The Ship-Dwellers: A Story of a Happy Cruise
by Albert Bigelow Paine · English · Gutenberg #34096 · 587,898 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Ship-Dwellers: A Story of a Happy Cruise
Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
Illustrator: Thomas Fogarty
Release date: October 18, 2010 [eBook #34096]
Language: English
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[Illustration: WE CHANGED OUR MINDS ABOUT BEING WILLING TO SAIL
PAST--See page 31.]
THE SHIP-DWELLERS
A Story of a Happy Cruise
by
ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE
Author of
"From Van-Dweller to Commuter"
"The Tent-Dwellers" Etc.
With Illustrations from Drawings by Thomas Fogarty and from Photographs
[Illustration]
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
MCMX
* * * * *
BOOKS BY
ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE
THE SHIP-DWELLERS. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50
THE TENT-DWELLERS. Illustrated. Post 8vo 1.50
THE HOLLOW TREE AND DEEP WOODS BOOK. Illustrated. Post 8vo 1.50
FROM VAN-DWELLER TO COMMUTER. Ill'd. Post 8vo 1.50
LIFE OF THOMAS NAST. Ill'd. 8vo _net_ 5.00
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, N. Y.
* * * * *
Copyright, 1910, by HARPER & BROTHERS
TO
MARK TWAIN
HERO OF MY CHILDHOOD
INSPIRATION OF MY YOUTH
FRIEND OF THESE LATER YEARS
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I THE BOOK, AND THE DREAM 1
II IN THE TRACK OF THE INNOCENTS 9
III DAYS AT SEA 16
IV WE BECOME HISTORY 23
V INTRODUCING THE REPROBATES 26
VI A LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE 29
VII A DAY TO OURSELVES 41
VIII OUT OF THE SUNRISE 46
IX EARLY MEDITERRANEAN EXPERIENCES 57
X THE DIVERTING STORY OF ALGIERS 62
XI WE ENTER THE ORIENT 68
XII WE TOUCH AT GENOA 86
XIII MALTA, A LAND OF YESTERDAY 95
XIV A SUNDAY AT SEA 113
XV A PORT OF MISSING DREAMS 118
XVI ATHENS THAT IS 139
XVII INTO THE DARDANELLES 146
XVIII A CITY OF ILLUSION 150
XIX THE TURK AND SOME OF HIS PHASES 158
XX ABDUL HAMID GOES TO PRAYER 172
XXI LOOKING DOWN ON YILDIZ 182
XXII EPHESUS: THE CITY THAT WAS 191
XXIII INTO SYRIA 208
XXIV THE HOUSE THAT CAIN BUILT 214
XXV GOING DOWN TO DAMASCUS 222
XXVI THE "PEARL OF THE EAST" 226
XXVII FOOTPRINTS OF PAUL 239
XXVIII DISCONTENTED PILGRIMS 247
XXIX DAMASCUS, THE GARDEN BEAUTIFUL 255
XXX WHERE PILGRIMS GATHER IN 263
XXXI THE HOLY CITY 274
XXXII THE HOLY SEPULCHRE 278
XXXIII TWO HOLY MOUNTAINS 288
XXXIV THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE MANGER 297
XXXV THE SORROW OF THE CHOSEN--THE WAY OF THE CROSS 301
XXXVI AT THE MOUTH OF THE NILE 309
XXXVII THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX 315
XXXVIII WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN 322
XXXIX WHERE HISTORY BEGAN 328
XL KARNAK AND LUXOR 335
XLI THE STILL VALLEY OF THE KINGS 346
XLII THE HIGHWAY OF EGYPT 359
XLIII OTHER WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN 370
XLIV SAKKARA AND THE SACRED BULLS 377
XLV A VISIT WITH RAMESES II 382
XLVI THE LONG WAY HOME 391
ILLUSTRATIONS
WE CHANGED OUR MINDS ABOUT BEING WILLING TO SAIL PAST _Frontispiece_
TO ME IT WAS ALL TRUE, ALL ROMANCE--ALL POETRY 3
SOMEBODY SENT ME A BASKET OF FRUIT 13
THEY ARE AN ATTRACTIVE LOT--THE REPROBATES 17
GAVE HIM THE "ICY MITT" 21
THEY COULD DIVE LIKE SEALS 33
TWO MEN TAKE YOU IN HAND, AND AWAY YOU GO 38
DID A SORT OF FANDAROLE 41
THEN IT DAWNED UPON THE DIPLOMAT 43
BUT NOW GIBRALTAR, THE CROUCHING LION OF TRAFALGAR, HAD RISEN
FROM THE SEA 49
WE COULD HAVE LISTENED ALL NIGHT TO BENUNES 53
"THAT IS THE KASBA" 66
ONE DOES NOT HURRY THE ORIENT--ONE WAITS ON IT 68
MARVELLOUS BASKETS AND QUEER THINGS 72
WE DID NOT CARE MUCH FOR PARKS 74
ETERNALLY EAST WITH NO HINT OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD 76
TWO BENT, WRINKLED WOMEN WEAVING LACE OUTSIDE THE DOOR 109
WE LOOKED ACROSS THE ENTRANCE AND THERE ROSE THE ACROPOLIS,
HIGH AGAINST THE BLUE 122
HE WOULD SWING HIS ARMS AND BEGIN, "YOU SEE--!" THE REST
REQUIRED A MIND-READER 124
I WOULD HAVE APPLIED FOR THE POSITION IN THE CHORUS MYSELF 129
TOOK TURNS ADDRESSING THE MULTITUDE 131
ONE'S AGE, STATED ON OATH, GOES WITH A PASSPORT 148
KEYEFF 150
I WANTED TO CARRY AWAY ONE OF THOSE TOMBSTONES 189
ALL THE PLAINS AND SLOPES OF THE OLD CITY, WITH ITS WHITE
FRAGMENTS AND POOR RUINED HARBOR, LAY AT OUR FEET 198
FROM THE TIME OF ADAM, BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS 216
SO THE PATRIARCHS JOURNEYED; SO, TWO THOUSAND YEARS LATER,
JOSEPH AND MARY TRAVELLED INTO EGYPT 225
URGING US TO PARTAKE OF THE PRECIOUS STUFF, WITHOUT STINT 243
ASKED HIM IF HE WOULDN'T EXECUTE A LITTLE COMMISSION FOR ME
IN THE BAZAARS 249
THE PATRIARCH KNEW ALL ABOUT JAFFA 264
JERUSALEM--ITS BUBBLE-ROOFED HOUSES AND DOMES, ITS CYPRESS
AND OLIVE TREES 294
A CAMEL TRAIN LED THE WAY THROUGH THE GATES 300
THE DEPTH OF THEIR FALL 302
THE WAY OF THE CROSS 304
THE TRUE GOLGOTHA--THE PLACE OF THE SKULL 306
A VAST INDIFFERENCE TO ALL PUNY THINGS 318
SANCTUARY IN KARNAK 332
GADDIS 332
I MADE A PICTURE OF THE FLY-BRUSH BRIGADE 338
ITS MAGNIFICENT PYLONS OR ENTRANCE WALLS ... AND THEN ONCE
MORE WE WERE ON THE DONKEYS 340
THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR ... ONCE MORE REFLECTING ITS COLUMNS IN
THE NILE 342
THINK OF WATERING A WHOLE WHEAT-FIELD WITH A WELL-SWEEP AND
A PAIL 360
GOT IT MADE CHEAP SOMEWHERE, WITH HER PICTURE CARVED ON THE
FRONT OF IT 386
SET OUT ON THE LONG, STEADY, ATLANTIC SWING 392
THE SHIP-DWELLERS
"The grand object of all travel is to see the shores of the
Mediterranean."
--DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON.
[Illustration]
I
THE BOOK, AND THE DREAM
It was a long time ago--far back in another century--that my father
brought home from the village, one evening, a brand-new book. There were
not so many books in those days, and this was a fine big one, with black
and gilt covers, and such a lot of pictures!
I was at an age to claim things. I said the book was _my_ book, and,
later, petitioned my father to establish that claim. (I remember we were
climbing through the bars at the time, having driven the cows to the
further pasture.)
My father was kindly disposed, but conservative; that was his habit. He
said that I might look at the book--that I might even read it, some day,
when I was old enough, and I think he added that privately I might call
it mine--a privilege which provided as well for any claim I might have
on the moon.
I don't think these permissions altogether satisfied me. I was already
in the second reader, and the lust of individual ownership was upon me.
Besides, this was a _New Pilgrim's Progress_. We had respect in our
house for the old _Pilgrim's Progress_, and I had been encouraged to
search its pages. I had read it, or read at it, for a good while, and my
claim of ownership in that direction had never been disputed. Now, here
was a brand-new one, and the pictures in it looked most attractive. I
was especially enamoured of the frontispiece, "The Pilgrim's Vision,"
showing the "Innocents" on their way "abroad," standing on the deck of
the _Quaker City_ and gazing at Bible pictures in the sky.
I do not remember how the question of ownership settled itself. I do
remember how the book that winter became the nucleus of our family
circle, and how night after night my mother read aloud from it while the
rest of us listened, and often the others laughed.
[Illustration: TO ME IT WAS ALL TRUE, ALL ROMANCE--ALL POETRY]
I did not laugh--not then. In the first place, I would not, in those
days, laugh at any _Pilgrim's Progress_, especially at a new one, and
then I had not arrived at the point of sophistication where a joke, a
literary joke, registers. To me it was all true, all romance--all
poetry--the story of those happy voyagers who sailed in a ship of dreams
to lands beyond the sunrise, where men with turbans, long flowing
garments and Bible whiskers rode on camels; where ruined columns rose in
a desert that was once a city; where the Sphinx and the Pyramids looked
out over the sands that had drifted about them long and long before the
Wise Men of the East had seen the Star rise over Bethlehem.
In the big, bleak farm-house on the wide, bleak Illinois prairie I
looked into the open fire and dreamed. Some day, somehow, I would see
those distant lands. I would sail away on that ship with "Dan" and
"Jack" and "The Doctor" to the Far East; I would visit Damascus and
Jerusalem, and pitch my camp on the borders of the Nile. Very likely I
should decide to remain there and live happy ever after.
How the dreams of youth stretch down the years, and fade, and change!
Only this one did not fade, and I thought it did not change. I learned
to laugh with the others, by-and-by, but the romance and the poetry of
the pilgrimage did not grow dim. The argonauts of the _Quaker City_
sailed always in a halo of romance to harbors of the forgotten days. As
often as I picked up the book the dream was fresh and new, though
realization seemed ever further and still further ahead.
Then all at once, there, just within reach, it lay. There was no reason
why, in some measure at least, I should not follow the track of those
old first "Innocents Abroad." Of course, I was dreaming again--only,
this time, perhaps, I could make the dream come true.
I began to read advertisements. I found that a good many ship-loads of
"Pilgrims" had followed that first little band to the Orient--that the
first "ocean picnic" steamer, which set sail in June forty-two years
before, had started a fashion in sea excursioning which had changed only
in details. Ocean picnics to the Mediterranean were made in winter now,
and the vessels used for them were fully eight times as big as the old
_Quaker City_, which had been a side-wheel steamer, and grand, no doubt,
for her period, with a register proudly advertised at eighteen hundred
tons! Itineraries, too, varied more or less, but Greece, Egypt, and the
Holy Land were still names to conjure with. Advertisements of cruises
were plentiful, and literature on the subject was luminous and exciting.
A small table by my bed became gorgeous with prospectuses in blue and
gold and crimson sunset dyes. The Sphinx, the Pyramids, and prows of
stately vessels looked out from many covers and became backgrounds for
lofty, dark-blue camels and dusky men of fantastic dress. Often I woke
in the night and lit my lamp and consulted these things. When I went to
the city I made the lives of various agents miserable with my inquiries.
It was hard--it was nerve-racking to decide. But on one of these
occasions I overheard the casual remark that the S. S. _Grosser
Kurfuerst_ would set out on her cruise to the Orient with two tons of
dressed chicken and four thousand bottles of champagne.
I hesitated no longer. Dear me, my dream had changed, then, after all!
Such things had not in the least concerned the boy who had looked into
the open fire, and pictured a pilgrimage to Damascus and Jerusalem, and
a camp on the borders of the Nile.
My remembrance of the next few days is hazy--that is, it is
kaleidoscopic. I recall doing a good many things in a hurry and
receiving a good deal of advice. Also the impression that everybody in
the world except myself had been everywhere in the world, and that
presently they were all going again, and that I should find them, no
doubt, strewn all the way from Gibraltar to Jerusalem, when I had been
persuading myself that in the places I had intended to visit I should
meet only the fantastic stranger. Suddenly it was two days before
sailing. Then it was the day before sailing. Then it was sailing day!
Perhaps it was the hurry and stress of those last days; perhaps it is
the feeling natural to such a proximity. I do not know. But I do know
that during those final flying hours, when I was looking across the very
threshold of realization, the old fascination faded, and if somebody
had only suggested a good reason for my staying at home, I would have
stayed there, and I would have given that person something valuable,
besides. But nobody did it. Not a soul was thoughtful enough to hint
that I was either needed or desired in my native land, and I was too
modest to mention it myself.
There had been rain, but it was bright enough that February morning of
departure--just a bit squally along the west. What a gay crowd there was
at the pier and on the vessel! I thought all of New York must be going.
That was a mistake--they were mostly visitors, as I discovered later. It
would average three visitors to one passenger, I should think. I had
more than that--twice as many. I am not boasting--they came mainly to be
sure that I got aboard and stayed there, and to see that I didn't lose
most of my things. They knew me and what I would be likely to do, alone.
They wanted to steer me to the right state-room and distribute my traps.
Then they could put me in charge of Providence and the deck-steward, and
wash their hands of me, and feel that whatever happened they had done
their duty and were not to blame.
So I had six, as I say, and we worked our way through, among the
passengers and visitors, who seemed all to be talking and laughing at
once or pawing over mail and packages heaped upon the cabin table. I
didn't feel like laughing and talking, and I wasn't interested in the
mail. Almost everybody in the world that meant anything to me was in my
crowd, and they were going away, presently, to leave me on this big
ship, among strangers, bound for the strange lands. My long dream of the
Orient dwindled to a decrepit thing.
But presently we found my state-room, and it was gratifying. I was
impressed with its regal furnishings. After all, there were
compensations in a habitation like that. Besides, there were always the
two tons of dressed chicken and those thousands of champagne. I became
more cheerful.
Only, I wish the ship people wouldn't find it necessary to blow their
whistle so loud and suddenly to send one's friends ashore. There is no
chance to carry off somebody--somebody you would enjoy having along.
They blow that thing until it shivers the very marrow of one's soul.
How the visitors do crowd ashore! A word--a last kiss--a "God bless
you"--your own are gone presently--you are left merely standing there,
abandoned, marooned, deserted--feeling somehow that it's all wrong, and
that something ought to be done about it. Why don't those people hurry?
You want to get away now; you want it over with.
A familiar figure fights its way up the gang-plank, breasting the
shoreward tide. Your pulse jumps--they are going to take you home, after
all. But no, he only comes to tell you that _your_ six will be at a
certain place near the end of the dock, where you can see them, and wave
to them.
You push to the ship's side for a place at the rail. The last visitors
are straggling off now, even to the final official. Then somewhere
somebody does something that slackens the cables, the remaining
gang-plank is dragged away. That whistle again, and then a band--our
band--turns loose a perfect storm of music.
We are going! We are going! We have dropped away from the pier and are
gliding past the rows of upturned faces, the lines of frantic
handkerchiefs. Yes, oh yes, we are going--there is no turning back now,
no changing of one's mind again. All the cares of work, the claims of
home--they cannot reach us any more. Those waiting at the pier's end to
wave as we pass--whatever life holds for me is centred there, and I am
leaving it all behind. There they are, now! Wave! Wave! Oh, I did not
know it would be like this! I did not suppose that I might--need another
handkerchief!
The smoke of a tug drifts between-- I have lost them. No, there they are
again, still waving. That white spot--that is a little furry coat--such
a little furry coat and getting so far off, and so blurry. My glass--if
I can only get hold of myself enough to see through it. Yes, there they
are! Oh, those wretched boats to drift in and shut that baby figure
away! Now they are gone, but I cannot find her again. The smoke, the
mist, and a sudden drift of snow have swept between. I have lost the
direction-- I don't know where to look any more. It is all over--we are
off--we are going out to sea!
[Illustration]
II
IN THE TRACK OF THE INNOCENTS
We are through luncheon; we have left Sandy Hook, and the shores have
dropped behind the western horizon. It was a noble luncheon we sat down
to as we crossed the lower bay. One stopped at the serving-table to
admire an exhibition like that. Banked up in splendid pyramids as for a
World's Fair display, garnished and embroidered and fringed with every
inviting trick of decoration, it was a spectacle to take one's breath
and make him resolve to consume it all. One felt that he could recover a
good deal on a luncheon like that, but I think the most of us recovered
too much. I am sure, now, that I did--a good deal too much--and that my
selections were not the best--not for the beginning of a strange, new
life at sea.
Then there was Laura--Laura, age fourteen, whose place at the table is
next to mine, and a rather sturdy young person; I think she also
considered the bill of fare too casually. She ventured the information
that this was her second voyage, that the first had been a short trip on
a smaller vessel, and that she had been seasick. She did not intend to
be seasick on a fine, big steamer like this, and I could tell by the
liberality with which she stowed away the satisfying German provender
that she had enjoyed an early and light breakfast, followed by brisk
exercise in getting to the ship. The tables were gay with flowers; the
company looked happy, handsome, and well-dressed; the music was
inspiring. Friends left behind seemed suddenly very far away. We had
become a little world all to ourselves--most of us strangers to one
another, but thrown in a narrow compass here and likely to remain
associates for weeks, even months. What a big, jolly picnic it was,
after all!
Outside it was bleak and squally, but no matter. The air was fine and
salt and invigorating. The old _Quaker City_ had been held by storm at
anchor in the lower bay. We were already down the Narrows and heading
straight for the open sea. Land presently lost its detail and became a
dark outline. That, too, sank lower and became grayer and fell back into
the mist.
I remembered that certain travellers had displayed strong emotions on
seeing their native land disappear. I had none--none of any consequence.
I had symptoms, though, and I recognized them. Like Laura, aged
fourteen, I had taken a shorter voyage on a poorer ship, and I had
decided that this would be different. I had engaged a steamer-chair, and
soon after luncheon I thought I would take a cigar and a book on Italy
and come out here and sit in it--in the chair, of course--and smoke and
think and look out to sea. But when I got to the door of my state-room
and felt the great vessel take a slow, curious side-step and caught a
faint whiff of linoleum and varnish from the newly renovated cabin, I
decided to forego the cigar and guide-book and take a volume on mind
cure instead.
It seems a good ship, though, and I feel that we shall all learn to be
proud of her, in time. In a little prospectus pamphlet I have here I
find some of her measurements and capacities, and I have been comparing
them with those of the _Quaker City_, the first steamer to set out on
this Oriental cruise. If she were travelling along beside us to-day I
suppose she would look like a private yacht. She must have had trouble
with a sea like this. She was little more than two hundred feet long, I
believe, and, as already mentioned, her tonnage was registered at
eighteen hundred. The figures set down in the prospectus for this vessel
are a good deal bigger than those, but they are still too modest. The
figures quote her as being a trifle less than six hundred feet long, but
I can see in both directions from where I sit, and I am satisfied that
it would take me hours to get either to her bow or stern. I don't
believe I could do it in that time. I am convinced that it is at least
half a mile to my state-room.
The prospectus is correct, however, in one item. It says that the
_Kurfuerst_ has a displacement of twenty-two thousand tons. That is
handsome, and it is not too much; I realized that some moments ago. When
I felt our noble vessel "sashay" in her slow majestic fashion toward
Cuba, and then pause to revolve the matter a little, and after
concluding to sink, suddenly set out in a long, slow, upward slide for
the moon, I knew that her displacement was all that is claimed for it,
and I prepared for the worst; so did Laura, and started for her
state-room suddenly....
Later: I don't know how many of our party went down to dinner. I know
one that did not go. The music is good, but I can hear it very well from
where I am. No doubt the dinner is good, too, but I am satisfied to give
it absent treatment.
There is a full-blown Scientist in the next room. She keeps saying "Mind
is all. Mind is all. This is nothing. This is--this is just--" after
which, the Earthquake.
