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EOTHEN

By
A. W. KINGLAKE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
By ANON

WITH A FRONTISPIECE
FROM A PAINTING
By the AUTHOR

LONDON
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
MDCCCC

Πρὸς ᾒῶ τε καί ήλἱου ἀνατολὰς ὲποιέετο τὴν ὀδὁν.—Herod. vii. 58.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I

Eothen is the earliest work of Alexander William Kinglake, best known as the historian of the Crimean War. It is an account of a tour—or rather of selected adventures which occurred during a tour—undertaken in the Levant in 1834, but was not published until ten years later. The biographical notices of the Author are somewhat meagre, as by his dying directions all his papers were destroyed. He was born near Taunton in 1809, and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, at which latter he is said to have been the friend of Thackeray and Tennyson. On leaving college he started on his Oriental tour with Lord Pollington (the Methley of Eothen), and on returning to England was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, and obtained a lucrative practice. But the life was too tame to suit his taste. In 1845 he visited Algeria, and went through a campaign with the flying column of St. Arnaud; and in 1854 went to the Crimea with Lord Raglan, and was present at the battle of Alma. On returning to England he decided to go into politics, and was elected for Bridgewater in 1857 in the Liberal interest. He seems to have been a poor speaker, and to have exercised little parliamentary influence; but we are told that in 1859 he was strongly opposed to the Conspiracy Bill, which was introduced after Orsini’s attempt to murder Napoleon III., and that in 1860 he denounced the cession of Nice and Savoy to France. In both cases he was apparently actuated by his personal dislike of Napoleon, which is evident in his historical works. In 1868 he was again returned for Bridgewater, but unseated on petition, for bribery. One might have supposed that he had acquired this habit in the East, but his biographers assert that he knew nothing of the irregularities which were committed by his agents. But the chief business of his later life was the composition of the History of the War in the Crimea, of which the first two volumes appeared in 1863, and the seventh and eighth (completing the work) in 1887. He died in 1891.

II

His earlier and less ambitious, though perhaps more charming, book was rejected by several publishers, but proved an immense success. It caught the popular fancy at once, and after the lapse of more than fifty years still maintains an honourable position. In the year after its first appearance it passed through three editions, containing several variations from the editio princeps which have attracted the attention of those who are interested in bibliography. It is only fair to reprint the book with these corrections, which seem mostly due to the author’s laudable desire for greater accuracy. For instance, he was apparently seized with qualms as to his assertion (end of chap. xiii.) that when he emerged from the Dead Sea after bathing therein his “skin was thickly encrusted with sulphate of magnesia,” and cautiously substituted “salts” for the more chemical expression. Yet I observe that the most recent Encyclopædia states that “the water of the Dead Sea is characterised by the presence of a large quantity of magnesian salts,” so perhaps his first statement was not so wrong after all. He also found that he had talked of Jove when he should have said Neptune in his account of the Troad, and, conceiving a mistrust of the former deity, removed his name not only from this passage but also from chap. xviii., in which he altered “That touch was worthy of Jove” into “In that touch was true hospitality.” I confess that I think this regard for truth might have moved him to expunge his account of the advances made to him by the young ladies of Bethlehem (end of chap. xvi.); I cannot believe that narrative to be even probable, but anyone may retort that my scepticism is due to the absence of those attractive qualities which Kinglake possessed.

In chap. xvi. he says that shrouds are dipped in the holy water of the Jordan and “preserved as a burial dress which shall inure” (later editions “enure”) “for salvation in the realms of death.” Some critical scholar of eminence should be called upon to emend or explain this mysterious passage. At least, if people are allowed to print such things in the nineteenth century what right have we to emend the classical authors when they choose to be unintelligible?

The truth is that Eothen, despite its great literary merits, is often comfortably slipshod. And very properly so, for if there is to be any correspondence between subject and style, it must be inappropriate for a traveller recounting confidentially his diversions and mishaps to adopt the phraseology of Gibbon. Matthew Arnold, in his “Essay on the Literary Influence of Academies,” selected the History of the Crimean War as an example of what he called the Corinthian style. Eothen certainly presents specimens of this manner, but they are hardly characteristic; it is often “urbane,” and has “the warm glow, blithe movement, and pliancy of life,” which, according to the critic’s definition, Corinthians lack. It is not devoid of unity, but it is many sided and kaleidoscopic. The author varies from the trivial to the solemn, from boisterous exuberance to careful austerity, from flippancy to rhapsody, and is perhaps never quite serious. One wonders whether one is reading a clever but somewhat slangy letter, or a long-meditated essay polished and repolished by incessant labor limæ. Perhaps between 1834 and 1844 he worked up and rearranged old spontaneous effusions, as indeed his preface suggests. He often writes like a schoolboy, and sometimes like a philosopher; he is at his best when he records what he has seen in phrases not without rhetoric and not without humour, but distinct and clear as his own impressions. “The foot falls noiseless in the crumbling soil of an Eastern city, and silence follows you still. Again and again you meet turbans, and faces of men, but they have nothing for you—no welcome—no wonder—no wrath—no scorn—they look upon you as we do upon a December’s fall of snow—as a ‘seasonable,’ unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, that may have been sent for some good purpose to be revealed hereafter.” How vivid and how true!

But perhaps the reader may ask, as I ask myself, whether an introduction to Eothen is really necessary. The book is so simple and complete in itself that it seems to require no explanation or commentary. But for the benefit of those who are not acquainted with the Levant of to-day, it is well to explain that the sixty-four years which have elapsed since Kinglake made his Eastern tour have brought about important changes in the extent, and some few in the condition, of the Turkish Empire. The “unchanging East” is a popular phrase which is only true in a very limited sense. It has arisen chiefly from the habit of pious publishers of representing Abraham in the costume of a modern Bedouin Sheikh, and it is peculiarly audacious to apply it to regions like Constantinople and Egypt, which have witnessed exceptional vicissitudes and undergone remarkable changes,—political, religious, and linguistic. It is however just to say that the Turk is unchanging,—and it is to the presence of the Turk that are due the peculiar characteristics of the Levant, as the region visited by Kinglake may conveniently be termed; like the Bourbons, he forgets nothing and learns nothing; as he was on the day when he entered Europe, so he was in 1834 and so he is now. The boundaries of Turkey have changed; there are now no Pashas at Belgrade, or even at Sofia; and Ottoman territory is no longer plague-stricken. But whenever one crosses the Turkish frontier, one may find functionaries like the delightful potentate of Karagholookoldour, and be conscious of effecting within the space of a few hundred yards a change greater than can be experienced in any amount of travel in other European countries, including Russia. One passes from regions where people have roughly the same habits and ideas as ourselves—where they believe in political economy, get drunk in public, sit upon chairs, and do not feel there is anything indelicate in mentioning their wives—to a land where people do none of these things, where the naked desolation of the country at the side of the railway offers a startling contrast to the smug prosperity of the Balkan States, where people prefer to sit curled up on hard sofas, and where it is bad taste to condole with a man on his wife’s death.

In 1834, the year of Kinglake’s journey, Turkey in Europe was considerably more extensive than at the present day. Greece had already revolted and been recognised as an independent state. Wallachia and Moldavia were in process of securing their freedom. But the territories now known as Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Herzegovina were still integral portions of the Ottoman Empire; and though Servia (in which the scene of the opening chapters of Eothen is laid) had been constituted a principality under Milosh Obrenovich as prince, in 1830, several of the fortresses were still garrisoned by Ottoman troops, which accounts for the presence of the Pasha at Belgrade. It is interesting to observe that though our Author must have proceeded to Adrianople straight across Bulgaria, he never mentions the name of that country. This apparently strange omission is really quite natural. The Bulgarians, though in some ways the most vigorous element among the Balkan races, passed through greater trials than the Servians or Roumanians, and for a time lost their national consciousness more completely. They were nearer Constantinople, and therefore any political movement was more easily kept in check; while all the religious and educational establishments of the country were in the hands of Greek priests who practically proscribed the Bulgarian language. I have been informed by a gentleman who has resided forty years in Turkey, that when he first entered the Ottoman dominions every educated Bulgarian called himself a Greek, and would have been ashamed to employ his national designation, which was hardly in general use before the movement of 1860. Another striking omission of Eothen is that it contains hardly any allusion to the Sultan. At the present day the descendant of Osman, who claims to be also the successor of the Prophet, is a well-known figure to the British public. The Pall Mall Gazette familiarly calls him “The Shadow.” [xiv] The friends of the Armenians hold him personally responsible for the massacres; and a modern Kinglake, even if bent on avoiding “political disquisitions,” would certainly describe the Selamlik or weekly visit of the Sovereign to the mosque. You cannot travel in Turkey without hearing the name of “Our Master” (Effendimiz) or “the Imperial Person” (Zat-i-Shahane) daily mentioned, and feeling that his wishes (which usually do not coincide with those of European travellers, and affect the minutest details) are the only real power in the country. This state of things is due almost entirely to the personal energy of the present occupant of the Ottoman throne, who for good or evil has succeeded in concentrating all power into his hands, and in displaying the greatest example of practical autocracy ever seen. In 1834 Mahmoud was Sultan, one of the most vigorous of Ottoman princes, but then near his end, and doubtless wearied out by a reign of constant reverse and ineffectual efforts at reform.

The Armenian question, like the Bulgarian, is of recent date, and we consequently find that Kinglake says as little of the one as of the other; but he often speaks of the doings of Mehemet Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha, which at this period formed one of the chief preoccupations of the Porte. Mehemet Ali was a native of Cavalla who held a military command in Egypt. In the troubles which succeeded the French occupation of that country, at the beginning of the century, he succeeded in making himself head of the popular party in Cairo, ousted the Turkish Governor, and established himself in his place. He was recognised by the Porte in 1805, and the Khediviate was subsequently made hereditary in his family. At this time the Mamluks (or descendants of the Turkish Guard instituted by the Sultans of Egypt in the thirteenth century) occupied a position somewhat similar to that of the Janissaries at Constantinople. Mehemet Ali, like Sultan Mahmoud, felt that this military imperium in imperio rendered fixed Government impossible, and determined to consolidate his own rule by breaking the power of the Mamluks. He did so by inviting their leaders to a banquet, at which they were surprised and massacred. The Sultan, in return for his recognition of Mehemet Ali as ruler of Egypt, made use of him during some years to keep in order various rebellious provinces of the Empire. He was first ordered to quell the Wahabi insurrection in Arabia, and his campaign there is alluded to in chap. xviii. These people were a sort of Mohammedan Puritans [xvi] who had made themselves masters of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Mehemet Ali sent against them his son Tosun, who captured Mecca in 1813, but died, and was replaced by his younger brother Ibrahim Pasha, who is often mentioned in Eothen. He finally concluded the Wahabi war in 1818, and is next heard of fighting against Greece, which was beginning the struggle for independence. Mehemet Ali was again called upon to assist the Sultan in suppressing rebellion, and again sent his son to represent him. Ibrahim captured Missolonghi in 1825, but was defeated in 1827 by the united fleets at Navarino, under Sir Edward Codrington, and retired from Greece. In return for these services Mehemet Ali claimed that the Pashalik of Syria should be added to his dominions. The Sultan refused the request of his powerful vassal; but the latter picked a quarrel with the Turkish governor of Syria, and sent Ibrahim to invade the province. Ibrahim not only made a triumphal entry into Damascus, but defeated the Turkish Army at Beilan and advanced into Asia Minor, where he routed a second force, sent against him by the Sultan, near Konia, in December 1832. The defeated Turkish troops joined the Egyptians, Ibrahim advanced victoriously to Broussa, and had Constantinople at his mercy. The Sultan in his extremity called the Russians to his assistance. The Treaty of Unkiar Iskelesi was concluded in 1833; Ibrahim was obliged to retire, but the Pashaliks of Syria and Adana were given to Mehemet Ali, and treated with great rigour, as mentioned in chap. xv. At the time of Kinglake’s visit to Egypt the plague seems to have been the one absorbing preoccupation of everyone in Cairo, and we learn little from him of the normal state of the country at this period. The most remarkable of his Egyptian sayings is the prophecy at the end of the chapter called “The Sphinx.” “The Englishman leaning far over to hold his loved India will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile and sit in the seats of the faithful.” To have made this prediction at a time when India was still under the Company, when we had no interests in North-East Africa or the Red Sea, before the Suez Canal was a serious project, perhaps before we had occupied Aden, [xvii] is indeed an example of no ordinary political foresight.

Such was the political condition of the lands which Kinglake visited, and of many aspects of which he gives a most living picture. In his diverting preface he disclaims all intention of being instructive, of describing manners and customs, still less of discussing political and social questions. Perhaps his narrative sometimes reminds the reader of his statement (chap. viii.) that a story may be false as a mere fact but perfectly true as an illustration. Some great writers impart durability to their work by selecting from a mass of details such traits as are important and characteristic, and passing lightly over what is transitory. For instance, the main impression left by Thackeray’s novels is not that the life there described is old-fashioned, but that it is in essentials the life of to-day. So, too, in Eothen a reader acquainted with the East hardly notices anachronisms. Judged as a description of the Levant of 1898, it is inaccurate, or rather inadequate, almost exclusively on account of its omissions. But the principal descriptions, incidents, and portraits—the Mohammedan quarter at Belgrade, the conversation between the Pasha and the Dragoman, the meeting of the two Englishmen in the desert, Dimitri and Mysseri—are, if considered as types, as true to nature to-day as they were sixty years ago, and doubtless will be sixty years hence.

Kinglake treats the Levant in the only way it ought to be treated if it is to be enjoyed—half-seriously. Those whom business or philanthropy oblige to devote to it any real exertion, sentiment, or interest, lay up for themselves nothing but disillusion and disappointment, for, whether they are fascinated by the picturesque and manly virtues of the Moslems, or roused to honourable indignation by the slaughter and oppression of their fellow-Christians, they will find in the end that, as Lord Salisbury once said, they have put their money on the wrong horse. In the Eastern Derby there are no winning horses. One after another they have all disappointed their backers; the faults of Eastern Christendom brought about and still keep up the rule of the Turk, and few who have an adequate knowledge of the facts of the case believe either that the Christians are happy under that rule or that they furnish in themselves the elements of anything much better.

Yet this dreary tragedy—this daily round of oppression and misgovernment, varied by outbursts of interracial fury—has a brighter side. To the mere spectator, to the intelligent traveller with literary taste and a sense of humour, the surface of Levantine life is a stream of perpetual amusement, often broadening into comedy, and sometimes bursting all bounds and breaking into a screaming farce. The number and variety of races and languages afford infinite possibilities of misunderstanding and mistranslation (which it must be admitted are the basis of many good stories); the Orientalised European and the Europeanised Oriental are alike inexpressibly droll. Their very crimes have an element of the burlesque, which seems to disarm censure and remove the whole transaction to a non-moral sphere where ordinary rules of right and wrong do not apply. The Turk, if not precisely witty himself, is at least the cause of wit in others. Extreme Asiatic dignity amidst ludicrously undignified European surroundings, a mixture of pomp and homeliness, power and childishness, give rise to humorous anecdotes of a peculiar and very characteristic flavour, examples of which may be found in several works besides Eothen, notably Robert Curzon’s Monasteries of the Levant. Another excellent illustration is supplied by Vazoff’s Under the Yoke, a translation of which has been published in English. It is an historical novel, written by a Bulgarian burning with indignation against the Ottoman rule. Yet the Turkish Caimmakam, as drawn by a bitter enemy, is no bloody tyrant, but an exquisitely diverting old gentleman whose every appearance is hailed by the reader with impatient delight. As the violence of the Turk, so also the dishonesty and corruption of the Rayah seem to lose their enormity when viewed in this gentle, humorous light. The swindling is so palpable, and yet so gravely decorous in its external forms, that it ceases to shock; it is so universal that in the end no one seems to have suffered much wrong. To vary the celebrated remark about the Scilly Islanders, one may say that these people gain a precarious livelihood by taking bribes from one another. Again the elaborate and ceremonious phraseology essential to all literary composition in the East enables a writer to make intrinsically preposterous assertions with a gravity which renders criticism impossible. What reply can be given to the officials who assert that Armenians commit suicide in order to throw suspicion on certain excellent Kurds residing in their neighbourhood? or who when called upon to explain why they have incarcerated a foreign traveller under circumstances of extreme indignity, blandly reply that “the said gentleman was indeed hospitably entertained in the Government buildings”?

This last instance shows that Oriental travelling must not be undertaken without due precautions. A certain retinue, and sufficient influence to secure the courtesy of the authorities (which Kinglake evidently had), are essential. With them the traveller acquires a feeling, often manifest in Eothen, that he is a sultan possessed of absolute authority over his surroundings. There is just enough hardship to make comparative comfort seem luxury, just enough danger to make it pleasant, when all is over, to hear from what perils one has escaped. Should, however, any reader be inclined to use Eothen as a practical manual, he must be cautious in following some of its precepts. Kinglake constantly insists that intimidation, haughtiness, and defiance of all regulations are the only means of impressing Orientals; and chronicles with great satisfaction his own exploits in this line, concluding with “the Surprise of Satalieh.” What he says is true enough as long as the Oriental believes that the traveller is a prince in his own country, and that any interference with his mad whims will bring severe punishment. But unfortunately the secret is out. Enlightened officials are well aware that many Englishmen are not cousins of the Queen, and have a shrewd suspicion that hindrances placed in the way of the prying European are not displeasing to the Imperial Government. The “Lord of London,” who fifty years ago obtained a firman which made every provincial official bow before him, may now be kept waiting days or weeks for a travelling passport; and, unless he uses tact as well as bumptiousness, may find himself in a position to write to the Times about the interior of Turkish provincial prisons, and become the subject of a Blue Book. Still even now, if travellers will be cautious and polite in dealing with people of whose language and customs they are profoundly ignorant, and not bluster unless they know very well what they are about (for I admit that bluster has its uses), they will find travelling more interesting, diverting, and enjoyable in the Levant than in any other part of the world.

I write these lines as I sit in the hall of the largest hotel in New York, a newly arrived stranger, somewhat dazed by the bustle and the glare. The whole establishment is on a greater scale than anything else in the world—except its own bills. Everything is made of gold and marble, including, I fancy, the food—at least this hypothesis plausibly reconciles the quality and texture of the viands with the value the vendors seem to attach to them. Enormous lifts shoot their living freights up into spheres unseen, or engulf them in abysmal chasms. All round people are ringing electric bells, telephoning, telegraphing, stenographing, polygraphing, and generally communicating their ideas about money to their fellow-creatures by any means rather than the voice which God put in the larynx for the purpose of quiet conversation. On one side an operatic concert is being performed, on the other porters and luggage jostle a brilliant throng of fashionably dressed people. It is as if someone had given an evening party at a railway station. “Whirr! whirr! all by wheels! whizz! whizz! all by steam!” and electricity, as the immortal Pasha of Karagholookoldour would have said. Now my mind (like the Pasha’s) comprehends locomotives, and I am an enthusiast for progress, but amidst all the whizz and whirr and ringing of electric bells, my memory turns somewhat regretfully to a hotel where I resided not long ago in the “Exalted Country”—that fine old Stamboul’s jargon is so much more soothing to the tongue than the strange abbreviations and initials they use over here—which was certainly more interesting, and not, I think, more uncomfortable than this Transatlantic Caravanserai. Perhaps I shall write an introduction congenial to the Shade of Kinglake (if indeed the Shades are interested in new editions of their works) if instead of instituting a comparison between the Levant of to-day and of 1834, I recount a journey to the town of Karakeui in the year of grace 1898, and describe the local hotel. Let not the reader in pursuit of that “sound learning” which Kinglake kept at arm’s length rashly identify Karakeui with the first town he finds on the map bearing that name. The Turk has not a great variety of local designations. When possible he adopts one from some other language, treating it with the scant courtesy which long-winded, infidel polysyllables deserve (e.g. Edirné, Fílibé, for Adrianople and Phílippopoli); but when forced to have recourse to his own invention he calls most places Karakeui (or Blacktown), except those which are dubbed Oldtown, Newtown, or Whitetown.

It has been justly said that the East begins on the other side of Vienna, but, out of deference to the susceptibilities of the Magyars, who consider themselves in the van of civilisation, the Orient Express affects to be extremely European during its transit through Hungary. It bustles and shakes, and is very uncomfortable. In Servia it is more at its ease, though it still makes a pretence of thinking that time is money by only stopping ten minutes at every station. In Bulgaria it ceases to imitate Western ways, and becomes frankly Oriental, reposing for half an hour at spots where there are no passengers and no traffic. The part of the journey which lies on Turkish territory follows a singularly tortuous and corkscrew course, across a perfectly level plain which presents no obvious engineering difficulties. The Porte confided the construction of this line to an eminent Israelite at a remuneration of so much for every kilometre built. The eminent Israelite was straightway possessed by the spirit of his ancestors, and made a large fortune by laying the rails along a road as lengthy and complicated as that selected by Moses when he spent forty years in traversing a distance which anyone else can accomplish in a few days.

On arriving in Turkey we are at once seized by the representatives of the Board of Health. After all, times have indeed changed since Eothen was written. Instead of being put in quarantine by Europe, Turkey now puts Europe in quarantine. It is true that good Moslems still hold that men’s souls leave their bodies when God calls them, and count it impious to suppose that neglect or precaution can hasten or delay the Divine summons. But though the Porte are not disposed to amend the sanitary condition of Mecca, they enforce quarantine regulations all round Constantinople with fanatical rigour. This is due partly to the fears of the Palace, and partly, I think, to a sense of humour. It is an excellent joke to apply a parody of European rules to Europeans in the name of sanitary science: to keep a set of fussy business people waiting a few days because they have come from a country which has not imposed quarantine on another country where there has been a doubtful case of cholera, or to detain a ship with a valuable cargo while embassies and merchants scream that thousands of pounds are being lost daily. On the present occasion we are told we must wait a day under inspection, to see if we develop the symptoms of any terrible malady, and are accordingly lodged in damp little wooden huts on a muddy plain, where we are certainly likely to fall ill even if hale and hearty on arriving. Turkish soldiers prevent us from crossing an imaginary line and contaminating the surrounding desert. The quarantine doctor, however, explains to me that he has a peculiar respect for my character, sanitary and general, and would like to take a walk with me outside the limits of the establishment. He has a remarkable pedigree. His father was a Bohemian monk who found convent life too narrow for his taste, and accordingly embraced Islam. Once within the true fold he made up for lost time by marrying as many wives as his new liberty allowed, and this is one of the results. He confides to me that his one ambition is to wear decorations, and that in return for his civilities strangers of distinction have procured for him the orders of their respective countries. The Siamese Minister, who recently passed through, made him a Commander of the Order of the White Elephant. Could I not obtain for him the Order of the Garter? Doubtless I possess it myself. With blushing mendacity I lead him to believe that I do, but explain that the distinction is only given to Englishmen and not to foreigners. I see that he does not believe me, and meditates revenge. Before we leave the quarantine station we have to be disinfected. The doctor attaches a garden hose to a reservoir filled with a fetid and corrosive fluid. The victims are led up one by one by the military authorities as if to execution, and the jet is turned upon them, causing their garments to burst out into leprous spots. I see by the doctor’s eye that he means to make me pay for my unfriendliness in the matter of the decoration, and therefore, casting scruple to the winds, I assure him that if he will only treat me gently he shall have the Fourth Class of the Garter. He is at once all civility and consideration, and when I am led up in front of his infernal machine, directs an odoriferous douche to the right and left, leaving me unwetted in the middle.

Truly the way into Turkey is beset with as many difficulties as the road to paradise. After the quarantine comes the Custom House. The entry of most things is absolutely prohibited, and those which do enter pay a high duty. Books are treated with incredible severity. No work is allowed to pass the frontier which hints that the Turks were ever defeated, or that the Ottoman Government or the Mohammedan religion have any imperfections. Turkish officials having found by experience that very little European literature comes up to their high standard, simply confiscate as “seditious” every publication which mentions Turkey or the Mohammedan East. Eothen, even without the present highly seditious preface, is placed on the index, as are also Shakespeare, Byron, Dante, the Encyclopædia Britannica, Baedeker, and Murray. In practice, of course, certain familiar argumenta ad hominem modify this Draconian system, but even the golden key sometimes fails to open the door. The officials watch one another, and know that they are much more likely to obtain a Turkish decoration by confiscating some infamous historian who is not ashamed to say that the Turks were once driven out of Hungary than they are to receive the Garter for letting his calumnies in. But there is an end to all troubles, even on the Turkish frontier, and at last we are allowed to proceed to Karakeui, where I ultimately alight at the hotel.

Karakeui lies on a plateau, under a range of snowy mountains which glitter with strange distinctness in the pure translucent air. A forest of minarets bears testimony to the piety of the place. It is the sacred month of Ramazan, and at sunset they will be festooned with lights and blaze like columns of fire, while in the mosque below myriads of little oil lamps will shed their soft glow on the bowing crowds, the plashing fountains, and the names of saints and prophets blazoned on the walls in green and red. In the streets is a motley throng of men and animals. Strings of camels and pack-horses, dogs, sheep, and turkeys are mixed up with the human crowd. Bulgarians and Servians quarrel in the bazaar, and denounce one another to the Turks. They each claim exclusive rights over the only Christian Church, and the Governor, to end the dispute, has shut it up altogether. A few Greeks are occupied in making large fortunes, and are ready to expatiate on the Hellenic Idea, and to explain how, from a certain peculiar point of view, the late war may be regarded as a victory for Greece. Albanians, armed with many weapons, and with moustaches as long as their own rifles, swagger through the crowd which respectfully makes way for them.

