From "The Bone Seekers"

. . . The summer was at its days of highest tension. It seemed that the sun had come a little bit closer to the earth in order to touch the grass and scorch it. The heat announced itself in the morning with a vast halo in the east. Then the cauldron of the sky began to boil slowly. This bone-white heat strangled the cicadas and shook the high stature of the ash trees. The elderly stuck like snails to the walls of the mosque, collecting a brief freshness buried in the heart of the stone or roughcast cement. The large necklines of their gondouras opened onto their torsos, dry and bushy. They breathed with difficulty, like hens oppressed by the absence of air. Of course one would have been more inspired to stay at home, to indulge in a siesta until the evening. But people had so long been chased from the outdoors by the occupation army, they had seen their horizons shrink so much during the years of war that they preferred to be there, offered to the scalding breath of the heat wave, to grasp that which the war had so long deprived them of. They wanted to claim once again, in filling their eyes, hands and lungs, the cherished landscapes and sensations that had been denied them in their youth. To bite, with all their teeth and all their heart, into the flickering blue of the sky, the glimmer of sinuous rivers, the scorching of the summer grass, the green roughness of the trees, and the sticky heat of their sap. . . .

Translated from the French
by Michael A. Toler