‘Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allah is great! Only Allah is God!’

It is not yet four o’clock and a pale blurred gleam of light spreads through the infinitely echoing air. The muezzin is calling to prayer.

He is calling the reveille prayer with his clear voice. The notes are interminable and unexpected, higher than the normal human register, with rare feeling and with a deadly sadness.

This is the muezzin of the closest mosque and you would think he is on my roof.

‘Allahu akbar! Allah is great! Only Allah is God!’

He repeats his call in all directions. When he calls to west and north, the words are lost and seemingly they are no longer human sounds, rather some oboe fugue.

I hear, but I am still asleep. Without my being able to explain the image, his call to prayer produces in me the effect of a large bird in a dream; it takes flight in the still-grey dawn, climbing, descending, hovering with constantly trembling light wings, up once more, down again at last in a shudder of death.

Every morning at dawn, I hear the muezzin's high utterances which are dragged out, only to finish like the ultimate plaintive cry. From this, I get an almost distressing feeling of Islam. I sleep more deeply as soon as he has finished calling.

Distancing ourselves more and more from the holy places, the images of which, alas, we feel already fading, we are about to resume our journey northwards, into the land of the gentiles, as far as the massive ruins of the temples of the sun. Then we shall reach Beirut where our pilgrimage ends. But this morning we are leaving and I shall not go back to sleep. Soon, below in the scarcely lit street, the bells of the morning mules tinkle merrily as they pass. Then the birds, the swifts, after a light prelude, join together in an extravagant dawn chorus. Then, human voices begin, traders calling, coppersmiths hammering, all the noises of oriental life. At six o’clock, we are on horseback, taking up once more our nomadic life and our woollen cloaks for our last four days.