IX. The Cave of Swimmers

With a lot of morphine Caravaggio makes the English patient talk about his past once again. He tells about when he first met Geoffrey and Katharine. They were on their honeymoon and have only been married for 2 weeks. Katharine was the only woman in the camp and at first she didn't feel that comfortable about bein in the desert, but she was very interested in this kind of landscape and read a lot and was really really smart.

In the desert were 4 men, the english patient who was 15 years older than katharine, her husband, Madox, and another man. And one woman, Katharine. She asked the EP for books, but he only had his one book with him that he would write his personal notes into. After he returned from a journey he gave it to her though.

Geoffrey threw a party for the EP's return.

They spent a lot of time together and the English patient did projects just to be with her and to spend time with her.

They became lovers when Katharine says to the EP:"I want you to ravish me" which means the same as "I want you to rape me". But after a while Katharine left him because she didn't believe in him loving her and returned to her husband who she knew, loved her more than anything else. The EP suffers because of her leaving him because he's serious about her.

After that Madox is described who had been the EP's best friend for 10 years. He shot himself in a ceremony in curch in 1939.

More morphine is given to the EP by Caravaggio.
He starts talking about him in the third person. He's talking about a dance with Katharine. Almásy (the EP) was drunk at this moment.

Then Caravaggio starts telling, like that he also knew Geoffrey and that he was a thief in the war. He tells Almásy that the Allies thought that Geoffrey had been killed by the EP because of Katharine. - The EP starts telling about what happened to him without taking any more morphine.



Own opinion: I think there are a lot of time jumps and I think it's really mean of Caravaggio making the EP talk with using drugs. The EP is wounded and he can't fight for what he wants so the others can just do whatever they want to.

Travel Report on San Girolamo

Now I would like to present to you, the villa "San Girolamo". It's located in Toscany, near Florence on a hill on the countryside. It kind of got destroyed in the war so some parts of it are ruins. The chapel next to the villa is completely destroyed, so are some rooms but that also makes the buildling more interesting because you can look outside from almost every room because a lot of walls hadbeen blown up during the 2nd world war. The villa had first been a nunnery, then got bombed by the allies because they wanted to get the germans out of there. After that it has been used as a war hospital. From the outside it doesn't seem so "luxurous".
There is one room in the first floor though that is the biggest room in the house and it isn't destroyed. It has a big bed in it and it also has some other furniture.
The villa has a really nice but wet library, with a lot of books and a large hole in the wall.
You can enter the villa through the kitchen which has a table in there.


The garden is nice to spend time in. There are orchards, vegetables and flowers. Also there is a tent, a fountain and a statue.

Have fun at "San Girolamo", guys!

sarong!?

"A sarong or sarung (pronounced [ˈsaɾoŋ] in Bahasa; English: /səˈrɒŋ/) is a large tube or length of fabric, often wrapped around the waist and worn as a kilt by men and as a skirt by women throughout much of South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa and on many Pacific islands. The fabric most often has woven plaid or checkered patterns, or may be brightly colored by means of batik or ikat dyeing. Many modern sarongs also have printed designs, often depicting animals or plants." - wikipedia

VIII. The Holy Forest

- Kip is in the garden


- Hana and Kip walk back into the house together


- Hana walks through the kitchen and up the stairs


- Ladybird: Hana holds it, then it walks to the english patient. After that it walks along his body.

• fuze box falls down because Caravaggio hits it when he turns around to look why Hana yelled
• before it hits the floor and would probably cause some damage, Kip catches it and saves Caravaggio's life
• Caravaggio notices that and knows that he won't ever forget the sapper
• Caravaggio talks about sarongs --> "Sarong!?"
• Hana asks if it's a real story and he says that it is and she almost believed it
• Caravaggio does strange things, for example opening advent calendars when breaking into a house
• walks in the library
• She begins to write there: "He says Lahore is an ancient city. London is a recent town compared with Lahore. I say, Well, I come from an even newer country. He says they have always known about gunpowder. As far back as the seventeenth century, court paintings recorded fuerworks displays He is small, not much taller than I am. An intimate smile up close that can charm anything when he displays it. A thoughness to his nature he doesn't show. The Englishman says he's one of those warrior saints. But he has a peculiar sense of humour that is more rambunctious than his manner suggests. Remeber "I'll rewire him in the morning" Ooh la la! He says Lahore has thirteen gates - named for saints and emperors or where they lead to. The word bungalow comes from Bengali."
• Kip's past: dream about defusing a bomb in the mud and water, uses iced oxygen,

