CHAPTER VII

THE CITIES OF OLD

More successfully than all other cities of its age and fame, Damascus

has repulsed the advance of Western civilization and invention. To be

sure, the whistle of the locomotive is heard now in her suburbs; for

besides the railway to the coast, a new line brings to the ancient city

the produce of the vast and fertile Hauran beyond Jordan. A few single

telegraph wires, too, connect “Shaam” with the outside world, and the

whir of the American sewing machine is heard in her long, vaulted

bazaars. But these things make the prehistoric way of the city the

stranger by comparison, and serve to remind the traveler that he is not

on another sphere, but merely far removed from the progressive and

prosaic West.

Here is a man, with a hammer that might have existed in the stone age,

beating into shape a vessel of brass on a flat rock. There a father and

son are turning a log into wooden clogs with a primitive bucksaw, the

man standing on the log, the boy kneeling on the ground beneath. Beyond

them is a turning lathe such as the workmen of Solomon may have used in

the building of his temple. The operator squats on the floor of his open

booth, facing the street—for no Damascan can carry on his business with

his back turned to the sights and sounds of the ever-changing multitude.

With one hand he draws back and forth a sort of Indian bow, the cord

wound once round the stick, which, whirling almost as rapidly as in a

steam lathe, is fashioned into the desired shape by a chisel held with

the left hand and the bare toes of the artisan. Mile after mile through

the endless rows of bazaars such prehistoric trades are plied. Not a

foot of space on either side of the narrow streets is unoccupied. Where

the overdressed owners of great heaps of silks and rugs have left a

pigeon-hole between their booths, sits the ragged vendor of sweetmeats

and half-inch slices of cocoanut. The Damascan does not set up his

business as far as possible from his competitors. In one quarter are

crowded a hundred manufacturers of the red fez of Islam. In another a

colony of brass workers make a deafening din. Beyond, sounds the squeak

of innumerable saws where huge logs are slowly turned into lumber by

hand power. The shopper in quest of a pair of slippers may wander from

daylight to dusk among booths overflowing with every other imaginable

ware, to come at last, when he is ready to purchase the first thing

bearing the remotest resemblance to footwear, into a section where

slippers of every size, shape, and quality are displayed in such

superabundance as to make him forget from very bewilderment what he came

for.

To endeavor to make headway against the surging multitude is much like

attempting to swim up the gorge of Niagara. Long lines of camels splash

through the human stream, utterly indifferent to the urchins under their

feet. Donkeys all but hidden under enormous bundles of fagots that

scrape the buildings on either side, asses bestraddled by foul-mouthed

boys who guide the beasts by kicking them behind either ear and urge

them on by a sound peculiar to the Arab—a disgusting trilling of the

soft palate—dash with set teeth out of obscure and unexpected side

streets. Not an inch do they swerve from their course, not once do they

slacken their pace. The faranchee who expects them to do so is sure to

receive many a jolt in the ribs from asinine shoulders or some unwieldy

cargo and to be sent sprawling, if there is room to sprawl, as the beast

and his driver glance back at his discomfiture with a diabolical gleam

in their eyes. Hairless, scabby mongrel curs, yellow or grey in color,

prowl among the legs of the throng, skulk through the byways devouring

the refuse, or lie undisturbed in the puddles that abound in every

street. The donkey may knock down a dozen pedestrians an hour, but he

takes good care to step over the pariah dogs in his path. Periodically

the mongrels gather in bands at busy corners, yelping and snarling,

snapping their yellow fangs, and raising an infernal din that impedes

bargainings a hundred yards away. If a bystander wades among them with

his stick and drives them off, it is only to have them collect again

five minutes after the last yelp has been silenced.

[Illustration: Damascus. “The street called Straight—which isn’t”]

[Illustration: A wood-turner of Damascus. He watches the ever-passing

throng, turning the stick with a bow and a loose string, and holding the

chisel with his toes]

Where in the Western world does the pursuit of dollars raise such a

hubbub as the scramble for metleeks in the streets of Damascus? A

dollar, after all, is a dollar and under certain conditions worth

shouting for; but a metleek is only a cent and the incessant calling

after it, like a multitude searching the wilderness for a lost child,

sounds penurious. “Metleek!” cries the seller of flat loaves, on the

ground at your feet. “Metleek!” roars the gruff-voiced nut vendor,

fighting his way through the rabble, basket on arm. “Metleek!” screams

the wandering bartender, jingling his brass disks. Unendingly the word

echoes through the recesses and windings of the bazaars; commandingly

from the hawker whose novelty has attracted the ever-susceptible

multitude, threateningly from the sturdy fellow whose stand has been

deserted, pleadingly from the crippled beggar who threads his way

miraculously through the human whirlpool. A great, discordant symphony

of “Metleek!” rises over the land, wherein are blended even the voices

of the pasha in his palace, the mullah in his mosque, and His Impuissant

Majesty in far-off “Stamboul.” Lives there a man in all the realm who

would accept a larger coin even under compulsion?

One figure stands out as the most miserable in all the teeming life of

Damascus—the Turkish soldier. The burden of conscription falls only on

the Mohammedan, for none but the followers of the prophet of Medina may

be enrolled under the Sick Man’s banners. The recruit receives a uniform

of the shoddiest material once a year, and an allowance of about two

cents a day. What the allowance will not cover, he pays for out of his

meager rations. His tobacco, his amusements, the very patches on his

miserable uniform, he reckons in terms of the flabby biscuits that are

served out to him. Every morning there sallies forth from the

tumble-down barracks an unkempt private, hopeless weariness of the petty

things of life stamped on his coarse features, his garb a crazy quilt of

awkward patches, who, holding before him a sack of soggy gkebis

contributed by his fellow-conscripts, wanders through the market places,

adding his long-drawn wail to the chorus of “Metleek.” Individually, he

is a gaunt scarecrow; on parade he bears far more resemblance to a band

of Bowery bootblacks than to a military company. In outward forms he is

as devoutly religious as his taskmaster at Stamboul, or the bejewelled

merchant who picks his way with effeminate tread through the reeking

streets to his mosque. Five times each day he halts for his prayers

wherever the voice of the muezzin finds him. Not even his racial dread

of water deters him from performing the ablutions required by the Koran.

In spite of his poverty he finds means to stain his nails with henna,

and to tattoo the knuckles or the backs of his hands with grotesque

figures that assist materially, no doubt, in the ultimate salvation of

his soul; and he snarls angrily at the dog of an unbeliever who would

transfix his image on photographic paper.

On the Sunday afternoon of my arrival in Damascus a surging multitude

swept me through the entrance to the parade ground opposite the

barracks. A sea of upturned faces surrounded a ragged band that was

perpetrating a concert of German and Italian airs. For a time I hung on

the tail of the crowd. When endurance failed, I withdrew to the only

seat in evidence—a stone pile in a far corner—to change the film in my

kodak. Almost before I had begun, a steady flow of humanity set in

towards me. In a twinkling I was the center of a jostling throng of

Damascans, each one screaming and pushing for a view of the strange

machine; and the players struggled on despairingly with only themselves

as audience. Distressed at having unintentionally set up a counter

attraction, I closed the apparatus and turned away. The move but

aggravated the difficulty. For a moment the Damascans gazed hesitatingly

from the deserted band stand to my retreating figure, swelled with

curiosity, and surged pell-mell after me. My reputation as a

self-sacrificing member of society was at stake. Bravely I turned and

marched back to the struggling musicians—the adjective, at least, is

used advisedly—and held the kodak in plain sight. An unprecedented

audience of music-lovers quickly gathered and for a time the concert

moved with great gusto. But the players were merely human, and only

Arabian humans at that. One by one they caught sight of the “queer

machine” below them. The technique faltered; the trombones lost the

key—or found it, which was quite as disconcerting; the fifers paused;

the cornetists lost their pucker; the leader turned to stare,

open-mouthed as the rest, and an air that had suggested, here and there,

the triumphal march from Aïda died a lingering, agonizing death.

This, surely, was the psychological moment for a photograph! I opened

the kodak. A hoarse murmur rose from the multitude. At last they

recognized the nefarious instrument! I pointed it at the leader. He

screamed like a pin-pricked infant, a man beside me snatched at the

kodak, another thumped me viciously in the ribs, a third tore at my

hair, and the frenzied population of Damascus swept down upon me, bent

on wreaking summary vengeance on a defiler of their religious

superstitions. I left them entangled in their own legs and darted under

the band stand towards the gate. A guard bellowed at me. I squirmed

through his arms and sped far away through the half-deserted streets of

the music-loving metropolis.

Darkness was falling when I caught breath in some unknown corner of the

city. Long lines of merchants were setting up the board-shutters before

their booths. Hardly a straggler remained of the maudlin, daytime

multitude. Dismally I wandered through the labyrinth so animate at

noonday, shut in on either side by endless, high board fences. It

mattered not in what European language I inquired for an inn from

belated citizens; each one muttered “m’abarafshee,” and hurried on. I

sat down before a lighted tobacco booth and feigned sleep. The

proprietor came out to drive off the curs sniffing at my feet and led

the way to a neighboring _khan_, in which the keeper spread me a bed of

blankets on the cobblestone floor.

