Before dxb lured me aside by an irresistable allusion, I was about to offer this favorite of mine, from the opening chapter of Justine, the first book of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartette.
These are the memories which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one's life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them. In this context too, I recover another such moment, lying beside a sleeping woman in a cheap room near the mosque. In that early spring dawn, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the Ebed -- a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. "I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing" (this repeated thrice, ever more slowly, in a high sweet register). "The perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme: the perfection of God, the One, the Sole: the perfection of Him who taketh unto himself no male or female partner, nor any like Him, not any that is disobedient, not any deputy, equal or offspring. His perfection be extolled."
The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words -- the voice of the muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity -- until the whole morning seemed dense with its marvellous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating that shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing as lightly as a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendour of a language she would never know.
