Oriental Encounters: Palestine and Syria, 1894-6

The brown plain, swimming in a haze of heat, stretched far away into the distance, where a chain of mountains trenched upon the cloudless sky. Six months of drought had withered...

The long day's ride was uneventful, but not so the night. I spent it in a village of the mountains at a very curious hostelry, kept by a fat native Christian, named Elias, who l...

Rashîd threw down the saddlebags, our customary luggage, which he had been carrying, and started running for his life. The carriage had got half-way down the narrow street half-...

We were giving a dinner-party on that day to half a dozen Turkish officers, and, when he brought me in my cup of tea at seven-thirty a.m., Rashîd informed me that our cook had b...

We had arrived in a village of the mountains late one afternoon, and were sauntering about the place, when some rude children shouted: 'Hi, O my uncle, you have come in two!'

'What happened to the man who went to seek one filthier than she was? How could he ever find one filthier?' inquired Rashîd, reverting to Suleymân's unfinished story of the fool...

The sand which had been a rich ochre turned to creamy white, the sea from blue became a livid green, the grass upon the sand-hills blackened and bowed down beneath a sudden gust...

Having to dress for dinner on a certain evening, I took off my money-belt, and quite forgot to put it on again. It happened to contain twelve English pounds. I left it lying on...

One summer, in the south of Syria, amid that tumbled wilderness of cliff and chasm, shale and boulder, which surges all around the Sea of Lot, we had been riding since the dawn...

Rashîd went with me, as in duty bound, and insisted on remaining with the servants of the missionary by the cook's fire, although I told him to go back repeatedly, knowing how h...

We had left Damascus after noon the day before, and had spent the night at a great fortress-khan--the first of many on the pilgrims' road. We had been on our way an hour before...

A European hat in those days was a rarity except in the large towns, and it attracted notice. That is the reason why I generally discarded it, with other too conspicuously Weste...

We were staying with an English friend of mine--a parson, though the least parsonical of men--who had a pleasant little house in a Druze village of Mount Lebanon, and nothing to...

Our English host possessed a spaniel bitch, which, being well-bred gave him much anxiety. The fear of mésalliances was ever in his mind, and furiously would he drive away the vi...

The fellâhîn who came to gossip in the winter evenings round our lamp and stove assured us there were tigers in the neighbouring mountain. We, of course, did not accept the stat...

There was to be a grand fantasia at the castle of the greatest of Druze sheykhs in honour of a visit from the English Consul-General in Syria; and as an Englishman I was invited...

The sun was sinking down over the sea, the mountain wall with all its clefts and promontories wore a cloak of many colours, when we saw before us on a rock a ruined tower. We we...

The moon began to shine upon the gardens of Damascus, casting pale shadows, though the daylight had not quite departed, and the sky behind the trees to westward was still green....

Of Suleymân in his capacity of dragoman I saw little but heard much both from himself and others. The English residents in Palestine and Syria--those who knew of him--regarded h...

I was staying for some weeks at Howard's Hotel in Jerusalem (Iskender Awwad, the dragoman, had transformed himself into the Chevalier Alexander Howard, a worthy, if choleric, ge...

I had decided to buy land and settle down in Syria; and had obtained consent from home upon condition that I did not spend more than a certain sum of money, not a large one, whi...

Though the reason of our coming, the Sheykh Yûsuf, had deserted us, we rode into the town and spent the night there, finding lodgings at a khan upon the outskirts of the place,...

'Allah forbid! Consider, O beloved, my position in this matter. To put it in the form of parables: Suppose a king and his vizier should pay a visit to another king and his vizie...

Our road, the merest bridle-path, which sometimes altogether disappeared and had to be retrieved by guesswork, meandered on the side of a ravine, down in the depths of which, in...

Rashîd and I were riding down to Tripoli, and had long been looking for a certain 'kheymah' or refreshment booth beside the road, which an enterprising Christian of that town ha...

My search for an estate provided us with an excuse for visiting all sorts of out-of-the-way places, and scraping acquaintance with all sorts of curious people. In some villages...

Even great men in the East rise early; so, when I arrived before the castle of the great Druze chief at six o'clock of a summer's morning, I was not surprised to find a crowd of...

Considering that I had bought a house and land exactly to my taste, and likely, as Rashîd declared, to raise our honour in the country, I felt that I had earned the right to tak...

If we wished to stay in any place for more than a day or two, Rashîd, upon arrival, wandered through the markets and inquired what dwellings were to let, while I sat down and wa...

One morning, as we rode along, we came to vineyards on a valley-side. Rashîd dismounted and began to pick the grapes. Suleymân dismounted likewise, and invited me to do the same.

Though I had known Suleymân for nearly two years, and had had him with me for some six months of that time, I had never seen him in his function of a dragoman, by which he earne...

I had been ill with typhoid fever. Just before my illness, the son of a sheykh in our neighbourhood had asked me to lend him my gun for a few days, since I never used it. There...

When I knew at length that I was going to leave Syria, I was seized with a desire to buy all kinds of notions of the country to show to my people at home--a very foolish way of...