A field identification walk
Nine deserts, built to their real ground. Five are identification walks — the Kalahari's red
vegetated dunes, the Atacama's salt-and-gravel pampa, the Chihuahuan limestone basin, the
Namib's fog-fed dune sea, the Gobi's cold stone pavement — where you walk until you find
something living and then name it, from the features a field guide would actually use.
Four are something else: one thing worth doing on foot that belongs to that country and
nowhere else. Burning a mosaic into Gibson spinifex ahead of the afternoon wind. Recording a
Taklamakan site the sand is about to take back. Following weathered bone uphill to what it
fell off, in the Flaming Cliffs. Surveying a Neolithic hunting trap in the Syrian Badiya and
working out which way the drive ran.
All nine, you are carrying water: four and a half minutes of it, and every desert has real
sources scattered across it to find.
Click the ground to walk there. Click anything — plant, animal, track or outcrop — to go and examine it.
Drag to look around. B raises binoculars for distant movement.
Animals leave their real spoor: cut a trail, read the print, take the bearing it gives you and follow.
Prefer keys? WS walk, AD turn,
Shift to run, E to examine, N for the notebook,
Esc to stop. The ◎ button turns on mouse-look if you want it.
AD or ←→ swing the view a full 360° ·
Q turns you around · R lets it drift round on its own ·
? beside the notebook shows every control.
On a touchscreen: the left pad walks and steers, drag elsewhere to look, or just tap what you see.
How to move and look
Animals leave their real spoor. Cut a trail, read the print, take the bearing it gives you and follow it.
Water is a clock. The gauge under your progress empties in four and a half minutes in the open, and faster while you run. Every desert here has three real water sources scattered across it — a San sip-well, a fog collector, a bedrock tinaja, ice in a Gobi gorge — and drinking at any of them fills you back up. Below about half a gauge the compass starts showing them in blue. Reading a card stops the clock. Let it reach zero and you go down with heat exhaustion, and the notebook goes with you.