Those peasants had, perhaps, feigned a little, as a Greek will, half unconsciously, if there be a chance to plume himself, even on misery. But I saw and heard much of them after their excitement had long passed and they were grown both familiar with me and fully aware of the measure of their loss; yet still undismayed, they held on their simple way after, as before a disaster which would have crushed or maddened northern husbandmen. Nor was their mood either callous or light. The peasant Greek is neither brute nor butterfly; but this he is—a man who is essentially inert, a man born physically outworn. The whole race, as it seems to me, is suffering from over-weariness. It lived fast in the forefront of mankind very long ago, and now is far gone in years; and in its home you feel that you have passed into the shadow of what has been, into an air in which men would rather be than do.
No doubt, also, the passivity common to most tillers of the earth reinforced the inborn nature of the Zakriotes. The husbandman is of all men the most apt to surrender to the discretion of Heaven and take its blows without thought whether they be deserved. Slave of the soil which he turns, to it he looks for all his being. What it gives him from year to year may vary in degree but not in kind. Much or little, it is always food. To be poor or rich is to have his belly better filled or worse; and, eating to live, he lives to eat only on a rare day of festival. So his customary toil, than which he knows no other business of his day, give him enough food, the shortening of it, or the loss of its variety will affect him less than a being of less simple life would think possible. Actual starvation he has not felt, and knows he will never feel, so long as his neighbour has food. His joys are found, not outside his day’s work, but in its course—in the satisfaction of bodily appetite, in drinking when he is athirst, in sleeping when he is weary, in warming himself in God’s sun, in cooling himself in the shade, in communing with his fellows, his wife and his babes. What should such a man know of the superfluity which we call wealth?
Simple though the Zakriotes were, they showed often in their talk that they knew themselves well enough to be preoccupied with this very question of their racial decay. Why, they were for ever asking me, had the Greeks fallen out of that front rank in which the schoolmaster told them they once marched? How came the “barbarians” of Europe to be now, nation for nation and man for man, so superior to the once Chosen Race? The processes of generation and birth, processes which, whether in man or beast, are never out of the thoughts or the talk of southern folk, were canvassed to show cause. Their maidens, they said, were betrothed as children, wedded at fourteen, and mothers in the course of months. They had heard we discouraged wedlock before the age of sixteen. Had they not better do so too? There was talk of a League of Hellenic Ladies to promote mature marriage, and the Headman’s wife, who twirled her spindle and bore her waterpot aloft among the rest, but with a statelier grace, wished to join it. Zakro had long been famous among Cretan villages for the easy delivery of mothers. A woman was not held to have done herself credit there if she let the midwife be in time. But what did I think? Did such easy bearing mean weak babes? I told the Headman’s lady how hardly it went with the delicate mothers of my own land, and she scarcely believed. Like Bedawis, who will halt but an hour on the march while a wife is delivered behind a spear-propped screen of cloaks, so too the sedentary mothers of the Near East make little trouble of bringing to birth. John Barker, consul in Aleppo, tells how once he halted with his wife for the night among the Syrian hills at a hut, whose mistress was plainly very near her time. In the morning the housewife gathered the family linen to wash it at the stream a thousand feet below, and, deaf to the English lady’s protests, went off down the hill. At sunset her figure was seen coming slowly up the path again, the new-washed linen on her head, the new-born babe in the crook of her arm.
I keep a very kindly memory of Zakro, despite its water fouled by the flood, despite the stenches which came up from the lightly sanded carcasses, despite the myriad mosquitoes of its shore. There was a tepid sea to bathe in morn and eve; there were fair slopes, unpeopled but not too wild, to ride over on Sabbaths and holidays; there was peace from the post and the political Greek; and there were half a score of buried brick houses of Minoan time to be explored, with all their contents, as well as pits and tombs and caves, which yielded me their secrets. I stayed till it was high summer, and what were left of barley fields were ripe already to harvest.
CHAPTER IV.
NILE FENS.
The Delta is unvisited by the thousands who seek their pleasure winter by winter on the Nile, although a glimpse of the fringe of its fens is everyone’s earliest and most vivid impression of Egypt. As the train speeds south from Alexandria, a vista slips past of level mere and copper-green fields and ant-hill villages breaking the line of an amber sky; or, more at leisure, between Port Said and Ismailia, you may look from the hurricane-deck over a silent lagoon, with flocks of waders standing at gaze, or trailing like far-blown smoke across the setting sun.
Twice I have gone for a sojourn of some weeks into the western fens, to glean, after another’s harvesting, on the mounds of Gaif, where King Amasis once made the Greeks build a very naughty city. It is a water-logged, ill-smelling spot, whose every detail is ugly or mean; but the large sunlit spaces around made one careless of the foreground, and even in this the eye was content with the shapely Walad Ali thieves who roam the mounds, and, if one lodged at the sheikh’s of the northern hamlet, with his daughter, Ayesha. She was as wild a maid as ever scoured pans for a Coptic cook and served two dusty diggers at their meat. Hers were the features of a Scopas head, the eyes of a frightened hare, and the wrists, hands, ankles, and feet of the purest breed of man. She was tattooed on brow and cheek and chin; the hue of her only robe was a smear of all the cakes in a paintbox; and she would rarely speak. When she did break silence, it was to ask for something in coin or kind towards the dowry, for lack of which she was aging at eighteen. The last time I visited Gaif, I heard she had been lifted at length to a bridal bower on camel-back, and had followed a Bedawi lord to the desert, as a sheikh’s daughter should. All luck and love be with her!
I had visited the fens, however, before I saw Gaif, having once ridden into them from Alexandria, when I was ranging the neighbourhood for buried Greek cities. Much was being said then of a mound lying beyond the swamps of Mariut, in a district almost without villages—a desolate doubtful tract of sour desert fringe, through which a pioneer canal had lately been dug. Some kind of farm was said to exist near this tell, tenanted by a party of Frenchmen; and no sooner had the good offices of an Alexandrian friend made me known to one of them, than I was bade cordially to come as I was and stay as long as I pleased. The farm-hands should attend me, cook for me and dig, and camels and Arab steeds were waiting my pleasure. But I caught the accent of Tarascon, and when I left Alexandria a few days later, it was with both horses and a servant of my own.
A BRIDAL BOWER AT GAIF.