Cracks

It is a very dry land.  Narrow strips with vegetation and a village are swallowed up in vast stretching dry dusty baked landscapes.  And usually even where there is a village, the great cracks in the earth come right up to the houses, sometimes overtaking the houses.  These are not river valleys or ravines or gullies where the rain runoff goes - there isn't any rain here.  These are places where the land is so clay-baked dry that it cracks.