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+Project Gutenberg's The Rulers of the Mediterranean, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+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 Rulers of the Mediterranean
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2012 [EBook #39522]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown, Julia Neufeld
+(illustrations were generously made available by The
+Internet Archive) and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
+
+Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
+
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT]
+
+  The Rulers
+
+  of
+
+  The Mediterranean
+
+  BY
+
+  RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
+
+  AUTHOR OF
+
+  "THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW" "GALLEGHER"
+  "VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS" ETC.
+
+  ILLUSTRATED
+
+  [Illustration: Publisher's Logo]
+
+  NEW YORK
+
+  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+
+  1894
+
+  Copyright, 1893, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
+
+  _All rights reserved._
+
+
+  TO
+
+  HON. EDWARD C. LITTLE
+
+  EX-DIPLOMATIC-AGENT AND CONSUL-GENERAL
+
+  OF
+
+  THE UNITED STATES TO EGYPT
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                                                            PAGE
+
+    I THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR                                           1
+
+   II TANGIER                                                        37
+
+  III FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO                                        72
+
+   IV CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE                                         102
+
+    V THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT                                       139
+
+   VI MODERN ATHENS                                                 178
+
+  VII CONSTANTINOPLE                                                198
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+  ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT                        _Frontispiece_
+
+  THE MAN FROM DETROIT                                                5
+
+  THE ROCK FROM THE BAY                                               9
+
+  TYPES                                                              13
+
+  GIBRALTAR AS SEEN ACROSS THE NEUTRAL GROUND                        15
+
+  AN ENGLISH SENTRY                                                  19
+
+  A SPANISH SENTRY                                                   21
+
+  SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK                              25
+
+  CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES                                           29
+
+  TEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERS                                      33
+
+  BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE                                        41
+
+  SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL                       47
+
+  A WOMAN OF TANGIER                                                 53
+
+  WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE                        57
+
+  A STREET DANCER                                                    63
+
+  IN THE PRISON                                                      67
+
+  MALTESE PEDDLERS                                                   75
+
+  STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA                                       79
+
+  BRINDISI                                                           85
+
+  PILLAR OF CÆSAR AT BRINDISI                                        89
+
+  APPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL                             93
+
+  STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL                             97
+
+  BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS                                        105
+
+  GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL                    109
+
+  A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS                  117
+
+  SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS                                   123
+
+  A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID                                          129
+
+  DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO                              135
+
+  EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS                     141
+
+  RIAZ PASHA, PRIME-MINISTER OF EGYPT                               145
+
+  AN EGYPTIAN LANCER                                                149
+
+  TIGRANE PASHA, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS                        153
+
+  A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA                                157
+
+  H. H. ABBAS II., KHEDIVE OF EGYPT                                 161
+
+  THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY                                  165
+
+  LORD CROMER, THE ENGLISH DIPLOMATIC AGENT IN EGYPT                169
+
+  A GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION                               173
+
+  GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORM                  179
+
+  GREEK PEASANT GIRL                                                181
+
+  THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS                                          183
+
+  ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN                                            186
+
+  ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN                                            187
+
+  GREEK PEASANT                                                     188
+
+  ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS                         189
+
+  POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL                                                191
+
+  AN OLD ATHENIAN OF THE PRESENT DAY                                194
+
+  A GREEK SHEPHERD                                                  195
+
+  GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE                                    201
+
+  ONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS                       205
+
+  A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE                                  209
+
+  STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE                                     215
+
+  GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE               219
+
+  EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF ST. SOPHIA                              225
+
+[Illustration: THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN]
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR
+
+[Illustration: Gibraltar]
+
+
+If you have always crossed the Atlantic in the spring-time or in the
+summer months, as do most tourists, you will find that leaving New York
+in the winter is more like a relief expedition to the north pole than
+the setting forth on a pleasure tour to the summer shores of the
+Mediterranean.
+
+There is no green grass on the hills of Staten Island, but there is,
+instead, a long field of ice stretching far up the Hudson River, and a
+wind that cuts into the face, and dashes the spray up over the tugboats
+in frozen layers, leaving it there like the icing on a cake. The
+Atlantic Highlands are black with bare branches and white with snow, and
+you observe for the first time that men who go down to the sea in ships
+know nothing of open fireplaces. An icy wind keeps the deck as clear as
+a master-at-arms could do it; and sudden storms of snow, which you had
+always before associated with streets or fields, and not at all with the
+decks of ships, burst over the side, and leave the wood-work wet and
+slippery, and cold to the touch.
+
+And then on the third or fourth day out the sea grows calm, and your
+overcoat seems to have taken on an extra lining; and strange people, who
+apparently have come on board during the night, venture out on the
+sunlit deck and inquire for steamer chairs and mislaid rugs.
+
+These smaller vessels which run from New York to Genoa are as different
+from the big North Atlantic boats, with their twin screws and five
+hundred cabin passengers, as a family boarding-house is from a Broadway
+hotel. This is so chiefly because you are sailing under a German instead
+of an English flag. There is no one so important as an English
+captain--he is like a bishop in gold lace; but a German captain
+considers his passengers as one large happy family, and treats them as
+such, whether they like their new relatives or not. The discipline on
+board the _Fulda_ was like that of a ship of war, where the officers and
+crew were concerned, but the passengers might have believed they were on
+their own private yacht.
+
+There was music for breakfast, dinner, and tea; music when the fingers
+of the trombonist were frozen and when the snow fell upon the taut
+surface of the big drum; and music at dawn to tell us it was Sunday, so
+that you awoke imagining yourself at church. There was also a ball, and
+the captain led an opening march, and the stewards stood at every point
+to see that the passengers kept in line, and "rounded up" those who
+tried to slip away from the procession. There were speeches, too, at all
+times, and lectures and religious services, and on the last night out a
+grand triumph of the _chef_, who built wonderful candy goddesses of
+Liberty smiling upon the other symbolic lady who keeps watch on the
+Rhine, and the band played "Dixie," which it had been told was the
+national anthem, and the portrait of the German Emperor smiled down upon
+us over his autograph. All this was interesting, because it was
+characteristic of the Germans; it showed their childish delight in
+little things, and the same simplicity of character which makes the
+German soldiers who would not move out of the way of the French bullets
+dance around a Christmas-tree. The American or the Englishman will not
+do these things, because he has too keen a sense of the ridiculous, and
+is afraid of being laughed at. So when he goes to sea he plays poker and
+holds auctions on the run.
+
+There was only one passenger on board who objected to the music. He was
+from Detroit, and for the first three days remained lashed to his
+steamer chair like a mummy, with nothing showing but a blue nose and
+closed eyelids. The band played at his end of the deck, and owing to
+the fingers of the players being frozen, and to the sudden lurches of
+the ship, the harmony was sometimes destroyed. Those who had an ear for
+music picked up their steamer chairs and moved to windward; but this
+young man, being half dead and firmly lashed to his place, was unable to
+save himself.
+
+On the morning of the fourth day, when the concert was over and the band
+had gone to thaw out, the young man suddenly sat upright and pointed his
+forefinger at the startled passengers. We had generally decided that he
+was dead. "The Lord knows I'm a sick man," he said, blinking his eyes
+feebly; "but if I live till midnight I'll find out where they hide those
+horns, and I'll drop 'em into the Gulf Stream, if it takes my dying
+breath." He then fell over backwards, and did not speak again until we
+reached Gibraltar.
+
+There is something about the sight of land after one has been a week
+without it which supplies a want that nothing else can fill; and it is
+interesting to note how careless one is as to its name, or whether it is
+pink or pale blue on the maps, or whether it is ruled by a king or a
+colonial secretary. It is quite sufficient that it is land. This was
+impressed upon me once, on entering New York Harbor, by a young man who
+emerged from his deck cabin to discover, what all the other passengers
+already knew, that we were in the upper bay. He gave a shout of ecstatic
+relief and pleasure. "That," he cried, pointing to the west, "is Staten
+Island, but that," pointing to the right, "is LAND."
+
+The first land you see on going to Gibraltar is the Azores Islands. They
+are volcanic and mountainous, and accompany the boat for a day and a
+half; but they could be improved if they were moved farther south about
+two hundred miles, as one has to get up at dawn to see the best of them.
+It is quite warm by this time, and the clothes you wore in New York seem
+to belong to a barbarous period and past fashion, and have become heavy
+and cumbersome, and take up an unnecessary amount of room in your trunk.
+
+[Illustration: THE MAN FROM DETROIT]
+
+And then people tell you that there is land in sight again, and you
+find how really far you are from home when you learn that it is
+Portugal, and so a part of Europe, and not an island thrown up by a
+volcano, or stolen or strayed from its moorings at the mainland.
+Portugal is apparently a high red hill, with a round white tower on the
+top of it flying signal flags. Its chief industry is the arranging of
+these flags by a man. It is, on the whole, a disappointing country.
+After this, everybody begins to pack and to exchange visiting-cards; and
+those who are to get off at Gibraltar are pursued by stewards and
+bandmasters and young men with testimonials that they want signed, and
+by the weak in spirit, who, at the eleventh hour, think they will not go
+on to Genoa, but will get off here and go on to Tangier, and who want
+you to decide for them. And which do you think would pay best, and what
+is there to see in Tangier, anyway? And as that is exactly what you are
+going to find out, you cannot tell.
+
+When I left the deck the last night out the stars were all over the
+heavens; and the foremast, as it swept slowly from side to side, looked
+like a black pendulum upside down marking out the sky and portioning off
+the stars. And when I woke there was a great creaking of chains, and I
+could see out of my port-hole hundreds of fixed lights and rows and
+double rows of lamps, so that you might have thought the ship during the
+night had run aground in the heart of a city.
+
+The first sight of Gibraltar is, I think, disappointing. It means so
+much, and so many lives have been given for it, and so many ships have
+been sunk by its batteries, and such great powers have warred for twelve
+hundred years for its few miles of stone, that its black outline against
+the sky, with nothing to measure it with but the fading stars, is
+dwarfed and spoiled. It is only after the sun begins to turn the lights
+out, and you are able to compare it with the great ships at its base,
+and you see the battlements and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds
+resting on its top, that you understand it; and then when the outline of
+the crouching lion, that faces all Europe, comes into relief, you
+remember it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, of which
+England holds the key. And even while you feel this, and are greedily
+following the course of each rampart and terrace with eyes that are
+tired of blank stretches of water, some one points to a low line of
+mountains lying like blue clouds before the red sky of the sunrise, dim,
+forbidding, and mysterious--and you know that it is Africa.
+
+Spain, lying to the right, all green and amethyst, and flippant and gay
+with white houses and red roofs, and Gibraltar's grim show of
+battlements and war, become somehow of little moment. You feel that you
+have known them always, and that they are as you fancied they would be.
+But this other land across the water looks as inscrutable, as dark, and
+as silent as the Sphinx that typifies it, and you feel that its Pillar
+of Hercules still marks the entrance to the "unknown world."
+
+Nine out of every ten of those who visit Gibraltar for the first time
+expect to find an island. It ought to be, and it would be one but for a
+strip of level turf half a mile wide and half a mile long which joins it
+to the sunny green hills of Spain. But for this bit of land, which they
+call "the Neutral Ground," Gibraltar would be an island, for it has the
+Mediterranean to the east, a bay, and beyond that the hills of Spain to
+the west, and Africa dimly showing fourteen miles across the sea to the
+south.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROCK FROM THE BAY]
+
+Gibraltar has been besieged thirteen times; by Moors and by Spaniards,
+and again by Moors, and again by Spaniards against Spaniards. It was
+during one of these wars between two factions in Spain, in 1704, that
+the English, who were helping one of the factions, took the Rock, and
+were so well pleased with it that they settled there, and have remained
+there ever since. If possession is nine points of the law, there was
+never a place in the history of the world held with nine as obvious
+points. There were three more sieges after the English took Gibraltar,
+one of them, the last, continuing for four years. The English were
+fighting America at the time, and rowing in the Nile, and so did not do
+much towards helping General George Elliot, who was Governor of the Rock
+at that time. It would appear to be, as well as one can judge from this
+distance, a case of neglect on the part of the mother-country for her
+little colony and her six thousand men, very much like her forgetfulness
+of Gordon, only Elliot succeeded where Gordon failed (if you can
+associate that word with that name), and so no one blamed the home
+government for risking what would have been a more serious loss than the
+loss of Calais, had Elliot surrendered, and "Gib" gone back to its
+rightful owners, that is, the owners who have the one point. The history
+of this siege is one of the most interesting of war stories; it is
+interesting whether you ever expect to visit Gibraltar or not; it is
+doubly interesting when you walk the pretty streets of the Rock to-day,
+with its floating population of twenty thousand, and try to imagine the
+place held by six thousand half-starved, sick, and wounded soldiers,
+living at times on grass and herbs and handfuls of rice, and yet
+carrying on an apparently forlorn fight for four years against the
+entire army and navy of Spain, and, at the last, against the arms of
+France as well.
