“It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinctly Asiatic: if a camel caravan could somehow transport Baikal across Siberia to Europe, and curious buyers unwrapped it in a marketplace, none would mistake it for a lake from around there.”

“Well I come from a land,from a far away place, where the caravan camels roam.They will cut of your ear if they don't like your face, it's babaric, but hey,it's home.”

“He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the New York blackout of 1977, and more recently, feasted on Vegas showgirls in the Dean Martin suite at the Bellagio. He has watched Hindu abstainers wash away their sins in the Ganges, danced a midnight tango on a boulevard in Buenos Aires, and bitten into a faux geisha under the shade of a shogun pavilion in Kyoto.”

“Just like a caravan of camels walking in the desert, be durable against the adversities of life and walk with decisive steps.”

“Is he really so much like the monster James tracked across Siberia?"Her eyes popped wide open, and then began flickering wildly from Edward to Seth to me, around and around."Not the same?" she snarled in her little girl's soprano. "Impossible!”

“After a few minutes Jim was forced to admit that he could recognize none of the constellations. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. For all their movements, the Japanese aircraft were its only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land.”