What an amazing ocean it is to be able to toss this mighty ship about in
such a way! I suppose there is no hope of her sinking. No hope!
[Illustration: SOMEBODY SENT ME A BASKET OF FRUIT]
Somebody sent me a basket of fruit. I vaguely wonder what it is like,
and if I shall ever know? I suppose there are men who could untie that
paper and look at it. I could stand in awe of a man like that. I could--
However, it is no matter; there is no such man.
* * * * *
But it was bright next morning, though a heavy sea was still running. I
was by no means perfectly happy, but I struggled on deck quite early,
and found company. A stout youngish man was marching round and round
vigorously as if the number of laps he might achieve was vital. He
fetched up suddenly as I stepped on deck. He spoke with quick energy.
"Look here," he said, earnestly, "perhaps you can tell me; it's
important, and I want to know: is a seasick man better off if he walks
or sits still? I'm seasick. I confess it, fully. My interior economy is
all disqualified, and I want advice. Now tell me, _is_ a seasick man
better off when he walks or when he sits still?"
I gave it up, and the Diplomat (we learned later that he was connected
with the consular service) passed to the next possible source of
information. I heard him propounding his inquiries several times during
the morning as new arrivals appeared on deck.
He was the most honest man on the ship. The rest of us did not confess
that we were seasick. We had a bad cold or rheumatism or dyspepsia or
locomotorataxia or pleurisy--all sorts of things--but we were not
seasick. It was remarkable what a floating hospital of miscellaneous
complaints the ship had become, and how suddenly they all disappeared
that afternoon when the sea went down.
It was Lincoln's Birthday, and, inspired by the lively appearance of the
deck, a kindly promoter of entertainment went among the passengers
inviting them to take part in some sort of simple exercises for the
evening. Our pleasure excursion seemed really to have begun now, and
walking leisurely around the promenade-deck one could get a fair
impression of our company and cast the horoscope. They were a fair
average of Americans, on the whole, with a heavy percentage of foreign
faces, mostly German. Referring to the passenger-list, one discovered
that we hailed from many States; but when I drifted into the German
purlieus of that register and found such prefixes as Herr
Regierungs-praesident a. D., and Frau Regierungs-praesident a. D., and
looking further discovered Herr Kommerzienrat, Herr Oberpraesidialrat
von, and a few more high-power explosives like that, I said, "This is
not an excursion, after all; it is a court assembly." I did not know in
the least what these titles meant, but I was uneasy. I had the feeling
that the owner of any one of them could nod to the executioner and
dismiss me permanently from the ship. The interpreter came along just
then. He said:
"Do not excite yourself. They are not so dangerous as they look. It is
only as one would say, 'Mr. and Mrs. Councilmanofthethirdward Jones, or
Mr. MayorofOshkosh Smith, or Mrs. Commissionerofhighways Brown.' It is
pure decoration; nothing fatal will occur." I felt better then, and set
out to identify some of the owners of this furniture. It was as the
interpreter had said--there was no danger. A man with a six-story title
could hardly be distinguished from the rest of his countrymen except
when he tried to sign it. But a thing like that must be valuable in
Germany; otherwise he would not go to the trouble and expense of lugging
such a burden around on a trip like this, when one usually wants to
travel light.
The ship gave us a surprise that night, and it was worth while. When we
got to the dining-room we found it decorated with the interwoven colors
of two nations; the tables likewise radiant, and there were menus with
the picture of Abraham Lincoln outside. We were far out in the blackness
of the ocean now, but here was as brilliant a spot as you would find at
Sherry's or Delmonico's, and a little company gathered from the world's
end to do honor to the pioneer boy of Kentucky. I think many of us there
had never observed Lincoln's Birthday before, and it was fitting enough
that we should begin at such a time and place. I know we all rose and
joined in _America_ and the _Star-Spangled Banner_ at the close, and we
are not likely to forget that mid-ocean celebration of the birth of
America's greatest, gentlest hero.
III
DAYS AT SEA
We have settled down into a pleasant routine of lazy life. Most of us
are regularly on deck now, though one sees new faces daily.
[Illustration: THEY ARE AN ATTRACTIVE LOT--THE REPROBATES]
We have taken up such amusements as please us--reading, games, gossip,
diaries, picture-puzzles, and there are even one or two mild flirtations
discoverable. In the "booze-bazaar" (the Diplomat's name for the
smoking-room) the Reprobates find solace in pleasant mixtures and droll
stories, while they win one another's money at diverting games. They are
an attractive lot--the Reprobates. One can hardly tear himself away from
them. Only the odors of the smoking-room are not quite attractive, as
yet. I am no longer seasick--at least, not definitely so; but I still
say "Mind is all" as I pass through the smoking-room.
We are getting well acquainted, too, for the brief period of time we
have been together. It does not seem brief, however. That bleak day of
departure in North River is already far back in the past--as far back as
if it belonged to another period, which indeed it does. We are becoming
acquainted, as I say. We are rapidly finding out one another's names;
whether we are married, single, or divorced--and why; what, if anything,
we do when we are at home; how we happened to come on this trip; and a
great deal of useful information--useful on a ship like this, where the
voyage is to be a long one and associations more or less continuous. We
form into little groups and discuss these things--our own affairs
first--then presently we shift the personnel of our groups and discuss
each other, and are happy and satisfied, and feel that the cruise is a
success.
There are not many young people on the ship--a condition which would
seem to have prevailed on these long ocean excursions since the first
Oriental pilgrimage, forty-two years ago. I suppose the prospects of
several months on one ship, with sight-seeing in Egypt and the Holy
Land, do not look attractive enough to the average young person who is
thinking of gayer things. One can be gay enough on shipboard, however,
where there is a good band of music; a quarter-deck to dance on; nooks
on the sun-deck to flirt in; promenades and shuffleboard, with full
dress every night for dinner. No need to have an idle time on an
excursion like this if one doesn't want it; which most of us do,
however, because we are no longer entirely young, and just loaf around
and talk of unimportant things and pretend to read up on the places we
are going to see.
We need to do that. What we don't know about history and geography on
this ship would sink it. Most of us who have been to school, even if it
is a good while ago, keep sort of mental pictures of the hemispheres,
and preserve the sound of certain old familiar names. We live under the
impression that this is knowledge, and it passes well enough for that
until a time comes like this when particular places on the map are to be
visited and particular associations are to be recalled. Then, of course,
we start in to classify and distinguish, and suddenly find that there is
scarcely anything to classify and less still to distinguish. I am
morally certain that there are not ten of us on this vessel who could
tell with certainty the difference between Deucalion and Deuteronomy, or
between the Pillars of Hercules and the Golden Horn. The brightest man
on the ship this morning asked if Algiers was in Egypt or Spain, and a
dashing high-school girl wanted to know if Greece were not a part of
Asia Minor.
We shall all know better when we are through with this trip. We shall be
wonders in the matter of knowledge, and we shall get it from first
hands. We shall no longer confuse Upper and Lower Egypt, or a peristyle
with a stadium. We are going to know about these things. That is why we
are here.
In the matter of our amusements, picture-puzzles seem to be in the lead.
They are fascinating things, once one gets the habit. They sell them on
this ship, and nearly everybody has one or more. The tables in the
forward cabin are full of them, and after dinner there is a group around
each table pawing over the pieces in a rapt way or offering advice to
whoever happens to be setting them. Certain of our middle-aged ladies in
particular find comfort in the picture-puzzles, and sit all day in their
steamer-chairs with the pieces on a large pasteboard cover, shifting and
trying and fitting them into place. One wonders what blessing those old
_Quaker City_ pilgrims had that took the place of the fascinating
picture-puzzle.
We are getting south now, and the weather is much warmer. The sun is
bright, too, and a little rainbow travels with the ship, just over the
port screw. When the water is fairly quiet the decks are really gay. New
faces still appear, however. Every little while there is a fresh
arrival, as it were; a fluttering out from some inner tangle of sea
magic and darkness, just as a butterfly might emerge from a cocoon. Some
of them do not stay. We run into a cross-sea or a swell, or something,
and they disappear again, and their places at the table remain vacant.
The Diplomat continues his fight and his inquiries. Every little while
one may hear him ask: "Is it better for a seasick man to walk or to sit
down?" The Diplomat never denies his condition. "Oh, Lord, I'm seasick!"
he says. "I'd be sick on a duck-pond. I'd be sick if the ship were tied
to the dock. I'd be sick if anybody told me I was on a ship. Say, what
is a fellow like that to do, anyway? And here I am bound for Jerusalem!"
Down here the water is very blue. We might be sailing on a great tub of
indigo. One imagines that to take up a glass of it would be to dip up
pure ultra-marine. I mentioned this to the Diplomat.
"Yes," he said, "it is a cracker-jack of an ocean, but I don't care for
it just now."
But what a lonely ocean it is! Not a vessel, not a sail, not a column of
smoke on the horizon!
We are officially German on this ship, and the language prevails. Our
passenger-list shows that we are fully half German, I believe, and of
course all the officers and stewards are of that race. The consequence
is that everybody on the ship, almost, speaks or tries to speak the
language. Persons one would never suspect of such a thing do it, and
some of them pretty well, too. Even I got reckless and shameless, and
from a long-buried past produced a few German remarks of my own. They
were only about ten-carat assay, but they were accepted at par. I
remember an old and very dear German man in America who once said to me,
speaking of his crops, "Der early corn, he iss all right; aber der late
corn, she's bad!"
My German is not as good as his English, but you'd think it was better,
the serious way these stewards accept it. They recognize the
quality--they have many cargoes of the same brand.
We have two exceedingly pretty girls on this ship--one of them as
amiable, as gentle, as lovely in every way as she is pretty. The
other--well, she is pretty enough in all conscience, and she may be
amiable--I wouldn't want to be unfair in my estimate--but if she is, she
has a genius for concealing it from the rest of the passengers. Her
chief characteristic besides her comeliness seems to be a conviction
that she has made a mistake in coming with such a crowd.
[Illustration: GAVE HIM THE "ICY MITT"]
We can't domesticate that girl--she won't mix with us. The poor old
Promoter, one of the kindliest creatures alive, approached her with an
invitation to read aloud a small selection for the little Lincoln
memorial he was preparing. She declined chillily--gave him the "icy
mitt," the Diplomat said.
"I nevah do anything on shipboahd," she declared, and ignored his
apologies.
She spends most of her time disposed in a ravishing fashion in a
steamer-chair, reading a novel or letting the volume drop listlessly at
her side, with one of her dainty fingers between the pages to mark the
place, while her spirit lives in other worlds than ours. The Promoter
says she is cold and frigidly beautiful--a winter landscape. But then
the Promoter is a simple, forgiving soul. I think she is just flitter
and frosting--just a Christmas-card. A ship like this is democratic--it
has to be. We are all just people here.
It is also cosmopolitan--it has to be that, too, with a crowd like ours.
This Sunday evening affords an example of what I mean. In the
dining-room forward there are religious exercises--prayers and a song
service under the direction of the Promoter--a repetition, no doubt, of
the very excellent programme given this morning. Far aft, on the
quarter-deck, a dance is in progress, under the direction, I believe, of
our German contingent; while amidships, in the "booze-bazaar," the
Reprobates and their Godless friends are engaged in revelry, probably
under the direction of Satan. The ship is very long, and the
entertainments do not conflict or compete. One may select whatever best
accords with his taste and morals, or, if he likes variety, he may
divide his time. Everything is running wide open as this luminous speck
of life--a small, self-constituted world--goes throbbing through the
dark.
IV
WE BECOME HISTORY
We had been four days at sea, boring our way into the sunrise at the
rate of three hundred and sixty miles a day, when we met the "Great
Sight"--the American fleet of sixteen ships of war returning from its
cruise around the world.
It had been rumored among us when we left New York that there was a
possibility of such a meeting. It was only a possibility, of course, for
even a fleet is a mere speck on a wide waste of ocean, and with engines
on both sides driving at full speed the chances of intersection were
small.
So we went about figuring and speculating and worrying the officers, who
were more anxious over the matter than we were, but conservative,
nevertheless. We only learned, therefore, or rather we guessed, I think,
that our Marconi flash was travelling out beyond the horizon, and the
loneliest sea imaginable, trying to find an answering spark.
During the afternoon of the Sunday previously mentioned a sentence on
the blackboard, the first official word, announced, with a German
flavor, that it was "not quite impossible" that the meeting would occur
next morning, and this we took to mean that wireless communication had
been established, though we were not further informed.
There was a wild gale during the night and a heavy sea running at
daybreak, but the sky was clear. A few stragglers were at early
breakfast when, all at once, a roll of drums and a burst of martial
music brought us to our feet.
We did not need any one to tell us what it meant. "The fleet!" came to
every man's lips, and a moment later we were on deck. Not only those in
the dining-room came. Sick or well, bundled together somehow, from every
opening our excursionists staggered forth, and, climbing to the
sun-deck, looked out across the bridge to where the sunrise had just
filled the morning sky. There they were--far, faint, and blurred at
first, but presently outlined clear--stretched across the glowing east,
lifting and tossing out of the morning, our sixteen noble vessels on
their homeward way!
At that moment I think there was not one on our ship who did not feel
that whatever might come, now, the cruise was a success. Foreign lands
would bring us grand sights, no doubt, but nothing that could equal
this. We realized that, fully, and whispered our good-fortune to one
another as we gazed out upon that spectacle of a lifetime.
Viewed across our bow, the vessels appeared to form a continuous
straight line, but they divided into two sections as they came on, eight
vessels in each, and passed in column formation. In a little while we
were close to them--they were just under our starboard bow--their upper
decks black with men turned out in our honor. We waved to them and our
band played, but we did not cheer. We were too much impressed to be
noisy, nor could we have made our voices heard across that wild
shouting sea. So we only looked, and waved, and perhaps wiped our eyes,
and some of us tried to photograph them.
They passed in perfect formation. Heavy seas broke over them, and every
billow seemed to sweep their decks, but their lines varied not a point
and the separating distances remained unchanged. So perfect was the
alignment that each column became a single vessel when they had left us
behind.
It was over, all too soon. Straight as an arrow those two noble lines
pierced the western horizon, passed through it, and were gone. We went
below then, to find chairs flying, crockery smashing, and state-rooms in
a wreck. It was the rough day of the trip, but we declared that we did
not mind it at all. By wireless we thanked Admiral Sperry, and wished
him safe arrival home. Then presently he returned thanks, and good
wishes for our journey in distant lands.
We meant to vote resolutions of gratitude to our captain that night at
dinner for his skill in finding the fleet. But it was our rough day, as
I have mentioned, and nobody was there to do it--at least, there was not
enough for a real, first-class, able-bodied resolution. We did it next
evening--that is, to-night. Between the asparagus and the pheasant we
told him some of the nice things we thought of him, and ended up by
drinking his health, standing, and by giving a great "Hoch soil er
leben!" in real German fashion.
We were vain and set up, and why not? Had we not been the first
Americans to give our fleet welcome home? We felt that we had become
almost history.
V
INTRODUCING THE REPROBATES
We are a week at sea now, and have been making our courtesy to the
sunrise half an hour earlier every morning. That is to say, we have
gained three hours and a half, and when the first bugle blows for
half-past seven, and commands us to get up and muss around and be ready
for the next bugle half an hour later, it means in the well-regulated
civilized country we've left behind that it's just four o'clock, and
time to turn over and settle down and really enjoy life. The result is
you swear at the bugler, when you ought to love him for the trouble he
takes to get you up in time for breakfast.
After breakfast, the deck. It is good to walk around and around the
promenade these fine mornings down here, even though the sea keeps
billowy and the horizon line lifts and falls with its majestic swing.
You are no longer disturbed by it. Your body has adapted itself to the
motion, and sways like an inverted pendulum. You feel that you have your
sea-legs almost as well as the stewards, and this makes you proud and
showy before the other passengers. It is February, but it is not cold
down in this violet, semi-tropic sea. The air is fresh enough, but it is
soft and gratifying, and one almost imagines that he can smell flowers
in it. Perhaps it is a fact, too, for we are not far from land now; we
shall reach Madeira to-morrow morning.
Yet somehow the thought of land is not exciting. I do not believe any of
us are eager for it. We are quite restored now, even the Diplomat, and
the days on shipboard are serene and pleasantly satisfying.
So many happy things go to make up the day. It is refreshing to play
shuffleboard on the after deck with Laura, age fourteen, and her
companion, the only other girl of her age on board. It is inspiring to
hear the band play every morning at ten when one is not too close to the
strenuous music. I suppose beating a bass drum and cymbals makes muscle,
and the man does not realize how strong he is. It is diverting to drift
into the smoking-room--now that I do not mind its fragrance any
more--and watch the Apostle (so christened because of his name and
general build and inspired look) winning money from the Colonel at
piquet, while the Horse Doctor discusses the philosophies of life in a
manner at least pleasing to the unregenerates.
I should add, I suppose, that the Horse Doctor is not really that by
profession, but having been dubbed so one day by his fellow-Reprobates,
the Apostle and the Colonel, his cheerful reply: "Yes, I expect to be
taken for one--travelling, as I do, with a couple of asses," fixed the
title for him permanently. We enjoy the Reprobates. They are so
ingenuous in their morals, and are corrupting the smoking-room in such a
frank, unrestricted way. We enjoy their arguments too, they are so free
and personal. We disapprove of the Reprobates, but we love them because
we are human and born in sin, and they stand for all things we would
like to do--if we dared.
It is inviting and comfortable almost anywhere on the ship these days.
It is good just to sit in the sun and dream; to lean over the rail and
watch the little rainbow that travels with us, the white lace that the
ship makes in its majestic sweep, to wander back to the stern and follow
the interminable wake of the screw as it stretches back beyond the
horizon line. Then there is the sunset; it was wonderful to-night. The
air was perfectly clear, the sun a red disk going down cleanly cut into
the sea. Laura and I saw it from amidships, looking out across the high
stern of the vessel that sank now below the horizon, then lifted into
the sky. Even the chief engineer and the ship's doctor came out to look
at it, and told us to watch for the green sun which would appear the
instant after setting. Later--after dinner, I mean--we danced.
They have put a stout awning over the quarter-deck and strung a lot of
electric globes there so that when the music is going and the
illumination is turned on, the place is gay and pretty and cosey, and
those of us who have not danced for twenty years of more begin to sit up
straighter when the music starts, and presently we forget that all is
vanity and life a sorry mess at best, and look about for a partner, and
there on the wide, lifting, falling quarter-deck caper away the years.
It is not so much wonder, then, that the prospect of land does not
arouse any feverish interest. We are willing to go right on sailing for
a while and not bother about land at all.
[Illustration]
VI
A LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
It was a mistake, however, to be indifferent to Madeira. We are no
longer so. Whatever enthusiasm we lacked beforehand we have acquired
now. Of all fair, jewelled islands of the sea, it is the particular gem.
Not one of us on this ship but has made up his mind to go to Madeira
again some day, and to stay there and live happy ever after; or, if not
during life, to try to exchange a corner of heaven for it when he dies.
We knew nothing about Madeira except what the little prospectus told us,
and the day before arrival we began to look up guide-book information on
the subject. There was not much of this on the ship; I suspect that
there is not much anywhere. Madeira was known to the Phoenicians, of
course, that race of people who knew everything, went everywhere, built
all the first cities, invented all the arts, named everything, and then
perished. I ought to be sorry that they perished, I suppose, but I'm
not. I've heard enough of that tribe on this ship.
The Patriarch is stuffed full of Phoenician statistics, and to touch
any line of historical discussion in his hearing is like tripping over a
cord attached to a spring gun. He is as fatal as an Irishman I once knew
who was perfectly adorable until some question of race came up. Then it
was time to stand from under. According to Malone there was originally
but one race--the Irish. All the early saints were Irish; so was
Abraham; so was Noah; so was Adam; so was--but that is far enough back.
I remember hearing him tell one night how, in a later day, when
Alexander the Great set out to conquer Asia, he first sent emissaries to
make peace with Ireland as a precaution against being attacked in the
rear.
