A great bolt of fire tears a white tunnel through the sky and turns the square outside my window a sullen violet-red. The thunder explodes and the square reappears, like the afterimage on a defective retina, flat, blank, and grayish. The shit-buildings across the street take shape, impossible buildings beyond the madness of Maurits Escher, separated from my jail by a wide brown dappled river.

The rain falls, the wind shrills, rising, fading, and, in fifteen minutes, dies. The brown river subsides, and the painted statues in the square are fresh and gaudy after their bath. They are carved, of course, of mud and shit, but, I must say, skillfully. Slim, elongated figures with a hint of caricature, the illustrated index of Who’s Who in Assama.

Just as some books are best read, I’ve been told, by candlelight, so Copro-liabad’s gallery of the great is best viewed at dawn, after the rain. In less than an hour its paint will be cracked and cobwebbed by the sun, and our newly minted sheikh and the woman we both loved, his ministers and his General, all will be afflicted by a new day’s scruffy assortment of botanical growths, more distorting than leprosy. But now they are astonishing as they stand uncertainly, that is, lifelike, with an abstracted air, solitary ghosts and strangers to each other, rich in irony as if they were not statues at all but flesh and blood transfixed into stillness by some capricious spell.

The young sheikh, Abdul al Sadr, is something of a jumped-up tribal chief who inherited the hefty title from his father, Saeed, a shrewd but otherwise ungifted warlord. When the Americans arrived in 2003, they paid little attention to him or to his wasteland people in the south. They concentrated their forces in the north, on the opposition and the oil.

Being ignored was an asset the old man made the most of. He lived quite well on a sandy flat above the muddy Shatt El Arab, at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Switching a few channel lights and buoys, he lured boats to the sandbars on the banks of both rivers. Then, in America’s disregard, Saeed sniffed a prodigious opportunity. He declared Assama a kind of independency within Iraq and installed himself as boss.