Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 55, no. 3 (Winter 2011), pgs. 11–15
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
DeHoff, Nathan. “‘Great dates and deserts!’ Some thoughts on the Deadly Desert of Oz.” Baum Bugle 55, no. 3 (2011): 11–15.
MLA 9th ed.:
DeHoff, Nathan. “‘Great dates and deserts!’ Some thoughts on the Deadly Desert of Oz.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 55, no. 3, 2011, pp. 11–15.
(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with illustrations that have not been reproduced here. However, typographical errors have been left in place to accurately reflect the printed version.)
“Never cross deserts till you come to ’em”
—Kabumpo of Oz
“Oz, as many of you know, is a funny and fascinating fairyland, oblong in shape and surrounded, for protection, by a deadly desert of sand.” This description of Oz, by Ruth Plumly Thompson mid-way through the Oz series, in Chapter 2 of The Gnome King of Oz (1927), presents a typical view of the geography of Oz. One of its defining features is the desert boundary that isolates it—though not completely, of course—from the surrounding countries on the magical continent and from the outside world. The nature of the deadly desert and characters’ ability to cross it, however, have shifted throughout the Oz series and leave us with several questions.[1]
That Oz is entirely surrounded by desert was established in the very first Oz book, in which the Munchkins tell Dorothy that deserts border the land to the east, west, and south; and the Good Witch of the North adds that it is the same in the north, and in fact they’re all the same big desert.
The map on the endpapers of Tik-Tok of Oz (1914) shows four different names—“Shifting Sands”[2] in the east, “Impassable Desert” in the north, “Deadly Desert” in the west, and “Great Sandy Waste” in the south—which could reflect the different nature of each part. Baum first used the alliterative term “Deadly Desert” some years earlier in The Road to Oz (1909), and this is the only name for the desert that appears in capitalized form inside Baum’s Oz books. In some of his later books, however, Baum uses variations on two other labels: “dreadful desert of sandy wastes” in The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) and “the sandy, impassable desert” in Glinda of Oz (1920). The four names are not used consistently through the series, and it is typical for the entire feature to be called the Deadly Desert.
Is the desert a magical boundary?
The text of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) suggests that the desert might be a barrier between magical and civilized countries. The Good Witch is quick to point out that Oz, unlike Kansas, is not civilized, and that is why magic can exist there. So is the desert a border between civilized and uncivilized lands, which is to say between places with magic and no magic? That might well be what Baum originally intended. In Chapter 18, the King of the Winged Monkeys states:
We belong to this country alone, and cannot leave it. There has never been a Winged Monkey in Kansas yet, and I suppose there never will be, for they don’t belong there. We shall be glad to serve you in any way in our power, but we cannot cross the desert. Good-bye.
Can the magical winged monkeys not cross the desert, or can they not travel all the way to Kansas? The desert appears to limit the crossing of the magical silver shoes. Glinda explains (Ch. 23) that “your Silver Shoes will carry you over the desert … [they] have wonderful powers. And one of the most curious things about them is that they can carry you to any place in the world in three steps. . . .” But the Silver Shoes fell off during Dorothy’s flight through the air and were lost forever in the desert.
When the Gump accidentally flies out of Oz in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), the Scarecrow says that “the Gump must have carried us entirely out of the Land of Oz and over the sandy deserts and into the terrible outside world that Dorothy told us about.” There must still be some magic in the area in which the characters found themselves, though, as it allowed a scarecrow, a tin man, and a flying thing made out of couches and a disembodied head to continue living.
