… The desert: now awakened from its dream, and we have all left the Ark of this dream. As one man. But I am already waiting for the night to return. The same night, if possible. To hear the song of man and to reconcile myself, the shadow, with him who casts it. The night will return. I am a prisoner of all the rest. A prisoner captured by the desert, guarded by it inasmuch as we are all desert, all of us. In the very obscurity of our flesh. I feel myself invaded by its dry, white odour to the depths of my being. Desert of deserts. Dust of dust. Silence of silences. Maybe we have won and the world has lost. Perhaps the void has made its nest in you and you have become just anybody exposed to the four winds, with no substance or outer covering other than the void which can only become emptier and melt you in the blaze of day.

“Come and smell the sweetest scent of all”, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby speech.