Hammond Innes · 1954 · survival

Hammond Innes's 1954 novel. A missionary in French Morocco pulls a half-drowned man out of the sea at Tangier and finds himself escorting a doctor who is not a doctor south toward the Atlas. Their destination is Kasbah Foum, a ruined fort in country the French barely administer, over which two Berber factions and at least one European are prepared to kill.

1. 1
   Tangier

   At Tangier a man is dragged out of the water from a wrecked boat, and the missionary Philip Latham finds himself responsible for a survivor with a doctor's papers, a false name and an unexplained determination to go south.

2. 2
   Casablanca

   The road south runs through the French protectorate's ports and administration, where papers are checked and questions asked - and the fewer answers Latham's companion gives, the clearer it becomes that somebody is following them.

3. 3
   Tizi n'Tichka

   Over the High Atlas by the Tichka pass, out of the settled country and into the pre-Sahara, where the writ of the authorities thins to nothing and local quarrels are settled by the people who have the men and the rifles.

4. 4
   Kasbah Foum

   At Kasbah Foum, an abandoned fort at the mouth of a gorge in the far south, the reason for the whole journey is finally dug out of the ground - and the country turns out to be as dangerous as everyone kept saying it was.