I ventured next day into the “Hotel Stamboul,” a proud hostelry facing

the stable that serves Damascus as post office, with little hope either

of making known my wants or of finding the rate within my means. The

proprietor, strange to say, mutilated a little French and, stranger

still, assigned me to a room at eight cents a day. The cost of living

was thereby reduced to a mere nothing. The Arab has a great abhorrence

of eating his fill at definite hours and prefers to nibble, nibble all

day long as if in constant fear of losing the use of his jaws by a

moment’s inactivity. Countless shops in Damascus cater to this nibbling

trade. For a copper or two they serve a well-filled dish of fruit, nuts,

sweetmeats, pastry, puddings, ragoût, syrups, or a variety of indigenous

products and messes which no Westerner could identify. They are savory

portions, too, for the Arab cook, however much he may differ in methods

from the Occidental chef, knows his profession. Like the street hawker

who sells a quart of raisins for a cent—the Mohammedan makes no wine—his

prices seem scarcely worth the collecting; and be his customer Frank or

Mussulman, they never vary. In the seaports of the Orient the whiteman

must expect to be “done.” The ignorance and asininity of generations of

tourists have turned seaside merchants into commercial vultures. In

untutored Damascus not a shopkeeper attempted to cheat me out of the

fraction of a copper.

Four days I had passed in Damascus before I turned to the problem of how

to get out of it. I had planned to strike southwestward through the

country to Nazareth. On the map the trip seemed easy. The journey from

the coast had proved, however, that the sketches of the gazetteer were

little to be trusted in this mysterious country. The highway from the

coast, moreover, is one of the few roads in all the land between Smyrna

and the Red Sea. Across the Bedouin-infected wilderness between Damascus

and Nazareth lay only a vaguely marked route, traversed in springtime by

a great concourse of pilgrims. In this late December the rainy season

was at hand. Several violent downpours, that would have convinced the

most skeptical of the literal truth of the Biblical account of the

deluge, had already burst over Damascus, storms that were sure to have

reduced Palestine to a soggy marsh and turned its summer brooks into

roaring torrents.

The passage, however, could not have been more difficult than the

gathering of information concerning it. The dwellers in the cities of

Asia Minor are the most incorrigible stay-at-homes on the globe. Travel

for pleasure or instruction they have never dreamed of. Only the direst

necessity can draw them forth from their accustomed haunts, and they

know no more of the territory a few miles outside their walls than of

the antipodes. It cost me a half-day’s search to find the American

consulate, a shame-faced hovel decorated with a battered shield of the

size and picturesqueness of a peddler’s license. The consul himself

opened the door and my hopes fell—for he was a native. A real American

would have seen my point of view and given me all the information in his

power. This suave and lady-like mortal dealt out cigarettes with a

lavish hand and delved into the details of my existence back to the

fourth generation; but directions he would not give, on the ground that

when I had been stolen by Bedouins or washed away by the rain my ghost

would rise up in the hours of darkness to denounce him. His last reason,

especially, was forceful. “If you attempt to go to Nazareth on foot,” he

cried, “you will get tired.”

Towards evening I ran to earth in the huddled bazaars a French-speaking

tailor who claimed to have made the first few miles of the journey.

Gleefully I jotted down his explicit directions. An hour’s walk, next

morning, brought me out on a wind-swept stretch of greyish sand beyond

the city. For some miles a vague path led across the monotonous waste.

Pariah dogs growled and snarled over the putrid carcasses of horses and

sheep that lined the way. The wind whirled aloft tiny particles of sand

that bit my cheeks and filled my eyes. A chilling rain began to fall,

sinking quickly into the desert. At the height of the storm the path

ceased at the brink of a muddy torrent that it would have been madness

to have attempted to cross. A solitary shepherd plodded along the bank

of the stream. I pointed across it and shouted, “Banias? Nazra?” The

Arab stared at me a moment, tossed his arms aloft, crying to Allah to

note the madness of a roving faranchee, and sped away across the desert.

I plodded back to the city. In the armorers’ bazaar a sword-maker called

out to me in German and I halted to renew my inquiries. The workman

paused in his task of beating a scimitar to venture his solemn opinion

that the tailor was an imbecile and an ass, and assured me that the road

to Nazareth left the city in exactly the opposite direction. “’Tis a

broad caravan trail,” he went on, “opening out beyond the shoemakers’

bazaar.” A bit more hopeful, I struck off again next morning.

The assertion of Abdul that it was “ver’ col’” in Damascus was not

without foundation. In the sunshine summer reigned, but in the shadow

lurked a chill that penetrated to the bones. On this cloudy morning the

air was biting. Before I had passed the last shoemaker’s booth a cold

drizzle set in. On the desert it turned to a wet snow that clung to bush

and boulder like shreds of white clothing. A toe protruded here and

there from my dilapidated cloth slippers. The sword-maker, apparently,

had indulged in a practical joke at my expense. A caravan track there

was beyond the last wretched hovel, a track that showed for miles across

the bleak country. But though it might have taken me to Bagdad or the

steppes of Siberia, it certainly did not lead to the land of the chosen

people.

I turned and trotted back to the city, cheered on by the anticipation of

such a fire as roars up the chimneys of American homes on the memorable

days of the first snow. The anticipation proved my ignorance of Damascan

customs. The proprietor and his guests were shivering over a pan of

coals that could not have heated a doll’s house. I fought my way into

the huddled group and warmed alternately a finger and a toe. But the

chill of the desert would not leave me. A servant summoned the landlord

to another part of the building. He picked up the “stove” and marched

away with it, and I took leave of my quaking fellow-guests and went to

bed, as the only possible place to restore my circulation.

Dusk was falling the next afternoon when I stumbled upon the British

consulate. Here, at last, was a man. The dull natives with their

slipshod mental habits had given me far less information in four days

than I gained from a five-minute interview with this alert Englishman.

He was none the less certain than they, however, that the overland

journey was impossible at that season. Late reports from the Waters of

Meron announced the route utterly impassable.

The consul was a director of the Beirut-Damascus line. Railway directors

in Asia Minor have, evidently, special privileges. For the Englishman

assured me that a note over his signature would take me back to the

coast as readily as a ticket. The next day I spent Christmas in a stuffy

coach on the cogwheel railway over the Lebanon and stepped out at

Beirut, shortly after dark, to run directly into the arms of Abdul Razac

Bundak.

Our “company” was definitely dissolved on the afternoon of December

twenty-seventh and I set out for Sidon. Here, at least, I could not lose

my way, for I had but to follow the coast. Even Abdul, however, did not

know whether the ancient city was one or ten days distant. A highway

through an olive grove, where lean Bedouins squatted on their hams, soon

broke up into several diverging footpaths. The one I chose led over

undulating sand dunes where the misfit shoes that I had picked up in a

pawn shop of Beirut soon filled to overflowing. I swung them over a

shoulder and plodded on barefooted. A roaring brook blocked the way. I

crossed it by climbing a willow on one bank and swinging into the

branches of another opposite, and plunged into another wilderness of

sand.

Towards dusk I came upon a peasant’s cottage on a tiny plain and halted

for water. A youth in the Sultan’s crazy quilt, sitting on the well

curb, brought me a basinful. I had started on again when a voice rang

out behind me, “Hé! D’où est-ce que vous venez? Où est-ce que vous

allez?” In the doorway of the hovel stood a slatternly woman of some

fifty years of age. I mentioned my nationality.

“American?” cried the feminine scarecrow, this time in English, as she

rushed out upon me, “My God! You American? Me American, too! My God!”

The assertion seemed scarcely credible, as she was decidedly Syrian,

both in dress and features.

“Yes, my God!” she went on, “I live six years in America, me! I go back

to America next month! I not see America for one year. Come in house!”

I followed her into the cottage. It was the usual dwelling of the

peasant class—dirt floor, a kettle hanging over an open fire in one

corner, a few ears of corn and bunches of dried grapes suspended from

the ceiling. On one of the rough stone walls, looking strangely out of

place amid this Oriental squalor, was pinned a newspaper portrait of

McKinley.

“Oh, my God!” cried the woman, as I glanced towards the distortion, “Me

Republican, me. One time I see McKinley when I peddle by Cleveland,

Ohio. You know Cleveland? My man over there”—she pointed away to the

fertile slopes of the Lebanon—“My man go back with me next month, vote

one more time for Roosevelt.”

The patch-work youth poked his head in at the door.

“Taala hena, Maghmoód,” bawled the boisterous Republican. “This American

man! He no have to go for soldier fight long time for greasy old Sultan.

Not work all day to get bishleek, him! Get ten, fifteen, twenty bishleek

day! Bah! You no good, you! Why for you not run away to America?”

The soldier listened to this more or less English with a silly smirk on

his face and shifted from one foot to the other with every fourth word.

The woman repeated the oration in her native tongue. The youth continued

to grin until the words “ashara, gkamsashar, ashreen” turned his smirk

to wide-eyed astonishment, and he dropped on his haunches in the dirt,

as if his legs had given way under the weight of such untold wealth.

The woman ran a sort of lodging house in an adjoining stone hut and

insisted that I spend the night there. Her vociferous affection for

Americans would, no doubt, have forced her to cling to my coat-tails had

I attempted to escape. Chattering disconnectedly, she prepared a supper

of lentils, bread-sheets, olives, and crushed sugar cane, and set out—to

the horror of the Mohammedan youth—a bottle of _beet_ (native wine). The

meal over, she lighted a narghileh, leaned back in a home-made chair,

and blew smoke at the ceiling with a far-away look in her eyes.

“Oh, my God!” she cried suddenly, “You sing American song! I like this

no-good soldier hear good song. Then he sing Arab song for you.”

I essayed the rôle of wandering minstrel with misgiving. At the first

lines of “The Swanee River” the conscript burst forth in a roar of

laughter that doubled him up in a paroxysm of mirth.

“You damn fool, you,” bellowed the female, shaking her fist at the

prostrate property of the Sultan. “You no know what song is! American

songs wonderful! Shut up! I split your head!”