The hotel is kept by an Armenian, who left his native village on account of what are beautifully termed the “events” which occurred there. Having been inspired by these occurrences with a wholesome respect for the followers of the Prophet, he is a little apt to recoup himself at the expense of his co-religionists; but the local Ottoman authorities, to whose care I am duly recommended as being “one of those who wish well to the Sublime Government,” have sternly informed him that I am not to be fleeced. (I wonder if the Governor of New York would address a similar warning to the proprietor of this hotel.) The establishment is constructed in the form of a quadrangle. The central space is a quagmire, wherein are embedded, and, so to speak, held as hostages for payment, the vehicles in which the travellers have arrived. The ground floor of the surrounding buildings is devoted to stabling. Outside the first floor, and above the aforesaid quagmire, runs a gallery, from which open a number of cells, bare and whitewashed, devoid of all furniture, but, contrary to what might be expected, scrupulously clean. A marble bath is not, as in New York, attached to each apartment, but in response to a suitable shout a boy brings a brass jug and basin, pours water over your hands and wipes them on an embroidered towel. There is no table and no bed. When you are disposed to sleep, a pile of rugs is spread on the floor. If you want to write, you naturally sit on your heels and hold your paper in your hand—an attitude which, at least in the case of Europeans, tends to restrain exuberance and keep literary composition within due limits. At meal times a little table like a high stool is brought in. The guests squat round it on their heels, and eat with their fingers out of a large saucer set on a broad tin tray. Turkish dinners consist of a quantity of dishes, generally at least seven or eight, and sometimes as many as twenty; but each is only tasted and rapidly removed. At first it looks somewhat mysterious when people apparently wrap up some pieces of string in brown paper and eat the parcel with avidity. But the string is cheese drawn out like very attenuated vermicelli, and the brown paper sheets of very thin bread which serve as a tablecloth and napkin as well as for food. During Ramazan no Moslem may eat, drink, or smoke between sunrise and sunset. The latter phenomenon is announced by a cannon, and some minutes before the gun fires a hungry crowd is gathered round the table waiting for the blessed sound. Then follows half an hour of rapid, silent nutrition, for Turks do not talk at table. Afterwards, an hour or more of prayer; and then the earlier part of the night, until at least twelve or one, is devoted to visiting or attending the puppet show called Karagyöz. [xxxi] Half an hour before dawn people go round the town beating drums, and the faithful hurriedly take a last meal before the morning cannon announces the dawn.

My neighbour in the room on the right is a spy appointed by the Imperial Government to watch over my doings. He is a charming companion, and I fancy has a very pretty talent for the composition of imaginative literature. My only regret is that I have never seen the daily reports which he draws up on my conduct. They are, I believe, replete with incident, and are excellent specimens of a new and interesting variety of fiction. The room on my left is occupied by the Christian Vice-Governor of the Province, who was appointed some months ago under immense pressure from the Powers, met by such resistance on the part of the Porte that one might have supposed his nomination was a deadly blow to the Turkish Empire. It is a wise plan of the Porte’s never to make the most trivial concession without opposing a resistance, which is often successful, and always seems to enhance the importance of the point in dispute. But the concession once made, means are soon discovered to deprive it of all its value, and the positions of victors and vanquished in the game prove to be reversed. In the present case the Christian Vice-Governor found that none of his co-religionists were disposed to let him lodgings; and the local authorities, with a tender solicitude for his welfare, represented to him that there was a strong feeling against him in the town, and that he would be much more comfortable in the hotel; predicting (like Kinglake’s prophet, Damoor) that if he went out into the streets, or meddled in the administration, he would arouse that excitable sentiment known as Mussulman religious feeling. Like the Jews of Safet, the Christian Vice-Governor thought that the predictions of such practical men were not to be disregarded, and takes his ease in his inn with as good a grace as he can muster. Another interesting occupant of the hotel is the Turkish inspector of Reforms. To rightly understand the duties of this functionary it must be remembered that the Turkish Government is divided into two parts, which have no connection with one another: firstly, the real Government, which is hard to comprehend, but of which one gets a dim idea by observation on the spot; and secondly, the show Government, intended to impress Europe, and having as chief practical result the enrichment of telegraphic agencies. Two common manifestations of the show Government are circulars to the Powers, and commissions despatched to the Provinces to rectify abuses. The present Commissioner has come to inspect reforms, and from the official language used respecting him it may be supposed that his mission is to tend and water the new institutions which are springing up like a luxuriant vegetation in a favourable climate, but at the same time to exercise a fatherly control, prevent the country from rushing into downright republicanism, and not permit the Christians to positively oppress their weaker Mohammedan brethren. He is a very affable man, with a broad, smiling face, and an amiable rotundity of person which causes his gorgeous uniform to burst its buttons and gape at critical points. He pays me long visits for the purpose of political discussion, being, as he calls it, tout à fait dans les idées libérales, and in order that this outpouring of radical views may not be interrupted, he brings a soldier to mount guard over the door. No tortures could make me disclose the Commissioner’s confidences. I will merely observe that the long fasts of Ramazan are irksome to an enlightened mind, and that liberal theologians hold that a mixture of brandy and champagne does not fall under the Prophet’s ban, inasmuch as it cannot accurately be described as either wine or spirits.

Very different is the room at the end of the passage. No guard is needed here. The door stands proudly open, and all the world may see that no crumb of bread or drop of water enters from sunrise to sunset. In the middle of a low sofa sits, cross-legged, a Hodja, clad in striped silk. He is no ordinary country parson, but a noted preacher invited to tour in the provinces during Ramazan, and hold what in other countries would be called revival meetings. His thin nervous face shows that he is not a real Turk. Probably he is of Arab extraction, and in any case he burns with a Semitic indignation against those who “ascribe companions to God.” Round him sit in a solemn circle the notables of the town,—stout, devout men of the churchwarden order, who, to judge from the heavy sighs and puffs which they occasionally emit, do not share the Hodja’s fierce joy in trampling on the desires of the flesh. To-morrow he will preach in the Great Mosque with a sword in his hand, in token that the building was once a Christian Church and has been won from the infidel. I tell the Commissioner for Reforms that I think this dangerous and injudicious. He explains that the whole point of the ceremony lies in the fact that the sword is sheathed, as a token that religious discord is at an end, and that an era of mutual love and toleration has commenced. But when I think of that nervous, fanatical face, the green garments, the ample turban, the amulets and the sword, I cannot help suspecting that it is better to be a Christian traveller than a Christian resident at Karakeui.

Preface to the First Edition

Addressed by the
Author to One of His Friends

When you first entertained the idea of travelling in the East you asked me to send you an outline of the tour which I had made, in order that you might the better be able to choose a route for yourself. In answer to this request I gave you a large French map, on which the course of my journeys had been carefully marked; but I did not conceal from myself that this was rather a dry mode for a man to adopt when he wished to impart the results of his experience to a dear and intimate friend. Now, long before the period of your planning an Oriental tour I had intended to write some account of my Eastern travels. I had, indeed, begun the task, and had failed; I had begun it a second time, and failing again, had abandoned my attempt with a sensation of utter distaste. I was unable to speak out, and chiefly, I think, for this reason, that I knew not to whom I was speaking. It might be you, or perhaps our Lady of Bitterness, [xxxv] who would read my story, or it might be some member of the Royal Statistical Society, and how on earth was I to write in a way that would do for all three?

Well, your request for a sketch of my tour suggested to me the idea of complying with your wish by a revival of my twice-abandoned attempt. I tried; and the pleasure and confidence which I felt in speaking to you soon made my task so easy, and even amusing, that after a while (though not in time for your tour) I completed the scrawl from which this book was originally printed.

The very feeling, however, which enabled me to write thus freely, prevented me from robing my thoughts in that grave and decorous style which I should have maintained if I had professed to lecture the public. Whilst I feigned to myself that you, and you only, were listening, I could not by any possibility speak very solemnly. Heaven forbid that I should talk to my own genial friend as though he were a great and enlightened community, or any other respectable aggregate!

Yet I well understood that the mere fact of my professing to speak to you rather than to the public generally could not perfectly excuse me for printing a narrative too roughly worded, and accordingly, in revising the proof-sheets, I have struck out those phrases which seemed to be less fit for a published volume than for intimate conversation. It is hardly to be expected, however, that correction of this kind should be perfectly complete, or that the almost boisterous tone in which many parts of the book were originally written should be thoroughly subdued. I venture, therefore, to ask, that the familiarity of language still possibly apparent in the work may be laid to the account of our delightful intimacy, rather than to any presumptuous motive. I feel, as you know, much too timidly, too distantly, and too respectfully toward the public to be capable of seeking to put myself on terms of easy fellowship with strange and casual readers.

It is right to forewarn people (and I have tried to do this as well as I can, by my studiously unpromising title-page) [xxxvii] that the book is quite superficial in its character. I have endeavoured to discard from it all valuable matter derived from the works of others, and it appears to me that my efforts in this direction have been attended with great success. I believe I may truly acknowledge that from all details of geographical discovery, or antiquarian research—from all display of “sound learning and religious knowledge”—from all historical and scientific illustrations—from all useful statistics—from all political disquisitions—and from all good moral reflections, the volume is thoroughly free.

My excuse for the book is its truth. You and I know a man fond of hazarding elaborate jokes, who, whenever a story of his happens not to go down as wit, will evade the awkwardness of the failure by bravely maintaining that all he has said is pure fact. I can honestly take this decent though humble mode of escape. My narrative is not merely righteously exact in matters of fact (where fact is in question), but it is true in this larger sense—it conveys, not those impressions which ought to have been produced upon any “well-constituted mind,” but those which were really and truly received at the time of his rambles by a headstrong and not very amiable traveller, whose prejudices in favour of other people’s notions were then exceedingly slight. As I have felt, so I have written; and the result is, that there will often be found in my narrative a jarring discord between the associations properly belonging to interesting sites, and the tone in which I speak of them. This seemingly perverse mode of treating the subject is forced upon me by my plan of adhering to sentimental truth, and really does not result from any impertinent wish to tease or trifle with readers. I ought, for instance, to have felt as strongly in Judæa as in Galilee, but it was not so in fact. The religious sentiment (born in solitude) which had heated my brain in the sanctuary of Nazareth was rudely chilled at the foot of Zion by disenchanting scenes, and this change is accordingly disclosed by the perfectly worldly tone in which I speak of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

My notion of dwelling precisely upon those matters which happened to interest me, and upon none other, would of course be intolerable in a regular book of travels. If I had been passing through countries not previously explored, it would have been sadly perverse to withhold careful descriptions of admirable objects merely because my own feelings of interest in them may have happened to flag; but where the countries which one visits have been thoroughly and ably described, and even artistically illustrated by others, one is fully at liberty to say as little (though not quite so much) as one chooses. Now a traveller is a creature not always looking at sights; he remembers (how often!) the happy land of his birth; he has, too, his moments of humble enthusiasm about fire and food, about shade and drink; and if he gives to these feelings anything like the prominence which really belonged to them at the time of his travelling, he will not seem a very good teacher. Once having determined to write the sheer truth concerning the things which chiefly have interested him, he must, and he will, sing a sadly long strain about self; he will talk for whole pages together about his bivouac fire, and ruin the ruins of Baalbec with eight or ten cold lines.

But it seems to me that this egotism of a traveller, however incessant, however shameless and obtrusive, must still convey some true ideas of the country through which he has passed. His very selfishness, his habit of referring the whole external world to his own sensations, compels him, as it were, in his writings to observe the laws of perspective;—he tells you of objects, not as he knows them to be, but as they seemed to him. The people and the things that most concern him personally, however mean and insignificant, take large proportions in his picture, because they stand so near to him. He shows you his dragoman, and the gaunt features of his Arabs—his tent, his kneeling camels, his baggage strewed upon the sand; but the proper wonders of the land—the cities, the mighty ruins and monuments of bygone ages, he throws back faintly in the distance. It is thus that he felt, and thus he strives to repeat the scenes of the Elder World. You may listen to him for ever without learning much in the way of statistics; but, perhaps, if you bear with him long enough, you may find yourself slowly and faintly impressed with the realities of Eastern travel.

My scheme of refusing to dwell upon matters which failed to interest my own feelings has been departed from in one instance—namely, in my detail of the late Lady Hester Stanhope’s conversation on supernatural topics. The truth is, that I have been much questioned on this subject, and I thought that my best plan would be to write down at once all that I could ever have to say concerning the personage whose career has excited so much curiosity amongst Englishwomen. The result is, that my account of the lady goes to a length which is not justified either by the importance of the subject, or by the extent to which it interested the narrator.

You will see that I constantly speak of “my People,” “my Party,” “my Arabs,” and so on, using terms which might possibly seem to imply that I moved about with a pompous retinue. This of course was not the case. I travelled with the simplicity proper to my station, as one of the industrious class, who was not flying from his country because of ennui, but was strengthening his will, and tempering the metal of his nature, for that life of toil and conflict in which he is now engaged. But an Englishman journeying in the East must necessarily have with him dragomen capable of interpreting the Oriental languages; the absence of wheeled carriages obliges him to use several beasts of burthen for his baggage, as well as for himself and his attendants; the owners of the horses, or camels, with their slaves or servants, fall in as part of his train; and altogether, the cavalcade becomes rather numerous, without, however, occasioning any proportionate increase of expense. When a traveller speaks of all these followers in mass, he calls them his “people,” or his “troop,” or his “party,” without intending to make you believe that he is therefore a Sovereign Prince.

You will see that I sometimes follow the custom of the Scots in describing my fellow-countrymen by the names of their paternal homes.

Of course all these explanations are meant for casual readers. To you, without one syllable of excuse or deprecation, and in all the confidence of a friendship that never yet was clouded, I give the long-promised volume, and add but this one “Goodbye!” for I dare not stand greeting you here.

CHAPTER I
OVER THE BORDER

At Semlin I still was encompassed by the scenes and the sounds of familiar life; the din of a busy world still vexed and cheered me; the unveiled faces of women still shone in the light of day. Yet, whenever I chose to look southward, I saw the Ottoman’s fortress—austere, and darkly impending high over the vale of the Danube—historic Belgrade. I had come, as it were, to the end of this wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and havoc of the East.

The two frontier towns are less than a cannon-shot distant, and yet their people hold no communion. [1] The Hungarian on the north, and the Turk and Servian on the southern side of the Save are as much asunder as though there were fifty broad provinces that lay in the path between them. Of the men that bustled around me in the streets of Semlin there was not, perhaps, one who had ever gone down to look upon the stranger race dwelling under the walls of that opposite castle. It is the plague, and the dread of the plague, that divide the one people from the other. All coming and going stands forbidden by the terrors of the yellow flag. If you dare to break the laws of the quarantine, you will be tried with military haste; the court will scream out your sentence to you from a tribunal some fifty yards off; the priest, instead of gently whispering to you the sweet hopes of religion, will console you at duelling distance; and after that you will find yourself carefully shot, and carelessly buried in the ground of the lazaretto.

When all was in order for our departure we walked down to the precincts of the quarantine establishment, and here awaited us a “compromised” [2] officer of the Austrian Government, who lives in a state of perpetual excommunication. The boats, with their “compromised” rowers, were also in readiness.

After coming in contact with any creature or thing belonging to the Ottoman Empire it would be impossible for us to return to the Austrian territory without undergoing an imprisonment of fourteen days in the odious lazaretto. We felt, therefore, that before we committed ourselves it was important to take care that none of the arrangements necessary for the journey had been forgotten; and in our anxiety to avoid such a misfortune, we managed the work of departure from Semlin with nearly as much solemnity as if we had been departing this life. Some obliging persons, from whom we had received civilities during our short stay in the place, came down to say their farewell at the river’s side; and now, as we stood with them at the distance of three or four yards from the “compromised” officer, they asked if we were perfectly certain that we had wound up all our affairs in Christendom, and whether we had no parting requests to make. We repeated the caution to our servants, and took anxious thought lest by any possibility we might be cut off from some cherished object of affection:—were they quite sure that nothing had been forgotten—that there was no fragrant dressing-case with its gold-compelling letters of credit from which we might be parting for ever?—No; all our treasures lay safely stowed in the boat, and we were ready to follow them to the ends of the earth. Now, therefore, we shook hands with our Semlin friends, who immediately retreated for three or four paces, so as to leave us in the centre of a space between them and the “compromised” officer. The latter then advanced, and asking once more if we had done with the civilised world, held forth his hand. I met it with mine, and there was an end to Christendom for many a day to come.

We soon neared the southern bank of the river, but no sounds came down from the blank walls above, and there was no living thing that we could yet see, except one great hovering bird of the vulture race, flying low, and intent, and wheeling round and round over the pest-accursed city.

But presently there issued from the postern a group of human beings—beings with immortal souls, and possibly some reasoning faculties; but to me the grand point was this, that they had real, substantial, and incontrovertible turbans. They made for the point towards which we were steering, and when at last I sprang upon the shore, I heard, and saw myself now first surrounded by men of Asiatic blood. I have since ridden through the land of the Osmanlees, from the Servian border to the Golden Horn—from the Gulf of Satalieh to the tomb of Achilles; but never have I seen such ultra-Turkish looking fellows as those who received me on the banks of the Save. They were men in the humblest order of life, having come to meet our boat in the hope of earning something by carrying our luggage up to the city; but poor though they were, it was plain that they were Turks of the proud old school, and had not yet forgotten the fierce, careless bearing of their once victorious race.

Though the province of Servia generally has obtained a kind of independence, yet Belgrade, as being a place of strength on the frontier, is still garrisoned by Turkish troops under the command of a Pasha. Whether the fellows who now surrounded us were soldiers, or peaceful inhabitants, I did not understand: they wore the old Turkish costume; vests and jackets of many and brilliant colours, divided from the loose petticoat-trousers by heavy volumes of shawl, so thickly folded around their waists as to give the meagre wearers something of the dignity of true corpulence. This cincture enclosed a whole bundle of weapons; no man bore less than one brace of immensely long pistols, and a yataghan (or cutlass), with a dagger or two of various shapes and sizes; most of these arms were inlaid with silver, and highly burnished, so that they contrasted shiningly with the decayed grandeur of the garments to which they were attached (this carefulness of his arms is a point of honour with the Osmanlee, who never allows his bright yataghan to suffer from his own adversity); then the long drooping mustachios, and the ample folds of the once white turbans, that lowered over the piercing eyes, and the haggard features of the men, gave them an air of gloomy pride, and that appearance of trying to be disdainful under difficulties, which I have since seen so often in those of the Ottoman people who live, and remember old times; they seemed as if they were thinking that they would have been more usefully, more honourably, and more piously employed in cutting our throats than in carrying our portmanteaus. The faithful Steel (Methley’s Yorkshire servant) stood aghast for a moment at the sight of his master’s luggage upon the shoulders of these warlike porters, and when at last we began to move up he could scarcely avoid turning round to cast one affectionate look towards Christendom, but quickly again he marched on with steps of a man, not frightened exactly, but sternly prepared for death, or the Koran, or even for plural wives.

The Moslem quarter of a city is lonely and desolate. You go up and down, and on over shelving and hillocky paths through the narrow lanes walled in by blank, windowless dwellings; you come out upon an open space strewed with the black ruins that some late fire has left; you pass by a mountain of castaway things, the rubbish of centuries, and on it you see numbers of big, wolflike dogs lying torpid under the sun, with limbs out-stretched to the full, as if they were dead; storks, or cranes, sitting fearless upon the low roofs, look gravely down upon you; the still air that you breathe is loaded with the scent of citron, and pomegranate rinds scorched by the sun, or (as you approach the bazaar) with the dry, dead perfume of strange spices. You long for some signs of life, and tread the ground more heavily, as though you would wake the sleepers with the heel of your boot; but the foot falls noiseless upon the crumbling soil of an Eastern city, and silence follows you still. Again and again you meet turbans, and faces of men, but they have nothing for you—no welcome—no wonder—no wrath—no scorn—they look upon you as we do upon a December’s fall of snow—as a “seasonable,” unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, that may have been sent for some good purpose, to be revealed hereafter.

Some people had come down to meet us with an invitation from the Pasha, and we wound our way up to the castle. At the gates there were groups of soldiers, some smoking, and some lying flat like corpses upon the cool stones. We went through courts, ascended steps, passed along a corridor, and walked into an airy, whitewashed room, with an European clock at one end of it, and Moostapha Pasha at the other; the fine, old, bearded potentate looked very like Jove—like Jove, too, in the midst of his clouds, for the silvery fumes of the narghile [6] hung lightly circling round him.

The Pasha received us with the smooth, kind, gentle manner that belongs to well-bred Osmanlees; then he lightly clapped his hands, and instantly the sound filled all the lower end of the room with slaves; a syllable dropped from his lips which bowed all heads, and conjured away the attendants like ghosts (their coming and their going was thus swift and quiet, because their feet were bare, and they passed through no door, but only by the yielding folds of a purder). Soon the coffee-bearers appeared, every man carrying separately his tiny cup in a small metal stand; and presently to each of us there came a pipe-bearer, who first rested the bowl of the tchibouque at a measured distance on the floor, and then, on this axis, wheeled round the long cheery stick, and gracefully presented it on half-bended knee; already the well-kindled fire was glowing secure in the bowl, and so, when I pressed the amber lip [7] to mine, there was no coyness to conquer; the willing fume came up, and answered my slightest sigh, and followed softly every breath inspired, till it touched me with some faint sense and understanding of Asiatic contentment.

Asiatic contentment! Yet scarcely, perhaps, one hour before I had been wanting my bill, and ringing for waiters, in a shrill and busy hotel.

In the Ottoman dominions there is scarcely any hereditary influence except that which belongs to the family of the Sultan; and wealth, too, is a highly volatile blessing, not easily transmitted to the descendant of the owner. From these causes it results that the people standing in the place of nobles and gentry are official personages, and though many (indeed the greater number) of these potentates are humbly born and bred, you will seldom, I think, find them wanting in that polished smoothness of manner, and those well-undulating tones which belong to the best Osmanlees. The truth is, that most of the men in authority have risen from their humble station by the arts of the courtier, and they preserve in their high estate those gentle powers of fascination to which they owe their success. Yet unless you can contrive to learn a little of the language, you will be rather bored by your visits of ceremony; the intervention of the interpreter, or dragoman as he is called, is fatal to the spirit of conversation. I think I should mislead you if I were to attempt to give the substance of any particular conversation with Orientals. A traveller may write and say that “the Pasha of So-and-so was particularly interested in the vast progress which has been made in the application of steam, and appeared to understand the structure of our machinery—that he remarked upon the gigantic results of our manufacturing industry—showed that he possessed considerable knowledge of our Indian affairs, and of the constitution of the Company, and expressed a lively admiration of the many sterling qualities for which the people of England are distinguished.” But the heap of commonplaces thus quietly attributed to the Pasha will have been founded perhaps on some such talking as this:—

Pasha.—The Englishman is welcome; most blessed among hours is this, the hour of his coming.

Dragoman (to the traveller).—The Pasha pays you his compliments.

Traveller.—Give him my best compliments in return, and say I’m delighted to have the honour of seeing him.

Dragoman (to the Pasha).—His lordship, this Englishman, Lord of London, Scorner of Ireland, Suppressor of France, has quitted his governments, and left his enemies to breathe for a moment, and has crossed the broad waters in strict disguise, with a small but eternally faithful retinue of followers, in order that he might look upon the bright countenance of the Pasha among Pashas—the Pasha of the everlasting Pashalik of Karagholookoldour.

Traveller (to his dragoman).—What on earth have you been saying about London? The Pasha will be taking me for a mere cockney. Have not I told you always to say that I am from a branch of the family of Mudcombe Park, and that I am to be a magistrate for the county of Bedfordshire, only I’ve not qualified, and that I should have been a deputy-lieutenant if it had not been for the extraordinary conduct of Lord Mountpromise, and that I was a candidate for Goldborough at the last election, and that I should have won easy if my committee had not been bought. I wish to Heaven that if you do say anything about me, you’d tell the simple truth.

Dragoman [is silent].

Pasha.—What says the friendly Lord of London? is there aught that I can grant him within the Pashalik of Karagholookoldour?

Dragoman (growing sulky and literal).—This friendly Englishman—this branch of Mudcombe—this head-purveyor of Goldborough—this possible policeman of Bedfordshire, is recounting his achievements, and the number of his titles.

Pasha.—The end of his honours is more distant than the ends of the earth, and the catalogue of his glorious deeds is brighter than the firmament of heaven!

Dragoman (to the traveller).—The Pasha congratulates your Excellency.

Traveller.—About Goldborough? The deuce he does!—but I want to get at his views in relation to the present state of the Ottoman Empire. Tell him the Houses of Parliament have met, and that there has been a speech from the throne, pledging England to preserve the integrity of the Sultan’s dominions.

Dragoman (to the Pasha).—This branch of Mudcombe, this possible policeman of Bedfordshire, informs your Highness that in England the talking houses have met, and that the integrity of the Sultan’s dominions has been assured for ever and ever by a speech from the velvet chair.

