A glittering geographic tour of the remarkable history, peoples, climate, creatures, sights and sounds of the largest and most austere desert on earth. Ten thousand years ago, the Sahara was a temperate grassland - petrified trees mark where forests used to stand, and former riverbeds are rich in the petrified bones of hippos, elephants, zebras and gazelles. Then a slight shift in the earth's axis transformed it into the greatest desert in the world with astonishing speed. Massive sand dunes are continuously formed and dissolved by fierce winds, making the ever-shifting topography of the desert more uncertain and hazardous to navigate. The inhabitants of this desolate terrain barely eke out a living. Throughout the millennia, diverse populations have struggled to make this severe landscape home. Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle chronicle the desert's nations and peoples and legacies they have left to the sand: stone circles older than Stonehenge; Roman aqueducts; remnants of Greek fields and vineyards, and the ruins of palaces and temples along the Royal Road, a once busy trading route for gold and salt, resources that fuelled the economies of the great empires of Old Africa before centuries of conquests, religious wars and tribal turf battles destroyed them. Illuminated by written testimonies of past travellers, 'Sahara' conveys the majesty, mystery and abundance of the desert's life in an evocative biography of the land and its people.

In Hell and Damnation , bestselling author Marq de Villiers takes readers on a journey into the strange richness of the human imaginings of hell, deep into time and across many faiths, back into early Egypt and the 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. This urbane, funny, and deeply researched guide ventures well beyond the Nine Circles of Dante's Hell and the many medieval Christian visions into the hellish descriptions in Islam, Buddhism, Jewish legend, Japanese traditions, and more.

In the parched and seemingly lifeless heart of the Sahara desert, earthworms find enough moisture to survive. Four major mountain ranges interrupt the flow of dunes and gravel plains, and at certain times waterfalls cascade from their peaks. Even the sand amazes: massive dunes can appear almost overnight, and be gone just as quickly. We think we know the Sahara, the largest and most austere desert on Earth--yet it is full of surprises, as Marq de Villiers reveals in his brilliant and evocative biography of the land and its people.
"If you traveled across the United States from Boston to San Diego, you still wouldn't have crossed the Sahara," writes de Villiers, painting a vivid picture of this most extraordinary place. He charts the course of Atlantic hurricanes, many of which are born in the Tibesti Mountains of northern Chad, and offers a fascinating disquisition on the physics of windblown sand and the formation of dunes. He chronicles the formation of the massive aquifers that lie beneath the desert, some filled with water that pre-dates the appearance of modern man on Earth. He marvels at the jagged mountains and at ancient cave paintings deep in the desert, which reveal that the Sahara was a verdant grassland 10,000 years ago--a cycle that has been repeated several times.
Woven through de Villiers's story is a chronicle of the desert's nations and people: the Berbers and Arabs of the north; its black African south, whose ancestors peopled the greatest empires of Old Africa; and the extraordinary nomads--the Moors, the Tuareg (the famous "blue men"), and the Tubu--who call the desert home today. Illuminated by the eloquent written testimonies of past travelers, " Sahara" is a glittering geographic tour conveying the majesty, mystery, and abundance of life in what the outside world thinks of as the Great Emptiness.