As we drove out of Baghdad yesterday morning, white tongues of flame shot from three anti-aircraft artillery pieces in a palm grove, with a loud, "pop, pop, pop".Outside Baghdad, Lara Marlowe, got a glimpse of the defences the regime has in place.
Men stood in the doorway of a grocery store, pointing to the sky, towards the US bomber that the gunners aimed for. Please don't let the pilot mistake us for a troop bus, I kept thinking.
It was the first time in two weeks of war that Iraqi authorities allowed foreign journalists to travel outside the capital. With amazing nonchalance, they took us southward, towards the battlefield with US forces, straight through their own defences. On a patch of scorched earth beside the motorway, an oil tanker poured petrol into a trench, that had burned itself out. More anti-aircraft artillery, this time stashed beneath a fly-over. Just south of the city, soldiers milled in front of a big barracks - not the sort of place any sane person would enter.
At the second big military complex - also not bombed - boulders had been placed on the road to stop intruders. Traffic was surprisingly heavy, considering we were only a few dozen kilometres from what US military spokesmen describe as "the relentless pounding of the Republican Guard". A makeshift food market was spread out by the side of the motorway with trucks piled with cabbage, potatoes and tomatoes.
Further on, in the vast, fertile plain south of Baghdad, dozens of military fuel and troop trucks were dug in, with earth embankments protecting their engines. Each vehicle was several hundred metres from the next one, making it impossible to hit more than one with a bomb or rocket.
If the Americans want to destroy our rickety old equipment, the Iraqis apparently think, we'll make them use up lots of expensive weapons.
Soldiers, like material, seem to be strategically spread out. Several stood in the cool of an unfinished brick house, a few more under a palm tree.
Everything - vegetation, weapons, soldiers - comes in the same tones of dusty grey, khaki and beige here. If it was this difficult to distinguish details with the naked eye from a few hundred metres, what must it be like from 30,000 feet? The next anti-aircraft artillery piece was sand-bagged on top of a motorway fly-over, not beneath it. But there wasn't a gunner in sight.
Petrol stations along the highway were also sand-bagged, but there wasn't much the Iraqis could do to hide an enormous fuel depot, other than paint its storage tanks in camouflage beige and green.
The war seems not to have fazed Mamudiya or Iskandariya, the first two big towns south of Baghdad. Main streets are crowded and shops looked well-stocked. A man swept the pavement with a palm frond, and rattan furniture made from Iraq's national tree was displayed for sale.
One soldier manned a machine-gun nest in front of Baath Party headquarters, while his comrades drank soft drinks in front of cafes, or had their shoes polished. Civilians and military intermingle.
Back in the open country, fields and walled complexes, canals, reed-filled marshes, houses and groves of palms, eucalyptus and scrubby pines stretch as far as the eye can see. I saw women in chadors, a herd of camels, a man on a bicycle - and soldiers, everywhere, but never in large groups.
There are no military encampments, no neat delineations between farmhouses, villages, warehouses and factories. No wonder US strategy is apparently to skirt the inhabited area of the fertile crescent, going north-west into the desert, to attack Baghdad from the side.
"They are welcome to roam in the desert," the Iraqi vice president said when the war started. Taking on Iraq's central heartland is a different proposition altogether.
The wide open spaces look like they've been dug up by an industrious mole: the crusts of pre-prepared gun positions are repeated ad infinitum, though it's impossible to know how many actually hold artillery. It was only on the return trip, watching the terrain to the east, that I saw a few blackened, bombed-out positions. There are earthen ramps for firing missiles, though I saw only one missile, being driven down the motorway, horizontal on a transporter. There was a tank next to the motorway, sleeping beneath two trees, a "Stalin organ" multiple rocket launcher, and a palm frond tent, covering what appeared to be a tank, or perhaps a missile launcher.
Soon after we spotted the ruins of ancient Babylon, which Saddam Hussein turned into a sort of Disneyland theme park, there was a 155mm artillery piece. I saw a few others, some shrouded in foliage, but never close together.
In the midst of a palm grove, a lorry-load of weary-looking soldiers - the biggest concentration I saw - jumped to the ground with their assault rifles.
If the Iraqis display all this on an open highway, what do they keep further inland? Sometimes the Iraqis are too cocky, for example when they tried to move five tracked armoured personnel carriers on a flat-bed train.
The railway line is blasted apart, the APCs burned-out wrecks now. Burned too were five military trucks, and what must have been a barracks, now a heap of grey ash. As I left Hilla, on the return leg of my 200 km journey, an American jet dragged white contrails through the sky.
Soldiers stood in the road, pointing at the white dot circling above us. Aircraft engines growled overhead for most of the 1½ hour drive. The bus driver kept craning his neck to try to see the invisible danger.
At the southern perimeter of the capital, the words "Baghdad, Peace Be Upon You" are painted on an arch straddling the highway. An air raid siren sounded, but the vegetable sellers didn't move, and a herd of dirty sheep kept sleeping. Black smoke swirled before us, and I realised I'd seen blue sky for the first time in days.
As we entered southern Baghdad, I saw a clutch of field guns pointed skyward, a handful of military trucks, covered with tarpaulins, dangerously close to an electricity station. There are slit-trenches and dug-outs down the side streets.
Let the Americans come, the regime keeps saying: we're waiting for them.
