T H I S+W E E K Lost in the Sahara By Jeffrey Tayler A simple overnight trip becomes a battle for survival > Dunescapes By Pamela Robertson A desert portfolio Letter from Amsterdam By Mary Elizabeth Williams Toke of the Town D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Running on full Mondo Weirdo Lions and rhinos and loos -- oh my! Readers' Tips and Tales Hitchhiking adventures - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LA S T+W E E K Tuesday, Sept. 9, 1997 Bali low By Cintra Wilson Loveless in paradise A full list of all Wanderlust articles

sensual sands PAMELA ROBERSON'S DUNESCAPES PLUMB THE ESSENCE OF THE DESERT. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTOS AND TEXT BY PAMELA ROBERSON | I was first intrigued by the spell that deserts cast upon people after a conversation with a fellow schoolteacher in Marjeuon, Lebanon. We were standing on a windy ridge looking out across the landscape into Israel. I said something about how barren and brown it looked, and he remarked how beautiful deserts were. He was a poet, from Utah, and his homesickness for his own desert landscape was expressed with such simplicity and yearning that I determined then and there to go to the American West someday (growing up in Washington, D.C., I had never even heard anyone talk about the West). I lived for 3 and a half years among the Druze people of Lebanon's Shouf Mountains, and during that time I naturally came to wonder about the geography that had formed such an intense culture. The little town where I taught school was like a Tuscan village in appearance, but I came to understand that the underpinnings of all the people -- souk merchants in the crowded alleys of Aleppo, olive farmers living high on the stone terraces on the Shouf, fishermen down by the sea -- were bound by a code of hospitality and loyalty based absolutely upon the mores demanded of their nomadic desert forebears. It helped to be reading T.E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" while teaching school in that eight-centuries-old Druze village, and immersing myself in the culture as only a 23-year-old recent graduate from suburban America could do. After the eruption of the civil war in 1975 and my evacuation from Beirut, I settled in New England. There, in the cold of a January night, I dreamed of a lovely, undulating landscape, all white and crystalline, rimmed by lavender mountains. I called a friend in Santa Fe, and explained that I'd just had this very powerful experience and felt that I had to go to New Mexico. After I got there, we looked around the Four Corners area, but the red mesas and buttes were nothing like the vision that had brought me 2,000 miles west, and I determined to move there and keep looking. Almost another year passed before I found that haunting landscape. It was May, a full moon sunset, in 1981. I came down over the rise outside of Alamogordo into White Sands, and I saw the place right there, exactly as I had dreamed it 17 months previously. I was filled with joy. Thus began a project that eventually led me to go out and live alone in the desert for three months photographing dunes throughout seven Western states. They were all interesting, but none of them ever compelled me the way those of White Sands did. In fact, in the 17 years that followed, photographic assignments for books, magazines and commercial clients in over 70 countries never quite equaled the magic that psychic landscape held for me. Even today it remains a place of singular excitement and calm for me. There is a process I undergo as I photograph a place or person. I try to empty out all the external and internal sounds and just concentrate on identifying the strongest emotion I feel while opening up to the subject. Then I focus on creating an image with as few lines or geometric shapes as possible. In the case of the dunescapes series, I would also challenge myself to work with just a single earth tone each day: browns, or whites, or blues. What I strive for in photography is to offer an image that is arresting enough to give people pause in this helter-skelter world. It's a challenge, as photography is everywhere, to create something that makes people just stop for a moment. Sept. 16, 1997 Pamela Roberson lives in Seattle. Her most recent books are "Peaks," "Islandgods" and "Mother Earth." She runs a home-based stock photography business, Photo Envision, and continues to teach workshops and do assignments worldwide. Do these images awaken your own feelings about the desert, or inspire new feelings? Is your experience of the desert similar or different? Share your reactions in Table Talk. SHIFTING SANDS | A portfolio of images ________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Sometimes the desert can turn from transcendental to terrifying. Read Jeffrey Tayler's riveting account of an innocent excursion gone awry in "Lost in the Sahara." ________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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