But I am beginning to wander. There is no trace of the Phoenicians, I
believe, on Madeira to-day, and the early history of the island is
mainly mythical. When ancient Mediterranean sailors went exploring a
little into the Atlantic and saw its purple form rise on the horizon
they decided that it must be the mouth of hell, or at all events the
abode of evil creatures, and hastily turned back. One account says that
in the course of time a gentleman named Taxicab--probably the inventor
of the vehicle later known by that name--and his companion were
shipwrecked on Madeira and set up a monument in celebration of the
event. I don't know what became of Taxicab and his friend or the
monument, but about the same time it was discovered again by a
Portuguese named Zargo, who set it afire as a means of clearing the
land of its splendid forests and kept the fires going for seven
years.[1]
Zargo's devastation began about five hundred years ago, and the island
has required all those centuries for recovery. It may be added that he
believed Madeira to be the lost Atlantis, though a point of land thirty
miles long and fifteen miles wide could hardly be more than a splinter
of that vanished continent. More likely Madeira and the fragmentary
islets about it formed that mythical Ultima Thule referred to by
Ulysses, when, according to Tennyson, he said:
"My purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew."
Perhaps Madeira was indeed a home of gods and favored spirits in the
olden days. It would have been a suitable place. When we drew near
enough to see its terraced hills--lofty hills they are, some of them in
the interior rising to a point six thousand feet above the sea--and to
make out the tiny houses nestling like white and tinted shells against
the green, we changed our minds about being willing to sail past without
stopping, and when at last we swung slowly into the Harbor of Funchal we
felt somehow that we had come upon an island enchantment in the middle
of the sea.
For everything was so marvellous in its beauty: the green hills,
terraced almost to the very top; the gorges between, the little fairy
city just where the hills flow into the sea. With glasses one could make
out flowering vines on many of the walls. Even with the naked eye,
somebody presently discovered a great purple mass, part way up the
hillside. The glass showed it to be a house almost covered with
bougainvillea--our first vision of this lavish and splendid flower of
the Mediterranean.
As we drew in and came to anchor, we saw descending upon us a fleet of
small, curious boats, filled with half-naked men. We prepared for the
worst, but they merely wanted us to throw coins over in the liquid azure
which they call water in this country, whereupon their divers would try
to intercept the said coins somewhere between the top and bottom of the
sea. We didn't believe they could do it, which was poor judgment on our
part.
[Illustration: THEY COULD DIVE LIKE SEALS]
If those amphibians did not always get the coins, they generally did.
They could see them perfectly in that amazing water, and they could dive
like seals. Some of the divers were mere children--poor, lean creatures
who stood up in their boats and shouted and implored and swung their
arms in a wild invitation to us to fling our money overboard. They did
not want small money--at least, not very small money--they declined to
dive for pennies. Perhaps they could only distinguish the gleam of the
white metal. Let a nickel or a dime be tossed over and two or three
were after it in a flash, while a vehement outbreak of Portuguese from
all the rest entreated still further largess. It was really a good show,
and being the first of its kind, we enjoyed it.
We had to go ashore in boats, and the water was not smooth. It was not
entirely easy to get into the landing-boats, and it was still less easy
to get out at the stairs which ascended to the stone piers. Every billow
would throw the little boats six or eight feet into the air, and one had
to be pretty careful to step just at the right instant or he would leave
one foot on a high step and the other in the boat, far below. Several of
our best passengers were dismembered in that way.
Once on shore, the enchantment took hold of us again. It was so sunny
and bright and the streets were so attractive--all paved with small
black cobbles, set in the neatest and most careful fashion. Our
conveyances were waiting just at the end of the pier, and they were, I
believe, the most curious conveyances in the world. They were not
carriages or carts or wheeled vehicles of any sort, but sleds--here in a
land of eternal summer--sleds with enclosed tops, and drawn by oxen.
Their drivers were grave, whiskered men who motioned us to get in; after
which we started, and they began greasing the runners as we went along.
They did this by putting a grease-soaked rag in front of a runner now
and then and driving over it.
I don't think an American would do it that way. He would take a barrel
of soft soap and a broom and lubricate the whole street. Their way is
neater, and about as effective, I suppose; besides, when they have been
doing it another three hundred years or so, they will have some grease
on these streets, too. Already one may see indications of it here and
there.
Our course was uphill, and we ascended along a panorama of sunny life
and tinted flower-hung walls to the outskirts of that neatest and most
charming of cities--continuously expressing our delight in the general
attractiveness of everything: the wonderfully laid streets; the really
beautiful sidewalks of very tiny vari-colored cobbles all set in perfect
mosaic patterns; the glow and bloom of summer everywhere. We admired
even the persistent little beggars who ran along on both sides of the
sleds, throwing camellias into our laps, crying out, "Penny! Penny!"
their one English word--hopping, dancing, beseeching, and refusing to be
comforted.
We gave to the first of these tormentors, but it was not a good way to
get rid of them. It was like putting out molasses to satisfy a few
flies. A dozen more were around us, going on in a most disturbing
manner. Our driver finally dispersed them by making some terrific
motions with his whip-handle.
We were at the outskirts at last, but only at the beginning of the real
climb. A funicular railway takes one up farther, and presently we are
ascending straight to Paradise, it seemed to us, by a way that led
through a perfect wilderness of beauty--flower, foliage, and waving
green, with tiny stucco houses set in tangled gardens and slopes of
cane--while below and beyond lay the city and the harbor and our ship at
anchor on the violet sea.
Would we be so enchanted with the magic of this Happy Isle if it were
not our first landing after a long winter voyage, which if not stormy
was at all events not entirely smooth? Perhaps not, yet I think there
are certain essentials of beauty and charm that are fundamental. The
things we dream of and do not believe exist; the things that an artist
will paint now and then when he forgets that the world is just a place
to live and toil and die in, and not really to be happy in at all. But
those things are all here in Madeira, and when we learned that nobody
ever gets sick here, and that everybody gets well of everything he
happens to have when he comes, we said: "Never mind going on; send the
ship home, or sink it; we will abide here and roam no more."
At the end of the funicular there was still more hill to climb, and one
could either do it afoot or be carried up in a hammock. Most of us young
people did it afoot, allowing enfeebled men of eighteen and twenty the
comfort of the hammocks. As they passed us we commented on their luxury,
and made it otherwise interesting for them. It was pleasant enough
walking and there was a good deal to see. The foliage was interesting,
ranging as it did from the palm of the tropics to the pine of the
northern forests. You can raise anything in Madeira, except money--there
is not much of that, and things are cheap accordingly. No doubt it is
the same in heaven, but I am getting ahead of my story.
We lunched at the top, in a hotel that was once a convent and still has
iron-barred windows, but before luncheon we walked out for the view to a
little platform which seems when you step out on it to be hanging in the
air, so that you involuntarily hesitate and reach for something firm.
All the distance you have climbed in the ox-sleds, by the funicular, and
afoot drops away perpendicularly at your feet, and you are looking down,
straight down, and still down, to what seem fairy tree-tops and a
wonderful picture valley through which a tumbling ribbon of water goes
foaming to the sea. It is the most sudden and dramatic bit of scenery I
know.
We had delicious strawberries at our luncheon--strawberries that
required no sugar--and a good many other kinds of fruit--some of which
we could identify and some of which the Reprobates discussed in their
usual unrestrained fashion, calling one another names that were at once
descriptive and suited to the subject in hand. There were pomegranates
and guavas and comquats and loquats; also there was Madeira wine, of
course, and hereafter I am going to know something about native wines in
the lands we visit before I begin business--that is, wholesale business.
But never mind--let it go; it is a good deal like sherry, only it tastes
better, and the Reprobates said--but as I mentioned before, let it
go--it really does not matter now.
[Illustration: TWO MEN TAKE YOU IN HAND AND AWAY YOU GO]
We descended that long, paved, greased hill in toboggans that are nice,
comfortable baskets on runners. They hold two and three, according to
size, and you get in and two men take you in hand, and away you go. You
go, too. A distance of two miles has been made in three minutes in those
things. I don't think we went as fast as that, but it was plenty fast
enough for the wild delight of it, and if I had money enough and time
enough I would go there and slide and slide away the eternal summer
days.
It was a swift panorama of flower and sunlit wall and distant sea--the
soft air rushing by. Now and then we would whirl past a carrier--a
brown, bent man with one of those great sleds on his shoulders, toiling
with it up the long, steep hill. They were marvellously picturesque,
those carriers, but I wish they wouldn't do it. It takes some of the joy
out of the slide to feel that somebody is going to carry your toboggan
up the hill on his back.
We shot out on the level at last, and started on a little tour of the
town. Laura and I wandered away alone, and stopped at little shops, and
tried to transact business, and finally bought a clay water-jug for a
hundred and twenty reis, which is to say sixpence, which is to say
twelve cents. Money in Madeira is calculated in reis, just as it is in
the Azores, and the sound of the word suddenly recalled the visit of the
_Quaker City_ "Pilgrims" to those islands, and the memory of Blucher's
disastrous dinner-party.
But they will take anything that looks like money in Madeira, rather
than miss a trade, and when a person who has been accustomed to
calculating dollars and cents is suddenly confronted with problems of
reis and pence and shillings and half-crowns and francs, he goes to
pieces on his money tables and wonders why a universal currency would
not be a good thing.
All the streets in Madeira have that dainty cobble paving, and all the
sidewalks are laid in the exquisite mosaic which makes it a joy to
follow them. The keynote of the island is invitation. Even a jail we saw
is of a sort to make crime attractive. I hasten to add that we examined
only the outside.
We were adopted by a guide presently--a boy whose only English was the
statement that he could speak it--and were directed quietly but firmly
toward places where things are sold. We tried to impress upon him in
such languages as we could think of that we did not want to buy
anything, and that we did not care much for a guide, anyway. We said we
wanted to see bougainvillea--a lot of bougainvillea, in a great mass
together, as we had seen it from the ship. He nodded excitedly and led
us away, but it was only to a place where they sold embroideries which
we did not care for, though they were cheap enough, dear knows, as
everything is cheap here--everything native at least.
When our guide grasped the fact at last that we did not want to do any
buying, he became sad, weakened gradually, dropped behind, accepted a
penny, and turned us over to another guide of the same sort. We wandered
about Funchal in that way until it was time to embark, adopted by one
guide after another, and abandoned to our fate when they realized that
we were not worth anything in the way of commissions from the merchants
and very little in any form. We did get a guide at last who knew where
the bougainvillea house was, but it was too late then to go to it. It
did not matter; there were flowers enough everywhere and bougainvillea
on many walls.
The place did not lose its charm with close acquaintance. It seemed
entirely unspoiled. We saw no suggestion of modern architecture or
European innovation--no blot anywhere, except a single motor-car--the
only one, I believe, in Funchal. There is but one fly in the ointment of
Madeira comfort--the beggars. They begin to beg before they can walk,
and they call, "Penny! Penny!" before they can lisp the sacred name of
"Mamma." However, one good thing has come of our experience with them.
They have prepared us for beggars elsewhere. We are hardened, now--at
least, we think we are. The savor of pity has gone out of us.
But I was speaking of architecture. Without knowing anything on the
subject, I should say that the architecture of Madeira is a mixture of
Spanish and Moorish, like that of Mexico. Only it is better than
anything in Mexico. From the ship, the stucco, tile-roofed city is
flawless; and as we steam away, and night comes down and lights break
out and become a jewelled necklace along the water's edge, our one
regret is that we are leaving it all behind.
Good-bye to Madeira--a gentle place, a lovely place--a place to live and
die in.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] By referring again to the German guide-book I find that the first
gentleman's name was not Taxicab, but as that is nearer to what it looks
like than anything that can be made out of the real name I will let it
stand.
[Illustration: DID A SORT OF FANDAROLE]
VII
A DAY TO OURSELVES
We had another full day at sea, after Madeira--a day of reflection and
reminiscence, for each of us had some special joy to recall. Perhaps
that of the Diplomat was as picturesque as any. He told it to me
privately, but a thing like that should not be allowed to remain
concealed forever; besides, the young lady is in darkest Germany now and
does not know English, anyway. That last-named fact was responsible for
the incident.
The Diplomat had just landed at the bottom of the slide, he said, when
two of our party--Americans--came along with a bright-faced and quite
stylish-looking German girl who was not having a very good time because
they knew no German and she no English. It was clearly a case for the
Diplomat, who is an unattached person, full of the joy of travel and
familiar with all languages, living and dead.
He had not been presented to the young German person on the ship, but he
had seen her now and again in company with an older, rather
plain-looking woman, very likely her maid. No doubt the young woman was
a countess, or a baroness, or at all events a person of station and
importance. Politely enough he proffered his services as escort, was
accepted, and the two set out gayly to enjoy the halcyon Madeira
afternoon.
She was a most sociable companion, the Diplomat said, ready for anything
that resembled a good time. They visited places of interest; they
dropped into little shops; he bought flowers for her; they had
refreshments here and there--dainty dishes and pleasant Madeira
wines--keeping up, meantime, their merry German clatter. They became
quite gay, in fact, and whenever they met any of the ship party, which
they did frequently enough, the Diplomat, as he confessed to me, became
rather vain and showy--set his hat on one side and did a sort of
fandarole, accompanying his step with operatic German airs. At such
moments she even took his hand and entered into the spirit of the
occasion.
[Illustration: THEN IT DAWNED UPON THE DIPLOMAT]
Altogether it was a charming experience, and they were both sorry when
it was time to return to the ship. Arriving there they were met by the
older, plain-looking woman, who greeted his companion with words that
were pleasant enough, gentle enough, but which partook of the nature of
a command. Then it dawned upon the Diplomat; it was not the older,
plain-looking woman who was the maid!
"I would have done it just the same," he explained to me in a dark
corner of the deck, after dinner, "just the same, of course, being a
gentleman, only under the circumstances I might have cut out the
cakewalk and the music."
A ship is a curious place altogether; a place of narrow limits and
close contact, yet full of subterranean depths from which surprises may
develop at any moment. The Chief Engineer, to whom I sit next at meals,
often quotes meditatively,
"A ship it is a funny thing,
It sails upon the sea--"
The Chief does not recall the rest of the stanza, but we all admit the
truth of what he does remember. Ship life on the whole is not like other
life; ship characteristics do not altogether resemble those on land.
Take the "Porpoise," for instance. I have no doubt that the Porpoise on
land is a most excellent and industrious business man, more or less
absorbed in the daily round of his ventures--a happy-hearted contented
Hebrew person, fairly quiet (it doesn't seem possible, but I am willing
to believe it), on the whole a good citizen, satisfied if his name
appears now and then in the local paper, when he gets in some new line
of goods or makes an improvement on his home.
But on shipboard the Porpoise is just--a porpoise. He is fat, as his
name implies, and describes revolutions of the ship, blowing constantly.
At no time of day and in no part of the ship will you be safe from the
Porpoise. He is from an interior town--an unimportant town, by its
census and location, but it has become important on this vessel.
He has instructed us upon other subjects, too. Nothing is too
complicated, or too deep, or too abstruse for the Porpoise. He will
attack any question at sight, and he will puff and spout and describe
circles and wallow in his oratory, and follow his audience about until
he has swept the deck clean. Yet we love that Porpoise, in spite of
everything. He is so happy and harmless and gentle. It is only because
he is on a ship that he is a bore.
Also, we love the "Mill." The Mill is a woman--a good woman--one of the
kindliest souls on earth, I suspect, and her mouth is her warrant for
her name. It goes all the time, but it does not deal with important
things. Indeed, nothing is too unimportant for her hopper, and she
grinds exceeding small. Just now, for an hour or so, she has been
explaining that she did not sleep very well last night, and minutely
cataloguing the reasons why. She will keep it up for another hour, and
then if somebody hasn't dropped her overboard she will dig up something
else of equal value and go right on, refreshed and rejoicing in the
consciousness of well-doing.
The Mill would not act this way at home--she would not have time. It is
only because she is on a ship where everybody is idle and irresponsible
and "different," and likely to be peculiar. As Laura, age fourteen, said
to me to-day--paraphrasing the words of the old Quaker spinster to her
sister, "I think everybody on this ship is peculiar except thee and me,
and sometimes I think _thee_ is a little peculiar." That expresses the
situation, and on the whole we enjoy it. We are like the little boy
whose reputation for being a strange child did not interfere with his
happiness. "Gee, ain't it great to be crazy!" was his favorite remark,
and whatever we may be on this ship, we are content with the conditions,
and would not change them, even if we could.
VIII
OUT OF THE SUNRISE
I have seen the shores of Africa and Spain! The bath steward came very
early, this morning--earlier than usual. He had his reasons, but I had
forgotten and was sleepy, so I said "No," and tried to doze again. Then
all at once from the deck there arose a swell of music--rich, triumphant
music--an orchestration of "Holy, Holy, Holy"--such a strain as one
might expect to hear if the eternal gates should swing ajar. I
remembered, then; it was Sunday morning--but there was something more.
Land! The land that lies on the other side of the ocean!
In a moment I was at my port-hole, which is on the starboard side. We
had changed our course and were bearing more to the north. Directly in
front of me the sun was rising. The east was a mass of glowing
outlines--golden clouds and hill-tops mingled. It was the Orient--that
is what it was--the Far East; the sun rising over Africa! Something got
hold of me then--I hardly know what. Certainly I was not unhappy; but
then it was all so sudden and spectacular, and I had waited for it so
long.
I do not remember how I got dressed; only for a moment at a time could I
drag myself away from that port-hole. The sun rose higher--the outlines
of Morocco became more distinct, but they did not lose their wonder of
color--their glory of purple and gold. I realized now that the
prospectuses had not exaggerated the splendor of the East, even on their
gorgeous covers--that they could not do so if they tried. By the time I
was on deck we were running close enough to the lofty shores to make out
villages here and there and hill-top towers--the habitation and the
watch-towers of the Moors. How eagerly and minutely one scanned these
with the glass to distinguish the first sign of Oriental life--to get a
glimpse of the reality of what had so long been but a romance and a
dream. It was those people who had conquered Spain and built the
Alhambra.
What was going on inside those curious flat-topped houses and those
towers? Marvellous matters, no doubt, that had to do with nargileh and
magic and scimiters and flying carpets and scarcely imperceptible nods
to the executioner who always hovered among the draperies in the
background. The Reprobates appeared and declared there was no romance
anywhere in sight and never had been in that direction; that Morocco was
just a place of wretched government and miserable people whose chief
industries were laziness and crime. There are moments when I would be
willing for this ship to sink to properly punish the Reprobates.
The Diplomat was better. He said there was as much romance and magic
over there as ever, and more executioners; and the Diplomat knows. We
would pass Ceuta, the African Pillar of Hercules, before long, he told
us. The other pillar was the Rock of Gibraltar, which lay still farther
ahead.
We went over to the other side of the ship presently, for we were
overlooking the Bay of Trafalgar, where a little more than a hundred
years ago Horatio Nelson died, after convincing the combined navies of
France and Spain that it required something besides numbers to win a
victory. Nelson went into that fight with thirty-two vessels, little and
big, against forty of the combined fleets. He hoisted the signal,
"England expects every man to do his duty," and every man did it. One
half of the combined fleets struck their colors, and the rest made off,
or sank, and with them went Napoleon Bonaparte's scheme for invading
England.
We looked out on the placid water, laughing in the Sunday morning
sunlight, and tried to imagine those vanished fleets--stately ships of
the line with their banks of guns; smart frigates and rakish
cutters--all that splendid concourse of black hull and towering canvas,
and then the boom and the flash of guns--the conflict and the glory of
that morning so long ago. This much was real, and it was romance; not
even the Reprobates could brush away the bloom.
The captain came by and pointed ahead to Tarifa, where the Barbary
pirates a long time ago levied tribute on the merchants and added the
word "tariff" to the dictionary. Their old castle has fallen into ruin,
but the old industry still thrives, under the same name. Then we went
back to starboard again for a look at Tangier, where, alas, we were not
to land, because Algiers had been provided for us instead.
[Illustration: BUT NOW GIBRALTAR, THE CROUCHING LION OF TRAFALGAR, HAD
RISEN FROM THE SEA]
But now Gibraltar, the crouching lion of Trafalgar, had risen from the
sea. The English call it "The Rock," and that is just what it looks
like--a big bowlder shaped like a sleeping lion--its head toward Spain,
its tail toward Africa. I think most persons have an idea that the Rock
lies lengthwise, east and west--I know I thought so. Instead it lies
north and south, and is really a stone finger pointed by Spain toward
the African coast. It is Great Britain's pride--it has cost enough for
her to be proud of it--and is her chief stronghold.
