From Derbénd to Smolénsk.
Your favourite Ammalát, my dearest Maria, will soon be quite Russianized. The Tartar Beks, in general, think the first step of civilization consists in the use of the unlawful wine and pork. I, on the contrary, have begun by re-educating the mind of Ammalát. I show him, I prove to him, what is bad in the customs of his nation, and what is good in those of ours; I explain to him universal and eternal truths. I read with him, I accustom him to write, and I remark with pleasure that he takes the deepest interest in composition. I may say, indeed, that he is passionately fond of it; for with him every wish, every desire, every caprice, is a passion—an ardent and impatient passion. It is difficult for a European to imagine, and still more difficult to understand, the inflammability of the unruly, or rather unbridled, passions of an Asiatic, with whom the will alone has been, since childhood, the only limit to his desires. Our passions are like domestic animals; or, if they are wild beasts, they are tamed, and taught to dance upon the rope of the "conveniences," with a ring through their nostrils and their claws cut: in the East they are free as the lion and the tiger.
It is curious to observe, on the countenance of Ammalát, the blush with which his features are covered at the least contradiction; the fire with which he is filled at any dispute; but as soon as he finds that he is in the wrong, he turns pale, and seems ready to weep. "I am in the wrong," says he; "pardon me: takhsirumdam ghitch, (blot out my fault;) forget that I am wrong, and that you have pardoned me." He has a good heart, but a heart always ready to be set on fire, either by a ray of the sun or by a spark of hell. Nature has gifted him with all that is necessary to render him a man, as well in his moral as physical constitution; but national prejudices, and the want of education, have done all that is possible to disfigure and to corrupt these natural qualities. His mind is a mixture of all sorts of inconsistencies, of the most absurd ideas, and of the soundest thoughts: sometimes he seizes instantly abstract propositions when they are presented to him in a simple form, and again he will obstinately oppose the plainest and most evident truths: because the former are quite new to him, and the latter are obscured by previous prejudices and impressions. I begin to fancy that it is easier to build a new edifice than to reconstruct an old one.
But how happens it that Ammalát is melancholy and absent? He makes great progress in every thing that does not require an attentive and continuous reflection, and a gradual development; but when the matter involves remote consequences, his mind resembles a short fire-arm, which sends its charge quickly, direct, and strongly, but not to any distance. Is this a defect of his mind? or is it that his attention is entirely occupied with something else? … For a man of twenty-three, however, it is easy to imagine the cause. Sometimes he appears to be listening attentively to what I am telling him; but when I ask for his answer, he seems all abroad. Sometimes I find the tears flowing from his eyes: I address him—he neither hears nor sees me. Last night he was restless in his sleep, and I heard the word "seltanét—seltanét," (power, power,) frequently escape him. Is it possible that the love of power can so torment a young heart? No, no! another passion agitates, troubles the soul of Ammalát. Is it for me to doubt of the symptoms of love's divine disease? He is in love—he is passionately in love; but with whom? Oh, I will know! Friendship is as curious as a woman.
OCCUPATION OF ADEN.
"It is only by a naval power," says Gibbon, "that the reduction of Yemen can be successfully attempted"—a remark, by the way, which more than one of the ancients had made before him. All the comparatively fertile districts in the south of Arabia, in fact, are even more completely insulated by the deserts and barren mountains of the interior on one side, than by the sea on the other—inasmuch as easier access would be gained by an invader, even by the dangerous and difficult navigation of the Red Sea, than by a march through a region where the means of subsistence do not exist, and where the Bedoweens, by choking or concealing the wells, might in a moment cut off even the scanty supply of water which the country affords. This mode of passive resistance was well understood and practised by them as early as the time of Ælius Gallus, the first Roman general who conceived the hope of rifling the virgin treasures popularly believed to be buried in the inaccessible hoards of the princes of Arabia, whose realms were long looked upon—perhaps on the principle of omne ignotum pro magnifico—as a sort of indefinite and mysterious El Dorado. [31]
[Footnote 31: "Intactis opulentior thesauris Arabum." —Horat. Od. iii. 24. Pliny (Hist. Nat. vi. 32) more soberly endeavours to prove the enormous accumulation of wealth which must have taken place in Arabia, from the constant influx of the precious metals for the purchase of their spices and other commodities, while they bought none of the productions of other countries in return.]
These golden dreams speedily vanished as the country became more extensively known: and though the Arab tribes of the desert between Syria and the Euphrates acknowledged a nominal subjection to Rome, the intercourse of the Imperial City with Yemen, or Arabia Felix, was confined to the trade which was carried on over the Red Sea from Egypt, and which became the channel through which not only the spices of Arabia, but the rich products of India, and even the slaves [32] and ivory of Eastern Africa, were supplied to the markets of Italy. At the present day, almost the whole of the south coast of Arabia fronting the Indian Ocean, nearly from the head of the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, as well as the eastern coast of Africa, from Cape Guardafui to the entrance of the Mozambique Channel a seaboard approaching 4000 miles in length—is more or less subject to the Sultan of Muscat, [33] a prince whose power is almost wholly maritime, and whose dominions nowhere extend more than thirty or forty miles inland: while our own recent acquisition of Aden, a detached point with which our communication can be maintained only by restraining the command of the sea, has for the first time given an European power (excepting the Turks, whose possessions in Arabia always depended on Egypt) a locus standi on the shores of Yemen.
[Footnote 32: This part of Africa is noticed by Arrian as famous for the excellent quality of the slaves brought from [Greek: ta doulicha chreissota],and it still retains its pre-eminence. The tribes in this quarter are far superior both in personal appearance and intellect to the negroes of Guinea.]
[Footnote 33: We have seen it somewhere stated that the Sultan has also attempted, by means of his navy, to exercise authority on the shores of Beloochistan; which would bring him into contact with our own outposts at Soumeeani, &c., near the mouth of the Indus.]