A safari on 4 km of coast, from dawn to night.

Good morning. Please, voices low. We are in a hide on the high ridge. Below us are four kilometres of dry land, and then the sea.

The sun is still under the sea line, so the valley is blue-grey. Every rock is a few sharp, flat faces, and each face catches a different shade of dawn. In the wadi, fog lies in the low ground. Watch the light shafts come in. In a moment they turn gold.

Listen: wind over the sand, one dog far off, and a low hum. That is the generator at the fuel depot, two kilometres south. Remember that hum.

There, on the coast road. Do you see the dust? That is a convoy: six trucks nose to tail, an armoured car in front. They come through here every morning.

Each one pulls a long plume of dust, and the low sun lights each plume from the side: orange at the top, brown at the bottom. Let us listen in on their radio.

Look up. Slowly. That small dark shape, turning in a wide, lazy circle, is the attack jet. It has circled this coast since before we arrived.

See the heat shimmer behind its engines? It is hard to spot until the sun hits its canopy. There: a single white flash. Its pilot is not a person. It is a mind made of rules, and it talks to itself.

Now watch the convoy. The lead car hears the engine note change, and the trucks begin to spread out on the road. Nobody taught them that exact move. They learned it.

Eyes on the third truck. First the flash, a white point that grows. Then the fireball, orange, then red, then a black column that rolls up into the morning light.

A few seconds later the sound arrives, because sound is slower than light. Hundreds of sparks bounce off the road, and the dry scrub begins to smoke. That smoke stays. This place remembers.

The survivors do not run in straight lines. They go for the low ground, the fog, the shadows.

Turn and look out to sea. A light helicopter, very low over the water, its rotor wash cutting a ring of spray. It is going for the wreck. It is fast, but it has no armour.

Watch it land. The downwash throws up a ring of dust in the colour of the fire. Two figures run, bent double. Ninety seconds on the ground. The jet is turning back.

Will it make the cliffs? Nobody here knows. That is why we watch.

Now south to the fuel depot. Remember the hum? This is where everything comes to drink. Trucks refuel, a patrol rests in the shade of a tank, and two guards argue over a radio.

The tanks are big, simple shapes, but their metal holds the whole sky. Heat haze stands over the pumps, and the moths have found the lamps. A calm place. For now.

We end where we began. At night the wreck still burns and lights the cliffs from below in deep red. Flares hang over the depot under small parachutes, swinging slowly, and every shadow on the ground swings with them.

Far out at sea, ship lights. On the road, a patrol's tracers skip off the rocks. And very high, very faint: the jet. It never sleeps.

Thank you for travelling with us. Mind the step on the way down.