cover image Seasons of Sand: One Man's Quest to Save a Dying Sahara Villiage

Seasons of Sand: One Man's Quest to Save a Dying Sahara Villiage

Ernst Aebi. Simon & Schuster, $21.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-76935-2

The solitude and wildness of the Saharan desert and the lives of the nomads who travel it become palpable in Aebi's amazing account of his search for a unique adventure. A romantic who longed to find some remaining unexplored ``white space'' on the map, this former artist and loft designer tagged along with a rented camel and a hired cameleer on a caravan headed for the infamous salt mines of Taoudenni in Mali, a two-month trek through the Sahara from Timbuktu. A stopover at Arouane, a historic desert village known for its good water, changed his life. Once a trans-Saharan trade center where caravans of 10,000 camels would stop to drink, Arouane was, by the time Aebi visited, a fly-infested, dirty ``hell on earth'' without a tree or any other vegetation, whose population had dropped from thousands to just 125 people. The author was seized by the idea of helping the village reclaim itself--``It wasn't any highblown sense of charity that had me entertaining such thoughts,'' he explains. ``It was a challenge, a bit of excitement.'' Frank and humorous, filled with marvelous people and the details of his own daily life, Aebi's book tells an original tale of how he won over Arouane's inhabitants, taught them to garden, doctored them and helped them gain a sense of controlling their own destinies, only in the end to see many of his achievements sacrificed to nearby political rebellions that made the village a target of attacks and once again destroyed nearly everything but its spirit. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)