THE only way in is across 120 kilometres of virgin, untamed desert from the old British colonial fort, H4, in Jordan. The only way out at the other end is across 300 kilometres of fiercer desert, soft sand and howling shamals causing constant sand-storms; country no colonial settlers have ever tamed.

The trick is to crab across the desert, a remarkable driving manoeuvre: slightly jack-knife the tractor unit and tilt, flick the steering wheels in the right direction, then foot down, pedal to metal, and off like a bat out of hell. They move, these monster juggernauts, when they are unleashed; 120 kilometres to cover nonstop, sideways to slipstream the bow-wave of scorching dust. There is a sand temperature of 160° Fahrenheit outside, so pray to God that the air-conditioning doesn’t pack up. Then 1,300 unremitting kilometres of the tapline, the world’s most unforgettable road.

Driving the desert is like dirt-track speedway riding a 46 ton monster with all 14 wheels going everywhichway simultaneously while wrenching, pitching and screaming to go the other. Heaven help the careless driver who has failed to check his wheel nuts and torque-wrench them tight, a wheel can arrive at the other end with bolt holes doubled in size and worn to a perfect oval. Throw that wheel away, or you may not arrive at all. The road, when it comes, superheats tyres until they explode like firecrackers. It plays havoc with tyres, wheels, hub casings, bearings, axles, transmissions, the fifth wheel joining the tractor to the trailer, havoc with the drivers’ nerves. But hard driving is the only way to beat the desert.

When development engineers, living out their quiet, thoughtful lives in comfortable plastic offices at Scania, Volvo, Mack, MAN, Mercedes, Magirus Deutz, Daf, Erf, British Leyland, Ford, Dodge and every other great automotive engineering headquarters have nightmares they dream of drivers crabbing across deserts. They plead: ‘Straighten up and drive right, please. Slow it down, keep it steady.’ The drivers smile and say: ‘OK, guv, but it don’t pay to ’ang about round ’ere, the rag ’eads don’t appreciate it, in fact, they don’t like it at all.’

Often chilling warnings are issued at border posts and military checkpoints: ‘Keep going. It is unsafe to stop with nomad tribesmen in the vicinity … do not go into tribal areas in the mountains, stay strictly on the marked route all the way.’

From nowhere sinister black-clad bedouin will materialise, immobile and impassive on their camels. Also out of nowhere a Jeep-load of soldiers appear, automatic rifles brandished, mounted machine-gun trained on a loitering truck; they gesticulate wildly: keep moving, move on. And the other warning suddenly comes alive: ‘It is forbidden to stop or park within one kilometre of the pipeline. No excuses are valid.’ The soldiers show that they really mean it.

Across the vinyl-tiled corridors of those automotive works, in plusher offices than those of the designers, export sales managers smile and think: ‘Jesus, those boys can really burn ’em out, get a couple more containers of spares to the agents in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Dammam, Qatar and all points East. Keep driving, boys, it’s all down to the sheikhs, the rag ’eads will pay, they’ve got plenty.’

Today there is quite a lot of asphalt about, but ten billion dollars lays only a strip the equivalent of a strand of raven hair on a mile-wide linen sheet.

The enormity of the landscape, the unendingness of the sky, the silence, induce a feeling of curious unreality. The boys drive like speedway riders and like speedway riders they are travelling from nowhere to nowhere. They leave one dump to arrive at another having travelled through a dozen cassette tapes played on the cab hi-fi and a stream of conscious, subconscious, hypnotic, fantasising thought. The road runs straight as it is drawn on the map with no twists, turns or kinks; it is there before the eyes running to a perspective pinpoint in the far distance, nothing in sight, no hazards. Yet the route is splattered with mangled, burned-out wrecks. The accident rate is prolific, head-on collisions occur in statistically impossible conditions as sand-struck drivers run into each other.

