Near Death in the Desert: True Stories of Disaster and Survival

Manna for the armchair traveler, this volume collects 12 stories of worn yet resilient travelers on a path through no-man\x92s-land. Revealing the startling beauty and unending danger of the desert, contributors identify local guides as both lifelines and enemies, and camels as courageous, strong, obstinate travel partners. Except for a 3,000-mile trek around Baja, Calif., and a Colorado River canyon expedition, entries detail the big deserts of Africa and Asia, complete with nomads, charlatans, ghastly provisions and ugly illnesses. Robyn Davidson, the lone woman contributor, writes beautifully of her love/hate relationship with India; travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse portrays hunger on a march through the Sahara as ""tentacles of discomfort that slowly crawled up the belly"" and ""the windy emptiness within""; British explorer Wilfred Thesiger describes the Arabian Peninsula\x92s Empty Quarter as a desert within a desert, ""a wilderness of sand dunes surrounded by featureless gravel plains even more lifeless,"" extending for some 1400 miles. Chronicling high adventure in barren lands, these brief, intense travel essays howl and snap with immediacy. (July)