Late in the morning I came in sight of the mud village of Dothan. A well-marked path marched boldly up to the first hovel, ran close along its wall, swung round behind the building, and ended. It neither broke up into small paths nor led to an opening in the earth; it merely vanished into thin air as if the hovel were the station of some aërial line. A score of giant mongrels, coming down upon me from the hill above, gave me little time for reflection. Luckily—for my clothing, at least—there lay within reach a long-handled kettle such as natives use in boiling lentils; and half the mangy population of the village, tumbling down the slope to gaze upon the unprecedented sight of a lone faranchee in their midst, beheld him laying about him right merrily. Not one of the villagers made the least attempt to call off the curs. It was the usual Arab case of every man’s dog no man’s dog.
The village above was a crowded collection of dwellings of the same design as those of the Esquimaux, with mud substituted for snow, perched on a succession of rock ledges that rose one above the other. The human mongrels inside them answered my inquiries with snarls and curses, one old hag exerting herself to the extent of rising to spit at me through her toothless gums. Wherever a narrow passageway gave suggestion of a trail I scrambled up the jagged faces of the rock ledges in an effort to find the route. As well might a landlubber have attempted to pick out the fore-royal halyards. Regularly I brought up in back yards where several human kennels choked the ground with their sewerage and the air with their smoke, and the reward of every scramble was several gashes in my hands and volleys of curses from the disturbed householders.
I caught sight at length of a peasant astride an ass, tacking back and forth through the town, but mounting steadily higher. Shadowing him, I came out upon an uninhabited ledge above. The precipitous path beyond was but a forerunner of the entire day’s journey. Over the range I overtook the peasant, and not far beyond a horseman burst out of a tributary cut and joined us. The peasant carried a cudgel and a long, blunt knife, and seemed quite anxious to keep both in a position that would attract attention. The horseman, in half-civilian, half-military trappings, carried two pistols and a dagger in his belt, a sword at his side, and a long, slim gun across his shoulders. The countryman offered me a mount, but, as his beast was scarcely my equal in weight, I contented myself with trudging at the heels of the animals.
About noon, in a narrow plateau, we came upon an open well from which a party of Bedouins, that I should not have chosen to meet alone, scattered at sight of the officer. My companions tethered their animals on the lip of grass and drew out their dinners. The officer knelt beside the well with a pot; but the water was out of reach of his corpulent and much-garbed form, and the peasant being of the Tom Thumb variety, I won the eloquent gratitude of both by coming to the rescue. Vainly I struggled to do away with the food that was thrust upon me from either side. The officer was, evidently, a man of wide experience and savoir-faire. Not only did he display no great astonishment at the faranchee manner of eating, but he owned a mysterious machine that filled the peasant with speechless awe. The mystery was none other than an alcohol lamp! Not until the coffee was prepared could the countryman be enticed within ten feet of it. But once having summoned up courage to touch the apparatus, he fell upon it like a child upon a mechanical toy and examined its inner workings so thoroughly that the officer spent a half-hour in fitting it together again.
During the afternoon the peasant turned aside to his village, and not far beyond, the horseman lost his way. I could not but speculate on the small chance I should have had alone on a route which eluded a native well acquainted with the country. We had followed for some distance a wild gorge which, ending abruptly, offered us on one side an impassable jungle of rocks and trees, and on the other a precipitous slope covered for hundreds of feet above with loose shale and rubble. The officer dismounted and squatted contentedly on his haunches. In the course of an hour, during which my companion had not once moved except to roll several cigarettes, a bedraggled fellah approached and replied to the officer’s question by pointing up the unwooded slope. Three times the horse essayed the climb, only to slide helplessly to the bottom. The Arab handed me his gun and, dismounting, sought to lead the steed up the slope by tacking back and forth across it. Several times the animal fell on its haunches and tobogganed down the hill, dragging the cavalryman after him. The gun soon weighed me down like a cannon; but we reached the summit at last, and were glad to stretch ourselves out on the solid rock surface of the wind-swept peak.
