2.20.4
It now happened that the servant who bought the supplies for the house died of the plague. When the gravediggers came to carry him away, the agent prevented them from entering, and they were afraid to oppose him because he was a Frank, the Franks being regarded by the Egyptians with excessive respect. The man then proceeded to a place where he could be on his own and went down on his knees, praying to the Mighty and Glorious to give him evidence of the truth of his belief. Then he opened the door, came out, threw himself on top of the body of the deceased and put his mouth to his ear, crying, “ʿAbd al-Jalīl”—the dead man’s name—“I call on you in the name of Christ the son of God to return from the darkness of death to the light of life!” He cocked an ear to hear the reply, but no one answered, so he gestured to the gravediggers to be patient and went back to the same place in which he’d prayed the first time and changed his kneeling posture so that his mouth was now between his legs while he mumbled his prayers, after the manner of the Prophet Ilyās when he prayed for the rain to descend after killing the prophets of Baal (who were four hundred and fifty in number, according to 1 Kings 17). There was, however, a difference between the two praying persons, in that the prophet prayed thus after a killing, whereas our man prayed before a resurrection. It would have been more appropriate if he’d carried ʿAbd al-Jalīl up into a loft as the aforementioned prophet did with the son of the widow who had been sustaining him, his prayer to God to resurrect the man being, “O Lord my God, hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?”665 etc.
2.20.5
Next, the man spread out the arms of the corpse to make a cross, sprang happily to his feet, and made haste to throw his body onto that of the deceased, repeating his earlier words in its ear. When no one answered him and he saw that the dead man was still lying there with his mouth open and his eyelids closed and hadn’t got up and walked around and about and hadn’t sneezed seven times as did the widow’s son raised by the Prophet al-Yashuʿ as mentioned in 2 Kings 4, he went to the kitchen and ordered the cook to make him some broth on the double. When the broth was poured, he took it to ʿAbd al-Jalīl and started emptying it down his throat, though the latter was too busy to pay attention as he was talking to Nākir and Nakīr. When all his efforts failed, he ordered the gravediggers to take him away, saying, “It’s not my fault I didn’t manage to resurrect him, it’s his.” Then he went to the Fāriyāq’s room and said to him, “Excuse me, friend, for failing to resurrect the servant, but the time of resurrection is not yet come. Still, I shall not weaken in my faith that I shall do it next time, God willing.” When the Fāriyāq heard this, he lost his composure and his blood rose in fury and sorrow, and on that same day the disease that was making the rounds afflicted him, a ganglion the size of a citron appeared in his armpit, he became feverish, and he got a painful headache. The agent, though, was unaffected, which is one of those mysteries that physicians cannot understand.
2.20.6
During his illness, the Fāriyāq pondered his situation, as a lone stranger with no companion to bring him cheer, no doctor to give him care. He said to himself, “If I should die now, who will benefit from these books of mine that I have spent so many nights in copying? True, death is hard and hateful under any circumstances, but for a young man like me to die in a strange land is harder still to bear. I have been afflicted in this city, praise God, with every kind of sickness that bears the tint of death. If God should now grant me a reprieve before my time is up, let me not leave this world without the solace of a son and heir, even if my worldly relics consist of nothing but my books. How can it be otherwise when Abīshalūm, son of Our Master Dāʾūd, built himself a wall666 to be remembered by after his death because he had no children. Let me then marry; if I have no children, there are plenty of bricks in Egypt. God make smooth the path! Your aid, O Generous One, O Compassionate, O Merciful!”
Every time, however, he thought carefully about the married state and pictured the troubles and hardships from the devastating heaviness of whose load he’d seen his friends and acquaintances suffer and moan, he’d go back on his decision and laugh at how puerile his mind was and at the weakness of its ability to understand the weakness of his body. Then he’d exuse himself on the basis that anybody who had spent his whole life with opinions opposed to everyone else’s and believing, when in good spirits, sound of body, and in good health, that all of them were in the wrong and he alone in the right, must inevitably quickly change his mind and reject his former way of thinking when afflicted by some bodily weakness. This is what happened to the philosopher Bion667 and many other sages and philosophers. Then the Almighty made amends to the Fāriyāq with His mercy and granted him relief from adversity, and he rose from his bed like one rising from the tomb, went straight to his tambour, and played on it and sang. Leave him now in this state and do nothing to spoil his mood, but gird instead your loins, along with me, and make ready to leap the blazing bonfire that awaits us in Book Three.
*
END OF BOOK TWO
NOTES
1Buṭrus Yūsuf Ḥawwā: one of a group of Lebanese merchants living in London, on whom al-Shidyāq depended for financial and moral support during his third sojourn there, between June 1853 and the summer of 1857, during which period he was also visiting Paris to oversee the printing of Al-Sāq; Ḥawwā provided al-Shidyāq with employment as a commercial agent in his offices.
2“that house” (hādhā l-bayt): i.e., either the Ḥawwā family or the trading house it owned.
3“the oddities of the language, including its rare words” (gharāʾibi l-lughah wa-nawādirihā): works on oddities and rarities of the “classical” or literary Arabic language form a well-established genre of Arabic letters, originally intended to clarify the use of unusual words in the Qurʾān and hadith.
4“morphologically parallel expressions” (ʿibārāt muraṣṣaʿah, from tarṣīʿ, literally, “studding with gems”): a device used in rhymed prose (sajʿ), e.g., ḥattā ʿāda taʿrīḍuka taṣrīḥan wa-ṣāra tamrīḍuka taṣḥīḥan (“until your obscurity reverted to plain statement and your deficient rendering became sound”).
5“substitution and swapping” (al-qalb wa-l-ibdāl): on the evidence of his work devoted to the topic, Sirr al-layāl fī l-qalb wa-l-ibdāl, the author includes, under qalb, not only palindromes (the conventional definition of the term; see Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey, Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 2:660) but also the substitution of one letter in a word by another without change of meaning (see, e.g., Sirr 46, bāḥah and sāḥah (“open space, plaza”)); by “swapping” the author means variation of the dots used to distinguish certain consonants over an identical or nearly identical ductus to produce different, related, words.