In Palestine I encountered a German tourist agency, a competitor of Thomas Cook & Son. This tourist agency had its own hotels at Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and its own guides, dragomans, horses, and carriages. Its men, who thoroughly understood the country, had established such relations with the Bedouin tribes that they could take parties anywhere. The agency’s road mending and other activities had opened up many hitherto inaccessible parts of the country. Indeed, the Germans started a new roads movement in the Holy Land. The first attempt was made when the Kaiser went from Jaffa to Jerusalem. The Sultan had the highway repaired, and when the Germans travelled over it, it was watered for the first time in its history, being sprinkled from skin-bags carried from the shoulders of women and girls, and filled at the springs, wells, and cisterns near by.
CHAPTER XXX
AMERICAN LEAVEN IN THE NEAR EAST
American education is revolutionizing the Orient. It has been one of the chief modernizing forces in Egypt, it had much to do with the revolution in Persia, and it is the basis of the reorganization of the whole Turkish Empire. The first schools of Egypt were started by the missionaries of the United Presbyterian Church, whose educational institutions now cover the Nile Valley. This church has schools in the Sudan and a great American college at Asyut, several hundred miles from Cairo. The college was started in a donkey stable more than forty years ago, and it has been turning out graduates ever since. It has now more than one thousand students who are housed in ten large two-story buildings, and it has three of the finest halls to be found in the East. These are situated just outside Asyut, at the junction of the Nile with the great canal north of that city. The college has about three hundred women.
These are not stones of the field, but great blocks of marble, many of them beautifully carved—the remains of the wondrous city of Diana
Storks build their nests in the palaces of Ephesus and the peasants fence their fields with chunks of marble from its once magnificent temples
There is a great rustling as the silkworms attack their breakfast of mulberry leaves. Every year representatives of the silk industry in the Lebanon go abroad to get worms for breeding, as those bred in that region do not lay healthy eggs