Westbury White Horse

So to understand the beginning of the story you have to know what the Westbury White Horse is

Wikipedia says:

The Westbury or Bratton White Horse is a hill figure on the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, approximately 2.5 km (1.6 mi) east of Westbury in England. Located on the edge of Bratton Downs and lying just below an Iron Age hill fort, it is the oldest of several white horses carved in Wiltshire. It was restored in 1778, an action which may have obliterated a previous horse which had occupied the same slope. A contemporary engraving of the 1760s appears to show a horse facing in the opposite direction, and also rather smaller than the present figure. However, there is at present no documentary or other evidence for the existence of a chalk horse at Westbury before the year 1742.

Chapter VII

Westbury, England, 1940

Kip has interrupted an family tradition by joining the army and working as a sapper later.

• Kirpal Singh on the back of the horse, descends while Lord Suffolk watches him through binoculars

• Conversation between Miss Morden and Singh: "Can you hear me?" - "Yes, it's fine"
• Miss Morden rubbed the chalk off her hands
• Discussion about who is responsible for the unexploded bombs
• naive words in 1939: "Unexploded bombs are considered the responsibility of the Home Office, who are agreed that they should be collected by A.R.P. wardens and police and delivered to convenient dumps, where members of the armed forces will in due course detonate them."
• A bomb is a combination of the following parts:
  1. A container of bomb case
  2. A fuze
  3. An initiating charge, or gaine
  4. A main charge of high explosive
  5. Superstructional fittings- fins, lifting lugs, kopfrings, etc.
• The problem: 2 kinds of bombs: First Kind: the ones that get thrown down and explode. 2nd kind: the ones that get thrown down and lie there until something touches it and makes is explode
• The second kind of bomb is the problem that Singh is trying to remove. He looks for those kinds of bombs and tries to make the area safe by defusing them.
• Conversation during the drive to the chalk horse
• Stop for tea
• talk about trust between Mr. singh and Lord Suffolk

My favorite quote in Chapter VI p. 174

"Two lovers and desert - starlight or moonlight, I don't remember. Everywhere else out there was a war."

I just LOVE this quote, because in this whole talk about war and fighting it seems so calm and peaceful.

VI. A Buried Plane

I chose this picture because it represents for me the english patient walking alone in the desert.
I think it is really beautiful, so it makes the english patient's love for the desert more understandable, also it's so large and endless and I would feel unsafe and consider it more like something beautiful to look at but something scary when you are there all by yourself

• Hana gives morphine to the english patient



• He's on a morphine trip in a two-dimensional world



• Description of Cairo in 1936: great bazars, crowded markets



• Uweinat in March, 1937

• Conversation: Caravaggio and Hana: Caravaggio tells Hana about the Hungarian Almásy who was a pilot and worked for the germans during the war. Caravaggio thinks that the English Patient is Almásy and that he isn't english after all and just got his english accent from school. Hana says that it would also be possible that he is Sansom who was also a desert lover and who was really similar to Almásy but Sansom couldn't fly.


• She wants that they stop thinking about who he was or who he had worked for and just take him as the person he is right now but Caravaggio wants to give him a bigger dose of morphine to make him talk and maybe find out more about where he comes from. Hana doesn't want to support him, so he decides to mix a Brompton cocktail out of alcohol and morphine and promises Hana that he won't kill him. Kip is also against the plan but Caravaggio just does what he wants and gives him the coctail


• 3:00 PM: David Caravaggio asks the English patient questions like from where he came and what he did there and tries to get as much information possible out of him


• They are talking about Gilf Kebir, he says that he came from there.


