In those far-off days we used to summer in Aley, the resort that was blessed with building after the railway came, and blessed with the abonné train that carried up every evening the husbands and brothers of the summering ladies, from the inferno of the coast to the paradise of the peaks.

And though "the Station" was the meeting place of the elegant young girls, and though the Khan al-Shaykh road was a promenade for the young men of the aristocratic class, who raced their carriages with their glossy horses after the carriages of the ladies of "Sursock" society — alongside that glittering touch of the city, which in those days moved slowly and gently, there were in the great summering villages colors of village life which our man of letters Sheikh Said Takieddine described when he told us of the village of "'Ayn al-Burghush," and his description was a marvel.

Colors that have vanished today from Aley and Bhamdoun and Souk al-Gharb. Dawn there is no longer that dawn — when we would rise from sleep and the cool breeze would tickle our cheeks as we went out to the arcaded gallery, where jars and pitchers of rose-colored earthenware had been set out, their water "setting the teeth on edge," with plates of fruit ranged beside them; and up to us from the valleys came the voices of the cows and the sheep and the goats, threaded through with the chugging of the train as it panted wearily up the grade with the string of cars it dragged behind it; then the fall of the mules' hooves on the road, the muleteers walking behind them humming village songs.

No. Dawn is no longer that dawn, nor night that night. People have traded the stars and the moon for electric lamps; and the bands of young men and girls have vanished who used to stroll beneath the balconies of the houses and call to one another to form choruses that marched singing along the 'Ayn al-Rummaneh road to the strumming of mandolins — innocent songs of love; and in their place have risen couples who drink and gamble and carouse in the clubs, leaving the pleasure of walking in the moonlight to the rubber and steel of motorcars.

Nor have the evenings remained those evenings; there is no room on the roads now for the flocks of gazelles, leaping and slipping in among the woods, of whom the zajal singers would say:

All the stars of Paradise beneath the pines of Araya!

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In those far-off days we used to summer in Aley.

And I would wallow in the delights of life in the villages, feeling the smell of the mountain enter through my nostrils into my blood and my bones. Sitting on the balcony, going to the spring, helping the baker-woman at the tannour, accompanying "the girl" to the square — all these were pleasures to me; had it happened that I was deprived of them, I would have counted it an unjust punishment such as only the cruel and the tyrannous impose.

That summer was my last with my father. One evening the disease he had concealed for months came upon us, asserting its existence decisively and finally. A doctor came, then another doctor, then a company of doctors; and when we went down to the city, there was a race on between medicine and the disease.

And the disease won, after forty days — during which we learned that the father who in his own house had been "lord and master" had been the same in his life among people. Our house began to swarm with callers from early morning until night; night became day, in which the big petroleum lamps were never put out; the young men and girls of the family and the wives of our uncles on both sides took turns sitting up, and slept — when they slept — on the benches or on mattresses laid on the floor.

The day the families of my grandfathers — my father's and my mother's — took refuge in Beirut from Wadi al-Taym after the catastrophe of 1860, my father was a little over ten years old. Before long he was carrying his whole family on his shoulders; and when his two brothers grew up they all supported one another in extensive commercial ventures, and he remained a faithful partner to his brothers until he died.

He was dignified, grave, a man of few words. A sharp, raised voice pained him, and he would knit his two thick eyebrows; the fall of footsteps pained him if the shoes had heels; the rattling of the windows pained him when the winds blew. So our care in the house was to walk like ants, to refrain from everything that made clatter and din, and to lay the great table and range the many chairs around it gently and with care.

From the day my young brother died — and he was the dearest thing in the world to him — he was never once seen laughing. When he came home of an evening from the city and we all came forward to kiss his hand, my sisters would push me ahead first, so that his features would relax and his lips part in a smile of contentment.

And when I traveled to Brazil in 1939, my uncle — by then an old man — told me that grapes had been my dead brother's favorite fruit, and that my father never tasted a single grape after losing him.

He used to forbid us to utter the word "servant," and so we grew used to saying "the girl" or "the girls."