The Eight Shades of the Netherworld

By Al Ghalibie

According to the Bible, the number (8) has a special meaning for God, as He chose the 8th day to mark the beginning of the new week. Everything that has a new beginning in the Bible has the number (8) associated with it. Number (8) is the personal number of Jesus. When we add together the (letter values) of the name Jesus in Greek, we get 888. Jesus was called The Christ, the (numerical value) of this title is 1480 (185 x 8). He was Saviour which has the value of 1408 (2 x 8 x 88).
Messiah has a (numerical value) of 656 (82 x8). Jesus also called himself the Son of man. The term occurs 88 times and is valued at 2960 (370 x 8). Jesus said, "I am the truth": the (numerical value) of "the truth" is 64 (8 x 8).
The last book in the Bible is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which has exactly 888 Greek words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665592178

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2021 Al Ghalibie. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/06/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9304-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9217-8 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

DAY ONE

DAY TWO

DAY THREE

DAY FOUR

DAY FIVE

DAY SIX

According to the Bible, the number (8) has a special meaning for God, as He chose the eighth day to mark the beginning of the new week. Everything that has a new beginning in the Bible has the number (8) associated with it.

The number (8) is the personal number of Jesus.

When we add together the letter values of the name Jesus in Greek, we get 888. Jesus was called the Christ; the numerical value of this title is 1480 (185 x 8). He was Saviour, which has the value of 1408 (2 x 8 x 88).

Messiah has the numerical value of 656 (82 x 8). Jesus also called himself the Son of Man. This term occurs 88 times and is valued at 2960 (370 x 8). Jesus said, ‘I am the truth’: the numerical value of ‘the truth’ is 64 (8 x 8).

The last book in the Bible is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which has exactly 888 Greek words.

The Uanna Camp, in the belly of the mother of all deserts, is one of the most famous camps for clay-tablet collectors. The signboard inscribed on a clay tablet hanging on the gate of the camp read:

THE CAMP OF THE DOORS AND BEGINNINGS, WHERE THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE

Oannes was a strange man who came out of the blue to this camp every time a story stopped short or was stuck in the middle owing to the many breaches in its clay tablet that caused whole paragraphs to be lost. That was what Oannes had told the campers over the years. But what he had been really looking for was a missing clay tablet which had a special meaning to him. The men in charge of the camp were all aware that he was sent by an authority from somewhere. Each one of them thought it was the other men who must have arranged his coming, but none of them knew for sure. His unforeseen coming was always shrouded in mystery.

In his last visit, Oannes had told an audience of campers the story of a mortal whose son’s life depended on that missing tablet. He got stuck in a warp of time, waiting for the missing tablet to turn up and take him on his journey to the Faraway to resurrect his son.

It was a chilly autumn evening. The horizon was thickened with a lazuli darkness like a last brushstroke of a giant artist on a silvery smooth mystical canvas, preparing for Oannes to conclude the story that had started many nights earlier. Oannes sat between the past and the future, betwixt mortality and immortality; he is sitting in the middle of reality and fiction.

The tea man, along with an old Emmettian guard, went to gather some dry twigs from around the barbed wire fence to light the few logs that the two had already prepared for a fire in the yard at the centre of the barracks. The tea man, Jihan from Farris, was a lively man in his early sixties, and duality was his passion. He put the kettle on and brought the metal teacups. They made a circle of seven men around the fire: the tea man; the cook guru, Babu, a man in his prime who spoke the native language with a fluency peculiar to their tongue-tipped accentuation; the accountant David who looked at the other men with a grandfatherly stare at odds with his youthful appearance; in the middle, the Nirvanist Buddy, the PRO of the camp; Contaofu, the doctor of the camp who observed etiquette to a fine art; the corporal Joseph from the Engs who commanded the security squad; and of course, the Emmettian old man.

Joseph spoke a little of the native language. His harsh fatherly voice added more friendliness to his stern character. He always commented on Mr Oannes, chewing his words like he would little stones, and puffing up the corners of his mouth with a snigger hidden under a thicket of a brownish moustache.

‘Ha-ha-ha…this devil Oannes, you never know when he’s going to spring out like a fish-man!’

