If you stand in the middle of what the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger called “The Empty Quarter” – the vast tract of desert that makes up most of Abu Dhabi emirate – and look around, what you will see is… emptiness. Mile upon mile of emptiness, as far as the eye can see. Pale yellow sand, orange sand, flat sand or rolling dunes, but sand all the same.
An endless vista of sand in the Empty Quarter
But look a little closer, and you will notice that in fact it is not empty at all. Here and there the odd bush or tree has found enough water to flourish and, every so often, irrigation pipes have allowed the building of a remote farm or palace, or the planting of a date farm, wresting fertility from the desert. Then there is the camel racetrack, where tents have been erected for the forthcoming races, and we stopped to watch the training of the young camels.
Camels being put through their paces
Of course, it was not entirely empty even in Thesiger’s day. Apart from the wandering nomads, the desert was populated by a whole variety of other species. When we ventured out for an early morning walk, before the wind had rearranged the sand, we saw tracks. A snake, a fox, and some kind of small rodent.
Early morning animal track
We stayed in the luxurious Tilal Liwa Hotel, right in the middle of the desert and about as far away from it all as you could possibly get!
Not your usual hotel patio – the Tilal Liwa Hotel
Increasingly, there are other types of activity here, too. There are inland oilfields, and preparations are being made for the construction of the UAE railway. You can see the infrastructure everywhere: pipelines, pylons, workers’ huts. The desert is gradually being reclaimed to make way for new towns and enterprises. Perhaps future generations will bemoan the loss of the desert environment.
Tents and pylons vying with one another
My novel “Shadow of the Dome”
