On the day of the opening match of the Qatar World Cup, a dust storm swept across Doha.
The wind came from the north-west, barrelling from across the desert, started by the flap of a butterfly wing somewhere else in the world a long time ago.
A blanket of haze blurs the horizon at the best of times, but this storm was thicker, more menacing, reaching high into the sky.
It turned the Sun a deep red as it dipped towards the Earth, like a wide, unblinking eye staring down at the unusual tournament that was about to begin below.
The Al Bayt stadium, which hosted the World Cup's opening ceremony and its first game between the hosts and Ecuador on Monday morning, emerged from the dimness of the dust a couple of kilometres away from our media bus.
It looked surreal, this gigantic Bedouin tent: something you recognised but didn't quite expect to be here, materialising out of a swirl of sand above an otherwise flat, empty landscape.
The wind grew fiercer as we got closer, bending the newly planted trees and slapping the FIFA-branded flags that lined the arterial roads fanning out from the stadium.
Despite our early departure, we still got caught in kilometres of queues, crawling past infinite parking zones towards the main entrance. For a place that's had more than a decade to prepare to welcome the world, it seems even they did not expect this.
We approach the stadium from the west, up one of the two main driveways that carries diplomats and VIPs to its front flap. Lining the road is a cavalry of bedazzled camels and horses, ridden by policemen wearing traditional dress with rifles slung across their shoulders.
The lights of the stadium are on now, and there's a giant torch that has been lit beneath the road. It resembles the campfires that kept travellers warm at night. Several black cars with blacker windows glide past, leaving a cloud of questions in their wake.
Once inside, the questions are answered; some of the Gulf's — indeed, the world's — most powerful men are here.
Mohammed Bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, receives a roar from the crowd. Hamad bin Khalifa, the father of the emir, receives an even louder one. But nothing compares to the sound produced for the emir himself, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the man who has brought the world in, even if some of that world does not want to be here.
Soon after these unfathomably influential men take their seats, the lights of the stadium dim, and the stormy voice of none other than Morgan Freeman fills the cavernous space. He recites some kind of prophetic verse as footage shows sharks moving through an ocean, circling an unknown object. The metaphor is a little too ominous.
And then there he is, striding out into the middle of the stadium. Morgan Freeman. In Qatar. And he's talking to Qatari YouTube star Ghanim Al Muftah, who was born without his lower limbs, about inclusion and hope and togetherness ahead of a World Cup that has highlighted, if anything, their exact opposites.
It felt like the collective fever dream of the 67,000 people in attendance; the surrealism of this whole dizzying spectacle made manifest in this most peculiar meeting of men.
The ceremony rolls on. There are men dancing with swords, mysterious figures twirling white glowing beams, a weird parade of World Cup mascots, headless torsos of all 32 national team jerseys swaying out of sync with deliberately catchy pop songs.
A two-storey-tall La'eeb — the ghostly World Cup mascot — inflates next to the stage, watching on silently as Jungkook from K-Pop supergroup BTS makes shapes across the glittering stage while singing his official FIFA song, Dreamers.
It is all bright and brilliant and doing what it is designed to do, though never quite without the shadow that lingers nearby.
Once the music dies down, the emir makes an address. It's more measured than the awkward hour-long ramble made by FIFA president Gianni Infantino a day earlier. There are no bungled attempts at showing empathy here. It strikes the patient, conciliatory tone that the frustrated Infantino could not, and it is received warmly by his adoring public.
It's followed by a video on the stadium's big screens; a home video, it turns out, of the emir and his father playing football in bare feet in the sand.
The shirt they wear in the video — a replica of which has been included in gift bags for every seat in the stadium — is then brought out to the emir and his father.
The image of the elderly man fumbling around with a sharpie pen as he tries to sign his name on the fabric, just a few stands away from pockets of loud, sweaty, paying football fans, serves as a reminder of this tournament's many uncomfortable juxtapositions, primarily, perhaps, the distance between those who run the sport and those who consume it.
After a flurry of lasers and fireworks, the ceremony concludes, and the lights of the stadium put the football part of this whole thing back into view. Because there is still, after all this, some real football to be played, even in these most surreal circumstances.
So Qatar and Ecuador line up and pull their shoulders back as their anthems march around the stands. Giant banners of each flag ripple across the grass as a towering World Cup trophy, filled with nothing but air, glints in the stadium's cold, white lights.
The teams huddle, the referee blows his whistle and the first ball of this whole difficult, dazzling tournament begins to roll, watched on by the red, unblinking eye of the rest of the world, waiting to see what happens next.
