The sun makes bright scales on the sand...

The sun makes bright scales on the sand, and the wind makes strange, surrealistic, and “futuristic” patterns in it only to obliterate them a few moments later. Thus the wind is constantly creating, destroying and recreating beauty. And this beauty, in all its infinite similitudes, is born to blush unseen in the desert air, and to perish and vanish unsung.

In the immensity of sand, the landscape keeps changing and assuming forever newer and more fantastic shapes, and keeps erratically “moving” from one place to another. Sand can be piled up into massive dunes which can rise more than 150 meters above bedrock. Depending on the direction and force of the wind, the dunes assume a variety of shapes like the spectacular crescent moon or long parallel ridges or great pyramidal massifs which may be called sand mountains.

If the desert has many faces, it also has many moods, and most of them are unpredictable. One moment it may be deceptively benign and tranquil but the very next moment, it may become vicious, temperamental, menacing and treacherous like a turbulent ocean. Whole caravans of men, camels and horses, are said to have disappeared in it, devoured, as if, by the cruel and hungry sands.

In a sandstorm which can last for several days, the sun, the moon, the stars, the contours of the landscape and the horizons are all obliterated, and towering columns of dust spin crazily, flashing surreal shadows over the surface of the roiling desert. In summer, the vertical sun generates thermal whirlwinds which scorch the land as if with a torch, and the desert becomes a composite of two elements – heat and sand.

Sometimes a dust storm is followed by a brisk shower which sports a “double-rainbow” – a full rainbow inset with a smaller one. Thus horror and beauty both fit strangely into the “life-cycle” of the desert. But through it all and forever, the desert remains remote, silent, sinister, savage, forbidding and formidable; and it remains overwhelming in its vast and awesome loneliness. Some people believe that the brooding desert has its own “mystique” which profoundly affects men.

It is against this backdrop that the Arab – the son of the desert – played out his life. Arabia is the world's largest peninsula but the Arabs themselves call it Jazirat-ul-Arab (the Island of Arabia), which in a sense it is.