From Adelaide to Alice Springs This is a kind of double-edged pilgrimage out into the vast clean country in a train that takes its name from those early settlers in the desert who knelt towards Mecca amongst salt bush and gibber plain.   As it travels through Port Augusta I think of camels in woven jewels of chanting men in mud-brick mosques despised by cattlemen for not drinking and despising those who still sing and hunt beyond the edge of town.   In the morning we pass over the Finke’s dry bed where borders and laws slice through language where…