Wajde introduces me to a friend. Rami is getting bored now that the kasbah protests have been wound up and the revolution is moving from the streets to committees. "They say it's our revolution, the old people, there is no sense in us fighting. Everywhere you go the young are free doing what they always wanted to." Young rebels are loading trucks of supplies set to hit the desert highways to refugee camps on the Libyan border. A split-second decision is made. Rami, together with his rogue friend Aiman, offers to drive me to the camps. 

Night and a gravel road. Dashboard lights dance on the windscreen. Aiman tunes the radio through the static and talks over the news from Libya. "There's no sense in us fighting. They'll all fall in our wave — Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya. Our energy, it's just going to prevail." Hedgerows of cacti in moonlight. They tune the radio to intifada love songs. The highway south is desolate. Libyan number-plates go the other way.

Near Kasserine, a hill town towards Algeria where more than a hundred fell in revolutionary fighting, shepherds in brown hooded cloaks glare at our passing car. Eight checkpoints. Kasserine is charred. Every government building has been set alight. Barbed-wire rings what it can. Scores of soldiers, guns slung or pointed, open boots and demand papers. 

"What are you doing here? How do you know a foreigner? When will you leave?" 

Sassi Bouallagui from the local Committee to Protect the Revolution has a face entirely made of horizontals under thick grey hair. We meet in the local café. Sarsi wears an oversized old coat. The café is full because everyone is unemployed. "There are only two parties in this area, the communists and the Islamists, and a few people from human rights organisations who are leftists or local lawyers," he grimaces as he sips tea.