Rub' al Khali
— — the dunes the wind keeps redrawing.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest continuous sand desert on earth, reaching south from the Liwa Oasis across the Arabian Peninsula. The dunes run in long parallel ridges, some over 250 metres high, and the wind moves their crests by a hand's width every day. At sunrise the sand reads pale gold; by mid-afternoon it is the colour of burnt apricot; after sunset it cools to a deep rose that holds for about twenty minutes. There is no permanent water and almost no permanent human presence. The horizon is the only line.
Rub' al Khali, 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 Rub' al Khali, often translated as the Empty Quarter, is the largest contiguous sand desert in the world. It covers roughly 650,000 square kilometres across the southern Arabian Peninsula, sharing borders with Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates. The UAE's portion lies in the Al Dhafra Region of Abu Dhabi, reached from the Liwa Oasis at the southern edge of the country. Dunes here run in long parallel ridges and reach heights of over 250 metres. The first recorded crossing by a westerner was Bertram Thomas in 1930-31, followed by Wilfred Thesiger's two crossings in the 1940s.
There are no permanent rivers, no towns, and almost no permanent human presence across the interior. The Bedu of the surrounding margins have crossed it for centuries on camel; today most visitors travel by four-wheel-drive from the Liwa side, often with a local guide. Once the dunes close behind the vehicle, the soundscape collapses to wind on sand and the occasional distant call of a sandgrouse. Wilfred Thesiger wrote, after his crossings in 1946 and 1947, that the silence there was the deepest he had ever known — and that the country gave back, in stillness, what it asked in hardship.
Summer in the Empty Quarter is severe. Daytime temperatures regularly exceed 50 degrees Celsius from June through August, and most tour operators close those months. The visiting season runs roughly November through March, when daytime air stays in the 20s and nights drop into the low teens, occasionally below. The light is strongest the hour after dawn and the hour before sunset; the middle of the day flattens the dunes into a single pale field. Rainfall across the desert averages less than 35 millimetres a year, and many parts go years without measurable rain.