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.
