Leaving Safita, we will go back on a different road, crossing directly to the sea-shore, and then along the coast to Tripoli. Here is a little abject village, and the people look as abject as the village. Their neighbors laugh at them for their stupidity, and tell the following story: They have no wells in the village, and the little fountain is not sufficient for their cattle, so they water them from the Ramet or pool, which is filled by the rains and lasts nearly all summer. One year the water in the Ramet began to fail, and there was a quarrel between the two quarters of the village, as to which part should have the first right to the water. Finally they decided to divide the pool into two parts, by making a fence of poles across the middle of it. This worked very well. One part watered their cattle on one side and the other part on the other side. But one night there was a great riot in the village. Some of the men from the north side saw a south-sider dipping up water from the north side and pouring it over the fence into the other part of the pool. Of course this made no difference, as the fence was nothing but open lattice work, but the people were too stupid to see that, so they fought and bruised one another for a long time.
In another village, Aaleih, near Beirût, the people were formerly so stupid that the Arabs say that once when the clouds came up the mountains and settled like a bank of fog under the cliff on which their village is built, they thought it was the sea, and went to fish in the clouds!
So you see the Syrians are as fond of humorous stories as other people.
PART IV.
But here we are coming upon a gypsy camp. The Arabs call them Nowar, and you will find that the Arab women of the villages are careful to keep an eye on their little children when the gypsies are around. They often steal children in the towns and cities, when they can find them straying away from home at dusk, and then sell them as servants in Moslem families. Last year we were all greatly interested in a story of this kind, which I know you will be glad to hear.
After the terrible massacre in Damascus in 1860, thousands of the Greek and Greek Catholic families migrated to Beirût, and among them was a man named Khalil Ferah, who escaped the fire and sword with his wife and his little daughter Zahidy. I remember well how we were startled one evening in 1862, by hearing a crier going through the streets, "child lost! girl lost!" The next day he came around again, "child lost!" There was great excitement about it. The poor father and mother went almost frantic. Little Zahidy, who was then about six years old, was coming home from school with other girls in the afternoon, and they said a man came along with a sack on his back, and told Zahidy that her mother had sent him to buy her some sugar plums and then take her home, and she went away with him. It is supposed that he decoyed her away to some by-road and then put her into the great sack, and carried her off to the Arabs or the gypsies.
The poor father left no means untried to find her. He wrote to Damascus, Alexandria, and Aleppo, describing the child and begged his friends everywhere to watch for her, and send him word if they found her. There was one mark on the child, which, he said, would be certain to distinguish her. When she was a baby, and nursing at her mother's breast, her mother upset a little cup of scalding hot coffee upon the child's breast, which burned it to a blister, leaving a scar which could not be removed. This sign the father described, and his friends aided him in trying to find the little girl. They went to the encampments of the gypsies and looked at all the children, but all in vain. The father journeyed by land and by sea. Hearing of a little girl in Aleppo who could not give an account of herself, he went there, but it was not his child. Then he went to Damascus and Alexandria, and at length hearing that a French Countess in Marseilles had a little Syrian orphan girl whose parents were not known, he sent to Marseilles and examined the girl, but she was not his child. Months and years passed on, but the father never ceased to speak and think of that little lost girl. The mother too was almost distracted.
At length light came. Nine years had passed away, and the Beirût people had almost forgotten the story of the lost Damascene girl. Your uncle S. and your Aunt A. were sitting in their house one day, in Tripoli, when Tannoos, the boy, brought word that a man and woman from Beirût wished to see them. They came in and introduced themselves. They were Khalil, the father of the little lost girl, and his sister, who had heard that Zahidy was in Tripoli, and had come to search for her. The mother was not able to leave home.
It seems that a native physician in Tripoli, named Sheikh Aiub el Hashim, was an old friend of the father and had known the family and all the circumstances of the little girl's disappearance, and for years he had been looking for her. At length he was called one day to attend a sick servant girl in the family of a Moslem named Syed Abdullah. The poor girl was ill from having been beaten in a cruel manner by the Moslem. Her face and arms were tattooed in the Bedawin style, and she told him that she was a Bedawin girl, and had been living here for some years, and her name was Khodra. While examining the bruises on her body, he observed a peculiar scar on her breast. He was startled. He looked again. It was precisely the scar that his friend had so often described to him. From her age, her features, her complexion and all, he felt sure that she was the lost child. He said nothing, but went home and wrote all about it to the father in Beirût. He hastened to Tripoli bringing his sister, as he being a man, could not be admitted to a Moslem hareem. Then the question arose, how should the sister see the girl! They came and talked with your uncle, and went to Yanni and the other Vice Consuls, and at length they found out that the women of that Moslem family were skillful in making silk and gold embroidery which they sold. So his sister determined to go and order some embroidered work, and see the girl. She talked with the Moslem women, and with their Bedawy servant girl, and made errands for the women to bring her specimens of their work, improving the opportunity to talk with the servant. She saw the scar, and satisfied herself from the striking resemblance of the girl to her mother, that she was the long-lost Zahidy.