"The desert is the land of the sun, therefore it is all the beauty on Earth!" With this phrase, "Le Clézio" encapsulates his love for the desert, about which he wrote repeatedly. In this novel, he makes us also lovers of it, as we will see it in a different way, accompanying the men of sand, wind, light, and night, and its women and children, led by Sheikh "Ma' al-'Aynayn," through the arduous paths of a journey in the early twentieth century.

This journey is intersected by another, taking place several decades later, as we accompany the young girl "Lalla" as she discovers herself, her identity, and her freedom through the legends of the desert and the tales of the sea, reaching "Marseille," to which she immigrates in search of her opportunity among the thousands of immigrants there.

And between the two times, we, the readers, are immersed in our own time, in the depths of this poetic novel, about which the Swedish Academy said when awarding its writer the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008, that it "depicts magnificent images of a lost culture in the deserts of North Africa." We are immersed in the majestic silence, seeing freedom in the vastness of space, and hearing the terrifying sound in its defiance, while the desert winds scatter and erase everything else.