The Treasures of the Poor

... How we wished that this beautiful face would never vanish from the world of Arabic letters in Lebanon. Perhaps our sole consolation is that he has vanished only within the bounds of time and place, and remains radiant in that which falls within none of these bounds.

A cow — yet not like a cow in bulk of body; rather she is nearer to a small calf. Her eyes gleam in the pitch-black night as though they were two embers or two stars. She is saddled with gold; her shoes and her anklets are of gold. And on her back are two saddlebags filled with pearls and rubies and precious stones. She comes to you at a late hour of the night and calls to you, saying:

Come, So-and-so, and take your share!

Do not be afraid, and do not wake any of your sleeping household; go toward her with a steady heart, take off her shoes and her anklets and her saddle, empty the two bags of their treasures, then fill them with whatever comes to hand — and best of all, put bread in the one and salt in the other: the sign of affection and thanks. Then she goes on her way, leaving in your house the gold and the pearls and the rubies and the precious stones. Blessed are you, for you are the rich and happy one!

... And in the latter half of the twelfth century of the Hijra the cow, "the bearer of fortune," visited my father's grandmother, the lady Safiyya, who was then, God rest her soul, in her seventies. She heard the clatter of the shoes and the ringing of the anklets on the steps of the stair, and she looked through the hole of the door bolted upon her in her room, and saw the gilded cow strutting in the courtyard of the house, her eyes blazing as though they were two embers or two stars, calling in a voice very like a lowing:

— Come, Safiyya, and take your share!

But the departed one froze where she stood, her tongue tied. As for the cow, she called her three times and then went off like one affronted, disdainful of a cowardice so extreme that nothing could exceed it! Yet she took her revenge on us by leaving, on one of the steps of the stair, one of her golden shoes — proof of the wealth no hand had reached out to take, and a cause of everlasting regret. It is told that our grandmother, when her tongue was loosed, uttered this memorable saying: "Courage, and not good fortune!" And so we were, and have remained, poor; our sole consolation — rather, my consolation, mine alone — is that in the latter half of the twelfth century of the Hijra I came near to being, behind the veil of the unseen, a rich man; and if I am not one, it is because my grandmother, the lady Safiyya, God's mercy upon her, did not wish it...

With this and its like we entertained one another on one of the nights of winter, all of us, old and young, seated around the brazier — my companionable, enlivening, faithful friend; and suddenly I witnessed, in that little room, how a world other than our world is created, peopled by folk other than our folk — a wondrous world, full of good spirits and evil ones, out of which marvels overflow into our world, and in which the common people find the interpretation of every mystery. And I felt as though this air, which I had thought deserted, is on the contrary so inhabited, so crowded, that you can scarcely find in it a single span not taken up by a jinni or an afreet.

And nothing is more wondrous, or more telling, than the bond the common people have made between our world and that world. Shall I tell you the story of the midwife who was summoned by night to a woman in childbirth, and whose path was crossed by a veiled lady who asked her to light her extinguished candle for her — and when she took the candle from her hand, the lady vanished between earth and sky, and the midwife looked, and behold, the candle was "a finger dyed with henna"?

Or shall I tell you the story of the righteous man who met, one night, the jinni bride, decked with gold from the crown of her head to her feet, and she said to him: Strip me of my clothes, and they are yours! But when he remembered that he would have to take off all her clothes and look upon her naked, he turned his gaze away, for he was no man of evil, and said to her: Cover yourself, my sister... cover yourself! — and then went off, having neither gained nor sinned?

Or what shall I tell you? We passed from one wondrous legend to a legend more wondrous still, and from a lovely little tale to a lovelier one, until it seemed to me that this night of ours was a night "strayed" from the East's great treasure of marvels — I mean the book of the Thousand and One Nights... And I fell to thinking again of what I had thought before, when I wrote "The Spellbound Door."

The creation of a world on the margin of this world of ours, or the imagining of an existence other than this ordinary existence, is not reserved to the inspiration of prophets and the imagination of poets. The common people have the longest hand in this creating and inventing; indeed, the prophets and the poets themselves perhaps draw from these springs which never cease to well up in every age and every land, and whose water never runs dry: the popular literatures. And if there be some doubt in the matter, the peoples, at the very least, meet their prophets and their poets on one common ground: the satisfying of the general, permanent human need for the miraculous and the marvelous — that is, for everything that lies "outside" this world and its known laws and its familiar truths. And in the popular literatures, or "folklore" as the Franks call it, there are delightful curiosities and abundant pleasure of meaning — the tales and the proverbs no less than the legends and the beliefs — to whose care many a Western specialist has devoted himself, collecting, ordering, and interpreting, in the belief that they are the arts of those who are no artists, the letters of those who are no men of letters, and the collected poems of those who are no poets; that in them not only is the national spirit revealed, but that they also, on the other side, give voice to the human soul in its entirety. They are like the cow saddled with gold: they carry the treasures of the poor.

... And the eldest of them confided to me:
— Do you know why So-and-so left to her sons (and she named a family well known in the town) a whole market, such-and-such a market? It is because the cow visited her, and she took her share of her... Otherwise, whence came all that vast fortune?

And the youngest of them said, fear and hope in her eyes:
— If the cow comes to me tonight and calls me: Salwa, get up and take your share! — I shall say to her from under the quilt: O cow, I am afraid, because I am little; so put my share on the doorstep, I beg you!

But Salwa's mother clasped her little one to her and charmed her against harm, saying:
— In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!