Based on the first two books, the desert that surrounds Oz (and, hence, Oz itself) could well be somewhere on the American continent. Critic Raylyn Moore observed: “The fact that the Land of Oz is a self-contained enclave surrounded on all sides not by the sea but by impassable deserts suggests that the undiscovered paradise which might have been an oasis at the core of the Great American Desert itself, if such a desert had existed on the scale once imagined by map-makers and explorers.”[3]
If that was so, Baum apparently later changed his mind. In Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy washes ashore in the Land of Ev, a fairyland located on the other side of the desert from Oz. Baum would eventually add other fairylands across the desert from Oz, and in Road, he identifies the locations from several of his other fantasies as being there as well. When he began developing the idea of Oz as part of a group of fairy countries rather than a hidden location in America, he also began giving more detail on the nature of the desert, and why it is considered deadly.
How deadly is the desert?
The impression given in Wonderful Wizard is simply that the desert is too large, hot, and dry to cross. Upon her arrival, Dorothy is told by a Munchkin that “none could live to cross” the great desert, and the Wizard later cautions her that “if the air should get cold the balloon would come down in the desert, and we should be lost.” But later books add more detail about the dangers of the desert.
The fact that Ozma and her party need a magic carpet to cross between Oz and Ev in Ozma suggests that the sands themselves are dangerous. In Chapter 7, Baum characterizes the threat from “the deadly, life-destroying sands of the desert,” and he has the Tin Woodman explain in Chapter 9:
Naturally our Ozma wished to undertake the adventure of liberating the poor prisoners; but for a long time she could find no way to cross the great desert between the two countries. Finally she went to a friendly sorceress of our land named Glinda the Good, who heard the story and at once presented Ozma a magic carpet, which would continually unroll beneath our feet and so make a comfortable path for us to cross the desert.
It would seem that the problem involves touching the sands, not merely the heat and aridness of the desert.
A sign at the edge of the desert in Road builds upon this idea, stating that that the sands will turn any living flesh to dust. Throughout the Oz series, characters repeat the lore. “Great dates and deserts!” exclaims the Cowardly Lion in The Royal Book of Oz (1921), for “…another step would have taken him straight on to the Deadly Desert, which destroys every living thing and keeps all intruders away from Oz” (Ch. 16). Ruth Plumly Thompson euphemistically notes that “one step on that desert and it would have been one long goodnight.” In Grampa in Oz (1924) the title character commands his fellow flying travelers to “Fly higher!” because “he had read so much of the deadly nature of this desert that he wanted to be as far above it as possible.” In The Hungry Tiger of Oz (1926), we learn that “Betsy well knew the look of this dread wilderness that surrounds the Fairyland of Oz and she knew also that contact with its burning sands meant instant destruction.” Peggo the Pirate repeats the warning in Pirates in Oz (1936), stating he’s “heard that Oz is surrounded by a Deadly Desert and that one step on its sands destroys one forever.” But we never actually see this happening in any of the canonical Oz books, raising the possibility that this is merely a legend. But if so, it is a widely believed one that even Glinda apparently buys into.
I think it is likely that the stories of the harmful effects of the sands are indeed true, and some books by Oz fans expand on this idea. In Phyllis Ann Karr’s The Gardener’s Boy of Oz (Buckethead Enterprises of Oz, 1988) the character Candy Longtaw constructs sand shoes in order to cross the desert, and the sand turns one of her toes to dust. In Jeremy Steadman’s The Emerald Ring of Oz (Buckethead Enterprises of Oz, 1993) Arthur Spyeking falls victim to the desert sands, but is restored by the Water of Ligrinia, an antidote developed by Glinda. Not only does it restore him to life, but it makes him immune to the desert for an entire year, which comes in handy in temporarily destroying the witch Kiex.
