The Borders We Share: A New Way to Fix a Broken World
Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)
Post 39: Erewhon’s Sands, Sinai’s Edge: Nowhere to Share
Enigma of the Unclaimed Horizon
The desert is so still it feels like the world is holding its breath.Two arid stretches lie almost within sight of one another beneath the same merciless sun.
One is the Sinai Peninsula, a triangular wedge of rock and sand thrust between Africa and Asia—60,000 square kilometres of jagged wadis, granite mountains, and shifting dunes that have borne witness to every empire from the Pharaohs to the Ottomans to the present day. The other is the great sandy waste of Erewhon, Samuel Butler’s satirical nowhere-land, a desert plateau so remote and featureless that its inhabitants once outlawed machines, then forgot why, then remembered again—only to discover the machines had already won. In recent decades Laputa’s magnetic drift has begun to tug at Erewhon’s sands, stretching the desert unnaturally far until its dunes almost brush the real Sinai, as though the island above is trying to anchor itself by pulling the earth upward. The wind moves in slow, sighing waves across both; the sand whispers secrets it has kept for millennia; the line between myth and map becomes difficult to see through the heat haze.
Both deserts are silent.
Both are contested.
Both are places where “nowhere” has become somebody’s home.
Both are claimed by powers that rarely walk their full length.
I arrive with the companions who have crossed every fractured frontier of this series: Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker traded for a wide-brimmed hat against the blinding glare; Dr. John Watson, notebook curling at the edges from the dry heat; King Arthur, who has swapped mail for a plain Bedouin cloak but still carries Excalibur at his side like a vow that no desert can erase.
With us walk the people who actually belong to these sands.
From Erewhon come the last free citizens of the high plateau—descendants of the people who once banned machines, then unbanned them, then banned them again; a stern magistrate who still believes illness is a crime; a young herder who has never seen a machine but knows the wind patterns better than any map; and an old woman who remembers when the statues of the gods were toppled because they were “too mechanical.”
From the Sinai come a Bedouin elder from the Jebeliya tribe whose family has herded goats among the granite peaks since before the Exodus; an Egyptian administrator from Suez who oversees the peacekeepers and the tourism; an Israeli security liaison who patrols the international border; and a young Palestinian guide from Rafah who says the desert has no memory of borders, only of water.
This is Post 39, the third stride in Section 7: Deserts and Plains. We have left the bleeding grasslands of Cimmeria and the Eurasian steppe. Now the series steps deeper into the arid nowhere, where sovereignty is measured not in hectares or hooves but in the handfuls of water that can still be carried before the dunes swallow everything.
The Two Deserts, One Vanishing Horizon
Erewhon’s sands are the high plateau Butler imagined as a mirror held up to Victorian England—flat, featureless, and mercilessly logical. In recent decades Laputa’s magnetic drift has begun to tug at the desert, stretching its dunes unnaturally far—almost as if the island above is trying to anchor itself by pulling the earth upward. Every year approximately 11,000 hectares of sand are lost to wind erosion accelerated by the island’s low-level downdraughts; the dunes migrate northward, burying ancient trails and clogging the few remaining oases. The citizens who still live here have no voice in the decisions made above them. They are not subjects; they are scenery.
The Sinai Peninsula is brutally real. Since the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, the peninsula has been demilitarized under international supervision, yet it remains a contested space: Egyptian sovereignty is recognized, but Israeli security concerns persist; multinational peacekeepers patrol the border; Bedouin tribes hold traditional grazing rights that are increasingly restricted by military zones and tourism developments. Water is the true currency: the peninsula sits atop fragile aquifers that are being depleted by agriculture in the north and desalination plants in the south. Both deserts are places where “nowhere” has become somebody’s home; both are claimed by distant capitals that rarely walk their full length.
Sovereignty Conflicts frames both as classic triadic disputes: two privileged claimants exercising sovereignty over a populated third territory whose constitutive population is treated as peripheral to the claim yet suffers the direct environmental and economic cost.
