life, in heaven, and in divinity after death — so which of the religions shall I embrace? I never heard a country described but my longing hastened toward it, nor listened to the voice of a people but I thought it the voice of my hope and my despair; nor did I imagine the distances of the earth, the reaches of the firmament, the deserts and the seas, the worlds and the stars, but a yearning for them swept over me, as though they were homelands awaiting me... Why then do the forces of my melan-choly gather, deep and keen, because I alone in this world am the one who has no homeland..."

××××

And May came down to Lebanon in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-two, and the women's associations delegated Salma Sayegh to answer May's cry. She said to her, in an appealing and stirring call: "Your homeland, May, is this little mountain, which was a homeland before the word patriotism took shape in the minds of men. Here is your homeland: Lebanon the aggrieved, against whom the nights rage, thrusting him into every one of the problems of the East, then cutting away his plains, then putting him to death by starvation and by hanging. And for a gleam of light to dawn upon him, for a sip of the waters of life, for a last breath to be restored to him, the earth quakes its quaking! Yet he is still the noble old man, laughing at the stinginess of men and the smallness of men, and distributing to the Arab world the blood of his heart and the pieces of his liver, as an eternal proof of his right to life. We have no flags, May, of stripes and stars and crescents and crosses; but we have, O raiser of the flag, flags that march fluttering over India and the Hijaz and Iraq and the Nile Valley and the Seine and the Amazon. We have ancient flags, stained with our blood and our tears, folded away in the belly of history: they are our victims, ancient and recent; we carry them upon our hands

and show them to the people, and they remember faithfulness. Here is your homeland — go, then, and bring the glad tidings of your return to it. For nothing upholds homelands but the shoulders of men and the hearts of women. You yourself are a homeland, May, with your teeming, overflowing life, which, were it divided out, would make of it a thousand lives. So say no more — may my soul be your ransom — 'Where is my homeland?'"

××××

I have conveyed these two historic cries to my readers only out of my

certainty that they deserve admi-ration and pride, and out of my belief that they inscribe two pages of glory in the Lebanese woman's struggle for her liberation and for the independence of her homeland.

May Ziadeh and Salma Sayegh — where are their two souls now? Where is that genius, to beckon to the living and point them to the remedy — these ills of which she forewarned us thirty-six years ago? It was granted to my mother that the prophecy come true before her eyes! As for May, she saw it from her far-off assembly on high.

CAMAY

Camay

the soap of enchanting women

Use it today

for the hands — the face — and the bath

CAMAY - SOAP OF BEAUTIFUL

CAMAY

THE SOAP OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN