‘The sun was scorching and the dust enveloped people and objects in a single halo. But Semereth’s golden words redeemed that miserable scene. He said: “We return from whence we came.”The peace negotiations with the Sanussi Brotherhood, the relocation of military garrisons, the current war on the Austrian front, General Caneva’s pompous ambitions on his arrival here, all that poverty, hunger, chaos, those men in rags, the soldiers … everything appeared to have been thrown upside down, far away, lost – along this road that begins with Him and which takes us back to Him. Standing on the gallows, Semereth almost looked like Jesus on the cross, or Moses holding the tablets of the law. It’s the only way to ever get to know our world, to organise our perceptions and see it for what it is, and it
