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.
South. Bu Gheilan first — the underground Berber houses, dug down into the earth rather than built up. Then the flight into the Fezzan, the true Sahara, where the Garamantes ran an empire on underground water two thousand years ago and where the Italians fought a desert war. Sebha is a garrison town on the edge of everything.
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.
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.
Sabratha last, on the coast west of Tripoli, and most people end up preferring it to Leptis — because you can see the Mediterranean from anywhere in the ruins, and because of the theatre. Three storeys of columns still standing behind the stage: the best Roman theatre façade anywhere in Africa. It was a Phoenician port before it was Roman. Then the airport, and the end of our services.
