When this week I recognised not only the region where British travellers have been kidnapped in the Danakil Depression, but the village itself — and when from the pictures of their shot-up vehicles I saw they had been been abducted from the very yard where my BBC producer, Jeremy Grange, Ethiopian guide, Solomon Berhe, and I slept alongside our own vehicles, a year ago — I thought it worth digging out our tapes.

Hamedelah (the village’s name) means Mohammad’s well: a flyblown settlement of sticks and stones by a dry river bed where thousands of camels and their drivers rest, en route to and from the salt-caked bed of the depression (an hour’s walk away) where villagers from the Afar tribe chip blocks of solid salt for the camels to carry up into the highlands. There are no roads, only tracks.

You stand at the foot of a thorn-pricked wilderness of dry mountains, rising 6,000ft up into the highlands and civilisation. With this escarpment at your back, you face east straight across the depression, 300ft below sea level: blinding white salt. To the right-hand side a smudge of inky blue-black, the dead salt lake; in the distance behind it a low, smouldering volcano, Hertale. A little to the left smoulders the crumbling rock-salt rubble of Dalol, where vivid yellow sulphur streaked with the orange of iron comes hissing out of the ground in a superheated sulphuric acid solution. Ahead and across, like an ocean, lies the salt pan, on its horizon a line of low, waterless Eritrean mountains called the Danakil Alps holding back the Red Sea. You could walk across within a day, though horribly exposed.

Near the village I met an Ethiopian called Osafa who had done so (at gunpoint) the year before, while he was making the salt-fetching journey with his camels and fellow camel-drivers. Now Osafa had only donkeys (one of which had just fallen) and a mule, all overburdened with salt. I was making a documentary, Camel Train, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last June.

Solomon translated (simultaneously) and Jeremy tape-recorded as we walked. Here is Osafa’s story. Solomon is translating; Osafa is speaking in his Tigrina tongue. “[It was] last June. [The kidnappers] had Kalashnikov. We were nine people. Among the nine people they only took three men — I don’t know how they select them — and 15 camel. They chose the best camels because they knew they were going to take them a long distance so it will not work to take the tired camel.

“So first [we] travelled three nights and three days continuously; then after that eight nights and eight days. So the first two days [we] started to feel thirsty and [we] couldn’t get water and [we] were vomiting and [we] were exhausted.” (Here on tape I interpose my own summary of Solomon’s lengthier translation . . .)

“The thirsty and exhausted group was eventually picked up by an Eritrean army patrol, who gave them water, food and medical treatment, but because of the political and military tensions between the two countries the soldiers had little sympathy for the plight of a few Ethiopian camel-men and soon handed them back to their captors.”

[Solomon translating]: “They put [us] in prison there, after two months they brought [us] eight days and eight nights to the border of Ethiopia then they left [us] . . . then [we] were begging for food and their water and . . . asking the way to [our] area, then [we] managed to reach [our] village.”

I asked Osafa how he dared return, this year, to the same journey. [Solomon translates:] “I don’t have any other choice, so I have to [carry salt] again until I die.”

I wish now we had recorded every word Osafa said; quizzed him about where he was taken, why his captors had taken men as well as camels and held them so long; and what was the relationship (if any) between his captors and the Eritrean Army. But I shall never see Osafa again. I hope he and his poor donkeys made it back to the highlands.

— Why, when the news media say the Iranians want nuclear “weapons”, do we call ours the British nuclear “deterrent”? Is ours not a weapon? Should we follow politicians in smuggling opinion (by choice of words) into a simple report?

Talking of opinion, which of the two countries is, in your opinion, in the clearer and more present danger of being attacked by a nuclear power? Which could more convincingly argue it needs a deterrent?

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