To my right two solitary pumps duck up and down with slow sinister inevitability, like giant storks feeding, or monster lobster claws digging in the sea bed. After a while the dirt track turns into a stretch of newly laid asphalt divided by a glowing yellow line which cuts through the eerie lunar landscape of the desert. The rock here is buttery gold and bulbous with not a jagged edge in sight. Now and again monoliths loom, some smooth and rounded by the elements, but others grotesque and deformed, like prehistoric beasts temporarily inert with sleep and so extraordinarily lifelike that I stop the truck to photograph them, imagining dinosaurs sweeping through this part of the world, nudging boulders aside with their tails before falling to the desert floor, exhausted by their efforts After an hour or so of this, landscape complacency sets in and I find myself zoning out and dreaming into the emptiness before me. How many bones are buried beneath this soil? How many ghosts haunt the ground above them? It strikes me that what makes this land so romantic is everything you cannot see, that which you can only imagine. The vastness out here is incomprehensible and absolute. It feels as though nothing you do could affect anyone or anybody. If a bolt of lightning were to smite the truck right now, I would turn to a speck of dust and nobody would be any the wiser. How different from existence in the city where everything you do impinges on someone else. You stall your car, the man behind bumps into you, five people turn to look, a passer-by becomes a witness and, before you know it, you’ve had an effect, a meaningless but nevertheless tangible effect on the lives of others. As a child, I was intrigued by this idea. I liked to think of people as snails, leaving a thin thread of life behind them, and every time one human being impacted on another I imagined these threads crossing, and the course of their lives becoming tangled forever.

The Mars landscape finally gives way to a drier, more desolate backdrop. I’m still unsure of where I am exactly, but the sun is dipping to the right, so I guess I must be heading south. This area is marked on the map as the Tohomo O’Odham reservation, and seems to be desert right up to the horizon. I come across a couple of yellow school buses disgorging Indian kids with backpacks onto the side of the road and I watch as, heads down against the dusty wind, they begin making their way along narrow paths to scattered trailer homes.