Nobody, least of all the intruders, saw any point in contradicting him. The U.S. Army was groveling to get the cooperation of the region’s assorted bandetti and to press swag on anybody who didn’t shoot at them and whose fealty they could buy. It took Saeed about ten minutes to realize that by declaring his rebelliousness he could benefit from American perks and porkbarrel diplomacy. He became an eager recipient of anything they offered—handouts now, electricity later. He died before the grid’s installation, leaving his statue to stare sightlessly from the square with a mien of silent, cunning, stationary greed. There is a hint of wiliness on the face of his son, who stands next to him, but Abdul’s is a magnetic face, holding the symmetry and the luster of an iron door-knocker, the handsome features attesting to his Arabpersian roots. His sculpted body seems to have less poise and assurance, perhaps, than he actually possesses. (Or had the sculptor fathomed something I didn’t?) The indecipherable eyes (seeing what new reform, what next outrageous improvement?) stare into my cell window with imperial aloofness and no understanding whatever.

Not like the eyes of General Kalid Qazwini at the right of the young overlord. Qazwini’s ashy eyes are cold, the eyes of an interstellar hit-beast. He stands like an army with banners…

But wait a minute. Why should I be wasting whatever time I have drawing word-pictures of the notables in Assama’s Parthenon? Hell with them, with all of them—the General and the Reverend Doctor Lipgloss and Shakir bin Zaki, the asshole intellectual, and squashy, pear-shaped Hashim Pachachi, captain of nonexistent industry. Maybe I’ll get around to them—frankly, I doubt it. In the meantime…

Look out! Here comes the sun! It does not rise or simply appear in Coproliabad. White-hot and unruly, it slams down like a sledge on an anvil and bounces off your skull with such force that dust devils whirl around the streets and the very air goes tremulous, and things you’d swear were immobile begin to dance behind a curtain of Vaseline—the schizoid buildings, the spavined tower on the right, the statues in the square. Mesmerized by the glinty eye of the sun, they undulate like a company of cobras standing on their tails.

My stomach rumbles, not in sympathy with the now distant thunder, but in protest of last night’s dinner: fish rot and scorpion salad, the jail’s blue-plate special. I hardly have the strength to wave at a buzzing fly. Soon, I console myself, it will be over. My eyes stray to that tower on my right.

It has a sort of sinister gaiety, rising like a vast untidy beehive, and surrounded at its base by bamboo stakes, repetitive as files on parade, their butts driven into the earth, their razor-sharp spikes pointing to the belvedere five stories above.