Chapter VI: The Arab World (2)

I took leave of my host early next morning, swung my knapsack over my shoulder, and limped down to the road. But Bhamdoon was not yet done with me. In the center of the highway, in front of the little shop of which he was proprietor, stood the sheik and several fellow townsmen. With great politeness, he invited me to step inside. My feet were still swollen and blistered from the long tramp of the day before, for the cloth slippers of Port Saïd offered no more protection from the sharp stones of the highway than a sheet of paper, and I accepted the invitation. The village head placed a stool for me in the front of the shop, in full sight from up or down the route. It soon became evident that I was on exhibition as a freak of humanity, for the sheik pointed me out with great delight to every passer-by. Apparently, too, he had chosen this opportune moment to collect some village tax. On the floor beside me stood an earthenware pot, and the sheik, as soon as his exhibit had been viewed from all sides, called upon each newcomer to drop into it a bishleek (ten cents). Like true Orientals, they gave smaller pieces, some half bishleeks, some one or two metleeks; but not a man passed without contributing his mite, for the command of the sheik of a Syrian village is law to all its inhabitants.

Some time I had served as a bait for tax-dodgers when a villager I had not yet seen put in an appearance, and addressed me in fluent English. He had gathered a Syrian fortune in Maine and returned, years before, to the rugged slopes of his native Lebanon. He insisted that I visit his house nearby and, once there, fell to tucking bread-sheets, black olives, raisins, and pieces of sugar-cane into any knapsack, shouting incessantly at the same time of his undying affection for America and things American. Out of mere pride for his bleak country, he took care, on the way back to the shop, to point out a narrow path that wound up the steep slope of a neighboring range.

“That,” he said, “leads to the Damascus road. But no man can journey to Damascus on foot.”

The earthenware pot was almost full when I took my seat again on the stool. I turned to my new acquaintance.

“What special taxes is the sheik gathering this morning?” I demanded.

“Eh! What?” cried the erstwhile New Englander, following the indication of my finger, “The pot? Why, don’t you know what that’s for?”

“No,” I answered.

“Why, that is a collection the sheik is taking up to buy you a ticket to Damascus on the railroad.”

I picked up my knapsack from the floor and stepped into the highway. The sheik and several bystanders threw themselves upon me with cries of dismay. It was no use attempting to escape from a dozen horny hands. I permitted myself to be led back to the stool and sat down with the knapsack across my knees. The sheik addressed me in soothing tones, pointing at the pot with every third word. The others resumed their seats on the floor, rolled new cigarettes, and fell quiet once more. With one leap I sprang from the stool into the street and set off at top speed down the highway, a screaming, howling, ever-increasing but ever more distant throng at my heels. A half-hour later I gained the summit of the neighboring range and slid down the opposite slope onto the highway to Damascus.

For miles the road ascended sharply, elbowing its way through narrow gorges, or crawling along the face of a mountain where its edge was a yawning precipice. The giant cedars of the first slopes had given way to clumps of stunted dwarfs, cowering in deep-cut ravines behind protecting shoulders of the range. Few were the villages, and being low and flat and built of the same calcareous rock as the mountains, they escaped the eye until one was almost upon them. In every hamlet one or more of the householders marched back and forth on the top of his dwelling, dragging after him a great stone roller and chanting a mournful dirge that seemed to cheer him on in his labor. At first sight these flat roofs seem to be of heavy blocks of stone. In reality they are made of branches and bushes, plastered over with mud, and, were the rolling neglected for a fortnight in this rainy season, they would soon sag and fall in of their own weight. More frequent than the villages were the ruins of a more pretentious generation, standing bleak and drear on commanding hillsides and adding to the haggard desolation. At long intervals appeared a line of camels, plodding westward with a tread of formal dignity, a company of villagers on horseback, or a straggling band of evil-eyed Bedouins astride lean asses. Never a human being alone, never a man on foot, and never a traveler without a long gun slung across his shoulders. The villagers stared at me open-mouthed, the camel drivers leered sarcastically, the scowling Bedouins halted to watch my retreating form as if undecided whether I was worth the robbing.

The snow, which, seen from Beirut, seemed to cover the entire summit of the range in impenetrable drifts, lay in isolated patches along the way. Here was no such Arctic realm as Abdul had pictured. The air was crisp at noonday; by night, no doubt, it would have been bitter cold—mere autumn weather to us of northern clime. But it was easy to understand why those accustomed to the perpetual summer of the coast had fancied the passage an unprecedented hardship.

At the summit, the snow lay deeper. Far below stretched a rectangular tableland, a fertile plain dotted with clusters of dwellings, and shut in on every side by mountain ranges. Across it, like a white ribbon, lay the Damascus highway, growing smaller and smaller, to be lost in tortuous windings in the foothills beyond.

