Advertisement
Published: February 1st 2006
Sahara in the Sea
Shocked, stunned, broken of past images. My own Sahara expanded, and I now know someday we will meet by camel's back.I can’t really describe what it is like to fly over the Sahara at 39,000 feet in a 747 jet. It is like empty space, yet I know I have never been there, or at least physically laid eyes upon it while floating freely in stupor—and I know most others have not either. It is like an open valley, or a calm sea with limitless horizons. There are no hills from above. Certainly no mountains. There are dunes which I can see, but only fingerlings of thirsting riverbeds, long ago dried, now swept by only air. They look like a swipe of a cloth cleaning with Windex and the immediate marking left behind on the glass. They look like a far-reaching snow-capped mountain, were few feet have ever lain, if any, scooping by fierce winds and harsh crystals.
Like Himalayan hills, a monotonous color stretches far and wide in all directions, only disrupted by arid patches of cream and white. Otherwise, nothing but raw sand, sand flat and smooth, windblown by a massive hairdryer whose switch has been broken and no plug can be found. Grasping incessantly, I can’t conceive of a more inhospitable place, and yet the more I imagine the struggle, the impenetrability and its isolation, the more my hunger grows for its possibility.
A solitary line dances, having risen from the surface of time. At this elevation, it appears to be a gigantic Saharan mole hill having been pushed to the surface from subterranean navigation. Pock marks scatter its skin, looking like scales of a sidewinder, and I recognize it to be one lone legendary dune elongated on an empty plateau. Further away, I see more, endlessly rising with an impartial skin. Interspersing the dunes are craters, shallow, but scaring the earth like a sudden transmission of electricity. Vast gorges now filled with both sand and landmarks turn red like a wet tongue. But there is no water here, and you have to wonder if there ever was. Only a dry soil; sand and its minerals of iron and magnesium.
High cirrus clouds block my view, and although disappointed, I can now only imagine the relief this brings to what life lies below.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.061s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 7; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0347s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Sandy Hilton
non-member comment
Pink sahara
Another wonder of nature - a vastness so far and wide brings to wonder what all that space is meant for. And why we are so abusive to the habitable space we have and to each other?