Ilhem

"Tonight was unique. Tonight he had not been to sleep at all, and it was ten.

Seven o'clock was familiar and domesticated. [...] Eight was unusual, and associated with trouble : having been punished, or being sick. Nine was the wild outpost of an unknown continent. Ten was the mountains of the moon, the burial-place of the elephants : white on the map."

"It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous, beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity, the rest always to be alien, he to be I."