The mirage... Then, from far, far down - from the staircase of contaminated layers of compact light, near the ground struck by an intense heat full of tormented anger, and while the mirage's rarefied light rebounded, run through with denser layers - in the heart of those superimposed dazzlements, a sharp, suspended light chose to show an overturned semblance of happy dwellings, surrounded by gardens reflected in a lake of eager, gushing water, and at the top, under a clump of branching palm trees, bunches of yellow dates... The most attractive of illusions and the cruelest of disappointments.
-Giuseppe Ungaretti
