IV
Oh, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Benin
One comes out where three goes in.
—Old British Navy Song.
Green pleasant England again, the white cliffs of Dover, and the autumn fog drifting down on London and the ships. Belzoni’s fame had gone before him to the capital. His popular title of “Signor,” which both Italianised him and linked him with his mountebank past, now fell into disuse, and it was as “Mr.” Belzoni that he faced a new life of dignity and prestige. Winter found the traveller and his Sarah living happily in London lodgings, visited and consulted by the learned and the great. Belzoni kept his head. With his usual commonsense he was busily at work arranging an exhibition.
“Belzoni’s Exhibition,”—the words were magical a hundred years ago. All London came to the hall on Piccadilly when the doors opened in the spring of 1821. The old red-faced generals who had fought Napoleon came to stare at Pasht and Osiris, egad, the port-sipping gentlemen of substance, the fine ladies, and the sober citizens linking arms with their bonneted wives. To please them, Belzoni had reproduced two of the principal chambers in the tomb of Seti I, painting, sculptures and all, and displayed “idols, coins, mummies, scarabœi, articles of dress and adornment, lachrymatories, and a splendid mass of papyrus.” The tomb of Seti was “lit within by lamps,” and made a tremendous impression. And there was a poem by Horace Smith, “Address to a Mummy in Belzoni’s Exhibition” which all the world was reading. Now and then the giant moved towering through the throng, and mothers would bid their little flaxen-haired boys and girls to look at the man who had opened the pyramid.
A season in Paris followed the year in London, and then came the last great adventure.
The fever of exploring woke again within his veins, and he determined to cross the great African desert, and make his way to the almost fabulous city of Timbuctoo. He would land in Morocco, go south through the Moroccan possessions, and then join a caravan bound for the fateful city. The plan seemed practical enough, and on an autumn morning in 1822, the roving Titan bade farewell to his faithful amazon, and followed his boxes and baggages aboard a vessel for Gibraltar.
In Fez, the Moroccan capital, they seem to have played with him for a while, for the Emperor first gave him a permission to go through the country, and then withdrew consent. The failure may have been due to intrigue, as Belzoni imagined, or to the deep-rooted native distrust of Europeans; it was probably a combination of the two. Much chagrined, the explorer now returned to Gibraltar, and there determined on a course which did honor to his courage and perseverance. The way south to Timbuctoo being barred, he would make his way along the African coast to the city of Great Benin, and then struggle northward to his goal. It was a route to daunt any explorer, for it led into one of the darkest and most dangerous areas of unknown Africa.