The darkness had wrapped the hemisphere off sight to allow for the moon and the campfire to make up a duet of lighting. The seven men settled down, waiting for Mr Oannes to join them. He came out of the barracks, which looked like a beach house, puffing at his pine pipe. His hulking physique and the smoke above his head made his figure out against the shady background of the barracks like an astronaut who had just landed.

He approached them, smiling mysteriously for some reason – they never figured out why, yet at the corner of their minds, a vague idea of the reason remained. Something about the man’s superiority as being an unknown troubleshooter who rushes in whenever needed – a guru of some enigmatic mission whose authenticity others are still bewildered about. A reed pen etching the fantasies of its holder on a clay tablet.

A cosmic storyteller who whizzes between unknown worlds, telling his stories from one world to another. You could never pin his features down to any one particular race, despite the Sumerian jaw that sat sedately under the thick lips. This game of origin would soon be abandoned and, as if bewitched by the spell of his presence, you’d be convinced he was a cosmopolitan man, belonging to everyone and yet to no one.

He sat on the straw mat, still pulling at his pipe, looking like Janus, god of gates and doorways delving into past wisdom and future knowledge. Oannes lit up his pipe, pulled at it again, and with the divine look of an old storyteller he inscribed, like Shin-eqi-unninni,¹ his pristine signature on the story.

He glanced at the audience, rubbing the wooden smoking pipe in his hands. The flames falling on Oannes’ face in silhouette conferred a gravity upon him, a certain credibility that did not belong to this world. You could feel that what he told was just the truth, or maybe the only true version ever told… and that he had come only to tell it and go.

The earth moved a little bit anticlockwise to let the sun slip out of sight for the day. The rising moon behind him was trying her best to have a shufti through the passing clouds into that circle of men around a fire. The moon had always witnessed, for the past thousands of years, those circles of men around fire, and had never figured out what they were up to. The tea man poured tea all around, and Oannes carried on with his story:

{Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves,

So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.}²

Open, wide as a sore snakelet…

The mouth of a snake,

Slithering out of a clay tablet

Following every move I make.

I am gradually being pulled towards this erect flickering head whose trunk keeps changing its shape to a mixture of numerical outlines and letters, snaking about me in a serpentine sphere as its tail is still inside the clay tablet. With every manoeuvre, whether to suck me in or to shove inside me, I feel I am being caged inside a large prison cell whose ever-changing bars are a mixture of the snake’s body, mine, and the clay inscriptions of the Sumerian clay tablet.

And I wake up! Or maybe I don’t. It just feels like waking up inside a long story. This same nightmare has been haunting me since I got hold of this strange magical clay tablet. I am a fabian³ character. My name is Shahid, in Aramic it means witness. I was a little boy a few weeks before my ninth birthday. I had been on a school excursion to one of the many antiquity ruins around the town of boredom.

The school buses parked by the fringe of the desert, and we walked about half an hour to get to the remnants. Following the first tour, under the scorching sun and through the hot sand, into the ancient relics of our Sumerian forefathers, the homozabians⁴, we stopped for lunch about an hour after midday.

As one of the teachers shouted for us to keep together and that we would resume our second tour after the lunch break, and that the last call before walking back to the buses would be fifteen minutes before six, the schoolboys dispersed in a noisy manner and sat in groups in the sand unwrapping their lunch – which usually contained the same damn meal; boiled eggs, tomatoes and bread. The smell of boiled eggs hit my nose and turned my stomach.

I moved far away from the crowd to a low shade behind the remains of a wall facing the trace of the famous Lake of Gilgamesh, and started chewing my cheese sandwich. As usual, I wasn’t missed by the boys or the teachers alike. I hated boiled eggs, ever since the geography lesson when the teacher disappointed us by telling us that Earth is not round like a football, as I liked to think, but rather an egg-shaped ellipsoid. I hated the shape and the smell of any egg after that.

