The sun was sinking at its leisure toward the Mediterranean when Aziz al-Kirbaj came home from his work and did not find his wife sitting on the steps as was her habit. He asked his mother about her, and she answered that she had gone out for a stroll an hour before and had not come back!.. Then she added that she might have looked in on some of the neighbors on her way.
Aziz was not satisfied with this explanation, for he knew that of late his wife had been shunning people and their company as one shuns vipers and scorpions. So he went straight into her chamber to see whether she had put on one of her visiting dresses, and satisfied himself that she was in her house clothes. But this time he did not find in her room the order and exactness he was used to. And while he was asking himself where his "qarqura" could be, his eye fell on a folded paper lying on the marble slab before the mirror. He took it up, and in it was written: "You will find me under the oak. — Jamila."
Aziz read those words and flew with the speed of lightning to the oak. He knew every branch of that tree as he knew the ten fingers of his hands. It was the selfsame oak under which he used to sit with Jamila in days gone by — the days of their intoxication with first love and the happiness of married life. An age-old oak standing on the crest of a knoll, at whose foot ran a spring of pure sweet water; around it many trees of differing ages, but it the oldest tree in that neighborhood — nay, in the whole town and its environs.
Aziz reached the oak and stood rooted like a man struck out of his senses, not knowing whether to weep or to laugh.
"Qarqura! Qarqura!" Before him lay his wife on the ground, stretched on her right side, wearing her wedding dress — the very dress in which she had stood at his side eleven years before, in front of Father Boulos. On her head was a wreath of flowers. Her hair, dark as agate, was loosed over her left shoulder, one braid of it circling her neck, and her fingers propped her right cheek.
"Jamila! Jamila!" Jamila did not answer.
He bent over her, a faint hope still fluttering in his heart that she might perhaps be asleep. He took her head between his hands, and instantly drew back and screamed in terror, for he found the "qarqura" a lifeless corpse.
When his senses returned and he drew near her again, he glimpsed among the folds of her dress, upon her breast, his picture and hers in their wedding clothes. And he found close by her a paper flung down on the
grass, as though she had tried to tear it up but death had come between her and the deed. He opened that paper with a trembling hand, and this is what he
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