“One must never look for happiness: one meets it by the way”
"She was what attracts me more than anything else: a rebel. What a delight to find someone who is truly herself , who rejects prejudice, servitude, banality, and who moves through life as freely as a bird through the air."
Her nature combined an extraordinary singleness of purpose and an equally powerful nostalgia for the unattainable. Over the years the goal imperceptibly changed from the idea of simple escape to the obsession of total freedom, only later manifesting itself in a quest for spiritual wisdom through the discipline of Sufism. (from the preface to "The oblivion seekers")
Isabelle Eberhardt, fluent in Arabic from an earlier stay in El Oued with her mother, travelled alone, a lot of the time in the disguise of a young male Arab, through Morocco and Algeria during the start of the 20th century, from around 1899, calling herself Si Mahmoud Essadi, and people believed her. She got married to an Algerian soldier on the way...and died in a flood at the age of 27. What is left of her are her writings, pieced together from what was found of it after the flood, which show a degree of genius and poetic giftedness which is astonishing... Read on below and enjoy!

If you are new, I suggest, you try to read the story threads from the beginning, as the stories come in installments with some commentary (by everyone) in between.

http://tribes.tribe.net/isabelleeberhardt