I arrived home about 10pm with sand in my shoes. Not just any sand - the trickle of fine grains that I emptied onto the damp, south London pavement was more silver than orange or yellow. It had come from one of the world's most fabled wildernesses, the Empty Quarter - a sand sea covering 250,000 square miles of southern Arabia, a place which less than 80 years ago hadn't been crossed or mapped by a European. A place T E Lawrence referred to as 'the great unsolved question of geography'. A place Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary explorer of Arabia, called 'a bitter, desiccated land that knows nothing of gentleness or ease ... a cruel land that can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match'. I'd been for the weekend.
Insane as it now seemed, that very morning I'd been in the Empty Quarter, close to where the borders of Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia meet, sitting alone astride a towering dune and watching the sun rise. Thesiger would be turning in his grave. He spent five years getting to know the Empty Quarter, living with its tribes and travelling as one of them. He despised the thought of fast travel, hated machines, and bitterly resented news of the first crossing of the Sahara by car (it took 21 days). What would he have made of a trip to the Empty Quarter that only required two days off work?
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