Desert Dunes Quotes

I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...

Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.

Behold, as a wild ass in the desert, go I forth to my work.

The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other

I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies

I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.

On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power," the Duke said. "Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.

The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors.

It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.

The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen... The desert is beautiful," the little prince added. And that was true. I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams... "What makes the desert beautiful," said the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well..." I was astonished by a sudden understanding of that mysterious radiation of the sands.

They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky.

There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening—first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: “It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!

To a person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with -- what else -- mica.

His eyes looked at my body as if it were a drink of water on a desert dune.

His eyes looked at my body as if it were a drink of water on a desert dune. "I don't know much," I confessed, my voice barely audible. "Don't worry. I know a lot.

Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop. Actually, in the deserts flowers bloomed and insects and other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great ability to adjust--for example, the man's beetle family. While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.

Now the days stretch before you with the dryness and sameness of desert dunes. And in this season of grief we who love you have become invisible to you. Our words worry the empty air around you and you can sense no meaning in our speech. Yet, we are here. We are still here. Our hearts ache to support you. We are always loving you. You are not alone.

If you’ve managed to keep a creature in your fridge for longer than most Americans remain married, you probably know a thing or two about it. Tardigrades are found on every continent and at nearly all elevations: in deep-sea trenches, burbling hot springs, forest canopies, and desert dunes.

But, putting on a stillsuit, he put on the desert.

There was nothing left in the world except sand and wind. At least, that’s how it seemed to Celaena Sardothien as she stood atop the crimson dune and gazed across the desert.

Food of Love Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler II I'm going to murder you with love; I'm going to suffocate you with embraces; I'm going to hug you, bone by bone, Till you're dead all over. Then I will dine on your delectable marrow. You will become my personal Sahara; I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallow Drain you remaining brackish well. With my female blade I'll carve my name In your most aspiring palm Before I chop it down. Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole. But in the total desert you become You'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon, Opulent mirage! Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen. Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold. So you will summon each dry grain of sand And move towards me in undulating dunes Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine: A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores; Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudes Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere, Surprising life! And I will be that green. When you are fed and watered, flourishing With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire, Till you are resurrected field in bloom, I will devour you, my natural food, My host, my final supper on the earth, And you'll begin to die again.

I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again. At

For too brief a moment in the universe the veil was lifted. The mysterious became known. Questions met answers somewhere behind the stars. Furrowed brows were smoothed and eyelids closed over long unblinking stares. Your beloved occupied the cosmos. You awoke to sunrays and nestled down to sleep in moonlight. All life was a gift open to you and burgeoning for you. Choirs sang to harps and your feet moved to ancestral drumbeats. For you were sustaining and being sustained by the arms of your beloved. Now the days stretch before you with the dryness and sameness of desert dunes. And in this season of grief we who love you have become invisible to you. Our words worry the empty air around you and you can sense no meaning in our speech. Yet, we are here. We are still here. Our hearts ache to support you. We are always loving you. You are not alone.

The dunes are changed b the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other.

Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa.

Arrakis—Dune—Desert Planet.

Stars were falling deep in the darkness as prayers rose softly, petals at dawn And as I listened, your voice seemed so clear so calmly you were calling your god Somewhere the sun rose, o'er dunes in the desert such was the stillness, I ne'er felt before Was this the question, pulling, pulling, pulling you in your heart, in your soul, did you find rest there? Elsewhere a snowfall, the first in the winter covered the ground as the bells filled the air You in your robes sang, calling, calling, calling him in your heart, in your soul, did you find peace there?

I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again

The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?

The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence.

MAGNITUDE of EXISTENCE U are a dot A point A speck An image A stillness A shadow A centrifugal force Turning into itself Emanating heat Emanating light You are a transient warmth Wave like u exist Resonating properties As body As mind As heart As human You are One dot in trillions exponentially Sifting through motion Expressed as e=motion You are engulfed in water From the inside out Wrapped in the Arms of giver of air Held ephemerally by the heart of sky In suspended attraction to the wooing of earth You are reflecting ash taken to travel Bathing in sun rays Resting as moonlight You are a resonant echo Given to name matter Bouncing dot like You are a distance timber Specified to forms A mountain A valley A hill A meadow A dune A desert Exacting measure You Are A magnitude of existences © Olivia Chumacero

The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes.

