Deserts of Imagining

This was going to be about the desert. It still is. There are just are so many types of desert. 

I walked in a desert. 

And I cried, 

"Ah, God, take me from this place!" 

A voice said, "It is no desert." 

I cried, "Well, but-- 

The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon." 

A voice said, "It is no desert." 

Stephen Crane

Sunset at Shaybah

As we drive out from Ad Dammām into the desert proper, it is mostly akin to Star Wars, except there are too many roads. Large, intersecting freeways undulate across the flatness. On one side, pipes, every shape and variety, litter the landscape in a series of triangular stacks. The start of the scrap yards - sorry, construction vehicle storage areas - begin as the road smoothes out. Alternately boiling and freezing under the great outdoors that unfortunately all too often doubles as the rubbish pit, the vehicles rust in mute testimony to a prior excess of construction, symptomatic of a throwaway culture where money is no object. 

In town, a typical sequence is: compound; plot - empty of life, full of rubbish; rusting vehicle site of desolation; compound. Then a repetition, with perhaps a shopping centre breaking the monotony. Each sequential block owned by a family, hence some are more elongated and elaborated than others. Consistent developmental principles do not apply here, it is, remarkably, still, a mostly feudal world. Living here, a fascinating study of feudal 'ways of being', we are reminded that we really do reside in a kingdom with all that that entails. 

The power lines march towards oblivion across the barren expanse. 

Power lines and more power lines 

At a major intersection thereof, a Bedouin community begins. One tent, lashed down as an angry elephant, billows out, subdued but defiant. Circles of embedded tyres surround tents; not quite 'found' art, the effect unlike that of any other home I know. Shabby as they are during the day, stolen electricity transforms them into things of bright beauty, all neon white light against a blue-black night. 

The ubiquitous camel is less in evidence, incongruous and dark against the palest of skies and sand. I saw my first, and Fem his second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and - seventh camel. Like all things of the desert they come into their own at dusk, plodding darkly into settling night. 

Black camels against the dunes

We drove past a sunset picnic party, bare metres from a four-lane highway, just the other side of a wire fence, between one scrap-yard and the next. Three women sitting on a large log, all in black, the wind plucking at their abayahs, a fire sending large flames up against the sky. "Do they chop off the left hand or the right hand?" I asked Fem, suddenly perplexed by this problem. His reply was that they probably do it in pairs, one left, one right, thus ensuring partners in crime have to remain buddies for life (which is of course, not true, it is the right, which, since it is the one you use to eat, makes you more of a social pariah than ever, but fortunately hand-chopping is minimal in this more modern age). I looked up to see: joy! a pink flamingo - but it was only a packet in the wind. This is a country of "Women In Black and Men in Frocks," I say. "No Sheep," adds Fem, "and the Camels are Unfriendly", the HumpBacks of our area having already proved unwilling to pose for their portraits. 

Looking through my notebook, I realise that, upon arrival that day at the patch of desert we have come to consider our own, I lost one vocabulary and drew everything instead. We arrived to find delicate desert prints all over, a veritable treasure of that afternoon's history haunting the face of the sand. Here a lizard scraped towards sanctuary, belly and tail marking crescent shapes, the legs enclosing the whole in parentheses - you could feel its entire body turn with the head as it swivels, now left, now right. 

Tracks in the sand

A bird with three short fore claws and one longer back one for balance, dizzyingly hurtled from grass clump to grass clump, then found, oh joy! kameeldorings (camel droppings) clad in insects in a frenzy of ecstatic feeding. Later, it attempted to intercept a huge concrete block, but discovered that, especially in this particular desert, you never are likely to get all your Christmases rolled into one. 

Having crested a hill, and beyond sight of the car parked on the tar track, I was seized with a feeling of being - not so alone, but so inevitably known. If ever you were hunted down, your tracks would recede behind and the desert everlastingly before, your best hope a desert storm you may not survive. 

More tracks in the sand

Fem's philosophy scant help in this regard: "Remember, it does not matter where you sit in the desert, sooner or later a dune will come to you."

We drank our juice and discovered that which would drink our blood. A tick, pawing its way down a slight slope, legs flailing excitedly, each one banded, now dark brown, now caramel. Whatever its "Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!" device, it was unbelievably efficient, sensing us no matter how we scuttled around, adamant in its pursuit of us, a small unstoppable device. Preferring not to plump out its dark wrinkles, we moved away, quickly, from the grass clump where we had made our stop. 

Desert plants only know disturbed ground, the endless fretting of the wind upon their roots. Where grass has set up an older establishment, small hillocks form around each; the sand is smooth where baby sprigs are only just settling down to business. 

Reed-like grass with tuber-like roots

I pulled one reed-like grass plant, with great difficulty, out - and out snaked a furry tuber of a root that was cold to the touch, and grey, alive as a reptile, and squirming in the wind. I yelped in response to its clamminess on my skin, and even Fem felt a need to scrutinize it carefully. I wondered if rituals are like the grass, that bed down the substance of life, however scant, and domesticate it for their own use; and whether life can become cumbered down by creed, custom and convention because there is so little for it to feed upon but - with all the bitter contradictoriness of a Stephen Crane creation - its very own self: 

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"

"It is bitter - bitter", he answered,

"But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart."

Sparrows like the one I drew dwell in the desert. An entire colony chittered to us from its sanctuary in a palm tree grove as we walked past. One or two left on a reconnoitre mission, to report back only that we were not snakes, so the colony was soon consumed again by rest. 

Each time I put Fem into a desert drawing, I turn him into a tall alien with bug eyes, tendrils of wavy hair curling around his face, growing into the breeze. I became afraid someday soon his people will use his growth as a means of wafting him home. So we had to cut his hair, it had anyway descended from a luxurious riot of tight corkscrews into the semblance of a mop from which the wet has been wrung, but the dirt remains. I note that he posed exceptionally well against a backdrop of blue, yellow, orange, peach and pink! Around him, bright green grass and seeds, almost lime in colour, are what I wanted to draw. The large pole he appropriated from a broken-down Bedouin structure left a line of splinters in his hand. On another day, the wind was so fierce and the sand stung, we sought some shelter there. But the wind blew through and the sand accumulated in our clothes and spat against our glasses. It was too hot to draw. 

When I tried to find words to contain the colours of the desert as the sun sets low, I note first gold, burnt cream, amber - green as it traverses grass - then the sand drifts into silver-grey and amber-gold towards the forefront of my frame. As dusk settles down, the grass becomes dark grey, smudging into olive green at the corners, while the sand assumes its khakis, along with olive, charcoal-grey, white-gold, grey white. Sunset from the level of sky, in layers going down, is blue, yellow, white, lilac. And then it was too dark to see. 

We went out there last week, again, on a 47C day, finding the grass tanned a dark wheat. Fem climbed our palm tree, all set about with tyres, so as to put perspective in the picture. As we walk, our clothes cling to us, hot and heavy, in the 80% humidity. We stop to rest. 

Hot wind, like a sea-shell, mutters in my ear of far seas and discontent. And I think about the first people in this alien land. It's like God gave them nothing, and when they complained, he told them to look at the night skies and the desert. And, seeing it for the first time, properly, they stayed.