+
+We are apt to consider the Gibraltar of to-day as occupying the same
+position to the Mediterranean as Queenstown does to the Atlantic, a
+place where passengers go ashore while the mails are being taken on
+board, and not so much for their interest in the place itself as to
+again feel solid earth under their feet. There are passengers who will
+tell you on the way out that you can see all there is to be seen there
+in three hours. As a matter of fact, one can live in Gibraltar for many
+weeks and see something new every day. It struck me as being more
+different kinds of a place than any other spot of land I had ever
+visited, and one that changed its aspect with every shifting of the
+wind, and with each rising and setting of the sun. It is the
+clearing-house for three most picturesque peoples--the Moors, in their
+yellow slippers and bare legs and voluminous robes and snowy turbans;
+the Spaniards, with romantic black capes and cloaks and red sashes, the
+women with the lace mantilla and brilliant kerchiefs and pretty faces;
+and, mixed with these, the pride and glory of the British army and navy,
+in all the bravery of red coats and white helmets, or blue jackets, or
+Highland kilts. It is a fortress as imposing as the Tower of London, a
+winter resort as pretty as St. Augustine, and a seaport town of free
+entry, into which come on every tide people of many nations, and ships
+flying every flag.
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE]
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE]
+
+Around its base are the ramparts, like a band of stone and steel; above
+them the town, rising like a staircase, with houses for steps--yellow
+houses, with light green blinds sticking out at different angles, and
+with sloping red roofs meeting other lines of red roofs, and broken by a
+carpeting of green where the parks and gardens make an opening in the
+yellow front of the town, and from which rise tall palms and palmettoes,
+and rows of sea-pines, and fluttering union-jacks which mark the
+barracks of a regiment. Above the town is the Rock, covered with a green
+growth of scrub and of little trees below, and naked and bare above,
+stretching for several miles from north to south, and rearing its great
+bulk up into the sky until it loses its summit in the clouds. It is
+never twice the same. To-day it may be smiling and resplendent under a
+warm, brilliant sun that spreads out each shade of green, and shows each
+terrace and rampart as clearly as though one saw it through a glass; the
+sky becomes as blue as the sea and the bay, and the white villages of
+Spain seem as near to one as the red soldier smoking his pipe on the
+mountings half-way up the Rock. And to-morrow the whole top of the Rock
+may be lost in a thick curtain of gray clouds, and the waters of the bay
+will be tossing and covered with white-caps, and the lands about
+disappear from sight as though they had sunk into the sea during the
+night and had left you alone on an island. At times a sunset paints the
+Rock a martial red, or the moonlight softens it, and you see only the
+tall palms and the graceful balconies and the gardens of plants, and
+each rampart becomes a terrace and each casemate a balcony. Or at night,
+when the lamps are lit, you might imagine yourself on the stage of a
+theatre, walking in a scene set for _Fra Diavolo_.
+
+There are no such streets or houses outside of stage-land. It is only in
+stage cities that the pavements and streets are so conspicuously clean,
+or that the hanging lamps of beaten iron-work throw such deep shadows,
+or that there are such high, heavily carved Moorish doorways and
+mysterious twisting stairways in the solid rock, or shops with such
+queer signs, or walls plastered with such odd-colored placards--streets
+where every footfall echoes, and where dark figures suddenly appear from
+narrow alleyways and cry "Halt, there!" at you, and then "All's well" as
+you pass by.
+
+[Illustration: GIBRALTAR AS SEEN ACROSS THE NEUTRAL GROUND]
+
+Gibraltar has one main street running up and clinging to the side of the
+hill from the principal quay to the most southern point of the Rock.
+Houses reach up to it from the first level of the ramparts, and continue
+on up the hill from its other side. On this street are the bazars of the
+Moors, and the English shops and the Spanish cafés, and the cathedral,
+and the hotels, and the Governor's house, and every one in Gibraltar is
+sure to appear on it at least once in the twenty-four hours. But the
+color and tone of the street are military. There are soldiers at every
+step--soldiers carrying the mail or bearing reports, or soldiers in bulk
+with a band ahead, or soldiers going out to guard the North Front, where
+lies the Neutral Ground, or to target practice, or to play football;
+soldiers in two or threes, with their sticks under their arms, and their
+caps very much cocked, and pipes in their mouths. But these make slow
+progress, for there is always an officer in sight--either a boy officer
+just out from England riding to the polo field near the Neutral Ground,
+or a commanding officer in a black tunic and a lot of ribbons across his
+breast, or an officer of the day with his sash and sword; and each of
+these has to be saluted. This is an interesting spectacle, and one that
+is always new. You see three soldiers coming at you with a quick step,
+talking and grinning, alert and jaunty, and suddenly the upper part of
+their three bodies becomes rigid, though their legs continue as before,
+apparently of their own volition, and their hands go up and their pipes
+and grins disappear, and they pass you with eyes set like dead men's
+eyes, and palms facing you as though they were trying to learn which way
+the wind was blowing. This is due, you discover, to the passing of a
+stout gentleman in knickerbockers, who switches his rattan stick in the
+air in reply. Sometimes when he salutes the soldier stops altogether,
+and so his walks abroad are punctuated at every twenty yards. It takes
+an ordinary soldier in Gibraltar one hour to walk ten minutes.
+
+Everybody walks in the middle of the main street in Gibraltar, because
+the sidewalks are only two feet wide, and because all the streets are as
+clean as the deck of a yacht. Cabs of yellow wood and diligences with
+jangling bells and red worsted harness gallop through this street and
+sweep the people up against the wall, and long lines of goats who leave
+milk in a natural manner at various shops tangle themselves up with long
+lines of little donkeys and longer lines of geese, with which the local
+police struggle valiantly. All of these things, troops and goats and
+yellow cabs and polo ponies and dog-carts, and priests with
+curly-brimmed hats, and baggy-breeched Moors, and huntsmen in pink coats
+and Tommies in red, and sailors rolling along in blue, make the main
+street of Gibraltar as full of variety as a mask ball.
+
+Of the Gibraltar militant, the fortress and the key to the
+Mediterranean, you can see but the little that lies open to you and to
+every one along the ramparts. Of the real defensive works of the place
+you are not allowed to have even a guess. The ramparts stretch all along
+the western side of the rock, presenting to the bay a high shelving wall
+which twists and changes its front at every hundred yards, and in such
+an unfriendly way that whoever tried to scale its slippery surface at
+one point would have a hundred yards of ramparts on either side of him,
+from which two sides gunners and infantry could observe his efforts with
+comfort and safety to themselves; and from which, when tired of watching
+him slip and scramble, they could and undoubtedly would blow him into
+bits. But they would probably save him the trouble of coming so far by
+doing that before he left his vessel in the bay. The northern face of
+the Rock--that end which faces Spain, and which makes the head of the
+crouching lion--shows two long rows of teeth cut in its surface by
+convicts of long ago. You are allowed to walk through these dungeons,
+and to look down upon the Neutral Ground and the little Spanish town at
+the end of its half-mile over the butts of great guns. And you will
+marvel not so much at the engineering skill of whoever it was who
+planned this defence as at the weariness and the toil of the criminals
+who gave up the greater part of their lives to hewing and blasting out
+these great galleries and gloomy passages, through which your footsteps
+echo like the report of cannon.
+
+[Illustration: AN ENGLISH SENTRY]
+
+Lower down, on the outside of this mask of rock, are more ramparts,
+built there by man, from which infantry could sweep the front of the
+enemy were they to approach from the only point from which a land
+attack is possible. The other side of the Rock, that which faces the
+Mediterranean, is unfortified, except by the big guns on the very
+summit, for no man could scale it, and no ball yet made could shatter
+its front. To further protect the north from a land attack there is at
+the base of the Rock and below the ramparts a great moat, bridged by an
+apparently solid piece of masonry. This roadway, which leads to the
+north gate of the fortress--the one which is closed at six each
+night--is undermined, and at a word could be blown into pebbles, turning
+the moat into a great lake of water, and virtually changing the Rock of
+Gibraltar into an island. I never crossed this roadway without wondering
+whether the sentry underneath might not be lighting his pipe near the
+powder-magazine, and I generally reached the end of it at a gallop.
+
+[Illustration: A SPANISH SENTRY]
+
+There is still another protection to the North Front. It is only the
+protection which a watch-dog gives at night; but a watch-dog is most
+important. He gives you time to sound your burglar-alarm and to get a
+pistol from under your pillow. A line of sentries pace the Neutral
+Ground, and have paced it for nearly two hundred years. Their
+sentry-boxes dot the half-mile of turf, and their red coats move
+backward and forward night and day, and any one who leaves the straight
+and narrow road crossing the Neutral Ground, and who comes too near,
+passes a dead-line and is shot. Facing them, a half-mile off, are the
+white adobe sentry-boxes of Spain and another row of sentries, wearing
+long blue coats and queer little shakos, and smoking cigarettes. And so
+the two great powers watch each other unceasingly across the half-mile
+of turf, and say, "So far shall you go, and no farther; this belongs to
+me." There is nothing more significant than these two rows of sentries;
+you notice it whenever you cross the Neutral Ground for a ride in Spain.
+First you see the English sentry, rather short and very young, but very
+clean and rigid, and scowling fiercely over the chin strap of his big
+white helmet. His shoulder-straps shine with pipe-clay and his boots
+with blacking, and his arms are burnished and oily. Taken alone, he is a
+little atom, a molecule; but he is complete in himself, with his food
+and lodging on his back, and his arms ready to his hand. He is one of a
+great system that obtains from India to Nova Scotia, and from Bermuda to
+Africa and Australia; and he shows that he knows this in the way in
+which he holds up his chin and kicks out his legs as he tramps back and
+forward guarding the big rock at his back. And facing him, half a mile
+away, you will see a tall handsome man seated on a stone, with the tails
+of his long coat wrapped warmly around his legs, and with his gun
+leaning against another rock while he rolls a cigarette; and then, with
+his hands in his pockets, he gazes through the smoke at the sky above
+and the sea on either side, and wonders when he will be paid his peseta
+a day for fighting and bleeding for his country. This helps to make you
+understand how six thousand half-starved Englishmen held Gibraltar for
+four years against the army of Spain.
+
+This is about all that you can see of Gibraltar as a fortress. You hear,
+of course, of much more, and you can guess at a great deal. Up above,
+where the Signal Station is, and where no one, not even an officer in
+uniform not engaged on the works, is allowed to go, are the real
+fortifications. What looks like a rock is a monster gun painted gray, or
+a tree hides the mouth of another. And in this forbidden territory are
+great cannon which are worked from the lowest ramparts. These are the
+present triumphs of Gibraltar. Before they came, the clouds which shut
+out the sight of the Rock as well as the rest of the world from its
+summit rendered the great pieces of artillery there as useless in bad
+weather as they are harmless in times of peace. The very elements
+threatened to war against the English, and a shower of rain or a veering
+wind might have altered the fortunes of a battle. But a clever man named
+Watkins has invented a position-finder, by means of which those on the
+lowest ramparts, well out of the clouds, can aim the great guns on the
+summit at a vessel unseen by the gunners lost in the mist above, and by
+electricity fire a shot from a gun a half-mile above them so that it
+will strike an object many miles off at sea. It will be a very strange
+sensation to the captain of such a vessel when he finds her bombarded by
+shells that belch forth from a drifting cloud.
+
+No stranger has really any idea of the real strength of this fortress,
+or in what part of it its real strength lies. Not one out of ten of its
+officers knows it. Gibraltar is a grand and grim practical joke; it is
+an armed foe like the army in _Macbeth_, who came in the semblance of a
+wood, or like the wooden horse of Troy that held the pick of the enemy's
+fighting-men. What looks like a solid face of rock is a hanging curtain
+that masks a battery; the blue waters of the bay are treacherous with
+torpedoes; and every little smiling village of Spain has been marked
+down for destruction, and has had its measurements taken as accurately
+as though the English batteries had been playing on it already for many
+years. The Rock is undermined and tunnelled throughout, and food and
+provisions are stored away in it to last a siege of seven years.
+Telephones and telegraphs, signal stations for flagging, search-lights,
+and other such devilish inventions, have been planted on every point,
+and only the Governor himself knows what other modern improvements have
+been introduced into the bowels of this mountain or distributed behind
+bits of landscape gardening on its surface.
