I was trying to develop this line of thought a bit further but in my heat-befuddled state it was proving just too much. It was easier just to stare blankly into the desert and let my mind wander around the silver grasses and olive-green trees that were somehow sucking life from the sand.
That's when I saw the cyclist. He rode past us, bare-chested, hair in untidy curls to his shoulders, a black-brimmed hat pulled low over his forehead. He appeared not to notice the 30 or so carriages of the train marooned beside him.
I blinked - and he was gone. Were hallucinations a symptom of heat stroke?
"Did anyone else see the man on the bike?" I asked my travel companions. Two looked at me blankly. Thankfully one had.
The Ghan began to slide slowly deeper into South Australia. The lights flickered into life, there was a brief puff of air conditioning and then, like the cyclist, they too were gone.
The train kept moving however and in a few minutes I saw him again - upright on his rather old-fashioned bike, looking neither left nor right and apparently not a bead of sweat on him.
If I could have opened the window in my hermetically sealed sauna I would have called out to him because the need to know where he had come from and where he was going to was as nagging as a swarm of Aussie flies.
About 30 minutes later we were once again becalmed in the ocean of sand while a hapless electrician or two ventured outside to do something clever with the electrics. They succeeded and hopefully were rewarded with a magnum or two of cold beer, but the cyclist never appeared.
Maybe he's still out there - biking through the night, pedalling through a chilly dawn, kangaroos bounding away from his wheels, a flock of cockatoos rising up in alarm and circling like giant yellow-smudged confetti.
