Aminatta Forna writes for Condé Nast Traveler about her time travelling with Will Jones and Société de Voyages Sahariens’s Rocco and Tommaso Ravà to the Ennedi Massif in northeastern Chad. Arriving in a landscape of towering sandstone pillars resembling ‘a gathering of giants turned to stone by a displeased god’ and desert ponds known as ‘gueltas’, Forna explains how over millions of years the ‘sun, wind, and water sculpted the sandstone into a dramatic, desolate, unearthly landscape of gorges and valleys, inselbergs and stacks, towering tassili and natural arches’. A journey into deep time, Forna takes us into the ’emptiest landscape I had ever experienced’, a ‘place of ancient wonders’, landing at the discovery that the desert is anything but empty. Photographs by Alistair Taylor-Young.