section_path: Human relations/In culture
section_name: In culture
paragraph_text: In culture
  
  The desert is generally thought of as a barren and empty landscape. It has been portrayed by writers, film-makers, philosophers, artists and critics as a place of extremes, a metaphor for anything from death, war or religion to the primitive past or the desolate future.
  
  There is an extensive literature on the subject of deserts. An early historical account is that of Marco Polo (c. 1254 –1324), who travelled through Central Asia to China, crossing a number of deserts in his twenty four year trek. Some accounts give vivid descriptions of desert conditions, though often accounts of journeys across deserts are interwoven with reflection, as is the case in Charles Montagu Doughty 's major work, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888). Antoine de Saint-Exupéry described both his flying and the desert in Wind, Sand and Stars, and Gertrude Bell travelled extensively in the Arabian desert in the early part of the 20th century, becoming an expert on the subject, writing books and advising the British government on dealing with the Arabs. Another woman explorer was Freya Stark, who travelled alone in the Middle East, visiting Turkey, Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Persia and Afghanistan, writing over twenty books on her experiences. The German naturalist Uwe George spent several years living in deserts, recording his experiences and research in his book, In the Deserts of this Earth.
  
  The American poet Robert Frost expressed his bleak thoughts in his poem, Desert Places (1933), which ends with the stanza "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars – on stars where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places."
  
  Saints associated with the desert include Anthony the Great, also known as "Anthony of the Desert". Pope Benedict XVI linked the metaphorical existence of "internal deserts" with physical and social deserts in his homily inaugurating his papacy: "The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast".