Proceedings of the expedition to explore the northern coast of Africa, from Tripoly eastward

by Frederick William Beechey; H. W. Beechey

There are remains of apartments adjoining each other to the westward of the handsome colonnades which we have mentioned, the plans of which we would not hazard without excavation; nor could we without it complete that of the porticoes, the columns of which are nearly four feet in diameter. The whole building appears to have extended about three hundred feet in a southerly direction, and to have occupied more than four hundred in length from east to west. There are remains of much larger columns, near the road, at the southern extremity of this large mass of building; and we feel confident that matter of considerable interest is still to be found beneath the rich soil which covers it, in their immediate vicinity and neighbourhood. Corn is now growing over a great part of the ground in question; and an old Arab, who was employed in cutting it down, when we measured the remains of building just described, was greatly astonished at the trouble we gave ourselves in walking over and examining them in a very hot day; when he could scarcely himself make his mind up to cut down his wheat, which was certainly a matter (he said) of much more importance. He had his gun ready charged by his side, and moved it along with him as he changed his position in reaping; a ceremony at which we should have been a little surprised, if we had not before seen frequent instances of similar precaution in the Arabs of the Syrtis and Cyrenaica. In fact, the Bedouin, like the Albanian or the Corsican, never stirs out without his gun, if he has one; for it rarely happens that any individual has not some feud upon his hands, and it is necessary to be provided with the means of defence, in a country where every man is the legal avenger of his own or his family’s wrongs. We use the term Bedouin, because, although our swarthy friend was cutting wheat, he was at the same time a wandering Arab; and only visited the place periodically, chiefly during the summer season. For three parts of the year Cyrene is untenanted, except by jackalls and hyænas, and the Bedouins pitch their tents chiefly on the low ground to the southward of the range on which the city is built. Were it not for its elevated position, Cyrene would probably, on account of its luxuriant pasturage, and the abundant supply of fresh water which it possesses, be at all times a favourite haunt of the wandering tribes of the Cyrenaica: but the Arab, for an active man, is one of the most lazy of any race of people with which we are acquainted, and will rather forego a very decided advantage than give himself much trouble in acquiring or maintaining it; he would in consequence easily persuade himself that the advantages which Cyrene must be acknowledged to possess, would be more than counterbalanced by the trouble of ascending and descending its hills, and of driving his flocks and his camels to water in places which would be thought inconvenient.

We are not aware that it will be of any service to dwell further upon the nature and condition of the buildings of Cyrene; as much as we were able to collect (with the time and means which we had at our disposal) has already been given of the objects most worthy of notice; and to say more would only be to offer conjecture, on subjects which do not afford sufficient data to authorise particular description.

In fact, the whole of the existing remains of this ancient and once beautiful city are at present little more than a mass of ruin; and the tombs afford the most perfect examples of Grecian art now remaining in Cyrene. To give plans of half these would be impossible, unless whole years of labour were devoted to the task; but we really believe, that any zealous antiquary, any person with tolerable feeling for the arts, would with pleasure devote every day to such employment should he find himself stationed for years in their neighbourhood.

We never, ourselves, passed our time more agreeably, than in collecting the details which we have been able to procure of them; and shall never forget the sensations of delight—we will not use a less impressive term—which we experienced on our first introduction to these beautiful examples of Grecian art.

The position of the tombs, as well as that of the city, has been already described, and too much can scarcely be said in its praise; we wish that our limits would allow us to give more of the architectural details of the former than can be collected from the general view of them; but we shall probably avail ourselves of some other opportunity of submitting a few examples to public inspection, and can only at present refer for some idea of them to the view which we have just alluded to. To have lived in the flourishing times of Cyrene would indeed have been a source of no trivial enjoyment; and we are ashamed to say how often we have envied those who beheld its numerous buildings in a state of perfection, and occupied, in their former cultivated state, the beautiful spots on which they stand.

We must not, however, take our leave of the city, without adverting once more to the excavated channel that has been formed for the water of the principal fountain, to which we have formerly alluded. We had been so much occupied in walking over the ruins, and collecting the details of Cyrene and Apollonia, that it was only the day before we set out on our return to Bengazi, that we were able to explore this passage to the end. It is formed entirely in the rock from which the stream issues, and runs, in an irregular course, for nearly a quarter of a mile into the bowels of the mountain: the sides and roof of the passage are flat, where time and the action of the current (which is very strong) have not worn them away; but the bottom is encumbered with stones, bedded fast in a quantity of clay which has accumulated about it and against the sides. The general height of this subterranean channel is scarcely five feet, an elevation which we found rather inconvenient, for it obliged us to stoop a good deal in advancing; and as it would not have been possible to examine the place properly, or indeed to have preserved our light, without keeping the head and body in an upright position, we usually found the water making higher encroaches than its chilling cold rendered agreeable.

