“The Eastern horizon is yet lost in the dusk; the false dawn is spreading the figments of its illusion; the trees in the distance seem like rain-clouds; and the amorphous shadows of the monasteries on the mountain heights and hilltops all around, have not yet developed into silhouettes.
Everything, except the river in the wadi below, is yet asleep. Not even the swallows are astir.
Ah, but my neighbour yonder is; the light in the loophole of his hut sends a struggling ray through the mulberries, and the tintinnabulations of his daughter’s loom are like so many stones thrown into this sleeping pond of silence. The loom-girl in these parts is never too early at her harness and shuttle.
I know a family here whose loom and spinning wheel are never idle: the wife works at the loom in the day and her boy at the wheel; while in the night, her husband and his old mother keep up the game. And this hardly secures for them their flour and lentils the year round. But I concern not myself now with questions of economy.
“There, another of my neighbours is awake; and the hinges of his door, shrieking terribly, fiendishly, startle the swallows from their sleep. And here are the muleteers, yodeling, as they pass by, their
‘Dhome, Dhome, Dhome, O mother, he is come; Hide me, hide me quickly, And say I am not home.’
“Lo, the horizon is disentangling itself from the meshes of darkness.
The dust of haze and dusk on the scalloped edges of the mountains, is blown away by the first breath of dawn. The lighter grey of the horizon is mirrored in the clearer blue of the sea.
But the darkness seems to gather on the breast of the sloping hills. Conquered on the heights, it retreats into the wadi.