This is a piece I wrote a while ago regarding my trip to the sands of Arabia:
You look out of a window and see red, everything red as if on fire. You strain your eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of any other shade except for that fiery red. But you fail miserably from your window high up in the air. As you go on, you get accustomed to sights at the ground level. You see dunes, monstrous on the ground, but tiny from the airplane where you are sitting. Stretching in a straight line like grand armies marching out to meet their foes in war and death, the dunes look like great, grim-faced, battle-worn warriors of sadistic and ruthless nature, who go everywhere in search of death, glory and nothing else. The clouds that you see surrounding you at that altitude of 30,000 feet above the ground (higher even than the world's tallest peak, Mt. Everest) appear red - such is the fire and the power of the desert.
Yet these glimpses are but a poor picture of the beauty of the desert landscape. It is not completely featureless as you initially are led to believe. After the initial shock of seeing something that has often developed the reputation of being a merciless graveyard that kills you slowly but surely, with your own eyes, you begin to decipher the vast desert landscape. You get few chances of taking a piercing look through the reddish-hued clouds and if you capitalize on those opportunities, you see rocks - ragged, monstrous and alone, standing like obstacles that have been created by the Unseen Power to hinder the free wind. There you see ridges appearing out of nowhere. These are brown-black in colour, appearing as if the sun has baked them to the point of being burnt. If you get the fortune, you can see the ragged, cruel cliffs and sheer rocks fashioning steep slopes. These precipices rise from sheer oblivion into the ridges which tower above the desert landscape. It suddenly dawns upon you that nature has fashioned these ridges, not for preventing infiltration by outsiders, but actually for keeping them in once they enter this domain. You may even see a vast mirage occasionally, but you know the desert. You know it is a delusion. You know that it may indeed have proved to be the death knell for many old travellers. You know all this, even from that high place where you are sitting comfortably and striding along with the swirling wind.
The sheer ruggedness and unfriendliness of the terrain is reflected in the landscape. Even the sky beneath the clouds looks red, not due to lights on the ground, but in fact, due to the red, hot sand. The lifeless desert peeks at you from beneath those clouds and you begin to belief that the region is indeed, a ruthless murderer of life. Yet, it is not so. There is vegetation, oh yes, it is sparse but it exists nevertheless. Thorny shrubs establish their realm in this region which support nothing else and you begin to wonder what the Unseen Power must have felt while creating all these.
Then you find the aeroplane is descending. Slowly but surely - in a matter of about ten minutes - you descend to about ten thousand feet. Now you begin to see the ground level more distinctly. You see a road winding down like a thin ribbon across the face of the desert. The road seems to stretch beyond friendly borders and onto the desert on the other side of the horizon.
With the airplane's descent, you know that the end of the journey is near. Soon you begin to see the city where your journey ends. You see houses - small and quiet. You see roads - wide, busy and beautiful. But soon, the aerial vision fades away. Your airplane lands and you step into the cool, air-conditioned clime inside the airport. But the situation on the outside cannot be more different. It is hot. The sunrays penetrate you like painful needles. The temperatures show the weather to be no hotter than 40 degrees, but you know it better than that. Mere statistics cannot convey the dryness of the air and the absence of a single, grey cloud in the sky. It is these factors that make the desert clime all the more unbearable.
Such is the first impression that you get of the Great Arabian Desert, the second largest plateau in the world. It is as if you have stepped into the realms of a whole new world that seems both ancient and modern, both rugged and sophisticated - at one and the same time. Such is the might and the rugged beauty of the desert that you half admire it and half fear it. Admiration, because you appreciate of the existence of such a different civilization only about two and a half thousand miles from your home and fear because you know now how cruel and lifeless nature can make itself.
That is precisely why; you want to modify the opening lines of Blake's poem and say-
You look out of a window and see red, everything red as if on fire. You strain your eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of any other shade except for that fiery red. But you fail miserably from your window high up in the air. As you go on, you get accustomed to sights at the ground level. You see dunes, monstrous on the ground, but tiny from the airplane where you are sitting. Stretching in a straight line like grand armies marching out to meet their foes in war and death, the dunes look like great, grim-faced, battle-worn warriors of sadistic and ruthless nature, who go everywhere in search of death, glory and nothing else. The clouds that you see surrounding you at that altitude of 30,000 feet above the ground (higher even than the world's tallest peak, Mt. Everest) appear red - such is the fire and the power of the desert.
Yet these glimpses are but a poor picture of the beauty of the desert landscape. It is not completely featureless as you initially are led to believe. After the initial shock of seeing something that has often developed the reputation of being a merciless graveyard that kills you slowly but surely, with your own eyes, you begin to decipher the vast desert landscape. You get few chances of taking a piercing look through the reddish-hued clouds and if you capitalize on those opportunities, you see rocks - ragged, monstrous and alone, standing like obstacles that have been created by the Unseen Power to hinder the free wind. There you see ridges appearing out of nowhere. These are brown-black in colour, appearing as if the sun has baked them to the point of being burnt. If you get the fortune, you can see the ragged, cruel cliffs and sheer rocks fashioning steep slopes. These precipices rise from sheer oblivion into the ridges which tower above the desert landscape. It suddenly dawns upon you that nature has fashioned these ridges, not for preventing infiltration by outsiders, but actually for keeping them in once they enter this domain. You may even see a vast mirage occasionally, but you know the desert. You know it is a delusion. You know that it may indeed have proved to be the death knell for many old travellers. You know all this, even from that high place where you are sitting comfortably and striding along with the swirling wind.
The sheer ruggedness and unfriendliness of the terrain is reflected in the landscape. Even the sky beneath the clouds looks red, not due to lights on the ground, but in fact, due to the red, hot sand. The lifeless desert peeks at you from beneath those clouds and you begin to belief that the region is indeed, a ruthless murderer of life. Yet, it is not so. There is vegetation, oh yes, it is sparse but it exists nevertheless. Thorny shrubs establish their realm in this region which support nothing else and you begin to wonder what the Unseen Power must have felt while creating all these.
Then you find the aeroplane is descending. Slowly but surely - in a matter of about ten minutes - you descend to about ten thousand feet. Now you begin to see the ground level more distinctly. You see a road winding down like a thin ribbon across the face of the desert. The road seems to stretch beyond friendly borders and onto the desert on the other side of the horizon.
With the airplane's descent, you know that the end of the journey is near. Soon you begin to see the city where your journey ends. You see houses - small and quiet. You see roads - wide, busy and beautiful. But soon, the aerial vision fades away. Your airplane lands and you step into the cool, air-conditioned clime inside the airport. But the situation on the outside cannot be more different. It is hot. The sunrays penetrate you like painful needles. The temperatures show the weather to be no hotter than 40 degrees, but you know it better than that. Mere statistics cannot convey the dryness of the air and the absence of a single, grey cloud in the sky. It is these factors that make the desert clime all the more unbearable.
Such is the first impression that you get of the Great Arabian Desert, the second largest plateau in the world. It is as if you have stepped into the realms of a whole new world that seems both ancient and modern, both rugged and sophisticated - at one and the same time. Such is the might and the rugged beauty of the desert that you half admire it and half fear it. Admiration, because you appreciate of the existence of such a different civilization only about two and a half thousand miles from your home and fear because you know now how cruel and lifeless nature can make itself.
That is precisely why; you want to modify the opening lines of Blake's poem and say-
'Fire, Fire, Burning Bright,
In the sandy desert's might,
What immortal hand or eye,
Made man, such an enemy?'
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