Read by Mark Kitto

The ferocious Taklamakan desert in Central Asia, one of the largest sandy deserts in the world and the harshest on earth, is known by the Chinese as the desert of death or the place of no return. Its unknown depths are said to be haunted by demons and spirits, and legend has it that ancient cities filled with treasure lie lost and buried beneath its dunes. The only certainty is that no human being in history had ever crossed it from end to end. But after five years of planning, in 1993, Charles Blackmore together with a team of the British, the Chinese, and Uyghurs and a caravan of 30 camels, set out to accomplish the seemingly impossible: They would cross the Taklamakan, west to east, directly through its unmapped, untrodden center. Conquering the Desert of Death is at once a deeply personal journey and the story of an adventure that will go down in history as one of the great achievements of exploration

Mode of access: World Wide Web