"Imagine Cormac McCarthy's savage lyricism in a Paul Bowles desert
landscape and you begin to enter the bleakly beautiful world of this
mesmerizing, fable-like novel."--The Independent
Gold Dust is a classic story of the brotherhood between man and beast,
the thread of companionship that is all the difference between life and
death in the desert. It is a story of the fight to endure in a world of
limitless and waterless wastes, and a parable of the struggle to survive
in the most dangerous landscape of all: human society.
Rejected by his tribe and hunted by the kin of the man he killed,
Ukhayyad and his thoroughbred camel flee across the desolate Tuareg
deserts of the Libyan Sahara. Between bloody wars against the Italians
in the north and famine raging in the south, Ukhayyad rides for the
remote rock caves of Jebel Hasawna. There, he says farewell to the mount
who has been his companion through thirst, disease, lust, and
loneliness. Alone in the desert, haunted by the prophetic cave paintings
of ancient hunting scenes and the cries of jinn in the night, Ukhayyad
awaits the arrival of his pursuers and their insatiable hunger for blood
and gold.