That evening the Ḳāimaḳām sent me a message asking whether I would choose to dine alone or whether I would honour him and his wife, and I begged to be allowed to take the latter alternative. In spite of a desire, touchingly evident, to be a good host, he was sad and silent during the earlier stages of the dinner, until we hit upon a subject that drew him from the memory of his sorrow. The mighty dead came out to help us with words upon their lips that have lifted the failing hearts of generations of mankind. The Ḳāimaḳām was well acquainted with Arabic literature; he knew the poets of the Ignorance by heart, and when he found that I had a scanty knowledge of them and a great love for them he quoted couplet after couplet. But his own tastes lay with more modern singers; the tenth-century Mutanabbi was evidently one of his favourite authors. Some of the old fire still smoulders in Mutanabbi's verse; it burnt again as the Ḳāimaḳām recited the famous ode in which the poet puts from him the joys of youth:
"Oft have I longed for age to still the tumult in my brain. And why should I repine when my prayer is fulfilled? We have renounced desire save for the spear-points, Neither do we dally, except with them. The most exalted seat in the world is the saddle of a swift horse, And the best companion for all time is a book."
"Your Excellency," concluded the Ḳāimaḳām, "must surely hold that couplet in esteem."
When we returned to the guest-chamber he asked whether he should not read his latest poem, composed at the request of the students of the American College at Beyrout (the most renowned institution of its kind in Syria) to commemorate an anniversary they were about to celebrate. He produced first the students' letter, which was couched in flattering terms, and then his sheets of manuscript, and declaimed his verses with the fine emphasis of the Oriental reciter, pausing from time to time to explain the full meaning of a metaphor or to give an illustration to some difficult couplet. His subject was the praise of learning, but he ended inconsequently with a fulsome panegyric on the Sultan, a passage of which he was immensely proud. As far as I could judge it was not very great poetry, but what of that? There is no solace in misfortune like authorship, and for a short hour the Ḳāimaḳām forgot his grief and entered into regions where there is neither death nor lamentation. I offered him sympathy and praise at suitable points and could have laughed to find myself talking the same agreeable rubbish in Arabic that we all talk so often in English. I might have been sitting in a London drawing-room, instead of between the bare walls of a Crusader tower, and the world is after all made of the one stuff throughout.