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Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

by William Makepeace Thackeray · English · Gutenberg #1863 · 388,827 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray


        
Release date: August 1, 1999 [eBook #1863]
                Most recently updated: October 5, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1863

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES ON A JOURNEY FROM CORNHILL TO GRAND CAIRO ***
NOTES ON A JOURNEY FROM CORNHILL TO GRAND CAIRO

By William Makepeace Thackeray




Contents

 DEDICATION
 PREFACE
 CHAPTER I: VIGO
 CHAPTER II: LISBON—CADIZ
 CHAPTER III: THE “LADY MARY WOOD”
 CHAPTER IV: GIBRALTAR
 CHAPTER V: ATHENS
 CHAPTER VI: SMYRNA—FIRST GLIMPSES OF THE EAST
 CHAPTER VII: CONSTANTINOPLE
 CHAPTER VIII: RHODES
 CHAPTER IX: THE WHITE SQUALL
 CHAPTER X: TELMESSUS—BEYROUT
 CHAPTER XI: A DAY AND NIGHT IN SYRIA
 CHAPTER XII: FROM JAFFA TO JERUSALEM
 CHAPTER XIII: JERUSALEM
 CHAPTER XIV: FROM JAFFA TO ALEXANDRIA
 CHAPTER XV: TO CAIRO
 Footnotes:




DEDICATION


TO CAPTAIN SAMUEL LEWIS, OF THE PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL STEAM
NAVIGATION COMPANY’S SERVICE.

My Dear Lewis,

After a voyage, during which the captain of the ship has displayed
uncommon courage, seamanship, affability, or other good qualities,
grateful passengers often present him with a token of their esteem, in
the shape of teapots, tankards, trays, &c. of precious metal. Among
authors, however, bullion is a much rarer commodity than paper, whereof
I beg you to accept a little in the shape of this small volume. It
contains a few notes of a voyage which your skill and kindness rendered
doubly pleasant; and of which I don’t think there is any recollection
more agreeable than that it was the occasion of making your friendship.

If the noble Company in whose service you command (and whose fleet
alone makes them a third-rate maritime power in Europe) should appoint
a few admirals in their navy, I hope to hear that your flag is hoisted
on board one of the grandest of their steamers. But, I trust, even
there you will not forget the “Iberia,” and the delightful
Mediterranean cruise we had in her in the Autumn of 1844.

Most faithfully yours, My dear Lewis, W. M. THACKERAY. LONDON: December
24, 1845.




PREFACE


On the 20th of August, 1844, the writer of this little book went to
dine at the—Club, quite unconscious of the wonderful events which Fate
had in store for him.

Mr. William was there, giving a farewell dinner to his friend Mr. James
(now Sir James). These two asked Mr. Titmarsh to join company with
them, and the conversation naturally fell upon the tour Mr. James was
about to take. The Peninsular and Oriental Company had arranged an
excursion in the Mediterranean, by which, in the space of a couple of
months, as many men and cities were to be seen as Ulysses surveyed and
noted in ten years. Malta, Athens, Smyrna, Constantinople, Jerusalem,
Cairo were to be visited, and everybody was to be back in London by
Lord Mayor’s Day.

The idea of beholding these famous places inflamed Mr. Titmarsh’s mind;
and the charms of such a journey were eloquently impressed upon him by
Mr. James. “Come,” said that kind and hospitable gentleman, “and make
one of my family party; in all your life you will never probably have a
chance again to see so much in so short a time. Consider—it is as easy
as a journey to Paris or to Baden.” Mr. Titmarsh considered all these
things; but also the difficulties of the situation: he had but
six-and-thirty hours to get ready for so portentous a journey—he had
engagements at home— finally, could he afford it? In spite of these
objections, however, with every glass of claret the enthusiasm somehow
rose, and the difficulties vanished.

But when Mr. James, to crown all, said he had no doubt that his
friends, the Directors of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, would
make Mr. Titmarsh the present of a berth for the voyage, all objections
ceased on his part: to break his outstanding engagements—to write
letters to his amazed family, stating that they were not to expect him
at dinner on Saturday fortnight, as he would be at Jerusalem on that
day—to purchase eighteen shirts and lay in a sea stock of Russia
ducks,—was the work of four-and- twenty hours; and on the 22nd of
August, the “Lady Mary Wood” was sailing from Southampton with the
“subject of the present memoir,” quite astonished to find himself one
of the passengers on board.

These important statements are made partly to convince some incredulous
friends—who insist still that the writer never went abroad at all, and
wrote the following pages, out of pure fancy, in retirement at Putney;
but mainly, to give him an opportunity of thanking the Directors of the
Company in question for a delightful excursion.

It was one so easy, so charming, and I think profitable—it leaves such
a store of pleasant recollections for after days—and creates so many
new sources of interest (a newspaper letter from Beyrout, or Malta, or
Algiers, has twice the interest now that it had formerly),—that I can’t
but recommend all persons who have time and means to make a similar
journey—vacation idlers to extend their travels and pursue it: above
all, young well-educated men entering life, to take this course, we
will say, after that at college; and, having their book-learning fresh
in their minds, see the living people and their cities, and the actual
aspect of Nature, along the famous shores of the Mediterranean.




CHAPTER I
VIGO


The sun brought all the sick people out of their berths this morning,
and the indescribable moans and noises which had been issuing from
behind the fine painted doors on each side of the cabin happily ceased.
Long before sunrise, I had the good fortune to discover that it was no
longer necessary to maintain the horizontal posture, and, the very
instant this truth was apparent, came on deck, at two o’clock in the
morning, to see a noble full moon sinking westward, and millions of the
most brilliant stars shining overhead. The night was so serenely pure,
that you saw them in magnificent airy perspective; the blue sky around
and over them, and other more distant orbs sparkling above, till they
glittered away faintly into the immeasurable distance. The ship went
rolling over a heavy, sweltering, calm sea. The breeze was a warm and
soft one; quite different to the rigid air we had left behind us, two
days since, off the Isle of Wight. The bell kept tolling its
half-hours, and the mate explained the mystery of watch and dog-watch.

The sight of that noble scene cured all the woes and discomfitures of
sea-sickness at once, and if there were any need to communicate such
secrets to the public, one might tell of much more good that the
pleasant morning-watch effected; but there are a set of emotions about
which a man had best be shy of talking lightly,—and the feelings
excited by contemplating this vast, magnificent, harmonious Nature are
among these. The view of it inspires a delight and ecstasy which is not
only hard to describe, but which has something secret in it that a man
should not utter loudly. Hope, memory, humility, tender yearnings
towards dear friends, and inexpressible love and reverence towards the
Power which created the infinite universe blazing above eternally, and
the vast ocean shining and rolling around—fill the heart with a solemn
humble happiness, that a person dwelling in a city has rarely occasion
to enjoy. They are coming away from London parties at this time: the
dear little eyes are closed in sleep under mother’s wing. How far off
city cares and pleasures appear to be! how small and mean they seem,
dwindling out of sight before this magnificent brightness of Nature!
But the best thoughts only grow and strengthen under it. Heaven shines
above, and the humble spirit looks up reverently towards that boundless
aspect of wisdom and beauty. You are at home, and with all at rest
there, however far away they may be; and through the distance the heart
broods over them, bright and wakeful like yonder peaceful stars
overhead.

The day was as fine and calm as the night; at seven bells, suddenly a
bell began to toll very much like that of a country church, and on
going on deck we found an awning raised, a desk with a flag flung over
it close to the compass, and the ship’s company and passengers
assembled there to hear the Captain read the Service in a manly
respectful voice. This, too, was a novel and touching sight to me.
Peaked ridges of purple mountains rose to the left of the
ship,—Finisterre and the coast of Galicia. The sky above was cloudless
and shining; the vast dark ocean smiled peacefully round about, and the
ship went rolling over it, as the people within were praising the Maker
of all.

In honour of the day, it was announced that the passengers would be
regaled with champagne at dinner; and accordingly that exhilarating
liquor was served out in decent profusion, the company drinking the
Captain’s health with the customary orations of compliment and
acknowledgment. This feast was scarcely ended, when we found ourselves
rounding the headland into Vigo Bay, passing a grim and tall island of
rocky mountains which lies in the centre of the bay.

Whether it is that the sight of land is always welcome to weary
mariners, after the perils and annoyances of a voyage of three days, or
whether the place is in itself extraordinarily beautiful, need not be
argued; but I have seldom seen anything more charming than the
amphitheatre of noble hills into which the ship now came— all the
features of the landscape being lighted up with a wonderful clearness
of air, which rarely adorns a view in our country. The sun had not yet
set, but over the town and lofty rocky castle of Vigo a great ghost of
a moon was faintly visible, which blazed out brighter and brighter as
the superior luminary retired behind the purple mountains of the
headland to rest. Before the general background of waving heights which
encompassed the bay, rose a second semicircle of undulating hills, as
cheerful and green as the mountains behind them were grey and solemn.
Farms and gardens, convent towers, white villages and churches, and
buildings that no doubt were hermitages once, upon the sharp peaks of
the hills, shone brightly in the sun. The sight was delightfully
cheerful, animated, and pleasing.

Presently the Captain roared out the magic words, “Stop her!” and the
obedient vessel came to a stand-still, at some three hundred yards from
the little town, with its white houses clambering up a rock, defended
by the superior mountain whereon the castle stands. Numbers of people,
arrayed in various brilliant colours of red, were standing on the sand
close by the tumbling, shining, purple waves: and there we beheld, for
the first time, the Royal red and yellow standard of Spain floating on
its own ground, under the guardianship of a light blue sentinel, whose
musket glittered in the sun. Numerous boats were seen, incontinently,
to put off from the little shore.

And now our attention was withdrawn from the land to a sight of great
splendour on board. This was Lieutenant Bundy, the guardian of Her
Majesty’s mails, who issued from his cabin in his long swallow-tailed
coat with anchor buttons; his sabre clattering between his legs; a
magnificent shirt-collar, of several inches in height, rising round his
good-humoured sallow face; and above it a cocked hat, that shone so, I
thought it was made of polished tin (it may have been that or oilskin),
handsomely laced with black worsted, and ornamented with a shining gold
cord. A little squat boat, rowed by three ragged gallegos, came
bouncing up to the ship. Into this Mr. Bundy and Her Majesty’s Royal
mail embarked with much majesty; and in the twinkling of an eye, the
Royal standard of England, about the size of a pocket-handkerchief,—and
at the bows of the boat, the man-of-war’s pennant, being a strip of
bunting considerably under the value of a farthing,—streamed out.

“They know that flag, sir,” said the good-natured old tar, quite
solemnly, in the evening afterwards: “they respect it, sir.” The
authority of Her Majesty’s lieutenant on board the steamer is stated to
be so tremendous, that he may order it to stop, to move, to go
larboard, starboard, or what you will; and the captain dare only
disobey him suo periculo.

It was agreed that a party of us should land for half-an-hour, and
taste real Spanish chocolate on Spanish ground. We followed Lieutenant
Bundy, but humbly in the providor’s boat; that officer going on shore
to purchase fresh eggs, milk for tea (in place of the slimy substitute
of whipped yolk of egg which we had been using for our morning and
evening meals), and, if possible, oysters, for which it is said the
rocks of Vigo are famous.

It was low tide, and the boat could not get up to the dry shore. Hence
it was necessary to take advantage of the offers of sundry gallegos,
who rushed barelegged into the water, to land on their shoulders. The
approved method seems to be, to sit upon one shoulder only, holding on
by the porter’s whiskers; and though some of our party were of the
tallest and fattest men whereof our race is composed, and their living
sedans exceedingly meagre and small, yet all were landed without
accident upon the juicy sand, and forthwith surrounded by a host of
mendicants, screaming, “I say, sir! penny, sir! I say, English! tam
your ays! penny!” in all voices, from extreme youth to the most lousy
and venerable old age. When it is said that these beggars were as
ragged as those of Ireland, and still more voluble, the Irish traveller
will be able to form an opinion of their capabilities.

Through this crowd we passed up some steep rocky steps, through a
little low gate, where, in a little guard-house and barrack, a few
dirty little sentinels were keeping a dirty little guard; and by
low-roofed whitewashed houses, with balconies, and women in them,— the
very same women, with the very same head-clothes, and yellow fans and
eyes, at once sly and solemn, which Murillo painted,—by a neat church
into which we took a peep, and, finally, into the Plaza del
Constitucion, or grand place of the town, which may be about as big as
that pleasing square, Pump Court, Temple. We were taken to an inn, of
which I forget the name, and were shown from one chamber and storey to
another, till we arrived at that apartment where the real Spanish
chocolate was finally to be served out. All these rooms were as clean
as scrubbing and whitewash could make them; with simple French prints
(with Spanish titles) on the walls; a few rickety half-finished
articles of furniture; and, finally, an air of extremely respectable
poverty. A jolly, black-eyed, yellow- shawled Dulcinea conducted us
through the apartment, and provided us with the desired refreshment.

Sounds of clarions drew our eyes to the Place of the Constitution; and,
indeed, I had forgotten to say, that that majestic square was filled
with military, with exceedingly small firelocks, the men ludicrously
young and diminutive for the most part, in a uniform at once cheap and
tawdry,—like those supplied to the warriors at Astley’s, or from still
humbler theatrical wardrobes: indeed, the whole scene was just like
that of a little theatre; the houses curiously small, with arcades and
balconies, out of which looked women apparently a great deal too big
for the chambers they inhabited; the warriors were in ginghams,
cottons, and tinsel; the officers had huge epaulets of sham silver lace
drooping over their bosoms, and looked as if they were attired at a
very small expense. Only the general—the captain-general (Pooch, they
told us, was his name: I know not how ’tis written in Spanish)—was well
got up, with a smart hat, a real feather, huge stars glittering on his
portly chest, and tights and boots of the first order. Presently, after
a good deal of trumpeting, the little men marched off the place, Pooch
and his staff coming into the very inn in which we were awaiting our
chocolate.

Then we had an opportunity of seeing some of the civilians of the town.
Three or four ladies passed, with fan and mantle; to them came three or
four dandies, dressed smartly in the French fashion, with strong Jewish
physiognomies. There was one, a solemn lean fellow in black, with his
collars extremely turned over, and holding before him a long
ivory-tipped ebony cane, who tripped along the little place with a
solemn smirk, which gave one an indescribable feeling of the truth of
“Gil Blas,” and of those delightful bachelors and licentiates who have
appeared to us all in our dreams.

In fact we were but half-an-hour in this little queer Spanish town; and
it appeared like a dream, too, or a little show got up to amuse us.
Boom! the gun fired at the end of the funny little entertainment. The
women and the balconies, the beggars and the walking Murillos, Pooch
and the little soldiers in tinsel, disappeared, and were shut up in
their box again. Once more we were carried on the beggars’ shoulders
out off the shore, and we found ourselves again in the great stalwart
roast-beef world; the stout British steamer bearing out of the bay,
whose purple waters had grown more purple. The sun had set by this
time, and the moon above was twice as big and bright as our degenerate
moons are.

The providor had already returned with his fresh stores, and Bundy’s
tin hat was popped into its case, and he walking the deck of the packet
denuded of tails. As we went out of the bay, occurred a little incident
with which the great incidents of the day may be said to wind up. We
saw before us a little vessel, tumbling and plunging about in the dark
waters of the bay, with a bright light beaming from the mast. It made
for us at about a couple of miles from the town, and came close up,
flouncing and bobbing in the very jaws of the paddle, which looked as
if it would have seized and twirled round that little boat and its
light, and destroyed them for ever and ever. All the passengers, of
course, came crowding to the ship’s side to look at the bold little
boat.

“I SAY!” howled a man; “I say!—a word!—I say! Pasagero! Pasagero!
Pasage-e-ero!” We were two hundred yards ahead by this time.

“Go on,” says the captain.

“You may stop if you like,” says Lieutenant Bundy, exerting his
tremendous responsibility. It is evident that the lieutenant has a soft
heart, and felt for the poor devil in the boat who was howling so
piteously “Pasagero!”

But the captain was resolute. His duty was NOT to take the man up. He
was evidently an irregular customer—someone trying to escape, possibly.

The lieutenant turned away, but did not make any further hints. The
captain was right; but we all felt somehow disappointed, and looked
back wistfully at the little boat, jumping up and down far astern now;
the poor little light shining in vain, and the poor wretch within
screaming out in the most heartrending accents a last faint desperate
“I say! Pasagero-o!”

We all went down to tea rather melancholy; but the new milk, in the
place of that abominable whipped egg, revived us again; and so ended
the great events on board the “Lady Mary Wood” steamer, on the 25th
August, 1844.




CHAPTER II
LISBON—CADIZ


A great misfortune which befalls a man who has but a single day to stay
in a town, is that fatal duty which superstition entails upon him of
visiting the chief lions of the city in which he may happen to be. You
must go through the ceremony, however much you may sigh to avoid it;
and however much you know that the lions in one capital roar very much
like the lions in another; that the churches are more or less large and
splendid, the palaces pretty spacious, all the world over; and that
there is scarcely a capital city in this Europe but has its pompous
bronze statue or two of some periwigged, hook-nosed emperor, in a Roman
habit, waving his bronze baton on his broad-flanked brazen charger. We
only saw these state old lions in Lisbon, whose roar has long since
ceased to frighten one. First we went to the Church of St. Roch, to see
a famous piece of mosaic-work there. It is a famous work of art, and
was bought by I don’t know what king for I don’t know how much money.
All this information may be perfectly relied on, though the fact is, we
did not see the mosaic-work: the sacristan, who guards it, was yet in
bed; and it was veiled from our eyes in a side-chapel by great dirty
damask curtains, which could not be removed, except when the
sacristan’s toilette was done, and at the price of a dollar. So we were
spared this mosaic exhibition; and I think I always feel relieved when
such an event occurs. I feel I have done my duty in coming to see the
enormous animal: if he is not at home, virtute mea me, &c.—we have done
our best, and mortal can do no more.

In order to reach that church of the forbidden mosaic, we had sweated
up several most steep and dusty streets—hot and dusty, although it was
but nine o’clock in the morning. Thence the guide conducted us into
some little dust-powdered gardens, in which the people make believe to
enjoy the verdure, and whence you look over a great part of the arid,
dreary, stony city. There was no smoke, as in honest London, only
dust—dust over the gaunt houses and the dismal yellow strips of
gardens. Many churches were there, and tall half-baked-looking public
edifices, that had a dry, uncomfortable, earth-quaky look, to my idea.
The ground-floors of the spacious houses by which we passed seemed the
coolest and pleasantest portions of the mansion. They were cellars or
warehouses, for the most part, in which white-jacketed clerks sat
smoking easy cigars. The streets were plastered with placards of a
bull-fight, to take place the next evening (there was no opera that
season); but it was not a real Spanish tauromachy—only a theatrical
combat, as you could see by the picture in which the horseman was
cantering off at three miles an hour, the bull tripping after him with
tips to his gentle horns. Mules interminable, and almost all
excellently sleek and handsome, were pacing down every street: here and
there, but later in the day, came clattering along a smart rider on a
prancing Spanish horse; and in the afternoon a few families might be
seen in the queerest old-fashioned little carriages, drawn by their
jolly mules and swinging between, or rather before, enormous wheels.

The churches I saw were of the florid periwig architecture—I mean of
that pompous cauliflower kind of ornament which was the fashion in
Louis the Fifteenth’s time, at which unlucky period a building mania
seems to have seized upon many of the monarchs of Europe, and
innumerable public edifices were erected. It seems to me to have been
the period in all history when society was the least natural, and
perhaps the most dissolute; and I have always fancied that the bloated
artificial forms of the architecture partake of the social
disorganisation of the time. Who can respect a simpering ninny,
grinning in a Roman dress and a full-bottomed wig, who is made to pass
off for a hero? or a fat woman in a hoop, and of a most doubtful
virtue, who leers at you as a goddess? In the palaces which we saw,
several Court allegories were represented, which, atrocious as they
were in point of art, might yet serve to attract the regard of the
moraliser. There were Faith, Hope, and Charity restoring Don John to
the arms of his happy Portugal: there were Virtue, Valour, and Victory
saluting Don Emanuel: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic (for what I
know, or some mythologic nymphs) dancing before Don Miguel—the picture
is there still, at the Ajuda; and ah me! where is poor Mig? Well, it is
these State lies and ceremonies that we persist in going to see;
whereas a man would have a much better insight into Portuguese manners,
by planting himself at a corner, like yonder beggar, and watching the
real transactions of the day.

A drive to Belem is the regular route practised by the traveller who
has to make only a short stay, and accordingly a couple of carriages
were provided for our party, and we were driven through the long merry
street of Belem, peopled by endless strings of mules,—by thousands of
gallegos, with water-barrels on their shoulders, or lounging by the
fountains to hire,—by the Lisbon and Belem omnibuses, with four mules,
jingling along at a good pace; and it seemed to me to present a far
more lively and cheerful, though not so regular, an appearance as the
stately quarters of the city we had left behind us. The little shops
were at full work— the men brown, well-dressed, manly, and handsome: so
much cannot, I am sorry to say, be said for the ladies, of whom, with
every anxiety to do so, our party could not perceive a single good-
looking specimen all day. The noble blue Tagus accompanies you all
along these three miles of busy pleasant street, whereof the chief
charm, as I thought, was its look of genuine business—that appearance
of comfort which the cleverest Court-architect never knows how to give.

