I fought my way into the huddled group, and warmed first a finger and then a toe. But the chill of the desert would not leave me. A servant called the landlord to another part of the building. He picked up the “stove” and marched away with it, and I left my shivering fellow guests and went to bed, as the only possible place where I could get the chill out of my bones.
The next day I spent Christmas in a stuffy car on the cogwheel railway over the Lebanon hills, and stepped out at Beirut shortly after dark, to run directly into the arms of Abdul Razac Bundak.
On the afternoon of December twenty-seventh I set out on foot for Sidon. Here, at least, I could not lose my way, for I had but to follow the coast. Even Abdul, however, did not know whether the ancient city was one or ten days distant. A highway through an olive grove soon broke up into several narrow paths. The one I chose led over low hills of sand, where the misfit shoes that I had picked up in a pawn-shop of Beirut soon filled to overflowing. I swung them over a shoulder and plodded on barefoot. A roaring brook blocked the way. I crossed it by climbing a willow on one bank and swinging into the branches of another opposite, and plunged into another wilderness of sand.
Toward dusk I came upon a peasant’s cottage on a tiny plain, and halted for water. A youth in the much patched uniform of the Turkish soldier, sitting on the well-curb, brought me a basinful. I had started on again, when a voice rang out behind me: “Hé! D’ou est-ce que vous venez? Ou est-ce que vous allez?” In the doorway of the hovel stood a slatternly woman of some fifty years of age. I told her my nationality.
“American?” she cried, this time in English, as she rushed out upon me. “Oh, my! You American? Me American, too! Oh, my!”
I could hardly believe her, for she looked decidedly like a Syrian, both in dress and features.
“Yes,” she went on. “I live six years in America, me! I go back to America next month. I not see America for one year. Come in house!”
I followed her into the cottage. It was the usual dwelling of the peasant class—dirt floor, a kettle hanging over an open fire in one corner, a few ears of corn and bunches of dried grapes suspended from the ceiling. On one of the rough stone walls was pinned a newspaper portrait of McKinley.
“Oh, my!” cried the woman, as I glanced toward the portrait. “Me Republican, me. One time I see McKinley when I peddle by Cleveland, Ohio. You know Cleveland? My man over there”—she pointed away to the fertile slopes of the Lebanon hills—“my man go back with me next month, vote one more time for Roosevelt.”
The patch-work youth poked his head in at the door.