+
+On the 25th of February, at half-past ten in the morning, three guns
+were fired in rapid succession from the top of the Rock, and the windows
+shook. Three guns mean that Gibraltar is about to be attacked by a fleet
+of war-ships, and that "England expects every man to do his duty." So I
+went out to see him do it. Men were running through the streets trailing
+their guns, and officers were galloping about pulling at their gloves,
+and bodies of troops were swinging along at a double-quick, which always
+makes them look as though they were walking in tight boots, and bugles
+were calling, and groups of men, black and clearly cut against the sky,
+were excitedly switching the air with flags from every jutting rock and
+every rampart of the garrison.
+
+[Illustration: SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK]
+
+Behind the ramparts, quite out of sight of the vessels in the bay, were
+many hundreds of infantrymen with rifles in hand, and only waiting for a
+signal to appear above the coping of the wall to empty their guns into
+the boats of the enemy. The enlisted men, who enjoy this sort of play,
+were pleased and interested; the officers were almost as calm as they
+would be before a real enemy, and very much bored at being called out
+and experimented with. The real object of the preparation for defence
+that morning was to learn whether the officers at different points
+could communicate with the Governor as he rode rapidly from one spot
+to another. This was done by means of flags, and although the officer
+who did the flagging for the Governor's party had about as much as he
+could do to keep his horse on four legs, the experiment was most
+successful. It was a very pretty and curious sight to see men talking a
+mile away to a party of horsemen going at full gallop.
+
+The life of a subaltern of the British army, who belongs to a smart
+regiment, and who is stationed at such a post as Gibraltar, impresses
+you as being as easy and satisfactory a state of existence as a young
+and unmarried man could ask. He has always the hope that some day--any
+day, in fact--he will have a chance to see active service, and so serve
+his country and distinguish his name. And while waiting for this chance
+he enjoys the good things the world brings him with a clear conscience.
+He has duties, it is true, but they did not strike me as being wearing
+ones, or as threatening nervous prostration. As far as I could see, his
+most trying duty was the number of times a day he had to change his
+clothes, and this had its ameliorating circumstance in that he each time
+changed into a more gorgeous costume. There was one youth whom I saw in
+four different suits in two hours. When I first noticed him he was
+coming back from polo, in boots and breeches; then he was directing the
+firing of a gun, with a pill-box hat on the side of his head, a large
+pair of field-glasses in his hand, and covered by a black and red
+uniform that fitted him like a jersey. A little later he turned up at a
+tennis party at the Governor's in flannels; and after that he came back
+there to dine in the garb of every evening. When the subaltern dines at
+mess he wears a uniform which turns that of the First City Troop into
+what looks in comparison like a second-hand and ready-made garment. The
+officers of the 13th Somerset Light Infantry wore scarlet jackets at
+dinner, with high black silk waistcoats bordered with two inches of gold
+lace. The jackets have gold buttons sewed along every edge that presents
+itself, and offer glorious chances for determining one's future by
+counting "poor man, rich man, beggar-man, thief." When eighteen of these
+jackets are placed around a table, the chance civilian feels and looks
+like an undertaker.
+
+Dining at mess is a very serious function in a British regiment. At
+other times her Majesty's officers have a reticent air; but at dinner,
+when you are a guest, or whether you are a guest or not, there is an
+intent to please and to be pleased which is rather refreshing.
+
+We have no regimental headquarters in America, and owing to our officers
+seeking promotion all over the country, the regimental _esprit de corps_
+is lacking. But in the English army regimental feeling is very strong;
+father and son follow on in the same regiment, and now that they are
+naming them for the counties from which they are recruited, they are
+becoming very close corporations indeed. At mess the traditions of the
+regiment come into play, and you can learn then of the actions in which
+it has been engaged from the engravings and paintings around the walls,
+and from the silver plate on the table and the flags stacked in the
+corner.
+
+[Illustration: CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES]
+
+When a man gets his company he presents the regiment with a piece of
+plate, or a silver inkstand, or a picture, or something which
+commemorates a battle or a man, and so the regimental headquarters are
+always telling a story of what has been in the past and inspiring fine
+deeds for the future. Each regiment has its peculiarity of uniform or
+its custom at mess, which is distinctive to it, and which means more the
+longer it is observed. Those in authority are trying to do away with
+these signs and differences in equipment, and are writing themselves
+down asses as they do so.
+
+You will notice, for instance, if you are up in such things, that the
+sergeants of the 13th Light Infantry wear their sashes from the left
+shoulder to the right hip, as officers do, and not from the right
+shoulder, as sergeants should. This means that once in a great battle
+every officer of the 13th was killed, and the sergeants, finding this
+out, and that they were now in command, changed their sashes to the
+other shoulder. And the officers ever after allowed them to do this, as
+a tribute to their brothers in command who had so conspicuously
+obliterated themselves and distinguished their regiment. There are other
+traditions, such as that no one must mention a woman's name at mess,
+except the title of one woman, to which they rise and drink at the end
+of the dinner, when the sergeant gives the signal to the band-master
+outside, and his men play the national anthem, while the bandmaster
+comes in, as Mr. Kipling describes him in "The Drums of the Fore and
+Aft," and "takes his glass of port-wine with the orfficers." The
+Sixtieth, or the Royal Rifles, for instance, wear no marks of rank at
+the mess, in order to express the idea that there they are all equal.
+This regiment had once for its name the King's American Rifles, and
+under that name it took Quebec and Montreal, and I had placed in front
+of me at mess one night a little silver statuette in the equipment of a
+Continental soldier, except that his coat, if it had been colored,
+would have been red, and not blue. He was dated 1768. In the mess-room
+are pictures of the regiment swarming over the heights of Quebec,
+storming the walls of Delhi, and running the gauntlet up the Nile as
+they pressed forward to save Gordon. All of this goes to make a
+subaltern feel things that are good for him to feel.
+
+Every day at Gibraltar there is tennis, and bands playing in the
+Alameda, and parades, or riding-parties across the Neutral Ground into
+Spain, and teas and dinners, at which the young ladies of the place
+dance Spanish dances, and twice a week the members of the Calpe Hunt
+meet in Spain, and chase foxes across the worst country that any
+Englishman ever rode over in pink. There are no fences, but there are
+ravines and cañons and precipices, down and up and over which the horses
+scramble and jump, and over which they will, if the rider leaves them
+alone, bring him safely.
+
+And if you lose the rest of the field, you can go to an old Spanish inn
+like that which Don Quixote visited, with drunken muleteers in the
+court-yard, and the dining-room over the stable, and with beautiful
+dark-eyed young women to give you omelet and native wine and black
+bread. Or, what is as amusing, you can stop in at the officer's
+guard-room at the North Front, and cheer that gentleman's loneliness by
+taking tea with him, and drying your things before his fire while he
+cuts the cake, and the women of the party straighten their hats in
+front of his glass, and two Tommies go off for hot water.
+
+There was a very entertaining officer guarding the North Front one
+night, and he proved so entertaining that neither of us heard the sunset
+gun, and so when I reached the gate I found it locked, and the bugler of
+the guard who take the keys to the Governor each night was sounding his
+bugle half-way up the town. There was a dark object on a wall to which I
+addressed all my arguments and explanations, which the object met with
+repeated requests to "move on, now," in the tone of expostulation with
+which a London policeman addresses a very drunken man.
+
+[Illustration: TEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERS]
+
+I knew that if I tried to cross the Neutral Ground I would be shot at
+for a smuggler; for, owing to Gibraltar's being a free port of entry,
+these gentlemen buy tobacco there, and carry it home each night, or run
+it across the half-mile of Neutral Ground strapped to the backs of dogs.
+So I wandered back again to the entertaining officer, and he was filled
+with remorse, and sent off a note of entreaty to his Excellency's
+representative, to whom he referred as a D. A. A. G., and whose name, he
+said, was Jones. We then went to the mess of the officers guarding the
+different approaches, and these gentlemen kindly offered me their own
+beds, proposing that they themselves should sleep on three chairs and a
+pile of overcoats; all except one subaltern, who excused his silence by
+saying diffidently that he fancied I would not care to sleep in the
+fever camp, of which he had charge. I had seen the officer of the
+keys pass every night, and the guards turn out to salute the keys, and I
+had rather imagined that it was more or less of a form, and that the
+pomp and circumstance were all there was of it. I did not believe that
+the Rock was really closed up at night like a safe with a combination
+lock. But I know now that it is. A note came back from the mysterious D.
+A. A. G. saying I could be admitted at eleven; but it said nothing at
+all about sentries, nor did the entertaining officer. Subalterns always
+say "Officer" when challenged, and the sentry always murmurs, "Pass,
+officer, and all's well," in an apologetic growl. But I suppose I did
+not say "Officer" as I had been told to do, with any show of confidence,
+for every sentry who appeared that night--and there seemed to be a
+regiment of them--would not have it at all, and wanted further data, and
+wanted it quick. Even if you have an order from a D. A. A. G. named
+Jones, it is very difficult to explain about it when you don't know
+whether to speak of him as the D. A. A. G. or as General Jones, and
+especially when a young and inexperienced shadow is twisting his gun
+about so that the moonlight plays up and down the very longest bayonet
+ever issued by a civilized nation. They were not nice sentries, either,
+like those on the Rock, who stand where you can see them, and who
+challenge you drowsily, like cabmen, and make the empty streets less
+lonely than otherwise.
+
+They were, on the contrary, fierce and in a terrible hurry, and had a
+way of jumping out of the shadow with a rattle of the gun and a shout
+that brought nerve-storms in successive shocks. To make it worse, I had
+gone over the post, while waiting for word from the D. A. A. G., to hear
+the sentries recite their instructions to the entertaining officer. They
+did this rather badly, I thought, the only portion of the rules, indeed,
+which they seemed to have by heart being those which bade them not to
+allow cows to trespass "without a permit," which must have impressed
+them by its humor, and the fact that when approached within fifty yards
+they were "to fire low." I found when challenged that night that this
+was the only part of their instructions that I also could remember.
+
+This was the only trying experience of my stay in Gibraltar, and it is
+brought in here as a compliment to the force that guards the North
+Front. For of them, and the rest of the inhabitants and officers of the
+garrison, any one who visits there can only think well; and I hope when
+the Rock is attacked, as it never will be, that they will all cover
+themselves with glory. It never will be attacked, for the reason that
+the American people are the only people clever enough to invent a way of
+taking it, and they are far too clever to attempt an impossible thing.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+TANGIER
+
+
+A great many thousand years ago Hercules built the mountain of Abyla and
+its twin mountain which we call Gibraltar. It was supposed to mark the
+limits of the unknown world, and it would seem from casual inspection,
+as I suggested in the last chapter, that it serves the same purpose to
+this day. Men have crept into Africa and crept out again, like flies
+over a ceiling, and they have gained much renown at Africa's expense for
+having done so. They have built little towns along its coasts, and run
+little rocking, bumping railroads into its forests, and dragged launches
+over its cataracts, and partitioned it off among emperors and powers and
+trading companies, without having ventured into the countries they
+pretend to have subdued. But from Paul du Chaillu to W. A. Chanler, "the
+Last Explorer," as he has been called, just how much more do we know of
+Africa than did the Romans whose bridges still stand in Tangier?
+
+The "Last Explorer" sounds well, and is distinctly a _mot_, but there
+will be other explorers to go, and perhaps to return. There are still a
+few things for us to learn. The Spaniards and the Pilgrim fathers
+touched the unknown world of America only four hundred years ago, and
+to-day any commercial traveller can tell you, with the aid of an A B C
+railroad guide, the name of every town in any part of it. But Turks and
+Romans and Spaniards, and, of late, English and Germans and French, have
+been pecking and nibbling at Africa like little mice around a cheese,
+and they are still nibbling at the rind, and know as little of the
+people they "protect," and of the countries they have annexed and
+colonized, as did Hannibal and Scipio. The American forests have been
+turned into railroad ties and telegraph poles, and the American Indian
+has been "exterminated" or taught to plough and to wear a high hat. The
+cowboy rides freely over the prairies; the Indian agent cheats the
+Indian--the Indian does not cheat him; the Germans own Milwaukee and
+Cincinnati; the Irish rule everywhere; even the much-abused Chinaman
+hangs out his red sign in every corner of the country. There is not a
+nation of the globe that has not its hold upon and does not make
+fortunes out of the continent of America; but the continent of Africa
+remains just as it was, holding back its secret, and still content to be
+the unknown world.
