It was night on a desert road in late spring.

From the dim remnants of the day's unrelenting light emerged a snorting beast bathed in headlamps, heralded by warning bleats and high-visibility vests. Its rank breath met the plummeting evening air as gaseous excretions. Approaching this horizon-inhabiting spectacle half-dazed by the vibrations of hurtling over cracked pavement at 110 kilometres per hour, I was soon engaged in a participatory interaction, my admittance marked by orange cones and MEN AT WORK signs.

As I slowed to a full stop, the roar of the truck engine was abruptly replaced by a complex symphony of grinding, whirling mechanical parts, chugging in unison for the sole purpose of laying a new road surface. The entire scene, engulfed by an oily black heat, was consumed by the mandate to make a path for progress. Moths and other insects took refuge in the low beams and fluttered into the truck cab unfazed by the graveyard of splattered exoskeletons adorning the windshield.

The continuous line on my dashboard map misrepresented the physical reality of the road-under-construction; a gap approximating the length of the road-eating-road-spewing mechanical creature appeared. This moving gap crept upon the flat sand-laden topography at a three-metre-perminute snail's pace. I could only trail behind in a stop-start manner, wasting time, fuel and patience, while other vehicles eventually joined the queue.

An entourage of fossil-fuel-expending groupies on a pilgrimage from here to there, we were eventually ushered on to a makeshift track to perform a slow procession around the scene. From the night's abyss beyond the floodlights, through waves of diesel exhaust, I gawked at the machine's digestive process and its attendants. Finally, at a speed inversely proportional to that at which we had entered, we emerged from the spectacle on to the smooth unmarked virgin surface of the other side.