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Faro heard it all—the man shouting, the loud bang that silenced him, and the flames that were freeing her now. BURN, she thought with delight. Let me out! LET ME OUT! She would have screamed it if she could.
was her color, and she was happiest during the hottest part of the day. She looked at the book in her hands and quickly decided to look around her instead. The building she’d left was on fire, a man lying in a growing pool of blood at the burning building’s door. He’d been the director, the head librarian. From
The man had died like this because of his mouth, not because of the manuscripts for which Timbouctou had become famous.
So though books burned, none of the ancient texts were harmed, except for five manuscripts. These had fallen off the wheelbarrow during the first secret nightly rush. Come morning, a young intern unaware of the plan had put them on the nearest shelf; the head librarian was strict and he’d wanted everything in the library quickly tidied up.
“Remember when you thought they’d do better than the government? These Arabs only care about what is theirs. Destroying someone else’s home is enjoyment for them.”
“You should get out of the street,” he said. “The French are coming. It’s not safe!”
The house looked the way he’d left it, no worse, no better.
Issaka lay there staring at the dusty, yellowed, crumbling manuscripts stacked in messy columns all the way to the ceiling. Stacks and stacks of pages covered the wall to his left, from floor to ceiling. His father and his father’s friends, men who had (according to his father) been entrusted with guarding the manuscripts over the last forty years, had been moving the manuscripts gradually, after hearing rumors that al-Qaeda was coming.
These men have a perverted view of Islam. They are fundamentalists. They worship death and destruction. They’ve already taken pickaxes to ancient mausoleums all over the country. They see them as idol worshipping, and they say that the Quran prohibits that; thus they believe they must destroy them. They see the manuscripts as idol worshipping, too.” He paused and looked at the others. “But it is also more than that. They want to erase the history of our people. They want to erase our ancestors. Wipe them all away and replace them with the memory of the Arab. It is a false jihad against the
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They were shooting the ancestors.