In the summer of 1990, we had toured Iraq, while the country had planned an attack on Kuwait. The memories still tease me in snatching glimpses. The scorching heat of the desert and the chilling cool inside the ziggurat tombs. The stark nakedness of the golden sands and the green of the hills in the north. The smiling faces of the beautiful Iraqi people and the lines of armoured tanks that we had spotted near Basra. The golden mosque and ruins of the Mesopotamian civilization. A child then, I had eagerly looked forward to Babylon, made popular by Boney M’s song. As we had strolled around the streets of Babylon, all we had seen were bare walls. Recently restored, the red of new bricks hurt the eyes. The heat of the summer desert had burned our skins as we had walked, wallowing in the history that was only in our minds. I wonder if any of it remains. The new walls of then must be rotting in the pool of rubble and ruins now. Nothing lasts forever. All things tangible and most things intangible disappear into oblivion, into time and the future. All that remains are legends, spoken about in the dark of the night. And as the script of hieroglyphics runs in the black of my mind like a series of binary code, a voice speaks in sotto voce into my ears. Stories to be passed on to the generations that will come. The story of the new red walls of Babylon. The story of the deserts of Iraq. And the story of its destruction.