Читать книгу Windows on the World - Frédéric Beigbeder - Страница 23

We now know with reasonable certainty what happened at 8:46 AM. An American Airlines Boeing 767 with ninety-two people on board, eleven of them crew, flew into the north face of One World Trade Center, between floors 94 and 98, and 10,500 gallons of jet fuel immediately burst into flames in the offices of Marsh & McLennan Companies. It was flight AA11 (Boston-Los Angeles) which had taken off from Logan airport at 7.59 AM and was moving at 500 m.p.h. The force of such an impact is estimated as being equivalent to an explosion of 265 tons of dynamite (a twelve-second shock wave measuring 0.9 on the Richter scale). We also know that none of the 1,344 people trapped on the nineteen floors above survived. Obviously, this piece of information removes any element of suspense from this book. So much the better: this isn’t a thriller; it is simply an attempt—doomed, perhaps—to describe the indescribable.

“Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.”^*