Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

I took my courage à deux mains, and said, “If you give me any more trouble the English Consul shall hear of it, and you will get the stick.”

“We want Backsheesh!”

“I’ll have no more of this,” I cried in a very sharp voice, and, turning to the ringleader, who held a candle, I said, “Here, you fellow! Take that candle on in front and let me out. Go!” He went!—and I blessed my stars, and all the stars, when I emerged out of that endless passage at last, and stood safe under the bright Egyptian sun.

I am glad to remember Ghiza as it was in those days before hotels, or even tents, were visible near it; when the solemn Sphinx,—so strangely and affectingly human! stood gazing over the desert sands, and beside it were only the ancient temple, the rifled tombs, and the three great Pyramids. To me in those days it seemed the most impressive Field of Death in the world.

The old Arab Mosques in Cairo also delighted me greatly both for their beauty and as studies of the original early English architecture. Needless to say I was enchanted with the streets and bazaars, and all the dim, strange, lovely pictures they afforded, and the Eastern odours which pervaded them in that bright, light air, wherein my chest grew sound and strong after having been for years oppressed with bronchial troubles. One day in my plenitude of enjoyment of health and vigour, I walked alone a long way down the splendid Shoubra avenue of Acacia Lebbex trees with the moving crowd of Arab men and women in all their varied costumes, and trains of camels and asses laden with green trefoil, glittering in the alternate sun and shade with never a cart or carriage to disturb the even currents to and fro. At last I came in sight of the Nile, and in the extreme excitement of the view, hastily concluded that the yellow bank which sloped down beyond the grass must be sand, and that I could actually plunge my hands in the River of Egypt. I ran down the slope some little distance from the avenue, and took a few steps on the supposed yellow sand. It proved to be merely mud, like the banks of the Avon at low tide at Clifton, though of different colour, and in a moment I felt myself sinking indefinitely. Already it was nearly up to my knees, and in a few minutes I should have been (quietly and unperceived by anybody) entombed for the investigation of Egyptologers of future generations. It was a ludicrous position, and even in the peril of it I believe I laughed outright. Any way I happily remembered that I had read years before in a bad French novel, how people saved themselves in quicksands in the Landes by throwing themselves down and so dividing their weight over a much larger surface than the soles of the feet. Instantly I turned back towards the bank, and cast myself along forward, and then by dint of enormous efforts withdrew my feet and struggled back to terra firma, much, I should think, after the mode of locomotion of an Ichthyosaurus or other “dragon of the prime.” Arrived at a place of safety I had next to reflect how I was to walk home into the town in the pickle to which I had reduced myself! Luckily the hot sun of Egypt dried the mud on my homely clothes and enabled me to brush it off as dust in an incredibly quick time. Before it had done so, however, a frog of exceptional ugliness mistook me for part of the bank and jumped on my lap. He looked such an ill-made creature that I constructed at once the (non-scientific) hypothesis that he must have been descended from some of the frogs which Pharaoh’s magicians are said to have made in rivalry to Moses; forerunners of those modern pathologists who are just clever enough to give us all sorts of Plagues, but always stop short of curing them.

I was very anxious, of course, to ascend the Nile to Philæ, or at the very least to Thebes; but I was too poor by far to hire a dahabieh for myself alone, and, in those days, excursion steamers were non-existent, or very rare. I did hear of a gentleman who wanted to make up a party and take a boat, but he coolly proposed that I should pay half of the expenses of five people, and I did not view that arrangement in a favourable light. Eventually I turned sorrowfully and disappointed back to Alexandria with a pleasant party of English and American ladies and gentlemen; and after a short passage to Jaffa, we rode up all together in two days to Jerusalem. I had given up riding many years before and taken to driving instead, but there was infinite exhilaration on finding myself again on horseback, on one of the active little, half Arab, Syrian steeds. That wonderful ride through the Jaffa orange groves and the Plain of Sharon with all its flowers, to Lydda and Ramleh, and then, next day, to Jerusalem, was beyond all words interesting. I think no one who has been brought up as we English are, on the double literature of Palestine and England, can visit the Holy Land with other than almost breathless curiosity mingled with a thousand tender associations. What England is to a cultivated American traveller of Washington Irving’s or Lowell’s stamp, that is Palestine to us all. As for me, my religious views made it, I think, rather more than less congenial and interesting to me than to many others. I find I wrote of it to my friend from Jerusalem (March 6th, 1858):

“I feel very happy to be here. The land seems worthy to be that in which from earliest history the human soul has highest and oftenest soared up to God. One wants no miraculous story to make such a country a ‘Holy Land;’ nor can such story make it less holy to me, as it does, I think, to some who equally disbelieve it. It seems to me as if Christians must be, and in fact are, overwhelmed and confounded to find themselves in the scene of such events. To me it is all pleasure. I believe that if Christ can see us now like other departed spirits, it is those who revere him as I do, and not those who give to him his Father’s place, whom he can regard most complacently. If I did not feel this it would pain me to be here.”

When I went first into the church of the Holy Sepulchre it happened, on account of some function going on elsewhere, to be unusually free from the crowds of pilgrims. It seemed to me to be a real parable in stone. All the different churches, Greek, Latin, Armenian Maronite, opened into the central Temple; as if to show that every creed has a Door leading to the true Holy Place.

I loved also the little narrow marble shrine in the midst with its small, low door, and the mere plain altar-tomb, with room to kneel beside it and pray,—if we will,—to him who is believed to have rested there for the mystic three days after his crucifixion; or if we will (and as I did), to “his Father and our Father”; in a spot hallowed by the associations of a hundred worshipping generations, and the memory of the holiest of men.

Another day I was able to walk alone nearly all round outside the walls of Jerusalem, beginning at the Jaffa gate and passing round through what was then a desert, but is now, I am told, a populous suburb. I came successively to Siloam and to the Valley of Hinnom, and of Jehoshaphat; to the Tombs of the Prophets, and at last to Gethsemane. At the time of my visit, this sacred spot, containing the ruins of an “oil press” (whence its supposed identification), was a small walled garden kept by monks who did their best to spoil its associations. Above it I sat for a long time beside the path up to St. Stephen’s Gate, where tradition places the scene of the great first Christian Martyrdom. The ground is all strewed still, with large stones and boulders, making it easy to conjure up the terrific picture of the kneeling saint and savage crowd, and of Saul standing by watching the scene.