Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

We saw the sunset every night on the Bay of Naples and Ischia, which all the world was talking about then because of the earthquake which had lately ravished it. Every night we saw a tree of fire rising from Vesuvius.

We used to spend our days in the orange groves of Sorrento, or driving in donkey-carts to Pompeii, that city of the resurrection of the ancient world. The weather was somnolently mild; for the first time we were eating of the fruit of the lotus, which we have eaten so often since, and which has pervaded my writings.

If Castellamare had only done that for us, it would be a milestone in my life, but it also planted the seeds of unrest—die Wanderlust—in my veins. Some one we met there—I don’t remember who it was now—had a craze for Greek ruins; Roman ruins meant nothing to him, he said; there were only two places for him, Athens and Sicily.

In Sicily it was Girgenti which won his heart, not Syracuse or Taormina, and he almost persuaded us to go there. He obviously preferred it, even to Athens. But the name meant nothing to me; I had read of Agrigentum in the classics, and he showed me photographs of the glorious Greek temples, which are still preserved in the environs of modern Girgenti. Athens, on the contrary, had been before my mind ever since I was a boy. The literature of Greece is, with the exception of Homer and Theocritus, roughly speaking, the literature of Athens. I knew most of its principal buildings almost as well as if I had seen them. I heard the call of Athens, and to Athens we went from Castellamare.

Going there showed how comparatively cheap and easy it is to get to distant places. We went through Taranto—Tarentum—to Brindisi; from Brindisi to Corfu, in the Ionian Islands, the earthly paradise of the fair Nausicaa, and the empresses of to-day; from Corfu to Patras and Corinth; from Corinth to Athens.

The moral effect began before ever we reached Athens; it was so vivifying to a student of the classics to pass Tarentum, and Cæsar’s Brundusium, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Ithaca of Ulysses, Corinth and the Piræus.

Lesbos! Corinth! Athens! Sappho! Ulysses! there was romance and undying poetry in the very names.

The Greece of those days really was something out of the beaten track. There were only two little railways of a few miles each, and there was not an hotel worthy of the name anywhere outside of Athens. Even in Athens, if you were not at a first-class hotel, kid’s flesh, and sheep’s-milk butter, black bread and honey of Hymettus, and wine which was full of resin, were the staples of diet. But what did it matter? We lived in a house and a street with beautiful classical names—we lived in the house of Hermes. And when we climbed up to the Acropolis at sunset, we were in an enchanted land midway between earth and heaven, for we were in the very heart of history surrounded by milk-white columns of the marble of Pentelicus, and facing a rich curtain of sunset, which hung over Ægina, and trailed into the waters of the Bay of Salamis. Athens is gloriously romantic and beautiful, and Time has laid its lightest fingers on her rocks and ruins, whose names are the commonplaces of Greek history.

We spent some glorious weeks at Athens, made interesting by the acquaintance of Tricoupis, the famous Prime Minister, and the presence of the President of my college at Oxford—now Bishop of Hereford, from whom I heard only the other day. From Athens Miss Lorimer’s unappeasable hunger to see the world swept us on, after several happy weeks, to Constantinople—the outpost of the East in Europe. Constantinople was one of the most delightful experiences of my life. There is no call which I hear like the call of the East, and in Constantinople you have the noblest mosques west of India, and bazaars almost as barbarous as the bazaars of North Africa, thronged, like the broad bridge of boats which crosses the Golden Horn, with the mixed races of the Levant, in their gay, uncouth costumes. The scene, too, is one of rare beauty, for the great mosques are rooted in dark cypress-groves, and rear their domes and minarets on the horizon, and the calm waters of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora are dotted with fantastic caïques.

We spent all too short a time there, dipping into the bowl of Oriental mystery, in perfect April weather, when we were called home to meet a sister-in-law coming from Australia.