Cannibal Sands
Arenas de los Caníbales
Not to be confused with Cannibal Sands (desert).
At the eastern edge of Essos, past where maps stop drawing firm lines, lie the Cannibal Sands: two deserts separated by hundreds of leagues that share nothing but a name. Travelers who skirt them claim their inhabitants feed on human flesh, though no first-hand account has ever confirmed it. It is one of those regions the Atlas can only point to from a distance, its borders at best an educated guess.
Chapter 1
Two deserts, one name
Books only
The western strip sits northeast of the Bleeding Sea, with N'ghai closing it off to the north and Mossovy watching from the northwest. To the east it bleeds into the Grey Waste without warning, so that no one could point to where one sand ends and the other begins. Nefer to the northwest and K'Dath to the south are the only fixed points the maps dare offer.
Chapter 2
The edge of the known world
Books only
The eastern strip opens northeast of the Abismo Árido and clings to the Grey Waste along its west and north, fading out past anything a map records. Ciudad de los Huesos and K'Dath, both to the west, are the last cities before the desert swallows certainty.
Of the people who live in those sands only rumors travel: that they are savages, that they eat human flesh. No one has come back to tell it first-hand, and the region's own name — repeated, split in two, uncertain even in translation — is all that has reached the Atlas.
The physical world
Se dice que los habitantes de las arenas son unos bárbaros que se alimentan de carne humana.
Population · A World of Ice and Fire
What we are not sure about
PositionWe worked it out
The position was inferred from the label on the base map rather than from a symbol of its own: it marks the area, not the point.
Spanish nameWe worked it out
The Spanish name is the atlas’s own reviewed translation, not the one in the published Gigamesh edition, which does not fix it.