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And while we were lingering over this and that, behold, he went to a small vessel to take from it one piece, then a second, then a third, of the colored glasswork that goes back to the age of the Phoenicians. He had identified them from a thick book, written in French, on the Phoenician antiquities in Lebanon, set among his few books on a shelf he had built above a water basin on the southern side of the hall. And behold, he showed us in it a colored plate of Phoenician glass exactly resembling the pieces in his hands. Then he showed us a fossilized shell he had come upon when a stone he was chiseling split open. He also showed us one of the fossilized plants, in the shape of a flower.
And this — the last, I mean — is in his eyes the most precious of the antiquities in his possession. For our artist has not confined himself to painting and sculpture: he has taken to studying geology, picking out from among the stones those that testify to remote antiquity — and how could any relic close at hand escape him, with that piercing eye of his? After we had spent about an hour of time, he set about honoring us now as people honor people, offering us a large plate filled with delicious grapes... I hesitated at first, thinking he was offering us his day's food, but that hesitation soon vanished when I made out that he was offering us grapes from his own garden — and behold, our friend is a farmer of the first order, tending vines, apples, and other fruits, and growing vegetables of every kind.
A farmer, and what a farmer!... His garden is not, as I imagined at first glance, an ordinary garden kept for the exploitation of its produce. It is rather a meticulous experimental field, in which he works at planting things out of their season and tends them by all manner of means — grafting, budding, manuring... — adapting here and there so as to obtain fruit out of its season, or new varieties of plants possessing desirable qualities. He has succeeded in grafting apples in July, and has managed to obtain apples of large size untouched by any blight. I
cannot, in truth, count up for the man all his agricultural feats, but I record here some of what stuck in my mind, such as his success in growing sour lemons in that cold climate, and his experiment to obtain artichokes in autumn instead of spring.
Nor was our artist only a farmer: he has outdone all the gardeners in the arrangement of his beautiful gardens. I say this while the exquisite statues scattered through every corner of them still cling to my memory — and I find I must dwell here on the word “scattered,” for the statues have indeed been scattered... Yet it became clear to me that he had taken the utmost care in setting each of them in its place, in keeping with the shape of the ground, the amount of sunlight, and the shadows that form upon each statue at the different hours of the day. And does a man like
our artist concern himself with the hours of the day? The answer is yes: he works by a special program which he has organized minutely, so as to reconcile his many weighty labors, guided not by a metal watch but by a sundial he set up on the roof of his hermitage. When I objected that he would need a clock at night, he answered me: “I consult the stars... My quiet nights help me to study them...” So he is an astronomer too, learned in the stars, in their courses and their movements.
So blessed be you, Youssef Howayek, for the grace the Creator has bestowed upon you, and blessed be you for your silent struggle in the cause of your art, your learning, and your letters.
And thank you, Dr. Rashid Maatouk, for the precious opportunity you gave me to visit this genius.
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