One Hundred Years of Solitude

spread over the doors were
splotched with mold, the
counters undermined by
termites, the walls eaten away
by dampness, but the Arabs
of the third generation were
sitting in the same place and
in the same position as their
fathers and grandfathers,
taciturn, dauntless,
invulnerable to time and
disaster, as alive or as dead as
they had been after the
insomnia plague and Colonel