We had left Benghazi two hundred kilometers behind us, at seven in the morning, when the connecting rod of our plane snapped clean. The Libyan desert stretched around us, without shadow, without a fold, all the way to the horizon. I remember that immense silence into which we came down. We had water for a week at most, and the radio operator, Prévot, and I set out walking toward what we supposed was the caravan route. The sun, from the first hours, became a burning mass that pressed on the backs of our necks like a hand of iron. We walked; I can hardly say what we did. It was an oven's heat. Each step became a calculation, each swallow of water a capital stolen from one's own body. In the evening, when at last the shadow rose before us like a wall, we dug a pit and lay down in it to sleep. But the desert does not sleep. At night the wind rose, and the sand, lifted in gusts, came to cover us like a rising tide. I would wake with eyes full of sand, mouth full of sand, and I would bury myself a little deeper for protection. One cannot imagine, before having lived it, that night in the desert when one feels so small. In those hours it seemed to me that I stood beyond death, in a country where death itself had no more hold, like a thing too distant to weigh. What astonishes me today is not the thirst, nor the sand, but those peaceful thoughts that came to me. I thought of my house, of my furniture, of the lamp on my work table, and these trifles seemed prodigious to me. Every simple thing takes on a marvelous weight when it has become distant. On the third day our strength was failing. Prévot walked behind me, and I heard him breathing in a worrying way. We spoke little. Sometimes we stopped, and we gazed at the horizon as if our looking could create a tree there. Thirst is not that sharp suffering one imagines: it is a kind of dull burning, a slow transformation of one's whole being, which ends by making the world appear to you as a gigantic mirror reflecting a single need. I saw mirages, of course. Lakes of a cardboard blue flecked with black islets, palm trees, phantom cities. One knows they are mirages, one despairs of them, and yet goes on believing in them all the same, as if the spirit refused to die before the body. And that is what I want to say: what I did, I swear to you, no beast would ever have done. A beast would have lain down from the first hour; it would have submitted. But man carries within him that desire to arrive which drives him beyond all animal prudence. We were walking toward a point we did not know, with a false map, toward wells of which we knew nothing, and yet we walked. What saves man is not his body; it is that something in him which refuses to stop. On the night of the fifth day, I thought I saw lights. At first I smiled, for I took them for one more mirage. But Prévot saw them too. They were the fires of Bedouins. We dragged ourselves toward them, and what we lived through then I cannot tell as one tells of a triumph. We were two pieces of wreckage. A Bedouin took us in, and when I think of that man who, with his thumb, crushed curdled milk for us in a bowl, telling me with gestures to eat, I think again of what is greatest in man. He did not speak our language. He expected nothing. He saved us because he had found us alive, and I know no finer gesture. When I think back to that country where I found myself, I tell myself that the desert, believed hostile, is in truth peopled. There are hidden springs, there are hidden men, there are hidden flowers. One sees nothing of all that, and yet it all exists, and one day, if one persists, life rises before you like a spring. The truth of man is that he is a link. Alone, he is almost nothing: a sorrow, a hunger, a suffering that goes out. But rejoined by another man, he becomes everything again: he becomes a village, a flame, a house. What I learned, lying in the sand, listening to my heart beat like a clock running down, is that the deepest taste of living is born of this need for others. I feel myself a man only when I am in communication with other men. The truth, the one that cannot be invented, is that: no one saves himself alone, and no one lives alone. The desert taught me, better than books, what water, milk, a human word are worth. It taught me that it takes many to make one man.