About it are gathered her warships of to-day--dark, low-browed fighters
like our own--any one of them able to send to the bottom a whole fleet
like Nelson's and the combined fleets besides. They look quiet enough,
ugly enough, and drowsy enough, now. So does Gibraltar, but it is just
as well, perhaps, not to twist the Lion's tail. We had no intention of
doing so, and I don't see why they were so afraid of us. They wouldn't
let us visit their shooting-galleries--the galleries where they keep
their big guns, I mean; they wouldn't let us climb the Rock on the
outside; they wouldn't even let us visit an old Moorish castle which
stands about half-way up. Perhaps they thought we would spike their
guns, or steal the castle, or blow up the Rock with infernal machines.
They did let us take carriages and drive along the main streets of the
city, through a park or two and out to Europa Point, I think that was
the place. We were interested, but not enthusiastic. After Madeira, one
does not go mad over the beauties of Gibraltar. The vehicles were funny
little affairs--Spanish, I suppose; the driver spoke the English of
Gibraltar--an English which nobody outside of Gibraltar, and only a few
people there, can understand; the road was good; the flowers--bluebells,
yellow daisies, dandelions and heliotrope--all wild--were profuse and
lavishly in bloom everywhere along the way. Had we come direct to
Gibraltar, we should have raved over these things like enough, and we
did rave a little, but it was a sort of placid ecstasy. Military
hospitals and barracks and officers' quarters are not the kind of
scenery to excite this crowd.
It was different, though, when we got to Europa Point. There, on one
side rose the great Rock abruptly from the sea, while before us
stretched the Mediterranean, all blue and emerald and iridescent, like
a great fire-opal in the sun. It was our first glimpse of the water
along whose shores began the history and the religions of more than half
the world. "The grand object of all travel is to see the shores of the
Mediterranean," said Dr. Johnson, and there were some of us who not
until that moment, I think, fully grasped the fact that this object,
this dream of a lifetime, was about to be accomplished.
The Patriarch forgot the Phoenicians for a little and began to talk
about Athens and of Mars Hill from which St. Paul had preached, though
he added presently that it was quite certain St. Paul's grandfather had
been a Phoenician; the Diplomat quoted something about his soul being
"far away sailing on the Vesuvian Bay"; the Porpoise began to meditate
audibly how far it was in a straight line to Jerusalem; the Mill ground
a quiet little grist about flannels she expected to wear in Egypt; even
the Reprobates were subdued and thoughtful in the face of this watery
theatre that had held the drama of the ancient world.
We drove back to the town, separated, and wandered about where fancy led
us. Laura and I had a little business with the American consul, who is
an example of what an American consul ought to be: a gentleman who is a
consul by profession and not by party favor, being the third Sprague in
line who has held the post. Through him we met a most interesting
person, one who brought us in direct contact, as it were, with that old
first party of Pilgrims to make the Oriental cruise. Michael Benunes was
his name, guide and courier to Mark Twain and his party, forty-two years
ago.
Benunes must have been a handsome creature in those days; he is a
handsome creature still--tall, finely featured, with flowing black
hair--carrying his sixty-five years as lightly as wind-flowers--gay,
voluble, enthusiastic--ready for the future, glorying in the past. He
took us to a coffee-house and entertained us, and held us enthralled for
an hour or more with his tide of eloquence and information. He told us
of the trip he had made through Spain with the "Innocents"; of many
other trips in lands near and far. He told us of the things in Gibraltar
we had not seen--of the galleries and the monkey-pit; also, of the
wonderful monkeys themselves who inhabit the Rock and are intelligent
almost beyond belief--who refrain from speaking English only because
they are afraid of having red coats and caps put on them and being made
into soldiers.
Gibraltar was once a part of Africa, according to tradition, and the
monkeys remained on the Rock when the separation took place. But guides
know that a subterranean passage from the bottomless monkey-pit connects
the Rock with Africa to this day; also that the monkeys travel back and
forth through it and keep posted on warfare and new inventions, in
preparation for a time when they shall be ready to regain their lost
empire, and that sometimes at dusk, if one lies hidden and remains very
quiet, he may overhear them discuss these things, as in the failing
twilight they "walk together, holding each other's tails."
[Illustration: WE COULD HAVE LISTENED ALL NIGHT TO BENUNES]
We could have listened all night to Benunes, for he made the old time
and still older traditions real to us. And perhaps Benunes would have
talked all night, for he declared--and we believed him--that he could
talk for five hours without a break. Naturally I expected to pay the
score in the coffee-house and to make some special acknowledgment to
Benunes for his time. Not at all; he called the waiter with a flourish,
threw down more than enough money and told him to keep the change,
regretting volubly that we could not partake further of his hospitality.
We should have the freedom of the city--of everything--he said, when we
came again. Ah me! I suspect there is only one Benunes, and that he
belongs to a time which will soon vanish away.
We went through the town--almost a closed town, because it was Sunday,
and not an inviting town, I think, at best. Here and there were narrow
streets that wound up or down, yet were only mildly seductive. But it is
a cosmopolitan town--the most cosmopolitan town on earth, perhaps. Every
kind of money is in use there--every language is spoken.
"Picture postals twelve for a quarter!" was the American cry that
greeted us at every turn. If we had been English it would have been
"twelve for a shilling," or if German "_zwoelf fuer ein Mark_," no doubt.
They do not mistake nationalities in Gibraltar--they have all kinds to
study from. Moors we saw--black, barelegged, and gayly attired--a taste
of the Orient we were about to enter--and if there were any
nationalities we did not see in this motley-thronged Mediterranean
gateway I do not recall them now. We bought a few postal cards, and two
fans with bull-fights on them, but unlike the _Quaker City_ "Pilgrims"
we bought no gloves.
I did look at certain stylish young creatures who passed now and then,
and wondered if one of them might not be the bewitching saleslady who
had sold those gloves. And then I remembered: she would not be young and
bewitching any more; she would be carrying the burden and the record of
many years. Unlike the first "Pilgrims," too, we did not hear the story
of the "Queen's Chair." That was worn out, at last, and exists to-day
only in the guide-books. We drove over to Spanish Town by and by, but it
was still less inviting over there, so we drove back, passed out through
the great gates which close every evening at sunset, and waited at the
pier for the little tender, for it was near evening and we were through
with Gibraltar--ready for the comfort of the ship.
It is a curious place--a place of a day's interest for the traveller--of
enormous interest to the military world. For two hundred years it has
been maintained with English blood and treasure, until it has become the
most costly jewel of that lavish kingdom. There are those
to-day--Englishmen--who say it is not worth the price--that it is no
longer worth any price--and they advocate returning it to Spain. No army
could take it, and no army wants to take it--nothing could be gained by
taking it any more. But it is one of England's precious traditions, and
it will take another two hundred years of vast maintenance before
England will let that tradition go.
There were papers on the tender, London and Paris journals, but the only
American news was that Congress had been advised against tinkering with
the tariff. That did not interest us. Had we not been face to face with
the headquarters of tariff that very morning, and heard the story of how
that noble industry was born? This later item was mere detail.
Back on the ship, looking at the lion couchant while the twilight falls
and the lights come out along its base. There is no harshness now. The
lion's skin has become velvet--it is a veritable lion asleep among
fireflies. We lift anchor and steam slowly into the Mediterranean. The
lion loses its form, becomes a dark wedge, the thin edge toward Spain.
Night deepens as we creep farther around; the wedge shortens, contracts
to a cone, a pyramid--the level sea changes to a desert. The feeling
somehow grows that Africa has reclaimed its own--the Lion of England has
become a pyramid of the sands.
IX
EARLY MEDITERRANEAN EXPERIENCES
Our first day in the Mediterranean was without a flaw. It was a quiet,
sunlit day--just pleasantly warm--the ship steady as a rock on that
luminous, level sea. No wonder the ancients did not want to leave these
placid tides and venture out upon the dark tossing Atlantic which they
could see foaming just beyond the Pillars of Hercules. No wonder they
peopled those hungry wastes with monsters and evil spirits. Here, on
this tranquil sea, there were no unfamiliar dangers. The summer shores
that shut them in held all their world--a golden world of romance
wherein gods mingled with the affairs of men; where fauns and hamadryads
flitted through the groves; where nereids and tritons sported along the
waves.
We have all day and night to get to Algiers--now less than three hundred
miles away--so we are just loafing along making wide circles--"to test
the compass," one of the officers said a while ago. I did not know they
had to test compasses, and I'm rather doubtful about the matter, still.
I suspect that officer is enjoying himself quietly at our expense. I
suspect it, because he is the same officer who told the Credulous One
the other day when the ship was rolling heavily, that the jarring,
beating sound we heard every now and then was made by the ship running
over whales. The noise was really made by the screw lifting out of the
water, and pounding the surface with its blades, but the Credulous One,
who is a trusting soul--a stout lady of middle age and gentle
spirit--believed the whale story and repeated it around the ship. She
said how many whales there must be down here, and pitied them whenever
she heard that cruel sound.
That officer came along again, a moment ago, and told us that the
mountains nearest are called the Sierra de Gata, which sounds true.
Somewhere beyond them lies Grenada and the Alhambra, and there, too, is
the old, old city of Cordova, capital of the Moorish kings, and for
three hundred years one of the greatest centres of commerce in the
world. But these things are only history. What we care for on a day like
this is invention--romance--and remembering that somewhere beyond that
snowy rim Don Quixote and Sancho wandered through the fields of fancy
and the woods of dream makes us wish that we might anchor along those
shores and follow that vagrant quest.
I drifted into the smoking-room and mentioned these things to the
Reprobates, but they did not seem interested. They had the place all to
themselves and the Doctor was dozing in one corner--between naps
administering philosophy to the Colonel and the Apostle, who were
engaged in their everlasting game of piquet. He roused up when I came in
to deal out a few comforting remarks.
"What do they care for scenery, or romance," he said, "or anything else
except to gamble all day? All you've got to do is to look at them to get
an inventory of their characters. Just look at the Colonel for
instance; did you ever see a better picture of Captain Kidd? Made his
money out of publishing the Bible without reading it and thinks he must
go to the Holy Land now to square himself. And the Apostle, there--look
at him! Look at his shape--why, he's likely to blow up, any time. Some
people think these are patients of mine. Nice advertisement, a pair like
that!"
I thought the Doctor a trifle hard on his fellow-Reprobates. I thought
the Colonel rather handsome, and I had seen him studying his guide-book
more than once. As for the Apostle, I said that I never really felt that
he was about to blow up; that appearances were often deceitful and very
likely there was no immediate danger.
They were not inclined to be sociable--the Colonel and the Apostle. They
merely intimated that we might go away, preferably to a place not down
on the ship's itinerary, and kept on with their eternal game.
It is curious, the fascination of that game, piquet--still more curious
how anybody can ever learn to play it. In fact nobody ever does learn
it. There are no rules--no discoverable rules. It is purely an
inspirational game, if one may judge from this exhibition of it. After
the cards are dealt out, the Colonel picks up his hand, jerks his hat a
little lower over his eyes, skins through his assortment, and says
"Huh!" At the same time the Apostle puts on his holiest look--chin up,
eye drooped, bland and child-like--examines his collection, and says,
"Goddlemighty!"
Then they play--that is, they go through the motions. The Colonel puts
down a handful of cards and says "Eight." The Apostle never looks at
them, but puts down a bigger handful of his own and says "Eleven." Then
the Colonel puts down another lot and says "Fourteen." Then the Apostle
lays down the balance of his stock and the Colonel says, "Hell, Joe,"
and they set down some figures. When they are through, the Colonel owes
the Apostle seven dollars.
Yes, it is a curious game, and would make the Colonel a pauper in time,
if nature did not provide other means of adjustment. After the Apostle
has his winnings comfortably put away and settled into place, the
Colonel takes out a new five-dollar gold piece, regards it thoughtfully,
turns it over, reads the date, and comments on its beauty. Then suddenly
he slaps it down on the table under his hand.
"Match you, Joe," he says, "match you for five!"
But the Apostle is wary. He smiles benignly while he turns his face from
temptation.
"No you don't," he says, "never again."
The Colonel slaps the coin down again, quite smartly.
"Just once, Joe," he wheedles; "just once, for luck!"
The Apostle strokes his chubby, child-like countenance with the tips of
his fingers, still looking away--his eyes turned heavenward.
"I won't do it, I tell you. No, now go on away. I told you yesterday I
wouldn't match you again--ever."
"Just once, Joe--just this one time."
"I won't do it."
The Apostle's attitude is still resolute, but there is a note of
weakening in his voice and his hand is working almost imperceptibly
toward his pocket.
"Just once more, Joe, just for five dollars--one turn."
The Apostle's hand is in his pocket.
"Now, I tell you," he says, "I'll match you this one time, and never
again."
"All right, Joe, just this one time, for luck; come on, now."
The coins go down together, and when they are uncovered the Colonel
takes both, always. Then the Apostle jerks up his cap, jams it on, and
starts for the deck.
"Hold on, Joe; just once more--just for luck."
"You go to hell, will you?"
This is the programme daily with but slight variation. Sometimes the
Apostle wins less than seven dollars--sometimes he loses more than five;
but he always does win at piquet and he always does lose at matching.
Thus do the unseen forces preserve the balance of exchange.
We crossed over and came in sight of the mountains of Algeria during the
afternoon, and all the rest of this halcyon day we skirted the African
shore, while Laura and I and two other juveniles kept a game of
shuffleboard going on the after deck. To-night there is to be another
grand dinner and dance, in honor of Washington's Birthday. We shall
awake to-morrow in the harbor of Algiers.
X
THE DIVERTING STORY OF ALGIERS
This is a voyage of happy mornings. It was morning--just sunrise--when
we met the American fleet homeward bound; it was morning when we caught
the first glimpse of Madeira and steamed into the harbor of Funchal; the
shores of Morocco--our first glimpse of the Orient--came out of the
sunrise, and it was just sunrise this morning when I looked out of my
port-hole on the blue harbor and terraced architecture of Algiers. And
the harbor of Algiers _is_ blue, and the terraced architecture is white,
or creamy, and behind it are the hills of vivid green. And there are
palms and cypress-trees, and bougainvillea and other climbing vines.
Viewed from the ship it is a picture city, and framed in the port-hole
it became a landscape miniature of wondrous radiance and vivid hues.
One of our passengers, a happy-hearted, elderly Hebrew soul, came along
the promenade just outside my state-room and surveyed the vision through
his glass. Presently he was joined by his comfortable, good-natured
wife.
"Vat you get me up so early for, Sol?" she said.
He handed her his glass, his whole face alive with joy of the
moment--fairly radiant it was.
"I yust couldn't help it!" he said. "Dot sunrising and dot harbor and
dot city all make such a beautiful sight."
A beautiful sight it was, and it had the added charm of being our first
near approach to the Orient. For Algiers is still the Orient, though it
has been a French colony for nearly a hundred years. The Orient and the
Occident have met here, and the Occident has conquered, but the Orient
is the Orient still, and will be so long as a vestige of it remains.
The story of Algiers, like that of every Mediterranean country, has been
a motley one, and bloody enough, of course. The Romans held it for
nearly five hundred years; the Vandals followed them, and these in turn
were ousted by the Arabs, about the year 700 A.D. Blood flowed during
each of these changes, and betweentimes. There was always blood--rivers
of it--lakes of it--this harbor has been red with it time and again.
It did not stop flowing with the Arabian conquest--not by any means.
Those Arabs were barbarians and robbers--Bedouins on land and pirates on
the sea. They were the friends of no nation or people, and when business
was dull outside, they would break out among themselves and indulge in
pillage and slaughter at home for mere pastime. About the time Columbus
was discovering America they were joined by the Moors and Jews who were
being driven out of Spain and who decided to take up piracy as a regular
business.
Piratic industry, combined with slavery, flourished for a matter of four
centuries after that; then Commodore Decatur with a handful of little
vessels met the Algerian fleet off Carthagena on the 20th of June,
1815. Decatur was a good hand with pirates. He went to work on that
fleet and when he got through there wasn't enough of it left to capture
a banana-boat. Then he appeared before Algiers and sent a note to the
Dey demanding the immediate release of all Americans in slavery. The Dey
replied that as a mere matter of form he hoped the American commander
would agree to sending a small annual tribute of powder.
"If you take the powder you must take the balls with it," was Decatur's
reply, and thus the young American republic, then only about thirty
years old, was first to break down the monstrous institutions of piracy
and enslavement which for more than a thousand years had furnished
Algerian revenues.
One Hussein (history does not mention his other name, but it was
probably Ali Ben) was the last Dey of Algiers, and his memory is not a
credit to his country's story. He was cruel and insolent; also, careless
in his statements.
Piracy under A. B. Hussein flourished with a good deal of its old vigor,
though I believe he was rather careful about plundering American
vessels. Hussein was also a usurer and the principal creditor of some
Jewish merchants who had a claim against France. The claim was in
litigation, and Hussein, becoming impatient, demanded payment from the
French king. As France had been the principal sufferer from Hussein's
pirates, it was not likely that the king would notice this demand. Soon
after, in the Dey's palace, the Kasba, at a court function the Dey asked
of the French consul why his master had remained silent.
"The King of France does not correspond with the Dey of Algiers," was
the haughty reply, whereupon Hussein struck the consul on the cheek with
his fan, and said a lot of unpleasant things of both king and consul.
That was the downfall of Algiers. A blockade was established by the
French, and three years later the French army of invasion marched in.
Fifteen hundred guns, seventeen ships of war, and fifty million francs
fell into the hands of France, as spoil of war. Algiers was no longer
the terror of the seas. Over six hundred thousand Christian people had
suffered the horrors of Algerian bondage, but with that July day, 1830,
came the end of this barbarism, since which time Algiers has acquired a
new habit--the habit of jumping at the crack of the French whip.
I may say here in passing that we were to hear a good deal of that
incident of the Dey, the French consul, and the fan. It was in the
guide-books in various forms, and as soon as I got dressed and on deck
one of our conductors--himself a former resident of Algiers--approached
me with:
[Illustration: "THAT IS THE KASBA"]
"Do you see that tower up there on the hill-top? That is the Kasba. It
was in that tower that Hussein, the last Dey of Algiers, struck the
French consul three times on the cheek with his fan--an act which led to
the conquest of Algiers by France."
I looked at the tower with greatly renewed interest, and brought it up
close to me with my glass. Then he pointed out other features of the
city, fair and beautiful in the light of morning: the mosque; the
governor's palace; the Arab quarter; the villas of wealthy Algerines. He
drifted away, then, and the Diplomat approached. He also had been in
Algiers once before. He said:
"Do you see that tower there on the hill-top? That is the Kasba. It was
in that tower that Hussein, the last Dey of Algiers, struck the French
consul three times on the cheek with his fan--an act which led to the
conquest of Algiers by France."
He went away, and I looked over the ship's side at the piratical-looking
boatmen who were gathering to the attack. They were a picturesque
lot--their costumes purely Oriental--their bare feet encased in shoes
right out of the _Arabian Nights_ pictures. I was just turning to remark
these things to one of the Reprobates, the Colonel, when he said:
"Do you see that tower up there on the hill-top?"
"Colonel," I said, "you've been reading your guide-book, and I saw you
the other day with a book called _Innocents Abroad_."
He looked a little dazed.
"Well," he said, "what of it?"
"Nothing; only that tower seems to be another 'Queen's Chair.' I've been
to it several times in the guide-book myself, and I've already had it
twice served up by hand. Let's don't talk about it any more, until we've
been ashore and had a look at it."
[Illustration: ONE DOES NOT HURRY THE ORIENT--ONE WAITS ON IT]
XI
WE ENTER THE ORIENT
We went ashore, in boats to the dock, then we stepped over some things,
and under some things and walked through the custom-house (they don't
seem to bother us at these places) and there were our carriages (very
grand carriages--quite different from the little cramped jiggle-wagons
of Gibraltar) all drawn up and waiting. And forthwith we found ourselves
in the midst of the Orient and the Occident--a busy, multitudinous life,
pressing about us, crowding up to our carriages to sell us postal cards
and gaudy trinkets, babbling away in mongrel French and other motley and
confused tongues.
What a grand exhibition it was to us who had come up out of the Western
Ocean, only half believing that such scenes as this--throngs of
sun-baked people in fantastic dress--could still exist anywhere in the
world! We were willing to sit there and look at them, and I kept my
camera going feverishly, being filled with a sort of fear, I suppose,
that there were no other such pictures on earth and I must catch them
now or never.
