Aminata arrived at the library before the sun was fully up. The lane that led to it was still in shadow. The mud-brick walls on either side held the coolness of the night, and the air between them was close and still. She had walked this lane every working morning for eleven years. She knew each of its irregularities. The place where the surface dipped near the wall of the old house on the left. The low wooden door set into the wall further along, always shut, never open. The smell of it, which was sand and wood smoke and the particular dryness of a city built from the earth it stood on.
The library building was at the end of the lane. It was a long, low structure of pale ochre banco, the mud-brick of Timbuktu, its walls thick and smooth, the surface of them showing the marks of the hands that had plastered and replastered them over many decades. Above the entrance, a shallow arch. Above the arch, the parapet with its line of wooden beams projecting from the upper wall, the ends of them weathered grey, the same grey as the stones of the lane. The door was iron-studded wood, old and heavy, and it opened inward on a leather hinge that had been oiled so many times it moved without sound.
She unlocked it with the key she had carried for eleven years, a large iron key, slightly warm even at this hour from being in her pocket. The door opened and she went in.
The entrance room was cool and dark. Light entered only through a single small window set high in the wall to her left, a window too narrow to pass a hand through, its function to admit air rather than light. From this window came a thin pale bar of early sky. She could see the shapes of things in the room by this light. The low bench along the wall. The wooden stand beside it on which hung the grey cotton coat she wore when working. The shelf above the bench with its row of covered vessels, the jars of mineral water she kept here, one for each day of the week.