Like most of her fellow Carthaginians, when the first of the frozen white crystals had fallen on their colony, Arishat had thought them an ominous omen. And, in a sense, they were, for it was not long after when the sickness first attacked her and her daughter.

Now that a week had passed since her husband had given them the new medicine he had obtained, she did not dread to look upon the snow outside their apartment anymore. Nor longer did she still think of it as “the white crystals of death...