The Rulers of the Mediterranean

by Richard Harding Davis

On the morning of the fourth day, when the concert was over and the band had gone to thaw out, the young man suddenly sat upright and pointed his forefinger at the startled passengers. We had generally decided that he was dead. "The Lord knows I'm a sick man," he said, blinking his eyes feebly; "but if I live till midnight I'll find out where they hide those horns, and I'll drop 'em into the Gulf Stream, if it takes my dying breath." He then fell over backwards, and did not speak again until we reached Gibraltar.

There is something about the sight of land after one has been a week without it which supplies a want that nothing else can fill; and it is interesting to note how careless one is as to its name, or whether it is pink or pale blue on the maps, or whether it is ruled by a king or a colonial secretary. It is quite sufficient that it is land. This was impressed upon me once, on entering New York Harbor, by a young man who emerged from his deck cabin to discover, what all the other passengers already knew, that we were in the upper bay. He gave a shout of ecstatic relief and pleasure. "That," he cried, pointing to the west, "is Staten Island, but that," pointing to the right, "is Land."

The first land you see on going to Gibraltar is the Azores Islands. They are volcanic and mountainous, and accompany the boat for a day and a half; but they could be improved if they were moved farther south about two hundred miles, as one has to get up at dawn to see the best of them. It is quite warm by this time, and the clothes you wore in New York seem to belong to a barbarous period and past fashion, and have become heavy and cumbersome, and take up an unnecessary amount of room in your trunk.

THE MAN FROM DETROIT

And then people tell you that there is land in sight again, and you find how really far you are from home when you learn that it is Portugal, and so a part of Europe, and not an island thrown up by a volcano, or stolen or strayed from its moorings at the mainland. Portugal is apparently a high red hill, with a round white tower on the top of it flying signal flags. Its chief industry is the arranging of these flags by a man. It is, on the whole, a disappointing country. After this, everybody begins to pack and to exchange visiting-cards; and those who are to get off at Gibraltar are pursued by stewards and bandmasters and young men with testimonials that they want signed, and by the weak in spirit, who, at the eleventh hour, think they will not go on to Genoa, but will get off here and go on to Tangier, and who want you to decide for them. And which do you think would pay best, and what is there to see in Tangier, anyway? And as that is exactly what you are going to find out, you cannot tell.

When I left the deck the last night out the stars were all over the heavens; and the foremast, as it swept slowly from side to side, looked like a black pendulum upside down marking out the sky and portioning off the stars. And when I woke there was a great creaking of chains, and I could see out of my port-hole hundreds of fixed lights and rows and double rows of lamps, so that you might have thought the ship during the night had run aground in the heart of a city.

The first sight of Gibraltar is, I think, disappointing. It means so much, and so many lives have been given for it, and so many ships have been sunk by its batteries, and such great powers have warred for twelve hundred years for its few miles of stone, that its black outline against the sky, with nothing to measure it with but the fading stars, is dwarfed and spoiled. It is only after the sun begins to turn the lights out, and you are able to compare it with the great ships at its base, and you see the battlements and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds resting on its top, that you understand it; and then when the outline of the crouching lion, that faces all Europe, comes into relief, you remember it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, of which England holds the key. And even while you feel this, and are greedily following the course of each rampart and terrace with eyes that are tired of blank stretches of water, some one points to a low line of mountains lying like blue clouds before the red sky of the sunrise, dim, forbidding, and mysterious—and you know that it is Africa.

Spain, lying to the right, all green and amethyst, and flippant and gay with white houses and red roofs, and Gibraltar's grim show of battlements and war, become somehow of little moment. You feel that you have known them always, and that they are as you fancied they would be. But this other land across the water looks as inscrutable, as dark, and as silent as the Sphinx that typifies it, and you feel that its Pillar of Hercules still marks the entrance to the "unknown world."