Making a Tagine in my last post awoke a set of recollections of the desert that had lain dormant for many years. I contemplated on how the open sky and still landscape can affect you profoundly. How you can be alienated by the culture, so self sufficient and unwestern. I have seen fellow travellers succumb to mental health issues. It often seems to happen when travellers are far from home in an alien environment that the mind wanders.<\/p>\n
A food stall at a street market<\/p><\/div>\n
I once spent a month of so with some friends in an old van seeing how far south we could get. We somehow passed into the western sahara, and headed down a long seldom used road into the\u00a0desert. I took some\u00a0psychedelics at an oasis with a hot spring. It was used by Berber nomads for healing skin complaints. \u00a0Under deep cowls I saw hideous disfigurements and diseases. The urge to escape from the heated dark rooms and quiet suffering was strong. I fled to the outskirts of the village and climbed a hill to spend what seemed like hours watching a still and silent panorama, a long valley full of ochres and browns on a huge scale. Not the slightest trace of humanity could be seen.<\/p>\n
Recently I looked up a passage from – The Sheltering Sky’ by Paul Bowles. He explores\u00a0<\/span>many of these themes and expresses the sense of ennui, fear and spiritual bankruptcy that can develop in that bright white landscape. The high desert sun eviscerates, bleaches and exposes the soul of all things.<\/span><\/p>\n