Rumors of Kitty’s ultimate fate grew and spread over the decades. Some claimed that she had survived but was suffering from amnesia and living under another name in South America, and many thought she was captured and enslaved by a tribe of Tuaregs. Only Amelia Earhart’s flight into the unknown caused more speculation.

The desert held its secret well. The sands became Kitty Mannock’s burial shroud. The enigma of her flight to nowhere would not be solved for another half a century.

<I>FRENZY

May 5, 1996

Asselar Oasis, Mali, Africa

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After traveling through the desert for days or weeks, seeing no animals, meeting no humans, civilization, no matter how tiny or primitive, comes as a stunning surprise. To the eleven people in the five Land Rovers, plus five tour driver/guides, the sight of a manmade habitat came as a great relief. Hot and unwashed, tired after a week of driving across pure desolation, the adventurous tourists on the Backworld Explorations’ twelve-day Across the Sahara Safari were only too happy to see humans and find enough water for a refreshing bath.

They sighted the village of Asselar sitting in barren isolation in the central Sahara region of the African nation of Mali. A sprawl of mud houses clustered around a well in the dry bottom of what must have been an ancient riverbed. Scattered around the outskirts were the crumbling ruins of a hundred or more abandoned houses and beyond them the low banks that dropped below the alluvial plain. From a distance the village was almost impossible to see, so well did the timeworn buildings merge with the austere and colorless landscape.

“Well, there she is,” pointed Major Ian Fairweather, the safari leader, to the tired and dusty tourists who exited the Land Rovers and grouped around him. “You’d never know to look at her that Asselar was once a cultural crossroads of western Africa. For five centuries it was an important watering hole for the great trade and slave caravans that passed through to the north and east.”

“Why did it go into decline?” asked a comely Canadian woman in halter-top and brief shorts.

“A combination of wars and conquests by the Moors and the French, the abolition of slavery, but mostly because the trade routes moved south and west toward the seacoasts. The deathblow came about forty years ago when its wells began to dry up. The only flowing well that still supports the town has been dug nearly 50 meters deep.”

“Not exactly a metropolitan paradise,” muttered a stout man in a Spanish accent.

Major Fairweather forced a smile. A tall, lean ex-Royal Marine who prodigiously puffed on a long filtered cigarette, he spoke in clipped, seemingly rehearsed tones. “Only a few Tuareg families that gave up the nomadic tradition reside in Asselar now. They mainly subsist on small herds of goats, patches of sandy soil irrigated by hand from the central village well, and a few handfuls of gemstones gleaned from the desert that they polish and carry by camel to the city of Gao where they sell them as souvenirs.”