Desert Colours

I took another trip to the deep desert, right on the edge of the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter. My own quarters were in the gypsum plains but I travelled out to the edge of the dunes, not the Empty Quarter itself, but one of the places where the heat and the wind practice at building dunes before the main event. It was ravenously hot, well into the forties. It was sunset and the wind was rising, not a refreshing breeze, but a heated sand-blast. The sun was too low to create a mirage of water, but I imagined that I saw a man in the distance, stumbling across the top of a dune.

I remembered that Wilfred Thesiger had passed this way and his Arabian Sands was on my bucket list. I bought it in good old-fashioned book form. A paperback, though, sorry Wilf. I don't entirely trust his hatred of the very progress which delivered him all of his privilege, or his desire to hide in the desert instead of taking the fight against progress to where it might have mattered. It seems to me that he was one of those men who represented the tip of the imperial spear: detached from his origins, funded by privilege and wealth but expressing disdain from it. One of those Englishmen who infiltrated the old cultures of the world and then betrayed them. No, not a spear. The tip of the stiletto claiming disdain for all stilettos as it slid regretfully between the ribs of the Bedu and their way of life. That said, he knew how to write. One section in particular addresses the colours of desert sand and rang clear and true as I watched the wind blowing off the dunes.

Sand blew like dust in little scurries across the road, lines dancing back and forth like great hot snakes. It blew off the tips of the dunes like smoke. But the sand that moves is the lighter sand, which is a different colour to the heavier sand which stays behind. This divides the scene into two tones. The dunes were the colour of chocolate powder; of dark honey, warm and glutinous like oil; dark skinned and sinuous, lying in sweet curves the colour of cinnamon powdered dry and hot in the mouth. The blowing sand was the colour of warm toast,  The low sun played with the heat and made fires of these gritty banners. A whirlwind crossed from right to left. Stopped. Caught my gaze. Promised to return and vanished.