The Endless Desert

For years, travellers claimed to hear voices in the sand as they made the gruelling trek — past towering mountain ranges and ancient cities now lost to time — across China’s western frontier. Centuries later, you can hear them still.

- Anna Sherman

Do you believe the voices are real?” My Chinese guide and I were standing in the Yardang National Geopark, on the border between Gansu Province and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China’s extreme northwest. The nearest town was Dunhuang, 110 miles to the southeast. Enormous yardangs — curving sandstone and mudstone strata carved by winds — towered over us. Others floated on the far horizon.

“You mean the singing sands?” I asked. On my map, an asterisk marked this strange feature of the Kumtag Desert, three miles from Dunhuang. If you throw yourself down the dunes in that place, the air resonates — sometimes like the lowest note on a cello; sometimes like a crack of thunder.

“Not the singing sands,” the guide said. “I mean voices. Like ghosts. Do people in the West think they exist?”

The Chinese pilgrim and scholar Xuanzang wrote in his A.D. 646 book “The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions” that in this desert region, travellers often heard singing and shouting, shrieking and crying. Disoriented, they would wander, get lost and die of thirst. More than 650 years later, the 13th-century Italian merchant Marco Polo described the same phenomenon; sometimes the voices would even call a traveler by name. “If you’re thirsty enough, and exhausted, and afraid, I guess you might hear things,” my guide murmured. He was looking away from me, into the maze of eroded landforms. We were tiny as pixels on an Imax screen.