We were willing to linger, but not too long. We got our first lesson in
Oriental deliberation right there. Guides had been arranged for and we
must wait for them before we could start the procession. They did not
come promptly. Nothing comes promptly in the Orient. _One does not hurry
the Orient--one waits on it._ That is a maxim I struck out on the anvil,
white-hot, that first hour in Algiers, and I am satisfied it is not
subject to change. The sun poured down on us; the turbaned, burnoused,
barefooted selling-men rallied more vociferously; the Reprobates
invented new forms of profanity to fit Eastern conditions, and still the
guides did not come.
We watched some workmen storing grain in warehouses built under the fine
esplanade that flanks the water-front, and the picture they made
consoled us for a time. They were Arabs of one tribe or another and they
wore a motley dress. All had some kind of what seemed cumbersome
head-gear--a turban or a folded shawl, or perhaps an old gunny-sack made
into a sort of hood with a long cape that draped down behind. A few of
them had on thick European coats over their other paraphernalia.
We wondered why they should dress in this voluminous fashion in such a
climate, and then we decided that the wisdom of the East had prompted
the protection of that head-gear and general assortment of wardrobe
against the blazing sun. Our guides came drifting in by and by, wholly
unexcited and only dreamily interested in our presence, and the
procession moved. Then we ascended to the streets above--beautiful
streets, and if it were not for the Oriental costumes and faces
everywhere we might have been in France.
French soldiers were discoverable all about; French groups were chatting
and drinking coffee and other beverages at open-air cafes; fine French
equipages rolled by with ladies and gentlemen in fashionable French
dress. Being carnival-time, the streets were decorated with banners and
festoons in the French colors. But for the intermixture of fezzes and
turbans and the long-flowing garments of the East we would have said,
"After all, this is not the Orient, it is France."
But French Algiers, "gay, beautiful, and modern as Paris itself" (the
guide-book expression), is, after all, only the outer bulwark, or rather
the ornate frame of the picture it encloses. That picture when you are
fairly in the heart of it is as purely Oriental I believe as anything in
the world to-day, and cannot have changed much since Mohammedanism came
into power there a thousand years ago. But I am getting ahead too fast.
We did not penetrate the heart of Algiers at once--only the outer edges.
We drove to our first mosque--a typical white-domed affair, plastered on
the outside, and we fought our way through the beggars who got in front
of us and behind us and about us, demanding "_sou-penny_" at least it
sounded like that--a sort of French-English combination, I suppose,
which probably has been found to work well enough to warrant its general
adoption.
We thought we had seen beggars at Madeira, and had become hardened to
them. We _had_ become hardened toward the beggars, but not to our own
offerings. One can only stand about so much punishment--then he
surrenders. It is easier and quicker to give a sou-penny, or a dozen of
them, than it is to be bedevilled and besmirched and bewildered by these
tatterdemalion Arabs who grab and cling and obstruct until one doesn't
know whether he is in Algiers or Altoona, and wishes only to find relief
and sanctuary. Evidently sight-seeing in the East has not become less
strenuous since the days when the "Innocents" made their pilgrimage in
these waters.
We found temporary sanctuary in the mosque, but it was not such as one
would wish to adopt permanently. It was a bare, unkempt place, and they
made us put on very objectionable slippers before we could step on their
sacred carpets. This is the first mosque we have seen, so of course I am
not a purist in the matter of mosques yet, but I am wondering if it
takes dirt and tatters to make a rug sacred, and if half a dozen mangy,
hungry-looking Arab priests inspire the regular attendants in a place
like that with religious fervor.
They inspired me only with a desire to get back to the beggars, where I
could pay sou-pennies for the privilege of looking at the variegated
humanity and of breathing the open air. The guide-book says this is a
poor mosque, but that is gratuitous information; I could have told that
myself as soon as I looked at it. Anybody could.
We went through some markets after that, and saw some new kinds of
flowers and fruit and fish, but they did not matter. I knew there were
better things than these in Algiers, and I was impatient to get to them.
I begrudged the time, too, that we put in on some public buildings,
though a down-town palace of Ali Ben Hussein, the final Dey of
Algiers--a gaudy wedding-cake affair, all fluting and frosting--was not
without interest, especially when we found that the late Hussein had
kept his seven wives there. It was a comparatively old building, built
in Barbarossa times, the guide said, and now used only on certain
official occasions. It is not in good taste, I imagine, even from the
Oriental standpoint.
[Illustration: MARVELLOUS BASKETS AND QUEER THINGS]
But what we wanted, some of us at least, was to get out of these
show-places and into the shops--the native shops that we could see
stretching down the little side-streets. We could discover perfectly
marvellous baskets and jugs and queer things of every sort fairly
stuffing these little native selling-places, and there were always
fascinating groups in those side-streets, besides men with big copper
water-jars on their shoulders that looked a thousand years old--the
jars, I mean--all battered and dented and polished by the mutations of
the passing years.
I wanted one of those jars. I would have given more for one of those
jars than for the mosque, including all the sacred rugs and the holy
men, or for the palace of A. B. Hussein, and Hussein himself, with his
seven wives thrown in for good measure. No, I withdraw that last item. I
would not make a quick decision like that in the matter of the wives. I
would like to look them over first. But, dear me, I forgot--they have
been dead a long, long time, so let the offer stand. That is to say, I
did want the jar and I was willing to do without the other things. There
was no good opportunity for investment just then, and when I discussed
the situation with Laura, who was in the carriage with me, she did not
encourage any side-adventures. She was right, I suppose, for we were
mostly on the move. We went clattering away through some pleasing parks,
presently, and our drivers, who were French, cracked their whips at the
Algerine rabble and would have run them down, I believe, with great
willingness, and could have done so, perhaps, without fear of penalty.
Certainly French soldiers are immune to retribution in Algiers. We saw
evidence of that, and I would have resented their conduct more, if I had
not remembered those days not so long ago of piracy and bondage, and
realized that these same people might be murdering and enslaving yet but
for the ever-ready whip of France.
[Illustration: WE DID NOT CARE MUCH FOR PARKS]
From one of the parks we saw above us an old, ruined, vine-covered
citadel. Could we go up there? we asked; we did not care much for parks.
Yes, we could go up there--all in good time. One does not hurry the
Orient--one waits on it. We did go up there, all in good time, and then
we found it was the Kasba, the same where had occurred the incident
which had brought about the fall of Algiers.
They did not show us the room where that historic spark had been
kindled, but they did tell us the story again, and they showed us a view
of the city and the harbor and the Atlas Mountains with snow on them,
and one of our party asked if those mountains were in Spain. I would
have been willing to watch that view for the rest of the day had we had
time. We did not have time. We were to lunch somewhere by and by, and
meantime we were to go through the very heart, the very heart of hearts,
of Algiers.
[Illustration: ETERNALLY EAST WITH NO HINT OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD]
That is to say, the Arab quarter--the inner circle of circles where, so
far as discoverable, French domination has not yet laid its hand. We
left the carriages at a point somewhere below the Kasba, passed through
an arch in a dead wall--an opening so low that the tallest of us had to
stoop (it was a "needle's eye," no doubt)--and there we were. At one
step we had come from a mingling of East and West to that which was
eternally East with no hint or suggestion of contact with any outside
world.
I should say the streets would average six to eight feet wide, all
leading down hill. They were winding streets, some of them dim, and each
a succession of stone steps and grades that meander down and down into a
stranger labyrinth of life than I had ever dreamed of.
How weak any attempt to tell of that life seems! The plastered,
blind-eyed houses with their mysterious entrances and narrow dusky
stairways leading to what dark and sinister occupancy; the narrow
streets bending off here and there that one might follow, who could say
whither; the silent, drowsing, strangely garbed humanity that regarded
us only with a vague scornful interest and did not even offer to beg;
the low dim coffee-houses before which men sat drinking and
contemplating--so inattentive to the moment's event that one might
believe they had sat always thus, sipping and contemplating, and would
so sit through time--how can I convey to the reader even a faint
reflection of that unreal, half-awake world or conjure again the spell
which, beholding it for the first time, one is bound to feel?
Everywhere was humanity which belonged only to the East--had always
belonged there--had remained unchanged in feature and dress and mode of
life since the beginning. The prophets looked and dressed just as these
people look and dress, and their cities were as this city, built into
steep hillsides, with streets a few feet wide, shops six feet square or
less, the dreaming shopkeeper in easy reach of every article of his
paltry trade.
I do not think it is a very clean place. Of course the matter of being
clean is more or less a comparative condition, and what one nation or
one family considers clean another nation or family might not be
satisfied with at all. But judged by any standards I have happened to
meet heretofore I should say the Arab quarter of Algiers was not
overclean.
But it was picturesque. In whatever direction you looked was a picture.
It was like nature untouched by civilization--it could not be
unpicturesque if it tried. It was, in fact, just that--nature unspoiled
by what we choose to call civilization because it means bustle,
responsibility, office hours, and, now and then, clean clothes. And
being nature, even the dirt was not unbeautiful.
Somebody has defined dirt as matter out of place. It was not out of
place here. Nor rags. Some of these creatures were literally a mass of
rags--rag upon rag--sewed on, tacked on, tied on, hung on--but they were
fascinating. What is the use trying to convey all the marvel of it in
words? One must see for himself to realize, and even then he will
believe he has been dreaming as soon as he turns away.
In a little recess, about half-way down the hill, heeding
nothing--wholly lost in reverie it would seem--sat two venerable,
turbaned men. They had long beards and their faces were fine and
dignified. These were holy men, the guides told us, and very sacred. I
did not understand just why they were holy--a mere trip to Mecca would
hardly have made them as holy as that, I should think--and nobody seemed
to know the answer when I asked about it. Then I asked if I might
photograph them, but I could see by the way our guide grabbed at
something firm to sustain himself that it would be just as well not to
press the suggestion.
I was not entirely subdued, however, and pretty soon hunted up further
trouble. A boy came along with one of the copper water-jars--a small
one--probably children's size. I made a dive for him and proposed buying
it; that is, I held out money and reached for the jar. He probably
thought I wanted a drink, and handed it to me, little suspecting my base
design. But when he saw me admiring the jar itself and discussing it
with Laura, who was waiting rather impatiently while our party was
drifting away, he reached for it himself, and my money did not seem to
impress him.
Now I suspect that those jars are not for sale. This one had a sort of
brass seal with a number and certain cryptic words on it which would
suggest some kind of record. As likely as not those jars are all
licensed, and for that boy to have parted with his would have landed us
both in a donjon keep. I don't know in the least what a donjon keep is,
but it sounds like a place to put people for a good while, and I had no
time then for experimental knowledge. Our friends had already turned a
corner when we started on and we hurried to catch up, not knowing
whether or not we should ever find them again.
We came upon them at last peering into an Arab school. The teacher, who
wore a turban, sat cross-legged on a raised dais, and the boys, who wore
fezzes--there were no girls--were grouped on either side--on a
rug--their pointed shoes standing in a row along the floor. They were
reciting in a chorus from some large cards--the Koran, according to the
guide--and it made a queer clatter.
It must have struck their dinner-hour, just then, for suddenly they all
rose, and each in turn made an obeisance to the teacher, kissed his
hand, slipped on a pair of little pointed shoes and swarmed out just as
any school-boy in any land might do. Only they were not so noisy or
impudent. They were rather grave, and their curiosity concerning us was
not of a frantic kind. They were training for the life of contemplation,
no doubt; perhaps even to be holy men.
We passed little recesses where artizans of all kinds were at work with
crude implements on what seemed unimportant things. We passed a
cubby-hole where a man was writing letters in the curious Arabic
characters for men who squatted about and waited their turn. We saw the
pettiest merchants in the world--men with half a dozen little heaps of
fruit and vegetables on the ground, not more than three or four
poor-looking items in each heap. In a land where fruit and vegetables
are the most plentiful of all products, a whole stock in trade like that
could not be worth above three or four cents. I wonder what sort of a
change they make when they sell only a part of one of those pitiful
heaps.
We were at the foot of the hill and out of that delightful Arab quarter
all too soon. But we could not stay. Our carriages were waiting there,
and we were in and off and going gaily through very beautiful streets to
reach the hotel where we were to lunch.
Neither shall I dwell on the governor's palace which we visited, though
it is set in a fair garden; nor on the museum, with the exception of
just one thing. That one item is, I believe, unique in the world's list
of curiosities. It is a plaster cast of the martyr Geronimo in the agony
of death. The Algerines put Geronimo alive into a soft mass of concrete
which presently hardened into a block, and was built into a fort. This
was in 1569, and about forty years later a Spanish writer described the
event and told exactly how that particular block could be located.
The fort stood for nearly three hundred years. Then in 1853 it was torn
down, the block was identified and broken open, and an almost perfect
mould of the dead martyr was found within. They filled the mould with
plaster, and the result--a wonderful cast--lies there in the museum
to-day, his face down as he died, hands and feet bound and straining,
head twisted to one side in the supreme torture of that terrible
martyrdom. It is a gruesome, fascinating thing, and you go back to look
at it more than once, and you slip out betweentimes for a breath of
fresh air.
Remembering the story and looking at that straining figure, you realize
a little of the need he must have known, and your lungs contract and you
smother and hurry out to the sky and sun and God-given oxygen of life.
He could not have lived long, but every second of consciousness must
have been an eternity of horror, for there is no such thing as time
except as to mode of measurement, and a measurement such as that would
compass ages unthinkable. If I lived in Algiers and at any time should
sprout a little bud of discontent with the present state of affairs--a
little sympathy with the subjugated population--I would go and take a
look at Geronimo, and forthwith all the discontent and the sympathy
would pass away, and I would come out gloating in the fact that France
can crack the whip and that we of the West can ride them down.
We drove through the suburbs, the most beautiful suburbs I have ever
seen in any country, and here and there beggars sprang up by the
roadside and pursued us up hill and down, though we were going
helter-skelter with fine horses over perfect roads. How these children
could keep up with us I shall never know, or how a girl of not more than
ten could carry a big baby and run full speed down hill, crying out
"_Sou-penny_" at every step, never stumbling or falling behind. Of
course, nobody could stand that. We flung her sou-pennies and she
gathered them up like lightning and was after the rear carriages,
unsatisfied and unabated in speed.
We passed a little lake with two frogs in it. They called to us, but
they spoke only French or Algerian, so we did not catch the point of
their remarks.
And now we drove home--that is, back to the fine streets near the
water-front where we were to leave the carriages and wander about for a
while, at will. That was a wild, splendid drive. We were all principals
in a gorgeous procession that went dashing down boulevards and through
villages, our drivers cracking their whips at the scattering people who
woke up long enough to make a fairly spry dash for safety.
Oh, but it was grand! The open barouches, the racing teams, the cracking
whips! Let the Arab horde have a care. They sank unoffending vessels;
they reddened the sea with blood; they enslaved thousands; they martyred
Geronimo. Let the whips crack--drive us fast over them!
Still, I wasn't quite so savage as I sound. I didn't really wish to
damage any of those Orientals. I only wanted to feel that I could do it
and not have to pay a fine--not a big fine--and I invented the idea of
taking a lot of those cheap Arabs to America for automobilists to use
up, and save money.
When we got back to town, while the others were nosing about the shops,
I slipped away and went up into the Arab quarter again, alone. It was
toward evening now, and it was twilight in there, and there was such a
lot of humanity among which I could not see a single European face or
dress. I realized that I was absolutely alone in that weird place and
that these people had no love for the "Christian Dog."
I do not think I was afraid, but I thought of these things, and wondered
how many years would be likely to pass before anybody would get a trace
of what had become of me, if anything did become of me, and what that
thing would be likely to be. Something free and handsome, no
doubt--something with hot skewers and boiling oil in it, or perhaps
soft concrete.
Still, I couldn't decide to turn back, not yet. If the place had been
interesting by daylight, it was doubly so, now, in the dusk, with the
noiseless, hooded figures slipping by; the silent coffee-drinkers in the
half gloom--leaning over now and then, to whisper a little gossip,
maybe, but usually abstracted, indifferent. What could they ever have to
gossip about anyway? They had no affairs. Their affairs all ended long
ago.
I came to an open place by and by, a tiny square which proved to be a
kind of second-hand market-place. I altered all my standards of economy
there in a few minutes. They were selling things that the poorest family
of the East Side of New York would pitch into the garbage-barrel. Broken
bottles, tin cans, wretched bits of clothing, cracked clay water-jars
that only cost a few cents new. I had bought a new one myself as I came
along for eight cents. I began to feel a deep regret that I had not
waited.
Adjoining the market was a gaming-place and coffee-house combined. Men
squatting on the ground in the dusk played dominoes and chess
wordlessly, never looking up, only sipping their coffee now and then,
wholly indifferent to time and change and death and the hereafter. I
could have watched them longer, but it would really be dark presently,
and one must reach the ship by a certain hour. One could hardly get lost
in the Arab quarter, for any downhill stair takes you toward the sea,
but I did not know by which I had come, so I took the first one and
started down.
I walked pretty rapidly, and I looked over my shoulder now and then,
because--well, never mind, I looked over my shoulder--and I would have
been glad to see anything that looked like a Christian. Presently I felt
that somebody was following me. I took a casual look and made up my mind
that it was true. There were quantities of smoking, drinking people all
about, but I didn't feel any safer for that. I stepped aside presently
and stood still to let him pass. He did pass--a sinister looking
Arab--but when I started on he stepped aside too, and got behind me
again.
So I stopped and let him pass once more, and then it wasn't necessary to
manoeuvre again, for a few yards ahead the narrow Arab defile flowed
into the lighter French thoroughfare. He was only a pick-pocket,
perhaps--there are said to be a good many in Algiers--but he was not a
pleasant-looking person, and I did not care to cultivate him at
nightfall in that dim, time-forgotten place.
I picked up some friends in the French quarter, and Laura and I drifted
toward the ship, pressed by a gay crowd of merry-makers. It was
carnival-time, as before mentioned, and the air was full of confetti,
and the open-air cafes were crowded with persons of both sexes and every
nation, drinking, smoking, and chattering, the air reeking with tobacco
and the fumes of absinthe. Everywhere were the red and blue soldiers of
France--Chasseurs d'Afrique and Zouaves--everywhere the fashionable
French costumes--everywhere the French tongue. And amid that fashion and
gayety of the West the fez and the turban and the long flowing robe of
the Orient mingled silently, while here and there little groups of
elderly, dignified sons of the desert stood in quiet corners, observing
and thinking long thoughts. And this is the Algiers of to-day--the West
dominant--the East a memory and a dream.
XII
WE TOUCH AT GENOA
We lost some of our passengers--the wrong ones--at Algiers. They wanted
to linger awhile in that lovely place, and no one could blame them. Only
I wish that next time we are to lose passengers I might make the
selection. I would pick, for instance--no, on the whole, I am not the
one to do it. I am fond of all of our people. They are peculiar, most of
them, as mentioned before--all of them, I believe, except me--but
thinking it over I cannot decide on a single one that I would be willing
to spare. Even the Porpoise-- But we have grown to love the Porpoise,
and the news that we are to lose him at Genoa saddens me.
We were pitched from Algiers to Genoa--not all at one pitch, though we
should have liked that better. A gale came up out of the north and,
great ship as the _Kurfuerst_ is, we stood alternately on our hind feet
and our fore feet all the way over--two nights and a day--while the roar
and howl of the wind were appalling. We changed our minds about the
placid, dreamy disposition of the Mediterranean; also, about sunny
Italy.
When the second morning came we were still a good way outside the harbor
of Genoa, in the grip of such a norther and blizzard as tears through
the Texas Panhandle and leaves dead cattle in its wake. Sunny Italy
indeed! The hills back of Genoa, when we could make them out at last,
were white with snow. To go out on deck was to breast the penetrating,
stinging beat of the storm.
But I stood it awhile to get an impression of the harbor. It is no
harbor at all, but simply a little corner of open sea, partly enclosed
by breakwaters that measurably protect vessels from heavy seas, when one
can get through the entrance. With our mighty engines and powerful
machinery we were beating and wallowing around the entrance for as much
as two hours, I should think, before we could get inside. You could stow
that harbor of Genoa anywhere along the New York City water-front,
shipping and all, and then you would need to employ a tug-boat captain
to find it for you. It is hard to understand how Genoa obtained her
maritime importance in the old days.
