“All the same,” said the cook, “but every man shall get married—Look out, sir, you are cutting your moustaches!”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Aah!” shrieked the cook, as I scraped my upper lip clean, “why faranchees make that? So soon I my moustaches would shave, so soon would I cut my neck.”
There is a road that, beginning down by Mary’s Well and winding its way out of the Nazarene arena, leads to Cana and the Sea of Galilee. Nehmé and Shukry, however, true sons of Palestine, utterly ignored the highway when they set out next morning to accompany me to the first village. From the Kawar home they struck off through the village and traversed Nazareth as the crow flies, with total disregard of the trend of the streets. Down through the market, dodging into tiny alleys, under vaulted passageways, through spaces where we were obliged to walk sidewise, they led the way. Where a shop intervened, they marched boldly through it, stepping over the merchandise and even over the squatting keeper, who returned their “good morning” without losing a puff at his narghileh. With never a moment of hesitation in the labyrinth of bazaars nor among the dwellings above, they stalked straight up the slope of Jebel es Sihk, by trails at times almost perpendicular, and out upon a well-marked path that led over the brow of the hill.
At the summit they paused. To the north rose the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hermon. Between the hills, to the west, peeped the sparkling Mediterranean. Eastward, unbroken as far as the eye could see in either direction, stretched the mighty wall of the trans-Jordan range. The view embraced a dozen villages, tucked away in narrow ravines, clinging to steep slopes, or lying prone on sharp ridges like broken-backed creatures. Shukry’s enumeration savored of Biblical lore. There was Raineh, down in the throat of the valley; further on Jotapta and Ruman; across the gorge Sufurieh, the home of fanatical rascals among whom Christians are outlaws. Every hamlet has a character of its own in Palestine. The inhabitants of one may be honest, industrious, kindly disposed towards any advance of civilization; while another, five miles distant, boasts a population of the worst scoundrels unhung, bigoted, clannish, and sworn enemies to every fellow-being who has not had the good fortune to be born in their enlightened midst. This diversity of characteristics, so marked that a man from across the valley is styled “foreigner,” makes resistance to the Turk impossible and breeds a deadly hatred that raises even to-day that sneering question, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”
The teachers took their leave in Raineh. Beyond Cana, perched on a gentle rise of ground among flourishing groves of pomegranates, the highway wavered and was lost in the mire. I set my own course across a half-inundated plain. Late in the afternoon the Horns of Hutin, adorned by a solitary shepherd whose flock grazed where once the multitude listened to the Sermon on the Mount, rose up to assure me that I had not gone astray, and an hour later the ground dropped suddenly away beneath my feet and the end of my pilgrimage lay before me. Near seven hundred feet below sea level, in a hollow of the earth dug by some gigantic spade, glimmered the blue Sea of Galilee, already in deep shadow, though the sunshine still flooded the plain behind me. I stepped over the edge of the precipice and, slipping, stumbling from rock to rock, steering myself by clutching at bush and boulder, fell headlong down into the city of Tiberias.
A city of refuge in ancient times, Tiberias is to-day one of the few towns of Palestine in which the Jewish population preponderates. It is a human cesspool. Greasy-locked males squat in the doorways of its wretched hovels; hideous females, dressed in an open jacket stiff with filth, which discloses to the public gaze their withered, bag-like breasts and their bloated abdomens, wallow through the sewerage of the streets in company with foul brats infected with every unclean disease from scurvy to leprosy. Dozens of idiots, the hair eaten off their heads, and their bodies covered with running sores, roam at large and quarrel with mongrel curs over the refuse. For these are the “men possessed of devils,” privileged members of society in all the Orient. An Arab proverb asserts that the king of fleas holds his court in Tiberias. To be king of all the fleas that dwell in Palestine is a position of far greater importance than to be czar of all the Russias; and it is strange that His Nimble Majesty has not long ago chosen a capital in which it would not be necessary to disinfect his palace daily.
The home of Michael Yakoumy, from the windows of which stretched an unobstructed view of the sea from the sortie of the Jordan to the site of Capernaum, was a model of cleanliness. Here, in this wretched hamlet, that whole-hearted descendant of Greek immigrants toils year after year at a ludicrous wage, striving to instill some knowledge and right living into the children of the surrounding rabble. He was, all unknowingly, a true disciple of the “simple life” in its best sense, displaying the interest of a child in the commonplace occurrences of the daily round, not entirely ignorant of, but wholly unenvious of the big things of the world outside.
I attended the opening of his school next morning and then turned back towards Nazareth. At the foot of the precipitous slope a storm broke and the combination of water and jagged rocks wrought disaster to my worn-out shoes. When I reached sea level they were succumbing to a rapid disintegration. In the first half-mile across the plain the heels, the soles, the uppers, the very laces, dropped bit by bit along the way. For a time the cakes of mud that clung to my socks protected my feet, but the socks, too, wore away and left me to plod on barefooted over the jagged stones of the field.
Long before I had reached the mountainous tract about Cana, I was suffering from a dozen cuts and stone-bruises; and the journey beyond must have appealed to a Hindu ascetic as a penance by which to win unlimited merit. As for Cana, it will always be associated in my mind with that breed of human who finds his pleasure in bear-baiting and cock-fighting. For, as I attempted to climb into the village market, my feet refused to cling to the slimy hillside and I skidded and sprawled into a slough at the bottom, amid shrieks of derisive laughter from a group of villagers above.