The carriages (the canvas one with four seats and the chaise in which I
drove) were brought suddenly up to a gate with the Royal arms over it;
and here we were introduced to as queer an exhibition as the eye has
often looked on. This was the state-carriage house, where there is a
museum of huge old tumble-down gilded coaches of the last century,
lying here, mouldy and dark, in a sort of limbo. The gold has vanished
from the great lumbering old wheels and panels; the velvets are wofully
tarnished. When one thinks of the patches and powder that have simpered
out of those plate-glass windows—the mitred bishops, the big-wigged
marshals, the shovel- hatted abbes which they have borne in their
time—the human mind becomes affected in no ordinary degree. Some human
minds heave a sigh for the glories of bygone days; while others,
considering rather the lies and humbug, the vice and servility, which
went framed and glazed and enshrined, creaking along in those old
Juggernaut cars, with fools worshipping under the wheels, console
themselves for the decay of institutions that may have been splendid
and costly, but were ponderous, clumsy, slow, and unfit for daily wear.
The guardian of these defunct old carriages tells some prodigious fibs
concerning them: he pointed out one carriage that was six hundred years
old in his calendar; but any connoisseur in bric-a-brac can see it was
built at Paris in the Regent Orleans’ time.

Hence it is but a step to an institution in full life and vigour,— a
noble orphan-school for one thousand boys and girls, founded by Don
Pedro, who gave up to its use the superb convent of Belem, with its
splendid cloisters, vast airy dormitories, and magnificent church. Some
Oxford gentlemen would have wept to see the desecrated edifice,—to
think that the shaven polls and white gowns were banished from it to
give place to a thousand children, who have not even the clergy to
instruct them. “Every lad here may choose his trade,” our little
informant said, who addressed us in better French than any of our party
spoke, whose manners were perfectly gentlemanlike and respectful, and
whose clothes, though of a common cotton stuff, were cut and worn with
a military neatness and precision. All the children whom we remarked
were dressed with similar neatness, and it was a pleasure to go through
their various rooms for study, where some were busy at mathematics,
some at drawing, some attending a lecture on tailoring, while others
were sitting at the feet of a professor of the science of shoemaking.
All the garments of the establishment were made by the pupils; even the
deaf and dumb were drawing and reading, and the blind were, for the
most part, set to perform on musical instruments, and got up a concert
for the visitors. It was then we wished ourselves of the numbers of the
deaf and dumb, for the poor fellows made noises so horrible, that even
as blind beggars they could hardly get a livelihood in the musical way.

Hence we were driven to the huge palace of Necessidades, which is but a
wing of a building that no King of Portugal ought ever to be rich
enough to complete, and which, if perfect, might outvie the Tower of
Babel. The mines of Brazil must have been productive of gold and silver
indeed when the founder imagined this enormous edifice. From the
elevation on which it stands it commands the noblest views,—the city is
spread before it, with its many churches and towers, and for many miles
you see the magnificent Tagus, rolling by banks crowned with trees and
towers. But to arrive at this enormous building you have to climb a
steep suburb of wretched huts, many of them with dismal gardens of dry
cracked earth, where a few reedy sprouts of Indian corn seemed to be
the chief cultivation, and which were guarded by huge plants of spiky
aloes, on which the rags of the proprietors of the huts were sunning
themselves. The terrace before the palace was similarly encroached upon
by these wretched habitations. A few millions judiciously expended
might make of this arid hill one of the most magnificent gardens in the
world; and the palace seems to me to excel for situation any Royal
edifice I have ever seen. But the huts of these swarming poor have
crawled up close to its gates,— the superb walls of hewn stone stop all
of a sudden with a lath- and-plaster hitch; and capitals, and hewn
stones for columns, still lying about on the deserted terrace, may lie
there for ages to come, probably, and never take their places by the
side of their brethren in yonder tall bankrupt galleries. The air of
this pure sky has little effect upon the edifices,—the edges of the
stone look as sharp as if the builders had just left their work; and
close to the grand entrance stands an outbuilding, part of which may
have been burnt fifty years ago, but is in such cheerful preservation
that you might fancy the fire had occurred yesterday. It must have been
an awful sight from this hill to have looked at the city spread before
it, and seen it reeling and swaying in the time of the earthquake. I
thought it looked so hot and shaky, that one might fancy a return of
the fit. In several places still remain gaps and chasms, and ruins lie
here and there as they cracked and fell.

Although the palace has not attained anything like its full growth, yet
what exists is quite big enough for the monarch of such a little
country; and Versailles or Windsor has not apartments more nobly
proportioned. The Queen resides in the Ajuda, a building of much less
pretensions, of which the yellow walls and beautiful gardens are seen
between Belem and the city. The Necessidades are only used for grand
galas, receptions of ambassadors, and ceremonies of state. In the
throne-room is a huge throne, surmounted by an enormous gilt crown,
than which I have never seen anything larger in the finest pantomime at
Drury Lane; but the effect of this splendid piece is lessened by a
shabby old Brussels carpet, almost the only other article of furniture
in the apartment, and not quite large enough to cover its spacious
floor. The looms of Kidderminster have supplied the web which ornaments
the “Ambassadors’ Waiting-Room,” and the ceilings are painted with huge
allegories in distemper, which pretty well correspond with the other
furniture. Of all the undignified objects in the world, a palace out at
elbows is surely the meanest. Such places ought not to be seen in
adversity,—splendour is their decency,—and when no longer able to
maintain it, they should sink to the level of their means, calmly
subside into manufactories, or go shabby in seclusion.

There is a picture-gallery belonging to the palace that is quite of a
piece with the furniture, where are the mythological pieces relative to
the kings before alluded to, and where the English visitor will see
some astonishing pictures of the Duke of Wellington, done in a very
characteristic style of Portuguese art. There is also a chapel, which
has been decorated with much care and sumptuousness of ornament—the
altar surmounted by a ghastly and horrible carved figure in the taste
of the time when faith was strengthened by the shrieks of Jews on the
rack, and enlivened by the roasting of heretics. Other such frightful
images may be seen in the churches of the city; those which we saw were
still rich, tawdry, and splendid to outward show, although the French,
as usual, had robbed their shrines of their gold and silver, and the
statues of their jewels and crowns. But brass and tinsel look to the
visitor full as well at a little distance,—as doubtless Soult and Junot
thought, when they despoiled these places of worship, like French
philosophers as they were.

A friend, with a classical turn of mind, was bent upon seeing the
aqueduct, whither we went on a dismal excursion of three hours, in the
worst carriages, over the most diabolical clattering roads, up and down
dreary parched hills, on which grew a few grey olive-trees and many
aloes. When we arrived, the gate leading to the aqueduct was closed,
and we were entertained with a legend of some respectable character who
had made a good livelihood there for some time past lately, having a
private key to this very aqueduct, and lying in wait there for unwary
travellers like ourselves, whom he pitched down the arches into the
ravines below, and there robbed them at leisure. So that all we saw was
the door and the tall arches of the aqueduct, and by the time we
returned to town it was time to go on board the ship again. If the inn
at which we had sojourned was not of the best quality, the bill, at
least, would have done honour to the first establishment in London. We
all left the house of entertainment joyfully, glad to get out of the
sun- burnt city and go HOME. Yonder in the steamer was home, with its
black funnel and gilt portraiture of “Lady Mary Wood” at the bows; and
every soul on board felt glad to return to the friendly little vessel.
But the authorities of Lisbon, however, are very suspicious of the
departing stranger, and we were made to lie an hour in the river before
the Sanita boat, where a passport is necessary to be procured before
the traveller can quit the country. Boat after boat laden with priests
and peasantry, with handsome red-sashed gallegos clad in brown, and
ill-favoured women, came and got their permits, and were off, as we lay
bumping up against the old hull of the Sanita boat; but the officers
seemed to take a delight in keeping us there bumping, looked at us
quite calmly over the ship’s sides, and smoked their cigars without the
least attention to the prayers which we shrieked out for release.

If we were glad to get away from Lisbon, we were quite as sorry to be
obliged to quit Cadiz, which we reached the next night, and where we
were allowed a couple of hours’ leave to land and look about. It seemed
as handsome within as it is stately without; the long narrow streets of
an admirable cleanliness, many of the tall houses of rich and noble
decorations, and all looking as if the city were in full prosperity. I
have seen no more cheerful and animated sight than the long street
leading from the quay where we were landed, and the market blazing in
sunshine, piled with fruit, fish, and poultry, under many-coloured
awnings; the tall white houses with their balconies and galleries
shining round about, and the sky above so blue that the best cobalt in
all the paint-box looks muddy and dim in comparison to it. There were
pictures for a year in that market-place—from the copper-coloured old
hags and beggars who roared to you for the love of Heaven to give
money, to the swaggering dandies of the market, with red sashes and
tight clothes, looking on superbly, with a hand on the hip and a cigar
in the mouth. These must be the chief critics at the great bull-fight
house yonder by the Alameda, with its scanty trees, and cool breezes
facing the water. Nor are there any corks to the bulls’ horns here, as
at Lisbon. A small old English guide who seized upon me the moment my
foot was on shore, had a store of agreeable legends regarding the
bulls, men, and horses that had been killed with unbounded profusion in
the late entertainments which have taken place.

It was so early an hour in the morning that the shops were scarcely
opened as yet; the churches, however, stood open for the faithful, and
we met scores of women tripping towards them with pretty feet, and
smart black mantillas, from which looked out fine dark eyes and
handsome pale faces, very different from the coarse brown countenances
we had seen at Lisbon. A very handsome modern cathedral, built by the
present bishop at his own charges, was the finest of the public
edifices we saw; it was not, however, nearly so much frequented as
another little church, crowded with altars and fantastic ornaments, and
lights and gilding, where we were told to look behind a huge iron
grille, and beheld a bevy of black nuns kneeling. Most of the good
ladies in the front ranks stopped their devotions, and looked at the
strangers with as much curiosity as we directed at them through the
gloomy bars of their chapel. The men’s convents are closed; that which
contains the famous Murillos has been turned into an academy of the
fine arts; but the English guide did not think the pictures were of
sufficient interest to detain strangers, and so hurried us back to the
shore, and grumbled at only getting three shillings at parting for his
trouble and his information. And so our residence in Andalusia began
and ended before breakfast, and we went on board and steamed for
Gibraltar, looking, as we passed, at Joinville’s black squadron, and
the white houses of St. Mary’s across the bay, with the hills of Medina
Sidonia and Granada lying purple beyond them. There’s something even in
those names which is pleasant to write down; to have passed only two
hours in Cadiz is something—to have seen real donnas with comb and
mantle—real caballeros with cloak and cigar—real Spanish barbers
lathering out of brass basins—and to have heard guitars under the
balconies: there was one that an old beggar was jangling in the market,
whilst a huge leering fellow in bushy whiskers and a faded velvet dress
came singing and jumping after our party,—not singing to a guitar, it
is true, but imitating one capitally with his voice, and cracking his
fingers by way of castanets, and performing a dance such as Figaro or
Lablache might envy. How clear that fellow’s voice thrums on the ear
even now; and how bright and pleasant remains the recollection of the
fine city and the blue sea, and the Spanish flags floating on the boats
that danced over it, and Joinville’s band beginning to play stirring
marches as we puffed out of the bay.

The next stage was Gibraltar, where we were to change horses. Before
sunset we skirted along the dark savage mountains of the African coast,
and came to the Rock just before gun-fire. It is the very image of an
enormous lion, crouched between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and
set there to guard the passage for its British mistress. The next
British lion is Malta, four days further on in the Midland Sea, and
ready to spring upon Egypt or pounce upon Syria, or roar so as to be
heard at Marseilles in case of need.

To the eyes of the civilian the first-named of these famous
fortifications is by far the most imposing. The Rock looks so
tremendous, that to ascend it, even without the compliment of shells or
shot, seems a dreadful task—what would it be when all those mysterious
lines of batteries were vomiting fire and brimstone; when all those
dark guns that you see poking their grim heads out of every imaginable
cleft and zigzag should salute you with shot, both hot and cold; and
when, after tugging up the hideous perpendicular place, you were to
find regiments of British grenadiers ready to plunge bayonets into your
poor panting stomach, and let out artificially the little breath left
there? It is a marvel to think that soldiers will mount such places for
a shilling—ensigns for five and ninepence—a day: a cabman would ask
double the money to go half way! One meekly reflects upon the above
strange truths, leaning over the ship’s side, and looking up the huge
mountain, from the tower nestled at the foot of it to the thin
flagstaff at the summit, up to which have been piled the most ingenious
edifices for murder Christian science ever adopted. My hobby-horse is a
quiet beast, suited for Park riding, or a gentle trot to Putney and
back to a snug stable, and plenty of feeds of corn:- it can’t abide
climbing hills, and is not at all used to gunpowder. Some men’s animals
are so spirited that the very appearance of a stone-wall sets them
jumping at it: regular chargers of hobbies, which snort and say “Ha,
ha!” at the mere notion of a battle.




CHAPTER III
THE “LADY MARY WOOD”


Our week’s voyage is now drawing to a close. We have just been to look
at Cape Trafalgar, shining white over the finest blue sea. (We, who
were looking at Trafalgar Square only the other day!) The sight of that
cape must have disgusted Joinville and his fleet of steamers, as they
passed yesterday into Cadiz bay, and to-morrow will give them a sight
of St. Vincent.

One of their steam-vessels has been lost off the coast of Africa; they
were obliged to burn her, lest the Moors should take possession of her.
She was a virgin vessel, just out of Brest. Poor innocent! to die in
the very first month of her union with the noble whiskered god of war!

We Britons on board the English boat received the news of the
“Groenenland’s” abrupt demise with grins of satisfaction. It was a sort
of national compliment, and cause of agreeable congratulation. “The
lubbers!” we said; “the clumsy humbugs! there’s none but Britons to
rule the waves!” and we gave ourselves piratical airs, and went down
presently and were sick in our little buggy berths. It was pleasant,
certainly, to laugh at Joinville’s admiral’s flag floating at his
foremast, in yonder black ship, with its two thundering great guns at
the bows and stern, its busy crew swarming on the deck, and a crowd of
obsequious shore-boats bustling round the vessel—and to sneer at the
Mogador warrior, and vow that we English, had we been inclined to do
the business, would have performed it a great deal better.

Now yesterday at Lisbon we saw H.M.S. “Caledonia.” THIS, on the
contrary, inspired us with feelings of respect and awful pleasure.
There she lay—the huge sea-castle—bearing the unconquerable flag of our
country. She had but to open her jaws, as it were, and she might bring
a second earthquake on the city—batter it into kingdom-come—with the
Ajuda palace and the Necessidades, the churches, and the lean, dry,
empty streets, and Don John, tremendous on horseback, in the midst of
Black Horse Square. Wherever we looked we could see that enormous
“Caledonia,” with her flashing three lines of guns. We looked at the
little boats which ever and anon came out of this monster, with humble
wonder. There was the lieutenant who boarded us at midnight before we
dropped anchor in the river: ten white-jacketed men pulling as one,
swept along with the barge, gig, boat, curricle, or coach-and-six, with
which he came up to us. We examined him—his red whiskers—his collars
turned down—his duck trousers, his bullion epaulets—with awe. With the
same reverential feeling we examined the seamen—the young gentleman in
the bows of the boat—the handsome young officers of marines we met
sauntering in the town next day—the Scotch surgeon who boarded us as we
weighed anchor—every man, down to the broken-nosed mariner who was
drunk in a wine-house, and had “Caledonia” written on his hat. Whereas
at the Frenchmen we looked with undisguised contempt. We were ready to
burst with laughter as we passed the Prince’s vessel—there was a little
French boy in a French boat alongside cleaning it, and twirling about a
little French mop—we thought it the most comical, contemptible French
boy, mop, boat, steamer, prince—Psha! it is of this wretched vapouring
stuff that false patriotism is made. I write this as a sort of homily à
propos of the day, and Cape Trafalgar, off which we lie. What business
have I to strut the deck, and clap my wings, and cry
“Cock-a-doodle-doo” over it? Some compatriots are at that work even
now.

We have lost one by one all our jovial company. There were the five
Oporto wine-merchants—all hearty English gentlemen—gone to their
wine-butts, and their red-legged partridges, and their duels at Oporto.
It appears that these gallant Britons fight every morning among
themselves, and give the benighted people among whom they live an
opportunity to admire the spirit national. There is the brave honest
major, with his wooden leg—the kindest and simplest of Irishmen: he has
embraced his children, and reviewed his little invalid garrison of
fifteen men, in the fort which he commands at Belem, by this time, and,
I have no doubt, played to every soul of them the twelve tunes of his
musical-box. It was pleasant to see him with that musical-box—how
pleased he wound it up after dinner—how happily he listened to the
little clinking tunes as they galloped, ding-dong, after each other! A
man who carries a musical-box is always a good-natured man.

Then there was his Grace, or his Grandeur, the Archbishop of Beyrouth
(in the parts of the infidels), His Holiness’s Nuncio to the Court of
Her Most Faithful Majesty, and who mingled among us like any simple
mortal,—except that he had an extra smiling courtesy, which simple
mortals do not always possess; and when you passed him as such, and
puffed your cigar in his face, took off his hat with a grin of such
prodigious rapture, as to lead you to suppose that the most delicious
privilege of his whole life was that permission to look at the tip of
your nose or of your cigar. With this most reverend prelate was his
Grace’s brother and chaplain—a very greasy and good-natured
ecclesiastic, who, from his physiognomy, I would have imagined to be a
dignitary of the Israelitish rather than the Romish Church—as profuse
in smiling courtesy as his Lordship of Beyrouth. These two had a meek
little secretary between them, and a tall French cook and valet, who,
at meal times, might be seen busy about the cabin where their
reverences lay. They were on their backs for the greater part of the
voyage; their yellow countenances were not only unshaven, but, to judge
from appearances, unwashed. They ate in private; and it was only of
evenings, as the sun was setting over the western wave, and, comforted
by the dinner, the cabin-passengers assembled on the quarter-deck, that
we saw the dark faces of the reverend gentlemen among us for a while.
They sank darkly into their berths when the steward’s bell tolled for
tea.

At Lisbon, where we came to anchor at midnight, a special boat came
off, whereof the crew exhibited every token of reverence for the
ambassador of the ambassador of Heaven, and carried him off from our
company. This abrupt departure in the darkness disappointed some of us,
who had promised ourselves the pleasure of seeing his Grandeur depart
in state in the morning, shaved, clean, and in full pontificals, the
tripping little secretary swinging an incense-pot before him, and the
greasy chaplain bearing his crosier.

Next day we had another bishop, who occupied the very same berth his
Grace of Beyrouth had quitted—was sick in the very same way— so much so
that this cabin of the “Lady Mary Wood” is to be christened “the
bishop’s berth” henceforth; and a handsome mitre is to be painted on
the basin.

Bishop No. 2 was a very stout, soft, kind-looking old gentleman, in a
square cap, with a handsome tassel of green and gold round his portly
breast and back. He was dressed in black robes and tight purple
stockings: and we carried him from Lisbon to the little flat coast of
Faro, of which the meek old gentleman was the chief pastor.

We had not been half-an-hour from our anchorage in the Tagus, when his
Lordship dived down into the episcopal berth. All that night there was
a good smart breeze; it blew fresh all the next day, as we went jumping
over the blue bright sea; and there was no sign of his Lordship the
bishop until we were opposite the purple hills of Algarve, which lay
some ten miles distant,—a yellow sunny shore stretching flat before
them, whose long sandy flats and villages we could see with our
telescope from the steamer.

Presently a little vessel, with a huge shining lateen sail, and bearing
the blue and white Portuguese flag, was seen playing a sort of
leap-frog on the jolly waves, jumping over them, and ducking down as
merry as could be. This little boat came towards the steamer as quick
as ever she could jump; and Captain Cooper roaring out, “Stop her!” to
“Lady Mary Wood,” her Ladyship’s paddles suddenly ceased twirling, and
news was carried to the good bishop that his boat was almost alongside,
and that his hour was come.

