You scrabble up rock hills and feel hot sand underneath your feet, take a look over your shoulder at a giant sun suspended in a dead and motionless sky like an unblinking eye that probes at the back of your head in a prolonged accusation…Small human drama played out in a desert ninety seven miles from….the Twilight Zone.
-I Shot an Arrow into the Air, Episode 15, The Twilight Zone, 1960
Egyptian planetary scientist Farouk El-Baz helped Apollo astronauts choose lunar landing sites by taking them to the Western Desert, the closest looking landscape to the moon on Earth. Rod Serling wrote about his astronauts crashing in the Nevada desert just over a sand dune from the road to Reno, and going crazy, thinking they had landed on an unknown waterless planet, arguing, plotting, and one murdering the other. I wonder what Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong would have made of KhairAllah if he had driven his herd past their simulator when they were out there alone somewhere near Wadi al-Kalabsha, what they would have done. Argue, steal his goatskin, or ask him, Wayn al-Funduk, Where is the Hotel?