Malta Cities
Borgo (aka Birgu, Vittoriosa) - Borgo Index Entry * Vittoriosa Index Entry
- "Tonight I will go to your little house in Vittoriosa, and before your black eyes break open this small pod of a heart and offer in communion the St.-John's-bread I have cherished like a Eucharist these nineteen years." (p.311-12)
- "When Elena's mother died from a stray bomb dropped on Vittoriosa" (p.319)
- "His cheeks hollowed and flattened as the xebec seemed to describe a complete circle and Grandmaster La Vallette's dream whirled away for Fort St. Elmo and the Mediterranean, which in their turn spun past into Ricasoli, Vittoriosa, the Dockyard." (p.457)
- "They occupied Xaghriet Mewwija, took Fort St. Elmo, and began their assault on Notabile, Borgo — today that's Vittoriosa — and Senglea, where La Vallette and the Knights were making their final stand.
- [...]
- "One of the great mysteries about the Siege is why, when the Turks outnumbered the invested Knights, when the days of the besieged were numbered on a single hand, when Borgo and thus Malta were almost in the same hand — Mustafa's — why should they suddenly pull up and retreat, hoist anchor and leave the island?" (p.464)
- "Overhead for a while hung Fort St. Angelo, dirty yellow and wrapped in a quiet not of this earth." (p.456)
- "His cheeks hollowed and flattened as the xebec seemed to describe a complete circle and Grandmaster La Vallette's dream whirled away for Fort St. Elmo and the Mediterranean, which in their turn spun past into Ricasoli, Vittoriosa, the Dockyard." (p.457)
- "They occupied Xaghriet Mewwija, took Fort St. Elmo, and began their assault on Notabile, Borgo — today that's Vittoriosa — and Senglea, where La Vallette and the Knights were making their final stand. (p.464)
- "But as the xebec was passing Fort St. Elmo or thereabouts, a shinning Benz was observed to pull up near the wharf and a black-liveried driver with a mutilated face to come to the harbor's edge and gaze out at the ship." (p.492)
- "At the time of the Ghallis Tower murder last year I had hopes . . ." (p.448)
- "But what a language! Have it, or today's Builders, advanced at all since the half men who built the sanctuaries of Hagiar Kim? We talk as animals might." (p.309)
- "But how could I know: with the same positive comfort in knowing the sun grows colder, the Hagiar Kim ruins progress towards dust, as do we [...]" (p.337)
- "Demivolt was out at Hamrun, conferring with agents among the millers." (p.482)
- "Two RAF lorries with machine guns dispersed an attack on the millers at Hamrun." (p.491)
- "Early on the morning of 10 June 1919, Mehemet's xebec set sail from Lascaris Wharf." (p.492)
- "[Mara] pleased the Sultan. Perhaps she made the effort. But was installed somehow as a concubine about the time La Vallette back on her island was blocking the creek between Senglea and St. Angelo with an iron chain and poisoning the springs in the Marsa plain with hemp and arsenic." (p.462)
- "Star-shells from the Bofors over Marsamuscetto." (p.323)
- "Forenoon for sea, afternoon for the city. Poor shattered city. Tilted toward Marsamuscetto; no stone shell — roofless, walless, windowless — could hide from the sun, which threw all their shadows uphill and out to see." (p.334)
- "But somehow the Turks got hold of intelligence that twenty thousand troops had landed at Melleha Bay and were on route to Notabile. General retreat was ordered [...]" (p.464)
- "They occupied Xaghriet Mewwija, took Fort St. Elmo, and began their assault on Notabile, Borgo — today that's Vittoriosa — and Senglea, where La Vallette and the Knights were making their final stand." (p.464)
- "His cheeks hollowed and flattened as the xebec seemed to describe a complete circle and Grandmaster La Vallette's dream whirled away for Fort St. Elmo and the Mediterranean, which in their turn spun past into Ricasoli, Vittoriosa, the Dockyard." (p.457)
- "[Bad Priest] lives in an old villa past Sliema, near the sea." (p.313)
- "Sliema was like another country" (p.339)
- "German bombers over today [...] Concentrated, as luck would have it, on Ta Kali." (p.315)
- "[Fausto's] work at the Ta Kali airfield was a sapper's drudgery; keeping the runways in condition for the British fighter planes; repairing the barracks, mess hall and hangars." (p.315)
- "[Maratt] was working as a mechanic out at Ta Kali and had grown fond of several pilots. One by one they were shot from the sky." (p.317)
- "Apparently [Fausto II] took at this time to shambling about in the streets, during raids. Hours away from Ta Kali, when he should have been sleeping." (p.323)
- "It was apparently Dnubietna's intention to bring Fausto to Ta Kali on foot (usual method was to hitch a ride from a lorry) to sober him up." (p.329)
- "Dnubietna hung over him, haggard, one eye beginning to swell. 'Away, away,' he croaked. Fausto got to his feet reluctant and off they went. There is no indication in the journal of how they did it, but the two reached Ta Kali just as the all-clear sounded." (p.330)
- "Elena was killed early in the morning [...] Word got to me at Ta Kali in the afternoon, during a lull." (p.341)
- "I returned to Ta Kali on foot. My shovel was still where I had left it." (p.345)
- "Bombing is concentrated around Valletta, the Three Cities, the Harbour." (p.322)
- "[Stencil's] father died in Valletta." (p.303)
- "For a matter of months, little more than 'impressions.' And was it not Valletta? During the raids everything civilian and with a soul was underground. Others were too busy to 'observe.' The city was left to itself; except for stragglers like Fausto, who felt nothing more than an unvoiced affinity and were enough like the city not to change the truth of the 'impressions' by the act of receiving them." (p.323)
- "How beautiful is blackout in Valletta. [...] Night fills the street like a black fluid; flows along the gutters, its current tugging at your ankles. As if the city were underwater; an Atlantis, under the night sea.
- "Is it night only that wraps Valletta? Or is it a human emotion; "an air of expectancy"? Not the expectancy of dreams, where our awaited is unclear and unnameable. Valletta knows well enough what she waits for." (p.324)
- "The children got about Valletta by their private routes, mostly underground." (p.332)
- "On days like that, we felt, Valletta had recalled her own pastoral history. As if vineyards would suddenly bloom along the sea-bastions, olive and pomegranate trees spring up from the pale wounds of Kinsway. The Harbour sparkled [...]" (p.333)
- "There were children everywhere in Valletta today, swinging down from the trees, jumping off the ruined ends of jetties into the sea" (p.333)
- "We had been using, it seemed, nothing but Valletta to fill up the hollows of ourselves. Stone and metal cannot nourish." (p.335)
- "was [Elena] here in fact or like Paola — dear God, not even our child but Valletta's — out alone, vibrating like a shadow in some street where the light is too clear [...]" (p.336)
- "But didn't Valletta — somehow — get to you? Make you feel anything? [...] [Stencil] was scared to death of Valletta." (p.381)
- "Now there was a sun-shower over Valletta, and even a rainbow." (p.424)
- "The buildings in this part of Valletta, eleven years after war's end, had not been rebuilt. [...] Presently, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished." (p.455)
- "Valletta, a city named after a man, but of feminine gender, a peninsula shaped like the mons Veneris" (p.465)
- "But Valletta seemed serence in her own past, in the Mediterranean womb, in something so insulating that Zeus himself might once have quarantined her and her island for an old sin or an older pestilence. So at peace was Valletta that with the least distance she would deteriorate to mere spectacle. She ceased to exist as anything quick or pulsed, and was assumed again into the textual stillness of her own history." (p.474)
- "No time in Valletta. No history, all history at once. . ." (p.484)
