THE THEATRE OF SIDÉ.
The next morning found the Utowana a few miles further east, at Old Adalia, settled, within the last year or two, by some two hundred Cretan families, who have made themselves dwellings within the shell of Sidé. Here is the wreck of a theatre only less enormous than that at Aspendus. Since there was no convenient hillside to be hollowed, the auditorium has been raised on arches like a half Coliseum, and it survives almost whole; but the scena wall has collapsed upon the stage in a mighty cataract of stones. One part of the ancient city is still a labyrinth of ruin; the other has been cleared and built upon by the Cretans. The exiles seemed ill at ease in their refuge. The Sultan had given them land and houses; but their fields, they said, were stony, and they lacked cattle for the plough; the water was bad, and they found they could talk little with their Greek tongues to the surrounding folk. It was hard, they thought, to have to begin life afresh, and for what fault? None the less, they seemed to be setting brave faces towards the future, and making the best of their fortune; and though they knew well enough that men of English speech had weighted the scale against their creed in Crete, they showed no rancour towards us, but were glad to trade in ancient coins and scarcely younger eggs. They bethought them, too, of other antiques in marble and terra-cotta, which they had found while collecting stones from Sidé, or turning its soil with their spades; and in the event, we spent some exhilarating hours in unashamed quest of forbidden things.
It were easy enough now to justify our looting, for, else, those marbles had gone long ago into the limekiln. But I doubt if any one of us thought a moment about justification, as we were loading the whale-boat once and again with spoils of Sidé. We were filled full of the lust of loot, possessing ourselves of treasure ready-made, reaping that we had not sown, tasting a joy which recks as little of justification as any on earth. It is the joy which has made pirates and filibusters and mercenary adventurers of all sorts and conditions of men, and kept them so till death. It recruited Greeks to fight for Persia, and Germans to fight for Rome, Norsemen to fight for Constantinople, and anyone and everyone to fight in Grand Companies, and Knightly Orders, and Janissary and Mameluke battalions; and it will recruit their like to the end of time. It has no rivals among motives of human action, but Love and Fear, and it has so often conquered both, that who will say, the greatest of these three is not the Lust of Loot?
CHAPTER VI.
CYRENE.
After coasting Cilicia and Cyprus for an idle week, the Utowana headed out to sea once more. We were bound for Cyrene, or so near at least as we might go to that long forbidden city. Had the party not been all of American nationality but one, we should never perhaps have put our luck to the test at all. But the Youngest Race sees no reason why it should not go anywhere on earth, and so it came about that the Utowana made the African shore late on a misty afternoon, and anchored off Ras el-Tin.
Under a red bar of sunset, Cyrenaica looked a grim land. Shelving up in low desert planes, treeless, houseless, tentless, it put us in mind more of present danger from Bedawi landlopers and Senussi fanatics than of the past glory of Cyrene. The latest news of the inner country, which had been current in Europe, reported it closed to Christians by a Government conscious that it could not guarantee them against the Senussi Order, which it was unwilling to offend. This mysterious Brotherhood was a bugbear of which we, like most people, knew very little. Widely spread and greatly respected through all north Africa, powerful in Mecca, and at one time, at any rate, not less powerful in Stambul, it had long been credited with a fanatic hatred of Christians, and indeed of all such Moslems as will make terms with Christendom, even the Caliph himself. Two generations ago it fixed its chief seat on Jebel Akhdar in Cyrenaica, attracted by the loneliness of the well-watered highlands; and although, since 1876, its leaders have been withdrawing by stages into the heart of Africa, we knew that two score Senussi convents flourished still about Cyrene, and had drawn the local Bedawis to them. In the early eighties, when Abdul Hamid was hoping to push his Islamic policy by means of the Brotherhood, the real power in Tripolitan Turkey was given into its hands; and Duveyrier, who set himself to study its aims and work in the oases behind French Africa, charged it with the constant endeavour to stay by robbery and murder all Frank advance. Others took up his cry, and pointed in proof to the killing of the Marquis de Morés by men of Ghadámes, as he was feeling his way towards Kufra. Our latest forerunner in Cyrene had found the Bedawis still as hostile to his presence as Murdoch Smith and James Hamilton had found them to theirs; and nothing, to our knowledge, had happened since to make the outlook more hopeful.
But, in fact, a certain change of good omen had taken place, as we were to learn next day in Derna. Well received in that pleasant half-Moorish town, whose coral beach and deep palm groves make it an outpost of tropic Africa, while its clean alleys, fair gardens, and grave, well-seeming Arabs, suggest an oasis town of Nejd, we heard that Cretan colonists were newly come to Cyrenaica. A hundred refugee families, it was said, had settled at Marsa Susa, and sixty about Ain Shahát, as Arabs name the Apollo fountain at Cyrene; and beside each colony a handful of Ottoman troops was encamped. True, Christians were still forbidden to travel in the inner country; but with credentials from Derna, said the Italian who flies our flag there on high days and holidays, we might drop anchor at Marsa Susa, and ask an escort to Ain Shahát. He himself had been there lately with a friend, and had found the mudir a most liberal Turk, who would rejoice to see us. So there was a mudir? Yes, a civilian officer who was gripping the Bedawis tighter every day. And the Senussis, what of them? He replied that, with the mudir on the spot and an escort to show that the Government was for us, there would be no trouble. Indeed, in these days, he added, the convents showed no ill-will to Europeans. He took us presently to call on the Governor, a fat little Candiote of an inordinate garrulity and a tremulous anxiety to please, who gave us the needful letter on the spot and then, after his kind, repented him bitterly, and asked for it again. But we held firm and, as we rowed out again to the yacht, on a night too warm for the season, over waters which doubled every star and the full globe of the moon, our minds were easy. There was no telegraph then in Cyrenaica, and the yacht could drop down to Marsa Susa many hours ahead of any mounted messenger from Derna.
Within five hours she was anchored there off the old city of Apollonia, which is become an heap; and in two more half her passengers, with an escort of seven soldiers and our Derniote friend’s kavass for guide, were mounted on two spavined white mares, two donkeys, and a camel. The yacht was left to rock on the treacherous roadstead outside the reefs, and the Owner, turning his back on his beautiful ship, put up a prayer that the land-wind which had followed the fair but fickle southerly breeze of the day before, might hold till the morrow. We had yet to learn that in Cyrenaica the Khamsin of Egypt is apt to pass into the dread Gharbís, a gale veering between south-west and north, from whose wrath there is no safe shelter at Marsa Susa, or indeed anywhere else on the coast for some hundreds of miles; so we kicked up our beasts and jogged merrily inland past plots of red tillage, and feeding flocks, and Cretan shepherds leaning on old Belgian rifles, towards the foot of the scarp up which a rock road of the ancients leads to Cyrene.
Forgotten highways always seem to me haunted places: and, since even second sight can be sharpened by realities, the better preserved a highway is, the better you see its ghosts. Therefore, if you would be fey, ride alone and by night from Apollonia to Cyrene through tangled forests and across deserted glades, treading pavements which dead men have worn. This strange way in the wilderness is not heaped up like a Roman road, but chiselled squarely out of living rock. Its raised side-walks still align it on either hand, and the tracks of Greek chariots and Libyan carts are cut deep on its face. For twenty centuries it has borne its witness to the grandeur that was once Cyrene, and it will bear it still for unnumbered centuries to come.
