THREE KINDS OF HOUSES—MUD, DRY-STONE, STONE-AND-MORTAR
A young tiger who had heard about the ability of men, though he had never seen one, felt so eager in his strength to have a combat that he expressed to his father a wish to go out and find a man and have a fight with him. The father tiger advised against such an undertaking, saying, “Even I who am older and stronger than you should not think of seeking a fight with a man, for I could not prevail against him.” But the proud young tiger, not heeding his father’s advice, went to seek a man. He journeyed until he came to a road much frequented by travelers and lay down under a tree to await a foe. While waiting there he noticed a camel running down the road, although loaded heavily. The camel was running away from his master. The young, inexperienced tiger got up and said to the camel, “Are you a man?” The camel answered hastily, “I am not a man, but I am running away from a man, because he loads such heavy burdens on me.” The young tiger thought to himself, “How strong must the man be if he causes so much distress and fear in this great creature.” Next a horse passed, and the tiger thought, “Maybe this is the man,” but received a negative reply to his question as he had from the camel. Then there came along a weak little donkey, loaded with wood and driven by a man. The tiger asked his question of the man, “Are you a man?” “Yes,” the man answered. Then the young tiger said, “I have come to have a fight with you.” “All right,” replied the man, “but I am not quite ready now. May I tie you with my rope to the tree until I can come back?” The tiger allowed the man to tie him, which the man did very securely, and then cut a strong, thick club from the tree, with which he beat the young tiger cruelly. The tiger cried out in pain, “Oh, please let me go; I’ll never try to fight with a man again.” Then the man let him go and the young tiger went to his father and told his experience.
A bit of current fiction regarding Asiatics is that the children are chronically unhappy. Moslem children are the especial victims of this Christian species of prevarication. To such people “children playing in the streets of Jerusalem” belong to the good time coming and are the sign of fulfilled prophecy,[[77]] despite the probable fact that children have been playing in Jerusalem’s streets for some thousands of years, whether tourists have seen them or not. Doubtless, as the tourist appears in any street, playing ceases and small children flee or stand in mute amazement. The child will probably be happy again when the apparition vanishes. Along the tourists’ route the children are too often taught to cry out for gifts (bakshîsh) and to show themselves at a disadvantage in order to excite pity. Moslem children sometimes curse or even attempt to stone travelers.
A matter of wonderment to us is the apparent immunity from harm with which children play on unprotected places, such as roofs and about empty pits and cisterns. Now and then we hear of some accident, but rarely. A neighbor’s little girl, playing on the flat housetop, fell over into the street and died.[[78]]
One day I saw some little girls five or six years of age playing at carrying head bundles of grass in imitation of women. Boys make and play with slings (miḳlâ‛) for throwing stones. When quarreling, the first impulse is for them to reach for a stone to throw. We noticed severe burns on some of the boys, near the wrist. Some of them made huge sores which roused our pitying concern. We found out that the wounds were self-inflicted, however, the superstitious scamps having a boyish notion that burning the wrist or forearm would insure for them greater accuracy in throwing. The boys play horse vigorously. They have a game played with pegs of wood very similar to our peggy, in which one strikes a double-pointed peg on one end with a stick and tries to gain ground with an opponent. Another game is played in a soft, spongy spot of ground with longer pegs sharpened on one end only. It is something like playing stick-knife. The object is so to drive the peg by a throw into the soft space in the ground as to dislodge an opponent’s pegs, previously thrown, and made to stick in the same place.
A game among the boys, called ‛alâm, is very similar to the game of roll to the bat. The privileged player strikes a ball with a stick and drives it out into a field of other players. The boy who secures the ball tries to throw or roll it so as to hit a stone marker (‛alâm) set up by the first player. The one thus aiming at the stone marker warns the others to stand aside and allow him to play by saying “Dustûr,” signifying, “By your leave.”
The boys in our school played a game called wolf. A circle of boys joined hands and went dancing around while one outside the moving circle, called the wolf, kept trying to snatch one from the circle of boys who represented sheep. But whenever a boy in the dancing circle came anywhere near the hovering wolf he let fly his heels to prevent capture. As boy after boy was snatched successfully by the outside boy the circle grew smaller until but one was left, who was to be the wolf in the next game.
Boys play about the threshing-floor and are often in the vineyards and gardens. They play many games that are either the same or very similar to those played by boys elsewhere. Such are marbles, duck-on-the-rock, seesaw, swinging, blindman, leap-frog and hide-and-seek. In Râm Allâh there is a variation of this last game called khurrak, played by sides. There is a game called ilkûrat which might well be considered a primitive relative of golf.
There is as much difference between the training of the children of the better class of peasants and the poorer in Palestine as obtains in the differing grades of homes in other countries. Most youths come to exhibit a very admirable respect for their elders and their teachers. They are taught to kiss the hand of their father[[79]] or of any guest who is visiting him. They seldom interject their own conversation or ideas into the current of talk going on about them, but listen with keen though modest attention. They are proud of the standing of the family in the respect of the neighborhood and eager to learn their part in the business of life.
One father, a shaykh in his village, on sending away a son to another village to attend school, was gruff in manner for some days before the boy’s departure and treated the boy so unhandsomely that the mother protested and said that it was wrong to let the boy go away feeling badly. In explanation of his treatment of his son the father said, “Do you love the boy more than I do? I am acting so that he will not be homesick.”