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 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 of iron about the plow

149The 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 150snatched 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 151who 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 152for 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 153evoked 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 154shifting 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 155colonies 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 156bath 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.

On the road between Haifa and Nazareth I meet a road-repair gang, all women but the boss

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

157An 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 158to 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 159a 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 160better-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.”

161“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.

162“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 163to-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 164of 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 165off, 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.

166The 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.”