+
+You need not travel far into Africa to learn this; you can find out how
+little we know of it at its very shore. This city of Tangier, lying but
+three hours off from Gibraltar's civilization, on the nearest coast of
+Africa, can teach you how little we or our civilized contemporaries
+understand of these barbarians and of their barbarous ways.
+
+A few months since England sent her ambassador to treat with the Sultan
+of Morocco; it was an untaught blackamoor opposed to a diplomat and a
+gentleman, and a representative of the most civilized and powerful of
+empires; and we have Stephen Bonsal's picture of this ambassador and his
+suite riding back along the hot, sandy trail from Fez, baffled and
+ridiculed and beaten. So that when I was in Tangier, half-naked Moors,
+taking every white stranger for an Englishman, would point a finger at
+me and cry, "Your Sultana a fool; the Sultan only wise." Which shows
+what a superior people we are when we get away from home, and how well
+the English understand the people they like to protect.
+
+Tangier lies like a mass of drifted snow on the green hills below, and
+over the point of rock on which stands its fortress, and from which
+waves the square red flag of Morocco. It is a fine place spoiled by
+civilization. And not a nice quality of civilization either. Back of it,
+in Tetuan or Fez, you can understand what Tangier once was and see the
+Moor at his best. There he lives in the exclusiveness which his religion
+teaches him is right--an exclusiveness to which the hauteur of an
+Englishman, and his fear that some one is going to speak to him on
+purpose, become a gracious manner and suggest undue familiarity. You see
+the Moor at his best in Tangier too, but he is never in his complete
+setting as he is in the inland cities, for when you walk abroad in
+Tangier you are constantly brought back to the new world by the presence
+and abodes of the foreign element; a French shop window touches a bazar,
+and a Moor in his finest robes is followed by a Spaniard in his black
+cape or an Englishman in a tweed suit, for the Englishman learns nothing
+and forgets nothing. He may live in Tangier for years, but he never
+learns to wear a burnoose, or forgets to put on the coat his tailor has
+sent him from home as the latest in fashion. The first thing which meets
+your eye on entering the harbor at Tangier is an immense blue-and-white
+enamel sign asking you to patronize the English store for groceries and
+provisions. It strikes you as much more barbarous than the Moors who
+come scrambling over the vessel's side.
+
+[Illustration: BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE]
+
+They come with a rush and with wild yells before the little steamer has
+stopped moving, and remind you of their piratical ancestors. They look
+quite as fierce, and as they throw their brown bare legs over the
+bulwarks and leap and scramble, pushing and shouting in apparently the
+keenest stage of excitement and rage, they only need long knives between
+their teeth and a cutlass to convince you that you are at the mercy
+of the Barbary pirates, and not merely of hotel porters and guides.
+
+My guide was a Moor named Mahamed. I had him about a week, or rather, to
+speak quite correctly, he had me. I do not know how he effected my
+capture, but he went with me, I think, because no one else would have
+him, and he accordingly imposed on my good-nature. As we say a man is
+"good-natured" when there is absolutely nothing else to be said for him,
+I hope when I say this that I shall not be accused of trying to pay
+myself a compliment. Mahamed was a tall Moor, with a fine array of
+different-colored robes and coats and undercoats, and a large white
+turban around his fez, which marked the fact that he was either married
+or that he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He followed me from morning
+until night, with the fidelity of a lamb, and with its sheeplike
+stupidity. No amount of argument or money or abuse could make him leave
+my side. Mahamed was not even picturesque, for he wore a large pair of
+blue spectacles and Congress gaiters. This hurt my sense of the fitness
+of things very much. His idea of serving me was to rush on ahead and
+shove all the little donkeys and blind beggars and children out of my
+way, at which the latter would weep, and I would have to go back and
+bribe them into cheerfulness again. In this way he made me most
+unpopular with the masses, and cost me a great deal in trying to buy
+their favor. I was never so completely at the mercy of any one before,
+and I hope he found me "intelligent, courteous, and a good linguist."
+
+As a matter of fact, there is very little need of a guide in Tangier. It
+has but few show places, for the place itself is the show. You can find
+your best entertainment in picking your way through its winding, narrow
+streets, and in wandering about the open market-places. The highways of
+Tangier are all very crooked and very steep. They are also very uneven
+and dirty, and one walks sometimes for hundreds of yards in a maze of
+dark alleys and little passageways walled in by whitewashed walls, and
+sheltered from the sun by archways and living-rooms hanging from one
+side of the street to the other. Green and blue doorways, through which
+one must stoop to enter, open in from the street, and you are constantly
+hearing them shut as you pass, as some of the women of the household
+recognize the presence of a foreigner. You are never quite sure as to
+what you will meet in the streets or what may be displayed at your elbow
+before the doors of the bazars. The odors of frying meat and of fresh
+fruit and of herbs, and of soap in great baskets, and of black coffee
+and hasheesh, come to you from cafés and tiny shops hardly as big as a
+packing-box. These are shut up at night by two half-doors, of which the
+upper one serves as a shield from the sun by day and the lower as a pair
+of steps. In the wider streets are the bazars, magnificent with color
+and with the glitter of gold lace and of brass plaques and silver
+daggers; handsome, comfortable-looking Moors sit crossed-legged in the
+middle of their small extent like soldiers in a sentry-box, and speak
+leisurely with their next-door neighbor without gesture, unless they
+grow excited over a bargain, and with a haughty contempt for the passing
+Christian. There is always something beneficial in feeling that you are
+thoroughly despised; and when a whole community combines to despise you,
+and looks over your head gravely as you pass, you begin to feel that
+those Moors who do not apparently hold you in contempt are a very poor
+and middle-class sort of people, and you would much prefer to be
+overlooked by a proud Moor than shaken hands with by a perverted one.
+But the pride of the rich Moorish gentlemen is nothing compared to the
+fanatic intolerance of the poor farmers from the country of the tribes
+who come in on market-day, and who hate the Christian properly as the
+Koran tells them they should. They stalk through the narrow street with
+both eyes fixed on a point far ahead of them, with head and shoulders
+erect and arms swinging. They brush against you as though you were a
+camel or a horse, and had four legs on which to stand instead of two.
+Sometimes a foreigner forgets that these men from the desert, where the
+foreign element has not come, are following out the religious training
+of a lifetime, and strikes at one of them with his riding-whip, and then
+takes refuge in a consulate and leaves on the next boat.
+
+I find it very hard not to sympathize with the Moors. The Englishman is
+always preaching that an Englishman's house is his castle, and yet he
+invades this country, he and his French and Spanish and American
+cousins, and demands that not only he shall be treated well, but that
+any native of the country, any subject of the Sultan, who chooses to
+call himself an American or an Englishman shall be protected too. Of
+course he knows that he is not wanted there; he knows he is forcing
+himself on the barbarian, and that all the barbarian has ever asked of
+him is to be let alone. But he comes, and he rides around in his baggy
+breeches and varnished boots, and he gets up polo games and cricket
+matches, and gallops about in a pink coat after foxes, and asks for
+bitter ale, and complains because he cannot get his bath, and all the
+rest of it, quite as if he had been begged to come and to stop as long
+as he liked. Sometimes you find a foreigner who tries to learn something
+of these people, a man like the late Mr. Leared or "Bébé" Carleton, who
+can speak all their dialects, and who has more power with the Sultan
+than has any foreign minister, and who, if the Sultan will not pay you
+for the last shipment of guns you sent him, or for the grand-piano for
+the harem, is the man to get you your money. But the average foreign
+resident, as far as I can see, neither adopts the best that the Moor has
+found good, nor introduces what the Moor most needs, and what he does
+not know or care enough about to introduce for himself. Tangier, for
+instance, is excellently adapted by nature for the purposes of good
+sanitation, but the arrangements are as bad and primitive as they were
+before a foreigner came into the place. They consist in dumping the
+refuse of the streets, into which everything is thrown, over the
+sea-wall out on the rocks below, where the pigs gather up what they
+want, and the waves wash the remainder back on the coast.
+
+[Illustration: SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL]
+
+If some of the foreign ministers would use their undoubted influence
+with the Bashaw to amend this, instead of introducing point-to-point
+pony races, they might in time show some reason for their invasion of
+Morocco other than the curious and obvious one that they all grow rich
+there while doing nothing. The foreign resident has a very great
+contempt for the Moor. He says the Moor is a great liar and a rogue.
+When people used to ask Walter Scott if it was he who wrote the Waverley
+Novels he used to tell them it was not, and he excused this afterwards
+by saying that if you are asked an impertinent or impossible question
+you have the right not to answer it or to tell an untruth. The very
+presence of the foreigner is an impertinence in the eyes of the Moor,
+and so he naturally does not feel severe remorse when he baffles the
+foreign invader, and does it whenever he can.
+
+As a matter of fact, the foreign invader at Tangier is not, in a number
+of cases, in a position in which he can gracefully throw down gauntlets.
+There is something about these hot, raw countries, hidden out of the way
+of public opinion and police courts and the respectability which drives
+a gig, that makes people forget the rules and axioms laid down in the
+temperate zone for the guidance of tax-payers and all reputable
+citizens. As the sailors say, "There is no Sunday south of the equator."
+It is hard to tell just what it is, but the sun, or the example of the
+barbarians, or the fact that the world is so far away, breeds queer
+ideas, and one hears stories one would not care to print as long as the
+law of libel obtains in the land. You have often read in novels,
+especially French novels, or have heard men on the stage say: "Come, let
+us leave this place, with its unjust laws and cruel bigotry. We will go
+to some unknown corner of the earth, where we will make a new home. And
+there, under a new flag and a new name, we will forget the sad past, and
+enter into a new world of happiness and content."
+
+When you hear a man on the stage say that, you can make up your mind
+that he is going to Tangier. It may be that he goes there with somebody
+else's money, or somebody else's wife, or that he has had trouble with a
+check; or, as in the case of one young man who was fêted and dined
+there, had robbed a diamond store in Brooklyn, and is now in Sing Sing;
+or, as in the case of a recent American consul, had sold his protection
+for two hundred dollars to any one who wanted it, and was recalled under
+several clouds. And you hear stories of ministers who retire after
+receiving an income of a few hundred pounds a year with two hundred
+thousand dollars they have saved out of it, and of cruelty and bursts of
+sudden passion that would undoubtedly cause a lynching in the chivalric
+and civilized states of Alabama or Tennessee. And so when I heard why
+several of the people of Tangier had come there, and why they did not
+go away again, I began to feel that the barbarian, whose forefathers
+swept Spain and terrorized the whole of Catholic Europe, had more reason
+than he knew for despising the Christian who is waiting to give to his
+country the benefits of civilization.
+
+Tangier's beauty lies in so many different things--in the monk-like garb
+of the men and in the white muffled figures of the women; in the
+brilliancy of its sky, and of the sea dashing upon the rocks and
+tossing the feluccas with their three-cornered sails from side to side;
+and in the green towers of the mosques, and the listless leaves of the
+royal palms rising from the centre of a mass of white roofs; and, above
+all, in the color and movement of the bazars and streets. The streets
+represent absolute equality. They are at the widest but three yards
+across, and every one pushes, and apparently every one has something to
+sell, or at least something to say, for they all talk and shout at once,
+and cry at their donkeys or abuse whoever touches them. A water-carrier,
+with his goat-skin bag on his back and his finger on the tube through
+which the water comes, jostles you on one side, and a slave as black and
+shiny as a patent-leather boot shoves you on the other as he makes way
+for his master on a fine white Arabian horse with brilliant trappings
+and a huge contempt for the donkeys in his way. It is worth going to
+Tangier if for no other reason than to see a slave, and to grasp the
+fact that he costs anywhere from a hundred to five hundred dollars. To
+the older generation this may not seem worth while, but to the present
+generation--those of it who were born after Richmond was taken--it is a
+new and momentous sensation to look at a man as fine and stalwart and
+human as one of your own people, and feel that he cannot strike for
+higher wages, or even serve as a parlor-car porter or own a barbershop,
+but must work out for life the two hundred dollars his owner paid for
+him at Fez.
+
+There is more movement in Tangier than I have ever noticed in a place of
+its size. Every one is either looking on cross-legged from the bazars
+and coffee-shops, or rushing, pushing, and screaming in the street. It
+is most bewildering; if you turn to look after a particularly
+magnificent Moor, or a half-naked holy man from the desert with wild
+eyes and hair as long as a horse's mane, you are trodden upon by a
+string of donkeys carrying kegs of water, or pushed to one side by a
+soldier with a gun eight feet long.
