The 300th anniversary issue of the Polaris series includes the first modern Russian edition of stories and sketches by Isabella Eberhard, a chronicle of spiritual journeys and wanderings in the sands of North Africa, loneliness and the endless desire for freedom. Eberhard, born in Switzerland into a family of Russian emigrants, professed Islam, lived in Tunisia and Algeria, traveled across the Sahara, joined a Sufi brotherhood, survived an assassination attempt and expulsion - and wrote romantic and harsh prose that anticipated A. Camus and P. Bowles. The young writer violated every conceivable prohibition: she wore men's clothes, her constant companions were "kif", alcohol and casual lovers, her husband was an Algerian spagi soldier. Her death was no less strange than her life: in 1904, at the age of 27, Isabella Eberhard died during a flood in the desert... Today her name is glorified in dozens of books and many articles and studies, films and even opera.