Getting back to the Oz canon, The Scarecrow of Oz (1915) is the first to refer to the desert letting off “disagreeable fumes and gases,” and several other books repeat this detail. The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946) mentions that Dorothy felt “faint and ill from the evil fumes of the sands” and provides this detailed description of the desert barrier:
Not always had Oz been a fairy realm. In those olden times Oz had been nothing more than a remarkably beautiful country of rolling plains, wooded hills and rich farmlands. Indeed, Oz had not been so much different from our own United States, except that it was surrounded on all sides by a Deadly Desert. It was this desert which prevented curious men from the great outside world from finding their way to Oz. For the fumes and gasses that rose from the shifting sands of the desert were deadly poison to all living things, and for a human to have set foot on the desert would have meant instant and terrible death. Consequently, all living things avoided the Deadly Desert, and it is no wonder that Oz was so entirely secluded and went unnoticed by the rest of the world for so many long years. (18)
The sand-boat passage in Road mentions that “the sand lay in billows, and was in places very uneven.” Some books, including The Silver Princess of Oz (1938) and Lucky Bucky in Oz (1942), mention the desert churning and breaking almost like a sea, while others suggest that it is eerily calm. Silver Princess offers an illustration of the bubbling desert on page 75, while the picture of the desert crossing on page 105 of Ozma shows the place as largely flat and a dull brown in color. Perhaps it all depends on the part of the desert, or some other factor.
How has the desert been crossed?
The Wizard is the first person known to have traversed the shifting sands. “Nobody has ever crossed the desert, unless it is Oz himself,” states the Soldier with the Green Whiskers in Wonderful Wizard (Ch. 18), and the Wizard confirms this in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (Ch. 15): “One day my balloon ran away with me and brought me across the deserts to this beautiful country.”
While transportation magic can be used to instantaneously bypass the desert, most border crossings have been accomplished by flying over it, traveling under it, or walking upon it with some magical aid.
Some flights over the desert have involved a weather phenomenon, as with the tornado that takes Dorothy over the desert in Wonderful Wizard, the geyser on Mount Mern described in Handy Mandy in Oz (1937), and the storm that blows Randy and Kabumpo over in Silver Princess. Many more air crossings have relied on birds or other flying beings that can cross the desert without too much trouble, as with the Wizard’s balloon, the aforementioned Gump-thing in Marvelous Land, the Orks and magically enlarged birds from Mo in Scarecrow, Kiki Aru and Ruggedo in bird form in The Magic of Oz (1919), the crows in Grampa, the iron-booted balloon man Atmos Fere in Hungry Tiger, Pigasus in Pirates, the red eagle in The Wishing Horse of Oz (1935), and the Mimics in bird form in Magical Mimics. An enchanted ship in Pirates and a flying island in Speedy in Oz (1934) cross the barrier quite easily. In The Emerald City of Oz (1910), the Wizard of Oz worries that airships (presumably meaning dirigibles, but the same basic principle would apply to airplanes) eventually will be able to fly over the desert to Oz.
The carpet from Ozma is used again by Dorothy and the Wizard in Rinkitink in Oz (1916), but this book adds an additional feature by noting that walking on the carpet reduces the amount of time and distance that need to be covered in order to cross the desert. The magical construction worker Johnny Dooit builds a sand boat in Road, and the Nomes tunnel under the desert for their invasion in Emerald City. At the end of this book, Ozma uses the Magic Belt to fill the tunnel again, and Glinda erects an invisible barrier that is supposed to stop strangers from getting to Oz. Aside from a few brief mentions, however, the barrier is largely forgotten until The Shaggy Man of Oz (1949). Oddly, this book has Shaggy and his friends using the tunnel to get from Ev to Oz, even though it had been filled in nearly forty years earlier.
The Runaway Country in Kabumpo is able to cross the desert with no difficulty, which makes sense as it is not made of flesh:
The air was now so hot and choking that Pompa flung himself face down on the cool grass. The Runaway Country did not seem to notice the burning sands and pattered smoothly along on its ten mountain feet . . . the Runaway Country stepped off the desert and swept over the border and into the Kingdom of Ev, making straight for a tall purple mountain. (Ch. 17)
Eric Shanower’s Forgotten Forest of Oz (Dark Horse Comics, 1993) has the Sawhorse, also not made of flesh, run across the desert. In Lucky Bucky, the wooden whale Davy Jones needs help to cross the desert, but it is stated that his main problem with the sands is the heat. Characters like the Sawhorse and the Runaway Country appear to be unaffected by heat, but Davy seems to be slightly different in his composition.
