The Desert

By Maliha Masood

I am unaware of walking on this immense sandy plateau. I am literally becoming a part of it. The sand feels warm, enticingly sensual. My legs move backward and forward, digging deep into its silky softness. I have no idea where I am going. The horizon seems so close – I feel like walking right up to the edge of the world. The sky is a blue I have never seen before, a brilliant turquoise blue with the texture of smooth silk. It looks deceptively close – maybe I could reach out and caress its face through the cotton wool clouds. Even these clouds are different – circling and gliding in a slow graceful dance, leaving behind wispy plumes of white feathers. My thoughts tumble and swirl like pieces of confetti. My feet move with a will of their own, as if I have no control to alter their direction or rhythm. So I surrender to the desert.

It is early morning and Badri, my Bedouin guide, is still sleeping peacefully in the open air. We spent our first night near Acrobat Mountain – a surreal landscape of sand stone mountains with crooked shapes and arches, smooth chalk-white rocks and sloping ridges of powdery dunes. It was hard to believe that we were less than 200 km away from Cairo. This place was like another planet.

Last night, we had set up camp in a circular alcove of beige boulders and golden sand. Badri plied me with dozens of tiny glasses of sugary mint tea, otherwise referred to as “Bedouin whiskey.” We lit a blazing fire and roasted chicken on hand made skewers. The rich, lilting voice of Um Kulsoum flooded the silent desert night - the best concert hall acoustics in the world! We listened to the classic song Inta Omri which means “you are my life” countless times. Badri translated the meanings of the lyrics from Arabic to English until they seared in my mind. We were building a good rapport grounded in our mutual love of the desert. He was friendly but not intrusive. I could always be alone with the elements.

The Buzz

The still, silent desert buzzes with presence. The ridges of dunes, the soft slithery feel of millions of sand grains, my footprints etched in the grains, the breeze swirling among the sandy plateau, the slowly undulating movements of the clouds, the fractured complexities of the distant rocky crags, all part of the eternal web. A web which is another reality, where thoughts are not fragmented, labeled, separated, but rather bound together in an inevitable totality that melts barriers and floods the soul with an incredible wholeness and completeness. The desert enchants and distracts with its surreal, haunting beauty.

Tiny black rocks with flower petal shapes littered the ground like hailstones. My pocket bulges as I collect them. I am sill carrying a piece of crystal that I scraped off the walls of a quarry completely studded with raw minerals. Yesterday’s drive unfolded a panorama of contrasts - black volcanic mountains, pyramid shaped with rocks tumbling like chunks of coal merged into a pancake flat medley of sand and sky.

We drove on the long straight asphalt paved road until the sand licked its edges and lured us to penetrate its harsh terrain. Badri made a swift turn and the jeep veered off the road and slid into the vast canvas of the desert. It was like entering a blank universe with no road map or signs. Driving in the desert is not for the faint-hearted but it seemed to be second nature to Badri who grinned mischievously as he scaled and slid down sloping dunes, the jeep skidding in wide turns and crunching its tires on the squishy sand. I couldn’t get over his instinctive sense of direction. He seemed to have some inner radar that told him which way was right or wrong. It was a jarring ride that made me feel like a rubber ball bouncing inside the cavernous jaws of eternity.

The Void

The nothingness of the desert…a featureless space of sand and sky. Nothing but an endless blankness in every direction. Except our jeep tracks that made deep incisions in the sand. I had come all this way to see nothing at all. No movement, no life. Nothing! The endless clockwork motion of the universe…a cycle of endings and beginnings, births and deaths…the beginning of the journey no more than a point on the way to its end…the motion ticked on to infinity, my vast journey a minute part of the gigantic works.

It was like vanishing into some vast realm beyond the mind, way beyond thoughts, beyond feelings and sensations and all the convoluted tangles of consciousness. Even beyond awareness itself. A space so colorless, so silent and so infinite that it seemed to be its own universe. And I simply disappeared into it. The heat shimmers were so violent that it was easy to distort distances. Two hundred yards away from a landmark appears the same as a hundred miles. Once, I was utterly lost in a miasma of brilliant shimmering white light.

The Embrace

We headed deeper into the Western Desert of Egypt towards the Libyan border – the eastern gateway of the Sahara. A terrifying magnificence of wilderness unfolded and held me captive. We discovered a plain with no visible limits - composed of sand and stone, speckled with spindly bushes. The plain was flooded with light, burning with the sun’s rays…and our camp became a pygmy village dwarfed by the immense wilderness.

