...of wind, sand and stars...

"Thus is the earth at once a desert and a paradise, rich in secret hidden gardens, gardens inaccessible, but to which the craft leads us ever back, one day or another. Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it may prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know that our comrades are somewhere "out there"--where, one can hardly say--silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful. And when our path crosses theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the shoulders! Indeed, we are accustomed to waiting."

"We forget that there is no hope of joy except in human relations. If I summon up those memories that have left me with an enduring savor, if I draw up the balance sheet of the hours in my life that have truly counted, surely I find only those that no wealth could have procured me. True riches cannot be bought... There is no buying the night flight with tis hundred thousand stars, its serenity, its few hours of sovereignty. It is not money that can procure for us that new vision of the world won through hardship--those trees, flowers, women, those treasures made flesh by the dew and color of life which the dawn restores to us, this concert of little things that sustain us and constitute our compensation." 

"So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginning of the world, we built a village of men... We were waiting for the rescuing dawn...Something, I know not what, lent this night the savor of Christmas. We told stories, we joked, we sang songs. In the air there was that slight fever that reigns over a gaily prepared feast. And yet we were infinitely poor. Wind, sand, and stars...But on this badly lighted cloth, a handful of men who possessed nothing in the world but their memories were sharing invisible riches."