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    Getting away for a weekend into the countryside is one of the great pleasures of life. The change from the hectic life in the offices and traffic of the big city to the silence of the sands brings calm to the nerves and a sense of wonder to the soul.

    When you set out with the car, laden with camping gear and cooling boxes full of food and drinks, there is the sense of adventure. It takes only half an hour to leave the busyness of the city behind and to see the dunes, rising ever higher on either side of the road. A very good area to find a nice camping spot is the dune area southeast of Schwayb. A wide sandy wadi runs between the high dunes on the West and the dark rugged mountains on the East. Before long, a track shows the way to a secluded sandy valley with a few picturesque ghaf trees. The setting sun paints the dunes a marvelous rose-red colour and the mountains towards the East fade into blue and purple, while the small sickle of the moon rises slowly over their peaks.

    Because the sliver of the moon does not give off a lot of light, we can observe the stars in all their glory. The brightest at first is Venus. Soon we can pick out the Plow and the hunter Orion, while the twinkling Pleiades show up later. Sometimes we spot a satellite on its way around our globe, while at other times an airplane with its blinking wing-lights shows its presence before it is heard.

    The campfire warms us when the temperatures fall, but even so, a warm blanket around the shoulders is welcome. The barbecue sizzles and from the valley below we hear the bark of a fox, no doubt attracted by the delicious smells of roasting meat. Later the silent flight of an owl momentarily blocks the flickering stars.

    Even in the silent dunes, sleep on a thin mattress is not always the best, so it is not difficult to get up at sunrise. It is worth the effort in any case. Sunrise over the dunes is always spectacular. Just before the first rays shoot across the mountain peaks, the dunes show themselves in mysterious mists that blur the outline of the ghaf trees. Dew lies heavy on the tents and the spring flowers at the foot of the dunes. The red colour of the sand is accentuated by the bright green of the saltbushes that grow at the foot of the dunes.

    This is the best part of the trip: a walk to "read the sands". The diffuse light shows up every track in the sand and outlines the sand patterns made by the wind. The tracks in the sand tell us the stories of what happened in the night.

    Most of the life of the desert unfolds when we sleep. The desert animals hide from the heat and are active only at night. With their large eyes they can gather what little light there is, which enables them to forage or hunt. Their huge ears pick up the slightest sound and the low temperature allows them to run after prey or dig for food without losing too much energy.

    The fox that barked last night has come to investigate if we left out any food. His footprints are easy to recognize by the sharp nails that are visible in front of the pad. All around the camp, there are the three-pronged prints left by gerbils, of which there are many different kinds. The two hind feet are kept close together and look like one print, while the two front feet are set a bit apart.

    Near the tents, a small track leads to a two-inch beetle that is standing in a strange position with its abdomen pointing upwards. If you look closely, you can see why: dew has formed on its shields and by standing with its head down, this water trickles towards its head and mouth parts, giving the beetle its much-needed moisture.

    Odd "bulldozer" tracks are left by camel spiders or scorpions. Often they come from or lead to a small slit underneath a bush - the burrow where they spend the daytime.

    The camel spider has an undeserved bad reputation. There are stories about how it anesthesizes your skin and then eats away at night without the victim feeling a thing.

Although it looks ferocious, it is really not dangerous to people. Its Latin name (Solifuga) means that it flees for the sun. It does not like any kind of light (although it seems attracted to camp fires sometimes) and when it is disturbed and exposed to light, it will run to the nearest shade, which is usually the person that disturbed him or that is holding the flash light. And it runs fast, so its rush to safety is misinterpreted as an attack.

    Scorpions can be found at night if you use a "black" (ultraviolet) light. In this light they show up as small greenish ghosts. It is surprising how many of them are around, and yet few people that camp are ever bothered by them. There are some poisonous species and it is better to avoid contact, for even if they won't kill, they can cause some discomfort and pain.

    Going uphill is a strange track of slanted stripes. One end of the stripe has a small U-shape. This is the track left by a side-winding snake. Here in the dunes that would be either the sand viper or the sawscale viper. The odd side-winding track is made when the snake has to move through loose sand. It pushes itself off by the lower part of its body, while the front third with its head are kept raised. The open end of the "U" is the direction in which it has been moving. It is better not to find it, because the vipers are poisonous, although not very aggressive generally.

    The track of a sand boa is a perfect sinus graphic. Sand boas are small fat snakes that live most of their life below the surface of the sand. They are constricting snakes, killing their prey (usually of small rodents) by squeezing them to death.

