The word "渺无人烟" is formed by sequentially combining the character 渺, meaning vast or indistinct, with 无, meaning without, and then the compound 人烟, where 人 means person and 烟 means smoke (here referring to signs of human life). This construction directly yields a literal sense of "vast and without human smoke", used to denote a place that is utterly desolate and uninhabited.