When night came on I was wandering dismally through the winding streets where long lines of merchants were setting up the board shutters before their shops. It mattered not in what European language I inquired for an inn of those I met. Each one muttered, “M’abarafshee” (“I don’t understand”), and hurried on.
I sat down before a lighted tobacco booth and pretended I was asleep. The proprietor came out to drive off the curs sniffing at my feet, and led the way to a neighboring caravan inn, where the keeper spread me a bed of blankets on the cobblestone floor.
The next day I discovered the Hotel Stamboul, facing the stable that serves Damascus as post-office. I went in with little hope either of making my wants known or of finding the price within my means. The proprietor, strange to say, spoke a little French, and, stranger still, assigned me to a room at eight cents a day.
I spent four days in Damascus before I began to make plans for getting out of it. I had intended to strike southwestward through the country to Nazareth. On the map the trip seemed easy. But I had found, on my journey from the coast, that maps do not show the distance to be covered in this little-known country. It was late in December, and the rainy season was at hand. Several violent downpours that made me think of the flood described in the Bible had already burst over Damascus. These storms were sure to have made Palestine a muddy marsh, and to have turned its summer brooks into roaring torrents.
The trip, however, could not have been more difficult than it was to find out about it. The people in the cities of Asia Minor are the most incurable stay-at-homes on the globe. They know no more of the country a few miles outside their walls than they do of the other side of the earth.
I spent a day inquiring about it, and learned nothing. Toward evening I came across a French-speaking tailor who claimed to have made the first few miles of the journey. Gleefully I jotted down his directions in my note-book. An hour’s walk next morning brought me out on a wind-swept stretch of grayish sand beyond the city. For some miles a faint path led across the dreary waste. Wild dogs growled and snarled over the dead bodies of horses and sheep that lined the way. The wind whirled on high tiny particles of sand that bit my cheeks and filled my eyes. A chilling rain began to fall, sinking quickly into the desert. The storm was becoming violent, when the path ceased at the brink of a muddy torrent that it would have been madness to try to cross.
A lone shepherd was plodding along the bank of the stream. I pointed across it and shouted, “Nazra?” The Arab stared at me a moment, tossed his arms above his head, 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 iron-workers’ bazaar a sword-maker called out to me in German, and I halted to ask him about the road to Nazareth. The workman paused in his task of pounding a queer-looking sword, to tell me that the tailor was a fool and 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.”
The next morning I struck out in the direction the sword-maker had pointed out to me. The morning was cloudy and the air biting. Before I had passed the last shoemaker’s shop a cold drizzle set in. On the desert it turned to a wet snow that clung to bushes and rocks like shreds of white clothing. The sword-maker certainly had played a joke on me. 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 to 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 by the hope of sitting before such a fire as roars up the chimneys of American homes on the well remembered days of the first snow. The hope showed how little I knew of Damascan customs. The hotel proprietor and his guests were shivering over a pan of coals that could not have heated a doll’s house.