Field notes, the desert road

The road west out of Cairo has the same notes every summer, and on a long weekend it has them at double density. The holiday landed on a Thursday this year, which turns two days into three and puts everyone on the same tarmac at the same hour.

A billboard every hundred metres or so. For the first forty minutes, not a single product on any of them. Houses. Compounds, phases, villas, chalets, a rendering of a lagoon that has not been dug yet, a family in linen standing beside a pool with nobody in it.

The developer's name set larger than the exit sign you actually need.

A petrol station that has quietly become a food court: three international chains, a coffee counter, a queue for the bathroom longer than the queue for fuel.

The car ahead with the whole summer in the boot. Two mattresses on the roof, a bicycle, a cooler box wedged against the back window so the driver cannot see out of it.

And a few minutes before the exit, a billboard for the compound half the cars on the road are about to turn into. The people it is selling to have already bought.

That is the part I keep coming back to. For three months this road is the most expensive gallery in the country, and most of it is selling addresses to people already on their way to an address.

It works because of what the address does on arrival. Nobody on the coast asks what you earn. They ask where you are staying, and the answer is heard by cousins, in-laws, school parents, and the family group on the phone within the hour.

The compound is a sentence said to the family. The road is where the sentence gets written.