He was faithful, you see, and he trusted us. Besides, we couldn't escape. There was only that one road and train. We took our seats in an open car, on account of the scenery. We didn't know it was third-class till later, but we didn't mind that. What we did mind was plunging into a thick, black, choking tunnel as soon as we started; then another and another. This was scenery with a vengeance.
We were out at last, and in a different world. Whatever was modern in Malta had been left behind. This was wholly Eastern—Syrian—a piece out of the Holy Land, if the pictures tell us the truth. Everywhere were the one-story, flat-topped architecture and the olive-trees of the Holy Land pictures; everywhere stony fields and myriads of stone walls.
At a bound we had come from what was only a few hundred years ago, mingled with to-day, to what was a few thousand years ago, mingled with nothing modern whatever. There is no touch of English dominion here, or French, or Italian. This might be Syrian or Moorish; it might be, and is Maltese.
We saw men ploughing with a single cow and a crooked stick in a manner that has prevailed here always. We mentioned the matter to our railway-conductor, who was a sociable person and had not much to do.
"You are from America," he said.
"Yes, we are from America."
"And do they use different ploughs there?"
He spoke the English of the colonies, and it seemed incredible that he should not know about these things. We broke it to him as gently as possible that we did not plough with a crooked stick in America, but with such ploughs as were used in England. However, that meant nothing to him, as he had never been off the island of Malta in his life. His name was Carina, he told us, and his parents and grandparents before him had been born on the island. Still, I think he must have had English or Irish pigment in that red hair of his. His English was perfect, though he spoke the Maltese, too, of course.
He became our guide as we went along, willing and generous with his information, though more interested, I thought, in the questions he modestly asked us, now and then. His whole environment—all his traditions—had been confined to that little sea-encircled space of old, old town, and older, much older country.
He would like to come to America, he confessed, and I wondered, if some day he should steam up New York harbor and look upon that piled architecture, and then should step ashore and find himself amidst its whirl of traffic, he would not be even more impressed by it than we were with his tiny forgotten island here to the south of Sicily.