The sun, rising red and clear next morning, put to rout even the protests of Nehmé and Shukry against my departure on Sunday. Elias sorrowfully said farewell at the mission gate. The teachers, carrying between them a package at which they cast mysterious glances now and then, conducted me to the foot of the Nazarene range. Pointing out a guiding mountain peak that rose above Gineen, far across the trackless plain of Esdraelon, they bade me good-by almost tearfully, thrust the package into my hands, and turned back up the mountain pass. Half certain of what the bundle contained, I did not open it until noonday overtook me, well out on the plain. Inside was a goodly supply of gkebis, oranges, native cheeses, and black olives; and at the bottom, a bundle of home-made cigarettes, and a package of “arabee,” with a book of papers.
Late afternoon brought me to the edge of Esdraelon. A veritable garden spot, covered with graceful palms and waving pomegranates and perfumed with the fragrance of orange and lemon groves, covered the lower slope of the peak that had been my phare. Back of the garden stood the fanatical town of Gineen. The appearance of a defenseless unbeliever in their midst aroused its inhabitants to scowls and curses, and a few stones from a group of youngsters at a corner of the bazaar rattled in the streets behind me. My letter was addressed in native script. The squatting shopkeeper to whom I displayed it attempted to scowl me out of countenance, then, recalling his duty of hospitality towards whoever should enter his dwelling, called a passing urchin and, mumbling a few words to him, bade me follow. The urchin mounted the sloping market-place, made several unexpected turnings, and, pointing out a large house surrounded by a forbidding stone wall, scampered away like one accustomed to take no chances of future damnation by lingering at the entrance to a Christian hotbed.
I clanged the heavy knocker until the sound echoed up and down the adjoining streets, and, receiving no response, sat down on the curb. A 168well-dressed native wandered by and I displayed the letter. He glared at it, muttered “etnashar s??” (twelve o’clock, i. e., nightfall by Arabic reckoning) and continued his way. From time to time visitors paused at neighboring gates or house doors and, standing in the center of the street, lifted up their voices in mournful wails that endured long enough to have given the wailer’s pedigree from the time of Noah; and were finally admitted. Beggars made the rounds, wailing longer and more mournfully than the others, seldom ceasing until a few bread-sheets or coppers were tossed out to them. Bands of females, whose veils may have covered great beauty or the hideous visages of hags, drew up in a circle round me now and then to discuss my personal attractions, and to fill me with the creepy feeling one might experience at a visit of the White Caps or the Klu-Klux Klan.
Full two hours I had squatted against the wall when an old man, in European garb, slowly ascended the street, mumbling to himself as he ran through his fingers a string of yellow beads. He paused at the gate and pulled out a key. I sprang to my feet and handed him the letter. He read it with something of a scowl and, motioning to me to wait, went inside. A long delay followed. At last the gate groaned and gave exit to the ugliest creature in the Arab world. He was a youth of about twenty, as long as a day without bread, and too thin to deflect a ray of light. His shoulders were bowed until his head stuck out at right angles to his body; his long, yellow teeth protruded from his lips; in his one eye was the gleam of the rascal; and his very attitude stamped him as one who hated faranchees with a deadly hatred. Around his lank form hung a half-dozen long, flowing garments as from a hat-rack, and on his head was the coiffure of the Bedouin.
I caught enough of his snarling harangue to know that he was a family domestic ordered to conduct me to the servants’ quarters. On the opposite side of the long street he unlocked a battered door, and admitted me to a hovel furnished with a moth-eaten divan and a pan of dead coals. A dapper young native entered soon after and addressed me in fluent French.
“My family is in a sad situation,” he explained; “we are friends of the Kawar and so always the friends of his friends. But we are the only Christians in Gineen and so we can only give you servant quarters.” His train of reasoning was not particularly clear. “But you must not stay in Gineen to-night. If you wait until to-morrow, you must go on alone and in the mountains are Bedouins who every day catch travelers, and fill their eyes and mouths and noses with 169sand, and drag them around by a rope, and cut them up in small pieces, and scatter them all around! You must go to-night, with the mail-train. Then you will be safe.”
“I’ve tramped all day,” I protested; “I’ll find lodgings in the town if I am inconveniencing your family.”
“Mon Dieu!” shrieked the young man; “there you would be cut to pieces in an hour! Gineen hates Christians. If you stop here, they will beat my family—”
His distress, real or feigned, was so acute that I assented at last to his plan. He ordered the misshapen servant to bring me supper, and departed.
