![]() Fortunately, the French administration regularly drops off food rations, which he in turn distributes to local families to keep them nourished. ![]() ![]() Just three days earlier, after the interminably long stretch of blazing heat, the intense snowfall hit out of nowhere without even a light rainfall to announce the transition from one extreme meteorological event to another. In the distance, he makes out the horse’s strained breath in the frigid air as the beast stumbles on uneven stones covered with “a layer of dirty white snow” that has fallen during an unexpected October blizzard (65).Īs Daru grabs a sweater from the schoolroom, he reflects on the previous eight-month drought, which has decimated what few crops could be cultivated in his region’s inhospitable soil and has killed off local livestock, as well as humans. Daru, a French schoolmaster born and raised in a remote, sparsely populated desert region in the Atlas Mountains of French colonial Algeria, glimpses a horseman and a pedestrian laboriously making their way towards his hillside schoolhouse as they traverse the plateau that meets the incline. ![]()
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