Mount Kuwait sits in an area of newly formed oil lakes, south of the oil town of Al Ahmadi, past the distinctive Longhorn fire, and a few miles off the Burgan road. Because we envisioned a long day, and because the summer temperatures in the desert often exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, it was a good idea to start early.

At 3:30 in the morning the air felt cool, about 85 degrees, and the streets of Kuwait City were empty. The traffic lights worked, but there was no traffic. It was a great place to run red lights, which I count as a fine activity.

A gentle breeze from the north had swept the sky clear of smoke. The city center might have been Miami, except that businesses and homes were abandoned, windows were broken, and the major hotels all showed evidence of recent fires. There were streaks of soot on most of the buildings. In March the city had been covered over in a thick shroud of smoke, and when the spring rains came they fell black and soiled all they touched.

By July, the fires in the oil fields south of the city had been beaten back dozens of miles. More than 200 fires had been"killed," and the best estimates had another 500 still burning. Fire fighters were working from the north with the prevailing winds at their backs, and Kuwait City was seldom inundated by smoke. Some days were whiskey brown; others were bright and blue and hot.

The outskirts of the city looked like Phoenix, where futuristic divided and elevated highways ran over single-story poured-concrete houses. We exited the freeway and plowed down the two-lane blacktop toward the oil fields. There was a mound of sand and a sign in English that said ROAD CLOSED. As journalists, we assumed the sign did not apply to us.

Levees of sand kept the ponds and lakes of oil from consuming the road. The oil lakes seemed to glow, silver-red, with the light from the fires on the southern horizon. After a few miles, the shimmering in the distance separated itself into individual fires: great plumes of flame that dotted the flat desert landscape. The shapes of the plumes themselves had become familiar landmarks. Some looked a bit like Christmas trees; some geysered up every 30 seconds; some lay close to the ground and seemed to burn horizontally. Not far past Al Ahmadi, the most distinctive of the fires howled out of control. Two plumes shot out along the ground—one to the west, one to the east—and each turned up at the end. The fire fighters, most of them Americans from Texas, called this one the Longhorn fire.

It was close to the road, and the western plume was directed at passing vehicles like a pyromaniac's wet dream. Here the moonless night was bright as day, only the light was red, flickering, hellish. A 20-mile-an-hour wind carried inky billows of smoke to the south, but along this road and others in the oil fields the winds sometimes sent impenetrable clouds of gritty soot rolling over passing vehicles.

Not far from here, on April 24, a small Japanese sedan had swerved off the oil-slicked road and into a burning oil lake, killing two British journalists. The driver had apparently been disoriented by the smoke and falling soot. Two other vehicles, a pumping truck and a tanker, had apparently followed the tracks of the sedan into the flames. At least one fire-fighting crew had passed by the three vehicles without raising an alarm: Burned-out cars in burning oil lakes are a common sight around Al Ahmadi. Those who finally recovered the bodies had seemed unaffected when they described the horror, but they mentioned it a lot, especially to journalists who assumed written warnings didn't apply to them.

The sun finally rose, a sickly orange color that I could look directly into without squinting, and in the near distance a rocky butte about 300 feet high, the highest piece of ground in all the oil fields, appeared. It took, by my watch, a little over two minutes to stroll to the top of this bump that oil workers had long ago names Mount Kuwait. It was supposed to be a joke, the name, like calling a bald-headed guy Curly.

The whole world smelled like a diesel engine. There were fires burning in all directions, more than 30 at a count, and they thundered belligerently. The lake below was burning in streaks and ribbons, with the flames hanging low over a mirrorlike surface that was unaffected by the wind. The ground was black, the sky was black, the drifting clouds were black, and only the fires lived on the land.

What I was seeing, it seemed to me, was the internal-combustion engine made external.

The country of Kuwait sits atop a vast reservoir of oil, 94 billion barrels of known reserves. This reservoir is two miles deep in places, and the oil is under tremendous pressure. Drop a pipe deep enough into the ground and oil erupts to a height of 30, 50, 70, 100 feet. Wells are capped with valve assemblies, the oil is transferred to gathering centers, then piped to sea terminals for export. It is used in internal-combustion engines around the world.

Iraqi troops had wired nearby wells to a single detonator. These wires still lay across the black sands. The explosions—dynamite directed downward by sandbags—had blown the caps off the wells and ignited the gushing oil.

Kuwait, on this day in July, would lose about $100 million worth of oil. That was the generally agreed upon figure, though the effects of the fires on the people and on the environment had yet to be coherently assessed. Toxic metals, released by combustion, will surely contaminate the desert soil and the sheep and goats and camels that graze there. Many of these food-borne metals might then cause brain damage and cardiovascular disorders in humans.

Meanwhile, a month earlier, a National Science Foundation team, flying over the burning oil fields, had said that environmental damage was a"concern" and not a crisis. Environmental Protection Agency experts measured pollutants common to American cities—the results of internal combustion—and decided, mostly from planes flying 20,000 feet over the choking hell below, that the air quality was not deadly. Further, the flights proved that while plumes rose thousands of feet, the fires weren't propelling the heavy smoke high enough into the atmosphere to cause worldwide climatic change.

Still, in April, about five million barrels of oil a day had gone up in flame. Black rain had fallen in Saudi Arabia and Iran; black snow had fallen on the ski slopes of Kashmir, more than 1,500 miles to the east. And no one had yet measured pollutants peculiar to this crisis; a class of carcinogens called polyaromatic hydrocarbons generated out of partially burned oil. Standing on the summit of Mount Kuwait, my own assessment was bleak. The desert, here in the oil fields, was both dead and deadly. It was a sure vision of the environmental apocalypse.

By the time we scrambled down Mount Kuwait, the sun was higher in the sky. A purple petroleum rain had fallen while we'd been climbing, and the evidence could be seen as pinpricks on the windshield. Peter fired up the Land Cruiser, but it was hard to hear the internal-combustion engine over the roar of the surrounding external combustion. I thought about those unburied Iraqi soldiers out near the Saudi border; one of them had been decapitated. In the gathering heat, the oil on the windshield now turned a streaky red, so that it looked like dried blood.