“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed.” So muses the desert explorer László de Almásy, the title character of Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel, The English Patient. “Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember.” Almásy is thinking of the vast and volatile sands between Middle Eastern cities, a terrain that quickened the pulse of cartographers and enthralled adventurers such as T. E. Lawrence. READ ON