C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Imr-al-Kais: Description of a Mountain Storm
By Arabic Literature
O
as though flashed a pair of hands in the pillar of crowned cloud.
Now, was it its blaze, or the lamps of a hermit that dwells alone,
and pours o’er the twisted wicks the oil from his slender cruse?
We sat there, my fellows and I, ’twixt Dárij and al-Udhaib,
and gazed as the distance gloomed, and waited its oncoming.
The right of its mighty rain advanced over Katan’s ridge;
the left of its trailing skirt swept Yadhbul and as-Sitar:
Then over Kutaifah’s steep the flood of its onset drave,
and headlong before its storm the tall trees were borne to ground;
And the drift of its waters passed o’er the crags of al-Kanân,
and drave forth the white-legged deer from the refuge they sought therein.
And Taimá—it left not there the stem of a palm aloft,
nor ever a tower, save ours, firm built on the living rock.
And when first its misty shroud bore down upon Mount Thabîr,
he stood like an ancient man in a gray-streaked mantle wrapt.
The clouds cast their burdens down on the broad plain of al-Ghabit,
as a trader from al-Yaman unfolds from the bales his store;
And the topmost crest, on the morrow, of al-Mujaimir’s cairn,
was heaped with the flood-borne wrack, like wool on a distaff wound.