Twenty-five years passed, during which the woman took refuge at the doors of mosques and shrines, begging, her tongue never ceasing to implore the charitable with that immortal sentence which suffers neither change nor alteration:

— Have mercy on a mother supporting her orphan child... have mercy on her, and God will have mercy on you!

Can her orphan son, do you think, remain a child, the attributes of childhood and orphanhood clinging to him down the years, even past twenty-five?!

Did Umm Sahloul not grasp that her child had grown up and matured, until he had become a young man in the splendor of youth, making his way in life as working men do?!

She would insist on counting him still a child, though he had reached the measure of men and had gone off from her to toil and venture; despite everything he was that weak, broken-winged child who could not do without his mother's care, watching over him and doting on him!

Umm Sahloul grew up in the keeping of a butcher who worked at the slaughterhouse, as though nature had fashioned him to represent the butchers' guild to perfection: a towering figure, broad slabs of shoulders, and a thick, pointed mustache on which a falcon might perch, as the proverbs say.

This woman grew up in his keep-ing, a girl who knew nothing at all of her past; he had come upon her on some road, an infant who could barely make herself under-stood, and picked her up out of pity and compassion. To him, then, was owed all the credit — every bit of it — for her remain-ing alive like other living things.

That is what the man repeated in her hearing morning and evening, twirling his mustache in his pride; so it is no wonder she believed in the debt she owed him, and repaid his goodness to her with unbroken loyalty

and blind obedience, serving him faithfully though he spoke roughly to her, and shouldering his burdens though he used her cruelly.

And how much she suffered from his drunken carousing when he came back to her in the dead of night, reeling drunk... pouring out on her head all the wine-bred whims in his own!

This lord and master of hers never tired of reminding her of her smallness and insignificance; it was he who named her "Umm Sahloul" before she had even come of age, in disdain and mockery. So she bore

this mother's name before she knew what motherhood was, accepted it without pride or complaint, and it settled in the depths of her soul that she was — as her master called her and as all the people around her called her — the most contemptible of all God's creatures and the ugliest of them in form...

The years swept that girl along until she had passed sixteen, still as she was: a creature on whom nature bestowed nothing of a woman's charm, with no share of life but that unending round of indignity, loathing, and humiliation.

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