It is midnight.

The sea is black. But the shore glows with orange light: a port on fire.

Yet it is not open flames. It is the cold radiance of the of sodium-vapor dock lamps, the glare of a ceaseless 24-hour exchange: of commerce, of global barter, of the tireless labor needed to move vast heaps of humanity's goods across the oceans on massive ships made of steel—ships that are many city blocks long, as high as tall buildings, bursting with every product, necessity, luxury, tool, medicine, and weapon employed by humankind at the turn of the millennium. It ...

During 32 years of fieldwork in the deserts of Ethiopia, Tim White, the eminent American paleoanthropologist, has brazened through every conceivable obstacle to his research into human origins.

Flash floods have marooned his vehicles in hip-deep pools of mud. Grazing wars between nomads have blocked access to promising fossil beds. And campfire visits by snakes and tarantulas are so routine they rank as minor nuisances.

Yet nothing has stymied White's pursuit of knowledge—or thwarted his scientific ambitions—like the hard-eyed men in flip-flop sandals who, valuing doubloons above Darwin, set sail hundreds of miles away in skiffs stocked with machine guns and rope ladders: Somali pirates.

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Give me your hand. I know you are tired. I am tired, too. But let us walk together, for a little while longer, down through these grey, round-shouldered hills—hills stripped to the bone by 10,000 years of hot winds, and steamed clean of all color—to the blinding edge of the Red Sea. Down to the final rim of Africa.

Houssain Mohamed Houssian, the Afar guide, leads the way, singing as usual.

We cross our first pavement in eight days. It is the Yugoslav-built road from the capital, Djibouti city, to the remote desert outposts of the north—Sagallou, Tadjourah, Obock. A car flashes past. Pale faces, possibly French sailors on shore ...

There is no relief here.

There is no sleep—at least not for outsiders, not for dusty wayfarers like us. No refuge. No relaxation. No peace. No rest. It is the wind.

The heavy oceanic air gushes ceaselessly inland from the Red Sea—we can smell the salt!—sucked westward into the heart of the desert, into Africa, by the hot, dry bowl of Lac Assal, the lowest point on the continent. A trick of physics has turned this mountain pass into a perfect wind tunnel. It makes the lapels on my shirt whir like helicopter blades. And the tottering village of Leita—erected here of rusty scraps of corrugated metal, of odds and ...

Winter in the desert of Djibouti. The sun does not shine equally for all.

By nine a.m., the thermometer pegs 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius). I begin to stew in my sweat. The Afar guides, meanwhile, shiver under shirts, sweaters, scarves. Mohamed Youssef, a cameleer, zips himself inside a “Tom Tailor” brand parka from China. The only uncomplaining one is Madoita, the lead camel. He is both warmed and shaded by a $600 blanket of photovoltaic silicon cells. He is a belching, furry, ambulatory wall plug for my satellite phone. We take turns cleaning the dust from these cells with a cloth. A new chore on an ancient ...

“Sorry!”

It is the Djiboutian gendarmes.  They smile from their roadside guard post. They hold up their hands in a sympathetic gesture.

One of their patrols has detained us, confiscated my passport and impounded the camels A’urta and Suma’atuli. They have marched us here, to the official frontier checkpoint, for an explanation. Because we have staggered down a mountain trail, lost. Because we have blundered into the blurry no-man’s-land between Ethiopia and Djibouti. Because no battery-powered gimcrack, no alien gewgaw, no child’s toy called a GPS, was going to tell my proud Ethiopian cameleers where they stood on the face of the Earth: that we had crossed, unwittingly, into Djibouti.

But ...

 “If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together. “ -- African proverb

We camp on the flank of Asa Fatma mountain, a basalt sentinel overlooking the caravan trails that braid eastward to the old Sultanate of Tadjourah, a distant port where ivory, salt, and slaves were once shipped by dhow to Arabia. The tiny Republic of Djibouti sprawls below us: a waterless plain, hotter and drier than the Ethiopian desert, sere lake beds of blinding white salt, scarps of gunmetal grey, and, doubtless, huddled somewhere in the shade of a doum palm, more Afar nomads—herders cleaved from their Ethiopian brethren by ...