There’s another thing, Jessica thought. Paul must be cautioned about their women. One of these desert women would not do as wife to a Duke. As concubine, yes, but not as wife.

Crossing the line from friend to enemy takes only a small step. The opposite journey, however, is far more difficult. —Zensunni wisdom of the desert

The Fremen! They’re paying the Guild for privacy, paying in a coin that’s freely available to anyone with desert power—spice.

I've always loved the desert. You sit down on a sand dune. You see nothing. You hear nothing. And yet something shines, something sings in that silence.

Dhartha’s deep blue eyes flashed. “This is not about pride, Aurelius Venport. This is only about killing a pest of the desert.

Ils étaient les hommes et les femmes du sable, du vent, de la lumière, de la nuit. Ils étaient apparus, comme dans un rêve, en haut d’une dune, comme s’ils étaient nés du ciel sans nuages.

The waters which we spread upon the desert have become blood. Blood upon our land! Behold our desert which could rejoice and blossom; it has lured the stranger and seduced him in our midst. They come for violence! Their faces are closed up as for the last wind of Kralizec! They gather the captivity of the sand. They suck up the abundance of the sand, the treasure hidden in the depths. Behold them as they go forth to their evil work. It is written: 'And I stood upon the sand, and I saw a beast rise up out of that sand, and upon the head of that beast was the name of God!

She rides the sandworm of space! She guides through all storms Into the land of gentle winds. Though we sleep by the snake's den, She guards our dreaming sould. Shunning the desert heat, She hides us in a cool hollow. The gleaming of her white teeth Guides us in the night. By the braids of her hair We are lifted to heaven! Sweet fragrance, flower-scented, Surrounds us in her presence.

Honey grevillea Meaning: Foresight Grevillea eriostachya | Inland Australia Kaliny-kalinypa (Pitjantjatjara) is a straggly shrub with long narrow silver-green leaves that produces bright green, yellow and orange flowers. Commonly grows on red sandhills and dunes. The flowers contain thick, honey-like nectar, which can be sucked from the flowers; a favorite treat for Anangu children.

Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations. Then Bauchan outdid him, having a type of sand dune named after him. But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.

He stepped on to the balcony and looked out over the desert, at the red dunes rolling to the windows directly below. For the fourth time he had moved up a floor, and the sequence of identical rooms he had occupied were like displaced images of himself seen through a prism. Their common focus, that elusive final definition of himself which he had sought for so long, still remained to be found. Timelessly the sand swept towards him, its shifting contours, approximating more closely than any other landscape he had found to complete psychic zero, enveloping his past failures and uncertainties, masking them in its enigmatic canopy.

I will tell you a thing about your new name,” Stilgar said. “The choice pleases us. Muad’Dib is wise in the ways of the desert. Muad’Dib creates his own water. Muad’Dib hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Muad’Dib is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Muad’Dib we call ‘instructor-of-boys.’ That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul-Muad’Dib, who is Usul among us. We welcome you.” Stilgar

That the desert was, in its own way, very much alive: a gargantuan sentient being whose shifting colours – one minute soft yellow, the next livid red, here blinding white, there sombre black – were curiously suggestive of changing moods and thought patterns. Its varied shapes and textures – dunes slumping into gravel flats, salt pans rearing into rock hills – likewise gave the unnerving impression that the landscape was moving, bunching and stretching itself, flexing its muscles

I'm a desert woman, and I'm proud of that. I want my husband to wander as free as the wind that shapes the dunes. And, if I have to, I will accept the fact that he has become a part of the clouds, and the animals, and the water of the desert.

He struggled to find himself, struggled to talk, his head now filled with sand dunes and desert winds. —Who are you? he asked again, gasping for the words. She stared at him with eyes the color of dark amber, then lowered her mouth to his and kissed

predawn hush had come over the desert basin. He looked up. Straight overhead, the stars were a sequin shawl flung over blue-black. Low on the southern horizon, the night’s second moon peered through a thin dust haze—an unbelieving moon that looked at him with a cynical light.

Where do you live, Kaznim?" "In the star tent beside the Moon Pool, beneath the long dune." Marwick looked puzzled. "So, where's that?" he asked. "Um. In the desert," said Kaznim. "The Desert of the Singing Sands." "OK... and whereabouts is that." Kaznim shook her head. "I ... I don't know.

