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Title: Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

Release date: August 1, 1999 [eBook #1863]
                Most recently updated: October 5, 2024

Language: English

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES ON A JOURNEY FROM CORNHILL TO GRAND CAIRO ***
NOTES ON A JOURNEY FROM CORNHILL TO GRAND CAIRO

By William Makepeace Thackeray




Contents

 DEDICATION
 PREFACE
 CHAPTER I: VIGO
 CHAPTER II: LISBON—CADIZ
 CHAPTER III: THE “LADY MARY WOOD”
 CHAPTER IV: GIBRALTAR
 CHAPTER V: ATHENS
 CHAPTER VI: SMYRNA—FIRST GLIMPSES OF THE EAST
 CHAPTER VII: CONSTANTINOPLE
 CHAPTER VIII: RHODES
 CHAPTER IX: THE WHITE SQUALL
 CHAPTER X: TELMESSUS—BEYROUT
 CHAPTER XI: A DAY AND NIGHT IN SYRIA
 CHAPTER XII: FROM JAFFA TO JERUSALEM
 CHAPTER XIII: JERUSALEM
 CHAPTER XIV: FROM JAFFA TO ALEXANDRIA
 CHAPTER XV: TO CAIRO
 Footnotes:




DEDICATION


TO CAPTAIN SAMUEL LEWIS, OF THE PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL STEAM
NAVIGATION COMPANY’S SERVICE.

My Dear Lewis,

After a voyage, during which the captain of the ship has displayed
uncommon courage, seamanship, affability, or other good qualities,
grateful passengers often present him with a token of their esteem, in
the shape of teapots, tankards, trays, &c. of precious metal. Among
authors, however, bullion is a much rarer commodity than paper, whereof
I beg you to accept a little in the shape of this small volume. It
contains a few notes of a voyage which your skill and kindness rendered
doubly pleasant; and of which I don’t think there is any recollection
more agreeable than that it was the occasion of making your friendship.

If the noble Company in whose service you command (and whose fleet
alone makes them a third-rate maritime power in Europe) should appoint
a few admirals in their navy, I hope to hear that your flag is hoisted
on board one of the grandest of their steamers. But, I trust, even
there you will not forget the “Iberia,” and the delightful
Mediterranean cruise we had in her in the Autumn of 1844.

Most faithfully yours, My dear Lewis, W. M. THACKERAY. LONDON: December
24, 1845.




PREFACE


On the 20th of August, 1844, the writer of this little book went to
dine at the—Club, quite unconscious of the wonderful events which Fate
had in store for him.

Mr. William was there, giving a farewell dinner to his friend Mr. James
(now Sir James). These two asked Mr. Titmarsh to join company with
them, and the conversation naturally fell upon the tour Mr. James was
about to take. The Peninsular and Oriental Company had arranged an
excursion in the Mediterranean, by which, in the space of a couple of
months, as many men and cities were to be seen as Ulysses surveyed and
noted in ten years. Malta, Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, Jerusalem,
Cairo were to be visited, and everybody was to be back in London by
Lord Mayor’s Day.

The idea of beholding these famous places inflamed Mr. Titmarsh’s mind;
and the charms of such a journey were eloquently impressed upon him by
Mr. James. “Come,” said that kind and hospitable gentleman, “and make
one of my family party; in all your life you will never probably have a
chance again to see so much in so short a time. Consider—it is as easy
as a journey to Paris or to Baden.” Mr. Titmarsh considered all these
things; but also the difficulties of the situation: he had but
six-and-thirty hours to get ready for so portentous a journey—he had
engagements at home— finally, could he afford it? In spite of these
objections, however, with every glass of claret the enthusiasm somehow
rose, and the difficulties vanished.

But when Mr. James, to crown all, said he had no doubt that his
friends, the Directors of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, would
make Mr. Titmarsh the present of a berth for the voyage, all objections
ceased on his part: to break his outstanding engagements—to write
letters to his amazed family, stating that they were not to expect him
at dinner on Saturday fortnight, as he would be at Jerusalem on that
day—to purchase eighteen shirts and lay in a sea stock of Russia
ducks,—was the work of four-and- twenty hours; and on the 22nd of
August, the “Lady Mary Wood” was sailing from Southampton with the
“subject of the present memoir,” quite astonished to find himself one
of the passengers on board.

These important statements are made partly to convince some incredulous
friends—who insist still that the writer never went abroad at all, and
wrote the following pages, out of pure fancy, in retirement at Putney;
but mainly, to give him an opportunity of thanking the Directors of the
Company in question for a delightful excursion.

It was one so easy, so charming, and I think profitable—it leaves such
a store of pleasant recollections for after days—and creates so many
new sources of interest (a newspaper letter from Beyrout, or Malta, or
Algiers, has twice the interest now that it had formerly),—that I can’t
but recommend all persons who have time and means to make a similar
journey—vacation idlers to extend their travels and pursue it: above
all, young well-educated men entering life, to take this course, we
will say, after that at college; and, having their book-learning fresh
in their minds, see the living people and their cities, and the actual
aspect of Nature, along the famous shores of the Mediterranean.




CHAPTER I
VIGO


The sun brought all the sick people out of their berths this morning,
and the indescribable moans and noises which had been issuing from
behind the fine painted doors on each side of the cabin happily ceased.
Long before sunrise, I had the good fortune to discover that it was no
longer necessary to maintain the horizontal posture, and, the very
instant this truth was apparent, came on deck, at two o’clock in the
morning, to see a noble full moon sinking westward, and millions of the
most brilliant stars shining overhead. The night was so serenely pure,
that you saw them in magnificent airy perspective; the blue sky around
and over them, and other more distant orbs sparkling above, till they
glittered away faintly into the immeasurable distance. The ship went
rolling over a heavy, sweltering, calm sea. The breeze was a warm and
soft one; quite different to the rigid air we had left behind us, two
days since, off the Isle of Wight. The bell kept tolling its
half-hours, and the mate explained the mystery of watch and dog-watch.

The sight of that noble scene cured all the woes and discomfitures of
sea-sickness at once, and if there were any need to communicate such
secrets to the public, one might tell of much more good that the
pleasant morning-watch effected; but there are a set of emotions about
which a man had best be shy of talking lightly,—and the feelings
excited by contemplating this vast, magnificent, harmonious Nature are
among these. The view of it inspires a delight and ecstasy which is not
only hard to describe, but which has something secret in it that a man
should not utter loudly. Hope, memory, humility, tender yearnings
towards dear friends, and inexpressible love and reverence towards the
Power which created the infinite universe blazing above eternally, and
the vast ocean shining and rolling around—fill the heart with a solemn
humble happiness, that a person dwelling in a city has rarely occasion
to enjoy. They are coming away from London parties at this time: the
dear little eyes are closed in sleep under mother’s wing. How far off
city cares and pleasures appear to be! how small and mean they seem,
dwindling out of sight before this magnificent brightness of Nature!
But the best thoughts only grow and strengthen under it. Heaven shines
above, and the humble spirit looks up reverently towards that boundless
aspect of wisdom and beauty. You are at home, and with all at rest
there, however far away they may be; and through the distance the heart
broods over them, bright and wakeful like yonder peaceful stars
overhead.

The day was as fine and calm as the night; at seven bells, suddenly a
bell began to toll very much like that of a country church, and on
going on deck we found an awning raised, a desk with a flag flung over
it close to the compass, and the ship’s company and passengers
assembled there to hear the Captain read the Service in a manly
respectful voice. This, too, was a novel and touching sight to me.
Peaked ridges of purple mountains rose to the left of the
ship,—Finisterre and the coast of Galicia. The sky above was cloudless
and shining; the vast dark ocean smiled peacefully round about, and the
ship went rolling over it, as the people within were praising the Maker
of all.

In honour of the day, it was announced that the passengers would be
regaled with champagne at dinner; and accordingly that exhilarating
liquor was served out in decent profusion, the company drinking the
Captain’s health with the customary orations of compliment and
acknowledgment. This feast was scarcely ended, when we found ourselves
rounding the headland into Vigo Bay, passing a grim and tall island of
rocky mountains which lies in the centre of the bay.

Whether it is that the sight of land is always welcome to weary
mariners, after the perils and annoyances of a voyage of three days, or
whether the place is in itself extraordinarily beautiful, need not be
argued; but I have seldom seen anything more charming than the
amphitheatre of noble hills into which the ship now came— all the
features of the landscape being lighted up with a wonderful clearness
of air, which rarely adorns a view in our country. The sun had not yet
set, but over the town and lofty rocky castle of Vigo a great ghost of
a moon was faintly visible, which blazed out brighter and brighter as
the superior luminary retired behind the purple mountains of the
headland to rest. Before the general background of waving heights which
encompassed the bay, rose a second semicircle of undulating hills, as
cheerful and green as the mountains behind them were grey and solemn.
Farms and gardens, convent towers, white villages and churches, and
buildings that no doubt were hermitages once, upon the sharp peaks of
the hills, shone brightly in the sun. The sight was delightfully
cheerful, animated, and pleasing.

Presently the Captain roared out the magic words, “Stop her!” and the
obedient vessel came to a stand-still, at some three hundred yards from
the little town, with its white houses clambering up a rock, defended
by the superior mountain whereon the castle stands. Numbers of people,
arrayed in various brilliant colours of red, were standing on the sand
close by the tumbling, shining, purple waves: and there we beheld, for
the first time, the Royal red and yellow standard of Spain floating on
its own ground, under the guardianship of a light blue sentinel, whose
musket glittered in the sun. Numerous boats were seen, incontinently,
to put off from the little shore.

And now our attention was withdrawn from the land to a sight of great
splendour on board. This was Lieutenant Bundy, the guardian of Her
Majesty’s mails, who issued from his cabin in his long swallow-tailed
coat with anchor buttons; his sabre clattering between his legs; a
magnificent shirt-collar, of several inches in height, rising round his
good-humoured sallow face; and above it a cocked hat, that shone so, I
thought it was made of polished tin (it may have been that or oilskin),
handsomely laced with black worsted, and ornamented with a shining gold
cord. A little squat boat, rowed by three ragged gallegos, came
bouncing up to the ship. Into this Mr. Bundy and Her Majesty’s Royal
mail embarked with much majesty; and in the twinkling of an eye, the
Royal standard of England, about the size of a pocket-handkerchief,—and
at the bows of the boat, the man-of-war’s pennant, being a strip of
bunting considerably under the value of a farthing,—streamed out.

“They know that flag, sir,” said the good-natured old tar, quite
solemnly, in the evening afterwards: “they respect it, sir.” The
authority of Her Majesty’s lieutenant on board the steamer is stated to
be so tremendous, that he may order it to stop, to move, to go
larboard, starboard, or what you will; and the captain dare only
disobey him suo periculo.

It was agreed that a party of us should land for half-an-hour, and
taste real Spanish chocolate on Spanish ground. We followed Lieutenant
Bundy, but humbly in the providor’s boat; that officer going on shore
to purchase fresh eggs, milk for tea (in place of the slimy substitute
of whipped yolk of egg which we had been using for our morning and
evening meals), and, if possible, oysters, for which it is said the
rocks of Vigo are famous.

It was low tide, and the boat could not get up to the dry shore. Hence
it was necessary to take advantage of the offers of sundry gallegos,
who rushed barelegged into the water, to land on their shoulders. The
approved method seems to be, to sit upon one shoulder only, holding on
by the porter’s whiskers; and though some of our party were of the
tallest and fattest men whereof our race is composed, and their living
sedans exceedingly meagre and small, yet all were landed without
accident upon the juicy sand, and forthwith surrounded by a host of
mendicants, screaming, “I say, sir! penny, sir! I say, English! tam
your ays! penny!” in all voices, from extreme youth to the most lousy
and venerable old age. When it is said that these beggars were as
ragged as those of Ireland, and still more voluble, the Irish traveller
will be able to form an opinion of their capabilities.

Through this crowd we passed up some steep rocky steps, through a
little low gate, where, in a little guard-house and barrack, a few
dirty little sentinels were keeping a dirty little guard; and by
low-roofed whitewashed houses, with balconies, and women in them,— the
very same women, with the very same head-clothes, and yellow fans and
eyes, at once sly and solemn, which Murillo painted,—by a neat church
into which we took a peep, and, finally, into the Plaza del
Constitucion, or grand place of the town, which may be about as big as
that pleasing square, Pump Court, Temple. We were taken to an inn, of
which I forget the name, and were shown from one chamber and storey to
another, till we arrived at that apartment where the real Spanish
chocolate was finally to be served out. All these rooms were as clean
as scrubbing and whitewash could make them; with simple French prints
(with Spanish titles) on the walls; a few rickety half-finished
articles of furniture; and, finally, an air of extremely respectable
poverty. A jolly, black-eyed, yellow- shawled Dulcinea conducted us
through the apartment, and provided us with the desired refreshment.

Sounds of clarions drew our eyes to the Place of the Constitution; and,
indeed, I had forgotten to say, that that majestic square was filled
with military, with exceedingly small firelocks, the men ludicrously
young and diminutive for the most part, in a uniform at once cheap and
tawdry,—like those supplied to the warriors at Astley’s, or from still
humbler theatrical wardrobes: indeed, the whole scene was just like
that of a little theatre; the houses curiously small, with arcades and
balconies, out of which looked women apparently a great deal too big
for the chambers they inhabited; the warriors were in ginghams,
cottons, and tinsel; the officers had huge epaulets of sham silver lace
drooping over their bosoms, and looked as if they were attired at a
very small expense. Only the general—the captain-general (Pooch, they
told us, was his name: I know not how ’tis written in Spanish)—was well
got up, with a smart hat, a real feather, huge stars glittering on his
portly chest, and tights and boots of the first order. Presently, after
a good deal of trumpeting, the little men marched off the place, Pooch
and his staff coming into the very inn in which we were awaiting our
chocolate.

Then we had an opportunity of seeing some of the civilians of the town.
Three or four ladies passed, with fan and mantle; to them came three or
four dandies, dressed smartly in the French fashion, with strong Jewish
physiognomies. There was one, a solemn lean fellow in black, with his
collars extremely turned over, and holding before him a long
ivory-tipped ebony cane, who tripped along the little place with a
solemn smirk, which gave one an indescribable feeling of the truth of
“Gil Blas,” and of those delightful bachelors and licentiates who have
appeared to us all in our dreams.

In fact we were but half-an-hour in this little queer Spanish town; and
it appeared like a dream, too, or a little show got up to amuse us.
Boom! the gun fired at the end of the funny little entertainment. The
women and the balconies, the beggars and the walking Murillos, Pooch
and the little soldiers in tinsel, disappeared, and were shut up in
their box again. Once more we were carried on the beggars’ shoulders
out off the shore, and we found ourselves again in the great stalwart
roast-beef world; the stout British steamer bearing out of the bay,
whose purple waters had grown more purple. The sun had set by this
time, and the moon above was twice as big and bright as our degenerate
moons are.

The providor had already returned with his fresh stores, and Bundy’s
tin hat was popped into its case, and he walking the deck of the packet
denuded of tails. As we went out of the bay, occurred a little incident
with which the great incidents of the day may be said to wind up. We
saw before us a little vessel, tumbling and plunging about in the dark
waters of the bay, with a bright light beaming from the mast. It made
for us at about a couple of miles from the town, and came close up,
flouncing and bobbing in the very jaws of the paddle, which looked as
if it would have seized and twirled round that little boat and its
light, and destroyed them for ever and ever. All the passengers, of
course, came crowding to the ship’s side to look at the bold little
boat.

“I SAY!” howled a man; “I say!—a word!—I say! Pasagero! Pasagero!
Pasage-e-ero!” We were two hundred yards ahead by this time.

“Go on,” says the captain.

“You may stop if you like,” says Lieutenant Bundy, exerting his
tremendous responsibility. It is evident that the lieutenant has a soft
heart, and felt for the poor devil in the boat who was howling so
piteously “Pasagero!”

But the captain was resolute. His duty was NOT to take the man up. He
was evidently an irregular customer—someone trying to escape, possibly.

The lieutenant turned away, but did not make any further hints. The
captain was right; but we all felt somehow disappointed, and looked
back wistfully at the little boat, jumping up and down far astern now;
the poor little light shining in vain, and the poor wretch within
screaming out in the most heartrending accents a last faint desperate
“I say! Pasagero-o!”

We all went down to tea rather melancholy; but the new milk, in the
place of that abominable whipped egg, revived us again; and so ended
the great events on board the “Lady Mary Wood” steamer, on the 25th
August, 1844.




CHAPTER II
LISBON—CADIZ


A great misfortune which befalls a man who has but a single day to stay
in a town, is that fatal duty which superstition entails upon him of
visiting the chief lions of the city in which he may happen to be. You
must go through the ceremony, however much you may sigh to avoid it;
and however much you know that the lions in one capital roar very much
like the lions in another; that the churches are more or less large and
splendid, the palaces pretty spacious, all the world over; and that
there is scarcely a capital city in this Europe but has its pompous
bronze statue or two of some periwigged, hook-nosed emperor, in a Roman
habit, waving his bronze baton on his broad-flanked brazen charger. We
only saw these state old lions in Lisbon, whose roar has long since
ceased to frighten one. First we went to the Church of St. Roch, to see
a famous piece of mosaic-work there. It is a famous work of art, and
was bought by I don’t know what king for I don’t know how much money.
All this information may be perfectly relied on, though the fact is, we
did not see the mosaic-work: the sacristan, who guards it, was yet in
bed; and it was veiled from our eyes in a side-chapel by great dirty
damask curtains, which could not be removed, except when the
sacristan’s toilette was done, and at the price of a dollar. So we were
spared this mosaic exhibition; and I think I always feel relieved when
such an event occurs. I feel I have done my duty in coming to see the
enormous animal: if he is not at home, virtute mea me, &c.—we have done
our best, and mortal can do no more.

In order to reach that church of the forbidden mosaic, we had sweated
up several most steep and dusty streets—hot and dusty, although it was
but nine o’clock in the morning. Thence the guide conducted us into
some little dust-powdered gardens, in which the people make believe to
enjoy the verdure, and whence you look over a great part of the arid,
dreary, stony city. There was no smoke, as in honest London, only
dust—dust over the gaunt houses and the dismal yellow strips of
gardens. Many churches were there, and tall half-baked-looking public
edifices, that had a dry, uncomfortable, earth-quaky look, to my idea.
The ground-floors of the spacious houses by which we passed seemed the
coolest and pleasantest portions of the mansion. They were cellars or
warehouses, for the most part, in which white-jacketed clerks sat
smoking easy cigars. The streets were plastered with placards of a
bull-fight, to take place the next evening (there was no opera that
season); but it was not a real Spanish tauromachy—only a theatrical
combat, as you could see by the picture in which the horseman was
cantering off at three miles an hour, the bull tripping after him with
tips to his gentle horns. Mules interminable, and almost all
excellently sleek and handsome, were pacing down every street: here and
there, but later in the day, came clattering along a smart rider on a
prancing Spanish horse; and in the afternoon a few families might be
seen in the queerest old-fashioned little carriages, drawn by their
jolly mules and swinging between, or rather before, enormous wheels.

The churches I saw were of the florid periwig architecture—I mean of
that pompous cauliflower kind of ornament which was the fashion in
Louis the Fifteenth’s time, at which unlucky period a building mania
seems to have seized upon many of the monarchs of Europe, and
innumerable public edifices were erected. It seems to me to have been
the period in all history when society was the least natural, and
perhaps the most dissolute; and I have always fancied that the bloated
artificial forms of the architecture partake of the social
disorganisation of the time. Who can respect a simpering ninny,
grinning in a Roman dress and a full-bottomed wig, who is made to pass
off for a hero? or a fat woman in a hoop, and of a most doubtful
virtue, who leers at you as a goddess? In the palaces which we saw,
several Court allegories were represented, which, atrocious as they
were in point of art, might yet serve to attract the regard of the
moraliser. There were Faith, Hope, and Charity restoring Don John to
the arms of his happy Portugal: there were Virtue, Valour, and Victory
saluting Don Emanuel: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic (for what I
know, or some mythologic nymphs) dancing before Don Miguel—the picture
is there still, at the Ajuda; and ah me! where is poor Mig? Well, it is
these State lies and ceremonies that we persist in going to see;
whereas a man would have a much better insight into Portuguese manners,
by planting himself at a corner, like yonder beggar, and watching the
real transactions of the day.

A drive to Belem is the regular route practised by the traveller who
has to make only a short stay, and accordingly a couple of carriages
were provided for our party, and we were driven through the long merry
street of Belem, peopled by endless strings of mules,—by thousands of
gallegos, with water-barrels on their shoulders, or lounging by the
fountains to hire,—by the Lisbon and Belem omnibuses, with four mules,
jingling along at a good pace; and it seemed to me to present a far
more lively and cheerful, though not so regular, an appearance as the
stately quarters of the city we had left behind us. The little shops
were at full work— the men brown, well-dressed, manly, and handsome: so
much cannot, I am sorry to say, be said for the ladies, of whom, with
every anxiety to do so, our party could not perceive a single good-
looking specimen all day. The noble blue Tagus accompanies you all
along these three miles of busy pleasant street, whereof the chief
charm, as I thought, was its look of genuine business—that appearance
of comfort which the cleverest Court-architect never knows how to give.

The carriages (the canvas one with four seats and the chaise in which I
drove) were brought suddenly up to a gate with the Royal arms over it;
and here we were introduced to as queer an exhibition as the eye has
often looked on. This was the state-carriage house, where there is a
museum of huge old tumble-down gilded coaches of the last century,
lying here, mouldy and dark, in a sort of limbo. The gold has vanished
from the great lumbering old wheels and panels; the velvets are wofully
tarnished. When one thinks of the patches and powder that have simpered
out of those plate-glass windows—the mitred bishops, the big-wigged
marshals, the shovel- hatted abbes which they have borne in their
time—the human mind becomes affected in no ordinary degree. Some human
minds heave a sigh for the glories of bygone days; while others,
considering rather the lies and humbug, the vice and servility, which
went framed and glazed and enshrined, creaking along in those old
Juggernaut cars, with fools worshipping under the wheels, console
themselves for the decay of institutions that may have been splendid
and costly, but were ponderous, clumsy, slow, and unfit for daily wear.
The guardian of these defunct old carriages tells some prodigious fibs
concerning them: he pointed out one carriage that was six hundred years
old in his calendar; but any connoisseur in bric-a-brac can see it was
built at Paris in the Regent Orleans’ time.

Hence it is but a step to an institution in full life and vigour,— a
noble orphan-school for one thousand boys and girls, founded by Don
Pedro, who gave up to its use the superb convent of Belem, with its
splendid cloisters, vast airy dormitories, and magnificent church. Some
Oxford gentlemen would have wept to see the desecrated edifice,—to
think that the shaven polls and white gowns were banished from it to
give place to a thousand children, who have not even the clergy to
instruct them. “Every lad here may choose his trade,” our little
informant said, who addressed us in better French than any of our party
spoke, whose manners were perfectly gentlemanlike and respectful, and
whose clothes, though of a common cotton stuff, were cut and worn with
a military neatness and precision. All the children whom we remarked
were dressed with similar neatness, and it was a pleasure to go through
their various rooms for study, where some were busy at mathematics,
some at drawing, some attending a lecture on tailoring, while others
were sitting at the feet of a professor of the science of shoemaking.
All the garments of the establishment were made by the pupils; even the
deaf and dumb were drawing and reading, and the blind were, for the
most part, set to perform on musical instruments, and got up a concert
for the visitors. It was then we wished ourselves of the numbers of the
deaf and dumb, for the poor fellows made noises so horrible, that even
as blind beggars they could hardly get a livelihood in the musical way.

Hence we were driven to the huge palace of Necessidades, which is but a
wing of a building that no King of Portugal ought ever to be rich
enough to complete, and which, if perfect, might outvie the Tower of
Babel. The mines of Brazil must have been productive of gold and silver
indeed when the founder imagined this enormous edifice. From the
elevation on which it stands it commands the noblest views,—the city is
spread before it, with its many churches and towers, and for many miles
you see the magnificent Tagus, rolling by banks crowned with trees and
towers. But to arrive at this enormous building you have to climb a
steep suburb of wretched huts, many of them with dismal gardens of dry
cracked earth, where a few reedy sprouts of Indian corn seemed to be
the chief cultivation, and which were guarded by huge plants of spiky
aloes, on which the rags of the proprietors of the huts were sunning
themselves. The terrace before the palace was similarly encroached upon
by these wretched habitations. A few millions judiciously expended
might make of this arid hill one of the most magnificent gardens in the
world; and the palace seems to me to excel for situation any Royal
edifice I have ever seen. But the huts of these swarming poor have
crawled up close to its gates,— the superb walls of hewn stone stop all
of a sudden with a lath- and-plaster hitch; and capitals, and hewn
stones for columns, still lying about on the deserted terrace, may lie
there for ages to come, probably, and never take their places by the
side of their brethren in yonder tall bankrupt galleries. The air of
this pure sky has little effect upon the edifices,—the edges of the
stone look as sharp as if the builders had just left their work; and
close to the grand entrance stands an outbuilding, part of which may
have been burnt fifty years ago, but is in such cheerful preservation
that you might fancy the fire had occurred yesterday. It must have been
an awful sight from this hill to have looked at the city spread before
it, and seen it reeling and swaying in the time of the earthquake. I
thought it looked so hot and shaky, that one might fancy a return of
the fit. In several places still remain gaps and chasms, and ruins lie
here and there as they cracked and fell.

Although the palace has not attained anything like its full growth, yet
what exists is quite big enough for the monarch of such a little
country; and Versailles or Windsor has not apartments more nobly
proportioned. The Queen resides in the Ajuda, a building of much less
pretensions, of which the yellow walls and beautiful gardens are seen
between Belem and the city. The Necessidades are only used for grand
galas, receptions of ambassadors, and ceremonies of state. In the
throne-room is a huge throne, surmounted by an enormous gilt crown,
than which I have never seen anything larger in the finest pantomime at
Drury Lane; but the effect of this splendid piece is lessened by a
shabby old Brussels carpet, almost the only other article of furniture
in the apartment, and not quite large enough to cover its spacious
floor. The looms of Kidderminster have supplied the web which ornaments
the “Ambassadors’ Waiting-Room,” and the ceilings are painted with huge
allegories in distemper, which pretty well correspond with the other
furniture. Of all the undignified objects in the world, a palace out at
elbows is surely the meanest. Such places ought not to be seen in
adversity,—splendour is their decency,—and when no longer able to
maintain it, they should sink to the level of their means, calmly
subside into manufactories, or go shabby in seclusion.

There is a picture-gallery belonging to the palace that is quite of a
piece with the furniture, where are the mythological pieces relative to
the kings before alluded to, and where the English visitor will see
some astonishing pictures of the Duke of Wellington, done in a very
characteristic style of Portuguese art. There is also a chapel, which
has been decorated with much care and sumptuousness of ornament—the
altar surmounted by a ghastly and horrible carved figure in the taste
of the time when faith was strengthened by the shrieks of Jews on the
rack, and enlivened by the roasting of heretics. Other such frightful
images may be seen in the churches of the city; those which we saw were
still rich, tawdry, and splendid to outward show, although the French,
as usual, had robbed their shrines of their gold and silver, and the
statues of their jewels and crowns. But brass and tinsel look to the
visitor full as well at a little distance,—as doubtless Soult and Junot
thought, when they despoiled these places of worship, like French
philosophers as they were.

A friend, with a classical turn of mind, was bent upon seeing the
aqueduct, whither we went on a dismal excursion of three hours, in the
worst carriages, over the most diabolical clattering roads, up and down
dreary parched hills, on which grew a few grey olive-trees and many
aloes. When we arrived, the gate leading to the aqueduct was closed,
and we were entertained with a legend of some respectable character who
had made a good livelihood there for some time past lately, having a
private key to this very aqueduct, and lying in wait there for unwary
travellers like ourselves, whom he pitched down the arches into the
ravines below, and there robbed them at leisure. So that all we saw was
the door and the tall arches of the aqueduct, and by the time we
returned to town it was time to go on board the ship again. If the inn
at which we had sojourned was not of the best quality, the bill, at
least, would have done honour to the first establishment in London. We
all left the house of entertainment joyfully, glad to get out of the
sun- burnt city and go HOME. Yonder in the steamer was home, with its
black funnel and gilt portraiture of “Lady Mary Wood” at the bows; and
every soul on board felt glad to return to the friendly little vessel.
But the authorities of Lisbon, however, are very suspicious of the
departing stranger, and we were made to lie an hour in the river before
the Sanita boat, where a passport is necessary to be procured before
the traveller can quit the country. Boat after boat laden with priests
and peasantry, with handsome red-sashed gallegos clad in brown, and
ill-favoured women, came and got their permits, and were off, as we lay
bumping up against the old hull of the Sanita boat; but the officers
seemed to take a delight in keeping us there bumping, looked at us
quite calmly over the ship’s sides, and smoked their cigars without the
least attention to the prayers which we shrieked out for release.

If we were glad to get away from Lisbon, we were quite as sorry to be
obliged to quit Cadiz, which we reached the next night, and where we
were allowed a couple of hours’ leave to land and look about. It seemed
as handsome within as it is stately without; the long narrow streets of
an admirable cleanliness, many of the tall houses of rich and noble
decorations, and all looking as if the city were in full prosperity. I
have seen no more cheerful and animated sight than the long street
leading from the quay where we were landed, and the market blazing in
sunshine, piled with fruit, fish, and poultry, under many-coloured
awnings; the tall white houses with their balconies and galleries
shining round about, and the sky above so blue that the best cobalt in
all the paint-box looks muddy and dim in comparison to it. There were
pictures for a year in that market-place—from the copper-coloured old
hags and beggars who roared to you for the love of Heaven to give
money, to the swaggering dandies of the market, with red sashes and
tight clothes, looking on superbly, with a hand on the hip and a cigar
in the mouth. These must be the chief critics at the great bull-fight
house yonder by the Alameda, with its scanty trees, and cool breezes
facing the water. Nor are there any corks to the bulls’ horns here, as
at Lisbon. A small old English guide who seized upon me the moment my
foot was on shore, had a store of agreeable legends regarding the
bulls, men, and horses that had been killed with unbounded profusion in
the late entertainments which have taken place.

It was so early an hour in the morning that the shops were scarcely
opened as yet; the churches, however, stood open for the faithful, and
we met scores of women tripping towards them with pretty feet, and
smart black mantillas, from which looked out fine dark eyes and
handsome pale faces, very different from the coarse brown countenances
we had seen at Lisbon. A very handsome modern cathedral, built by the
present bishop at his own charges, was the finest of the public
edifices we saw; it was not, however, nearly so much frequented as
another little church, crowded with altars and fantastic ornaments, and
lights and gilding, where we were told to look behind a huge iron
grille, and beheld a bevy of black nuns kneeling. Most of the good
ladies in the front ranks stopped their devotions, and looked at the
strangers with as much curiosity as we directed at them through the
gloomy bars of their chapel. The men’s convents are closed; that which
contains the famous Murillos has been turned into an academy of the
fine arts; but the English guide did not think the pictures were of
sufficient interest to detain strangers, and so hurried us back to the
shore, and grumbled at only getting three shillings at parting for his
trouble and his information. And so our residence in Andalusia began
and ended before breakfast, and we went on board and steamed for
Gibraltar, looking, as we passed, at Joinville’s black squadron, and
the white houses of St. Mary’s across the bay, with the hills of Medina
Sidonia and Granada lying purple beyond them. There’s something even in
those names which is pleasant to write down; to have passed only two
hours in Cadiz is something—to have seen real donnas with comb and
mantle—real caballeros with cloak and cigar—real Spanish barbers
lathering out of brass basins—and to have heard guitars under the
balconies: there was one that an old beggar was jangling in the market,
whilst a huge leering fellow in bushy whiskers and a faded velvet dress
came singing and jumping after our party,—not singing to a guitar, it
is true, but imitating one capitally with his voice, and cracking his
fingers by way of castanets, and performing a dance such as Figaro or
Lablache might envy. How clear that fellow’s voice thrums on the ear
even now; and how bright and pleasant remains the recollection of the
fine city and the blue sea, and the Spanish flags floating on the boats
that danced over it, and Joinville’s band beginning to play stirring
marches as we puffed out of the bay.

The next stage was Gibraltar, where we were to change horses. Before
sunset we skirted along the dark savage mountains of the African coast,
and came to the Rock just before gun-fire. It is the very image of an
enormous lion, crouched between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and
set there to guard the passage for its British mistress. The next
British lion is Malta, four days further on in the Midland Sea, and
ready to spring upon Egypt or pounce upon Syria, or roar so as to be
heard at Marseilles in case of need.

To the eyes of the civilian the first-named of these famous
fortifications is by far the most imposing. The Rock looks so
tremendous, that to ascend it, even without the compliment of shells or
shot, seems a dreadful task—what would it be when all those mysterious
lines of batteries were vomiting fire and brimstone; when all those
dark guns that you see poking their grim heads out of every imaginable
cleft and zigzag should salute you with shot, both hot and cold; and
when, after tugging up the hideous perpendicular place, you were to
find regiments of British grenadiers ready to plunge bayonets into your
poor panting stomach, and let out artificially the little breath left
there? It is a marvel to think that soldiers will mount such places for
a shilling—ensigns for five and ninepence—a day: a cabman would ask
double the money to go half way! One meekly reflects upon the above
strange truths, leaning over the ship’s side, and looking up the huge
mountain, from the tower nestled at the foot of it to the thin
flagstaff at the summit, up to which have been piled the most ingenious
edifices for murder Christian science ever adopted. My hobby-horse is a
quiet beast, suited for Park riding, or a gentle trot to Putney and
back to a snug stable, and plenty of feeds of corn:- it can’t abide
climbing hills, and is not at all used to gunpowder. Some men’s animals
are so spirited that the very appearance of a stone-wall sets them
jumping at it: regular chargers of hobbies, which snort and say “Ha,
ha!” at the mere notion of a battle.




CHAPTER III
THE “LADY MARY WOOD”


Our week’s voyage is now drawing to a close. We have just been to look
at Cape Trafalgar, shining white over the finest blue sea. (We, who
were looking at Trafalgar Square only the other day!) The sight of that
cape must have disgusted Joinville and his fleet of steamers, as they
passed yesterday into Cadiz bay, and to-morrow will give them a sight
of St. Vincent.

One of their steam-vessels has been lost off the coast of Africa; they
were obliged to burn her, lest the Moors should take possession of her.
She was a virgin vessel, just out of Brest. Poor innocent! to die in
the very first month of her union with the noble whiskered god of war!

We Britons on board the English boat received the news of the
“Groenenland’s” abrupt demise with grins of satisfaction. It was a sort
of national compliment, and cause of agreeable congratulation. “The
lubbers!” we said; “the clumsy humbugs! there’s none but Britons to
rule the waves!” and we gave ourselves piratical airs, and went down
presently and were sick in our little buggy berths. It was pleasant,
certainly, to laugh at Joinville’s admiral’s flag floating at his
foremast, in yonder black ship, with its two thundering great guns at
the bows and stern, its busy crew swarming on the deck, and a crowd of
obsequious shore-boats bustling round the vessel—and to sneer at the
Mogador warrior, and vow that we English, had we been inclined to do
the business, would have performed it a great deal better.

Now yesterday at Lisbon we saw H.M.S. “Caledonia.” THIS, on the
contrary, inspired us with feelings of respect and awful pleasure.
There she lay—the huge sea-castle—bearing the unconquerable flag of our
country. She had but to open her jaws, as it were, and she might bring
a second earthquake on the city—batter it into kingdom-come—with the
Ajuda palace and the Necessidades, the churches, and the lean, dry,
empty streets, and Don John, tremendous on horseback, in the midst of
Black Horse Square. Wherever we looked we could see that enormous
“Caledonia,” with her flashing three lines of guns. We looked at the
little boats which ever and anon came out of this monster, with humble
wonder. There was the lieutenant who boarded us at midnight before we
dropped anchor in the river: ten white-jacketed men pulling as one,
swept along with the barge, gig, boat, curricle, or coach-and-six, with
which he came up to us. We examined him—his red whiskers—his collars
turned down—his duck trousers, his bullion epaulets—with awe. With the
same reverential feeling we examined the seamen—the young gentleman in
the bows of the boat—the handsome young officers of marines we met
sauntering in the town next day—the Scotch surgeon who boarded us as we
weighed anchor—every man, down to the broken-nosed mariner who was
drunk in a wine-house, and had “Caledonia” written on his hat. Whereas
at the Frenchmen we looked with undisguised contempt. We were ready to
burst with laughter as we passed the Prince’s vessel—there was a little
French boy in a French boat alongside cleaning it, and twirling about a
little French mop—we thought it the most comical, contemptible French
boy, mop, boat, steamer, prince—Psha! it is of this wretched vapouring
stuff that false patriotism is made. I write this as a sort of homily à
propos of the day, and Cape Trafalgar, off which we lie. What business
have I to strut the deck, and clap my wings, and cry
“Cock-a-doodle-doo” over it? Some compatriots are at that work even
now.

We have lost one by one all our jovial company. There were the five
Oporto wine-merchants—all hearty English gentlemen—gone to their
wine-butts, and their red-legged partridges, and their duels at Oporto.
It appears that these gallant Britons fight every morning among
themselves, and give the benighted people among whom they live an
opportunity to admire the spirit national. There is the brave honest
major, with his wooden leg—the kindest and simplest of Irishmen: he has
embraced his children, and reviewed his little invalid garrison of
fifteen men, in the fort which he commands at Belem, by this time, and,
I have no doubt, played to every soul of them the twelve tunes of his
musical-box. It was pleasant to see him with that musical-box—how
pleased he wound it up after dinner—how happily he listened to the
little clinking tunes as they galloped, ding-dong, after each other! A
man who carries a musical-box is always a good-natured man.

Then there was his Grace, or his Grandeur, the Archbishop of Beyrouth
(in the parts of the infidels), His Holiness’s Nuncio to the Court of
Her Most Faithful Majesty, and who mingled among us like any simple
mortal,—except that he had an extra smiling courtesy, which simple
mortals do not always possess; and when you passed him as such, and
puffed your cigar in his face, took off his hat with a grin of such
prodigious rapture, as to lead you to suppose that the most delicious
privilege of his whole life was that permission to look at the tip of
your nose or of your cigar. With this most reverend prelate was his
Grace’s brother and chaplain—a very greasy and good-natured
ecclesiastic, who, from his physiognomy, I would have imagined to be a
dignitary of the Israelitish rather than the Romish Church—as profuse
in smiling courtesy as his Lordship of Beyrouth. These two had a meek
little secretary between them, and a tall French cook and valet, who,
at meal times, might be seen busy about the cabin where their
reverences lay. They were on their backs for the greater part of the
voyage; their yellow countenances were not only unshaven, but, to judge
from appearances, unwashed. They ate in private; and it was only of
evenings, as the sun was setting over the western wave, and, comforted
by the dinner, the cabin-passengers assembled on the quarter-deck, that
we saw the dark faces of the reverend gentlemen among us for a while.
They sank darkly into their berths when the steward’s bell tolled for
tea.