The living caricature followed his master and returned with a bowl of lentils and several “side dishes.” With him appeared two companions, almost as unprepossessing of mien as himself; and he had no sooner placed the food on the floor than all three squatted around it and, clawing with both hands, made way with the meal so rapidly that I had barely time to snatch a few mouthfuls. When the last scrap had disappeared, the newcomers fell to licking out the bowls. The elongated servant set up the wailing monotony that is the Arabic notion of a song, and, swaying back and forth and thrusting out his misplaced fangs in a fixed leer, he continued for an unbroken two hours a performance which the roars of mirth from his mates proved was no compliment to faranchees.
Towards nine in the evening he turned his fellow-rascals into the street, and motioning to me to take up my knapsack, dived out into the night. By good fortune I managed to keep at his heels without splitting my head on the huts among which he dodged and doubled in an effort to shake me off before we arrived at the mail-train khan. The keeper was a bitter enemy of unbelievers and admitted me only under protest, and with a steady flow of vile oaths that was unchecked as long as I remained in the building. My guide deposited his cadaverous frame on a heap of chaff and took up his song of derision and his leering where he had left off.
At the appearance of the mail train the song ceased, and the singer, having briefly stated the desire of his master, disappeared. The snarls of the servant and the khan-keeper had been friendly greetings compared with those of the three drivers of the mail train. To all appearances they were more to be feared than capture by sand-stuffing Bedouins; but my sponsor was a man of higher caste than mere muleteers and would surely in some degree hold them responsible for my 170safe arrival—so it seemed—and I determined to stick to the plan. Of the four mules that made up the train, one was saddled with the mail-sacks and, at a signal from the leader, the driver sprang astride the others. The khan door opened, letting in a cutting draught of January air, and I followed the party outside, fully expecting to be offered a mount. The train, however, kept steadily on. The hindmost Arab signed to me to grasp the crupper of his mule; then he cut the animal across the flanks perilously near my fingers. Only then did the truth burst upon me. Instead of letting me ride, as certainly the Christian had expected them to do, the rascals had taken this golden opportunity to reverse the usual order of things Oriental. The true believers would serenely bestride their animals and the faranchee might trot behind like a Damascus donkey-boy. I fancied I heard several chuckles of delight, half-smothered in blatant curses.
The night was as black as a Port Sa?d coaling nigger. In the first few rods I lost my footing more than once and barked my shins on a dozen boulders. The practical joke of the Arabs, however, was not ended. Once far enough from the khan to make a return difficult, the leader shouted an order, the three struck viciously at their animals, and with a rattle of small stones against the boulders away went the party at full gallop. I lost my grip on the crupper, broke into a run in an attempt to keep the pace, slipped and slid on the stones, struck a slope that I had not made out in the darkness, and stumbling halfway up it on my hands and knees, sprawled at full length over a boulder.
I sat up and listened until the tinkle of the pack-mule’s bell died away on the night air; then rose to grope my way back to the khan. It was closed and locked. By some rare fortune I found my way to the street in which the Christian lived and pushed open the door of the hovel. The room was unoccupied, though the lighted wick of a tallow lamp showed that the servant had returned. I spread out three of the four blankets folded away on the divan and lay down. A moment later the walking mizzenmast entered, leaped sidewise as though he saw the ghost of a forgotten victim, and spreading the remaining blanket in the most distant corner, curled up with all his multifarious garb upon him. I rose to blow out the light, but the Arab set up a howl of abject terror that might have been heard on the northern wall of Esdraelon, and I desisted.
The route between Gineen and Nablous was in strange contrast to that of the day before, much like a sudden transition from Holland to an uncivilized Tyrol. Directly back of the fanatical town lay 171range after range of rocky peaks, half covered with tangled forests of oak and terebinth. A pathway there was, but it indicated little travel, and broke up now and then into forking trails from which I could only choose at random. Against a mountain side, here and there clung a black-hide village of roving Bedouins. These were the tribes which, if rumor was to be believed, busied themselves with corralling lone Christians and scattering their remains among the wooded valleys. To-day, however, they were engaged in a no more awful vocation than the tending of a few decimated flocks of fat-tailed sheep.