+
+There is something continually interesting in the muffled figures of the
+women. They make you almost ashamed of the uncovered faces of the
+American women in the town; and, in the lack of any evidence to the
+contrary, you begin to believe every Moorish woman or girl you meet is
+as beautiful as her eyes would make it appear that she is. Those of the
+Moorish girls whose faces I saw were distinctly handsome; they were the
+women Benjamin Constant paints in his pictures of Algiers, and about
+whom Pierre Loti goes into ecstasies in his book on Tangier. Their robe
+or cloak, or whatever the thing is that they affect, covers the head
+like a hood, and with one hand they hold one of its folds in front of
+the face as high as their eyes, or keep it in place by biting it between
+their teeth.
+
+The only time that I ever saw the face of any of them was when I
+occasionally eluded Mahamed and ran off with a little guide called
+Isaac, the especial protector of two American women, who farmed him out
+to me when they preferred to remain in the hotel. He is a particularly
+beautiful youth, and I noticed that whenever he was with me the cloaks
+of the women had a fashion of coming undone, and they would lower them
+for an instant and look at Isaac, and then replace them severely upon
+the bridge of the nose. Then Isaac would turn towards me with a shy
+conscious smile and blush violently. Isaac says that the young men of
+Tangier can tell whether or not a girl is pretty by looking at her feet.
+It is true that their feet are bare, but it struck me as being a
+somewhat reckless test for selecting a bride. I will recommend Isaac to
+whoever thinks of going to Tangier. He speaks eight languages, is
+eighteen years old, wears beautiful and barbarous garments, and is
+always happy. He is especially good at making bargains, and he
+entertained me for many half-hours while I sat and watched him fighting
+over two dollars more or less with the proprietors of the bazars. He was
+an antagonist worthy of the oldest and proudest Moor in Tangier. He had
+no respect for their rage or their contempt or their proffered bribes or
+their long white beards. Sometimes he would laugh them to scorn--them
+and their prices; and again he would talk to them sadly and plaintively;
+and again he would stamp and rage and slap his hands at them and rush
+off with a great show of disgust, until they called him back again, when
+he and they would go over the performance once more with unabated
+interest. Mahamed always paid them what they asked, and got his
+commission from them later, as a guide should; but Isaac would storm and
+finally beat them down one-half. Isaac can be found at the Calpe Hotel,
+and is welcome to whatever this notice may be worth to him.
+
+[Illustration: A WOMAN OF TANGIER]
+
+I had read in books on Morocco and had been given to understand that
+when you were told that the price of anything in a bazar was worth three
+dollars, you should offer one, and that then the Moor would cry aloud to
+Allah to take note of the insult, and would ask you to sit down and have
+a cup of coffee, and that he would then beat you up and you would beat
+him down, and that at the end of two or three hours you would get what
+you wanted for two dollars. It struck me that this, if one had several
+months to spare and wanted anything badly enough, might be rather
+amusing. The first thing I saw that I wanted badly was a long gun, for
+which the Moor asked me twelve dollars. I offered him eight. I then
+waited to see him tear his beard and unwrap his turban and cry aloud to
+Allah; but he did none of these things. He merely put the gun back in
+its place and continued the conversation, which I had so flippantly
+interrupted, with a long-bearded friend. And no further remarks on my
+part affected him in the least, and I was forced to go away feeling very
+much ashamed and very mean. The next day a man at the hotel brought in
+the gun, having paid fourteen dollars for it, and said he would not sell
+it for fifty. We would pay much more than that for it at home, which
+shows that you cannot always follow guide-books.
+
+There are only five things the guides take you to see in Tangier--the
+café chantant, the governor's palace, the prisons, and the harem, to
+which men are not admitted. They also take you to see the markets, but
+you can see them for yourself. The markets are bare, open places covered
+with stones and lined with bazars, and on market-days peopled with
+thousands of muffled figures selling or trying to sell herbs and eggs
+and everything else that is eatable, from dates to haunches of mutton.
+It is a wonderfully picturesque sight, with the sun trickling through
+the palm-leaf mats overhead on the piles of yellow melons at your feet,
+and with strings of camels dislocating their countenances over their
+grain, and dancing-men and snake-charmers and story-tellers, as eloquent
+as actors, clamoring on every side.
+
+The café chantant is a long room lined with mats, and with rugs
+scattered over the floor, on which sit musicians and the regular
+customers of the place, who play cards and smoke long pipes, with which
+they rap continually on the tin ash-holders. The music is very strange,
+to say the least, and the singing very startling, full of sudden pauses,
+and beginning again after one of these when you think the song is over.
+It is not a particularly exciting place to visit, but there is no choice
+between that and the hotel smoking-room. Tangier is not a town where one
+can move about much at night. There is also a place where the guests
+tell you that you can see Moorish women dance the dance which so
+startled Paris in the Algerian exhibit at the exposition. As I had no
+desire to be startled in that way again, I did not go to see them, and
+so cannot say what they are like. But it is quite safe to say that any
+visitor to Tangier who thinks he is seeing anything that is real and
+native to the home life of the people, and that is not a show gotten up
+by the guides, is going to be greatly taken in. The harem to which they
+lead women is not a harem at all, but the home of the widow of an
+ex-governor, who sits with her daughters for strange women to look at.
+It is a most undignified proceeding on the part of the widow of a dead
+Bashaw, and no one but the guides know what she is doing. I came to
+find out about it through some American women who went there with Isaac
+in the morning, and were taken to call at the same place by an English
+lady resident in the afternoon. The English woman laughed at them for
+thinking they had seen the interior of a harem, and they did not tell
+her that they had already visited her friends and paid their franc for
+admittance to their society.
+
+The other show places are the governor's palace and the prisons. The
+palace is a very handsome Moorish building, and the prisons are very
+dirty. All that the tourist can see of them is the little he can discern
+through a hole cut in the stout wooden door of each, which is the only
+exit and entrance. You cannot see much even then, for the prisoners, as
+soon as they discover a face at the opening, stick it full of the
+palm-leaf baskets that they make and sell in order to buy food. The
+government gives them neither water, which is expensive in Tangier, nor
+bread, unless they are dying for want of it, but expects the family or
+friends of each criminal to see that he is kept alive until he has
+served out his term of imprisonment.
+
+[Illustration: WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE]
+
+A great deal has been written about these prisons of the Sultan, and of
+the cruelty shown to the inmates, notably of late by a Mr. Mackenzie in
+the London _Times_. You are told that in Tangier, within the four square
+walls of the prison, there are madmen and half-starved murderers and
+rebels, loaded with chains, dying of disease and want, who are
+tortured and starved until they die. For this reason no one in Morocco
+is sentenced for more than ten or twelve years, so you are told, because
+he is sure to die before that time has expired. It seemed to me that if
+this were true it would be worth while to visit the prison and to tell
+what one saw there. When I was informed that, with the exception of two
+residents of Tangier, no one has been allowed to enter the Sultan's
+prison for the last _ten years_, I suspected that there must be
+something there which the Sultan did not want seen: it was not a
+difficult deduction to make. So I set about getting into the prison. It
+is not at all necessary to go into the details of my endeavors, or to
+tell what proposals I made; it is quite sufficient to say that in every
+way I was eminently unsuccessful. It was interesting, however, to find a
+people to whom the arguments and inducements which had proved effective
+with one's own countrymen were foolish and incomprehensible. For two
+days I haunted the outer walls of the prison, and was smiled upon
+contemptuously by the Bashaw's counsellors, who sat calmly in the cool
+hallway of the palace, and watched me kicking impatiently at the stones
+in the court-yard and broiling in the sun, while the governor or Bashaw
+returned me polite expressions of his regret. I finally dragged the
+Consul-General into it, and brought things to such a pass that I could
+see no way out of it but my admittance to the prison or a declaration of
+war from the United States.
+
+Either event seemed to promise exciting and sensational developments.
+Colonel Mathews, the Consul-General, did not, however, share my views,
+but arranged that I should have an audience with the Bashaw, during the
+course of which he promised he would bring up the question of my
+admittance to the prison.
+
+On board the _Fulda_, I had had the pleasure of sitting at table next to
+the Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field, the editor of the _Evangelist_, and a
+distinguished traveller in many lands. While on the steamer I had
+twitted the doctor with not having seen certain phases of life with
+which, it seemed to me, he should be more familiar, and I offered, on
+finding we were making the same tour for the same purpose, to introduce
+him to bull-fights and pig-sticking and cafés chantants, and other
+incidents of foreign travel, of which he seemed to be ignorant. He
+refused my offer with dignity, but I think with some regret. I was,
+nevertheless, glad to find that he was in Tangier, and that he was to be
+one of the party to call at the governor's palace. On learning of my
+desire to visit the prison Dr. Field added his petition to mine, and I
+am quite sure that Colonel Mathews wished we were both in the United
+States.
+
+We first called upon the Sultan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, who
+received us in a little room leading from a pretty portico near the
+street entrance. It was furnished, I was pained to note, not with divans
+and rugs, but with a set of red plush and walnut sofas and chairs, such
+as you would find in the salon of a third-rate French hotel. The
+Minister of Foreign Affairs was a dear, kindly old gentleman, with a
+fine white beard down to his waist, but he had a cold in his head, and
+this kept him dabbing at his nose with a red bandanna handkerchief
+rolled up in a ball, which was not in keeping with the rest of his
+costume, nor with the dignity of his appearance. He and Dr. Field got on
+very well; they found out that they were both seventy years of age, and
+both highly esteemed in their different churches. Indeed, the Minister
+of Foreign Affairs was good enough to say, through Colonel Mathews, that
+Dr. Field had a good face, and one that showed he had led a religious
+life. He rather neglected me, and I was out of it, especially when both
+the doctor and the cabinet minister began hoping that Allah would bless
+them both. I thought it most unorthodox language for Dr. Field to use.
+
+We then walked up the hill upon which stand the fort, the prisons, the
+treasury, and the governor's palace, and were received at the entrance
+to the latter by the same gentlemen who had for the last two days been
+enjoying my discomfiture. They were now most gracious in their manner,
+and bowed proudly and respectfully to Colonel Mathews as we passed
+between two rows of them and entered the hall of the palace. We went
+through three halls covered with colored tiles and topped with arches of
+ornamental scrollwork of intricate designs. At the extreme end of these
+rooms the Bashaw stood waiting for us. He was the finest-looking Moor I
+had seen; and I think the Moorish gentleman, though it seems a strange
+thing to say, is the most perfect type of a gentleman that I have seen
+in any country. He is seldom less than six feet tall, and he carries his
+six feet with the erectness of a soldier and with the grace of a woman.
+The bones of his face are strong and well-placed, and he looks kind and
+properly self-respecting, and is always courteous. When you add to this
+clothing as brilliant and robes as clean and soft and white as a
+bride's, you have a very worthy-looking man. The Bashaw towered above
+all of us. He wore brown and dark-blue cloaks, with a long
+under-waistcoat of light-blue silk, yellow shoes, and a white turban as
+big as a bucket, and his baggy trousers were as voluminous as Letty
+Lind's divided skirts. He could not speak English, but he shook hands
+with us, which Moors do not do to one another, and walked on ahead
+through court-yards and halls and up stairways to a little room filled
+with divans and decorated with a carved ceiling and tiled walls. There
+we all sat down, and a soldier in a long red cloak and with numerous
+swords sticking out of his person gave us tea, and sweet cakes made
+entirely of sugar. As soon as we had finished one cup he brought in
+another, and, noticing this, I indulged sparingly; but the doctor
+finished his first, and then refused the rest, until the Consul-General
+told him he must drink or be guilty of a breach of etiquette.
+
+[Illustration: A STREET DANCER]
+
+The Bashaw and Colonel Mathews talked together, and we paid the governor
+long and laborious compliments, at which he smiled indulgently. He did
+not strike me as being at all overcome by them; he had, on the contrary,
+very much the air of a man of the world, and seemed rather to be bored,
+but too polite to say so. He looked exactly like Salvini as Othello.
+While the tea-drinking was going on we were making asides to Colonel
+Mathews, and urging him to propose our going into the prison, which he
+said he would do, but that it must be done diplomatically. We told him
+we would give all the prisoners bread and water, or a lump sum to the
+guards, or whatever he thought would please the Bashaw best. He and the
+Bashaw then began to talk about it, and the doctor and I looked
+consciously at the ceiling. The Bashaw said that never since he had been
+governor of Tangier had he allowed either a native or a foreigner to
+enter the prison; and that if a European did so, he would be torn to
+pieces by the fanatics imprisoned there, who would think they were
+pleasing Allah by abusing an unbeliever. Colonel Mathews also added, on
+his own account, that we would probably catch some horrible disease. The
+more they did not want us to go, the more we wanted to go, the doctor
+rising to the occasion with a keenness and readiness of resource worthy
+of a New York reporter after a beat. I can pay him no higher compliment.
