At El Djem, the huge amphitheatre which is larger than the colosseum at Rome, had just had “two sections” blown to pieces to prevent its being used as a fortress by marauding tribes. A rumour stirred the camp, a rumour of a petrified Roman city with “petrified men and horses, women at the churn, the little children, the cats, the dogs, and the mice.” A romantic tale; indeed, it was all romance!
At Tunis the expedition gathered in one Osman, a “French renegade,” “very brave,” says Bruce, “but he needed a sharp lookout that he did not often embroil us where there was access to women or to wine.”
“I believe I may confidently say,” wrote Bruce, “that there is not either in the territories of Algiers or Tunis a fragment of good taste of which I have not brought a drawing to Britain.”
Adventure by sea now awaited this cultural cavalcade. Arriving at Ptolemais, a small port of Tripolitania, the whole muster of Moors, sailors, and attendants took passage on a small Greek junk bound for Crete. The African littoral being in the grip of a famine, the ship had arrived from Crete with a cargo of corn. Returning to Crete, a storm presently gathered up the vessel, and wrecked her on the Libyan shoals. Bruce swam ashore, and falling into the hands of Arabs who had come to plunder the wreck, was stripped naked, and beaten. Painfully hurt, and ignorant of the fate of his goods and his company, he took refuge from the continuing storm in the lee of bush. In the morning an old man and a number of young men came up to where he was sitting. Then Bruce:
“I gave them the salute Salam alicum! which was only returned by one young man in a tone as if he wondered at my impudence. The old man then asked me Whether I was a Turk, and what I had to do there? I replied I was no Turk, but a poor Christian physician, a dervish that went about the world seeking to do good for God’s sake, and was then flying from famine and going to Greece to get bread. He then asked me if I was a Cretan? I said I had never been in Crete, but came from Tunis, and was returning to that town, having lost everything I had in the shipwreck of that vessel. I said this in so despairing a tone that there was no doubt left with the Arabs that the fact was true. A ragged, dirty barracan was immediately thrown over me and I was ordered up to a tent in the end of which stood a long spear thrust through it, a mark of sovereignty.”
Little by little the company and even the baggage come to light. The wanderings begin again; they become confused and difficult to follow; the tall Scot is acquiring a touch of the true vagabond mind; one now finds him roaming everywhere, ruin or no ruin. The sailors are sent home; the company drops away; his young Italian architectural draughtsman, Luigi Balugani, is now with Bruce, now waiting in some end-of-the-world town for his return.
Somewhere in Northern Africa he encounters a tribe who eat lions, and shares their repast. “The first was a he-lion, smelling violently of musk.... I then had a lion’s whelp six or seven months old; it tasted on the whole the worst of the three.”
In Egypt he ascended the Nile, fought off bandits in the Valley of the Kings, made friends with Ali Bey, governor of Egypt, and his Vizir, a Copt given to astrology. His fame as wandering Christian physician had opened the door, for Moslem rulers in the eighteenth century were as eager to have Christian physicians as Christian rulers were to have Moslem physicians in the twelfth. A case of telescopes, to which he clung with a true Scot’s persistence, won for him the special standing of an astrologer. As a reward for treating Ali Bey, the governor obtained from Constantinople a kind of supreme laissez passer, “a firman of the Grand Signor wrapped up in green taffeta, magnificently written and titled and the inscription powdered with gold dust.” Ali Bey also gave him a letter to Ras Michael, lord of Abyssinia.
The western coast of the Red Sea is a thing of lifeless burning rock and glaring beaches of blazing white sand; in the eighteenth century the region was still nominally a part of the Turkish Empire, and Turkish officials dwelt in the coral houses, and waddled to the beach to plunder travellers standing bewildered in the apocalyptic sun. In 1769, a tall man arrived who looked his would-be plunderers in the face, and even managed to awe them with his letter from the “Grand Signor” with its powder of gold. This gentleman was the Laird of Kinnaird, for His Majesty’s late consul at Algiers had succeeded to the paternal estate. The Laird of Kinnaird seeing the world as a Frankish dervish! Balugani, the draughtsman, was still with him; the young artist must have beep something of a man.
“The noblest of all occupations,” wrote Bruce in later times, “is that of exploring the distant parts of the Globe.” The Laird of Kinnaird was on his way to perhaps the most inaccessible country of his world, a land forgotten for five hundred years in the forests of Africa. Mr. Bruce had determined to reach the Kingdom of Abyssinia.