Late in the morning I came in sight of the mud village of Dothan. A well-marked path marched boldly up to the first hovel, ran close along its wall, swung round behind the building, and ended. It neither broke up into small paths nor led to an opening in the earth; it merely vanished into thin air as if the hovel were the station of some a?rial line. A score of giant mongrels, coming down upon me from the hill above, gave me little time for reflection. Luckily—for my clothing, at least—there lay within reach a long-handled kettle such as natives use in boiling lentils; and half the mangy population of the village, tumbling down the slope to gaze upon the unprecedented sight of a lone faranchee in their midst, beheld him laying about him right merrily. Not one of the villagers made the least attempt to call off the curs. It was the usual Arab case of every man’s dog no man’s dog.
The village above was a crowded collection of dwellings of the same design as those of the Esquimaux, with mud substituted for snow, perched on a succession of rock ledges that rose one above the other. The human mongrels inside them answered my inquiries with snarls and curses, one old hag exerting herself to the extent of rising to spit at me through her toothless gums. Wherever a narrow passageway gave suggestion of a trail I scrambled up the jagged faces of the rock ledges in an effort to find the route. As well might a landlubber have attempted to pick out the fore-royal halyards. Regularly I brought up in back yards where several human kennels choked the ground with their sewerage and the air with their smoke, and the reward of every scramble was several gashes in my hands and volleys of curses from the disturbed householders.
I caught sight at length of a peasant astride an ass, tacking back and forth through the town, but mounting steadily higher. Shadowing him, I came out upon an uninhabited ledge above. The precipitous path beyond was but a forerunner of the entire day’s journey. Over 172the range I overtook the peasant, and not far beyond a horseman burst out of a tributary cut and joined us. The peasant carried a cudgel and a long, blunt knife, and seemed quite anxious to keep both in a position that would attract attention. The horseman, in half-civilian, half-military trappings, carried two pistols and a dagger in his belt, a sword at his side, and a long, slim gun across his shoulders. The countryman offered me a mount, but, as his beast was scarcely my equal in weight, I contented myself with trudging at the heels of the animals.
About noon, in a narrow plateau, we came upon an open well from which a party of Bedouins, that I should not have chosen to meet alone, scattered at sight of the officer. My companions tethered their animals on the lip of grass and drew out their dinners. The officer knelt beside the well with a pot; but the water was out of reach of his corpulent and much-garbed form, and the peasant being of the Tom Thumb variety, I won the eloquent gratitude of both by coming to the rescue. Vainly I struggled to do away with the food that was thrust upon me from either side. The officer was, evidently, a man of wide experience and savoir-faire. Not only did he display no great astonishment at the faranchee manner of eating, but he owned a mysterious machine that filled the peasant with speechless awe. The mystery was none other than an alcohol lamp! Not until the coffee was prepared could the countryman be enticed within ten feet of it. But once having summoned up courage to touch the apparatus, he fell upon it like a child upon a mechanical toy and examined its inner workings so thoroughly that the officer spent a half-hour in fitting it together again.
During the afternoon the peasant turned aside to his village, and not far beyond, the horseman lost his way. I could not but speculate on the small chance I should have had alone on a route which eluded a native well acquainted with the country. We had followed for some distance a wild gorge which, ending abruptly, offered us on one side an impassable jungle of rocks and trees, and on the other a precipitous slope covered for hundreds of feet above with loose shale and rubble. The officer dismounted and squatted contentedly on his haunches. In the course of an hour, during which my companion had not once moved except to roll several cigarettes, a bedraggled fellah approached and replied to the officer’s question by pointing up the unwooded slope. Three times the horse essayed the climb, only to slide helplessly to the bottom. The Arab handed me his 173gun and, dismounting, sought to lead the steed up the slope by tacking back and forth across it. Several times the animal fell on its haunches and tobogganed down the hill, dragging the cavalryman after him. The gun soon weighed me down like a cannon; but we reached the summit at last, and were glad to stretch ourselves out on the solid rock surface of the wind-swept peak.
The officer spread out food between us. To the southward lay a panorama that rivaled the prospect from the summit of Jebel es Sihk. Two ranges of haggard mountains, every broken peak as distinct in individuality as though each were fearful of being charged with imitation of its fellows, raced side by side to the southeast. Between them lay a wild tangle of rocks and small forests through which a swift stream fought its way, deflected far to the southward in its struggle towards the Mediterranean by the rounded base of the mountain beneath us. Over all the scene hovered utter desolation and solitude, as of an undiscovered world innumerable leagues distant from any human habitation.
