The Airmail Pilot

The planes were barely more than kites with engines.

In 1926, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry joined Aéropostale, the French airmail company running routes from Europe to West Africa. The Morocco stretch — from Casablanca to Dakar — was the most dangerous. The planes were unreliable. The weather was treacherous. And if you went down in the desert, the nomadic tribes weren't always friendly to French pilots.

Saint-Exupéry loved it.

He flew the mail at night, navigating by stars and the occasional landmark visible in moonlight. When the stars disappeared, he flew by dead reckoning — mathematics and faith. The planes had open cockpits; he flew wrapped in leather, frozen at altitude, alone with the engine noise and the dark.

He crashed. Everyone crashed eventually. In 1935, attempting a speed record, he went down in the Libyan desert and nearly died of thirst before Bedouins found him. But even the Morocco years had their emergencies — downed pilots he flew out to rescue, nights spent with wreckage waiting for dawn, conversations with nomads who'd never seen a European.

He wrote about it in "Wind, Sand and Stars" and "Southern Mail" — books about flight that are really about solitude, duty, and what humans find when everything else is stripped away. The desert taught him that.

And then there's the Little Prince.

A pilot crashes in the Sahara and meets a small boy from an asteroid. The boy talks about a rose, a fox, a snake. He asks questions that adults have forgotten to ask. The story is a children's book that isn't for children — or is for the children that adults used to be.

Saint-Exupéry wrote it in New York during World War II, but the desert is Morocco's desert. The stars are the stars he navigated by over the Atlantic coast. The silence is the silence he found when the engine stopped and he waited in the sand for rescue or death.

He disappeared in 1944, flying a reconnaissance mission over occupied France. His plane was never found intact. He'd spent his life falling out of the sky; eventually, the sky kept him.

But the Little Prince is still in the desert, talking to foxes, watching sunsets, asking the questions that matter.