The Saddlebag [antikvár]

THE THIEF There was once a Thief who made his living by stealing from pilgrims along the road between Mecca and Medina. He was a Bedouin who had been bom among the dunes and had never known a father. The priests too were alien to him and he cared nothing for the Prophet or his laws. Since he had been raised by several mothers who had all died before he learned the art of picking pockets, he had received little love and no schooling. But he had always been free. Freedom, for the Bedouin, was the desert air he breathed. It was that open space of possibility between the known and the denied, that uninhabited place of expectation between apparent facts. He had been bom to this inheritance of emptiness; it was a legacy that had been left him gratis. Even as a boy he knew the value of it but he still had to define this freedom for himself. City dwellers, he discovered, did not tmst such freedom: they bound its myriad meanings within human wills and walls. The only place he found its vestiges in huddled towns and squalid villages was in those secret gardens where sweet fmit trees bloomed. The wildemess still flourished there, like the memory of orange blossom, within a courtyard, by