May 27, 2007
Nothing
If you fly from Dubai to Amman, your route goes across northern Saudi, parallel to the Kuwaiti and Iraqi borders but maybe 100 km south.
And if you look out the window of your plane, you see... nothing.
Well, you see desert. But it's empty desert. There are no roads, there are no towns. There's no sign of humanity. There's no sign of life at all. Just this reddish-tan... surface.
The day was pretty clear. Some haze, but I could probably see eighty or a hundred miles. And the desert extended, empty, for as far as I could see.
And this went on for a couple of hours.
Nothingness is strangely hard to look at. The eye sort of claws at the desert and then falls back, baffled. Perhaps it's different on the ground but from cruising altitude it's almost painful after a while. If not for the signature blue of the atmosphere, we could have been in a probe flying low over one of the duller parts of Mars.
The desert gets livelier when you get close to Jordan: there are hills, and depressions, and lots of dry riverbeds. You can look at that with interest. But northeast Saudi is just flat and dead and empty, going on for hundreds of miles. There's just... nothing.
However: there's a part of Saudi Arabia called "The Empty Quarter". And the part we were flying over? Wasn't it.
It's a big world.
Posted by douglas at May 27, 2007 03:59 PMI've been in the empty quarter. It's much more interesting to look at than the northern desert. Why? Dunes. Huge impossibly varigated dunes.
Red dunes. Bright slightly-orangy red dunes. Of very fine-grained sand. Many many stories high.
That you can ski on.
I am not making this up.
Posted by: Noel Maurer at May 27, 2007 05:32 PMYah, Wilfred Thesiger -- who seems to be a local hero in Dubai; the airport shop was full of stuff about him -- goes on about the dunes in his crossing-the-Empty-Quarter book. Apparently they're close to being small mountains, or small mountain ranges.
There's one sequence where they need to cross over Big Dune. So they laboriously climb over a big dune, hundreds of feet high, nearly killing themselves and their camels, and Thesiger is all "thank God that's over" and says so, and the Bedouin replies "Oh that's not Big Dune -- we reach Big Dune tomorrow -- Big Dune is /big/." And Thesiger writes, at this point I was like keep struggling? Or just resign myself to death?
Of course, he was the /second/ non-Bedu to cross the Empty Quarter. I've never seen Philby's account of his trip, though.
Random: the book I mentioned? It's _The Flame Trees of Thika_, which is so much better than the movie. And it's about another Edwardian-born Brit experiencing the alien, albeit some years earlier and a bit further south.
I'll say this for those guys: they produced some crackling memoirs.
Doug M.
I love the blog that you have. I was wondering if you would link my blog to yours and in return I would do the same for your blog. If you want to, my site name is American Legends and the URL is:
www.americanlegends.blogspot.com
If you want to do this just go to my blog and in one of the comments just write your blog name and the URL and I will add it to my site.
Thanks,
David