The house at Freikeh
... The eyes of the night did not sleep, that night in Freikeh!
And the eyes of "Freikeh" did not sleep that night!
And even this red butterfly, the color of flame in the fire, never stilled a wing... it went on fluttering... and it was fluttering upon the lashes of my eyes!
My eyes hung upon those two blazing wings...
while I listened to a faint, deep whisper within it...
Whence had that red butterfly come, in that night, to the house of Rihani?
Was it a perfume in a flask, that the Rihanis had let loose in welcome to the kings among us and to the vagabonds?
•
... Above Sannine a star still hangs in the night... and over the sea one like it, bewildered... and the gray cloaks of fog flood the valley with something like the color of incense in the censers...
And I drink in deeply, alone, with the night, these deep moments of my life...
•
I fancied I had outrun the morning, to meet the face of God before morning rose.
But there, before me, was a face radiant with faith in God, a lip murmuring the name of God, and a heart hailing God, from the balcony of the Rihani house above the old church, the house's neighbor. This is the face of "Umm Amin." I knew her before I ever met her, in this deep spiritual serenity that has known nothing but goodness and happiness...
And in this furrowed brow, where the paths and windings of the lines of age intertwine, and a merry smile on a mouth over which nothing has fluttered but the name of the Most Holy.
... And I bent to kiss the pure hand, and the beads of that long rosary, the Papacy's gift in Rome to a stubborn infidel among the infidels of my country... a rosary Amin carried from the corridors of the Vatican as a gift to Umm Amin...
— Amin has gone ahead of you, my son, and ahead of me, down to the valley — his habit every day, he outruns the sparrows to the valley, on the back of his Saudi mare...
He is down in the valley, writing, writing for the sparrows and the pines, the rocks and the gorse and the broom.
... What does he write?... I ask him, what do you do, my son, every morning in the valley alone? And he laughs and says: I glorify God, Umm Amin, with the
sparrows and the rocks of the valley and its plants.
— Glorify God in the church, my son — this neighbor who reproaches you that you have not entered her door in fifty years... Glorify Him with the people, Amin, my boy, I tell him; and he embraces me and says: You pray to God for me, Umm Amin; pray always for me in this church and in all the churches of Lebanon... The church is God's house, mother, for those who know no house of God but the churches. As for me, Umm Amin, I have known all God's doors in His houses... or I fancy I have known them... Every place,