This gentle hint, rendered into Arabic, convinced the youth of the

solemnity of the occasion, and he listened most attentively with set

teeth until the Occidental concert was ended.

When his turn came, he struck up a woeful monotone that sounded not

unlike the wailing of a lost soul, and sang for nearly an hour in about

three notes, shaking his head and rocking his body back and forth in the

emotional passages as his voice rose to an ear-splitting yell.

The dirge was interrupted by a shout from the darkness outside. The

woman called back in answer, and two ragged, bespattered Bedouins pushed

into the hut. The howling and shouting that ensued left me undecided

whether murder or merely highway robbery had been committed. The

contention, however, subsided after a half-hour of shaking of fists and

alternate reduction to the verge of tears, and my hostess took from the

wall a huge key and stepped out, followed by the Bedouins.

“You know what for we fight?” she demanded, as she returned alone. “They

Arabs. Want to sleep in my hotel. They want pay only four coppers. I say

must pay five coppers—one metleek. Bah! This country no good.”

Four-fifths of a cent was, perhaps, as great a price as she should have

demanded from any lodger in the “hotel” to which she conducted me a

half-hour later.

All next day I followed a faintly-marked path that clung closely to the

coast, swerving far out on every headland as if fearful of losing itself

in the solitude of the moors. Here and there a woe-begone peasant from a

village in the hills was toiling in a tiny patch. Across a stump or a

gnarled tree trunk, always close at hand, leaned a long, rusty gun, as

primitive in appearance as the wooden plow which the tiny oxen dragged

back and forth across the fields. Those whose curiosity got the better

of them served as illustrations to the Biblical assertion, “No man

having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom

of Heaven.” For the implement was sure to strike a root or a rock, and

the peasant who picked himself up out of the mire could never have been

admitted by the least fastidious St. Peter. Nineteen showers flung their

waters upon me during the day, showers that were sometimes distinctly

separated from each other by periods of sunshine, showers that merged

one into another through a dreary drizzle.

A wind from off the Mediterranean put the leaden clouds to flight late

in the afternoon and the sun was smiling bravely when the path turned

into a well-kept road, winding through a forest of orange trees where

countless natives, in a garb that did not seem particularly adapted to

such occupation, were stripping the overladen branches of their fruit.

Her oranges and her tobacco give livelihood—of a sort—to the ten

thousand inhabitants of modern Sidon. From the first shop in the

outskirts to the drawbridge of the ruined castle boldly facing the sea,

the bazaar was one long, orange-colored streak. The Sidonese who

gathered round me in the market would have buried me under their

donations of the fruit—windfalls that had split open—had I not waved

them off and followed one of their number, I knew not whither.

[Illustration: Women of Bethlehem going to the Church of the Nativity]

[Illustration: The most thickly settled portion of Damascus is the

graveyard. A picture taken at risk of mobbing]

He turned in at a gate that gave admittance to a large walled inclosure.

From the doors and down the outside stairways of a large building in its

center poured a multitude of boys and youths, in drab-colored uniforms,

shrieking words of welcome. A young man at the head of the throng

reached me first.

“They students,” he cried; “I am teacher. This American Mission College.

They always run to see white man because they study white man’s language

and country!”

Every class in the institution, evidently, had been dismissed that they

might attend an illustrated lecture on anthropology. The students formed

a circle about me, and the “teacher” marched round and round me,

discoursing on the various points of my person and dress that differed

from the native, as glibly as any medical failure over a cadaver.

“Will you, kind sir,” he said, pausing for breath, “will you show to my

students the funny things with which the white man holds up his

stockings?”

I refused the request, indignantly, of course—the bare thought of such

immodesty! Besides, those important articles of my attire had long since

been gathered into the bag of a Marseilles rag-picker.

I moved towards the gate.

“Wait, sir,” cried the tutor, “very soon the American president of the

school comes. He will give you supper and bed.”

“I’ll pay my own,” I answered.

“What!” shouted the Syrian, “You got metleek? Thees man bring you here

because you sit in the market-place like you have no money.”

Some time later, as I emerged from an eating shop, a native sprang

forward with a wild shout and grasped me by the hand. Grinning with

self-complacency at his knowledge of the faranchee mode of greeting, he

fell to working my arm like a pump handle, yelping at the same time an

unbroken string of Arabic that rapidly brought down upon us every

lounger in the market-place. He was dressed in the blanket-like cloak

and the flowing headdress of the countryman. His weather-beaten visage,

at best reminiscent of a blue-ribbon bulldog, was rendered hideous by a

broken nose that had been driven entirely out of its normal position and

halfway into his left cheek. Certainly he was no new acquaintance. For

some moments I struggled to recall where I had seen that wreck of a face

before. From the jumble that fell from his lips I caught a few

words:—“locanda, bnam, Beirut.” Then I remembered. He of the pump-handle

movement had occupied a bed beside my own during my first days in Beirut

and had turned the nights into purgatory by wailing a native song in a

never-changing monotone, while he rolled and puffed at innumerable

cigarettes.

When I had disengaged my aching arm I enquired for an inn. My

long-lost roommate nodded his head and led the way to the one large

building abutting on the street, a blank wall of sun-baked bricks some

forty feet in length, unbroken except for a door through which the

Arab pushed me before him. We found ourselves in a vast, gloomy room,

its walls the seamy side of the sun-baked bricks, its floor trampled

earth, and its flat roof supported by massive beams of such wood as

Hiram sent to Solomon for the temple on Mt. Moriah. Save for a bit of

space near the door, the room was crowded with camels, donkeys, dogs,

and men, and heaps of bundled merchandise. It was the Sidon khan, a

station for the caravan trains that make their way up and down the

coast. Across the room, above the door, ran a wooden gallery, some ten

feet wide. My companion pushed me up the ladder before him, took two

blankets—evidently his own property—from a heap in the corner, and,

spreading them out in a space unoccupied by prostrate muleteers or

camel drivers, invited me to lie down.

The scene below us was a very pandemonium. Donkeys, large and small,

lying, standing, kicking, braying, broke away, now and then, to lead

their owners a merry chase in and out of the throng. Reclining camels

chewed their cud, and gazed at the chaos about them with scornful

dignity. Others of these phlegmatic beasts, newly arrived, shrilly

protested against kneeling until their cursing masters could relieve

them of their loads. Men and dogs were everywhere. Gaunt curs glared

about them like famished wolves. Men in coarse cloaks, that resembled

grain-sacks split up the front, were cudgeling their beasts, quarreling

over the sharing of a blanket, or shrieking at the keeper who collected

the khan dues. Among them, less excited mortals squatted, singly or in

groups, on blankets spread between a camel and an ass, rolled out the

stocking-like rags swinging over their shoulders, and fell to munching

their meager suppers. Here and there a man stood barefooted on his

cloak, deaf to every sound about him, salaaming his reverences towards

the south wall, beyond which lay Mecca.

Before the first grey of dawn appeared, the mingling sounds that had

made an incessant murmur during the night increased to a roar. There

came the tinkling of bells on ass and dromedary, the braying and cursing

of the denizens of the desert. Men wrestled with unwieldy cargoes, or

cudgeled animals reluctant to take up their burdens. At frequent

intervals the door beneath our gallery creaked, and one by one the

caravans filed out into the breaking day.

The khan was almost empty when I descended the ladder. Late risers were

hurrying through their prayers or loading the few animals that remained.

The keeper, sitting crosslegged near the door, rolled me a cigarette and

demanded a bishleek for my lodging. I knew as well as he that such a

price was preposterous, and he was fully aware of my knowledge. He had

merely begun the skirmish that is the preliminary of every financial

transaction in the East. A little experience with Oriental merchants

imbues the faranchee traveler with the spirit of haggling; when he

learns, as soon he will, that every tradesman who gets the better of him

laughs at him for a fool, self-respect comes to the rescue. For who

would not spend a half-hour of sluggish Eastern time to prove that the

men of his nation are no inferiors in astuteness to these suave

followers of “Maghmoód,” however small may be the amount under

discussion?

By the time my cigarette was half finished I had reduced the price to

four metleeks. Before I tossed it away, the keeper of the khan had

accepted a mouth-organ that had somehow found its way into my pack and

about three reeds of which responded to the most powerful pair of lungs;

and he bade me good-bye with a much more respectful opinion of

faranchees than he would have done had I paid the first amount demanded.

The wail of a leather-lunged muezzin echoed across the wilderness as I

set off again to the southward. A road that sallied forth from the city

stopped short at the edge of an inundated morass and left me to lay my

own course, guided by the booming of the Mediterranean. The cheering

prospect of a night out of doors lay before me; for, if the map was to

be trusted, the next village was fully two days distant. Mile after mile

the way led over slippery spurs of the mountain chain and across marshes

in which I sank halfway to my knees, with here and there a muddy stream

to be forded. Only an occasional sea gull, circling over the waves, gave

life to the dreary landscape. A few isolated patches showed signs of

cultivation, but the cold, incessant downpour kept even the hardy

peasants cooped up in their villages among the hills to the eastward.

The utter solitude was broken but once by a human being, a ragged

muleteer splashing northward as fast as the clinging mud permitted. On

his face was the utter dejection of one who had been denied admittance

at St. Peter’s gate. At sight of me he struggled to increase his pace

and, pointing away through the storm, bawled plaintively, “Homar,

efendee? Shoof! Fee homar henak?” (Ass, sir? Look! Is there an ass

beyond?) When I shook my head he lifted up his voice and wept in true

Biblical fashion, and stumbled on across the morass.

