255 – I heard one of our companions relate, on the authority of a scholar, that he said: “I discovered these verses—dating two thousand years before Islam—in one of the caves of Najd, and I rendered them into Arabic:

Permanence has been forbidden; there is no abiding for you two—
the night, its darkness virgin, and the day.
Never have the pair been seen together in one place;
each of them is driven on by destiny’s decree.
Should anything reach the collars they both adorn,
it would be worn away in turn by wind and rain.⦗189⦘
We kept our eyes on the night, wherever it might lead,
and on the sun—till our sight withdrew, overcome.
Allah passes His judgment between the two,
and within that judgment lie both ease and hardship.
By it a tribe meets extinction or finds new life,
as the days and seasons come and go in steady succession."