Marusja

I am not nearly as interesting as Isabelle Eberhardt. Born 1877 in Geneva to an aristocratic Lutheran German mother and a Russian father who was an ex-priest-turned-nihilist intellectual, Eberhardt had all the makings of an unconventional life. At the age of twenty she traveled with her mother to North Africa, where they both converted to Islam. Soon after, her mother died. But rather than returning to Europe, Isabelle bought a horse and rode off alone into the Algerian desert. Thus began her life as an explorer: dressed as a man, calling herself Si Mahmoud Essadi, she moved amongst the nomadic peoples of North Africa, joining the secret Sufi brotherhood, Qadriya, and marrying an Algerian soldier in 1901. She kept extensive journals, and her writings appeared in many books and French newspapers. "I am full of the sorrow that goes with changes in surroundings," she gloomed, "those successive stages of annihilation that slowly lead to the great and final void." Such thoughts were no doubt animated by her alcoholism and addiction to morphine. However she also declared, "I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way." In 1904 she got her wish, or perhaps not, dying in a flash-flood. She was twenty-seven. A fitting end for a woman who penned the words, "For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all."