• 1942: Journey to Cairo - returning from there - Uweinat - truck exploded miles from Gilf Kebir - the English Patient flew off the truck and into the sand and hid from the sparks because a fire in the desert would be really dangerous. He thinks that the truck had been sabotaged.


• The Clifton's plane named Rupert <--> the aging plane of Madox's


• started walking towards Uweinat where he knew that there was a buried plane. It took 4 nights of wakling. War everywhere.


• "Caravaggio thinks he knows who you are," Hana said. She tells him about David's presumtion and also about what Caravaggio did before he came to the villa.


• lake - climbing - swimmers


• "She" ? He wants to have sex with her. He carried her into the sun. didn't need a map

• Three years earlier, 1939, she had been injured because her husband had crashed the plane because he had planned on killing her, the english patient and himself. He had to try and reach help and leave her behind.


• They had come together again after months of being apart from each other. During this time the english patient had been avoiding her as much as possible. "Too proud to be a lover, a secret." "I don't miss you yet. You will"


• "She was against him"


• He went to Gilf Kebir in the last days before the war.


• "The husband they had both loved until they began to love each other"


• "A husband gone mad. Killing all of them. Killing himself and his wife ..."


• She tells him what hurt her when he was gone then she tells him to kiss her.


• "I left you because I knew I could never change you"

The english patient stops telling his story and there is another morphine being taken. The story goes on

• desert towards Kufra Oasis - only robes against the heat and cold
• they sit together in the desert (--> Quote)

1942: They walk towards the airplane together - cockpit - the english patient catches fire

• When Hana walks into the room there is Kip and the English patient passing around condenced milk and the english patient asks Kip how long he had worked as a sapper for and he replies that it must have been around 5 years which he mostly had spent in London.
• They are talking about Lord Suffolk and Miss Murden, his secretarian and Mr. Fred Harts, his driver. --> Holy Trinity
• 1941, Erith: they were all blown up

My own opinion:

It took soooooooo long to read.

I found some really nice quotes though that i also wrote in the Summary and that I made a post about too.

I like some of the descriptions but I just HATE everytime there's some information from the past, because i just DON'T care. I know it's important for the story but those jumps in time are annoying me so freaking much, I can't handle them anymore I even tried and skip them but I just didn't understand the story anymore then. So they aren't useless they are just FREAKING ANNOOOYING and they should be shortend!!

Not looking forward to reading the 7th chapter at all.

Biography Hana

Hello, I'm Hana and I'm 20 years old. I am canadian and have been working as a nurse in Europe during the war.
Now I'm living in a ruined villa on the countryside near Florence.
My hair is short and brown and I sometimes even have to wear old clothes of dead soldiers.
My living conditions right now are okay, i would say. I mean, it could be way worse, I can be glad for only being alive and not being insured in this hard time at the end of the war. I am the only woman in the house which is okay but sometimes i feel kind of lonely.

I spend my time running around in the villa, looking for food, planting vegetables in the garden, working around the house, reading to the english patient, taking care of him or spending time with Kip or Caravaggio.
So those are also the people I live with: Kip, Caravaggio and the English Patient.
Weeeell, kind of. Kip lives in the garden and sleeps in a tent.
I really like Kip. He's gorgeous and I feel some kind of connection to him.
My father died in the war and I just have such a bad feeling about the war. I've seen so much more than most people my age have. I've seen so many people die because of injuries.
Sometimes I just wish I could leave and go back to Canada and just leave all this war-stuff behind me. But on the other hand I got this connection to the people in my house and I also feel responsible for the english patient. If I left now, he'd have to die. He's such a wonderful person and he's so smart and i love talking to him.
I love being able to help people and the most important things in my life are frienship and family, although there isn't a lot of family left for me.
I also really enjoy reading because it allowes me to forget reality for a second. I sometimes like to just dream away in a different world.
My wish is that the war is going to end soon and that as much people as possible can survive.