Accidents of an antiquary's life

by D. G. Hogarth

THE ROCK ROAD FROM APOLLONIA TO CYRENE.

TOMBS OF CYRENE.

Except for the stirring sight of it, we found our ride to Cyrene an irksome exercise. The sky was clouded with coming scirocco, the air hung heavy, and there was no water by the way for our flagging beasts or the marching escort of Syrian soldiers. But here a ruined fort guarding a pass, there a group of sarcophagi, and everywhere the curves and cuttings of the road fed imagination, and shortened the hours, till, at an elbow of the climbing track, we came suddenly in sight of the tombs of Cyrene. There was yet a mile to go through the suburb of the dead, and with every step our wonder grew. Fresh from the carved cliffs of Lycia, we were not prepared for a finer spectacle in Africa. Terraced from top to bottom of the mountain buttresses, the pillared rock-graves of Cyrene rise in Doric, Ionic, and hybrid styles. Yet the more splendid fronts amaze one less than the endless tiers of commoner graves, mere rock-pits with gabled lids, which are cut out by thousands, with hardly a foot’s breadth between them, on the hill sides. When later on we entered a larger tomb here and there, we often found behind one narrow façade a catacomb parcelled out in niches for half a hundred dead, whose beds have been used again and again. In modern days we set our cemeteries apart within walls and in remote spots, fearing the corpse as we might a vampire, and rarely make the houses of the dead an embellishment of cities. But the Greek, and the Roman after him, who held serried graves to be the noblest civic avenue, lavished art on the last homes of hero-spirits to make them the chief glories of their towns; and Death must have lost half its sting for those who knew they would lie beside the main road in tombs seen of all wayfaring men and praised in distant lands.

Among the myriad mansions of the dead we heard the first sounds of men. Voices cried to us from tombs opening high on a hillside below a thin crown of pines; but the two or three troglodytes, who came out to view, went back at sight of our soldiers. Unmet and unsaluted, we followed the splendid curves and counter-curves of the road, till at last it ran out on a level stretch; and there near a single hut of rough stones, under the bloody flag of Turkey, we came on the booted mudir himself in council with four spearmen of the Haasa. He looked up in some astonishment and trouble, for few and far between are European visitors to Cyrene. But the breeding of a Turk, the custom of Islam, and the sight of our Iradé, secured us hospitality in his bullet-proof room, built above a Roman sepulchre.

We were not minded, however, to sit long over a mudir’s coffee, and presently went forth again to see something of the city before dark fell. The scirocco had not yet veiled, though it dimmed, the distance, and we could understand, if not echo, the rapture of lucky travellers, who in clear weather have looked across the cemeteries to the cornlands of the lower plateau. The sea swelled grey to the horizon, confounded with the dun northward sky; and in the nearer view stretched the broad belt of ruddy soil, now not half ploughed, which was once the pride of Cyrene. A green ribband, spreading fanwise as it sloped, marked the course of the Apollo waters, captured and distributed by the Senussis; and a sinuous line of scarps and tree-tops, winding westward, was, we were told, the vaunted Wady bil-Ghadir, the Happy Valley, where are other tombs as splendid as any which we had seen. The greater monuments, such as the Theatre and the Apollo Temple itself, of which last little is visible except the platform on which the main building once stood, lie along the higher course of the Apollo stream. Southward, also, the view from the crest of the plateau is amazing, not for ruins of the city, of which little enough stands up now out of the corn, but for the immensity of the site. Cyrene was built at the summit of a slope which falls steeply to the sea but gently inland, melting southward into steppe at the limit of vision, and for miles and miles is dotted with fragments of grey ruin. The Bedawis say that it is six camel-hours from one end to another of “Grené,” as the name “Kyrene” has been softened in their mouths. No site of antiquity so well suggests how a large city of our own day will seem when at last deserted by man.

THE MUDIR OF CYRENE.

All that we saw then in fast fading light we should see better on the morrow, and it was not worth while to do more than climb the height above the Apollo Fountain, which was surely the acropolis of the city. A Cretan came out of a tomb, and showed us this and that bit of moulding or sculpture, betraying a Greek’s brain below his turban; but such Bedawis as we crossed in the way saluted the mudir only. The latter, obviously careful on the return to guide us into a bypath out of sight of the Senussi convent, walked quickly and nervously; but, once returned to his windowless room, became at ease, showing the keepsakes and trinkets with which he kept Stambuline life in mind in this wild place. He was a young Cypriote, mild-eyed, and, naturally, I should judge, of good parts and disposition; but full of wistful envy of Frankish culture, of which he had had a taste in boyhood at Nicosia, and in later youth at the French lycée of Galata. This kind of Turk makes rather a melancholy figure. Latin Europe does little for him beyond bringing cafés chantants and lewd photographs within his ken; and by robbing him of his implicit reliance on the law and custom of Islam, it throws him upon his own individuality, unsupported by the social code to which he was born. How, then, shall he keep his hands clean in some solitary seat of petty power? He may endure for a while; but, lacking pride of self and all faith, why should he refrain from picking and stealing and grinding the face of the poor? Hoping and approving the best way, he is bound sooner or later to follow the worst; and probably from his type develop the most evil of governors, those who are cruel for no other reason than that they feel weak and alone.

He was kind to us, however, putting all and sundry of his possessions at our service, even his single bedstead. But as the three of us would have filled a Great Bed of Ware, we settled precedence by stretching ourselves cheek by jowl on the floor; and so passed an unquiet night in the close air of the barred room. I slipped the bolts in the small hours of morning, and looked out over Cyrene. A pallid moon was sailing high within an iridescent ring, and mirk and scud were blowing up fast and faster from the west. We might count ourselves in luck if there were still some southing in the gale by the time we could reach the ship; but come what might, we must give a morning to Cyrene.