Mauro Prosperi’s run through the Sahara desert was going well. The Marathon des Sables is a notorious foot race – 250km in extreme heat across terrain that ranges from dunes three storeys high to stony outcrops. Prosperi, a former Olympian, was among the fastest competitors. But, as he began to pass through a section of the race that was dominated by small dunes, the sand around him started to lift and swirl. “Small dunes, unlike large ones, walk,” he says. The swirling resembled a dance, rhythmic and mesmerising at first, but the rhythm became insistent and before he knew what was happening, Prosperi faced a yellow wall. “I couldn’t see anything. The wind blew so violently, the sand hurt.”
At the start, the organisers had given a talk and advised runners to take shelter in the event of a sandstorm. If lost, they should walk towards the clouds that gather at sunset. But, as Prosperi says, “There aren’t many shelters in the desert. In the middle of the dunes, it’s hard to find a place that will defend you.”
So he kept moving. He tried to shelter several times, but the sand always covered him up. He moved again, sheltered again. The storm took seven hours to pass. When it had gone, there was absolutely nothing left to point his compass at. “The sandstorm took away every point of reference,” he says. “The landscape was completely transformed.”
Prosperi’s first instinct was to run. He had lost a lot of time and his thoughts were on finishing the race. “I hoped to at least get in the medals,” he says. Still, it struck him as strange that he hadn’t seen anyone. This was 1994, and the event was little known. Prosperi ran mostly alone. But why hadn’t he passed the walkers, who set off early from the checkpoint? Or seen any race markers? He climbed a dune, but saw no one. “I knew that something was wrong,” he says. Still, he would have a story to tell his friend Giovanni Manzo, who was mostly walking the course. And an off-schedule night alone in the Sahara desert brought its own magic. “It was immediately fascinating,” he says. “You have this sky that is white with stars that almost suffocates you.”
Prosperi, who will be 68 this month, says that he had had a fatalistic understanding of death all his life. “I was convinced that the end is already written when you are born.” As a child in Rome, he listened to his grandfather’s stories of the first world war, and perhaps it was a sense of embattlement that brought them to mind now. “He told me that when there was no water, he and other soldiers had drunk their own urine to survive,” Prosperi says. He promptly peed into his canteen. “It was clear like water.” He was sure he wouldn’t need it. The organisers would find him soon.
The next morning, Prosperi continued to run. He kept faith in the race, the sense that he was still a competitor. He did not know that the organisers had yet to begin a search – and that to survive, he would need to effect his own rescue. When he heard a helicopter, he assumed it had come for him. It flew low. He saw the pilot’s white helmet. But the pilot did not see Prosperi. The runners had been issued with flares, small and thin like a ballpoint pen. Prosperi shot his into the sky, waved the Italian flag from his backpack, and lost all self-control. “I ran after him. I shouted at him. I called him Paolo, Giovanni” – every random name that sprang to mind. But the noise of the engine faded to a hum, then there was silence.
Prosperi slowed down to a walk. He was in a different contest, with an unplotted route, a finishing line of his own devising and adversaries that were only beginning to make themselves known. He carried mostly dehydrated food, and no water. And yet for the nine and a half days that he was lost – and this was the moment when he really understood that he was lost – Prosperi says he felt no fear. Instead he experienced a deep, consuming serenity pocked with moments of riveting anger.
The resilience, strength and stamina that he had accrued during years of elite sport must have helped him. But these qualities also honed instincts that he now had to overthrow. He had been a modern pentathlete since the age of seven, when he bumped into one of his father’s friends, who was a coach at the local sports centre in Rome. Prosperi began to excel. He joined the state police from school and was picked up by the Fiamme Oro sports section that is run by the force. In 1984, he represented Italy at the Los Angeles Olympics, and the world championships the year after that. But a professional, single-minded focus was at odds with what he needed now – an aliveness to the world outside the parameters of the race.
“When you are going all out to win, you don’t notice anything. I won Olympics and World Cups. But, I didn’t look around me. As a professional, you have to do the race, full stop. You have to win, full stop,” Prosperi says. “In the desert, I learned that it is really important to look around you, to see what is happening, to know the being next to you.”
In Prosperi’s case, the beings next to him were sometimes a family of dromedary camels, or a tree that interrupted the endless sand whose branches felt like home, almost like kin, the sand on Prosperi’s skin a kind of bark. Climbing one on his second day lost, Prosperi spotted a disturbance to the view. “I was convinced it was somebody’s home or a holy man’s shrine.” But the shrine, or marabout, was empty. The only holy man was in a sarcophagus.
“At least I had a roof over my head,” Prosperi says. Securing his Italian flag to the turret, he heard a squeaking noise, like small birds chirping. Clusters of tiny bats clung to the walls. He grabbed a handful, squeezed them dead. He cut off their heads, stirred up their insides with his little knife, and sucked them out. He repeated this with about 20 bats. “This way, I ate and drank at the same time,” he says.
Did he make a practical decision to catch the bats, or were his instincts in charge? “I saw them. I thought, I’ll eat them raw. Then I won’t need water,” he says. It is fair to say that Prosperi emphasises practicality over emotions. While his friend Giovanni was given to reflection and hoped through the ultra marathon “to know himself better”, Prosperi says, “I don’t really do that.” I’m curious about whether he had to overrule disgust to eat the bats, but he seems nonplussed by the question. “I ate and that was it. The only thing was they stank a bit.”