I reached the plain by evening and halted in a hamlet not far off the city of Zakleh. Among the heavy-handed peasants who surrounded me was one who had labored long enough in Italy to have picked up a smattering of her language. We of the West might well take lessons in hospitality from the Arab. Imagine a Syrian arriving at night and on foot in, let us say, a village of rural Kansas; a Syrian in native costume who, in answer to the questions put to him could do no more than point to the road across the prairie and gurgle some such word as “Chikak! Cheekako!” each time with a different accent. An Arabic-speaking villager, arriving on the scene, would, possibly, pause to inquire the stranger’s wants. He might direct him to an inn, but he would not consider it his duty to put himself to the annoyance of seeing that he found it. Such was not the Italian-speaking Arab’s notion of the proper treatment of strangers. He took personal charge of me at once, led the way to the caravanserai, acted as interpreter, quarreled with the proprietor when he tried to overcharge me, and to save me a dismal evening surrounded by a jabbering multitude, remained until late at night.

I took leave of him at the door of a stone stable—the only lodging which the hamlet offered. The few camel drivers already gathered there were well supplied with bags and blankets which they made no offer to share with me. When I had watched them chasing through the mysteries and hiding-places of their manifold garments the nimble creatures with which they were infected, I lay down on the cobblestone floor without a sigh of regret. Long before morning, however, I should gladly have accepted the most flea-bitten covering. The kodak that served me as a pillow rattled hour after hour with my shivering. I shivered until my neck and arms ached with the exertion of vainly trying to hold myself still, and never before had I realized the astonishing length of a December night.

I put off with the first suspicion of dawn and was already halfway across the plain when the sun climbed the mountain rampart to the eastward. To the natives the morning was bitter cold. Bands of laborers on their way to the fields grinned at me sympathetically and passed their hands over the scarfs wound round and round their necks and heads. They were certain that, with face and ears unprotected, I was suffering acutely; yet each and all of them, in low slippers, was bare of leg halfway to the knee.

Where the plain ended the highway wound upward through a narrow, rocky defile. Marauding Bedouins could not have chosen a better spot to lie in wait for their victims. I started in alarm when a shout rang out at the summit of the pass. The summons came from no highwayman, however. Before a ruined hut on the hill above, stood a man in khaki uniform, the reins of a saddle horse that grazed at his feet over one arm. “Teskereh!” he bawled. I climbed the hillside and handed over my Turkish passport. The officer grew friendly at once, tethered his horse, and invited me into the hut. Its only furnishings were a mat-covered bench that served the guardian as a bed, and a pan of coals. I drew out a few coins and ate an imaginary breakfast. The officer could not—or would not—understand my pantomime. He motioned me to a seat, offered a cigarette, and poured out a cup of muddy coffee from a pot over the coals. But food he would not bring forth.

While we sat grinning speechlessly at each other, the tinkle of a bell sounded up the pass. The officer sprang to his feet and hurried down the hill. Not once before had I been called upon to produce the teskereh which the American consul had assured me was indispensable, and a suspicion that one-half the amount it had cost would have sufficed to blind the officers of the Porte to its absence grew to conviction at this Thermopylæ of the Lebanon. A war of words sounded from the highway. I stepped to the door. The soldier and the driver of an overburdened ass were screaming at each other in the center of the route. When the quarrel had reached its height, the traveler dropped something into the guardsman’s hand and continued on his way. The officer climbed the hill, smiling broadly, “Teskereh, ma feesh!” he cried, “Etnane bishleek!” (he had no teskereh! Two bishleeks); and he dropped the coins with a rattle into a stocking-like purse that was by no means empty. I drew him out of the hut and, once in the sunshine, opened my kodak. He gave one wild shriek and stumbled over himself in his haste to regain the hovel; nor could any amount of wheedling induce him to venture forth again until I had closed the apparatus. Accepting a bribe was a mere matter of business; to have his picture taken was a sure way to future perdition.

Beyond the pass stretched mile after mile of desolation absolute, hills upon hills sank down behind each other, barren and drear, except for an occasional olive tree, a sturdy form of vegetation that, in itself, added to the general loneliness. Few corners of the globe can equal in fearful stretches of utter solitude this land so aptly termed, in Biblical phraseology, “the waste places of the earth.” All through the day I tramped on, with never a sight nor sound of an animate object, save once in mid-afternoon, when I broke my fast on bread-sheets and cakes of ground sugar-cane at an isolated shop. Darkness fell over the same haggard wilderness. The wind, howling across the solitary waste, filled my ears. On this blackest of nights I could not have made out a ghost a yard away, and the unknown highway led me into many a pitfall. Long hours after sunset I was plodding blindly on, my cloth slippers making not a sound, when I ran squarely into the arms of some species of human whose native footwear had rendered his approach as noiseless as my own. Three startled male voices rang out in guttural shrieks of “Allah”—Arabic invocations, evidently, against evil spirits—as the trio sprang back in terror.

