Your suspicion is misplaced, author: Saad Hajar

They carry their bottles at the first breezes of a rural night fragrant with the smell of clay, and small hopes carried with them like children clinging to the edges of their muddy-colored shirts. These transparent bottles, sometimes clear and sometimes stained with mud, are the only reliance that will tame the arrogance of village nights when the darkness deepens, intoxicated with the scent that rises in its late hours to perfume them. Their spirits remain afloat despite the heaviness of what they carry. The harsh unemployment and the time that still drags itself along its empty belly have left them no room to think whether what they do is right or wrong, or whether life in this village as a whole calls for escape and leaving far away: here they have found the way that lifts their heads high, the way that allows escape from everything, as they move away every night from the village houses and the last light falling from its feeble lamps. They merge with the fields, in pure, ascetic darkness, with tranquility and reverence that the night of this village deposits in their chests, as if the sky inhabits their souls and suspends them. The big cities have driven them away from it, and where else would they find food if not in these cities, which hardly number two or three, each separated from the other by many towns? They found the way that takes them out of the village through its pristine fields. They follow the goats’ trail through the narrowest carved bends, cautious in their steps not to accidentally uproot a stone boundary.