Pasha.—Wonderful chair! Wonderful houses!—whirr! whirr! all by wheels!—whiz! whiz! all by steam!—wonderful chair! wonderful houses! wonderful people!—whirr! whirr! all by wheels!—whiz! whiz! all by steam!

Traveller (to the dragoman).—What does the Pasha mean by that whizzing? he does not mean to say, does he, that our Government will ever abandon their pledges to the Sultan?

Dragoman.—No, your Excellency; but he says the English talk by wheels, and by steam.

Traveller.—That’s an exaggeration; but say that the English really have carried machinery to great perfection; tell the Pasha (he’ll be struck with that) that whenever we have any disturbances to put down, even at two or three hundred miles from London, we can send troops by the thousand to the scene of action in a few hours.

Dragoman (recovering his temper and freedom of speech).—His Excellency, this Lord of Mudcombe, observes to your Highness, that whenever the Irish, or the French, or the Indians rebel against the English, whole armies of soldiers, and brigades of artillery, are dropped into a mighty chasm called Euston Square, and in the biting of a cartridge they arise up again in Manchester, or Dublin, or Paris, or Delhi, and utterly exterminate the enemies of England from the face of the earth.

Pasha.—I know it—I know all—the particulars have been faithfully related to me, and my mind comprehends locomotives. The armies of the English ride upon the vapours of boiling caldrons, and their horses are flaming coals!—whirr! whirr! all by wheels!—whiz! whiz! all by steam!

Traveller (to his dragoman).—I wish to have the opinion of an unprejudiced Ottoman gentleman as to the prospects of our English commerce and manufactures; just ask the Pasha to give me his views on the subject.

Pasha (after having received the communication of the dragoman).—The ships of the English swarm like flies; their printed calicoes cover the whole earth; and by the side of their swords the blades of Damascus are blades of grass. All India is but an item in the ledger-books of the merchants, whose lumber-rooms are filled with ancient thrones!—whirr! whirr! all by wheels!—whiz! whiz! all by steam!

Dragoman.—The Pasha compliments the cutlery of England, and also the East India Company.

Traveller.—The Pasha’s right about the cutlery (I tried my scimitar with the common officers’ swords belonging to our fellows at Malta, and they cut it like the leaf of a novel). Well (to the dragoman), tell the Pasha I am exceedingly gratified to find that he entertains such a high opinion of our manufacturing energy, but I should like him to know, though, that we have got something in England besides that. These foreigners are always fancying that we have nothing but ships, and railways, and East India Companies; do just tell the Pasha that our rural districts deserve his attention, and that even within the last two hundred years there has been an evident improvement in the culture of the turnip, and if he does not take any interest about that, at all events you can explain that we have our virtues in the country—that we are a truth-telling people, and, like the Osmanlees, are faithful in the performance of our promises. Oh! and, by the bye, whilst you are about it, you may as well just say at the end that the British yeoman is still, thank God! the British yeoman.

Pasha (after hearing the dragoman).—It is true, it is true:—through all Feringhistan the English are foremost and best; for the Russians are drilled swine, and the Germans are sleeping babes, and the Italians are the servants of songs, and the French are the sons of newspapers, and the Greeks they are weavers of lies, but the English and the Osmanlees are brothers together in righteousness; for the Osmanlees believe in one only God, and cleave to the Koran, and destroy idols; so do the English worship one God, and abominate graven images, and tell the truth, and believe in a book, and though they drink the juice of the grape, yet to say that they worship their prophet as God, or to say that they are eaters of pork, these are lies—lies born of Greeks, and nursed by Jews!

Dragoman.—The Pasha compliments the English.

Traveller (rising).—Well, I’ve had enough of this. Tell the Pasha I am greatly obliged to him for his hospitality, and still more for his kindness in furnishing me with horses, and say that now I must be off.

Pasha (after hearing the dragoman, and standing up on his divan). [13]—Proud are the sires, and blessed are the dams of the horses that shall carry his Excellency to the end of his prosperous journey. May the saddle beneath him glide down to the gates of the happy city, like a boat swimming on the third river of Paradise. May he sleep the sleep of a child, when his friends are around him; and the while that his enemies are abroad, may his eyes flame red through the darkness—more red than the eyes of ten tigers! Farewell!

Dragoman.—The Pasha wishes your Excellency a pleasant journey.

So ends the visit.

CHAPTER II
TURKISH TRAVELLING

In two or three hours our party was ready; the servants, the Tatar, the mounted Suridgees, [14a] and the baggage-horses, altogether made up a strong cavalcade. The accomplished Mysseri, [14b] of whom you have heard me speak so often, and who served me so faithfully throughout my Oriental journeys, acted as our interpreter, and was, in fact, the brain of our corps. The Tatar, you know, is a Government courier properly employed in carrying despatches, but also sent with travellers to speed them on their way, and answer with his head for their safety. The man whose head was thus pledged for our precious lives was a glorious-looking fellow, with the regular and handsome cast of countenance which is now characteristic of the Ottoman race. [14c] His features displayed a good deal of serene pride, self-respect, fortitude, a kind of ingenuous sensuality, and something of instinctive wisdom, without any sharpness of intellect. He had been a Janissary (as I afterwards found), and kept up the odd strut of his old corps, which used to affright the Christians in former times—that rolling gait so comically pompous, that a close imitation of it, even in the broadest farce, would be looked upon as a very rough over-acting of the character. It is occasioned in part by dress and accoutrements. The weighty bundle of weapons carried upon the chest throws back the body so as to give it a wonderful portliness, and, moreover, the immense masses of clothes that swathe his limbs force the wearer in walking to swing himself heavily round from left to right, and from right to left. In truth, this great edifice of woollen, and cotton, and silk, and silver, and brass, and steel is not at all fitted for moving on foot; it cannot even walk without frightfully discomposing its fair proportions; and as to running—our Tatar ran once (it was in order to pick up a partridge that Methley had winged with a pistol-shot), and really the attempt was one of the funniest misdirections of human energy that wondering man ever saw. But put him in his stirrups, and then is the Tatar himself again: there he lives at his pleasure, reposing in the tranquillity of that true home (the home of his ancestors) which the saddle seems to afford him, and drawing from his pipe the calm pleasures of his “own fireside,” or else dashing sudden over the earth, as though for a moment he felt the mouth of a Turcoman steed, and saw his own Scythian plains lying boundless and open before him.

It was not till his subordinates had nearly completed their preparations for their march that our Tatar, “commanding the forces,” arrived; he came sleek and fresh from the bath (for so is the custom of the Ottomans when they start upon a journey), and was carefully accoutred at every point. From his thigh to his throat he was loaded with arms and other implements of a campaigning life. There is no scarcity of water along the whole road from Belgrade to Stamboul, but the habits of our Tatar were formed by his ancestors and not by himself, so he took good care to see that his leathern water-flask was amply charged and properly strapped to the saddle, along with his blessed tchibouque. And now at last he has cursed the Suridgees in all proper figures of speech, and is ready for a ride of a thousand miles; but before he comforts his soul in the marble baths of Stamboul he will be another and a lesser man; his sense of responsibility, his too strict abstemiousness, and his restless energy, disdainful of sleep, will have worn him down to a fraction of the sleek Moostapha that now leads out our party from the gates of Belgrade.

The Suridgees are the men employed to lead the baggage-horses. They are most of them gipsies. Their lot is a sad one: they are the last of the human race, and all the sins of their superiors (including the horses) can safely be visited on them. But the wretched look often more picturesque than their betters; and though all the world despise these poor Suridgees, their tawny skins and their grisly beards will gain them honourable standing in the foreground of a landscape. We had a couple of these fellows with us, each leading a baggage-horse, to the tail of which last another baggage-horse was attached. There was a world of trouble in persuading the stiff angular portmanteaus of Europe to adapt themselves to their new condition and sit quietly on pack-saddles, but all was right at last, and it gladdened my eyes to see our little troop file off through the winding lanes of the city, and show down brightly in the plain beneath. The one of our party that seemed to be most out of keeping with the rest of the scene was Methley’s Yorkshire servant, who always rode doggedly on in his pantry jacket, looking out for “gentlemen’s seats.”

Methley and I had English saddles, but I think we should have done just as well (I should certainly have seen more of the country) if we had adopted saddles like that of our Tatar, who towered so loftily over the scraggy little beast that carried him. In taking thought for the East, whilst in England, I had made one capital hit which you must not forget—I had brought with me a pair of common spurs. These were a great comfort to me throughout my horseback travels, by keeping up the cheerfulness of the many unhappy nags that I had to bestride; the angle of the Oriental stirrup is a very poor substitute for spurs.

The Ottoman horseman, raised by his saddle to a great height above the humble level of the back that he bestrides, and using an awfully sharp bit, is able to lift the crest of his nag, and force him into a strangely fast shuffling walk, the orthodox pace for the journey. My comrade and I, using English saddles, could not easily keep our beasts up to this peculiar amble; besides, we thought it a bore to be followed by our attendants for a thousand miles, and we generally, therefore, did duty as the rearguard of our “grand army”; we used to walk our horses till the party in front had got into the distance, and then retrieve the lost ground by a gallop.

We had ridden on for some two or three hours; the stir and bustle of our commencing journey had ceased, the liveliness of our little troop had worn off with the declining day, and the night closed in as we entered the great Servian forest. Through this our road was to last for more than a hundred miles. Endless, and endless now on either side, the tall oaks closed in their ranks and stood gloomily lowering over us, as grim as an army of giants with a thousand years’ pay in arrear. One strived with listening ear to catch some tidings of that forest world within—some stirring of beasts, some night-bird’s scream, but all was quite hushed, except the voice of the cicalas that peopled every bough, and filled the depths of the forest through and through, with one same hum everlasting—more stilling than very silence.

At first our way was in darkness, but after a while the moon got up, and touched the glittering arms and tawny faces of our men with light so pale and mystic, that the watchful Tatar felt bound to look out for demons, and take proper means for keeping them off; forthwith he determined that the duty of frightening away our ghostly enemies (like every other troublesome work) should fall upon the poor Suridgees, who accordingly lifted up their voices, and burst upon the dreadful stillness of the forest with shrieks and dismal howls. These precautions were kept up incessantly, and were followed by the most complete success, for not one demon came near us.

Long before midnight we reached the hamlet in which we were to rest for the night; it was made up of about a dozen clay huts, standing upon a small tract of ground hardly won from the forest. The peasants that lived there spoke a Slavonic dialect, and Mysseri’s knowledge of the Russian tongue enabled him to talk with them freely. We took up our quarters in a square room with white walls and an earthen floor, quite bare of furniture, and utterly void of women. They told us, however, that these Servian villagers lived in happy abundance, but that they were careful to conceal their riches, as well as their wives.

The burthens unstrapped from the pack-saddles very quickly furnished our den; a couple of quilts spread upon the floor, with a carpet-bag at the head of each, became capital sofas—portmanteaus, and hat-boxes, and writing-cases, and books, and maps, and gleaming arms soon lay strewed around us in pleasant confusion. Mysseri’s canteen too began to yield up its treasures, but we relied upon finding some provisions in the village. At first the natives declared that their hens were mere old maids and all their cows unmarried; but our Tatar swore such a grand sonorous oath, and fingered the hilt of his yataghan with such persuasive touch, that the land soon flowed with milk, and mountains of eggs arose.

And soon there was tea before us, with all its unspeakable fragrance, and as we reclined on the floor, we found that a portmanteau was just the right height for a table; the duty of candlesticks was ably performed by a couple of intelligent natives; the rest of the villagers stood by the open doorway at the lower end of the room, and watched our banqueting with grave and devout attention.

The first night of your first campaign (though you be but a mere peaceful campaigner) is a glorious time in your life. It is so sweet to find one’s self free from the stale civilisation of Europe! Oh, my dear ally, when first you spread your carpet in the midst of these Eastern scenes, do think for a moment of those your fellow-creatures, that dwell in squares, and streets, and even (for such is the fate of many!) in actual country houses; think of the people that are “presenting their compliments,” and “requesting the honour,” and “much regretting,”—of those that are pinioned at dinner-tables, or stuck up in ballrooms, or cruelly planted in pews,—ay, think of these, and so remembering how many poor devils are living in a state of utter respectability, you will glory the more in your own delightful escape.

I am bound to confess, however, that with all its charms a mud floor (like a mercenary match) does certainly promote early rising. Long before daybreak we were up, and had breakfasted; after this there was nearly a whole tedious hour to endure whilst the horses were laden by torchlight; but this had an end, and at last we went on once more. Cloaked, and sombre, at first we made our sullen way through the darkness, with scarcely one barter of words; but soon the genial morn burst down from heaven, and stirred the blood so gladly through our veins, that the very Suridgees, with all their troubles, could now look up for an instant, and almost seem to believe in the temporary goodness of God.

The actual movement from one place to another, in Europeanised countries, is a process so temporary—it occupies, I mean, so small a proportion of the traveller’s entire time—that his mind remains unsettled, so long as the wheels are going; he may be alive enough to external objects of interest, and to the crowding ideas which are often invited by the excitement of a changing scene, but he is still conscious of being in a provisional state, and his mind is constantly recurring to the expected end of his journey; his ordinary ways of thought have been interrupted, and before any new mental habits can be formed he is quietly fixed in his hotel. It will be otherwise with you when you journey in the East. Day after day, perhaps week after week and month after month, your foot is in the stirrup. To taste the cold breath of the earliest morn, and to lead, or follow, your bright cavalcade till sunset through forests and mountain passes, through valleys and desolate plains, all this becomes your mode of life, and you ride, eat, drink, and curse the mosquitoes as systematically as your friends in England eat, drink, and sleep. If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period of time thus occupied in actual movement as the mere gulf dividing you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare and plastic seasons of your life from which, perhaps, in after times you may love to date the moulding of your character—that is, your very identity. Once feel this, and you will soon grow happy and contented in your saddle-home. As for me and my comrade, however, in this part of our journey we often forgot Stamboul, forgot all the Ottoman Empire, and only remembered old times. We went back, loitering on the banks of Thames—not grim old Thames of “after life,” that washes the Parliament Houses, and drowns despairing girl—but Thames, the “old Eton fellow,” that wrestled with us in our boyhood till he taught us to be stronger than he. We bullied Keate, and scoffed at Larry Miller, and Okes; we rode along loudly laughing, and talked to the grave Servian forest as though it were the “Brocas clump.”

Our pace was commonly very slow, for the baggage-horses served us for a drag, and kept us to a rate of little more than five miles in the hour, but now and then, and chiefly at night, a spirit of movement would suddenly animate the whole party; the baggage-horses would be teased into a gallop, and when once this was done, there would be such a banging of portmanteaus, and such convulsions of carpet-bags upon their panting sides, and the Suridgees would follow them up with such a hurricane of blows, and screams, and curses, that stopping or relaxing was scarcely possible; then the rest of us would put our horses into a gallop, and so, all shouting cheerily, would hunt, and drive the sumpter beasts like a flock of goats, up hill and down dale, right on to the end of their journey.

The distances at which we got relays of horses varied greatly; some were not more than fifteen or twenty miles, but twice, I think, we performed a whole day’s journey of more than sixty miles with the same beasts.

When at last we came out from the forest our road lay through scenes like those of an English park. The green sward unfenced, and left to the free pasture of cattle, was dotted with groups of stately trees, and here and there darkened over with larger masses of wood, that seemed gathered together for bounding the domain, and shutting out some “infernal” fellow-creature in the shape of a newly made squire; in one or two spots the hanging copses looked down upon a lawn below with such sheltering mien, that seeing the like in England you would have been tempted almost to ask the name of the spendthrift, or the madman who had dared to pull down “the old hall.”

There are few countries less infested by “lions” than the provinces on this part of your route. You are not called upon to “drop a tear” over the tomb of “the once brilliant” anybody, or to pay your “tribute of respect” to anything dead or alive. There are no Servian or Bulgarian litterateurs with whom it would be positively disgraceful not to form an acquaintance; you have no staring, no praising to get through; the only public building of any interest that lies on the road is of modern date, but is said to be a good specimen of Oriental architecture; it is of a pyramidical shape, and is made up of thirty thousand skulls, contributed by the rebellious Servians in the early part (I believe) of this century: I am not at all sure of my date, but I fancy it was in the year 1806 that the first skull was laid. [23] I am ashamed to say that in the darkness of the early morning we unknowingly went by the neighbourhood of this triumph of art, and so basely got off from admiring “the simple grandeur of the architect’s conception,” and “the exquisite beauty of the fretwork.”

There being no “lions,” we ought at least to have met with a few perils, but the only robbers we saw anything of had been long since dead and gone. The poor fellows had been impaled upon high poles, and so propped up by the transverse spokes beneath them, that their skeletons, clothed with some white, wax-like remains of flesh, still sat up lolling in the sunshine, and listlessly stared without eyes.

One day it seemed to me that our path was a little more rugged than usual, and I found that I was deserving for myself the title of Sabalkansky, or “Transcender of the Balcan.” The truth is, that, as a military barrier, the Balcan is a fabulous mountain. Such seems to be the view of Major Keppell, who looked on it towards the east with the eye of a soldier, and certainly in the Sophia Pass, which I followed, there is no narrow defile, and no ascent sufficiently difficult to stop, or delay for long time, a train of siege artillery.

Before we reached Adrianople, Methley had been seized with we knew not what ailment, and when we had taken up our quarters in the city he was cast to the very earth by sickness. Andrianople enjoyed an English consul, and I felt sure that, in Eastern phrase, his house would cease to be his house, and would become the house of my sick comrade. I should have judged rightly under ordinary circumstances, but the levelling plague was abroad, and the dread of it had dominion over the consular mind. So now (whether dying or not, one could hardly tell), upon a quilt stretched out along the floor, there lay the best hope of an ancient line, without the material aids to comfort of even the humblest sort, and (sad to say) without the consolation of a friend, or even a comrade worth having. I have a notion that tenderness and pity are affections occasioned in some measure by living within doors; certainly, at the time I speak of, the open-air life which I have been leading, or the wayfaring hardships of the journey, had so strangely blunted me, that I felt intolerant of illness, and looked down upon my companion as if the poor fellow in falling ill had betrayed a want of spirit. I entertained, too, a most absurd idea—an idea that his illness was partly affected. You see that I have made a confession: this I hope—that I may always hereafter look charitably upon the hard, savage acts of peasants, and the cruelties of a “brutal” soldiery. God knows that I strived to melt myself into common charity, and to put on a gentleness which I could not feel, but this attempt did not cheat the keenness of the sufferer; he could not have felt the less deserted because that I was with him.

We called to aid a solemn Armenian (I think he was), half soothsayer, half hakim or doctor, who, all the while counting his beads, fixed his eyes steadily upon the patient, and then suddenly dealt him a violent blow on the chest. Methley bravely dissembled his pain, for he fancied that the blow was meant to try whether or not the plague were on him.

Here was really a sad embarrassment—no bed; nothing to offer the invalid in the shape of food save a piece of thin, tough, flexible, drab-coloured cloth, made of flour and mill-stones in equal proportions, and called by the name of “bread”; then the patient, of course, had no “confidence in his medical man,” and on the whole, the best chance of saving my comrade seemed to lie in taking him out of the reach of his doctor, and bearing him away to the neighbourhood of some more genial consul. But how was this to be done? Methley was much too ill to be kept in his saddle, and wheel carriages, as means of travelling, were unknown. There is, however, such a thing as an “araba,” a vehicle drawn by oxen, in which the wives of a rich man are sometimes dragged four or five miles over the grass by way of recreation. The carriage is rudely framed, but you recognise in the simple grandeur of its design a likeness to things majestic; in short, if your carpenter’s son were to make a “Lord Mayor’s coach” for little Amy, he would build a carriage very much in the style of a Turkish araba. No one had ever heard of horses being used for drawing a carriage in this part of the world, but necessity is the mother of innovation as well as of invention. I was fully justified, I think, in arguing that there were numerous instances of horses being used for that purpose in our own country—that the laws of nature are uniform in their operation over all the world (except Ireland)—that that which was true in Piccadilly, must be true in Adrianople—that the matter could not fairly be treated as an ecclesiastical question, for that the circumstance of Methley’s going on to Stamboul in an araba drawn by horses, when calmly and dispassionately considered, would appear to be perfectly consistent with the maintenance of the Mahometan religion as by law established. Thus poor, dear, patient Reason would have fought her slow battle against Asiatic prejudice, and I am convinced that she would have established the possibility (and perhaps even the propriety) of harnessing horses in a hundred and fifty years; but in the meantime Mysseri, well seconded by our Tatar, put a very quick end to the controversy by having the horses put to.

It was a sore thing for me to see my poor comrade brought to this, for young though he was, he was a veteran in travel. When scarcely yet of age he had invaded India from the frontiers of Russia, and that so swiftly, that measuring by the time of his flight the broad dominions of the king of kings were shrivelled up to a dukedom, and now, poor fellow, he was to be poked into an araba, like a Georgian girl! He suffered greatly, for there were no springs for the carriage, and no road for the wheels; and so the concern jolted on over the open country with such twists, and jerks, and jumps, as might almost dislocate the supple tongue of Satan.

All day the patient kept himself shut up within the lattice-work of the araba, and I could hardly know how he was faring until the end of the day’s journey, when I found that he was not worse, and was buoyed up with the hope of some day reaching Constantinople.

I was always conning over my maps, and fancied that I knew pretty well my line, but after Adrianople I had made more southing than I knew for, and it was with unbelieving wonder, and delight, that I came suddenly upon the shore of the sea. A little while, and its gentle billows were flowing beneath the hoofs of my beast; but the hearing of the ripple was not enough communion, and the seeing of the blue Propontis was not to know and possess it—I must needs plunge into its depth and quench my longing love in the palpable waves; and so when old Moostapha (defender against demons) looked round for his charge, he saw with horror and dismay that he for whose life his own life stood pledged was possessed of some devil who had driven him down into the sea—that the rider and the steed had vanished from earth, and that out among the waves was the gasping crest of a post-horse, and the ghostly head of the Englishman moving upon the face of the waters.

We started very early indeed on the last day of our journey, and from the moment of being off until we gained the shelter of the imperial walls we were struggling face to face with an icy storm that swept right down from the steppes of Tartary, keen, fierce, and steady as a northern conqueror. Methley’s servant, who was the greatest sufferer, kept his saddle until we reached Stamboul, but was then found to be quite benumbed in limbs, and his brain was so much affected that when he was lifted from his horse he fell away in a state of unconsciousness, the first stage of a dangerous fever.

Our Tatar, worn down by care and toil, and carrying seven heavens full of water in his manifold jackets and shawls, was a mere weak and vapid dilution of the sleek Moostapha, who scarce more than one fortnight before came out like a bridegroom from his chamber to take the command of our party.

Mysseri seemed somewhat over-wearied, but he had lost none of his strangely quiet energy. He wore a grave look, however, for he now had learnt that the plague was prevailing at Constantinople, and he was fearing that our two sick men, and the miserable looks of our whole party, might make us unwelcome at Pera.

We crossed the Golden Horn in a caïque. As soon as we had landed, some woebegone-looking fellows were got together and laden with our baggage. Then on we went, dripping, and sloshing, and looking very like men that had been turned back by the Royal Humane Society as being incurably drowned. Supporting our sick, we climbed up shelving steps and threaded many windings, and at last came up into the main street of Pera, humbly hoping that we might not be judged guilty of plague, and so be cast back with horror from the doors of the shuddering Christians.

Such was the condition of our party, which fifteen days before had filed away so gaily from the gates of Belgrade. A couple of fevers and a north-easterly storm had thoroughly spoiled our looks.

The interest of Mysseri with the house of Giuseppini was too powerful to be denied, and at once, though not without fear and trembling, we were admitted as guests.

CHAPTER III
CONSTANTINOPLE

Even if we don’t take a part in the chant about “mosques and minarets,” we can still yield praises to Stamboul. We can chant about the harbour; we can say, and sing, that nowhere else does the sea come so home to a city; there are no pebbly shores—no sand bars—no slimy river-beds—no black canals—no locks nor docks to divide the very heart of the place from the deep waters. If being in the noisiest mart of Stamboul you would stroll to the quiet side of the way amidst those cypresses opposite, you will cross the fathomless Bosphorus; if you would go from your hotel to the bazaars, you must go by the bright, blue pathway of the Golden Horn, that can carry a thousand sail of the line. You are accustomed to the gondolas that glide among the palaces of St. Mark, but here at Stamboul it is a 120-gun ship that meets you in the street. Venice strains out from the steadfast land, and in old times would send forth the chief of the State to woo and wed the reluctant sea; but the stormy bride of the Doge is the bowing slave of the Sultan. She comes to his feet with the treasures of the world—she bears him from palace to palace—by some unfailing witchcraft she entices the breezes to follow her [31] and fan the pale cheek of her lord—she lifts his armed navies to the very gates of his garden—she watches the walls of his serai—she stifles the intrigues of his ministers—she quiets the scandals of his courts—she extinguishes his rivals, and hushes his naughty wives all one by one. So vast are the wonders of the deep!

