« There and Back Again | Main

Happy New Year

Your humble author, 4th from the left, the one with the grim visage and two weeks of facial hair. This was taken after sleeping overnight in a very cold gully on a mountainside in the Northwestern Sudan during November 2009.

In case you were wondering, yes it is entirely possible to get hypothermia in the Sahara and yes, I had the time of my life getting it.

What I saw when I was there in the Sahara can't really be captured with cameras or words, though many have tried I can assure you that they just cut around the edges of the fabric, the essential part of what the desert experience is like has barely been scratched, even by men like the writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry or T.E. Lawrence.

I had thought that between "Saint Ex" and T. E. Lawrence I had read all the artistic visions of what the deep desert was like and would recognize it like an old friend, but that was not to be the case. Frankly, they both failed miserably to capture what it was really like in words. If those two men of letters cant quite do it justice, I wont even try to attempt to describe it here. You just had to be there and even while I was actually there, I still find it hard to describe in words what it was that I did see. I saw something out there that was simply beyond my experience of life. I saw the simple majesty of life and the world we live, in brought out into the open by an expanse of barren rock and yellow sand. I thought I knew the desert, but I found that I knew nothing at all and I was deeply humbled by that fact.

I saw rock art left in caves that was left by people who died out before the last ice age ended and long before the permits were pulled for the construction of the Pyramids. yet that same rock art will still be here when I am long dead and gone and it will probably still be here when the Pyramids have dissolved into the oceans.

I saw a landscape devoid of any and all life and topsoil, just mile after mile of rock and sand, with precious little else all the way to the horizon in all directions of the compass.

I saw up close and personal what the good folks at NASA consider to be a complete working analog to the geology of Mars and I found that a lifetime living here on earth unprepared to understand just what it was that I saw. The familiar surroundings where I live in the deserts of North America and Mexico now appear to me to be a virtual 'jungle of life' by comparison to that found out on the Gilf Kebir, a place so harsh that it hasn't even the ever present life form found wherever humans camp - the common fly!

But the thing that was the most deeply moving and will stay with me forever was something I could never capture on camera much less in words.

It was the night time sky.

Out in that part of the world, its hundreds of miles just to get to the next light bulb. Towns, what of them that exist in the Libyan desert (or the "western desert" as the Egyptians call it), are hundreds of miles apart and what electricity there is goes to other uses besides lighting up the local eateries. From horizon to horizon in 360 degrees, there was no lights to mar the darkness, no glow of distant cities, no humidity to further dim the starlight, just the night time sky in all directions from the ground to the zenith, it was a blanket of stars.

As the Milky Way came up over the horizon, the brighter stars in the mist would appear the way that car headlights do out in the distance on long roads in Nevada, a pop of brightness as you would adjust to the new presence in the sky, and yet they were not the familiar headlights or street signs we are so used to in the modern world, but stars in the millions, so many that finding individual stars was pointless, each point of light was a like a blur of hornets hanging in the sky.

Even without the Moon in the sky, you did not need a flashlight to walk around or to read. I'm almost 50, and yet I felt that for the first time I was seeing the sky the way it had been seen by our species for millenia on this planet. For me it was as if I had never seen the sky at all in my entire life and now that I have seen it, it all seems rather sad to think I might have missed it.

It was intoxicating and emotionally moving all at the same time and try as I might I still haven't quite managed to capture what it was like, what it was really like to just sit at night in the dunes of the Sahara; to stare out at the sky and hear nothing but your own heartbeat and the desert wind for hours on end; to know that the closest group of other humans would be when the International Space Station passed overheard.

Its been said that explorers are always searching for something "out there" and yet they always they find the same thing no matter where they go - themselves. This fact is true of me as well. I went to the desert to see a part of the world rarely seen by others and came back knowing only slightly more about the desert but a great deal more about myself. And I wouldn't have missed it for all the world.

I am thankful that I lived long enough to see that sight; the blanket of stars above the sands of the Sahara desert. I didn't expect to see it before when I went there, but it was something I shall never forget; the sky as God always intended it to be seen and they sky the way it will be a million years from now.

Blogging, the old fashioned kind, sans vacation 'snaps' and desert drivel, shall now continue....

Posted @ December 29, 2009 08:35 PM | Photoblogging

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