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 132the 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.
Damascus. “The street called Straight—which isn’t”
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 133the 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 134barracks. 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 A?da 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 135so 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, rago?t, 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 136truth 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 137solemn 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 138stepped 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.
139“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 r?le 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 140pushed 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.
Women of Bethlehem going to the Church of the Nativity
The most thickly settled portion of Damascus is the graveyard. A picture taken at risk of mobbing
141He 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 142to 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 143him, 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 144sea 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 145lights 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 146an 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 r?le. 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 147intervals, 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 148apes 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.
Tyre is now a miserable village connected with the mainland by a wind-blown neck of sand
Agriculture in Palestine. There is not an ounce ............