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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Ship Dwellers, by Albert Bigelow Paine,
+Illustrated by Thomas Fogarty
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Ship Dwellers
+       A Story of a Happy Cruise
+
+
+Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2010  [eBook #34096]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHIP DWELLERS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Annie McGuire from page images generously made
+available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 34096-h.htm or 34096-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34096/34096-h/34096-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34096/34096-h.zip)
+
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/shipdwellersstor00painrich
+
+
+
+
+
+[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 BE�UNES                         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
+Kurf�rst_ 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
+_Kurf�rst_ 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-pr�sident a. D., and Frau Regierungs-pr�sident a. D., and
+looking further discovered Herr Kommerzienrat, Herr Oberpr�sidialrat
+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 Be�unes was
+his name, guide and courier to Mark Twain and his party, forty-two years
+ago.
+
+Be�unes 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 BE�UNES]
+
+We could have listened all night to Be�unes, for he made the old time
+and still older traditions real to us. And perhaps Be�unes 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
+Be�unes 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 Be�unes, 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 "_zw�lf f�r 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 caf�s; 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 caf�s 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 _Kurf�rst_ 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 medi�val 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 �schylus 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 C�sar 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 medi�val 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 _Kurf�rst_ 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 arch�ology,
+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 na�vet� 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 d�bris,
+     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 �schylus 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
+�sculapius 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 �sculapius 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 Propyl�a, 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 drachmas would redeem Greece.
+
+I was half a mind to look up the heirs of that old money-lender and buy
+their claim and begin their suit. Think of being involved in a tangle
+that has been stringing along through twenty-three centuries, and would
+tie up yesterday, to-day, and forever in a hard knot! I would have done
+it, I think, only that it might take another twenty-three centuries to
+settle it, and I was afraid the ship wouldn't wait.
+
+If there is any one who still does not believe that modern Athens is
+beautiful and a credit to her ancient name, let him visit as we did her
+modern temples. We had passed the ancient market entrance, the Tower of
+the Winds, and other of the old landmarks, when suddenly we turned into
+a wonderful boulevard, and drove by or visited, one after another, the
+New Academy, the University, the National Library, the Gallery of Fine
+Arts, and the National Museum. If Pericles were alive to-day he would
+approve of those buildings and add them to his collection.
+
+All the old classic grace and beauty have been preserved in the same
+pure-white pentelican marble, of which it is estimated that there is
+enough to last any city five thousand years. Corinthian, Ionic, and
+Doric columns that might have come from the Acropolis itself--and did,
+in design--adorn and support these new edifices as they did the old, and
+lend their ineffable glory to the rehabilitation of Greece.
+
+We have learned, by-the-way, to distinguish the kinds of columns. They
+were all just Greek to us at first, but we know them now. When we see a
+column with acanthus leaves on the capital we know it is Corinthian,
+because we remember the story of the girl of Corinth who planted
+acanthus on her lover's grave and put a hollow tile around it for
+protection. Some of the leaves came up outside of the tile by and by,
+and a young architect came along and got his idea for the Corinthian
+capital.
+
+We know the Ionic, too, because it looks like its initial--a capital "I"
+with a little curly top--and we say "I" is for Ionic; and we can tell
+the Doric, because it's the only one that doesn't suggest anything
+particular to remember it by. It's worth coming to Greece to learn these
+things. We should never have learned them at home--never in the world.
+We should not have had any reason for wanting to learn them.
+
+We got tired of the Museum--Laura, age fourteen, and I--we were too
+young and frivolous for such things, though they are wonderful enough, I
+am sure. But then museums we have always with us, while a day in Athens
+is a fleeting thing. We wanted to take one of our private
+side-excursions, and we tried to communicate this fact to the Blue
+Elephant, who was our driver to-day, as yesterday.
+
+It was no light matter. He nodded and smiled when we indicated that we
+wanted to leave the procession and go it on our own hook, but he did not
+move. We had already made up our minds that he was subject to fits, or
+was just plain crazy, for more than once he had suddenly broke away from
+the party and whirled us around side-streets for a dozen blocks or so to
+something not down on the programme, rejoining the procession in some
+unexpected place.
+
+But whatever may have induced his impulses then, nothing seemed to stir
+his ambition for adventure now. I gesticulated and produced money; I
+summoned the Diplomat to tackle him in his best Xenophan, but it was no
+use. I got the guide at last, and then there was an exciting harangue
+that looked as if it might end in blood. I suppose our man thought he
+wouldn't get his full pay if he deserted the ship crowd. He must have
+been convinced, finally, for he leaped upon the box, and away we went in
+a wild race for the shops and by-streets where we had begged the guide
+to let us go.
+
+We had explained that we wanted some bags--some little embroidered bags,
+such as we had seen earlier in the day when we could not stop. The Blue
+Elephant understood now and took us to where there were bags--many bags.
+The whole street was lined with bags and other embroideries, and the
+Greeks turned out to give us a welcome.
+
+It is said that one Greek is equal to three Turks, and I believe it. The
+poorest Greek we saw was too much for two Americans, and we were beset
+and besieged and literally borne down and swamped by a rising tide of
+bags. We bought at many prices and in many places; we piled the carriage
+full and fled away at last when they were going to dump upon us a
+collection of costumes and firearms and draperies that would have
+required a flat-car.
+
+We were breathing easier when the Blue Elephant pulled us into another
+narrow street, and behold! it was another street of bags. Dear me! how
+could we explain that we had enough bags and wanted to see other things?
+I would almost have given four hundred dollars to have been able to
+tell him that I wanted to visit the old Byzantine structure we had
+passed that morning--the one with all the little shoemakers
+down-stairs--but the thing was impossible. I must buy some more bags,
+there was no help for it. So I did buy some more, and I picked out a
+place where a man spoke enough English to give the Blue Elephant a fresh
+start, which brought us at last to the old Byzantine building and the
+little shoemakers.
+
+Then we saw the street of a hundred clanking sounds--anyway we called it
+that, for they made all kinds of copper vessels in there--and we got out
+and told the Blue Elephant to wait, for the place was very narrow; but
+we couldn't lose him, seeing he was always on our heels, ready to whirl
+us away somewhere, anywhere, in his crazy, fitty fashion. We had to let
+him do it, now, for we had used up all the interpreters we could find;
+besides, we didn't care, any more.
+
+Still, when it got to be near luncheon-time we did begin to wonder where
+the party had gone. It did not matter greatly, we could lunch anywhere,
+but we were curious to know whether we should ever see them or the ship
+again, and when we mentioned the matter to the Blue Elephant he merely
+grinned and whipped up his horses and capered across another square. But
+presently I realized that some sort of procession was passing and that
+he had turned into it. Then it was all just like dreams I've had, for it
+was our own procession, and we were calmly going along in it, and right
+away were being personally conducted through a remarkable church where
+the king and queen go, and sit in golden chairs. Alice in Wonderland
+could hardly have had a more surprising adventure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our party being free after luncheon, Laura and I engaged Lykabettos on
+our own account and drove out to the Bay of Salamis, where Xerxes made
+his great mistake in the matter of fleets.
+
+Perhaps Lykabettos had taken a fancy to us, for he engaged a carriage
+that had been awarded a prize last year in the games, he said, and the
+team with it. We believed Lykabettos--anybody would--and anyway it was a
+beautiful outfit, and we cantered away over a fine road, past wayside
+shrines, past little huts and houses, past a little memorial that marks
+the place on a hill where Xerxes placed his silver-footed throne so that
+he might sit comfortably and watch the enemy's ships go down. Only, the
+programme didn't work out that way, Lykabettos said:
+
+"Zen Xerxes he pretty soon see zat it was not ze Greek ship zat sink,
+and he mus' run pretty quick or he will be capture; and hees ship zay
+try to escape, and he not take away hees army from zat little island you
+see over zere; zay stay zere and are all massacre by ze Greek--by ze men
+and ze women, too, who have watch ze battle from here and go over and
+kill zem."
+
+The little island Lykabettos pointed out was Psyttalleia, and the flower
+of Persia perished there. It was a tiny bit of barren land then, and it
+is to-day. The hills around Salamis are barren, too, covered only with a
+gray weed like the sage-brush of Nevada, and stunted groves of scrubby
+pine and ground cedar--referred to by Lykabettos as "ze forest."
+
+We came to the tiny hamlet on the water's side, a collection of two or
+three huts, and Lykabettos engaged a lateen-sailed lugger (I should call
+it that, though its name was probably something else), and with a fresh
+wind half-ahead we billowed over the blue waters of Salamis, where
+twenty-five hundred years ago the Persian ships went down. It was a
+cloudy afternoon and there was a stormy feeling in the sky. It seemed
+just the time to be there, and there was nothing to dispel the illusion
+of imminent battle that was in the air.
+
+I was perfectly sure, and so was Laura, that the Persian fleet was
+likely at any moment to round the point and land troops on Pysttalleia;
+also that the Greek fleet was hiding somewhere in the Bay of Eleusis,
+and that there were going to be very disagreeable happenings there in a
+few minutes. There was a hut where we landed on the Island of Salamis
+and a girl making lace at the front door. She might have been there
+twenty-five hundred years ago, as well as not--perhaps was--and saw the
+great victory.
+
+We sailed back then, crossing again the exact spot where the battle
+raged, and drove home through the gathering evening, while Lykabettos
+recounted in that sad voice of his the history of ancient days. We are
+on the ship now, with anchor weighed, looking to the Farther East.
+Athens with its temples and its traditions drops below the horizon.
+Darkness and silence once more claim the birthplace of gods and heroes
+as we slip out of these quiet waters and head for the �gean Sea.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+INTO THE DARDANELLES
+
+
+We saw but little of the Isles of Greece. It was night and we were tired
+after a hard day; most of us, I think, turned in early. Now and then a
+light--a far tiny speck--appeared in one quarter or another--probably a
+signal beacon; that was all.
+
+But in the morning--it was soon after breakfast--a gray bank rose up out
+of the sea, and the word went round that it was Asia. That was a strange
+thing for a boy who had been brought up on the prairies of the Middle
+West--to look across the bow and see Asia coming up out of the sea. It
+brought back a small, one-room, white district schoolhouse, dropped down
+on the bleak, level prairie, and geography-class of three, standing in a
+row and singing to the tune of _Old Dan Tucker_ the rhymes of the
+continents:
+
+  "Asia sixteen millions,
+  The largest of the five grand divisions."
+
+It was not much of a rhyme, nor much of a tune, but there was a swing in
+the way we did it which fixed those facts for life. They came back now,
+and I had to get hold of myself a little to realize that this was the
+same Asia with all those square miles--the land of the Arabian Nights,
+of the apostles and the patriarchs--the wonderful country I had one day
+hoped to see. And presently we were off the Plains of Troy, passing near
+where the ships of the Greeks lay anchored, all of which seemed very
+wonderful, too, I thought. We were in the Dardanelles, then, following
+the path of those first Argonauts who set sail with Jason, and of that
+later band who set out in the _Quaker City_, forty-two years ago. No
+lack of history and tradition and old association here.
+
+But how one's information does go to seed; all of us knew something, but
+none of us knew much. Not one of us knew positively whether the
+Hellespont was the same as the Dardanelles or as the Bosporus, and when,
+with the help of the guide-book, we decided that it was the former, we
+fell into other luminous debates as to where Leander swam it when he was
+courting Hero and where Xerxes built his bridge. The captain said that
+both these things took place at Abydos, which he pointed out to us, and
+then we were in trouble right away again as to whether this was the
+Abydos of Lord Byron's poem, or merely another town by the same name. At
+all events it was not much of a place.
+
+On the whole, the shores of the Dardanelles are mostly barren and
+uninteresting, with small towns here and there and fortifications. At
+one place some men came out in a boat and went through the formality of
+letting us enter the country. It did not seem much of a permission; I
+could have given it myself. But I suppose we had to have theirs;
+otherwise they might have reached us with some kind of a gun.
+
+We entered the Sea of Marmora, passed a barren island or two; then the
+shores fell back beyond the horizon, and most of us put in the rest of
+the day pretending to read up on Constantinople. It was dark when we
+dropped anchor in the mouth of the Bosporus, and we were at dinner--a
+gala dinner, after which we danced. A third of the way around the world
+to the westward, in a country called America, a new President would be
+inaugurated to-morrow, and in the quiet dusk of our anchorage, with the
+scattered lights of Asia blinking across from one side and a shadowy,
+mysterious grove and a fairy-lighted city on the other, we celebrated
+that great occasion in the West and our arrival at the foremost mart of
+the East by dancing before Stamboul.
+
+That should have ended our day, but when we were about to break up, a
+boat-load or two of uniformed officials with distinctly Oriental faces
+and fezzes came aboard and opened business in the after cabin, going
+through our passports. Then for an hour or so there was most
+extraordinary medley of confused tongues. We had all our own kinds going
+at once and several varieties of Constantinoplese besides. And what an
+amazing performance it was, altogether--something not to be equalled
+anywhere else on the earth, I imagine, unless in Russia--a sufficient
+commentary on the progress and enlightenment of these two laggard
+nations.
+
+[Illustration: ONE'S AGE, STATED ON OATH, GOES WITH A PASSPORT]
+
+Curious how some of our ladies hesitate about showing their passports.
+One's age, stated on oath, goes with a passport.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+A CITY OF ILLUSION
+
+
+I suppose there is no more beautiful city from the outside and no more
+disheartening city from the inside than Constantinople. From the outside
+it is all fairyland and enchantment; from the inside it is all grime and
+wretchedness. Viewed from the entrance of the Bosporus, through the haze
+of morning, it is a vision. Viewed from a carriage driven through the
+streets it becomes a nightmare. If one only might see it as we did--at
+sunrise, with the minarets and domes lifting from the foliage, all aglow
+with the magic of morning--and then sail away from that dream spectacle,
+his hunger unsatisfied, he would hold at least one supreme illusion in
+his heart.
+
+For that is what it is--just an illusion--the most superb fantasy in the
+whole world. We left anchorage soon after sunrise and moved over
+abreast of Galata a little below the bridge that crosses the Golden Horn
+and connects this part of Constantinople with Stamboul. We are lying now
+full length against the street, abreast of it, where all day long a
+soiled, disordered life goes on. It is a perpetual show, but hardly a
+pleasing one. It is besmirched and raucous; it is wretched.
+
+Hawkers, guides, beggars, porters weave in and out and mingle
+vociferously. To leave the ship is to be assailed on every side. Across
+the street is a row of coffee-houses where unholy music and singing keep
+up most of the time. Also, there are dogs, scores of them--a wolfish
+breed--and they are seldom silent. This is the reverse of the picture.
+As the outside is fairyland, so this is inferno.
+
+We battled our way to our carriages and drove across the bridge to
+Stamboul. Perhaps it would be better there. But that was a mistake--it
+was worse. We entered some narrow, thronging streets--a sort of general
+market, I should say--that fairly reeked with offal. We saw presently
+that nearly everybody wore rubbers, or stilted shoes--wooden sandal
+things, with two or three inches of heel and sole--and we understood
+why; it was to lift them out of the filth. I have had dreams where,
+whichever way I turned, lay ordure and corruption, with no way out on
+any side. Such dreams were hardly worse than this. A passenger of our
+party--a lady--said afterwards:
+
+"When we drove through those streets I felt as if I had died and gone to
+hell."
+
+Yet on the whole, I think hell would be cleaner. I am sure it would not
+smell so. I have no special preference for brimstone, but I would have
+welcomed it as we drove through those Constantinople streets.
+
+I know what they smell like; I can describe it exactly: they smell like
+a garbage-can. Not the average garbage-can--fairly fresh and leading the
+busy life--but an old, opulent, tired garbage-can--one that has been
+filled up and overlooked, in August. Now and then at home a can like
+that gets into the garbage-wagon, and when that wagon comes along the
+street on a still summer morning it arrests attention. I have seen
+strong men turn pale and lovely women totter when that can went by.
+
+It would have no distinction in Constantinople. The whole city is just
+one vast garbage-can, and old--so old--why, for a thousand years or more
+they have been throwing stuff into the streets for the dogs to eat up,
+and the dogs can't eat some things, and so--
+
+Never mind; enough is enough; but if ever I get home, and if ever I want
+to recall vividly this vision of the East, I shall close my eyes when
+that garbage-wagon drives by, and once more the panaroma--panorama, I
+mean--of these thronging streets will unfold; I shall be transported
+once more to the heart of this busy city; I shall see again all the
+outlandish dress, all the strange faces, all the mosques and minarets,
+all the magic of the Orient, and I shall say, "This is it--this is the
+spicy East--this is Constantinople--Allah is indeed good!"
+
+It was at the entrance of the mosque of St. Sophia--a filthy entrance
+through a sort of an alley--that we heard our first cry of
+"Baksheesh!"--a plaintive cry from a pretty, pathetic little girl who
+clung to us, and called it over and over like the cry of a soul being
+dragged to perdition--"Bak-she-_e-e-sh_! Bak-_sh-e-e-e-sh_!" a
+long-drawn-out wail. Not one of us who would not have given her freely
+had we not known that to do so would be to touch off the cyclone--the
+cloud of vultures hovering on the outskirts. One's heart grows hard in
+the East; it has to.
+
+At the door of the mosque there was a group of creatures who put
+slippers on us and made a pretence of tying the wretched things. They
+didn't do it, of course, and one had to slide and skate and straddle to
+keep from losing them--which thing would be a fearful desecration--we
+being "Christian dogs." The Apostle in those slippers, skating and
+straddling and puffing his way through St. Sophia's was worth coming far
+to see.
+
+It is a mighty place, a grand place, but it has been described too often
+for me to attempt the details here. It is very, very old, and they have
+some candles there ten feet high and ten inches through (they look
+exactly like smooth marble columns and make the place very holy), and
+there are some good rugs on the floor. Several of our party who are
+interested in such things agreed that the rugs are valuable, though they
+are laid crooked, as they all point toward Mecca, whereas the mosque,
+originally a Christian church, stands with the points of the compass.
+
+It has been built and rebuilt a good many times. The Emperor Justinian
+was its last great builder, and he robbed the ruins of Ephesus and
+Baalbec of certain precious columns for his purpose. On Christmas Day,
+537 A.D., he finished and dedicated his work. Altogether he had spent
+five million dollars on the undertaking and had nearly bankrupted the
+empire. Nine hundred years later the Turks captured Constantinople, and
+Mohammed II., with drawn sword, rode into St. Sophia's and made the
+bloody handprint which remains the Moslem ruler's sign-manual to this
+day. They showed us the print, but I don't think it is the same one. It
+may be, but I don't think so--unless Mohammed was riding a camel.
+
+Some kind of ceremony was in progress when we arrived, but as usual in
+such places, we did not mind. We went right in just the same, and our
+guides, too, and we talked and pointed and did what we could to break up
+the services. Old turbaned sons of the Prophet were kneeling and bowing
+and praying here and there, and were a good deal in the way. Sometimes
+we fell over them, but we were charitably disposed and did not kick
+them--at least, I didn't, and I don't think any of the party did. We
+might kick a dog--kick at him, I mean--if we tripped over one, but we do
+not kick a Moslem--not a live one. We only take his picture and step on
+him and muss him up, and make a few notes and go.
+
+I have been wondering what would happen to a party of tourists--Moslems,
+for instance--who broke into an American church during services, with
+guides to point and explain, and stared at the people who were saying
+their prayers, and talked them over as if they were wax figures. An
+American congregation would be annoyed by a mob like that, and would
+remove it and put it in the calaboose. But then such things wouldn't
+happen in America. We have cowed our foreign visitors. Besides, there is
+nothing in an American church that a foreigner would care to see.
+
+We went to other mosques: to Suleiman, to Ahmed, to the "Pigeon" mosque
+with its gentle birds that come in clouds to be fed, but there is a good
+deal of sameness in these splendid edifices. Not that they are alike,
+but they seem alike, with their mellow lights, their alcoves and sacred
+sanctuaries; their gigantic wax candles; their little Turkeys--Turkish
+boys, I mean--rocking and singing the Koran, learning to be priests. And
+everywhere, whether it be prayer-time or not, there were old bearded men
+prostrated in worship or bowed in contemplation. Quite frequently we sat
+down on these praying men to rest a little, but they were too absorbed
+to notice it.
+
+There were no women in the mosques. The men supply the souls and the
+religion for the Turkish household. A woman has no use for a soul in
+Turkey. She wouldn't know what to do with it, and it would only make her
+trouble. She is allowed to pretend she has one, however, and to go to
+mosque now and then, just as we allow children to play "store" or
+"keeping-house." But it's make believe. She really hasn't any
+soul--everybody knows that.
+
+Constantinople is full of landmarks that perpetuate some memory--usually
+a bloody one--of the Janizaries. Every little while our guide would say,
+"This is where the Janizaries conquered the forces of Abdullah VI."; or
+"This is where the Janizaries overthrew and assassinated Mahmoud I."; or
+"This is where the Janizaries attacked the forces of His Sacred Majesty
+Bismillah II.," and everybody would say, "Oh, yes, of course," and we
+would go on.
+
+I said, "Oh yes, of course," with the others, which made it hard, later
+on, when I had worked up some curiosity on the subject, to ask who in
+the deuce the Janizaries were, anyway, and why they had been allowed to
+do all these bloody things unreproved.
+
+By and by we came to a place where the guide said that eight thousand of
+them had perished in the flames, and added that fifteen thousand more
+had been executed and twenty thousand banished. And we all said, "Oh
+yes, of course," again, and this time I meant it, for I thought that was
+about what would be likely to happen to persons with Janizary habits.
+Then I made a memorandum to look up that tribe when I got back to the
+ship.
+
+I have done so, now. The Janizaries were a body of military police,
+organized about 1330, originally of young Christians compelled to become
+Moslems. They became a powerful and terrible body, by and by, and
+conducted matters with a high hand. They were a wild, impetuous horde,
+and five hundred years of their history is full of assassinations of
+sultans and general ravage and bloodshed. In time they became a great
+deal more dangerous to Turkey than her enemies, but it was not until
+1826 that a sultan, Mahmoud II., managed to arouse other portions of his
+army to that pitch of fanatical zeal which has made Janizaries
+exceedingly scarce ever since. I think our guide is a Janizary--he has
+the look--but I have decided not to mention the matter.
+
+We skated through mosques and the tombs of sultans and their wives most
+of the day, appraising the rugs and shawls and general _bric-�-brac_,
+and dropped into a museum--the best one, so far, in my opinion. They
+have a sarcophagus of Alexander there--that is, it was made for
+Alexander, though it is said he never slept in it, which is too bad, if
+true, for it is the most beautiful thing in the world--regarded by
+experts as the finest existing specimen of Greek art. We lingered a long
+time about that exquisite gem--long for us--and bought photographs of it
+when we came away. Then we set out for the Long Street of Smells,
+crossed the Galata bridge, and were at the ship--home.
+
+We have only made a beginning of Constantinople, for we are to be here
+several days. But if it is all like to-day I could do with less of it. I
+have got enough of that smell to last a good while, and of the
+pandemonium that reigns in this disordered aggregation of thoroughfares,
+humanity and buildings--this weird phantasmagoria miscalled a city.
+Through my port-hole, now--I am on the street side--there comes the most
+devilish concatenation of sounds: dogs barking and yelping, barbaric
+singing, wild mandolin music, all mingled with the cries of the hawkers
+and street arabs, and when I reflect that this is the real inwardness of
+that wonder dream we saw at sunrise, I am filled with a far regret that
+we could not have satisfied ourselves with that vision of paradise and
+sailed away.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+THE TURK AND SOME OF HIS PHASES
+
+
+If one wants to get a fair idea of the mixed population of
+Constantinople, when the city's phantasmagoric life is in full swing, he
+may walk slowly across the Galata bridge, or he may stand still and
+watch the kaleidoscope revolve. Every costume, every color and kind of
+fabric, every type of Oriental will be represented there. It is a wild
+fancy-dress parade let loose--only that most of the bizarre costumes are
+rather dingy and have the look of belonging to their wearers, which is
+less likely to be so on an artificial occasion.
+
+The red fez predominates as to head-gear, and sanguinary waves of them
+go by. But there is every manner of turban, too, and the different kinds
+are interesting. Some of them are bound with rope or cord; some with
+twisted horsehair (those are Bedouins, I believe); some are wound with
+white muslin--these are worn by priests--and some are wound or bound
+with green, which indicates that the wearer is a descendant of Mohammed
+himself--that is, a "Son of the Prophet." The Prophet seems to have a
+good many descendants--not so many as Israel had in the same length of
+time, but still an industrious showing.
+
+One might suppose that these wearers of the green turban would be marked
+for special honor, and perhaps they are, but by no means are they all
+men of leisure. I saw one "wearer of the green" tooling a tram to the
+Seven Towers, and another son of the Prophet--a venerable man--bowed
+beneath a great box until his white beard and the rear elevation of his
+trousers nearly dragged in the dust.
+
+I think, by-the-way, I am more interested in the Turkish trousers than
+in any other article of national dress. They are rather short as to leg,
+but what they lack in length they make up in width and general
+amplitude. There is enough goods in the average pair of Turkish trousers
+to make a whole suit of clothes with material left for repairs. They are
+ridiculous enough from the front and the rear, but I rather like a side
+view best. The long after-part has such a drooping pendulous swing to
+it, and one gets the full value of the outline in profile and can
+calculate just what portion of it is occupied by the owner, and can lose
+himself in speculation as to what the rest is for. I like freedom and
+comfort well enough, too, in my clothes, but I would not be willing to
+sacrifice in the length of my trousers for the sake of that laundry-bag
+effect in the rear. I can admire it, though, and I do, often.
+
+At the Stamboul end of the Galata bridge is the most picturesque group,
+I believe, in the Orient. A coffee-house is there, and in front of it
+all the picture types of the East are gathered, with not a single
+Caucasian face or dress. When I used to look at the gorgeously
+extravagant costumes and the flowing beards and patriarchal faces of the
+paintings and illustrations of the East, I said: "No, they do not
+really exist. They may have done so once, but not to-day. I have seen
+the Indian of my own country in his native sage-brush. And he is no
+longer the Indian of the pictures. His dress is adulterated with
+ready-made trousers and a straw hat; his face is mixed in color and
+feature; with the Orient it must be the same."
+
+[Illustration: KEYEFF]
+
+I was mistaken. All the picture people are collected here, and more than
+picture ever saw. No sober imagination could conceive the scene at the
+end of the Galata bridge. To present it a painter would have to
+inebriate himself, spill his colors all about the place and wind up with
+the jimjams. What do these people do there? They indulge in keyeff.
+There is no English word for keyeff--no word in any language, probably,
+except Turkish. It is not done in any other language. Keyeff is a
+condition of pure enjoyment, unimpaired even by thought. Over his coffee
+and nargileh the Turk will sit for hours in a thought-vacancy which the
+Western mind can comprehend no more than it can grasp the fourth
+dimension. It is not contemplation--that would require mental exercise.
+It is absence of thought--utter absence of effort--oblivion--the
+condition for which the Western mind requires chloroform.
+
+From the end of the Galata bridge the thronged streets diverge, and into
+these a motley procession flows. Men of every calling under the
+sun--merchants, clerks, mechanics, laborers, peddlers, beggars,
+bandits--all men--or nearly all, for the Mohammedan woman mostly bides
+at home.
+
+It is just as well that she does, if one may judge from the samples.
+She is not interesting, I think. She may be, but my opinion is the other
+way. She dresses in a sort of domino, usually of dingy goods, her feet
+and ankles showing disreputable stockings and shoes. Even the richest
+silk garments, when worn by women--those one sees on the street--have a
+way of revealing disgusting foot-gear and hosiery. No, the Mohammedan
+woman is not interesting and she has no soul. I believe the Prophet
+decided that, and I agree with him. If she had one--a real feminine
+soul--she would be more particular about these details.
+
+The Turk is a dingy person altogether, and his city is unholy in its
+squalor. Yet the religion of these people commands cleanliness. Only the
+command was not clear enough as to terms. The Prophet bade his followers
+to be as cleanly as possible. There was latitude in an order like that,
+and they have been widening it ever since. I don't believe they are as
+"clean as possible." They pray five times a day, and they wash before
+prayer, but they wash too little and pray too much for the best results.
+I mean so far as outward appearance is concerned. Very likely their
+souls are perfect.
+
+At all events they are sober. The Prophet commanded abstinence, and I
+saw no drunkenness. There are no saloons in Constantinople. One may buy
+"brandy-sticks"--canes with long glass phials concealed in them and a
+tiny glass for tippling--though I suspect these are sold mostly to
+visitors.
+
+You are in the business part of Constantinople as soon as you leave the
+bridge--in the markets and shops, and presently in the bazaars. The
+streets are only a few feet wide, and are swarming with men and beasts
+of burden, yet carriages dash through, and the population falls out of
+the way, cursing the "Christian dogs," no doubt, in the case of
+tourists. Yet let a carriage but stop and there is eager attention on
+every hand--a lavish willingness to serve, to dance attendance, to
+grovel, to do anything that will bring return.
+
+The excursionist, in fact, presently gets an idea that these people are
+conducting a sort of continuous entertainment for his benefit--a
+permanent World's Fair Midway Plaisance, as it were, where curious wares
+and sights are arranged for his special diversion. He is hardly to be
+blamed for this notion. He sees every native ready to jump to serve
+him--to leave everything else for his pleasure. The shopkeeper will let
+a native customer wait and fume till doomsday as long as the tourist is
+even a prospect. The native piastre is nothing to him when American gold
+is in sight. That is what he lives for by day and dreams of by night. He
+will sweat for it, lie for it, steal for it, die for it. It is his life,
+his hope, his salvation. He will give everything but his immortal soul
+for the gold of the West, and he would give that too, if it would bring
+anything.
+
+Most places along the Mediterranean deal in mixed moneys, but compared
+with Constantinople the financial problem elsewhere is simple. Here the
+traveller's pocket is a medley of francs, lire, crowns, piastres,
+drachmas, marks, and American coins of various denominations. He tries
+feebly to keep track of table values, but it is no use. The crafty
+shopkeepers, who have all the world's monetary lore at their fingertips,
+rob him every time they make change, and the more he tries to figure the
+more muddled he gets, until he actually can't calculate the coin of his
+own realm.
+
+As for Turkish money, in my opinion it is worth nothing whatever. It is
+mostly a lot of tinware and plated stuff, and the plating is worn off,
+and the hieroglyphics, and it was never anything more than a lot of
+silly medals in the beginning. Whenever I get any of it I work it off on
+beggars as quickly as possible for baksheesh, and I always feel guilty,
+and look the other way and sing a little to forget.
+
+Nobody really knows what any of those Turkish metallic coins are
+supposed to be worth. One of them will pay for a shine, but then the
+shine isn't worth anything, either, so that is no basis of value. There
+is actually no legal tender in Turkey. How could there be, with a
+make-believe money like that?
+
+Speaking of bootblacks, they all sit in a row at the other end of the
+Galata bridge, and they go to sleep over your shoes and pretend to work
+on them and take off the polish you gave them yourself in the morning.
+They have curious-looking boxes, and their work is as nearly useless as
+any effort, if it is that, I have ever known.
+
+I have been trying for a page or two to say something more about the
+streets of Constantinople, and now I've forgotten what it was I wanted
+to say. Most of them are not streets at all, in fact, but alleys,
+wretched alleys--some of them roofed over--and as you drive through
+them your face gets all out of shape trying to fit itself to the sights
+and smells. I remember now; I wanted to mention the donkeys--the poor,
+patient little beasts of burden that plod through those thoroughfares,
+weighed down with great loads of brick and dirt and wood and every sort
+of heavy thing, enough to make a camel sway-backed, I should think. They
+are the gentlest creatures alive, and the most imposed upon. If Mohammed
+provided a heaven for the donkeys, I hope it isn't the one the Turks go
+to.
+
+Then there are the fountains--that is, the public watering-places. They
+are nearly all carved in relief and belong to an earlier period, when
+art here was worth something. Here and there is a modern one--gaudy,
+tinsel, wretched.
+
+But one has to stop a minute to remember that these old streets are not
+always occupied by the turbans and fezzes of the unspeakable Turk.
+Constantinople was Greek in the beginning, founded away back, six
+hundred years or more B.C., and named Byzantium, after one Byzas, its
+founder. The colony had started to settle several miles farther up the
+Golden Horn, when a crow came along and carried off a piece of their
+sacrificial meat. They were mad at first; but when they found he had
+dropped it over on Bosporus Point they concluded to take his judgment
+and settle there instead.
+
+Then came a good many changes. Persians and Greeks held the place by
+turns, and by and by it was allied to Rome. The Christian Emperor
+Constantine made it his capital about 328 A.D. and called it New Rome.
+But the people wouldn't have that title. Constantine had rebuilt the
+city, and they insisted on giving it his name. So Constantinople it
+became and remained--the names Galata, Pera, Stamboul, and Skutari
+(accent on the "Sku") being merely divisions, the last-named on the
+Asiatic side.
+
+It was not until eleven hundred years after Constantine that the
+Turkomans swarmed in and possessed themselves of what had become a
+tottering empire. So the Turkish occupation is comparatively
+recent--only since 1453.
+
+Still, that is a good while ago, when one considers what has been done
+elsewhere. Christopher Columbus was playing marbles in Genoa, or helping
+his father comb wool, then. America was a place of wigwams--a habitation
+of Indian tribes. We have done a good deal in the four and a half
+centuries since--more than the Turk will do in four and a half million
+years. The Turk is not an express train. He is not even a slow freight.
+He is not a train at all, but an old caboose on the hind end of day
+before yesterday. By the way, I know now why these old cities have still
+older cities buried under them. They never clean the streets, and a city
+gets entirely covered up at last with dirt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been wanting to speak of the dogs of Constantinople ever since I
+began this chapter. They have been always in my mind, but I wanted to
+work off my ill-nature, first, on the Turk. For I have another feeling
+for the dogs--a friendly feeling--a sympathetic feeling--an affectionate
+feeling.
+
+Every morning at four o'clock the dogs of Constantinople turn their
+faces toward Mecca and howl their heartbreak to the sky. At least, I
+suppose they turn toward Mecca--that being the general habit here when
+one has anything official to give out. I know they howl and bark and
+make such a disturbance as is heard nowhere else on earth. In America,
+two or three dogs will keep a neighborhood awake, but imagine a vast
+city of dogs all barking at once--forty or fifty dogs to the block,
+counting the four sides! Do you think you could sleep during that
+morning orison? If you could, then you are sound-proof.
+
+I have said that I have an affection for the dogs, but not at that hour.
+It develops later, when things have quieted down, and I have had
+breakfast and am considering them over the ship's side. There is a band
+of them owns this section of the water-front, and they are worth
+studying.
+
+They are not as unsightly and as wretched as I expected to find them.
+Life for them is not a path of roses, but neither is it a trail of
+absolute privation. They live on refuse, and there is plenty of refuse.
+They are in fair condition, therefore, as to flesh, and they do not look
+particularly unhappy, though they are dirty enough, and sometimes mangy
+and moth-eaten and tufty; but then the Turks themselves are all of these
+things, and why should the dogs be otherwise?
+
+The type of these dogs impresses me. They have reverted to the original
+pattern--they are wolf-dogs. They vary only in color--usually some tone
+of grizzly gray--and not widely in that. They have returned to race--to
+the old wild breed that made his bed in the grass and revolved three
+times before he was ready to lie down. One might expect them to be ugly
+and dangerous, but they are not. They are the kindest, gentlest members
+of the dog family notwithstanding the harsh treatment they receive, and
+the most intelligent. No one really human can study them without
+sympathy and admiration.
+
+I have watched these dogs a good deal since we came here, and a lady of
+Constantinople, the wife of a foreign minister, has added largely to my
+information on the subject.
+
+They are quite wonderful in many ways. They have divided themselves into
+groups or squads, and their territory into districts, with borders
+exactly defined. They know just about how much substance each district
+will supply and the squads are not allowed to grow. There is a captain
+to each of these companies, and his rule is absolute. When the garbage
+from each house is brought out and dumped into the street, he oversees
+the distribution and keeps order. He keeps it, too. There is no fighting
+and very little discord, unless some outlaw dog from a neighboring group
+attempts to make an incursion. Then there is a wild outbreak, and if the
+dog escapes undamaged he is lucky.
+
+The captain of a group is a sultan with the power of life and death over
+his subjects. When puppies come along he designates the few--the very
+few--that are to live, and one mother nurses several of the reduced
+litters--the different mothers taking turns. When a dog gets too old to
+be useful in the strenuous round--when he is no longer valuable to the
+band--he is systematically put out of the way by starvation. A day comes
+when the captain issues some kind of an edict that he is no longer to
+have food. From that moment, until his death, not a morsel passes his
+lips. With longing eyes he looks at the others eating, but he makes no
+attempt to join them. Now and again a bit of something falls his way.
+The temptation is too strong--he reaches toward the morsel. The captain,
+who overlooks nothing, gives a low growl. The dying creature shrinks
+back without a murmur. He knows the law. Perhaps he, too, was once a
+captain.
+
+The minister's wife told me that she had tried to feed one of those
+dying dogs, but that even when the food was placed in front of him he
+would only look pleadingly at the captain and refuse to touch it. She
+brought him inside, at last, where he was no longer under that deadly
+surveillance. He ate then, but lived only a little while. Perhaps it was
+too late; perhaps the decree was not to be disobeyed, even there.
+
+As a rule, it is unwise to show kindness or the least attention to these
+dogs, she said. The slightest word or notice unlocks such a store-house
+of gratitude and heart-hunger in those poor creatures that one can never
+venture near that neighborhood again without being fairly overwhelmed
+with devotion. Speak a word to one of them and he will desert his
+companions and follow you for miles.
+
+The minister's wife told how once a male member of her household had
+shown some mark of attention to one of the dogs of their neighborhood
+group. A day or two later she set out for a walk, carrying her parasol,
+holding it downward. Suddenly she felt it taken from her hand. Looking
+down, she saw a dog walking by her side, carrying it. It was the favored
+animal, trying to make return to any one who came out of that heavenly
+house.
+
+She told me how in the winter the dogs pile up in pyramids to keep warm,
+and how those underneath, when they have smothered as long as they can,
+will work out and get to the top of the heap and let the others have a
+chance to get warm and smothered too.
+
+Once, when some excavations were going on in her neighborhood the dogs
+of several bands, made kin by a vigorous touch of nature, cold, had
+packed themselves into a sort of tunnel which the workmen had made. One
+dog who had come a little late was left outside. He made one or two
+efforts to get a position, but it was no use. He reflected upon the
+situation and presently set up a loud barking. That was too much for
+those other dogs. They came tumbling out to see what had happened, but
+before they had a chance to find out, the late arrival had slipped
+quietly in and established himself in the warmest place.
+
+Once a pasha visited a certain neighborhood in Pera, and the dogs kept
+him awake. In his irritation he issued an order that the dogs of that
+environment should be killed. The order was carried out, and for a day
+and a night there was silence there. But then the word had gone forth
+that a section of rich territory had been vacated, and there was a rush
+for it that was like the occupation of the Oklahoma strip.
+
+There was trouble, too, in establishing the claim and electing officers.
+No such excitement and commotion and general riot had ever been known in
+that street before. It lasted two days and nights. Then everything was
+peaceable enough. Captains had fought their way to a scarred and limping
+victory. Claims had been duly surveyed and distributed. The pasha had
+retired permanently from the neighborhood.
+
+It is against the law for the ordinary citizen to kill one of the dogs.
+They are scavengers, and the law protects them. One may kick and beat
+and scald and maim them, and the Turk has a habit of doing these things;
+but he must not kill them--not unless he is a pasha. And, after all, the
+dogs own Constantinople--the pariah dogs, I mean; there are few of the
+other kind. One seldom sees a pet dog on the streets. The pariah dogs do
+not care for him. They do not attack him, they merely set up a racket
+which throws that pet dog into a fever and fills him with an abiding
+love of home. But I am dwelling too long on this subject. I enjoy
+writing about these wonderful dogs. They interest me.
+
+Perhaps the "Young Turks" will improve Constantinople. Already they have
+made the streets safer; perhaps they will make them cleaner. Also, they
+may improve the Turkish postal service. That would be a good place to
+begin, I should think. Constantinople has a native post-office, but it
+isn't worth anything. Anybody who wants a letter to arrive sends it
+through one of the foreign post-offices, of which each European nation
+supports one on its own account. To trust a letter to the Turkish
+post-office is to bid it a permanent good-bye. The officials will open
+it for money first, and soak off the stamp afterward. If you inquire
+about it, they will tell you it was probably seditionary and destroyed
+by the sultan's orders. Perhaps that will not be so any more. The
+sultan's late force of twenty thousand spies has been disbanded, and
+things to-day are on a much more liberal basis. Two royal princes came
+aboard our vessel to-day, unattended except by an old marshal--something
+which has never happened here before.
+
+These princes have been virtually in prison all their lives. Until very
+recently they had never left the palace except under guard. They had
+never been aboard a vessel until they came aboard the _Kurf�rst_, and
+though grown men, they were like children in their manner and their
+curiosity. They had never seen a type-writer. They had never seen a
+steam-engine. Our chief engineer took them down among the machinery and
+they were delighted. They greeted everybody, saluted everybody, and
+drove away at last in their open victoria drawn by two white horses,
+with no outriders, no guards, no attendants of any kind except the old
+marshal--a thing which only a little while ago would not have been
+dreamed of as possible.
+
+Perhaps there is hope for Turkey, after all.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+ABDUL HAMID GOES TO PRAYER
+
+
+It was on our second day in Constantinople that we saw the
+Selamlik--that is, the Sultan Abdul Hamid II. on his way to prayer. It
+was Friday, which is the Mohammedan Sunday, and the sultan, according to
+his custom, went to the mosque in state. The ceremony was, in fact, a
+grand military review, with twenty-five thousand soldiers drawn up on
+the hillside surrounding the royal mosque, and many bands of music; the
+whole gay and resplendent with the varied uniforms of different
+brigades, the trappings of high officials, the flutter of waving
+banners, the splendor of royal cort�ge--all the fuss and fanfare of this
+fallen king.[3]
+
+For Abdul Hamid is no longer monarch except by sufferance. A tyrant who
+in his time has ordered the massacre of thousands; has imprisoned and
+slain members of his own family; has sent a multitude to the Bosporus
+and into exile; has maintained in this enlightened day a court and a
+rule of the Middle Ages--he is only a figurehead now, likely to be
+removed at a moment's warning.
+
+The Young Turk is in the saddle. Hamid's force of twenty thousand spies
+has been disbanded. Men-of-war lie in the Bosporus just under Yildiz,
+ready to open fire on that royal palace at the first sign of any
+disturbance there. The tottering old man is still allowed his royal
+guard, his harem, and this weekly ceremonial and display to keep up a
+semblance of imperial power. But he is only a make-believe king; the
+people know that, and he knows it, too, best of all.
+
+We had special invitations from the palace and a special enclosure from
+which to view the ceremony. We had cakes, too, and sherbet served while
+we waited--by the sultan's orders, it was said--but I didn't take any. I
+thought Abdul might have heard I didn't care for him and put poison in
+mine. That would be like him.
+
+I was tempted, though, for we had driven a long way through the blinding
+dust. It was hot there, and we had to stand up and keep on standing up
+while all that great review got together and arranged and rearranged
+itself; while officials and black Nubian eunuchs, those sexless slaves
+of the harem, ran up and down, and men sanded the track--that is, the
+road over which his majesty was to drive--and did a hundred other things
+to consume time.
+
+One does not hurry the Orient--one waits on it. That is a useful
+maxim--I'm glad I invented it. I said it over about a hundred times
+while we stood there waiting for Abdul Hamid, who was dallying with
+certain favorites, like as not, and remembering us not at all.
+
+It was worth seeing, though. Brigade after brigade swung by to the weird
+music of their bands--billow after billow of brown, red, and blue
+uniforms. The hillside became a perfect storm of fezzes; the tide of
+spectators rose till its waves touched the housetops.
+
+Still we waited and watched the clock on the mosque. Nobody can tell
+time by a Turkish clock, but there was some comfort in watching it.
+Presently an informing person at my side explained that Turkish
+chronology is run on an altogether different basis from ours. There are
+only three hundred and fifty-four days in a Turkish year, he said, which
+makes the seasons run out a good deal faster, so that it is usually
+about year after next in Turkey; but as it is only about day before
+yesterday by the clock, the balance is kept fairly even.
+
+He was a very entertaining person. Referring to the music, he said that
+once the sultan's special brass band had played before him so pleasingly
+that he ordered all their instruments filled with gold, which was well
+enough, except for the piccolo-player, who said: "Sire, I am left out of
+this reward." "Never mind," said the sultan, "your turn will come." And
+it did, next day, for the band played so badly that the sultan roared
+out: "Ram all their instruments down their throats," which was
+impossible, of course, except in the case of the piccolo-player.
+
+My entertainer said that formerly cameras were allowed at the Selamlik,
+but that an incident occurred which resulted in prohibiting cameras and
+all suspicious articles. He said that a gentleman engaged a carriage
+for the Selamlik, and explained to the driver that he had invented a
+wonderful new camera--one that would take pictures in all the
+colors--and instructed him just how to work the machine.
+
+The gentleman had to make a train, he said, and couldn't wait for the
+sultan to arrive, but if the driver would press the button when the
+sultan reached a certain place the picture would take, after which the
+driver could bring the camera to the Pera Palace Hotel on a certain day
+and get a hundred piastres, a sum larger than the driver had ever owned
+at one time. Then the gentleman left in a good deal of a hurry, and the
+driver told all the other drivers about his good-fortune while they
+waited; and by and by, when the sultan came, and got just to the place
+where the gentleman had said, the driver pressed the button, and blew a
+hole seventy-five feet wide and thirty feet deep right on that spot, and
+it rained drivers and horses and fezzes and things for seven minutes. It
+didn't damage the sultan any, but it gave him a permanent distaste for
+cameras and other suspicious objects.
+
+Laura, age fourteen, who had been listening to the story, said:
+
+"Did they do anything to the driver who did it?"
+
+"Yes; they gathered him up in a cigar box and gave him a funeral. No,
+the man didn't call for the camera."
+
+I am sorry I have kept the reader waiting for the Selamlik, but the
+sultan is to blame. One may not hurry a sultan, and one must fill in the
+time, somehow.
+
+Some carriages go by at last, and enter the mosque enclosure, but they
+do not contain the sultan, only some of his favorite wives, with those
+long black eunuchs running behind. Then there is a carriage with a
+little boy in it--the sultan's favorite son, it is said--the most
+beautiful child I ever saw.
+
+A blare of trumpets--all the bayonets straight up--a gleaming forest of
+them. Oh, what a bad time to fall out of a balloon!
+
+A shout from the troops--a huzzah, timed and perfunctory, but general.
+Then men in uniform, walking ahead; a carriage with a splendid driver; a
+pale, bearded, hook-nosed old man with a tired, rather vacant face. Here
+and there he touches his forehead and his lips with his fingers, waving
+the imperial salute. For a moment every eye of that vast concourse is
+upon him--he is the one important bauble of that splendid setting. Then
+he has passed between the gates and is gone.
+
+Thus it was that Sultan Abdul Hamid attended mosque. It seemed a good
+deal of fuss to make over an old man going to prayer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We drove from the Selamlik to the Dancing Dervishes. I have always heard
+of them and now I have seen them. I am not sorry to have it over.
+
+Their headquarters are in a weather-beaten-frame-barn of a place, and we
+stood outside for a long time before the doors were open. Inside it was
+hot and close and crowded, and everybody twisted this way and that and
+stood up on things to get a look. I held two women together on one
+chair--they were standing up--and I expected to give out any minute and
+turn loose a disaster that would break up the show. There wasn't
+anything to see, either; not a thing, for hours.
+
+We were in a sort of circular gallery and the dancing-floor was below.
+We could see squatted there a ring of men--a dozen or so bowed, solemn,
+abstracted high priests in gowns of different colors and tall fezzes.
+These were the dervishes, no doubt, but they didn't do anything--not a
+thing--and we didn't care to stare at them and at the dancing-floor and
+the rest of the suffering audience forever.
+
+Then we noticed in our gallery a little reserved section with some more
+abstracted men in gowns and fezzes, and after a long time--as much as a
+thousand years, I should think--there was an almost imperceptible
+movement in this reserved compartment, and one of the elect produced
+some kind of reed and began to blow a strain that must have been born
+when the woods were temples and the winds were priests--it was so
+weirdly, mournfully enthralling. I could have listened to that music and
+forgotten all the world if I hadn't been busy holding those two women on
+that chair.
+
+The perspiration ran down and my joints petrified while that music
+droned on and on. Then there was another diversion: a man got up and
+began to sing. I don't know why they picked that particular
+man--certainly not for his voice. It was Oriental singing--a sort of
+chanting monotone in a nasal pitch. Yet there was something wild and
+seductive about it--something mystical--and I liked it well enough.
+Only I didn't want it to go on forever, situated as I was. I wanted the
+dancing to begin, and pretty soon, too. It didn't, however. Nothing
+begins soon in the Orient.
+
+But by-and-by, when that songster had wailed for as much as a week,
+those high priests on the dancing-floor began to show signs of life.
+They moved a little; they got up; they went through some slow
+evolutions--to limber themselves, perhaps--then they began to whirl.
+
+The dance is a religious rite, and it is supposed to represent the
+planets revolving about the sun. The dancers serve an apprenticeship of
+one thousand and one days, and they can whirl and keep on whirling
+forever without getting dizzy. The central figure, who represents the
+sun, has had the most practice, no doubt, for he revolves just twice as
+fast as the planets, who are ranged in two circles around him. His
+performance is really wonderful. I did not think so much of the others,
+except as to their ability to stand upright. I thought I could revolve
+as fast as they did, myself, and I would have given four dollars for a
+little freedom just then to try it.
+
+Would that constellation never run down? The satellites whirled on and
+on, and the high priest in the middle either got faster or I imagined
+it. Then at last they stopped--just stopped--that was all; only I let go
+of those two women then and clawed my way to fresh air.
+
+We went to the bazaars after that. There is where the _Kurf�rster_ finds
+real bliss. He may talk learnedly of historic sites and rave over superb
+ruins and mosques and such things, when you drag him in carriages to
+see them. But only say the word bazaar to him and he will walk three
+miles to find it. To price the curious things of the East; to barter and
+beat down; to walk away and come back a dozen times; to buy at last at a
+third of the asking price--such is the passion that presently gets hold
+of the irresponsible tourist who lives on one ship and has a permanent
+state-room for his things.
+
+You should see some of those state-rooms! Jars, costumes, baskets, rugs,
+draperies, statuary--piled everywhere, hung everywhere, stowed
+everywhere--why, we could combine the stuff on this ship and open a
+floating bazaar that would be the wonder of the world.
+
+The bazaars of Constantinople are crowded together and roofed over, and
+there are narrow streets and labyrinthine lanes. One can buy anything
+there--anything Eastern: ornaments, inlaid work, silks, curious weapons,
+picture postals (what _did_ those _Quaker City_ pilgrims do without
+them?), all the wares of the Orient--he can get a good deal for a little
+if he is patient and unyielding--and he will be cheated every time he
+makes change. Never mind; one's experience is always worth something,
+and this particular tariff is not likely to be high.
+
+We bought several things in Constantinople, but we did not buy any
+confections. The atmosphere did not seem suited to bonbons, and the
+places where such things were sold did not look inviting. Laura
+inspected the assortment and decided that the best Turkish Delight is
+made in America, and that Broadway is plenty far enough east for
+nougat. In one bazaar they had a marvellous collection of royal jewels:
+swords with incrusted handles; caskets "worth a king's ransom"--simply a
+mass of rubies, emeralds, and diamonds--half a barrel of such things, at
+least, but we didn't buy any of those goods, either. We would have done
+so, of course, only they were not for sale.
+
+We called at the bazaar of Far-away Moses, but he wasn't there. He died
+only a little while ago, and has gone to that grand bazaar of delight
+which the Mohammedans have selected as their heaven.
+
+As usual, Laura and I were the last to leave. We were still pulling over
+some things when our driver, whom we call Suleiman because he has such a
+holy, villanous look, came suddenly to the entrance, waving frantically.
+We started then and piled into our carriage. The rest of our party were
+already off, and we set out helter-skelter after them, Suleiman probably
+believing that the ship had its anchors up ready to sail.
+
+We were doing very well when right in front of a great arch one of our
+horses fell down. We had a crowd in a minute, and as it was getting dusk
+I can't say that I liked the situation. But Suleiman got the horse on
+his feet somehow, and we pushed along and once more entered that
+diabolical Street of Smells. It had been bad day by day, but nothing to
+what it was now. There were no lights, except an oil-lamp here and
+there; the place was swarming with humanity and dogs, general vileness
+permeating everything. The woman who thought she had died and gone to
+hell could be certain of it here.
+
+It seemed that we would never get out of that street. We had to go
+slower, and the horrible gully was eternal in its length. How far ahead
+our party was we did not know. We were entirely alone in that unholy
+neighborhood with our faithful Suleiman, who looked like a cutthroat,
+anyhow. I wished he didn't look like that, and Laura said quietly that
+she never expected to see the light of another dawn.
+
+Bumpety-bump--bark, howl, clatter, darkness, stench--rolling and
+pitching through that mess, and then, heavenly sight--a vision of
+lights, water, the end of the Galata bridge!
+
+We made our way through the evening jam and the wild bedlam at the other
+end, crossing a crimson tide of fezzes, to reach the one clean place we
+have seen in Constantinople--that is, the ship. The ship is clean--too
+clean, we think, when we hear them scrubbing and mopping and thumping
+the decks at four o'clock in the morning, just about dog-howling time.
+Which brings me to a specimen of our ship German--American
+German--produced by a gentle soul named Fosdick, of Ohio. He used it on
+the steward after being kept awake by the ship-cleaning. This is what he
+said:
+
+"Vas in damnation is das noise? How can I schlaff mit das hellgefired
+donner-wetter going on oben mine head?"
+
+That is the sort of thing we can do when we get really stirred up. It is
+effective, too. There was no unseemly noise this morning.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] Note--a year later.--The Selamlik here described was among the last
+of such occasions. A few weeks later, in April, 1909, Abdul Hamid
+regained a brief ascendancy, ordered the terrible massacres of Adana,
+and on April 27th was permanently dethroned. He was succeeded by his
+brother, Mehmed V., who attends mosque with little or no ceremony. Abdul
+meantime has retired to Salonica, where he is living quietly--as quietly
+as one may with seventeen favorite wives and the imminent prospect of
+assassination.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+LOOKING DOWN ON YILDIZ
+
+
+Heretofore, during our stay here, whenever any one happened to mention
+the less attractive aspects of Constantinople, I have said:
+
+"Yes, the city is pretty bad, but I'll wager the country is a dream.
+Remember Algiers and her suburban villas? It will be the same here."
+
+I do not say that any more, now that we have been to the country. We
+went over to Skutari (Asiatic Constantinople) this morning, and took
+carriages to Bulgurlu Mountain, which overlooks all the city and a vast
+stretch of country. It is a good view, but it should be, considering
+what it costs to get there--in wear and tear, I mean.
+
+Of all villanous roads, those outside Skutari are the most depraved.
+They are not roads at all, but just washes and wallows and ditches and
+stone gullies. I have seen bad roads in Virginia--roads surveyed by
+George Washington, and never touched since--but they were a dream of
+luxury as compared with these of Turkey. Our carriages billowed and
+bobbed and pitched and humped themselves until I got out and walked to
+keep from being lamed for life.
+
+And then the houses--the villas I had expected to see; dear me, how can
+I picture those cheap, ugly, unpainted, overdecorated architectural
+crimes? They are wooden and belong to the jig-saw period gone mad. They
+suggest an owner who has been too busy saving money for a home to
+acquire any taste; who has spent his savings for lumber and trimmings
+and has nothing left for paint. Still, he managed to reserve enough to
+put iron bars on his windows--that is, on part of the house--the
+harem--every man becoming his own jailer, as it were. I remarked:
+
+"I suppose that is to keep the neighbors from stealing their wives."
+
+But the Horse-Doctor--wiser and more observant--said:
+
+"No, it is to keep a neighbor from breaking in and leaving another."
+
+Standing on the top of Bulgurlu--looking down on the Bosporus and the
+royal palaces--the wife of a foreign minister told us something of the
+history that has been written there:
+
+When Abdul Aziz, in 1876, became Abdul "as was"[4] (his veins were
+opened with a penknife, I believe), one Murad, his nephew, an educated
+and travelled prince, came into power. But Murad was for
+progress--bridges and railroads--so Murad retired to Cheragan Palace,
+where for thirty-two years he sat at a window and looked out on a world
+in which he had no part, while Abdul Hamid II. reigned in his stead.
+Murad was wise and gentle, and did not reproach Abdul, who came to him
+now and again for advice concerning matters of state.
+
+But Murad was fond of watching the people from his window--excursion
+parties such as ours, and the like--and these in turn used to look up
+at Murad's window; which things in time came to Abdul Hamid's ears. Then
+Abdul decided that this indulgence was not good for Murad--nor for the
+people. Thirty-two years was already too long for that sort of thing. So
+Murad's face disappeared from the window, and it was given out that he
+had died--the bulletin did not say what of, but merely mentioned that it
+had been a "general death"--that is to say, a natural death, under the
+circumstances--the kind of death a retired Sultan is likely to die. And
+Abdul mourned for Murad many days, and gave him a costly funeral.
+
+That was Abdul's way. He was always a good brother--always a generous
+soul--according to a guide-book published in Constantinople during the
+time when there were twenty thousand secret agents inspecting such
+things. The author of that book wanted those twenty thousand secret
+agents to tell Abdul how good and gentle the book said he was;
+otherwise, the modest and humble Abdul might not remember. Besides, that
+author did not wish to disappear from among his friends and be sewed up
+in a sack and dropped into the Bosporus some quiet evening. But I
+wander-- I always wander.
+
+Abdul Hamid is said to be affectionate with his family--all his
+family--and quick--very quick--that is to say, impulsive. He is a crack
+shot, too, and keeps pistols on his dressing-table. One day he saw one
+of his little sons--or it may have been one of his little daughters (it
+isn't always easy to tell them apart, when they are so plentiful and
+dress a good deal alike), but anyway this was a favorite of Abdul's--he
+saw this child handling one of his pistols, perhaps playfully pointing
+it in his direction.
+
+Hamid didn't tell the child to put the weapon down, and then lecture
+him. No, he couldn't scold the child, he was too impulsive for that--and
+quick, as I have mentioned. He drew a revolver of his own and shot the
+child dead. There were rumors of plots floating around the palace just
+then, and Hamid wasn't taking any chances. It must have made his heart
+bleed to have to punish the child in that sudden way.
+
+But by-and-by the times were out of joint for sultans. A spirit of
+discontent was spreading--there was a cry for freer government. Enver
+Bey and Niazi Bey, those two young officers whose names are being
+perpetuated by male babies in every Turkish household, disguised
+themselves as newsboys or bootblacks, and going among the people of the
+streets whispered the gospel of freedom. Then one day came the upheaval
+of which all the world has read. Abdul Hamid one morning, looking out of
+his window in Yildiz Palace, saw, lying in the Bosporus just below, the
+men-of-war which all the years of his reign had been turning to rust and
+wormwood in the Golden Horn.
+
+Abdul did not believe it at first. He thought he was just having one of
+those bad dreams that had pestered him now and then since spies and
+massacres had become unpopular. He pinched himself and rubbed his eyes,
+but the ships stayed there. Then he sent for the Grand Vizier. (At
+least, I suppose it was the Grand Vizier--that is what a sultan
+generally sends for in a case like that.) When he arrived the Sultan
+was fingering his artillery and looking dangerous.
+
+"What in h---- that is, Allah be praised, but why, sirrah, are those
+ships lying down there?" he roared.
+
+The G. V. was not full of vain knowledge.
+
+"I--I really don't know, Your Majesty," he said, soothingly. "I will go
+and see."
+
+He was standing near the door and dodged as he went out. He did not come
+back. When he had inquired about the ships he decided not to seek Abdul
+himself, but to send a man--a cheap man--to tell him about it. This was
+just a dull fellow with not much politeness and no imagination.
+
+"The ships are there by the order of the Minister of Marine, Your
+Majesty," he said.
+
+Abdul was so astonished that he forgot to slay the fellow.
+
+"Bring the Minister of Marine!" he gasped, when at last he could catch
+his breath.
+
+The Minister of Marine came--a new minister--one of the Young Turk
+Party. He was polite, but not upset by the Sultan's emotion. When Abdul
+demanded the reason why the old ships had been furbished up and brought
+down into the Bosporus, he replied that they were there by his orders,
+and added:
+
+"We think they look better there, Your Majesty, as in the old days."
+
+"But, by the beard of the Prophet, I will not have them there! Take them
+away!"
+
+"Your Majesty, it grieves me to seem discourteous, not to say rude, but
+those ships are to remain at their present anchorage. It grieves me
+still further to appear to be firm, not to say harsh, but if there is
+any show of resistance in this neighborhood they have orders to open
+fire on Your Majesty's palace."
+
+Abdul took a chair and sat down. His jaw dropped, and he looked at the
+Minister of Marine a good while without seeming to see him. Then he got
+up and tottered over to the window and gazed out on those ships lying
+just below, on the Bosporus. By-and-by, he went to a little ornamental
+table and took a pen and some paper and wrote an order in this wise:
+
+     Owing to my declining years and my great burdens of
+     responsibility, it is my wish that in future all matters
+     pertaining to the army and navy be under the supervision of
+     the Secretary of War and the Minister of Marine.
+
+  ABDUL HAMID, KAHN II.
+  Son of the Prophet--Shadow of God, etc., etc.
+
+At all events, that was the purport of it. In reality, it was a
+succession of wriggly marks which only a Moslem could read. Never mind,
+it was a graceful surrender.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a wonderful old Moslem cemetery near Bulgurlu--one of the
+largest in the world and the most thickly planted. It is favored by
+Moslems because it is on the side of the city nearest Mecca, and they
+are lying there three deep and have overflowed into the roads and
+byways. Their curiously shaped and elaborately carved headstones stand
+as thick as grain--some of them crowned with fezzes--some with suns--all
+of them covered with emblems and poetry and passages from the Koran.
+They are tumbled this way and that; they are lying everywhere along the
+road; they have been built into the wayside walls.
+
+[Illustration: I WANTED TO CARRY AWAY ONE OF THOSE TOMBSTONES]
+
+I wanted to carry away one of those tombstones--one of the old ones--and
+I would have done it if I had known enough Moslem to corrupt the driver.
+A thing like that would be worth it--adding to one's collection, I mean.
+The palace was full of great cypresses, too--tall, funereal
+trees--wonderfully impressive and beautiful.
+
+We drove back to Skutari and there saw our driver Suleiman for the last
+time. I had already tipped him at the end of each day, but I suppose he
+expected something rather unusual as a farewell token. Unfortunately, I
+was low in fractional currency. I scraped together all I had left--a few
+piastres--and handed them to him and turned quickly away. There came a
+sudden explosion as of a bomb. I did not look to see what it was--I
+knew. It was the bursting of Suleiman's heart.
+
+Up the Golden Horn in the afternoon, as far as the Sweet Waters of
+Europe. It is a beautiful sail, and there is a mosque where the ceremony
+of conferring the sword on a new Sultan is performed; also, a fine view
+across the Sweet Waters, with Jewish graveyards whitening the distant
+hills. But there was nothing of special remark--we being a little tired
+of the place by this time--except the homecoming.
+
+There were _caiques_ lying about the little steamer-landing when we were
+ready to return, and Laura and I decided to take one of these down the
+Horn to the ship. The _caique_ is a curiously shaped canoe-sort of a
+craft, and you have to get in carefully and sit still. But once in and
+seated, it moves as silently and smoothly as a gliding star.
+
+It was sunset, and the Golden Horn was true to its name. Ships at
+anchor, barges drifting up and down, were aglow with the sheen of
+evening--the water a tawny, molten flood, the still atmosphere like an
+impalpable dust of gold. _Caiques_ carrying merchants to their homes
+somewhere along the upper shores were burnished with the aureate hue.
+Domes and minarets caught and reflected the wonder of it--the Galata
+bridge ahead of us had become such a span as might link the shores of
+the River of Peace.
+
+Once more Constantinople was a dream of Paradise--a vision of
+enchantment--a city of illusion.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] Ship-joke.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+EPHESUS: THE CITY THAT WAS
+
+
+Like Oriental harbors generally, Smyrna from the sea has a magic charm.
+When we slowly sailed down a long reach of water between quiet hills and
+saw the ancient city rising from the morning mist, we had somehow a
+feeling that we had reached a hitherto undiscovered port--a mirage,
+perhaps, of some necromancer's spell.
+
+We landed, found our train, and went joggling away through the spring
+landscape, following the old highway that from time immemorial has led
+from Ephesus to Smyrna--the highway which long ago St. Paul travelled,
+and St. John, too, no doubt, and the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen. For
+all these journeyed between Ephesus and Smyrna in their time, and the
+ancient road would be crowded with countless camel trains and laden
+donkeys then; also with the wheeled vehicles of that period--cars and
+chariots and cages of wild animals for the games--and there would be
+elephants, too, gaudily caparisoned, carrying some rich potentate of the
+East and his retinue--a governor, perhaps, or a king. It was a mighty
+thoroughfare in those older days and may be still, though it is no
+longer crowded, and we did not notice any kings.
+
+We did notice some Reprobates--the ones we have always with us. They
+sat just across the aisle, engaged in their usual edifying discussion as
+to the identity of the historic sites we were supposed to be passing.
+Finally they got into a particularly illuminating dispute as to the
+period of St. Paul's life and ministrations. It began by the Apostle
+(our Apostle) casually remarking that St. Paul had lived about
+twenty-one hundred years ago.
+
+It was a mild remark--innocent enough in its trifling inaccuracy of two
+or three centuries--but it disturbed the Colonel, who has fallen into
+the guide-book habit, and is set up with the knowledge thereof.
+
+"Look here," he said, "if I knew as little as you do about such things
+I'd restrain the desire to give out information before company."
+
+The Apostle was undisturbed by this sarcasm. He folded his hands across
+his comfortable forward elevation and smiled in his angel way.
+
+"Oh, you think so," he said placidly. "Well, you think like a camel's
+hump. You never heard of St. Paul till you started on this trip. I used
+to study about him at Sunday-school when a mere child."
+
+"Yes, you did! as a child! Why, you old lobscouse" (lobscouse is an
+article on the _Kurf�rst_ bill of fare) "you never saw the inside of a
+Sunday-school. You heard somebody last night say something about
+twenty-one hundred years ago, and with your genius for getting facts
+mixed you saddled that date on St. Paul."
+
+The Colonel turned for corroboration to the Horse-Doctor, who regarded
+critically the outlines of the Apostle, which for convenience required
+an entire seat; then, speaking thoughtfully:
+
+"It isn't worth while to notice the remarks of a person who looks like
+that. Why, he's all malformed. He'll probably explode before we reach
+Ephesus."
+
+I felt sorry for the Apostle, and was going over to sit with him, only
+there wasn't room, and just then somebody noticed a camel train--the
+first we have seen--huge creatures heavily loaded and plodding along on
+the old highway. This made a diversion. Then there was another camel
+train, and another. Then came a string of donkeys--all laden with the
+wares of the East going to Smyrna. The lagging Oriental day was awake;
+the old road was still alive, after all.
+
+Like the first "Innocents," we had brought a carload or so of
+donkeys--four-legged donkeys--from Smyrna, and I think they were the
+same ones, from their looks. They were aged and patchy, and they filled
+the bill in other ways. They wrung our hearts with their sad, patient
+faces and their decrepitude, and they exasperated us with their
+indifference to our desires.
+
+I suppose excursion parties look pretty much alike, and that the _Quaker
+City_ pilgrims forty-two years ago looked a good deal like ours as we
+strung away down the valley toward the ancient city. I hope they did not
+look any worse than ours. To see long-legged men and stout ladies
+perched on the backs of those tiny asses, in rickety saddles that feel
+as if they would slip (and do slip if one is not careful), may be
+diverting enough, but it is not pretty. If the donkey stays in the
+middle of the narrow, worn pathway, it is very well; but if he goes to
+experimenting and wandering off over the rocks, then look out. You can't
+steer him with the single remnant of rope on his halter (he has no
+bridle), and he pitches a good deal when he gets off his course. Being a
+tall person, I was closed up like a grasshopper, and felt fearfully
+top-heavy. Laura, age fourteen, kept behind me--commenting on my
+appearance and praying for my overthrow.
+
+It was a good way to the ruins--the main ruins--though in reality there
+were ruins everywhere: old mosques, gray with age and half-buried in the
+soil--a thousand years old, but young compared with the more ancient
+city; crumbling Roman aqueducts leading away to the mountains--old even
+before the mosques were built, but still new when Ephesus was already
+hoary with antiquity; broken columns sticking everywhere out of the
+weeds and grass--scarred, crumbling, and moss-grown, though still not of
+that first, far, unrecorded period.
+
+But by-and-by we came to mighty walls of stone--huge abutments rising
+from the marshy plain--and these were really old. The Phoenicians may
+have laid them in some far-off time, but tradition goes still farther
+back and declares they were laid by giants--the one-eyed kind, the
+Cyclops--when all this marsh was sea. These huge abutments were piers in
+that ancient day. A blue harbor washed them, and the merchant ships of
+mighty Ephesus lay alongside and loaded for every port.
+
+That was a long time ago. Nobody can say when these stone piers were
+built, but Diana and Apollo were both born in Ephesus, and there was
+probably a city here even then. What we know is that by the beginning of
+the Christian era Ephesus was a metropolis with a temple so amazing, a
+theatre so vast and a library so beautiful that we stand amid the
+desolation to-day, helplessly trying to reconstruct the proportions of a
+community which could require these things; could build them and then
+vanish utterly, leaving not a living trace behind.
+
+For nobody to-day lives in Ephesus--not a soul. A wandering shepherd may
+build his camp-fire here, or an Arab who is tilling a bit of ground; but
+his home will be in Ayasaluk, several miles away, not here. Once the
+greatest port of trade in western Asia, Ephesus is voiceless and vacant
+now, except when a party like ours comes to disturb its solitude and
+trample among its forlorn glories.
+
+There is no lack of knowledge concerning certain of the structures
+here--the more recent ones, we may call them, though they were built two
+thousand years ago. There are descriptions everywhere, and some of them
+are as cleanly cut to-day as they were when the tool left them. This
+library was built in honor of Augustus C�sar and Livia, and it must have
+been a veritable marble vision. Here in its corners the old students sat
+and pored over books and precious documents that filled these crumbling
+recesses and the long-vanished shelves. St. Paul doubtless came here to
+study during the three years of his residence, and before him St. John,
+for he wrote his gospel in Ephesus, and would be likely to seek out the
+place of books. And Mary would walk with him to the door sometimes, I
+think, and Mary of Magdala, for these three passed their final days in
+Ephesus, and would be drawn close together by their sacred bond.
+
+The great theatre where St. Paul battled with the wild beasts stands
+just across the way. It seated twenty-five thousand, and its stone
+benches stretch upward to the sky. The steep marble flight that carries
+you from tier to tier is there to-day exactly as when troops of fair
+ladies and handsome beaux climbed up and still up to find their places
+from which to look down on the play or the gladiatorial combat or the
+massacre of the Christians in the arena below.
+
+These old theatres were built in a semicircle dug out of the
+mountain-side, so that the seats were solid against the ground and rose
+one above the other with the slope of the hill, which gave everybody a
+good view. There were no columns to interfere with one's vision, for
+there was no roof to be supported, except, perhaps, over the stage, but
+the top seats were so remote from the arena and the proscenium that the
+players must have seemed miniatures. Yet even above these there was
+still mountain-side, and little boys who could not get money for an
+entrance fee or carry water to the animals for a ticket sat up in that
+far perch, no doubt, and looked down and shouted at the show.
+
+Laura and I, who, as usual, had dropped behind the party, climbed far up
+among the seats and tried to imagine we had come to the afternoon
+performance--had come early, not to miss any of it. But it was
+difficult, even when we shut our eyes. Weeds and grass grew everywhere
+in the crevices; dandelions bloomed and briers tangled where sat the
+beaux and belles of twenty centuries ago. Just here at our feet the mobs
+of Demetrius the silversmith gathered, crying, "Great is Diana of the
+Ephesians!" because the religion of St. Paul was spoiling their trade
+for miniature temples. Down there in the arena Paul did battle with the
+beasts, very likely as punishment. This is the spot--these are the very
+benches--but we cannot see the picture: we cannot wake the tread of the
+vanished years.
+
+Behind the arena are the columns that support the stage, and back of
+these are the dressing-rooms, their marble walls as solid and perfect
+to-day as when the ancient players dallied and gossiped there. At one
+end is a dark, cave-like place where we thought the wild beasts might
+have been kept. I stood at the entrance and Laura made my picture, but
+she complained that I did not look fierce enough for her purpose.
+
+On another slope of the hill a smaller theatre, the Odeon, has recently
+been uncovered. A gem of beauty it was, and much of its wonder is still
+preserved. Here the singers of a forgotten time gave forth their melody
+to a group of music-lovers, gathered in this close circle of seats that
+not a note or shading might be lost.
+
+[Illustration: ALL THE PLAINS AND SLOPES OF THE OLD CITY WITH ITS WHITE
+FRAGMENTS AND POOR RUINED HARBOR LAY AT OUR FEET
+
+NOTE.--In this picture the theatre where St. Paul fought is in the
+foreground; the library just beyond, the market-place to the right. Bits
+of water show where the harbor once lay.]
+
+We passed around this dainty playhouse, across a little wheat-field that
+some peasant has planted against its very walls, on up the hill,
+scrambling along steep declivities over its brow, and, behold! we came
+out high above the great theatre on the other side, and all the plain
+and slopes of the old city, with its white fragments and its poor
+ruined harbor, lay at our feet. Earthquakes shook the city down and
+filled up the splendid harbor. If the harbor had been spared the city
+would have been rebuilt. Instead, the harbor is a marsh, the city a
+memory.
+
+From where we stood we could survey the sweep of the vanished city. We
+could look across into the library and the market-place and follow a
+marble road--its white blocks worn smooth by a million treading
+feet--where it stretched away toward the sea. And once more we tried to
+conjure the vision of the past--to close our eyes and reproduce the
+vanished day. And once more we failed. We could glimpse a picture, we
+could construct a city, but it was never quite that city--never quite in
+that place. Our harbor with its white sails and thronging wharves was
+never quite that harbor--our crowded streets were never quite those
+streets. Here were just ruins--always ruins--they could never have been
+anything but ruins. Perhaps our imaginations were not in good working
+order.
+
+We descended again into the great theatre, for it fascinated us, nearly
+breaking our necks where vines and briers tangled, pausing every other
+minute to rest and consider and dream. Pawing over a heap of
+rubbish--odd bits of carving, inscriptions, and the like--the place is a
+treasure-trove of such things--I found a little marble torso of a female
+figure. Head and arms and the lower part of the body all gone, but what
+remained was exquisite beyond words--a gem, even though rubbish, in
+Ephesus.
+
+Now, of course, the reader is an honest person. He would have said, as
+I did: "No, it does not matter, rubbish or no rubbish, it is not mine.
+It belongs to the government-- I cannot steal. Besides, there is Laura,
+age fourteen: I cannot set her a bad example. Also, there are the
+police. No, my conscience is perfect; I cannot do it."
+
+I know the reader would have reflected thus, and so did I, as stated.
+Then I found I could crowd it into my inside coat-pocket, and that by
+cramming my handkerchief carefully on top of it, it did not distress me
+so much, especially when I gave it a little support with my forearm, to
+make it swing in a natural way. But when I remembered that the _Quaker
+City_ pilgrims had been searched on leaving Ephesus, my conscience began
+to harass me again, though not enough as yet to make me disgorge.
+
+Our party had all trailed back to the hotel when we got to our donkeys,
+and it was beginning to sprinkle rain. The sky was overcast and a quiet
+had settled among the ruins. When our donkey-driver gave me a sharp look
+I began to suffer. I thought he was a spy, and had his eye on that
+pocket. I recalled now that I had always had a tender conscience; it
+seemed unwise to torture it in this way.
+
+I began to think of ways to ease it. I thought five francs might do it,
+so far as our donkey-boy was concerned. But then there was the official
+search at the other end; that, of course, would be a public matter, and
+the five francs would be wasted. I was almost persuaded to drop the
+little torso quietly by the roadside--it discomforted me so.
+
+We rode along rather quietly, and I spoke improvingly to Laura of how
+St. Paul had travelled over this very road when he was making his good
+fight, and of several other saints and their works, and how Ephesus had
+probably been destroyed because of its sinfulness. Near a crumbling arch
+a flock of sheep grazed, herded by a shepherd who had been there when
+the apostles came--at least his cape had, and his hat--and everything
+about him was Biblical and holylike, and so were the gentle rain and the
+donkeys, and I said how sweet and soothing it all was; after which I
+began to reflect on what would be proper to do if anything resembling an
+emergency should conclude our peaceful ride. I decided that, as we had
+just come from Smyrna, I had bought the bit of heathen marble on the way
+to the station. That was simple and straightforward, and I felt a good
+deal strengthened as I practised it over and tried it on Laura as we
+rode along. The _Kurf�rsters_ had been with me and would stand by the
+statement--any _Kurf�rster_ would do that whether he flocked with the
+forward-cabin crowd or the unregenerates of the booze-bazaar. I felt
+reassured and whistled a little, and then from the roadside a man rose
+up and said something sharp to our donkey-driver. It was sudden, and I
+suppose I did jump a little, but I was ready for him.
+
+"No," I said, "I didn't steal it. I bought it in Smyrna on the way to
+the train. I can prove it by Laura here, and the other passengers. We
+are incorruptible. Go in peace."
+
+But it was wasted. This creature had business only with our
+donkey-driver and his tobacco. He didn't understand a word I said.
+
+We rode amid a very garden of fragmentary ruins. Precious blocks of
+fluted marble, rich with carving and inscriptions, lay everywhere. We
+were confronted by gems of sculpture and graven history at every turn.
+Yet here I was, suffering over a little scrap the size of one's fist. No
+conscience should be as sensitive as that.
+
+Suddenly a regular bundle of firearms--a human arsenal--stepped out of a
+shed into the middle of the road and began a harangue. I could feel my
+hair turning gray.
+
+"You are wholly in error," I said. "I bought it in Smyrna. All the
+passengers saw me. Still, I will give it up if you say so."
+
+But that was wasted, too. He only took the rest of our driver's tobacco
+and let us pass. We met a little puny calf next, standing shrunken and
+forlorn in the drizzle, but not too shrunken and friendless to have a
+string of blue beads around his neck to avert the evil eye. I was
+inclined to take them away from him and put them on myself.
+
+We were opposite the Temple of Diana by this time--all that is left of
+what was once one of the seven wonders of the world. It is only some
+broken stones sinking into a marsh now, but it was a marvel in its time,
+and I remembered how one Herostratus, ages ago, had fired it to
+perpetuate his name--also how the Ephesians had snuffed out Herostratus,
+and issued a decree that his name should never again be mentioned on
+pain of severe punishment; which was a mistake, of course, for it
+advertised Herostratus into the coveted immortality. I wonder what kind
+of a mistake the Ephesians would make when they found that bit of
+marble on my person, and what kind of advertising I would get.
+
+We were almost to the little hotel now, and, lo! right at the gates we
+were confronted by a file of men with muskets. Here it was, then, at
+last. My moral joints turned to water.
+
+"I didn't do it, gentlemen," I said. "I am without a flaw. It was
+Laura--you can see for yourself she looks guilty."
+
+But they did not search Laura. They did not even search me. They merely
+looked us over and talked about us in strange tongues. We reached the
+shelter of the hotel and the comfort of food in safety. Neither did they
+inspect us at the station, and as we glided back to Smyrna I impressed
+upon Laura the value of keeping one's conscience clear, and how one is
+always rewarded with torsos and things for pursuing a straightforward,
+simple course through life.
+
+I suppose a man could take away marble from Ephesus to-day by the
+wagon-load if he had any place to take it to. Nobody is excavating
+there--nobody seems to care for it, and never was such a mine of relics
+under the sun. At Ayasaluk, the Arab village, priceless treasures of
+carving and inscription look out at you from the wall of every peasant's
+hut and stable--from the tumbling stone fences that divide their fields.
+Wonderful columns stick out of every bank and heap of earth. Precious
+marbles and porphyry mingle with the very macadam of the roads. Rare
+pieces are sold around the hotel for a few piastres.
+
+Remember, a mighty marble city perished here. Earthquakes shook it
+down, shattered the walls of its temples, overthrew the statuary,
+tumbled the inscriptions in the dust. The ages have spread a layer of
+earth upon the ruin, but only partially covered it. Just beneath the
+shallow plough of the peasant lie riches uncountable for the nation that
+shall bring them to the light of day. Historical societies dig a little
+here and there, and have done noble work. But their means run low before
+they can make any real beginning on the mighty task. Ephesus is still a
+buried city.
+
+The day will come when Ephesus will be restored to her former greatness.
+It will take an earthquake to do it, but the spirit of prophecy is upon
+me and I foresee that earthquake. The future is very long--I am in no
+hurry--fulfilment may take its time. I merely want to get my prophecy in
+now and registered, so when the event comes along I shall get proper
+credit. Some day an earthquake will strike Ephesus again; the bottom
+will drop out of that swamp and make it a harbor once more; ships will
+sail in as in the old days, and Ephesus, like Athens, will renew her
+glory.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back to Smyrna--a modern city and beautiful from any high vantage, with
+its red-tiled roofs, its domes and minarets, its graceful cypress-trees,
+its picture hillsides, and its cobalt sky. It is clean, too, compared
+with Constantinople. To be sure, Smyrna has its ruins and its historic
+interest, with the tomb of Polycarp the martyr, who was Bishop of Smyrna
+in the second century, and died for his faith at the age of eighty-six.
+He was burned on a hill just outside the city on the Ephesus road, and
+his tomb, guarded by two noble cypresses, overlooks the sea.
+
+But it is busy, bustling Smyrna that, after Ephesus, most attracted us.
+It is more truly the Orient than anything we have seen. Fully as
+picturesque as Constantinople in costume, it is brighter, fresher,
+healthier-looking, and, more than all, its crowded streets are
+perpetually full of mighty camel trains swinging in from the deeper
+East, loaded with all the wares and fabrics of our dreams. Those camels
+are monstrously large--twice the size of any circus camels that come to
+America, and with their great panniers they fill an Oriental street from
+side to side.
+
+They move, too, and other things had better keep out of the way when a
+camel train heaves in sight if they want to remain undamaged. I was
+examining some things outside of a bazaar when suddenly I thought I had
+been hit by a planet. I thought so because of the positive manner of my
+disaster and the number of constellations I saw. But it was only one
+side of a loaded camel that had annihilated me, and the camel was moving
+straight ahead without the slightest notion that anything had interfered
+with its progress.
+
+It hadn't, as a matter of fact. Nothing short of a stone wall interrupts
+a camel--a Smyrna camel--when he's out for business and under a full
+head of steam. Vehicles and other things turn down another street when
+there is a camel train coming. You may squat down, as these Orientals
+do, and get below the danger line, for a camel is not likely to step on
+you, but his load is another matter--you must look out for that
+yourself.
+
+I was fascinated by the camel trains; they are a part of the East I
+hardly expected to find. I thought their day was about over. Nothing of
+the sort. The camel trains, in fact, own Smyrna, and give it its
+commercial importance. They bring the great bulk of merchandise--rugs,
+mattings, nuts, dried fruits, spices, and all the rare native handiwork
+from far dim interiors that railroads will not reach in a hundred years.
+They come swinging out of Kurdistan--from Ispahan and from Khiva; they
+cross the burning desert of Kara Koom.
+
+A camel train can run cheaper than the railway kind. A railway requires
+coal and wood for fuel. A camel would like those things also. But he is
+not particular--he will accept whatever comes along. He will eat
+anything a goat can, and he would eat the goat, too, if permitted--horns
+and all. Consequently, he arrives at Smyrna fit and well fed, ready for
+the thousand miles or so of return trip at a moment's notice.
+
+They run these camel trains in sections--about six camels in each. An
+Arab mounted on a donkey that wears a string of blue beads for luck
+leads each section, and the forward camel wears against his shoulder a
+bell. It is a musical compound affair--one bell inside the other with a
+blue bead in the last one to keep off the evil eye. I had already
+acquired some of the blue strings of donkey beads, and I made up my mind
+now to have a camel bell.
+
+By-and-by, at the entrance of a bazaar, I saw one. It was an old
+one--worn with years of chafing against the shoulder muscle of many a
+camel that had followed the long track from the heart of Asia over
+swamp and steep and across burning sands. At the base of the outer bell
+was a band of Arabic characters--prayers, no doubt, from the Koran, for
+the safety of the caravan. I would never leave Smyrna without that bell.
+
+However, one must be cautious. I gave it an indifferent jingle as I
+passed in and began to examine other things. A murmuring, insinuating
+Moslem was at my elbow pushing forward the gaudy bits of embroidery and
+cheaply chased weapons in which I pretended an interest. I dallied and
+priced, and he grew weary and discouraged. Finally, hesitating at the
+doorway, I touched the bell again, scarcely noticing it.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Sixtin franc--very chip."
+
+My impulse was to fling the money at him and grab the treasure before he
+changed his mind. But we do not do these things--not any more--we have
+acquired education. Besides, we have grown professionally proud of our
+bargains.
+
+"Ho! Sixteen francs! You mean six francs-- I give you five."
+
+"No--no--sixtin franc--sixtin! What you think? Here--fine!" He had the
+precious thing down and was jingling it. Its music fairly enthralled me.
+But I refused to take it in my hands--if I did I should surrender.
+"See," he continued, pointing to the inscription. "Oh, be-eautiful.
+Here, fiftin franc--three dollar!"
+
+He pushed it toward me. I pretended to be interested in a wretchedly new
+and cheaply woven rug. I had to, to keep steadfast. I waved him off.
+
+"No--no; five francs--no more!"
+
+He hung up the bell and I started to go. He seized it and ran after me.
+
+"Here, mister--fourtin franc--give me!"
+
+"Five francs!--no more."
+
+"No, no, mister--twelve franc--las' price--ver' las' price. Here, see!"
+
+He jingled the bell a little. If he did that once more I was gone at any
+price.
+
+"_Five francs_," I said, with heavy decision. "I'll give you five francs
+for it--no more."
+
+I faced resolutely around--as resolutely as I could--and pretended
+really to start.
+
+"Here, mister--_ten franc--ten_! Mister--mister!"
+
+He followed me, but fortunately he had hung up the bell and couldn't
+jingle it. I was at least two steps away.
+
+"Eight franc, mister--please--I lose money--I make
+nothing--mister--seven! seven franc!"
+
+"Five--five francs." I called it back over my shoulder--indifferently.
+
+"Mister! mister! Six! six franc!"
+
+Confound him! He got hold of that bell again and gave it a jingle. I
+handed him the six francs. If he had only left it alone, I think I could
+have held out.
+
+Still, as I look at it now, hanging here in my state-room, and think of
+the long lonely nights and the days of sun and storm it has seen, of the
+far journeys it has travelled in its weary way down the years to me, I
+do not so much mind that final franc after all.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+INTO SYRIA
+
+
+I picked up a cold that rainy day at Ephesus. Not an ordinary sniffling
+cold, but a wrenching, racking cold that made every bone and every tooth
+jump, and set my eyes to throbbing like the ship's engines. I felt sure
+I was going to die when we arrived in the harbor of Beirut, and decided
+that it would be better to die on deck; so I crawled out and dressed,
+and crept into a steamer-chair, and tried to appreciate the beautiful
+city that had arisen out of the sea--the upper gateway to Syria.
+
+The Patriarch came along, highly elate. This was where he belonged; this
+was home; this was Phoenicia itself! Fifteen hundred years B.C. Beirut
+had been a great Phoenician seaport, he said, and most of the rare
+handiwork mentioned in ancient history and mythology had been wrought in
+this neighborhood. The silver vase of Achilles, the garment which Hecuba
+gave to Minerva, and the gold-edged bowl of Telemachus were all
+Phoenician, according to the Patriarch, who hinted that he rather
+hoped to find some such things at Beirut; also some of the celebrated
+Phoinus, or purple dye, which gave the tribe its name. I said no doubt
+he would, and, being sick and suffering, added that he might dye himself
+dead for all I cared, which was a poor joke--besides being an
+afterthought, when the Patriarch was well out of range.
+
+I had no idea of going ashore. I was miserably sorry, too, for I was
+stuffed with guide-book knowledge about Baalbec and Damascus, and had
+looked forward to that side-trip from the beginning. I knew how Moses
+felt on Mount Pisgah now, and I was getting so sorry for myself I could
+hardly stand it, when suddenly the bugle blew the sharp call, "All
+ashore!" Laura, age fourteen, came racing down the deck, and before I
+knew it I had my bag--packed the night before--and was going down the
+ship's ladder into a boat, quarrelling meantime with one of the
+Reprobates as to whether Beirut was the Berothai of the Old Testament,
+where David smote Hadadezer and took "exceeding much brass," or the
+Berytus of the Roman conquest. It was of no consequence, but it gave
+life a new purpose, for I wanted to prove that he was wrong. Wherefore I
+forgot I was going to die, and presently we were ashore and in a
+railway-station where there was a contiguous little train ready to start
+for Baalbec and Damascus, with a lot of men selling oranges, of which
+Laura and I bought a basketful for a franc, climbed aboard, the bell
+rang--and the funeral was postponed.
+
+The road followed the sea for a distance, and led through fields of
+flowers. I had never seen wildflowers like those. They were the crimson
+anemone mingled riotously with a gorgeous yellow flower--I did not learn
+its name. The ground was literally massed with them. Never was such a
+prodigality of bloom.
+
+From Beirut to Baalbec is only about sixty miles; but it takes pretty
+much all day to get there, for the Lebanon Mountains lie between, and
+this is a deliberate land. We did not mind. There was plenty to see all
+along, and our leisurely train gave us ample time.
+
+There were the little stations, where we stopped anywhere from five to
+fifteen minutes, and got out and mingled with the curious rural life;
+there were the hills, that had little soil on them, but were terraced
+and fruitful--some of them to the very summit; there was the old
+Damascus road, winding with us, or above us, or below us--the road over
+which Abraham may have travelled, and Adam, too, for that matter, and
+Eve, when they were sent out of their happy garden. Eden lay not far
+from here, and the exiles would be likely to come this way, I think. We
+saw plenty of groups that might have been Abraham and his household, or
+any of the patriarchs. I did not notice any that suggested Adam and Eve.
+
+The road had another interest for me. Forty-two years ago, before the
+railroad came this way, the _Quaker City_ pilgrims toiled up through the
+summer heat, setting out on the "long trip" through the full length of
+Palestine. Nobody makes it in summer now. Few make it at all, except by
+rail and in carriages, with good hostelries at the end of every stage.
+Still, I am glad those first pilgrims made it, or we should not have had
+that wonderful picture of Syrian summer-time, nor of "Jericho" and
+"Baalbec." Those two horses are worth knowing--in literature--and I
+tried to imagine that little early party of excursionists climbing the
+steep path to Palestine on their sorry nags.
+
+It is warm in Syria, even now, but we were not too warm, riding;
+besides, we were going steadily uphill, and by-and-by somebody pointed
+out a white streak along the mountain-top, and it was snow. Then, after
+a long time, we got to a place where the vegetation was very scanty and
+there were no more terraced hills, but only barren peaks and sand, where
+the wind blew cold and colder, and presently the snow lay right along
+our way. We had reached the highest point then--five thousand feet above
+the sea. In five hours we had come thirty-six miles--thirty-five in
+length and one straight up in the air. Somebody said:
+
+"Look, there is Mount Hermon!"
+
+And, sure enough, away to the south, though nigh upon us it seemed--so
+close that one might put out his hand and touch it, almost--there rose a
+stately, snow-clad elevation which, once seen, dominated the barren
+landscape. It was so pure white against the blue--so impressive in its
+massive dignity--the eye followed it across every vista, longed for it
+when immediate peaks rose between, welcomed it when time after time it
+rose grandly into view.
+
+With an altitude of between nine and ten thousand feet, Mount Hermon is
+the highest mountain in Syria, I believe--certainly the most important.
+The Bible is full of it. The Amorites and the Hivites, and most of the
+other tribes that Joshua buried or persuaded to go away, had their lands
+under Mount Hermon (all of them in sight of it), and that grand old hill
+looked down on Joshua's slaughter of men and women and little children,
+and perhaps thought it a puny performance to be undertaken in the name,
+and by the direction, of God.
+
+Joshua established Mount Hermon as the northern boundary of Palestine,
+and from whatever point the Israelite turned his face northward, he saw
+its white summit against the blue. It became symbolic of grandeur,
+stability, purity, and peace. It was to one of its three peaks that
+Christ came when, with Peter, James, and John, He withdrew to "an high
+mountain apart" for the Transfiguration. So it became sanctified as a
+sort of holy judgment-seat.[5]
+
+Down the Lebanon slope and across the valley to Reyak, a Syrian village
+in the sand, at the foot of the Anti-Lebanon range. Reyak is the parting
+of the ways--the railways--that lead to Damascus and Baalbec, and there
+is a lunch-room there--a good one by Turkish standards. It was our first
+complete introduction to Turkish food--that is a diet of nuts, dates,
+oranges, and curious meat and vegetable preparations--and I ate a good
+deal for a dying man. Then I went outside to look at the population, and
+wonder what these people, who scratch a living out of the sand and stone
+barrens, would do in a fertile country like America. They would consider
+it heaven, I thought.
+
+At the end of the station sat a drowsy, stoutish man in semi-European
+dress, holding a few pairs of coarse home-knit socks, evidently for
+sale. I stopped and talked to him. He spoke English very well, and when
+he told me his story I marvelled.
+
+He had been in America; in Brooklyn; had carried on business
+there--something in Syrian merchandise--and had done very well. He had
+married there--a Syrian woman; his children were born there--Americans.
+Then one day he had sold out and brought them all to this flat-topped
+mud village in the Syrian sand. Why had he done it? Well, he could
+hardly tell; he had wanted to see Syria again--he could think of no
+other reason. No, his wife did not like it, nor the children--not at
+all.
+
+He pointed out his mud hut a little way from the station, and I could
+not blame them. He would go back some day--yes, certainly. Meantime, his
+wife is earning money for the trip by knitting the coarse socks which he
+sells around the station at Reyak at a few piastres a pair.
+
+Our train was about ready to start for Baalbec, and I was lingering over
+a little collection of relics which a blind pedler offered, when I felt
+a hand on my shoulder and heard my name called. I turned and was face to
+face with the artist Jules Gurin, of New York. I had known nothing of
+his presence in Syria, he had known nothing of our coming. He was going
+in one direction, I in another. In this remote waste our lines had
+crossed. He was so glad to see me--he thought I had a supply of cigars.
+I never saw a man's enthusiasm die so suddenly as his did when I told
+him how I had been sick that morning and forgotten them.
+
+Altogether that was a curious half hour. Reyak is the most uninteresting
+place in Syria, but I shall always remember it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] One tradition places the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, but Tabor
+is fifty miles away whereas Cesarea Philippi, to which the little group
+descended, lies at the foot of Hermon.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+THE HOUSE THAT CAIN BUILT
+
+
+It was well along in the afternoon when we reached Baalbec, and drove
+through a cloud of dust to a hotel which stands in a mud village near
+the ruins. Long before we arrived we could make out massive remnants of
+what was once a wonder of the world, and remains no less so to-day. We
+could distinguish sections of the vast wall, and, towering high above
+them, the six columns of the Temple of the Sun.
+
+I knew those six columns. I had carried a picture of them in my mind
+ever since that winter so long ago when the old first edition of the
+_New Pilgrim's Progress_ became familiar in our household. I know they
+were seventy-five feet high and eight feet through, and had blocks of
+stone on the top of them as big as our old-fashioned parlor at home;
+also, that they were probably erected by giants. Those items had made an
+impression that had lasted. Now, here they were, outlined against the
+sky, in full view and perfectly familiar, but never in the world could
+they be as big as the book said. Why, these were as slender and graceful
+as fairy architecture! I recalled that there were some big stones to
+see, stones laid by Cain and his giants when the world was new. Perhaps
+they would not be so very big, after all. I had a feeling that we ought
+to hurry.
+
+We did hurry--Laura and I. We did not wait for the party, but set out
+straight for the ruins, through narrow streets and byways, with beggars
+at our heels. By-and-by we came to a rushing brook, and just beyond it
+were the temple walls.
+
+I remembered now. There had been a wonderful garden outside the temples
+in the old days, and this stream had made it richly verdant and
+beautiful. There was no garden any more. Only some grass and bushes,
+such as will gather about an oasis.
+
+They would not let us into the temple enclosure until our party came, so
+we wandered around the outer walls and gazed up at cornices and capitals
+and entablatures as beautiful, we thought, as any we had seen at Athens.
+Then the party arrived, and there was a gatekeeper to let us in.
+
+It would take a man in perfect health to carry away even an approximate
+impression of Baalbec. Trying to remember now, I seem to have spent the
+afternoon in some amazing delirium of tumbling walls and ruined
+colonnades; of heaped and piled fragments; of scarred and defaced
+sculpture; of Titanic masonry flung about by the fury of angry gods.
+Athens had been a mellowed and hallowed dream of the past; Ephesus a
+vast suggestion of ancient greatness buried and overgrown; Baalbec was a
+wild agony of destruction and desecration crying out to the sky.
+
+[Illustration: FROM THE TIME OF ADAM BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS]
+
+It is a colossal object-lesson in what religions can do when they try.
+Nobody really knows who began to build temples here, but from the time
+of Adam Baalbec became a place of altars. Before history began it was
+already a splendid Syrian city, associated with the names of Cain,
+Nimrod, and Abraham, and it may have been Cain himself who raised the
+first altar here when he made that offering for which the Lord "had not
+respect." More likely, however--and this is the Arab belief--it was the
+city of refuge built by Cain, whose fear must have been very large if
+one may judge from the size of the materials used.
+
+Cain could not fail to build a temple, however. He would try to ease the
+punishment which he declared was greater than he could bear, and with
+burnt offering and architecture would seek to propitiate an angry God.
+How long the worship inaugurated by him lasted we can only surmise--to
+the flood, maybe--but the Phoenicians came next, and set up temples to
+their Gods, whoever they were, and after the Phoenicians came Solomon,
+who built a temple to a sort of compromise god by the name of Baal--a
+deity left over by the Phoenicians and adapted to Judean needs and
+ceremonies--hence the name, Baalbec. Solomon built the temple to Baal to
+satisfy certain of his heathen wives, and he made the place a strong
+city to rival Damascus--the latter having refused to acknowledge his
+reign.
+
+After Solomon, the Romans. Two hundred years or so after Christ--in the
+twilight of their glory and their gods--the Romans under Elagabalus
+brought the glory of Grecian architecture to Baalbec, named the place
+Heliopolis, and set up temples that were--and are--the wonder of the
+world.
+
+What satisfactory gods they must have been to deserve temples such as
+these--each shrine a marvel of size and beauty--more splendid even than
+those of the Acropolis of Athens in their lavish magnificence! This
+carved doorway to the Temple of Jupiter; this frieze of the Temple of
+Bacchus; these towering six columns of the Temple of the Sun; still
+holding their matchless Corinthian capitals and amazing entablature to
+the sky--where else will one find their equals, and what must they have
+been in their prime, when these scarred remnants can still overpower the
+world!
+
+It was another religion that brought ruin here--early
+Christianity--presently followed by early Mohammedanism--each burning
+with vandalic zeal. It was the good Emperor Constantine that first upset
+the Roman gods and their temples. Then Theodosius came along and pulled
+down the great structures, and out of the pieces built a church that was
+an architectural failure. Then all the early Christians in the
+neighborhood took a hand in pulling down and overturning; hacking away
+at the heathen sculpture and tracery--climbing high up the walls to scar
+and disfigure--to obliterate anything resembling a face. Then pretty
+soon the early Mohammedans came along and carried on the good work, and
+now and then an earthquake took a hand, until by-and-by the place became
+the ghastly storm of destruction it appears to-day.
+
+I was ill when I saw Baalbec. My flesh was burning and my pulse
+throbbing with fever. Perhaps my vision was distorted and the nightmare
+seemed worse than it really is, but as I stood in that field of
+mutilation and disorder, gazing along its wrecked and insulted glory,
+and through tumbling arch and ruined door caught vistas of fertile and
+snow-capped hill, I seemed to see a vision of what it had been in the
+day of its perfection. Also, I felt an itch to meet one or two of those
+early enthusiasts--some night in a back alley when they were not looking
+for me and I had a piece of scantling--I felt a sick man's craving, as
+it were, to undertake a little damage and disfiguration on my own
+account. Oh, well, it's all in the eternal story. Religions established
+these temples; religions pulled them down. The followers of one faith
+have always regarded as heathen those which preceded them. There lies a
+long time ahead. Will the next religion restore Baalbec or complete its
+desolation?
+
+Some little Syrian girls beset Laura on the way back to the hotel and
+tried to sell her some bead embroidery which it seems they make in a
+mission-school established here by the English. One of them--a little
+brown madonna of about ten--could speak English quite well. Laura asked
+her name.
+
+"Name Mary," she said.
+
+"But that's an English name."
+
+She trotted along silently, thinking; then said:
+
+"No, Syria--Mary Syria name."
+
+Sure enough, we had forgotten. The first Mary had indeed been Syrian,
+and I imagined her, now, a child--brown, barefoot and beautiful, like
+this Mary, with the same pathetic eyes. Laura--young, fair-skinned and
+pink-cheeked--was a marvel to these children. They followed her to the
+door, and when she could not buy all their stock in trade they insisted
+on making her presents, and one of them--little Mary--begged to be taken
+to America.
+
+We saw the celebrated "big stones" next morning. Several of them are
+built into the lower tiers of the enclosing temple wall, and three of
+these--the largest ones--measure each from sixty-two to sixty-four feet
+long and are thirteen feet thick! They rest upon stones somewhat
+thicker, but shorter--stones about the size of a two-story cottage--and
+these in turn rest on masonry still less gigantic. Evidently it was the
+intention of the builders to increase the size of their material as they
+went higher, and the big block still in the quarry carries out that
+idea.
+
+Authorities differ as to when these big stones were laid, and how. Some
+claim that they were put here by the Romans, because they find Greek
+axe-marks on the ones below them. But then I found American jack-knife
+marks on them too, and the names of certain of my countrymen, which
+proves nothing except that these puny people had been there and left
+their measurement. If these monster stones had been laid by the Romans
+only two thousand years ago, we should have had some knowledge of the
+means by which they were transported and lifted into place. There is no
+such record, and nowhere else at least did the Romans ever attempt
+structure of such gigantic proportions. That is precisely the word,
+"gigantic," for there were giants in the days when these stones were
+laid--stones that could have been there six thousand years as well as
+two thousand, being of such material as forms the foundations of the
+world.
+
+If Cain did any building at Baalbec, he did it here. He did not finish
+the work, it would seem, or at least not in these proportions. Perhaps
+his giants deserted him--struck, as we say to-day. Perhaps the hands of
+men were no longer against him and the need of this mighty bulwark about
+his place of refuge ceased. At all events, the first stone hewn out for
+the next layer stands in the quarry still.
+
+We drove over there. It was half a mile away, at least--possibly a mile,
+down hill and rather rough going. The stones we saw in the wall were
+brought up that road. The one standing in the quarry had been lifted and
+started a little, and would have been on its way presently, if the
+strike, or the amnesty, had not interfered.
+
+It is seventy-two feet long and seventeen feet thick. Try to think of a
+plain box building, a barn or a store-house, say, of that size, then
+mentally convert it into a solid block of stone. Mark Twain likens it to
+two freight-cars placed end to end, but _it is also as high and as
+wide_. _Eight freight-cars set four and four_ would just about express
+it! Think of that! Think of moving a stone of that size!
+
+It is squared and dressed and ready to be taken to the temple wall. It
+will never be taken there. Perhaps that last item is gratuitous
+information, but at least it is authentic. We have no means of moving
+that stone half a mile up a rough hill in these puny times, and the
+speculations as to how Cain did it have been mainly hazy and
+random--quite random.
+
+One writer suggests that such stones were "rolled up an inclined plane
+of earth prepared for the purpose." I should love to see a stone like
+that rolled. I'd travel all the way to Baalbec again for the sight, and
+they could prepare the inclined plane any way they pleased. An Oriental
+authority declares that these stones were moved and laid by the demon
+Echmoudi, which is better than the rolling idea. I confess a weakness
+for Echmoudi, but I fear hard cold science will frown him out of court.
+
+It has taken an Englishman to lead the way to light. He says that Cain
+employed mastodons to do his moving. Now we are on the way to truth, but
+we must go further--a good deal further. Cain did employ mastodons, but
+only for his light work. Even mastodons would balk at pulling stones
+like these. Cain would use brontosaurs for such work as that. There were
+plenty of them loafing about, and I can imagine nothing more impressive
+than Cain standing on a handy elevation overlooking his force of giants
+and a sixteen-span brontosaur team yanking a stone as big as a bonded
+warehouse up Baalbec hill.
+
+Truly, there is no reason why those monster stones should not have been
+quarried a million or so years ago and moved by the vast animal
+creatures of that period. We have biblical authority for the giants, and
+I have seen a brontosaur in the New York Museum that seemed to go with
+stones of about that size. Think of any force the Romans could summon
+rolling a three-million-pound square stone up an inclined plane.
+Preposterous! The brontosaur's the thing.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+GOING DOWN TO DAMASCUS
+
+
+There is a good deal of country, mainly desert, between Baalbec and
+Damascus, and a good many barren hills. Crossing the Anti-Lebanon
+mountains there is a little of water and soil and much red, rocky waste.
+Here and there a guide pointed out a hill where Cain killed Abel--not
+always the same hill, but no matter, it was a hill in this neighborhood;
+any one of them would make a good place. Occasionally the train passed a
+squalid village, perched on a lonely shelf--a single roof stretching
+over most of the houses--the inhabitants scarcely visible. We wondered
+where they got their sustenance. They were shepherds, perhaps, but where
+did their flocks feed?
+
+Across the divide, between snow-capped hills, and suddenly we are face
+to face with green banks and the orchard bloom of spring. We have
+reached the Abana, the river which all the ages has flowed down to
+Damascus with its gift of eternal youth. For as the desert defends, so
+the river sustains Damascus, and the banks of the Abana (they call it
+the Barada now) are just a garden--the Garden of Eden, if old tales be
+true.
+
+It is not hard to believe that tradition here, at this season. Peach,
+apricot, almond, and plum fairly sing with blossom; birch and sycamore
+blend a cadence of tender green; the red earth from which Adam was
+created (and which his name signifies) forms an abundant underchord. If
+we could linger a little by these pleasant waters we might learn the
+lilt of the tree of life--its whisper of the forbidden fruit.
+
+We are among our older traditions here--the beginnings of the race. We
+have returned after devious wanderings. These people whom we see leading
+donkeys and riding camels, tending their flocks and bathing in the
+Abana, they are our relatives--sons and daughters of Adam. Only, they
+did not move away. They stayed on the old place, as it were, and
+preserved the family traditions, and customs. I am moved to get out and
+call them "cousin" and embrace them, and thank them for not trailing off
+after the false gods and frivolities of the West.
+
+[Illustration: SO THE PATRIARCHS JOURNEYED; SO, TWO THOUSAND YEARS
+LATER, JOSEPH AND MARY TRAVELLED INTO EGYPT]
+
+The road that winds by the Abana is full of pictures. The story of the
+Old Testament--the New, too, for that matter--is dramatized here in a
+manner and a setting that would discourage the artificial stage. Not a
+group but might have stepped out of the Bible pages. This man leading a
+little donkey--a woman riding it--their garb and circumstance the
+immutable investment of the East: so the patriarchs journeyed; so, two
+thousand years later, Joseph and Mary travelled into Egypt. No change,
+you see, in all that time--no change in the two thousand years that have
+followed--no change in the two thousand years that lie ahead. Wonderful,
+changeless East! How frivolous we seem in comparison--always racing
+after some new pattern of head-gear or drapery! How can we hope to
+establish any individuality, any nationality, any artistic stability
+when we have so little fixed foundation in what, more than any other one
+thing, becomes a part of the man himself--his clothing?
+
+These hills are interesting. Some of them have verdure on them, and I
+can fancy Abraham pasturing his flocks on them, and with little Isaac
+chasing calves through the dews of Hermon. It would not be the "dews of
+Hermon," but I like the sound of that phrase. I believe history does not
+mention that Abraham and Isaac chased calves. No matter; anybody that
+keeps flocks has to chase calves now and then, and he has to get his
+little boy to help him. So Abraham must sometimes have called Isaac
+quite early in the morning to "go and head off that calf," just as my
+father used to call me, and I can imagine how they raced up and down and
+sweat and panted, and how they said uncomplimentary things about the
+calf and his family, and declared that there was nothing on earth that
+could make a person so mad as a fool calf, anyhow.
+
+Travel on the highway has increased--more camels, more donkeys, more
+patriarchs with their families and flocks. Merchandise trains follow
+close, one behind the other. Dust rises in a fog and settles on the
+wayside vegetation. Here and there on the hillsides are villas and
+entertainment gardens.
+
+A widening of the valley, an expanse of green and bloom, mingled with
+domes and minarets; a slowing down of speed, a shouting of porters
+through the sunlit dust, and behold, we have reached the heart and
+wonder of the East, Damascus, the imperishable--older than history, yet
+forever young.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+THE "PEARL OF THE EAST"
+
+
+It is the oldest city in the world. It is the oldest locality mentioned
+in the Bible, if the Garden of Eden theory be true. I suspect that
+Noah's flood washed away the garden, and that his grandson, Uz, wanted
+to commemorate the site by building a city there. At all events, Uz
+built Damascus, according to Josephus, and he could not have picked a
+better location than this wide, level plain, watered by these beautiful
+living streams. That was about 2400 B.C., which means that Damascus was
+already an old city--five hundred years old, or more--when Abraham
+overtook Chedorlaomer, King of Elam--Tidal, King of Nations, and two
+other kings--these four having captured Abraham's nephew, Lot, "who
+dwelt in Sodom, and his goods, and departed."
+
+A matter of four kings did not disturb Abraham. He had a better
+combination than that. He armed his trained servants, three hundred and
+eighteen in number, "born in his own house," and went after those kings
+and "smote them and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand
+of Damascus, rescued Lot and brought back the goods."
+
+That is the first Bible mention of Damascus, and it was no doubt a
+goodly city, even then. After that it appears, time and again, in both
+the scriptures, and one never fails to feel its importance in the
+world's story. Five hundred years after Abraham, Thothmes III. thought
+it worth while to cross over from Egypt to conquer Damascus, and after
+still another five hundred years King David ravaged the country round
+about and set up a garrison here. Those were not frequent changes.
+Damascus does not do things frequently or without reflection. I believe
+the Medes came next, and after them the Romans, and then, quite
+recently--recently for Damascus, I mean--only thirteen hundred years
+ago--the Mohammedans took the place and have held it ever since.
+
+And Damascus herself has remained unchanged. Other cities have risen and
+prospered and perished even from memory. They did not matter to
+Damascus. Nothing matters to Damascus. It may have altered its
+appearance a trifle now and then, but not materially. It is the same
+Damascus that Abraham knew and that David conquered. I can see both of
+these old fellows any time I look out of my hotel window; also, the
+three hundred and eighteen servants born in Abraham's household--all the
+tableau of the ancient city that has remained forever young.
+
+     "Though old as history itself, thou art as fresh as the
+     breath of spring, blooming as thine own rosebud, and
+     fragrant as thine own orange-flower, O Damascus, pearl of
+     the East!"
+
+We are at the Grande Hotel Victoria. All these hotels are "Grande"
+something or other. A box shanty ten by fifteen is likely to be called
+"Grande Hotel de France." However, the Victoria _is_ grand, rather, and
+quite Oriental in its general atmosphere. The rooms are clean, too, and
+the Turkish pictures amusing. Furthermore, our rooms look across the
+river--the soul of Damascus--the water in which Eve first saw her sweet
+reflected form, if tradition holds. Its banks are bordered by a great
+thoroughfare now, where against a background of peach-bloom and minaret
+an eternal panorama flows by. Camel trains from Bagdad and the far
+depths of Persia; mule trains from the Holy Land; donkey trains from
+nowhere in particular; soldiers with bands playing weird music; groups
+of Arabs mounted on splendid horses--dark men with long guns, their
+burnouses flying in the wind. One might sit here forever and drift out
+of time, out of space, in the fabric of the never-ending story.
+
+Being late in the afternoon, with no programme, Laura and I set out to
+seek adventure, were immediately adopted by a guide, and steered toward
+the bazaars. We crossed a public square near the hotel where there were
+all sorts and conditions of jackasses--some of them mounted by men,
+others loaded with every merchandise under the sun. We saw our first
+unruly donkey just then--a very small donkey mounted by a very fat son
+of the prophet with a vast turban and beard. It being the Mohammedan
+Sunday (Friday), he had very likely been to the mosque and to market,
+and was going home. He had a very large bush broom under his arm, and it
+may have been this article thrashing up and down on the donkey's flank
+that made him restive. At all events, he was cavorting about (the
+donkey, I mean) in a most unseemly fashion for one bestridden by so
+grave a burden, and Mustapha Mohammed--they are all named that--was
+bent forward in a ball, uttering what Laura thought might be quotations
+from the Koran. We did not see what happened. They were still gyrating
+and spinning when we were caught up by the crowd and swept into the
+bazaar.
+
+The Grande Bazaar of Damascus excels anything we have seen. It is bigger
+and better and cleaner than the bazaar of Constantinople, and a
+hundred--no, a million--times more inviting. No Christian could eat
+anything in a Constantinople market-place. The very thought of it gags
+me now as I write, while here in Damascus, Laura and I were having
+confections almost immediately--and lemonade cooled with snow brought on
+the backs of camels from the Lebanon mountain-tops. Mark Twain speaks of
+the place as being filthy. I think they must have cleaned up a good deal
+since then; besides, that was midsummer. I would not like to say that
+the place is speckless, but for the Orient it was clean, and the general
+bouquet was not disturbing. Also, I had a safer feeling in Damascus. I
+did not feel that if I stepped into a side-street I would immediately be
+dragged down and robbed. I did not feel as if I were a lost soul in a
+bedlam of demons.
+
+We noticed other things. The little booths, one after another, were
+filled with the most beautiful wares--such wares as we have seen nowhere
+else--but the drowsy merchants sat cross-legged in meditation, smoking
+their nargileh or reading their prayers, and did not ask us to buy. If
+we stopped to look at their goods they hardly noticed us. If we priced
+them they answered our guide in Arabic monosyllables. Here and there a
+Jew with a more pretentious stock would solicit custom in the old way of
+Israel, but the Arab was silent, indifferent, disinterested. Clearly it
+was his preference that we pass by as quickly as possible. His goods
+were not for such as us. I did manage to add to my collection of
+donkey-beads, and would have bought more if Laura had not suggested that
+they probably thought I was buying them to wear myself. At the
+book-booth they even would not let us touch the volumes displayed for
+sale.
+
+Another thing I have noticed: there are no beggars here--none worth
+while. Now and then, perhaps, somebody half extends a timid hand, but on
+the whole there is a marked absence of begging. Damascus does not beg
+from the Christian.
+
+It is a weird, wonderful place, that bazaar. It covers an endless space,
+if one may judge from its labyrinthine interior. Everywhere they stretch
+away, the dim arcades, flimsily roofed with glass and matting and bark,
+fading into vague Oriental vistas of flitting figures and magic
+outlines. Here in the main thoroughfare a marvellous life goes on. The
+space is wide, and there are masses of people moving to and fro, mingled
+with donkeys and camels, and even carriages that dash recklessly
+through; and there is a constant cry of this thing and that thing from
+the donkey-boys and the pedlers of nuts and bread and insipid sweetened
+drinks. Some of the pedling people clatter little brass cymbals as they
+walk up and down, and repeat over and over some words which our guide
+said were something between a prayer and a song, probably as old as the
+language.[6] And the vendors of drinks carry their stock in trade in a
+goat-skin, or maybe in a pigskin, which is not a pretty thing to look
+at--all black and hairy and wet, with distended legs sticking out like
+something drowned. We didn't buy any of those drinks. We thought they
+might be clean enough, but we were no longer thirsty.
+
+All sorts of things are incorporated in this bazaar: old
+dwelling-houses; columns of old temples; stairways beginning anywhere,
+leading nowhere; mosques--the limitless roof of merchandise has
+stretched out and enveloped these things. To attempt a detailed
+description of the place would be unwisdom. One may only generalize this
+vast hive of tiny tradesmen and tiny trades. All the curious merchants
+and wares we have seen pictured for a lifetime are gathered here. It is
+indeed the Grande Bazaar--the emporium of the East.
+
+The street we followed came to an end by-and-by at a great court open to
+the sky. It was a magnificent enclosure, and I was quite willing to
+enter it. I did not do so, however. I had my foot raised to step over
+the low barrier, when there was a warning cry and a brown hand pushed me
+back. Our guide had dropped a step behind. He came hurrying up now, and
+explained that this was the court of the Great Mosque. We must have
+special permission to enter. We would come with the party to-morrow.
+
+The place impressed me more than any mosque we have seen--not for its
+beauty, though it is beautiful, but because of its vastness, its open
+sky, and its stone floor, polished like glass by the bare and stockinged
+feet that have slipped over it for centuries. We could not enter, but we
+were allowed to watch those who came as they removed their shoes and
+stepped over into the court to pray. When you realize that the enclosure
+is as big as two or three city squares, and that the stones, only fairly
+smooth in the beginning, reflect like a mirror now, you will form some
+idea of the feet and knees and hands that have pressed them, and realize
+something of the fervor of the Damascus faith.
+
+We left the bazaar by a different way, and our guide got lost getting us
+back to the hotel. I didn't blame him, though--anybody could get lost in
+those tangled streets. We were in a hopeless muddle, for it was getting
+dark, when down at the far end of a narrow defile Laura got a glimpse of
+a building which she said was like one opposite our hotel. So we went to
+look for it, and it was the same building. Then our guide found the
+hotel for us, and we paid him, and everything was all right. He didn't
+know anything about the city, I believe, but was otherwise a perfect
+guide.
+
+Following, we put in a busy two days in Damascus--a marvellous two days,
+I thought. Our carriages were at the hotel next morning, and I want to
+say here that of all the carriages and horses we have seen, those of
+Damascus are far and away the best. The horses are simply beautiful
+creatures and in perfect condition. Even those kept for hire are superb
+animals with skins of velvet. They are Arabian, of course, and I can
+believe, now, that the Arab loves his horse, for I have never seen finer
+animals, not even on Fifth Avenue. I can understand, too, why the
+_Quaker City_ pilgrims--ambling into Damascus on those old, blind, halt
+and spavined Beirut nags--made their entry by night.
+
+And these Damascus horses go. Their drivers may love them, but they make
+them hurry. They crack their whips, and we go racing through the streets
+like mad. However deliberate the East may be in most things, it is swift
+enough in the matter of driving.
+
+I don't care for it. It keeps me watching all the time to see what kind
+of an Arab we are going to kill, and I miss a good many sights. We went
+through that crowded thoroughfare of the Grande Bazaar at a rate which
+fairly was homicidal. Certainly if those drowsy shopkeepers did not hate
+Christians enough before, they do now.
+
+We drove to the Grande Mosque, and we had to put on slippers, of course,
+to enter even the outer court. It is nearly a quarter of a mile long,
+and we slid and straddled across that vast marble skating-rink, pausing
+at a little pavilion--the Dome of the Treasury--where they keep some
+venerable books--the oldest books in the world, I believe, and so sacred
+that nobody ever sees them. Then we entered the Grande Mosque
+itself--still known as the Church of St. John the Divine.
+
+For, like the temples of Baalbec and otherwheres, the Grande Mosque of
+Damascus has sheltered a variety of religious doctrines. It was the
+Temple of Rimmon, first, god of the Syrians. The Romans, who conquered
+and templed the world, came next, and built here, as they always built,
+in magnificence and pride, with architecture stolen from the Greeks.
+After the Romans, the early Christians under Constantine and Theodosius,
+who for some reason did not destroy, as was their habit, but only
+adapted the great temple to their needs. The son of Theodosius made some
+improvements, and above the south door left a Christian inscription
+which stands to this day.
+
+When, in 634 A.D., Damascus fell, the church was at first divided
+between Mohammedan and Christian worshippers--the two entering by the
+same gate. They were not so far asunder in those days--not farther, I
+think, than some of our present-day Christian sects--so called. Seventy
+years later the strife became bitter, and the followers of Mohammed
+claimed it all. The Caliph entered the church with guards, smashed the
+Christian images, and set up emblems of the new faith. Then he lavished
+quantities of money, making the place as splendid as possible, until it
+was more beautiful even than St. Sophia's. Sixteen years ago it was
+badly damaged by fire, but now it has been restored--by Christian
+workmen, Habib said. Habib, I should add, is our party guide--a
+Christian Syrian, educated in a college at Beirut--a quite wonderful
+person of many languages.
+
+The mosque interior is the most beautiful place we have seen. Its
+ceiling, its windows, its mosaic walls, its rugs--all overwhelming in
+exquisite workmanship and prodigality of design. The pictures I have
+dreamed of Aladdin's palace grow dim in this enchanted place. No wonder
+the faithful linger here on their way to and from Mecca; for after the
+long desert stages it is like a vision of that lavish paradise which
+their generous prophet has provided. They are all about--prostrating
+themselves with many genuflections and murmurings--and we step on them
+as little as possible, but they are a good deal in the way. The place
+holds ten or twelve thousand of them every Friday, Habib said.
+
+Habib, by-the-way, has small respect for the Moslem. Also, he does not
+seem to fear consequences, which I confess I do, being in the very
+stronghold of fanaticism, and remembering that some five thousand
+Christians were suddenly and violently destroyed in Damascus not so many
+years ago. We were in front of a very marvellous mosaic shrine, and
+Habib beckoned us to come closer to admire its exquisite workmanship. A
+devotee was prostrated in the little alcove, bowing and praying in the
+usual rhythmic way. We surrounded him, but were inclined to hold a
+little aloof.
+
+"Closer, closer!" urged Habib. "You must see it!"
+
+We crowded up and entangled the praying person, who became aware of our
+presence and turned up his face helplessly. Then he pressed it again to
+the floor, and tried to go on with his murmurings. It was no use. Habib
+jostled him, waved his pointing stick over his head, tapped the
+ornamentation within an inch of his nose. We were told to step up and
+examine the work closely--to touch it, smell of it. Clearly Habib
+regarded that devotee no more than if he had been a mile removed instead
+of being actually against us. The poor pious pilgrim stole another look
+at us, this way and that, slipped a notch in his prayers, gathered
+himself and tried again, let go a whole distich, quavered in his attempt
+to make himself heard, cast another appealing glance at the
+_Kurf�rsters_, broke through, and fled. This is not an exaggeration, but
+an actual happening. In America there would have been trouble.
+
+"He is nothing," said Habib, when I seemed disturbed. "He is only an
+Arab." Still, he was praying to Habib's God.
+
+Many persons do not realize, I believe, that Christianity and
+Mohammedanism differ mainly in their Messiah. The Jew furnished the
+Moslem as well as the Christian with a God, patriarchs, and
+prophets--the Old Testament being common to all. The Moslem goes further
+than the Jew, for he accepts parts of the New Testament. He recognizes
+John the Baptist as a holy messenger, even claiming to have his head in
+this very church, in a shrine which we saw, though I could see that
+Habib thought the relic apocryphal. Furthermore, the Moslem accepts
+Christ! To him, Christ is only a lesser prophet than Mohammed, but still
+a great being--an emissary of God--and on this same mosque is the
+Minaret of Jesus, where, one day, as they believe, he will stand to
+judge the world. On the other hand, the average Christian believes that
+Mohammed was merely a fraud, and it is this difference of opinion that
+has reddened the East with blood. I am moved to set down this paragraph
+of rather general information for the reason that it contains some
+things which I suppose others to be as ignorant of as I was--things
+which seem to me interesting.
+
+We did see one old book, by-the-way--fifteen hundred years old, Habib
+said, and a member of our party asked if it was printed on a press;
+though that is nothing--I have done worse myself. Then we ascended the
+Minaret of the Bride for the view. We climbed and climbed, and got hot,
+and shaky in the knees, but the view repaid us. There was Damascus
+spread out in its beauty; its marble courts, its domes and minarets and
+painted houses--a magic city in the midst of a garden of bloom.
+Certainly this is fairyland--a mirage whose fragile fabric may vanish in
+a breath. Oh, our time is all too short! One must have long and long to
+look upon the East--it has taken so long to build!
+
+We went to Saladin's tomb, and that is authoritative, though I confess
+that I could not realize, as we stood in that narrow building and viewed
+the catafalque in the centre, that the mighty Saracen hero of romance
+rested there. For me, he belongs only in tales of enchantment and fierce
+deeds, and not in that quiet place. I remembered that his sword was so
+sharp that a feather pillow dropped on its edge would fall on either
+side. Perhaps they have the sword there, and possibly the pillow to
+prove it, but I did not see them.
+
+A Turkish school turned out to look at us and smile. We looked and
+smiled back, and everybody was satisfied. It is certain that we look
+more strange to them than they do to us, now. I know this, for when I
+stop anywhere and look over our party, here amid the turbans and fezzes
+and long flowing garments of the Orient, I can see for myself that it is
+really our party that looks queer and fantastic and out of place--not
+these people at all.
+
+It is natural that one should realize this in Damascus, for Damascus is
+the great reality--the unchanged and changeless. Algiers was a framed
+picture; Constantinople was a world's Midway--a sort of masquerade,
+prepared for our benefit. Here it is different. No longer the country
+and the people constitute the show, but ourselves. One presently
+discovers that he is artificial--an alien, a discord--that he has no
+place here. These others are the eternal verities; their clothes are the
+real clothes--not ours, that change fashion with every year and season.
+One is tempted to abjure all the fanfare and flourish of his so-called
+progress--to strip off his ridiculous garments and customs and fall in
+with the long steady rhythm of the ages.
+
+Only, you don't do it. You discover objections to such a course. I could
+name some of them if I wanted to. Never mind; you couldn't do it anyway.
+You have been hurrying and sweating and capering about and wearing your
+funny clothes and singing in false keys too long. You cannot immediately
+put on the garb of the ages, and lock step with the swing of a thousand
+years.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] The pedler of bread cries, "O Allah who sustaineth us, send trade!"
+The pedler of beverages, "O cheer thine heart!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+FOOTPRINTS OF PAUL
+
+
+We entered the "street which is called Straight," and came to the house
+of Judas, where St. Paul lodged when he was led blind into Damascus,
+trembling and astonished of the Lord. His name was Saul, and he had been
+on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians, by the authority of
+Rome. The story is in the ninth chapter of Acts, and is too familiar to
+repeat here. I believe, though, most of us thought the house of Judas
+had some connection with the unfaithful disciple of that name, until
+Habib enlightened us. Habib said that this was another Judas--a good
+man--well-to-do for his time. The Street called Straight runs through
+the Grande Bazaar, and the house of Judas is in the very midst of that
+dim aggregation of trades. It is roofless and unoccupied, but it is kept
+clean and whitewashed, and its stone walls will stand for another two
+thousand years.
+
+Next to the birth and crucifixion of the Saviour, the most important
+event in the story of Christianity happened there. It seemed strange and
+dream-like to be standing in the house of St. Paul's conversion--a place
+which heretofore had seemed to exist only in the thin leaves and fine
+print of our Sunday-school days--and I found myself wondering which
+corner of the house St. Paul occupied, just where he sat at table, and a
+number of such things. Then I noticed the drifting throngs outside,
+passing and repassing or idling drowsily, who did not seem to know that
+it was St. Paul's house, and paid no attention to it at all.
+
+At the house of Ananias, which came next, Habib was slow in arriving,
+and the Horse-Doctor gave us a preliminary lecture.
+
+"This," he said, "is the house of Ananias, once fed by the ravens.
+Later, through being a trifle careless with the truth, he became the
+founder and charter member of a club which in the United States of
+America still bears his name. Still later he was struck by lightning for
+deceiving his mother-in-law, Saphira, who perished at the same time to
+furnish a Scripture example that the innocent must suffer with the
+guilty (see Deuteronomy xi. 16): This is the spot where Ananias fell.
+That stone marks the spot where his mother-in-law stood. The hole in the
+roof was made by the lightning when it came through. We will now pass on
+to the next--"
+
+That was good enough gospel for our party if Habib had only let it
+alone. He came in just then and interrupted. He said:
+
+"This is the house of Ananias--called St. Ananias, to distinguish him
+from a liar by the same name. That Ananias and his wife, Saphira, fell
+dead at the feet of St. Peter because of falsehood, a warning to those
+who trifle with the truth to-day. St. Ananias was a good man, who
+restored St. Paul's sight and instructed him in the Christian
+doctrine."
+
+We naturally avoided the Doctor for a time after that. His neighborhood
+seemed dangerous.
+
+The house of Ananias is below ground, and was probably used as a
+hiding-place in a day when it was not safe for an active and busy
+Christian to be at large. Such periods have not been unusual in
+Damascus. St. Paul preached Christianity openly, but not for long; for
+the Jews "took counsel to kill him," and watched the gate to see that he
+did not get away.