After dinner, Badri and I took a long walk, barefoot in the cold sand. We had no need to talk much - the engulfing silence spoke volumes. I asked him how he managed never to get lost in that vast space. He simply said “learn to read the stars, the language of the sky.” So I threw my head back and stared hard at the black dome above littered with tiny silver thumbtacks. The stars appeared permanent and ageless. Despite their inconceivable distance, they did not seem so far away. I kept walking in the sand, cloaked in the darkness, with Badri’s familiar shape like a roving shadow next to mine. That night, I almost had the illusion of truly being united with universal time and space. The desert assigns its own slow rhythms – a rhythm from beyond silence, from beyond life – to the smallest gesture, the most insignificant word.

In the cool quiet morning at sunrise, when I opened my tent, the outside air carried a whiff of perfume, as if someone had broken a vial of aromatics outside the front door of my tent. The forlorn valley was also perfumed like an oriental temple with countless incense burners. The air ripened with citronella, geranium and myrrh…soon, the morning sun would play a game of light and shadow with the nearby rocks, and burn off the black tattered clouds, fleeing fast to the north. After a chilly dawn, the sun suddenly started to climb and warm…once I imagined it like a big dying ember that could fall from the sky.

Far from excluding us, the desert envelops us. We become the immensity of sand, just as we are the book when we write. The prattling, rather worrisome creature that I usually am seemed to fade away into insignificance. Replaced by a sense of utter certainty that everything is as it should be and that I am safe and that all I have to do is to set off into the void and I would be led to safety by something, someone inside me - a someone who always seems to hover around when I get myself into situations over which I have no control whatsoever. I burst out laughing at the surrealism of the whole predicament and my feet, without any prompting and guidance from the conscious part of me, walk more surely right back through the vast empty silence to the camp.

The ochre shade of the sand is as impossible as an alchemist’s gold. The sky looks close enough to touch…as if you could reach up and grab a handful of stardust. Once, I stood on top of a sandy ridge and witnessed the curvature of the earth. It was the loneliest, emptiest corner on the planet, strangely smiling inwardly and on the outside, utterly at peace, as if in some blissful limbo between life and death. Far from exclusion, I felt the crushing embrace of the desert.

The Mirror

I am all alone in this open cosmic void. There is no trace of any other human being. The desert looks primordial, raw, untarnished – as if you are witnessing the earth when it was newly born. Last night, I slept on a cold sand dune.

There was not even the slightest wind, just a great stillness as if time itself was suspended. I felt totally exposed and vulnerable to the infinite space around me - a space without walls, furniture, or restrictions. But it is not a space for drowning. It is a space studded with hundreds of tiny self-reflecting mirrors. So you have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide – you come right back to yourself – as if all the light from a thousand suns is shining upon you up close. Suddenly, all the pages of your life spread out in a seamless totality on the endless, sweeping sand fields. There is no beginning or end. No artificial cut-off points or blunt edges – but a life clustered with dots where you finally begin to see the pattern and make the connections.

We are in total harmony – the desert and I. It overwhelms my senses with its vastness. But I am not scared. On the contrary, I feel blissfully peaceful - strangely united with the world and myself at the same moment. The desert melts time…time was day into night, sunrise, sunset, the passing of the planets, the silent theater of the stars…time was birth, childhood, thirst, hunger, struggle, war, old age, a death…time is survival. In the clear light of the desert morning, where the basic forces of the earth are taking shape, it seemed almost absurd to reckon time in human years.

The Sanctum

The silence of the desert is unbearable. It rings loudly in my ears; it is impossible to ignore its blaring sound. You stretch your ears into the stillness and hear a shrill siren. The silence has weight, substance – it feels incredibly heavy. Where does it come from? What does it mean? Is it the echo of our own consciousness? Is it the inaudible pitch of our own inner voice that we hear so clearly in this vacuum? The purity of the silence rang like a Buddhist bell clear and endless.

The desert is still with me now. In moments of reflection, I can return to its space and silence and in a strange way, I find it comforting and reassuring. We all could possibly benefit by having a desert in our minds. A place of refuge and utter peace, where, despite all evidence to the contrary, we are completely safe. A place in the mind, yet far, far beyond the mind.

Maliha Masood is a recent graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy with a Master’s Degree in International Affairs. Masood is co-producer of Nazrah, a documentary film on Muslim women living in the Pacific North West. Her forthcoming book about her travels in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey is being published by Cune Press in 2005.