The 15,000-square-mile Ennedi Massif, in northeastern Chad, is a plateau the size of Switzerland. Between 350 million and 500 million years ago, this part of the globe was ocean. Then the ocean disappeared, leaving the sandstone floor exposed. The climate shifted from rain-soaked to arid. Sun, wind and water sculpted the sandstone into a dramatic, desolate and unearthly landscape of gorges and valleys, inselbergs and stacks, towering tassili and natural arches.
When I was a child, a teacher tried to give my class some sense of eternity. Imagine a rock 10,000 miles by 10,000 miles, she said. Every 10,000 years, a small bird comes and wipes its beak this way and that upon the rock. Deep time, earth time, captures the entire process of erosion, until the rock is finally worn away.
In the desert the delicate threads of life are apparent in trails of tiny footprints scattered across the sands: here, the tear-shaped tracks of a lizard; there, the dimpled prints of a gerbil. I have travelled to many deserts but, as I lay in bed in the open air and gazed directly into the face of the moon, it was clear to me that the Ennedi was the emptiest landscape I had ever experienced.
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