Chapter 13

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

The nephew of the village carpenter, a youth educated in the American Mission School of Sidon, appointed himself my guide next morning. The ancient city of Tyre is to-day a collection of stone and mud hovels, covering less than a third of the sandy point that once teemed with metropolitan life, and housing four thousand humble humans, destitute alike of education, arts, and enterprise. Our pilgrimage began at the narrow neck of wind-blown sand—all that remains of the causeway of Alexander. To the south of the present hamlet, once the site of rich dwellings, stretched rambling rows of crude head-stones over Christian and Mohammedan graves, a dreary spot above which circled and swooped a few sombre rooks. On the eastern edge a knoll rose above the pathetic village wall, a rampart that would not afford defense against a self-confident goat. Below lay a broad playground, worn bare and smooth by the tramp of many feet, peopled now by groups of romping children and here and there an adult loafing under the rays of the December sun. Only a few narrow chasms, from which peeped the top of a window or door, served to remind the observer that he was not looking down upon an open space, but on the flat housetops of the closely-packed city.

Further away rose an unsteady minaret, and beyond, the tree-girdled dwelling of the Italian monks. To the north, in the wretched roadstead, a few decrepit fishing smacks, sad remnants of the fleets whose mariners once caroused and sang in the streets of Tyre, lay at anchor. Down on the encircling beach, half buried under the drifting sands and worn away by the lapping waves, lay the ruins of what must long ago have been great business blocks. The Tyreans of to-day, mere parasites, have borne away stone by stone these edifices of a mightier generation to build their own humble habitations. Even as we looked, a half dozen ragged Arabs were prying off the top of a great pillar and loading the fragments into a dilapidated feluca.

A narrow street through the center of the town forms the boundary between her two religions. To the north dwell Christians, to the south Metawalies, Mohammedans of unorthodox superstitions. Their women do not cover their faces, but tattoo their foreheads, cheeks, and hands. To them the unpardonable sin is to touch, ever so slightly, a being not of their faith. Ugly scowls greeted our passage in all this section. I halted at a shop to buy oranges. A mangy old crone tossed the fruit at me and, spreading a cloth over her hand, stretched it out. I attempted to lay the coppers in her open palm. Shesnatched 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 fellowwho 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 sendfor 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 songAre hushed, or wake to woe.”

“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 effortsevoked 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. Theshifting 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 marshescolonies 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 abath 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 adragomanof 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

An hour later I gained the highest point of the route. Far below the highway, colored by that peculiar atmosphere of Palestine a delicate blue that undulated and trembled in the afternoon sunshine, stretched the vast plain of Esdraelon, walled by mountain ranges that seemed innumerable leagues away. The route crawled along the top of the western wall, choked here between two mountain spurs, breathing freely there on a tiny plateau, and, rounding at last a gigantic boulder, burst into Nazareth.

A mere village in the time of Christ, Nazareth covers to-day the bowl-shaped valley in which it is built to the summits of the surrounding hills and, viewed from a distance, takes on the form of an almost perfect amphitheatre. In the arena of the circus, a teeming, babbling bazaar, I endeavored in vain to find the dentist Kawar to whom my letter was addressed. When my legs grew aweary of wandering through the labyrinth and my tongue refused longer to deform itself in attempts to reproduce the peculiar sounds of the Arabic language, I sat down on a convenient and conspicuous bazaar stand, rolled a cigarette, and leaned back in the perfect contentment of knowing that I should presently be taken care of. Near me on all sides rose a whisper, in the hoarse voice of squatting shopkeepers, in the treble of passing children under heavy burdens, a whisper that seemed to grow into a thing animate and hurried away through the long rows and intricate byways of the market as no really living thing of the Orient ever does hurry, crying: “Faranchee! Fee wahed faranchee!” Before my first cigarette was well lighted an awe-struck urchin paused nearby to stare unqualifiedly, with the manner of one ready to take to terror-stricken flight at the first inkling of a hostile move on the part of this strange being, in dress so ludicrous, and whose legs were clothed in separate garments! Here, surely, was one of those dread boogiemen who are known to dine on small Arabs, and so near that—perhaps he had better edge away and take to his heels before—but no, here are a dozen men of familiar mien collecting in a semicircle back of him! And there comes his uncle, the camel driver. Perhaps the boogieman is not ferocious after all, for the men crowd close around, calling him “faranchee” and “efendee,” and appearing not in the least afraid.

The camel-driver is doubly courageous—who would not be proudto 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 likea 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, andraison 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 thebetter-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, Letmyhouse be his—andmine!—andmine! 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. “Ifmyfather had been to America I would give nice whippings every day. Many friends I have—” and he launched forth into a series of anecdotes the heroes of which had returned with naturalization papers for the sole purpose, evidently, of making life unendurable for the officers of the Sultan.

“If they only refuse to obey the soldiers,” said Nehmé, “that is nothing. Everybody does that. But here is the wonderful! They do not have even to give backsheesh!”

“Do you have backsheesh in America?” demanded Shukry.

