the individual is the most important value. All religions peacefully coexist and Halba openly encourages freedom of inquiry. The Halbans are also aggressive promoters of their philosophy of life in other nations; preparations are underway as Qindil arrives for a war with neighboring Aman. There, Qindil meets and marries Samia, an intellectual Muslim pediatrician in Halba's hospital. Qindil reunites with Arousa, who thought he was lost and had since married a Buddhist man. With Samia's reluctant approval, Qindil decides to continue his journey before war makes such travel impossible. In the land of Aman, justice is held as the most important value. To maintain order, he leaves just as Aman and Halba prepare to fight. His next stop, the land of Ghuroub, finds Qindil questioned to the depths of his being. Does he earnestly desire to go to Gebel, and why? Qindil states as he has many times before that he seeks to learn Gebel's secret of perfection in life and share it with the people of his homeland. He and the other seekers of Gebel are driven from Ghuroub by an invading army from Aman, and after months of travel, they sight Gebel itself from a mountain peak. As Qindil descends to continue his journey, the story ends leaving the reader to surmise whether or not he reached the city. Setting The setting of the story is not clearly spatial or temporal; the journey moves through a space that can represent the historical Middle East, an analogical space of different periods of history or a simply imaginary space. It can be viewed as some combination of these spaces. The story may be allegorical for the rise of Human Civilization. Qindil starts his adventure from his homeland, the Dar al-Islam, which practices traditional, familiar Islamic values but imperfectly, and with a great deal of corruption. When Qindil sets out, the first land he visits is the Land of Mashriq. Mashriq is the land of the sunrise, and may represent early civilization; particularly that of pre-Islamic Arabia. Mashriq employs a very basic religion based on worship of the moon, and incorporates primal, tribal, values representative of early human development. Haira may thus represent the rise of human civilization and the chaos that accompanied it. Haira means “confusion” in Arabic and features the rule of a divine king and frequent wars. Its values seem to reflect those of absolutism; though without any