"Faith was the sound of extreme desolation because that's how we felt at the time," he says.
He finds a woman living "with regret and desolation," but not because of the ugly circumstances in which she finds herself.
There is none of the desolation of the spirit one sees in countries like Angola and Congo.
Overall, it's running ahead of The Desolation of Smaug in pretty much every comparable market.
"Over this desolation, centuries of caravans had moved.
Only a few figures stir in this desolation, some of them bizarre.
Everything is so charged, intense, brooding, teetering on the edge of desolation, full of physical drama.
Guilt, remorse, a sense of defilement, and the hopeless desolation of being cut off from God cannot be understood in the abstract, because if they are only understood abstractly they are not ours.
This is perhaps especially so because the drama is a whodunnit, so that the desolation of real deaths collides with Christie's jaunty pile-up of corpses.
Five Armies has opened 4% ahead of the previous Hobbit film, The Desolation of Smaug (£9.33m).
