Harry Alverson Franck

“ When business was slow, Abdul could think of nothing better to do than to eat and drink. Let his cigarette burn out, and he rose with a yawn, and we rambled away through the windings of the bazaars to some tiny tavern. The keepers were always delighted to be awakened from their dreams by our “company.” While we sat on a log or an upturned basket and sipped a glass of some native drink, Abdul spun long tales of the faranchee world. Some of these stories could not have been true; but, with a live faranchee to serve as illustration, the shop-keepers were satisfied and listened open-mouthed. ”

“ I left Cairo on foot, and, crossing the Nile, turned southward along a ridge of shifting sand beyond the village of Gizeh. There was an irrigating ditch near the ridge. Scores of natives, moving with the regularity of machinery, were ceaselessly dipping the water that gives life to the fields of Egypt. Between the canal and the sparkling Nile, groups of Egyptian farmers, called fellahs, deaf to the fiery sunshine, set out sugar-cane, or clawed the soil of the dry plain. On the desert wind rode the never-ceasing squawk of the Egyptian water-wheel. ”

“ The ancient city of Tyre is to-day a collection of stone and mud huts covering less than a third of the sandy point that was once filled with the life of a great city. Its four thousand humble people are now without education, art, or ambition. To the north, in the wretched harbor, were a few old fishing-boats, far different from the fleets whose sailors once made merry and sang in the streets of Tyre. Down on the encircling beach, half buried under the drifting sands and worn away by the lapping waves, lay the ruins of what must long ago have been great business blocks. ”

“ Then, creeping noiselessly on hands and knees, I lay hold on the highway and sped silently away, by no means certain whether I was headed toward Damascus or the coast.
An hour later the howling of dogs told me that I was near a village. Once I halted to listen for sounds of human voices. Everybody, it seemed, was asleep, for what Syrian could be awake and silent? The lights that shone from every hovel proved nothing, for Arabs are afraid of the evil spirits that lurk in the darkness and leave their lamps burning all night. ”

“ At sunset we were climbing down into another valley, when we came suddenly upon a tiny clearing in the jungle, and a tinier village. “Thenganyenam,” the natives called it. There were four bamboo huts and a dak bungalow, housing thirty-one “wild men” and one tame one. It was easy to see how many there were, for the natives poured forth from their hovels to meet us before we had crossed five yards of the clearing.
At their head trotted the tamed human being. Among all the shrieking, staring band of men, women, and children, there was no other that wore clothing. ”

“ The train on which I traveled was run by a Eurasian driver, who gave me a compartment in the car all to myself. The country we passed through was covered with hills and ridges, over which the train rose and fell like a ship crossing the waves of the ocean. On both sides of the track stretched a jungle where the vines and trees grew so thick and close together that even the sunshine could not pierce its way into the woods. The villages we passed were merely clusters of huts behind the railway station. ”

“ Arab passengers on the Nile steamer. Except when saying their prayers, they scarcely move once a day.
There was nothing growing on its banks. The fertile strips of green fed by the dippers and the squawking waterwheels had been left behind. Except for a few tiny oases, the desert had pushed its way to the very water’s edge, here sloping down in beaches of the softest sand, there falling sheer into the stream in rugged, rocky cliffs. Yet somewhere in this yellow wilderness a hardy people found a living. ”

“ On the plain at the foot of the mountains I could see here and there well cultivated patches between dreary stretches of blood-red sand. A few minutes later we dropped anchor well out in the harbor of Beirut. Down the gangway tumbled a mighty landslide of Asiatics, men and women, large and small, dirty and half dirty, pushing, kicking, scratching and biting one another, hopelessly entangled with bundles of every thinkable shape. Shouting boatmen rowed us ashore. As we swung in against the rock, I caught a proud-looking Bedouin trying to separate me from my knapsack. ”

“ People of all shades and castes, and from every part of India, swarmed through the streets.
Holy bulls shouldered us aside as if they cared nothing for the color of our skins. Twice great elephants crossed our path. On the fronts and roofs of Hindu temples, monkeys, wearing glittering rings on every finger, scampered and chattered daringly. No wonder the natives thought that the souls of men lived in the bodies of these bold and lively beasts. ”

“ At the very edge of the river began a vine-choked tropical jungle, covering hill and valley as far as the eye could see, and broken nowhere in all its extent by a clearing, or even by the beginning of a pathway.
“There,” went on the commissioner, “is one of the wildest regions under British rule. Tigers abound; snakes sun themselves on every bush; wild animals lie in wait in every thicket. The valleys are full of wild men, savage outlaws that even the government fears; and the spring floods have made the mountain streams raging torrents. There is absolutely nothing to guide you. ”

“ Sittang was a mere bamboo village with a few grass-grown streets that faded away in the surrounding wilderness. At one time we lost the path and plunged on aimlessly for hours through a tropical forest. Noonday had passed before we broke out upon an open plain where the railway embankment began again, and satisfied our screaming thirst in the hut of a babu employed by the railway company. ”

“ After we had sat grinning speechlessly at each other for a while, I drew him out of the hut, and, once in the sunshine, opened my camera. He gave one wild shriek, and stumbled over himself in his haste to get back into the hovel. Nor could any amount of coaxing lead him to come out again until I had closed the camera.
Beyond the pass stretched mile after mile of rocky country, the loneliest that I had ever seen. Hills upon hills sank down behind each other, rocky and drear. Here and there a single olive tree added to the loneliness of the surroundings. ”