For an hour we followed the trend of the stream far below, rounding several peaks and gradually descending. The path became a bit more distinct; but our surroundings lost none of their savage aspect, and as far as the eye could see appeared neither man, beast, nor fowl. Suddenly the cavalryman, rounding a jutting boulder before me, reined in his horse with an excited jerk, and, grasping his sword, pointed with the scabbard across the valley. “Nablous!” he shouted. I hastened to his side. On a small plateau far below us, and moated by the rushing stream, in a setting of haggard wilderness, stood a city, a real city, with street after street of closely packed stone buildings of very modern architecture. Like a regiment drawn up in close ranks, the houses presented on four sides an unwavering line; inside there was not an open space, outside hardly a shepherd’s shelter.
We wound down the mountain path to an ancient stone bridge that led directly into the city. A squad of those ragged, half-starved soldiers indigenous to the Turkish empire would have stopped me at the gate but for my companion, who, with a wave of the hand, drove them off. Without prelude we plunged into the seething life of the bazaars. The streets were as narrow, as intricate, and as numerous as those of Damascus; but their novelty lay in the fact that they were nearly everywhere vaulted over, and one had the sensation of strolling through a crowded subway from which rails and cars were lacking. 174The shoes of the horse rang sharp and metallic against the cobblestones as the animal plowed his way through the jabbering multitude, and by keeping close at his heels, I escaped the returning waves of humanity that rebounded from the unbroken line of shops on either side of the narrow passages to fill our wake. The cavalryman dismounted before a shop that minutely resembled its neighbors, handed the reins to a keeper who advanced to meet him, and urgently invited me to spend the night in the inn above. My Nazarene friends, however, had intrusted me with personal epistles, which I felt in duty bound to deliver.
The addressee was one Iskander Saaba, a Nazarene school teacher. His house was not nearly so easily found as the proof that the inhabitants of Nablous were fanatical, unreasonable haters of Christians. In the cities of Asia Minor the streets are neither named nor the houses numbered. Mr. Smith, you learn, lives near the house of Mr. Jones. If you pursue the investigation further you may gather the information that Mr. Jones lives not far from the house of Mr. Smith, and all the raving of western impatience will not gain you more. A few yards from the inn a water carrier and a baker’s boy struck me simultaneously in the ribs with their respective burdens. A wayward donkey, bestrided by a leering wretch, ran me down. A tradesman carrying a heavy beam turned a corner just in time to give me a distinct view of a starry firmament in a vaulted passageway. These things, of course, were purely accidental. But when three stout rascals grasped the knapsack across my shoulders and clung to it until I had kicked one of them into a neighboring shop, and a corner street vendor went out of his way to step on my heels, I could not so readily excuse them. As long as I remained in the teeming bazaars these sneaking injuries continued. Wherever I stopped a crowd quickly gathered and showed their enmity openly by jostling against me, by reviling the whole faranchee race, and even by spitting on my nether garments.
In a residential district my inquiries were answered at last, and I was soon welcomed with true Arabian hospitality by Iskander Saaba. A most pleasant evening I spent in the dwelling of the youthful teacher, a cosy house adjoining the mission school, the windows of which looked down on the roaring river far beneath. The family and a white-haired native, whom Saaba introduced as “my assistance in the school,” plied me with questions ranging from the age of my grandfather to the income of my various cousins, and gasped when I 175pleaded ignorance. But these things were but harmless examples of the frankness of the Arab, at which only an underfed mortal could have taken offense.
A steady rain was falling next morning and my host awoke me with the old saw—“To-morrow is just as good a day as to-day.” When I had convinced him that this was not an Occidental proverb, he set out to pilot me through the city. On the way he paused often to purchase food or tobacco, with which he stuffed my knapsack in spite of my protests, answering always: “It is far to Jerusalem, and some day I will come to America.” All in all, he did not spend twenty-five cents; but I was well nigh staggering under my load when I took leave of him at the southern gate of the city and struck off across the oblong plateau shielded by Mt. Ebal and Mt Gerizim. Since the day when it was called Shechem, a city of refuge, Nablous has carried on much traffic with Jerusalem, and in recent years the pusillanimous Turk has set himself to the task of building a connecting highway. The section beyond the southern gate promised well; but in this rainy season it was a river of mud which clung to my shoes in great cakes and made progress more difficult than in the trackless mountains to the north.
