gets the speculation, pays the Pacha on the spot,
and then sells out to smaller fry, who sell in turn
to a piratical horde of still smaller fry. These
latter compel the peasant to bring his little trifle
of grain to the village, at his own cost. It
must be weighed, the various taxes set apart, and
the remainder returned to the producer. But the
collector delays this duty day after day, while the
producer’s family are perishing for bread; at
last the poor wretch, who can not but understand the
game, says, “Take a quarter—take half—take
two-thirds if you will, and let me go!” It
is a most outrageous state of things.
These people are naturally good-hearted and intelligent,
and with education and liberty, would be a happy and
contented race. They often appeal to the stranger
to know if the great world will not some day come
to their relief and save them. The Sultan has
been lavishing money like water in England and Paris,
but his subjects are suffering for it now.
This fashion of camping out bewilders me. We
have boot-jacks and a bath-tub, now, and yet all the
mysteries the pack-mules carry are not revealed.
What next?
We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the
sun, across the Valley of Lebanon. It proved
to be not quite so much of a garden as it had seemed
from the hill-sides. It was a desert, weed-grown
waste, littered thickly with stones the size of a
man’s fist. Here and there the natives
had scratched the ground and reared a sickly crop of
grain, but for the most part the valley was given
up to a handful of shepherds, whose flocks were doing
what they honestly could to get a living, but the chances
were against them. We saw rude piles of stones
standing near the roadside, at intervals, and recognized
the custom of marking boundaries which obtained in
Jacob’s time. There were no walls, no fences,
no hedges—nothing to secure a man’s
possessions but these random heaps of stones.
The Israelites held them sacred in the old patriarchal
times, and these other Arabs, their lineal descendants,
do so likewise. An American, of ordinary intelligence,
would soon widely extend his property, at an outlay
of mere manual labor, performed at night, under so
loose a system of fencing as this.
The plows these people use are simply a sharpened
stick, such as Abraham plowed with, and they still
winnow their wheat as he did—they pile it
on the house-top, and then toss it by shovel-fulls
into the air until the wind has blown all the chaff
away. They never invent any thing, never learn
any thing.
We had a fine race, of a mile, with an Arab perched
on a camel. Some of the horses were fast, and
made very good time, but the camel scampered by them
without any very great effort. The yelling and
shouting, and whipping and galloping, of all parties
interested, made it an exhilarating, exciting, and
particularly boisterous race.
