A pale bouquet over the sand

There is an infinity to the desert that I don’t find anywhere else. Even at sea, out of sight of land, the waves and currents which must after all be going somewhere admit that beyond the horizon there is land, terra firma, people, civilisation, and therefore activity beyond the push of the gulf stream and the pull of the moon. But the desert, more often than not, makes no such admission.

I first fell in love with the desert while cycling around Australia, through such imaginitively named tracts as the Great Sandy Desert but also the Kimberleys, Pilbara, Salinaland, and the Nullarbor Plain. My love of deserts shares a little with my love of mountains, expressed most fully in Bo and the mountain but while a desert may be monumental, the deserts I have known contain few monuments. If the mountain is mother nature in exultation, and to climb a mountain is to feel lifted beyond oneself, the desert is almost the opposite, akin to being pressed into oneself.

All is stillness and desolation. One reflects how many centuries it has thus been, and how many more it will thus remain. Yet in this scene without one bright object there is high pleasure which I can neither explain or comprehend.

— Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, Ch. VIII: Banda Oriental and Patagonia, 1839

A desert is a desolate place, almost barren of features and people, and the Kazakh Steppe, Ustyurt Plateau, and Kyzylkum Desert that have dominated the walk so far this year have been no exception, a naked landscape stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions with no promise but more of the same. For two-thousand kilometres the horizon has lain flat, “the lone and level sands stretching far away”¹, unchanging. Without the intrusion of so much as a hill the days lose definition until the whole experience melts into one continuous march atop a treadmill of infinite sand under a vast blue sky. In a still desert even the ground seems to fall away and the sensation, heightened by the uber fatigue of too much walking and too little sleep, is of endlessly falling fowards.

But the desert is not always still. If I have been aware of anything in these two months it has been the wind. Hot winds from the East, cold winds from the West and North, steady winds, gusting winds, winds that sworl and squall, winds that lift and others that seem to press you down to the earth more than gravity itself. Even an absence of wind begins to feel like yet another of its many voices. For two days a wretched headwind bent me double and pushed me one step back for every five forward in an exhausting tug of war. In the city of Kungrad, at the end of a 400km stretch across Qaraqalpaqstan without more than the slightest of settlements to interrupt the expanse, my host would tell me that those same winds had wrenched roofs from houses and flattened power poles, leaving large parts of the city without power for days.

When the wind blows, that once still sand takes flight, and all of a sudden the eyelashes, dormant and ornamental for much of our lives, become active and essential again. The airborne sand, seemingly immune to the weak protests of zippers, seals, and roll-top bags works its way into everything: into shoes, into pockets, into the ears and into every pore of exposed skin; it finds its way into the threads beneath the caps of water bottles, builds up beneath my watch strap, and collects between the wadded notes of Kazakh Tenge and Uzbeki Som in my wallet. My skin, already scorched by the unrelenting sun and dried by the many voices of the wind, is abraded by this assault of sand until my hands begin to resemble the coarse and cracked surface of the desert itself.

I walk for hours after the sun has set, often until two or three in the morning, and while I steal a little sleep on the sand, all around me the wind and the sand are at work. I sleep deliriously, half-aware of the whip-like lashing of the wind that seems intent on flattening my tent, and of the almost continuous vibrations of the single forked aluminium pole that forms the skeleton of it. With each gust the tent seems to bow lower, as if trying to get beneath the wind itself, either in submission or stoic rebellion, until the fabric of the fly is pressed against my face like a ghostly hand come to suffocate me. At last the dawn, “the appearance of that pale bouquet, of that beacon that rises to the east of the black lands”², lighting my tent enough to reveal the drifts of dust-like sand that have worked their way under the rainfly, over the bathtub floor, and through the mesh of the inner, so that by morning the floor of the tent seems already halfway to being subsumed by the desert floor beneath it. Like this, even within the span of a few hours, the steady work of the desert is revealed, the erosion and reclamation of all that trespass through it, and the erosion and reclamation of me too.