All the while that I stayed at Constantinople the plague was prevailing, but not with any degree of violence. Its presence, however, lent a mysterious and exciting, though not very pleasant, interest to my first knowledge of a great Oriental city; it gave tone and colour to all I saw, and all I felt—a tone and a colour sombre enough, but true, and well befitting the dreary monuments of past power and splendour. With all that is most truly Oriental in its character the plague is associated; it dwells with the faithful in the holiest quarters of their city. The coats and the hats of Pera are held to be nearly as innocent of infection as they are ugly in shape and fashion; but the rich furs and the costly shawls, the broidered slippers and the gold-laden saddle-cloths, the fragrance of burning aloes and the rich aroma of patchouli—these are the signs that mark the familiar home of plague. You go out from your queenly London—the centre of the greatest and strongest amongst all earthly dominions—you go out thence, and travel on to the capital of an Eastern Prince, you find but a waning power, and a faded splendour, that inclines you to laugh and mock; but let the infernal Angel of Plague be at hand, and he, more mighty than armies, more terrible than Suleyman in his glory, can restore such pomp and majesty to the weakness of the Imperial city, that if, when HE is there, you must still go prying amongst the shades of this dead empire, at least you will tread the path with seemly reverence and awe.

It is the firm faith of almost all the Europeans living in the East that plague is conveyed by the touch of infected substances, and that the deadly atoms especially lurk in all kinds of clothes and furs. It is held safer to breathe the same air with a man sick of the plague, and even to come in contact with his skin, than to be touched by the smallest particle of woollen or of thread which may have been within the reach of possible infection. If this be a right notion, the spread of the malady must be materially aided by the observance of a custom prevailing amongst the people of Stamboul. It is this: when an Osmanlee dies, one of his dresses is cut up, and a small piece of it is sent to each of his friends as a memorial of the departed—a fatal present, according to the opinion of the Franks, for it too often forces the living not merely to remember the dead man, but to follow and bear him company.

The Europeans during the prevalence of the plague, if they are forced to venture into the streets, will carefully avoid the touch of every human being whom they pass. Their conduct in this respect shows them strongly in contrast with the “true believers”; the Moslem stalks on serenely, as though he were under the eye of his God, and were “equal to either fate”; the Franks go crouching and slinking from death, and some (those chiefly of French extraction) will fondly strive to fence out destiny with shining capes of oilskin!

For some time you may manage by great care to thread your way through the streets of Stamboul without incurring contact, for the Turks, though scornful of the terrors felt by the Franks, are generally very courteous in yielding to that which they hold to be a useless and impious precaution, and will let you pass safe if they can. It is impossible, however, that your immunity can last for any length of time if you move about much through the narrow streets and lanes of a crowded city.

As for me, I soon got “compromised.” After one day of rest, the prayers of my hostess began to lose their power of keeping me from the pestilent side of the Golden Horn. Faithfully promising to shun the touch of all imaginable substances, however enticing, I set off very cautiously, and held my way uncompromised till I reached the water’s edge; but before my caïque was quite ready some rueful-looking fellows came rapidly shambling down the steps with a plague-stricken corpse, which they were going to bury amongst the faithful on the other side of the water. I contrived to be so much in the way of this brisk funeral, that I was not only touched by the men bearing the body, but also, I believe, by the foot of the dead man, as it hung lolling out of the bier. This accident gave me such a strong interest in denying the soundness of the contagion theory, that I did in fact deny and repudiate it altogether; and from that time, acting upon my own convenient view of the matter, I went wherever I chose, without taking any serious pains to avoid a touch. It seems to me now very likely that the Europeans are right, and that the plague may be really conveyed by contagion; but during the whole time of my remaining in the East, my views on this subject more nearly approached to those of the fatalists; and so, when afterwards the plague of Egypt came dealing his blows around me, I was able to live amongst the dying without that alarm and anxiety which would inevitably have pressed upon my mind if I had allowed myself to believe that every passing touch was really a probable death-stroke.

And perhaps as you make your difficult way through a steep and narrow alley, shut in between blank walls, and little frequented by passers, you meet one of those coffin-shaped bundles of white linen that implies an Ottoman lady. Painfully struggling against the obstacles to progression interposed by the many folds of her clumsy drapery, by her big mud-boots, and especially by her two pairs of slippers, she works her way on full awkwardly enough, but yet there is something of womanly consciousness in the very labour and effort with which she tugs and lifts the burthen of her charms. She is closely followed by her women slaves. Of her very self you see nothing except the dark, luminous eyes that stare against your face, and the tips of the painted fingers depending like rosebuds from out of the blank bastions of the fortress. She turns, and turns again, and carefully glances around her on all sides, to see that she is safe from the eyes of Mussulmans, and then suddenly withdrawing the yashmak, [34] she shines upon your heart and soul with all the pomp and might of her beauty. And this, it is not the light, changeful grace that leaves you to doubt whether you have fallen in love with a body, or only a soul; it is the beauty that dwells secure in the perfectness of hard, downright outlines, and in the glow of generous colour. There is fire, though, too—high courage and fire enough in the untamed mind, or spirit, or whatever it is, which drives the breath of pride through those scarcely parted lips.

You smile at pretty women—you turn pale before the beauty that is great enough to have dominion over you. She sees, and exults in your giddiness; she sees and smiles; then presently, with a sudden movement, she lays her blushing fingers upon your arm, and cries out, “Yumourdjak!” (Plague! meaning, “there is a present of the plague for you!”) This is her notion of a witticism. It is a very old piece of fun, no doubt—quite an Oriental Joe Miller; but the Turks are fondly attached, not only to the institutions, but also to the jokes of their ancestors; so the lady’s silvery laugh rings joyously in your ears, and the mirth of her women is boisterous and fresh, as though the bright idea of giving the plague to a Christian had newly lit upon the earth.

Methley began to rally very soon after we had reached Constantinople; but there seemed at first to be no chance of his regaining strength enough for travelling during the winter, and I determined to stay with my comrade until he had quite recovered; so I bought me a horse, and a “pipe of tranquillity,” [35] and took a Turkish phrase-master. I troubled myself a great deal with the Turkish tongue, and gained at last some knowledge of its structure. It is enriched, perhaps overladen, with Persian and Arabic words, imported into the language chiefly for the purpose of representing sentiments and religious dogmas, and terms of art and luxury, entirely unknown to the Tartar ancestors of the present Osmanlees; but the body and the spirit of the old tongue are yet alive, and the smooth words of the shopkeeper at Constantinople can still carry understanding to the ears of the untamed millions who rove over the plains of Northern Asia. The structure of the language, especially in its more lengthy sentences, is very like to the Latin: [36] the subject matters are slowly and patiently enumerated, without disclosing the purpose of the speaker until he reaches the end of his sentence, and then at last there comes the clenching word, which gives a meaning and connection to all that has gone before. If you listen at all to speaking of this kind, your attention, rather than be suffered to flag, must grow more and more lively as the phrase marches on.

The Osmanlees speak well. In countries civilised according to the European plan the work of trying to persuade tribunals is almost all performed by a set of men, the great body of whom very seldom do anything else; but in Turkey this division of labour has never taken place, and every man is his own advocate. The importance of the rhetorical art is immense, for a bad speech may endanger the property of the speaker, as well as the soles of his feet and the free enjoyment of his throat. So it results that most of the Turks whom one sees have a lawyer-like habit of speaking connectedly, and at length. Even the treaties continually going on at the bazaar for the buying and selling of the merest trifles are carried on by speechifying rather than by mere colloquies, and the eternal uncertainty as to the market value of things in constant sale gives room enough for discussion. The seller is for ever demanding a price immensely beyond that for which he sells at last, and so occasions unspeakable disgust in many Englishmen, who cannot see why an honest dealer should ask more for his goods than he will really take! The truth is, however, that an ordinary tradesman of Constantinople has no other way of finding out the fair market value of his property. The difficulty under which he labours is easily shown by comparing the mechanism of the commercial system in Turkey with that of our own country. In England, or in any other great mercantile country, the bulk of the things bought and sold goes through the hands of a wholesale dealer, and it is he who higgles and bargains with an entire nation of purchasers by entering into treaty with retail sellers. The labour of making a few large contracts is sufficient to give a clue for finding the fair market value of the goods sold throughout the country; but in Turkey, from the primitive habits of the people, and partly from the absence of great capital and great credit, the importing merchant, the warehouseman, the wholesale dealer, the retail dealer, and the shopman, are all one person. Old Moostapha, or Abdallah, or Hadgi Mohamed waddles up from the water’s edge with a small packet of merchandise, which he has bought out of a Greek brigantine, and when at last he has reached his nook in the bazaar he puts his goods before the counter, and himself upon it; then laying fire to his tchibouque he “sits in permanence,” and patiently waits to obtain “the best price that can be got in an open market.” This is his fair right as a seller, but he has no means of finding out what that best price is except by actual experiment. He cannot know the intensity of the demand, or the abundance of the supply, otherwise than by the offers which may be made for his little bundle of goods; so he begins by asking a perfectly hopeless price, and then descends the ladder until he meets a purchaser, for ever

“Striving to attain
By shadowing out the unattainable.”

This is the struggle which creates the continual occasion for debate. The vendor, perceiving that the unfolded merchandise has caught the eye of a possible purchaser, commences his opening speech. He covers his bristling broadcloths and his meagre silks with the golden broidery of Oriental praises, and as he talks, along with the slow and graceful waving of his arms, he lifts his undulating periods, upholds and poises them well, till they have gathered their weight and their strength, and then hurls them bodily forward with grave, momentous swing. The possible purchaser listens to the whole speech with deep and serious attention; but when it is over his turn arrives. He elaborately endeavours to show why he ought not to buy the things at a price twenty times larger than their value. Bystanders attracted to the debate take a part in it as independent members; the vendor is heard in reply, and coming down with his price, furnishes the materials for a new debate. Sometimes, however, the dealer, if he is a very pious Mussulman, and sufficiently rich to hold back his ware, will take a more dignified part, maintaining a kind of judicial gravity, and receiving the applicants who come to his stall as if they were rather suitors than customers. He will quietly hear to the end some long speech that concludes with an offer, and will answer it all with the one monosyllable “Yok,” which means distinctly “No.”

I caught one glimpse of the old heathen world. My habits for studying military subjects had been hardening my heart against poetry; for ever staring at the flames of battle, I had blinded myself to the lesser and finer lights that are shed from the imaginations of men. In my reading at this time I delighted to follow from out of Arabian sands the feet of the armed believers, and to stand in the broad, manifest storm-track of Tartar devastation; and thus, though surrounded at Constantinople by scenes of much interest to the “classical scholar,” I had cast aside their associations like an old Greek grammar, and turned my face to the “shining Orient,” forgetful of old Greece and all the pure wealth she left to this matter-of-fact-ridden world. But it happened to me one day to mount the high grounds overhanging the streets of Pera. I sated my eyes with the pomps of the city and its crowded waters, and then I looked over where Scutari lay half veiled in her mournful cypresses. I looked yet farther and higher, and saw in the heavens a silvery cloud that stood fast and still against the breeze: it was pure and dazzling white, as might be the veil of Cytherea, yet touched with such fire, as though from beneath the loving eyes of an immortal were shining through and through. I knew the bearing, but had enormously misjudged its distance and underrated its height, and so it was as a sign and a testimony, almost as a call from the neglected gods, and now I saw and acknowledged the snowy crown of the Mysian Olympus!

CHAPTER IV [41]
THE TROAD

Methley recovered almost suddenly, and we determined to go through the Troad together.

My comrade was a capital Grecian. It is true that his singular mind so ordered and disposed his classic lore as to impress it with something of an original and barbarous character—with an almost Gothic quaintness, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad than to the poetry of Hellas. There was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek—an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian gods, lugged in under the oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old Norman hall. But Methley, abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good deal of the practical sagacity

“Of a Yorkshireman hippodamoio,”

and this enabled him to apply his knowledge with much more tact than is usually shown by people so learned as he.

I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar’s love. The most humble and pious among women was yet so proud a mother that she could teach her firstborn son no Watts’ hymns, no collects for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood no less than this, to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that old Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek was ingeniously rendered into English, the English of Pope even, but not even a mesh like that can screen an earnest child from the fire of Homer’s battles.

I pored over the Odyssey as over a story-book, hoping and fearing for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the Iliad—line by line I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love. As an old woman deeply trustful sits reading her Bible because of the world to come, so, as though it would fit me for the coming strife of this temporal world, I read and read the Iliad. Even outwardly, it was not like other books; it was throned in towering folios. There was a preface or dissertation printed in type still more majestic than the rest of the book; this I read, but not till my enthusiasm for the Iliad had already run high. The writer compiling the opinions of many men, and chiefly of the ancients, set forth, I know not how quaintly, that the Iliad was all in all to the human race—that it was history, poetry, revelation; that the works of men’s hands were folly and vanity, and would pass away like the dreams of a child, but that the kingdom of Homer would endure for ever and ever.

I assented with all my soul. I read, and still read; I came to know Homer. A learned commentator knows something of the Greeks, in the same sense as an oil-and-colour man may be said to know something of painting; but take an untamed child, and leave him alone for twelve months with any translation of Homer, and he will be nearer by twenty centuries to the spirit of old Greece; he does not stop in the ninth year of the siege to admire this or that group of words; he has no books in his tent, but he shares in vital counsels with the “king of men,” and knows the inmost souls of the impending gods; how profanely he exults over the powers divine when they are taught to dread the prowess of mortals! and most of all, how he rejoices when the God of War flies howling from the spear of Diomed, and mounts into heaven for safety! Then the beautiful episode of the Sixth Book: the way to feel this is not to go casting about, and learning from pastors and masters how best to admire it. The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their talking; the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy has he for the child that is young enough to be frightened at the nodding plume of a helmet; but all the while that he thus chafes at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer’s poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the Iliad, that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his mother’s shawl; yet of this great gain he is unconscious, and on he goes, vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy, and never remitting his fierceness till almost suddenly it is changed for sorrow—the new and generous sorrow that he learns to feel when the noblest of all his foes lies sadly dying at the Scæan gate.

Heroic days are these, but the dark ages of schoolboy life come closing over them. I suppose it is all right in the end, yet, by Jove, at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall from your mother’s dressing-room to a buzzing school. You feel so keenly the delights of early knowledge; you form strange mystic friendships with the mere names of mountains, and seas, and continents, and mighty rivers; you learn the ways of the planets, and transcend their narrow limits, and ask for the end of space; you vex the electric cylinder till it yields you, for your toy to play with, that subtle fire in which our earth was forged; you know of the nations that have towered high in the world, and the lives of the men who have saved whole empires from oblivion. What more will you ever learn? Yet the dismal change is ordained, and then, thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody), with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your early lore. Instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages, are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of “Scriptores Romani,”—from Greek poetry down, down to the cold rations of “Poetæ Græci,” cut up by commentators, and served out by schoolmasters!

It was not the recollection of school nor college learning, but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, which made me bend forward so longingly to the plains of Troy.

Away from our people and our horses, Methley and I went loitering along by the willow banks of a stream that crept in quietness through the low, even plain. There was no stir of weather overhead, no sound of rural labour, no sign of life in the land; but all the earth was dead and still, as though it had lain for thrice a thousand years under the leaden gloom of one unbroken Sabbath.

Softly and sadly the poor, dumb, patient stream went winding and winding along through its shifting pathway; in some places its waters were parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet once more. I could see that the stream from year to year was finding itself new channels, and flowed no longer in its ancient track, but I knew that the springs which fed it were high on Ida—the springs of Simois and Scamander!

It was coldly and thanklessly, and with vacant, unsatisfied eyes that I watched the slow coming and gliding away of the waters. I tell myself now, as a profane fact, that I did stand by that river (Methley gathered some seeds from the bushes that grew there), but since that I am away from his banks, “divine Scamander” has recovered the proper mystery belonging to him as an unseen deity; a kind of indistinctness, like that which belongs to far antiquity, has spread itself over my memory, of the winding stream that I saw with these very eyes. One’s mind regains in absence that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their rude contact. You force yourself hardily into the material presence of a mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your feelings wound up and kept ready for some sort of half-expected rapture are chilled, and borne down for the time under all this load of real earth and water; but let these once pass out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to mythology.

It is not over the plain before Troy that the river now flows; its waters have edged away far towards the north, since the day that “divine Scamander” (whom the gods call Xanthus) went down to do battle for Ilion, “with Mars, and Phoebus, and Latona, and Diana glorying in her arrows, and Venus the lover of smiles.”

And now, when I was vexed at the migration of Scamander, and the total loss or absorption of poor dear Simois, how happily Methley reminded me that Homer himself had warned us of some such changes! The Greeks in beginning their wall had neglected the hecatombs due to the gods, and so after the fall of Troy Apollo turned the paths of the rivers that flow from Ida, and sent them flooding over the wall, till all the beach was smooth and free from the unhallowed works of the Greeks. It is true I see now, on looking to the passage, that Neptune, when the work of destruction was done, turned back the rivers to their ancient ways:

“ . . . ποταμους δ᾽ ετρεψε νεεσθαι
Καρ᾽ ροον ήπερ προσθεν ιεν καλλιρροον ὑδωρ,”

but their old channels passing through that light pervious soil would have been lost in the nine days’ flood, and perhaps the god, when he willed to bring back the rivers to their ancient beds, may have done his work but ill: it is easier, they say, to destroy than it is to restore.

We took to our horses again, and went southward towards the very plain between Troy and the tents of the Greeks, but we rode by a line at some distance from the shore. Whether it was that the lay of the ground hindered my view towards the sea, or that I was all intent upon Ida, or whether my mind was in vacancy, or whether, as is most like, I had strayed from the Dardan plains all back to gentle England, there is now no knowing, nor caring, but it was not quite suddenly indeed, but rather, as it were, in the swelling and falling of a single wave, that the reality of that very sea-view, which had bounded the sight of the Greeks, now visibly acceded to me, and rolled full in upon my brain. Conceive how deeply that eternal coastline, that fixed horizon, those island rocks, must have graven their images upon the minds of the Grecian warriors by the time that they had reached the ninth year of the siege! conceive the strength, and the fanciful beauty, of the speeches with which a whole army of imagining men must have told their weariness, and how the sauntering chiefs must have whelmed that daily, daily scene with their deep Ionian curses!

And now it was that my eyes were greeted with a delightful surprise. Whilst we were at Constantinople, Methley and I had pored over the map together. We agreed that whatever may have been the exact site of Troy, the Grecian camp must have been nearly opposite to the space betwixt the islands of Imbros and Tenedos,

“Μεσσηγυς Τενεδοιο και Ιμβρου παιπαλοεσσης,”

but Methley reminded me of a passage in the Iliad in which Neptune is represented as looking at the scene of action before Ilion from above the island of Samothrace. Now Samothrace, according to the map, appeared to be not only out of all seeing distance from the Troad, but to be entirely shut out from it by the intervening Imbros, which is a larger island, stretching its length right athwart the line of sight from Samothrace to Troy. Piously allowing that the dread Commoter of our globe might have seen all mortal doings, even from the depth of his own cerulean kingdom, I still felt that if a station were to be chosen from which to see the fight, old Homer, so material in his ways of thought, so averse from all haziness and overreaching, would have meant to give the god for his station some spot within reach of men’s eyes from the plains of Troy. I think that this testing of the poet’s words by map and compass may have shaken a little of my faith in the completeness of his knowledge. Well, now I had come; there to the south was Tenedos, and here at my side was Imbros, all right, and according to the map, but aloft over Imbros, aloft in a far-away heaven, was Samothrace, the watch-tower of Neptune!

So Homer had appointed it, and so it was; the map was correct enough, but could not, like Homer, convey the whole truth. Thus vain and false are the mere human surmises and doubts which clash with Homeric writ!

Nobody whose mind had not been reduced to the most deplorable logical condition could look upon this beautiful congruity betwixt the Iliad and the material world and yet bear to suppose that the poet may have learned the features of the coast from mere hearsay; now then, I believed; now I knew that Homer had passed along here, that this vision of Samothrace over-towering the nearer island was common to him and to me.

After a journey of some few days by the route of Adramiti and Pergamo we reached Smyrna. The letters which Methley here received obliged him to return to England.

CHAPTER V
INFIDEL SMYRNA

Smyrna, or Giaour Izmir, “Infidel Smyrna,” as the Mussulmans call it, is the main point of commercial contact betwixt Europe and Asia. You are there surrounded by the people, and the confused customs of many and various nations; you see the fussy European adopting the East, and calming his restlessness with the long Turkish “pipe of tranquillity”; you see Jews offering services, and receiving blows; [50] on one side you have a fellow whose dress and beard would give you a good idea of the true Oriental, if it were not for the gobe-mouche expression of countenance with which he is swallowing an article in the National; and there, just by, is a genuine Osmanlee, smoking away with all the majesty of a sultan, but before you have time to admire sufficiently his tranquil dignity, and his soft Asiatic repose, the poor old fellow is ruthlessly “run down” by an English midshipman, who had set sail on a Smyrna hack. Such are the incongruities of the “infidel city” at ordinary times; but when I was there, our friend Carrigaholt [51] had imported himself and his oddities as an accession to the other and inferior wonders of Smyrna.

I was sitting alone in my room one day at Constantinople, when I heard Methley approaching my door with shouts of laughter and welcome, and presently I recognised that peculiar cry by which our friend Carrigaholt expresses his emotions; he soon explained to us the final causes by which the fates had worked out their wonderful purpose of bringing him to Constantinople. He was always, you know, very fond of sailing, but he had got into such sad scrapes (including, I think, a lawsuit) on account of his last yacht, that he took it into his head to have a cruise in a merchant vessel, so he went to Liverpool, and looked through the craft lying ready to sail, till he found a smart schooner that perfectly suited his taste. The destination of the vessel was the last thing he thought of; and when he was told that she was bound for Constantinople, he merely assented to that as a part of the arrangement to which he had no objection. As soon as the vessel had sailed, the hapless passenger discovered that his skipper carried on board an enormous wife, with an inquiring mind and an irresistible tendency to impart her opinions. She looked upon her guest as upon a piece of waste intellect that ought to be carefully tilled. She tilled him accordingly. If the dons at Oxford could have seen poor Carrigaholt thus absolutely “attending lectures” in the Bay of Biscay, they would surely have thought him sufficiently punished for all the wrongs he did them whilst he was preparing himself under their care for the other and more boisterous University. The voyage did not last more than six or eight weeks, and the philosophy inflicted on Carrigaholt was not entirely fatal to him; certainly he was somewhat emaciated, and, for aught I know, he may have subscribed somewhat too largely to the “Feminine-right-of-reason Society”; but it did not appear that his health had been seriously affected. There was a scheme on foot, it would seem, for taking the passenger back to England in the same schooner—a scheme, in fact, for keeping him perpetually afloat, and perpetually saturated with arguments; but when Carrigaholt found himself ashore, and remembered that the skipperina (who had imprudently remained on board) was not there to enforce her suggestions, he was open to the hints of his servant (a very sharp fellow), who arranged a plan for escaping, and finally brought off his master to Giuseppini’s hotel.

Our friend afterwards went by sea to Smyrna, and there he now was in his glory. He had a good, or at all events a gentleman-like, judgment in matters of taste, and as his great object was to surround himself with all that his fancy could dictate, he lived in a state of perpetual negotiation. He was for ever on the point of purchasing, not only the material productions of the place, but all sorts of such fine ware as “intelligence,” “fidelity,” and so on. He was most curious, however, as the purchaser of the “affections.” Sometimes he would imagine that he had a marital aptitude, and his fancy would sketch a graceful picture, in which he appeared reclining on a divan, with a beautiful Greek woman fondly couched at his feet, and soothing him with the witchery of her guitar. Having satisfied himself with the ideal picture thus created, he would pass into action; the guitar he would buy instantly, and would give such intimations of his wish to be wedded to a Greek as could not fail to produce great excitement in the families of the beautiful Smyrniotes. Then again (and just in time perhaps to save him from the yoke) his dream would pass away, and another would come in its stead; he would suddenly feel the yearnings of a father’s love, and willing by force of gold to transcend all natural preliminaries, he would issue instructions for the purchase of some dutiful child that could be warranted to love him as a parent. Then at another time he would be convinced that the attachment of menials might satisfy the longings of his affectionate heart, and thereupon he would give orders to his slave-merchant for something in the way of eternal fidelity. You may well imagine that this anxiety of Carrigaholt to purchase not only the scenery, but the many dramatis personæ belonging to his dreams, with all their goodness and graces complete, necessarily gave an immense stimulus to the trade and intrigue of Smyrna, and created a demand for human virtues which the moral resources of the place were totally inadequate to supply. Every day after breakfast this lover of the good and the beautiful held a levee, which was often exceedingly amusing. In his ante-room there would be not only the sellers of pipes and slippers and shawls, and suchlike Oriental merchandise; not only embroiderers and cunning workmen patiently striving to realise his visions of Albanian dresses; not only the servants offering for places, and the slave-dealer tendering his sable ware; but there would be the Greek master, waiting to teach his pupil the grammar of the soft Ionian tongue, in which he was to delight the wife of his imagination; and the music-master, who was to teach him some sweet replies to the anticipated sounds of the fancied guitar; and then, above all, and proudly eminent with undisputed preference of entrée, and fraught with the mysterious tidings on which the realisation of the whole dream might depend, was the mysterious match-maker, [54] enticing and postponing the suitor, yet ever keeping alive in his soul the love of that pictured virtue, whose beauty (unseen by eyes) was half revealed to the imagination.

