تأتي الرواية على شكل يوميات كُتبت في القرن التاسع عشر في القاهرة، وتعود لمصور فوتوغرافي ومحقق جنائي يدعى «سليمان أفندي السيوفي»، وصف من خلالها تفاصيل تحقيق كلف به للتقصي حول مصرع أحد الباشوات بطريقة شنيعة، ليكتشف أسرار غامضة ومحيرة.
My mother's lambs: I also loved those stories that my mother used to tell me. I loved to tell them to you and pass them on so that you can tell them to your children. These stories of my mother are in the local dialect and I conveyed them to you on her tongue as I heard them, so that they are closer to your hearts and to increase your loyalty and love for the Emirati dialect and to instill in your souls the stories of our ancestors, as they are a different type of heritage stories known as (the sheep).
We must contemplate the secret of Homeric creativity in the epic narrative. So Homer does not care about telling only what happened in his epic “The Iliad,” but he is more interested in presenting the context of what happened and depicting the world in which this event occurred. We find events covering the universe from above Mount Olympus - the snowy sky - to the depths of the raging sea and the burning forests, and even the depths of the human soul itself in all its conditions, whether good or bad.
The events also cover gods, humans, the animal kingdom and birds. So we are dealing with a depiction of a universal existential situation, not a passing individual event. We are faced with an integrated system in which all the features and various components of living things and things interact, so that in the end we obtain a poetic exploration of the universe and its working system.
