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.
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.
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.
Into the Ubari Sand Sea, and this is the Sahara of the imagination — dunes a hundred metres high running to the horizon in every direction. Hidden among them are the lakes: Umm al-Maa, the Mother of Water, and Gabroun — deep blue-green pools saltier than the sea, ringed with palms, sitting impossibly in the middle of the dunes. Until the 1990s Tuareg families lived beside them. You camp in the sand, and there is no light and no sound at all.
Wadi Mathendous carries some of the most important rock art on Earth — carvings cut into the stone up to 12,000 years ago, when the Sahara was green: elephants, giraffes, rhinoceros, crocodiles, hippos, cattle. There is a famous panel of two wild cats fighting that is as confident as anything in European art. This was savannah, and people lived off it. A second night in the desert.
Germa was Garama, capital of the Garamantes — a Saharan civilisation Herodotus wrote about, which cut a network of underground irrigation tunnels, ran chariots across the desert, traded with Rome and fought it, and then vanished when the water ran out. The mud-brick city is still standing in the sand. Then the flight north.
Sabratha in the morning — the great theatre, and the sea behind it. Then up into Jebel Nafusa, the Berber highlands. Qasr al-Hajj is a 12th-century fortified granary: a circle of several hundred cells stacked four storeys high, each one a family's grain store, built by a sheikh who charged a quarter of the harvest and is buried in the courtyard. Kabaw is the same idea, on a cliff edge. At Bu Gheilan people still live in troglodyte houses — pits dug into the earth with rooms cut off the sides, cool in summer, warm in winter, inhabited for centuries.
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.
A last morning in the souks of the medina — the copper, the spices, the tailors — and then the airport. End of our services.
