Sol 5.6

  1. Our two Jufrān clans failed one another—had they joined forces,

    we would have drunk our fill; whoever is forsaken in a just cause is overcome.

  2. Two tribes that never set their two proud brows on equal terms

    for my own people or a protected neighbor when anger flared.

  3. They summoned one another, though my milch-camels had wronged no one openly before the assembly,

    when the turbaned rider came into view.

  4. They yearned toward Dhū al-Haḍb until it seemed

    their yearning was my own, though they had never circled it as a watering place.

  5. When they saw that calamities had driven them

    to a fearsome defender who drives away from the pool whatever comes near it,

  6. they raised their necks above it and called back and forth,

    an answering clamor like a rumbling cloud at forenoon, pouring rain.

  7. All night the old she-camels were kept abreast, among their young, by

    a troop like flocks of sandgrouse streaming away.

  8. Whenever a dark, scowling ridge of ʿĀlij blocked their way,

    its heights forbidding to climb upon its domed back,

  9. they scaled its summit and made it

    a road, reaching it through a passage like a narrow bore.

  10. Above them rose a lofty plume of dust, its column all around it,

    and within it two dense masses, made up of tractable camels and unruly.

  11. They passed through the mountains’ two constricted defiles as though they were

    companies of horsemen on the trail of pursued quarry.

  12. By morning they reached it—before dawn, or after it broke—

    clear as water from a rain cloud pouring down.

  13. Ah, many a sweltering summer day have I seen them

    grazing together in a remote hollow, or at Barbar.

  14. Whenever the two herdsmen called to them, they drew back together

    toward a compact, firm-fleshed, nobly bred male camel,

  15. hard and massive, immense across the shoulders, as though

    a deep-piled, untrimmed mantle lay over his breast.

  16. You see the milk-dry she-camels seek shelter at his sides as though

    they were maidens walking demurely among their people and their playground.

  17. Tall in the withers, their necks lifted proudly,

    like the palms of al-Qurā, their trunks unlopped.

  18. You see every tall, long-striding, smooth-bodied, broad-ribbed she-camel,

    lavish with milk, filling one pail after another.

  19. Her eyes stream at forenoon from her fullness,

    pouring like spray from old, worn-through waterskins.

  20. And another, upon whose lingering flesh summer has built up fat,

    has scant milk; but for rich pasture, she would not be milked.

  21. A free-flowing milker behind the lean ones—even if there drove against her

    an east wind and a bitterly cold north wind, she would not be overturned.

  22. On a bitter-cold night, the animals at the herd’s edges shelter beneath her,

    clinging like sandgrouse to a cleft at the summit of a sharp peak.

Sol 5.6