The sun was now high in the sky and it must have been 30 degrees,At the morning briefing, Saïda had asked everyone to walk alone for this first day of walking.Isabelle had been walking for several hours now, in silence.Tirelessly, her fangs filled with sand when she set foot, then emptied when her foot left the ground. In front of her, the camels, loaded with equipment, walked in convoy, tied to each other in small groups of three or four. They walked under the orders of their camel driver.Behind them, scattered over several hundred metres, each one walked at his own pace, keeping an eye on the caravan, but creating his own path through the criss-crossing dunes.Some preferred the straight line, which seemed to be the shortest, but which often required climbing the steepest slopes of the dunes.Others were looking for a route of lesser effort, never going down into the hollows and not climbing the bumps.Others, like Isabelle, went without thinking too much and let themselves be guided by the moment.Aziz kept an eye on the little group, making sure that no one got lost.Isabelle smiled, remembering her radical position of the day before and her promise to return home in the morning.The evening before, after a dinner of barley soup and vegetarian couscous followed by dates, exhausted by the day's travel, Isabelle had taken refuge in the warmth of her sleeping bag. She had had little time to enjoy the magnificent starry sky above her head, as sleep had taken hold of her quickly. When she opened her eyes this morning at sunrise. Without even thinking, she had run to Saida.Out of breath, she said, "Saida, in 48 hours I have done things I would never have dared. Yesterday I didn't realise it, I was resisting, but this morning I realise, I am infinitely grateful to you for offering me this experience and this opportunity, I want to go all the way.Joyful, she had straightened up and shouted to the desert "I'm staying, I'm staying, I'm staying" so that it could hear her.Saida had no other word than a tender smile.That morning, the 4x4s had left the camp without taking any trainees with them. As she continued to put one step in front of the other, Isabelle knew that her colleagues were carrying out the usual daily work rituals. Instead, she had made another choice, an innocuous one, to sign up for training. Yet in a few hours this simple decision had taken her thousands of miles away, and wherever she looked, all she saw was sand as far as the eye could see. She was surrounded only by strangers on whom she was totally dependent. She realised that she had always been only one decision away from another life.Isabelle was happy.
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New Gaze - New World
NouvellesAfter the tsunami of revelations from the Davos summit, the ethical and economic foundations of the planet were called into question, the seeds of a new world were sown. But will this new world have enough gardeners to care for and grow these seeds...
