Cool Relief
Nothing beats a desert village with a leaky water tank after a long day trekking through a seemingly endless expanse of sand, as a member of a 2001-02 expedition discovered. The expedition, led by John Hare, retraced a 1906 trek by Hanns Vischer, a British civil servant who was intrigued by a centuries-old slave-trading route from Lake Chad, Nigeria, to Tripoli, Libya. Hare's team lost a couple of camels along the way but was mentally prepared in a way that his predecessor wasn't. "I had entered it frivolously, like a fool," Vischer wrote. "I left it as one stunned, crushed by the deadly majesty I had seen too closely."

Photograph by Carsten Peter