At Lisbon, where we came to anchor at midnight, a special boat came
off, whereof the crew exhibited every token of reverence for the
ambassador of the ambassador of Heaven, and carried him off from our
company. This abrupt departure in the darkness disappointed some of us,
who had promised ourselves the pleasure of seeing his Grandeur depart
in state in the morning, shaved, clean, and in full pontificals, the
tripping little secretary swinging an incense-pot before him, and the
greasy chaplain bearing his crosier.

Next day we had another bishop, who occupied the very same berth his
Grace of Beyrouth had quitted—was sick in the very same way— so much so
that this cabin of the “Lady Mary Wood” is to be christened “the
bishop’s berth” henceforth; and a handsome mitre is to be painted on
the basin.

Bishop No. 2 was a very stout, soft, kind-looking old gentleman, in a
square cap, with a handsome tassel of green and gold round his portly
breast and back. He was dressed in black robes and tight purple
stockings: and we carried him from Lisbon to the little flat coast of
Faro, of which the meek old gentleman was the chief pastor.

We had not been half-an-hour from our anchorage in the Tagus, when his
Lordship dived down into the episcopal berth. All that night there was
a good smart breeze; it blew fresh all the next day, as we went jumping
over the blue bright sea; and there was no sign of his Lordship the
bishop until we were opposite the purple hills of Algarve, which lay
some ten miles distant,—a yellow sunny shore stretching flat before
them, whose long sandy flats and villages we could see with our
telescope from the steamer.

Presently a little vessel, with a huge shining lateen sail, and bearing
the blue and white Portuguese flag, was seen playing a sort of
leap-frog on the jolly waves, jumping over them, and ducking down as
merry as could be. This little boat came towards the steamer as quick
as ever she could jump; and Captain Cooper roaring out, “Stop her!” to
“Lady Mary Wood,” her Ladyship’s paddles suddenly ceased twirling, and
news was carried to the good bishop that his boat was almost alongside,
and that his hour was come.

It was rather an affecting sight to see the poor old fat gentleman,
looking wistfully over the water as the boat now came up, and her eight
seamen, with great noise, energy, and gesticulation laid her by the
steamer. The steamer steps were let down; his Lordship’s servant, in
blue and yellow livery (like the Edinburgh Review), cast over the
episcopal luggage into the boat, along with his own bundle and the
jack-boots with which he rides postilion on one of the bishop’s fat
mules at Faro. The blue and yellow domestic went down the steps into
the boat. Then came the bishop’s turn; but he couldn’t do it for a long
while. He went from one passenger to another, sadly shaking them by the
hand, often taking leave and seeming loth to depart, until Captain
Cooper, in a stern but respectful tone, touched him on the shoulder,
and said, I know not with what correctness, being ignorant of the
Spanish language, “Senor ’Bispo! Senor ’Bispo!” on which summons the
poor old man, looking ruefully round him once more, put his square cap
under his arm, tucked up his long black petticoats, so as to show his
purple stockings and jolly fat calves, and went trembling down the
steps towards the boat. The good old man! I wish I had had a shake of
that trembling podgy hand somehow before he went upon his sea
martyrdom. I felt a love for that soft-hearted old Christian. Ah! let
us hope his governante tucked him comfortably in bed when he got to
Faro that night, and made him a warm gruel and put his feet in warm
water. The men clung around him, and almost kissed him as they popped
him into the boat, but he did not heed their caresses. Away went the
boat scudding madly before the wind. Bang! another lateen-sailed boat
in the distance fired a gun in his honour; but the wind was blowing
away from the shore, and who knows when that meek bishop got home to
his gruel?

I think these were the notables of our party. I will not mention the
laughing ogling lady of Cadiz, whose manners, I very much regret to
say, were a great deal too lively for my sense of propriety; nor those
fair sufferers, her companions, who lay on the deck with sickly,
smiling female resignation: nor the heroic children, who no sooner ate
biscuit than they were ill, and no sooner were ill than they began
eating biscuit again: but just allude to one other martyr, the kind
lieutenant in charge of the mails, and who bore his cross with what I
can’t but think a very touching and noble resignation.

There’s a certain sort of man whose doom in the world is
disappointment,—who excels in it,—and whose luckless triumphs in his
meek career of life, I have often thought, must be regarded by the kind
eyes above with as much favour as the splendid successes and
achievements of coarser and more prosperous men. As I sat with the
lieutenant upon deck, his telescope laid over his lean legs, and he
looking at the sunset with a pleased, withered old face, he gave me a
little account of his history. I take it he is in nowise disinclined to
talk about it, simple as it is: he has been seven- and-thirty years in
the navy, being somewhat more mature in the service than Lieutenant
Peel, Rear-Admiral Prince de Joinville, and other commanders who need
not be mentioned. He is a very well- educated man, and reads
prodigiously,—travels, histories, lives of eminent worthies and heroes,
in his simple way. He is not in the least angry at his want of luck in
the profession. “Were I a boy to-morrow,” he said, “I would begin it
again; and when I see my schoolfellows, and how they have got on in
life, if some are better off than I am, I find many are worse, and have
no call to be discontented.” So he carries Her Majesty’s mails meekly
through this world, waits upon port-admirals and captains in his old
glazed hat, and is as proud of the pennon at the bow of his little
boat, as if it were flying from the mainmast of a thundering
man-of-war. He gets two hundred a year for his services, and has an old
mother and a sister living in England somewhere, who I will wager
(though he never, I swear, said a word about it) have a good portion of
this princely income.

Is it breaking a confidence to tell Lieutenant Bundy’s history? Let the
motive excuse the deed. It is a good, kind, wholesome, and noble
character. Why should we keep all our admiration for those who win in
this world, as we do, sycophants as we are? When we write a novel, our
great stupid imaginations can go no further than to marry the hero to a
fortune at the end, and to find out that he is a lord by right. O
blundering lickspittle morality! And yet I would like to fancy some
happy retributive Utopia in the peaceful cloud-land, where my friend
the meek lieutenant should find the yards of his ship manned as he went
on board, all the guns firing an enormous salute (only without the
least noise or vile smell of powder), and he be saluted on the deck as
Admiral Sir James, or Sir Joseph—ay, or Lord Viscount Bundy, knight of
all the orders above the sun.

I think this is a sufficient, if not a complete catalogue of the
worthies on board the “Lady Mary Wood.” In the week we were on board—it
seemed a year, by the way—we came to regard the ship quite as a home.
We felt for the captain—the most good-humoured, active, careful, ready
of captains—a filial, a fraternal regard; for the providor, who
provided for us with admirable comfort and generosity, a genial
gratitude; and for the brisk steward’s lads— brisk in serving the
banquet, sympathising in handing the basin— every possible sentiment of
regard and good-will. What winds blew, and how many knots we ran, are
all noted down, no doubt, in the ship’s log: and as for what ships we
saw—every one of them with their gunnage, tonnage, their nation, their
direction whither they were bound—were not these all noted down with
surprising ingenuity and precision by the lieutenant, at a family desk
at which he sat every night, before a great paper elegantly and
mysteriously ruled off with his large ruler? I have a regard for every
man on board that ship, from the captain down to the crew—down even to
the cook, with tattooed arms, sweating among the saucepans in the
galley, who used (with a touching affection) to send us locks of his
hair in the soup. And so, while our feelings and recollections are
warm, let us shake hands with this knot of good fellows, comfortably
floating about in their little box of wood and iron, across Channel,
Biscay Bay, and the Atlantic, from Southampton Water to Gibraltar
Straits.




CHAPTER IV
GIBRALTAR


Suppose all the nations of the earth to send fitting ambassadors to
represent them at Wapping or Portsmouth Point, with each, under its own
national signboard and language, its appropriate house of call, and
your imagination may figure the Main Street of Gibraltar: almost the
only part of the town, I believe, which boasts of the name of street at
all, the remaining houserows being modestly called lanes, such as Bomb
Lane, Battery Lane, Fusee Lane, and so on. In Main Street the Jews
predominate, the Moors abound; and from the “Jolly Sailor,” or the
brave “Horse Marine,” where the people of our nation are drinking
British beer and gin, you hear choruses of “Garryowen” or “The Lass I
left behind me;” while through the flaring lattices of the Spanish
ventas come the clatter of castanets and the jingle and moan of Spanish
guitars and ditties. It is a curious sight at evening this thronged
street, with the people, in a hundred different costumes, bustling to
and fro under the coarse flare of the lamps; swarthy Moors, in white or
crimson robes; dark Spanish smugglers in tufted hats, with gay silk
handkerchiefs round their heads; fuddled seamen from men-of-war, or
merchantmen; porters, Galician or Genoese; and at every few minutes’
interval, little squads of soldiers tramping to relieve guard at some
one of the innumerable posts in the town.

Some of our party went to a Spanish venta, as a more convenient or
romantic place of residence than an English house; others made choice
of the club-house in Commercial Square, of which I formed an agreeable
picture in my imagination; rather, perhaps, resembling the Junior
United Service Club in Charles Street, by which every Londoner has
passed ere this with respectful pleasure, catching glimpses of
magnificent blazing candelabras, under which sit neat half-pay
officers, drinking half-pints of port. The club-house of Gibraltar is
not, however, of the Charles Street sort: it may have been cheerful
once, and there are yet relics of splendour about it. When officers
wore pigtails, and in the time of Governor O’Hara, it may have been a
handsome place; but it is mouldy and decrepit now; and though his
Excellency, Mr. Bulwer, was living there, and made no complaints that I
heard of, other less distinguished persons thought they had reason to
grumble. Indeed, what is travelling made of? At least half its
pleasures and incidents come out of inns; and of them the tourist can
speak with much more truth and vivacity than of historical
recollections compiled out of histories, or filched out of handbooks.
But to speak of the best inn in a place needs no apology: that, at
least, is useful information. As every person intending to visit
Gibraltar cannot have seen the flea-bitten countenances of our
companions, who fled from their Spanish venta to take refuge at the
club the morning after our arrival, they may surely be thankful for
being directed to the best house of accommodation in one of the most
unromantic, uncomfortable, and prosaic of towns.

If one had a right to break the sacred confidence of the mahogany, I
could entertain you with many queer stories of Gibraltar life, gathered
from the lips of the gentlemen who enjoyed themselves round the dingy
tablecloth of the club-house coffee-room, richly decorated with cold
gravy and spilt beer. I heard there the very names of the gentlemen who
wrote the famous letters from the “Warspite” regarding the French
proceedings at Mogador; and met several refugee Jews from that place,
who said that they were much more afraid of the Kabyles without the
city than of the guns of the French squadron, of which they seemed to
make rather light. I heard the last odds on the ensuing match between
Captain Smith’s b. g. Bolter, and Captain Brown’s ch. c. Roarer: how
the gun-room of Her Majesty’s ship “Purgatory” had “cobbed” a tradesman
of the town, and of the row in consequence. I heard capital stories of
the way in which Wilkins had escaped the guard, and Thompson had been
locked up among the mosquitoes for being out after ten without the
lantern. I heard how the governor was an old -, but to say what, would
be breaking a confidence: only this may be divulged, that the epithet
was exceedingly complimentary to Sir Robert Wilson. All the while these
conversations were going on, a strange scene of noise and bustle was
passing in the market-place, in front of the window, where Moors, Jews,
Spaniards, soldiers were thronging in the sun; and a ragged fat fellow,
mounted on a tobacco-barrel, with his hat cocked on his ear, was
holding an auction, and roaring with an energy and impudence that would
have done credit to Covent Garden.

The Moorish castle is the only building about the Rock which has an air
at all picturesque or romantic; there is a plain Roman Catholic
cathedral, a hideous new Protestant church of the cigar-divan
architecture, and a Court-house with a portico which is said to be an
imitation of the Parthenon: the ancient religions houses of the Spanish
town are gone, or turned into military residences, and masked so that
you would never know their former pious destination. You walk through
narrow whitewashed lanes, bearing such martial names as are before
mentioned, and by-streets with barracks on either side: small
Newgate-like looking buildings, at the doors of which you may see the
sergeants’ ladies conversing; or at the open windows of the officers’
quarters, Ensign Fipps lying on his sofa and smoking his cigar, or
Lieutenant Simson practising the flute to while away the weary hours of
garrison dulness. I was surprised not to find more persons in the
garrison library, where is a magnificent reading-room, and an admirable
collection of books.

In spite of the scanty herbage and the dust on the trees, the Alameda
is a beautiful walk; of which the vegetation has been as laboriously
cared for as the tremendous fortifications which flank it on either
side. The vast Rock rises on one side with its interminable works of
defence, and Gibraltar Bay is shining on the other, out on which from
the terraces immense cannon are perpetually looking, surrounded by
plantations of cannon-balls and beds of bomb-shells, sufficient, one
would think, to blow away the whole peninsula. The horticultural and
military mixture is indeed very queer: here and there temples, rustic
summer-seats, &c. have been erected in the garden, but you are sure to
see a great squat mortar look up from among the flower-pots: and amidst
the aloes and geraniums sprouts the green petticoat and scarlet coat of
a Highlander. Fatigue-parties are seen winding up the hill, and busy
about the endless cannon-ball plantations; awkward squads are drilling
in the open spaces: sentries marching everywhere, and (this is a
caution to artists) I am told have orders to run any man through who is
discovered making a sketch of the place. It is always beautiful,
especially at evening, when the people are sauntering along the walks,
and the moon is shining on the waters of the bay and the hills and
twinkling white houses of the opposite shore. Then the place becomes
quite romantic: it is too dark to see the dust on the dried leaves; the
cannon-balls do not intrude too much, but have subsided into the shade;
the awkward squads are in bed; even the loungers are gone, the
fan-flirting Spanish ladies, the sallow black-eyed children, and the
trim white-jacketed dandies. A fife is heard from some craft at roost
on the quiet waters somewhere; or a faint cheer from yonder black
steamer at the Mole, which is about to set out on some night
expedition. You forget that the town is at all like Wapping, and
deliver yourself up entirely to romance; the sentries look noble pacing
there, silent in the moonlight, and Sandy’s voice is quite musical as
he challenges with a “Who goes there?”

“All’s Well” is very pleasant when sung decently in tune, and inspires
noble and poetic ideas of duty, courage, and danger: but when you hear
it shouted all the night through, accompanied by a clapping of muskets
in a time of profound peace, the sentinel’s cry becomes no more
romantic to the hearer than it is to the sandy Connaught-man or the
bare-legged Highlander who delivers it. It is best to read about wars
comfortably in Harry Lorrequer or Scott’s novels, in which knights
shout their war-cries, and jovial Irish bayoneteers hurrah, without
depriving you of any blessed rest. Men of a different way of thinking,
however, can suit themselves perfectly at Gibraltar; where there is
marching and counter- marching, challenging and relieving guard all the
night through. And not here in Commercial Square alone, but all over
the huge Rock in the darkness—all through the mysterious zig-zags, and
round the dark cannon-ball pyramids, and along the vast rock-galleries,
and up to the topmost flagstaff, where the sentry can look out over two
seas, poor fellows are marching and clapping muskets, and crying “All’s
Well,” dressed in cap and feather, in place of honest nightcaps best
befitting the decent hours of sleep.

All these martial noises three of us heard to the utmost advantage,
lying on iron bedsteads at the time in a cracked old room on the
ground-floor, the open windows of which looked into the square. No spot
could be more favourably selected for watching the humours of a
garrison town by night. About midnight, the door hard by us was visited
by a party of young officers, who having had quite as much drink as was
good for them, were naturally inclined for more; and when we
remonstrated through the windows, one of them in a young tipsy voice
asked after our mothers, and finally reeled away. How charming is the
conversation of high-spirited youth! I don’t know whether the guard got
hold of them: but certainly if a civilian had been hiccuping through
the streets at that hour, he would have been carried off to the
guard-house, and left to the mercy of the mosquitoes there, and had up
before the Governor in the morning. The young man in the coffee-room
tells me he goes to sleep every night with the keys of Gibraltar under
his pillow. It is an awful image, and somehow completes the notion of
the slumbering fortress. Fancy Sir Robert Wilson, his nose just visible
over the sheets, his night-cap and the huge key (you see the very
identical one in Reynolds’s portrait of Lord Heathfield) peeping out
from under the bolster!

If I entertain you with accounts of inns and nightcaps it is because I
am more familiar with these subjects than with history and
fortifications: as far as I can understand the former, Gibraltar is the
great British depot for smuggling goods into the Peninsula. You see
vessels lying in the harbour, and are told in so many words they are
smugglers: all those smart Spaniards with cigar and mantles are
smugglers, and run tobaccos and cotton into Catalonia; all the
respected merchants of the place are smugglers. The other day a Spanish
revenue vessel was shot to death under the thundering great guns of the
fort, for neglecting to bring to, but it so happened that it was in
chase of a smuggler: in this little corner of her dominions Britain
proclaims war to custom-houses, and protection to free trade. Perhaps
ere a very long day, England may be acting that part towards the world,
which Gibraltar performs towards Spain now; and the last war in which
we shall ever engage may be a custom-house war. For once establish
railroads and abolish preventive duties through Europe, and what is
there left to fight for? It will matter very little then under what
flag people live, and foreign ministers and ambassadors may enjoy a
dignified sinecure; the army will rise to the rank of peaceful
constables, not having any more use for their bayonets than those
worthy people have for their weapons now who accompany the law at
assizes under the name of javelin-men. The apparatus of bombs and
eighty-four- pounders may disappear from the Alameda, and the crops of
cannon- balls which now grow there may give place to other plants more
pleasant to the eye; and the great key of Gibraltar may be left in the
gate for anybody to turn at will, and Sir Robert Wilson may sleep in
quiet.

I am afraid I thought it was rather a release, when, having made up our
minds to examine the Rock in detail and view the magnificent
excavations and galleries, the admiration of all military men, and the
terror of any enemies who may attack the fortress, we received orders
to embark forthwith in the “Tagus,” which was to early us to Malta and
Constantinople. So we took leave of this famous Rock— this great
blunderbuss—which we seized out of the hands of the natural owners a
hundred and forty years ago, and which we have kept ever since
tremendously loaded and cleaned and ready for use. To seize and have it
is doubtless a gallant thing; it is like one of those tests of courage
which one reads of in the chivalrous romances, when, for instance, Sir
Huon of Bordeaux is called upon to prove his knighthood by going to
Babylon and pulling out the Sultan’s beard and front teeth in the midst
of his Court there. But, after all, justice must confess it was rather
hard on the poor Sultan. If we had the Spaniards established at Land’s
End, with impregnable Spanish fortifications on St. Michael’s Mount, we
should perhaps come to the same conclusion. Meanwhile let us hope,
during this long period of deprivation, the Sultan of Spain is
reconciled to the loss of his front teeth and bristling whiskers— let
us even try to think that he is better without them. At all events,
right or wrong, whatever may be our title to the property, there is no
Englishman but must think with pride of the manner in which his
countrymen have kept it, and of the courage, endurance, and sense of
duty with which stout old Eliott and his companions resisted Crillon
and the Spanish battering ships and his fifty thousand men. There seems
to be something more noble in the success of a gallant resistance than
of an attack, however brave. After failing in his attack on the fort,
the French General visited the English Commander who had foiled him,
and parted from him and his garrison in perfect politeness and
good-humour. The English troops, Drinkwater says, gave him thundering
cheers as he went away, and the French in return complimented us on our
gallantry, and lauded the humanity of our people. If we are to go on
murdering each other in the old-fashioned way, what a pity it is that
our battles cannot end in the old-fashioned way too!

One of our fellow-travellers, who had written a book, and had suffered
considerably from sea-sickness during our passage along the coasts of
France and Spain, consoled us all by saying that the very minute we got
into the Mediterranean we might consider ourselves entirely free from
illness; and, in fact, that it was unheard of in the Inland Sea. Even
in the Bay of Gibraltar the water looked bluer than anything I have
ever seen—except Miss Smith’s eyes. I thought, somehow, the delicious
faultless azure never could look angry—just like the eyes before
alluded to—and under this assurance we passed the Strait, and began
coasting the African shore calmly and without the least apprehension,
as if we were as much used to the tempest as Mr. T. P. Cooke.

But when, in spite of the promise of the man who had written the book,
we found ourselves worse than in the worst part of the Bay of Biscay,
or off the storm-lashed rocks of Finisterre, we set down the author in
question as a gross impostor, and had a mind to quarrel with him for
leading us into this cruel error. The most provoking part of the
matter, too, was, that the sky was deliciously clear and cloudless, the
air balmy, the sea so insultingly blue that it seemed as if we had no
right to be ill at all, and that the innumerable little waves that
frisked round about our keel were enjoying an anerithmon gelasma (this
is one of my four Greek quotations: depend on it I will manage to
introduce the other three before the tour is done)—seemed to be
enjoying, I say, the above-named Greek quotation at our expense. Here
is the dismal log of Wednesday, 4th of September: —“All attempts at
dining very fruitless. Basins in requisition. Wind hard ahead. Que
diable allais-je faire dans cette galere? Writing or thinking
impossible: so read ‘Letters from the AEgean.’” These brief words give,
I think, a complete idea of wretchedness, despair, remorse, and
prostration of soul and body. Two days previously we passed the forts
and moles and yellow buildings of Algiers, rising very stately from the
sea, and skirted by gloomy purple lines of African shore, with fires
smoking in the mountains, and lonely settlements here and there.

On the 5th, to the inexpressible joy of all, we reached Valetta, the
entrance to the harbour of which is one of the most stately and
agreeable scenes ever admired by sea-sick traveller. The small basin
was busy with a hundred ships, from the huge guard-ship, which lies
there a city in itself;—merchantmen loading and crews cheering, under
all the flags of the world flaunting in the sunshine; a half-score of
busy black steamers perpetually coming and going, coaling and painting,
and puffing and hissing in and out of harbour; slim men-of-war’s barges
shooting to and fro, with long shining oars flashing like wings over
the water; hundreds of painted town-boats, with high heads and white
awnings,—down to the little tubs in which some naked, tawny young
beggars came paddling up to the steamer, entreating us to let them dive
for halfpence. Round this busy blue water rise rocks, blazing in
sunshine, and covered with every imaginable device of fortification; to
the right, St. Elmo, with flag and lighthouse; and opposite, the
Military Hospital, looking like a palace; and all round, the houses of
the city, for its size the handsomest and most stately in the world.

Nor does it disappoint you on a closer inspection, as many a foreign
town does. The streets are thronged with a lively comfortable-looking
population; the poor seem to inhabit handsome stone palaces, with
balconies and projecting windows of heavy carved stone. The lights and
shadows, the cries and stenches, the fruit-shops and fish-stalls, the
dresses and chatter of all nations; the soldiers in scarlet, and women
in black mantillas; the beggars, boat-men, barrels of pickled herrings
and macaroni; the shovel-hatted priests and bearded capuchins; the
tobacco, grapes, onions, and sunshine; the signboards, bottled-porter
stores, the statues of saints and little chapels which jostle the
stranger’s eyes as he goes up the famous stairs from the Water-gate,
make a scene of such pleasant confusion and liveliness as I have never
witnessed before. And the effect of the groups of multitudinous actors
in this busy cheerful drama is heightened, as it were, by the
decorations of the stage. The sky is delightfully brilliant; all the
houses and ornaments are stately; castle and palaces are rising all
around; and the flag, towers, and walls of Fort St. Elmo look as fresh
and magnificent as if they had been erected only yesterday.

The Strada Reale has a much more courtly appearance than that one
described. Here are palaces, churches, court-houses and libraries, the
genteel London shops, and the latest articles of perfumery. Gay young
officers are strolling about in shell-jackets much too small for them:
midshipmen are clattering by on hired horses; squads of priests,
habited after the fashion of Don Basilio in the opera, are demurely
pacing to and fro; professional beggars run shrieking after the
stranger; and agents for horses, for inns, and for worse places still,
follow him and insinuate the excellence of their goods. The houses
where they are selling carpet-bags and pomatum were the palaces of the
successors of the goodliest company of gallant knights the world ever
heard tell of. It seems unromantic; but THESE were not the romantic
Knights of St. John. The heroic days of the Order ended as the last
Turkish galley lifted anchor after the memorable siege. The present
stately houses were built in times of peace and splendour and decay. I
doubt whether the Auberge de Provence, where the “Union Club”
flourishes now, has ever seen anything more romantic than the pleasant
balls held in the great room there.

The Church of St. John, not a handsome structure without, is
magnificent within: a noble hall covered with a rich embroidery of
gilded carving, the chapels of the different nations on either side,
but not interfering with the main structure, of which the whole is
simple, and the details only splendid; it seemed to me a fitting place
for this wealthy body of aristocratic soldiers, who made their
devotions as it were on parade, and, though on their knees, never
forgot their epaulets or their quarters of nobility. This mixture of
religion and worldly pride seems incongruous at first; but have we not
at church at home similar relics of feudal ceremony?—the verger with
the silver mace who precedes the vicar to the desk; the two chaplains
of my Lord Archbishop, who bow over his Grace as he enters the
communion-table gate; even poor John, who follows my Lady with a
coroneted prayer-book, and makes his conge as he hands it into the pew.
What a chivalrous absurdity is the banner of some high and mighty
prince, hanging over his stall in Windsor Chapel, when you think of the
purpose for which men are supposed to assemble there! The Church of the
Knights of St. John is paved over with sprawling heraldic devices of
the dead gentlemen of the dead Order; as if, in the next world, they
expected to take rank in conformity with their pedigrees, and would be
marshalled into heaven according to the orders of precedence. Cumbrous
handsome paintings adorn the walls and chapels, decorated with pompous
monuments of Grand Masters. Beneath is a crypt, where more of these
honourable and reverend warriors lie, in a state that a Simpson would
admire. In the altar are said to lie three of the most gallant relics
in the world: the keys of Acre, Rhodes, and Jerusalem. What blood was
shed in defending these emblems! What faith, endurance, genius, and
generosity; what pride, hatred, ambition, and savage lust of blood were
roused together for their guardianship!

In the lofty halls and corridors of the Governor’s house, some
portraits of the late Grand Masters still remain: a very fine one, by
Caravaggio, of a knight in gilt armour, hangs in the dining- room, near
a full-length of poor Louis XVI., in Royal robes, the very picture of
uneasy impotency. But the portrait of De Vignacourt is the only one
which has a respectable air; the other chiefs of the famous Society are
pompous old gentlemen in black, with huge periwigs, and crowns round
their hats, and a couple of melancholy pages in yellow and red. But
pages and wigs and Grand Masters have almost faded out of the canvas,
and are vanishing into Hades with a most melancholy indistinctness. The
names of most of these gentlemen, however, live as yet in the forts of
the place, which all seem to have been eager to build and christen: so
that it seems as if, in the Malta mythology, they had been turned into
freestone.

In the armoury is the very suit painted by Caravaggio, by the side of
the armour of the noble old La Valette, whose heroism saved his island
from the efforts of Mustapha and Dragut, and an army quite as fierce
and numerous as that which was baffled before Gibraltar, by similar
courage and resolution. The sword of the last-named famous corsair (a
most truculent little scimitar), thousands of pikes and halberts,
little old cannons and wall-pieces, helmets and cuirasses, which the
knights or their people wore, are trimly arranged against the wall,
and, instead of spiking Turks or arming warriors, now serve to point
morals and adorn tales. And here likewise are kept many thousand
muskets, swords, and boarding-pikes for daily use, and a couple of
ragged old standards of one of the English regiments, who pursued and
conquered in Egypt the remains of the haughty and famous French
republican army, at whose appearance the last knights of Malta flung
open the gates of all their fortresses, and consented to be
extinguished without so much as a remonstrance, or a kick, or a
struggle.

We took a drive into what may be called the country; where the fields
are rocks, and the hedges are stones—passing by the stone gardens of
the Florian, and wondering at the number and handsomeness of the stone
villages and churches rising everywhere among the stony hills. Handsome
villas were passed everywhere, and we drove for a long distance along
the sides of an aqueduct, quite a Royal work of the Caravaggio in gold
armour, the Grand Master De Vignacourt. A most agreeable contrast to
the arid rocks of the general scenery was the garden at the Governor’s
country-house; with the orange-trees and water, its beautiful golden
grapes, luxuriant flowers, and thick cool shrubberies. The eye longs
for this sort of refreshment, after being seared with the hot glare of
the general country; and St. Antonio was as pleasant after Malta as
Malta was after the sea.

We paid the island a subsequent visit in November, passing seventeen
days at an establishment called Fort Manuel there, and by punsters the
Manuel des Voyageurs; where Government accommodates you with quarters;
where the authorities are so attentive as to scent your letters with
aromatic vinegar before you receive them, and so careful of your health
as to lock you up in your room every night lest you should walk in your
sleep, and so over the battlements into the sea—if you escaped drowning
in the sea, the sentries on the opposite shore would fire at you, hence
the nature of the precaution. To drop, however, this satirical strain:
those who know what quarantine is, may fancy that the place somehow
becomes unbearable in which it has been endured. And though the
November climate of Malta is like the most delicious May in England,
and though there is every gaiety and amusement in the town, a
comfortable little opera, a good old library filled full of good old
books (none of your works of modern science, travel, and history, but
good old USELESS books of the last two centuries), and nobody to
trouble you in reading them, and though the society of Valetta is most
hospitable, varied, and agreeable, yet somehow one did not feel SAFE in
the island, with perpetual glimpses of Fort Manuel from the opposite
shore; and, lest the quarantine authorities should have a fancy to
fetch one back again, on a pretext of posthumous plague, we made our
way to Naples by the very first opportunity—those who remained, that
is, of the little Eastern Expedition. They were not all there. The
Giver of life and death had removed two of our company: one was left
behind to die in Egypt, with a mother to bewail his loss, another we
buried in the dismal lazaretto cemetery.

* * *

One is bound to look at this, too, as a part of our journey. Disease
and death are knocking perhaps at your next cabin door. Your kind and
cheery companion has ridden his last ride and emptied his last glass
beside you. And while fond hearts are yearning for him far away, and
his own mind, if conscious, is turning eagerly towards the spot of the
world whither affection or interest calls it—the Great Father summons
the anxious spirit from earth to himself, and ordains that the nearest
and dearest shall meet here no more.

Such an occurrence as a death in a lazaretto, mere selfishness renders
striking. We were walking with him but two days ago on deck. One has a
sketch of him, another his card, with the address written yesterday,
and given with an invitation to come and see him at home in the
country, where his children are looking for him. He is dead in a day,
and buried in the walls of the prison. A doctor felt his pulse by
deputy—a clergyman comes from the town to read the last service over
him—and the friends, who attend his funeral, are marshalled by
lazaretto-guardians, so as not to touch each other. Every man goes back
to his room and applies the lesson to himself. One would not so depart
without seeing again the dear dear faces. We reckon up those we love:
they are but very few, but I think one loves them better than ever now.
Should it be your turn next?—and why not? Is it pity or comfort to
think of that affection which watches and survives you?

The Maker has linked together the whole race of man with this chain of
love. I like to think that there is no man but has had kindly feelings
for some other, and he for his neighbour, until we bind together the
whole family of Adam. Nor does it end here. It joins heaven and earth
together. For my friend or my child of past days is still my friend or
my child to me here, or in the home prepared for us by the Father of
all. If identity survives the grave, as our faith tells us, is it not a
consolation to think that there may be one or two souls among the
purified and just, whose affection watches us invisible, and follows
the poor sinner on earth?




CHAPTER V
ATHENS


Not feeling any enthusiasm myself about Athens, my bounden duty of
course is clear, to sneer and laugh heartily at all who have. In fact,
what business has a lawyer, who was in Pump Court this day three weeks,
and whose common reading is law reports or the newspaper, to pretend to
fall in love for the long vacation with mere poetry, of which I swear a
great deal is very doubtful, and to get up an enthusiasm quite foreign
to his nature and usual calling in life? What call have ladies to
consider Greece “romantic,” they who get their notions of mythology
from the well-known pages of “Tooke’s Pantheon”? What is the reason
that blundering Yorkshire squires, young dandies from Corfu regiments,
jolly sailors from ships in the harbour, and yellow old Indians
returning from Bundelcund, should think proper to be enthusiastic about
a country of which they know nothing; the mere physical beauty of which
they cannot, for the most part, comprehend; and because certain
characters lived in it two thousand four hundred years ago? What have
these people in common with Pericles, what have these ladies in common
with Aspasia (O fie)? Of the race of Englishmen who come wandering
about the tomb of Socrates, do you think the majority would not have
voted to hemlock him? Yes: for the very same superstition which leads
men by the nose now, drove them onward in the days when the lowly
husband of Xantippe died for daring to think simply and to speak the
truth. I know of no quality more magnificent in fools than their faith:
that perfect consciousness they have, that they are doing virtuous and
meritorious actions, when they are performing acts of folly, murdering
Socrates, or pelting Aristides with holy oyster-shells—all for Virtue’s
sake; and a “History of Dulness in all Ages of the World,” is a book
which a philosopher would surely be hanged, but as certainly blessed,
for writing.

If papa and mamma (honour be to them!) had not followed the faith of
their fathers, and thought proper to send away their only beloved son
(afterwards to be celebrated under the name of Titmarsh) into ten
years’ banishment of infernal misery, tyranny, annoyance; to give over
the fresh feelings of the heart of the little Michael Angelo to the
discipline of vulgar bullies, who, in order to lead tender young
children to the Temple of Learning (as they do in the spelling-books),
drive them on with clenched fists and low abuse; if they fainted,
revive them with a thump, or assailed them with a curse; if they were
miserable, consoled them with a brutal jeer—if, I say, my dear parents,
instead of giving me the inestimable benefit of a ten years’ classical
education, had kept me at home with my dear thirteen sisters, it is
probable I should have liked this country of Attica, in sight of the
blue shores of which the present pathetic letter is written; but I was
made so miserable in youth by a classical education, that all connected
with it is disagreeable in my eyes; and I have the same recollection of
Greek in youth that I have of castor-oil.

So in coming in sight of the promontory of Sunium, where the Greek
Muse, in an awful vision, came to me, and said in a patronising way,
“Why, my dear” (she always, the old spinster, adopts this high and
mighty tone)—“Why, my dear, are you not charmed to be in this famous
neighbourhood, in this land of poets and heroes, of whose history your
classical education ought to have made you a master? if it did not, you
have wofully neglected your opportunities, and your dear parents have
wasted their money in sending you to school.” I replied, “Madam, your
company in youth was made so laboriously disagreeable to me, that I
can’t at present reconcile myself to you in age. I read your poets, but
it was in fear and trembling; and a cold sweat is but an ill
accompaniment to poetry. I blundered through your histories; but
history is so dull (saving your presence) of herself, that when the
brutal dulness of a schoolmaster is superadded to her own slow
conversation, the union becomes intolerable: hence I have not the
slightest pleasure in renewing my acquaintance with a lady who has been
the source of so much bodily and mental discomfort to me.” To make a
long story short, I am anxious to apologise for a want of enthusiasm in
the classical line, and to excuse an ignorance which is of the most
undeniable sort.

This is an improper frame of mind for a person visiting the land of
AEschylus and Euripides; add to which, we have been abominably
overcharged at the inn: and what are the blue hills of Attica, the
silver calm basin of Piraeus, the heathery heights of Pentelicus, and
yonder rocks crowned by the Doric columns of the Parthenon, and the
thin Ionic shafts of the Erechtheum, to a man who has had little rest,
and is bitten all over by bugs? Was Alcibiades bitten by bugs, I
wonder; and did the brutes crawl over him as he lay in the rosy arms of
Phryne? I wished all night for Socrates’s hammock or basket, as it is
described in the “Clouds;” in which resting- place, no doubt, the
abominable animals kept perforce clear of him.

A French man-of-war, lying in the silvery little harbour, sternly
eyeing out of its stern portholes a saucy little English corvette
beside, began playing sounding marches as a crowd of boats came
paddling up to the steamer’s side to convey us travellers to shore.
There were Russian schooners and Greek brigs lying in this little bay;
dumpy little windmills whirling round on the sunburnt heights round
about it; an improvised town of quays and marine taverns has sprung up
on the shore; a host of jingling barouches, more miserable than any to
be seen even in Germany, were collected at the landing-place; and the
Greek drivers (how queer they looked in skull-caps, shabby jackets with
profuse embroidery of worsted, and endless petticoats of dirty calico!)
began, in a generous ardour for securing passengers, to abuse each
other’s horses and carriages in the regular London fashion. Satire
could certainly hardly caricature the vehicle in which we were made to
journey to Athens; and it was only by thinking that, bad as they were,
these coaches were much more comfortable contrivances than any
Alcibiades or Cimon ever had, that we consoled ourselves along the
road. It was flat for six miles along the plain to the city: and you
see for the greater part of the way the purple mount on which the
Acropolis rises, and the gleaming houses of the town spread beneath.
Round this wide, yellow, barren plain,—a stunted district of
olive-trees is almost the only vegetation visible—there rises, as it
were, a sort of chorus of the most beautiful mountains; the most
elegant, gracious, and noble the eye ever looked on. These hills did
not appear at all lofty or terrible, but superbly rich and
aristocratic. The clouds were dancing round about them; you could see
their rosy purple shadows sweeping round the clear serene summits of
the hill. To call a hill aristocratic seems affected or absurd; but the
difference between these hills and the others, is the difference
between Newgate Prison and the Travellers’ Club, for instance: both are
buildings; but the one stern, dark, and coarse; the other rich,
elegant, and festive. At least, so I thought. With such a stately
palace as munificent Nature had built for these people, what could they
be themselves but lordly, beautiful, brilliant, brave, and wise? We saw
four Greeks on donkeys on the road (which is a dust-whirlwind where it
is not a puddle); and other four were playing with a dirty pack of
cards, at a barrack that English poets have christened the “Half-way
House.” Does external nature and beauty influence the soul to good? You
go about Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and
wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands Shakspeare
must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense of beauty
which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a Coventry
ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on those very
same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You theorise about the
influence which the climate and appearance of Attica must have had in
ennobling those who were born there: yonder dirty, swindling, ragged
blackguards, lolling over greasy cards three hours before noon,
quarrelling and shrieking, armed to the teeth and afraid to fight, are
bred out of the same land which begot the philosophers and heroes. But
the “Half-way House” is passed by this time, and behold! we are in the
capital of King Otho.

