My eyes wept blood-coloured tears for days afterwards and I’ll never dare go back to Dura Europos, an ancient frontier city perched above the banks of the Euphrates.

I love ruins, the spirit-haunted battlefields of the past or the empty cells of a monastery, but Dura Europos offered something else: a ruined city engulfed in a sandstorm that had come up from the Arabian desert and brought its own extraordinary atmosphere.