cellar of a world and you and I pumping the water out of its bottom?—I can see the palaces on which you waste your rhymes, but mankind live in them only in the flesh. The soul I tell you, still occupies the basement, even the sub-cellar. And an inundated cellar at that. The soul, Shakib, is kept below, although the high places are vacant.”
And his partner sputters out his despair; for instead of helping to pump out the water, Khalid stands there gazing into it, as if by some miracle he would draw it out with his eyes or with his breath. And the poor Poet cries out, “Pump! the water is gaining on us, and our shop is going to ruin. Pump!” Whereupon the lazy, absentminded one resumes pumping, while yearning all the while for the plashing stone-rollers and the purling eaves of his home in Baalbek. And once in a pinch—they are labouring under a peltering rain—he stops as is his wont to remind Shakib of the Arabic saying, “From the dripping ceiling to the running gargoyle.” He is labouring again under a hurricane of ideas. And again he asks, “Are you sure we are better off here?”
And our poor Scribe, knee-deep in the water below, blusters out curses, which Khalid heeds not. “I am tired of this job,” he growls; “the stone-roller never drew so much on my strength, nor did muleteering. Ah, for my dripping ceiling again, for are we not now under the running gargoyle?” And he reverts into a stupor, leaving the world to the poet and the pump.
For five years and more they lead such a life in the cellar. And they do not move out of it, lest they excite the envy of their compatriots. But instead of sleeping on the floor, they stretch themselves on the counters. The rising tide teaches them this little wisdom, which keeps the doctor and Azrael away. Their merchandise, however—their crosses, and scapulars and prayer-beads—are beyond hope of recovery. For what the rising tide spares, the rascally flyaway peddlers carry away. That is why they themselves shoulder the box and take to the road. And the pious old