Five years Gebrail had hated them. Hated the stone buildings and metaled roads, the iron bridges and glass windows of Shepheard's Hotel which it seemed were only different forms of the dead sand that had taken his home. 'The city,' Gebrail often told his wife, just after admitting he'd come home drunk and just before beginning to yell at his children--the five of them curled blind in the windowless room above the barber like so many puppy-bodies--'the city is only the desert in disguise.