The Empty Quarter, or Rub’ al Khali in Arabic, is a giant sea of sand covering southern Arabia. At about 650,000 square kilometres it’s the largest single stretch of sand on Earth - bigger than France, and made of nothing but dunes for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.
Some of the dunes are 250 metres tall. The Empty Quarter is so hostile that even Bedouin nomads avoid most of it. The first European to cross it on foot, Bertram Thomas, only managed it in 1931 with the help of expert guides.
In 1992 a NASA satellite picked out faint tracks under the dunes that led to the ruins of a lost city. It turned out to be Iram of the Pillars, a place mentioned in the Quran that scholars had long thought was just a legend.