You would have thought that this practical dreaming must have soon brought Carrigaholt to a bad end, but he was in much less danger than you would suppose; for besides that the new visions of happiness almost always came in time to counteract the fatal completion of the preceding scheme, his high breeding and his delicately sensitive taste almost always came to his aid at times when he was left without any other protection; and the efficacy of these qualities in keeping a man out of harm’s way is really immense. In all baseness and imposture there is a coarse, vulgar spirit, which, however artfully concealed for a time, must sooner or later show itself in some little circumstance sufficiently plain to occasion an instant jar upon the minds of those whose taste is lively and true. To such men a shock of this kind, disclosing the ugliness of a cheat, is more effectively convincing than any mere proofs could be.

Thus guarded from isle to isle, and through Greece, and through Albania, this practical Plato with a purse in his hand, carried on his mad chase after the good and the beautiful, and yet returned in safety to his home. But now, poor fellow! the lowly grave, that is the end of men’s romantic hopes, has closed over all his rich fancies, and all his high aspirations; he is utterly married! No more hope, no more change for him—no more relays—he must go on Vetturini-wise to the appointed end of his journey!

Smyrna, I think, may be called the chief town and capital of the Grecian race, against which you will be cautioned so carefully as soon as you touch the Levant. You will say that I ought not to confound as one people the Greeks living under a constitutional Government with the unfortunate Rayahs who “groan under the Turkish yoke,” but I can’t see that political events have hitherto produced any strongly marked difference of character. If I could venture to rely (which I feel that I cannot at all do) upon my own observation, I should tell you that there was more heartiness and strength in the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire than in those of the new kingdom. The truth is, that there is a greater field for commercial enterprise, and even for Greek ambition, under the Ottoman sceptre, than is to be found in the dominions of Otho. Indeed the people, by their frequent migrations from the limits of the constitutional kingdom to the territories of the Porte, seem to show that, on the whole, they prefer “groaning under the Turkish yoke” to the honour of “being the only true source of legitimate power” in their own land.

For myself, I love the race; in spite of all their vices, and even in spite of all their meannesses, I remember the blood that is in them, and still love the Greeks. The Osmanlees are, of course, by nature, by religion, and by politics, the strong foes of the Hellenic people; and as the Greeks, poor fellows! happen to be a little deficient in some of the virtues which facilitate the transaction of commercial business (such as veracity, fidelity, etc.), it naturally follows that they are highly unpopular with the European merchants. Now these are the persons through whom, either directly or indirectly, is derived the greater part of the information which you gather in the Levant, and therefore you must make up your mind to hear an almost universal and unbroken testimony against the character of the people whose ancestors invented virtue. And strange to say, the Greeks themselves do not attempt to disturb this general unanimity of opinion by any dissent on their part. Question a Greek on the subject, and he will tell you at once that the people are traditori, and will then, perhaps, endeavour to shake off his fair share of the imputation by asserting that his father had been dragoman to some foreign embassy, and that he (the son), therefore, by the law of nations, had ceased to be Greek.

“E dunque no siete traditore?”

“Possibile, signor, ma almeno Io no sono Greco.”

Not even the diplomatic representatives of the Hellenic kingdom are free from the habit of depreciating their brethren. I recollect that at one of the ports in Syria a Greek vessel was rather unfairly kept in quarantine by order of the Board of Health, which consisted entirely of Europeans. A consular agent from the kingdom of Greece had lately hoisted his flag in the town, and the captain of the vessel drew up a remonstrance, which he requested his consul to present to the Board.

“Now, is this reasonable?” said the consul; “is it reasonable that I should place myself in collision with all the principal European gentlemen of the place for the sake of you, a Greek?” The skipper was greatly vexed at the failure of his application, but he scarcely even questioned the justice of the ground which his consul had taken. Well, it happened some time afterwards that I found myself at the same port, having gone thither with the view of embarking for the port of Syra. I was anxious, of course, to elude as carefully as possible the quarantine detentions which threatened me on my arrival, and hearing that the Greek consul had a brother who was a man in authority at Syra, I got myself presented to the former, and took the liberty of asking him to give me such a letter of introduction to his relative at Syra as might possibly have the effect of shortening the term of my quarantine. He acceded to this request with the utmost kindness and courtesy; but when he replied to my thanks by saying that “in serving an Englishman he was doing no more than his strict duty commanded,” not even my gratitude could prevent me from calling to mind his treatment of the poor captain who had the misfortune of not being an alien in blood to his consul and appointed protector.

I think that the change which has taken place in the character of the Greeks has been occasioned, in great measure, by the doctrines and practice of their religion. The Greek Church has animated the Muscovite peasant, and inspired him with hopes and ideas which, however humble, are still better than none at all; but the faith, and the forms, and the strange ecclesiastical literature which act so advantageously upon the mere clay of the Russian serf, seem to hang like lead upon the ethereal spirit of the Greek. Never in any part of the world have I seen religious performances so painful to witness as those of the Greeks. The horror, however, with which one shudders at their worship is attributable, in some measure, to the mere effect of costume. In all the Ottoman dominions, and very frequently too in the kingdom of Otho, the Greeks wear turbans or other head-dresses, and shave their heads, leaving only a rat’s-tail at the crown of the head; they of course keep themselves covered within doors as well as abroad, and they never remove their headgear merely on account of being in a church; but when the Greek stops to worship at his proper shrine, then, and then only, he always uncovers; and as you see him thus with shaven skull and savage tail depending from his crown, kissing a thing of wood and glass, and cringing with base prostrations and apparent terror before a miserable picture, you see superstition in a shape which, outwardly at least, is sadly abject and repulsive.

The fasts, too, of the Greek Church produce an ill effect upon the character of the people, for they are not a mere farce, but are carried to such an extent as to bring about a real mortification of the flesh; the febrile irritation of the frame operating in conjunction with the depression of the spirits occasioned by abstinence, will so far answer the objects of the rite, as to engender some religious excitement, but this is of a morbid and gloomy character, and it seems to be certain, that along with the increase of sanctity, there comes a fiercer desire for the perpetration of dark crimes. The number of murders committed during Lent is greater, I am told, than at any other time of the year. A man under the influence of a bean dietary (for this is the principal food of the Greeks during their fasts) will be in an apt humour for enriching the shrine of his saint, and passing a knife through his next-door neighbour. The moneys deposited upon the shrines are appropriated by priests; the priests are married men, and have families to provide for; they “take the good with the bad,” and continue to recommend fasts.

Then, too, the Greek Church enjoins her followers to keep holy such a vast number of saints’ days as practically to shorten the lives of the people very materially. I believe that one-third out of the number of days in the year are “kept holy,” or rather, kept stupid, in honour of the saints; no great portion of the time thus set apart is spent in religious exercises, and the people don’t betake themselves to any such animating pastimes as might serve to strengthen the frame, or invigorate the mind, or exalt the taste. On the contrary, the saints’ days of the Greeks in Smyrna are passed in the same manner as the Sabbaths of well-behaved Protestant housemaids in London—that is to say, in a steady and serious contemplation of street scenery. The men perform this duty at the doors of their houses, the women at the windows, which the custom of Greek towns has so decidedly appropriated to them as the proper station of their sex, that a man would be looked upon as utterly effeminate if he ventured to choose that situation for the keeping of the saints’ days. I was present one day at a treaty for the hire of some apartments at Smyrna, which was carried on between Carrigaholt and the Greek woman to whom the rooms belonged. Carrigaholt objected that the windows commanded no view of the street. Immediately the brow of the majestic matron clouded, and with all the scorn of a Spartan mother she coolly asked Carrigaholt, and said, “Art thou a tender damsel that thou wouldst sit and gaze from windows?” The man whom she addressed, however, had not gone to Greece with any intention of placing himself under the laws of Lycurgus, and was not to be diverted from his views by a Spartan rebuke, so he took care to find himself windows after his own heart, and there, I believe, for many a month, he kept the saints’ days, and all the days intervening, after the fashion of Grecian women.

Oh! let me be charitable to all who write, and to all who lecture, and to all who preach, since even I, a layman not forced to write at all, can hardly avoid chiming in with some tuneful cant! I have had the heart to talk about the pernicious effects of the Greek holidays, to which I owe some of my most beautiful visions! I will let the words stand, as a humbling proof that I am subject to that immutable law which compels a man with a pen in his hand to be uttering every now and then some sentiment not his own. It seems as though the power of expressing regrets and desires by written symbols were coupled with a condition that the writer should from time to time express the regrets and desires of other people; as though, like a French peasant under the old régime, one were bound to perform a certain amount of work upon the public highways. I rebel as stoutly as I can against this horrible corvée. I try not to deceive you—I try to set down the thoughts which are fresh within me, and not to pretend any wishes, or griefs, which I do not really feel; but no sooner do I cease from watchfulness in this regard, than my right hand is, as it were, seized by some false angel, and even now, you see, I have been forced to put down such words and sentences as I ought to have written if really and truly I had wished to disturb the saints’ days of the beautiful Smyrniotes!

Which, Heaven forbid! for as you move through the narrow streets of the city at these times of festival, the transom-shaped windows suspended over your head on either side are filled with the beautiful descendants of the old Ionian race; all (even yonder empress that sits throned at the window of that humblest mud cottage) are attired with seeming magnificence; their classic heads are crowned with scarlet, and loaded with jewels or coins of gold, the whole wealth of the wearer; [61] their features are touched with a savage pencil, which hardens the outline of eyes and eyebrows, and lends an unnatural fire to the stern, grave looks with which they pierce your brain. Endure their fiery eyes as best you may, and ride on slowly and reverently, for facing you from the side of the transom, that looks longwise through the street, you see the one glorious shape transcendent in its beauty; you see the massive braid of hair as it catches a touch of light on its jetty surface, and the broad, calm, angry brow; the large black eyes, deep set, and self-relying like the eyes of a conqueror, with their rich shadows of thought lying darkly around them; you see the thin fiery nostril, and the bold line of the chin and throat disclosing all the fierceness, and all the pride, passion, and power that can live along with the rare womanly beauty of those sweetly turned lips. But then there is a terrible stillness in this breathing image; it seems like the stillness of a savage that sits intent and brooding, day by day, upon some one fearful scheme of vengeance, but yet more like it seems to the stillness of an Immortal, whose will must be known, and obeyed without sign or speech. Bow down!—Bow down and adore the young Persephonie, transcendent Queen of Shades!

CHAPTER VI
GREEK MARINERS

I sailed from Smyrna in the Amphitrite, a Greek brigantine, which was confidently said to be bound for the coast of Syria; but I knew that this announcement was not to be relied upon with positive certainty, for the Greek mariners are practically free from the stringency of ship’s papers, and where they will, there they go. However, I had the whole of the cabin for myself and my attendant, Mysseri, subject only to the society of the captain at the hour of dinner. Being at ease in this respect, being furnished too with plenty of books, and finding an unfailing source of interest in the thorough Greekness of my captain and my crew, I felt less anxious than most people would have been about the probable length of the cruise. I knew enough of Greek navigation to be sure that our vessel would cling to earth like a child to its mother’s knee, and that I should touch at many an isle before I set foot upon the Syrian coast; but I had no invidious preference for Europe, Asia, or Africa, and I felt that I could defy the winds to blow me upon a coast that was blank and void of interest. My patience was extremely useful to me, for the cruise altogether endured some forty days, and that in the midst of winter.

According to me, the most interesting of all the Greeks (male Greeks) are the mariners, because their pursuits and their social condition are so nearly the same as those of their famous ancestors. You will say, that the occupation of commerce must have smoothed down the salience of their minds; and this would be so perhaps, if their mercantile affairs were conducted according to the fixed business-like routine of Europeans; but the ventures of the Greeks are surrounded by such a multitude of imagined dangers (and from the absence of regular marts, in which the true value of merchandise can be ascertained), are so entirely speculative, and besides, are conducted in a manner so wholly determined upon by the wayward fancies and wishes of the crew, that they belong to enterprise rather than to industry, and are very far indeed from tending to deaden any freshness of character.

The vessels in which war and piracy were carried on during the years of the Greek Revolution became merchantmen at the end of the war; but the tactics of the Greeks, as naval warriors, were so exceedingly cautious, and their habits as commercial mariners are so wild, that the change has been more slight than you might imagine. The first care of Greeks (Greek Rayahs) when they undertake a shipping enterprise is to procure for their vessel the protection of some European power. This is easily managed by a little intriguing with the dragoman of one of the embassies at Constantinople, and the craft soon glories in the ensign of Russia, or the dazzling Tricolor, or the Union Jack. Thus, to the great delight of her crew, she enters upon the ocean world with a flaring lie at her peak, but the appearance of the vessel does no discredit to the borrowed flag; she is frail indeed, but is gracefully built, and smartly rigged; she always carries guns, and, in short, gives good promise of mischief and speed.

The privileges attached to the vessel and her crew by virtue of the borrowed flag are so great, as to imply a liberty wider even than that which is often enjoyed in our more strictly civilised countries, so that there is no pretence for saying that the development of the true character belonging to Greek mariners is prevented by the dominion of the Ottoman. These men are free, too, from the power of the great capitalist, whose sway is more withering than despotism itself to the enterprises of humble venturers. The capital employed is supplied by those whose labour is to render it productive. The crew receive no wages, but have all a share in the venture, and in general, I believe, they are the owners of the whole freight. They choose a captain, to whom they entrust just power enough to keep the vessel on her course in fine weather, but not quite enough for a gale of wind; they also elect a cook and a mate. The cook whom we had on board was particularly careful about the ship’s reckoning, and when under the influence of the keen sea-breezes we grew fondly expectant of an instant dinner, the great author of pilafs would be standing on deck with an ancient quadrant in his hands, calmly affecting to take an observation. But then to make up for this the captain would be exercising a controlling influence over the soup, so that all in the end went well. Our mate was a Hydriot, a native of that island rock which grows nothing but mariners and mariners’ wives. His character seemed to be exactly that which is generally attributed to the Hydriot race; he was fierce, and gloomy, and lonely in his ways. One of his principal duties seemed to be that of acting as counter-captain, or leader of the opposition, denouncing the first symptoms of tyranny, and protecting even the cabin-boy from oppression. Besides this, when things went smoothly he would begin to prognosticate evil, in order that his more lighthearted comrades might not be puffed up with the seeming good fortune of the moment.

It seemed to me that the personal freedom of these sailors, who own no superiors except those of their own choice, is as like as may be to that of their seafaring ancestors. And even in their mode of navigation they have admitted no such an entire change as you would suppose probable. It is true that they have so far availed themselves of modern discoveries as to look to the compass instead of the stars, and that they have superseded the immortal gods of their forefathers by St. Nicholas in his glass case, [66] but they are not yet so confident either in their needle, or their saint, as to love an open sea, and they still hug their shores as fondly as the Argonauts of old. Indeed, they have a most unsailor-like love for the land, and I really believe that in a gale of wind they would rather have a rock-bound coast on their lee than no coast at all. According to the notions of an English seaman, this kind of navigation would soon bring the vessel on which it might be practised to an evil end. The Greek, however, is unaccountably successful in escaping the consequences of being “jammed in,” as it is called, upon a lee-shore.

These seamen, like their forefathers, rely upon no winds unless they are right astern or on the quarter; they rarely go on a wind if it blows at all fresh, and if the adverse breeze approaches to a gale, they at once fumigate St. Nicholas, and put up the helm. The consequence, of course, is that under the ever-varying winds of the Ægean they are blown about in the most whimsical manner. I used to think that Ulysses, with his ten years’ voyage, had taken his time in making Ithaca, but my experience in Greek navigation soon made me understand that he had had, in point of fact, a pretty good “average passage.”

Such are now the mariners of the Ægean: free, equal amongst themselves, navigating the seas of their forefathers with the same heroic, and yet childlike, spirit of venture, the same half-trustful reliance upon heavenly aid, they are the liveliest images of true old Greeks that time and the new religions have spared to us.

With one exception, our crew were “a solemn company,” [67] and yet, sometimes, when all things went well, they would relax their austerity, and show a disposition to fun, or rather to quiet humour. When this happened, they invariably had recourse to one of their number, who went by the name of “Admiral Nicolou.” He was an amusing fellow, the poorest, I believe, and the least thoughtful of the crew, but full of rich humour. His oft-told story of the events by which he had gained the sobriquet of “Admiral” never failed to delight his hearers, and when he was desired to repeat it for my benefit, the rest of the crew crowded round with as much interest as if they were listening to the tale for the first time. A number of Greek brigs and brigantines were at anchor in the bay of Beyrout. A festival of some kind, particularly attractive to the sailors, was going on in the town, and whether with or without leave I know not, but the crews of all the craft, except that of Nicolou, had gone ashore. On board his vessel, however, which carried dollars, there was, it would seem, a more careful, or more influential captain, who was able to enforce his determination that one man, at least, should be left on board. Nicolou’s good nature was with him so powerful an impulse, that he could not resist the delight of volunteering to stay with the vessel whilst his comrades went ashore. His proposal was accepted, and the crew and captain soon left him alone on the deck of his vessel. The sailors, gathering together from their several ships, were amusing themselves in the town, when suddenly there came down from betwixt the mountains one of those sudden hurricanes which sometimes occur in southern climes. Nicolou’s vessel, together with four of the craft which had been left unmanned, broke from her moorings, and all five of the vessels were carried out seaward. The town is on a salient point at the southern side of the bay, so that “that Admiral” was close under the eyes of the inhabitants and the shore-gone sailors when he gallantly drifted out at the head of his little fleet. If Nicolou could not entirely control the manœuvres of the squadron, there was at least no human power to divide his authority, and thus it was that he took rank as “Admiral.” Nicolou cut his cable, and thus for the time saved his vessel; for the rest of the fleet under his command were quickly wrecked, whilst “the Admiral” got away clear to the open sea. The violence of the squall soon passed off, but Nicolou felt that his chance of one day resigning his high duties as an admiral for the enjoyments of private life on the steadfast shore mainly depended upon his success in working the brig with his own hands, so after calling on his namesake, the saint (not for the first time, I take it), he got up some canvas, and took the helm: he became equal, he told us, to a score of Nicolous, and the vessel, as he said, was “manned with his terrors.” For two days, it seems, he cruised at large, but at last, either by his seamanship, or by the natural instinct of the Greek mariners for finding land, he brought his craft close to an unknown shore, that promised well for his purpose of running in the vessel; and he was preparing to give her a good berth on the beach, when he saw a gang of ferocious-looking fellows coming down to the point for which he was making. Poor Nicolou was a perfectly unlettered and untutored genius, and for that reason, perhaps, a keen listener to tales of terror. His mind had been impressed with some horrible legend of cannibalism, and he now did not doubt for a moment that the men awaiting him on the beach were the monsters at whom he had shuddered in the days of his childhood. The coast on which Nicolou was running his vessel was somewhere, I fancy, at the foot of the Anzairie Mountains, and the fellows who were preparing to give him a reception were probably very rough specimens of humanity. It is likely enough that they might have given themselves the trouble of putting “the Admiral” to death, for the purpose of simplifying their claim to the vessel and preventing litigation, but the notion of their cannibalism was of course utterly unfounded. Nicolou’s terror had, however, so graven the idea on his mind, that he could never afterwards dismiss it. Having once determined the character of his expectant hosts, the Admiral naturally thought that it would be better to keep their dinner waiting any length of time than to attend their feast in the character of a roasted Greek, so he put about his vessel, and tempted the deep once more. After a further cruise the lonely commander ran his vessel upon some rocks at another part of the coast, where she was lost with all her treasures, and Nicolou was but too glad to scramble ashore, though without one dollar in his girdle. These adventures seem flat enough as I repeat them, but the hero expressed his terrors by such odd terms of speech, and such strangely humorous gestures, that the story came from his lips with an unfailing zest, so that the crew, who had heard the tale so often, could still enjoy to their hearts’ content the rich fright of the Admiral, and still shuddered with unabated horror when he came to the loss of the dollars.

The power of listening to long stories (for which, by the bye, I am giving you large credit) is common, I fancy, to most sailors, and the Greeks have it to a high degree, for they can be perfectly patient under a narrative of two or three hours’ duration. These long stories are mostly founded upon Oriental topics, and in one of them I recognised with some alteration an old friend of the Arabian Nights. I inquired as to the source from which the story had been derived, and the crew all agreed that it had been handed down unwritten from Greek to Greek. Their account of the matter does not, perhaps, go very far towards showing the real origin of the tale; but when I afterwards took up the Arabian Nights, I became strongly impressed with a notion that they must have sprung from the brain of a Greek. It seems to me that these stories, whilst they disclose a complete and habitual knowledge of things Asiatic, have about them so much of freshness and life, so much of the stirring and volatile European character, that they cannot have owed their conception to a mere Oriental, who for creative purposes is a thing dead and dry—a mental mummy, that may have been a live king just after the Flood, but has since lain balmed in spice. At the time of the Caliphat the Greek race was familiar enough to Baghdad: they were the merchants, the pedlars, the barbers, and intriguers-general of south-western Asia, and therefore the Oriental materials with which the Arabian tales were wrought must have been completely at the command of the inventive people to whom I would attribute their origin.

We were nearing the isle of Cyprus when there arose half a gale of wind, with a heavy chopping sea. My Greek seamen considered that the weather amounted not to a half, but to an integral gale of wind at the very least, so they put up the helm, and scudded for twenty hours. When we neared the mainland of Anadoli the gale ceased, and a favourable breeze sprung up, which brought us off Cyprus once more. Afterwards the wind changed again, but we were still able to lay our course by sailing close-hauled.

We were at length in such a position, that by holding on our course for about half an hour we should get under the lee of the island and find ourselves in smooth water, but the wind had been gradually freshening; it now blew hard, and there was a heavy sea running.

As the grounds for alarm arose, the crew gathered together in one close group; they stood pale and grim under their hooded capotes like monks awaiting a massacre, anxiously looking by turns along the pathway of the storm and then upon each other, and then upon the eye of the captain who stood by the helmsman. Presently the Hydriot came aft, more moody than ever, the bearer of fierce remonstrance against the continuing of the struggle; he received a resolute answer, and still we held our course. Soon there came a heavy sea, that caught the bow of the brigantine as she lay jammed in betwixt the waves; she bowed her head low under the waters, and shuddered through all her timbers, then gallantly stood up again over the striving sea, with bowsprit entire. But where were the crew? It was a crew no longer, but rather a gathering of Greek citizens; the shout of the seamen was changed for the murmuring of the people—the spirit of the old Demos was alive. The men came aft in a body, and loudly asked that the vessel should be put about, and that the storm be no longer tempted. Now then, for speeches. The captain, his eyes flashing fire, his frame all quivering with emotion—wielding his every limb, like another and a louder voice, pours forth the eloquent torrent of his threats and his reasons, his commands and his prayers; he promises, he vows, he swears that there is safety in holding on—safety, if Greeks will be brave! The men hear and are moved; but the gale rouses itself once more, and again the raging sea comes trampling over the timbers that are the life of all. The fierce Hydriot advances one step nearer to the captain, and the angry growl of the people goes floating down the wind, but they listen; they waver once more, and once more resolve, then waver again, thus doubtfully hanging between the terrors of the storm and the persuasion of glorious speech, as though it were the Athenian that talked, and Philip of Macedon that thundered on the weather-bow.

Brave thoughts winged on Grecian words gained their natural mastery over terror; the brigantine held on her course, and reached smooth water at last. I landed at Limasol, the westernmost port of Cyprus, leaving the vessel to sail for Larnaca, where she was to remain for some days.

CHAPTER VII
CYPRUS

There was a Greek at Limasol who hoisted his flag as an English vice-consul, and he insisted upon my accepting his hospitality. With some difficulty, and chiefly by assuring him that I could not delay my departure beyond an early hour in the afternoon, I induced him to allow my dining with his family instead of banqueting all alone with the representative of my Sovereign in consular state and dignity. The lady of the house, it seemed, had never sat at table with a European. She was very shy about the matter, and tried hard to get out of the scrape, but the husband, I fancy, reminded her that she was theoretically an Englishwoman, by virtue of the flag that waved over her roof, and that she was bound to show her nationality by sitting at meat with me. Finding herself inexorably condemned to bear with the dreaded gaze of European eyes, she tried to save her innocent children from the hard fate awaiting herself, but I obtained that all of them (and I think there were four or five) should sit at the table. You will meet with abundance of stately receptions and of generous hospitality, too, in the East, but rarely, very rarely in those regions (or even, so far as I know, in any part of southern Europe) does one gain an opportunity of seeing the familiar and indoor life of the people.

This family party of the good consul’s (or rather of mine, for I originated the idea, though he furnished the materials) went off very well. The mamma was shy at first, but she veiled the awkwardness which she felt by affecting to scold her children, who had all of them, I think, immortal names—names too which they owed to tradition, and certainly not to any classical enthusiasm of their parents. Every instant I was delighted by some such phrases as these, “Themistocles, my love, don’t fight.”—“Alcibiades, can’t you sit still?”—“Socrates, put down the cup.”—“Oh, fie! Aspasia don’t. Oh! don’t be naughty!” It is true that the names were pronounced Socrāhtie, Aspāhsie—that is, according to accent, and not according to quantity—but I suppose it is scarcely now to be doubted that they were so sounded in ancient times.

