Summary

In Chapter 7 "Hollow Land" MacFarlane travels with Lucian, his Italian friend and guide, into the mountains in the Julian Alps in Slovenia. The limestone range was the sight of the White War, battles along the border of Austria-Hungary and Italy during WWI. Many of the caves in the limestone mountains were used during the war and some of the mountains were hollowed out. At the beginning of the chapter, MacFarlane references the “place of horror” he will visit later (221). The trees have swastikas gouged into them and they find a poem on a metal sheet nailed to one trunk. The title of the poem is “Dehumanization.” MacFarlane feels “a sudden horror reaching up and out of the sinkhole to coil around my heart. Something terrible has taken place here, and continues to reverberate” (215). This sets the stage for the journey in the rest of...