1 - Introduction

Summary

I shall never be able to express clearly whence comes this pleasure men take from aridity, but always and everywhere I have seen men attach themselves more stubbornly to barren lands than to any other. Men will die for a calcined, leafless stony mountain. The nomads will defend to the death their great store of sand as if it were a treasure of gold dust. And we, my comrades and I, we too have loved the desert to the point of feeling that it was there we had lived the best years of our lives.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, French aviator and writer Wind, Sand and Stars (1939)

If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections … once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.

Mary Austin, American naturalist and writer The Land of Little Rain (1903)

Deserts, in spite of the popular perception of their uniformity over vast distances, often contain within them a complex mosaic of microclimates and local weather. Great contrasts also exist in the climate and surface characteristics from one desert to the next.