 Grad Zelene Brade, or City of the Green Beard, is a reference to the tree-lined banks of the Neretva, which runs through the heart of the city.Džumhur later refers to the hands of the city's clock-tower as having long ago drowned in its "dark whirlpools...quickly and easily, like two severed hands of time," while at the end of the chapter the city itself is consumed in the "black whirlpools of the swollen Bogomil river - redundant and ridiculous/ in the tattered vests of forgotten old captains - crippled and starving!/...under a quilt of cherry blossoms - dim and dilapidated!/under the dead guards of dead empires..bareheaded, barehanded, barelegged and bare-boned.