Rodd died at the Rodd on 16 March 1978 and was buried in Presteigne cemetery. At the top of his gravestone – which was designed by letter-cutter David Kindersley – there is an image of the ‘Agadez cross’. This is a prominent Tuareg image which, according to Rodd, probably originated with the ‘Ankh’, an Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol. Further down there is a Tamasheq word written in traditional Tifinagh script, ‘ǁ ⵆ ⵔ ⵗ ⵙ’. Pronounced ‘Al-har-as’, this was (and remains) a greeting meaning something like ‘Peace to you’. Rodd translated it as ‘Naught but good’. This word had been embossed in gold on the front cover of People of the Veil. The references to Tuareg culture on the gravestone were clearly intended to convey the idea that, although Rodd was buried in Wales, a remote section of the central Sahara remained in his heart: he was a man whose interests and emotions straddled different continents. This was undoubtedly true. The landscape of Aïr was always before him. In his bedroom at home, he kept a framed photo of Agellal village and mountains (see Figure 3.4) – an area to the south-west of Iferuan. At the same time, while his interests extended to many countries, geography in some ways pulled him in different directions: it fed both his desire to see the world (through his trips to Africa and Australia, for example) and his wish to settle down (to life on the English–Welsh border).

Throughout his life, Rodd was in a kind of dialogue with the landscapes he encountered. If, as David Livingstone notes, agency can be understood as not solely connected to human intentionality, it opens up the possibility of the natural, non-human world having some element of agency. Rodd's experience illustrates this possibility. Landscapes conveyed a variety of messages to him. He was a restless person, and there is a case for saying that empty or beautiful places suggested to him the existence of a stable, harmonious environment – they hinted at an answer to his restlessness. In this, they provoked an existential response from him. But they also appealed to the aspiring scientist in him. The Enlightenment project of subjecting the world to a rational analysis appealed to his enduring desire to impose order over chaos and be systematic in his thinking.