Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates  (English, Paperback, Blunt Anne Lad)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HOSPITABLE ENTERTAINMENT. 35 CHAPTER III. " Set you down this, that in Aleppo once Shakspeare. We are entertained by a Wise Man.—Tales of my Landlord.—How Jedaan laughed at the Pasha's Beard, and made his Friend Ahmet happy. — The Anazeh and their Migrations.—We are inspired with the Idea of visiting the Bedouins.—Seyd Ahmet and the Jews.—A Sturdy Beggar. I Shall always consider it a fortunate circumstance, little as we thought it to be so at the time, that the severe storms, for which the winter of 1877-78 will long be remembered in Syria, held us for a whole month weather-bound at Aleppo. Not that the town itself particularly interested us, though it is an excellent specimen of a purely Oriental city, but because the delay gave us time to look about us, and to get some idea of the country we were going to, and of the manners and customs of its inhabitants, all of which information was, later on, of the greatest possible service to us. We had hardly been more than a few hours at our lokanda, a poor cooped-up place with a court-yard like a well, before Mr. S , the British consul, to whom we had letters, called, in company with his amiable wife, and hospitably compelled us to exchange our dismal lodgings for his own comfortable house. The Consulate, though partly ruined by an earthquake five years ago, is an attractive building, set on solid stone arches across a river. There is a pleasant sound of water underneath the rooms, and a pleasant lookout over market-gardens from the windows—just the sort of place Orientals choose, who have more love of trees and running water than fear of damp. The house was a convent once, and still has a cloistral look. There is a grotto in the gardenwhere the nuns used to be buried, with graves cut in the rock containi...