The gloomy day was waning when I plunged into a valley of rank

vegetation, where several massive stone ruins and a crumbling stone

bridge that humped its back over a wandering stream, suggested an

ancient center of civilization. I scanned the debris for a hole in which

to sleep. Shelter there was none, and a gnawing hunger protested against

a halt. From the top of the bridge an unhoped-for sight caught my eye.

Miles away, at the end of a low cape that ran far out into the sea, rose

a slender minaret, surrounded by a jumble of flat buildings. I tore my

way through the undergrowth with hope renewed and struck out towards the

unknown, perhaps unpeopled, hamlet.

Dusk turned to utter darkness. For an interminable period I staggered on

through the mire, sprawling, now and then, in a stinking slough. The

lapping of waves sounded at last, and I struck a solider footing of

sloping sand. Far ahead twinkled a few lights, so far out across the

water that, had I not seen the village by day, I had fancied them the

illuminated portholes of a steamer at anchor. The beach described a

half-circle. The twinkling lights drew on before like wills o’ the wisp.

The flat sand gave way to rocks and boulders—the ruins, apparently, of

ancient buildings—against which I barked my shins repeatedly.

I had all but given up in despair the pursuit of the fugitive glowworms,

when the baying of dogs fell on my ear. An unveiled corner of the moon

disclosed a faintly defined path up the sloping beach, which, leading

across the sand-dunes, brought up against a fort-like building, pierced

in the center by a gateway. Two flickering lights under the archway cast

weird shadows over a group of Arabs, huddled in their blankets.

The arrival of any traveler at such an hour was an event to bring

astonishment; a mud-bespattered faranchee projected thus upon them out

of the blackness of the night brought them to their feet with excited

cries. I pushed through the group and plunged into a maze of wretched,

hovel-choked alleyways. Silence reigned in the bazaars, but the keeper

of one squalid shop was still dozing over his pan of coals between a

stack of aged bread-sheets and a simmering kettle of sour-milk soup. I

prodded him into semi-wakefulness and, gathering in the gkebis, sat down

in his place. He dipped up a bowl of soup from force of habit, then

catching sight of me for the first time, generously distributed the

jelly-like mixture over my outstretched legs.

The second serving reached me in the orthodox manner. To the nibbling

Arabs who had ranged themselves on the edge of the circle of light cast

by the shop lamp, a bowl of soup was an ample meal for one man. When I

called for a second, they stared open-mouthed. Again I sent the bowl

back. The bystanders burst forth in a roar of laughter which the

deserted labyrinth echoed back to us a third and a fourth time, and the

boldest stepped forward to pat their stomachs derisively.

I inquired for an inn as I finished. A ragged Sampson stepped into the

arc of light and crying “taala,” set off to the westward. Almost at a

trot, he led the way by cobbled streets, down the center of which ran an

open sewer, up hillocks and down, under vaulted bazaars and narrow

archways, by turns innumerable.

He stopped at last before a high garden wall, behind which, among the

trees, stood a large building of monasterial aspect.

“Italiano faranchee henak,” he said, raising the heavy iron knocker over

the gate and letting it fall with a boom that startled the dull ear of

night. Again and again he knocked. The muffled sound of an opening door

came from the distant building. A step fell on the graveled walk, a step

that advanced with slow and stately tread to within a few feet of the

gate; then a deep, reverberant voice called out something in Arabic.

I replied in Italian; “I am a white man, looking for an inn.”

The voice that answered was trained to the chanting of masses. One could

almost fancy himself in some vast cathedral, listening to an invocation

from far back in the nave, as the words came, deep and sharp-cut, one

from another: “Non si riceveno qui pellegrini.” The scrape of feet on

the graveled walk grew fainter and fainter, a heavy door slammed, and

all was still.

The Arab put his ear to the keyhole of the gate, scratched his head in

perplexity, and with another “taala” dashed off once more. A no less

devious route brought us out on the water front of the back bay. In a

brightly lighted café sat a dozen convivial souls over narghilehs and

coffee. My cicerone paused some distance away and set up a wailing chant

in which the word “faranchee” was often repeated. Plainly, the revelers

gave small credence to this cry of Frank out of the night. Calmly they

continued smoking and chattering, peering indifferently, now and then,

into the outer darkness. The Arab drew me into the circle of light. A

roar went up from the carousers and they tumbled pell-mell out upon us.

My guide was, evidently, a village butt, rarely permitted to appear

before his fellow-townsman in so important a rôle. Fame, at last, was

knocking at his door. His first words tripped over each other

distressingly, but his racial eloquence of phrase and gesture came to

the rescue, and he launched forth in a panegyric such as never

congressional candidate suffered at the hands of a rural chairman. His

zeal worked his undoing. From every dwelling within sound of his

trumpet-like voice poured forth half-dressed men who, crowding closely

around, raised a Babel that drowned out the orator before his

introductory premise had been half ended. An enemy suggested an

adjournment to the café and left the new Cicero—the penniless being

denied admittance—to deliver his maiden speech to the unpeopled

darkness.

The keeper, with his best company smile, placed a chair for me in the

center of the room; the elder men grouped themselves about me on similar

articles of furniture; and the younger squatted on their haunches around

the wall. The language of signs was proving a poor means of

communication, when a native, in more elaborate costume, pushed into the

circle and addressed me in French. With an interpreter at hand, nothing

short of my entire biography would satisfy my hearers; and to avoid any

semblance of partiality, I was forced to swing round and round on my

stool in the telling, despite the fact that only one of the audience

understood the queer faranchee words. The proprietor, meanwhile, in a

laudable endeavor to make hay while the sun shone, made the circuit of

the room at frequent intervals, asking each with what he could serve

him. Those few who did not order were ruthlessly pushed into the street,

where a throng of boys and penniless men flitted back and forth on the

edge of the light, peering in upon us. Anxious to secure the good-will

of so unusual an attraction, the keeper ran forward each time my

whirling brought him within my field of vision to offer a cup of thick

coffee, a narghileh, or a native liquor.

I concluded my saga with the statement that I had left Sidon that

morning.

“Impossible!” shouted the interpreter. “No man can walk from Sidra to

Soor in one day.”

“Soor?” I cried, recognizing the native name for Tyre, and scarcely

believing my ears. “Is this Soor?”

“Is it possible,” gasped the native, “that you have not recognized the

ancient city of Tyre? Yes, indeed, my friend, this is Soor. But if you

have left Sidon this morning you have slept a night on the way without

knowing it.”

I turned the conversation by inquiring the identity of the worthies

about me. The interpreter introduced them one by one. The village

scribe, the village barber, the village carpenter, the village tailor,

and—even thus far from the land of chestnut trees—the village blacksmith

were all in evidence. Most striking of all the throng in appearance was

a young man of handsome, forceful face and sturdy, well-poised figure,

attired in a flowing, jet-black gown and almost as black a fez. From

time to time he rose to address his companions on the all-important

topic of faranchees. A gift of native eloquence of which he seemed

supremely unconscious, and the long sweep of his gown over his left

shoulder with which he ended every discourse, recalled my visualization

of Hamlet. I was surprised to find that he was only a common sailor, and

that in a land where the seaman is regarded as the lowest of created

beings.

“Hamlet” owed his position of authority on this occasion to a single

journey to Buenos Ayres. After long striving, I succeeded in exchanging

with him a few meager ideas in Spanish, much to the discomfiture of the

“regular” interpreter, who, posing as a man of unexampled erudition,

turned away with an angry shrug of the shoulders and fell upon my

unguarded knapsack. I swung round in time to find him complacently

turning the film-wind of my kodak and clawing at the edges in an attempt

to open it. If one would keep his possessions intact in the East he must

sit upon them, for not even the apes of the jungle have the curiosity of

the Oriental nor less realization of the difference between mine and

thine.

The city fathers of Tyre, in solemn conviviality assembled, resolved

unanimously that I could not be permitted to continue on foot. Some days

before, midway between Tyre and Acre, a white man had been found,

murdered by some blunt instrument and nailed to the ground by a stake

driven through his body. The tale was told, with the fullness of detail

doted on by our yellow journals, in French and crippled Spanish; and

innumerable versions in Arabic were followed by an elaborate pantomime

by the village carpenter, with Hamlet and the scribe as the assassins,

and the tube of a water-pipe as the stake. Midnight had long since

passed. I promised the good citizens of Tyre to remain in their city for

a day of reflection, and inquired for a place to sleep.

Not a man among them, evidently, had thought of that problem. The

assemblage resolved itself into a committee of the whole and spent a

good half hour in weighty debate. Then the interpreter rose to

communicate to me the result of the deliberations. There was no public

inn in the city of Tyre—they thanked God for that. But its inhabitants

had ever been ready to treat royally the stranger within their gates.

The keeper of the café had a back room. In that back room was a wooden

bench. The keeper was moved to give me permission to occupy that back

room and that bench. Nay! Even more! He was resolved to spread on that

bench a rush mat, and cover me over with what had once been the sail of

his fishing-smack. But first he must ask me one question. Aye! The

citizens of Tyre, there assembled, must demand an answer to that query

and the spokesman abjured me, by the beard of Allah, to answer

truthfully and deliberately.

I moved the previous question. The village elders hitched their stools

nearer, the squatters strained their necks to listen. The man of

learning gasped twice, nay, thrice, and broke the utter silence with a

tense whisper:—

“Are you, sir, a _Jew_?”

I denied the allegation.

“Because,” went on the speaker, “we are haters of the Jews and no Jew

could stop in this café over night, though the clouds rained down

boulders and water-jars on our city of Tyre.”

The keeper fulfilled his promise to the letter and, putting up the

shutters of the café, locked me in and marched away.

