THERE WAS NO RAILROAD from Haifa in Palestine to Beirut in Syria. I don’t know why we had thought there would be, and the fact came as a shock. We engaged a car, with a chauffeur who spoke only Arabic and a guide who slept all the way, and made the trip in six hours.
Later on we learned that we had passed through Acre, where Richard I landed on the third crusade, through Tyre and Sidon. But our guide slept cozily on the front seat, and as I had left my Baedeker in the train during our hurried exit, history passed us by unnoted. At dusk we drew into Beirut and went to the Grand Hotel.
That evening, Saturday, I wrote a few final words to the family to be delivered in case of accident, and at five o’clock of a Monday morning a large and handsome Panhard car stopped in front of our hotel. It was brand new, luxurious and—one hoped—more or less bullet proof. Into it we packed our two suitcases, the Head’s camera, the extra fur coat which Lord Allenby had mistakenly assured me I would need, and ourselves. Also a large and heavy book in French, relating to India and presented us by the smiling and genial host of the hotel, who apparently labored under the impression that that was where we were going.
This latter we placed in the netting overhead, from which at every bump it dropped onto one or the other of us. And bumps were numerous. So numerous, indeed, that on the seven-hundred-mile return journey in a Dodge car, holding himself down to save himself from a fractured skull, the Head wore the seat entirely out of his trousers, and was forced to alight in Beirut on a broiling hot day, clad in a heavy overcoat.
“I know now why they call it a Dodge car,” he said ruefully, surveying the sharp-angled brace above his head. “I’ve done nothing but dodge in the darned thing.”
But the Dodge was better than the Panhard, as it turned out.
By five-thirty A.M. a Swiss gentleman with an agreeable smile and no conversation had settled himself beside the driver; we had picked up Madame, a delightful and polyglot person who changed from German to French, from English to Arabic without, probably, splitting an infinitive; the Captain, who is an official of the company, had placed a revolver in a side pocket of the car and crawled in beside it, and we were off.
Fine macadam roads climbed the great Lebanon range, with beautiful Mount Hermon covered with snow. From the top of that mountain wall, when we could turn our eyes from the twisting road that clung along the cliffs, we could see Beirut far below, lying amid its olive trees on the blue Mediterranean. A little city, yet famous throughout the east for the great American University we have built there; perhaps the single greatest opportunity for self-improvement the entire East possesses, and certainly the most far-reaching in its influence.
In their own section were the pitiful huts and refuges of thirty thousand Armenians, dumped on this little city to die or survive, as the case may be. A few boards, a bit of tar paper, and they have made a house. They have worked, they have starved and died, but they have never begged. Not a likable people, a detested people indeed by those who have had to deal with them in the past, let this one virtue recommend them now.
We grew acquainted. On top of the mountain wall we stopped and had hot coffee, and grew better acquainted. The company was doing well. British officials could get out now in three days instead of three weeks on their home leave.
The Bedouins? Well, they were Bedouins; one never knew about them. There were bad people among them, but so were there bad people everywhere. Major Imbrie had gone in by this route safely enough; it was in Teheran he had been killed.
But bit by bit, here and there, I got the story of the French vice-consul’s wife, and a sad story it was.
The murdered woman, with her husband and baby, had been en route from Bagdad to Beirut. They had crossed the Wadi Harun, that treacherous creek in which later the Panhard was to stick, and a few miles beyond it out of the darkness bullets began to rain on the car. Radiator and tires were punctured and the car came to a stop. After it had stopped the shooting continued, aimed at the chauffeur, but it was the woman beside him who was struck and mortally wounded.
The Bedouins paid no attention to her. As she lay dying they rifled the car and the travelers, taking also the vice-consul’s dispatch bags, which were found the next day slit open and their papers scattered about. They departed, and the second car of the convoy found this small tragedy of the desert waiting them, a dead woman who still clutched in her hand her baby’s shoes, a crying, hungry child and a distracted father.
They got to the ruins of Palmyra, and the Arab village built within the ancient Temple of the Sun. And from there the word went out. Immediately the strong hand of the British government took hold. It sent out its camel police in force, and from the guilty tribe it took twelve hostages, to be hanged unless the murderers were surrendered.
And things had reached this pass as we started out. Later on we were to pick up this story again, on our way over to see four suspicious Bedouin figures watching us, and further along to meet the camel corps and make our report. And on our journey back, strangely enough, we were to happen on the end of the story, to come face to face with it.