During this last fortnight they have again proved that they are heart and hand with us in time of trouble. Let us, if they desire it, make their voices be heard in council. They have told us that their cannon shall speak for us in the field.—Nineteenth Century.
[ODD QUARTERS.]
BY FREDERICK BOYLE.
My record of campaigns and outlandish travel includes in its barest shape, Borneo, Upper Egypt, Central America, the Cape, the West Coast of Africa, the Danubian Principalities, Afghanistan, India, Turkey, Greece, Egypt a third time; were I to count the episodes, it would swell into a geographic catalogue. In such journeying I have found many odd billets, a few of which I purpose to sketch just as they occur to mind in writing, without story or connection. But, so far as may be, I shall avoid those scenes which have been made familiar to the public through historic events, and through the descriptions furnished by my own “Special” fraternity.
No eccentricity of fortune surprises me now, though it brings vastly more discomfort for the time than in earlier days; and my recollections grow weaker proportionately. However strange one’s quarters, however distressed or frightened one may be, an abiding consciousness dwells in the soul that one has seen and done and gone through the same experience already. The power of observation is not dulled, nor the sense of fun, still less that of alarm; but the circumstances do not seem worth remembering particularly. If one reflects more, one feels less. After his first visit to the Antipodes, so to speak, a boy has stories inexhaustible of anecdote, remark, and adventure; but from each succeeding journey he brings back shorter and drier reports, until a trip to the moon would seem hardly worth telling at length: after stating the facts, he has done. Last week I entertained a confrère just returned from El Teb and Tamasi; we have served together in divers parts, and the public, I understand, has been interested in our stories; but all through the evening not fifty words were exchanged touching on matters personal in his late vicissitudes. It seems less and less worth while to dwell upon impressions and to carry them away, the more impressions one gathers. This is not the common belief. We read of men in novels, who having been everywhere and done everything, are always ready with a tale of adventure that thrills the heroine. I will venture to say that such a personage has not been far into terra incognita, nor has served in many wars, unless, of course, he is a professional talker.
Thus it happens that a man’s earliest memories of travel are the strongest, though they be insignificant compared with others he might have collected on the same ground at a later date. I have a hundred cabinet pictures of Egypt as I knew it, an idle boy, but not one worth sketching from the late campaign. That was a very big business;—one recorded the facts, stored them for use, and forgot the incidents. It is only by an effort that I recall scenes therein quite otherwise impressive than that unforgotten experience of Esné by night, which struck me twenty-one years ago, and still remains fresh of color. At that time the banished sisterhood of Almeh, Ghawazee, dancing and singing women, still dwelt at the spot assigned them—or many did. We had seen a performance in going up, and had ordered something more special for our return. An old negress who kept what one may describe as the box office, in a vile mud hut, assured us with conviction that the best dancer and the loveliest woman in those parts would attend at nightfall. A respectable Arab addressed us returning to the dabeah, and asked permission to go with our party. In the evening he followed to a hut, somewhat larger but not less vile than the box office. The only lights were set on the mud floor, one by each of the musicians, who squatted there smoking hasheesh to nerve them for special exertions. In a line across the back, their faces hardly to be distinguished, sat the Ghawazee, arrayed in silks and muslins of the brightest hue, the coins that decked their heads twinkling and faintly jingling as they moved restlessly. The police-officer sat beside us, on one of our chairs, in snowy uniform and gold belt. Everybody smoked, including specially the candles, and the spiral cloud from every mouth had a curious effect so long as it was visible.