“ Breakfast over next morning, I returned to the village, and left on the south-bound train. The third-class coach was packed with natives huddled together with unmanageable bundles. Three gloomy Arabs, who had no room to squat on the floor, perched themselves on a bench at the side of the car like fowls on a roost. The air that swept through the open car was almost wintry. Only the faces of the men were uncovered. The women, wrapped like mummies in fold after fold of black gowns, crouched on the floor, so motionless that one could hardly tell which were women and which were bundles. ”

“ TRAMPING THROUGH FRANCE The month of August was drawing to a close when I started southward. At first I had to pass through noisy, dirty villages filled with crying children and many curs. Beyond, travel was more pleasant, for the national highways are excellently built. The heaviest rain raises hardly a layer of mud. But these roads wind and ramble like mountain streams. They zigzag from village to village even in a level country, and where hills abound there are villages ten miles apart with twenty miles of tramping between them. ”

“ Wherever there are dwellings in British India, there are croaking lizards. I have listened to their shriek from Colombo to Delhi; I have seen them darting across the carpeted floor in the bungalows of commissioners; I have awakened many a time to find one dragging its clammy way across my face. But nowhere are they in greater numbers or more loud-voiced than in the jungle of the Malay Peninsula. ”

“ A metleek is only a cent. Yet, as you pass through the streets of Damascus, the constant calling for it sounds like a multitude searching the wilderness for a lost child. “Metleek!” cries the seller of flat loaves, on the ground at your feet. “Metleek!” screams the wandering bartender, jingling his brass disks. The word is shouted commandingly from the peddler whose novelty has attracted a crowd, fiercely from the angry-looking fellow whose stand has been deserted, pleadingly from the crippled beggar, who threads his way with astonishing swiftness through the human whirlpool. ”

“ Women do most of the work in the rice-fields of Japan.
Wherever I stopped for a drink of water, the town rose in a mass to watch my strange action. When I set the cup down they passed it wonderingly from hand to hand. To stop for a lunch was almost dangerous, for the crowd that collected at the door of the shop threatened to do me to death under their trampling clogs. In the smaller villages the whole population, men, women, and children, followed me out along the highway, leaving the place as utterly deserted as if the dogs of war had been loosed upon it. ”

“ No sooner had we reached the bottom of a narrow valley than we found ourselves at the base of another higher mountain, which we climbed hand over hand as a sailor climbs a rope. In our ears sounded the continual hum of insects; now and then a snake squirmed off through the bushes; more than once we heard the roar of some beast. Monkeys swarmed in the thick network of 288branches overhead, and fled screaming away, as we came near, into the dark depths of the forest.
At every mud-hole we halted to drink; for within us burned a thirst such as no man knows who has not suffered it in the jungle. ”

“ Outside the European section lies many a square mile of two-story shanties that crowd one another in an effort to stand upright. The maze of narrow foot-paths winding among these buildings are aglow with the brilliant signboards of gay Chinese shops, and swarm with sour-faced yellow men who scowl fiercely at the white foot traveler, or mock his movements and make faces at him. Cackling peddlers zigzag through the crowd; wealthy Chinamen in gay robes and carefully oiled queues pick their way along the narrow meandering lanes. ”

“ Bathing seemed to be the national sport of Ceylon. Every stream I passed was alive with splashing natives. Mothers, walking from one village to another, halted at every stream to roll a banana leaf into a cone-shaped bucket and pour gallons of water on their sputtering babies, crouched naked on the bank. Travelers on foot or by oxcart took a dip every hour or so along the way. The farmer left his plowing often to plunge into the nearest water-hole. ”

“ Heavy ox-carts, massive wagons, here and there a horseman, fought their way up the hill amid shrill shouts, roaring oaths, screaming yeehawing of asses, the rumble of wheels on cobblestones, the snap of whips, the whack of heavy sticks. I moved along with the bawling multitude before and behind me, and a long time afterward reached level streets, and was dragged into a miserable lodging-house by a boarding-house runner.
In Naples the business people do not wait for you to come into the shop to ask for what you want. ”

“ A sandy highway led forth from the village, but soon swung northward; and we struck across an untracked plain. Far away to the eastward were rocky hills, deep blue in color, foot-hills of wild mountain chains that we would have to cross later. But around us lay a stretch of sandy lowlands, dull and flat, with never a hut or a human being in sight.
Ten miles of plodding, without even a mud-hole in which to quench our thirst, brought us to a crowded village of 255bamboo huts hidden away in a tangled wood. A pack of dogs came leaping toward us, barking noisily. ”

“ From Nagoya the railway turned southward, following the coast, so that again I caught frequent glimpses of the ocean as we sped along, passing through a country filled with rice-fields, where peasant women wallowed in the water, clawing with bare hands the mud about the roots of the rice plants. On slopes too steep to be flooded, long rows of tea bushes stretched from the railway to the wooded tops of the hills. ”

“ A few miles beyond the village we came upon a gang of men and women at work on the new railroad. There were at least three hundred of them, all Hindus, for the Burman scorns coolie labor. There was no machinery. A few scooped up the earth with shovels in the shallow trenches; the others swarmed up the embankment in endless line, carrying flat baskets of earth on their heads.
Nightfall found us still plodding on in a lonely jungle. We had heard that a division engineer lived just across the Sittang River, and we were determined to reach his bungalow before midnight. ”