Blank Pages

Sometimes It's hard not to imagine what things must have been like before you arrived; before all the old places you see had collapsed, and were rebuilt for you to pay to look at.

Rebuilt, so that it's hard to envision them back in when they were already crumbling, let alone back when they were bustling with life and with purpose... a purpose other than to show how things must have been, how different it was back then, to a handful of tourists, emptying their pockets and happily snapping away, trying to capture on film what is already just a map, a representation of all that went before.

And yet when it's a quiet little fort, re-erected, re-plastered with mortar bristling with grasses and sticks which poke from the sand coloured walls, when there's no-one else around, no placard saying when and where and why, it's hard not to imagine those things that must - no, might- have been.

I quite enjoy blank pages ready to be filled. The forts around the Liwa are like that, for now. In time as we discover more of the facts and fill in the spaces, dates and times, a history will grow, we'll know who used them and why. The facts will be interesting no doubt, fabulous perhaps.

But for now those forts are anything, looking to me as the night skies must have to people gone before - back when the earth was flat and no bigger than a village - beautiful and absolutely mysterious. Once we know their history, there is only one thing they could possibly have been. For now they are anything, and nothing but playgrounds for my mind.

It's hard not to hear battles and cries in the night, or the whispers of lovers beneath the stars. If there's a placard there somewhere, all it says is, "You are here, and they were too."