It was as if we were on a wholly lifeless planet. If one strayed behind a moment and let the caravan out of one's sight, a loneliness could be felt in the boundless expanse such as brought fear even in the stoutest heart. And the deeper we penetrated into the sand ocean, the stronger this feeling was. If the wind or a storm be a sign of life, the lack of it, however annoying it had been, had an almost crushing effect. Nothing but sand and sky; … all else is dead.

I was standing there wholly alone, my body the center of a vast empty disk. The horizon around me formed one uninterrupted circle. The sky was a glaring colorless brightness, with not a cloud to be seen. Aside from me and the ground on which I stood, there was nothing but the brilliantly white, shimmering disk of the sun … An indescribable sense of loneliness and forsakenness overpowered me. Suddenly I no longer seemed to have any sense of spatial or temporal dimensions. Here, where there were no visible standards of measurement, I felt as if I had lost all the inner standards that gave me an awareness of time and place. An infinite distance appeared to separate me from the nearest living being, and it would take me forever, it seemed, to cover the distance.