I had been feeling a little hot and dozy when I spotted a bulging corner of something that looked like an old thin brick glittering under the sunbeams out of the depression of thick gritty sand that used to be the Lake of Gilgamesh in ancient days. It could have been another episode of my dreams. Yet, I crawled slowly towards the object. It glistened even more. I put my right forefinger onto it and moved it smoothly around its skin. It hissed and moved a little. I flinched. Then I sat up, putting my sandwich on the sand, and tried with my fingers to rub its smooth skin. It slithered out neatly with a shimmer of gold around it that made the particles of sand look like gold dust. I pulled my fingers away. Now most of its oblong shape was out of the sand; my right-hand fingers were still inches away from its edge. I was about to have a panic attack when I heard a whispering golden voice:

Free me from this sandy shell

I will tell you the only true tale.

I felt sick and dizzy as I froze in time for an interval that seemed like hours. I opened my eyes wide with an unexplained determination and I asked the tablet:

‘The only true tale? What are you? You are a speaking clay tablet?’

‘Yes, I am a speaking clay tablet! And I am the only clay tablet that can tell you the true story,’ the clay tablet replied.

‘Wow! A talking tablet! The only true story of what?’ I asked.

‘The only tale of the real Faraway!’ the clay tablet replied.

‘What is the Faraway? I am a little boy of eight. I do not know anything about what you are talking about.’ I said.

‘You know about clay tablets. All other clay tablets that came down to you from Sumer are alleging that their Faraway is the true one. They are all false faraway characters,’ the clay tablet replied.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because I am the only clay tablet that carries on its skin the real character of the Faraway,’ the clay tablet replied.

‘Who is your Faraway?’

‘Take me out of there, and let me be read, then you and everyone else will find out the name of the true Faraway!’

the clay tablet replied.

‘If I took you out, how can I read you, or let the story flow?’ I asked.

‘Anyone rubs me as they mutter these words – Ma Nansu Ina Bara Ak Zu En Elenu Sunn Su Ud Ussu – can make my storyteller - Oannes - tell the true tale!’ the tablet replied; and the face of my father, Al-Urbee, lit up inside my head.

‘You have a storyteller?’ I asked.

‘Of course, every story has its own storyteller. My storyteller, the most reliable narrator is Mr Oannes,’ the clay tablet replied.

The golden tablet repeated the strange words to me over and over again until I felt drowsy, and before I knew it, I fell asleep. In my sleep, I had a dream, the dream moved deeper inside another dream, and the third one opened another unfathomable one. I felt as if I was spinning deeply round and round in an endless spiral of dreams that kept twirling deeper and deeper. Yet, I kept coming back to the very first dream.

In the very first dream, I pulled the clay tablet off the sand, and it landed softly on my right palm.

It was a golden oblong clay tablet. One side has the ureburus snake that bites its own tail, not in a circular way, rather in a shape that recalls the symbol of the number (8) lying down horizontally ∞. On top of this side too, the shape of a key, etched horizontally, while the other side, a table of three columns and six rows – 18 cells in total.

The summit of the 18 cells are eight round signs – three signs on top, under which are another three signs, and below those, only two signs. The contents of all eight cells seem to have been etched with those strange symbols, possibly cuneiform.

The contents could have been digits or letters.

The other 10 cells below the top eight are square cells, and they are partly defaced. A pair of serpents entwined around each other making a big circle that runs around the entire side of the tablet as eight vipers lay underneath the table.

When I heard the hubbub of the schoolboys running around, I jotted the strange words on the back of one of my books, slid the clay tablet into the inner pocket of my jacket and joined the rest.

When I arrived home, I hid the clay tablet under my bed without telling anyone about it. But I did not forget about the tablet’s promise of telling the true tale.

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Ishtar has taken her crown off at the first gate of the Underworld, as Venus has moved away from Earth to the far end of the sun.

Our big house, with its rectangular clay Sargon-style courtyard, around which the many clay rooms were arranged, was at the far side of the round town of boredom, the town where the first prophets told their first stories, probably relying on clay tablets.

The inhabitants of the town of boredom are mere homofabians who are the offspring of the homozabians of Ur, in their half-real, half-fictional entity. The reason for this duality is their obsession with the past and with the continuous storytelling. The small markets of the town of boredom were always busy with their daily trade of selling clay tablets which supposedly had been found in the ruins of the town, holding secrets and clues from its past, the city of Ur.

