O friend, see the lightning there! it flickered and now is gone, 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. * * * * * FROM THE 'MU 'ALLAKÂT' OF ZUHÉIR A lament for the desertion, through a war, of his former home and the haunts of his tribe; Translation of C. J. Lyall. I