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BARIS is the second largest settlement after El-Kharga; a sign at the entrance to town welcomes you to "Paris", but don't expect to find anything grand. Half a dozen kiosks and a place dispensing fuul and felafel (except on Fridays) ensure that you won't starve here, and there's an unsignposted resthouse (£E5 per person) on the northern edge of town, at right angles to the highway. Before this, you'll pass the abandoned village of Baris Gedida (New Baris), which the architect Hassan Fathy based on the principles of traditional oasis architecture, including wind shafts to cool the marketplace. Alas for his idealism, work was halted by the Six Day War of 1967 and never resumed, so the initial settlers soon drifted away. Baris itself is just a place to stay and/or hire a pick-up to reach the Roman Temple of Dush (£E20 return, with waiting time).

A paved road runs 23km southeast from Baris, directly to the site. Potsherds, cemeteries and the ruins of ancient Kysis are scatttered around a hilltop fortress, whose ruined walls are six metres high. Abutting this is the Temple of Dush (8am-5pm; £E16), built by Domitian and enlarged by Hadrian and Trajan. Reputedly once sheathed in gold, it is covered in dedications to the last two emperors, and the gateway in graffiti by Cailliaud and other nineteenth-century travellers. The discovery of an elaborate system of clay pipes and a Christian church suggests that the town was abandoned when its wells dried up, some time after the fourth century AD. "Dush" is believed to derive from Kush, the name of the ancient Sudanese kingdom with which the Egyptians traded along the Nile.

It's uncertain when desert routes to Sudan developed, but the introduction of camels to North Africa after the Persian invasion of 525 BC enabled travellers to cover far greater distances between wells, making new routes feasible. However, caravans lacked an incentive to make such a long and dangerous journey until the Mamluke era, when rising tolls and bribes for customs officials along the Nile made a desert route more profitable. Thus arose the infamous Darb al-Arba'in or Forty Days Road , which entered the oasis and came under scrutiny at MAKS BAHRI (Customs North) and MAKS QIBLI (Customs South). Today, there's no evidence of their slave-trafficking past in either village, though in Maks Qibli you can still see a small mud-brick watchtower, the Tabid el-Darawish , built by the British after the Dervish invasion of 1893.