Nothing for Forty Kilometres

• Wadi Rum village, looking east
• 15:05
• 19°C, clear, warm

You come in from the Desert Highway and there is a village and then there is nothing, and the nothing is the point. The sand is not dune-shaped for most of it — it is a flat red floor with sandstone blocks standing up out of it a kilometre apart, and the scale only makes sense when a truck goes across and turns out to be smaller than a full stop.

• The track towards Um Fruth
• 10:30
• 14°C, clear

Every vehicle here is the same white Toyota pickup with a bench and a canopy welded into the bed, and you sit facing backwards watching your own tracks unspool. Attayak drove with one hand and the window down in February. I gave up trying to shoot from a moving truck by the second day and just held the camera in my lap.

there is no seatbelt and nobody has ever mentioned one

• Burdah rock bridge
• 12:40
• 21°C, clear, no wind

Burdah is about an hour of scrambling on rock that grips like sandpaper, and then you are standing under a span of sandstone with nothing under it for a very long way. I did not walk out onto it. The man who went before me did, and stood in the middle with his arms down, and that is the frame — because without him it is just a hole in a rock.

• Bedouin camp, Wadi Um Ishrin
• 14:15
• 20°C, warm in the shade

Camp is a low wall, some poles, a roof of goat hair and about nine rugs, and it faces whichever way the afternoon sun is not. You sit on the floor with your back against a cushion and look at forty kilometres of nothing through a rectangle somebody framed for you, which is a more honest piece of composition than anything I did all week.