Contents - The City of the Seven Shadows – A Sappho of the sand – The secret of Sa – The Three Dwarfs of Lebo – The coming of Allah – The evil of the Thousand Eyes – The gate of Hell – The Queen of the Silent Kingdom – The Father of the Hundred Slaves – The mystery of Afo – The Throne of the Great Torture.

I’m a masked man. I openly admit to being a squatter and a brigand. Living out in the Great Desert, six moons from Algiers and a thousand miles beyond the French outposts, robbery is a natural industry for my nomadic tribe it is a branch of education. We supplement our herds’ scarcity by extracting ransoms from some of our neighbors and entirely despoiling others. When the name Ahamadou is mentioned on any of the caravan routes between the Atlas Mountains and Lake Tsad, the face of the traveler pales beneath its bronze, for as sheik of the most powerful piratical tribe in the Sahara, I have earned unenviable notoriety as the leader of
The Breath of the Wind, the Sahara. While the Arabs have given my people three epithets that encapsulate their psychology:
Thieves, Hyenas, and Allah’s Abandoned.