It was rather an affecting sight to see the poor old fat gentleman,
looking wistfully over the water as the boat now came up, and her eight
seamen, with great noise, energy, and gesticulation laid her by the
steamer. The steamer steps were let down; his Lordship’s servant, in
blue and yellow livery (like the Edinburgh Review), cast over the
episcopal luggage into the boat, along with his own bundle and the
jack-boots with which he rides postilion on one of the bishop’s fat
mules at Faro. The blue and yellow domestic went down the steps into
the boat. Then came the bishop’s turn; but he couldn’t do it for a long
while. He went from one passenger to another, sadly shaking them by the
hand, often taking leave and seeming loth to depart, until Captain
Cooper, in a stern but respectful tone, touched him on the shoulder,
and said, I know not with what correctness, being ignorant of the
Spanish language, “Senor ’Bispo! Senor ’Bispo!” on which summons the
poor old man, looking ruefully round him once more, put his square cap
under his arm, tucked up his long black petticoats, so as to show his
purple stockings and jolly fat calves, and went trembling down the
steps towards the boat. The good old man! I wish I had had a shake of
that trembling podgy hand somehow before he went upon his sea
martyrdom. I felt a love for that soft-hearted old Christian. Ah! let
us hope his governante tucked him comfortably in bed when he got to
Faro that night, and made him a warm gruel and put his feet in warm
water. The men clung around him, and almost kissed him as they popped
him into the boat, but he did not heed their caresses. Away went the
boat scudding madly before the wind. Bang! another lateen-sailed boat
in the distance fired a gun in his honour; but the wind was blowing
away from the shore, and who knows when that meek bishop got home to
his gruel?

I think these were the notables of our party. I will not mention the
laughing ogling lady of Cadiz, whose manners, I very much regret to
say, were a great deal too lively for my sense of propriety; nor those
fair sufferers, her companions, who lay on the deck with sickly,
smiling female resignation: nor the heroic children, who no sooner ate
biscuit than they were ill, and no sooner were ill than they began
eating biscuit again: but just allude to one other martyr, the kind
lieutenant in charge of the mails, and who bore his cross with what I
can’t but think a very touching and noble resignation.

There’s a certain sort of man whose doom in the world is
disappointment,—who excels in it,—and whose luckless triumphs in his
meek career of life, I have often thought, must be regarded by the kind
eyes above with as much favour as the splendid successes and
achievements of coarser and more prosperous men. As I sat with the
lieutenant upon deck, his telescope laid over his lean legs, and he
looking at the sunset with a pleased, withered old face, he gave me a
little account of his history. I take it he is in nowise disinclined to
talk about it, simple as it is: he has been seven- and-thirty years in
the navy, being somewhat more mature in the service than Lieutenant
Peel, Rear-Admiral Prince de Joinville, and other commanders who need
not be mentioned. He is a very well- educated man, and reads
prodigiously,—travels, histories, lives of eminent worthies and heroes,
in his simple way. He is not in the least angry at his want of luck in
the profession. “Were I a boy to-morrow,” he said, “I would begin it
again; and when I see my schoolfellows, and how they have got on in
life, if some are better off than I am, I find many are worse, and have
no call to be discontented.” So he carries Her Majesty’s mails meekly
through this world, waits upon port-admirals and captains in his old
glazed hat, and is as proud of the pennon at the bow of his little
boat, as if it were flying from the mainmast of a thundering
man-of-war. He gets two hundred a year for his services, and has an old
mother and a sister living in England somewhere, who I will wager
(though he never, I swear, said a word about it) have a good portion of
this princely income.

Is it breaking a confidence to tell Lieutenant Bundy’s history? Let the
motive excuse the deed. It is a good, kind, wholesome, and noble
character. Why should we keep all our admiration for those who win in
this world, as we do, sycophants as we are? When we write a novel, our
great stupid imaginations can go no further than to marry the hero to a
fortune at the end, and to find out that he is a lord by right. O
blundering lickspittle morality! And yet I would like to fancy some
happy retributive Utopia in the peaceful cloud-land, where my friend
the meek lieutenant should find the yards of his ship manned as he went
on board, all the guns firing an enormous salute (only without the
least noise or vile smell of powder), and he be saluted on the deck as
Admiral Sir James, or Sir Joseph—ay, or Lord Viscount Bundy, knight of
all the orders above the sun.

I think this is a sufficient, if not a complete catalogue of the
worthies on board the “Lady Mary Wood.” In the week we were on board—it
seemed a year, by the way—we came to regard the ship quite as a home.
We felt for the captain—the most good-humoured, active, careful, ready
of captains—a filial, a fraternal regard; for the providor, who
provided for us with admirable comfort and generosity, a genial
gratitude; and for the brisk steward’s lads— brisk in serving the
banquet, sympathising in handing the basin— every possible sentiment of
regard and good-will. What winds blew, and how many knots we ran, are
all noted down, no doubt, in the ship’s log: and as for what ships we
saw—every one of them with their gunnage, tonnage, their nation, their
direction whither they were bound—were not these all noted down with
surprising ingenuity and precision by the lieutenant, at a family desk
at which he sat every night, before a great paper elegantly and
mysteriously ruled off with his large ruler? I have a regard for every
man on board that ship, from the captain down to the crew—down even to
the cook, with tattooed arms, sweating among the saucepans in the
galley, who used (with a touching affection) to send us locks of his
hair in the soup. And so, while our feelings and recollections are
warm, let us shake hands with this knot of good fellows, comfortably
floating about in their little box of wood and iron, across Channel,
Biscay Bay, and the Atlantic, from Southampton Water to Gibraltar
Straits.




CHAPTER IV
GIBRALTAR


Suppose all the nations of the earth to send fitting ambassadors to
represent them at Wapping or Portsmouth Point, with each, under its own
national signboard and language, its appropriate house of call, and
your imagination may figure the Main Street of Gibraltar: almost the
only part of the town, I believe, which boasts of the name of street at
all, the remaining houserows being modestly called lanes, such as Bomb
Lane, Battery Lane, Fusee Lane, and so on. In Main Street the Jews
predominate, the Moors abound; and from the “Jolly Sailor,” or the
brave “Horse Marine,” where the people of our nation are drinking
British beer and gin, you hear choruses of “Garryowen” or “The Lass I
left behind me;” while through the flaring lattices of the Spanish
ventas come the clatter of castanets and the jingle and moan of Spanish
guitars and ditties. It is a curious sight at evening this thronged
street, with the people, in a hundred different costumes, bustling to
and fro under the coarse flare of the lamps; swarthy Moors, in white or
crimson robes; dark Spanish smugglers in tufted hats, with gay silk
handkerchiefs round their heads; fuddled seamen from men-of-war, or
merchantmen; porters, Galician or Genoese; and at every few minutes’
interval, little squads of soldiers tramping to relieve guard at some
one of the innumerable posts in the town.

Some of our party went to a Spanish venta, as a more convenient or
romantic place of residence than an English house; others made choice
of the club-house in Commercial Square, of which I formed an agreeable
picture in my imagination; rather, perhaps, resembling the Junior
United Service Club in Charles Street, by which every Londoner has
passed ere this with respectful pleasure, catching glimpses of
magnificent blazing candelabras, under which sit neat half-pay
officers, drinking half-pints of port. The club-house of Gibraltar is
not, however, of the Charles Street sort: it may have been cheerful
once, and there are yet relics of splendour about it. When officers
wore pigtails, and in the time of Governor O’Hara, it may have been a
handsome place; but it is mouldy and decrepit now; and though his
Excellency, Mr. Bulwer, was living there, and made no complaints that I
heard of, other less distinguished persons thought they had reason to
grumble. Indeed, what is travelling made of? At least half its
pleasures and incidents come out of inns; and of them the tourist can
speak with much more truth and vivacity than of historical
recollections compiled out of histories, or filched out of handbooks.
But to speak of the best inn in a place needs no apology: that, at
least, is useful information. As every person intending to visit
Gibraltar cannot have seen the flea-bitten countenances of our
companions, who fled from their Spanish venta to take refuge at the
club the morning after our arrival, they may surely be thankful for
being directed to the best house of accommodation in one of the most
unromantic, uncomfortable, and prosaic of towns.

If one had a right to break the sacred confidence of the mahogany, I
could entertain you with many queer stories of Gibraltar life, gathered
from the lips of the gentlemen who enjoyed themselves round the dingy
tablecloth of the club-house coffee-room, richly decorated with cold
gravy and spilt beer. I heard there the very names of the gentlemen who
wrote the famous letters from the “Warspite” regarding the French
proceedings at Mogador; and met several refugee Jews from that place,
who said that they were much more afraid of the Kabyles without the
city than of the guns of the French squadron, of which they seemed to
make rather light. I heard the last odds on the ensuing match between
Captain Smith’s b. g. Bolter, and Captain Brown’s ch. c. Roarer: how
the gun-room of Her Majesty’s ship “Purgatory” had “cobbed” a tradesman
of the town, and of the row in consequence. I heard capital stories of
the way in which Wilkins had escaped the guard, and Thompson had been
locked up among the mosquitoes for being out after ten without the
lantern. I heard how the governor was an old -, but to say what, would
be breaking a confidence: only this may be divulged, that the epithet
was exceedingly complimentary to Sir Robert Wilson. All the while these
conversations were going on, a strange scene of noise and bustle was
passing in the market-place, in front of the window, where Moors, Jews,
Spaniards, soldiers were thronging in the sun; and a ragged fat fellow,
mounted on a tobacco-barrel, with his hat cocked on his ear, was
holding an auction, and roaring with an energy and impudence that would
have done credit to Covent Garden.

The Moorish castle is the only building about the Rock which has an air
at all picturesque or romantic; there is a plain Roman Catholic
cathedral, a hideous new Protestant church of the cigar-divan
architecture, and a Court-house with a portico which is said to be an
imitation of the Parthenon: the ancient religions houses of the Spanish
town are gone, or turned into military residences, and masked so that
you would never know their former pious destination. You walk through
narrow whitewashed lanes, bearing such martial names as are before
mentioned, and by-streets with barracks on either side: small
Newgate-like looking buildings, at the doors of which you may see the
sergeants’ ladies conversing; or at the open windows of the officers’
quarters, Ensign Fipps lying on his sofa and smoking his cigar, or
Lieutenant Simson practising the flute to while away the weary hours of
garrison dulness. I was surprised not to find more persons in the
garrison library, where is a magnificent reading-room, and an admirable
collection of books.

In spite of the scanty herbage and the dust on the trees, the Alameda
is a beautiful walk; of which the vegetation has been as laboriously
cared for as the tremendous fortifications which flank it on either
side. The vast Rock rises on one side with its interminable works of
defence, and Gibraltar Bay is shining on the other, out on which from
the terraces immense cannon are perpetually looking, surrounded by
plantations of cannon-balls and beds of bomb-shells, sufficient, one
would think, to blow away the whole peninsula. The horticultural and
military mixture is indeed very queer: here and there temples, rustic
summer-seats, &c. have been erected in the garden, but you are sure to
see a great squat mortar look up from among the flower-pots: and amidst
the aloes and geraniums sprouts the green petticoat and scarlet coat of
a Highlander. Fatigue-parties are seen winding up the hill, and busy
about the endless cannon-ball plantations; awkward squads are drilling
in the open spaces: sentries marching everywhere, and (this is a
caution to artists) I am told have orders to run any man through who is
discovered making a sketch of the place. It is always beautiful,
especially at evening, when the people are sauntering along the walks,
and the moon is shining on the waters of the bay and the hills and
twinkling white houses of the opposite shore. Then the place becomes
quite romantic: it is too dark to see the dust on the dried leaves; the
cannon-balls do not intrude too much, but have subsided into the shade;
the awkward squads are in bed; even the loungers are gone, the
fan-flirting Spanish ladies, the sallow black-eyed children, and the
trim white-jacketed dandies. A fife is heard from some craft at roost
on the quiet waters somewhere; or a faint cheer from yonder black
steamer at the Mole, which is about to set out on some night
expedition. You forget that the town is at all like Wapping, and
deliver yourself up entirely to romance; the sentries look noble pacing
there, silent in the moonlight, and Sandy’s voice is quite musical as
he challenges with a “Who goes there?”

“All’s Well” is very pleasant when sung decently in tune, and inspires
noble and poetic ideas of duty, courage, and danger: but when you hear
it shouted all the night through, accompanied by a clapping of muskets
in a time of profound peace, the sentinel’s cry becomes no more
romantic to the hearer than it is to the sandy Connaught-man or the
bare-legged Highlander who delivers it. It is best to read about wars
comfortably in Harry Lorrequer or Scott’s novels, in which knights
shout their war-cries, and jovial Irish bayoneteers hurrah, without
depriving you of any blessed rest. Men of a different way of thinking,
however, can suit themselves perfectly at Gibraltar; where there is
marching and counter- marching, challenging and relieving guard all the
night through. And not here in Commercial Square alone, but all over
the huge Rock in the darkness—all through the mysterious zig-zags, and
round the dark cannon-ball pyramids, and along the vast rock-galleries,
and up to the topmost flagstaff, where the sentry can look out over two
seas, poor fellows are marching and clapping muskets, and crying “All’s
Well,” dressed in cap and feather, in place of honest nightcaps best
befitting the decent hours of sleep.

All these martial noises three of us heard to the utmost advantage,
lying on iron bedsteads at the time in a cracked old room on the
ground-floor, the open windows of which looked into the square. No spot
could be more favourably selected for watching the humours of a
garrison town by night. About midnight, the door hard by us was visited
by a party of young officers, who having had quite as much drink as was
good for them, were naturally inclined for more; and when we
remonstrated through the windows, one of them in a young tipsy voice
asked after our mothers, and finally reeled away. How charming is the
conversation of high-spirited youth! I don’t know whether the guard got
hold of them: but certainly if a civilian had been hiccuping through
the streets at that hour, he would have been carried off to the
guard-house, and left to the mercy of the mosquitoes there, and had up
before the Governor in the morning. The young man in the coffee-room
tells me he goes to sleep every night with the keys of Gibraltar under
his pillow. It is an awful image, and somehow completes the notion of
the slumbering fortress. Fancy Sir Robert Wilson, his nose just visible
over the sheets, his night-cap and the huge key (you see the very
identical one in Reynolds’s portrait of Lord Heathfield) peeping out
from under the bolster!

If I entertain you with accounts of inns and nightcaps it is because I
am more familiar with these subjects than with history and
fortifications: as far as I can understand the former, Gibraltar is the
great British depot for smuggling goods into the Peninsula. You see
vessels lying in the harbour, and are told in so many words they are
smugglers: all those smart Spaniards with cigar and mantles are
smugglers, and run tobaccos and cotton into Catalonia; all the
respected merchants of the place are smugglers. The other day a Spanish
revenue vessel was shot to death under the thundering great guns of the
fort, for neglecting to bring to, but it so happened that it was in
chase of a smuggler: in this little corner of her dominions Britain
proclaims war to custom-houses, and protection to free trade. Perhaps
ere a very long day, England may be acting that part towards the world,
which Gibraltar performs towards Spain now; and the last war in which
we shall ever engage may be a custom-house war. For once establish
railroads and abolish preventive duties through Europe, and what is
there left to fight for? It will matter very little then under what
flag people live, and foreign ministers and ambassadors may enjoy a
dignified sinecure; the army will rise to the rank of peaceful
constables, not having any more use for their bayonets than those
worthy people have for their weapons now who accompany the law at
assizes under the name of javelin-men. The apparatus of bombs and
eighty-four- pounders may disappear from the Alameda, and the crops of
cannon- balls which now grow there may give place to other plants more
pleasant to the eye; and the great key of Gibraltar may be left in the
gate for anybody to turn at will, and Sir Robert Wilson may sleep in
quiet.

I am afraid I thought it was rather a release, when, having made up our
minds to examine the Rock in detail and view the magnificent
excavations and galleries, the admiration of all military men, and the
terror of any enemies who may attack the fortress, we received orders
to embark forthwith in the “Tagus,” which was to early us to Malta and
Constantinople. So we took leave of this famous Rock— this great
blunderbuss—which we seized out of the hands of the natural owners a
hundred and forty years ago, and which we have kept ever since
tremendously loaded and cleaned and ready for use. To seize and have it
is doubtless a gallant thing; it is like one of those tests of courage
which one reads of in the chivalrous romances, when, for instance, Sir
Huon of Bordeaux is called upon to prove his knighthood by going to
Babylon and pulling out the Sultan’s beard and front teeth in the midst
of his Court there. But, after all, justice must confess it was rather
hard on the poor Sultan. If we had the Spaniards established at Land’s
End, with impregnable Spanish fortifications on St. Michael’s Mount, we
should perhaps come to the same conclusion. Meanwhile let us hope,
during this long period of deprivation, the Sultan of Spain is
reconciled to the loss of his front teeth and bristling whiskers— let
us even try to think that he is better without them. At all events,
right or wrong, whatever may be our title to the property, there is no
Englishman but must think with pride of the manner in which his
countrymen have kept it, and of the courage, endurance, and sense of
duty with which stout old Eliott and his companions resisted Crillon
and the Spanish battering ships and his fifty thousand men. There seems
to be something more noble in the success of a gallant resistance than
of an attack, however brave. After failing in his attack on the fort,
the French General visited the English Commander who had foiled him,
and parted from him and his garrison in perfect politeness and
good-humour. The English troops, Drinkwater says, gave him thundering
cheers as he went away, and the French in return complimented us on our
gallantry, and lauded the humanity of our people. If we are to go on
murdering each other in the old-fashioned way, what a pity it is that
our battles cannot end in the old-fashioned way too!

One of our fellow-travellers, who had written a book, and had suffered
considerably from sea-sickness during our passage along the coasts of
France and Spain, consoled us all by saying that the very minute we got
into the Mediterranean we might consider ourselves entirely free from
illness; and, in fact, that it was unheard of in the Inland Sea. Even
in the Bay of Gibraltar the water looked bluer than anything I have
ever seen—except Miss Smith’s eyes. I thought, somehow, the delicious
faultless azure never could look angry—just like the eyes before
alluded to—and under this assurance we passed the Strait, and began
coasting the African shore calmly and without the least apprehension,
as if we were as much used to the tempest as Mr. T. P. Cooke.

But when, in spite of the promise of the man who had written the book,
we found ourselves worse than in the worst part of the Bay of Biscay,
or off the storm-lashed rocks of Finisterre, we set down the author in
question as a gross impostor, and had a mind to quarrel with him for
leading us into this cruel error. The most provoking part of the
matter, too, was, that the sky was deliciously clear and cloudless, the
air balmy, the sea so insultingly blue that it seemed as if we had no
right to be ill at all, and that the innumerable little waves that
frisked round about our keel were enjoying an anerithmon gelasma (this
is one of my four Greek quotations: depend on it I will manage to
introduce the other three before the tour is done)—seemed to be
enjoying, I say, the above-named Greek quotation at our expense. Here
is the dismal log of Wednesday, 4th of September: —“All attempts at
dining very fruitless. Basins in requisition. Wind hard ahead. Que
diable allais-je faire dans cette galere? Writing or thinking
impossible: so read ‘Letters from the AEgean.’” These brief words give,
I think, a complete idea of wretchedness, despair, remorse, and
prostration of soul and body. Two days previously we passed the forts
and moles and yellow buildings of Algiers, rising very stately from the
sea, and skirted by gloomy purple lines of African shore, with fires
smoking in the mountains, and lonely settlements here and there.

On the 5th, to the inexpressible joy of all, we reached Valetta, the
entrance to the harbour of which is one of the most stately and
agreeable scenes ever admired by sea-sick traveller. The small basin
was busy with a hundred ships, from the huge guard-ship, which lies
there a city in itself;—merchantmen loading and crews cheering, under
all the flags of the world flaunting in the sunshine; a half-score of
busy black steamers perpetually coming and going, coaling and painting,
and puffing and hissing in and out of harbour; slim men-of-war’s barges
shooting to and fro, with long shining oars flashing like wings over
the water; hundreds of painted town-boats, with high heads and white
awnings,—down to the little tubs in which some naked, tawny young
beggars came paddling up to the steamer, entreating us to let them dive
for halfpence. Round this busy blue water rise rocks, blazing in
sunshine, and covered with every imaginable device of fortification; to
the right, St. Elmo, with flag and lighthouse; and opposite, the
Military Hospital, looking like a palace; and all round, the houses of
the city, for its size the handsomest and most stately in the world.

Nor does it disappoint you on a closer inspection, as many a foreign
town does. The streets are thronged with a lively comfortable-looking
population; the poor seem to inhabit handsome stone palaces, with
balconies and projecting windows of heavy carved stone. The lights and
shadows, the cries and stenches, the fruit-shops and fish-stalls, the
dresses and chatter of all nations; the soldiers in scarlet, and women
in black mantillas; the beggars, boat-men, barrels of pickled herrings
and macaroni; the shovel-hatted priests and bearded capuchins; the
tobacco, grapes, onions, and sunshine; the signboards, bottled-porter
stores, the statues of saints and little chapels which jostle the
stranger’s eyes as he goes up the famous stairs from the Water-gate,
make a scene of such pleasant confusion and liveliness as I have never
witnessed before. And the effect of the groups of multitudinous actors
in this busy cheerful drama is heightened, as it were, by the
decorations of the stage. The sky is delightfully brilliant; all the
houses and ornaments are stately; castle and palaces are rising all
around; and the flag, towers, and walls of Fort St. Elmo look as fresh
and magnificent as if they had been erected only yesterday.