That's why I want you to continue toward your goal. If you have to wait until the war is over, then wait. But if you have to go before then, go on in pursuit of your dream. The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other.

We must walk without rhythm," Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand . . . both prescient memory and real memory. "Watch how I do it," he said. "This is how Fremen walk the sand." He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace. Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand . . . like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step . . . drag . . . drag . . . step . . . step . . . wait . . . drag . . . step . . .

But on the voluptuous stone of the Colorado Plateau nothing is ever as it appears. There is constant potential. The desert is not dried up and empty as if it might blow away like the seeds of brittle grass. It is the bones of the earth brought to daylight, half stuck out of the ground so that winds and flash floods constantly reveal more. Just as it is beneath our flesh, the bones are the sturdiest, most lasting parts. With their hollowed sockets and deliberate lines, they set a foundation upon which the flesh of forests, mountains, and oceans might accumulate. Only here, the flesh is gone, the last of it turned to dune sand.

So when their campfire was nothing but embers and the horses were dozing behind them, Ansel and Celaena lay on their backs on the side of a dune and stared up at the stars. Her hands tucked behind her head, Celaena took a long, deep breath, savoring the balmy night breeze, the exhaustion ebbing from her limbs. She rarely got to see stars so bright—not with the lights of Rifthold. The wind moved across the dunes, and the sand sighed. “That’s the stag,” Celaena breathed. “The Lord of the North.”... the smile faded when she stared at the familiar constellation. “Because the stag remains constant—no matter the season, he’s always there.

One bee does not make a swarm. One wasp does not make a nest. One wolf does not make a pack. One bull does not make a herd. One dog does not make a litter. One sheep does not make a flock. One lion does not make a pride. One branch does not make a tree. One pebble does not make a hill. One rock does not make a mountain. One dune does not make a desert. One spark does not make a flame. One finger does not make a hand. One color does not make a rainbow. One leaf does not make a plant. One flower does not make a garden. One seed does not make a forest. One drop does not make an ocean. One cloud does not make a sky. One star does not make a galaxy. One world does not make a universe.

What you say is true,’ said Fr. Dioscuros with a smile. ‘You can pray anywhere. After all, God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.’ He gestured to the darkening sand dunes outside: ‘But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself . And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God?

There is a saying in the Middle East that goes something like this: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father drove a car, I travel on a jet, and my grandchild will ride a camel.” Not necessarily. The deserts of the Middle East and North Africa have more solar potential per square inch than any other region in the world—more energy potential, in fact, than all of the oil ever extracted from deep beneath its sand dunes. The

island’s handful of cops can’t enforce it when people ignore the signs and stroll the three miles up from the public beach. Connor is rumored to have set his dogs on such trespassers, even to have chased them off in his dune buggy. When we climb the last dune, I’m pleasantly distracted by the scene before us—the sun a few degrees above the water, miles of deserted sand in either direction, the crashing of the waves. Indeed, it has

The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing fast and furious across my skin. I saw insects and scorpions, the line of a snake. Mohammed said the dunes moved millimeters a day. They inched across the desert floor toward the ocean. I smiled. The geographers were blind.

Still all "realities" and "fantasies" can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind.

The Highest Octaves of Light Sands, in wild winds of surging waves Over the desert dunes, sing with the tones Of tiny pebbles moving all together, a shifting Of dust grains humming and moaning Over the growing and diminishing dunes. His body in the mirror is the color Of sands. The song he sings in the voice Of light shining like waves of wind Passing over his body inside the glass. The mirror sings with the color of sand In the highest octaves of light. Have you ever listened to sands sing With gold light as they fall in threads Through the needle-eye opening At the center of a hour-glass globe? Why not arrange such globes in rows Before a window of sun, each globe A different width, a different height Of refined or rudimentary glass, clear Amber rose, a tinted blue of noon sky, And listen to the chorus? And then why not turn the globes Upside down and over again to hear Sands sing one more time? The desert dunes are singing, wind-risen Voices from a primeval earth, haunting, Pacific, pining and irate. we listen For the repeating message we remember. The songs are only tumbling pebble grains; Their words are only notes of swirling dust, Sings the eternal light, Emanuel.