Little boys, carrying small and fairly large clay tablets and chasing foreigners, whose sole interest was to stumble on the find of their life in one of these clay tablets, was the everyday scene in town. Every family in town has its own family clay tablet that tells the story of the family since the Faraway⁵, like a family tree, foreign clay-tablet collectors come and go. There are camps set up in the outskirts of the town or deep in the desert for those who come to exchange information about their tablets, or seek out information about a certain tablet and tell each other stories out of their finds, such as the famous Uanna Camp.

My father, Al-Urbee, worked as a storyteller for some time, but when people gave up reading and opted for watching television, he gave up his work and opened a clay-tablet shop in town. I helped; whether in the shop or in searching for new clay tablets deep in the desert around the ruins of the city of Ur, the town of boredom now. My father set up a weekly routine on Tuesdays, when he would invite his friends for supper and a story. He would tell us all about one of his new finds from the Sumerian clay tablets that he had discovered a few days earlier. I decided to give the tablet to my father on my ninth birthday in a few days to come.

The Sad-damned ruler of the country enacted a new law which ruled that when every boy in town reaches his ninth, he should be taken by the men-with-moustache to join the training camps to become a soldier ready to die for the Sad-damned potentate.

My parents, and I of course, were dreading that day. My father tried to forge my age one or two years younger, just to avoid that day a little, but he failed.

On the eve of my birthday, none of the three of us could sleep that night due to the apprehension of the visit of the men-with-moustache in the morning.

It had been raining all night. At dawn, I decided to give my father the clay tablet that I had found. But I did not want my mother to know about it. So when she fell asleep for an hour, I asked my father to come into the kitchen.

Through the window, we both watched the rainbow.

‘Dad, how do rainbows form?’ I asked my father, Al-Urbee.

‘A rainbow is an optical phenomenon, son, which involves three processes: reflection, dispersion, and refraction,’ my father said.

‘Reflection happens when water droplets act like little mirrors. When a ray of sunlight strikes one of these tiny spheres of water, most of the light bounces off its rear wall and is reflected back. During rain, the air is full of water droplets acting together like a reflective curtain made of millions of minuscule mirrors casting the sunlight back at you,’ he added.

‘OK, Dad. But sunlight is white – so if the water droplets reflect the sunlight, how does the rainbow get its colours?’ I asked.

‘This is where the dispersion comes into play. You see, Shahid, light consists of all visible colours. As soon as a ray of sunlight enters a water droplet, it is split up into its components, causing its colours to fan out and become visible as a spectrum of colours,’ Father replied.

‘But why do the little colours, Daddy, bend?’ I asked.

‘When light leaves the water droplet, its direction is also changed slightly in the third process of refraction.

Each colour is refracted in a different direction, creating the impression of a fan of seven colours, on top red, then orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet,’ Father answered.

‘Dad, some kids say the rainbow has seven colours, but the teacher said they really have eight colours and even more. So which is right?’ I asked.

‘They are both right, I suppose. You see, son, colour is a personal experience, it depends on the looker and his or her eyes, position of sight and so on. For some it is seven and for others it is eight colours,’ my father replied.

After about a minute of silence as my father was still staring at the fading rainbow, he suddenly said absentmindedly,

‘There’s a rainbow always after the rain!’

‘What is that, Dad?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it’s an old saying, son. It is a sign of hope. In the Bible, you know after the great flood; the rainbow came out to Noah to reassure him it was a sign for the end of rain, and that it was time for him and his family in the Ark to come out,’ Al-Urbee added.

‘But mother never mentioned a rainbow when she told me the story of the flood, Father!’ I said.

‘The version of the story in the Quran, son, does not have a rainbow in it,’ Father replied.

When the last drops of rain stopped, and the sun slid off the horizon, we both went into the small garden that my father had cultivated at the back of our house.

My father stared at a spot in the garden and sighed. I asked why he sighed.

‘This is the spot where your mother tried to plant a shrub in your name the day you were born. But no matter how many times she tried, the shrub died, leaving a dry circle of solid earth instead,’ Father replied.

‘Maybe it wasn’t meant, Dad!’ I said.

I pulled the clay tablet out of my pocket. The moment I put it next to my supposed plant, a snake jumped at the clay tablet; my father and I stayed away out of fear.

