Before this picture is an oil lamp, ever burning, I am told. ‘And this altar,’ quoth the shepherd, ‘was my mother’s. When she died she bequeathed it to me. I carry it with me in the wilderness, and keep the oil burning in her memory.’ Saying which he took to weeping. Even the shepherd, O Khalid, is sent to rebuke thee. I thank him, and resume my march.
“At eventide, descending from one hilltop to another, I reach a village of no mean size. It occupies a broad deep steep, in which the walnut and poplar relieve the monotony of the mulberries. I hate the mulberry, which is so suggestive of worms; and I hate worms, and though they be of the silk-making kind. I hate them the more, because the Lebanon peasant seems to live for the silkworms, which he tends and cultivates better than he does his children.
“When I stood on the top of the steep, the village glittering with a thousand lights lay beneath like a strip of the sidereal sky. It made me feel I was above the clouds, even above the stars. The gabled houses overtopping each other, spreading in clusters and half-circles, form here an aigrette, as it were, on the sylvan head of the mountain, there a necklace on its breast, below a cestus brilliant with an hundred lights. I descend into the village and stop before the first house I reach. The door is wide open; and the little girl who sees me enter runs in fright to tell her mother. Straightway, the woman and her son, a comely and lusty youth, come out in a where-is-the-brigand manner, and, as they see me, stand abashed, amazed. The young man who wore a robe-de-chambre and Turkish slippers worked in gold, returns my salaam courteously and invites me up to the divan. There is a spark of intelligence in his eyes, and an alien affectation in his speech. I foresaw that he had been in America. He does not ask me the conventional questions about my religious persuasion; but after his inquiries of whence and whither, he offers me an Egyptian cigarette, and goes in to order the coffee. It did not occur to him that I was his guest for the night.—