I swear solemnly that I would rather have two hundred a year in Fleet
Street, than be King of the Greeks, with Basileus written before my
name round their beggarly coin; with the bother of perpetual
revolutions in my huge plaster-of-Paris palace, with no amusement but a
drive in the afternoon over a wretched arid country, where roads are
not made, with ambassadors (the deuce knows why, for what good can the
English, or the French, or the Russian party get out of such a bankrupt
alliance as this?) perpetually pulling and tugging at me, away from
honest Germany, where there is beer and aesthetic conversation, and
operas at a small cost. The shabbiness of this place actually beats
Ireland, and that is a strong word. The palace of the Basileus is an
enormous edifice of plaster, in a square containing six houses, three
donkeys, no roads, no fountains (except in the picture of the inn);
backwards it seems to look straight to the mountain—on one side is a
beggarly garden—the King goes out to drive (revolutions permitting) at
five—some four-and-twenty blackguards saunter up to the huge sandhill
of a terrace, as His Majesty passes by in a gilt barouche and an absurd
fancy dress; the gilt barouche goes plunging down the sandhills; the
two dozen soldiers, who have been presenting arms, slouch off to their
quarters; the vast barrack of a palace remains entirely white, ghastly,
and lonely; and, save the braying of a donkey now and then (which
long-eared minstrels are more active and sonorous in Athens than in any
place I know), all is entirely silent round Basileus’s palace. How
could people who knew Leopold fancy he would be so “jolly green” as to
take such a berth? It was only a gobemouche of a Bavarian that could
ever have been induced to accept it.

I beseech you to believe that it was not the bill and the bugs at the
inn which induced the writer hereof to speak so slightingly of the
residence of Basileus. These evils are now cured and forgotten. This is
written off the leaden flats and mounds which they call the Troad. It
is stern justice alone which pronounces this excruciating sentence. It
was a farce to make this place into a kingly capital; and I make no
manner of doubt that King Otho, the very day he can get away
unperceived, and get together the passage- money, will be off for dear
old Deutschland, Fatherland, Beerland!

I have never seen a town in England which may be compared to this; for
though Herne Bay is a ruin now, money was once spent upon it and houses
built; here, beyond a few score of mansions comfortably laid out, the
town is little better than a rickety agglomeration of larger and
smaller huts, tricked out here and there with the most absurd cracked
ornaments and cheap attempts at elegance. But neatness is the elegance
of poverty, and these people despise such a homely ornament. I have got
a map with squares, fountains, theatres, public gardens, and Places
d’Othon marked out; but they only exist in the paper capital—the
wretched tumble-down wooden one boasts of none.

One is obliged to come back to the old disagreeable comparison of
Ireland. Athens may be about as wealthy a place as Carlow or
Killarney—the streets swarm with idle crowds, the innumerable little
lanes flow over with dirty little children, they are playing and
puddling about in the dirt everywhere, with great big eyes, yellow
faces, and the queerest little gowns and skull-caps. But in the outer
man, the Greek has far the advantage of the Irishman: most of them are
well and decently dressed (if five-and-twenty yards of petticoat may
not be called decent, what may?), they swagger to and fro with huge
knives in their girdles. Almost all the men are handsome, but live
hard, it is said, in order to decorate their backs with those fine
clothes of theirs. I have seen but two or three handsome women, and
these had the great drawback which is common to the race—I mean, a
sallow, greasy, coarse complexion, at which it was not advisable to
look too closely.

And on this score I think we English may pride ourselves on possessing
an advantage (by WE, I mean the lovely ladies to whom this is addressed
with the most respectful compliments) over the most classical country
in the world. I don’t care for beauty which will only bear to be looked
at from a distance, like a scene in a theatre. What is the most
beautiful nose in the world, if it be covered with a skin of the
texture and colour of coarse whitey- brown paper; and if Nature has
made it as slippery and shining as though it had been anointed with
pomatum? They may talk about beauty, but would you wear a flower that
had been dipped in a grease-pot? No; give me a fresh, dewy, healthy
rose out of Somersetshire; not one of those superb, tawdry, unwholesome
exotics, which are only good to make poems about. Lord Byron wrote more
cant of this sort than any poet I know of. Think of “the peasant girls
with dark blue eyes” of the Rhine—the brown-faced, flat-nosed,
thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of “filling high a cup of Samian
wine;” small beer is nectar compared to it, and Byron himself always
drank gin. That man never wrote from his heart. He got up rapture and
enthusiasm with an eye to the public; but this is dangerous ground,
even more dangerous than to look Athens full in the face, and say that
your eyes are not dazzled by its beauty. The Great Public admires
Greece and Byron: the public knows best. Murray’s “Guide-book” calls
the latter “our native bard.” Our native bard! Mon Dieu! HE
Shakspeare’s, Milton’s, Keats’s, Scott’s native bard! Well, woe be to
the man who denies the public gods!

The truth is, then, that Athens is a disappointment; and I am angry
that it should be so. To a skilled antiquarian, or an enthusiastic
Greek scholar, the feelings created by a sight of the place of course
will be different; but you who would be inspired by it must undergo a
long preparation of reading, and possess, too, a particular feeling;
both of which, I suspect, are uncommon in our busy commercial
newspaper-reading country. Men only say they are enthusiastic about the
Greek and Roman authors and history, because it is considered proper
and respectable. And we know how gentlemen in Baker Street have
editions of the classics handsomely bound in the library, and how they
use them. Of course they don’t retire to read the newspaper; it is to
look over a favourite ode of Pindar, or to discuss an obscure passage
in Athenaeus! Of course country magistrates and Members of Parliament
are always studying Demosthenes and Cicero; we know it from their
continual habit of quoting the Latin grammar in Parliament. But it is
agreed that the classics are respectable; therefore we are to be
enthusiastic about them. Also let us admit that Byron is to be held up
as “our native bard.”

I am not so entire a heathen as to be insensible to the beauty of those
relics of Greek art, of which men much more learned and enthusiastic
have written such piles of descriptions. I thought I could recognise
the towering beauty of the prodigious columns of the Temple of Jupiter;
and admire the astonishing grace, severity, elegance, completeness of
the Parthenon. The little Temple of Victory, with its fluted Corinthian
shafts, blazed under the sun almost as fresh as it must have appeared
to the eyes of its founders; I saw nothing more charming and brilliant,
more graceful, festive, and aristocratic than this sumptuous little
building. The Roman remains which lie in the town below look like the
works of barbarians beside these perfect structures. They jar strangely
on the eye, after it has been accustoming itself to perfect harmony and
proportions. If, as the schoolmaster tells us, the Greek writing is as
complete as the Greek art; if an ode of Pindar is as glittering and
pure as the Temple of Victory; or a discourse of Plato as polished and
calm as yonder mystical portico of the Erechtheum: what treasures of
the senses and delights of the imagination have those lost to whom the
Greek books are as good as sealed!

And yet one meets with very dull first-class men. Genius won’t
transplant from one brain to another, or is ruined in the carriage,
like fine Burgundy. Sir Robert Peel and Sir John Hobhouse are both good
scholars; but their poetry in Parliament does not strike one as fine.
Muzzle, the schoolmaster, who is bullying poor trembling little boys,
was a fine scholar when he was a sizar, and a ruffian then and ever
since. Where is the great poet, since the days of Milton, who has
improved the natural offshoots of his brain by grafting it from the
Athenian tree?

I had a volume of Tennyson in my pocket, which somehow settled that
question, and ended the querulous dispute between me and Conscience,
under the shape of the neglected and irritated Greek muse, which had
been going on ever since I had commenced my walk about Athens. The old
spinster saw me wince at the idea of the author of Dora and Ulysses,
and tried to follow up her advantage by farther hints of time lost, and
precious opportunities thrown away. “You might have written poems like
them,” said she; “or, no, not like them perhaps, but you might have
done a neat prize poem, and pleased your papa and mamma. You might have
translated Jack and Jill into Greek iambics, and been a credit to your
college.” I turned testily away from her. “Madam,” says I, “because an
eagle houses on a mountain, or soars to the sun, don’t you be angry
with a sparrow that perches on a garret window, or twitters on a twig.
Leave me to myself: look, my beak is not aquiline by any means.”

And so, my dear friend, you who have been reading this last page in
wonder, and who, instead of a description of Athens, have been
accommodated with a lament on the part of the writer, that he was idle
at school, and does not know Greek, excuse this momentary outbreak of
egotistic despondency. To say truth, dear Jones, when one walks among
the nests of the eagles, and sees the prodigious eggs they laid, a
certain feeling of discomfiture must come over us smaller birds. You
and I could not invent—it even stretches our minds painfully to try and
comprehend part of the beauty of the Parthenon—ever so little of
it,—the beauty of a single column,—a fragment of a broken shaft lying
under the astonishing blue sky there, in the midst of that unrivalled
landscape. There may be grander aspects of nature, but none more
deliciously beautiful. The hills rise in perfect harmony, and fall in
the most exquisite cadences—the sea seems brighter, the islands more
purple, the clouds more light and rosy than elsewhere. As you look up
through the open roof, you are almost oppressed by the serene depth of
the blue overhead. Look even at the fragments of the marble, how soft
and pure it is, glittering and white like fresh snow! “I was all
beautiful,” it seems to say: “even the hidden parts of me were
spotless, precious, and fair”—and so, musing over this wonderful scene,
perhaps I get some feeble glimpse or idea of that ancient Greek spirit
which peopled it with sublime races of heroes and gods; {1} and which I
never could get out of a Greek book,—no, not though Muzzle flung it at
my head.




CHAPTER VI
SMYRNA—FIRST GLIMPSES OF THE EAST


I am glad that the Turkish part of Athens was extinct, so that I should
not be baulked of the pleasure of entering an Eastern town by an
introduction to any garbled or incomplete specimen of one. Smyrna seems
to me the most Eastern of all I have seen; as Calais will probably
remain to the Englishman the most French town in the world. The
jack-boots of the postilions don’t seem so huge elsewhere, or the tight
stockings of the maid-servants so Gallic. The churches and the
ramparts, and the little soldiers on them, remain for ever impressed
upon your memory; from which larger temples and buildings, and whole
armies have subsequently disappeared: and the first words of actual
French heard spoken, and the first dinner at “Quillacq’s,” remain after
twenty years as clear as on the first day. Dear Jones, can’t you
remember the exact smack of the white hermitage, and the toothless old
fellow singing “Largo al factotum”?

The first day in the East is like that. After that there is nothing.
The wonder is gone, and the thrill of that delightful shock, which so
seldom touches the nerves of plain men of the world, though they seek
for it everywhere. One such looked out at Smyrna from our steamer, and
yawned without the least excitement, and did not betray the slightest
emotion, as boats with real Turks on board came up to the ship. There
lay the town with minarets and cypresses, domes and castles; great guns
were firing off, and the blood-red flag of the Sultan flaring over the
fort ever since sunrise; woods and mountains came down to the gulf’s
edge, and as you looked at them with the telescope, there peeped out of
the general mass a score of pleasant episodes of Eastern life—there
were cottages with quaint roofs; silent cool kiosks, where the chief of
the eunuchs brings down the ladies of the harem. I saw Hassan, the
fisherman, getting his nets; and Ali Baba going off with his donkey to
the great forest for wood. Smith looked at these wonders quite unmoved;
and I was surprised at his apathy; but he had been at Smyrna before. A
man only sees the miracle once; though you yearn over it ever so, it
won’t come again. I saw nothing of Ali Baba and Hassan the next time we
came to Smyrna, and had some doubts (recollecting the badness of the
inn) about landing at all. A person who wishes to understand France or
the East should come in a yacht to Calais or Smyrna, land for two
hours, and never afterwards go back again.

But those two hours are beyond measure delightful. Some of us were
querulous up to that time, and doubted of the wisdom of making the
voyage. Lisbon, we owned, was a failure; Athens a dead failure; Malta
very well, but not worth the trouble and sea-sickness: in fact,
Baden-Baden or Devonshire would be a better move than this; when Smyrna
came, and rebuked all mutinous Cockneys into silence. Some men may read
this who are in want of a sensation. If they love the odd and
picturesque, if they loved the “Arabian Nights” in their youth, let
them book themselves on board one of the Peninsular and Oriental
vessels, and try one DIP into Constantinople or Smyrna. Walk into the
bazaar, and the East is unveiled to you: how often and often have you
tried to fancy this, lying out on a summer holiday at school! It is
wonderful, too, how LIKE it is: you may imagine that you have been in
the place before, you seem to know it so well!

The beauty of that poetry is, to me, that it was never too handsome;
there is no fatigue of sublimity about it. Shacabac and the little
Barber play as great a part in it as the heroes; there are no
uncomfortable sensations of terror; you may be familiar with the great
Afreet, who was going to execute the travellers for killing his son
with a date-stone. Morgiana, when she kills the forty robbers with
boiling oil, does not seem to hurt them in the least; and though King
Schahriar makes a practice of cutting off his wives’ heads, yet you
fancy they have got them on again in some of the back rooms of the
palace, where they are dancing and playing on dulcimers. How fresh,
easy, good-natured, is all this! How delightful is that notion of the
pleasant Eastern people about knowledge, where the height of science is
made to consist in the answering of riddles! and all the mathematicians
and magicians bring their great beards to bear on a conundrum!

When I got into the bazaar among this race, somehow I felt as if they
were all friends. There sat the merchants in their little shops, quiet
and solemn, but with friendly looks. There was no smoking, it was the
Ramazan; no eating, the fish and meat fizzing in the enormous pots of
the cook-shops are only for the Christians. The children abounded; the
law is not so stringent upon them, and many wandering merchants were
there selling figs (in the name of the Prophet, doubtless) for their
benefit, and elbowing onwards with baskets of grapes and cucumbers.
Countrymen passed bristling over with arms, each with a huge bellyful
of pistols and daggers in his girdle; fierce, but not the least
dangerous. Wild swarthy Arabs, who had come in with the caravans,
walked solemnly about, very different in look and demeanour from the
sleek inhabitants of the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked,
their shops tended by sallow-faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled
and welcomed you in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colours; and women,
with black nose-bags and shuffling yellow slippers, chattered and
bargained at the doors of the little shops. There was the rope quarter
and the sweetmeat quarter, and the pipe bazaar and the arm bazaar, and
the little turned-up shoe quarter, and the shops where ready-made
jackets and pelisses were swinging, and the region where, under the
ragged awning, regiments of tailors were at work. The sun peeps through
these awnings of mat or canvas, which are hung over the narrow lanes of
the bazaar, and ornaments them with a thousand freaks of light and
shadow. Cogia Hassan Alhabbal’s shop is in a blaze of light; while his
neighbour, the barber and coffee-house keeper, has his premises, his
low seats and narghiles, his queer pots and basins, in the shade. The
cobblers are always good- natured; there was one who, I am sure, has
been revealed to me in my dreams, in a dirty old green turban, with a
pleasant wrinkled face like an apple, twinkling his little grey eyes as
he held them up to talk to the gossips, and smiling under a delightful
old grey beard, which did the heart good to see. You divine the
conversation between him and the cucumber-man, as the Sultan used to
understand the language of birds. Are any of those cucumbers stuffed
with pearls, and is that Armenian with the black square turban Haroun
Alraschid in disguise, standing yonder by the fountain where the
children are drinking—the gleaming marble fountain, chequered all over
with light and shadow, and engraved with delicate arabesques and
sentences from the Koran?

But the greatest sensation of all is when the camels come. Whole
strings of real camels, better even than in the procession of Blue
Beard, with soft rolling eyes and bended necks, swaying from one side
of the bazaar to the other to and fro, and treading gingerly with their
great feet. O you fairy dreams of boyhood! O you sweet meditations of
half-holidays, here you are realised for half-an- hour! The genius
which presides over youth led us to do a good action that day. There
was a man sitting in an open room, ornamented with fine long-tailed
sentences of the Koran: some in red, some in blue; some written
diagonally over the paper; some so shaped as to represent ships,
dragons, or mysterious animals. The man squatted on a carpet in the
middle of this room, with folded arms, waggling his head to and fro,
swaying about, and singing through his nose choice phrases from the
sacred work. But from the room above came a clear noise of many little
shouting voices, much more musical than that of Naso in the matted
parlour, and the guide told us it was a school, so we went upstairs to
look.

I declare, on my conscience, the master was in the act of bastinadoing
a little mulatto boy; his feet were in a bar, and the brute was laying
on with a cane; so we witnessed the howling of the poor boy, and the
confusion of the brute who was administering the correction. The other
children were made to shout, I believe, to drown the noise of their
little comrade’s howling; but the punishment was instantly discontinued
as our hats came up over the stair-trap, and the boy cast loose, and
the bamboo huddled into a corner, and the schoolmaster stood before us
abashed. All the small scholars in red caps, and the little girls in
gaudy handkerchiefs, turned their big wondering dark eyes towards us;
and the caning was over for THAT time, let us trust. I don’t envy some
schoolmasters in a future state. I pity that poor little blubbering
Mahometan: he will never be able to relish the “Arabian Nights” in the
original, all his life long.

From this scene we rushed off somewhat discomposed to make a breakfast
off red mullets and grapes, melons, pomegranates, and Smyrna wine, at a
dirty little comfortable inn, to which we were recommended: and from
the windows of which we had a fine cheerful view of the gulf and its
busy craft, and the loungers and merchants along the shore. There were
camels unloading at one wharf, and piles of melons much bigger than the
Gibraltar cannon-balls at another. It was the fig-season, and we passed
through several alleys encumbered with long rows of fig-dressers,
children and women for the most part, who were packing the fruit
diligently into drums, dipping them in salt-water first, and spreading
them neatly over with leaves; while the figs and leaves are drying,
large white worms crawl out of them, and swarm over the decks of the
ships which carry them to Europe and to England, where small children
eat them with pleasure—I mean the figs, not the worms—and where they
are still served at wine-parties at the Universities. When fresh they
are not better than elsewhere; but the melons are of admirable flavour,
and so large, that Cinderella might almost be accommodated with a coach
made of a big one, without any very great distension of its original
proportions.

Our guide, an accomplished swindler, demanded two dollars as the fee
for entering the mosque, which others of our party subsequently saw for
sixpence, so we did not care to examine that place of worship. But
there were other cheaper sights, which were to the full as picturesque,
for which there was no call to pay money, or, indeed, for a day,
scarcely to move at all. I doubt whether a man who would smoke his pipe
on a bazaar counter all day, and let the city flow by him, would not be
almost as well employed as the most active curiosity-hunter.

To be sure he would not see the women. Those in the bazaar were shabby
people for the most part, whose black masks nobody would feel a
curiosity to remove. You could see no more of their figures than if
they had been stuffed in bolsters; and even their feet were brought to
a general splay uniformity by the double yellow slippers which the
wives of true believers wear. But it is in the Greek and Armenian
quarters, and among those poor Christians who were pulling figs, that
you see the beauties; and a man of a generous disposition may lose his
heart half-a-dozen times a day in Smyrna. There was the pretty maid at
work at a tambour-frame in an open porch, with an old duenna spinning
by her side, and a goat tied up to the railings of the little
court-garden; there was the nymph who came down the stair with the
pitcher on her head, and gazed with great calm eyes, as large and
stately as Juno’s; there was the gentle mother, bending over a queer
cradle, in which lay a small crying bundle of infancy. All these three
charmers were seen in a single street in the Armenian quarter, where
the house-doors are all open, and the women of the families sit under
the arches in the court. There was the fig-girl, beautiful beyond all
others, with an immense coil of deep black hair twisted round a head of
which Raphael was worthy to draw the outline and Titian to paint the
colour. I wonder the Sultan has not swept her off, or that the Persian
merchants, who come with silks and sweetmeats, have not kidnapped her
for the Shah of Tehran.

We went to see the Persian merchants at their khan, and purchased some
silks there from a swarthy black-bearded man, with a conical cap of
lambswool. Is it not hard to think that silks bought of a man in a
lambswool cap, in a caravanserai, brought hither on the backs of
camels, should have been manufactured after all at Lyons? Others of our
party bought carpets, for which the town is famous; and there was one
who absolutely laid in a stock of real Smyrna figs; and purchased three
or four real Smyrna sponges for his carriage; so strong was his passion
for the genuine article.

I wonder that no painter has given us familiar views of the East: not
processions, grand sultans, or magnificent landscapes; but faithful
transcripts of everyday Oriental life, such as each street will supply
to him. The camels afford endless motives, couched in the
market-places, lying by thousands in the camel-square, snorting and
bubbling after their manner, the sun blazing down on their backs, their
slaves and keepers lying behind them in the shade: and the Caravan
Bridge, above all, would afford a painter subjects for a dozen of
pictures. Over this Roman arch, which crosses the Meles river, all the
caravans pass on their entrance to the town. On one side, as we sat and
looked at it, was a great row of plane- trees; on the opposite bank, a
deep wood of tall cypresses—in the midst of which rose up innumerable
grey tombs, surmounted with the turbans of the defunct believers.
Beside the stream, the view was less gloomy. There was under the
plane-trees a little coffee- house, shaded by a trellis-work, covered
over with a vine, and ornamented with many rows of shining pots and
water-pipes, for which there was no use at noon-day now, in the time of
Ramazan. Hard by the coffee-house was a garden and a bubbling marble
fountain, and over the stream was a broken summer-house, to which
amateurs may ascend for the purpose of examining the river; and all
round the plane-trees plenty of stools for those who were inclined to
sit and drink sweet thick coffee, or cool lemonade made of fresh green
citrons. The master of the house, dressed in a white turban and light
blue pelisse, lolled under the coffee-house awning; the slave in white
with a crimson striped jacket, his face as black as ebony, brought us
pipes and lemonade again, and returned to his station at the
coffee-house, where he curled his black legs together, and began
singing out of his flat nose to the thrumming of a long guitar with
wire strings. The instrument was not bigger than a soup-ladle, with a
long straight handle, but its music pleased the performer; for his eyes
rolled shining about, and his head wagged, and he grinned with an
innocent intensity of enjoyment that did one good to look at. And there
was a friend to share his pleasure: a Turk dressed in scarlet, and
covered all over with daggers and pistols, sat leaning forward on his
little stool, rocking about, and grinning quite as eagerly as the black
minstrel. As he sang and we listened, figures of women bearing pitchers
went passing over the Roman bridge, which we saw between the large
trunks of the planes; or grey forms of camels were seen stalking across
it, the string preceded by the little donkey, who is always here their
long-eared conductor.

These are very humble incidents of travel. Wherever the steamboat
touches the shore adventure retreats into the interior, and what is
called romance vanishes. It won’t bear the vulgar gaze; or rather the
light of common day puts it out, and it is only in the dark that it
shines at all. There is no cursing and insulting of Giaours now. If a
Cockney looks or behaves in a particularly ridiculous way, the little
Turks come out and laugh at him. A Londoner is no longer a spittoon for
true believers: and now that dark Hassan sits in his divan and drinks
champagne, and Selim has a French watch, and Zuleika perhaps takes
Morison’s pills, Byronism becomes absurd instead of sublime, and is
only a foolish expression of Cockney wonder. They still occasionally
beat a man for going into a mosque, but this is almost the only sign of
ferocious vitality left in the Turk of the Mediterranean coast, and
strangers may enter scores of mosques without molestation. The
paddle-wheel is the great conqueror. Wherever the captain cries “Stop
her!” Civilisation stops, and lands in the ship’s boat, and makes a
permanent acquaintance with the savages on shore. Whole hosts of
crusaders have passed and died, and butchered here in vain. But to
manufacture European iron into pikes and helmets was a waste of metal:
in the shape of piston-rods and furnace-pokers it is irresistible; and
I think an allegory might be made showing how much stronger commerce is
than chivalry, and finishing with a grand image of Mahomet’s crescent
being extinguished in Fulton’s boiler.

This I thought was the moral of the day’s sights and adventures. We
pulled off to the steamer in the afternoon—the Inbat blowing fresh, and
setting all the craft in the gulf dancing over its blue waters. We were
presently under way again, the captain ordering his engines to work
only at half power, so that a French steamer which was quitting Smyrna
at the same time might come up with us, and fancy she could beat their
irresistible, “Tagus.” Vain hope! Just as the Frenchman neared us, the
“Tagus” shot out like an arrow, and the discomfited Frenchman went
behind. Though we all relished the joke exceedingly, there was a French
gentleman on board who did not seem to be by any means tickled with it;
but he had received papers at Smyrna, containing news of Marshal
Bugeaud’s victory at Isly, and had this land victory to set against our
harmless little triumph at sea.

That night we rounded the island of Mitylene: and the next day the
coast of Troy was in sight, and the tomb of Achilles—a dismal- looking
mound that rises in a low dreary barren shore—less lively and not more
picturesque than the Scheldt or the mouth of the Thames. Then we passed
Tenedos and the forts and town at the mouth of the Dardanelles. The
weather was not too hot, the water as smooth as at Putney, and
everybody happy and excited at the thought of seeing Constantinople
to-morrow. We had music on board all the way from Smyrna. A German
commis-voyageur, with a guitar, who had passed unnoticed until that
time, produced his instrument about mid-day, and began to whistle
waltzes. He whistled so divinely that the ladies left their cabins, and
men laid down their books. He whistled a polka so bewitchingly that two
young Oxford men began whirling round the deck, and performed that
popular dance with much agility until they sank down tired. He still
continued an unabated whistling, and as nobody would dance, pulled off
his coat, produced a pair of castanets, and whistling a mazurka,
performed it with tremendous agility. His whistling made everybody gay
and happy— made those acquainted who had not spoken before, and
inspired such a feeling of hilarity in the ship, that that night, as we
floated over the Sea of Marmora, a general vote was expressed for
broiled bones and a regular supper-party. Punch was brewed, and
speeches were made, and, after a lapse of fifteen years, I heard the
“Old English Gentleman” and “Bright Chanticleer Proclaims the Morn,”
sung in such style that you would almost fancy the proctors must hear,
and send us all home.




CHAPTER VII
CONSTANTINOPLE


When we arose at sunrise to see the famous entry to Constantinople, we
found, in the place of the city and the sun, a bright white fog, which
hid both from sight, and which only disappeared as the vessel advanced
towards the Golden Horn. There the fog cleared off as it were by
flakes, and as you see gauze curtains lifted away, one by one, before a
great fairy scene at the theatre. This will give idea enough of the
fog; the difficulty is to describe the scene afterwards, which was in
truth the great fairy scene, than which it is impossible to conceive
anything more brilliant and magnificent. I can’t go to any more
romantic place than Drury Lane to draw my similes from—Drury Lane, such
as we used to see it in our youth, when to our sight the grand last
pictures of the melodrama or pantomime were as magnificent as any
objects of nature we have seen with maturer eyes. Well, the view of
Constantinople is as fine as any of Stanfield’s best theatrical
pictures, seen at the best period of youth, when fancy had all the
bloom on her—when all the heroines who danced before the scene appeared
as ravishing beauties, when there shone an unearthly splendour about
Baker and Diddear—and the sound of the bugles and fiddles, and the
cheerful clang of the cymbals, as the scene unrolled, and the gorgeous
procession meandered triumphantly through it—caused a thrill of
pleasure, and awakened an innocent fulness of sensual enjoyment that is
only given to boys.

The above sentence contains the following propositions:- The enjoyments
of boyish fancy are the most intense and delicious in the world.
Stanfield’s panorama used to be the realisation of the most intense
youthful fancy. I puzzle my brains and find no better likeness for the
place. The view of Constantinople resembles the ne plus ultra of a
Stanfield diorama, with a glorious accompaniment of music, spangled
houris, warriors, and winding processions, feasting the eyes and the
soul with light, splendour, and harmony. If you were never in this way
during your youth ravished at the play-house, of course the whole
comparison is useless: and you have no idea, from this description, of
the effect which Constantinople produces on the mind. But if you were
never affected by a theatre, no words can work upon your fancy, and
typographical attempts to move it are of no use. For, suppose we
combine mosque, minaret, gold, cypress, water, blue, caiques,
seventy-four, Galata, Tophana, Ramazan, Backallum, and so forth,
together, in ever so many ways, your imagination will never be able to
depict a city out of them. Or, suppose I say the Mosque of St. Sophia
is four hundred and seventy-three feet in height, measuring from the
middle nail of the gilt crescent surmounting the dome to the ring in
the centre stone; the circle of the dome is one hundred and
twenty-three feet in diameter, the windows ninety-seven in number—and
all this may be true, for anything I know to the contrary: yet who is
to get an idea of St. Sophia from dates, proper names, and calculations
with a measuring-line? It can’t be done by giving the age and
measurement of all the buildings along the river, the names of all the
boatmen who ply on it. Has your fancy, which pooh-poohs a simile, faith
enough to build a city with a foot-rule? Enough said about descriptions
and similes (though whenever I am uncertain of one I am naturally most
anxious to fight for it): it is a scene not perhaps sublime, but
charming, magnificent, and cheerful beyond any I have ever seen—the
most superb combination of city and gardens, domes and shipping, hills
and water, with the healthiest breeze blowing over it, and above it the
brightest and most cheerful sky.

It is proper, they say, to be disappointed on entering the town, or any
of the various quarters of it, because the houses are not so
magnificent on inspection and seen singly as they are when beheld en
masse from the waters. But why form expectations so lofty? If you see a
group of peasants picturesquely disposed at a fair, you don’t suppose
that they are all faultless beauties, or that the men’s coats have no
rags, and the women’s gowns are made of silk and velvet: the wild
ugliness of the interior of Constantinople or Pera has a charm of its
own, greatly more amusing than rows of red bricks or drab stones,
however symmetrical. With brick or stone they could never form those
fantastic ornaments, railings, balconies, roofs, galleries, which jut
in and out of the rugged houses of the city. As we went from Galata to
Pera up a steep hill, which newcomers ascend with some difficulty, but
which a porter, with a couple of hundredweight on his back, paces up
without turning a hair, I thought the wooden houses far from being
disagreeable objects, sights quite as surprising and striking as the
grand one we had just left.

I do not know how the custom-house of His Highness is made to be a
profitable speculation. As I left the ship, a man pulled after my boat,
and asked for backsheesh, which was given him to the amount of about
twopence. He was a custom-house officer, but I doubt whether this sum
which he levied ever went to the revenue.

I can fancy the scene about the quays somewhat to resemble the river of
London in olden times, before coal-smoke had darkened the whole city
with soot, and when, according to the old writers, there really was
bright weather. The fleets of caiques bustling along the shore, or
scudding over the blue water, are beautiful to look at: in Hollar’s
print London river is so studded over with wherry- boats, which bridges
and steamers have since destroyed. Here the caique is still in full
perfection: there are thirty thousand boats of the kind plying between
the cities; every boat is neat, and trimly carved and painted; and I
scarcely saw a man pulling in one of them that was not a fine specimen
of his race, brawny and brown, with an open chest and a handsome face.
They wear a thin shirt of exceedingly light cotton, which leaves their
fine brown limbs full play; and with a purple sea for a background,
every one of these dashing boats forms a brilliant and glittering
picture. Passengers squat in the inside of the boat; so that as it
passes you see little more than the heads of the true believers, with
their red fez and blue tassel, and that placid gravity of expression
which the sucking of a tobacco-pipe is sure to give to a man.

The Bosphorus is enlivened by a multiplicity of other kinds of craft.
There are the dirty men-of-war’s boats of the Russians, with unwashed
mangy crews; the great ferry-boats carrying hundreds of passengers to
the villages; the melon-boats piled up with enormous golden fruit; His
Excellency the Pasha’s boat, with twelve men bending to their oars; and
His Highness’s own caique, with a head like a serpent, and
eight-and-twenty tugging oarsmen, that goes shooting by amidst the
thundering of the cannon. Ships and steamers, with black sides and
flaunting colours, are moored everywhere, showing their flags, Russian
and English, Austrian, American, and Greek; and along the quays country
ships from the Black Sea or the islands, with high carved poops and
bows, such as you see in the pictures of the shipping of the
seventeenth century. The vast groves and towers, domes and quays, tall
minarets and spired spreading mosques of the three cities, rise all
around in endless magnificence and variety, and render this
water-street a scene of such delightful liveliness and beauty, that one
never tires of looking at it. I lost a great number of the sights in
and round Constantinople through the beauty of this admirable scene:
but what are sights after all? and isn’t that the best sight which
makes you most happy?

We were lodged at Pera at Misseri’s Hotel, the host of which has been
made famous ere this time by the excellent book “Eothen,”—a work for
which all the passengers on board our ship had been battling, and which
had charmed all—from our great statesman, our polished lawyer, our
young Oxonian, who sighed over certain passages that he feared were
wicked, down to the writer of this, who, after perusing it with
delight, laid it down with wonder, exclaiming, “Aut Diabolus aut”—a
book which has since (greatest miracle of all) excited a feeling of
warmth and admiration in the bosom of the god-like, impartial, stony
Athenaeum. Misseri, the faithful and chivalrous Tartar, is transformed
into the most quiet and gentlemanlike of landlords, a great deal more
gentlemanlike in manner and appearance than most of us who sat at his
table, and smoked cool pipes on his house-top, as we looked over the
hill and the Russian palace to the water, and the Seraglio gardens
shining in the blue. We confronted Misseri, “Eothen” in hand, and
found, on examining him, that it WAS “aut Diabolus aut amicus”—but the
name is a secret; I will never breathe it, though I am dying to tell
it.

The last good description of a Turkish bath, I think, was Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu’s—which voluptuous picture must have been painted at
least a hundred and thirty years ago; so that another sketch may be
attempted by a humbler artist in a different manner. The Turkish bath
is certainly a novel sensation to an Englishman, and may be set down as
a most queer and surprising event of his life. I made the
valet-de-place or dragoman (it is rather a fine thing to have a
dragoman in one’s service) conduct me forthwith to the best appointed
hummums in the neighbourhood; and we walked to a house at Tophana, and
into a spacious hall lighted from above, which is the cooling-room of
the bath.

The spacious hall has a large fountain in the midst, a painted gallery
running round it; and many ropes stretched from one gallery to another,
ornamented with profuse draperies of towels and blue cloths, for the
use of the frequenters of the place. All round the room and the
galleries were matted inclosures, fitted with numerous neat beds and
cushions for reposing on, where lay a dozen of true believers smoking,
or sleeping, or in the happy half-dozing state. I was led up to one of
these beds, to rather a retired corner, in consideration of my modesty;
and to the next bed presently came a dancing dervish, who forthwith
began to prepare for the bath.

When the dancing dervish had taken off his yellow sugar-loaf cap, his
gown, shawl, &c., he was arrayed in two large blue cloths; a white one
being thrown over his shoulders, and another in the shape of a turban
plaited neatly round his head; the garments of which he divested
himself were folded up in another linen, and neatly put by. I beg leave
to state I was treated in precisely the same manner as the dancing
dervish.

The reverend gentleman then put on a pair of wooden pattens, which
elevated him about six inches from the ground; and walked down the
stairs, and paddled across the moist marble floor of the hall, and in
at a little door, by the which also Titmarsh entered. But I had none of
the professional agility of the dancing dervish; I staggered about very
ludicrously upon the high wooden pattens; and should have been down on
my nose several times, had not the dragoman and the master of the bath
supported me down the stairs and across the hall. Dressed in three
large cotton napkins, with a white turban round my head, I thought of
Pall Mall with a sort of despair. I passed the little door, it was
closed behind me—I was in the dark—I couldn’t speak the language—in a
white turban. Mon Dieu! what was going to happen?

The dark room was the tepidarium, a moist oozing arched den, with a
light faintly streaming from an orifice in the domed ceiling. Yells of
frantic laughter and song came booming and clanging through the echoing
arches, the doors clapped to with loud reverberations. It was the
laughter of the followers of Mahound, rollicking and taking their
pleasure in the public bath. I could not go into that place: I swore I
would not; they promised me a private room, and the dragoman left me.
My agony at parting from that Christian cannot be described.

When you get into the sudarium, or hot room, your first sensations only
occur about half a minute after entrance, when you feel that you are
choking. I found myself in that state, seated on a marble slab; the
bath man was gone; he had taken away the cotton turban and shoulder
shawl: I saw I was in a narrow room of marble, with a vaulted roof, and
a fountain of warm and cold water; the atmosphere was in a steam, the
choking sensation went off, and I felt a sort of pleasure presently in
a soft boiling simmer, which, no doubt, potatoes feel when they are
steaming. You are left in this state for about ten minutes: it is warm
certainly, but odd and pleasant, and disposes the mind to reverie.

But let any delicate mind in Baker Street fancy my horror when, on
looking up out of this reverie, I saw a great brown wretch extended
before me, only half dressed, standing on pattens, and exaggerated by
them and the steam until he looked like an ogre, grinning in the most
horrible way, and waving his arm, on which was a horsehair glove. He
spoke, in his unknown nasal jargon, words which echoed through the
arched room; his eyes seemed astonishingly large and bright, his ears
stuck out, and his head was all shaved, except a bristling top-knot,
which gave it a demoniac fierceness.

This description, I feel, is growing too frightful; ladies who read it
will be going into hysterics, or saying, “Well, upon my word, this is
the most singular, the most extraordinary kind of language. Jane, my
love, you will not read that odious book—” and so I will be brief. This
grinning man belabours the patient violently with the horse-brush. When
he has completed the horsehair part, and you lie expiring under a
squirting fountain of warm water, and fancying all is done, he
reappears with a large brass basin, containing a quantity of lather, in
the midst of which is something like old Miss MacWhirter’s flaxen wig
that she is so proud of, and that we have all laughed at. Just as you
are going to remonstrate, the thing like the wig is dashed into your
face and eyes, covered over with soap, and for five minutes you are
drowned in lather: you can’t see, the suds are frothing over your
eye-balls; you can’t hear, the soap is whizzing into your ears; can’t
gasp for breath, Miss MacWhirter’s wig is down your throat with half a
pailful of suds in an instant—you are all soap. Wicked children in
former days have jeered you, exclaiming, “How are you off for soap?”
You little knew what saponacity was till you entered a Turkish bath.

When the whole operation is concluded, you are led—with what heartfelt
joy I need not say—softly back to the cooling-room, having been robed
in shawls and turbans as before. You are laid gently on the reposing
bed; somebody brings a narghile, which tastes as tobacco must taste in
Mahomet’s Paradise; a cool sweet dreamy languor takes possession of the
purified frame; and half-an- hour of such delicious laziness is spent
over the pipe as is unknown in Europe, where vulgar prejudice has most
shamefully maligned indolence—calls it foul names, such as the father
of all evil, and the like; in fact, does not know how to educate
idleness as those honest Turks do, and the fruit which, when properly
cultivated, it bears.

