Where are the roses of the land and the waves of great inland seas made of sand and where does the wind always blow the mountains away?
Of course you would probably give the right answer at once—"the desert"—because you know I am talking about deserts. And the "water that isn't there," and the trees and people and things that are upside down—you probably know that's the mirage; and that the inland seas with their waves of sand are the dunes; that the rivers without mouths are those that, like the Tajunga in California, lose their waters in the sand.
Most people who have gone to school know all these things. Most people also think of the desert as just a sea of sand and all tawny, like a lion's skin; but this is wrong. The Romans used to call the African desert "the panther's skin," because of the tawny stretches spotted with the dark palms of the oases, but the sands are not all tawny, and the desert isn't all covered with sand.
If we could arrange to get on the back of any one of the great birds of the Sahara—say an eagle or his big cousin the vulture—and sail with him on his way to dinner, the scenery would unroll beneath us something like this:
On the northern border the Atlas Mountains, with precipices of wild beauty and ranges of bare, pink rock outlined against the blue of the morning sky; then dune waves stretching for miles and miles with valleys between them, so wide that it takes the camels from breakfast time until noon to lumber their way across. The crests of some of these dune waves go spinning off in spray with every freshening breeze. Little dunes often dissolve away in the wind as the caravan moves toward them.
GAUNT OUTLINES OF THE HUNGRY HILLS
Then we come to more mountain ranges running right across the desert's face, their bare rocks shivered and shelving down into broken fragments at their feet; then sharp-edged, jagged hills—not rounded, plump, and well-fed hills, such as we have at home. They are the bones of the hungry landscape showing through. Then we come to bare table-lands and the empty beds of rivers and lakes that long ago went dry; valleys scattered with boulders of all sizes and in every imaginable position; and so on over into the Arabian desert, with its flats of white sand closed in by high cliffs, and vast stretches of black and red gravel. More of the sand and gravel of the desert is red than yellow; but some of it is white and some of it is black.
AN OASIS