To me it seems, that of all the lands I know (you will see in a minute how I connect this piece of prose with the Isle of Cyprus), there is none in which mere wealth, mere unaided wealth, is held half so cheaply; none in which a poor devil of a millionaire, without birth, or ability, occupies so humble a place as in England. My Greek host and I were sitting together, I think, upon the roof of the house (for that is the lounging-place in Eastern climes), when the former assumed a serious air, and intimated a wish to converse upon the subject of the British Constitution, with which he assured me that he was thoroughly acquainted. He presently, however, informed me that there was one anomalous circumstance attended upon the practical working of our political system which he had never been able to hear explained in a manner satisfactory to himself. From the fact of his having found a difficulty in his subject, I began to think that my host might really know rather more of it than his announcement of a thorough knowledge had led me to expect. I felt interested at being about to hear from the lips of an intelligent Greek, quite remote from the influence of European opinions, what might seem to him the most astonishing and incomprehensible of all those results which have followed from the action of our political institutions. The anomaly, the only anomaly which had been detected by the vice-consular wisdom, consisted in the fact that Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been the Prime Minister of England! I gravely tried to throw some light upon the mysterious causes that had kept the worthy Israelite out of the Cabinet, but I think I could see that my explanation was not satisfactory. Go and argue with the flies of summer that there is a power divine, yet greater than the sun in the heavens, but never dare hope to convince the people of the south that there is any other God than Gold.

My intended journey was to the site of the Paphian temple. I take no antiquarian interest in ruins, and care little about them, unless they are either striking in themselves, or else serve to mark some spot on which my fancy loves to dwell. I knew that the ruins of Paphos were scarcely, if at all, discernible, but there was a will and a longing more imperious than mere curiosity that drove me thither.

For this just then was my pagan soul’s desire—that (not forfeiting my inheritance for the life to come) it had yet been given me to live through this world to live a favoured mortal under the old Olympian dispensation—to speak out my resolves to the listening Jove, and hear him answer with approving thunder—to be blessed with divine councils from the lips of Pallas Athēnie—to believe—ay, only to believe—to believe for one rapturous moment that in the gloomy depths of the grove, by the mountain’s side, there were some leafy pathway that crisped beneath the glowing sandal of Aphrodētie—Aphrodētie, not coldly disdainful of even a mortal’s love! And this vain, heathenish longing of mine was father to the thought of visiting the scene of the ancient worship.

The isle is beautiful. From the edge of the rich, flowery fields on which I trod to the midway sides of the snowy Olympus, the ground could only here and there show an abrupt crag, or a high straggling ridge that up-shouldered itself from out of the wilderness of myrtles, and of the thousand bright-leaved shrubs that twined their arms together in lovesome tangles. The air that came to my lips was warm and fragrant as the ambrosial breath of the goddess, infecting me, not (of course) with a faith in the old religion of the isle, but with a sense and apprehension of its mystic power—a power that was still to be obeyed—obeyed by me, for why otherwise did I toil on with sorry horses to “where, for her, the hundred altars glowed with Arabian incense, and breathed with the fragrance of garlands ever fresh”? [77]

I passed a sadly disenchanting night in the cabin of a Greek priest—not a priest of the goddess, but of the Greek Church; there was but one humble room, or rather shed, for man, and priest, and beast. The next morning I reached Baffa (Paphos), a village not far distant from the site of the temple. There was a Greek husbandman there who (not for emolument, but for the sake of the protection and dignity which it afforded) had got leave from the man at Limasol to hoist his flag as a sort of deputy-provisionary-sub-vice-pro-acting-consul of the British sovereign: the poor fellow instantly changed his Greek headgear for the cap of consular dignity, and insisted upon accompanying me to the ruins. I would not have stood this if I could have felt the faintest gleam of my yesterday’s pagan piety, but I had ceased to dream, and had nothing to dread from any new disenchanters.

The ruins (the fragments of one or two prostrate pillars) lie upon a promontory, bare and unmystified by the gloom of surrounding groves. My Greek friend in his consular cap stood by, respectfully waiting to see what turn my madness would take, now that I had come at last into the presence of the old stones. If you have no taste for research, and can’t affect to look for inscriptions, there is some awkwardness in coming to the end of a merely sentimental pilgrimage; when the feeling which impelled you has gone, you have nothing to do but to laugh the thing off as well as you can, and, by the bye, it is not a bad plan to turn the conversation (or rather, allow the natives to turn it) towards the subject of hidden treasures. This is a topic on which they will always speak with eagerness, and if they can fancy that you, too, take an interest in such matters, they will not only think you perfectly sane, but will begin to give you credit for some more than human powers of forcing the obscure earth to show you its hoards of gold.

When we returned to Baffa, the vice-consul seized a club with the quietly determined air of a brave man resolved to do some deed of note. He went into the yard adjoining his cottage, where there were some thin, thoughtful, canting cocks, and serious, low-church-looking hens, respectfully listening, and chickens of tender years so well brought up, as scarcely to betray in their conduct the careless levity of youth. The vice-consul stood for a moment quite calm, collecting his strength; then suddenly he rushed into the midst of the congregation, and began to deal death and destruction on all sides. He spared neither sex nor age; the dead and dying were immediately removed from the field of slaughter, and in less than an hour, I think, they were brought on the table, deeply buried in mounds of snowy rice.

My host was in all respects a fine, generous fellow. I could not bear the idea of impoverishing him by my visit, and I consulted my faithful Mysseri, who not only assured me that I might safely offer money to the vice-consul, but recommended that I should give no more to him than to “the other,” meaning any other peasant. I felt, however, that there was something about the man, besides the flag and the cap, which made me shrink from offering coin, and as I mounted my horse on departing I gave him the only thing fit for a present that I happened to have with me, a rather handsome clasp-dagger, brought from Vienna. The poor fellow was ineffably grateful, and I had some difficulty in tearing myself from out of the reach of his thanks. At last I gave him what I supposed to be the last farewell, and rode on, but I had not gained more than about a hundred yards when my host came bounding and shouting after me, with a goat’s-milk cheese in his hand, which he implored me to accept. In old times the shepherd of Theocritus, or (to speak less dishonestly) the shepherd of the “Poetæ Græci,” sung his best song; I in this latter age presented my best dagger, and both of us received the same rustic reward.

It had been known that I should return to Limasol, and when I arrived there I found that a noble old Greek had been hospitably plotting to have me for his guest. I willingly accepted his offer. The day of my arrival happened to be the birthday of my host, and in consequence of this there was a constant influx of visitors, who came to offer their congratulations. A few of these were men, but most of them were young, graceful girls. Almost all of them went through the ceremony with the utmost precision and formality; each in succession spoke her blessing, in the tone of a person repeating a set formula, then deferentially accepted the invitation to sit, partook of the proffered sweetmeats and the cold, glittering water, remained for a few minutes either in silence or engaged in very thin conversation, then arose, delivered a second benediction, followed by an elaborate farewell, and departed.

The bewitching power attributed at this day to the women of Cyprus is curious in connection with the worship of the sweet goddess, who called their isle her own. The Cypriote is not, I think, nearly so beautiful in face as the Ionian queens of Izmir, but she is tall, and slightly formed; there is a high-souled meaning and expression, a seeming consciousness of gentle empire, that speaks in the wavy line of the shoulder, and winds itself like Cytherea’s own cestus around the slender waist; then the richly-abounding hair (not enviously gathered together under the head-dress) descends the neck, and passes the waist in sumptuous braids. Of all other women with Grecian blood in their veins the costume is graciously beautiful, but these, the maidens of Limasol—their robes are more gently, more sweetly imagined, and fall like Julia’s cashmere in soft, luxurious folds. The common voice of the Levant allows that in face the women of Cyprus are less beautiful than their brilliant sisters of Smyrna; and yet, says the Greek, he may trust himself to one and all the bright cities of the Ægean, and may yet weigh anchor with a heart entire, but that so surely as he ventures upon the enchanted isle of Cyprus, so surely will he know the rapture or the bitterness of love. The charm, they say, owes its power to that which the people call the astonishing “politics” (πολιτικη) of the women, meaning, I fancy, their tact and their witching ways: the word, however, plainly fails to express one half of that which the speakers would say. I have smiled to hear the Greek, with all his plenteousness of fancy, and all the wealth of his generous language, yet vainly struggling to describe the ineffable spell which the Parisians dispose of in their own smart way by a summary “Je ne sçai quoi.”

I went to Larnaca, the chief city of the isle, and over the water at last to Beyrout.

CHAPTER VIII
LADY HESTER STANHOPE [82]

Beyrout on its land side is hemmed in by the Druses, who occupy all the neighbouring highlands.

Often enough I saw the ghostly images of the women with their exalted horns stalking through the streets, and I saw too in travelling the affrighted groups of the mountaineers as they fled before me, under the fear that my party might be a company of income-tax commissioners, or a press-gang enforcing the conscription for Mehemet Ali; but nearly all my knowledge of the people, except in regard of their mere costume and outward appearance, is drawn from books and despatches, to which I have the honour to refer you.

I received hospitable welcome at Beyrout from the Europeans as well as from the Syrian Christians, and I soon discovered that their standing topic of interest was the Lady Hester Stanhope, who lived in an old convent on the Lebanon range, at the distance of about a day’s journey from the town. The lady’s habit of refusing to see Europeans added the charm of mystery to a character which, even without that aid, was sufficiently distinguished to command attention.

Many years of Lady Hester’s early womanhood had been passed with Lady Chatham at Burton Pynsent, and during that inglorious period of the heroine’s life her commanding character, and (as they would have called it in the language of those days) her “condescending kindness” towards my mother’s family, had increased in them those strong feelings of respect and attachment which her rank and station alone would have easily won from people of the middle class. You may suppose how deeply the quiet women in Somersetshire must have been interested, when they slowly learned by vague and uncertain tidings that the intrepid girl who had been used to break their vicious horses for them was reigning in sovereignty over the wandering tribes of Western Asia! I know that her name was made almost as familiar to me in my childhood as the name of Robinson Crusoe—both were associated with the spirit of adventure; but whilst the imagined life of the castaway mariner never failed to seem glaringly real, the true story of the Englishwoman ruling over Arabs always sounded to me like fable. I never had heard, nor indeed, I believe, had the rest of the world ever heard, anything like a certain account of the heroine’s adventures; all I knew was, that in one of the drawers which were the delight of my childhood, along with attar of roses and fragrant wonders from Hindustan, there were letters carefully treasured, and trifling presents which I was taught to think valuable because they had come from the queen of the desert, who dwelt in tents, and reigned over wandering Arabs.

This subject, however, died away, and from the ending of my childhood up to the period of my arrival in the Levant, I had seldom even heard a mentioning of the Lady Hester Stanhope, but now, wherever I went, I was met by the name so familiar in sound, and yet so full of mystery from the vague, fairy-tale sort of idea which it brought to my mind; I heard it, too, connected with fresh wonders, for it was said that the woman was now acknowledged as an inspired being by the people of the mountains, and it was even hinted with horror that she claimed to be more than a prophet.

I felt at once that my mother would be sadly sorry to hear that I had been within a day’s ride of her early friend without offering to see her, and I therefore despatched a letter to the recluse, mentioning the maiden name of my mother (whose marriage was subsequent to Lady Hester’s departure), and saying that if there existed on the part of her ladyship any wish to hear of her old Somersetshire acquaintance, I should make a point of visiting her. My letter was sent by a foot-messenger, who was to take an unlimited time for his journey, so that it was not, I think, until either the third or the fourth day that the answer arrived. A couple of horsemen covered with mud suddenly dashed into the little court of the “locanda” in which I was staying, bearing themselves as ostentatiously as though they were carrying a cartel from the Devil to the Angel Michael: one of these (the other being his attendant) was an Italian by birth (though now completely orientalised), who lived in my lady’s establishment as doctor nominally, but practically as an upper servant; he presented me a very kind and appropriate letter of invitation.

It happened that I was rather unwell at this time, so that I named a more distant day for my visit than I should otherwise have done, and after all, I did not start at the time fixed. Whilst still remaining at Beyrout I received this letter, which certainly betrays no symptom of the pretensions to divine power which were popularly attributed to the writer:—

“Sir,—I hope I shall be disappointed in seeing you on Wednesday, for the late rains have rendered the river Damoor if not dangerous, at least very unpleasant to pass for a person who has been lately indisposed, for if the animal swims, you would be immerged in the waters. The weather will probably change after the 21st of the moon, and after a couple of days the roads and the river will be passable, therefore I shall expect you either Saturday or Monday.

“It will be a great satisfaction to me to have an opportunity of inquiring after your mother, who was a sweet, lovely girl when I knew her.—Believe me, sir, yours sincerely,

Hester Lucy Stanhope.”

Early one morning I started from Beyrout. There are no regularly established relays of horses in Syria, at least not in the line which I took, and you therefore hire your cattle for the whole journey, or at all events for your journey to some large town. Under these circumstances you have no occasion for a Tatar (whose principal utility consists in his power to compel the supply of horses). In other respects, the mode of travelling through Syria differs very little from that which I have described as prevailing in Turkey. I hired my horses and mules (for I had some of both) for the whole of the journey from Beyrout to Jerusalem. The owner of the beasts (who had a couple of fellows under him) was the most dignified member of my party; he was, indeed, a magnificent old man, and was called Shereef, or “holy”—a title of honour which, with the privilege of wearing the green turban, he well deserved, not only from the blood of the Prophet that flowed in his veins, but from the well-known sanctity of his life and the length of his blessed beard.

Mysseri, of course, still travelled with me, but the Arabic was not one of the seven languages which he spoke so perfectly, and I was therefore obliged to hire another interpreter. I had no difficulty in finding a proper man for the purpose—one Demetrius, or, as he was always called, Dthemetri, a native of Zante, who had been tossed about by fortune in all directions. He spoke the Arabic very well, and communicated with me in Italian. The man was a very zealous member of the Greek Church. He had been a tailor. He was as ugly as the devil, having a thoroughly Tatar countenance, which expressed the agony of his body or mind, as the case might be, in the most ludicrous manner imaginable. He embellished the natural caricature of his person by suspending about his neck and shoulders and waist quantities of little bundles and parcels, which he thought too valuable to be entrusted to the jerking of pack-saddles. The mule that fell to his lot on this journey every now and then, forgetting that his rider was a saint, and remembering that he was a tailor, took a quiet roll upon the ground, and stretched his limbs calmly and lazily, like a good man awaiting a sermon. Dthemetri never got seriously hurt, but the subversion and dislocation of his bundles made him for the moment a sad spectacle of ruin, and when he regained his legs, his wrath with the mule became very amusing. He always addressed the beast in language which implied that he, as a Christian and saint, had been personally insulted and oppressed by a Mahometan mule. Dthemetri, however, on the whole proved to be a most able and capital servant. I suspected him of now and then leading me out of my way in order that he might have the opportunity of visiting the shrine of a saint; and on one occasion, as you will see by and by, he was induced by religious motives to commit a gross breach of duty; but putting these pious faults out of the question (and they were faults of the right side), he was always faithful and true to me.

I left Saïde (the Sidon of ancient times) on my right, and about an hour, I think, before sunset began to ascend one of the many low hills of Lebanon. On the summit before me was a broad, grey mass of irregular building, which from its position, as well as from the gloomy blankness of its walls, gave the idea of a neglected fortress. It had, in fact, been a convent of great size, and like most of the religious houses in this part of the world, had been made strong enough for opposing an inert resistance to any mere casual band of assailants who might be unprovided with regular means of attack: this was the dwelling-place of the Chatham’s fiery granddaughter.

The aspect of the first court which I entered was such as to keep one in the idea of having to do with a fortress rather than a mere peaceable dwelling-place. A number of fierce-looking and ill-clad Albanian soldiers were hanging about the place, and striving to bear the curse of tranquillity as well as they could: two or three of them, I think, were smoking their tchibouques, but the rest of them were lying torpidly upon the flat stones, like the bodies of departed brigands. I rode on to an inner part of the building, and at last, quitting my horses, was conducted through a doorway that led me at once from an open court into an apartment on the ground floor. As I entered, an Oriental figure in male costume approached me from the farther end of the room with many and profound bows, but the growing shades of evening prevented me from distinguishing the features of the personage who was receiving me with this solemn welcome. I had always, however, understood that Lady Hester Stanhope wore the male attire, and I began to utter in English the common civilities that seemed to be proper on the commencement of a visit by an uninspired mortal to a renowned prophetess; but the figure which I addressed only bowed so much the more, prostrating itself almost to the ground, but speaking to me never a word. I feebly strived not to be outdone in gestures of respect; but presently my bowing opponent saw the error under which I was acting, and suddenly convinced me that, at all events, I was not yet in the presence of a superhuman being, by declaring that he was not “miladi,” but was, in fact, nothing more or less god-like than the poor doctor, who had brought his mistress’s letter to Beyrout.

Her ladyship, in the right spirit of hospitality, now sent and commanded me to repose for a while after the fatigues of my journey, and to dine.

The cuisine was of the Oriental kind, which is highly artificial, and I thought it very good. I rejoiced too in the wine of the Lebanon.

Soon after the ending of the dinner the doctor arrived with miladi’s compliments, and an intimation that she would be happy to receive me if I were so disposed. It had now grown dark, and the rain was falling heavily, so that I got rather wet in following my guide through the open courts that I had to pass in order to reach the presence chamber. At last I was ushered into a small apartment, which was protected from the draughts of air passing through the doorway by a folding screen; passing this, I came alongside of a common European sofa, where sat the lady prophetess. She rose from her seat very formally, spoke to me a few words of welcome, pointed to a chair which was placed exactly opposite to her sofa at a couple of yards’ distance, and remained standing up to the full of her majestic height, perfectly still and motionless, until I had taken my appointed place; she then resumed her seat, not packing herself up according to the mode of the Orientals, but allowing her feet to rest on the floor or the footstool; at the moment of seating herself she covered her lap with a mass of loose white drapery which she held in her hand. It occurred to me at the time that she did this in order to avoid the awkwardness of sitting in manifest trousers under the eye of a European, but I can hardly fancy now that with her wilful nature she would have brooked such a compromise as this.

The woman before me had exactly the person of a prophetess—not, indeed, of the divine sibyl imagined by Domenichino, so sweetly distracted betwixt love and mystery, but of a good business-like, practical prophetess, long used to the exercise of her sacred calling. I have been told by those who knew Lady Hester Stanhope in her youth, that any notion of a resemblance betwixt her and the great Chatham must have been fanciful; but at the time of my seeing her, the large commanding features of the gaunt woman, then sixty years old or more, certainly reminded me of the statesman that lay dying [90a] in the House of Lords, according to Copley’s picture. Her face was of the most astonishing whiteness; [90b] she wore a very large turban, which seemed to be of pale cashmere shawls, so disposed as to conceal the hair; her dress, from the chin down to the point at which it was concealed by the drapery which she held over her lap, was a mass of white linen loosely folding—an ecclesiastical sort of affair, more like a surplice than any of those blessed creations which our souls love under the names of “dress” and “frock” and “bodice” and “collar” and “habit-shirt” and sweet “chemisette.”

Such was the outward seeming of the personage that sat before me, and indeed she was almost bound by the fame of her actual achievements, as well as by her sublime pretensions, to look a little differently from the rest of womankind. There had been something of grandeur in her career. After the death of Lady Chatham, which happened in 1803, she lived under the roof of her uncle, the second Pitt, and when he resumed the Government in 1804, she became the dispenser of much patronage, and sole secretary of state for the department of Treasury banquets. Not having seen the lady until late in her life, when she was fired with spiritual ambition, I can hardly fancy that she could have performed her political duties in the saloons of the Minister with much of feminine sweetness and patience. I am told, however, that she managed matters very well indeed: perhaps it was better for the lofty-minded leader of the House to have his reception-rooms guarded by this stately creature, than by a merely clever and managing woman; it was fitting that the wholesome awe with which he filled the minds of the country gentlemen should be aggravated by the presence of his majestic niece. But the end was approaching. The sun of Austerlitz showed the Czar madly sliding his splendid army like a weaver’s shuttle from his right hand to his left, under the very eyes—the deep, grey, watchful eyes of Napoleon; before night came, the coalition was a vain thing—meet for history, and the heart of its great author was crushed with grief when the terrible tidings came to his ears. In the bitterness of his despair he cried out to his niece, and bid her “Roll up the map of Europe”; there was a little more of suffering, and at last, with his swollen tongue (so they say) still muttering something for England, he died by the noblest of all sorrows.

Lady Hester, meeting the calamity in her own fierce way, seems to have scorned the poor island that had not enough of God’s grace to keep the “heaven-sent” Minister alive. I can hardly tell why it should be, but there is a longing for the East very commonly felt by proud-hearted people when goaded by sorrow. Lady Hester Stanhope obeyed this impulse. For some time, I believe, she was at Constantinople, where her magnificence and near alliance to the late Minister gained her great influence. Afterwards she passed into Syria. The people of that country, excited by the achievements of Sir Sidney Smith, had begun to imagine the possibility of their land being occupied by the English, and many of them looked upon Lady Hester as a princess who came to prepare the way for the expected conquest. I don’t know it from her own lips, or indeed from any certain authority, but I have been told that she began her connection with the Bedouins by making a large present of money (£500 it was said—immense in piastres) to the Sheik whose authority was recognised in that part of the desert which lies between Damascus and Palmyra. The prestige created by the rumours of her high and undefined rank, as well as of her wealth and corresponding magnificence, was well sustained by her imperious character and her dauntless bravery. Her influence increased. I never heard anything satisfactory as to the real extent or duration of her sway, but it seemed that for a time at least she certainly exercised something like sovereignty amongst the wandering tribes. [92] And now that her earthly kingdom had passed away she strove for spiritual power, and impiously dared, as it was said, to boast some mystic union with the very God of very God!

A couple of black slave girls came at a signal, and supplied their mistress as well as myself with lighted tchibouques and coffee.

The custom of the East sanctions, and almost commands, some moments of silence whilst you are inhaling the first few breaths of the fragrant pipe. The pause was broken, I think, by my lady, who addressed to me some inquiries respecting my mother, and particularly as to her marriage; but before I had communicated any great amount of family facts, the spirit of the prophetess kindled within her, and presently (though with all the skill of a woman of the world) she shuffled away the subject of poor, dear Somersetshire, and bounded onward into loftier spheres of thought.

My old acquaintance with some of “the twelve” enabled me to bear my part (of course a very humble one) in a conversation relative to occult science. Milnes once spread a report, that every gang of gipsies was found upon inquiry to have come last from a place to the westward, and to be about to make the next move in an eastern direction; either therefore they were to be all gathered together towards the rising of the sun by the mysterious finger of Providence, or else they were to revolve round the globe for ever and ever: both of these suppositions were highly gratifying, because they were both marvellous; and though the story on which they were founded plainly sprang from the inventive brain of a poet, no one had ever been so odiously statistical as to attempt a contradiction of it. I now mentioned the story as a report to Lady Hester Stanhope, and asked her if it were true. I could not have touched upon any imaginable subject more deeply interesting to my hearer, more closely akin to her habitual train of thinking. She immediately threw off all the restraint belonging to an interview with a stranger; and when she had received a few more similar proofs of my aptness for the marvellous, she went so far as to say that she would adopt me as her élève in occult science.

For hours and hours this wondrous white woman poured forth her speech, for the most part concerning sacred and profane mysteries; but every now and then she would stay her lofty flight and swoop down upon the world again. Whenever this happened I was interested in her conversation.

She adverted more than once to the period of her lost sway amongst the Arabs, and mentioned some of the circumstances that aided her in obtaining influence with the wandering tribes. The Bedouin, so often engaged in irregular warfare, strains his eyes to the horizon in search of a coming enemy just as habitually as the sailor keeps his “bright look-out” for a strange sail. In the absence of telescopes a far-reaching sight is highly valued, and Lady Hester possessed this quality to an extraordinary degree. She told me that on one occasion, when there was good reason to expect a hostile attack, great excitement was felt in the camp by the report of a far-seeing Arab, who declared that he could just distinguish some moving objects upon the very farthest point within the reach of his eyes. Lady Hester was consulted, and she instantly assured her comrades in arms that there were indeed a number of horses within sight, but that they were without riders. The assertion proved to be correct, and from that time forth her superiority over all others in respect of far sight remained undisputed.

