Lost memories of a forgotten captain

Prisoners of the sands for days and months, navigating from one stockade to the next as pilots of the Sahara postal service, flying over the pristine desert mantle spread out under the pure sky, a place as beautiful as it was inhospitable, where each dune was a potential ambush and where the few men you did meet - generally grim-faced Touaregs - took aim at you with their rifles the moment they spotted the shadow of your wings and made you fall like a shooting star.

Thus described Antoine de Saint-Exupéry the hardship of those early years working the Casablanca-Dakar air route, a 2,800-kilometer journey spread out over three danger-filled days, passing Agadir, Cape Juby and Saint Louis de Sénégal. It was one of the great pioneering adventures of aviation, and the route was marked by many an Icarus who crashed his biplane. They might crash, yes, but the girls went crazy for them.

La Ligne (The Line) are major words in the epic history of aeroplanes, and the names of Saint-Exupéry, Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet ring out as its best-known heroes. But there is another, much more obscure hero who nevertheless played a decisive role in this winged adventure: Captain (later Colonel) Joseph Roig, the man in charge of opening up the route that would later be taken by the celebrated archangels of the L'Aéropostale.

Elisabet Riera was fascinated by the character of Joseph Roig, who was born in the southern French region of Roussillon in 1889. She began learning all there was to know about his life, and after years of research, decided to write a book about him in novel form, much as Michael Ondaatje did with another desert pilot, Count Almásy, in The English Patient . This novel by the Barcelona-based writer, called La línea del desierto (or, The Desert Line) is doubly biographical, because it not only follows Roig's vital flight, but also Riera's own adventure as she follows Roig's trail across the desert, barely concealed behind the passionate character of the narrator.

"My novel is based on the real life story of Latécoère Airlines and the creation of the route between Casablanca and Dakar," explains Riera, a gutsy, attractive woman who did not hesitate to follow the trail of La Ligne in person, running a few risks of her own in the process. "My main source on Roig and his mission is the captain's memoirs, Pour que le courrier passe , although I have recreated the texts that appear in the novel."

The captain, explains Riera, was in charge of the Roig Mission, an early reconnaissance flight made in 1923 under his command before the official inauguration of the Casablanca-Dakar line. Roig, who was hired by the legendary Pierre-Georges Latécoère to undertake all the preparations needed to make the route possible, went to great lengths to fulfill his mission, often traveling by camel and dealing with hostile tribes and suspicious Spanish military personnel. He personally selected the best landing spots, set up fuel deposits and finally commanded a trial run of three Breguet XIV biplanes, the birds of the Western Sahara dunes.

Fascinated by the desert and by heroes like Lawrence of Arabia or Paul Bowles, and brought up on The Little Prince , Riera happily follows Roig, who was also a military pilot during the Great War. A singular detail is that the narrator is homosexual, leading her to feature profiles of legendary female aviators, a high-flying romance with a female Airbus pilot, and an unforgettable scene inside a bar filled with Air France flight attendants. The book is a beautiful, romantic, fetishist trip across old airfields, a factory that made the old mail planes, the pilots' hotel, museums, brothels, graves and, of course, the desert. In a moving scene, the main character (and Riera in real life) climbs on board a replica of the Bréguet plane inside a hangar.

"The world looked wonderful from up there. I grabbed the controls. That was exactly the way all the Ligne pilots had done it. That simple gesture had marked the beginning of the adventure by men like Saint-Exupéry. And also Joseph Roig," the author says.