Translator of Nightmares

But Hari kept wondering about his own family. He knew where his surviving brothers, his parents and two of his sisters were, but the fate of one sister and her children was unknown amid the hundreds of thousands of villagers who had come under attack.

Little boys he talked to in his older sister's village described how the bombing there had started, how the birds fluttered up from the trees and flew away. "This is the first thing we noticed," one boy told Hari. And then the villagers heard the distant rumble of helicopter gunships.

The villagers swarmed out of their dwellings and ran to refugee camps where flimsy tents flapped in the desert winds. They, too, had migrated from their nests like "birds of passage," Hari writes in the book.

In the past, news of danger or auspicious events traveled as communal code through the roll of distant drums. Hari remembers them. He had heard them echo through the rain from a haven of huts that would have taken three days and three nights to reach by foot.

Now a new code was working its way into Darfurians' instincts for survival. Riding in jeeps, he would lean out to look for telltale trails in the desert sand. Tracks from big tires meant government trucks and death, he wrote. Large numbers of fresh horse tracks meant the Janjaweed and death.

Even the terrain had changed. Trees that once provided shade had gone up in bonfires; wells were cratered and charred. The desert landscape that once was his playground now crackled and crunched with human bones. And the ever-present stench of death made him retch.

He knew how these sights and sounds could sting the souls of hardened journalists, so he never traveled without a bottle of whiskey stashed in his duffel bag to help reporters who went on these harrowing trips. He, too, would down a few shots. "It helped me forget a little, go to bed, if just for three or four hours, to have the strength to get up the next day. I still have to do that sometimes."