“Ah—er—well—the name is not in common use,” I stammered.

“It is in my town of Acre that the backsheesh is nice,” cried the cook, proudly, “and the nicest smuggling. Have you seen that big, strong gate to my town, sir? Ah, sir, many nice smugglings go in there. But how you think?”—he winked one eye long and solemnly—“The nice smugglings are the ladies. Many things the lady can carry under her long dress.”

“But there are the guards,” I put in.

“The guards? Quick the guard get dead if he put the finger on the lady.”

“Then why not have a woman guard?” I suggested.

“Aah!” cried the cook. “How nasty!”

“But the man,” he went on, sadly, “must pay backsheesh if he smuggle a pound of arabee (native tobacco, so-called in distinction from “Stambouli,” the revenued weed) or if he make a man dead.”

“What!” I cried, “Backsheesh for murder?”

“Oh, of course,” apologized the cook, “if the man that makes dead has no money, he is made dead by the soldiers—”

“‘Kill’ is the English word, Elias,” put in Nehmé.

“Oh, yes,” continued Elias, “if the man that kills has money, the officer sends a soldier after him. The man puts his head through his door and drops some mejeediehs in the soldier’s hand. Then the soldier comes back and gives almost all the mejeediehs to the officer, and they decide that the man has run away and cannot be find. But if it is a faranchee has been made—er—killed, very bad, for the consul tell the government to find the man and kill him—and if the man have not so much money that the government cannot find—very bad!”

“To-morrow,” said Shukry, as I stropped the razor which the cook invited me to use, “you are coming to live with me.”

“To-morrow,” I answered, “I go to the Sea of Galilee.”

“Ah!” cried the three, in chorus, “Then we give you a letter to our good friend, Michael Yakoumy. He is teacher in Tiberias and he takes much pleasure to see you.”

“And you take a letter for my wife,” said Elias. “She is nurse in the hospital. Often I write but the government lose the letter.”

“So you’re married?” I observed, through the lather.

“No! no!” screamed the cook. “How you can come to my house if I am married? This only my—my—”

“Fiancée,” said Nehmé.

“Or sweetheart,” said Shukry.

“Aah!” muttered Elias, “I know the word ‘sweetheart.’ But I don’t like. How you call a womansweet? 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.

“Butyourfiancée—” I began.

“All the same,” said the cook, “but every man shall get married—Look out, sir, you are cutting your moustaches!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Aah!” shrieked the cook, as I scraped my upper lip clean, “why faranchees make that? So soon I my moustaches would shave, so soon would I cut my neck.”

There is a road that, beginning down by Mary’s Well and winding its way out of the Nazarene arena, leads to Cana and the Sea of Galilee. Nehmé and Shukry, however, true sons of Palestine, utterly ignored the highway when they set out next morning to accompany me to the first village. From the Kawar home they struck off through the village and traversed Nazareth as the crow flies, with total disregard of the trend of the streets. Down through the market, dodging into tiny alleys, under vaulted passageways, through spaces where we were obliged to walk sidewise, they led the way. Where a shop intervened, they marched boldly through it, stepping over the merchandise and even over the squatting keeper, who returned their “good morning” without losing a puff at his narghileh. With never a moment of hesitation in the labyrinth of bazaars nor among the dwellings above, they stalked straight up the slope of Jebel es Sihk, by trails at times almost perpendicular, and out upon a well-marked path that led over the brow of the hill.

At the summit they paused. To the north rose the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hermon. Between the hills, to the west, peeped the sparkling Mediterranean. Eastward, unbroken as far as the eye could see in either direction, stretched the mighty wall of the trans-Jordan range. The view embraced a dozen villages, tucked away in narrow ravines, clinging to steep slopes, or lying prone on sharp ridges like broken-backed creatures. Shukry’s enumeration savored of Biblical lore. There was Raineh, down in the throat of the valley; further on Jotapta and Ruman; across the gorge Sufurieh, the home of fanatical rascals among whom Christians are outlaws. Every hamlet has a character of its own in Palestine. The inhabitants of one may be honest, industrious, kindly disposed towards any advance of civilization; while another, five miles distant, boasts a population of the worst scoundrels unhung, bigoted, clannish, and sworn enemies to every fellow-being who has not had the good fortune to be born in their enlightened midst. This diversity of characteristics, so marked that a man from across the valley is styled “foreigner,” makes resistance to the Turk impossible and breeds a deadly hatred that raises evento-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 occurrencesof 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 shoesoff, 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 peoplebuydogs!” and the mere suggestion of so ludicrous a transaction sent the assembled group into paroxysms of laughter.

“Theydo,” I replied.

The pompous ex-mayor fell into such convulsions of merriment that his rotund face grew the color of burnished copper.

“BUY dogs?” roared his sons, in a chorus of several languages. “But what for?”

Never having settled that question entirely to my own satisfaction, I parried it with another: “How doyouget a dog if you want one?”

“W—w—w—why,” answered the eldest son, wiping the tears from his eyes, “if anyonewantsa 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.”

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