On a stormy winter night I sat by the charcoal fire in a Maronite hut high up among the mountains, and heard read from a grimy, much-thumbed manuscript a long poem which described the brave part played by that village in the struggles of fifty years ago. The sonorous Arabic sentences had almost an Homeric ring. Like the list of Grecian ships sounded the rhythmic roll of the local heroes of half a century gone by. And as the dull light of the fire shone on the circle of dark, bearded mountaineers, the grim lines of their faces showed that the valor of the village had not weakened with the passing years, nor had the wrongs of the village fathers been forgot.
To the traveler, bewildered by strange customs and by peculiar ways of doing familiar things, this seems indeed a “Left-hand Land.” The Syrian holds a loose sheet of paper in his palm and writes from right to left. Yet numbers are written, like ours, from left to right. In beckoning, the fingers are turned downward. To nod “No” the head is jerked upward, and added emphasis is sometimes given by a sharp cluck of the tongue. The carpenter draws his saw toward him on the cutting stroke. The oarsman likes to stand up and face the bow of his boat. When digging, one man holds the handle of the shovel while two others do most of the work by pulling it with ropes. Except in cities which have felt European influence, it is the men who wear skirts or flowing bloomers, and the women who wear trousers. Keys are put into the locks upside down. In entering a house, the hat is kept on the head, but the shoes are removed.
Grown men greet one another in public with embraces and kisses. You see them walking along hand in hand, or smelling little nosegays. Yet these acts are not necessarily indicative of effeminacy. For all you know, these same fellows may occupy their leisure moments with highway robbery. The slightest difference of opinion gives rise to excited vituperation and offensive gesticulation; but a blow is seldom given. When a Syrian does smite, he employs no half-way measures: he smites to kill. I only once saw a blow struck in anger: then a club four inches thick was, without warning, brought down with full force upon the head of an unfortunate boatman.
In this topsy-turvy land, parents take the name of their first-born son, and use it even in signing legal papers. The gate-keeper at the American College, for instance, was never called anything but Abu Mohammed, “the Father of Mohammed.” When a son is despaired of, the public humiliation is sometimes avoided by inventing one. It is quite possible that Abu Zeki or Abu Saïd has no children at all.
The daughters of the family are often called after jewels or flowers or constellations; yet, except in Protestant families, the birth of a girl is not an occasion for rejoicing. One father insisted on christening an unwelcome girl baby Balash, which might be translated “Nothing doing!” Another parent, who already had six daughters, was so disgusted at the advent of a seventh that he named her Bikeffeh, “Enough!” A Maronite proverb says, “The threshold mourns forty days when a girl is born.” Nevertheless the lot of the Christian woman, even in communities where Christianity means hardly more than a political organization, is usually far better than that of her Moslem sisters.
Surnames are very indefinite and shifting matters. If Musa has a son named Jurjus, the boy will naturally be known as Jurjus Musa. But the father will, of course, change his own name to Abu Jurjus. Many surnames are taken from occupations. Haddad or “Smith” is here, as in every country, one of the most common. Others are derived from localities. Hanna Shweiri is “John from Shweir,” and Suleiman Beiruti is “Beirut Solomon.” Real family or clan names, however, are not uncommon, especially among the aristocracy.
As a man becomes more prosperous he will often drop his commonplace appellation in favor of a more dignified one, which perhaps revives an ancient but long neglected designation of his family. This easy putting on and off of names sometimes leads to considerable confusion. I once asked all over a mountain village for the house of a friend whom I had known in Beirut, and met with the most positive assurances that no such person lived there. Fortunately I happened to remember that my friend’s father was a baker. “John Baker! Oh, yes, everybody in town knows him! But that other fellow you’ve been asking about—we never heard of him.”
The mountain boys, especially, used often to take new surnames when they came to college. Sometimes they afterward exchanged these for still better ones. So a facetious professor greeted a returning student with “Well, Eliya, what is your name this year?” An exasperated inquirer, who had vainly tried to pin down a certain youth to a satisfactory statement of his chosen titles, finally exclaimed, “Now, tell me, what is your name?” Then came the maddeningly irritating answer which so frequently tempts the Occidental to commit homicide, “As you like, sir!” Another young man, who had narrowly escaped expulsion for his various misdeeds, decided to turn over a new leaf; so he came back to the college the next autumn with a different name—and made it good. The Syrian understands better than do we the full content of the divine promise of “a new name.”[7]
At first this seems a land of inexplicable contrasts. I could write of its ravaging pestilences so that one would find it hard to believe that Syria is notable for its healthfulness. I could record fearful massacres until the reader would think me foolishly daring for never carrying a weapon during all my travels. I could—quite truthfully—tell how a Syrian landscape lacks so many of the old familiar aspects of our home scenes, and give no hint of the glorious panoramas of this fertile, well-watered, bright-colored land—where the mountains sit with their feet in the Great Sea and their heads among the glorious clouds, while mantles of shimmering silver fall above their richly tinted garments.