"The people made these fires by this river about 450 000 years ago ~ before the last two ice ages. During their time, the Outer Mongolian plateau to the north continued its slow rise, blocking Indian Ocean monsoons; the northern plateau dried to dust and formed the Gobi Desert. The people would have seen dust clouds blow from the north, probably only a few big dust clouds every year. Such dust today! they must have thought. After the people vanished, the dust continued to blow down on their land; it laid yellow and gray loess deposits hundreds of feet deep. Almost forty~five hundred centuries passed, and in 1222 Genghis Khan and his hordes rode ponies over the plateau, over these hundreds of feet of packed loess, over the fecund dust and barren sand, over the animal bones, the chipped blades, and the hearth. Teilhard thought of this, of Genghis Khan and the ponies. 'Much later,' he wrote, 'Genghis Khan crossed this plain in all the pride of his victories.' At that time the Mongols made stirrups and horseshoes from wild~sheep horns."
Annie Dillard, "For the Time Being"
"There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.
There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and re~align themselves anti~clockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days ~ burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob ~ a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for 'fifty,' blooming for fifty days ~ the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.
There is also the ~~~~~~~, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat ~ a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar~ifoullousen ~ a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as 'that which plucks the fowls.' The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, 'black wind.' The samiel from Turkey, 'poison and wind,' used often in battle. As well as the other 'poison winds,' the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.
Other, private winds.
Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the 'sea of darkness.' Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. 'Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.'
There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was 'so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.'"
~ Michael Ondaatje, "The English Patient"
"Palm forests, sulfurous hot springs, Bedouin farmers and an enchanting air of calm ~ bordering on inertia ~ characterises this patchwork of cultivation. Farafra is one of a string of desert oases linked by road that fan in an arc westward from the Nile, part of what Egyptian officials began referring to in the 1950s as the New Valley.
Stepping out of the palm groves and into the surrounding desert, one is reminded of the extent of Farafra’s isolation. A short journey in any direction from the oasis will bring one into contact with some of the most pristine, dramatic and sometimes unusual desert landscapes on the planet. Farafra sits at the cusp of several unique and converging landscapes, including the White Desert, the Black Desert and the Great Sand Sea – one of the largest sand dune fields on Earth.
The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Lost Army of the 6th-century Persian King Cambyses departed from near Farafra on its ill-fated march across the Great Sand Sea to distant Siwa Oasis, famously vanishing in a sand storm. The Persians were later followed by the Romans and Byzantines who both occupied distant outposts here. In 19th and 20th centuries, desert explorers – including an elite unit of the British Special Forces during the Second World War – used the oasis as a platform in which to launch expeditions and raids deep into the Sahara.
With its long history and periodic entanglements in the affairs of empires, Farafra has surprisingly little to show in terms of relics or material culture... Dust~blown and exuding an air of abandonment, Farafra’s main town resides in another dimension, located somewhere between the outskirts of modernity and the metaphysical void."
John Zada, "The End of the Line" from The National
"When a person arrives in the world as a baby, says one Midrash, 'his hands are clenched as though to say, 'Everything is mine. I will inherit it all.' When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, 'I have aquired nothing from the world.'"
Annie Dillard, "For the Time Being"
(photo credit: the above image of Medieval Cairo was taken by my beloved friend, Uncle Giggles. Thanks for the pic, Sweetheart!)
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