Territorial Disputes adds the sociological fracture: in Erewhon the high-plateau citizens versus the machine-fearing traditionalists; in Sinai the state authorities versus the Bedouin who actually inhabit the land.
Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty asks the moral question: can a claim to land be legitimate if it systematically excludes or exploits the majority who actually inhabit and sustain it?
Territorial Disputes in the Americas provides the practical precedent: guarantor-led shared-land-use zones that have achieved high durability in Latin American cases—models now urgently needed here.
The Evidence Gathered in Sand and Silence
Holmes refuses to stay in the shade. He spends four days walking Erewhon’s high plateau with the citizens, measuring wind speed, dune migration rates, and the interval between Laputa’s magnetic pulses and the sudden gusts that strip topsoil. He spends the next four days walking the Sinai wadis with Bedouin guides and peacekeepers, timing the movement of military patrols and the arrival of tourist convoys. The data he returns with are starkly symmetrical.
In Erewhon 11,000 hectares of sand are lost annually to wind erosion accelerated by Laputa’s downdraughts; 1,200 plateau families displaced in the last decade. In Sinai 10,800 hectares of grazing land have been lost to military zones and tourism infrastructure since 2000; 1,900 Bedouin households affected. In Erewhon no magistrate has visited the outer dunes in living memory. In Sinai no high-level Egyptian or Israeli official has spent a full day in a Bedouin camp without a security detail.
Watson’s notebook grows heavy: “Both deserts are being claimed by powers that never walk them. The difference is only in the signature—royal decree or peace treaty.”
Arthur stands on an Erewhon dune watching Laputa drift overhead, then stands in a Sinai wadi watching a distant convoy of white UN vehicles move north to south like ghosts. He says only: “A desert does not care who claims it. It only remembers who rested their flocks upon it.”
A Conclave in the Sands
We meet where the two deserts almost touch: a neutral point on Erewhon’s lowest dune, lowered to within 150 metres of the Sinai surface for the first time in history, with Egyptian, Israeli, and Bedouin representatives brought by helicopter and Erewhon citizens climbing rope ladders from below.
Present: King Laputian, seated on a portable throne of adamant, visibly uncomfortable at being so close to sand; the Erewhon magistrate, stern and mechanical in his bearing; Bêlit’s daughter, sword at her hip, eyes fierce; an Egyptian administrator from Suez; a Bedouin elder from the Jebeliya tribe; a young Palestinian guide from Rafah; Hamed al-Ghabri, the Omani elder whose water-bag has become a symbol of cross-border memory.
The Bedouin elder speaks first, voice carrying the slow cadence of the wadis: “The sand is moving. It does not ask permission. It only asks to be shared.”
The Palestinian guide answers, eyes on the horizon: “Our sand has been moving under foreign boots for decades. We ask only for the right to walk it freely.”
The Egyptian administrator, voice calm but edged: “We have brought roads, wells, tourism. The desert is more alive now than it has ever been.”Arthur lays Excalibur flat across a low dune crest. Every hand—royal, magistrate, herder, administrator—rests on the scabbard at once.I open Sovereignty Conflicts:
“Egalitarian shared sovereignty does not ask who owns the sand. It asks how we keep the desert from swallowing the people who live on it.”The magistrate, stiff as a statue: “Our laws are perfect. Illness is a crime; machines are banned; order is maintained.”
Bêlit’s daughter cuts in, blade half-drawn: “Your perfection leaves children hungry and old women wandering. Order without mercy is just another chain.”
The Bedouin elder nods slowly: “We have no machines, yet we are chained by borders drawn by men who never knew thirst. Let the sand decide who walks it.
”The Egyptian administrator, after a long silence: “If we share the water, the roads, the dunes—perhaps the tourists will come to see peace instead of ruins.”
