“And all around is the Desert; a corner of the mournful Kingdom of Sand.”
Pierre Loti, French Novelist and Naval Officer
The desert has a strong relationship with spiritual quests. The desert itself invokes images of a vast expanse, where man may be alone to commune with the higher power and forces of nature. For the Sufi poet Rumi, poetry about the desert was an allegory for a spiritual quest of the Soul journeying into the infinite.
The Libyan Desert (Arabic: الصحراء الليبية) is located in the northern and eastern part of the Sahara Desert. It occupies Egypt west of the Nile (the Egyptian portion is thus called the Western Desert), eastern Libya and northwestern Sudan alongside the Nubian Desert. Covering an area of approximately 1,100,000 square kilometers, it extends approximately 1100 km from east to west, and 1,000 km from north to south, in about the shape of a rectangle. Like most of the Sahara, this desert is primarily sand and hamada or stony plain.The desert features a striking diversity of landscapes including mountains like Jebel Uweinat (1980m, the Gilf Kebir plateau, and sand seas as detailed below. The Libyan Desert is barely populated apart from the modern settlements in eastern Libya.
