PORT OF MANY PEOPLES.

Taihape Daily Times, 27 December 1918, Page 7

PORT OF MANY PEOPLES.

BEYRUT’S MEDLEY OF A DOaEN RALES. me&u—----(By U. E. RechhoL-.-,. iu me London Express.) As one comes down by road or railway from the Leganon range, Boynu is visible, far below, clustering on i s peninsula. Two long promontories .run out into sea forming a natural harbour, in the midst of which the city lies. As a city, to say nothing of it as a port, Beyrut is markedly different from any other of the cities of the Holy Land. It strikes one as neither primitively Eastern, like Jana or Ga/a, nor primarily pseudo ?European, jrke Haifa. It is rather a conglomeration of all types—-a Turkish-Italian FrenchGerman . Greek .Jewish. American. English Syrian town.

When I knew it, in peace time, it was small enough for this extraordinary miscellany of nationalities to be obvious. As you walked along tne quays in the centre of the city you would hear more languages spoken than anybody except a born Levantine could possibly understand. There were separate churches, hospitals. and schools for many of the nationalities, as well as post offices under different flags. Suppose, for example, that you wished to send a letter to England, you would probably prefer to post it at the British post ; office. But possibly you might have information —never very reliable, by the way, in Beyrut—that a French or Italian steamer was due to leave first, in which case you might choose to use a French stamp and post your letter at a French post r.ilic'e, tre an Italian post office, or send it through the German or Turkish post. But, walking about, you would occasionally be forced to realise that Beyrut was technically Turkish. Sometimes a rattling collection-bcx would be thrust under your nose and you would, be asked to subscribe to the voluntary fund for buying battleships for Turkey. One’s political sense was not very acute in those days—l speak of the early part of 1914 —and foreigners gave willingly to the collection, feeling as they did so a kind of chivalric sympathy with the unpractical Turk,

especially as there was before one’s eyes a,constant reminder of Turkish misfortunes of war, in the shape of two gunboats, which lay half-sunken derelict and rusty in the midst of the busy shipping of the harbour. The wrecks are there to this day impeding the entrance to the . main quay, though soon they will no doubt be raised or blown up by the new conquerors of the city.