Explorer, adventurer and writer Robert Twigger has been a tour leader with the Explorer School since 2006, but the sum total of other human beings he has come across on the expeditions he has led is — nil.

Now he and fellow director of the Oxford-based school, Richard Mohun, are at it again. This time they will lead an expedition across some of the remotest regions of the Egyptian Sahara from the Dakhla Oasis, 850 km south of Cairo — where Mr Twigger lives — to the Siwa Oasis in, well, the middle of nowhere.

The 36-day expedition will set out on December 27, and finish on January 31, 2010. It will follow in the footsteps of the 19th century German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs, who made the journey in 1874. And, like Rohlfs, members of the expedition will travel by camel.

Already the school has four travellers signed up, each paying £3,000, which is enough to ensure the tour will definitely go ahead. Now they ideally need to find another three to reach their maximum of seven.

Mr Twigger said: “The expedition provides a wonderful opportunity for people to get away from it all entirely and learn about a world that hasn’t changed at all since Rohlfs’ time.

“Fundamentally, I think it is better to learn something than just consume. With us, people who are fit and enthusiastic — and can afford £3,000, or find sponsorship — find out about navigation, self-reliance, and planning. And how to handle camels.”

The Explorer School is mainly web-based, operating as it does largely in Egypt, but Mr Twigger explained that its headquarters is in a garden shed in Headington, the property of Richard Mohun.

As many will know, the main job of Mr Twigger, an Oxford University graduate, is that of an award-winning writer. And in his travel book Lost Oasis (2007) there is a hint of what he is trying to impart to travellers leaving the modern world for a sojourn in the desert beneath the stars by night and the burning sun by day.

He writes that he is “seeking vastness in the face of human confusion and brain fatigue.” And later: “The jungle is more. I wanted less.” Could that be the concrete, urban jungle most of us westerners inhabit? And could escape from it explain why he and his family have left Oxfordshire to live in Cairo? Not that Cairo itself is any less polluted and car-infested.

All I could draw from Mr Twigger on the subject was: “The life of a writer is deskbound and this gets me out and enables to meet other people.”

I suspect there is a spectre of the film The English Patient here. After all, the desert not only maintains an ancient way of life but it preserves things in the sand, too. Nothing much rots.

In that film a biplane is dug up and flown away after ten years — which would be possible — and in the 19th century poets and travellers were fascinated by the thought of ancient things preserved.

Mr Twigger’s expedition in the footsteps of Rohlfs will start from Cairo. From there, participants will travel 850km by four-wheel drive south to Dakhla camp where they will pick up 11 camels and meet up with their Bedouin guides.

Then it will be all aboard the ships of the desert to cross the sea of sand. Luckily for Rohlfs, back in 1874 there was a fortuitous, rare, downpour of rain when he was about two weeks into his journey. These modern travellers cannot, of course, hope for such luck, and Mr Twigger has organised a water drop at about the spot where Rohlfs was forced to turn north and abandon his project to cross the Libyan Desert, as it was then called, from east to west.

But what about real emergencies, I asked, surely no one will be left in the desert to die?

“No they will not”, said Mr Twigger. “Hidden away in the baggage is a satellite telephone which, of course, no-one may touch except in the most dire straits.”

Mr Twigger, who originally studied engineering at Balliol before changing to philosophy is, some might say, a sort of 19th century adventurer in a 21st century skin. A real polymath.

In addition to having won the1998 Somerset Maugham Award for literature, his book Angry White Pyjamas also carried off the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.

His exploits include the capture of what he claimed to be the world’s longest snake — recounted in the book Big Snake — about his expedition into the heart of Indonesia.

There was also a three-year canoe journey across North West Canada in the wake of 18th century trapper Alexander Mackenzie.

His latest book, Dr Ragab’s Universal Language, is set in Cairo and is all about a polymath. Sound familiar?

Clearly he believes he has a message for modern people, and that message is best delivered in the desert where he has spent so much of his life searching for lost oases.