... You are on the shaded sandy path leading to his house atop a hill overlooking Beirut, in Zaydaniyya. Before you is the great gateway, above which, from behind the glass, the red eyes of blossoms peep, straying among the greening leaves... Around the house are meadows rippling with a luxury of color, left, as their owner wished them, in nature's keeping — but for shrubs standing here and there, radiant in the fullness of their budding, and but for a row of poplar trees rising in loftiness and might...

Over a cup of coffee... amid the paintings: the artist Omar Onsi, then his wife, then the writer of this article, then the artist Youssef Howayek.

And your imagination runs ahead of you into the house where the masterpieces are: hung, standing... leaning, sleeping... Would that you had a thousand eyes to

The Lebanese dabke... to the tune of the mijwiz...