The Strada Reale has a much more courtly appearance than that one
described. Here are palaces, churches, court-houses and libraries, the
genteel London shops, and the latest articles of perfumery. Gay young
officers are strolling about in shell-jackets much too small for them:
midshipmen are clattering by on hired horses; squads of priests,
habited after the fashion of Don Basilio in the opera, are demurely
pacing to and fro; professional beggars run shrieking after the
stranger; and agents for horses, for inns, and for worse places still,
follow him and insinuate the excellence of their goods. The houses
where they are selling carpet-bags and pomatum were the palaces of the
successors of the goodliest company of gallant knights the world ever
heard tell of. It seems unromantic; but THESE were not the romantic
Knights of St. John. The heroic days of the Order ended as the last
Turkish galley lifted anchor after the memorable siege. The present
stately houses were built in times of peace and splendour and decay. I
doubt whether the Auberge de Provence, where the “Union Club”
flourishes now, has ever seen anything more romantic than the pleasant
balls held in the great room there.

The Church of St. John, not a handsome structure without, is
magnificent within: a noble hall covered with a rich embroidery of
gilded carving, the chapels of the different nations on either side,
but not interfering with the main structure, of which the whole is
simple, and the details only splendid; it seemed to me a fitting place
for this wealthy body of aristocratic soldiers, who made their
devotions as it were on parade, and, though on their knees, never
forgot their epaulets or their quarters of nobility. This mixture of
religion and worldly pride seems incongruous at first; but have we not
at church at home similar relics of feudal ceremony?—the verger with
the silver mace who precedes the vicar to the desk; the two chaplains
of my Lord Archbishop, who bow over his Grace as he enters the
communion-table gate; even poor John, who follows my Lady with a
coroneted prayer-book, and makes his conge as he hands it into the pew.
What a chivalrous absurdity is the banner of some high and mighty
prince, hanging over his stall in Windsor Chapel, when you think of the
purpose for which men are supposed to assemble there! The Church of the
Knights of St. John is paved over with sprawling heraldic devices of
the dead gentlemen of the dead Order; as if, in the next world, they
expected to take rank in conformity with their pedigrees, and would be
marshalled into heaven according to the orders of precedence. Cumbrous
handsome paintings adorn the walls and chapels, decorated with pompous
monuments of Grand Masters. Beneath is a crypt, where more of these
honourable and reverend warriors lie, in a state that a Simpson would
admire. In the altar are said to lie three of the most gallant relics
in the world: the keys of Acre, Rhodes, and Jerusalem. What blood was
shed in defending these emblems! What faith, endurance, genius, and
generosity; what pride, hatred, ambition, and savage lust of blood were
roused together for their guardianship!

In the lofty halls and corridors of the Governor’s house, some
portraits of the late Grand Masters still remain: a very fine one, by
Caravaggio, of a knight in gilt armour, hangs in the dining- room, near
a full-length of poor Louis XVI., in Royal robes, the very picture of
uneasy impotency. But the portrait of De Vignacourt is the only one
which has a respectable air; the other chiefs of the famous Society are
pompous old gentlemen in black, with huge periwigs, and crowns round
their hats, and a couple of melancholy pages in yellow and red. But
pages and wigs and Grand Masters have almost faded out of the canvas,
and are vanishing into Hades with a most melancholy indistinctness. The
names of most of these gentlemen, however, live as yet in the forts of
the place, which all seem to have been eager to build and christen: so
that it seems as if, in the Malta mythology, they had been turned into
freestone.

In the armoury is the very suit painted by Caravaggio, by the side of
the armour of the noble old La Valette, whose heroism saved his island
from the efforts of Mustapha and Dragut, and an army quite as fierce
and numerous as that which was baffled before Gibraltar, by similar
courage and resolution. The sword of the last-named famous corsair (a
most truculent little scimitar), thousands of pikes and halberts,
little old cannons and wall-pieces, helmets and cuirasses, which the
knights or their people wore, are trimly arranged against the wall,
and, instead of spiking Turks or arming warriors, now serve to point
morals and adorn tales. And here likewise are kept many thousand
muskets, swords, and boarding-pikes for daily use, and a couple of
ragged old standards of one of the English regiments, who pursued and
conquered in Egypt the remains of the haughty and famous French
republican army, at whose appearance the last knights of Malta flung
open the gates of all their fortresses, and consented to be
extinguished without so much as a remonstrance, or a kick, or a
struggle.

We took a drive into what may be called the country; where the fields
are rocks, and the hedges are stones—passing by the stone gardens of
the Florian, and wondering at the number and handsomeness of the stone
villages and churches rising everywhere among the stony hills. Handsome
villas were passed everywhere, and we drove for a long distance along
the sides of an aqueduct, quite a Royal work of the Caravaggio in gold
armour, the Grand Master De Vignacourt. A most agreeable contrast to
the arid rocks of the general scenery was the garden at the Governor’s
country-house; with the orange-trees and water, its beautiful golden
grapes, luxuriant flowers, and thick cool shrubberies. The eye longs
for this sort of refreshment, after being seared with the hot glare of
the general country; and St. Antonio was as pleasant after Malta as
Malta was after the sea.

We paid the island a subsequent visit in November, passing seventeen
days at an establishment called Fort Manuel there, and by punsters the
Manuel des Voyageurs; where Government accommodates you with quarters;
where the authorities are so attentive as to scent your letters with
aromatic vinegar before you receive them, and so careful of your health
as to lock you up in your room every night lest you should walk in your
sleep, and so over the battlements into the sea—if you escaped drowning
in the sea, the sentries on the opposite shore would fire at you, hence
the nature of the precaution. To drop, however, this satirical strain:
those who know what quarantine is, may fancy that the place somehow
becomes unbearable in which it has been endured. And though the
November climate of Malta is like the most delicious May in England,
and though there is every gaiety and amusement in the town, a
comfortable little opera, a good old library filled full of good old
books (none of your works of modern science, travel, and history, but
good old USELESS books of the last two centuries), and nobody to
trouble you in reading them, and though the society of Valetta is most
hospitable, varied, and agreeable, yet somehow one did not feel SAFE in
the island, with perpetual glimpses of Fort Manuel from the opposite
shore; and, lest the quarantine authorities should have a fancy to
fetch one back again, on a pretext of posthumous plague, we made our
way to Naples by the very first opportunity—those who remained, that
is, of the little Eastern Expedition. They were not all there. The
Giver of life and death had removed two of our company: one was left
behind to die in Egypt, with a mother to bewail his loss, another we
buried in the dismal lazaretto cemetery.

* * *

One is bound to look at this, too, as a part of our journey. Disease
and death are knocking perhaps at your next cabin door. Your kind and
cheery companion has ridden his last ride and emptied his last glass
beside you. And while fond hearts are yearning for him far away, and
his own mind, if conscious, is turning eagerly towards the spot of the
world whither affection or interest calls it—the Great Father summons
the anxious spirit from earth to himself, and ordains that the nearest
and dearest shall meet here no more.

Such an occurrence as a death in a lazaretto, mere selfishness renders
striking. We were walking with him but two days ago on deck. One has a
sketch of him, another his card, with the address written yesterday,
and given with an invitation to come and see him at home in the
country, where his children are looking for him. He is dead in a day,
and buried in the walls of the prison. A doctor felt his pulse by
deputy—a clergyman comes from the town to read the last service over
him—and the friends, who attend his funeral, are marshalled by
lazaretto-guardians, so as not to touch each other. Every man goes back
to his room and applies the lesson to himself. One would not so depart
without seeing again the dear dear faces. We reckon up those we love:
they are but very few, but I think one loves them better than ever now.
Should it be your turn next?—and why not? Is it pity or comfort to
think of that affection which watches and survives you?

The Maker has linked together the whole race of man with this chain of
love. I like to think that there is no man but has had kindly feelings
for some other, and he for his neighbour, until we bind together the
whole family of Adam. Nor does it end here. It joins heaven and earth
together. For my friend or my child of past days is still my friend or
my child to me here, or in the home prepared for us by the Father of
all. If identity survives the grave, as our faith tells us, is it not a
consolation to think that there may be one or two souls among the
purified and just, whose affection watches us invisible, and follows
the poor sinner on earth?




CHAPTER V
ATHENS


Not feeling any enthusiasm myself about Athens, my bounden duty of
course is clear, to sneer and laugh heartily at all who have. In fact,
what business has a lawyer, who was in Pump Court this day three weeks,
and whose common reading is law reports or the newspaper, to pretend to
fall in love for the long vacation with mere poetry, of which I swear a
great deal is very doubtful, and to get up an enthusiasm quite foreign
to his nature and usual calling in life? What call have ladies to
consider Greece “romantic,” they who get their notions of mythology
from the well-known pages of “Tooke’s Pantheon”? What is the reason
that blundering Yorkshire squires, young dandies from Corfu regiments,
jolly sailors from ships in the harbour, and yellow old Indians
returning from Bundelcund, should think proper to be enthusiastic about
a country of which they know nothing; the mere physical beauty of which
they cannot, for the most part, comprehend; and because certain
characters lived in it two thousand four hundred years ago? What have
these people in common with Pericles, what have these ladies in common
with Aspasia (O fie)? Of the race of Englishmen who come wandering
about the tomb of Socrates, do you think the majority would not have
voted to hemlock him? Yes: for the very same superstition which leads
men by the nose now, drove them onward in the days when the lowly
husband of Xantippe died for daring to think simply and to speak the
truth. I know of no quality more magnificent in fools than their faith:
that perfect consciousness they have, that they are doing virtuous and
meritorious actions, when they are performing acts of folly, murdering
Socrates, or pelting Aristides with holy oyster-shells—all for Virtue’s
sake; and a “History of Dulness in all Ages of the World,” is a book
which a philosopher would surely be hanged, but as certainly blessed,
for writing.

If papa and mamma (honour be to them!) had not followed the faith of
their fathers, and thought proper to send away their only beloved son
(afterwards to be celebrated under the name of Titmarsh) into ten
years’ banishment of infernal misery, tyranny, annoyance; to give over
the fresh feelings of the heart of the little Michael Angelo to the
discipline of vulgar bullies, who, in order to lead tender young
children to the Temple of Learning (as they do in the spelling-books),
drive them on with clenched fists and low abuse; if they fainted,
revive them with a thump, or assailed them with a curse; if they were
miserable, consoled them with a brutal jeer—if, I say, my dear parents,
instead of giving me the inestimable benefit of a ten years’ classical
education, had kept me at home with my dear thirteen sisters, it is
probable I should have liked this country of Attica, in sight of the
blue shores of which the present pathetic letter is written; but I was
made so miserable in youth by a classical education, that all connected
with it is disagreeable in my eyes; and I have the same recollection of
Greek in youth that I have of castor-oil.

So in coming in sight of the promontory of Sunium, where the Greek
Muse, in an awful vision, came to me, and said in a patronising way,
“Why, my dear” (she always, the old spinster, adopts this high and
mighty tone)—“Why, my dear, are you not charmed to be in this famous
neighbourhood, in this land of poets and heroes, of whose history your
classical education ought to have made you a master? if it did not, you
have wofully neglected your opportunities, and your dear parents have
wasted their money in sending you to school.” I replied, “Madam, your
company in youth was made so laboriously disagreeable to me, that I
can’t at present reconcile myself to you in age. I read your poets, but
it was in fear and trembling; and a cold sweat is but an ill
accompaniment to poetry. I blundered through your histories; but
history is so dull (saving your presence) of herself, that when the
brutal dulness of a schoolmaster is superadded to her own slow
conversation, the union becomes intolerable: hence I have not the
slightest pleasure in renewing my acquaintance with a lady who has been
the source of so much bodily and mental discomfort to me.” To make a
long story short, I am anxious to apologise for a want of enthusiasm in
the classical line, and to excuse an ignorance which is of the most
undeniable sort.

This is an improper frame of mind for a person visiting the land of
AEschylus and Euripides; add to which, we have been abominably
overcharged at the inn: and what are the blue hills of Attica, the
silver calm basin of Piraeus, the heathery heights of Pentelicus, and
yonder rocks crowned by the Doric columns of the Parthenon, and the
thin Ionic shafts of the Erechtheum, to a man who has had little rest,
and is bitten all over by bugs? Was Alcibiades bitten by bugs, I
wonder; and did the brutes crawl over him as he lay in the rosy arms of
Phryne? I wished all night for Socrates’s hammock or basket, as it is
described in the “Clouds;” in which resting- place, no doubt, the
abominable animals kept perforce clear of him.

A French man-of-war, lying in the silvery little harbour, sternly
eyeing out of its stern portholes a saucy little English corvette
beside, began playing sounding marches as a crowd of boats came
paddling up to the steamer’s side to convey us travellers to shore.
There were Russian schooners and Greek brigs lying in this little bay;
dumpy little windmills whirling round on the sunburnt heights round
about it; an improvised town of quays and marine taverns has sprung up
on the shore; a host of jingling barouches, more miserable than any to
be seen even in Germany, were collected at the landing-place; and the
Greek drivers (how queer they looked in skull-caps, shabby jackets with
profuse embroidery of worsted, and endless petticoats of dirty calico!)
began, in a generous ardour for securing passengers, to abuse each
other’s horses and carriages in the regular London fashion. Satire
could certainly hardly caricature the vehicle in which we were made to
journey to Athens; and it was only by thinking that, bad as they were,
these coaches were much more comfortable contrivances than any
Alcibiades or Cimon ever had, that we consoled ourselves along the
road. It was flat for six miles along the plain to the city: and you
see for the greater part of the way the purple mount on which the
Acropolis rises, and the gleaming houses of the town spread beneath.
Round this wide, yellow, barren plain,—a stunted district of
olive-trees is almost the only vegetation visible—there rises, as it
were, a sort of chorus of the most beautiful mountains; the most
elegant, gracious, and noble the eye ever looked on. These hills did
not appear at all lofty or terrible, but superbly rich and
aristocratic. The clouds were dancing round about them; you could see
their rosy purple shadows sweeping round the clear serene summits of
the hill. To call a hill aristocratic seems affected or absurd; but the
difference between these hills and the others, is the difference
between Newgate Prison and the Travellers’ Club, for instance: both are
buildings; but the one stern, dark, and coarse; the other rich,
elegant, and festive. At least, so I thought. With such a stately
palace as munificent Nature had built for these people, what could they
be themselves but lordly, beautiful, brilliant, brave, and wise? We saw
four Greeks on donkeys on the road (which is a dust-whirlwind where it
is not a puddle); and other four were playing with a dirty pack of
cards, at a barrack that English poets have christened the “Half-way
House.” Does external nature and beauty influence the soul to good? You
go about Warwickshire, and fancy that from merely being born and
wandering in those sweet sunny plains and fresh woodlands Shakspeare
must have drunk in a portion of that frank artless sense of beauty
which lies about his works like a bloom or dew; but a Coventry
ribbon-maker, or a slang Leamington squire, are looking on those very
same landscapes too, and what do they profit? You theorise about the
influence which the climate and appearance of Attica must have had in
ennobling those who were born there: yonder dirty, swindling, ragged
blackguards, lolling over greasy cards three hours before noon,
quarrelling and shrieking, armed to the teeth and afraid to fight, are
bred out of the same land which begot the philosophers and heroes. But
the “Half-way House” is passed by this time, and behold! we are in the
capital of King Otho.

I swear solemnly that I would rather have two hundred a year in Fleet
Street, than be King of the Greeks, with Basileus written before my
name round their beggarly coin; with the bother of perpetual
revolutions in my huge plaster-of-Paris palace, with no amusement but a
drive in the afternoon over a wretched arid country, where roads are
not made, with ambassadors (the deuce knows why, for what good can the
English, or the French, or the Russian party get out of such a bankrupt
alliance as this?) perpetually pulling and tugging at me, away from
honest Germany, where there is beer and aesthetic conversation, and
operas at a small cost. The shabbiness of this place actually beats
Ireland, and that is a strong word. The palace of the Basileus is an
enormous edifice of plaster, in a square containing six houses, three
donkeys, no roads, no fountains (except in the picture of the inn);
backwards it seems to look straight to the mountain—on one side is a
beggarly garden—the King goes out to drive (revolutions permitting) at
five—some four-and-twenty blackguards saunter up to the huge sandhill
of a terrace, as His Majesty passes by in a gilt barouche and an absurd
fancy dress; the gilt barouche goes plunging down the sandhills; the
two dozen soldiers, who have been presenting arms, slouch off to their
quarters; the vast barrack of a palace remains entirely white, ghastly,
and lonely; and, save the braying of a donkey now and then (which
long-eared minstrels are more active and sonorous in Athens than in any
place I know), all is entirely silent round Basileus’s palace. How
could people who knew Leopold fancy he would be so “jolly green” as to
take such a berth? It was only a gobemouche of a Bavarian that could
ever have been induced to accept it.

I beseech you to believe that it was not the bill and the bugs at the
inn which induced the writer hereof to speak so slightingly of the
residence of Basileus. These evils are now cured and forgotten. This is
written off the leaden flats and mounds which they call the Troad. It
is stern justice alone which pronounces this excruciating sentence. It
was a farce to make this place into a kingly capital; and I make no
manner of doubt that King Otho, the very day he can get away
unperceived, and get together the passage- money, will be off for dear
old Deutschland, Fatherland, Beerland!

I have never seen a town in England which may be compared to this; for
though Herne Bay is a ruin now, money was once spent upon it and houses
built; here, beyond a few score of mansions comfortably laid out, the
town is little better than a rickety agglomeration of larger and
smaller huts, tricked out here and there with the most absurd cracked
ornaments and cheap attempts at elegance. But neatness is the elegance
of poverty, and these people despise such a homely ornament. I have got
a map with squares, fountains, theatres, public gardens, and Places
d’Othon marked out; but they only exist in the paper capital—the
wretched tumble-down wooden one boasts of none.

One is obliged to come back to the old disagreeable comparison of
Ireland. Athens may be about as wealthy a place as Carlow or
Killarney—the streets swarm with idle crowds, the innumerable little
lanes flow over with dirty little children, they are playing and
puddling about in the dirt everywhere, with great big eyes, yellow
faces, and the queerest little gowns and skull-caps. But in the outer
man, the Greek has far the advantage of the Irishman: most of them are
well and decently dressed (if five-and-twenty yards of petticoat may
not be called decent, what may?), they swagger to and fro with huge
knives in their girdles. Almost all the men are handsome, but live
hard, it is said, in order to decorate their backs with those fine
clothes of theirs. I have seen but two or three handsome women, and
these had the great drawback which is common to the race—I mean, a
sallow, greasy, coarse complexion, at which it was not advisable to
look too closely.

And on this score I think we English may pride ourselves on possessing
an advantage (by WE, I mean the lovely ladies to whom this is addressed
with the most respectful compliments) over the most classical country
in the world. I don’t care for beauty which will only bear to be looked
at from a distance, like a scene in a theatre. What is the most
beautiful nose in the world, if it be covered with a skin of the
texture and colour of coarse whitey- brown paper; and if Nature has
made it as slippery and shining as though it had been anointed with
pomatum? They may talk about beauty, but would you wear a flower that
had been dipped in a grease-pot? No; give me a fresh, dewy, healthy
rose out of Somersetshire; not one of those superb, tawdry, unwholesome
exotics, which are only good to make poems about. Lord Byron wrote more
cant of this sort than any poet I know of. Think of “the peasant girls
with dark blue eyes” of the Rhine—the brown-faced, flat-nosed,
thick-lipped, dirty wenches! Think of “filling high a cup of Samian
wine;” small beer is nectar compared to it, and Byron himself always
drank gin. That man never wrote from his heart. He got up rapture and
enthusiasm with an eye to the public; but this is dangerous ground,
even more dangerous than to look Athens full in the face, and say that
your eyes are not dazzled by its beauty. The Great Public admires
Greece and Byron: the public knows best. Murray’s “Guide-book” calls
the latter “our native bard.” Our native bard! Mon Dieu! HE
Shakspeare’s, Milton’s, Keats’s, Scott’s native bard! Well, woe be to
the man who denies the public gods!

The truth is, then, that Athens is a disappointment; and I am angry
that it should be so. To a skilled antiquarian, or an enthusiastic
Greek scholar, the feelings created by a sight of the place of course
will be different; but you who would be inspired by it must undergo a
long preparation of reading, and possess, too, a particular feeling;
both of which, I suspect, are uncommon in our busy commercial
newspaper-reading country. Men only say they are enthusiastic about the
Greek and Roman authors and history, because it is considered proper
and respectable. And we know how gentlemen in Baker Street have
editions of the classics handsomely bound in the library, and how they
use them. Of course they don’t retire to read the newspaper; it is to
look over a favourite ode of Pindar, or to discuss an obscure passage
in Athenaeus! Of course country magistrates and Members of Parliament
are always studying Demosthenes and Cicero; we know it from their
continual habit of quoting the Latin grammar in Parliament. But it is
agreed that the classics are respectable; therefore we are to be
enthusiastic about them. Also let us admit that Byron is to be held up
as “our native bard.”

