After ten minutes’ driving in the direction of the smoke I found another track. It was heading towards a cluster of makeshift buildings. There was a chance I was about to be robbed, but I didn’t have much choice. I continued, past a starved-looking dog chasing a carrier bag, into a herdsmen’s village. The houses were low and misshapen: rough walls of mud bricks, occasionally plastered over and painted white; small windows; roofs of corrugated iron weighed down by bricks. A grotesque parody of a nomadic camp: winter cattle sheds had been built from whatever lay to hand – fragments from dismembered trucks, old tyres, rusted bedposts.

The smoke led to a shack. Two men lay among empty vodka bottles beside a stove filled with ash. They looked up at me as if I was a hallucination not worth responding to. Past the shack was an adobe house behind a fence made of flattened drums that, according to their markings, had once held sodium chlorate. I walked around to the back, past an ice-encrusted water tank to a pile of scrap metal. No one responded when I called.

I was leaving when I felt eyes on me. A girl, nine or ten years old, appeared among the scrap.

‘Hello,’ I said. An identical girl appeared. They were twins, clothes faded and patched beneath their coats. One whispered something to the other and they giggled. I searched my pockets and gave them a protein bar. Then the mother appeared, saw me and began scolding them.

I showed her the map on my phone and asked where we were. It was too cold to be outside, she said, and invited me in.

The home had a warm, damp, close smell. Wall-hung carpets hid the dirt. Furniture was a double mattress and cushions. An antique sewing machine took centre stage. A stove poked its chimney through the roof. A man’s boots hung off a nail along with a rusted horse bridle.

The woman heated a samovar. I felt that code of hospitality, lost in the developed world, with no knowledge of what it might mean to be dependent on strangers. I would never forget the men and women who had invited me into their homes and offered tea: in Aleppo, Afrin, Shatoi. It was the code of the sea, an obligation to help vessels in distress, and an Islamic tradition, a religion of the desert; the knowledge that the absence of hospitality was death.

‘The weather is changing,’ she warned as the tea heated. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Pavlodar,’ I said.

‘Not tonight,’ she said.

She asked where I was from, what on earth I was doing here, and I gave my story. The girls poured the tea, watching me openly.

‘Hello,’ one said in English. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m very well. How are you?’

They laughed. ‘What is your name?’ the other said.

‘Toby. What is yours?’

I didn’t get an answer.