Below, the ​land, the pale dunes, the black mountains shaped like spears, like towers, like fortresses. On the horizon one volcano pouring its crimson plume into the air, fierce, uncompromising, and real. A wild land, a cruel land, a land to catch you out, bury you in sandstorm, broil you under the sun, freeze you under the stars, dehydrate and suffocate you in the heat with its low oxygen count. A land to thrill and humble you in that single unit after the rains, when all the barren sand is bright with green, and ferns spring toward the mountains and cover their flanks like a rolling ancient sea.

If bees make honey, you can create candy. If flowers make gardens, you can create perfumes. If plants make herbs, you can create medicine. If deserts make dunes, you can create oases. If seeds make trees, you can create forests. If clouds make rain, you can create lakes. If stars make light, you can create lamps. If stones make hills, you can create garrisons. If rocks make mountains, you can create towers. If spiders make webs, you can create fortresses. If ants make colonies, you can create houses. If bees make hives, you can create mansions. If termites make mounds, you can create palaces. If birds make nests, you can create castles.

Little heard of, Dakar with a population of over a million people is the capital and largest city of Senegal. Counting the surrounding area, the population would go well over 2,000,000. This would be our last landing for fuel, before our arrival in Liberia. Our DC-6 took a long turn over the Atlantic and made a slow decent to the runway of the “Aéroport international de Dakar” just north of Dakar. The Portuguese founded Dakar in 1444, as a base for the export of slaves. Dakar came under French rule in 1872 and was the capital of the Mali Federation for a year after 1959. On August 20, 1960, it became the capital of Senegal. It is here that the sand dunes of the North African desert, gives way to the dense tropical rain forests of Equatorial Africa.

No end of blessings from heaven and earth. As we climb up out of the Moab valley and reach the high tableland stretching northward, traces of snow flying across the road, the sun emerges clear of the overcast, burning free on the very edge of the horizon. For a few minutes the whole region from the canyon of the Colorado to the Book Cliffs—crag, mesa, turret, dome, canyon wall, plain, swale and dune—glows with a vivid amber light against the darkness on the east. At the same time I see a mountain peak rising clear of the clouds, old Tukuhnikivats fierce as the Matterhorn, snowy as Everest, invincible. “Ferris, stop this car. Let’s go back.” But he only steps harder on the gas. “No,” he says, “you’ve got a train to catch.” He sees me craning my neck to stare backward. “Don’t worry,” he adds, “it’ll all still be here next spring.” The

...otherwise it was barren as a desert, just long dunes of brick and cement and slate and asphalt.

Radatz described MK12’s first week on the job, ‘We felt like kid astronauts with keys to an actual shuttle, like someone was going to call our bluff at any minute.’139 MK12’s initial creative brief was to explore the element at the heart of the film – water: We learned that we’d been thinking about the film from an opposite perspective than that of Marc and the producers: where we saw water as the central theme, they saw the lack of water as Bond and Greene’s motivation. Our initial concept set Bond in a landscape made of backlit female forms submerged in water. After mulling over random ideas for a few days, it occurred to us that the same technique could be transplanted to a desert scenario, with the female forms instead becoming sand dunes.

That she intended to swim alone, and had ridden alone to such a deserted place, puzzled him. Though the countryside around Rome was neither Sicily nor Calabria, it was not safe for an unaccompanied woman, it never had been, and it never would be. He turned almost blue with the thought that she might have—indeed, must have—met a lover on the road, in which case his triple race would have been for nothing, and his shame would drive him to emigrate to Argentina. He began to think about Argentina, and it was not unpleasant, but before he left he would stand by the stream that flowed into the sea and watch as Lia and her lover emerged from the dunes. What an exquisite look he would give them. His expression would be that of a spurned horseman on foot in a Budapest cafe, who, about to shoot himself in the head, would glance at the woman he loved, and smile. All was forgiven, if only because everything was so magnificently bittersweet.

