So with songs and pictures, with musings, and the dinner of a Mecca pilgrim, passed the first evening upon the Nile.
A CHARACTER.
Verde Giovane was joyous and gay. He had already been to the pyramids, and had slept in a tomb, and had his pockets picked as he wandered through their disagreeable darkness. He had come freshly and fast from England, to see the world, omitting Paris and Western Europe on his way, as he embarked at Southampton for Alexandria. Being in Cairo, he felt himself abroad. Sternhold and Hopkins were his Laureates, for perpetually on all kinds of wings of mighty winds he came flying all abroad. He lost a great deal of money at billiards to "jolly" fellows whom he afterward regaled with cold punch and choice cigars. He wrangled wildly with a dragoman of very imperfect English powers, and packed his tea for the voyage in brown paper parcels. He was perpetually on the point of leaving. At breakfast, he would take a loud leave of the "jolly" fellows, and if there were ladies in the room, he slung his gun in a very abandoned manner over his shoulder, and while he adjusted his shot-pouch with careless heroism, as if the enemy were in ambush on the stairs, as who should say, "I'll do their business easily enough," he would remark with a meaning smile, that he should stop a day or two at Esne, probably, and then go off humming a song from the Favorita—or an air whose words were well known to the jolly fellows, but would scarcely bear female criticism.
After this departure, he had a pleasant way of reappearing at the dinner-table, for the pale ale was not yet aboard, or the cook was ill, or there had been another explosion with the dragoman. Verde Giovane found the Cairene evenings "slow." It was astonishing how much execution he accomplished with those words of very moderate calibre, "slow," "jolly," and "stunning." The universe arraying itself in Verde Giovane's mind, under those three heads. Presently it was easy to predicate his criticisms in any department. He had lofty views of travel. Verde Giovane had come forth to see the world, and vainly might the world seek to be unseen. He wished to push on to Sennaar and Ethiopia. It was very slow to go only to the cataracts. Ordinary travel, and places already beheld of men, were not for Verde. But if there were any Chinese wall to be scaled, or the English standard were to be planted upon any vague and awful Himmalayan height, or a new oasis were to be revealed in the desert of Sahara, here was the heaven-appointed Verde Giovane, only awaiting his pale ale, and determined to dally a little at Esne. After subduing the East by travel, he proposed to enter the Caucasian Mountains, and serve as a Russian officer. These things were pleasant to hear, as to behold at Christmas those terrible beheadings of giants by Tom Thumb, for you enjoyed a sweet sense of security and a consciousness that no harm was done. They were wild Arabian romances, attributable to the inspiration of the climate, in the city he found so slow. The Cairenes were listening elsewhere to their poets, Verde Giovane was ours; and we knew very well that he would go quietly up to the first cataract, and then returning to Alexandria, would steam to Jaffa, and thence donkey placidly to Jerusalem, moaning in his sleep of Cheapside and St. Paul's.
PROSPECTS OF THE EAST.
That the East will never regenerate itself, contemporary history shows; nor has any nation of history culminated twice. The spent summer reblooms no more—the Indian summer is but a memory and a delusion. The sole hope of the East is Western inoculation. The child must suckle the age of the parent, and even "Medea's wondrous alchemy" will not restore its peculiar prime. If the East awakens, it will be no longer in the turban and red slippers, but in hat and boots. The West is the sea that advances forever upon the shore, the shore can not stay it, but becomes the bottom of the ocean. The Western, who lives in the Orient, does not assume the kaftan and the baggy breeches, and those of his Muslim neighbors shrink and disappear before his coat and pantaloons. The Turkish army is clothed, like the armies of Europe. The grand Turk himself, Mohammad's vicar, the Commander of the Faithful, has laid away the magnificence of Haroun Alrashid, and wears the simple red Tarboosh, and a stiff suit of military blue. Cairo is an English station to India, and the Howadji does not drink sherbert upon the pyramids, but champagne. The choice Cairo of our Eastern imagination is contaminated with carriages. They are showing the secrets of the streets to the sun. Their silence is no longer murmurous, but rattling. The "Uzbeekeeyah," public garden of Cairo, is a tea garden, of a Sunday afternoon crowded with ungainly Franks, listening to bad music. Ichabod, Ichabod! steam has towed the Mediterranean up the Nile to Boulak, and as you move on to Cairo, through the still surviving masquerade of the Orient, the cry of the melon-merchant seems the sadly significant cry of each sad-eyed Oriental, "Consoler of the embarrassed, O Pips!"
The century has seen the failure of the Eastern experiment, headed as it is not likely to be headed again, by an able and wise leader. Mohammad Alee had Egypt and Syria, and was mounting the steps of the sultan's throne. Then he would have marched to Bagdad, and sat down in Haroun Alrashid's seat, to draw again broader and more deeply the lines of the old Eastern empire. But the West would not suffer it. Even had it done so, the world of Mohammad Alee would have crumbled to chaos again when he died, for it existed only by his imperial will, and not by the perception of the people.
At this moment the East is the El Dorado of European political hope. No single power dares to grasp it, but at last England and Russia will meet there, face to face, and the lion and the polar bear will shiver the desert silence with the roar of their struggle. It will be the return of the children to claim the birth-place. They may quarrel among themselves, but whoever wins, will introduce the life of the children and not of the parent. A possession and a province it may be, but no more an independent empire. Father Ishmael shall be a sheikh of honor, but of dominion no longer, and sit turbaned in the chimney corner, while his hatted heirs rule the house. The children will cluster around him, fascinated with his beautiful traditions, and curiously compare their little black shoes with his red slippers.
THE DANCING WOMEN OF THE EAST.
The Howadji entered the bower of the Ghazeeyah. A damsel admitted us at the gate, closely vailed, as if women's faces were to be seen no more forever. Across a clean little court, up stone steps that once were steadier, and we emerged upon a small, inclosed stone terrace, the sky-vaulted ante-chamber of that bower. Through a little door that made us stoop to enter, we passed into the peculiar retreat of the Ghazeeyah. It was a small, white, oblong room, with but one window, opposite the door, and that closed. On three sides there were small holes to admit light, as in dungeons, but too lofty for the eye to look through, like the oriel windows of sacristies. Under these openings were small glass vases holding oil, on which floated wicks. These were the means of illumination.