The Spirit Series

Point of the Dagger  - Book 1

Blade of the Sword  - Book 2

work in progress

Trigger of the Gun  - Book 3

work in progress

About This Series

The Sahara Desert; blinding sun, heat.Think of herons wading through water and you don’t think of the Sahara. The world’s largest hot desert, full of burning gravel plains and shifting sand dunes high as office buildings.

But also surprisingly worn-down mountains harbouring life from a long gone age. An age when the Sahara was savannah, grassland, trees.

Such places exist. The Tassili n'Ajjer is one. In eastern Algeria rises a sandstone plateau and at its core a volcanic ridge of granite. The area is barren and hyper-arid with weathered pillars of stone like ruins.

Yet chasms or wadis snake their way through these mountains. Sometimes the rivers that carved them are held in gueltas and oases, or still lie beneath the surface of the sand. It is here in these deep shaded valleys that there are remnants of the wildlife and vegetation that once covered North Africa when the climate was wetter.

Think of the desert and imagine dragonflies, leopard and eagle; picture pink flowering oleander and rushes, fish and shrimp darting in clear water; and even until a few decades ago, crocodile.

The Sahara Desert. Blistering sun, heat. Wind driving sand into dust storms. Hell on earth.

And in a few lone places, Paradise.

Visualise this

by the pool a single gazelle. A myth whispered from father to son. Sacred because it is white, pure like salt, with a horn that can cleanse the most contaminated waters.

It is revered and protected by the Kel Ajjer, the local tribes of the Tuareg people. Spoken of in Tamahak, the Tuareg language, the myth is a guiding hope for when the desert is harsh and faith dwindles.

These people are nomads; herding their goats from acacia grove to grove. This is the traditional way. The women control their wealth of camels and jewelry and can divorce their husbands. Only the men wear veils. Though Muslim they retain much of their original culture before Islam was introduced.

The Tassili n'Ajjer and Taureg are real, the white gazelle is not.

But what if it were? What then?

Listen to this

The stars and the horizon are the boundaries of a Tuareg’s life, the desert his freedom.

The rains fall less each year, the goats die. Drought comes. Families are forced to abandon the nomadic life and settle in shantytowns on the outskirts of cities. There they struggle to find work. They are unemployed, they are guides, they make arts for tourists. Men leave on camel trains to barter for months at a time, they leave for war, they leave their women behind.

In poverty, physical and cultural, sons are choosing not to return to the land of their fathers.

Listen to this.

But some remain.

The desert is my cradle, I was born here

The desert is my road, I travel here

The desert is my grave, I will die here.’

A Tuareg poem