Ali glanced at the ruined temple, his drowsiness abruptly dissipating into an ethereal wakefulness. The remnants of the defaced altar appeared, the positions of the scattered pillars and crumbling foundations stood revealed. His gaze frozen, his heart fluttering, like a blind man regaining his sight, he began to see and think and contemplate. To think and contemplate. This round of surging thought and reflection generated in his soul the ghosts of a memory, then he remembered. He remembered these pillars standing proudly upright. He recalled silver lamps and thuribles ranged about a revered statuette. He remembered worthy priests offering up sacrifices before an altar embellished with leaves of ivory and gold. He called to mind young girls beating drums and youths chanting hymns to the goddess of love and beauty. He remembered and saw these lucid images with electrified vision, feeling the influence of their enigmas that stirred him to the depths. The memory, however, brought back only nebulous images, such as we see when we think back on our past life and hear only echoes of the voices our ears once perceived. What connection could there be between this mystic remembrance and the past life of a youth born among tents, who spent the spring of his life shepherding a flock in the countryside?

Ali rose and walked among the fallen stones, his distant memories pulling the veil of forgetfulness from his imagination as a little girl might brush a spider’s web from the face of her mirror. When he reached the sanctuary of the temple he stood stock still, as though the earth’s gravity had seized his feet. He looked around and found himself standing before a smashed sculpture which was sunk into the ground. He knelt next to it aimlessly, and emotion flooded his breast the way hemorrhaging blood rushes from a grave wound. His pulse quickened then slackened, just as the waves of the sea rise and fall. He lowered his eyes, sighing repeatedly, then wept tormentedly, for he felt a painful solitude, a poisonous distance, separating him from a beautiful spirit who had been close to him before his advent in this life.

He felt that the substance of his soul was only a spark taken from a brightly burning flame, which God had severed from his essence only a little before his life had ended.

He perceived the rustling of delicate wings, fluttering among his inflamed ribs and around his reeling brain.

He felt an ardent, powerful love encompass his heart and take control of his breathing, the love that divulges the secrets of the soul to the soul and by its poetics distinguishes true intellect from the realm of measurement and quantity. We hear that love speaking when the tongue of life falls silent, and see it as towering pillars of light when gloom envelops all things. That love, that god, descended at that hour upon the soul of Ali al-Husaini and awakened in him emotions both bitter and sweet, just as the sun causes flowers to blossom next to thorns.