• 4 •
Those of us confined in the tunnels under Majd Square and other smaller vaults in the vicinity – I mean those classed weak and vulnerable in a city about to be trampled by war – did not know what had happened or how. The total chaos, whose emanations we felt before it reached us – was it real, or just a claustrophobic dream trapped in the imagination of Sur’s inhabitants since they learned the city was the target of evil forces?
We really were confined and, for days on end, had sunlight only as a mirage filtering through small ventilation holes. We cooked whatever simple foul-tasting food we could manage, ate meagre amounts or not at all, and drank salty water mixed with mud because the good wells were outside the city, where nothing but evil whispers lay.
We flirted a lot with ho