Before I could pass on, one of them—plainly a materialist—struck a match. The howling wind blew it out instantly, but in that brief flicker I caught sight of three ugly faces under a headdress that belongs to the roving Bedouin. With a simultaneous scream of “Faranchee!” the nomads flung themselves upon the particular corner of the darkness where the match had shown me standing. The motive of their attack, perhaps, was Oriental hospitality. In the excitement of the moment I credited them with a desire to increase their capital in the kingdom of black-eyed houris, and evacuated the spot by a bit of side stepping that would have won me fame in the roped arena. In my haste to execute the manœuvre, however, I fell off the highway, and the rattling of stones under my feet precipitated another charge. A dozen times during the ensuing game of hide-and-seek I felt the breath of one of the flea-bitten rascals in my face. The Arabic rules of the game, fortunately, required the players to keep up a continual howling for mutual encouragement, while I moved silently, after the fashion of the West. Aided by this unfair advantage, I eluded their welcoming embraces until they stopped for a consultation, and, creeping noiselessly on hands and knees, I lay hold on the highway and sped silently away, by no means certain whether I was headed towards Damascus or the coast.

An hour later the howling of dogs heralded my approach to some hamlet. Once in it, I halted to listen for sounds of human life. Its inhabitants, apparently, were lost in slumber, for what Syrian could be awake and silent? The lights that shone from every hovel proved nothing, for the Arab nations are unaccountably fearful of the evil spirits that lurk in the darkness. I beat off the snapping curs and started on again. Suddenly muffled peals of laughter and the excited voices of male and female sounded from the depths of a building before me. I hurried towards it and knocked loudly on the iron-studded door. The festivities ceased as suddenly as if I had touched an electric button controlling them. For several moments the silence was absolute. Then there came the slapping of slippered feet along the passageway inside, and a woman’s voice called out to me. I summoned up my limited Arabic: “M’abarafshee arabee! Faranchee! Fee wahed locanda? Bnam!” (I don’t speak Arabic! Foreigner! Is there an inn? Sleep!). Without a word the unknown lady slapped back along the corridor. A good five minutes elapsed. I knocked once more and again there came the patter of feet. This time a man’s gruff voice greeted me. I repeated my Arabic vocabulary. There sounded the sliding of innumerable bolts and bars, the massive door opened ever so slightly, and the muzzle of a matchlock was thrust out into my face.

The eyes that appeared above it were evidently satisfied with their inspection. The door was thrown wide open, and a very Hercules of a native, with a mustache that would have put the Kaiser to shame, stepped out, holding his clumsy gun ready for instant use. I could not but laugh at his frightened aspect. He smiled sheepishly and, retreating into the house, returned in a moment unarmed, and carrying a lamp and a rush mat. At one end of the building he pushed open a door that hung by one hinge and lighted me into a room with earth floor and one window, from which five of the six panes were missing. A heap of dried branches at one end stamped it as a wood shed.

A gaunt cur wandered in at our heels. The native drove him off, spread the mat on the ground and brought from the house a pan of live coals. I called for food. When he returned with several bread-sheets, I drew out my handkerchief and began to untie it. My host shook his head fiercely, made the sign of the cross and pointed several times at the ceiling, implying, evidently, that he was a convert of the Catholic missionaries and that the Allah of the Christians would pay my bill.

Barely had the native disappeared when the dog poked his ugly head through the half-open door and snarled viciously at me. He was a wolfish animal of the yellow mongrel variety so common in Syria, and in his eye gleamed a rascality that gave him a startling resemblance to the thieving nomads that infect that drear land. I drove him off and made the door fast, built a roaring fire of twigs, and rolling up in the mat, lay down beside the blaze. I awoke from a half-conscious nap to find that irrepressible cur sniffing at me and displaying his ugly fangs within six inches of my face. A dozen times I fastened the door against him in vain. Had he merely bayed the moon all night it would have mattered little, for with a fire to tend I had small chance to sleep; but his silent skulking and muffled snarls kept me wide-eyed with apprehension until the grey of dawn peeped in at the ragged window.

The village was named Hemeh—a station of the railway from the coast not far beyond told me as much. The dreary ranges of the day before fell quickly away. The highway descended a narrow, fertile valley in close company with a small river, on the banks of which grew willows and poplars in profusion.

A bright morning sun soon made the air grateful, though the chill of night and the mountains still hovered in the shadows. Travelers became frequent; peasant families driving their asses homeward from the morning market, bands of merchants on horseback, well-to-do natives in a garb that recalled the ill-omened coat of Joseph. Here passed a camel caravan whose drivers would, perhaps, purchase just such a slave of his brothers this very day. There squatted a band of Bedouins at breakfast and their eating was as ceremonial as any meal among the ancient Jews. Beyond rode a full-bearded sheik who was surely as much a patriarch in appearance as Abraham of old.

The road continued its descent, the passing throng became almost a procession, and I swung at last round a mountain spur that had hidden from view an unequaled sight. Two miles away, across a vast, level plain, traversed by the sparkling river, and peopled by a battalion of soldiers in manœuvre, the white city of Damascus stood out against a background of dull-red hills, the morning sun gleaming on graceful domes and minarets of superb Saracenic architecture. It was an ultra-Oriental panorama before which that first quatrain of Omar sprang unbidden to the lips. I passed on with the throng and was soon swallowed up in the multitude that surged through “the Street called Straight”—which isn’t.