One hot afternoon in April 1931, a Stearman C3B biplane, its fuel tanks overflowing and cockpit crammed with two weeks’ food and water, struggled into the air from the French Foreign Legion airstrip at Colomb-Béchar, Algeria. The plane glowed in the sunlight, with golden wings and scarlet fuselage, and bright American flags painted on its golden tail — a good move, since rebellious North African nomads sometimes fired at French military aircraft. Leveling off at 500 feet, it headed south toward the Legion outpost at Gao, on the Niger River, 1,300 miles straight across the Sahara Desert.

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To Richard Halliburton, in the front cockpit, the Sahara appeared ‘a burned crust of gravel without a dip or a crack…the horizon a straight line.’ The navigation chart was also featureless. Since magnetic compasses tended to be inaccurate over such distances, pilot Moye Stephens was following the military motor track — a ghostly trace on the stony surface below them, covered in places by drifting sand. At only 500 feet, heat and blowing sand stung their searching eyes. Several times they lost the faint track, then had to climb to 5,000 feet and circle until they again detected it.

In 1931 Halliburton was perhaps the world’s most famous travel adventure writer, with three books simultaneously on the bestseller list and translated into nine languages. But the French military authorities regarded his most recent venture as nothing less than foolhardy. With extra fuel tanks, the Stearman carried only enough gasoline for six hours’ cruising: 540 miles plus reserve — with no head wind — according to Stephens. The French reluctantly authorized them to use two fuel dumps maintained by Shell Oil for the fortnightly supply convoy to Gao. The first was at Adrar oasis, 400 miles south of Colomb-Béchar, which they reached the first day. The second, 500 miles farther south, was only an unattended tank beside the track.

The first day out, several small oases broke the visual monotony, but the next 800 miles, Halliburton wrote his parents, were a ‘real blankness — not a rise of 100 feet, not a blade of grass, not a human being.’ Fighting a head wind the second day, they were a half-hour overdue in reaching the second dump. Halliburton kept recalling ‘the morbid stories I’d heard in Colomb-Béchar about death on the Sahara.’ Finally, Stephens spotted several discarded gasoline tins beside the track. They landed and taxied over. ‘We noted a curious-looking sand dune nearby,’ Halliburton recalled. ‘A pump handle was sticking out of it. There was our tank! A thousand eyes would never have seen it from above.’

Digging away a ‘ton of sand,’ they unlocked the tank, then transferred the precious fluid a gallon at a time in ‘annihilating heat.’ Halliburton left a receipt for 100 gallons — at $4 a gallon — in the middle of the Sahara. In partial sponsorship, Shell would cancel his debt after his return. The slow refueling plus a rising head wind left them 200 miles short of Gao at nightfall. Stephens landed, and they anchored the plane’s wheels with gravel-filled sacks. After a canned-beef supper, they fell asleep lying on their parachutes under the stars, serenaded by a windup phonograph. Before dawn they awoke shivering — the temperature had plummeted 75 degrees. At Gao they spent three days cleaning sand out of the engine, then flew 300 miles up the Niger to the African cotton, salt and slave emporium of Timbuktu (also spelled Timbuctoo).

‘Everybody talks about the place — ‘from here to Timbuctoo,’ people say — but nobody ever goes there,’ was Halliburton’s comment to reporters when he left the United States. But fabled Timbuktu was just the first destination of an aerial expedition to the legendary cities of the ancient world. The name of the vehicle for this fabulous journey was painted on its fuselage: The Flying Carpet.

Halliburton was at the peak of his career in February 1930 when he went to Hollywood to sell Fox Films the movie rights to his book The Royal Road to Romance. Yet he felt vulnerable, about to be eclipsed — a has-been at 31. He had backpacked through the Old World and the New, climbed the Matterhorn solo, swam the length of the Panama Canal, dived into the sacred cenote of Chichén-Itzá. He tried to think of a new kind of adventure, one that would set him apart from his competitors and excite his fans — and himself. Then a former Royal Air Force pilot working as a technical adviser made him realize that what was new and exciting in 1930 was flying. Later he would tell reporters, ‘An adventure not in the air is obsolete.’

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