My dad and I were cowering in front of a rampant serpent that was whistling and hissing at us as it slithered towards the tablet. When Dad hit the serpent with a stone, it stood up on its tail puffing at him in an outlandish power. He got scared, but watching my fear in my eyes, gave him the strength to charge at the serpent hissing and whistling harder than the snake. The snake turned to the golden tablet and puffed its trunk to almost twice its size, and then it started whistling in a most shrilling sound that made me put my hands on my ears, shaking. The snake then started sucking the contents of the tablet that began to burn like an iron tablet in an oven.

The clay tablet then was being pulled up by an invisible power, and it started sloughing its contents off in a dancing ensemble of colours that moved from the tablet and right into the mouth of the snake. Suddenly, everything became calm, and the tablet fell on the ground, colourless. The snake slithered away. I touched the tablet that had about eight holes, with the signs gone. I got scorched, so I let it go. My father hugged me, and then after the clay tablet cooled down, I picked it up and handed it over to my dad.

‘There you go, Dad, this was meant to be my present to you on my birthday before they take me,’ I said.

‘O dear son, they will come and take you any minute now, and I cannot do anything,’ my father said.

‘It doesn’t matter, Dad; I won’t be alone, hundreds of boys my age will be with me,’ I said, and then I added,

‘Dad, this tablet…erm…believe me, talked to me and promised me to tell the true story of the Faraway. It had these eight strange round signs, probably Sumerian writing. But the horrible snake has taken them as you saw.’

‘True! That was strange, why would a snake attack us and empty the clay tablet of its contents?’ Father wondered.

‘That is for you to find out, Dad! As for the true tale, wait for the right time, rub the tablet, and say these Sumerian words Ma Nansu Ina Bara Ak Zu En Elenu Sunn Su Ud Ussu!’ I said, and handed him a piece of paper where I scribbled the Sumerian words.

‘You scare me son, you talk as if something is going to happen to you,’ my father, Al-Urbee, said.

‘Dad, no one knows what happens next!’ I said.

‘But we both saw, son, how the strange serpent sucked away something off the tablet, probably rendering it worthless!’ my father said.

‘Father, the weird way in which I found this tablet must mean something to us, to my life in particular. Just keep it, look after it as if it is part of me, and maybe the future will tell what its significance is!’ I said.

‘Where did you find it?’ my father asked.

‘On my last school trip to the ruins of Ur,’ I replied.

‘Dad, what is the Faraway?’ I asked.

‘Erm…he is a character in clay tablets as well as in religious books. No one can tell for sure if he was ever a real character or not,’ Father replied with a sigh.

The sun winged a little more in the sky, my mother woke up and prepared our breakfast, and then she brought the birthday cake.

An hour later, the men-with-moustache came and took me away.

This is my last telling of this story. I trust the clay tablet will keep its word and tell the rest of the story.

I only wish that it would let my father, Al-Urbee, the storyteller by profession, tell it.

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Ishtar has only just given up her eight-pointed star which adorned her neck as she is coming down through the second gate of the Underworld.

I am the clay tablet that promised Shahid to tell the true tale of the Faraway. In other words, to tell the rest of Shahid’s story. Now that he is out of the story, it is my duty to tell the rest of his story through my storyteller Oannes.

As old clay tablets carry stories on their shoulders for years hoping that one day they would be read, some tablets are unlucky; they would not be read for a long time, maybe never. Those stories get rotten and fade away.

Some clay tablets have parts of their stories deleted by the erosion of time. Some break into pieces, and their broken parts leave the mother tablet broken-hearted and incomplete.

Some of the clay tablets are brutally misinterpreted to other languages in such a cruel way as to totally confuse the main themes of the story that the unfortunate clay tablet happens to carry on its skin…such as the issues of swinging between the myth and the truth of creation, whether the story promotes one God or many gods, whether the characters were created by the Abrahamic God or by Enki, as well as the flood dilemma. Who plagiarised from whom? Noah or Ziusudra! Or, to put it mildly, which Faraway is the true one? Therefore, I have no say in what I carry. It is the duty of my storyteller Oannes to do the job.

