The oleander was blossoming in the courtyard of the tekija, a dervish lodge set in a cliff; and in the last light of a September afternoon, the white blossoms shone against the red rock. More than forty species of birds nest in the cliff, which also houses the source of the Buna River, an emerald tributary of the Nerevta flowing through Mostar, in eastern Bosnia, where Sufi dervishes arrived in the fifteenth century. They flourished here until the Communist takeover of Yugoslavia in 1945, when they went underground; they resurfaced in 1991, when Yugoslavia began to break apart, and now there were seminarians talking in low tones at a table outside the kitchen -near a display of prayer ropes, shawls, kilims, and devotional books for sale. A waiter brought Turkish coffee to our literary delegation. In the gloaming, we watched the swallows sweep along the cliff.