The after-bath state is the most delightful condition of laziness I
ever knew, and I tried it wherever we went afterwards on our little
tour. At Smyrna the whole business was much inferior to the method
employed in the capital. At Cairo, after the soap, you are plunged into
a sort of stone coffin, full of water which is all but boiling. This
has its charms; but I could not relish the Egyptian shampooing. A
hideous old blind man (but very dexterous in his art) tried to break my
back and dislocate my shoulders, but I could not see the pleasure of
the practice; and another fellow began tickling the soles of my feet,
but I rewarded him with a kick that sent him off the bench. The pure
idleness is the best, and I shall never enjoy such in Europe again.

Victor Hugo, in his famous travels on the Rhine, visiting Cologne,
gives a learned account of what he DIDN’T see there. I have a
remarkable catalogue of similar objects at Constantinople. I didn’t see
the dancing dervishes, it was Ramazan; nor the howling dervishes at
Scutari, it was Ramazan; nor the interior of St. Sophia, nor the
women’s apartment of the Seraglio, nor the fashionable promenade at the
Sweet Waters, always because it was Ramazan; during which period the
dervishes dance and howl but rarely, their legs and lungs being unequal
to much exertion during a fast of fifteen hours. On account of the same
holy season, the Royal palaces and mosques are shut; and though the
Valley of the Sweet Waters is there, no one goes to walk; the people
remaining asleep all day, and passing the night in feasting and
carousing. The minarets are illuminated at this season; even the
humblest mosque at Jerusalem, or Jaffa, mounted a few circles of dingy
lamps; those of the capital were handsomely lighted with many festoons
of lamps, which had a fine effect from the water. I need not mention
other and constant illuminations of the city, which innumerable
travellers have described—I mean the fires. There were three in Pera
during our eight days’ stay there; but they did not last long enough to
bring the Sultan out of bed to come and lend his aid. Mr. Hobhouse
(quoted in the “Guide-book”) says, if a fire lasts an hour, the Sultan
is bound to attend it in person; and that people having petitions to
present, have often set houses on fire for the purpose of forcing out
this Royal trump. The Sultan can’t lead a very “jolly life,” if this
rule be universal. Fancy His Highness, in the midst of his moon-faced
beauties, handkerchief in hand, and obliged to tie it round his face,
and go out of his warm harem at midnight at the cursed cry of “Yang en
Var!”

We saw His Highness in the midst of his people and their petitions,
when he came to the mosque at Tophana; not the largest, but one of the
most picturesque of the public buildings of the city. The streets were
crowded with people watching for the august arrival, and lined with the
squat military in their bastard European costume; the sturdy police,
with bandeliers and brown surtouts, keeping order, driving off the
faithful from the railings of the Esplanade through which their Emperor
was to pass, and only admitting (with a very unjust partiality, I
thought) us Europeans into that reserved space. Before the august
arrival, numerous officers collected, colonels and pashas went by with
their attendant running footmen; the most active, insolent, and hideous
of these great men, as I thought, being His Highness’s black eunuchs,
who went prancing through the crowd, which separated before them with
every sign of respect.

The common women were assembled by many hundreds: the yakmac, a muslin
chin-cloth which they wear, makes almost every face look the same; but
the eyes and noses of these beauties are generally visible, and, for
the most part, both these features are good. The jolly negresses wear
the same white veil, but they are by no means so particular about
hiding the charms of their good-natured black faces, and they let the
cloth blow about as it lists, and grin unconfined. Wherever we went the
negroes seemed happy. They have the organ of child-loving: little
creatures were always prattling on their shoulders, queer little things
in night gowns of yellow dimity, with great flowers, and pink or red or
yellow shawls, with great eyes glistening underneath. Of such the black
women seemed always the happy guardians. I saw one at a fountain,
holding one child in her arms, and giving another a drink—a ragged
little beggar—a sweet and touching picture of a black charity.

I am almost forgetting His Highness the Sultan. About a hundred guns
were fired off at clumsy intervals from the Esplanade facing the
Bosphorus, warning us that the monarch had set off from his Summer
Palace, and was on the way to his grand canoe. At last that vessel made
its appearance; the band struck up his favourite air; his caparisoned
horse was led down to the shore to receive him; the eunuchs, fat
pashas, colonels and officers of state gathering round as the Commander
of the Faithful mounted. I had the indescribable happiness of seeing
him at a very short distance. The Padishah, or Father of all the
Sovereigns on earth, has not that majestic air which some sovereigns
possess, and which makes the beholder’s eyes wink, and his knees
tremble under him: he has a black beard, and a handsome well-bred face,
of a French cast; he looks like a young French roue worn out by
debauch; his eyes bright, with black rings round them; his cheeks pale
and hollow. He was lolling on his horse as if he could hardly hold
himself on the saddle: or as if his cloak, fastened with a blazing
diamond clasp on his breast, and falling over his horse’s tail, pulled
him back. But the handsome sallow face of the Refuge of the World
looked decidedly interesting and intellectual. I have seen many a young
Don Juan at Paris, behind a counter, with such a beard and countenance;
the flame of passion still burning in his hollow eyes, while on his
damp brow was stamped the fatal mark of premature decay. The man we saw
cannot live many summers. Women and wine are said to have brought the
Zilullah to this state; and it is whispered by the dragomans, or
laquais-de-place (from whom travellers at Constantinople generally get
their political information), that the Sultan’s mother and his
ministers conspire to keep him plunged in sensuality, that they may
govern the kingdom according to their own fancies. Mr. Urquhart, I am
sure, thinks that Lord Palmerston has something to do with the
business, and drugs the Sultan’s champagne for the benefit of Russia.

As the Pontiff of Mussulmans passed into the mosques a shower of
petitions was flung from the steps where the crowd was collected, and
over the heads of the gendarmes in brown. A general cry, as for
justice, rose up; and one old ragged woman came forward and burst
through the throng, howling, and flinging about her lean arms, and
baring her old shrunken breast. I never saw a finer action of tragic
woo, or heard sounds more pitiful than those old passionate groans of
hers. What was your prayer, poor old wretched soul? The gendarmes
hemmed her round, and hustled her away, but rather kindly. The Padishah
went on quite impassible—the picture of debauch and ennui.

I like pointing morals, and inventing for myself cheap consolations, to
reconcile me to that state of life into which it has pleased Heaven to
call me; and as the Light of the World disappeared round the corner, I
reasoned pleasantly with myself about His Highness, and enjoyed that
secret selfish satisfaction a man has, who sees he is better off than
his neighbour. “Michael Angelo,” I said, “you are still (by courtesy)
young: if you had five hundred thousand a year, and were a great
prince, I would lay a wager that men would discover in you a
magnificent courtesy of demeanour, and a majestic presence that only
belongs to the sovereigns of the world. If you had such an income, you
think you could spend it with splendour: distributing genial
hospitalities, kindly alms, soothing misery, bidding humility be of
good heart, rewarding desert. If you had such means of purchasing
pleasure, you think, you rogue, you could relish it with gusto. But
fancy being brought to the condition of the poor Light of the Universe
yonder; and reconcile yourself with the idea that you are only a
farthing rushlight. The cries of the poor widow fall as dead upon him
as the smiles of the brightest eyes out of Georgia. He can’t stir
abroad but those abominable cannon begin roaring and deafening his
ears. He can’t see the world but over the shoulders of a row of fat
pashas, and eunuchs, with their infernal ugliness. His ears can never
be regaled with a word of truth, or blessed with an honest laugh. The
only privilege of manhood left to him, he enjoys but for a month in the
year, at this time of Ramazan, when he is forced to fast for fifteen
hours; and, by consequence, has the blessing of feeling hungry.” Sunset
during Lent appears to be his single moment of pleasure; they say the
poor fellow is ravenous by that time, and as the gun fires the
dish-covers are taken off, so that for five minutes a day he lives and
is happy over pillau, like another mortal.

And yet, when floating by the Summer Palace, a barbaric edifice of wood
and marble, with gilded suns blazing over the porticoes, and all sorts
of strange ornaments and trophies figuring on the gates and
railings—when we passed a long row of barred and filigreed windows,
looking on the water—when we were told that those were the apartments
of His Highness’s ladies, and actually heard them whispering and
laughing behind the bars—a strange feeling of curiosity came over some
ill-regulated minds—just to have one peep, one look at all those
wondrous beauties, singing to the dulcimers, paddling in the fountains,
dancing in the marble halls, or lolling on the golden cushions, as the
gaudy black slaves brought pipes and coffee. This tumultuous movement
was calmed by thinking of that dreadful statement of travellers, that
in one of the most elegant halls there is a trap-door, on peeping below
which you may see the Bosphorus running underneath, into which some
luckless beauty is plunged occasionally, and the trap-door is shut, and
the dancing and the singing, and the smoking and the laughing go on as
before. They say it is death to pick up any of the sacks thereabouts,
if a stray one should float by you. There were none any day when I
passed, AT LEAST, ON THE SURFACE OF THE WATER.

It has been rather a fashion of our travellers to apologise for Turkish
life, of late, and paint glowing agreeable pictures of many of its
institutions. The celebrated author of “Palm-Leaves” (his name is
famous under the date-trees of the Nile, and uttered with respect
beneath the tents of the Bedaween) has touchingly described Ibrahim
Pasha’s paternal fondness, who cut off a black slave’s head for having
dropped and maimed one of his children; and has penned a melodious
panegyric of “The Harem,” and of the fond and beautiful duties of the
inmates of that place of love, obedience, and seclusion. I saw, at the
mausoleum of the late Sultan Mahmoud’s family, a good subject for a
Ghazul, in the true new Oriental manner.

These Royal burial-places are the resort of the pious Moslems. Lamps
are kept burning there; and in the antechambers, copies of the Koran
are provided for the use of believers; and you never pass these
cemeteries but you see Turks washing at the cisterns, previous to
entering for prayer, or squatted on the benches, chanting passages from
the sacred volume. Christians, I believe, are not admitted, but may
look through the bars, and see the coffins of the defunct monarchs and
children of the Royal race. Each lies in his narrow sarcophagus, which
is commonly flanked by huge candles, and covered with a rich
embroidered pall. At the head of each coffin rises a slab, with a
gilded inscription; for the princesses, the slab is simple, not unlike
our own monumental stones. The headstones of the tombs of the defunct
princes are decorated with a turban, or, since the introduction of the
latter article of dress, with the red fez. That of Mahmoud is decorated
with the imperial aigrette.

In this dismal but splendid museum, I remarked two little tombs with
little red fezzes, very small, and for very young heads evidently,
which were lying under the little embroidered palls of state. I forget
whether they had candles too; but their little flame of life was soon
extinguished, and there was no need of many pounds of wax to typify it.
These were the tombs of Mahmoud’s grandsons, nephews of the present
Light of the Universe, and children of his sister, the wife of Halil
Pasha. Little children die in all ways: these of the much-maligned
Mahometan Royal race perished by the bowstring. Sultan Mahmoud (may he
rest in glory!) strangled the one; but, having some spark of human
feeling, was so moved by the wretchedness and agony of the poor
bereaved mother, his daughter, that his Royal heart relented towards
her, and he promised that, should she ever have another child, it
should be allowed to live. He died; and Abdul Medjid (may his name be
blessed!), the debauched young man whom we just saw riding to the
mosque, succeeded. His sister, whom he is said to have loved, became
again a mother, and had a son. But she relied upon her father’s word
and her august brother’s love, and hoped that this little one should be
spared. The same accursed hand tore this infant out of its mother’s
bosom, and killed it. The poor woman’s heart broke outright at this
second calamity, and she died. But on her death-bed she sent for her
brother, rebuked him as a perjurer and an assassin, and expired calling
down the divine justice on his head. She lies now by the side of the
two little fezzes.

Now I say this would be a fine subject for an Oriental poem. The
details are dramatic and noble, and could be grandly touched by a fine
artist. If the mother had borne a daughter, the child would have been
safe; that perplexity might be pathetically depicted as agitating the
bosom of the young wife about to become a mother. A son is born: you
can see her despair and the pitiful look she casts on the child, and
the way in which she hugs it every time the curtains of her door are
removed. The Sultan hesitated probably; he allowed the infant to live
for six weeks. He could not bring his Royal soul to inflict pain. He
yields at last; he is a martyr- -to be pitied, not to be blamed. If he
melts at his daughter’s agony, he is a man and a father. There are men
and fathers too in the much-maligned Orient.

Then comes the second act of the tragedy. The new hopes, the fond
yearnings, the terrified misgivings, the timid belief, and weak
confidence; the child that is born—and dies smiling prettily—and the
mother’s heart is rent so, that it can love, or hope, or suffer no
more. Allah is God! She sleeps by the little fezzes. Hark! the guns are
booming over the water, and His Highness is coming from his prayers.

After the murder of that little child, it seems to me one can never
look with anything but horror upon the butcherly Herod who ordered it.
The death of the seventy thousand Janissaries ascends to historic
dignity, and takes rank as war. But a great Prince and Light of the
Universe, who procures abortions and throttles little babies, dwindles
away into such a frightful insignificance of crime, that those may
respect him who will. I pity their Excellencies the Ambassadors, who
are obliged to smirk and cringe to such a rascal. To do the Turks
justice—and two days’ walk in Constantinople will settle this fact as
well as a year’s residence in the city—the people do not seem in the
least animated by this Herodian spirit. I never saw more kindness to
children than among all classes, more fathers walking about with little
solemn Mahometans in red caps and big trousers, more business going on
than in the toy quarter, and in the Atmeidan. Although you may see
there the Thebaic stone set up by the Emperor Theodosius, and the
bronze column of serpents which Murray says was brought from Delphi,
but which my guide informed me was the very one exhibited by Moses in
the wilderness, yet I found the examination of these antiquities much
less pleasant than to look at the many troops of children assembled on
the plain to play; and to watch them as they were dragged about in
little queer arobas, or painted carriages, which are there kept for
hire. I have a picture of one of them now in my eyes: a little green
oval machine, with flowers rudely painted round the window, out of
which two smiling heads are peeping, the pictures of happiness. An old,
good-humoured, grey- bearded Turk is tugging the cart; and behind it
walks a lady in a yakmac and yellow slippers, and a black female slave,
grinning as usual, towards whom the little coach-riders are looking. A
small sturdy barefooted Mussulman is examining the cart with some
feelings of envy: he is too poor to purchase a ride for himself and the
round-faced puppy-dog, which he is hugging in his arms as young ladies
in our country do dolls.

All the neighbourhood of the Atmeidan is exceedingly picturesque— the
mosque court and cloister, where the Persians have their stalls of
sweetmeats and tobacco; a superb sycamore-tree grows in the middle of
this, overshadowing an aromatic fountain; great flocks of pigeons are
settling in corners of the cloister, and barley is sold at the gates,
with which the good-natured people feed them. From the Atmeidan you
have a fine view of St. Sophia: and here stands a mosque which struck
me as being much more picturesque and sumptuous—the Mosque of Sultan
Achmed, with its six gleaming white minarets and its beautiful courts
and trees. Any infidels may enter the court without molestation, and,
looking through the barred windows of the mosque, have a view of its
airy and spacious interior. A small audience of women was collected
there when I looked in, squatted on the mats, and listening to a
preacher, who was walking among them, and speaking with great energy.
My dragoman interpreted to me the sense of a few words of his sermon:
he was warning them of the danger of gadding about to public places,
and of the immorality of too much talking; and, I dare say, we might
have had more valuable information from him regarding the follies of
womankind, had not a tall Turk clapped my interpreter on the shoulder,
and pointed him to be off.

Although the ladies are veiled, and muffled with the ugliest dresses in
the world, yet it appears their modesty is alarmed in spite of all the
coverings which they wear. One day, in the bazaar, a fat old body, with
diamond rings on her fingers, that were tinged with henne of a logwood
colour, came to the shop where I was purchasing slippers, with her son,
a young Aga of six years of age, dressed in a braided frock-coat, with
a huge tassel to his fez, exceeding fat, and of a most solemn
demeanour. The young Aga came for a pair of shoes, and his contortions
were so delightful as he tried them, that I remained looking on with
great pleasure, wishing for Leech to be at hand to sketch his lordship
and his fat mamma, who sat on the counter. That lady fancied I was
looking at her, though, as far as I could see, she had the figure and
complexion of a roly-poly pudding; and so, with quite a premature
bashfulness, she sent me a message by the shoemaker, ordering me to
walk away if I had made my purchases, for that ladies of her rank did
not choose to be stared at by strangers; and I was obliged to take my
leave, though with sincere regret, for the little lord had just
squeezed himself into an attitude than which I never saw anything more
ludicrous in General Tom Thumb. When the ladies of the Seraglio come to
that bazaar with their cortege of infernal black eunuchs, strangers are
told to move on briskly. I saw a bevy of about eight of these, with
their aides-de-camp; but they were wrapped up, and looked just as
vulgar and ugly as the other women, and were not, I suppose, of the
most beautiful sort. The poor devils are allowed to come out,
half-a-dozen times in the year, to spend their little wretched
allowance of pocket-money in purchasing trinkets and tobacco; all the
rest of the time they pursue the beautiful duties of their existence in
the walls of the sacred harem.

Though strangers are not allowed to see the interior of the cage in
which these birds of Paradise are confined, yet many parts of the
Seraglio are free to the curiosity of visitors, who choose to drop a
backsheesh here and there. I landed one morning at the Seraglio point
from Galata, close by an ancient pleasure-house of the defunct Sultan;
a vast broad-brimmed pavilion, that looks agreeable enough to be a
dancing room for ghosts now: there is another summer-house, the
Guide-book cheerfully says, whither the Sultan goes to sport with his
women and mutes. A regiment of infantry, with their music at their
head, were marching to exercise in the outer grounds of the Seraglio;
and we followed them, and had an opportunity of seeing their
evolutions, and hearing their bands, upon a fine green plain under the
Seraglio walls, where stands one solitary column, erected in memory of
some triumph of some Byzantian emperor.

There were three battalions of the Turkish infantry, exercising here;
and they seemed to perform their evolutions in a very satisfactory
manner: that is, they fired all together, and charged and halted in
very straight lines, and bit off imaginary cartridge- tops with great
fierceness and regularity, and made all their ramrods ring to measure,
just like so many Christians. The men looked small, young, clumsy, and
ill-built; uncomfortable in their shabby European clothes; and about
the legs, especially, seemed exceedingly weak and ill-formed. Some
score of military invalids were lolling in the sunshine, about a
fountain and a marble summer- house that stand on the ground, watching
their comrades’ manoeuvres (as if they could never have enough of that
delightful pastime); and these sick were much better cared for than
their healthy companions. Each man had two dressing-gowns, one of white
cotton, and an outer wrapper of warm brown woollen. Their heads were
accommodated with wadded cotton nightcaps; and it seemed to me, from
their condition and from the excellent character of the military
hospitals, that it would be much more wholesome to be ill than to be
well in the Turkish service.

Facing this green esplanade, and the Bosphorus shining beyond it, rise
the great walls of the outer Seraglio Gardens: huge masses of ancient
masonry, over which peep the roofs of numerous kiosks and outhouses,
amongst thick evergreens, planted so as to hide the beautiful
frequenters of the place from the prying eyes and telescopes. We could
not catch a glance of a single figure moving in these great
pleasure-grounds. The road winds round the walls; and the outer park,
which is likewise planted with trees, and diversified by garden-plots
and cottages, had more the air of the outbuildings of a homely English
park, than of a palace which we must all have imagined to be the most
stately in the world. The most commonplace water-carts were passing
here and there; roads were being repaired in the Macadamite manner; and
carpenters were mending the park-palings, just as they do in Hampshire.
The next thing you might fancy would be the Sultan walking out with a
spud and a couple of dogs, on the way to meet the post-bag and the
Saint James’s Chronicle.

The palace is no palace at all. It is a great town of pavilions, built
without order, here and there, according to the fancy of succeeding
Lights of the Universe, or their favourites. The only row of domes
which looked particularly regular or stately, were the kitchens. As you
examined the buildings they had a ruinous dilapidated look: they are
not furnished, it is said, with particular splendour,—not a bit more
elegantly than Miss Jones’s seminary for young ladies, which we may be
sure is much more comfortable than the extensive establishment of His
Highness Abdul Medjid.

In the little stable I thought to see some marks of Royal magnificence,
and some horses worthy of the king of all kings. But the Sultan is said
to be a very timid horseman: the animal that is always kept saddled for
him did not look to be worth twenty pounds; and the rest of the horses
in the shabby dirty stalls were small, ill-kept, common-looking brutes.
You might see better, it seemed to me, at a country inn stable on any
market-day.

The kitchens are the most sublime part of the Seraglio. There are nine
of these great halls, for all ranks, from His Highness downwards, where
many hecatombs are roasted daily, according to the accounts, and where
cooking goes on with a savage Homeric grandeur. Chimneys are despised
in these primitive halls; so that the roofs are black with the smoke of
hundreds of furnaces, which escapes through apertures in the domes
above. These, too, give the chief light in the rooms, which streams
downwards, and thickens and mingles with the smoke, and so murkily
lights up hundreds of swarthy figures busy about the spits and the
cauldrons. Close to the door by which we entered they were making
pastry for the sultanas; and the chief pastrycook, who knew my guide,
invited us courteously to see the process, and partake of the
delicacies prepared for those charming lips. How those sweet lips must
shine after eating these puffs! First, huge sheets of dough are rolled
out till the paste is about as thin as silver paper: then an artist
forms the dough-muslin into a sort of drapery, curling it round and
round in many fanciful and pretty shapes, until it is all got into the
circumference of a round metal tray in which it is baked. Then the cake
is drenched in grease most profusely; and, finally, a quantity of syrup
is poured over it, when the delectable mixture is complete. The
moon-faced ones are said to devour immense quantities of this wholesome
food; and, in fact, are eating grease and sweetmeats from morning till
night. I don’t like to think what the consequences may be, or allude to
the agonies which the delicate creatures must inevitably suffer.

The good-natured chief pastrycook filled a copper basin with greasy
puffs; and, dipping a dubious ladle into a large cauldron, containing
several gallons of syrup, poured a liberal portion over the cakes, and
invited us to eat. One of the tarts was quite enough for me: and I
excused myself on the plea of ill-health from imbibing any more grease
and sugar. But my companion, the dragoman, finished some forty puffs in
a twinkling. They slipped down his opened jaws as the sausages do down
clowns’ throats in a pantomime. His moustaches shone with grease, and
it dripped down his beard and fingers. We thanked the smiling chief
pastrycook, and rewarded him handsomely for the tarts. It is something
to have eaten of the dainties prepared for the ladies of the harem; but
I think Mr. Cockle ought to get the names of the chief sultanas among
the exalted patrons of his antibilious pills.

From the kitchens we passed into the second court of the Seraglio,
beyond which is death. The Guide-book only hints at the dangers which
would befall a stranger caught prying in the mysterious FIRST court of
the palace. I have read “Bluebeard,” and don’t care for peeping into
forbidden doors; so that the second court was quite enough for me; the
pleasure of beholding it being heightened, as it were, by the notion of
the invisible danger sitting next door, with uplifted scimitar ready to
fall on you—present though not seen.

A cloister runs along one side of this court; opposite is the hall of
the divan, “large but low, covered with lead, and gilt, after the
Moorish manner, plain enough.” The Grand Vizier sits in this place, and
the ambassadors used to wait here, and be conducted hence on horseback,
attired with robes of honour. But the ceremony is now, I believe,
discontinued; the English envoy, at any rate, is not allowed to receive
any backsheesh, and goes away as he came, in the habit of his own
nation. On the right is a door leading into the interior of the
Seraglio; NONE PASS THROUGH IT BUT SUCH AS ARE SENT FOR, the Guide-book
says: it is impossible to top the terror of that description.

About this door lads and servants were lolling, ichoglans and pages,
with lazy looks and shabby dresses; and among them, sunning himself
sulkily on a bench, a poor old fat, wrinkled, dismal white eunuch, with
little fat white hands, and a great head sunk into his chest, and two
sprawling little legs that seemed incapable to hold up his bloated old
body. He squeaked out some surly reply to my friend the dragoman, who,
softened and sweetened by the tarts he had just been devouring, was, no
doubt, anxious to be polite: and the poor worthy fellow walked away
rather crestfallen at this return of his salutation, and hastened me
out of the place.

The palace of the Seraglio, the cloister with marble pillars, the hall
of the ambassadors, the impenetrable gate guarded by eunuchs and
ichoglans, have a romantic look in print; but not so in reality. Most
of the marble is wood, almost all the gilding is faded, the guards are
shabby, the foolish perspectives painted on the walls are half cracked
off. The place looks like Vauxhall in the daytime.

We passed out of the second court under THE SUBLIME PORTE—which is like
a fortified gate of a German town of the middle ages—into the outer
court, round which are public offices, hospitals, and dwellings of the
multifarious servants of the palace. This place is very wide and
picturesque: there is a pretty church of Byzantine architecture at the
further end; and in the midst of the court a magnificent plane-tree, of
prodigious dimensions and fabulous age according to the guides; St.
Sophia towers in the further distance: and from here, perhaps, is the
best view of its light swelling domes and beautiful proportions. The
Porte itself, too, forms an excellent subject for the sketcher, if the
officers of the court will permit him to design it. I made the attempt,
and a couple of Turkish beadles looked on very good-naturedly for some
time at the progress of the drawing; but a good number of other
spectators speedily joined them, and made a crowd, which is not
permitted, it would seem, in the Seraglio; so I was told to pack up my
portfolio, and remove the cause of the disturbance, and lost my drawing
of the Ottoman Porte.

I don’t think I have anything more to say about the city which has not
been much better told by graver travellers. I, with them, could see
(perhaps it was the preaching of the politicians that warned me of the
fact) that we are looking on at the last days of an empire; and heard
many stories of weakness, disorder, and oppression. I even saw a
Turkish lady drive up to Sultan Achmet’s mosque IN A BROUGHAM. Is not
that a subject to moralise upon? And might one not draw endless
conclusions from it, that the knell of the Turkish dominion is rung;
that the European spirit and institutions once admitted can never be
rooted out again; and that the scepticism prevalent amongst the higher
orders must descend ere very long to the lower; and the cry of the
muezzin from the mosque become a mere ceremony?

But as I only stayed eight days in this place, and knew not a syllable
of the language, perhaps it is as well to pretermit any disquisitions
about the spirit of the people. I can only say that they looked to be
very good-natured, handsome, and lazy; that the women’s yellow slippers
are very ugly; that the kabobs at the shop hard by the Rope Bazaar are
very hot and good; and that at the Armenian cookshops they serve you
delicious fish, and a stout raisin wine of no small merit. There came
in, as we sat and dined there at sunset, a good old Turk, who called
for a penny fish, and sat down under a tree very humbly, and ate it
with his own bread. We made that jolly old Mussulman happy with a quart
of the raisin wine; and his eyes twinkled with every fresh glass, and
he wiped his old beard delighted, and talked and chirped a good deal,
and, I dare say, told us the whole state of the empire. He was the only
Mussulman with whom I attained any degree of intimacy during my stay in
Constantinople; and you will see that, for obvious reasons, I cannot
divulge the particulars of our conversation.

“You have nothing to say, and you own it,” says somebody: “then why
write?” That question perhaps (between ourselves) I have put likewise;
and yet, my dear sir, there are SOME things worth remembering even in
this brief letter: that woman in the brougham is an idea of
significance: that comparison of the Seraglio to Vauxhall in the
daytime is a true and real one; from both of which your own great soul
and ingenious philosophic spirit may draw conclusions, that I myself
have modestly forborne to press. You are too clever to require a moral
to be tacked to all the fables you read, as is done for children in the
spelling-books; else I would tell you that the government of the
Ottoman Porte seems to be as rotten, as wrinkled, and as feeble as the
old eunuch I saw crawling about it in the sun; that when the lady drove
up in a brougham to Sultan Achmet, I felt that the schoolmaster was
really abroad; and that the crescent will go out before that luminary,
as meekly as the moon does before the sun.




CHAPTER VIII
RHODES


The sailing of a vessel direct for Jaffa brought a great number of
passengers together, and our decks were covered with Christian, Jew,
and Heathen. In the cabin we were Poles and Russians, Frenchmen,
Germans, Spaniards, and Greeks; on the deck were squatted several
little colonies of people of different race and persuasion. There was a
Greek Papa, a noble figure with a flowing and venerable white beard,
who had been living on bread-and-water for I don’t know how many years,
in order to save a little money to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
There were several families of Jewish Rabbis, who celebrated their
“feast of tabernacles” on board; their chief men performing worship
twice or thrice a day, dressed in their pontifical habits, and bound
with phylacteries: and there were Turks, who had their own ceremonies
and usages, and wisely kept aloof from their neighbours of Israel.

The dirt of these children of captivity exceeds all possibility of
description; the profusion of stinks which they raised, the grease of
their venerable garments and faces, the horrible messes cooked in the
filthy pots, and devoured with the nasty fingers, the squalor of mats,
pots, old bedding, and foul carpets of our Hebrew friends, could hardly
be painted by Swift in his dirtiest mood, and cannot be, of course,
attempted by my timid and genteel pen. What would they say in Baker
Street to some sights with which our new friends favoured us? What
would your ladyship have said if you had seen the interesting Greek nun
combing her hair over the cabin— combing it with the natural fingers,
and, averse to slaughter, flinging the delicate little intruders, which
she found in the course of her investigation, gently into the great
cabin? Our attention was a good deal occupied in watching the strange
ways and customs of the various comrades of ours.

The Jews were refugees from Poland, going to lay their bones to rest in
the valley of Jehoshaphat, and performing with exceeding rigour the
offices of their religion. At morning and evening you were sure to see
the chiefs of the families, arrayed in white robes, bowing over their
books, at prayer. Once a week, on the eve before the Sabbath, there was
a general washing in Jewry, which sufficed until the ensuing Friday.
The men wore long gowns and caps of fur, or else broad-brimmed hats,
or, in service time, bound on their heads little iron boxes, with the
sacred name engraved on them. Among the lads there were some beautiful
faces; and among the women your humble servant discovered one who was a
perfect rosebud of beauty when first emerging from her Friday’s toilet,
and for a day or two afterwards, until each succeeding day’s smut
darkened those fresh and delicate cheeks of hers. We had some very
rough weather in the course of the passage from Constantinople to
Jaffa, and the sea washed over and over our Israelitish friends and
their baggages and bundles; but though they were said to be rich, they
would not afford to pay for cabin shelter. One father of a family,
finding his progeny half drowned in a squall, vowed he WOULD pay for a
cabin; but the weather was somewhat finer the next day, and he could
not squeeze out his dollars, and the ship’s authorities would not admit
him except upon payment.

This unwillingness to part with money is not only found amongst the
followers of Moses, but in those of Mahomet, and Christians too. When
we went to purchase in the bazaars, after offering money for change,
the honest fellows would frequently keep back several piastres, and
when urged to refund, would give most dismally: and begin doling out
penny by penny, and utter pathetic prayers to their customer not to
take any more. I bought five or six pounds’ worth of Broussa silks for
the womankind, in the bazaar at Constantinople, and the rich Armenian
who sold them begged for three-halfpence to pay his boat to Galata.
There is something naif and amusing in this exhibition of cheatery—this
simple cringing and wheedling, and passion for twopence-halfpenny. It
was pleasant to give a millionaire beggar an alms, and laugh in his
face and say, “There, Dives, there’s a penny for you: be happy, you
poor old swindling scoundrel, as far as a penny goes.” I used to watch
these Jews on shore, and making bargains with one another as soon as
they came on board; the battle between vendor and purchaser was an
agony—they shrieked, clasped hands, appealed to one another
passionately; their handsome noble faces assumed a look of woe— quite
an heroic eagerness and sadness about a farthing.

Ambassadors from our Hebrews descended at Rhodes to buy provisions, and
it was curious to see their dealings: there was our venerable Rabbi,
who, robed in white and silver, and bending over his book at the
morning service, looked like a patriarch, and whom I saw chaffering
about a fowl with a brother Rhodian Israelite. How they fought over the
body of that lean animal! The street swarmed with Jews: goggling eyes
looked out from the old carved casements— hooked noses issued from the
low antique doors—Jew boys driving donkeys, Hebrew mothers nursing
children, dusky, tawdry, ragged young beauties and most venerable
grey-bearded fathers were all gathered round about the affair of the
hen! And at the same time that our Rabbi was arranging the price of it,
his children were instructed to procure bundles of green branches to
decorate the ship during their feast. Think of the centuries during
which these wonderful people have remained unchanged; and how, from the
days of Jacob downwards, they have believed and swindled!

The Rhodian Jews, with their genius for filth, have made their quarter
of the noble desolate old town the most ruinous and wretched of all.
The escutcheons of the proud old knights are still carved over the
doors, whence issue these miserable greasy hucksters and pedlars. The
Turks respected these emblems of the brave enemies whom they had
overcome, and left them untouched. When the French seized Malta they
were by no means so delicate: they effaced armorial bearings with their
usual hot-headed eagerness; and a few years after they had torn down
the coats-of- arms of the gentry, the heroes of Malta and Egypt were
busy devising heraldry for themselves, and were wild to be barons and
counts of the Empire.

The chivalrous relics at Rhodes are very superb. I know of no buildings
whose stately and picturesque aspect seems to correspond better with
one’s notions of their proud founders. The towers and gates are warlike
and strong, but beautiful and aristocratic: you see that they must have
been high-bred gentlemen who built them. The edifices appear in almost
as perfect a condition as when they were in the occupation of the noble
Knights of St. John; and they have this advantage over modern
fortifications, that they are a thousand times more picturesque.
Ancient war condescended to ornament itself, and built fine carved
castles and vaulted gates: whereas, to judge from Gibraltar and Malta,
nothing can be less romantic than the modern military architecture;
which sternly regards the fighting, without in the least heeding the
war-paint. Some of the huge artillery with which the place was defended
still lies in the bastions; and the touch-holes of the guns are
preserved by being covered with rusty old corselets, worn by defenders
of the fort three hundred years ago. The Turks, who battered down
chivalry, seem to be waiting their turn of destruction now. In walking
through Rhodes one is strangely affected by witnessing the signs of
this double decay. For instance, in the streets of the knights, you see
noble houses, surmounted by noble escutcheons of superb knights, who
lived there, and prayed, and quarrelled, and murdered the Turks; and
were the most gallant pirates of the inland seas; and made vows of
chastity, and robbed and ravished; and, professing humility, would
admit none but nobility into their order; and died recommending
themselves to sweet St. John, and calmly hoping for heaven in
consideration of all the heathen they had slain. When this superb
fraternity was obliged to yield to courage as great as theirs, faith as
sincere, and to robbers even more dexterous and audacious than the
noblest knight who ever sang a canticle to the Virgin, these halls were
filled by magnificent Pashas and Agas, who lived here in the intervals
of war, and having conquered its best champions, despised Christendom
and chivalry pretty much as an Englishman despises a Frenchman. Now the
famous house is let to a shabby merchant, who has his little beggarly
shop in the bazaar; to a small officer, who ekes out his wretched
pension by swindling, and who gets his pay in bad coin. Mahometanism
pays in pewter now, in place of silver and gold. The lords of the world
have run to seed. The powerless old sword frightens nobody now—the
steel is turned to pewter too, somehow, and will no longer shear a
Christian head off any shoulders. In the Crusades my wicked sympathies
have always been with the Turks. They seem to me the better Christians
of the two: more humane, less brutally presumptuous about their own
merits, and more generous in esteeming their neighbours. As far as I
can get at the authentic story, Saladin is a pearl of refinement
compared to the brutal beef-eating Richard—about whom Sir Walter Scott
has led all the world astray.

When shall we have a real account of those times and heroes—no
good-humoured pageant, like those of the Scott romances—but a real
authentic story to instruct and frighten honest people of the present
day, and make them thankful that the grocer governs the world now in
place of the baron? Meanwhile a man of tender feelings may be pardoned
for twaddling a little over this sad spectacle of the decay of two of
the great institutions of the world. Knighthood is gone—amen; it
expired with dignity, its face to the foe: and old Mahometanism is
lingering about just ready to drop. But it is unseemly to see such a
Grand Potentate in such a state of decay: the son of Bajazet Ilderim
insolvent; the descendants of the Prophet bullied by Calmucs and
English and whipper-snapper Frenchmen; the Fountain of Magnificence
done up, and obliged to coin pewter! Think of the poor dear houris in
Paradise, how sad they must look as the arrivals of the Faithful become
less and less frequent every day. I can fancy the place beginning to
wear the fatal Vauxhall look of the Seraglio, and which has pursued me
ever since I saw it: the fountains of eternal wine are beginning to run
rather dry, and of a questionable liquor; the ready-roasted-meat trees
may cry, “Come eat me,” every now and then, in a faint voice, without
any gravy in it—but the Faithful begin to doubt about the quality of
the victuals. Of nights you may see the houris sitting sadly under
them, darning their faded muslins: Ali, Omar, and the Imaums are
reconciled and have gloomy consultations: and the Chief of the Faithful
himself, the awful camel-driver, the supernatural husband of Khadijah,
sits alone in a tumbledown kiosk, thinking moodily of the destiny that
is impending over him; and of the day when his gardens of bliss shall
be as vacant as the bankrupt Olympus.

All the town of Rhodes has this appearance of decay and ruin, except a
few consuls’ houses planted on the sea-side, here and there, with
bright flags flaunting in the sun; fresh paint; English crockery;
shining mahogany, &c.,—so many emblems of the new prosperity of their
trade, while the old inhabitants were going to rack—the fine Church of
St. John, converted into a mosque, is a ruined church, with a ruined
mosque inside; the fortifications are mouldering away, as much as time
will let them. There was considerable bustle and stir about the little
port; but it was the bustle of people who looked for the most part to
be beggars; and I saw no shop in the bazaar that seemed to have the
value of a pedlar’s pack.

I took, by way of guide, a young fellow from Berlin, a journeyman
shoemaker, who had just been making a tour in Syria, and who professed
to speak both Arabic and Turkish quite fluently—which I thought he
might have learned when he was a student at college, before he began
his profession of shoemaking; but I found he only knew about three
words of Turkish, which were produced on every occasion, as I walked
under his guidance through the desolate streets of the noble old town.
We went out upon the lines of fortification, through an ancient gate
and guard-house, where once a chapel probably stood, and of which the
roofs were richly carved and gilded. A ragged squad of Turkish soldiers
lolled about the gate now; a couple of boys on a donkey; a grinning
slave on a mule; a pair of women flapping along in yellow papooshes; a
basket-maker sitting under an antique carved portal, and chanting or
howling as he plaited his osiers: a peaceful well of water, at which
knights’ chargers had drunk, and at which the double-boyed donkey was
now refreshing himself—would have made a pretty picture for a
sentimental artist. As he sits, and endeavours to make a sketch of this
plaintive little comedy, a shabby dignitary of the island comes
clattering by on a thirty-shilling horse, and two or three of the
ragged soldiers leave their pipes to salute him as he passes under the
Gothic archway.

