a "beautiful artificial lake" around which the ancient writings of the Tuaregs' forebears are preserved--allegedly extending as far back as the Flood.

We can feel free to accept or reject, Hansen's story about the Tuaregs and the mighty works of their forebears, but one detail in her conversation with the stranger is extremely intriguing: the man mentions that the Tuaregs trace their descent back to the ancient Greek hero Heracles, better known to us under the Latin designation of Hercules.

French author Louis Charpentier suggests in his Les Geants et les Mystéres de Sont Origines (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1968) that the character of Herakles does not refer to a single hero of superhuman strength, but is a name which has a similar meaning as "paladin" or "champion". The Herakles relatedto North Africa and the Sahara in particular would have been the one detailed to exterminate the giant Antaeus and bring the Golden Apples from the Hesperides. Mighty Antaeus, writes Charpentier, was wedded to Tingis, the daughter of Atlas--both of them North African place names--and ruled a kingdom surrounding the Triton--the inland sea which supposedly occupied the northern Sahara and whose name survived well into Roman times (it survives today as the salt desert known as Chott al-Djerid, the location where the first installment of Star Wars was filmed in 1976). To bolster his argument, Charpentier points to the burial place of the giant Antaeus at Charf, a mound to the south of modern Tangier, a place excavated by Roman legionaries whose efforts under the hot sun were