Sahara
— — the country where the wind keeps the record.
Not only on a wall.
“Egypt's share of the Sahara runs west of the Nile across two-thirds of the country, a sea of dune fields, limestone plateaus, and oases. The Great Sand Sea rolls toward the Libyan border in long parallel ridges. Siwa sits in a depression below sea level with palm groves and salt lakes. South of Bahariya the White Desert opens into chalk towers shaped by the wind. Light here goes from copper to bone to blue in the last hour of the day. from the studio
Sahara, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert, covering roughly 9.2 million square kilometres across North Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Egypt's portion is the Western Desert, lying west of the Nile and extending to the Libyan border across about 681,000 square kilometres, roughly two-thirds of the country. The terrain is a mix of limestone plateaus, dune fields, and depressions, including the Qattara Depression at 133 metres below sea level. Five inhabited oases punctuate the Western Desert: Siwa, Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, and Kharga.
The Great Sand Sea covers about 72,000 square kilometres along the Egyptian-Libyan border, with longitudinal dune ridges running up to 140 kilometres in unbroken line. Summer daytime temperatures regularly exceed 40°C; winter nights at altitude drop near freezing. The wind here is the sculptor: the chalk yardangs of the White Desert National Park, gazetted in 2002 north of Farafra, are wind-cut limestone towers, and the dark cones of the Black Desert south of Bahariya are basalt-capped hills the wind has slowly stripped. Rain falls under 5 millimetres a year across much of the region.
Siwa Oasis sits 50 kilometres east of the Libyan border and 18 metres below sea level, with around 25,000 inhabitants who speak Siwi, a Berber language. The oracle temple of Amun, consulted by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, still stands above the date palms at Aghurmi. Off the oasis, the Western Desert is among the quietest landscapes on earth: no insect chorus, no running water, no wind in leaves. At night the Milky Way reads as a band of dust across a sky with no light pollution for 300 kilometres in any direction.