Dune Physics And Five Kinds Of Thirst

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Dune Physics and Five Kinds of Thirst: A review of Sahara Unveiled by William Langewiesche Nothing lives for hundreds of miles in the vast Tanzenrouft of Adrar, where the annual rainfall is less than an inch, the daily temperature is 128oF, there is no shade, and the sky is nearly white. The Great Eastern Erg of El Oued is a literal sand sea, uninhabitable except in sparse areas where survival depends on a kind of "farming:" a lifetime of days removing sand by shovel and bulldozer to protect the date palms and the entire city itself from burial. William Langewiesche, in his travel memoir, Sahara Unveiled, never gives a reason for his journey, but only that: "The Sahara is not a natural destination and never will be. A writer writes about it, as a reader reads about it, to satisfy his curiosity about an unseen part of the world." He doesn't try to explain the allure of the Sahara as Paul Bowles did, especially in terms of the immense silence of the dunes at night, the profound solitude, the confrontation of one's own insignificance - the very things that Western culture was built to obscure. Like William Vollman in Atlas or Butterfly Stories (or Melville...or embedded journalists) Langewiesche abandons the instinct for self-preservation in search of his story. The result is a rich view from the inside of the geographical landscape and its inhabitants, considered within an historical context. For example, in Tadart, a hostile, remote region near the Algerian border with Libya, in search of ancient rock paintings, Langewiesche finds himself deceived and abandoned in a desolate area by his driver, a self-aggrandizing Tuareg with embroidered pants and white aviator scarf who will "watch himself in any reflection." Until then, the driver's romantic depictions of himself are pretty funny, such as when they blow out a tire: "Don't worry." He held two fingers
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