The astonishing brightness and clearness of the sky under which the
island seemed to bask, struck me as surpassing anything I had seen-
-not even at Cadiz, or the Piraeus, had I seen sands so yellow, or
water so magnificently blue. The houses of the people along the shore
were but poor tenements, with humble courtyards and gardens; but every
fig-tree was gilded and bright, as if it were in an Hesperian orchard;
the palms, planted here and there, rose with a sort of halo of light
round about them; the creepers on the walls quite dazzled with the
brilliancy of their flowers and leaves; the people lay in the cool
shadows, happy and idle, with handsome solemn faces; nobody seemed to
be at work; they only talked a very little, as if idleness and silence
were a condition of the delightful shining atmosphere in which they
lived.

We went down to an old mosque by the sea-shore, with a cluster of
ancient domes hard by it, blazing in the sunshine, and carved all over
with names of Allah, and titles of old pirates and generals who reposed
there. The guardian of the mosque sat in the garden- court, upon a high
wooden pulpit, lazily wagging his body to and fro, and singing the
praises of the Prophet gently through his nose, as the breeze stirred
through the trees overhead, and cast chequered and changing shadows
over the paved court, and the little fountains, and the nasal psalmist
on his perch. On one side was the mosque, into which you could see,
with its white walls and cool-matted floor, and quaint carved pulpit
and ornaments, and nobody at prayers. In the middle distance rose up
the noble towers and battlements of the knightly town, with the deep
sea-line behind them.

It really seemed as if everybody was to have a sort of sober
cheerfulness, and must yield to indolence under this charming
atmosphere. I went into the courtyard by the sea-shore (where a few
lazy ships were lying, with no one on board), and found it was the
prison of the place. The door was as wide open as Westminster Hall.
Some prisoners, one or two soldiers and functionaries, and some
prisoners’ wives, were lolling under an arcade by a fountain; other
criminals were strolling about here and there, their chains clinking
quite cheerfully; and they and the guards and officials came up
chatting quite friendly together, and gazed languidly over the
portfolio, as I was endeavouring to get the likeness of one or two of
these comfortable malefactors. One old and wrinkled she- criminal, whom
I had selected on account of the peculiar hideousness of her
countenance, covered it up with a dirty cloth, at which there was a
general roar of laughter among this good- humoured auditory of
cut-throats, pickpockets, and policemen. The only symptom of a prison
about the place was a door, across which a couple of sentinels were
stretched, yawning; while within lay three freshly-caught
pirates—chained by the leg. They had committed some murders of a very
late date, and were awaiting sentence; but their wives were allowed to
communicate freely with them: and it seemed to me that if half-a-dozen
friends would set them flee, and they themselves had energy enough to
move, the sentinels would be a great deal too lazy to walk after them.

The combined influence of Rhodes and Ramazan, I suppose, had taken
possession of my friend the Schustergesell from Berlin. As soon as he
received his fee, he cut me at once, and went and lay down by a
fountain near the port, and ate grapes out of a dirty pocket-
handkerchief. Other Christian idlers lay near him, dozing, or
sprawling, in the boats, or listlessly munching water-melons. Along the
coffee-houses of the quay sat hundreds more, with no better employment;
and the captain of the “Iberia” and his officers, and several of the
passengers in that famous steamship, were in this company, being idle
with all their might. Two or three adventurous young men went off to
see the valley where the dragon was killed; but others, more
susceptible of the real influence of the island, I am sure would not
have moved though we had been told that the Colossus himself was taking
a walk half a mile off.




CHAPTER IX
THE WHITE SQUALL


On deck, beneath the awning, I dozing lay and yawning; It was the grey
of dawning, Ere yet the sun arose; And above the funnel’s roaring, And
the fitful wind’s deploring, I heard the cabin snoring With universal
nose. I could hear the passengers snorting, I envied their disporting:
Vainly I was courting The pleasure of a doze.

So I lay, and wondered why light Came not, and watched the twilight And
the glimmer of the skylight, That shot across the deck; And the
binnacle pale and steady, And the dull glimpse of the dead-eye, And the
sparks in fiery eddy, That whirled from the chimney neck: In our jovial
floating prison There was sleep from fore to mizen, And never a star
had risen The hazy sky to speck.

Strange company we harboured; We’d a hundred Jews to larboard,
Unwashed, uncombed, uubarbered, Jews black, and brown, and grey; With
terror it would seize ye, And make your souls uneasy, To see those
Rabbis greasy, Who did nought but scratch and pray: Their dirty
children pucking, Their dirty saucepans cooking, Their dirty fingers
hooking Their swarming fleas away.

To starboard Turks and Greeks were, Whiskered, and brown their cheeks
were, Enormous wide their breeks were, Their pipes did puff alway; Each
on his mat allotted, In silence smoked and squatted, Whilst round their
children trotted In pretty, pleasant play. He can’t but smile who
traces The smiles on those brown faces, And the pretty prattling graces
Of those small heathens gay.

And so the hours kept tolling, And through the ocean rolling, Went the
brave “Iberia” bowling Before the break of day - When a SQUALL upon a
sudden Came o’er the waters scudding; And the clouds began to gather,
And the sea was lashed to lather, And the lowering thunder grumbled,
And the lightning jumped and tumbled, And the ship, and all the ocean,
Woke up in wild commotion.

Then the wind set up a howling, And the poodle-dog a yowling, And the
cocks began a crowing, And the old cow raised a lowing, As she heard
the tempest blowing; And fowls and geese did cackle, And the cordage
and the tackle Began to shriek and crackle; And the spray dashed o’er
the funnels, And down the deck in runnels; And the rushing water soaks
all, From the seamen in the fo’ksal To the stokers, whose black faces
Peer out of their bed-places; And the captain he was bawling, And the
sailors pulling, hauling; And the quarter-deck tarpauling Was shivered
in the squalling; And the passengers awaken, Most pitifully shaken; And
the steward jumps up, and hastens For the necessary basins.

Then the Greeks they groaned and quivered, And they knelt, and moaned,
and shivered, As the plunging waters met them, And splashed and overset
them; And they call in their emergence Upon countless saints and
virgins; And their marrowbones are bended, And they think the world is
ended.

And the Turkish women for’ard Were frightened and behorror’d; And,
shrieking and bewildering, The mothers clutched their children; The men
sung, “Allah Illah! Mashallah Bismillah!”

As the warring waters doused them, And splashed them and soused them;
And they called upon the Prophet, And thought but little of it.

Then all the fleas in Jewry Jumped up and bit like fury; And the
progeny of Jacob Did on the main-deck wake up (I wot those greasy
Rabbins Would never pay for cabins); And each man moaned and jabbered
in His filthy Jewish gaberdine, In woe and lamentation, And howling
consternation. And the splashing water drenches Their dirty brats and
wenches; And they crawl from bales and benches, In a hundred thousand
stenches.

This was the White Squall famous Which latterly o’ercame us, And which
all will well remember On the 28th September: When a Prussian Captain
of Lancers (Those tight-laced, whiskered prancers) Came on the deck
astonished, By that wild squall admonished, And wondering cried,
“Potztausend! Wie ist der Sturm jetzt brausend!” And looked at Captain
Lewis, Who calmly stood and blew his Cigar in all the bustle, And
scorned the tempest’s tussle. And oft we’ve thought thereafter How he
beat the storm to laughter; For well he knew his vessel With that vain
wind could wrestle; And when a wreck we thought her And doomed
ourselves to slaughter, How gaily he fought her, And through the hubbub
brought her, And, as the tempest caught her, Cried, “GEORGE! SOME
BRANDY-AND-WATER!”

And when, its force expended, The harmless storm was ended, And, as the
sunrise splendid Came blushing o’er the sea; I thought, as day was
breaking, My little girls were waking, And smiling, and making A prayer
at home for me.




CHAPTER X
TELMESSUS—BEYROUT


There should have been a poet in our company to describe that charming
little bay of Glaucus, into which we entered on the 26th of September,
in the first steam-boat that ever disturbed its beautiful waters. You
can’t put down in prose that delicious episode of natural poetry; it
ought to be done in a symphony, full of sweet melodies and swelling
harmonies; or sung in a strain of clear crystal iambics, such as Milnes
knows how to write. A mere map, drawn in words, gives the mind no
notion of that exquisite nature. What do mountains become in type, or
rivers in Mr. Vizetelly’s best brevier? Here lies the sweet bay,
gleaming peaceful in the rosy sunshine: green islands dip here and
there in its waters: purple mountains swell circling round it; and
towards them, rising from the bay, stretches a rich green plain,
fruitful with herbs and various foliage, in the midst of which the
white houses twinkle. I can see a little minaret, and some spreading
palm-trees; but, beyond these, the description would answer as well for
Bantry Bay as for Makri. You could write so far, nay, much more
particularly and grandly, without seeing the place at all, and after
reading Beaufort’s “Caramania,” which gives you not the least notion of
it.

Suppose the great Hydrographer of the Admiralty himself can’t describe
it, who surveyed the place; suppose Mr. Fellowes, who discovered it
afterwards—suppose, I say, Sir John Fellowes, Knt., can’t do it (and I
defy any man of imagination to got an impression of Telmessus from his
book)—can you, vain man, hope to try? The effect of the artist, as I
take it, ought to be, to produce upon his hearer’s mind, by his art, an
effect something similar to that produced on his own by the sight of
the natural object. Only music, or the best poetry, can do this.
Keats’s “Ode to the Grecian Urn” is the best description I know of that
sweet old silent ruin of Telmessus. After you have once seen it, the
remembrance remains with you, like a tune from Mozart, which he seems
to have caught out of heaven, and which rings sweet harmony in your
ears for ever after! It’s a benefit for all after life! You have but to
shut your eyes, and think, and recall it, and the delightful vision
comes smiling back, to your order!—the divine air—the delicious little
pageant, which nature set before you on this lucky day.

Here is the entry made in the note-book on the eventful day:- “In the
morning steamed into the bay of Glaucus—landed at Makri— cheerful old
desolate village—theatre by the beautiful sea-shore— great fertility,
oleanders—a palm-tree in the midst of the village, spreading out like a
Sultan’s aigrette—sculptured caverns, or tombs, up the mountain—camels
over the bridge.”

Perhaps it is best for a man of fancy to make his own landscape out of
these materials: to group the couched camels under the plane- trees;
the little crowd of wandering ragged heathens come down to the calm
water, to behold the nearing steamer; to fancy a mountain, in the sides
of which some scores of tombs are rudely carved; pillars and porticos,
and Doric entablatures. But it is of the little theatre that he must
make the most beautiful picture—a charming little place of festival,
lying out on the shore, and looking over the sweet bay and the swelling
purple islands. No theatre-goer ever looked out on a fairer scene. It
encourages poetry, idleness, delicious sensual reverie. O Jones! friend
of my heart! would you not like to be a white-robed Greek, lolling
languidly, on the cool benches here, and pouring compliments (in the
Ionic dialect) into the rosy ears of Neaera? Instead of Jones, your
name should be Ionides; instead of a silk hat, you should wear a
chaplet of roses in your hair: you would not listen to the choruses
they were singing on the stage, for the voice of the fair one would be
whispering a rendezvous for the mesonuktiais horais, and my Ionides
would have no ear for aught beside. Yonder, in the mountain, they would
carve a Doric cave temple, to receive your urn when all was done; and
you would be accompanied thither by a dirge of the surviving Ionidae.
The caves of the dead are empty now, however, and their place knows
them not any more among the festal haunts of the living. But, by way of
supplying the choric melodies sung here in old time, one of our
companions mounted on the scene and spouted,

“My name is Norval.”

On the same day we lay to for a while at another ruined theatre, that
of Antiphilos. The Oxford men, fresh with recollections of the
little-go, bounded away up the hill on which it lies to the ruin,
measured the steps of the theatre, and calculated the width of the
scene; while others, less active, watched them with telescopes from the
ship’s sides, as they plunged in and out of the stones and hollows.

Two days after the scene was quite changed. We were out of sight of the
classical country, and lay in St. George’s Bay, behind a huge mountain,
upon which St. George fought the dragon, and rescued the lovely Lady
Sabra, the King of Babylon’s daughter. The Turkish fleet was lying
about us, commanded by that Halil Pasha whose two children the two last
Sultans murdered. The crimson flag, with the star and crescent, floated
at the stern of his ship. Our diplomatist put on his uniform and
cordons, and paid his Excellency a visit. He spoke in rapture, when he
returned, of the beauty and order of the ship, and the urbanity of the
infidel Admiral. He sent us bottles of ancient Cyprus wine to drink:
and the captain of Her Majesty’s ship “Trump,” alongside which we were
lying, confirmed that good opinion of the Capitan Pasha which the
reception of the above present led us to entertain, by relating many
instances of his friendliness and hospitalities. Captain G- said the
Turkish ships were as well manned, as well kept, and as well
manoeuvred, as any vessels in any service; and intimated a desire to
command a Turkish seventy-four, and a perfect willingness to fight her
against a French ship of the same size. But I heartily trust he will
neither embrace the Mahometan opinions, nor be called upon to engage
any seventy-four whatever. If he do, let us hope he will have his own
men to fight with. If the crew of the “Trump” were all like the crew of
the captain’s boat, they need fear no two hundred and fifty men out of
any country, with any Joinville at their head. We were carried on shore
by this boat. For two years, during which the “Trump” had been lying
off Beyrout, none of the men but these eight had ever set foot on
shore. Mustn’t it be a happy life? We were landed at the busy quay of
Beyrout, flanked by the castle that the fighting old commodore half
battered down.

Along the Beyrout quays civilisation flourishes under the flags of the
consuls, which are streaming out over the yellow buildings in the clear
air. Hither she brings from England her produce of marine-stores and
woollens, her crockeries, her portable soups, and her bitter ale.
Hither she has brought politeness, and the last modes from Paris. They
were exhibited in the person of a pretty lady, superintending the great
French store, and who, seeing a stranger sketching on the quay, sent
forward a man with a chair to accommodate that artist, and greeted him
with a bow and a smile, such as only can be found in France. Then she
fell to talking with a young French officer with a beard, who was
greatly smitten with her. They were making love just as they do on the
Boulevard. An Arab porter left his bales, and the camel he was
unloading, to come and look at the sketch. Two stumpy flat-faced
Turkish soldiers, in red caps and white undresses, peered over the
paper. A noble little Lebanonian girl, with a deep yellow face, and
curly dun- coloured hair, and a blue tattooed chin, and for all
clothing a little ragged shift of blue cloth, stood by like a little
statue, holding her urn, and stared with wondering brown eyes. How
magnificently blue the water was!—how bright the flags and buildings as
they shone above it, and the lines of the rigging tossing in the bay!
The white crests of the blue waves jumped and sparkled like
quicksilver; the shadows were as broad and cool as the lights were
brilliant and rosy; the battered old towers of the commodore looked
quite cheerful in the delicious atmosphere; and the mountains beyond
were of an amethyst colour. The French officer and the lady went on
chattering quite happily about love, the last new bonnet, or the battle
of Isly, or the “Juif Errant.” How neatly her gown and sleeves fitted
her pretty little person! We had not seen a woman for a month, except
honest Mrs. Flanigan, the stewardess, and the ladies of our party, and
the tips of the noses of the Constantinople beauties as they passed by
leering from their yakmacs, waddling and plapping in their odious
yellow papooshes.

And this day is to be marked with a second white stone, for having
given the lucky writer of the present, occasion to behold a second
beauty. This was a native Syrian damsel, who bore the sweet name of
Mariam. So it was she stood as two of us (I mention the number for fear
of scandal) took her picture.

So it was that the good-natured black cook looked behind her young
mistress, with a benevolent grin, that only the admirable Leslie could
paint.

Mariam was the sister of the young guide whom we hired to show us
through the town, and to let us be cheated in the purchase of gilt
scarfs and handkerchiefs, which strangers think proper to buy. And
before the following authentic drawing could be made, many were the
stratagems the wily artists were obliged to employ, to subdue the
shyness of the little Mariam. In the first place, she would stand
behind the door (from which in the darkness her beautiful black eyes
gleamed out like penny tapers); nor could the entreaties of her brother
and mamma bring her from that hiding-place. In order to conciliate the
latter, we began by making a picture of her too— that is, not of her,
who was an enormous old fat woman in yellow, quivering all over with
strings of pearls, and necklaces of sequins, and other ornaments, the
which descended from her neck, and down her ample stomacher: we did not
depict that big old woman, who would have been frightened at an
accurate representation of her own enormity; but an ideal being, all
grace and beauty, dressed in her costume, and still simpering before me
in my sketch- book like a lady in a book of fashions.

This portrait was shown to the old woman, who handed it over to the
black cook, who, grinning, carried it to little Mariam—and the result
was, that the young creature stepped forward, and submitted; and has
come over to Europe as you see. {2}

A very snug and happy family did this of Mariam’s appear to be. If you
could judge by all the laughter and giggling, by the splendour of the
women’s attire, by the neatness of the little house, prettily decorated
with arabesque paintings, neat mats, and gay carpets, they were a
family well to do in the Beyrout world, and lived with as much comfort
as any Europeans. They had one book; and, on the wall of the principal
apartment, a black picture of the Virgin, whose name is borne by pretty
Mariam.

The camels and the soldiers, the bazaars and khans, the fountains and
awnings, which chequer, with such delightful variety of light and
shade, the alleys and markets of an Oriental town, are to be seen in
Beyrout in perfection; and an artist might here employ himself for
months with advantage and pleasure. A new costume was here added to the
motley and picturesque assembly of dresses. This was the dress of the
blue-veiled women from the Lebanon, stalking solemnly through the
markets, with huge horns, near a yard high, on their foreheads. For
thousands of years, since the time the Hebrew prophets wrote, these
horns have so been exalted in the Lebanon.

At night Captain Lewis gave a splendid ball and supper to the “Trump.”
We had the “Trump’s” band to perform the music; and a grand sight it
was to see the captain himself enthusiastically leading on the drum.
Blue lights and rockets were burned from the yards of our ship; which
festive signals were answered presently from the “Trump,” and from
another English vessel in the harbour.

They must have struck the Capitan Pasha with wonder, for he sent his
secretary on board of us to inquire what the fireworks meant. And the
worthy Turk had scarcely put his foot on the deck, when he found
himself seized round the waist by one of the “Trump’s” officers, and
whirling round the deck in a waltz, to his own amazement, and the huge
delight of the company. His face of wonder and gravity, as he went on
twirling, could not have been exceeded by that of a dancing dervish at
Scutari; and the manner in which he managed to enjamber the waltz
excited universal applause.

I forgot whether he accommodated himself to European ways so much
further as to drink champagne at supper-time; to say that he did would
be telling tales out of school, and might interfere with the future
advancement of that jolly dancing Turk.

We made acquaintance with another of the Sultan’s subjects, who, I
fear, will have occasion to doubt of the honour of the English nation,
after the foul treachery with which he was treated.

Among the occupiers of the little bazaar matchboxes, vendors of
embroidered handkerchiefs and other articles of showy Eastern
haberdashery, was a good-looking neat young fellow, who spoke English
very fluently, and was particularly attentive to all the passengers on
board our ship. This gentleman was not only a pocket-handkerchief
merchant in the bazaar, but earned a further livelihood by letting out
mules and donkeys; and he kept a small lodging-house, or inn, for
travellers, as we were informed.

No wonder he spoke good English, and was exceedingly polite and
well-bred; for the worthy man had passed some time in England, and in
the best society too. That humble haberdasher at Beyrout had been a
lion here, at the very best houses of the great people, and had
actually made his appearance at Windsor, where he was received as a
Syrian Prince, and treated with great hospitality by Royalty itself.

I don’t know what waggish propensity moved one of the officers of the
“Trump” to say that there was an equerry of His Royal Highness the
Prince on board, and to point me out as the dignified personage in
question. So the Syrian Prince was introduced to the Royal equerry, and
a great many compliments passed between us. I even had the audacity to
state that on my very last interview with my Royal master, His Royal
Highness had said, “Colonel Titmarsh, when you go to Beyrout, you will
make special inquiries regarding my interesting friend Cogia Hassan.”

Poor Cogia Hassan (I forget whether that was his name, but it is as
good as another) was overpowered with this Royal message; and we had an
intimate conversation together, at which the waggish officer of the
“Trump” assisted with the greatest glee.

But see the consequences of deceit! The next day, as we were getting
under way, who should come on board but my friend the Syrian Prince,
most eager for a last interview with the Windsor equerry; and he begged
me to carry his protestations of unalterable fidelity to the gracious
consort of Her Majesty. Nor was this all. Cogia Hassan actually
produced a great box of sweetmeats, of which he begged my Excellency to
accept, and a little figure of a doll dressed in the costume of
Lebanon. Then the punishment of imposture began to be felt severely by
me. How to accept the poor devil’s sweetmeats? How to refuse them? And
as we know that one fib leads to another, so I was obliged to support
the first falsehood by another; and putting on a dignified air—“Cogia
Hassan,” says I, “I am surprised you don’t know the habits of the
British Court better, and are not aware that our gracious master
solemnly forbids his servants to accept any sort of backsheesh upon our
travels.”

So Prince Cogia Hassan went over the side with his chest of sweetmeats,
but insisted on leaving the doll, which may be worth
twopence-halfpenny; of which, and of the costume of the women of
Lebanon, the following is an accurate likeness:-




CHAPTER XI
A DAY AND NIGHT IN SYRIA


When, after being for five whole weeks at sea, with a general belief
that at the end of a few days the marine malady leaves you for good,
you find that a brisk wind and a heavy rolling swell create exactly the
same inward effects which they occasioned at the very commencement of
the voyage—you begin to fancy that you are unfairly dealt with: and I,
for my part, had thought of complaining to the Company of this
atrocious violation of the rules of their prospectus; but we were
perpetually coming to anchor in various ports, at which intervals of
peace and good-humour were restored to us.

On the 3rd of October our cable rushed with a huge rattle into the blue
sea before Jaffa, at a distance of considerably more than a mile off
the town, which lay before us very clear, with the flags of the consuls
flaring in the bright sky and making a cheerful and hospitable show.
The houses a great heap of sun-baked stones, surmounted here and there
by minarets and countless little whitewashed domes; a few date-trees
spread out their fan-like heads over these dull-looking buildings; long
sands stretched away on either side, with low purple hills behind them;
we could see specks of camels crawling over these yellow plains; and
those persons who were about to land had the leisure to behold the
sea-spray flashing over the sands, and over a heap of black rocks which
lie before the entry to the town. The swell is very great, the passage
between the rocks narrow, and the danger sometimes considerable. So the
guide began to entertain the ladies and other passengers in the huge
country boat which brought us from the steamer with an agreeable story
of a lieutenant and eight seamen of one of Her Majesty’s ships, who
were upset, dashed to pieces, and drowned upon these rocks, through
which two men and two boys, with a very moderate portion of clothing,
each standing and pulling half an oar—there were but two oars between
them, and another by way of rudder—were endeavouring to guide us.

When the danger of the rocks and surf was passed, came another danger
of the hideous brutes in brown skins and the briefest shirts, who came
towards the boat, straddling through the water with outstretched arms,
grinning and yelling their Arab invitations to mount their shoulders. I
think these fellows frightened the ladies still more than the rocks and
the surf; but the poor creatures were obliged to submit; and,
trembling, were accommodated somehow upon the mahogany backs of these
ruffians, carried through the shallows, and flung up to a ledge before
the city gate, where crowds more of dark people were swarming, howling
after their fashion. The gentlemen, meanwhile, were having arguments
about the eternal backsheesh with the roaring Arab boatmen; and I
recall with wonder and delight especially, the curses and screams of
one small and extremely loud-lunged fellow, who expressed discontent at
receiving a five, instead of a six-piastre piece. But how is one to
know, without possessing the language? Both coins are made of a greasy
pewtery sort of tin; and I thought the biggest was the most valuable:
but the fellow showed a sense of their value, and a disposition
seemingly to cut any man’s throat who did not understand it. Men’s
throats have been cut for a less difference before now.

Being cast upon the ledge, the first care of our gallantry was to look
after the ladies, who were scared and astonished by the naked savage
brutes, who were shouldering the poor things to and fro; and bearing
them through these and a dark archway, we came into a street crammed
with donkeys and their packs and drivers, and towering camels with
leering eyes looking into the second-floor rooms, and huge splay feet,
through which mesdames et mesdemoiselles were to be conducted. We made
a rush at the first open door, and passed comfortably under the heels
of some horses gathered under the arched court, and up a stone
staircase, which turned out to be that of the Russian consul’s house.
His people welcomed us most cordially to his abode, and the ladies and
the luggage (objects of our solicitude) were led up many stairs and
across several terraces to a most comfortable little room, under a dome
of its own, where the representative of Russia sat. Women with brown
faces and draggle-tailed coats and turbans, and wondering eyes, and no
stays, and blue beads and gold coins hanging round their necks, came to
gaze, as they passed, upon the fair neat Englishwomen. Blowsy black
cooks puffing over fires and the strangest pots and pans on the
terraces, children paddling about in long striped robes, interrupted
their sports or labours to come and stare; and the consul, in his cool
domed chamber, with a lattice overlooking the sea, with clean mats, and
pictures of the Emperor, the Virgin, and St. George, received the
strangers with smiling courtesies, regaling the ladies with
pomegranates and sugar, the gentlemen with pipes of tobacco, whereof
the fragrant tubes were three yards long.

The Russian amenities concluded, we left the ladies still under the
comfortable cool dome of the Russian consulate, and went to see our own
representative. The streets of the little town are neither agreeable to
horse nor foot travellers. Many of the streets are mere flights of
rough steps, leading abruptly into private houses: you pass under
archways and passages numberless; a steep dirty labyrinth of
stone-vaulted stables and sheds occupies the ground- floor of the
habitations; and you pass from flat to flat of the terraces; at various
irregular corners of which, little chambers, with little private domes,
are erected, and the people live seemingly as much upon the terrace as
in the room.

We found the English consul in a queer little arched chamber, with a
strange old picture of the King’s arms to decorate one side of it: and
here the consul, a demure old man, dressed in red flowing robes, with a
feeble janissary bearing a shabby tin-mounted staff, or mace, to denote
his office, received such of our nation as came to him for hospitality.
He distributed pipes and coffee to all and every one; he made us a
present of his house and all his beds for the night, and went himself
to lie quietly on the terrace; and for all this hospitality he declined
to receive any reward from us, and said he was but doing his duty in
taking us in. This worthy man, I thought, must doubtless be very well
paid by our Government for making such sacrifices; but it appears that
he does not get one single farthing, and that the greater number of our
Levant consuls are paid at a similar rate of easy remuneration. If we
have bad consular agents, have we a right to complain? If the worthy
gentlemen cheat occasionally, can we reasonably be angry? But in
travelling through these countries, English people, who don’t take into
consideration the miserable poverty and scanty resources of their
country, and are apt to brag and be proud of it, have their vanity hurt
by seeing the representatives of every nation but their own well and
decently maintained, and feel ashamed at sitting down under the shabby
protection of our mean consular flag.

The active young men of our party had been on shore long before us, and
seized upon all the available horses in the town; but we relied upon a
letter from Halil Pasha, enjoining all governors and pashas to help us
in all ways: and hearing we were the bearers of this document, the cadi
and vice-governor of Jaffa came to wait upon the head of our party;
declared that it was his delight and honour to set eyes upon us; that
he would do everything in the world to serve us; that there were no
horses, unluckily, but he would send and get some in three hours; and
so left us with a world of grinning bows and many choice compliments
from one side to the other, which came to each filtered through an
obsequious interpreter. But hours passed, and the clatter of horses’
hoofs was not heard. We had our dinner of eggs and flaps of bread, and
the sunset gun fired: we had our pipes and coffee again, and the night
fell. Is this man throwing dirt upon us? we began to think. Is he
laughing at our beards, and are our mothers’ graves ill-treated by this
smiling swindling cadi? We determined to go and seek in his own den
this shuffling dispenser of infidel justice. This time we would be no
more bamboozled by compliments; but we would use the language of stern
expostulation, and, being roused, would let the rascal hear the roar of
the indignant British lion; so we rose up in our wrath. The poor consul
got a lamp for us with a bit of wax-candle, such as I wonder his means
could afford; the shabby janissary marched ahead with his tin mace; the
two laquais-de-place, that two of our company had hired, stepped
forward, each with an old sabre, and we went clattering and stumbling
down the streets of the town, in order to seize upon this cadi in his
own divan. I was glad, for my part (though outwardly majestic and
indignant in demeanour), that the horses had not come, and that we had
a chance of seeing this little queer glimpse of Oriental life, which
the magistrate’s faithlessness procured for us.

As piety forbids the Turks to eat during the weary daylight hours of
the Ramazan, they spend their time profitably in sleeping until the
welcome sunset, when the town wakens: all the lanterns are lighted up;
all the pipes begin to puff, and the narghiles to bubble; all the
sour-milk-and-sherbet-men begin to yell out the excellence of their
wares; all the frying-pans in the little dirty cookshops begin to friz,
and the pots to send forth a steam: and through this dingy, ragged,
bustling, beggarly, cheerful scene, we began now to march towards the
Bow Street of Jaffa. We bustled through a crowded narrow archway which
led to the cadi’s police- office, entered the little room, atrociously
perfumed with musk, and passing by the rail-board, where the common
sort stood, mounted the stage upon which his worship and friends sat,
and squatted down on the divans in stern and silent dignity. His honour
ordered us coffee, his countenance evidently showing considerable
alarm. A black slave, whose duty seemed to be to prepare this beverage
in a side-room with a furnace, prepared for each of us about a
teaspoonful of the liquor: his worship’s clerk, I presume, a tall Turk
of a noble aspect, presented it to us; and having lapped up the little
modicum of drink, the British lion began to speak.

All the other travellers (said the lion with perfect reason) have good
horses and are gone; the Russians have got horses, the Spaniards have
horses, the English have horses, but we, we vizirs in our country,
coming with letters of Halil Pasha, are laughed at, spit upon! Are
Halil Pasha’s letters dirt, that you attend to them in this way? Are
British lions dogs that you treat them so?—and so on. This speech with
many variations was made on our side for a quarter of an hour; and we
finally swore that unless the horses were forthcoming we would write to
Halil Pasha the next morning, and to His Excellency the English
Minister at the Sublime Porte. Then you should have heard the chorus of
Turks in reply: a dozen voices rose up from the divan, shouting,
screaming, ejaculating, expectorating (the Arabic spoken language seems
to require a great employment of the two latter oratorical methods),
and uttering what the meek interpreter did not translate to us, but
what I dare say were by no means complimentary phrases towards us and
our nation. Finally, the palaver concluded by the cadi declaring that
by the will of Heaven horses should be forthcoming at three o’clock in
the morning; and that if not, why, then, we might write to Halil Pasha.

This posed us, and we rose up and haughtily took leave. I should like
to know that fellow’s real opinion of us lions very much: and
especially to have had the translation of the speeches of a huge-
breeched turbaned roaring infidel, who looked and spoke as if he would
have liked to fling us all into the sea, which was hoarsely murmuring
under our windows an accompaniment to the concert within.

We then marched through the bazaars, that were lofty and grim, and
pretty full of people. In a desolate broken building, some hundreds of
children were playing and singing; in many corners sat parties over
their water-pipes, one of whom every now and then would begin twanging
out a most queer chant; others there were playing at casino—a crowd
squatted around the squalling gamblers, and talking and looking on with
eager interest. In one place of the bazaar we found a hundred people at
least listening to a story- teller who delivered his tale with
excellent action, voice, and volubility: in another they were playing a
sort of thimble-rig with coffee-cups, all intent upon the game, and the
player himself very wild lest one of our party, who had discovered
where the pea lay, should tell the company. The devotion and energy
with which all these pastimes were pursued, struck me as much as
anything. These people have been playing thimble-rig and casino; that
story- teller has been shouting his tale of Antar for forty years; and
they are just as happy with this amusement now as when first they tried
it. Is there no ennui in the Eastern countries, and are blue-devils not
allowed to go abroad there?

From the bazaars we went to see the house of Mustapha, said to be the
best house and the greatest man of Jaffa. But the great man had
absconded suddenly, and had fled into Egypt. The Sultan had made a
demand upon him for sixteen thousand purses, 80,000l.— Mustapha
retired—the Sultan pounced down upon his house, and his goods, his
horses and his mules. His harem was desolate. Mr. Milnes could have
written six affecting poems, had he been with us, on the dark
loneliness of that violated sanctuary. We passed from hall to hall,
terrace to terrace—a few fellows were slumbering on the naked floors,
and scarce turned as we went by them. We entered Mustapha’s particular
divan—there was the raised floor, but no bearded friends squatting away
the night of Ramazan; there was the little coffee furnace, but where
was the slave and the coffee and the glowing embers of the pipes?
Mustapha’s favourite passages from the Koran were still painted up on
the walls, but nobody was the wiser for them. We walked over a sleeping
negro, and opened the windows which looked into his gardens. The horses
and donkeys, the camels and mules were picketed there below, but where
is the said Mustapha? From the frying-pan of the Porte, has he not
fallen into the fire of Mehemet Ali? And which is best, to broil or to
fry? If it be but to read the “Arabian Nights” again on getting home,
it is good to have made this little voyage and seen these strange
places and faces.

Then we went out through the arched lowering gateway of the town into
the plain beyond, and that was another famous and brilliant scene of
the “Arabian Nights.” The heaven shone with a marvellous brilliancy—the
plain disappeared far in the haze—the towers and battlements of the
town rose black against the sky—old outlandish trees rose up here and
there—clumps of camels were couched in the rare herbage—dogs were
baying about—groups of men lay sleeping under their haicks round
about—round about the tall gates many lights were twinkling—and they
brought us water-pipes and sherbet- -and we wondered to think that
London was only three weeks off.

Then came the night at the consul’s. The poor demure old gentleman
brought out his mattresses; and the ladies sleeping round on the
divans, we lay down quite happy; and I for my part intended to make as
delightful dreams as Alnaschar; but—lo, the delicate mosquito sounded
his horn: the active flea jumped up, and came to feast on Christian
flesh (the Eastern flea bites more bitterly than the most savage bug in
Christendom), and the bug—oh, the accursed! Why was he made? What duty
has that infamous ruffian to perform in the world, save to make people
wretched? Only Bulwer in his most pathetic style could describe the
miseries of that night—the moaning, the groaning, the cursing, the
tumbling, the blistering, the infamous despair and degradation! I heard
all the cocks in Jaffa crow; the children crying, and the mothers
hushing them; the donkeys braying fitfully in the moonlight; at last I
heard the clatter of hoofs below, and the hailing of men. It was three
o’clock, the horses were actually come; nay, there were camels
likewise; asses and mules, pack-saddles and drivers, all bustling
together under the moonlight in the cheerful street—and the first night
in Syria was over.




CHAPTER XII
FROM JAFFA TO JERUSALEM


It took an hour or more to get our little caravan into marching order,
to accommodate all the packs to the horses, the horses to the riders;
to see the ladies comfortably placed in their litter, with a sleek and
large black mule fore and aft, a groom to each mule, and a tall and
exceedingly good-natured and mahogany-coloured infidel to walk by the
side of the carriage, to balance it as it swayed to and fro, and to
offer his back as a step to the inmates whenever they were minded to
ascend or alight. These three fellows, fasting through the Ramazan, and
over as rough a road, for the greater part, as ever shook mortal bones,
performed their fourteen hours’ walk of near forty miles with the most
admirable courage, alacrity, and good-humour. They once or twice drank
water on the march, and so far infringed the rule; but they refused all
bread or edible refreshment offered to them, and tugged on with an
energy that the best camel, and I am sure the best Christian, might
envy. What a lesson of good-humoured endurance it was to certain Pall
Mall Sardanapaluses, who grumble if club sofa cushions are not soft
enough!

If I could write sonnets at leisure, I would like to chronicle in
fourteen lines my sensations on finding myself on a high Turkish
saddle, with a pair of fire-shovel stirrups and worsted reins, red
padded saddle-cloth, and innumerable tags, fringes, glass-beads, ends
of rope, to decorate the harness of the horse, the gallant steed on
which I was about to gallop into Syrian life. What a figure we cut in
the moonlight, and how they would have stared in the Strand! Ay, or in
Leicestershire, where I warrant such a horse and rider are not often
visible! The shovel stirrups are deucedly short; the clumsy leathers
cut the shins of some equestrians abominably; you sit over your horse
as it were on a tower, from which the descent would be very easy, but
for the big peak of the saddle. A good way for the inexperienced is to
put a stick or umbrella across the saddle peak again, so that it is
next to impossible to go over your horse’s neck. I found this a vast
comfort in going down the hills, and recommend it conscientiously to
other dear simple brethren of the city.

Peaceful men, we did not ornament our girdles with pistols, yataghans,
&c., such as some pilgrims appeared to bristle all over with; and as a
lesson to such rash people, a story may be told which was narrated to
us at Jerusalem, and carries a wholesome moral. The Honourable Hoggin
Armer, who was lately travelling in the East, wore about his stomach
two brace of pistols, of such exquisite finish and make, that a Sheikh,
in the Jericho country, robbed him merely for the sake of the pistols.
I don’t know whether he has told the story to his friends at home.

Another story about Sheikhs may here be told a propos. That celebrated
Irish Peer, Lord Oldgent (who was distinguished in the Buckinghamshire
Dragoons), having paid a sort of black mail to the Sheikh of Jericho
country, was suddenly set upon by another Sheikh, who claimed to be the
real Jerichonian governor; and these twins quarrelled over the body of
Lord Oldgent, as the widows for the innocent baby before Solomon. There
was enough for both—but these digressions are interminable.

