She feels sad that the light has gone; she thinks of darkness as one of those bad times that only being old enough can get you through, with a measur… - Shulamith Hareven

reference to a Georgis Seferis poem, in the essay "On Being a Levantine"

The Hittite woman would not give up. Each time Salu came, she clutched desperately at the threads of his life as if at a garment she could pull him by. (p 171)

An immense freedom, vast beyond human measure, hung over everything. The days had no rules and the laws of nature themselves seemed suspended. There was no longer any need to rise for work in the morning. There were no masters and no slaves. There was only the desert, which held no threat, and the gullies among the rocks. And the fresh, boundless mornings with the thinnest of mists rising from the thorn trees and from the flowering star thistles in the plain. The silence was palpable. There was no end of sky. (p 16)