(I have just referred to the guide-book. It says: "The magnificent
harbor of Genoa was the cause of the mediaeval prosperity of the city,"
and adds that it is about two miles in diameter. Very well; I take it
all back. I was merely judging from observation. It has led me into
trouble before.)
We were only to touch at Genoa; some more of our passengers were to
leave us, and we were to take on the European contingent there. It was
not expected that there would be much sight-seeing, especially on such a
day, but some of us went ashore nevertheless. Laura, age fourteen, and I
were among those who went. We set out alone, were captured immediately
by a guide, repelled him, and temporarily escaped. It was a mistake,
however; we discovered soon that a guide would have been better on this
bitter, buffeting day.
We had no idea where to go, and when we spoke to people about it, they
replied in some dialect of Mulberry Street that ought not to be
permitted at large. Laura tried her French on them presently, but with
no visible effect, though it had worked pretty well in Algiers. Then I
discovered a German sign, over a restaurant or something, and I said I
would get information there.
I had faith in my German since my practice on the stewards, and I went
into the place hopefully. What I wanted to ask was "Where is Cook's?"
the first question that every tourist wants to ask when he finds himself
lost and cold and hungry in a strange land. But being lost and cold and
hungry confused me, I suppose, and I got mixed in my adverbs, and when
the sentence came out it somehow started with "_Warum_" instead of
"_Wo_" so instead of asking "Where is Cook's?" I had asked "Why is
Cook's?" a question which I could have answered myself if I had only
known I had asked it.
But I didn't realize, and kept on asking it, with a little more emphasis
each time, while the landlord and the groups about the tables began to
edge away and to reach for something handy and solid to use on a crazy
man. I backed out then, and by the time I was outside I realized my
slight error in the choice of words. I did not go back to correct my
inquiry. I merely told Laura that those people in there did not seem
very intelligent, and that was true, or they would have known that
anybody is likely to say "why" when he means "where," especially in
German.
There are too many languages in the world, anyway. There is nothing so
hopeless as to hunt for information in a place where not a soul
understands your language, and where you can't speak a word of his. The
first man at your very side may have all the information you need right
at his tongue's end, but it might as well be buried in a cellar so far
as you are concerned.
I am in deep sympathy with the people who invented Volapuk, and are
trying to invent Esperanto. I never thought much about it before, but
since I've been to Genoa I know I believe in those things. Only, I wish
they'd adopt English as the universal speech. I find it plenty good
enough.
Laura and I made our way uphill and climbed some stairways, met a
_gendarme_, got what seemed to be information, climbed down again, and
met a man with a fish-net full of bread--caught in some back alley, from
the looks of it. Then we followed a car-track a while along the deserted
street, past black, desolate-looking houses, and were cold and
discouraged and desperate, when suddenly, right out of heaven, came that
guide, who had been following us all the time, of course, and realized
that the psychological moment had come.
We could have fallen on his neck for pure joy. Everything became all
right, then. He could understand what we said, and we could understand
what he said; we tried him repeatedly and he could do it every time.
That was joy and occupation enough at first. Then we asked him "Where
was Cook's?" and he knew that too. It was wonderful.
We grew to love that guide like a brother. It's marvellous how soon and
fondly you can learn to love a rescuer like that when you are a stranger
in a strange land and have been sinking helplessly in a sea of unknown
words.
He was a good soul, too; attentive without being officious, anxious to
show us as much as possible in the brief space of our visit. He led us
through the narrow, cleft-like streets of the old city; he pointed out
the birthplace of Columbus and portions of the old city wall; he
conducted us to the Hotel de Ville (the old Fieschi Palace), where we
decided to have luncheon; he led us back to the ship at last, and
trusted me while I went aboard to get the five _lira_ of his charge.
Whatever the Genoese guides were in the old days, this one was a jewel.
If I had any voice in the matter Genoa would inscribe a tablet to a man
like that and put his bones in a silver box and label them "St. John the
Baptist" instead of the set of St. John bones they now have in the
Cathedral of St. Lorenzo, which he pointed out to us.
But the Cathedral itself was interesting enough. It was built in the
ninth century, and is the first church we have seen that has interested
us. In it Laura noticed again the absence of seats; for they kneel, on
this side of the water, and know not the comfort of pews.
We passed palaces galore in Genoa, but we had only time to glance in,
except at the Fieschi, where we lunched, and later were shown the rooms
where the famous conspiracy took place. I don't know what the conspiracy
was, but the guide-book speaks of it as "the famous conspiracy," so
everybody but me will know just which one is meant. It probably
concerned the Ghibellines and the Guelphs, and had strangling in it and
poison--three kinds, slow, medium, and swift--these features being
usually identified with the early Italian school.
The dim, mysterious streets of Genoa interested us--many of the houses
frescoed outside--and the old city gates, dating back to the crusade;
also some English signs, one of which said:
DINNER 3 LIRA, WINE ENCLOSED,
and another:
MILK FOR SALE, OR TO LET.
I am in favor of these people learning English, but not too well. The
picturesque standard of those signs is about right.
Our new passengers were crowding aboard the ship when we returned. They
were a polyglot assortment, English, German, French, Hungarian--a
happy-looking lot, certainly, and eager for the housing and comfort of
the ship. But one dear old soul, a German music-master--any one could
tell that at first glance--was in no hurry for the cabin. He had been
looking forward to that trip. Perhaps this was his first sight of the
sea and shipping and all the things he had wanted so long. He came to
where I was looking over the rail, his head bare, his white hair blowing
in the wind. He looked at me anxiously.
"Haben Sie Deutsch?" he asked.
I confessed that I still had a small broken assortment of German on
hand, such as it was. He pointed excitedly to a vessel lying near us--a
ship with an undecipherable name in the Greek character.
"Greek," he said, "it is Greek--a vessel from Greece!"
He was deeply moved. To him that vessel--a rather poor, grimy
affair--with its name in the characters of Homer and Aeschylus was a
thing to make his blood leap and his eyes grow moist, because to him it
meant the marvel and story of a land made visible--the first breath of
realization of what before had just been a golden dream. I had been
thinking of those things, too. We did not mind the cold, and stood
looking down at the Greek vessel while we sailed away.
But a change has come over the spirit of our ship. It is a good ship
still, with a goodly company--only it is not the same. We lost some
worthy people in Genoa and we took on this European invasion. It is
educational, and here in the smoking-room I could pick up all the
languages I need so much if I were willing to listen and had an ear for
such things. I could pick up customs, too. It is after dinner, and the
smoking-room is crowded with mingled races of both sexes, who have come
in for their coffee and their cigarettes, their gossip and their games.
Over there in one corner is a French group--Parisian, without
doubt--the women are certainly that, otherwise they could not chatter
and handle their cigarettes in that dainty way--and they are going-on
and waving their hands and turning their eyes to heaven in the interest
and ecstasy of their enjoyment. Games do not interest them--they are in
themselves sufficient diversion to one another.
It is different with a group of Germans at the next table; they have
settled down to cards--pinochle, likely enough--and they are playing it
soberly--as soberly as that other group who are absorbed in chess. At
still another table a game of poker is being organized, and from that
direction comes the beloved American tongue, carrying such words as
"What's the blue chips worth?" "Shall we play jack-pots?" "Does the
dealer ante?" and in these familiar echoes I recognize the voices of
friends.
The centre of the smoking-room is different. The tables there are filled
with a variegated lot of men and women, all talking together, each
pursuing a different subject--each speaking a language of his own. Every
nation of Europe, I should think, is represented there--it is a sort of
lingual congress in open session.
The Reprobates no longer own the smoking-room. They are huddled off in a
corner over their game of piquet, and they have a sort of cowed,
helpless look. Only now and then I can see the Colonel jerk his hat a
bit lower and hear him say, "Hell, Joe!" as the Apostle lay down his
final cards. Then I recognize that we are still here and somewhat in
evidence, though our atmosphere is not the same.
That couldn't be expected. When you have set out with a crowd of
pleasure-seeking irresponsibles, gathered up at random, and have become
a bit of the amalgamation which takes place in two weeks' mixing, you
somehow feel that a certain unity has resulted from the process and you
are reluctant about seeing it disturbed. You feel a personal loss in
every face that goes--a personal grievance in every stranger that
intrudes.
The ship's family has become a sort of club. It has formed itself into
groups and has discussed its members individually and collectively. It
has found out their business and perhaps some of the hopes and
ambitions--even some of the sorrows--of each member. Then, suddenly,
here is a new group of people that breaks in. You know nothing about
them--they know nothing about you. They are good people, and you will
learn to like some of them--perhaps all of them--in time. Yet you regard
them doubtfully. Rearrangement is never easy, and amalgamation will be
slow.
Oh, well, it is ever thus, and it is the very evanescence of things that
makes them worth while. That old crowd of ours would have grown deadly
tired of one another if there hadn't been always the prospect and
imminence of change. And, anyhow, this is far more picturesque, and we
are sailing to-night before the wind, over a smooth sea, for Malta, and
it has grown warm outside and the lights of Corsica are on our starboard
bow.
[Illustration]
XIII
MALTA, A LAND OF YESTERDAY
We came a long way around from Algiers to "Malta and its dependencies,"
the little group of islands which lies between Sicily and the African
coast. We have spent two days at sea, meantime, but they were rather
profitable days, for when one goes capering among marvels, as we do
ashore, he needs these ship days to get his impressions sorted out and
filed for reference.
We were in the harbor of Valetta, Malta, when we woke this morning--a
rather dull morning--and a whole felucca of boats--flotilla, I mean--had
appeared in the offing to take us ashore. At least, I suppose they were
in the offing-- I'm going to look that word up, by and by, in the ship
dictionary, and see what it means. They have different boats in each of
the places we have visited--every country preserving its native pattern.
These at Malta are a sort of gondola with a piece sticking up at each
end--for ornament, probably--I have been unable to figure out any use
for the feature.
We leaned over the rail, watching them and admiring the boatmen while we
tried to recognize the native language. The Diplomat came along and
informed us that it was Arabic, mixed with Italian, the former heavily
predominating. The Arabs had once occupied the island for two hundred
and twenty years, he said, and left their language, their architecture,
and their customs. He had been trying his Arabic on some natives who had
come aboard and they could almost understand it.
The Patriarch, who had been early on deck, came up full of enthusiasm.
There was a Phoenician temple in Malta which he was dying to visit. It
was the first real footprint, thus far, of his favorite tribe, and
though we have learned to restrain the Patriarch when he unlimbers on
Phoenicians, we let him get off this time, softened, perhaps, by the
thought of the ruined temple.
The Phoenicians had, of course, been the first settlers of Malta, he
told us, thirty-five hundred years ago, when Rome had not been heard of
and Greece was mere mythology; after which preliminary the Patriarch
really got down to business.
"We are told by Sanchuniathon," he said, "in the Phoinikika, which was
not only a cosmogony but a necrological diptych, translated into Greek
by Philo of Byblus, with commentary by Porphyry and preserved by
Eusebius in fragmentary form, that the Phoenicians laid the
foundations of the world's arts, sciences, and religions, though the
real character of their own faith has been but imperfectly expiscated.
We are told--"
The Horse-Doctor laid his hand reverently but firmly on the Patriarch's
arm.
"General," he said (the Patriarch's ship title is General)--"General, we
all love you, and we all respect your years and your learning. We will
stand almost anything from you, even the Phoenicians; but don't crowd
us, General--don't take advantage of our good-nature. We'll try to put
up with Sanchuniathon and Porphyry and those other old dubs, but when
you turned loose that word 'expiscated' I nearly lost control of myself
and threw you overboard."
The bugle blew the summons to go ashore. Amidst a clatter of Maltese we
descended into the boats and started for the quay. Sitting thus low down
upon the water, one could get an idea of the little shut-in harbor, one
of the deepest and finest in the world. We could not see its outlet, or
the open water, for the place is like a jug, and the sides are high and
steep. They are all fortified, too, and looking up through the gloomy
morning at the grim bastions and things, the place loomed sombre enough
and did not invite enthusiasm. It was too much like Gibraltar in its
atmosphere, which was not surprising, for it is an English
stronghold--the second in importance in these waters. Gibraltar is the
gateway, Malta is the citadel of the Mediterranean, and England to-day
commands both.
But Malta has had a more picturesque history than Gibraltar. Its story
has been not unlike that of Algiers, and many nations have fought for it
and shed blood and romance along its shores, and on all the lands about.
We touched mythology, too, here, for the first time; and Bible history.
Long ago, even before the Phoenicians, the Cyclops--a race of one-eyed
giants--owned Malta, and here Calypso, daughter of Atlas, lived and
enchanted Ulysses when he happened along this way and was shipwrecked on
the "wooded island of Ogygia, far apart from men."
I am glad they do not call it that any more. It is hard to say Ogygia,
and it is no longer a wooded isle. It is little more than a rock, in
fact, covered with a thin, fertile soil, and there are hardly any trees
to be discovered anywhere. But there were bowers and groves in Ulysses'
time, and Calypso wooed him among the greenery and in a cave which is
pointed out to this day. She promised him immortality if he would forget
his wife and native land, and marry her, but Ulysses postponed his
decision, and after a seven-year sample of the matrimony concluded he
didn't care for perpetual existence on those terms.
Calypso bore him two sons, and when he sailed away died of grief.
Ulysses returned to Penelope, but he was disqualified for the simple
life of Ithaca, and after he had slain her insolent suitors and told
everybody about his travels he longed to go sailing away again to other
adventures and islands, and Calypsos, perhaps, "beyond the baths of all
the western stars." Such was life even then.
The Biblical interest of Malta concerns a shipwreck, too. St. Paul on
his way to Italy to preach the gospel was caught in a great tempest, the
Euroclydon, which continued for fourteen days. Acts xxvii, xxviii
contain the story, which is very interesting and beautiful.
Here is a brief summary.
"And when the ship was caught, and could not bear up in the
wind, we let her drive....
"And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and
no small tempest lay upon us, all hope that we should be
saved was taken away."
Paul comforted them and told how an angel had stood by him, assuring him
that he, Paul, would appear before Caesar and that all with him would be
saved. "Howbeit, we must be cast upon a certain island."
The island was Melita (_i.e._, Malta), and "falling into a place where
two seas met, they ran the ship aground."
There were two hundred and sixteen souls in the vessel, and all got to
land somehow.
"And the barbarous people showed us no little kindness: for
they kindled a fire and received us every one, because of
the present rain, and because of the cold."
Paul remained three months in Malta and preached the gospel and
performed miracles there, which is a better record than Ulysses made. He
also banished the poison snakes, it is said. It was the Euroclydon that
swept the trees from Malta, and nineteen hundred years have not repaired
the ravage of that storm.
Gods, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans,
Germans, Spanish, Knights of Jerusalem, French, and English have all
battled for Malta because of its position as a stronghold, a watch-tower
between the eastern and western seas. All of them have fortified it more
or less, until to-day it is a sort of museum of military works,
occupied and abandoned.
After the Gods, the Phoenicians were the first occupants, and with all
due deference to the Patriarch, they were skedaddling out of Canaan at
the time, because Joshua was transacting a little business in warfare
which convinced them that it was time to grow up with new countries
farther west. The Knights of Jerusalem--also known as the Knights of St.
John and the Knights of Rhodes--were the last romantic inheritors. The
Knights were originally hospital nurses who looked after pilgrims that
went to visit the Holy Sepulchre, nearly a thousand years ago. They
became great soldiers in time: knightly crusaders with sacred vows of
chastity and service to the Lord. Charles V. of Spain gave them the
Island of Malta, and they became the Knights of Malta henceforth. They
did not maintain their vows by and by, but became profligates and even
pirates. Meantime they had rendered mighty service to the Mediterranean
and the world at large.
They prevented the terrible Turk from overrunning and possessing all
Europe. Under John de la Valette, the famous Grand Master, Malta stood a
Turkish siege that lasted four months, with continuous assault and heavy
bombardments. The Turks gave it up at last and sailed away, after a loss
of over twenty thousand men.
Only seven thousand Maltese and two hundred and sixty knights were
killed, and it is said that before he died each knight had anywhere from
fifty to a hundred dead Turks to his credit. It must have been hard to
kill a knight in those days. I suppose they wore consecrated armor and
talismans, and were strengthened by special benedictions. And this all
happened in 1565, after which La Valette decided to build a city, and on
the 28th of March, 1566, laid the corner-stone of Valetta, our
anchorage.
It is a curious place and interesting. When we landed at the quay our
vehicles were waiting for us, and these were our first entertainment.
They resembled the little affairs of Gibraltar, but were more absurd, I
think. They had funny canopy tops--square parasol things with fancy
edges--and there was no room inside for a tall man with knees. I was
only partly in my conveyance, and I would have been willing to have been
out of it altogether, only we were going up a steep hill and I couldn't
get out without damage to something or somebody. Then we passed through
some gates and entered the city.
I don't think any of us had any clear idea of what Malta was like. It is
another of those places that every one has heard of and nobody knows
about. We all knew about Maltese cats because we had cats more or less
Maltese at home, and we had heard of the Knights of Malta and of Maltese
lace. But some of us thought Malta was a city on the north shore of
Africa and the rest of us believed it to be an island in the Persian
Gulf.[2]
However, these slight inaccuracies do not disturb us any more. We have
learned to accept places where and as we find them, without undue
surprise. If we should awake some morning in a strange harbor and be
told that it was Sheol, we would merely say:
"Oh yes, certainly; we knew it was down here somewhere. When can we go
ashore?"
Then we would set out sight-seeing and shopping without further remark,
some of us still serene in the conviction that it was an African
seaport, the rest believing it to be an island in the Persian Gulf.
But there were no Maltese cats in Malta--not that I saw, and no knights,
I think. What did strike us first was a herd of goats, goatesses I mean,
being driven along from house to house and supplying milk. They were the
mildest-eyed, most inoffensive little creatures in the world, and can
carry more milk for their size than any other mammal, unless I am a poor
judge. They did not seem to be under any restraint, but they never
wandered far away from their master. They nibbled and loafed along, and
were ready for business at call. They seemed much more reliable than any
cows of my acquaintance.
But presently I forgot the goats, for a woman came along--several
women--and they wore a black head-gear of alpaca or silk, a cross
between a sunbonnet and a nun's veil--hooped out on one side and looped
in on the other--a curious head-gear, but not a bad setting for a
handsome face. And those ladies had handsome faces--rich, oval faces,
with lustrous eyes--and the faldette (they call it that) made a
background that melted into their wealth of atramentous hair.
We have not seen handsome native women before, but they are plentiful
enough here. None of them are really bad-looking, and every other one is
a beauty, by my standards.
We were well up into the city now, and could see what the place was
like. The streets were not over-wide, and the houses had an Oriental
look, with their stuccoed walls and their projecting Arab windows. They
were full of people and donkeys--very small donkeys with great pack
baskets of vegetables and other merchandise--but we could not well
observe these things because of the beggars and bootblacks and would-be
guides, besides all the sellers of postal cards and trinkets.
It was worse than Madeira, worse than Gibraltar, worse even than
Algiers. England ought to be ashamed of herself to permit, in one of her
possessions, such lavish and ostentatious poverty as exists in Malta.
When we got out of the carriages we were overwhelmed. They stormed
around us; they separated us; they fought over us; they were ready to
devour us piecemeal. Some of us escaped into shops--some into the
museum--some into St. John's Cathedral, which was across the way.
Laura and I were among the last named, and we drew a long breath as we
slipped into that magnificent place. We rejoiced a little too soon,
however, for a second later we were nabbed by a guide, and there was no
escape. We couldn't make a row in a church, especially as services were
going on; at least, we didn't think it safe to try.
It _is_ a magnificent church--the most elaborately decorated, I
believe, in all Europe. Grand Master John L'Eveque de la Cassar, at his
own expense, put up the building, and all Europe contributed to its
wealth and splendor. Its spacious floor is one vast mosaic of memorial
tablets to dead heroes. There are four hundred richly inlaid slabs, each
bearing a coat of arms and inscriptions in colors. They are wonderfully
beautiful; no other church in the world has such a floor. Napoleon
Bonaparte, who was a greater vandal than a soldier, allowed his troops
to rifle St. John's when he took possession of Malta in 1798. But there
are riches enough there now and apparently Napoleon did not deface the
edifice itself.
