Owing to scientific advancement and comprehensive healthcare, mortality rates decline, life expectancy rises, and the population grows, causing space to become increasingly scarce. The afflicted country demands that the world expand its territory by extending the wall outward, but the world refuses. This state of affairs persists for fifteen years.

The besieged country devises alternative plans, building underground cities and developing alternative energy sources. Scientific progress drives the government to seriously consider space exploration and to expand its defensive and offensive capabilities—goals it ultimately achieves. The small country becomes capable of controlling the world through dominance over satellites and the global technological sphere. Beneath a sealed electronic defensive dome—impervious to airspace intrusion and resistant to aircraft and missiles—the country turns into a blind spot for all surveillance satellites, leaving the world ignorant of what transpires beneath that dome.

The siege and the disgraceful international treatment of the stricken country, coupled with immense scientific advancement, pave the way for the rise of hatred and extremist ideologies among its people. A far-right party comes to power and calls for the invasion of the world. The world, with all its scientific, military, and technological might, stands powerless before this small country, which sets a deadline for lifting the siege—the wall—asserting that the disease did not turn the infected into wolves; rather, those who besieged the country are the ones who became wolves in human form.

Events accelerate and reach a climactic confrontation, in which the entire world is defeated by that country—one that also succeeds in transferring life to the surface of the Moon by transporting soil, water, oxygen, an artificial sun, trees, plants, birds, and animals.

Suddenly, as a man digs a grave for his father beneath an ancient olive tree, in accordance with his father’s will, a spring emerges whose water removes the hair from the bodies of the afflicted people. The water undergoes analysis, and the results reveal it to be ordinary water. Thus ends the crisis that nearly brought the planet to ruin.

The novel belongs to the genre of science fiction. Its chapters alternate between a narrator recounting the hours of his first day in quarantine and an omniscient narrator who relates what transpired over fifteen years in the lives of that country and the world.

The setting is unnamed, and the characters remain anonymous. Only time can be inferred through calculation: the principal narrator was born in 1980 and began writing his account of events in 2055, at the age of seventy-five. Twenty years earlier, in 2035, the crisis—having lasted fifteen years—came to an end.

The novel is an imagined, contemplative work on life, the possibilities of catastrophe and chaos, the descent of the world into the abyss, and the potential reactions of individuals, societies, and nations in such circumstances.

In 2020, the world awakens to news of the outbreak of an extremely rare disease in a small country. The disease is known as Ambras Syndrome, or what is commonly referred to as werewolf syndrome, in which hair grows with extraordinary density over the human body, without being accompanied by rabies or bloodlust, as portrayed in horror films and novels. It is merely a hormonal disorder—yet it afflicts an entire population.

That country, along with the rest of the world, stands helpless before discovering why this rare disease has turned into an epidemic and a global pandemic. The world decides to impose a suffocating siege on the infected country and to build a massive isolation wall around it, under the pretext of preventing the spread of the disease and averting the transformation of humans into wolves—or, at the very least, into apes. The siege succeeds in containing the disease.

Life gradually returns to normal in the stricken country, whose people adapt to the illness, though the siege remains in place. Profound intellectual, cultural, and social transformations emerge as a result of this new condition. The country witnesses a tremendous scientific boom, discovering cures for all incurable diseases—cancer, AIDS, paralysis, heart disease, diabetes, and more—yet it fails to uncover the reason behind the transformation of Ambras Syndrome into an epidemic.

On behalf of the unknown.. Speaking of the tongue of disaster