“You damn fool, you,” bellowed the female, shaking her fist at the prostrate property of the Sultan. “You no know what song is! American songs wonderful! Shut up! I split your head!”
This gentle hint, rendered into Arabic, convinced the youth of the solemnity of the occasion, and he listened most attentively with set teeth until the Occidental concert was ended.
When his turn came, he struck up a woeful monotone that sounded not unlike the wailing of a lost soul, and sang for nearly an hour in about three notes, shaking his head and rocking his body back and forth in the emotional passages as his voice rose to an ear-splitting yell.
The dirge was interrupted by a shout from the darkness outside. The woman called back in answer, and two ragged, bespattered Bedouins pushed into the hut. The howling and shouting that ensued left me undecided whether murder or merely highway robbery had been committed. The contention, however, subsided after a half-hour of shaking of fists and alternate reduction to the verge of tears, and my hostess took from the wall a huge key and stepped out, followed by the Bedouins.
“You know what for we fight?” she demanded, as she returned alone. “They Arabs. Want to sleep in my hotel. They want pay only four coppers. I say must pay five coppers—one metleek. Bah! This country no good.”
Four-fifths of a cent was, perhaps, as great a price as she should have demanded from any lodger in the “hotel” to which she conducted me a half-hour later.
All next day I followed a faintly-marked path that clung closely to the coast, swerving far out on every headland as if fearful of losing itself in the solitude of the moors. Here and there a woe-begone peasant from a village in the hills was toiling in a tiny patch. Across a stump or a gnarled tree trunk, always close at hand, leaned a long, rusty gun, as primitive in appearance as the wooden plow which the tiny oxen dragged back and forth across the fields. Those whose curiosity got the better of them served as illustrations to the Biblical assertion, “No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of Heaven.” For the implement was sure to strike a root or a rock, and the peasant who picked himself up out of the mire could never have been admitted by the least fastidious St. Peter. Nineteen showers flung their waters upon me during the day, showers that were sometimes distinctly separated from each other by periods of sunshine, showers that merged one into another through a dreary drizzle.
A wind from off the Mediterranean put the leaden clouds to flight late in the afternoon and the sun was smiling bravely when the path turned into a well-kept road, winding through a forest of orange trees where countless natives, in a garb that did not seem particularly adapted to such occupation, were stripping the overladen branches of their fruit. Her oranges and her tobacco give livelihood—of a sort—to the ten thousand inhabitants of modern Sidon. From the first shop in the outskirts to the drawbridge of the ruined castle boldly facing the sea, the bazaar was one long, orange-colored streak. The Sidonese who gathered round me in the market would have buried me under their donations of the fruit—windfalls that had split open—had I not waved them off and followed one of their number, I knew not whither.
Women of Bethlehem going to the Church of the Nativity