+
+"Then the disciples took him by night, and let him down the wall in a
+basket."
+
+We drove to the outer wall, and came to the place and the window where
+Paul is said to have been let down. It _might_ have happened there; the
+wall is Roman, and the window above it could have been there in St.
+Paul's day. I prefer to believe it is the real window, though I have
+reason to think they show another one sometimes.
+
+Habib said we were to visit some of the handsome residences of Damascus.
+We were eager for that. From the Minaret of the Bride we had looked down
+upon those marble courts and gay fa�ades, and had been fascinated. We
+drove back into the city, through narrow mud-walled streets, forbidding
+and not overclean. When these alleys had become so narrow and
+disheartening that we could travel only with discomfort, we stopped at a
+wretched entrance and were told to get out. Certainly this was never the
+portal to any respectable residence. But we were mistaken. The Damascus
+house is built from the inside out. It is mud and unseemly disrepute
+without, but it is fairyland within. Every pretentious house is built
+on the same plan, and has a marble court, with a fountain or pool, and
+some peach or apricot or orange trees. On one side of the court is the
+front of the house. It has a high entrance, and rooms to the right and
+to the left--rooms that have a raised floor at one end (that is where
+the rich rugs are) and very high ceilings--forty feet high, some of
+them--decorated with elaborate designs. In the first house the round
+writhing rafters were exposed, and the decoration on them made them look
+exactly like snakes. The Apostle took one look and fled, and I confess I
+did not care for them much myself. The rest of the house was divided
+into rooms of many kinds, and there was running water, and a bath. We
+visited another house, different only in details. Some of the occupants
+were at home here--women-folks who seemed glad to see us, and showed us
+about eagerly. A tourist party from far-off America is a diversion to
+them, no doubt.
+
+[Illustration: URGING US TO PARTAKE OF THE PRECIOUS STUFF, WITHOUT
+STINT]
+
+Then we went to still another house. We saw at once that it was a
+grander place than the two already visited, and we were simply
+bewildered at the abundance of the graven brass and inlaid furniture,
+rich rugs and general bric-�-brac, that filled a great reception-room.
+Suddenly servants in Turkish dress appeared with trays of liqueurs--two
+kinds, orange and violet--urging us to partake of the precious stuff,
+without stint. Also, there were trays of rare coffee and dainty
+sweetmeats, and we were invited to sit in the priceless chairs and to
+handle the wonderful things to our hearts' content. We were amazed,
+stunned. Oriental hospitality could go no further. Then in some subtle
+manner--I don't remember how the information was conveyed, but it must
+have been delicately, Orientally done--we learned that all this brass,
+all these marvellous things, were for sale!
+
+Did we buy them? Did we! David did not take more brass from Hadadezer
+than we carried out of that Damascus residence, which was simply an
+annex to a great brass and mosaic factory, as we discovered later.
+Perhaps those strange liqueurs got into our enthusiasm; certainly I have
+never seen our party so liberal--so little inclined to haggle and hammer
+down.
+
+But the things themselves were worth while. The most beautiful brass in
+the world is made in Damascus, and it is made in that factory.
+
+They took us in where the work was going on. I expected to see
+machinery. Nothing of the sort--not a single machine anywhere. Every
+stage of the work is performed by hand--done in the most primitive way,
+by workmen sitting on the ground, shaping some artistic form, or with a
+simple graving-tool working out an intricate design. Many of the workers
+were mere children--girls, most of them--some of them not over seven or
+eight years old, yet even these were producing work which would cause
+many an "arts and crafts" young lady in America to pale with envy. They
+get a few cents a day. The skilled workers, whose deft fingers and
+trained vision produce the exquisite silver inlay designs, get as much
+as a shilling. No wonder our people did not haggle. The things were
+cheap, and they knew it.
+
+In a wareroom in the same factory I noticed that one of the walls was
+stone, and looked like Roman masonry; also that in it were the outlines
+of two high arches, walled up. I asked Habib about it.
+
+"Those," he said, "are two of the entrances to the Street called
+Straight. We are outside of the wall here; this house is built against
+it. The Straight street had three entrances in the old days. Those two
+have long been closed."
+
+It always gives me a curious sensation to realize that actual people are
+living and following their daily occupations in the midst of
+associations like these. I can't get used to it at all.
+
+To them, however, it is nothing. The fact that they sleep and wake and
+pursue their drowsy round in places hallowed by tradition; that the
+house which sheltered St. Paul stands in the midst of their murmuring
+bazaar; that one side of this wareroom is the wall of the ancient city,
+the actual end of the Street called Straight; that every step they take
+is on historic ground, sacred to at least three religions--this to me
+marvellous condition is to them not strange at all.
+
+It is not that they do not realize the existence of these things: they
+do--at least, most of them do--and honor and preserve their landmarks.
+But that a column against which they dream and smoke may be one of the
+very columns against which St. Paul leaned as he groped his blind way
+down the Street called Straight is to them not a matter for wonder, or
+even comment.
+
+I am beginning to understand their point of view--even to envy it. I do
+not envy some of the things they have--some of their customs--but their
+serenity of habit, their security of place in the stately march of time,
+their establishment of race and religion--one must envy these things
+when he considers them here, apart from that environment which we call
+civilized--the whirl which we call progress.
+
+I do not think I shall turn Moslem. The doctrine has attractive
+features, both here and hereafter; but I would not like to undertake the
+Koran at my time of life. I can, however, and I do, pay the tribute of
+respect to the sun-baked land and sun-browned race that have given birth
+to three of the world's great religions, even though they have not
+unnaturally claimed their last invention as their best and held it as
+their own.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+DISCONTENTED PILGRIMS
+
+
+We entered the remaining portal of the Street called Straight and drove
+to the Grand Bazaar. We were in a buying fever by this time, and plunged
+into a regular debauch of bargain and purchase. We were all a little
+weary when we reached the hotel. We came in carrying our brass and other
+loot, and dropped down on the first divan, letting our bundles fall
+where they listed.
+
+I thought the Apostle looked particularly solemn. Being a weighty
+person, jouncing all day in a carriage and walking through brass bazaars
+and fez bazaars and silk bazaars and rug bazaars and silver bazaars and
+leather bazaars and saddle bazaars, and at least two hundred and seven
+other bazaars, had told on him. When I spoke cheeringly he merely
+grunted and reached for something in a glass which, if it tasted as it
+smelled, was not calculated to improve his temper. When I sat down
+beside him he did not seem over cordial.
+
+[Illustration: ASKED HIM IF HE WOULDN'T EXECUTE A LITTLE COMMISSION FOR
+ME IN THE BAZAARS]
+
+Then, quite casually, I asked him if he wouldn't execute a little
+commission for me in the bazaars; there were a few trifles I had
+overlooked: another coffee-set, for instance--something for a friend at
+home; I had faith in his (the Apostle's) taste.
+
+It seemed a reasonable request, and I made it politely enough, but the
+Apostle became suddenly violent. He said:
+
+"Damn the bazaars! I'm full of brass and Oriental rugs and bric-�-brac.
+I never want to hear of a bazaar again. I want to give away the junk
+I've already bought, and get back to the ship." Which we knew he didn't
+mean, for he had put in weary hours acquiring those things, inspired
+with a large generosity for loved ones at home.
+
+The Colonel came drifting along just then--unruffled,
+debonair--apparently unwearied by the day's round. Nothing disturbs the
+Colonel. If he should outwear the century, he would still be as blithe
+of speech and manner as he is to-day at--dear me, how old is the
+Colonel? Is he thirty? Is he fifty? He might be either of those ages or
+at any mile-post between.
+
+He stood now, looking down at the Apostle and his cup of poison. Then,
+with a coaxing smile:
+
+"Match you, Joe--my plunder against yours--just once."
+
+The Apostle looked up with a perfectly divine sneer.
+
+"_Yes_, you will-- I think I see myself!"
+
+The Colonel slapped a coin on the table briskly.
+
+"Come on, Joe--we never matched for bric-�-brac before. Let's be
+game--just this time."
+
+What was the use? The Apostle resisted--at first violently, then
+feebly--then he matched--and lost.
+
+For a moment he could hardly realize the extent of his disaster. Then he
+reached for the mixture in front of him, swallowed it, gagged, and
+choked alarmingly. When he could get his voice, he said:
+
+"I'm the hellfiredest fool in Syria. I walked four hundred miles to buy
+those things."
+
+The Horse-Doctor regarded him thoughtfully.
+
+"You always interest me," he said. "I don't know whether it's your shape
+or your mental habitudes. Both are so peculiar."
+
+After which we left the Apostle--that is, we stood from under and went
+in to dinner.
+
+The Apostle is a good traveller, however--all the Reprobates are. They
+take things as they find them, which cannot be said for all of our
+people. One wonders what some of them expected in Damascus--probably
+steamer fare and New York hotel accommodations. I judge this from their
+remarks.
+
+As a matter of fact, we are at the best hotel in Damascus, and the hotel
+people are racking their bodies and risking their souls to give us the
+best they know. A traveller cannot get better than the best--even in
+heaven. Travelling alone in any strange land, he is more likely to get
+the worst. Yet the real traveller will make the best of what he finds,
+and do better when he finds he can. But these malcontents of ours have
+been pampered and spoiled by that steamer until they expect nothing
+short of perfection--_their_ kind of perfection--wherever they set foot.
+They are so disturbed over the fact that the bill-of-fare is unusual and
+not adjusted to their tastes that they are not enjoying the sights, and
+want to clear out, forthwith. They have been in Damascus a little more
+than a day; they want to go now. This old race has stood it five
+thousand years or more. These ship-dwellers can't stand it two days
+without complaint. I don't want to be severe, but such travellers tire
+me. I suppose the bill-of-fare in heaven won't please them. I hope not,
+if I'm invited to remain there--any length of time, I mean.
+
+The rest of us are having great enjoyment. We like everything, and we
+eat most of it. There are any number of dried fruits and nuts and fine
+juicy oranges always on the table, strung down the centre--its full
+length. And even if the meats are a bit queer, they are by no means bad.
+We whoop up the bill-of-fare, and go through it forward and backward and
+diagonally, working from both ends toward the centre, and back again if
+we feel like it. We have fruit and nuts piled by our plates and on our
+plates all through the meal. _We_ don't get tired of Damascus. We could
+stay here and start a famine. What _will_ these grumblers do in heaven,
+where very likely there isn't a single dish they ever heard of before?
+
+In the matter of wines, however, I am conservative. You see, Mohammed
+forbade the use of spirituous beverages by the faithful, and liquor
+forms no part of their long, symphonic rhyme. They don't drink it
+themselves; they only make it for visitors.
+
+It would require no command of the Prophet to make me abstain from it. I
+have tried their vintage. I tried one brand called the "Wine of
+Ephesus." The name conjured visions; so did the wine, but they were not
+the same visions. The name suggested banquets in marble halls, where
+gentlemen and ladies of the old days reclined on rich divans and were
+served by slaves on bended knee. The wine itself--the taste of it, I
+mean--suggested a combination of hard cider and kerosene, with a hurry
+call for the doctor.
+
+I was coy about the wines of the East after that, but by-and-by I tried
+another brand--a different color with a different name. This time it was
+"Nectar of Heliopolis." They had curious ideas of nectar in Heliopolis.
+Still, it was better than the Wine of Ephesus. Hair-oil is always better
+than kerosene in a mixture like that--but not much better. The flavor
+did not invite debauch.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is Sunday (the Christian Sunday), and I have been out for an early
+morning walk. I took the trolley that starts near the hotel. I did not
+care for a trolley excursion, but I wanted to see what a Damascus
+trolley is like and where it went. It isn't like anything in particular,
+and it didn't go anywhere--not while I was on it.
+
+I noticed that it was divided into three sections, and I climbed into
+the front one. The conductor motioned to me, and I understood that I had
+made a wrong selection, somehow. A woman, veiled and bangled, climbed
+aboard just then, and I understood. I was in the women's section--a
+thing not allowed in Damascus. So I got back into the rear section, but
+that wouldn't do, either. The conductor was motioning again.
+
+I comprehended at length. The rear compartment was second class. He
+wanted me to go in style. So I got into the middle compartment and gave
+him a tin medal, and got two or three similar ones in change, and sat
+there waiting for the procession to move. I waited a good while. There
+was an Arabic inscription on the back of the seats in front of me--in
+the place where, in America, it says, "Wait for the car to stop." I
+suppose it says, "Wait for the car to start" in Damascus. We did that.
+The conductor dozed.
+
+Now and then somebody climbed on, but the arrivals were infrequent. I
+wondered if we were waiting for a load. It would take a week to fill up,
+at that rate. I looked at my watch now and then. The others went to
+sleep. That is about the difference between the East and the West. The
+West counts the time; for the East it has no existence. Moments, hours,
+months mean nothing to the East. The word hurry is not of her language.
+She drives her horses fast, but merely for pleasure, not haste. She has
+constructed this trolley, but merely for style. It doesn't really serve
+any useful purpose.
+
+We moved a little by-and-by, and I had hopes. They were premature. We
+crawled up in front of a coffee-house where a lot of turbans and fezzes
+were gathered outside, over tiny cups and hubble-bubble pipes; then we
+stopped. Our conductor and motorman got off and leaned against an
+almond-tree and began gossiping with friends. Finally coffee came out to
+them, and pipes, and they squatted down to smoke.
+
+I finished my ride then; I shall always wonder where those other
+passengers thought they were going, and if they ever got there.
+
+I followed down a narrow street, and came to a succession of tiny
+work-shops. It was then I discovered what a man's feet are for--that
+is, some uses I had not known before. They are to assist the hands in
+performing mechanical labor. All mechanics work barefooted here. They
+sit flat on the floor or ground, with their various appliances in
+front of them, and there is scarcely any operation in which the feet
+do not take part. I came to a turning-lathe--a whole row of
+turning-lathes--tiny, crude affairs, down on the ground, of course,
+driven back and forth with a bow and a string. The workman held the bow
+in one hand, while the other hand, assisted by the foot, guided the
+cutting tool. It would never occur to these workmen to put the lathe
+higher in the air and attach a treadle, leaving both hands free to guide
+the tool.
+
+Their sawing is the crudest process imaginable. They have no trestles or
+even saw-bucks. They have only a slanting stick stuck in the ground, and
+against this, with their feet and one hand, they hold the piece to be
+sawed, while the other hand runs the earliest saw ever made--the kind
+Noah used when he built the Ark. Sometimes a sawyer has a helper--a boy
+who pushes and pulls as the saw runs back and forth.
+
+I bought a Sunday-morning paper. It does not resemble the
+sixty-four-page New York Sunday dailies. It consists of four small
+pages, printed in wriggly animalcul� and other aquaria, and contains
+news four years old--or four hundred, it does not matter. Possibly it
+denounces the sultan--it is proper to do that just now--but I think not.
+That would be too current. I think it is still denouncing Constantine.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+DAMASCUS, THE GARDEN BEAUTIFUL
+
+
+Later, we drove to the foot of Mohammed's Hill--the hill from which the
+Prophet looked down on the Pearl of the East and decided that as he
+could have only one paradise he would wait for the next. They have built
+a little tower to mark the spot where he rested, and we thought we would
+climb up there.
+
+We didn't, however. The carriages could only go a little way beyond the
+city outskirts, and when we started to climb that blistering, barren
+hillside afoot we changed our minds rapidly. We had permission to go as
+high as we pleased, but it is of no value. Anybody could give it. Laura
+and I and a German newspaper man were the only ones who toiled up high
+enough to look down through the mystical haze on the vision Mohammed
+saw. Heavens! but it was hot up there! And this is March--early spring!
+How those _Quaker City_ pilgrims stood it to travel across the Syrian
+desert in August I cannot imagine. In the _Innocents_ I find this
+observation:
+
+     "The sun-flames shot down like shafts of fire that stream
+     out of a blowpipe. The rays seemed to fall in a steady
+     deluge on my head and pass downward like rain from a roof."
+
+That is a white-hot description, but not too intense, I think, for
+Syrian summer-time.
+
+Another thing we noticed up there: Damascus is growing--in that
+direction at least. Older than history, the place is actually having a
+boom. All the houses out that way are new--mud-walled, but some of them
+quite pretentious. They have pushed out far beyond the gardens, across
+the barren plain, and they are climbing the still more barren slope.
+They stand there in the baking sun, unshaded as yet by any living thing.
+One pities the women shut up behind those tiny barred windows. These
+places will have gardens about them some day. Already their owners are
+scratching the earth with their crooked sticks, and they will plant and
+water and make the desert bloom.
+
+Being free in the afternoon, Laura and I engaged Habib and a carriage
+and went adventuring on our own account. We let Habib manage the
+excursion, and I shall always remember it as a sweet, restful
+experience.
+
+We visited a Moslem burying-ground first, and the tomb of Fatima--the
+original Fatima--Mohammed's beautiful daughter, who married a rival
+prophet, Ali, yet sleeps to-day with honor in a little mosque-like tomb.
+We passed a tree said to have been planted by the Mohammedan conqueror
+of Damascus nearly thirteen hundred years ago--an enormous tree, ten
+feet through or more--on one side a hollow which would hold a dozen men,
+standing.
+
+Then at last we came to the gardens of Damascus, and got out and walked
+among the olive-trees and the peach and almond and apricot--most of them
+in riotous bloom. Summer cultivation had only just begun, and few
+workmen were about. Later the gardens will swarm with them, and they
+will be digging and irrigating, and afterward gathering the fruit,
+preserving and drying it, and sending it to market. Habib showed us the
+primitive methods of doing these things.
+
+How sweet and quiet and fragrant it was there among the flowering trees!
+In one place a little group of Syrian Christians were recreating (it
+being Sunday), playing some curious dulcimer instrument and singing a
+weird hymn.
+
+We crossed the garden, and sat on the grass under the peach-bloom while
+Habib went for the carriage. Sitting there, we realized that the
+guide-book had been only fair to Damascus.
+
+     "For miles around it is a wilderness of gardens--gardens
+     with roses among the tangled shrubberies, and with fruit on
+     the branches overhead. Everywhere among the trees the murmur
+     of unseen rivulets is heard."
+
+That sounds like fairyland, but it is only Damascus--Damascus in June,
+when the fruit is ripening and the water-ways are full.
+
+We drove out of Damascus altogether--far out across a fertile plain, to
+the slopes of the West Lebanon hills. Then turning, we watched the sun
+slip down the sky while Habib told us many things. Whatever there is to
+know, Habib knows, and to localities and landmarks he fitted stories and
+traditions which brought back all the old atmosphere and made this
+Damascus the Damascus of fable and dreams.
+
+Habib pointed out landmarks near and far--minarets of the great mosque,
+the direction of Jerusalem, of Mecca; he showed us where the waters of
+Damascus rise and where they waste into the desert sands. To the
+westward was Mount Hermon; southward came the lands of Naphtali, and
+Bashan where the giant Og once reigned. All below us lay Palestine;
+Mount Hermon was the watch-tower, Damascus the capital of the North.
+
+Damascus in the sunset, its domes and minarets lifting above the lacing
+green! There is no more beautiful picture in the world than that. We
+turned to it again and again when every other interest had waned--the
+jewel, the "pearl set in emeralds," on the desert's edge. Laura and I
+will always remember that Sunday evening vision of the old city, the
+things that Habib told us, and the drive home.
+
+Next to the city itself I think the desert interested us. It begins just
+a little beyond Damascus, Habib said, and stretches the length of the
+Red Sea and to the Persian Gulf. A thousand miles down its length lies
+Mecca, to which pilgrims have journeyed for ages--a horde of them every
+year. There is a railway, now, as far as Tebook, but Mecca is still six
+hundred miles beyond. The great annual pilgrimages, made up of the
+faithful from all over Asia and portions of Europe and Africa, depart
+from Damascus, and those that survive it return after long months of
+wasting desert travel. Habib said that a great pilgrimage was returning
+now; the city was full of holy men.
+
+Then he told us about the dromedary mail that crosses the desert from
+Damascus to Bagdad, like a through express. It is about five hundred
+miles across as the stork flies, but the dromedary is not disturbed by
+distance. He destroys it at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, and
+capers in fresh and smiling at the other end. Habib did not advise
+dromedary travel. It is very rough, he said. Nothing but an Arab trained
+to the business could stand it. Once an Englishman wanted to go through
+by the dromedary mail, and did go, though they implored him to travel in
+the regular way. He got through all right, but his liver and his heart
+had changed places, and it took three doctors seven days to rearrange
+his works.
+
+A multitude was pouring out of the city when we reached the
+gates--dwellers in the lands about. We entered and turned aside into
+quiet streets, the twilight gathering about mysterious doorways and in
+dim shops and stalls, where were bowed, turbaned men who never seemed to
+sell anything, or to want to sell anything--who barely noticed us as we
+passed through the Grand Bazaar, where it was getting dark, and all the
+drowsy merchants of all the drowsy merchandise were like still shadows
+that only moved a little to let us pass. Out again into streets that
+were full of dusk, and dim flitting figures and subdued sounds.
+
+All at once I caught sight of a black stone jar hanging at the door of a
+very small and dusky booth. It was such a jar as is used in Damascus
+to-day for water--was used there in the time of Abraham.
+
+"Habib!"
+
+I had wanted one of the pots from the first. The carriage stops
+instantly.
+
+"Habib! That black water-jar--a small one!"
+
+I had meant to bargain for it myself, but Habib is ahead of me. He
+scorns to bargain for such a trifle, and with such a merchant. He merely
+seizes the jar, says a guttural word or two in whatever tongue the man
+knows, flings him a paltry coin, and is back in the carriage, directing
+our course along the darkening, narrow way.
+
+What a wonderful life the dark is bringing out! There, in front of that
+coffee-house, that row of men smoking nargileh--surely they are
+magicians, every one. "That silent group with shaven faces and snowy
+beards: who are they, Habib?"
+
+"Mongolians," he says. "Pilgrims returning from Mecca. They live far
+over to the north of China, but still are followers of the Prophet." The
+scope of Islamism is wide--oh yes, very wide, and increasing. That group
+gathered at the fountain--their dress, their faces--
+
+"Habib!"
+
+The horses come up with a jerk.
+
+"A copper water-jar, Habib! An old, old man is filling it--such a
+strange pattern"--
+
+Habib is down instantly, and amid the crowd. Cautiously I follow. The
+old man is stooped, wrinkled, travel-worn. His robe and his turban are
+full of dust. He is listening to Habib and replying briefly.
+
+Habib explains. The pilgrim is returning with it from Mecca; it is very
+old; he cannot part with it. My heart sinks; every word adds value to
+the treasure. Habib tries again, while I touch the ancient, curiously
+wrought jar lovingly. The pilgrim draws away. He will hardly allow me
+even this comfort.
+
+We return to the carriage sadly. The driver starts. Some one comes
+running behind, calling. Again we stop; a boy calls something to Habib.
+
+"He will sell," Habib laughs, "and why not? He demands a napoleon. Of
+course you will not give it!"
+
+Oh, coward heart! I cannot, after that. I have the napoleon and the
+desire, but I cannot appear a fool before Habib.
+
+"No, it is too much. Drive on."
+
+We dash forward; the East closes behind us; the opportunity is forever
+lost.
+
+If one could only be brave at the instant! All my days shall I recall
+the group at the fountain: that bent, travel-stained pilgrim; that
+strangely fashioned water-pot which perhaps came down to him from
+patriarchal days. How many journeys to Mecca had it made; how many times
+had it moistened the parching lips of some way-worn pilgrim dragging
+across the burning sand; how many times had it furnished water for
+absolution before the prayer in the desert! And all this could have been
+mine. For a paltry napoleon I could have had the talisman for my
+own--all the wonder of the East, its music, its mystery, its
+superstition; I could have fondled it and gazed on it and re-created
+each picture at a touch.
+
+Oh, Habib, Habib, may the Prophet forgive you; for, alas, I never can!
+
+At the station next morning a great horde of pilgrims were waiting for
+the train which would bear them to Beirut--Mongolians, many of them, who
+had been on the long, long, pilgrimage over land and sea. At Beirut, we
+were told, seven steamers were waiting to take them on the next stage of
+their homeward journey. What a weary way they had yet to travel!
+
+They were all loaded down with baggage. They had their bundles,
+clothing, quilts, water-bottles: and I wandered about among them vainly
+hoping to find my pilgrim of the copper pot. Hopeless, indeed. There
+were pots in plenty, but they were all new or unsightly things.
+
+All the pilgrims were old men, for the Moslem, like most of the rest of
+us, puts off his spiritual climax until he has acquired his material
+account. He _has_ to, in fact; for, even going the poorest way and
+mainly afoot, a journey of ten or twelve thousand miles across mountain
+and desert, wilderness and wave cannot be made without substance.
+
+We took a goodly number of them on our train. Freight-cars crowded with
+them were attached behind, and we crawled across the mountains with that
+cargo of holy men, who poured out at every other station and prostrated
+themselves, facing Mecca, to pray for our destruction. At least, I
+suppose they did that. I know they made a most imposing spectacle at
+their devotions, and the Moslem would hardly overlook an enemy in such
+easy praying distance.
+
+However, we crossed the steeps, skirted the precipices safely enough,
+and by-and-by a blue harbor lay below, and in it, like a fair picture,
+the ship--home. We had been gone less than a week--it seemed a year.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+WHERE PILGRIMS GATHER IN
+
+
+At some time last night we crossed over the spot where the Lord stirred
+up a mighty tempest and a great fish to punish Jonah, and this morning
+at daybreak we were in the harbor of Jaffa, "the beautiful," from which
+port Jonah sailed on that remarkable cruise.
+
+We were not the only ones there. Two other great excursion steamers lay
+at anchor, the _Arabic_ and the _Moltke_, their decks filled with our
+fellow-countrymen, and I think the several parties of ship-dwellers took
+more interest in looking at one another, and in comparing the appearance
+of their respective vessels, than in the rare vision of Jaffa aglow with
+morning. Three ship-loads at once! It seemed like a good deal of an
+invasion to land on these sacred shores. But then we remembered how many
+invasions had landed at Jaffa--how Alexander and Titus had been there
+before us, besides all the crusades--so a modest scourge like ours would
+hardly matter. As for that military butcher, Napoleon, who a little more
+than a century ago murdered his way through this inoffending land, he
+shot four thousand Turkish prisoners here on the Jaffa sands, after
+accepting their surrender under guarantee of protection. We promised
+ourselves that we would do nothing like that. We might destroy a pedler
+now and then, or a baksheesh fiend; but four thousand, even of that
+breed, would be too heavy a contract.
+
+[Illustration: THE PATRIARCH KNEW ALL ABOUT JAFFA]
+
+The Patriarch knew all about Jaffa. It is one of his special landmarks,
+being the chief seaport of the Phoenicians, the one place they never
+really surrendered. A large share of the vast traffic that went in and
+out of Palestine in the old days went by Jaffa, and a great deal goes
+that way still. The cedarwood from Lebanon, used in Solomon's Temple,
+was brought by water to this port; the treasure and rich goods that went
+down to Jerusalem in the day of her ancient glory all came this way; her
+conquerors landed here. The blade and brand prepared for Jerusalem were
+tried experimentally on Jaffa. According to Josephus, eighty thousand of
+her inhabitants perished at one time. Yet Jaffa has survived. Her
+harbor, which is not really a harbor at all, but merely an anchorage,
+with a landing dangerous and uncertain, has still been sufficient to
+keep her the chief seaport of Judea.
+
+There is another reason for Jaffa's survival. Beyond her hills lie the
+sacred cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The fields that knew Ruth and
+Benjamin and a man named Jesus lie also there. From Jaffa in every
+direction stretch lands made memorable by stories and traditions in
+which the God and the prophets of at least three religions are
+intimately concerned. So during long centuries Jaffa has been a holy
+gateway, and through its portals the tide of pilgrimage has never ceased
+to flow.
+
+Some of us who were to put in full time in Egypt would have only a few
+days in the Holy Land, and we were off the ship presently, being pulled
+through the turquoise water by boatmen who sang a barbaric chorus as
+they bent over their huge, clumsy oars. Then we were ashore and in
+carriages, and in another moment were "jumping through Jaffa," as one of
+the party expressed it, in a way that made events and landmarks flit
+together like the spokes of a wheel.
+
+We visited the tomb of Dorcas, whom Peter raised from the dead, though
+for some reason we did not feel a positive conviction that it was the
+very tomb--perhaps because we did not have time to get up a
+conviction--and we called at the house of Simon the Tanner. It was with
+Simon, "whose house is by the seaside," that Peter lodged when he had
+his "vision of tolerance," in which it was made known to him that "God
+is no respecter of persons, but only of righteousness." It is truly by
+the seaside, and there is an ancient tanner's vat in the court-yard. But
+I hope the place was cleaner when Peter lodged there than it is now. One
+had to step carefully, and, though it did not smell of a tanyard, it did
+of several other things. Many travellers, including Dean Stanley, have
+accepted this as the veritable house where Simon dwelt and St. Peter
+lodged. Those people ought to get together and have it cleaned up. I
+could believe in it then myself.
+
+Jaffa, as a whole, could stand the scrub-brush and the hose. It is not
+"the beautiful" from within. It is wretchedly unbeautiful, though just
+as we were getting ready to leave it we did have one genuine vision.
+From the enclosures of the Greek Church we looked across an interminable
+orange-grove, in which the trees seemed mere shrubs, but were literally
+massed with golden fruit--the whole blending away into tinted haze and
+towering palms. No blight, no vileness, no inodorous breath, but only
+the dreamlit mist and the laden trees--the Orient of our long ago.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One might reasonably suppose that, as often as parties like ours travel
+over the railway that potters along from Jaffa to Jerusalem, there would
+be no commotion, no controversy with the officials--that the guard would
+only need to come in and check up our tickets and let us go.
+
+Nothing of the kind; every such departure as ours is a function, an
+occasion--an entirely new proposition, to be considered and threshed out
+in a separate and distinct fashion. Before we were fairly seated in the
+little coach provided, dark-skinned men came in one after another to
+look us over and get wildly excited--over our beauty, perhaps; I could
+discover nothing else unusual about us. They would wave their hands and
+carry on, first inside and then on the platform, where they would seem
+to settle it. When they had paid us several visits of this kind, they
+locked us in and went away, and we expected to start.
+
+Not at all; they came back presently and did it all over again, only
+louder. Then our dragoman appeared, and bloodshed seemed imminent. When
+they went away again he said it was nothing--just the usual business of
+getting started.
+
+By-and-by some of us discovered that our bags had not been put on the
+train, so we drifted out to look for them. We found them here and there,
+with from two to seven miscreants battling over each as to which should
+have the piastre or two of baksheesh collectible for handing our things
+from the carriage to the train. Such is the manner of graft in the Holy
+Land. It lacks organization and does not command respect.
+
+The station was a hot, thirsty place. We loaded up with baskets of
+oranges, the great, sweet, juicy oranges of Jaffa--the finest oranges in
+the world, I am sure--then we forgot all our delays and troubles, for we
+were moving out through the groves and gardens of the suburbs, entering
+the Plains of Sharon--"a fold for flocks, a fertile land, blossoming as
+the rose."
+
+That old phrase expresses it exactly. I have never seen a place that so
+completely conveyed the idea of fertility as those teeming, haze-haunted
+plains of Sharon. Level as a floor, the soil dark, loose, and loamy;
+here green with young wheat, there populous with labor--men and women,
+boys and girls, dressed in the old, old dress, tilling the fields in the
+old, old manner; flocks and herds tended by such shepherds as saw the
+Star rise over Bethlehem; girls carrying water-jars on their heads;
+camel trains swinging across the horizon--a complete picture of primal
+husbandry, it was--a vast allegory of increase. I have seen agricultural
+and pastoral life on a large scale in America, where we do all of the
+things with machinery and many of them with steam, and would find it
+hard to plough with a camel and a crooked stick; but I have somehow
+never felt such a sense of tillage and production--of communing with
+mother earth and drawing life and sustenance from her bosom--as came to
+me there crossing the Plains of Sharon, the garden of Syria.
+
+It is a goodly tract for that country--about fifty miles long and from
+six to fifteen wide. The tribes of Dan and Manasseh owned it in the old
+days, and to look out of the car-window at their descendants is to see
+those first families that Joshua settled there, for they have never
+changed.
+
+Our dragoman began to point out sites and landmarks. Here was the Plain
+of Joshua, where Samson made firebrands of three hundred foxes and
+destroyed the standing corn of the Philistines. The tower ahead is at
+Ramleh, and was built by the crusaders nearly a thousand years
+ago--Ramleh being the Arimathea where lived Joseph, who provided the
+Saviour with a sepulchre. Also, it is said to be the place where in the
+days when Samuel judged Israel the Jews besought him for a king, and
+acquired Saul and the line of David and Solomon as a result. To the
+eastward lies the Valley of Ajalon, where Joshua stopped the
+astronomical clock for the only time in a million ages, that he might
+slaughter some remaining Amorites before dark.
+
+We are out of the Plains of Sharon by this time, running through a
+profitless-looking country, mostly rock and barren, hardly worth
+fighting over, it would seem. Yet there were plenty of people to be
+killed here in the old days, and as late as fifteen hundred years after
+Joshua the Roman Emperor Hadrian slaughtered so many Jews at Bittir (a
+place we shall pass presently) that the horses waded to their nostrils
+in blood, and a stone weighing several pounds was swept along by the
+ruby tide. The guide told us this, and said if we did not believe it he
+could produce the stone.
+
+Landmarks fairly overlap one another. Here, at Hill Gezer, are the ruins
+of an ancient city presented to Solomon by one of his seven hundred
+fathers-in-law. Yonder at Ekron so much history has been made that a
+chapter would be required to record even a list of the events. Ekron was
+one of the important cities which Joshua did not capture, perhaps
+because he could not manage the solar system permanently. The whole
+route fairly bristles with Bible names, and we are variously affected.
+When we are shown the footprints of Joshua and Jacob and David and
+Solomon we are full of interest. When we recall that this is also the
+land of Phut and Cush and Buz and Jidlaph and Pildash we are moved
+almost to tears.
+
+For those last must have been worthy men. The Bible records nothing
+against them, which is more than can be said of the others named. Take
+Jacob, for instance. I have searched carefully, and I fail to find
+anything to his credit beyond the fact that he procreated the Lord's
+chosen people. I do find that he deceived his father, defrauded his
+brother, outmanoeuvred his rascally father-in-law, and was a craven at
+last before Esau, who had been rewarded for his manhood and forgiveness
+and wrongs by being classed with the Ishmaelites, a name that carries
+with it a reproach to this day.
+
+Then there is Solomon. We need not go into the matter of his thousand
+wives and pretty favorites. Long ago we condoned that trifling
+irregularity as incident to the period--related in some occult but
+perfectly reasonable way to great wisdom. No, the wives are all
+right--also the near-wives, we have swallowed those, too; but then there
+comes in his heresy, his idolatry--all those temples built to heathen
+gods when he had become magnificent and mighty and full of years. There
+was that altar which he set up to Moloch on the hill outside of
+Jerusalem (called to this day the Hill of Offence), an altar for the
+_sacrifice of children by fire_. Even Tiberius C�sar and Nero did not go
+as far as that. I'm sorry, and I shall be damned for it, no doubt, but
+I think, on the whole, in the language of the Diplomat, I shall have to
+"pass Solomon up." Never mind about the other two. Joshua's record is
+good enough if one cares for a slayer of women and children, and David
+was a poet--a supreme poet, a divine poet--which accounts for a good
+deal. Still, he did not need to put the captured Moabites under saws and
+harrows of iron and make them walk through brick-kilns, as described in
+II. Samuel xii: 31, to be picturesque. Neither did he need to kill Uriah
+the Hittite in order to take his wife away from him. Uriah would
+probably have parted with her on easier terms.
+
+It is sad enough to reflect that the Bible, in its good, old, relentless
+way, found it necessary to record such things as these against our
+otherwise Sunday-school heroes and models. Nothing of the sort is set
+down against Buz and Cush and Phut and Pildash and Jidlaph. Very likely
+they were about perfect. I wish I knew where they sleep.
+
+The nearer one approaches Jerusalem the more barren and unproductive
+becomes the country. There are olive-groves and there are cultivated
+fields, but there are more of flinty hillsides and rocky steeps. The
+habitations are no longer collected in villages, in the Syrian fashion,
+but are scattered here and there, with wide sterile places between.
+There would seem to be not enough good land in any one place to support
+a village.
+
+I suppose this is the very home of baksheesh. I know at every station
+mendicants, crippled and blind--always blind--come swarming about,
+holding up piteous hands and repeating endlessly the plaintive wail,
+"Baksheesh! bak-sheesh!" One's heart grows sick and hard by turns. There
+are moments when you long for the wealth of a Rockefeller to give all
+these people a financial standing, and there are moments when you long
+for a Gatling-gun to turn loose in their direction. We are only weak and
+human. We may pity the hungry fly ever so much, but we destroy him.
+
+I think, by-the-way, some of these beggars only cry baksheesh from
+habit, and never expect to get anything. I think so, because here and
+there groups of them stand along the railway between stations, and hold
+out their hands, and voice the eternal refrain as we sweep by. It is
+hardly likely that any one ever flings anything out of a car-window.
+Pity becomes too sluggish in the East to get action as promptly as that.
+
+It was toward evening when we ran into a rather modern little railway
+station, and were told that we were "there." We got out of the train
+then, and found ourselves in such a howling mob of humanity as I never
+dreamed could gather in this drowsy land. We were about the last party
+of the season, it seems, and the porters and beggars and cabmen and
+general riffraff were going to make the most of us. We were seized and
+dragged and torn and lifted--our dragoman could keep us together about
+as well as one cowboy could handle a stampeded herd. I have no distinct
+recollection of how we managed to reach the carriages, but the first
+words I heard after regaining consciousness were:
+
+"That pool down there is where Solomon was anointed king."
+
+I began to take notice then. We were outside a range of lofty
+battlemented walls, approaching a wide gate flanked by an imposing tower
+that might belong to the Middle Ages. We looked down on the squalid pool
+of Gihon, and I tried to visualize the scene of Solomon's coronation
+there, which I confess I found difficult. Then we turned to the tower
+and the entrance to the Holy City.
+
+We were entering Jerusalem by the Jaffa gate, and the tower was the
+Tower of David.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+THE HOLY CITY
+
+
+Thirty-nine hundred years ago it was called merely Salem, and was ruled
+over by Melchisedek, who feasted Abraham when he returned from punishing
+the four kings who carried off his nephew, Lot. Five hundred years
+later, when Joshua ravaged Canaan, the place was known as Jebusi, the
+stronghold of the Jebusites, a citadel "enthroned on a mountain
+fastness" which Joshua failed to conquer, in spite of the traditional
+promise to Israel. Its old name had been not altogether dropped, and the
+transition from Jebusi-salem to Jebu-salem and Jerusalem naturally
+followed.
+
+It was four hundred years after Joshua's time that David brought the
+head of Goliath to Jerusalem, and fifteen years later, when he had
+become king, he took the "stronghold of Zion," smote the difficult
+Jebusite even to the blind and the lame, and named the place the City of
+David.
+
+     "And David said on that day, whosoever getteth up to the
+     gutter and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the
+     blind, _that are_ hated of David's soul, he shall be chief
+     and captain."
+
+That is not as cruel as it sounds. Those incapables had no doubt been
+after David for baksheesh, and he felt just that way. I would like to
+appoint a few chiefs and captains of Jerusalem on the same terms.
+
+But I digress. The Bible calls it a "fort," and it was probably not much
+more than that until David "built round about" and turned it into a
+city, the fame of which extended to Hiram, King of Tyre, who sent
+carpenters and masons and materials to David and built him a house.
+After which "David took him some more concubines and wives out of
+Jerusalem," brought up the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim, and
+prepared to live happy ever after. The Ark was, of course, very sacred,
+and one Uzzah was struck dead on the way up from Kirjath for putting out
+his hand to save it when it was about to roll into a ditch.
+
+It was with David that the glory of Jerusalem as a city began. Then came
+Solomon--David's second son by Uriah's wife--wise, masterful, and
+merciless, and Jerusalem became one of the magnificent cities of the
+world. Under Solomon the Hebrew race became more nearly a nation then
+ever before or since. Solomon completed the Temple begun by David on
+Mount Moriah; the Ark of the Covenant was duly installed. Judaism had
+acquired headquarters--Israel, organization, and a capital.
+
+The fame of the great philosopher-poet-king spread to the ends of the
+earth. The mighty from many lands came to hear his wisdom and to gaze
+upon the magnificence of his court. The Queen of Sheba drifted in from
+her far sunlit kingdom with offerings of gold, spices, and precious
+stones. And "she communed with him of all that was in her heart." That
+was more than a thousand years before Christ. Greece had no history
+then. Rome had not been even considered. Culture and splendor were at
+high-tide in the Far East. It was the golden age of Jerusalem.
+
+The full tide must ebb, and the waning in Jerusalem began early.
+Solomon's reign was a failure at the end. Degenerating into a sensualist
+and an idolater, his enemies prevailed against him. The Lord "stirred up
+an adversary" in Hadad the Edomite, who had an old grudge. Also others,
+and trouble followed. The nation was divided. Revolt, civil wars, and
+abounding iniquities dragged the people down. That which would come to
+Rome a thousand years later came now on a smaller scale to Israel.
+Egyptian and Arabian ravaged it by turns, and the Assyrian came down
+numerously. It became the habit of adjoining nations to go over and
+plunder and destroy Jerusalem.
+
+Four hundred years after Solomon, Josiah undertook to rehabilitate the
+nation and restore its ancient faith. He pulled down the heathen altars
+which Solomon had constructed, "that no man might make his son or
+daughter pass through the fire to Moloch"; he drove out and destroyed
+the iniquitous priests; he burned the high places of pollution and
+stamped the powder in the dust.
+
+It was too late. Josiah was presently slain in a battle with the
+Egyptians, and his son dropped back into the evil practices of his
+fathers. Nebuchadnezzar came then, and in one raid after another utterly
+destroyed Jerusalem, including the Temple and the Ark, and carried the
+inhabitants, to the last man, into a captivity which lasted seventy
+years. Then Nehemiah was allowed to return with a large following and
+rebuild the city. But its prosperity was never permanent. The Jews were
+never a governing nation. Discontented and factional, they invited
+conquest. Alexander came, and, later, Rome. Herod the Great renewed and
+beautified the city, and to court favor with the Jews rebuilt the Temple
+on a splendid scale. This was Jerusalem in its final glory. Seventy
+years later the Jews rebelled, and Titus destroyed the city so
+completely that it is said to have remained a barren waste without a
+single inhabitant for fifty years.
+
+To-day the city is divided into "quarters"--Christian, Jewish,
+Mohammedan, and Armenian. All worships are permitted, and the sacred
+relics--most of them--of whatever faith, are accessible to all. Such in
+scanty outline is the story of the Holy City. It has been besieged and
+burned and pulled down no less than sixteen times--totally destroyed and
+rebuilt at least eight times, and the very topography of its site has
+been changed by the accumulation of rubbish. Hillsides have disappeared.
+Where once were hollows are now mere depressions or flats. Most of the
+streets that Jesus and the prophets trod lie from thirty to a hundred
+feet below the present surface, and bear little relation even in
+direction to those of the present day. Yet certain sites and landmarks
+have been identified, while others are interesting for later reasons.
+
+Hence, both to sceptic and believer, Jerusalem is still a shrine.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
+
+
+We lost no time. Though it was twilight when we reached our hotel, we
+set out at once to visit the spot which for centuries was the most
+sacred in all Christendom--that holiest of holies which during two
+hundred years summoned to its rescue tide after tide of knightly
+crusaders, depleted the chivalry and changed the map of Europe--the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
+
+This, at least, would be genuine in so far as it was the spot toward
+which the flower of knighthood marched--Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard of
+the Lion Heart, Ivanhoe, and all the rest--under the banner of the
+Cross, with the cry "God wills it" on their lips. We are eager to see
+that precious landmark.
+
+It was only a little way--nothing is far in Jerusalem--and we walked. We
+left the narrow street in front of the hotel and entered some still
+narrower ones where there were tiny booths of the Oriental kind, and
+flickering lights, and curious, bent figures, and donkeys; also steps
+that we went up or down, generally down, which seemed strange when we
+were going to Calvary, because we had always thought Calvary a hill.
+
+It was impressive, though. We were in Jerusalem, and if these were not
+the very streets that Jesus trod, surely they were not unlike them, for
+the people have not changed, nor their habits, nor their
+architecture--at least, not greatly--nor their needs. Whatever was their
+cry for baksheesh then, He must often have heard it, and their blind
+eyes and their withered limbs were such as He once paused to heal.
+
+I think we continued to descend gradually to the very door of the
+church. It did not seem quite like the entrance to a church, and, in
+reality, it is not altogether that; it is more a repository, a
+collection of sacred relics, a museum of scriptural history.
+
+We paused a little outside while the guide--his name was something that
+meant St. George--told us briefly the story. Constantine's mother, the
+Empress Helena, he said, through a dream had located the site of the
+crucifixion and burial of the Saviour, whereupon Constantine, in 335
+A.D., had erected some buildings to mark the place. The Persians
+destroyed these buildings by-and-by, but they were rebuilt. Then the
+Moslems set fire to the place; but again some chapels were set up, and
+these the conquering crusaders enclosed under one great roof. This was
+about the beginning of the twelfth century, and portions of the
+buildings still remain, though as late as 1808 there came a great fire
+which necessitated a general rebuilding, with several enlargements
+since, as the relics to be surrounded have increased.
+
+We went inside then. The place is dimly lit--it is always lit, I
+believe, for it can never be very light in there--and everywhere there
+seemed to be flitting processions of tapers, and of chanting,
+dark-robed priests. Just beyond the entrance we came to the first great
+relic--the Stone of Unction--the slab upon which the body of Christ was
+laid when it was taken down from the Cross. It is red, or looked red in
+that light, like a piece of Tennessee marble, and, though it is not
+smoothly cut, it is polished with the kisses of devout pilgrims who come
+far to pay this tribute, and to measure it, that their winding-sheets
+may be made the same size. Above it hang a number of lamps and
+candelabra, and with the worshippers kneeling and kissing and measuring,
+the spectacle was sufficiently impressive. Then, as we were about to go,
+our guide remembered that this was not the true Stone of Unction, but
+one like it, the real stone having been buried somewhere beneath it. The
+pilgrims did not know the difference, he said, and they used up a stone
+after a while, kissing and measuring it so much. Near to the stone is
+the Station of Mary, where she stood while the body of Jesus was being
+anointed, or perhaps where she stood watching the tomb--it is not
+certain which. At all events, it has been revealed by a vision that she
+stood there, and the place is marked and enclosed with a railing.
+
+We followed our guide deeper into the twinkling darkness, where the
+chanting processions were flickering to and fro, and presently stood
+directly beneath a dome, facing an ornate marble or alabaster structure,
+flanked and surrounded by elaborately wrought lamps and
+candlesticks--the Holy Sepulchre itself.
+
+But I had to be told. I should never have guessed this to be the shrine
+of shrines, the receptacle of the gentle Nazarene who taught the
+doctrine of humility to mankind. And it is the same within. If a
+rock-hewn tomb is there, it is overlaid now with costly marbles;
+polished with kisses; bedewed with tears.
+
+We did not remain in the tomb long, Laura and I. Perhaps they would not
+have let us; but, in any case, we did not wish to linger. At Damascus,
+Laura had gone so far as to criticise the house of Judas, because it had
+been whitewashed since St. Paul lodged there. So it was not likely that
+a tomb which was not a tomb, but merely a fancy marble memorial, would
+inspire much enthusiasm. To us it contained no suggestion of the gentle
+Prince of Peace.
+
+But at the entrance of the Sepulchre, facing us as we came out, there
+was a genuine thing. It was a woman kneeling, a peasant woman--of
+Russia, I suppose, from her dress. And she was not looking at us at all,
+but beyond us, through us, into that little glowing interior which to
+her was shining with the very light of the Lamb. I have never seen
+another face with an expression like that. It was fairly luminous with
+rapt adoration. Yes, she at least was genuine--an absolute embodiment of
+the worship that had led her along footsore and weary miles to kneel at
+last at the shrine of her faith.
+
+I am not going to weary the reader with detailed description of the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is a vast place, and contains most of
+the sacred relics and many of the sacred sites that have been identified
+since the zealous Queen Helena set the fashion of seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. We made the tour of a number of the chapels of
+different religious denominations. They are not on good terms with one
+another, by-the-way, and require Mohammedan guards to keep them from
+fighting around the very Sepulchre itself. Then we descended some stairs
+to the Chapel of St. Helena, where there is an altar to the penitent
+thief, and another to Queen Helena, though I did not learn that she ever
+repented, or even reformed.
+
+They showed us where the Queen sat when, pursuing one of her visions,
+they were digging for the true Cross and found all three of them; and
+they told us how they identified the holy one by sending all three to
+the bedside of a noble lady who lay at the point of death. The first
+shown her made her a maniac; the second threw her into spasms; the third
+cured her instantly. The commemoration of this event is called in the
+calendar "The Invention of the Cross," which seems to convey the idea. I
+think it was in the Chapel of the Finding of the Cross that I bought a
+wax candle, and a prayer went with it, though whether it was for my soul
+or Queen Helena's I am not certain. It does not matter. I am willing
+Helena should have it, if she needs it, and I think she does.
+
+We went on wandering around, and by-and-by we came to a chapel where the
+Crown of Thorns was made, and presently to a short column marking the
+Centre of the Earth, the spot from which the dust was taken that was
+used in making Adam. You see, it is necessary to double up on some of
+the landmarks or enlarge the church again.
+
+You can climb a flight of stairs in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and
+be told that you are on Calvary, and you are allowed to put your hand
+through the floor into the sockets where the crosses stood. We did not
+do it, however. We climbed the stairs, but a collection of priests were
+holding some kind of ceremony with candles and chanting, and we were not
+sufficiently impressed to wait.
+
+We did pause, as we came away, to note in the vestibule of the Holy
+Sepulchre the two holes through which on Easter Eve the Holy Fire is
+distributed to Christian pilgrims who assemble from all parts of the
+world. On this occasion the Fire Bishop enters the Sepulchre, and fire
+from heaven lights the candles on the altar. Then the Bishop, who is all
+alone in the Sepulchre, passes the Holy Fire out through these holes, in
+the form of a bundle of burning tapers, to priests. The pilgrims with
+unlighted tapers then rush and jam and scramble toward these dispensers
+of the sacred flame and pay any price demanded to have their candles
+speedily lighted. Usually a riot takes place, and the Mohammedan guards
+are required to prevent bloodshed.
+
+In 1834 there occurred a riot over the Holy Fire which piled the dead
+five feet deep around the Sepulchre. Four or five hundred were killed,
+and corpses lay thick even on the Stone of Unction. It seems a useless
+sacrifice, when one thinks of it, but then the blood of five hundred is
+only a drop as compared with what the centuries have contributed to this
+revered shrine.
+
+I want to be quite serious for a moment about the Church of the Holy
+Sepulchre--here in Jerusalem--now, while I am in the spirit of the
+thing.
+
+It is the biggest humbug in all Christendom. Of the scores of sites and
+relics enclosed within its walls, it is unlikely that a single one is
+genuine. With all respect to Queen Helena's talent for dreams, her
+knowledge of Scripture must have been sparing, or she would have located
+Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem. This place is in the heart of
+the city--was always in the heart of the city, in spite of all
+gerrymandering to prove it otherwise; and it was more of a flat or a
+hollow in the time of Christ than it is now.
+
+As for the other traditions and trumpery gathered in this ecclesiastical
+side-show, they are unworthy of critical attention. Probably not one in
+a million of the readers of _Innocents Abroad_ but thought the finding
+of the Grave of Adam one of Mark Twain's jokes. Not at all; it is
+located here under Calvary, and the place from which came Adam's dust
+(the Centre of the World) is close by. Then there is that Stone of
+Unction, which every one of intelligence knows to be a fraud, and there
+is the stone which the angel rolled away, and Adam's skull--they have
+that, too.
+
+It would seem that the human animal had exhausted his simian inheritance
+then. But no, he can never exhaust that--it is his one limitless gift.
+He has gone right on adding to his heap of bones and crockery, enlarging
+the museum from time to time to make room. And he will add more. The
+future is long, and it is only a question of time and faith when he will
+bring over the tombs of the patriarchs from Hebron, the Grotto of the
+Nativity from Bethlehem, the House of Judas from Damascus, and the
+Street that was called Straight. Oh, he can do it! A creature who can
+locate the Holy Sepulchre, the Grave of Adam, the Centre of the World,
+Mount Calvary, and fifty other historical sites all within the radius of
+a few feet, and find enough of his own kind to accept them, can do
+anything. As an insult to human intelligence and genuine Christian
+faith, I suppose this institution stands alone.
+
+Do the priests themselves, the beneficiaries, believe it? Perhaps--at
+least some of them do. There is nothing so dense, so sodden, so
+impenetrable as priestly superstition. Not a ray of reason can enter a
+mind darkened for a lifetime by ceremonials in which candles, chantings,
+swinging censers, and prostrations are regarded as worship. Could you
+produce any evidence that would appeal to the minds of those figures
+that march and countermarch, and carry tapers and chant among
+these frauds and fripperies of their faith? Hardly--they would not
+care for evidence. What they want is more superstition; more for
+themselves--more, always more, for their followers; the more
+superstition, the more power, the more baksheesh. They have no use for
+facts and testimony. They can create both to fit the need. Let any
+corner of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre become vacant, and
+immediately some prelate will dream that it is the true place where
+Balaam's Ass saw the angel with the flaming sword, and they will
+promptly consecrate the spot; then they will excavate and find the sword
+and a footprint of the angel, also a piece of the Ass, and they will
+make a saint of Balaam, and very likely of the Ass, and they will set
+up an altar and get a sign-painter to make a picture of the vision, and
+the people will contribute prayers and piastres, and yell baksheesh at
+every traveller to keep the high priests of Balaam in food and funds.
+
+Strange that we who regard the Mohammedan pilgrim with disdain or
+compassion, on his journey to Mecca and Medina, excuse or condone the
+existence of a shrine like this. The Prophet's birthplace and tomb are
+at least authentic, and it was his desire that his followers should
+visit them. They are acknowledging a fact. These people are supporting a
+fraud.
+
+And then the pity of it! The remembering that it was for this trumpery
+thing those mighty crusades swept like a flame across Europe, robbed her
+of her chivalry, and desolated a million homes; for this that gallant
+knights put on their armor and rode away under the banner of the Cross,
+shouting, "God wills it!" For this that men have drenched more than one
+nation with blood and changed the map and history of the world!
+
+True, one may not altogether regret the crusades. They made romance and
+the high achievement to be celebrated in picture and in song. It was
+fine, indeed, to ride away in shining mail in a vast army in which all
+were officers--splendid knights battling for glory in a cause. Aching
+hearts and forsaken homes were plentiful behind, yet even they reflected
+the glamour of romance, the fervor of a faith.
+
+But there was one crusade in which there was neither romance nor
+glory--nothing except heartbreak and anguish, and the long torture of
+the years.
+
+That was the Children's Crusade--the crusade in which fanaticism spelled
+its last word--when a countless number of children of all ages, as young
+as seven some of them, flocked to the standard of a boy of seventeen and
+wandered off down through Europe, to faint and fall and die by hundreds
+and by thousands from hunger and heat and thirst--moaning and grieving
+unheeded among the stones and bushes--to reach the Mediterranean at
+last, a scattered remnant, there to be taken on board some vessels and
+sold into slavery in Algiers!
+
+There was no glory, no triumph however imaginary, in that crusade; no
+romance, no glamour after the first day's march. It was only weariness
+and torture after that--only wretchedness and the fevered cry for the
+comfort of a mother's arm. And all for the sake of this dime-museum of
+faith, this huge ecclesiastical joke. The pity of it, indeed! Here
+to-night, a stone's-throw away, my heart bleeds for those little weary
+feet struggling on and on, for those little fainting souls, moaning,
+grieving, trying to keep up, lying down at last to coax the blessed
+release of death, and I would like to stand here on the housetops of
+Jerusalem and cry out against this insult to the memory of One who, when
+He said, "Suffer little children to come unto me," could hardly have
+foreseen that His words would bear such bitter fruit.
+
+I do not do it, however. I want to live to get home and print this
+thing, and have it graven on my tomb.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+TWO HOLY MOUNTAINS
+
+
+We set out early next morning for Mount Moriah, the site of Solomon's
+temple and those that followed it.
+
+It was really David's temple in the beginning, undertaken to avert a
+pestilence which he had selected from three punishments offered by the
+Lord because he, David, had presumed to number his people. A Hebrew
+census was a sin in those days, it would seem, and seventy thousand of
+the enrolled had already died when David saw an angel with a drawn
+sword--the usual armament of an angel--standing by the threshing-floor
+of Oman the Jebusite. Through Gad, his Soothsayer, David was commanded
+to set up an altar on that spot, to avert further calamity. Negotiations
+with Oman were at once begun, to the end that Oman parted with the site
+for "six hundred shekels of gold, by weight"; the threshing-floor was
+quickly replaced by an altar, and here, on the top of Mount Moriah--on
+the great bowlder reputed to have been the sacrificial stone of
+Melchizedek--and of Abraham, who was said to have proffered Isaac
+here--King David made offering to the Lord, and was answered by fire
+from heaven on the newly erected altar. And the angel "put up his sword
+again into the sheath thereof."
+
+From that day the bowlder on the top of Mount Moriah became the place of
+sacrifice--the great central shrine of the Jewish faith. David decided
+to build a temple there, and prepared for it abundantly, as became his
+high purpose. But because David had shed much blood, the Lord interfered
+and commanded him to turn the enterprise over to Solomon, "a man of
+rest." "He shall build an house for my name; and he shall be my son, and
+I will be his father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom
+over Israel forever."
+
+In the light of thoughtful Bible reading, it is not easy to see that
+Solomon was much of an improvement over David, in the long-run, and one
+cannot but notice the fact that the promise to establish his throne over
+Israel forever was not long maintained. But perhaps the Lord did not
+foresee how Solomon was going to turn out; besides, forever is a long
+time, and the Kingdom of Solomon may still prevail.
+
+Solomon completed the temple in a manner that made it celebrated, even
+to this day. The "oracle, or holy room, which held the Ark of the
+Covenant, was overlaid within with pure gold," and the rest of the
+temple was in keeping with this dazzling chamber.
+
+The temple was often pillaged during the troublous times that followed
+Solomon's reign, but it managed to stand till Nebuchadnezzar's conquest,
+four centuries later. It was twice rebuilt, the last time by Herod, on a
+scale of surpassing splendor. It was Herod's temple that Christ knew,
+and the work of beautifying and adding to it was going on during his
+entire lifetime. It was finished in 65 A.D., and five years later it
+went down in the general destruction, though Titus himself tried to
+preserve it.
+
+Most of what exists to-day are the remains of Herod's temple. The vast
+court, or temple area, occupies about one-sixth of all Jerusalem, and of
+the genuineness of this site there is no question. In the centre of it,
+where once the house of David and Solomon stood, stands the Dome of the
+Rock--also called the Mosque of Omar, though it is not really a mosque,
+and was not built by Omar. It is, in fact, a marvellous jewelled
+casket--the most beautiful piece of architecture in the world, it has
+been called--built for no other purpose than to hold the old sacrificial
+stone of Melchizedek and Abraham--a landmark revered alike by Moslem,
+Christian, and Jew.
+
+One is bound to feel impressed in the presence of that old bowlder,
+seamed and scarred by ages of sun and tempest; hacked for this purpose
+and that; gray with antiquity--the very corner-stone of three religions,
+upholding the traditions and the faith of four thousand years. There is
+nothing sham or tawdry about that. The building is splendid enough, but
+it is artistically beautiful, and the old rock itself--the genuine rock
+of ages--is as bare and rugged as when Isaac lay upon it bound, and the
+"chosen people" narrowly missed non-existence.
+
+There is a railing around it; but you can look over or through as long
+as you like, and if one is of a reflective temperament he can look a
+long time. Among other things he will notice a number of small square
+holes, cut long ago to receive the ends of slender supports that upheld
+a royal canopy or screen, and he will see the conduits cut to carry off
+the blood of the sacrifice. To his mental vision these things will
+conjure pictures--a panorama of rites and ceremonials--of altar and
+incense, with all the splendid costume and blazonry of the Judean king.
+And, after these, sacrifices of another sort--the cry of battle and the
+clash of arms across this hoary relic, its conduits filled with a
+crimson tide that flowed without regard to ritual or priest.
+
+Other pictures follow: the feast of the Passover, when Jerusalem was
+crowded with strangers, when the great outer court of the temple was
+filled with booths and pens of the sellers who offered sheep, goats,
+cattle, and even doves for the sacrifice; when the temple itself was
+crowded with throngs of eager worshippers who brought their sacrifices,
+with tithes to the priests, and were made clean.
+
+Amid one such throng there is a boy of twelve years, who with His
+parents has come up to Jerusalem "after the custom of the feast." We
+think of them as quiet, simple people, those three from Nazareth,
+jostled by the crowds a good deal, and looking rather wonderingly on the
+curious sights of that great yearly event. They would work their way
+into the temple, by-and-by, and they would come here to the Rock, and
+perhaps the sad, deep-seeing eyes of that boy of twelve would look down
+the years to a day when in this same city it would be His blood that
+would flow at the hands of men.
+
+I hope He did not see that far. But we know that light for Him lay
+somewhat on the path ahead, for when the feast was over, and His parents
+had set out for Nazareth, He lingered to mingle with the learned men,
+and He said to His parents when they came for Him, "Wist ye not that I
+must be about my father's business?" Among all those who thronged about
+this stone for a thousand years, somehow the gentle presence of that boy
+of twelve alone remains, unvanishing and clear.
+
+And what a mass of legends have heaped themselves upon this old
+landmark!--a groundwork of Jewish tradition--a layer of Christian
+imagery--an ever-thickening crust of Moslem whim and fantasy. A few of
+them are perhaps worth repeating. The Talmud, for instance, is authority
+for the belief that the Rock covers the mouth of an abyss wherein the
+waters of the Flood may be heard roaring. Another belief of the Jews
+held it as the centre and one of the foundations of the world. Of Jesus
+it is said that He discovered upon the Rock the great and unspeakable
+name of God (Shem), and was thereby enabled to work his miracles.
+
+But the Moslem soars into fairyland when he comes in the neighborhood of
+this ancient relic. To him the Rock hangs suspended in mid-air, and
+would have followed Mohammed to heaven if the Angel Gabriel had not held
+fast to it. We saw the prints of Gabriel's fingers, which were about the
+size and formation of a two-inch auger. Another Moslem fancy is that the
+rock rests on a palm watered by a river of Paradise.
+
+In the hollow beneath the Rock (probably an artificial grotto) there is
+believed to be a well, the Well of Souls, where spirits of the deceased
+assemble twice a week to pray. They regard it as also the mouth of
+hell, which I don't think can be true, or the souls would not come
+there--not if they could help it--not as often as twice a week, I mean.
+
+A print of Mohammed's head is also shown in the roof of the grotto, and
+I believe in that, because, being a tall man, when I raised up suddenly
+I made another just like it. But I am descending into trivialities, and
+the Rock is not trivial by any means. It has been there since the
+beginning, and it is likely to remain there until all religions are
+forgotten, and the world is dead, and all the stars are dark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: JERUSALEM--ITS BUBBLE-ROOFED HOUSES AND DOMES, ITS
+CYPRESS AND OLIVE TREES]
+
+In front of the Dome of the Rock the sun was bright, and looking across
+the approach one gets a characteristic view of Jerusalem--its
+bubble-roofed houses and domes, its cypress and olive trees. I made a
+photograph of Laura, age fourteen, and a friend of hers, against that
+background, but they would have looked more "in the picture" in Syrian
+dress. I am not sure, however; some of our party have had themselves
+photographed in Syrian dress, which seemed to belong to most of them
+about as much as a baseball uniform might belong to a Bedouin--or a
+camel.
+
+We crossed over to the ancient mosque El-Aksa, also within the temple
+area, but it was only mildly interesting after the Dome of the Rock.
+Still, there were things worth noting. There were the two pillars, for
+instance, which stand so close together that only slender people could
+squeeze between them. Yet in an earlier time every pilgrim had to try,
+and those who succeeded were certain of Paradise. This made it
+humiliating for the others, and the impulse to train down for the test
+became so prevalent that stanchions were placed between the pillars a
+few years ago. We could only estimate our chances and give ourselves the
+benefit of the doubt.
+
+Then there is the Well of the Leaf, which has a pretty story. It is a
+cistern under the mosque, and the water is very clear. Once, during the
+caliphate of Omar, a sheik came to this well for water, and his bucket
+slipped from his hands. He went down after it, and came to a mysterious
+door which, when he opened it, led into a beautiful garden. Enchanted,
+he lingered there and finally plucked a leaf to bring back as a token of
+what he had seen. The leaf never withered, and so a prophecy of
+Mohammed's that one of his followers should enter Paradise alive had
+been fulfilled.
+
+I said I would go down and hunt for the door. But they said, "No"--that
+a good many had tried it without success. The cistern used to collect
+every year the pilgrims who went down to find that door; no one was
+permitted to try, now.
+
+In one of the windows of the old mosque we saw a curious sight: a very
+aged and very black, withered man--Bedouin, I should say--reclining face
+down in the wide sill, poring over an ancient parchment book, patiently
+transcribing from it cabalistic passages on a black, charred board with
+a sharpened stick. The guide said he was a magician from somewhere in
+the dim interior; certainly he looked it.
+
+From somewhere--it was probably from an opening in the wall near the
+Golden Gate--we looked eastward across the valley of Kedron toward the
+fair hillsides, which presently we were to visit.
+
+Immediately we set out for the Mount of Olives. We drove, and perhaps no
+party ever ascended that sacred hill on a fairer morning. The air was
+still, and there was a quiet Sunday feeling in the sunshine. In the
+distance there was a filmy, dreamy haze that gave just the touch of
+ideality to the picture.
+
+The road that leads up Olivet is bordered by traditional landmarks, but
+we could not stop for them. It was enough to be on the road itself,
+following the dusty way the Son of Man and His disciples once knew so
+well. For this hill of fair olive-groves, overlooking Jerusalem, was
+their favorite resort, and it was their habit to come here to look down
+in contemplation on the holy city. It was here that the Master felt the
+shadow of coming events: the destruction of the city; the persecution
+and triumph of His followers; His own approaching tragedy. It was here
+that He gave them the parable of the Virgins, and of the Talents, and it
+was here that He came often at evening for rest and prayer, after the
+buffet and labor of the day. This is the road His feet so often trod--a
+well-kept road, with the olive-groves, now as then, sloping away on
+either side.
+
+Here and there we turned to look down on Jerusalem, lying there bathed
+in the sunlit haze--a toy city, it seemed, with its little round-topped
+houses, its domes and minarets, its battlemented walls. How very small
+it was, indeed! Why, one could run its entire circuit without losing
+breath. It is, in fact, little more than half a mile across in any
+direction, and from a distance it becomes an exquisite jewel set amid
+barren hills.
+
+I am afraid I did not properly enjoy the summit of the Mount of
+Olives--its landmarks, I mean. The Russian and Greek and Latin churches
+have spoiled it with offensive architecture, and they have located and
+labelled exact sites in a way that destroys the reality of the events.
+They have framed in the precise spot where Jesus stood at the time of
+His ascension. It is a mistake to leave it there. It should be
+transferred to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
+
+But the view eastward, looking down on the Jordan and the Dead Sea, with
+the mountains of Moab lying beyond, they cannot spoil or change. Down
+there on that spot, thirty-five hundred years ago, the chosen people
+camped and prepared for the ravage and conquest of this valley, this
+mountain, and the fair lands beyond, even to Mount Hermon and the
+westward sea. Over there, on "Nebo's lonely mountain," Moses looked down
+upon this land of vine and olive which he was never to enter, and being
+weary with the harassings of his stiff-necked people, lay down by the
+wayside and left them to work out their own turbulent future.
+
+  "And the angels of God upturned the sod
+    And laid the dead man there."
+
+I have always loved those lines, and it was worth the voyage to remember
+them here, looking down from the Mount of Olives toward the spot where
+lies that unknown grave.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE MANGER
+
+
+It was afternoon when we drove to Bethlehem--a pleasant drive, though
+dusty withal. The road lies between grain-fields--fields where Ruth may
+have gleaned, and where the Son of Man may have stopped to gather corn.
+It gives one a curious feeling to remember that these fields are the
+same, and that for them through all the centuries seed-time and harvest
+have never failed. Nor have they changed--the walls, the laborers, the
+methods, the crops belong to any period that this country has known.
+
+The convent of Elijah was pointed out to us, but it did not matter.
+Elijah never saw it--never heard of it. It is different, however, with a
+stone across the way from the entrance. Elijah went to sleep on that
+stone, and slept so heavily that he left his imprint there, which
+remains to this day. We viewed that stone with interest; then we took
+most of it and went on.
+
+In a little while we came to the tomb of Rachel. The small, mosque-like
+building that covers it is not very old, but the site is probably as
+well authenticated as any of that period. Jacob was on his way from
+Padan when she died, and he buried her by the roadside "when there was
+but a little way to come into Ephrath" (which is Bethlehem). He marked
+the grave with a pillar which the generations would not fail to point
+out, one to another, as the last resting-place of this mother in Israel
+who died that Benjamin might have life.
+
+Poor Rachel! Supplanted in her husband's love; denied long the natural
+heritage of woman; paying the supreme price at last, only to be left
+here by the wayside alone, outside the family tomb. All the others are
+gathered at Hebron in the Field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought from
+the children of Heth for Sarah's burial-place. Jacob, at the very last,
+made his sons swear that they would bury him at Hebron with the others.
+He remembered Rachel in her lonely grave, and spoke of her there, but
+did not ask that he be taken to lie by her side, or that she be laid
+with the others. He died as he had lived--self-seeking, unsympathetic--a
+commonplace old man.
+
+Just outside of Bethlehem we were welcomed by a crowd of little
+baksheesh girls, of a better look and distinctly of a better way than
+the Jerusalem type. They ran along with the carriage and began a chant
+which, behold, was German, at least Germanesque:
+
+  "Oh, du Fr�liche!
+  Oh, du Heilege!
+        Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"
+
+I suppose "Oh, thou happy one; Oh, thou holy one," would be about the
+translation, with the wailing refrain at the end. I think we gave them
+something. I hope so; they are after us always, and we either give them
+or we don't, without much discrimination. You can't discriminate. They
+are all wretched and miserably needy. You give to get rid of them, or
+when pity clutches a little fiercer than usual at your heart.
+
+[Illustration: A CAMEL TRAIN LED THE WAY THROUGH THE GATES]
+
+So we were at the gates of Bethlehem--the little town whose name is
+familiar at the firesides of more than half the world--a name that
+always brings with it a feeling of bright stars and dim fields:
+
+  "Where shepherds watched their flocks by night
+      All seated on the ground,"
+
+and of angel voices singing peace and goodwill. A camel-train led the
+way through the gates.
+
+I suppose the city itself is not unlike Jerusalem in its general
+character, only somewhat cleaner, and less extensive. We went
+immediately to the place of the nativity, but before we could get to it
+we were seized and dragged and almost compelled to buy some of the
+mother-of-pearl beads and fancy things that are made just across the
+way. We escaped into the Church of the Nativity at last--an old, old
+church, desolate and neglected in its aspect, though sufficiently
+occupied with chanting and droning and candle-bearing acolytes. Yet it
+is better--oh, much better--than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and
+it has a legitimate excuse. If Christ was born in a Bethlehem manger, as
+the gospel records, it is probable that He was born here. There are many
+reasons for believing that the grotto below this church was used as the
+inn stables in that time, and that the brief life which has laid its
+tender loveliness on so many lives had its beginning here.
+
+We descended to the grotto and stood on the spot that is said to have
+heard His first infant cry. There is a silver star in the floor polished
+with kisses, and there are a lot of ornate lamps and other paltry things
+hanging about. It does not matter, I suppose, but I wish these
+professional religionists did not find such things necessary to
+stimulate their faith. Still one could shut his eyes and realize, or try
+to realize that he was standing in the place where the Light that has
+illumined a world struck its first feeble spark; where the impulse that
+for nineteen hundred years has swept across the nations in tides of war
+and peace first trembled into life--a wave of love in a mother's heart.
+As I say, the rest did not matter.
+
+While the others were looking into the shops across the way, I wandered
+about the streets a little, the side streets, which in character cannot
+have changed much in nineteen hundred years. The people are poor, and
+there are many idlers. There are beggars, too; some of them very
+wretched--and leprous, I think. It seems a pity, here in the birthplace
+of Him who healed with a word.
+
+We bought some of the Bethlehem beads. They will sell you a string a
+yard long for a franc, and they cut each bead separately from
+mother-of-pearl with the most primitive tools, and they shape it and
+polish it and bore a hole in it, all by hand, and link it on a gimp
+wire. In America you could not get a single bead made in that way for
+less than double what they ask for a whole string. But, as I have said,
+they are very poor here--as poor as when they bestowed a Saviour on
+mankind.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+THE SORROW OF THE CHOSEN--THE WAY OF THE CROSS
+
+
+We had left Bethlehem and were back in Jerusalem, presently, on our way
+to the Jews' Wailing-place. I did not believe in it before I went. I was
+afraid it might be a sort of show-place, prepared for the occasion. I
+have changed my mind now. If there is one thing in Jerusalem absolutely
+genuine and directly linked with its ancient glories, it is the Jews'
+Wailing-place.
+
+You approach it through a narrow lane--a sickening gantlet of misery.
+Near the entrance wretched crones, with the distaff and spindle of the
+Fates, sat in the dust, spinning what might have been the thread of
+sorrow. Along the way the beggars; not the ordinary vociferous beggars
+of Constantinople, of Smyrna, of Ephesus, even of Jaffa, but beggars
+such as the holy city alone can duplicate. Men and women who are only
+the veriest shreds of humanity, crouched in the dirt, reeking with filth
+and rags and vermin and sores, staring with blind and festering eyes,
+mumbling, moaning, and wailing out their eternal cry of baksheesh,
+often--if a woman--clutching some ghastly infant to a bare, scrawny
+breast. There was no loud demand for alms; it was only a muted chorus of
+pleading, the voice with which misery spells its last word. Some made no
+sound, nor gesture, even. They saw nothing, heard nothing, knew
+nothing--they were no longer alive--they had only not ceased to breathe
+and suffer. The spectacle made us gasp and want to cry out with the very
+horror of it.
+
+We were through the fearful gantlet at last, and went directly into the
+Jews' Wailing-place. There behold the most lamentable passage in the
+most tragic epic of all history--the frayed remnant of a once mighty
+race mourning for its fall. A few hours before, and but a few rods away,
+we had looked upon the evidences of its former greatness, its splendor
+and its glory--the place of King Solomon's temple when it sat as on the
+pinnacle of the world. Indeed, we were looking at it now, for this wall
+before which they bow in anguish is a portion of the mighty architecture
+for which they mourn. In the general destruction of Titus this imposing
+fragment remained, and to-day they bow before it and utter their sorrow
+in the most doleful grieving that ever fell on human ear. Along the wall
+they stand or kneel, and on rows of benches behind they gather thickly,
+reading from faded and tattered Hebrew Scriptures the "Lamentations," or
+chanting in chorus the saddest dirge the world has ever known.
+
+  "Because of the palace which is deserted--
+  We sit alone and weep.
+  Because of the temple which is destroyed,
+  Because of the walls which are broken down,
+  Because of our greatness which has departed,
+  Because of the precious stones of the temple ground to powder,
+  Because of our priests who have erred and gone astray,
+  Because of our kings who have contemned God--
+  We sit alone and weep!"
+
+[Illustration: THE DEPTH OF THEIR FALL]
+
+It is no mere ceremony--no mock sorrow; it is the mingled wail of a
+fallen people. These Jews know as no others of their race can realize
+the depth of their fall, and they gather here to give it voice--a tonal
+and visual embodiment of despair. Even I, who am not of that race, felt
+all at once the deadly clutch of that vast grieving, and knew something
+of what a young Hebrew, a member of our party, felt when he turned sick
+and hurried from the spot.
+
+What other race has maintained an integrity of sorrow? What, for
+instance, does the blood of Imperial Rome care for its departed
+grandeur? It does not even recognize itself. What other nation has ever
+maintained racial integrity of any kind? But, then, these were a _chosen
+people_!
+
+Chosen, why? Because they were a noble people? Hardly. Their own
+chronicles record them as a murmuring, rebellious, unstable race.
+Following the history of the chosen people from Jacob to Joshua, one is
+in a constant state of wonder at the divine selection. We may admit that
+God loved them, but we seek in vain for an excuse. In His last talk with
+Moses He declared that they would forsake Him, and that He in turn would
+forsake _them_ and hide His face because of the evils they should do.
+
+Moses, who knew them even better, distrusted them even more. "For I know
+that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves," he said, almost
+with his latest breath. He told them that curses would befall them, and
+gave them a few sample curses, any one of which would lift the bark off
+of a tree. No wonder he was willing to lie down in Mount Nebo and be at
+peace.
+
+Yet they _are_ a chosen people--a people apart--a race that remains a
+race, and does not perish. Chosen for what? To make a bitter example of
+what a race can do when it remains a race--how high it can rise and how
+low may become its estate of misery? Remember, I am not considering the
+Jew as an individual; he is often noble as an individual; and it was a
+Jew who brought light into the world. I am considering a race--a race no
+worse than any other, and no better, but a _chosen_ race; a race that
+without a ruler, without a nation, without a government--that outcast
+and despised of many nations has yet remained a unit through three
+thousand years. I am maintaining that only a chosen people could do
+that, and, without being able even to surmise the purpose, it is my
+humble opinion that the ages will show that purpose to have been good.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: THE WAY OF THE CROSS
+
+(HOLY WEEK)]
+
+I have already inferred that the landmarks and localities of Jerusalem
+may be viewed with interest, but not too seriously. They have all
+associations, but most of them not the particular and sacred
+associations with which they are supposed to be identified. The majority
+of them were not located until Christ had been dead for a thousand
+years, and the means of locating them does not invite conviction.
+Inspiration located most of them, dreams the rest. That is to say,
+imagination. Whenever a priest or a dignitary wanted to distinguish
+himself he discovered something. He first made up his mind what he
+would like to discover, and then had an inspiration or a dream, and the
+thing was done. The eight Stations of the Cross, for instance, were
+never mentioned earlier than the twelfth century, and the Via Dolorosa,
+the Way of the Cross, was not so known until the fourteenth. Still, it
+must have been along some such street that the Man of Sorrow passed
+between the Garden and the Cross.
+
+We visited the Garden first. It was now late in the afternoon, and the
+sunlight had become tender and still and dream-like, and as we passed
+the traditional places--the house of Pilate, under the Ecce Homo arch,
+and the others, we had the feeling that it might have been on an evening
+like this that the Son of Man left the city, and with His disciples went
+down to Gethsemane to pray.
+
+We were a very small party now--there were only four of us and the
+guide, for the others had become tired and were willing to let other
+things go. But if we were tired, we did not know it, and I shall always
+be glad of that fact.
+
+At St. Stephen's gate (the tradition is that he was stoned there) we
+stopped to look down on Gethsemane. Perhaps it is not the real site, and
+perhaps the curious gilt-turreted church is not beautiful, but set there
+on the hillside amid the cypresses and venerable olive-trees, all aglow
+and agleam with the sunset, with the shadow of the dome of Omar creeping
+down upon it, there was about it a beauty of unreality that was
+positively supernatural. I was almost tempted not to go down there for
+fear of spoiling the illusion.
+
+We went, however, and the gnarled olive-trees, some of which are said to
+have been there at the time of Christ--and look it--were worth while.
+The garden as a whole, however, was less interesting than from above,
+and it was only the feeling that somewhere near here the Man who would
+die on Calvary asked that the cup of sorrow might pass from Him which
+made us linger.
+
+It was verging on twilight when we climbed to the city, and the others
+were for going to the hotel. But there was one more place I wanted to
+see. That was the hill outside of Jerusalem which the guide-books rather
+charily mention as "Gordon's Calvary," because General Gordon once
+visited it and accepted it as the true place of the Crucifixion. I knew
+that other thoughtful men had accepted it, too, and had favored a tomb
+not far away called the "Garden Tomb" as the true Sepulchre. I wanted to
+see these things and judge for myself. But two of our party and the
+guide spoke no English, and my Biblical German needed practice. There
+seemed to be no German word for Calvary, and when I ventured into
+details I floundered. Still, I must have struck a spark somewhere, for
+presently a light illumined our guide's face:
+
+"Golgota! Das richtige Golgota" (the true Golgotha), he said, excitedly,
+and then I remembered that I should have said Golgotha, the "Place of
+the Skull," in the beginning.
+
+[Illustration: THE TRUE GOLGOTHA--THE PLACE OF THE SKULL
+
+(Notice the large eyes and mouth of the skull formed by cavities in the
+cliff. The place of execution is marked by the little heap of stones
+above.)]
+
+We were away immediately, all of us, hurrying for the Damascus gate,
+beyond which it lay. It was not far--nothing is far in Jerusalem--and
+presently we were outside, at the wicket of a tiny garden--a sweet,
+orderly little place--where a pleasant German woman and a tall old
+Englishman with a spiritual face were letting us in. Then they led us to
+a little arbor, and directly--to a tomb, a real tomb, cut into the cliff
+overhanging the garden.
+
+I do not know whether Jesus was laid in that tomb or not, and it is not
+likely that any one will ever know. But He _could_ have been laid there,
+and it is not unlikely that He _was_ laid there, for Golgotha--the hill
+that every unprejudiced visitor immediately accepts as the true
+Golgotha--overlooks this garden.
+
+We could not ascend the hill--the Mohammedans no longer permit that--but
+we could go to the end of the garden and look up to the little heap of
+stones which marks the old place of stoning and of crucifixion. It was
+always the place of public execution. The Talmud refers to it, and the
+Jews of Jerusalem spit toward it to this day. We could make out the
+contour of the skull which gave it its name, and even the face, for in
+its rocky side ancient tombs and clefts formed the clearly distinguished
+features.
+
+It is a hill; it is outside the walls; it is the traditional site of
+executions; it is the one natural place to which Jesus would have been
+taken for crucifixion. The Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
+was _never_ a hill; it was _never_ outside the walls; it was _never_ a
+traditional site for anything until Queen Helena began to dream.
+
+Perhaps the reader may say, "With all the tales and traditions and
+disputes and doubts, what does it matter?" Perhaps it does not matter.
+Perhaps that old question of Pilate, "What is truth?" need not be
+answered.
+
+Yet somewhere amid the mass of confliction there follows a thread of
+fact. Sifting the testimony, it is difficult to deny that there once
+lived a man named Jesus--later, and perhaps then--known as the Christ;
+that He was of humble birth, and grew up to teach a doctrine of
+forgiveness and humility (a doctrine new to the Hebrew teachers of His
+day, whose religion consisted mainly of ceremonial forms); that He was
+able to heal the sick; that He had a following who, perhaps, hailed Him
+as their king; that it was because of these things that He was crucified
+on a hill outside of Jerusalem.
+
+I think this is as far as general acknowledgment goes. The Scriptures
+declare more, the sceptic allows less; but the majority of mankind unite
+on the foregoing admissions. At all events, a great religion was founded
+on this man's life and death--a doctrine of gentleness when creeds are
+stripped away--and it is proper that such truth as can be established
+concerning the ground He trod, especially on that last dark day, should
+be recognized and made known. Of our little party of four there was not
+one who--standing there as the stars came out, and looking up at that
+hill outlined against the sky--did not feel a full and immediate
+conviction that this was indeed the spot where that last, supreme
+expiation was made, and that this sweet garden, guarded by these two
+gentle people, was the truer site for the Sepulchre which was "nigh at
+hand."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+AT THE MOUTH OF THE NILE
+
+
+I am not a gifted person; I cannot write about existing places and
+things without seeing them, and I am afraid to steal from the
+guide-book--unintelligently, I mean. I have sometimes found the
+guide-book mistaken--not often, I admit, but too often to take chances.
+I should be struck with remorse if I should steal from the guide-book
+and then find that I had stolen a mistake. So I shall have to skip
+Galilee, Tiberias, Nazareth, and Hebron, for the reason that I could not
+visit those and include Egypt, too, by our schedule.
+
+One _must_ go to Egypt. If the "grand object of all travel is to visit
+the shores of the Mediterranean," then the grand climax of that tour is
+Egypt. One _must_ take all the time there is for that amazing land, and
+any time will be too short, even though it be a lifetime.
+
+The guide-book says that the arrival at Alexandria is not very
+impressive. I suppose a good deal depends on the day and the time of day
+and one's mental attitude. As usual with our arrivals, it was early
+morning, and everything was hazy and yellow-misty with sunrise. We were
+moving slowly, and the water was glassy still. Here and there across the
+yellow haze drifted a barge-like craft with a lateen-sail, or a slow
+moving boat, pulled by men in native dress. Then out of the mist across
+the port bow came the outline of a low-lying shore, and a shaft that
+rose, a vague pencil against the morning glow. The Diplomat was leaning
+on the rail at my side.
+
+"Egypt," he said, quietly. "That is a lighthouse--they call it a pharos,
+after the one that Ptolemy built; it must have stood about in the same
+direction."
+
+Certainly that was not very dramatic, not actively so at least, but to
+me it was impressive; and stealing into that dream-like harbor, through
+the mellow quiet of the morning, I had the feeling that we were creeping
+up on the past--catching it asleep, as it were; that this was indeed the
+pharos of the Ptolemies--the harbor they had known.
+
+I shall always remember Alexandria, Egypt. I shall always remember the
+railway station with its wild hallabaloo of Arab porters, who grab one's
+hand-baggage, make off with it, and sit on it in a secluded place until
+you race around and hunt it up and produce baksheesh for its return. You
+do not check baggage in Egypt, by the way; you register it, which means
+that you tell somebody about it, then try to convince yourself that it
+is all right and that some day you will see it again.
+
+But I shall remember that station for another reason. When we had
+finally fought our way through to the train, and Laura and I had placed
+our things here and there in our compartment--in the racks and about--we
+realized that we were hot and thirsty, and I said I would slip back and
+get some oranges, seeing we had plenty of time.
+
+It was easy to do that--easy enough, I mean, for I no longer had
+anything for the Bedouins to grab. I got the oranges and paid a piastre
+apiece for them--about ten times what they were worth in Jaffa, and I
+had the usual difficulty making change--a detachment of interested Arabs
+looking on meanwhile. Then I started back, and was stopped by a guard
+who wanted to see my ticket. I felt for the flat leather case which I
+generally carry in my hip-pocket. It was gone!
+
+If there had been anything resembling a chair there I should have sat
+down. As it was I took hold of the little railing, for my knees had a
+watery feeling which I felt was not to be trusted. That pocket-book
+contained my letter of credit; all my money, except a little change; my
+tickets, my character--everything that an unprotected stranger is likely
+to need in a strange land! When I got my breath I dived into all my
+pockets at once, then went through them categorically, as much as three
+times apiece. I had never realized I owned so many pockets or that they
+could be so empty, so useless.
+
+Those Bedouins had done it, of course. I rushed back to the orange-man,
+and in a mixture of three languages which nobody, not even myself, could
+understand, explained my loss. He shrugged his shoulders in French,
+elevated his hands in Egyptian, and said "No can tell" in English. I
+glared around at the contiguous Bedouins, but they all looked
+disinterestedly guilty. In a mixed daze I went back to the guard, and
+crept through when he was attending to another passenger. I still held
+the bag of oranges, and handed them to Laura, who was quietly waiting,
+looking out the window at the passing show. Little did she guess my
+condition, and how could I tell her?
+
+It was quite by chance that I glanced up at the overhead rack where I
+had stowed our smaller packages. Ah me! The gates of bliss open wide
+will never be a more inspiring sight than what I saw there. There it
+lay--that precious pocket-book! In the disordered mental state of our
+arrival I had for some unguessed reason taken out my pocket-case and
+laid it there with the other items. It was safe--safe in every detail.
+The world suddenly became glorified. Those Bedouins were my brothers. I
+would have gone back and embraced them if the train had not begun to
+move.
+
+Yes, I shall always remember Alexandria.
+
+There is a continuous panorama between Alexandria and Cairo, absolutely
+fascinating to one who has not seen it before, and I wonder how it can
+ever grow old to any one. Almost immediately there was water--the Nile,
+or one of its canals--and stretching away, a dead level of
+green--lavish, luxurious, blossoming green--the delta-land of Lower
+Egypt, the richest garden in all the world. A network of irrigation; mud
+villages that might have been made by wasps; a low-dropping sky that met
+the level green--these made a background, and against it, along the
+raised road that follows the Nile, an endless procession passed.
+
+A man riding a camel, leading another; a boy watering two buffaloes; an
+Arab walking, followed by his wife and a string of loaded donkeys;
+ditto camels; a cow grinding an old Egyptian water-mill that has been in
+use since Pharaoh's time; two men turning an Archimedes screw to lift
+the water to their fields--so the pictures whirl by. The Orient has
+become familiar to us, yet for some reason the atmosphere, the
+impression, is wholly different here, because--I cannot tell
+why--because this is Egypt, I suppose, and there is only one Egypt, a
+fact easier to realize than to explain.
+
+The day was well along when we reached Cairo and, after the usual battle
+with the Ishmaelites, drove to Shepheard's Hotel. As there is only one
+Egypt, so there is only one Shepheard's Hotel. There are other hotels as
+large and as lavish, with as fair gardens, perhaps, but I believe there
+is no other hotel on the planet where you can sit on a vast balmy
+terrace and look down on such a panorama of the nations--American,
+European, Asiatic, African--such a universal congress of pleasure as
+each winter assembles here. It would take a more riotous pen than mine
+to achieve a description of that mixture. If the reader can imagine a
+World's Fair Midway of every nationality and every costume and every
+language and mode of locomotion under the sun, and can see mingled with
+it all the dark-faced sellers of shawls and scarabs, and beads and
+relics, the picture will serve, and we will let it go at that.
+
+And perhaps I may as well say here that Cairo is the wildest, freest
+place in Christendom. The confluence of Upper and Lower Egypt--the Delta
+and the Nile--here on the edge of the desert, it is the veritable
+jumping-off place where all conventions melt away. It is the neutral
+ground where East and West meet--each to adopt the special privilege and
+license of the other--madly to compete in lavishness of dress and the
+reckless joy of living. In the language of the Reprobates, "One gets his
+money's worth in Cairo, if he makes his headquarters at Shepheard's and
+sits in the game." But he will require a certain capital to make good
+his ante. If I hadn't found that pocket-book at Alexandria I should have
+taken my meals with the Arabs in the back basement.
+
+The Arab, by-the-way, is the general servitor in the Egyptian hotel. You
+ring three times when you want him, and he is as picturesque and gentle
+a Bedouin as ever held up a camel train or slew a Christian to glorify
+his faith. He is na�ve and noiseless, and whatever you ask him for he
+says "Yes," and if you ask him if he understands he says "Yes," and you
+will never know whether he does or not until you see what he brings. It
+does not help matters to talk loudly to the Arab. Volume of sound does
+not increase his lingual gifts, and spelling the article is likewise
+wasted effort. Ladies sometimes try that method. The trunk of one of our
+party had not reached her room--and she needed it.
+
+"My trunk," she said to the Arab. "_You_ know, trunk--t-r-u-n-k,
+trunk--yes, trunk, with my name on it--_you_ know--n-a-m-e--my initials,
+I mean, _you_ know--T. D.--T. D. on both ends."
+
+The Arab did know "trunk"; the rest was mere embroidery.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX
+
+
+There was not much left of the afternoon when we reached Cairo, but some
+of us wandered off here and there to get the habit of the place, as it
+were. Laura and I came to a trolley-line presently, and found that it
+ran out to the Pyramids and Sphinx. We were rather shocked at the
+thought, but recovered and decided to steal a march on the others by
+slipping out there and having those old wonders all to ourselves, at
+sunset.
+
+It is a long way. You pass through streets of many kinds and by houses
+of many sorts, and you cross the Nile and glide down an avenue of palms
+where there are glimpses of water--the infinite desert stretching away
+into the evening. Long before we reached them we saw the outlines of the
+three pyramids against the sky, and then we made out the Sphinx--that
+old group which is perhaps the most familiar picture that children know.
+
+Yet, somehow, it could not be true that this was the reality of the
+pictures we had seen. The likeness was very great, certainly, but those
+pictures had represented something in a realm of books and romance--the
+unattainable land--while these were here; we were actually going to
+them, and in a trolley-car! It required all the spell of Egypt
+then--the palms, the desert, and the evening sky--to fit the reality
+into its old place in the hall of dreams.
+
+We had thought to have a quiet view, but this was a miscalculation.
+There is no such thing as a quiet view of the Pyramids. At any hour of
+the day or night you are immediately beset by beggars and
+fortune-tellers and would-be guides, and you are pulled and dragged and
+distracted by their importunities until you have lost all interest in
+your original purpose in a general desire to start a plague or a
+massacre that will wipe out the whole pestiferous crew. There is no
+hope, except in the employment of one or two of the guides--the
+strongest-looking ones, who will in a certain measure keep off the
+others--and you will have to engage donkeys, and perhaps have your
+fortune told. Otherwise these creatures will follow you and surround
+you, insisting that they want no money; that they only love you; that it
+makes them happy even to be near you; that they love all Americans;
+that, in short, for a shilling, just a shilling, and a baksheesh (a
+piastre), one little baksheesh, they will become your guide, your slave,
+the dirt under your feet--"Ah, mister--ze Sphinkis, ze Pyramid,
+aevry-zing!" It is a disgrace to Egypt, and to England who is in charge
+here now, that such persecution is permitted in the shadow of one of the
+world's most revered and imposing ruins.
+
+We engaged donkeys, at last, after there had been several fights over
+us, and set out up the road to the Great Pyramid, assailed every little
+way by bandits lying in wait. The Great Pyramid does not improve with
+close acquaintance. It has been too much damaged by time and criminal
+assault. It loses its clean-cut outlines as you come near and becomes
+little more than a stupendous heap of stones. I think we were a trifle
+disappointed with a close inspection, to tell the truth, for even the
+largest pictures do not give one quite the impression of the reality. It
+was as if we had been gazing at some marvellous painting, and then had
+walked up very near to see how the work was done.
+
+The charm came back as we rode off a little and turned to view it now
+and again in the evening light. The irregularities disappeared; the
+outlines became clean against the sky; I was no longer disappointed in
+that giant of architecture whose shadow (it lay now just at our feet)
+began marking time at a period when the world had no recorded history.
+
+Yet in one or two respects the reality differed from the dream. Usually
+stone grows gray with age and takes on moss and lichen--the mould of
+time. The Pyramids are entirely bare, and they are not gray. The stones
+might have been laid up yesterday so far as any vegetable increment is
+concerned, and their color is a tawny gold--luminous gold in the sunset,
+like the barren hills beyond. The daily sandblast of the desert will
+level these monuments in time, no doubt, but the last fragment in that
+remote age will still be bare and in color unchanged.
+
+As with the Pyramids, our first impression of the Sphinx was one of
+disappointment. It seemed small to us. It is small compared with a
+pyramid, while the photographs give one another idea. The photographs
+are made with the Sphinkis (Sphinx, I mean--one falls so easily into
+the native speech) in the foreground, looking fully as big as the
+second-size pyramid and quite able to have the third-size pyramid for
+breakfast. Figures mean nothing in the face of a picture like that; you
+comprehend them, but you do not realize them--visualize them, perhaps I
+ought to say.
+
+So the Sphinx seemed small to us as we approached, and even when we were
+on the immediate brink of sand, gazing down upon it, its sixty-five feet
+of stature seemed reduced from the image in our minds.
+
+[Illustration: A VAST INDIFFERENCE TO ALL PUNY THINGS]
+
+But the Sphinx grows on one. As the light faded and the shadows softened
+its scarred features there came also a dignity and with it a feeling of
+immensity, of grandeur, a vast indifference to all puny things. And
+then--perhaps it was the light, perhaps it was because I stood at a
+particular angle, but certainly--standing just there, at that moment, I
+saw, or fancied I saw, about its serene lips the suggestion or beginning
+of a smile. The more I looked, the more certain of it I became, and when
+I spoke of it to Laura, she saw it, too. Yes, undoubtedly we had caught
+the Sphinx smiling--not outwardly, at least not openly, but quietly,
+quizzically--smiling inside as one might say. I could not understand it
+then, but later it came to me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back at the hotel, to-night, I thought it out. I remembered that the
+Sphinx had been there a long time; nobody knows how long, but _a very
+long time indeed_. I remembered that it had seen a number of
+things--_a very great number of things_. I remembered that it had seen
+one very curious thing, to wit:
+
+A long time ago, when a certain Pharaoh--we can only guess which
+Pharaoh--ruled over Egypt, it saw a young man who had been sold into
+bondage from Syria rise in the king's favor through certain dreams and
+become his chief counsellor, even "ruler over all the land of Egypt." It
+saw him in the height of his power and glory bring his family, who were
+Syrian shepherds, down from their barren hills and establish them in the
+favor of the Egyptian king. The Sphinx was old--a thousand years old, at
+least, even then--and, being wise, heard with certain curiosity their
+claim that they were a "chosen people," and thoughtfully watched them
+multiply through a few brief centuries into a band of servitors who,
+because of this tradition, held themselves a race apart, repeating tales
+of a land of promise which they would some day inherit. Then at last,
+during a period of visitation, the Sphinx saw them escape, taking what
+they could lay their hands on, straggling away, with their families and
+their flocks, toward the Red Sea. The Sphinx heard nothing more of that
+tribe for about three thousand years.
+
+Then an amazing thing happened. Among those who came to wonder at the
+Sphinx's age and mystery were some who repeated tales of that runaway
+band--tales magnified and embroidered almost beyond recognition--and,
+what was more curious, accepted them--not as such tales are usually
+accepted, with a heavy basis of discount--but as gospel; inspired truth;
+the foundation of a mighty religion; the word of God.
+
+Nor was that all. The Sphinx realized presently that not only were those
+old stories accepted as gospel by the descendants of the race
+themselves, but by a considerable number of the human race at
+large--accepted and debated in a most serious manner, even to the point
+of bloodshed.
+
+Some details of this inspired chronology were wholly new to the Sphinx.
+It was interesting, for example, to hear that there had been three
+million of those people, and that before they started there had been a
+time when the Nile had been turned to blood--twice, in fact: once by the
+grace of God and once by magicians. The Sphinx did not remember a time
+when the Nile had turned to blood. In the five thousand years and more
+of its existence it had never heard of a magician who could produce that
+result. It was interesting, too, to learn that the Red Sea had opened a
+way for those people to cross, and that the hosts of Egypt, trying to
+follow them, had been swallowed up and drowned. This was wholly new. The
+Sphinx had been there and seen all that had happened, but she had
+somehow missed those things.
+
+Not that the Sphinx was surprised at these embroideries. She had seen
+several mythologies created, and knew the general scale of enlargement
+and glorification. It was only when she saw strong, cultured, and
+enlightened nations still accepting the old Hebrew poem--with all its
+stately figures and exaggerations--as gospel; heard them actually trying
+to prove that a multitude as big as the census of Australia had marched
+out with its chattels and its flocks; heard them vow that the Red Sea
+had parted long enough to let this population pass through; heard them
+maintain that this vast assembly had found shade and refreshment on the
+other side by twelve wells of water and under seventy palm-trees: heard
+them tell how the sea behind them had suddenly rushed together and
+swallowed up all the Egyptian army (including the king himself, some
+said)--it was only when the Sphinx heard learned men argue these things
+as facts that a smile--scarcely perceptible, yet still a smile--began to
+grow behind the stone lips.
+
+That is the smile we saw to-night--a quiet smile, a gracious smile, a
+compassionate smile--and as it has grown so slowly, so it will not soon
+depart. For by-and-by, when these ages have passed, and with them their
+story and their gospels--when those old chronicles of the Jews have been
+relegated to the realm of mythology for a thousand years--there may come
+another band who will establish their traditions as God's holy word, and
+the Sphinx--still remaining, still observing, still looking across the
+encompassing sands to the sunrise--will smile, and dream old dreams.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN
+
+
+I wonder why we are always taken first to the mosques, or why, when our
+time is pretty limited, we are taken to them at all. Mosques are well
+enough, but when you have seen a pretty exhaustive line of them in
+Turkey and Syria, Egypt cannot furnish any very startling attractions in
+this field. For mosques are modern (anything less than a thousand years
+old is modern to us now), and Egypt is not a land of modern things.
+Besides, here in Cairo there are such a number of fascinating
+out-of-the-way corners which we are dying to see--unholy side-streets,
+picturesquely hidden nooks, and mysterious, shut-in life; besides all
+the bazaars--
+
+Never mind; the mosques did have a certain interest, especially the
+mosque of Al-Azhar, which is nine hundred years old and built about a
+great court--an old mosque when America was still undiscovered--and the
+mosque of Hassan, "whose prayer will nevair be accept," Abraham said
+(Abraham being our guide), "because when ze architec' have finish, ze
+Sultan Hassan have cut off hees han' so he cannot produce him again."
+Napoleon's first gun in Egypt hit a minaret of Hassan's mosque, it is
+said, and it has had bad luck generally, perhaps because of the cruel
+act of its royal builder. We were not even required to put on slippers
+to enter it, so it cannot be held in very great veneration. Then there
+is the mosque of Mohammed Ali, built within the last century and modern
+throughout, the only mosque in the world, I believe, to have electric
+lights!
+
+It was Mohammed Ali who settled the Mameluke problem in the conclusive
+way which sultans adopt at times. The Mamelukes were the Janizaries of
+Egypt, though fewer in number. Still, there were enough of them to make
+trouble and keep matters stirred up, and Ali grew tired of them. So did
+the public, according to our guide:
+
+"Ali, he say to some people, 'You like get rid of zose Mameluke?' an'
+all ze people say, 'Yez, of course.' So Ali he make big dinner, an' ze
+Mameluke come an' eat, an' have fine, big time."
+
+It was on the 1st of March, 1811, that Ali issued his general invitation
+to the Mameluke leaders to attend a function at the Citadel; and, after
+entertaining them hospitably, invited them to march through a narrow
+passageway, which was suddenly closed at each end, while from above
+opened a musket-fire that presently concluded those Mamelukes--470 of
+them--with the exception of one man, who is said to have leaped his
+horse through a window down a hundred feet or so, where he "Jump from
+hees horse and run--run fas' to Jaffa!" which was natural enough.
+
+There was only one trouble with that story. Abraham did not explain how
+this particular Mameluke came to have his horse at luncheon, and why,
+with or without horses, a number of those other Mamelukes did not follow
+him. Every Mameluke of my acquaintance would have gone through that
+window, mounted or otherwise, and without calculating the distance to
+the ground. However, Abraham showed us the passage and the place of the
+leap, and later the graves of the 470, all of which was certainly
+convincing. Following the removal of the leaders, a general burial of
+Mamelukes took place throughout Egypt, since which time members of that
+organization have been extremely hard to catch. It must have been Ali's
+neat solution of the Mameluke problem which fifteen years later was
+copied in Constantinople by Mahmoud II., when he disposed of the
+Janizaries.
+
+It was at the tomb of a distinguished pasha--a fine, inviting
+place--that we saw a small green piece of the robe of Abraham. It was
+incorporated in a very sacred rug, one of the twelve which Cairo,
+Constantinople, and Damascus contribute to Mecca each year. We asked how
+Abraham's robe could hold out this way, and his namesake shrugged and
+smiled:
+
+"Oh, zay take little piece of ze real robe an' roll him 'roun' an'
+'roun' wiz many piece of goods, an' zay become _all_ ze robe of
+Abraham."
+
+Thus does a thread leaven a whole wardrobe.
+
+Laura and I escaped then. We did not care for any more tombs and
+mosques, and we did care a great deal for a street we had noticed where,
+squatted on the ground on both sides of it, their wares spread in the
+dust, were sellers of certain trinkets and jars which, though not of the
+past, had a fatal lure we could not all forget. Our driver was a black,
+scarred semi-Nubian who looked as if he had been through a fire, and had
+possibly five words of English. It does not matter--Menelek (so we
+named him) served us well, and will retain a place in my affections.
+
+We took the back track, and presently were in the street of small
+sellers, driving carefully, for there was barely room to pass between
+their displayed goods. Here and there we stooped to inspect, and we
+bought a water-jar for a piastre--an Egyptian piastre, which is really
+money and worth exactly five cents. Beyond the jars was a woman selling
+glass bracelets, such as the Arab women wear. I had wanted some of those
+from the beginning. I picked out a gay handful, and then discovered I
+had only a gold twenty-franc piece to pay with. The woman had never
+owned twenty francs, and no seller in the neighborhood could furnish the
+change. So I handed it to Menelek, who grinned and disappeared while we
+sat there in the carriage waiting.
+
+I suppose he had to go miles in that neighborhood for as much change as
+that. I know we sat there in the sun and looked at all the curious
+things in all the assortments about us, over and over, and discussed
+them and wondered if Menelek would ever return. It became necessary at
+last that he should do so. No vehicle could pass us in that narrow
+thoroughfare, and in a string behind there was collecting as motley an
+assortment of curiosities as ever were gathered in a menagerie. There
+was a curious two-wheeled cart or dray, drawn by water-buffaloes, upon
+which a man had his collection of wives out for an airing; there was a
+camel loaded with huge water-jars until they projected out over the
+heads of the selling people; there was a load of hay drawn by a cow;
+there was a donkey train that reached back to the end of the street, and
+what lay beyond only Allah knew.
+
+The East is patient, but even the East has its limits. Presently we
+began to be interviewed by dark men--camel-drivers and the like--who had
+a way of flinging up their hands, while from behind came a rising tide
+of what I assumed to be imprecation.
+
+We were calm--that is, we assured each other that we were calm--and we
+told them quite pleasantly how matters stood. The result was not
+encouraging. One Bedouin grabbed the bridle, and I was at the point of
+slaying him with my water-jar when at the same moment appeared a member
+of the Cairo police--one of those with a tall red fez--also Menelek, our
+long-lost Menelek, with the change, out of which there was baksheesh for
+the discontented drivers. Everything was all right then. We headed the
+procession. Behind us came the buffalo-cart--the wives, sandwiched fore
+and aft and smiling--the camel with his distended load of jars; the
+heaped-up little hay-wagon; the string of donkeys all in blue beads,
+with heaven knows what else trailing down the distance. All the curses
+were removed; all the drivers singing; traffic congestion in the East
+was over.
+
+One of the first things we had noticed in Egypt was the curious brass
+spool affair which Arab women wear, suspended perpendicularly across the
+forehead, from the head-gear to the top of their veil. It extends from
+the nose upward, and has sharp, saw-like ridges on it, which look as if
+they would cut in. When we asked about these things, we were told that
+they were worn to avert the evil eye, also as a handy means by which the
+husband may correct any little indiscretion on the part of one of his
+wives. He merely has to tap that brass spool with his cane or
+broomstick, or whatever is handy, and it cuts in and neatly reminds the
+wearer that she is a woman and had better behave. Family discipline has
+matured in this ancient land.
+
+I explained to Menelek now, in some fashion, that I wanted one of those
+brass things; whereupon we entered the narrow and thronging thoroughfare
+of commerce--a gay place, with all sorts of showy wares lavishly
+displayed--and went weaving in and out among the crowd to find it. Every
+other moment Menelek would shout something that sounded exactly like,
+"Oh, I _mean_ it! Oh, I _mean_ it!" which made us wonder _what_ he meant
+in that emphatic way.
+
+Then all at once he changed to, "Oh, I _schmell_ it! Oh, I _schmell_
+it!"
+
+"That's all right," we said; "so do we," for, though Cairo is cleaner
+than Constantinople, it was not over-sweet just there. But presently,
+when he changed again to, "Oh, I eat it! Oh, I eat it!" we drew the
+line. We said, "No, we do not go as far as that."
+
+We have learned now that those calls are really "O-i-menuk,
+o-i-schmeluk," etc., and indicate that some one is to turn to the right
+or left, or simply get out of the way, as the case may be. We used them
+ourselves after that, which gave Menelek great joy.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+WHERE HISTORY BEGAN
+
+
+When I glanced casually over the little heap of hand-bags that would
+accompany our party up the Nile--we were then waiting on the terrace of
+Shepheard's for the carriages--I noticed that my own did not appear to
+be of the number. I mentioned this to the guides, to the head-porter, to
+the clerk, to casual Bedouins in the hotel uniform, without arousing any
+active interest. Finally, I went on a still hunt on my own account. I
+found the missing bag out in the back area-way, with a Bedouin whom I
+had not seen before sitting on it, smoking dreamily and murmuring a song
+about lotus and moonlight and the spell of his lady's charms. Growing
+familiar with the habits of the country, I dispossessed him with my foot
+and marched back through the vast corridors carrying my bag myself.
+Still, I am sorry now I didn't contribute the baksheesh he expected. He
+was probably the cousin or brother or brother-in-law of one of my room
+servitors. They all have a line of those relatives, and they must live,
+I suppose, though it is difficult to imagine why.
+
+There was a red glow in the sky when our train slipped out of the Cairo
+station toward Luxor. The Nile was red, too, and against this tide of
+evening were those curious sail-boats of Egypt that are like great
+pointed-winged butterflies, and the tall palms of the farther shore.
+By-and-by we began to run through mud villages that rose from the river
+among the palms, wonderfully picturesque in the gathering dusk. This was
+the Egypt of the pictures, the Egypt we have always known. No need to
+strain one's imagination to accept this reality. You are possessed,
+enveloped by it, and I cannot think that I enjoyed it any the less from
+seeing it through the window of a comfortable diner, with the knowledge
+that an equally comfortable, even if tiny, state-room was reserved in
+the car ahead. The back of a camel or deck of a dahabiyah would be more
+picturesque, certainly--more poetic--but those things require time, and
+there are drawbacks, too. Railway travel in Egypt is both swift and
+satisfactory. The accommodations differ somewhat from those of America,
+but not unpleasantly.
+
+We were a small party now. There were fewer than twenty of us--all
+English-speaking, except a young man who shared my apartment and was
+polite enough to pretend to understand my German.
+
+It was a little after 5 A.M. when I heard him getting up. I inquired if
+there was "_Etwas los?_" which is the ship idiom for asking if anything
+had gone wrong. He said no, but that the sun would be upstanding
+directly, which brought me into similar action. One does not miss
+sunrises on the Nile, if one cares for sunrises anywhere. We hurried
+through our dressing and were out on the platform when the train drew up
+for water at Nag Hamadeh--a station like many others, surrounded by the
+green luxury of the Nile's fertile strip, with yellow desert and
+mountains pressing close on either hand. It was just before sunrise. The
+eastward sky was all resonant with ruddy tones--a stately overture of
+its coming. Uplifting palms, moveless in the morning air, broke the
+horizon line, while nearer lay the low village--compact and flat of
+roof--a vast, irregular hive built of that old material of Egypt, bricks
+without straw. Below it the Nile repeated the palms, the village, the
+swelling symphony of dawn. Only here and there was any sign of life. An
+Arab woman with a water-jar drowsed toward the river-bank; a camp of
+Bedouins with their camels and their tents were beginning to stir and
+kindle their morning fires. The railroad crosses the river here, and
+just as we were creeping out over the slow-moving flood the sun rose,
+and the orchestra of the sky broke into a majestic crescendo, as rare
+and radiant and splendid as it was when Memnon answered to its waking
+thrill and sang welcome to the day.
+
+The young man and I had forgotten each other, I think, for neither of us
+had spoken for some moments. Then we both spoke at once--"_Wunderbar!_"
+we said, "_Wunderschon!_" for I have trained myself to speak German even
+when strongly moved. Then with one impulse we looked at our watches. It
+was precisely six, and we remembered that it was the 22d of March--the
+equinox.
+
+We stayed out there and saw the land awake--that old land which has
+awakened so many times and in so much the same fashion. Outside of its
+cities and its temples it cannot have changed greatly since the days of
+Rameses. It is still just a green, fertile thread of life, watered and
+tilled in the manner of fifty centuries ago. They had to drag us in to
+breakfast at last, for we would be at Luxor before long, four hundred
+and fifty miles from Cairo; that is, at ancient Thebes, where--though
+the place has lingered for our coming a good four thousand years--"ze
+train he have not time to wait."
+
+We are in Thebes now, the "city of a hundred gateways and twenty
+thousand chariots of war." Homer called it that, though it was falling
+to ruin even then. Homer was a poet, but his statistics are believed to
+be correct enough in this instance, for Diodorus, who saw the ruins a
+little before the Christian era, states that there were a hundred war
+stables, each capable of holding two hundred horses, "the marks and
+signs of which," he says, "are visible to this day." Of its glory in
+general he adds: "There was no city under the sun so adorned with so
+many and stately monuments of gold and silver and ivory, and multitudes
+of colossi and obelisks cut out of entire stone." Still further along
+Diodorus adds, "There, they say, are the wonderful sepulchres of the
+ancient kings, which for state and grandeur far exceed all that
+posterity can attain unto at this day."
+
+Coming from a historian familiar with Athens and Rome in the height of
+their splendor, this statement is worth considering. We have journeyed
+to Thebes to see the ruin of the mighty temples which Diodorus saw, and
+the colossi and the obelisks, and to visit the royal tombs of which he
+heard--now open to the light of day.
+
+We had glimpses of these things at the very moment of our arrival. The
+Temple of Luxor (so called) is but a step from the hotel, and, waiting
+on the terrace for our donkeys, we looked across the Nile to the Colossi
+of Memnon, still rising from the wide plain where once a thronging city
+stood--still warming to the sunrise that has never failed in their
+thirty-five hundred years.
+
+We were in no hurry to leave that prospect, but our donkeys were ready
+presently, and a gallant lot indeed. The Luxor donkeys are the best in
+Egypt, we are told, and we believe it. They are a mad, racing
+breed--fat, unwearied, and strenuous--the pick of their species. They
+can gallop all day in the blazing sun, and the naked rascal that races
+behind, waving a stick and shouting, can keep up with them hour after
+hour when an American would drop dead in five minutes.
+
+They are appropriately named, those donkeys. Mine was "Whiskey
+Straight," and he arrived accordingly. He was a gray, wild-headed
+animal, made of spring steel. We headed the procession that led away for
+the Temple of Karnak in a riotous stampede. Laura's donkey was "Whiskey
+and Soda"--a slightly milder proposition, but sufficient unto the day. I
+have never seen our ship-dwellers so unreserved in their general
+behavior, so "let loose," as it were, from anything that resembled
+convention, as when we went cavorting through that Arab settlement of
+"El-Uksur," where had been ancient Thebes. Beset with a mad, enjoying
+fear, our ladies--some of whom were no longer young and perhaps had
+never ridden before--broke into frantic and screaming prophecies of
+destruction, struggling to check their locomotion, their feet set
+straight ahead, skirts, scarfs, hats, hair streaming down the wind. It
+was no time for scenery--Egyptian scenery; we knew nothing, could attend
+to nothing, till at the towering entrance of the great Temple of Karnak
+we came to a sudden and confused halt.
+
+We dismounted there, shook ourselves together, and stared wonderingly up
+at those amazing walls whose relief carving and fresco tints the dry air
+of this rainless land has so miraculously preserved. And then presently
+we noticed that Gaddis, our guide for the Nile, had stepped quietly out
+before us, and with that placid smile he always wears had lifted his
+hand to the records of his ancestors.
+
+[Illustration: SANCTUARY IN KARNAK]
+
+[Illustration: GADDIS
+
+YOUNG IN YEARS. GADDIS IS AS OLD AS THESE MONUMENTS IN REFLECTION AND
+MENTAL HERITAGE--A PART WITH THEM OF A VANISHED DAY]
+
+I want to speak a word just here of Gaddis. He is pure Copt, and the
+name "Copt" is from "Gypt"--that is, "Egypt"--the Copts being the direct
+descendants of the race that built ancient Thebes. His color is a clear,
+rich brown; his profile might be a part of these wall decorations. Then
+there are his eyes--mere dreamy slits, behind which he dwells in an age
+far removed from ours, while his lips wear always that ineffable smile
+which belongs only to Egypt, its sculpture and its people, the smile
+that regards with gentle contemplation--and compassion--all trivial
+things. Young in years, Gaddis is as old as these monuments in
+reflection and mental heritage--a part with them of a vanished day. And
+but for his fez and little European coat, which with the sash and
+figured skirt complete the dress of the Egyptian guide, Gaddis might
+truly have been plucked from these pictured walls. I should add that he
+reads the hieroglyphics and has all languages on his tongue--English,
+French, German--the Egyptian is born with these, I think; his voice is a
+drowsy hum that is pure music; his temper is as sweet and changeless as
+his smile.
+
+So much for Gaddis. He stood now with his lifted hand directed to the
+panoramic story of the past; then, in slow, measured voice:
+
+"Zis is ze great temple of Karnak--ze work of many king. Here you will
+see ze King Ram-e-ses II. wiz ze crown an' symbol of Upper an' Lower
+Egypt, making sacrifice of fruit and fowl an' all good sings to ze gawd
+Amm-Ra, in ze presence of Horus, ze hawk-headed sun-gawd, an' Anubis an'
+Osiris, ze gawd of ze under-worlid."
+
+Thus it was our sight-seeing in Upper Egypt began.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+KARNAK AND LUXOR
+
+
+The temple of Karnak cannot be described. The guide-books attempt it,
+but the result is only a maze of figures and detail for which the mind
+cares little. All the Greek temples on the Acropolis combined would make
+but a miniature showing by the side of Karnak. Most of the Egyptian
+kings, beginning as far back as 3000 B.C., had a hand in its building,
+and for above two thousand years it was in a state of construction,
+restoration, or repair. The result is an amazing succession of halls and
+columns, monoliths, and mighty walls--many of them tumbled and tumbling
+now, but enough standing to show what a race once flourished here. Long
+ago the road over which we came from Luxor was an avenue eighty feet
+wide and a mile and a half long, connecting the two great temples. It
+was faced on each side with ram-headed sphinxes only a few feet apart.
+Most of them are gone now, but the few mutilated specimens left prompt
+one's imagination of that mighty boulevard. The Karnak of that day, with
+its various enclosures, is said to have covered a thousand acres. The
+mind does not grasp that, any more than it comprehends the ages of its
+construction, the history it has seen. It is like trying to grasp the
+distance to the stars.
+
+No one may say who began Karnak, but the Usertsens of the earliest
+Theban Dynasty had a hand in its building, and after them the other
+dynasties down to the Ptolemaic days. Thothmes III. and his aunt, the
+wonderful Queen Hatasu--the ablest woman of her time--were among its
+builders, and these two set up obelisks, erected pylons and vast
+columned halls. This was about 1600 B.C., when the glory of Egypt was at
+flood-tide. Two centuries later the mighty Seti I., whose mummied form
+sleeps to-day in the Museum at Cairo, began what is known as the great
+Hypostile Hall, finished by his still mightier son, Rameses II., whose
+mummy likewise reposes in Cairo, father and son together. Rameses built
+other additions to Karnak, and crowded most of them with pictures and
+statues of himself and the sculptured glorification of his deeds. He
+was, in fact, not only the greatest king, but the greatest egotist the
+world has ever known, and in the end believed himself a god. It is said
+that he built more than seventy temples altogether, chiefly to hold his
+statues, and that he put his name on a number that had been built by his
+predecessors. It has been hinted that to his title of "The Great" the
+word "Advertiser" should have been added, and the fact that he is now on
+exhibition in a glass case must be a crowning gratification to him, if
+he knows it. It should be mentioned that Rameses II. is thought to be
+one of the oppressors of the Israelites, which may tend to arrange his
+period and personality in the Biblical mind.
+
+I am wandering away from the subject in hand. I want to talk about
+Karnak, and I find myself talking of kings. But, then, one _cannot_
+talk about Karnak--not intelligently. One must _see_ Karnak, and he will
+believe himself dreaming all the time, and he will come away silent. The
+Romans came to Karnak when the Egyptians had finished with their
+building, and by-and-by the early Christians, who could always be
+depended upon to pull down and mutilate and destroy anything that was
+particularly magnificent. Our old friend, the good Queen Helena,
+arrived, and the temples of Egypt crumbled before the blight of her
+fanaticism. But I must change cars again. I get a little rabid when I
+take up Queen Helena and her tribe.
+
+We followed Gaddis from arch to pylon, from enclosure to sanctuary--we
+passed down colonnades that one must see to believe. There are two kinds
+of columns in Egypt, by-the-way, the Lotus and the Papyrus--the former
+with a capital that opens out like a flaring bowl, the cup of the
+lotus-flower; the other with a capital that is more like an opening bud.
+The lotus symbolizes the Delta country, Lower Egypt; the papyrus stands
+for Upper Egypt, the country of the Nile, where we now are. Both are
+used in these temples, and here in Karnak there is a hall of Lotus
+columns--one hundred and thirty-four in number--twelve of them sixty
+feet high and twelve feet through!
+
+That is the great Hypostile Hall of Seti I., and I wish the English
+language were big enough, and I on sufficiently good terms with it to
+convey the overwhelming impression of that place. Try to conceive an
+architectural forest of the size of a city block, planted with
+sculptured and painted columns and filled with sunlight--the columns
+towering till they seem to touch the sky, and of such thickness that six
+men with extended arms, finger-tip to finger-tip, can barely span them
+round. The twelve mightier columns form a central avenue that simply
+dwarfs into insignificance any living thing that enters it. You suddenly
+become an insect when you stand between those columns and look up, and
+you have the feeling that you are likely to be stepped on. The rest of
+that colossal assembly stretch away on either side and are only a degree
+smaller. All are painted with the four colors of the Nile--mellow tones
+of blue, red, green and yellow, signifying high and low Nile, green
+fields and harvest--imperishable pigments as fresh and luminous under
+this sunlit sky as when they were laid there by artists who finished and
+put their brushes away more than three thousand years ago. How poor are
+mere words in the presence of this mighty reality which has outlived so
+many languages--will outlive all the puny languages that try to convey
+it now!
+
+Looking down the great central avenue of Seti's hall, we beheld at the
+end--standing as true to-day as when she placed it there--the graceful
+granite obelisk of Queen Hatasu.
+
+"Set up in honor of father Amen," she relates in her inscription on the
+base. She adds that she covered the tip with copper that it might be
+seen at a great distance, and tells how the monolith and its mate (now
+lying broken near it) were hewn from the Assuan quarries and brought
+down the Nile to Thebes. I may say here that we did not read these
+inscriptions ourselves. We could do it, of course, if we had time, but
+Gaddis, who is at least five thousand years old, inside, is better at it
+than we could be in a brief period like that, so we depend on him a good
+deal. Gaddis can read anything. A bird without a head, followed by a
+pair of legs walking, a row of sawteeth, a picked chicken, a gum-drop
+and a comb, all done in careful outline, mean "Homage to the Horus of
+the two horizons" to Gaddis, though I have been unable as yet to see
+why.
+
+We went into the Hall, or Temple, of Khonsu, the moon-god, and here was
+a breath-taking collection of papyrus columns, short, thick, built to
+stand through the ages on the uncertain foundation of this alluvial
+plain. We passed into a sanctuary where the priests of Amen prepared the
+sacrifice, and Gaddis read the story on the walls, and pointed out for
+the twentieth time, perhaps, Horus, the hawk-headed god, and Hapi, his
+son, who has a dog head and can hardly be called handsome; also Anubis,
+the jackal-headed god of the Under World. We came to a temple with a
+wall upon which Seti recorded his victories over the forces of Syria,
+and pictured himself in the act of destroying an army single handed by
+gathering their long hair into a single twist preparatory to smiting off
+this combined multitude of heads at a blow. We follow Gaddis through
+long tumbling avenues and corridors of decorated walls; we climbed over
+fallen columns that prostrate were twice as high as our heads; we
+studied the records which those old kings, in ages when all the rest of
+the world was myth and fable set up to preserve the story of their
+deeds. And remember, all these columns and walls were not only
+completely covered with figures carved in relief, but tinted in those
+unfading colors, subdued, harmonious, and more beautiful than I can
+tell.
+
+[Illustration: I MADE A PICTURE OF THE FLY-BRUSH BRIGADE]
+
+How little and how feebly I seem to be writing about this stupendous
+ruin, yet I must conclude presently for lack of room. We went into the
+Ramesseum, a temple literally lined with heroic statues of Rameses,
+where I made a picture of the fly-brush brigade, as we call ourselves
+now, because in Upper Egypt a fly-brush is absolutely necessary not
+alone to comfort, but to very existence. The fly here is not the
+ordinary house variety, fairly coy and flirtatious if one has a
+newspaper or other impromptu weapon, retiring now and again to a safe
+place for contemplation; no, the Egyptian fly is different. He never
+retires and he is not in the least coy. He makes for you in a cloud, and
+it is only by continuous industry that you can beat him off at all.
+Furthermore, he begins business the instant he touches, and he has
+continuously the gift which our fly sometimes has on a sultry, muggy
+day--the art of sticking with his feet, which drives you frantic. So you
+buy a fly-brush the instant you land in Upper Egypt, and you keep it
+going constantly from dawn to dark. The flies retire then, for needed
+rest.
+
+[Illustration: ITS MAGNIFICENT PYLONS OR ENTRANCE WALLS ... AND THEN
+ONCE MORE WE WERE ON THE DONKEYS]
+
+We passed through another avenue of ram-headed sphinxes (some of the
+heads were gone) which Rameses built, and stood outside of the great
+temple of Amen, once called the "Throne of the World." Its magnificent
+pylons, or entrance walls, are one hundred and fifty feet high and
+three hundred broad. We ascended one of these for a general view of the
+vast field of ruin.
+
+Piled and tumbled and flung about lay the mighty efforts of a mighty
+race. At one place excavating was still going on, and a regiment of
+little boys were running back and forth with baskets of dirt on their
+heads, singing and sweating in the blazing sun, earning as much as two
+piastres (ten cents) a day. Men were working, too; they receive quite
+fancy sums--twenty cents a day, some of them.
+
+Now that we were outside of the shaded temple and sanctuary enclosures
+our party was not very game. It was our first day in Upper Egypt, and
+the flies and the sun made a pretty deadly combination. We began to
+complain, and to long for the cool corridors and fizzy drinks and
+protecting screens of the hotel. We might have played golf or tennis in
+that sun, but seeing ruins was different, and we began to pray for the
+donkeys again. So Gaddis led us around by the Sacred Lake, where once
+the splendid ceremonials were performed--it is only a shallow pool
+now--and then once more we were on the donkeys, strung out in a crazy,
+shrieking stampede for the hotel. Gaddis rode near me. His donkey was a
+racer, too, but Gaddis did not laugh or cry out, or anything of the
+sort. He only wore that gentle serene smile, the smile of Egypt,
+observing trivial things.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR ... ONCE MORE REFLECTING ITS COLUMNS
+IN THE NILE]
+
+In the afternoon we visited the Temple of Luxor, that beautiful
+structure which Amenophis III. built on the banks of the Nile. Luxor is
+Karnak on a smaller scale, though big enough in all conscience, and it
+is not all excavated yet. D�bris had covered this temple to the very
+top, and it is not so long ago that a village was built on a level with
+the capitals of these columns. When M. Maspero, in 1883, began his work
+of excavation, the natives naturally protested against the uncovering of
+the "heathen" ruins at the expense of their mud huts. The work went on,
+however, and to-day a large part of the magnificent architecture stands
+revealed, once more reflecting its columns in the Nile.
+
+There is still a quantity of d�bris to be removed. One end of the Temple
+is full of it, and may remain so a good while. On top of this mass, some
+five hundred years ago, a Mohammedan mosque was built by the descendants
+of a saint named Abu Haggag, and sufficient of his family are left to
+this day to hold that mosque intact against all would-be excavators.
+However, the mosque itself begins to look pretty old. If the diggers
+keep encroaching, it may slide off into the Temple some day, saints and
+all.
+
+Luxor, as a whole, is better preserved than Karnak. I suppose the
+heaped-up d�bris kept the columns in position during the last ten or a
+dozen centuries. I wish it had been there when the early Christian came
+along. Cambyses of Persia, who burned everything that would burn in
+Egypt, about 527 B.C., blackened the walls of this temple with fire, the
+marks of which show to this day, but he was nothing to the followers of
+Queen Helena. Even the guide-book, which is likely to be conservative in
+any comment that may touch upon the faith of its readers, says
+concerning the followers of Helena: "Not content with turning certain
+sections of it into churches, the more fanatical among them smashed
+statues, and disfigured bas-reliefs and wrecked shrines with
+characteristic savage and ignorant zeal."[7]
+
+There ought to be a painting or a marble group somewhere entitled "Early
+Christian at Work"--a lean-faced, stringy-haired maniac with sledge,
+murdering a symbolized figure of Defenceless Art in the Far East. The
+early Christian is said to have destroyed forty-five thousand statues in
+Thebes in one day.
+
+Still, those statues may not matter so much--they were probably all of
+Rameses the Great, and there are enough of him left. The Luxor Temple
+had them in all sizes, and of all materials, from granite to alabaster.
+Also some of "Mrs. Rameses," as Gaddis called her--no particular Mrs.
+Rameses--there having been several of her; just a sort of generic type
+of connubial happiness, I suppose. Mrs. Rameses, by the way, does not
+cut much figure in the statuary. She usually comes only about to the
+knee of the King, though she is life-size even then, for his own statues
+are colossal, ranging anywhere from fifteen to fifty feet high. That was
+to represent their difference in importance, of course, an idea which
+the women members of our party seemed to disapprove.[8]
+
+One of the statues of Rameses was found in a curious manner. A guide
+only a little while ago was lecturing to a party of tourists, while a
+young lady not far away was sketching a corner of the ruin. The sketcher
+stopped to listen to the guide's talk, and when he had finished said to
+the boy who was keeping the flies from her:
+
+"Go up on that heap of rubbish and see what that stone is."