The band struck up, with voice and instrument—a metallic hum, a nasal scream, a twang of strings so loose that they seemed to take their note from the wood itself, a dull beat of tomtoms. Presently a Ghawazee arose. You have all read descriptions of the performance, but it must be seen in its natural habitat, as here, to keep any sort of interest. I have never beheld it, that I recollect, in the pitiless glow of gas, when, no doubt, it is grotesque. But in that dim and ruddy twilight, the long robes and full trousers of the Ghawazee, quivering to the tremulous movement of her limbs, have sudden strange effects of sheen and shadow. The arms out-curved, with small castanets betwixt the index and the thumb, the head thrown back, the closed eyelashes, the white teeth gleaming, have significance and charm also in that misty air, though they seem prurient affectation under strong light. But the entertainment is monotonous. Before our programme was half through, we called for the prima ballerina, and she came forward—a good-looking woman, helmeted with coins—put out her small bare foot, the toes turned up, rounded her arms, and tinkled her castanets with the air of a mistress. At the instant our guest sprang by and seized her, shouting—the musicians tumbled this way and that—the candles upset—a woman took fire—the police-officer bawled—and we were a struggling mass in the doorway! The dragoman afterwards explained that this man’s son had married the dancer, on an understanding, of course, that she dropped her profession. He heard that the box-keeper had tempted her, with her husband’s consent, to perform for our benefit, and hence the interruption.
A series of earthquakes alarmed Nicaragua in January, 1866, and the municipality of the capital asked us to explore Mombacho, an ancient crater from which the disturbance was supposed to come. My companion and I rode out, with guides, and at nightfall reached Dirioma, an Indian village. A superb avenue of organo cactus leads to that secluded settlement; the trunks, ten feet high, looked like fluted pillars of marble in the pale glow of starlight. Dirioma is much the same now, probably, as the Conquistadores found it, a marvel of color, softness, and grace of form. Each dwelling, framed of bamboos and sticks, like a bird-cage, stands in its own compound; the road runs straight and broad and smooth in front; palms droop over the cactus hedge, black against the night sky as ostrich plumes, and behind them lies a dusky mass of foliage, gleaming red in the glow of the hearth. All day and all night the place is still, for Indian children, if they play, are silent.
Our billet assigned was such a hut, hung round with hollow logs used as beehives; in dismounting we upset one, but the insects were familiar with disasters of the sort, and they took it kindly. We asked about “Carib Stones,” as usual—all antiquities are called Carib Stones in Nicaragua—and the guide led us into another compound, where a very old man crouched beside an enormous fire, with three or four Indians about him. When our inquiries were explained, with difficulty, the veteran brightened and began talking like a machine. Some feathers of the quetzal bird lay beside him; these he snatched up, waved, and shook to emphasise his statements. We could understand very little of the patois, more than half Indian; but the naked old man’s shadow played grotesquely on the lattice wall behind, the brandished plumes flashed emerald and sapphire, the elders sat round like wrinkled effigies in bronze, their small eyes fixed upon us with never a wink. The ancient hero did not tell much—he spoke of the golden temple which, as everybody knows, is hid somewhere in the neighboring woods; but gave no precise information. Afterwards we learned that this was a lineal descendant of the old caciques of Dirioma, who gave four thousand axes of gold—or whatever the number may have been—to Gil Gonzalez de Avila. Though he worked as a slave before the emancipation, the Indians revere and obey him to such degree that a Secretary of State thought worth while to ask of us what his remarks had been.
Many odd quarters we knew on the West Coast, where men and circumstances have a character all their own. Quisa recurs to my mind just now; I could not tell why, for we saw places as strange under more exciting conditions. This is the first town, or was, within the Ashanti realm proper. It looked almost civilized to us, marching from the coast—for refinement is comparative—and decidedly picturesque. Quisa might be called a town, its ways streets, its dwellings cottages of unusual form. A row of fine shade-trees in the middle of the chief thoroughfare had earthen benches at their feet, where the elders sat for council and gossip. The king’s house stood at the intersection of the main streets. It had not the alcove or box in the outer wall, so conspicuous in the architecture of Coomassie, but the façade, of polished stucco, was broken by niches, and moulded arabesques, two inches in relief, covered it all over. What they represented or signified we could not make out with confidence, so thoroughly had the style been “conventionalized” by generations of artists; but in the original idea they were human figures probably, engaged in war and ceremonies of state. The wall was colored in Venetian red, with a pleasing gloss upon it, and it stretched twenty yards or so on either side the doorway. This was a Moorish arch, of wood, the same in type as those we are familiar with at Sydenham, and gaily painted. Inside and out all was clean and perfect.