sick man an infusion of henna, to be drunk with chicken broth for seven days, and an anointing for forty days with myrrh mixed with pitch and tar!
He said it was a prescription from the Tadhkira of Dawud, the manuscript copy of which had come down to him from his grandfather. And the sheikh went out of the village with a camel-load of the villagers' gifts!
The people of the village had long since forgotten why they had taken the pledges and had the talismans written; and in spite of their disappointment in courting good fortune, they went on believing in the shepherd and in the sheikh in Zagazig... and calling on them for help in easing what was hard and relieving the distress of the distressed...
Even Ismail's mother!
The public-health doctor crossed no one's mind, for in the villagers' eyes he was... the one charlatan among all those trustworthy men of learning!
The disease, the shepherd's handiwork, and the medicine of the sheikh in Zagazig joined forces, and they put out most of the bright candles in Ismail's eyes.
The nodules and swellings began to spread through his body; Ismail's nerves began to tire and give way; and the disease began stealing in like a practiced thief, snatching from him a finger here and a finger there, until Ismail the strong lay helpless, able to do nothing.
The man who used to see the jinn "sister" knocking at his door by night said that she had quarreled with him because he married, and had taken the most evil of revenges upon him.
And the man who used to claim that his success was a blessing from the prayers of righteous parents said: I had thought his father a righteous man. There is no power and no strength save in God. Truly, people are mysteries.
But not one of the villagers wavered in his faith in the power of the shepherd, or in the secret of the sheikh in Zagazig!
The patience of the devoted friends wore out; they began heeding the registrar's new
counsels and fleeing from Ismail the leper as they would flee from a lion...
And Ismail lost all his charm over them...
He became like a grave: "visited much, then less than much, then scarcely, then forgotten as though it had never been visited!"
Yet there remained to him his devoted wife, who had not lost her hope in God and in the sheikh in Zagazig — that her husband would be given back to her strong as he had been, handsome as he had been; and let her be the light of his eye if he had lost some of the light of his eye, and let her be his limbs if the disease had ravaged his limbs, and let her be a bondmaid to her master Ismail. And there remained to him his mother, selling the calf and the ewe and the hens and spending lavishly on his treatment at the shepherd's hands.
And Ismail, as he lay before the house warming himself in the winter sun, never lacked some villager who had lost his way and, passing by this forbidden house, felt shame and offered him a greeting.
Sometimes the hand of one of his old friends would open toward him in greeting; then he would turn away his face and his mist-veiled eyes, ignore the outstretched hand, refuse the alms his friends bestowed upon him against their will, and send that generous friend away with a kind word...
The disease went on to its end, cruel and unmerciful, mocking the incantations and the talismans, the supplications and the prayers; and his sight failed until he no longer saw the light.
From the house there vanished the bleating of the ewe, the lowing of the calf, and the clucking of the hens.
And the star of good fortune set in a muddy spring, and its setting seemed to be forever.
Despair crept into the wife's heart of any cure for that impossible body...
When he asked for a drink of water in his mother's absence, she took to putting her hand over her nose, going in to him with the
jar, setting it down at his side, and darting off like an arrow.
She began telling the women of the village of her ill luck, weeping for her wasted effort and for her earrings, whose price had gone to the sheikh of Zagazig — and she remembered that she had a mother-in-law!
And in the end she too fled from her leper husband...
Ismail had lost his charm over his wife, as he had lost it over his devoted friends, and as he had lost it before over the hoe and the plow.
But he did not lose his charm over his mother...
She remained to him: giving him drink while she went thirsty, feeding him while she went hungry, kissing the lips that the angel of death disdained to kiss; selling all her world to buy him back, and asking God to make her the ransom for her poor beloved boy.
And in the end there remained to him his mother and the flies... and the angel of death hovering over him from afar.
Roccal
Guard against microbes!
By using a solution of Roccal
For disinfecting fruit and vegetables
Without taste, without odor... and without color!
It kills the germs of amoeba, dysentery, and typhoid
Very economical in use
Sold in all pharmacies