This Mauritanian novel in English translation, the first from Arabic, is an unforgettable journey into the heart of the country by the well-known Mauritanian journalist and writer Abdallah Uld Mohamadi Bah. The constant life on the move of the novel's narrator is inspired by the Sahara of the author's childhood and his devotion from an early age to the vagabond life of the pre-Islamic poets.The search for the inner stillness known only to desert dwellers leads the narrator from his work in Madrid, the Gulf states and Guinea back to Nabaa, and always to the music, song and poetry so much a part of Mauritanian life and the spiritual universe of Sufism.How the harsh environment affects people's personalities and how migration shapes their futures, their fates, are two themes that run quietly through the work, in concert with intriguing dreams of the narrator and others, poetry recitation sessions and a return to a changed Nabaa.