Sahara (1982)
Sahara is a 1982 contaminación book written by Clive Cussler.
Dirk Pitt is Clive Cussler's answer to Indiana Jones with a diving tank, a marine engineer who reads the world's oceans and deserts as one enormous treasure map. Here he chases a plague spreading out of West Africa, a toxin poisoning the sea, and two buried mysteries at once: a vanished Confederate ironclad and the last flight of a lost aviatrix. The trail runs from the Nile to a slave-worked gold mine deep in the Sahara, past a billionaire industrialist and a warlord. Cussler writes for pace and spectacle, and Sahara delivers both by the truckload.
Explore Sahara guides
Sahara in our writing
- Companion guide: Lost Civilizations
- Companion guide: Treasure Hunts & Adventure
A few thoughts on Sahara
Pitt's globe-trotting Treasure Hunts & Adventure translate best to screen and controller. The 2005 film Sahara hands Matthew McConaughey the role for exactly this desert chase, and the Uncharted games put you behind a wisecracking adventurer raiding lost sites for the same pulpy rush. Both keep Clive Cussler's engine running: history, danger, and a grin.
Treasure hunters who treat the whole world as a map
Dirk Pitt treats his marine-engineer toolkit like a passport into danger, chasing a lost ironclad and a vanished flyer past a warlord and an industrialist. Nathan Drake chases the same kind of prize in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Largo Winch turns a corporate empire into cover for globe-hopping schemes, Made in Abyss sends explorers into a hole nobody returns from unchanged, and Captain Harlock roams for something worth the risk.
Big-budget action movies that chase treasure across continents
Sahara has already been to the multiplex once, its Nile-to-desert chase turned into the 2005 film with Matthew McConaughey. That same appetite for globe-trotting stunts runs through xXx and xXx: Return of Xander Cage, where extreme athletes double as spies, and The Sum of All Fears, where one analyst races to stop a catastrophe before the map runs out of time.
Adventure stories that race against a hidden countdown
Sahara keeps its heroes moving against a deadline: a spreading plague, a hidden gold mine, secrets nobody wants found. Scorpia sends teenage spy Alex Rider up against an organization with its own countdown, Jurassic Park turns a tour of dinosaurs into a fight for survival, Citadel drops trained agents into a conspiracy racing toward them, and Mr. Robot follows a hacker pulled into a plot bigger than he understands.