How wonderful is the turning year. He lived through its seasons, working without pause. Winter in the alley was pretty severe but it spurred a man to work; spring with its sandy khamsin wind was a curse, summer an inferno, and autumn a mysterious, meditative smile. He kept on working with an iron will and a burning passion. His law books were ranged under the bed and on the windowsill. He spent little of the night in sleep. He embraced ideas and wrestled with the inscrutable. Success alone was not enough to satisfy him. Friday was usually set aside for acquiring general knowledge worthy of directors and those in their service. He paid special attention to poetry and learned plenty of it by heart. He even tried composing it but failed. He told himself that poetry had always been the best means of currying favor with superiors and of shining at official parties. It was a heavy loss not to be able to write poetry. Still, learning it was at any rate the best way to perfect one’s prose. The art of public speaking was no less important for success than poetry, and eloquence was essential, so his heart told him. Even more so were foreign languages. All these branches of knowledge were useful, and there comes a time when their value goes up in the stock exchange of officialdom. For a civil servant did not live by financial regulations alone. Indeed, he must equip himself with a measure of everything useful, for who knew what might happen? He would tell himself that his life was an unbroken stream flowing in the direction of light and learning, loaded with its cargo of all sorts of novelties and fed by tributaries from the fields of thought: a stream carried forward by the intensity of faith, nobility, and human pride to reach in the end its estuary at the divine threshold.

As for peace of mind, that he attained on the steps of the ancient fountain, in the embrace of fervid love, in the arms of the pretty, loving girl, and her burning, virgin bosom. He allowed himself no commitment in word or deed. Yet he was as fond of her as of life itself. If only life could be satisfied with love and simple happiness, he thought. So anxious was Sayyida that she cast off her natural reserve. She no longer shrank from expressing her true emotions, or revealing the ardor of her yearning for him. On one occasion she said to him in a tone of reverence, “I cannot live without you.”

But her words were tepid compared with the generosity of her full lips. On another occasion she said, “You are everything to me: the past and the future…”

Her brown eyes glowed with fidelity, with apprehension, and with real yearning. And in the melting moment of a passionate embrace she sighed, “We lack something…”

“Our perfect love lacks nothing,” was his dull and selfish answer.