by Jesame Geldenhuys
PureTravel Wriing Competition 2023
It’s my 21st birthday and I’m in Wadi Rum, Jordan — the Valley of the Moon. I’m too curious to stay in the majlis so I venture outside. I’m barefoot and there’s an unexpected heat still radiating from the ground. I find a boulder to sit on and it’s as if it was predestined to be a seat from which to marvel. There’s a full moon and it looks like something big and divine has zipped open the contents of the Cosmos and spilled them onto this ancient seabed. At a glance it feels suspiciously static but when it comes into focus it has a life of its own; bobbing, dwindling, melting, undulating, morphing, and extending without end. The emptiness in this desert feels like a spatial presence rather than a void, the mountains and boulders embodied keepers of its history.
The moonlight from this fullest moon spills over the sand. The dunes beneath look glassy washed in moonglow. There are no competing obstacles. No sharp skyscrapers digging into the moon’s belly, no citylights burning through its silk skin, no shadows reaching for a moment in the spotlight. The proportion of the mountains and boulders become distorted, an exodus of dimension. Forms disappear into depth-deceiving shapes.
At night the blanket of saffron, pumpkin, ginger, honey, and marmalade daytime hues morph into swathes of charcoal, ink black, obsidian, black coral, and onyx. The transformation offers an illusion of a deep ocean floor and gentle tides rolling across the horizon, a flashback to what it once was. A young bedouin man leading the herd of 13 camels we travel on tells me oceans and deserts like to swap places sometimes.
I put my ear against the rock to hear what ambient sounds it keeps inside. It is miles from the buzz of the concrete city I come from — still, silent. The vastness of the place and the reminiscence of unimaginable and unreachable depths reminds me that Earth is first and foremost a planet in a multiverse. It is raw, honest, and genuine. I feel tiny and unafraid, dwarfed by everything around and above. Aware that here, away from the systems and institutions that govern us, it is simple: I am human, this is desert, and we are mere specks on this pale blue dot. I’ve never felt more free.
Photo by lior dahan on Unsplash
