[6] The protagonist of the story, a professor of linguistic anthropology, is traveling in southern Morocco to the remote village of Aïn Tadouirt (a purely fictional location).
A largely sentimental journey, the professor seeks to rekindle a friendship he had enjoyed with a café proprietor ten years earlier, Hassan Ramani.
The qaouaji who now runs the establishment spurns the professor's gratuitous and insulting efforts to enlist him in obtaining souvenir camel-udder boxes.
Believing he is cheated, the villager murders a Reguiba for revenge, and is arrested by French authorities, leaving the professor unguarded in his house.
[7] His next effort, "A Distant Episode", was completed the same year, and, according to critic Gore Vidal, Bowles "now possessed the art to depict his dreams.
"[8] "A Distant Episode" was written while Bowles was residing in New York City, and was first published in the January 1947 issue of Partisan Review.
"[16]Contrary to this interpretation, literary critic Francine Prose argues that a trace of will is detectable in the Professor's "simultaneously innocent and arrogant cultural mistakes and miscalculations.
Yet upon closer examination, the Professor turns out to be not entirely innocent and is in fact vaguely responsible for his regrettable fate…"[17]Paul Bowles, in an interview, offered this laconic reference to theme in "A Distant Episode": I wanted to tell what the desert can do to us.
[18]In 2015 "A Distant Episode" was adapted into film by Ben Rivers under the title The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.