A Prisoner of Sand

The Sahara

Antoine Saint-Exupéry was an unusual man; an early aviator, masterful writer, adventurer and philosopher who had traveled the world when it was not an easy place to travel. His award-winning book The Little Prince, is still a classic and adored by millions. The inspiration for that book was the near death experience he had when he and his navigator crashed in the Sahara Desert while flying to Southeast Asia in 1935. He told that story in another book Wind, Sand and Stars, which won the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1939, one of France's most prestigious literary awards, and, the same year, the U.S. National Book Award for nonfiction.

It is one of the most haunting and beautifully written books about travel and adventure I have ever read. National Geographic and Outside magazines agree, and rate it as one of the best adventures put between two covers.

The book tells the stories of many of Saint-Exupéry’s remarkable experiences, but the most astounding was the desert crash. It began after he  and André Prévot, his navigator, had departed Paris flying a Caudron C.630 Simoun single-propeller plane the evening of December 29, 1935. The men were heading to Saigon to break a new aviation record: fly the 13,000 miles to Indochina faster than anyone else, and do it within 90 hours to pocket the winning purse, about $15,000, more than $300,000 in today’s money. The flight would be a grueling: passing over Europe and Sardinia, across the Mediterranean Sea, along Morocco and the Sahara, past Cairo and beyond the Levant and Indian subcontinent.

Just short of 20 hours into the flight, Saint-Exupéry could not locate himself in space. He guessed they were somewhere west of the Nile and east of Benghazi, Libya as they skirted the blue ribbon of the Mediterranean that rims the Sahara Desert, but who could tell? It was pitch black. In 1935 there were no satellites circling the globe that could pinpoint an airplane in space, no complex international tracking systems pinging every flight encircling the world.  The best tools the two men had for getting from here to there were the Simoun’s compass, a stack of less-than-perfect maps, the stars and dead reckoning. Nevertheless, Saint-Exupéry was in his element.

“There is a particular flavor about the tiny cabin …” he wrote of his airplane, “[and] in the magical instruments set like jewels in their panel and glimmering like a constellation in the dark of night. The mineral glow of the artificial horizon, these stethoscopes designed to take the heartbeat of the heavens, are things a pilot loves. The cabin of a plane is a world unto itself, and to the pilot it is home.”

But on this December night, it would not be home for long.

Earlier they had come out of torrents of rain along the sea, and still the cloud deck was dangerously low. But Saint-Exupéry wanted to make certain he didn’t overshoot the lights of Cairo, their next fueling depot. He dropped below the large thunderclouds in the black night and then suddenly the Simoun struck the earth. Traveling at 175 miles per hour, the collision splintered the cabin, blew out its windows, and peeled away the plane’s metal skin like a paring knife peels a potato.

Instantly both men were launched out of the shattered airplane’s window and flung into the utter darkness, hopelessly lost in the Sahara. They had run into a gentle slope at the top of a barren, sand plateau, and only survived because the desert surface was strewn with round black pebbles which had acted like millions of tiny wheels.

But what good had it done them?

The airplane’s radio had been obliterated. Its drinking water tank was demolished, and not a drop of liquid remained. From the wreckage they fished out a pint of coffee and a half pint of white wine. For food, they had a handful of grapes and a single orange. The men calculated that if they had drifted off course, it would take six months for a search party to cover two thousand miles into which they had plummeted. The best they could hope for was to be discovered along the Benghazi-Cairo lane. That might take a week. But then they would never survive that long.

“You know, it’s a shame,” Prevot told Saint-Exupéry, as they sat in the sand.

“What’s a shame?”

“That we didn’t crash properly and get it over with.”

Nevertheless, they developed a plan: they would walk all day and return to the plane before dark. Maybe they would find an oasis, or the wreckage might be found by a lucky plane passing by. They would write a message in huge letters in the sand when the sun came up, and hope.

Both men knew three days was the outer limit of survival without water. Between the coffee and wine, grapes and orange, they might last a little longer. But eventually, their throats would close, the light would fill their eyes and after 72 hours of hallucinations and torturous thirst, they would succumb, desiccated by the wind that made the Sahara’s dunes so magnificent.

Soon they abandoned their plan to return to the wreckage each evening, and simply began to tramp across the sand and black pebbles to the East. Maybe they would stumble into an oasis or small village. Each day they sun ruthlessly sucked them dry.

They thought of their wives and family and cried, they begged for water (the coffee, wine, grapes and orange were gone after a day). They set fires at night and prayed for salvation. As they stumbled across the sand they thought they found grass, a lake, a lighthouse and, three times, a Bedouin to save them, only to discover the shadows of clouds, waves of heat, black rocks and petrified trees; all specters. The hallucinations were setting in, and more than once they were certain one or the other of them was a goner. Yet neither man complained, and they kept walking.

On the third day Saint-Exupéry plodded across the dunes while Prevot gathered wood for another fire.

“This world,” he wrote, “was a gigantic anvil upon which the sun beat down. I strode across this anvil and at my temples I could feel the hammer-strokes of the sun.”

That night the men began to freeze in the night wind, unable to move enough blood through their coagulating blood streams to summon up warmth. In the cold their throats closed, their salvia retreated, their tongues turned to cloth and they waited for death.

Yet on the fourth day, they were still alive. Their throats opened in the warm air and they stumbled on.

Somehow they had covered 120 miles. By now they must have looked like death itself. Their mouths and lips were peeled bark, their eyes filled with bright speckles of light, a sure sign that they were on the brink. Soon the coughing would begin and that would be it.  And then they saw first one and then a second Bedouin on their camels, far off. Were they real? They croaked at them certain they couldn’t be heard and then one of them turned their way. This time the man was real.

The first Arab dismounted and walked toward them.

“He was walking toward us over the sand like a god over the waves,” Saint-Exupéry recalled. “[He] looked at us without a word. He placed his hands upon our shoulders and we obeyed him: we stretched out upon the sand. Race, language, religion were forgotten. There was only this humble nomad with the hands of an archangel on our shoulders.”

Within a few hours both men were in Cairo between cool, clean sheets.

They had wrecked near the Libyan-Egyptian border along a route to the Nile and near Wadi El Natrun, salt bed long ago part of the Nile Delta. Ironically, the alkaline in these beds were once used to help mummify the corpses of ancient Egyptians. But rather than dying, these men were resurrected and went on to live long and remarkable lives, utterly changed by their journey.

Luckily, we are the beneficiaries.

Saint Antoine-Exupéry’s award winning book, Wind, Sand and Stars is available here.