Here’s a treat for desert lovers. William Atkins, author of the widely admired book The Moor, has wisely exchanged the dank, wind-lashed chill of Britain’s moorland for eight of the world’s fieriest deserts, from the Empty Quarter of Oman and Egypt’s Eastern Desert to the Taklamakan in China and an unlikely stint at Burning Man in America’s Black Rock Desert.
It’s not entirely clear what prompted these particular journeys or this specific quest. We learn in the second sentence that a long-standing girlfriend has gone to live and work abroad and Atkins is not going with her; so perhaps a retreat into the desert is the wholly appropriate response in a travel writer searching for new territory to furrow. After a flurry of desert travelogues (Lawrence, Doughty, Thesiger, Philby, Thomas et al), he reckons that the ultimate objective of every desert traveller is ‘the axis where the absolute coexists with the infinite’. And off he goes to Oman.
Atkins is amusingly down on adventurers, whom he considers a ‘new breed of fanatic: rangy, large-toothed guys seeking not knowledge, or even territory, but novelty, managed suffering, “experience”, material, sponsorship’. He is far more interested in the desert as a concept, its history and culture, and the mostly fraught, frequently fatal interaction between the indigenous inhabitants of these wild places and those outsiders who have come to explore, civilise, appropriate and all too often desecrate them.
He has certainly put in a lot of research at the dune face. He explains how the grains of sand in the Empty Quarter are composed of quartz whose ‘rind’ of ferric oxide imparts that unmistakable, reddish tinge. He is also a lover of camels, which means he passes one of the desert’s most important tests with flying colours.
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