The party got under way at near four o’clock: the ladies in the litter,
the French femme-de-chambre manfully caracoling on a grey horse; the
cavaliers, like your humble servant, on their high saddles; the
domestics, flunkeys, guides, and grooms, on all sorts of animals,—some
fourteen in all. Add to these, two most grave and stately Arabs in
white beards, white turbans, white haicks and raiments; sabres curling
round their military thighs, and immense long guns at their backs. More
venerable warriors I never saw; they went by the side of the litter
soberly prancing. When we emerged from the steep clattering streets of
the city into the grey plains, lighted by the moon and starlight, these
militaries rode onward, leading the way through the huge avenues of
strange diabolical-looking prickly pears (plants that look as if they
had grown in Tartarus), by which the first mile or two of route from
the city is bounded; and as the dawn arose before us, exhibiting first
a streak of grey, then of green, then of red in the sky, it was fine to
see these martial figures defined against the rising light. The sight
of that little cavalcade, and of the nature around it, will always
remain with me, I think, as one of the freshest and most delightful
sensations I have enjoyed since the day I first saw Calais pier. It was
full day when they gave their horses a drink at a large pretty Oriental
fountain, and then presently we entered the open plain—the famous plain
of Sharon—so fruitful in roses once, now hardly cultivated, but always
beautiful and noble.

Here presently, in the distance, we saw another cavalcade pricking over
the plain. Our two white warriors spread to the right and left, and
galloped to reconnoitre. We, too, put our steeds to the canter, and
handling our umbrellas as Richard did his lance against Saladin, went
undaunted to challenge this caravan. The fact is, we could distinguish
that it was formed of the party of our pious friends the Poles, and we
hailed them with cheerful shouting, and presently the two caravans
joined company, and scoured the plain at the rate of near four miles
per hour. The horse-master, a courier of this company, rode three miles
for our one. He was a broken- nosed Arab, with pistols, a sabre, a
fusee, a yellow Damascus cloth flapping over his head, and his nose
ornamented with diachylon. He rode a hog-necked grey Arab, bristling
over with harness, and jumped, and whirled, and reared, and halted, to
the admiration of all.

Scarce had the diachylonian Arab finished his evolutions, when lo! yet
another cloud of dust was seen, and another party of armed and
glittering horsemen appeared. They, too, were led by an Arab, who was
followed by two janissaries, with silver maces shining in the sun.
’Twas the party of the new American Consul-General of Syria and
Jerusalem, hastening to that city, with the inferior consuls of Ramleh
and Jaffa to escort him. He expects to see the Millennium in three
years, and has accepted the office of consul at Jerusalem, so as to be
on the spot in readiness.

When the diachylon Arab saw the American Arab, he straightway galloped
his steed towards him, took his pipe, which he delivered at his
adversary in guise of a jereed, and galloped round and round, and in
and out, and there and back again, as in a play of war. The American
replied in a similar playful ferocity—the two warriors made a little
tournament for us there on the plains before Jaffa, in the which
diachylon, being a little worsted, challenged his adversary to a race,
and fled away on his grey, the American following on his bay. Here poor
sticking-plaster was again worsted, the Yankee contemptuously riding
round him, and then declining further exercise.

What more could mortal man want? A troop of knights and paladins could
have done no more. In no page of Walter Scott have I read a scene more
fair and sparkling. The sober warriors of our escort did not join in
the gambols of the young men. There they rode soberly, in their white
turbans, by their ladies’ litter, their long guns rising up behind
them.

There was no lack of company along the road: donkeys numberless, camels
by twos and threes; now a mule-driver, trudging along the road,
chanting a most queer melody; now a lady, in white veil, black mask,
and yellow papooshes, bestriding her ass, and followed by her
husband,—met us on the way; and most people gave a salutation.
Presently we saw Ramleh, in a smoking mist, on the plain before us,
flanked to the right by a tall lonely tower, that might have held the
bells of some moutier of Caen or Evreux. As we entered, about three
hours and a half after starting, among the white domes and stone houses
of the little town, we passed the place of tombs. Two women were
sitting on one of them,—the one bending her head towards the stone, and
rocking to and fro, and moaning out a very sweet pitiful lamentation.
The American consul invited us to breakfast at the house of his
subaltern, the hospitable one-eyed Armenian, who represents the United
States at Jaffa. The stars and stripes were flaunting over his
terraces, to which we ascended, leaving our horses to the care of a
multitude of roaring ragged Arabs beneath, who took charge of and fed
the animals, though I can’t say in the least why; but, in the same way
as getting off my horse on entering Jerusalem, I gave the rein into the
hand of the first person near me, and have never heard of the worthy
brute since. At the American consul’s we were served first with rice
soup in pishpash, flavoured with cinnamon and spice; then with boiled
mutton, then with stewed ditto and tomatoes; then with fowls swimming
in grease; then with brown ragouts belaboured with onions; then with a
smoking pilaff of rice: several of which dishes I can pronounce to be
of excellent material and flavour. When the gentry had concluded this
repast, it was handed to a side table, where the commonalty speedily
discussed it. We left them licking their fingers as we hastened away
upon the second part of the ride.

And as we quitted Ramleh, the scenery lost that sweet and peaceful look
which characterises the pretty plain we had traversed; and the sun,
too, rising in the heaven, dissipated all those fresh beautiful tints
in which God’s world is clothed of early morning, and which city people
have so seldom the chance of beholding. The plain over which we rode
looked yellow and gloomy; the cultivation little or none; the land
across the roadside fringed, for the most part, with straggling
wild-carrot plants; a patch of green only here and there. We passed
several herds of lean, small, well- conditioned cattle: many flocks of
black goats, tended now and then by a ragged negro shepherd, his long
gun slung over his back, his hand over his eyes to shade them as he
stared at our little cavalcade. Most of the half-naked countryfolks we
met had this dismal appendage to Eastern rustic life; and the weapon
could hardly be one of mere defence, for, beyond the faded skull-cap,
or tattered coat of blue or dirty white, the brawny, brown-chested,
solemn-looking fellows had nothing seemingly to guard. As before, there
was no lack of travellers on the road: more donkeys trotted by, looking
sleek and strong; camels singly and by pairs, laden with a little
humble ragged merchandise, on their way between the two towns. About
noon we halted eagerly at a short distance from an Arab village and
well, where all were glad of a drink of fresh water. A village of
beavers, or a colony of ants, make habitations not unlike these dismal
huts piled together on the plain here. There were no single huts along
the whole line of road; poor and wretched as they are, the Fellahs
huddle all together for protection from the other thieves their
neighbours. The government (which we restored to them) has no power to
protect them, and is only strong enough to rob them. The women, with
their long blue gowns and ragged veils, came to and fro with pitchers
on their heads. Rebecca had such an one when she brought drink to the
lieutenant of Abraham. The boys came staring round, bawling after us
with their fathers for the inevitable backsheesh. The village dogs
barked round the flocks, as they were driven to water or pasture.

We saw a gloomy, not very lofty-looking ridge of hills in front of us;
the highest of which the guide pointing out to us, told us that from it
we should see Jerusalem. It looked very near, and we all set up a trot
of enthusiasm to get into this hill country.

But that burst of enthusiasm (it may have carried us nearly a quarter
of a mile in three minutes) was soon destined to be checked by the
disagreeable nature of the country we had to traverse. Before we got to
the real mountain district, we were in a manner prepared for it, by the
mounting and descent of several lonely outlying hills, up and down
which our rough stony track wound. Then we entered the hill district,
and our path lay through the clattering bed of an ancient stream, whose
brawling waters have rolled away into the past, along with the fierce
and turbulent race who once inhabited these savage hills. There may
have been cultivation here two thousand years ago. The mountains, or
huge stony mounds environing this rough path, have level ridges all the
way up to their summits; on these parallel ledges there is still some
verdure and soil: when water flowed here, and the country was thronged
with that extraordinary population, which, according to the Sacred
Histories, was crowded into the region, these mountain steps may have
been gardens and vineyards, such as we see now thriving along the hills
of the Rhine. Now the district is quite deserted, and you ride among
what seem to be so many petrified waterfalls. We saw no animals moving
among the stony brakes; scarcely even a dozen little birds in the whole
course of the ride. The sparrows are all at Jerusalem, among the
housetops, where their ceaseless chirping and twittering forms the most
cheerful sound of the place.

The company of Poles, the company of Oxford men, and the little
American army, travelled too quick for our caravan, which was made to
follow the slow progress of the ladies’ litter, and we had to make the
journey through the mountains in a very small number. Not one of our
party had a single weapon more dreadful than an umbrella: and a couple
of Arabs, wickedly inclined, might have brought us all to the halt, and
rifled every carpet-bag and pocket belonging to us. Nor can I say that
we journeyed without certain qualms of fear. When swarthy fellows, with
girdles full of pistols and yataghans, passed us without unslinging
their long guns—when scowling camel-riders, with awful long bending
lances, decorated with tufts of rags, or savage plumes of scarlet
feathers, went by without molestation—I think we were rather glad that
they did not stop and parley: for, after all, a British lion with an
umbrella is no match for an Arab with his infernal long gun. What, too,
would have become of our women? So we tried to think that it was
entirely out of anxiety for them that we were inclined to push on.

There is a shady resting-place and village in the midst of the mountain
district where the travellers are accustomed to halt for an hour’s
repose and refreshment; and the other caravans were just quitting this
spot, having enjoyed its cool shades and waters, when we came up.
Should we stop? Regard for the ladies (of course no other earthly
consideration) made us say, “No!” What admirable self-denial and
chivalrous devotion! So our poor devils of mules and horses got no rest
and no water, our panting litter-men no breathing time, and we
staggered desperately after the procession ahead of us. It wound up the
mountain in front of us: the Poles with their guns and attendants, the
American with his janissaries; fifty or sixty all riding slowly like
the procession in “Bluebeard.”

But alas, they headed us very soon; when we got up the weary hill they
were all out of sight. Perhaps thoughts of Fleet Street did cross the
minds of some of us then, and a vague desire to see a few policemen.
The district now seemed peopled, and with an ugly race. Savage
personages peered at us out of huts, and grim holes in the rocks. The
mules began to loiter most abominably—water the muleteers must
have—and, behold, we came to a pleasant-looking village of trees
standing on a hill; children were shaking figs from the trees—women
were going about—before us was the mosque of a holy man—the village,
looking like a collection of little forts, rose up on the hill to our
right, with a long view of the fields and gardens stretching from it,
and camels arriving with their burdens. Here we must stop; Paolo, the
chief servant, knew the Sheikh of the village—he very good man—give him
water and supper- -water very good here—in fact we began to think of
the propriety of halting here for the night, and making our entry into
Jerusalem on the next day.

A man on a handsome horse dressed in red came prancing up to us,
looking hard at the ladies in the litter, and passed away. Then two
others sauntered up, one handsome, and dressed in red too, and he
stared into the litter without ceremony, began to play with a little
dog that lay there, asked if we were Inglees, and was answered by me in
the affirmative. Paolo had brought the water, the most delicious
draught in the world. The gentlefolks had had some, the poor muleteers
were longing for it. The French maid, the courageous Victoire (never
since the days of Joan of Arc has there surely been a more gallant and
virtuous female of France) refused the drink; when suddenly a servant
of the party scampers up to his master and says: “Abou Gosh says the
ladies must get out and show themselves to the women of the village!”

It was Abou Gosh himself, the redoubted robber Sheikh about whom we had
been laughing and crying “Wolf!” all day. Never was seen such a skurry!
“March!” was the instant order given. When Victoire heard who it was
and the message, you should have seen how she changed countenance;
trembling for her virtue in the ferocious clutches of a Gosh. “Un verre
d’eau pour l’amour de Dieu!” gasped she, and was ready to faint on her
saddle. “Ne buvez plus, Victoire!” screamed a little fellow of our
party. “Push on, push on!” cried one and all. “What’s the matter?”
exclaimed the ladies in the litter, as they saw themselves suddenly
jogging on again. But we took care not to tell them what had been the
designs of the redoubtable Abou Gosh. Away then we went—Victoire was
saved—and her mistresses rescued from dangers they knew not of, until
they were a long way out of the village.

Did he intend insult or good will? Did Victoire escape the odious
chance of becoming Madame Abou Gosh? Or did the mountain chief simply
propose to be hospitable after his fashion? I think the latter was his
desire; if the former had been his wish, a half- dozen of his long guns
could have been up with us in a minute, and had all our party at their
mercy. But now, for the sake of the mere excitement, the incident was,
I am sorry to say, rather a pleasant one than otherwise: especially for
a traveller who is in the happy condition of being able to sing before
robbers, as is the case with the writer of the present.

A little way out of the land of Goshen we came upon a long stretch of
gardens and vineyards, slanting towards the setting sun, which
illuminated numberless golden clusters of the most delicious grapes, of
which we stopped and partook. Such grapes were never before tasted;
water so fresh as that which a countryman fetched for us from a well
never sluiced parched throats before. It was the ride, the sun, and
above all Abou Gosh, who made that refreshment so sweet, and hereby I
offer him my best thanks. Presently, in the midst of a most diabolical
ravine, down which our horses went sliding, we heard the evening gun:
it was fired from Jerusalem. The twilight is brief in this country, and
in a few minutes the landscape was grey round about us, and the sky
lighted up by a hundred thousand stars, which made the night beautiful.

Under this superb canopy we rode for a couple of hours to our journey’s
end. The mountains round about us dark, lonely, and sad; the landscape
as we saw it at night (it is not more cheerful in the daytime), the
most solemn and forlorn I have ever seen. The feelings of almost terror
with which, riding through the night, we approached this awful place,
the centre of the world’s past and future history, have no need to be
noted down here. The recollection of those sensations must remain with
a man as long as his memory lasts; and he should think of them as
often, perhaps, as he should talk of them little.




CHAPTER XIII
JERUSALEM


The ladies of our party found excellent quarters in readiness for them
at the Greek convent in the city; where airy rooms, and plentiful
meals, and wines and sweet-meats delicate and abundant, were provided
to cheer them after the fatigues of their journey. I don’t know whether
the worthy fathers of the convent share in the good things which they
lavish on their guests; but they look as if they do. Those whom we saw
bore every sign of easy conscience and good living; there were a pair
of strong, rosy, greasy, lazy lay- brothers, dawdling in the sun on the
convent terrace, or peering over the parapet into the street below,
whose looks gave one a notion of anything but asceticism.

In the principal room of the strangers’ house (the lay traveller is not
admitted to dwell in the sacred interior of the convent), and over the
building, the Russian double-headed eagle is displayed. The place is
under the patronage of the Emperor Nicholas; an Imperial Prince has
stayed in these rooms; the Russian consul performs a great part in the
city; and a considerable annual stipend is given by the Emperor towards
the maintenance of the great establishment in Jerusalem. The Great
Chapel of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is by far the richest, in
point of furniture, of all the places of worship under that roof. We
were in Russia, when we came to visit our friends here; under the
protection of the Father of the Church and the Imperial Eagle! This
butcher and tyrant, who sits on his throne only through the crime of
those who held it before him—every step in whose pedigree is stained by
some horrible mark of murder, parricide, adultery—this padded and
whiskered pontiff—who rules in his jack-boots over a system of spies
and soldiers, of deceit, ignorance, dissoluteness, and brute force,
such as surely the history of the world never told of before—has a
tender interest in the welfare of his spiritual children: in the
Eastern Church ranks after Divinity, and is worshipped by millions of
men. A pious exemplar of Christianity truly! and of the condition to
which its union with politics has brought it! Think of the rank to
which he pretends, and gravely believes that he possesses, no
doubt!—think of those who assumed the same ultra-sacred character
before him!—and then of the Bible and the Founder of the Religion, of
which the Emperor assumes to be the chief priest and defender!

We had some Poles of our party; but these poor fellows went to the
Latin convent, declining to worship after the Emperor’s fashion. The
next night after our arrival, two of them passed in the Sepulchre.
There we saw them, more than once on subsequent visits, kneeling in the
Latin Church before the pictures, or marching solemnly with candles in
processions, or lying flat on the stones, or passionately kissing the
spots which their traditions have consecrated as the authentic places
of the Saviour’s sufferings. More honest or more civilised, or from
opposition, the Latin fathers have long given up and disowned the
disgusting mummery of the Eastern Fire—which lie the Greeks continue
annually to tell.

Their travellers’ house and convent, though large and commodious, are
of a much poorer and shabbier condition than those of the Greeks. Both
make believe not to take money; but the traveller is expected to pay in
each. The Latin fathers enlarge their means by a little harmless trade
in beads and crosses, and mother-of-pearl shells, on which figures of
saints are engraved; and which they purchase from the manufacturers,
and vend at a small profit. The English, until of late, used to be
quartered in these sham inns; but last year two or three Maltese took
houses for the reception of tourists, who can now be accommodated with
cleanly and comfortable board, at a rate not too heavy for most
pockets.

To one of these we went very gladly; giving our horses the bridle at
the door, which went off of their own will to their stables, through
the dark inextricable labyrinths of streets, archways, and alleys,
which we had threaded after leaving the main street from the Jaffa
Gate. There, there was still some life. Numbers of persons were
collected at their doors, or smoking before the dingy coffee-houses,
where singing and story-telling were going on; but out of this great
street everything was silent, and no sign of a light from the windows
of the low houses which we passed.

We ascended from a lower floor up to a terrace, on which were several
little domed chambers, or pavilions. From this terrace, whence we
looked in the morning, a great part of the city spread before us:-
white domes upon domes, and terraces of the same character as our own.
Here and there, from among these whitewashed mounds round about, a
minaret rose, or a rare date-tree; but the chief part of the vegetation
near was that odious tree the prickly pear,—one huge green wart growing
out of another, armed with spikes, as inhospitable as the aloe, without
shelter or beauty. To the right the Mosque of Omar rose; the rising sun
behind it. Yonder steep tortuous lane before us, flanked by ruined
walls on either side, has borne, time out of mind, the title of Via
Dolorosa; and tradition has fixed the spots where the Saviour rested,
bearing his cross to Calvary. But of the mountain, rising immediately
in front of us, a few grey olive-trees speckling the yellow side here
and there, there can be no question. That is the Mount of Olives.
Bethany lies beyond it. The most sacred eyes that ever looked on this
world have gazed on those ridges: it was there He used to walk and
teach. With shame and humility one looks towards the spot where that
inexpressible Love and Benevolence lived and breathed; where the great
yearning heart of the Saviour interceded for all our race; and whence
the bigots and traitors of his day led Him away to kill Him!

That company of Jews whom we had brought with us from Constantinople,
and who had cursed every delay on the route, not from impatience to
view the Holy City, but from rage at being obliged to purchase dear
provisions for their maintenance on ship- board, made what bargains
they best could at Jaffa, and journeyed to the Valley of Jehoshaphat at
the cheapest rate. We saw the tall form of the old Polish Patriarch,
venerable in filth, stalking among the stinking ruins of the Jewish
quarter. The sly old Rabbi, in the greasy folding hat, who would not
pay to shelter his children from the storm off Beyrout, greeted us in
the bazaars; the younger Rabbis were furbished up with some smartness.
We met them on Sunday at the kind of promenade by the walls of the
Bethlehem Gate; they were in company of some red-bearded
co-religionists, smartly attired in Eastern raiment; but their voice
was the voice of the Jews of Berlin, and of course as we passed they
were talking about so many hundert thaler. You may track one of the
people, and be sure to hear mention of that silver calf that they
worship.

The English mission has been very unsuccessful with these religionists.
I don’t believe the Episcopal apparatus—the chaplains, and the
colleges, and the beadles—have succeeded in converting a dozen of them;
and a sort of martyrdom is in store for the luckless Hebrews at
Jerusalem who shall secede from their faith. Their old community spurn
them with horror; and I heard of the case of one unfortunate man, whose
wife, in spite of her husband’s change of creed, being resolved, like a
true woman, to cleave to him, was spirited away from him in his
absence; was kept in privacy in the city, in spite of all exertions of
the mission, of the consul and the bishop, and the chaplains and the
beadles; was passed away from Jerusalem to Beyrout, and thence to
Constantinople; and from Constantinople was whisked off into the
Russian territories, where she still pines after her husband. May that
unhappy convert find consolation away from her. I could not help
thinking, as my informant, an excellent and accomplished gentleman of
the mission, told me the story, that the Jews had done only what the
Christians do under the same circumstances. The woman was the daughter
of a most learned Rabbi, as I gathered. Suppose the daughter of the
Rabbi of Exeter, or Canterbury, were to marry a man who turned Jew,
would not her Right Reverend Father be justified in taking her out of
the power of a person likely to hurl her soul to perdition? These poor
converts should surely be sent away to England out of the way of
persecution. We could not but feel a pity for them, as they sat there
on their benches in the church conspicuous; and thought of the scorn
and contumely which attended them without, as they passed, in their
European dresses and shaven beards, among their grisly, scowling,
long-robed countrymen.

As elsewhere in the towns I have seen, the Ghetto of Jerusalem is
pre-eminent in filth. The people are gathered round about the dung-gate
of the city. Of a Friday you may hear their wailings and lamentations
for the lost glories of their city. I think the Valley of Jehoshaphat
is the most ghastly sight I have seen in the world. From all quarters
they come hither to bury their dead. When his time is come yonder hoary
old miser, with whom we made our voyage, will lay his carcase to rest
here. To do that, and to claw together money, has been the purpose of
that strange long life.

We brought with us one of the gentlemen of the mission, a Hebrew
convert, the Rev. Mr. E-; and lest I should be supposed to speak with
disrespect above of any of the converts of the Hebrew faith, let me
mention this gentleman as the only one whom I had the fortune to meet
on terms of intimacy. I never saw a man whose outward conduct was more
touching, whose sincerity was more evident, and whose religious feeling
seemed more deep, real, and reasonable.

Only a few feet off, the walls of the Anglican Church of Jerusalem rise
up from their foundations on a picturesque open spot, in front of the
Bethlehem Gate. The English Bishop has his church hard by: and near it
is the house where the Christians of our denomination assemble and
worship.

There seem to be polyglot services here. I saw books of prayer, or
Scripture, in Hebrew, Greek, and German: in which latter language Dr.
Alexander preaches every Sunday. A gentleman who sat near me at church
used all these books indifferently; reading the first lesson from the
Hebrew book, and the second from the Greek. Here we all assembled on
the Sunday after our arrival: it was affecting to hear the music and
language of our country sounding in this distant place; to have the
decent and manly ceremonial of our service; the prayers delivered in
that noble language. Even that stout anti-prelatist, the American
consul, who has left his house and fortune in America in order to
witness the coming of the Millennium, who believes it to be so near
that he has brought a dove with him from his native land (which bird he
solemnly informed us was to survive the expected Advent), was affected
by the good old words and service. He swayed about and moaned in his
place at various passages; during the sermon he gave especial marks of
sympathy and approbation. I never heard the service more excellently
and impressively read than by the Bishop’s chaplain, Mr. Veitch. But it
was the music that was most touching I thought,—the sweet old songs of
home.

There was a considerable company assembled: near a hundred people I
should think. Our party made a large addition to the usual
congregation. The Bishop’s family is proverbially numerous: the consul,
and the gentlemen of the mission, have wives, and children, and English
establishments. These, and the strangers, occupied places down the
room, to the right and left of the desk and communion-table. The
converts, and the members of the college, in rather a scanty number,
faced the officiating clergyman; before whom the silver maces of the
janissaries were set up, as they set up the beadles’ maces in England.

I made many walks round the city to Olivet and Bethany, to the tombs of
the kings, and the fountains sacred in story. These are green and
fresh, but all the rest of the landscape seemed to me to be FRIGHTFUL.
Parched mountains, with a grey bleak olive-tree trembling here and
there; savage ravines and valleys, paved with tombstones—a landscape
unspeakably ghastly and desolate, meet the eye wherever you wander
round about the city. The place seems quite adapted to the events which
are recorded in the Hebrew histories. It and they, as it seems to me,
can never be regarded without terror. Fear and blood, crime and
punishment, follow from page to page in frightful succession. There is
not a spot at which you look, but some violent deed has been done
there: some massacre has been committed, some victim has been murdered,
some idol has been worshipped with bloody and dreadful rites. Not far
from hence is the place where the Jewish conqueror fought for the
possession of Jerusalem. “The sun stood still, and hasted not to go
down about a whole day;” so that the Jews might have daylight to
destroy the Amorites, whose iniquities were full, and whose land they
were about to occupy. The fugitive heathen king, and his allies, were
discovered in their hiding-place, and hanged: “and the children of
Judah smote Jerusalem with the edge of the sword, and set the city on
fire; and they left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that
breathed.”

I went out at the Zion Gate, and looked at the so-called tomb of David.
I had been reading all the morning in the Psalms, and his history in
Samuel and Kings. “Bring thou down Shimei’s hoar head to the grave with
blood,” are the last words of the dying monarch as recorded by the
history. What they call the tomb is now a crumbling old mosque; from
which Jew and Christian are excluded alike. As I saw it, blazing in the
sunshine, with the purple sky behind it, the glare only served to mark
the surrounding desolation more clearly. The lonely walls and towers of
the city rose hard by. Dreary mountains, and declivities of naked
stones, were round about: they are burrowed with holes in which
Christian hermits lived and died. You see one green place far down in
the valley: it is called En Rogel. Adonijah feasted there, who was
killed by his brother Solomon, for asking for Abishag for wife. The
Valley of Hinnom skirts the hill: the dismal ravine was a fruitful
garden once. Ahaz, and the idolatrous kings, sacrificed to idols under
the green trees there, and “caused their children to pass through the
fire.” On the mountain opposite, Solomon, with the thousand women of
his harem, worshipped the gods of all their nations, “Ashtoreth,” and
“Milcom, and Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites.” An enormous
charnel-house stands on the hill where the bodies of dead pilgrims used
to be thrown; and common belief has fixed upon this spot as the
Aceldama, which Judas purchased with the price of his treason. Thus you
go on from one gloomy place to another, each seared with its bloody
tradition. Yonder is the Temple, and you think of Titus’s soldiery
storming its flaming porches, and entering the city, in the savage
defence of which two million human souls perished. It was on Mount Zion
that Godfrey and Tancred had their camp: when the Crusaders entered the
mosque, they rode knee-deep in the blood of its defenders, and of the
women and children who had fled thither for refuge: it was the victory
of Joshua over again. Then, after three days of butchery, they purified
the desecrated mosque and went to prayer. In the centre of this history
of crime rises up the Great Murder of all . . .

I need say no more about this gloomy landscape. After a man has seen it
once, he never forgets it—the recollection of it seems to me to follow
him like a remorse, as it were to implicate him in the awful deed which
was done there. Oh! with what unspeakable shame and terror should one
think of that crime, and prostrate himself before the image of that
Divine Blessed Sufferer!

Of course the first visit of the traveller is to the famous Church of
the Sepulchre.

In the archway, leading from the street to the court and church, there
is a little bazaar of Bethlehemites, who must interfere considerably
with the commerce of the Latin fathers. These men bawl to you from
their stalls, and hold up for your purchase their devotional
baubles,—bushels of rosaries and scented beads, and carved
mother-of-pearl shells, and rude stone salt-cellars and figures. Now
that inns are established—envoys of these pedlars attend them on the
arrival of strangers, squat all day on the terraces before your door,
and patiently entreat you to buy of their goods. Some worthies there
are who drive a good trade by tattooing pilgrims with the five crosses,
the arms of Jerusalem; under which the name of the city is punctured in
Hebrew, with the auspicious year of the Hadji’s visit. Several of our
fellow- travellers submitted to this queer operation, and will carry to
their grave this relic of their journey. Some of them had engaged as
servant a man at Beyrout, who had served as a lad on board an English
ship in the Mediterranean. Above his tattooage of the five crosses, the
fellow had a picture of two hearts united, and the pathetic motto,
“Betsy my dear.” He had parted with Betsy my dear five years before at
Malta. He had known a little English there, but had forgotten it. Betsy
my dear was forgotten too. Only her name remained engraved with a vain
simulacrum of constancy on the faithless rogue’s skin: on which was now
printed another token of equally effectual devotion. The beads and the
tattooing, however, seem essential ceremonies attendant on the
Christian pilgrim’s visit; for many hundreds of years, doubtless, the
palmers have carried off with them these simple reminiscences of the
sacred city. That symbol has been engraven upon the arms of how many
Princes, Knights, and Crusaders! Don’t you see a moral as applicable to
them as to the swindling Beyrout horseboy? I have brought you back that
cheap and wholesome apologue, in lieu of any of the Bethlehemite shells
and beads.

After passing through the porch of the pedlars, you come to the
courtyard in front of the noble old towers of the Church of the
Sepulchre, with pointed arches and Gothic traceries, rude, but rich and
picturesque in design. Here crowds are waiting in the sun, until it
shall please the Turkish guardians of the church-door to open. A swarm
of beggars sit here permanently: old tattered hags with long veils,
ragged children, blind old bearded beggars, who raise up a chorus of
prayers for money, holding out their wooden bowls, or clattering with
their sticks on the stones, or pulling your coat-skirts and moaning and
whining; yonder sit a group of coal-black Coptish pilgrims, with robes
and turbans of dark blue, fumbling their perpetual beads. A party of
Arab Christians have come up from their tents or villages: the men
half-naked, looking as if they were beggars, or banditti, upon
occasion; the women have flung their head-cloths back, and are looking
at the strangers under their tattooed eyebrows. As for the strangers,
there is no need to describe THEM: that figure of the Englishman, with
his hands in his pockets, has been seen all the world over: staring
down the crater of Vesuvius, or into a Hottentot kraal—or at a pyramid,
or a Parisian coffee-house, or an Esquimaux hut—with the same insolent
calmness of demeanour. When the gates of the church are open, he elbows
in among the first, and flings a few scornful piastres to the Turkish
door-keeper; and gazes round easily at the place, in which people of
every other nation in the world are in tears, or in rapture, or wonder.
He has never seen the place until now, and looks as indifferent as the
Turkish guardian who sits in the doorway, and swears at the people as
they pour in.

Indeed, I believe it is impossible for us to comprehend the source and
nature of the Roman Catholic devotion. I once went into a church at
Rome at the request of a Catholic friend, who described the interior to
be so beautiful and glorious, that he thought (he said) it must be like
heaven itself. I found walls hung with cheap stripes of pink and white
calico, altars covered with artificial flowers, a number of wax
candles, and plenty of gilt-paper ornaments. The place seemed to me
like a shabby theatre; and here was my friend on his knees at my side,
plunged in a rapture of wonder and devotion.

I could get no better impression out of this the most famous church in
the world. The deceits are too open and flagrant; the inconsistencies
and contrivances too monstrous. It is hard even to sympathise with
persons who receive them as genuine; and though (as I know and saw in
the case of my friend at Rome) the believer’s life may be passed in the
purest exercise of faith and charity, it is difficult even to give him
credit for honesty, so barefaced seem the impostures which he professes
to believe and reverence. It costs one no small effort even to admit
the possibility of a Catholic’s credulity: to share in his rapture and
devotion is still further out of your power; and I could get from this
church no other emotions but those of shame and pain.

The legends with which the Greeks and Latins have garnished the spot
have no more sacredness for you than the hideous, unreal, barbaric
pictures and ornaments which they have lavished on it. Look at the
fervour with which pilgrims kiss and weep over a tawdry Gothic
painting, scarcely better fashioned than an idol in a South Sea Morai.
The histories which they are called upon to reverence are of the same
period and order,—savage Gothic caricatures. In either a saint appears
in the costume of the middle ages, and is made to accommodate himself
to the fashion of the tenth century.

The different churches battle for the possession of the various relics.
The Greeks show you the Tomb of Melchisedec, while the Armenians
possess the Chapel of the Penitent Thief; the poor Copts (with their
little cabin of a chapel) can yet boast of possessing the thicket in
which Abraham caught the Ram, which was to serve as the vicar of Isaac;
the Latins point out the Pillar to which the Lord was bound. The place
of the Invention of the Sacred Cross, the Fissure in the Rock of
Golgotha, the Tomb of Adam himself—are all here within a few yards’
space. You mount a few steps, and are told it is Calvary upon which you
stand. All this in the midst of blaring candles, reeking incense,
savage pictures of Scripture story, or portraits of kings who have been
benefactors to the various chapels; a din and clatter of strange
people,—these weeping, bowing, kissing,—those utterly indifferent; and
the priests clad in outlandish robes, snuffling and chanting
incomprehensible litanies, robing, disrobing, lighting up candles or
extinguishing them, advancing, retreating, bowing with all sorts of
unfamiliar genuflexions. Had it pleased the inventors of the Sepulchre
topography to have fixed on fifty more spots of ground as the places of
the events of the sacred story, the pilgrim would have believed just as
now. The priest’s authority has so mastered his faith, that it
accommodates itself to any demand upon it; and the English stranger
looks on the scene, for the first time, with a feeling of scorn,
bewilderment, and shame at that grovelling credulity, those strange
rites and ceremonies, that almost confessed imposture.

Jarred and distracted by these, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for
some time, seems to an Englishman the least sacred spot about
Jerusalem. It is the lies, and the legends, and the priests, and their
quarrels, and their ceremonies, which keep the Holy Place out of sight.
A man has not leisure to view it, for the brawling of the guardians of
the spot. The Roman conquerors, they say, raised up a statue of Venus
in this sacred place, intending to destroy all memory of it. I don’t
think the heathen was as criminal as the Christian is now. To deny and
disbelieve, is not so bad as to make belief a ground to cheat upon. The
liar Ananias perished for that; and yet out of these gates, where
angels may have kept watch—out of the tomb of Christ—Christian priests
issue with a lie in their hands. What a place to choose for imposture,
good God! to sully with brutal struggles for self-aggrandisement or
shameful schemes of gain!

The situation of the Tomb (into which, be it authentic or not, no man
can enter without a shock of breathless fear, and deep and awful
self-humiliation) must have struck all travellers. It stands in the
centre of the arched rotunda, which is common to all denominations, and
from which branch off the various chapels belonging to each particular
sect. In the Coptic chapel I saw one coal-black Copt, in blue robes,
cowering in the little cabin, surrounded by dingy lamps, barbarous
pictures, and cheap faded trumpery. In the Latin Church there was no
service going on, only two fathers dusting the mouldy gewgaws along the
brown walls, and laughing to one another. The gorgeous church of the
Fire impostors, hard by, was always more fully attended; as was that of
their wealthy neighbours, the Armenians. These three main sects hate
each other; their quarrels are interminable; each bribes and intrigues
with the heathen lords of the soil, to the prejudice of his neighbour.
Now it is the Latins who interfere, and allow the common church to go
to ruin, because the Greeks purpose to roof it; now the Greeks demolish
a monastery on Mount Olivet, and leave the ground to the Turks, rather
than allow the Armenians to possess it. On another occasion, the Greeks
having mended the Armenian steps which lead to the (so-called) Cave of
the Nativity at Bethlehem, the latter asked for permission to destroy
the work of the Greeks, and did so. And so round this sacred spot, the
centre of Christendom, the representatives of the three great sects
worship under one roof, and hate each other!

Above the Tomb of the Saviour, the cupola is OPEN, and you see the blue
sky overhead. Which of the builders was it that had the grace to leave
that under the high protection of Heaven, and not confine it under the
mouldering old domes and roofs, which cover so much selfishness, and
uncharitableness, and imposture?

We went to Bethlehem, too; and saw the apocryphal wonders there.

Five miles’ ride brings you from Jerusalem to it, over naked wavy
hills; the aspect of which, however, grows more cheerful as you
approach the famous village. We passed the Convent of Mar Elyas on the
road, walled and barred like a fort. In spite of its strength, however,
it has more than once been stormed by the Arabs, and the luckless
fathers within put to death. Hard by was Rebecca’s Well: a dead body
was lying there, and crowds of male and female mourners dancing and
howling round it. Now and then a little troop of savage scowling
horsemen—a shepherd driving his black sheep, his gun over his
shoulder—a troop of camels—or of women, with long blue robes and white
veils, bearing pitchers, and staring at the strangers with their great
solemn eyes—or a company of labourers, with their donkeys, bearing
grain or grapes to the city,—met us and enlivened the little ride. It
was a busy and cheerful scene. The Church of the Nativity, with the
adjoining convents, forms a vast and noble Christian structure. A party
of travellers were going to the Jordan that day, and scores of their
followers—of the robbing Arabs, who profess to protect them
(magnificent figures some of them, with flowing haicks and turbans,
with long guns and scimitars, and wretched horses, covered with gaudy
trappings), were standing on the broad pavement before the little
convent gate. It was such a scene as Cattermole might paint. Knights
and Crusaders may have witnessed a similar one. You could fancy them
issuing out of the narrow little portal, and so greeted by the swarms
of swarthy clamorous women and merchants and children.

The scene within the building was of the same Gothic character. We were
entertained by the Superior of the Greek Convent, in a fine refectory,
with ceremonies and hospitalities that pilgrims of the middle ages
might have witnessed. We were shown over the magnificent Barbaric
Church, visited of course the Grotto where the Blessed Nativity is said
to have taken place, and the rest of the idols set up for worship by
the clumsy legend. When the visit was concluded, the party going to the
Dead Sea filed off with their armed attendants; each individual
traveller making as brave a show as he could, and personally accoutred
with warlike swords and pistols. The picturesque crowds, and the Arabs
and the horsemen, in the sunshine; the noble old convent, and the
grey-bearded priests, with their feast; and the church, and its
pictures and columns, and incense; the wide brown hills spreading round
the village; with the accidents of the road,—flocks and shepherds,
wells and funerals, and camel-trains,—have left on my mind a brilliant,
romantic, and cheerful picture. But you, dear M-, without visiting the
place, have imagined one far finer; and Bethlehem, where the Holy Child
was born, and the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth peace and goodwill towards men,” is the most sacred and beautiful
spot in the earth to you.

By far the most comfortable quarters in Jerusalem are those of the
Armenians, in their convent of St. James. Wherever we have been, these
Eastern quakers look grave, and jolly, and sleek. Their convent at
Mount Zion is big enough to contain two or three thousand of their
faithful; and their church is ornamented by the most rich and hideous
gifts ever devised by uncouth piety. Instead of a bell, the fat monks
of the convent beat huge noises on a board, and drub the faithful in to
prayers. I never saw men more lazy and rosy than these reverend
fathers, kneeling in their comfortable matted church, or sitting in
easy devotion. Pictures, images, gilding, tinsel, wax candles, twinkle
all over the place; and ten thousand ostrichs’ eggs (or any lesser
number you may allot) dangle from the vaulted ceiling. There were great
numbers of people at worship in this gorgeous church: they went on
their knees, kissing the walls with much fervour, and paying reverence
to the most precious relic of the convent,—the chair of St. James,
their patron, the first Bishop of Jerusalem.

