The French were not the first men to enter the city’s security building and not be seen again.

When supervisors at the oil company headquarters in Marseilles received no word from their oil exploration team, they became concerned and requested a search. The Malian Security Forces made a show of sweeping the desert again but claimed to have found nothing but the oil company’s abandoned Renault truck.

The names of the French geologists and the missing tourists from Backworld Expeditions were simply added to the list of outsiders who disappeared and perished in the vast desert.

Dr. Haroun Madani stood on the steps of the Gao hospital, beneath the brick portico with its unfathomable designs running around the top of the walls. He stared nervously down the dusty street running between the seedy old colonial buildings and the single-story mud brick houses. A breeze from the north blew a light coating of sand over the city, once the capital of three great empires but now a decaying relic of French colonial days.

The call to evening prayers drifted over the city from the high-towered minarets that rose above the mosque. The faithful were no longer summoned to prayer by a Muslim holy man, or muezzin, who climbed the narrow steps inside the minarets and wailed from the balcony. Now the muezzin stayed on the ground and offered the prayers to Allah and the Prophet Mohammed through microphones and loudspeakers.

A short distance from the mosque, a -three-quarter moon reflected its beam on the Niger River. Wide, scenic, its current slow and gentle, the Niger is a mere shadow of its former course. Once mighty and deep, decades of drought had lowered it to a shallow stream, plied by fleets of small sailing ships called pinnaces. Its waters once lapped at the base of the mosque. Now they sluggishly flowed nearly two city blocks away.

The Malian people are a mixture of the lighter-skinned descendants of the French and Berbers, the dark brown of the desert Arabs and Moors, and the black Africans. Dr. Madani was coal black. His facial features were Negroid with deep-set ebony eyes and a wide flattened nose. He was a big bull of a man in his late forties, beefy around the middle, with a wide square jawed head.

His ancestors had been Mandingo slaves who were brought north by the Moroccans who overran the country in 1591. His parents had farmed the lush lands south of the Niger when he was a boy. He was raised by a major in the French Foreign Legion, educated and sent through medical school in Paris. Why or how this came about he was never told.

The doctor stiffened as the yellow headlights of an old and unique automobile swung into view. The car rolled quietly down the uneven street, its elegant rose-magenta-colored body oddly out of sync amid the dismal and austere mud structures. There was an aura of dignified elegance about the 1936 Avions Voisin sedan. The design of the coachwork was an odd combination of pre-World War II aerodynamics, cubist art, and Frank Lloyd Wright. It was powered by a six-cylinder sleeve-valve engine that provided smooth silence and simple endurance. A masterwork of uncompromising engineering standards, it once belonged to the Governor General when Mali was a territory of French West Africa.