Death in the Sahara: The Story of the Massacre of the Colonial Railway Expedition at the Hands of the Vicious Lords of the Desert

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Overview

Desert explorer Michael Asher investigates the most disastrous exploration mission in the history of the Sahara.

In 1880, the French government ordered a surveying expedition for a railway that would bring the fabulous wealth of Timbuktu, in French Sudan, to Paris. This trek should have heralded a new era of French prosperity. Instead, it was a deadly fiasco. Under-armed in hostile territory, and foolishly employing the enemy as guides, the ...
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Overview

Desert explorer Michael Asher investigates the most disastrous exploration mission in the history of the Sahara.

In 1880, the French government ordered a surveying expedition for a railway that would bring the fabulous wealth of Timbuktu, in French Sudan, to Paris. This trek should have heralded a new era of French prosperity. Instead, it was a deadly fiasco. Under-armed in hostile territory, and foolishly employing the enemy as guides, the one hundred men of the expedition were ambushed and stranded without camels or supplies in the deserts of southern Algeria. Many were killed outright, and for four months the survivors were menaced by the Tuareg, the "lords of the desert," robbed, starved, and tricked into eating poisoned fruit. To escape, the men hid in the wastelands of the Sahara with little hope of finding food or water. They were finally forced to eat their own dead, or, worse, the merely weak. Only a dozen malnourished men lived to tell their tale. The story of their 1,000 mile journey is one of the most astonishing narratives of survival ever recorded.

With a "superb grip of narrative and uncanny ability to evoke battle scenes" (The Guardian), Michael Asher has written an amazing true story that is as dramatic as it is frightening.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In 1880, the French government sent 100 men into the unexplored Sahara to scout the path for a possible railway from the coast. Here, Asher depicts a grim saga of treachery, endurance and slaughter along the way. In the desert, the expedition ran afoul of Tuareg tribes, warlike nomads who had resisted outsiders for a thousand years. Betrayed and attacked, the surviving soldiers made a grueling four-month trek back to the coast; only a dozen survived, some by eating their companions. As a veteran explorer of the Sahara, Asher offers intense descriptions of desert customs and landscapes, so much so that at times the actual narrative of the expedition fades in comparison. No Frenchman survived to write his memoirs (only Arab soldiers attached to the expedition), and the lack of primary source material makes Asher's task unenviable. Far too many times, he attempts to enliven the story by explaining what the soldiers thought and felt, even as they are being killed. Despite these shortcomings, his telling remains a fascinating saga of a brutal desert world suspended somewhere between the medieval and the modern. (May)

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Library Journal

In 1880, an ill-fated French expedition headed across the Sahara to investigate the possibility of building a railroad across the desert for the quick exportation of salt, gold, and ivory to Europe. The expedition turned into a massacre of the French by the native Tuareg. These "lords of the desert" were a rather ruthless lot that robbed, starved, and tricked many strangers, or invaders, as a means of survival in one of the harshest climates on Earth. At first seeming to be sincere guides on the expedition, they double-crossed the French, leading them into traps, dead ends, and hostile areas. Asher (Khartoum) has written an impressively detailed account of this expedition, using firsthand sources such as French Foreign Legion reports and letters and narratives by French survivors (a dozen of the 100 or so men managed to survive the 1000-km trek back north after being attacked). This well-told story is recommended for high school and public library collections on Africa and on European incursions there. (Maps not seen.)
—James Thorsen

Kirkus Reviews
French colonialism goes awry in a saga of hope, betrayal, slaughter and cannibalism in 19th-century North Africa. British desert explorer and Morocco resident Asher (Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure, 2008, etc.) tracks the French government's ambitious plan to build a railroad from Algiers to Timbuctoo (as it was spelled in those days). The Trans-Saharan Railway was intended not so much to carry human passengers as to convey French commercial goods into the vast markets of African nations and return with exotic natural resources to be shipped to Paris. Not so incidentally, the railroad's planners expected that it would speed the spread of French morality among the Sahara Desert's tribes, whom they viewed as benighted heathens. In 1880, Paul Flatters led a mission into the populated portion of Algeria and from there into the desert to map the proposed railway route. A veteran of the French Army of Africa, Flatters craved renown and saw this as his chance: "The man who led the Trans-Saharan survey mission would go down in history as the last of the great Saharan explorers." Flatters felt certain he could negotiate with nomadic tribes that controlled the desert, even though the Tuareg in particular were known for their hostility to interlopers on their land. His naivete cost him and dozens in his party their lives; on February 16, 1881, more than 300 Tuareg warriors attacked the expedition. Asher builds the tension slowly but inexorably toward this climactic battle, during which Flatters was murdered. It occurs slightly before the book's midpoint; after that, the narrative devolves into a gruesome account of the survivors' struggles against thirst and starvation as well as lethaltribesmen. The agony was relentless as they dragged themselves toward safety, their camels stolen or dead. The survivors' desperate resort to cannibalism will horrify, but not surprise, readers. Not for the faint of heart, the faint of stomach or those put off by relentless descriptions of battle scenes. Agent: Anthony Goff/David Higham Associates
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781602396302
  • Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
  • Publication date: 5/1/2008
  • Pages: 320
  • Sales rank: 1,196,300
  • Product dimensions: 6.20 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.20 (d)

Meet the Author

Michael Asher is an SAS veteran, desert explorer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a fluent Arabic speaker. He lived with nomads in the Sahara for three years, completely cut off from the modern world, and was the first person to cross the Sahara from west to east. The author of fourteen previous books, he lives in Morocco.
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