The angel of peace returned to the Kirbaj house. Aziz gave up drink and contented himself with the narghile alone; the smile came back to his face and the light of happiness to his eyes. And his mother received the congratulations of the townsfolk with a heart brimming over with joy, reminding each one of them that no credit for what had happened was hers, saying:

"Our Lady — glory to her name!"

In the fullness of his joy Aziz did not notice the strange change that had come over his wife. He did not notice that the angelic smile which once glittered on her rosy face had now vanished forever, leaving in its place an obscure question mark. He did not see that the electric current which used to steal from her laugh-ing eyes into the depths of his heart, filling it with heavenly gladness, had now disappeared behind those long lashes that seemed at every minute to be making ready to weep and mourn. He did not sense the new note in her voice — a note of deep sorrow without beginning or end. He did not see the pallor of her face, nor the constant knitting of her brows that told of her inward pain. And if he did see something of all this, he counted it natural to the condition of pregnancy.

As for Jamila, it was as though she had withdrawn from the outer world into her own inner self, as the snail withdraws into its shell. There her soul was alone with itself for the first time in her life, and dread came over her as she began to analyze her own being, lifting the curtain little by little from inward things she had always felt without knowing their meaning. For the first time in her life she asked herself what all of it might mean: her girlhood, and her youth, and her marriage, and the everlasting thirst of her soul, and a happiness she had scarcely touched before it shrank from between her hands and vanished forever? And the unceasing moan of her heart, as though a serpent were gnawing at its cords; and her journeyings to Beirut and Damascus and Zahle; and the visits to monasteries, the vows to the saints, the offering up of prayers? What might all that mean? Was this life? And if that was life, what did it want of her? That she should conceive and bear a "bridegroom" to please her husband and her husband's people? She was with child now — why then was

she not content? But how had she conceived?..

Jamila would carry her thoughts to this point, then return to where she had begun. However she turned, she felt as if she were walking in an enchanted circle of thoughts that pursued her like the ghosts of dead hopes. How often she tried to break out of that circle, and could not! How often she tried to escape from herself and plunge headlong once more into the wide sea of life — into love of her husband and her mother, into the fond attentions of her mother-in-law and her father-in-law — but to no avail. Her husband's kisses had become a poison seeping through her whole body, and her mother-in-law's

endearments a lance severing the arteries of her heart.

She understood that she had become like a leaf the winds had torn from its tree and carried off to strange, far places. She understood that she was a stranger in her husband's house and in her mother's house and in all her town — nay, in the whole world. And this estrangement of the spirit pressed upon her conscious-ness every minute and every second, until life was poisoned for her, and the world was poisoned.

The tenth of May, 1911, was one of those spring days in Lebanon known to whoever has lived in the high places of that mountain — days to which no pen has yet appeared that could do justice in description.

K.L.M. — Royal Dutch Airlines

K.L.M

LIGNES AERIENNES ROYALES NEERLANDAISES

1919 — 30e ANNEE — 1949

For those who wish to travel to Venezuela

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K.L.M

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