A small crowd of very worried Isfahānis clad in their national dress came running, and doubtless would have left some of their number in our carriage, but that several effendis pursued them and headed them off wherever they attempted to gain entrance. Most of them knew no Arabic nor Turkish, but were obviously bent on getting to Aleppo. Puzzled at the inexplicable attitude of the omnipotent effendis, refusing place to these poor strangers, who emphatically announced that they had paid their fare, I leant out and asked one in Persian what was the trouble. For a moment he seemed to be dazed, hearing his own language spoken by a fezzed Turk, but his ears at last convinced him, and he poured out his woes. “Bah! la’nat ullah ’alaihim” (“God’s curse upon them!”) he shouted. “From Damascus we had second-class tickets. They put us and our women in a cattle-truck, these sons of Sunni dogs; offspring of Turkish prostitutes, and now they refuse us even that;” and even as he spoke I heard a raucous voice shouting in Arabic, “La makān ul ’Ajam” (“There is no place for Persians”), and in the hated Turkish, “Get desharda! keupek oghlu!” (“Get outside, son of a dog!”) The unfortunate men--pilgrims returning from Mecca they were--were hustled from door to door, cursed and reviled for heretics and Shi’ahs, refused room anywhere. No insult was bad enough for these unfortunates, no jibe too cutting. Suddenly from somewhere a French official appeared, who had as little sympathy with Sunni as with Shi’ah Musulman, and he solved the question by tacking an extra coach on, wherein the Persians were accommodated, and kept separate, their quarters infinitely more roomy and comfortable than those of their oppressors; and so we started and fell asleep, to wake in the early sunlight at Baalbak, a place great with memories of the past, but all too quickly left behind in the present, when the train, that cares nothing for the worship of Baal, pauses but a few moments, and continues its way over rolling plains with low hills in the distance to Homs and Hama, two Arab towns, whose Christian population saves them from the decay inseparable from Turkish rule and Musulman subjectivity.