European investment in border enforcement in North African and Sahelian states has redirected migration routes into more dangerous terrains where migrants are vulnerable to exploitation and violence by armed smugglers and militias and to exposure and dehydration in punishing and ‘empty’ landscapes. This contribution centers the story of Amadou, a 22 year old Guinean man who left Conkary to pursue l’aventure in Europe. During his journey through the Sahara, he was robbed by 'Tuareg rebels' and held for ransom by ‘bandits,’ escaping into the desert to walk for seven days before reaching aid in the Algerian town of Reggane. Amadou’s ‘adventure’ in the Sahara reveals the desert as a productive space bound up in contemporary geopolitics and longer histories of exchange and exploitation in the EurAfrica region. Drawing on the geographic concept of ‘deep space’ and Michelle Wright’s notion of ‘epiphenomenal time,’ this paper explores how desert spaces archive the routes and roots of human mobility from south to north, even as they enfold, conceal, and obfuscate its attendant violence. West and Central African migrants traverse Saharan landscapes dotted with 'ruins' of earlier passages, both forced and voluntary, that condition the possibilities of survival and flourishing on the journey and in spaces of arrival.