The Floor of the Oven

• Road through Abala
• 17:40
• 31°C, dust, low sun

From Mekele you descend for hours, through highland towns where the cattle come home through the dust at golden hour like a parade nobody organised. Every stop, someone sold roasted barley from a bucket. The air got thicker and warmer with every switchback, like opening an oven in stages.

• Dallol hydrothermal field
• 08:30
• 38°C, 38 by nine a.m.

Sulphur ponds in green and yellow that no editing slider will ever be accused of. You walk single file where the guide walks, because the crust lies. It hisses. My sandals, wrong choice, spent the walk being gently cooked.

the smell files a complaint directly with your brainstem

• Lake Assale salt flats
• 10:50
• 40°C, white glare

The camel trains come across Lake Assale in single file, loaded with cut salt, the same route and the same cargo for a thousand years. The trucks will finish this trade within my lifetime and everyone involved knows it. The camels walk like they've heard the news and don't care.

• Salt workings, Lake Assale
• 11:30
• 41°C

The Afar cutters lever the crust up with poles and axe it into ganfur, the standard block, entirely by eye. I watched a man true up a slab in four strokes. He offered me the axe; my block would have embarrassed a child, and it did, because a child was watching.

• Lake Afrera
• 15:20
• 42°C, furnace wind

At Lake Afrera a single bent acacia holds the shore like a pensioner holding a queue spot. Everything else is white crust and hot blue water too salty to sink in. We floated. You could hear your own heartbeat in the water and absolutely nothing else.