"In the last days of November 1993, I was traveling in a battered jeep from the Algerian town of Tamanrasset to Assakrem, the highest mountain in the Hoggar range of the south-western Sahara. Assakrem, a tabletop mountain some 10,000 feet high, is the home of two Christian brothers of the Catholic Order, The Little Brothers of the Desert. They have three or four tiny retreat huts scattered around the perimeter of the tabletop and I had obtained permission to stay in one for a week.

"After a long day's ride, the jeep dropped me at the foot of the mountain and I wound my way up the path that led to the Brothers' hut. They greeted me with a smile and with barely a word, led me to a hut on the far side of the tabletop perimeter. Built of the volcanic stones that lay scattered everywhere, with a corrugated iron roof, it was divided into two parts, each with its own outside door: a tiny living quarters, with a bed, a camping stove and a table; and a chapel that was bare except for a stone slab of an alter, adorned with a picture of Christ and an animal skin on the floor. Outside, a small courtyard had been carved out of the skree and enclosed with a low stone wall. I had brought my own food and would see no-one for the week I was there.

"I stood in the courtyard and gazed out on the spectacular world I had entered: phallic pillars of red rock, ridges twisted into sleeping giants, huge boulders strewn at random by the force of some ancient volcanic eruption; mountains in the shape of pyramids, saddlebacks, tabletops; valley floors of dust and sand, an old river bed snaking its way off to the east. Heavy clouds hung trails of vapor over the crests, while on the horizon the mountain waves were shrouded in dust. I stood there until dusk and watched a crack of gold slit open the gray in the west. Two birds danced along the courtyard wall, then flew off into the void. A faint flurry of pink and the day was done, the dun color of earth pervaded sky and land. I peered out over the fading view. 'This is my religion,' I said out loud.

"Two days later, it was all rather different. I had discovered that they wear you down, the wind, the rocks, the altitude. Trying to think straight in a wind that whipped through my coat from one direction, then stopped suddenly only to start up again from another side. The door creaked even when shut and the iron roof flapped all night. Looking at rocks for hours on end: nothing else, no green, no life, no relief from the burning ground. And this at an altitude which already had my head as light as a balloon when I woke in the morning. Nothing moved there; only the sun behind the clouds. I could hear the pulse in my ears. The habitual self withers without its customary props.

"For the first two days I never opened the door to the chapel my church was outside, in the wind and the light. On the third evening, I was sitting with my eyes on a small icon of Christ Pantocrator that was on the desk of my little room. Suddenly I got up and opened the chapel door. It was dark in there and as I stooped to enter, something softened inside.

"When I first arrived I talked to myself aloud, then mentally. Gradually my soliloquies were replaced with silence. To begin with I was afraid of my own boredom and depression. I pushed them away with reading and writing. As the days passed the sense of boredom disappeared, even when I was doing nothing, which was most of the time. I began to sit in the chapel darkness three or four times a day. I started to sense how, even more than natural beauty, it is the awareness of one's poverty that opens the heart. To my own surprise, I began to feel some understanding, sympathy even, for the Christian teaching of original sin which has been perverted and turned into a dogma of oppression for centuries. Yet beneath all the layers of distortion lies a deep and profound teaching. My own nature — all human nature — contains a built-in fault line that severs me from authentic living. There is no blame in this; rather it is the genuine seeing of it that is required. Out there on that mountain, there was no soothing balm: even the beauty was hard edged. The desert reduces everything to essentials, to whitened bone. There was no choice but to let go and offer my own divisions to whatever there might be — call it God, the Presence, the Self — that was more real than the contents of my own mind. I returned from that week smaller, silenced and grateful."