On 30 December 1935, at 2:45 am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his mechanic-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Libyan desert, during an attempt to break the speed record in a Paris-to-Saigon air race and win a prize of 150,000 francs.

Both Saint-Exupéry and Prévot miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous, leaving them with no idea of their location.

Lost among the sand dunes, their sole supplies consisted of some grapes, two oranges, a madeleine, a pint of coffee in a battered thermos and a half pint of white wine in another. They also had with them a small store of medicine: "a hundred grammes of ninety percent alcohol, the same of pure ether, and a small bottle of iodine."

The pair had only one day's worth of fluids. They both saw mirages and experienced auditory hallucinations, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third day, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating. On the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment that saved their lives. [281 The near brush with death would figure prominently in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, winner of several awards. Saint-Exupéry's classic novella The Little Prince, which begins with a pilot being stranded in the desert, is, in part, a reference to this experience.