". . . It would be just too bad for us . . ."

CCXV

Rub’-al-Khali, the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the largest of all Ergs, has the greatest oil reserves in the world. Europeans did not penetrate the region until the early 1930s. In a more fertile antiquity much of the world’s frankincense and coffee came from this region

Despite the image most people have of deserts, relatively few areas of any desert are made up of what, in Arabic, are called Ergs --- those immense oceans of sand and dunes that lack virtually everything necessary for typical plant and animal survival. 

The Sahara Desert is very much larger than the Rub’-al-Khali, and has many Ergs, but it is also marked by more variation in landforms and easier access to the fossil water in the aquifers beneath ground

Deserts are, by definition, marked by low precipitation --- aridity --- and a general lack of cultival topsoil. Water-retaining plants and animals can live in most deserts, and when the rare rain does fall, the desert can bloom, briefly and magnificently --- but not the Ergs.

Less arid than the Old World deserts, the Sonoran Desert of southwestern North America blooms after its rare but intense rainfalls. The giant Saguaro Cactus is synonymous with the Sonoran Desert

Deserts do not even necessarily have to be hot zones --- there are cold deserts --- and even the hot deserts suffer from biting cold on a regular basis. Lacking any kind of significant ground cover, deserts tend to give up whatever heat they may have gathered in daylight to the night air, resulting in extreme temperature fluctuations over the course of a 24 hour day. An eighty degree noon can become a 28 degree midnight.  Although deserts tend to have seasonal climate as opposed to daily, changing weather, these dramatic fluctuations of temperature act as catalysts for extreme atmospheric events elsewhere --- for example, the interplay of Saharan heat and the cooler air over the North Atlantic near Africa causes tropical storms and hurricanes in North America.

Key Monastery in Tibet. Cold deserts, are remarkable for low temperatures, high elevation (or high latitudes), and a lack of precipitation --- not even snow

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had overflown scrubby regions of the Sahel, and even areas where the expanding Sahara was reaching southward, but they had yet to experience the utter desolation and bizarre conditions of an Erg.

An Arabian oasis

Once they crossed the Bab-el-Mandeb, they soon found themselves over the Rub’-Al-Khali, the stupefying Empty Quarter of Arabia. Although they were paralleling the coast they flew not near the shore but inland, over the Hadhramaut region of Arabia, an oil-rich but untamed British Protectorate. The British did not advise Earhart to land anywhere in the Hadhramaut as they could not guarantee her safety among the ever-warring clans of the region. Even the Jewish clans --- particularly the Ben Qattian --- were renowned for the daggers they produced.  

Modern-day Hadhrami tribesmen attending a wedding

Amelia reflected on the flight:

[We said farewell to] everything that was green and approach[ed] a land terribly barren beyond description . . . In no part of southern Arabia is a forced landing desirable. The waterless, treeless desert geography is in itself pretty hopeless, a further negative factor being the probable attitude of the sparse nomadic population, if, as, and when encountered. In some districts the Arab tribesmen might not be hospitable to strange interlopers, especially a woman. Or perhaps under special circumstances too hospitable . . . [A]s a special precaution we carried a letter written in Arabic, presumably addressed "To Whom It May Concern" and bespeaking for us those things that should be bespoken . . . [W]e carried the document . . . ready for emergency. We carried, too, a pretty generous supply of water in canteens, concentrated foods, a small land compass, and very heavy walking shoes. Fortunately we did not have to walk!

Over The Empty Quarter

Though jocularly written after reaching Karachi, India (now Pakistan), a full 1,783 miles by direct flight (although Earhart’s elapsed distance read 1,920 miles), there was nothing jocular about the flight. It was a long, bruising, and dangerous trek by air that lasted a full thirteen hours and ten minutes. Forced down in the Empty Quarter meeting no one, their bones might never be found. Meeting anyone, they might be reduced to rumors, letter from the Crown or no:

 . . . It would be just too bad for us if such an introduction was presented to the wrong local faction.

Modern Hadhrami Bedouins

The heat was awesome. Not only was the ambient temperature very high, but they could feel the radiating heat of the desert through the soles of their shoes atop the cabin deck of the Electra.

A dagger made by a Ben Qattian daggersmith. These are still prized possessions in Yemen

Then there was the uncooperative desert itself. Huge invisible columns or towers of heat were rising off the floor of the desert following the topography of the ground. When the Electra passed through or over one of these columns the plane was buffeted violently at best, and at worst it would experience a sudden elevator-like drop in altitude of scores of feet at any given time (hotter rising air providing less lift than colder sinking air). Every time it happened Amelia and Fred’s hearts jumped into their mouths, and not only from fear but from the simple physical reaction to the sudden descent. The Electra was rattling and thudding as it battled the very element it was designed to operate in, and the twin Wasp engines alternately growled and screamed as the air pressure reaching their cylinders changed moment by moment, thinning or thickening. Amelia found herself constantly attending to the fuel mixture ratios and to the pitch of the propellers to adjust their “bite” in the air.

The ever-mutable sea of sand that is the Erg of the Rub’-al-Khali

When she could spare a look at the landforms she was astounded. Although the Erg seemed to be a measurelessly inert landscape, hypnotic in its endless sameness, as the hours passed she began to recognize that what lay beneath her was a boundless sea as ever-changing as the Atlantic or the Pacific. The dunes were as impermanent as seawaves --- in fact, they were landwaves --- constantly shifting as the winds blew and the earth turned, and the sun marched across the sky, reacting to local alterations in temperature. Cat’s-paws riffled the ground, and sand devils, the spume of the desert, appeared and disappeared even as she watched.  Even trackless, she noted some goat trails here and there, a few dry wadis and salt pans, as they flew on. But of Man himself they saw naught. 

Traversing the Erg-haunted Hadhramaut took more than 13 exhausting hours under some of the roughest flying conditions Earhart and Noonan had yet experienced