she tried to persuade him that blackberries were good food for human beings to eat.
“This is such a poor country! What a pity they do not know the value of their own fruits!” she exclaimed.
After Brittany came Switzerland; of this there remains the awe of the Alps, the chill breath of the Jungfrau, the edelweiss at Chamonix, the bear-pit at Berne. These were surface things, easily recalled; when it comes to memory’s substratum, that’s a different story. My mind is like a vast rubbish heap that covers some buried city; if I dig hard enough I uncover priceless treasures, temples, statues, long colonnades leading to forgotten altars where once the sacred fire burned.
My friend Giacomo Boni, who found the tomb of Romulus in the Roman Forum, showed me his method of excavation. The dust of ages was carefully skimmed off in layers. As each stratum represented a different epoch, it was isolated and sifted, and every bit of marble, glass, metal, or brick sorted and fitted together. I have helped him sort his treasures in the little workroom over the Forum, watched his skillful, nervous fingers put together the fragments of an exquisite vase three thousand years old. By a like method I too can find bits of jeweled glass and earthenware: can piece them together; the trouble is in choosing where to dig!
Among the spoils of these months of wandering three objects survive, treasured by my mother through all the years; a tiny clay statuette of the goddess Pacht, ravished from an Egyptian tomb, a small Greek terra cotta cup, and some pressed flowers in an envelope marked “Gethsemane.” Out of that shining past that I alone remember, let me snatch something worth preserving of the three countries which these, her little keepsakes, recall,—Egypt, Greece, Palestine!
If you look at the map of Egypt you will see something like a lily with a long curving stem, lying at the edge of the Mediterranean. The graceful stem is the river Nile, the cup is the Nile Delta, the lotus of Isis and Osiris.
We landed at Alexandria, November 27, 1878, and left the next day for Cairo, where we stayed at Shepheard’s Hotel, then a primitive place, where the turbaned fellaheen servants were summoned by clapping the hands. As we sat on that famous terrace of Shepheard’s, looking out at the motley crowd surging by, two figures with flowing white sleeves, carrying light wands in their hands, ran side by side down the street, before a victoria drawn by a pair of Arab horses. The flying figures were the sais or running footmen, who go before the carriage of a notable to clear away the crowd. At their low cry, “O Wai Yer Geddeh! O Wai Yer Geddeh!” (“Out of the way, you clever fellow!”) the water carriers, snake charmers, donkey boys, and camel drivers made way for the carriage to draw up before the hotel.
“That,” said Sir George Elliott, a new acquaintance, “is Stone Pasha, Chief of Staff to the Khedive. He has come to call on some one.”
He had come to call on us. Our cousin, Julia McAllister, who was traveling with us, was an old friend; to her we owed the good offices of this powerful friend at court. Stone Pasha was a handsome man with white hair and mustache and strong regular features. In spite of his Egyptian uniform and fez, he bore the stamp of West Point, and looked the typical Civil War general he was. Our first meeting with Stone Pasha was full of interest. Though he was most solicitous that we should receive every attention, he was preoccupied and wore a harried look. How should he not?
The curtain had rung up on the last act in the drama of Ismaïl Pasha’s life as Khedive of Egypt. The four million pounds England had paid for his interest in the Suez Canal were already spent, and Mr. Rivers Wilson was in Cairo looking after British interests. Stone Pasha must have known that the final catastrophe was near at hand, but he played the game to the end.