A legendary document charting the extraordinary journey of Isabelle Eberhardt. Isabelle Eberhardt's life was one of the most extraordinary of any writer's of the last 150 years. Daughter of a Russian nihilist who forbade her any contact with society, dressed her as a man, and insisted her education consisted of hard physical labor, she ran away to North Africa in 1897 at the age of 20. There she traveled through the Sahara and became one of the few white women ever to have been initiated into Sufism. She also produced a small but exceptional body of writing. This compilation is a selection of her best stories and vignettes of African life, including several excerpts from the unfinished work her biographer Cecily Mackworth called ''one of the strangest documents that a woman has given to the world.''