Deadly Desert

Deadly Desert
The official map of Oz and surrounding deserts
The Oz series location
Other name(s)	Shifting Sands, Great Sandy Waste, Impassable Desert
Created by	L. Frank Baum
Genre	Children's books
Type	Magical desert

The Deadly Desert is the magical desert that completely surrounds the fictional Land of Oz.

Geology

On maps, the eastern quadrant of the desert is called the Deadly Desert, while the other three quadrants of desert are called the Shifting Sands, the Impassable Desert, and the Great Sandy Waste.

The desert was originally described as dangerous as any natural desert but no more. Indeed, in The Marvelous Land of Oz, Mombi tries to escape through it in the form of a griffin and Glinda chases her over the sands. In Ozma of Oz, it has become a magical desert with life-destroying sands and noxious fumes, a feature that remained constant through the rest of the series.^[1]

Anyone who sets foot into the sand of any of these deserts turns into sand themselves. The desert is used as a literary device to explain why Oz is essentially cut off from the rest of the world and the rest of Nonestica. However, it has been crossed several times by people from within Oz and from the outside world, with applied ingenuity, with magical assistance, or through unusual natural phenomena.

Notable crossings

• Dorothy Gale is carried into Oz in her house by a cyclone and back over again by her magic shoes, which fall off during her flight and are lost in the desert.
• The Wizard of Oz originally arrived in Oz by a circus balloon (which he implies functioned by a gas lighter than air, rather than hot air), and years later leaves Oz in a hot-air balloon of his own design.
• Princess Ozma crosses the desert with her whole court by use of an infinitely unrolling carpet.
• Dorothy Gale, Shaggy Man, and Button-Bright cross the desert into Oz by use of a sand ship.
• The Nome King dug a tunnel underneath the desert.

In other media

• In the film Return to Oz, Dorothy Gale crosses the edge of the Desert by stepping upon stones. Later, the pack of Wheelers working for Mombi fail to get across the Deadly Desert in pursuit of Dorothy and her flying sofa, who cross the desert to reach the Nome King's mountain. Six of the Wheelers fall into the desert and are subsequently turned into sand and killed. The seven remaining Wheelers later return with Princess Mombi and cross the desert through the tunnel dug underneath the desert to reach the Nome King's mountain.

References