+
+It was the rubbish that slopes down from the old mosque. The boy climbed
+up, pulled away the trash, and uncovered the head of one of the most
+perfect Rameseses yet discovered.
+
+Originally the Temple of Luxor was five hundred feet long, one hundred
+and eighty feet wide, and, as before mentioned, was connected with
+Karnak by a double row of ram-headed sphinxes. Amenophis III. built it
+about 1500 B.C., and it was regarded as the most beautiful of Egyptian
+temples. Then came his son, Amenophis IV., who, being a sun-worshipper
+after the manner of his Mesopotamian mother, cut away the name of the
+Egyptian god Amen and set up a new worship here. It was a brief
+innovation. The priests made it too hot for the Heretic King. He gave up
+the struggle after a time, went into the desert farther down the Nile,
+and built there a city and temples of his own. Then this temple was
+sacred to the old religion again. It remained so until Alexander came,
+cut his name here and there, and probably worshipped his own assortment
+of gods. Later came the Roman and the early Christian; still later the
+Mohammedan established ceremonies and reconstructed shrines.
+
+We had all the old sacrifices and processions and gods and victories
+over again in Luxor, including the picture story of the birth of
+Amenophis III., which depicts an immaculate conception; an annunciation;
+a visitation of wise men with gifts, executed about 1500 B.C.
+
+After which we returned to the hotel; but when the sun was low in the
+west beyond the Nile and the air was getting balmy, I slipped back and
+sat in the old Temple in the quiet, and thought of a number of things.
+Then as the sun slipped below the verge, a figure stepped out on the
+minaret just over my head and began that weird thrilling chant which
+once heard will remain forever unforgotten, the cry of the East--"Allah
+il Allah," the Muezzin's call to prayer.
+
+So it is still a place of worship. The voice of faith has reached down
+thirty-four centuries, and whatever the form, or the prophet, or the
+priest, it is all embodied there at evening and at morning in the cry,
+"There is no God but God."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] _Cook's Egypt_, page 562.
+
+[8] At Abou Simbel there are sitting statues of Rameses the Great which,
+if standing erect, would be eighty-three feet tall.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+THE STILL VALLEY OF THE KINGS
+
+
+It was early next morning when we crossed the Nile to the rhythm of a
+weird chorus which the boatmen sang to the beat of the oars. It is
+probably older than these temples, and the boatmen themselves do not
+know the meaning of the words, Gaddis said. One intones and the others
+answer, and it is in minor keys with a dying fall at the end, except now
+and then when a curious lifting note drops in, like a flash of light on
+the oars. Bound for the Valley of the Kings, the House of Hatasu, and
+the Colossi of Memnon, it seemed a fitting overture.
+
+The donkeys were waiting on the other bank--the same we had used
+yesterday, fat and fresh as ever, and the same boys were there calling
+and gesticulating to their special charges of the day before. There are
+always a few more donkey-boys than is necessary, it seems, all of them
+wildly eager for the privilege of racing all day in the perishing sun,
+urging the donkeys and yelling for baksheesh at every jump--not that
+they expect to get it until the end of the day, but as a traditional
+part of the performance. The donkey-boy gets nothing, we are told, but
+what one is pleased to give him--the donkey hire going to the Sheik, who
+owns the donkeys and lets the boys get what they can. I would write a
+good deal about those half-naked, half-savage, tireless donkey-boys if
+permitted. They and their brothers, and their cousins even to the fourth
+remove, who come in like a charging army in the wild baksheesh skirmish
+at the end, interest me.
+
+Mounted, we led away in the usual stampede along canals and by lush
+green fields, across the fertile strip that borders the Nile. The green
+is rather wide here--as much as a mile, I should think, and it was
+pleasant going through the still morning if one kept well forward in the
+procession--in front of the dust that rose mightily behind us. Every
+little way where we slackened speed, detachments of sellers would charge
+from the roadside with trinkets, imitation scarabs, and images, but more
+notably with fragments (and these were genuine enough) of what long
+ago--as much as three or four thousand years, perhaps--had been human
+beings like ourselves. Remnants of mummies they were, quarried out of
+the barren hills where lie not only the kings but the millions who in
+the glory of Egypt lived and died in Thebes. The hills are full of them,
+Gaddis said, and unearthing them has become an industry.
+
+It was rather grewsome at first to be offered such things--to have a
+head, or a hand, or a foot thrust up under your eyes, and with it an
+outstretched palm for payment. The prices demanded were not very high,
+and the owners, the present owners, would take less--a good deal less
+than the first quotation. A physician in our party bought a head--hard
+and black as old mahogany, with some bits of gold-leaf still sticking to
+it--for five francs, and I was offered a baby's hand (it had been soft
+and dimpled once--it was dark and withered now) for a shilling.
+
+We crossed the line which "divides the desert from the sown"--a sharp,
+perfectly distinguishable line in Egypt--and were in the sand, the sun
+getting high and blazing down, fairly drenching us with its flame. We
+thought it would be better when we entered the hills, but that was a
+mistake. It was worse, for there was not a particle of growing shade,
+not a blade of any green thing, and there seemed no breath of life in
+that stirless air.
+
+Remember it never rains here; these hills have never known water since
+the Flood, but have been baking in this vast kiln for a million years.
+You will realize that it must be hot, then, but you will never know how
+hot until you go there. Here and there a rock leaned over a little and
+made a skimpy blue shadow, which we sidled into as we passed for a
+blessed instant of relief. We understood now the fuller meaning of that
+Bible phrase, "As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." This was
+a weary land with shadows far between. Now and then those astonishing
+donkeys broke into a gallop and stirred up a little scorching wind, the
+unflagging boys capering and shouting behind.
+
+It seemed an endless way, up into these calcined hills to the
+Burial-place of Kings, but by-and-by there were traces of ruins and
+excavation, and we heard the throb of a dynamo on the quivering air. We
+dismounted then, and Gaddis led us up a burning little steep to what at
+first seemed a great tunnel into the mountain-side. How deep and cool
+and inviting it looked up there; we would go in, certainly. Was it
+really a tomb? No wonder those old kings looked forward to such a place.
+
+It was merely an entrance to a tomb--a tunnel, truly, and of such size
+that I believe two railway trains could enter it side by side and two
+more on top of them! I think most of us had the idea--I know I did--that
+we would go down ladders into these tombs, and that they would be
+earthy, cheerless places, more interesting than attractive.
+
+They are the most beautiful places I ever saw. The entrances--vast, as I
+have stated--go directly in from the hillside; the rock floors are dry
+and clean, while the side-walls and the ceilings are simply a mass of
+such carving and color as the world nowhere else contains. An electric
+dynamo set up in a tomb that was never finished (that of Rameses XII., I
+believe) supplies illumination for these homes of the kingly dead, and
+as you follow deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain your
+wonder grows at the inconceivable artistic effort and constructive labor
+that have been expended on those walls. Deeper, and still deeper, along
+a gradual decline that seems a veritable passage to the underworld. Here
+and there, at the side, are antechambers or avenues that lead away--we
+wonder whither.
+
+Now and again Gaddis paused to explain the marvellous story of the
+walls--the progress of the King to the underworld--his reception there,
+his triumphs, his life in general in that long valley of spirits which
+ran parallel with Egypt and was neither above nor below the level of the
+earth. It was this form and idea of the underworld that the shape of
+these tombs was intended to express, while their walls illustrate the
+happy future life of the King. Chapters from the "Book of the
+Underworld" (a sort of descriptive geography of the country) and from
+the "Book of the Dead" (a manual of general instruction as to customs
+and deportment in the new life) cover vast spaces. Here and there a
+design was not entirely worked out, but the sketch was traced in
+outline, which would indicate that perhaps the King died before his tomb
+(always a life-work) was complete.
+
+Now, realize: This gorgeous passage was nearly five hundred feet long,
+cut into the living rock, and opened into a vast pillared and vaulted
+chamber fully sixty feet long by forty wide and thirty high--the whole
+covered with splendid decorations that the dry air and protection have
+preserved as fresh and beautiful as the day they were finished so many
+centuries ago. This was the royal chamber, empty now, where in silent
+state King Seti I. once lay. We are a frivolous crowd, but we were awed
+into low-voiced wonder at the magnitude of this work, the mightiness of
+a people who could provide so overwhelmingly for their dead.
+
+I do not remember how many such tombs we visited, but they were a good
+many, including those of Rameses I. and II., the father and the mighty
+son of Seti I., all three of whom now sleep in the Cairo Museum. Also
+the tomb of Rameses IX., one of the finest of the lot.
+
+In some of the tombs the sarcophagi were still in place, but all are
+empty of occupants except one. This was the splendid tomb of Amenophis
+II., of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who lived in the glory of Egypt, 1600
+B.C., a warrior who slew seven Syrian chiefs with his own hand. Gaddis
+had not told us what to expect in that tomb, and when we had followed
+through the long declining way to the royal chamber and beheld there,
+not an empty sarcophagus but a king asleep, we were struck to silence
+with that three thousand five hundred years of visible rest.
+
+The top of the sarcophagus is removed, and is replaced by heavy plate
+glass. Just over the sleeper's face there is a tiny electric globe, and
+I believe one could never tire of standing there and looking at that
+quiet visage, darkened by age, but beautiful in its dignity; unmoved,
+undisturbed by the storm and stress of the fretful years.
+
+How long he has been asleep! The Israelites were still in bondage when
+he fell into that quiet doze, and for their exodus, a century or two
+later, he did not care. Hector and Achilles and Paris and the rest had
+not battled on the Plains of Troy; the gods still assembled on Mt.
+Olympus; Rome was not yet dreamed. He had been asleep nigh a thousand
+years when Romulus quit nursing the she-wolf to build the walls of a
+city which would one day rule the world. The rise, the conquest, the
+decline of that vast empire he never knew. When her armies swept the
+nations of the East and landed upon his own shores he did not stir in
+his sleep. The glory of Egypt ebbed away, but he did not care. Old
+religions perished; new gods and new prophets replaced the gods and
+prophets he had known--it mattered not to him, here in this quiet
+underworld. Through every change he lay here in peace, just as he lies
+to-day, so still, so fine in his kingly majesty--upon his face that soft
+electric glow which seems in no wise out of place, because it has come
+as all things come at last to him who waits.
+
+In a sort of anteroom near the royal chamber lie the mummies of three
+adherents of the King, each with a large hole in the skull and a large
+gash in the breast--royal slaves, no doubt, sent to bear their liege
+company. I remember one of them as having very long thick curly hair--a
+handsome fellow, I suppose; a favorite who could not, or would not, be
+left behind.
+
+A number of other royal mummies were found in the Tomb of Amenophis II.,
+so that at some period of upheaval it must have been used as a
+hiding-place for the regal dead, as was a cave across the mountains at
+Der al-Bahari. Perhaps those who secreted them here thought that a king
+who in life had slain seven chiefs with his own hand would make a potent
+guard. They were not mistaken. Through all the centuries the guests of
+that still house lay undisturbed.
+
+We paused, though briefly--for it was fairly roasting outside--at the
+excavations of our countryman, Mr. Theodore M. Davis, who has brought to
+light so many priceless relics in this place; after which we bought an
+entire stock of oranges from an Arab who suddenly appeared from nowhere,
+sucked them ravenously, and set out, leading our donkeys up a broiling
+precipitous path over the mountains, for the house of Queen Hatasu,
+which lies at the base of the cliffs on the other side.
+
+It was not very far, I suppose, but it was strenuous and seemed miles.
+We were rewarded, however, when we reached the plateau of the mountain
+top. From the brink of the great cliff we could look out over the whole
+plain of Thebes, its villages and its ruins, its green cultivation and
+its blazing sands. Once it was a vast city--"the city of a hundred gates
+and twenty thousand chariots of war." Through its centre flowed the
+Nile, a very fountain of life, its one outlet to the world. To the east
+and the west lay Nature's surest fortifications, the dead hills and the
+encompassing sands. It is estimated that the city of Paris could stand
+on this level sweep and that Thebes overspread it all. As at Ephesus, we
+tried to re-create that vanished city, but we did not try long, for the
+mid-day sun was too frying hot.
+
+So we descended to the rest-house of Der al-Bahari, where we created a
+famine in everything resembling refreshments, liquid or otherwise, in
+that wayside shelter. Then out on the piazza we swung our fly-brushes,
+beat off the sellers of things, and tried to assimilate our half-baked
+knowledge.
+
+We were in a mixed state of temples and tombs and dynasties and
+localities--of sacrificial processions, and gods of the "Underworld."
+The sun had got into our heads, too, and some of the refreshments had
+been of strange color and curious brands. It is no wonder that we
+drifted into deliriums of verse. I have forgotten who had the first
+seizure, but from internal evidence it was probably Fosdick--Fosdick of
+Ohio. This is it:
+
+  Queen Hatasu, of Timbuctoo,
+    She lived a busy life;
+  She fell in love with King Khufu,
+    And she became his wife.
+
+  She put him in a pyramid--
+    He put her in another,
+  And now four thousand years have gone
+    You can't tell one from tother.
+
+I do remember how we tried to reason with the author; how we explained
+to him carefully that Hatasu, who was also called Hatshepset and certain
+other names, did not hail from Timbuctoo; also that King Khufu, alias
+Cheops, had been in his pyramid at least two thousand years, with
+fourteen dynasties on top of him, when that lady of the Nile was born.
+It was no use; he turned a glazed eye on us and said all periods looked
+alike to him, that art was long and life fleeting, that a trifle of two
+thousand years was as a few grains on the Egyptian sands of time. We
+saw, then, he was hopeless, but later he improved and seemed sorry. It
+did not matter; another member of the party had been taken with the
+poetic madness, and we gave room for his attack. It was of milder form,
+and mercifully short:
+
+  King Rameses, he strove to please,
+    And put his foes to flight;
+  To celebrate his victories
+    He toiled both day and night.
+
+  He filled full threescore temples with
+    His statues vast and grim,
+  And some of Mrs. Rameses
+    Who wa'n't knee-high to him.
+
+I don't know why a malady of this sort should fall upon our party. Such
+things never happened on the ship, but then Egypt is different, as I
+have said. There was one more outbreak before we got the germ destroyed:
+
+  Behold the halls of Seti I.,
+    And also Seti II.;
+  Likewise of old Amenhetep
+    And haughty Hatasu.
+
+  They lived in state, their days were great
+    And glided gayly by;
+  Sometimes they used to rail at fate,
+    The same as you and I.
+
+  Oh, Seti I., your race is run,
+    And also Seti II.,
+  And lizards sleep where ages creep
+    In the house of Hatasu.
+
+It was time to check the tendency; it was getting serious.
+
+We went up to the "House of Hatasu"--all that is left of it--a beautiful
+fragment of what was built by the great Queen as her Holy of Holies. It
+is unlike other temples we have seen, with its square columns; its
+beautiful open portico; its fine ceiling, still perfect in workmanship
+and coloring. Queen Hatasu had ideas of her own about building; also,
+her own architect. His name was Senmut, and his tomb, a mile from the
+temple, commands a view of it to this day.
+
+Hatasu once made a notable expedition to the lower east coast of
+Africa--to Punt, as it was called then, and she has recorded it on these
+walls. It shows the natives bringing valuable presents--woods, spices,
+gold, and the like--in exchange for glass beads and tin whistles, after
+the customary manner of such barter. A part of the relief shows the
+Prince of Punt and "Mrs. Punt," whose figure was certainly remarkable,
+followed by their family, all with hands raised in deference to the
+Egyptian Queen.
+
+It was near here, in 1881, that the cave or pit was found containing the
+mummies of many kings, including Seti I., Rameses II., and others who
+had been stored here for safety. Arabs had been selling royal scarabs
+for some time, and the arch�ologists finally discovered the secret of
+their supply. It was a priceless find, and with the treasures of the
+tomb of Amenophis II., made the museum of Cairo the richest
+arch�ological depository in the world.
+
+We put in the afternoon visiting temples, mostly of Rameses the Great,
+and looking at statues which he had caused to be erected of himself
+wherever there was room. I remember one colossal granite figure of that
+self-sufficient king, lying prostrate on the sand now, estimated to
+weigh a thousand tons--which is to say two million pounds. That statue
+was sixty feet high when it stood upright, and it is cut like a gem. It
+was brought down from Assuan in one piece, by barge, as was the enormous
+granite base, which is thirty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and eight
+feet thick.
+
+I remember, too, some sun-dried brick--brick made by the Israelites,
+maybe--with the imprint of Rameses still on them, uneffaced after
+thirty-three centuries. The sun bakes hard in Egypt; no other kiln is
+needed. I remember a temple of Rameses III. and a pictorial record of
+one of his victories. His soldiers had reported a killing of twelve
+thousand of the enemy; he said:
+
+"Go bring the evidence. If you have those dead men anywhere you can
+bring something to prove it."
+
+So the army returned and got the right hands of their victims. The story
+is all cut there on the walls, and the hands are there too.
+
+Rameses III. knew the custom inaugurated by his ancestor "The Great," of
+eliminating old names with new ones, and he took measures accordingly by
+cutting his own inscriptions deep. Some of them sink ten inches into the
+walls and will stay there a good while.
+
+I had noticed one curious thing along the outer walls of all these old
+temples, to wit: row after row of smooth egg-shaped holes, ranging
+irregularly, one above the other, from the base upward--sometimes to the
+very top. It was as if they had been dug out by some animal or insect. I
+asked Gaddis, at last, what they were, and he told me this curious
+thing.
+
+The childless Arab woman, he said, for ages had believed that some magic
+in these walls could make them fruitful, so had come and rubbed
+patiently with their fingers until they worked a few grains of the
+sandstone into a cup of water, which they drank with a prayer of hope.
+They had begun, he said, in that far-off time when the temples stood as
+clear of rubbish as they do to-day; and, as the years heaped up the
+d�bris, these anxious women had rubbed higher and higher up the walls
+until, with the drift of the ages, they had reached the very top. So
+there the record stands to-day, and when one realizes how little of that
+stone can be rubbed away with the finger-end; how comparatively few must
+have been the childless mothers, and then sees how innumerable and deep
+those holes are, he gets a sudden and comprehensive grasp of the vast
+stretch of time these walls stood tenantless, vanishing, and unregarded,
+save by those generations of barren women.
+
+We raced away for the Colossi of Memnon, where, I fear, we did not
+linger as long as was proper. It was growing late--we were very tired
+and were overfull of undigested story and tangled chronology. Also the
+scarab men and flies were especially bad just there. We were willing to
+take a bare look at that majestic pair who have watched the sun rise
+morning after morning while a great city vanished away from around them,
+and then go steaming away across the sands for the Nile and the cool
+rest of the hotel.
+
+Such a time as we had settling with those donkey-boys--the old
+white-turbaned sheik, owner of the donkeys, squatting and smoking
+indifferently while the storm raged about him. But it was over at last,
+and the boatmen sang again--a quiet afterlude of that extraordinary
+day--and collected baksheesh on the farther shore.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+THE HIGHWAY OF EGYPT
+
+
+There could hardly be a daintier boat than the _Memnon_. It just holds
+our party; it is as clean and speckless as possible, and there is an
+open deck the full width of the tiny steamer, with pretty rugs and lazy
+chairs, where we may lounge and drowse and dream and look out on the
+gently passing panorama of the Nile.
+
+For we have left Luxor, and are floating in this peaceful fashion down
+to Cairo, resting in the delight of it, after those fierce
+temple-hunting, tomb-visiting days. Not that we are entirely through
+with temples and the like. Here and there we tie up to the bank, and go
+ashore and scamper away on donkeys to some tumbled ruin, but it is a
+diversion now, not a business, and we find such stops welcome. For the
+most part we spend our days just idling, and submitting to the spell of
+Egypt, which has encompassed us and possessed us as it will encompass
+and possess any one who has a trace of the old human tendency to drift
+and dream.
+
+It has been said of Boston that it is less a locality than a state of
+mind. I wish _I_ had said that--of Egypt. I will say it now, and without
+humor, for of this land it is so eminently true. A mere river-bank; a
+filament of green; a long slender lotus-stem, of which the Delta is the
+flower--_that_ is Egypt. Remote--shut in by the desert and the dead
+hills--it is far less a country and a habitation than a psychological
+condition which all the mummied ages have been preparing--which the
+traveller from the earliest moment is bound to feel. It has lived so
+long! It had made and recorded its history when the rest of the world
+was dealing in nursery-tales! The glamour of that stately past has
+become the spell, the enchantment of to-day. The magic of the lotus
+grows more potent with the years.
+
+It is such a narrow land! Sometimes the lifeless hills close in on one
+side or the other to the water's edge. Nowhere is the fertile strip
+wide, for its fertility depends wholly on the water it receives from the
+Nile, and when that water is drawn up by hand with a goat-skin pail and
+a well-sweep--a _shaduf_, as they call it--it means that fields cannot
+be very extensive, even if there were room, which as a rule there is
+not.
+
+[Illustration: THINK OF WATERING A WHOLE WHEAT-FIELD WITH A WELL-SWEEP
+AND A PAIL]
+
+Think of watering a whole wheat-field with a well-sweep and a pail!
+Furthermore, where the banks are high the water is sometimes lifted
+three times between the Nile and the surface, and much of it is wasted
+in transit. It is the oldest form of irrigation; the hieroglyphics show
+that it was in use in Egypt five thousand years ago. It is also still
+the most popular form in Upper Egypt. We saw a good many of the
+_sakkieh_--primitive and wasteful water-wheels propelled by a buffalo or
+a camel or a cow--and at rare intervals a windmill, where some
+Englishman has established a plantation, but it is the _shaduf_ that
+largely predominates.
+
+The mud villages among the date-palms are unfailingly picturesque; the
+sail-boats of the Nile--_markab_ they call them--drifting down upon us
+like great butterflies, have a charm not to be put in words; the life
+along the shores never loses its interest; the sun sets and the sun
+rises round the dreamy days with a marvel of color that seems each time
+more wonderful. Then there is the moonlight. But I must not speak of
+Egyptian moonlight or I shall lose my sense of proportion altogether,
+for it is like no other light that ever lay on sea or land.
+
+We do not travel through the night, but anchor at dusk until daybreak.
+It is curious to reflect that one sees the entire country on a trip like
+this, if he rises early. We do rise early, most of us--though the cool
+nights (nights are always cool in Egypt) and the stillness are an
+inducement to sleep--and we are usually very hungry before breakfast
+comes along. One may have coffee on the deck if he likes--the
+picturesque Arab will bring it joyfully, especially where there is a
+baksheesh at the end. It is good coffee, too, and the food is good;
+everything is good on the _Memnon_ except the beverages and the cigars.
+The wine could be improved and the cigars could be thrown away. I paid a
+shilling for one that was as hard as a stick and crumbled to dust when I
+bit it. Never mind the flavor. That brand was called "The Scarab." It
+should have been named "The Mummy"--it had all the characteristics.
+
+The pilot commands this boat--the captain merely conducts the excursion.
+The captain wears European dress and speaks English, but the pilot is
+Arab throughout--dark-faced, heavily turbaned, silent--watching the
+water like a sphinx. Now and then he makes a motion and says a word to
+the steersman at his side. Whenever we lie up or strike safe water he
+locates Mecca, prostrates himself, and prays. I should think his
+emotions would be conflicting at times. Doctrinally, of course, it is
+his duty to pray for the boat to sink and exterminate this crowd.
+Professionally, it is his duty to take us safely to Cairo. Poor old
+Abbas! how are you going to explain to the prophet by-and-by?
+
+We may not reach Cairo, however. The Nile is shallow at this season, and
+already we have scraped the sand more than once. It is a curious
+river--full of currents and shifting sand--the water getting scantier as
+you descend. That seemed strange to us until we realize that its entire
+flow comes from the far interior; that it has no feeding tributaries,
+while the steady evaporation, the irrigation, and the absorption of
+these burning sands constitute a heavy drain. It is hard to grasp a
+condition like that, or what this river means--has always meant--to the
+dwellers along its shores. Not alone an artery of life, it is life
+itself--water, food, clothing, cleanliness.
+
+They don't take as much advantage of that last blessing as they
+should--nor of the next to the last. It is true that most of them have
+some semblance of clothing, but not all of them. In this interior Nile,
+as we may call the district between Luxor and Cairo, early principles to
+some extent still prevail. At first we saw boys--donkey-boys and the
+like--without any perceivable clothing, and more lately we have seen
+men--brown-skinned muscular creatures loading boats--utterly destitute
+of wardrobe. Yet, somehow, these things did not shock us--not greatly.
+They seemed to go with the sun, and the dead blue sky and the other
+scenery. A good deal depends on surroundings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our stops were not all brief. We put in a full day at Abydos, where
+there is a splendid temple built by Seti I., and Rameses the Great (of
+course), and where the donkeys are as poor as they are good in Luxor.
+Not that they were wretched in appearance, or ill-cared for, but they
+were a stiff-necked, unwilling breed. Mine had a way of stopping
+suddenly and facing about toward home. Twice I went over his head during
+these manoeuvres, which the others thought entertaining.
+
+But they had their troubles, too. The distance to the temple was
+long--eight miles, I should think--and part of the way the road was an
+embankment several feet high. Some of the donkeys seemed to think it
+amusing to suddenly decide to go down this embankment and make off over
+the desert. We were a scattering, disordered cavalcade, and what with
+the flies and distracting donkey-boys who were perpetually at one's side
+with "Mister, good donkey--fine donkey--baksheesh, mister," the trip was
+a memorable one. Once when my donkey, whose name was "Straight Flush"
+and should have been "Two-spot" got behind the party, I caught my
+attendant, not only twisting his tail, but biting it.
+
+It was a good excursion, on the whole. We had luncheon in the great hall
+of the temple, and I could not help wondering who had held the first
+feast in that mighty place where we were holding the last, to date.
+
+We feel at home now in a temple, especially when we see the relief of
+our faithful Rameses, and of Osiris, king of the underworld, and his
+kind. We have become familiar and even disrespectful toward these great
+guardians of the past. This makes it hard on Gaddis at times; especially
+after luncheon, when we are in a sportive mood.
+
+"Zis is ze temple of Rameses ze Great"--he begins.
+
+"Ah, so it is--we suspected it all along."
+
+"Here you will see hees seventy-two son--"
+
+"Sure enough--our old friends."
+
+"And hees fourteen wive."
+
+"Happy man, but why a king and so few?"
+
+"An' here all zose seventy-two son carry gift to Osiris--"
+
+"King of the underworld--so they do, we would recognize that gang
+anywhere."
+
+Truly, it is time we were giving up temples; we are no longer serious.
+But in this temple of Seti I., at Abydos, we sometimes forgot to jest.
+Frivolous and riotous as we have become, we were silent in the presence
+of one splendid decoration of Seti offering sacrifice before the sacred
+boat, and again where we confronted in a corridor that precious and
+beautiful relief carving, the Tablet of Egypt's Kings. The cartouche of
+every king down to Seti I. is there--with one exception: the name of
+Amenophis IV., the king who abandoned his faith and worshipped his
+mother's gods, has no place in that royal company. Otherwise the story
+is as complete as it is impressive, and I recognized something of what
+that document means to those of Egypt who know (like Gaddis), when I put
+out a finger to touch the exquisite work and he whispered, "No, please."
+
+What record will there be of our history thirty-five centuries from now?
+Not a book of all those printed to-day will last any considerable
+fraction of that period. A tablet like this sets one to wondering if we
+should not get an appropriation to preserve at least the skeleton of our
+chronology on plates of bronze to be stored in some deep vault safe from
+the ravages of fire and flood and earthquake.
+
+We also stopped at Assuit, or Asyut, or Suit--I like these Egyptian
+names--you can spell them any way you please. Every one of them has all
+the spellings you can think of; you could not invent a new one if you
+tried. It is at Assuit they make the spangled shawls, and the natives
+flock down to the boat-landing to sell them. Gaddis had probably
+telegraphed ahead that a floating asylum of Americans was on the way and
+they had assembled accordingly. Long before we were in trading distance
+they began to dance about and gesticulate--the sheen of their fabrics
+blazing in the sun--crying the prices which they did not expect to get.
+
+Some of our ladies were quite eager, and began to make offers when we
+were still many yards from shore. I suppose they thought the supply was
+limited. By the time we touched the landing the wildest trading was
+already going on. Shawls rolled in a ball were being flung aboard for
+examination, and flung back wildly with preposterous under-bids, only
+to come hurtling back again with a fierce protest of refusal. For a time
+it was a regular game of snowball and fireworks. There were canes to
+sell, too, and fly-whips--beautiful ivory-handled things. Commerce
+swelled to high tide. In the midst of the mel�e somebody happened to
+notice, what we had not seen before, another steamer lying a little way
+ahead--an English party, we were told--the ladies and gentlemen quietly
+reading or pityingly regarding our exhibition. I know, now, that the
+English have no sense of humor. Another American boat would have been in
+spasms of delight at our antics. Also, the Englishman's Egypt is not as
+ours, and he does not enjoy it as much. How could he, without loading
+up, as we did, with those wonderful Assuit shawls?
+
+Only one more stop along the Nile will I record. This was at Tell
+al-Amarna, where, in the desert a little beyond the green, lies all that
+is left of the city built by the heretic king, Amenophis IV., who
+abandoned Amen-Ra for the sun-worship of his Mesopotamia mother, Queen
+Thi.
+
+It was a splendid granite city once, but it is all gone now. Only a
+little of the floor of the palace is left, Queen Thi's apartment, Gaddis
+said, but it held for us a curious interest. For it is painted, or
+perhaps enamelled, in colors, and the decorations, still in a good state
+of preservation, are not Egyptian in design, but Syrian or Persian! The
+Princess who had left her land to marry an Egyptian king could not
+forsake her gods and her traditions, and that old floor remains to-day
+after thirty-five centuries to tell the story of her loyalty and her
+love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We should have made other stops, perhaps, but we met disaster. The Nile
+was low, as I have said, and a hundred miles below Cairo we awoke one
+morning to find our boat hard and fast aground. We had, in fact,
+grounded the evening before, and Abbas and his men had been working all
+night, putting out anchors and pulling on ropes, a picturesque group, to
+the chorus "Ali sah--ali ya seni--ali hoop!" which is an appeal to the
+god of the Nile, Gaddis said, in this case unavailing. We were there to
+stay for the summer, unless we took train to Cairo, so after breakfast
+Gaddis and I went ashore with Abraham, still semi-officially attached to
+our party, and walked three miles to the nearest railway station to see
+what might be done. It was a fine walk, even though a warm one, across
+the Egyptian fields, and I saw some papyrus plant and bought a distaff
+and spindle from a man who was sitting by the road spinning after the
+fashion of the earliest race of men.
+
+It was Fachen that we reached, an Arab town to which tourists never
+come, and the donkeys we arranged for there, to carry our party from the
+shore landing to the station, were a nondescript lot without saddle or
+bridle--with no gear, in fact, except a remnant of rope tied around the
+neck. Then we walked back opposite the boat, another three miles, and
+sat on the bank, and sweat and waved our hands and called to those
+people, half a mile away in mid-stream, who for some reason could not
+see our signals.
+
+It was not uninteresting, though. The natives came to inspect us--an
+unusual opportunity for them--and some women came down to the Nile with
+great stone jars for water. Those jars must hold eight or ten gallons,
+and are heavy enough empty, yet those women will balance them on their
+heads and go stepping away chatting lightly, indifferent to their great
+burdens. They were barefooted and wore anklets which I wanted to buy,
+but Gaddis did not seem interested, and I could not transact a delicate
+business like that without careful interpretation.
+
+Our people saw us at last and came for us in a boat. Then there was a
+bustle of preparation; a loading into the markab which we had engaged to
+take us ashore; a good-bye to our pretty, unfortunate little _Memnon_; a
+drifting down to the donkey landing, and a sorry-looking procession to
+the railway.
+
+Our guides had difficulty settling with donkey-men, who, never having
+had tourists before, had engaged, no doubt, at their usual rates; then
+suddenly they had awakened to the idea that they were missing the chance
+of a fortune. The baksheesh we gave them must have opened their eyes.
+Probably they had never received so much at one time before. At all
+events, they came back for a new settlement, surrounded Gaddis and
+Abraham, and for a while we thought inferno had broken loose. Gaddis
+finally resorted to a stick, but Abraham, who is as big as a camel,
+first delivered an admonition, and then ran bodily upon the whole crowd
+and swept them like chaff from the platform.
+
+The wait at Fachen was not overlong, but it became a trifle tedious
+after the novelty of the place had passed. We telegraphed Cairo of our
+coming, and Abraham entertained us with a few marvels to while away the
+time. He said that the stone used in building the pyramids had been
+brought across the Nile; that such stone was light like pumice-stone
+when quarried; that it floated across, and that the water it soaked up
+solidified and turned it into hard, heavy stone on the other side. The
+Credulous One believed this statement. He said the _Memnon_ had grounded
+on a reef of crocodiles, at this season asleep, tucked up in the bed of
+the Nile. The Credulous One believed that, too. Several of the party
+did. He said that all telegrams in Egypt are sent in English, for the
+reason that the Arabic characters get tangled up in the wires. I
+believed that myself. He would have enlightened us further, only the
+train came just then.
+
+We had to change at Wasta, where it was night, and I shall never forget
+that fevered scene of Arab faces and flaring lamps, and heat, and
+thirst--the one hot night in Egypt--as we wandered about that Egyptian
+station waiting for the Cairo express. Suddenly we came upon another
+party of our ship-dwellers, whose boat, ahead of ours, had grounded too.
+Finding them there in that weird place was all like something in a
+fever. Then we were on the express at last, roaring away through the
+dust and dark and heat to Cairo--a flight out of Egypt so modern that
+one could imagine the gates of the dead centuries behind us rushing
+together with a bang.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+OTHER WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN
+
+
+The Reprobates were at Shepheard's when we returned, enjoying Egypt
+thoroughly. Shepheard's is a good place in which to enjoy Egypt. Some of
+the sights there are quite wonderful, and American refreshments are
+connected with an electric bell.
+
+The Reprobates had done Upper Egypt, however. They had done it in one
+day. They had left Cairo in the evening, telegraphing ahead for
+carriages to meet the train at Luxor, where they had arrived next
+morning. They had driven directly from the train to Karnak, from Karnak
+to the temple of Luxor, from Luxor to the hotel for luncheon. In the
+afternoon they had soared over to the Valley of the Kings; from the
+Kings they had dropped down on the House of Hatasu, the temples of
+Rameses and others; they had come coursing back by the Colossi of Memnon
+in time to catch the Cairo express, which landed them at Shepheard's
+about daybreak. The Reprobates had enjoyed Upper Egypt very much, though
+I could see they regretted the necessity of devoting all that time to it
+when Shepheard's still remained partially unexplored.
+
+I had hardly landed in my room when a call-boy from the office came up
+to say that a police-officer was below, asking for me. For a moment I
+wondered a little feverishly what particular thing it was he wanted me
+for. Then the boy said, "Pyramid police," which brought a gleam of
+light. "Oh, why--yes, of course--show him up!"
+
+And now, while we are waiting for him, I am going to record a
+circumstance which I suppose a good many readers--especially those
+familiar with the East--may find it difficult to believe. Nevertheless,
+it is authentic and provable.
+
+In Egypt, baksheesh is a national institution. Everybody takes it--every
+Egyptian, I mean; if I should begin by saying I had met an exception to
+this rule I could not expect any one who knows Cairo to read any
+further. This by-the-way.
+
+It was during our first stop in Cairo, and we had been there a day or
+two before we made our official visit to the Pyramids and Sphinx. We
+went in carriages then, attended by two guides. For some reason,
+however, our protectors left us to shift pretty much for ourselves when
+we got there, and it was a pretty poor shift. The fortune-tellers and
+scarab-sellers and donkey-men and would-be guides swarmed about us and
+overran us and would not be appeased. When we repulsed them temporarily
+they rallied and broke over us in waves, and swept us here and there,
+until we became mere human flotsam and jetsam on that tossing Egyptian
+tide.
+
+It was all like a curiously confused dream. Members of our party would
+suddenly turn up, and as suddenly disappear again: there would be
+moments of lull when we seemed about to collect, then, presto! without
+any apparent cause there would occur wild confusion and despair.
+
+It was no use. Laura and I wanted to go inside the Great Pyramid, and we
+did not want to climb it. It was impossible to do one, and it was about
+equally impossible not to do the other. Out of the confusion of things
+at last I remembered a young officer of the police, whom I had met
+riding home that first night on the trolley--a mere lad of nineteen or
+twenty, but a big fellow, who spoke excellent English and said he was
+Superintendent of the Pyramid Police. I decided now to see if this was
+true, and, if so, to ask his advice in our present difficulties.
+
+I remembered that the police station was near the trolley terminus, and
+we gradually fought our way back there. Yes, there he was, at his desk,
+a handsome Soldierly figure in a tall red fez. He rose and bowed,
+remembering us immediately.
+
+We would like to look about a little, I said, and to go inside the big
+Pyramid, but we preferred to be alive when we got through; also fairly
+decent as to appearance. Couldn't he pick us out a guard or two, who
+would keep the enemy in check, and see us through?
+
+He bowed with easy grace.
+
+"I will accompany you myself," he said.
+
+Now, I already knew the custom of Egypt, and I began to make a hasty
+estimate of my ready money, wondering if I had sufficient for a
+baksheesh of this rank. It was by no means certain. However, there would
+be ship-dwellers about: I could borrow, perhaps.
+
+I decided presently that whatever the duty imposed, it was worth it.
+With that big uniformed fellow at our side we were immune to all that
+hungry horde of Arab vultures. We walked through unscathed. Our
+protector procured the entrance tickets for us; he selected two strong
+men to push and pull us up the long, dark, glassy-slick passage that
+leads to the sepulchre of Khufu in the very heart of the Pyramid; he
+went with us himself into that still mysterious place, explaining in
+perfect English how five or six thousand years ago the sarcophagus of
+the great king was pushed up that incline; he showed us the mortises in
+the stone where uprights were set to hold the great granite coffin when
+the laborers stopped to rest. It was a weird experience in the cool,
+quiet darkness of that mightiest of tombs with the flaring candles and
+eager sure-footed Arabs; it seemed to belong in Rider Haggard's story of
+_She_. Then, after we had seen the old black sarcophagus, which is empty
+now, and had remained a little in that removed place, trying to imagine
+that we were really in the very centre of the big Pyramid, we made our
+way out again to light and the burning desert heat. I settled with our
+Arabs with little or no difficulty, which is worth something in itself,
+and when we had found a quiet place I thanked our guardian and tendered
+him what I thought a liberal honorarium--fairly liberal, even for
+America.
+
+He drew back a little.
+
+"Oh no," he said, "I beg your pardon."
+
+I had not made it large enough then. I glanced about for some of the
+party who would have funds.
+
+"I am sorry," I began, "it is not more. I will--"
+
+"I beg your pardon," he repeated, "but I could not accept anything for
+what is but my duty. I am only very glad to do what I may for you. I
+will do something more, if you wish."
+
+Then, of course, I knew it _must_ be a dream, and that I would wake up
+presently in Shepheard's Hotel to find that we hadn't started for the
+Pyramids yet. Still, I would keep up the blessed trance a moment longer.
+
+"You mean that you will not allow me to acknowledge your great favor to
+us?" I said in that polite manner for which our ship is justly famous.
+
+"Not in money," he said. "The Government pays me a salary for my work
+and this is only part of my work. It has also given me pleasure."
+
+I surreptitiously pinched myself in certain tender places to see if I
+couldn't wake up. It was no use. He persisted in his refusal, and
+presently produced an ancient corroded coin, Greek or Roman, such as is
+sometimes found among the d�bris.
+
+"I should like to offer you this," he said. "I found it myself, so I am
+sure it is genuine."
+
+Ah, this was the delicate opportunity.
+
+"You will let me buy it, of course."
+
+But no, he declined that, too. He wished us only to remember him, he
+insisted. He added:
+
+"I have two scarabs at home; I should like to bring them to your hotel."
+
+It was rather dazing. The seller of scarabs--genuine or imitation--will
+not let a prospective purchaser get out of sight. I wondered why we
+should be trusted in this unheard-of way; I also wondered what those two
+scarabs were likely to be worth. Could he come to-night? I asked; we
+should be sight-seeing to-morrow and leaving for Upper Egypt in the
+afternoon.
+
+But no, he would not be home in time. He would wait until we returned
+from Upper Egypt.
+
+So it was we had parted, and in the tumult of sight-seeing up the Nile I
+had forgotten the matter altogether. Now, here he was. I counted up my
+spare currency, and waited.
+
+He had on his best smile as he entered, also a brand-new uniform, and he
+certainly made a handsome figure. He inquired as to our sight-seeing up
+the Nile, then rather timidly he produced two of those little Egyptian
+gems--a scarab and an amulet, such as men and women of old Egypt wore,
+and took with them to their tombs.
+
+"I got them from a man who took them from a mummy. They are genuine. I
+want to give them to you and the little lady," he said.
+
+"But you must not _give_ them to us--they are too valuable," I began.
+
+He flushed and straightened up a little.
+
+"But that is why I wish you to have them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, of course, no one who knows Cairo can ever believe that story. Yet
+it all truly happened, precisely as I have set it down. He was just a
+young Egyptian who had attended school in Alexandria, and he spoke and
+wrote English, French, Italian, and the dialects of Arabic. The Egyptian
+acquires the lore of languages naturally, it would seem, but that this
+youth should acquire all those things, and such a standard of honor and
+generosity, here in a land where baksheesh is the native god, did seem
+amazing. When we left, he wrote down our address in the neatest possible
+hand, requesting permission to send us something more.
+
+     NOTE.--As my reputation for truth is already gone I may as
+     well add, a year later, that he has since sent two
+     presents--some little funerary figures, and a beautiful
+     ivory-handled fly-whip.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+SAKKARA AND THE SACRED BULLS
+
+
+One begins and finishes Egypt with Cairo. Starting with the Sphinx and
+Pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty, you work down through the Theban periods
+of the Upper Nile and then once more at Cairo, leap far back into the
+First period in a trip to Memphis, the earliest capital of Egypt, the
+beginning of all Egyptian things. After which, follows the Museum, for
+only after visiting localities and landmarks can that great climax be
+properly approached.
+
+I think we were no longer very enthusiastic about ruins, but every one
+said we must go to Sakkara. There was yet another very wonderful statue
+of Rameses there, they said, also the oldest pyramids ever built, and
+the Mausoleum of the Sacred Bulls. It would never do to miss them.
+
+I am glad now that I did not miss them, but I remember the Memphis
+donkeys with unkindness. The farther down the Nile the worse the
+donkeys. We thought they had been bad at Abydos, but the Abydos donkeys
+were without sin compared with those of Sakkara. Mine was named
+"Sunrise," and I picked him for his beauty, always a dangerous asset. He
+was thoroughly depraved and had a gait like a steam-drill. The boat
+landed us at Bedrashen and I managed to survive as far as the colossal
+statue of Rameses, a prostrate marvel, and the site of the ancient city
+of Menes--capital of Egypt a good deal more than six thousand years
+ago--that is, before the world began, by gospel calculation. I was
+perfectly willing to stay there among the cooling palms and watch the
+little children gather camel-dung and pat it into cakes to dry for fuel,
+and I would have done it if I had known what was going to happen to me.
+
+It is a weary way across the desert to the pyramids and the tombs of
+those sacred bulls, but I was not informed of that. When I realized, it
+was too late. The rest of the party were far ahead of me beyond some
+hills, and I was alone in the desert with that long-eared disaster and a
+donkey-boy who stopped to talk with the children, beset by a plague of
+flies that would have brought Pharaoh to terms. It was useless to kick
+and hammer that donkey or to denounce the donkey-boy. Sunrise had long
+ago formulated his notions of speed, and the donkey-boy was simply a
+criminal in disguise. When we passed a mud village, at last, and a new
+brigade of flies joined those I had with me, I would have given any
+reasonable sum to have been at Cairo with the Reprobates, in the cool
+quiet of Shepheard's marble halls.
+
+Beyond the village was just the sand waste, and not a soul of the party
+in sight. I didn't have the courage to go back, and hardly the courage
+to go on. I said I would lie down by the trail and die, and let them
+find me there and be sorry they had forsaken me in that pitiless way.
+Then for the sake of speed I got off and walked. It was heavy walking
+through the loose sand, with the sun blazing down.
+
+Presently I looked around for my escort. He was close at my heels--on
+the donkey's back. I said the most crushing things I could think of and
+displaced him. Then we settled down into the speed of a ram-headed
+sphinx again. Everything seemed utterly hopeless. It was useless to
+swear; I was too old to cry.
+
+I don't know when we reached the first pyramid, but the party had been
+there and gone. I did not care for it much. It might be the oldest
+pyramid in the world, but it was rather a poor specimen, I thought, and
+could not make me forget my sorrow. I went on, and after a weary time
+came to the Tomb of Thi, who lived in the Fifth Dynasty and was in no
+way related to Queen Thi of Tell al-Amarna, who came along some two
+thousand years later. There was an Englishman and his guide there who
+told me about it, and it was worth seeing, certainly, with its relief
+frescoes over five thousand years old, though it is not such a tomb as
+those of the Upper Nile.
+
+I overtook the party at the Tomb of the Sacred Bulls. By that time I had
+little enthusiasm for bulls; or for tombs, unless it was one I could use
+for Sunrise. The party had done the bulls, but when I got hold of Gaddis
+and laid my case before him, he said he would find me a new donkey and
+that the others would wait while we inspected the bulls. So everything
+was better then, and I was glad of the bulls, though I was still warm
+and resentful at Sunrise and his keeper, and even at Gaddis, who was
+innocent enough, Heaven knows.
+
+In the tomb of the bulls everything unpleasant passed away. It was cool
+and dark in there, and we carried lights and wandered along those vast
+still corridors, which are simply astounding when one remembers their
+purpose.
+
+This Serapeum or Apis mausoleum is a vast succession of huge underground
+vaults and elaborate granite sarcophagi, which once contained all the
+Apis or Sacred Bulls of Memphis. The Apis was the product of an
+immaculate conception. Lightning descended from heaven upon a cow--any
+cow--and the Apis was the result. He was recognized by being black, with
+a triangular spot of white on his forehead and a figure of an eagle on
+his back. Furthermore, he had double hairs in his tail and a beetle on
+his tongue. It was recognized that only lightning could produce a bull
+like that, and no others were genuine, regardless of watchful
+circumstance.
+
+Apis was about the most sacred of the whole synod of Egyptian beasts.
+Even the Hawk of Horus and the Jackal of Anubis had to retire to
+obscurity when Apis came along, mumbling and pawing up the dust. When he
+died there were very solemn ceremonies, and he was put into one of those
+polished granite sarcophagi, with a tablet on the walls relating the
+story of his life, and mentioning the King whose reign had been honored
+by this bellowing bovine aristocrat. Also they set up a special chapel
+over his tomb, and this series of chapels and tombs eventually
+solidified into a great temple with pylons approached by an avenue of
+sphinxes.
+
+The Serapeum dates from about 1500 B.C. and continued in active use down
+to the time of the Ptolomies. The Egyptian Pantheon was breaking up
+then, and Apis was probably one of the first deities to go. A nation's
+gods fall into disrepute when they can no longer bring victory to a
+nation's arms, and a sacred bull who could not beat off Julius C�sar
+would very likely be asked to resign.
+
+There are sixty-four vaults in the part of the Serapeum we visited, and
+twenty-four of them contain the granite sarcophagi. The sarcophagi are
+about thirteen feet long by eleven feet wide, and eight high--that is to
+say, the size of an ordinary bedroom--and in each of these, mummified
+and in state, an Apis slept.
+
+He is not there now. Only two of him were found when these galleries
+were opened in modern times. But I have seen Apis, for one of him sleeps
+now in a glass case in the Historical Library in New York City. I shall
+visit him again on my return, and view him with deeper interest and more
+respect since I have seen his tomb.
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+A VISIT WITH RAMESES II.
+
+
+I have never quite known just how it was I happened to be overlooked and
+deserted that next evening at the Museum. I remember walking miles
+through its wonderful galleries; I recollect standing before the rare
+group of Rameses and his queen--recently discovered and put in
+place--the most beautiful sculpture in Egypt; I recall that we visited
+the room of Mr. Theodore Davis and looked on all the curiously modern
+chairs and couches and the perfectly preserved chariot taken from the
+tombs opened in the Valley of the Kings; also the room where all the
+royal jewels are kept, marvellous necklaces and amulets, and every
+ornament that would delight a king or queen in any age; I have a
+confused impression of hundreds of bronze and thousands of clay figures
+taken from tombs; I know that, as a grand climax, we came at last to the
+gem of the vast collection, the room where Seti I., Rameses the Great,
+and the rest of the royal dead, found at Der al-Bahari, lie asleep. I
+remember, too, that I was tired then, monumentally tired in the thought
+that this was the last word in Egypt; that we were done; that there was
+no need of keeping up and alive for further endeavor--that only before
+us lay the sweet anticipation of rest.
+
+The others were tired, too, but they wanted to buy some things in the
+little salesroom down-stairs, and were going, presently. They would come
+back and see the kings again, later. I said I would stay there and
+commune a little alone with the great Seti, and his royal son, who, in
+that dim long ago, had remembered himself so numerously along the Nile.
+They meant to come back, no doubt, the party, I mean; they claim now
+that the main museum was already closed when they had finished their
+purchases, and they supposed I had gone. It does not matter, I have
+forgiven them, whatever their sin.
+
+It was pleasant and restful there, when they had left me. I dropped down
+on a little seat against the wall and looked at those still figures,
+father and son, kings, mighty warriors and temple-builders when the
+glory of Egypt was at full flood.
+
+It was an impressive thought that those stately temples up the Nile,
+which men travel across the world to see, were built by these two; that
+the statues are their statues; that the battles and sacrifices depicted
+on a thousand walls were _their_ battles and _their_ sacrifices; that
+they loved and fought and conquered, and set up monuments in those
+far-off centuries when history was in its sunrise, yet lie here before
+us in person to-day, frail drift on the long tide of years.
+
+And it was a solemn thought that their life story is forever done--that
+any life story can last but a little while. Tossed up out of the
+unexplored, one's feet some day touch the earth--the ancient earth that
+had been going on so long before we came. Then, for a few years, we
+bustle importantly up and down--fight battles and build temples,
+maybe--and all at once slip back into the uncharted waste, while the
+world--the ancient world--fights new battles, builds new temples, sends
+new ships across the sea, though we have part in it no more, no
+more--forever, and forever.
+
+Looking at those two, who in their brief sojourn had made and recorded
+some of the most ancient history we know, I recalled portions of their
+pictured story on the temple walls and tried to build a human semblance
+of their daily lives. Of course they were never troubled with petty
+things, I thought; economies, frivolities, small vanities, domestic
+irritations--these were modern. _They_ had been as gods in the full
+panoply of a race divinely new. They had been--
+
+But it was too much of an effort. I was too worn. I could only look at
+them, and envy the long nap they were having there under the glass in
+that still, pleasant room.
+
+I was a good deal surprised, then, when I fancied I saw Rameses stir and
+appear a little restless in his sleep. It was even more interesting to
+see him presently slide away the glass and sit up. I thought there must
+be some mistake, and I was going to get an attendant, when he noticed me
+and seemed to guess my thought.
+
+"It's all right," he said, "you needn't call any one. The place closed
+an hour ago and there is only a guard down-stairs, who is asleep by this
+time. It happens to be my night to reincarnate and I am glad you are
+here to keep me company. You can tell me a good deal, no doubt. These
+people here don't know anything." He waved a hand to the sleepers about
+him. "They are allowed only one night in a thousand years. The gods
+allow me a night in every century. I was always a favorite of the gods.
+It is fortunate you happened to stop with us to-night."
+
+"It _is_ fortunate," I said. "I shall be envied by my race. I have just
+been trying to imagine something of your life and period. That is far
+more interesting than to-day. Tell me something about it."
+
+Rameses rested comfortably on the side of his case.
+
+"Oh, well," he said, reflectively, "of course mine was a great period--a
+very great period. Egypt was never so great as it was under my rule. It
+was my rule that made it great--my policy, of course, and my vigorous
+action. I was always for progress and war. The histories you have of my
+period are poor things. They never did me justice, but it was my own
+fault, of course. I did not leave enough records of my work. I was
+always a modest man--too modest for my own good, everybody said that.
+
+"I was religious, too, and built temples wherever there was room. It is
+said that I claimed temples that I did not build. Nonsense!--I built all
+the temples. I built Karnak; I built Luxor; I built Abou-Simbel; I built
+Abydos; I built the Pyramids; I built the Sphinx; I invented the sacred
+bulls; I was all there was to religion, in Egypt. I was all there was to
+_Egypt_. I was the whole thing. It is a pity I did not make a record of
+these things somewhere."
+
+"There _are_ a few statues of you," I suggested, "and inscriptions--they
+seem to imply--"
+
+"Ah yes," he said, "but not many. It was slow work carving those things.
+I could have had many more, if the workmen had been more industrious.
+But everything was slow, and very costly--very costly indeed--why, I
+spent a fortune on that temple of Karnak alone. You saw what I did
+there; those ram-headed sphinxes nearly bankrupted me. I had to cut down
+household expenses to finish them.
+
+"Yes, my wife objected a good deal-- I speak collectively, of course,
+signifying my domestic companionship--there were fourteen of her.
+
+[Illustration: GOT IT MADE CHEAP SOMEWHERE WITH HER PICTURE CARVED ON
+THE FRONT OF IT]
+
+"She wanted jewelry--collectively--individually, too, for that
+matter--and it took such a lot to go around. You saw all those things in
+the next room. They were for her; they were for that matrimonial
+collection; I could never satisfy the female craving for such things.
+Why, I bought one round of necklaces that cost as much as a ram-headed
+sphinx. Still she was not satisfied. Then she was sorry
+afterward--collectively--and bought me a sphinx as a present--got it
+made cheap somewhere with her picture carved on the front of it. You may
+have noticed it--third on the right as you come out. I used it--I had
+to--but it was a joke. When wives buy things for their husbands it is
+quite often so.
+
+"Oh yes, I was a great king, of course, and the greatest warrior the
+world has ever seen; but my path was not all roses. My wife--my
+household collection--wanted their statues placed by the side of mine.
+Individually! Think of what a figure I would have cut! It was a silly
+notion. What had they done to deserve statues? I did it, though--that
+is collectively--here and there. I embodied her in a single figure at my
+knee, as became her position. But she wasn't satisfied--collectively and
+individually she declared she amounted to as much as I did, and pointed
+at our seventy-two sons.
+
+"No, I was never understood by that lot. I was never a hero in my own
+house. So I had to order another statue, putting her at my side. You saw
+it down-stairs. It is very beautiful, of course, and is a good likeness
+of her, collectively. She always made a good composite picture, but is
+it fair to me? She was never regarded in that important way, except by
+herself.
+
+"Yes, it is very pleasant here--very indeed. The last time I was allowed
+to reincarnate, I was still in the cave at Der al-Bahari, where they
+stored us when Cambyses came along and raided Thebes. Cambyses burned a
+number of my temples. It was too bad. The cave was a poor place, but
+safe. My tomb was much pleasanter, though it was not as grand as I had
+intended it to be. I meant to have the finest tomb in the valley, but my
+contractor cheated me.
+
+"The men who furnished the materials paid him large sums and gave me
+very poor returns. His name was Baksheesh, which is how the word
+originated, though it means several things now, I believe."
+
+"How interesting!" I interrupted. "We would call that grafting in our
+country."
+
+"Very likely; I didn't find out that he was grafting, as you say, until
+quite late, then I put him into a block of concrete and built him into a
+temple. He made a very good block; he is there yet. After that there
+was no trouble for a while."
+
+"I saw something of the kind at Algiers--one Geronimo," I began--
+
+"Later, three thousand years later. I originated the idea--it has been
+often adopted since. Those people along the Coast adopted a good many of
+my ideas, but they never get the value out of them. It put an end to
+baksheesh--graft as you call it--in Thebes, and it would be valuable
+to-day in Cairo, I should think. A wall around Cairo could be built in
+that way--there is enough material."
+
+The King rested a little on his other arm, then continued:
+
+"Speaking of my tomb. I am glad I am not there. I attract much more
+attention here than if I were on exhibition in that remote place.
+There's Amenophis II. I understand that he's very proud of the fact that
+he's the only king left in his tomb. I don't envy him at all. I have a
+hundred visitors where he has one. They are passing by me here in a
+string all day, and when they are your countrymen I can hear a good deal
+even through the thick glass. I find it more interesting to stay here in
+my case through the day, than to be stalking about the underworld,
+attending sacrifices to Anubis and those other gods. I was always fond
+of activity and progress."
+
+"You keep up with your doings, then?"
+
+"Well, not altogether. You see, I cannot go about in the upper world. I
+catch only a word of things from the tourists. I hear they have a new
+kind of boat on the Nile."
+
+"Yes, indeed," I said. "A boat that is run by steam--a mixture of fire
+and water--and is lit by electricity--a form of lightning."
+
+I thought he would be excited over these things, and full of questions;
+but he only reflected a little and asked,
+
+"What is the name of that boat?"
+
+"Oh, there are many of them. The one I came down on was called the
+_Memnon_."
+
+He sighed.
+
+"There it is," he said, sadly. "I am discredited, you see. I suppose
+they couldn't name it 'Rameses the Great.'"
+
+"Ah, but there is one of that name, too."
+
+He brightened a little, but grew sad again.
+
+"Only one?" he said.
+
+"Do you think there should be more of that name?" I asked.
+
+He sat up quite straight.
+
+"In my time they would all have borne that great name," he said.
+
+"And--ah, wouldn't that be a bit confusing?"
+
+"Not at all. I have set up as many as a hundred statues in one
+temple--_all_ of Rameses the Great. They were not at all confusing. You
+knew _all_ of them immediately."
+
+"True enough; and now I think of it, perhaps you have not heard that
+they have made your portrait as you lie here, and, by a magic process of
+ours, have placed it on a sort of papyrus tablet--a postal card we call
+it--and by another process have sent thousands of them over the world."
+
+He looked at me with eyes that penetrated my conscience.
+
+"Is that statement true?" he asked, tremulously.
+
+"It is--every word. Your portrait is as familiar to the world to-day as
+it was here in Egypt three thousand years ago."
+
+The great peace that had rested on the king's face came back to it. The
+piercing eyes closed restfully, and he slipped back on his pillow.
+
+"Then, after all, I am vindicated," he murmured. "I have not lived and
+died in vain."
+
+A hand was resting on my shoulder. The sun was shining in, and a
+threatening guard was standing over me.
+
+It was nothing. Five francs allayed his indignation. Five francs is a
+large baksheesh in Cairo, but I did not begrudge it, as matters stood.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+THE LONG WAY HOME
+
+
+We bade good-bye to Egypt that morning, and to Gaddis--whose name and
+memory will always mean Egypt to me--and were off for Alexandria, where
+the ship was waiting. That long-ago dream of a visit to Damascus and
+Jerusalem, and of a camp on the Nile had been realized. Now it was over.
+
+We were ready to go home--at least some of us were. There would be a
+stop at Naples, with Pompeii and Rome for those who cared for it, but
+even these great places would be tame after Egypt. They must be
+approached from another direction for that eager interest which properly
+belongs to an expedition of this kind. A number of our ship-dwellers had
+an eager interest--a large and growing interest--but it was for home, an
+interest that was multiplied each day by the square of the distance
+travelled.
+
+[Illustration: SET OUT ON THE LONG, STEADY, ATLANTIC SWING]
+
+Not many of us were left when we had made our last touch on the Riviera,
+rounded the Rock, and set out on the long, steady, Atlantic swing. The
+Reprobates had gone _vi�_ Monte Carlo to Paris. Others had drifted up
+through Europe to sail from Cherbourg. The Diplomat was still with us;
+also Fosdick of Ohio, and Laura, age fourteen, but only a score or two
+of the original muster could gather at the long table in the dining-room
+on the last night out of port, for a final look at one another, and to
+exchange the greetings and god-speeds for which there would be little
+time during the bustle of arrival. It was hardly an occasion; just a
+pleasant little meeting that even with jollification was not without
+sadness. One of the ship's poets offered some verses of good-bye, of
+which I recall these lines:
+
+  "To-night, we are here who have stayed by the ship;
+  To-morrow, the harbor and anchor and slip--
+  The word of command for the gang-plank to fall--
+  The word that shall suddenly scatter us all--
+  Then all the King's horses and all the King's men
+  Could never collect us together again."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That was a good while ago, nearly a year now, and already it seems as
+far back in the past as the days of Rameses; for, as I have said
+somewhere before, we have but a meagre conception of time. Indeed, I
+suspect there is no such thing as time. How can there be when one period
+is as long as another compared with eternity?
+
+However, I do not compare with eternity, now. I compare with Egypt. I
+shall _always_ compare with Egypt--everything else in the world. Other
+interests and other memories may fade and change, but Egypt, the real
+Egypt, the enchantment of that land, which is not a land, but a vast
+processional epic, will never change, and it will not grow dim. I may
+never visit it again, but I shall see it many times. I shall see the
+sunrise above the palms, flooding the mountains with amethyst and
+turning the sky to crimson gold. Again at sunset I shall sit in the vast
+temple of Luxor and hear once more the Muezzin's call to prayer. I shall
+race with Laura across the hot desert; I shall hear the cry of the
+donkey-boys and the scarab-sellers and the wail for baksheesh; I shall
+see our cavalcade scattering through the dust across the Libyan sands.
+And I shall wander once more among the tombs of the kings, and follow
+down the splendid passage where Amenophis lies with the repose of the
+ages on his benignant face. I shall recall other lands and other ages,
+too, but it is to Egypt that I shall turn after all the others have
+drifted by; to her temples and her tombs--her glories of the past made
+visible. Beyond the sands and the centuries they lie, but they are mine
+now, and neither thief nor beggar, nor importunate creditor, can ever
+take them away.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHIP DWELLERS***
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Ship Dwellers, by Albert Bigelow Paine,
+Illustrated by Thomas Fogarty</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Ship Dwellers</p>
+<p>       A Story of a Happy Cruise</p>
+<p>Author: Albert Bigelow Paine</p>
+<p>Release Date: October 18, 2010  [eBook #34096]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHIP DWELLERS***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>E-text prepared by Annie McGuire<br />
+    from page images generously made available by<br />
+    Internet Archive<br />
+    (<a href="http://www.archive.org/">http://www.archive.org</a>)</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;margin: 0 auto;" cellpadding="10">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/shipdwellersstor00painrich">
+      http://www.archive.org/details/shipdwellersstor00painrich</a>
+	</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="ILL_001" id="ILL_001"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_001.jpg" width="600" height="384" alt="WE CHANGED OUR MINDS ABOUT BEING WILLING TO SAIL
+PAST&mdash;See page 31." title="" />
+<span class="caption">WE CHANGED OUR MINDS ABOUT BEING WILLING TO SAIL
+PAST&mdash;See page 31.</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>THE SHIP-DWELLERS</h1>
+
+<h3>A STORY OF A HAPPY CRUISE</h3>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE</h2>
+
+<p class="center">AUTHOR OF</p>
+
+<p class="center">"FROM VAN-DWELLER TO COMMUTER"</p>
+
+<p class="center">"THE TENT-DWELLERS" ETC.</p>
+
+<h3>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM</h3>
+
+<h3>DRAWINGS BY THOMAS FOGARTY</h3>
+
+<h3>AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 78px;">
+<img src="images/ill_002.jpg" width="78" height="100" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS</h4>
+
+<h4>NEW YORK AND LONDON</h4>
+
+<h4>MCMX</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><span class="smcap">Books by</span></h2>
+
+<h2>ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Ship-Dwellers</span>. Illustrated. 8vo <i>net</i></td><td align='right'>$1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Tent-Dwellers</span>. Illustrated. Post 8vo</td><td align='right'>1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">The Hollow Tree and Deep Woods Book</span>. Illustrated. Post 8vo</td><td align='right'>1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">From Van-Dweller to Commuter</span>. Ill'd. Post 8vo</td><td align='right'>1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Life of Thomas Nast</span>. Ill'd. 8vo <i>net</i></td><td align='right'>5.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h4>HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, N.&nbsp;Y.</h4>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p class="center">Copyright, 1910, by <small>Harper &amp; Brothers</small></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4>TO</h4>
+
+<h4>MARK TWAIN</h4>
+
+<h4>HERO OF MY CHILDHOOD</h4>
+
+<h4>INSPIRATION OF MY YOUTH</h4>
+
+<h4>FRIEND OF THESE LATER YEARS</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='right'>I</td><td align='left'><a href="#I"><b><span class="smcap">The Book, and the Dream</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>II</td><td align='left'><a href="#II"><b><span class="smcap">In the Track of the Innocents</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>III</td><td align='left'><a href="#III"><b><span class="smcap">Days at Sea</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IV</td><td align='left'><a href="#IV"><b><span class="smcap">We Become History</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>V</td><td align='left'><a href="#V"><b><span class="smcap">Introducing the Reprobates</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VI</td><td align='left'><a href="#VI"><b><span class="smcap">A Land of Heart's Desire</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VII</td><td align='left'><a href="#VII"><b><span class="smcap">A Day to Ourselves</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VIII</td><td align='left'><a href="#VIII"><b><span class="smcap">Out of the Sunrise</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IX</td><td align='left'><a href="#IX"><b><span class="smcap">Early Mediterranean Experiences</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>X</td><td align='left'><a href="#X"><b><span class="smcap">The Diverting Story of Algiers</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XI</td><td align='left'><a href="#XI"><b><span class="smcap">We Enter the Orient</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XII"><b><span class="smcap">We Touch at Genoa</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XIII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XIII"><b><span class="smcap">Malta, a Land of Yesterday</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XIV</td><td align='left'><a href="#XIV"><b><span class="smcap">A Sunday at Sea</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XV</td><td align='left'><a href="#XV"><b><span class="smcap">A Port of Missing Dreams</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XVI</td><td align='left'><a href="#XVI"><b><span class="smcap">Athens that Is</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XVII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XVII"><b><span class="smcap">Into the Dardanelles</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XVIII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XVIII"><b><span class="smcap">A City of Illusion</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XIX</td><td align='left'><a href="#XIX"><b><span class="smcap">The Turk and Some of His Phases</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XX</td><td align='left'><a href="#XX"><b><span class="smcap">Abdul Hamid Goes to Prayer</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXI</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXI"><b><span class="smcap">Looking Down on Yildiz</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXII"><b><span class="smcap">Ephesus: the City that Was</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXIII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXIII"><b><span class="smcap">Into Syria</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXIV</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXIV"><b><span class="smcap">The House that Cain Built</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXV</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXV"><b><span class="smcap">Going Down to Damascus</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXVI</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXVI"><b><span class="smcap">The "Pearl of the East"</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXVII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXVII"><b><span class="smcap">Footprints of Paul</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXVIII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXVIII"><b><span class="smcap">Discontented Pilgrims</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXIX</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXIX"><b><span class="smcap">Damascus, the Garden Beautiful</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXX</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXX"><b><span class="smcap">Where Pilgrims Gather In</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXI</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXI"><b><span class="smcap">The Holy City</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXII"><b><span class="smcap">The Holy Sepulchre</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXIII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXIII"><b><span class="smcap">Two Holy Mountains</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXIV</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXIV"><b><span class="smcap">The Little Town of the Manger</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXV</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXV"><b><span class="smcap">The Sorrow of the Chosen&mdash;The Way of the Cross</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXVI</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXVI"><b><span class="smcap">At the Mouth of the Nile</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXVII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXVII"><b><span class="smcap">The Smile of the Sphinx</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXVIII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXVIII"><b><span class="smcap">Ways that Are Egyptian</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XXXIX</td><td align='left'><a href="#XXXIX"><b><span class="smcap">Where History Began</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XL</td><td align='left'><a href="#XL"><b><span class="smcap">Karnak and Luxor</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XLI</td><td align='left'><a href="#XLI"><b><span class="smcap">The Still Valley of the Kings</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XLII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XLII"><b><span class="smcap">The Highway of Egypt</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XLIII</td><td align='left'><a href="#XLIII"><b><span class="smcap">Other Ways that Are Egyptian</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XLIV</td><td align='left'><a href="#XLIV"><b><span class="smcap">Sakkara and the Sacred Bulls</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XLV</td><td align='left'><a href="#XLV"><b><span class="smcap">A Visit with Rameses II</span></b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XLVI</td><td align='left'><a href="#XLVI"><b><span class="smcap">The Long Way Home</span></b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_001"><b>WE CHANGED OUR MINDS ABOUT BEING WILLING TO SAIL PAST</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_004"><b>TO ME IT WAS ALL TRUE, ALL ROMANCE&mdash;ALL POETRY</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_006"><b>SOMEBODY SENT ME A BASKET OF FRUIT</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_007"><b>THEY ARE AN ATTRACTIVE LOT&mdash;THE REPROBATES</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_008"><b>GAVE HIM THE "ICY MITT"</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_010"><b>THEY COULD DIVE LIKE SEALS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_011"><b>TWO MEN TAKE YOU IN HAND, AND AWAY YOU GO</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_012"><b>DID A SORT OF FANDAROLE</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_013"><b>THEN IT DAWNED UPON THE DIPLOMAT</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_014"><b>BUT NOW GIBRALTAR, THE CROUCHING LION OF TRAFALGAR, HAD RISEN FROM THE SEA</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_015"><b>WE COULD HAVE LISTENED ALL NIGHT TO BE&Ntilde;UNES</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_016"><b>"THAT IS THE KASBA"</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_017"><b>ONE DOES NOT HURRY THE ORIENT&mdash;ONE WAITS ON IT</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_018"><b>MARVELLOUS BASKETS AND QUEER THINGS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_019"><b>WE DID NOT CARE MUCH FOR PARKS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_020"><b>ETERNALLY EAST WITH NO HINT OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_022"><b>TWO BENT, WRINKLED WOMEN WEAVING LACE OUTSIDE THE DOOR</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_023"><b>WE LOOKED ACROSS THE ENTRANCE AND THERE ROSE THE ACROPOLIS, HIGH AGAINST THE BLUE</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_024"><b>HE WOULD SWING HIS ARMS AND BEGIN, "YOU SEE&mdash;!" THE REST REQUIRED A MIND-READER</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_025"><b>I WOULD HAVE APPLIED FOR THE POSITION IN THE CHORUS MYSELF</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_026"><b>TOOK TURNS ADDRESSING THE MULTITUDE</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_027"><b>ONE'S AGE, STATED ON OATH, GOES WITH A PASSPORT</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_028"><b>KEYEFF</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_029"><b>I WANTED TO CARRY AWAY ONE OF THOSE TOMBSTONES</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_030"><b>ALL THE PLAINS AND SLOPES OF THE OLD CITY, WITH ITS WHITE FRAGMENTS AND POOR RUINED HARBOR, LAY AT OUR FEET</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_031"><b>FROM THE TIME OF ADAM, BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_032"><b>SO THE PATRIARCHS JOURNEYED; SO, TWO THOUSAND YEARS LATER, JOSEPH AND MARY TRAVELLED INTO EGYPT</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_033"><b>URGING US TO PARTAKE OF THE PRECIOUS STUFF, WITHOUT STINT</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_034"><b>ASKED HIM IF HE WOULDN'T EXECUTE A LITTLE COMMISSION FOR ME IN THE BAZAARS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_035"><b>THE PATRIARCH KNEW ALL ABOUT JAFFA</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_036"><b>JERUSALEM&mdash;ITS BUBBLE-ROOFED HOUSES AND DOMES, ITS CYPRESS AND OLIVE TREES</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_037"><b>A CAMEL TRAIN LED THE WAY THROUGH THE GATES</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_038"><b>THE DEPTH OF THEIR FALL</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_039"><b>THE WAY OF THE CROSS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_040"><b>THE TRUE GOLGOTHA&mdash;THE PLACE OF THE SKULL</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_041"><b>A VAST INDIFFERENCE TO ALL PUNY THINGS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_042"><b>SANCTUARY IN KARNAK</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_043"><b>GADDIS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_044"><b>I MADE A PICTURE OF THE FLY-BRUSH BRIGADE</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_045"><b>ITS MAGNIFICENT PYLONS OR ENTRANCE WALLS ... AND THEN ONCE MORE WE WERE ON THE DONKEYS</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_046"><b>THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR ... ONCE MORE REFLECTING ITS COLUMNS IN THE NILE</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_047"><b>THINK OF WATERING A WHOLE WHEAT-FIELD WITH A WELL-SWEEP AND A PAIL</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_048"><b>GOT IT MADE CHEAP SOMEWHERE, WITH HER PICTURE CARVED ON THE FRONT OF IT</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#ILL_049"><b>SET OUT ON THE LONG, STEADY, ATLANTIC SWING</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE SHIP-DWELLERS</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The grand object of all travel is to see the shores of the
+Mediterranean."</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 34em;">&mdash;<span class="smcap">Dr. Samuel Johnson</span>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/ill_003.jpg" width="500" height="260" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BOOK, AND THE DREAM</h3>
+
+<p>It was a long time ago&mdash;far back in another century&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>I was at an age to claim things. I said the book was <i>my</i> 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.)</p>
+
+<p>My father was kindly disposed, but conservative; that was his habit. He
+said that I might look at the book&mdash;that I might even read it, some day,
+when I was old enough, and I think he added that privately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> I might call
+it mine&mdash;a privilege which provided as well for any claim I might have
+on the moon.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>New Pilgrim's Progress</i>. We had respect in our
+house for the old <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>, 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 <i>Quaker City</i> and gazing at Bible pictures in the sky.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_004" id="ILL_004"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_004.jpg" width="500" height="335" alt="TO ME IT WAS ALL TRUE, ALL ROMANCE&mdash;ALL POETRY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">TO ME IT WAS ALL TRUE, ALL ROMANCE&mdash;ALL POETRY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I did not laugh&mdash;not then. In the first place, I would not, in those
+days, laugh at any <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i>, 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&mdash;all
+poetry&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> poetry of
+the pilgrimage did not grow dim. The argonauts of the <i>Quaker City</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;only,
+this time, perhaps, I could make the dream come true.</p>
+
+<p>I began to read advertisements. I found that a good many ship-loads of
+"Pilgrims" had followed that first little band to the Orient&mdash;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
+<i>Quaker City</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> 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&mdash;it was nerve-racking to decide. But on one of these
+occasions I overheard the casual remark that the S.&nbsp;S. <i>Grosser
+Kurf&uuml;rst</i> would set out on her cruise to the Orient with two tons of
+dressed chicken and four thousand bottles of champagne.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My remembrance of the next few days is hazy&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>There had been rain, but it was bright enough that February morning of
+departure&mdash;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&mdash;they were mostly visitors, as I discovered later. It
+would average three visitors to one passenger, I should think. I had
+more than that&mdash;twice as many. I am not boasting&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> me on this big
+ship, among strangers, bound for the strange lands. My long dream of the
+Orient dwindled to a decrepit thing.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;somebody you would enjoy having along.
+They blow that thing until it shivers the very marrow of one's soul.</p>
+
+<p>How the visitors do crowd ashore! A word&mdash;a last kiss&mdash;a "God bless
+you"&mdash;your own are gone presently&mdash;you are left merely standing there,
+abandoned, marooned, deserted&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>A familiar figure fights its way up the gang-plank, breasting the
+shoreward tide. Your pulse jumps&mdash;they are going to take you home, after
+all. But no, he only comes to tell you that <i>your</i> six will be at a
+certain place near the end of the dock, where you can see them, and wave
+to them.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> is dragged away. That whistle again, and then a band&mdash;our
+band&mdash;turns loose a perfect storm of music.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;there is no turning back now,
+no changing of one's mind again. All the cares of work, the claims of
+home&mdash;they cannot reach us any more. Those waiting at the pier's end to
+wave as we pass&mdash;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&mdash;need another
+handkerchief!</p>
+
+<p>The smoke of a tug drifts between&mdash; I have lost them. No, there they are
+again, still waving. That white spot&mdash;that is a little furry coat&mdash;such
+a little furry coat and getting so far off, and so blurry. My glass&mdash;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&mdash; I don't know where to look any more. It is all over&mdash;we are
+off&mdash;we are going out to sea!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/ill_005.jpg" width="500" height="198" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>IN THE TRACK OF THE INNOCENTS</h3>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a good deal too much&mdash;and that my
+selections were not the best&mdash;not for the beginning of a strange, new
+life at sea.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was Laura&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> 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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>Outside it was bleak and squally, but no matter. The air was fine and
+salt and invigorating. The old <i>Quaker City</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>I remembered that certain travellers had displayed strong emotions on
+seeing their native land disappear. I had none&mdash;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&mdash;in the chair, of course&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> to forego the cigar and guide-book and take a volume on mind
+cure instead.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Quaker City</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>The prospectus is correct, however, in one item. It says that the
+<i>Kurf&uuml;rst</i> 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....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There is a full-blown Scientist in the next room. She keeps saying "Mind
+is all. Mind is all. This is nothing. This is&mdash;this is just&mdash;" after
+which, the Earthquake.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_006" id="ILL_006"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_006.jpg" width="500" height="451" alt="SOMEBODY SENT ME A BASKET OF FRUIT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">SOMEBODY SENT ME A BASKET OF FRUIT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>However, it is no matter; there is no such man.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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, <i>is</i> a seasick man
+better off when he walks or when he sits still?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;all sorts of things&mdash;but we were not
+seasick. It was remarkable what a floating hospital of miscellaneous
+complaints the ship had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> become, and how suddenly they all disappeared
+that afternoon when the sea went down.</p>
+
+<p>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-pr&auml;sident a.&nbsp;D., and Frau Regierungs-pr&auml;sident a.&nbsp;D., and
+looking further discovered Herr Kommerzienrat, Herr Oberpr&auml;sidialrat
+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:</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+interpreter had said&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>America</i> and the <i>Star-Spangled Banner</i> at the close, and we
+are not likely to forget that mid-ocean celebration of the birth of
+America's greatest, gentlest hero.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>DAYS AT SEA</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_007" id="ILL_007"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_007.jpg" width="500" height="324" alt="THEY ARE AN ATTRACTIVE LOT&mdash;THE REPROBATES" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THEY ARE AN ATTRACTIVE LOT&mdash;THE REPROBATES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We have taken up such amusements as please us&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;at least, not definitely so; but I still
+say "Mind is all" as I pass through the smoking-room.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> useful information&mdash;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&mdash;our own affairs
+first&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>There are not many young people on the ship&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> know about these things. That is why we
+are here.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Quaker City</i> pilgrims had that took the place of the fascinating
+picture-puzzle.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> 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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, "it is a cracker-jack of an ocean, but I don't care for
+it just now."</p>
+
+<p>But what a lonely ocean it is! Not a vessel, not a sail, not a column of
+smoke on the horizon!</p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;they have many cargoes of the same brand.</p>
+
+<p>We have two exceedingly pretty girls on this ship&mdash;one of them as
+amiable, as gentle, as lovely in every way as she is pretty. The
+other&mdash;well, she is pretty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> enough in all conscience, and she may be
+amiable&mdash;I wouldn't want to be unfair in my estimate&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 495px;"><a name="ILL_008" id="ILL_008"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_008.jpg" width="495" height="500" alt="GAVE HIM THE &quot;ICY MITT&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">GAVE HIM THE &quot;ICY MITT&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We can't domesticate that girl&mdash;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&mdash;gave him the "icy
+mitt," the Diplomat said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I nevah do anything on shipboahd," she declared, and ignored his
+apologies.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a winter landscape. But then
+the Promoter is a simple, forgiving soul. I think she is just flitter
+and frosting&mdash;just a Christmas-card. A ship like this is democratic&mdash;it
+has to be. We are all just people here.</p>
+
+<p>It is also cosmopolitan&mdash;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&mdash;prayers and a song
+service under the direction of the Promoter&mdash;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&mdash;a small, self-constituted world&mdash;goes throbbing through the
+dark.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>WE BECOME HISTORY</h3>
+
+<p>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"&mdash;the American fleet of sixteen ships of war returning from its
+cruise around the world.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;far, faint, and blurred at
+first, but presently outlined clear&mdash;stretched across the glowing east,
+lifting and tossing out of the morning, our sixteen noble vessels on
+their homeward way!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;they were just under our starboard bow&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;at least, there was not
+enough for a real, first-class, able-bodied resolution. We did it next
+evening&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>INTRODUCING THE REPROBATES</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> far from land now; we
+shall reach Madeira to-morrow morning.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;now that I do not mind its fragrance any
+more&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> human and born in sin, and they stand for all things we would
+like to do&mdash;if we dared.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;after dinner, I mean&mdash;we danced.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/ill_009.jpg" width="500" height="269" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>A LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Ph&oelig;nicians, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> sorry that they perished, I suppose, but I'm
+not. I've heard enough of that tribe on this ship.</p>
+
+<p>The Patriarch is stuffed full of Ph&oelig;nician 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&mdash;the Irish. All the early saints were Irish; so was
+Abraham; so was Noah; so was Adam; so was&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But I am beginning to wander. There is no trace of the Ph&oelig;nicians, 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&mdash;probably the inventor
+of the vehicle later known by that name&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> of its splendid forests and kept the fires going for seven
+years.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 30em;">"My purpose holds</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">To sail beyond the sunset and the baths</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Of all the western stars, until I die.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">And see the great Achilles whom we knew."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;lofty hills they are, some of them in
+the interior rising to a point six thousand feet above the sea&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> we had come upon an island enchantment in the middle
+of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;our first vision of this lavish and splendid flower of
+the Mediterranean.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_010" id="ILL_010"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_010.jpg" width="500" height="401" alt="THEY COULD DIVE LIKE SEALS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THEY COULD DIVE LIKE SEALS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;at least, not very small money&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Once on shore, the enchantment took hold of us again. It was so sunny
+and bright and the streets were so attractive&mdash;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&mdash;here in a
+land of eternal summer&mdash;sleds with enclosed tops, and drawn by oxen.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> beggars who ran along on both sides of the
+sleds, throwing camellias into our laps, crying out, "Penny! Penny!"
+their one English word&mdash;hopping, dancing, beseeching, and refusing to be
+comforted.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;flower, foliage, and waving
+green, with tiny stucco houses set in tangled gardens and slopes of
+cane&mdash;while below and beyond lay the city and the harbor and our ship at
+anchor on the violet sea.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> on; send the
+ship home, or sink it; we will abide here and roam no more."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We had delicious strawberries at our luncheon&mdash;strawberries that
+required no sugar&mdash;and a good many other kinds of fruit&mdash;some of which
+we could identify<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> 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&mdash;that is, wholesale business.
+But never mind&mdash;let it go; it is a good deal like sherry, only it tastes
+better, and the Reprobates said&mdash;but as I mentioned before, let it
+go&mdash;it really does not matter now.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 381px;"><a name="ILL_011" id="ILL_011"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_011.jpg" width="381" height="500" alt="TWO MEN TAKE YOU IN HAND AND AWAY YOU GO" title="" />
+<span class="caption">TWO MEN TAKE YOU IN HAND AND AWAY YOU GO</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was a swift panorama of flower and sunlit wall and distant sea&mdash;the
+soft air rushing by. Now and then we would whirl past a carrier&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>We shot out on the level at last, and started on a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> 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
+<i>Quaker City</i> "Pilgrims" to those islands, and the memory of Blucher's
+disastrous dinner-party.</p>
+
+<p>But they will take anything that looks like money<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We were adopted by a guide presently&mdash;a boy whose only English was the
+statement that he could speak it&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;everything native at least.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The place did not lose its charm with close acquaintance. It seemed
+entirely unspoiled. We saw no suggestion of modern architecture or
+European innovation&mdash;no blot anywhere, except a single motor-car&mdash;the
+only one, I believe, in Funchal. There is but one fly in the ointment of
+Madeira comfort&mdash;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&mdash;at
+least, we think we are. The savor of pity has gone out of us.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Good-bye to Madeira&mdash;a gentle place, a lovely place&mdash;a place to live and
+die in.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_012" id="ILL_012"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_012.jpg" width="500" height="472" alt="DID A SORT OF FANDAROLE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">DID A SORT OF FANDAROLE</span>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>A DAY TO OURSELVES</h3>
+
+<p>We had another full day at sea, after Madeira&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The Diplomat had just landed at the bottom of the slide, he said, when
+two of our party&mdash;Americans&mdash;came along with a bright-faced and quite
+stylish-looking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;dainty dishes and pleasant Madeira
+wines&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_013" id="ILL_013"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_013.jpg" width="500" height="480" alt="THEN IT DAWNED UPON THE DIPLOMAT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THEN IT DAWNED UPON THE DIPLOMAT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> 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!</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>A ship is a curious place altogether; a place of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> 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,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"A ship it is a funny thing,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">It sails upon the sea&mdash;"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But on shipboard the Porpoise is just&mdash;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&mdash;an unimportant town, by its
+census and location, but it has become important on this vessel.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Also, we love the "Mill." The Mill is a woman&mdash;a good woman&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The Mill would not act this way at home&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>thee</i> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>OUT OF THE SUNRISE</h3>
+
+<p>I have seen the shores of Africa and Spain! The bath steward came very
+early, this morning&mdash;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&mdash;rich, triumphant
+music&mdash;an orchestration of "Holy, Holy, Holy"&mdash;such a strain as one
+might expect to hear if the eternal gates should swing ajar. I
+remembered, then; it was Sunday morning&mdash;but there was something more.
+Land! The land that lies on the other side of the ocean!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;golden clouds and hill-tops mingled. It was the Orient&mdash;that
+is what it was&mdash;the Far East; the sun rising over Africa! Something got
+hold of me then&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the outlines
+of Morocco became more distinct, but they did not lose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> their wonder of
+color&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We looked out on the placid water, laughing in the Sunday morning
+sunlight, and tried to imagine those vanished fleets&mdash;stately ships of
+the line with their banks of guns; smart frigates and rakish
+cutters&mdash;all that splendid concourse of black hull and towering canvas,
+and then the boom and the flash of guns&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_014" id="ILL_014"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_014.jpg" width="500" height="369" alt="BUT NOW GIBRALTAR, THE CROUCHING LION OF TRAFALGAR, HAD
+RISEN FROM THE SEA" title="" />
+<span class="caption">BUT NOW GIBRALTAR, THE CROUCHING LION OF TRAFALGAR, HAD
+RISEN FROM THE SEA</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But now Gibraltar, the crouching lion of Trafalgar, had risen from the
+sea. The English call it "The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> Rock," and that is just what it looks
+like&mdash;a big bowlder shaped like a sleeping lion&mdash;its head toward Spain,
+its tail toward Africa. I think most persons have an idea that the Rock
+lies lengthwise, east and west&mdash;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&mdash;it has cost enough for
+her to be proud of it&mdash;and is her chief stronghold.</p>
+
+<p>About it are gathered her warships of to-day&mdash;dark, low-browed fighters
+like our own&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Spanish, I suppose; the driver spoke the English of
+Gibraltar&mdash;an English which nobody outside of Gibraltar, and only a few
+people there, can understand; the road was good; the flowers&mdash;bluebells,
+yellow daisies, dandelions and heliotrope&mdash;all wild&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The Patriarch forgot the Ph&oelig;nicians 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 Ph&oelig;nician; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Be&ntilde;unes was
+his name, guide and courier to Mark Twain and his party, forty-two years
+ago.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Be&ntilde;unes must have been a handsome creature in those days; he is a
+handsome creature still&mdash;tall, finely featured, with flowing black
+hair&mdash;carrying his sixty-five years as lightly as wind-flowers&mdash;gay,
+voluble, enthusiastic&mdash;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&mdash;of the galleries and the monkey-pit; also, of the
+wonderful monkeys themselves who inhabit the Rock and are intelligent
+almost beyond belief&mdash;who refrain from speaking English only because
+they are afraid of having red coats and caps put on them and being made
+into soldiers.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_015" id="ILL_015"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_015.jpg" width="500" height="392" alt="WE COULD HAVE LISTENED ALL NIGHT TO BE&Ntilde;UNES" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WE COULD HAVE LISTENED ALL NIGHT TO BE&Ntilde;UNES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We could have listened all night to Be&ntilde;unes, for he made the old time
+and still older traditions real to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> us. And perhaps Be&ntilde;unes would have
+talked all night, for he declared&mdash;and we believed him&mdash;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
+Be&ntilde;unes 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&mdash;of everything&mdash;he said, when we
+came again. Ah me! I suspect there is only one Be&ntilde;unes, and that he
+belongs to a time which will soon vanish away.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We went through the town&mdash;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&mdash;the most cosmopolitan town on earth, perhaps. Every
+kind of money is in use there&mdash;every language is spoken.</p>
+
+<p>"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 "<i>zw&ouml;lf f&uuml;r ein Mark</i>," no doubt.
+They do not mistake nationalities in Gibraltar&mdash;they have all kinds to
+study from. Moors we saw&mdash;black, barelegged, and gayly attired&mdash;a taste
+of the Orient we were about to enter&mdash;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 <i>Quaker City</i> "Pilgrims"
+we bought no gloves.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> at sunset, and waited at the
+pier for the little tender, for it was near evening and we were through
+with Gibraltar&mdash;ready for the comfort of the ship.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious place&mdash;a place of a day's interest for the traveller&mdash;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&mdash;Englishmen&mdash;who say it is not worth the price&mdash;that it is no
+longer worth any price&mdash;and they advocate returning it to Spain. No army
+could take it, and no army wants to take it&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> deepens as we creep farther around; the wedge shortens, contracts
+to a cone, a pyramid&mdash;the level sea changes to a desert. The feeling
+somehow grows that Africa has reclaimed its own&mdash;the Lion of England has
+become a pyramid of the sands.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>EARLY MEDITERRANEAN EXPERIENCES</h3>
+
+<p>Our first day in the Mediterranean was without a flaw. It was a quiet,
+sunlit day&mdash;just pleasantly warm&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>We have all day and night to get to Algiers&mdash;now less than three hundred
+miles away&mdash;so we are just loafing along making wide circles&mdash;"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+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&mdash;a stout lady of middle age and gentle
+spirit&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;romance&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> 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&mdash;look
+at him! Look at his shape&mdash;why, he's likely to blow up, any time. Some
+people think these are patients of mine. Nice advertisement, a pair like
+that!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They were not inclined to be sociable&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious, the fascination of that game, piquet&mdash;still more curious
+how anybody can ever learn to play it. In fact nobody ever does learn
+it. There are no rules&mdash;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&mdash;chin up,
+eye drooped, bland and child-like&mdash;examines his collection, and says,
+"Goddlemighty!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then they play&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Match you, Joe," he says, "match you for five!"</p>
+
+<p>But the Apostle is wary. He smiles benignly while he turns his face from
+temptation.</p>
+
+<p>"No you don't," he says, "never again."</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel slaps the coin down again, quite smartly.</p>
+
+<p>"Just once, Joe," he wheedles; "just once, for luck!"</p>
+
+<p>The Apostle strokes his chubby, child-like countenance with the tips of
+his fingers, still looking away&mdash;his eyes turned heavenward.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't do it, I tell you. No, now go on away. I told you yesterday I
+wouldn't match you again&mdash;ever."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Just once, Joe&mdash;just this one time."</p>
+
+<p>"I won't do it."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Just once more, Joe, just for five dollars&mdash;one turn."</p>
+
+<p>The Apostle's hand is in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, I tell you," he says, "I'll match you this one time, and never
+again."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, Joe, just this one time, for luck; come on, now."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on, Joe; just once more&mdash;just for luck."</p>
+
+<p>"You go to hell, will you?"</p>
+
+<p>This is the programme daily with but slight variation. Sometimes the
+Apostle wins less than seven dollars&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>THE DIVERTING STORY OF ALGIERS</h3>
+
+<p>This is a voyage of happy mornings. It was morning&mdash;just sunrise&mdash;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&mdash;our first glimpse of the Orient&mdash;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 <i>is</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Vat you get me up so early for, Sol?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>He handed her his glass, his whole face alive with joy of the
+moment&mdash;fairly radiant it was.</p>
+
+<p>"I yust couldn't help it!" he said. "Dot sunrising<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> and dot harbor and
+dot city all make such a beautiful sight."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="smcap">a.d</span>. Blood flowed during
+each of these changes, and betweentimes. There was always blood&mdash;rivers
+of it&mdash;lakes of it&mdash;this harbor has been red with it time and again.</p>
+
+<p>It did not stop flowing with the Arabian conquest&mdash;not by any means.
+Those Arabs were barbarians and robbers&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Piratic industry, combined with slavery, flourished for a matter of four
+centuries after that; then Commodore Decatur with a handful of little
+vessels met<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Piracy under A.&nbsp;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> the French consul why his master had remained silent.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the habit of jumping at the crack of the French whip.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 415px;"><a name="ILL_016" id="ILL_016"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_016.jpg" width="415" height="500" alt="&quot;THAT IS THE KASBA&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;THAT IS THE KASBA&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;himself a former resident of Algiers&mdash;approached
+me with:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;an act which led to
+the conquest of Algiers by France."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you see that tower there on the hill-top?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> 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&mdash;an act which led to the
+conquest of Algiers by France."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;their costumes purely Oriental&mdash;their bare feet encased in shoes
+right out of the <i>Arabian Nights</i> pictures. I was just turning to remark
+these things to one of the Reprobates, the Colonel, when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you see that tower up there on the hill-top?"</p>
+
+<p>"Colonel," I said, "you've been reading your guide-book, and I saw you
+the other day with a book called <i>Innocents Abroad</i>."</p>
+
+<p>He looked a little dazed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, "what of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_017" id="ILL_017"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_017.jpg" width="500" height="348" alt="ONE DOES NOT HURRY THE ORIENT&mdash;ONE WAITS ON IT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ONE DOES NOT HURRY THE ORIENT&mdash;ONE WAITS ON IT</span>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>WE ENTER THE ORIENT</h3>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>What a grand exhibition it was to us who had come up out of the Western
+Ocean, only half believing that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> such scenes as this&mdash;throngs of
+sun-baked people in fantastic dress&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>One does not hurry
+the Orient&mdash;one waits on it.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>We wondered why they should dress in this voluminous fashion in such a
+climate, and then we decided<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> 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&mdash;beautiful
+streets, and if it were not for the Oriental costumes and faces
+everywhere we might have been in France.</p>
+
+<p>French soldiers were discoverable all about; French groups were chatting
+and drinking coffee and other beverages at open-air caf&eacute;s; 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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;only the outer edges.</p>
+
+<p>We drove to our first mosque&mdash;a typical white-domed affair, plastered on
+the outside, and we fought our way through the beggars who got in front
+of us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> and behind us and about us, demanding "<i>sou-penny</i>" at least it
+sounded like that&mdash;a sort of French-English combination, I suppose,
+which probably has been found to work well enough to warrant its general
+adoption.</p>
+
+<p>We thought we had seen beggars at Madeira, and had become hardened to
+them. We <i>had</i> become hardened toward the beggars, but not to our own
+offerings. One can only stand about so much punishment&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a gaudy wedding-cake affair, all fluting and frosting&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 457px;"><a name="ILL_018" id="ILL_018"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_018.jpg" width="457" height="500" alt="MARVELLOUS BASKETS AND QUEER THINGS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">MARVELLOUS BASKETS AND QUEER THINGS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But what we wanted, some of us at least, was to get out of these
+show-places and into the shops&mdash;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&mdash;the
+jars, I mean&mdash;all battered and dented and polished by the mutations of
+the passing years.</p>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_019" id="ILL_019"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_019.jpg" width="500" height="389" alt="WE DID NOT CARE MUCH FOR PARKS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WE DID NOT CARE MUCH FOR PARKS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;all in good time. One does not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> hurry the
+Orient&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 220px;"><a name="ILL_020" id="ILL_020"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_020.jpg" width="220" height="500" alt="ETERNALLY EAST WITH NO HINT OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ETERNALLY EAST WITH NO HINT OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>That is to say, the Arab quarter&mdash;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&mdash;an opening so low that the tallest of us had to
+stoop (it was a "needle's eye," no doubt)&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>How weak any attempt to tell of that life seems! The plastered,
+blind-eyed houses with their mysterious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> 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&mdash;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&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere was humanity which belonged only to the East&mdash;had always
+belonged there&mdash;had remained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But it was picturesque. In whatever direction you looked was a picture.
+It was like nature untouched by civilization&mdash;it could not be
+unpicturesque if it tried. It was, in fact, just that&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;rag upon rag&mdash;sewed on, tacked on, tied on, hung on&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>In a little recess, about half-way down the hill, heeding
+nothing&mdash;wholly lost in reverie it would seem&mdash;sat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> 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&mdash;a mere trip to Mecca would
+hardly have made them as holy as that, I should think&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I was not entirely subdued, however, and pretty soon hunted up further
+trouble. A boy came along with one of the copper water-jars&mdash;a small
+one&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;there were no girls&mdash;were grouped on either side&mdash;on a
+rug&mdash;their pointed shoes standing in a row along the floor. They were
+reciting in a chorus from some large cards&mdash;the Koran, according to the
+guide&mdash;and it made a queer clatter.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> sort of a
+change they make when they sell only a part of one of those pitiful
+heaps.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a wonderful cast&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> 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&mdash;a
+little sympathy with the subjugated population&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+"<i>Sou-penny</i>" 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And now we drove home&mdash;that is, back to the fine streets near the
+water-front where we were to leave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;drive us fast over them!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;not a big fine&mdash;and I invented the idea of
+taking a lot of those cheap Arabs to America for automobilists to use
+up, and save money.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;something with hot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> skewers and boiling oil in it, or perhaps
+soft concrete.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I walked pretty rapidly, and I looked over my shoulder now and then,
+because&mdash;well, never mind, I looked over my shoulder&mdash;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&mdash;a sinister looking
+Arab&mdash;but when I started on he stepped aside too, and got behind me
+again.</p>
+
+<p>So I stopped and let him pass once more, and then it wasn't necessary to
+man&oelig;uvre again, for a few yards ahead the narrow Arab defile flowed
+into the lighter French thoroughfare. He was only a pick-pocket,
+perhaps&mdash;there are said to be a good many in Algiers&mdash;but he was not a
+pleasant-looking person, and I did not care to cultivate him at
+nightfall in that dim, time-forgotten place.</p>
+
+<p>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 caf&eacute;s 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&mdash;Chasseurs d'Afrique and Zouaves&mdash;everywhere the fashionable
+French costumes&mdash;everywhere the French tongue. And amid that fashion and
+gayety of the West the fez and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> 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&mdash;the West
+dominant&mdash;the East a memory and a dream.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+<h3>WE TOUCH AT GENOA</h3>
+
+<p>We lost some of our passengers&mdash;the wrong ones&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;all of them, I believe, except me&mdash;but
+thinking it over I cannot decide on a single one that I would be willing
+to spare. Even the Porpoise&mdash; But we have grown to love the Porpoise,
+and the news that we are to lose him at Genoa saddens me.</p>
+
+<p>We were pitched from Algiers to Genoa&mdash;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 <i>Kurf&uuml;rst</i> is, we stood alternately on our hind feet
+and our fore feet all the way over&mdash;two nights and a day&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>(I have just referred to the guide-book. It says: "The magnificent
+harbor of Genoa was the cause of the medi&aelig;val 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.)</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 "<i>Warum</i>" instead of
+"<i>Wo</i>" 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Laura and I made our way uphill and climbed some stairways, met a
+<i>gendarme</i>, got what seemed to be information, climbed down again, and
+met a man with a fish-net full of bread&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>lira</i> of his charge.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;three kinds, slow, medium, and swift&mdash;these features being
+usually identified with the early Italian school.</p>
+
+<p>The dim, mysterious streets of Genoa interested us&mdash;many of the houses
+frescoed outside&mdash;and the old city gates, dating back to the crusade;
+also some English signs, one of which said:</p>
+
+<h4>DINNER 3 LIRA, WINE ENCLOSED,</h4>
+
+<p>and another:</p>
+
+<h4>MILK FOR SALE, OR TO LET.</h4>
+
+<p>I am in favor of these people learning English, but not too well. The
+picturesque standard of those signs is about right.</p>
+
+<p>Our new passengers were crowding aboard the ship when we returned. They
+were a polyglot assortment, English, German, French, Hungarian&mdash;a
+happy-looking lot, certainly, and eager for the housing and comfort of
+the ship. But one dear old soul, a German music-master&mdash;any one could
+tell that at first glance&mdash;was in no hurry for the cabin. He had been
+looking forward to that trip. Perhaps this was his first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Haben Sie Deutsch?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a
+ship with an undecipherable name in the Greek character.</p>
+
+<p>"Greek," he said, "it is Greek&mdash;a vessel from Greece!"</p>
+
+<p>He was deeply moved. To him that vessel&mdash;a rather poor, grimy
+affair&mdash;with its name in the characters of Homer and &AElig;schylus 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But a change has come over the spirit of our ship. It is a good ship
+still, with a goodly company&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> is a French group&mdash;Parisian, without
+doubt&mdash;the women are certainly that, otherwise they could not chatter
+and handle their cigarettes in that dainty way&mdash;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&mdash;they are in
+themselves sufficient diversion to one another.</p>
+
+<p>It is different with a group of Germans at the next table; they have
+settled down to cards&mdash;pinochle, likely enough&mdash;and they are playing it
+soberly&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;each speaking a language of his own. Every
+nation of Europe, I should think, is represented there&mdash;it is a sort of
+lingual congress in open session.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a personal grievance in every stranger that
+intrudes.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;even some of the sorrows&mdash;of each member. Then, suddenly,
+here is a new group of people that breaks in. You know nothing about
+them&mdash;they know nothing about you. They are good people, and you will
+learn to like some of them&mdash;perhaps all of them&mdash;in time. Yet you regard
+them doubtfully. Rearrangement is never easy, and amalgamation will be
+slow.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/ill_021.jpg" width="500" height="251" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>MALTA, A LAND OF YESTERDAY</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We were in the harbor of Valetta, Malta, when we woke this morning&mdash;a
+rather dull morning&mdash;and a whole felucca of boats&mdash;flotilla, I mean&mdash;had
+appeared in the offing to take us ashore. At least, I suppose they were
+in the offing&mdash; 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&mdash;every country preserving its native pattern.
+These at Malta are a sort of gondola with a piece sticking up at each
+end&mdash;for ornament, probably&mdash;I have been unable to figure out any use
+for the feature.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Patriarch, who had been early on deck, came up full of enthusiasm.
+There was a Ph&oelig;nician 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
+Ph&oelig;nicians, we let him get off this time, softened, perhaps, by the
+thought of the ruined temple.</p>
+
+<p>The Ph&oelig;nicians 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 Ph&oelig;nicians 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&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Horse-Doctor laid his hand reverently but firmly on the Patriarch's
+arm.</p>
+
+<p>"General," he said (the Patriarch's ship title is General)&mdash;"General, we
+all love you, and we all respect your years and your learning. We will
+stand almost anything from you, even the Ph&oelig;nicians; but don't crowd
+us, General&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the second in importance in these waters. Gibraltar is the
+gateway, Malta is the citadel of the Mediterranean, and England to-day
+commands both.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> the first time; and Bible history.
+Long ago, even before the Ph&oelig;nicians, the Cyclops&mdash;a race of one-eyed
+giants&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Here is a brief summary.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"And when the ship was caught, and could not bear up in the
+wind, we let her drive....</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Paul comforted them and told how an angel had stood by him, assuring him
+that he, Paul, would appear before C&aelig;sar and that all with him would be
+saved. "Howbeit, we must be cast upon a certain island."</p>
+
+<p>The island was Melita (<i>i.e.</i>, Malta), and "falling into a place where
+two seas met, they ran the ship aground."</p>
+
+<p>There were two hundred and sixteen souls in the vessel, and all got to
+land somehow.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Gods, Ph&oelig;nicians, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> museum of military works,
+occupied and abandoned.</p>
+
+<p>After the Gods, the Ph&oelig;nicians 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&mdash;also known as the Knights of St.
+John and the Knights of Rhodes&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;square parasol things with fancy
+edges&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>However, these slight inaccuracies do not disturb<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, certainly; we knew it was down here somewhere. When can we go
+ashore?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But there were no Maltese cats in Malta&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But presently I forgot the goats, for a woman came along&mdash;several
+women&mdash;and they wore a black head-gear of alpaca or silk, a cross
+between a sunbonnet and a nun's veil&mdash;hooped out on one side and looped
+in on the other&mdash;a curious head-gear, but not a bad setting for a
+handsome face. And those ladies had handsome faces&mdash;rich, oval faces,
+with lustrous eyes&mdash;and the faldette (they call it that) made a
+background that melted into their wealth of atramentous hair.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;very small donkeys with great pack
+baskets of vegetables and other merchandise&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;some into the
+museum&mdash;some into St. John's Cathedral, which was across the way.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It <i>is</i> a magnificent church&mdash;the most elaborately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Keep the carrion," he said.</p>
+
+<p>They hate the memory of Napoleon in Malta to this day.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Our crowd was waiting admission outside the chapel and we did not need
+our guide any more. But that didn't matter&mdash;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&mdash;not a pleasant spot in
+which to linger&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;long, deadly-looking
+weapons&mdash;and there were rope guns; also little mortars not more than
+three or four inches deep&mdash;mere toys&mdash;a stout man with a pile of rocks
+would be more effective, I should think.</p>
+
+<p>We saw the trumpet, too, that led La Valette to victory in 1565, and
+some precious documents&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> with
+cold chicken and ices and nice fizzy drinks. No, that was not what
+happened&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We were not alone. A crowd had collected while we were inside&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>We laid out our programme for the afternoon. We wanted to get some
+Maltese lace, and to make a little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a place where it was made. He led us to
+another bazaar. Again we said, "No, a little shop&mdash;a <i>very</i> little shop,
+on a back street."</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 423px;"><a name="ILL_022" id="ILL_022"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_022.jpg" width="423" height="500" alt="TWO BENT, WRINKLED WOMEN WEAVING LACE OUTSIDE THE DOOR" title="" />
+<span class="caption">TWO BENT, WRINKLED WOMEN WEAVING LACE OUTSIDE THE DOOR</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>He took us to the railway-station&mdash;the only railway in Malta. Then I
+made a discovery: we had no current coin of the realm and the railway
+would take<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> tunnel as soon as we started; then another and
+another. This was scenery with a vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>We were out at last, and in a different world. Whatever was modern in
+Malta had been left behind. This was wholly Eastern&mdash;Syrian&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>is</i> Maltese.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You are from America," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, we are from America."</p>
+
+<p>"And do they use different ploughs there?"</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;all his
+traditions&mdash;had been confined to that little sea-encircled space of old,
+old town, and older, much older country.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;many a long-protracted siege. To-day it is
+a place of crumbling ruins and deserted streets&mdash;a medi&aelig;val dream.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> our own boat, received the rest of his
+fortune&mdash;enough to set him up for life, by Maltese standards&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a world apart. We are weighing anchor
+now, and working our course out of the bottle-neck, to sea. It is a
+narrow opening&mdash;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&mdash;the green billows catching the dusk purple
+on their tips, the gulls white as they breast the rising wind.</p>
+
+<p>We gather on the after deck to say good-bye to Malta. Wall upon wall,
+terrace upon terrace it rises from the sea&mdash;heaped and piled back
+against the hills&mdash;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&mdash;it suggests all those names, and
+we speak of these things in low voices, awed by the spectacle of
+gathering night and storm.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>A SUNDAY AT SEA</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I have mentioned that this is Sunday, but I acquired<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the old-fashioned Sunday,
+such as we had the first week out.</p>
+
+<p>Not that our "pilgrims" are a bad lot&mdash;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 <i>Kurf&uuml;rst</i> for
+perfectly proper, and on this particular Sunday you could not scrape up
+enough real sin on this ship to interest Satan five minutes.</p>
+
+<p>Even the Reprobates are not entirely abandoned, and only three different
+parties have been removed from their table in the dining-saloon by
+request&mdash;request of the parties, that is&mdash;said parties being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> accustomed
+to the simpler life&mdash;pleasant diversions of the home circle, as it
+were&mdash;and not to the sparkle and the flow of good-fellowship on the high
+seas, with the <i>bon mot</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be too late, if you're not careful," he said. "You'd better go
+right up and get your ticket now."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"But suppose you decide to go after the party is made up?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>However, he will go, because the Colonel is going; and the Colonel is
+going because, as the Doctor still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> insists, he made his money by
+publishing Bibles without reading them, which I think doubtful&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 arch&aelig;ology,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 na&iuml;vet&eacute; and unfailing
+good-nature that divert us. She approached one of our American ladies
+who wears black.</p>
+
+<p>"You a widow, not?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, I am not a widow."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, then mebbe you yus' divorce, like me."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Quaker City</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash; 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.</p>
+
+<p>I expected the shores of Greece would look like that&mdash;bleak, barren, and
+forbidding. I don't know why, but that was my thought&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>To-morrow he will go mad, I think, for we shall anchor at Athens, in the
+Bay of Phaleron.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+<h3>A PORT OF MISSING DREAMS</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>Which the other girl did, and, after gazing steadily for a moment, said:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! Oh yes, indeed&mdash; I can see them now, quite distinctly!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;its columned crown
+beginning to glow and burn in answer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> to the old, old friend that has
+awakened it to glory, morning after morning, century after century, for
+a full twenty-three hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>The light came fast now, and with my glass I could bring the hill-top
+near. I could make out the Parthenon&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the
+rise of Christianity in Greece.</p>
+
+<p>I got into a row myself, presently, with one of the boys, just because I
+happened to make some little classical allusion&mdash; I have forgotten what
+it was now,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Our chariots were waiting at the station&mdash;carriages, I mean, nice modern
+ones&mdash;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&mdash;that old,
+discolored temple standing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> there unenclosed, unprotected, unregarded in
+the busy midst of modern surroundings.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the
+country was bankrupt, the throne had gone begging. In <i>Innocents Abroad</i>
+Mark Twain says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> 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 d&eacute;bris,
+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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_023" id="ILL_023"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_023.jpg" width="500" height="269" alt="WE LOOKED ACROSS THE ENTRANCE AND THERE ROSE THE ACROPOLIS, HIGH AGAINST THE BLUE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WE LOOKED ACROSS THE ENTRANCE AND THERE ROSE THE ACROPOLIS, HIGH AGAINST THE BLUE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_024" id="ILL_024"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_024.jpg" width="500" height="388" alt="HE WOULD SWING HIS ARMS AND BEGIN, &quot;YOU SEE&mdash;!&quot; THE REST
+REQUIRED A MIND-READER" title="" />
+<span class="caption">HE WOULD SWING HIS ARMS AND BEGIN, &quot;YOU SEE&mdash;!&quot; THE REST
+REQUIRED A MIND-READER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was hard to leave that place. It would have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> 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&mdash;probably in jail&mdash;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&mdash;!" The rest required a
+mind-reader. The German guide was better&mdash;much better. I haven't a
+perfect ear for German, but I concluded to join that party.</p>
+
+<p>It was not far to the Temple of Jupiter&mdash;the group<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> 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!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="smcap">a.d</span>., and
+complete it, and renew it, and dedicate it to Jupiter Olympus, whose
+reign by that time was nearly over.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &AElig;schylus and
+Euripides had their first nights&mdash;or days, perhaps, for I believe they
+were mostly matinees&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I took one of the last named&mdash;a beautiful marble chair in the front row,
+just below the plinth where once the throne of Hadrian sat&mdash;a chair with
+an inscription which told that in the old days it was reserved for a
+priest or dignitary&mdash;and I looked across the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> 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&mdash;they called
+it the Orchestra then&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_025" id="ILL_025"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_025.jpg" width="500" height="394" alt="I WOULD HAVE APPLIED FOR A POSITION IN THE CHORUS MYSELF" title="" />
+<span class="caption">I WOULD HAVE APPLIED FOR A POSITION IN THE CHORUS MYSELF</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> contemporaries. Deep enough
+for the popocrat Cleon, who tried to deprive Aristophanes of his
+citizenship, in revenge.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that of Cleon&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We climbed the hill a little way to a grotto and drank of the spring of
+&AElig;sculapius 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&mdash;the little theatre which Herodes Atticus built in
+memory of his wife.</p>
+
+<p>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 &AElig;sculapius 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&mdash;the people's
+forum&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We did stop briefly at the Pnyx hill&mdash;the gathering-place of the
+Athenians&mdash;and stood on the rostrum cut from the living rock&mdash;the "Bema"
+from which Demosthenes harangued the populace.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_026" id="ILL_026"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_026.jpg" width="500" height="342" alt="TOOK TURNS ADDRESSING THE MULTITUDE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">TOOK TURNS ADDRESSING THE MULTITUDE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> it going and coming.
+Perhaps his English was not the best, but I confess I adored it. He
+lisped a little, and his voice&mdash;droning, plaintive, and pathetic&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the rest missing&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p>"Zat did not fall down, but stay zere, always ze same&mdash;ze honly piece
+zat Lord Elgin could not take away," and so on and on, through that long
+sweet afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not attempt the story of the Acropolis here. The tale of that
+old citadel which later became<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p><i>They</i> 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&mdash;they are only yesterdays to the hills. The last fragment of these
+temples will be gone by and by&mdash;the last memory of their glory&mdash;but the
+hills will be still young and wearing their violet crown, still turning
+green in the breath of a Grecian spring.</p>
+
+<p>Down through that splendid entrance, the Propyl&aelig;a, at last, for it was
+growing late. We had intended climbing the Hill of Mars, where St. Paul
+preached,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> 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&mdash;of criticism, perhaps&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some
+mocked: and others said, 'We will hear thee again of the
+matter.'"</p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;which
+indeed it was, for we had been travelling backward and forward since
+then through the long millennial years.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;as quiet as
+Washington, almost.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;he had
+all three heads going at once now&mdash;and tried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But for Marathon there would have been no Golden Age&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>ATHENS THAT IS</h3>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 drachmas would redeem Greece.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I was half a mind to look up the heirs of that old money-lender and buy
+their claim and begin their suit. Think of being involved in a tangle
+that has been stringing along through twenty-three centuries, and would
+tie up yesterday, to-day, and forever in a hard knot! I would have done
+it, I think, only that it might take another twenty-three centuries to
+settle it, and I was afraid the ship wouldn't wait.</p>
+
+<p>If there is any one who still does not believe that modern Athens is
+beautiful and a credit to her ancient name, let him visit as we did her
+modern temples. We had passed the ancient market entrance, the Tower of
+the Winds, and other of the old landmarks, when suddenly we turned into
+a wonderful boulevard, and drove by or visited, one after another, the
+New Academy, the University, the National Library, the Gallery of Fine
+Arts, and the National Museum. If Pericles were alive to-day he would
+approve of those buildings and add them to his collection.</p>
+
+<p>All the old classic grace and beauty have been preserved in the same
+pure-white pentelican marble, of which it is estimated that there is
+enough to last any city five thousand years. Corinthian, Ionic, and
+Doric columns that might have come from the Acropolis itself&mdash;and did,
+in design&mdash;adorn and support these new edifices as they did the old, and
+lend their ineffable glory to the rehabilitation of Greece.</p>
+
+<p>We have learned, by-the-way, to distinguish the kinds of columns. They
+were all just Greek to us at first, but we know them now. When we see a
+column with acanthus leaves on the capital we know it is Corinthian,
+because we remember the story of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> girl of Corinth who planted
+acanthus on her lover's grave and put a hollow tile around it for
+protection. Some of the leaves came up outside of the tile by and by,
+and a young architect came along and got his idea for the Corinthian
+capital.</p>
+
+<p>We know the Ionic, too, because it looks like its initial&mdash;a capital "I"
+with a little curly top&mdash;and we say "I" is for Ionic; and we can tell
+the Doric, because it's the only one that doesn't suggest anything
+particular to remember it by. It's worth coming to Greece to learn these
+things. We should never have learned them at home&mdash;never in the world.
+We should not have had any reason for wanting to learn them.</p>
+
+<p>We got tired of the Museum&mdash;Laura, age fourteen, and I&mdash;we were too
+young and frivolous for such things, though they are wonderful enough, I
+am sure. But then museums we have always with us, while a day in Athens
+is a fleeting thing. We wanted to take one of our private
+side-excursions, and we tried to communicate this fact to the Blue
+Elephant, who was our driver to-day, as yesterday.</p>
+
+<p>It was no light matter. He nodded and smiled when we indicated that we
+wanted to leave the procession and go it on our own hook, but he did not
+move. We had already made up our minds that he was subject to fits, or
+was just plain crazy, for more than once he had suddenly broke away from
+the party and whirled us around side-streets for a dozen blocks or so to
+something not down on the programme, rejoining the procession in some
+unexpected place.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever may have induced his impulses then,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> nothing seemed to stir
+his ambition for adventure now. I gesticulated and produced money; I
+summoned the Diplomat to tackle him in his best Xenophan, but it was no
+use. I got the guide at last, and then there was an exciting harangue
+that looked as if it might end in blood. I suppose our man thought he
+wouldn't get his full pay if he deserted the ship crowd. He must have
+been convinced, finally, for he leaped upon the box, and away we went in
+a wild race for the shops and by-streets where we had begged the guide
+to let us go.</p>
+
+<p>We had explained that we wanted some bags&mdash;some little embroidered bags,
+such as we had seen earlier in the day when we could not stop. The Blue
+Elephant understood now and took us to where there were bags&mdash;many bags.
+The whole street was lined with bags and other embroideries, and the
+Greeks turned out to give us a welcome.</p>
+
+<p>It is said that one Greek is equal to three Turks, and I believe it. The
+poorest Greek we saw was too much for two Americans, and we were beset
+and besieged and literally borne down and swamped by a rising tide of
+bags. We bought at many prices and in many places; we piled the carriage
+full and fled away at last when they were going to dump upon us a
+collection of costumes and firearms and draperies that would have
+required a flat-car.</p>
+
+<p>We were breathing easier when the Blue Elephant pulled us into another
+narrow street, and behold! it was another street of bags. Dear me! how
+could we explain that we had enough bags and wanted to see other things?
+I would almost have given four hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> dollars to have been able to
+tell him that I wanted to visit the old Byzantine structure we had
+passed that morning&mdash;the one with all the little shoemakers
+down-stairs&mdash;but the thing was impossible. I must buy some more bags,
+there was no help for it. So I did buy some more, and I picked out a
+place where a man spoke enough English to give the Blue Elephant a fresh
+start, which brought us at last to the old Byzantine building and the
+little shoemakers.</p>
+
+<p>Then we saw the street of a hundred clanking sounds&mdash;anyway we called it
+that, for they made all kinds of copper vessels in there&mdash;and we got out
+and told the Blue Elephant to wait, for the place was very narrow; but
+we couldn't lose him, seeing he was always on our heels, ready to whirl
+us away somewhere, anywhere, in his crazy, fitty fashion. We had to let
+him do it, now, for we had used up all the interpreters we could find;
+besides, we didn't care, any more.</p>
+
+<p>Still, when it got to be near luncheon-time we did begin to wonder where
+the party had gone. It did not matter greatly, we could lunch anywhere,
+but we were curious to know whether we should ever see them or the ship
+again, and when we mentioned the matter to the Blue Elephant he merely
+grinned and whipped up his horses and capered across another square. But
+presently I realized that some sort of procession was passing and that
+he had turned into it. Then it was all just like dreams I've had, for it
+was our own procession, and we were calmly going along in it, and right
+away were being personally conducted through a remarkable church where
+the king and queen go, and sit in golden chairs. Alice in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> Wonderland
+could hardly have had a more surprising adventure.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Our party being free after luncheon, Laura and I engaged Lykabettos on
+our own account and drove out to the Bay of Salamis, where Xerxes made
+his great mistake in the matter of fleets.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Lykabettos had taken a fancy to us, for he engaged a carriage
+that had been awarded a prize last year in the games, he said, and the
+team with it. We believed Lykabettos&mdash;anybody would&mdash;and anyway it was a
+beautiful outfit, and we cantered away over a fine road, past wayside
+shrines, past little huts and houses, past a little memorial that marks
+the place on a hill where Xerxes placed his silver-footed throne so that
+he might sit comfortably and watch the enemy's ships go down. Only, the
+programme didn't work out that way, Lykabettos said:</p>
+
+<p>"Zen Xerxes he pretty soon see zat it was not ze Greek ship zat sink,
+and he mus' run pretty quick or he will be capture; and hees ship zay
+try to escape, and he not take away hees army from zat little island you
+see over zere; zay stay zere and are all massacre by ze Greek&mdash;by ze men
+and ze women, too, who have watch ze battle from here and go over and
+kill zem."</p>
+
+<p>The little island Lykabettos pointed out was Psyttalleia, and the flower
+of Persia perished there. It was a tiny bit of barren land then, and it
+is to-day. The hills around Salamis are barren, too, covered only with a
+gray weed like the sage-brush of Nevada, and stunted groves of scrubby
+pine and ground cedar&mdash;referred to by Lykabettos as "ze forest."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We came to the tiny hamlet on the water's side, a collection of two or
+three huts, and Lykabettos engaged a lateen-sailed lugger (I should call
+it that, though its name was probably something else), and with a fresh
+wind half-ahead we billowed over the blue waters of Salamis, where
+twenty-five hundred years ago the Persian ships went down. It was a
+cloudy afternoon and there was a stormy feeling in the sky. It seemed
+just the time to be there, and there was nothing to dispel the illusion
+of imminent battle that was in the air.</p>
+
+<p>I was perfectly sure, and so was Laura, that the Persian fleet was
+likely at any moment to round the point and land troops on Pysttalleia;
+also that the Greek fleet was hiding somewhere in the Bay of Eleusis,
+and that there were going to be very disagreeable happenings there in a
+few minutes. There was a hut where we landed on the Island of Salamis
+and a girl making lace at the front door. She might have been there
+twenty-five hundred years ago, as well as not&mdash;perhaps was&mdash;and saw the
+great victory.</p>
+
+<p>We sailed back then, crossing again the exact spot where the battle
+raged, and drove home through the gathering evening, while Lykabettos
+recounted in that sad voice of his the history of ancient days. We are
+on the ship now, with anchor weighed, looking to the Farther East.
+Athens with its temples and its traditions drops below the horizon.
+Darkness and silence once more claim the birthplace of gods and heroes
+as we slip out of these quiet waters and head for the &AElig;gean Sea.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>INTO THE DARDANELLES</h3>
+
+<p>We saw but little of the Isles of Greece. It was night and we were tired
+after a hard day; most of us, I think, turned in early. Now and then a
+light&mdash;a far tiny speck&mdash;appeared in one quarter or another&mdash;probably a
+signal beacon; that was all.</p>
+
+<p>But in the morning&mdash;it was soon after breakfast&mdash;a gray bank rose up out
+of the sea, and the word went round that it was Asia. That was a strange
+thing for a boy who had been brought up on the prairies of the Middle
+West&mdash;to look across the bow and see Asia coming up out of the sea. It
+brought back a small, one-room, white district schoolhouse, dropped down
+on the bleak, level prairie, and geography-class of three, standing in a
+row and singing to the tune of <i>Old Dan Tucker</i> the rhymes of the
+continents:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">"Asia sixteen millions,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">The largest of the five grand divisions."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It was not much of a rhyme, nor much of a tune, but there was a swing in
+the way we did it which fixed those facts for life. They came back now,
+and I had to get hold of myself a little to realize that this was the
+same Asia with all those square miles&mdash;the land<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> of the Arabian Nights,
+of the apostles and the patriarchs&mdash;the wonderful country I had one day
+hoped to see. And presently we were off the Plains of Troy, passing near
+where the ships of the Greeks lay anchored, all of which seemed very
+wonderful, too, I thought. We were in the Dardanelles, then, following
+the path of those first Argonauts who set sail with Jason, and of that
+later band who set out in the <i>Quaker City</i>, forty-two years ago. No
+lack of history and tradition and old association here.</p>
+
+<p>But how one's information does go to seed; all of us knew something, but
+none of us knew much. Not one of us knew positively whether the
+Hellespont was the same as the Dardanelles or as the Bosporus, and when,
+with the help of the guide-book, we decided that it was the former, we
+fell into other luminous debates as to where Leander swam it when he was
+courting Hero and where Xerxes built his bridge. The captain said that
+both these things took place at Abydos, which he pointed out to us, and
+then we were in trouble right away again as to whether this was the
+Abydos of Lord Byron's poem, or merely another town by the same name. At
+all events it was not much of a place.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, the shores of the Dardanelles are mostly barren and
+uninteresting, with small towns here and there and fortifications. At
+one place some men came out in a boat and went through the formality of
+letting us enter the country. It did not seem much of a permission; I
+could have given it myself. But I suppose we had to have theirs;
+otherwise they might have reached us with some kind of a gun.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We entered the Sea of Marmora, passed a barren island or two; then the
+shores fell back beyond the horizon, and most of us put in the rest of
+the day pretending to read up on Constantinople. It was dark when we
+dropped anchor in the mouth of the Bosporus, and we were at dinner&mdash;a
+gala dinner, after which we danced. A third of the way around the world
+to the westward, in a country called America, a new President would be
+inaugurated to-morrow, and in the quiet dusk of our anchorage, with the
+scattered lights of Asia blinking across from one side and a shadowy,
+mysterious grove and a fairy-lighted city on the other, we celebrated
+that great occasion in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> West and our arrival at the foremost mart of
+the East by dancing before Stamboul.</p>
+
+<p>That should have ended our day, but when we were about to break up, a
+boat-load or two of uniformed officials with distinctly Oriental faces
+and fezzes came aboard and opened business in the after cabin, going
+through our passports. Then for an hour or so there was most
+extraordinary medley of confused tongues. We had all our own kinds going
+at once and several varieties of Constantinoplese besides. And what an
+amazing performance it was, altogether&mdash;something not to be equalled
+anywhere else on the earth, I imagine, unless in Russia&mdash;a sufficient
+commentary on the progress and enlightenment of these two laggard
+nations.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_027" id="ILL_027"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_027.jpg" width="500" height="399" alt="ONE&#39;S AGE, STATED ON OATH, GOES WITH A PASSPORT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ONE&#39;S AGE, STATED ON OATH, GOES WITH A PASSPORT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Curious how some of our ladies hesitate about showing their passports.
+One's age, stated on oath, goes with a passport.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>A CITY OF ILLUSION</h3>
+
+<p>I suppose there is no more beautiful city from the outside and no more
+disheartening city from the inside than Constantinople. From the outside
+it is all fairyland and enchantment; from the inside it is all grime and
+wretchedness. Viewed from the entrance of the Bosporus, through the haze
+of morning, it is a vision. Viewed from a carriage driven through the
+streets it becomes a nightmare. If one only might see it as we did&mdash;at
+sunrise, with the minarets and domes lifting from the foliage, all aglow
+with the magic of morning&mdash;and then sail away from that dream spectacle,
+his hunger unsatisfied, he would hold at least one supreme illusion in
+his heart.</p>
+
+<p>For that is what it is&mdash;just an illusion&mdash;the most superb fantasy in the
+whole world. We left anchorage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> soon after sunrise and moved over
+abreast of Galata a little below the bridge that crosses the Golden Horn
+and connects this part of Constantinople with Stamboul. We are lying now
+full length against the street, abreast of it, where all day long a
+soiled, disordered life goes on. It is a perpetual show, but hardly a
+pleasing one. It is besmirched and raucous; it is wretched.</p>
+
+<p>Hawkers, guides, beggars, porters weave in and out and mingle
+vociferously. To leave the ship is to be assailed on every side. Across
+the street is a row of coffee-houses where unholy music and singing keep
+up most of the time. Also, there are dogs, scores of them&mdash;a wolfish
+breed&mdash;and they are seldom silent. This is the reverse of the picture.
