Central Australia

This scene is an original illustration set in Central Australia. It lies in the subtropics, where the climate is hot desert — evaporation far outruns rainfall.

Deep rust-red sand stretches to the horizon. A low corrugated-iron house with a wide verandah on all sides sits in the middle distance, a water tank and windmill beside it. A pale-trunked eucalypt stands to one side. Shadows are short and pooled beneath things; the light is vertical and hard.

Why does the verandah wrap all the way around the house?

Iron roofing and a verandah wrapping the whole house are a heat design: the roof sheds the sun, the verandah keeps it off the walls. Red comes from iron oxide in soil that has weathered for a very long time without being scraped away by ice or renewed by volcanism — a mark of ancient, stable land. The short shadows put the sun near overhead, and eucalypts narrow the continent to one.

Terpano is a free daily geography puzzle. You study one original illustration, place a pin on a borderless terrain map, and see how close you were. There is no account and no sign-up; progress stays in your own browser. It plays in 11 languages.