[Illustration: Tyre is now a miserable village connected with the

mainland by a wind-blown neck of sand]

[Illustration: Agriculture in Palestine. There is not an ounce of iron

about the plow]

The nephew of the village carpenter, a youth educated in the American

Mission School of Sidon, appointed himself my guide next morning. The

ancient city of Tyre is to-day a collection of stone and mud hovels,

covering less than a third of the sandy point that once teemed with

metropolitan life, and housing four thousand humble humans, destitute

alike of education, arts, and enterprise. Our pilgrimage began at the

narrow neck of wind-blown sand—all that remains of the causeway of

Alexander. To the south of the present hamlet, once the site of rich

dwellings, stretched rambling rows of crude head-stones over Christian

and Mohammedan graves, a dreary spot above which circled and swooped a

few sombre rooks. On the eastern edge a knoll rose above the pathetic

village wall, a rampart that would not afford defense against a

self-confident goat. Below lay a broad playground, worn bare and smooth

by the tramp of many feet, peopled now by groups of romping children and

here and there an adult loafing under the rays of the December sun. Only

a few narrow chasms, from which peeped the top of a window or door,

served to remind the observer that he was not looking down upon an open

space, but on the flat housetops of the closely-packed city.

Further away rose an unsteady minaret, and beyond, the tree-girdled

dwelling of the Italian monks. To the north, in the wretched roadstead,

a few decrepit fishing smacks, sad remnants of the fleets whose mariners

once caroused and sang in the streets of Tyre, lay at anchor. Down on

the encircling beach, half buried under the drifting sands and worn away

by the lapping waves, lay the ruins of what must long ago have been

great business blocks. The Tyreans of to-day, mere parasites, have borne

away stone by stone these edifices of a mightier generation to build

their own humble habitations. Even as we looked, a half dozen ragged

Arabs were prying off the top of a great pillar and loading the

fragments into a dilapidated feluca.

A narrow street through the center of the town forms the boundary

between her two religions. To the north dwell Christians, to the south

Metawalies, Mohammedans of unorthodox superstitions. Their women do not

cover their faces, but tattoo their foreheads, cheeks, and hands. To

them the unpardonable sin is to touch, ever so slightly, a being not of

their faith. Ugly scowls greeted our passage in all this section. I

halted at a shop to buy oranges. A mangy old crone tossed the fruit at

me and, spreading a cloth over her hand, stretched it out. I attempted

to lay the coppers in her open palm. She snatched her hand away with a

snarl and a display of yellow fangs less suggestive of a human than of a

mongrel over a bone.

“Hold your hand above hers and drop the money,” said my companion. “If

you touch her, she is polluted.”

To a mere unbeliever the danger of pollution seemed reversed. But mayhap

it is not given to unbelievers to see clearly.

Once across the line of demarkation cheery greetings sounded from every

shop. Generations of intermarriage have welded this Christian community

into one great family. Often the youth halted to observe:

“Here lives my uncle; that man is my cousin; this shop belongs to my

sister’s husband; in that house dwells the brother-in-law of my father.”

America was the promised land to every denizen of this section. Hardly a

man of them had given up hope of putting together money enough to

emigrate to the new world. The brother of my guide voiced a prayer that

I had often heard among the Christians of Asia Minor.

“We hope more every day,” he said, “that America will some time take

this land away from the Turks, for the Turks are rascals and the king

rascal is the Sultan at Stamboul. Please, you, sir, get America to do

this when you come back.”

My cicerone was a true Syrian, in his horror of travel. His family had

been Christians—of the Greek faith—for generations, and Nazareth and

Jerusalem lay just beyond the ranges to the eastward; yet neither he,

his father, nor any ancestor, to his knowledge, had ever journeyed

further than to Sidon. His teachers had imbued him with an almost

American view of life, had instilled in him a code of personal morals at

utter variance with those of this land, in which crimes ranging from

bribery to murder are discussed in a spirit of levity by all classes.

But they had not given him the energy of the West, nor convinced him

that the education he had acquired was something more than an added

power for the amassing of metleeks. Some day, when he had money enough,

he would go to America to turn his linguistic ability into more money.

Meanwhile, he squatted on his haunches in the filth of Tyre, waiting

more patiently than Micawber for something to “turn up.”

The highest ideal, to the people he represented, is the merchant—a

middle-man between work and responsibility who may drone out his days in

reposeful self-sufficiency. The round of the streets led us to the

liquor and fruit shop kept by his father, a flabby-skinned fellow who

stretched his derelict bulk on a divan and growled whenever a client

disturbed his day-dreams. To his son he was the most fortunate being in

Tyre.

“Why,” cried the youth in admiration, “he never has to do anything but

rest in his seat all day and put up his shutters and go home at night!

Would you not like to own a shop and never have to work again all the

days of your life?”

My answer that the dénouement of such a fate would probably be the

sighing of willows over a premature grave was lost upon him.

An unprecedented throng was gathered in the café when I reached it in

the evening. The proprietor danced blindly about the room, well nigh

frantic from an ambitious but vain endeavor to serve all comers.

“Hamlet,” done with his day’s fishing and his sea-going rags, was again

on hand to give unconscious entertainment. The village scribe, if the

bursts of laughter were as unforced as they seemed, had brought with him

a stock of witty tales less threadbare than those of the night before;

and the expression on the face of my guide, and his repeated refusals to

interpret them, suggested that the stories were not of the jeune fille

order.

The village carpenter was the leader of the opposition against my

departure on foot, and finding that his pantomime had not aroused in me

a becoming dread of the Bedouin-infected wilderness, he set out on a new

tack. A coasting steamer was due in a few days. He proposed that the

assembled Tyreans take up a collection to pay my passage to the next

port, and set the ball rolling by dropping a bishleek into his empty

coffee cup. A steady flow of metleeks had already set in before my

protests grew vociferous enough to check it. Why I should refuse to

accept whatever they proposed to give was something very few of these

simple fellows could understand. The carpenter wiped out all my

arguments in the ensuing debate by summing up with that incontestable

postulate of the Arab: “Sir,” he cried, by interpreter, appealing to the

others for confirmation, “if you go to Acre on foot, you will get

tired!”

I slept again on the rush mat. My guide and his uncle accompanied me

through the city gate next morning, still entreating me to reconsider my

rash decision. The older man gave up just outside the village and with

an “Allah m’akum’” (the Lord be with you) hurried back, as if the

unwonted experience of getting out of sight of his workshop had filled

him with unconquerable terror. The youth halted beyond the wind-blown

neck of sand, and, after entreating me to send for him as soon as I

returned to America, fled after his uncle. From this distance the gloomy

huddle of kennels behind recalled even more readily than a closer view

those lines of the wandering bard:

“Dim is her glory, gone her fame,

Her boasted wealth has fled.

On her proud rock, alas, her shame,

The fisher’s net is spread.

The tyrean harp has slumbered long,

And Tyria’s mirth is low;

The timbrel, dulcimer, and song

Are hushed, or wake to woe.”

For the first few miles the way led along the hard sands of the beach.

Beyond, the “Ladder of Tyre,” a spur of the Lebanon falling sharply off

into the sea, presented a precipitous slope that I scaled with many

bruises. Few spots on the globe present a more desolate prospect than

the range after range of barren hills that stretch out from the summit

of the “Ladder.” Half climbing, half sliding, I descended the southern

slope and struggled on across a trackless country in a never-ceasing

downpour.

It was the hour of nightfall when the first habitation of man broke the

monotony of the lifeless waste. Half famished, I hurried towards it. At

a distance the hamlet presented the appearance of a low fortress or

blockhouse. The outer fringe of buildings—all these peasant villages

form a more or less perfect circle—were set so closely together as to

make an almost continuous wall, with never a window nor door opening on

the world outside. I circled half the town before I found an entrance to

its garden of miseries. The hovels, partly of limestone, chiefly of

baked mud, were packed like stacks in a scanty barnyard. The spaces

between them left meager passages, and, being the village dumping ground

and sewer as well as the communal barn, reeked with every abomination of

man and beast. In cleanliness and picturesqueness the houses resembled

the streets. Here and there a human sty stood open and lazy smoke curled

upward from its low doorway; for the chimney is as yet unknown in rural

Asia Minor.

A complete circuit of the “city” disclosed no shops and I began a

canvass of the hovels, stooping to thrust my head through the

smoke-choked doorways, and shaking my handkerchief of coins in the faces

of the half asphyxiated occupants, with a cry of “gkebis.” Wretched hags

and half-naked children glared at me. My best pulmonary efforts evoked

no more than a snarl or a stolid stare. Only once did I receive verbal

reply. A peasant whose garb was one-fourth cloth, one-fourth the skin of

some other animal, and one-half the accumulated filth of some two-score

years, squatted in the center of the last hut, eating from a stack of

newly baked bread-sheets. Having caught him with the goods, I bawled

“gkebis” commandingly. He turned to peer at me through the smoke with

the lack-luster eye of a dead haddock. Once more I demanded bread. A

diabolical leer overspread his features. He rose to a crouching posture,

a doubled sheet between his fangs, and, springing at me half way across

the hut, roared, “MA FEESH!”

Now there is no more forcible word in the Arabic language than “ma

feesh.” It is rich in meanings, among which “there is none!” “We haven’t

any!” “None left!” “Can’t be done!” and “Nothing doing!” are but a few.

The native can give it an articulation that would make the most

aggressive of bulldogs put his tail between his legs and decamp. My eyes

certainly had not deceived me. There was bread and plenty of it. But

somehow I felt no longing to tarry, near nightfall, in a fanatical

village far from the outskirts of civilization, to wage debate with an

Arab who could utter “ma feesh” in that tone of voice. With never an

audible reply, I fled to the encircling wilderness.

