the lords of the desert and the Timbuktu railway expedition massacre
In 1880 the French government ordered a surveying expedition for a railway that would bring the fabulous wealth of Timbuktu in French Sudan to Paris. The expedition was a fiasco. Under-armed in hostile territory, native guides led the one-hundred man expedition into an ambush that stranded them without camels or supplies in the deserts of southern Algeria. Only a dozen malnourished men lived to tell their tale.