Lady Hester related to me this other anecdote of her Arab life. It was when the heroic qualities of the Englishwoman were just beginning to be felt amongst the people of the desert, that she was marching one day, along with the forces of the tribe to which she had allied herself. She perceived that preparations for an engagement were going on, and upon her making inquiry as to the cause, the Sheik at first affected mystery and concealment, but at last confessed that war had been declared against his tribe on account of its alliance with the English princess, and that they were now unfortunately about to be attacked by a very superior force. He made it appear that Lady Hester was the sole cause of hostility betwixt his tribe and the impending enemy, and that his sacred duty of protecting the Englishwoman whom he had admitted as his guest was the only obstacle which prevented an amicable arrangement of the dispute. The Sheik hinted that his tribe was likely to sustain an almost overwhelming blow, but at the same time declared, that no fear of the consequences, however terrible to him and his whole people, should induce him to dream of abandoning his illustrious guest. The heroine instantly took her part: it was not for her to be a source of danger to her friends, but rather to her enemies, so she resolved to turn away from the people, and trust for help to none save only her haughty self. The Sheiks affected to dissuade her from so rash a course, and fairly told her that although they (having been freed from her presence) would be able to make good terms for themselves, yet that there were no means of allaying the hostility felt towards her, and that the whole face of the desert would be swept by the horsemen of her enemies so carefully as to make her escape into other districts almost impossible. The brave woman was not to be moved by terrors of this kind, and bidding farewell to the tribe which had honoured and protected her, she turned her horse’s head and rode straight away from them, without friend or follower. Hours had elapsed, and for some time she had been alone in the centre of the round horizon, when her quick eye perceived some horsemen in the distance. The party came nearer and nearer; soon it was plain that they were making towards her, and presently some hundreds of Bedouins, fully armed, galloped up to her, ferociously shouting, and apparently intending to take her life at the instant with their pointed spears. Her face at the time was covered with the yashmak, according to Eastern usage, but at the moment when the foremost of the horsemen had all but reached her with their spears, she stood up in her stirrups, withdrew the yashmak that veiled the terrors of her countenance, waved her arm slowly and disdainfully, and cried out with a loud voice “Avaunt!” [96] The horsemen recoiled from her glance, but not in terror. The threatening yells of the assailants were suddenly changed for loud shouts of joy and admiration at the bravery of the stately Englishwoman, and festive gunshots were fired on all sides around her honoured head. The truth was, that the party belonged to the tribe with which she had allied herself, and that the threatened attack as well as the pretended apprehension of an engagement had been contrived for the mere purpose of testing her courage. The day ended in a great feast prepared to do honour to the heroine, and from that time her power over the minds of the people grew rapidly. Lady Hester related this story with great spirit, and I recollect that she put up her yashmak for a moment in order to give me a better idea of the effect which she produced by suddenly revealing the awfulness of her countenance.

With respect to her then present mode of life, Lady Hester informed me, that for her sin she had subjected herself during many years to severe penance, and that her self-denial had not been without its reward. “Vain and false,” said she, “is all the pretended knowledge of the Europeans—their doctors will tell you that the drinking of milk gives yellowness to the complexion; milk is my only food, and you see if my face be not white.” Her abstinence from food intellectual was carried as far as her physical fasting. She never, she said, looked upon a book or a newspaper, but trusted alone to the stars for her sublime knowledge; she usually passed the nights in communing with these heavenly teachers, and lay at rest during the daytime. She spoke with great contempt of the frivolity and benighted ignorance of the modern Europeans, and mentioned in proof of this, that they were not only untaught in astrology, but were unacquainted with the common and every-day phenomena produced by magic art. She spoke as if she would make me understand that all sorcerous spells were completely at her command, but that the exercise of such powers would be derogatory to her high rank in the heavenly kingdom. She said that the spell by which the face of an absent person is thrown upon a mirror was within the reach of the humblest and most contemptible magicians, but that the practice of such-like arts was unholy as well as vulgar.

We spoke of the bending twig by which, it is said, precious metals may be discovered. In relation to this, the prophetess told me a story rather against herself, and inconsistent with the notion of her being perfect in her science; but I think that she mentioned the facts as having happened before the time at which she attained to the great spiritual authority which she now arrogated. She told me that vast treasures were known to exist in a situation which she mentioned, if I rightly remember, as being near Suez; that Napoleon, profanely brave, thrust his arm into the cave containing the coveted gold, and that instantly his flesh became palsied, but the youthful hero (for she said he was great in his generation) was not to be thus daunted; he fell back characteristically upon his brazen resources, and ordered up his artillery; but man could not strive with demons, and Napoleon was foiled. In after years came Ibrahim Pasha, with heavy guns, and wicked spells to boot, but the infernal guardians of the treasure were too strong for him. It was after this that Lady Hester passed by the spot, and she described with animated gesture the force and energy with which the divining twig had suddenly leaped in her hands. She ordered excavations, and no demons opposed her enterprise; the vast chest in which the treasure had been deposited was at length discovered, but, lo and behold, it was full of pebbles! She said, however, that the times were approaching in which the hidden treasures of the earth would become available to those who had true knowledge.

Speaking of Ibrahim Pasha, Lady Hester said that he was a bold, bad man, and was possessed of some of those common and wicked magical arts upon which she looked down with so much contempt. She said, for instance, that Ibrahim’s life was charmed against balls and steel, and that after a battle he loosened the folds of his shawl and shook out the bullets like dust.

It seems that the St. Simonians once made overtures to Lady Hester. She told me that the Père Enfantin (the chief of the sect) had sent her a service of plate, but that she had declined to receive it. She delivered a prediction as to the probability of the St. Simonians finding the “mystic mother,” and this she did in a way which would amuse you. Unfortunately I am not at liberty to mention this part of the woman’s prophecies; why, I cannot tell, but so it is, that she bound me to eternal secrecy.

Lady Hester told me that since her residence at Djoun she had been attacked by a terrible illness, which rendered her for a long time perfectly helpless; all her attendants fled, and left her to perish. Whilst she lay thus alone, and quite unable to rise, robbers came and carried away her property. [99] She told me that they actually unroofed a great part of the building, and employed engines with pulleys, for the purpose of hoisting out such of her valuables as were too bulky to pass through doors. It would seem that before this catastrophe Lady Hester had been rich in the possession of Eastern luxuries; for she told me that when the chiefs of the Ottoman force took refuge with her after the fall of Acre, they brought their wives also in great numbers. To all of these Lady Hester, as she said, presented magnificent dresses; but her generosity occasioned strife only instead of gratitude, for every woman who fancied her present less splendid than that of another with equal or less pretension, became absolutely furious: all these audacious guests had now been got rid of, but the Albanian soldiers, who had taken refuge with Lady Hester at the same time, still remained under her protection.

In truth, this half-ruined convent, guarded by the proud heart of an English gentlewoman, was the only spot throughout all Syria and Palestine in which the will of Mehemet Ali and his fierce lieutenant was not the law. More than once had the Pasha of Egypt commanded that Ibrahim should have the Albanians delivered up to him, but this white woman of the mountain (grown classical not by books, but by very pride) answered only with a disdainful invitation to “come and take them.” Whether it was that Ibrahim was acted upon by any superstitious dread of interfering with the prophetess (a notion not at all incompatible with his character as an able Oriental commander), or that he feared the ridicule of putting himself in collision with a gentlewoman, he certainly never ventured to attack the sanctuary, and so long as the Chatham’s granddaughter breathed a breath of life there was always this one hillock, and that too in the midst of a most populous district, which stood out, and kept its freedom. Mehemet Ali used to say, I am told, that the Englishwoman had given him more trouble than all the insurgent people of Syria and Palestine.

The prophetess announced to me that we were upon the eve of a stupendous convulsion, which would destroy the then recognised value of all property upon earth; and declaring that those only who should be in the East at the time of the great change could hope for greatness in the new life that was now close at hand, she advised me, whilst there was yet time, to dispose of my property in poor frail England, and gain a station in Asia. She told me that, after leaving her, I should go into Egypt, but that in a little while I should return into Syria. I secretly smiled at this last prophecy as a “bad shot,” for I had fully determined after visiting the Pyramids to take ship from Alexandria for Greece. But men struggle vainly in the meshes of their destiny. The unbelieved Cassandra was right after all; the plague came, and the necessity of avoiding the quarantine, to which I should have been subjected if I had sailed from Alexandria, forced me to alter my route. I went down into Egypt, and stayed there for a time, and then crossed the desert once more, and came back to the mountains of the Lebanon, exactly as the prophetess had foretold.

Lady Hester talked to me long and earnestly on the subject of religion, announcing that the Messiah was yet to come. She strived to impress me with the vanity and the falseness of all European creeds, as well as with a sense of her own spiritual greatness: throughout her conversation upon these high topics she carefully insinuated, without actually asserting, her heavenly rank.

Amongst other much more marvellous powers, the lady claimed to have one which most women, I fancy, possess, namely, that of reading men’s characters in their faces. She examined the line of my features very attentively, and told me the result, which, however, I mean to keep hidden.

One favoured subject of discourse was that of “race,” upon which she was very diffuse, and yet rather mysterious. She set great value upon the ancient French [102] (not Norman blood, for that she vilified), but did not at all appreciate that which we call in this country “an old family.” She had a vast idea of the Cornish miners on account of their race, and said, if she chose, she could give me the means of rousing them to the most tremendous enthusiasm.

Such are the topics on which the lady mainly conversed, but very often she would descend to more worldly chat, and then she was no longer the prophetess, but the sort of woman that you sometimes see, I am told, in London drawing-rooms—cool, decisive in manner, unsparing of enemies, full of audacious fun, and saying the downright things that the sheepish society around her is afraid to utter. I am told that Lady Hester was in her youth a capital mimic, and she showed me that not all the queenly dullness to which she had condemned herself, not all her fasting and solitude, had destroyed this terrible power. The first whom she crucified in my presence was poor Lord Byron. She had seen him, it appeared, I know not where, soon after his arrival in the East, and was vastly amused at his little affectations. He had picked up a few sentences of the Romanic, with which he affected to give orders to his Greek servant. I can’t tell whether Lady Hester’s mimicry of the bard was at all close, but it was amusing; she attributed to him a curiously coxcombical lisp.

Another person whose style of speaking the lady took off very amusingly was one who would scarcely object to suffer by the side of Lord Byron—I mean Lamartine, who had visited her in the course of his travels. The peculiarity which attracted her ridicule was an over-refinement of manner: according to my lady’s imitation of Lamartine (I have never seen him myself), he had none of the violent grimace of his countrymen, and not even their usual way of talking, but rather bore himself mincingly, like the humbler sort of English dandy. [103]

Lady Hester seems to have heartily despised everything approaching to exquisiteness. She told me, by the bye (and her opinion upon that subject is worth having), that a downright manner, amounting even to brusqueness, is more effective than any other with the Oriental; and that amongst the English of all ranks and all classes there is no man so attractive to the Orientals, no man who can negotiate with them half so effectively, as a good, honest, open-hearted, and positive naval officer of the old school.

I have told you, I think, that Lady Hester could deal fiercely with those she hated. One man above all others (he is now uprooted from society, and cast away for ever) she blasted with her wrath. You would have thought that in the scornfulness of her nature she must have sprung upon her foe with more of fierceness than of skill; but this was not so, for with all the force and vehemence of her invective she displayed a sober, patient, and minute attention to the details of vituperation, which contributed to its success a thousand times more than mere violence.

During the hours that this sort of conversation, or rather discourse, was going on our tchibouques were from time to time replenished, and the lady as well as I continued to smoke with little or no intermission till the interview ended. I think that the fragrant fumes of the latakiah must have helped to keep me on my good behaviour as a patient disciple of the prophetess.

It was not till after midnight that my visit for the evening came to an end. When I quitted my seat the lady rose and stood up in the same formal attitude (almost that of a soldier in a state of “attention”) which she had assumed at my entrance; at the same time she let go the drapery which she had held over her lap whilst sitting and allowed it to fall to the ground.

The next morning after breakfast I was visited by my lady’s secretary—the only European, except the doctor, whom she retained in her household. This secretary, like the doctor, was Italian, but he preserved more signs of European dress and European pretensions than his medical fellow-slave. He spoke little or no English, though he wrote it pretty well, having been formerly employed in a mercantile house connected with England. The poor fellow was in an unhappy state of mind. In order to make you understand the extent of his spiritual anxieties, I ought to have told you that the doctor [105] (who had sunk into the complete Asiatic, and had condescended accordingly to the performance of even menial services) had adopted the common faith of all the neighbouring people, and had become a firm and happy believer in the divine power of his mistress. Not so the secretary. When I had strolled with him to a distance from the building, which rendered him safe from being overheard by human ears, he told me in a hollow voice, trembling with emotion, that there were times at which he doubted the divinity of “milèdi.” I said nothing to encourage the poor fellow in that frightful state of scepticism which, if indulged, might end in positive infidelity. I found that her ladyship had rather arbitrarily abridged the amusements of her secretary, forbidding him from shooting small birds on the mountain-side. This oppression had aroused in him a spirit of inquiry that might end fatally, perhaps for himself, perhaps for the “religion of the place.”

The secretary told me that his mistress was greatly disliked by the surrounding people, whom she oppressed by her exactions, and the truth of this statement was borne out by the way in which my lady spoke to me of her neighbours. But in Eastern countries hate and veneration are very commonly felt for the same object, and the general belief in the superhuman power of this wonderful white lady, her resolute and imperious character, and above all, perhaps, her fierce Albanians (not backward to obey an order for the sacking of a village), inspired sincere respect amongst the surrounding inhabitants. Now the being “respected” amongst Orientals is not an empty or merely honorary distinction, but carries with it a clear right to take your neighbour’s corn, his cattle, his eggs, and his honey, and almost anything that is his, except his wives. This law was acted upon by the princess of Djoun, and her establishment was supplied by contributions apportioned amongst the nearest of the villages.

I understood that the Albanians (restrained, I suppose, by the dread of being delivered up to Ibrahim) had not given any very troublesome proofs of their unruly natures. The secretary told me that their rations, including a small allowance of coffee and tobacco, were served out to them with tolerable regularity.

I asked the secretary how Lady Hester was off for horses, and said that I would take a look at the stable. The man did not raise any opposition to my proposal, and affected no mystery about the matter, but said that the only two steeds which then belonged to her ladyship were of a very humble sort. This answer, and a storm of rain then beginning to descend, prevented me at the time from undertaking my journey to the stable, which was at some distance from the part of the building in which I was quartered, and I don’t know that I ever thought of the matter afterwards until my return to England, when I saw Lamartine’s eye-witnessing account of the horse saddled by the hands of his Maker!

When I returned to my apartment (which, as my hostess told me, was the only one in the whole building that kept out the rain) her ladyship sent to say that she would be glad to receive me again. I was rather surprised at this, for I had understood that she reposed during the day, and it was now little later than noon. “Really,” said she, when I had taken my seat and my pipe, “we were together for hours last night, and still I have heard nothing at all of my old friends; now do tell me something of your dear mother and her sister; I never knew your father—it was after I left Burton Pynsent that your mother married.” I began to make slow answer, but my questioner soon went off again to topics more sublime, so that this second interview, which lasted two or three hours, was occupied by the same sort of varied discourse as that which I have been describing.

In the course of the afternoon the captain of an English man-of-war arrived at Djoun, and her ladyship determined to receive him for the same reason as that which had induced her to allow my visit, namely, an early intimacy with his family. I and the new visitor, who was a pleasant, amusing person, dined together, and we were afterwards invited to the presence of my lady, with whom we sat smoking and talking till midnight. The conversation turned chiefly, I think, upon magical science. I had determined to be off at an early hour the next morning, and so at the end of this interview I bade my lady farewell. With her parting words she once more advised me to abandon Europe and seek my reward in the East, and she urged me too to give the like counsels to my father, and tell him that “She had said it.”

Lady Hester’s unholy claim to supremacy in the spiritual kingdom was, no doubt, the suggestion of fierce and inordinate pride most perilously akin to madness, but I am quite sure that the mind of the woman was too strong to be thoroughly overcome by even this potent feeling. I plainly saw that she was not an unhesitating follower of her own system, and I even fancied that I could distinguish the brief moments during which she contrived to believe in herself, from those long and less happy intervals in which her own reason was too strong for her.

As for the lady’s faith in astrology and magic science, you are not for a moment to suppose that this implied any aberration of intellect. She believed these things in common with those around her, for she seldom spoke to anybody except crazy old dervishes, who received her alms, and fostered her extravagancies, and even when (as on the occasion of my visit) she was brought into contact with a person entertaining different notions, she still remained uncontradicted. This entourage and the habit of fasting from books and newspapers were quite enough to make her a facile recipient of any marvellous story.

I think that in England we are scarcely sufficiently conscious of the great debt we owe to the wise and watchful press which presides over the formation of our opinions, and which brings about this splendid result, namely, that in matters of belief the humblest of us are lifted up to the level of the most sagacious, so that really a simple cornet in the Blues is no more likely to entertain a foolish belief about ghosts or witchcraft, or any other supernatural topic, than the Lord High Chancellor or the Leader of the House of Commons. How different is the intellectual régime of Eastern countries! In Syria and Palestine and Egypt you might as well dispute the efficacy of grass or grain as of magic. There is no controversy about the matter. The effect of this, the unanimous belief of an ignorant people upon the mind of a stranger, is extremely curious, and well worth noticing. A man coming freshly from Europe is at first proof against the nonsense with which he is assailed, but often it happens that after a little while the social atmosphere in which he lives will begin to infect him, and if he has been unaccustomed to the cunning of fence by which Reason prepares the means of guarding herself against fallacy, he will yield himself at last to the faith of those around him, and this he will do by sympathy, it would seem, rather than from conviction. I have been much interested in observing that the mere “practical man,” however skilful and shrewd in his own way, has not the kind of power that will enable him to resist the gradual impression made upon his mind by the common opinion of those whom he sees and hears from day to day. Even amongst the English (whose good sense and sound religious knowledge would be likely to guard them from error) I have known the calculating merchant, the inquisitive traveller, and the post-captain, with his bright, wakeful eye of command—I have known all these surrender themselves to the really magic-like influence of other people’s minds. Their language at first is that they are “staggered,” leading you by that expression to suppose that they had been witnesses to some phenomenon, which it was very difficult to account for otherwise than by supernatural causes; but when I have questioned further, I have always found that these “staggering” wonders were not even specious enough to be looked upon as good “tricks.” A man in England who gained his whole livelihood as a conjurer would soon be starved to death if he could perform no better miracles than those which are wrought with so much effect in Syria and Egypt; sometimes, no doubt, a magician will make a good hit (Sir John once said a “good thing”), but all such successes range, of course, under the head of mere “tentative miracles,” as distinguished by the strong-brained Paley.

CHAPTER IX
THE SANCTUARY

I crossed the plain of Esdraelon and entered amongst the hills of beautiful Galilee. It was at sunset that my path brought me sharply round into the gorge of a little valley, and close upon a grey mass of dwellings that lay happily nestled in the lap of the mountain. There was one only shining point still touched with the light of the sun, who had set for all besides; a brave sign this to “holy” Shereef and the rest of my Moslem men, for the one glittering summit was the head of a minaret, and the rest of the seeming village that had veiled itself so meekly under the shades of evening was Christian Nazareth!

Within the precincts of the Latin convent in which I was quartered there stands the great Catholic church which encloses the sanctuary, the dwelling of the blessed Virgin. [111] This is a grotto of about ten feet either way, forming a little chapel or recess, to which you descend by steps. It is decorated with splendour. On the left hand a column of granite hangs from the top of the grotto to within a few feet of the ground; immediately beneath it is another column of the same size, which rises from the ground as if to meet the one above; but between this and the suspended pillar there is an interval of more than a foot; these fragments once formed a single column, against which the angel leant when he spoke and told to Mary the mystery of her awful blessedness. Hard by, near the altar, the holy Virgin was kneeling.

I had been journeying (cheerily indeed, for the voices of my followers were ever within my hearing, but yet), as it were, in solitude, for I had no comrade to whet the edge of my reason, or wake me from my noonday dreams. I was left all alone to be taught and swayed by the beautiful circumstances of Palestine travelling—by the clime, and the land, and the name of the land, with all its mighty import; by the glittering freshness of the sward, and the abounding masses of flowers that furnished my sumptuous pathway; by the bracing and fragrant air that seemed to poise me in my saddle, and to lift me along as a planet appointed to glide through space.

And the end of my journey was Nazareth, the home of the blessed Virgin! In the first dawn of my manhood the old painters of Italy had taught me their dangerous worship of the beauty that is more than mortal, but those images all seemed shadowy now, and floated before me so dimly, the one overcasting the other, that they left me no one sweet idol on which I could look and look again and say, “Maria mia!” Yet they left me more than an idol; they left me (for to them I am wont to trace it) a faint apprehension of beauty not compassed with lines and shadows; they touched me (forgive, proud Marie of Anjou!)—they touched me with a faith in loveliness transcending mortal shapes.

I came to Nazareth, and was led from the convent to the sanctuary. Long fasting will sometimes heat my brain and draw me away out of the world—will disturb my judgment, confuse my notions of right and wrong, and weaken my power of choosing the right: I had fasted perhaps too long, for I was fevered with the zeal of an insane devotion to the heavenly queen of Christendom. But I knew the feebleness of this gentle malady, and knew how easily my watchful reason, if ever so slightly provoked, would drag me back to life. Let there but come one chilling breath of the outer world, and all this loving piety would cower and fly before the sound of my own bitter laugh. And so as I went I trod tenderly, not looking to the right nor to the left, but bending my eyes to the ground.

The attending friar served me well; he led me down quietly and all but silently to the Virgin’s home. The mystic air was so burnt with the consuming flames of the altar, and so laden with incense, that my chest laboured strongly, and heaved with luscious pain. There—there with beating heart the Virgin knelt and listened. I strived to grasp and hold with my riveted eyes some one of the feigned Madonnas, but of all the heaven-lit faces imagined by men there was none that would abide with me in this the very sanctuary. Impatient of vacancy, I grew madly strong against Nature, and if by some awful spell, some impious rite, I could—Oh most sweet Religion, that bid me fear God, and be pious, and yet not cease from loving! Religion and gracious custom commanded me that I fall down loyally and kiss the rock that blessed Mary pressed. With a half consciousness, with the semblance of a thrilling hope that I was plunging deep, deep into my first knowledge of some most holy mystery, or of some new rapturous and daring sin, I knelt, and bowed down my face till I met the smooth rock with my lips. One moment—one moment my heart, or some old pagan demon within me, woke up, and fiercely bounded; my bosom was lifted, and swung, as though I had touched her warm robe. One moment, one more, and then the fever had left me. I rose from my knees. I felt hopelessly sane. The mere world reappeared. My good old monk was there, dangling his key with listless patience, and as he guided me from the church, and talked of the refectory and the coming repast, I listened to his words with some attention and pleasure.

CHAPTER X
THE MONKS OF PALESTINE

Whenever you come back to me from Palestine we will find some “golden wine” [115] of Lebanon, that we may celebrate with apt libations the monks of the Holy Land, and though the poor fellows be theoretically “dead to the world,” we will drink to every man of them a good long life, and a merry one! Graceless is the traveller who forgets his obligations to these saints upon earth; little love has he for merry Christendom if he has not rejoiced with great joy to find in the very midst of water-drinking infidels those lowly monasteries, in which the blessed juice of the grape is quaffed in peace. Ay! ay! we will fill our glasses till they look like cups of amber, and drink profoundly to our gracious hosts in Palestine.

Christianity permits, and sanctions, the drinking of wine, and of all the holy brethren in Palestine there are none who hold fast to this gladsome rite so strenuously as the monks of Damascus; not that they are more zealous Christians than the rest of their fellows in the Holy Land, but that they have better wine. Whilst I was at Damascus I had my quarters at the Franciscan convent there, and very soon after my arrival I asked one of the monks to let me know something of the spots that deserved to be seen. I made my inquiry in reference to the associations with which the city had been hallowed by the sojourn and adventures of St. Paul. “There is nothing in all Damascus,” said the good man, “half so well worth seeing as our cellars;” and forthwith he invited me to go, see, and admire the long range of liquid treasure that he and his brethren had laid up for themselves on earth. And these I soon found were not as the treasures of the miser, that lie in unprofitable disuse; for day by day, and hour by hour, the golden juice ascended from the dark recesses of the cellar to the uppermost brains of the friars. Dear old fellows! in the midst of that solemn land their Christian laughter rang loudly and merrily, their eyes kept flashing with joyous bonfires, and their heavy woollen petticoats could no more weigh down the springiness of their paces, than the filmy gauze of a danseuse can clog her bounding step.

You would be likely enough to fancy that these monastics are men who have retired to the sacred sites of Palestine from an enthusiastic longing to devote themselves to the exercise of religion in the midst of the very land on which its first seeds were cast; and this is partially, at least, the case with the monks of the Greek Church, but it is not with enthusiasts that the Catholic establishments are filled. The monks of the Latin convents are chiefly persons of the peasant class from Italy and Spain, who have been handed over to these remote asylums by order of their ecclesiastical superiors, and can no more account for their being in the Holy Land, than men of marching regiments can explain why they are in “stupid quarters.” I believe that these monks are for the most part well conducted men, punctual in their ceremonial duties, and altogether humble-minded Christians. Their humility is not at all misplaced, for you see at a glance (poor fellows!) that they belong to the lag remove of the human race. If the taking of the cowl does not imply a complete renouncement of the world, it is at least (in these days) a thorough farewell to every kind of useful and entertaining knowledge, and accordingly the low bestial brow and the animal caste of those almost Bourbon features show plainly enough that all the intellectual vanities of life have been really and truly abandoned. But it is hard to quench altogether the spirit of inquiry that stirs in the human breast, and accordingly these monks inquire—they are always inquiring—inquiring for “news”! Poor fellows! they could scarcely have yielded themselves to the sway of any passion more difficult of gratification, for they have no means of communicating with the busy world except through European travellers; and these, in consequence I suppose of that restlessness and irritability that generally haunt their wanderings, seem to have always avoided the bore of giving any information to their hosts. As for me, I am more patient and good-natured, and when I found that the kind monks who gathered round me at Nazareth were longing to know the real truth about the General Bonaparte who had recoiled from the siege of Acre, I softened my heart down to the good humour of Herodotus, and calmly began to “sing history,” telling my eager hearers of the French Empire and the greatness of its glory, and of Waterloo and the fall of Napoleon! Now my story of this marvellous ignorance on the part of the poor monks is one upon which (though depending on my own testimony) I look “with considerable suspicion.” It is quite true (how silly it would be to invent anything so witless!), and yet I think I could satisfy the mind of a “reasonable man” that it is false. Many of the older monks must have been in Europe at the time when the Italy and the Spain from which they came were in act of taking their French lessons, or had parted so lately with their teachers, that not to know of “the Emperor” was impossible, and these men could scarcely, therefore, have failed to bring with them some tidings of Napoleon’s career. Yet I say that that which I have written is true—the one who believes because I have said it will be right (she always is), whilst poor Mr. “reasonable man,” who is convinced by the weight of my argument, will be completely deceived.

