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the saluki hounds which were used by the princes of the East for hunting gazelle.
    A curve of the road hid them, and all at once it was an ordinary day again. We were at the hotel, and it was time for lunch.
    We saw the rider again, on our way down the otherside of the valley. We had spent more than an hour over lunch, and the horseman must have used paths which cut off a thousand difficult corners that a car had to take. As we picked our way between the potholes into some tiny settlement in a lost high valley where the snow lay not very far above us, I saw the rider below, walking his horse down a barely visible path that took him thigh-deep through a field of sunflowers. The dogs were invisible below the thick, heart-shaped leaves. Then they raced ahead of him out on to a lower curve of the road, the horse breaking into a canter behind them. So clear was the air that I could hear the jingling of bridle bells above the thud of hoofs in the dust.
    The squat peeling houses of the village crowded in on the car and hid him from view.
    We stopped in the village to buy oranges.
    This was Hamid’s idea. We could have bought them at one of the dozens of stalls on the way out of Beirut, but these, he said, would be something special, straight from the tree and warm with the sun and ripe, divinely ripe.
    ‘And I shall buy them for you as a present,’ he said, drawing the car to a halt in the shade of a mulberry tree and coming round to open the door for me.
    The village was poor, that was obvious; the houses were nothing more than shacks patched with mud brick, but they were screened with vines, and each one squatted among its laborious terraces of fruit and grain. Some of the Goddess’s fertility had spilled over into the place, for all its height. It must be shelteredfrom the worst of the winds, and there would be no lack of moisture as the snow melted. The carefully trapped water stood deep-green in square cisterns under the bare silver poplars, and the village – just a handful of houses in a natural amphitheatre sheltered from the wind – was full of fruit blossom, not only the enchanting glossy trees heavy with the waxy flowers and fruit of oranges and lemons, but the snow of pears and the sharp pink of almond, and everywhere the blush-pink of the apple, the staple fruit of the Lebanon.
    The sun was hot. A small crowd of staring children had gathered round the car; they were very small and rather engaging, with their thick black hair and enormous dark eyes and thumb-sucking curiosity. The place seemed dead, with the afternoon deadness. No one was in the fields; if there was a café it was only some dark room in one of the cottages; and I saw no women. Apart from the children, the skinny hens scratching, and a miserable-looking donkey with rope sores, the only creature moving was an old man who sat in the sun smoking a pipe. He could, indeed, hardly be said to be moving. He seemed to be smoking almost in his sleep, and his eyes turned up slowly and half blind to Hamid as the latter greeted him and asked him a question in Arabic, presumably who would sell us the fruit that hung still on the lovely trees.
    The old man waited a full half minute while the question wound its way through his brain, then he removed the pipe from his mouth, turned his head through a full three degrees, spat revoltingly into the dust, and mumbled something to himself. Then hiseyes resumed their myopic staring at vacancy, and the pipe went back into his mouth.
    Hamid grinned at me, shrugged, said: ‘I won’t be a moment,’ and vanished into a dark doorway.
    I wandered across the street, the children following. At the edge of the road was a six-foot retaining wall holding up, it seemed, the entire plateau on which the village was built. Below this were the terraced fields where I had seen the rider on the chestnut horse. The sunflowers were too tall and too thickly planted to allow the lovely profusion of flowers that I had seen in the lower reaches