“My family is in a sad situation,” he explained; “we are friends of the Kawar and so always the friends of his friends. But we are the only Christians in Gineen and so we can only give you servant quarters.” His train of reasoning was not particularly clear. “But you must not stay in Gineen to-night. If you wait until to-morrow, you must go on alone and in the mountains are Bedouins who every day catch travelers, and fill their eyes and mouths and noses with sand, and drag them around by a rope, and cut them up in small pieces, and scatter them all around! You must go to-night, with the mail-train. Then you will be safe.”
“I’ve tramped all day,” I protested; “I’ll find lodgings in the town if I am inconveniencing your family.”
“Mon Dieu!” shrieked the young man; “there you would be cut to pieces in an hour! Gineen hates Christians. If you stop here, they will beat my family—”
His distress, real or feigned, was so acute that I assented at last to his plan. He ordered the misshapen servant to bring me supper, and departed.
The living caricature followed his master and returned with a bowl of lentils and several “side dishes.” With him appeared two companions, almost as unprepossessing of mien as himself; and he had no sooner placed the food on the floor than all three squatted around it and, clawing with both hands, made way with the meal so rapidly that I had barely time to snatch a few mouthfuls. When the last scrap had disappeared, the newcomers fell to licking out the bowls. The elongated servant set up the wailing monotony that is the Arabic notion of a song, and, swaying back and forth and thrusting out his misplaced fangs in a fixed leer, he continued for an unbroken two hours a performance which the roars of mirth from his mates proved was no compliment to faranchees.
Towards nine in the evening he turned his fellow-rascals into the street, and motioning to me to take up my knapsack, dived out into the night. By good fortune I managed to keep at his heels without splitting my head on the huts among which he dodged and doubled in an effort to shake me off before we arrived at the mail-train khan. The keeper was a bitter enemy of unbelievers and admitted me only under protest, and with a steady flow of vile oaths that was unchecked as long as I remained in the building. My guide deposited his cadaverous frame on a heap of chaff and took up his song of derision and his leering where he had left off.
At the appearance of the mail train the song ceased, and the singer, having briefly stated the desire of his master, disappeared. The snarls of the servant and the khan-keeper had been friendly greetings compared with those of the three drivers of the mail train. To all appearances they were more to be feared than capture by sand-stuffing Bedouins; but my sponsor was a man of higher caste than mere muleteers and would surely in some degree hold them responsible for my safe arrival—so it seemed—and I determined to stick to the plan. Of the four mules that made up the train, one was saddled with the mail-sacks and, at a signal from the leader, the driver sprang astride the others. The khan door opened, letting in a cutting draught of January air, and I followed the party outside, fully expecting to be offered a mount. The train, however, kept steadily on. The hindmost Arab signed to me to grasp the crupper of his mule; then he cut the animal across the flanks perilously near my fingers. Only then did the truth burst upon me. Instead of letting me ride, as certainly the Christian had expected them to do, the rascals had taken this golden opportunity to reverse the usual order of things Oriental. The true believers would serenely bestride their animals and the faranchee might trot behind like a Damascus donkey-boy. I fancied I heard several chuckles of delight, half-smothered in blatant curses.
The night was as black as a Port Saïd coaling nigger. In the first few rods I lost my footing more than once and barked my shins on a dozen boulders. The practical joke of the Arabs, however, was not ended. Once far enough from the khan to make a return difficult, the leader shouted an order, the three struck viciously at their animals, and with a rattle of small stones against the boulders away went the party at full gallop. I lost my grip on the crupper, broke into a run in an attempt to keep the pace, slipped and slid on the stones, struck a slope that I had not made out in the darkness, and stumbling halfway up it on my hands and knees, sprawled at full length over a boulder.
I sat up and listened until the tinkle of the pack-mule’s bell died away on the night air; then rose to grope my way back to the khan. It was closed and locked. By some rare fortune I found my way to the street in which the Christian lived and pushed open the door of the hovel. The room was unoccupied, though the lighted wick of a tallow lamp showed that the servant had returned. I spread out three of the four blankets folded away on the divan and lay down. A moment later the walking mizzenmast entered, leaped sidewise as though he saw the ghost of a forgotten victim, and spreading the remaining blanket in the most distant corner, curled up with all his multifarious garb upon him. I rose to blow out the light, but the Arab set up a howl of abject terror that might have been heard on the northern wall of Esdraelon, and I desisted.
The route between Gineen and Nablous was in strange contrast to that of the day before, much like a sudden transition from Holland to an uncivilized Tyrol. Directly back of the fanatical town lay range after range of rocky peaks, half covered with tangled forests of oak and terebinth. A pathway there was, but it indicated little travel, and broke up now and then into forking trails from which I could only choose at random. Against a mountain side, here and there clung a black-hide village of roving Bedouins. These were the tribes which, if rumor was to be believed, busied themselves with corralling lone Christians and scattering their remains among the wooded valleys. To-day, however, they were engaged in a no more awful vocation than the tending of a few decimated flocks of fat-tailed sheep.