Afterwards, he carried the bat remains out of the shrine and buried them. This was an act of respect for the shrine and the bats, and perhaps it felt important to impose a ritual of civilisation upon what had just occurred. “That’s how I am. Very ordered in things. And it seemed just to me, if I have to kill an animal to live, I will bury the remains,” he says. Last October, he returned to the spot with an Italian television crew and, digging, found all the tiny skeletons.
No wonder, then, the marabout was where Prosperi confronted the prospect of his own remains. Hearing another aircraft, he rushed outside to light a fire. “I made a hole in the sand. I put in all my things: sleeping bag, rucksack. Plastic things make smoke. Unfortunately, as soon as it was lit, another sandstorm hit. I felt so much anger in my body.”
He waited 12 hours inside the marabout for the storm to pass and next day came to a decision. “In Italy, if they don’t find the body of the presumed dead, the family doesn’t receive a payout.” Since he was a policeman, his wife (they are now divorced) would have been entitled to his state pension. They had three young children. She had not wanted him to go. “I felt a bit guilty. I thought, maybe it would have been better if I didn’t come. Because if I walk towards the clouds, I don’t know if I’ll arrive. And if I die, they will never find my body. In the desert, within a few days, everything disappears. Only the skeleton remains.”
Prosperi weighed all this up, and decided that the sensible course of action was to cut his veins. If he bled to death in the marabout, his body would be found, and the pension paid. “Slowly, slowly, I will fall asleep and die,” he thought. It sounds like an act of despair, but Prosperi says it was the product of great anger and acuity.
“I only had a little knife,” he says. He must have felt piteously sad to cut his veins – to wait out death alone like that. “Sad? No, no. “It was necessary. I had made this decision.” And maybe carrying out the ultimate act of self-determination, putting reason before emotion, was itself affirming.
Prosperi woke the next morning to find that, due to extreme dehydration, the blood had clotted almost immediately at his wrists. “I thought, it is not my moment. I am not to die here. I will head towards the clouds.”
It wasn’t exactly a celebration tipple but it was at this point he drank his urine. From that moment, “I did everything I could” to survive. “I ate what I found.” He rustled up mice and snakes from the shady growth at the base of trees. “I squashed everything up in a little cup that I found in the marabout.” He ate large ants, chewed leaves, and cut the backs off his running shoes to relieve the sores on his heels. In the “profound silence”, it was sometimes the hiss of wind that kept him company. He walked towards the clouds.
Over the following six days, Prosperi “really looked” around him. He had to, to live. “I saw fantastic panoramas,” he says. He saw “an enchanted valley, like a gigantic dry estuary. There were two canals and, in the middle, a mound of stones like a castle.”
Was he scared of dying? “I learned something,” he says. “I don’t fear death. It is suffering that makes you scared. If you don’t suffer, you don’t feel fear.” So he didn’t suffer by being lost, by his struggle to survive? “No, I didn’t suffer. Everything I could do, I did.”
“I lived with death – arm in arm, next to me every day. Death became a friend of mine. It was close to me, was with me, always, every day. I looked to survive – and death kept me company, positively, not even negatively. It gave me the force, the strength, to not succumb.”
Prosperi thinks he survived, where surely others would not, because “the impossible did not exist” for him. He tried “to normalise” whatever he could, to persuade himself that “it was the most normal thing in the world that I was there”. He encouraged himself “to see the positive – the chance to know more profoundly the desert”.
One day, he spotted “small things moving” in the distance. Dromedaries, he thought. As he grew closer, he realised they were goats. He was about 200m away when he saw that they were being herded by a girl. He had reached a Berber settlement. “I understood then, that I was reborn. I had been in the desert nine and a half days. I felt I had been inside the belly of the desert, like a pregnancy. I was born anew.” The Berber families gave him goats’ milk which he vomited up because it was too much after the days of starvation and dehydration.
Prosperi had walked to Algeria, through the land-mined border region. By then, he weighed just 43kg. He was taken, blindfolded, by military police to the base in Tindouf, and later to the hospital where he spent a week in intensive care. “They thought I was an agent,” he says, until they found his race papers.
When he finally returned to Rome, and posed for photographers with his wife at his side, Prosperi was asked by a sports journalist who had known him as an Olympian, “‘So will you do the marathon, then?’ And I answered, ‘I always finish my races.’”
True to his word, Prosperi rebuilt his strength over the next two years and returned to run the Marathon des Sables in 1997. He subsequently completed the race a further nine times, running his last in 2017.
“I say to a lot of people, if you really want to understand life, you have to go to the desert,” he says. People often associate the desert with death, he says, but for him the opposite was true. “If you have a life that you can’t interpret, you become alone.” After he survived, “everything felt amplified. My love of nature, my love of sport, the will to do, the love of life.” After retiring from the police force, he worked as a fencing coach and an Olympic coordinator. He married for the second time four years ago.
Prosperi is a grandfather now. He continues to set himself challenges, such as kayaking around the coast of Sicily where he lives. He is waiting for the right moment to tell his grandchildren how he survived.
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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