deserted: empty of people, whether a wild stretch of country, a quiet out-of-the-way spot, or a place or person left forsaken.
At root this word describes one thing: a place with no people in it. Everything it means in the New Testament grows out of that single idea of emptiness, and which shade you hear depends on the noun beside it and the picture the sentence is painting.
Most often it names the open, uninhabited wild country, what English Bibles usually call the wilderness or the desert. This is not always sand and dunes; in the Bible it is mainly the dry, rough, lightly grazed land beyond the towns. Above all it carries the weight of Israel's story: the wilderness where the people wandered forty years and ate manna, and the same kind of country where John the Baptist later preached and Jesus was tested. Used this way the word almost becomes a proper name, the wilderness, and it can be charged with meaning, a place of testing, of hunger, and of meeting God.
The same word also marks a smaller, more ordinary kind of emptiness: a quiet, out-of-the-way spot away from the crowds. This is the lonely place where Jesus withdrew to pray or to rest with his disciples. It is the same idea of no people, just on the scale of a single hillside rather than a whole region.
Finally the word can describe something left empty that should be full: a house, a homestead, a road, or even a woman without children, abandoned and desolate. Here the note is loss, a place or person stripped of the life that ought to be there. So the one word ranges from neutral open country, to a welcome quiet retreat, to bleak abandonment, held together by the plain sense of being deserted.