Further away rose an unsteady minaret, and beyond, the tree-girdled dwelling of the Italian monks. To the north, in the wretched roadstead, a few decrepit fishing smacks, sad remnants of the fleets whose mariners once caroused and sang in the streets of Tyre, lay at anchor. Down on the encircling beach, half buried under the drifting sands and worn away by the lapping waves, lay the ruins of what must long ago have been great business blocks. The Tyreans of to-day, mere parasites, have borne away stone by stone these edifices of a mightier generation to build their own humble habitations. Even as we looked, a half dozen ragged Arabs were prying off the top of a great pillar and loading the fragments into a dilapidated feluca.
A narrow street through the center of the town forms the boundary between her two religions. To the north dwell Christians, to the south Metawalies, Mohammedans of unorthodox superstitions. Their women do not cover their faces, but tattoo their foreheads, cheeks, and hands. To them the unpardonable sin is to touch, ever so slightly, a being not of their faith. Ugly scowls greeted our passage in all this section. I halted at a shop to buy oranges. A mangy old crone tossed the fruit at me and, spreading a cloth over her hand, stretched it out. I attempted to lay the coppers in her open palm. She snatched her hand away with a snarl and a display of yellow fangs less suggestive of a human than of a mongrel over a bone.
“Hold your hand above hers and drop the money,” said my companion. “If you touch her, she is polluted.”
To a mere unbeliever the danger of pollution seemed reversed. But mayhap it is not given to unbelievers to see clearly.
Once across the line of demarkation cheery greetings sounded from every shop. Generations of intermarriage have welded this Christian community into one great family. Often the youth halted to observe:
“Here lives my uncle; that man is my cousin; this shop belongs to my sister’s husband; in that house dwells the brother-in-law of my father.”
America was the promised land to every denizen of this section. Hardly a man of them had given up hope of putting together money enough to emigrate to the new world. The brother of my guide voiced a prayer that I had often heard among the Christians of Asia Minor.
“We hope more every day,” he said, “that America will some time take this land away from the Turks, for the Turks are rascals and the king rascal is the Sultan at Stamboul. Please, you, sir, get America to do this when you come back.”
My cicerone was a true Syrian, in his horror of travel. His family had been Christians—of the Greek faith—for generations, and Nazareth and Jerusalem lay just beyond the ranges to the eastward; yet neither he, his father, nor any ancestor, to his knowledge, had ever journeyed further than to Sidon. His teachers had imbued him with an almost American view of life, had instilled in him a code of personal morals at utter variance with those of this land, in which crimes ranging from bribery to murder are discussed in a spirit of levity by all classes. But they had not given him the energy of the West, nor convinced him that the education he had acquired was something more than an added power for the amassing of metleeks. Some day, when he had money enough, he would go to America to turn his linguistic ability into more money. Meanwhile, he squatted on his haunches in the filth of Tyre, waiting more patiently than Micawber for something to “turn up.”
The highest ideal, to the people he represented, is the merchant—a middle-man between work and responsibility who may drone out his days in reposeful self-sufficiency. The round of the streets led us to the liquor and fruit shop kept by his father, a flabby-skinned fellow who stretched his derelict bulk on a divan and growled whenever a client disturbed his day-dreams. To his son he was the most fortunate being in Tyre.