A gruesome signpost in international colours and lettering points straight ahead ‘Qatar – 500 kms’, a thinner crossbar indicates an intersection. Or does it? At the end of the crossbar where, in Europe or America, a vertical red-painted band would proclaim a cul-de-sac, here there is a pirate skull and crossbones – death either to the right or left. Drive straight ahead to stay alive, stray off the route and there is no chance of survival.

Suddenly, in the middle of nowhere, at the very heart of nothing, there appears an impossibly battered tin shack shanty. It emerges like a mirage through the swirling dust dancing and shimmering in the heat haze. The phut-phut of a two-stroke engine carries on the still, hot air. In the squalor surrounding the shack is a sign, all too familiar and all the more remarkable for that: ‘Coca-Cola – ice cold Coke’.

The two-stroke works the refrigerator, but a hurricane lamp lights the shack at night; Coke quenches thirst at one-tenth the cost of pure drinking water.

Coke, Pepsi, Seven-Up, where the one goes the others are sure to follow: no other facets of Western culture have penetrated so deeply into the world’s wildernesses. Coke, manufactured under franchise, has made more millionaires throughout the world than any other single product and also sustained more cults. Coke is a nectar, a celebration and a miracle under the blistering fire of a desert sun for heat-sapped ‘cowboys’ – ice cold Coke, when that relentless blaze in the sky has scorched the air in the deepest shade to 140°.

‘Whoever brings Coke to a Godforsaken hole like this is either a nutter or a bloody genius.’

To which a Coke salesman could properly reply: ‘Whoever brings a juggernaut to the same hellhole is either a nutter or a bloody genius.’

So, if you are either very clever or mad, climb in the cab and come along … it is only a 14,000 mile ride.

But first, let us consider how it all began and how and why these huge articulated trucks and their idiosyncratic drivers ever came to be here in the first place. In the beginning, the fact that terra firma stretched from the continental Channel ports as far as Arabia and China had been ignored by freight forwarders. It was thought to be an impossible journey – the accepted way to the East was by sea. But when the Middle East boom began in real earnest tiny Arab ports along the Gulf coasts could not handle the traffic. Ships queued for 300 miles and waited up to two years to get into docks. Money was evaporating in the torrid heat of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea; ship owners chartered aircraft to fly out relief crews and bring home those exhausted by the tedium and boredom of month in, month out swinging round the anchor. Profits were being eaten away. Ashore, work was being held up because vital supplies were not getting through quickly enough, penalty clauses for late completion were being enforced; profits were, in fact, too often becoming losses.

Nothing galvanises the commercial world into exceptional action so much as a loss of profits and when it is a case of astronomical profits at risk the mood becomes one of Go! Go! Go! So the thinking became: ‘There is solid land all the way there; forget the mountains, forget the deserts, forget the vile, crippling winters and the intolerable heats of summer; get on the road and blast your way through.’

By the same token, nothing galvanises enterprising truckers so much as the thought of the sniff of a big profit for themselves, so they did it – the hard way. Very few at first but increasing to a veritable host, the massive juggernauts began to roll along that Golden Road to Arabia. Nowadays a lot of people travel the road but that doesn’t make it commonplace. Ed Hillary scaling Everest for the first time and Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile were sensational at the time. Today expeditions pop up the Himalayas every year and all world-class milers clock under four minutes – but that still doesn’t make it easy.

The first cowboys sorted out the problems, then they cracked the time barriers and delays, then they began to beat the ships.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the Gulf import boom was that as the inadequate docks clogged to a standstill, the governing authorities brought in teams of London and Liverpool dockers to shift the backlog; men who had become better known for their militancy and predilection for strike action than their working skills. They were paid fantastic wages, were not constricted by union rules and they cleared the docks a year ahead of the estimated time. Now huge container ships can be turned round in a couple of days. However, that has not solved the problems. The Arab mind is individualistic and often unfathomable, operating in a labyrinthine tangle of misconceptions and taboos. The result is that now imported goods clear the...