I am not so entire a heathen as to be insensible to the beauty of those
relics of Greek art, of which men much more learned and enthusiastic
have written such piles of descriptions. I thought I could recognise
the towering beauty of the prodigious columns of the Temple of Jupiter;
and admire the astonishing grace, severity, elegance, completeness of
the Parthenon. The little Temple of Victory, with its fluted Corinthian
shafts, blazed under the sun almost as fresh as it must have appeared
to the eyes of its founders; I saw nothing more charming and brilliant,
more graceful, festive, and aristocratic than this sumptuous little
building. The Roman remains which lie in the town below look like the
works of barbarians beside these perfect structures. They jar strangely
on the eye, after it has been accustoming itself to perfect harmony and
proportions. If, as the schoolmaster tells us, the Greek writing is as
complete as the Greek art; if an ode of Pindar is as glittering and
pure as the Temple of Victory; or a discourse of Plato as polished and
calm as yonder mystical portico of the Erechtheum: what treasures of
the senses and delights of the imagination have those lost to whom the
Greek books are as good as sealed!

And yet one meets with very dull first-class men. Genius won’t
transplant from one brain to another, or is ruined in the carriage,
like fine Burgundy. Sir Robert Peel and Sir John Hobhouse are both good
scholars; but their poetry in Parliament does not strike one as fine.
Muzzle, the schoolmaster, who is bullying poor trembling little boys,
was a fine scholar when he was a sizar, and a ruffian then and ever
since. Where is the great poet, since the days of Milton, who has
improved the natural offshoots of his brain by grafting it from the
Athenian tree?

I had a volume of Tennyson in my pocket, which somehow settled that
question, and ended the querulous dispute between me and Conscience,
under the shape of the neglected and irritated Greek muse, which had
been going on ever since I had commenced my walk about Athens. The old
spinster saw me wince at the idea of the author of Dora and Ulysses,
and tried to follow up her advantage by farther hints of time lost, and
precious opportunities thrown away. “You might have written poems like
them,” said she; “or, no, not like them perhaps, but you might have
done a neat prize poem, and pleased your papa and mamma. You might have
translated Jack and Jill into Greek iambics, and been a credit to your
college.” I turned testily away from her. “Madam,” says I, “because an
eagle houses on a mountain, or soars to the sun, don’t you be angry
with a sparrow that perches on a garret window, or twitters on a twig.
Leave me to myself: look, my beak is not aquiline by any means.”

And so, my dear friend, you who have been reading this last page in
wonder, and who, instead of a description of Athens, have been
accommodated with a lament on the part of the writer, that he was idle
at school, and does not know Greek, excuse this momentary outbreak of
egotistic despondency. To say truth, dear Jones, when one walks among
the nests of the eagles, and sees the prodigious eggs they laid, a
certain feeling of discomfiture must come over us smaller birds. You
and I could not invent—it even stretches our minds painfully to try and
comprehend part of the beauty of the Parthenon—ever so little of
it,—the beauty of a single column,—a fragment of a broken shaft lying
under the astonishing blue sky there, in the midst of that unrivalled
landscape. There may be grander aspects of nature, but none more
deliciously beautiful. The hills rise in perfect harmony, and fall in
the most exquisite cadences—the sea seems brighter, the islands more
purple, the clouds more light and rosy than elsewhere. As you look up
through the open roof, you are almost oppressed by the serene depth of
the blue overhead. Look even at the fragments of the marble, how soft
and pure it is, glittering and white like fresh snow! “I was all
beautiful,” it seems to say: “even the hidden parts of me were
spotless, precious, and fair”—and so, musing over this wonderful scene,
perhaps I get some feeble glimpse or idea of that ancient Greek spirit
which peopled it with sublime races of heroes and gods; {1} and which I
never could get out of a Greek book,—no, not though Muzzle flung it at
my head.




CHAPTER VI
SMYRNA—FIRST GLIMPSES OF THE EAST


I am glad that the Turkish part of Athens was extinct, so that I should
not be baulked of the pleasure of entering an Eastern town by an
introduction to any garbled or incomplete specimen of one. Smyrna seems
to me the most Eastern of all I have seen; as Calais will probably
remain to the Englishman the most French town in the world. The
jack-boots of the postilions don’t seem so huge elsewhere, or the tight
stockings of the maid-servants so Gallic. The churches and the
ramparts, and the little soldiers on them, remain for ever impressed
upon your memory; from which larger temples and buildings, and whole
armies have subsequently disappeared: and the first words of actual
French heard spoken, and the first dinner at “Quillacq’s,” remain after
twenty years as clear as on the first day. Dear Jones, can’t you
remember the exact smack of the white hermitage, and the toothless old
fellow singing “Largo al factotum”?

The first day in the East is like that. After that there is nothing.
The wonder is gone, and the thrill of that delightful shock, which so
seldom touches the nerves of plain men of the world, though they seek
for it everywhere. One such looked out at Smyrna from our steamer, and
yawned without the least excitement, and did not betray the slightest
emotion, as boats with real Turks on board came up to the ship. There
lay the town with minarets and cypresses, domes and castles; great guns
were firing off, and the blood-red flag of the Sultan flaring over the
fort ever since sunrise; woods and mountains came down to the gulf’s
edge, and as you looked at them with the telescope, there peeped out of
the general mass a score of pleasant episodes of Eastern life—there
were cottages with quaint roofs; silent cool kiosks, where the chief of
the eunuchs brings down the ladies of the harem. I saw Hassan, the
fisherman, getting his nets; and Ali Baba going off with his donkey to
the great forest for wood. Smith looked at these wonders quite unmoved;
and I was surprised at his apathy; but he had been at Smyrna before. A
man only sees the miracle once; though you yearn over it ever so, it
won’t come again. I saw nothing of Ali Baba and Hassan the next time we
came to Smyrna, and had some doubts (recollecting the badness of the
inn) about landing at all. A person who wishes to understand France or
the East should come in a yacht to Calais or Smyrna, land for two
hours, and never afterwards go back again.

But those two hours are beyond measure delightful. Some of us were
querulous up to that time, and doubted of the wisdom of making the
voyage. Lisbon, we owned, was a failure; Athens a dead failure; Malta
very well, but not worth the trouble and sea-sickness: in fact,
Baden-Baden or Devonshire would be a better move than this; when Smyrna
came, and rebuked all mutinous Cockneys into silence. Some men may read
this who are in want of a sensation. If they love the odd and
picturesque, if they loved the “Arabian Nights” in their youth, let
them book themselves on board one of the Peninsular and Oriental
vessels, and try one DIP into Constantinople or Smyrna. Walk into the
bazaar, and the East is unveiled to you: how often and often have you
tried to fancy this, lying out on a summer holiday at school! It is
wonderful, too, how LIKE it is: you may imagine that you have been in
the place before, you seem to know it so well!

The beauty of that poetry is, to me, that it was never too handsome;
there is no fatigue of sublimity about it. Shacabac and the little
Barber play as great a part in it as the heroes; there are no
uncomfortable sensations of terror; you may be familiar with the great
Afreet, who was going to execute the travellers for killing his son
with a date-stone. Morgiana, when she kills the forty robbers with
boiling oil, does not seem to hurt them in the least; and though King
Schahriar makes a practice of cutting off his wives’ heads, yet you
fancy they have got them on again in some of the back rooms of the
palace, where they are dancing and playing on dulcimers. How fresh,
easy, good-natured, is all this! How delightful is that notion of the
pleasant Eastern people about knowledge, where the height of science is
made to consist in the answering of riddles! and all the mathematicians
and magicians bring their great beards to bear on a conundrum!

When I got into the bazaar among this race, somehow I felt as if they
were all friends. There sat the merchants in their little shops, quiet
and solemn, but with friendly looks. There was no smoking, it was the
Ramazan; no eating, the fish and meat fizzing in the enormous pots of
the cook-shops are only for the Christians. The children abounded; the
law is not so stringent upon them, and many wandering merchants were
there selling figs (in the name of the Prophet, doubtless) for their
benefit, and elbowing onwards with baskets of grapes and cucumbers.
Countrymen passed bristling over with arms, each with a huge bellyful
of pistols and daggers in his girdle; fierce, but not the least
dangerous. Wild swarthy Arabs, who had come in with the caravans,
walked solemnly about, very different in look and demeanour from the
sleek inhabitants of the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked,
their shops tended by sallow-faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled
and welcomed you in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colours; and women,
with black nose-bags and shuffling yellow slippers, chattered and
bargained at the doors of the little shops. There was the rope quarter
and the sweetmeat quarter, and the pipe bazaar and the arm bazaar, and
the little turned-up shoe quarter, and the shops where ready-made
jackets and pelisses were swinging, and the region where, under the
ragged awning, regiments of tailors were at work. The sun peeps through
these awnings of mat or canvas, which are hung over the narrow lanes of
the bazaar, and ornaments them with a thousand freaks of light and
shadow. Cogia Hassan Alhabbal’s shop is in a blaze of light; while his
neighbour, the barber and coffee-house keeper, has his premises, his
low seats and narghiles, his queer pots and basins, in the shade. The
cobblers are always good- natured; there was one who, I am sure, has
been revealed to me in my dreams, in a dirty old green turban, with a
pleasant wrinkled face like an apple, twinkling his little grey eyes as
he held them up to talk to the gossips, and smiling under a delightful
old grey beard, which did the heart good to see. You divine the
conversation between him and the cucumber-man, as the Sultan used to
understand the language of birds. Are any of those cucumbers stuffed
with pearls, and is that Armenian with the black square turban Haroun
Alraschid in disguise, standing yonder by the fountain where the
children are drinking—the gleaming marble fountain, chequered all over
with light and shadow, and engraved with delicate arabesques and
sentences from the Koran?

But the greatest sensation of all is when the camels come. Whole
strings of real camels, better even than in the procession of Blue
Beard, with soft rolling eyes and bended necks, swaying from one side
of the bazaar to the other to and fro, and treading gingerly with their
great feet. O you fairy dreams of boyhood! O you sweet meditations of
half-holidays, here you are realised for half-an- hour! The genius
which presides over youth led us to do a good action that day. There
was a man sitting in an open room, ornamented with fine long-tailed
sentences of the Koran: some in red, some in blue; some written
diagonally over the paper; some so shaped as to represent ships,
dragons, or mysterious animals. The man squatted on a carpet in the
middle of this room, with folded arms, waggling his head to and fro,
swaying about, and singing through his nose choice phrases from the
sacred work. But from the room above came a clear noise of many little
shouting voices, much more musical than that of Naso in the matted
parlour, and the guide told us it was a school, so we went upstairs to
look.

I declare, on my conscience, the master was in the act of bastinadoing
a little mulatto boy; his feet were in a bar, and the brute was laying
on with a cane; so we witnessed the howling of the poor boy, and the
confusion of the brute who was administering the correction. The other
children were made to shout, I believe, to drown the noise of their
little comrade’s howling; but the punishment was instantly discontinued
as our hats came up over the stair-trap, and the boy cast loose, and
the bamboo huddled into a corner, and the schoolmaster stood before us
abashed. All the small scholars in red caps, and the little girls in
gaudy handkerchiefs, turned their big wondering dark eyes towards us;
and the caning was over for THAT time, let us trust. I don’t envy some
schoolmasters in a future state. I pity that poor little blubbering
Mahometan: he will never be able to relish the “Arabian Nights” in the
original, all his life long.

From this scene we rushed off somewhat discomposed to make a breakfast
off red mullets and grapes, melons, pomegranates, and Smyrna wine, at a
dirty little comfortable inn, to which we were recommended: and from
the windows of which we had a fine cheerful view of the gulf and its
busy craft, and the loungers and merchants along the shore. There were
camels unloading at one wharf, and piles of melons much bigger than the
Gibraltar cannon-balls at another. It was the fig-season, and we passed
through several alleys encumbered with long rows of fig-dressers,
children and women for the most part, who were packing the fruit
diligently into drums, dipping them in salt-water first, and spreading
them neatly over with leaves; while the figs and leaves are drying,
large white worms crawl out of them, and swarm over the decks of the
ships which carry them to Europe and to England, where small children
eat them with pleasure—I mean the figs, not the worms—and where they
are still served at wine-parties at the Universities. When fresh they
are not better than elsewhere; but the melons are of admirable flavour,
and so large, that Cinderella might almost be accommodated with a coach
made of a big one, without any very great distension of its original
proportions.

Our guide, an accomplished swindler, demanded two dollars as the fee
for entering the mosque, which others of our party subsequently saw for
sixpence, so we did not care to examine that place of worship. But
there were other cheaper sights, which were to the full as picturesque,
for which there was no call to pay money, or, indeed, for a day,
scarcely to move at all. I doubt whether a man who would smoke his pipe
on a bazaar counter all day, and let the city flow by him, would not be
almost as well employed as the most active curiosity-hunter.

To be sure he would not see the women. Those in the bazaar were shabby
people for the most part, whose black masks nobody would feel a
curiosity to remove. You could see no more of their figures than if
they had been stuffed in bolsters; and even their feet were brought to
a general splay uniformity by the double yellow slippers which the
wives of true believers wear. But it is in the Greek and Armenian
quarters, and among those poor Christians who were pulling figs, that
you see the beauties; and a man of a generous disposition may lose his
heart half-a-dozen times a day in Smyrna. There was the pretty maid at
work at a tambour-frame in an open porch, with an old duenna spinning
by her side, and a goat tied up to the railings of the little
court-garden; there was the nymph who came down the stair with the
pitcher on her head, and gazed with great calm eyes, as large and
stately as Juno’s; there was the gentle mother, bending over a queer
cradle, in which lay a small crying bundle of infancy. All these three
charmers were seen in a single street in the Armenian quarter, where
the house-doors are all open, and the women of the families sit under
the arches in the court. There was the fig-girl, beautiful beyond all
others, with an immense coil of deep black hair twisted round a head of
which Raphael was worthy to draw the outline and Titian to paint the
colour. I wonder the Sultan has not swept her off, or that the Persian
merchants, who come with silks and sweetmeats, have not kidnapped her
for the Shah of Tehran.

We went to see the Persian merchants at their khan, and purchased some
silks there from a swarthy black-bearded man, with a conical cap of
lambswool. Is it not hard to think that silks bought of a man in a
lambswool cap, in a caravanserai, brought hither on the backs of
camels, should have been manufactured after all at Lyons? Others of our
party bought carpets, for which the town is famous; and there was one
who absolutely laid in a stock of real Smyrna figs; and purchased three
or four real Smyrna sponges for his carriage; so strong was his passion
for the genuine article.

I wonder that no painter has given us familiar views of the East: not
processions, grand sultans, or magnificent landscapes; but faithful
transcripts of everyday Oriental life, such as each street will supply
to him. The camels afford endless motives, couched in the
market-places, lying by thousands in the camel-square, snorting and
bubbling after their manner, the sun blazing down on their backs, their
slaves and keepers lying behind them in the shade: and the Caravan
Bridge, above all, would afford a painter subjects for a dozen of
pictures. Over this Roman arch, which crosses the Meles river, all the
caravans pass on their entrance to the town. On one side, as we sat and
looked at it, was a great row of plane- trees; on the opposite bank, a
deep wood of tall cypresses—in the midst of which rose up innumerable
grey tombs, surmounted with the turbans of the defunct believers.
Beside the stream, the view was less gloomy. There was under the
plane-trees a little coffee- house, shaded by a trellis-work, covered
over with a vine, and ornamented with many rows of shining pots and
water-pipes, for which there was no use at noon-day now, in the time of
Ramazan. Hard by the coffee-house was a garden and a bubbling marble
fountain, and over the stream was a broken summer-house, to which
amateurs may ascend for the purpose of examining the river; and all
round the plane-trees plenty of stools for those who were inclined to
sit and drink sweet thick coffee, or cool lemonade made of fresh green
citrons. The master of the house, dressed in a white turban and light
blue pelisse, lolled under the coffee-house awning; the slave in white
with a crimson striped jacket, his face as black as ebony, brought us
pipes and lemonade again, and returned to his station at the
coffee-house, where he curled his black legs together, and began
singing out of his flat nose to the thrumming of a long guitar with
wire strings. The instrument was not bigger than a soup-ladle, with a
long straight handle, but its music pleased the performer; for his eyes
rolled shining about, and his head wagged, and he grinned with an
innocent intensity of enjoyment that did one good to look at. And there
was a friend to share his pleasure: a Turk dressed in scarlet, and
covered all over with daggers and pistols, sat leaning forward on his
little stool, rocking about, and grinning quite as eagerly as the black
minstrel. As he sang and we listened, figures of women bearing pitchers
went passing over the Roman bridge, which we saw between the large
trunks of the planes; or grey forms of camels were seen stalking across
it, the string preceded by the little donkey, who is always here their
long-eared conductor.

These are very humble incidents of travel. Wherever the steamboat
touches the shore adventure retreats into the interior, and what is
called romance vanishes. It won’t bear the vulgar gaze; or rather the
light of common day puts it out, and it is only in the dark that it
shines at all. There is no cursing and insulting of Giaours now. If a
Cockney looks or behaves in a particularly ridiculous way, the little
Turks come out and laugh at him. A Londoner is no longer a spittoon for
true believers: and now that dark Hassan sits in his divan and drinks
champagne, and Selim has a French watch, and Zuleika perhaps takes
Morison’s pills, Byronism becomes absurd instead of sublime, and is
only a foolish expression of Cockney wonder. They still occasionally
beat a man for going into a mosque, but this is almost the only sign of
ferocious vitality left in the Turk of the Mediterranean coast, and
strangers may enter scores of mosques without molestation. The
paddle-wheel is the great conqueror. Wherever the captain cries “Stop
her!” Civilisation stops, and lands in the ship’s boat, and makes a
permanent acquaintance with the savages on shore. Whole hosts of
crusaders have passed and died, and butchered here in vain. But to
manufacture European iron into pikes and helmets was a waste of metal:
in the shape of piston-rods and furnace-pokers it is irresistible; and
I think an allegory might be made showing how much stronger commerce is
than chivalry, and finishing with a grand image of Mahomet’s crescent
being extinguished in Fulton’s boiler.

This I thought was the moral of the day’s sights and adventures. We
pulled off to the steamer in the afternoon—the Inbat blowing fresh, and
setting all the craft in the gulf dancing over its blue waters. We were
presently under way again, the captain ordering his engines to work
only at half power, so that a French steamer which was quitting Smyrna
at the same time might come up with us, and fancy she could beat their
irresistible, “Tagus.” Vain hope! Just as the Frenchman neared us, the
“Tagus” shot out like an arrow, and the discomfited Frenchman went
behind. Though we all relished the joke exceedingly, there was a French
gentleman on board who did not seem to be by any means tickled with it;
but he had received papers at Smyrna, containing news of Marshal
Bugeaud’s victory at Isly, and had this land victory to set against our
harmless little triumph at sea.

That night we rounded the island of Mitylene: and the next day the
coast of Troy was in sight, and the tomb of Achilles—a dismal- looking
mound that rises in a low dreary barren shore—less lively and not more
picturesque than the Scheldt or the mouth of the Thames. Then we passed
Tenedos and the forts and town at the mouth of the Dardanelles. The
weather was not too hot, the water as smooth as at Putney, and
everybody happy and excited at the thought of seeing Constantinople
to-morrow. We had music on board all the way from Smyrna. A German
commis-voyageur, with a guitar, who had passed unnoticed until that
time, produced his instrument about mid-day, and began to whistle
waltzes. He whistled so divinely that the ladies left their cabins, and
men laid down their books. He whistled a polka so bewitchingly that two
young Oxford men began whirling round the deck, and performed that
popular dance with much agility until they sank down tired. He still
continued an unabated whistling, and as nobody would dance, pulled off
his coat, produced a pair of castanets, and whistling a mazurka,
performed it with tremendous agility. His whistling made everybody gay
and happy— made those acquainted who had not spoken before, and
inspired such a feeling of hilarity in the ship, that that night, as we
floated over the Sea of Marmora, a general vote was expressed for
broiled bones and a regular supper-party. Punch was brewed, and
speeches were made, and, after a lapse of fifteen years, I heard the
“Old English Gentleman” and “Bright Chanticleer Proclaims the Morn,”
sung in such style that you would almost fancy the proctors must hear,
and send us all home.




CHAPTER VII
CONSTANTINOPLE


When we arose at sunrise to see the famous entry to Constantinople, we
found, in the place of the city and the sun, a bright white fog, which
hid both from sight, and which only disappeared as the vessel advanced
towards the Golden Horn. There the fog cleared off as it were by
flakes, and as you see gauze curtains lifted away, one by one, before a
great fairy scene at the theatre. This will give idea enough of the
fog; the difficulty is to describe the scene afterwards, which was in
truth the great fairy scene, than which it is impossible to conceive
anything more brilliant and magnificent. I can’t go to any more
romantic place than Drury Lane to draw my similes from—Drury Lane, such
as we used to see it in our youth, when to our sight the grand last
pictures of the melodrama or pantomime were as magnificent as any
objects of nature we have seen with maturer eyes. Well, the view of
Constantinople is as fine as any of Stanfield’s best theatrical
pictures, seen at the best period of youth, when fancy had all the
bloom on her—when all the heroines who danced before the scene appeared
as ravishing beauties, when there shone an unearthly splendour about
Baker and Diddear—and the sound of the bugles and fiddles, and the
cheerful clang of the cymbals, as the scene unrolled, and the gorgeous
procession meandered triumphantly through it—caused a thrill of
pleasure, and awakened an innocent fulness of sensual enjoyment that is
only given to boys.

