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The mirage of Runn of Kuchh
As I reached the desolate, cruel landscape of the run of Kucch on the extreme south of Pakistan, in the Thar desert, the memory of school days, when we learnt about this place in history, when an invading army of aliens that attacked this godforsaken area for wealth, plunder and loot, lost their way. They took a local guide to lead them out of the wilderness, the likes of which they had never seen before. The guide marched ahead of the army, angry and revengeful, which lead them to this slimy, sandy, treacherous deathtrap.
This deathtrap stood right in front of me, on my recent trip to Thar, beyond Mithi and Nagar Parkar. On the left was a vast, white encrusted, barren stretch of land that went as far as the horizon. There was no sign of life around. No man dare walk on this crunchy marsh which has a thin coat of salt, left by the saline water of the Arabian sea. The water had evaporated and left salt on the muck and mire, on the mudflats, that would support no weight of man, goat, a camel or even a small bird. Whosoever, landed on it would be sucked up by the mud, slime or, at times, by the quicksand.
I used my binocular to find if there was a creature as light as the butterfly but I saw none. There was chirping of the birds to break the monotony of silence. At the far end was a huge lake of water in which reflected bushes, grassy patches, shadows of trees that danced and waived with the wind. It gave a deceptive impression of trees growing along the shoreline. It struck to me that this was the famous death trap of Thar and Kuchh, known as the Runn of Kuchh.
Runn is a deformed version of Rinn, in Sindhi, which means absolute desolation of the desert. Kuchh is the name of the province of Gujrat just across the boundary where Sindh ends and the territory of Gujrat in India starts.
As I got ready to photograph the mirage I was told that since it was an optical illusion, human beings get deceived by the it; however, the camera has no brain and will catch nothing but a white stretch of encrusted salt, to which I did not agree. Here is for you probably the first photograph of a mirage published anywhere in a newspaper in Karachi.
A mirage is the realistic image of an object that is either totally imaginary or that appears to be in a location other than the real one. The imaginary vision is a psychological aberration, sometimes experienced by people suffering from such conditions as extreme thirst or physical strain.
The phenomenon that causes the object to appear out of place usually takes place in a desert or at sea. It is the result of atmospheric conditions. When the earth radiates heat as in a desert, it causes a fall in the density of the air just above the surface. This forces a denser layer of air to remain above the hot air instead of being below it, which is usually the case. The boundary between the two layers produces a lens-like effect and refracts or bends rays of light from a distant object; it also gives the appearance of a layer of water. The image produced by the rays bent by abnormal vertical distribution of the air density appears inverted and below the real object, just as the image reflected in water appears to be when observed from a distance. A common experience of this phenomenon is the mirrored reflection of objects on a paved road in hot weather.
In the case of a mirage at sea the denser layer of the air is next to the cooler surface of water and the reflection takes place from the rarer atmosphere above this object. This reflection appears distorted, elongated, inverted and suspended in the air producing a so-called looming effect.
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