“The Villa San Girolamo, built to protect inhabitants from the flesh of the devil, had the look of a besieged fortress, the limbs of most of the statues blown off during the first day of shelling. There seemed little demarcation between house and…
“The name that still filled our mouths was Gilf Kebir. Somewhere in the Gilf nestled Zerzura, whose name occurs in Arab writings as far back as the thirteenth century" (Ondaatje, 142)
"Nurses too became shell-shocked from the dying around them. Or from something as small as a letter. They would carry a severed arm down a hall, or swab at blood that never stopped, as if the wound were a well, and they began to believe in nothing,…