We came, at last, to a brightly lighted café, where a dozen jolly Arabs sat smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. My guide began calling out mournfully in the darkness, and drew me into the circle of light. A roar went up from the men in the café, and they tumbled pell-mell out upon us.
My guide explained my presence in a trumpet-like voice. From every dwelling around poured forth dark, half-dressed men who, crowding closely about, began talking all together. Some one said that we ought to go inside the café. We did so, and the keeper, with his best company smile, placed a chair for me in the center of the room. The older men grouped themselves about me on more chairs, and the younger squatted on their heels around the wall. We were trying to talk in the language of signs, when a native pushed into the circle and addressed me in French. Through him they asked me where I came from, and why I was there, and were not satisfied until I had told them the entire history of my wanderings.
I ended my story with the statement that I had left Sidon that morning.
“Impossible!” shouted the one who could speak French. “No man can walk from Sidon to Soor in one day.”
“Soor?” I cried, recognizing the native name for Tyre, and scarcely believing my ears. “Is this Soor?”
“Is it possible,” gasped the native, “that you do not know you are in the ancient city of Tyre? Yes, indeed, my friend; this is Soor. But if you left Sidon this morning you have slept a night on the way without knowing it.”
I inquired about the men in the room. The interpreter introduced them, one by one: the village clerk, the village barber, the village carpenter, the village tailor, and—even thus far from the land of chestnut trees—the village blacksmith. They every one decided that I could not be allowed to continue on foot. Some days before, they said, between Tyre and Acre, a white man had been found murdered by some blunt instrument, and nailed to the ground by a stake driven through his body. They told the story, leaving out none of the horrors. Then they told it again to each other in Arabic, and acted it out for me. The village carpenter was the white man, a fisherman and the clerks were the assassins, and a piece of water-pipe was the stake.
Midnight had long since passed. I promised the good citizens of Tyre to remain in their city for a day, to think it over. The keeper offered to let me sleep on a rush mat in a back room of the café. I accepted the invitation, and the men put up the shutters and marched away.
The ancient city of Tyre is to-day a collection of stone and mud huts covering less than a third of the sandy point that was once filled with the life of a great city. Its four thousand humble people are now without education, art, or ambition. To the north, in the wretched harbor, were a few old fishing-boats, far different from the fleets whose sailors once made merry and sang in the streets of Tyre. Down on the encircling beach, half buried under the drifting sands and worn away by the lapping waves, lay the ruins of what must long ago have been great business blocks. The Tyreans of to-day have carried away these ruins, stone by stone, to build their own humble dwellings. Even as I looked, half a dozen ragged Arabs were prying off the top of a great pillar, and loading the pieces into an old sailing-vessel.
The next morning I passed through the city gate and continued my journey on foot. From a short distance the gloomy group of huts behind looked pitifully small and mean, huddled together on the great plain near the vast blue sea.