Overview

They will flood the Sahara. And nothing-not the desert, not its people-will stop them. The plan is audacious: dig a canal from the Mediterranean to the salt depressions of Tunisia and Algeria, creating an inland sea that will transform worthless desert into fertile, navigable territory. French colonial engineers promise prosperity. Progress. Civilization. Captain Hardigan oversees the work. But as construction advances, Tuareg tribes whose lands will be destroyed mount increasingly desperate resistance. The desert they've inhabited for centuries will vanish beneath French ambition. Their oases will flood. Their way of life will end. Then an earthquake breaches the canal. Water rushes in catastrophically. The Sahara Sea is born-not through human decision but through nature's intervention. The French claim victory. The Tuareg lose everything. And the question of whether such transformation was ever justified disappears beneath the flood. Jules Verne's final novel, published posthumously in 1905, anticipates modern debates about geoengineering and massive environmental projects decades before they became reality. Yet it cannot escape its colonial framework: indigenous resistance is portrayed sympathetically but dismissed as futile, and the novel's resolution conveniently sidesteps who had the right to reshape Africa. From the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea-a prescient warning about playing god with geography, told from an empire's perspective.

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