"The population of Jerusalem," she says, "I would divide into three classes: the smokers, the criers, and the mutes or phantoms. The first-named, forming in groups or bands, are seated outside the cafés smoking, while youths in the pretty Greek costume hasten from one to another with a wretched-looking coffee-pot and pour out the coffee—the blacker it is the more highly it is esteemed—into very small cups. With an air of keen satisfaction the smokers quaff it, drop by drop. Frequently one of them delivers himself of a recital with very animated gestures; the others listen attentively, but you seldom see them laugh. In the café may often be heard the sound of a guitar, accompanied by a dull monotonous strain, in celebration of warlike exploits or love adventures; the Arabs give to it their pleased attention. In the bazaars, in the shops, wherever a pacific life predominates, smokers are met with. Those wearing a green turban spring from the stock of Mohammed, or else have performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and learned the Koran by heart, which raises them to the rank of holy men.
"The criers' class of Jerusalem consists of all who sell in the streets, of the camel and donkey drivers, and of the country-women who daily bring fuel, herbs, vegetables, and eggs, into the city. They generally station themselves and their wares on the Place de Jaffa, and scream in a frightful manner; one would think they were quarrelling, when, in reality, they are only gossiping. These women allow their dirty mantles or veils to fall from the head down upon the back, and do not cover the face. They are always decked and sometimes plated with silver ornaments. Silver coins, strung together, are carried in bands across the forehead, and hang down the cheeks. Their fingers are covered with rings and their wrists with bracelets. Not unfrequently you will see very young girls with the face framed in silver money, to correspond with their head-gear—a small cap or hood embroidered with Turkish piastres, set as close together as the scales of a fish.
"I have heard it said that this cap is a maiden's dower. The country-women are often remarkable for a kind of savage beauty, but generally they are ugly, with an expression of rudeness and ill-nature. They are a collection of sorceresses, whom I feared more than the men of the same class, though the latter assuredly did not inspire me with much confidence.
"The Arab women of high rank, enveloped in long white mantles, and with their faces hidden by a close veil of black, yellow, or blue gauze, form my third division. They walk, or rather totter, through the streets in numerous groups or bands, shod with yellow slippers or bottines, to enjoy a promenade outside the Jaffa Gate. You never hear them utter a word in the streets, nor do they pause for a moment. If that black or yellow object approach you, covered with her white veil, and turn in your direction, it is with an expressive, a piercing, questioning glance; but you cannot discover nor even divine the face concealed by that coloured gauze. These poor dumb phantoms, who are all the more to be pitied because they have no idea that they need pity, generally betake themselves to the cemeteries, where, seated under the olive trees, they spend the day in doing nothing."
The ease, grace, and dramatic power of this description no reader will question.
After visiting most shrines of interest in the Holy Land, Miss Bremer extended her tour to the Turkish sea-coast, and investigated all that was worth seeing at Beyrout, Tripoli, Latakia, Rhodes, Smyrna, and Constantinople. In bidding farewell to the East, she expressed her joy and delight at having seen it, but added that not all its gold, nor all its treasure, would induce her to spend her days in its indolent and luxurious atmosphere. She loved the West, with its intellectual activity and deep moral life, its progress and its aspirations after the higher liberty. The inertia of the East irritates a strong brain almost to madness.
Her next pilgrimage was to classic Greece, the land of Solon and Lycurgus, Pericles and Pisistratus, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Demosthenes—the land of Byron and Shelley—the land of poetry and patriotism, of the myths of gods and the histories of heroes—the land which Art and Nature have fondly combined to enrich with their choicest treasures. The impression it made upon her was profound. Writing at Athens, she says:—
"I confess that the effect produced upon me here by life and the surrounding objects makes me almost dread to remain for any length of time; dread, lest beneath this clear Olympian heaven, and amid all the delightful entertainment offered to the senses, it might be possible, not, indeed, to forget, but to feel much less forcibly the great aim and purpose of that life for which the God-Man lived, died, and rose again from the dead. 'They who cannot bear strong wines should not make use of them.' For this reason, therefore, I shall soon leave Greece, and return to my Northern home, the cloudy skies and long winters of which will not delude me into finding an earthly existence too bewitchingly beautiful. Yet am I glad that I shall be able to say to the men and women in the far North, 'If there be any one among you who suffers both in body and soul from the bleak cold of the North, or from the heavy burden of its life, let him come hither. Not to Italy, where prevails too much sirocco, and the rain, when it once begins, rains as if it would never leave off; no, but hither, where the air is pure as the atmosphere of freedom, the heavens as free from cloud as the dwellings of the gods; where the temples on the heights lift the glance upwards, and the sea and the mountains expand vast horizons to the eye, rich in colour, in thought, and in feeling; where all things are full of hope-awakening life—antiquity, the present, and the future. Let him, beneath the sacred colonnades on the hills, or in the shade of the classic groves in the valleys, listen anew to the divine Plato, enjoy the grapes of the vales of Athéné, the figs from the native village of Socrates, honey from the thyme-scented hills of Hymettus and Cithæron, feed the glance and the mind, the soul and the body, daily with that old, ever-young beauty—that which was, and that which now springs up to new life, and he will be restored to his usual vigour of health; or, dying, will thank God that the earth can become a vestibule to the Father's home above.'"[15]
"I shall soon leave Greece," she writes; but the charm of Hellas proved too powerful for her, and she spent nearly a year in visiting its memorable places. It was in the early days of August, 1859, that she landed at Athens; in the early days of June, 1860, she arrived at Venice. In the interval she had visited Nauplia, Argos, and Corinth; had sailed amongst the beautiful islands of the blue Ægean; had wandered in the classic vale of Eurotas, and amongst the ruins of Sparta; had traversed Thessaly, and surveyed the famous Pass where Leonidas and his warriors stood at bay against the hosts of Persia; had mused in the oracular shades of Delphi and gazed at the haunted peak of Parnassus, and looked upon all that remains of hundred-gated Thebes. It is impossible for us to follow in all this extended circuit, and over ground so rich in tradition and association. Wherever she went she carried the great gift of a refined taste and a cultivated mind, so that she was always in full accord with the scene, could appreciate its character, and recall whatever was memorable about it. It is only thus that travel can be made profitable, or that a genuine enjoyment can be derived from it; just as it is only an harmonious nature that feels the full charm of music.
There are delightful pages in Miss Bremer's "Greece and the Greeks"; the keen pleasure she felt in the classic and lovely scenes around her she knows how to communicate to her readers; her literary skill puts them before us in all their freshness of colour and purity of atmosphere. Let us take a picture from Naxos, the island consecrated by the lovely legend of Ariadne; it shall be a landscape fit to inspire a poet's song:—