How large is the desert?
The distance to traverse the desert varies from one part to another, as depicted in the map from Tik-Tok. For instance, the desert appears to be fairly narrow near Oogaboo. This is probably why Thompson chose this as the part of the desert for Ruggedo in giant form to jump across in Kabumpo. “The Deadly Desert is so narrow at this point that with one jump Ruggedo was across.” Thompson’s notion of “narrow” can be quantified to be in the range of a mile or so, because she notes the size of his stride: “When a giant runs he gets somewhere. Each step carried him a half mile” Overall, the desert is wide enough to pose a considerable obstacle even without its life-destroying properties, yet it never seems to take anyone more than a few hours at the most to cross it. A more leisurely journey is described in Ozma (Ch. 20), when the travelers crossing from Ev to Oz “began the trip across the desert early in the morning, and as they stopped only long enough for Billina to lay her daily egg, before sunset they espied the green slopes and wooded hills of the beautiful Land of Oz.”
Is the desert inhabited?
It would seem unlikely that anything lives in the deadly desert, seeing as how it turns living flesh to dust, but creatures in and around Oz are often made of materials other than flesh. The first creatures living in the sandy waste that we learn of are the Heelers, who allegedly were added to the manuscript of The Wonder City of Oz (1940) by an editor at Reilly & Lee. Their bodies are like giant sponges, they walk on their heels, and they live on votes. Since the Heelers are immune to magic, that might pertain to the desert itself, and explain how they can live there.
The Flame Folk from Shaggy Man live in the desert, and Jack Snow claims that salamanders and scorpions can also survive there. In Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw’s The Forbidden Fountain of Oz (International Wizard of Oz Club, 1980), Toby Bridlecull says that a band of blue-eyed gypsies dwells in the Impassable Desert, at an oasis known as the Fountains of Romany. If this is indeed true, perhaps they have some magic to protect them from the ill effects of the sands.
In his Oz stories, March Laumer placed several human habitations within the desert, but I never really accepted this. Still other apocryphal sources add robots (not alive, but self-aware nonetheless) and dust devils as residents of the sandy waste. I would imagine that even these beings tend to stick to specific isolated regions of the desert, however.
Is the desert a symbolic barrier?
Does the desert represent something in Baum’s own life? This is a possibility raised by critic Michael O. Riley, who wonders if the deadly desert is “symbolic of some barrier that Baum would have liked to place around his own personal paradise—that of his lost childhood or of California—to protect it from insensitive and jaded intrusions from the real world.”[4] There was a definite theme in his fantasy books of fairylands being somehow set off from more mundane lands. Mo and Merryland, for instance, are both surrounded by mountain ranges that are well nigh impossible to cross. Even if it was nothing symbolic on Baum’s part, he appears to have liked the idea of a land set apart from an unspoiled by the world as a whole.
There is a popular rumor that L. Frank Baum’s final words to his wife were “now we can cross the Shifting Sands.” Whether true or not, this anecdote prompted at least one Oz enthusiast to wonder in which direction—into or out of Oz—Baum envisioned his final passage.[5]
Notes
[1] Hughs, Barbara. “The Deadly Desert.” Baum Bugle, Autumn 1968 pp. 15–18 (reprinted in The Best of the Baum Bugle 1967–1969, pp. 84–87).
[2] In his 1916 novel Mary Louise, Baum (as Edith Van Dyne) titled a chapter “Shifting Sands.”
[3] Moore, Raylyn. Wonderful Wizard, Marvelous Land. Bowling Green University. Popular Press, 1974, p. 96.
[4] Riley, Michael O. Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. University Press of Kansas, 1997, p. 139.
[5] Meyer, Fred M. “L. Frank Baum Memorial Award: Acceptance Speech.” Baum Bugle, Autumn 1978, p. 26.
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