How nice it would be, he told himself, for a man to live far from the realm of his own consciousness. Then the purging statute was announced. He read it with a frenzied attentiveness and bitter despair: the destruction threatening the parties and leaders would destroy him as well: the roots that kept him fixed to the ground would be torn up one by one. What strange things were happening! Here was his friend Ibrahim Khairat, a lawyer and ex-member of Parliament, writing enthusiastically about the revolution in more than one newspaper, as though he were one of the officers himself! Attacking the parties—his own among them, of course—and the past era as though he himself had never been a part of it. Abbas Sadiq, calm and peaceful, a man who had not taken any notice of the events, had found a shield to protect him and had even continued his ambitious quest for promotion with greater hopes than he’d had before. Only Samir Abd al-Baqi, a thin, slender young man with a yellowish complexion and a dreamy look in his green eyes, had suffered the same fate as Isa and shared his own anxious fears. In him Isa found some consolation. “What will happen to us, do you think?” he asked.

“Dismissal is the least we can expect,” Samir replied with a pallid smile.

“What should we do?” he asked with a dry throat.

“A worthless salary. But we might find a job with a company.”

“I wonder if that could be arranged for us. Could we find the courage to start at the very beginning all over again?”

His friend shook his head. There were even a few gray hairs among the black.

“Maybe events will prove us wrong,” Isa muttered spiritlessly.

Complaints piled up in the office of the Purge Committee like so much refuse. Isa gathered that most of them were aimed at him. This did not surprise him, however, in view of the nature of the situation. Of the people who now held senior positions in the ministry, more were his enemies than were his friends. To those he could add the spiteful and the jealous as well as others who would volunteer for any opportunity to inflict some damage. Some of these people defied him openly in the ministry for no particular reason and made sarcastic remarks about him to his face. Even a few of his subordinates considered themselves permitted to look on him with contempt. All this turned the ministry into a corner of hell itself.