“And you would lose your way and die in the snow,” put in the other. All through the morning the pair were kept busy interpreting the opinion of the group on the absolutely unsurmountable obstacles against such an undertaking. It was the first version of a story that grew old and threadbare before I ended my journeyings in the Orient. But it was a new tale then, told with an unoriental vehemence, and as I ran my eye along the snow-cowled wall that faded into hazy distance to the north and south, I was half inclined to believe that I was nearing a land where my plans must be abandoned.
The coast line drew nearer. On the plain at the mountain foot appeared well-cultivated patches, interspersed with dreary stretches of blood-red sand. At high noon we dropped anchor well out in the harbor of Beirut. Clamoring boatmen were soon rowing first-class passengers ashore. But the red flag of quarantine was snapping in the breeze above the custom house, and as deck passengers, more likely to spread the plague than tourists well supplied with “backsheesh,” we were detained on board. Four sweltering hours had passed when a screech sounded ashore, and several company tenders put out from the inner harbor. Down the gangway tumbled a mighty cascade of Orientals, male and female, large and small, dirty and half dirty, pushing, kicking, scratching, and biting each other with utter disregard of color, sex, or social standing, and hopelessly entangled with bundles of every conceivable shape. The sinewy boatmen established something like an equality of burdens by rough and ready tactics, and amid the shrieks of husbands separated from wives, children from parents, Bedouins from their priceless rolls of blankets, the tenders set off for a stern, stone building on a barren rock across the bay. The spirit of segregation grew contagious. As we swung in against the rock I caught a haughty Bedouin attempting to separate me from my knapsack. A well-directed push landed him in the laps of several heavily-veiled females and I sprang up a stairway cut in the face of the rock. The building at the summit bore the star and crescent, and the title “Lazeret.” In small groups we passed into a room where a pudgy-faced man in European garments, topped by a fez, stared at me long and quizzically before he beckoned to the first of our party to approach. One by one my fellow passengers answered a few questions, received a paper signed by the man in the fez, and fell to quarreling with him over the price thereof. Well they knew that no amount of bellowing could reduce the official fee, but as Orientals they could not have purchased a postage stamp without attempting to “beat down” the salesman. The officer heaved a sigh of relief when I handed him without protest the five piastres demanded, and I passed on, still wondering why I had been taxed. The paper was in French as well as Turkish and informed me that I had paid for disinfection.
Some time after the last man had paid his fee—the female passengers had mysteriously disappeared—a second door swung open, an official folded our papers, tore a round hole in them, and we entered a room containing several long tables. An unwashed and officious Arab handed to each of us a garment not unlike a scanty nightshirt, and ordered us to strip. When our wardrobes had been laid out on the tables in separate heaps, a half-dozen ragged urchins appeared, rolled each heap into a bundle, and disappeared through a tight-fitting steel door. Disinfecting a Frank was, evidently, a new problem in the Lazeret of Beirut. An urchin stared at my clothing, bawled something to the unwashed official, and passed me by. The officer picked my garments up one by one with a puzzled air, handed me my sweater and suspenders, as if he did not feel that such mysterious articles could be rated as clothing, and sped away with the rest.
A long hour passed. The nightshirts lent their wearers neither dignity nor modesty. My own had been designed for the smallest of Arabs and did a white man meager service, but the jabbering natives would not have been in the least disturbed if their wardrobe had been reduced to the fig leaf of notorious past. The steel door opened. We filed into the next room and found our disinfected bundles arrayed on more long tables and steaming like newly-boiled cabbages. As rapidly as the garments cooled, I attired myself and turned out upon a tiny square before the Lazeret. Suddenly there rang out a cry for passports. An icy bubble ran up and down my spine, but I stepped boldly forward and thrust my letter of introduction into the face of a diminutive, white-haired officer at the gate. He received it gingerly, as if expecting it to explode in his hands, turned it up sidewise, upside down, sidewise once more, and, certain that he had found its proper position, began to run his finger up and down the lines, mumbling to himself and shaking his head sagely from side to side. Slowly he turned, eyed me suspiciously, and after several preliminary gurgles, wheezed: “Paseeporto? Paseeporto?”
“Sure, it’s a passeporto!” I replied, nodding my head vigorously. The officer glanced from the paper to my face and back at the paper several times, plainly as helpless before a problem for which he knew no precedent as a child. The doctor who had made out our disinfection slips stepped out into the square, and the officer, knowing that he read and spoke French, rushed upon him. The good leech could hold the letter right side up, but he knew no more of its contents than the man who had read it sidewise. He turned to ply me with questions. I assured him that American passports were just such simple things, and he accepted my assertion. The officer thrust the letter into his sack—for in Turkey passports are held over night by the police and returned to the owner’s consulate in the morning—and waved his hand as a sign of dismissal.
Darkness had fallen and the city was some miles distant. The doctor called a sinister-looking native, attired in a single garment that reached his knees, and ordered him to guide me to the town. We set off through the night, heavy with the smell of oranges, along a narrow road, six inches deep in the softest mud. At the outskirts of the city the native halted and addressed me in Arabic. I shook my head. Like most uneducated Orientals, he was of the opinion that, if a full-grown Frank could not understand language intelligible to the smallest child of his acquaintance, it was through some fault of his hearing. He put the question again and again, louder and more rapidly with every repetition. I let him bellow until breath failed him and he gave up and splashed on. He halted once more in a square, reeking with mud, in the center of the city, and burst forth in a greater vehemence of incoherency than before.
“Ingleesee?” he shrieked with his last gasp.
“No,” I answered, comprehending this one word, “Americano.”
“Ha!” shouted the Arab, “Americano?” and he began his bellowing once more. Evidently he was attempting to explain something about my fellow countrymen, for the word “americano” was often repeated. Exhausted once more, he struck off to the southward. I shouted “hotel” and “inn” in every language I could muster, but after a few mumbles he fell silent and only the splash of our feet in the muddy roadway attended our progress. We left the city behind, but still the Arab plodded steadily and silently southward. Many a quartermaster’s story of white men led into Mussulman traps passed through my mind. Far out among the orange groves of the suburbs he turned into a small garden and pointed to a lighted sign above the portal of the building among the trees. It announced the American consulate. Not knowing what else to do with a Frank who did not understand the loudest Arabic, the native had led me to the only man in Beirut to whom he had heard the term “americano” applied.
When I had paid my bill next morning in the French pension to which I had been directed, my worldly wealth was reduced to one English sovereign. I turned in at the office of Cook and Son and, tossing the piece to the native clerk, asked him to change it into coin of the realm, of small denomination. He turned the sovereign over several times, bit it, laid it carefully away, and set to pulling out boxes and drawers and dumping the coins they contained on the counter before me. There were pieces of copper, pieces of silver, pieces of bronze, tin, iron, nickel, zinc; coins half the size of a dime, coins that looked like tobacco tags, coins big enough with which to fell an ox, coins with holes in them, coins bent double, saucer-shaped coins, coins that had been scalloped around the edge by some erstwhile possessor of artistic temperament and hours of leisure; and still the clerk continued to pour out coins until I felt in duty bound, as a tolerably honest member of society, to call a halt.