The officer spread out food between us. To the southward lay a panorama that rivaled the prospect from the summit of Jebel es Sihk. Two ranges of haggard mountains, every broken peak as distinct in individuality as though each were fearful of being charged with imitation of its fellows, raced side by side to the southeast. Between them lay a wild tangle of rocks and small forests through which a swift stream fought its way, deflected far to the southward in its struggle towards the Mediterranean by the rounded base of the mountain beneath us. Over all the scene hovered utter desolation and solitude, as of an undiscovered world innumerable leagues distant from any human habitation.
For an hour we followed the trend of the stream far below, rounding several peaks and gradually descending. The path became a bit more distinct; but our surroundings lost none of their savage aspect, and as far as the eye could see appeared neither man, beast, nor fowl. Suddenly the cavalryman, rounding a jutting boulder before me, reined in his horse with an excited jerk, and, grasping his sword, pointed with the scabbard across the valley. “Nablous!” he shouted. I hastened to his side. On a small plateau far below us, and moated by the rushing stream, in a setting of haggard wilderness, stood a city, a real city, with street after street of closely packed stone buildings of very modern architecture. Like a regiment drawn up in close ranks, the houses presented on four sides an unwavering line; inside there was not an open space, outside hardly a shepherd’s shelter.
We wound down the mountain path to an ancient stone bridge that led directly into the city. A squad of those ragged, half-starved soldiers indigenous to the Turkish empire would have stopped me at the gate but for my companion, who, with a wave of the hand, drove them off. Without prelude we plunged into the seething life of the bazaars. The streets were as narrow, as intricate, and as numerous as those of Damascus; but their novelty lay in the fact that they were nearly everywhere vaulted over, and one had the sensation of strolling through a crowded subway from which rails and cars were lacking. The shoes of the horse rang sharp and metallic against the cobblestones as the animal plowed his way through the jabbering multitude, and by keeping close at his heels, I escaped the returning waves of humanity that rebounded from the unbroken line of shops on either side of the narrow passages to fill our wake. The cavalryman dismounted before a shop that minutely resembled its neighbors, handed the reins to a keeper who advanced to meet him, and urgently invited me to spend the night in the inn above. My Nazarene friends, however, had intrusted me with personal epistles, which I felt in duty bound to deliver.
The addressee was one Iskander Saaba, a Nazarene school teacher. His house was not nearly so easily found as the proof that the inhabitants of Nablous were fanatical, unreasonable haters of Christians. In the cities of Asia Minor the streets are neither named nor the houses numbered. Mr. Smith, you learn, lives near the house of Mr. Jones. If you pursue the investigation further you may gather the information that Mr. Jones lives not far from the house of Mr. Smith, and all the raving of western impatience will not gain you more. A few yards from the inn a water carrier and a baker’s boy struck me simultaneously in the ribs with their respective burdens. A wayward donkey, bestrided by a leering wretch, ran me down. A tradesman carrying a heavy beam turned a corner just in time to give me a distinct view of a starry firmament in a vaulted passageway. These things, of course, were purely accidental. But when three stout rascals grasped the knapsack across my shoulders and clung to it until I had kicked one of them into a neighboring shop, and a corner street vendor went out of his way to step on my heels, I could not so readily excuse them. As long as I remained in the teeming bazaars these sneaking injuries continued. Wherever I stopped a crowd quickly gathered and showed their enmity openly by jostling against me, by reviling the whole faranchee race, and even by spitting on my nether garments.
In a residential district my inquiries were answered at last, and I was soon welcomed with true Arabian hospitality by Iskander Saaba. A most pleasant evening I spent in the dwelling of the youthful teacher, a cosy house adjoining the mission school, the windows of which looked down on the roaring river far beneath. The family and a white-haired native, whom Saaba introduced as “my assistance in the school,” plied me with questions ranging from the age of my grandfather to the income of my various cousins, and gasped when I pleaded ignorance. But these things were but harmless examples of the frankness of the Arab, at which only an underfed mortal could have taken offense.