Deserts

The term 'desert' in relation to a landscape tends to mean a hot, dry place with very little in the way of vegetation or other forms of life, so places like the Sahara and the Namib spring to mind. In an earlier, and perhaps more correct English sense, it meant a place which was deserted of human life, so might equally refer to Antarctica or the northern Canadian tundra.

There is something utterly beautiful about a hot, dry desert. Perhaps it is its simplicity, that it is land stripped to the bone; perhaps it is the silence, the sense of vastness, perhaps it is the colours, less at midday when the intensity of the light bleeds them out of the landscape, more in the clean light of dawn or the dusty light of evening; perhaps it is its emptiness, a place where one can be utterly alone with oneself; certainly it is the wonder of the desert night sky, where the stars burn so bright and close one feels one could reach out and touch them. Perhaps, too, a desert's beauty also lies in a sense of awe, that it is a terribly dangerous place, a place where man must tread only with the utmost wariness.

I have seen two of the world's great deserts, the Sahara and the Namib. I spent time in the Sahara when I was hitch-hiking in North Africa, time sitting by the side of a road with nothing to look at but a barren landscape, time spent hunkered down under the heat, time spent appreciating my puniness against its magnificence. The Namib I visited for a few days, enough to remember and to wish we could have stayed longer.

In both deserts there was something very special indeed about those places where the land met a greater desert - in the older sense of the word - the sea, and where it also met the sky, so three deserts met; and the breakers which washed onto the beach mixed their three elements together, earth, air and water.