Book ChapterA desert is "waterless," "treeless," "barren," "remote," "uninteresting," and "presumably uninhabited," according to the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary. The word is derived from deserere, a Latin verb meaning "to leave." In English, to desert is still to "abandon," "forsake," or "fail." Because language shapes perception, emptiness tends to figure prominently in one's first (and possibly lasting) impression of any place referred to as a desert. What should be there (water, trees) is absent. What is there is useless and dull. "Normal" plants and animals may once have lived there, but if so, they found the place inhospitable and eventually departed, leaving behind an impoverished residue of twisted, spiny losers
