ABSOLUTE & INEFFABLE
Author finds ‘extraordinary richness and diversity’ as he explores vast deserts around the world
I don’t really find it worthwhile to think of myself as an adventure writer. I’m not an explorer. I don’t see myself as an anthropologist.
WILLIAM ATKINS
The Immeasurable World William Atkins Doubleday
There were times when William Atkins felt anger as he wandered the deserts of the world.
It happened in Australia when he learned of the effects of British nuclear tests on the Indigenous population.
And again in Arizona border country, where he was appalled at “the weaponization of that landscape in order to kill undocumented migrants.”
In contrast, he experienced wonder and awe at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, an improbable treasure house engulfed in the harshness of the Gobi Desert.
In contrast again there was the ecological horror he felt walking the desertified floor of what was once the world’s fourthlargest saline lake. His new book, The Immeasurable World, conjures up images of “a plain of grey porridge, of doused ashes … its emptiness as starkly alarming as a socket deprived of its eye.” That eerie experience leaves him pondering the devastation that the Soviet Union wrought in Central Asia when it began diverting rivers to boost cotton crops.
But also — and this is clearly important to him — there was the peace he would find in Egypt’s eastern desert at the shrine of St. Antony, a key figure in the monastic movement.
Atkins was prepared for the mysterious and unfathomable as he sought out the driest, hottest parts of the planet in preparation for his remarkable new book. He would end up visiting eight deserts on five continents — but in search of what?
“The promise of the inexplicable is one of the things that draws us to the desert,” Atkins says. “It’s this idea of a place where the humanist can be discovered, the infinite can be confronted and ultimately the absolute and ineffable.”
There is a meditative aspect to the book’s enthralling fusion of the natural world, history, mythology and present-day reportage as he takes us to the often inhuman landscapes of Oman’s Empty Quarter, Australia’s Great Victoria Desert, the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts of China, the destruction of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and the deserts of the U.S. Southwest.
Atkins doesn’t see The Immeasurable World as an “angry” book. He’s insistent on this point and points to the serenity of its final pages. But anger nevertheless enters his voice when he talks about Australia’s Great Victorian Desert and the desecration of the Arungu’s traditional homeland by British nuclear testing six decades ago.
“The casual dismissal of Indigenous culture reveals the racism of British policy in Australia at the time,” he says. “It also reveals massive ignorance about the landscape and what it means. I suppose this was a theme I tried to visit in the book — the misunderstanding of these places, which outsiders see as being without meaning, without value, without any kind of cultural significance. Whereas, for those who live there, these are places of extraordinary richness and diversity.”
But it’s the desert country along the U.S.-Mexican border that triggers the toughest memories. Atkins is chatting in the busy coffee shop of the British Library, one of his favourite places, but at this moment his mind is thousands of kilometres away, remembering the place where a 16-year-old Mexican teenager named Jose Rodriguez died in 2012 in a hail of bullets.
The youth was four blocks from home at the time, throwing stones over the fence separating his country from Arizona. A U.S. border patrol agent responded by firing 10 bullets through the fence into the boy’s body.
If Atkins’s calmness seems to be deserting him at this moment, it’s perhaps because he’s giving this interview one day after a Tucson jury acquitted the officer on charges of second-degree murder.
Atkins says he can relate to the Arizona activist who suggested to him that U.S. President Donald Trump might have more empathy for the illegal migrant if he were taken deep into the Sonoran Desert and deposited beside a dry well with only a week’s supply of water.
“I was there before Trump was elected, but he was very much on the horizon,” Atkins says. He points out that sections of wall and fence already exist but beyond that there is a “natural” wall of mountains and deserts that requires five days to cross on foot.
He joined members of the No More Deaths charity in leaving survival packs for illegal Mexican immigrants. He sees it as a simple humanitarian gesture, given that more than 2,700 bodies were discovered in Southern Arizona alone between 2000 and 2014.
“These people are heroic,” he says admiringly of the volunteers. “It’s extraordinary that there are places where water is left simply in order to save lives.” But if U.S. border control finds these life-saving caches, it will destroy them.
The stark U.S. chapters are but one component of a book that reveals the astonishing richness and variety of desert culture. Atkins’s writing has earned him comparisons with legendary travel writer Bruce Chatwin, but he sees himself in more modest terms.
“I don’t really find it worthwhile to think of myself as an adventure writer,” he says — gently shrugging aside the fact that in Yemen and Egypt he was on the “edge” of conflict. “I’m not an explorer. I don’t see myself as an anthropologist.”
Asked about his most awesome moment, Atkins remembers the cave of St. Antony, the first Christian monk in Egypt. He’d been attending midnight mass and “I remember coming from that very hot airless cave into the desert night and seeing this moonlight plain stretched out before me.”
Was Atkins experiencing infinity at this moment? He answers this way: “I’m writing about the effects of a landscape upon myself and trying to describe what it felt like to be there, while telling the stories of others.”
So has he unlocked the infinite mystery of the desert?
“To no degree,” Atkins says. “It’s not really an investigation that can be unlocked.”