Moon rise to sun rise

The desert could not be claimed or owned - it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East...All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries.  It was a place of faith.  We disappeared into landscape.
                                                                 - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient               

Last weekend, I went with 8 of the other girls on my program on an overnight camping trip to the Western Desert, specifically the Black and the White Desert.  The White Desert, a well-kept secret for a long time, is swiftly becoming one of the most popular tourist destinations in Egypt.  But it's probably the only tourist place in Egypt where no will try to sell you anything.  They may instead cook amazing meals for you, stop every time you want to take in a view, or play drums for you as you look up at the endless Milky Way.  

This is the Black Desert.  The whole desert area used to be an ancient sea - really ancient - and this area had a lot of active underwater volcanoes.  So now that it's desert, everything here is covered in black volcanic basalt rock.  We renamed it Mordor, and picked out Lord of the Rings characters for each other.  I'm so glad to be here in Egypt with so many awesome nerds.  

Also, I'm Frodo apparently.

Driving along.  We drove four hours from Cairo to the Bahariya oasis in a bone-rattling van, and in Bahariya we transferred to the 4x4 which would take us out into the desert and onto the sands.  We stopped first at a 50 meter golden sand dune and climbed to the top, frolicking and shrieking and reveling in the sun and sand.  We were like children, like animals, looking and running and climbing and sinking into the sand, and taking pictures of each other, laughing constantly, stunned by what we were seeing.  

There is a feeling with beautiful and mighty things in Egypt that what you are seeing is not real, that you cannot actually be looking with your own eyes at what your are seeing.  With the Pyramids, it's hard to comprehend the reality of what you're seeing, because the image of the Pyramids is so familiar.  You've seen them a thousand times in pictures, how is this time any different?  What I have learned after all these months is to close my eyes and use my other senses.  What does the desert sound like, smell like, feel like?  You can even taste it sometimes, though I don't recommend doing that in downtown Cairo. 

On top of the dunes, you feel the sun on your face and neck and you register the implacable dry heat of it.  Mostly though you feel the wind - buffeting and whipping and making you grateful that you cut your hair so short in Italy, because now it doesn't tangle.  And then sometimes the wind is completely still, and then you hear the silence of the desert.  You're up so high, and you're so far away from anyone, that you can relish in silence, the most precious sound in Egypt.  Then your driver, behind you on the next dune, turns on the car radio because he's bored of waiting for you, and Elisa, the Lebanese singer who you're actually beginning to like, comes screeching scratchily across the space to you.  The feel of the desert is the best thing.  You've kicked off your shoes a long time ago, so you can feel the sand under your calloused feet, shifting so quickly from hard and packed to soft and sinking, from the surprising cool that makes you want to stand still for a while, to the heat that makes you jerk and tiptoe like a dance.  The taste of the desert is just dry, and then you can taste your hallucinations of water.  

This was Romario, our 4x4 driver, with me, Marisa, Lauren, Liana and Ger.  He named himself Romario as an homage to "Mario Kart" and a brag that he was a comparable driver.  He really was pretty awesome, but I would have liked him to do more wild off-roading stunts.  We were there for adventure, after all.  We all got new names in the desert too - mine's Aziza, if you're curious.  

And then there's the sun.  In the desert, I saw so many stars.  The whole Milky Way stretched out over my head, so that I had lie down on the ground and just look up with my whole body.  So many stars, and only a few familiar constellations.  I was not the only one that night who wished out loud that I had studied astronomy, that I knew something to say or think to make sense or style out of the vastness of the sky above me.  But the most important star was our own, of course.  Here at sunset, turning everything your usual purple and pink and gold and blue and black.  Shining behind the moon like the light in a shadow puppet theater, turning it's perfect half-circle from bright orange to gold to silver to the same bone-white as the desert, or lighting up the whole desert at sunrise.  

The 4x4s were draped with colorful blankets, delicious chicken was barbequed and served with rice and fresh vegetables, songs were sung, the stars were celebrated, we were all renamed, and myriad other wild things happened around our desert campfire.  

Our guides woke us a few minutes before the sun had begun to show on the horizon, and we climbed an ancient chalk rock, bundled in blankets and sleepy-eyed, to watch the whole thing.    

The White Desert, a few minutes after sunrise.  The white chalk sculptures that cover the entire desert are the remnants of an ancient coral reef.  We humans walked through a desert, and billions of years ago, fish swam through a sea.  We are probably descended from those fish.

I suppose every photograph of the desert makes it look the same, but the stunning reality of it is that when you're there, every single instant looks different, and it looks like nothing you've ever seen before. It seems impossible to find your way in the desert, but not because everything looks the same - rather because everything looks different, even if you look and then close your eyes and look right back.  It is a place - but the meaning of place implies a fixed nature, a location to be plotted and to orient by.  The desert, even the vast unyieldingness of the Sahara, is no such thing.  A place that transcends place, that cannot be held down with a pin and can be marked only by the passage of eons of time.  

I will come back to the desert.  It's a place to feel the urgency and the importance of your connection to other people, as you feel both your own smallness and the power of your togetherness, of how different you and your friends are from the rest of the desert.  But it's a place to feel entirely alone, to feel your own isolation from everything else.  And to feel how desperately you need sometimes to sit around a campfire and laugh wildly and sing and smile with others of your kind, and how sometimes you need to lie alone on the sand and stare back at the universe.