beneath our feet. We were led into the center of the garden, where a very large square pool or reservoir had been made, with a stone parapet round it. On the south side there was a pleasant vaulted stone chamber, with a wide-spreading archway opening close on to the edge of the pool. Here carpets and cushions were spread, and coffee and pipes, sherbets, and fruit and flowers were brought for us.
This is the beau-ideal of Oriental afternoon enjoyment—a lulling narghilé in an arched recess, near to a pool or stream of sparkling water—in the midst of a fruit garden, carpeted with violets, in the Spring—and with white everlasting flowers in the Summer and Autumn. These delights are the chief subjects of many of the modern Arab songs and poems.
Before sunset we traversed the town from one end to the other, and went to the house of Daûd Tannûs, the chief member of the Protestant community in Nablûs, where we had been invited to dine. We were led up a crooked, open stone stairway, to an irregular uneven court, into which several rooms and a kitchen opened. In the latter the mistress of the house and women-servants were busy in the midst of savory odors. They stood in the wide doorway, half hiding their faces, and looking shyly at us as we passed to the guest-chamber. Monthly roses and carnations in full blossom, planted in large, broken, red-clay water jars, turned upside down, stood on each side of the entrance steps. The room was large, though not lofty—raised divans covered with Manchester prints were on three sides of it, and a musketo-curtained bed on the other. Fifteen of our Nablûs friends were assembled there to meet us, and among them M. Zeller, but no women appeared.
While we were seated on the divan, one of the guests said to me in broken English, "Your friendship with your brother, the Consul, has already become a proverb in this city." "How so?" I inquired. He explained: "To-day I heard people angrily talking and crying near my house,