The chair pointed out with greatest pride in the church of the Latin
Convent, is that shabby red damask one appropriated to the French
Consul,—the representative of the King of that nation,—and the
protection which it has from time immemorial accorded to the Christians
of the Latin rite in Syria. All French writers and travellers speak of
this protection with delightful complacency. Consult the French books
of travel on the subject, and any Frenchman whom you may meet: he says,
“La France, Monsieur, de tous les temps protege les Chretiens
d’Orient;” and the little fellow looks round the church with a sweep of
the arm, and protects it accordingly. It is bon ton for them to go in
processions; and you see them on such errands, marching with long
candles, as gravely as may be. But I have never been able to edify
myself with their devotion; and the religious outpourings of Lamartine
and Chateaubriand, which we have all been reading a propos of the
journey we are to make, have inspired me with an emotion anything but
respectful. “Voyez comme M. de Chateaubriand prie Dieu,” the Viscount’s
eloquence seems always to say. There is a sanctified grimace about the
little French pilgrim which it is very difficult to contemplate
gravely.

The pictures, images, and ornaments of the principal Latin convent are
quite mean and poor, compared to the wealth of the Armenians. The
convent is spacious, but squalid. Many hopping and crawling plagues are
said to attack the skins of pilgrims who sleep there. It is laid out in
courts and galleries, the mouldy doors of which are decorated with
twopenny pictures of favourite saints and martyrs; and so great is the
shabbiness and laziness, that you might fancy yourself in a convent in
Italy. Brown-clad fathers, dirty, bearded, and sallow, go gliding about
the corridors. The relic manufactory before mentioned carries on a
considerable business, and despatches bales of shells, crosses, and
beads to believers in Europe. These constitute the chief revenue of the
convent now. La France is no longer the most Christian kingdom, and her
protection of the Latins is not good for much since Charles X. was
expelled; and Spain, which used likewise to be generous on occasions
(the gifts, arms, candlesticks, baldaquins of the Spanish sovereigns
figure pretty frequently in the various Latin chapels), has been stingy
since the late disturbances, the spoliation of the clergy, &c. After we
had been taken to see the humble curiosities of the place, the Prior
treated us in his wooden parlour with little glasses of pink Rosolio,
brought with many bows and genuflexions by his reverence the convent
butler.

After this community of holy men, the most important perhaps is the
American Convent, a Protestant congregation of Independents chiefly,
who deliver tracts, propose to make converts, have meetings of their
own, and also swell the little congregation that attends the Anglican
service. I have mentioned our fellow- traveller, the Consul-General for
Syria of the United States. He was a tradesman, who had made a
considerable fortune, and lived at a country-house in comfortable
retirement. But his opinion is, that the prophecies of Scripture are
about to be accomplished; that the day of the return of the Jews is at
hand, and the glorification of the restored Jerusalem. He is to witness
this—he and a favourite dove with which he travels; and he forsook home
and comfortable country-house, in order to make this journey. He has no
other knowledge of Syria but what he derives from the prophecy; and
this (as he takes the office gratis) has been considered a sufficient
reason for his appointment by the United States Government. As soon as
he arrived, he sent and demanded an interview with the Pasha; explained
to him his interpretation of the Apocalypse, in which he has discovered
that the Five Powers and America are about to intervene in Syrian
affairs, and the infallible return of the Jews to Palestine. The news
must have astonished the Lieutenant of the Sublime Porte; and since the
days of the Kingdom of Munster, under his Anabaptist Majesty, John of
Leyden, I doubt whether any Government has received or appointed so
queer an ambassador. The kind, worthy, simple man took me to his
temporary consulate-house at the American Missionary Establishment;
and, under pretence of treating me to white wine, expounded his ideas;
talked of futurity as he would about an article in The Times; and had
no more doubt of seeing a divine kingdom established in Jerusalem than
you that there would be a levee next spring at St. James’s. The little
room in which we sat was padded with missionary tracts, but I heard of
scarce any converts—not more than are made by our own Episcopal
establishment.

But if the latter’s religious victories are small, and very few people
are induced by the American tracts, and the English preaching and
catechising, to forsake their own manner of worshipping the Divine
Being in order to follow ours; yet surely our religious colony of men
and women can’t fail to do good, by the sheer force of good example,
pure life, and kind offices. The ladies of the mission have numbers of
clients, of all persuasions, in the town, to whom they extend their
charities. Each of their houses is a model of neatness, and a
dispensary of gentle kindnesses; and the ecclesiastics have formed a
modest centre of civilisation in the place. A dreary joke was made in
the House of Commons about Bishop Alexander and the Bishopess his lady,
and the Bishoplings his numerous children, who were said to have
scandalised the people of Jerusalem. That sneer evidently came from the
Latins and Greeks; for what could the Jews and Turks care because an
English clergyman had a wife and children as their own priests have?
There was no sort of ill will exhibited towards them, as far as I could
learn; and I saw the Bishop’s children riding about the town as safely
as they could about Hyde Park. All Europeans, indeed, seemed to me to
be received with forbearance, and almost courtesy, within the walls. As
I was going about making sketches, the people would look on very
good-humouredly, without offering the least interruption; nay, two or
three were quite ready to stand still for such an humble portrait as my
pencil could make of them; and the sketch done, it was passed from one
person to another, each making his comments, and signifying a very
polite approval. Here are a pair of them, {2} Fath Allah and Ameenut
Daoodee his father, horse-dealers by trade, who came and sat with us at
the inn, and smoked pipes (the sun being down), while the original of
the above masterpiece was made. With the Arabs outside the walls,
however, and the freshly arriving country people, this politeness was
not so much exhibited. There was a certain tattooed girl, with black
eyes and huge silver earrings, and a chin delicately picked out with
blue, who formed one of a group of women outside the great convent,
whose likeness I longed to carry off;— there was a woman with a little
child, with wondering eyes, drawing water at the Pool of Siloam, in
such an attitude and dress as Rebecca may have had when Isaac’s
lieutenant asked her for drink:- both of these parties standing still
for half a minute, at the next cried out for backsheesh: and not
content with the five piastres which I gave them individually, screamed
out for more, and summoned their friends, who screamed out backsheesh
too. I was pursued into the convent by a dozen howling women calling
for pay, barring the door against them, to the astonishment of the
worthy papa who kept it; and at Miriam’s Well the women were joined by
a man with a large stick, who backed their petition. But him we could
afford to laugh at, for we were two and had sticks likewise.

In the village of Siloam I would not recommend the artist to loiter. A
colony of ruffians inhabit the dismal place, who have guns as well as
sticks at need. Their dogs howl after the strangers as they pass
through; and over the parapets of their walls you are saluted by the
scowls of a villanous set of countenances, that it is not good to see
with one pair of eyes. They shot a man at mid-day at a few hundred
yards from the gates while we were at Jerusalem, and no notice was
taken of the murder. Hordes of Arab robbers infest the neighbourhood of
the city, with the Sheikhs of whom travellers make terms when minded to
pursue their journey. I never could understand why the walls stopped
these warriors if they had a mind to plunder the city, for there are
but a hundred and fifty men in the garrison to man the long lonely
lines of defence.

I have seen only in Titian’s pictures those magnificent purple shadows
in which the hills round about lay, as the dawn rose faintly behind
them; and we looked at Olivet for the last time from our terrace, where
we were awaiting the arrival of the horses that were to carry us to
Jaffa. A yellow moon was still blazing in the midst of countless
brilliant stars overhead; the nakedness and misery of the surrounding
city were hidden in that beautiful rosy atmosphere of mingling night
and dawn. The city never looked so noble; the mosques, domes, and
minarets rising up into the calm star-lit sky.

By the gate of Bethlehem there stands one palm-tree, and a house with
three domes. Put these and the huge old Gothic gate as a background
dark against the yellowing eastern sky: the foreground is a deep grey:
as you look into it dark forms of horsemen come out of the twilight:
now there come lanterns, more horsemen, a litter with mules, a crowd of
Arab horseboys and dealers accompanying their beasts to the gate; all
the members of our party come up by twos and threes; and, at last, the
great gate opens just before sunrise, and we get into the grey plains.

Oh! the luxury of an English saddle! An English servant of one of the
gentlemen of the mission procured it for me, on the back of a little
mare, which (as I am a light weight) did not turn a hair in the course
of the day’s march—and after we got quit of the ugly, stony,
clattering, mountainous Abou Gosh district, into the fair undulating
plain, which stretches to Ramleh, carried me into the town at a
pleasant hand-gallop. A negro, of preternatural ugliness, in a yellow
gown, with a crimson handkerchief streaming over his head, digging his
shovel spurs into the lean animal he rode, and driving three others
before—swaying backwards and forwards on his horse, now embracing his
ears, and now almost under his belly, screaming “yallah” with the most
frightful shrieks, and singing country songs—galloped along ahead of
me. I acquired one of his poems pretty well, and could imitate his
shriek accurately; but I shall not have the pleasure of singing it to
you in England. I had forgotten the delightful dissonance two days
after, both the negro’s and that of a real Arab minstrel, a
donkey-driver accompanying our baggage, who sang and grinned with the
most amusing good-humour.

We halted, in the middle of the day, in a little wood of olive- trees,
which forms almost the only shelter between Jaffa and Jerusalem, except
that afforded by the orchards in the odious village of Abou Gosh,
through which we went at a double quick pace. Under the olives, or up
in the branches, some of our friends took a siesta. I have a sketch of
four of them so employed. Two of them were dead within a month of the
fatal Syrian fever. But we did not know how near fate was to us then.
Fires were lighted, and fowls and eggs divided, and tea and coffee
served round in tin panikins, and here we lighted pipes, and smoked and
laughed at our ease. I believe everybody was happy to be out of
Jerusalem. The impression I have of it now is of ten days passed in a
fever.

We all found quarters in the Greek convent at Ramleh, where the monks
served us a supper on a terrace, in a pleasant sunset; a beautiful and
cheerful landscape stretching around; the land in graceful undulations,
the towers and mosques rosy in the sunset, with no lack of verdure,
especially of graceful palms. Jaffa was nine miles off. As we rode all
the morning we had been accompanied by the smoke of our steamer, twenty
miles off at sea.

The convent is a huge caravanserai; only three or four monks dwell in
it, the ghostly hotel-keepers of the place. The horses were tied up and
fed in the courtyard, into which we rode; above were the living-rooms,
where there is accommodation, not only for an unlimited number of
pilgrims, but for a vast and innumerable host of hopping and crawling
things, who usually persist in partaking of the traveller’s bed. Let
all thin-skinned travellers in the East be warned on no account to
travel without the admirable invention described in Mr. Fellowes’s
book; nay, possibly invented by that enterprising and learned
traveller. You make a sack, of calico or linen, big enough for the
body, appended to which is a closed chimney of muslin, stretched out by
cane hoops, and fastened up to a beam, or against the wall. You keep a
sharp eye to see that no flea or bug is on the look-out, and when
assured of this, you pop into the bag, tightly closing the orifice
after you. This admirable bug-disappointer I tried at Ramleh, and had
the only undisturbed night’s rest I enjoyed in the East. To be sure it
was a short night, for our party were stirring at one o’clock, and
those who got up insisted on talking and keeping awake those who
inclined to sleep. But I shall never forget the terror inspired in my
mind, being shut up in the bug-disappointer, when a facetious
lay-brother of the convent fell upon me and began tickling me. I never
had the courage again to try the anti-flea contrivance, preferring the
friskiness of those animals to the sports of such a greasy grinning wag
as my friend at Ramleh.

In the morning, and long before sunrise, our little caravan was in
marching order again. We went out with lanterns and shouts of “yallah”
through the narrow streets, and issued into the plain, where, though
there was no moon, there were blazing stars shining steadily overhead.
They become friends to a man who travels, especially under the clear
Eastern sky; whence they look down as if protecting you, solemn,
yellow, and refulgent. They seem nearer to you than in Europe; larger
and more awful. So we rode on till the dawn rose, and Jaffa came in
view. The friendly ship was lying out in waiting for us; the horses
were given up to their owners; and in the midst of a crowd of naked
beggars, and a perfect storm of curses and yells for backsheesh, our
party got into their boats, and to the ship, where we were welcomed by
the very best captain that ever sailed upon this maritime globe,
namely, Captain Samuel Lewis, of the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s
Service.




CHAPTER XIV
FROM JAFFA TO ALEXANDRIA


[From the Providor’s Log-book.]

Bill of Fare, October 12th.

Mulligatawny Soup. Salt Fish and Egg Sauce. Roast Haunch of Mutton.
Boiled Shoulder and Onion Sauce. Boiled Beef. Roast Fowls. Pillau
ditto. Ham. Haricot Mutton. Curry and Rice.

Cabbage. French Beans. Boiled Potatoes. Baked ditto. Damson Tart. Rice
Puddings. Currant ditto. Currant Fritters.

We were just at the port’s mouth—and could see the towers and buildings
of Alexandria rising purple against the sunset, when the report of a
gun came booming over the calm golden water; and we heard, with much
mortification, that we had no chance of getting pratique that night.
Already the ungrateful passengers had begun to tire of the ship,—though
in our absence in Syria it had been carefully cleansed and purified;
though it was cleared of the swarming Jews who had infested the decks
all the way from Constantinople; and though we had been feasting and
carousing in the manner described above.

But very early next morning we bore into the harbour, busy with a great
quantity of craft. We passed huge black hulks of mouldering men-of-war,
from the sterns of which trailed the dirty red flag, with the star and
crescent; boats, manned with red-capped seamen, and captains and
steersmen in beards and tarbooshes, passed continually among these old
hulks, the rowers bending to their oars, so that at each stroke they
disappeared bodily in the boat. Besides these, there was a large fleet
of country ships, and stars and stripes, and tricolours, and Union
Jacks; and many active steamers, of the French and English companies,
shooting in and out of the harbour, or moored in the briny waters. The
ship of our company, the “Oriental,” lay there—a palace upon the brine,
and some of the Pasha’s steam-vessels likewise, looking very like
Christian boats; but it was queer to look at some unintelligible
Turkish flourish painted on the stern, and the long-tailed Arabian
hieroglyphics gilt on the paddle-boxes. Our dear friend and comrade of
Beyrout (if we may be permitted to call her so), H.M.S. “Trump,” was in
the harbour; and the captain of that gallant ship, coming to greet us,
drove some of us on shore in his gig.

I had been preparing myself overnight, by the help of a cigar and a
moonlight contemplation on deck, for sensations on landing in Egypt. I
was ready to yield myself up with solemnity to the mystic grandeur of
the scene of initiation. Pompey’s Pillar must stand like a mountain, in
a yellow plain, surrounded by a grove of obelisks as tall as
palm-trees. Placid sphinxes brooding o’er the Nile—mighty Memnonian
countenances calm—had revealed Egypt to me in a sonnet of Tennyson’s,
and I was ready to gaze on it with pyramidal wonder and hieroglyphic
awe.

The landing quay at Alexandria is like the dockyard quay at Portsmouth:
with a few score of brown faces scattered among the population. There
are slop-sellers, dealers in marine-stores, bottled-porter shops,
seamen lolling about; flys and cabs are plying for hire; and a yelling
chorus of donkey-boys, shrieking, “Ride, sir!—Donkey, sir!—I say, sir!”
in excellent English, dispel all romantic notions. The placid sphinxes
brooding o’er the Nile disappeared with that shriek of the donkey-boys.
You might be as well impressed with Wapping as with your first step on
Egyptian soil.

The riding of a donkey is, after all, not a dignified occupation. A man
resists the offer at first, somehow, as an indignity. How is that poor
little, red-saddled, long-eared creature to carry you? Is there to be
one for you, and another for your legs? Natives and Europeans, of all
sizes, pass by, it is true, mounted upon the same contrivance. I waited
until I got into a very private spot, where nobody could see me, and
then ascended—why not say descended, at once?—on the poor little
animal. Instead of being crushed at once, as perhaps the rider
expected, it darted forward, quite briskly and cheerfully, at six or
seven miles an hour; requiring no spur or admonitive to haste, except
the shrieking of the little Egyptian gamin, who ran along by asinus’s
side.

The character of the houses by which you pass is scarcely Eastern at
all. The streets are busy with a motley population of Jews and
Armenians, slave-driving-looking Europeans, large-breeched Greeks, and
well-shaven buxom merchants, looking as trim and fat as those on the
Bourse or on ’Change; only, among the natives, the stranger can’t fail
to remark (as the Caliph did of the Calenders in the “Arabian Nights”)
that so many of them HAVE ONLY ONE EYE. It is the horrid ophthalmia
which has played such frightful ravages with them. You see children
sitting in the doorways, their eyes completely closed up with the green
sickening sore, and the flies feeding on them. Five or six minutes of
the donkey-ride brings you to the Frank quarter, and the handsome broad
street (like a street of Marseilles) where the principal hotels and
merchants’ houses are to be found, and where the consuls have their
houses, and hoist their flags. The palace of the French Consul-General
makes the grandest show in the street, and presents a great contrast to
the humble abode of the English representative, who protects his
fellow-countrymen from a second floor.

But that Alexandrian two-pair-front of a Consulate was more welcome and
cheering than a palace to most of us. For there lay certain letters,
with post-marks of HOME upon them; and kindly tidings, the first heard
for two months:- though we had seen so many men and cities since, that
Cornhill seemed to be a year off, at least, with certain persons
dwelling (more or less) in that vicinity. I saw a young Oxford man
seize his despatches, and slink off with several letters, written in a
tight neat hand, and sedulously crossed; which any man could see,
without looking farther, were the handiwork of Mary Ann, to whom he is
attached. The lawyer received a bundle from his chambers, in which his
clerk eased his soul regarding the state of Snooks v. Rodgers, Smith
ats Tomkins, &c. The statesman had a packet of thick envelopes,
decorated with that profusion of sealing-wax in which official
recklessness lavishes the resources of the country: and your humble
servant got just one little modest letter, containing another, written
in pencil characters, varying in size between one and two inches; but
how much pleasanter to read than my Lord’s despatch, or the clerk’s
account of Smith ats Tomkins,—yes, even than the Mary Ann
correspondence! . . . Yes, my dear madam, you will understand me, when
I say that it was from little Polly at home, with some confidential
news about a cat, and the last report of her new doll.

It is worth while to have made the journey for this pleasure: to have
walked the deck on long nights, and have thought of home. You have no
leisure to do so in the city. You don’t see the heavens shine above you
so purely there, or the stars so clearly. How, after the perusal of the
above documents, we enjoyed a file of the admirable Galignani; and what
O’Connell was doing; and the twelve last new victories of the French in
Algeria; and, above all, six or seven numbers of Punch! There might
have been an avenue of Pompey’s Pillars within reach, and a live sphinx
sporting on the banks of the Mahmoodieh Canal, and we would not have
stirred to see them, until Punch had had his interview and Galignani
was dismissed.

The curiosities of Alexandria are few, and easily seen. We went into
the bazaars, which have a much more Eastern look than the European
quarter, with its Anglo-Gallic-Italian inhabitants, and Babel-like
civilisation. Here and there a large hotel, clumsy and whitewashed,
with Oriental trellised windows, and a couple of slouching sentinels at
the doors, in the ugliest composite uniform that ever was seen, was
pointed out as the residence of some great officer of the Pasha’s
Court, or of one of the numerous children of the Egyptian Solomon. His
Highness was in his own palace, and was consequently not visible. He
was in deep grief, and strict retirement. It was at this time that the
European newspapers announced that he was about to resign his empire;
but the quidnuncs of Alexandria hinted that a love-affair, in which the
old potentate had engaged with senile extravagance, and the effects of
a potion of hachisch, or some deleterious drug, with which he was in
the habit of intoxicating himself, had brought on that languor and
desperate weariness of life and governing, into which the venerable
Prince was plunged. Before three days were over, however, the fit had
left him, and he determined to live and reign a little longer. A very
few days afterwards several of our party were presented to him at
Cairo, and found the great Egyptian ruler perfectly convalescent.

This, and the Opera, and the quarrels of the two prime donne, and the
beauty of one of them, formed the chief subjects of conversation; and I
had this important news in the shop of a certain barber in the town,
who conveyed it in a language composed of French, Spanish, and Italian,
and with a volubility quite worthy of a barber of “Gil Blas.”

Then we went to see the famous obelisk presented by Mehemet Ali to the
British Government, who have not shown a particular alacrity to accept
this ponderous present. The huge shaft lies on the ground, prostrate,
and desecrated by all sorts of abominations. Children were sprawling
about, attracted by the dirt there. Arabs, negroes, and donkey-boys
were passing, quite indifferent, by the fallen monster of a stone—as
indifferent as the British Government, who don’t care for recording the
glorious termination of their Egyptian campaign of 1801. If our country
takes the compliment so coolly, surely it would be disloyal upon our
parts to be more enthusiastic. I wish they would offer the Trafalgar
Square Pillar to the Egyptians; and that both of the huge ugly monsters
were lying in the dirt there side by side.

Pompey’s Pillar is by no means so big as the Charing Cross trophy. This
venerable column has not escaped ill-treatment either. Numberless
ships’ companies, travelling cockneys, &c., have affixed their rude
marks upon it. Some daring ruffian even painted the name of “Warren’s
blacking” upon it, effacing other inscriptions,— one, Wilkinson says,
of “the second Psammetichus.” I regret deeply, my dear friend, that I
cannot give you this document respecting a lamented monarch, in whose
history I know you take such an interest.

The best sight I saw in Alexandria was a negro holiday; which was
celebrated outside of the town by a sort of negro village of huts,
swarming with old, lean, fat, ugly, infantine, happy faces, that nature
had smeared with a preparation even more black and durable than that
with which Psammetichus’s base has been polished. Every one of these
jolly faces was on the broad grin, from the dusky mother to the
india-rubber child sprawling upon her back, and the venerable jetty
senior whose wool was as white as that of a sheep in Florian’s
pastorals.

To these dancers a couple of fellows were playing on a drum and a
little banjo. They were singing a chorus, which was not only singular,
and perfectly marked in the rhythm, but exceeding sweet in the tune.
They danced in a circle; and performers came trooping from all
quarters, who fell into the round, and began waggling their heads, and
waving their left hands, and tossing up and down the little thin rods
which they each carried, and all singing to the very best of their
power.

I saw the chief eunuch of the Grand Turk at Constantinople pass by-
-(here is an accurate likeness of his beautiful features {2})—but with
what a different expression! Though he is one of the greatest of the
great in the Turkish Empire (ranking with a Cabinet Minister or Lord
Chamberlain here), his fine countenance was clouded with care, and
savage with ennui.

Here his black brethren were ragged, starving, and happy; and I need
not tell such a fine moralist as you are, how it is the case, in the
white as well as the black world, that happiness (republican leveller,
who does not care a fig for the fashion) often disdains the turrets of
kings, to pay a visit to the “tabernas pauperum.”

We went the round of the coffee-houses in the evening, both the polite
European places of resort, where you get ices and the French papers,
and those in the town, where Greeks, Turks, and general company resort,
to sit upon uncomfortable chairs, and drink wretched muddy coffee, and
to listen to two or three miserable musicians, who keep up a variation
of howling for hours together. But the pretty song of the niggers had
spoiled me for that abominable music.




CHAPTER XV
TO CAIRO


We had no need of hiring the country boats which ply on the Mahmoodieh
Canal to Atfeh, where it joins the Nile, but were accommodated in one
of the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s fly- boats; pretty similar to
those narrow Irish canal boats in which the enterprising traveller has
been carried from Dublin to Ballinasloe. The present boat was, to be
sure, tugged by a little steamer, so that the Egyptian canal is ahead
of the Irish in so far: in natural scenery, the one prospect is fully
equal to the other; it must be confessed that there is nothing to see.
In truth, there was nothing but this: you saw a muddy bank on each side
of you, and a blue sky overhead. A few round mud-huts and palm-trees
were planted along the line here and there. Sometimes we would see, on
the water-side, a woman in a blue robe, with her son by her, in that
tight brown costume with which Nature had supplied him. Now, it was a
hat dropped by one of the party into the water; a brown Arab plunged
and disappeared incontinently after the hat, re-issued from the muddy
water, prize in hand, and ran naked after the little steamer (which was
by this time far ahead of him), his brawny limbs shining in the sun:
then we had half-cold fowls and bitter ale: then we had dinner—bitter
ale and cold fowls; with which incidents the day on the canal passed
away, as harmlessly as if we had been in a Dutch trackschuyt.

Towards evening we arrived at the town of Atfeh—half land, half houses,
half palm-trees, with swarms of half-naked people crowding the rustic
shady bazaars, and bartering their produce of fruit or many-coloured
grain. Here the canal came to a check, ending abruptly with a large
lock. A little fleet of masts and country ships were beyond the lock,
and it led into THE NILE.

After all, it is something to have seen these red waters. It is only
low green banks, mud-huts, and palm-clumps, with the sun setting red
behind them, and the great, dull, sinuous river flashing here and there
in the light. But it is the Nile, the old Saturn of a stream—a divinity
yet, though younger river-gods have deposed him. Hail! O venerable
father of crocodiles! We were all lost in sentiments of the profoundest
awe and respect; which we proved by tumbling down into the cabin of the
Nile steamer that was waiting to receive us, and fighting and cheating
for sleeping- berths.

At dawn in the morning we were on deck; the character had not altered
of the scenery about the river. Vast flat stretches of land were on
either side, recovering from the subsiding inundations: near the mud
villages, a country ship or two was roosting under the date-trees; the
landscape everywhere stretching away level and lonely. In the sky in
the east was a long streak of greenish light, which widened and rose
until it grew to be of an opal colour, then orange; then, behold, the
round red disc of the sun rose flaming up above the horizon. All the
water blushed as he got up; the deck was all red; the steersman gave
his helm to another, and prostrated himself on the deck, and bowed his
head eastward, and praised the Maker of the sun: it shone on his white
turban as he was kneeling, and gilt up his bronzed face, and sent his
blue shadow over the glowing deck. The distances, which had been grey,
were now clothed in purple; and the broad stream was illuminated. As
the sun rose higher, the morning blush faded away; the sky was
cloudless and pale, and the river and the surrounding landscape were
dazzlingly clear.

Looking ahead in an hour or two, we saw the Pyramids. Fancy my
sensations, dear M -: two big ones and a little one -

! ! !

There they lay, rosy and solemn in the distance—those old, majestical,
mystical, familiar edifices. Several of us tried to be impressed; but
breakfast supervening, a rush was made at the coffee and cold pies, and
the sentiment of awe was lost in the scramble for victuals.

Are we so blases of the world that the greatest marvels in it do not
succeed in moving us? Have society, Pall Mall clubs, and a habit of
sneering, so withered up our organs of veneration that we can admire no
more? My sensation with regard to the Pyramids was, that I had seen
them before: then came a feeling of shame that the view of them should
awaken no respect. Then I wanted (naturally) to see whether my
neighbours were any more enthusiastic than myself—Trinity College,
Oxford, was busy with the cold ham: Downing Street was particularly
attentive to a bunch of grapes: Figtree Court behaved with decent
propriety; he is in good practice, and of a Conservative turn of mind,
which leads him to respect from principle les faits accomplis: perhaps
he remembered that one of them was as big as Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But,
the truth is, nobody was seriously moved . . . And why should they,
because of an exaggeration of bricks ever so enormous? I confess, for
my part, that the Pyramids are very big.

After a voyage of about thirty hours, the steamer brought up at the
quay of Boulak, amidst a small fleet of dirty comfortless cangias, in
which cottons and merchandise were loading and unloading, and a huge
noise and bustle on the shore. Numerous villas, parks, and
country-houses had begun to decorate the Cairo bank of the stream ere
this: residences of the Pasha’s nobles, who have had orders to take
their pleasure here and beautify the precincts of the capital; tall
factory chimneys also rise here; there are foundries and steam-engine
manufactories. These, and the pleasure-houses, stand as trim as
soldiers on parade; contrasting with the swarming, slovenly, close,
tumble-down, Eastern old town, that forms the outport of Cairo, and was
built before the importation of European taste and discipline.

Here we alighted upon donkeys, to the full as brisk as those of
Alexandria, invaluable to timid riders, and equal to any weight. We had
a Jerusalem pony race into Cairo; my animal beating all the rest by
many lengths. The entrance to the capital, from Boulak, is very
pleasant and picturesque—over a fair road, and the wide- planted plain
of the Ezbekieh; where are gardens, canals, fields, and avenues of
trees, and where the great ones of the town come and take their
pleasure. We saw many barouches driving about with fat Pashas lolling
on the cushions; stately-looking colonels and doctors taking their
ride, followed by their orderlies or footmen; lines of people taking
pipes and sherbet in the coffee-houses; and one of the pleasantest
sights of all,—a fine new white building with HOTEL D’ORIENT written up
in huge French characters, and which, indeed, is an establishment as
large and comfortable as most of the best inns of the South of France.
As a hundred Christian people, or more, come from England and from
India every fortnight, this inn has been built to accommodate a large
proportion of them; and twice a month, at least, its sixty rooms are
full.

The gardens from the windows give a very pleasant and animated view:
the hotel-gate is besieged by crews of donkey-drivers; the noble
stately Arab women, with tawny skins (of which a simple robe of
floating blue cotton enables you liberally to see the colour) and large
black eyes, come to the well hard by for water: camels are perpetually
arriving and setting down their loads: the court is full of bustling
dragomans, ayahs, and children from India; and poor old venerable
he-nurses, with grey beards and crimson turbans, tending little
white-faced babies that have seen the light at Dumdum or Futtyghur: a
copper-coloured barber, seated on his hams, is shaving a camel-driver
at the great inn-gate. The bells are ringing prodigiously; and
Lieutenant Waghorn is bouncing in and out of the courtyard full of
business. He only left Bombay yesterday morning, was seen in the Red
Sea on Tuesday, is engaged to dinner this afternoon in the Regent’s
Park, and (as it is about two minutes since I saw him in the courtyard)
I make no doubt he is by this time at Alexandria, or at Malta, say,
perhaps, at both. Il en est capable. If any man can be at two places at
once (which I don’t believe or deny) Waghorn is he.

Six o’clock bell rings. Sixty people sit down to a quasi-French
banquet: thirty Indian officers in moustaches and jackets; ten
civilians in ditto and spectacles; ten pale-faced ladies with ringlets,
to whom all pay prodigious attention. All the pale ladies drink pale
ale, which, perhaps, accounts for it; in fact the Bombay and Suez
passengers have just arrived, and hence this crowding and bustling, and
display of military jackets and moustaches, and ringlets and beauty.
The windows are open, and a rush of mosquitoes from the Ezbekieh
waters, attracted by the wax candles, adds greatly to the excitement of
the scene. There was a little tough old Major, who persisted in
flinging open the windows, to admit these volatile creatures, with a
noble disregard to their sting—and the pale ringlets did not seem to
heed them either, though the delicate shoulders of some of them were
bare.

All the meat, ragouts, fricandeaux, and roasts, which are served round
at dinner, seem to me to be of the same meat: a black uncertain sort of
viand do these “fleshpots of Egypt” contain. But what the meat is no
one knew: is it the donkey? The animal is more plentiful than any other
in Cairo.

After dinner, the ladies retiring, some of us take a mixture of hot
water, sugar, and pale French brandy, which is said to be deleterious,
but is by no means unpalatable. One of the Indians offers a bundle of
Bengal cheroots; and we make acquaintance with those honest bearded
white-jacketed Majors and military Commanders, finding England here in
a French hotel kept by an Italian, at the city of Grand Cairo, in
Africa.

On retiring to bed you take a towel with you into the sacred interior,
behind the mosquito curtains. Then your duty is, having tucked the
curtains closely around, to flap and bang violently with this towel,
right and left, and backwards and forwards, until every mosquito should
have been massacred that may have taken refuge within your muslin
canopy.

Do what you will, however, one of them always escapes the murder; and
as soon as the candle is out the miscreant begins his infernal droning
and trumpeting; descends playfully upon your nose and face, and so
lightly that you don’t know that he touches you. But that for a week
afterwards you bear about marks of his ferocity, you might take the
invisible little being to be a creature of fancy—a mere singing in your
ears.

This, as an account of Cairo, dear M-, you will probably be disposed to
consider as incomplete: the fact is, I have seen nothing else as yet. I
have peered into no harems. The magicians, proved to be humbugs, have
been bastinadoed out of town. The dancing-girls, those lovely Alme, of
whom I had hoped to be able to give a glowing and elegant, though
strictly moral, description, have been whipped into Upper Egypt, and as
you are saying in your mind— Well, it ISN’T a good description of
Cairo: you are perfectly right. It is England in Egypt. I like to see
her there with her pluck, enterprise, manliness, bitter ale, and Harvey
Sauce. Wherever they come they stay and prosper. From the summit of
yonder Pyramids forty centuries may look down on them if they are
minded; and I say, those venerable daughters of time ought to be better
pleased by the examination, than by regarding the French bayonets and
General Bonaparte, Member of the Institute, fifty years ago, running
about with sabre and pigtail. Wonders he did, to be sure, and then ran
away, leaving Kleber, to be murdered, in the lurch—a few hundred yards
from the spot where these disquisitions are written. But what are his
wonders compared to Waghorn? Nap massacred the Mamelukes at the
Pyramids: Wag has conquered the Pyramids themselves; dragged the
unwieldy structures a month nearer England than they were, and brought
the country along with them. All the trophies and captives that ever
were brought to Roman triumph were not so enormous and wonderful as
this. All the heads that Napoleon ever caused to be struck off (as
George Cruikshank says) would not elevate him a monument as big. Be
ours the trophies of peace! O my country! O Waghorn! Hae tibi erunt
artes. When I go to the Pyramids I will sacrifice in your name, and
pour out libations of bitter ale and Harvey Sauce in your honour.

One of the noblest views in the world is to be seen from the citadel,
which we ascended to-day. You see the city stretching beneath it, with
a thousand minarets and mosques,—the great river curling through the
green plains, studded with innumerable villages. The Pyramids are
beyond, brilliantly distinct; and the lines and fortifications of the
height, and the arsenal lying below. Gazing down, the guide does not
fail to point out the famous Mameluke leap, by which one of the corps
escaped death, at the time that His Highness the Pasha arranged the
general massacre of the body.

The venerable Patriarch’s harem is close by, where he received, with
much distinction, some of the members of our party. We were allowed to
pass very close to the sacred precincts, and saw a comfortable white
European building, approached by flights of steps, and flanked by
pretty gardens. Police and law-courts were here also, as I understood;
but it was not the time of the Egyptian assizes. It would have been
pleasant, otherwise, to see the Chief Cadi in his hall of justice; and
painful, though instructive, to behold the immediate application of the
bastinado.

The great lion of the place is a new mosque which Mehemet Ali is
constructing very leisurely. It is built of alabaster of a fair white,
with a delicate blushing tinge; but the ornaments are European—the
noble, fantastic, beautiful Oriental art is forgotten. The old mosques
of the city, of which I entered two, and looked at many, are a thousand
times more beautiful. Their variety of ornament is astonishing,—the
difference in the shapes of the domes, the beautiful fancies and
caprices in the forms of the minarets, which violate the rules of
proportion with the most happy daring grace, must have struck every
architect who has seen them. As you go through the streets, these
architectural beauties keep the eye continually charmed: now it is a
marble fountain, with its arabesque and carved overhanging roof, which
you can look at with as much pleasure as an antique gem, so neat and
brilliant is the execution of it; then, you come to the arched entrance
to a mosque, which shoots up like—like what?—like the most beautiful
pirouette by Taglioni, let us say. This architecture is not sublimely
beautiful, perfect loveliness and calm, like that which was revealed to
us at the Parthenon (and in comparison of which the Pantheon and
Colosseum are vulgar and coarse, mere broad-shouldered Titans before
ambrosial Jove); but these fantastic spires, and cupolas, and
galleries, excite, amuse, tickle the imagination, so to speak, and
perpetually fascinate the eye. There were very few believers in the
famous mosque of Sultan Hassan when we visited it, except the
Moslemitish beadle, who was on the look-out for backsheesh, just like
his brother officer in an English cathedral; and who, making us put on
straw slippers, so as not to pollute the sacred pavement of the place,
conducted us through it.

It is stupendously light and airy; the best specimens of Norman art
that I have seen (and surely the Crusaders must have carried home the
models of these heathenish temples in their eyes) do not exceed its
noble grace and simplicity. The mystics make discoveries at home, that
the Gothic architecture is Catholicism carved in stone— (in which case,
and if architectural beauty is a criterion or expression of religion,
what a dismal barbarous creed must that expressed by the Bethesda
meeting-house and Independent chapels be?)—if, as they would gravely
hint, because Gothic architecture is beautiful, Catholicism is
therefore lovely and right,—why, Mahometanism must have been right and
lovely too once. Never did a creed possess temples more elegant; as
elegant as the Cathedral at Rouen, or the Baptistery at Pisa.

But it is changed now. There was nobody at prayers; only the official
beadles, and the supernumerary guides, who came for backsheesh. Faith
hath degenerated. Accordingly they can’t build these mosques, or invent
these perfect forms, any more. Witness the tawdry incompleteness and
vulgarity of the Pasha’s new temple, and the woful failures among the
very late edifices in Constantinople!

However, they still make pilgrimages to Mecca in great force. The
Mosque of Hassan is hard by the green plain on which the Hag encamps
before it sets forth annually on its pious peregrination. It was not
yet its time, but I saw in the bazaars that redoubted Dervish, who is
the master of the Hag—the leader of every procession, accompanying the
sacred camel; and a personage almost as much respected as Mr. O’Connell
in Ireland.

This fellow lives by alms (I mean the head of the Hag). Winter and
summer he wears no clothes but a thin and scanty white shirt. He wields
a staff, and stalks along scowling and barefoot. His immense shock of
black hair streams behind him, and his brown brawny body is curled over
with black hair, like a savage man. This saint has the largest harem in
the town; he is said to be enormously rich by the contributions he has
levied; and is so adored for his holiness by the infatuated folk, that
when he returns from the Hag (which he does on horseback, the chief
Mollahs going out to meet him and escort him home in state along the
Ezbekieh road), the people fling themselves down under the horse’s
feet, eager to be trampled upon and killed, and confident of heaven if
the great Hadji’s horse will but kick them into it. Was it my fault if
I thought of Hadji Daniel, and the believers in him?

There was no Dervish of repute on the plain when I passed; only one
poor wild fellow, who was dancing, with glaring eyes and grizzled
beard, rather to the contempt of the bystanders, as I thought, who by
no means put coppers into his extended bowl. On this poor devil’s head
there was a poorer devil still—a live cock, entirely plucked, but
ornamented with some bits of ragged tape and scarlet and tinsel, the
most horribly grotesque and miserable object I ever saw.

