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 out straight, and heels together on the floor.

Yussuf brought me coffee without waiting to be asked.  I paid him a half-piastre for it, which is half the proper price, and utterly ignored his expostulation.  He touched me on the shoulder, displayed the coin in the palm of his hand and went through a prodigious pantomime.  I did not even try to appear interested.  He ordered Suliman to explain to me.

“Mafish mukhkh!” said the boy, touching his own forehead.

My real motive was to act as differently as possible from the white man, who always pays twice what he should.  By establishing the suggestion of accustomed meanness, I hoped to offset any breaks I might make presently.  Spies, and people of that kind, usually have plenty of money for their needs, so that by acting the part of a man unused to spending except in minute driblets I stood a better chance of not being detected.