“Do not notice that fine baby too much! If you were a native, you would say to the mother, ‘What a poor, miserable little girl you have there!’”
“But why, when it is a boy, and the best of the lot?” was asked. The Englishwoman smiled and shook her head.
“I can’t explain—you couldn’t understand—it is not well to praise a child to these people; it brings bad luck.”
I understood! This was “the evil thing come out of Africa”, magic and fear of magic. In Hayti they call it voodoo, in Italy, jettatura!
As we neared the Dardanelles the old captain gave us another sensation. Pointing a blunt forefinger towards the faint blue coast, he said, “Troy once stood there!”
“Then Helen passed this way with Paris, Agamemnon, Achilles, and all the rest of them?” The captain nodded.
“So they say. There’s a deal more important happened since, though. My father fought the bloody Algerine pirates in these waters before I was born.—The Mediterranean wa’n’t exactly a tourist resort in those days!”
We made quite a stay at Constantinople. Much of what we did and saw on this wonder journey is lost to me now, but I have never lost the sympathy for the poetry and art of the Orient. “I heard the East a callin’”—it calls me yet!
While in Syria we had some disagreeable encounters with Turkish officialdom and formed a poor opinion of it. At the Constantinople customhouse the officers were incredibly insolent. One snatched a bouquet from my hand and threw it into the sea; another took from my ulster pocket a photograph of a Greek officer. The photograph was handed from one to another amid jeers and laughter.
We spent a delightful week at Constantinople as the guests of Captain—now Admiral—and Mrs. Frank Higginson. Captain Higginson’s ship was in the port and we met many of his officers, among others, Lieutenant John Jacob Hunker. These good friends arranged endless frolics and sight-seeing expeditions for us. Aside from our pleasure of being with such hospitable compatriots, Constantinople did not please me. I did not like the Turks or their capital. After the beautiful bronze and ebony people of upper and lower Egypt, the Turks looked a pale, ugly, washed-out race. I sighed for Hassan, our Bisharin guide at Assuan, with a patina of richest chocolate; for Abbas, our Theban donkey boy, whose color was like new-cast golden bronze. Hassan, who was twelve years old, was offered to us by his father as a gift, it being forbidden for a man to sell his son!