“...he was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completedtheir higher studies in the West and returned to their country toapply what they had learned there—lock, stock, and barrel—withinEgyptian academia. For people like them, “progress” and “the West”were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positiveand negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for thegreat Western values—democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, andequality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation’sheritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they consideredshackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it wasour duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved.”

“West had woken up something inside of me. I never felt more alive than I did when I was with West. West pushed me to be more. More human and yet more cybernetic at the same time. West could go anywhere with me. He could nearly match me step for step on scouting duties, could hunt with me. But I still didnt fully trust him. West kept too many secrets, had lied to me too many times. And he almost seemed to like to make me angry.”

“The forest has been growing for hundreds of years. Each time a child is born, a tree is planted. You could see from his tree how old a person was. The tall and thick tree trunks, which gave the most shade, belonged to people who had already returned to the spirit world. But the trees of the living and the dead stood in the same grove, sought their nourishment from the same soil and the same rain. They stood there waiting for the children that were not yet born, the trees that had not yet been planted. In that way the forest would grow, and the age of the village would be visible for all time. No one could tell from a tree whether someone was dead, only that he had been born.”

“Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about. They all knew that feeling and at the same time were afraid of knowing it; they turned their heads away from fear of seeing the border and stumbling (lured by vertigo as by an abyss) across it to the other side, where the language of their tortured people make a noise as trivial as the twittering of birds.”

“And while they were in the same place, there came a great mist about them and a darkness, so that they could not know what way they were going, and they heard the noise of a rider coming towards them. 'It would be a great grief to us,' said Conn, 'to be brought away into a strange country.”

“So perished the hope founded on the wonderful being who thus ceased to be. In the study room to which he was never to return, the water buttercups he had brought from the country were still fresh.”