The highway ended abruptly at noonday, as I had been warned it would. “It is all complete,” Shukry had said, “except over the mountain, the highest mountain in Palestine, and over that it runs not.” The barrier must, indeed, have been a problem to the engineers, for it towered hundreds of feet above, as nearly perpendicular as nature is wont to construct her works. Diagonally up the face of the cliff a path was cut, but no spiral stairway, compressed within a slender tower, ever offered more difficult ascent. At the summit I came again upon the road, as wide, as finely ballasted, as well engineered, as the most exacting traveler could have demanded; yet, as it stood, utterly useless. It had been built that carriages might pass from Nablous to the Holy City; but no wheeled vehicle in existence could have been dragged up that wall-like hillside; and the sure-footed ass, who still carries on the traffic between the two cities, would make the journey exactly as well had the highway never been proposed. One could read in that road the character of the power that holds Palestine, and fancy its builders, like the highway, wandering irresolutely from east to west and west to east, and halting at the highest point to peer helplessly over the dizzy edge upon the section below.
Long after nightfall I stumbled upon an isolated shop, occupied 176by the keeper and an errant salesman of tobacco. The building was no more than a wooden frame covered over with sheet iron; and the rain, that began soon after I turned in with the drummer on one of the shelves that served as bunks, thundered on the roof through the night and made sleep as impossible as inside the bass drum at a Wagnerian performance. In the morning, a deluge more violent than I had ever known, held us prisoners; and, the weather being bitterly cold, I kept to my shelf and listened to the roaring of the tin shack through the longest day that ever rained and blew itself into the past tense.
The storm had abated somewhat when I set out again on the following day. One stone village broke the dreary prospect; the ancient Bethel, beyond the sharp hills of which the highway side-stepped to the eastward. The rain of the preceding days had, no doubt, left the peculiar atmosphere of Palestine unusually humid. In no other way can I account for the strange vision that appeared late in the morning. The hills ahead were somewhat indistinct, in the valleys lay a thick, gray mist, while overhead, the sky was dull and leaden. Before me, well above the horizon, hung a long dark cloud which, as I looked, took on gradually the faint shape of a distant line of buildings. It could have been no more than a mirage, for beneath it was a considerable strip of sky; yet it grew plainer and plainer until there rode in the heavens, like the army in that weird painting of the soldier’s dream, a dull, gray city, a long city, bounded at one end by a great tower, at the other shading off into nothing. Then suddenly it vanished. Black clouds, hurrying westward from across Jordan, wiped out the vision as one erases a lightly penciled line. Yet the image was Jerusalem. Miles beyond, the fog lifted and showed the city plainly, and it was that same long city bounded on the eastward by a great tower, but with solid footing now on a dull, drear hill that sloped to the west. The highway led downward across bleak fields, past the reputed Tombs of the Kings and Judges, to-day the refuges of shivering shepherd boys, and through the Damascus gate into the crowded bazaars of the Holy City.
The shopkeeper and the traveling salesman with whom I spent two nights and a day on the lonely road to Jerusalem. Arabs are very sensitive to cold, except on their feet and ankles
A high official of Mohammedanism. It being against the teachings of the Koran to have one’s picture taken, master and servant turn away their faces
A howling horde swept me away through markets infinitely dirtier and far less picturesque than those of Damascus, up and down slimy stone steps, jostling, pushing, trampling upon me at every turn, not maliciously, but from mere indifference to such familiar beings as faranchees. At the end of a reeking street I turned for refuge to an open doorway, through which I had caught a glimpse of a long greensward and a great mosque with superbly graceful dome. A 177shout rose from a rabble of men and boys at one side of the square. In Damascus, such demonstrations, bursting forth each time I entered a mosque enclosure, had soon subsided. So I marched on with an air of indifference. The shouts redoubled. Men and youths came down upon me from every direction, howling like demons, and discharging a volley of stones, some of which struck me in the legs, while others whistled ominously near my head. I beat a hasty retreat. Not until later in the day did I know the reason for my expulsion. I had trespassed on the sacred precincts of the mosque of Omar on the summit of Mt. Moriah, where no unbeliever may enter without an escort of bribed soldiers.
A second attempt to escape the throng led me down more slimy steps and along a narrow alley to a towering stone............