March 5, 2003 The thin blanket of clouds in the west was aflame. The blazing color might make you wonder if there had been an explosion or something. It was actually Mother Nature's doing, a play of light created by the sunlight reflected on floating sand particles. Just after sundown, the whole western sky glowed scarlet. Everything on earth then turned rose red as if a tinted filter was cast over it. It was a wonderfully surreal sight. I was in a desert in southern Morocco, close to the border with Algeria. Searching for perfect wind ripples with no footsteps to spoil their beauty, I was walking into the depths of the desert. I climbed to the top of a sand dune a few dozens of meters high. Below my eyes were rolling hills of sand, beyond which lies an endless wilderness of gravel desert. Far in the distance, clouds are crawling just over the horizon. Overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all, I could no longer tell which clouds were closer or farther. Stretching about 4,500 kilometers from east to west and 1,600 kilometers from north to south, the Sahara is the biggest desert on earth. Covering an area of about 9 million square kilometers, it is 24 times larger than Japan's land area. It is a sea of sand extending beyond Morocco to countries like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan. I decided to do nothing but feel the wind for a while. There was a mind-bogglingly big space around me. Viewed from afar, I would have looked like a tiny little speck on the sand. In the vastness of nature, man is just a tiny existence. Why in the world do we have to live in such a hurry in the city, I wondered. My shoes were filled with sand as my feet sank into the sand many times on the way. I didn't care a bit, however, and sat down on the orange-tinged sand hill. Feeling a gentle wind blowing through my hair, I enjoyed a most relaxing moment. (Published in USHIO, April 2003 issue)