Nuances of shade and colour in the sand and rock; desert textures - fine, rough, ordered, chaotic, ridged with salt-crust; a broken and wind-swept landscape blends seamlessly into hidden valleys gentled with acacia trees; the smoothness of an ancient lake-bed followed by long struggles with soft sand; rolling hills tessellated with smooth black stones, so ordered it could be a mosaic; salt pans, still wet and yielding under our tyres, the surface cracked and wrinkled like elephant-skin; fine, milky, wind-blown dust so thick that the lower half of a body or motorbike simply disappears below waist height and strange half-people move mysteriously, seemingly unconnected with the ground; crisp-edged dunes lie on the hard desert surface, sculpted by the wind's hand; gnarled acacia trees, lonely patriarchs, seem to crouch and writhe against the heat, standing incongruous in the sand - disparate images flicker through my mind, blend and come together, separate and coalesce like slides flashed briefly against a wall and then they blend again.

Riddle of the Sphinx Moth Your hawk eyed wing peers with fierce stillness upon the day scorched Sonoran sands which, humbled in sparseness like the Sinai, found favor in God’s eye to cloak you in Joseph’s many colored coat. Tail horned larvae, thick in hermetic mystery, raise their headsin sphinx-like pose, riddling enemies with their stony gaze,spitting green soup at trespassers, worthy of Linda Blair in the Exorcist. At dusk you emerge from your cryptic shyness to pry the secrets of the Dune Evening Primrose with your well hung proboscis, so tapered to the task she can’t reproduce without your whirring whispers bruited in her ear, her cloying nectar saved only for you. With pugilist’s craft you woo all the desert blooms, bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali midair, swift and relentless, then hovering patiently like predatory helicopters on the Mekong spewing their gift of Agent Orange.

With your work finished and the caravan halted, you stretch out on the sand with a blanket under your head and breathe in the gentle breeze which has replaced the dry, fiery daytime wind. Then you leave the camp and go down to the dunes for prayer. Time passes undisturbed. No obligations harass you, no noise disturbs you, no worry awaits you: time is all yours. So you satiate yourself with prayer and silence, while the stars light up in the sky.

Thank you for getting me out of there,” the dragon panted as they landed. “I’m Dune.” “Six-Claws. What was that all about?” Dune immediately looked at Six-Claws’s talons — yes, he had six claws on each of his front feet instead of the usual five; thanks so much for letting everyone know right away, parents — and then tried very hard to pretend that he hadn’t.

There had been so many things to learn. Arrakis would be a place so different from Caladan that Paul’s mind whirled with the new knowledge. Arrakis—Dune—Desert Planet.

the lids, have taken on a coral-pink, the color of the dunes.

Kynes passed an unreadable glance across Bewt, said: 'It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.

The desert looked pale and perfect at dawn. The dunes lying in vast interlocked patterns. Almost pink - but that didn't fool me. Nothing was alive down there, nothing soft. Even the trees were armored. The acacias buckled under the weight of their spikes, and they grabbed their leaves close and stingy around themselves, refusing to spread out green, keeping gray instead, as if the color were a hoard of treasure they were afraid to share. And beyond that, on the horizon, a flat yellow sun sliding up into a dull white sky, a cardboard sunrise.

I am sending you on a pilgrimage which will take you to secluded places. Into deep forests. To lakes and rivers. Along the ocean shores and across desert dunes. Into the heart of the jungle and to the summits of the highest cliffs. Into monasteries and their temples. You will depart so that you may face the most basic realities of life. You will walk towards those places alone, because there is room enough on the narrow path only for one.

Look out the window of the train: you’re moving, but you can’t remember leaving. Jagged brown crater dwellings run across the landscape, pipes with thick black smoke pouring out. Smoke overflowing, as the buildings themselves are caked with a sort of black tar. Evening sun peeks over the horizon through rusted steel water towers and other ancient skeletons. Their frames stand fixed, albeit hunched forward, anchored in by the ankles in scrap iron dunes that stretch for miles with frigid desert rats scurrying through as giant shivering Scarabs hover in the sky: wired-in and vigilant, murmuring ancient mantras, overshadowing newer, but desperately cruel partisan inscriptions of code in the soot-stained brick facade. Look at your superimposed reflection in the window across from your seat and envision subatomic particles acquiring sentience in the vacuum of an Accelerator. All wondering how it is they got there, who it is they presume to be. Always wondering. Spiraling...really! Always spiraling at breakneck speeds through the vacuum—eternally in doubt. You are suddenly reminded of the words of that great Algorithmist painter, Carlotta Wakefield, 'Mediocre painters portray that which they understand. Fabulous painters: that which they Surmise...' You wonder if that, too, applies to our constructions of reality, ersatz or otherwise. (From the short story "Leapfrog")

polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert.

