The president and members of the Guidance Association reviewing the association's affairs
Where woman veils herself and exercises her electoral rights... and busies herself with works of charity!
I kept shifting my gaze from the green fields on my right to the congealed salt pans on the other side along the coast, before the city of Tripoli and beyond it to the north... glinting under the rays like polished mirrors, while the blue sea stretched away to where our longings stretch... and the car devoured with us the long road to Latakia.
Sewing is an indispensable necessity for girls;
it is therefore a principal subject of instruction in the school of the Guidance Association
I was seeing the road for the first time, and I confess that the credit here belongs to a gracious invitation I had received from Miss Suad Haroun to visit the city.
"Angele Abboud," my companion on the trip, sat beside me, a costly camera slung to her shoulder like any respectable American lady tourist... volunteering to point out to me every monument we passed on our way... for with every monument she has school memories that she keeps and does not forget.
I listened and gazed while the sun pouring through the car window burned my cheek, and I did not care. I was in need of the sun — my pale face bore witness to that.
We passed Tripoli, and the refineries of the Iraq Petroleum Company there reminded me of its refineries in Haifa, in the days when that was the main field of its activity; and now my turn had come with memories — I stirred them and they stirred me, and I could hardly hear Angele's voice saying: and here is the club of the company's employees... and that is a flame fed by petroleum, which the company keeps burning night and day...
And the car slid on... An island in the sea, looking poetic from afar — that is Arwad, whose people live on fishing and on the lullabies of legends...
After it we were in Tartous. I did not like it... it had neither the features of a city nor the traits of a village — something lost between the one and the other. The season there is the sugar-cane season: people carry it in the road and suck its fibers, then leave them on the ground for armies of flies to settle on... flies that strut between the cane leavings and sweets a peddler had spread out on a cart... and I still do not know where the eyes of the health inspector were!!
We left it behind... and once more Angele went back to telling me about history. There, on the right, was a huge Crusader castle standing on a knoll, and the villagers had not left it to history: they built their huts around it and went on living with the castle — a monument with a monument's stillness!!
And this is the watchtower: the shells of the war (I do not know whether the last one or the one before it — I shall ask Angele in any case) opened in it a breach that looked like a mouth which, if you asked it, was on the point of telling a great deal.
"And this is Banias," says the driver; we look out and see nothing in it to stir us except its nearness to the blue sea... where ships bound for Latakia sway along, yearning to kiss its shore, yet they remain gazing wistfully from afar, for the harbor is not yet finished being built. The Yugoslav company under contract for the project is still hard at work building it...
And we entered Latakia...
A few minutes later we were seated in soft chairs