The first time I saw her she melted the ice in my soul.Malak is a tiny beautiful five year old girl child. She lives in a cave in dire poverty with her drunkard father her Saharoui mother and sister. Her enemies are all the town children who victimize her and her sister because of their race and condition. Her only friend is a single mother named Latifa and Malak´s grandmother Jeeda Hazzah who dies of cancer. But Malak is the champion of her family against a violent father and the children of the Zoco who she fights singlehandedly. This is a magical and often mystical story of a young girl and the people she stumbles upon as she is rushed away by her uncertain destiny to the land in which her mother was born, the Sahara Desert. The unravelling of Malak's story is also the unsnarling of the web of intrigue surrounding the North of Africa, and it´s peoples and history, and the reasons for many current dilemmas in this land of witchcraft and mystery. The tale begins in earnest when a wandering ex warrior happens on the child and is struck by her magnificent courage and beauty. After a major episode with a drunken father and his cronies, having interceded on the family´s behalf, he flees with them on a stolen high speed cruiser heading for Western Sahara and freedom.In the course of their errant journey, they are taken into threatening custody by the Algerian police. The day is saved by the intervention of an old friend of the warrior´s. The friend, a powerful Algerian Warlord, falls under the spell of the feisty child and seems to want to help them although Malak and her mother see in him a very enigmatic and untrustworthy character. Malak´s personality and mystic nature make of her the flux in an adventure which begins as a race to return her to her maternal grandfather´s family. Things begin to escalate as her father reports her family as kidnapped and his country uses it as an excuse to intervene militarily.What begins as a flight of mercy will become a fight against time as Malak and her friends take on the impossible to try and avoid a military invasion of the whole region by the allied forces of half of the civilised world. In this, they enlist the help of hundreds of thousands of tribes people. Some tribes known to all and others lost in the wastes of the mysterious desert and the annals of history.The story comes to an emotional and pent up conclusion in the only way that it possibly could.