The above sentence contains the following propositions:- The enjoyments
of boyish fancy are the most intense and delicious in the world.
Stanfield’s panorama used to be the realisation of the most intense
youthful fancy. I puzzle my brains and find no better likeness for the
place. The view of Constantinople resembles the ne plus ultra of a
Stanfield diorama, with a glorious accompaniment of music, spangled
houris, warriors, and winding processions, feasting the eyes and the
soul with light, splendour, and harmony. If you were never in this way
during your youth ravished at the play-house, of course the whole
comparison is useless: and you have no idea, from this description, of
the effect which Constantinople produces on the mind. But if you were
never affected by a theatre, no words can work upon your fancy, and
typographical attempts to move it are of no use. For, suppose we
combine mosque, minaret, gold, cypress, water, blue, caiques,
seventy-four, Galata, Tophana, Ramazan, Backallum, and so forth,
together, in ever so many ways, your imagination will never be able to
depict a city out of them. Or, suppose I say the Mosque of St. Sophia
is four hundred and seventy-three feet in height, measuring from the
middle nail of the gilt crescent surmounting the dome to the ring in
the centre stone; the circle of the dome is one hundred and
twenty-three feet in diameter, the windows ninety-seven in number—and
all this may be true, for anything I know to the contrary: yet who is
to get an idea of St. Sophia from dates, proper names, and calculations
with a measuring-line? It can’t be done by giving the age and
measurement of all the buildings along the river, the names of all the
boatmen who ply on it. Has your fancy, which pooh-poohs a simile, faith
enough to build a city with a foot-rule? Enough said about descriptions
and similes (though whenever I am uncertain of one I am naturally most
anxious to fight for it): it is a scene not perhaps sublime, but
charming, magnificent, and cheerful beyond any I have ever seen—the
most superb combination of city and gardens, domes and shipping, hills
and water, with the healthiest breeze blowing over it, and above it the
brightest and most cheerful sky.

It is proper, they say, to be disappointed on entering the town, or any
of the various quarters of it, because the houses are not so
magnificent on inspection and seen singly as they are when beheld en
masse from the waters. But why form expectations so lofty? If you see a
group of peasants picturesquely disposed at a fair, you don’t suppose
that they are all faultless beauties, or that the men’s coats have no
rags, and the women’s gowns are made of silk and velvet: the wild
ugliness of the interior of Constantinople or Pera has a charm of its
own, greatly more amusing than rows of red bricks or drab stones,
however symmetrical. With brick or stone they could never form those
fantastic ornaments, railings, balconies, roofs, galleries, which jut
in and out of the rugged houses of the city. As we went from Galata to
Pera up a steep hill, which newcomers ascend with some difficulty, but
which a porter, with a couple of hundredweight on his back, paces up
without turning a hair, I thought the wooden houses far from being
disagreeable objects, sights quite as surprising and striking as the
grand one we had just left.

I do not know how the custom-house of His Highness is made to be a
profitable speculation. As I left the ship, a man pulled after my boat,
and asked for backsheesh, which was given him to the amount of about
twopence. He was a custom-house officer, but I doubt whether this sum
which he levied ever went to the revenue.

I can fancy the scene about the quays somewhat to resemble the river of
London in olden times, before coal-smoke had darkened the whole city
with soot, and when, according to the old writers, there really was
bright weather. The fleets of caiques bustling along the shore, or
scudding over the blue water, are beautiful to look at: in Hollar’s
print London river is so studded over with wherry- boats, which bridges
and steamers have since destroyed. Here the caique is still in full
perfection: there are thirty thousand boats of the kind plying between
the cities; every boat is neat, and trimly carved and painted; and I
scarcely saw a man pulling in one of them that was not a fine specimen
of his race, brawny and brown, with an open chest and a handsome face.
They wear a thin shirt of exceedingly light cotton, which leaves their
fine brown limbs full play; and with a purple sea for a background,
every one of these dashing boats forms a brilliant and glittering
picture. Passengers squat in the inside of the boat; so that as it
passes you see little more than the heads of the true believers, with
their red fez and blue tassel, and that placid gravity of expression
which the sucking of a tobacco-pipe is sure to give to a man.

The Bosphorus is enlivened by a multiplicity of other kinds of craft.
There are the dirty men-of-war’s boats of the Russians, with unwashed
mangy crews; the great ferry-boats carrying hundreds of passengers to
the villages; the melon-boats piled up with enormous golden fruit; His
Excellency the Pasha’s boat, with twelve men bending to their oars; and
His Highness’s own caique, with a head like a serpent, and
eight-and-twenty tugging oarsmen, that goes shooting by amidst the
thundering of the cannon. Ships and steamers, with black sides and
flaunting colours, are moored everywhere, showing their flags, Russian
and English, Austrian, American, and Greek; and along the quays country
ships from the Black Sea or the islands, with high carved poops and
bows, such as you see in the pictures of the shipping of the
seventeenth century. The vast groves and towers, domes and quays, tall
minarets and spired spreading mosques of the three cities, rise all
around in endless magnificence and variety, and render this
water-street a scene of such delightful liveliness and beauty, that one
never tires of looking at it. I lost a great number of the sights in
and round Constantinople through the beauty of this admirable scene:
but what are sights after all? and isn’t that the best sight which
makes you most happy?

We were lodged at Pera at Misseri’s Hotel, the host of which has been
made famous ere this time by the excellent book “Eothen,”—a work for
which all the passengers on board our ship had been battling, and which
had charmed all—from our great statesman, our polished lawyer, our
young Oxonian, who sighed over certain passages that he feared were
wicked, down to the writer of this, who, after perusing it with
delight, laid it down with wonder, exclaiming, “Aut Diabolus aut”—a
book which has since (greatest miracle of all) excited a feeling of
warmth and admiration in the bosom of the god-like, impartial, stony
Athenaeum. Misseri, the faithful and chivalrous Tartar, is transformed
into the most quiet and gentlemanlike of landlords, a great deal more
gentlemanlike in manner and appearance than most of us who sat at his
table, and smoked cool pipes on his house-top, as we looked over the
hill and the Russian palace to the water, and the Seraglio gardens
shining in the blue. We confronted Misseri, “Eothen” in hand, and
found, on examining him, that it WAS “aut Diabolus aut amicus”—but the
name is a secret; I will never breathe it, though I am dying to tell
it.

The last good description of a Turkish bath, I think, was Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu’s—which voluptuous picture must have been painted at
least a hundred and thirty years ago; so that another sketch may be
attempted by a humbler artist in a different manner. The Turkish bath
is certainly a novel sensation to an Englishman, and may be set down as
a most queer and surprising event of his life. I made the
valet-de-place or dragoman (it is rather a fine thing to have a
dragoman in one’s service) conduct me forthwith to the best appointed
hummums in the neighbourhood; and we walked to a house at Tophana, and
into a spacious hall lighted from above, which is the cooling-room of
the bath.

The spacious hall has a large fountain in the midst, a painted gallery
running round it; and many ropes stretched from one gallery to another,
ornamented with profuse draperies of towels and blue cloths, for the
use of the frequenters of the place. All round the room and the
galleries were matted inclosures, fitted with numerous neat beds and
cushions for reposing on, where lay a dozen of true believers smoking,
or sleeping, or in the happy half-dozing state. I was led up to one of
these beds, to rather a retired corner, in consideration of my modesty;
and to the next bed presently came a dancing dervish, who forthwith
began to prepare for the bath.

When the dancing dervish had taken off his yellow sugar-loaf cap, his
gown, shawl, &c., he was arrayed in two large blue cloths; a white one
being thrown over his shoulders, and another in the shape of a turban
plaited neatly round his head; the garments of which he divested
himself were folded up in another linen, and neatly put by. I beg leave
to state I was treated in precisely the same manner as the dancing
dervish.

The reverend gentleman then put on a pair of wooden pattens, which
elevated him about six inches from the ground; and walked down the
stairs, and paddled across the moist marble floor of the hall, and in
at a little door, by the which also Titmarsh entered. But I had none of
the professional agility of the dancing dervish; I staggered about very
ludicrously upon the high wooden pattens; and should have been down on
my nose several times, had not the dragoman and the master of the bath
supported me down the stairs and across the hall. Dressed in three
large cotton napkins, with a white turban round my head, I thought of
Pall Mall with a sort of despair. I passed the little door, it was
closed behind me—I was in the dark—I couldn’t speak the language—in a
white turban. Mon Dieu! what was going to happen?

The dark room was the tepidarium, a moist oozing arched den, with a
light faintly streaming from an orifice in the domed ceiling. Yells of
frantic laughter and song came booming and clanging through the echoing
arches, the doors clapped to with loud reverberations. It was the
laughter of the followers of Mahound, rollicking and taking their
pleasure in the public bath. I could not go into that place: I swore I
would not; they promised me a private room, and the dragoman left me.
My agony at parting from that Christian cannot be described.

When you get into the sudarium, or hot room, your first sensations only
occur about half a minute after entrance, when you feel that you are
choking. I found myself in that state, seated on a marble slab; the
bath man was gone; he had taken away the cotton turban and shoulder
shawl: I saw I was in a narrow room of marble, with a vaulted roof, and
a fountain of warm and cold water; the atmosphere was in a steam, the
choking sensation went off, and I felt a sort of pleasure presently in
a soft boiling simmer, which, no doubt, potatoes feel when they are
steaming. You are left in this state for about ten minutes: it is warm
certainly, but odd and pleasant, and disposes the mind to reverie.

But let any delicate mind in Baker Street fancy my horror when, on
looking up out of this reverie, I saw a great brown wretch extended
before me, only half dressed, standing on pattens, and exaggerated by
them and the steam until he looked like an ogre, grinning in the most
horrible way, and waving his arm, on which was a horsehair glove. He
spoke, in his unknown nasal jargon, words which echoed through the
arched room; his eyes seemed astonishingly large and bright, his ears
stuck out, and his head was all shaved, except a bristling top-knot,
which gave it a demoniac fierceness.

This description, I feel, is growing too frightful; ladies who read it
will be going into hysterics, or saying, “Well, upon my word, this is
the most singular, the most extraordinary kind of language. Jane, my
love, you will not read that odious book—” and so I will be brief. This
grinning man belabours the patient violently with the horse-brush. When
he has completed the horsehair part, and you lie expiring under a
squirting fountain of warm water, and fancying all is done, he
reappears with a large brass basin, containing a quantity of lather, in
the midst of which is something like old Miss MacWhirter’s flaxen wig
that she is so proud of, and that we have all laughed at. Just as you
are going to remonstrate, the thing like the wig is dashed into your
face and eyes, covered over with soap, and for five minutes you are
drowned in lather: you can’t see, the suds are frothing over your
eye-balls; you can’t hear, the soap is whizzing into your ears; can’t
gasp for breath, Miss MacWhirter’s wig is down your throat with half a
pailful of suds in an instant—you are all soap. Wicked children in
former days have jeered you, exclaiming, “How are you off for soap?”
You little knew what saponacity was till you entered a Turkish bath.

When the whole operation is concluded, you are led—with what heartfelt
joy I need not say—softly back to the cooling-room, having been robed
in shawls and turbans as before. You are laid gently on the reposing
bed; somebody brings a narghile, which tastes as tobacco must taste in
Mahomet’s Paradise; a cool sweet dreamy languor takes possession of the
purified frame; and half-an- hour of such delicious laziness is spent
over the pipe as is unknown in Europe, where vulgar prejudice has most
shamefully maligned indolence—calls it foul names, such as the father
of all evil, and the like; in fact, does not know how to educate
idleness as those honest Turks do, and the fruit which, when properly
cultivated, it bears.

The after-bath state is the most delightful condition of laziness I
ever knew, and I tried it wherever we went afterwards on our little
tour. At Smyrna the whole business was much inferior to the method
employed in the capital. At Cairo, after the soap, you are plunged into
a sort of stone coffin, full of water which is all but boiling. This
has its charms; but I could not relish the Egyptian shampooing. A
hideous old blind man (but very dexterous in his art) tried to break my
back and dislocate my shoulders, but I could not see the pleasure of
the practice; and another fellow began tickling the soles of my feet,
but I rewarded him with a kick that sent him off the bench. The pure
idleness is the best, and I shall never enjoy such in Europe again.

Victor Hugo, in his famous travels on the Rhine, visiting Cologne,
gives a learned account of what he DIDN’T see there. I have a
remarkable catalogue of similar objects at Constantinople. I didn’t see
the dancing dervishes, it was Ramazan; nor the howling dervishes at
Scutari, it was Ramazan; nor the interior of St. Sophia, nor the
women’s apartment of the Seraglio, nor the fashionable promenade at the
Sweet Waters, always because it was Ramazan; during which period the
dervishes dance and howl but rarely, their legs and lungs being unequal
to much exertion during a fast of fifteen hours. On account of the same
holy season, the Royal palaces and mosques are shut; and though the
Valley of the Sweet Waters is there, no one goes to walk; the people
remaining asleep all day, and passing the night in feasting and
carousing. The minarets are illuminated at this season; even the
humblest mosque at Jerusalem, or Jaffa, mounted a few circles of dingy
lamps; those of the capital were handsomely lighted with many festoons
of lamps, which had a fine effect from the water. I need not mention
other and constant illuminations of the city, which innumerable
travellers have described—I mean the fires. There were three in Pera
during our eight days’ stay there; but they did not last long enough to
bring the Sultan out of bed to come and lend his aid. Mr. Hobhouse
(quoted in the “Guide-book”) says, if a fire lasts an hour, the Sultan
is bound to attend it in person; and that people having petitions to
present, have often set houses on fire for the purpose of forcing out
this Royal trump. The Sultan can’t lead a very “jolly life,” if this
rule be universal. Fancy His Highness, in the midst of his moon-faced
beauties, handkerchief in hand, and obliged to tie it round his face,
and go out of his warm harem at midnight at the cursed cry of “Yang en
Var!”

We saw His Highness in the midst of his people and their petitions,
when he came to the mosque at Tophana; not the largest, but one of the
most picturesque of the public buildings of the city. The streets were
crowded with people watching for the august arrival, and lined with the
squat military in their bastard European costume; the sturdy police,
with bandeliers and brown surtouts, keeping order, driving off the
faithful from the railings of the Esplanade through which their Emperor
was to pass, and only admitting (with a very unjust partiality, I
thought) us Europeans into that reserved space. Before the august
arrival, numerous officers collected, colonels and pashas went by with
their attendant running footmen; the most active, insolent, and hideous
of these great men, as I thought, being His Highness’s black eunuchs,
who went prancing through the crowd, which separated before them with
every sign of respect.

The common women were assembled by many hundreds: the yakmac, a muslin
chin-cloth which they wear, makes almost every face look the same; but
the eyes and noses of these beauties are generally visible, and, for
the most part, both these features are good. The jolly negresses wear
the same white veil, but they are by no means so particular about
hiding the charms of their good-natured black faces, and they let the
cloth blow about as it lists, and grin unconfined. Wherever we went the
negroes seemed happy. They have the organ of child-loving: little
creatures were always prattling on their shoulders, queer little things
in night gowns of yellow dimity, with great flowers, and pink or red or
yellow shawls, with great eyes glistening underneath. Of such the black
women seemed always the happy guardians. I saw one at a fountain,
holding one child in her arms, and giving another a drink—a ragged
little beggar—a sweet and touching picture of a black charity.

I am almost forgetting His Highness the Sultan. About a hundred guns
were fired off at clumsy intervals from the Esplanade facing the
Bosphorus, warning us that the monarch had set off from his Summer
Palace, and was on the way to his grand canoe. At last that vessel made
its appearance; the band struck up his favourite air; his caparisoned
horse was led down to the shore to receive him; the eunuchs, fat
pashas, colonels and officers of state gathering round as the Commander
of the Faithful mounted. I had the indescribable happiness of seeing
him at a very short distance. The Padishah, or Father of all the
Sovereigns on earth, has not that majestic air which some sovereigns
possess, and which makes the beholder’s eyes wink, and his knees
tremble under him: he has a black beard, and a handsome well-bred face,
of a French cast; he looks like a young French roue worn out by
debauch; his eyes bright, with black rings round them; his cheeks pale
and hollow. He was lolling on his horse as if he could hardly hold
himself on the saddle: or as if his cloak, fastened with a blazing
diamond clasp on his breast, and falling over his horse’s tail, pulled
him back. But the handsome sallow face of the Refuge of the World
looked decidedly interesting and intellectual. I have seen many a young
Don Juan at Paris, behind a counter, with such a beard and countenance;
the flame of passion still burning in his hollow eyes, while on his
damp brow was stamped the fatal mark of premature decay. The man we saw
cannot live many summers. Women and wine are said to have brought the
Zilullah to this state; and it is whispered by the dragomans, or
laquais-de-place (from whom travellers at Constantinople generally get
their political information), that the Sultan’s mother and his
ministers conspire to keep him plunged in sensuality, that they may
govern the kingdom according to their own fancies. Mr. Urquhart, I am
sure, thinks that Lord Palmerston has something to do with the
business, and drugs the Sultan’s champagne for the benefit of Russia.

As the Pontiff of Mussulmans passed into the mosques a shower of
petitions was flung from the steps where the crowd was collected, and
over the heads of the gendarmes in brown. A general cry, as for
justice, rose up; and one old ragged woman came forward and burst
through the throng, howling, and flinging about her lean arms, and
baring her old shrunken breast. I never saw a finer action of tragic
woo, or heard sounds more pitiful than those old passionate groans of
hers. What was your prayer, poor old wretched soul? The gendarmes
hemmed her round, and hustled her away, but rather kindly. The Padishah
went on quite impassible—the picture of debauch and ennui.

I like pointing morals, and inventing for myself cheap consolations, to
reconcile me to that state of life into which it has pleased Heaven to
call me; and as the Light of the World disappeared round the corner, I
reasoned pleasantly with myself about His Highness, and enjoyed that
secret selfish satisfaction a man has, who sees he is better off than
his neighbour. “Michael Angelo,” I said, “you are still (by courtesy)
young: if you had five hundred thousand a year, and were a great
prince, I would lay a wager that men would discover in you a
magnificent courtesy of demeanour, and a majestic presence that only
belongs to the sovereigns of the world. If you had such an income, you
think you could spend it with splendour: distributing genial
hospitalities, kindly alms, soothing misery, bidding humility be of
good heart, rewarding desert. If you had such means of purchasing
pleasure, you think, you rogue, you could relish it with gusto. But
fancy being brought to the condition of the poor Light of the Universe
yonder; and reconcile yourself with the idea that you are only a
farthing rushlight. The cries of the poor widow fall as dead upon him
as the smiles of the brightest eyes out of Georgia. He can’t stir
abroad but those abominable cannon begin roaring and deafening his
ears. He can’t see the world but over the shoulders of a row of fat
pashas, and eunuchs, with their infernal ugliness. His ears can never
be regaled with a word of truth, or blessed with an honest laugh. The
only privilege of manhood left to him, he enjoys but for a month in the
year, at this time of Ramazan, when he is forced to fast for fifteen
hours; and, by consequence, has the blessing of feeling hungry.” Sunset
during Lent appears to be his single moment of pleasure; they say the
poor fellow is ravenous by that time, and as the gun fires the
dish-covers are taken off, so that for five minutes a day he lives and
is happy over pillau, like another mortal.

And yet, when floating by the Summer Palace, a barbaric edifice of wood
and marble, with gilded suns blazing over the porticoes, and all sorts
of strange ornaments and trophies figuring on the gates and
railings—when we passed a long row of barred and filigreed windows,
looking on the water—when we were told that those were the apartments
of His Highness’s ladies, and actually heard them whispering and
laughing behind the bars—a strange feeling of curiosity came over some
ill-regulated minds—just to have one peep, one look at all those
wondrous beauties, singing to the dulcimers, paddling in the fountains,
dancing in the marble halls, or lolling on the golden cushions, as the
gaudy black slaves brought pipes and coffee. This tumultuous movement
was calmed by thinking of that dreadful statement of travellers, that
in one of the most elegant halls there is a trap-door, on peeping below
which you may see the Bosphorus running underneath, into which some
luckless beauty is plunged occasionally, and the trap-door is shut, and
the dancing and the singing, and the smoking and the laughing go on as
before. They say it is death to pick up any of the sacks thereabouts,
if a stray one should float by you. There were none any day when I
passed, AT LEAST, ON THE SURFACE OF THE WATER.

