After a few days a caravan arrived from the east, the leader of which informed them that he had espied Nathan wandering in a far desert, out of his senses, in the haunts of gazelles.

Ages passed, crushing beneath invisible feet the works of previous generations, and the gods grew remote from the land. Irascible deities took their place, who delighted in havoc and chaos. The stately temples of the City of the Sun were demolished, its striking palaces razed. Its lush gardens withered, and its fertile plots became barren. Nothing remained in that spot save decrepit ruins that called the specters of yesteryear painfully to mind and reminded the soul of the reverberations of ancient and magnificent jubilees.

But the eons that pass and crush the works of humans cannot annihilate their dreams or weaken their emotions.

Dreams and feelings survive with the endurance of the eternal, Universal Soul, though they might wane at times and subside at others, just as does the sun with the approach of night or the moon with the advent of the morn.

II

(Spring, 1,890 after the coming of Jesus the Nazarene)

The day dwindled, the light faded, and the sun gathered up its sash from the plains of Baalbek. Ali al-Husaini ⁵ returned at the head of his flock to the remains of the temple and seated himself amidst fallen pillars that resembled the ribs of an abandoned soldier, rent by combat and stripped by the elements. His sheep lay themselves down around him, seeking security in the melodies of his reed flute.

In the middle of the night the sky sowed the seeds of the morrow in the chasms of its blackness. Ali’s eyelids wearied of the phantasms of wakefulness and his reason tired of the procession of apparitions that paced with eerie tranquillity among what remained of the walls. He made a pillow of his forearm, as drowsiness stole nigh and caressed his senses with the hem of its inmost veil, as the fog caresses the surface of a placid lake. He forgot his borrowed essence and encountered his hidden, archetypal spirit, brimming with dreams that transcended the laws and teachings of human beings. The range of his vision widened before his eyes, concealed mysteries were revealed to him, and his soul withdrew from the pageant of time that was speeding toward oblivion. He stood alone before symmetrical thoughts and vying ideas, for the first time in his life knowing, or almost knowing, the reasons for the spiritual hunger that had overtaken his youth, a hunger that combined the sweetness with the bitterness of life, a thirst that united the sigh of yearning with the serenity of contentment, a craving that the splendors of this world could never remove nor the torrents of life divert.

For the first time in his life, Ali al-Husaini experienced an uncanny feeling, awakened in him by the relics of the temple. It was a delicate sentiment, the memory of where the incense had lain near the censers. It was an enchanted emotion that played over his senses the way a musician’s fingers play over consecutive strings. The new feeling sprang forth from nothing, or from everything, growing and progressing until it embraced the entirety of his soul and filled it with an ardent passion tempered only by its gentleness, and with a grief sweet in its bitterness and delicious in its cruelty. The feeling was generated from within a single sleep-filled moment, and from a single moment are born the customs of generations, just as peoples propagate themselves from a single seed.