Chapter 20
This time Lubna had known where she was running.
She fondled the rough masonry. It still had some warmth left in it. But the sun had left the valley, and the line of the Alhambra’s bastions that marched and beetled along the wooded slope was darkening to the shade of bruised flesh. Light lingered only on Jabal Shulayr, turning the scant snowfields lilac.
The scene had inspired a hundred odes, a thousand stanzas, myriad verses, a few of them by Lubna. But now she knew the beauty of it was a lie.
She looked up at the holes that pierced the escarpment above the graveyard, and remembered what Abu Abdallah had said about the cave: that its emptiness was an illusion. She shook her head. The old man had meant well, but he was wrong. Emptiness, nothingness, death were the only reali
