24 APRIL 1959, Page 29

The Most Beautiful Desert of All. By Philippe Diole. (Cape,

18s.) Some men fall in love with the desert, as others fall in love with the sea. Philippe Diold loves both, and follows his books on under- water exploration with a strange evocative work on the Sahara, once fertile and thickly peopled, now abandoned, 'a vast pandemonium frozen into stillness.' Soon it will be busy and banal again, for there is oil there, but this is what the pale, secret desert is like now, with its sudden brief spring- time, its traces of Stone Age man and of the slave caravans, between the Roman cities of the Libyan shore and the forts of the Foreign Legion.