PREFACE
Sand is overrated—it’s just tiny little rocks.
I should have turned left some distance back, but following twisting and diverging tracks in the sand took concentration and made distinguishing a left turn difficult. There were no signposts; the map was a tentative set of branching spidery lines, petering out into not very much. Having missed the left turn and driven straight on for some time, I found myself entering the Rub’ al-Khali, the aptly named Empty Quarter, the largest sand sea on Earth; the sight, the sense of the place, was unlike anything I had encountered before—immense, impersonal, and, yes, very empty. I was on my own in an ancient but valiant Land Rover, attempting to catch up with my companions. It’s tempting to say I was lost and terrified, but in truth I was neither: if I looked behind me, I could still see, over the tops of the rolling sand hills, the Oman Mountains, out of which I had recently driven. But if I looked ahead of me, there was nothing, nothing but a horizon lost in haze, and I truly did not know where I was—I was not terrified, but I was deeply nervous.
Over thirty years ago, I was on my first job as a professional geologist, surveying the Oman Mountains as part of a British government aid project. The country was being dragged out of the dark ages by its new sultan, who had decided that his father’s medieval approach—wearing glasses had been, until recently, illegal—required change. Maps, communications, transport were, to say the least, unsophisticated, and the British Army was still attempting to control insurgency. As geologists, we needed to spend our time in places the army advised us against visiting, and we tended to avoid the scattered villages that marked the occasional emergence of water. We did so, however, not through safety concerns, but simply because we could not afford the time required by the embracing hospitality of the local people, the protocol of moving from one elder’s palm-shaded house to another’s for yet more varieties of dates.
But now I was a long way from any hospitality, and felt it. Why I was on my own I forget exactly, but it would have been a need to stock up on tinned supplies or flour, or to collect yet another spare part for one of the Land Rovers. I had elected to do this while the others went ahead and set up camp in our next area of work. We camped in wadis, the great dry gullies and canyons typical of any arid land. The wadis were the highways, for us and for the occasional storms that gathered in the mountains and, in flash floods, poured huge volumes of sand, gravel, cobbles, and boulders out onto the edge of the desert. Unfortunately, because of the scale of the work done by the wadis in burying the flanks of the mountains in a chaos of detritus, it was necessary to drive a long way out into the desert before the gullies were shallow enough to allow travel parallel with the mountains. This, together with my missing the left turn, had put me out on the edge of the Empty Quarter, or, as the antique map hanging on my wall objectively describes it, the “Great Desert between Mecca and Oman.”
I had, at the time, no aspirations for desert exploration, no desire to follow in the footsteps (or camel prints or car tracks) of Wilfred Thesiger or T. E. Lawrence, and I gave no thought to the basic rules of desert travel (number one being “don’t do it alone”). Panic was beginning. I drove on. I lurched over the top of a dune and slid to a halt, faced with two well-armed military types standing in front of a small hut, there in the middle of nowhere. I had, unknowingly, crossed an international frontier, and these were the border formalities for the United Arab Emirates. This was not the kind of human presence I had hoped to encounter, and the panic rose. We had no common language, other than my feeble attempt at a cheerful greeting in Arabic and the universal gestures of pointed guns. I quickly pulled out a letter of introduction from the Oman government to convince anyone who needed convincing of my peaceable and purely scientific intentions. My hopes rose when this was carefully scrutinized, but fell when I realized that the document was upside down. For whatever reason, however, it seemed to work: swirling motions of rifle barrels suggested that I turn around, and this I hastily did, waving goodbye and disappearing back toward the mountains in a cloud of sand. Some hours later, I rounded a bend in a large wadi to see a cluster of familiar tents. I arrived, to the relief of companions who had expected me somewhat earlier, in time for the evening meal of chapatis and something tinned. The following day, I returned to the mundane task of sieving wadi sand for mineral analysis and banging at the mountains, as geologists do, with my back to the Rub’ al-Khali.
Deserts are arguably the most dramatic and evocative images of sand for all of us, whether we’ve experienced their immensity for ourselves or not. Direct encounters with sand are typically at the beach or, more frustratingly, on the golf course or in the process of trying to set level paving stones. But why a book on this seemingly mundane stuff? Because, as I hope to convince you, sand is anything but “just tiny little rocks” sand is one of our planet’s most ubiquitous and fundamental materials and is both a medium and a tool for nature’s gigantic and ever-changing sculptures. Because, as William Blake recognized—“To see a world in a grain of sand”—every sand grain has a story to tell, of the present and the past. Because without it, our world, both on a global scale and on the scale of our everyday lives, would be dramatically different. Sand is all around us in different guises—it has made possible the information age and the computer on which these words are being written, it provides the basis for buildings (and windows), it enables us to have toothpaste and many pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and foods. It is an unsung hero of our world and our everyday lives, as well as, quite frequently, a nuisance. Sometimes it sings to you. Its stories of diversity, power, and beauty deserve to be told, whether they are of individual grains of sand or of the great deserts of this world and others.
As I gathered thoughts and materials for this book, the potential scope began to reveal itself, and the challenge became how to weave the narrative through all the diverse stories of sand. The task rapidly became deciding what to leave out. But it also became clear that the nature of sand lends itself to using, metaphorically, the anthropologist’s approach. An anthropologist might begin an account with individuals and their character, building up into a discussion of family units, tribes, and societies, relationships and dynamics, taking note along the way of imagery, imagination, and myths. Thus this book builds up in scale, beginning with sand in the natural world: individual grains (chapter 1) and their strange collective—tribal—behaviors (chapter 2). Then we follow the great journeys and migrations of sand that are driven by water, wind, and ice, together with the landscapes that are both the stage for these journeys and their outcomes (chapters 4, 5, and 6). Much of the Earth’s history is recorded in the testaments of ancient sands, and using modern sand as our interpreter, we review some highlights of these records (chapter 7). Then, moving from the natural to the man-made world, we look at the astonishing diversity of ways in which sand is our servant, a critical ingredient of so many aspects of our lives (chapter 9). Along the way, we take a couple of breaks to reflect on how the imagery of sand has embedded itself in our imaginations—in mathematics, art, literature, and language, as medium and muse (chapters 3 and 8). Finally, we peer outward and onward, beyond the Earth and beyond the present (chapter 10).
This book is very much about scale, from the microscopic to the global and the astronomical, and from hours to eons. Sand is a character that has a role to play at every scale, both in the physical sense and in our collective imagination. There are worlds to see in a grain of sand, and countless grains to see in our world.
“To measure is to know.” Because this book is very much about scale, measurements play an important role. Where possible, I have tried to use evocative and analogous measures, but explicit quantities are unavoidable. Scientific investigation is conducted and reported globally in metric, or International System, units, and the primary measures in this book are thus expressed. Each is followed by a translation in parentheses into United States customary units (otherwise known, quaintly, as English or imperial units), whose international definitions are, nevertheless, metric.