... And it is as though the prince of the two crafts would consent to speak to us of snow only at the very height of the sun's festival.

The city — In this exile from (the Mountain), a thousand nights of the mountain winter's nights come knocking at my memory — God's peace be upon them! One in the depth of a valley; a second behind the trees, on a hilltop; a third with us at home; and so on to the end

of what is there... And how am I to count them all, when night upon night has been folded away into the hands of the past!? They have become most like a book without a title, whose contents one keeps by the whole, not by the letter, nor by the page! So I turn that book over, at certain promptings of the soul, and content myself with leafing through — as though the long versions were vanity, and forgetting were a pleasure...

And night on the mountaintops is another thing than night in the streets! It is the night of enchantment and of echoes, in which the sky draws so near the earth that you can almost hear the movement of the sphere in certain quarters! Or as if something were falling from above... That is when the season is summer; but in winter we have the wind and the rain and the bitter cold and the white snow! Winter nights of true lineage — not these counterfeit coastal ones that creep soundlessly along the shore. The mountain is winter's own house, where it puts off ceremony and does not hold back a shudder that sets it laughing aloud in the air!

And how fine is the mountain under snow! Whiteness upon greenness, a covered treasure gathering in its edges in secret, until the days of sun come, and the silver runs and the turquoise shows... The snow is a white hand! You look down on it from the window of your house, when it has wrapped the earth in the color of joy, and reached even the black cypress tree and stippled it with pearls, and you would think the world had been changed: it was dust-colored, and behold it is white; it was scattered patches and fragments, and behold it is a single carpet!!

I said to my father's mother — I was then a child crawling toward my fifth year — when she turned my eyes, from behind the glass, to what the snow had wrought around our house after a long winter night:

— Grandmother, how strange!

She said:

— And what do you wonder at, my child?

I said:

— At what the snow has done in our garden. It has not

left a span of the face of the earth in it!

She said:

— And what should that matter to us, so long as we have a thousand spans of it in the house!

I said:

— It is as though you had forgotten what you told me, some days ago, of how the little angels carried