MAGAN'S WORLD: Manchán Maganon the Hoggar Mountains
EACH EASTER SUNDAY my grandmother used to get me to watch the sun dancing in the sky in joy at the Resurrection, and I would always clearly see it dance. Nowadays I find it harder to see, yet there is one place where I know it still dances, and that's in Tamanrasset, a dirty, sand-blasted oasis at the dead heart of the Sahara that is now only two flights away, thanks to Air Algérie via London or Paris.
You don't go there for the architecture - a jumble of dried-blood-coloured buildings made of mud and sandy cement - nor the food, which consists of fried eggs and chickpeas served on baguettes whose flavour is improved by the weevils and sand grains in the flour.
No, the reason you go to Tamanrasset is for the Hoggar Mountains, a gruesome black, dust-blown skeleton of rock grown brittle through the ages that soars into the sky right outside of town.
When you get there you'll need to hire a jeep and a driver, because the route ahead is challenging. Head up into the black outcrop of volcanic boulders, lava flows, burnt quartzite and grotesquely twisted spires as far as you can go, skidding and sliding over the bare rock for bone-juddering hours. It'll be dark by the time you finally reach a gravel-strewn ledge with a ramshackle stone building on it. In there is where you're going to sleep; with luck you've brought a roll mat and a good sleeping bag, because otherwise you're going to be cold, freezing cold - one of the things they don't tell you about the Sahara is that at night you long for heat as passionately as you do for cold during the day.
At about 4am start walking up the last stretch of mountain along a narrow, winding trail to the summit. It'll be pitch dark, and you'll be making your way across the rocks using your hands as antennae. But it'll be worth it. The sun will appear way off in the distance, out towards Egypt.
Wrap a blanket around yourself, for in a few minutes the sun is going to start dancing its way through the blackened spires and gnarled columns, carving around the monstrous needles and illuminating bits of quartzite as it goes, making the world look like a monstrous neon sea urchin.
You are perched on the only high point for hundreds of kilometres around, 3,000m above the rest of the world, watching as it is slowly set alight. And you will have no doubt that the sun is dancing. You'll stake your life on it.
Afterwards, you should head down to the stone oratory, where, if you're lucky, a hermit will be saying Mass. Just sit there quietly on the bench and, when he's finished, ask him about Charles de Foucauld, the original hermit, who built this place 100 years ago - a debauched French playboy who after living a life of gluttony and carnal excess experienced an epiphany and turned towards religion. He quickly grew disillusioned with the hypocrisy of Catholicism and fled here to find God directly, living on what he managed to barter from passing Tuareg nomads. After seeing the dawn's ethereal light, you'll be pretty sure that de Foucauld found what he was looking for.