~ ~ ~



A sirocco blows in from the moon. Viv hears the mournful songs of the nearby mosques. As the woman with the turquoise hair follows the driver, watched by Ethiopians in the distance, the walls of the passages resonate with distant chants and the thunder of a gathering storm.

To the south, Viv glimpses an ancient underground church carved from rock, bubbling up out of an earth radiant with three thousand millennia, the oldest place that human-time remembers, barely. Around her, she feels the monsoon of the storm above and the Nile-saturated ground below yearn for each other; the woman and driver pass inviolate stone corners still smelling of the mustard gas with which Mussolini’s army massacred a million Ethiopians seventy years ago. The passage is crisscrossed by alleys where people in white gauze float in and out of the shadows.

The trip is so clandestine and mysterious that it can’t help seeming as though Sheba’s mother should be waiting at the end of wherever it leads; but finally Viv stops the driver. “No,” she says, “this isn’t right,” and looks over her shoulder behind her, with no idea where she’s come from.


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