Ladislaus Eduard (László Ede) Almásy was born in 1895 at the castle of Bernstein in the Austrian region of Burgenland. He was a pilot and an automobile pioneer.

Thanks to his numerous expeditions to desert areas and business trips to Egypt he became one of the best connoisseurs of the Eastern Sahara desert. As an army officer of Hungary, which was allied with Germany during World War II, he helped the German secret service smuggle spies through the desert to Egypt.

Appointed a Count by Emperor Karl I, Almásy died in 1951 in Salzburg, Austria, of a not-healed amoebic dysentery (and not, like in the novel and the film The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, of wounds caused by a plane crash).

Almásy, called Abu Ramla ("Father of the Sands") by his Bedouin friends, recorded his adventures in the book Az ismeretlen Szahara, first published in 1934 in Budapest. He re-wrote it in German under the title Unbekannte Sahara. Mit Flugzeug und Auto in der Libyschen Wüste, published five years later in Leipzig. It contains accounts of his most sensational discoveries like the one of the Jebel Uwenat (the highest mountain of the Eastern Sahara desert), of the rock paintings in the Gilf Kebir and of the lost oasis of Zarzura which he found together with his comrades Penderel, the pilot, and Sir Robert Clayton.

Almásy had succeeded in turning from an autodidact into a serious discoverer. In the mid-1930s, time for research and adventure was drawing to a close: His former sponsor Clayton had died in 1932 – yet not of the crash-land as peddled in the novel, but of an infection from a desert fly from the Gilf Kebir. Clayton's wife died one year later in a mysterious plane crash.

It is known today that Almásy smuggled two German secret agents into English territory in April and June 1942, but what exactly his role was in World War II is probably never going to become completely clear. For being a spy, though, he received the Eisernes Kreuz from Erwin Rommel who led the German Afrika Korps from 1941 to 1943.

After long times of suffering in jail (he was imprisoned by the Soviets for collaboration) and months of misery due to his illness, he died in 1951 in Salzburg. The epitaph on his grave honours him as a "Pilot, Saharaforscher und Entdecker der Oase Zarzura".