“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well.”
For many of us, the desert conjures up vast, featureless expanses of shifting sand dunes, stripped of life. What the wise child philosopher of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943) understands is that these remote arid landscapes in fact teem with vitality. All over the world, diverse forms of flora, fauna, not to mention humans, have successfully adapted to the desert’s extreme temperatures and harsh environment.
Why is the desert such a mystery?
Occupying as much as one fifth of the earth’s land area, deserts are also hugely varied. Loosely defined as any large, extremely dry area of land with minimal vegetation, they comprise one of its major ecosystems, extending from the frozen tundras of Antarctica to the majestic, multi-hued mountains of Arizona’s Painted Desert to the mineral-rich dunes of the Namib Desert that glow yellow, orange and red.
Possessing a raw beauty untouched by human hands, deserts hold a mystical allure as that ‘other place’, one where, far from our technology-filled, screen-saturated, city-dwelling lives, we can escape manmade distractions and be captivated by their emptiness and silence. As artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Emily Kam Kngwarray, Nancy Holt and James Turrell have discovered, the remoteness of the desert brings us closer to the inescapable power of nature on earth and the vast, unknown expanses of the universe beyond.
What can we learn from the desert?
In The Little Prince, the desert delivers the lesson that beauty is often buried deep beneath the surface. It becomes a place of meaningful discovery for the book’s narrator, an aviator who, until he meets the little prince, feels isolated and alone when his plane crashes in the desert (just as Saint-Exupery himself had done in 1935). The narrator’s physical environment mirrors his internal state, which has been ‘made barren by grown-up ideas’.
It is only in the desert, away from the trivial and materialistic concerns of adulthood, that the little prince can teach him hope and hidden treasures appear even in the most desolate moments.
More than meets the eye
The Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert, is perhaps the most famous of them all. It spans North Africa with its vast stony plateaus and mountains, along with the more than two million people who call it home.
Despite its harshness, it is home to more than 500 species of plants from the salt-tolerant grasses of the Atlantic coast to the deep-rooted acacia tree with its white and yellow flowers and broad, shade-providing branches. Many creatures have also adapted to Saharan survival. The fennec fox’s giant ears help radiate excess body heat and aid the detection of prey beneath the sand, while their furry paws provide protection from extreme heat in the day and extreme cold at night. Known as the ‘ship of the desert’, the dromedary camel stores fat in its hump to provide energy in times of scarcity. Its large, two-toed feet prevent sinking in shifting sands, its long eyelashes and closing nostrils offer protection during a sandstorm.
The diamond deserts
Further south on the continent, the Namib Desert, one of the world’s oldest deserts, stretches down from Angola through Namibia down to the northern tip of South Africa. It is home to a diverse range of landscapes and lifeforms. The Welwitschia plant thrives in the unique fog belt of its Skeleton Coast, drawing water from the moisture in the fog that forms when cold Atlantic currents meet hot desert air.
Growing in one of earth’s last remaining wildernesses, it grows only two leaves throughout its lifetime. And what a lifetime. Some specimens of this extraordinary otherworldly, albeit withered-looking, plant are believed to have survived more than 1,500 years. This living fossil also provides food to desert-dwelling animals and humans alike.
Minerals, including copper, uranium and, of course, diamonds, lie deep beneath the surface of the sands and mean that the Namib Desert is as rich with colour as an artist’s paint palette, On the rare occasions when it does rain, lush emerald-green tufts of grass spring up across vast plains of red and golden dunes. The dramatic, jagged blue-purple mountains of its Naukluft Park stand out against the surrounding sands of burnt sienna, and the ancient open-air art gallery of engravings at Twyfelfontein, prove that human life here stretches back more than 6,000 years.
A landscape to be respected
Across the Atlantic, lie the equally varied deserts of North America. To the indigenous communities that have lived in them for millennia, these are not barren wastelands but vibrant ecosystems teeming with resources, landscapes that should be respected and revered for their life-giving properties.
The sophisticated skills these inhabitants developed for surviving the desert’s challenges were largely ignored or misunderstood by European settlers. Lacking their respect for these lands, these newcomers exploited the desert for its material resources and forced its inhabitants into reservations.
Antelope Canyon in the high desert of Arizona has long been a place of reverence for the Navajo people. A slot canyon formed by thousands of years of wind and water erosion in the sandstone has created undulous, winding, underground corridors of pinks, reds and yellows, into which spill shafts of sunlight spill to breathtaking effect.
The striated layers of mesas and rock formations of the Painted Desert in northeastern Arizona range from red to pink to lavender. This desert is also home to Roden Crater, a monumental art installation by light and space artist James Turrell. He has spent almost 50 years developing the 2.5-mile-wide project inside a black-red cinder cone of an extinct volcano.
Desert inspiration
For Turrell, the shaping of the crater’s rim and the carving out of vast, temple-like rooms inside, connect the earthly and the celestial. Inspired by the Mayan people, whose archaeological sites reveal their sophisticated understanding of the cosmos, Turrell’s work provides uninterrupted views of truly black, star-speckled skies and luminous tunnels that change hue according to the weather conditions. Roden Crater has even succeeded in capturing the attention of Kanye West, who after describing his 2019 visit to the site as ‘life-changing’, donated USD 10m to its completion.
Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray only started painting in her 70s but her decade of work has secured her a place as one of the most celebrated artists of the 21st century. Her vast canvases vibrate with colour and texture, transporting you to the deserts of her homeland in Australia’s Northern Territory. They are an expression of her spiritual connection to the land where she was raised and still lives, the desert’s native plants, emus and lizards emerging from her landscapes of lines and dots.
Georgia O’Keeffe was an immigrant to the desert although she was no less captivated by it. She grew up on the vast Wisconsin prairies and spent her early career in the hustle and bustle of Chicago and New York, during the period that these cities became sky-scraping temples of 20th-century American urbanism.
Soon the multitudinous distractions of city life became too much, and she retreated to the vast desert expanses of New Mexico, making its landscapes and its animal bones the subject of some of her most powerful paintings. Her passion for the desert is captured in her sign-off to a letter to friend and desert dweller Vernon Hunter in 1932: “So give my greetings to the sun and the sky — and the wind — and the dry never-ending land.”
A beautiful escape
Artist Nancy Holt responded to the vastness of the Utah desert in a similar way: “Out there a ‘lifetime’ seems very minute,” she wrote of her first transformative trip in 1968. A pioneer of the Land Art movement of the1960s, where artists created site-specific works directly in the landscape, Holt subsequently purchased a featureless tract of land in Utah’s Great Basin Desert.
It was here she created Sun Tunnels (1973-6), a work in which she used giant concrete cylinders and the natural passage of the sun to challenge our perception of time, light and space. Holt worked with astronomers to align the tunnels precisely so they would frame the sun on the horizon during winter and summer solstices.
The idea of the desert bringing us closer to the sheer power of nature and the mysterious universe beyond, was one expounded by nature writer Edward Abbey. In his 1977 essay The Great American Desert, he asked: ‘Why the desert, given a world of such splendour and variety?’ To him, the desert provided an essential escape to human intervention.
As well as providing hidden depths of physical beauty and varied life and colour, the sheer remoteness and silent stillness of the desert provide even the most dedicated urban dweller a transformative, meditative journey of self-discovery and reflection.