+After a long, loud, and excited debate the Bashaw submitted, and the
+Consul-General won.
+
+The first prison they showed us was the county jail, in which men are
+placed for a month or more. It was dirty and uninteresting, and we
+protested that it was not the one which the Bashaw had described, and
+asked to be shown the one where the enemies of the government were
+incarcerated. Colonel Mathews called back the Bashaw's soldiers, and we
+went on to the larger prison immediately adjoining. Some time ago the
+inmates of this made a break for liberty, and forced open the one door
+which bars those inside from the outer world. The guards fired into the
+mass of them, and the place shows where the bullets struck. To prevent a
+repetition of this, three heavy bars were driven into the masonry around
+the door, so close together that it is impossible for more than one man
+to leave or enter the prison at one time even when the door is open. And
+the opening is so small that to do this he must either crawl in on his
+hands and knees, or lift himself up by the crossbar and swing himself
+in feet foremost. It impressed me as a particularly embarrassing way to
+make an entrance among a lot of people who meditated tearing you to
+pieces. I pointed this out to the doctor, but he was determined, though
+pale. So the guards swung the door in, and the first glimpse of a
+Christian gentleman the prisoners had in ten years was a pair of yellow
+riding-boots which shot into space, followed by a young man, and a
+moment later by an elderly gentleman with a white tie. We made a
+combined movement to the middle of the prison, which was lighted from
+above by a square opening in the roof, protected by iron bars. This was
+the only light in the place. All around the four sides of the patio or
+court were rows of pillars supporting a portico, and back of these was a
+second and outer corridor opening into the porticos, and so into the
+patio. The whole place--patio, porticos, and outer corridor--was about
+as big as the stage of a New York theatre. It was paved with dirt and
+broken slabs, and littered with straw. There was no furniture of any
+sort. With the exception of the sink upon which we stood, directly under
+the opening in the roof, the place was in almost complete darkness,
+although the sun was shining brilliantly outside.
+
+I think there must have been about fifty or sixty men in the prison, and
+for a short time not one of them moved. They were apparently, to judge
+by the way they looked at us, as much startled as though we had
+ascended from a trap like goblins in a pantomime, and then half of them,
+with one accord, came scrambling towards us on their hands and knees.
+They were half naked, and their hair hung down over their eyes; and
+this, and their crawling towards us instead of walking, made them look
+more or less like animals. As they came forward there was a clanking of
+chains, and I saw that it was because their legs were fettered that they
+came as they did, and not standing erect like human beings. The guard
+who followed us in was over two minutes in getting the door fastened
+behind him, and my mind was more occupied with this fact than with what
+I saw before me; for it seemed to me that if there was any tearing to
+pieces to be gone through with, I should hate to have to wait that long
+while the door was being opened again. This thought, with the shock of
+seeing thirty wild men moving upon us out of complete darkness on their
+hands and knees, was the only sensation of any interest that I received
+while visiting the prison.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE PRISON]
+
+The inmates looked exactly like the poorer of the Moors outside, except
+that their hair was longer and their clothing was not so white. There
+was one man, however, quite as well dressed as any of the Sultan's
+counsellors, and he seemed to be the only one who objected to our
+presence. The rest did nothing except to gratify their curiosity by
+staring at us; they did not even hold out their hands for money. They
+were very dirty and poorly clothed, and their long imprisonment had
+made them haggard and pale, and the iron bars around their legs gave
+them a certain interest. The atmosphere of the place was horribly foul,
+but not worse than the atmosphere of either the men's or women's ward at
+night in a precinct station-house in New York city. Indeed, I was not so
+much impressed with the horrors of the Sultan's prison as with the fact
+that our own are so little better, considering our advanced
+civilization. I do not mean our large prisons, but the cells and the
+vagrants' rooms in the police stations. There the vagrant is given a
+sloping board and no ventilation. In Tangier he is given straw and an
+opening in the roof. To be fair, you must compare a prisoner's condition
+in jail with that which he is accustomed to in his own home, and the
+homes of the Moors of the lower class are as much like stables as their
+stables are like pigsties. The poor of Tangier are allowed, through the
+kindness of the Sultan, to sleep on the bare stones around the entrance
+to one of the mosques. For the poor sick there has been built a portico,
+about as large as a Fifth Avenue omnibus, opposite this same mosque.
+This is called the hospital of Tangier. It is considered quite good
+enough for sick people and for those who have no homes. And every night
+you will see bundles of rags lying in the open street or under the
+narrow roof of the portico, exposed to the rain and to the bitter cold.
+If this, in the minds of the Moors, is fair treatment of the sick and
+the poor, one cannot expect them to give their criminals and murderers
+white bread and a freshly rolled turban every morning.
+
+If I had seen horrible things in the Sultan's prison--men starving, or
+too sick to rise, or chained to the walls, or half mad, or loathsome
+with disease--I should certainly have been glad to call the attention of
+other people to it, not from any philanthropic motives perhaps, but as a
+matter of news interest. I did not, however, see any of these things.
+Dr. Field, I believe, was differently impressed, and is of the opinion
+that the outer corridor contained many things much too horrible to
+believe possible. He compared this to Dante's ninth circle of hell, and
+made a point of the fact that the guard had called me back when I walked
+towards it. I, however, went into it while the doctor and the guard were
+getting the door open for us to return, and saw nothing there but straw.
+It seemed to me to be the place where the men slept when the rain,
+coming through the opening in the roof, made it unpleasant for them to
+remain in the court.
+
+It may seem that my persistence in visiting the prison is inconsistent
+with what I have said of foreigners forcing themselves into places in
+Morocco where they are not wanted, but I am quite sure that, had any one
+heard the stories told me of the horror of these jails, he would have
+considered himself justified in learning the truth about them; and I
+cannot understand why, if the members of the legations who tell these
+stories believe them, they have not used their influence to try and
+better the condition of the prisoners, rather than to introduce
+game-laws for the protection of partridges and wild-boars. It is,
+perhaps, gratifying to note that the two gentlemen of whom I spoke as
+having visited the prison in the last ten years were the American
+Consul-General and another resident American. Both of these contributed
+food to the prisoners, and reported what they had seen to our
+government.
+
+On the whole, Tangier impresses one as a fine thing spoiled by
+civilization. Barbarism with electric lights at night is not attractive.
+Tangier to every traveller should be chiefly interesting as a
+stepping-stone towards Tetuan or Fez. Tetuan can be reached in a day's
+journey, and there the Moor is to be seen pure and simple, barbarous and
+beautiful.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO
+
+
+There are certain places and things with which the English novel has
+made us so familiar that it is not necessary for us to go far afield or
+to study guide-books in order to feel that we have known them intimately
+and always. We know Paddington Station as the place where the detective
+interrogates the porter who handled the luggage of the escaping
+criminal, and as the spot from which the governess takes her ticket for
+the country-house where she is to be persecuted by its mistress and
+loved by all the masculine members of the household. We also know that a
+P. and O. steamer is a means of conveyance almost as generally used by
+heroes and heroines of English fiction as a hansom cab. It is a vessel
+upon which the heroine meets her Fate, either in the person of a young
+man on his way home from India, or by being shipwrecked on a desert
+island on her way to Australia, and where the only other surviving
+passenger tattooes his will upon her back, leaves her all his fortune,
+and considerately dies. Long ago a line of steamers ran to the
+Peninsula of Spain; later they shortened their sails, as the Romans
+shortened their swords, and, like the Romans, extended their boundaries
+to the Orient. This line is now an institution with traditions and
+precedents and armorial bearings and time-hallowed jokes, and when you
+step upon the deck of a P. and O. steamer for the first time you feel
+that you are not merely an ordinary passenger, but a part of a novel in
+three volumes, or of a picture in the London _Graphic_, and that all
+sorts of things are imminent and possible. It may not have occurred to
+you before embarking, but you know as soon as you come over the side
+that you expected to find the deck strewn with laces and fans and
+daggers from Tangier, and photographs of Gibraltar, and such other
+trifles for possible purchase by the outbound passengers, and that the
+crew would be little barefooted lascars in red turbans and long blue
+shirts, with a cumberband about their persons, and that you would be
+called to tiffin instead of to lunch.
+
+A fat little lascar balanced himself in the jolly-boat outlined against
+the sky and held aloft a red flag until the hawser swung clear of the
+propeller, when he raised a white flag above him and stood as motionless
+as the Statue of Liberty, while the _Sutlej_ cleared Europa Point of
+Gibraltar and headed towards the East. Then he pattered across the deck
+and leaned over the side and crooned in a lazy, barbarous monotone to
+the waves. The sun fell upon the boat like a spell and turned us into
+sleepy and indolent fixtures wherever it first found us, and showed us
+the white-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada of Spain to the north, and
+the dim blue mountains of Africa to the south. The deck below was
+scrubbed as white as a bread-board, and the masts and rigging threw
+black shadows on the awning overhead, and on every side the blue
+Mediterranean and the bluer Mediterranean sky met and sparkled and
+reflected each other's brilliancy like mirrors placed face to face.
+
+For four days the sun greeted the _Sutlej_ by day and the moon by night,
+and the coast of Africa played hide-and-seek along her starboard side,
+disappearing in a white mist of cloud for an hour or so, and then
+running along with us again in comfortable proximity. On the other side
+boats passed at almost as frequent intervals, and at such friendly range
+that one could count the people on the decks and read their flag signals
+without a glass. The loneliness of the North Atlantic, where an iceberg
+stands for land, and only an occasional tramp steamer rests the eye, is
+as different to this sea as a railroad journey over the prairie is to
+the jaunt from New York to Washington. On the second night out we see
+Algiers, glowing and sparkling in the night like a million of
+fire-flies, and with the clear steady eye of the light-house warning us
+away, as though the quarantine had not warned some of us away already.
+And on the third night we pass Cape Bon, and can imagine Tunis lying
+tantalizingly near us, behind its light-house, shut off also by the
+quarantine that the cholera at Marseilles has made imperative wherever
+the French line of steamers touch. By this time the twoscore passengers
+have foregathered as they would never have done had they all been
+Americans, or had there been three hundred of them, and their place of
+meeting the deck of a transatlantic steamer instead of one of this
+picturesque fleet, upon which you expect strange things to happen.
+
+[Illustration: MALTESE PEDDLERS]
+
+When an American goes to sea, he reads books, or he calculates the
+number of tons of coal it is taking to run the vessel at that rate of
+speed, and he determines that rate of speed by counting the rise and
+fall of the piston-rod, with his watch in his hand; and when this ceases
+to amuse him he plays cards in the smoking-room or holds pools on the
+run and on the pilot's number. The Englishman joins in these latter
+amusements, because nothing better offers. But when his foot is on his
+native heath or on the deck of one of his own vessels, he demonstrates
+his preference for that sort of entertainment which requires exercise
+and little thought. If it is at a country-house, he plays games which
+entail considerable running about, and at picnics he enjoys "Throw the
+handkerchief," and on board ship he plays cricket and other games dear
+to the heart of the American at the age of five. This is partly because
+he always exercises and likes moving about, as Americans do not, and
+because the reading of books (except such books as _Mr. Potter of
+Texas_, which, I firmly believe, every Englishman I ever met has read,
+and upon which they have bestowed the most unqualified approval as the
+truest picture of American life and character they have ever found)
+entertains him for but a very short period at a time.
+
+So a netting is placed about the upper deck for him, and he plays
+cricket; not only he, but his wife and his sister and his mother and the
+unattached young ladies under the captain's care, who are going out to
+India, presumably to be met at the wharf by prospective husbands. There
+is something most charming in the absolute equality which this sport
+entails, and the seriousness with which the English regard it. We could
+not in America expect a white-haired lady with spectacles to bowl
+overhand, or to see that it is considered quite as a matter of course
+that she should do it by the member of the last Oxford eleven, nor would
+our young women be able to hold a hot ball, or to take it with the hands
+crossed and only partly open, and not palm to palm and wide apart. An
+American, as a rule, walks in order that he may reach a certain point,
+but the Englishman walks for the sake of the walking. And he plays
+games, also, apparently for the exercise there is in them; games in
+which people sit in a circle and discuss whether love or reason should
+guide them in going into matrimony do not appeal to him so strongly as
+do "Oranges and lemons," or "Where are you, Jacob?" which is a very fine
+game, in which an early training in sliding to bases gives you a certain
+advantage. It is certainly instructive to hear a captain who got his
+company through storming Fort Nilt last year in the Pamir inquire,
+anxiously, "Oranges or lemons? Yes, I know. But _which_ should I say,
+old chap? I'm a little rusty in the game, you know." If people can get
+back to the days when they were children by playing games, or in any
+other way, no one can blame them.
