I moved the previous question. The village elders hitched their stools nearer, the squatters strained their necks to listen. The man of learning gasped twice, nay, thrice, and broke the utter silence with a tense whisper:—
“Are you, sir, a Jew?”
I denied the allegation.
“Because,” went on the speaker, “we are haters of the Jews and no Jew could stop in this café over night, though the clouds rained down boulders and water-jars on our city of Tyre.”
The keeper fulfilled his promise to the letter and, putting up the shutters of the café, locked me in and marched away.
Tyre is now a miserable village connected with the mainland by a wind-blown neck of sand
Agriculture in Palestine. There is not an ounce of iron about the plow
The nephew of the village carpenter, a youth educated in the American Mission School of Sidon, appointed himself my guide next morning. The ancient city of Tyre is to-day a collection of stone and mud hovels, covering less than a third of the sandy point that once teemed with metropolitan life, and housing four thousand humble humans, destitute alike of education, arts, and enterprise. Our pilgrimage began at the narrow neck of wind-blown sand—all that remains of the causeway of Alexander. To the south of the present hamlet, once the site of rich dwellings, stretched rambling rows of crude head-stones over Christian and Mohammedan graves, a dreary spot above which circled and swooped a few sombre rooks. On the eastern edge a knoll rose above the pathetic village wall, a rampart that would not afford defense against a self-confident goat. Below lay a broad playground, worn bare and smooth by the tramp of many feet, peopled now by groups of romping children and here and there an adult loafing under the rays of the December sun. Only a few narrow chasms, from which peeped the top of a window or door, served to remind the observer that he was not looking down upon an open space, but on the flat housetops of the closely-packed city.