1 «It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and the storyteller» [EP 246].

2 «Gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night» [EP 7].

3 «There is also the —, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it» [EP 16].

4 «Maps diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books» [EP 96].

5 Marlene Goldman mentionne également le lien entre craie et jeu de pouvoir dans «War and the Game of Representation», Re-Constructing the Fragments of Michael Ondaatje’s Works, textes rassemblés par Jean-Michel Lacroix (Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999) p. 182-248.

6 «The successful defusing of a bomb ended novels» [EP105].

7 «And something this evening has brought the stone out of the water and allowed it to move back within the air towards the hill town in Italy» [EP 300].

8 «Where does he sit as he thinks of her? These years later. A stone of history skipping over the water, bouncing up so she and he have aged before it touches the surface again and sinks»[EP 299].

9 «I grew up with traditions from my country, but later more often, from your country. Your fragile White island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You stood for precise behaviour. (...) Indian soldiers wasted their lives as heroes so they could be pukkah» [EP 283].

10 «And this is the world of nomads in any case, an apocryphal story. A mind travelling east and west in the disguise of sandstorms» [EP 148].

11 «But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through (...). When she begins a book she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards. Parma and Paris and India spread their carpets» [EP 93].

12 «Trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds» [EP 118].

13 «A place of pockets. The trompe l’œil of time and water» [EP 259].

14 «A piece of cloth carried by winds», «a hundred shifting names» [EP138].

15 «Sporadic appearances and disappearances, like legends and rumours through history» [EP141].

16 «A half invented world of the desert» [EP150].

17 «A capsule from the past» [EP 33], «each in his own sphere of memory and solitude» [EP 47].

18 «‘This history of mine,’ Herodotus says, ‘has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ What you find in him are culs-de-sacs within the sweep of history – how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love ...» [EP 119].

19 «A scurry in the ceiling like a mouse», «a scurry in her mind like a mouse in the ceiling» [EP 8, 7, 30].

20 Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, 35.

21 «Only desire makes the story errant, flickering like a compass needle» [EP 248].

22 «There are stories the man recites quietly in the room which slip from level to level like a hawk» [EP 4].

23 Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, 33.

24 «He goes up and down now like a well bucket» [EP 175].

25 «The rumour of wells. In the palace of winds» [EP 261].

26 «For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places» [EP 21, 150].

27 «Antiphonal dance» [EP 21], «music antiphonal, a press of chords» [EP 64].

28 Ce texte a en partie fait l’objet d’une communication à l’Université de Reims lors du colloque sur «Rythmes» en mars 2004.

29 «The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East» [EP 139].

30 «This country – had I charted it and turned it into a place of war?» [EP 261].

31 «The map of the story» [EP 94].

32 «We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I die. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map (...) All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps» [EP 261.

33 «When I turned her around, her whole body was covered in bright pigment. Herbs and stones and light and the ash of acacia to make her eternal. The body pressed against sacred colour. Only the eye blue removed, made anonymous, a naked map where nothing is depicted, no signature of lake, no dark cluster of mountain as there is north of the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti, no lime-green fan where the Nile rivers enter the open palm of Alexandria, the edge of Africa» [EP 261].

34 «The deserts of Libya. Remove politics and it is the loveliest phrase I know. Libya. A sexual, drawn-out word, a coaxed well» [EP 257].

35 «When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently» [EP 259].

36 Selon Théodore Monod dans Méharées, la mer envahit la région au début de l’ère primaire, puis au ternaire, pour se recouvrir d’eau douce au quaternaire, 202.

37 «Water is the exile» [EP 19].

38 «L’homme préhistorique a donc connu un Sahara bien différent de l’actuel; un Sahara des paysans, des pasteurs, et des pêcheurs néolithiques a précédé celui des cavaliers et des méharistes libyens, ancêtres de nomades berbères d’aujourd’hui, un Sahara lacustre» Théodore Monod, Méharées, 86.

39 «We sailed into the past» [EP 142].

40 «The gale swept the tents from their moorings and we rolled with them, taking in sand like a sinking boat takes in water» [EP 137].

41 «I have always had information like a sea in me» [EP 18]: « je suis un océan de savoir».

42 «the penis sleeping like a sea horse» [EP 4].

43 «A pool for her» [EP 41], «an ebony pool» [EP 48].

44 «She wished for a river they could swim in» [EP 129].

45 «In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover’s name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence» [EP 141].

46 «A man in the desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water» [EP 155].

47 «Am I just a book? Something to be read...» [EP 253].

48 «I wondered whether civilisation is indeed, as we think it in Europe, a resistless power sweeping forward and carrying upon its crest those who are apt to profit by its advance; or whether it is not rather a tide that ebbs and flows, and in its ceaseless turn and return touches ever at the flood the self-same place upon the shore» [DS 255].

49 Fernand Braudel, Écrits sur l’histoire (Paris : Flamarrion, 1969) 11-12.

50 «The nunneries and churches that were turned briefly into hospitals are solitary (...) They hold the remnants of war societies, small moraines left by a vast glacier» [Ep 92].