The sun was settling to his bath in the Mediterranean. Across the

pulsating sea to the beach below the village stretched an undulating

ribbon of orange and red. Away to the eastward, in the valleys of the

Lebanon, darkness already lay. On the rugged peaks a few isolated trees,

swaying in a swift landward breeze, stood out against the evening sky.

Within hail of the hamlet a lonely shepherd guarded a flock of

fat-tailed sheep. Beyond him lay utter solitude. The level plain soon

changed to row after row of sand dunes, unmarked by a single footprint,

over which my virgin path rose and fell with the regularity of a tossing

ship.

The last arc of the blazing sun sank beneath the waves. The prismatic

ribbon quivered a moment longer, faded, and disappeared, leaving only an

unbroken expanse of black water. Advancing twilight dimmed the outline

of the swaying trees, the very peaks lost individuality and blended into

the darkening sky of evening. In the trough of the sand dunes the night

made mysterious gulfs in which the eye could not distinguish where the

descent ended and the ascent began.

Invariably I stumbled half way up each succeeding slope. The shifting

sands muffled to silence my footsteps. On the summit of the ridges

sounded a low moaning of the wind, rising and falling like far-off

sobbing. A creative imagination might easily have peopled the

surrounding blackness with flitting forms of murderous nomads. Somewhere

among these never-ending ridges the “staked faranchee” had been done to

death.

Mile after mile the way led on, rising and falling as rhythmically as

though over and over the same sandy billow. Sunset had dispelled the

rain, but not a star broke through the overcast sky, and only the

hoarse-voiced boom of the breakers guided my steps. Now and then I

halted at the summit of a ridge to search for the glimmer of a distant

light and to strain my ears for some other sound than the wailing of the

wind and the muffled thunder of the ocean. But even Napoleon was once

forced to build a hill from which to sweep the horizon before he could

orientate himself in this billowy wilderness.

The surly peasant was long since forgotten when, descending a ridge with

my feet raised high at each step in anticipation of a succeeding ascent,

I plunged into a slough in which I sank almost to my knees. From force

of habit I plowed on. The booming of the waves grew louder, as if the

land receded, and the wind from off the sea blew stronger and more

chilling. Suddenly there sounded at my feet the rush of waters. I moved

forward cautiously and felt the edge of what seemed to be a broad river,

pouring seaward. It was an obstacle not to be surmounted on a black

night. I drew back from the brink and, finding a spot that seemed to

offer some resistance beneath my feet, threw myself down.

But I sank inch by inch into the morass, and fearful of being buried

before morning, I rose and wandered towards the sea. On a slight rise of

ground I stumbled over a heap of cobblestones, piled up at some earlier

date by the peasants. I built a bed of stones under the lee of the pile,

tucked my kodak in a crevice, and pulling my coat over my head, lay

down. A patter of rain sounded on the coat, then another and another,

faster and faster, and in less than a minute there began a downpour that

abated not once during the night. The heap afforded small protection

against the piercing wind, and, being short and semicircular in shape,

compelled me to lie motionless on my right side, for only my body

protected the kodak and films beneath. The rain quickly soaked through

my clothing and ran in rivulets along my skin. The wind turned colder

and whistled through the chinks of the pile. The sea boomed incessantly,

and in the surrounding marshes colonies of unwearying frogs croaked a

dismal refrain. Thus, on the fringe of the Mediterranean, I watched out

the old year, and, though not a change in the roar of the sea, the

tattoo of the storm, nor the note of a frog, marked the hour, I was

certainly awake at the waning.

An Oriental proverb tells us that “He who goes not to bed will be early

up.” He who goes to bed on a rock pile will also be up betimes—though

with difficulty. The new year was peering over the Lebanon when I rose

to my feet. My left leg, though creaking like a rusty armor, sustained

me; but I had no sooner shifted my weight to the right than it gave way

like a thing of straw and let me down with disconcerting suddenness in

the mud. By dint of long massaging, I recovered the use of the limb; but

even then an attempt to walk in a straight line sent me round in a

circle from left to right. Daylight showed the river to be lined with

quicksands. It was broad and swift, but not deep, and some distance up

the stream I effected a crossing without sinking below my armpits. Far

off to the southeast lay a small forest. A village, perhaps, was hidden

in its shade, and I dashed eagerly forward through a sea of mud.

The forest turned out to be a large orange grove, surrounded by a high

hedge and a turgid, moat-like stream. There was not a human habitation

in sight. The trees were heavily laden with yellow fruit. I cast the

contents of my knapsack on the ground, plunged through moat and hedge,

and tore savagely at the tempting fare. With half-filled bag I regained

the plain, caught up my scattered belongings, and struck southward,

peeling an orange. The skin was close to an inch thick, the fruit inside

would have aroused the dormant appetite of an Epicurean. Greedily I

stuffed a generous quarter into my mouth—and stopped stock-still with a

sensation as of a sudden blow in the back of the neck. The orange was as

green as the Emerald Isle, its juice more acrid than a half-and-half of

vinegar and gall! I peeled another and another. Each was more sour and

bitter than its forerunner. Tearfully I dumped the treasure trove in the

mire and stumbled on.

Two hours later, under a blazing sun—so great is the contrast in this

hungry land between night and unclouded day—I entered a native village,

more wretched if possible than that of the night before. Scowls and

snarls greeted me in almost every hut; but one hideously tattooed female

pushed away the proffered coins and thrust into my hands two

bread-sheets the ragged edge of which showed the marks of infant teeth.

They were as tender as a sea boot, as palatable as a bath towel, and

satisfied my hunger as a peanut would have satisfied that of an

elephant. But no amount of vociferation could induce the villagers to

part with another morsel, and, thankful for small favors, I trudged on.

A well-marked path, inundated here and there and peopled by bands of

natives, turned westward beyond an ancient aqueduct, and at noonday I

passed through the fortified gate of Acre. The power of faranchee

appetites was the absorbing topic of conversation in the stronghold when

I fell in with a band of emigrating Bedouins, and departed. The white

city of Haiffa, perched on the nose of recumbent Mt. Carmel across the

bay, seemed but a stone’s throw distant. It was an illusion of sea and

sun, however. Long hours I splashed after the Arabs through surf and

rivulet along the narrow beach, my shoes swinging over my shoulder, and

night had fallen before we parted in the Haiffan market place.

At a Jewish inn, in Haiffa, I made the acquaintance of a

fellow-countryman. He was a _dragoman_ of a well-known tourist company,

born in Nazareth, of Arab blood, and had never been outside the confines

of Asia Minor. His grandfather had lived a few years in New York, and,

though the good old gentleman had long since been gathered to his

fathers, his descendants were still entitled to flaunt his

naturalization papers in the faces of the Turkish police and

tax-gatherers and to greet travelers from the new world as compatriots.

Nazry Kawar, the dragoman, was overjoyed at the meeting. He dedicated

the afternoon to drawing, for my benefit, sketches of the routes of

Palestine, and took his leave, promising to write me a letter of

introduction to his uncle, a Nazarene dentist.

Early the next morning I passed through the vaulted market of Haiffa and

out upon the road to Nazareth. It was really a road, repaired not long

before for the passage of the German Emperor; but already the labor of

the Sultan’s servants had been half undone by the peasants, to whom a

highway is useful only as an excellent place in which to pitch stones

picked up in the adjoining fields. For once the day was clear and balmy

and a sunshine as of June illuminated the rugged fields and their

tillers. Towards noon, in the bleak hills beyond the first village, two

Bedouins, less bloodthirsty than hungry, fell upon me while I ate my

lunch by the wayside. Though they bombarded me with stones from opposite

sides, they threw like boarding-school misses and dodged like ocean

liners, and I had wrought more injury than I had received when I

challenged them to a race down the highway. They were no mean runners,

but the appearance over the first hill of a road-repair gang, a score of

bronze-faced, sinewy women under command of a skirt-clad male, forced

them to postpone their laudable attempt to win favor with the houris.

[Illustration: On the road between Haifa and Nazareth I meet a

road-repair gang, all women but the boss]

[Illustration: On the summit of Jebel es Sihk, back of Nazareth. From

left to right: Shukry Nasr, teacher; Elias Awad, cook; and Nehmé Simán,

teacher; my hosts in Nazareth]

An hour later I gained the highest point of the route. Far below the

highway, colored by that peculiar atmosphere of Palestine a delicate

blue that undulated and trembled in the afternoon sunshine, stretched

the vast plain of Esdraelon, walled by mountain ranges that seemed

innumerable leagues away. The route crawled along the top of the western

wall, choked here between two mountain spurs, breathing freely there on

a tiny plateau, and, rounding at last a gigantic boulder, burst into

Nazareth.

A mere village in the time of Christ, Nazareth covers to-day the

bowl-shaped valley in which it is built to the summits of the

surrounding hills and, viewed from a distance, takes on the form of an

almost perfect amphitheatre. In the arena of the circus, a teeming,

babbling bazaar, I endeavored in vain to find the dentist Kawar to whom

my letter was addressed. When my legs grew aweary of wandering through

the labyrinth and my tongue refused longer to deform itself in attempts

to reproduce the peculiar sounds of the Arabic language, I sat down on a

convenient and conspicuous bazaar stand, rolled a cigarette, and leaned

back in the perfect contentment of knowing that I should presently be

taken care of. Near me on all sides rose a whisper, in the hoarse voice

of squatting shopkeepers, in the treble of passing children under heavy

burdens, a whisper that seemed to grow into a thing animate and hurried

away through the long rows and intricate byways of the market as no

really living thing of the Orient ever does hurry, crying: “Faranchee!

