Desert

It is only in the desert that we can pay a visit to death and afterwards return to the land of the living.

from an essay by Ibrahim al-Koni for Myth and Landscape by David Parker (2014).

The desert is not a place, writes al Koni:

A place has preconditions, and one of the preconditions is water, and the lack of water in the desert makes it impossible to settle there, so the desert becomes a place of absence, a place that is the shadow of another place...

Image: New Desert Myths I (detail) by David Parker.

Here is a view on Mars, January 2015