The philosopher narrator, with director Gerard who wants to make a film about Charles de Foucauld and Eric-Emmanel to write the scenario, join eight others on a walking expedition from Temanrasset, through the Hoggar (a mountainous area in the middle of the Sahara Desert) to Assekrem, the place of Foucauld's hermitage.
The expedition is led by the Tuareg Abaygher (a man of the old wisdom of pre-industrialised societies) and the American guide Donald. They camp rough over ten to eleven days, in fear of snakes and scorpions and perhaps other humans. Ségolène is a Catholic who questions Eric-Emmanuel on his atheism and he tells her about the three philosphical 'proofs' of the existence of God: the universal consensus proof, the cosmological proof, and the ontological proof, all of which can be blown away in a few words.
However, Eric-Emmanuel rather stupidly loses himself from the group in a particularly anonymous, mountainous area. He has no food and virtually no water, and with night coming on he has to dig himself a bed to shield himself from the bitter cold. It is during this time that he had an epiphanic moment, and comes to believe in God: in the morning he finds his way to the camp and the worried team by following the path the stars showed him the night before.
In the Epilogue, the present-day Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt talks about his profound experience in the desert, when he was born a second time, and explains that he remains a philosopher, and if asked if he believes in God he would say 'I don't know', followed by 'I think I do'. He has a sentence to 'explain' things: 'What I know isn't what I believe.' He believes that certainty, a person knowing that he or she does or doesn't believe, is the problem, as this position goes beyond the rational, and certainties create dead bodies. He seems sure of this, but all I can think is 'Er, just a second...'.
My Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt posts:
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Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Nuit de feu
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: Milarepa
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Tectonique des sentiments
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: La Femme au miroir
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