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I can’t really describe what it is like to fly over the Sahara at 39,000 feet in a 747 jet. It is like empty space, yet I know I have never been there, or at least physically laid eyes upon it while floating freely in stupor—and I know most others have not either. It is like an open valley, or a calm sea with limitless horizons. There are no hills from above. Certainly no mountains. There are dunes which I can see, but only fingerlings of thirsting riverbeds, long ago dried, now swept by only air. They look like a swipe of a cloth cleaning with Windex and the immediate marking left behind on the glass. They look like a far-reaching snow-capped mountain, were few feet have ever lain, if any, scooping by fierce winds and harsh crystals. <br />

The Ancient Imagination and the Birth of Potential

Camron Karsten
2006-02-18 20:23:12

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I can’t really describe what it is like to fly over the Sahara at 39,000 feet in a 747 jet. It is like empty space, yet I know I have never been there, or at least physically laid eyes upon it while floating freely in stupor—and I know most others have not either. It is like an open valley, or a calm sea with limitless horizons. There are no hills from above. Certainly no mountains. There are dunes which I can see, but only fingerlings of thirsting riverbeds, long ago dried, now swept by only air. They look like a swipe of a cloth cleaning with Windex and the immediate marking left behind on the glass. They look like a far-reaching snow-capped mountain, were few feet have ever lain, if any, scooping by fierce winds and harsh crystals.

Like Himalayan hills, a monotonous color stretches far and wide in all directions, only disrupted by arid patches of cream and white. Otherwise, nothing but raw sand, sand flat and smooth, windblown by a massive hairdryer whose switch has been broken and no plug can be found. Grasping incessantly, I can’t conceive of a more inhospitable place, and yet the more I imagine the struggle, the impenetrability and its isolation, the more my hunger grows for its possibility.

A solitary line dances, having risen from the surface of time. At this elevation, it appears to be a gigantic Saharan mole hill having been pushed to the surface from subterranean navigation. Pock marks scatter its skin, looking like scales of a sidewinder, and I recognize it to be one lone legendary dune elongated on an empty plateau. Further away, I see more, endlessly rising with an impartial skin. Interspersing the dunes are craters, shallow, but scaring the earth like a sudden transmission of electricity. Vast gorges now filled with both sand and landmarks turn red like a wet tongue. But there is no water here, and you have to wonder if there ever was. Only a dry soil; sand and its minerals of iron and magnesium.

High cirrus clouds block my view, and although disappointed, I can now only imagine the relief this brings to what life lies below.