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The arabian nightmare by robert irwin5/21/2023 ![]() Surely the Father of Cats - at the Invisible College of Sleep layers below the streets - knows something about the Arabian Nightmare but, on the other hand, the Arabian Nightmare, and possibly the whole of Cairo's sick dreamlife, might be a projection of the Father of Cat's diseased mind. He meets Dirty Yoll the Storyteller, who has reconstructed Balian's dreamlife and is narrating it to an enthralled crowd or perhaps Balian has merely dreamt that he met Dirty Yoll narrating to a dreamt crowd. Balian's dreams have verisimilitude, and he dreams dreams within dreams, so it's hard to say where his waking life ends and his sleep begins, or where one dream interconnects with the next. Once in Cairo, Balian falls prey to an exotic dream illness, the Arabian Nightmare, a nocturnal disease that consumes minds in ever-intensifying fits of delusion. ![]() Catherine, actually a spy in French pay hired to report on the shifting fortunes of the Mameluke dynasty. Balian of Norwich travels through Egypt, apparently as a pilgrim en route to the shrine of St. ![]() ![]() Labyrinthine, hugely digressive, but curiously engaging arabesque set in 15th-century Cairo, originally published in England in 1983. ![]()
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