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the metal came down like rain—
ting, ting, ting, ting
—for a long time. Some trees and huts were on fire when we came running back to find our mothers and grandparents.”
    I noticed how loud the boys were talking, and then I realized they were not hearing well. I remembered how the RPGs had damaged my own hearing for a long time when I was a little boy caught in an attack.
    Seven people were dead, but the toll could have been much worse if not for the vigilance of the women. It could have been much worse if helicopter gunships had chased down the children and women, as happened so many other places. It could have been worse if the attack had been followed by the armed horsemen of the Janjaweed and the government’s own troops, who would have raped every girl and woman and then shot everyone they could find. This had not happened yet to this village, but they understood it was yet to come.
    Many dead animals still needed to be buried or taken away. I tended to some of this, helping wherever I could.
    The smell of the chemical was still heavy on the village. It made everyone, especially the children, suffer diarrhea and vomiting for several days. Many had difficulty breathing,particularly the very young and old. The birds who drank from the water points began to die. Fifty or more camels and other animals who had trusted the water too soon lay dead at the wells.
    Junked appliances and other scrap metal had been packed around the huge bombs dropped by the Sudanese government, creating a million flying daggers with each explosion. I had heard that this was happening, but did not believe it until I saw the pieces of junk stuck in the trunks of trees. Most of those killed by the bombs were buried in several pieces.
    The women, normally dressed in bright colors or in the white robes of mourning, were now all in dark browns to make themselves less visible in the desert. They had poured sand in their hair, which is a custom of grieving for the dead, and they began to look like the earth itself. The children were in the darkest colors their mothers could find for them. All the bright color of the village, except a sad sprinkling of dead songbirds, was now gone.
    After the second day I told Halima that it was time for me to go find our parents and the others of our family in the home village. We said goodbye very warmly, because we well knew the trouble coming.

6.
The End of the World
    There is a small town within a few hours’ walk of my home village. Like most towns in the middle of an area of villages, it has a marketplace and a boys’ school and a girls’ school, all with mud-brick buildings.
    As we approached the town in the Land Cruiser, we moved from the flat desert into a wadi between small mountains. We drove along the sand of the dry riverbed. Up ahead would be, in normal times, green trees, the sound of birds, and the smell of cooking. Boys and girls would be tending animals at the water points along the sandy bottom. All that was different now. Many of the trees were now burned and the water points were blackened and cratered. There were very few birds.
    The children of the village looked at us seriously instead of running along beside us. Their animals were nowhere to be seen. Some burned huts were still smoking.
    Each family compound has a kitchen hut that usually includes three or four red clay vessels inside, called
nunus
, full of millet. These are sometimes much bigger than you can reach around, and can be fairly squat or as tall as a man. These silos can keep millet for ten or fifteen years and provide some insurance for hard times. From the burned huts, the smoke from these vessels layered the village with a smell of burned cooking, plus the burnt-hair smell of smoldering blankets and mattresses. There was also the smell of the dead, since not every animal had been buried yet.
    I went first to the sheikh’s huts: I knew him well and so could get the best information there. His huts were partially burned; no