Giovanni Drogo arrives at Fort Bastiani on the edge of a desert that may or may not contain an enemy that may or may not be advancing. He plans to stay briefly; he stays his whole life, waiting for a battle that never comes. Buzzati's 1940 novel is Kafka in the desert, a parable of wasted time and deferred life that grows more terrifying the longer you think about it. The prose is clear and dreamlike. By the end, you realize the enemy was never in the desert. The enemy was always the waiting itself.