188
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
the bold, generous to a friend, merciless to a foe. They shall
always have a place of honor at my table."
If you gave Moustafa something—anything to eat, to drink,
to wear, he sang your praises like a poet. I would treat him to
dinner just to hear him perorate on my people. Most Arabs
are poetic. The language has nuances of grace and beauty, and
powers of expression beside which English is stiff, stilted,
bony, and barren.
The Armenian did not have his own truck. Someone was
driving him back with three drums of gasoline the Armenian
had bought and sacks of grain for milling. We hopped on,
preferring to sit tete-a-tete on the grain sacks, instead of up
front.
The Negev stretched around us like an undulating desert
sea. The Armenian began to talk, not of chit-chat, or about
wanting to come to America, but of what he had long kept
pent up.
"What a strange and stubborn people we are," he began.
"How many thousands of years old we are I do not know.1
Genesis speaks of us. We had a civilization and an alphabet
while England was a forest. Our kingdom reached from Ararat
to the Black Sea and down to the Mediterranean. A thousand
years now we have been a people governed by Tartars, Mongols, Seljuks, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Russians. Before them it
was the Greeks and Romans who tried to assimilate us. They"
—the Armenian chuckled at this—"always choked when they
tried it. We bent, yes, but inside remained like steel. We assimilated some of the best traits of the conquering visitors,
which made us hardy and impossible t