Following his difficult decision to resign as president of Catholic Action, Carlo Carretto became a member of the religious congregation of Father Charles Foucauld's Little Brothers of Jesus. He left for Algeria to join the novitiate on 8th December 1954. The community was based at El Aboidh, a centre of Moslem pilgrimage founded by Sheikh Sidi. For ten years Carretto was to live a hermit-like existence in the Sahara desert, a time in which he began to speak with the prophetic voice which was to become well-known. This book records the experiences of the first two years of his new life, when his initial nervousness was transformed into an enduring spirituality. The voice of Carretto in this journal is, however, not the voice of a superhuman, but that of a sympathetic fellow-traveller.