Off the map in the Arabian desert

Venturing into Arabia’s mighty Empty Quarter

All photos © copyright Matthew Brace

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August in the Rub’ al Khali desert (or Empty Quarter) is not for the fainthearted. It is one of the hottest, driest and most sparsely populated places on earth.

It covers a large stretch of, well, emptiness across southern Saudi Arabia, northern Oman and Yemen, and the western fringe of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). My first visit was to the UAE section in summer with my Emirati friend and colleague His Excellency Hamad Saif Al Mansouri. It was an immense privilege to see this land through his native eyes.

Hamad tore along the highway from Abu Dhabi, stopping only to pray in roadside mosques and shoo away camels wandering nonchalantly across the baking hot asphalt. Once we approached the edge of the desert and the flat lands gave way to the towering dunes he dived off the road and we headed deep into the sand sea.

Dunes move over the years, of course, but Hamad knew that land as well as I know London’s back streets from Marble Arch to Leicester Square in a blackout on a moonless night.

Every now and then he stopped, got out and ‘read’ the landscape, relying on memory and innate desert navigation skills inherited from his Bedouin ancestors. When in doubt, he gave me a cheeky grin and checked the 4WD satnav. “The old and the new,” he said, “we need both here.”

On our second afternoon we climbed a perfectly sculpted dune. The heat was oven-like and all was calm. We could see for miles, out towards the Saudi border and into the heat haze beyond, where the desert becomes seriously empty. Hamad scanned the horizon silently, reverentially. Despite the great wealth and luxuries that Emiratis have acquired through the UAE’s rapid oil and gas expansion, it is the simplicity of the desert and its connection to their recent nomadic past that really moves them.

Heading back down the dune we dropped into a breathless sand canyon where a camel and her calf were making for a sliver of shade under a ridge. Hamad watched them, remembering similar scenes from his childhood. I was reminded of passages from Arabian Sands, explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s evocative travel narrative about crossing the Empty Quarter. (The book is a must for anyone interested in the Middle East, its landscapes and its people.)

Back at the 4WD, the dashboard told us the outside temperature had hit 50^oC (122^oF). It was the greatest heat I had experienced, hotter even than my July drive through California’s Death Valley two years before. Yet, oddly, it was not overpowering. The lack of humidity was the key. The unbearable stickiness that plagues the UAE’s coastal capital Abu Dhabi and second city Dubai during summer can out-soak Miami. On the edge of the bone-dry Rub’ al Khali, however, the heat is crystalline.

That night Hamad and I sat in the moonlight by our campfire, sipping cardamom-infused Arabic coffee, eating dates and talking. I let the warm sand run through my fingers and swore I would return to see more of this intoxicating place.