+As the outside is fairyland, so this is inferno.</p>
+
+<p>We battled our way to our carriages and drove across the bridge to
+Stamboul. Perhaps it would be better there. But that was a mistake&mdash;it
+was worse. We entered some narrow, thronging streets&mdash;a sort of general
+market, I should say&mdash;that fairly reeked with offal. We saw presently
+that nearly everybody wore rubbers, or stilted shoes&mdash;wooden sandal
+things, with two or three inches of heel and sole&mdash;and we understood
+why; it was to lift them out of the filth. I have had dreams where,
+whichever way I turned, lay ordure and corruption, with no way out on
+any side. Such dreams were hardly worse than this. A passenger of our
+party&mdash;a lady&mdash;said afterwards:</p>
+
+<p>"When we drove through those streets I felt as if I had died and gone to
+hell."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Yet on the whole, I think hell would be cleaner. I am sure it would not
+smell so. I have no special preference for brimstone, but I would have
+welcomed it as we drove through those Constantinople streets.</p>
+
+<p>I know what they smell like; I can describe it exactly: they smell like
+a garbage-can. Not the average garbage-can&mdash;fairly fresh and leading the
+busy life&mdash;but an old, opulent, tired garbage-can&mdash;one that has been
+filled up and overlooked, in August. Now and then at home a can like
+that gets into the garbage-wagon, and when that wagon comes along the
+street on a still summer morning it arrests attention. I have seen
+strong men turn pale and lovely women totter when that can went by.</p>
+
+<p>It would have no distinction in Constantinople. The whole city is just
+one vast garbage-can, and old&mdash;so old&mdash;why, for a thousand years or more
+they have been throwing stuff into the streets for the dogs to eat up,
+and the dogs can't eat some things, and so&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Never mind; enough is enough; but if ever I get home, and if ever I want
+to recall vividly this vision of the East, I shall close my eyes when
+that garbage-wagon drives by, and once more the panaroma&mdash;panorama, I
+mean&mdash;of these thronging streets will unfold; I shall be transported
+once more to the heart of this busy city; I shall see again all the
+outlandish dress, all the strange faces, all the mosques and minarets,
+all the magic of the Orient, and I shall say, "This is it&mdash;this is the
+spicy East&mdash;this is Constantinople&mdash;Allah is indeed good!"</p>
+
+<p>It was at the entrance of the mosque of St. Sophia&mdash;a filthy entrance
+through a sort of an alley&mdash;that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> we heard our first cry of
+"Baksheesh!"&mdash;a plaintive cry from a pretty, pathetic little girl who
+clung to us, and called it over and over like the cry of a soul being
+dragged to perdition&mdash;"Bak-she-<i>e-e-sh</i>! Bak-<i>sh-e-e-e-sh</i>!" a
+long-drawn-out wail. Not one of us who would not have given her freely
+had we not known that to do so would be to touch off the cyclone&mdash;the
+cloud of vultures hovering on the outskirts. One's heart grows hard in
+the East; it has to.</p>
+
+<p>At the door of the mosque there was a group of creatures who put
+slippers on us and made a pretence of tying the wretched things. They
+didn't do it, of course, and one had to slide and skate and straddle to
+keep from losing them&mdash;which thing would be a fearful desecration&mdash;we
+being "Christian dogs." The Apostle in those slippers, skating and
+straddling and puffing his way through St. Sophia's was worth coming far
+to see.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mighty place, a grand place, but it has been described too often
+for me to attempt the details here. It is very, very old, and they have
+some candles there ten feet high and ten inches through (they look
+exactly like smooth marble columns and make the place very holy), and
+there are some good rugs on the floor. Several of our party who are
+interested in such things agreed that the rugs are valuable, though they
+are laid crooked, as they all point toward Mecca, whereas the mosque,
+originally a Christian church, stands with the points of the compass.</p>
+
+<p>It has been built and rebuilt a good many times. The Emperor Justinian
+was its last great builder, and he robbed the ruins of Ephesus and
+Baalbec of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> certain precious columns for his purpose. On Christmas Day,
+537 <span class="smcap">a.d</span>., he finished and dedicated his work. Altogether he had spent
+five million dollars on the undertaking and had nearly bankrupted the
+empire. Nine hundred years later the Turks captured Constantinople, and
+Mohammed II., with drawn sword, rode into St. Sophia's and made the
+bloody handprint which remains the Moslem ruler's sign-manual to this
+day. They showed us the print, but I don't think it is the same one. It
+may be, but I don't think so&mdash;unless Mohammed was riding a camel.</p>
+
+<p>Some kind of ceremony was in progress when we arrived, but as usual in
+such places, we did not mind. We went right in just the same, and our
+guides, too, and we talked and pointed and did what we could to break up
+the services. Old turbaned sons of the Prophet were kneeling and bowing
+and praying here and there, and were a good deal in the way. Sometimes
+we fell over them, but we were charitably disposed and did not kick
+them&mdash;at least, I didn't, and I don't think any of the party did. We
+might kick a dog&mdash;kick at him, I mean&mdash;if we tripped over one, but we do
+not kick a Moslem&mdash;not a live one. We only take his picture and step on
+him and muss him up, and make a few notes and go.</p>
+
+<p>I have been wondering what would happen to a party of tourists&mdash;Moslems,
+for instance&mdash;who broke into an American church during services, with
+guides to point and explain, and stared at the people who were saying
+their prayers, and talked them over as if they were wax figures. An
+American congregation would be annoyed by a mob like that, and would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+remove it and put it in the calaboose. But then such things wouldn't
+happen in America. We have cowed our foreign visitors. Besides, there is
+nothing in an American church that a foreigner would care to see.</p>
+
+<p>We went to other mosques: to Suleiman, to Ahmed, to the "Pigeon" mosque
+with its gentle birds that come in clouds to be fed, but there is a good
+deal of sameness in these splendid edifices. Not that they are alike,
+but they seem alike, with their mellow lights, their alcoves and sacred
+sanctuaries; their gigantic wax candles; their little Turkeys&mdash;Turkish
+boys, I mean&mdash;rocking and singing the Koran, learning to be priests. And
+everywhere, whether it be prayer-time or not, there were old bearded men
+prostrated in worship or bowed in contemplation. Quite frequently we sat
+down on these praying men to rest a little, but they were too absorbed
+to notice it.</p>
+
+<p>There were no women in the mosques. The men supply the souls and the
+religion for the Turkish household. A woman has no use for a soul in
+Turkey. She wouldn't know what to do with it, and it would only make her
+trouble. She is allowed to pretend she has one, however, and to go to
+mosque now and then, just as we allow children to play "store" or
+"keeping-house." But it's make believe. She really hasn't any
+soul&mdash;everybody knows that.</p>
+
+<p>Constantinople is full of landmarks that perpetuate some memory&mdash;usually
+a bloody one&mdash;of the Janizaries. Every little while our guide would say,
+"This is where the Janizaries conquered the forces of Abdullah VI."; or
+"This is where the Janizaries overthrew and assassinated Mahmoud I."; or
+"This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> is where the Janizaries attacked the forces of His Sacred Majesty
+Bismillah II.," and everybody would say, "Oh, yes, of course," and we
+would go on.</p>
+
+<p>I said, "Oh yes, of course," with the others, which made it hard, later
+on, when I had worked up some curiosity on the subject, to ask who in
+the deuce the Janizaries were, anyway, and why they had been allowed to
+do all these bloody things unreproved.</p>
+
+<p>By and by we came to a place where the guide said that eight thousand of
+them had perished in the flames, and added that fifteen thousand more
+had been executed and twenty thousand banished. And we all said, "Oh
+yes, of course," again, and this time I meant it, for I thought that was
+about what would be likely to happen to persons with Janizary habits.
+Then I made a memorandum to look up that tribe when I got back to the
+ship.</p>
+
+<p>I have done so, now. The Janizaries were a body of military police,
+organized about 1330, originally of young Christians compelled to become
+Moslems. They became a powerful and terrible body, by and by, and
+conducted matters with a high hand. They were a wild, impetuous horde,
+and five hundred years of their history is full of assassinations of
+sultans and general ravage and bloodshed. In time they became a great
+deal more dangerous to Turkey than her enemies, but it was not until
+1826 that a sultan, Mahmoud II., managed to arouse other portions of his
+army to that pitch of fanatical zeal which has made Janizaries
+exceedingly scarce ever since. I think our guide is a Janizary&mdash;he has
+the look&mdash;but I have decided not to mention the matter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We skated through mosques and the tombs of sultans and their wives most
+of the day, appraising the rugs and shawls and general <i>bric-&agrave;-brac</i>,
+and dropped into a museum&mdash;the best one, so far, in my opinion. They
+have a sarcophagus of Alexander there&mdash;that is, it was made for
+Alexander, though it is said he never slept in it, which is too bad, if
+true, for it is the most beautiful thing in the world&mdash;regarded by
+experts as the finest existing specimen of Greek art. We lingered a long
+time about that exquisite gem&mdash;long for us&mdash;and bought photographs of it
+when we came away. Then we set out for the Long Street of Smells,
+crossed the Galata bridge, and were at the ship&mdash;home.</p>
+
+<p>We have only made a beginning of Constantinople, for we are to be here
+several days. But if it is all like to-day I could do with less of it. I
+have got enough of that smell to last a good while, and of the
+pandemonium that reigns in this disordered aggregation of thoroughfares,
+humanity and buildings&mdash;this weird phantasmagoria miscalled a city.
+Through my port-hole, now&mdash;I am on the street side&mdash;there comes the most
+devilish concatenation of sounds: dogs barking and yelping, barbaric
+singing, wild mandolin music, all mingled with the cries of the hawkers
+and street arabs, and when I reflect that this is the real inwardness of
+that wonder dream we saw at sunrise, I am filled with a far regret that
+we could not have satisfied ourselves with that vision of paradise and
+sailed away.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE TURK AND SOME OF HIS PHASES</h3>
+
+<p>If one wants to get a fair idea of the mixed population of
+Constantinople, when the city's phantasmagoric life is in full swing, he
+may walk slowly across the Galata bridge, or he may stand still and
+watch the kaleidoscope revolve. Every costume, every color and kind of
+fabric, every type of Oriental will be represented there. It is a wild
+fancy-dress parade let loose&mdash;only that most of the bizarre costumes are
+rather dingy and have the look of belonging to their wearers, which is
+less likely to be so on an artificial occasion.</p>
+
+<p>The red fez predominates as to head-gear, and sanguinary waves of them
+go by. But there is every manner of turban, too, and the different kinds
+are interesting. Some of them are bound with rope or cord; some with
+twisted horsehair (those are Bedouins, I believe); some are wound with
+white muslin&mdash;these are worn by priests&mdash;and some are wound or bound
+with green, which indicates that the wearer is a descendant of Mohammed
+himself&mdash;that is, a "Son of the Prophet." The Prophet seems to have a
+good many descendants&mdash;not so many as Israel had in the same length of
+time, but still an industrious showing.</p>
+
+<p>One might suppose that these wearers of the green turban would be marked
+for special honor, and perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> they are, but by no means are they all
+men of leisure. I saw one "wearer of the green" tooling a tram to the
+Seven Towers, and another son of the Prophet&mdash;a venerable man&mdash;bowed
+beneath a great box until his white beard and the rear elevation of his
+trousers nearly dragged in the dust.</p>
+
+<p>I think, by-the-way, I am more interested in the Turkish trousers than
+in any other article of national dress. They are rather short as to leg,
+but what they lack in length they make up in width and general
+amplitude. There is enough goods in the average pair of Turkish trousers
+to make a whole suit of clothes with material left for repairs. They are
+ridiculous enough from the front and the rear, but I rather like a side
+view best. The long after-part has such a drooping pendulous swing to
+it, and one gets the full value of the outline in profile and can
+calculate just what portion of it is occupied by the owner, and can lose
+himself in speculation as to what the rest is for. I like freedom and
+comfort well enough, too, in my clothes, but I would not be willing to
+sacrifice in the length of my trousers for the sake of that laundry-bag
+effect in the rear. I can admire it, though, and I do, often.</p>
+
+<p>At the Stamboul end of the Galata bridge is the most picturesque group,
+I believe, in the Orient. A coffee-house is there, and in front of it
+all the picture types of the East are gathered, with not a single
+Caucasian face or dress. When I used to look at the gorgeously
+extravagant costumes and the flowing beards and patriarchal faces of the
+paintings and illustrations of the East, I said: "No, they do not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+really exist. They may have done so once, but not to-day. I have seen
+the Indian of my own country in his native sage-brush. And he is no
+longer the Indian of the pictures. His dress is adulterated with
+ready-made trousers and a straw hat; his face is mixed in color and
+feature; with the Orient it must be the same."</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_028" id="ILL_028"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_028.jpg" width="500" height="351" alt="KEYEFF" title="" />
+<span class="caption">KEYEFF</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I was mistaken. All the picture people are collected here, and more than
+picture ever saw. No sober imagination could conceive the scene at the
+end of the Galata bridge. To present it a painter would have to
+inebriate himself, spill his colors all about the place and wind up with
+the jimjams. What do these people do there? They indulge in keyeff.
+There is no English word for keyeff&mdash;no word in any language, probably,
+except Turkish. It is not done in any other language. Keyeff is a
+condition of pure enjoyment, unimpaired even by thought. Over his coffee
+and nargileh the Turk will sit for hours in a thought-vacancy which the
+Western mind can comprehend no more than it can grasp the fourth
+dimension. It is not contemplation&mdash;that would require mental exercise.
+It is absence of thought&mdash;utter absence of effort&mdash;oblivion&mdash;the
+condition for which the Western mind requires chloroform.</p>
+
+<p>From the end of the Galata bridge the thronged streets diverge, and into
+these a motley procession flows. Men of every calling under the
+sun&mdash;merchants, clerks, mechanics, laborers, peddlers, beggars,
+bandits&mdash;all men&mdash;or nearly all, for the Mohammedan woman mostly bides
+at home.</p>
+
+<p>It is just as well that she does, if one may judge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> from the samples.
+She is not interesting, I think. She may be, but my opinion is the other
+way. She dresses in a sort of domino, usually of dingy goods, her feet
+and ankles showing disreputable stockings and shoes. Even the richest
+silk garments, when worn by women&mdash;those one sees on the street&mdash;have a
+way of revealing disgusting foot-gear and hosiery. No, the Mohammedan
+woman is not interesting and she has no soul. I believe the Prophet
+decided that, and I agree with him. If she had one&mdash;a real feminine
+soul&mdash;she would be more particular about these details.</p>
+
+<p>The Turk is a dingy person altogether, and his city is unholy in its
+squalor. Yet the religion of these people commands cleanliness. Only the
+command was not clear enough as to terms. The Prophet bade his followers
+to be as cleanly as possible. There was latitude in an order like that,
+and they have been widening it ever since. I don't believe they are as
+"clean as possible." They pray five times a day, and they wash before
+prayer, but they wash too little and pray too much for the best results.
+I mean so far as outward appearance is concerned. Very likely their
+souls are perfect.</p>
+
+<p>At all events they are sober. The Prophet commanded abstinence, and I
+saw no drunkenness. There are no saloons in Constantinople. One may buy
+"brandy-sticks"&mdash;canes with long glass phials concealed in them and a
+tiny glass for tippling&mdash;though I suspect these are sold mostly to
+visitors.</p>
+
+<p>You are in the business part of Constantinople as soon as you leave the
+bridge&mdash;in the markets and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> shops, and presently in the bazaars. The
+streets are only a few feet wide, and are swarming with men and beasts
+of burden, yet carriages dash through, and the population falls out of
+the way, cursing the "Christian dogs," no doubt, in the case of
+tourists. Yet let a carriage but stop and there is eager attention on
+every hand&mdash;a lavish willingness to serve, to dance attendance, to
+grovel, to do anything that will bring return.</p>
+
+<p>The excursionist, in fact, presently gets an idea that these people are
+conducting a sort of continuous entertainment for his benefit&mdash;a
+permanent World's Fair Midway Plaisance, as it were, where curious wares
+and sights are arranged for his special diversion. He is hardly to be
+blamed for this notion. He sees every native ready to jump to serve
+him&mdash;to leave everything else for his pleasure. The shopkeeper will let
+a native customer wait and fume till doomsday as long as the tourist is
+even a prospect. The native piastre is nothing to him when American gold
+is in sight. That is what he lives for by day and dreams of by night. He
+will sweat for it, lie for it, steal for it, die for it. It is his life,
+his hope, his salvation. He will give everything but his immortal soul
+for the gold of the West, and he would give that too, if it would bring
+anything.</p>
+
+<p>Most places along the Mediterranean deal in mixed moneys, but compared
+with Constantinople the financial problem elsewhere is simple. Here the
+traveller's pocket is a medley of francs, lire, crowns, piastres,
+drachmas, marks, and American coins of various denominations. He tries
+feebly to keep track of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> table values, but it is no use. The crafty
+shopkeepers, who have all the world's monetary lore at their fingertips,
+rob him every time they make change, and the more he tries to figure the
+more muddled he gets, until he actually can't calculate the coin of his
+own realm.</p>
+
+<p>As for Turkish money, in my opinion it is worth nothing whatever. It is
+mostly a lot of tinware and plated stuff, and the plating is worn off,
+and the hieroglyphics, and it was never anything more than a lot of
+silly medals in the beginning. Whenever I get any of it I work it off on
+beggars as quickly as possible for baksheesh, and I always feel guilty,
+and look the other way and sing a little to forget.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody really knows what any of those Turkish metallic coins are
+supposed to be worth. One of them will pay for a shine, but then the
+shine isn't worth anything, either, so that is no basis of value. There
+is actually no legal tender in Turkey. How could there be, with a
+make-believe money like that?</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of bootblacks, they all sit in a row at the other end of the
+Galata bridge, and they go to sleep over your shoes and pretend to work
+on them and take off the polish you gave them yourself in the morning.
+They have curious-looking boxes, and their work is as nearly useless as
+any effort, if it is that, I have ever known.</p>
+
+<p>I have been trying for a page or two to say something more about the
+streets of Constantinople, and now I've forgotten what it was I wanted
+to say. Most of them are not streets at all, in fact, but alleys,
+wretched alleys&mdash;some of them roofed over&mdash;and as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> you drive through
+them your face gets all out of shape trying to fit itself to the sights
+and smells. I remember now; I wanted to mention the donkeys&mdash;the poor,
+patient little beasts of burden that plod through those thoroughfares,
+weighed down with great loads of brick and dirt and wood and every sort
+of heavy thing, enough to make a camel sway-backed, I should think. They
+are the gentlest creatures alive, and the most imposed upon. If Mohammed
+provided a heaven for the donkeys, I hope it isn't the one the Turks go
+to.</p>
+
+<p>Then there are the fountains&mdash;that is, the public watering-places. They
+are nearly all carved in relief and belong to an earlier period, when
+art here was worth something. Here and there is a modern one&mdash;gaudy,
+tinsel, wretched.</p>
+
+<p>But one has to stop a minute to remember that these old streets are not
+always occupied by the turbans and fezzes of the unspeakable Turk.
+Constantinople was Greek in the beginning, founded away back, six
+hundred years or more <span class="smcap">b.c</span>., and named Byzantium, after one Byzas, its
+founder. The colony had started to settle several miles farther up the
+Golden Horn, when a crow came along and carried off a piece of their
+sacrificial meat. They were mad at first; but when they found he had
+dropped it over on Bosporus Point they concluded to take his judgment
+and settle there instead.</p>
+
+<p>Then came a good many changes. Persians and Greeks held the place by
+turns, and by and by it was allied to Rome. The Christian Emperor
+Constantine made it his capital about 328 <span class="smcap">a.d</span>. and called it New<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> Rome.
+But the people wouldn't have that title. Constantine had rebuilt the
+city, and they insisted on giving it his name. So Constantinople it
+became and remained&mdash;the names Galata, Pera, Stamboul, and Skutari
+(accent on the "Sku") being merely divisions, the last-named on the
+Asiatic side.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until eleven hundred years after Constantine that the
+Turkomans swarmed in and possessed themselves of what had become a
+tottering empire. So the Turkish occupation is comparatively
+recent&mdash;only since 1453.</p>
+
+<p>Still, that is a good while ago, when one considers what has been done
+elsewhere. Christopher Columbus was playing marbles in Genoa, or helping
+his father comb wool, then. America was a place of wigwams&mdash;a habitation
+of Indian tribes. We have done a good deal in the four and a half
+centuries since&mdash;more than the Turk will do in four and a half million
+years. The Turk is not an express train. He is not even a slow freight.
+He is not a train at all, but an old caboose on the hind end of day
+before yesterday. By the way, I know now why these old cities have still
+older cities buried under them. They never clean the streets, and a city
+gets entirely covered up at last with dirt.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I have been wanting to speak of the dogs of Constantinople ever since I
+began this chapter. They have been always in my mind, but I wanted to
+work off my ill-nature, first, on the Turk. For I have another feeling
+for the dogs&mdash;a friendly feeling&mdash;a sympathetic feeling&mdash;an affectionate
+feeling.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Every morning at four o'clock the dogs of Constantinople turn their
+faces toward Mecca and howl their heartbreak to the sky. At least, I
+suppose they turn toward Mecca&mdash;that being the general habit here when
+one has anything official to give out. I know they howl and bark and
+make such a disturbance as is heard nowhere else on earth. In America,
+two or three dogs will keep a neighborhood awake, but imagine a vast
+city of dogs all barking at once&mdash;forty or fifty dogs to the block,
+counting the four sides! Do you think you could sleep during that
+morning orison? If you could, then you are sound-proof.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that I have an affection for the dogs, but not at that hour.
+It develops later, when things have quieted down, and I have had
+breakfast and am considering them over the ship's side. There is a band
+of them owns this section of the water-front, and they are worth
+studying.</p>
+
+<p>They are not as unsightly and as wretched as I expected to find them.
+Life for them is not a path of roses, but neither is it a trail of
+absolute privation. They live on refuse, and there is plenty of refuse.
+They are in fair condition, therefore, as to flesh, and they do not look
+particularly unhappy, though they are dirty enough, and sometimes mangy
+and moth-eaten and tufty; but then the Turks themselves are all of these
+things, and why should the dogs be otherwise?</p>
+
+<p>The type of these dogs impresses me. They have reverted to the original
+pattern&mdash;they are wolf-dogs. They vary only in color&mdash;usually some tone
+of grizzly gray&mdash;and not widely in that. They have returned to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> race&mdash;to
+the old wild breed that made his bed in the grass and revolved three
+times before he was ready to lie down. One might expect them to be ugly
+and dangerous, but they are not. They are the kindest, gentlest members
+of the dog family notwithstanding the harsh treatment they receive, and
+the most intelligent. No one really human can study them without
+sympathy and admiration.</p>
+
+<p>I have watched these dogs a good deal since we came here, and a lady of
+Constantinople, the wife of a foreign minister, has added largely to my
+information on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>They are quite wonderful in many ways. They have divided themselves into
+groups or squads, and their territory into districts, with borders
+exactly defined. They know just about how much substance each district
+will supply and the squads are not allowed to grow. There is a captain
+to each of these companies, and his rule is absolute. When the garbage
+from each house is brought out and dumped into the street, he oversees
+the distribution and keeps order. He keeps it, too. There is no fighting
+and very little discord, unless some outlaw dog from a neighboring group
+attempts to make an incursion. Then there is a wild outbreak, and if the
+dog escapes undamaged he is lucky.</p>
+
+<p>The captain of a group is a sultan with the power of life and death over
+his subjects. When puppies come along he designates the few&mdash;the very
+few&mdash;that are to live, and one mother nurses several of the reduced
+litters&mdash;the different mothers taking turns. When a dog gets too old to
+be useful in the strenuous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> round&mdash;when he is no longer valuable to the
+band&mdash;he is systematically put out of the way by starvation. A day comes
+when the captain issues some kind of an edict that he is no longer to
+have food. From that moment, until his death, not a morsel passes his
+lips. With longing eyes he looks at the others eating, but he makes no
+attempt to join them. Now and again a bit of something falls his way.
+The temptation is too strong&mdash;he reaches toward the morsel. The captain,
+who overlooks nothing, gives a low growl. The dying creature shrinks
+back without a murmur. He knows the law. Perhaps he, too, was once a
+captain.</p>
+
+<p>The minister's wife told me that she had tried to feed one of those
+dying dogs, but that even when the food was placed in front of him he
+would only look pleadingly at the captain and refuse to touch it. She
+brought him inside, at last, where he was no longer under that deadly
+surveillance. He ate then, but lived only a little while. Perhaps it was
+too late; perhaps the decree was not to be disobeyed, even there.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, it is unwise to show kindness or the least attention to these
+dogs, she said. The slightest word or notice unlocks such a store-house
+of gratitude and heart-hunger in those poor creatures that one can never
+venture near that neighborhood again without being fairly overwhelmed
+with devotion. Speak a word to one of them and he will desert his
+companions and follow you for miles.</p>
+
+<p>The minister's wife told how once a male member of her household had
+shown some mark of attention<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> to one of the dogs of their neighborhood
+group. A day or two later she set out for a walk, carrying her parasol,
+holding it downward. Suddenly she felt it taken from her hand. Looking
+down, she saw a dog walking by her side, carrying it. It was the favored
+animal, trying to make return to any one who came out of that heavenly
+house.</p>
+
+<p>She told me how in the winter the dogs pile up in pyramids to keep warm,
+and how those underneath, when they have smothered as long as they can,
+will work out and get to the top of the heap and let the others have a
+chance to get warm and smothered too.</p>
+
+<p>Once, when some excavations were going on in her neighborhood the dogs
+of several bands, made kin by a vigorous touch of nature, cold, had
+packed themselves into a sort of tunnel which the workmen had made. One
+dog who had come a little late was left outside. He made one or two
+efforts to get a position, but it was no use. He reflected upon the
+situation and presently set up a loud barking. That was too much for
+those other dogs. They came tumbling out to see what had happened, but
+before they had a chance to find out, the late arrival had slipped
+quietly in and established himself in the warmest place.</p>
+
+<p>Once a pasha visited a certain neighborhood in Pera, and the dogs kept
+him awake. In his irritation he issued an order that the dogs of that
+environment should be killed. The order was carried out, and for a day
+and a night there was silence there. But then the word had gone forth
+that a section of rich territory had been vacated, and there was a rush
+for it that was like the occupation of the Oklahoma strip.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was trouble, too, in establishing the claim and electing officers.
+No such excitement and commotion and general riot had ever been known in
+that street before. It lasted two days and nights. Then everything was
+peaceable enough. Captains had fought their way to a scarred and limping
+victory. Claims had been duly surveyed and distributed. The pasha had
+retired permanently from the neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p>It is against the law for the ordinary citizen to kill one of the dogs.
+They are scavengers, and the law protects them. One may kick and beat
+and scald and maim them, and the Turk has a habit of doing these things;
+but he must not kill them&mdash;not unless he is a pasha. And, after all, the
+dogs own Constantinople&mdash;the pariah dogs, I mean; there are few of the
+other kind. One seldom sees a pet dog on the streets. The pariah dogs do
+not care for him. They do not attack him, they merely set up a racket
+which throws that pet dog into a fever and fills him with an abiding
+love of home. But I am dwelling too long on this subject. I enjoy
+writing about these wonderful dogs. They interest me.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the "Young Turks" will improve Constantinople. Already they have
+made the streets safer; perhaps they will make them cleaner. Also, they
+may improve the Turkish postal service. That would be a good place to
+begin, I should think. Constantinople has a native post-office, but it
+isn't worth anything. Anybody who wants a letter to arrive sends it
+through one of the foreign post-offices, of which each European nation
+supports one on its own account. To trust a letter to the Turkish
+post-office is to bid it a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> permanent good-bye. The officials will open
+it for money first, and soak off the stamp afterward. If you inquire
+about it, they will tell you it was probably seditionary and destroyed
+by the sultan's orders. Perhaps that will not be so any more. The
+sultan's late force of twenty thousand spies has been disbanded, and
+things to-day are on a much more liberal basis. Two royal princes came
+aboard our vessel to-day, unattended except by an old marshal&mdash;something
+which has never happened here before.</p>
+
+<p>These princes have been virtually in prison all their lives. Until very
+recently they had never left the palace except under guard. They had
+never been aboard a vessel until they came aboard the <i>Kurf&uuml;rst</i>, and
+though grown men, they were like children in their manner and their
+curiosity. They had never seen a type-writer. They had never seen a
+steam-engine. Our chief engineer took them down among the machinery and
+they were delighted. They greeted everybody, saluted everybody, and
+drove away at last in their open victoria drawn by two white horses,
+with no outriders, no guards, no attendants of any kind except the old
+marshal&mdash;a thing which only a little while ago would not have been
+dreamed of as possible.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps there is hope for Turkey, after all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+<h3>ABDUL HAMID GOES TO PRAYER</h3>
+
+<p>It was on our second day in Constantinople that we saw the
+Selamlik&mdash;that is, the Sultan Abdul Hamid II. on his way to prayer. It
+was Friday, which is the Mohammedan Sunday, and the sultan, according to
+his custom, went to the mosque in state. The ceremony was, in fact, a
+grand military review, with twenty-five thousand soldiers drawn up on
+the hillside surrounding the royal mosque, and many bands of music; the
+whole gay and resplendent with the varied uniforms of different
+brigades, the trappings of high officials, the flutter of waving
+banners, the splendor of royal cort&eacute;ge&mdash;all the fuss and fanfare of this
+fallen king.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p>For Abdul Hamid is no longer monarch except by sufferance. A tyrant who
+in his time has ordered the massacre of thousands; has imprisoned and
+slain members of his own family; has sent a multitude to the Bosporus
+and into exile; has maintained in this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> enlightened day a court and a
+rule of the Middle Ages&mdash;he is only a figurehead now, likely to be
+removed at a moment's warning.</p>
+
+<p>The Young Turk is in the saddle. Hamid's force of twenty thousand spies
+has been disbanded. Men-of-war lie in the Bosporus just under Yildiz,
+ready to open fire on that royal palace at the first sign of any
+disturbance there. The tottering old man is still allowed his royal
+guard, his harem, and this weekly ceremonial and display to keep up a
+semblance of imperial power. But he is only a make-believe king; the
+people know that, and he knows it, too, best of all.</p>
+
+<p>We had special invitations from the palace and a special enclosure from
+which to view the ceremony. We had cakes, too, and sherbet served while
+we waited&mdash;by the sultan's orders, it was said&mdash;but I didn't take any. I
+thought Abdul might have heard I didn't care for him and put poison in
+mine. That would be like him.</p>
+
+<p>I was tempted, though, for we had driven a long way through the blinding
+dust. It was hot there, and we had to stand up and keep on standing up
+while all that great review got together and arranged and rearranged
+itself; while officials and black Nubian eunuchs, those sexless slaves
+of the harem, ran up and down, and men sanded the track&mdash;that is, the
+road over which his majesty was to drive&mdash;and did a hundred other things
+to consume time.</p>
+
+<p>One does not hurry the Orient&mdash;one waits on it. That is a useful
+maxim&mdash;I'm glad I invented it. I said it over about a hundred times
+while we stood there waiting for Abdul Hamid, who was dallying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> with
+certain favorites, like as not, and remembering us not at all.</p>
+
+<p>It was worth seeing, though. Brigade after brigade swung by to the weird
+music of their bands&mdash;billow after billow of brown, red, and blue
+uniforms. The hillside became a perfect storm of fezzes; the tide of
+spectators rose till its waves touched the housetops.</p>
+
+<p>Still we waited and watched the clock on the mosque. Nobody can tell
+time by a Turkish clock, but there was some comfort in watching it.
+Presently an informing person at my side explained that Turkish
+chronology is run on an altogether different basis from ours. There are
+only three hundred and fifty-four days in a Turkish year, he said, which
+makes the seasons run out a good deal faster, so that it is usually
+about year after next in Turkey; but as it is only about day before
+yesterday by the clock, the balance is kept fairly even.</p>
+
+<p>He was a very entertaining person. Referring to the music, he said that
+once the sultan's special brass band had played before him so pleasingly
+that he ordered all their instruments filled with gold, which was well
+enough, except for the piccolo-player, who said: "Sire, I am left out of
+this reward." "Never mind," said the sultan, "your turn will come." And
+it did, next day, for the band played so badly that the sultan roared
+out: "Ram all their instruments down their throats," which was
+impossible, of course, except in the case of the piccolo-player.</p>
+
+<p>My entertainer said that formerly cameras were allowed at the Selamlik,
+but that an incident occurred which resulted in prohibiting cameras and
+all suspicious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> articles. He said that a gentleman engaged a carriage
+for the Selamlik, and explained to the driver that he had invented a
+wonderful new camera&mdash;one that would take pictures in all the
+colors&mdash;and instructed him just how to work the machine.</p>
+
+<p>The gentleman had to make a train, he said, and couldn't wait for the
+sultan to arrive, but if the driver would press the button when the
+sultan reached a certain place the picture would take, after which the
+driver could bring the camera to the Pera Palace Hotel on a certain day
+and get a hundred piastres, a sum larger than the driver had ever owned
+at one time. Then the gentleman left in a good deal of a hurry, and the
+driver told all the other drivers about his good-fortune while they
+waited; and by and by, when the sultan came, and got just to the place
+where the gentleman had said, the driver pressed the button, and blew a
+hole seventy-five feet wide and thirty feet deep right on that spot, and
+it rained drivers and horses and fezzes and things for seven minutes. It
+didn't damage the sultan any, but it gave him a permanent distaste for
+cameras and other suspicious objects.</p>
+
+<p>Laura, age fourteen, who had been listening to the story, said:</p>
+
+<p>"Did they do anything to the driver who did it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; they gathered him up in a cigar box and gave him a funeral. No,
+the man didn't call for the camera."</p>
+
+<p>I am sorry I have kept the reader waiting for the Selamlik, but the
+sultan is to blame. One may not hurry a sultan, and one must fill in the
+time, somehow.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Some carriages go by at last, and enter the mosque enclosure, but they
+do not contain the sultan, only some of his favorite wives, with those
+long black eunuchs running behind. Then there is a carriage with a
+little boy in it&mdash;the sultan's favorite son, it is said&mdash;the most
+beautiful child I ever saw.</p>
+
+<p>A blare of trumpets&mdash;all the bayonets straight up&mdash;a gleaming forest of
+them. Oh, what a bad time to fall out of a balloon!</p>
+
+<p>A shout from the troops&mdash;a huzzah, timed and perfunctory, but general.
+Then men in uniform, walking ahead; a carriage with a splendid driver; a
+pale, bearded, hook-nosed old man with a tired, rather vacant face. Here
+and there he touches his forehead and his lips with his fingers, waving
+the imperial salute. For a moment every eye of that vast concourse is
+upon him&mdash;he is the one important bauble of that splendid setting. Then
+he has passed between the gates and is gone.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was that Sultan Abdul Hamid attended mosque. It seemed a good
+deal of fuss to make over an old man going to prayer.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We drove from the Selamlik to the Dancing Dervishes. I have always heard
+of them and now I have seen them. I am not sorry to have it over.</p>
+
+<p>Their headquarters are in a weather-beaten-frame-barn of a place, and we
+stood outside for a long time before the doors were open. Inside it was
+hot and close and crowded, and everybody twisted this way and that and
+stood up on things to get a look. I held two women together on one
+chair&mdash;they were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> standing up&mdash;and I expected to give out any minute and
+turn loose a disaster that would break up the show. There wasn't
+anything to see, either; not a thing, for hours.</p>
+
+<p>We were in a sort of circular gallery and the dancing-floor was below.
+We could see squatted there a ring of men&mdash;a dozen or so bowed, solemn,
+abstracted high priests in gowns of different colors and tall fezzes.
+These were the dervishes, no doubt, but they didn't do anything&mdash;not a
+thing&mdash;and we didn't care to stare at them and at the dancing-floor and
+the rest of the suffering audience forever.</p>
+
+<p>Then we noticed in our gallery a little reserved section with some more
+abstracted men in gowns and fezzes, and after a long time&mdash;as much as a
+thousand years, I should think&mdash;there was an almost imperceptible
+movement in this reserved compartment, and one of the elect produced
+some kind of reed and began to blow a strain that must have been born
+when the woods were temples and the winds were priests&mdash;it was so
+weirdly, mournfully enthralling. I could have listened to that music and
+forgotten all the world if I hadn't been busy holding those two women on
+that chair.</p>
+
+<p>The perspiration ran down and my joints petrified while that music
+droned on and on. Then there was another diversion: a man got up and
+began to sing. I don't know why they picked that particular
+man&mdash;certainly not for his voice. It was Oriental singing&mdash;a sort of
+chanting monotone in a nasal pitch. Yet there was something wild and
+seductive about it&mdash;something mystical&mdash;and I liked it well enough.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+Only I didn't want it to go on forever, situated as I was. I wanted the
+dancing to begin, and pretty soon, too. It didn't, however. Nothing
+begins soon in the Orient.</p>
+
+<p>But by-and-by, when that songster had wailed for as much as a week,
+those high priests on the dancing-floor began to show signs of life.
+They moved a little; they got up; they went through some slow
+evolutions&mdash;to limber themselves, perhaps&mdash;then they began to whirl.</p>
+
+<p>The dance is a religious rite, and it is supposed to represent the
+planets revolving about the sun. The dancers serve an apprenticeship of
+one thousand and one days, and they can whirl and keep on whirling
+forever without getting dizzy. The central figure, who represents the
+sun, has had the most practice, no doubt, for he revolves just twice as
+fast as the planets, who are ranged in two circles around him. His
+performance is really wonderful. I did not think so much of the others,
+except as to their ability to stand upright. I thought I could revolve
+as fast as they did, myself, and I would have given four dollars for a
+little freedom just then to try it.</p>
+
+<p>Would that constellation never run down? The satellites whirled on and
+on, and the high priest in the middle either got faster or I imagined
+it. Then at last they stopped&mdash;just stopped&mdash;that was all; only I let go
+of those two women then and clawed my way to fresh air.</p>
+
+<p>We went to the bazaars after that. There is where the <i>Kurf&uuml;rster</i> finds
+real bliss. He may talk learnedly of historic sites and rave over superb
+ruins<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> and mosques and such things, when you drag him in carriages to
+see them. But only say the word bazaar to him and he will walk three
+miles to find it. To price the curious things of the East; to barter and
+beat down; to walk away and come back a dozen times; to buy at last at a
+third of the asking price&mdash;such is the passion that presently gets hold
+of the irresponsible tourist who lives on one ship and has a permanent
+state-room for his things.</p>
+
+<p>You should see some of those state-rooms! Jars, costumes, baskets, rugs,
+draperies, statuary&mdash;piled everywhere, hung everywhere, stowed
+everywhere&mdash;why, we could combine the stuff on this ship and open a
+floating bazaar that would be the wonder of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The bazaars of Constantinople are crowded together and roofed over, and
+there are narrow streets and labyrinthine lanes. One can buy anything
+there&mdash;anything Eastern: ornaments, inlaid work, silks, curious weapons,
+picture postals (what <i>did</i> those <i>Quaker City</i> pilgrims do without
+them?), all the wares of the Orient&mdash;he can get a good deal for a little
+if he is patient and unyielding&mdash;and he will be cheated every time he
+makes change. Never mind; one's experience is always worth something,
+and this particular tariff is not likely to be high.</p>
+
+<p>We bought several things in Constantinople, but we did not buy any
+confections. The atmosphere did not seem suited to bonbons, and the
+places where such things were sold did not look inviting. Laura
+inspected the assortment and decided that the best Turkish Delight is
+made in America, and that Broadway<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> is plenty far enough east for
+nougat. In one bazaar they had a marvellous collection of royal jewels:
+swords with incrusted handles; caskets "worth a king's ransom"&mdash;simply a
+mass of rubies, emeralds, and diamonds&mdash;half a barrel of such things, at
+least, but we didn't buy any of those goods, either. We would have done
+so, of course, only they were not for sale.</p>
+
+<p>We called at the bazaar of Far-away Moses, but he wasn't there. He died
+only a little while ago, and has gone to that grand bazaar of delight
+which the Mohammedans have selected as their heaven.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, Laura and I were the last to leave. We were still pulling over
+some things when our driver, whom we call Suleiman because he has such a
+holy, villanous look, came suddenly to the entrance, waving frantically.
+We started then and piled into our carriage. The rest of our party were
+already off, and we set out helter-skelter after them, Suleiman probably
+believing that the ship had its anchors up ready to sail.</p>
+
+<p>We were doing very well when right in front of a great arch one of our
+horses fell down. We had a crowd in a minute, and as it was getting dusk
+I can't say that I liked the situation. But Suleiman got the horse on
+his feet somehow, and we pushed along and once more entered that
+diabolical Street of Smells. It had been bad day by day, but nothing to
+what it was now. There were no lights, except an oil-lamp here and
+there; the place was swarming with humanity and dogs, general vileness
+permeating everything. The woman who thought she had died and gone to
+hell could be certain of it here.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It seemed that we would never get out of that street. We had to go
+slower, and the horrible gully was eternal in its length. How far ahead
+our party was we did not know. We were entirely alone in that unholy
+neighborhood with our faithful Suleiman, who looked like a cutthroat,
+anyhow. I wished he didn't look like that, and Laura said quietly that
+she never expected to see the light of another dawn.</p>
+
+<p>Bumpety-bump&mdash;bark, howl, clatter, darkness, stench&mdash;rolling and
+pitching through that mess, and then, heavenly sight&mdash;a vision of
+lights, water, the end of the Galata bridge!</p>
+
+<p>We made our way through the evening jam and the wild bedlam at the other
+end, crossing a crimson tide of fezzes, to reach the one clean place we
+have seen in Constantinople&mdash;that is, the ship. The ship is clean&mdash;too
+clean, we think, when we hear them scrubbing and mopping and thumping
+the decks at four o'clock in the morning, just about dog-howling time.
+Which brings me to a specimen of our ship German&mdash;American
+German&mdash;produced by a gentle soul named Fosdick, of Ohio. He used it on
+the steward after being kept awake by the ship-cleaning. This is what he
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Vas in damnation is das noise? How can I schlaff mit das hellgefired
+donner-wetter going on oben mine head?"</p>
+
+<p>That is the sort of thing we can do when we get really stirred up. It is
+effective, too. There was no unseemly noise this morning.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+<h3>LOOKING DOWN ON YILDIZ</h3>
+
+<p>Heretofore, during our stay here, whenever any one happened to mention
+the less attractive aspects of Constantinople, I have said:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the city is pretty bad, but I'll wager the country is a dream.
+Remember Algiers and her suburban villas? It will be the same here."</p>
+
+<p>I do not say that any more, now that we have been to the country. We
+went over to Skutari (Asiatic Constantinople) this morning, and took
+carriages to Bulgurlu Mountain, which overlooks all the city and a vast
+stretch of country. It is a good view, but it should be, considering
+what it costs to get there&mdash;in wear and tear, I mean.</p>
+
+<p>Of all villanous roads, those outside Skutari are the most depraved.
+They are not roads at all, but just washes and wallows and ditches and
+stone gullies. I have seen bad roads in Virginia&mdash;roads surveyed by
+George Washington, and never touched since&mdash;but they were a dream of
+luxury as compared with these of Turkey. Our carriages billowed and
+bobbed and pitched and humped themselves until I got out and walked to
+keep from being lamed for life.</p>
+
+<p>And then the houses&mdash;the villas I had expected to see; dear me, how can
+I picture those cheap, ugly, unpainted, overdecorated architectural
+crimes? They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> are wooden and belong to the jig-saw period gone mad. They
+suggest an owner who has been too busy saving money for a home to
+acquire any taste; who has spent his savings for lumber and trimmings
+and has nothing left for paint. Still, he managed to reserve enough to
+put iron bars on his windows&mdash;that is, on part of the house&mdash;the
+harem&mdash;every man becoming his own jailer, as it were. I remarked:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose that is to keep the neighbors from stealing their wives."</p>
+
+<p>But the Horse-Doctor&mdash;wiser and more observant&mdash;said:</p>
+
+<p>"No, it is to keep a neighbor from breaking in and leaving another."</p>
+
+<p>Standing on the top of Bulgurlu&mdash;looking down on the Bosporus and the
+royal palaces&mdash;the wife of a foreign minister told us something of the
+history that has been written there:</p>
+
+<p>When Abdul Aziz, in 1876, became Abdul "as was"<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> (his veins were
+opened with a penknife, I believe), one Murad, his nephew, an educated
+and travelled prince, came into power. But Murad was for
+progress&mdash;bridges and railroads&mdash;so Murad retired to Cheragan Palace,
+where for thirty-two years he sat at a window and looked out on a world
+in which he had no part, while Abdul Hamid II. reigned in his stead.
+Murad was wise and gentle, and did not reproach Abdul, who came to him
+now and again for advice concerning matters of state.</p>
+
+<p>But Murad was fond of watching the people from his window&mdash;excursion
+parties such as ours, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> like&mdash;and these in turn used to look up
+at Murad's window; which things in time came to Abdul Hamid's ears. Then
+Abdul decided that this indulgence was not good for Murad&mdash;nor for the
+people. Thirty-two years was already too long for that sort of thing. So
+Murad's face disappeared from the window, and it was given out that he
+had died&mdash;the bulletin did not say what of, but merely mentioned that it
+had been a "general death"&mdash;that is to say, a natural death, under the
+circumstances&mdash;the kind of death a retired Sultan is likely to die. And
+Abdul mourned for Murad many days, and gave him a costly funeral.</p>
+
+<p>That was Abdul's way. He was always a good brother&mdash;always a generous
+soul&mdash;according to a guide-book published in Constantinople during the
+time when there were twenty thousand secret agents inspecting such
+things. The author of that book wanted those twenty thousand secret
+agents to tell Abdul how good and gentle the book said he was;
+otherwise, the modest and humble Abdul might not remember. Besides, that
+author did not wish to disappear from among his friends and be sewed up
+in a sack and dropped into the Bosporus some quiet evening. But I
+wander&mdash; I always wander.</p>
+
+<p>Abdul Hamid is said to be affectionate with his family&mdash;all his
+family&mdash;and quick&mdash;very quick&mdash;that is to say, impulsive. He is a crack
+shot, too, and keeps pistols on his dressing-table. One day he saw one
+of his little sons&mdash;or it may have been one of his little daughters (it
+isn't always easy to tell them apart, when they are so plentiful and
+dress a good deal alike), but anyway this was a favorite of Abdul's&mdash;he
+saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> this child handling one of his pistols, perhaps playfully pointing
+it in his direction.</p>
+
+<p>Hamid didn't tell the child to put the weapon down, and then lecture
+him. No, he couldn't scold the child, he was too impulsive for that&mdash;and
+quick, as I have mentioned. He drew a revolver of his own and shot the
+child dead. There were rumors of plots floating around the palace just
+then, and Hamid wasn't taking any chances. It must have made his heart
+bleed to have to punish the child in that sudden way.</p>
+
+<p>But by-and-by the times were out of joint for sultans. A spirit of
+discontent was spreading&mdash;there was a cry for freer government. Enver
+Bey and Niazi Bey, those two young officers whose names are being
+perpetuated by male babies in every Turkish household, disguised
+themselves as newsboys or bootblacks, and going among the people of the
+streets whispered the gospel of freedom. Then one day came the upheaval
+of which all the world has read. Abdul Hamid one morning, looking out of
+his window in Yildiz Palace, saw, lying in the Bosporus just below, the
+men-of-war which all the years of his reign had been turning to rust and
+wormwood in the Golden Horn.</p>
+
+<p>Abdul did not believe it at first. He thought he was just having one of
+those bad dreams that had pestered him now and then since spies and
+massacres had become unpopular. He pinched himself and rubbed his eyes,
+but the ships stayed there. Then he sent for the Grand Vizier. (At
+least, I suppose it was the Grand Vizier&mdash;that is what a sultan
+generally sends for in a case like that.) When he arrived the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> Sultan
+was fingering his artillery and looking dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>"What in h&mdash;&mdash; that is, Allah be praised, but why, sirrah, are those
+ships lying down there?" he roared.</p>
+
+<p>The G.&nbsp;V. was not full of vain knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I really don't know, Your Majesty," he said, soothingly. "I will go
+and see."</p>
+
+<p>He was standing near the door and dodged as he went out. He did not come
+back. When he had inquired about the ships he decided not to seek Abdul
+himself, but to send a man&mdash;a cheap man&mdash;to tell him about it. This was
+just a dull fellow with not much politeness and no imagination.</p>
+
+<p>"The ships are there by the order of the Minister of Marine, Your
+Majesty," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Abdul was so astonished that he forgot to slay the fellow.</p>
+
+<p>"Bring the Minister of Marine!" he gasped, when at last he could catch
+his breath.</p>
+
+<p>The Minister of Marine came&mdash;a new minister&mdash;one of the Young Turk
+Party. He was polite, but not upset by the Sultan's emotion. When Abdul
+demanded the reason why the old ships had been furbished up and brought
+down into the Bosporus, he replied that they were there by his orders,
+and added:</p>
+
+<p>"We think they look better there, Your Majesty, as in the old days."</p>
+
+<p>"But, by the beard of the Prophet, I will not have them there! Take them
+away!"</p>
+
+<p>"Your Majesty, it grieves me to seem discourteous, not to say rude, but
+those ships are to remain at their present anchorage. It grieves me
+still further to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> appear to be firm, not to say harsh, but if there is
+any show of resistance in this neighborhood they have orders to open
+fire on Your Majesty's palace."</p>
+
+<p>Abdul took a chair and sat down. His jaw dropped, and he looked at the
+Minister of Marine a good while without seeming to see him. Then he got
+up and tottered over to the window and gazed out on those ships lying
+just below, on the Bosporus. By-and-by, he went to a little ornamental
+table and took a pen and some paper and wrote an order in this wise:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Owing to my declining years and my great burdens of
+responsibility, it is my wish that in future all matters
+pertaining to the army and navy be under the supervision of
+the Secretary of War and the Minister of Marine.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 34em;"><span class="smcap">Abdul Hamid, Kahn II</span>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 34em;">Son of the Prophet&mdash;Shadow of God, etc., etc.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>At all events, that was the purport of it. In reality, it was a
+succession of wriggly marks which only a Moslem could read. Never mind,
+it was a graceful surrender.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There is a wonderful old Moslem cemetery near Bulgurlu&mdash;one of the
+largest in the world and the most thickly planted. It is favored by
+Moslems because it is on the side of the city nearest Mecca, and they
+are lying there three deep and have overflowed into the roads and
+byways. Their curiously shaped and elaborately carved headstones stand
+as thick as grain&mdash;some of them crowned with fezzes&mdash;some with suns&mdash;all
+of them covered with emblems and poetry and passages from the Koran.
+They are tumbled this way and that; they are lying everywhere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> along the
+road; they have been built into the wayside walls.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 331px;"><a name="ILL_029" id="ILL_029"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_029.jpg" width="331" height="500" alt="I WANTED TO CARRY AWAY ONE OF THOSE TOMBSTONES" title="" />
+<span class="caption">I WANTED TO CARRY AWAY ONE OF THOSE TOMBSTONES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I wanted to carry away one of those tombstones&mdash;one of the old ones&mdash;and
+I would have done it if I had known enough Moslem to corrupt the driver.
+A thing like that would be worth it&mdash;adding to one's collection, I mean.
+The palace was full of great cypresses, too&mdash;tall, funereal
+trees&mdash;wonderfully impressive and beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>We drove back to Skutari and there saw our driver Suleiman for the last
+time. I had already tipped him at the end of each day, but I suppose he
+expected something rather unusual as a farewell token. Unfortunately, I
+was low in fractional currency. I scraped together all I had left&mdash;a few
+piastres&mdash;and handed them to him and turned quickly away. There came a
+sudden explosion as of a bomb. I did not look to see what it was&mdash;I
+knew. It was the bursting of Suleiman's heart.</p>
+
+<p>Up the Golden Horn in the afternoon, as far as the Sweet Waters of
+Europe. It is a beautiful sail, and there is a mosque where the ceremony
+of conferring the sword on a new Sultan is performed; also, a fine view
+across the Sweet Waters, with Jewish graveyards whitening the distant
+hills. But there was nothing of special remark&mdash;we being a little tired
+of the place by this time&mdash;except the homecoming.</p>
+
+<p>There were <i>caiques</i> lying about the little steamer-landing when we were
+ready to return, and Laura and I decided to take one of these down the
+Horn to the ship. The <i>caique</i> is a curiously shaped canoe-sort of a
+craft, and you have to get in carefully and sit still.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> But once in and
+seated, it moves as silently and smoothly as a gliding star.</p>
+
+<p>It was sunset, and the Golden Horn was true to its name. Ships at
+anchor, barges drifting up and down, were aglow with the sheen of
+evening&mdash;the water a tawny, molten flood, the still atmosphere like an
+impalpable dust of gold. <i>Caiques</i> carrying merchants to their homes
+somewhere along the upper shores were burnished with the aureate hue.
+Domes and minarets caught and reflected the wonder of it&mdash;the Galata
+bridge ahead of us had become such a span as might link the shores of
+the River of Peace.</p>
+
+<p>Once more Constantinople was a dream of Paradise&mdash;a vision of
+enchantment&mdash;a city of illusion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+<h3>EPHESUS: THE CITY THAT WAS</h3>
+
+<p>Like Oriental harbors generally, Smyrna from the sea has a magic charm.
+When we slowly sailed down a long reach of water between quiet hills and
+saw the ancient city rising from the morning mist, we had somehow a
+feeling that we had reached a hitherto undiscovered port&mdash;a mirage,
+perhaps, of some necromancer's spell.</p>
+
+<p>We landed, found our train, and went joggling away through the spring
+landscape, following the old highway that from time immemorial has led
+from Ephesus to Smyrna&mdash;the highway which long ago St. Paul travelled,
+and St. John, too, no doubt, and the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen. For
+all these journeyed between Ephesus and Smyrna in their time, and the
+ancient road would be crowded with countless camel trains and laden
+donkeys then; also with the wheeled vehicles of that period&mdash;cars and
+chariots and cages of wild animals for the games&mdash;and there would be
+elephants, too, gaudily caparisoned, carrying some rich potentate of the
+East and his retinue&mdash;a governor, perhaps, or a king. It was a mighty
+thoroughfare in those older days and may be still, though it is no
+longer crowded, and we did not notice any kings.</p>
+
+<p>We did notice some Reprobates&mdash;the ones we have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> always with us. They
+sat just across the aisle, engaged in their usual edifying discussion as
+to the identity of the historic sites we were supposed to be passing.
+Finally they got into a particularly illuminating dispute as to the
+period of St. Paul's life and ministrations. It began by the Apostle
+(our Apostle) casually remarking that St. Paul had lived about
+twenty-one hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>It was a mild remark&mdash;innocent enough in its trifling inaccuracy of two
+or three centuries&mdash;but it disturbed the Colonel, who has fallen into
+the guide-book habit, and is set up with the knowledge thereof.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here," he said, "if I knew as little as you do about such things
+I'd restrain the desire to give out information before company."</p>
+
+<p>The Apostle was undisturbed by this sarcasm. He folded his hands across
+his comfortable forward elevation and smiled in his angel way.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you think so," he said placidly. "Well, you think like a camel's
+hump. You never heard of St. Paul till you started on this trip. I used
+to study about him at Sunday-school when a mere child."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you did! as a child! Why, you old lobscouse" (lobscouse is an
+article on the <i>Kurf&uuml;rst</i> bill of fare) "you never saw the inside of a
+Sunday-school. You heard somebody last night say something about
+twenty-one hundred years ago, and with your genius for getting facts
+mixed you saddled that date on St. Paul."</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel turned for corroboration to the Horse-Doctor, who regarded
+critically the outlines of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> Apostle, which for convenience required
+an entire seat; then, speaking thoughtfully:</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't worth while to notice the remarks of a person who looks like
+that. Why, he's all malformed. He'll probably explode before we reach
+Ephesus."</p>
+
+<p>I felt sorry for the Apostle, and was going over to sit with him, only
+there wasn't room, and just then somebody noticed a camel train&mdash;the
+first we have seen&mdash;huge creatures heavily loaded and plodding along on
+the old highway. This made a diversion. Then there was another camel
+train, and another. Then came a string of donkeys&mdash;all laden with the
+wares of the East going to Smyrna. The lagging Oriental day was awake;
+the old road was still alive, after all.</p>
+
+<p>Like the first "Innocents," we had brought a carload or so of
+donkeys&mdash;four-legged donkeys&mdash;from Smyrna, and I think they were the
+same ones, from their looks. They were aged and patchy, and they filled
+the bill in other ways. They wrung our hearts with their sad, patient
+faces and their decrepitude, and they exasperated us with their
+indifference to our desires.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose excursion parties look pretty much alike, and that the <i>Quaker
+City</i> pilgrims forty-two years ago looked a good deal like ours as we
+strung away down the valley toward the ancient city. I hope they did not
+look any worse than ours. To see long-legged men and stout ladies
+perched on the backs of those tiny asses, in rickety saddles that feel
+as if they would slip (and do slip if one is not careful), may be
+diverting enough, but it is not pretty. If the donkey stays in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> the
+middle of the narrow, worn pathway, it is very well; but if he goes to
+experimenting and wandering off over the rocks, then look out. You can't
+steer him with the single remnant of rope on his halter (he has no
+bridle), and he pitches a good deal when he gets off his course. Being a
+tall person, I was closed up like a grasshopper, and felt fearfully
+top-heavy. Laura, age fourteen, kept behind me&mdash;commenting on my
+appearance and praying for my overthrow.</p>
+
+<p>It was a good way to the ruins&mdash;the main ruins&mdash;though in reality there
+were ruins everywhere: old mosques, gray with age and half-buried in the
+soil&mdash;a thousand years old, but young compared with the more ancient
+city; crumbling Roman aqueducts leading away to the mountains&mdash;old even
+before the mosques were built, but still new when Ephesus was already
+hoary with antiquity; broken columns sticking everywhere out of the
+weeds and grass&mdash;scarred, crumbling, and moss-grown, though still not of
+that first, far, unrecorded period.</p>
+
+<p>But by-and-by we came to mighty walls of stone&mdash;huge abutments rising
+from the marshy plain&mdash;and these were really old. The Ph&oelig;nicians may
+have laid them in some far-off time, but tradition goes still farther
+back and declares they were laid by giants&mdash;the one-eyed kind, the
+Cyclops&mdash;when all this marsh was sea. These huge abutments were piers in
+that ancient day. A blue harbor washed them, and the merchant ships of
+mighty Ephesus lay alongside and loaded for every port.</p>
+
+<p>That was a long time ago. Nobody can say when these stone piers were
+built, but Diana and Apollo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> were both born in Ephesus, and there was
+probably a city here even then. What we know is that by the beginning of
+the Christian era Ephesus was a metropolis with a temple so amazing, a
+theatre so vast and a library so beautiful that we stand amid the
+desolation to-day, helplessly trying to reconstruct the proportions of a
+community which could require these things; could build them and then
+vanish utterly, leaving not a living trace behind.</p>
+
+<p>For nobody to-day lives in Ephesus&mdash;not a soul. A wandering shepherd may
+build his camp-fire here, or an Arab who is tilling a bit of ground; but
+his home will be in Ayasaluk, several miles away, not here. Once the
+greatest port of trade in western Asia, Ephesus is voiceless and vacant
+now, except when a party like ours comes to disturb its solitude and
+trample among its forlorn glories.</p>
+
+<p>There is no lack of knowledge concerning certain of the structures
+here&mdash;the more recent ones, we may call them, though they were built two
+thousand years ago. There are descriptions everywhere, and some of them
+are as cleanly cut to-day as they were when the tool left them. This
+library was built in honor of Augustus C&aelig;sar and Livia, and it must have
+been a veritable marble vision. Here in its corners the old students sat
+and pored over books and precious documents that filled these crumbling
+recesses and the long-vanished shelves. St. Paul doubtless came here to
+study during the three years of his residence, and before him St. John,
+for he wrote his gospel in Ephesus, and would be likely to seek out the
+place of books. And Mary would walk with him to the door<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> sometimes, I
+think, and Mary of Magdala, for these three passed their final days in
+Ephesus, and would be drawn close together by their sacred bond.</p>
+
+<p>The great theatre where St. Paul battled with the wild beasts stands
+just across the way. It seated twenty-five thousand, and its stone
+benches stretch upward to the sky. The steep marble flight that carries
+you from tier to tier is there to-day exactly as when troops of fair
+ladies and handsome beaux climbed up and still up to find their places
+from which to look down on the play or the gladiatorial combat or the
+massacre of the Christians in the arena below.</p>
+
+<p>These old theatres were built in a semicircle dug out of the
+mountain-side, so that the seats were solid against the ground and rose
+one above the other with the slope of the hill, which gave everybody a
+good view. There were no columns to interfere with one's vision, for
+there was no roof to be supported, except, perhaps, over the stage, but
+the top seats were so remote from the arena and the proscenium that the
+players must have seemed miniatures. Yet even above these there was
+still mountain-side, and little boys who could not get money for an
+entrance fee or carry water to the animals for a ticket sat up in that
+far perch, no doubt, and looked down and shouted at the show.</p>
+
+<p>Laura and I, who, as usual, had dropped behind the party, climbed far up
+among the seats and tried to imagine we had come to the afternoon
+performance&mdash;had come early, not to miss any of it. But it was
+difficult, even when we shut our eyes. Weeds and grass grew everywhere
+in the crevices; dandelions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> bloomed and briers tangled where sat the
+beaux and belles of twenty centuries ago. Just here at our feet the mobs
+of Demetrius the silversmith gathered, crying, "Great is Diana of the
+Ephesians!" because the religion of St. Paul was spoiling their trade
+for miniature temples. Down there in the arena Paul did battle with the
+beasts, very likely as punishment. This is the spot&mdash;these are the very
+benches&mdash;but we cannot see the picture: we cannot wake the tread of the
+vanished years.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the arena are the columns that support the stage, and back of
+these are the dressing-rooms, their marble walls as solid and perfect
+to-day as when the ancient players dallied and gossiped there. At one
+end is a dark, cave-like place where we thought the wild beasts might
+have been kept. I stood at the entrance and Laura made my picture, but
+she complained that I did not look fierce enough for her purpose.</p>
+
+<p>On another slope of the hill a smaller theatre, the Odeon, has recently
+been uncovered. A gem of beauty it was, and much of its wonder is still
+preserved. Here the singers of a forgotten time gave forth their melody
+to a group of music-lovers, gathered in this close circle of seats that
+not a note or shading might be lost.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_030" id="ILL_030"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_030.jpg" width="500" height="342" alt="ALL THE PLAINS AND SLOPES OF THE OLD CITY WITH ITS WHITE
+FRAGMENTS AND POOR RUINED HARBOR LAY AT OUR FEET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ALL THE PLAINS AND SLOPES OF THE OLD CITY WITH ITS WHITE
+FRAGMENTS AND POOR RUINED HARBOR LAY AT OUR FEET<br /><br />Note.&mdash;In this picture the theatre where St. Paul fought is in the
+foreground; the library just beyond, the market-place to the right. Bits
+of water show where the harbor once lay.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We passed around this dainty playhouse, across a little wheat-field that
+some peasant has planted against its very walls, on up the hill,
+scrambling along steep declivities over its brow, and, behold! we came
+out high above the great theatre on the other side, and all the plain
+and slopes of the old city, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> its white fragments and its poor
+ruined harbor, lay at our feet. Earthquakes shook the city down and
+filled up the splendid harbor. If the harbor had been spared the city
+would have been rebuilt. Instead, the harbor is a marsh, the city a
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>From where we stood we could survey the sweep of the vanished city. We
+could look across into the library and the market-place and follow a
+marble road&mdash;its white blocks worn smooth by a million treading
+feet&mdash;where it stretched away toward the sea. And once more we tried to
+conjure the vision of the past&mdash;to close our eyes and reproduce the
+vanished day. And once more we failed. We could glimpse a picture, we
+could construct a city, but it was never quite that city&mdash;never quite in
+that place. Our harbor with its white sails and thronging wharves was
+never quite that harbor&mdash;our crowded streets were never quite those
+streets. Here were just ruins&mdash;always ruins&mdash;they could never have been
+anything but ruins. Perhaps our imaginations were not in good working
+order.</p>
+
+<p>We descended again into the great theatre, for it fascinated us, nearly
+breaking our necks where vines and briers tangled, pausing every other
+minute to rest and consider and dream. Pawing over a heap of
+rubbish&mdash;odd bits of carving, inscriptions, and the like&mdash;the place is a
+treasure-trove of such things&mdash;I found a little marble torso of a female
+figure. Head and arms and the lower part of the body all gone, but what
+remained was exquisite beyond words&mdash;a gem, even though rubbish, in
+Ephesus.</p>
+
+<p>Now, of course, the reader is an honest person. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> would have said, as
+I did: "No, it does not matter, rubbish or no rubbish, it is not mine.
+It belongs to the government&mdash; I cannot steal. Besides, there is Laura,
+age fourteen: I cannot set her a bad example. Also, there are the
+police. No, my conscience is perfect; I cannot do it."</p>
+
+<p>I know the reader would have reflected thus, and so did I, as stated.
+Then I found I could crowd it into my inside coat-pocket, and that by
+cramming my handkerchief carefully on top of it, it did not distress me
+so much, especially when I gave it a little support with my forearm, to
+make it swing in a natural way. But when I remembered that the <i>Quaker
+City</i> pilgrims had been searched on leaving Ephesus, my conscience began
+to harass me again, though not enough as yet to make me disgorge.</p>
+
+<p>Our party had all trailed back to the hotel when we got to our donkeys,
+and it was beginning to sprinkle rain. The sky was overcast and a quiet
+had settled among the ruins. When our donkey-driver gave me a sharp look
+I began to suffer. I thought he was a spy, and had his eye on that
+pocket. I recalled now that I had always had a tender conscience; it
+seemed unwise to torture it in this way.</p>
+
+<p>I began to think of ways to ease it. I thought five francs might do it,
+so far as our donkey-boy was concerned. But then there was the official
+search at the other end; that, of course, would be a public matter, and
+the five francs would be wasted. I was almost persuaded to drop the
+little torso quietly by the roadside&mdash;it discomforted me so.</p>
+
+<p>We rode along rather quietly, and I spoke improvingly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> to Laura of how
+St. Paul had travelled over this very road when he was making his good
+fight, and of several other saints and their works, and how Ephesus had
+probably been destroyed because of its sinfulness. Near a crumbling arch
+a flock of sheep grazed, herded by a shepherd who had been there when
+the apostles came&mdash;at least his cape had, and his hat&mdash;and everything
+about him was Biblical and holylike, and so were the gentle rain and the
+donkeys, and I said how sweet and soothing it all was; after which I
+began to reflect on what would be proper to do if anything resembling an
+emergency should conclude our peaceful ride. I decided that, as we had
+just come from Smyrna, I had bought the bit of heathen marble on the way
+to the station. That was simple and straightforward, and I felt a good
+deal strengthened as I practised it over and tried it on Laura as we
+rode along. The <i>Kurf&uuml;rsters</i> had been with me and would stand by the
+statement&mdash;any <i>Kurf&uuml;rster</i> would do that whether he flocked with the
+forward-cabin crowd or the unregenerates of the booze-bazaar. I felt
+reassured and whistled a little, and then from the roadside a man rose
+up and said something sharp to our donkey-driver. It was sudden, and I
+suppose I did jump a little, but I was ready for him.</p>
+
+<p>"No," I said, "I didn't steal it. I bought it in Smyrna on the way to
+the train. I can prove it by Laura here, and the other passengers. We
+are incorruptible. Go in peace."</p>
+
+<p>But it was wasted. This creature had business only with our
+donkey-driver and his tobacco. He didn't understand a word I said.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We rode amid a very garden of fragmentary ruins. Precious blocks of
+fluted marble, rich with carving and inscriptions, lay everywhere. We
+were confronted by gems of sculpture and graven history at every turn.
+Yet here I was, suffering over a little scrap the size of one's fist. No
+conscience should be as sensitive as that.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a regular bundle of firearms&mdash;a human arsenal&mdash;stepped out of a
+shed into the middle of the road and began a harangue. I could feel my
+hair turning gray.</p>
+
+<p>"You are wholly in error," I said. "I bought it in Smyrna. All the
+passengers saw me. Still, I will give it up if you say so."</p>
+
+<p>But that was wasted, too. He only took the rest of our driver's tobacco
+and let us pass. We met a little puny calf next, standing shrunken and
+forlorn in the drizzle, but not too shrunken and friendless to have a
+string of blue beads around his neck to avert the evil eye. I was
+inclined to take them away from him and put them on myself.</p>
+
+<p>We were opposite the Temple of Diana by this time&mdash;all that is left of
+what was once one of the seven wonders of the world. It is only some
+broken stones sinking into a marsh now, but it was a marvel in its time,
+and I remembered how one Herostratus, ages ago, had fired it to
+perpetuate his name&mdash;also how the Ephesians had snuffed out Herostratus,
+and issued a decree that his name should never again be mentioned on
+pain of severe punishment; which was a mistake, of course, for it
+advertised Herostratus into the coveted immortality. I wonder what kind
+of a mistake the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> Ephesians would make when they found that bit of
+marble on my person, and what kind of advertising I would get.</p>
+
+<p>We were almost to the little hotel now, and, lo! right at the gates we
+were confronted by a file of men with muskets. Here it was, then, at
+last. My moral joints turned to water.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't do it, gentlemen," I said. "I am without a flaw. It was
+Laura&mdash;you can see for yourself she looks guilty."</p>
+
+<p>But they did not search Laura. They did not even search me. They merely
+looked us over and talked about us in strange tongues. We reached the
+shelter of the hotel and the comfort of food in safety. Neither did they
+inspect us at the station, and as we glided back to Smyrna I impressed
+upon Laura the value of keeping one's conscience clear, and how one is
+always rewarded with torsos and things for pursuing a straightforward,
+simple course through life.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose a man could take away marble from Ephesus to-day by the
+wagon-load if he had any place to take it to. Nobody is excavating
+there&mdash;nobody seems to care for it, and never was such a mine of relics
+under the sun. At Ayasaluk, the Arab village, priceless treasures of
+carving and inscription look out at you from the wall of every peasant's
+hut and stable&mdash;from the tumbling stone fences that divide their fields.
+Wonderful columns stick out of every bank and heap of earth. Precious
+marbles and porphyry mingle with the very macadam of the roads. Rare
+pieces are sold around the hotel for a few piastres.</p>
+
+<p>Remember, a mighty marble city perished here.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> Earthquakes shook it
+down, shattered the walls of its temples, overthrew the statuary,
+tumbled the inscriptions in the dust. The ages have spread a layer of
+earth upon the ruin, but only partially covered it. Just beneath the
+shallow plough of the peasant lie riches uncountable for the nation that
+shall bring them to the light of day. Historical societies dig a little
+here and there, and have done noble work. But their means run low before
+they can make any real beginning on the mighty task. Ephesus is still a
+buried city.</p>
+
+<p>The day will come when Ephesus will be restored to her former greatness.
+It will take an earthquake to do it, but the spirit of prophecy is upon
+me and I foresee that earthquake. The future is very long&mdash;I am in no
+hurry&mdash;fulfilment may take its time. I merely want to get my prophecy in
+now and registered, so when the event comes along I shall get proper
+credit. Some day an earthquake will strike Ephesus again; the bottom
+will drop out of that swamp and make it a harbor once more; ships will
+sail in as in the old days, and Ephesus, like Athens, will renew her
+glory.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Back to Smyrna&mdash;a modern city and beautiful from any high vantage, with
+its red-tiled roofs, its domes and minarets, its graceful cypress-trees,
+its picture hillsides, and its cobalt sky. It is clean, too, compared
+with Constantinople. To be sure, Smyrna has its ruins and its historic
+interest, with the tomb of Polycarp the martyr, who was Bishop of Smyrna
+in the second century, and died for his faith at the age of eighty-six.
+He was burned on a hill just outside the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> city on the Ephesus road, and
+his tomb, guarded by two noble cypresses, overlooks the sea.</p>
+
+<p>But it is busy, bustling Smyrna that, after Ephesus, most attracted us.
+It is more truly the Orient than anything we have seen. Fully as
+picturesque as Constantinople in costume, it is brighter, fresher,
+healthier-looking, and, more than all, its crowded streets are
+perpetually full of mighty camel trains swinging in from the deeper
+East, loaded with all the wares and fabrics of our dreams. Those camels
+are monstrously large&mdash;twice the size of any circus camels that come to
+America, and with their great panniers they fill an Oriental street from
+side to side.</p>
+
+<p>They move, too, and other things had better keep out of the way when a
+camel train heaves in sight if they want to remain undamaged. I was
+examining some things outside of a bazaar when suddenly I thought I had
+been hit by a planet. I thought so because of the positive manner of my
+disaster and the number of constellations I saw. But it was only one
+side of a loaded camel that had annihilated me, and the camel was moving
+straight ahead without the slightest notion that anything had interfered
+with its progress.</p>
+
+<p>It hadn't, as a matter of fact. Nothing short of a stone wall interrupts
+a camel&mdash;a Smyrna camel&mdash;when he's out for business and under a full
+head of steam. Vehicles and other things turn down another street when
+there is a camel train coming. You may squat down, as these Orientals
+do, and get below the danger line, for a camel is not likely to step on
+you, but his load is another matter&mdash;you must look out for that
+yourself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I was fascinated by the camel trains; they are a part of the East I
+hardly expected to find. I thought their day was about over. Nothing of
+the sort. The camel trains, in fact, own Smyrna, and give it its
+commercial importance. They bring the great bulk of merchandise&mdash;rugs,
+mattings, nuts, dried fruits, spices, and all the rare native handiwork
+from far dim interiors that railroads will not reach in a hundred years.
+They come swinging out of Kurdistan&mdash;from Ispahan and from Khiva; they
+cross the burning desert of Kara Koom.</p>
+
+<p>A camel train can run cheaper than the railway kind. A railway requires
+coal and wood for fuel. A camel would like those things also. But he is
+not particular&mdash;he will accept whatever comes along. He will eat
+anything a goat can, and he would eat the goat, too, if permitted&mdash;horns
+and all. Consequently, he arrives at Smyrna fit and well fed, ready for
+the thousand miles or so of return trip at a moment's notice.</p>
+
+<p>They run these camel trains in sections&mdash;about six camels in each. An
+Arab mounted on a donkey that wears a string of blue beads for luck
+leads each section, and the forward camel wears against his shoulder a
+bell. It is a musical compound affair&mdash;one bell inside the other with a
+blue bead in the last one to keep off the evil eye. I had already
+acquired some of the blue strings of donkey beads, and I made up my mind
+now to have a camel bell.</p>
+
+<p>By-and-by, at the entrance of a bazaar, I saw one. It was an old
+one&mdash;worn with years of chafing against the shoulder muscle of many a
+camel that had followed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> the long track from the heart of Asia over
+swamp and steep and across burning sands. At the base of the outer bell
+was a band of Arabic characters&mdash;prayers, no doubt, from the Koran, for
+the safety of the caravan. I would never leave Smyrna without that bell.</p>
+
+<p>However, one must be cautious. I gave it an indifferent jingle as I
+passed in and began to examine other things. A murmuring, insinuating
+Moslem was at my elbow pushing forward the gaudy bits of embroidery and
+cheaply chased weapons in which I pretended an interest. I dallied and
+priced, and he grew weary and discouraged. Finally, hesitating at the
+doorway, I touched the bell again, scarcely noticing it.</p>
+
+<p>"How much?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sixtin franc&mdash;very chip."</p>
+
+<p>My impulse was to fling the money at him and grab the treasure before he
+changed his mind. But we do not do these things&mdash;not any more&mdash;we have
+acquired education. Besides, we have grown professionally proud of our
+bargains.</p>
+
+<p>"Ho! Sixteen francs! You mean six francs&mdash; I give you five."</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no&mdash;sixtin franc&mdash;sixtin! What you think? Here&mdash;fine!" He had the
+precious thing down and was jingling it. Its music fairly enthralled me.
+But I refused to take it in my hands&mdash;if I did I should surrender.
+"See," he continued, pointing to the inscription. "Oh, be-eautiful.
+Here, fiftin franc&mdash;three dollar!"</p>
+
+<p>He pushed it toward me. I pretended to be interested in a wretchedly new
+and cheaply woven rug. I had to, to keep steadfast. I waved him off.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no; five francs&mdash;no more!"</p>
+
+<p>He hung up the bell and I started to go. He seized it and ran after me.</p>
+
+<p>"Here, mister&mdash;fourtin franc&mdash;give me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Five francs!&mdash;no more."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, mister&mdash;twelve franc&mdash;las' price&mdash;ver' las' price. Here, see!"</p>
+
+<p>He jingled the bell a little. If he did that once more I was gone at any
+price.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Five francs</i>," I said, with heavy decision. "I'll give you five francs
+for it&mdash;no more."</p>
+
+<p>I faced resolutely around&mdash;as resolutely as I could&mdash;and pretended
+really to start.</p>
+
+<p>"Here, mister&mdash;<i>ten franc&mdash;ten</i>! Mister&mdash;mister!"</p>
+
+<p>He followed me, but fortunately he had hung up the bell and couldn't
+jingle it. I was at least two steps away.</p>
+
+<p>"Eight franc, mister&mdash;please&mdash;I lose money&mdash;I make
+nothing&mdash;mister&mdash;seven! seven franc!"</p>
+
+<p>"Five&mdash;five francs." I called it back over my shoulder&mdash;indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>"Mister! mister! Six! six franc!"</p>
+
+<p>Confound him! He got hold of that bell again and gave it a jingle. I
+handed him the six francs. If he had only left it alone, I think I could
+have held out.</p>
+
+<p>Still, as I look at it now, hanging here in my state-room, and think of
+the long lonely nights and the days of sun and storm it has seen, of the
+far journeys it has travelled in its weary way down the years to me, I
+do not so much mind that final franc after all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+
+<h3>INTO SYRIA</h3>
+
+<p>I picked up a cold that rainy day at Ephesus. Not an ordinary sniffling
+cold, but a wrenching, racking cold that made every bone and every tooth
+jump, and set my eyes to throbbing like the ship's engines. I felt sure
+I was going to die when we arrived in the harbor of Beirut, and decided
+that it would be better to die on deck; so I crawled out and dressed,
+and crept into a steamer-chair, and tried to appreciate the beautiful
+city that had arisen out of the sea&mdash;the upper gateway to Syria.</p>
+
+<p>The Patriarch came along, highly elate. This was where he belonged; this
+was home; this was Ph&oelig;nicia itself! Fifteen hundred years <span class="smcap">b.c</span>. Beirut
+had been a great Ph&oelig;nician seaport, he said, and most of the rare
+handiwork mentioned in ancient history and mythology had been wrought in
+this neighborhood. The silver vase of Achilles, the garment which Hecuba
+gave to Minerva, and the gold-edged bowl of Telemachus were all
+Ph&oelig;nician, according to the Patriarch, who hinted that he rather
+hoped to find some such things at Beirut; also some of the celebrated
+Phoinus, or purple dye, which gave the tribe its name. I said no doubt
+he would, and, being sick and suffering, added that he might dye himself
+dead for all I cared, which was a poor joke&mdash;besides being an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+afterthought, when the Patriarch was well out of range.</p>
+
+<p>I had no idea of going ashore. I was miserably sorry, too, for I was
+stuffed with guide-book knowledge about Baalbec and Damascus, and had
+looked forward to that side-trip from the beginning. I knew how Moses
+felt on Mount Pisgah now, and I was getting so sorry for myself I could
+hardly stand it, when suddenly the bugle blew the sharp call, "All
+ashore!" Laura, age fourteen, came racing down the deck, and before I
+knew it I had my bag&mdash;packed the night before&mdash;and was going down the
+ship's ladder into a boat, quarrelling meantime with one of the
+Reprobates as to whether Beirut was the Berothai of the Old Testament,
+where David smote Hadadezer and took "exceeding much brass," or the
+Berytus of the Roman conquest. It was of no consequence, but it gave
+life a new purpose, for I wanted to prove that he was wrong. Wherefore I
+forgot I was going to die, and presently we were ashore and in a
+railway-station where there was a contiguous little train ready to start
+for Baalbec and Damascus, with a lot of men selling oranges, of which
+Laura and I bought a basketful for a franc, climbed aboard, the bell
+rang&mdash;and the funeral was postponed.</p>
+
+<p>The road followed the sea for a distance, and led through fields of
+flowers. I had never seen wildflowers like those. They were the crimson
+anemone mingled riotously with a gorgeous yellow flower&mdash;I did not learn
+its name. The ground was literally massed with them. Never was such a
+prodigality of bloom.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>From Beirut to Baalbec is only about sixty miles; but it takes pretty
+much all day to get there, for the Lebanon Mountains lie between, and
+this is a deliberate land. We did not mind. There was plenty to see all
+along, and our leisurely train gave us ample time.</p>
+
+<p>There were the little stations, where we stopped anywhere from five to
+fifteen minutes, and got out and mingled with the curious rural life;
+there were the hills, that had little soil on them, but were terraced
+and fruitful&mdash;some of them to the very summit; there was the old
+Damascus road, winding with us, or above us, or below us&mdash;the road over
+which Abraham may have travelled, and Adam, too, for that matter, and
+Eve, when they were sent out of their happy garden. Eden lay not far
+from here, and the exiles would be likely to come this way, I think. We
+saw plenty of groups that might have been Abraham and his household, or
+any of the patriarchs. I did not notice any that suggested Adam and Eve.</p>
+
+<p>The road had another interest for me. Forty-two years ago, before the
+railroad came this way, the <i>Quaker City</i> pilgrims toiled up through the
+summer heat, setting out on the "long trip" through the full length of
+Palestine. Nobody makes it in summer now. Few make it at all, except by
+rail and in carriages, with good hostelries at the end of every stage.
+Still, I am glad those first pilgrims made it, or we should not have had
+that wonderful picture of Syrian summer-time, nor of "Jericho" and
+"Baalbec." Those two horses are worth knowing&mdash;in literature&mdash;and I
+tried to imagine that little early party of excursionists<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> climbing the
+steep path to Palestine on their sorry nags.</p>
+
+<p>It is warm in Syria, even now, but we were not too warm, riding;
+besides, we were going steadily uphill, and by-and-by somebody pointed
+out a white streak along the mountain-top, and it was snow. Then, after
+a long time, we got to a place where the vegetation was very scanty and
+there were no more terraced hills, but only barren peaks and sand, where
+the wind blew cold and colder, and presently the snow lay right along
+our way. We had reached the highest point then&mdash;five thousand feet above
+the sea. In five hours we had come thirty-six miles&mdash;thirty-five in
+length and one straight up in the air. Somebody said:</p>
+
+<p>"Look, there is Mount Hermon!"</p>
+
+<p>And, sure enough, away to the south, though nigh upon us it seemed&mdash;so
+close that one might put out his hand and touch it, almost&mdash;there rose a
+stately, snow-clad elevation which, once seen, dominated the barren
+landscape. It was so pure white against the blue&mdash;so impressive in its
+massive dignity&mdash;the eye followed it across every vista, longed for it
+when immediate peaks rose between, welcomed it when time after time it
+rose grandly into view.</p>
+
+<p>With an altitude of between nine and ten thousand feet, Mount Hermon is
+the highest mountain in Syria, I believe&mdash;certainly the most important.
+The Bible is full of it. The Amorites and the Hivites, and most of the
+other tribes that Joshua buried or persuaded to go away, had their lands
+under Mount Hermon (all of them in sight of it), and that grand old hill
+looked down on Joshua's slaughter of men and women<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> and little children,
+and perhaps thought it a puny performance to be undertaken in the name,
+and by the direction, of God.</p>
+
+<p>Joshua established Mount Hermon as the northern boundary of Palestine,
+and from whatever point the Israelite turned his face northward, he saw
+its white summit against the blue. It became symbolic of grandeur,
+stability, purity, and peace. It was to one of its three peaks that
+Christ came when, with Peter, James, and John, He withdrew to "an high
+mountain apart" for the Transfiguration. So it became sanctified as a
+sort of holy judgment-seat.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>
+
+<p>Down the Lebanon slope and across the valley to Reyak, a Syrian village
+in the sand, at the foot of the Anti-Lebanon range. Reyak is the parting
+of the ways&mdash;the railways&mdash;that lead to Damascus and Baalbec, and there
+is a lunch-room there&mdash;a good one by Turkish standards. It was our first
+complete introduction to Turkish food&mdash;that is a diet of nuts, dates,
+oranges, and curious meat and vegetable preparations&mdash;and I ate a good
+deal for a dying man. Then I went outside to look at the population, and
+wonder what these people, who scratch a living out of the sand and stone
+barrens, would do in a fertile country like America. They would consider
+it heaven, I thought.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the station sat a drowsy, stoutish man in semi-European
+dress, holding a few pairs of coarse home-knit socks, evidently for
+sale. I stopped and talked to him. He spoke English very well, and when
+he told me his story I marvelled.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He had been in America; in Brooklyn; had carried on business
+there&mdash;something in Syrian merchandise&mdash;and had done very well. He had
+married there&mdash;a Syrian woman; his children were born there&mdash;Americans.
+Then one day he had sold out and brought them all to this flat-topped
+mud village in the Syrian sand. Why had he done it? Well, he could
+hardly tell; he had wanted to see Syria again&mdash;he could think of no
+other reason. No, his wife did not like it, nor the children&mdash;not at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>He pointed out his mud hut a little way from the station, and I could
+not blame them. He would go back some day&mdash;yes, certainly. Meantime, his
+wife is earning money for the trip by knitting the coarse socks which he
+sells around the station at Reyak at a few piastres a pair.</p>
+
+<p>Our train was about ready to start for Baalbec, and I was lingering over
+a little collection of relics which a blind pedler offered, when I felt
+a hand on my shoulder and heard my name called. I turned and was face to
+face with the artist Jules Gurin, of New York. I had known nothing of
+his presence in Syria, he had known nothing of our coming. He was going
+in one direction, I in another. In this remote waste our lines had
+crossed. He was so glad to see me&mdash;he thought I had a supply of cigars.
+I never saw a man's enthusiasm die so suddenly as his did when I told
+him how I had been sick that morning and forgotten them.</p>
+
+<p>Altogether that was a curious half hour. Reyak is the most uninteresting
+place in Syria, but I shall always remember it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HOUSE THAT CAIN BUILT</h3>
+
+<p>It was well along in the afternoon when we reached Baalbec, and drove
+through a cloud of dust to a hotel which stands in a mud village near
+the ruins. Long before we arrived we could make out massive remnants of
+what was once a wonder of the world, and remains no less so to-day. We
+could distinguish sections of the vast wall, and, towering high above
+them, the six columns of the Temple of the Sun.</p>
+
+<p>I knew those six columns. I had carried a picture of them in my mind
+ever since that winter so long ago when the old first edition of the
+<i>New Pilgrim's Progress</i> became familiar in our household. I know they
+were seventy-five feet high and eight feet through, and had blocks of
+stone on the top of them as big as our old-fashioned parlor at home;
+also, that they were probably erected by giants. Those items had made an
+impression that had lasted. Now, here they were, outlined against the
+sky, in full view and perfectly familiar, but never in the world could
+they be as big as the book said. Why, these were as slender and graceful
+as fairy architecture! I recalled that there were some big stones to
+see, stones laid by Cain and his giants when the world was new. Perhaps
+they would not be so very big, after all. I had a feeling that we ought
+to hurry.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We did hurry&mdash;Laura and I. We did not wait for the party, but set out
+straight for the ruins, through narrow streets and byways, with beggars
+at our heels. By-and-by we came to a rushing brook, and just beyond it
+were the temple walls.</p>
+
+<p>I remembered now. There had been a wonderful garden outside the temples
+in the old days, and this stream had made it richly verdant and
+beautiful. There was no garden any more. Only some grass and bushes,
+such as will gather about an oasis.</p>
+
+<p>They would not let us into the temple enclosure until our party came, so
+we wandered around the outer walls and gazed up at cornices and capitals
+and entablatures as beautiful, we thought, as any we had seen at Athens.
+Then the party arrived, and there was a gatekeeper to let us in.</p>
+
+<p>It would take a man in perfect health to carry away even an approximate
+impression of Baalbec. Trying to remember now, I seem to have spent the
+afternoon in some amazing delirium of tumbling walls and ruined
+colonnades; of heaped and piled fragments; of scarred and defaced
+sculpture; of Titanic masonry flung about by the fury of angry gods.
+Athens had been a mellowed and hallowed dream of the past; Ephesus a
+vast suggestion of ancient greatness buried and overgrown; Baalbec was a
+wild agony of destruction and desecration crying out to the sky.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_031" id="ILL_031"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_031.jpg" width="500" height="242" alt="FROM THE TIME OF ADAM BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">FROM THE TIME OF ADAM BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is a colossal object-lesson in what religions can do when they try.
+Nobody really knows who began to build temples here, but from the time
+of Adam Baalbec became a place of altars. Before history began it was
+already a splendid Syrian city, associated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> with the names of Cain,
+Nimrod, and Abraham, and it may have been Cain himself who raised the
+first altar here when he made that offering for which the Lord "had not
+respect." More likely, however&mdash;and this is the Arab belief&mdash;it was the
+city of refuge built by Cain, whose fear must have been very large if
+one may judge from the size of the materials used.</p>
+
+<p>Cain could not fail to build a temple, however. He would try to ease the
+punishment which he declared was greater than he could bear, and with
+burnt offering and architecture would seek to propitiate an angry God.
+How long the worship inaugurated by him lasted we can only surmise&mdash;to
+the flood, maybe&mdash;but the Ph&oelig;nicians came next, and set up temples to
+their Gods, whoever they were, and after the Ph&oelig;nicians came Solomon,
+who built a temple to a sort of compromise god by the name of Baal&mdash;a
+deity left over by the Ph&oelig;nicians and adapted to Judean needs and
+ceremonies&mdash;hence the name, Baalbec. Solomon built the temple to Baal to
+satisfy certain of his heathen wives, and he made the place a strong
+city to rival Damascus&mdash;the latter having refused to acknowledge his
+reign.</p>
+
+<p>After Solomon, the Romans. Two hundred years or so after Christ&mdash;in the
+twilight of their glory and their gods&mdash;the Romans under Elagabalus
+brought the glory of Grecian architecture to Baalbec, named the place
+Heliopolis, and set up temples that were&mdash;and are&mdash;the wonder of the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>What satisfactory gods they must have been to deserve temples such as
+these&mdash;each shrine a marvel of size and beauty&mdash;more splendid even than
+those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> of the Acropolis of Athens in their lavish magnificence! This
+carved doorway to the Temple of Jupiter; this frieze of the Temple of
+Bacchus; these towering six columns of the Temple of the Sun; still
+holding their matchless Corinthian capitals and amazing entablature to
+the sky&mdash;where else will one find their equals, and what must they have
+been in their prime, when these scarred remnants can still overpower the
+world!</p>
+
+<p>It was another religion that brought ruin here&mdash;early
+Christianity&mdash;presently followed by early Mohammedanism&mdash;each burning
+with vandalic zeal. It was the good Emperor Constantine that first upset
+the Roman gods and their temples. Then Theodosius came along and pulled
+down the great structures, and out of the pieces built a church that was
+an architectural failure. Then all the early Christians in the
+neighborhood took a hand in pulling down and overturning; hacking away
+at the heathen sculpture and tracery&mdash;climbing high up the walls to scar
+and disfigure&mdash;to obliterate anything resembling a face. Then pretty
+soon the early Mohammedans came along and carried on the good work, and
+now and then an earthquake took a hand, until by-and-by the place became
+the ghastly storm of destruction it appears to-day.</p>
+
+<p>I was ill when I saw Baalbec. My flesh was burning and my pulse
+throbbing with fever. Perhaps my vision was distorted and the nightmare
+seemed worse than it really is, but as I stood in that field of
+mutilation and disorder, gazing along its wrecked and insulted glory,
+and through tumbling arch and ruined door<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> caught vistas of fertile and
+snow-capped hill, I seemed to see a vision of what it had been in the
+day of its perfection. Also, I felt an itch to meet one or two of those
+early enthusiasts&mdash;some night in a back alley when they were not looking
+for me and I had a piece of scantling&mdash;I felt a sick man's craving, as
+it were, to undertake a little damage and disfiguration on my own
+account. Oh, well, it's all in the eternal story. Religions established
+these temples; religions pulled them down. The followers of one faith
+have always regarded as heathen those which preceded them. There lies a
+long time ahead. Will the next religion restore Baalbec or complete its
+desolation?</p>
+
+<p>Some little Syrian girls beset Laura on the way back to the hotel and
+tried to sell her some bead embroidery which it seems they make in a
+mission-school established here by the English. One of them&mdash;a little
+brown madonna of about ten&mdash;could speak English quite well. Laura asked
+her name.</p>
+
+<p>"Name Mary," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"But that's an English name."</p>
+
+<p>She trotted along silently, thinking; then said:</p>
+
+<p>"No, Syria&mdash;Mary Syria name."</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough, we had forgotten. The first Mary had indeed been Syrian,
+and I imagined her, now, a child&mdash;brown, barefoot and beautiful, like
+this Mary, with the same pathetic eyes. Laura&mdash;young, fair-skinned and
+pink-cheeked&mdash;was a marvel to these children. They followed her to the
+door, and when she could not buy all their stock in trade they insisted
+on making her presents, and one of them&mdash;little Mary&mdash;begged to be taken
+to America.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We saw the celebrated "big stones" next morning. Several of them are
+built into the lower tiers of the enclosing temple wall, and three of
+these&mdash;the largest ones&mdash;measure each from sixty-two to sixty-four feet
+long and are thirteen feet thick! They rest upon stones somewhat
+thicker, but shorter&mdash;stones about the size of a two-story cottage&mdash;and
+these in turn rest on masonry still less gigantic. Evidently it was the
+intention of the builders to increase the size of their material as they
+went higher, and the big block still in the quarry carries out that
+idea.</p>
+
+<p>Authorities differ as to when these big stones were laid, and how. Some
+claim that they were put here by the Romans, because they find Greek
+axe-marks on the ones below them. But then I found American jack-knife
+marks on them too, and the names of certain of my countrymen, which
+proves nothing except that these puny people had been there and left
+their measurement. If these monster stones had been laid by the Romans
+only two thousand years ago, we should have had some knowledge of the
+means by which they were transported and lifted into place. There is no
+such record, and nowhere else at least did the Romans ever attempt
+structure of such gigantic proportions. That is precisely the word,
+"gigantic," for there were giants in the days when these stones were
+laid&mdash;stones that could have been there six thousand years as well as
+two thousand, being of such material as forms the foundations of the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>If Cain did any building at Baalbec, he did it here. He did not finish
+the work, it would seem, or at least not in these proportions. Perhaps
+his giants deserted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> him&mdash;struck, as we say to-day. Perhaps the hands of
+men were no longer against him and the need of this mighty bulwark about
+his place of refuge ceased. At all events, the first stone hewn out for
+the next layer stands in the quarry still.</p>
+
+<p>We drove over there. It was half a mile away, at least&mdash;possibly a mile,
+down hill and rather rough going. The stones we saw in the wall were
+brought up that road. The one standing in the quarry had been lifted and
+started a little, and would have been on its way presently, if the
+strike, or the amnesty, had not interfered.</p>
+
+<p>It is seventy-two feet long and seventeen feet thick. Try to think of a
+plain box building, a barn or a store-house, say, of that size, then
+mentally convert it into a solid block of stone. Mark Twain likens it to
+two freight-cars placed end to end, but <i>it is also as high and as
+wide</i>. <i>Eight freight-cars set four and four</i> would just about express
+it! Think of that! Think of moving a stone of that size!</p>
+
+<p>It is squared and dressed and ready to be taken to the temple wall. It
+will never be taken there. Perhaps that last item is gratuitous
+information, but at least it is authentic. We have no means of moving
+that stone half a mile up a rough hill in these puny times, and the
+speculations as to how Cain did it have been mainly hazy and
+random&mdash;quite random.</p>
+
+<p>One writer suggests that such stones were "rolled up an inclined plane
+of earth prepared for the purpose." I should love to see a stone like
+that rolled. I'd travel all the way to Baalbec again for the sight, and
+they could prepare the inclined plane any way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> they pleased. An Oriental
+authority declares that these stones were moved and laid by the demon
+Echmoudi, which is better than the rolling idea. I confess a weakness
+for Echmoudi, but I fear hard cold science will frown him out of court.</p>
+
+<p>It has taken an Englishman to lead the way to light. He says that Cain
+employed mastodons to do his moving. Now we are on the way to truth, but
+we must go further&mdash;a good deal further. Cain did employ mastodons, but
+only for his light work. Even mastodons would balk at pulling stones
+like these. Cain would use brontosaurs for such work as that. There were
+plenty of them loafing about, and I can imagine nothing more impressive
+than Cain standing on a handy elevation overlooking his force of giants
+and a sixteen-span brontosaur team yanking a stone as big as a bonded
+warehouse up Baalbec hill.</p>
+
+<p>Truly, there is no reason why those monster stones should not have been
+quarried a million or so years ago and moved by the vast animal
+creatures of that period. We have biblical authority for the giants, and
+I have seen a brontosaur in the New York Museum that seemed to go with
+stones of about that size. Think of any force the Romans could summon
+rolling a three-million-pound square stone up an inclined plane.
+Preposterous! The brontosaur's the thing.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV</h2>
+
+<h3>GOING DOWN TO DAMASCUS</h3>
+
+<p>There is a good deal of country, mainly desert, between Baalbec and
+Damascus, and a good many barren hills. Crossing the Anti-Lebanon
+mountains there is a little of water and soil and much red, rocky waste.
+Here and there a guide pointed out a hill where Cain killed Abel&mdash;not
+always the same hill, but no matter, it was a hill in this neighborhood;
+any one of them would make a good place. Occasionally the train passed a
+squalid village, perched on a lonely shelf&mdash;a single roof stretching
+over most of the houses&mdash;the inhabitants scarcely visible. We wondered
+where they got their sustenance. They were shepherds, perhaps, but where
+did their flocks feed?</p>
+
+<p>Across the divide, between snow-capped hills, and suddenly we are face
+to face with green banks and the orchard bloom of spring. We have
+reached the Abana, the river which all the ages has flowed down to
+Damascus with its gift of eternal youth. For as the desert defends, so
+the river sustains Damascus, and the banks of the Abana (they call it
+the Barada now) are just a garden&mdash;the Garden of Eden, if old tales be
+true.</p>
+
+<p>It is not hard to believe that tradition here, at this season. Peach,
+apricot, almond, and plum fairly sing with blossom; birch and sycamore
+blend a cadence of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> tender green; the red earth from which Adam was
+created (and which his name signifies) forms an abundant underchord. If
+we could linger a little by these pleasant waters we might learn the
+lilt of the tree of life&mdash;its whisper of the forbidden fruit.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 316px;"><a name="ILL_032" id="ILL_032"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_032.jpg" width="316" height="500" alt="SO THE PATRIARCHS JOURNEYED; SO, TWO THOUSAND YEARS
+LATER, JOSEPH AND MARY TRAVELLED INTO EGYPT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">SO THE PATRIARCHS JOURNEYED; SO, TWO THOUSAND YEARS
+LATER, JOSEPH AND MARY TRAVELLED INTO EGYPT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We are among our older traditions here&mdash;the beginnings of the race. We
+have returned after devious wanderings. These people whom we see leading
+donkeys and riding camels, tending their flocks and bathing in the
+Abana, they are our relatives&mdash;sons and daughters of Adam. Only, they
+did not move away. They stayed on the old place, as it were, and
+preserved the family traditions, and customs. I am moved to get out and
+call them "cousin" and embrace them, and thank them for not trailing off
+after the false gods and frivolities of the West.</p>
+
+<p>The road that winds by the Abana is full of pictures. The story of the
+Old Testament&mdash;the New, too, for that matter&mdash;is dramatized here in a
+manner and a setting that would discourage the artificial stage. Not a
+group but might have stepped out of the Bible pages. This man leading a
+little donkey&mdash;a woman riding it&mdash;their garb and circumstance the
+immutable investment of the East: so the patriarchs journeyed; so, two
+thousand years later, Joseph and Mary travelled into Egypt. No change,
+you see, in all that time&mdash;no change in the two thousand years that have
+followed&mdash;no change in the two thousand years that lie ahead. Wonderful,
+changeless East! How frivolous we seem in comparison&mdash;always racing
+after some new pattern of head-gear or drapery! How can we hope to
+establish any individuality, any nationality,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> any artistic stability
+when we have so little fixed foundation in what, more than any other one
+thing, becomes a part of the man himself&mdash;his clothing?</p>
+
+<p>These hills are interesting. Some of them have verdure on them, and I
+can fancy Abraham pasturing his flocks on them, and with little Isaac
+chasing calves through the dews of Hermon. It would not be the "dews of
+Hermon," but I like the sound of that phrase. I believe history does not
+mention that Abraham and Isaac chased calves. No matter; anybody that
+keeps flocks has to chase calves now and then, and he has to get his
+little boy to help him. So Abraham must sometimes have called Isaac
+quite early in the morning to "go and head off that calf," just as my
+father used to call me, and I can imagine how they raced up and down and
+sweat and panted, and how they said uncomplimentary things about the
+calf and his family, and declared that there was nothing on earth that
+could make a person so mad as a fool calf, anyhow.</p>
+
+<p>Travel on the highway has increased&mdash;more camels, more donkeys, more
+patriarchs with their families and flocks. Merchandise trains follow
+close, one behind the other. Dust rises in a fog and settles on the
+wayside vegetation. Here and there on the hillsides are villas and
+entertainment gardens.</p>
+
+<p>A widening of the valley, an expanse of green and bloom, mingled with
+domes and minarets; a slowing down of speed, a shouting of porters
+through the sunlit dust, and behold, we have reached the heart and
+wonder of the East, Damascus, the imperishable&mdash;older than history, yet
+forever young.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>XXVI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE "PEARL OF THE EAST"</h3>
+
+<p>It is the oldest city in the world. It is the oldest locality mentioned
+in the Bible, if the Garden of Eden theory be true. I suspect that
+Noah's flood washed away the garden, and that his grandson, Uz, wanted
+to commemorate the site by building a city there. At all events, Uz
+built Damascus, according to Josephus, and he could not have picked a
+better location than this wide, level plain, watered by these beautiful
+living streams. That was about 2400 <span class="smcap">b.c</span>., which means that Damascus was
+already an old city&mdash;five hundred years old, or more&mdash;when Abraham
+overtook Chedorlaomer, King of Elam&mdash;Tidal, King of Nations, and two
+other kings&mdash;these four having captured Abraham's nephew, Lot, "who
+dwelt in Sodom, and his goods, and departed."</p>
+
+<p>A matter of four kings did not disturb Abraham. He had a better
+combination than that. He armed his trained servants, three hundred and
+eighteen in number, "born in his own house," and went after those kings
+and "smote them and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand
+of Damascus, rescued Lot and brought back the goods."</p>
+
+<p>That is the first Bible mention of Damascus, and it was no doubt a
+goodly city, even then. After that it appears, time and again, in both
+the scriptures, and one never fails to feel its importance in the
+world's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> story. Five hundred years after Abraham, Thothmes III. thought
+it worth while to cross over from Egypt to conquer Damascus, and after
+still another five hundred years King David ravaged the country round
+about and set up a garrison here. Those were not frequent changes.
+Damascus does not do things frequently or without reflection. I believe
+the Medes came next, and after them the Romans, and then, quite
+recently&mdash;recently for Damascus, I mean&mdash;only thirteen hundred years
+ago&mdash;the Mohammedans took the place and have held it ever since.</p>
+
+<p>And Damascus herself has remained unchanged. Other cities have risen and
+prospered and perished even from memory. They did not matter to
+Damascus. Nothing matters to Damascus. It may have altered its
+appearance a trifle now and then, but not materially. It is the same
+Damascus that Abraham knew and that David conquered. I can see both of
+these old fellows any time I look out of my hotel window; also, the
+three hundred and eighteen servants born in Abraham's household&mdash;all the
+tableau of the ancient city that has remained forever young.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Though old as history itself, thou art as fresh as the
+breath of spring, blooming as thine own rosebud, and
+fragrant as thine own orange-flower, O Damascus, pearl of
+the East!"</p></div>
+
+<p>We are at the Grande Hotel Victoria. All these hotels are "Grande"
+something or other. A box shanty ten by fifteen is likely to be called
+"Grande Hotel de France." However, the Victoria <i>is</i> grand, rather, and
+quite Oriental in its general atmosphere.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> The rooms are clean, too, and
+the Turkish pictures amusing. Furthermore, our rooms look across the
+river&mdash;the soul of Damascus&mdash;the water in which Eve first saw her sweet
+reflected form, if tradition holds. Its banks are bordered by a great
+thoroughfare now, where against a background of peach-bloom and minaret
+an eternal panorama flows by. Camel trains from Bagdad and the far
+depths of Persia; mule trains from the Holy Land; donkey trains from
+nowhere in particular; soldiers with bands playing weird music; groups
+of Arabs mounted on splendid horses&mdash;dark men with long guns, their
+burnouses flying in the wind. One might sit here forever and drift out
+of time, out of space, in the fabric of the never-ending story.</p>
+
+<p>Being late in the afternoon, with no programme, Laura and I set out to
+seek adventure, were immediately adopted by a guide, and steered toward
+the bazaars. We crossed a public square near the hotel where there were
+all sorts and conditions of jackasses&mdash;some of them mounted by men,
+others loaded with every merchandise under the sun. We saw our first
+unruly donkey just then&mdash;a very small donkey mounted by a very fat son
+of the prophet with a vast turban and beard. It being the Mohammedan
+Sunday (Friday), he had very likely been to the mosque and to market,
+and was going home. He had a very large bush broom under his arm, and it
+may have been this article thrashing up and down on the donkey's flank
+that made him restive. At all events, he was cavorting about (the
+donkey, I mean) in a most unseemly fashion for one bestridden by so
+grave a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> burden, and Mustapha Mohammed&mdash;they are all named that&mdash;was
+bent forward in a ball, uttering what Laura thought might be quotations
+from the Koran. We did not see what happened. They were still gyrating
+and spinning when we were caught up by the crowd and swept into the
+bazaar.</p>
+
+<p>The Grande Bazaar of Damascus excels anything we have seen. It is bigger
+and better and cleaner than the bazaar of Constantinople, and a
+hundred&mdash;no, a million&mdash;times more inviting. No Christian could eat
+anything in a Constantinople market-place. The very thought of it gags
+me now as I write, while here in Damascus, Laura and I were having
+confections almost immediately&mdash;and lemonade cooled with snow brought on
+the backs of camels from the Lebanon mountain-tops. Mark Twain speaks of
+the place as being filthy. I think they must have cleaned up a good deal
+since then; besides, that was midsummer. I would not like to say that
+the place is speckless, but for the Orient it was clean, and the general
+bouquet was not disturbing. Also, I had a safer feeling in Damascus. I
+did not feel that if I stepped into a side-street I would immediately be
+dragged down and robbed. I did not feel as if I were a lost soul in a
+bedlam of demons.</p>
+
+<p>We noticed other things. The little booths, one after another, were
+filled with the most beautiful wares&mdash;such wares as we have seen nowhere
+else&mdash;but the drowsy merchants sat cross-legged in meditation, smoking
+their nargileh or reading their prayers, and did not ask us to buy. If
+we stopped to look at their goods they hardly noticed us. If we priced
+them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> they answered our guide in Arabic monosyllables. Here and there a
+Jew with a more pretentious stock would solicit custom in the old way of
+Israel, but the Arab was silent, indifferent, disinterested. Clearly it
+was his preference that we pass by as quickly as possible. His goods
+were not for such as us. I did manage to add to my collection of
+donkey-beads, and would have bought more if Laura had not suggested that
+they probably thought I was buying them to wear myself. At the
+book-booth they even would not let us touch the volumes displayed for
+sale.</p>
+
+<p>Another thing I have noticed: there are no beggars here&mdash;none worth
+while. Now and then, perhaps, somebody half extends a timid hand, but on
+the whole there is a marked absence of begging. Damascus does not beg
+from the Christian.</p>
+
+<p>It is a weird, wonderful place, that bazaar. It covers an endless space,
+if one may judge from its labyrinthine interior. Everywhere they stretch
+away, the dim arcades, flimsily roofed with glass and matting and bark,
+fading into vague Oriental vistas of flitting figures and magic
+outlines. Here in the main thoroughfare a marvellous life goes on. The
+space is wide, and there are masses of people moving to and fro, mingled
+with donkeys and camels, and even carriages that dash recklessly
+through; and there is a constant cry of this thing and that thing from
+the donkey-boys and the pedlers of nuts and bread and insipid sweetened
+drinks. Some of the pedling people clatter little brass cymbals as they
+walk up and down, and repeat over and over some words which our guide
+said were something between a prayer and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> a song, probably as old as the
+language.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> And the vendors of drinks carry their stock in trade in a
+goat-skin, or maybe in a pigskin, which is not a pretty thing to look
+at&mdash;all black and hairy and wet, with distended legs sticking out like
+something drowned. We didn't buy any of those drinks. We thought they
+might be clean enough, but we were no longer thirsty.</p>
+
+<p>All sorts of things are incorporated in this bazaar: old
+dwelling-houses; columns of old temples; stairways beginning anywhere,
+leading nowhere; mosques&mdash;the limitless roof of merchandise has
+stretched out and enveloped these things. To attempt a detailed
+description of the place would be unwisdom. One may only generalize this
+vast hive of tiny tradesmen and tiny trades. All the curious merchants
+and wares we have seen pictured for a lifetime are gathered here. It is
+indeed the Grande Bazaar&mdash;the emporium of the East.</p>
+
+<p>The street we followed came to an end by-and-by at a great court open to
+the sky. It was a magnificent enclosure, and I was quite willing to
+enter it. I did not do so, however. I had my foot raised to step over
+the low barrier, when there was a warning cry and a brown hand pushed me
+back. Our guide had dropped a step behind. He came hurrying up now, and
+explained that this was the court of the Great Mosque. We must have
+special permission to enter. We would come with the party to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>The place impressed me more than any mosque<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> we have seen&mdash;not for its
+beauty, though it is beautiful, but because of its vastness, its open
+sky, and its stone floor, polished like glass by the bare and stockinged
+feet that have slipped over it for centuries. We could not enter, but we
+were allowed to watch those who came as they removed their shoes and
+stepped over into the court to pray. When you realize that the enclosure
+is as big as two or three city squares, and that the stones, only fairly
+smooth in the beginning, reflect like a mirror now, you will form some
+idea of the feet and knees and hands that have pressed them, and realize
+something of the fervor of the Damascus faith.</p>
+
+<p>We left the bazaar by a different way, and our guide got lost getting us
+back to the hotel. I didn't blame him, though&mdash;anybody could get lost in
+those tangled streets. We were in a hopeless muddle, for it was getting
+dark, when down at the far end of a narrow defile Laura got a glimpse of
+a building which she said was like one opposite our hotel. So we went to
+look for it, and it was the same building. Then our guide found the
+hotel for us, and we paid him, and everything was all right. He didn't
+know anything about the city, I believe, but was otherwise a perfect
+guide.</p>
+
+<p>Following, we put in a busy two days in Damascus&mdash;a marvellous two days,
+I thought. Our carriages were at the hotel next morning, and I want to
+say here that of all the carriages and horses we have seen, those of
+Damascus are far and away the best. The horses are simply beautiful
+creatures and in perfect condition. Even those kept for hire<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> are superb
+animals with skins of velvet. They are Arabian, of course, and I can
+believe, now, that the Arab loves his horse, for I have never seen finer
+animals, not even on Fifth Avenue. I can understand, too, why the <span class="smcap">Quaker
+City</span> pilgrims&mdash;ambling into Damascus on those old, blind, halt and
+spavined Beirut nags&mdash;made their entry by night.</p>
+
+<p>And these Damascus horses go. Their drivers may love them, but they make
+them hurry. They crack their whips, and we go racing through the streets
+like mad. However deliberate the East may be in most things, it is swift
+enough in the matter of driving.</p>
+
+<p>I don't care for it. It keeps me watching all the time to see what kind
+of an Arab we are going to kill, and I miss a good many sights. We went
+through that crowded thoroughfare of the Grande Bazaar at a rate which
+fairly was homicidal. Certainly if those drowsy shopkeepers did not hate
+Christians enough before, they do now.</p>
+
+<p>We drove to the Grande Mosque, and we had to put on slippers, of course,
+to enter even the outer court. It is nearly a quarter of a mile long,
+and we slid and straddled across that vast marble skating-rink, pausing
+at a little pavilion&mdash;the Dome of the Treasury&mdash;where they keep some
+venerable books&mdash;the oldest books in the world, I believe, and so sacred
+that nobody ever sees them. Then we entered the Grande Mosque
+itself&mdash;still known as the Church of St. John the Divine.</p>
+
+<p>For, like the temples of Baalbec and otherwheres, the Grande Mosque of
+Damascus has sheltered a variety of religious doctrines. It was the
+Temple<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> of Rimmon, first, god of the Syrians. The Romans, who conquered
+and templed the world, came next, and built here, as they always built,
+in magnificence and pride, with architecture stolen from the Greeks.
+After the Romans, the early Christians under Constantine and Theodosius,
+who for some reason did not destroy, as was their habit, but only
+adapted the great temple to their needs. The son of Theodosius made some
+improvements, and above the south door left a Christian inscription
+which stands to this day.</p>
+
+<p>When, in 634 <span class="smcap">a.d</span>., Damascus fell, the church was at first divided
+between Mohammedan and Christian worshippers&mdash;the two entering by the
+same gate. They were not so far asunder in those days&mdash;not farther, I
+think, than some of our present-day Christian sects&mdash;so called. Seventy
+years later the strife became bitter, and the followers of Mohammed
+claimed it all. The Caliph entered the church with guards, smashed the
+Christian images, and set up emblems of the new faith. Then he lavished
+quantities of money, making the place as splendid as possible, until it
+was more beautiful even than St. Sophia's. Sixteen years ago it was
+badly damaged by fire, but now it has been restored&mdash;by Christian
+workmen, Habib said. Habib, I should add, is our party guide&mdash;a
+Christian Syrian, educated in a college at Beirut&mdash;a quite wonderful
+person of many languages.</p>
+
+<p>The mosque interior is the most beautiful place we have seen. Its
+ceiling, its windows, its mosaic walls, its rugs&mdash;all overwhelming in
+exquisite workmanship<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> and prodigality of design. The pictures I have
+dreamed of Aladdin's palace grow dim in this enchanted place. No wonder
+the faithful linger here on their way to and from Mecca; for after the
+long desert stages it is like a vision of that lavish paradise which
+their generous prophet has provided. They are all about&mdash;prostrating
+themselves with many genuflections and murmurings&mdash;and we step on them
+as little as possible, but they are a good deal in the way. The place
+holds ten or twelve thousand of them every Friday, Habib said.</p>
+
+<p>Habib, by-the-way, has small respect for the Moslem. Also, he does not
+seem to fear consequences, which I confess I do, being in the very
+stronghold of fanaticism, and remembering that some five thousand
+Christians were suddenly and violently destroyed in Damascus not so many
+years ago. We were in front of a very marvellous mosaic shrine, and
+Habib beckoned us to come closer to admire its exquisite workmanship. A
+devotee was prostrated in the little alcove, bowing and praying in the
+usual rhythmic way. We surrounded him, but were inclined to hold a
+little aloof.</p>
+
+<p>"Closer, closer!" urged Habib. "You must see it!"</p>
+
+<p>We crowded up and entangled the praying person, who became aware of our
+presence and turned up his face helplessly. Then he pressed it again to
+the floor, and tried to go on with his murmurings. It was no use. Habib
+jostled him, waved his pointing stick over his head, tapped the
+ornamentation within an inch of his nose. We were told to step up and
+examine the work closely&mdash;to touch it, smell of it. Clearly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> Habib
+regarded that devotee no more than if he had been a mile removed instead
+of being actually against us. The poor pious pilgrim stole another look
+at us, this way and that, slipped a notch in his prayers, gathered
+himself and tried again, let go a whole distich, quavered in his attempt
+to make himself heard, cast another appealing glance at the
+<i>Kurf&uuml;rsters</i>, broke through, and fled. This is not an exaggeration, but
+an actual happening. In America there would have been trouble.</p>
+
+<p>"He is nothing," said Habib, when I seemed disturbed. "He is only an
+Arab." Still, he was praying to Habib's God.</p>
+
+<p>Many persons do not realize, I believe, that Christianity and
+Mohammedanism differ mainly in their Messiah. The Jew furnished the
+Moslem as well as the Christian with a God, patriarchs, and
+prophets&mdash;the Old Testament being common to all. The Moslem goes further
+than the Jew, for he accepts parts of the New Testament. He recognizes
+John the Baptist as a holy messenger, even claiming to have his head in
+this very church, in a shrine which we saw, though I could see that
+Habib thought the relic apocryphal. Furthermore, the Moslem accepts
+Christ! To him, Christ is only a lesser prophet than Mohammed, but still
+a great being&mdash;an emissary of God&mdash;and on this same mosque is the
+Minaret of Jesus, where, one day, as they believe, he will stand to
+judge the world. On the other hand, the average Christian believes that
+Mohammed was merely a fraud, and it is this difference of opinion that
+has reddened the East with blood. I am moved to set down this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> paragraph
+of rather general information for the reason that it contains some
+things which I suppose others to be as ignorant of as I was&mdash;things
+which seem to me interesting.</p>
+
+<p>We did see one old book, by-the-way&mdash;fifteen hundred years old, Habib
+said, and a member of our party asked if it was printed on a press;
+though that is nothing&mdash;I have done worse myself. Then we ascended the
+Minaret of the Bride for the view. We climbed and climbed, and got hot,
+and shaky in the knees, but the view repaid us. There was Damascus
+spread out in its beauty; its marble courts, its domes and minarets and
+painted houses&mdash;a magic city in the midst of a garden of bloom.
+Certainly this is fairyland&mdash;a mirage whose fragile fabric may vanish in
+a breath. Oh, our time is all too short! One must have long and long to
+look upon the East&mdash;it has taken so long to build!</p>
+
+<p>We went to Saladin's tomb, and that is authoritative, though I confess
+that I could not realize, as we stood in that narrow building and viewed
+the catafalque in the centre, that the mighty Saracen hero of romance
+rested there. For me, he belongs only in tales of enchantment and fierce
+deeds, and not in that quiet place. I remembered that his sword was so
+sharp that a feather pillow dropped on its edge would fall on either
+side. Perhaps they have the sword there, and possibly the pillow to
+prove it, but I did not see them.</p>
+
+<p>A Turkish school turned out to look at us and smile. We looked and
+smiled back, and everybody was satisfied. It is certain that we look
+more strange<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> to them than they do to us, now. I know this, for when I
+stop anywhere and look over our party, here amid the turbans and fezzes
+and long flowing garments of the Orient, I can see for myself that it is
+really our party that looks queer and fantastic and out of place&mdash;not
+these people at all.</p>
+
+<p>It is natural that one should realize this in Damascus, for Damascus is
+the great reality&mdash;the unchanged and changeless. Algiers was a framed
+picture; Constantinople was a world's Midway&mdash;a sort of masquerade,
+prepared for our benefit. Here it is different. No longer the country
+and the people constitute the show, but ourselves. One presently
+discovers that he is artificial&mdash;an alien, a discord&mdash;that he has no
+place here. These others are the eternal verities; their clothes are the
+real clothes&mdash;not ours, that change fashion with every year and season.
+One is tempted to abjure all the fanfare and flourish of his so-called
+progress&mdash;to strip off his ridiculous garments and customs and fall in
+with the long steady rhythm of the ages.</p>
+
+<p>Only, you don't do it. You discover objections to such a course. I could
+name some of them if I wanted to. Never mind; you couldn't do it anyway.
+You have been hurrying and sweating and capering about and wearing your
+funny clothes and singing in false keys too long. You cannot immediately
+put on the garb of the ages, and lock step with the swing of a thousand
+years.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>XXVII</h2>
+
+<h3>FOOTPRINTS OF PAUL</h3>
+
+<p>We entered the "street which is called Straight," and came to the house
+of Judas, where St. Paul lodged when he was led blind into Damascus,
+trembling and astonished of the Lord. His name was Saul, and he had been
+on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians, by the authority of
+Rome. The story is in the ninth chapter of Acts, and is too familiar to
+repeat here. I believe, though, most of us thought the house of Judas
+had some connection with the unfaithful disciple of that name, until
+Habib enlightened us. Habib said that this was another Judas&mdash;a good
+man&mdash;well-to-do for his time. The Street called Straight runs through
+the Grande Bazaar, and the house of Judas is in the very midst of that
+dim aggregation of trades. It is roofless and unoccupied, but it is kept
+clean and whitewashed, and its stone walls will stand for another two
+thousand years.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the birth and crucifixion of the Saviour, the most important
+event in the story of Christianity happened there. It seemed strange and
+dream-like to be standing in the house of St. Paul's conversion&mdash;a place
+which heretofore had seemed to exist only in the thin leaves and fine
+print of our Sunday-school days&mdash;and I found myself wondering which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+corner of the house St. Paul occupied, just where he sat at table, and a
+number of such things. Then I noticed the drifting throngs outside,
+passing and repassing or idling drowsily, who did not seem to know that
+it was St. Paul's house, and paid no attention to it at all.</p>
+
+<p>At the house of Ananias, which came next, Habib was slow in arriving,
+and the Horse-Doctor gave us a preliminary lecture.</p>
+
+<p>"This," he said, "is the house of Ananias, once fed by the ravens.
+Later, through being a trifle careless with the truth, he became the
+founder and charter member of a club which in the United States of
+America still bears his name. Still later he was struck by lightning for
+deceiving his mother-in-law, Saphira, who perished at the same time to
+furnish a Scripture example that the innocent must suffer with the
+guilty (see Deuteronomy xi. 16): This is the spot where Ananias fell.
+That stone marks the spot where his mother-in-law stood. The hole in the
+roof was made by the lightning when it came through. We will now pass on
+to the next&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>That was good enough gospel for our party if Habib had only let it
+alone. He came in just then and interrupted. He said:</p>
+
+<p>"This is the house of Ananias&mdash;called St. Ananias, to distinguish him
+from a liar by the same name. That Ananias and his wife, Saphira, fell
+dead at the feet of St. Peter because of falsehood, a warning to those
+who trifle with the truth to-day. St. Ananias was a good man, who
+restored St. Paul's sight and instructed him in the Christian
+doctrine."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We naturally avoided the Doctor for a time after that. His neighborhood
+seemed dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>The house of Ananias is below ground, and was probably used as a
+hiding-place in a day when it was not safe for an active and busy
+Christian to be at large. Such periods have not been unusual in
+Damascus. St. Paul preached Christianity openly, but not for long; for
+the Jews "took counsel to kill him," and watched the gate to see that he
+did not get away.</p>
+
+<p>"Then the disciples took him by night, and let him down the wall in a
+basket."</p>
+
+<p>We drove to the outer wall, and came to the place and the window where
+Paul is said to have been let down. It <i>might</i> have happened there; the
+wall is Roman, and the window above it could have been there in St.
+Paul's day. I prefer to believe it is the real window, though I have
+reason to think they show another one sometimes.</p>
+
+<p>Habib said we were to visit some of the handsome residences of Damascus.
+We were eager for that. From the Minaret of the Bride we had looked down
+upon those marble courts and gay fa&ccedil;ades, and had been fascinated. We
+drove back into the city, through narrow mud-walled streets, forbidding
+and not overclean. When these alleys had become so narrow and
+disheartening that we could travel only with discomfort, we stopped at a
+wretched entrance and were told to get out. Certainly this was never the
+portal to any respectable residence. But we were mistaken. The Damascus
+house is built from the inside out. It is mud and unseemly disrepute
+without,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> but it is fairyland within. Every pretentious house is built
+on the same plan, and has a marble court, with a fountain or pool, and
+some peach or apricot or orange trees. On one side of the court is the
+front of the house. It has a high entrance, and rooms to the right and
+to the left&mdash;rooms that have a raised floor at one end (that is where
+the rich rugs are) and very high ceilings&mdash;forty feet high, some of
+them&mdash;decorated with elaborate designs. In the first house the round
+writhing rafters were exposed, and the decoration on them made them look
+exactly like snakes. The Apostle took one look and fled, and I confess I
+did not care for them much myself. The rest of the house was divided
+into rooms of many kinds, and there was running water, and a bath. We
+visited another house, different only in details. Some of the occupants
+were at home here&mdash;women-folks who seemed glad to see us, and showed us
+about eagerly. A tourist party from far-off America is a diversion to
+them, no doubt.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 315px;"><a name="ILL_033" id="ILL_033"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_033.jpg" width="315" height="500" alt="URGING US TO PARTAKE OF THE PRECIOUS STUFF, WITHOUT
+STINT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">URGING US TO PARTAKE OF THE PRECIOUS STUFF, WITHOUT
+STINT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Then we went to still another house. We saw at once that it was a
+grander place than the two already visited, and we were simply
+bewildered at the abundance of the graven brass and inlaid furniture,
+rich rugs and general bric-&agrave;-brac, that filled a great reception-room.
+Suddenly servants in Turkish dress appeared with trays of liqueurs&mdash;two
+kinds, orange and violet&mdash;urging us to partake of the precious stuff,
+without stint. Also, there were trays of rare coffee and dainty
+sweetmeats, and we were invited to sit in the priceless chairs and to
+handle the wonderful things to our hearts' content. We were amazed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+stunned. Oriental hospitality could go no further. Then in some subtle
+manner&mdash;I don't remember how the information was conveyed, but it must
+have been delicately, Orientally done&mdash;we learned that all this brass,
+all these marvellous things, were for sale!</p>
+
+<p>Did we buy them? Did we! David did not take more brass from Hadadezer
+than we carried out of that Damascus residence, which was simply an
+annex to a great brass and mosaic factory, as we discovered later.
+Perhaps those strange liqueurs got into our enthusiasm; certainly I have
+never seen our party so liberal&mdash;so little inclined to haggle and hammer
+down.</p>
+
+<p>But the things themselves were worth while. The most beautiful brass in
+the world is made in Damascus, and it is made in that factory.</p>
+
+<p>They took us in where the work was going on. I expected to see
+machinery. Nothing of the sort&mdash;not a single machine anywhere. Every
+stage of the work is performed by hand&mdash;done in the most primitive way,
+by workmen sitting on the ground, shaping some artistic form, or with a
+simple graving-tool working out an intricate design. Many of the workers
+were mere children&mdash;girls, most of them&mdash;some of them not over seven or
+eight years old, yet even these were producing work which would cause
+many an "arts and crafts" young lady in America to pale with envy. They
+get a few cents a day. The skilled workers, whose deft fingers and
+trained vision produce the exquisite silver inlay designs, get as much
+as a shilling. No wonder our people did not haggle. The things were
+cheap, and they knew it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In a wareroom in the same factory I noticed that one of the walls was
+stone, and looked like Roman masonry; also that in it were the outlines
+of two high arches, walled up. I asked Habib about it.</p>
+
+<p>"Those," he said, "are two of the entrances to the Street called
+Straight. We are outside of the wall here; this house is built against
+it. The Straight street had three entrances in the old days. Those two
+have long been closed."</p>
+
+<p>It always gives me a curious sensation to realize that actual people are
+living and following their daily occupations in the midst of
+associations like these. I can't get used to it at all.</p>
+
+<p>To them, however, it is nothing. The fact that they sleep and wake and
+pursue their drowsy round in places hallowed by tradition; that the
+house which sheltered St. Paul stands in the midst of their murmuring
+bazaar; that one side of this wareroom is the wall of the ancient city,
+the actual end of the Street called Straight; that every step they take
+is on historic ground, sacred to at least three religions&mdash;this to me
+marvellous condition is to them not strange at all.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that they do not realize the existence of these things: they
+do&mdash;at least, most of them do&mdash;and honor and preserve their landmarks.
+But that a column against which they dream and smoke may be one of the
+very columns against which St. Paul leaned as he groped his blind way
+down the Street called Straight is to them not a matter for wonder, or
+even comment.</p>
+
+<p>I am beginning to understand their point of view&mdash;even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> to envy it. I do
+not envy some of the things they have&mdash;some of their customs&mdash;but their
+serenity of habit, their security of place in the stately march of time,
+their establishment of race and religion&mdash;one must envy these things
+when he considers them here, apart from that environment which we call
+civilized&mdash;the whirl which we call progress.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think I shall turn Moslem. The doctrine has attractive
+features, both here and hereafter; but I would not like to undertake the
+Koran at my time of life. I can, however, and I do, pay the tribute of
+respect to the sun-baked land and sun-browned race that have given birth
+to three of the world's great religions, even though they have not
+unnaturally claimed their last invention as their best and held it as
+their own.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>XXVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>DISCONTENTED PILGRIMS</h3>
+
+<p>We entered the remaining portal of the Street called Straight and drove
+to the Grand Bazaar. We were in a buying fever by this time, and plunged
+into a regular debauch of bargain and purchase. We were all a little
+weary when we reached the hotel. We came in carrying our brass and other
+loot, and dropped down on the first divan, letting our bundles fall
+where they listed.</p>
+
+<p>I thought the Apostle looked particularly solemn. Being a weighty
+person, jouncing all day in a carriage and walking through brass bazaars
+and fez bazaars and silk bazaars and rug bazaars and silver bazaars and
+leather bazaars and saddle bazaars, and at least two hundred and seven
+other bazaars, had told on him. When I spoke cheeringly he merely
+grunted and reached for something in a glass which, if it tasted as it
+smelled, was not calculated to improve his temper. When I sat down
+beside him he did not seem over cordial.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 349px;"><a name="ILL_034" id="ILL_034"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_034.jpg" width="349" height="500" alt="ASKED HIM IF HE WOULDN&#39;T EXECUTE A LITTLE COMMISSION FOR
+ME IN THE BAZAARS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ASKED HIM IF HE WOULDN&#39;T EXECUTE A LITTLE COMMISSION FOR
+ME IN THE BAZAARS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Then, quite casually, I asked him if he wouldn't execute a little
+commission for me in the bazaars; there were a few trifles I had
+overlooked: another coffee-set, for instance&mdash;something for a friend at
+home; I had faith in his (the Apostle's) taste.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed a reasonable request, and I made it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> politely enough, but the
+Apostle became suddenly violent. He said:</p>
+
+<p>"Damn the bazaars! I'm full of brass and Oriental rugs and bric-&agrave;-brac.