It has been rather a fashion of our travellers to apologise for Turkish
life, of late, and paint glowing agreeable pictures of many of its
institutions. The celebrated author of “Palm-Leaves” (his name is
famous under the date-trees of the Nile, and uttered with respect
beneath the tents of the Bedaween) has touchingly described Ibrahim
Pasha’s paternal fondness, who cut off a black slave’s head for having
dropped and maimed one of his children; and has penned a melodious
panegyric of “The Harem,” and of the fond and beautiful duties of the
inmates of that place of love, obedience, and seclusion. I saw, at the
mausoleum of the late Sultan Mahmoud’s family, a good subject for a
Ghazul, in the true new Oriental manner.

These Royal burial-places are the resort of the pious Moslems. Lamps
are kept burning there; and in the antechambers, copies of the Koran
are provided for the use of believers; and you never pass these
cemeteries but you see Turks washing at the cisterns, previous to
entering for prayer, or squatted on the benches, chanting passages from
the sacred volume. Christians, I believe, are not admitted, but may
look through the bars, and see the coffins of the defunct monarchs and
children of the Royal race. Each lies in his narrow sarcophagus, which
is commonly flanked by huge candles, and covered with a rich
embroidered pall. At the head of each coffin rises a slab, with a
gilded inscription; for the princesses, the slab is simple, not unlike
our own monumental stones. The headstones of the tombs of the defunct
princes are decorated with a turban, or, since the introduction of the
latter article of dress, with the red fez. That of Mahmoud is decorated
with the imperial aigrette.

In this dismal but splendid museum, I remarked two little tombs with
little red fezzes, very small, and for very young heads evidently,
which were lying under the little embroidered palls of state. I forget
whether they had candles too; but their little flame of life was soon
extinguished, and there was no need of many pounds of wax to typify it.
These were the tombs of Mahmoud’s grandsons, nephews of the present
Light of the Universe, and children of his sister, the wife of Halil
Pasha. Little children die in all ways: these of the much-maligned
Mahometan Royal race perished by the bowstring. Sultan Mahmoud (may he
rest in glory!) strangled the one; but, having some spark of human
feeling, was so moved by the wretchedness and agony of the poor
bereaved mother, his daughter, that his Royal heart relented towards
her, and he promised that, should she ever have another child, it
should be allowed to live. He died; and Abdul Medjid (may his name be
blessed!), the debauched young man whom we just saw riding to the
mosque, succeeded. His sister, whom he is said to have loved, became
again a mother, and had a son. But she relied upon her father’s word
and her august brother’s love, and hoped that this little one should be
spared. The same accursed hand tore this infant out of its mother’s
bosom, and killed it. The poor woman’s heart broke outright at this
second calamity, and she died. But on her death-bed she sent for her
brother, rebuked him as a perjurer and an assassin, and expired calling
down the divine justice on his head. She lies now by the side of the
two little fezzes.

Now I say this would be a fine subject for an Oriental poem. The
details are dramatic and noble, and could be grandly touched by a fine
artist. If the mother had borne a daughter, the child would have been
safe; that perplexity might be pathetically depicted as agitating the
bosom of the young wife about to become a mother. A son is born: you
can see her despair and the pitiful look she casts on the child, and
the way in which she hugs it every time the curtains of her door are
removed. The Sultan hesitated probably; he allowed the infant to live
for six weeks. He could not bring his Royal soul to inflict pain. He
yields at last; he is a martyr- -to be pitied, not to be blamed. If he
melts at his daughter’s agony, he is a man and a father. There are men
and fathers too in the much-maligned Orient.

Then comes the second act of the tragedy. The new hopes, the fond
yearnings, the terrified misgivings, the timid belief, and weak
confidence; the child that is born—and dies smiling prettily—and the
mother’s heart is rent so, that it can love, or hope, or suffer no
more. Allah is God! She sleeps by the little fezzes. Hark! the guns are
booming over the water, and His Highness is coming from his prayers.

After the murder of that little child, it seems to me one can never
look with anything but horror upon the butcherly Herod who ordered it.
The death of the seventy thousand Janissaries ascends to historic
dignity, and takes rank as war. But a great Prince and Light of the
Universe, who procures abortions and throttles little babies, dwindles
away into such a frightful insignificance of crime, that those may
respect him who will. I pity their Excellencies the Ambassadors, who
are obliged to smirk and cringe to such a rascal. To do the Turks
justice—and two days’ walk in Constantinople will settle this fact as
well as a year’s residence in the city—the people do not seem in the
least animated by this Herodian spirit. I never saw more kindness to
children than among all classes, more fathers walking about with little
solemn Mahometans in red caps and big trousers, more business going on
than in the toy quarter, and in the Atmeidan. Although you may see
there the Thebaic stone set up by the Emperor Theodosius, and the
bronze column of serpents which Murray says was brought from Delphi,
but which my guide informed me was the very one exhibited by Moses in
the wilderness, yet I found the examination of these antiquities much
less pleasant than to look at the many troops of children assembled on
the plain to play; and to watch them as they were dragged about in
little queer arobas, or painted carriages, which are there kept for
hire. I have a picture of one of them now in my eyes: a little green
oval machine, with flowers rudely painted round the window, out of
which two smiling heads are peeping, the pictures of happiness. An old,
good-humoured, grey- bearded Turk is tugging the cart; and behind it
walks a lady in a yakmac and yellow slippers, and a black female slave,
grinning as usual, towards whom the little coach-riders are looking. A
small sturdy barefooted Mussulman is examining the cart with some
feelings of envy: he is too poor to purchase a ride for himself and the
round-faced puppy-dog, which he is hugging in his arms as young ladies
in our country do dolls.

All the neighbourhood of the Atmeidan is exceedingly picturesque— the
mosque court and cloister, where the Persians have their stalls of
sweetmeats and tobacco; a superb sycamore-tree grows in the middle of
this, overshadowing an aromatic fountain; great flocks of pigeons are
settling in corners of the cloister, and barley is sold at the gates,
with which the good-natured people feed them. From the Atmeidan you
have a fine view of St. Sophia: and here stands a mosque which struck
me as being much more picturesque and sumptuous—the Mosque of Sultan
Achmed, with its six gleaming white minarets and its beautiful courts
and trees. Any infidels may enter the court without molestation, and,
looking through the barred windows of the mosque, have a view of its
airy and spacious interior. A small audience of women was collected
there when I looked in, squatted on the mats, and listening to a
preacher, who was walking among them, and speaking with great energy.
My dragoman interpreted to me the sense of a few words of his sermon:
he was warning them of the danger of gadding about to public places,
and of the immorality of too much talking; and, I dare say, we might
have had more valuable information from him regarding the follies of
womankind, had not a tall Turk clapped my interpreter on the shoulder,
and pointed him to be off.

Although the ladies are veiled, and muffled with the ugliest dresses in
the world, yet it appears their modesty is alarmed in spite of all the
coverings which they wear. One day, in the bazaar, a fat old body, with
diamond rings on her fingers, that were tinged with henne of a logwood
colour, came to the shop where I was purchasing slippers, with her son,
a young Aga of six years of age, dressed in a braided frock-coat, with
a huge tassel to his fez, exceeding fat, and of a most solemn
demeanour. The young Aga came for a pair of shoes, and his contortions
were so delightful as he tried them, that I remained looking on with
great pleasure, wishing for Leech to be at hand to sketch his lordship
and his fat mamma, who sat on the counter. That lady fancied I was
looking at her, though, as far as I could see, she had the figure and
complexion of a roly-poly pudding; and so, with quite a premature
bashfulness, she sent me a message by the shoemaker, ordering me to
walk away if I had made my purchases, for that ladies of her rank did
not choose to be stared at by strangers; and I was obliged to take my
leave, though with sincere regret, for the little lord had just
squeezed himself into an attitude than which I never saw anything more
ludicrous in General Tom Thumb. When the ladies of the Seraglio come to
that bazaar with their cortege of infernal black eunuchs, strangers are
told to move on briskly. I saw a bevy of about eight of these, with
their aides-de-camp; but they were wrapped up, and looked just as
vulgar and ugly as the other women, and were not, I suppose, of the
most beautiful sort. The poor devils are allowed to come out,
half-a-dozen times in the year, to spend their little wretched
allowance of pocket-money in purchasing trinkets and tobacco; all the
rest of the time they pursue the beautiful duties of their existence in
the walls of the sacred harem.

Though strangers are not allowed to see the interior of the cage in
which these birds of Paradise are confined, yet many parts of the
Seraglio are free to the curiosity of visitors, who choose to drop a
backsheesh here and there. I landed one morning at the Seraglio point
from Galata, close by an ancient pleasure-house of the defunct Sultan;
a vast broad-brimmed pavilion, that looks agreeable enough to be a
dancing room for ghosts now: there is another summer-house, the
Guide-book cheerfully says, whither the Sultan goes to sport with his
women and mutes. A regiment of infantry, with their music at their
head, were marching to exercise in the outer grounds of the Seraglio;
and we followed them, and had an opportunity of seeing their
evolutions, and hearing their bands, upon a fine green plain under the
Seraglio walls, where stands one solitary column, erected in memory of
some triumph of some Byzantian emperor.

There were three battalions of the Turkish infantry, exercising here;
and they seemed to perform their evolutions in a very satisfactory
manner: that is, they fired all together, and charged and halted in
very straight lines, and bit off imaginary cartridge- tops with great
fierceness and regularity, and made all their ramrods ring to measure,
just like so many Christians. The men looked small, young, clumsy, and
ill-built; uncomfortable in their shabby European clothes; and about
the legs, especially, seemed exceedingly weak and ill-formed. Some
score of military invalids were lolling in the sunshine, about a
fountain and a marble summer- house that stand on the ground, watching
their comrades’ manoeuvres (as if they could never have enough of that
delightful pastime); and these sick were much better cared for than
their healthy companions. Each man had two dressing-gowns, one of white
cotton, and an outer wrapper of warm brown woollen. Their heads were
accommodated with wadded cotton nightcaps; and it seemed to me, from
their condition and from the excellent character of the military
hospitals, that it would be much more wholesome to be ill than to be
well in the Turkish service.

Facing this green esplanade, and the Bosphorus shining beyond it, rise
the great walls of the outer Seraglio Gardens: huge masses of ancient
masonry, over which peep the roofs of numerous kiosks and outhouses,
amongst thick evergreens, planted so as to hide the beautiful
frequenters of the place from the prying eyes and telescopes. We could
not catch a glance of a single figure moving in these great
pleasure-grounds. The road winds round the walls; and the outer park,
which is likewise planted with trees, and diversified by garden-plots
and cottages, had more the air of the outbuildings of a homely English
park, than of a palace which we must all have imagined to be the most
stately in the world. The most commonplace water-carts were passing
here and there; roads were being repaired in the Macadamite manner; and
carpenters were mending the park-palings, just as they do in Hampshire.
The next thing you might fancy would be the Sultan walking out with a
spud and a couple of dogs, on the way to meet the post-bag and the
Saint James’s Chronicle.

The palace is no palace at all. It is a great town of pavilions, built
without order, here and there, according to the fancy of succeeding
Lights of the Universe, or their favourites. The only row of domes
which looked particularly regular or stately, were the kitchens. As you
examined the buildings they had a ruinous dilapidated look: they are
not furnished, it is said, with particular splendour,—not a bit more
elegantly than Miss Jones’s seminary for young ladies, which we may be
sure is much more comfortable than the extensive establishment of His
Highness Abdul Medjid.

In the little stable I thought to see some marks of Royal magnificence,
and some horses worthy of the king of all kings. But the Sultan is said
to be a very timid horseman: the animal that is always kept saddled for
him did not look to be worth twenty pounds; and the rest of the horses
in the shabby dirty stalls were small, ill-kept, common-looking brutes.
You might see better, it seemed to me, at a country inn stable on any
market-day.

The kitchens are the most sublime part of the Seraglio. There are nine
of these great halls, for all ranks, from His Highness downwards, where
many hecatombs are roasted daily, according to the accounts, and where
cooking goes on with a savage Homeric grandeur. Chimneys are despised
in these primitive halls; so that the roofs are black with the smoke of
hundreds of furnaces, which escapes through apertures in the domes
above. These, too, give the chief light in the rooms, which streams
downwards, and thickens and mingles with the smoke, and so murkily
lights up hundreds of swarthy figures busy about the spits and the
cauldrons. Close to the door by which we entered they were making
pastry for the sultanas; and the chief pastrycook, who knew my guide,
invited us courteously to see the process, and partake of the
delicacies prepared for those charming lips. How those sweet lips must
shine after eating these puffs! First, huge sheets of dough are rolled
out till the paste is about as thin as silver paper: then an artist
forms the dough-muslin into a sort of drapery, curling it round and
round in many fanciful and pretty shapes, until it is all got into the
circumference of a round metal tray in which it is baked. Then the cake
is drenched in grease most profusely; and, finally, a quantity of syrup
is poured over it, when the delectable mixture is complete. The
moon-faced ones are said to devour immense quantities of this wholesome
food; and, in fact, are eating grease and sweetmeats from morning till
night. I don’t like to think what the consequences may be, or allude to
the agonies which the delicate creatures must inevitably suffer.

The good-natured chief pastrycook filled a copper basin with greasy
puffs; and, dipping a dubious ladle into a large cauldron, containing
several gallons of syrup, poured a liberal portion over the cakes, and
invited us to eat. One of the tarts was quite enough for me: and I
excused myself on the plea of ill-health from imbibing any more grease
and sugar. But my companion, the dragoman, finished some forty puffs in
a twinkling. They slipped down his opened jaws as the sausages do down
clowns’ throats in a pantomime. His moustaches shone with grease, and
it dripped down his beard and fingers. We thanked the smiling chief
pastrycook, and rewarded him handsomely for the tarts. It is something
to have eaten of the dainties prepared for the ladies of the harem; but
I think Mr. Cockle ought to get the names of the chief sultanas among
the exalted patrons of his antibilious pills.

From the kitchens we passed into the second court of the Seraglio,
beyond which is death. The Guide-book only hints at the dangers which
would befall a stranger caught prying in the mysterious FIRST court of
the palace. I have read “Bluebeard,” and don’t care for peeping into
forbidden doors; so that the second court was quite enough for me; the
pleasure of beholding it being heightened, as it were, by the notion of
the invisible danger sitting next door, with uplifted scimitar ready to
fall on you—present though not seen.

A cloister runs along one side of this court; opposite is the hall of
the divan, “large but low, covered with lead, and gilt, after the
Moorish manner, plain enough.” The Grand Vizier sits in this place, and
the ambassadors used to wait here, and be conducted hence on horseback,
attired with robes of honour. But the ceremony is now, I believe,
discontinued; the English envoy, at any rate, is not allowed to receive
any backsheesh, and goes away as he came, in the habit of his own
nation. On the right is a door leading into the interior of the
Seraglio; NONE PASS THROUGH IT BUT SUCH AS ARE SENT FOR, the Guide-book
says: it is impossible to top the terror of that description.

About this door lads and servants were lolling, ichoglans and pages,
with lazy looks and shabby dresses; and among them, sunning himself
sulkily on a bench, a poor old fat, wrinkled, dismal white eunuch, with
little fat white hands, and a great head sunk into his chest, and two
sprawling little legs that seemed incapable to hold up his bloated old
body. He squeaked out some surly reply to my friend the dragoman, who,
softened and sweetened by the tarts he had just been devouring, was, no
doubt, anxious to be polite: and the poor worthy fellow walked away
rather crestfallen at this return of his salutation, and hastened me
out of the place.

The palace of the Seraglio, the cloister with marble pillars, the hall
of the ambassadors, the impenetrable gate guarded by eunuchs and
ichoglans, have a romantic look in print; but not so in reality. Most
of the marble is wood, almost all the gilding is faded, the guards are
shabby, the foolish perspectives painted on the walls are half cracked
off. The place looks like Vauxhall in the daytime.

We passed out of the second court under THE SUBLIME PORTE—which is like
a fortified gate of a German town of the middle ages—into the outer
court, round which are public offices, hospitals, and dwellings of the
multifarious servants of the palace. This place is very wide and
picturesque: there is a pretty church of Byzantine architecture at the
further end; and in the midst of the court a magnificent plane-tree, of
prodigious dimensions and fabulous age according to the guides; St.
Sophia towers in the further distance: and from here, perhaps, is the
best view of its light swelling domes and beautiful proportions. The
Porte itself, too, forms an excellent subject for the sketcher, if the
officers of the court will permit him to design it. I made the attempt,
and a couple of Turkish beadles looked on very good-naturedly for some
time at the progress of the drawing; but a good number of other
spectators speedily joined them, and made a crowd, which is not
permitted, it would seem, in the Seraglio; so I was told to pack up my
portfolio, and remove the cause of the disturbance, and lost my drawing
of the Ottoman Porte.

I don’t think I have anything more to say about the city which has not
been much better told by graver travellers. I, with them, could see
(perhaps it was the preaching of the politicians that warned me of the
fact) that we are looking on at the last days of an empire; and heard
many stories of weakness, disorder, and oppression. I even saw a
Turkish lady drive up to Sultan Achmet’s mosque IN A BROUGHAM. Is not
that a subject to moralise upon? And might one not draw endless
conclusions from it, that the knell of the Turkish dominion is rung;
that the European spirit and institutions once admitted can never be
rooted out again; and that the scepticism prevalent amongst the higher
orders must descend ere very long to the lower; and the cry of the
muezzin from the mosque become a mere ceremony?

But as I only stayed eight days in this place, and knew not a syllable
of the language, perhaps it is as well to pretermit any disquisitions
about the spirit of the people. I can only say that they looked to be
very good-natured, handsome, and lazy; that the women’s yellow slippers
are very ugly; that the kabobs at the shop hard by the Rope Bazaar are
very hot and good; and that at the Armenian cookshops they serve you
delicious fish, and a stout raisin wine of no small merit. There came
in, as we sat and dined there at sunset, a good old Turk, who called
for a penny fish, and sat down under a tree very humbly, and ate it
with his own bread. We made that jolly old Mussulman happy with a quart
of the raisin wine; and his eyes twinkled with every fresh glass, and
he wiped his old beard delighted, and talked and chirped a good deal,
and, I dare say, told us the whole state of the empire. He was the only
Mussulman with whom I attained any degree of intimacy during my stay in
Constantinople; and you will see that, for obvious reasons, I cannot
divulge the particulars of our conversation.

“You have nothing to say, and you own it,” says somebody: “then why
write?” That question perhaps (between ourselves) I have put likewise;
and yet, my dear sir, there are SOME things worth remembering even in
this brief letter: that woman in the brougham is an idea of
significance: that comparison of the Seraglio to Vauxhall in the
daytime is a true and real one; from both of which your own great soul
and ingenious philosophic spirit may draw conclusions, that I myself
have modestly forborne to press. You are too clever to require a moral
to be tacked to all the fables you read, as is done for children in the
spelling-books; else I would tell you that the government of the
Ottoman Porte seems to be as rotten, as wrinkled, and as feeble as the
old eunuch I saw crawling about it in the sun; that when the lady drove
up in a brougham to Sultan Achmet, I felt that the schoolmaster was
really abroad; and that the crescent will go out before that luminary,
as meekly as the moon does before the sun.




CHAPTER VIII
RHODES


The sailing of a vessel direct for Jaffa brought a great number of
passengers together, and our decks were covered with Christian, Jew,
and Heathen. In the cabin we were Poles and Russians, Frenchmen,
Germans, Spaniards, and Greeks; on the deck were squatted several
little colonies of people of different race and persuasion. There was a
Greek Papa, a noble figure with a flowing and venerable white beard,
who had been living on bread-and-water for I don’t know how many years,
in order to save a little money to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
There were several families of Jewish Rabbis, who celebrated their
“feast of tabernacles” on board; their chief men performing worship
twice or thrice a day, dressed in their pontifical habits, and bound
with phylacteries: and there were Turks, who had their own ceremonies
and usages, and wisely kept aloof from their neighbours of Israel.

The dirt of these children of captivity exceeds all possibility of
description; the profusion of stinks which they raised, the grease of
their venerable garments and faces, the horrible messes cooked in the
filthy pots, and devoured with the nasty fingers, the squalor of mats,
pots, old bedding, and foul carpets of our Hebrew friends, could hardly
be painted by Swift in his dirtiest mood, and cannot be, of course,
attempted by my timid and genteel pen. What would they say in Baker
Street to some sights with which our new friends favoured us? What
would your ladyship have said if you had seen the interesting Greek nun
combing her hair over the cabin— combing it with the natural fingers,
and, averse to slaughter, flinging the delicate little intruders, which
she found in the course of her investigation, gently into the great
cabin? Our attention was a good deal occupied in watching the strange
ways and customs of the various comrades of ours.

