One hundred years ago, the British explorer WJ Harding King tried and failed to cross Egypt’s myth-laden Western Desert. Jack Shenker follows his footsteps into a once-isolated world on the cusp of transformation.

Excluded from the rapid development of Sinai’s tourist coast and subject to a prolonged police crackdown, the Bedouins who have made the Peninsula their home for centuries now teeter on the brink of social implosion