escape from a First Order spacecraft, and they had done that. Not that it would matter if he was found here, wandering alive among the dunes. Of one thing he was certain: His former colleagues would not understand, no matter how hard he tried to explain. No one fled the First Order and lived. The sand sucked at his feet as he stumbled toward the rising smoke. “Poe! Say something if you can hear me! Poe!” He did not expect a response, but he hoped for one. Flame had joined smoke in enveloping the wreck of the TIE fighter. Built more robustly than the typical ship of its class, the Special Forces craft had survived the crash landing, although hardly intact. Debris from the impact was scattered over a wide area. Careful not to cut himself on twisted shards of metal and still-hot composite, he pushed through the heat and haze until he reached the cockpit. It lay crushed and open to the desert air. Trying to shield his eyes against the smoke, Finn moved in closer. Something—there was something sticking out of the wreckage. An arm. Ignoring the heat and the licking flames, Finn reached in until he could get a grip on it. First one hand, then both, then pull—and it came free in his hands. No arm, no body: just Poe’s jacket. Frustrated, he threw it aside and tried to enter the ruined cockpit. Increasing smoke and heat made it impossible for him to even see, much less work his way inside. “Poe!” He felt his legs start to go out from under him. But they hadn’t buckled; the ground had. Looking down, he saw sand beginning to slide beneath him. His feet were already half covered. He was sinking. In front of him, the ruins of the ship began to slide into the hollow in which it had come to rest. Sand was crawling up the wings and reaching for the open cockpit. If he didn’t get away from the quicksand, it was clear he was going to join the TIE fighter in premature internment. He began backpedaling frantically, yelling at the disappearing vessel. “POE!” Going. Down, down into the sand, to a depth that could not be

Our supremacy on Caladan,” the Duke said, “depended on sea and air power. Here, we must develop something I choose to call desert power. This

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1967 In The Batmobile Andy and I packed into P’s 1966 Batmobile with me sitting on my Valet’s lap. The vehicle sped away as soon as we were buckled in. The prince zoomed down the deserted Abu Dhabi streets, running red lights in the city owned by his family. I broke out in a cold sweat as the speedometer leapt to 120 miles and continued to rise. Andy’s perspiring hands held me tightly while I leaned against his muscular chest for assurance. I could also feel my protector’s heart racing against my back as he pleaded despondently for P to slow, to no avail. The Arab was convinced that his Batmobile was “everything-proof” and that no harm would come to us even if we crashed into a sand dune. Off we flew at 2.00 A.M., towards Abu Dhabi airport. Andy and I had no idea where we were heading. All we had was blind trust that the reckless driver would get us there in one piece.

Then you should just go take one,” Hawat sneered. “Yes,” the Fremen said. “We took one. We have it hidden where Stilgar can study it for Liet and where Liet can see it for himself if he wishes. But I doubt he’ll want to: the weapon is not a very good one. Poor design for Arrakis.” “You…took one?” Hawat asked. “It was a good fight,” the Fremen said. “We lost only two men and spilled the water from more than a hundred of theirs.” There were Sardaukar at every gun, Hawat thought. This desert madman speaks casually of losing only two men against Sardaukar!

I beg your pardon, dune sea, but I am just here to get my girls. If you would kindly. This is not my first desert, you see. I am not done with my life—I’d say I’m about halfway through. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I am a young white man in America and we typically do quite well here. So if you will excuse me.

Dakar with a population of over a million people is the capital and largest city of Senegal. Counting the surrounding area the population would go well over 2,000,000. This would be our last landing for fuel, before our arrival in Liberia. We took a long turn over the Atlantic and made a slow decent to the runway of the “Aéroport international de Dakar” just north of Dakar. The Portuguese founded Dakar in 1444, as a base for the export of slaves. Dakar came under French rule in 1872 and was the capital of the Mali Federation for a year after 1959. On August 20, 1960, it became the capital of Senegal. It is here that the sand dunes of the North African desert, gives way to the dense tropical rain forests of Equatorial Africa. On a map of Africa, Liberia is on the western bulge, just 5 degrees north of the equator. This is where, during the blisteringly hot summer months it constantly rains, and just south of where the tropical depressions become the fierce hurricanes that threaten the Caribbean Islands and North America. The impenetrable jungle of Liberia is euphemistically called “The Bush.” This hell hot, humid, Garden of Eden, was to become my home for the next eighteen months.

