"Wherever you look, you can only apprehend a portion of the whole".

This is an expansive kingdom entirely ruled by sand; fine soft sand. They call it the Great Sand Sea because it is vast. Sand is its beginning and its end, and has a lot in common with any sea. Its expansive surface and its creeping waves created by winds convince you of its proper name.

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After the sand dunes and the fun at Siwa's White Desert, and the shade and the short rest, we drove towards Shyata; a small uninhabited oasis that has a salty lake, 45 kilometers west of the town of Siwa. A 'natural protectorate' area surrounded by palm trees where gazelles would come to feed and birds would visit in their migrating journeys.

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It seemed the only sensible alternative at the moment to converse with my mystic writer, Gamal al-Ghitani, as I was reading his novel The Pyramids Texts.As the midnight bus still had five hours to go, my friends were fast asleep despite the voices screaming from the hanging video screen. "Each soul has a longing!" said al Ghitani.

"True! Siwa, the most distant oasis in the Egyptian Desert, more than 750 km away from Cairo, was my longing,"I replied."

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