In Spanish politics, however, the monks are better instructed. The revenues of the monasteries, which had been principally supplied by the bounty of their most Catholic majesties, have been withheld since Ferdinand’s death, and the interests of these establishments being thus closely involved in the destinies of Spain, it is not wonderful that the brethren should be a little more knowing in Spanish affairs than in other branches of history. Besides, a large proportion of the monks were natives of the Peninsula. To these, I remember, Mysseri’s familiarity with the Spanish language and character was a source of immense delight; they were always gathering around him, and it seemed to me that they treasured like gold the few Castilian words which he deigned to spare them.

The monks do a world of good in their way; and there can be no doubting that previously to the arrival of Bishop Alexander, with his numerous young family and his pretty English nursemaids, they were the chief propagandists of Christianity in Palestine. My old friends of the Franciscan convent at Jerusalem some time since gave proof of their goodness by delivering themselves up to the peril of death for the sake of duty. When I was their guest they were forty I believe in number, and I don’t recollect that there was one of them whom I should have looked upon as a desirable life-holder of any property to which I might be entitled in expectancy. Yet these forty were reduced in a few days to nineteen. The plague was the messenger that summoned them to a taste of real death; but the circumstances under which they perished are rather curious; and though I have no authority for the story except an Italian newspaper, I harbour no doubt of its truth, for the facts were detailed with minuteness, and strictly corresponded with all that I knew of the poor fellows to whom they related.

It was about three months after the time of my leaving Jerusalem that the plague set his spotted foot on the Holy City. The monks felt great alarm; they did not shrink from their duty, but for its performance they chose a plan most sadly well fitted for bringing down upon them the very death which they were striving to ward off. They imagined themselves almost safe so long as they remained within their walls; but then it was quite needful that the Catholic Christians of the place, who had always looked to the convent for the supply of their spiritual wants, should receive the aids of religion in the hour of death. A single monk therefore was chosen, either by lot or by some other fair appeal to destiny. Being thus singled out, he was to go forth into the plague-stricken city, and to perform with exactness his priestly duties; then he was to return, not to the interior of the convent, for fear of infecting his brethren, but to a detached building (which I remember) belonging to the establishment, but at some little distance from the inhabited rooms. He was provided with a bell, and at a certain hour in the morning he was ordered to ring it, if he could; but if no sound was heard at the appointed time, then knew his brethren that he was either delirious or dead, and another martyr was sent forth to take his place. In this way twenty-one of the monks were carried off. One cannot well fail to admire the steadiness with which the dismal scheme was carried through; but if there be any truth in the notion that disease may be invited by a frightening imagination, it is difficult to conceive a more dangerous plan than that which was chosen by these poor fellows. The anxiety with which they must have expected each day the sound of the bell, the silence that reigned instead of it, and then the drawing of the lots (the odds against death being one point lower than yesterday), and the going forth of the newly-doomed man—all this must have widened the gulf that opens to the shades below. When his victim had already suffered so much of mental torture, it was but easy work for big bullying pestilence to follow a forlorn monk from the beds of the dying, and wrench away his life from him as he lay all alone in an outhouse.

In most, I believe in all, of the Holy Land convents there are two personages so strangely raised above their brethren in all that dignifies humanity, that their bearing the same habit, their dwelling under the same roof, their worshipping the same God (consistent as all this is with the spirit of their religion), yet strikes the mind with a sense of wondrous incongruity; the men I speak of are the “Padre Superiore,” and the “Padre Missionario.” The former is the supreme and absolute governor of the establishment over which he is appointed to rule, the latter is entrusted with the more active of the spiritual duties attaching to the Pilgrim Church. He is the shepherd of the good Catholic flock, whose pasture is prepared in the midst of Mussulmans and schismatics; he keeps the light of the true faith ever vividly before their eyes, reproves their vices, supports them in their good resolves, consoles them in their afflictions, and teaches them to hate the Greek Church. Such are his labours, and you may conceive that great tact must be needed for conducting with success the spiritual interests of the Church under circumstances so odd as those which surround it in Palestine.

But the position of the Padre Superiore is still more delicate; he is almost unceasingly in treaty with the powers that be, and the worldly prosperity of the establishment over which he presides is in great measure dependent upon the extent of diplomatic skill which he can employ in its favour. I know not from what class of churchmen these personages are chosen, for there is a mystery attending their origin and the circumstance of their being stationed in these convents, which Rome does not suffer to be penetrated. I have heard it said that they are men of great note, and, perhaps, of too high ambition in the Catholic Hierarchy, who, having fallen under the grave censure of the Church, are banished for fixed periods to these distant monasteries. I believe that the term during which they are condemned to remain in the Holy Land is from eight to twelve years. By the natives of the country, as well as by the rest of the brethren, they are looked upon as superior beings; and rightly too, for Nature seems to have crowned them in her own true way.

The chief of the Jerusalem convent was a noble creature; his worldly and spiritual authority seemed to have surrounded him, as it were, with a kind of “court,” and the manly gracefulness of his bearing did honour to the throne which he filled. There were no lords of the bedchamber, and no gold sticks and stones in waiting, yet everybody who approached him looked as though he were being “presented”; every interview which he granted wore the air of an “audience”; the brethren as often as they came near bowed low and kissed his hand; and if he went out, the Catholics of the place that hovered about the convent would crowd around him with devout affection, and almost scramble for the blessing which his touch could give. He bore his honours all serenely, as though calmly conscious of his power to “bind and to loose.”

CHAPTER XI
GALILEE

Neither old “sacred” [123] himself, nor any of his helpers, knew the road which I meant to take from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee and from thence to Jerusalem, so I was forced to add another to my party by hiring a guide. The associations of Nazareth, as well as my kind feeling towards the hospitable monks, whose guest I had been, inclined me to set at naught the advice which I had received against employing Christians. I accordingly engaged a lithe, active young Nazarene, who was recommended to me by the monks, and who affected to be familiar with the line of country through which I intended to pass. My disregard of the popular prejudices against Christians was not justified in this particular instance by the result of my choice. This you will see by and by.

I passed by Cana and the house in which the water had been turned into wine; I came to the field in which our Saviour had rebuked the Scotch Sabbath-keepers of that period, by suffering His disciples to pluck corn on the Lord’s Day; I rode over the ground on which the fainting multitude had been fed, and they showed me some massive fragments—the relics, they said, of that wondrous banquet, now turned into stone. The petrifaction was most complete.

I ascended the height on which our Lord was standing when He wrought the miracle. The hill was lofty enough to show me the fairness of the land on all sides, but I have an ancient love for the mere features of a lake, and so forgetting all else when I reached the summit, I looked away eagerly to the eastward. There she lay, the Sea of Galilee. Less stern than Wast Water, less fair than gentle Windermere, she had still the winning ways of an English lake; she caught from the smiling heavens unceasing light and changeful phases of beauty, and with all this brightness on her face, she yet clung so fondly to the dull he-looking mountain at her side, as though she would

“Soothe him with her finer fancies,
Touch him with her lighter thought.” [124]

If one might judge of men’s real thoughts by their writings, it would seem that there are people who can visit an interesting locality and follow up continuously the exact train of thought that ought to be suggested by the historical associations of the place. A person of this sort can go to Athens and think of nothing later than the age of Pericles; can live with the Scipios as long as he stays in Rome; can go up in a balloon, and think how resplendently in former times the now vacant and desolate air was peopled with angels, how prettily it was crossed at intervals by the rounds of Jacob’s ladder! I don’t possess this power at all; it is only by snatches, and for few moments together, that I can really associate a place with its proper history.

“There at Tiberias, and along this western shore towards the north, and upon the bosom too of the lake, our Saviour and His disciples”—away flew those recollections, and my mind strained eastward, because that that farthest shore was the end of the world that belongs to man the dweller, the beginning of the other and veiled world that is held by the strange race, whose life (like the pastime of Satan) is a “going to and fro upon the face of the earth.” From those grey hills right away to the gates of Bagdad stretched forth the mysterious “desert”—not a pale, void, sandy tract, but a land abounding in rich pastures, a land without cities or towns, without any “respectable” people or any “respectable” things, yet yielding its eighty thousand cavalry to the beck of a few old men. But once more—“Tiberias—the plain of Gennesareth—the very earth on which I stood—that the deep low tones of the Saviour’s voice should have gone forth into eternity from out of the midst of these hills and these valleys!”—Ay, ay, but yet again the calm face of the lake was uplifted, and smiled upon my eyes with such familiar gaze, that the “deep low tones” were hushed, the listening multitudes all passed away, and instead there came to me a dear old memory from over the seas in England, a memory sweeter than Gospel to that poor wilful mortal, me.

I went to Tiberias, and soon got afloat upon the water. In the evening I took up my quarters in the Catholic church, and the building being large enough, the whole of my party were admitted to the benefit of the same shelter. With portmanteaus and carpet bags, and books and maps, and fragrant tea, Mysseri soon made me a home on the southern side of the church. One of old Shereef’s helpers was an enthusiastic Catholic, and was greatly delighted at having so sacred a lodging. He lit up the altar with a number of tapers, and when his preparations were complete, he began to perform his orisons in the strangest manner imaginable. His lips muttered the prayers of the Latin Church, but he bowed himself down and laid his forehead to the stones beneath him after the manner of a Mussulman. The universal aptness of a religious system for all stages of civilisation, and for all sorts and conditions of men, well befits its claim of divine origin. She is of all nations, and of all times, that wonderful Church of Rome!

Tiberias is one of the four holy cities, [126] according to the Talmud, and it is from this place, or the immediate neighbourhood of it, that the Messiah is to arise.

Except at Jerusalem, never think of attempting to sleep in a “holy city.” Old Jews from all parts of the world go to lay their bones upon the sacred soil, and as these people never return to their homes, it follows that any domestic vermin which they may bring with them are likely to become permanently resident, so that the population is continually increasing. No recent census had been taken when I was at Tiberias, but I know that the congregation of fleas which attended at my church alone must have been something enormous. It was a carnal, self-seeking congregation, wholly inattentive to the service which was going on, and devoted to the one object of having my blood. The fleas of all nations were there. The smug, steady, importunate flea from Holywell Street; the pert, jumping puce from hungry France, the wary, watchful pulce with his poisoned stiletto; the vengeful pulga of Castile with his ugly knife; the German floh with his knife and fork, insatiate, not rising from table; whole swarms from all the Russias, and Asiatic hordes unnumbered—all these were there, and all rejoiced in one great international feast. I could no more defend myself against my enemies than if I had been pain à discretion in the hands of a French patriot, or English gold in the claws of a Pennsylvanian Quaker. After passing a night like this you are glad to pick up the wretched remains of your body long, long before morning dawns. Your skin is scorched, your temples throb, your lips feel withered and dried, your burning eyeballs are screwed inwards against the brain. You have no hope but only in the saddle and the freshness of the morning air.

CHAPTER XII
MY FIRST BIVOUAC

The course of the Jordan is from the north to the south, and in that direction, with very little of devious winding, it carries the shining waters of Galilee straight down into the solitudes of the Dead Sea. Speaking roughly, the river in that meridian is a boundary between the people living under roofs and the tented tribes that wander on the farther side. And so, as I went down in my way from Tiberias towards Jerusalem, along the western bank of the stream, my thinking all propended to the ancient world of herdsmen and warriors that lay so close over my bridle arm.

If a man, and an Englishman, be not born of his mother with a natural Chiffney-bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society; a time for not liking tamed people; a time for not dancing quadrilles, not sitting in pews; a time for pretending that Milton and Shelley, and all sorts of mere dead people, were greater in death than the first living Lord of the Treasury; a time, in short, for scoffing and railing, for speaking lightly of the very opera, and all our most cherished institutions. It is from nineteen to two or three and twenty perhaps that this war of the man against men is like to be waged most sullenly. You are yet in this smiling England, but you find yourself wending away to the dark sides of her mountains, climbing the dizzy crags, exulting in the fellowship of mists and clouds, and watching the storms how they gather, or proving the mettle of your mare upon the broad and dreary downs, because that you feel congenially with the yet unparcelled earth. A little while you are free and unlabelled, like the ground that you compass; but civilisation is coming and coming; you and your much-loved waste lands will be surely enclosed, and sooner or later brought down to a state of mere usefulness; the ground will be curiously sliced into acres and roods and perches, and you, for all you sit so smartly in your saddle, you will be caught, you will be taken up from travel as a colt from grass, to be trained and tried, and matched and run. All this in time, but first come Continental tours and the moody longing for Eastern travel. The downs and the moors of England can hold you no longer; with large strides you burst away from these slips and patches of free land; you thread your path through the crowds of Europe, and at last, on the banks of Jordan, you joyfully know that you are upon the very frontier of all accustomed respectabilities. There, on the other side of the river (you can swim it with one arm), there reigns the people that will be like to put you to death for not being a vagrant, for not being a robber, for not being armed and houseless. There is comfort in that—health, comfort, and strength to one who is dying from very weariness of that poor, dear, middle-aged, deserving, accomplished, pedantic, and painstaking governess, Europe.

I had ridden for some hours along the right bank of Jordan when I came to the Djesr el Medjamé (an old Roman bridge, I believe), which crossed the river. My Nazarene guide was riding ahead of the party, and now, to my surprise and delight, he turned leftwards, and led on over the bridge. I knew that the true road to Jerusalem must be mainly by the right bank of Jordan, but I supposed that my guide was crossing the bridge at this spot in order to avoid some bend in the river, and that he knew of a ford lower down by which we should regain the western bank. I made no question about the road, for I was but too glad to set my horse’s hoofs upon the land of the wandering tribes. None of my party except the Nazarene knew the country. On we went through rich pastures upon the eastern side of the water. I looked for the expected bend of the river, but far as I could see it kept a straight southerly course; I still left my guide unquestioned.

The Jordan is not a perfectly accurate boundary betwixt roofs and tents, for soon after passing the bridge I came upon a cluster of huts. Some time afterwards the guide, upon being closely questioned by my servants, confessed that the village which we had left behind was the last that we should see, but he declared that he knew a spot at which we should find an encampment of friendly Bedouins, who would receive me with all hospitality. I had long determined not to leave the East without seeing something of the wandering tribes, but I had looked forward to this as a pleasure to be found in the desert between El Arish and Egypt; I had no idea that the Bedouins on the east of Jordan were accessible. My delight was so great at the near prospect of bread and salt in the tent of an Arab warrior, that I wilfully allowed my guide to go on and mislead me. I saw that he was taking me out of the straight route towards Jerusalem, and was drawing me into the midst of the Bedouins; but the idea of his betraying me seemed (I know not why) so utterly absurd, that I could not entertain it for a moment. I fancied it possible that the fellow had taken me out of my route in order to attempt some little mercantile enterprise with the tribe for which he was seeking, and I was glad of the opportunity which I might thus gain of coming in contact with the wanderers.

Not long after passing the village a horseman met us. It appeared that some of the cavalry of Ibrahim Pasha had crossed the river for the sake of the rich pastures on the eastern bank, and that this man was one of the troopers. He stopped and saluted; he was obviously surprised at meeting an unarmed, or half-armed, cavalcade, and at last fairly told us that we were on the wrong side of the river, and that if we proceeded we must lay our account with falling amongst robbers. All this while, and throughout the day, my Nazarene kept well ahead of the party, and was constantly up in his stirrups, straining forward and searching the distance for some objects which still remained unseen.

For the rest of the day we saw no human being; we pushed on eagerly in the hope of coming up with the Bedouins before nightfall. Night came, and we still went on in our way till about ten o’clock. Then the thorough darkness of the night, and the weariness of our beasts (which had already done two good days’ journey in one), forced us to determine upon coming to a standstill. Upon the heights to the eastward we saw lights; these shone from caves on the mountain-side, inhabited, as the Nazarene told us, by rascals of a low sort—not real Bedouins, men whom we might frighten into harmlessness, but from whom there was no willing hospitality to be expected.

We heard at a little distance the brawling of a rivulet, and on the banks of this it was determined to establish our bivouac. We soon found the stream, and following its course for a few yards, came to a spot which was thought to be fit for our purpose. It was a sharply cold night in February, and when I dismounted I found myself standing upon some wet rank herbage that promised ill for the comfort of our resting-place. I had bad hopes of a fire, for the pitchy darkness of the night was a great obstacle to any successful search for fuel, and, besides, the boughs of trees or bushes would be so full of sap in this early spring, that they would not be easily persuaded to burn. However, we were not likely to submit to a dark and cold bivouac without an effort, and my fellows groped forward through the darkness, till after advancing a few paces they were happily stopped by a complete barrier of dead prickly bushes. Before our swords could be drawn to reap this welcome harvest it was found to our surprise that the fuel was already hewn and strewed along the ground in a thick mass. A spot for the fire was found with some difficulty, for the earth was moist and the grass high and rank. At last there was a clicking of flint and steel, and presently there stood out from darkness one of the tawny faces of my muleteers, bent down to near the ground, and suddenly lit up by the glowing of the spark which he courted with careful breath. Before long there was a particle of dry fibre or leaf that kindled to a tiny flame; then another was lit from that, and then another. Then small crisp twigs, little bigger than bodkins, were laid athwart the glowing fire. The swelling cheeks of the muleteer, laid level with the earth, blew tenderly at first and then more boldly upon the young flame, which was daintily nursed and fed, and fed more plentifully when it gained good strength. At last a whole armful of dry bushes was piled up over the fire, and presently, with a loud cheery crackling and crackling, a royal tall blaze shot up from the earth and showed me once more the shapes and faces of my men, and the dim outlines of the horses and mules that stood grazing hard by.

My servants busied themselves in unpacking the baggage as though we had arrived at an hotel—Shereef and his helpers unsaddled their cattle. We had left Tiberias without the slightest idea that we were to make our way to Jerusalem along the desolate side of the Jordan, and my servants (generally provident in those matters) had brought with them only, I think, some unleavened bread and a rocky fragment of goat’s-milk cheese. These treasures were produced. Tea and the contrivances for making it were always a standing part of my baggage. My men gathered in circle round the fire. The Nazarene was in a false position from having misled us so strangely, and he would have shrunk back, poor devil, into the cold and outer darkness, but I made him draw near and share the luxuries of the night. My quilt and my pelisse were spread, and the rest of my party had all their capotes or pelisses, or robes of some sort, which furnished their couches. The men gathered in circle, some kneeling, some sitting, some lying reclined around our common hearth. Sometimes on one, sometimes on another, the flickering light would glare more fiercely. Sometimes it was the good Shereef that seemed the foremost, as he sat with venerable beard the image of manly piety—unknowing of all geography, unknowing where he was or whither he might go, but trusting in the goodness of God and the clinching power of fate and the good star of the Englishman. Sometimes, like marble, the classic face of the Greek Mysseri would catch the sudden light, and then again by turns the ever-perturbed Dthemetri, with his old Chinaman’s eye and bristling, terrier-like moustache, shone forth illustrious.

I always liked the men who attended me on these Eastern travels, for they were all of them brave, cheery-hearted fellows; and although their following my career brought upon them a pretty large share of those toils and hardships which are so much more amusing to gentlemen than to servants, yet not one of them ever uttered or hinted a syllable of complaint, or even affected to put on an air of resignation. I always liked them, but never perhaps so much as when they were thus grouped together under the light of the bivouac fire. I felt towards them as my comrades rather than as my servants, and took delight in breaking bread with them, and merrily passing the cup.

The love of tea is a glad source of fellow-feeling between the Englishman and the Asiatic. In Persia it is drunk by all, and although it is a luxury that is rarely within the reach of the Osmanlees, there are few of them who do not know and love the blessed tchäi. Our camp-kettle, filled from the brook, hummed doubtfully for a while, then busily bubbled under the sidelong glare of the flames; cups clinked and rattled; the fragrant steam ascended, and soon this little circlet in the wilderness grew warm and genial as my lady’s drawing-room.

And after this there came the tchibouque—great comforter of those that are hungry and wayworn. And it has this virtue—it helps to destroy the gêne and awkwardness which one sometimes feels at being in company with one’s dependants; for whilst the amber is at your lips, there is nothing ungracious in your remaining silent, or speaking pithily in short inter-whiff sentences. And for us that night there was pleasant and plentiful matter of talk; for the where we should be on the morrow, and the wherewithal we should be fed, whether by some ford we should regain the western bank of Jordan, or find bread and salt under the tents of a wandering tribe, or whether we should fall into the hands of the Philistines, and so come to see death—the last and greatest of all “the fine sights” that there be—these were questionings not dull nor wearisome to us, for we were all concerned in the answers. And it was not an all-imagined morrow that we probed with our sharp guesses, for the lights of those low Philistines, the men of the caves, still hung over our heads, and we knew by their yells that the fire of our bivouac had shown us.

At length we thought it well to seek for sleep. Our plans were laid for keeping up a good watch through the night. My quilt and my pelisse and my cloak were spread out so that I might lie spokewise, with my feet towards the central fire. I wrapped my limbs daintily round, and gave myself positive orders to sleep like a veteran soldier. But I found that my attempt to sleep upon the earth that God gave me was more new and strange than I had fancied it. I had grown used to the scene which was before me whilst I was sitting or reclining by the side of the fire, but now that I laid myself down at length it was the deep black mystery of the heavens that hung over my eyes—not an earthly thing in the way from my own very forehead right up to the end of all space. I grew proud of my boundless bedchamber. I might have “found sermons” in all this greatness (if I had I should surely have slept), but such was not then my way. If this cherished self of mine had built the universe, I should have dwelt with delight on “the wonders of creation.” As it was, I felt rather the vain-glory of my promotion from out of mere rooms and houses into the midst of that grand, dark, infinite palace.

And then, too, my head, far from the fire, was in cold latitudes, and it seemed to me strange that I should be lying so still and passive, whilst the sharp night breeze walked free over my cheek, and the cold damp clung to my hair, as though my face grew in the earth and must bear with the footsteps of the wind and the falling of the dew as meekly as the grass of the field. Besides, I got puzzled and distracted by having to endure heat and cold at the same time, for I was always considering whether my feet were not over-devilled and whether my face was not too well iced. And so when from time to time the watch quietly and gently kept up the languishing fire, he seldom, I think, was unseen to my restless eyes. Yet, at last, when they called me and said that the morn would soon be dawning, I rose from a state of half-oblivion not much unlike to sleep, though sharply qualified by a sort of vegetable’s consciousness of having been growing still colder and colder for many and many an hour.

CHAPTER XIII
THE DEAD SEA

The grey light of the morning showed us for the first time the ground which we had chosen for our resting-place. We found that we had bivouacked upon a little patch of barley plainly belonging to the men of the caves. The dead bushes which we found so happily placed in readiness for our fire had been strewn as a fence for the protection of the little crop. This was the only cultivated spot of ground which we had seen for many a league, and I was rather sorry to find that our night fire and our cattle had spread so much ruin upon this poor solitary slip of corn-land.

The saddling and loading of our beasts was a work which generally took nearly an hour, and before this was half over daylight came. We could now see the men of the caves. They collected in a body, amounting, I should think, to nearly fifty, and rushed down towards our quarters with fierce shouts and yells. But the nearer they got the slower they went; their shouts grew less resolute in tone, and soon ceased altogether. The fellows, however, advanced to a thicket within thirty yards of us, and behind this “took up their position.” My men without premeditation did exactly that which was best; they kept steadily to their work of loading the beasts without fuss or hurry; and whether it was that they instinctively felt the wisdom of keeping quiet, or that they merely obeyed the natural inclination to silence which one feels in the early morning, I cannot tell, but I know that, except when they exchanged a syllable or two relative to the work they were about, not a word was said. I now believe that this quietness of our party created an undefined terror in the minds of the cave-holders and scared them from coming on; it gave them a notion that we were relying on some resources which they knew not of. Several times the fellows tried to lash themselves into a state of excitement which might do instead of pluck. They would raise a great shout and sway forward in a dense body from behind the thicket; but when they saw that their bravery thus gathered to a head did not even suspend the strapping of a portmanteau or the tying of a hatbox, their shout lost its spirit, and the whole mass was irresistibly drawn back like a wave receding from the shore.

These attempts at an onset were repeated several times, but always with the same result. I remained under the apprehension of an attack for more than half an hour, and it seemed to me that the work of packing and loading had never been done so slowly. I felt inclined to tell my fellows to make their best speed, but just as I was going to speak I observed that every one was doing his duty already; I therefore held my peace and said not a word, till at last Mysseri led up my horse and asked me if I were ready to mount.

We all marched off without hindrance.

After some time we came across a party of Ibrahim’s cavalry, which had bivouacked at no great distance from us. The knowledge that such a force was in the neighbourhood may have conduced to the forbearance of the cave-holders.