Hark, I hear the piping of the shepherd and the tinkling bell of the wether. Yonder is his flock; and there sits he on a rock blowing his doleful reed. I am almost slain with thirst. I go to him, and cheerfully does he milk for me. I do not think Rebekah was kinder and sweeter in Abraham’s servant’s eyes than was this wight in mine.
‘Where dost thou sleep?’ I ask, ‘Under this rock,’ he replies. And he shows me into the cave beneath it, which is furnished with a goatskin, a masnad , and a little altar for the picture of the Virgin. 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