The Summer in Abu Dhabi is only different from its Spring Mother by dint of its heat, a heat that is wrapping and exhausting, binding and melting, piercing and blinding. The youthful vigour of the Spring is washed away in merciless rays of sapping, gruelling, incessant heat. As the months fold into August, the roads become quieter as travellers hide heads in shaded corners, the roads themselves raising psalms in blurring hot oscillation skywards.
There is a quiet noise to the heat. It crackles canticles in the bushes; it shrills with the gryllidae chorus; it bellows a boiling ballad from some distant molten core. Yet there seems within its stillness a constant movement that cannot be focussed upon, movement that can only be seen through daydream eyes, a hint rather than revelation.
Summer is to be hidden from; refuge is the order of every day and night. Yet its tendrils get everywhere, like sand it seeps and creeps and gnaws irritation of the flesh, like some match maker it weds skin to fabric, covering faces with clear sheens and dripping discontent. There is no escape here. The coastal desert city brings the suns scorn and the oceans angry blanketing breath all at once. Together they tire the soul, grind the days and nights together into a thick gruel of discomfort and tiredness. The brightness of the season which would normally invigorate and excite is slaughtered in the light of searing destruction from a sun that doesn’t rest even as it lurks below the listless horizon.
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