A few days ago a heavy downpour fell, ruining many harvests in Hawran and elsewhere, as well as the masatiḥ 1 and other holdings. Truly, to Allah we belong and to Him we shall return.
On the night of Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of that same month, after the late ‘isha prayer but before the citadel drum sounded, a horseman entered from the direction of Bab al-Faraj toward the inner Citadel Gate. A chain had been stretched across that gate, and another across Bab al-Nasr, both recently installed so that no rider might pass the Gate of the Victorious Citadel. The rider spurred his mount at the first chain and snapped it, then charged the second and snapped it as well, riding out through Bab al-Nasr. He could not be identified, for his face was veiled.
On the eleventh of Safar—indeed, a day earlier—a courier arrived from Egypt with an honorable summons for the amir Sayf al-Din Zabala, one of the commanders of a thousand, to come to Cairo. He had already been dismissed from the citadel deputyship on account of the affair mentioned earlier. The courier also brought back the decrees that many people held concerning additions to the Congregational Mosque; these documents were returned to their holders, and they were confirmed in what they possessed. The mosque supervisor, al-Sahib Taqi al-Din ibn Marajil, had tried to have the additions removed, citing the memorandum issued in the days of Sarghitmush, but his effort came to nothing.
Shaykh Bahaʾ al-Din ibn al-Subki, the Shafi‘i chief judge of Syria, departed Damascus for Egypt on Sunday, the sixteenth of Safar this year. The judges and notable citizens accompanied him to bid farewell. At that time he informed us that his brother, the chief judge Taj al-Din, had received the robe of office in Egypt and would proceed to Syria as soon as he reached Cairo; he also remarked that his brother disliked Syria.
Judge Salah al-Din al-Safadi recited to me on the night of Friday, the fourteenth of the month, some lines he had composed, reversing a verse by al-Mutanabbi. He said:
‘When a youth grows accustomed to plunging into mortal perils,
the very least he will pass through is mud.’ 2
He then added:
‘Entering Damascus leaves us gaunt,
as though she alone possessed a place among mankind;
Once the stranger grows used to wading within her,
the easiest thing he will meet is death.’
This is vigorous verse and a manifest inversion, both in wording and in meaning. 3
On the night of Friday, the twenty-first of Safar, a large ceremonial tent was erected at the Daqaqi hospital beside the Congregational Mosque to mark the completion of its renovation: the roof had been rebuilt with sun-dried brick, even its four arches with variegated stone, and in its upper part