Basatin al-uns 77.100

77.100

The ascetic took pity on my fire-filled chest, and at the sight of my tear-filled eyes, bloody tears rained down from his own eyes.
After three days, when the power of the four elements began to visit the infirm body, and the five senses
escaped from the impasse of calamity, he took me in his companionship to a garden wherein he watered the meadows of ascetic discipline
and in its precinct illuminated the candle of his inner conscience with the lights of gnosis. Like
an accountant's finger at the time of reckoning, stumbling and rising in following him, I set foot upon the path, and with the endurance of great hardship
I reached the aforementioned place. To strengthen my weak soul and emaciated body, he went to fetch various
fruits; and whichever tree he raised his head toward, its fruit fell down into his skirt without the trouble of breaking it.
When his skirt was filled with various fresh fruits, he brought them before me by way of a gift, and opened his tongue
with an apology, saying, ‘Gifts are according to the measure of the giver.’ Out of extreme starvation I had reached such a pass,
and had become so wishful, that at night I expected a grain from the harvest of the moon, and by day, in hope of the disc of
the sun, I kept my mouth open like an oven; like a chameleon I would not take my two eyes off it, and hoping that
a crust of bread might fall into its mouth, the heart burned upon the fire of the chest like a frying pan; and my soul, out of the severity of the torment of the fire
of hunger, was sated with the pleasure of life and resigned itself to departing from the body. I imagined that perhaps Riḍwān
had brought the blessings of the highest paradise as a gift to this forsaken one, or that the cloud of divine generosity had rained drops of mercy
upon the garden of that ascetic and endowed its fruits with the sweetness of the taste of Paradise. When the fire of hunger