The upper part of the Cathedral can only be comprehended in the single
word "gorgeous." To attempt to put into sentences any impressions of its
lavish ceiling and decorations and furnishings would be to cheapen a
thing which, though ornate, is not cheap and does not look so. There are
paintings by Correggio and other Italian masters, and rare sacred
statuary, and there is a solid silver altar rail which Napoleon did not
carry off because a thoughtful priest quickly gave it a coat of
lampblack when he heard the soldiers coming.
The original keys of Jerusalem and several other holy places are said to
be in one of the chapels, and in another is a thorn from the Saviour's
crown, the stones with which St. Stephen was martyred, and some
apostolic bones. These things are as likely to be here as anywhere, and
one of the right hands of John the Baptist, encased in a gold glove, was
here when Napoleon came. Napoleon took up the hand and slipped off a
magnificent diamond ring from one of the fingers. Then he slipped the
ring on his own finger and tossed the hand aside.
"Keep the carrion," he said.
They hate the memory of Napoleon in Malta to this day.
The ceiling of the church is a mass of gold and color, and there are
chapels along the sides, each trying to outdo the next in splendor. I am
going to stop description right here, for I could do nothing with the
details.
I have mentioned that services were in progress, but it did not seem to
interfere with our sight-seeing. It would in America, but it doesn't in
Malta. There was chanting around the altar, and there were worshippers
kneeling all about, but our guide led us among them and over them as if
they had not existed. It seemed curious to us that he could do this,
that we could follow him unmolested. We tried to get up some feeling of
delicacy in the matter, and to make some show of reluctance, but he led
us and drove us along relentlessly, and did not seem to fear the
consequences.
We got outside at last and were nailed by a frowsy man who wanted to
sell one grimy postal card of the Chapel of Bones. We didn't want the
card, but we said he might take us to the chapel if he knew the way.
Nothing so good as that ever came into his life before. From a mendicant
seller of one wretched card, worth a penny at most, he had suddenly
blossomed into the guide of two American tourists. The card disappeared.
With head erect he led the way as one having received knighthood.
Our crowd was waiting admission outside the chapel and we did not need
our guide any more. But that didn't matter--he needed us. He accepted
his salary to date, but he did not accept his discharge. We went into
the Chapel of Bones, which is a rather grewsome place, with a lot of
decorations made out of bleached human remnants--not a pleasant spot in
which to linger--and when we came out again there was our guide, ready
to take us in hand. We resisted feebly, but surrendered. We didn't care
for the regular programme and wanted to wander away, anyhow. He
suggested that we go to the Governor's palace and armory, so we went
there.
The armory was worth while. It was full of armor of the departed knights
and of old arms of every sort. We think breech-loading guns are modern,
but we saw them there from the sixteenth century--long, deadly-looking
weapons--and there were rope guns; also little mortars not more than
three or four inches deep--mere toys--a stout man with a pile of rocks
would be more effective, I should think.
We saw the trumpet, too, that led La Valette to victory in 1565, and
some precious documents--among them the Grant of Malta made by Charles
V. to the knights, 1530. These were interesting things and we lingered
there until within a minute of noon, when we went out into the grounds
to see the great bronze clock on the Governor's palace strike twelve.
And all the rest of our party had collected in the grounds of the
Governor's palace, and pretty soon the Governor came out and made us a
little speech of welcome and invited us to luncheon on the lawn, with
cold chicken and ices and nice fizzy drinks. No, that was not what
happened--not exactly. Our crowd was not there, and we did not see the
Governor and we were not invited to picnic on the lawn. Otherwise the
statement is correct. We did go out into the grounds, and we did see the
clock strike. The other things are what we thought should happen, and
they would have happened if we had received our just deserts.
Well, then, those things did not materialize, but our guide did. He
would always materialize, so long as we stayed in Malta. So we
re-engaged him and signified that we wanted food. He led us away to what
seemed to be a hotel, but the clerk, who did not speak English, regarded
us doubtfully. Then the landlord came. He had a supply of English but no
food. No one is fed at a hotel in Malta who has not ordered in advance.
At least, that is what he said, and we went away, sorrowing.
We were not alone. A crowd had collected while we were inside--a crowd
of the would-be guides and already beggars, with sellers and torments of
various kinds. We were assailed as soon as we touched the street, and
our guide, who was not very robust, was not entirely able to protect us
from them. He did steer us to a restaurant, however, a decent enough
little place, and on the steps outside they disputed for us and wrangled
over us and divided us up while we ate. It was like the powers getting
ready to dismember China.
We laid out our programme for the afternoon. We wanted to get some
Maltese lace, and to make a little side trip by rail to Citta Vecchia
(the old city) which two native gentlemen at our table told us would
give us a good idea of the country. Then we paid our bill, had a battle
with a bootblack who had surreptitiously been polishing my shoes, fought
our way through the barbarians without, and finally escaped by sheer
flight, our guide at our heels.
We told him that we wanted lace. Ah, a smile that was like morning
overspread his face. He took us to a large shop, where we found some of
our friends already negotiating, but we did not linger. We said we
wanted to find a little shop--a place where it was made. He led us to
another bazaar. Again we said, "No, a little shop--a _very_ little shop,
on a back street."
[Illustration: TWO BENT, WRINKLED WOMEN WEAVING LACE OUTSIDE THE DOOR]
Clearly he was disappointed. He did find one for us, however, a tiny
place in an alley, with two bent, wrinkled women weaving lace outside
the door.
How their deft fingers made those little bobbins fly, and what beautiful
stuff it was, creamy white silk in the most wonderful patterns and
stitches. They showed us their stock eagerly, and they had masses of it.
Then we bargained and cheapened and haggled, in the approved fashion we
have picked up along the way, and went off at last with our purchases,
everybody happy--they because they would have taken less, we because we
would have given more. Only our guide was a bit solemn. I suppose his
commission was modest enough in a place like that.
He took us to the railway-station--the only railway in Malta. Then I
made a discovery: we had no current coin of the realm and the railway
would take only English money. No matter. We had discharged our guide
three times and paid him each separate time. He was a capitalist now,
and he promptly advanced the needed funds. We were grateful, and invited
him to go along. But he said "No," that he would remain at the station
until our return.
He was faithful, you see, and he trusted us. Besides, we couldn't
escape. There was only that one road and train. We took our seats in an
open car, on account of the scenery. We didn't know it was third-class
till later, but we didn't mind that. What we did mind was plunging into
a thick, black, choking tunnel as soon as we started; then another and
another. This was scenery with a vengeance.
We were out at last, and in a different world. Whatever was modern in
Malta had been left behind. This was wholly Eastern--Syrian--a piece out
of the Holy Land, if the pictures tell us the truth. Everywhere were the
one-story, flat-topped architecture and the olive-trees of the Holy Land
pictures; everywhere stony fields and myriads of stone walls.
At a bound we had come from what was only a few hundred years ago,
mingled with to-day, to what was a few thousand years ago, mingled with
nothing modern whatever. There is no touch of English dominion here, or
French, or Italian. This might be Syrian or Moorish; it might be, and
_is_ Maltese.
We saw men ploughing with a single cow and a crooked stick in a manner
that has prevailed here always. We mentioned the matter to our
railway-conductor, who was a sociable person and had not much to do.
"You are from America," he said.
"Yes, we are from America."
"And do they use different ploughs there?"
He spoke the English of the colonies, and it seemed incredible that he
should not know about these things. We broke it to him as gently as
possible that we did not plough with a crooked stick in America, but
with such ploughs as were used in England. However, that meant nothing
to him, as he had never been off the island of Malta in his life. His
name was Carina, he told us, and his parents and grandparents before him
had been born on the island. Still, I think he must have had English or
Irish pigment in that red hair of his. His English was perfect, though
he spoke the Maltese, too, of course.
He became our guide as we went along, willing and generous with his
information, though more interested, I thought, in the questions he
modestly asked us, now and then. His whole environment--all his
traditions--had been confined to that little sea-encircled space of old,
old town, and older, much older country.
He would like to come to America, he confessed, and I wondered, if some
day he should steam up New York harbor and look upon that piled
architecture, and then should step ashore and find himself amidst its
whirl of traffic, he would not be even more impressed by it than we were
with his tiny forgotten island here to the south of Sicily.
We passed little stations, now and then, with pretty stone and marble
station-houses, but with no villages of any consequence, and came to
Citta Vecchia, which the Arabs called Medina, formerly the capital of
the island. It is a very ancient place, set upon a hill and bastioned
round with walls that are too high to scale, and were once impregnable.
It has stood many an assault--many a long-protracted siege. To-day it is
a place of crumbling ruins and deserted streets--a mediaeval dream.
It was raining when we got back to Valetta, and our faithful guide
hurried us toward the boat-landing by a short way, for we were anxious
to get home now. Every few yards we were assailed by hackmen and
beggars, and by boatmen as soon as we reached the pier. He kept us
intact, however, and got us into our own boat, received the rest of his
fortune--enough to set him up for life, by Maltese standards--waved us
good-bye, and we were being navigated across the wide, rainy waste
toward our steamer, which seemed to fill one side of that little harbor.
What a joy to be on deck again and in the cosey cabin, drinking hot tea
and talking over our adventures and purchases with our fellow-wanderers.
The ship is home, rest, comfort--a world apart. We are weighing anchor
now, and working our course out of the bottle-neck, to sea. It is a
narrow opening--a native pilot directs us through it and leaves the ship
only at the gateway. Then we sail through and out into the darkening sky
where a storm is gathering--the green billows catching the dusk purple
on their tips, the gulls white as they breast the rising wind.
We gather on the after deck to say good-bye to Malta. Wall upon wall,
terrace upon terrace it rises from the sea--heaped and piled back
against the hills--as old, as quaint, as unchanged as it was a thousand
years ago. Viewed in this spectral half-light it might be any one of the
ancient cities. Ephesus, Antioch, Tyre--it suggests all those names, and
we speak of these things in low voices, awed by the spectacle of
gathering night and storm.
Then, as the picture fades, we return to the lighted cabins, where it is
gay and cheerful and modern, while there in the dark behind, that old
curious island life still goes on; those curious shut-in people are
gathering in their houses; the day, with its cares, its worries, and its
hopes is closing in on that tiny speck, set in that dark and lonely
sea.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] There would seem to have been some sort of confusion of Malta with
the city of Muscat. Perhaps the reader can figure out just what it was.
It had something to do with domestic pets, I believe.
XIV
A SUNDAY AT SEA
We are in classic waters now. All this bleak Sunday we have been
steaming over the Ionian Sea, crossed so long ago by Ulysses when he
went exploring; crossed and recrossed a hundred times by the galleyed
fleets of Rome. We have followed the exact course, perhaps, of those old
triremes with their piled-up banks of oars, when they sailed away to
conquer the East, also when they returned loaded down with captives and
piled high with treasure.
A little while ago Cythera was on our port bow, the island where
Aphrodite was born of wind and wave, and presently set out to make
trouble among the human family. She and her son Cupid, who has always
been too busy to grow up, have a good deal to answer for, and they are
still at their mischief, and will be, no doubt, so long as men are brave
and women fair.
However, they seemed to have overlooked this ship. There is only one
love-affair discoverable, and even that is of such a mild academic
variety that it is doubtful whether that tricksy jade Venus and her
dimpled son had any concern in the matter. It is rather a case of
Diana's hunting, I suspect, and not a love-affair at all.
I have mentioned that this is Sunday, but I acquired this knowledge
from the calendar. One would never guess it from the aspect of this ship
and its company. We made a pretty good attempt at Sabbath observance the
first Sunday out, and we did something in that line a week later. But
then we struck Genoa, where we lost the Promoter and took on this
European influx of languages, and now Sunday is the same as Friday or
Tuesday or any other day, and it would take an expert to tell the
difference.
I do not blame it all to the Europeans. They are a good lot, I believe,
some of them I am sure are, and we have taken to them amazingly. They
did teach us a few new diversions, but we were ready for instruction and
the Reprobates would have corrupted us anyhow, so it is no matter. The
new-comers only stimulated our education and added variety to our
progress. But they did make it bad for Sunday--the old-fashioned Sunday,
such as we had the first week out.
Not that our "pilgrims" are a bad lot--not by any means. They do whoop
it up pretty lively in the booze-bazaar now and then, and even a number
of our American ladies have developed a weakness for that congenial
corner of the ship. But everything is p. p., which is _Kurfuerst_ for
perfectly proper, and on this particular Sunday you could not scrape up
enough real sin on this ship to interest Satan five minutes.
Even the Reprobates are not entirely abandoned, and only three different
parties have been removed from their table in the dining-saloon by
request--request of the parties, that is--said parties being accustomed
to the simpler life--pleasant diversions of the home circle, as it
were--and not to the sparkle and the flow of good-fellowship on the high
seas, with the _bon mot_ of the Horse-Doctor, the repartee of the
Colonel, and the placid expletive of the Apostle which the rest of us
are depraved enough to adore.
The Apostle, by-the-way, is going to Jerusalem. He has been there
before, which he does not offer as a reason for going again, for he
found no comfort there, and he is unable to furnish the Doctor with a
sane reason why any one should ever want to go there, even once. I
suspect that when the sale of tickets for the side trips began the
Apostle, in his innocence, feared that there might not be enough to go
around, and thought that he had better secure one in case of accident. I
suspect this from his manner of urging the Doctor to secure one for
himself.
"You'll be too late, if you're not careful," he said. "You'd better go
right up and get your ticket now."
The Doctor was not alarmed. "Don't worry, Joe," he said. "You're booked
for Jerusalem, all right enough. I'll get mine when I decide to go."
"But suppose you decide to go after the party is made up?"
The Doctor stroked his chin. "Hell-of-a-note if I can't go ashore and
buy a ticket for Jerusalem," he said, which had not occurred to the
Apostle, who immediately remembered that he didn't want to go to
Jerusalem anyway, had never wanted to go, and had vowed, before, he
would never go again.
However, he will go, because the Colonel is going; and the Colonel is
going because, as the Doctor still insists, he made his money by
publishing Bibles without reading them, which I think doubtful--not
doubtful that he did not read them, but that he is going to the Holy
Land in consequence. I think he is going because he knows the Apostle is
going--and the Doctor, and the game of piquet. Those are reasons enough
for the Colonel. He is ready at a moment's notice to follow that
combination around the world.
But if we no longer have services on these sea Sundays we have other
features. The Music-Master plays for us, if encouraged, and he gave us a
lecture this afternoon. It was on ancient music, or art, or archaeology,
I am not sure which. I listened attentively and I am pretty sure it was
one of those things. He is a delightful old soul and his German is the
best I ever heard. If I could have about ten years' steady practice,
twelve hours a day, I think I could understand some of it.
The "Widow" entertains us too. She belongs to the Genoa contingent, and
is one of those European polyglots who speak every continental language
and make a fair attempt at English. It is her naivete and unfailing
good-nature that divert us. She approached one of our American ladies
who wears black.
"You a widow, not?" she said.
"Oh no, I am not a widow."
"Ah, then mebbe you yus' divorce, like me."
We get along well with the Europeans. Our captain tells us he has never
seen the nations mix more harmoniously, which means that we are a good
lot, altogether, which is fortunate enough.
But I am prone to run on about the ship and our travellers and forget
graver things; I ought to be writing about Greece, I suppose, and of the
wonders we are going to see, to-morrow, in Athens. I would do it, only I
haven't read the guide-book yet, and then I have a notion that Greece
has been done before. The old _Quaker City_ was quarantined and did not
land her people in Greece (except two parties who went by night), and
the "Innocents" furnishes only that fine description of the Acropolis by
moonlight.
But a good many other excursionists have landed there, and most of them
have told about it, in one way and another. Now it is my turn, but I
shall wait. I have already waited a long time for Athens-- I do not need
to begin the story just yet. Instead I have come out here on deck to
look across to Peloponnesus, which has risen out of the sea, a long gray
shore, our first sight of the mainland where heroes battled and
mythology was born.
I expected the shores of Greece would look like that--bleak, barren, and
forbidding. I don't know why, but that was my thought--perhaps because
the nation itself has lost the glory of its ancient days. The
Music-Master is looking at it too. It means more to him than to most of
us, I imagine. As he looks over to that gray shore he is seeing in his
vision a land where there was once a Golden Age, when the groves sang
with Orpheus and the reeds with Pan, while nymphs sported in hidden
pools or tripped lightly in the dappled shade.
To-morrow he will go mad, I think, for we shall anchor at Athens, in the
Bay of Phaleron.
XV
A PORT OF MISSING DREAMS
There were low voices on the deck, just outside my port-hole. I realized
that it was morning then; also that the light was coming in and that we
were lying at anchor. I was up by that time. It was just at the first
sunrising, and the stretch of water between the ship and the shore had
turned a pinkish hue. Beyond it were some buildings, and above the
buildings, catching the first glint of day on its structured heights,
rose a stately hill.
The Amiable Girl (I have mentioned her before, I believe) and a
companion were leaning over the ship's rail, trying to distinguish
outlines, blended in the vague morning light. The Amiable Girl was
peering through a binocular, and I caught the words "Parthenon" and
"Caryatides"; then to her companion, "Take the glass."
Which the other girl did, and, after gazing steadily for a moment, said:
"Yes! Oh yes, indeed-- I can see them now, quite distinctly!"
And then, even with my naked eye, I could make out certain details of
that historic summit we have travelled so far to see. Three miles away,
perhaps, the Acropolis arose directly in front of us--its columned crown
beginning to glow and burn in answer to the old, old friend that has
awakened it to glory, morning after morning, century after century, for
a full twenty-three hundred years.
The light came fast now, and with my glass I could bring the hill-top
near. I could make out the Parthenon--also the Temple of Victory, I
thought, and those marble women who have seen races pass and nations
crumble, and religions fade back into fable and the realm of shades. It
was all aglow, presently--a vision! So many wonderful mornings, we have
had, but none like this. Nor can there be so many lives that hold in
them a sunrise on the Acropolis from the Bay of Phaleron.
I lost no time in getting on deck, but it seemed that everybody was
there ahead of me. They were strung along the rail, and each one had his
glass, or his neighbor's, and was pointing and discoursing and argufying
and having a beautiful time. The Diplomat was holding forth on the
similarity of modern and ancient Greek, and was threatening to use the
latter on the first victim that came within range. The Patriarch, who is
religious when he happens to think about it, was trying to find Mars
Hill, where St. Paul preached; the Credulous One was pointing out to
everybody Lykabettos Hill as Mt. Ararat (information obtained from the
Horse-Doctor), while the Apostle and the Colonel were quarrelling
fiercely over a subject which neither of them knew anything about--the
rise of Christianity in Greece.
I got into a row myself, presently, with one of the boys, just because I
happened to make some little classical allusion-- I have forgotten what
it was now, and I didn't seem to know much about it then, from what he
said. We were all stirred up with knowledge, brought face to face with
history, as we were, and bound to unload it on somebody. Only the
Music-Master wasn't. A little apart from any group, he stood clutching
the rail, his face shining with a light that was not all of the morning,
gazing in silence at his hill of dreams.
We went ashore in boats that had pretty Greek rugs in them, and took a
little train on which all the cars were smoking-cars (there are no other
kind in Greece), and we looked out the windows trying to imagine we were
really in Greece where once the gods dwelt; where Homer sang and
Achilles fought; where the first Argonauts set sail for the Golden
Fleece. I wish we could have met those voyagers before they started.
They wouldn't have needed to go then. They could have taken the Golden
Fleece off of this crowd if they had anything to sell in that Argosy of
theirs, and their descendants are going to do it yet. I know from the
conversation that is going on behind me. The Mill and a lot of her boon
companions are doing the talking, and it is not of the classic ruins we
are about to see, but of the lace they bought in Malta and Gibraltar,
and of the embroidery they are going to buy in Greece.
Our chariots were waiting at the station--carriages, I mean, nice modern
ones--and we were started in a minute, and suddenly there was the
Theseum, the best preserved of Greek ruins, I believe, right in front of
us, though we did not stop for it then. But it was startling--that old,
discolored temple standing there unenclosed, unprotected, unregarded in
the busy midst of modern surroundings.
We went swinging away down a fine street, staring at Greek signs and new
types of faces; the occasional native costume; the little panniered
donkeys lost in their loads of fruit. I was in a carriage with Laura and
the Diplomat, and the Diplomat translated Greek signs, rejoicing to find
that he could make out some of the words; also that he could get a rise
out of the driver when he spoke to him, though it wasn't certain whether
the driver, who was a very large person in a big blue coat (we
christened him the Blue Elephant), was talking to him of the horse, and
we were all equally pleased, whichever it was.
