Enveloped by darkness, it took me a while to see the light within the void.
At first, it was a faint blue line searing the desert horizon. Then it spread across the night sky. Slowly, as the first colors of sunrise cut the sky, another Sahara Desert day had begun. I was some five hundred miles deep in the baking sand dunes of northern Mali on a camel expedition in search of the sacred. We’d left Timbuktu weeks earlier heading north, navigating by an ancient system of the Tuareg, the blue men of the desert. Each day after his morning prayers, my guide, a devote Muslim named Mohammed, would sit quietly on a high sand dune tracking the lingering morning star, then he’d intensely observe the shadows across the land and the direction of the wind patterns across the desert to the horizon. All of these subtle signs allowed him to lead us precisely
