Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamalموسم الهجرة إلى الشمال

"What was it that drew Ann Hammond to me?" I met her when she was not yet twenty, studying Oriental languages ​​at Oxford; she was vibrant, with an intelligent, playful face and eyes sparkling with curiosity. When she looked at me, she saw a dark passion—like a false dawn. She was my opposite, yearning for tropical climes, harsh suns, and purple horizons; in her eyes, I embodied all that longing—I, a Southerner yearning for the North and the frost. Mustafa Sa'eed is a man shrouded in secrets; his path led him to settle in that Sudanese village to work the land—tilling and sowing—after having been a merchant in Khartoum. Yet, on certain evenings, English poetry would flow from his lips as if he were an Englishman himself. There was depth in his gaze, serenity in his features, and a calm in his bearing that radiated confidently outward. The narrator—who tells the story of that man who once migrated North to the land of frost—is no less captivated than the reader who follows the mystery of a stranger, himself haunted by a figure even more enigmatic, through the events and narratives of *Season of Migration to the North*.