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Duna

In the Namib Desert, barely a centimeter of rain falls each year. For this reason, the beetles undertake the hard journey to the top of the dunes every morning.

When they arrive at the top, the beetles turn their bodies against the wind, stretch their hind legs and lower their head. The fog, which has risen from the ocean, condenses on their backs, slowly dripping towards their mouths, allowing them to survive in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet.
While we were waiting for the truck, which we had rented to travel to the oldest dunes in the world located in Sossusvlei, Namibia, I recalled how the dunes had been described to me.
"It's like going to the moon, an incredible vista. After you become accustomed to the immensity of the open space, the sensation is out of this world... you know you are still on Earth, but the information your brain receives from the light, air, and everything else contradicts this."
Sossusvlei is accessed through the wide Tsauchab Valley. The dunes are numbered, as if they were streets. The 7th dune is the highest on Earth, reaching 380 meters above sea level.
Having hardly slept, we began the trip at dawn in order to see daybreak from the top. Climbing a dune is as arduous as climbing a real mountain, but the effort is worth it.
It is hard to describe sunrise over the Namib Desert. As the darkness retreats, everything changes color: black, white, yellow, orange, red, garnet. Namib, in the native dialect, means "the country where there is nothing." But this is not true. The desert is full of animal and plant life, which have adapted to survive... there are even herds of wild horses, descendents of those that were abandoned here during the First World War by the imperial German army. The Namib Desert is nature in its purest state. You recognize this immediately.
Before descending, we photographed the impressions our footsteps had left on the dune. It was as if nobody else had ever set foot here before. The sand that we walked over is more than eighty million years old. We glide down gently with bare feet, an incredible feeling.
We spent five days in the Namib Desert, and each dawn we would climb a different dune to enjoy the spectacle once again. At that time I grasped that the dunes move constantly. Immense, they move with each capricious movement of the wind, and the landscape changes like magic in front of your very eyes. There is a secret harmony in this dance: the sand moves to a rhythm of its own music... because some deserts do sing. Some sound like bells, others like trumpets, organs, tambourines, thunder...
The phenomenon appears to occur when the wind moves and temperature changes forcing the sand to slide, but experts still do not know the exact reason. While scientists continue seeking an explanation, I prefer to think that the dunes sing in order to tell us something...or maybe not. There is an old Chinese proverb that says that the bird does not sing because it has something to say, it sings because it has a song.