The Acropolis was in sight from points here and there, but we did not
visit it yet. Instead, we turned into a fine boulevard, anchored for a
time at the corner of a park, waiting for guides, perhaps, then went
swinging down by the royal gardens and the white marble palace of the
king.
It is King George First now, a worthy successor to the rulers of that
elder day when Greek art and poetry and national prosperity set a
standard for the world. Athens was a pretty poor place when King George
came to the throne in 1863. He was only eighteen years old, then--the
country was bankrupt, the throne had gone begging. In _Innocents Abroad_
Mark Twain says:
"It was offered to one of Victoria's sons, and afterwards to
various other younger sons of royalty who had no thrones and
were out of business, but they all had the charity to
decline the dreary honor, and was laid out in a natural
hollow by Lycurgus, before Christ over three hundred years,
and was rebuilt something less than five hundred years later
by the Averof of that day, Herodes Atticus, whose body was
buried there. Then came the tumble and crumble of European
glory; the place fell into ruin, was covered with debris,
and lay forgotten or disregarded for a thousand years; after
which, King George took up the matter, and dug out the
remains as soon as he could get money for the job."
That was Averof's inspiration. Without it he would most likely have
spent his money in Alexandria, where he made it. Certainly without King
George to point the way the progress of Athens would have been a sorry
straggle instead of a stately march.
[Illustration: WE LOOKED ACROSS THE ENTRANCE AND THERE ROSE
THE ACROPOLIS, HIGH AGAINST THE BLUE]
The stadium seats fifty thousand, and has held half as many more when
crowded. In the revived Olympic games in 1896 the Greeks won twelve
prizes, the Americans followed with eleven, France carried off three,
and the English one. That was a good record for the Americans, and we
didn't fail to mention it, though I think most of us were thinking of
those older games, won and lost here under this placid sky, and of the
crowds that had sat here and shouted themselves hoarse as the victors
turned the goal. Then, standing high on the marble seats, we looked
across the entrance, and there rose the Acropolis, lifted high against
the blue, just as those old spectators had seen it so long ago. Through
half-closed lashes we re-created it in gleaming pentelican and so gazed
upon a vision, the vision they had seen.
[Illustration: HE WOULD SWING HIS ARMS AND BEGIN, "YOU SEE--!" THE REST
REQUIRED A MIND-READER]
It was hard to leave that place. It would have been harder, if it had
not been for the guide we had. He insisted on talking in some language
which nobody recognized, and which upon inquiry I was surprised to find
was English. He had learned it overnight, it having been discovered that
the guide engaged for our party had been detained--probably in jail--for
the same offence. Still our sample would have done better if he had sat
up later. As it was he knew just two words. He would swing his arms and
point to something and begin, "You see--!" The rest required a
mind-reader. The German guide was better--much better. I haven't a
perfect ear for German, but I concluded to join that party.
It was not far to the Temple of Jupiter--the group of fifteen
Corinthian columns which are all that remain of what Aristotle called "a
work of despotic grandeur." It must have been that. There were
originally one hundred and four of these columns, each nearly sixty feet
high and more than five and a half feet in diameter. Try to imagine
that, if you can!
Think of the largest elm-tree you know; its trunk will not be as thick
as that, nor as high, but it will give you a tangible idea. Then try to
imagine one hundred and four marble pillars of that size, the side
extending in double row the length of a city block, and the ends in
triple row a little less than half as far--pure-white and fluted,
crowned with capitals of acanthus leaves, and you will form some vague
idea of what Aristotle meant. We cramped our necks and strained our
eyes, gazing at the beautiful remnant of that vast structure, but we did
not realize the full magnitude of it until we came near a fallen column
and stood beside it and stepped its length. Even then it was hard to
believe that each of the graceful group still standing was of such size
as this.
Peisistratos the tyrant began this temple and picked the location, said
to be the spot where the last waters of the Deluge disappeared. It was
to be dedicated to Deucalion, the founder of the new race of mortals,
and the low ground was filled up and made level and bulwarked round with
a stone substructure, as good to-day as when it was finished,
twenty-five hundred years ago.
Peisistratos did not get the temple done. He died when it was only
fairly under way, and his sons did not remain in power long enough to
carry out his plans. He was a tyrant, though a gentle one, ambitious
and fond of all lovely things. He had his faults, but they were mainly
lovable ones, and he fostered a cultivation which within a century would
make Athens the architectural garden of the world.
The example of Peisistratos was followed lavishly during the next
hundred years, but his own splendid temple was overlooked. Perhaps
Pericles did not like the location and preferred to spend his money on
the Acropolis, where it would make a better showing. I don't know. I
know it was left untouched for nearly four hundred years, and then the
work was carried on by Antiochus of Syria, who constructed it on a grand
scale. But it killed Antiochus, too, and then it waited another three
hundred years for the Emperor Hadrian to come along, about 174 A.D., and
complete it, and renew it, and dedicate it to Jupiter Olympus, whose
reign by that time was nearly over.
Never mind who built it, now, or what creed was consecrated there. The
glory of the Golden Age rises on the hill above us, but I think one can
meet nothing more impressive than this in all Greece.
Hadrian's arch is just beyond the Temple of Jupiter, and we drove
through it on our way to the Acropolis. It is not a very big arch, nor
is it very impressive. I don't think Hadrian built it himself or it
wouldn't have been like that. It looks as if it had been built by an
economical successor.
However, it is complimentary enough. On the side toward what was then
the new part of Athens, called Hadrianople, is an inscription in Greek
which says "This is the City of Hadrian, and not of Theseus," and on
the side toward the Acropolis, "This is the old city of Theseus." And
old it was, for the newest temples on the Acropolis had been built six
hundred years even then.
It was only a little way to the foot of the Acropolis and the Theatre of
Dionysus. We have visited no place where I wished so much to linger.
This was the theatre of Greece in her Golden Age. Here Aeschylus and
Euripides had their first nights--or days, perhaps, for I believe they
were mostly matinees--and Sophocles, too, and here it was that the
naughty Aristophanes burlesqued them with his biting parodies. Here it
was they competed for prizes, and tried to be friends though
playwrights, and abused the manager when they got into a corner
together, and abused the actors openly, and vowed that some day they
would build a theatre of their own where they could present their own
plays in their own way, and where their suppressed manuscripts could get
a hearing.
Perhaps history does not record these things, but it does not need to. I
know a good many playwrights and managers and actors, and I know that
human nature has not changed in twenty-four hundred years. I know that
the old, old war was going on then, just as it is now, and will continue
to go on so long as there are such things as proscenium and auditorium,
box-office, gallery, and reserved seats.
I took one of the last named--a beautiful marble chair in the front row,
just below the plinth where once the throne of Hadrian sat--a chair with
an inscription which told that in the old days it was reserved for a
priest or dignitary--and I looked across the marble floor where the
chorus did its rhythmic march, and beyond to the marble stage-front with
its classic reliefs and the figure of Silenus whose bowed shoulders have
so long been the support of dramatic art. The marble floor--they called
it the Orchestra then--is no longer perfect, and grass and flowers push
their way up between the slabs. The reliefs are headless and scarred,
but the slabs are still the same the chorus trod, the place is still a
theatre, and one has but to close his eyes a little to fill it with
forms vague and shadowy indeed, as ghosts are likely to be, but
realities none the less. Our party had moved along now to other things,
and Laura and I lingered for the play.
It was much better than our theatres at home. There was no dazzle of
lights, no close air or smell of gas, and there was plenty of room for
one to put his feet. However, the play I did not care for so much as the
chorus. The acting was heavy and stilted, I thought, and declamatory. I
was inclined to throw a piece of the theatre at the leading man.
[Illustration: I WOULD HAVE APPLIED FOR A POSITION IN THE CHORUS MYSELF]
But the chorus! Why, the very words "Greek Chorus" have something in
them that rouses and thrills, and I know, now, the reason why. In
movement, in voice, in costume it was pure poetry. I would have applied
for a position in the chorus myself, but Laura suddenly announced that
the show was over and that everybody but us had gone long ago.
If I had lived in that elder day I should have gone mainly to the plays
of Aristophanes. They were gay and full of good things, and they were
rare, too, and poetic, even though they were not always more than skin
deep. That was deep enough for some of his contemporaries. Deep enough
for the popocrat Cleon, who tried to deprive Aristophanes of his
citizenship, in revenge.
Aristophanes wrote a play that acted like a mustard-plaster on Cleon. It
made him howl and caper and sweat and bring libel suits. Whereupon
Aristophanes wrote another, and when he could get no actor to take the
leading part--that of Cleon--he took it himself, and Cleon went to see
it and wore out his teeth on tenpenny nails during the performance. Yes,
I should have had a weakness for Aristophanes in those days, though I
wish he might have omitted that tragic satire which twenty years later
was to send Socrates the hemlock cup.
We climbed the hill a little way to a grotto and drank of the spring of
Aesculapius and all our diseases passed away. It only cost a penny or
two, and was the cheapest doctor bill I ever paid. I never saw a
healthier lot than our party when they came out of the grotto and
started for the Odeon--the little theatre which Herodes Atticus built in
memory of his wife.
Two thousand years ago Cicero wrote home from Athens: "Wherever we walk
is history." We realize that here at the base of the Acropolis. From the
Theatre of Dionysus to the Spring of Aesculapius is only a step. From the
Spring to the Sanctuary of Isis is another step; from the Sanctuary to
the Odeon of Herodes is a moment's walk; the Pnyx--the people's
forum--is a stone's-throw away, and the Hill of Mars. All about, and
everywhere, great events have trod one upon the other; mighty mobs have
been aroused by oratory; mighty armies have rallied to the assault; a
hundred battles have drenched the place with blood. And above all this
rises the Acropolis, the crowning glory.
We postponed the Acropolis until after luncheon. There would have been
further riot and bloodshed on this consecrated ground had our conductor
proposed to attempt it then. Our Argonauts are a fairly well-behaved lot
and fond of antiquities, even though they giggle at the guide now and
then, but they are human, too, and have the best appetites I ever saw.
They would leave the Acropolis for luncheon, even though they knew an
earthquake would destroy it before they could get back.
We did stop briefly at the Pnyx hill--the gathering-place of the
Athenians--and stood on the rostrum cut from the living rock--the "Bema"
from which Demosthenes harangued the populace.
[Illustration: TOOK TURNS ADDRESSING THE MULTITUDE]
As usual Laura, age fourteen, and I got behind the party. We stood on
the Bema and took turns addressing the multitude, until we came near
being left altogether by the Diplomat and the Blue Elephant, who finally
whirled us away in a wild gallop to the hotel, which, thanks to Jupiter
and all the Olympian synod, we reached in time.
We made a new guide arrangement in the afternoon. It was discovered that
the guide for the German party could handle English, too, so we doubled
up and he talked to us first in one language, then in the other, and
those of us who knew a little of both caught it going and coming.
Perhaps his English was not the best, but I confess I adored it. He
lisped a little, and his voice--droning, plaintive, and pathetic--was
full of the sorrow that goes with a waning glory and a vanished day. We
named him Lykabettos because somehow he looked like that, and then, too,
he towered above us as he talked.
So long as I draw breath that afternoon on the Acropolis will live
before me as a sunlit dream. I shall see it always in the tranquil light
of an afternoon in spring when the distant hills are turning green and
forming pictures everywhere between mellowed columns and down ruined
aisles. Always I shall wander there with Laura, and resting on the steps
of the Parthenon I shall hear the sad and gentle voice of Lykabettos
recounting the tale of its glory and decline. I shall hear him say:
"Zen Pericles he gazzer all ze moany zat was collect for ze army and he
bring it here. But Pericles he use it to make all zese beautiful temple,
and by and by when ze war come zere was no moany for ze army, so zay
could not win."
Lykabettos' eyes wander mournfully in the direction of Sparta, whence
the desolation had come. Then a little later, pointing up to a rare
section of frieze--the rest missing--!
"Zat did not fall down, but stay zere, always ze same--ze honly piece
zat Lord Elgin could not take away," and so on and on, through that long
sweet afternoon.
I shall not attempt the story of the Acropolis here. The tale of that
old citadel which later became literally the pinnacle of Greek
architecture already fills volumes. I do not think Lykabettos was
altogether just to Pericles, however, or to Lord Elgin, for that matter.
True, Pericles did complete the Parthenon and otherwise beautify the
Acropolis, and in a general way he was for architecture rather than war.
But I do not find that he ever exhausted the public treasury on those
temples, and I do find where his war policy was disregarded when
disregard meant defeat. Still, if there had been more money and fewer
temples on the Acropolis, the result of any policy might have been
different, and there is something pathetically gratifying in the thought
that in the end Athens laid down military supremacy as the price of her
marble crown.
As for Lord Elgin, it may be, as is said, that he did carry off a
carload or so of the beautiful things when he had obtained from the
Government (it was Turkish then) permission to remove a few pieces. But
it may be added that the things he removed were wholly uncared for at
that time and were being mutilated and appropriated by vandals who, but
for Elgin, might have robbed the world of them altogether. As it is,
they are safe in the British Museum, though I think they should be
restored to Greece in this her day of reincarnation.
We stood before the Temple of Victory and gazed out on the Bay of
Salamis, where victory was won. We entered the Erechtheum, built on the
sacred spot where Athena victoriously battled with Poseidon for the
possession of Athens, and we stood in reverential awe before the marble
women that have upheld her portico so long. We crossed the relic-strewn
space and visited the Acropolis museum, but it was chilly and lifeless,
and I did not care for the classified, fragmentary things. Then we
entered the little enclosure known as Belvedere and gazed down on the
Athens of to-day.
If anybody doubts that modern Athens is beautiful, let him go to that
spot and look down through the evening light and behold a marble vision
such as the world nowhere else presents. Whatever ancient Athens may
have been, it would hardly surpass this in beauty, and if Pericles could
stand here to-day and gaze down upon the new city which has arisen to
preserve his treasures, I think he would be satisfied.
When the others had gone to visit the Hill of Mars, Laura and I wandered
back to the Parthenon, followed its silent corridors, and saw it all
again to our hearts' content. And when our eyes were tired, we rested
them by looking out between the columns to the hills, Hymettus and
Pentelicus, glorified in the evening light, wearing always their "violet
crown."
_They_ are unchanged. Races may come and go, temples may rise and totter
and crumble into dust. The old, old days that we so prize and
honor--they are only yesterdays to the hills. The last fragment of these
temples will be gone by and by--the last memory of their glory--but the
hills will be still young and wearing their violet crown, still turning
green in the breath of a Grecian spring.
Down through that splendid entrance, the Propylaea, at last, for it was
growing late. We had intended climbing the Hill of Mars, where St. Paul
preached, but we could see it plainly in the sunset light and there was
no need to labor up the stairs. I think it was about this time of the
day when St. Paul preached there. He had been wandering about Athens,
among the temples, on a sort of tour of observation, making a remark
occasionally--of criticism, perhaps--disputing with the Jews in the
synagogue, and now and again in the market-place. The story, told in the
seventeenth chapter of Acts, begins:
"Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the
Stoicks encountered him. And some said, 'What will this
babbler say?' Other some, 'He seemeth to be a setter forth
of strange gods,' because he preached unto them Jesus and
the resurrection."
They brought St. Paul here to the Areopagus, that is, to Mars Hill,
where in ancient days an open-air court was held, a court of supreme
jurisdiction in cases of life and death. But it would seem that the
court had degenerated in St. Paul's time to a place of gossip and
wrangle. "For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent
their time in nothing else, but either to tell or hear some new thing."
Paul rose up before the assembly and made his famous utterance
beginning, "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too
superstitious." It was a fearless, wonderful sermon he delivered, and I
like to think that it was just at the hour when we saw the hill; just at
the evening-time, with the sunset glory on his face. Paul closed his
remarks with a reference to the resurrection, a doctrine new to them:
"And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some
mocked: and others said, 'We will hear thee again of the
matter.'"
Which they did, for that was nineteen hundred years ago, and the
churches of Greece to-day still ring with St. Paul's doctrine. We
climbed into our waiting carriages, and turning saw the Acropolis in the
sunset, as we had seen it in the sunrise that now seemed ages ago--which
indeed it was, for we had been travelling backward and forward since
then through the long millennial years.
* * * * *
I wanted to see Athens by night, and after dinner I slipped away and
bribed a couple of boatmen who were hovering about the ship to take me
ashore. It was not so far, but the wind and tide had kicked up a heavy
sea and I confess I was sorry I started. Every time we slid down one
wave I was certain we were going straight through the next, and I think
the boatmen had some such idea, for they prayed steadily and crossed
themselves whenever safety permitted.
We arrived, however, and I took the little train for the Theseus
station. I wanted to get a near view of the temple and I thought night
would be a good time. I would have walked there but I did not quite know
the way. So I got into a carriage and said "Theseum," and the driver
took me to a beer-saloon. It was a cheerful enough temple, but it was
not classic. When I had seen it sufficiently, I got into the carriage
and said "Theseum" again, and he took me to a theatre. The theatre was
not classic, either, being of about the average Bowery type. So I got
into the carriage and said "Theseum" again, and he took me to a
graveyard. It didn't seem a good time to visit graveyards. I only looked
through the gate a little and got back into the carriage and said the
magic word once more and was hauled off to a blazing hotel.
That wouldn't do either. These might be, and doubtless were, all
Theseums, but they were that in name only. What I wanted was the
sure-enough, only original Theseum, set down in the guide-book as the
best-preserved temple of the ancient Greek world. I explained this to a
man in the hotel who explained it to my driver and we were off, down a
beautiful marble business street, all closed and shuttered, for Athens
being a capital is a quiet place after nightfall--as quiet as
Washington, almost.
We were in front of the old temple soon. It was fairly dark there and
nobody about. There was a dog barking somewhere, but I did not mind
that. Dogs are not especially modern, and this one might be the
three-headed Cerberus for all I knew or cared. What I wanted was to see
the old temple when other people had gone to bed and the shadows had
shut away the less-fortunate near-by architecture. They had done that
now; the old temple might be amidst its earliest surroundings so far as
I could see.
I walked up and down among its graceful Doric columns and stepped its
measurements, and found it over a hundred feet long and nearly fifty
wide; then I sat down on the step and listened to Cerberus bark--he had
all three heads going at once now--and tried to imagine the life that
had gathered there when this old fane was new. It is one of the temples
of that brief golden period when all Athens burst into architectural
flower. It was dedicated to Theseus and Hercules, and perhaps to a few
other heroes and demi-gods and goddesses that they happened to think of
when they laid the corner-stone.
One story has it that it was built on the spot where the Marathon runner
fell dead, after telling in a word his news of victory. I like to
believe that this is true. I like to reassemble the crowds here--the
anxious faces waiting for the earliest returns from that momentous
struggle which would decide the fate of Greece. I like to picture that
panting, white-faced runner as he dashes in among them and utters his
single glad cry as his soul goes out, and I like to believe that this
temple, dedicated to other heroes, was established here in his memory.
But for Marathon there would have been no Golden Age--no Pericles, no
Parthenon, no splendid constellation of names that need not be repeated
here. The victory of Marathon was the first great check to a Persian
invasion that would have Orientalized not only Greece, but all Europe.
So it is proper that a temple should be built on the spot where that
great news was told, and proper, too, that of all the temples of that
halcyon time this should remain the most perfect through the years.
XVI
ATHENS THAT IS
On the road that leads from the old market-place, up past the Theseum to
the Acropolis, there is a record of a humble but interesting sort. On
the lower corner block of an old stone house, facing the highway, are
three inscriptions. Two of them have been partly erased, but the third
is quite legible, and one who knows Greek can read plainly a description
of the property in metes and bounds and the original Greek word for
"hypothecated," followed by "1000 drachmas."
It is a "live" mortgage, that is what it is, and it has been clinging to
that property and piling up interest for more than two thousand years.
The two half-obliterated inscriptions above it were once mortgages, too,
but they were paid some time, and cancelled by erasure. The third one
has never been satisfied, and would hold, like enough, in a court of
law.
The owner of the property wrestled with that mortgage, I suppose, and
struggled along, and died at last without paying it. Or perhaps the
great war came, with upheaval and dissolution of things in general.
Anyway, it was never paid, but has stayed there century after century,
compounding interest, until to-day the increment of that original
thousand d
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