Aenean And Indian Deserts

Poul Anderson excels at descriptions of planetary environments where human colonists survive or thrive but not always easily. See the Dreary and Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments.

SM Stirling describes an Indian desert that should be identical with ours although it is in an alternative timeline. There are:

a large, bright moon;
stars like silver dust in a very black sky;
insects;
large, black, swarming, lethal scorpions;
lions;
gazelles, eaten by the lions;
wild red dogs;
cold air that is "...painfully dry, but...had an exhilarating cleanness."
-SM Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003), Chapter Nineteen, p. 362.

Anderson imagines but, of course, cannot experience Aeneas. Stirling can experience Terrestrial deserts and surely writes from experience when he describes the desert air as painfully dry but exhilaratingly clean? That sounds like the voice of experience, not of imagination. And many of us could have been there but never described it as well as that.