He has always loved to read aloud, to hear words float about a room, to swim in stories and breathe in poetry. And he has a powerful voice, a beautiful voice, as deep, thick and rich as melted chocolate. Characters seem to come alive when he speaks, sliding off the page to stalk the bookshop aisles and relive their fictional lives in 3-D and Technicolor. At night, after Walt flips over the "closed" sign on the front door, he sits back behind the counter and opens doors to other worlds: bookshelves transmute into swamp trees, floors into muddy marshes, the ceiling into a purple sky cracked with lightning as he floats down the Mississippi with Huck Finn. When he meets Robinson Crusoe, the trees become heavy with coconuts, the floorboards a barren desert of sand dunes whipped by screeching winds. When he fights pirates off the coasts of Treasure Island, the floors dip and heave, the salty splash of ocean waves stings his eyes and clouds of gunpowder stain the air. As a rule Walt sticks with adventures and leaves romances untouched, preferring to escape his own aching heart rather than being reminded of it.

Plasma escapes containment to displace great gulps of dirt and air. It turns running men and women into gray puffs of instant cinder, then blows them into dust with howling wind. A thick layer of surface sand ripples into moving sheets of gooey glass that flow stickily down flattened dunes, pooling into molten lakes at the bottom. Rolling sheets engulf craters and ruins, encasing scalded bones of dead armor and bits of wrecked trench works. More liquid glass captures screaming fighters inside hardening silicate globes. a man’s or woman’s last moment of life and pain and final scream trapped in clear, golden glass sarcophagi. They’ll cool later, lying atop the desert like huge, ancient insects locked in Triassic amber. They’ll be the most prized of all Amasian death-glass, illegal but kept anyway in secret private collections.

Uh,” Six-Claws said. “My, um … my friend Dune helped, too.” “Oh, yes?” said Char. “Would you like to join the army as well, dragonet?” “Yes, please, sir!” Dune said eagerly. “Hmmm. You’re a bit young, but we can put you in basic training for now. I’ll have you two assigned to the same battalion.” Char nodded again, looking pleased with himself, and wandered away.

The sandtrout,” he repeated, “was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet . . . and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase.

...polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert.

The dunes are changed by the wind, but the desert never changes. That's the way it will be with our love for each other. "Maktub," she said. "If I am really a part of your dream, you'll come back one day.

Our supremacy on Caladan,” the Duke said, “depended on sea and air power. Here, we must develop something I choose to call desert power.

The Fremen must be brave to live at the edge of that desert." "By all accounts. They compose poems to their knives.

the chant for those committed to the desert, the ones whose water went to Shai-hulud: “Mother of sand, father of Time, beginning of Life, grant him passage.

I will tell you a thing about your new name,” Stilgar said. “The choice pleases us. Muad’Dib is wise in the ways of the desert. Muad’Dib creates his own water. Muad’Dib hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Muad’Dib is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Muad’Dib we call ‘instructor-of-boys.’ That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul-Muad’Dib, who is Usul among us. We welcome you.

Imperial man,” said Turok, stepping forward from the shade, “what is it you see when you stare out onto the desert like that?” Kynes answered without looking at him. “I see limitless possibilities.

Polish comes from the cities, went an old Fremen saying, wisdom from the desert.

Kynes had assumed that when he finally found a hidden Fremen settlement, it would be primitive, almost shameful in its lack of amenities. But here, in this walled-off grotto with side caves and lava tubes and tunnels extending like a warren throughout the mountain, Kynes saw that the desert people lived in an austere yet comfortable style. Quarters here rivaled anything Harkonnen functionaries enjoyed in the city of Carthag. And it was much more natural.

There were bright stars overhead and an orange glow around the horizon. The silhouettes of hanging frond trees made the realization sink in. Ambrielle was back in the oasis, the oasis in the middle of endless dunes and rock. The lonely desert wilderness she hoped to never see again.