The whispering desert

The experience of the desert, whether in fact or in the mind, is basic to spiritual discovery. A London-based journalist explains how he found himself challenged

FOR millennia the desert has been the place favoured by prophets and shamans seeking divine inspiration. Moses, Jesus and Muhammad all began their ministries after extended periods in the Egyptian, Palestinian and Arabian deserts. St Anthony and the Desert Fathers retreated to the desert outside Alexandria in the early days of the Roman Church, escaping the distractions of urban society in order to commune more closely with God. During a recent stay in Abu Dhabi, principal kingdom of the United Arab Emirates, I spent two days wandering in the Empty Quarter of southern Arabia and was afforded a glimpse of why, throughout history, the desert has proved itself the principal landscape of spiritual discovery.

Present-day Abu Dhabi is an oil state of unimaginable wealth. The modern city stands on an island in the Arabian Gulf, where just 40 years ago a tiny fishing village of scattered tents and makeshift shacks peppered the coastline. Today a mini-Manhattan of high-rise blocks with crystal windows glinting blue, gold, and silver in the sun rises out of a false oasis of beautifully manicured gardens, irrigated by the largest desalination project in the world. Traffic roars around the grid of six-lane highways that criss-cross the city. Skyscrapers are erected day and night as new- found wealth fuels a construction boom that is not merely an economic phenomenon, but an actual sound. Five times a day the voices of a thousand muezzins call the faithful to prayer, their meandering protestations adding to the general cacophony of a modern Islamic city.

But outside, it is not long before you find yourself in the arid wastelands that swift and well-funded development has so successfully concealed. The road south towards the oil fields surrounding the Liwa oasis is like a physical equivalent to the ritual emptying of the mind practised in meditation. The activity that assaults your senses in the town evaporates bit by bit, piece by piece, and is replaced with nothing. The trees and shrubs along the verges thin out, the buildings melt away, and the traffic disperses, until you are left driving on an empty highway across flat gravel plains inhabited only by lonely camels, superciliously picking at spiky gorse and scrub.

And then the sand-drifts rise from the rocky plains; small at first, mere ripples on the surface of an otherwise flat landscape. This is the beginning of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter. The largest sand sea on earth, it stretches from Abu Dhabi and the emirates across Saudi Arabia and Oman towards Yemen, covering an area the size of France, Belgium and Holland combined ? hundreds of thousands of square miles of uninhabited and inhospitable wilderness.

By the time you reach the Liwa, a ring of natural oases 200 miles south of Abu Dhabi, the dunes have become large hills, looming over the road and threatening to engulf the tiny villages. Compared with the booming self-confidence of the city, life here feels precarious. The oases may have been a source of life for thousands of years, but they look fragile nestling among the huge hills that surround them; a futile attempt to colonise a mighty and inhospitable landscape; folly, doomed to ultimate failure when the great mountains of dust and sand finally decide to swallow them, indifferent to man?s pathetic endeavour.

Leaving this last outpost of cultivation and civilisation (and the tarmac road) behind us, we at last enter the desert proper, our vehicles seeming to sail across the vast ocean of sand that stretches to the south and west. Thirty miles from Liwa you are as far away from anything as you ever really need to be. The immense sand-drifts rise up to 300 metres from the salt and gypsum flats at their feet, and in a hollow scooped out of the sand half-way up one such colossus, we made our camp.

The desert is a mystical place, and magical. Setting off from camp to roam and explore the empty vastness around us, we each quite unintentionally wandered from our companions, as if called to experience this great solitude for ourselves. One roams slowly, as seems fitting in a landscape so infinite. Words become meaningless, the prattle of everyday small-talk so useless and wearisome here. Better to be alone ? the better to experience being alone, really alone, for the first time.

There is nothing here. It is completely barren. Atop the highest peak, the view affords nothing but range upon range of mountainous dunes as far as you can see ? nothing but sand and sky. But in its emptiness the desert is never still, and its energy is palpable. Wisps of sand swirl about and race across the dunes. The desert is always shifting. Over thousands of years the dunes crawl, inch by inch, driven by the prevailing north-westerly wind, migrating south-east with slow, dread purpose. But like the sea, the desert seems not controlled by the wind, but to have power over it, or to be in league with it. Desert and sky are not entirely distinct in a land where, when the wind picks up, sand can fill the air.

In the void, distance and size are hard to judge, for there is nothing to measure them by. Perceptions are deceptive. What seems near is far. What appears to be a small hillock is actually a mountain. A slope that looks gentle turns out to be a steep vertical wall, almost unassailable. Sand that looks the same on the surface is firm underfoot for a few paces, then treacherous as quicksand in the next step. What is so soft and fine when scooped in your hands compacts to form a concrete surface if you fall. It is a landscape of contradictions, utterly surreal. It plays with perspective, twisting it until you no longer entirely trust your senses.

Nothing can be heard: no noise of man, animal or bird. Yet in its peace the desert is never quiet. It seems to whisper constantly, but not with a sound at a distance, able to be plotted or defined. Rather, the wind in your ears seems as the desert itself whispering in your mind, if only you could understand what ancient wisdom it confided. But when the wind dies, sound travels over the empty sands with incredible ease, and voices can be heard over great distances as though the speakers were close at hand. Their words echo in the silence.

I could no longer rely on ordinary sense perceptions, and the assumptions with which I navigate through normal life were worthless. My senses, freed from life?s clutter, found nothing to turn to. I closed my eyes ? nothing but the faint whispering in my ears. I opened them, and found myself marooned in solitude; nothing but sand and sky ? and me. I was the only presence here. I was wandering through the void. The world around me was stripped of the distractions that norm-ally compete for my attention. I was journeying, seemingly, through the bare landscape of my mind, experiencing existence at its most pure.

My mind was overwhelmed by the dormant power about me. It was useless to recall the trivialities of my life. My concerns seemed meaningless in this ancient vastness. My life, inconsequential. Faced with a landscape that whispered of the infinite, I, whose footprints evaporated behind me as I walked, evidence of whose presence and very existence would be slowly but deliberately eradicated by the sands, paled into insignificance. The sheer impertinence of my self-importance! But these thoughts did not disturb me. Rather, I found this frame of mind soothing, and discovered a certain calm and serenity. It was enough just to exist and take even a small part in the greater scheme of things. I began to feel I was not alone. Nature at its most bare was also at its most powerful. And in the nakedness of creation, the Creator was also at his most exposed, and his presence was the more potent for it. I felt this presence in the raw and powerful landscape around me and I stood before it in awe. Perhaps this is what the desert tribes mean when they say ?God is my companion?.

Just a few hours in the desert had exposed me to myself and revealed the infinite in creation. Yet the great prophets and saints had spent weeks in the wilderness, their senses confused by the surreal emptiness, their minds dizzy with the extremes of the heat of the day and the chill of night, and parched through fasting. Such time alone in this landscape would surely bring you to madness, or God ? probably a little of both.

The sun set hazily through the dusty sky, enhancing the rich, rusty colours of the sands, red, ochre, and pink, casting long slender shadows across the dunes, and defining the ripples on the surface of the sand; a glorious display of deep and rich sensuality after the glare and heat of the day. I found myself humming softly to myself the Azan, the Muslim call to prayer. In this hot, dusty Arab landscape, it seemed appropriate.