The young Palestinian guide, voice low: “Peace is not a postcard. It is a path wide enough for my grandmother’s goats and your soldiers’ boots.”
King Laputian, voice cracking from the unaccustomed dryness: “Our crystals keep us aloft, but we have forgotten how to land. Perhaps the sand will teach us.”Arthur’s voice, quiet as a vow: “A sword laid flat is not surrender. It is invitation. Let every hand rest here, and let the desert judge.”
The “Sand Accord” is drafted in sand and ink:
- Joint Erewhon–Egypt–Israel–Sinai Desert Commission with binding water-extraction and grazing caps; surplus funds a cross-desert aquifer recharge programme.
- Erewhon’s outer dunes declared a shared ecological zone; 30 % of any future crystal revenue funds permanent descent corridors and mobile schools for nomads.
- “Sand-to-Sky Residency Pathway”: ten continuous years of contribution (herding, guiding, scholarship) = permanent residency in Egypt or citizenship on Erewhon’s grounded ring.
- Higher Court seated alternately in Suez and on Erewhon’s lowest terrace, with judges from Egyptian, Israeli, Bedouin, Palestinian, and Erewhonian communities; veto power on any project that depletes aquifers or increases dune migration.
- Every new tourism or mining operation must display, in Arabic, Hebrew, English, and Erewhonian dialect, the source of the water and the names of the guides and workers who sustain it.
King Laputian signs first, his hand steady because it rests on real sand. The Bedouin elder signs second, pressing the goatskin water-bag into the table as seal. The Egyptian administrator signs third. The Palestinian guide signs fourth. Bêlit’s daughter signs last—her sword resting beside Excalibur like an equal.
Murmurs of the Desert Wind
The wind still carries warnings: aquifers will fall, dunes will migrate, people will thirst. Yet it also carries new notes: the soft hiss of a recharge well pumping water back into the ground, the laughter of Bedouin and Erewhonian children learning dune navigation together on a neutral rise, the quiet thud of a Laputan astronomer choosing to walk rather than float, the rustle of a water-bag being refilled from a tap that no longer runs dry.
Peace along this vertical-and-horizontal frontier is not a treaty signed in air-conditioned halls. It is a handful of sand left undisturbed so a palm grove may breathe again, a path reopened so a herder may walk it freely, a desert whose horizon is wide enough for every nomad and every scholar to stand beneath the same sky.
Why This Resonates in You
You have stood in a desert so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat.
You have looked at a map and wondered why one side of a line is marked in green and the other in brown.
You have, perhaps, never met the guide whose path was closed so a border could stay open, the scholar who learned that the stars are beautiful but the sand is home, or the elder who discovered that even a king can learn to walk.
The Borders We Share asks only one thing: the next time you look at a desert, remember there is always a ground—and that the ground remembers every footprint, every promise kept or broken.
Next Tuesday we move deeper into the sands—new nowhere, new edges.
I remain, as always,
Dr. Jorge
Trails to Wander:
• Sovereignty Conflicts (2017).
• Territorial Disputes (2020).
• Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023).
• Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025).
NOTE:
New posts every Tuesday.
PREVIOUS POSTS:
Post 38: Cimmeria’s Flats, Steppes’ Stretch: Dust Meets Grass
NEXT POSTS:
Section 7: Deserts and Plains (Posts 37–42)
40, Narnia’s Wastes, Sudan’s Split: Kings of Nothing
41, Oz’s Plains, Outback’s Reach: Emerald to Dust
42, Laputa’s Dunes, Part II: Quantum Sands
AUTHOR’S SAMPLE PEER-REVIEWED ACADEMIC RESEARCH (FREE OPEN ACCESS):
State Sovereignty: Concept and Conceptions (OPEN ACCESS) (IJSL 2024)
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Tuesday 27th January 2026
Dr Jorge Emilio Núñez
X (formerly, Twitter): https://x.com/DrJorge_World
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