How do you like the Libyan Desert? Weird, what?
-Cairo (1942)
In Egypt’s Libyan Desert we saw yardangs, mud lions, inselbergs, oyster banks, hematite crystals, seif and star dunes, some parabolic, more barchan, and gravel playas and sheets and the Great Sand Sea. Farafra, Abu Minqar, Bahariyya, and Kharga- oases we drove past, some without stopping. I was eager to return to Gharghūr, in Dakhla, to find the man who had hosted me there twenty years earlier, whose name I had forgotten, whose repainted front door I did not recognize, but whose old fig tree in his home’s inner courtyard I would have known anywhere.