Harvesting the spice is also hazardous in the extreme, due to both the harsh climate of the planet and the fact that melange deposits are guarded by giant sandworms.

[7] The Fremen collect water in underground reservoirs to fulfill their dream of someday terraforming the planet, and pay the Spacing Guild exorbitant fees in melange to keep the skies over Arrakis free of any satellites which might observe their efforts.

[4] As indicated by its large salt flats, Arrakis once had lakes and oceans; Lady Jessica also notes in Dune that wells drilled in the sinks and basins initially produce a "trickle" of water which soon stops, as if "something plugs it.

By harvesting melange, they were able to bribe the Spacing Guild for privacy from observation and weather control in order to hide from the Imperium their true population and their plans to terraform Arrakis.

Paul Muad'Dib continues the efforts to terraform Arrakis into a green world, a plan begun by the Fremen under the guidance of Imperial Planetologist Pardot Kynes and his son Liet-Kynes.

By the time of Children of Dune, Alia Atreides (and then Leto II and Ghanima) realize that the ecological transformation of Arrakis is altering the sandworm cycle, which would eventually result in the end of all spice production.

Once he himself begins the transformation into a human/sandworm hybrid, he eradicates all desert on Arrakis except for a small area he makes his base of operations, and destroys all of the sandworms save one—himself.

In Heretics of Dune, all life on Arrakis is destroyed (and the entire surface of the planet slagged into oblivion) by the Honored Matres in a failed attempt to eliminate the latest Duncan Idaho ghola.

He and his family take up residence in the ostentatious palace previously occupied by the planetary governor Count Fenring and his wife Margot during the Harkonnen period of stewardship over Arrakis.

Paul Atreides and his mother Lady Jessica, safely escaping from the Harkonnen attack, come upon Sietch Tabr and are eventually accepted into the community.

During the reign of Muad'Dib until the ascension of his son Leto II, the Atreides home-base was a colossal megastructure in Arrakeen, designed to intimidate, known as the Keep.

A statue of St. Alia Atreides, shown as "The Soother of Pains," stands twenty-two meters tall but is one of the smallest adornments in the hall.

Two hundred such statues could be stacked one atop the other against the entrance pillars and still fall short of the doorway's capitol arch, which itself is almost a thousand meters below the first beams upholding the lower roof.Alia's Fane (or Alia's Temple) is the two-kilometer wide temple Paul-Muad'Dib built for his sister Alia between the events of Dune and Dune Messiah.

Herbert described it in The Road to Dune: If you are numbered among "the heartfelt pilgrims," you will cross the last thousand meters of this approach to the Temple of Alia on your knees.

Those thousand meters fall well within the sweeping curves leading your eyes up to the transcendent symbols dedicating this Temple to St. Alia of the Knife.

The famed "Sun-Sweep Window" incorporates every solar calendar known to human history in the one translucent display whose brilliant colors, driven by the sun of Dune, thread through the interior on prismatic pathways.The Tyrant Leto II rules the universe from the Citadel, a fortress built in the Last Desert of the Sareer.

When the Harkonnens controlled the planet, they ruled from the Harkonnen-built "megalopolis" of Carthag, described by Jessica as "a cheap and brassy place some two hundred kilometers northeast across the Broken Land.

The novel Paul of Dune (2008) by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson establishes that the first known inhabitants of Arrakis had been the Muadru, who introduced the sandworms to the planet.