In some places, however, where there appear to have been originally flaws or fissures in the rock, the roof was irregular, and there was room enough to stand upright, an occurrence of which we very gladly availed ourselves, to the great relief of our knees. We found the average width from three to four feet, although in the places just mentioned it was occasionally as much as six feet; and were it not for the clay which has been collected against the sides, we should often have suffered from their roughness. From the irregularity of the course of the passage we were obliged to take bearings very often; and at each time we stopped for this purpose we took down the distance measured with our chain between the point we stopped at and the last; so that after much trouble we succeeded in obtaining a tolerably correct plan of the whole. The length and course of the channel will be seen in the plan of Cyrene, where it is marked with a dotted line beginning from the cliff, at the foot of which the fountain now discharges itself, and runs across the level ground on which the amphitheatre, and little temple (as we have named it) of Diana are situated. Within forty feet of the end of the channel (that is to say, about thirteen hundred feet from its beginning at the foot of the cliff), it becomes so low, that a man cannot advance farther without creeping upon his hands and knees, and then finishes in a small aperture scarcely a foot in diameter, beyond which of course it is impossible to penetrate. We were not a little surprised at the length of this singular excavation, which seemed, as we advanced, as if it never would finish; and as we could not accelerate our mode of operation without sacrificing the plan of the passage, we had to remain for several hours in the water before we had completed our task. We must say, however, that with all the inconvenience of the stooping position which we were obliged to assume, and the extreme cold of the water, we found the undertaking a very agreeable one, for the interest naturally increased with the length of the passage, and we were more than rewarded for our trouble and temporary annoyance before we reached the end of the passage. In fact we observed after continuing our route for some time, that the clay, which we have already mentioned had been washed down in considerable quantities by the current, was occasionally plastered against the sides of the passage, and smoothed very carefully with the palm of the hand: in this we thought we perceived that something like letters had been scratched, which we should scarcely have thought it worth while to examine, had we not been a little curious to know what Europeans had visited the place before us; we knew of none besides Signor Della Cella, who does not appear from his own account to have penetrated more than a few steps beyond the entrance[9]—probably to the first turning, as far as which the light from without would guide him. Our first conclusion was, that some of our own party had taken this method of writing their names on the wall,—a practice which John Bull seldom neglects in any part of the world which he visits; or that some intrepid Arab had allowed his curiosity to prevail over his fear of evil spirits, and penetrated thus far into the subterranean channel[10]: it never, in effect, for a moment occurred to us, that the characters (whatever they were,), which might be traced on so perishable a surface, were of more than very recent formation. Our surprise may in consequence be readily imagined when we found, on a closer examination, that the walls of the place were covered with Greek inscriptions; some of which, from their dates, must have remained on the wet clay for more than fifteen hundred years, whatever might have been the periods at which others had been written: the preservation of these may certainly be accounted for, by the dampness of the place, and its extreme seclusion, which would conspire to prevent the clay from cracking and dropping off, and from being rubbed off by intruders; but we were not prepared to meet with inscriptions engraved on so yielding a substance, and certainly not to find that, having once been written, they should have remained on it down to the present day, as perfect as when they were left there by those whose visit they were intended to commemorate. They consist, of course, chiefly in a collection of names; many of which are Roman, and the earliest of the most conspicuous dates which we remarked and copied, (for it would take whole days to read and copy them all) were those of the reign of Dioclesian. We could collect no other fact from those which we read, than that a priest appears to have officiated at the fountain, after Cyrene became a Roman colony, whose name and calling (in the form επι ιερεος, &c.) are usually written after the name of the visiter. They are in general very rudely scratched, with a point of any kind (a sword or knife, perhaps, or the stone of a ring,) and often with the point of the fingers. We observed a few Arabic inscriptions among the rest, but were so much occupied in reading over the Greek ones, in order to gain some intelligence respecting the fountain, which might serve to throw light upon the period at which the channel was excavated, or other questions of interest, that we neglected to copy them. There is an appearance in one of the Greek inscriptions of allusion to the name of Apollo, the deity to whom we suppose this fountain to have been sacred; but the letters are not sufficiently clear to establish the fact decidedly, although we do not see what other sense could be given to the words in question, with so much probability of being that which the writer intended; and it is plain, that as the sentence now stands it is incomplete[11]. We could not succeed in finding any Greek dates of antiquity, although the Greek names are very numerous; but a person accustomed to the many negligent modes of writing the character, with plenty of time and light at his disposal, might probably succeed in finding Greek inscriptions of more interest than we were able to discover in the mass of writing here alluded to; a great portion of which, as might naturally be expected, consists of rude scrawls and hasty scratches—mere apologies in fact for letters almost of any kind. That the fountain continued to be an object of curiosity, and probably of religious veneration, after the cession of the country to the Romans, may, however, be inferred from what we have stated; and a minimum may at least be established with respect to the date of the excavated channel, if we cannot ascertain the precise time of its formation, or whether it was cut at one or at several periods.

We have already mentioned that several hours had elapsed, from the time of our entering the channel to that of our re-appearance at its mouth; and we really believe that the Arabs of the place, who had collected themselves round the fountain to see us come out, were extremely disappointed to find that no accident had befallen any one of the party; in spite of the demons so confidently believed to haunt its dark and mysterious recesses. For our own parts, we could not help laughing very heartily at the ridiculous appearance which each of us exhibited on first coming into the light, covered as we were from head to foot with the brown clay accumulated in the channel of the fountain, which had adhered too closely to be washed away by the stream, although its current, as we have mentioned, was extremely rapid.

As the next day was that which had been fixed for our departure, we employed the remainder of the afternoon in making preparations for the journey, and set out early on the following morning for Bengazi. Captain Beechey and Lieutenant Coffin had already preceded us, with the intention of running over to Malta, in order to procure a small vessel for the embarkation of the statues, which we had decided upon removing to Apollonia, where the vessel would have taken them on board. On their arrival, however, at Bengazi, they found a packet of letters from England; and among them, was a despatch from the Foreign Office, which made it necessary that we should alter our plan, and give up any further operations. As the season was far advanced, during which any vessels are found in the harbour of Bengazi, a passage was secured in the last which remained, and camels were despatched to Cyrene to bring away our baggage and tents.

The interval was employed in completing the plans of the buildings and tombs at Cyrene; and that of the excavated channel of the fountain was the last upon which we employed ourselves. We had determined, on first discovering this passage, to explore it as far as it might be found practicable, and the first leisure moment was accordingly devoted to it on the day which preceded our departure.