And Tyria’s mirth is low;
The timbrel, dulcimer, and song
Are hushed, or wake to woe.”
For the first few miles the way led along the hard sands of the beach. Beyond, the “Ladder of Tyre,” a spur of the Lebanon falling sharply off into the sea, presented a precipitous slope that I scaled with many bruises. Few spots on the globe present a more desolate prospect than the range after range of barren hills that stretch out from the summit of the “Ladder.” Half climbing, half sliding, I descended the southern slope and struggled on across a trackless country in a never-ceasing downpour.
It was the hour of nightfall when the first habitation of man broke the monotony of the lifeless waste. Half famished, I hurried towards it. At a distance the hamlet presented the appearance of a low fortress or blockhouse. The outer fringe of buildings—all these peasant villages form a more or less perfect circle—were set so closely together as to make an almost continuous wall, with never a window nor door opening on the world outside. I circled half the town before I found an entrance to its garden of miseries. The hovels, partly of limestone, chiefly of baked mud, were packed like stacks in a scanty barnyard. The spaces between them left meager passages, and, being the village dumping ground and sewer as well as the communal barn, reeked with every abomination of man and beast. In cleanliness and picturesqueness the houses resembled the streets. Here and there a human sty stood open and lazy smoke curled upward from its low doorway; for the chimney is as yet unknown in rural Asia Minor.
A complete circuit of the “city” disclosed no shops and I began a canvass of the hovels, stooping to thrust my head through the smoke-choked doorways, and shaking my handkerchief of coins in the faces of the half asphyxiated occupants, with a cry of “gkebis.” Wretched hags and half-naked children glared at me. My best pulmonary efforts evoked no more than a snarl or a stolid stare. Only once did I receive verbal reply. A peasant whose garb was one-fourth cloth, one-fourth the skin of some other animal, and one-half the accumulated filth of some two-score years, squatted in the center of the last hut, eating from a stack of newly baked bread-sheets. Having caught him with the goods, I bawled “gkebis” commandingly. He turned to peer at me through the smoke with the lack-luster eye of a dead haddock. Once more I demanded bread. A diabolical leer overspread his features. He rose to a crouching posture, a doubled sheet between his fangs, and, springing at me half way across the hut, roared, “MA FEESH!”
Now there is no more forcible word in the Arabic language than “ma feesh.” It is rich in meanings, among which “there is none!” “We haven’t any!” “None left!” “Can’t be done!” and “Nothing doing!” are but a few. The native can give it an articulation that would make the most aggressive of bulldogs put his tail between his legs and decamp. My eyes certainly had not deceived me. There was bread and plenty of it. But somehow I felt no longing to tarry, near nightfall, in a fanatical village far from the outskirts of civilization, to wage debate with an Arab who could utter “ma feesh” in that tone of voice. With never an audible reply, I fled to the encircling wilderness.
The sun was settling to his bath in the Mediterranean. Across the pulsating sea to the beach below the village stretched an undulating ribbon of orange and red. Away to the eastward, in the valleys of the Lebanon, darkness already lay. On the rugged peaks a few isolated trees, swaying in a swift landward breeze, stood out against the evening sky. Within hail of the hamlet a lonely shepherd guarded a flock of fat-tailed sheep. Beyond him lay utter solitude. The level plain soon changed to row after row of sand dunes, unmarked by a single footprint, over which my virgin path rose and fell with the regularity of a tossing ship.
The last arc of the blazing sun sank beneath the waves. The prismatic ribbon quivered a moment longer, faded, and disappeared, leaving only an unbroken expanse of black water. Advancing twilight dimmed the outline of the swaying trees, the very peaks lost individuality and blended into the darkening sky of evening. In the trough of the sand dunes the night made mysterious gulfs in which the eye could not distinguish where the descent ended and the ascent began.
Invariably I stumbled half way up each succeeding slope. The shifting sands muffled to silence my footsteps. On the summit of the ridges sounded a low moaning of the wind, rising and falling like far-off sobbing. A creative imagination might easily have peopled the surrounding blackness with flitting forms of murderous nomads. Somewhere among these never-ending ridges the “staked faranchee” had been done to death.