You are riding along at 15 miles an hour and no sweat. At this speed the air blows over you like a hot air drier. You bring your Brompton bicycle to a stop, the air drier gives way to the solar heater and the sweat pours out of you. You are dehydrating. Whilst riding you were being dried. You take another photograph. The desert stretches away for miles around, rippled sand until a sheer wall of mountain rock rises thousands of feet to a rounded, red summit. You have only two litres of water and an Arab wife to help communicate with the Bedouins and she is a mile ahead and she has the water.

You press on. Two hours ago you had asked your Swedish friend Kjell, "Can you drive the Shadow?"
"Yes, I think I have a Shadow", says Kjell unable to remember what Rolls-Royces he has because he has so many and some are in Gothenburg and others in Florida.

"So we'll ride on for a couple of hours to see the desert in detail and then you can catch us up along the road." That was the big idea.

Your wife has stopped. You catch her up and she is swigging the water. The bottle is almost empty. At that rate you know you won't last another hour. As you get back on the bike a small lizard slides behind a rock and you don't wait to find out if it is poisonous. There is no other sign of life.

There is no sound. You are following a woman with flowing black hair and tight, white clothing through a natural oven. Maybe in the distance that is a camel grazing on dry sand. It is hard to tell how far away the mountains are, the air is so clear. The drier wafts over you and you try to ignore the empty water bottle.
Then a car overtakes. You didn't hear it coming. A silent Rolls-Royce. It is your car. Kjell pulls up and you greet him like he is the last person on earth which, of course, he is. You fold your bicycles, put them in the boot and shiver into your air conditioned car. The outside temperature reading is off the scale; it must be over forty. The car keeps accelerating so you ease back to seventy and you say to yourself, "This is the answer. A bicycle and then a Rolls-Royce. The best of both worlds."

© Andrew Hague