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about 173 across, smaller than the more famous Saharan Ahaggar Mountains but rivaling those in the ferocity of its demeanor. The massif lies mostly in Chad, but it stretches north into Libya and even west into Niger. It is really less a mountain range than it is a rupture in the earth, formed when lava streams forced their way through the planetary skin, leaving a stratum of crystalline rock covered with sandstone. This sandstone was then forced violently upward again as two massive tectonic plates collided, deep within the mantle; it now rises abruptly from the surrounding plains, reaching to 11,204 feet at the summit of Emi Koussi, the Sahara's highest point. Some of the volcanoes are still active and emit a sulfurous smoke from the roiling magma far below. The whole place is deeply eroded, cracked with ravines and awful wells in the rock, unplumbed and of unknown depth. In places the lava resembles the waves of a petrified sea, albeit a sea with swells reachingfive hundred feet or more. Once, in the Sahara's distant past, great rivers roared through these ravines, leaving scars that are still clearly visible. Three of these ancient river courses provided the secretive Tubu their way into the massif, and there they built a few scattered towns, among them the remote Bardai.

On that summer day, so benign on America's eastern seaboard, the hot breath of the desert flungitself against Emi Koussi and scaled rapidly into the upper troposphere. The superheated air rushing up the slopes (in what is called anabatic, or up-mountain, flow) at some point met the cooler, denser air flowing downward (katabaticflow), creating pulses of turbulence, rapid mixing, and the formation of massive thunderheads and ominous, towering black clouds. The sulfurous volcanic air was riven by lightning, and thunder rolled across the ravines, echoing off the boulders that were scattered like a giant's abandoned toy box across the landscape. The system spun off tornadoes, their evil spirals twisting among the ravines. For the next few days the thunder cells drifted slowly westward, driven by the prevailing easterlies of the season. At high altitudes there were violent showers and localized mountain floods; on the superheated plains west of the salt mining center of Bilma the rains fell, but the air was so hot itflash-evaporated the water before it could reach the ground, and the Tuareg nomads could see the cooling water falling without ever feeling it. A day or so later the system passed south of Agadez in Niger, where it was reinforced by yet more turbulent air generated by the lower but nevertheless forbidding black peaks of the Air massif of the central Sahara. Then the set of thunder cells crossed the desert north of Timbuktu, and the small weather station there recorded its passage in a handwritten logbook. It was one of many that passed by that month. The records say there were violent downdrafts and gusts of 60 miles an hour.

Air, in a gesture of atmospheric alchemy, had by now transformed itself into wind. It was the last week of August 2004.

I

The first time I really thought about air, the stuff that makes the wind, was on a beach on the Indian Ocean side of South Africa, near the tidy little town of George. Our family was lying on the white sand drying out after an early morning swim, and my cousin Colin, who had the day before caught a clawless rock lobster by the simple expedient of diving down through six feet or so of clear water and picking it off the sand, asked a typically unexpected question.

"If the crayfish can't see the water," he said, "and they look up, do they think the fish are flying?"

There was a gentle onshore breeze that morning, I'm sure— there was always a gentle onshore breeze in the morning—but I didn't notice it. I remember looking up at the puffy cumulus clouds scudding overhead, but I paid them no mind either. I found Colin's question curiously vertiginous. It was similar to the question asked in many a school geography class ("If you couldn't see the water, would you not think ships were flying?") but in