You are met at Mitiga, walked through the formalities, and driven into a city almost nobody you know has seen. Tripoli's old town is Ottoman, Italian and Roman stacked on top of each other: the Arch of Marcus Aurelius has stood since 165 AD, hemmed in now by houses. The Red Castle looks over Martyrs' Square, where Gaddafi gave his speeches and where the crowds came out in 2011. In the Gurgi Mosque the tilework and carved marble are Ottoman at its best, and the House of Yusuf Karamanli belonged to the pasha who once made the young United States pay tribute to stop his corsairs — and then didn't.
Leptis Magna is the reason to come to Libya. It is the best-preserved Roman city on the Mediterranean and it is not a near thing — Pompeii is more famous, Leptis is more complete. Septimius Severus was born here, became emperor, and spent a fortune rebuilding his home town in marble: a basilica, a forum, a theatre, a four-way arch, baths that still have their plunge pools. Then sand buried it for thirteen centuries, which is why it survived. You will likely have it almost to yourself. The Corniche in the late afternoon, and the sea.
Up through the Berber highlands: Qasr al-Hajj, the great circular fortified granary of the 12th century, and Kabaw on its cliff. Then five hours west across the hammada to Ghadames, arriving in the dark — which is the right way to arrive.
Ghadames is the Pearl of the Desert and the strangest town in North Africa. The old city is entirely covered — a labyrinth of whitewashed passages built so the men walk in the shaded tunnels below while the women move across the connected rooftops above: an entire second city in the air. It has been continuously inhabited for at least two thousand years; the Romans kept a garrison here. In the afternoon, 4WDs out to the fort of Ras al-Ghoul on the point where Libya, Algeria and Tunisia meet, then the dunes, and tea with the Tuareg by a fire as the light goes.
The long road back across the stone desert, with a stop at the underground houses of Bu Gheilan. It is a big drive and the emptiness is part of the point.
Sabratha in the morning: the theatre with its three tiers of columns, the temples, and the Mediterranean at the end of every street. The afternoon is yours in Tripoli.
Fly east into Cyrenaica, which is a different country in every way that matters — Greek instead of Phoenician, green instead of desert, and until recently entirely closed. Apollonia was the port of Cyrene, and half of it is now under the sea; you walk the Byzantine basilicas on the shore and look at the columns standing in the water. Overnight in Al Bayda, up on the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain.
Cyrene is one of the great classical cities of the world and hardly anybody has been there. Founded by Greeks from Thera in 631 BC on the word of the Delphic oracle, it became the intellectual centre of the ancient world's southern shore — Callimachus came from here, and Eratosthenes, the man who measured the circumference of the Earth. The Temple of Zeus is bigger than the Parthenon. The sanctuary of Apollo runs down the hillside in terraces to a spring that has never stopped flowing. Then the Byzantine churches on the coast, their mosaic floors open to the sky.
Qasr Libya holds fifty Byzantine mosaic panels found by accident in 1957 — one of them depicts the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders, and it is the only image of it that survives anywhere. Then Ptolemais on the coast, a Hellenistic city with its street grid, its cisterns and its villas still legible in the ground. Benghazi in the evening, and the flight west.
A last morning in the souks of the medina — the copper, the spices, the tailors — and then the airport. End of our services.