Hence, I cannot guarantee sticking to the very same original names of the characters with the way the contents of clay tablets have been lost in translation. I only hope that Shahid’s name would be a synonym of his or a homonym at best. Yet, I will try to stick to the gist of the story that has been etched on my back by a reed pen by some author whom I have no knowledge of.

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The rest of Shahid’s story;

Venus has waned further away from Earth towards the sun, stripping into her second phase.

8 June 2004, Tuesday.

The transit of Venus has just occurred at 8: 19: 44.

This date was the 160th day of the year 2004 in the Gregorian calendar. There were 206 days remaining until the end of the year.

That one year…in the near past…in this same town of boredom, while the one million barefoot and hungry soldiers were filling the belt of trenches around the town defending the nation, every other able hand was digging the outskirts of town in search for the clay tablet of rejuvenation to cure the ailing Sad-damned ruler and lessen his boredom.

While all other fabian characters were living in a dull tiresome life, their Sad-damned was the most bored and boring character in town. As the clay tablets piled up, the dead bodies of soldiers piled up too. While the outside war was creeping, an inner war of clay tablets was milling the heart of the besieged town.

Most of the families were trying to find ways and means of recovering the bodies of their sons and arranging their decent burials. The orders of the Sad-damned were to stigmatise the boys who did not die in either war, the outer or the inner, as cowards, and so exclude them from burial.

Lucky were those families whose boys died either on the front or in the frantic campaigns of digging for clay tablets. They could be buried as martyrs according to the traditions in the holy shrine of the Faraway through the Potentate’s permission and his own transport and secured off-desert routes to the Faraway.

Those who lived in the town of boredom, separated from the shrine of the Faraway by sand, enemy soldiers and the taboo of the Sad-damned on their non-hero son were resigned to burying their sons secretly in their gardens. Those brands of parents would buy the corpse on the black market if they could afford the price.

A host of undercover agents thrived to mediate between the bereaved and the men-with-moustache to sell the wanted bodies. The stench of rotten bodies inside plywood boxes cluttering the streets muffled up the town in an atmosphere appropriate only to the Netherworld. Every now and then, masked dustmen would come in a large tipper to collect the disowned coffins and tip them into huge crates from which clay tablets had been dug up and charge the families for the service. As clay tablets come out, fabian bodies take their place under the earth.

The desert sat heavily between the town of boredom and the shrine of the Faraway. The stories about passing through that snaky desert were as horrible as those of the two wars. Almost none of the fabians who decided to bury their stigmatised sons in the Faraway shrine and who set off on illegal secret journeys towards the shrine of the Faraway had ever come back to tell the tale.

The dream of every fabian is to become a homofabian. The homofabians allegedly are the ancestors of the homozabians, known for their black-white pain and pleasure.

So, the fabians’ empty life that was stripped of pain and pleasure created its own suffering: boredom, and hollow routine life, with every story they tell, their life gets more tedious and stale as ever. Hence, the motto of the town:

I am bored, therefore I am.

The big house sat, like an old bereaved woman, on its own, beyond the railway with its grimed by sand clay walls far away from the river. It was wide open to the onslaughts of the desert. The few muddy streets would get roasted and the gusts of sand would sweep trodden, left-over clay tablets that were unsold to the foreigners off those streets together with the dead sunflowers. The sun went down behind the contours of town after half a day’s long struggle with the sand. It lost its red colour and turned sandy at the level of the horizon. The battle would go on the following day.

On that one hot Tuesday evening of June, I, Al-Urbaidee, am sitting with my wife and my few male friends whom I invite every Tuesday for supper and a story in the Sargon-style yard of our house. After supper, I tell one of my stories that I pick up from the clay tablets I find. I am sitting on the reed mat surrounded by the half circle of my listeners; the clay tablet was resting inside the pocket of my baggy robe. The big box of water and ice sat in the middle of the half circle surrounded by two halves of a large watermelon.

The holy book, the Quran, was set on a shelf, fixed to the wall on my left, and wrapped up in a green cloth. A black tall snake slithered smoothly from behind the small pile of prayer clay tablets sat at the dark corner of the yard. My wife Hoot leapt out like a legendary heroine, a pillow in her left hand and her heavy sandal in her right. We all shrank away, mainly from the whistling of the hissing snake.

‘Dear