Seventeen thousand French troops leave Toulon harbour in May 1798 unaware of their ultimate destination. Barely three months after taking Rome, Napoleon Bonaparte has rewarded the finest regiments of that campaign with a place among the Army of Orient, the elite invasion force bound - as Bonaparte's more guarded tones reveal - for Egypt. By the time the discontented ranks of Alain Lausard's cavalry unit have staggered, starved and exhausted, upon the desert shores, his dragoons have more than glory to fight for. Worn down by the blistering heat, they summon unknown strengths to resist the Arab warrior raids that blight their path towards the Nile, but as they are drawn deeper into forbidding territory, despair and disease, Nelson's destruction of the French fleet and Bonaparte's obsessive war-mongering convinces Lausard he will never see Paris again...