National Geographic: Setting the Scene On the southwest coast of Madagascar, the sun burns bright and fierce over white-hot sands and turquoise seas. The plants are small and spiny and hardened against the relentless droughtthey store water over long periods in bulging baobab trunks, and open their stomata to drink in CO2 only sparingly in the relative cool of the night. The people of the southwest too, are dark and weathered and wiryin the jumbled diversity of ethnicities that characterize the Eighth Continent,...