And one night when the sun is going to go down, they come to the great dunes of sand and they think: “Ah, now we are in the Sahara, we are going to make tea.”
-The Sheltering Sky
Our Sahara was nothing like this, no great dunes at all, just wadi beds, gravel pans, and a few sand hills when we crossed the notch made by the Nile’s rectangular side step at Delgo, where that day’s lead Khabīr Muhammad al-Himri got us lost and he finally climbed the tallest of the low hills to see Sulb Temple, and we were no longer lost. My first glimpse of real dunes was ten years later on the loop road between Egypt’s Oases, when at the highest point I stopped the car, climbed on the hood, and standing on tip toes looked west at the Great Sand Sea.