My guide was, evidently, a village butt, rarely permitted to appear before his fellow-townsman in so important a rôle. Fame, at last, was knocking at his door. His first words tripped over each other distressingly, but his racial eloquence of phrase and gesture came to the rescue, and he launched forth in a panegyric such as never congressional candidate suffered at the hands of a rural chairman. His zeal worked his undoing. From every dwelling within sound of his trumpet-like voice poured forth half-dressed men who, crowding closely around, raised a Babel that drowned out the orator before his introductory premise had been half ended. An enemy suggested an adjournment to the café and left the new Cicero—the penniless being denied admittance—to deliver his maiden speech to the unpeopled darkness.
The keeper, with his best company smile, placed a chair for me in the center of the room; the elder men grouped themselves about me on similar articles of furniture; and the younger squatted on their haunches around the wall. The language of signs was proving a poor means of communication, when a native, in more elaborate costume, pushed into the circle and addressed me in French. With an interpreter at hand, nothing short of my entire biography would satisfy my hearers; and to avoid any semblance of partiality, I was forced to swing round and round on my stool in the telling, despite the fact that only one of the audience understood the queer faranchee words. The proprietor, meanwhile, in a laudable endeavor to make hay while the sun shone, made the circuit of the room at frequent intervals, asking each with what he could serve him. Those few who did not order were ruthlessly pushed into the street, where a throng of boys and penniless men flitted back and forth on the edge of the light, peering in upon us. Anxious to secure the good-will of so unusual an attraction, the keeper ran forward each time my whirling brought him within my field of vision to offer a cup of thick coffee, a narghileh, or a native liquor.
I concluded my saga with the statement that I had left Sidon that morning.
“Impossible!” shouted the interpreter. “No man can walk from Sidra to Soor in one day.”
“Soor?” I cried, recognizing the native name for Tyre, and scarcely believing my ears. “Is this Soor?”
“Is it possible,” gasped the native, “that you have not recognized the ancient city of Tyre? Yes, indeed, my friend, this is Soor. But if you have left Sidon this morning you have slept a night on the way without knowing it.”
I turned the conversation by inquiring the identity of the worthies about me. The interpreter introduced them one by one. The village scribe, the village barber, the village carpenter, the village tailor, and—even thus far from the land of chestnut trees—the village blacksmith were all in evidence. Most striking of all the throng in appearance was a young man of handsome, forceful face and sturdy, well-poised figure, attired in a flowing, jet-black gown and almost as black a fez. From time to time he rose to address his companions on the all-important topic of faranchees. A gift of native eloquence of which he seemed supremely unconscious, and the long sweep of his gown over his left shoulder with which he ended every discourse, recalled my visualization of Hamlet. I was surprised to find that he was only a common sailor, and that in a land where the seaman is regarded as the lowest of created beings.
“Hamlet” owed his position of authority on this occasion to a single journey to Buenos Ayres. After long striving, I succeeded in exchanging with him a few meager ideas in Spanish, much to the discomfiture of the “regular” interpreter, who, posing as a man of unexampled erudition, turned away with an angry shrug of the shoulders and fell upon my unguarded knapsack. I swung round in time to find him complacently turning the film-wind of my kodak and clawing at the edges in an attempt to open it. If one would keep his possessions intact in the East he must sit upon them, for not even the apes of the jungle have the curiosity of the Oriental nor less realization of the difference between mine and thine.
The city fathers of Tyre, in solemn conviviality assembled, resolved unanimously that I could not be permitted to continue on foot. Some days before, midway between Tyre and Acre, a white man had been found, murdered by some blunt instrument and nailed to the ground by a stake driven through his body. The tale was told, with the fullness of detail doted on by our yellow journals, in French and crippled Spanish; and innumerable versions in Arabic were followed by an elaborate pantomime by the village carpenter, with Hamlet and the scribe as the assassins, and the tube of a water-pipe as the stake. Midnight had long since passed. I promised the good citizens of Tyre to remain in their city for a day of reflection, and inquired for a place to sleep.
Not a man among them, evidently, had thought of that problem. The assemblage resolved itself into a committee of the whole and spent a good half hour in weighty debate. Then the interpreter rose to communicate to me the result of the deliberations. There was no public inn in the city of Tyre—they thanked God for that. But its inhabitants had ever been ready to treat royally the stranger within their gates. The keeper of the café had a back room. In that back room was a wooden bench. The keeper was moved to give me permission to occupy that back room and that bench. Nay! Even more! He was resolved to spread on that bench a rush mat, and cover me over with what had once been the sail of his fishing-smack. But first he must ask me one question. Aye! The citizens of Tyre, there assembled, must demand an answer to that query and the spokesman abjured me, by the beard of Allah, to answer truthfully and deliberately.