+
+The island of Gozo rose up out of the sea on the fourth day--a yellow
+rib of rock on the right, with houses and temples on it--and
+demonstrated how few days of water are necessary to rob one's memory of
+the usual look of a house. One would imagine by the general interest in
+them that we had spent the last few years of our lives in tents, or in
+the arctic regions under huts of snow and ice. And then the ship heads
+in towards Malta, and instead of dropping anchor and waiting for a
+tender, glides calmly into what is apparently its chief thoroughfare. It
+is like a Venice of the sea, and you feel as though you were intruding
+in a gentleman's front yard. The houses and battlements and ramparts lie
+close on either side, so near that one could toss a biscuit into the
+hands of the Tommies smoking on the guns, or the natives lounging on the
+steps that run from the front doors into the sea itself. The yard-arms
+reach above the line of the house-tops, and the bowsprit seems to
+threaten havoc with the window-panes of the custom-house. We are not
+apparently entering a harbor, but steaming down the main street of a
+city--a city of yellow limestone, with streets, walls, houses, and waste
+places all of yellow limestone. We might, for all the disturbance we are
+making, be moving forward in a bark canoe, and not in an ocean steamer
+drawing twenty-five feet of water. And then when the anchor drops,
+dozens of little boats, yellow and green and blue, with high posts at
+the bow and sterns like those on gondolas, shoot out from the steps, and
+their owners clamor for the proud privilege of carrying us over the
+few feet of water which runs between the line of houses and the ship's
+sides.
+
+[Illustration: STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA]
+
+There was at the Centennial Exposition the head of a woman cut in
+butter, which attracted much attention from the rural visitors. For this
+they passed by the women painted on canvas or carved in marble, they
+were too like the real thing, and the countrymen probably knew how
+difficult it is to make butter into moulds. For some reason Malta
+reminds you of this butter lady. It is a real city--with real houses and
+cathedral and streets, no doubt, but you have a feeling that they are
+not genuine, and that though it is very cleverly done, it is, after all,
+a city carved out of cheese or butter. Some of the cheese is mouldy and
+covered with green, and some of the walls have holes in them, as has
+aerated bread or _Schweitzerkase_, and the streets and the pavements,
+and the carved façades of the churches and opera-house, and the earth
+and the hills beyond--everything upon which your eye can rest is glaring
+and yellow, with not a red roof to relieve it; it is all just yellow
+limestone, and it looks like Dutch cheese. It is like no other place
+exactly that you have ever seen. The approach into the canal-like harbor
+under the guns and the search-lights of the fortifications, the moats
+and drawbridges, and the glaring monotony of the place itself, which
+seems to have been cut out of one piece and painted with one brush,
+suggest those little toy fortresses of yellow wood which appear in the
+shop windows at Christmas-time.
+
+Of course the first and last thought one has of Malta is that the island
+was the home of the Order of the Knights of St. John, or Knights
+Hospitallers. This order, which was the most noble of those of the days
+of mediæval chivalry, was composed of that band of warrior monks who
+waged war against the infidels, who kept certain vows, and who, under
+the banner of the white cross, became honored and feared throughout the
+then known world. Their headquarters changed from place to place during
+the four hundred years that stretched from the eleventh century, when
+the order was first established, up to 1530, when Charles V. made over
+Malta and all its dependencies in perpetual sovereignty to the keeping
+of these Knights. They had no sooner fortified the island than there
+began the nine months' siege of the Turks, one of the most memorable
+sieges in history. When it was ended, the Turks re-embarked ten thousand
+of the forty thousand men they had landed, and of the nine thousand
+Knights present under the Grand Master Jean de la Valette when the siege
+had opened, but six hundred capable of bearing arms remained alive.
+
+The order continued in possession of their island until the beginning of
+the nineteenth century, when the French, under General Bonaparte, took
+it with but little trouble. The French in turn were besieged by Maltese
+and English, and after two years capitulated. In 1814 the island was
+transferred to England. It now, in its monuments and its memories,
+speaks of the days of chivalry; but present and mixed with these is the
+ubiquitous red coat of the British soldier; and the eight-pointed
+Maltese cross, which suggests Ivanhoe, is placed side by side with the
+lion and the unicorn; the culverin has given way to the quick-throbbing
+Maxim gun, the Templar's sword to the Lee-Metford rifle, and the heroes
+of Walter Scott to the friends of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
+
+The most conspicuous relic of the French occupation is not a noble one.
+It is the penitential hood of the Maltese woman--a strangely picturesque
+article of apparel, like a cowl or Shaker bonnet, only much larger than
+the latter, and with a cape which hangs over the shoulders. The women
+hold the two projecting flaps of the hood together at the throat, and
+unless you are advancing directly towards them, their faces are quite
+invisible. The hoods and capes are black, and are worn as a penance for
+the frailty of the women of Malta when the French took the place and
+robbed the churches, and pillaged the storehouses of the Knights, and
+bore themselves with less restraint than the infidel Turks had done.
+
+Malta retains a slight suggestion of mediævalism in the garb of the
+Capuchin monks, whose tonsured heads and bare feet and roped waists look
+like a masquerade in their close proximity to the young officers in
+tweeds and varnished boots. But one gets the best idea of the past from
+the great Church of St. John, which is full of the trophies and gifts of
+the Grand Masters of the Order, and floored with two thousand marble
+tombs of the Knights themselves. Each Grand Master vied with those who
+had preceded him in enriching this church, and each Knight on his
+promotion made it a gift, so that to-day it is rich in these and
+wonderfully beautiful. This is the chief show-place, and the Governor's
+palace is another, and, to descend from the sublimity of the past to the
+absurdity of the present, so is also the guard-room of the officer of
+the day, which generations of English subalterns have helped to
+decorate. Each year a committee of officers go over the pictures on its
+walls and rub out the least amusing, and this survival of the fittest
+has resulted in a most entertaining gallery of black and white.
+
+The Order of Jerusalem, or of St. John, still obtains in Europe, and
+those who can show fourteen quarterings on one side and twelve on the
+other are entitled to belong to it; but they are carpet knights, and
+wearing an enamel Maltese cross on the left side of an evening coat is a
+different thing from carrying it on a shield for Saracens to hack at.
+
+[Illustration: BRINDISI]
+
+Sicily showed itself for a few hours while the boat continued on its way
+to Brindisi; and as that day happened to be the 4th of March, the
+captain of the _Sutlej_ was asked to make a calculation for which there
+will be no further need for four years to come. This calculation
+showed at what point in the Mediterranean ocean the _Sutlej_ would be
+when a President was being inaugurated in Washington, and at the proper
+time the passengers were invited to the cabin, and the fact that a
+government was changing into the hands of one who could best take care
+of it was impressed upon them in different ways. And later, after
+dinner, the captain of the _Sutlej_ made a speech, and said things about
+the important event (which he insisted on calling an election) which was
+then taking place in America, and the English cheered and drank the new
+President's health, and the two Americans on board, who fortunately were
+both good Democrats, felt not so far from home as before.
+
+You must touch at Brindisi, which is situated on the heel of the boot of
+Italy, if you wish to go a part of the way by land from the East to
+London or from London to the East. And as many people prefer travelling
+forty-eight hours across the Continent to rounding Gibraltar, one hears
+often of Brindisi, and pictures it as a shipping port of the importance
+of Liverpool or Marseilles. Instead of which it is as desolate as a
+summer resort in midwinter, and is like that throughout the year. There
+was a long, broad stone wharf, and tall stucco houses behind, and banks
+of coal which suggested the rear approach to Long Island City, and the
+soft blue Italian skies of which we had read were steely blue, and most
+of us wore overcoats. We lay bound fast to the wharf, with a plank
+thrown from the boat's side to the quay, for the day, and we had free
+permission to learn to walk on streets again for full twenty-four hours;
+but after facing the wind, and dodging guides who had nothing to show,
+we came back by preference to the clean deck and the steamer-chair.
+Desperate-looking Italian soldiers with feathers in their hats, and
+custom-house officers, and gendarmes paraded up and down the quay for
+our delectation, and a wicked little boy stood on the pier-head and sang
+"Ta-ra-ra-boom-chi-ay," pointedly varying this knowledge of our several
+nationalities by crying: "I _say_, buy box matches. Get out." This show
+of learning caused him to be regarded by his fellows with much envy, and
+they watched us to see how far we were impressed.
+
+[Illustration: PILLAR OF CÆSAR AT BRINDISI]
+
+There are two things which need no newspaper advertising and which
+recognize no geographical lines; one is a pretty face and the other is a
+good song. I have seen photographs for sale of Isabelle Irving and
+Lillian Russell in as different localities as Santiago in Cuba, and
+Rotterdam, and I saw a play-bill in San Antonio, Texas, upon which the
+Countess Dudley and the Duchess of Leinster were reproduced under the
+names of the Walsh Sisters. A good song will travel as far, changing its
+name, too, perhaps, and its words, but keeping the same melody that has
+pleased people in a different part of the world. When the moon came out
+at Brindisi and hid the heaps of coal, and showed only the white houses
+and the pillar of Cæsar, a party of young men with guitars and
+mandolins gathered under the bow and sang a song called "Oh, Caroline,"
+which I had last heard Francis Wilson sing as a part of the score of
+"The Lion-tamer," to very different words. As the scene of "The
+Lion-tamer" is laid in Sicily, the song was more or less in place; but
+the contrast between the dark-browed Italian and Mr. Wilson's genial
+countenance which the song brought back was striking. And on the night
+after we had left Brindisi, when the crew gave a concert, one of them
+sang "Oh, promise me," and some one asked if the song had yet reached
+America. I did not undeceive him, but said it had.
+
+After Brindisi the hands of the clock go back a few thousand years, and
+we see Cethdonia, where Ulysses owned much property, and Crete, from
+whence St. Paul set sail, with its long range of mountains covered with
+snow, and then we come back to the present near the island of Zante,
+where the earthquake moved a month ago and swallowed up the homes of the
+people.
+
+The _Sutlej_ had been going out of her course all of the fourth day in
+order to dodge possible islands thrown up by the earthquake, and she was
+late. That night, as she steamed forward at her best speed, the level
+oily sea fell back from her bows with a steady ripple as she cut it in
+two and turned it back out of the way. A light on the horizon, like a
+policeman's lantern, which changed to the burnt-out end of a match and
+back again to a bull's-eye, told us that beyond the light lay the level
+sands of Egypt, almost as far-reaching and monotonous as the sea that
+touched its shore.
+
+[Illustration: APPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL]
+
+The force of habit is very strong on many people, and if they approach
+the land of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra an hour after their usual
+bedtime, they feel no inclination to diverge from their usual habits on
+that account. When you consider how many hours there are for slumber,
+and how many are given to dances, you would think one hour of sleep
+might be spared out of a lifetime in order that you could see Port Said
+at night. There was a long line of lamps on the shore, like a gigantic
+row of footlights or a prairie fire along the horizon, and we passed
+towards this through buoys with red and green lights, with a long
+sea-wall reaching out on one side, and the natural reef of jagged rocks
+rising black out of the sea in the path of the moon on the other. Then
+black boats shot out from the shore and assailed us with strange cries,
+and men in turbans and long robes, and negroes in what looked like
+sacking, and which probably was sacking, but which could not hide the
+suppleness and strength of their limbs, climbed up over the high sides.
+These were the coal-trimmers making way for the black islands, filled
+with black coal and blacker men, who made fast to the side and began
+feeding the vessel through a blazing hole like an open fireplace in her
+iron side. Four braziers filled with soft coal burnt with a fierce red
+flame from the corners of the barges, and in this light from out of
+the depths half-naked negroes ran shrieking and crying with baskets of
+coal on their shoulders to the top of an inclined plank, and stood there
+for a second in the full glare of the opening until one could see the
+whites of their eyes and the sweat glistening on the black faces. Then
+they pitched the coal forward into the lighted opening, as though they
+were feeding a fire, and disappeared with a jump downward into the pit
+of blackness. The coal dust rose in great curtains of mist, through
+which the figures of the men and the red light showed dimly and with
+wavering outline, like shadows in an iron-mill, and through it all came
+their cries and shouts, and the roar of the coal blocks as they rattled
+down into the hold.
+
+Port Said occupies the same position to the waters of the world as Dodge
+City once did to the Western States of America--it is the meeting-place
+of vessels from every land over every water, just as Dodge City was the
+meeting-place of the great trails across the prairies. When a cowboy
+reached Dodge City after six months of constant riding by day and of
+sleeping under the stars by night, and with wild steers for company, he
+wanted wickedness in its worst form--such being the perversity of man.