    Early morning is the best time to see another of the subterranean sand dwellers: the sand skinks or sand fish. They can swim under the surface of the sand - quite like a fish swims in water. They come out early in the morning to "sunbathe". They always emerge form the sand on the lee side of a dune - where the sand is very soft. All reptiles are slow to move when they are cold and need the sun's warmth to raise their body temperature enough to move at speed.

    While the skink is still warming up, it stays in a spot where it can dive deeply in a split second. If you climb up the hard side of the dune and carefully peer over the edge, you have a chance to observe the skink in action. They skitter around for a bit, diving into the sand just below the surface form time to time, to emerge again and look for another place for nice tidbits - mostly of insects.

    Their body is beautifully streamlined - even their head has a counter-sunk lower jaw - a shape that facilitates its underground movements. Their ear holes can be closed, while they also have special scales that can cover their eyes for protection. Their toes have fringes, which helps in swimming through the sand. The scales of their body are as smooth and glossy as porcelain, and at least one of the two species that we have here is very colourful with black sidebars on its overall orange-yellow body. Local bedouin used to eat the sand skinks as a much-needed addition of meat to their meager diet of dates and camel or goat milk.

    At the bottom of the valley, where there is more vegetation, the larger prints of the desert hare are showing how they went from place to place. Its prints are a bit blurry, because the soles of its feet are covered with hair that enable it to move on soft, sometimes very hot sand. Although the hare grazes at night, it has to be able to run in the daytime, when it is flushed from its resting place in the shade of bushes. Unlike rabbits, hares do not use burrows. They even drop their young just somewhere on the sand and visit them for the first few weeks several time a day to feed them but leaving them most of the time to fend for themselves.

"Early morning is the best time to see another of the subterranean sand dwellers: the sand skinks or sand fish.  They can swim under the surface of the sand".

    Some of the bushes are backlit by the low rays of the sun and show a beautiful crop of glossy pink "flowers". These "flowers" are actually fruit wings, paper-thin petals that surround the seed and enable it to be carried by the wind to far-off places to germinate.

    One of the most conspicuous flowers of the dunes is the white Campion - a plant that opens its flowers at dusk and stays open all night, for night-flying moths to enjoy. Within a few hours after sunrise, the dainty flowers close and the plant looks uninteresting.

    In one low-lying area there is a carpet of small white four-petaled flowers. The Latin name of this plant is Eremobium eagyptiaca - which means "desert life". After good rains they can change the sands into a garden.

    Further down a bright sulphur-yellow flowering bush seems attractive, but when you touch it, it turns out to have an appalling smell. Somehow it is attractive to the caterpillars of a butterfly - the Plain Tiger. This butterfly has a conspicuous colour pattern of orange black and white, which tells birds that it is not very tasty. The butterfly gets this bad taste because its caterpillar always feeds on plants that have bad-tasting or poisonous juices.

    The dry bed of the wadi is dotted with the grey-green shrubs of the Sodom 's apple. This large bush indicates that there has been too much grazing in this area. Since the Sodom 's apple (Calotropis procera) is another one of the bad-tasting plants, that are the food plants of the Plain Tiger caterpillar, it is not eaten by grazing livestock. In areas where all other vegetation disappears because of overgrazing, the Sodom 's apple takes over and dominates the landscape. It has rather attractive purple flowers that hang in heavy bouquets between the large round leaves. These leaves feel woolly, due to a covering of short white hairs. These hairs retain moisture close to the surface of the leaf, and reflect sunlight away from the leaf, contributing in this way to the successful survival of the plant. The woody roots of the bush were used in the past to make charcoal, which in turn was used to make gunpowder. The fruit is shaped like a fat banana and contains hundreds of seeds, each with their own little parachute of silken hairs that enable them to float far on the wind. In Northern Africa where this plant is ubiquitous, the fruits are more round, looking like an apple, which gave the plant its name.

    In bygone years these dunes were also the home of the cute white sand fox and the very small sand cat. The cat has disappeared, retreating into the less disturbed dunes of the Empty Quarter , and the sand fox has become very rare. In fact, it was thought to have gone also, but has been sighted recently within the area of Al Maha resort. Both small mammals spend the day in burrows underground and hunt at night, but they can be seen at times in the early morning near their burrows, warming themselves in the rays of the rising sun.

    Even though these days the wild flora and fauna is diminished, it is still worthwhile to spend some time enjoying the peace of the desert and appreciating the many ways in which wild plants and animals manage to survive in an environment that is very difficult and hostile during much of the year. With more respect for this desert life, it should be possible to remember to take rubbish home and not to drive off-track.