+I never want to hear of a bazaar again. I want to give away the junk
+I've already bought, and get back to the ship." Which we knew he didn't
+mean, for he had put in weary hours acquiring those things, inspired
+with a large generosity for loved ones at home.</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel came drifting along just then&mdash;unruffled,
+debonair&mdash;apparently unwearied by the day's round. Nothing disturbs the
+Colonel. If he should outwear the century, he would still be as blithe
+of speech and manner as he is to-day at&mdash;dear me, how old is the
+Colonel? Is he thirty? Is he fifty? He might be either of those ages or
+at any mile-post between.</p>
+
+<p>He stood now, looking down at the Apostle and his cup of poison. Then,
+with a coaxing smile:</p>
+
+<p>"Match you, Joe&mdash;my plunder against yours&mdash;just once."</p>
+
+<p>The Apostle looked up with a perfectly divine sneer.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Yes</i>, you will&mdash; I think I see myself!"</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel slapped a coin on the table briskly.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, Joe&mdash;we never matched for bric-&agrave;-brac before. Let's be
+game&mdash;just this time."</p>
+
+<p>What was the use? The Apostle resisted&mdash;at first violently, then
+feebly&mdash;then he matched&mdash;and lost.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he could hardly realize the extent of his disaster. Then he
+reached for the mixture in front of him, swallowed it, gagged, and
+choked alarmingly. When he could get his voice, he said:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'm the hellfiredest fool in Syria. I walked four hundred miles to buy
+those things."</p>
+
+<p>The Horse-Doctor regarded him thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"You always interest me," he said. "I don't know whether it's your shape
+or your mental habitudes. Both are so peculiar."</p>
+
+<p>After which we left the Apostle&mdash;that is, we stood from under and went
+in to dinner.</p>
+
+<p>The Apostle is a good traveller, however&mdash;all the Reprobates are. They
+take things as they find them, which cannot be said for all of our
+people. One wonders what some of them expected in Damascus&mdash;probably
+steamer fare and New York hotel accommodations. I judge this from their
+remarks.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, we are at the best hotel in Damascus, and the hotel
+people are racking their bodies and risking their souls to give us the
+best they know. A traveller cannot get better than the best&mdash;even in
+heaven. Travelling alone in any strange land, he is more likely to get
+the worst. Yet the real traveller will make the best of what he finds,
+and do better when he finds he can. But these malcontents of ours have
+been pampered and spoiled by that steamer until they expect nothing
+short of perfection&mdash;<i>their</i> kind of perfection&mdash;wherever they set foot.
+They are so disturbed over the fact that the bill-of-fare is unusual and
+not adjusted to their tastes that they are not enjoying the sights, and
+want to clear out, forthwith. They have been in Damascus a little more
+than a day; they want to go now. This old race has stood it five
+thousand years or more. These ship-dwellers can't stand it two days
+without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> complaint. I don't want to be severe, but such travellers tire
+me. I suppose the bill-of-fare in heaven won't please them. I hope not,
+if I'm invited to remain there&mdash;any length of time, I mean.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of us are having great enjoyment. We like everything, and we
+eat most of it. There are any number of dried fruits and nuts and fine
+juicy oranges always on the table, strung down the centre&mdash;its full
+length. And even if the meats are a bit queer, they are by no means bad.
+We whoop up the bill-of-fare, and go through it forward and backward and
+diagonally, working from both ends toward the centre, and back again if
+we feel like it. We have fruit and nuts piled by our plates and on our
+plates all through the meal. <i>We</i> don't get tired of Damascus. We could
+stay here and start a famine. What <i>will</i> these grumblers do in heaven,
+where very likely there isn't a single dish they ever heard of before?</p>
+
+<p>In the matter of wines, however, I am conservative. You see, Mohammed
+forbade the use of spirituous beverages by the faithful, and liquor
+forms no part of their long, symphonic rhyme. They don't drink it
+themselves; they only make it for visitors.</p>
+
+<p>It would require no command of the Prophet to make me abstain from it. I
+have tried their vintage. I tried one brand called the "Wine of
+Ephesus." The name conjured visions; so did the wine, but they were not
+the same visions. The name suggested banquets in marble halls, where
+gentlemen and ladies of the old days reclined on rich divans and were
+served by slaves on bended knee. The wine itself&mdash;the taste of it, I
+mean&mdash;suggested a combination<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> of hard cider and kerosene, with a hurry
+call for the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>I was coy about the wines of the East after that, but by-and-by I tried
+another brand&mdash;a different color with a different name. This time it was
+"Nectar of Heliopolis." They had curious ideas of nectar in Heliopolis.
+Still, it was better than the Wine of Ephesus. Hair-oil is always better
+than kerosene in a mixture like that&mdash;but not much better. The flavor
+did not invite debauch.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>This is Sunday (the Christian Sunday), and I have been out for an early
+morning walk. I took the trolley that starts near the hotel. I did not
+care for a trolley excursion, but I wanted to see what a Damascus
+trolley is like and where it went. It isn't like anything in particular,
+and it didn't go anywhere&mdash;not while I was on it.</p>
+
+<p>I noticed that it was divided into three sections, and I climbed into
+the front one. The conductor motioned to me, and I understood that I had
+made a wrong selection, somehow. A woman, veiled and bangled, climbed
+aboard just then, and I understood. I was in the women's section&mdash;a
+thing not allowed in Damascus. So I got back into the rear section, but
+that wouldn't do, either. The conductor was motioning again.</p>
+
+<p>I comprehended at length. The rear compartment was second class. He
+wanted me to go in style. So I got into the middle compartment and gave
+him a tin medal, and got two or three similar ones in change, and sat
+there waiting for the procession to move.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> I waited a good while. There
+was an Arabic inscription on the back of the seats in front of me&mdash;in
+the place where, in America, it says, "Wait for the car to stop." I
+suppose it says, "Wait for the car to start" in Damascus. We did that.
+The conductor dozed.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then somebody climbed on, but the arrivals were infrequent. I
+wondered if we were waiting for a load. It would take a week to fill up,
+at that rate. I looked at my watch now and then. The others went to
+sleep. That is about the difference between the East and the West. The
+West counts the time; for the East it has no existence. Moments, hours,
+months mean nothing to the East. The word hurry is not of her language.
+She drives her horses fast, but merely for pleasure, not haste. She has
+constructed this trolley, but merely for style. It doesn't really serve
+any useful purpose.</p>
+
+<p>We moved a little by-and-by, and I had hopes. They were premature. We
+crawled up in front of a coffee-house where a lot of turbans and fezzes
+were gathered outside, over tiny cups and hubble-bubble pipes; then we
+stopped. Our conductor and motorman got off and leaned against an
+almond-tree and began gossiping with friends. Finally coffee came out to
+them, and pipes, and they squatted down to smoke.</p>
+
+<p>I finished my ride then; I shall always wonder where those other
+passengers thought they were going, and if they ever got there.</p>
+
+<p>I followed down a narrow street, and came to a succession of tiny
+work-shops. It was then I discovered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> what a man's feet are for&mdash;that
+is, some uses I had not known before. They are to assist the hands in
+performing mechanical labor. All mechanics work barefooted here. They
+sit flat on the floor or ground, with their various appliances in
+front of them, and there is scarcely any operation in which the feet
+do not take part. I came to a turning-lathe&mdash;a whole row of
+turning-lathes&mdash;tiny, crude affairs, down on the ground, of course,
+driven back and forth with a bow and a string. The workman held the bow
+in one hand, while the other hand, assisted by the foot, guided the
+cutting tool. It would never occur to these workmen to put the lathe
+higher in the air and attach a treadle, leaving both hands free to guide
+the tool.</p>
+
+<p>Their sawing is the crudest process imaginable. They have no trestles or
+even saw-bucks. They have only a slanting stick stuck in the ground, and
+against this, with their feet and one hand, they hold the piece to be
+sawed, while the other hand runs the earliest saw ever made&mdash;the kind
+Noah used when he built the Ark. Sometimes a sawyer has a helper&mdash;a boy
+who pushes and pulls as the saw runs back and forth.</p>
+
+<p>I bought a Sunday-morning paper. It does not resemble the
+sixty-four-page New York Sunday dailies. It consists of four small
+pages, printed in wriggly animalcul&aelig; and other aquaria, and contains
+news four years old&mdash;or four hundred, it does not matter. Possibly it
+denounces the sultan&mdash;it is proper to do that just now&mdash;but I think not.
+That would be too current. I think it is still denouncing Constantine.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>XXIX</h2>
+
+<h3>DAMASCUS, THE GARDEN BEAUTIFUL</h3>
+
+<p>Later, we drove to the foot of Mohammed's Hill&mdash;the hill from which the
+Prophet looked down on the Pearl of the East and decided that as he
+could have only one paradise he would wait for the next. They have built
+a little tower to mark the spot where he rested, and we thought we would
+climb up there.</p>
+
+<p>We didn't, however. The carriages could only go a little way beyond the
+city outskirts, and when we started to climb that blistering, barren
+hillside afoot we changed our minds rapidly. We had permission to go as
+high as we pleased, but it is of no value. Anybody could give it. Laura
+and I and a German newspaper man were the only ones who toiled up high
+enough to look down through the mystical haze on the vision Mohammed
+saw. Heavens! but it was hot up there! And this is March&mdash;early spring!
+How those <i>Quaker City</i> pilgrims stood it to travel across the Syrian
+desert in August I cannot imagine. In the <i>Innocents</i> I find this
+observation:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The sun-flames shot down like shafts of fire that stream
+out of a blowpipe. The rays seemed to fall in a steady
+deluge on my head and pass downward like rain from a roof."</p></div>
+
+<p>That is a white-hot description, but not too intense, I think, for
+Syrian summer-time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Another thing we noticed up there: Damascus is growing&mdash;in that
+direction at least. Older than history, the place is actually having a
+boom. All the houses out that way are new&mdash;mud-walled, but some of them
+quite pretentious. They have pushed out far beyond the gardens, across
+the barren plain, and they are climbing the still more barren slope.
+They stand there in the baking sun, unshaded as yet by any living thing.
+One pities the women shut up behind those tiny barred windows. These
+places will have gardens about them some day. Already their owners are
+scratching the earth with their crooked sticks, and they will plant and
+water and make the desert bloom.</p>
+
+<p>Being free in the afternoon, Laura and I engaged Habib and a carriage
+and went adventuring on our own account. We let Habib manage the
+excursion, and I shall always remember it as a sweet, restful
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>We visited a Moslem burying-ground first, and the tomb of Fatima&mdash;the
+original Fatima&mdash;Mohammed's beautiful daughter, who married a rival
+prophet, Ali, yet sleeps to-day with honor in a little mosque-like tomb.
+We passed a tree said to have been planted by the Mohammedan conqueror
+of Damascus nearly thirteen hundred years ago&mdash;an enormous tree, ten
+feet through or more&mdash;on one side a hollow which would hold a dozen men,
+standing.</p>
+
+<p>Then at last we came to the gardens of Damascus, and got out and walked
+among the olive-trees and the peach and almond and apricot&mdash;most of them
+in riotous bloom. Summer cultivation had only just<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> begun, and few
+workmen were about. Later the gardens will swarm with them, and they
+will be digging and irrigating, and afterward gathering the fruit,
+preserving and drying it, and sending it to market. Habib showed us the
+primitive methods of doing these things.</p>
+
+<p>How sweet and quiet and fragrant it was there among the flowering trees!
+In one place a little group of Syrian Christians were recreating (it
+being Sunday), playing some curious dulcimer instrument and singing a
+weird hymn.</p>
+
+<p>We crossed the garden, and sat on the grass under the peach-bloom while
+Habib went for the carriage. Sitting there, we realized that the
+guide-book had been only fair to Damascus.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"For miles around it is a wilderness of gardens&mdash;gardens
+with roses among the tangled shrubberies, and with fruit on
+the branches overhead. Everywhere among the trees the murmur
+of unseen rivulets is heard."</p></div>
+
+<p>That sounds like fairyland, but it is only Damascus&mdash;Damascus in June,
+when the fruit is ripening and the water-ways are full.</p>
+
+<p>We drove out of Damascus altogether&mdash;far out across a fertile plain, to
+the slopes of the West Lebanon hills. Then turning, we watched the sun
+slip down the sky while Habib told us many things. Whatever there is to
+know, Habib knows, and to localities and landmarks he fitted stories and
+traditions which brought back all the old atmosphere and made this
+Damascus the Damascus of fable and dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Habib pointed out landmarks near and far&mdash;minarets of the great mosque,
+the direction of Jerusalem, of Mecca; he showed us where the waters of
+Damascus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> rise and where they waste into the desert sands. To the
+westward was Mount Hermon; southward came the lands of Naphtali, and
+Bashan where the giant Og once reigned. All below us lay Palestine;
+Mount Hermon was the watch-tower, Damascus the capital of the North.</p>
+
+<p>Damascus in the sunset, its domes and minarets lifting above the lacing
+green! There is no more beautiful picture in the world than that. We
+turned to it again and again when every other interest had waned&mdash;the
+jewel, the "pearl set in emeralds," on the desert's edge. Laura and I
+will always remember that Sunday evening vision of the old city, the
+things that Habib told us, and the drive home.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the city itself I think the desert interested us. It begins just
+a little beyond Damascus, Habib said, and stretches the length of the
+Red Sea and to the Persian Gulf. A thousand miles down its length lies
+Mecca, to which pilgrims have journeyed for ages&mdash;a horde of them every
+year. There is a railway, now, as far as Tebook, but Mecca is still six
+hundred miles beyond. The great annual pilgrimages, made up of the
+faithful from all over Asia and portions of Europe and Africa, depart
+from Damascus, and those that survive it return after long months of
+wasting desert travel. Habib said that a great pilgrimage was returning
+now; the city was full of holy men.</p>
+
+<p>Then he told us about the dromedary mail that crosses the desert from
+Damascus to Bagdad, like a through express. It is about five hundred
+miles across as the stork flies, but the dromedary is not disturbed by
+distance. He destroys it at the rate of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> fifteen miles an hour, and
+capers in fresh and smiling at the other end. Habib did not advise
+dromedary travel. It is very rough, he said. Nothing but an Arab trained
+to the business could stand it. Once an Englishman wanted to go through
+by the dromedary mail, and did go, though they implored him to travel in
+the regular way. He got through all right, but his liver and his heart
+had changed places, and it took three doctors seven days to rearrange
+his works.</p>
+
+<p>A multitude was pouring out of the city when we reached the
+gates&mdash;dwellers in the lands about. We entered and turned aside into
+quiet streets, the twilight gathering about mysterious doorways and in
+dim shops and stalls, where were bowed, turbaned men who never seemed to
+sell anything, or to want to sell anything&mdash;who barely noticed us as we
+passed through the Grand Bazaar, where it was getting dark, and all the
+drowsy merchants of all the drowsy merchandise were like still shadows
+that only moved a little to let us pass. Out again into streets that
+were full of dusk, and dim flitting figures and subdued sounds.</p>
+
+<p>All at once I caught sight of a black stone jar hanging at the door of a
+very small and dusky booth. It was such a jar as is used in Damascus
+to-day for water&mdash;was used there in the time of Abraham.</p>
+
+<p>"Habib!"</p>
+
+<p>I had wanted one of the pots from the first. The carriage stops
+instantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Habib! That black water-jar&mdash;a small one!"</p>
+
+<p>I had meant to bargain for it myself, but Habib is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> ahead of me. He
+scorns to bargain for such a trifle, and with such a merchant. He merely
+seizes the jar, says a guttural word or two in whatever tongue the man
+knows, flings him a paltry coin, and is back in the carriage, directing
+our course along the darkening, narrow way.</p>
+
+<p>What a wonderful life the dark is bringing out! There, in front of that
+coffee-house, that row of men smoking nargileh&mdash;surely they are
+magicians, every one. "That silent group with shaven faces and snowy
+beards: who are they, Habib?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mongolians," he says. "Pilgrims returning from Mecca. They live far
+over to the north of China, but still are followers of the Prophet." The
+scope of Islamism is wide&mdash;oh yes, very wide, and increasing. That group
+gathered at the fountain&mdash;their dress, their faces&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Habib!"</p>
+
+<p>The horses come up with a jerk.</p>
+
+<p>"A copper water-jar, Habib! An old, old man is filling it&mdash;such a
+strange pattern"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Habib is down instantly, and amid the crowd. Cautiously I follow. The
+old man is stooped, wrinkled, travel-worn. His robe and his turban are
+full of dust. He is listening to Habib and replying briefly.</p>
+
+<p>Habib explains. The pilgrim is returning with it from Mecca; it is very
+old; he cannot part with it. My heart sinks; every word adds value to
+the treasure. Habib tries again, while I touch the ancient, curiously
+wrought jar lovingly. The pilgrim draws away. He will hardly allow me
+even this comfort.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We return to the carriage sadly. The driver starts. Some one comes
+running behind, calling. Again we stop; a boy calls something to Habib.</p>
+
+<p>"He will sell," Habib laughs, "and why not? He demands a napoleon. Of
+course you will not give it!"</p>
+
+<p>Oh, coward heart! I cannot, after that. I have the napoleon and the
+desire, but I cannot appear a fool before Habib.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it is too much. Drive on."</p>
+
+<p>We dash forward; the East closes behind us; the opportunity is forever
+lost.</p>
+
+<p>If one could only be brave at the instant! All my days shall I recall
+the group at the fountain: that bent, travel-stained pilgrim; that
+strangely fashioned water-pot which perhaps came down to him from
+patriarchal days. How many journeys to Mecca had it made; how many times
+had it moistened the parching lips of some way-worn pilgrim dragging
+across the burning sand; how many times had it furnished water for
+absolution before the prayer in the desert! And all this could have been
+mine. For a paltry napoleon I could have had the talisman for my
+own&mdash;all the wonder of the East, its music, its mystery, its
+superstition; I could have fondled it and gazed on it and re-created
+each picture at a touch.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, Habib, Habib, may the Prophet forgive you; for, alas, I never can!</p>
+
+<p>At the station next morning a great horde of pilgrims were waiting for
+the train which would bear them to Beirut&mdash;Mongolians, many of them, who
+had been on the long, long, pilgrimage over land and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> sea. At Beirut, we
+were told, seven steamers were waiting to take them on the next stage of
+their homeward journey. What a weary way they had yet to travel!</p>
+
+<p>They were all loaded down with baggage. They had their bundles,
+clothing, quilts, water-bottles: and I wandered about among them vainly
+hoping to find my pilgrim of the copper pot. Hopeless, indeed. There
+were pots in plenty, but they were all new or unsightly things.</p>
+
+<p>All the pilgrims were old men, for the Moslem, like most of the rest of
+us, puts off his spiritual climax until he has acquired his material
+account. He <i>has</i> to, in fact; for, even going the poorest way and
+mainly afoot, a journey of ten or twelve thousand miles across mountain
+and desert, wilderness and wave cannot be made without substance.</p>
+
+<p>We took a goodly number of them on our train. Freight-cars crowded with
+them were attached behind, and we crawled across the mountains with that
+cargo of holy men, who poured out at every other station and prostrated
+themselves, facing Mecca, to pray for our destruction. At least, I
+suppose they did that. I know they made a most imposing spectacle at
+their devotions, and the Moslem would hardly overlook an enemy in such
+easy praying distance.</p>
+
+<p>However, we crossed the steeps, skirted the precipices safely enough,
+and by-and-by a blue harbor lay below, and in it, like a fair picture,
+the ship&mdash;home. We had been gone less than a week&mdash;it seemed a year.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXX" id="XXX"></a>XXX</h2>
+
+<h3>WHERE PILGRIMS GATHER IN</h3>
+
+<p>At some time last night we crossed over the spot where the Lord stirred
+up a mighty tempest and a great fish to punish Jonah, and this morning
+at daybreak we were in the harbor of Jaffa, "the beautiful," from which
+port Jonah sailed on that remarkable cruise.</p>
+
+<p>We were not the only ones there. Two other great excursion steamers lay
+at anchor, the <i>Arabic</i> and the <i>Moltke</i>, their decks filled with our
+fellow-countrymen, and I think the several parties of ship-dwellers took
+more interest in looking at one another, and in comparing the appearance
+of their respective vessels, than in the rare vision of Jaffa aglow with
+morning. Three ship-loads at once! It seemed like a good deal of an
+invasion to land on these sacred shores. But then we remembered how many
+invasions had landed at Jaffa&mdash;how Alexander and Titus had been there
+before us, besides all the crusades&mdash;so a modest scourge like ours would
+hardly matter. As for that military butcher, Napoleon, who a little more
+than a century ago murdered his way through this inoffending land, he
+shot four thousand Turkish prisoners here on the Jaffa sands, after
+accepting their surrender under guarantee of protection. We promised
+ourselves that we would do nothing like that. We might destroy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> a pedler
+now and then, or a baksheesh fiend; but four thousand, even of that
+breed, would be too heavy a contract.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_035" id="ILL_035"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_035.jpg" width="500" height="404" alt="THE PATRIARCH KNEW ALL ABOUT JAFFA" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE PATRIARCH KNEW ALL ABOUT JAFFA</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Patriarch knew all about Jaffa. It is one of his special landmarks,
+being the chief seaport of the Ph&oelig;nicians, the one place they never
+really surrendered. A large share of the vast traffic that went in and
+out of Palestine in the old days went by Jaffa, and a great deal goes
+that way still. The cedarwood from Lebanon, used in Solomon's Temple,
+was brought by water to this port; the treasure and rich goods that went
+down to Jerusalem in the day of her ancient glory all came this way; her
+conquerors landed here. The blade and brand prepared for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> Jerusalem were
+tried experimentally on Jaffa. According to Josephus, eighty thousand of
+her inhabitants perished at one time. Yet Jaffa has survived. Her
+harbor, which is not really a harbor at all, but merely an anchorage,
+with a landing dangerous and uncertain, has still been sufficient to
+keep her the chief seaport of Judea.</p>
+
+<p>There is another reason for Jaffa's survival. Beyond her hills lie the
+sacred cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The fields that knew Ruth and
+Benjamin and a man named Jesus lie also there. From Jaffa in every
+direction stretch lands made memorable by stories and traditions in
+which the God and the prophets of at least three religions are
+intimately concerned. So during long centuries Jaffa has been a holy
+gateway, and through its portals the tide of pilgrimage has never ceased
+to flow.</p>
+
+<p>Some of us who were to put in full time in Egypt would have only a few
+days in the Holy Land, and we were off the ship presently, being pulled
+through the turquoise water by boatmen who sang a barbaric chorus as
+they bent over their huge, clumsy oars. Then we were ashore and in
+carriages, and in another moment were "jumping through Jaffa," as one of
+the party expressed it, in a way that made events and landmarks flit
+together like the spokes of a wheel.</p>
+
+<p>We visited the tomb of Dorcas, whom Peter raised from the dead, though
+for some reason we did not feel a positive conviction that it was the
+very tomb&mdash;perhaps because we did not have time to get up a
+conviction&mdash;and we called at the house of Simon the Tanner. It was with
+Simon, "whose house is by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> seaside," that Peter lodged when he had
+his "vision of tolerance," in which it was made known to him that "God
+is no respecter of persons, but only of righteousness." It is truly by
+the seaside, and there is an ancient tanner's vat in the court-yard. But
+I hope the place was cleaner when Peter lodged there than it is now. One
+had to step carefully, and, though it did not smell of a tanyard, it did
+of several other things. Many travellers, including Dean Stanley, have
+accepted this as the veritable house where Simon dwelt and St. Peter
+lodged. Those people ought to get together and have it cleaned up. I
+could believe in it then myself.</p>
+
+<p>Jaffa, as a whole, could stand the scrub-brush and the hose. It is not
+"the beautiful" from within. It is wretchedly unbeautiful, though just
+as we were getting ready to leave it we did have one genuine vision.
+From the enclosures of the Greek Church we looked across an interminable
+orange-grove, in which the trees seemed mere shrubs, but were literally
+massed with golden fruit&mdash;the whole blending away into tinted haze and
+towering palms. No blight, no vileness, no inodorous breath, but only
+the dreamlit mist and the laden trees&mdash;the Orient of our long ago.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>One might reasonably suppose that, as often as parties like ours travel
+over the railway that potters along from Jaffa to Jerusalem, there would
+be no commotion, no controversy with the officials&mdash;that the guard would
+only need to come in and check up our tickets and let us go.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing of the kind; every such departure as ours<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> is a function, an
+occasion&mdash;an entirely new proposition, to be considered and threshed out
+in a separate and distinct fashion. Before we were fairly seated in the
+little coach provided, dark-skinned men came in one after another to
+look us over and get wildly excited&mdash;over our beauty, perhaps; I could
+discover nothing else unusual about us. They would wave their hands and
+carry on, first inside and then on the platform, where they would seem
+to settle it. When they had paid us several visits of this kind, they
+locked us in and went away, and we expected to start.</p>
+
+<p>Not at all; they came back presently and did it all over again, only
+louder. Then our dragoman appeared, and bloodshed seemed imminent. When
+they went away again he said it was nothing&mdash;just the usual business of
+getting started.</p>
+
+<p>By-and-by some of us discovered that our bags had not been put on the
+train, so we drifted out to look for them. We found them here and there,
+with from two to seven miscreants battling over each as to which should
+have the piastre or two of baksheesh collectible for handing our things
+from the carriage to the train. Such is the manner of graft in the Holy
+Land. It lacks organization and does not command respect.</p>
+
+<p>The station was a hot, thirsty place. We loaded up with baskets of
+oranges, the great, sweet, juicy oranges of Jaffa&mdash;the finest oranges in
+the world, I am sure&mdash;then we forgot all our delays and troubles, for we
+were moving out through the groves and gardens of the suburbs, entering
+the Plains of Sharon&mdash;"a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> fold for flocks, a fertile land, blossoming as
+the rose."</p>
+
+<p>That old phrase expresses it exactly. I have never seen a place that so
+completely conveyed the idea of fertility as those teeming, haze-haunted
+plains of Sharon. Level as a floor, the soil dark, loose, and loamy;
+here green with young wheat, there populous with labor&mdash;men and women,
+boys and girls, dressed in the old, old dress, tilling the fields in the
+old, old manner; flocks and herds tended by such shepherds as saw the
+Star rise over Bethlehem; girls carrying water-jars on their heads;
+camel trains swinging across the horizon&mdash;a complete picture of primal
+husbandry, it was&mdash;a vast allegory of increase. I have seen agricultural
+and pastoral life on a large scale in America, where we do all of the
+things with machinery and many of them with steam, and would find it
+hard to plough with a camel and a crooked stick; but I have somehow
+never felt such a sense of tillage and production&mdash;of communing with
+mother earth and drawing life and sustenance from her bosom&mdash;as came to
+me there crossing the Plains of Sharon, the garden of Syria.</p>
+
+<p>It is a goodly tract for that country&mdash;about fifty miles long and from
+six to fifteen wide. The tribes of Dan and Manasseh owned it in the old
+days, and to look out of the car-window at their descendants is to see
+those first families that Joshua settled there, for they have never
+changed.</p>
+
+<p>Our dragoman began to point out sites and landmarks. Here was the Plain
+of Joshua, where Samson made firebrands of three hundred foxes and
+destroyed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> the standing corn of the Philistines. The tower ahead is at
+Ramleh, and was built by the crusaders nearly a thousand years
+ago&mdash;Ramleh being the Arimathea where lived Joseph, who provided the
+Saviour with a sepulchre. Also, it is said to be the place where in the
+days when Samuel judged Israel the Jews besought him for a king, and
+acquired Saul and the line of David and Solomon as a result. To the
+eastward lies the Valley of Ajalon, where Joshua stopped the
+astronomical clock for the only time in a million ages, that he might
+slaughter some remaining Amorites before dark.</p>
+
+<p>We are out of the Plains of Sharon by this time, running through a
+profitless-looking country, mostly rock and barren, hardly worth
+fighting over, it would seem. Yet there were plenty of people to be
+killed here in the old days, and as late as fifteen hundred years after
+Joshua the Roman Emperor Hadrian slaughtered so many Jews at Bittir (a
+place we shall pass presently) that the horses waded to their nostrils
+in blood, and a stone weighing several pounds was swept along by the
+ruby tide. The guide told us this, and said if we did not believe it he
+could produce the stone.</p>
+
+<p>Landmarks fairly overlap one another. Here, at Hill Gezer, are the ruins
+of an ancient city presented to Solomon by one of his seven hundred
+fathers-in-law. Yonder at Ekron so much history has been made that a
+chapter would be required to record even a list of the events. Ekron was
+one of the important cities which Joshua did not capture, perhaps
+because he could not manage the solar system permanently.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> The whole
+route fairly bristles with Bible names, and we are variously affected.
+When we are shown the footprints of Joshua and Jacob and David and
+Solomon we are full of interest. When we recall that this is also the
+land of Phut and Cush and Buz and Jidlaph and Pildash we are moved
+almost to tears.</p>
+
+<p>For those last must have been worthy men. The Bible records nothing
+against them, which is more than can be said of the others named. Take
+Jacob, for instance. I have searched carefully, and I fail to find
+anything to his credit beyond the fact that he procreated the Lord's
+chosen people. I do find that he deceived his father, defrauded his
+brother, outman&oelig;uvred his rascally father-in-law, and was a craven at
+last before Esau, who had been rewarded for his manhood and forgiveness
+and wrongs by being classed with the Ishmaelites, a name that carries
+with it a reproach to this day.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is Solomon. We need not go into the matter of his thousand
+wives and pretty favorites. Long ago we condoned that trifling
+irregularity as incident to the period&mdash;related in some occult but
+perfectly reasonable way to great wisdom. No, the wives are all
+right&mdash;also the near-wives, we have swallowed those, too; but then there
+comes in his heresy, his idolatry&mdash;all those temples built to heathen
+gods when he had become magnificent and mighty and full of years. There
+was that altar which he set up to Moloch on the hill outside of
+Jerusalem (called to this day the Hill of Offence), an altar for the
+<i>sacrifice of children by fire</i>. Even Tiberius C&aelig;sar and Nero did not go
+as far as that.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> I'm sorry, and I shall be damned for it, no doubt, but
+I think, on the whole, in the language of the Diplomat, I shall have to
+"pass Solomon up." Never mind about the other two. Joshua's record is
+good enough if one cares for a slayer of women and children, and David
+was a poet&mdash;a supreme poet, a divine poet&mdash;which accounts for a good
+deal. Still, he did not need to put the captured Moabites under saws and
+harrows of iron and make them walk through brick-kilns, as described in
+II. Samuel xii: 31, to be picturesque. Neither did he need to kill Uriah
+the Hittite in order to take his wife away from him. Uriah would
+probably have parted with her on easier terms.</p>
+
+<p>It is sad enough to reflect that the Bible, in its good, old, relentless
+way, found it necessary to record such things as these against our
+otherwise Sunday-school heroes and models. Nothing of the sort is set
+down against Buz and Cush and Phut and Pildash and Jidlaph. Very likely
+they were about perfect. I wish I knew where they sleep.</p>
+
+<p>The nearer one approaches Jerusalem the more barren and unproductive
+becomes the country. There are olive-groves and there are cultivated
+fields, but there are more of flinty hillsides and rocky steeps. The
+habitations are no longer collected in villages, in the Syrian fashion,
+but are scattered here and there, with wide sterile places between.
+There would seem to be not enough good land in any one place to support
+a village.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose this is the very home of baksheesh. I know at every station
+mendicants, crippled and blind&mdash;always blind&mdash;come swarming about,
+holding up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> piteous hands and repeating endlessly the plaintive wail,
+"Baksheesh! bak-sheesh!" One's heart grows sick and hard by turns. There
+are moments when you long for the wealth of a Rockefeller to give all
+these people a financial standing, and there are moments when you long
+for a Gatling-gun to turn loose in their direction. We are only weak and
+human. We may pity the hungry fly ever so much, but we destroy him.</p>
+
+<p>I think, by-the-way, some of these beggars only cry baksheesh from
+habit, and never expect to get anything. I think so, because here and
+there groups of them stand along the railway between stations, and hold
+out their hands, and voice the eternal refrain as we sweep by. It is
+hardly likely that any one ever flings anything out of a car-window.
+Pity becomes too sluggish in the East to get action as promptly as that.</p>
+
+<p>It was toward evening when we ran into a rather modern little railway
+station, and were told that we were "there." We got out of the train
+then, and found ourselves in such a howling mob of humanity as I never
+dreamed could gather in this drowsy land. We were about the last party
+of the season, it seems, and the porters and beggars and cabmen and
+general riffraff were going to make the most of us. We were seized and
+dragged and torn and lifted&mdash;our dragoman could keep us together about
+as well as one cowboy could handle a stampeded herd. I have no distinct
+recollection of how we managed to reach the carriages, but the first
+words I heard after regaining consciousness were:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That pool down there is where Solomon was anointed king."</p>
+
+<p>I began to take notice then. We were outside a range of lofty
+battlemented walls, approaching a wide gate flanked by an imposing tower
+that might belong to the Middle Ages. We looked down on the squalid pool
+of Gihon, and I tried to visualize the scene of Solomon's coronation
+there, which I confess I found difficult. Then we turned to the tower
+and the entrance to the Holy City.</p>
+
+<p>We were entering Jerusalem by the Jaffa gate, and the tower was the
+Tower of David.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXI" id="XXXI"></a>XXXI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HOLY CITY</h3>
+
+<p>Thirty-nine hundred years ago it was called merely Salem, and was ruled
+over by Melchisedek, who feasted Abraham when he returned from punishing
+the four kings who carried off his nephew, Lot. Five hundred years
+later, when Joshua ravaged Canaan, the place was known as Jebusi, the
+stronghold of the Jebusites, a citadel "enthroned on a mountain
+fastness" which Joshua failed to conquer, in spite of the traditional
+promise to Israel. Its old name had been not altogether dropped, and the
+transition from Jebusi-salem to Jebu-salem and Jerusalem naturally
+followed.</p>
+
+<p>It was four hundred years after Joshua's time that David brought the
+head of Goliath to Jerusalem, and fifteen years later, when he had
+become king, he took the "stronghold of Zion," smote the difficult
+Jebusite even to the blind and the lame, and named the place the City of
+David.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"And David said on that day, whosoever getteth up to the
+gutter and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the
+blind, <i>that are</i> hated of David's soul, he shall be chief
+and captain."</p></div>
+
+<p>That is not as cruel as it sounds. Those incapables had no doubt been
+after David for baksheesh, and he felt just that way. I would like to
+appoint a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> few chiefs and captains of Jerusalem on the same terms.</p>
+
+<p>But I digress. The Bible calls it a "fort," and it was probably not much
+more than that until David "built round about" and turned it into a
+city, the fame of which extended to Hiram, King of Tyre, who sent
+carpenters and masons and materials to David and built him a house.
+After which "David took him some more concubines and wives out of
+Jerusalem," brought up the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim, and
+prepared to live happy ever after. The Ark was, of course, very sacred,
+and one Uzzah was struck dead on the way up from Kirjath for putting out
+his hand to save it when it was about to roll into a ditch.</p>
+
+<p>It was with David that the glory of Jerusalem as a city began. Then came
+Solomon&mdash;David's second son by Uriah's wife&mdash;wise, masterful, and
+merciless, and Jerusalem became one of the magnificent cities of the
+world. Under Solomon the Hebrew race became more nearly a nation then
+ever before or since. Solomon completed the Temple begun by David on
+Mount Moriah; the Ark of the Covenant was duly installed. Judaism had
+acquired headquarters&mdash;Israel, organization, and a capital.</p>
+
+<p>The fame of the great philosopher-poet-king spread to the ends of the
+earth. The mighty from many lands came to hear his wisdom and to gaze
+upon the magnificence of his court. The Queen of Sheba drifted in from
+her far sunlit kingdom with offerings of gold, spices, and precious
+stones. And "she communed with him of all that was in her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> heart." That
+was more than a thousand years before Christ. Greece had no history
+then. Rome had not been even considered. Culture and splendor were at
+high-tide in the Far East. It was the golden age of Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p>The full tide must ebb, and the waning in Jerusalem began early.
+Solomon's reign was a failure at the end. Degenerating into a sensualist
+and an idolater, his enemies prevailed against him. The Lord "stirred up
+an adversary" in Hadad the Edomite, who had an old grudge. Also others,
+and trouble followed. The nation was divided. Revolt, civil wars, and
+abounding iniquities dragged the people down. That which would come to
+Rome a thousand years later came now on a smaller scale to Israel.
+Egyptian and Arabian ravaged it by turns, and the Assyrian came down
+numerously. It became the habit of adjoining nations to go over and
+plunder and destroy Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p>Four hundred years after Solomon, Josiah undertook to rehabilitate the
+nation and restore its ancient faith. He pulled down the heathen altars
+which Solomon had constructed, "that no man might make his son or
+daughter pass through the fire to Moloch"; he drove out and destroyed
+the iniquitous priests; he burned the high places of pollution and
+stamped the powder in the dust.</p>
+
+<p>It was too late. Josiah was presently slain in a battle with the
+Egyptians, and his son dropped back into the evil practices of his
+fathers. Nebuchadnezzar came then, and in one raid after another utterly
+destroyed Jerusalem, including the Temple and the Ark, and carried the
+inhabitants, to the last man,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> into a captivity which lasted seventy
+years. Then Nehemiah was allowed to return with a large following and
+rebuild the city. But its prosperity was never permanent. The Jews were
+never a governing nation. Discontented and factional, they invited
+conquest. Alexander came, and, later, Rome. Herod the Great renewed and
+beautified the city, and to court favor with the Jews rebuilt the Temple
+on a splendid scale. This was Jerusalem in its final glory. Seventy
+years later the Jews rebelled, and Titus destroyed the city so
+completely that it is said to have remained a barren waste without a
+single inhabitant for fifty years.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the city is divided into "quarters"&mdash;Christian, Jewish,
+Mohammedan, and Armenian. All worships are permitted, and the sacred
+relics&mdash;most of them&mdash;of whatever faith, are accessible to all. Such in
+scanty outline is the story of the Holy City. It has been besieged and
+burned and pulled down no less than sixteen times&mdash;totally destroyed and
+rebuilt at least eight times, and the very topography of its site has
+been changed by the accumulation of rubbish. Hillsides have disappeared.
+Where once were hollows are now mere depressions or flats. Most of the
+streets that Jesus and the prophets trod lie from thirty to a hundred
+feet below the present surface, and bear little relation even in
+direction to those of the present day. Yet certain sites and landmarks
+have been identified, while others are interesting for later reasons.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, both to sceptic and believer, Jerusalem is still a shrine.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXII" id="XXXII"></a>XXXII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HOLY SEPULCHRE</h3>
+
+<p>We lost no time. Though it was twilight when we reached our hotel, we
+set out at once to visit the spot which for centuries was the most
+sacred in all Christendom&mdash;that holiest of holies which during two
+hundred years summoned to its rescue tide after tide of knightly
+crusaders, depleted the chivalry and changed the map of Europe&mdash;the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>This, at least, would be genuine in so far as it was the spot toward
+which the flower of knighthood marched&mdash;Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard of
+the Lion Heart, Ivanhoe, and all the rest&mdash;under the banner of the
+Cross, with the cry "God wills it" on their lips. We are eager to see
+that precious landmark.</p>
+
+<p>It was only a little way&mdash;nothing is far in Jerusalem&mdash;and we walked. We
+left the narrow street in front of the hotel and entered some still
+narrower ones where there were tiny booths of the Oriental kind, and
+flickering lights, and curious, bent figures, and donkeys; also steps
+that we went up or down, generally down, which seemed strange when we
+were going to Calvary, because we had always thought Calvary a hill.</p>
+
+<p>It was impressive, though. We were in Jerusalem,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> and if these were not
+the very streets that Jesus trod, surely they were not unlike them, for
+the people have not changed, nor their habits, nor their
+architecture&mdash;at least, not greatly&mdash;nor their needs. Whatever was their
+cry for baksheesh then, He must often have heard it, and their blind
+eyes and their withered limbs were such as He once paused to heal.</p>
+
+<p>I think we continued to descend gradually to the very door of the
+church. It did not seem quite like the entrance to a church, and, in
+reality, it is not altogether that; it is more a repository, a
+collection of sacred relics, a museum of scriptural history.</p>
+
+<p>We paused a little outside while the guide&mdash;his name was something that
+meant St. George&mdash;told us briefly the story. Constantine's mother, the
+Empress Helena, he said, through a dream had located the site of the
+crucifixion and burial of the Saviour, whereupon Constantine, in 335
+<span class="smcap">a.d</span>., had erected some buildings to mark the place. The Persians
+destroyed these buildings by-and-by, but they were rebuilt. Then the
+Moslems set fire to the place; but again some chapels were set up, and
+these the conquering crusaders enclosed under one great roof. This was
+about the beginning of the twelfth century, and portions of the
+buildings still remain, though as late as 1808 there came a great fire
+which necessitated a general rebuilding, with several enlargements
+since, as the relics to be surrounded have increased.</p>
+
+<p>We went inside then. The place is dimly lit&mdash;it is always lit, I
+believe, for it can never be very light in there&mdash;and everywhere there
+seemed to be flitting processions of tapers, and of chanting,
+dark-robed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> priests. Just beyond the entrance we came to the first great
+relic&mdash;the Stone of Unction&mdash;the slab upon which the body of Christ was
+laid when it was taken down from the Cross. It is red, or looked red in
+that light, like a piece of Tennessee marble, and, though it is not
+smoothly cut, it is polished with the kisses of devout pilgrims who come
+far to pay this tribute, and to measure it, that their winding-sheets
+may be made the same size. Above it hang a number of lamps and
+candelabra, and with the worshippers kneeling and kissing and measuring,
+the spectacle was sufficiently impressive. Then, as we were about to go,
+our guide remembered that this was not the true Stone of Unction, but
+one like it, the real stone having been buried somewhere beneath it. The
+pilgrims did not know the difference, he said, and they used up a stone
+after a while, kissing and measuring it so much. Near to the stone is
+the Station of Mary, where she stood while the body of Jesus was being
+anointed, or perhaps where she stood watching the tomb&mdash;it is not
+certain which. At all events, it has been revealed by a vision that she
+stood there, and the place is marked and enclosed with a railing.</p>
+
+<p>We followed our guide deeper into the twinkling darkness, where the
+chanting processions were flickering to and fro, and presently stood
+directly beneath a dome, facing an ornate marble or alabaster structure,
+flanked and surrounded by elaborately wrought lamps and
+candlesticks&mdash;the Holy Sepulchre itself.</p>
+
+<p>But I had to be told. I should never have guessed this to be the shrine
+of shrines, the receptacle of the gentle Nazarene who taught the
+doctrine of humility<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> to mankind. And it is the same within. If a
+rock-hewn tomb is there, it is overlaid now with costly marbles;
+polished with kisses; bedewed with tears.</p>
+
+<p>We did not remain in the tomb long, Laura and I. Perhaps they would not
+have let us; but, in any case, we did not wish to linger. At Damascus,
+Laura had gone so far as to criticise the house of Judas, because it had
+been whitewashed since St. Paul lodged there. So it was not likely that
+a tomb which was not a tomb, but merely a fancy marble memorial, would
+inspire much enthusiasm. To us it contained no suggestion of the gentle
+Prince of Peace.</p>
+
+<p>But at the entrance of the Sepulchre, facing us as we came out, there
+was a genuine thing. It was a woman kneeling, a peasant woman&mdash;of
+Russia, I suppose, from her dress. And she was not looking at us at all,
+but beyond us, through us, into that little glowing interior which to
+her was shining with the very light of the Lamb. I have never seen
+another face with an expression like that. It was fairly luminous with
+rapt adoration. Yes, she at least was genuine&mdash;an absolute embodiment of
+the worship that had led her along footsore and weary miles to kneel at
+last at the shrine of her faith.</p>
+
+<p>I am not going to weary the reader with detailed description of the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is a vast place, and contains most of
+the sacred relics and many of the sacred sites that have been identified
+since the zealous Queen Helena set the fashion of seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. We made the tour of a number of the chapels of
+different religious denominations. They are not on good terms with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> one
+another, by-the-way, and require Mohammedan guards to keep them from
+fighting around the very Sepulchre itself. Then we descended some stairs
+to the Chapel of St. Helena, where there is an altar to the penitent
+thief, and another to Queen Helena, though I did not learn that she ever
+repented, or even reformed.</p>
+
+<p>They showed us where the Queen sat when, pursuing one of her visions,
+they were digging for the true Cross and found all three of them; and
+they told us how they identified the holy one by sending all three to
+the bedside of a noble lady who lay at the point of death. The first
+shown her made her a maniac; the second threw her into spasms; the third
+cured her instantly. The commemoration of this event is called in the
+calendar "The Invention of the Cross," which seems to convey the idea. I
+think it was in the Chapel of the Finding of the Cross that I bought a
+wax candle, and a prayer went with it, though whether it was for my soul
+or Queen Helena's I am not certain. It does not matter. I am willing
+Helena should have it, if she needs it, and I think she does.</p>
+
+<p>We went on wandering around, and by-and-by we came to a chapel where the
+Crown of Thorns was made, and presently to a short column marking the
+Centre of the Earth, the spot from which the dust was taken that was
+used in making Adam. You see, it is necessary to double up on some of
+the landmarks or enlarge the church again.</p>
+
+<p>You can climb a flight of stairs in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and
+be told that you are on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> Calvary, and you are allowed to put your hand
+through the floor into the sockets where the crosses stood. We did not
+do it, however. We climbed the stairs, but a collection of priests were
+holding some kind of ceremony with candles and chanting, and we were not
+sufficiently impressed to wait.</p>
+
+<p>We did pause, as we came away, to note in the vestibule of the Holy
+Sepulchre the two holes through which on Easter Eve the Holy Fire is
+distributed to Christian pilgrims who assemble from all parts of the
+world. On this occasion the Fire Bishop enters the Sepulchre, and fire
+from heaven lights the candles on the altar. Then the Bishop, who is all
+alone in the Sepulchre, passes the Holy Fire out through these holes, in
+the form of a bundle of burning tapers, to priests. The pilgrims with
+unlighted tapers then rush and jam and scramble toward these dispensers
+of the sacred flame and pay any price demanded to have their candles
+speedily lighted. Usually a riot takes place, and the Mohammedan guards
+are required to prevent bloodshed.</p>
+
+<p>In 1834 there occurred a riot over the Holy Fire which piled the dead
+five feet deep around the Sepulchre. Four or five hundred were killed,
+and corpses lay thick even on the Stone of Unction. It seems a useless
+sacrifice, when one thinks of it, but then the blood of five hundred is
+only a drop as compared with what the centuries have contributed to this
+revered shrine.</p>
+
+<p>I want to be quite serious for a moment about the Church of the Holy
+Sepulchre&mdash;here in Jerusalem&mdash;now, while I am in the spirit of the
+thing.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is the biggest humbug in all Christendom. Of the scores of sites and
+relics enclosed within its walls, it is unlikely that a single one is
+genuine. With all respect to Queen Helena's talent for dreams, her
+knowledge of Scripture must have been sparing, or she would have located
+Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem. This place is in the heart of
+the city&mdash;was always in the heart of the city, in spite of all
+gerrymandering to prove it otherwise; and it was more of a flat or a
+hollow in the time of Christ than it is now.</p>
+
+<p>As for the other traditions and trumpery gathered in this ecclesiastical
+side-show, they are unworthy of critical attention. Probably not one in
+a million of the readers of <i>Innocents Abroad</i> but thought the finding
+of the Grave of Adam one of Mark Twain's jokes. Not at all; it is
+located here under Calvary, and the place from which came Adam's dust
+(the Centre of the World) is close by. Then there is that Stone of
+Unction, which every one of intelligence knows to be a fraud, and there
+is the stone which the angel rolled away, and Adam's skull&mdash;they have
+that, too.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that the human animal had exhausted his simian inheritance
+then. But no, he can never exhaust that&mdash;it is his one limitless gift.
+He has gone right on adding to his heap of bones and crockery, enlarging
+the museum from time to time to make room. And he will add more. The
+future is long, and it is only a question of time and faith when he will
+bring over the tombs of the patriarchs from Hebron, the Grotto of the
+Nativity from Bethlehem,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> the House of Judas from Damascus, and the
+Street that was called Straight. Oh, he can do it! A creature who can
+locate the Holy Sepulchre, the Grave of Adam, the Centre of the World,
+Mount Calvary, and fifty other historical sites all within the radius of
+a few feet, and find enough of his own kind to accept them, can do
+anything. As an insult to human intelligence and genuine Christian
+faith, I suppose this institution stands alone.</p>
+
+<p>Do the priests themselves, the beneficiaries, believe it? Perhaps&mdash;at
+least some of them do. There is nothing so dense, so sodden, so
+impenetrable as priestly superstition. Not a ray of reason can enter a
+mind darkened for a lifetime by ceremonials in which candles, chantings,
+swinging censers, and prostrations are regarded as worship. Could you
+produce any evidence that would appeal to the minds of those figures
+that march and countermarch, and carry tapers and chant among these
+frauds and fripperies of their faith? Hardly&mdash;they would not care for
+evidence. What they want is more superstition; more for
+themselves&mdash;more, always more, for their followers; the more
+superstition, the more power, the more baksheesh. They have no use for
+facts and testimony. They can create both to fit the need. Let any
+corner of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre become vacant, and
+immediately some prelate will dream that it is the true place where
+Balaam's Ass saw the angel with the flaming sword, and they will
+promptly consecrate the spot; then they will excavate and find the sword
+and a footprint of the angel, also a piece of the Ass, and they will
+make a saint of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> Balaam, and very likely of the Ass, and they will set
+up an altar and get a sign-painter to make a picture of the vision, and
+the people will contribute prayers and piastres, and yell baksheesh at
+every traveller to keep the high priests of Balaam in food and funds.</p>
+
+<p>Strange that we who regard the Mohammedan pilgrim with disdain or
+compassion, on his journey to Mecca and Medina, excuse or condone the
+existence of a shrine like this. The Prophet's birthplace and tomb are
+at least authentic, and it was his desire that his followers should
+visit them. They are acknowledging a fact. These people are supporting a
+fraud.</p>
+
+<p>And then the pity of it! The remembering that it was for this trumpery
+thing those mighty crusades swept like a flame across Europe, robbed her
+of her chivalry, and desolated a million homes; for this that gallant
+knights put on their armor and rode away under the banner of the Cross,
+shouting, "God wills it!" For this that men have drenched more than one
+nation with blood and changed the map and history of the world!</p>
+
+<p>True, one may not altogether regret the crusades. They made romance and
+the high achievement to be celebrated in picture and in song. It was
+fine, indeed, to ride away in shining mail in a vast army in which all
+were officers&mdash;splendid knights battling for glory in a cause. Aching
+hearts and forsaken homes were plentiful behind, yet even they reflected
+the glamour of romance, the fervor of a faith.</p>
+
+<p>But there was one crusade in which there was neither romance nor
+glory&mdash;nothing except heartbreak and anguish, and the long torture of
+the years.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That was the Children's Crusade&mdash;the crusade in which fanaticism spelled
+its last word&mdash;when a countless number of children of all ages, as young
+as seven some of them, flocked to the standard of a boy of seventeen and
+wandered off down through Europe, to faint and fall and die by hundreds
+and by thousands from hunger and heat and thirst&mdash;moaning and grieving
+unheeded among the stones and bushes&mdash;to reach the Mediterranean at
+last, a scattered remnant, there to be taken on board some vessels and
+sold into slavery in Algiers!</p>
+
+<p>There was no glory, no triumph however imaginary, in that crusade; no
+romance, no glamour after the first day's march. It was only weariness
+and torture after that&mdash;only wretchedness and the fevered cry for the
+comfort of a mother's arm. And all for the sake of this dime-museum of
+faith, this huge ecclesiastical joke. The pity of it, indeed! Here
+to-night, a stone's-throw away, my heart bleeds for those little weary
+feet struggling on and on, for those little fainting souls, moaning,
+grieving, trying to keep up, lying down at last to coax the blessed
+release of death, and I would like to stand here on the housetops of
+Jerusalem and cry out against this insult to the memory of One who, when
+He said, "Suffer little children to come unto me," could hardly have
+foreseen that His words would bear such bitter fruit.</p>
+
+<p>I do not do it, however. I want to live to get home and print this
+thing, and have it graven on my tomb.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIII" id="XXXIII"></a>XXXIII</h2>
+
+<h3>TWO HOLY MOUNTAINS</h3>
+
+<p>We set out early next morning for Mount Moriah, the site of Solomon's
+temple and those that followed it.</p>
+
+<p>It was really David's temple in the beginning, undertaken to avert a
+pestilence which he had selected from three punishments offered by the
+Lord because he, David, had presumed to number his people. A Hebrew
+census was a sin in those days, it would seem, and seventy thousand of
+the enrolled had already died when David saw an angel with a drawn
+sword&mdash;the usual armament of an angel&mdash;standing by the threshing-floor
+of Oman the Jebusite. Through Gad, his Soothsayer, David was commanded
+to set up an altar on that spot, to avert further calamity. Negotiations
+with Oman were at once begun, to the end that Oman parted with the site
+for "six hundred shekels of gold, by weight"; the threshing-floor was
+quickly replaced by an altar, and here, on the top of Mount Moriah&mdash;on
+the great bowlder reputed to have been the sacrificial stone of
+Melchizedek&mdash;and of Abraham, who was said to have proffered Isaac
+here&mdash;King David made offering to the Lord, and was answered by fire
+from heaven on the newly erected altar. And the angel "put up his sword
+again into the sheath thereof."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>From that day the bowlder on the top of Mount Moriah became the place of
+sacrifice&mdash;the great central shrine of the Jewish faith. David decided
+to build a temple there, and prepared for it abundantly, as became his
+high purpose. But because David had shed much blood, the Lord interfered
+and commanded him to turn the enterprise over to Solomon, "a man of
+rest." "He shall build an house for my name; and he shall be my son, and
+I will be his father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom
+over Israel forever."</p>
+
+<p>In the light of thoughtful Bible reading, it is not easy to see that
+Solomon was much of an improvement over David, in the long-run, and one
+cannot but notice the fact that the promise to establish his throne over
+Israel forever was not long maintained. But perhaps the Lord did not
+foresee how Solomon was going to turn out; besides, forever is a long
+time, and the Kingdom of Solomon may still prevail.</p>
+
+<p>Solomon completed the temple in a manner that made it celebrated, even
+to this day. The "oracle, or holy room, which held the Ark of the
+Covenant, was overlaid within with pure gold," and the rest of the
+temple was in keeping with this dazzling chamber.</p>
+
+<p>The temple was often pillaged during the troublous times that followed
+Solomon's reign, but it managed to stand till Nebuchadnezzar's conquest,
+four centuries later. It was twice rebuilt, the last time by Herod, on a
+scale of surpassing splendor. It was Herod's temple that Christ knew,
+and the work of beautifying and adding to it was going on during his
+entire lifetime. It was finished in 65 <span class="smcap">a.d</span>., and five<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> years later it
+went down in the general destruction, though Titus himself tried to
+preserve it.</p>
+
+<p>Most of what exists to-day are the remains of Herod's temple. The vast
+court, or temple area, occupies about one-sixth of all Jerusalem, and of
+the genuineness of this site there is no question. In the centre of it,
+where once the house of David and Solomon stood, stands the Dome of the
+Rock&mdash;also called the Mosque of Omar, though it is not really a mosque,
+and was not built by Omar. It is, in fact, a marvellous jewelled
+casket&mdash;the most beautiful piece of architecture in the world, it has
+been called&mdash;built for no other purpose than to hold the old sacrificial
+stone of Melchizedek and Abraham&mdash;a landmark revered alike by Moslem,
+Christian, and Jew.</p>
+
+<p>One is bound to feel impressed in the presence of that old bowlder,
+seamed and scarred by ages of sun and tempest; hacked for this purpose
+and that; gray with antiquity&mdash;the very corner-stone of three religions,
+upholding the traditions and the faith of four thousand years. There is
+nothing sham or tawdry about that. The building is splendid enough, but
+it is artistically beautiful, and the old rock itself&mdash;the genuine rock
+of ages&mdash;is as bare and rugged as when Isaac lay upon it bound, and the
+"chosen people" narrowly missed non-existence.</p>
+
+<p>There is a railing around it; but you can look over or through as long
+as you like, and if one is of a reflective temperament he can look a
+long time. Among other things he will notice a number of small square
+holes, cut long ago to receive the ends of slender supports that upheld
+a royal canopy or screen, and he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> will see the conduits cut to carry off
+the blood of the sacrifice. To his mental vision these things will
+conjure pictures&mdash;a panorama of rites and ceremonials&mdash;of altar and
+incense, with all the splendid costume and blazonry of the Judean king.
+And, after these, sacrifices of another sort&mdash;the cry of battle and the
+clash of arms across this hoary relic, its conduits filled with a
+crimson tide that flowed without regard to ritual or priest.</p>
+
+<p>Other pictures follow: the feast of the Passover, when Jerusalem was
+crowded with strangers, when the great outer court of the temple was
+filled with booths and pens of the sellers who offered sheep, goats,
+cattle, and even doves for the sacrifice; when the temple itself was
+crowded with throngs of eager worshippers who brought their sacrifices,
+with tithes to the priests, and were made clean.</p>
+
+<p>Amid one such throng there is a boy of twelve years, who with His
+parents has come up to Jerusalem "after the custom of the feast." We
+think of them as quiet, simple people, those three from Nazareth,
+jostled by the crowds a good deal, and looking rather wonderingly on the
+curious sights of that great yearly event. They would work their way
+into the temple, by-and-by, and they would come here to the Rock, and
+perhaps the sad, deep-seeing eyes of that boy of twelve would look down
+the years to a day when in this same city it would be His blood that
+would flow at the hands of men.</p>
+
+<p>I hope He did not see that far. But we know that light for Him lay
+somewhat on the path ahead, for when the feast was over, and His parents
+had set out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> for Nazareth, He lingered to mingle with the learned men,
+and He said to His parents when they came for Him, "Wist ye not that I
+must be about my father's business?" Among all those who thronged about
+this stone for a thousand years, somehow the gentle presence of that boy
+of twelve alone remains, unvanishing and clear.</p>
+
+<p>And what a mass of legends have heaped themselves upon this old
+landmark!&mdash;a groundwork of Jewish tradition&mdash;a layer of Christian
+imagery&mdash;an ever-thickening crust of Moslem whim and fantasy. A few of
+them are perhaps worth repeating. The Talmud, for instance, is authority
+for the belief that the Rock covers the mouth of an abyss wherein the
+waters of the Flood may be heard roaring. Another belief of the Jews
+held it as the centre and one of the foundations of the world. Of Jesus
+it is said that He discovered upon the Rock the great and unspeakable
+name of God (Shem), and was thereby enabled to work his miracles.</p>
+
+<p>But the Moslem soars into fairyland when he comes in the neighborhood of
+this ancient relic. To him the Rock hangs suspended in mid-air, and
+would have followed Mohammed to heaven if the Angel Gabriel had not held
+fast to it. We saw the prints of Gabriel's fingers, which were about the
+size and formation of a two-inch auger. Another Moslem fancy is that the
+rock rests on a palm watered by a river of Paradise.</p>
+
+<p>In the hollow beneath the Rock (probably an artificial grotto) there is
+believed to be a well, the Well of Souls, where spirits of the deceased
+assemble twice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> a week to pray. They regard it as also the mouth of
+hell, which I don't think can be true, or the souls would not come
+there&mdash;not if they could help it&mdash;not as often as twice a week, I mean.</p>
+
+<p>A print of Mohammed's head is also shown in the roof of the grotto, and
+I believe in that, because, being a tall man, when I raised up suddenly
+I made another just like it. But I am descending into trivialities, and
+the Rock is not trivial by any means. It has been there since the
+beginning, and it is likely to remain there until all religions are
+forgotten, and the world is dead, and all the stars are dark.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_036" id="ILL_036"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_036.jpg" width="500" height="294" alt="JERUSALEM&mdash;ITS BUBBLE-ROOFED HOUSES AND DOMES, ITS
+CYPRESS AND OLIVE TREES" title="" />
+<span class="caption">JERUSALEM&mdash;ITS BUBBLE-ROOFED HOUSES AND DOMES, ITS
+CYPRESS AND OLIVE TREES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>In front of the Dome of the Rock the sun was bright, and looking across
+the approach one gets a characteristic view of Jerusalem&mdash;its
+bubble-roofed houses and domes, its cypress and olive trees. I made a
+photograph of Laura, age fourteen, and a friend of hers, against that
+background, but they would have looked more "in the picture" in Syrian
+dress. I am not sure, however; some of our party have had themselves
+photographed in Syrian dress, which seemed to belong to most of them
+about as much as a baseball uniform might belong to a Bedouin&mdash;or a
+camel.</p>
+
+<p>We crossed over to the ancient mosque El-Aksa, also within the temple
+area, but it was only mildly interesting after the Dome of the Rock.
+Still, there were things worth noting. There were the two pillars, for
+instance, which stand so close together that only slender people could
+squeeze between them. Yet in an earlier time every pilgrim had to try,
+and those who succeeded were certain of Paradise. This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> made it
+humiliating for the others, and the impulse to train down for the test
+became so prevalent that stanchions were placed between the pillars a
+few years ago. We could only estimate our chances and give ourselves the
+benefit of the doubt.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is the Well of the Leaf, which has a pretty story. It is a
+cistern under the mosque, and the water is very clear. Once, during the
+caliphate of Omar, a sheik came to this well for water, and his bucket
+slipped from his hands. He went down after it, and came to a mysterious
+door which, when he opened it, led into a beautiful garden. Enchanted,
+he lingered there and finally plucked a leaf to bring back as a token of
+what he had seen. The leaf never withered, and so a prophecy of
+Mohammed's that one of his followers should enter Paradise alive had
+been fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>I said I would go down and hunt for the door. But they said, "No"&mdash;that
+a good many had tried it without success. The cistern used to collect
+every year the pilgrims who went down to find that door; no one was
+permitted to try, now.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the windows of the old mosque we saw a curious sight: a very
+aged and very black, withered man&mdash;Bedouin, I should say&mdash;reclining face
+down in the wide sill, poring over an ancient parchment book, patiently
+transcribing from it cabalistic passages on a black, charred board with
+a sharpened stick. The guide said he was a magician from somewhere in
+the dim interior; certainly he looked it.</p>
+
+<p>From somewhere&mdash;it was probably from an opening in the wall near the
+Golden Gate&mdash;we looked eastward<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> across the valley of Kedron toward the
+fair hillsides, which presently we were to visit.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately we set out for the Mount of Olives. We drove, and perhaps no
+party ever ascended that sacred hill on a fairer morning. The air was
+still, and there was a quiet Sunday feeling in the sunshine. In the
+distance there was a filmy, dreamy haze that gave just the touch of
+ideality to the picture.</p>
+
+<p>The road that leads up Olivet is bordered by traditional landmarks, but
+we could not stop for them. It was enough to be on the road itself,
+following the dusty way the Son of Man and His disciples once knew so
+well. For this hill of fair olive-groves, overlooking Jerusalem, was
+their favorite resort, and it was their habit to come here to look down
+in contemplation on the holy city. It was here that the Master felt the
+shadow of coming events: the destruction of the city; the persecution
+and triumph of His followers; His own approaching tragedy. It was here
+that He gave them the parable of the Virgins, and of the Talents, and it
+was here that He came often at evening for rest and prayer, after the
+buffet and labor of the day. This is the road His feet so often trod&mdash;a
+well-kept road, with the olive-groves, now as then, sloping away on
+either side.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there we turned to look down on Jerusalem, lying there bathed
+in the sunlit haze&mdash;a toy city, it seemed, with its little round-topped
+houses, its domes and minarets, its battlemented walls. How very small
+it was, indeed! Why, one could run its entire circuit without losing
+breath. It is, in fact, little more than half a mile across in any
+direction,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> and from a distance it becomes an exquisite jewel set amid
+barren hills.</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid I did not properly enjoy the summit of the Mount of
+Olives&mdash;its landmarks, I mean. The Russian and Greek and Latin churches
+have spoiled it with offensive architecture, and they have located and
+labelled exact sites in a way that destroys the reality of the events.
+They have framed in the precise spot where Jesus stood at the time of
+His ascension. It is a mistake to leave it there. It should be
+transferred to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>But the view eastward, looking down on the Jordan and the Dead Sea, with
+the mountains of Moab lying beyond, they cannot spoil or change. Down
+there on that spot, thirty-five hundred years ago, the chosen people
+camped and prepared for the ravage and conquest of this valley, this
+mountain, and the fair lands beyond, even to Mount Hermon and the
+westward sea. Over there, on "Nebo's lonely mountain," Moses looked down
+upon this land of vine and olive which he was never to enter, and being
+weary with the harassings of his stiff-necked people, lay down by the
+wayside and left them to work out their own turbulent future.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">"And the angels of God upturned the sod</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 22em;">And laid the dead man there."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I have always loved those lines, and it was worth the voyage to remember
+them here, looking down from the Mount of Olives toward the spot where
+lies that unknown grave.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIV" id="XXXIV"></a>XXXIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE MANGER</h3>
+
+<p>It was afternoon when we drove to Bethlehem&mdash;a pleasant drive, though
+dusty withal. The road lies between grain-fields&mdash;fields where Ruth may
+have gleaned, and where the Son of Man may have stopped to gather corn.
+It gives one a curious feeling to remember that these fields are the
+same, and that for them through all the centuries seed-time and harvest
+have never failed. Nor have they changed&mdash;the walls, the laborers, the
+methods, the crops belong to any period that this country has known.</p>
+
+<p>The convent of Elijah was pointed out to us, but it did not matter.
+Elijah never saw it&mdash;never heard of it. It is different, however, with a
+stone across the way from the entrance. Elijah went to sleep on that
+stone, and slept so heavily that he left his imprint there, which
+remains to this day. We viewed that stone with interest; then we took
+most of it and went on.</p>
+
+<p>In a little while we came to the tomb of Rachel. The small, mosque-like
+building that covers it is not very old, but the site is probably as
+well authenticated as any of that period. Jacob was on his way from
+Padan when she died, and he buried her by the roadside "when there was
+but a little way to come into Ephrath" (which is Bethlehem). He marked
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> grave with a pillar which the generations would not fail to point
+out, one to another, as the last resting-place of this mother in Israel
+who died that Benjamin might have life.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Rachel! Supplanted in her husband's love; denied long the natural
+heritage of woman; paying the supreme price at last, only to be left
+here by the wayside alone, outside the family tomb. All the others are
+gathered at Hebron in the Field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought from
+the children of Heth for Sarah's burial-place. Jacob, at the very last,
+made his sons swear that they would bury him at Hebron with the others.
+He remembered Rachel in her lonely grave, and spoke of her there, but
+did not ask that he be taken to lie by her side, or that she be laid
+with the others. He died as he had lived&mdash;self-seeking, unsympathetic&mdash;a
+commonplace old man.</p>
+
+<p>Just outside of Bethlehem we were welcomed by a crowd of little
+baksheesh girls, of a better look and distinctly of a better way than
+the Jerusalem type. They ran along with the carriage and began a chant
+which, behold, was German, at least Germanesque:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">"Oh, du Fr&ouml;liche!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">Oh, du Heilege!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 29em;">Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I suppose "Oh, thou happy one; Oh, thou holy one," would be about the
+translation, with the wailing refrain at the end. I think we gave them
+something. I hope so; they are after us always, and we either give them
+or we don't, without much discrimination.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> You can't discriminate. They
+are all wretched and miserably needy. You give to get rid of them, or
+when pity clutches a little fiercer than usual at your heart.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_037" id="ILL_037"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_037.jpg" width="500" height="291" alt="A CAMEL TRAIN LED THE WAY THROUGH THE GATES" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A CAMEL TRAIN LED THE WAY THROUGH THE GATES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>So we were at the gates of Bethlehem&mdash;the little town whose name is
+familiar at the firesides of more than half the world&mdash;a name that
+always brings with it a feeling of bright stars and dim fields:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">"Where shepherds watched their flocks by night</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">All seated on the ground,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>and of angel voices singing peace and goodwill. A camel-train led the
+way through the gates.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose the city itself is not unlike Jerusalem in its general
+character, only somewhat cleaner, and less extensive. We went
+immediately to the place of the nativity, but before we could get to it
+we were seized and dragged and almost compelled to buy some of the
+mother-of-pearl beads and fancy things that are made just across the
+way. We escaped into the Church of the Nativity at last&mdash;an old, old
+church, desolate and neglected in its aspect, though sufficiently
+occupied with chanting and droning and candle-bearing acolytes. Yet it
+is better&mdash;oh, much better&mdash;than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and
+it has a legitimate excuse. If Christ was born in a Bethlehem manger, as
+the gospel records, it is probable that He was born here. There are many
+reasons for believing that the grotto below this church was used as the
+inn stables in that time, and that the brief life which has laid its
+tender loveliness on so many lives had its beginning here.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We descended to the grotto and stood on the spot that is said to have
+heard His first infant cry. There is a silver star in the floor polished
+with kisses, and there are a lot of ornate lamps and other paltry things
+hanging about. It does not matter, I suppose, but I wish these
+professional religionists did not find such things necessary to
+stimulate their faith. Still one could shut his eyes and realize, or try
+to realize that he was standing in the place where the Light that has
+illumined a world struck its first feeble spark; where the impulse that
+for nineteen hundred years has swept across the nations in tides of war
+and peace first trembled into life&mdash;a wave of love in a mother's heart.
+As I say, the rest did not matter.</p>
+
+<p>While the others were looking into the shops across the way, I wandered
+about the streets a little, the side streets, which in character cannot
+have changed much in nineteen hundred years. The people are poor, and
+there are many idlers. There are beggars, too; some of them very
+wretched&mdash;and leprous, I think. It seems a pity, here in the birthplace
+of Him who healed with a word.</p>
+
+<p>We bought some of the Bethlehem beads. They will sell you a string a
+yard long for a franc, and they cut each bead separately from
+mother-of-pearl with the most primitive tools, and they shape it and
+polish it and bore a hole in it, all by hand, and link it on a gimp
+wire. In America you could not get a single bead made in that way for
+less than double what they ask for a whole string. But, as I have said,
+they are very poor here&mdash;as poor as when they bestowed a Saviour on
+mankind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXV" id="XXXV"></a>XXXV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SORROW OF THE CHOSEN&mdash;THE WAY OF THE CROSS</h3>
+
+<p>We had left Bethlehem and were back in Jerusalem, presently, on our way
+to the Jews' Wailing-place. I did not believe in it before I went. I was
+afraid it might be a sort of show-place, prepared for the occasion. I
+have changed my mind now. If there is one thing in Jerusalem absolutely
+genuine and directly linked with its ancient glories, it is the Jews'
+Wailing-place.</p>
+
+<p>You approach it through a narrow lane&mdash;a sickening gantlet of misery.
+Near the entrance wretched crones, with the distaff and spindle of the
+Fates, sat in the dust, spinning what might have been the thread of
+sorrow. Along the way the beggars; not the ordinary vociferous beggars
+of Constantinople, of Smyrna, of Ephesus, even of Jaffa, but beggars
+such as the holy city alone can duplicate. Men and women who are only
+the veriest shreds of humanity, crouched in the dirt, reeking with filth
+and rags and vermin and sores, staring with blind and festering eyes,
+mumbling, moaning, and wailing out their eternal cry of baksheesh,
+often&mdash;if a woman&mdash;clutching some ghastly infant to a bare, scrawny
+breast. There was no loud demand for alms; it was only a muted chorus of
+pleading, the voice with which misery spells its last word. Some made no
+sound, nor gesture, even.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> They saw nothing, heard nothing, knew
+nothing&mdash;they were no longer alive&mdash;they had only not ceased to breathe
+and suffer. The spectacle made us gasp and want to cry out with the very
+horror of it.</p>
+
+<p>We were through the fearful gantlet at last, and went directly into the
+Jews' Wailing-place. There behold the most lamentable passage in the
+most tragic epic of all history&mdash;the frayed remnant of a once mighty
+race mourning for its fall. A few hours before, and but a few rods away,
+we had looked upon the evidences of its former greatness, its splendor
+and its glory&mdash;the place of King Solomon's temple when it sat as on the
+pinnacle of the world. Indeed, we were looking at it now, for this wall
+before which they bow in anguish is a portion of the mighty architecture
+for which they mourn. In the general destruction of Titus this imposing
+fragment remained, and to-day they bow before it and utter their sorrow
+in the most doleful grieving that ever fell on human ear. Along the wall
+they stand or kneel, and on rows of benches behind they gather thickly,
+reading from faded and tattered Hebrew Scriptures the "Lamentations," or
+chanting in chorus the saddest dirge the world has ever known.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">"Because of the palace which is deserted&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">We sit alone and weep.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Because of the temple which is destroyed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Because of the walls which are broken down,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Because of our greatness which has departed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Because of the precious stones of the temple ground to powder,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Because of our priests who have erred and gone astray,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Because of our kings who have contemned God&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">We sit alone and weep!"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 351px;"><a name="ILL_038" id="ILL_038"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_038.jpg" width="351" height="500" alt="THE DEPTH OF THEIR FALL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE DEPTH OF THEIR FALL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is no mere ceremony&mdash;no mock sorrow; it is the mingled wail of a
+fallen people. These Jews know as no others of their race can realize
+the depth of their fall, and they gather here to give it voice&mdash;a tonal
+and visual embodiment of despair. Even I, who am not of that race, felt
+all at once the deadly clutch of that vast grieving, and knew something
+of what a young Hebrew, a member of our party, felt when he turned sick
+and hurried from the spot.</p>
+
+<p>What other race has maintained an integrity of sorrow? What, for
+instance, does the blood of Imperial Rome care for its departed
+grandeur? It does not even recognize itself. What other nation has ever
+maintained racial integrity of any kind? But, then, these were a <i>chosen
+people</i>!</p>
+
+<p>Chosen, why? Because they were a noble people? Hardly. Their own
+chronicles record them as a murmuring, rebellious, unstable race.
+Following the history of the chosen people from Jacob to Joshua, one is
+in a constant state of wonder at the divine selection. We may admit that
+God loved them, but we seek in vain for an excuse. In His last talk with
+Moses He declared that they would forsake Him, and that He in turn would
+forsake <i>them</i> and hide His face because of the evils they should do.</p>
+
+<p>Moses, who knew them even better, distrusted them even more. "For I know
+that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves," he said, almost
+with his latest breath. He told them that curses would befall them, and
+gave them a few sample curses, any one of which would lift the bark off
+of a tree. No<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> wonder he was willing to lie down in Mount Nebo and be at
+peace.</p>
+
+<p>Yet they <i>are</i> a chosen people&mdash;a people apart&mdash;a race that remains a
+race, and does not perish. Chosen for what? To make a bitter example of
+what a race can do when it remains a race&mdash;how high it can rise and how
+low may become its estate of misery? Remember, I am not considering the
+Jew as an individual; he is often noble as an individual; and it was a
+Jew who brought light into the world. I am considering a race&mdash;a race no
+worse than any other, and no better, but a <i>chosen</i> race; a race that
+without a ruler, without a nation, without a government&mdash;that outcast
+and despised of many nations has yet remained a unit through three
+thousand years. I am maintaining that only a chosen people could do
+that, and, without being able even to surmise the purpose, it is my
+humble opinion that the ages will show that purpose to have been good.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 374px;"><a name="ILL_039" id="ILL_039"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_039.jpg" width="374" height="500" alt="THE WAY OF THE CROSS(HOLY WEEK)" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE WAY OF THE CROSS<br /><br />(HOLY WEEK)</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have already inferred that the landmarks and localities of Jerusalem
+may be viewed with interest, but not too seriously. They have all
+associations, but most of them not the particular and sacred
+associations with which they are supposed to be identified. The majority
+of them were not located until Christ had been dead for a thousand
+years, and the means of locating them does not invite conviction.
+Inspiration located most of them, dreams the rest. That is to say,
+imagination. Whenever a priest or a dignitary wanted to distinguish
+himself he discovered something. He first made up his mind what he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+would like to discover, and then had an inspiration or a dream, and the
+thing was done. The eight Stations of the Cross, for instance, were
+never mentioned earlier than the twelfth century, and the Via Dolorosa,
+the Way of the Cross, was not so known until the fourteenth. Still, it
+must have been along some such street that the Man of Sorrow passed
+between the Garden and the Cross.</p>
+
+<p>We visited the Garden first. It was now late in the afternoon, and the
+sunlight had become tender and still and dream-like, and as we passed
+the traditional places&mdash;the house of Pilate, under the Ecce Homo arch,
+and the others, we had the feeling that it might have been on an evening
+like this that the Son of Man left the city, and with His disciples went
+down to Gethsemane to pray.</p>
+
+<p>We were a very small party now&mdash;there were only four of us and the
+guide, for the others had become tired and were willing to let other
+things go. But if we were tired, we did not know it, and I shall always
+be glad of that fact.</p>
+
+<p>At St. Stephen's gate (the tradition is that he was stoned there) we
+stopped to look down on Gethsemane. Perhaps it is not the real site, and
+perhaps the curious gilt-turreted church is not beautiful, but set there
+on the hillside amid the cypresses and venerable olive-trees, all aglow
+and agleam with the sunset, with the shadow of the dome of Omar creeping
+down upon it, there was about it a beauty of unreality that was
+positively supernatural. I was almost tempted not to go down there for
+fear of spoiling the illusion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We went, however, and the gnarled olive-trees, some of which are said to
+have been there at the time of Christ&mdash;and look it&mdash;were worth while.
+The garden as a whole, however, was less interesting than from above,
+and it was only the feeling that somewhere near here the Man who would
+die on Calvary asked that the cup of sorrow might pass from Him which
+made us linger.</p>
+
+<p>It was verging on twilight when we climbed to the city, and the others
+were for going to the hotel. But there was one more place I wanted to
+see. That was the hill outside of Jerusalem which the guide-books rather
+charily mention as "Gordon's Calvary," because General Gordon once
+visited it and accepted it as the true place of the Crucifixion. I knew
+that other thoughtful men had accepted it, too, and had favored a tomb
+not far away called the "Garden Tomb" as the true Sepulchre. I wanted to
+see these things and judge for myself. But two of our party and the
+guide spoke no English, and my Biblical German needed practice. There
+seemed to be no German word for Calvary, and when I ventured into
+details I floundered. Still, I must have struck a spark somewhere, for
+presently a light illumined our guide's face:</p>
+
+<p>"Golgota! Das richtige Golgota" (the true Golgotha), he said, excitedly,
+and then I remembered that I should have said Golgotha, the "Place of
+the Skull," in the beginning.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_040" id="ILL_040"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_040.jpg" width="500" height="287" alt="THE TRUE GOLGOTHA&mdash;THE PLACE OF THE SKULL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE TRUE GOLGOTHA&mdash;THE PLACE OF THE SKULL<br /><br />(Notice the large eyes and mouth of the skull formed by cavities in the
+cliff. The place of execution is marked by the little heap of stones
+above.)</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We were away immediately, all of us, hurrying for the Damascus gate,
+beyond which it lay. It was not far&mdash;nothing is far in Jerusalem&mdash;and
+presently we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> were outside, at the wicket of a tiny garden&mdash;a sweet,
+orderly little place&mdash;where a pleasant German woman and a tall old
+Englishman with a spiritual face were letting us in. Then they led us to
+a little arbor, and directly&mdash;to a tomb, a real tomb, cut into the cliff
+overhanging the garden.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether Jesus was laid in that tomb or not, and it is not
+likely that any one will ever know. But He <i>could</i> have been laid there,
+and it is not unlikely that He <i>was</i> laid there, for Golgotha&mdash;the hill
+that every unprejudiced visitor immediately accepts as the true
+Golgotha&mdash;overlooks this garden.</p>
+
+<p>We could not ascend the hill&mdash;the Mohammedans no longer permit that&mdash;but
+we could go to the end of the garden and look up to the little heap of
+stones which marks the old place of stoning and of crucifixion. It was
+always the place of public execution. The Talmud refers to it, and the
+Jews of Jerusalem spit toward it to this day. We could make out the
+contour of the skull which gave it its name, and even the face, for in
+its rocky side ancient tombs and clefts formed the clearly distinguished
+features.</p>
+
+<p>It is a hill; it is outside the walls; it is the traditional site of
+executions; it is the one natural place to which Jesus would have been
+taken for crucifixion. The Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
+was <i>never</i> a hill; it was <i>never</i> outside the walls; it was <i>never</i> a
+traditional site for anything until Queen Helena began to dream.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the reader may say, "With all the tales and traditions and
+disputes and doubts, what does it matter?" Perhaps it does not matter.
+Perhaps that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> old question of Pilate, "What is truth?" need not be
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>Yet somewhere amid the mass of confliction there follows a thread of
+fact. Sifting the testimony, it is difficult to deny that there once
+lived a man named Jesus&mdash;later, and perhaps then&mdash;known as the Christ;
+that He was of humble birth, and grew up to teach a doctrine of
+forgiveness and humility (a doctrine new to the Hebrew teachers of His
+day, whose religion consisted mainly of ceremonial forms); that He was
+able to heal the sick; that He had a following who, perhaps, hailed Him
+as their king; that it was because of these things that He was crucified
+on a hill outside of Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p>I think this is as far as general acknowledgment goes. The Scriptures
+declare more, the sceptic allows less; but the majority of mankind unite
+on the foregoing admissions. At all events, a great religion was founded
+on this man's life and death&mdash;a doctrine of gentleness when creeds are
+stripped away&mdash;and it is proper that such truth as can be established
+concerning the ground He trod, especially on that last dark day, should
+be recognized and made known. Of our little party of four there was not
+one who&mdash;standing there as the stars came out, and looking up at that
+hill outlined against the sky&mdash;did not feel a full and immediate
+conviction that this was indeed the spot where that last, supreme
+expiation was made, and that this sweet garden, guarded by these two
+gentle people, was the truer site for the Sepulchre which was "nigh at
+hand."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVI" id="XXXVI"></a>XXXVI</h2>
+
+<h3>AT THE MOUTH OF THE NILE</h3>
+
+<p>I am not a gifted person; I cannot write about existing places and
+things without seeing them, and I am afraid to steal from the
+guide-book&mdash;unintelligently, I mean. I have sometimes found the
+guide-book mistaken&mdash;not often, I admit, but too often to take chances.
+I should be struck with remorse if I should steal from the guide-book
+and then find that I had stolen a mistake. So I shall have to skip
+Galilee, Tiberias, Nazareth, and Hebron, for the reason that I could not
+visit those and include Egypt, too, by our schedule.</p>
+
+<p>One <i>must</i> go to Egypt. If the "grand object of all travel is to visit
+the shores of the Mediterranean," then the grand climax of that tour is
+Egypt. One <i>must</i> take all the time there is for that amazing land, and
+any time will be too short, even though it be a lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>The guide-book says that the arrival at Alexandria is not very
+impressive. I suppose a good deal depends on the day and the time of day
+and one's mental attitude. As usual with our arrivals, it was early
+morning, and everything was hazy and yellow-misty with sunrise. We were
+moving slowly, and the water was glassy still. Here and there across the
+yellow haze drifted a barge-like craft with a lateen-sail, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> a slow
+moving boat, pulled by men in native dress. Then out of the mist across
+the port bow came the outline of a low-lying shore, and a shaft that
+rose, a vague pencil against the morning glow. The Diplomat was leaning
+on the rail at my side.</p>
+
+<p>"Egypt," he said, quietly. "That is a lighthouse&mdash;they call it a pharos,
+after the one that Ptolemy built; it must have stood about in the same
+direction."</p>
+
+<p>Certainly that was not very dramatic, not actively so at least, but to
+me it was impressive; and stealing into that dream-like harbor, through
+the mellow quiet of the morning, I had the feeling that we were creeping
+up on the past&mdash;catching it asleep, as it were; that this was indeed the
+pharos of the Ptolemies&mdash;the harbor they had known.</p>
+
+<p>I shall always remember Alexandria, Egypt. I shall always remember the
+railway station with its wild hallabaloo of Arab porters, who grab one's
+hand-baggage, make off with it, and sit on it in a secluded place until
+you race around and hunt it up and produce baksheesh for its return. You
+do not check baggage in Egypt, by the way; you register it, which means
+that you tell somebody about it, then try to convince yourself that it
+is all right and that some day you will see it again.</p>
+
+<p>But I shall remember that station for another reason. When we had
+finally fought our way through to the train, and Laura and I had placed
+our things here and there in our compartment&mdash;in the racks and about&mdash;we
+realized that we were hot and thirsty, and I said I would slip back and
+get some oranges, seeing we had plenty of time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was easy to do that&mdash;easy enough, I mean, for I no longer had
+anything for the Bedouins to grab. I got the oranges and paid a piastre
+apiece for them&mdash;about ten times what they were worth in Jaffa, and I
+had the usual difficulty making change&mdash;a detachment of interested Arabs
+looking on meanwhile. Then I started back, and was stopped by a guard
+who wanted to see my ticket. I felt for the flat leather case which I
+generally carry in my hip-pocket. It was gone!</p>
+
+<p>If there had been anything resembling a chair there I should have sat
+down. As it was I took hold of the little railing, for my knees had a
+watery feeling which I felt was not to be trusted. That pocket-book
+contained my letter of credit; all my money, except a little change; my
+tickets, my character&mdash;everything that an unprotected stranger is likely
+to need in a strange land! When I got my breath I dived into all my
+pockets at once, then went through them categorically, as much as three
+times apiece. I had never realized I owned so many pockets or that they
+could be so empty, so useless.</p>
+
+<p>Those Bedouins had done it, of course. I rushed back to the orange-man,
+and in a mixture of three languages which nobody, not even myself, could
+understand, explained my loss. He shrugged his shoulders in French,
+elevated his hands in Egyptian, and said "No can tell" in English. I
+glared around at the contiguous Bedouins, but they all looked
+disinterestedly guilty. In a mixed daze I went back to the guard, and
+crept through when he was attending to another passenger. I still held
+the bag of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> oranges, and handed them to Laura, who was quietly waiting,
+looking out the window at the passing show. Little did she guess my
+condition, and how could I tell her?</p>
+
+<p>It was quite by chance that I glanced up at the overhead rack where I
+had stowed our smaller packages. Ah me! The gates of bliss open wide
+will never be a more inspiring sight than what I saw there. There it
+lay&mdash;that precious pocket-book! In the disordered mental state of our
+arrival I had for some unguessed reason taken out my pocket-case and
+laid it there with the other items. It was safe&mdash;safe in every detail.
+The world suddenly became glorified. Those Bedouins were my brothers. I
+would have gone back and embraced them if the train had not begun to
+move.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I shall always remember Alexandria.</p>
+
+<p>There is a continuous panorama between Alexandria and Cairo, absolutely
+fascinating to one who has not seen it before, and I wonder how it can
+ever grow old to any one. Almost immediately there was water&mdash;the Nile,
+or one of its canals&mdash;and stretching away, a dead level of
+green&mdash;lavish, luxurious, blossoming green&mdash;the delta-land of Lower
+Egypt, the richest garden in all the world. A network of irrigation; mud
+villages that might have been made by wasps; a low-dropping sky that met
+the level green&mdash;these made a background, and against it, along the
+raised road that follows the Nile, an endless procession passed.</p>
+
+<p>A man riding a camel, leading another; a boy watering two buffaloes; an
+Arab walking, followed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> by his wife and a string of loaded donkeys;
+ditto camels; a cow grinding an old Egyptian water-mill that has been in
+use since Pharaoh's time; two men turning an Archimedes screw to lift
+the water to their fields&mdash;so the pictures whirl by. The Orient has
+become familiar to us, yet for some reason the atmosphere, the
+impression, is wholly different here, because&mdash;I cannot tell
+why&mdash;because this is Egypt, I suppose, and there is only one Egypt, a
+fact easier to realize than to explain.</p>
+
+<p>The day was well along when we reached Cairo and, after the usual battle
+with the Ishmaelites, drove to Shepheard's Hotel. As there is only one
+Egypt, so there is only one Shepheard's Hotel. There are other hotels as
+large and as lavish, with as fair gardens, perhaps, but I believe there
+is no other hotel on the planet where you can sit on a vast balmy
+terrace and look down on such a panorama of the nations&mdash;American,
+European, Asiatic, African&mdash;such a universal congress of pleasure as
+each winter assembles here. It would take a more riotous pen than mine
+to achieve a description of that mixture. If the reader can imagine a
+World's Fair Midway of every nationality and every costume and every
+language and mode of locomotion under the sun, and can see mingled with
+it all the dark-faced sellers of shawls and scarabs, and beads and
+relics, the picture will serve, and we will let it go at that.</p>
+
+<p>And perhaps I may as well say here that Cairo is the wildest, freest
+place in Christendom. The confluence of Upper and Lower Egypt&mdash;the Delta
+and the Nile&mdash;here on the edge of the desert, it is the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> veritable
+jumping-off place where all conventions melt away. It is the neutral
+ground where East and West meet&mdash;each to adopt the special privilege and
+license of the other&mdash;madly to compete in lavishness of dress and the
+reckless joy of living. In the language of the Reprobates, "One gets his
+money's worth in Cairo, if he makes his headquarters at Shepheard's and
+sits in the game." But he will require a certain capital to make good
+his ante. If I hadn't found that pocket-book at Alexandria I should have
+taken my meals with the Arabs in the back basement.</p>
+
+<p>The Arab, by-the-way, is the general servitor in the Egyptian hotel. You
+ring three times when you want him, and he is as picturesque and gentle
+a Bedouin as ever held up a camel train or slew a Christian to glorify
+his faith. He is na&iuml;ve and noiseless, and whatever you ask him for he
+says "Yes," and if you ask him if he understands he says "Yes," and you
+will never know whether he does or not until you see what he brings. It
+does not help matters to talk loudly to the Arab. Volume of sound does
+not increase his lingual gifts, and spelling the article is likewise
+wasted effort. Ladies sometimes try that method. The trunk of one of our
+party had not reached her room&mdash;and she needed it.</p>
+
+<p>"My trunk," she said to the Arab. "<i>You</i> know, trunk&mdash;t-r-u-n-k,
+trunk&mdash;yes, trunk, with my name on it&mdash;<i>you</i> know&mdash;n-a-m-e&mdash;my initials,
+I mean, <i>you</i> know&mdash;T.&nbsp;D.&mdash;T.&nbsp;D. on both ends."</p>
+
+<p>The Arab did know "trunk"; the rest was mere embroidery.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVII" id="XXXVII"></a>XXXVII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX</h3>
+
+<p>There was not much left of the afternoon when we reached Cairo, but some
+of us wandered off here and there to get the habit of the place, as it
+were. Laura and I came to a trolley-line presently, and found that it
+ran out to the Pyramids and Sphinx. We were rather shocked at the
+thought, but recovered and decided to steal a march on the others by
+slipping out there and having those old wonders all to ourselves, at
+sunset.</p>
+
+<p>It is a long way. You pass through streets of many kinds and by houses
+of many sorts, and you cross the Nile and glide down an avenue of palms
+where there are glimpses of water&mdash;the infinite desert stretching away
+into the evening. Long before we reached them we saw the outlines of the
+three pyramids against the sky, and then we made out the Sphinx&mdash;that
+old group which is perhaps the most familiar picture that children know.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, somehow, it could not be true that this was the reality of the
+pictures we had seen. The likeness was very great, certainly, but those
+pictures had represented something in a realm of books and romance&mdash;the
+unattainable land&mdash;while these were here; we were actually going to
+them, and in a trolley-car! It required all the spell of Egypt
+then&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> palms, the desert, and the evening sky&mdash;to fit the reality
+into its old place in the hall of dreams.</p>
+
+<p>We had thought to have a quiet view, but this was a miscalculation.
+There is no such thing as a quiet view of the Pyramids. At any hour of
+the day or night you are immediately beset by beggars and
+fortune-tellers and would-be guides, and you are pulled and dragged and
+distracted by their importunities until you have lost all interest in
+your original purpose in a general desire to start a plague or a
+massacre that will wipe out the whole pestiferous crew. There is no
+hope, except in the employment of one or two of the guides&mdash;the
+strongest-looking ones, who will in a certain measure keep off the
+others&mdash;and you will have to engage donkeys, and perhaps have your
+fortune told. Otherwise these creatures will follow you and surround
+you, insisting that they want no money; that they only love you; that it
+makes them happy even to be near you; that they love all Americans;
+that, in short, for a shilling, just a shilling, and a baksheesh (a
+piastre), one little baksheesh, they will become your guide, your slave,
+the dirt under your feet&mdash;"Ah, mister&mdash;ze Sphinkis, ze Pyramid,
+aevry-zing!" It is a disgrace to Egypt, and to England who is in charge
+here now, that such persecution is permitted in the shadow of one of the
+world's most revered and imposing ruins.</p>
+
+<p>We engaged donkeys, at last, after there had been several fights over
+us, and set out up the road to the Great Pyramid, assailed every little
+way by bandits lying in wait. The Great Pyramid does not improve with
+close acquaintance. It has been too much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> damaged by time and criminal
+assault. It loses its clean-cut outlines as you come near and becomes
+little more than a stupendous heap of stones. I think we were a trifle
+disappointed with a close inspection, to tell the truth, for even the
+largest pictures do not give one quite the impression of the reality. It
+was as if we had been gazing at some marvellous painting, and then had
+walked up very near to see how the work was done.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_041" id="ILL_041"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_041.jpg" width="500" height="383" alt="A VAST INDIFFERENCE TO ALL PUNY THINGS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A VAST INDIFFERENCE TO ALL PUNY THINGS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The charm came back as we rode off a little and turned to view it now
+and again in the evening light. The irregularities disappeared; the
+outlines became clean against the sky; I was no longer disappointed in
+that giant of architecture whose shadow (it lay now just at our feet)
+began marking time at a period when the world had no recorded history.</p>
+
+<p>Yet in one or two respects the reality differed from the dream. Usually
+stone grows gray with age and takes on moss and lichen&mdash;the mould of
+time. The Pyramids are entirely bare, and they are not gray. The stones
+might have been laid up yesterday so far as any vegetable increment is
+concerned, and their color is a tawny gold&mdash;luminous gold in the sunset,
+like the barren hills beyond. The daily sandblast of the desert will
+level these monuments in time, no doubt, but the last fragment in that
+remote age will still be bare and in color unchanged.</p>
+
+<p>As with the Pyramids, our first impression of the Sphinx was one of
+disappointment. It seemed small to us. It is small compared with a
+pyramid, while the photographs give one another idea. The photographs
+are made with the Sphinkis (Sphinx,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> I mean&mdash;one falls so easily into
+the native speech) in the foreground, looking fully as big as the
+second-size pyramid and quite able to have the third-size pyramid for
+breakfast. Figures mean nothing in the face of a picture like that; you
+comprehend them, but you do not realize them&mdash;visualize them, perhaps I
+ought to say.</p>
+
+<p>So the Sphinx seemed small to us as we approached, and even when we were
+on the immediate brink of sand, gazing down upon it, its sixty-five feet
+of stature seemed reduced from the image in our minds.</p>
+
+<p>But the Sphinx grows on one. As the light faded and the shadows softened
+its scarred features there came also a dignity and with it a feeling of
+immensity, of grandeur, a vast indifference to all puny things. And
+then&mdash;perhaps it was the light, perhaps it was because I stood at a
+particular angle, but certainly&mdash;standing just there, at that moment, I
+saw, or fancied I saw, about its serene lips the suggestion or beginning
+of a smile. The more I looked, the more certain of it I became, and when
+I spoke of it to Laura, she saw it, too. Yes, undoubtedly we had caught
+the Sphinx smiling&mdash;not outwardly, at least not openly, but quietly,
+quizzically&mdash;smiling inside as one might say. I could not understand it
+then, but later it came to me.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Back at the hotel, to-night, I thought it out. I remembered that the
+Sphinx had been there a long time; nobody knows how long, but <i>a very
+long time indeed</i>. I remembered that it had seen a number of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+things&mdash;<i>a very great number of things</i>. I remembered that it had seen
+one very curious thing, to wit:</p>
+
+<p>A long time ago, when a certain Pharaoh&mdash;we can only guess which
+Pharaoh&mdash;ruled over Egypt, it saw a young man who had been sold into
+bondage from Syria rise in the king's favor through certain dreams and
+become his chief counsellor, even "ruler over all the land of Egypt." It
+saw him in the height of his power and glory bring his family, who were
+Syrian shepherds, down from their barren hills and establish them in the
+favor of the Egyptian king. The Sphinx was old&mdash;a thousand years old, at
+least, even then&mdash;and, being wise, heard with certain curiosity their
+claim that they were a "chosen people," and thoughtfully watched them
+multiply through a few brief centuries into a band of servitors who,
+because of this tradition, held themselves a race apart, repeating tales
+of a land of promise which they would some day inherit. Then at last,
+during a period of visitation, the Sphinx saw them escape, taking what
+they could lay their hands on, straggling away, with their families and
+their flocks, toward the Red Sea. The Sphinx heard nothing more of that
+tribe for about three thousand years.</p>
+
+<p>Then an amazing thing happened. Among those who came to wonder at the
+Sphinx's age and mystery were some who repeated tales of that runaway
+band&mdash;tales magnified and embroidered almost beyond recognition&mdash;and,
+what was more curious, accepted them&mdash;not as such tales are usually
+accepted, with a heavy basis of discount&mdash;but as gospel; inspired truth;
+the foundation of a mighty religion; the word of God.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nor was that all. The Sphinx realized presently that not only were those
+old stories accepted as gospel by the descendants of the race
+themselves, but by a considerable number of the human race at
+large&mdash;accepted and debated in a most serious manner, even to the point
+of bloodshed.</p>
+
+<p>Some details of this inspired chronology were wholly new to the Sphinx.
+It was interesting, for example, to hear that there had been three
+million of those people, and that before they started there had been a
+time when the Nile had been turned to blood&mdash;twice, in fact: once by the
+grace of God and once by magicians. The Sphinx did not remember a time
+when the Nile had turned to blood. In the five thousand years and more
+of its existence it had never heard of a magician who could produce that
+result. It was interesting, too, to learn that the Red Sea had opened a
+way for those people to cross, and that the hosts of Egypt, trying to
+follow them, had been swallowed up and drowned. This was wholly new. The
+Sphinx had been there and seen all that had happened, but she had
+somehow missed those things.</p>
+
+<p>Not that the Sphinx was surprised at these embroideries. She had seen
+several mythologies created, and knew the general scale of enlargement
+and glorification. It was only when she saw strong, cultured, and
+enlightened nations still accepting the old Hebrew poem&mdash;with all its
+stately figures and exaggerations&mdash;as gospel; heard them actually trying
+to prove that a multitude as big as the census of Australia had marched
+out with its chattels and its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> flocks; heard them vow that the Red Sea
+had parted long enough to let this population pass through; heard them
+maintain that this vast assembly had found shade and refreshment on the
+other side by twelve wells of water and under seventy palm-trees: heard
+them tell how the sea behind them had suddenly rushed together and
+swallowed up all the Egyptian army (including the king himself, some
+said)&mdash;it was only when the Sphinx heard learned men argue these things
+as facts that a smile&mdash;scarcely perceptible, yet still a smile&mdash;began to
+grow behind the stone lips.</p>
+
+<p>That is the smile we saw to-night&mdash;a quiet smile, a gracious smile, a
+compassionate smile&mdash;and as it has grown so slowly, so it will not soon
+depart. For by-and-by, when these ages have passed, and with them their
+story and their gospels&mdash;when those old chronicles of the Jews have been
+relegated to the realm of mythology for a thousand years&mdash;there may come
+another band who will establish their traditions as God's holy word, and
+the Sphinx&mdash;still remaining, still observing, still looking across the
+encompassing sands to the sunrise&mdash;will smile, and dream old dreams.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXVIII" id="XXXVIII"></a>XXXVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN</h3>
+
+<p>I wonder why we are always taken first to the mosques, or why, when our
+time is pretty limited, we are taken to them at all. Mosques are well
+enough, but when you have seen a pretty exhaustive line of them in
+Turkey and Syria, Egypt cannot furnish any very startling attractions in
+this field. For mosques are modern (anything less than a thousand years
+old is modern to us now), and Egypt is not a land of modern things.
+Besides, here in Cairo there are such a number of fascinating
+out-of-the-way corners which we are dying to see&mdash;unholy side-streets,
+picturesquely hidden nooks, and mysterious, shut-in life; besides all
+the bazaars&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Never mind; the mosques did have a certain interest, especially the
+mosque of Al-Azhar, which is nine hundred years old and built about a
+great court&mdash;an old mosque when America was still undiscovered&mdash;and the
+mosque of Hassan, "whose prayer will nevair be accept," Abraham said
+(Abraham being our guide), "because when ze architec' have finish, ze
+Sultan Hassan have cut off hees han' so he cannot produce him again."
+Napoleon's first gun in Egypt hit a minaret of Hassan's mosque, it is
+said, and it has had bad luck generally, perhaps because of the cruel
+act of its royal builder. We were not even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> required to put on slippers
+to enter it, so it cannot be held in very great veneration. Then there
+is the mosque of Mohammed Ali, built within the last century and modern
+throughout, the only mosque in the world, I believe, to have electric
+lights!</p>
+
+<p>It was Mohammed Ali who settled the Mameluke problem in the conclusive
+way which sultans adopt at times. The Mamelukes were the Janizaries of
+Egypt, though fewer in number. Still, there were enough of them to make
+trouble and keep matters stirred up, and Ali grew tired of them. So did
+the public, according to our guide:</p>
+
+<p>"Ali, he say to some people, 'You like get rid of zose Mameluke?' an'
+all ze people say, 'Yez, of course.' So Ali he make big dinner, an' ze
+Mameluke come an' eat, an' have fine, big time."</p>
+
+<p>It was on the 1st of March, 1811, that Ali issued his general invitation
+to the Mameluke leaders to attend a function at the Citadel; and, after
+entertaining them hospitably, invited them to march through a narrow
+passageway, which was suddenly closed at each end, while from above
+opened a musket-fire that presently concluded those Mamelukes&mdash;470 of
+them&mdash;with the exception of one man, who is said to have leaped his
+horse through a window down a hundred feet or so, where he "Jump from
+hees horse and run&mdash;run fas' to Jaffa!" which was natural enough.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one trouble with that story. Abraham did not explain how
+this particular Mameluke came to have his horse at luncheon, and why,
+with or without horses, a number of those other Mamelukes did not follow
+him. Every Mameluke of my acquaintance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> would have gone through that
+window, mounted or otherwise, and without calculating the distance to
+the ground. However, Abraham showed us the passage and the place of the
+leap, and later the graves of the 470, all of which was certainly
+convincing. Following the removal of the leaders, a general burial of
+Mamelukes took place throughout Egypt, since which time members of that
+organization have been extremely hard to catch. It must have been Ali's
+neat solution of the Mameluke problem which fifteen years later was
+copied in Constantinople by Mahmoud II., when he disposed of the
+Janizaries.</p>
+
+<p>It was at the tomb of a distinguished pasha&mdash;a fine, inviting
+place&mdash;that we saw a small green piece of the robe of Abraham. It was
+incorporated in a very sacred rug, one of the twelve which Cairo,
+Constantinople, and Damascus contribute to Mecca each year. We asked how
+Abraham's robe could hold out this way, and his namesake shrugged and
+smiled:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, zay take little piece of ze real robe an' roll him 'roun' an'
+'roun' wiz many piece of goods, an' zay become <i>all</i> ze robe of
+Abraham."</p>
+
+<p>Thus does a thread leaven a whole wardrobe.</p>
+
+<p>Laura and I escaped then. We did not care for any more tombs and
+mosques, and we did care a great deal for a street we had noticed where,
+squatted on the ground on both sides of it, their wares spread in the
+dust, were sellers of certain trinkets and jars which, though not of the
+past, had a fatal lure we could not all forget. Our driver was a black,
+scarred semi-Nubian who looked as if he had been through a fire, and had
+possibly five words of English. It does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> not matter&mdash;Menelek (so we
+named him) served us well, and will retain a place in my affections.</p>
+
+<p>We took the back track, and presently were in the street of small
+sellers, driving carefully, for there was barely room to pass between
+their displayed goods. Here and there we stooped to inspect, and we
+bought a water-jar for a piastre&mdash;an Egyptian piastre, which is really
+money and worth exactly five cents. Beyond the jars was a woman selling
+glass bracelets, such as the Arab women wear. I had wanted some of those
+from the beginning. I picked out a gay handful, and then discovered I
+had only a gold twenty-franc piece to pay with. The woman had never
+owned twenty francs, and no seller in the neighborhood could furnish the
+change. So I handed it to Menelek, who grinned and disappeared while we
+sat there in the carriage waiting.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose he had to go miles in that neighborhood for as much change as
+that. I know we sat there in the sun and looked at all the curious
+things in all the assortments about us, over and over, and discussed
+them and wondered if Menelek would ever return. It became necessary at
+last that he should do so. No vehicle could pass us in that narrow
+thoroughfare, and in a string behind there was collecting as motley an
+assortment of curiosities as ever were gathered in a menagerie. There
+was a curious two-wheeled cart or dray, drawn by water-buffaloes, upon
+which a man had his collection of wives out for an airing; there was a
+camel loaded with huge water-jars until they projected out over the
+heads of the selling people; there was a load of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> hay drawn by a cow;
+there was a donkey train that reached back to the end of the street, and
+what lay beyond only Allah knew.</p>
+
+<p>The East is patient, but even the East has its limits. Presently we
+began to be interviewed by dark men&mdash;camel-drivers and the like&mdash;who had
+a way of flinging up their hands, while from behind came a rising tide
+of what I assumed to be imprecation.</p>
+
+<p>We were calm&mdash;that is, we assured each other that we were calm&mdash;and we
+told them quite pleasantly how matters stood. The result was not
+encouraging. One Bedouin grabbed the bridle, and I was at the point of
+slaying him with my water-jar when at the same moment appeared a member
+of the Cairo police&mdash;one of those with a tall red fez&mdash;also Menelek, our
+long-lost Menelek, with the change, out of which there was baksheesh for
+the discontented drivers. Everything was all right then. We headed the
+procession. Behind us came the buffalo-cart&mdash;the wives, sandwiched fore
+and aft and smiling&mdash;the camel with his distended load of jars; the
+heaped-up little hay-wagon; the string of donkeys all in blue beads,
+with heaven knows what else trailing down the distance. All the curses
+were removed; all the drivers singing; traffic congestion in the East
+was over.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first things we had noticed in Egypt was the curious brass
+spool affair which Arab women wear, suspended perpendicularly across the
+forehead, from the head-gear to the top of their veil. It extends from
+the nose upward, and has sharp, saw-like ridges on it, which look as if
+they would cut in. When we asked about these things, we were told that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>
+they were worn to avert the evil eye, also as a handy means by which the
+husband may correct any little indiscretion on the part of one of his
+wives. He merely has to tap that brass spool with his cane or
+broomstick, or whatever is handy, and it cuts in and neatly reminds the
+wearer that she is a woman and had better behave. Family discipline has
+matured in this ancient land.</p>
+
+<p>I explained to Menelek now, in some fashion, that I wanted one of those
+brass things; whereupon we entered the narrow and thronging thoroughfare
+of commerce&mdash;a gay place, with all sorts of showy wares lavishly
+displayed&mdash;and went weaving in and out among the crowd to find it. Every
+other moment Menelek would shout something that sounded exactly like,
+"Oh, I <i>mean</i> it! Oh, I <i>mean</i> it!" which made us wonder <i>what</i> he meant
+in that emphatic way.</p>
+
+<p>Then all at once he changed to, "Oh, I <i>schmell</i> it! Oh, I <i>schmell</i>
+it!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right," we said; "so do we," for, though Cairo is cleaner
+than Constantinople, it was not over-sweet just there. But presently,
+when he changed again to, "Oh, I eat it! Oh, I eat it!" we drew the
+line. We said, "No, we do not go as far as that."</p>
+
+<p>We have learned now that those calls are really "O-i-menuk,
+o-i-schmeluk," etc., and indicate that some one is to turn to the right
+or left, or simply get out of the way, as the case may be. We used them
+ourselves after that, which gave Menelek great joy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXIX" id="XXXIX"></a>XXXIX</h2>
+
+<h3>WHERE HISTORY BEGAN</h3>
+
+<p>When I glanced casually over the little heap of hand-bags that would
+accompany our party up the Nile&mdash;we were then waiting on the terrace of
+Shepheard's for the carriages&mdash;I noticed that my own did not appear to
+be of the number. I mentioned this to the guides, to the head-porter, to
+the clerk, to casual Bedouins in the hotel uniform, without arousing any
+active interest. Finally, I went on a still hunt on my own account. I
+found the missing bag out in the back area-way, with a Bedouin whom I
+had not seen before sitting on it, smoking dreamily and murmuring a song
+about lotus and moonlight and the spell of his lady's charms. Growing
+familiar with the habits of the country, I dispossessed him with my foot
+and marched back through the vast corridors carrying my bag myself.
+Still, I am sorry now I didn't contribute the baksheesh he expected. He
+was probably the cousin or brother or brother-in-law of one of my room
+servitors. They all have a line of those relatives, and they must live,
+I suppose, though it is difficult to imagine why.</p>
+
+<p>There was a red glow in the sky when our train slipped out of the Cairo
+station toward Luxor. The Nile was red, too, and against this tide of
+evening were those curious sail-boats of Egypt that are like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> great
+pointed-winged butterflies, and the tall palms of the farther shore.
+By-and-by we began to run through mud villages that rose from the river
+among the palms, wonderfully picturesque in the gathering dusk. This was
+the Egypt of the pictures, the Egypt we have always known. No need to
+strain one's imagination to accept this reality. You are possessed,
+enveloped by it, and I cannot think that I enjoyed it any the less from
+seeing it through the window of a comfortable diner, with the knowledge
+that an equally comfortable, even if tiny, state-room was reserved in
+the car ahead. The back of a camel or deck of a dahabiyah would be more
+picturesque, certainly&mdash;more poetic&mdash;but those things require time, and
+there are drawbacks, too. Railway travel in Egypt is both swift and
+satisfactory. The accommodations differ somewhat from those of America,
+but not unpleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>We were a small party now. There were fewer than twenty of us&mdash;all
+English-speaking, except a young man who shared my apartment and was
+polite enough to pretend to understand my German.</p>
+
+<p>It was a little after 5 <span class="smcap">a.m</span>. when I heard him getting up. I inquired if
+there was "<i>Etwas los?</i>" which is the ship idiom for asking if anything
+had gone wrong. He said no, but that the sun would be upstanding
+directly, which brought me into similar action. One does not miss
+sunrises on the Nile, if one cares for sunrises anywhere. We hurried
+through our dressing and were out on the platform when the train drew up
+for water at Nag Hamadeh&mdash;a station like many others, surrounded by the
+green luxury of the Nile's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> fertile strip, with yellow desert and
+mountains pressing close on either hand. It was just before sunrise. The
+eastward sky was all resonant with ruddy tones&mdash;a stately overture of
+its coming. Uplifting palms, moveless in the morning air, broke the
+horizon line, while nearer lay the low village&mdash;compact and flat of
+roof&mdash;a vast, irregular hive built of that old material of Egypt, bricks
+without straw. Below it the Nile repeated the palms, the village, the
+swelling symphony of dawn. Only here and there was any sign of life. An
+Arab woman with a water-jar drowsed toward the river-bank; a camp of
+Bedouins with their camels and their tents were beginning to stir and
+kindle their morning fires. The railroad crosses the river here, and
+just as we were creeping out over the slow-moving flood the sun rose,
+and the orchestra of the sky broke into a majestic crescendo, as rare
+and radiant and splendid as it was when Memnon answered to its waking
+thrill and sang welcome to the day.</p>
+
+<p>The young man and I had forgotten each other, I think, for neither of us
+had spoken for some moments. Then we both spoke at once&mdash;"<i>Wunderbar!</i>"
+we said, "<i>Wunderschon!</i>" for I have trained myself to speak German even
+when strongly moved. Then with one impulse we looked at our watches. It
+was precisely six, and we remembered that it was the 22d of March&mdash;the
+equinox.</p>
+
+<p>We stayed out there and saw the land awake&mdash;that old land which has
+awakened so many times and in so much the same fashion. Outside of its
+cities and its temples it cannot have changed greatly since the days of
+Rameses. It is still just a green, fertile<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> thread of life, watered and
+tilled in the manner of fifty centuries ago. They had to drag us in to
+breakfast at last, for we would be at Luxor before long, four hundred
+and fifty miles from Cairo; that is, at ancient Thebes, where&mdash;though
+the place has lingered for our coming a good four thousand years&mdash;"ze
+train he have not time to wait."</p>
+
+<p>We are in Thebes now, the "city of a hundred gateways and twenty
+thousand chariots of war." Homer called it that, though it was falling
+to ruin even then. Homer was a poet, but his statistics are believed to
+be correct enough in this instance, for Diodorus, who saw the ruins a
+little before the Christian era, states that there were a hundred war
+stables, each capable of holding two hundred horses, "the marks and
+signs of which," he says, "are visible to this day." Of its glory in
+general he adds: "There was no city under the sun so adorned with so
+many and stately monuments of gold and silver and ivory, and multitudes
+of colossi and obelisks cut out of entire stone." Still further along
+Diodorus adds, "There, they say, are the wonderful sepulchres of the
+ancient kings, which for state and grandeur far exceed all that
+posterity can attain unto at this day."</p>
+
+<p>Coming from a historian familiar with Athens and Rome in the height of
+their splendor, this statement is worth considering. We have journeyed
+to Thebes to see the ruin of the mighty temples which Diodorus saw, and
+the colossi and the obelisks, and to visit the royal tombs of which he
+heard&mdash;now open to the light of day.</p>
+
+<p>We had glimpses of these things at the very moment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> of our arrival. The
+Temple of Luxor (so called) is but a step from the hotel, and, waiting
+on the terrace for our donkeys, we looked across the Nile to the Colossi
+of Memnon, still rising from the wide plain where once a thronging city
+stood&mdash;still warming to the sunrise that has never failed in their
+thirty-five hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>We were in no hurry to leave that prospect, but our donkeys were ready
+presently, and a gallant lot indeed. The Luxor donkeys are the best in
+Egypt, we are told, and we believe it. They are a mad, racing
+breed&mdash;fat, unwearied, and strenuous&mdash;the pick of their species. They
+can gallop all day in the blazing sun, and the naked rascal that races
+behind, waving a stick and shouting, can keep up with them hour after
+hour when an American would drop dead in five minutes.</p>
+
+<p>They are appropriately named, those donkeys. Mine was "Whiskey
+Straight," and he arrived accordingly. He was a gray, wild-headed
+animal, made of spring steel. We headed the procession that led away for
+the Temple of Karnak in a riotous stampede. Laura's donkey was "Whiskey
+and Soda"&mdash;a slightly milder proposition, but sufficient unto the day. I
+have never seen our ship-dwellers so unreserved in their general
+behavior, so "let loose," as it were, from anything that resembled
+convention, as when we went cavorting through that Arab settlement of
+"El-Uksur," where had been ancient Thebes. Beset with a mad, enjoying
+fear, our ladies&mdash;some of whom were no longer young and perhaps had
+never ridden before&mdash;broke into frantic and screaming prophecies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> of
+destruction, struggling to check their locomotion, their feet set
+straight ahead, skirts, scarfs, hats, hair streaming down the wind. It
+was no time for scenery&mdash;Egyptian scenery; we knew nothing, could attend
+to nothing, till at the towering entrance of the great Temple of Karnak
+we came to a sudden and confused halt.</p>
+
+<p>We dismounted there, shook ourselves together, and stared wonderingly up
+at those amazing walls whose relief carving and fresco tints the dry air
+of this rainless land has so miraculously preserved. And then presently
+we noticed that Gaddis, our guide for the Nile, had stepped quietly out
+before us, and with that placid smile he always wears had lifted his
+hand to the records of his ancestors.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 412px;"><a name="ILL_042" id="ILL_042"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_042.jpg" width="412" height="500" alt="SANCTUARY IN KARNAK" title="" />
+<span class="caption">SANCTUARY IN KARNAK</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 419px;"><a name="ILL_043" id="ILL_043"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_043.jpg" width="419" height="500" alt="GADDIS YOUNG IN YEARS. GADDIS IS AS OLD AS THESE MONUMENTS IN REFLECTION AND
+MENTAL HERITAGE&mdash;A PART WITH THEM OF A VANISHED DAY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">GADDIS<br /><br />YOUNG IN YEARS. GADDIS IS AS OLD AS THESE MONUMENTS IN REFLECTION AND
+MENTAL HERITAGE&mdash;A PART WITH THEM OF A VANISHED DAY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I want to speak a word just here of Gaddis. He is pure Copt, and the
+name "Copt" is from "Gypt"&mdash;that is, "Egypt"&mdash;the Copts being the direct
+descendants of the race that built ancient Thebes. His color is a clear,
+rich brown; his profile might be a part of these wall decorations. Then
+there are his eyes&mdash;mere dreamy slits, behind which he dwells in an age
+far removed from ours, while his lips wear always that ineffable smile
+which belongs only to Egypt, its sculpture and its people, the smile
+that regards with gentle contemplation&mdash;and compassion&mdash;all trivial
+things. Young in years, Gaddis is as old as these monuments in
+reflection and mental heritage&mdash;a part with them of a vanished day. And
+but for his fez and little European coat, which with the sash and
+figured skirt complete the dress of the Egyptian guide, Gaddis might
+truly have been plucked from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> these pictured walls. I should add that he
+reads the hieroglyphics and has all languages on his tongue&mdash;English,
+French, German&mdash;the Egyptian is born with these, I think; his voice is a
+drowsy hum that is pure music; his temper is as sweet and changeless as
+his smile.</p>
+
+<p>So much for Gaddis. He stood now with his lifted hand directed to the
+panoramic story of the past; then, in slow, measured voice:</p>
+
+<p>"Zis is ze great temple of Karnak&mdash;ze work of many king. Here you will
+see ze King Ram-e-ses II. wiz ze crown an' symbol of Upper an' Lower
+Egypt, making sacrifice of fruit and fowl an' all good sings to ze gawd
+Amm-Ra, in ze presence of Horus, ze hawk-headed sun-gawd, an' Anubis an'
+Osiris, ze gawd of ze under-worlid."</p>
+
+<p>Thus it was our sight-seeing in Upper Egypt began.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XL" id="XL"></a>XL</h2>
+
+<h3>KARNAK AND LUXOR</h3>
+
+<p>The temple of Karnak cannot be described. The guide-books attempt it,
+but the result is only a maze of figures and detail for which the mind
+cares little. All the Greek temples on the Acropolis combined would make
+but a miniature showing by the side of Karnak. Most of the Egyptian
+kings, beginning as far back as 3000 <span class="smcap">b.c</span>., had a hand in its building,
+and for above two thousand years it was in a state of construction,
+restoration, or repair. The result is an amazing succession of halls and
+columns, monoliths, and mighty walls&mdash;many of them tumbled and tumbling
+now, but enough standing to show what a race once flourished here. Long
+ago the road over which we came from Luxor was an avenue eighty feet
+wide and a mile and a half long, connecting the two great temples. It
+was faced on each side with ram-headed sphinxes only a few feet apart.
+Most of them are gone now, but the few mutilated specimens left prompt
+one's imagination of that mighty boulevard. The Karnak of that day, with
+its various enclosures, is said to have covered a thousand acres. The
+mind does not grasp that, any more than it comprehends the ages of its
+construction, the history it has seen. It is like trying to grasp the
+distance to the stars.</p>
+
+<p>No one may say who began Karnak, but the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> Usertsens of the earliest
+Theban Dynasty had a hand in its building, and after them the other
+dynasties down to the Ptolemaic days. Thothmes III. and his aunt, the
+wonderful Queen Hatasu&mdash;the ablest woman of her time&mdash;were among its
+builders, and these two set up obelisks, erected pylons and vast
+columned halls. This was about 1600 <span class="smcap">b.c</span>., when the glory of Egypt was at
+flood-tide. Two centuries later the mighty Seti I., whose mummied form
+sleeps to-day in the Museum at Cairo, began what is known as the great
+Hypostile Hall, finished by his still mightier son, Rameses II., whose
+mummy likewise reposes in Cairo, father and son together. Rameses built
+other additions to Karnak, and crowded most of them with pictures and
+statues of himself and the sculptured glorification of his deeds. He
+was, in fact, not only the greatest king, but the greatest egotist the
+world has ever known, and in the end believed himself a god. It is said
+that he built more than seventy temples altogether, chiefly to hold his
+statues, and that he put his name on a number that had been built by his
+predecessors. It has been hinted that to his title of "The Great" the
+word "Advertiser" should have been added, and the fact that he is now on
+exhibition in a glass case must be a crowning gratification to him, if
+he knows it. It should be mentioned that Rameses II. is thought to be
+one of the oppressors of the Israelites, which may tend to arrange his
+period and personality in the Biblical mind.</p>
+
+<p>I am wandering away from the subject in hand. I want to talk about
+Karnak, and I find myself talking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> of kings. But, then, one <i>cannot</i>
+talk about Karnak&mdash;not intelligently. One must <i>see</i> Karnak, and he will
+believe himself dreaming all the time, and he will come away silent. The
+Romans came to Karnak when the Egyptians had finished with their
+building, and by-and-by the early Christians, who could always be
+depended upon to pull down and mutilate and destroy anything that was
+particularly magnificent. Our old friend, the good Queen Helena,
+arrived, and the temples of Egypt crumbled before the blight of her
+fanaticism. But I must change cars again. I get a little rabid when I
+take up Queen Helena and her tribe.</p>
+
+<p>We followed Gaddis from arch to pylon, from enclosure to sanctuary&mdash;we
+passed down colonnades that one must see to believe. There are two kinds
+of columns in Egypt, by-the-way, the Lotus and the Papyrus&mdash;the former
+with a capital that opens out like a flaring bowl, the cup of the
+lotus-flower; the other with a capital that is more like an opening bud.
+The lotus symbolizes the Delta country, Lower Egypt; the papyrus stands
+for Upper Egypt, the country of the Nile, where we now are. Both are
+used in these temples, and here in Karnak there is a hall of Lotus
+columns&mdash;one hundred and thirty-four in number&mdash;twelve of them sixty
+feet high and twelve feet through!</p>
+
+<p>That is the great Hypostile Hall of Seti I., and I wish the English
+language were big enough, and I on sufficiently good terms with it to
+convey the overwhelming impression of that place. Try to conceive an
+architectural forest of the size of a city block,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> planted with
+sculptured and painted columns and filled with sunlight&mdash;the columns
+towering till they seem to touch the sky, and of such thickness that six
+men with extended arms, finger-tip to finger-tip, can barely span them
+round. The twelve mightier columns form a central avenue that simply
+dwarfs into insignificance any living thing that enters it. You suddenly
+become an insect when you stand between those columns and look up, and
+you have the feeling that you are likely to be stepped on. The rest of
+that colossal assembly stretch away on either side and are only a degree
+smaller. All are painted with the four colors of the Nile&mdash;mellow tones
+of blue, red, green and yellow, signifying high and low Nile, green
+fields and harvest&mdash;imperishable pigments as fresh and luminous under
+this sunlit sky as when they were laid there by artists who finished and
+put their brushes away more than three thousand years ago. How poor are
+mere words in the presence of this mighty reality which has outlived so
+many languages&mdash;will outlive all the puny languages that try to convey
+it now!</p>
+
+<p>Looking down the great central avenue of Seti's hall, we beheld at the
+end&mdash;standing as true to-day as when she placed it there&mdash;the graceful
+granite obelisk of Queen Hatasu.</p>
+
+<p>"Set up in honor of father Amen," she relates in her inscription on the
+base. She adds that she covered the tip with copper that it might be
+seen at a great distance, and tells how the monolith and its mate (now
+lying broken near it) were hewn from the Assuan quarries and brought
+down the Nile to Thebes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> I may say here that we did not read these
+inscriptions ourselves. We could do it, of course, if we had time, but
+Gaddis, who is at least five thousand years old, inside, is better at it
+than we could be in a brief period like that, so we depend on him a good
+deal. Gaddis can read anything. A bird without a head, followed by a
+pair of legs walking, a row of sawteeth, a picked chicken, a gum-drop
+and a comb, all done in careful outline, mean "Homage to the Horus of
+the two horizons" to Gaddis, though I have been unable as yet to see
+why.</p>
+
+<p>We went into the Hall, or Temple, of Khonsu, the moon-god, and here was
+a breath-taking collection of papyrus columns, short, thick, built to
+stand through the ages on the uncertain foundation of this alluvial
+plain. We passed into a sanctuary where the priests of Amen prepared the
+sacrifice, and Gaddis read the story on the walls, and pointed out for
+the twentieth time, perhaps, Horus, the hawk-headed god, and Hapi, his
+son, who has a dog head and can hardly be called handsome; also Anubis,
+the jackal-headed god of the Under World. We came to a temple with a
+wall upon which Seti recorded his victories over the forces of Syria,
+and pictured himself in the act of destroying an army single handed by
+gathering their long hair into a single twist preparatory to smiting off
+this combined multitude of heads at a blow. We follow Gaddis through
+long tumbling avenues and corridors of decorated walls; we climbed over
+fallen columns that prostrate were twice as high as our heads; we
+studied the records which those old kings, in ages when all the rest of
+the world was myth and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> fable set up to preserve the story of their
+deeds. And remember, all these columns and walls were not only
+completely covered with figures carved in relief, but tinted in those
+unfading colors, subdued, harmonious, and more beautiful than I can
+tell.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_044" id="ILL_044"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_044.jpg" width="500" height="311" alt="I MADE A PICTURE OF THE FLY-BRUSH BRIGADE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">I MADE A PICTURE OF THE FLY-BRUSH BRIGADE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>How little and how feebly I seem to be writing about this stupendous
+ruin, yet I must conclude presently for lack of room. We went into the
+Ramesseum, a temple literally lined with heroic statues of Rameses,
+where I made a picture of the fly-brush brigade, as we call ourselves
+now, because in Upper Egypt a fly-brush is absolutely necessary not
+alone to comfort, but to very existence. The fly here is not the
+ordinary house variety, fairly coy and flirtatious if one has a
+newspaper or other impromptu weapon, retiring now and again to a safe
+place for contemplation; no, the Egyptian fly is different. He never
+retires and he is not in the least coy. He makes for you in a cloud, and
+it is only by continuous industry that you can beat him off at all.
+Furthermore, he begins business the instant he touches, and he has
+continuously the gift which our fly sometimes has on a sultry, muggy
+day&mdash;the art of sticking with his feet, which drives you frantic. So you
+buy a fly-brush the instant you land in Upper Egypt, and you keep it
+going constantly from dawn to dark. The flies retire then, for needed
+rest.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_045" id="ILL_045"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_045.jpg" width="500" height="290" alt="ITS MAGNIFICENT PYLONS OR ENTRANCE WALLS ... AND THEN
+ONCE MORE WE WERE ON THE DONKEYS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ITS MAGNIFICENT PYLONS OR ENTRANCE WALLS ... AND THEN
+ONCE MORE WE WERE ON THE DONKEYS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We passed through another avenue of ram-headed sphinxes (some of the
+heads were gone) which Rameses built, and stood outside of the great
+temple of Amen, once called the "Throne of the World." Its magnificent
+pylons, or entrance walls, are one hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> and fifty feet high and
+three hundred broad. We ascended one of these for a general view of the
+vast field of ruin.</p>
+
+<p>Piled and tumbled and flung about lay the mighty efforts of a mighty
+race. At one place excavating was still going on, and a regiment of
+little boys were running back and forth with baskets of dirt on their
+heads, singing and sweating in the blazing sun, earning as much as two
+piastres (ten cents) a day. Men were working, too; they receive quite
+fancy sums&mdash;twenty cents a day, some of them.</p>
+
+<p>Now that we were outside of the shaded temple and sanctuary enclosures
+our party was not very game. It was our first day in Upper Egypt, and
+the flies and the sun made a pretty deadly combination. We began to
+complain, and to long for the cool corridors and fizzy drinks and
+protecting screens of the hotel. We might have played golf or tennis in
+that sun, but seeing ruins was different, and we began to pray for the
+donkeys again. So Gaddis led us around by the Sacred Lake, where once
+the splendid ceremonials were performed&mdash;it is only a shallow pool
+now&mdash;and then once more we were on the donkeys, strung out in a crazy,
+shrieking stampede for the hotel. Gaddis rode near me. His donkey was a
+racer, too, but Gaddis did not laugh or cry out, or anything of the
+sort. He only wore that gentle serene smile, the smile of Egypt,
+observing trivial things.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="ILL_046" id="ILL_046"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_046.jpg" width="500" height="293" alt="THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR ... ONCE MORE REFLECTING ITS COLUMNS
+IN THE NILE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR ... ONCE MORE REFLECTING ITS COLUMNS
+IN THE NILE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the afternoon we visited the Temple of Luxor, that beautiful
+structure which Amenophis III. built<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> on the banks of the Nile. Luxor is
+Karnak on a smaller scale, though big enough in all conscience, and it
+is not all excavated yet. D&eacute;bris had covered this temple to the very
+top, and it is not so long ago that a village was built on a level with
+the capitals of these columns. When M. Maspero, in 1883, began his work
+of excavation, the natives naturally protested against the uncovering of
+the "heathen" ruins at the expense of their mud huts. The work went on,
+however, and to-day a large part of the magnificent architecture stands
+revealed, once more reflecting its columns in the Nile.</p>
+
+<p>There is still a quantity of d&eacute;bris to be removed. One end of the Temple
+is full of it, and may remain so a good while. On top of this mass, some
+five hundred years ago, a Mohammedan mosque was built by the descendants
+of a saint named Abu Haggag, and sufficient of his family are left to
+this day to hold that mosque intact against all would-be excavators.
