Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/191

SOME SALT PEOPLE aged people talk about the good old times if they want to. I have no patience with such old fogies. I believe that the world is getting better every day."

Ras Baalbek is a little village some twenty miles north of the famous temples. Its thousand inhabitants are exceedingly ignorant and bigoted Oriental Catholics. The only native Protestant family is that of the school-teacher. There is also one American citizen—an adopted brother of ours who accumulated a few hundred dollars in the United States, learned a few words of English, and then returned to his birthplace, where he keeps the village khan, which has an evil reputation as a gambling-house. The Ras is cold in winter, hot in summer, and filthy at all seasons. The houses are built half of mud and half of stone; the streets are filled with unmitigated mud. A legion of fierce curs fill the night with their howling, and rush out of dark corners to snap at unsuspecting strangers.

It was not an inviting town, but we had heard that two American ladies were spending the winter there in missionary work; so, after we had turned over our horses to our fellow citizen of the khan and had dug passably clean collars out of our dusty saddle-bags, we went to pay them an evening call. Their house was not hard to find, for it was the finest in all the village, a commodious mansion with two rooms, one built of stone and the other of mud. [ 149 ]