KHAL AND HAWI 247Who can protect us from the boredom of the desert?
Drive away that fearful monster;
When from the cave of sunset it crawls out,
Wrapping up the diseased street and the gloomy neighbourhood? (p. 32)The poet is scared of the visions and nightmares of the night, and he has not
sufficient courage to face the feeling of his insignificance during the day.
His hell being in his blood, he cannot escape. He has lost his belief in a
forthcoming paradise and his life cannot be given a meaning either by the
pursuit of wealth or by indulgence in vice or physical pleasures. In 'The
Coffin of the Drunkards' we meet the poet, together with other 'victims of
accursed boredom', in a brothel: they are all drunk in a futile attempt to run
away from themselves and he is railing at a prostitute who is singing of real
love and chastity, in a manner reminiscent of the early Abu Shabaka, author
of The Serpents of Paradise. Then we get a glimpse of the poet's state of mind
in 'Cold Hell' when he wishes that 'this cold paralyzed being [i.e. himself]
would either live or die', since black visions have turned him into an embit-
tered, cold and hateful creature, whose 'senses have become worn out',
whose nerves are now like 'cobweb threads' and whose home reeks of the
smell of a tomb. In 'Without Address' there is nothing to look forward to but
'cold, hunger and madness', and all that he knows, he says in the section
entitled 'Inside the Whale', is that he is 'dying, an insignificant morsel in the
belly of a whale', and all that he remembers about his life in the past is that
it has been a cave in which spiders crawl and bats fly. 'Laughter and Children'
records how he no longer succumbs to the temptation to flee from his prison
or to indulge in the idle hope of being pardoned, since in his heart time has
now 'rusted'; he has become absorbed by the darkness of his prison, his
eyelids eaten away by dust, this limbs have disintegrated into rotted flesh
and bones scattered by rats' feet. In 'Sodom' is a clear indication that the
whole of the poet's society is dead (p. 63). In the following section, entitled
'The Magi in Europe', there is a merciless satire on the poet's people, parti-
cularly in these lines so memorable in Arabic:
We are from Beirut, alas, we were born
With borrowed faces and with borrowed minds.
Our thoughts are born whores in the market places.
Then spend their lives pretending to be virgins, (p. 67)In the tenth section, 'After the Ice', however, we detect a faint glimmer
of hope which will grow brighter in the three remaining sections to the
extent that the end of the poem, if it is not exactly a note of triumph, is at
least a far cry from the loss and despair of 'The Mariner and the Dervish' at