The first thing the desert took from me was my sense of distance. A ridge that looked an hour away was a day; a shadow I took for a rock turned out to be a person walking toward me. By the second morning I had stopped estimating and simply started to walk.
The second thing it took was noise. Not only the obvious noise but the inner kind — the faint, constant commentary of someone who is always about to be late. In the evening, when the dunes turn the colour of a clay pot, even that goes quiet.
I do not want to make too much of it. I was there for four days, with good boots and a guide who knew the water. But I came home with a new rule, which is that distances are better walked than calculated, and I have been quietly applying it to most things since.