+However, the mosque itself begins to look pretty old. If the diggers
+keep encroaching, it may slide off into the Temple some day, saints and
+all.</p>
+
+<p>Luxor, as a whole, is better preserved than Karnak. I suppose the
+heaped-up d&eacute;bris kept the columns in position during the last ten or a
+dozen centuries. I wish it had been there when the early Christian came
+along. Cambyses of Persia, who burned everything that would burn in
+Egypt, about 527 <span class="smcap">b.c</span>., blackened the walls of this temple with fire, the
+marks of which show to this day, but he was nothing to the followers of
+Queen Helena. Even the guide-book, which is likely to be conservative in
+any comment that may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> touch upon the faith of its readers, says
+concerning the followers of Helena: "Not content with turning certain
+sections of it into churches, the more fanatical among them smashed
+statues, and disfigured bas-reliefs and wrecked shrines with
+characteristic savage and ignorant zeal."<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p>There ought to be a painting or a marble group somewhere entitled "Early
+Christian at Work"&mdash;a lean-faced, stringy-haired maniac with sledge,
+murdering a symbolized figure of Defenceless Art in the Far East. The
+early Christian is said to have destroyed forty-five thousand statues in
+Thebes in one day.</p>
+
+<p>Still, those statues may not matter so much&mdash;they were probably all of
+Rameses the Great, and there are enough of him left. The Luxor Temple
+had them in all sizes, and of all materials, from granite to alabaster.
+Also some of "Mrs. Rameses," as Gaddis called her&mdash;no particular Mrs.
+Rameses&mdash;there having been several of her; just a sort of generic type
+of connubial happiness, I suppose. Mrs. Rameses, by the way, does not
+cut much figure in the statuary. She usually comes only about to the
+knee of the King, though she is life-size even then, for his own statues
+are colossal, ranging anywhere from fifteen to fifty feet high. That was
+to represent their difference in importance, of course, an idea which
+the women members of our party seemed to disapprove.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>One of the statues of Rameses was found in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> curious manner. A guide
+only a little while ago was lecturing to a party of tourists, while a
+young lady not far away was sketching a corner of the ruin. The sketcher
+stopped to listen to the guide's talk, and when he had finished said to
+the boy who was keeping the flies from her:</p>
+
+<p>"Go up on that heap of rubbish and see what that stone is."</p>
+
+<p>It was the rubbish that slopes down from the old mosque. The boy climbed
+up, pulled away the trash, and uncovered the head of one of the most
+perfect Rameseses yet discovered.</p>
+
+<p>Originally the Temple of Luxor was five hundred feet long, one hundred
+and eighty feet wide, and, as before mentioned, was connected with
+Karnak by a double row of ram-headed sphinxes. Amenophis III. built it
+about 1500 <span class="smcap">b.c</span>., and it was regarded as the most beautiful of Egyptian
+temples. Then came his son, Amenophis IV., who, being a sun-worshipper
+after the manner of his Mesopotamian mother, cut away the name of the
+Egyptian god Amen and set up a new worship here. It was a brief
+innovation. The priests made it too hot for the Heretic King. He gave up
+the struggle after a time, went into the desert farther down the Nile,
+and built there a city and temples of his own. Then this temple was
+sacred to the old religion again. It remained so until Alexander came,
+cut his name here and there, and probably worshipped his own assortment
+of gods. Later came the Roman and the early Christian; still later the
+Mohammedan established ceremonies and reconstructed shrines.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We had all the old sacrifices and processions and gods and victories
+over again in Luxor, including the picture story of the birth of
+Amenophis III., which depicts an immaculate conception; an annunciation;
+a visitation of wise men with gifts, executed about 1500 <span class="smcap">b.c</span>.</p>
+
+<p>After which we returned to the hotel; but when the sun was low in the
+west beyond the Nile and the air was getting balmy, I slipped back and
+sat in the old Temple in the quiet, and thought of a number of things.
+Then as the sun slipped below the verge, a figure stepped out on the
+minaret just over my head and began that weird thrilling chant which
+once heard will remain forever unforgotten, the cry of the East&mdash;"Allah
+il Allah," the Muezzin's call to prayer.</p>
+
+<p>So it is still a place of worship. The voice of faith has reached down
+thirty-four centuries, and whatever the form, or the prophet, or the
+priest, it is all embodied there at evening and at morning in the cry,
+"There is no God but God."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLI" id="XLI"></a>XLI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE STILL VALLEY OF THE KINGS</h3>
+
+<p>It was early next morning when we crossed the Nile to the rhythm of a
+weird chorus which the boatmen sang to the beat of the oars. It is
+probably older than these temples, and the boatmen themselves do not
+know the meaning of the words, Gaddis said. One intones and the others
+answer, and it is in minor keys with a dying fall at the end, except now
+and then when a curious lifting note drops in, like a flash of light on
+the oars. Bound for the Valley of the Kings, the House of Hatasu, and
+the Colossi of Memnon, it seemed a fitting overture.</p>
+
+<p>The donkeys were waiting on the other bank&mdash;the same we had used
+yesterday, fat and fresh as ever, and the same boys were there calling
+and gesticulating to their special charges of the day before. There are
+always a few more donkey-boys than is necessary, it seems, all of them
+wildly eager for the privilege of racing all day in the perishing sun,
+urging the donkeys and yelling for baksheesh at every jump&mdash;not that
+they expect to get it until the end of the day, but as a traditional
+part of the performance. The donkey-boy gets nothing, we are told, but
+what one is pleased to give him&mdash;the donkey hire going to the Sheik, who
+owns the donkeys and lets the boys get what they can. I would write a
+good deal about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> those half-naked, half-savage, tireless donkey-boys if
+permitted. They and their brothers, and their cousins even to the fourth
+remove, who come in like a charging army in the wild baksheesh skirmish
+at the end, interest me.</p>
+
+<p>Mounted, we led away in the usual stampede along canals and by lush
+green fields, across the fertile strip that borders the Nile. The green
+is rather wide here&mdash;as much as a mile, I should think, and it was
+pleasant going through the still morning if one kept well forward in the
+procession&mdash;in front of the dust that rose mightily behind us. Every
+little way where we slackened speed, detachments of sellers would charge
+from the roadside with trinkets, imitation scarabs, and images, but more
+notably with fragments (and these were genuine enough) of what long
+ago&mdash;as much as three or four thousand years, perhaps&mdash;had been human
+beings like ourselves. Remnants of mummies they were, quarried out of
+the barren hills where lie not only the kings but the millions who in
+the glory of Egypt lived and died in Thebes. The hills are full of them,
+Gaddis said, and unearthing them has become an industry.</p>
+
+<p>It was rather grewsome at first to be offered such things&mdash;to have a
+head, or a hand, or a foot thrust up under your eyes, and with it an
+outstretched palm for payment. The prices demanded were not very high,
+and the owners, the present owners, would take less&mdash;a good deal less
+than the first quotation. A physician in our party bought a head&mdash;hard
+and black as old mahogany, with some bits of gold-leaf still sticking to
+it&mdash;for five francs, and I was offered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> a baby's hand (it had been soft
+and dimpled once&mdash;it was dark and withered now) for a shilling.</p>
+
+<p>We crossed the line which "divides the desert from the sown"&mdash;a sharp,
+perfectly distinguishable line in Egypt&mdash;and were in the sand, the sun
+getting high and blazing down, fairly drenching us with its flame. We
+thought it would be better when we entered the hills, but that was a
+mistake. It was worse, for there was not a particle of growing shade,
+not a blade of any green thing, and there seemed no breath of life in
+that stirless air.</p>
+
+<p>Remember it never rains here; these hills have never known water since
+the Flood, but have been baking in this vast kiln for a million years.
+You will realize that it must be hot, then, but you will never know how
+hot until you go there. Here and there a rock leaned over a little and
+made a skimpy blue shadow, which we sidled into as we passed for a
+blessed instant of relief. We understood now the fuller meaning of that
+Bible phrase, "As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." This was
+a weary land with shadows far between. Now and then those astonishing
+donkeys broke into a gallop and stirred up a little scorching wind, the
+unflagging boys capering and shouting behind.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed an endless way, up into these calcined hills to the
+Burial-place of Kings, but by-and-by there were traces of ruins and
+excavation, and we heard the throb of a dynamo on the quivering air. We
+dismounted then, and Gaddis led us up a burning little steep to what at
+first seemed a great tunnel into the mountain-side. How deep and cool
+and inviting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> it looked up there; we would go in, certainly. Was it
+really a tomb? No wonder those old kings looked forward to such a place.</p>
+
+<p>It was merely an entrance to a tomb&mdash;a tunnel, truly, and of such size
+that I believe two railway trains could enter it side by side and two
+more on top of them! I think most of us had the idea&mdash;I know I did&mdash;that
+we would go down ladders into these tombs, and that they would be
+earthy, cheerless places, more interesting than attractive.</p>
+
+<p>They are the most beautiful places I ever saw. The entrances&mdash;vast, as I
+have stated&mdash;go directly in from the hillside; the rock floors are dry
+and clean, while the side-walls and the ceilings are simply a mass of
+such carving and color as the world nowhere else contains. An electric
+dynamo set up in a tomb that was never finished (that of Rameses XII., I
+believe) supplies illumination for these homes of the kingly dead, and
+as you follow deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain your
+wonder grows at the inconceivable artistic effort and constructive labor
+that have been expended on those walls. Deeper, and still deeper, along
+a gradual decline that seems a veritable passage to the underworld. Here
+and there, at the side, are antechambers or avenues that lead away&mdash;we
+wonder whither.</p>
+
+<p>Now and again Gaddis paused to explain the marvellous story of the
+walls&mdash;the progress of the King to the underworld&mdash;his reception there,
+his triumphs, his life in general in that long valley of spirits which
+ran parallel with Egypt and was neither above nor below the level of the
+earth. It was this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> form and idea of the underworld that the shape of
+these tombs was intended to express, while their walls illustrate the
+happy future life of the King. Chapters from the "Book of the
+Underworld" (a sort of descriptive geography of the country) and from
+the "Book of the Dead" (a manual of general instruction as to customs
+and deportment in the new life) cover vast spaces. Here and there a
+design was not entirely worked out, but the sketch was traced in
+outline, which would indicate that perhaps the King died before his tomb
+(always a life-work) was complete.</p>
+
+<p>Now, realize: This gorgeous passage was nearly five hundred feet long,
+cut into the living rock, and opened into a vast pillared and vaulted
+chamber fully sixty feet long by forty wide and thirty high&mdash;the whole
+covered with splendid decorations that the dry air and protection have
+preserved as fresh and beautiful as the day they were finished so many
+centuries ago. This was the royal chamber, empty now, where in silent
+state King Seti I. once lay. We are a frivolous crowd, but we were awed
+into low-voiced wonder at the magnitude of this work, the mightiness of
+a people who could provide so overwhelmingly for their dead.</p>
+
+<p>I do not remember how many such tombs we visited, but they were a good
+many, including those of Rameses I. and II., the father and the mighty
+son of Seti I., all three of whom now sleep in the Cairo Museum. Also
+the tomb of Rameses IX., one of the finest of the lot.</p>
+
+<p>In some of the tombs the sarcophagi were still in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> place, but all are
+empty of occupants except one. This was the splendid tomb of Amenophis
+II., of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who lived in the glory of Egypt, 1600
+<span class="smcap">b.c</span>., a warrior who slew seven Syrian chiefs with his own hand. Gaddis
+had not told us what to expect in that tomb, and when we had followed
+through the long declining way to the royal chamber and beheld there,
+not an empty sarcophagus but a king asleep, we were struck to silence
+with that three thousand five hundred years of visible rest.</p>
+
+<p>The top of the sarcophagus is removed, and is replaced by heavy plate
+glass. Just over the sleeper's face there is a tiny electric globe, and
+I believe one could never tire of standing there and looking at that
+quiet visage, darkened by age, but beautiful in its dignity; unmoved,
+undisturbed by the storm and stress of the fretful years.</p>
+
+<p>How long he has been asleep! The Israelites were still in bondage when
+he fell into that quiet doze, and for their exodus, a century or two
+later, he did not care. Hector and Achilles and Paris and the rest had
+not battled on the Plains of Troy; the gods still assembled on Mt.
+Olympus; Rome was not yet dreamed. He had been asleep nigh a thousand
+years when Romulus quit nursing the she-wolf to build the walls of a
+city which would one day rule the world. The rise, the conquest, the
+decline of that vast empire he never knew. When her armies swept the
+nations of the East and landed upon his own shores he did not stir in
+his sleep. The glory of Egypt ebbed away, but he did not care. Old
+religions perished; new gods and new prophets replaced the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> gods and
+prophets he had known&mdash;it mattered not to him, here in this quiet
+underworld. Through every change he lay here in peace, just as he lies
+to-day, so still, so fine in his kingly majesty&mdash;upon his face that soft
+electric glow which seems in no wise out of place, because it has come
+as all things come at last to him who waits.</p>
+
+<p>In a sort of anteroom near the royal chamber lie the mummies of three
+adherents of the King, each with a large hole in the skull and a large
+gash in the breast&mdash;royal slaves, no doubt, sent to bear their liege
+company. I remember one of them as having very long thick curly hair&mdash;a
+handsome fellow, I suppose; a favorite who could not, or would not, be
+left behind.</p>
+
+<p>A number of other royal mummies were found in the Tomb of Amenophis II.,
+so that at some period of upheaval it must have been used as a
+hiding-place for the regal dead, as was a cave across the mountains at
+Der al-Bahari. Perhaps those who secreted them here thought that a king
+who in life had slain seven chiefs with his own hand would make a potent
+guard. They were not mistaken. Through all the centuries the guests of
+that still house lay undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>We paused, though briefly&mdash;for it was fairly roasting outside&mdash;at the
+excavations of our countryman, Mr. Theodore M. Davis, who has brought to
+light so many priceless relics in this place; after which we bought an
+entire stock of oranges from an Arab who suddenly appeared from nowhere,
+sucked them ravenously, and set out, leading our donkeys up a broiling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>
+precipitous path over the mountains, for the house of Queen Hatasu,
+which lies at the base of the cliffs on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>It was not very far, I suppose, but it was strenuous and seemed miles.
+We were rewarded, however, when we reached the plateau of the mountain
+top. From the brink of the great cliff we could look out over the whole
+plain of Thebes, its villages and its ruins, its green cultivation and
+its blazing sands. Once it was a vast city&mdash;"the city of a hundred gates
+and twenty thousand chariots of war." Through its centre flowed the
+Nile, a very fountain of life, its one outlet to the world. To the east
+and the west lay Nature's surest fortifications, the dead hills and the
+encompassing sands. It is estimated that the city of Paris could stand
+on this level sweep and that Thebes overspread it all. As at Ephesus, we
+tried to re-create that vanished city, but we did not try long, for the
+mid-day sun was too frying hot.</p>
+
+<p>So we descended to the rest-house of Der al-Bahari, where we created a
+famine in everything resembling refreshments, liquid or otherwise, in
+that wayside shelter. Then out on the piazza we swung our fly-brushes,
+beat off the sellers of things, and tried to assimilate our half-baked
+knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>We were in a mixed state of temples and tombs and dynasties and
+localities&mdash;of sacrificial processions, and gods of the "Underworld."
+The sun had got into our heads, too, and some of the refreshments had
+been of strange color and curious brands. It is no wonder that we
+drifted into deliriums of verse. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> have forgotten who had the first
+seizure, but from internal evidence it was probably Fosdick&mdash;Fosdick of
+Ohio. This is it:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">Queen Hatasu, of Timbuctoo,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">She lived a busy life;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">She fell in love with King Khufu,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">And she became his wife.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">She put him in a pyramid&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">He put her in another,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">And now four thousand years have gone</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">You can't tell one from tother.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I do remember how we tried to reason with the author; how we explained
+to him carefully that Hatasu, who was also called Hatshepset and certain
+other names, did not hail from Timbuctoo; also that King Khufu, alias
+Cheops, had been in his pyramid at least two thousand years, with
+fourteen dynasties on top of him, when that lady of the Nile was born.
+It was no use; he turned a glazed eye on us and said all periods looked
+alike to him, that art was long and life fleeting, that a trifle of two
+thousand years was as a few grains on the Egyptian sands of time. We
+saw, then, he was hopeless, but later he improved and seemed sorry. It
+did not matter; another member of the party had been taken with the
+poetic madness, and we gave room for his attack. It was of milder form,
+and mercifully short:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">King Rameses, he strove to please,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">And put his foes to flight;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">To celebrate his victories</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 24em;">He toiled both day and night.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">He filled full threescore temples with</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">His statues vast and grim,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">And some of Mrs. Rameses</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">Who wa'n't knee-high to him.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I don't know why a malady of this sort should fall upon our party. Such
+things never happened on the ship, but then Egypt is different, as I
+have said. There was one more outbreak before we got the germ destroyed:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">Behold the halls of Seti I.,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">And also Seti II.;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">Likewise of old Amenhetep</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">And haughty Hatasu.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">They lived in state, their days were great</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">And glided gayly by;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">Sometimes they used to rail at fate,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">The same as you and I.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">Oh, Seti I., your race is run,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">And also Seti II.,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 23em;">And lizards sleep where ages creep</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;">In the house of Hatasu.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It was time to check the tendency; it was getting serious.</p>
+
+<p>We went up to the "House of Hatasu"&mdash;all that is left of it&mdash;a beautiful
+fragment of what was built by the great Queen as her Holy of Holies. It
+is unlike other temples we have seen, with its square columns; its
+beautiful open portico; its fine ceiling, still perfect in workmanship
+and coloring. Queen Hatasu had ideas of her own about building; also,
+her own architect. His name was Senmut, and his tomb, a mile from the
+temple, commands a view of it to this day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Hatasu once made a notable expedition to the lower east coast of
+Africa&mdash;to Punt, as it was called then, and she has recorded it on these
+walls. It shows the natives bringing valuable presents&mdash;woods, spices,
+gold, and the like&mdash;in exchange for glass beads and tin whistles, after
+the customary manner of such barter. A part of the relief shows the
+Prince of Punt and "Mrs. Punt," whose figure was certainly remarkable,
+followed by their family, all with hands raised in deference to the
+Egyptian Queen.</p>
+
+<p>It was near here, in 1881, that the cave or pit was found containing the
+mummies of many kings, including Seti I., Rameses II., and others who
+had been stored here for safety. Arabs had been selling royal scarabs
+for some time, and the arch&aelig;ologists finally discovered the secret of
+their supply. It was a priceless find, and with the treasures of the
+tomb of Amenophis II., made the museum of Cairo the richest
+arch&aelig;ological depository in the world.</p>
+
+<p>We put in the afternoon visiting temples, mostly of Rameses the Great,
+and looking at statues which he had caused to be erected of himself
+wherever there was room. I remember one colossal granite figure of that
+self-sufficient king, lying prostrate on the sand now, estimated to
+weigh a thousand tons&mdash;which is to say two million pounds. That statue
+was sixty feet high when it stood upright, and it is cut like a gem. It
+was brought down from Assuan in one piece, by barge, as was the enormous
+granite base, which is thirty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and eight
+feet thick.</p>
+
+<p>I remember, too, some sun-dried brick&mdash;brick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> made by the Israelites,
+maybe&mdash;with the imprint of Rameses still on them, uneffaced after
+thirty-three centuries. The sun bakes hard in Egypt; no other kiln is
+needed. I remember a temple of Rameses III. and a pictorial record of
+one of his victories. His soldiers had reported a killing of twelve
+thousand of the enemy; he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Go bring the evidence. If you have those dead men anywhere you can
+bring something to prove it."</p>
+
+<p>So the army returned and got the right hands of their victims. The story
+is all cut there on the walls, and the hands are there too.</p>
+
+<p>Rameses III. knew the custom inaugurated by his ancestor "The Great," of
+eliminating old names with new ones, and he took measures accordingly by
+cutting his own inscriptions deep. Some of them sink ten inches into the
+walls and will stay there a good while.</p>
+
+<p>I had noticed one curious thing along the outer walls of all these old
+temples, to wit: row after row of smooth egg-shaped holes, ranging
+irregularly, one above the other, from the base upward&mdash;sometimes to the
+very top. It was as if they had been dug out by some animal or insect. I
+asked Gaddis, at last, what they were, and he told me this curious
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>The childless Arab woman, he said, for ages had believed that some magic
+in these walls could make them fruitful, so had come and rubbed
+patiently with their fingers until they worked a few grains of the
+sandstone into a cup of water, which they drank with a prayer of hope.
+They had begun, he said, in that far-off time when the temples stood as
+clear of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> rubbish as they do to-day; and, as the years heaped up the
+d&eacute;bris, these anxious women had rubbed higher and higher up the walls
+until, with the drift of the ages, they had reached the very top. So
+there the record stands to-day, and when one realizes how little of that
+stone can be rubbed away with the finger-end; how comparatively few must
+have been the childless mothers, and then sees how innumerable and deep
+those holes are, he gets a sudden and comprehensive grasp of the vast
+stretch of time these walls stood tenantless, vanishing, and unregarded,
+save by those generations of barren women.</p>
+
+<p>We raced away for the Colossi of Memnon, where, I fear, we did not
+linger as long as was proper. It was growing late&mdash;we were very tired
+and were overfull of undigested story and tangled chronology. Also the
+scarab men and flies were especially bad just there. We were willing to
+take a bare look at that majestic pair who have watched the sun rise
+morning after morning while a great city vanished away from around them,
+and then go steaming away across the sands for the Nile and the cool
+rest of the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>Such a time as we had settling with those donkey-boys&mdash;the old
+white-turbaned sheik, owner of the donkeys, squatting and smoking
+indifferently while the storm raged about him. But it was over at last,
+and the boatmen sang again&mdash;a quiet afterlude of that extraordinary
+day&mdash;and collected baksheesh on the farther shore.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLII" id="XLII"></a>XLII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HIGHWAY OF EGYPT</h3>
+
+<p>There could hardly be a daintier boat than the <i>Memnon</i>. It just holds
+our party; it is as clean and speckless as possible, and there is an
+open deck the full width of the tiny steamer, with pretty rugs and lazy
+chairs, where we may lounge and drowse and dream and look out on the
+gently passing panorama of the Nile.</p>
+
+<p>For we have left Luxor, and are floating in this peaceful fashion down
+to Cairo, resting in the delight of it, after those fierce
+temple-hunting, tomb-visiting days. Not that we are entirely through
+with temples and the like. Here and there we tie up to the bank, and go
+ashore and scamper away on donkeys to some tumbled ruin, but it is a
+diversion now, not a business, and we find such stops welcome. For the
+most part we spend our days just idling, and submitting to the spell of
+Egypt, which has encompassed us and possessed us as it will encompass
+and possess any one who has a trace of the old human tendency to drift
+and dream.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said of Boston that it is less a locality than a state of
+mind. I wish <i>I</i> had said that&mdash;of Egypt. I will say it now, and without
+humor, for of this land it is so eminently true. A mere river-bank; a
+filament of green; a long slender lotus-stem,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> of which the Delta is the
+flower&mdash;<i>that</i> is Egypt. Remote&mdash;shut in by the desert and the dead
+hills&mdash;it is far less a country and a habitation than a psychological
+condition which all the mummied ages have been preparing&mdash;which the
+traveller from the earliest moment is bound to feel. It has lived so
+long! It had made and recorded its history when the rest of the world
+was dealing in nursery-tales! The glamour of that stately past has
+become the spell, the enchantment of to-day. The magic of the lotus
+grows more potent with the years.</p>
+
+<p>It is such a narrow land! Sometimes the lifeless hills close in on one
+side or the other to the water's edge. Nowhere is the fertile strip
+wide, for its fertility depends wholly on the water it receives from the
+Nile, and when that water is drawn up by hand with a goat-skin pail and
+a well-sweep&mdash;a <i>shaduf</i>, as they call it&mdash;it means that fields cannot
+be very extensive, even if there were room, which as a rule there is
+not.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 330px;"><a name="ILL_047" id="ILL_047"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_047.jpg" width="330" height="500" alt="THINK OF WATERING A WHOLE WHEAT-FIELD WITH A WELL-SWEEP
+AND A PAIL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THINK OF WATERING A WHOLE WHEAT-FIELD WITH A WELL-SWEEP
+AND A PAIL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Think of watering a whole wheat-field with a well-sweep and a pail!
+Furthermore, where the banks are high the water is sometimes lifted
+three times between the Nile and the surface, and much of it is wasted
+in transit. It is the oldest form of irrigation; the hieroglyphics show
+that it was in use in Egypt five thousand years ago. It is also still
+the most popular form in Upper Egypt. We saw a good many of the
+<i>sakkieh</i>&mdash;primitive and wasteful water-wheels propelled by a buffalo or
+a camel or a cow&mdash;and at rare intervals a windmill, where some
+Englishman has established a plantation, but it is the <i>shaduf</i> that
+largely predominates.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The mud villages among the date-palms are unfailingly picturesque; the
+sail-boats of the Nile&mdash;<i>markab</i> they call them&mdash;drifting down upon us
+like great butterflies, have a charm not to be put in words; the life
+along the shores never loses its interest; the sun sets and the sun
+rises round the dreamy days with a marvel of color that seems each time
+more wonderful. Then there is the moonlight. But I must not speak of
+Egyptian moonlight or I shall lose my sense of proportion altogether,
+for it is like no other light that ever lay on sea or land.</p>
+
+<p>We do not travel through the night, but anchor at dusk until daybreak.
+It is curious to reflect that one sees the entire country on a trip like
+this, if he rises early. We do rise early, most of us&mdash;though the cool
+nights (nights are always cool in Egypt) and the stillness are an
+inducement to sleep&mdash;and we are usually very hungry before breakfast
+comes along. One may have coffee on the deck if he likes&mdash;the
+picturesque Arab will bring it joyfully, especially where there is a
+baksheesh at the end. It is good coffee, too, and the food is good;
+everything is good on the <i>Memnon</i> except the beverages and the cigars.
+The wine could be improved and the cigars could be thrown away. I paid a
+shilling for one that was as hard as a stick and crumbled to dust when I
+bit it. Never mind the flavor. That brand was called "The Scarab." It
+should have been named "The Mummy"&mdash;it had all the characteristics.</p>
+
+<p>The pilot commands this boat&mdash;the captain merely conducts the excursion.
+The captain wears European dress and speaks English, but the pilot is
+Arab<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> throughout&mdash;dark-faced, heavily turbaned, silent&mdash;watching the
+water like a sphinx. Now and then he makes a motion and says a word to
+the steersman at his side. Whenever we lie up or strike safe water he
+locates Mecca, prostrates himself, and prays. I should think his
+emotions would be conflicting at times. Doctrinally, of course, it is
+his duty to pray for the boat to sink and exterminate this crowd.
+Professionally, it is his duty to take us safely to Cairo. Poor old
+Abbas! how are you going to explain to the prophet by-and-by?</p>
+
+<p>We may not reach Cairo, however. The Nile is shallow at this season, and
+already we have scraped the sand more than once. It is a curious
+river&mdash;full of currents and shifting sand&mdash;the water getting scantier as
+you descend. That seemed strange to us until we realize that its entire
+flow comes from the far interior; that it has no feeding tributaries,
+while the steady evaporation, the irrigation, and the absorption of
+these burning sands constitute a heavy drain. It is hard to grasp a
+condition like that, or what this river means&mdash;has always meant&mdash;to the
+dwellers along its shores. Not alone an artery of life, it is life
+itself&mdash;water, food, clothing, cleanliness.</p>
+
+<p>They don't take as much advantage of that last blessing as they
+should&mdash;nor of the next to the last. It is true that most of them have
+some semblance of clothing, but not all of them. In this interior Nile,
+as we may call the district between Luxor and Cairo, early principles to
+some extent still prevail. At first we saw boys&mdash;donkey-boys and the
+like&mdash;without any perceivable clothing, and more lately we have seen
+men&mdash;brown-skinned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> muscular creatures loading boats&mdash;utterly destitute
+of wardrobe. Yet, somehow, these things did not shock us&mdash;not greatly.
+They seemed to go with the sun, and the dead blue sky and the other
+scenery. A good deal depends on surroundings.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Our stops were not all brief. We put in a full day at Abydos, where
+there is a splendid temple built by Seti I., and Rameses the Great (of
+course), and where the donkeys are as poor as they are good in Luxor.
+Not that they were wretched in appearance, or ill-cared for, but they
+were a stiff-necked, unwilling breed. Mine had a way of stopping
+suddenly and facing about toward home. Twice I went over his head during
+these man&oelig;uvres, which the others thought entertaining.</p>
+
+<p>But they had their troubles, too. The distance to the temple was
+long&mdash;eight miles, I should think&mdash;and part of the way the road was an
+embankment several feet high. Some of the donkeys seemed to think it
+amusing to suddenly decide to go down this embankment and make off over
+the desert. We were a scattering, disordered cavalcade, and what with
+the flies and distracting donkey-boys who were perpetually at one's side
+with "Mister, good donkey&mdash;fine donkey&mdash;baksheesh, mister," the trip was
+a memorable one. Once when my donkey, whose name was "Straight Flush"
+and should have been "Two-spot" got behind the party, I caught my
+attendant, not only twisting his tail, but biting it.</p>
+
+<p>It was a good excursion, on the whole. We had luncheon in the great hall
+of the temple, and I could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> not help wondering who had held the first
+feast in that mighty place where we were holding the last, to date.</p>
+
+<p>We feel at home now in a temple, especially when we see the relief of
+our faithful Rameses, and of Osiris, king of the underworld, and his
+kind. We have become familiar and even disrespectful toward these great
+guardians of the past. This makes it hard on Gaddis at times; especially
+after luncheon, when we are in a sportive mood.</p>
+
+<p>"Zis is ze temple of Rameses ze Great"&mdash;he begins.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, so it is&mdash;we suspected it all along."</p>
+
+<p>"Here you will see hees seventy-two son&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure enough&mdash;our old friends."</p>
+
+<p>"And hees fourteen wive."</p>
+
+<p>"Happy man, but why a king and so few?"</p>
+
+<p>"An' here all zose seventy-two son carry gift to Osiris&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"King of the underworld&mdash;so they do, we would recognize that gang
+anywhere."</p>
+
+<p>Truly, it is time we were giving up temples; we are no longer serious.
+But in this temple of Seti I., at Abydos, we sometimes forgot to jest.
+Frivolous and riotous as we have become, we were silent in the presence
+of one splendid decoration of Seti offering sacrifice before the sacred
+boat, and again where we confronted in a corridor that precious and
+beautiful relief carving, the Tablet of Egypt's Kings. The cartouche of
+every king down to Seti I. is there&mdash;with one exception: the name of
+Amenophis IV., the king who abandoned his faith and worshipped his
+mother's gods, has no place in that royal company.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> Otherwise the story
+is as complete as it is impressive, and I recognized something of what
+that document means to those of Egypt who know (like Gaddis), when I put
+out a finger to touch the exquisite work and he whispered, "No, please."</p>
+
+<p>What record will there be of our history thirty-five centuries from now?
+Not a book of all those printed to-day will last any considerable
+fraction of that period. A tablet like this sets one to wondering if we
+should not get an appropriation to preserve at least the skeleton of our
+chronology on plates of bronze to be stored in some deep vault safe from
+the ravages of fire and flood and earthquake.</p>
+
+<p>We also stopped at Assuit, or Asyut, or Suit&mdash;I like these Egyptian
+names&mdash;you can spell them any way you please. Every one of them has all
+the spellings you can think of; you could not invent a new one if you
+tried. It is at Assuit they make the spangled shawls, and the natives
+flock down to the boat-landing to sell them. Gaddis had probably
+telegraphed ahead that a floating asylum of Americans was on the way and
+they had assembled accordingly. Long before we were in trading distance
+they began to dance about and gesticulate&mdash;the sheen of their fabrics
+blazing in the sun&mdash;crying the prices which they did not expect to get.</p>
+
+<p>Some of our ladies were quite eager, and began to make offers when we
+were still many yards from shore. I suppose they thought the supply was
+limited. By the time we touched the landing the wildest trading was
+already going on. Shawls rolled in a ball were being flung aboard for
+examination,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> and flung back wildly with preposterous under-bids, only
+to come hurtling back again with a fierce protest of refusal. For a time
+it was a regular game of snowball and fireworks. There were canes to
+sell, too, and fly-whips&mdash;beautiful ivory-handled things. Commerce
+swelled to high tide. In the midst of the mel&eacute;e somebody happened to
+notice, what we had not seen before, another steamer lying a little way
+ahead&mdash;an English party, we were told&mdash;the ladies and gentlemen quietly
+reading or pityingly regarding our exhibition. I know, now, that the
+English have no sense of humor. Another American boat would have been in
+spasms of delight at our antics. Also, the Englishman's Egypt is not as
+ours, and he does not enjoy it as much. How could he, without loading
+up, as we did, with those wonderful Assuit shawls?</p>
+
+<p>Only one more stop along the Nile will I record. This was at Tell
+al-Amarna, where, in the desert a little beyond the green, lies all that
+is left of the city built by the heretic king, Amenophis IV., who
+abandoned Amen-Ra for the sun-worship of his Mesopotamia mother, Queen
+Thi.</p>
+
+<p>It was a splendid granite city once, but it is all gone now. Only a
+little of the floor of the palace is left, Queen Thi's apartment, Gaddis
+said, but it held for us a curious interest. For it is painted, or
+perhaps enamelled, in colors, and the decorations, still in a good state
+of preservation, are not Egyptian in design, but Syrian or Persian! The
+Princess who had left her land to marry an Egyptian king could not
+forsake her gods and her traditions, and that old floor remains to-day
+after thirty-five<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> centuries to tell the story of her loyalty and her
+love.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We should have made other stops, perhaps, but we met disaster. The Nile
+was low, as I have said, and a hundred miles below Cairo we awoke one
+morning to find our boat hard and fast aground. We had, in fact,
+grounded the evening before, and Abbas and his men had been working all
+night, putting out anchors and pulling on ropes, a picturesque group, to
+the chorus "Ali sah&mdash;ali ya seni&mdash;ali hoop!" which is an appeal to the
+god of the Nile, Gaddis said, in this case unavailing. We were there to
+stay for the summer, unless we took train to Cairo, so after breakfast
+Gaddis and I went ashore with Abraham, still semi-officially attached to
+our party, and walked three miles to the nearest railway station to see
+what might be done. It was a fine walk, even though a warm one, across
+the Egyptian fields, and I saw some papyrus plant and bought a distaff
+and spindle from a man who was sitting by the road spinning after the
+fashion of the earliest race of men.</p>
+
+<p>It was Fachen that we reached, an Arab town to which tourists never
+come, and the donkeys we arranged for there, to carry our party from the
+shore landing to the station, were a nondescript lot without saddle or
+bridle&mdash;with no gear, in fact, except a remnant of rope tied around the
+neck. Then we walked back opposite the boat, another three miles, and
+sat on the bank, and sweat and waved our hands and called to those
+people, half a mile away in mid-stream, who for some reason could not
+see our signals.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was not uninteresting, though. The natives came to inspect us&mdash;an
+unusual opportunity for them&mdash;and some women came down to the Nile with
+great stone jars for water. Those jars must hold eight or ten gallons,
+and are heavy enough empty, yet those women will balance them on their
+heads and go stepping away chatting lightly, indifferent to their great
+burdens. They were barefooted and wore anklets which I wanted to buy,
+but Gaddis did not seem interested, and I could not transact a delicate
+business like that without careful interpretation.</p>
+
+<p>Our people saw us at last and came for us in a boat. Then there was a
+bustle of preparation; a loading into the markab which we had engaged to
+take us ashore; a good-bye to our pretty, unfortunate little <i>Memnon</i>; a
+drifting down to the donkey landing, and a sorry-looking procession to
+the railway.</p>
+
+<p>Our guides had difficulty settling with donkey-men, who, never having
+had tourists before, had engaged, no doubt, at their usual rates; then
+suddenly they had awakened to the idea that they were missing the chance
+of a fortune. The baksheesh we gave them must have opened their eyes.
+Probably they had never received so much at one time before. At all
+events, they came back for a new settlement, surrounded Gaddis and
+Abraham, and for a while we thought inferno had broken loose. Gaddis
+finally resorted to a stick, but Abraham, who is as big as a camel,
+first delivered an admonition, and then ran bodily upon the whole crowd
+and swept them like chaff from the platform.</p>
+
+<p>The wait at Fachen was not overlong, but it became<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> a trifle tedious
+after the novelty of the place had passed. We telegraphed Cairo of our
+coming, and Abraham entertained us with a few marvels to while away the
+time. He said that the stone used in building the pyramids had been
+brought across the Nile; that such stone was light like pumice-stone
+when quarried; that it floated across, and that the water it soaked up
+solidified and turned it into hard, heavy stone on the other side. The
+Credulous One believed this statement. He said the <i>Memnon</i> had grounded
+on a reef of crocodiles, at this season asleep, tucked up in the bed of
+the Nile. The Credulous One believed that, too. Several of the party
+did. He said that all telegrams in Egypt are sent in English, for the
+reason that the Arabic characters get tangled up in the wires. I
+believed that myself. He would have enlightened us further, only the
+train came just then.</p>
+
+<p>We had to change at Wasta, where it was night, and I shall never forget
+that fevered scene of Arab faces and flaring lamps, and heat, and
+thirst&mdash;the one hot night in Egypt&mdash;as we wandered about that Egyptian
+station waiting for the Cairo express. Suddenly we came upon another
+party of our ship-dwellers, whose boat, ahead of ours, had grounded too.
+Finding them there in that weird place was all like something in a
+fever. Then we were on the express at last, roaring away through the
+dust and dark and heat to Cairo&mdash;a flight out of Egypt so modern that
+one could imagine the gates of the dead centuries behind us rushing
+together with a bang.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLIII" id="XLIII"></a>XLIII</h2>
+
+<h3>OTHER WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN</h3>
+
+<p>The Reprobates were at Shepheard's when we returned, enjoying Egypt
+thoroughly. Shepheard's is a good place in which to enjoy Egypt. Some of
+the sights there are quite wonderful, and American refreshments are
+connected with an electric bell.</p>
+
+<p>The Reprobates had done Upper Egypt, however. They had done it in one
+day. They had left Cairo in the evening, telegraphing ahead for
+carriages to meet the train at Luxor, where they had arrived next
+morning. They had driven directly from the train to Karnak, from Karnak
+to the temple of Luxor, from Luxor to the hotel for luncheon. In the
+afternoon they had soared over to the Valley of the Kings; from the
+Kings they had dropped down on the House of Hatasu, the temples of
+Rameses and others; they had come coursing back by the Colossi of Memnon
+in time to catch the Cairo express, which landed them at Shepheard's
+about daybreak. The Reprobates had enjoyed Upper Egypt very much, though
+I could see they regretted the necessity of devoting all that time to it
+when Shepheard's still remained partially unexplored.</p>
+
+<p>I had hardly landed in my room when a call-boy from the office came up
+to say that a police-officer was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> below, asking for me. For a moment I
+wondered a little feverishly what particular thing it was he wanted me
+for. Then the boy said, "Pyramid police," which brought a gleam of
+light. "Oh, why&mdash;yes, of course&mdash;show him up!"</p>
+
+<p>And now, while we are waiting for him, I am going to record a
+circumstance which I suppose a good many readers&mdash;especially those
+familiar with the East&mdash;may find it difficult to believe. Nevertheless,
+it is authentic and provable.</p>
+
+<p>In Egypt, baksheesh is a national institution. Everybody takes it&mdash;every
+Egyptian, I mean; if I should begin by saying I had met an exception to
+this rule I could not expect any one who knows Cairo to read any
+further. This by-the-way.</p>
+
+<p>It was during our first stop in Cairo, and we had been there a day or
+two before we made our official visit to the Pyramids and Sphinx. We
+went in carriages then, attended by two guides. For some reason,
+however, our protectors left us to shift pretty much for ourselves when
+we got there, and it was a pretty poor shift. The fortune-tellers and
+scarab-sellers and donkey-men and would-be guides swarmed about us and
+overran us and would not be appeased. When we repulsed them temporarily
+they rallied and broke over us in waves, and swept us here and there,
+until we became mere human flotsam and jetsam on that tossing Egyptian
+tide.</p>
+
+<p>It was all like a curiously confused dream. Members of our party would
+suddenly turn up, and as suddenly disappear again: there would be
+moments of lull when we seemed about to collect, then, presto! without
+any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> apparent cause there would occur wild confusion and despair.</p>
+
+<p>It was no use. Laura and I wanted to go inside the Great Pyramid, and we
+did not want to climb it. It was impossible to do one, and it was about
+equally impossible not to do the other. Out of the confusion of things
+at last I remembered a young officer of the police, whom I had met
+riding home that first night on the trolley&mdash;a mere lad of nineteen or
+twenty, but a big fellow, who spoke excellent English and said he was
+Superintendent of the Pyramid Police. I decided now to see if this was
+true, and, if so, to ask his advice in our present difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>I remembered that the police station was near the trolley terminus, and
+we gradually fought our way back there. Yes, there he was, at his desk,
+a handsome Soldierly figure in a tall red fez. He rose and bowed,
+remembering us immediately.</p>
+
+<p>We would like to look about a little, I said, and to go inside the big
+Pyramid, but we preferred to be alive when we got through; also fairly
+decent as to appearance. Couldn't he pick us out a guard or two, who
+would keep the enemy in check, and see us through?</p>
+
+<p>He bowed with easy grace.</p>
+
+<p>"I will accompany you myself," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I already knew the custom of Egypt, and I began to make a hasty
+estimate of my ready money, wondering if I had sufficient for a
+baksheesh of this rank. It was by no means certain. However, there would
+be ship-dwellers about: I could borrow, perhaps.</p>
+
+<p>I decided presently that whatever the duty imposed, it was worth it.
+With that big uniformed fellow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> at our side we were immune to all that
+hungry horde of Arab vultures. We walked through unscathed. Our
+protector procured the entrance tickets for us; he selected two strong
+men to push and pull us up the long, dark, glassy-slick passage that
+leads to the sepulchre of Khufu in the very heart of the Pyramid; he
+went with us himself into that still mysterious place, explaining in
+perfect English how five or six thousand years ago the sarcophagus of
+the great king was pushed up that incline; he showed us the mortises in
+the stone where uprights were set to hold the great granite coffin when
+the laborers stopped to rest. It was a weird experience in the cool,
+quiet darkness of that mightiest of tombs with the flaring candles and
+eager sure-footed Arabs; it seemed to belong in Rider Haggard's story of
+<i>She</i>. Then, after we had seen the old black sarcophagus, which is empty
+now, and had remained a little in that removed place, trying to imagine
+that we were really in the very centre of the big Pyramid, we made our
+way out again to light and the burning desert heat. I settled with our
+Arabs with little or no difficulty, which is worth something in itself,
+and when we had found a quiet place I thanked our guardian and tendered
+him what I thought a liberal honorarium&mdash;fairly liberal, even for
+America.</p>
+
+<p>He drew back a little.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no," he said, "I beg your pardon."</p>
+
+<p>I had not made it large enough then. I glanced about for some of the
+party who would have funds.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry," I began, "it is not more. I will&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon," he repeated, "but I could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> not accept anything for
+what is but my duty. I am only very glad to do what I may for you. I
+will do something more, if you wish."</p>
+
+<p>Then, of course, I knew it <i>must</i> be a dream, and that I would wake up
+presently in Shepheard's Hotel to find that we hadn't started for the
+Pyramids yet. Still, I would keep up the blessed trance a moment longer.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that you will not allow me to acknowledge your great favor to
+us?" I said in that polite manner for which our ship is justly famous.</p>
+
+<p>"Not in money," he said. "The Government pays me a salary for my work
+and this is only part of my work. It has also given me pleasure."</p>
+
+<p>I surreptitiously pinched myself in certain tender places to see if I
+couldn't wake up. It was no use. He persisted in his refusal, and
+presently produced an ancient corroded coin, Greek or Roman, such as is
+sometimes found among the d&eacute;bris.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to offer you this," he said. "I found it myself, so I am
+sure it is genuine."</p>
+
+<p>Ah, this was the delicate opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>"You will let me buy it, of course."</p>
+
+<p>But no, he declined that, too. He wished us only to remember him, he
+insisted. He added:</p>
+
+<p>"I have two scarabs at home; I should like to bring them to your hotel."</p>
+
+<p>It was rather dazing. The seller of scarabs&mdash;genuine or imitation&mdash;will
+not let a prospective purchaser get out of sight. I wondered why we
+should be trusted in this unheard-of way; I also wondered what those two
+scarabs were likely to be worth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> Could he come to-night? I asked; we
+should be sight-seeing to-morrow and leaving for Upper Egypt in the
+afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>But no, he would not be home in time. He would wait until we returned
+from Upper Egypt.</p>
+
+<p>So it was we had parted, and in the tumult of sight-seeing up the Nile I
+had forgotten the matter altogether. Now, here he was. I counted up my
+spare currency, and waited.</p>
+
+<p>He had on his best smile as he entered, also a brand-new uniform, and he
+certainly made a handsome figure. He inquired as to our sight-seeing up
+the Nile, then rather timidly he produced two of those little Egyptian
+gems&mdash;a scarab and an amulet, such as men and women of old Egypt wore,
+and took with them to their tombs.</p>
+
+<p>"I got them from a man who took them from a mummy. They are genuine. I
+want to give them to you and the little lady," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But you must not <i>give</i> them to us&mdash;they are too valuable," I began.</p>
+
+<p>He flushed and straightened up a little.</p>
+
+<p>"But that is why I wish you to have them."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Now, of course, no one who knows Cairo can ever believe that story. Yet
+it all truly happened, precisely as I have set it down. He was just a
+young Egyptian who had attended school in Alexandria, and he spoke and
+wrote English, French, Italian, and the dialects of Arabic. The Egyptian
+acquires the lore of languages naturally, it would seem, but that this
+youth should acquire all those things, and such a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> standard of honor and
+generosity, here in a land where baksheesh is the native god, did seem
+amazing. When we left, he wrote down our address in the neatest possible
+hand, requesting permission to send us something more.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Note</span>.&mdash;As my reputation for truth is already gone I may as
+well add, a year later, that he has since sent two
+presents&mdash;some little funerary figures, and a beautiful
+ivory-handled fly-whip.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLIV" id="XLIV"></a>XLIV</h2>
+
+<h3>SAKKARA AND THE SACRED BULLS</h3>
+
+<p>One begins and finishes Egypt with Cairo. Starting with the Sphinx and
+Pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty, you work down through the Theban periods
+of the Upper Nile and then once more at Cairo, leap far back into the
+First period in a trip to Memphis, the earliest capital of Egypt, the
+beginning of all Egyptian things. After which, follows the Museum, for
+only after visiting localities and landmarks can that great climax be
+properly approached.</p>
+
+<p>I think we were no longer very enthusiastic about ruins, but every one
+said we must go to Sakkara. There was yet another very wonderful statue
+of Rameses there, they said, also the oldest pyramids ever built, and
+the Mausoleum of the Sacred Bulls. It would never do to miss them.</p>
+
+<p>I am glad now that I did not miss them, but I remember the Memphis
+donkeys with unkindness. The farther down the Nile the worse the
+donkeys. We thought they had been bad at Abydos, but the Abydos donkeys
+were without sin compared with those of Sakkara. Mine was named
+"Sunrise," and I picked him for his beauty, always a dangerous asset. He
+was thoroughly depraved and had a gait like a steam-drill. The boat
+landed us at Bedrashen and I managed to survive as far as the colossal
+statue of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> Rameses, a prostrate marvel, and the site of the ancient city
+of Menes&mdash;capital of Egypt a good deal more than six thousand years
+ago&mdash;that is, before the world began, by gospel calculation. I was
+perfectly willing to stay there among the cooling palms and watch the
+little children gather camel-dung and pat it into cakes to dry for fuel,
+and I would have done it if I had known what was going to happen to me.</p>
+
+<p>It is a weary way across the desert to the pyramids and the tombs of
+those sacred bulls, but I was not informed of that. When I realized, it
+was too late. The rest of the party were far ahead of me beyond some
+hills, and I was alone in the desert with that long-eared disaster and a
+donkey-boy who stopped to talk with the children, beset by a plague of
+flies that would have brought Pharaoh to terms. It was useless to kick
+and hammer that donkey or to denounce the donkey-boy. Sunrise had long
+ago formulated his notions of speed, and the donkey-boy was simply a
+criminal in disguise. When we passed a mud village, at last, and a new
+brigade of flies joined those I had with me, I would have given any
+reasonable sum to have been at Cairo with the Reprobates, in the cool
+quiet of Shepheard's marble halls.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the village was just the sand waste, and not a soul of the party
+in sight. I didn't have the courage to go back, and hardly the courage
+to go on. I said I would lie down by the trail and die, and let them
+find me there and be sorry they had forsaken me in that pitiless way.
+Then for the sake of speed I got off and walked. It was heavy walking
+through the loose sand, with the sun blazing down.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Presently I looked around for my escort. He was close at my heels&mdash;on
+the donkey's back. I said the most crushing things I could think of and
+displaced him. Then we settled down into the speed of a ram-headed
+sphinx again. Everything seemed utterly hopeless. It was useless to
+swear; I was too old to cry.</p>
+
+<p>I don't know when we reached the first pyramid, but the party had been
+there and gone. I did not care for it much. It might be the oldest
+pyramid in the world, but it was rather a poor specimen, I thought, and
+could not make me forget my sorrow. I went on, and after a weary time
+came to the Tomb of Thi, who lived in the Fifth Dynasty and was in no
+way related to Queen Thi of Tell al-Amarna, who came along some two
+thousand years later. There was an Englishman and his guide there who
+told me about it, and it was worth seeing, certainly, with its relief
+frescoes over five thousand years old, though it is not such a tomb as
+those of the Upper Nile.</p>
+
+<p>I overtook the party at the Tomb of the Sacred Bulls. By that time I had
+little enthusiasm for bulls; or for tombs, unless it was one I could use
+for Sunrise. The party had done the bulls, but when I got hold of Gaddis
+and laid my case before him, he said he would find me a new donkey and
+that the others would wait while we inspected the bulls. So everything
+was better then, and I was glad of the bulls, though I was still warm
+and resentful at Sunrise and his keeper, and even at Gaddis, who was
+innocent enough, Heaven knows.</p>
+
+<p>In the tomb of the bulls everything unpleasant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> passed away. It was cool
+and dark in there, and we carried lights and wandered along those vast
+still corridors, which are simply astounding when one remembers their
+purpose.</p>
+
+<p>This Serapeum or Apis mausoleum is a vast succession of huge underground
+vaults and elaborate granite sarcophagi, which once contained all the
+Apis or Sacred Bulls of Memphis. The Apis was the product of an
+immaculate conception. Lightning descended from heaven upon a cow&mdash;any
+cow&mdash;and the Apis was the result. He was recognized by being black, with
+a triangular spot of white on his forehead and a figure of an eagle on
+his back. Furthermore, he had double hairs in his tail and a beetle on
+his tongue. It was recognized that only lightning could produce a bull
+like that, and no others were genuine, regardless of watchful
+circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>Apis was about the most sacred of the whole synod of Egyptian beasts.
+Even the Hawk of Horus and the Jackal of Anubis had to retire to
+obscurity when Apis came along, mumbling and pawing up the dust. When he
+died there were very solemn ceremonies, and he was put into one of those
+polished granite sarcophagi, with a tablet on the walls relating the
+story of his life, and mentioning the King whose reign had been honored
+by this bellowing bovine aristocrat. Also they set up a special chapel
+over his tomb, and this series of chapels and tombs eventually
+solidified into a great temple with pylons approached by an avenue of
+sphinxes.</p>
+
+<p>The Serapeum dates from about 1500 <span class="smcap">b.c</span>. and continued in active use down
+to the time of the Ptolomies.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> The Egyptian Pantheon was breaking up
+then, and Apis was probably one of the first deities to go. A nation's
+gods fall into disrepute when they can no longer bring victory to a
+nation's arms, and a sacred bull who could not beat off Julius C&aelig;sar
+would very likely be asked to resign.</p>
+
+<p>There are sixty-four vaults in the part of the Serapeum we visited, and
+twenty-four of them contain the granite sarcophagi. The sarcophagi are
+about thirteen feet long by eleven feet wide, and eight high&mdash;that is to
+say, the size of an ordinary bedroom&mdash;and in each of these, mummified
+and in state, an Apis slept.</p>
+
+<p>He is not there now. Only two of him were found when these galleries
+were opened in modern times. But I have seen Apis, for one of him sleeps
+now in a glass case in the Historical Library in New York City. I shall
+visit him again on my return, and view him with deeper interest and more
+respect since I have seen his tomb.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLV" id="XLV"></a>XLV</h2>
+
+<h3>A VISIT WITH RAMESES II.</h3>
+
+<p>I have never quite known just how it was I happened to be overlooked and
+deserted that next evening at the Museum. I remember walking miles
+through its wonderful galleries; I recollect standing before the rare
+group of Rameses and his queen&mdash;recently discovered and put in
+place&mdash;the most beautiful sculpture in Egypt; I recall that we visited
+the room of Mr. Theodore Davis and looked on all the curiously modern
+chairs and couches and the perfectly preserved chariot taken from the
+tombs opened in the Valley of the Kings; also the room where all the
+royal jewels are kept, marvellous necklaces and amulets, and every
+ornament that would delight a king or queen in any age; I have a
+confused impression of hundreds of bronze and thousands of clay figures
+taken from tombs; I know that, as a grand climax, we came at last to the
+gem of the vast collection, the room where Seti I., Rameses the Great,
+and the rest of the royal dead, found at Der al-Bahari, lie asleep. I
+remember, too, that I was tired then, monumentally tired in the thought
+that this was the last word in Egypt; that we were done; that there was
+no need of keeping up and alive for further endeavor&mdash;that only before
+us lay the sweet anticipation of rest.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The others were tired, too, but they wanted to buy some things in the
+little salesroom down-stairs, and were going, presently. They would come
+back and see the kings again, later. I said I would stay there and
+commune a little alone with the great Seti, and his royal son, who, in
+that dim long ago, had remembered himself so numerously along the Nile.
+They meant to come back, no doubt, the party, I mean; they claim now
+that the main museum was already closed when they had finished their
+purchases, and they supposed I had gone. It does not matter, I have
+forgiven them, whatever their sin.</p>
+
+<p>It was pleasant and restful there, when they had left me. I dropped down
+on a little seat against the wall and looked at those still figures,
+father and son, kings, mighty warriors and temple-builders when the
+glory of Egypt was at full flood.</p>
+
+<p>It was an impressive thought that those stately temples up the Nile,
+which men travel across the world to see, were built by these two; that
+the statues are their statues; that the battles and sacrifices depicted
+on a thousand walls were <i>their</i> battles and <i>their</i> sacrifices; that
+they loved and fought and conquered, and set up monuments in those
+far-off centuries when history was in its sunrise, yet lie here before
+us in person to-day, frail drift on the long tide of years.</p>
+
+<p>And it was a solemn thought that their life story is forever done&mdash;that
+any life story can last but a little while. Tossed up out of the
+unexplored, one's feet some day touch the earth&mdash;the ancient earth that
+had been going on so long before we came. Then, for a few years, we
+bustle importantly up and down&mdash;fight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> battles and build temples,
+maybe&mdash;and all at once slip back into the uncharted waste, while the
+world&mdash;the ancient world&mdash;fights new battles, builds new temples, sends
+new ships across the sea, though we have part in it no more, no
+more&mdash;forever, and forever.</p>
+
+<p>Looking at those two, who in their brief sojourn had made and recorded
+some of the most ancient history we know, I recalled portions of their
+pictured story on the temple walls and tried to build a human semblance
+of their daily lives. Of course they were never troubled with petty
+things, I thought; economies, frivolities, small vanities, domestic
+irritations&mdash;these were modern. <i>They</i> had been as gods in the full
+panoply of a race divinely new. They had been&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But it was too much of an effort. I was too worn. I could only look at
+them, and envy the long nap they were having there under the glass in
+that still, pleasant room.</p>
+
+<p>I was a good deal surprised, then, when I fancied I saw Rameses stir and
+appear a little restless in his sleep. It was even more interesting to
+see him presently slide away the glass and sit up. I thought there must
+be some mistake, and I was going to get an attendant, when he noticed me
+and seemed to guess my thought.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right," he said, "you needn't call any one. The place closed
+an hour ago and there is only a guard down-stairs, who is asleep by this
+time. It happens to be my night to reincarnate and I am glad you are
+here to keep me company. You can tell me a good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> deal, no doubt. These
+people here don't know anything." He waved a hand to the sleepers about
+him. "They are allowed only one night in a thousand years. The gods
+allow me a night in every century. I was always a favorite of the gods.
+It is fortunate you happened to stop with us to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>is</i> fortunate," I said. "I shall be envied by my race. I have just
+been trying to imagine something of your life and period. That is far
+more interesting than to-day. Tell me something about it."</p>
+
+<p>Rameses rested comfortably on the side of his case.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well," he said, reflectively, "of course mine was a great period&mdash;a
+very great period. Egypt was never so great as it was under my rule. It
+was my rule that made it great&mdash;my policy, of course, and my vigorous
+action. I was always for progress and war. The histories you have of my
+period are poor things. They never did me justice, but it was my own
+fault, of course. I did not leave enough records of my work. I was
+always a modest man&mdash;too modest for my own good, everybody said that.</p>
+
+<p>"I was religious, too, and built temples wherever there was room. It is
+said that I claimed temples that I did not build. Nonsense!&mdash;I built all
+the temples. I built Karnak; I built Luxor; I built Abou-Simbel; I built
+Abydos; I built the Pyramids; I built the Sphinx; I invented the sacred
+bulls; I was all there was to religion, in Egypt. I was all there was to
+<i>Egypt</i>. I was the whole thing. It is a pity I did not make a record of
+these things somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>"There <i>are</i> a few statues of you," I suggested, "and inscriptions&mdash;they
+seem to imply&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Ah yes," he said, "but not many. It was slow work carving those things.
+I could have had many more, if the workmen had been more industrious.
+But everything was slow, and very costly&mdash;very costly indeed&mdash;why, I
+spent a fortune on that temple of Karnak alone. You saw what I did
+there; those ram-headed sphinxes nearly bankrupted me. I had to cut down
+household expenses to finish them.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my wife objected a good deal&mdash; I speak collectively, of course,
+signifying my domestic companionship&mdash;there were fourteen of her.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 327px;"><a name="ILL_048" id="ILL_048"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_048.jpg" width="327" height="500" alt="GOT IT MADE CHEAP SOMEWHERE WITH HER PICTURE CARVED ON
+THE FRONT OF IT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">GOT IT MADE CHEAP SOMEWHERE WITH HER PICTURE CARVED ON
+THE FRONT OF IT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"She wanted jewelry&mdash;collectively&mdash;individually, too, for that
+matter&mdash;and it took such a lot to go around. You saw all those things in
+the next room. They were for her; they were for that matrimonial
+collection; I could never satisfy the female craving for such things.
+Why, I bought one round of necklaces that cost as much as a ram-headed
+sphinx. Still she was not satisfied. Then she was sorry
+afterward&mdash;collectively&mdash;and bought me a sphinx as a present&mdash;got it
+made cheap somewhere with her picture carved on the front of it. You may
+have noticed it&mdash;third on the right as you come out. I used it&mdash;I had
+to&mdash;but it was a joke. When wives buy things for their husbands it is
+quite often so.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes, I was a great king, of course, and the greatest warrior the
+world has ever seen; but my path was not all roses. My wife&mdash;my
+household collection&mdash;wanted their statues placed by the side of mine.
+Individually! Think of what a figure I would have cut! It was a silly
+notion. What had they done to deserve statues? I did it, though&mdash;that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span>
+is collectively&mdash;here and there. I embodied her in a single figure at my
+knee, as became her position. But she wasn't satisfied&mdash;collectively and
+individually she declared she amounted to as much as I did, and pointed
+at our seventy-two sons.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I was never understood by that lot. I was never a hero in my own
+house. So I had to order another statue, putting her at my side. You saw
+it down-stairs. It is very beautiful, of course, and is a good likeness
+of her, collectively. She always made a good composite picture, but is
+it fair to me? She was never regarded in that important way, except by
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it is very pleasant here&mdash;very indeed. The last time I was allowed
+to reincarnate, I was still in the cave at Der al-Bahari, where they
+stored us when Cambyses came along and raided Thebes. Cambyses burned a
+number of my temples. It was too bad. The cave was a poor place, but
+safe. My tomb was much pleasanter, though it was not as grand as I had
+intended it to be. I meant to have the finest tomb in the valley, but my
+contractor cheated me.</p>
+
+<p>"The men who furnished the materials paid him large sums and gave me
+very poor returns. His name was Baksheesh, which is how the word
+originated, though it means several things now, I believe."</p>
+
+<p>"How interesting!" I interrupted. "We would call that grafting in our
+country."</p>
+
+<p>"Very likely; I didn't find out that he was grafting, as you say, until
+quite late, then I put him into a block of concrete and built him into a
+temple. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> made a very good block; he is there yet. After that there
+was no trouble for a while."</p>
+
+<p>"I saw something of the kind at Algiers&mdash;one Geronimo," I began&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Later, three thousand years later. I originated the idea&mdash;it has been
+often adopted since. Those people along the Coast adopted a good many of
+my ideas, but they never get the value out of them. It put an end to
+baksheesh&mdash;graft as you call it&mdash;in Thebes, and it would be valuable
+to-day in Cairo, I should think. A wall around Cairo could be built in
+that way&mdash;there is enough material."</p>
+
+<p>The King rested a little on his other arm, then continued:</p>
+
+<p>"Speaking of my tomb. I am glad I am not there. I attract much more
+attention here than if I were on exhibition in that remote place.
+There's Amenophis II. I understand that he's very proud of the fact that
+he's the only king left in his tomb. I don't envy him at all. I have a
+hundred visitors where he has one. They are passing by me here in a
+string all day, and when they are your countrymen I can hear a good deal
+even through the thick glass. I find it more interesting to stay here in
+my case through the day, than to be stalking about the underworld,
+attending sacrifices to Anubis and those other gods. I was always fond
+of activity and progress."</p>
+
+<p>"You keep up with your doings, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, not altogether. You see, I cannot go about in the upper world. I
+catch only a word of things from the tourists. I hear they have a new
+kind of boat on the Nile."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, indeed," I said. "A boat that is run by steam&mdash;a mixture of fire
+and water&mdash;and is lit by electricity&mdash;a form of lightning."</p>
+
+<p>I thought he would be excited over these things, and full of questions;
+but he only reflected a little and asked,</p>
+
+<p>"What is the name of that boat?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there are many of them. The one I came down on was called the
+<i>Memnon</i>."</p>
+
+<p>He sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"There it is," he said, sadly. "I am discredited, you see. I suppose
+they couldn't name it 'Rameses the Great.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, but there is one of that name, too."</p>
+
+<p>He brightened a little, but grew sad again.</p>
+
+<p>"Only one?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think there should be more of that name?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>He sat up quite straight.</p>
+
+<p>"In my time they would all have borne that great name," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"And&mdash;ah, wouldn't that be a bit confusing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all. I have set up as many as a hundred statues in one
+temple&mdash;<i>all</i> of Rameses the Great. They were not at all confusing. You
+knew <i>all</i> of them immediately."</p>
+
+<p>"True enough; and now I think of it, perhaps you have not heard that
+they have made your portrait as you lie here, and, by a magic process of
+ours, have placed it on a sort of papyrus tablet&mdash;a postal card we call
+it&mdash;and by another process have sent thousands of them over the world."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He looked at me with eyes that penetrated my conscience.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that statement true?" he asked, tremulously.</p>
+
+<p>"It is&mdash;every word. Your portrait is as familiar to the world to-day as
+it was here in Egypt three thousand years ago."</p>
+
+<p>The great peace that had rested on the king's face came back to it. The
+piercing eyes closed restfully, and he slipped back on his pillow.</p>
+
+<p>"Then, after all, I am vindicated," he murmured. "I have not lived and
+died in vain."</p>
+
+<p>A hand was resting on my shoulder. The sun was shining in, and a
+threatening guard was standing over me.</p>
+
+<p>It was nothing. Five francs allayed his indignation. Five francs is a
+large baksheesh in Cairo, but I did not begrudge it, as matters stood.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XLVI" id="XLVI"></a>XLVI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LONG WAY HOME</h3>
+
+<p>We bade good-bye to Egypt that morning, and to Gaddis&mdash;whose name and
+memory will always mean Egypt to me&mdash;and were off for Alexandria, where
+the ship was waiting. That long-ago dream of a visit to Damascus and
+Jerusalem, and of a camp on the Nile had been realized. Now it was over.</p>
+
+<p>We were ready to go home&mdash;at least some of us were. There would be a
+stop at Naples, with Pompeii and Rome for those who cared for it, but
+even these great places would be tame after Egypt. They must be
+approached from another direction for that eager interest which properly
+belongs to an expedition of this kind. A number of our ship-dwellers had
+an eager interest&mdash;a large and growing interest&mdash;but it was for home, an
+interest that was multiplied each day by the square of the distance
+travelled.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 440px;"><a name="ILL_049" id="ILL_049"></a>
+<img src="images/ill_049.jpg" width="440" height="500" alt="SET OUT ON THE LONG, STEADY, ATLANTIC SWING" title="" />
+<span class="caption">SET OUT ON THE LONG, STEADY, ATLANTIC SWING</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Not many of us were left when we had made our last touch on the Riviera,
+rounded the Rock, and set out on the long, steady, Atlantic swing. The
+Reprobates had gone <i>vi&acirc;</i> Monte Carlo to Paris. Others had drifted up
+through Europe to sail from Cherbourg. The Diplomat was still with us;
+also Fosdick of Ohio, and Laura, age fourteen, but only a score or two
+of the original muster could gather at the long table in the dining-room
+on the last night out of port, for a final<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> look at one another, and to
+exchange the greetings and god-speeds for which there would be little
+time during the bustle of arrival. It was hardly an occasion; just a
+pleasant little meeting that even with jollification was not without
+sadness. One of the ship's poets offered some verses of good-bye, of
+which I recall these lines:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">"To-night, we are here who have stayed by the ship;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">To-morrow, the harbor and anchor and slip&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">The word of command for the gang-plank to fall&mdash;</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 21em;">The word that shall suddenly scatter us all&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Then all the King's horses and all the King's men</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;">Could never collect us together again."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That was a good while ago, nearly a year now, and already it seems as
+far back in the past as the days of Rameses; for, as I have said
+somewhere before, we have but a meagre conception of time. Indeed, I
+suspect there is no such thing as time. How can there be when one period
+is as long as another compared with eternity?</p>
+
+<p>However, I do not compare with eternity, now. I compare with Egypt. I
+shall <i>always</i> compare with Egypt&mdash;everything else in the world. Other
+interests and other memories may fade and change, but Egypt, the real
+Egypt, the enchantment of that land, which is not a land, but a vast
+processional epic, will never change, and it will not grow dim. I may
+never visit it again, but I shall see it many times. I shall see the
+sunrise above the palms, flooding the mountains with amethyst and
+turning the sky to crimson gold. Again at sunset I shall sit in the vast
+temple of Luxor and hear once more the Muezzin's call to prayer. I shall
+race with Laura across the hot desert; I shall hear the cry of the
+donkey-boys and the scarab-sellers and the wail for baksheesh; I shall
+see our cavalcade scattering through the dust across the Libyan sands.
+And I shall wander once more among the tombs of the kings, and follow
+down the splendid passage where Amenophis lies with the repose of the
+ages on his benignant face. I shall recall other lands and other ages,
+too, but it is to Egypt that I shall turn after all the others have
+drifted by; to her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> temples and her tombs&mdash;her glories of the past made
+visible. Beyond the sands and the centuries they lie, but they are mine
+now, and neither thief nor beggar, nor importunate creditor, can ever
+take them away.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Note&mdash;a year later.&mdash;The Selamlik here described was among
+the last of such occasions. A few weeks later, in April, 1909, Abdul
+Hamid regained a brief ascendancy, ordered the terrible massacres of
+Adana, and on April 27th was permanently dethroned. He was succeeded by
+his brother, Mehmed V., who attends mosque with little or no ceremony.
+Abdul meantime has retired to Salonica, where he is living quietly&mdash;as
+quietly as one may with seventeen favorite wives and the imminent
+prospect of assassination.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Ship-joke.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> One tradition places the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor,
+but Tabor is fifty miles away whereas Cesarea Philippi, to which the
+little group descended, lies at the foot of Hermon.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> The pedler of bread cries, "O Allah who sustaineth us, send
+trade!" The pedler of beverages, "O cheer thine heart!"</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Cook's Egypt</i>, page 562.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> At Abou Simbel there are sitting statues of Rameses the
+Great which, if standing erect, would be eighty-three feet tall.</p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+</div>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHIP DWELLERS***</p>
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@@ -0,0 +1,10923 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Ship Dwellers, by Albert Bigelow Paine,
+Illustrated by Thomas Fogarty
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Ship Dwellers
+       A Story of a Happy Cruise
+
+
+Author: Albert Bigelow Paine
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2010  [eBook #34096]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHIP DWELLERS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Annie McGuire from page images generously made
+available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 34096-h.htm or 34096-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34096/34096-h/34096-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34096/34096-h.zip)
+
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/shipdwellersstor00painrich
+
+
+
+
+
+[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 drachmas would redeem Greece.
+
+I was half a mind to look up the heirs of that old money-lender and buy
+their claim and begin their suit. Think of being involved in a tangle
+that has been stringing along through twenty-three centuries, and would
+tie up yesterday, to-day, and forever in a hard knot! I would have done
+it, I think, only that it might take another twenty-three centuries to
+settle it, and I was afraid the ship wouldn't wait.
+
+If there is any one who still does not believe that modern Athens is
+beautiful and a credit to her ancient name, let him visit as we did her
+modern temples. We had passed the ancient market entrance, the Tower of
+the Winds, and other of the old landmarks, when suddenly we turned into
+a wonderful boulevard, and drove by or visited, one after another, the
+New Academy, the University, the National Library, the Gallery of Fine
+Arts, and the National Museum. If Pericles were alive to-day he would
+approve of those buildings and add them to his collection.
+
+All the old classic grace and beauty have been preserved in the same
+pure-white pentelican marble, of which it is estimated that there is
+enough to last any city five thousand years. Corinthian, Ionic, and
+Doric columns that might have come from the Acropolis itself--and did,
+in design--adorn and support these new edifices as they did the old, and
+lend their ineffable glory to the rehabilitation of Greece.
+
+We have learned, by-the-way, to distinguish the kinds of columns. They
+were all just Greek to us at first, but we know them now. When we see a
+column with acanthus leaves on the capital we know it is Corinthian,
+because we remember the story of the girl of Corinth who planted
+acanthus on her lover's grave and put a hollow tile around it for
+protection. Some of the leaves came up outside of the tile by and by,
+and a young architect came along and got his idea for the Corinthian
+capital.
+
+We know the Ionic, too, because it looks like its initial--a capital "I"
+with a little curly top--and we say "I" is for Ionic; and we can tell
+the Doric, because it's the only one that doesn't suggest anything
+particular to remember it by. It's worth coming to Greece to learn these
+things. We should never have learned them at home--never in the world.
+We should not have had any reason for wanting to learn them.
+
+We got tired of the Museum--Laura, age fourteen, and I--we were too
+young and frivolous for such things, though they are wonderful enough, I
+am sure. But then museums we have always with us, while a day in Athens
+is a fleeting thing. We wanted to take one of our private
+side-excursions, and we tried to communicate this fact to the Blue
+Elephant, who was our driver to-day, as yesterday.
+
+It was no light matter. He nodded and smiled when we indicated that we
+wanted to leave the procession and go it on our own hook, but he did not
+move. We had already made up our minds that he was subject to fits, or
+was just plain crazy, for more than once he had suddenly broke away from
+the party and whirled us around side-streets for a dozen blocks or so to
+something not down on the programme, rejoining the procession in some
+unexpected place.
+
+But whatever may have induced his impulses then, nothing seemed to stir
+his ambition for adventure now. I gesticulated and produced money; I
+summoned the Diplomat to tackle him in his best Xenophan, but it was no
+use. I got the guide at last, and then there was an exciting harangue
+that looked as if it might end in blood. I suppose our man thought he
+wouldn't get his full pay if he deserted the ship crowd. He must have
+been convinced, finally, for he leaped upon the box, and away we went in
+a wild race for the shops and by-streets where we had begged the guide
+to let us go.
+
+We had explained that we wanted some bags--some little embroidered bags,
+such as we had seen earlier in the day when we could not stop. The Blue
+Elephant understood now and took us to where there were bags--many bags.
+The whole street was lined with bags and other embroideries, and the
+Greeks turned out to give us a welcome.
+
+It is said that one Greek is equal to three Turks, and I believe it. The
+poorest Greek we saw was too much for two Americans, and we were beset
+and besieged and literally borne down and swamped by a rising tide of
+bags. We bought at many prices and in many places; we piled the carriage
+full and fled away at last when they were going to dump upon us a
+collection of costumes and firearms and draperies that would have
+required a flat-car.
+
+We were breathing easier when the Blue Elephant pulled us into another
+narrow street, and behold! it was another street of bags. Dear me! how
+could we explain that we had enough bags and wanted to see other things?
+I would almost have given four hundred dollars to have been able to
+tell him that I wanted to visit the old Byzantine structure we had
+passed that morning--the one with all the little shoemakers
+down-stairs--but the thing was impossible. I must buy some more bags,
+there was no help for it. So I did buy some more, and I picked out a
+place where a man spoke enough English to give the Blue Elephant a fresh
+start, which brought us at last to the old Byzantine building and the
+little shoemakers.
+
+Then we saw the street of a hundred clanking sounds--anyway we called it
+that, for they made all kinds of copper vessels in there--and we got out
+and told the Blue Elephant to wait, for the place was very narrow; but
+we couldn't lose him, seeing he was always on our heels, ready to whirl
+us away somewhere, anywhere, in his crazy, fitty fashion. We had to let
+him do it, now, for we had used up all the interpreters we could find;
+besides, we didn't care, any more.
+
+Still, when it got to be near luncheon-time we did begin to wonder where
+the party had gone. It did not matter greatly, we could lunch anywhere,
+but we were curious to know whether we should ever see them or the ship
+again, and when we mentioned the matter to the Blue Elephant he merely
+grinned and whipped up his horses and capered across another square. But
+presently I realized that some sort of procession was passing and that
+he had turned into it. Then it was all just like dreams I've had, for it
+was our own procession, and we were calmly going along in it, and right
+away were being personally conducted through a remarkable church where
+the king and queen go, and sit in golden chairs. Alice in Wonderland
+could hardly have had a more surprising adventure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our party being free after luncheon, Laura and I engaged Lykabettos on
+our own account and drove out to the Bay of Salamis, where Xerxes made
+his great mistake in the matter of fleets.
+
+Perhaps Lykabettos had taken a fancy to us, for he engaged a carriage
+that had been awarded a prize last year in the games, he said, and the
+team with it. We believed Lykabettos--anybody would--and anyway it was a
+beautiful outfit, and we cantered away over a fine road, past wayside
+shrines, past little huts and houses, past a little memorial that marks
+the place on a hill where Xerxes placed his silver-footed throne so that
+he might sit comfortably and watch the enemy's ships go down. Only, the
+programme didn't work out that way, Lykabettos said:
+
+"Zen Xerxes he pretty soon see zat it was not ze Greek ship zat sink,
+and he mus' run pretty quick or he will be capture; and hees ship zay
+try to escape, and he not take away hees army from zat little island you
+see over zere; zay stay zere and are all massacre by ze Greek--by ze men
+and ze women, too, who have watch ze battle from here and go over and
+kill zem."
+
+The little island Lykabettos pointed out was Psyttalleia, and the flower
+of Persia perished there. It was a tiny bit of barren land then, and it
+is to-day. The hills around Salamis are barren, too, covered only with a
+gray weed like the sage-brush of Nevada, and stunted groves of scrubby
+pine and ground cedar--referred to by Lykabettos as "ze forest."
+
+We came to the tiny hamlet on the water's side, a collection of two or
+three huts, and Lykabettos engaged a lateen-sailed lugger (I should call
+it that, though its name was probably something else), and with a fresh
+wind half-ahead we billowed over the blue waters of Salamis, where
+twenty-five hundred years ago the Persian ships went down. It was a
+cloudy afternoon and there was a stormy feeling in the sky. It seemed
+just the time to be there, and there was nothing to dispel the illusion
+of imminent battle that was in the air.
+
+I was perfectly sure, and so was Laura, that the Persian fleet was
+likely at any moment to round the point and land troops on Pysttalleia;
+also that the Greek fleet was hiding somewhere in the Bay of Eleusis,
+and that there were going to be very disagreeable happenings there in a
+few minutes. There was a hut where we landed on the Island of Salamis
+and a girl making lace at the front door. She might have been there
+twenty-five hundred years ago, as well as not--perhaps was--and saw the
+great victory.
+
+We sailed back then, crossing again the exact spot where the battle
+raged, and drove home through the gathering evening, while Lykabettos
+recounted in that sad voice of his the history of ancient days. We are
+on the ship now, with anchor weighed, looking to the Farther East.
+Athens with its temples and its traditions drops below the horizon.
+Darkness and silence once more claim the birthplace of gods and heroes
+as we slip out of these quiet waters and head for the Aegean Sea.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+INTO THE DARDANELLES
+
+
+We saw but little of the Isles of Greece. It was night and we were tired
+after a hard day; most of us, I think, turned in early. Now and then a
+light--a far tiny speck--appeared in one quarter or another--probably a
+signal beacon; that was all.
+
+But in the morning--it was soon after breakfast--a gray bank rose up out
+of the sea, and the word went round that it was Asia. That was a strange
+thing for a boy who had been brought up on the prairies of the Middle
+West--to look across the bow and see Asia coming up out of the sea. It
+brought back a small, one-room, white district schoolhouse, dropped down
+on the bleak, level prairie, and geography-class of three, standing in a
+row and singing to the tune of _Old Dan Tucker_ the rhymes of the
+continents:
+
+  "Asia sixteen millions,
+  The largest of the five grand divisions."
+
+It was not much of a rhyme, nor much of a tune, but there was a swing in
+the way we did it which fixed those facts for life. They came back now,
+and I had to get hold of myself a little to realize that this was the
+same Asia with all those square miles--the land of the Arabian Nights,
+of the apostles and the patriarchs--the wonderful country I had one day
+hoped to see. And presently we were off the Plains of Troy, passing near
+where the ships of the Greeks lay anchored, all of which seemed very
+wonderful, too, I thought. We were in the Dardanelles, then, following
+the path of those first Argonauts who set sail with Jason, and of that
+later band who set out in the _Quaker City_, forty-two years ago. No
+lack of history and tradition and old association here.
+
+But how one's information does go to seed; all of us knew something, but
+none of us knew much. Not one of us knew positively whether the
+Hellespont was the same as the Dardanelles or as the Bosporus, and when,
+with the help of the guide-book, we decided that it was the former, we
+fell into other luminous debates as to where Leander swam it when he was
+courting Hero and where Xerxes built his bridge. The captain said that
+both these things took place at Abydos, which he pointed out to us, and
+then we were in trouble right away again as to whether this was the
+Abydos of Lord Byron's poem, or merely another town by the same name. At
+all events it was not much of a place.
+
+On the whole, the shores of the Dardanelles are mostly barren and
+uninteresting, with small towns here and there and fortifications. At
+one place some men came out in a boat and went through the formality of
+letting us enter the country. It did not seem much of a permission; I
+could have given it myself. But I suppose we had to have theirs;
+otherwise they might have reached us with some kind of a gun.
+
+We entered the Sea of Marmora, passed a barren island or two; then the
+shores fell back beyond the horizon, and most of us put in the rest of
+the day pretending to read up on Constantinople. It was dark when we
+dropped anchor in the mouth of the Bosporus, and we were at dinner--a
+gala dinner, after which we danced. A third of the way around the world
+to the westward, in a country called America, a new President would be
+inaugurated to-morrow, and in the quiet dusk of our anchorage, with the
+scattered lights of Asia blinking across from one side and a shadowy,
+mysterious grove and a fairy-lighted city on the other, we celebrated
+that great occasion in the West and our arrival at the foremost mart of
+the East by dancing before Stamboul.
+
+That should have ended our day, but when we were about to break up, a
+boat-load or two of uniformed officials with distinctly Oriental faces
+and fezzes came aboard and opened business in the after cabin, going
+through our passports. Then for an hour or so there was most
+extraordinary medley of confused tongues. We had all our own kinds going
+at once and several varieties of Constantinoplese besides. And what an
+amazing performance it was, altogether--something not to be equalled
+anywhere else on the earth, I imagine, unless in Russia--a sufficient
+commentary on the progress and enlightenment of these two laggard
+nations.
+
+[Illustration: ONE'S AGE, STATED ON OATH, GOES WITH A PASSPORT]
+
+Curious how some of our ladies hesitate about showing their passports.
+One's age, stated on oath, goes with a passport.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+A CITY OF ILLUSION
+
+
+I suppose there is no more beautiful city from the outside and no more
+disheartening city from the inside than Constantinople. From the outside
+it is all fairyland and enchantment; from the inside it is all grime and
+wretchedness. Viewed from the entrance of the Bosporus, through the haze
+of morning, it is a vision. Viewed from a carriage driven through the
+streets it becomes a nightmare. If one only might see it as we did--at
+sunrise, with the minarets and domes lifting from the foliage, all aglow
+with the magic of morning--and then sail away from that dream spectacle,
+his hunger unsatisfied, he would hold at least one supreme illusion in
+his heart.
+
+For that is what it is--just an illusion--the most superb fantasy in the
+whole world. We left anchorage soon after sunrise and moved over
+abreast of Galata a little below the bridge that crosses the Golden Horn
+and connects this part of Constantinople with Stamboul. We are lying now
+full length against the street, abreast of it, where all day long a
+soiled, disordered life goes on. It is a perpetual show, but hardly a
+pleasing one. It is besmirched and raucous; it is wretched.
+
+Hawkers, guides, beggars, porters weave in and out and mingle
+vociferously. To leave the ship is to be assailed on every side. Across
+the street is a row of coffee-houses where unholy music and singing keep
+up most of the time. Also, there are dogs, scores of them--a wolfish
+breed--and they are seldom silent. This is the reverse of the picture.
+As the outside is fairyland, so this is inferno.
+
+We battled our way to our carriages and drove across the bridge to
+Stamboul. Perhaps it would be better there. But that was a mistake--it
+was worse. We entered some narrow, thronging streets--a sort of general
+market, I should say--that fairly reeked with offal. We saw presently
+that nearly everybody wore rubbers, or stilted shoes--wooden sandal
+things, with two or three inches of heel and sole--and we understood
+why; it was to lift them out of the filth. I have had dreams where,
+whichever way I turned, lay ordure and corruption, with no way out on
+any side. Such dreams were hardly worse than this. A passenger of our
+party--a lady--said afterwards:
+
+"When we drove through those streets I felt as if I had died and gone to
+hell."
+
+Yet on the whole, I think hell would be cleaner. I am sure it would not
+smell so. I have no special preference for brimstone, but I would have
+welcomed it as we drove through those Constantinople streets.
+
+I know what they smell like; I can describe it exactly: they smell like
+a garbage-can. Not the average garbage-can--fairly fresh and leading the
+busy life--but an old, opulent, tired garbage-can--one that has been
+filled up and overlooked, in August. Now and then at home a can like
+that gets into the garbage-wagon, and when that wagon comes along the
+street on a still summer morning it arrests attention. I have seen
+strong men turn pale and lovely women totter when that can went by.
+
+It would have no distinction in Constantinople. The whole city is just
+one vast garbage-can, and old--so old--why, for a thousand years or more
+they have been throwing stuff into the streets for the dogs to eat up,
+and the dogs can't eat some things, and so--
+
+Never mind; enough is enough; but if ever I get home, and if ever I want
+to recall vividly this vision of the East, I shall close my eyes when
+that garbage-wagon drives by, and once more the panaroma--panorama, I
+mean--of these thronging streets will unfold; I shall be transported
+once more to the heart of this busy city; I shall see again all the
+outlandish dress, all the strange faces, all the mosques and minarets,
+all the magic of the Orient, and I shall say, "This is it--this is the
+spicy East--this is Constantinople--Allah is indeed good!"
+
+It was at the entrance of the mosque of St. Sophia--a filthy entrance
+through a sort of an alley--that we heard our first cry of
+"Baksheesh!"--a plaintive cry from a pretty, pathetic little girl who
+clung to us, and called it over and over like the cry of a soul being
+dragged to perdition--"Bak-she-_e-e-sh_! Bak-_sh-e-e-e-sh_!" a
+long-drawn-out wail. Not one of us who would not have given her freely
+had we not known that to do so would be to touch off the cyclone--the
+cloud of vultures hovering on the outskirts. One's heart grows hard in
+the East; it has to.
+
+At the door of the mosque there was a group of creatures who put
+slippers on us and made a pretence of tying the wretched things. They
+didn't do it, of course, and one had to slide and skate and straddle to
+keep from losing them--which thing would be a fearful desecration--we
+being "Christian dogs." The Apostle in those slippers, skating and
+straddling and puffing his way through St. Sophia's was worth coming far
+to see.
+
+It is a mighty place, a grand place, but it has been described too often
+for me to attempt the details here. It is very, very old, and they have
+some candles there ten feet high and ten inches through (they look
+exactly like smooth marble columns and make the place very holy), and
+there are some good rugs on the floor. Several of our party who are
+interested in such things agreed that the rugs are valuable, though they
+are laid crooked, as they all point toward Mecca, whereas the mosque,
+originally a Christian church, stands with the points of the compass.
+
+It has been built and rebuilt a good many times. The Emperor Justinian
+was its last great builder, and he robbed the ruins of Ephesus and
+Baalbec of certain precious columns for his purpose. On Christmas Day,
+537 A.D., he finished and dedicated his work. Altogether he had spent
+five million dollars on the undertaking and had nearly bankrupted the
+empire. Nine hundred years later the Turks captured Constantinople, and
+Mohammed II., with drawn sword, rode into St. Sophia's and made the
+bloody handprint which remains the Moslem ruler's sign-manual to this
+day. They showed us the print, but I don't think it is the same one. It
+may be, but I don't think so--unless Mohammed was riding a camel.
+
+Some kind of ceremony was in progress when we arrived, but as usual in
+such places, we did not mind. We went right in just the same, and our
+guides, too, and we talked and pointed and did what we could to break up
+the services. Old turbaned sons of the Prophet were kneeling and bowing
+and praying here and there, and were a good deal in the way. Sometimes
+we fell over them, but we were charitably disposed and did not kick
+them--at least, I didn't, and I don't think any of the party did. We
+might kick a dog--kick at him, I mean--if we tripped over one, but we do
+not kick a Moslem--not a live one. We only take his picture and step on
+him and muss him up, and make a few notes and go.
+
+I have been wondering what would happen to a party of tourists--Moslems,
+for instance--who broke into an American church during services, with
+guides to point and explain, and stared at the people who were saying
+their prayers, and talked them over as if they were wax figures. An
+American congregation would be annoyed by a mob like that, and would
+remove it and put it in the calaboose. But then such things wouldn't
+happen in America. We have cowed our foreign visitors. Besides, there is
+nothing in an American church that a foreigner would care to see.
+
+We went to other mosques: to Suleiman, to Ahmed, to the "Pigeon" mosque
+with its gentle birds that come in clouds to be fed, but there is a good
+deal of sameness in these splendid edifices. Not that they are alike,
+but they seem alike, with their mellow lights, their alcoves and sacred
+sanctuaries; their gigantic wax candles; their little Turkeys--Turkish
+boys, I mean--rocking and singing the Koran, learning to be priests. And
+everywhere, whether it be prayer-time or not, there were old bearded men
+prostrated in worship or bowed in contemplation. Quite frequently we sat
+down on these praying men to rest a little, but they were too absorbed
+to notice it.
+
+There were no women in the mosques. The men supply the souls and the
+religion for the Turkish household. A woman has no use for a soul in
+Turkey. She wouldn't know what to do with it, and it would only make her
+trouble. She is allowed to pretend she has one, however, and to go to
+mosque now and then, just as we allow children to play "store" or
+"keeping-house." But it's make believe. She really hasn't any
+soul--everybody knows that.
+
+Constantinople is full of landmarks that perpetuate some memory--usually
+a bloody one--of the Janizaries. Every little while our guide would say,
+"This is where the Janizaries conquered the forces of Abdullah VI."; or
+"This is where the Janizaries overthrew and assassinated Mahmoud I."; or
+"This is where the Janizaries attacked the forces of His Sacred Majesty
+Bismillah II.," and everybody would say, "Oh, yes, of course," and we
+would go on.
+
+I said, "Oh yes, of course," with the others, which made it hard, later
+on, when I had worked up some curiosity on the subject, to ask who in
+the deuce the Janizaries were, anyway, and why they had been allowed to
+do all these bloody things unreproved.
+
+By and by we came to a place where the guide said that eight thousand of
+them had perished in the flames, and added that fifteen thousand more
+had been executed and twenty thousand banished. And we all said, "Oh
+yes, of course," again, and this time I meant it, for I thought that was
+about what would be likely to happen to persons with Janizary habits.
+Then I made a memorandum to look up that tribe when I got back to the
+ship.
+
+I have done so, now. The Janizaries were a body of military police,
+organized about 1330, originally of young Christians compelled to become
+Moslems. They became a powerful and terrible body, by and by, and
+conducted matters with a high hand. They were a wild, impetuous horde,
+and five hundred years of their history is full of assassinations of
+sultans and general ravage and bloodshed. In time they became a great
+deal more dangerous to Turkey than her enemies, but it was not until
+1826 that a sultan, Mahmoud II., managed to arouse other portions of his
+army to that pitch of fanatical zeal which has made Janizaries
+exceedingly scarce ever since. I think our guide is a Janizary--he has
+the look--but I have decided not to mention the matter.
+
+We skated through mosques and the tombs of sultans and their wives most
+of the day, appraising the rugs and shawls and general _bric-a-brac_,
+and dropped into a museum--the best one, so far, in my opinion. They
+have a sarcophagus of Alexander there--that is, it was made for
+Alexander, though it is said he never slept in it, which is too bad, if
+true, for it is the most beautiful thing in the world--regarded by
+experts as the finest existing specimen of Greek art. We lingered a long
+time about that exquisite gem--long for us--and bought photographs of it
+when we came away. Then we set out for the Long Street of Smells,
+crossed the Galata bridge, and were at the ship--home.
+
+We have only made a beginning of Constantinople, for we are to be here
+several days. But if it is all like to-day I could do with less of it. I
+have got enough of that smell to last a good while, and of the
+pandemonium that reigns in this disordered aggregation of thoroughfares,
+humanity and buildings--this weird phantasmagoria miscalled a city.
+Through my port-hole, now--I am on the street side--there comes the most
+devilish concatenation of sounds: dogs barking and yelping, barbaric
+singing, wild mandolin music, all mingled with the cries of the hawkers
+and street arabs, and when I reflect that this is the real inwardness of
+that wonder dream we saw at sunrise, I am filled with a far regret that
+we could not have satisfied ourselves with that vision of paradise and
+sailed away.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+THE TURK AND SOME OF HIS PHASES
+
+
+If one wants to get a fair idea of the mixed population of
+Constantinople, when the city's phantasmagoric life is in full swing, he
+may walk slowly across the Galata bridge, or he may stand still and
+watch the kaleidoscope revolve. Every costume, every color and kind of
+fabric, every type of Oriental will be represented there. It is a wild
+fancy-dress parade let loose--only that most of the bizarre costumes are
+rather dingy and have the look of belonging to their wearers, which is
+less likely to be so on an artificial occasion.
+
+The red fez predominates as to head-gear, and sanguinary waves of them
+go by. But there is every manner of turban, too, and the different kinds
+are interesting. Some of them are bound with rope or cord; some with
+twisted horsehair (those are Bedouins, I believe); some are wound with
+white muslin--these are worn by priests--and some are wound or bound
+with green, which indicates that the wearer is a descendant of Mohammed
+himself--that is, a "Son of the Prophet." The Prophet seems to have a
+good many descendants--not so many as Israel had in the same length of
+time, but still an industrious showing.
+
+One might suppose that these wearers of the green turban would be marked
+for special honor, and perhaps they are, but by no means are they all
+men of leisure. I saw one "wearer of the green" tooling a tram to the
+Seven Towers, and another son of the Prophet--a venerable man--bowed
+beneath a great box until his white beard and the rear elevation of his
+trousers nearly dragged in the dust.
+
+I think, by-the-way, I am more interested in the Turkish trousers than
+in any other article of national dress. They are rather short as to leg,
+but what they lack in length they make up in width and general
+amplitude. There is enough goods in the average pair of Turkish trousers
+to make a whole suit of clothes with material left for repairs. They are
+ridiculous enough from the front and the rear, but I rather like a side
+view best. The long after-part has such a drooping pendulous swing to
+it, and one gets the full value of the outline in profile and can
+calculate just what portion of it is occupied by the owner, and can lose
+himself in speculation as to what the rest is for. I like freedom and
+comfort well enough, too, in my clothes, but I would not be willing to
+sacrifice in the length of my trousers for the sake of that laundry-bag
+effect in the rear. I can admire it, though, and I do, often.
+
+At the Stamboul end of the Galata bridge is the most picturesque group,
+I believe, in the Orient. A coffee-house is there, and in front of it
+all the picture types of the East are gathered, with not a single
+Caucasian face or dress. When I used to look at the gorgeously
+extravagant costumes and the flowing beards and patriarchal faces of the
+paintings and illustrations of the East, I said: "No, they do not
+really exist. They may have done so once, but not to-day. I have seen
+the Indian of my own country in his native sage-brush. And he is no
+longer the Indian of the pictures. His dress is adulterated with
+ready-made trousers and a straw hat; his face is mixed in color and
+feature; with the Orient it must be the same."
+
+[Illustration: KEYEFF]
+
+I was mistaken. All the picture people are collected here, and more than
+picture ever saw. No sober imagination could conceive the scene at the
+end of the Galata bridge. To present it a painter would have to
+inebriate himself, spill his colors all about the place and wind up with
+the jimjams. What do these people do there? They indulge in keyeff.
+There is no English word for keyeff--no word in any language, probably,
+except Turkish. It is not done in any other language. Keyeff is a
+condition of pure enjoyment, unimpaired even by thought. Over his coffee
+and nargileh the Turk will sit for hours in a thought-vacancy which the
+Western mind can comprehend no more than it can grasp the fourth
+dimension. It is not contemplation--that would require mental exercise.
+It is absence of thought--utter absence of effort--oblivion--the
+condition for which the Western mind requires chloroform.
+
+From the end of the Galata bridge the thronged streets diverge, and into
+these a motley procession flows. Men of every calling under the
+sun--merchants, clerks, mechanics, laborers, peddlers, beggars,
+bandits--all men--or nearly all, for the Mohammedan woman mostly bides
+at home.
+
+It is just as well that she does, if one may judge from the samples.
+She is not interesting, I think. She may be, but my opinion is the other
+way. She dresses in a sort of domino, usually of dingy goods, her feet
+and ankles showing disreputable stockings and shoes. Even the richest
+silk garments, when worn by women--those one sees on the street--have a
+way of revealing disgusting foot-gear and hosiery. No, the Mohammedan
+woman is not interesting and she has no soul. I believe the Prophet
+decided that, and I agree with him. If she had one--a real feminine
+soul--she would be more particular about these details.
+
+The Turk is a dingy person altogether, and his city is unholy in its
+squalor. Yet the religion of these people commands cleanliness. Only the
+command was not clear enough as to terms. The Prophet bade his followers
+to be as cleanly as possible. There was latitude in an order like that,
+and they have been widening it ever since. I don't believe they are as
+"clean as possible." They pray five times a day, and they wash before
+prayer, but they wash too little and pray too much for the best results.
+I mean so far as outward appearance is concerned. Very likely their
+souls are perfect.
+
+At all events they are sober. The Prophet commanded abstinence, and I
+saw no drunkenness. There are no saloons in Constantinople. One may buy
+"brandy-sticks"--canes with long glass phials concealed in them and a
+tiny glass for tippling--though I suspect these are sold mostly to
+visitors.
+
+You are in the business part of Constantinople as soon as you leave the
+bridge--in the markets and shops, and presently in the bazaars. The
+streets are only a few feet wide, and are swarming with men and beasts
+of burden, yet carriages dash through, and the population falls out of
+the way, cursing the "Christian dogs," no doubt, in the case of
+tourists. Yet let a carriage but stop and there is eager attention on
+every hand--a lavish willingness to serve, to dance attendance, to
+grovel, to do anything that will bring return.
+
+The excursionist, in fact, presently gets an idea that these people are
+conducting a sort of continuous entertainment for his benefit--a
+permanent World's Fair Midway Plaisance, as it were, where curious wares
+and sights are arranged for his special diversion. He is hardly to be
+blamed for this notion. He sees every native ready to jump to serve
+him--to leave everything else for his pleasure. The shopkeeper will let
+a native customer wait and fume till doomsday as long as the tourist is
+even a prospect. The native piastre is nothing to him when American gold
+is in sight. That is what he lives for by day and dreams of by night. He
+will sweat for it, lie for it, steal for it, die for it. It is his life,
+his hope, his salvation. He will give everything but his immortal soul
+for the gold of the West, and he would give that too, if it would bring
+anything.
+
+Most places along the Mediterranean deal in mixed moneys, but compared
+with Constantinople the financial problem elsewhere is simple. Here the
+traveller's pocket is a medley of francs, lire, crowns, piastres,
+drachmas, marks, and American coins of various denominations. He tries
+feebly to keep track of table values, but it is no use. The crafty
+shopkeepers, who have all the world's monetary lore at their fingertips,
+rob him every time they make change, and the more he tries to figure the
+more muddled he gets, until he actually can't calculate the coin of his
+own realm.
+
+As for Turkish money, in my opinion it is worth nothing whatever. It is
+mostly a lot of tinware and plated stuff, and the plating is worn off,
+and the hieroglyphics, and it was never anything more than a lot of
+silly medals in the beginning. Whenever I get any of it I work it off on
+beggars as quickly as possible for baksheesh, and I always feel guilty,
+and look the other way and sing a little to forget.
+
+Nobody really knows what any of those Turkish metallic coins are
+supposed to be worth. One of them will pay for a shine, but then the
+shine isn't worth anything, either, so that is no basis of value. There
+is actually no legal tender in Turkey. How could there be, with a
+make-believe money like that?
+
+Speaking of bootblacks, they all sit in a row at the other end of the
+Galata bridge, and they go to sleep over your shoes and pretend to work
+on them and take off the polish you gave them yourself in the morning.
+They have curious-looking boxes, and their work is as nearly useless as
+any effort, if it is that, I have ever known.
+
+I have been trying for a page or two to say something more about the
+streets of Constantinople, and now I've forgotten what it was I wanted
+to say. Most of them are not streets at all, in fact, but alleys,
+wretched alleys--some of them roofed over--and as you drive through
+them your face gets all out of shape trying to fit itself to the sights
+and smells. I remember now; I wanted to mention the donkeys--the poor,
+patient little beasts of burden that plod through those thoroughfares,
+weighed down with great loads of brick and dirt and wood and every sort
+of heavy thing, enough to make a camel sway-backed, I should think. They
+are the gentlest creatures alive, and the most imposed upon. If Mohammed
+provided a heaven for the donkeys, I hope it isn't the one the Turks go
+to.
+
+Then there are the fountains--that is, the public watering-places. They
+are nearly all carved in relief and belong to an earlier period, when
+art here was worth something. Here and there is a modern one--gaudy,
+tinsel, wretched.
+
+But one has to stop a minute to remember that these old streets are not
+always occupied by the turbans and fezzes of the unspeakable Turk.
+Constantinople was Greek in the beginning, founded away back, six
+hundred years or more B.C., and named Byzantium, after one Byzas, its
+founder. The colony had started to settle several miles farther up the
+Golden Horn, when a crow came along and carried off a piece of their
+sacrificial meat. They were mad at first; but when they found he had
+dropped it over on Bosporus Point they concluded to take his judgment
+and settle there instead.
+
+Then came a good many changes. Persians and Greeks held the place by
+turns, and by and by it was allied to Rome. The Christian Emperor
+Constantine made it his capital about 328 A.D. and called it New Rome.
+But the people wouldn't have that title. Constantine had rebuilt the
+city, and they insisted on giving it his name. So Constantinople it
+became and remained--the names Galata, Pera, Stamboul, and Skutari
+(accent on the "Sku") being merely divisions, the last-named on the
+Asiatic side.
+
+It was not until eleven hundred years after Constantine that the
+Turkomans swarmed in and possessed themselves of what had become a
+tottering empire. So the Turkish occupation is comparatively
+recent--only since 1453.
+
+Still, that is a good while ago, when one considers what has been done
+elsewhere. Christopher Columbus was playing marbles in Genoa, or helping
+his father comb wool, then. America was a place of wigwams--a habitation
+of Indian tribes. We have done a good deal in the four and a half
+centuries since--more than the Turk will do in four and a half million
+years. The Turk is not an express train. He is not even a slow freight.
+He is not a train at all, but an old caboose on the hind end of day
+before yesterday. By the way, I know now why these old cities have still
+older cities buried under them. They never clean the streets, and a city
+gets entirely covered up at last with dirt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been wanting to speak of the dogs of Constantinople ever since I
+began this chapter. They have been always in my mind, but I wanted to
+work off my ill-nature, first, on the Turk. For I have another feeling
+for the dogs--a friendly feeling--a sympathetic feeling--an affectionate
+feeling.
+
+Every morning at four o'clock the dogs of Constantinople turn their
+faces toward Mecca and howl their heartbreak to the sky. At least, I
+suppose they turn toward Mecca--that being the general habit here when
+one has anything official to give out. I know they howl and bark and
+make such a disturbance as is heard nowhere else on earth. In America,
+two or three dogs will keep a neighborhood awake, but imagine a vast
+city of dogs all barking at once--forty or fifty dogs to the block,
+counting the four sides! Do you think you could sleep during that
+morning orison? If you could, then you are sound-proof.
+
+I have said that I have an affection for the dogs, but not at that hour.
+It develops later, when things have quieted down, and I have had
+breakfast and am considering them over the ship's side. There is a band
+of them owns this section of the water-front, and they are worth
+studying.
+
+They are not as unsightly and as wretched as I expected to find them.
+Life for them is not a path of roses, but neither is it a trail of
+absolute privation. They live on refuse, and there is plenty of refuse.
+They are in fair condition, therefore, as to flesh, and they do not look
+particularly unhappy, though they are dirty enough, and sometimes mangy
+and moth-eaten and tufty; but then the Turks themselves are all of these
+things, and why should the dogs be otherwise?
+
+The type of these dogs impresses me. They have reverted to the original
+pattern--they are wolf-dogs. They vary only in color--usually some tone
+of grizzly gray--and not widely in that. They have returned to race--to
+the old wild breed that made his bed in the grass and revolved three
+times before he was ready to lie down. One might expect them to be ugly
+and dangerous, but they are not. They are the kindest, gentlest members
+of the dog family notwithstanding the harsh treatment they receive, and
+the most intelligent. No one really human can study them without
+sympathy and admiration.
+
+I have watched these dogs a good deal since we came here, and a lady of
+Constantinople, the wife of a foreign minister, has added largely to my
+information on the subject.
+
+They are quite wonderful in many ways. They have divided themselves into
+groups or squads, and their territory into districts, with borders
+exactly defined. They know just about how much substance each district
+will supply and the squads are not allowed to grow. There is a captain
+to each of these companies, and his rule is absolute. When the garbage
+from each house is brought out and dumped into the street, he oversees
+the distribution and keeps order. He keeps it, too. There is no fighting
+and very little discord, unless some outlaw dog from a neighboring group
+attempts to make an incursion. Then there is a wild outbreak, and if the
+dog escapes undamaged he is lucky.
+
+The captain of a group is a sultan with the power of life and death over
+his subjects. When puppies come along he designates the few--the very
+few--that are to live, and one mother nurses several of the reduced
+litters--the different mothers taking turns. When a dog gets too old to
+be useful in the strenuous round--when he is no longer valuable to the
+band--he is systematically put out of the way by starvation. A day comes
+when the captain issues some kind of an edict that he is no longer to
+have food. From that moment, until his death, not a morsel passes his
+lips. With longing eyes he looks at the others eating, but he makes no
+attempt to join them. Now and again a bit of something falls his way.
+The temptation is too strong--he reaches toward the morsel. The captain,
+who overlooks nothing, gives a low growl. The dying creature shrinks
+back without a murmur. He knows the law. Perhaps he, too, was once a
+captain.
+
+The minister's wife told me that she had tried to feed one of those
+dying dogs, but that even when the food was placed in front of him he
+would only look pleadingly at the captain and refuse to touch it. She
+brought him inside, at last, where he was no longer under that deadly
+surveillance. He ate then, but lived only a little while. Perhaps it was
+too late; perhaps the decree was not to be disobeyed, even there.
+
+As a rule, it is unwise to show kindness or the least attention to these
+dogs, she said. The slightest word or notice unlocks such a store-house
+of gratitude and heart-hunger in those poor creatures that one can never
+venture near that neighborhood again without being fairly overwhelmed
+with devotion. Speak a word to one of them and he will desert his
+companions and follow you for miles.
+
+The minister's wife told how once a male member of her household had
+shown some mark of attention to one of the dogs of their neighborhood
+group. A day or two later she set out for a walk, carrying her parasol,
+holding it downward. Suddenly she felt it taken from her hand. Looking
+down, she saw a dog walking by her side, carrying it. It was the favored
+animal, trying to make return to any one who came out of that heavenly
+house.
+
+She told me how in the winter the dogs pile up in pyramids to keep warm,
+and how those underneath, when they have smothered as long as they can,
+will work out and get to the top of the heap and let the others have a
+chance to get warm and smothered too.
+
+Once, when some excavations were going on in her neighborhood the dogs
+of several bands, made kin by a vigorous touch of nature, cold, had
+packed themselves into a sort of tunnel which the workmen had made. One
+dog who had come a little late was left outside. He made one or two
+efforts to get a position, but it was no use. He reflected upon the
+situation and presently set up a loud barking. That was too much for
+those other dogs. They came tumbling out to see what had happened, but
+before they had a chance to find out, the late arrival had slipped
+quietly in and established himself in the warmest place.
+
+Once a pasha visited a certain neighborhood in Pera, and the dogs kept
+him awake. In his irritation he issued an order that the dogs of that
+environment should be killed. The order was carried out, and for a day
+and a night there was silence there. But then the word had gone forth
+that a section of rich territory had been vacated, and there was a rush
+for it that was like the occupation of the Oklahoma strip.
+
+There was trouble, too, in establishing the claim and electing officers.
+No such excitement and commotion and general riot had ever been known in
+that street before. It lasted two days and nights. Then everything was
+peaceable enough. Captains had fought their way to a scarred and limping
+victory. Claims had been duly surveyed and distributed. The pasha had
+retired permanently from the neighborhood.
+
+It is against the law for the ordinary citizen to kill one of the dogs.
+They are scavengers, and the law protects them. One may kick and beat
+and scald and maim them, and the Turk has a habit of doing these things;
+but he must not kill them--not unless he is a pasha. And, after all, the
+dogs own Constantinople--the pariah dogs, I mean; there are few of the
+other kind. One seldom sees a pet dog on the streets. The pariah dogs do
+not care for him. They do not attack him, they merely set up a racket
+which throws that pet dog into a fever and fills him with an abiding
+love of home. But I am dwelling too long on this subject. I enjoy
+writing about these wonderful dogs. They interest me.
+
+Perhaps the "Young Turks" will improve Constantinople. Already they have
+made the streets safer; perhaps they will make them cleaner. Also, they
+may improve the Turkish postal service. That would be a good place to
+begin, I should think. Constantinople has a native post-office, but it
+isn't worth anything. Anybody who wants a letter to arrive sends it
+through one of the foreign post-offices, of which each European nation
+supports one on its own account. To trust a letter to the Turkish
+post-office is to bid it a permanent good-bye. The officials will open
+it for money first, and soak off the stamp afterward. If you inquire
+about it, they will tell you it was probably seditionary and destroyed
+by the sultan's orders. Perhaps that will not be so any more. The
+sultan's late force of twenty thousand spies has been disbanded, and
+things to-day are on a much more liberal basis. Two royal princes came
+aboard our vessel to-day, unattended except by an old marshal--something
+which has never happened here before.
+
+These princes have been virtually in prison all their lives. Until very
+recently they had never left the palace except under guard. They had
+never been aboard a vessel until they came aboard the _Kurfuerst_, and
+though grown men, they were like children in their manner and their
+curiosity. They had never seen a type-writer. They had never seen a
+steam-engine. Our chief engineer took them down among the machinery and
+they were delighted. They greeted everybody, saluted everybody, and
+drove away at last in their open victoria drawn by two white horses,
+with no outriders, no guards, no attendants of any kind except the old
+marshal--a thing which only a little while ago would not have been
+dreamed of as possible.
+
+Perhaps there is hope for Turkey, after all.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+ABDUL HAMID GOES TO PRAYER
+
+
+It was on our second day in Constantinople that we saw the
+Selamlik--that is, the Sultan Abdul Hamid II. on his way to prayer. It
+was Friday, which is the Mohammedan Sunday, and the sultan, according to
+his custom, went to the mosque in state. The ceremony was, in fact, a
+grand military review, with twenty-five thousand soldiers drawn up on
+the hillside surrounding the royal mosque, and many bands of music; the
+whole gay and resplendent with the varied uniforms of different
+brigades, the trappings of high officials, the flutter of waving
+banners, the splendor of royal cortege--all the fuss and fanfare of this
+fallen king.[3]
+
+For Abdul Hamid is no longer monarch except by sufferance. A tyrant who
+in his time has ordered the massacre of thousands; has imprisoned and
+slain members of his own family; has sent a multitude to the Bosporus
+and into exile; has maintained in this enlightened day a court and a
+rule of the Middle Ages--he is only a figurehead now, likely to be
+removed at a moment's warning.
+
+The Young Turk is in the saddle. Hamid's force of twenty thousand spies
+has been disbanded. Men-of-war lie in the Bosporus just under Yildiz,
+ready to open fire on that royal palace at the first sign of any
+disturbance there. The tottering old man is still allowed his royal
+guard, his harem, and this weekly ceremonial and display to keep up a
+semblance of imperial power. But he is only a make-believe king; the
+people know that, and he knows it, too, best of all.
+
+We had special invitations from the palace and a special enclosure from
+which to view the ceremony. We had cakes, too, and sherbet served while
+we waited--by the sultan's orders, it was said--but I didn't take any. I
+thought Abdul might have heard I didn't care for him and put poison in
+mine. That would be like him.
+
+I was tempted, though, for we had driven a long way through the blinding
+dust. It was hot there, and we had to stand up and keep on standing up
+while all that great review got together and arranged and rearranged
+itself; while officials and black Nubian eunuchs, those sexless slaves
+of the harem, ran up and down, and men sanded the track--that is, the
+road over which his majesty was to drive--and did a hundred other things
+to consume time.
+
+One does not hurry the Orient--one waits on it. That is a useful
+maxim--I'm glad I invented it. I said it over about a hundred times
+while we stood there waiting for Abdul Hamid, who was dallying with
+certain favorites, like as not, and remembering us not at all.
+
+It was worth seeing, though. Brigade after brigade swung by to the weird
+music of their bands--billow after billow of brown, red, and blue
+uniforms. The hillside became a perfect storm of fezzes; the tide of
+spectators rose till its waves touched the housetops.
+
+Still we waited and watched the clock on the mosque. Nobody can tell
+time by a Turkish clock, but there was some comfort in watching it.
+Presently an informing person at my side explained that Turkish
+chronology is run on an altogether different basis from ours. There are
+only three hundred and fifty-four days in a Turkish year, he said, which
+makes the seasons run out a good deal faster, so that it is usually
+about year after next in Turkey; but as it is only about day before
+yesterday by the clock, the balance is kept fairly even.
+
+He was a very entertaining person. Referring to the music, he said that
+once the sultan's special brass band had played before him so pleasingly
+that he ordered all their instruments filled with gold, which was well
+enough, except for the piccolo-player, who said: "Sire, I am left out of
+this reward." "Never mind," said the sultan, "your turn will come." And
+it did, next day, for the band played so badly that the sultan roared
+out: "Ram all their instruments down their throats," which was
+impossible, of course, except in the case of the piccolo-player.
+
+My entertainer said that formerly cameras were allowed at the Selamlik,
+but that an incident occurred which resulted in prohibiting cameras and
+all suspicious articles. He said that a gentleman engaged a carriage
+for the Selamlik, and explained to the driver that he had invented a
+wonderful new camera--one that would take pictures in all the
+colors--and instructed him just how to work the machine.
+
+The gentleman had to make a train, he said, and couldn't wait for the
+sultan to arrive, but if the driver would press the button when the
+sultan reached a certain place the picture would take, after which the
+driver could bring the camera to the Pera Palace Hotel on a certain day
+and get a hundred piastres, a sum larger than the driver had ever owned
+at one time. Then the gentleman left in a good deal of a hurry, and the
+driver told all the other drivers about his good-fortune while they
+waited; and by and by, when the sultan came, and got just to the place
+where the gentleman had said, the driver pressed the button, and blew a
+hole seventy-five feet wide and thirty feet deep right on that spot, and
+it rained drivers and horses and fezzes and things for seven minutes. It
+didn't damage the sultan any, but it gave him a permanent distaste for
+cameras and other suspicious objects.
+
+Laura, age fourteen, who had been listening to the story, said:
+
+"Did they do anything to the driver who did it?"
+
+"Yes; they gathered him up in a cigar box and gave him a funeral. No,
+the man didn't call for the camera."
+
+I am sorry I have kept the reader waiting for the Selamlik, but the
+sultan is to blame. One may not hurry a sultan, and one must fill in the
+time, somehow.
+
+Some carriages go by at last, and enter the mosque enclosure, but they
+do not contain the sultan, only some of his favorite wives, with those
+long black eunuchs running behind. Then there is a carriage with a
+little boy in it--the sultan's favorite son, it is said--the most
+beautiful child I ever saw.
+
+A blare of trumpets--all the bayonets straight up--a gleaming forest of
+them. Oh, what a bad time to fall out of a balloon!
+
+A shout from the troops--a huzzah, timed and perfunctory, but general.
+Then men in uniform, walking ahead; a carriage with a splendid driver; a
+pale, bearded, hook-nosed old man with a tired, rather vacant face. Here
+and there he touches his forehead and his lips with his fingers, waving
+the imperial salute. For a moment every eye of that vast concourse is
+upon him--he is the one important bauble of that splendid setting. Then
+he has passed between the gates and is gone.
+
+Thus it was that Sultan Abdul Hamid attended mosque. It seemed a good
+deal of fuss to make over an old man going to prayer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We drove from the Selamlik to the Dancing Dervishes. I have always heard
+of them and now I have seen them. I am not sorry to have it over.
+
+Their headquarters are in a weather-beaten-frame-barn of a place, and we
+stood outside for a long time before the doors were open. Inside it was
+hot and close and crowded, and everybody twisted this way and that and
+stood up on things to get a look. I held two women together on one
+chair--they were standing up--and I expected to give out any minute and
+turn loose a disaster that would break up the show. There wasn't
+anything to see, either; not a thing, for hours.
+
+We were in a sort of circular gallery and the dancing-floor was below.
+We could see squatted there a ring of men--a dozen or so bowed, solemn,
+abstracted high priests in gowns of different colors and tall fezzes.
+These were the dervishes, no doubt, but they didn't do anything--not a
+thing--and we didn't care to stare at them and at the dancing-floor and
+the rest of the suffering audience forever.
+
+Then we noticed in our gallery a little reserved section with some more
+abstracted men in gowns and fezzes, and after a long time--as much as a
+thousand years, I should think--there was an almost imperceptible
+movement in this reserved compartment, and one of the elect produced
+some kind of reed and began to blow a strain that must have been born
+when the woods were temples and the winds were priests--it was so
+weirdly, mournfully enthralling. I could have listened to that music and
+forgotten all the world if I hadn't been busy holding those two women on
+that chair.
+
+The perspiration ran down and my joints petrified while that music
+droned on and on. Then there was another diversion: a man got up and
+began to sing. I don't know why they picked that particular
+man--certainly not for his voice. It was Oriental singing--a sort of
+chanting monotone in a nasal pitch. Yet there was something wild and
+seductive about it--something mystical--and I liked it well enough.
+Only I didn't want it to go on forever, situated as I was. I wanted the
+dancing to begin, and pretty soon, too. It didn't, however. Nothing
+begins soon in the Orient.
+
+But by-and-by, when that songster had wailed for as much as a week,
+those high priests on the dancing-floor began to show signs of life.
+They moved a little; they got up; they went through some slow
+evolutions--to limber themselves, perhaps--then they began to whirl.
+
+The dance is a religious rite, and it is supposed to represent the
+planets revolving about the sun. The dancers serve an apprenticeship of
+one thousand and one days, and they can whirl and keep on whirling
+forever without getting dizzy. The central figure, who represents the
+sun, has had the most practice, no doubt, for he revolves just twice as
+fast as the planets, who are ranged in two circles around him. His
+performance is really wonderful. I did not think so much of the others,
+except as to their ability to stand upright. I thought I could revolve
+as fast as they did, myself, and I would have given four dollars for a
+little freedom just then to try it.
+
+Would that constellation never run down? The satellites whirled on and
+on, and the high priest in the middle either got faster or I imagined
+it. Then at last they stopped--just stopped--that was all; only I let go
+of those two women then and clawed my way to fresh air.
+
+We went to the bazaars after that. There is where the _Kurfuerster_ finds
+real bliss. He may talk learnedly of historic sites and rave over superb
+ruins and mosques and such things, when you drag him in carriages to
+see them. But only say the word bazaar to him and he will walk three
+miles to find it. To price the curious things of the East; to barter and
+beat down; to walk away and come back a dozen times; to buy at last at a
+third of the asking price--such is the passion that presently gets hold
+of the irresponsible tourist who lives on one ship and has a permanent
+state-room for his things.
+
+You should see some of those state-rooms! Jars, costumes, baskets, rugs,
+draperies, statuary--piled everywhere, hung everywhere, stowed
+everywhere--why, we could combine the stuff on this ship and open a
+floating bazaar that would be the wonder of the world.
+
+The bazaars of Constantinople are crowded together and roofed over, and
+there are narrow streets and labyrinthine lanes. One can buy anything
+there--anything Eastern: ornaments, inlaid work, silks, curious weapons,
+picture postals (what _did_ those _Quaker City_ pilgrims do without
+them?), all the wares of the Orient--he can get a good deal for a little
+if he is patient and unyielding--and he will be cheated every time he
+makes change. Never mind; one's experience is always worth something,
+and this particular tariff is not likely to be high.
+
+We bought several things in Constantinople, but we did not buy any
+confections. The atmosphere did not seem suited to bonbons, and the
+places where such things were sold did not look inviting. Laura
+inspected the assortment and decided that the best Turkish Delight is
+made in America, and that Broadway is plenty far enough east for
+nougat. In one bazaar they had a marvellous collection of royal jewels:
+swords with incrusted handles; caskets "worth a king's ransom"--simply a
+mass of rubies, emeralds, and diamonds--half a barrel of such things, at
+least, but we didn't buy any of those goods, either. We would have done
+so, of course, only they were not for sale.
+
+We called at the bazaar of Far-away Moses, but he wasn't there. He died
+only a little while ago, and has gone to that grand bazaar of delight
+which the Mohammedans have selected as their heaven.
+
+As usual, Laura and I were the last to leave. We were still pulling over
+some things when our driver, whom we call Suleiman because he has such a
+holy, villanous look, came suddenly to the entrance, waving frantically.
+We started then and piled into our carriage. The rest of our party were
+already off, and we set out helter-skelter after them, Suleiman probably
+believing that the ship had its anchors up ready to sail.
+
+We were doing very well when right in front of a great arch one of our
+horses fell down. We had a crowd in a minute, and as it was getting dusk
+I can't say that I liked the situation. But Suleiman got the horse on
+his feet somehow, and we pushed along and once more entered that
+diabolical Street of Smells. It had been bad day by day, but nothing to
+what it was now. There were no lights, except an oil-lamp here and
+there; the place was swarming with humanity and dogs, general vileness
+permeating everything. The woman who thought she had died and gone to
+hell could be certain of it here.
+
+It seemed that we would never get out of that street. We had to go
+slower, and the horrible gully was eternal in its length. How far ahead
+our party was we did not know. We were entirely alone in that unholy
+neighborhood with our faithful Suleiman, who looked like a cutthroat,
+anyhow. I wished he didn't look like that, and Laura said quietly that
+she never expected to see the light of another dawn.
+
+Bumpety-bump--bark, howl, clatter, darkness, stench--rolling and
+pitching through that mess, and then, heavenly sight--a vision of
+lights, water, the end of the Galata bridge!
+
+We made our way through the evening jam and the wild bedlam at the other
+end, crossing a crimson tide of fezzes, to reach the one clean place we
+have seen in Constantinople--that is, the ship. The ship is clean--too
+clean, we think, when we hear them scrubbing and mopping and thumping
+the decks at four o'clock in the morning, just about dog-howling time.
+Which brings me to a specimen of our ship German--American
+German--produced by a gentle soul named Fosdick, of Ohio. He used it on
+the steward after being kept awake by the ship-cleaning. This is what he
+said:
+
+"Vas in damnation is das noise? How can I schlaff mit das hellgefired
+donner-wetter going on oben mine head?"
+
+That is the sort of thing we can do when we get really stirred up. It is
+effective, too. There was no unseemly noise this morning.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] Note--a year later.--The Selamlik here described was among the last
+of such occasions. A few weeks later, in April, 1909, Abdul Hamid
+regained a brief ascendancy, ordered the terrible massacres of Adana,
+and on April 27th was permanently dethroned. He was succeeded by his
+brother, Mehmed V., who attends mosque with little or no ceremony. Abdul
+meantime has retired to Salonica, where he is living quietly--as quietly
+as one may with seventeen favorite wives and the imminent prospect of
+assassination.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+LOOKING DOWN ON YILDIZ
+
+
+Heretofore, during our stay here, whenever any one happened to mention
+the less attractive aspects of Constantinople, I have said:
+
+"Yes, the city is pretty bad, but I'll wager the country is a dream.
+Remember Algiers and her suburban villas? It will be the same here."
+
+I do not say that any more, now that we have been to the country. We
+went over to Skutari (Asiatic Constantinople) this morning, and took
+carriages to Bulgurlu Mountain, which overlooks all the city and a vast
+stretch of country. It is a good view, but it should be, considering
+what it costs to get there--in wear and tear, I mean.
+
+Of all villanous roads, those outside Skutari are the most depraved.
+They are not roads at all, but just washes and wallows and ditches and
+stone gullies. I have seen bad roads in Virginia--roads surveyed by
+George Washington, and never touched since--but they were a dream of
+luxury as compared with these of Turkey. Our carriages billowed and
+bobbed and pitched and humped themselves until I got out and walked to
+keep from being lamed for life.
+
+And then the houses--the villas I had expected to see; dear me, how can
+I picture those cheap, ugly, unpainted, overdecorated architectural
+crimes? They are wooden and belong to the jig-saw period gone mad. They
+suggest an owner who has been too busy saving money for a home to
+acquire any taste; who has spent his savings for lumber and trimmings
+and has nothing left for paint. Still, he managed to reserve enough to
+put iron bars on his windows--that is, on part of the house--the
+harem--every man becoming his own jailer, as it were. I remarked:
+
+"I suppose that is to keep the neighbors from stealing their wives."
+
+But the Horse-Doctor--wiser and more observant--said:
+
+"No, it is to keep a neighbor from breaking in and leaving another."
+
+Standing on the top of Bulgurlu--looking down on the Bosporus and the
+royal palaces--the wife of a foreign minister told us something of the
+history that has been written there:
+
+When Abdul Aziz, in 1876, became Abdul "as was"[4] (his veins were
+opened with a penknife, I believe), one Murad, his nephew, an educated
+and travelled prince, came into power. But Murad was for
+progress--bridges and railroads--so Murad retired to Cheragan Palace,
+where for thirty-two years he sat at a window and looked out on a world
+in which he had no part, while Abdul Hamid II. reigned in his stead.
+Murad was wise and gentle, and did not reproach Abdul, who came to him
+now and again for advice concerning matters of state.
+
+But Murad was fond of watching the people from his window--excursion
+parties such as ours, and the like--and these in turn used to look up
+at Murad's window; which things in time came to Abdul Hamid's ears. Then
+Abdul decided that this indulgence was not good for Murad--nor for the
+people. Thirty-two years was already too long for that sort of thing. So
+Murad's face disappeared from the window, and it was given out that he
+had died--the bulletin did not say what of, but merely mentioned that it
+had been a "general death"--that is to say, a natural death, under the
+circumstances--the kind of death a retired Sultan is likely to die. And
+Abdul mourned for Murad many days, and gave him a costly funeral.
+
+That was Abdul's way. He was always a good brother--always a generous
+soul--according to a guide-book published in Constantinople during the
+time when there were twenty thousand secret agents inspecting such
+things. The author of that book wanted those twenty thousand secret
+agents to tell Abdul how good and gentle the book said he was;
+otherwise, the modest and humble Abdul might not remember. Besides, that
+author did not wish to disappear from among his friends and be sewed up
+in a sack and dropped into the Bosporus some quiet evening. But I
+wander-- I always wander.
+
+Abdul Hamid is said to be affectionate with his family--all his
+family--and quick--very quick--that is to say, impulsive. He is a crack
+shot, too, and keeps pistols on his dressing-table. One day he saw one
+of his little sons--or it may have been one of his little daughters (it
+isn't always easy to tell them apart, when they are so plentiful and
+dress a good deal alike), but anyway this was a favorite of Abdul's--he
+saw this child handling one of his pistols, perhaps playfully pointing
+it in his direction.
+
+Hamid didn't tell the child to put the weapon down, and then lecture
+him. No, he couldn't scold the child, he was too impulsive for that--and
+quick, as I have mentioned. He drew a revolver of his own and shot the
+child dead. There were rumors of plots floating around the palace just
+then, and Hamid wasn't taking any chances. It must have made his heart
+bleed to have to punish the child in that sudden way.
+
+But by-and-by the times were out of joint for sultans. A spirit of
+discontent was spreading--there was a cry for freer government. Enver
+Bey and Niazi Bey, those two young officers whose names are being
+perpetuated by male babies in every Turkish household, disguised
+themselves as newsboys or bootblacks, and going among the people of the
+streets whispered the gospel of freedom. Then one day came the upheaval
+of which all the world has read. Abdul Hamid one morning, looking out of
+his window in Yildiz Palace, saw, lying in the Bosporus just below, the
+men-of-war which all the years of his reign had been turning to rust and
+wormwood in the Golden Horn.
+
+Abdul did not believe it at first. He thought he was just having one of
+those bad dreams that had pestered him now and then since spies and
+massacres had become unpopular. He pinched himself and rubbed his eyes,
+but the ships stayed there. Then he sent for the Grand Vizier. (At
+least, I suppose it was the Grand Vizier--that is what a sultan
+generally sends for in a case like that.) When he arrived the Sultan
+was fingering his artillery and looking dangerous.
+
+"What in h---- that is, Allah be praised, but why, sirrah, are those
+ships lying down there?" he roared.
+
+The G. V. was not full of vain knowledge.
+
+"I--I really don't know, Your Majesty," he said, soothingly. "I will go
+and see."
+
+He was standing near the door and dodged as he went out. He did not come
+back. When he had inquired about the ships he decided not to seek Abdul
+himself, but to send a man--a cheap man--to tell him about it. This was
+just a dull fellow with not much politeness and no imagination.
+
+"The ships are there by the order of the Minister of Marine, Your
+Majesty," he said.
+
+Abdul was so astonished that he forgot to slay the fellow.
+
+"Bring the Minister of Marine!" he gasped, when at last he could catch
+his breath.
+
+The Minister of Marine came--a new minister--one of the Young Turk
+Party. He was polite, but not upset by the Sultan's emotion. When Abdul
+demanded the reason why the old ships had been furbished up and brought
+down into the Bosporus, he replied that they were there by his orders,
+and added:
+
+"We think they look better there, Your Majesty, as in the old days."
+
+"But, by the beard of the Prophet, I will not have them there! Take them
+away!"
+
+"Your Majesty, it grieves me to seem discourteous, not to say rude, but
+those ships are to remain at their present anchorage. It grieves me
+still further to appear to be firm, not to say harsh, but if there is
+any show of resistance in this neighborhood they have orders to open
+fire on Your Majesty's palace."
+
+Abdul took a chair and sat down. His jaw dropped, and he looked at the
+Minister of Marine a good while without seeming to see him. Then he got
+up and tottered over to the window and gazed out on those ships lying
+just below, on the Bosporus. By-and-by, he went to a little ornamental
+table and took a pen and some paper and wrote an order in this wise:
+
+     Owing to my declining years and my great burdens of
+     responsibility, it is my wish that in future all matters
+     pertaining to the army and navy be under the supervision of
+     the Secretary of War and the Minister of Marine.
+
+  ABDUL HAMID, KAHN II.
+  Son of the Prophet--Shadow of God, etc., etc.
+
+At all events, that was the purport of it. In reality, it was a
+succession of wriggly marks which only a Moslem could read. Never mind,
+it was a graceful surrender.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a wonderful old Moslem cemetery near Bulgurlu--one of the
+largest in the world and the most thickly planted. It is favored by
+Moslems because it is on the side of the city nearest Mecca, and they
+are lying there three deep and have overflowed into the roads and
+byways. Their curiously shaped and elaborately carved headstones stand
+as thick as grain--some of them crowned with fezzes--some with suns--all
+of them covered with emblems and poetry and passages from the Koran.