Fee wahed faranchee!” Before my first cigarette was well lighted an

awe-struck urchin paused nearby to stare unqualifiedly, with the manner

of one ready to take to terror-stricken flight at the first inkling of a

hostile move on the part of this strange being, in dress so ludicrous,

and whose legs were clothed in separate garments! Here, surely, was one

of those dread boogiemen who are known to dine on small Arabs, and so

near that—perhaps he had better edge away and take to his heels

before—but no, here are a dozen men of familiar mien collecting in a

semicircle back of him! And there comes his uncle, the camel driver.

Perhaps the boogieman is not ferocious after all, for the men crowd

close around, calling him “faranchee” and “efendee,” and appearing not

in the least afraid.

The camel-driver is doubly courageous—who would not be proud to be his

nephew?—for he actually addresses himself to the strange being, while

the throng behind him grows and grows.

“Barhaba!” says the camel-driver, in greeting, “Lailtak saeedee! Where

does the efendee hail from? Italiano, perhaps?”

“No, American.”

“Amerikhano!” The word runs from mouth to mouth and the faces of all

hearers light up with interest. “America? Why, that is where Abdul el

Kassab, the butcher, went, long years ago. It is said to be far away,

further than “El Gkudis” (Jerusalem) or “Shaam” (Damascus).” But the

camel driver has derived another bit of information. Listen! “Bahree!

The faranchee is a bahree, a sailor, a man who works on the great water,

the ‘bahr’ that anyone can see from the top of Jebel es Sihk above, and

on the shores of which this same camel driver claims to have been. It is

even rumored that to reach this America of the faranchee and of Abdul el

Kassab, one must travel on the great water! Indeed, ’tis far away, and,

were the faranchee not a bahree, how could he have journeyed from

far-off America to this very Nazra?”

But my Arabic was soon exhausted and the simple Nazarenes, to whom a man

unable to express himself in their vernacular was as much to be pitied

as a deaf-mute, burst forth in sympathetic cries of “meskeen” (poor

devil). The camel driver, striving to gain further information, was

rapidly becoming the butt of the bystanders, when a native, in more

festive dress, pushed through the throng and addressed me in English. I

held up the letter.

“Ah,” he cried, “the dentist Kawar?” and he snatched the note out of my

hand and tore it open.

“But, here,” I cried, “are you the dentist?”

“Oh, no, indeed,” said the native, without looking up from the reading.

“Then what right have you to open that letter?” I demanded, grasping it.

The native gazed at me a moment, the picture of Innocence Accused and

astonished at the accusation.

“Oh, sir,” he said; “the Kawar is my friend. If it is my friend’s

letter, it is my letter. If it is my letter, it is my friend’s letter.

Arabs make like that, sir. I am Elias Awad, cook to the British

missionary and friend to the dentist. Very nice man, but gone to Acre.

But Kawar family live close here. Please, you, sir, come with me.”

Ten minutes later I had been received by the family Kawar like a

long-lost friend. One glimpse of their dwelling showed them to be people

of Nazarene wealth and position. The head of the house, keeper of a

dry-goods store, had once been sheik or mayor of Nazareth and was a man

of extreme courtesy. He spoke only Arabic. His sons, ranging from

bearded men to a boy of nine, had been impartially distributed among the

mission schools of the town. Two spoke English and one German and were

stout champions of the Protestant faith. The fourth and fifth spoke

French and Italian, respectively, and posed as devout Catholics. The

youngest, already well versed in Russian, clung to the faith of his

father, the orthodox Greek. Amid the bombardment of questions in four

languages I found a moment, here and there, to congratulate myself on my

ignorance of the tongue of the Cossacks.

While the evening meal was preparing, the cosmopolitan family, a small

army in assorted sizes, sallied forth to show me the regulation

“sights.” With deep reverence for every spot reminiscent of Jesus, they

pointed out Mary’s Well, the Greek church over the supplying spring, the

workshop of Joseph, and many a less authentic relic; and, utterly

oblivious of the incongruity, halted on the way back to cry: “This, sir,

is the house of the only Jew, thank God, who still dwells in Nazareth!”

Supper over, the Protestants dragged me away to a little church on the

brow of the valley. The service, though conducted in Arabic, was

Presbyterian even to the tunes of the hymns; the worship quite the

antithesis. For the men displayed the latest creations in fezes in the

front pews, and the women, in uniform white gowns, sat with bated breath

on the rear benches. Now and then a communicant kicked off his loose

slippers and folded his legs in his seat; and the most devout could not

suppress entirely a desire to stare at a faranchee who sat bareheaded in

church! After the benediction the ladies modestly hurried home, but not

one of the males was missing from the throng that greeted our exit. To

these my companions hastened to divulge my qualities, history, and

raison d’être, as exactly as some information and an untrammeled

imagination permitted. Among the hearers were two young men, by name

Shukry Nasr and Nehmé Simán, teachers of English in the mission school,

who, eager for conversational practice and touched with the curiosity of

the Arab, refused to leave until I had promised to be their guest after

my stay with the Kawars was ended.

The next day was one long lesson on the customs and traits of the

better-class Arab. Shukry Nasr and Nehmé Simán called early and led me

away to visit their friend, Elias, the cook. On the way I protested

against their refusal to allow me to spend a single metleek even for

tobacco. “You are our guest, sir,” said Nehmé; “we are very glad to have

you for a guest and to talk English. But even if we did not like, we

should take good care of you, for Christ said, ‘Thou shalt house the

stranger who is within thy gates.’”

“Why,” cried the cook, when our discussion had been carried into his

room in the mission, “in the days of my father, for a stranger to pay a

place to live would have been insult to all. A stranger in town! Why,

Let _my_ house be his—and _mine_!—and _mine_! would have shouted every

honorable citizen!”

“But Nazareth is getting bad,” sighed Shukry. “The faranchees who are

coming are very proud. They will not eat our food and sleep in our small

houses. And so many are coming! So some inns have been built and even

the Italian monastery like to have pay. Very disgraceful!”

“Did you give any policemen a nice whipping?” asked Elias, suddenly.

“Eh?” I cried.

“If a faranchee comes to our country,” he explained, “or if we go to

live in America and come back, the policeman cannot arrest.”

“Yes, I know,” I answered.

“If a policeman touches you, then, you must give him a nice whipping,”

continued the cook. “If _my_ father had been to America I would give

nice whippings every day. Many friends I have—” and he launched forth

into a series of anecdotes the heroes of which had returned with

naturalization papers for the sole purpose, evidently, of making life

unendurable for the officers of the Sultan.

“If they only refuse to obey the soldiers,” said Nehmé, “that is

nothing. Everybody does that. But here is the wonderful! They do not

have even to give backsheesh!”

“Do you have backsheesh in America?” demanded Shukry.

“Ah—er—well—the name is not in common use,” I stammered.

“It is in my town of Acre that the backsheesh is nice,” cried the cook,

proudly, “and the nicest smuggling. Have you seen that big, strong gate

to my town, sir? Ah, sir, many nice smugglings go in there. But how you

think?”—he winked one eye long and solemnly—“The nice smugglings are the

ladies. Many things the lady can carry under her long dress.”

“But there are the guards,” I put in.

“The guards? Quick the guard get dead if he put the finger on the lady.”

“Then why not have a woman guard?” I suggested.

“Aah!” cried the cook. “How nasty!”

“But the man,” he went on, sadly, “must pay backsheesh if he smuggle a

pound of arabee (native tobacco, so-called in distinction from

“Stambouli,” the revenued weed) or if he make a man dead.”

“What!” I cried, “Backsheesh for murder?”

“Oh, of course,” apologized the cook, “if the man that makes dead has no

money, he is made dead by the soldiers—”

“‘Kill’ is the English word, Elias,” put in Nehmé.

“Oh, yes,” continued Elias, “if the man that kills has money, the

officer sends a soldier after him. The man puts his head through his

door and drops some mejeediehs in the soldier’s hand. Then the soldier

comes back and gives almost all the mejeediehs to the officer, and they

decide that the man has run away and cannot be find. But if it is a

faranchee has been made—er—killed, very bad, for the consul tell the

government to find the man and kill him—and if the man have not so much

money that the government cannot find—very bad!”

“To-morrow,” said Shukry, as I stropped the razor which the cook invited

me to use, “you are coming to live with me.”

“To-morrow,” I answered, “I go to the Sea of Galilee.”

“Ah!” cried the three, in chorus, “Then we give you a letter to our good

friend, Michael Yakoumy. He is teacher in Tiberias and he takes much

pleasure to see you.”

“And you take a letter for my wife,” said Elias. “She is nurse in the

hospital. Often I write but the government lose the letter.”

“So you’re married?” I observed, through the lather.

“No! no!” screamed the cook. “How you can come to my house if I am

married? This only my—my—”

“Fiancée,” said Nehmé.

“Or sweetheart,” said Shukry.

“Aah!” muttered Elias, “I know the word ‘sweetheart.’ But I don’t like.

How you call a woman _sweet_? Every woman bad, and if she live in

Palestine or America, she cannot be trust”; and Nehmé and Shukry, in all

the wisdom of seventeen years, nodded solemnly in approval.

“But _your_ fiancée—” I began.

“All the same,” said the cook, “but every man shall get married—Look

out, sir, you are cutting your moustaches!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Aah!” shrieked the cook, as I scraped my upper lip clean, “why

faranchees make that? So soon I my moustaches would shave, so soon would

I cut my neck.”