The Jews were refugees from Poland, going to lay their bones to rest in
the valley of Jehoshaphat, and performing with exceeding rigour the
offices of their religion. At morning and evening you were sure to see
the chiefs of the families, arrayed in white robes, bowing over their
books, at prayer. Once a week, on the eve before the Sabbath, there was
a general washing in Jewry, which sufficed until the ensuing Friday.
The men wore long gowns and caps of fur, or else broad-brimmed hats,
or, in service time, bound on their heads little iron boxes, with the
sacred name engraved on them. Among the lads there were some beautiful
faces; and among the women your humble servant discovered one who was a
perfect rosebud of beauty when first emerging from her Friday’s toilet,
and for a day or two afterwards, until each succeeding day’s smut
darkened those fresh and delicate cheeks of hers. We had some very
rough weather in the course of the passage from Constantinople to
Jaffa, and the sea washed over and over our Israelitish friends and
their baggages and bundles; but though they were said to be rich, they
would not afford to pay for cabin shelter. One father of a family,
finding his progeny half drowned in a squall, vowed he WOULD pay for a
cabin; but the weather was somewhat finer the next day, and he could
not squeeze out his dollars, and the ship’s authorities would not admit
him except upon payment.

This unwillingness to part with money is not only found amongst the
followers of Moses, but in those of Mahomet, and Christians too. When
we went to purchase in the bazaars, after offering money for change,
the honest fellows would frequently keep back several piastres, and
when urged to refund, would give most dismally: and begin doling out
penny by penny, and utter pathetic prayers to their customer not to
take any more. I bought five or six pounds’ worth of Broussa silks for
the womankind, in the bazaar at Constantinople, and the rich Armenian
who sold them begged for three-halfpence to pay his boat to Galata.
There is something naif and amusing in this exhibition of cheatery—this
simple cringing and wheedling, and passion for twopence-halfpenny. It
was pleasant to give a millionaire beggar an alms, and laugh in his
face and say, “There, Dives, there’s a penny for you: be happy, you
poor old swindling scoundrel, as far as a penny goes.” I used to watch
these Jews on shore, and making bargains with one another as soon as
they came on board; the battle between vendor and purchaser was an
agony—they shrieked, clasped hands, appealed to one another
passionately; their handsome noble faces assumed a look of woe— quite
an heroic eagerness and sadness about a farthing.

Ambassadors from our Hebrews descended at Rhodes to buy provisions, and
it was curious to see their dealings: there was our venerable Rabbi,
who, robed in white and silver, and bending over his book at the
morning service, looked like a patriarch, and whom I saw chaffering
about a fowl with a brother Rhodian Israelite. How they fought over the
body of that lean animal! The street swarmed with Jews: goggling eyes
looked out from the old carved casements— hooked noses issued from the
low antique doors—Jew boys driving donkeys, Hebrew mothers nursing
children, dusky, tawdry, ragged young beauties and most venerable
grey-bearded fathers were all gathered round about the affair of the
hen! And at the same time that our Rabbi was arranging the price of it,
his children were instructed to procure bundles of green branches to
decorate the ship during their feast. Think of the centuries during
which these wonderful people have remained unchanged; and how, from the
days of Jacob downwards, they have believed and swindled!

The Rhodian Jews, with their genius for filth, have made their quarter
of the noble desolate old town the most ruinous and wretched of all.
The escutcheons of the proud old knights are still carved over the
doors, whence issue these miserable greasy hucksters and pedlars. The
Turks respected these emblems of the brave enemies whom they had
overcome, and left them untouched. When the French seized Malta they
were by no means so delicate: they effaced armorial bearings with their
usual hot-headed eagerness; and a few years after they had torn down
the coats-of- arms of the gentry, the heroes of Malta and Egypt were
busy devising heraldry for themselves, and were wild to be barons and
counts of the Empire.

The chivalrous relics at Rhodes are very superb. I know of no buildings
whose stately and picturesque aspect seems to correspond better with
one’s notions of their proud founders. The towers and gates are warlike
and strong, but beautiful and aristocratic: you see that they must have
been high-bred gentlemen who built them. The edifices appear in almost
as perfect a condition as when they were in the occupation of the noble
Knights of St. John; and they have this advantage over modern
fortifications, that they are a thousand times more picturesque.
Ancient war condescended to ornament itself, and built fine carved
castles and vaulted gates: whereas, to judge from Gibraltar and Malta,
nothing can be less romantic than the modern military architecture;
which sternly regards the fighting, without in the least heeding the
war-paint. Some of the huge artillery with which the place was defended
still lies in the bastions; and the touch-holes of the guns are
preserved by being covered with rusty old corselets, worn by defenders
of the fort three hundred years ago. The Turks, who battered down
chivalry, seem to be waiting their turn of destruction now. In walking
through Rhodes one is strangely affected by witnessing the signs of
this double decay. For instance, in the streets of the knights, you see
noble houses, surmounted by noble escutcheons of superb knights, who
lived there, and prayed, and quarrelled, and murdered the Turks; and
were the most gallant pirates of the inland seas; and made vows of
chastity, and robbed and ravished; and, professing humility, would
admit none but nobility into their order; and died recommending
themselves to sweet St. John, and calmly hoping for heaven in
consideration of all the heathen they had slain. When this superb
fraternity was obliged to yield to courage as great as theirs, faith as
sincere, and to robbers even more dexterous and audacious than the
noblest knight who ever sang a canticle to the Virgin, these halls were
filled by magnificent Pashas and Agas, who lived here in the intervals
of war, and having conquered its best champions, despised Christendom
and chivalry pretty much as an Englishman despises a Frenchman. Now the
famous house is let to a shabby merchant, who has his little beggarly
shop in the bazaar; to a small officer, who ekes out his wretched
pension by swindling, and who gets his pay in bad coin. Mahometanism
pays in pewter now, in place of silver and gold. The lords of the world
have run to seed. The powerless old sword frightens nobody now—the
steel is turned to pewter too, somehow, and will no longer shear a
Christian head off any shoulders. In the Crusades my wicked sympathies
have always been with the Turks. They seem to me the better Christians
of the two: more humane, less brutally presumptuous about their own
merits, and more generous in esteeming their neighbours. As far as I
can get at the authentic story, Saladin is a pearl of refinement
compared to the brutal beef-eating Richard—about whom Sir Walter Scott
has led all the world astray.

When shall we have a real account of those times and heroes—no
good-humoured pageant, like those of the Scott romances—but a real
authentic story to instruct and frighten honest people of the present
day, and make them thankful that the grocer governs the world now in
place of the baron? Meanwhile a man of tender feelings may be pardoned
for twaddling a little over this sad spectacle of the decay of two of
the great institutions of the world. Knighthood is gone—amen; it
expired with dignity, its face to the foe: and old Mahometanism is
lingering about just ready to drop. But it is unseemly to see such a
Grand Potentate in such a state of decay: the son of Bajazet Ilderim
insolvent; the descendants of the Prophet bullied by Calmucs and
English and whipper-snapper Frenchmen; the Fountain of Magnificence
done up, and obliged to coin pewter! Think of the poor dear houris in
Paradise, how sad they must look as the arrivals of the Faithful become
less and less frequent every day. I can fancy the place beginning to
wear the fatal Vauxhall look of the Seraglio, and which has pursued me
ever since I saw it: the fountains of eternal wine are beginning to run
rather dry, and of a questionable liquor; the ready-roasted-meat trees
may cry, “Come eat me,” every now and then, in a faint voice, without
any gravy in it—but the Faithful begin to doubt about the quality of
the victuals. Of nights you may see the houris sitting sadly under
them, darning their faded muslins: Ali, Omar, and the Imaums are
reconciled and have gloomy consultations: and the Chief of the Faithful
himself, the awful camel-driver, the supernatural husband of Khadijah,
sits alone in a tumbledown kiosk, thinking moodily of the destiny that
is impending over him; and of the day when his gardens of bliss shall
be as vacant as the bankrupt Olympus.

All the town of Rhodes has this appearance of decay and ruin, except a
few consuls’ houses planted on the sea-side, here and there, with
bright flags flaunting in the sun; fresh paint; English crockery;
shining mahogany, &c.,—so many emblems of the new prosperity of their
trade, while the old inhabitants were going to rack—the fine Church of
St. John, converted into a mosque, is a ruined church, with a ruined
mosque inside; the fortifications are mouldering away, as much as time
will let them. There was considerable bustle and stir about the little
port; but it was the bustle of people who looked for the most part to
be beggars; and I saw no shop in the bazaar that seemed to have the
value of a pedlar’s pack.

I took, by way of guide, a young fellow from Berlin, a journeyman
shoemaker, who had just been making a tour in Syria, and who professed
to speak both Arabic and Turkish quite fluently—which I thought he
might have learned when he was a student at college, before he began
his profession of shoemaking; but I found he only knew about three
words of Turkish, which were produced on every occasion, as I walked
under his guidance through the desolate streets of the noble old town.
We went out upon the lines of fortification, through an ancient gate
and guard-house, where once a chapel probably stood, and of which the
roofs were richly carved and gilded. A ragged squad of Turkish soldiers
lolled about the gate now; a couple of boys on a donkey; a grinning
slave on a mule; a pair of women flapping along in yellow papooshes; a
basket-maker sitting under an antique carved portal, and chanting or
howling as he plaited his osiers: a peaceful well of water, at which
knights’ chargers had drunk, and at which the double-boyed donkey was
now refreshing himself—would have made a pretty picture for a
sentimental artist. As he sits, and endeavours to make a sketch of this
plaintive little comedy, a shabby dignitary of the island comes
clattering by on a thirty-shilling horse, and two or three of the
ragged soldiers leave their pipes to salute him as he passes under the
Gothic archway.

The astonishing brightness and clearness of the sky under which the
island seemed to bask, struck me as surpassing anything I had seen-
-not even at Cadiz, or the Piraeus, had I seen sands so yellow, or
water so magnificently blue. The houses of the people along the shore
were but poor tenements, with humble courtyards and gardens; but every
fig-tree was gilded and bright, as if it were in an Hesperian orchard;
the palms, planted here and there, rose with a sort of halo of light
round about them; the creepers on the walls quite dazzled with the
brilliancy of their flowers and leaves; the people lay in the cool
shadows, happy and idle, with handsome solemn faces; nobody seemed to
be at work; they only talked a very little, as if idleness and silence
were a condition of the delightful shining atmosphere in which they
lived.

We went down to an old mosque by the sea-shore, with a cluster of
ancient domes hard by it, blazing in the sunshine, and carved all over
with names of Allah, and titles of old pirates and generals who reposed
there. The guardian of the mosque sat in the garden- court, upon a high
wooden pulpit, lazily wagging his body to and fro, and singing the
praises of the Prophet gently through his nose, as the breeze stirred
through the trees overhead, and cast chequered and changing shadows
over the paved court, and the little fountains, and the nasal psalmist
on his perch. On one side was the mosque, into which you could see,
with its white walls and cool-matted floor, and quaint carved pulpit
and ornaments, and nobody at prayers. In the middle distance rose up
the noble towers and battlements of the knightly town, with the deep
sea-line behind them.

It really seemed as if everybody was to have a sort of sober
cheerfulness, and must yield to indolence under this charming
atmosphere. I went into the courtyard by the sea-shore (where a few
lazy ships were lying, with no one on board), and found it was the
prison of the place. The door was as wide open as Westminster Hall.
Some prisoners, one or two soldiers and functionaries, and some
prisoners’ wives, were lolling under an arcade by a fountain; other
criminals were strolling about here and there, their chains clinking
quite cheerfully; and they and the guards and officials came up
chatting quite friendly together, and gazed languidly over the
portfolio, as I was endeavouring to get the likeness of one or two of
these comfortable malefactors. One old and wrinkled she- criminal, whom
I had selected on account of the peculiar hideousness of her
countenance, covered it up with a dirty cloth, at which there was a
general roar of laughter among this good- humoured auditory of
cut-throats, pickpockets, and policemen. The only symptom of a prison
about the place was a door, across which a couple of sentinels were
stretched, yawning; while within lay three freshly-caught
pirates—chained by the leg. They had committed some murders of a very
late date, and were awaiting sentence; but their wives were allowed to
communicate freely with them: and it seemed to me that if half-a-dozen
friends would set them flee, and they themselves had energy enough to
move, the sentinels would be a great deal too lazy to walk after them.

The combined influence of Rhodes and Ramazan, I suppose, had taken
possession of my friend the Schustergesell from Berlin. As soon as he
received his fee, he cut me at once, and went and lay down by a
fountain near the port, and ate grapes out of a dirty pocket-
handkerchief. Other Christian idlers lay near him, dozing, or
sprawling, in the boats, or listlessly munching water-melons. Along the
coffee-houses of the quay sat hundreds more, with no better employment;
and the captain of the “Iberia” and his officers, and several of the
passengers in that famous steamship, were in this company, being idle
with all their might. Two or three adventurous young men went off to
see the valley where the dragon was killed; but others, more
susceptible of the real influence of the island, I am sure would not
have moved though we had been told that the Colossus himself was taking
a walk half a mile off.




CHAPTER IX
THE WHITE SQUALL


On deck, beneath the awning, I dozing lay and yawning; It was the grey
of dawning, Ere yet the sun arose; And above the funnel’s roaring, And
the fitful wind’s deploring, I heard the cabin snoring With universal
nose. I could hear the passengers snorting, I envied their disporting:
Vainly I was courting The pleasure of a doze.

So I lay, and wondered why light Came not, and watched the twilight And
the glimmer of the skylight, That shot across the deck; And the
binnacle pale and steady, And the dull glimpse of the dead-eye, And the
sparks in fiery eddy, That whirled from the chimney neck: In our jovial
floating prison There was sleep from fore to mizen, And never a star
had risen The hazy sky to speck.

Strange company we harboured; We’d a hundred Jews to larboard,
Unwashed, uncombed, uubarbered, Jews black, and brown, and grey; With
terror it would seize ye, And make your souls uneasy, To see those
Rabbis greasy, Who did nought but scratch and pray: Their dirty
children pucking, Their dirty saucepans cooking, Their dirty fingers
hooking Their swarming fleas away.

To starboard Turks and Greeks were, Whiskered, and brown their cheeks
were, Enormous wide their breeks were, Their pipes did puff alway; Each
on his mat allotted, In silence smoked and squatted, Whilst round their
children trotted In pretty, pleasant play. He can’t but smile who
traces The smiles on those brown faces, And the pretty prattling graces
Of those small heathens gay.

And so the hours kept tolling, And through the ocean rolling, Went the
brave “Iberia” bowling Before the break of day - When a SQUALL upon a
sudden Came o’er the waters scudding; And the clouds began to gather,
And the sea was lashed to lather, And the lowering thunder grumbled,
And the lightning jumped and tumbled, And the ship, and all the ocean,
Woke up in wild commotion.

Then the wind set up a howling, And the poodle-dog a yowling, And the
cocks began a crowing, And the old cow raised a lowing, As she heard
the tempest blowing; And fowls and geese did cackle, And the cordage
and the tackle Began to shriek and crackle; And the spray dashed o’er
the funnels, And down the deck in runnels; And the rushing water soaks
all, From the seamen in the fo’ksal To the stokers, whose black faces
Peer out of their bed-places; And the captain he was bawling, And the
sailors pulling, hauling; And the quarter-deck tarpauling Was shivered
in the squalling; And the passengers awaken, Most pitifully shaken; And
the steward jumps up, and hastens For the necessary basins.

Then the Greeks they groaned and quivered, And they knelt, and moaned,
and shivered, As the plunging waters met them, And splashed and overset
them; And they call in their emergence Upon countless saints and
virgins; And their marrowbones are bended, And they think the world is
ended.

And the Turkish women for’ard Were frightened and behorror’d; And,
shrieking and bewildering, The mothers clutched their children; The men
sung, “Allah Illah! Mashallah Bismillah!”

As the warring waters doused them, And splashed them and soused them;
And they called upon the Prophet, And thought but little of it.

Then all the fleas in Jewry Jumped up and bit like fury; And the
progeny of Jacob Did on the main-deck wake up (I wot those greasy
Rabbins Would never pay for cabins); And each man moaned and jabbered
in His filthy Jewish gaberdine, In woe and lamentation, And howling
consternation. And the splashing water drenches Their dirty brats and
wenches; And they crawl from bales and benches, In a hundred thousand
stenches.

This was the White Squall famous Which latterly o’ercame us, And which
all will well remember On the 28th September: When a Prussian Captain
of Lancers (Those tight-laced, whiskered prancers) Came on the deck
astonished, By that wild squall admonished, And wondering cried,
“Potztausend! Wie ist der Sturm jetzt brausend!” And looked at Captain
Lewis, Who calmly stood and blew his Cigar in all the bustle, And
scorned the tempest’s tussle. And oft we’ve thought thereafter How he
beat the storm to laughter; For well he knew his vessel With that vain
wind could wrestle; And when a wreck we thought her And doomed
ourselves to slaughter, How gaily he fought her, And through the hubbub
brought her, And, as the tempest caught her, Cried, “GEORGE! SOME
BRANDY-AND-WATER!”

And when, its force expended, The harmless storm was ended, And, as the
sunrise splendid Came blushing o’er the sea; I thought, as day was
breaking, My little girls were waking, And smiling, and making A prayer
at home for me.




CHAPTER X
TELMESSUS—BEYROUT


There should have been a poet in our company to describe that charming
little bay of Glaucus, into which we entered on the 26th of September,
in the first steam-boat that ever disturbed its beautiful waters. You
can’t put down in prose that delicious episode of natural poetry; it
ought to be done in a symphony, full of sweet melodies and swelling
harmonies; or sung in a strain of clear crystal iambics, such as Milnes
knows how to write. A mere map, drawn in words, gives the mind no
notion of that exquisite nature. What do mountains become in type, or
rivers in Mr. Vizetelly’s best brevier? Here lies the sweet bay,
gleaming peaceful in the rosy sunshine: green islands dip here and
there in its waters: purple mountains swell circling round it; and
towards them, rising from the bay, stretches a rich green plain,
fruitful with herbs and various foliage, in the midst of which the
white houses twinkle. I can see a little minaret, and some spreading
palm-trees; but, beyond these, the description would answer as well for
Bantry Bay as for Makri. You could write so far, nay, much more
particularly and grandly, without seeing the place at all, and after
reading Beaufort’s “Caramania,” which gives you not the least notion of
it.

Suppose the great Hydrographer of the Admiralty himself can’t describe
it, who surveyed the place; suppose Mr. Fellowes, who discovered it
afterwards—suppose, I say, Sir John Fellowes, Knt., can’t do it (and I
defy any man of imagination to got an impression of Telmessus from his
book)—can you, vain man, hope to try? The effect of the artist, as I
take it, ought to be, to produce upon his hearer’s mind, by his art, an
effect something similar to that produced on his own by the sight of
the natural object. Only music, or the best poetry, can do this.
Keats’s “Ode to the Grecian Urn” is the best description I know of that
sweet old silent ruin of Telmessus. After you have once seen it, the
remembrance remains with you, like a tune from Mozart, which he seems
to have caught out of heaven, and which rings sweet harmony in your
ears for ever after! It’s a benefit for all after life! You have but to
shut your eyes, and think, and recall it, and the delightful vision
comes smiling back, to your order!—the divine air—the delicious little
pageant, which nature set before you on this lucky day.

Here is the entry made in the note-book on the eventful day:- “In the
morning steamed into the bay of Glaucus—landed at Makri— cheerful old
desolate village—theatre by the beautiful sea-shore— great fertility,
oleanders—a palm-tree in the midst of the village, spreading out like a
Sultan’s aigrette—sculptured caverns, or tombs, up the mountain—camels
over the bridge.”

Perhaps it is best for a man of fancy to make his own landscape out of
these materials: to group the couched camels under the plane- trees;
the little crowd of wandering ragged heathens come down to the calm
water, to behold the nearing steamer; to fancy a mountain, in the sides
of which some scores of tombs are rudely carved; pillars and porticos,
and Doric entablatures. But it is of the little theatre that he must
make the most beautiful picture—a charming little place of festival,
lying out on the shore, and looking over the sweet bay and the swelling
purple islands. No theatre-goer ever looked out on a fairer scene. It
encourages poetry, idleness, delicious sensual reverie. O Jones! friend
of my heart! would you not like to be a white-robed Greek, lolling
languidly, on the cool benches here, and pouring compliments (in the
Ionic dialect) into the rosy ears of Neaera? Instead of Jones, your
name should be Ionides; instead of a silk hat, you should wear a
chaplet of roses in your hair: you would not listen to the choruses
they were singing on the stage, for the voice of the fair one would be
whispering a rendezvous for the mesonuktiais horais, and my Ionides
would have no ear for aught beside. Yonder, in the mountain, they would
carve a Doric cave temple, to receive your urn when all was done; and
you would be accompanied thither by a dirge of the surviving Ionidae.
The caves of the dead are empty now, however, and their place knows
them not any more among the festal haunts of the living. But, by way of
supplying the choric melodies sung here in old time, one of our
companions mounted on the scene and spouted,

“My name is Norval.”

On the same day we lay to for a while at another ruined theatre, that
of Antiphilos. The Oxford men, fresh with recollections of the
little-go, bounded away up the hill on which it lies to the ruin,
measured the steps of the theatre, and calculated the width of the
scene; while others, less active, watched them with telescopes from the
ship’s sid

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