A little way from him, there was a sort of play going on—a clown and a
knowing one, like Widdicombe and the clown with us,—the buffoon
answering with blundering responses, which made all the audience shout
with laughter; but the only joke which was translated to me would make
you do anything but laugh, and shall therefore never be revealed by
these lips. All their humour, my dragoman tells me, is of this
questionable sort; and a young Egyptian gentleman, son of a Pasha, whom
I subsequently met at Malta, confirmed the statement, and gave a detail
of the practices of private life which was anything but edifying. The
great aim of woman, he said, in the much-maligned Orient, is to
administer to the brutality of her lord; her merit is in knowing how to
vary the beast’s pleasures. He could give us no idea, he said, of the
wit of the Egyptian women, and their skill in double entendre; nor, I
presume, did we lose much by our ignorance. What I would urge, humbly,
however, is this—Do not let us be led away by German writers and
aesthetics, Semilassoisms, Hahnhahnisms, and the like. The life of the
East is a life of brutes. The much maligned Orient, I am confident, has
not been maligned near enough; for the good reason that none of us can
tell the amount of horrible sensuality practised there.

Beyond the Jack-pudding rascal and his audience, there was on the green
a spot, on which was pointed out to me a mark, as of blood. That
morning the blood had spouted from the neck of an Arnaoot soldier, who
had been executed for murder. These Arnaoots are the curse and terror
of the citizens. Their camps are without the city; but they are always
brawling, or drunken, or murdering within, in spite of the rigid law
which is applied to them, and which brings one or more of the
scoundrels to death almost every week.

Some of our party had seen this fellow borne by the hotel the day
before, in the midst of a crowd of soldiers who had apprehended him.
The man was still formidable to his score of captors: his clothes had
been torn off; his limbs were bound with cords; but he was struggling
frantically to get free; and my informant described the figure and
appearance of the naked, bound, writhing savage, as quite a model of
beauty.

Walking in the street, this fellow had just before been struck by the
looks of a woman who was passing, and laid hands on her. She ran away,
and he pursued her. She ran into the police-barrack, which was luckily
hard by; but the Arnaoot was nothing daunted, and followed into the
midst of the police. One of them tried to stop him. The Arnaoot pulled
out a pistol, and shot the policeman dead. He cut down three or four
more before he was secured. He knew his inevitable end must be death:
that he could not seize upon the woman: that he could not hope to
resist half a regiment of armed soldiers: yet his instinct of lust and
murder was too strong; and so he had his head taken off quite calmly
this morning, many of his comrades attending their brother’s last
moments. He cared not the least about dying; and knelt down and had his
head off as coolly as if he were looking on at the same ceremony
performed on another.

When the head was off, and the blood was spouting on the ground, a
married woman, who had no children, came forward very eagerly out of
the crowd, to smear herself with it,—the application of criminals’
blood being considered a very favourable medicine for women afflicted
with barrenness,—so she indulged in this remedy.

But one of the Arnaoots standing near said, “What, you like blood, do
you?” (or words to that effect). “Let’s see how yours mixes with my
comrade’s.” And thereupon, taking out a pistol, he shot the woman in
the midst of the crowd and the guards who were attending the execution;
was seized of course by the latter; and no doubt to-morrow morning will
have HIS head off too. It would be a good chapter to write—the Death of
the Arnaoot—but I shan’t go. Seeing one man hanged is quite enough in
the course of a life. J’y ai ete, as the Frenchman said of hunting.

These Arnaoots are the terror of the town. They seized hold of an
Englishman the other day, and were very nearly pistolling him. Last
week one of them murdered a shopkeeper at Boulak, who refused to sell
him a water-melon at a price which he, the soldier, fixed upon it. So,
for the matter of three-halfpence, he killed the shopkeeper; and had
his own rascally head chopped off, universally regretted by his
friends. Why, I wonder, does not His Highness the Pasha invite the
Arnaoots to a dejeuner at the Citadel, as he did the Mamelukes, and
serve them up the same sort of breakfast? The walls are considerably
heightened since Emin Bey and his horse leapt them, and it is probable
that not one of them would escape.

This sort of pistol practice is common enough here, it would appear;
and not among the Arnaoots merely, but the higher orders. Thus, a short
time since, one of His Highness’s grandsons, whom I shall call
Bluebeard Pasha (lest a revelation of the name of the said Pasha might
interrupt our good relations with his country)— one of the young Pashas
being rather backward in his education, and anxious to learn
mathematics, and the elegant deportment of civilised life, sent to
England for a tutor. I have heard he was a Cambridge man, and had
learned both algebra and politeness under the Reverend Doctor Whizzle,
of—College.

One day when Mr. MacWhirter, B.A., was walking in Shoubra Gardens, with
His Highness the young Bluebeard Pasha, inducting him into the usages
of polished society, and favouring him with reminiscences of
Trumpington, there came up a poor fellah, who flung himself at the feet
of young Bluebeard, and calling for justice in a loud and pathetic
voice, and holding out a petition, besought His Highness to cast a
gracious eye upon the same, and see that his slave had justice done
him.

Bluebeard Pasha was so deeply engaged and interested by his respected
tutor’s conversation, that he told the poor fellah to go to the deuce,
and resumed the discourse which his ill-timed outcry for justice had
interrupted. But the unlucky wight of a fellah was pushed by his evil
destiny, and thought he would make yet another application. So he took
a short cut down one of the garden lanes, and as the Prince and the
Reverend Mr. MacWhirter, his tutor, came along once more engaged in
pleasant disquisition, behold the fellah was once more in their way,
kneeling at the august Bluebeard’s feet, yelling out for justice as
before, and thrusting his petition into the Royal face.

When the Prince’s conversation was thus interrupted a second time, his
Royal patience and clemency were at an end. “Man,” said he, “once
before I bade thee not to pester me with thy clamour, and lo! you have
disobeyed me,—take the consequences of disobedience to a Prince, and
thy blood be upon thine own head.” So saying, he drew out a pistol and
blew out the brains of that fellah, so that he never bawled out for
justice any more.

The Reverend Mr. MacWhirter was astonished at this sudden mode of
proceeding: “Gracious Prince,” said he, “we do not shoot an
undergraduate at Cambridge even for walking over a college grass-
plot.—Let me suggest to your Royal Highness that this method of ridding
yourself of a poor devil’s importunities is such as we should consider
abrupt and almost cruel in Europe. Let me beg you to moderate your
Royal impetuosity for the future; and, as your Highness’s tutor,
entreat you to be a little less prodigal of your powder and shot.”

“O Mollah!” said His Highness, here interrupting his governor’s
affectionate appeal,—“you are good to talk about Trumpington and the
Pons Asinorum, but if you interfere with the course of justice in any
way, or prevent me from shooting any dog of an Arab who snarls at my
heels, I have another pistol; and, by the beard of the Prophet! a
bullet for you too.” So saying he pulled out the weapon, with such a
terrific and significant glance at the Reverend Mr. MacWhirter, that
that gentleman wished himself back in his Combination Room again; and
is by this time, let us hope, safely housed there.

Another facetious anecdote, the last of those I had from a well-
informed gentleman residing at Cairo, whose name (as many copies of
this book that is to be will be in the circulating libraries there) I
cannot, for obvious reasons, mention. The revenues of the country come
into the august treasury through the means of farmers, to whom the
districts are let out, and who are personally answerable for their
quota of the taxation. This practice involves an intolerable deal of
tyranny and extortion on the part of those engaged to levy the taxes,
and creates a corresponding duplicity among the fellahs, who are not
only wretchedly poor among themselves, but whose object is to appear
still more poor, and guard their money from their rapacious overseers.
Thus the Orient is much maligned; but everybody cheats there: that is a
melancholy fact. The Pasha robs and cheats the merchants; knows that
the overseer robs him, and bides his time, until he makes him disgorge
by the application of the tremendous bastinado; the overseer robs and
squeezes the labourer; and the poverty-stricken devil cheats and robs
in return; and so the government moves in a happy cycle of roguery.

Deputations from the fellahs and peasants come perpetually before the
august presence, to complain of the cruelty and exactions of the chiefs
set over them: but, as it is known that the Arab never will pay without
the bastinado, their complaints, for the most part, meet with but
little attention. His Highness’s treasury must be filled, and his
officers supported in their authority.

However, there was one village, of which the complaints were so
pathetic, and the inhabitants so supremely wretched, that the Royal
indignation was moved at their story, and the chief of the village,
Skinflint Beg, was called to give an account of himself at Cairo.

When he came before the presence, Mehemet Ali reproached him with his
horrible cruelty and exactions; asked him how he dared to treat his
faithful and beloved subjects in this way, and threatened him with
disgrace, and the utter confiscation of his property, for thus having
reduced a district to ruin.

“Your Highness says I have reduced these fellahs to ruin,” said
Skinflint Beg: “what is the best way to confound my enemies, and to
show you the falsehood of their accusations that I have ruined them?—To
bring more money from them. If I bring you five hundred purses from my
village, will you acknowledge that my people are not ruined yet?”

The heart of the Pasha was touched: “I will have no more bastinadoing,
O Skinflint Beg; you have tortured these poor people so much, and have
got so little from them, that my Royal heart relents for the present,
and I will have them suffer no farther.”

“Give me free leave—give me your Highness’s gracious pardon, and I will
bring the five hundred purses as surely as my name is Skinflint Beg. I
demand only the time to go home, the time to return, and a few days to
stay, and I will come back as honestly as Regulus Pasha did to the
Carthaginians,—I will come back and make my face white before your
Highness.”

Skinflint Beg’s prayer for a reprieve was granted, and he returned to
his village, where he forthwith called the elders together. “O
friends,” he said, “complaints of our poverty and misery have reached
the Royal throne, and the benevolent heart of the Sovereign has been
melted by the words that have been poured into his ears. ‘My heart
yearns towards my people of El Muddee,’ he says; ‘I have thought how to
relieve their miseries. Near them lies the fruitful land of El Guanee.
It is rich in maize and cotton, in sesame and barley; it is worth a
thousand purses; but I will let it to my children for seven hundred,
and I will give over the rest of the profit to them, as an alleviation
for their affliction.’”

The elders of El Muddee knew the great value and fertility of the lands
of Guanee, but they doubted the sincerity of their governor, who,
however, dispelled their fears, and adroitly quickened their eagerness
to close with the proffered bargain. “I will myself advance two hundred
and fifty purses,” he said; “do you take counsel among yourselves, and
subscribe the other five hundred; and when the sum is ready, a
deputation of you shall carry it to Cairo, and I will come with my
share; and we will lay the whole at the feet of His Highness.” So the
grey-bearded ones of the village advised with one another; and those
who had been inaccessible to bastinadoes, somehow found money at the
calling of interest; and the Sheikh, and they, and the five hundred
purses, set off on the road to the capital.

When they arrived, Skinflint Beg and the elders of El Muddee sought
admission to the Royal throne, and there laid down their purses. “Here
is your humble servant’s contribution,” said Skinflint, producing his
share; “and here is the offering of your loyal village of El Muddee.
Did I not before say that enemies and deceivers had maligned me before
the august presence, pretending that not a piastre was left in my
village, and that my extortion had entirely denuded the peasantry? See!
here is proof that there is plenty of money still in El Muddee: in
twelve hours the elders have subscribed five hundred purses, and lay
them at the feet of their lord.”

Instead of the bastinado, Skinflint Beg was instantly rewarded with the
Royal favour, and the former mark of attention was bestowed upon the
fellahs who had maligned him; Skinflint Beg was promoted to the rank of
Skinflint Bey; and his manner of extracting money from his people may
be studied with admiration in a part of the United Kingdom. {3}

At the time of the Syrian quarrel, and when, apprehending some general
rupture with England, the Pasha wished to raise the spirit of the
fellahs, and relever la morale nationale, he actually made one of the
astonished Arabs a colonel. He degraded him three days after peace was
concluded. The young Egyptian colonel, who told me this, laughed and
enjoyed the joke with the utmost gusto. “Is it not a shame,” he said,
“to make me a colonel at three-and-twenty; I, who have no particular
merit, and have never seen any service?” Death has since stopped the
modest and good-natured young fellow’s further promotion. The death
of—Bey was announced in the French papers a few weeks back.

My above kind-hearted and agreeable young informant used to discourse,
in our evenings in the Lazaretto at Malta, very eloquently about the
beauty of his wife, whom he had left behind him at Cairo—her brown
hair, her brilliant complexion, and her blue eyes. It is this
Circassian blood, I suppose, to which the Turkish aristocracy that
governs Egypt must be indebted for the fairness of their skin. Ibrahim
Pasha, riding by in his barouche, looked like a bluff jolly-faced
English dragoon officer, with a grey moustache and red cheeks, such as
you might see on a field-day at Maidstone. All the numerous officials
riding through the town were quite as fair as Europeans. We made
acquaintance with one dignitary, a very jovial and fat Pasha, the
proprietor of the inn, I believe, who was continually lounging about
the Ezbekieh garden, and who, but for a slight Jewish cast of
countenance, might have passed any day for a Frenchman. The ladies whom
we saw were equally fair; that is, the very slight particles of the
persons of ladies which our lucky eyes were permitted to gaze on. These
lovely creatures go through the town by parties of three or four,
mounted on donkeys, and attended by slaves holding on at the crupper,
to receive the lovely riders lest they should fall, and shouting out
shrill cries of “Schmaalek,” “Ameenek” (or however else these words may
be pronounced), and flogging off the people right and left with the
buffalo-thong. But the dear creatures are even more closely disguised
than at Constantinople: their bodies are enveloped with a large black
silk hood, like a cab-head; the fashion seemed to be to spread their
arms out, and give this covering all the amplitude of which it was
capable, as they leered and ogled you from under their black masks with
their big rolling eyes.

Everybody has big rolling eyes here (unless, to be sure, they lose one
of ophthalmia). The Arab women are some of the noblest figures I have
ever seen. The habit of carrying jars on the head always gives the
figure grace and motion; and the dress the women wear certainly
displays it to full advantage. I have brought a complete one home with
me, at the service of any lady for a masqued ball. It consists of a
coarse blue dress of calico, open in front, and fastened with a horn
button. Three yards of blue stuff for a veil; on the top of the veil a
jar to be balanced on the head; and a little black strip of silk to
fall over the nose, and leave the beautiful eyes full liberty to roll
and roam. But such a costume, not aided by any stays or any other
article of dress whatever, can be worn only by a very good figure. I
suspect it won’t be borrowed for many balls next season.

The men, a tall, handsome, noble race, are treated like dogs. I shall
never forget riding through the crowded bazaars, my interpreter, or
laquais-de-place, ahead of me to clear the way— when he took his whip,
and struck it over the shoulders of a man who could not or would not
make way!

The man turned round—an old, venerable, handsome face, with awfully sad
eyes, and a beard long and quite grey. He did not make the least
complaint, but slunk out of the way, piteously shaking his shoulder.
The sight of that indignity gave me a sickening feeling of disgust. I
shouted out to the cursed lackey to hold his hand, and forbade him ever
in my presence to strike old or young more; but everybody is doing it.
The whip is in everybody’s hands: the Pasha’s running footman, as he
goes bustling through the bazaar; the doctor’s attendant, as he soberly
threads the crowd on his mare; the negro slave, who is riding by
himself, the most insolent of all, strikes and slashes about without
mercy, and you never hear a single complaint.

How to describe the beauty of the streets to you!—the fantastic
splendour; the variety of the houses, and archways, and hanging roofs,
and balconies, and porches; the delightful accidents of light and shade
which chequer them: the noise, the bustle, the brilliancy of the crowd;
the interminable vast bazaars with their barbaric splendour. There is a
fortune to be made for painters in Cairo, and materials for a whole
Academy of them. I never saw such a variety of architecture, of life,
of picturesqueness, of brilliant colour, and light and shade. There is
a picture in every street, and at every bazaar stall. Some of these our
celebrated water-colour painter, Mr. Lewis, has produced with admirable
truth and exceeding minuteness and beauty; but there is room for a
hundred to follow him; and should any artist (by some rare occurrence)
read this, who has leisure, and wants to break new ground, let him take
heart, and try a winter in Cairo, where there is the finest climate and
the best subjects for his pencil.

A series of studies of negroes alone would form a picturebook,
delightfully grotesque. Mounting my donkey to-day, I took a ride to the
desolate noble old buildings outside the city, known as the Tombs of
the Caliphs. Every one of these edifices, with their domes, and courts,
and minarets, is strange and beautiful. In one of them there was an
encampment of negro slaves newly arrived: some scores of them were
huddled against the sunny wall; two or three of their masters lounged
about the court, or lay smoking upon carpets. There was one of these
fellows, a straight-nosed ebony- faced Abyssinian, with an expression
of such sinister good-humour in his handsome face as would form a
perfect type of villany. He sat leering at me, over his carpet, as I
endeavoured to get a sketch of that incarnate rascality. “Give me some
money,” said the fellow. “I know what you are about. You will sell my
picture for money when you get back to Europe; let me have some of it
now!” But the very rude and humble designer was quite unable to depict
such a consummation and perfection of roguery; so flung him a cigar,
which he began to smoke, grinning at the giver. I requested the
interpreter to inform him, by way of assurance of my disinterestedness,
that his face was a great deal too ugly to be popular in Europe, and
that was the particular reason why I had selected it.

Then one of his companions got up and showed us his black cattle. The
male slaves were chiefly lads, and the women young, well formed, and
abominably hideous. The dealer pulled her blanket off one of them, and
bade her stand up, which she did with a great deal of shuddering
modesty. She was coal black, her lips were the size of sausages, her
eyes large and good-humoured; the hair or wool on this young person’s
head was curled and greased into a thousand filthy little ringlets. She
was evidently the beauty of the flock.

They are not unhappy: they look to being bought, as many a spinster
looks to an establishment in England; once in a family they are kindly
treated and well clothed, and fatten, and are the merriest people of
the whole community. These were of a much more savage sort than the
slaves I had seen in the horrible market at Constantinople, where I
recollect the following young creature—{2} (indeed it is a very fair
likeness of her) whilst I was looking at her and forming pathetic
conjectures regarding her fate—smiling very good-humouredly, and
bidding the interpreter ask me to buy her for twenty pounds.

From these Tombs of the Caliphs the Desert is before you. It comes up
to the walls of the city, and stops at some gardens which spring up all
of a sudden at its edge. You can see the first Station- house on the
Suez Road; and so from distance-point to point, could ride thither
alone without a guide.

Asinus trotted gallantly into this desert for the space of a quarter of
an hour. There we were (taking care to keep our back to the city
walls), in the real actual desert: mounds upon mounds of sand,
stretching away as far as the eye can see, until the dreary prospect
fades away in the yellow horizon! I had formed a finer idea of it out
of “Eothen.” Perhaps in a simoom it may look more awful. The only
adventure that befell in this romantic place was that Asinus’s legs
went deep into a hole: whereupon his rider went over his head, and bit
the sand, and measured his length there; and upon this hint rose up,
and rode home again. No doubt one should have gone out for a couple of
days’ march—as it was, the desert did not seem to me sublime, only
UNCOMFORTABLE.

Very soon after this perilous adventure the sun likewise dipped into
the sand (but not to rise therefrom so quickly as I had done); and I
saw this daily phenomenon of sunset with pleasure, for I was engaged at
that hour to dine with our old friend J-, who has established himself
here in the most complete Oriental fashion.

You remember J-, and what a dandy he was, the faultlessness of his
boots and cravats, the brilliancy of his waistcoats and kid-gloves; we
have seen his splendour in Regent Street, in the Tuileries, or on the
Toledo. My first object on arriving here was to find out his house,
which he has taken far away from the haunts of European civilisation,
in the Arab quarter. It is situated in a cool, shady, narrow alley; so
narrow, that it was with great difficulty— His Highness Ibrahim Pasha
happening to pass at the same moment— that my little procession of two
donkeys, mounted by self and valet-de-place, with the two donkey-boys
our attendants, could range ourselves along the wall, and leave room
for the august cavalcade. His Highness having rushed on (with an
affable and good-humoured salute to our imposing party), we made J.’s
quarters; and, in the first place, entered a broad covered court or
porch, where a swarthy tawny attendant, dressed in blue, with white
turban, keeps a perpetual watch. Servants in the East lie about all the
doors, it appears; and you clap your hands, as they do in the dear old
“Arabian Nights,” to summon them.

This servant disappeared through a narrow wicket, which he closed after
him; and went into the inner chambers, to ask if his lord would receive
us. He came back presently, and rising up from my donkey, I confided
him to his attendant (lads more sharp, arch, and wicked than these
donkey-boys don’t walk the pave of Paris or London), and passed the
mysterious outer door.

First we came into a broad open court, with a covered gallery running
along one side of it. A camel was reclining on the grass there; near
him was a gazelle, to glad J- with his dark blue eye; and a numerous
brood of hens and chickens, who furnish his liberal table. On the
opposite side of the covered gallery rose up the walls of his long,
queer, many-windowed, many-galleried house. There were wooden lattices
to those arched windows, through the diamonds of one of which I saw two
of the most beautiful, enormous, ogling black eyes in the world,
looking down upon the interesting stranger. Pigeons were flapping, and
hopping, and fluttering, and cooing about. Happy pigeons, you are, no
doubt, fed with crumbs from the henne-tipped fingers of Zuleika! All
this court, cheerful in the sunshine, cheerful with the astonishing
brilliancy of the eyes peering out from the lattice-bars, was as
mouldy, ancient, and ruinous—as any gentleman’s house in Ireland, let
us say. The paint was peeling off the rickety old carved galleries; the
arabesques over the windows were chipped and worn;—the ancientness of
the place rendered it doubly picturesque. I have detained you a long
time in the outer court. Why the deuce was Zuleika there, with the
beautiful black eyes?

Hence we passed into a large apartment, where there was a fountain; and
another domestic made his appearance, taking me in charge, and
relieving the tawny porter of the gate. This fellow was clad in blue
too, with a red sash and a grey beard. He conducted me into a great
hall, where there was a great, large Saracenic oriel window. He seated
me on a divan; and stalking off, for a moment, returned with a long
pipe and a brass chafing-dish: he blew the coal for the pipe, which he
motioned me to smoke, and left me there with a respectful bow. This
delay, this mystery of servants, that outer court with the camels,
gazelles, and other beautiful-eyed things, affected me prodigiously all
the time he was staying away; and while I was examining the strange
apartment and its contents, my respect and awe for the owner increased
vastly.

As you will be glad to know how an Oriental nobleman (such as J—
undoubtedly is) is lodged and garnished, let me describe the contents
of this hall of audience. It is about forty feet long, and eighteen or
twenty high. All the ceiling is carved, gilt, painted and embroidered
with arabesques, and choice sentences of Eastern writing. Some Mameluke
Aga, or Bey, whom Mehemet Ali invited to breakfast and massacred, was
the proprietor of this mansion once: it has grown dingier, but,
perhaps, handsomer, since his time. Opposite the divan is a great
bay-window, with a divan likewise round the niche. It looks out upon a
garden about the size of Fountain Court, Temple; surrounded by the tall
houses of the quarter. The garden is full of green. A great palm-tree
springs up in the midst, with plentiful shrubberies, and a talking
fountain. The room beside the divan is furnished with one deal table,
value five shillings; four wooden chairs, value six shillings; and a
couple of mats and carpets. The table and chairs are luxuries imported
from Europe. The regular Oriental dinner is put upon copper trays,
which are laid upon low stools. Hence J- Effendi’s house may be said to
be much more sumptuously furnished than those of the Beys and Agas his
neighbours.

When these things had been examined at leisure, J- appeared. Could it
be the exquisite of the “Europa” and the “Trois Freres”? A man- -in a
long yellow gown, with a long beard somewhat tinged with grey, with his
head shaved, and wearing on it, first, a white wadded cotton nightcap;
second, a red tarboosh—made his appearance and welcomed me cordially.
It was some time, as the Americans say, before I could “realise” the
semillant J- of old times.

He shuffled off his outer slippers before he curled up on the divan
beside me. He clapped his hands, and languidly called “Mustapha.”
Mustapha came with more lights, pipes, and coffee; and then we fell to
talking about London, and I gave him the last news of the comrades in
that dear city. As we talked, his Oriental coolness and languor gave
way to British cordiality; he was the most amusing companion of the
club once more.

He has adapted himself outwardly, however, to the Oriental life. When
he goes abroad he rides a grey horse with red housings, and has two
servants to walk beside him. He wears a very handsome grave costume of
dark blue, consisting of an embroidered jacket and gaiters, and a pair
of trousers, which would make a set of dresses for an English family.
His beard curls nobly over his chest, his Damascus scimitar on his
thigh. His red cap gives him a venerable and Bey-like appearance. There
is no gewgaw or parade about him, as in some of your dandified young
Agas. I should say that he is a Major-General of Engineers, or a grave
officer of State. We and the Turkified European, who found us at
dinner, sat smoking in solemn divan.

His dinners were excellent; they were cooked by a regular Egyptian
female cook. We had delicate cucumbers stuffed with forced-meats;
yellow smoking pilaffs, the pride of the Oriental cuisine; kid and
fowls a l’Aboukir and a la Pyramide: a number of little savoury plates
of legumes of the vegetable-marrow sort: kibobs with an excellent sauce
of plums and piquant herbs. We ended the repast with ruby pomegranates,
pulled to pieces, deliciously cool and pleasant. For the meats, we
certainly ate them with the Infidel knife and fork; but for the fruit,
we put our hands into the dish and flicked them into our mouths in what
cannot but be the true Oriental manner. I asked for lamb and
pistachio-nuts, and cream- tarts au poivre; but J.’s cook did not
furnish us with either of those historic dishes. And for drink, we had
water freshened in the porous little pots of grey clay, at whose spout
every traveller in the East has sucked delighted. Also, it must be
confessed, we drank certain sherbets, prepared by the two great rivals,
Hadji Hodson and Bass Bey—the bitterest and most delicious of draughts!
O divine Hodson! a camel’s load of thy beer came from Beyrout to
Jerusalem while we were there. How shall I ever forget the joy inspired
by one of those foaming cool flasks?

We don’t know the luxury of thirst in English climes. Sedentary men in
cities at least have seldom ascertained it; but when they travel, our
countrymen guard against it well. The road between Cairo and Suez is
jonche with soda-water corks. Tom Thumb and his brothers might track
their way across the desert by those landmarks.

Cairo is magnificently picturesque: it is fine to have palm-trees in
your gardens, and ride about on a camel; but, after all, I was anxious
to know what were the particular excitements of Eastern life, which
detained J-, who is a town-bred man, from his natural pleasures and
occupations in London; where his family don’t hear from him, where his
room is still kept ready at home, and his name is on the list of his
club; and where his neglected sisters tremble to think that their
Frederick is going about with a great beard and a crooked sword,
dressed up like an odious Turk. In a “lark” such a costume may be very
well; but home, London, a razor, your sister to make tea, a pair of
moderate Christian breeches in lieu of those enormous Turkish shulwars,
are vastly more convenient in the long run. What was it that kept him
away from these decent and accustomed delights?

It couldn’t be the black eyes in the balcony—upon his honour she was
only the black cook, who has done the pilaff, and stuffed the
cucumbers. No, it was an indulgence of laziness such as Europeans,
Englishmen, at least, don’t know how to enjoy. Here he lives like a
languid Lotus-eater—a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life. He was away
from evening parties, he said: he needn’t wear white kid gloves, or
starched neckcloths, or read a newspaper. And even this life at Cairo
was too civilised for him: Englishmen passed through; old acquaintances
would call: the great pleasure of pleasures was life in the
desert,—under the tents, with still more nothing to do than in Cairo;
now smoking, now cantering on Arabs, and no crowd to jostle you; solemn
contemplations of the stars at night, as the camels were picketed, and
the fires and the pipes were lighted.

The night-scene in the city is very striking for its vastness and
loneliness. Everybody has gone to rest long before ten o’clock. There
are no lights in the enormous buildings; only the stars blazing above,
with their astonishing brilliancy, in the blue peaceful sky. Your
guides carry a couple of little lanterns which redouble the darkness in
the solitary echoing street. Mysterious people are curled up and
sleeping in the porches. A patrol of soldiers passes, and hails you.
There is a light yet in one mosque, where some devotees are at prayers
all night; and you hear the queerest nasal music proceeding from those
pious believers. As you pass the madhouse, there is one poor fellow
still talking to the moon—no sleep for him. He howls and sings there
all the night—quite cheerfully, however. He has not lost his vanity
with his reason: he is a Prince in spite of the bars and the straw.

What to say about those famous edifices, which has not been better said
elsewhere?—but you will not believe that we visited them, unless I
bring some token from them. Here is one:- {2}

That white-capped lad skipped up the stones with a jug of water in his
hand, to refresh weary climbers; and squatting himself down on the
summit, was designed as you see. The vast flat landscape stretches
behind him; the great winding river; the purple city, with forts, and
domes, and spires; the green fields, and palm- groves, and speckled
villages; the plains still covered with shining inundations—the
landscape stretches far far away, until it is lost and mingled in the
golden horizon. It is poor work this landscape-painting in print.
Shelley’s two sonnets are the best views that I know of the
Pyramids—better than the reality; for a man may lay down the book, and
in quiet fancy conjure up a picture out of these magnificent words,
which shan’t be disturbed by any pettinesses or mean realities,—such as
the swarms of howling beggars, who jostle you about the actual place,
and scream in your ears incessantly, and hang on your skirts, and bawl
for money.

The ride to the Pyramids is one of the pleasantest possible. In the
fall of the year, though the sky is almost cloudless above you, the sun
is not too hot to bear; and the landscape, refreshed by the subsiding
inundations, delightfully green and cheerful. We made up a party of
some half-dozen from the hotel, a lady (the kind soda- water provider,
for whose hospitality the most grateful compliments are hereby offered)
being of the company, bent like the rest upon going to the summit of
Cheops. Those who were cautious and wise, took a brace of donkeys. At
least five times during the route did my animals fall with me, causing
me to repeat the desert experiment over again, but with more success.
The space between a moderate pair of legs and the ground, is not many
inches. By eschewing stirrups, the donkey could fall, and the rider
alight on the ground, with the greatest ease and grace. Almost
everybody was down and up again in the course of the day.

We passed through the Ezbekieh and by the suburbs of the town, where
the garden-houses of the Egyptian noblesse are situated, to Old Cairo,
where a ferry-boat took the whole party across the Nile, with that
noise and bawling volubility in which the Arab people seem to be so
unlike the grave and silent Turks; and so took our course for some
eight or ten miles over the devious tract which the still outlying
waters obliged us to pursue. The Pyramids were in sight the whole way.
One or two thin silvery clouds were hovering over them, and casting
delicate rosy shadows upon the grand simple old piles. Along the track
we saw a score of pleasant pictures of Eastern life:- The Pasha’s
horses and slaves stood caparisoned at his door; at the gate of one
country-house, I am sorry to say, the Bey’s GIG was in waiting,—a most
unromantic chariot; the husbandmen were coming into the city, with
their strings of donkeys and their loads; as they arrived, they stopped
and sucked at the fountain: a column of red-capped troops passed to
drill, with slouched gait, white uniforms, and glittering bayonets.
Then we had the pictures at the quay: the ferryboat, and the red-sailed
river-boat, getting under way, and bound up the stream. There was the
grain market, and the huts on the opposite side; and that beautiful
woman, with silver armlets, and a face the colour of gold, which (the
nose-bag having been luckily removed) beamed solemnly on us Europeans,
like a great yellow harvest moon. The bunches of purpling dates were
pending from the branches; grey cranes or herons were flying over the
cool shining lakes, that the river’s overflow had left behind; water
was gurgling through the courses by the rude locks and barriers formed
there, and overflowing this patch of ground; whilst the neighbouring
field was fast budding into the more brilliant fresh green. Single
dromedaries were stepping along, their riders lolling on their hunches;
low sail-boats were lying in the canals; now, we crossed an old marble
bridge; now, we went, one by one, over a ridge of slippery earth; now,
we floundered through a small lake of mud. At last, at about
half-a-mile off the Pyramid, we came to a piece of water some two-score
yards broad, where a regiment of half-naked Arabs, seizing upon each
individual of the party, bore us off on their shoulders, to the
laughter of all, and the great perplexity of several, who every moment
expected to be pitched into one of the many holes with which the
treacherous lake abounded.

It was nothing but joking and laughter, bullying of guides, shouting
for interpreters, quarrelling about sixpences. We were acting a farce,
with the Pyramids for the scene. There they rose up enormous under our
eyes, and the most absurd trivial things were going on under their
shadow. The sublime had disappeared, vast as they were. Do you remember
how Gulliver lost his awe of the tremendous Brobdingnag ladies? Every
traveller must go through all sorts of chaffering, and bargaining, and
paltry experiences, at this spot. You look up the tremendous steps,
with a score of savage ruffians bellowing round you; you hear faint
cheers and cries high up, and catch sight of little reptiles crawling
upwards; or, having achieved the summit, they come hopping and bouncing
down again from degree to degree,—the cheers and cries swell louder and
more disagreeable; presently the little jumping thing, no bigger than
an insect a moment ago, bounces down upon you expanded into a panting
Major of Bengal cavalry. He drives off the Arabs with an oath,—wipes
his red shining face with his yellow handkerchief, drops puffing on the
sand in a shady corner, where cold fowl and hard eggs are awaiting him,
and the next minute you see his nose plunged in a foaming beaker of
brandy and soda-water. He can say now, and for ever, he has been up the
Pyramid. There is nothing sublime in it. You cast your eye once more up
that staggering perspective of a zigzag line, which ends at the summit,
and wish you were up there—and down again. Forwards!—Up with you! It
must be done. Six Arabs are behind you, who won’t let you escape if you
would.

The importunity of these ruffians is a ludicrous annoyance to which a
traveller must submit. For two miles before you reach the Pyramids they
seize on you and never cease howling. Five or six of them pounce upon
one victim, and never leave him until they have carried him up and
down. Sometimes they conspire to run a man up the huge stair, and bring
him, half-killed and fainting, to the top. Always a couple of brutes
insist upon impelling you sternwards; from whom the only means to
release yourself is to kick out vigorously and unmercifully, when the
Arabs will possibly retreat. The ascent is not the least romantic, or
difficult, or sublime: you walk up a great broken staircase, of which
some of the steps are four feet high. It’s not hard, only a little
high. You see no better view from the top than you behold from the
bottom; only a little more river, and sand, and ricefield. You jump
down the big steps at your leisure; but your meditations you must keep
for after-times,—the cursed shrieking of the Arabs prevents all thought
or leisure.

- And this is all you have to tell about the Pyramids? Oh! for shame!
Not a compliment to their age and size? Not a big phrase,- -not a
rapture? Do you mean to say that you had no feeling of respect and awe?
Try, man, and build up a monument of words as lofty as they are—they,
whom “imber edax” and “aquilo impotens” and the flight of ages have not
been able to destroy.

- No: be that work for great geniuses, great painters, great poets!
This quill was never made to take such flights; it comes of the wing of
a humble domestic bird, who walks a common; who talks a great deal (and
hisses sometimes); who can’t fly far or high, and drops always very
quickly; and whose unromantic end is, to be laid on a Michaelmas or
Christmas table, and there to be discussed for half-an-hour—let us
hope, with some relish.

* * *

Another week saw us in the Quarantine Harbour at Malta, where seventeen
days of prison and quiet were almost agreeable, after the incessant
sight-seeing of the last two months. In the interval, between the 23rd
of August and the 27th of October, we may boast of having seen more men
and cities than most travellers have seen in such a time:- Lisbon,
Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta, Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, Jerusalem,
Cairo. I shall have the carpet-bag, which has visited these places in
company with its owner, embroidered with their names; as military flags
are emblazoned, and laid up in ordinary, to be looked at in old age.
With what a number of sights and pictures,—of novel sensations, and
lasting and delightful remembrances, does a man furnish his mind after
such a tour! You forget all the annoyances of travel; but the pleasure
remains with you, through that kind provision of nature by which a man
forgets being ill, but thinks with joy of getting well, and can
remember all the minute circumstances of his convalescence. I forget
what sea-sickness is now: though it occupies a woful portion of my
Journal. There was a time on board when the bitter ale was decidedly
muddy; and the cook of the ship deserting at Constantinople, it must be
confessed his successor was for some time before he got his hand in.
These sorrows have passed away with the soothing influence of time: the
pleasures of the voyage remain, let us hope, as long as life will
endure. It was but for a couple of days that those shining columns of
the Parthenon glowed under the blue sky there; but the experience of a
life could scarcely impress them more vividly. We saw Cadiz only for an
hour; but the white buildings, and the glorious blue sea, how clear
they are to the memory!—with the tang of that gipsy’s guitar dancing in
the market-place, in the midst of the fruit, and the beggars, and the
sunshine. Who can forget the Bosphorus, the brightest and fairest scene
in all the world; or the towering lines of Gibraltar; or the great
piles of Mafra, as we rode into the Tagus? As I write this, and think,
back comes Rhodes, with its old towers and artillery, and that
wonderful atmosphere, and that astonishing blue sea which environs the
island. The Arab riders go pacing over the plains of Sharon, in the
rosy twilight, just before sunrise; and I can see the ghastly Moab
mountains, with the Dead Sea gleaming before them, from the mosque on
the way towards Bethany. The black gnarled trees of Gethsemane lie at
the foot of Olivet, and the yellow ramparts of the city rise up on the
stony hills beyond.

But the happiest and best of all the recollections, perhaps, are those
of the hours passed at night on the deck, when the stars were shining
overhead, and the hours were tolled at their time, and your thoughts
were fixed upon home far away. As the sun rose I once heard the priest,
from the minaret of Constantinople, crying out, “Come to prayer,” with
his shrill voice ringing through the clear air; and saw, at the same
hour, the Arab prostrate himself and pray, and the Jew Rabbi, bending
over his book, and worshipping the Maker of Turk and Jew. Sitting at
home in London, and writing this last line of farewell, those figures
come back the clearest of all to the memory, with the picture, too, of
our ship sailing over the peaceful Sabbath sea, and our own prayers and
services celebrated there. So each, in his fashion, and after his kind,
is bowing down, and adoring the Father, who is equally above all. Cavil
not, you brother or sister, if your neighbour’s voice is not like
yours; only hope that his words are honest (as far as they may be), and
his heart humble and thankful.

Footnotes:

{1} Saint Paul speaking from the Areopagus, and rebuking these
superstitions away, yet speaks tenderly to the people before him, whose
devotions he had marked; quotes their poets, to bring them to think of
the God unknown, whom they had ignorantly worshipped; and says, that
the times of this ignorance God winked at, but that now it was time to
repent. No rebuke can surely be more gentle than this delivered by the
upright Apostle.

{2} Thackeray’s drawing is shown at this point in the book.

{3} At Derrynane Beg, for instance.




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