Once you have reached the desert, you must plunge into it both to learn its extraordinary softness and to acknowledge its hateful power. You must submit to being transported to this lunar landscape on earth – “the first death to have occurred on earth,” as the Tuareg poet Hawad put it – wrapping yourself in exile and regaining your freedom. But, while the desert opens itself up, it does so only to close itself more firmly. For the desert, might death be the ultimate in seduction? The profusion of animal carcasses bears witness to its love of being lethal.
Jean-François Chaix, An Intimate Vastness
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