151 – Ibrāhīm ibn al-Mundhir al-Ḥizāmī narrated to me; ʿUmar ibn ʿUthmān al-Taymī reported to us. He said: “My father heard some lines of verse from ʿUbayd Allah ibn ʿUmar ibn Ḥafṣ ibn ʿĀṣim ibn ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, and he said to him, ‘Write them down for your nephew.’ So ʿUbayd Allah wrote them out for me, and along with them he gave me these verses by ʿAdī ibn Zayd:

Nations before us have vanished, whole generations gone—
Among them were the people of Moses, the Children of Israel.
They tunneled through the lands in dread of death,
Roaming far and wide across the face of the earth.
At last they returned to the stuff from which they were made,
And lay as nothing but drifting, powdery dust.
Do you think a single trace of them still remains—
A fleeting scent borne off by the east and north winds?