The desert depicted here is cursed. We don't see anything even remotely menacing, we don't hear anything ominous, merely some wind at most. Nothing here is physically threatening to us. Yet we can feel somehow that we aren't alone here. Some kind of entity is here and we feel it wants us to go away, which is why we say this place is cursed. But what does that mean exactly? If we step into someone's garden and their dog comes to us barking, growling and threatening to bite us, we don't say that garden is cursed. When we go into a savanna and a lion who's marked that place as his territory comes to kill us, we don't call that savanna cursed. So why do we use the word "cursed" to describe this desert? It's because the garden and the savanna above are guarded by animals, entities that belong to the nature of this planet and we know pretty well. Because we can face and fight them, because other animals can fight them, because we know what they want and don't want and we know how this all works. But whatever presence is in this desert completely escapes our understanding. The most we can imagine is that it's some kind of spiritual or transcendent animal who calls this place its home much like our worldly animals do and it's all but defending its territory. If that's the case we could assume other spiritual or ghostly beings may exist and may fight this entity much like our world's fauna does. If that's the case we may just be assisting a very basic example of relationships between animals fighting for their homes, only in a superior plane of existence we can't possibly hope to understand. But this is all a conjecture we invent to try and apply some logic to a scenario that lacks any, a primal attempt to protect our precious sanity. The truth is that, just to begin with, we have been unknowingly applying basic math to something we'll never any knowledge about. We think it's one entity, but is it actually one? Could it be two? One and a half? Do we require periodic decimals to try and "count"... that? Can our numbers even describe what exists in this desert? And in how many ways can this whatever interact with us? Is it just a physical threat? Can it actually warp our minds? Is that why we feel this uneasy? Are we simply scaring ourselves to death about a completely normal desert? Or is that the thought it's plaguing us with? Trying to apply any kind of science to this situation is a futile attempt at best and a life threatening decision at worst. We don't know if this thing is even alive, or what intentions it may actually have, assuming the concept of intention can be applied here. All we have is this suffocating uncomfortable feeling that this desert is trying to end our lives. Human language fails at describing it and always will. We're just not prepared. So in the face of what we can only describe as overwhelming, we turn to the most primitive corner of our brains for help. And the answer we get is unequivocal: anything we don't and can't know must be classified as a threat; and the unspeakable terror we feel as a result compels us to run away and dedicate every cell of our bodies to that task. Maybe, should we survive, will we wonder how such a place can exist in our planet. Every language has developed a word to englobe all this amalgam of incomprehensibility, consternation and fear. The English word for it is "cursed".