The road takes you through eucalyptus groves, whose leaves, in the early morning, give off a heady medicinal perfume, before crossing a plateau of almost unimaginable bleakness. When it came to power in 1993, Eritrea’s new government launched an ambitious reforestation campaign and brave green saplings, their bark protected from nibbling goats by little iron wigwams, have been planted at neatly-spaced intervals along the way. But it will be decades before their handkerchiefs of shade make any impression on this glaring, denuded landscape. Much of the Hamasien highlands looks as though it was scooped up at a quarry and deposited from the tail-end of a dumper-truck. With so little standing in its path, the wind is free to harry the cappuccino-coloured dust, so soft it could have been poured from a lady’s powder compact, so fine a trailing fingertip registers no contact at all. Donkeys stand motionless in the middle of the road, as though stunned into imbecility by the heat and sheer unfairness of being expected to graze off an expanse of rubble.