+They are tumbled this way and that; they are lying everywhere along the
+road; they have been built into the wayside walls.
+
+[Illustration: I WANTED TO CARRY AWAY ONE OF THOSE TOMBSTONES]
+
+I wanted to carry away one of those tombstones--one of the old ones--and
+I would have done it if I had known enough Moslem to corrupt the driver.
+A thing like that would be worth it--adding to one's collection, I mean.
+The palace was full of great cypresses, too--tall, funereal
+trees--wonderfully impressive and beautiful.
+
+We drove back to Skutari and there saw our driver Suleiman for the last
+time. I had already tipped him at the end of each day, but I suppose he
+expected something rather unusual as a farewell token. Unfortunately, I
+was low in fractional currency. I scraped together all I had left--a few
+piastres--and handed them to him and turned quickly away. There came a
+sudden explosion as of a bomb. I did not look to see what it was--I
+knew. It was the bursting of Suleiman's heart.
+
+Up the Golden Horn in the afternoon, as far as the Sweet Waters of
+Europe. It is a beautiful sail, and there is a mosque where the ceremony
+of conferring the sword on a new Sultan is performed; also, a fine view
+across the Sweet Waters, with Jewish graveyards whitening the distant
+hills. But there was nothing of special remark--we being a little tired
+of the place by this time--except the homecoming.
+
+There were _caiques_ lying about the little steamer-landing when we were
+ready to return, and Laura and I decided to take one of these down the
+Horn to the ship. The _caique_ is a curiously shaped canoe-sort of a
+craft, and you have to get in carefully and sit still. But once in and
+seated, it moves as silently and smoothly as a gliding star.
+
+It was sunset, and the Golden Horn was true to its name. Ships at
+anchor, barges drifting up and down, were aglow with the sheen of
+evening--the water a tawny, molten flood, the still atmosphere like an
+impalpable dust of gold. _Caiques_ carrying merchants to their homes
+somewhere along the upper shores were burnished with the aureate hue.
+Domes and minarets caught and reflected the wonder of it--the Galata
+bridge ahead of us had become such a span as might link the shores of
+the River of Peace.
+
+Once more Constantinople was a dream of Paradise--a vision of
+enchantment--a city of illusion.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] Ship-joke.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+EPHESUS: THE CITY THAT WAS
+
+
+Like Oriental harbors generally, Smyrna from the sea has a magic charm.
+When we slowly sailed down a long reach of water between quiet hills and
+saw the ancient city rising from the morning mist, we had somehow a
+feeling that we had reached a hitherto undiscovered port--a mirage,
+perhaps, of some necromancer's spell.
+
+We landed, found our train, and went joggling away through the spring
+landscape, following the old highway that from time immemorial has led
+from Ephesus to Smyrna--the highway which long ago St. Paul travelled,
+and St. John, too, no doubt, and the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen. For
+all these journeyed between Ephesus and Smyrna in their time, and the
+ancient road would be crowded with countless camel trains and laden
+donkeys then; also with the wheeled vehicles of that period--cars and
+chariots and cages of wild animals for the games--and there would be
+elephants, too, gaudily caparisoned, carrying some rich potentate of the
+East and his retinue--a governor, perhaps, or a king. It was a mighty
+thoroughfare in those older days and may be still, though it is no
+longer crowded, and we did not notice any kings.
+
+We did notice some Reprobates--the ones we have always with us. They
+sat just across the aisle, engaged in their usual edifying discussion as
+to the identity of the historic sites we were supposed to be passing.
+Finally they got into a particularly illuminating dispute as to the
+period of St. Paul's life and ministrations. It began by the Apostle
+(our Apostle) casually remarking that St. Paul had lived about
+twenty-one hundred years ago.
+
+It was a mild remark--innocent enough in its trifling inaccuracy of two
+or three centuries--but it disturbed the Colonel, who has fallen into
+the guide-book habit, and is set up with the knowledge thereof.
+
+"Look here," he said, "if I knew as little as you do about such things
+I'd restrain the desire to give out information before company."
+
+The Apostle was undisturbed by this sarcasm. He folded his hands across
+his comfortable forward elevation and smiled in his angel way.
+
+"Oh, you think so," he said placidly. "Well, you think like a camel's
+hump. You never heard of St. Paul till you started on this trip. I used
+to study about him at Sunday-school when a mere child."
+
+"Yes, you did! as a child! Why, you old lobscouse" (lobscouse is an
+article on the _Kurfuerst_ bill of fare) "you never saw the inside of a
+Sunday-school. You heard somebody last night say something about
+twenty-one hundred years ago, and with your genius for getting facts
+mixed you saddled that date on St. Paul."
+
+The Colonel turned for corroboration to the Horse-Doctor, who regarded
+critically the outlines of the Apostle, which for convenience required
+an entire seat; then, speaking thoughtfully:
+
+"It isn't worth while to notice the remarks of a person who looks like
+that. Why, he's all malformed. He'll probably explode before we reach
+Ephesus."
+
+I felt sorry for the Apostle, and was going over to sit with him, only
+there wasn't room, and just then somebody noticed a camel train--the
+first we have seen--huge creatures heavily loaded and plodding along on
+the old highway. This made a diversion. Then there was another camel
+train, and another. Then came a string of donkeys--all laden with the
+wares of the East going to Smyrna. The lagging Oriental day was awake;
+the old road was still alive, after all.
+
+Like the first "Innocents," we had brought a carload or so of
+donkeys--four-legged donkeys--from Smyrna, and I think they were the
+same ones, from their looks. They were aged and patchy, and they filled
+the bill in other ways. They wrung our hearts with their sad, patient
+faces and their decrepitude, and they exasperated us with their
+indifference to our desires.
+
+I suppose excursion parties look pretty much alike, and that the _Quaker
+City_ pilgrims forty-two years ago looked a good deal like ours as we
+strung away down the valley toward the ancient city. I hope they did not
+look any worse than ours. To see long-legged men and stout ladies
+perched on the backs of those tiny asses, in rickety saddles that feel
+as if they would slip (and do slip if one is not careful), may be
+diverting enough, but it is not pretty. If the donkey stays in the
+middle of the narrow, worn pathway, it is very well; but if he goes to
+experimenting and wandering off over the rocks, then look out. You can't
+steer him with the single remnant of rope on his halter (he has no
+bridle), and he pitches a good deal when he gets off his course. Being a
+tall person, I was closed up like a grasshopper, and felt fearfully
+top-heavy. Laura, age fourteen, kept behind me--commenting on my
+appearance and praying for my overthrow.
+
+It was a good way to the ruins--the main ruins--though in reality there
+were ruins everywhere: old mosques, gray with age and half-buried in the
+soil--a thousand years old, but young compared with the more ancient
+city; crumbling Roman aqueducts leading away to the mountains--old even
+before the mosques were built, but still new when Ephesus was already
+hoary with antiquity; broken columns sticking everywhere out of the
+weeds and grass--scarred, crumbling, and moss-grown, though still not of
+that first, far, unrecorded period.
+
+But by-and-by we came to mighty walls of stone--huge abutments rising
+from the marshy plain--and these were really old. The Phoenicians may
+have laid them in some far-off time, but tradition goes still farther
+back and declares they were laid by giants--the one-eyed kind, the
+Cyclops--when all this marsh was sea. These huge abutments were piers in
+that ancient day. A blue harbor washed them, and the merchant ships of
+mighty Ephesus lay alongside and loaded for every port.
+
+That was a long time ago. Nobody can say when these stone piers were
+built, but Diana and Apollo were both born in Ephesus, and there was
+probably a city here even then. What we know is that by the beginning of
+the Christian era Ephesus was a metropolis with a temple so amazing, a
+theatre so vast and a library so beautiful that we stand amid the
+desolation to-day, helplessly trying to reconstruct the proportions of a
+community which could require these things; could build them and then
+vanish utterly, leaving not a living trace behind.
+
+For nobody to-day lives in Ephesus--not a soul. A wandering shepherd may
+build his camp-fire here, or an Arab who is tilling a bit of ground; but
+his home will be in Ayasaluk, several miles away, not here. Once the
+greatest port of trade in western Asia, Ephesus is voiceless and vacant
+now, except when a party like ours comes to disturb its solitude and
+trample among its forlorn glories.
+
+There is no lack of knowledge concerning certain of the structures
+here--the more recent ones, we may call them, though they were built two
+thousand years ago. There are descriptions everywhere, and some of them
+are as cleanly cut to-day as they were when the tool left them. This
+library was built in honor of Augustus Caesar and Livia, and it must have
+been a veritable marble vision. Here in its corners the old students sat
+and pored over books and precious documents that filled these crumbling
+recesses and the long-vanished shelves. St. Paul doubtless came here to
+study during the three years of his residence, and before him St. John,
+for he wrote his gospel in Ephesus, and would be likely to seek out the
+place of books. And Mary would walk with him to the door sometimes, I
+think, and Mary of Magdala, for these three passed their final days in
+Ephesus, and would be drawn close together by their sacred bond.
+
+The great theatre where St. Paul battled with the wild beasts stands
+just across the way. It seated twenty-five thousand, and its stone
+benches stretch upward to the sky. The steep marble flight that carries
+you from tier to tier is there to-day exactly as when troops of fair
+ladies and handsome beaux climbed up and still up to find their places
+from which to look down on the play or the gladiatorial combat or the
+massacre of the Christians in the arena below.
+
+These old theatres were built in a semicircle dug out of the
+mountain-side, so that the seats were solid against the ground and rose
+one above the other with the slope of the hill, which gave everybody a
+good view. There were no columns to interfere with one's vision, for
+there was no roof to be supported, except, perhaps, over the stage, but
+the top seats were so remote from the arena and the proscenium that the
+players must have seemed miniatures. Yet even above these there was
+still mountain-side, and little boys who could not get money for an
+entrance fee or carry water to the animals for a ticket sat up in that
+far perch, no doubt, and looked down and shouted at the show.
+
+Laura and I, who, as usual, had dropped behind the party, climbed far up
+among the seats and tried to imagine we had come to the afternoon
+performance--had come early, not to miss any of it. But it was
+difficult, even when we shut our eyes. Weeds and grass grew everywhere
+in the crevices; dandelions bloomed and briers tangled where sat the
+beaux and belles of twenty centuries ago. Just here at our feet the mobs
+of Demetrius the silversmith gathered, crying, "Great is Diana of the
+Ephesians!" because the religion of St. Paul was spoiling their trade
+for miniature temples. Down there in the arena Paul did battle with the
+beasts, very likely as punishment. This is the spot--these are the very
+benches--but we cannot see the picture: we cannot wake the tread of the
+vanished years.
+
+Behind the arena are the columns that support the stage, and back of
+these are the dressing-rooms, their marble walls as solid and perfect
+to-day as when the ancient players dallied and gossiped there. At one
+end is a dark, cave-like place where we thought the wild beasts might
+have been kept. I stood at the entrance and Laura made my picture, but
+she complained that I did not look fierce enough for her purpose.
+
+On another slope of the hill a smaller theatre, the Odeon, has recently
+been uncovered. A gem of beauty it was, and much of its wonder is still
+preserved. Here the singers of a forgotten time gave forth their melody
+to a group of music-lovers, gathered in this close circle of seats that
+not a note or shading might be lost.
+
+[Illustration: ALL THE PLAINS AND SLOPES OF THE OLD CITY WITH ITS WHITE
+FRAGMENTS AND POOR RUINED HARBOR LAY AT OUR FEET
+
+NOTE.--In this picture the theatre where St. Paul fought is in the
+foreground; the library just beyond, the market-place to the right. Bits
+of water show where the harbor once lay.]
+
+We passed around this dainty playhouse, across a little wheat-field that
+some peasant has planted against its very walls, on up the hill,
+scrambling along steep declivities over its brow, and, behold! we came
+out high above the great theatre on the other side, and all the plain
+and slopes of the old city, with its white fragments and its poor
+ruined harbor, lay at our feet. Earthquakes shook the city down and
+filled up the splendid harbor. If the harbor had been spared the city
+would have been rebuilt. Instead, the harbor is a marsh, the city a
+memory.
+
+From where we stood we could survey the sweep of the vanished city. We
+could look across into the library and the market-place and follow a
+marble road--its white blocks worn smooth by a million treading
+feet--where it stretched away toward the sea. And once more we tried to
+conjure the vision of the past--to close our eyes and reproduce the
+vanished day. And once more we failed. We could glimpse a picture, we
+could construct a city, but it was never quite that city--never quite in
+that place. Our harbor with its white sails and thronging wharves was
+never quite that harbor--our crowded streets were never quite those
+streets. Here were just ruins--always ruins--they could never have been
+anything but ruins. Perhaps our imaginations were not in good working
+order.
+
+We descended again into the great theatre, for it fascinated us, nearly
+breaking our necks where vines and briers tangled, pausing every other
+minute to rest and consider and dream. Pawing over a heap of
+rubbish--odd bits of carving, inscriptions, and the like--the place is a
+treasure-trove of such things--I found a little marble torso of a female
+figure. Head and arms and the lower part of the body all gone, but what
+remained was exquisite beyond words--a gem, even though rubbish, in
+Ephesus.
+
+Now, of course, the reader is an honest person. He would have said, as
+I did: "No, it does not matter, rubbish or no rubbish, it is not mine.
+It belongs to the government-- I cannot steal. Besides, there is Laura,
+age fourteen: I cannot set her a bad example. Also, there are the
+police. No, my conscience is perfect; I cannot do it."
+
+I know the reader would have reflected thus, and so did I, as stated.
+Then I found I could crowd it into my inside coat-pocket, and that by
+cramming my handkerchief carefully on top of it, it did not distress me
+so much, especially when I gave it a little support with my forearm, to
+make it swing in a natural way. But when I remembered that the _Quaker
+City_ pilgrims had been searched on leaving Ephesus, my conscience began
+to harass me again, though not enough as yet to make me disgorge.
+
+Our party had all trailed back to the hotel when we got to our donkeys,
+and it was beginning to sprinkle rain. The sky was overcast and a quiet
+had settled among the ruins. When our donkey-driver gave me a sharp look
+I began to suffer. I thought he was a spy, and had his eye on that
+pocket. I recalled now that I had always had a tender conscience; it
+seemed unwise to torture it in this way.
+
+I began to think of ways to ease it. I thought five francs might do it,
+so far as our donkey-boy was concerned. But then there was the official
+search at the other end; that, of course, would be a public matter, and
+the five francs would be wasted. I was almost persuaded to drop the
+little torso quietly by the roadside--it discomforted me so.
+
+We rode along rather quietly, and I spoke improvingly to Laura of how
+St. Paul had travelled over this very road when he was making his good
+fight, and of several other saints and their works, and how Ephesus had
+probably been destroyed because of its sinfulness. Near a crumbling arch
+a flock of sheep grazed, herded by a shepherd who had been there when
+the apostles came--at least his cape had, and his hat--and everything
+about him was Biblical and holylike, and so were the gentle rain and the
+donkeys, and I said how sweet and soothing it all was; after which I
+began to reflect on what would be proper to do if anything resembling an
+emergency should conclude our peaceful ride. I decided that, as we had
+just come from Smyrna, I had bought the bit of heathen marble on the way
+to the station. That was simple and straightforward, and I felt a good
+deal strengthened as I practised it over and tried it on Laura as we
+rode along. The _Kurfuersters_ had been with me and would stand by the
+statement--any _Kurfuerster_ would do that whether he flocked with the
+forward-cabin crowd or the unregenerates of the booze-bazaar. I felt
+reassured and whistled a little, and then from the roadside a man rose
+up and said something sharp to our donkey-driver. It was sudden, and I
+suppose I did jump a little, but I was ready for him.
+
+"No," I said, "I didn't steal it. I bought it in Smyrna on the way to
+the train. I can prove it by Laura here, and the other passengers. We
+are incorruptible. Go in peace."
+
+But it was wasted. This creature had business only with our
+donkey-driver and his tobacco. He didn't understand a word I said.
+
+We rode amid a very garden of fragmentary ruins. Precious blocks of
+fluted marble, rich with carving and inscriptions, lay everywhere. We
+were confronted by gems of sculpture and graven history at every turn.
+Yet here I was, suffering over a little scrap the size of one's fist. No
+conscience should be as sensitive as that.
+
+Suddenly a regular bundle of firearms--a human arsenal--stepped out of a
+shed into the middle of the road and began a harangue. I could feel my
+hair turning gray.
+
+"You are wholly in error," I said. "I bought it in Smyrna. All the
+passengers saw me. Still, I will give it up if you say so."
+
+But that was wasted, too. He only took the rest of our driver's tobacco
+and let us pass. We met a little puny calf next, standing shrunken and
+forlorn in the drizzle, but not too shrunken and friendless to have a
+string of blue beads around his neck to avert the evil eye. I was
+inclined to take them away from him and put them on myself.
+
+We were opposite the Temple of Diana by this time--all that is left of
+what was once one of the seven wonders of the world. It is only some
+broken stones sinking into a marsh now, but it was a marvel in its time,
+and I remembered how one Herostratus, ages ago, had fired it to
+perpetuate his name--also how the Ephesians had snuffed out Herostratus,
+and issued a decree that his name should never again be mentioned on
+pain of severe punishment; which was a mistake, of course, for it
+advertised Herostratus into the coveted immortality. I wonder what kind
+of a mistake the Ephesians would make when they found that bit of
+marble on my person, and what kind of advertising I would get.
+
+We were almost to the little hotel now, and, lo! right at the gates we
+were confronted by a file of men with muskets. Here it was, then, at
+last. My moral joints turned to water.
+
+"I didn't do it, gentlemen," I said. "I am without a flaw. It was
+Laura--you can see for yourself she looks guilty."
+
+But they did not search Laura. They did not even search me. They merely
+looked us over and talked about us in strange tongues. We reached the
+shelter of the hotel and the comfort of food in safety. Neither did they
+inspect us at the station, and as we glided back to Smyrna I impressed
+upon Laura the value of keeping one's conscience clear, and how one is
+always rewarded with torsos and things for pursuing a straightforward,
+simple course through life.
+
+I suppose a man could take away marble from Ephesus to-day by the
+wagon-load if he had any place to take it to. Nobody is excavating
+there--nobody seems to care for it, and never was such a mine of relics
+under the sun. At Ayasaluk, the Arab village, priceless treasures of
+carving and inscription look out at you from the wall of every peasant's
+hut and stable--from the tumbling stone fences that divide their fields.
+Wonderful columns stick out of every bank and heap of earth. Precious
+marbles and porphyry mingle with the very macadam of the roads. Rare
+pieces are sold around the hotel for a few piastres.
+
+Remember, a mighty marble city perished here. Earthquakes shook it
+down, shattered the walls of its temples, overthrew the statuary,
+tumbled the inscriptions in the dust. The ages have spread a layer of
+earth upon the ruin, but only partially covered it. Just beneath the
+shallow plough of the peasant lie riches uncountable for the nation that
+shall bring them to the light of day. Historical societies dig a little
+here and there, and have done noble work. But their means run low before
+they can make any real beginning on the mighty task. Ephesus is still a
+buried city.
+
+The day will come when Ephesus will be restored to her former greatness.
+It will take an earthquake to do it, but the spirit of prophecy is upon
+me and I foresee that earthquake. The future is very long--I am in no
+hurry--fulfilment may take its time. I merely want to get my prophecy in
+now and registered, so when the event comes along I shall get proper
+credit. Some day an earthquake will strike Ephesus again; the bottom
+will drop out of that swamp and make it a harbor once more; ships will
+sail in as in the old days, and Ephesus, like Athens, will renew her
+glory.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back to Smyrna--a modern city and beautiful from any high vantage, with
+its red-tiled roofs, its domes and minarets, its graceful cypress-trees,
+its picture hillsides, and its cobalt sky. It is clean, too, compared
+with Constantinople. To be sure, Smyrna has its ruins and its historic
+interest, with the tomb of Polycarp the martyr, who was Bishop of Smyrna
+in the second century, and died for his faith at the age of eighty-six.
+He was burned on a hill just outside the city on the Ephesus road, and
+his tomb, guarded by two noble cypresses, overlooks the sea.
+
+But it is busy, bustling Smyrna that, after Ephesus, most attracted us.
+It is more truly the Orient than anything we have seen. Fully as
+picturesque as Constantinople in costume, it is brighter, fresher,
+healthier-looking, and, more than all, its crowded streets are
+perpetually full of mighty camel trains swinging in from the deeper
+East, loaded with all the wares and fabrics of our dreams. Those camels
+are monstrously large--twice the size of any circus camels that come to
+America, and with their great panniers they fill an Oriental street from
+side to side.
+
+They move, too, and other things had better keep out of the way when a
+camel train heaves in sight if they want to remain undamaged. I was
+examining some things outside of a bazaar when suddenly I thought I had
+been hit by a planet. I thought so because of the positive manner of my
+disaster and the number of constellations I saw. But it was only one
+side of a loaded camel that had annihilated me, and the camel was moving
+straight ahead without the slightest notion that anything had interfered
+with its progress.
+
+It hadn't, as a matter of fact. Nothing short of a stone wall interrupts
+a camel--a Smyrna camel--when he's out for business and under a full
+head of steam. Vehicles and other things turn down another street when
+there is a camel train coming. You may squat down, as these Orientals
+do, and get below the danger line, for a camel is not likely to step on
+you, but his load is another matter--you must look out for that
+yourself.
+
+I was fascinated by the camel trains; they are a part of the East I
+hardly expected to find. I thought their day was about over. Nothing of
+the sort. The camel trains, in fact, own Smyrna, and give it its
+commercial importance. They bring the great bulk of merchandise--rugs,
+mattings, nuts, dried fruits, spices, and all the rare native handiwork
+from far dim interiors that railroads will not reach in a hundred years.
+They come swinging out of Kurdistan--from Ispahan and from Khiva; they
+cross the burning desert of Kara Koom.
+
+A camel train can run cheaper than the railway kind. A railway requires
+coal and wood for fuel. A camel would like those things also. But he is
+not particular--he will accept whatever comes along. He will eat
+anything a goat can, and he would eat the goat, too, if permitted--horns
+and all. Consequently, he arrives at Smyrna fit and well fed, ready for
+the thousand miles or so of return trip at a moment's notice.
+
+They run these camel trains in sections--about six camels in each. An
+Arab mounted on a donkey that wears a string of blue beads for luck
+leads each section, and the forward camel wears against his shoulder a
+bell. It is a musical compound affair--one bell inside the other with a
+blue bead in the last one to keep off the evil eye. I had already
+acquired some of the blue strings of donkey beads, and I made up my mind
+now to have a camel bell.
+
+By-and-by, at the entrance of a bazaar, I saw one. It was an old
+one--worn with years of chafing against the shoulder muscle of many a
+camel that had followed the long track from the heart of Asia over
+swamp and steep and across burning sands. At the base of the outer bell
+was a band of Arabic characters--prayers, no doubt, from the Koran, for
+the safety of the caravan. I would never leave Smyrna without that bell.
+
+However, one must be cautious. I gave it an indifferent jingle as I
+passed in and began to examine other things. A murmuring, insinuating
+Moslem was at my elbow pushing forward the gaudy bits of embroidery and
+cheaply chased weapons in which I pretended an interest. I dallied and
+priced, and he grew weary and discouraged. Finally, hesitating at the
+doorway, I touched the bell again, scarcely noticing it.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Sixtin franc--very chip."
+
+My impulse was to fling the money at him and grab the treasure before he
+changed his mind. But we do not do these things--not any more--we have
+acquired education. Besides, we have grown professionally proud of our
+bargains.
+
+"Ho! Sixteen francs! You mean six francs-- I give you five."
+
+"No--no--sixtin franc--sixtin! What you think? Here--fine!" He had the
+precious thing down and was jingling it. Its music fairly enthralled me.
+But I refused to take it in my hands--if I did I should surrender.
+"See," he continued, pointing to the inscription. "Oh, be-eautiful.
+Here, fiftin franc--three dollar!"
+
+He pushed it toward me. I pretended to be interested in a wretchedly new
+and cheaply woven rug. I had to, to keep steadfast. I waved him off.
+
+"No--no; five francs--no more!"
+
+He hung up the bell and I started to go. He seized it and ran after me.
+
+"Here, mister--fourtin franc--give me!"
+
+"Five francs!--no more."
+
+"No, no, mister--twelve franc--las' price--ver' las' price. Here, see!"
+
+He jingled the bell a little. If he did that once more I was gone at any
+price.
+
+"_Five francs_," I said, with heavy decision. "I'll give you five francs
+for it--no more."
+
+I faced resolutely around--as resolutely as I could--and pretended
+really to start.
+
+"Here, mister--_ten franc--ten_! Mister--mister!"
+
+He followed me, but fortunately he had hung up the bell and couldn't
+jingle it. I was at least two steps away.
+
+"Eight franc, mister--please--I lose money--I make
+nothing--mister--seven! seven franc!"
+
+"Five--five francs." I called it back over my shoulder--indifferently.
+
+"Mister! mister! Six! six franc!"
+
+Confound him! He got hold of that bell again and gave it a jingle. I
+handed him the six francs. If he had only left it alone, I think I could
+have held out.
+
+Still, as I look at it now, hanging here in my state-room, and think of
+the long lonely nights and the days of sun and storm it has seen, of the
+far journeys it has travelled in its weary way down the years to me, I
+do not so much mind that final franc after all.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+INTO SYRIA
+
+
+I picked up a cold that rainy day at Ephesus. Not an ordinary sniffling
+cold, but a wrenching, racking cold that made every bone and every tooth
+jump, and set my eyes to throbbing like the ship's engines. I felt sure
+I was going to die when we arrived in the harbor of Beirut, and decided
+that it would be better to die on deck; so I crawled out and dressed,
+and crept into a steamer-chair, and tried to appreciate the beautiful
+city that had arisen out of the sea--the upper gateway to Syria.
+
+The Patriarch came along, highly elate. This was where he belonged; this
+was home; this was Phoenicia itself! Fifteen hundred years B.C. Beirut
+had been a great Phoenician seaport, he said, and most of the rare
+handiwork mentioned in ancient history and mythology had been wrought in
+this neighborhood. The silver vase of Achilles, the garment which Hecuba
+gave to Minerva, and the gold-edged bowl of Telemachus were all
+Phoenician, according to the Patriarch, who hinted that he rather
+hoped to find some such things at Beirut; also some of the celebrated
+Phoinus, or purple dye, which gave the tribe its name. I said no doubt
+he would, and, being sick and suffering, added that he might dye himself
+dead for all I cared, which was a poor joke--besides being an
+afterthought, when the Patriarch was well out of range.
+
+I had no idea of going ashore. I was miserably sorry, too, for I was
+stuffed with guide-book knowledge about Baalbec and Damascus, and had
+looked forward to that side-trip from the beginning. I knew how Moses
+felt on Mount Pisgah now, and I was getting so sorry for myself I could
+hardly stand it, when suddenly the bugle blew the sharp call, "All
+ashore!" Laura, age fourteen, came racing down the deck, and before I
+knew it I had my bag--packed the night before--and was going down the
+ship's ladder into a boat, quarrelling meantime with one of the
+Reprobates as to whether Beirut was the Berothai of the Old Testament,
+where David smote Hadadezer and took "exceeding much brass," or the
+Berytus of the Roman conquest. It was of no consequence, but it gave
+life a new purpose, for I wanted to prove that he was wrong. Wherefore I
+forgot I was going to die, and presently we were ashore and in a
+railway-station where there was a contiguous little train ready to start
+for Baalbec and Damascus, with a lot of men selling oranges, of which
+Laura and I bought a basketful for a franc, climbed aboard, the bell
+rang--and the funeral was postponed.
+
+The road followed the sea for a distance, and led through fields of
+flowers. I had never seen wildflowers like those. They were the crimson
+anemone mingled riotously with a gorgeous yellow flower--I did not learn
+its name. The ground was literally massed with them. Never was such a
+prodigality of bloom.
+
+From Beirut to Baalbec is only about sixty miles; but it takes pretty
+much all day to get there, for the Lebanon Mountains lie between, and
+this is a deliberate land. We did not mind. There was plenty to see all
+along, and our leisurely train gave us ample time.
+
+There were the little stations, where we stopped anywhere from five to
+fifteen minutes, and got out and mingled with the curious rural life;
+there were the hills, that had little soil on them, but were terraced
+and fruitful--some of them to the very summit; there was the old
+Damascus road, winding with us, or above us, or below us--the road over
+which Abraham may have travelled, and Adam, too, for that matter, and
+Eve, when they were sent out of their happy garden. Eden lay not far
+from here, and the exiles would be likely to come this way, I think. We
+saw plenty of groups that might have been Abraham and his household, or
+any of the patriarchs. I did not notice any that suggested Adam and Eve.
+
+The road had another interest for me. Forty-two years ago, before the
+railroad came this way, the _Quaker City_ pilgrims toiled up through the
+summer heat, setting out on the "long trip" through the full length of
+Palestine. Nobody makes it in summer now. Few make it at all, except by
+rail and in carriages, with good hostelries at the end of every stage.
+Still, I am glad those first pilgrims made it, or we should not have had
+that wonderful picture of Syrian summer-time, nor of "Jericho" and
+"Baalbec." Those two horses are worth knowing--in literature--and I
+tried to imagine that little early party of excursionists climbing the
+steep path to Palestine on their sorry nags.
+
+It is warm in Syria, even now, but we were not too warm, riding;
+besides, we were going steadily uphill, and by-and-by somebody pointed
+out a white streak along the mountain-top, and it was snow. Then, after
+a long time, we got to a place where the vegetation was very scanty and
+there were no more terraced hills, but only barren peaks and sand, where
+the wind blew cold and colder, and presently the snow lay right along
+our way. We had reached the highest point then--five thousand feet above
+the sea. In five hours we had come thirty-six miles--thirty-five in
+length and one straight up in the air. Somebody said:
+
+"Look, there is Mount Hermon!"
+
+And, sure enough, away to the south, though nigh upon us it seemed--so
+close that one might put out his hand and touch it, almost--there rose a
+stately, snow-clad elevation which, once seen, dominated the barren
+landscape. It was so pure white against the blue--so impressive in its
+massive dignity--the eye followed it across every vista, longed for it
+when immediate peaks rose between, welcomed it when time after time it
+rose grandly into view.
+
+With an altitude of between nine and ten thousand feet, Mount Hermon is
+the highest mountain in Syria, I believe--certainly the most important.
+The Bible is full of it. The Amorites and the Hivites, and most of the
+other tribes that Joshua buried or persuaded to go away, had their lands
+under Mount Hermon (all of them in sight of it), and that grand old hill
+looked down on Joshua's slaughter of men and women and little children,
+and perhaps thought it a puny performance to be undertaken in the name,
+and by the direction, of God.
+
+Joshua established Mount Hermon as the northern boundary of Palestine,
+and from whatever point the Israelite turned his face northward, he saw
+its white summit against the blue. It became symbolic of grandeur,
+stability, purity, and peace. It was to one of its three peaks that
+Christ came when, with Peter, James, and John, He withdrew to "an high
+mountain apart" for the Transfiguration. So it became sanctified as a
+sort of holy judgment-seat.[5]
+
+Down the Lebanon slope and across the valley to Reyak, a Syrian village
+in the sand, at the foot of the Anti-Lebanon range. Reyak is the parting
+of the ways--the railways--that lead to Damascus and Baalbec, and there
+is a lunch-room there--a good one by Turkish standards. It was our first
+complete introduction to Turkish food--that is a diet of nuts, dates,
+oranges, and curious meat and vegetable preparations--and I ate a good
+deal for a dying man. Then I went outside to look at the population, and
+wonder what these people, who scratch a living out of the sand and stone
+barrens, would do in a fertile country like America. They would consider
+it heaven, I thought.
+
+At the end of the station sat a drowsy, stoutish man in semi-European
+dress, holding a few pairs of coarse home-knit socks, evidently for
+sale. I stopped and talked to him. He spoke English very well, and when
+he told me his story I marvelled.
+
+He had been in America; in Brooklyn; had carried on business
+there--something in Syrian merchandise--and had done very well. He had
+married there--a Syrian woman; his children were born there--Americans.
+Then one day he had sold out and brought them all to this flat-topped
+mud village in the Syrian sand. Why had he done it? Well, he could
+hardly tell; he had wanted to see Syria again--he could think of no
+other reason. No, his wife did not like it, nor the children--not at
+all.
+
+He pointed out his mud hut a little way from the station, and I could
+not blame them. He would go back some day--yes, certainly. Meantime, his
+wife is earning money for the trip by knitting the coarse socks which he
+sells around the station at Reyak at a few piastres a pair.
+
+Our train was about ready to start for Baalbec, and I was lingering over
+a little collection of relics which a blind pedler offered, when I felt
+a hand on my shoulder and heard my name called. I turned and was face to
+face with the artist Jules Gurin, of New York. I had known nothing of
+his presence in Syria, he had known nothing of our coming. He was going
+in one direction, I in another. In this remote waste our lines had
+crossed. He was so glad to see me--he thought I had a supply of cigars.
+I never saw a man's enthusiasm die so suddenly as his did when I told
+him how I had been sick that morning and forgotten them.
+
+Altogether that was a curious half hour. Reyak is the most uninteresting
+place in Syria, but I shall always remember it.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] One tradition places the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, but Tabor
+is fifty miles away whereas Cesarea Philippi, to which the little group
+descended, lies at the foot of Hermon.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+THE HOUSE THAT CAIN BUILT
+
+
+It was well along in the afternoon when we reached Baalbec, and drove
+through a cloud of dust to a hotel which stands in a mud village near
+the ruins. Long before we arrived we could make out massive remnants of
+what was once a wonder of the world, and remains no less so to-day. We
+could distinguish sections of the vast wall, and, towering high above
+them, the six columns of the Temple of the Sun.
+
+I knew those six columns. I had carried a picture of them in my mind
+ever since that winter so long ago when the old first edition of the
+_New Pilgrim's Progress_ became familiar in our household. I know they
+were seventy-five feet high and eight feet through, and had blocks of
+stone on the top of them as big as our old-fashioned parlor at home;
+also, that they were probably erected by giants. Those items had made an
+impression that had lasted. Now, here they were, outlined against the
+sky, in full view and perfectly familiar, but never in the world could
+they be as big as the book said. Why, these were as slender and graceful
+as fairy architecture! I recalled that there were some big stones to
+see, stones laid by Cain and his giants when the world was new. Perhaps
+they would not be so very big, after all. I had a feeling that we ought
+to hurry.
+
+We did hurry--Laura and I. We did not wait for the party, but set out
+straight for the ruins, through narrow streets and byways, with beggars
+at our heels. By-and-by we came to a rushing brook, and just beyond it
+were the temple walls.
+
+I remembered now. There had been a wonderful garden outside the temples
+in the old days, and this stream had made it richly verdant and
+beautiful. There was no garden any more. Only some grass and bushes,
+such as will gather about an oasis.
+
+They would not let us into the temple enclosure until our party came, so
+we wandered around the outer walls and gazed up at cornices and capitals
+and entablatures as beautiful, we thought, as any we had seen at Athens.
+Then the party arrived, and there was a gatekeeper to let us in.
+
+It would take a man in perfect health to carry away even an approximate
+impression of Baalbec. Trying to remember now, I seem to have spent the
+afternoon in some amazing delirium of tumbling walls and ruined
+colonnades; of heaped and piled fragments; of scarred and defaced
+sculpture; of Titanic masonry flung about by the fury of angry gods.
+Athens had been a mellowed and hallowed dream of the past; Ephesus a
+vast suggestion of ancient greatness buried and overgrown; Baalbec was a
+wild agony of destruction and desecration crying out to the sky.
+
+[Illustration: FROM THE TIME OF ADAM BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS]
+
+It is a colossal object-lesson in what religions can do when they try.
+Nobody really knows who began to build temples here, but from the time
+of Adam Baalbec became a place of altars. Before history began it was
+already a splendid Syrian city, associated with the names of Cain,
+Nimrod, and Abraham, and it may have been Cain himself who raised the
+first altar here when he made that offering for which the Lord "had not
+respect." More likely, however--and this is the Arab belief--it was the
+city of refuge built by Cain, whose fear must have been very large if
+one may judge from the size of the materials used.
+
+Cain could not fail to build a temple, however. He would try to ease the
+punishment which he declared was greater than he could bear, and with
+burnt offering and architecture would seek to propitiate an angry God.
+How long the worship inaugurated by him lasted we can only surmise--to
+the flood, maybe--but the Phoenicians came next, and set up temples to
+their Gods, whoever they were, and after the Phoenicians came Solomon,
+who built a temple to a sort of compromise god by the name of Baal--a
+deity left over by the Phoenicians and adapted to Judean needs and
+ceremonies--hence the name, Baalbec. Solomon built the temple to Baal to
+satisfy certain of his heathen wives, and he made the place a strong
+city to rival Damascus--the latter having refused to acknowledge his
+reign.
+
+After Solomon, the Romans. Two hundred years or so after Christ--in the
+twilight of their glory and their gods--the Romans under Elagabalus
+brought the glory of Grecian architecture to Baalbec, named the place
+Heliopolis, and set up temples that were--and are--the wonder of the
+world.
+
+What satisfactory gods they must have been to deserve temples such as
+these--each shrine a marvel of size and beauty--more splendid even than
+those of the Acropolis of Athens in their lavish magnificence! This
+carved doorway to the Temple of Jupiter; this frieze of the Temple of
+Bacchus; these towering six columns of the Temple of the Sun; still
+holding their matchless Corinthian capitals and amazing entablature to
+the sky--where else will one find their equals, and what must they have
+been in their prime, when these scarred remnants can still overpower the
+world!
+
+It was another religion that brought ruin here--early
+Christianity--presently followed by early Mohammedanism--each burning
+with vandalic zeal. It was the good Emperor Constantine that first upset
+the Roman gods and their temples. Then Theodosius came along and pulled
+down the great structures, and out of the pieces built a church that was
+an architectural failure. Then all the early Christians in the
+neighborhood took a hand in pulling down and overturning; hacking away
+at the heathen sculpture and tracery--climbing high up the walls to scar
+and disfigure--to obliterate anything resembling a face. Then pretty
+soon the early Mohammedans came along and carried on the good work, and
+now and then an earthquake took a hand, until by-and-by the place became
+the ghastly storm of destruction it appears to-day.
+
+I was ill when I saw Baalbec. My flesh was burning and my pulse
+throbbing with fever. Perhaps my vision was distorted and the nightmare
+seemed worse than it really is, but as I stood in that field of
+mutilation and disorder, gazing along its wrecked and insulted glory,
+and through tumbling arch and ruined door caught vistas of fertile and
+snow-capped hill, I seemed to see a vision of what it had been in the
+day of its perfection. Also, I felt an itch to meet one or two of those
+early enthusiasts--some night in a back alley when they were not looking
+for me and I had a piece of scantling--I felt a sick man's craving, as
+it were, to undertake a little damage and disfiguration on my own
+account. Oh, well, it's all in the eternal story. Religions established
+these temples; religions pulled them down. The followers of one faith
+have always regarded as heathen those which preceded them. There lies a
+long time ahead. Will the next religion restore Baalbec or complete its
+desolation?
+
+Some little Syrian girls beset Laura on the way back to the hotel and
+tried to sell her some bead embroidery which it seems they make in a
+mission-school established here by the English. One of them--a little
+brown madonna of about ten--could speak English quite well. Laura asked
+her name.
+
+"Name Mary," she said.
+
+"But that's an English name."
+
+She trotted along silently, thinking; then said:
+
+"No, Syria--Mary Syria name."
+
+Sure enough, we had forgotten. The first Mary had indeed been Syrian,
+and I imagined her, now, a child--brown, barefoot and beautiful, like
+this Mary, with the same pathetic eyes. Laura--young, fair-skinned and
+pink-cheeked--was a marvel to these children. They followed her to the
+door, and when she could not buy all their stock in trade they insisted
+on making her presents, and one of them--little Mary--begged to be taken
+to America.
+
+We saw the celebrated "big stones" next morning. Several of them are
+built into the lower tiers of the enclosing temple wall, and three of
+these--the largest ones--measure each from sixty-two to sixty-four feet
+long and are thirteen feet thick! They rest upon stones somewhat
+thicker, but shorter--stones about the size of a two-story cottage--and
+these in turn rest on masonry still less gigantic. Evidently it was the
+intention of the builders to increase the size of their material as they
+went higher, and the big block still in the quarry carries out that
+idea.
+
+Authorities differ as to when these big stones were laid, and how. Some
+claim that they were put here by the Romans, because they find Greek
+axe-marks on the ones below them. But then I found American jack-knife
+marks on them too, and the names of certain of my countrymen, which
+proves nothing except that these puny people had been there and left
+their measurement. If these monster stones had been laid by the Romans
+only two thousand years ago, we should have had some knowledge of the
+means by which they were transported and lifted into place. There is no
+such record, and nowhere else at least did the Romans ever attempt
+structure of such gigantic proportions. That is precisely the word,
+"gigantic," for there were giants in the days when these stones were
+laid--stones that could have been there six thousand years as well as
+two thousand, being of such material as forms the foundations of the
+world.
+
+If Cain did any building at Baalbec, he did it here. He did not finish
+the work, it would seem, or at least not in these proportions. Perhaps
+his giants deserted him--struck, as we say to-day. Perhaps the hands of
+men were no longer against him and the need of this mighty bulwark about
+his place of refuge ceased. At all events, the first stone hewn out for
+the next layer stands in the quarry still.
+
+We drove over there. It was half a mile away, at least--possibly a mile,
+down hill and rather rough going. The stones we saw in the wall were
+brought up that road. The one standing in the quarry had been lifted and
+started a little, and would have been on its way presently, if the
+strike, or the amnesty, had not interfered.
+
+It is seventy-two feet long and seventeen feet thick. Try to think of a
+plain box building, a barn or a store-house, say, of that size, then
+mentally convert it into a solid block of stone. Mark Twain likens it to
+two freight-cars placed end to end, but _it is also as high and as
+wide_. _Eight freight-cars set four and four_ would just about express
+it! Think of that! Think of moving a stone of that size!
+
+It is squared and dressed and ready to be taken to the temple wall. It
+will never be taken there. Perhaps that last item is gratuitous
+information, but at least it is authentic. We have no means of moving
+that stone half a mile up a rough hill in these puny times, and the
+speculations as to how Cain did it have been mainly hazy and
+random--quite random.
+
+One writer suggests that such stones were "rolled up an inclined plane
+of earth prepared for the purpose." I should love to see a stone like
+that rolled. I'd travel all the way to Baalbec again for the sight, and
+they could prepare the inclined plane any way they pleased. An Oriental
+authority declares that these stones were moved and laid by the demon
+Echmoudi, which is better than the rolling idea. I confess a weakness
+for Echmoudi, but I fear hard cold science will frown him out of court.
+
+It has taken an Englishman to lead the way to light. He says that Cain
+employed mastodons to do his moving. Now we are on the way to truth, but
+we must go further--a good deal further. Cain did employ mastodons, but
+only for his light work. Even mastodons would balk at pulling stones
+like these. Cain would use brontosaurs for such work as that. There were
+plenty of them loafing about, and I can imagine nothing more impressive
+than Cain standing on a handy elevation overlooking his force of giants
+and a sixteen-span brontosaur team yanking a stone as big as a bonded
+warehouse up Baalbec hill.
+
+Truly, there is no reason why those monster stones should not have been
+quarried a million or so years ago and moved by the vast animal
+creatures of that period. We have biblical authority for the giants, and
+I have seen a brontosaur in the New York Museum that seemed to go with
+stones of about that size. Think of any force the Romans could summon
+rolling a three-million-pound square stone up an inclined plane.
+Preposterous! The brontosaur's the thing.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+GOING DOWN TO DAMASCUS
+
+
+There is a good deal of country, mainly desert, between Baalbec and
+Damascus, and a good many barren hills. Crossing the Anti-Lebanon
+mountains there is a little of water and soil and much red, rocky waste.
+Here and there a guide pointed out a hill where Cain killed Abel--not
+always the same hill, but no matter, it was a hill in this neighborhood;
+any one of them would make a good place. Occasionally the train passed a
+squalid village, perched on a lonely shelf--a single roof stretching
+over most of the houses--the inhabitants scarcely visible. We wondered
+where they got their sustenance. They were shepherds, perhaps, but where
+did their flocks feed?
+
+Across the divide, between snow-capped hills, and suddenly we are face
+to face with green banks and the orchard bloom of spring. We have
+reached the Abana, the river which all the ages has flowed down to
+Damascus with its gift of eternal youth. For as the desert defends, so
+the river sustains Damascus, and the banks of the Abana (they call it
+the Barada now) are just a garden--the Garden of Eden, if old tales be
+true.
+
+It is not hard to believe that tradition here, at this season. Peach,
+apricot, almond, and plum fairly sing with blossom; birch and sycamore
+blend a cadence of tender green; the red earth from which Adam was
+created (and which his name signifies) forms an abundant underchord. If
+we could linger a little by these pleasant waters we might learn the
+lilt of the tree of life--its whisper of the forbidden fruit.
+
+We are among our older traditions here--the beginnings of the race. We
+have returned after devious wanderings. These people whom we see leading
+donkeys and riding camels, tending their flocks and bathing in the
+Abana, they are our relatives--sons and daughters of Adam. Only, they
+did not move away. They stayed on the old place, as it were, and
+preserved the family traditions, and customs. I am moved to get out and
+call them "cousin" and embrace them, and thank them for not trailing off
+after the false gods and frivolities of the West.
+
+[Illustration: SO THE PATRIARCHS JOURNEYED; SO, TWO THOUSAND YEARS
+LATER, JOSEPH AND MARY TRAVELLED INTO EGYPT]
+
+The road that winds by the Abana is full of pictures. The story of the
+Old Testament--the New, too, for that matter--is dramatized here in a
+manner and a setting that would discourage the artificial stage. Not a
+group but might have stepped out of the Bible pages. This man leading a
+little donkey--a woman riding it--their garb and circumstance the
+immutable investment of the East: so the patriarchs journeyed; so, two
+thousand years later, Joseph and Mary travelled into Egypt. No change,
+you see, in all that time--no change in the two thousand years that have
+followed--no change in the two thousand years that lie ahead. Wonderful,
+changeless East! How frivolous we seem in comparison--always racing
+after some new pattern of head-gear or drapery! How can we hope to
+establish any individuality, any nationality, any artistic stability
+when we have so little fixed foundation in what, more than any other one
+thing, becomes a part of the man himself--his clothing?
+
+These hills are interesting. Some of them have verdure on them, and I
+can fancy Abraham pasturing his flocks on them, and with little Isaac
+chasing calves through the dews of Hermon. It would not be the "dews of
+Hermon," but I like the sound of that phrase. I believe history does not
+mention that Abraham and Isaac chased calves. No matter; anybody that
+keeps flocks has to chase calves now and then, and he has to get his
+little boy to help him. So Abraham must sometimes have called Isaac
+quite early in the morning to "go and head off that calf," just as my
+father used to call me, and I can imagine how they raced up and down and
+sweat and panted, and how they said uncomplimentary things about the
+calf and his family, and declared that there was nothing on earth that
+could make a person so mad as a fool calf, anyhow.
+
+Travel on the highway has increased--more camels, more donkeys, more
+patriarchs with their families and flocks. Merchandise trains follow
+close, one behind the other. Dust rises in a fog and settles on the
+wayside vegetation. Here and there on the hillsides are villas and
+entertainment gardens.
+
+A widening of the valley, an expanse of green and bloom, mingled with
+domes and minarets; a slowing down of speed, a shouting of porters
+through the sunlit dust, and behold, we have reached the heart and
+wonder of the East, Damascus, the imperishable--older than history, yet
+forever young.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+THE "PEARL OF THE EAST"
+
+
+It is the oldest city in the world. It is the oldest locality mentioned
+in the Bible, if the Garden of Eden theory be true. I suspect that
+Noah's flood washed away the garden, and that his grandson, Uz, wanted
+to commemorate the site by building a city there. At all events, Uz
+built Damascus, according to Josephus, and he could not have picked a
+better location than this wide, level plain, watered by these beautiful
+living streams. That was about 2400 B.C., which means that Damascus was
+already an old city--five hundred years old, or more--when Abraham
+overtook Chedorlaomer, King of Elam--Tidal, King of Nations, and two
+other kings--these four having captured Abraham's nephew, Lot, "who
+dwelt in Sodom, and his goods, and departed."
+
+A matter of four kings did not disturb Abraham. He had a better
+combination than that. He armed his trained servants, three hundred and
+eighteen in number, "born in his own house," and went after those kings
+and "smote them and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand
+of Damascus, rescued Lot and brought back the goods."
+
+That is the first Bible mention of Damascus, and it was no doubt a
+goodly city, even then. After that it appears, time and again, in both
+the scriptures, and one never fails to feel its importance in the
+world's story. Five hundred years after Abraham, Thothmes III. thought
+it worth while to cross over from Egypt to conquer Damascus, and after
+still another five hundred years King David ravaged the country round
+about and set up a garrison here. Those were not frequent changes.
+Damascus does not do things frequently or without reflection. I believe
+the Medes came next, and after them the Romans, and then, quite
+recently--recently for Damascus, I mean--only thirteen hundred years
+ago--the Mohammedans took the place and have held it ever since.
+
+And Damascus herself has remained unchanged. Other cities have risen and
+prospered and perished even from memory. They did not matter to
+Damascus. Nothing matters to Damascus. It may have altered its
+appearance a trifle now and then, but not materially. It is the same
+Damascus that Abraham knew and that David conquered. I can see both of
+these old fellows any time I look out of my hotel window; also, the
+three hundred and eighteen servants born in Abraham's household--all the
+tableau of the ancient city that has remained forever young.
+
+     "Though old as history itself, thou art as fresh as the
+     breath of spring, blooming as thine own rosebud, and
+     fragrant as thine own orange-flower, O Damascus, pearl of
+     the East!"
+
+We are at the Grande Hotel Victoria. All these hotels are "Grande"
+something or other. A box shanty ten by fifteen is likely to be called
+"Grande Hotel de France." However, the Victoria _is_ grand, rather, and
+quite Oriental in its general atmosphere. The rooms are clean, too, and
+the Turkish pictures amusing. Furthermore, our rooms look across the
+river--the soul of Damascus--the water in which Eve first saw her sweet
+reflected form, if tradition holds. Its banks are bordered by a great
+thoroughfare now, where against a background of peach-bloom and minaret
+an eternal panorama flows by. Camel trains from Bagdad and the far
+depths of Persia; mule trains from the Holy Land; donkey trains from
+nowhere in particular; soldiers with bands playing weird music; groups
+of Arabs mounted on splendid horses--dark men with long guns, their
+burnouses flying in the wind. One might sit here forever and drift out
+of time, out of space, in the fabric of the never-ending story.
+
+Being late in the afternoon, with no programme, Laura and I set out to
+seek adventure, were immediately adopted by a guide, and steered toward
+the bazaars. We crossed a public square near the hotel where there were
+all sorts and conditions of jackasses--some of them mounted by men,
+others loaded with every merchandise under the sun. We saw our first
+unruly donkey just then--a very small donkey mounted by a very fat son
+of the prophet with a vast turban and beard. It being the Mohammedan
+Sunday (Friday), he had very likely been to the mosque and to market,
+and was going home. He had a very large bush broom under his arm, and it
+may have been this article thrashing up and down on the donkey's flank
+that made him restive. At all events, he was cavorting about (the
+donkey, I mean) in a most unseemly fashion for one bestridden by so
+grave a burden, and Mustapha Mohammed--they are all named that--was
+bent forward in a ball, uttering what Laura thought might be quotations
+from the Koran. We did not see what happened. They were still gyrating
+and spinning when we were caught up by the crowd and swept into the
+bazaar.
+
+The Grande Bazaar of Damascus excels anything we have seen. It is bigger
+and better and cleaner than the bazaar of Constantinople, and a
+hundred--no, a million--times more inviting. No Christian could eat
+anything in a Constantinople market-place. The very thought of it gags
+me now as I write, while here in Damascus, Laura and I were having
+confections almost immediately--and lemonade cooled with snow brought on
+the backs of camels from the Lebanon mountain-tops. Mark Twain speaks of
+the place as being filthy. I think they must have cleaned up a good deal
+since then; besides, that was midsummer. I would not like to say that
+the place is speckless, but for the Orient it was clean, and the general
+bouquet was not disturbing. Also, I had a safer feeling in Damascus. I
+did not feel that if I stepped into a side-street I would immediately be
+dragged down and robbed. I did not feel as if I were a lost soul in a
+bedlam of demons.
+
+We noticed other things. The little booths, one after another, were
+filled with the most beautiful wares--such wares as we have seen nowhere
+else--but the drowsy merchants sat cross-legged in meditation, smoking
+their nargileh or reading their prayers, and did not ask us to buy. If
+we stopped to look at their goods they hardly noticed us. If we priced
+them they answered our guide in Arabic monosyllables. Here and there a
+Jew with a more pretentious stock would solicit custom in the old way of
+Israel, but the Arab was silent, indifferent, disinterested. Clearly it
+was his preference that we pass by as quickly as possible. His goods
+were not for such as us. I did manage to add to my collection of
+donkey-beads, and would have bought more if Laura had not suggested that
+they probably thought I was buying them to wear myself. At the
+book-booth they even would not let us touch the volumes displayed for
+sale.
+
+Another thing I have noticed: there are no beggars here--none worth
+while. Now and then, perhaps, somebody half extends a timid hand, but on
+the whole there is a marked absence of begging. Damascus does not beg
+from the Christian.
+
+It is a weird, wonderful place, that bazaar. It covers an endless space,
+if one may judge from its labyrinthine interior. Everywhere they stretch
+away, the dim arcades, flimsily roofed with glass and matting and bark,
+fading into vague Oriental vistas of flitting figures and magic
+outlines. Here in the main thoroughfare a marvellous life goes on. The
+space is wide, and there are masses of people moving to and fro, mingled
+with donkeys and camels, and even carriages that dash recklessly
+through; and there is a constant cry of this thing and that thing from
+the donkey-boys and the pedlers of nuts and bread and insipid sweetened
+drinks. Some of the pedling people clatter little brass cymbals as they
+walk up and down, and repeat over and over some words which our guide
+said were something between a prayer and a song, probably as old as the
+language.[6] And the vendors of drinks carry their stock in trade in a
+goat-skin, or maybe in a pigskin, which is not a pretty thing to look
+at--all black and hairy and wet, with distended legs sticking out like
+something drowned. We didn't buy any of those drinks. We thought they
+might be clean enough, but we were no longer thirsty.
+
+All sorts of things are incorporated in this bazaar: old
+dwelling-houses; columns of old temples; stairways beginning anywhere,
+leading nowhere; mosques--the limitless roof of merchandise has
+stretched out and enveloped these things. To attempt a detailed
+description of the place would be unwisdom. One may only generalize this
+vast hive of tiny tradesmen and tiny trades. All the curious merchants
+and wares we have seen pictured for a lifetime are gathered here. It is
+indeed the Grande Bazaar--the emporium of the East.
+
+The street we followed came to an end by-and-by at a great court open to
+the sky. It was a magnificent enclosure, and I was quite willing to
+enter it. I did not do so, however. I had my foot raised to step over
+the low barrier, when there was a warning cry and a brown hand pushed me
+back. Our guide had dropped a step behind. He came hurrying up now, and
+explained that this was the court of the Great Mosque. We must have
+special permission to enter. We would come with the party to-morrow.
+
+The place impressed me more than any mosque we have seen--not for its
+beauty, though it is beautiful, but because of its vastness, its open
+sky, and its stone floor, polished like glass by the bare and stockinged
+feet that have slipped over it for centuries. We could not enter, but we
+were allowed to watch those who came as they removed their shoes and
+stepped over into the court to pray. When you realize that the enclosure
+is as big as two or three city squares, and that the stones, only fairly
+smooth in the beginning, reflect like a mirror now, you will form some
+idea of the feet and knees and hands that have pressed them, and realize
+something of the fervor of the Damascus faith.
+
+We left the bazaar by a different way, and our guide got lost getting us
+back to the hotel. I didn't blame him, though--anybody could get lost in
+those tangled streets. We were in a hopeless muddle, for it was getting
+dark, when down at the far end of a narrow defile Laura got a glimpse of
+a building which she said was like one opposite our hotel. So we went to
+look for it, and it was the same building. Then our guide found the
+hotel for us, and we paid him, and everything was all right. He didn't
+know anything about the city, I believe, but was otherwise a perfect
+guide.
+
+Following, we put in a busy two days in Damascus--a marvellous two days,
+I thought. Our carriages were at the hotel next morning, and I want to
+say here that of all the carriages and horses we have seen, those of
+Damascus are far and away the best. The horses are simply beautiful
+creatures and in perfect condition. Even those kept for hire are superb
+animals with skins of velvet. They are Arabian, of course, and I can
+believe, now, that the Arab loves his horse, for I have never seen finer
+animals, not even on Fifth Avenue. I can understand, too, why the
+_Quaker City_ pilgrims--ambling into Damascus on those old, blind, halt
+and spavined Beirut nags--made their entry by night.
+
+And these Damascus horses go. Their drivers may love them, but they make
+them hurry. They crack their whips, and we go racing through the streets
+like mad. However deliberate the East may be in most things, it is swift
+enough in the matter of driving.
+
+I don't care for it. It keeps me watching all the time to see what kind
+of an Arab we are going to kill, and I miss a good many sights. We went
+through that crowded thoroughfare of the Grande Bazaar at a rate which
+fairly was homicidal. Certainly if those drowsy shopkeepers did not hate
+Christians enough before, they do now.
+
+We drove to the Grande Mosque, and we had to put on slippers, of course,
+to enter even the outer court. It is nearly a quarter of a mile long,
+and we slid and straddled across that vast marble skating-rink, pausing
+at a little pavilion--the Dome of the Treasury--where they keep some
+venerable books--the oldest books in the world, I believe, and so sacred
+that nobody ever sees them. Then we entered the Grande Mosque
+itself--still known as the Church of St. John the Divine.
+
+For, like the temples of Baalbec and otherwheres, the Grande Mosque of
+Damascus has sheltered a variety of religious doctrines. It was the
+Temple of Rimmon, first, god of the Syrians. The Romans, who conquered
+and templed the world, came next, and built here, as they always built,
+in magnificence and pride, with architecture stolen from the Greeks.
+After the Romans, the early Christians under Constantine and Theodosius,
+who for some reason did not destroy, as was their habit, but only
+adapted the great temple to their needs. The son of Theodosius made some
+improvements, and above the south door left a Christian inscription
+which stands to this day.
+
+When, in 634 A.D., Damascus fell, the church was at first divided
+between Mohammedan and Christian worshippers--the two entering by the
+same gate. They were not so far asunder in those days--not farther, I
+think, than some of our present-day Christian sects--so called. Seventy
+years later the strife became bitter, and the followers of Mohammed
+claimed it all. The Caliph entered the church with guards, smashed the
+Christian images, and set up emblems of the new faith. Then he lavished
+quantities of money, making the place as splendid as possible, until it
+was more beautiful even than St. Sophia's. Sixteen years ago it was
+badly damaged by fire, but now it has been restored--by Christian
+workmen, Habib said. Habib, I should add, is our party guide--a
+Christian Syrian, educated in a college at Beirut--a quite wonderful
+person of many languages.
+
+The mosque interior is the most beautiful place we have seen. Its
+ceiling, its windows, its mosaic walls, its rugs--all overwhelming in
+exquisite workmanship and prodigality of design. The pictures I have
+dreamed of Aladdin's palace grow dim in this enchanted place. No wonder
+the faithful linger here on their way to and from Mecca; for after the
+long desert stages it is like a vision of that lavish paradise which
+their generous prophet has provided. They are all about--prostrating
+themselves with many genuflections and murmurings--and we step on them
+as little as possible, but they are a good deal in the way. The place
+holds ten or twelve thousand of them every Friday, Habib said.
+
+Habib, by-the-way, has small respect for the Moslem. Also, he does not
+seem to fear consequences, which I confess I do, being in the very
+stronghold of fanaticism, and remembering that some five thousand
+Christians were suddenly and violently destroyed in Damascus not so many
+years ago. We were in front of a very marvellous mosaic shrine, and
+Habib beckoned us to come closer to admire its exquisite workmanship. A
+devotee was prostrated in the little alcove, bowing and praying in the
+usual rhythmic way. We surrounded him, but were inclined to hold a
+little aloof.
+
+"Closer, closer!" urged Habib. "You must see it!"
+
+We crowded up and entangled the praying person, who became aware of our
+presence and turned up his face helplessly. Then he pressed it again to
+the floor, and tried to go on with his murmurings. It was no use. Habib
+jostled him, waved his pointing stick over his head, tapped the
+ornamentation within an inch of his nose. We were told to step up and
+examine the work closely--to touch it, smell of it. Clearly Habib
+regarded that devotee no more than if he had been a mile removed instead
+of being actually against us. The poor pious pilgrim stole another look
+at us, this way and that, slipped a notch in his prayers, gathered
+himself and tried again, let go a whole distich, quavered in his attempt
+to make himself heard, cast another appealing glance at the
+_Kurfuersters_, broke through, and fled. This is not an exaggeration, but
+an actual happening. In America there would have been trouble.
+
+"He is nothing," said Habib, when I seemed disturbed. "He is only an
+Arab." Still, he was praying to Habib's God.
+
+Many persons do not realize, I believe, that Christianity and
+Mohammedanism differ mainly in their Messiah. The Jew furnished the
+Moslem as well as the Christian with a God, patriarchs, and
+prophets--the Old Testament being common to all. The Moslem goes further
+than the Jew, for he accepts parts of the New Testament. He recognizes
+John the Baptist as a holy messenger, even claiming to have his head in
+this very church, in a shrine which we saw, though I could see that
+Habib thought the relic apocryphal. Furthermore, the Moslem accepts
+Christ! To him, Christ is only a lesser prophet than Mohammed, but still
+a great being--an emissary of God--and on this same mosque is the
+Minaret of Jesus, where, one day, as they believe, he will stand to
+judge the world. On the other hand, the average Christian believes that
+Mohammed was merely a fraud, and it is this difference of opinion that
+has reddened the East with blood. I am moved to set down this paragraph
+of rather general information for the reason that it contains some
+things which I suppose others to be as ignorant of as I was--things
+which seem to me interesting.
+
+We did see one old book, by-the-way--fifteen hundred years old, Habib
+said, and a member of our party asked if it was printed on a press;
+though that is nothing--I have done worse myself. Then we ascended the
+Minaret of the Bride for the view. We climbed and climbed, and got hot,
+and shaky in the knees, but the view repaid us. There was Damascus
+spread out in its beauty; its marble courts, its domes and minarets and
+painted houses--a magic city in the midst of a garden of bloom.
+Certainly this is fairyland--a mirage whose fragile fabric may vanish in
+a breath. Oh, our time is all too short! One must have long and long to
+look upon the East--it has taken so long to build!
+
+We went to Saladin's tomb, and that is authoritative, though I confess
+that I could not realize, as we stood in that narrow building and viewed
+the catafalque in the centre, that the mighty Saracen hero of romance
+rested there. For me, he belongs only in tales of enchantment and fierce
+deeds, and not in that quiet place. I remembered that his sword was so
+sharp that a feather pillow dropped on its edge would fall on either
+side. Perhaps they have the sword there, and possibly the pillow to
+prove it, but I did not see them.
+
+A Turkish school turned out to look at us and smile. We looked and
+smiled back, and everybody was satisfied. It is certain that we look
+more strange to them than they do to us, now. I know this, for when I
+stop anywhere and look over our party, here amid the turbans and fezzes
+and long flowing garments of the Orient, I can see for myself that it is
+really our party that looks queer and fantastic and out of place--not
+these people at all.
+
+It is natural that one should realize this in Damascus, for Damascus is
+the great reality--the unchanged and changeless. Algiers was a framed
+picture; Constantinople was a world's Midway--a sort of masquerade,
+prepared for our benefit. Here it is different. No longer the country
+and the people constitute the show, but ourselves. One presently
+discovers that he is artificial--an alien, a discord--that he has no
+place here. These others are the eternal verities; their clothes are the
+real clothes--not ours, that change fashion with every year and season.
+One is tempted to abjure all the fanfare and flourish of his so-called
+progress--to strip off his ridiculous garments and customs and fall in
+with the long steady rhythm of the ages.
+
+Only, you don't do it. You discover objections to such a course. I could
+name some of them if I wanted to. Never mind; you couldn't do it anyway.
+You have been hurrying and sweating and capering about and wearing your
+funny clothes and singing in false keys too long. You cannot immediately
+put on the garb of the ages, and lock step with the swing of a thousand
+years.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] The pedler of bread cries, "O Allah who sustaineth us, send trade!"
+The pedler of beverages, "O cheer thine heart!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+FOOTPRINTS OF PAUL
+
+
+We entered the "street which is called Straight," and came to the house
+of Judas, where St. Paul lodged when he was led blind into Damascus,
+trembling and astonished of the Lord. His name was Saul, and he had been
+on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians, by the authority of
+Rome. The story is in the ninth chapter of Acts, and is too familiar to
+repeat here. I believe, though, most of us thought the house of Judas
+had some connection with the unfaithful disciple of that name, until
+Habib enlightened us. Habib said that this was another Judas--a good
+man--well-to-do for his time. The Street called Straight runs through
+the Grande Bazaar, and the house of Judas is in the very midst of that
+dim aggregation of trades. It is roofless and unoccupied, but it is kept
+clean and whitewashed, and its stone walls will stand for another two
+thousand years.
+
+Next to the birth and crucifixion of the Saviour, the most important
+event in the story of Christianity happened there. It seemed strange and
+dream-like to be standing in the house of St. Paul's conversion--a place
+which heretofore had seemed to exist only in the thin leaves and fine
+print of our Sunday-school days--and I found myself wondering which
+corner of the house St. Paul occupied, just where he sat at table, and a
+number of such things. Then I noticed the drifting throngs outside,
+passing and repassing or idling drowsily, who did not seem to know that
+it was St. Paul's house, and paid no attention to it at all.
+
+At the house of Ananias, which came next, Habib was slow in arriving,
+and the Horse-Doctor gave us a preliminary lecture.
+
+"This," he said, "is the house of Ananias, once fed by the ravens.
+Later, through being a trifle careless with the truth, he became the
+founder and charter member of a club which in the United States of
+America still bears his name. Still later he was struck by lightning for
+deceiving his mother-in-law, Saphira, who perished at the same time to
+furnish a Scripture example that the innocent must suffer with the
+guilty (see Deuteronomy xi. 16): This is the spot where Ananias fell.
+That stone marks the spot where his mother-in-law stood. The hole in the
+roof was made by the lightning when it came through. We will now pass on
+to the next--"
+
+That was good enough gospel for our party if Habib had only let it
+alone. He came in just then and interrupted. He said:
+
+"This is the house of Ananias--called St. Ananias, to distinguish him
+from a liar by the same name. That Ananias and his wife, Saphira, fell
+dead at the feet of St. Peter because of falsehood, a warning to those
+who trifle with the truth to-day. St. Ananias was a good man, who
+restored St. Paul's sight and instructed him in the Christian
+doctrine."
+
+We naturally avoided the Doctor for a time after that. His neighborhood
+seemed dangerous.
+
+The house of Ananias is below ground, and was probably used as a
+hiding-place in a day when it was not safe for an active and busy
+Christian to be at large. Such periods have not been unusual in
+Damascus. St. Paul preached Christianity openly, but not for long; for
+the Jews "took counsel to kill him," and watched the gate to see that he
+did not get away.
+
+"Then the disciples took him by night, and let him down the wall in a
+basket."
+
+We drove to the outer wall, and came to the place and the window where
+Paul is said to have been let down. It _might_ have happened there; the
+wall is Roman, and the window above it could have been there in St.
+Paul's day. I prefer to believe it is the real window, though I have
+reason to think they show another one sometimes.
+
+Habib said we were to visit some of the handsome residences of Damascus.
+We were eager for that. From the Minaret of the Bride we had looked down
+upon those marble courts and gay facades, and had been fascinated. We
+drove back into the city, through narrow mud-walled streets, forbidding
+and not overclean. When these alleys had become so narrow and
+disheartening that we could travel only with discomfort, we stopped at a
+wretched entrance and were told to get out. Certainly this was never the
+portal to any respectable residence. But we were mistaken. The Damascus
+house is built from the inside out. It is mud and unseemly disrepute
+without, but it is fairyland within. Every pretentious house is built
+on the same plan, and has a marble court, with a fountain or pool, and
+some peach or apricot or orange trees. On one side of the court is the
+front of the house. It has a high entrance, and rooms to the right and
+to the left--rooms that have a raised floor at one end (that is where
+the rich rugs are) and very high ceilings--forty feet high, some of
+them--decorated with elaborate designs. In the first house the round
+writhing rafters were exposed, and the decoration on them made them look
+exactly like snakes. The Apostle took one look and fled, and I confess I
+did not care for them much myself. The rest of the house was divided
+into rooms of many kinds, and there was running water, and a bath. We
+visited another house, different only in details. Some of the occupants
+were at home here--women-folks who seemed glad to see us, and showed us
+about eagerly. A tourist party from far-off America is a diversion to
+them, no doubt.
+
+[Illustration: URGING US TO PARTAKE OF THE PRECIOUS STUFF, WITHOUT
+STINT]
+
+Then we went to still another house. We saw at once that it was a
+grander place than the two already visited, and we were simply
+bewildered at the abundance of the graven brass and inlaid furniture,
+rich rugs and general bric-a-brac, that filled a great reception-room.
+Suddenly servants in Turkish dress appeared with trays of liqueurs--two
+kinds, orange and violet--urging us to partake of the precious stuff,
+without stint. Also, there were trays of rare coffee and dainty
+sweetmeats, and we were invited to sit in the priceless chairs and to
+handle the wonderful things to our hearts' content. We were amazed,
+stunned. Oriental hospitality could go no further. Then in some subtle
+manner--I don't remember how the information was conveyed, but it must
+have been delicately, Orientally done--we learned that all this brass,
+all these marvellous things, were for sale!
+
+Did we buy them? Did we! David did not take more brass from Hadadezer
+than we carried out of that Damascus residence, which was simply an
+annex to a great brass and mosaic factory, as we discovered later.
+Perhaps those strange liqueurs got into our enthusiasm; certainly I have
+never seen our party so liberal--so little inclined to haggle and hammer
+down.
+
+But the things themselves were worth while. The most beautiful brass in
+the world is made in Damascus, and it is made in that factory.
+
+They took us in where the work was going on. I expected to see
+machinery. Nothing of the sort--not a single machine anywhere. Every
+stage of the work is performed by hand--done in the most primitive way,
+by workmen sitting on the ground, shaping some artistic form, or with a
+simple graving-tool working out an intricate design. Many of the workers
+were mere children--girls, most of them--some of them not over seven or
+eight years old, yet even these were producing work which would cause
+many an "arts and crafts" young lady in America to pale with envy. They
+get a few cents a day. The skilled workers, whose deft fingers and
+trained vision produce the exquisite silver inlay designs, get as much
+as a shilling. No wonder our people did not haggle. The things were
+cheap, and they knew it.
+
+In a wareroom in the same factory I noticed that one of the walls was
+stone, and looked like Roman masonry; also that in it were the outlines
+of two high arches, walled up. I asked Habib about it.
+
+"Those," he said, "are two of the entrances to the Street called
+Straight. We are outside of the wall here; this house is built against
+it. The Straight street had three entrances in the old days. Those two
+have long been closed."
+
+It always gives me a curious sensation to realize that actual people are
+living and following their daily occupations in the midst of
+associations like these. I can't get used to it at all.
+
+To them, however, it is nothing. The fact that they sleep and wake and
+pursue their drowsy round in places hallowed by tradition; that the
+house which sheltered St. Paul stands in the midst of their murmuring
+bazaar; that one side of this wareroom is the wall of the ancient city,
+the actual end of the Street called Straight; that every step they take
+is on historic ground, sacred to at least three religions--this to me
+marvellous condition is to them not strange at all.
+
+It is not that they do not realize the existence of these things: they
+do--at least, most of them do--and honor and preserve their landmarks.
+But that a column against which they dream and smoke may be one of the
+very columns against which St. Paul leaned as he groped his blind way
+down the Street called Straight is to them not a matter for wonder, or
+even comment.
+
+I am beginning to understand their point of view--even to envy it. I do
+not envy some of the things they have--some of their customs--but their
+serenity of habit, their security of place in the stately march of time,
+their establishment of race and religion--one must envy these things
+when he considers them here, apart from that environment which we call
+civilized--the whirl which we call progress.
+
+I do not think I shall turn Moslem. The doctrine has attractive
+features, both here and hereafter; but I would not like to undertake the
+Koran at my time of life. I can, however, and I do, pay the tribute of
+respect to the sun-baked land and sun-browned race that have given birth
+to three of the world's great religions, even though they have not
+unnaturally claimed their last invention as their best and held it as
+their own.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+DISCONTENTED PILGRIMS
+
+
+We entered the remaining portal of the Street called Straight and drove
+to the Grand Bazaar. We were in a buying fever by this time, and plunged
+into a regular debauch of bargain and purchase. We were all a little
+weary when we reached the hotel. We came in carrying our brass and other
+loot, and dropped down on the first divan, letting our bundles fall
+where they listed.
+
+I thought the Apostle looked particularly solemn. Being a weighty
+person, jouncing all day in a carriage and walking through brass bazaars
+and fez bazaars and silk bazaars and rug bazaars and silver bazaars and
+leather bazaars and saddle bazaars, and at least two hundred and seven
+other bazaars, had told on him. When I spoke cheeringly he merely
+grunted and reached for something in a glass which, if it tasted as it
+smelled, was not calculated to improve his temper. When I sat down
+beside him he did not seem over cordial.
+
+[Illustration: ASKED HIM IF HE WOULDN'T EXECUTE A LITTLE COMMISSION FOR
+ME IN THE BAZAARS]
+
+Then, quite casually, I asked him if he wouldn't execute a little
+commission for me in the bazaars; there were a few trifles I had
+overlooked: another coffee-set, for instance--something for a friend at
+home; I had faith in his (the Apostle's) taste.
+
+It seemed a reasonable request, and I made it politely enough, but the
+Apostle became suddenly violent. He said:
+
+"Damn the bazaars! I'm full of brass and Oriental rugs and bric-a-brac.
+I never want to hear of a bazaar again. I want to give away the junk
+I've already bought, and get back to the ship." Which we knew he didn't
+mean, for he had put in weary hours acquiring those things, inspired
+with a large generosity for loved ones at home.
+
+The Colonel came drifting along just then--unruffled,
+debonair--apparently unwearied by the day's round. Nothing disturbs the
+Colonel. If he should outwear the century, he would still be as blithe
+of speech and manner as he is to-day at--dear me, how old is the
+Colonel? Is he thirty? Is he fifty? He might be either of those ages or
+at any mile-post between.
+
+He stood now, looking down at the Apostle and his cup of poison. Then,
+with a coaxing smile:
+
+"Match you, Joe--my plunder against yours--just once."
+
+The Apostle looked up with a perfectly divine sneer.
+
+"_Yes_, you will-- I think I see myself!"
+
+The Colonel slapped a coin on the table briskly.
+
+"Come on, Joe--we never matched for bric-a-brac before. Let's be
+game--just this time."
+
+What was the use? The Apostle resisted--at first violently, then
+feebly--then he matched--and lost.
+
+For a moment he could hardly realize the extent of his disaster. Then he
+reached for the mixture in front of him, swallowed it, gagged, and
+choked alarmingly. When he could get his voice, he said:
+
+"I'm the hellfiredest fool in Syria. I walked four hundred miles to buy
+those things."
+
+The Horse-Doctor regarded him thoughtfully.
+
+"You always interest me," he said. "I don't know whether it's your shape
+or your mental habitudes. Both are so peculiar."
+
+After which we left the Apostle--that is, we stood from under and went
+in to dinner.
+
+The Apostle is a good traveller, however--all the Reprobates are. They
+take things as they find them, which cannot be said for all of our
+people. One wonders what some of them expected in Damascus--probably
+steamer fare and New York hotel accommodations. I judge this from their
+remarks.
+
+As a matter of fact, we are at the best hotel in Damascus, and the hotel
+people are racking their bodies and risking their souls to give us the
+best they know. A traveller cannot get better than the best--even in
+heaven. Travelling alone in any strange land, he is more likely to get
+the worst. Yet the real traveller will make the best of what he finds,
+and do better when he finds he can. But these malcontents of ours have
+been pampered and spoiled by that steamer until they expect nothing
+short of perfection--_their_ kind of perfection--wherever they set foot.
+They are so disturbed over the fact that the bill-of-fare is unusual and
+not adjusted to their tastes that they are not enjoying the sights, and
+want to clear out, forthwith. They have been in Damascus a little more
+than a day; they want to go now. This old race has stood it five
+thousand years or more. These ship-dwellers can't stand it two days
+without complaint. I don't want to be severe, but such travellers tire
+me. I suppose the bill-of-fare in heaven won't please them. I hope not,
+if I'm invited to remain there--any length of time, I mean.
+
+The rest of us are having great enjoyment. We like everything, and we
+eat most of it. There are any number of dried fruits and nuts and fine
+juicy oranges always on the table, strung down the centre--its full
+length. And even if the meats are a bit queer, they are by no means bad.
+We whoop up the bill-of-fare, and go through it forward and backward and
+diagonally, working from both ends toward the centre, and back again if
+we feel like it. We have fruit and nuts piled by our plates and on our
+plates all through the meal. _We_ don't get tired of Damascus. We could
+stay here and start a famine. What _will_ these grumblers do in heaven,
+where very likely there isn't a single dish they ever heard of before?
+
+In the matter of wines, however, I am conservative. You see, Mohammed
+forbade the use of spirituous beverages by the faithful, and liquor
+forms no part of their long, symphonic rhyme. They don't drink it
+themselves; they only make it for visitors.
+
+It would require no command of the Prophet to make me abstain from it. I
+have tried their vintage. I tried one brand called the "Wine of
+Ephesus." The name conjured visions; so did the wine, but they were not
+the same visions. The name suggested banquets in marble halls, where
+gentlemen and ladies of the old days reclined on rich divans and were
+served by slaves on bended knee. The wine itself--the taste of it, I
+mean--suggested a combination of hard cider and kerosene, with a hurry
+call for the doctor.
+
+I was coy about the wines of the East after that, but by-and-by I tried
+another brand--a different color with a different name. This time it was
+"Nectar of Heliopolis." They had curious ideas of nectar in Heliopolis.
+Still, it was better than the Wine of Ephesus. Hair-oil is always better
+than kerosene in a mixture like that--but not much better. The flavor
+did not invite debauch.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is Sunday (the Christian Sunday), and I have been out for an early
+morning walk. I took the trolley that starts near the hotel. I did not
+care for a trolley excursion, but I wanted to see what a Damascus
+trolley is like and where it went. It isn't like anything in particular,
+and it didn't go anywhere--not while I was on it.
+
+I noticed that it was divided into three sections, and I climbed into
+the front one. The conductor motioned to me, and I understood that I had
+made a wrong selection, somehow. A woman, veiled and bangled, climbed
+aboard just then, and I understood. I was in the women's section--a
+thing not allowed in Damascus. So I got back into the rear section, but
+that wouldn't do, either. The conductor was motioning again.
+
+I comprehended at length. The rear compartment was second class. He
+wanted me to go in style. So I got into the middle compartment and gave
+him a tin medal, and got two or three similar ones in change, and sat
+there waiting for the procession to move. I waited a good while. There
+was an Arabic inscription on the back of the seats in front of me--in
+the place where, in America, it says, "Wait for the car to stop." I
+suppose it says, "Wait for the car to start" in Damascus. We did that.
+The conductor dozed.
+
+Now and then somebody climbed on, but the arrivals were infrequent. I
+wondered if we were waiting for a load. It would take a week to fill up,
+at that rate. I looked at my watch now and then. The others went to
+sleep. That is about the difference between the East and the West. The
+West counts the time; for the East it has no existence. Moments, hours,
+months mean nothing to the East. The word hurry is not of her language.
+She drives her horses fast, but merely for pleasure, not haste. She has
+constructed this trolley, but merely for style. It doesn't really serve
+any useful purpose.
+
+We moved a little by-and-by, and I had hopes. They were premature. We
+crawled up in front of a coffee-house where a lot of turbans and fezzes
+were gathered outside, over tiny cups and hubble-bubble pipes; then we
+stopped. Our conductor and motorman got off and leaned against an
+almond-tree and began gossiping with friends. Finally coffee came out to
+them, and pipes, and they squatted down to smoke.
+
+I finished my ride then; I shall always wonder where those other
+passengers thought they were going, and if they ever got there.
+
+I followed down a narrow street, and came to a succession of tiny
+work-shops. It was then I discovered what a man's feet are for--that
+is, some uses I had not known before. They are to assist the hands in
+performing mechanical labor. All mechanics work barefooted here. They
+sit flat on the floor or ground, with their various appliances in
+front of them, and there is scarcely any operation in which the feet
+do not take part. I came to a turning-lathe--a whole row of
+turning-lathes--tiny, crude affairs, down on the ground, of course,
+driven back and forth with a bow and a string. The workman held the bow
+in one hand, while the other hand, assisted by the foot, guided the
+cutting tool. It would never occur to these workmen to put the lathe
+higher in the air and attach a treadle, leaving both hands free to guide
+the tool.
+
+Their sawing is the crudest process imaginable. They have no trestles or
+even saw-bucks. They have only a slanting stick stuck in the ground, and
+against this, with their feet and one hand, they hold the piece to be
+sawed, while the other hand runs the earliest saw ever made--the kind
+Noah used when he built the Ark. Sometimes a sawyer has a helper--a boy
+who pushes and pulls as the saw runs back and forth.
+
+I bought a Sunday-morning paper. It does not resemble the
+sixty-four-page New York Sunday dailies. It consists of four small
+pages, printed in wriggly animalculae and other aquaria, and contains
+news four years old--or four hundred, it does not matter. Possibly it
+denounces the sultan--it is proper to do that just now--but I think not.
+That would be too current. I think it is still denouncing Constantine.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+DAMASCUS, THE GARDEN BEAUTIFUL
+
+
+Later, we drove to the foot of Mohammed's Hill--the hill from which the
+Prophet looked down on the Pearl of the East and decided that as he
+could have only one paradise he would wait for the next. They have built
+a little tower to mark the spot where he rested, and we thought we would
+climb up there.
+
+We didn't, however. The carriages could only go a little way beyond the
+city outskirts, and when we started to climb that blistering, barren
+hillside afoot we changed our minds rapidly. We had permission to go as
+high as we pleased, but it is of no value. Anybody could give it. Laura
+and I and a German newspaper man were the only ones who toiled up high
+enough to look down through the mystical haze on the vision Mohammed
+saw. Heavens! but it was hot up there! And this is March--early spring!
+How those _Quaker City_ pilgrims stood it to travel across the Syrian
+desert in August I cannot imagine. In the _Innocents_ I find this
+observation:
+
+     "The sun-flames shot down like shafts of fire that stream
+     out of a blowpipe. The rays seemed to fall in a steady
+     deluge on my head and pass downward like rain from a roof."
+
+That is a white-hot description, but not too intense, I think, for
+Syrian summer-time.
+
+Another thing we noticed up there: Damascus is growing--in that
+direction at least. Older than history, the place is actually having a
+boom. All the houses out that way are new--mud-walled, but some of them
+quite pretentious. They have pushed out far beyond the gardens, across
+the barren plain, and they are climbing the still more barren slope.
+They stand there in the baking sun, unshaded as yet by any living thing.
+One pities the women shut up behind those tiny barred windows. These
+places will have gardens about them some day. Already their owners are
+scratching the earth with their crooked sticks, and they will plant and
+water and make the desert bloom.
+
+Being free in the afternoon, Laura and I engaged Habib and a carriage
+and went adventuring on our own account. We let Habib manage the
+excursion, and I shall always remember it as a sweet, restful
+experience.
+
+We visited a Moslem burying-ground first, and the tomb of Fatima--the
+original Fatima--Mohammed's beautiful daughter, who married a rival
+prophet, Ali, yet sleeps to-day with honor in a little mosque-like tomb.
+We passed a tree said to have been planted by the Mohammedan conqueror
+of Damascus nearly thirteen hundred years ago--an enormous tree, ten
+feet through or more--on one side a hollow which would hold a dozen men,
+standing.
+
+Then at last we came to the gardens of Damascus, and got out and walked
+among the olive-trees and the peach and almond and apricot--most of them
+in riotous bloom. Summer cultivation had only just begun, and few
+workmen were about. Later the gardens will swarm with them, and they
+will be digging and irrigating, and afterward gathering the fruit,
+preserving and drying it, and sending it to market. Habib showed us the
+primitive methods of doing these things.
+
+How sweet and quiet and fragrant it was there among the flowering trees!
+In one place a little group of Syrian Christians were recreating (it
+being Sunday), playing some curious dulcimer instrument and singing a
+weird hymn.
+
+We crossed the garden, and sat on the grass under the peach-bloom while
+Habib went for the carriage. Sitting there, we realized that the
+guide-book had been only fair to Damascus.
+
+     "For miles around it is a wilderness of gardens--gardens
+     with roses among the tangled shrubberies, and with fruit on
+     the branches overhead. Everywhere among the trees the murmur
+     of unseen rivulets is heard."
+
+That sounds like fairyland, but it is only Damascus--Damascus in June,
+when the fruit is ripening and the water-ways are full.
+
+We drove out of Damascus altogether--far out across a fertile plain, to
+the slopes of the West Lebanon hills. Then turning, we watched the sun
+slip down the sky while Habib told us many things. Whatever there is to
+know, Habib knows, and to localities and landmarks he fitted stories and
+traditions which brought back all the old atmosphere and made this
+Damascus the Damascus of fable and dreams.
+
+Habib pointed out landmarks near and far--minarets of the great mosque,
+the direction of Jerusalem, of Mecca; he showed us where the waters of
+Damascus rise and where they waste into the desert sands. To the
+westward was Mount Hermon; southward came the lands of Naphtali, and
+Bashan where the giant Og once reigned. All below us lay Palestine;
+Mount Hermon was the watch-tower, Damascus the capital of the North.
+
+Damascus in the sunset, its domes and minarets lifting above the lacing
+green! There is no more beautiful picture in the world than that. We
+turned to it again and again when every other interest had waned--the
+jewel, the "pearl set in emeralds," on the desert's edge. Laura and I
+will always remember that Sunday evening vision of the old city, the
+things that Habib told us, and the drive home.
+
+Next to the city itself I think the desert interested us. It begins just
+a little beyond Damascus, Habib said, and stretches the length of the
+Red Sea and to the Persian Gulf. A thousand miles down its length lies
+Mecca, to which pilgrims have journeyed for ages--a horde of them every
+year. There is a railway, now, as far as Tebook, but Mecca is still six
+hundred miles beyond. The great annual pilgrimages, made up of the
+faithful from all over Asia and portions of Europe and Africa, depart
+from Damascus, and those that survive it return after long months of
+wasting desert travel. Habib said that a great pilgrimage was returning
+now; the city was full of holy men.
+
+Then he told us about the dromedary mail that crosses the desert from
+Damascus to Bagdad, like a through express. It is about five hundred
+miles across as the stork flies, but the dromedary is not disturbed by
+distance. He destroys it at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, and
+capers in fresh and smiling at the other end. Habib did not advise
+dromedary travel. It is very rough, he said. Nothing but an Arab trained
+to the business could stand it. Once an Englishman wanted to go through
+by the dromedary mail, and did go, though they implored him to travel in
+the regular way. He got through all right, but his liver and his heart
+had changed places, and it took three doctors seven days to rearrange
+his works.
+
+A multitude was pouring out of the city when we reached the
+gates--dwellers in the lands about. We entered and turned aside into
+quiet streets, the twilight gathering about mysterious doorways and in
+dim shops and stalls, where were bowed, turbaned men who never seemed to
+sell anything, or to want to sell anything--who barely noticed us as we
+passed through the Grand Bazaar, where it was getting dark, and all the
+drowsy merchants of all the drowsy merchandise were like still shadows
+that only moved a little to let us pass. Out again into streets that
+were full of dusk, and dim flitting figures and subdued sounds.
+
+All at once I caught sight of a black stone jar hanging at the door of a
+very small and dusky booth. It was such a jar as is used in Damascus
+to-day for water--was used there in the time of Abraham.
+
+"Habib!"
+
+I had wanted one of the pots from the first. The carriage stops
+instantly.
+
+"Habib! That black water-jar--a small one!"
+
+I had meant to bargain for it myself, but Habib is ahead of me. He
+scorns to bargain for such a trifle, and with such a merchant. He merely
+seizes the jar, says a guttural word or two in whatever tongue the man
+knows, flings him a paltry coin, and is back in the carriage, directing
+our course along the darkening, narrow way.
+
+What a wonderful life the dark is bringing out! There, in front of that
+coffee-house, that row of men smoking nargileh--surely they are
+magicians, every one. "That silent group with shaven faces and snowy
+beards: who are they, Habib?"
+
+"Mongolians," he says. "Pilgrims returning from Mecca. They live far
+over to the north of China, but still are followers of the Prophet." The
+scope of Islamism is wide--oh yes, very wide, and increasing. That group
+gathered at the fountain--their dress, their faces--
+
+"Habib!"
+
+The horses come up with a jerk.
+
+"A copper water-jar, Habib! An old, old man is filling it--such a
+strange pattern"--
+
+Habib is down instantly, and amid the crowd. Cautiously I follow. The
+old man is stooped, wrinkled, travel-worn. His robe and his turban are
+full of dust. He is listening to Habib and replying briefly.
+
+Habib explains. The pilgrim is returning with it from Mecca; it is very
+old; he cannot part with it. My heart sinks; every word adds value to
+the treasure. Habib tries again, while I touch the ancient, curiously
+wrought jar lovingly. The pilgrim draws away. He will hardly allow me
+even this comfort.
+
+We return to the carriage sadly. The driver starts. Some one comes
+running behind, calling. Again we stop; a boy calls something to Habib.
+
+"He will sell," Habib laughs, "and why not? He demands a napoleon. Of
+course you will not give it!"
+
+Oh, coward heart! I cannot, after that. I have the napoleon and the
+desire, but I cannot appear a fool before Habib.
+
+"No, it is too much. Drive on."
+
+We dash forward; the East closes behind us; the opportunity is forever
+lost.
+
+If one could only be brave at the instant! All my days shall I recall
+the group at the fountain: that bent, travel-stained pilgrim; that
+strangely fashioned water-pot which perhaps came down to him from
+patriarchal days. How many journeys to Mecca had it made; how many times
+had it moistened the parching lips of some way-worn pilgrim dragging
+across the burning sand; how many times had it furnished water for
+absolution before the prayer in the desert! And all this could have been
+mine. For a paltry napoleon I could have had the talisman for my
+own--all the wonder of the East, its music, its mystery, its
+superstition; I could have fondled it and gazed on it and re-created
+each picture at a touch.
+
+Oh, Habib, Habib, may the Prophet forgive you; for, alas, I never can!
+
+At the station next morning a great horde of pilgrims were waiting for
+the train which would bear them to Beirut--Mongolians, many of them, who
+had been on the long, long, pilgrimage over land and sea. At Beirut, we
+were told, seven steamers were waiting to take them on the next stage of
+their homeward journey. What a weary way they had yet to travel!
+
+They were all loaded down with baggage. They had their bundles,
+clothing, quilts, water-bottles: and I wandered about among them vainly
+hoping to find my pilgrim of the copper pot. Hopeless, indeed. There
+were pots in plenty, but they were all new or unsightly things.
+
+All the pilgrims were old men, for the Moslem, like most of the rest of
+us, puts off his spiritual climax until he has acquired his material
+account. He _has_ to, in fact; for, even going the poorest way and
+mainly afoot, a journey of ten or twelve thousand miles across mountain
+and desert, wilderness and wave cannot be made without substance.
+
+We took a goodly number of them on our train. Freight-cars crowded with
+them were attached behind, and we crawled across the mountains with that
+cargo of holy men, who poured out at every other station and prostrated
+themselves, facing Mecca, to pray for our destruction. At least, I
+suppose they did that. I know they made a most imposing spectacle at
+their devotions, and the Moslem would hardly overlook an enemy in such
+easy praying distance.
+
+However, we crossed the steeps, skirted the precipices safely enough,
+and by-and-by a blue harbor lay below, and in it, like a fair picture,
+the ship--home. We had been gone less than a week--it seemed a year.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+WHERE PILGRIMS GATHER IN
+
+
+At some time last night we crossed over the spot where the Lord stirred
+up a mighty tempest and a great fish to punish Jonah, and this morning
+at daybreak we were in the harbor of Jaffa, "the beautiful," from which
+port Jonah sailed on that remarkable cruise.
+
+We were not the only ones there. Two other great excursion steamers lay
+at anchor, the _Arabic_ and the _Moltke_, their decks filled with our
+fellow-countrymen, and I think the several parties of ship-dwellers took
+more interest in looking at one another, and in comparing the appearance
+of their respective vessels, than in the rare vision of Jaffa aglow with
+morning. Three ship-loads at once! It seemed like a good deal of an
+invasion to land on these sacred shores. But then we remembered how many
+invasions had landed at Jaffa--how Alexander and Titus had been there
+before us, besides all the crusades--so a modest scourge like ours would
+hardly matter. As for that military butcher, Napoleon, who a little more
+than a century ago murdered his way through this inoffending land, he
+shot four thousand Turkish prisoners here on the Jaffa sands, after
+accepting their surrender under guarantee of protection. We promised
+ourselves that we would do nothing like that. We might destroy a pedler
+now and then, or a baksheesh fiend; but four thousand, even of that
+breed, would be too heavy a contract.
+
+[Illustration: THE PATRIARCH KNEW ALL ABOUT JAFFA]
+
+The Patriarch knew all about Jaffa. It is one of his special landmarks,
+being the chief seaport of the Phoenicians, the one place they never
+really surrendered. A large share of the vast traffic that went in and
+out of Palestine in the old days went by Jaffa, and a great deal goes
+that way still. The cedarwood from Lebanon, used in Solomon's Temple,
+was brought by water to this port; the treasure and rich goods that went
+down to Jerusalem in the day of her ancient glory all came this way; her
+conquerors landed here. The blade and brand prepared for Jerusalem were
+tried experimentally on Jaffa. According to Josephus, eighty thousand of
+her inhabitants perished at one time. Yet Jaffa has survived. Her
+harbor, which is not really a harbor at all, but merely an anchorage,
+with a landing dangerous and uncertain, has still been sufficient to
+keep her the chief seaport of Judea.
+
+There is another reason for Jaffa's survival. Beyond her hills lie the
+sacred cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The fields that knew Ruth and
+Benjamin and a man named Jesus lie also there. From Jaffa in every
+direction stretch lands made memorable by stories and traditions in
+which the God and the prophets of at least three religions are
+intimately concerned. So during long centuries Jaffa has been a holy
+gateway, and through its portals the tide of pilgrimage has never ceased
+to flow.
+
+Some of us who were to put in full time in Egypt would have only a few
+days in the Holy Land, and we were off the ship presently, being pulled
+through the turquoise water by boatmen who sang a barbaric chorus as
+they bent over their huge, clumsy oars. Then we were ashore and in
+carriages, and in another moment were "jumping through Jaffa," as one of
+the party expressed it, in a way that made events and landmarks flit
+together like the spokes of a wheel.
+
+We visited the tomb of Dorcas, whom Peter raised from the dead, though
+for some reason we did not feel a positive conviction that it was the
+very tomb--perhaps because we did not have time to get up a
+conviction--and we called at the house of Simon the Tanner. It was with
+Simon, "whose house is by the seaside," that Peter lodged when he had
+his "vision of tolerance," in which it was made known to him that "God
+is no respecter of persons, but only of righteousness." It is truly by
+the seaside, and there is an ancient tanner's vat in the court-yard. But
+I hope the place was cleaner when Peter lodged there than it is now. One
+had to step carefully, and, though it did not smell of a tanyard, it did
+of several other things. Many travellers, including Dean Stanley, have
+accepted this as the veritable house where Simon dwelt and St. Peter
+lodged. Those people ought to get together and have it cleaned up. I
+could believe in it then myself.
+
+Jaffa, as a whole, could stand the scrub-brush and the hose. It is not
+"the beautiful" from within. It is wretchedly unbeautiful, though just
+as we were getting ready to leave it we did have one genuine vision.
+From the enclosures of the Greek Church we looked across an interminable
+orange-grove, in which the trees seemed mere shrubs, but were literally
+massed with golden fruit--the whole blending away into tinted haze and
+towering palms. No blight, no vileness, no inodorous breath, but only
+the dreamlit mist and the laden trees--the Orient of our long ago.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One might reasonably suppose that, as often as parties like ours travel
+over the railway that potters along from Jaffa to Jerusalem, there would
+be no commotion, no controversy with the officials--that the guard would
+only need to come in and check up our tickets and let us go.
+
+Nothing of the kind; every such departure as ours is a function, an
+occasion--an entirely new proposition, to be considered and threshed out
+in a separate and distinct fashion. Before we were fairly seated in the
+little coach provided, dark-skinned men came in one after another to
+look us over and get wildly excited--over our beauty, perhaps; I could
+discover nothing else unusual about us. They would wave their hands and
+carry on, first inside and then on the platform, where they would seem
+to settle it. When they had paid us several visits of this kind, they
+locked us in and went away, and we expected to start.
+
+Not at all; they came back presently and did it all over again, only
+louder. Then our dragoman appeared, and bloodshed seemed imminent. When
+they went away again he said it was nothing--just the usual business of
+getting started.
+
+By-and-by some of us discovered that our bags had not been put on the
+train, so we drifted out to look for them. We found them here and there,
+with from two to seven miscreants battling over each as to which should
+have the piastre or two of baksheesh collectible for handing our things
+from the carriage to the train. Such is the manner of graft in the Holy
+Land. It lacks organization and does not command respect.
+
+The station was a hot, thirsty place. We loaded up with baskets of
+oranges, the great, sweet, juicy oranges of Jaffa--the finest oranges in
+the world, I am sure--then we forgot all our delays and troubles, for we
+were moving out through the groves and gardens of the suburbs, entering
+the Plains of Sharon--"a fold for flocks, a fertile land, blossoming as
+the rose."
+
+That old phrase expresses it exactly. I have never seen a place that so
+completely conveyed the idea of fertility as those teeming, haze-haunted
+plains of Sharon. Level as a floor, the soil dark, loose, and loamy;
+here green with young wheat, there populous with labor--men and women,
+boys and girls, dressed in the old, old dress, tilling the fields in the
+old, old manner; flocks and herds tended by such shepherds as saw the
+Star rise over Bethlehem; girls carrying water-jars on their heads;
+camel trains swinging across the horizon--a complete picture of primal
+husbandry, it was--a vast allegory of increase. I have seen agricultural
+and pastoral life on a large scale in America, where we do all of the
+things with machinery and many of them with steam, and would find it
+hard to plough with a camel and a crooked stick; but I have somehow
+never felt such a sense of tillage and production--of communing with
+mother earth and drawing life and sustenance from her bosom--as came to
+me there crossing the Plains of Sharon, the garden of Syria.
+
+It is a goodly tract for that country--about fifty miles long and from
+six to fifteen wide. The tribes of Dan and Manasseh owned it in the old
+days, and to look out of the car-window at their descendants is to see
+those first families that Joshua settled there, for they have never
+changed.
+
+Our dragoman began to point out sites and landmarks. Here was the Plain
+of Joshua, where Samson made firebrands of three hundred foxes and
+destroyed the standing corn of the Philistines. The tower ahead is at
+Ramleh, and was built by the crusaders nearly a thousand years
+ago--Ramleh being the Arimathea where lived Joseph, who provided the
+Saviour with a sepulchre. Also, it is said to be the place where in the
+days when Samuel judged Israel the Jews besought him for a king, and
+acquired Saul and the line of David and Solomon as a result. To the
+eastward lies the Valley of Ajalon, where Joshua stopped the
+astronomical clock for the only time in a million ages, that he might
+slaughter some remaining Amorites before dark.
+
+We are out of the Plains of Sharon by this time, running through a
+profitless-looking country, mostly rock and barren, hardly worth
+fighting over, it would seem. Yet there were plenty of people to be
+killed here in the old days, and as late as fifteen hundred years after
+Joshua the Roman Emperor Hadrian slaughtered so many Jews at Bittir (a
+place we shall pass presently) that the horses waded to their nostrils
+in blood, and a stone weighing several pounds was swept along by the
+ruby tide. The guide told us this, and said if we did not believe it he
+could produce the stone.
+
+Landmarks fairly overlap one another. Here, at Hill Gezer, are the ruins
+of an ancient city presented to Solomon by one of his seven hundred
+fathers-in-law. Yonder at Ekron so much history has been made that a
+chapter would be required to record even a list of the events. Ekron was
+one of the important cities which Joshua did not capture, perhaps
+because he could not manage the solar system permanently. The whole
+route fairly bristles with Bible names, and we are variously affected.
+When we are shown the footprints of Joshua and Jacob and David and
+Solomon we are full of interest. When we recall that this is also the
+land of Phut and Cush and Buz and Jidlaph and Pildash we are moved
+almost to tears.
+
+For those last must have been worthy men. The Bible records nothing
+against them, which is more than can be said of the others named. Take
+Jacob, for instance. I have searched carefully, and I fail to find
+anything to his credit beyond the fact that he procreated the Lord's
+chosen people. I do find that he deceived his father, defrauded his
+brother, outmanoeuvred his rascally father-in-law, and was a craven at
+last before Esau, who had been rewarded for his manhood and forgiveness
+and wrongs by being classed with the Ishmaelites, a name that carries
+with it a reproach to this day.
+
+Then there is Solomon. We need not go into the matter of his thousand
+wives and pretty favorites. Long ago we condoned that trifling
+irregularity as incident to the period--related in some occult but
+perfectly reasonable way to great wisdom. No, the wives are all
+right--also the near-wives, we have swallowed those, too; but then there
+comes in his heresy, his idolatry--all those temples built to heathen
+gods when he had become magnificent and mighty and full of years. There
+was that altar which he set up to Moloch on the hill outside of
+Jerusalem (called to this day the Hill of Offence), an altar for the
+_sacrifice of children by fire_. Even Tiberius Caesar and Nero did not go
+as far as that. I'm sorry, and I shall be damned for it, no doubt, but
+I think, on the whole, in the language of the Diplomat, I shall have to
+"pass Solomon up." Never mind about the other two. Joshua's record is
+good enough if one cares for a slayer of women and children, and David
+was a poet--a supreme poet, a divine poet--which accounts for a good
+deal. Still, he did not need to put the captured Moabites under saws and
+harrows of iron and make them walk through brick-kilns, as described in
+II. Samuel xii: 31, to be picturesque. Neither did he need to kill Uriah
+the Hittite in order to take his wife away from him. Uriah would
+probably have parted with her on easier terms.
+
+It is sad enough to reflect that the Bible, in its good, old, relentless
+way, found it necessary to record such things as these against our
+otherwise Sunday-school heroes and models. Nothing of the sort is set
+down against Buz and Cush and Phut and Pildash and Jidlaph. Very likely
+they were about perfect. I wish I knew where they sleep.
+
+The nearer one approaches Jerusalem the more barren and unproductive
+becomes the country. There are olive-groves and there are cultivated
+fields, but there are more of flinty hillsides and rocky steeps. The
+habitations are no longer collected in villages, in the Syrian fashion,
+but are scattered here and there, with wide sterile places between.
+There would seem to be not enough good land in any one place to support
+a village.
+
+I suppose this is the very home of baksheesh. I know at every station
+mendicants, crippled and blind--always blind--come swarming about,
+holding up piteous hands and repeating endlessly the plaintive wail,
+"Baksheesh! bak-sheesh!" One's heart grows sick and hard by turns. There
+are moments when you long for the wealth of a Rockefeller to give all
+these people a financial standing, and there are moments when you long
+for a Gatling-gun to turn loose in their direction. We are only weak and
+human. We may pity the hungry fly ever so much, but we destroy him.
+
+I think, by-the-way, some of these beggars only cry baksheesh from
+habit, and never expect to get anything. I think so, because here and
+there groups of them stand along the railway between stations, and hold
+out their hands, and voice the eternal refrain as we sweep by. It is
+hardly likely that any one ever flings anything out of a car-window.
+Pity becomes too sluggish in the East to get action as promptly as that.
+
+It was toward evening when we ran into a rather modern little railway
+station, and were told that we were "there." We got out of the train
+then, and found ourselves in such a howling mob of humanity as I never
+dreamed could gather in this drowsy land. We were about the last party
+of the season, it seems, and the porters and beggars and cabmen and
+general riffraff were going to make the most of us. We were seized and
+dragged and torn and lifted--our dragoman could keep us together about
+as well as one cowboy could handle a stampeded herd. I have no distinct
+recollection of how we managed to reach the carriages, but the first
+words I heard after regaining consciousness were:
+
+"That pool down there is where Solomon was anointed king."
+
+I began to take notice then. We were outside a range of lofty
+battlemented walls, approaching a wide gate flanked by an imposing tower
+that might belong to the Middle Ages. We looked down on the squalid pool
+of Gihon, and I tried to visualize the scene of Solomon's coronation
+there, which I confess I found difficult. Then we turned to the tower
+and the entrance to the Holy City.
+
+We were entering Jerusalem by the Jaffa gate, and the tower was the
+Tower of David.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+THE HOLY CITY
+
+
+Thirty-nine hundred years ago it was called merely Salem, and was ruled
+over by Melchisedek, who feasted Abraham when he returned from punishing
+the four kings who carried off his nephew, Lot. Five hundred years
+later, when Joshua ravaged Canaan, the place was known as Jebusi, the
+stronghold of the Jebusites, a citadel "enthroned on a mountain
+fastness" which Joshua failed to conquer, in spite of the traditional
+promise to Israel. Its old name had been not altogether dropped, and the
+transition from Jebusi-salem to Jebu-salem and Jerusalem naturally
+followed.
+
+It was four hundred years after Joshua's time that David brought the
+head of Goliath to Jerusalem, and fifteen years later, when he had
+become king, he took the "stronghold of Zion," smote the difficult
+Jebusite even to the blind and the lame, and named the place the City of
+David.
+
+     "And David said on that day, whosoever getteth up to the
+     gutter and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the
+     blind, _that are_ hated of David's soul, he shall be chief
+     and captain."
+
+That is not as cruel as it sounds. Those incapables had no doubt been
+after David for baksheesh, and he felt just that way. I would like to
+appoint a few chiefs and captains of Jerusalem on the same terms.
+
+But I digress. The Bible calls it a "fort," and it was probably not much
+more than that until David "built round about" and turned it into a
+city, the fame of which extended to Hiram, King of Tyre, who sent
+carpenters and masons and materials to David and built him a house.
+After which "David took him some more concubines and wives out of
+Jerusalem," brought up the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim, and
+prepared to live happy ever after. The Ark was, of course, very sacred,
+and one Uzzah was struck dead on the way up from Kirjath for putting out
+his hand to save it when it was about to roll into a ditch.
+
+It was with David that the glory of Jerusalem as a city began. Then came
+Solomon--David's second son by Uriah's wife--wise, masterful, and
+merciless, and Jerusalem became one of the magnificent cities of the
+world. Under Solomon the Hebrew race became more nearly a nation then
+ever before or since. Solomon completed the Temple begun by David on
+Mount Moriah; the Ark of the Covenant was duly installed. Judaism had
+acquired headquarters--Israel, organization, and a capital.
+
+The fame of the great philosopher-poet-king spread to the ends of the
+earth. The mighty from many lands came to hear his wisdom and to gaze
+upon the magnificence of his court. The Queen of Sheba drifted in from
+her far sunlit kingdom with offerings of gold, spices, and precious
+stones. And "she communed with him of all that was in her heart." That
+was more than a thousand years before Christ. Greece had no history
+then. Rome had not been even considered. Culture and splendor were at
+high-tide in the Far East. It was the golden age of Jerusalem.
+
+The full tide must ebb, and the waning in Jerusalem began early.
+Solomon's reign was a failure at the end. Degenerating into a sensualist
+and an idolater, his enemies prevailed against him. The Lord "stirred up
+an adversary" in Hadad the Edomite, who had an old grudge. Also others,
+and trouble followed. The nation was divided. Revolt, civil wars, and
+abounding iniquities dragged the people down. That which would come to
+Rome a thousand years later came now on a smaller scale to Israel.
+Egyptian and Arabian ravaged it by turns, and the Assyrian came down
+numerously. It became the habit of adjoining nations to go over and
+plunder and destroy Jerusalem.
+
+Four hundred years after Solomon, Josiah undertook to rehabilitate the
+nation and restore its ancient faith. He pulled down the heathen altars
+which Solomon had constructed, "that no man might make his son or
+daughter pass through the fire to Moloch"; he drove out and destroyed
+the iniquitous priests; he burned the high places of pollution and
+stamped the powder in the dust.
+
+It was too late. Josiah was presently slain in a battle with the
+Egyptians, and his son dropped back into the evil practices of his
+fathers. Nebuchadnezzar came then, and in one raid after another utterly
+destroyed Jerusalem, including the Temple and the Ark, and carried the
+inhabitants, to the last man, into a captivity which lasted seventy
+years. Then Nehemiah was allowed to return with a large following and
+rebuild the city. But its prosperity was never permanent. The Jews were
+never a governing nation. Discontented and factional, they invited
+conquest. Alexander came, and, later, Rome. Herod the Great renewed and
+beautified the city, and to court favor with the Jews rebuilt the Temple
+on a splendid scale. This was Jerusalem in its final glory. Seventy
+years later the Jews rebelled, and Titus destroyed the city so
+completely that it is said to have remained a barren waste without a
+single inhabitant for fifty years.
+
+To-day the city is divided into "quarters"--Christian, Jewish,
+Mohammedan, and Armenian. All worships are permitted, and the sacred
+relics--most of them--of whatever faith, are accessible to all. Such in
+scanty outline is the story of the Holy City. It has been besieged and
+burned and pulled down no less than sixteen times--totally destroyed and
+rebuilt at least eight times, and the very topography of its site has
+been changed by the accumulation of rubbish. Hillsides have disappeared.
+Where once were hollows are now mere depressions or flats. Most of the
+streets that Jesus and the prophets trod lie from thirty to a hundred
+feet below the present surface, and bear little relation even in
+direction to those of the present day. Yet certain sites and landmarks
+have been identified, while others are interesting for later reasons.
+
+Hence, both to sceptic and believer, Jerusalem is still a shrine.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
+
+
+We lost no time. Though it was twilight when we reached our hotel, we
+set out at once to visit the spot which for centuries was the most
+sacred in all Christendom--that holiest of holies which during two
+hundred years summoned to its rescue tide after tide of knightly
+crusaders, depleted the chivalry and changed the map of Europe--the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
+
+This, at least, would be genuine in so far as it was the spot toward
+which the flower of knighthood marched--Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard of
+the Lion Heart, Ivanhoe, and all the rest--under the banner of the
+Cross, with the cry "God wills it" on their lips. We are eager to see
+that precious landmark.
+
+It was only a little way--nothing is far in Jerusalem--and we walked. We
+left the narrow street in front of the hotel and entered some still
+narrower ones where there were tiny booths of the Oriental kind, and
+flickering lights, and curious, bent figures, and donkeys; also steps
+that we went up or down, generally down, which seemed strange when we
+were going to Calvary, because we had always thought Calvary a hill.
+
+It was impressive, though. We were in Jerusalem, and if these were not
+the very streets that Jesus trod, surely they were not unlike them, for
+the people have not changed, nor their habits, nor their
+architecture--at least, not greatly--nor their needs. Whatever was their
+cry for baksheesh then, He must often have heard it, and their blind
+eyes and their withered limbs were such as He once paused to heal.
+
+I think we continued to descend gradually to the very door of the
+church. It did not seem quite like the entrance to a church, and, in
+reality, it is not altogether that; it is more a repository, a
+collection of sacred relics, a museum of scriptural history.
+
+We paused a little outside while the guide--his name was something that
+meant St. George--told us briefly the story. Constantine's mother, the
+Empress Helena, he said, through a dream had located the site of the
+crucifixion and burial of the Saviour, whereupon Constantine, in 335
+A.D., had erected some buildings to mark the place. The Persians
+destroyed these buildings by-and-by, but they were rebuilt. Then the
+Moslems set fire to the place; but again some chapels were set up, and
+these the conquering crusaders enclosed under one great roof. This was
+about the beginning of the twelfth century, and portions of the
+buildings still remain, though as late as 1808 there came a great fire
+which necessitated a general rebuilding, with several enlargements
+since, as the relics to be surrounded have increased.
+
+We went inside then. The place is dimly lit--it is always lit, I
+believe, for it can never be very light in there--and everywhere there
+seemed to be flitting processions of tapers, and of chanting,
+dark-robed priests. Just beyond the entrance we came to the first great
+relic--the Stone of Unction--the slab upon which the body of Christ was
+laid when it was taken down from the Cross. It is red, or looked red in
+that light, like a piece of Tennessee marble, and, though it is not
+smoothly cut, it is polished with the kisses of devout pilgrims who come
+far to pay this tribute, and to measure it, that their winding-sheets
+may be made the same size. Above it hang a number of lamps and
+candelabra, and with the worshippers kneeling and kissing and measuring,
+the spectacle was sufficiently impressive. Then, as we were about to go,
+our guide remembered that this was not the true Stone of Unction, but
+one like it, the real stone having been buried somewhere beneath it. The
+pilgrims did not know the difference, he said, and they used up a stone
+after a while, kissing and measuring it so much. Near to the stone is
+the Station of Mary, where she stood while the body of Jesus was being
+anointed, or perhaps where she stood watching the tomb--it is not
+certain which. At all events, it has been revealed by a vision that she
+stood there, and the place is marked and enclosed with a railing.
+
+We followed our guide deeper into the twinkling darkness, where the
+chanting processions were flickering to and fro, and presently stood
+directly beneath a dome, facing an ornate marble or alabaster structure,
+flanked and surrounded by elaborately wrought lamps and
+candlesticks--the Holy Sepulchre itself.
+
+But I had to be told. I should never have guessed this to be the shrine
+of shrines, the receptacle of the gentle Nazarene who taught the
+doctrine of humility to mankind. And it is the same within. If a
+rock-hewn tomb is there, it is overlaid now with costly marbles;
+polished with kisses; bedewed with tears.
+
+We did not remain in the tomb long, Laura and I. Perhaps they would not
+have let us; but, in any case, we did not wish to linger. At Damascus,
+Laura had gone so far as to criticise the house of Judas, because it had
+been whitewashed since St. Paul lodged there. So it was not likely that
+a tomb which was not a tomb, but merely a fancy marble memorial, would
+inspire much enthusiasm. To us it contained no suggestion of the gentle
+Prince of Peace.
+
+But at the entrance of the Sepulchre, facing us as we came out, there
+was a genuine thing. It was a woman kneeling, a peasant woman--of
+Russia, I suppose, from her dress. And she was not looking at us at all,
+but beyond us, through us, into that little glowing interior which to
+her was shining with the very light of the Lamb. I have never seen
+another face with an expression like that. It was fairly luminous with
+rapt adoration. Yes, she at least was genuine--an absolute embodiment of
+the worship that had led her along footsore and weary miles to kneel at
+last at the shrine of her faith.
+
+I am not going to weary the reader with detailed description of the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is a vast place, and contains most of
+the sacred relics and many of the sacred sites that have been identified
+since the zealous Queen Helena set the fashion of seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. We made the tour of a number of the chapels of
+different religious denominations. They are not on good terms with one
+another, by-the-way, and require Mohammedan guards to keep them from
+fighting around the very Sepulchre itself. Then we descended some stairs
+to the Chapel of St. Helena, where there is an altar to the penitent
+thief, and another to Queen Helena, though I did not learn that she ever
+repented, or even reformed.
+
+They showed us where the Queen sat when, pursuing one of her visions,
+they were digging for the true Cross and found all three of them; and
+they told us how they identified the holy one by sending all three to
+the bedside of a noble lady who lay at the point of death. The first
+shown her made her a maniac; the second threw her into spasms; the third
+cured her instantly. The commemoration of this event is called in the
+calendar "The Invention of the Cross," which seems to convey the idea. I
+think it was in the Chapel of the Finding of the Cross that I bought a
+wax candle, and a prayer went with it, though whether it was for my soul
+or Queen Helena's I am not certain. It does not matter. I am willing
+Helena should have it, if she needs it, and I think she does.
+
+We went on wandering around, and by-and-by we came to a chapel where the
+Crown of Thorns was made, and presently to a short column marking the
+Centre of the Earth, the spot from which the dust was taken that was
+used in making Adam. You see, it is necessary to double up on some of
+the landmarks or enlarge the church again.
+
+You can climb a flight of stairs in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and
+be told that you are on Calvary, and you are allowed to put your hand
+through the floor into the sockets where the crosses stood. We did not
+do it, however. We climbed the stairs, but a collection of priests were
+holding some kind of ceremony with candles and chanting, and we were not
+sufficiently impressed to wait.
+
+We did pause, as we came away, to note in the vestibule of the Holy
+Sepulchre the two holes through which on Easter Eve the Holy Fire is
+distributed to Christian pilgrims who assemble from all parts of the
+world. On this occasion the Fire Bishop enters the Sepulchre, and fire
+from heaven lights the candles on the altar. Then the Bishop, who is all
+alone in the Sepulchre, passes the Holy Fire out through these holes, in
+the form of a bundle of burning tapers, to priests. The pilgrims with
+unlighted tapers then rush and jam and scramble toward these dispensers
+of the sacred flame and pay any price demanded to have their candles
+speedily lighted. Usually a riot takes place, and the Mohammedan guards
+are required to prevent bloodshed.
+
+In 1834 there occurred a riot over the Holy Fire which piled the dead
+five feet deep around the Sepulchre. Four or five hundred were killed,
+and corpses lay thick even on the Stone of Unction. It seems a useless
+sacrifice, when one thinks of it, but then the blood of five hundred is
+only a drop as compared with what the centuries have contributed to this
+revered shrine.
+
+I want to be quite serious for a moment about the Church of the Holy
+Sepulchre--here in Jerusalem--now, while I am in the spirit of the
+thing.
+
+It is the biggest humbug in all Christendom. Of the scores of sites and
+relics enclosed within its walls, it is unlikely that a single one is
+genuine. With all respect to Queen Helena's talent for dreams, her
+knowledge of Scripture must have been sparing, or she would have located
+Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem. This place is in the heart of
+the city--was always in the heart of the city, in spite of all
+gerrymandering to prove it otherwise; and it was more of a flat or a
+hollow in the time of Christ than it is now.
+
+As for the other traditions and trumpery gathered in this ecclesiastical
+side-show, they are unworthy of critical attention. Probably not one in
+a million of the readers of _Innocents Abroad_ but thought the finding
+of the Grave of Adam one of Mark Twain's jokes. Not at all; it is
+located here under Calvary, and the place from which came Adam's dust
+(the Centre of the World) is close by. Then there is that Stone of
+Unction, which every one of intelligence knows to be a fraud, and there
+is the stone which the angel rolled away, and Adam's skull--they have
+that, too.
+
+It would seem that the human animal had exhausted his simian inheritance
+then. But no, he can never exhaust that--it is his one limitless gift.
+He has gone right on adding to his heap of bones and crockery, enlarging
+the museum from time to time to make room. And he will add more. The
+future is long, and it is only a question of time and faith when he will
+bring over the tombs of the patriarchs from Hebron, the Grotto of the
+Nativity from Bethlehem, the House of Judas from Damascus, and the
+Street that was called Straight. Oh, he can do it! A creature who can
+locate the Holy Sepulchre, the Grave of Adam, the Centre of the World,
+Mount Calvary, and fifty other historical sites all within the radius of
+a few feet, and find enough of his own kind to accept them, can do
+anything. As an insult to human intelligence and genuine Christian
+faith, I suppose this institution stands alone.
+
+Do the priests themselves, the beneficiaries, believe it? Perhaps--at
+least some of them do. There is nothing so dense, so sodden, so
+impenetrable as priestly superstition. Not a ray of reason can enter a
+mind darkened for a lifetime by ceremonials in which candles, chantings,
+swinging censers, and prostrations are regarded as worship. Could you
+produce any evidence that would appeal to the minds of those figures
+that march and countermarch, and carry tapers and chant among
+these frauds and fripperies of their faith? Hardly--they would not
+care for evidence. What they want is more superstition; more for
+themselves--more, always more, for their followers; the more
+superstition, the more power, the more baksheesh. They have no use for
+facts and testimony. They can create both to fit the need. Let any
+corner of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre become vacant, and
+immediately some prelate will dream that it is the true place where
+Balaam's Ass saw the angel with the flaming sword, and they will
+promptly consecrate the spot; then they will excavate and find the sword
+and a footprint of the angel, also a piece of the Ass, and they will
+make a saint of Balaam, and very likely of the Ass, and they will set
+up an altar and get a sign-painter to make a picture of the vision, and
+the people will contribute prayers and piastres, and yell baksheesh at
+every traveller to keep the high priests of Balaam in food and funds.
+
+Strange that we who regard the Mohammedan pilgrim with disdain or
+compassion, on his journey to Mecca and Medina, excuse or condone the
+existence of a shrine like this. The Prophet's birthplace and tomb are
+at least authentic, and it was his desire that his followers should
+visit them. They are acknowledging a fact. These people are supporting a
+fraud.
+
+And then the pity of it! The remembering that it was for this trumpery
+thing those mighty crusades swept like a flame across Europe, robbed her
+of her chivalry, and desolated a million homes; for this that gallant
+knights put on their armor and rode away under the banner of the Cross,
+shouting, "God wills it!" For this that men have drenched more than one
+nation with blood and changed the map and history of the world!
+
+True, one may not altogether regret the crusades. They made romance and
+the high achievement to be celebrated in picture and in song. It was
+fine, indeed, to ride away in shining mail in a vast army in which all
+were officers--splendid knights battling for glory in a cause. Aching
+hearts and forsaken homes were plentiful behind, yet even they reflected
+the glamour of romance, the fervor of a faith.
+
+But there was one crusade in which there was neither romance nor
+glory--nothing except heartbreak and anguish, and the long torture of
+the years.
+
+That was the Children's Crusade--the crusade in which fanaticism spelled
+its last word--when a countless number of children of all ages, as young
+as seven some of them, flocked to the standard of a boy of seventeen and
+wandered off down through Europe, to faint and fall and die by hundreds
+and by thousands from hunger and heat and thirst--moaning and grieving
+unheeded among the stones and bushes--to reach the Mediterranean at
+last, a scattered remnant, there to be taken on board some vessels and
+sold into slavery in Algiers!
+
+There was no glory, no triumph however imaginary, in that crusade; no
+romance, no glamour after the first day's march. It was only weariness
+and torture after that--only wretchedness and the fevered cry for the
+comfort of a mother's arm. And all for the sake of this dime-museum of
+faith, this huge ecclesiastical joke. The pity of it, indeed! Here
+to-night, a stone's-throw away, my heart bleeds for those little weary
+feet struggling on and on, for those little fainting souls, moaning,
+grieving, trying to keep up, lying down at last to coax the blessed
+release of death, and I would like to stand here on the housetops of
+Jerusalem and cry out against this insult to the memory of One who, when
+He said, "Suffer little children to come unto me," could hardly have
+foreseen that His words would bear such bitter fruit.
+
+I do not do it, however. I want to live to get home and print this
+thing, and have it graven on my tomb.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+TWO HOLY MOUNTAINS
+
+
+We set out early next morning for Mount Moriah, the site of Solomon's
+temple and those that followed it.
+
+It was really David's temple in the beginning, undertaken to avert a
+pestilence which he had selected from three punishments offered by the
+Lord because he, David, had presumed to number his people. A Hebrew
+census was a sin in those days, it would seem, and seventy thousand of
+the enrolled had already died when David saw an angel with a drawn
+sword--the usual armament of an angel--standing by the threshing-floor
+of Oman the Jebusite. Through Gad, his Soothsayer, David was commanded
+to set up an altar on that spot, to avert further calamity. Negotiations
+with Oman were at once begun, to the end that Oman parted with the site
+for "six hundred shekels of gold, by weight"; the threshing-floor was
+quickly replaced by an altar, and here, on the top of Mount Moriah--on
+the great bowlder reputed to have been the sacrificial stone of
+Melchizedek--and of Abraham, who was said to have proffered Isaac
+here--King David made offering to the Lord, and was answered by fire
+from heaven on the newly erected altar. And the angel "put up his sword
+again into the sheath thereof."
+
+From that day the bowlder on the top of Mount Moriah became the place of
+sacrifice--the great central shrine of the Jewish faith. David decided
+to build a temple there, and prepared for it abundantly, as became his
+high purpose. But because David had shed much blood, the Lord interfered
+and commanded him to turn the enterprise over to Solomon, "a man of
+rest." "He shall build an house for my name; and he shall be my son, and
+I will be his father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom
+over Israel forever."
+
+In the light of thoughtful Bible reading, it is not easy to see that
+Solomon was much of an improvement over David, in the long-run, and one
+cannot but notice the fact that the promise to establish his throne over
+Israel forever was not long maintained. But perhaps the Lord did not
+foresee how Solomon was going to turn out; besides, forever is a long
+time, and the Kingdom of Solomon may still prevail.
+
+Solomon completed the temple in a manner that made it celebrated, even
+to this day. The "oracle, or holy room, which held the Ark of the
+Covenant, was overlaid within with pure gold," and the rest of the
+temple was in keeping with this dazzling chamber.
+
+The temple was often pillaged during the troublous times that followed
+Solomon's reign, but it managed to stand till Nebuchadnezzar's conquest,
+four centuries later. It was twice rebuilt, the last time by Herod, on a
+scale of surpassing splendor. It was Herod's temple that Christ knew,
+and the work of beautifying and adding to it was going on during his
+entire lifetime. It was finished in 65 A.D., and five years later it
+went down in the general destruction, though Titus himself tried to
+preserve it.
+
+Most of what exists to-day are the remains of Herod's temple. The vast
+court, or temple area, occupies about one-sixth of all Jerusalem, and of
+the genuineness of this site there is no question. In the centre of it,
+where once the house of David and Solomon stood, stands the Dome of the
+Rock--also called the Mosque of Omar, though it is not really a mosque,
+and was not built by Omar. It is, in fact, a marvellous jewelled
+casket--the most beautiful piece of architecture in the world, it has
+been called--built for no other purpose than to hold the old sacrificial
+stone of Melchizedek and Abraham--a landmark revered alike by Moslem,
+Christian, and Jew.
+
+One is bound to feel impressed in the presence of that old bowlder,
+seamed and scarred by ages of sun and tempest; hacked for this purpose
+and that; gray with antiquity--the very corner-stone of three religions,
+upholding the traditions and the faith of four thousand years. There is
+nothing sham or tawdry about that. The building is splendid enough, but
+it is artistically beautiful, and the old rock itself--the genuine rock
+of ages--is as bare and rugged as when Isaac lay upon it bound, and the
+"chosen people" narrowly missed non-existence.
+
+There is a railing around it; but you can look over or through as long
+as you like, and if one is of a reflective temperament he can look a
+long time. Among other things he will notice a number of small square
+holes, cut long ago to receive the ends of slender supports that upheld
+a royal canopy or screen, and he will see the conduits cut to carry off
+the blood of the sacrifice. To his mental vision these things will
+conjure pictures--a panorama of rites and ceremonials--of altar and
+incense, with all the splendid costume and blazonry of the Judean king.
+And, after these, sacrifices of another sort--the cry of battle and the
+clash of arms across this hoary relic, its conduits filled with a
+crimson tide that flowed without regard to ritual or priest.
+
+Other pictures follow: the feast of the Passover, when Jerusalem was
+crowded with strangers, when the great outer court of the temple was
+filled with booths and pens of the sellers who offered sheep, goats,
+cattle, and even doves for the sacrifice; when the temple itself was
+crowded with throngs of eager worshippers who brought their sacrifices,
+with tithes to the priests, and were made clean.
+
+Amid one such throng there is a boy of twelve years, who with His
+parents has come up to Jerusalem "after the custom of the feast." We
+think of them as quiet, simple people, those three from Nazareth,
+jostled by the crowds a good deal, and looking rather wonderingly on the
+curious sights of that great yearly event. They would work their way
+into the temple, by-and-by, and they would come here to the Rock, and
+perhaps the sad, deep-seeing eyes of that boy of twelve would look down
+the years to a day when in this same city it would be His blood that
+would flow at the hands of men.
+
+I hope He did not see that far. But we know that light for Him lay
+somewhat on the path ahead, for when the feast was over, and His parents
+had set out for Nazareth, He lingered to mingle with the learned men,
+and He said to His parents when they came for Him, "Wist ye not that I
+must be about my father's business?" Among all those who thronged about
+this stone for a thousand years, somehow the gentle presence of that boy
+of twelve alone remains, unvanishing and clear.
+
+And what a mass of legends have heaped themselves upon this old
+landmark!--a groundwork of Jewish tradition--a layer of Christian
+imagery--an ever-thickening crust of Moslem whim and fantasy. A few of
+them are perhaps worth repeating. The Talmud, for instance, is authority
+for the belief that the Rock covers the mouth of an abyss wherein the
+waters of the Flood may be heard roaring. Another belief of the Jews
+held it as the centre and one of the foundations of the world. Of Jesus
+it is said that He discovered upon the Rock the great and unspeakable
+name of God (Shem), and was thereby enabled to work his miracles.
