We look anxiously at the sky as we open our eyes; the morning is empty and clear and the sun in the east will be able to rise in all its splendour.

It is about half past six in the morning by the time we are at the monastery gate, ready to leave. The vaulted street is still drowned in shadows, but under one of the arches, a corner of the garden full of flowering orange trees and roses appears, bathed in sunlight. Even if it is dark here, our guess is that, beyond the oppressive old pointed stone arches, the sun is shining.

Opposite us, in the darkness, the lepers of Nablus, tipped off yesterday that we are passing through, fall into line to be there for our departure. Under their old hoods and wretched old turbans are swollen eaten-away faces, with no noses and no eyes.

They extend their hands towards us, hands without nails, even without fingers and they murmur in a quiet voice their good wishes of bon voyage. ‘Throw your alms! Don't touch their hands!’, the fathers shout to us from the threshold of their cloisters where they have come down to bid us farewell. Quickly, we mount our animals, harnessed with bedouin pendants, impatient to be sunning ourselves in the countryside in the fresh air. At last the weather is fine! Everything is changing and all the magic of the Orient is rediscovered… an immense delight. As we emerge from the town, into the gorgeous orchards where birds are singing, it smells of orange trees, jasmine and roses – and something else indistinct and sweet, but which is like the very odour of the Levant and intoxicating. Now cemeteries rise in tiers against the side of the mountain. In accordance with tradition, a crowd of Muslim women are gathered there. The funerary stones stand all alike like white figures, resembling women visitors, also white, draped in their veils. Among clusters of large spear-shaped leaves, gladioli and irises, there is a strange and pleasant confusion in the radiant light of the morning and it is difficult to distinguish between the women and the tombs.