The passage, however, could not have been more difficult than the gathering of information concerning it. The dwellers in the cities of Asia Minor are the most incorrigible stay-at-homes on the globe. Travel for pleasure or instruction they have never dreamed of. Only the direst necessity can draw them forth from their accustomed haunts, and they know no more of the territory a few miles outside their walls than of the antipodes. It cost me a half-day’s search to find the American consulate, a shame-faced hovel decorated with a battered shield of the size and picturesqueness of a peddler’s license. The consul himself opened the door and my hopes fell—for he was a native. A real American would have seen my point of view and given me all the information in his power. This suave and lady-like mortal dealt out cigarettes with a lavish hand and delved into the details of my existence back to the fourth generation; but directions he would not give, on the ground that when I had been stolen by Bedouins or washed away by the rain my ghost would rise up in the hours of darkness to denounce him. His last reason, especially, was forceful. “If you attempt to go to Nazareth on foot,” he cried, “you will get tired.”
Towards evening I ran to earth in the huddled bazaars a French-speaking tailor who claimed to have made the first few miles of the journey. Gleefully I jotted down his explicit directions. An hour’s walk, next morning, brought me out on a wind-swept stretch of greyish sand beyond the city. For some miles a vague path led across the monotonous waste. Pariah dogs growled and snarled over the putrid carcasses of horses and sheep that lined the way. The wind whirled aloft tiny particles of sand that bit my cheeks and filled my eyes. A chilling rain began to fall, sinking quickly into the desert. At the height of the storm the path ceased at the brink of a muddy torrent that it would have been madness to have attempted to cross. A solitary shepherd plodded along the bank of the stream. I pointed across it and shouted, “Banias? Nazra?” The Arab stared at me a moment, tossed his arms aloft, crying to Allah to note the madness of a roving faranchee, and sped away across the desert.
I plodded back to the city. In the armorers’ bazaar a sword-maker called out to me in German and I halted to renew my inquiries. The workman paused in his task of beating a scimitar to venture his solemn opinion that the tailor was an imbecile and an ass, and assured me that the road to Nazareth left the city in exactly the opposite direction. “’Tis a broad caravan trail,” he went on, “opening out beyond the shoemakers’ bazaar.” A bit more hopeful, I struck off again next morning.
The assertion of Abdul that it was “ver’ col’” in Damascus was not without foundation. In the sunshine summer reigned, but in the shadow lurked a chill that penetrated to the bones. On this cloudy morning the air was biting. Before I had passed the last shoemaker’s booth a cold drizzle set in. On the desert it turned to a wet snow that clung to bush and boulder like shreds of white clothing. A toe protruded here and there from my dilapidated cloth slippers. The sword-maker, apparently, had indulged in a practical joke at my expense. A caravan track there was beyond the last wretched hovel, a track that showed for miles across the bleak country. But though it might have taken me to Bagdad or the steppes of Siberia, it certainly did not lead to the land of the chosen people.
I turned and trotted back to the city, cheered on by the anticipation of such a fire as roars up the chimneys of American homes on the memorable days of the first snow. The anticipation proved my ignorance of Damascan customs. The proprietor and his guests were shivering over a pan of coals that could not have heated a doll’s house. I fought my way into the huddled group and warmed alternately a finger and a toe. But the chill of the desert would not leave me. A servant summoned the landlord to another part of the building. He picked up the “stove” and marched away with it, and I took leave of my quaking fellow-guests and went to bed, as the only possible place to restore my circulation.
Dusk was falling the next afternoon when I stumbled upon the British consulate. Here, at last, was a man. The dull natives with their slipshod mental habits had given me far less information in four days than I gained from a five-minute interview with this alert Englishman. He was none the less certain than they, however, that the overland journey was impossible at that season. Late reports from the Waters of Meron announced the route utterly impassable.
The consul was a director of the Beirut-Damascus line. Railway directors in Asia Minor have, evidently, special privileges. For the Englishman assured me that a note over his signature would take me back to the coast as readily as a ticket. The next day I spent Christmas in a stuffy coach on the cogwheel railway over the Lebanon and stepped out at Beirut, shortly after dark, to run directly into the arms of Abdul Razac Bundak.
Our “company” was definitely dissolved on the afternoon of December twenty-seventh and I set out for Sidon. Here, at least, I could not lose my way, for I had but to follow the coast. Even Abdul, however, did not know whether the ancient city was one or ten days distant. A highway through an olive grove, where lean Bedouins squatted on their hams, soon broke up into several diverging footpaths. The one I chose led over undulating sand dunes where the misfit shoes that I had picked up in a pawn shop of Beirut soon filled to overflowing. I swung them over a shoulder and plodded on barefooted. A roaring brook blocked the way. I crossed it by climbing a willow on one bank and swinging into the branches of another opposite, and plunged into another wilderness of sand.
Towards dusk I came upon a peasant’s cottage on a tiny plain and halted for water. A youth in the Sultan’s crazy quilt, sitting on the well curb, brought me a basinful. I had started on again when a voice rang out behind me, “Hé! D’où est-ce que vous venez? Où est-ce que vous allez?” In the doorway of the hovel stood a slatternly woman of some fifty years of age. I mentioned my nationality.
“American?” cried the feminine scarecrow, this time in English, as she rushed out upon me, “My God! You American? Me American, too! My God!”