This sad place cheers up for an hour in the morning. A cuckoo sings its spring song in the little coppice of poplars, alone in the midst of this rocky land. High above, the snow sparkles. The men of the hamlet come down to sit as they did yesterday and to watch us leave. Then the seven little girls in their same little chemises also take their place, squeezed together like a line of birds. Off we go through broken grey rocks; the intersecting tracks are scarcely visible.

The desolate undulations before us follow a downward slope. Then, vast flat sombre bleak empty expanses unfold, bordered into the far distance by the whiteness of the snows of the Anti-Lebanon.

Two people pass close by – a touching sight: an old Druze couple, in their seventies at least, travelling on the same old nag, the man still upright and noble, the woman with white hair, sitting on the rump behind him and tenderly holding onto him round the waist. Where are they going in this wilderness? What pleasures, what hopes do they still have? In this land of struggles, what have the lives of these two simple folk been like, united in body and soul until they reach old age? We meet passers-by, Syrian men and women on donkeys and Druze on horseback or on camels, but we are back in the wilderness. As the light fades, it is the same dying of the sun as in Arabia or Edom. It appears to be the result of several hours of preparation, skilfully managed to make the clear appearance of the oasis of Damascus more striking afterwards.

Towards midday, something astonishing takes shape at the end of the grey plains, a green expanse, not an intense green as in the tropics or in the oases of the south, but rather a clear green, as clear as pale emeralds. It is what must be a forest of deciduous trees in the delicate and rare freshness of April. It is a thick compact forest in the midst of which seem to emerge the countless domes and minarets of a pink town, salmon pink, flesh-coloured pink; but they are still small unclear and only perceptible because of the clear air.