Maps: Moths to Fire

…or…mystique richesse?

Is mystique the Empty Quarter landscape magnet for Western culture? If so, then how…why?

How could a place, a landscape where cultures of India and Africa have interlaced for millennia be…empty?

How can there be an Arabian Peninsula landscape virtually untouched by Islam these last 1400 Hegira years?

And before Islam, how in the Empty Quarter can there be long lost whisperings…mystical names…unwritten sagas…still emerging from those sands…

But is this Empty Quarter mystique nothing more than a moth to fire?

For me it is unimaginable how non-Muslim foreigners came in search of this landscape…a foreign land…a foreign culture…a foreign religion…a foreign language…what to speak of…NO GPS…NO TELECOM…NO WEATHER REPORTS…

Everytime I think about our ‘modern technological tethers’, the real time information resources to which we are all accustomed, I am amazed by the strength and will power of these earlier explorers…and that gives their writing all the more gravitas.