THE ARTIST-DRAGOMAN
Of Suleymân in his capacity of dragoman I saw little but heard much
both from himself and others. The English residents in Palestine and
Syria--those who knew of him--regarded him as but a doubtful
character, if one may judge from their repeated warnings to me not to
trust him out of sight. His wisdom and his independent way of airing
it did not please everybody as they did me; and reverence in dealing
with a fellow-man was not his strong point. By travellers, I gather
from innumerable testimonials which he showed me, he was either much
beloved or the reverse, though none could say he did not know his
business.
His English, though voluminous and comprehensive, was sometimes
strange to native English ears. He had read the Bible in a German
mission school, and spoke of 'Billiam's donkey' and 'the mighty
Simson' where we should speak of Balaam's ass and Samson. He called
the goatskins used for carrying water 'beastly skins,' and sometimes
strengthened a mild sentence with an expletive.
I do not think he ever went so far in this way as another dragoman
who, riding out from Haifa one fine morning with an English lady,
pointed to Mount Carmel and observed:
'Bloody fine hill, madam!'
He knew how to adapt his language to his audience. But it is curious
that a man whose speech in Arabic was highly mannered, in English
should have cultivated solecisms. That he did cultivate them as an
asset of his stock-in-trade I can affirm, for he would invent absurd
mistakes and then rehearse them to me, with the question: 'Is that
funny? Will that make the English laugh?'
For clergymen he kept a special manner and a special store of jokes.
When leading such through Palestine he always had a Bible up before
him on the saddle; and every night would join them after dinner and
preach a sermon on the subject of the next day's journey. This he
would make as comical as possible for their amusement, for clergymen,
he often used to say to me, are fond of laughter of a certain kind.
One English parson he bedevilled utterly by telling him the truth--or
the accepted legend--in such a form that it seemed false or mad to
him.
As they were riding out from Jaffa towards Jerusalem, he pointed to
the mud-built village of Latrûn and said:
'That, sir, is the place where Simpson catch the foxes.'
'Ah?' said the clergyman. 'And who was Simpson?'
'He was a very clever gentleman, and liked a bit of sport.'
'Was he an Englishman?'
'No, sir; he was a Jew. He catch a lot of foxes with some traps; he
kill them and he take their skins to Jaffa to the tailor, and he tell
the tailor: "Make me one big skin out of these little ones." The
tailor make one thundering big fox's skin, big enough for Simpson to
get inside of it. Then Simpson, he put on that skin one night, and go
and sit out in the field and make the same noise what the little foxes
make. The little foxes come out of their holes to look; they see one
big fox sitting there, and they not know it's really Simpson. They
come quite near and Simpson catch hold of their tails and tie their
tails together. Then they make the noise, and still more foxes come,
and Simpson catch hold of their tails and tie their tails together,
till he got hundreds and hundreds.'
'Whatever did he do with them?' inquired the parson.
'He set fire to them.'
'What on earth did he do that for?'
'That, sir, was to annoy his wife's relations.'
'And would you believe it,' added Suleymân when he told me the story,
'that foolish preacher did not know that it is in the Bible. He took
it all down in his notebook as the exploit of a Jewish traveller. He
was the Heavy One.'
The last remark was in allusion to an Arabic proverb of which Suleymân
was very fond:
'When the Heavy One alights in the territory of a people there is
nothing for the inhabitants except departure.'
Which, in its turn, is an allusion to the following story:
A colony of ducks lived on an island in a river happily until a
certain day, when the carcase of an ox came drifting down the current
and stuck upon the forepoint of that island. They tried in vain to
lift it up or push it off; it was too heavy to be moved an inch by all
their efforts. They named it in their speech the Heavy One. Its stench
infected the whole island, and kept on increasing until the hapless
ducks were forced to emigrate.
Many Heavy Ones fell to the lot of Suleymân as dragoman, and he was by
temperament ill-fitted to endure their neighbourhood. Upon the other
hand, he sometimes happened on eccentrics who rejoiced his heart. An
American admiral, on shore in Palestine for two days, asked only one
thing: to be shown the tree on which Judas Iscariot had hanged
himself, in order that he might defile it in a natural manner and so
attest his faith. Suleymân was able to conduct him to the very tree,
and to make the journey occupy exactly the time specified. The
American was satisfied, and wrote him out a handsome testimonial.
It must have been a hardship for Suleymân--a man by nature sensitive
and independent--to take his orders from some kinds of tourists and
endure their rudeness. If left alone to manage the whole journey, he
was--I have been told, and I can well believe it--the best guide in
Syria, devoting all his energies to make the tour illuminating and
enjoyable; if heckled or distrusted, he grew careless and eventually
dangerous, intent to play off jokes on people whom he counted enemies.
One Englishman, with a taste for management but little knowledge of
the country, and no common sense, he cruelly obeyed in all things,
with the natural result in loss of time and loss of luggage, sickness
and discomfort. That was his way of taking vengeance on the Heavy
Ones.
'And yet the man was happy, having had things his own way, even after
the most horrid and disastrous journey ever made,' he told me with a
sigh. 'Some men are asses.'
One afternoon, when I was riding round the bay from Akka towards the
foot of Carmel, supposing Suleymân to be a hundred miles away, I came
upon a group of tourists by the river Kishon, on the outskirts of the
palm grove. They had alighted and were grouped around a dragoman in
gorgeous raiment, like gulls around a parrot. The native of the land
was holding forth to them. His voice was richly clerical in
intonation, which made me notice that his audience consisted solely of
members of the clergy and their patient women.
'This, ladies and gentlemen,' the rascal was declaiming like a man
inspired, 'is that ancient riffer, the riffer Kishon. It was here that
the great Brophet Elijah bring the Brophets of Baal after he catch
them with that dirty trick which I exblain to you about the sacrifice
ub there upon that mountain what you see behind you. Elijah he come
strollin' down, quite habby, to this ancient riffer, singin' one
little song; and the beoble they lug down those wicked brophets. Then
Elijah take one big, long knife his uncle gif him and sharben it ubon
a stone like what I'm doin'. Then he gif a chuckle and he look among
those brophets; and he see one man he like the look of, nice and fat;
and he say: "Bring me that man!" They bring that man; Elijah slit his
throat and throw him in the riffer. Then he say: "Bring his brother!"
and they bring his brother, and he slit his throat and throw him in
the riffer ... till they was ALL gone. Then Elijah clean his knife
down in the earth, and when he'd finished laughin' he put ub a brayer.
'That was a glorious massycration, gentlemen!'
The preacher was Suleymân, at struggle with the Heavy Ones. He was not
at all abashed when he caught sight of me.