It is after eight years of living in the barren landscape of a Saudi village that I have come to not only imagine heat with its burning, boiling and beaming quality but also recognise the smell of heat. (This is not ideal as an opening sentence because it’s too complex in its syntax. Opt for something a little clearer, even for a descriptive essay. There were lots of instances of long sentences in this essay and I just broke most of them up for your convenience. There is almost never any advantage in writing a sentence that’s over 26 words long. You are setting yourself up for defeat if you try to do this under exam conditions.)

Hints of small grocery shops, broken plain roads and minimal facilities decorated the desolate village of Rifaya Al Jamesh, a place that has no home on an actual map, GPS or even Google. It could only be accessed by barely constructed and maintained roads. It was miracle to even have the luxury of roads given the frequency of sandstorms. This meant everything would be covered by a thick sheet of heavy grained sand that warms up and cools down quicker than superhuman Usain Bolt can sprint 100 meters. To be greeted by a small hill of sand in the middle of a road was no surprise there. However, this minimalistic lifestyle was where a tiny civilisation existed, it was worse outside the village, where finding biological life was like a needle in a hay stack.

Once, we were driving to Mecca, a city 600 kilometres from my microscopic village on a cloudless sunny morning of mid-June. Travelling long distances was very common as Saudi Arabia’s barrenness was accompanied by its vastness which made the country a dehydrated, sandy and flaming plot of land. Voyaging on Saudi roads is like sailing a canoe on narrow streams of water with bumps, bounce and bangs of wild river resisting your moves. The road precisely craved out smooth sand like an artist flings and forces a carving knife into a smooth lino block and chisels into existence these roads. Our car, Nissan Pathfinder, was surrounded on both sides by soft yet deadly peaks of sand dunes. These fatal sand dunes could effortlessly bury our car if a sandstorm threatened to come our way. And it did.

The experience of being in a sandstorm is truly horrifying and a traumatising one. Aggressive winds hurling, howling and thrusting with such brute force that they are known to tumble cars on their backs. These spirals of winds pocket within themselves millions of specks of sand whose sole purpose is to render you helpless. They attempt to enter your eyes, nose and mouth. You become breathless not because you are admiring their beauty but because they block your trachea. Your most prized abilities of sight and breathing is snatched away from you until you slowly reach your death or the sandstorm passes away. The native people of barren Saudi Arabia have mastered the intricate art of surviving a sandstorm. They adorn long thick clothes with huge fluffy scarfs on their faces to shield them from the violence of the air currents. That art was too complicated for a foreigner like me to craft and adapt so I was left on the mercy of my car.

It’s not only the inhabitants of the empty land that were so unique but also its fauna. They have remarkable ability to survive and thrive in that unforgiving land. They burrow holes, shield with their hard shells and store exceptional quantities of water. The so called ‘ships of the desert’ camels are majestic animals. The long thick eyelashes, and their leisurely way of walking gave them a nonchalant and delicate look. Their impressive power to store gallons of water made them a perfect companion in the backdrop of barren landscape. On our never-ending journey to Mecca we came across a herd of camels. They were so common it wasn’t unusual to see one anywhere in Saudi Arabia except maybe in the middle of Red Sea on the gulf coast. My dad swiftly slowed the car down to let the herd peacefully make its migration across the road. Witnessing a herd of camels with its own pack of she-camels nursing the calves, massive male camels pridefully striding and naughty youngest camels annoying drivers ( and my dad) by occasionally sitting in the middle of the road was a blissful yet mundane event. What was not blissful was funky smells of camels that greets you in every corner of this barren country. A smell stocked with grass, animal waste and Arabian coffee. A bizarre combination that urges you to block your nose.

The vast and deserted land of Saudi Arabia wasn’t just equipped with deadly sandstorms but also cruel heat. It didn’t help that we were also travelling in summer with no protection from sun. The temperature was soaring 45 degrees and the air conditioning in the car was pumping cool breeze at maximum rate to prevent our deaths by heat stroke. Hypothetically, if one sits long enough in this car with no air-conditioning, it will eventually become an oven and cook you from inside out. Our six hundred kilometres long journey would become a suicide mission rather than a family trip. I didn’t like to think about that but at occasions the brush with death due to head felt really close. Even with the ac at full speed, clothes stuck to our body as a new-born sticking to the breast of his exhausted mother. Every curve, fold and bend on our clothes glued tightly to our skin was inevitable. It is these frequent encounters with heat that has trained my nose to detect its special smell. It has a burning quality and if one huffs a handful, it travels down the body, warming it up just as an oven warms up its components. Heat smells like clear sky sucking all the moisture from your body, leaving every inch of it dehydrated and yearning for water. It smells like death. It smells like Saudi Arabia.

On our detours to join the highway for a smoother ride to Mecca, my father had the tendency to take wrong turns and get us lost. It was by our accidental driving we stumbled upon our most cherished landscape from our journey. We named them the Lava Mountains due to the black sheen on them. They used to be active volcanos hundreds of years into history. We admired the story they told. The story of a past long before us, the past when dinosaurs roamed the vast lands of this kingdom and when this infertile land was a lush emerald forest ahead of its kind. Surrounded by emptiness the residents of Saudi Arabia like us likely forget the ‘black gold’ i.e. the crude oil furiously gushing out of these barren soils, feeding not only its own people but foreigners like us too. Those abandoned and isolated mountains give an ode to a past not known by me and made me wonder what other jewels are hidden deep within the emptiness of this unforgiving land. I’ll never come to know them, explore them and adore them as this land has a mind of its own. It chooses whomever it wants to bestow the blessing of opening its secrets and sadly I wasn’t one of them.

Every minute of my life in Ireland I long to return back to empty yet fertile, alien yet so familiar lands of my childhood. With its deadly heat, sandstorms and its unforgiving nature, it hides a beauty that is not witnessed by many. It is a land of secrets, history and majesty that I’ll forever long to explore.