+
+But the Moslem soars into fairyland when he comes in the neighborhood of
+this ancient relic. To him the Rock hangs suspended in mid-air, and
+would have followed Mohammed to heaven if the Angel Gabriel had not held
+fast to it. We saw the prints of Gabriel's fingers, which were about the
+size and formation of a two-inch auger. Another Moslem fancy is that the
+rock rests on a palm watered by a river of Paradise.
+
+In the hollow beneath the Rock (probably an artificial grotto) there is
+believed to be a well, the Well of Souls, where spirits of the deceased
+assemble twice a week to pray. They regard it as also the mouth of
+hell, which I don't think can be true, or the souls would not come
+there--not if they could help it--not as often as twice a week, I mean.
+
+A print of Mohammed's head is also shown in the roof of the grotto, and
+I believe in that, because, being a tall man, when I raised up suddenly
+I made another just like it. But I am descending into trivialities, and
+the Rock is not trivial by any means. It has been there since the
+beginning, and it is likely to remain there until all religions are
+forgotten, and the world is dead, and all the stars are dark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: JERUSALEM--ITS BUBBLE-ROOFED HOUSES AND DOMES, ITS
+CYPRESS AND OLIVE TREES]
+
+In front of the Dome of the Rock the sun was bright, and looking across
+the approach one gets a characteristic view of Jerusalem--its
+bubble-roofed houses and domes, its cypress and olive trees. I made a
+photograph of Laura, age fourteen, and a friend of hers, against that
+background, but they would have looked more "in the picture" in Syrian
+dress. I am not sure, however; some of our party have had themselves
+photographed in Syrian dress, which seemed to belong to most of them
+about as much as a baseball uniform might belong to a Bedouin--or a
+camel.
+
+We crossed over to the ancient mosque El-Aksa, also within the temple
+area, but it was only mildly interesting after the Dome of the Rock.
+Still, there were things worth noting. There were the two pillars, for
+instance, which stand so close together that only slender people could
+squeeze between them. Yet in an earlier time every pilgrim had to try,
+and those who succeeded were certain of Paradise. This made it
+humiliating for the others, and the impulse to train down for the test
+became so prevalent that stanchions were placed between the pillars a
+few years ago. We could only estimate our chances and give ourselves the
+benefit of the doubt.
+
+Then there is the Well of the Leaf, which has a pretty story. It is a
+cistern under the mosque, and the water is very clear. Once, during the
+caliphate of Omar, a sheik came to this well for water, and his bucket
+slipped from his hands. He went down after it, and came to a mysterious
+door which, when he opened it, led into a beautiful garden. Enchanted,
+he lingered there and finally plucked a leaf to bring back as a token of
+what he had seen. The leaf never withered, and so a prophecy of
+Mohammed's that one of his followers should enter Paradise alive had
+been fulfilled.
+
+I said I would go down and hunt for the door. But they said, "No"--that
+a good many had tried it without success. The cistern used to collect
+every year the pilgrims who went down to find that door; no one was
+permitted to try, now.
+
+In one of the windows of the old mosque we saw a curious sight: a very
+aged and very black, withered man--Bedouin, I should say--reclining face
+down in the wide sill, poring over an ancient parchment book, patiently
+transcribing from it cabalistic passages on a black, charred board with
+a sharpened stick. The guide said he was a magician from somewhere in
+the dim interior; certainly he looked it.
+
+From somewhere--it was probably from an opening in the wall near the
+Golden Gate--we looked eastward across the valley of Kedron toward the
+fair hillsides, which presently we were to visit.
+
+Immediately we set out for the Mount of Olives. We drove, and perhaps no
+party ever ascended that sacred hill on a fairer morning. The air was
+still, and there was a quiet Sunday feeling in the sunshine. In the
+distance there was a filmy, dreamy haze that gave just the touch of
+ideality to the picture.
+
+The road that leads up Olivet is bordered by traditional landmarks, but
+we could not stop for them. It was enough to be on the road itself,
+following the dusty way the Son of Man and His disciples once knew so
+well. For this hill of fair olive-groves, overlooking Jerusalem, was
+their favorite resort, and it was their habit to come here to look down
+in contemplation on the holy city. It was here that the Master felt the
+shadow of coming events: the destruction of the city; the persecution
+and triumph of His followers; His own approaching tragedy. It was here
+that He gave them the parable of the Virgins, and of the Talents, and it
+was here that He came often at evening for rest and prayer, after the
+buffet and labor of the day. This is the road His feet so often trod--a
+well-kept road, with the olive-groves, now as then, sloping away on
+either side.
+
+Here and there we turned to look down on Jerusalem, lying there bathed
+in the sunlit haze--a toy city, it seemed, with its little round-topped
+houses, its domes and minarets, its battlemented walls. How very small
+it was, indeed! Why, one could run its entire circuit without losing
+breath. It is, in fact, little more than half a mile across in any
+direction, and from a distance it becomes an exquisite jewel set amid
+barren hills.
+
+I am afraid I did not properly enjoy the summit of the Mount of
+Olives--its landmarks, I mean. The Russian and Greek and Latin churches
+have spoiled it with offensive architecture, and they have located and
+labelled exact sites in a way that destroys the reality of the events.
+They have framed in the precise spot where Jesus stood at the time of
+His ascension. It is a mistake to leave it there. It should be
+transferred to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
+
+But the view eastward, looking down on the Jordan and the Dead Sea, with
+the mountains of Moab lying beyond, they cannot spoil or change. Down
+there on that spot, thirty-five hundred years ago, the chosen people
+camped and prepared for the ravage and conquest of this valley, this
+mountain, and the fair lands beyond, even to Mount Hermon and the
+westward sea. Over there, on "Nebo's lonely mountain," Moses looked down
+upon this land of vine and olive which he was never to enter, and being
+weary with the harassings of his stiff-necked people, lay down by the
+wayside and left them to work out their own turbulent future.
+
+  "And the angels of God upturned the sod
+    And laid the dead man there."
+
+I have always loved those lines, and it was worth the voyage to remember
+them here, looking down from the Mount of Olives toward the spot where
+lies that unknown grave.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE MANGER
+
+
+It was afternoon when we drove to Bethlehem--a pleasant drive, though
+dusty withal. The road lies between grain-fields--fields where Ruth may
+have gleaned, and where the Son of Man may have stopped to gather corn.
+It gives one a curious feeling to remember that these fields are the
+same, and that for them through all the centuries seed-time and harvest
+have never failed. Nor have they changed--the walls, the laborers, the
+methods, the crops belong to any period that this country has known.
+
+The convent of Elijah was pointed out to us, but it did not matter.
+Elijah never saw it--never heard of it. It is different, however, with a
+stone across the way from the entrance. Elijah went to sleep on that
+stone, and slept so heavily that he left his imprint there, which
+remains to this day. We viewed that stone with interest; then we took
+most of it and went on.
+
+In a little while we came to the tomb of Rachel. The small, mosque-like
+building that covers it is not very old, but the site is probably as
+well authenticated as any of that period. Jacob was on his way from
+Padan when she died, and he buried her by the roadside "when there was
+but a little way to come into Ephrath" (which is Bethlehem). He marked
+the grave with a pillar which the generations would not fail to point
+out, one to another, as the last resting-place of this mother in Israel
+who died that Benjamin might have life.
+
+Poor Rachel! Supplanted in her husband's love; denied long the natural
+heritage of woman; paying the supreme price at last, only to be left
+here by the wayside alone, outside the family tomb. All the others are
+gathered at Hebron in the Field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought from
+the children of Heth for Sarah's burial-place. Jacob, at the very last,
+made his sons swear that they would bury him at Hebron with the others.
+He remembered Rachel in her lonely grave, and spoke of her there, but
+did not ask that he be taken to lie by her side, or that she be laid
+with the others. He died as he had lived--self-seeking, unsympathetic--a
+commonplace old man.
+
+Just outside of Bethlehem we were welcomed by a crowd of little
+baksheesh girls, of a better look and distinctly of a better way than
+the Jerusalem type. They ran along with the carriage and began a chant
+which, behold, was German, at least Germanesque:
+
+  "Oh, du Froeliche!
+  Oh, du Heilege!
+        Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"
+
+I suppose "Oh, thou happy one; Oh, thou holy one," would be about the
+translation, with the wailing refrain at the end. I think we gave them
+something. I hope so; they are after us always, and we either give them
+or we don't, without much discrimination. You can't discriminate. They
+are all wretched and miserably needy. You give to get rid of them, or
+when pity clutches a little fiercer than usual at your heart.
+
+[Illustration: A CAMEL TRAIN LED THE WAY THROUGH THE GATES]
+
+So we were at the gates of Bethlehem--the little town whose name is
+familiar at the firesides of more than half the world--a name that
+always brings with it a feeling of bright stars and dim fields:
+
+  "Where shepherds watched their flocks by night
+      All seated on the ground,"
+
+and of angel voices singing peace and goodwill. A camel-train led the
+way through the gates.
+
+I suppose the city itself is not unlike Jerusalem in its general
+character, only somewhat cleaner, and less extensive. We went
+immediately to the place of the nativity, but before we could get to it
+we were seized and dragged and almost compelled to buy some of the
+mother-of-pearl beads and fancy things that are made just across the
+way. We escaped into the Church of the Nativity at last--an old, old
+church, desolate and neglected in its aspect, though sufficiently
+occupied with chanting and droning and candle-bearing acolytes. Yet it
+is better--oh, much better--than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and
+it has a legitimate excuse. If Christ was born in a Bethlehem manger, as
+the gospel records, it is probable that He was born here. There are many
+reasons for believing that the grotto below this church was used as the
+inn stables in that time, and that the brief life which has laid its
+tender loveliness on so many lives had its beginning here.
+
+We descended to the grotto and stood on the spot that is said to have
+heard His first infant cry. There is a silver star in the floor polished
+with kisses, and there are a lot of ornate lamps and other paltry things
+hanging about. It does not matter, I suppose, but I wish these
+professional religionists did not find such things necessary to
+stimulate their faith. Still one could shut his eyes and realize, or try
+to realize that he was standing in the place where the Light that has
+illumined a world struck its first feeble spark; where the impulse that
+for nineteen hundred years has swept across the nations in tides of war
+and peace first trembled into life--a wave of love in a mother's heart.
+As I say, the rest did not matter.
+
+While the others were looking into the shops across the way, I wandered
+about the streets a little, the side streets, which in character cannot
+have changed much in nineteen hundred years. The people are poor, and
+there are many idlers. There are beggars, too; some of them very
+wretched--and leprous, I think. It seems a pity, here in the birthplace
+of Him who healed with a word.
+
+We bought some of the Bethlehem beads. They will sell you a string a
+yard long for a franc, and they cut each bead separately from
+mother-of-pearl with the most primitive tools, and they shape it and
+polish it and bore a hole in it, all by hand, and link it on a gimp
+wire. In America you could not get a single bead made in that way for
+less than double what they ask for a whole string. But, as I have said,
+they are very poor here--as poor as when they bestowed a Saviour on
+mankind.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+THE SORROW OF THE CHOSEN--THE WAY OF THE CROSS
+
+
+We had left Bethlehem and were back in Jerusalem, presently, on our way
+to the Jews' Wailing-place. I did not believe in it before I went. I was
+afraid it might be a sort of show-place, prepared for the occasion. I
+have changed my mind now. If there is one thing in Jerusalem absolutely
+genuine and directly linked with its ancient glories, it is the Jews'
+Wailing-place.
+
+You approach it through a narrow lane--a sickening gantlet of misery.
+Near the entrance wretched crones, with the distaff and spindle of the
+Fates, sat in the dust, spinning what might have been the thread of
+sorrow. Along the way the beggars; not the ordinary vociferous beggars
+of Constantinople, of Smyrna, of Ephesus, even of Jaffa, but beggars
+such as the holy city alone can duplicate. Men and women who are only
+the veriest shreds of humanity, crouched in the dirt, reeking with filth
+and rags and vermin and sores, staring with blind and festering eyes,
+mumbling, moaning, and wailing out their eternal cry of baksheesh,
+often--if a woman--clutching some ghastly infant to a bare, scrawny
+breast. There was no loud demand for alms; it was only a muted chorus of
+pleading, the voice with which misery spells its last word. Some made no
+sound, nor gesture, even. They saw nothing, heard nothing, knew
+nothing--they were no longer alive--they had only not ceased to breathe
+and suffer. The spectacle made us gasp and want to cry out with the very
+horror of it.
+
+We were through the fearful gantlet at last, and went directly into the
+Jews' Wailing-place. There behold the most lamentable passage in the
+most tragic epic of all history--the frayed remnant of a once mighty
+race mourning for its fall. A few hours before, and but a few rods away,
+we had looked upon the evidences of its former greatness, its splendor
+and its glory--the place of King Solomon's temple when it sat as on the
+pinnacle of the world. Indeed, we were looking at it now, for this wall
+before which they bow in anguish is a portion of the mighty architecture
+for which they mourn. In the general destruction of Titus this imposing
+fragment remained, and to-day they bow before it and utter their sorrow
+in the most doleful grieving that ever fell on human ear. Along the wall
+they stand or kneel, and on rows of benches behind they gather thickly,
+reading from faded and tattered Hebrew Scriptures the "Lamentations," or
+chanting in chorus the saddest dirge the world has ever known.
+
+  "Because of the palace which is deserted--
+  We sit alone and weep.
+  Because of the temple which is destroyed,
+  Because of the walls which are broken down,
+  Because of our greatness which has departed,
+  Because of the precious stones of the temple ground to powder,
+  Because of our priests who have erred and gone astray,
+  Because of our kings who have contemned God--
+  We sit alone and weep!"
+
+[Illustration: THE DEPTH OF THEIR FALL]
+
+It is no mere ceremony--no mock sorrow; it is the mingled wail of a
+fallen people. These Jews know as no others of their race can realize
+the depth of their fall, and they gather here to give it voice--a tonal
+and visual embodiment of despair. Even I, who am not of that race, felt
+all at once the deadly clutch of that vast grieving, and knew something
+of what a young Hebrew, a member of our party, felt when he turned sick
+and hurried from the spot.
+
+What other race has maintained an integrity of sorrow? What, for
+instance, does the blood of Imperial Rome care for its departed
+grandeur? It does not even recognize itself. What other nation has ever
+maintained racial integrity of any kind? But, then, these were a _chosen
+people_!
+
+Chosen, why? Because they were a noble people? Hardly. Their own
+chronicles record them as a murmuring, rebellious, unstable race.
+Following the history of the chosen people from Jacob to Joshua, one is
+in a constant state of wonder at the divine selection. We may admit that
+God loved them, but we seek in vain for an excuse. In His last talk with
+Moses He declared that they would forsake Him, and that He in turn would
+forsake _them_ and hide His face because of the evils they should do.
+
+Moses, who knew them even better, distrusted them even more. "For I know
+that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves," he said, almost
+with his latest breath. He told them that curses would befall them, and
+gave them a few sample curses, any one of which would lift the bark off
+of a tree. No wonder he was willing to lie down in Mount Nebo and be at
+peace.
+
+Yet they _are_ a chosen people--a people apart--a race that remains a
+race, and does not perish. Chosen for what? To make a bitter example of
+what a race can do when it remains a race--how high it can rise and how
+low may become its estate of misery? Remember, I am not considering the
+Jew as an individual; he is often noble as an individual; and it was a
+Jew who brought light into the world. I am considering a race--a race no
+worse than any other, and no better, but a _chosen_ race; a race that
+without a ruler, without a nation, without a government--that outcast
+and despised of many nations has yet remained a unit through three
+thousand years. I am maintaining that only a chosen people could do
+that, and, without being able even to surmise the purpose, it is my
+humble opinion that the ages will show that purpose to have been good.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: THE WAY OF THE CROSS
+
+(HOLY WEEK)]
+
+I have already inferred that the landmarks and localities of Jerusalem
+may be viewed with interest, but not too seriously. They have all
+associations, but most of them not the particular and sacred
+associations with which they are supposed to be identified. The majority
+of them were not located until Christ had been dead for a thousand
+years, and the means of locating them does not invite conviction.
+Inspiration located most of them, dreams the rest. That is to say,
+imagination. Whenever a priest or a dignitary wanted to distinguish
+himself he discovered something. He first made up his mind what he
+would like to discover, and then had an inspiration or a dream, and the
+thing was done. The eight Stations of the Cross, for instance, were
+never mentioned earlier than the twelfth century, and the Via Dolorosa,
+the Way of the Cross, was not so known until the fourteenth. Still, it
+must have been along some such street that the Man of Sorrow passed
+between the Garden and the Cross.
+
+We visited the Garden first. It was now late in the afternoon, and the
+sunlight had become tender and still and dream-like, and as we passed
+the traditional places--the house of Pilate, under the Ecce Homo arch,
+and the others, we had the feeling that it might have been on an evening
+like this that the Son of Man left the city, and with His disciples went
+down to Gethsemane to pray.
+
+We were a very small party now--there were only four of us and the
+guide, for the others had become tired and were willing to let other
+things go. But if we were tired, we did not know it, and I shall always
+be glad of that fact.
+
+At St. Stephen's gate (the tradition is that he was stoned there) we
+stopped to look down on Gethsemane. Perhaps it is not the real site, and
+perhaps the curious gilt-turreted church is not beautiful, but set there
+on the hillside amid the cypresses and venerable olive-trees, all aglow
+and agleam with the sunset, with the shadow of the dome of Omar creeping
+down upon it, there was about it a beauty of unreality that was
+positively supernatural. I was almost tempted not to go down there for
+fear of spoiling the illusion.
+
+We went, however, and the gnarled olive-trees, some of which are said to
+have been there at the time of Christ--and look it--were worth while.
+The garden as a whole, however, was less interesting than from above,
+and it was only the feeling that somewhere near here the Man who would
+die on Calvary asked that the cup of sorrow might pass from Him which
+made us linger.
+
+It was verging on twilight when we climbed to the city, and the others
+were for going to the hotel. But there was one more place I wanted to
+see. That was the hill outside of Jerusalem which the guide-books rather
+charily mention as "Gordon's Calvary," because General Gordon once
+visited it and accepted it as the true place of the Crucifixion. I knew
+that other thoughtful men had accepted it, too, and had favored a tomb
+not far away called the "Garden Tomb" as the true Sepulchre. I wanted to
+see these things and judge for myself. But two of our party and the
+guide spoke no English, and my Biblical German needed practice. There
+seemed to be no German word for Calvary, and when I ventured into
+details I floundered. Still, I must have struck a spark somewhere, for
+presently a light illumined our guide's face:
+
+"Golgota! Das richtige Golgota" (the true Golgotha), he said, excitedly,
+and then I remembered that I should have said Golgotha, the "Place of
+the Skull," in the beginning.
+
+[Illustration: THE TRUE GOLGOTHA--THE PLACE OF THE SKULL
+
+(Notice the large eyes and mouth of the skull formed by cavities in the
+cliff. The place of execution is marked by the little heap of stones
+above.)]
+
+We were away immediately, all of us, hurrying for the Damascus gate,
+beyond which it lay. It was not far--nothing is far in Jerusalem--and
+presently we were outside, at the wicket of a tiny garden--a sweet,
+orderly little place--where a pleasant German woman and a tall old
+Englishman with a spiritual face were letting us in. Then they led us to
+a little arbor, and directly--to a tomb, a real tomb, cut into the cliff
+overhanging the garden.
+
+I do not know whether Jesus was laid in that tomb or not, and it is not
+likely that any one will ever know. But He _could_ have been laid there,
+and it is not unlikely that He _was_ laid there, for Golgotha--the hill
+that every unprejudiced visitor immediately accepts as the true
+Golgotha--overlooks this garden.
+
+We could not ascend the hill--the Mohammedans no longer permit that--but
+we could go to the end of the garden and look up to the little heap of
+stones which marks the old place of stoning and of crucifixion. It was
+always the place of public execution. The Talmud refers to it, and the
+Jews of Jerusalem spit toward it to this day. We could make out the
+contour of the skull which gave it its name, and even the face, for in
+its rocky side ancient tombs and clefts formed the clearly distinguished
+features.
+
+It is a hill; it is outside the walls; it is the traditional site of
+executions; it is the one natural place to which Jesus would have been
+taken for crucifixion. The Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
+was _never_ a hill; it was _never_ outside the walls; it was _never_ a
+traditional site for anything until Queen Helena began to dream.
+
+Perhaps the reader may say, "With all the tales and traditions and
+disputes and doubts, what does it matter?" Perhaps it does not matter.
+Perhaps that old question of Pilate, "What is truth?" need not be
+answered.
+
+Yet somewhere amid the mass of confliction there follows a thread of
+fact. Sifting the testimony, it is difficult to deny that there once
+lived a man named Jesus--later, and perhaps then--known as the Christ;
+that He was of humble birth, and grew up to teach a doctrine of
+forgiveness and humility (a doctrine new to the Hebrew teachers of His
+day, whose religion consisted mainly of ceremonial forms); that He was
+able to heal the sick; that He had a following who, perhaps, hailed Him
+as their king; that it was because of these things that He was crucified
+on a hill outside of Jerusalem.
+
+I think this is as far as general acknowledgment goes. The Scriptures
+declare more, the sceptic allows less; but the majority of mankind unite
+on the foregoing admissions. At all events, a great religion was founded
+on this man's life and death--a doctrine of gentleness when creeds are
+stripped away--and it is proper that such truth as can be established
+concerning the ground He trod, especially on that last dark day, should
+be recognized and made known. Of our little party of four there was not
+one who--standing there as the stars came out, and looking up at that
+hill outlined against the sky--did not feel a full and immediate
+conviction that this was indeed the spot where that last, supreme
+expiation was made, and that this sweet garden, guarded by these two
+gentle people, was the truer site for the Sepulchre which was "nigh at
+hand."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+AT THE MOUTH OF THE NILE
+
+
+I am not a gifted person; I cannot write about existing places and
+things without seeing them, and I am afraid to steal from the
+guide-book--unintelligently, I mean. I have sometimes found the
+guide-book mistaken--not often, I admit, but too often to take chances.
+I should be struck with remorse if I should steal from the guide-book
+and then find that I had stolen a mistake. So I shall have to skip
+Galilee, Tiberias, Nazareth, and Hebron, for the reason that I could not
+visit those and include Egypt, too, by our schedule.
+
+One _must_ go to Egypt. If the "grand object of all travel is to visit
+the shores of the Mediterranean," then the grand climax of that tour is
+Egypt. One _must_ take all the time there is for that amazing land, and
+any time will be too short, even though it be a lifetime.
+
+The guide-book says that the arrival at Alexandria is not very
+impressive. I suppose a good deal depends on the day and the time of day
+and one's mental attitude. As usual with our arrivals, it was early
+morning, and everything was hazy and yellow-misty with sunrise. We were
+moving slowly, and the water was glassy still. Here and there across the
+yellow haze drifted a barge-like craft with a lateen-sail, or a slow
+moving boat, pulled by men in native dress. Then out of the mist across
+the port bow came the outline of a low-lying shore, and a shaft that
+rose, a vague pencil against the morning glow. The Diplomat was leaning
+on the rail at my side.
+
+"Egypt," he said, quietly. "That is a lighthouse--they call it a pharos,
+after the one that Ptolemy built; it must have stood about in the same
+direction."
+
+Certainly that was not very dramatic, not actively so at least, but to
+me it was impressive; and stealing into that dream-like harbor, through
+the mellow quiet of the morning, I had the feeling that we were creeping
+up on the past--catching it asleep, as it were; that this was indeed the
+pharos of the Ptolemies--the harbor they had known.
+
+I shall always remember Alexandria, Egypt. I shall always remember the
+railway station with its wild hallabaloo of Arab porters, who grab one's
+hand-baggage, make off with it, and sit on it in a secluded place until
+you race around and hunt it up and produce baksheesh for its return. You
+do not check baggage in Egypt, by the way; you register it, which means
+that you tell somebody about it, then try to convince yourself that it
+is all right and that some day you will see it again.
+
+But I shall remember that station for another reason. When we had
+finally fought our way through to the train, and Laura and I had placed
+our things here and there in our compartment--in the racks and about--we
+realized that we were hot and thirsty, and I said I would slip back and
+get some oranges, seeing we had plenty of time.
+
+It was easy to do that--easy enough, I mean, for I no longer had
+anything for the Bedouins to grab. I got the oranges and paid a piastre
+apiece for them--about ten times what they were worth in Jaffa, and I
+had the usual difficulty making change--a detachment of interested Arabs
+looking on meanwhile. Then I started back, and was stopped by a guard
+who wanted to see my ticket. I felt for the flat leather case which I
+generally carry in my hip-pocket. It was gone!
+
+If there had been anything resembling a chair there I should have sat
+down. As it was I took hold of the little railing, for my knees had a
+watery feeling which I felt was not to be trusted. That pocket-book
+contained my letter of credit; all my money, except a little change; my
+tickets, my character--everything that an unprotected stranger is likely
+to need in a strange land! When I got my breath I dived into all my
+pockets at once, then went through them categorically, as much as three
+times apiece. I had never realized I owned so many pockets or that they
+could be so empty, so useless.
+
+Those Bedouins had done it, of course. I rushed back to the orange-man,
+and in a mixture of three languages which nobody, not even myself, could
+understand, explained my loss. He shrugged his shoulders in French,
+elevated his hands in Egyptian, and said "No can tell" in English. I
+glared around at the contiguous Bedouins, but they all looked
+disinterestedly guilty. In a mixed daze I went back to the guard, and
+crept through when he was attending to another passenger. I still held
+the bag of oranges, and handed them to Laura, who was quietly waiting,
+looking out the window at the passing show. Little did she guess my
+condition, and how could I tell her?
+
+It was quite by chance that I glanced up at the overhead rack where I
+had stowed our smaller packages. Ah me! The gates of bliss open wide
+will never be a more inspiring sight than what I saw there. There it
+lay--that precious pocket-book! In the disordered mental state of our
+arrival I had for some unguessed reason taken out my pocket-case and
+laid it there with the other items. It was safe--safe in every detail.
+The world suddenly became glorified. Those Bedouins were my brothers. I
+would have gone back and embraced them if the train had not begun to
+move.
+
+Yes, I shall always remember Alexandria.
+
+There is a continuous panorama between Alexandria and Cairo, absolutely
+fascinating to one who has not seen it before, and I wonder how it can
+ever grow old to any one. Almost immediately there was water--the Nile,
+or one of its canals--and stretching away, a dead level of
+green--lavish, luxurious, blossoming green--the delta-land of Lower
+Egypt, the richest garden in all the world. A network of irrigation; mud
+villages that might have been made by wasps; a low-dropping sky that met
+the level green--these made a background, and against it, along the
+raised road that follows the Nile, an endless procession passed.
+
+A man riding a camel, leading another; a boy watering two buffaloes; an
+Arab walking, followed by his wife and a string of loaded donkeys;
+ditto camels; a cow grinding an old Egyptian water-mill that has been in
+use since Pharaoh's time; two men turning an Archimedes screw to lift
+the water to their fields--so the pictures whirl by. The Orient has
+become familiar to us, yet for some reason the atmosphere, the
+impression, is wholly different here, because--I cannot tell
+why--because this is Egypt, I suppose, and there is only one Egypt, a
+fact easier to realize than to explain.
+
+The day was well along when we reached Cairo and, after the usual battle
+with the Ishmaelites, drove to Shepheard's Hotel. As there is only one
+Egypt, so there is only one Shepheard's Hotel. There are other hotels as
+large and as lavish, with as fair gardens, perhaps, but I believe there
+is no other hotel on the planet where you can sit on a vast balmy
+terrace and look down on such a panorama of the nations--American,
+European, Asiatic, African--such a universal congress of pleasure as
+each winter assembles here. It would take a more riotous pen than mine
+to achieve a description of that mixture. If the reader can imagine a
+World's Fair Midway of every nationality and every costume and every
+language and mode of locomotion under the sun, and can see mingled with
+it all the dark-faced sellers of shawls and scarabs, and beads and
+relics, the picture will serve, and we will let it go at that.
+
+And perhaps I may as well say here that Cairo is the wildest, freest
+place in Christendom. The confluence of Upper and Lower Egypt--the Delta
+and the Nile--here on the edge of the desert, it is the veritable
+jumping-off place where all conventions melt away. It is the neutral
+ground where East and West meet--each to adopt the special privilege and
+license of the other--madly to compete in lavishness of dress and the
+reckless joy of living. In the language of the Reprobates, "One gets his
+money's worth in Cairo, if he makes his headquarters at Shepheard's and
+sits in the game." But he will require a certain capital to make good
+his ante. If I hadn't found that pocket-book at Alexandria I should have
+taken my meals with the Arabs in the back basement.
+
+The Arab, by-the-way, is the general servitor in the Egyptian hotel. You
+ring three times when you want him, and he is as picturesque and gentle
+a Bedouin as ever held up a camel train or slew a Christian to glorify
+his faith. He is naive and noiseless, and whatever you ask him for he
+says "Yes," and if you ask him if he understands he says "Yes," and you
+will never know whether he does or not until you see what he brings. It
+does not help matters to talk loudly to the Arab. Volume of sound does
+not increase his lingual gifts, and spelling the article is likewise
+wasted effort. Ladies sometimes try that method. The trunk of one of our
+party had not reached her room--and she needed it.
+
+"My trunk," she said to the Arab. "_You_ know, trunk--t-r-u-n-k,
+trunk--yes, trunk, with my name on it--_you_ know--n-a-m-e--my initials,
+I mean, _you_ know--T. D.--T. D. on both ends."
+
+The Arab did know "trunk"; the rest was mere embroidery.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX
+
+
+There was not much left of the afternoon when we reached Cairo, but some
+of us wandered off here and there to get the habit of the place, as it
+were. Laura and I came to a trolley-line presently, and found that it
+ran out to the Pyramids and Sphinx. We were rather shocked at the
+thought, but recovered and decided to steal a march on the others by
+slipping out there and having those old wonders all to ourselves, at
+sunset.
+
+It is a long way. You pass through streets of many kinds and by houses
+of many sorts, and you cross the Nile and glide down an avenue of palms
+where there are glimpses of water--the infinite desert stretching away
+into the evening. Long before we reached them we saw the outlines of the
+three pyramids against the sky, and then we made out the Sphinx--that
+old group which is perhaps the most familiar picture that children know.
+
+Yet, somehow, it could not be true that this was the reality of the
+pictures we had seen. The likeness was very great, certainly, but those
+pictures had represented something in a realm of books and romance--the
+unattainable land--while these were here; we were actually going to
+them, and in a trolley-car! It required all the spell of Egypt
+then--the palms, the desert, and the evening sky--to fit the reality
+into its old place in the hall of dreams.
+
+We had thought to have a quiet view, but this was a miscalculation.
+There is no such thing as a quiet view of the Pyramids. At any hour of
+the day or night you are immediately beset by beggars and
+fortune-tellers and would-be guides, and you are pulled and dragged and
+distracted by their importunities until you have lost all interest in
+your original purpose in a general desire to start a plague or a
+massacre that will wipe out the whole pestiferous crew. There is no
+hope, except in the employment of one or two of the guides--the
+strongest-looking ones, who will in a certain measure keep off the
+others--and you will have to engage donkeys, and perhaps have your
+fortune told. Otherwise these creatures will follow you and surround
+you, insisting that they want no money; that they only love you; that it
+makes them happy even to be near you; that they love all Americans;
+that, in short, for a shilling, just a shilling, and a baksheesh (a
+piastre), one little baksheesh, they will become your guide, your slave,
+the dirt under your feet--"Ah, mister--ze Sphinkis, ze Pyramid,
+aevry-zing!" It is a disgrace to Egypt, and to England who is in charge
+here now, that such persecution is permitted in the shadow of one of the
+world's most revered and imposing ruins.
+
+We engaged donkeys, at last, after there had been several fights over
+us, and set out up the road to the Great Pyramid, assailed every little
+way by bandits lying in wait. The Great Pyramid does not improve with
+close acquaintance. It has been too much damaged by time and criminal
+assault. It loses its clean-cut outlines as you come near and becomes
+little more than a stupendous heap of stones. I think we were a trifle
+disappointed with a close inspection, to tell the truth, for even the
+largest pictures do not give one quite the impression of the reality. It
+was as if we had been gazing at some marvellous painting, and then had
+walked up very near to see how the work was done.
+
+The charm came back as we rode off a little and turned to view it now
+and again in the evening light. The irregularities disappeared; the
+outlines became clean against the sky; I was no longer disappointed in
+that giant of architecture whose shadow (it lay now just at our feet)
+began marking time at a period when the world had no recorded history.
+
+Yet in one or two respects the reality differed from the dream. Usually
+stone grows gray with age and takes on moss and lichen--the mould of
+time. The Pyramids are entirely bare, and they are not gray. The stones
+might have been laid up yesterday so far as any vegetable increment is
+concerned, and their color is a tawny gold--luminous gold in the sunset,
+like the barren hills beyond. The daily sandblast of the desert will
+level these monuments in time, no doubt, but the last fragment in that
+remote age will still be bare and in color unchanged.
+
+As with the Pyramids, our first impression of the Sphinx was one of
+disappointment. It seemed small to us. It is small compared with a
+pyramid, while the photographs give one another idea. The photographs
+are made with the Sphinkis (Sphinx, I mean--one falls so easily into
+the native speech) in the foreground, looking fully as big as the
+second-size pyramid and quite able to have the third-size pyramid for
+breakfast. Figures mean nothing in the face of a picture like that; you
+comprehend them, but you do not realize them--visualize them, perhaps I
+ought to say.
+
+So the Sphinx seemed small to us as we approached, and even when we were
+on the immediate brink of sand, gazing down upon it, its sixty-five feet
+of stature seemed reduced from the image in our minds.
+
+[Illustration: A VAST INDIFFERENCE TO ALL PUNY THINGS]
+
+But the Sphinx grows on one. As the light faded and the shadows softened
+its scarred features there came also a dignity and with it a feeling of
+immensity, of grandeur, a vast indifference to all puny things. And
+then--perhaps it was the light, perhaps it was because I stood at a
+particular angle, but certainly--standing just there, at that moment, I
+saw, or fancied I saw, about its serene lips the suggestion or beginning
+of a smile. The more I looked, the more certain of it I became, and when
+I spoke of it to Laura, she saw it, too. Yes, undoubtedly we had caught
+the Sphinx smiling--not outwardly, at least not openly, but quietly,
+quizzically--smiling inside as one might say. I could not understand it
+then, but later it came to me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Back at the hotel, to-night, I thought it out. I remembered that the
+Sphinx had been there a long time; nobody knows how long, but _a very
+long time indeed_. I remembered that it had seen a number of
+things--_a very great number of things_. I remembered that it had seen
+one very curious thing, to wit:
+
+A long time ago, when a certain Pharaoh--we can only guess which
+Pharaoh--ruled over Egypt, it saw a young man who had been sold into
+bondage from Syria rise in the king's favor through certain dreams and
+become his chief counsellor, even "ruler over all the land of Egypt." It
+saw him in the height of his power and glory bring his family, who were
+Syrian shepherds, down from their barren hills and establish them in the
+favor of the Egyptian king. The Sphinx was old--a thousand years old, at
+least, even then--and, being wise, heard with certain curiosity their
+claim that they were a "chosen people," and thoughtfully watched them
+multiply through a few brief centuries into a band of servitors who,
+because of this tradition, held themselves a race apart, repeating tales
+of a land of promise which they would some day inherit. Then at last,
+during a period of visitation, the Sphinx saw them escape, taking what
+they could lay their hands on, straggling away, with their families and
+their flocks, toward the Red Sea. The Sphinx heard nothing more of that
+tribe for about three thousand years.
+
+Then an amazing thing happened. Among those who came to wonder at the
+Sphinx's age and mystery were some who repeated tales of that runaway
+band--tales magnified and embroidered almost beyond recognition--and,
+what was more curious, accepted them--not as such tales are usually
+accepted, with a heavy basis of discount--but as gospel; inspired truth;
+the foundation of a mighty religion; the word of God.
+
+Nor was that all. The Sphinx realized presently that not only were those
+old stories accepted as gospel by the descendants of the race
+themselves, but by a considerable number of the human race at
+large--accepted and debated in a most serious manner, even to the point
+of bloodshed.
+
+Some details of this inspired chronology were wholly new to the Sphinx.
+It was interesting, for example, to hear that there had been three
+million of those people, and that before they started there had been a
+time when the Nile had been turned to blood--twice, in fact: once by the
+grace of God and once by magicians. The Sphinx did not remember a time
+when the Nile had turned to blood. In the five thousand years and more
+of its existence it had never heard of a magician who could produce that
+result. It was interesting, too, to learn that the Red Sea had opened a
+way for those people to cross, and that the hosts of Egypt, trying to
+follow them, had been swallowed up and drowned. This was wholly new. The
+Sphinx had been there and seen all that had happened, but she had
+somehow missed those things.
+
+Not that the Sphinx was surprised at these embroideries. She had seen
+several mythologies created, and knew the general scale of enlargement
+and glorification. It was only when she saw strong, cultured, and
+enlightened nations still accepting the old Hebrew poem--with all its
+stately figures and exaggerations--as gospel; heard them actually trying
+to prove that a multitude as big as the census of Australia had marched
+out with its chattels and its flocks; heard them vow that the Red Sea
+had parted long enough to let this population pass through; heard them
+maintain that this vast assembly had found shade and refreshment on the
+other side by twelve wells of water and under seventy palm-trees: heard
+them tell how the sea behind them had suddenly rushed together and
+swallowed up all the Egyptian army (including the king himself, some
+said)--it was only when the Sphinx heard learned men argue these things
+as facts that a smile--scarcely perceptible, yet still a smile--began to
+grow behind the stone lips.
+
+That is the smile we saw to-night--a quiet smile, a gracious smile, a
+compassionate smile--and as it has grown so slowly, so it will not soon
+depart. For by-and-by, when these ages have passed, and with them their
+story and their gospels--when those old chronicles of the Jews have been
+relegated to the realm of mythology for a thousand years--there may come
+another band who will establish their traditions as God's holy word, and
+the Sphinx--still remaining, still observing, still looking across the
+encompassing sands to the sunrise--will smile, and dream old dreams.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN
+
+
+I wonder why we are always taken first to the mosques, or why, when our
+time is pretty limited, we are taken to them at all. Mosques are well
+enough, but when you have seen a pretty exhaustive line of them in
+Turkey and Syria, Egypt cannot furnish any very startling attractions in
+this field. For mosques are modern (anything less than a thousand years
+old is modern to us now), and Egypt is not a land of modern things.
+Besides, here in Cairo there are such a number of fascinating
+out-of-the-way corners which we are dying to see--unholy side-streets,
+picturesquely hidden nooks, and mysterious, shut-in life; besides all
+the bazaars--
+
+Never mind; the mosques did have a certain interest, especially the
+mosque of Al-Azhar, which is nine hundred years old and built about a
+great court--an old mosque when America was still undiscovered--and the
+mosque of Hassan, "whose prayer will nevair be accept," Abraham said
+(Abraham being our guide), "because when ze architec' have finish, ze
+Sultan Hassan have cut off hees han' so he cannot produce him again."
+Napoleon's first gun in Egypt hit a minaret of Hassan's mosque, it is
+said, and it has had bad luck generally, perhaps because of the cruel
+act of its royal builder. We were not even required to put on slippers
+to enter it, so it cannot be held in very great veneration. Then there
+is the mosque of Mohammed Ali, built within the last century and modern
+throughout, the only mosque in the world, I believe, to have electric
+lights!
+
+It was Mohammed Ali who settled the Mameluke problem in the conclusive
+way which sultans adopt at times. The Mamelukes were the Janizaries of
+Egypt, though fewer in number. Still, there were enough of them to make
+trouble and keep matters stirred up, and Ali grew tired of them. So did
+the public, according to our guide:
+
+"Ali, he say to some people, 'You like get rid of zose Mameluke?' an'
+all ze people say, 'Yez, of course.' So Ali he make big dinner, an' ze
+Mameluke come an' eat, an' have fine, big time."
+
+It was on the 1st of March, 1811, that Ali issued his general invitation
+to the Mameluke leaders to attend a function at the Citadel; and, after
+entertaining them hospitably, invited them to march through a narrow
+passageway, which was suddenly closed at each end, while from above
+opened a musket-fire that presently concluded those Mamelukes--470 of
+them--with the exception of one man, who is said to have leaped his
+horse through a window down a hundred feet or so, where he "Jump from
+hees horse and run--run fas' to Jaffa!" which was natural enough.
+
+There was only one trouble with that story. Abraham did not explain how
+this particular Mameluke came to have his horse at luncheon, and why,
+with or without horses, a number of those other Mamelukes did not follow
+him. Every Mameluke of my acquaintance would have gone through that
+window, mounted or otherwise, and without calculating the distance to
+the ground. However, Abraham showed us the passage and the place of the
+leap, and later the graves of the 470, all of which was certainly
+convincing. Following the removal of the leaders, a general burial of
+Mamelukes took place throughout Egypt, since which time members of that
+organization have been extremely hard to catch. It must have been Ali's
+neat solution of the Mameluke problem which fifteen years later was
+copied in Constantinople by Mahmoud II., when he disposed of the
+Janizaries.
+
+It was at the tomb of a distinguished pasha--a fine, inviting
+place--that we saw a small green piece of the robe of Abraham. It was
+incorporated in a very sacred rug, one of the twelve which Cairo,
+Constantinople, and Damascus contribute to Mecca each year. We asked how
+Abraham's robe could hold out this way, and his namesake shrugged and
+smiled:
+
+"Oh, zay take little piece of ze real robe an' roll him 'roun' an'
+'roun' wiz many piece of goods, an' zay become _all_ ze robe of
+Abraham."
+
+Thus does a thread leaven a whole wardrobe.
+
+Laura and I escaped then. We did not care for any more tombs and
+mosques, and we did care a great deal for a street we had noticed where,
+squatted on the ground on both sides of it, their wares spread in the
+dust, were sellers of certain trinkets and jars which, though not of the
+past, had a fatal lure we could not all forget. Our driver was a black,
+scarred semi-Nubian who looked as if he had been through a fire, and had
+possibly five words of English. It does not matter--Menelek (so we
+named him) served us well, and will retain a place in my affections.
+
+We took the back track, and presently were in the street of small
+sellers, driving carefully, for there was barely room to pass between
+their displayed goods. Here and there we stooped to inspect, and we
+bought a water-jar for a piastre--an Egyptian piastre, which is really
+money and worth exactly five cents. Beyond the jars was a woman selling
+glass bracelets, such as the Arab women wear. I had wanted some of those
+from the beginning. I picked out a gay handful, and then discovered I
+had only a gold twenty-franc piece to pay with. The woman had never
+owned twenty francs, and no seller in the neighborhood could furnish the
+change. So I handed it to Menelek, who grinned and disappeared while we
+sat there in the carriage waiting.
+
+I suppose he had to go miles in that neighborhood for as much change as
+that. I know we sat there in the sun and looked at all the curious
+things in all the assortments about us, over and over, and discussed
+them and wondered if Menelek would ever return. It became necessary at
+last that he should do so. No vehicle could pass us in that narrow
+thoroughfare, and in a string behind there was collecting as motley an
+assortment of curiosities as ever were gathered in a menagerie. There
+was a curious two-wheeled cart or dray, drawn by water-buffaloes, upon
+which a man had his collection of wives out for an airing; there was a
+camel loaded with huge water-jars until they projected out over the
+heads of the selling people; there was a load of hay drawn by a cow;
+there was a donkey train that reached back to the end of the street, and
+what lay beyond only Allah knew.
+
+The East is patient, but even the East has its limits. Presently we
+began to be interviewed by dark men--camel-drivers and the like--who had
+a way of flinging up their hands, while from behind came a rising tide
+of what I assumed to be imprecation.
+
+We were calm--that is, we assured each other that we were calm--and we
+told them quite pleasantly how matters stood. The result was not
+encouraging. One Bedouin grabbed the bridle, and I was at the point of
+slaying him with my water-jar when at the same moment appeared a member
+of the Cairo police--one of those with a tall red fez--also Menelek, our
+long-lost Menelek, with the change, out of which there was baksheesh for
+the discontented drivers. Everything was all right then. We headed the
+procession. Behind us came the buffalo-cart--the wives, sandwiched fore
+and aft and smiling--the camel with his distended load of jars; the
+heaped-up little hay-wagon; the string of donkeys all in blue beads,
+with heaven knows what else trailing down the distance. All the curses
+were removed; all the drivers singing; traffic congestion in the East
+was over.
+
+One of the first things we had noticed in Egypt was the curious brass
+spool affair which Arab women wear, suspended perpendicularly across the
+forehead, from the head-gear to the top of their veil. It extends from
+the nose upward, and has sharp, saw-like ridges on it, which look as if
+they would cut in. When we asked about these things, we were told that
+they were worn to avert the evil eye, also as a handy means by which the
+husband may correct any little indiscretion on the part of one of his
+wives. He merely has to tap that brass spool with his cane or
+broomstick, or whatever is handy, and it cuts in and neatly reminds the
+wearer that she is a woman and had better behave. Family discipline has
+matured in this ancient land.
+
+I explained to Menelek now, in some fashion, that I wanted one of those
+brass things; whereupon we entered the narrow and thronging thoroughfare
+of commerce--a gay place, with all sorts of showy wares lavishly
+displayed--and went weaving in and out among the crowd to find it. Every
+other moment Menelek would shout something that sounded exactly like,
+"Oh, I _mean_ it! Oh, I _mean_ it!" which made us wonder _what_ he meant
+in that emphatic way.
+
+Then all at once he changed to, "Oh, I _schmell_ it! Oh, I _schmell_
+it!"
+
+"That's all right," we said; "so do we," for, though Cairo is cleaner
+than Constantinople, it was not over-sweet just there. But presently,
+when he changed again to, "Oh, I eat it! Oh, I eat it!" we drew the
+line. We said, "No, we do not go as far as that."
+
+We have learned now that those calls are really "O-i-menuk,
+o-i-schmeluk," etc., and indicate that some one is to turn to the right
+or left, or simply get out of the way, as the case may be. We used them
+ourselves after that, which gave Menelek great joy.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+WHERE HISTORY BEGAN
+
+
+When I glanced casually over the little heap of hand-bags that would
+accompany our party up the Nile--we were then waiting on the terrace of
+Shepheard's for the carriages--I noticed that my own did not appear to
+be of the number. I mentioned this to the guides, to the head-porter, to
+the clerk, to casual Bedouins in the hotel uniform, without arousing any
+active interest. Finally, I went on a still hunt on my own account. I
+found the missing bag out in the back area-way, with a Bedouin whom I
+had not seen before sitting on it, smoking dreamily and murmuring a song
+about lotus and moonlight and the spell of his lady's charms. Growing
+familiar with the habits of the country, I dispossessed him with my foot
+and marched back through the vast corridors carrying my bag myself.
+Still, I am sorry now I didn't contribute the baksheesh he expected. He
+was probably the cousin or brother or brother-in-law of one of my room
+servitors. They all have a line of those relatives, and they must live,
+I suppose, though it is difficult to imagine why.
+
+There was a red glow in the sky when our train slipped out of the Cairo
+station toward Luxor. The Nile was red, too, and against this tide of
+evening were those curious sail-boats of Egypt that are like great
+pointed-winged butterflies, and the tall palms of the farther shore.
+By-and-by we began to run through mud villages that rose from the river
+among the palms, wonderfully picturesque in the gathering dusk. This was
+the Egypt of the pictures, the Egypt we have always known. No need to
+strain one's imagination to accept this reality. You are possessed,
+enveloped by it, and I cannot think that I enjoyed it any the less from
+seeing it through the window of a comfortable diner, with the knowledge
+that an equally comfortable, even if tiny, state-room was reserved in
+the car ahead. The back of a camel or deck of a dahabiyah would be more
+picturesque, certainly--more poetic--but those things require time, and
+there are drawbacks, too. Railway travel in Egypt is both swift and
+satisfactory. The accommodations differ somewhat from those of America,
+but not unpleasantly.
+
+We were a small party now. There were fewer than twenty of us--all
+English-speaking, except a young man who shared my apartment and was
+polite enough to pretend to understand my German.
+
+It was a little after 5 A.M. when I heard him getting up. I inquired if
+there was "_Etwas los?_" which is the ship idiom for asking if anything
+had gone wrong. He said no, but that the sun would be upstanding
+directly, which brought me into similar action. One does not miss
+sunrises on the Nile, if one cares for sunrises anywhere. We hurried
+through our dressing and were out on the platform when the train drew up
+for water at Nag Hamadeh--a station like many others, surrounded by the
+green luxury of the Nile's fertile strip, with yellow desert and
+mountains pressing close on either hand. It was just before sunrise. The
+eastward sky was all resonant with ruddy tones--a stately overture of
+its coming. Uplifting palms, moveless in the morning air, broke the
+horizon line, while nearer lay the low village--compact and flat of
+roof--a vast, irregular hive built of that old material of Egypt, bricks
+without straw. Below it the Nile repeated the palms, the village, the
+swelling symphony of dawn. Only here and there was any sign of life. An
+Arab woman with a water-jar drowsed toward the river-bank; a camp of
+Bedouins with their camels and their tents were beginning to stir and
+kindle their morning fires. The railroad crosses the river here, and
+just as we were creeping out over the slow-moving flood the sun rose,
+and the orchestra of the sky broke into a majestic crescendo, as rare
+and radiant and splendid as it was when Memnon answered to its waking
+thrill and sang welcome to the day.
+
+The young man and I had forgotten each other, I think, for neither of us
+had spoken for some moments. Then we both spoke at once--"_Wunderbar!_"
+we said, "_Wunderschon!_" for I have trained myself to speak German even
+when strongly moved. Then with one impulse we looked at our watches. It
+was precisely six, and we remembered that it was the 22d of March--the
+equinox.
+
+We stayed out there and saw the land awake--that old land which has
+awakened so many times and in so much the same fashion. Outside of its
+cities and its temples it cannot have changed greatly since the days of
+Rameses. It is still just a green, fertile thread of life, watered and
+tilled in the manner of fifty centuries ago. They had to drag us in to
+breakfast at last, for we would be at Luxor before long, four hundred
+and fifty miles from Cairo; that is, at ancient Thebes, where--though
+the place has lingered for our coming a good four thousand years--"ze
+train he have not time to wait."
+
+We are in Thebes now, the "city of a hundred gateways and twenty
+thousand chariots of war." Homer called it that, though it was falling
+to ruin even then. Homer was a poet, but his statistics are believed to
+be correct enough in this instance, for Diodorus, who saw the ruins a
+little before the Christian era, states that there were a hundred war
+stables, each capable of holding two hundred horses, "the marks and
+signs of which," he says, "are visible to this day." Of its glory in
+general he adds: "There was no city under the sun so adorned with so
+many and stately monuments of gold and silver and ivory, and multitudes
+of colossi and obelisks cut out of entire stone." Still further along
+Diodorus adds, "There, they say, are the wonderful sepulchres of the
+ancient kings, which for state and grandeur far exceed all that
+posterity can attain unto at this day."
+
+Coming from a historian familiar with Athens and Rome in the height of
+their splendor, this statement is worth considering. We have journeyed
+to Thebes to see the ruin of the mighty temples which Diodorus saw, and
+the colossi and the obelisks, and to visit the royal tombs of which he
+heard--now open to the light of day.
+
+We had glimpses of these things at the very moment of our arrival. The
+Temple of Luxor (so called) is but a step from the hotel, and, waiting
+on the terrace for our donkeys, we looked across the Nile to the Colossi
+of Memnon, still rising from the wide plain where once a thronging city
+stood--still warming to the sunrise that has never failed in their
+thirty-five hundred years.
+
+We were in no hurry to leave that prospect, but our donkeys were ready
+presently, and a gallant lot indeed. The Luxor donkeys are the best in
+Egypt, we are told, and we believe it. They are a mad, racing
+breed--fat, unwearied, and strenuous--the pick of their species. They
+can gallop all day in the blazing sun, and the naked rascal that races
+behind, waving a stick and shouting, can keep up with them hour after
+hour when an American would drop dead in five minutes.
+
+They are appropriately named, those donkeys. Mine was "Whiskey
+Straight," and he arrived accordingly. He was a gray, wild-headed
+animal, made of spring steel. We headed the procession that led away for
+the Temple of Karnak in a riotous stampede. Laura's donkey was "Whiskey
+and Soda"--a slightly milder proposition, but sufficient unto the day. I
+have never seen our ship-dwellers so unreserved in their general
+behavior, so "let loose," as it were, from anything that resembled
+convention, as when we went cavorting through that Arab settlement of
+"El-Uksur," where had been ancient Thebes. Beset with a mad, enjoying
+fear, our ladies--some of whom were no longer young and perhaps had
+never ridden before--broke into frantic and screaming prophecies of
+destruction, struggling to check their locomotion, their feet set
+straight ahead, skirts, scarfs, hats, hair streaming down the wind. It
+was no time for scenery--Egyptian scenery; we knew nothing, could attend
+to nothing, till at the towering entrance of the great Temple of Karnak
+we came to a sudden and confused halt.
+
+We dismounted there, shook ourselves together, and stared wonderingly up
+at those amazing walls whose relief carving and fresco tints the dry air
+of this rainless land has so miraculously preserved. And then presently
+we noticed that Gaddis, our guide for the Nile, had stepped quietly out
+before us, and with that placid smile he always wears had lifted his
+hand to the records of his ancestors.
+
+[Illustration: SANCTUARY IN KARNAK]
+
+[Illustration: GADDIS
+
+YOUNG IN YEARS. GADDIS IS AS OLD AS THESE MONUMENTS IN REFLECTION AND
+MENTAL HERITAGE--A PART WITH THEM OF A VANISHED DAY]
+
+I want to speak a word just here of Gaddis. He is pure Copt, and the
+name "Copt" is from "Gypt"--that is, "Egypt"--the Copts being the direct
+descendants of the race that built ancient Thebes. His color is a clear,
+rich brown; his profile might be a part of these wall decorations. Then
+there are his eyes--mere dreamy slits, behind which he dwells in an age
+far removed from ours, while his lips wear always that ineffable smile
+which belongs only to Egypt, its sculpture and its people, the smile
+that regards with gentle contemplation--and compassion--all trivial
+things. Young in years, Gaddis is as old as these monuments in
+reflection and mental heritage--a part with them of a vanished day. And
+but for his fez and little European coat, which with the sash and
+figured skirt complete the dress of the Egyptian guide, Gaddis might
+truly have been plucked from these pictured walls. I should add that he
+reads the hieroglyphics and has all languages on his tongue--English,
+French, German--the Egyptian is born with these, I think; his voice is a
+drowsy hum that is pure music; his temper is as sweet and changeless as
+his smile.
+
+So much for Gaddis. He stood now with his lifted hand directed to the
+panoramic story of the past; then, in slow, measured voice:
+
+"Zis is ze great temple of Karnak--ze work of many king. Here you will
+see ze King Ram-e-ses II. wiz ze crown an' symbol of Upper an' Lower
+Egypt, making sacrifice of fruit and fowl an' all good sings to ze gawd
+Amm-Ra, in ze presence of Horus, ze hawk-headed sun-gawd, an' Anubis an'
+Osiris, ze gawd of ze under-worlid."
+
+Thus it was our sight-seeing in Upper Egypt began.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+KARNAK AND LUXOR
+
+
+The temple of Karnak cannot be described. The guide-books attempt it,
+but the result is only a maze of figures and detail for which the mind
+cares little. All the Greek temples on the Acropolis combined would make
+but a miniature showing by the side of Karnak. Most of the Egyptian
+kings, beginning as far back as 3000 B.C., had a hand in its building,
+and for above two thousand years it was in a state of construction,
+restoration, or repair. The result is an amazing succession of halls and
+columns, monoliths, and mighty walls--many of them tumbled and tumbling
+now, but enough standing to show what a race once flourished here. Long
+ago the road over which we came from Luxor was an avenue eighty feet
+wide and a mile and a half long, connecting the two great temples. It
+was faced on each side with ram-headed sphinxes only a few feet apart.
+Most of them are gone now, but the few mutilated specimens left prompt
+one's imagination of that mighty boulevard. The Karnak of that day, with
+its various enclosures, is said to have covered a thousand acres. The
+mind does not grasp that, any more than it comprehends the ages of its
+construction, the history it has seen. It is like trying to grasp the
+distance to the stars.
+
+No one may say who began Karnak, but the Usertsens of the earliest
+Theban Dynasty had a hand in its building, and after them the other
+dynasties down to the Ptolemaic days. Thothmes III. and his aunt, the
+wonderful Queen Hatasu--the ablest woman of her time--were among its
+builders, and these two set up obelisks, erected pylons and vast
+columned halls. This was about 1600 B.C., when the glory of Egypt was at
+flood-tide. Two centuries later the mighty Seti I., whose mummied form
+sleeps to-day in the Museum at Cairo, began what is known as the great
+Hypostile Hall, finished by his still mightier son, Rameses II., whose
+mummy likewise reposes in Cairo, father and son together. Rameses built
+other additions to Karnak, and crowded most of them with pictures and
+statues of himself and the sculptured glorification of his deeds. He
+was, in fact, not only the greatest king, but the greatest egotist the
+world has ever known, and in the end believed himself a god. It is said
+that he built more than seventy temples altogether, chiefly to hold his
+statues, and that he put his name on a number that had been built by his
+predecessors. It has been hinted that to his title of "The Great" the
+word "Advertiser" should have been added, and the fact that he is now on
+exhibition in a glass case must be a crowning gratification to him, if
+he knows it. It should be mentioned that Rameses II. is thought to be
+one of the oppressors of the Israelites, which may tend to arrange his
+period and personality in the Biblical mind.
+
+I am wandering away from the subject in hand. I want to talk about
+Karnak, and I find myself talking of kings. But, then, one _cannot_
+talk about Karnak--not intelligently. One must _see_ Karnak, and he will
+believe himself dreaming all the time, and he will come away silent. The
+Romans came to Karnak when the Egyptians had finished with their
+building, and by-and-by the early Christians, who could always be
+depended upon to pull down and mutilate and destroy anything that was
+particularly magnificent. Our old friend, the good Queen Helena,
+arrived, and the temples of Egypt crumbled before the blight of her
+fanaticism. But I must change cars again. I get a little rabid when I
+take up Queen Helena and her tribe.
+
+We followed Gaddis from arch to pylon, from enclosure to sanctuary--we
+passed down colonnades that one must see to believe. There are two kinds
+of columns in Egypt, by-the-way, the Lotus and the Papyrus--the former
+with a capital that opens out like a flaring bowl, the cup of the
+lotus-flower; the other with a capital that is more like an opening bud.
+The lotus symbolizes the Delta country, Lower Egypt; the papyrus stands
+for Upper Egypt, the country of the Nile, where we now are. Both are
+used in these temples, and here in Karnak there is a hall of Lotus
+columns--one hundred and thirty-four in number--twelve of them sixty
+feet high and twelve feet through!
+
+That is the great Hypostile Hall of Seti I., and I wish the English
+language were big enough, and I on sufficiently good terms with it to
+convey the overwhelming impression of that place. Try to conceive an
+architectural forest of the size of a city block, planted with
+sculptured and painted columns and filled with sunlight--the columns
+towering till they seem to touch the sky, and of such thickness that six
+men with extended arms, finger-tip to finger-tip, can barely span them
+round. The twelve mightier columns form a central avenue that simply
+dwarfs into insignificance any living thing that enters it. You suddenly
+become an insect when you stand between those columns and look up, and
+you have the feeling that you are likely to be stepped on. The rest of
+that colossal assembly stretch away on either side and are only a degree
+smaller. All are painted with the four colors of the Nile--mellow tones
+of blue, red, green and yellow, signifying high and low Nile, green
+fields and harvest--imperishable pigments as fresh and luminous under
+this sunlit sky as when they were laid there by artists who finished and
+put their brushes away more than three thousand years ago. How poor are
+mere words in the presence of this mighty reality which has outlived so
+many languages--will outlive all the puny languages that try to convey
+it now!
+
+Looking down the great central avenue of Seti's hall, we beheld at the
+end--standing as true to-day as when she placed it there--the graceful
+granite obelisk of Queen Hatasu.
+
+"Set up in honor of father Amen," she relates in her inscription on the
+base. She adds that she covered the tip with copper that it might be
+seen at a great distance, and tells how the monolith and its mate (now
+lying broken near it) were hewn from the Assuan quarries and brought
+down the Nile to Thebes. I may say here that we did not read these
+inscriptions ourselves. We could do it, of course, if we had time, but
+Gaddis, who is at least five thousand years old, inside, is better at it
+than we could be in a brief period like that, so we depend on him a good
+deal. Gaddis can read anything. A bird without a head, followed by a
+pair of legs walking, a row of sawteeth, a picked chicken, a gum-drop
+and a comb, all done in careful outline, mean "Homage to the Horus of
+the two horizons" to Gaddis, though I have been unable as yet to see
+why.
+
+We went into the Hall, or Temple, of Khonsu, the moon-god, and here was
+a breath-taking collection of papyrus columns, short, thick, built to
+stand through the ages on the uncertain foundation of this alluvial
+plain. We passed into a sanctuary where the priests of Amen prepared the
+sacrifice, and Gaddis read the story on the walls, and pointed out for
+the twentieth time, perhaps, Horus, the hawk-headed god, and Hapi, his
+son, who has a dog head and can hardly be called handsome; also Anubis,
+the jackal-headed god of the Under World. We came to a temple with a
+wall upon which Seti recorded his victories over the forces of Syria,
+and pictured himself in the act of destroying an army single handed by
+gathering their long hair into a single twist preparatory to smiting off
+this combined multitude of heads at a blow. We follow Gaddis through
+long tumbling avenues and corridors of decorated walls; we climbed over
+fallen columns that prostrate were twice as high as our heads; we
+studied the records which those old kings, in ages when all the rest of
+the world was myth and fable set up to preserve the story of their
+deeds. And remember, all these columns and walls were not only
+completely covered with figures carved in relief, but tinted in those
+unfading colors, subdued, harmonious, and more beautiful than I can
+tell.
+
+[Illustration: I MADE A PICTURE OF THE FLY-BRUSH BRIGADE]
+
+How little and how feebly I seem to be writing about this stupendous
+ruin, yet I must conclude presently for lack of room. We went into the
+Ramesseum, a temple literally lined with heroic statues of Rameses,
+where I made a picture of the fly-brush brigade, as we call ourselves
+now, because in Upper Egypt a fly-brush is absolutely necessary not
+alone to comfort, but to very existence. The fly here is not the
+ordinary house variety, fairly coy and flirtatious if one has a
+newspaper or other impromptu weapon, retiring now and again to a safe
+place for contemplation; no, the Egyptian fly is different. He never
+retires and he is not in the least coy. He makes for you in a cloud, and
+it is only by continuous industry that you can beat him off at all.
+Furthermore, he begins business the instant he touches, and he has
+continuously the gift which our fly sometimes has on a sultry, muggy
+day--the art of sticking with his feet, which drives you frantic. So you
+buy a fly-brush the instant you land in Upper Egypt, and you keep it
+going constantly from dawn to dark. The flies retire then, for needed
+rest.
+
+[Illustration: ITS MAGNIFICENT PYLONS OR ENTRANCE WALLS ... AND THEN
+ONCE MORE WE WERE ON THE DONKEYS]
+
+We passed through another avenue of ram-headed sphinxes (some of the
+heads were gone) which Rameses built, and stood outside of the great
+temple of Amen, once called the "Throne of the World." Its magnificent
+pylons, or entrance walls, are one hundred and fifty feet high and
+three hundred broad. We ascended one of these for a general view of the
+vast field of ruin.
+
+Piled and tumbled and flung about lay the mighty efforts of a mighty
+race. At one place excavating was still going on, and a regiment of
+little boys were running back and forth with baskets of dirt on their
+heads, singing and sweating in the blazing sun, earning as much as two
+piastres (ten cents) a day. Men were working, too; they receive quite
+fancy sums--twenty cents a day, some of them.
+
+Now that we were outside of the shaded temple and sanctuary enclosures
+our party was not very game. It was our first day in Upper Egypt, and
+the flies and the sun made a pretty deadly combination. We began to
+complain, and to long for the cool corridors and fizzy drinks and
+protecting screens of the hotel. We might have played golf or tennis in
+that sun, but seeing ruins was different, and we began to pray for the
+donkeys again. So Gaddis led us around by the Sacred Lake, where once
+the splendid ceremonials were performed--it is only a shallow pool
+now--and then once more we were on the donkeys, strung out in a crazy,
+shrieking stampede for the hotel. Gaddis rode near me. His donkey was a
+racer, too, but Gaddis did not laugh or cry out, or anything of the
+sort. He only wore that gentle serene smile, the smile of Egypt,
+observing trivial things.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR ... ONCE MORE REFLECTING ITS COLUMNS
+IN THE NILE]
+
+In the afternoon we visited the Temple of Luxor, that beautiful
+structure which Amenophis III. built on the banks of the Nile. Luxor is
+Karnak on a smaller scale, though big enough in all conscience, and it
+is not all excavated yet. Debris had covered this temple to the very
+top, and it is not so long ago that a village was built on a level with
+the capitals of these columns. When M. Maspero, in 1883, began his work
+of excavation, the natives naturally protested against the uncovering of
+the "heathen" ruins at the expense of their mud huts. The work went on,
+however, and to-day a large part of the magnificent architecture stands
+revealed, once more reflecting its columns in the Nile.
+
+There is still a quantity of debris to be removed. One end of the Temple
+is full of it, and may remain so a good while. On top of this mass, some
+five hundred years ago, a Mohammedan mosque was built by the descendants
+of a saint named Abu Haggag, and sufficient of his family are left to
+this day to hold that mosque intact against all would-be excavators.
+However, the mosque itself begins to look pretty old. If the diggers
+keep encroaching, it may slide off into the Temple some day, saints and
+all.
+
+Luxor, as a whole, is better preserved than Karnak. I suppose the
+heaped-up debris kept the columns in position during the last ten or a
+dozen centuries. I wish it had been there when the early Christian came
+along. Cambyses of Persia, who burned everything that would burn in
+Egypt, about 527 B.C., blackened the walls of this temple with fire, the
+marks of which show to this day, but he was nothing to the followers of
+Queen Helena. Even the guide-book, which is likely to be conservative in
+any comment that may touch upon the faith of its readers, says
+concerning the followers of Helena: "Not content with turning certain
+sections of it into churches, the more fanatical among them smashed
+statues, and disfigured bas-reliefs and wrecked shrines with
+characteristic savage and ignorant zeal."[7]
+
+There ought to be a painting or a marble group somewhere entitled "Early
+Christian at Work"--a lean-faced, stringy-haired maniac with sledge,
+murdering a symbolized figure of Defenceless Art in the Far East. The
+early Christian is said to have destroyed forty-five thousand statues in
+Thebes in one day.
+
+Still, those statues may not matter so much--they were probably all of
+Rameses the Great, and there are enough of him left. The Luxor Temple
+had them in all sizes, and of all materials, from granite to alabaster.
+Also some of "Mrs. Rameses," as Gaddis called her--no particular Mrs.
+Rameses--there having been several of her; just a sort of generic type
+of connubial happiness, I suppose. Mrs. Rameses, by the way, does not
+cut much figure in the statuary. She usually comes only about to the
+knee of the King, though she is life-size even then, for his own statues
+are colossal, ranging anywhere from fifteen to fifty feet high. That was
+to represent their difference in importance, of course, an idea which
+the women members of our party seemed to disapprove.[8]
+
+One of the statues of Rameses was found in a curious manner. A guide
+only a little while ago was lecturing to a party of tourists, while a
+young lady not far away was sketching a corner of the ruin. The sketcher
+stopped to listen to the guide's talk, and when he had finished said to
+the boy who was keeping the flies from her:
+
+"Go up on that heap of rubbish and see what that stone is."
+
+It was the rubbish that slopes down from the old mosque. The boy climbed
+up, pulled away the trash, and uncovered the head of one of the most
+perfect Rameseses yet discovered.
+
+Originally the Temple of Luxor was five hundred feet long, one hundred
+and eighty feet wide, and, as before mentioned, was connected with
+Karnak by a double row of ram-headed sphinxes. Amenophis III. built it
+about 1500 B.C., and it was regarded as the most beautiful of Egyptian
+temples. Then came his son, Amenophis IV., who, being a sun-worshipper
+after the manner of his Mesopotamian mother, cut away the name of the
+Egyptian god Amen and set up a new worship here. It was a brief
+innovation. The priests made it too hot for the Heretic King. He gave up
+the struggle after a time, went into the desert farther down the Nile,
+and built there a city and temples of his own. Then this temple was
+sacred to the old religion again. It remained so until Alexander came,
+cut his name here and there, and probably worshipped his own assortment
+of gods. Later came the Roman and the early Christian; still later the
+Mohammedan established ceremonies and reconstructed shrines.
+
+We had all the old sacrifices and processions and gods and victories
+over again in Luxor, including the picture story of the birth of
+Amenophis III., which depicts an immaculate conception; an annunciation;
+a visitation of wise men with gifts, executed about 1500 B.C.
+
+After which we returned to the hotel; but when the sun was low in the
+west beyond the Nile and the air was getting balmy, I slipped back and
+sat in the old Temple in the quiet, and thought of a number of things.
+Then as the sun slipped below the verge, a figure stepped out on the
+minaret just over my head and began that weird thrilling chant which
+once heard will remain forever unforgotten, the cry of the East--"Allah
+il Allah," the Muezzin's call to prayer.
+
+So it is still a place of worship. The voice of faith has reached down
+thirty-four centuries, and whatever the form, or the prophet, or the
+priest, it is all embodied there at evening and at morning in the cry,
+"There is no God but God."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] _Cook's Egypt_, page 562.
+
+[8] At Abou Simbel there are sitting statues of Rameses the Great which,
+if standing erect, would be eighty-three feet tall.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+THE STILL VALLEY OF THE KINGS
+
+
+It was early next morning when we crossed the Nile to the rhythm of a
+weird chorus which the boatmen sang to the beat of the oars. It is
+probably older than these temples, and the boatmen themselves do not
+know the meaning of the words, Gaddis said. One intones and the others
+answer, and it is in minor keys with a dying fall at the end, except now
+and then when a curious lifting note drops in, like a flash of light on
+the oars. Bound for the Valley of the Kings, the House of Hatasu, and
+the Colossi of Memnon, it seemed a fitting overture.
+
+The donkeys were waiting on the other bank--the same we had used
+yesterday, fat and fresh as ever, and the same boys were there calling
+and gesticulating to their special charges of the day before. There are
+always a few more donkey-boys than is necessary, it seems, all of them
+wildly eager for the privilege of racing all day in the perishing sun,
+urging the donkeys and yelling for baksheesh at every jump--not that
+they expect to get it until the end of the day, but as a traditional
+part of the performance. The donkey-boy gets nothing, we are told, but
+what one is pleased to give him--the donkey hire going to the Sheik, who
+owns the donkeys and lets the boys get what they can. I would write a
+good deal about those half-naked, half-savage, tireless donkey-boys if
+permitted. They and their brothers, and their cousins even to the fourth
+remove, who come in like a charging army in the wild baksheesh skirmish
+at the end, interest me.
+
+Mounted, we led away in the usual stampede along canals and by lush
+green fields, across the fertile strip that borders the Nile. The green
+is rather wide here--as much as a mile, I should think, and it was
+pleasant going through the still morning if one kept well forward in the
+procession--in front of the dust that rose mightily behind us. Every
+little way where we slackened speed, detachments of sellers would charge
+from the roadside with trinkets, imitation scarabs, and images, but more
+notably with fragments (and these were genuine enough) of what long
+ago--as much as three or four thousand years, perhaps--had been human
+beings like ourselves. Remnants of mummies they were, quarried out of
+the barren hills where lie not only the kings but the millions who in
+the glory of Egypt lived and died in Thebes. The hills are full of them,
+Gaddis said, and unearthing them has become an industry.
+
+It was rather grewsome at first to be offered such things--to have a
+head, or a hand, or a foot thrust up under your eyes, and with it an
+outstretched palm for payment. The prices demanded were not very high,
+and the owners, the present owners, would take less--a good deal less
+than the first quotation. A physician in our party bought a head--hard
+and black as old mahogany, with some bits of gold-leaf still sticking to
+it--for five francs, and I was offered a baby's hand (it had been soft
+and dimpled once--it was dark and withered now) for a shilling.
+
+We crossed the line which "divides the desert from the sown"--a sharp,
+perfectly distinguishable line in Egypt--and were in the sand, the sun
+getting high and blazing down, fairly drenching us with its flame. We
+thought it would be better when we entered the hills, but that was a
+mistake. It was worse, for there was not a particle of growing shade,
+not a blade of any green thing, and there seemed no breath of life in
+that stirless air.
+
+Remember it never rains here; these hills have never known water since
+the Flood, but have been baking in this vast kiln for a million years.
+You will realize that it must be hot, then, but you will never know how
+hot until you go there. Here and there a rock leaned over a little and
+made a skimpy blue shadow, which we sidled into as we passed for a
+blessed instant of relief. We understood now the fuller meaning of that
+Bible phrase, "As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." This was
+a weary land with shadows far between. Now and then those astonishing
+donkeys broke into a gallop and stirred up a little scorching wind, the
+unflagging boys capering and shouting behind.
+
+It seemed an endless way, up into these calcined hills to the
+Burial-place of Kings, but by-and-by there were traces of ruins and
+excavation, and we heard the throb of a dynamo on the quivering air. We
+dismounted then, and Gaddis led us up a burning little steep to what at
+first seemed a great tunnel into the mountain-side. How deep and cool
+and inviting it looked up there; we would go in, certainly. Was it
+really a tomb? No wonder those old kings looked forward to such a place.
+
+It was merely an entrance to a tomb--a tunnel, truly, and of such size
+that I believe two railway trains could enter it side by side and two
+more on top of them! I think most of us had the idea--I know I did--that
+we would go down ladders into these tombs, and that they would be
+earthy, cheerless places, more interesting than attractive.
+
+They are the most beautiful places I ever saw. The entrances--vast, as I
+have stated--go directly in from the hillside; the rock floors are dry
+and clean, while the side-walls and the ceilings are simply a mass of
+such carving and color as the world nowhere else contains. An electric
+dynamo set up in a tomb that was never finished (that of Rameses XII., I
+believe) supplies illumination for these homes of the kingly dead, and
+as you follow deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain your
+wonder grows at the inconceivable artistic effort and constructive labor
+that have been expended on those walls. Deeper, and still deeper, along
+a gradual decline that seems a veritable passage to the underworld. Here
+and there, at the side, are antechambers or avenues that lead away--we
+wonder whither.
+
+Now and again Gaddis paused to explain the marvellous story of the
+walls--the progress of the King to the underworld--his reception there,
+his triumphs, his life in general in that long valley of spirits which
+ran parallel with Egypt and was neither above nor below the level of the
+earth. It was this form and idea of the underworld that the shape of
+these tombs was intended to express, while their walls illustrate the
+happy future life of the King. Chapters from the "Book of the
+Underworld" (a sort of descriptive geography of the country) and from
+the "Book of the Dead" (a manual of general instruction as to customs
+and deportment in the new life) cover vast spaces. Here and there a
+design was not entirely worked out, but the sketch was traced in
+outline, which would indicate that perhaps the King died before his tomb
+(always a life-work) was complete.
+
+Now, realize: This gorgeous passage was nearly five hundred feet long,
+cut into the living rock, and opened into a vast pillared and vaulted
+chamber fully sixty feet long by forty wide and thirty high--the whole
+covered with splendid decorations that the dry air and protection have
+preserved as fresh and beautiful as the day they were finished so many
+centuries ago. This was the royal chamber, empty now, where in silent
+state King Seti I. once lay. We are a frivolous crowd, but we were awed
+into low-voiced wonder at the magnitude of this work, the mightiness of
+a people who could provide so overwhelmingly for their dead.
+
+I do not remember how many such tombs we visited, but they were a good
+many, including those of Rameses I. and II., the father and the mighty
+son of Seti I., all three of whom now sleep in the Cairo Museum. Also
+the tomb of Rameses IX., one of the finest of the lot.
+
+In some of the tombs the sarcophagi were still in place, but all are
+empty of occupants except one. This was the splendid tomb of Amenophis
+II., of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who lived in the glory of Egypt, 1600
+B.C., a warrior who slew seven Syrian chiefs with his own hand. Gaddis
+had not told us what to expect in that tomb, and when we had followed
+through the long declining way to the royal chamber and beheld there,
+not an empty sarcophagus but a king asleep, we were struck to silence
+with that three thousand five hundred years of visible rest.
+
+The top of the sarcophagus is removed, and is replaced by heavy plate
+glass. Just over the sleeper's face there is a tiny electric globe, and
+I believe one could never tire of standing there and looking at that
+quiet visage, darkened by age, but beautiful in its dignity; unmoved,
+undisturbed by the storm and stress of the fretful years.
+
+How long he has been asleep! The Israelites were still in bondage when
+he fell into that quiet doze, and for their exodus, a century or two
+later, he did not care. Hector and Achilles and Paris and the rest had
+not battled on the Plains of Troy; the gods still assembled on Mt.
+Olympus; Rome was not yet dreamed. He had been asleep nigh a thousand
+years when Romulus quit nursing the she-wolf to build the walls of a
+city which would one day rule the world. The rise, the conquest, the
+decline of that vast empire he never knew. When her armies swept the
+nations of the East and landed upon his own shores he did not stir in
+his sleep. The glory of Egypt ebbed away, but he did not care. Old
+religions perished; new gods and new prophets replaced the gods and
+prophets he had known--it mattered not to him, here in this quiet
+underworld. Through every change he lay here in peace, just as he lies
+to-day, so still, so fine in his kingly majesty--upon his face that soft
+electric glow which seems in no wise out of place, because it has come
+as all things come at last to him who waits.
+
+In a sort of anteroom near the royal chamber lie the mummies of three
+adherents of the King, each with a large hole in the skull and a large
+gash in the breast--royal slaves, no doubt, sent to bear their liege
+company. I remember one of them as having very long thick curly hair--a
+handsome fellow, I suppose; a favorite who could not, or would not, be
+left behind.
+
+A number of other royal mummies were found in the Tomb of Amenophis II.,
+so that at some period of upheaval it must have been used as a
+hiding-place for the regal dead, as was a cave across the mountains at
+Der al-Bahari. Perhaps those who secreted them here thought that a king
+who in life had slain seven chiefs with his own hand would make a potent
+guard. They were not mistaken. Through all the centuries the guests of
+that still house lay undisturbed.
+
+We paused, though briefly--for it was fairly roasting outside--at the
+excavations of our countryman, Mr. Theodore M. Davis, who has brought to
+light so many priceless relics in this place; after which we bought an
+entire stock of oranges from an Arab who suddenly appeared from nowhere,
+sucked them ravenously, and set out, leading our donkeys up a broiling
+precipitous path over the mountains, for the house of Queen Hatasu,
+which lies at the base of the cliffs on the other side.
+
+It was not very far, I suppose, but it was strenuous and seemed miles.
+We were rewarded, however, when we reached the plateau of the mountain
+top. From the brink of the great cliff we could look out over the whole
+plain of Thebes, its villages and its ruins, its green cultivation and
+its blazing sands. Once it was a vast city--"the city of a hundred gates
+and twenty thousand chariots of war." Through its centre flowed the
+Nile, a very fountain of life, its one outlet to the world. To the east
+and the west lay Nature's surest fortifications, the dead hills and the
+encompassing sands. It is estimated that the city of Paris could stand
+on this level sweep and that Thebes overspread it all. As at Ephesus, we
+tried to re-create that vanished city, but we did not try long, for the
+mid-day sun was too frying hot.
+
+So we descended to the rest-house of Der al-Bahari, where we created a
+famine in everything resembling refreshments, liquid or otherwise, in
+that wayside shelter. Then out on the piazza we swung our fly-brushes,
+beat off the sellers of things, and tried to assimilate our half-baked
+knowledge.
+
+We were in a mixed state of temples and tombs and dynasties and
+localities--of sacrificial processions, and gods of the "Underworld."
+The sun had got into our heads, too, and some of the refreshments had
+been of strange color and curious brands. It is no wonder that we
+drifted into deliriums of verse. I have forgotten who had the first
+seizure, but from internal evidence it was probably Fosdick--Fosdick of
+Ohio. This is it:
+
+  Queen Hatasu, of Timbuctoo,
+    She lived a busy life;
+  She fell in love with King Khufu,
+    And she became his wife.
+
+  She put him in a pyramid--
+    He put her in another,
+  And now four thousand years have gone
+    You can't tell one from tother.
+
+I do remember how we tried to reason with the author; how we explained
+to him carefully that Hatasu, who was also called Hatshepset and certain
+other names, did not hail from Timbuctoo; also that King Khufu, alias
+Cheops, had been in his pyramid at least two thousand years, with
+fourteen dynasties on top of him, when that lady of the Nile was born.
+It was no use; he turned a glazed eye on us and said all periods looked
+alike to him, that art was long and life fleeting, that a trifle of two
+thousand years was as a few grains on the Egyptian sands of time. We
+saw, then, he was hopeless, but later he improved and seemed sorry. It
+did not matter; another member of the party had been taken with the
+poetic madness, and we gave room for his attack. It was of milder form,
+and mercifully short:
+
+  King Rameses, he strove to please,
+    And put his foes to flight;
+  To celebrate his victories
+    He toiled both day and night.
+
+  He filled full threescore temples with
+    His statues vast and grim,
+  And some of Mrs. Rameses
+    Who wa'n't knee-high to him.
+
+I don't know why a malady of this sort should fall upon our party. Such
+things never happened on the ship, but then Egypt is different, as I
+have said. There was one more outbreak before we got the germ destroyed:
+
+  Behold the halls of Seti I.,
+    And also Seti II.;
+  Likewise of old Amenhetep
+    And haughty Hatasu.
+
+  They lived in state, their days were great
+    And glided gayly by;
+  Sometimes they used to rail at fate,
+    The same as you and I.
+
+  Oh, Seti I., your race is run,
+    And also Seti II.,
+  And lizards sleep where ages creep
+    In the house of Hatasu.
+
+It was time to check the tendency; it was getting serious.
+
+We went up to the "House of Hatasu"--all that is left of it--a beautiful
+fragment of what was built by the great Queen as her Holy of Holies. It
+is unlike other temples we have seen, with its square columns; its
+beautiful open portico; its fine ceiling, still perfect in workmanship
+and coloring. Queen Hatasu had ideas of her own about building; also,
+her own architect. His name was Senmut, and his tomb, a mile from the
+temple, commands a view of it to this day.
+
+Hatasu once made a notable expedition to the lower east coast of
+Africa--to Punt, as it was called then, and she has recorded it on these
+walls. It shows the natives bringing valuable presents--woods, spices,
+gold, and the like--in exchange for glass beads and tin whistles, after
+the customary manner of such barter. A part of the relief shows the
+Prince of Punt and "Mrs. Punt," whose figure was certainly remarkable,
+followed by their family, all with hands raised in deference to the
+Egyptian Queen.
+
+It was near here, in 1881, that the cave or pit was found containing the
+mummies of many kings, including Seti I., Rameses II., and others who
+had been stored here for safety. Arabs had been selling royal scarabs
+for some time, and the archaeologists finally discovered the secret of
+their supply. It was a priceless find, and with the treasures of the
+tomb of Amenophis II., made the museum of Cairo the richest
+archaeological depository in the world.
+
+We put in the afternoon visiting temples, mostly of Rameses the Great,
+and looking at statues which he had caused to be erected of himself
+wherever there was room. I remember one colossal granite figure of that
+self-sufficient king, lying prostrate on the sand now, estimated to
+weigh a thousand tons--which is to say two million pounds. That statue
+was sixty feet high when it stood upright, and it is cut like a gem. It
+was brought down from Assuan in one piece, by barge, as was the enormous
+granite base, which is thirty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and eight
+feet thick.
+
+I remember, too, some sun-dried brick--brick made by the Israelites,
+maybe--with the imprint of Rameses still on them, uneffaced after
+thirty-three centuries. The sun bakes hard in Egypt; no other kiln is
+needed. I remember a temple of Rameses III. and a pictorial record of
+one of his victories. His soldiers had reported a killing of twelve
+thousand of the enemy; he said:
+
+"Go bring the evidence. If you have those dead men anywhere you can
+bring something to prove it."
+
+So the army returned and got the right hands of their victims. The story
+is all cut there on the walls, and the hands are there too.
+
+Rameses III. knew the custom inaugurated by his ancestor "The Great," of
+eliminating old names with new ones, and he took measures accordingly by
+cutting his own inscriptions deep. Some of them sink ten inches into the
+walls and will stay there a good while.
+
+I had noticed one curious thing along the outer walls of all these old
+temples, to wit: row after row of smooth egg-shaped holes, ranging
+irregularly, one above the other, from the base upward--sometimes to the
+very top. It was as if they had been dug out by some animal or insect. I
+asked Gaddis, at last, what they were, and he told me this curious
+thing.
+
+The childless Arab woman, he said, for ages had believed that some magic
+in these walls could make them fruitful, so had come and rubbed
+patiently with their fingers until they worked a few grains of the
+sandstone into a cup of water, which they drank with a prayer of hope.
+They had begun, he said, in that far-off time when the temples stood as
+clear of rubbish as they do to-day; and, as the years heaped up the
+debris, these anxious women had rubbed higher and higher up the walls
+until, with the drift of the ages, they had reached the very top. So
+there the record stands to-day, and when one realizes how little of that
+stone can be rubbed away with the finger-end; how comparatively few must
+have been the childless mothers, and then sees how innumerable and deep
+those holes are, he gets a sudden and comprehensive grasp of the vast
+stretch of time these walls stood tenantless, vanishing, and unregarded,
+save by those generations of barren women.
+
+We raced away for the Colossi of Memnon, where, I fear, we did not
+linger as long as was proper. It was growing late--we were very tired
+and were overfull of undigested story and tangled chronology. Also the
+scarab men and flies were especially bad just there. We were willing to
+take a bare look at that majestic pair who have watched the sun rise
+morning after morning while a great city vanished away from around them,
+and then go steaming away across the sands for the Nile and the cool
+rest of the hotel.
+
+Such a time as we had settling with those donkey-boys--the old
+white-turbaned sheik, owner of the donkeys, squatting and smoking
+indifferently while the storm raged about him. But it was over at last,
+and the boatmen sang again--a quiet afterlude of that extraordinary
+day--and collected baksheesh on the farther shore.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+THE HIGHWAY OF EGYPT
+
+
+There could hardly be a daintier boat than the _Memnon_. It just holds
+our party; it is as clean and speckless as possible, and there is an
+open deck the full width of the tiny steamer, with pretty rugs and lazy
+chairs, where we may lounge and drowse and dream and look out on the
+gently passing panorama of the Nile.
+
+For we have left Luxor, and are floating in this peaceful fashion down
+to Cairo, resting in the delight of it, after those fierce
+temple-hunting, tomb-visiting days. Not that we are entirely through
+with temples and the like. Here and there we tie up to the bank, and go
+ashore and scamper away on donkeys to some tumbled ruin, but it is a
+diversion now, not a business, and we find such stops welcome. For the
+most part we spend our days just idling, and submitting to the spell of
+Egypt, which has encompassed us and possessed us as it will encompass
+and possess any one who has a trace of the old human tendency to drift
+and dream.
+
+It has been said of Boston that it is less a locality than a state of
+mind. I wish _I_ had said that--of Egypt. I will say it now, and without
+humor, for of this land it is so eminently true. A mere river-bank; a
+filament of green; a long slender lotus-stem, of which the Delta is the
+flower--_that_ is Egypt. Remote--shut in by the desert and the dead
+hills--it is far less a country and a habitation than a psychological
+condition which all the mummied ages have been preparing--which the
+traveller from the earliest moment is bound to feel. It has lived so
+long! It had made and recorded its history when the rest of the world
+was dealing in nursery-tales! The glamour of that stately past has
+become the spell, the enchantment of to-day. The magic of the lotus
+grows more potent with the years.
+
+It is such a narrow land! Sometimes the lifeless hills close in on one
+side or the other to the water's edge. Nowhere is the fertile strip
+wide, for its fertility depends wholly on the water it receives from the
+Nile, and when that water is drawn up by hand with a goat-skin pail and
+a well-sweep--a _shaduf_, as they call it--it means that fields cannot
+be very extensive, even if there were room, which as a rule there is
+not.
+
+[Illustration: THINK OF WATERING A WHOLE WHEAT-FIELD WITH A WELL-SWEEP
+AND A PAIL]
+
+Think of watering a whole wheat-field with a well-sweep and a pail!
+Furthermore, where the banks are high the water is sometimes lifted
+three times between the Nile and the surface, and much of it is wasted
+in transit. It is the oldest form of irrigation; the hieroglyphics show
+that it was in use in Egypt five thousand years ago. It is also still
+the most popular form in Upper Egypt. We saw a good many of the
+_sakkieh_--primitive and wasteful water-wheels propelled by a buffalo or
+a camel or a cow--and at rare intervals a windmill, where some
+Englishman has established a plantation, but it is the _shaduf_ that
+largely predominates.
+
+The mud villages among the date-palms are unfailingly picturesque; the
+sail-boats of the Nile--_markab_ they call them--drifting down upon us
+like great butterflies, have a charm not to be put in words; the life
+along the shores never loses its interest; the sun sets and the sun
+rises round the dreamy days with a marvel of color that seems each time
+more wonderful. Then there is the moonlight. But I must not speak of
+Egyptian moonlight or I shall lose my sense of proportion altogether,
+for it is like no other light that ever lay on sea or land.
+
+We do not travel through the night, but anchor at dusk until daybreak.
+It is curious to reflect that one sees the entire country on a trip like
+this, if he rises early. We do rise early, most of us--though the cool
+nights (nights are always cool in Egypt) and the stillness are an
+inducement to sleep--and we are usually very hungry before breakfast
+comes along. One may have coffee on the deck if he likes--the
+picturesque Arab will bring it joyfully, especially where there is a
+baksheesh at the end. It is good coffee, too, and the food is good;
+everything is good on the _Memnon_ except the beverages and the cigars.
+The wine could be improved and the cigars could be thrown away. I paid a
+shilling for one that was as hard as a stick and crumbled to dust when I
+bit it. Never mind the flavor. That brand was called "The Scarab." It
+should have been named "The Mummy"--it had all the characteristics.
+
+The pilot commands this boat--the captain merely conducts the excursion.
+The captain wears European dress and speaks English, but the pilot is
+Arab throughout--dark-faced, heavily turbaned, silent--watching the
+water like a sphinx. Now and then he makes a motion and says a word to
+the steersman at his side. Whenever we lie up or strike safe water he
+locates Mecca, prostrates himself, and prays. I should think his
+emotions would be conflicting at times. Doctrinally, of course, it is
+his duty to pray for the boat to sink and exterminate this crowd.
+Professionally, it is his duty to take us safely to Cairo. Poor old
+Abbas! how are you going to explain to the prophet by-and-by?
+
+We may not reach Cairo, however. The Nile is shallow at this season, and
+already we have scraped the sand more than once. It is a curious
+river--full of currents and shifting sand--the water getting scantier as
+you descend. That seemed strange to us until we realize that its entire
+flow comes from the far interior; that it has no feeding tributaries,
+while the steady evaporation, the irrigation, and the absorption of
+these burning sands constitute a heavy drain. It is hard to grasp a
+condition like that, or what this river means--has always meant--to the
+dwellers along its shores. Not alone an artery of life, it is life
+itself--water, food, clothing, cleanliness.
+
+They don't take as much advantage of that last blessing as they
+should--nor of the next to the last. It is true that most of them have
+some semblance of clothing, but not all of them. In this interior Nile,
+as we may call the district between Luxor and Cairo, early principles to
+some extent still prevail. At first we saw boys--donkey-boys and the
+like--without any perceivable clothing, and more lately we have seen
+men--brown-skinned muscular creatures loading boats--utterly destitute
+of wardrobe. Yet, somehow, these things did not shock us--not greatly.
+They seemed to go with the sun, and the dead blue sky and the other
+scenery. A good deal depends on surroundings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our stops were not all brief. We put in a full day at Abydos, where
+there is a splendid temple built by Seti I., and Rameses the Great (of
+course), and where the donkeys are as poor as they are good in Luxor.
+Not that they were wretched in appearance, or ill-cared for, but they
+were a stiff-necked, unwilling breed. Mine had a way of stopping
+suddenly and facing about toward home. Twice I went over his head during
+these manoeuvres, which the others thought entertaining.
+
+But they had their troubles, too. The distance to the temple was
+long--eight miles, I should think--and part of the way the road was an
+embankment several feet high. Some of the donkeys seemed to think it
+amusing to suddenly decide to go down this embankment and make off over
+the desert. We were a scattering, disordered cavalcade, and what with
+the flies and distracting donkey-boys who were perpetually at one's side
+with "Mister, good donkey--fine donkey--baksheesh, mister," the trip was
+a memorable one. Once when my donkey, whose name was "Straight Flush"
+and should have been "Two-spot" got behind the party, I caught my
+attendant, not only twisting his tail, but biting it.
+
+It was a good excursion, on the whole. We had luncheon in the great hall
+of the temple, and I could not help wondering who had held the first
+feast in that mighty place where we were holding the last, to date.
+
+We feel at home now in a temple, especially when we see the relief of
+our faithful Rameses, and of Osiris, king of the underworld, and his
+kind. We have become familiar and even disrespectful toward these great
+guardians of the past. This makes it hard on Gaddis at times; especially
+after luncheon, when we are in a sportive mood.
+
+"Zis is ze temple of Rameses ze Great"--he begins.
+
+"Ah, so it is--we suspected it all along."
+
+"Here you will see hees seventy-two son--"
+
+"Sure enough--our old friends."
+
+"And hees fourteen wive."
+
+"Happy man, but why a king and so few?"
+
+"An' here all zose seventy-two son carry gift to Osiris--"
+
+"King of the underworld--so they do, we would recognize that gang
+anywhere."
+
+Truly, it is time we were giving up temples; we are no longer serious.
+But in this temple of Seti I., at Abydos, we sometimes forgot to jest.
+Frivolous and riotous as we have become, we were silent in the presence
+of one splendid decoration of Seti offering sacrifice before the sacred
+boat, and again where we confronted in a corridor that precious and
+beautiful relief carving, the Tablet of Egypt's Kings. The cartouche of
+every king down to Seti I. is there--with one exception: the name of
+Amenophis IV., the king who abandoned his faith and worshipped his
+mother's gods, has no place in that royal company. Otherwise the story
+is as complete as it is impressive, and I recognized something of what
+that document means to those of Egypt who know (like Gaddis), when I put
+out a finger to touch the exquisite work and he whispered, "No, please."
+
+What record will there be of our history thirty-five centuries from now?
+Not a book of all those printed to-day will last any considerable
+fraction of that period. A tablet like this sets one to wondering if we
+should not get an appropriation to preserve at least the skeleton of our
+chronology on plates of bronze to be stored in some deep vault safe from
+the ravages of fire and flood and earthquake.
+
+We also stopped at Assuit, or Asyut, or Suit--I like these Egyptian
+names--you can spell them any way you please. Every one of them has all
+the spellings you can think of; you could not invent a new one if you
+tried. It is at Assuit they make the spangled shawls, and the natives
+flock down to the boat-landing to sell them. Gaddis had probably
+telegraphed ahead that a floating asylum of Americans was on the way and
+they had assembled accordingly. Long before we were in trading distance
+they began to dance about and gesticulate--the sheen of their fabrics
+blazing in the sun--crying the prices which they did not expect to get.
+
+Some of our ladies were quite eager, and began to make offers when we
+were still many yards from shore. I suppose they thought the supply was
+limited. By the time we touched the landing the wildest trading was
+already going on. Shawls rolled in a ball were being flung aboard for
+examination, and flung back wildly with preposterous under-bids, only
+to come hurtling back again with a fierce protest of refusal. For a time
+it was a regular game of snowball and fireworks. There were canes to
+sell, too, and fly-whips--beautiful ivory-handled things. Commerce
+swelled to high tide. In the midst of the melee somebody happened to
+notice, what we had not seen before, another steamer lying a little way
+ahead--an English party, we were told--the ladies and gentlemen quietly
+reading or pityingly regarding our exhibition. I know, now, that the
+English have no sense of humor. Another American boat would have been in
+spasms of delight at our antics. Also, the Englishman's Egypt is not as
+ours, and he does not enjoy it as much. How could he, without loading
+up, as we did, with those wonderful Assuit shawls?
+
+Only one more stop along the Nile will I record. This was at Tell
+al-Amarna, where, in the desert a little beyond the green, lies all that
+is left of the city built by the heretic king, Amenophis IV., who
+abandoned Amen-Ra for the sun-worship of his Mesopotamia mother, Queen
+Thi.
+
+It was a splendid granite city once, but it is all gone now. Only a
+little of the floor of the palace is left, Queen Thi's apartment, Gaddis
+said, but it held for us a curious interest. For it is painted, or
+perhaps enamelled, in colors, and the decorations, still in a good state
+of preservation, are not Egyptian in design, but Syrian or Persian! The
+Princess who had left her land to marry an Egyptian king could not
+forsake her gods and her traditions, and that old floor remains to-day
+after thirty-five centuries to tell the story of her loyalty and her
+love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We should have made other stops, perhaps, but we met disaster. The Nile
+was low, as I have said, and a hundred miles below Cairo we awoke one
+morning to find our boat hard and fast aground. We had, in fact,
+grounded the evening before, and Abbas and his men had been working all
+night, putting out anchors and pulling on ropes, a picturesque group, to
+the chorus "Ali sah--ali ya seni--ali hoop!" which is an appeal to the
+god of the Nile, Gaddis said, in this case unavailing. We were there to
+stay for the summer, unless we took train to Cairo, so after breakfast
+Gaddis and I went ashore with Abraham, still semi-officially attached to
+our party, and walked three miles to the nearest railway station to see
+what might be done. It was a fine walk, even though a warm one, across
+the Egyptian fields, and I saw some papyrus plant and bought a distaff
+and spindle from a man who was sitting by the road spinning after the
+fashion of the earliest race of men.
+
+It was Fachen that we reached, an Arab town to which tourists never
+come, and the donkeys we arranged for there, to carry our party from the
+shore landing to the station, were a nondescript lot without saddle or
+bridle--with no gear, in fact, except a remnant of rope tied around the
+neck. Then we walked back opposite the boat, another three miles, and
+sat on the bank, and sweat and waved our hands and called to those
+people, half a mile away in mid-stream, who for some reason could not
+see our signals.
+
+It was not uninteresting, though. The natives came to inspect us--an
+unusual opportunity for them--and some women came down to the Nile with
+great stone jars for water. Those jars must hold eight or ten gallons,
+and are heavy enough empty, yet those women will balance them on their
+heads and go stepping away chatting lightly, indifferent to their great
+burdens. They were barefooted and wore anklets which I wanted to buy,
+but Gaddis did not seem interested, and I could not transact a delicate
+business like that without careful interpretation.
+
+Our people saw us at last and came for us in a boat. Then there was a
+bustle of preparation; a loading into the markab which we had engaged to
+take us ashore; a good-bye to our pretty, unfortunate little _Memnon_; a
+drifting down to the donkey landing, and a sorry-looking procession to
+the railway.
+
+Our guides had difficulty settling with donkey-men, who, never having
+had tourists before, had engaged, no doubt, at their usual rates; then
+suddenly they had awakened to the idea that they were missing the chance
+of a fortune. The baksheesh we gave them must have opened their eyes.
+Probably they had never received so much at one time before. At all
+events, they came back for a new settlement, surrounded Gaddis and
+Abraham, and for a while we thought inferno had broken loose. Gaddis
+finally resorted to a stick, but Abraham, who is as big as a camel,
+first delivered an admonition, and then ran bodily upon the whole crowd
+and swept them like chaff from the platform.
+
+The wait at Fachen was not overlong, but it became a trifle tedious
+after the novelty of the place had passed. We telegraphed Cairo of our
+coming, and Abraham entertained us with a few marvels to while away the
+time. He said that the stone used in building the pyramids had been
+brought across the Nile; that such stone was light like pumice-stone
+when quarried; that it floated across, and that the water it soaked up
+solidified and turned it into hard, heavy stone on the other side. The
+Credulous One believed this statement. He said the _Memnon_ had grounded
+on a reef of crocodiles, at this season asleep, tucked up in the bed of
+the Nile. The Credulous One believed that, too. Several of the party
+did. He said that all telegrams in Egypt are sent in English, for the
+reason that the Arabic characters get tangled up in the wires. I
+believed that myself. He would have enlightened us further, only the
+train came just then.
+
+We had to change at Wasta, where it was night, and I shall never forget
+that fevered scene of Arab faces and flaring lamps, and heat, and
+thirst--the one hot night in Egypt--as we wandered about that Egyptian
+station waiting for the Cairo express. Suddenly we came upon another
+party of our ship-dwellers, whose boat, ahead of ours, had grounded too.
+Finding them there in that weird place was all like something in a
+fever. Then we were on the express at last, roaring away through the
+dust and dark and heat to Cairo--a flight out of Egypt so modern that
+one could imagine the gates of the dead centuries behind us rushing
+together with a bang.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+OTHER WAYS THAT ARE EGYPTIAN
+
+
+The Reprobates were at Shepheard's when we returned, enjoying Egypt
+thoroughly. Shepheard's is a good place in which to enjoy Egypt. Some of
+the sights there are quite wonderful, and American refreshments are
+connected with an electric bell.
+
+The Reprobates had done Upper Egypt, however. They had done it in one
+day. They had left Cairo in the evening, telegraphing ahead for
+carriages to meet the train at Luxor, where they had arrived next
+morning. They had driven directly from the train to Karnak, from Karnak
+to the temple of Luxor, from Luxor to the hotel for luncheon. In the
+afternoon they had soared over to the Valley of the Kings; from the
+Kings they had dropped down on the House of Hatasu, the temples of
+Rameses and others; they had come coursing back by the Colossi of Memnon
+in time to catch the Cairo express, which landed them at Shepheard's
+about daybreak. The Reprobates had enjoyed Upper Egypt very much, though
+I could see they regretted the necessity of devoting all that time to it
+when Shepheard's still remained partially unexplored.
+
+I had hardly landed in my room when a call-boy from the office came up
+to say that a police-officer was below, asking for me. For a moment I
+wondered a little feverishly what particular thing it was he wanted me
+for. Then the boy said, "Pyramid police," which brought a gleam of
+light. "Oh, why--yes, of course--show him up!"
+
+And now, while we are waiting for him, I am going to record a
+circumstance which I suppose a good many readers--especially those
+familiar with the East--may find it difficult to believe. Nevertheless,
+it is authentic and provable.
+
+In Egypt, baksheesh is a national institution. Everybody takes it--every
+Egyptian, I mean; if I should begin by saying I had met an exception to
+this rule I could not expect any one who knows Cairo to read any
+further. This by-the-way.
+
+It was during our first stop in Cairo, and we had been there a day or
+two before we made our official visit to the Pyramids and Sphinx. We
+went in carriages then, attended by two guides. For some reason,
+however, our protectors left us to shift pretty much for ourselves when
+we got there, and it was a pretty poor shift. The fortune-tellers and
+scarab-sellers and donkey-men and would-be guides swarmed about us and
+overran us and would not be appeased. When we repulsed them temporarily
+they rallied and broke over us in waves, and swept us here and there,
+until we became mere human flotsam and jetsam on that tossing Egyptian
+tide.
+
+It was all like a curiously confused dream. Members of our party would
+suddenly turn up, and as suddenly disappear again: there would be
+moments of lull when we seemed about to collect, then, presto! without
+any apparent cause there would occur wild confusion and despair.
+
+It was no use. Laura and I wanted to go inside the Great Pyramid, and we
+did not want to climb it. It was impossible to do one, and it was about
+equally impossible not to do the other. Out of the confusion of things
+at last I remembered a young officer of the police, whom I had met
+riding home that first night on the trolley--a mere lad of nineteen or
+twenty, but a big fellow, who spoke excellent English and said he was
+Superintendent of the Pyramid Police. I decided now to see if this was
+true, and, if so, to ask his advice in our present difficulties.
+
+I remembered that the police station was near the trolley terminus, and
+we gradually fought our way back there. Yes, there he was, at his desk,
+a handsome Soldierly figure in a tall red fez. He rose and bowed,
+remembering us immediately.
+
+We would like to look about a little, I said, and to go inside the big
+Pyramid, but we preferred to be alive when we got through; also fairly
+decent as to appearance. Couldn't he pick us out a guard or two, who
+would keep the enemy in check, and see us through?
+
+He bowed with easy grace.
+
+"I will accompany you myself," he said.
+
+Now, I already knew the custom of Egypt, and I began to make a hasty
+estimate of my ready money, wondering if I had sufficient for a
+baksheesh of this rank. It was by no means certain. However, there would
+be ship-dwellers about: I could borrow, perhaps.
+
+I decided presently that whatever the duty imposed, it was worth it.
+With that big uniformed fellow at our side we were immune to all that
+hungry horde of Arab vultures. We walked through unscathed. Our
+protector procured the entrance tickets for us; he selected two strong
+men to push and pull us up the long, dark, glassy-slick passage that
+leads to the sepulchre of Khufu in the very heart of the Pyramid; he
+went with us himself into that still mysterious place, explaining in
+perfect English how five or six thousand years ago the sarcophagus of
+the great king was pushed up that incline; he showed us the mortises in
+the stone where uprights were set to hold the great granite coffin when
+the laborers stopped to rest. It was a weird experience in the cool,
+quiet darkness of that mightiest of tombs with the flaring candles and
+eager sure-footed Arabs; it seemed to belong in Rider Haggard's story of
+_She_. Then, after we had seen the old black sarcophagus, which is empty
+now, and had remained a little in that removed place, trying to imagine
+that we were really in the very centre of the big Pyramid, we made our
+way out again to light and the burning desert heat. I settled with our
+Arabs with little or no difficulty, which is worth something in itself,
+and when we had found a quiet place I thanked our guardian and tendered
+him what I thought a liberal honorarium--fairly liberal, even for
+America.
+
+He drew back a little.
+
+"Oh no," he said, "I beg your pardon."
+
+I had not made it large enough then. I glanced about for some of the
+party who would have funds.
+
+"I am sorry," I began, "it is not more. I will--"
+
+"I beg your pardon," he repeated, "but I could not accept anything for
+what is but my duty. I am only very glad to do what I may for you. I
+will do something more, if you wish."
+
+Then, of course, I knew it _must_ be a dream, and that I would wake up
+presently in Shepheard's Hotel to find that we hadn't started for the
+Pyramids yet. Still, I would keep up the blessed trance a moment longer.
+
+"You mean that you will not allow me to acknowledge your great favor to
+us?" I said in that polite manner for which our ship is justly famous.
+
+"Not in money," he said. "The Government pays me a salary for my work
+and this is only part of my work. It has also given me pleasure."
+
+I surreptitiously pinched myself in certain tender places to see if I
+couldn't wake up. It was no use. He persisted in his refusal, and
+presently produced an ancient corroded coin, Greek or Roman, such as is
+sometimes found among the debris.
+
+"I should like to offer you this," he said. "I found it myself, so I am
+sure it is genuine."
+
+Ah, this was the delicate opportunity.
+
+"You will let me buy it, of course."
+
+But no, he declined that, too. He wished us only to remember him, he
+insisted. He added:
+
+"I have two scarabs at home; I should like to bring them to your hotel."
+
+It was rather dazing. The seller of scarabs--genuine or imitation--will
+not let a prospective purchaser get out of sight. I wondered why we
+should be trusted in this unheard-of way; I also wondered what those two
+scarabs were likely to be worth. Could he come to-night? I asked; we
+should be sight-seeing to-morrow and leaving for Upper Egypt in the
+afternoon.
+
+But no, he would not be home in time. He would wait until we returned
+from Upper Egypt.
+
+So it was we had parted, and in the tumult of sight-seeing up the Nile I
+had forgotten the matter altogether. Now, here he was. I counted up my
+spare currency, and waited.
+
+He had on his best smile as he entered, also a brand-new uniform, and he
+certainly made a handsome figure. He inquired as to our sight-seeing up
+the Nile, then rather timidly he produced two of those little Egyptian
+gems--a scarab and an amulet, such as men and women of old Egypt wore,
+and took with them to their tombs.
+
+"I got them from a man who took them from a mummy. They are genuine. I
+want to give them to you and the little lady," he said.
+
+"But you must not _give_ them to us--they are too valuable," I began.
+
+He flushed and straightened up a little.
+
+"But that is why I wish you to have them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, of course, no one who knows Cairo can ever believe that story. Yet
+it all truly happened, precisely as I have set it down. He was just a
+young Egyptian who had attended school in Alexandria, and he spoke and
+wrote English, French, Italian, and the dialects of Arabic. The Egyptian
+acquires the lore of languages naturally, it would seem, but that this
+youth should acquire all those things, and such a standard of honor and
+generosity, here in a land where baksheesh is the native god, did seem
+amazing. When we left, he wrote down our address in the neatest possible
+hand, requesting permission to send us something more.
+
+     NOTE.--As my reputation for truth is already gone I may as
+     well add, a year later, that he has since sent two
+     presents--some little funerary figures, and a beautiful
+     ivory-handled fly-whip.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+SAKKARA AND THE SACRED BULLS
+
+
+One begins and finishes Egypt with Cairo. Starting with the Sphinx and
+Pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty, you work down through the Theban periods
+of the Upper Nile and then once more at Cairo, leap far back into the
+First period in a trip to Memphis, the earliest capital of Egypt, the
+beginning of all Egyptian things. After which, follows the Museum, for
+only after visiting localities and landmarks can that great climax be
+properly approached.
+
+I think we were no longer very enthusiastic about ruins, but every one
+said we must go to Sakkara. There was yet another very wonderful statue
+of Rameses there, they said, also the oldest pyramids ever built, and
+the Mausoleum of the Sacred Bulls. It would never do to miss them.
+
+I am glad now that I did not miss them, but I remember the Memphis
+donkeys with unkindness. The farther down the Nile the worse the
+donkeys. We thought they had been bad at Abydos, but the Abydos donkeys
+were without sin compared with those of Sakkara. Mine was named
+"Sunrise," and I picked him for his beauty, always a dangerous asset. He
+was thoroughly depraved and had a gait like a steam-drill. The boat
+landed us at Bedrashen and I managed to survive as far as the colossal
+statue of Rameses, a prostrate marvel, and the site of the ancient city
+of Menes--capital of Egypt a good deal more than six thousand years
+ago--that is, before the world began, by gospel calculation. I was
+perfectly willing to stay there among the cooling palms and watch the
+little children gather camel-dung and pat it into cakes to dry for fuel,
+and I would have done it if I had known what was going to happen to me.
+
+It is a weary way across the desert to the pyramids and the tombs of
+those sacred bulls, but I was not informed of that. When I realized, it
+was too late. The rest of the party were far ahead of me beyond some
+hills, and I was alone in the desert with that long-eared disaster and a
+donkey-boy who stopped to talk with the children, beset by a plague of
+flies that would have brought Pharaoh to terms. It was useless to kick
+and hammer that donkey or to denounce the donkey-boy. Sunrise had long
+ago formulated his notions of speed, and the donkey-boy was simply a
+criminal in disguise. When we passed a mud village, at last, and a new
+brigade of flies joined those I had with me, I would have given any
+reasonable sum to have been at Cairo with the Reprobates, in the cool
+quiet of Shepheard's marble halls.
+
+Beyond the village was just the sand waste, and not a soul of the party
+in sight. I didn't have the courage to go back, and hardly the courage
+to go on. I said I would lie down by the trail and die, and let them
+find me there and be sorry they had forsaken me in that pitiless way.
+Then for the sake of speed I got off and walked. It was heavy walking
+through the loose sand, with the sun blazing down.
+
+Presently I looked around for my escort. He was close at my heels--on
+the donkey's back. I said the most crushing things I could think of and
+displaced him. Then we settled down into the speed of a ram-headed
+sphinx again. Everything seemed utterly hopeless. It was useless to
+swear; I was too old to cry.
+
+I don't know when we reached the first pyramid, but the party had been
+there and gone. I did not care for it much. It might be the oldest
+pyramid in the world, but it was rather a poor specimen, I thought, and
+could not make me forget my sorrow. I went on, and after a weary time
+came to the Tomb of Thi, who lived in the Fifth Dynasty and was in no
+way related to Queen Thi of Tell al-Amarna, who came along some two
+thousand years later. There was an Englishman and his guide there who
+told me about it, and it was worth seeing, certainly, with its relief
+frescoes over five thousand years old, though it is not such a tomb as
+those of the Upper Nile.
+
+I overtook the party at the Tomb of the Sacred Bulls. By that time I had
+little enthusiasm for bulls; or for tombs, unless it was one I could use
+for Sunrise. The party had done the bulls, but when I got hold of Gaddis
+and laid my case before him, he said he would find me a new donkey and
+that the others would wait while we inspected the bulls. So everything
+was better then, and I was glad of the bulls, though I was still warm
+and resentful at Sunrise and his keeper, and even at Gaddis, who was
+innocent enough, Heaven knows.
+
+In the tomb of the bulls everything unpleasant passed away. It was cool
+and dark in there, and we carried lights and wandered along those vast
+still corridors, which are simply astounding when one remembers their
+purpose.
+
+This Serapeum or Apis mausoleum is a vast succession of huge underground
+vaults and elaborate granite sarcophagi, which once contained all the
+Apis or Sacred Bulls of Memphis. The Apis was the product of an
+immaculate conception. Lightning descended from heaven upon a cow--any
+cow--and the Apis was the result. He was recognized by being black, with
+a triangular spot of white on his forehead and a figure of an eagle on
+his back. Furthermore, he had double hairs in his tail and a beetle on
+his tongue. It was recognized that only lightning could produce a bull
+like that, and no others were genuine, regardless of watchful
+circumstance.
+
+Apis was about the most sacred of the whole synod of Egyptian beasts.
+Even the Hawk of Horus and the Jackal of Anubis had to retire to
+obscurity when Apis came along, mumbling and pawing up the dust. When he
+died there were very solemn ceremonies, and he was put into one of those
+polished granite sarcophagi, with a tablet on the walls relating the
+story of his life, and mentioning the King whose reign had been honored
+by this bellowing bovine aristocrat. Also they set up a special chapel
+over his tomb, and this series of chapels and tombs eventually
+solidified into a great temple with pylons approached by an avenue of
+sphinxes.
+
+The Serapeum dates from about 1500 B.C. and continued in active use down
+to the time of the Ptolomies. The Egyptian Pantheon was breaking up
+then, and Apis was probably one of the first deities to go. A nation's
+gods fall into disrepute when they can no longer bring victory to a
+nation's arms, and a sacred bull who could not beat off Julius Caesar
+would very likely be asked to resign.
+
+There are sixty-four vaults in the part of the Serapeum we visited, and
+twenty-four of them contain the granite sarcophagi. The sarcophagi are
+about thirteen feet long by eleven feet wide, and eight high--that is to
+say, the size of an ordinary bedroom--and in each of these, mummified
+and in state, an Apis slept.
+
+He is not there now. Only two of him were found when these galleries
+were opened in modern times. But I have seen Apis, for one of him sleeps
+now in a glass case in the Historical Library in New York City. I shall
+visit him again on my return, and view him with deeper interest and more
+respect since I have seen his tomb.
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+A VISIT WITH RAMESES II.
+
+
+I have never quite known just how it was I happened to be overlooked and
+deserted that next evening at the Museum. I remember walking miles
+through its wonderful galleries; I recollect standing before the rare
+group of Rameses and his queen--recently discovered and put in
+place--the most beautiful sculpture in Egypt; I recall that we visited
+the room of Mr. Theodore Davis and looked on all the curiously modern
+chairs and couches and the perfectly preserved chariot taken from the
+tombs opened in the Valley of the Kings; also the room where all the
+royal jewels are kept, marvellous necklaces and amulets, and every
+ornament that would delight a king or queen in any age; I have a
+confused impression of hundreds of bronze and thousands of clay figures
+taken from tombs; I know that, as a grand climax, we came at last to the
+gem of the vast collection, the room where Seti I., Rameses the Great,
+and the rest of the royal dead, found at Der al-Bahari, lie asleep. I
+remember, too, that I was tired then, monumentally tired in the thought
+that this was the last word in Egypt; that we were done; that there was
+no need of keeping up and alive for further endeavor--that only before
+us lay the sweet anticipation of rest.
+
+The others were tired, too, but they wanted to buy some things in the
+little salesroom down-stairs, and were going, presently. They would come
+back and see the kings again, later. I said I would stay there and
+commune a little alone with the great Seti, and his royal son, who, in
+that dim long ago, had remembered himself so numerously along the Nile.
+They meant to come back, no doubt, the party, I mean; they claim now
+that the main museum was already closed when they had finished their
+purchases, and they supposed I had gone. It does not matter, I have
+forgiven them, whatever their sin.
+
+It was pleasant and restful there, when they had left me. I dropped down
+on a little seat against the wall and looked at those still figures,
+father and son, kings, mighty warriors and temple-builders when the
+glory of Egypt was at full flood.
+
+It was an impressive thought that those stately temples up the Nile,
+which men travel across the world to see, were built by these two; that
+the statues are their statues; that the battles and sacrifices depicted
+on a thousand walls were _their_ battles and _their_ sacrifices; that
+they loved and fought and conquered, and set up monuments in those
+far-off centuries when history was in its sunrise, yet lie here before
+us in person to-day, frail drift on the long tide of years.
+
+And it was a solemn thought that their life story is forever done--that
+any life story can last but a little while. Tossed up out of the
+unexplored, one's feet some day touch the earth--the ancient earth that
+had been going on so long before we came. Then, for a few years, we
+bustle importantly up and down--fight battles and build temples,
+maybe--and all at once slip back into the uncharted waste, while the
+world--the ancient world--fights new battles, builds new temples, sends
+new ships across the sea, though we have part in it no more, no
+more--forever, and forever.
+
+Looking at those two, who in their brief sojourn had made and recorded
+some of the most ancient history we know, I recalled portions of their
+pictured story on the temple walls and tried to build a human semblance
+of their daily lives. Of course they were never troubled with petty
+things, I thought; economies, frivolities, small vanities, domestic
+irritations--these were modern. _They_ had been as gods in the full
+panoply of a race divinely new. They had been--
+
+But it was too much of an effort. I was too worn. I could only look at
+them, and envy the long nap they were having there under the glass in
+that still, pleasant room.
+
+I was a good deal surprised, then, when I fancied I saw Rameses stir and
+appear a little restless in his sleep. It was even more interesting to
+see him presently slide away the glass and sit up. I thought there must
+be some mistake, and I was going to get an attendant, when he noticed me
+and seemed to guess my thought.
+
+"It's all right," he said, "you needn't call any one. The place closed
+an hour ago and there is only a guard down-stairs, who is asleep by this
+time. It happens to be my night to reincarnate and I am glad you are
+here to keep me company. You can tell me a good deal, no doubt. These
+people here don't know anything." He waved a hand to the sleepers about
+him. "They are allowed only one night in a thousand years. The gods
+allow me a night in every century. I was always a favorite of the gods.
+It is fortunate you happened to stop with us to-night."
+
+"It _is_ fortunate," I said. "I shall be envied by my race. I have just
+been trying to imagine something of your life and period. That is far
+more interesting than to-day. Tell me something about it."
+
+Rameses rested comfortably on the side of his case.
+
+"Oh, well," he said, reflectively, "of course mine was a great period--a
+very great period. Egypt was never so great as it was under my rule. It
+was my rule that made it great--my policy, of course, and my vigorous
+action. I was always for progress and war. The histories you have of my
+period are poor things. They never did me justice, but it was my own
+fault, of course. I did not leave enough records of my work. I was
+always a modest man--too modest for my own good, everybody said that.
+
+"I was religious, too, and built temples wherever there was room. It is
+said that I claimed temples that I did not build. Nonsense!--I built all
+the temples. I built Karnak; I built Luxor; I built Abou-Simbel; I built
+Abydos; I built the Pyramids; I built the Sphinx; I invented the sacred
+bulls; I was all there was to religion, in Egypt. I was all there was to
+_Egypt_. I was the whole thing. It is a pity I did not make a record of
+these things somewhere."
+
+"There _are_ a few statues of you," I suggested, "and inscriptions--they
+seem to imply--"
+
+"Ah yes," he said, "but not many. It was slow work carving those things.
+I could have had many more, if the workmen had been more industrious.
+But everything was slow, and very costly--very costly indeed--why, I
+spent a fortune on that temple of Karnak alone. You saw what I did
+there; those ram-headed sphinxes nearly bankrupted me. I had to cut down
+household expenses to finish them.
+
+"Yes, my wife objected a good deal-- I speak collectively, of course,
+signifying my domestic companionship--there were fourteen of her.
+
+[Illustration: GOT IT MADE CHEAP SOMEWHERE WITH HER PICTURE CARVED ON
+THE FRONT OF IT]
+
+"She wanted jewelry--collectively--individually, too, for that
+matter--and it took such a lot to go around. You saw all those things in
+the next room. They were for her; they were for that matrimonial
+collection; I could never satisfy the female craving for such things.
+Why, I bought one round of necklaces that cost as much as a ram-headed
+sphinx. Still she was not satisfied. Then she was sorry
+afterward--collectively--and bought me a sphinx as a present--got it
+made cheap somewhere with her picture carved on the front of it. You may
+have noticed it--third on the right as you come out. I used it--I had
+to--but it was a joke. When wives buy things for their husbands it is
+quite often so.
+
+"Oh yes, I was a great king, of course, and the greatest warrior the
+world has ever seen; but my path was not all roses. My wife--my
+household collection--wanted their statues placed by the side of mine.
+Individually! Think of what a figure I would have cut! It was a silly
+notion. What had they done to deserve statues? I did it, though--that
+is collectively--here and there. I embodied her in a single figure at my
+knee, as became her position. But she wasn't satisfied--collectively and
+individually she declared she amounted to as much as I did, and pointed
+at our seventy-two sons.
+
+"No, I was never understood by that lot. I was never a hero in my own
+house. So I had to order another statue, putting her at my side. You saw
+it down-stairs. It is very beautiful, of course, and is a good likeness
+of her, collectively. She always made a good composite picture, but is
+it fair to me? She was never regarded in that important way, except by
+herself.
+
+"Yes, it is very pleasant here--very indeed. The last time I was allowed
+to reincarnate, I was still in the cave at Der al-Bahari, where they
+stored us when Cambyses came along and raided Thebes. Cambyses burned a
+number of my temples. It was too bad. The cave was a poor place, but
+safe. My tomb was much pleasanter, though it was not as grand as I had
+intended it to be. I meant to have the finest tomb in the valley, but my
+contractor cheated me.
+
+"The men who furnished the materials paid him large sums and gave me
+very poor returns. His name was Baksheesh, which is how the word
+originated, though it means several things now, I believe."
+
+"How interesting!" I interrupted. "We would call that grafting in our
+country."
+
+"Very likely; I didn't find out that he was grafting, as you say, until
+quite late, then I put him into a block of concrete and built him into a
+temple. He made a very good block; he is there yet. After that there
+was no trouble for a while."
+
+"I saw something of the kind at Algiers--one Geronimo," I began--
+
+"Later, three thousand years later. I originated the idea--it has been
+often adopted since. Those people along the Coast adopted a good many of
+my ideas, but they never get the value out of them. It put an end to
+baksheesh--graft as you call it--in Thebes, and it would be valuable
+to-day in Cairo, I should think. A wall around Cairo could be built in
+that way--there is enough material."
+
+The King rested a little on his other arm, then continued:
+
+"Speaking of my tomb. I am glad I am not there. I attract much more
+attention here than if I were on exhibition in that remote place.
+There's Amenophis II. I understand that he's very proud of the fact that
+he's the only king left in his tomb. I don't envy him at all. I have a
+hundred visitors where he has one. They are passing by me here in a
+string all day, and when they are your countrymen I can hear a good deal
+even through the thick glass. I find it more interesting to stay here in
+my case through the day, than to be stalking about the underworld,
+attending sacrifices to Anubis and those other gods. I was always fond
+of activity and progress."
+
+"You keep up with your doings, then?"
+
+"Well, not altogether. You see, I cannot go about in the upper world. I
+catch only a word of things from the tourists. I hear they have a new
+kind of boat on the Nile."
+
+"Yes, indeed," I said. "A boat that is run by steam--a mixture of fire
+and water--and is lit by electricity--a form of lightning."
+
+I thought he would be excited over these things, and full of questions;
+but he only reflected a little and asked,
+
+"What is the name of that boat?"
+
+"Oh, there are many of them. The one I came down on was called the
+_Memnon_."
+
+He sighed.
+
+"There it is," he said, sadly. "I am discredited, you see. I suppose
+they couldn't name it 'Rameses the Great.'"
+
+"Ah, but there is one of that name, too."
+
+He brightened a little, but grew sad again.
+
+"Only one?" he said.
+
+"Do you think there should be more of that name?" I asked.
+
+He sat up quite straight.
+
+"In my time they would all have borne that great name," he said.
+
+"And--ah, wouldn't that be a bit confusing?"
+
+"Not at all. I have set up as many as a hundred statues in one
+temple--_all_ of Rameses the Great. They were not at all confusing. You
+knew _all_ of them immediately."
+
+"True enough; and now I think of it, perhaps you have not heard that
+they have made your portrait as you lie here, and, by a magic process of
+ours, have placed it on a sort of papyrus tablet--a postal card we call
+it--and by another process have sent thousands of them over the world."
+
+He looked at me with eyes that penetrated my conscience.
+
+"Is that statement true?" he asked, tremulously.
+
+"It is--every word. Your portrait is as familiar to the world to-day as
+it was here in Egypt three thousand years ago."
+
+The great peace that had rested on the king's face came back to it. The
+piercing eyes closed restfully, and he slipped back on his pillow.
+
+"Then, after all, I am vindicated," he murmured. "I have not lived and
+died in vain."
+
+A hand was resting on my shoulder. The sun was shining in, and a
+threatening guard was standing over me.
+
+It was nothing. Five francs allayed his indignation. Five francs is a
+large baksheesh in Cairo, but I did not begrudge it, as matters stood.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+THE LONG WAY HOME
+
+
+We bade good-bye to Egypt that morning, and to Gaddis--whose name and
+memory will always mean Egypt to me--and were off for Alexandria, where
+the ship was waiting. That long-ago dream of a visit to Damascus and
+Jerusalem, and of a camp on the Nile had been realized. Now it was over.
+
+We were ready to go home--at least some of us were. There would be a
+stop at Naples, with Pompeii and Rome for those who cared for it, but
+even these great places would be tame after Egypt. They must be
+approached from another direction for that eager interest which properly
+belongs to an expedition of this kind. A number of our ship-dwellers had
+an eager interest--a large and growing interest--but it was for home, an
+interest that was multiplied each day by the square of the distance
+travelled.
+
+[Illustration: SET OUT ON THE LONG, STEADY, ATLANTIC SWING]
+
+Not many of us were left when we had made our last touch on the Riviera,
+rounded the Rock, and set out on the long, steady, Atlantic swing. The
+Reprobates had gone _via_ Monte Carlo to Paris. Others had drifted up
+through Europe to sail from Cherbourg. The Diplomat was still with us;
+also Fosdick of Ohio, and Laura, age fourteen, but only a score or two
+of the original muster could gather at the long table in the dining-room
+on the last night out of port, for a final look at one another, and to
+exchange the greetings and god-speeds for which there would be little
+time during the bustle of arrival. It was hardly an occasion; just a
+pleasant little meeting that even with jollification was not without
+sadness. One of the ship's poets offered some verses of good-bye, of
+which I recall these lines:
+
+  "To-night, we are here who have stayed by the ship;
+  To-morrow, the harbor and anchor and slip--
+  The word of command for the gang-plank to fall--
+  The word that shall suddenly scatter us all--
+  Then all the King's horses and all the King's men
+  Could never collect us together again."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That was a good while ago, nearly a year now, and already it seems as
+far back in the past as the days of Rameses; for, as I have said
+somewhere before, we have but a meagre conception of time. Indeed, I
+suspect there is no such thing as time. How can there be when one period
+is as long as another compared with eternity?
+
+However, I do not compare with eternity, now. I compare with Egypt. I
+shall _always_ compare with Egypt--everything else in the world. Other
+interests and other memories may fade and change, but Egypt, the real
+Egypt, the enchantment of that land, which is not a land, but a vast
+processional epic, will never change, and it will not grow dim. I may
+never visit it again, but I shall see it many times. I shall see the
+sunrise above the palms, flooding the mountains with amethyst and
+turning the sky to crimson gold. Again at sunset I shall sit in the vast
+temple of Luxor and hear once more the Muezzin's call to prayer. I shall
+race with Laura across the hot desert; I shall hear the cry of the
+donkey-boys and the scarab-sellers and the wail for baksheesh; I shall
+see our cavalcade scattering through the dust across the Libyan sands.
+And I shall wander once more among the tombs of the kings, and follow
+down the splendid passage where Amenophis lies with the repose of the
+ages on his benignant face. I shall recall other lands and other ages,
+too, but it is to Egypt that I shall turn after all the others have
+drifted by; to her temples and her tombs--her glories of the past made
+visible. Beyond the sands and the centuries they lie, but they are mine
+now, and neither thief nor beggar, nor importunate creditor, can ever
+take them away.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHIP DWELLERS***
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