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Updated: May 31, 2025
He named an Armenian gentleman of my acquaintance an amiable, learned man of modest means, the last person in the country whom I should have thought a usurer. Nor was he one habitually, for he himself informed me that this loan to the Druze chieftain was his sole investment of the kind. I called on him one afternoon in the city, and handed him my cheque, explaining how the matter stood.
"If you value your life," went on the stranger, "you will get out of this as quickly as you can, or the men, who are a bad lot, will kill you. I am a Druze but I pretend to be a Moslem." "What sort of a man is the Chief of Ithera?" asked Forder. "Very kind," was the reply. So the friendly stranger went out. Forder listened carefully to the talk.
He went from Druze to Druze, wherever he could find them, in their own homes, or sitting at a shady corner of a street, where the tiny rush-bottomed stools are gathered round the tea-stalls with their hissing brazen urns and porcelain cups, or lounging in the bazaars, or at the marble drinking-fountains.
But as we were in a mood for excursions, we went by a longer and roundabout route. We had a delightful ride across the Anti-Lebanon, and then we went by way of Shtora across a mountain called Jebel Baruk, and then a long scramble of six hours led us to the village of Baruk, a Druze stronghold in a wild glen on the borders of the Druze territory.
Residing in the mountains, Kasim had two of his sons already baptized by the Maronites, and had openly professed himself to be no longer a Druze, but a Christian. He had not himself received baptism, for fear of his relatives, who had once gone in a body and beaten him.
'But what of the Sheykh Yûsuf? I exclaimed, reminding him. 'Ah, to be sure! rejoined the Governor with a slight frown. 'Of what religion is he? 'I suppose a Druze. 'And the people who attacked him so unmercifully? 'Are Druzes too. 'Ah, then, it is all in the family, as the saying goes.
Accordingly, when we at length set out from Mazarib, Suleymân, with many compliments, informed the knight of a dilemma which distressed us greatly. I had been summoned to the bedside of a friend of mine, a great Druze sheykh, now lying very ill, whose one wish was to gaze on me before he died.
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