Word: sahara
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...week in five, Soustelle flies off to the Sahara, where he functions as a kind of one-man Cabinet. As the top political authority in France's two Saharan departments (Saoura and Oases), Soustelle supervises the affairs of 93 municipal governments that he has established in the desert, bears responsibility for the security of Reggan, France's atomic test area in the Sahara. And as chief of O.C.R.S. (Common Organization for the Saharan Regions), he is empowered to negotiate pacts with the four newly independent African members of the French Community who share the western and southern Sahara...
Lunar Landscapes. Soustelle's empire is only a part of the world's largest desert; by usual geographers' reckoning, the Sahara runs from the Atlas Mountains south to the Niger and from Africa's Atlantic Coast east to the Red Sea. But even the French Community's half of the Sahara is awesome in size (1,600,000 sq. mi. v. 213,000 for France) and bewildering in its diversity. Barely a seventh of it is the movie desert of The Sheik-the vast expanses of sand wind-blown into golden dunes. The rest...
France took on this unpromising territory largely by happenstance. When Britain in 1890 agreed to concede France a free hand in the Sahara, Lord Salisbury commented: "Let the Gallic cock sharpen his spurs in the desert sand." But for nearly half a century virtually the only Frenchmen to show much interest in the desert sands were adventurers and eccentrics. Tindouf, now one of the French army's most important Sahara outposts, was not occupied until 1934, and the last of the marauding desert bands was not brought under control until...
...first man to see potential wealth in the Sahara was a brilliant but unstable French geologist named Conrad Kilian. In 1927, after three harrowing years in the central Sahara-on one expedition he was obliged to remove his own tonsils without anesthetic-Kilian returned to Paris proclaiming that the Sahara was a huge depository of oil and natural gas. Geologists scoffed. "There is no more oil in the Sahara than there are trees in the Atlantic," cracked one. In 1950, worn out by repeated bouts of mental illness and years of rebuffs from French authorities, Kilian hanged himself...
Within months of his death the first official geological research parties set out for the Sahara; within five years the first Sahara oil was discovered at the ocher-red waste, of Edjel...