The old town of Beyrout is very old, and its streets are narrow and very often rough and dirty. The new town, or rather the new part of the town, has wide streets and is sufficiently well paved to allow carriages and carts to move about; the pavement is excellent for Syria, but would have been considered very poor in an American city. The population is now about sixty thousand, which is three times what it was thirty years ago; it is a mixed population of Moslems, Christians, and Jews—about as mixed as that of Constantinople or Cairo. Business is active, and the city has a very pronounced air of prosperity.
Antiquities and curious sights for the ordinary tourist are few in number and not very interesting. There are Roman, Assyrian, and Arabic remains, in the shape of tablets sculptured on the rocky walls of the Nahr-el-Kelb or Dog River, about half an hour’s drive from Beyrout; and there are a few traces in the town itself of the Roman occupation. All of them can be seen in a short time, and to a stranger who has come straight from America, without stopping, they would doubtless be interesting. But where you have done Rome and Athens, and half the cities of Europe and Asia, you won’t linger long over the antiquities of Beyrout.
But all this time, while I have been droning about Beyrout and Mount Lebanon, I have kept you waiting at the gangway of the
steamer. Well, you have the consolation of knowing that you have put in the time while waiting for the ship to undergo the quarantine formalities and obtain pratique.
A crowd of dragomen and guides invaded the steamer as soon as they had permission to come on board, and were very energetic in endeavors to secure our patronage. They presented credentials that would have entitled them to anything short of canonization, and to read their credentials you would consider them the best and most honest men in the world.
We selected the guide belonging to the hotel which we had determined to patronize, and repelled as best we could all the others, by telling them we had no need of their services, and should not take them. We obtained a boat, with a little bargaining, and went on shore, where a dense crowd of Arab porters were in attendance. Two francs of “backsheesh” took us through the custom house, and we followed guides and porters to the hotel, and were followed by a guard of honor of about a dozen dragomen, very much as an organ-grinder is accompanied by a troop of small boys.