There is a road that, beginning down by Mary’s Well and winding its way

out of the Nazarene arena, leads to Cana and the Sea of Galilee. Nehmé

and Shukry, however, true sons of Palestine, utterly ignored the highway

when they set out next morning to accompany me to the first village.

From the Kawar home they struck off through the village and traversed

Nazareth as the crow flies, with total disregard of the trend of the

streets. Down through the market, dodging into tiny alleys, under

vaulted passageways, through spaces where we were obliged to walk

sidewise, they led the way. Where a shop intervened, they marched boldly

through it, stepping over the merchandise and even over the squatting

keeper, who returned their “good morning” without losing a puff at his

narghileh. With never a moment of hesitation in the labyrinth of bazaars

nor among the dwellings above, they stalked straight up the slope of

Jebel es Sihk, by trails at times almost perpendicular, and out upon a

well-marked path that led over the brow of the hill.

At the summit they paused. To the north rose the snow-capped peak of Mt.

Hermon. Between the hills, to the west, peeped the sparkling

Mediterranean. Eastward, unbroken as far as the eye could see in either

direction, stretched the mighty wall of the trans-Jordan range. The view

embraced a dozen villages, tucked away in narrow ravines, clinging to

steep slopes, or lying prone on sharp ridges like broken-backed

creatures. Shukry’s enumeration savored of Biblical lore. There was

Raineh, down in the throat of the valley; further on Jotapta and Ruman;

across the gorge Sufurieh, the home of fanatical rascals among whom

Christians are outlaws. Every hamlet has a character of its own in

Palestine. The inhabitants of one may be honest, industrious, kindly

disposed towards any advance of civilization; while another, five miles

distant, boasts a population of the worst scoundrels unhung, bigoted,

clannish, and sworn enemies to every fellow-being who has not had the

good fortune to be born in their enlightened midst. This diversity of

characteristics, so marked that a man from across the valley is styled

“foreigner,” makes resistance to the Turk impossible and breeds a deadly

hatred that raises even to-day that sneering question, “Can any good

thing come out of Nazareth?”

The teachers took their leave in Raineh. Beyond Cana, perched on a

gentle rise of ground among flourishing groves of pomegranates, the

highway wavered and was lost in the mire. I set my own course across a

half-inundated plain. Late in the afternoon the Horns of Hutin, adorned

by a solitary shepherd whose flock grazed where once the multitude

listened to the Sermon on the Mount, rose up to assure me that I had not

gone astray, and an hour later the ground dropped suddenly away beneath

my feet and the end of my pilgrimage lay before me. Near seven hundred

feet below sea level, in a hollow of the earth dug by some gigantic

spade, glimmered the blue Sea of Galilee, already in deep shadow, though

the sunshine still flooded the plain behind me. I stepped over the edge

of the precipice and, slipping, stumbling from rock to rock, steering

myself by clutching at bush and boulder, fell headlong down into the

city of Tiberias.

A city of refuge in ancient times, Tiberias is to-day one of the few

towns of Palestine in which the Jewish population preponderates. It is a

human cesspool. Greasy-locked males squat in the doorways of its

wretched hovels; hideous females, dressed in an open jacket stiff with

filth, which discloses to the public gaze their withered, bag-like

breasts and their bloated abdomens, wallow through the sewerage of the

streets in company with foul brats infected with every unclean disease

from scurvy to leprosy. Dozens of idiots, the hair eaten off their

heads, and their bodies covered with running sores, roam at large and

quarrel with mongrel curs over the refuse. For these are the “men

possessed of devils,” privileged members of society in all the Orient.

An Arab proverb asserts that the king of fleas holds his court in

Tiberias. To be king of all the fleas that dwell in Palestine is a

position of far greater importance than to be czar of all the Russias;

and it is strange that His Nimble Majesty has not long ago chosen a

capital in which it would not be necessary to disinfect his palace

daily.

The home of Michael Yakoumy, from the windows of which stretched an

unobstructed view of the sea from the sortie of the Jordan to the site

of Capernaum, was a model of cleanliness. Here, in this wretched hamlet,

that whole-hearted descendant of Greek immigrants toils year after year

at a ludicrous wage, striving to instill some knowledge and right living

into the children of the surrounding rabble. He was, all unknowingly, a

true disciple of the “simple life” in its best sense, displaying the

interest of a child in the commonplace occurrences of the daily round,

not entirely ignorant of, but wholly unenvious of the big things of the

world outside.

I attended the opening of his school next morning and then turned back

towards Nazareth. At the foot of the precipitous slope a storm broke and

the combination of water and jagged rocks wrought disaster to my

worn-out shoes. When I reached sea level they were succumbing to a rapid

disintegration. In the first half-mile across the plain the heels, the

soles, the uppers, the very laces, dropped bit by bit along the way. For

a time the cakes of mud that clung to my socks protected my feet, but

the socks, too, wore away and left me to plod on barefooted over the

jagged stones of the field.

Long before I had reached the mountainous tract about Cana, I was

suffering from a dozen cuts and stone-bruises; and the journey beyond

must have appealed to a Hindu ascetic as a penance by which to win

unlimited merit. As for Cana, it will always be associated in my mind

with that breed of human who finds his pleasure in bear-baiting and

cock-fighting. For, as I attempted to climb into the village market, my

feet refused to cling to the slimy hillside and I skidded and sprawled

into a slough at the bottom, amid shrieks of derisive laughter from a

group of villagers above.

By the time I reached Raineh it was as dark as a pocket, and the path

over the Jebel was out of the question. The winding highway pursued its

leisurely course and led me into Nazareth at an hour when every shop was

closed. For some time I could not orientate myself and wandered

shivering through the silent bazaars, the cold, dank stones underfoot

sending through me a thrill of helplessness such as Anteus must have

felt when lifted off the strength-giving earth. Then a familiar corner

gave me my bearings, and I hobbled away to the home of Elias.

The village shoemaker, being summoned next morning, appeared with

several pairs of Nazarene slippers, heelless and thin as Indian

moccasins; again shod, I set out with the teachers for the home of

Shukry. It was a simple dwelling of the better class, halfway up the

slope of Jebel es Sihk, and from its roof spread out the bowl-shaped

village at our feet, Mt. Tabor, and the lesser peaks away in the

distance. The recent death of his father had left the youth to rule over

the household. In all but years he was a mature man, boasting already a

bristling moustache, for humans ripen early in the East.

It was January seventh according to our calendar, or Christmas Day

according to the Russian, a time of festival among the Greek churchmen

and of ceremonial visits among all Christians. Our shoes off, we were

sitting on a divan when the guests began to appear. Each arrival—all

men, of course, though Shukry’s mother hovered in the far background—was

greeted by the head of the family standing erect in the center of the

room. There was no hand-shaking, but a low kow-tow by guest and host and

a carelessly mumbled greeting. Then the visitor slid out of his

slippers, squatted on the capacious divan, and, when all were firmly

seated, the salutation “naharak saeed” was exchanged, this time being

clearly enunciated. If the newcomer was a priest, Shukry’s small brother

slid forward to kiss his hand and retired again into an obscure corner.

These formalities over, the guest, priest or layman, was served

cigarettes and a tiny cup of coffee. Frankness is the key to the Arab

character. The hypocritical smirks of our own social gatherings are not

required of the Nazarene who lays claim to good breeding. If the visitor

was a friend or fellow-churchman of his host an animated conversation

broke out and, interrupted at brief intervals by new arrivals, raged

long and vociferously. Those who professed a different faith—the Greek

priests especially—sipped their coffee in absolute silence, puffed at a

cigarette, and, with another “naharak saeed,” glided into their slippers

and departed.

Later in the day I made, with my host, the round of the Christian

families, deafened with questions in Protestant homes, suffered to sit

in painful silence in Greek dwellings, and undermining my constitution

with every known brand of cigarette. Our course ended at the Kawar home.

The former mayor, dressed in latest faranchee garb, with a vast expanse

of white vest, sat cross-legged in his white stocking-feet, a fez

perched on his head. The conversation soon turned to things American.

“Many years ago,” translated the eldest son, on behalf of his father, “I

began to wonder why, by the beard of the prophet, faranchees come from a

great, rich country like America to travel in a miserable land like

ours.”

A long dissertation on the joys and advantages of globe-trotting drew

from the former sheik only an exclamation of “M’abaraf!” (I don’t

understand).

“An American who was in Nazareth long ago,” he went on, by mouth of

offspring, “told me a strange story. I did not believe him, for it

cannot be true. He said that in America people _buy_ dogs!” and the mere

suggestion of so ludicrous a transaction sent the assembled group into

paroxysms of laughter.

“They _do_,” I replied.

The pompous ex-mayor fell into such convulsions of merriment that his

rotund face grew the color of burnished copper.

“BUY dogs?” roared his sons, in a chorus of several languages. “But what

for?”

Never having settled that question entirely to my own satisfaction, I

parried it with another: “How do _you_ get a dog if you want one?”

“W—w—w—why,” answered the eldest son, wiping the tears from his eyes,

“if anyone _wants_ a dog he tells someone else and they give him one;

but who ever WANTS a dog?”

Once the guest of the better-class Arab, the traveler is almost certain

to be relayed from one city to another through an endless chain of the

friends of his original host. I had announced my intention of leaving

Nazareth in the morning. The ex-mayor, after attempting to frighten me

out of my project by the usual bear-stories, wrote me four letters of

introduction.

“Without these letters,” he explained, “you would not dare stay in

Gineen or Nablous, for my friends are the only Christians and those are

very bad towns. My friends in Jerusalem and Jaffa—if you ever get there

alive—may be able to help you find work.”