austere, pebbled landscape rising and falling in slow rhythms, a charm, an ancient rune calling out an ancient tune. They couldn’t see much, a new house or two way back from the highway, solid white structures flowing with harmonious consistence against the night and the moon, a few cars on the road beside them disguised by the night as more costly vehicles than they probably were, and primarily the solemn emptiness resonating tranquility, a desert rhapsody Adam had heard before but Alia had been listening to all her life. And what was this desert rhapsody, this response of the eye to the inner ear, who composed this song, invisible senses ringing to certain fine frequencies, the pure light equally visible on a moonless night or a high plateau ridged with summer skies? The origin of this resonance was the longing in the heart, the secrets, the search, the pure wisdom to be known in open space alone. Adam breathed a sigh born of the desert, destined to die in the desert, “We are here, return to the holy land,” recognition, remembrance like crossed blades transecting the point, the seeking heart, “We go forward from this place, we will always come to this place.” These were his thoughts as Alia exclaimed beside him, “Adam, Adam, it’s amazing, I’m in love with it already and I can’t really see anything, it’s just the feeling, the dazzling presence I must prostrate before to acknowledge, thank you my beloved for bringing me to this place.” Soon they were in the ancient city which had been content to lie about in its own ruins until the early decades of this century when it awoke to new life, this era; a conjunction of history and nonhistory, time and the non-temporal, all this reached out to engulf them in its noiseless night. The bus let them off on some unknown street among unknown streets. The words, “What should we do now?” rose in Alia’s throat but had not yet been released when she turned to find Adam already in conversation with an aging taxi-driver whose gaunt, unshaved face was shrouded in a red and white checkered keffieyeh, familiar as the traditional headgear worn by Arabs everywhere. He greeted them with warm pleasure when Adam said as-salamu ‘alaikum, returning his salams vigorously, adding a fervent ahlan wa sahlan to this blonde and blue eyed stranger whose first words had been the ancient greeting of peace. “You want hotel?” his dark, bright eyes assessing them carefully, they nodded cautiously, “But not, I think, luxury hotel.” They laughed in agreement, cementing the first of many casual but profoundly sincere connections made everywhere, daily, among a people where innate hospitality was equaled by friendliness and polite curiosity. “Not in city,” their first protector whose name was Nasr decided, “No, not downtown,” Adam agreed, “Then let me take you, I know some place, is quiet, clean, good for you I think.” They drove the winding, hilly streets with Nasr that first night, actually he got lost himself once or

107