"What do you know of Staff-Captain Ali Mirza?"

"Nothing."

Once more the door closed and I could hear the murmur of
voices inside--but only a confused murmur, for the door was
thick. When it opened again two other heads were peering
from behind Yussuf's.

"Has he money?" he asked.

"Kif? Ma indi khabar!" [How should I know?]

Yussuf opened the door wide and made a sign for me to enter. He
seemed in two minds whether to let Suliman come in with me or
not, but finally admitted him with a gruff admonition to keep
still in one place and not talk.

The place was fairly full. It was a square room, with one window
high in the wall on David Street. Around three sides, including
that on which was the front door, ran a wooden seat furnished
with thin cushions. Facing the front door was another one
leading to a dark hole in the rear, where pots were washed and
rice was boiled; beside that door, occupying most of the length
of the fourth wall, was a thing like an altar of dressed stone,
on which the coffee was prepared in dozens of little copper pots.

The benches being pretty well occupied, I was about to squat down
on the floor, but they made room for me close to the front door,
so I squatted on the corner of the bench and tucked my legs under
me. Suliman dropped down on the floor in front of me with his
head about level with my knees.

The other occupants of the room were all Syrian Arabs--not a
Bedouin among them. All of them wore more or less European
clothing, with the inevitable tarboosh, each set at a different
angle. You can guess the mentality of the Syrian by the angle of
that red Islamic symbol he wears on his head. The black tassel
normally hangs behind, and the steady-going conservatives and all
who take their religion seriously, wear the inverted flower-pot-
shaped affair as nearly straight up as the cranium permits.

But once let a Syrian take up new politics, join the Young Turk
Party, forswear religion, or grow cynical about accepted
doctrine, and the angle of his tarboosh shows it, just as surely
as the angle of the London Cockney's "bowler" betrays irreverence
and the New York gangster's "lid" expresses self-contempt
disguised as self-esteem.

The head-gears were set at every possible angle in that coffee-
shop of Yussuf's, from the backward tilt of the breezy optimist
to the far-forward thrust down over the eye of malignant
cynicism, which usually went with folded arms, legs thrust