+And you are told that Port Said offers to travellers and crew the same
+attractive features after a month or weeks of rough voyaging that Dodge
+City once offered to the trailsmen. In _The Light that Failed_ we are
+told that Port Said is the wickedest place on earth, that it is a sink
+of iniquity and a hole of vice, and a wild night in Port Said is
+described there with pitiless detail. Almost every young man who leaves
+home for the East is instructed by his friends to reproduce that night,
+or never return to civilization. And every sea-captain or traveller or
+ex-member of the Army of Occupation in Egypt that I met on this visit to
+the East either smiled darkly when he spoke of Port Said or raised his
+eyes in horror. They all agreed on two things--that it was the home of
+the most beautiful woman on earth, which is saying a good deal, and that
+it was the wickedest, wildest, and most vicious place that man had
+created and God forgotten. One would naturally buy pocket-knives at
+Sheffield, and ginger ale in Belfast, and would not lay in a stock of
+cigars if going to Havana; and so when guides in Continental cities and
+in the East have invited me to see and to buy strange things which
+caused me to doubt the morals of those who had gone before, I have
+always put them off, because I knew that some day I should visit Port
+Said. I did not want second-best and imitation wickedness, but the most
+awful wickedness of the entire world sounded as though it might prove
+most amusing. I expected a place blazing with lights, and with
+gambling-houses and _cafés chantants_ open to the air, and sailors
+fighting with bare knives, and guides who cheated and robbed you, or led
+you to dives where you could be drugged and robbed by others.
+
+[Illustration: STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL]
+
+So I went on shore and gathered the guides together, and told them for
+the time being to sink their rivalry and to join with loyal local pride
+in showing me the worst Port Said could do. They consulted for some
+time, and then said that they were sorry, but the only gambling-house in
+the place closed at twelve, and so did the only _café chantant_; and as
+it was now nearly half-past twelve, every one was properly in bed. I
+expressed myself fully, and they were hurt, and said that Egypt was a
+great country, and that after I had seen Cairo I would say so. So I told
+them I had not meant to offend their pride of country, and that I was
+going to Cairo in order to see things almost as old as wickedness, and
+much more worth while, and that all I asked of Port Said was that it
+should live up to its name. I told them to hire a house, and wake the
+people in Port Said up, and show me the very worst, lowest, wickedest,
+and most vicious sights of which their city boasted; that I would give
+them four hours in which to do it, and what money they needed. I should
+like to print what, after long consultation, the five guides of Port
+Said--which is a place a half-mile across, and with which they were
+naturally acquainted--offered me as the acme of riotous dissipation. I
+do not do so, not because it would bring the blush to the cheek of the
+reader, but to the inhabitants of Port Said, who have enjoyed a
+notoriety they do not deserve, and who are like those desperadoes in the
+West who would rather be considered "bad" than the nonentities that
+they are. I bought photographs, a box of cigarettes, and a cup of black
+coffee at Port Said. That cannot be considered a night of wild
+dissipation. Port Said may have been a sink of iniquity when Mr. Kipling
+was last there, but when I visited it it was a coaling station. I would
+hate to be called a coaling station if I were Port Said, even by me.
+
+When I awoke after my night of riot at Port Said the _Sutlej_ was
+steaming slowly down the Suez Canal, and its waters rippled against its
+sandy banks and sent up strange odors of fish and mud. On either side
+stretched long levels of yellow sand dotted with bunches of dark green
+grass, like tufts on a quilt, over which stalked an occasional camel,
+bending and rocking, and scorning the rival ship at its side. You have
+heard so much of the Suez Canal as an engineering feat that you rather
+expect, in your ignorance, to find the banks upheld by walls of masonry,
+and to pass through intricate locks from one level to another, or at
+least to see a well-beaten towpath at its side. But with the exception
+of dikes here and there, you pass between slipping sandy banks, which
+show less of the hand of man than does a mill-dam at home, and you begin
+to think that Ferdinand de Lesseps drew his walking-stick through the
+sand from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and twenty thousand negroes
+followed him and dug a ditch. On either side of this ditch you see
+reproduced in real life the big colored prints which hung on the walls
+of the Sunday-School. There are the buffaloes drawing the ploughs of
+wood, and the wells of raw sun-baked clay, and the ditches and
+water-works of two cog-wheels and clay pots for irrigating the land, and
+the strings of camels, and the veiled women carrying earthen jars on the
+left shoulder. And beyond these stretches the yellow sand, not white and
+heavy, like our own, but dun-colored and fine, like dust, and over it
+amethyst skies bare of clouds, and tall palms. And then the boat stops
+again at Ismaïlia to let you off for Cairo, and the brave captains
+returning from leave, and the braver young women who are going out to
+work in hospitals, and the young wives with babies whom their
+fathers have not seen, and the commissioners returning to rule and
+bully a native prince, pass on to India, and you are assaulted
+by donkey-boys who want you to ride "Mark Twain," or "Lady Dunlo," or
+"Two-Pair-of-Black-Eyes-Oh-What-a-Surprise-Grand-Ole-Man." A jerky,
+rumbling train carries you from Ismaïlia past Tel-el-Kebir station,
+where the British army surprised the enemy by a night march and took a
+train back to Cairo in three hours. And then, after a five hours' ride,
+you stop at Cairo, and this chapter ends.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE
+
+
+As a rule, when you visit the capital of a country for the first time it
+is sufficient that you should have studied the history of that
+particular country in order that you may properly appreciate the
+monuments and the show-places of its chief cities; it is not necessary
+that you should be an authority on the history of Norway and Sweden to
+understand Paris or New York. For a full appreciation of most of the
+great cities of the world one finds a single red-bound volume of
+Baedeker to be all-sufficient; but when you go to Cairo, in order that
+you may understand all that lies spread out for your pleasure, you
+should first have mastered the Old and the New Testament, a complete
+history of the world, several of Shakespeare's plays, and the files of
+the London _Times_ for the past ten years. Almost every man who was
+great, not only in the annals of his own country, but in the history of
+the world, has left his mark on this oldest country of Egypt, as
+tourists to the Colosseum have scratched their initials on its stones,
+and so hope for immortality. You are shown in Cairo the monuments of
+great monarchs and of a great people, who were not known beyond the
+limits of their own country in contemporaneous history only because
+there was no contemporaneous history, and of those who came thousands of
+years later. The isle of Rodda, between the two banks of the Nile at
+Cairo, marks where Moses was found in the bulrushes; a church covers the
+stones upon which Mary and Joseph rested; in the city of Alexandria is
+the spot where Alexander the Great scratched his name upon the sands of
+Egypt; the mouldering walls of Old Cairo are the souvenirs of Cæsar, as
+are the monuments upon which the Egyptians carved his name with
+"Autocrator" after it. At Actium and Alexandria you think of Antony and
+of the two women, so widely opposed and so differently beautiful, whom
+Sarah Bernhardt and Julia Neilson re-embody to-day in Paris and in
+London, and to whom Shakespeare and Kingsley have paid tribute.
+Mansoorah marks the capture of Saint-Louis of France, and the crescent
+and star which is floating over Cairo at this minute speak of Osman
+Sultan Selim I., with whom began the dependence of Egypt as a part of
+the Ottoman Empire. From there you see the windmills and bake-ovens of
+Napoleon, which latter, stretching for miles across the desert, mark the
+march of his army. Abukir speaks of Nelson and the battle of the Nile;
+and after him come the less momentous names Tel-el-Kebir and "England's
+Only General," Wolseley, and the fall of Khartoom and the loss of
+Gordon. The history of Egypt is the history of the Old World.
+
+Moses, Rameses II., Darius, Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, Mehemet Ali, and
+Nelson--these are all good names; and yet what they failed to do is
+apparently being done to-day by an Army of Occupation without force, but
+with the show of it only: not by a single great military hero, but by a
+lot of men in tweed suits who during business hours irrigate land and
+add up columns of irritating figures, and in their leisure moments
+solemnly play golf at the very base of the pyramids. The best of Cairo
+lies, of course, in that which is old, and not in what has been imported
+from the New World, and its most amusing features are the incongruities
+which these importations make possible. I am speaking of Cairo now from
+a tourist's point of view, and not from that of a political economist.
+He would probably be interested in the improved sanitation and the Mixed
+Tribunal.
+
+[Illustration: BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS]
+
+I had pictured Cairo as an Oriental city of much color, with beautiful
+minarets piercing the sky-line, and with much richness of decoration on
+the outside of its palaces and mosques. Cairo is divided into two parts,
+that which is old and decaying and that which is European and modern;
+the prevailing colors of both are gray, a dull yellow, and white. The
+mosques are of gray stone, the houses of dirty white, and in the new
+part the palaces and residences remind one of white Italian villas.
+These are surrounded by tropical gardens, which alone save the city from
+one monotonous variation of sombre colors. It is not, therefore, the
+buildings, either new or old, which make Cairo one of the most
+picturesque and incongruous and entertaining of cities in the whole
+world; it is the people who live in it and who move about in it, and who
+are so constantly in the streets that from the Citadel above the city
+its roar comes to you like the roar of London. In that city it is the
+voice of traffic and steam and manufactures, but in Cairo it emanates
+from the people themselves, who talk and pray and shout and live their
+lives out-of-doors. These people are the natives, the European
+residents, the Army of Occupation, and, during the winter months, the
+tourists. When you say natives you include Egyptians, Arabians, Copts,
+Syrians, negroes from the Upper Nile, and about a hundred other
+subdivisions, which embrace every known nationality of the East.
+
+Mixed with these are the residents, chiefly Greek and French and Turks,
+and the Army of Occupation, who, when they are not in beautiful
+uniforms, are in effective riding-clothes, and their wives and sisters
+in men's shirts and straw hats or Karkee riding-habits. The tourists,
+for their part, wear detective cameras and ready-made ties if they are
+Americans, and white helmets and pugarees floating over their necks and
+white umbrellas if they are English. This latter tropical outfit is
+spoiled somewhat by the fact that they are forced to wear overcoats the
+greater part of the time; but as they always take the overcoats off when
+they are being photographed at the base of the pyramids, their envious
+friends at home imagine they are in a warm climate.
+
+The longer you remain in Cairo the more satisfying it becomes, as you
+find how uninterruptedly the old, old life of the people is going on
+about you, and as you discover for yourself bazars and mosques and tiny
+workshops and open cafés of which the guide-books say nothing, and to
+which there are no guides. You can see all the show-places in Cairo of
+which you have read in a week, and yet at the end of the week you feel
+as though what you had seen was not really the city, but just the goods
+in the shop-window. So keep away from show-places. Lose yourself in the
+streets, or sit idly on the terrace of your hotel and watch the show
+move by, feeling that the best of it, after all, lies in the fact that
+nothing you see is done for show; that it is all natural to the people
+or the place; that if they make pictures of themselves, they do so
+unconsciously; and that no one is posing except the tourist in his pith
+helmet.
+
+The bazars in Cairo cover much ground, and run in cliques according to
+the nature of the goods they expose for sale. From a narrow avenue of
+red and yellow leather shoes you come to another lane of rugs and
+curtains and cloth, and through this to an alley of brass--brass lamps
+and brass pots and brass table-tops--and so on into groups of
+bookbinders, and of armorers, and sellers of perfumes. These lanes are
+unpaved, and only wide enough at places for two men to push past at one
+time; at the widest an open carriage can just make its way slowly, and
+only at the risk of the driver's falling off his box in a paroxysm of
+rage. The houses and shops that overhang these filthy streets are as
+primitive and old as the mud in which you tramp, but they are
+fantastically and unceasingly beautiful. On the level of the street is
+the bazar--a little box with a show-case at one side, and at the back an
+oven, or a forge, or a loom, according to the nature of the thing which
+is being made before your eyes. Goldsmiths beat and blow on the raw
+metal as you stand at their elbow; bakers knead their bread; laundrymen
+squirt water over the soiled linen; armorers hammer on a spear-head,
+which is afterwards to be dug up and sold as an assegai from the Soudan;
+and the bookbinders to the Khedive paste and tool the leather boxes for
+his Highness with the dust from the street covering them and their work,
+with two dogs fighting for garbage at their feet, and the uproar of
+thousands of people ringing in their ears. The Oriental cannot express
+himself in the street without shouting. Everybody shouts--donkey-boys
+and drivers, venders of a hundred trifles, police and storekeepers,
+auctioneers and beggars. They do not shout occasionally, but
+continually. They have to shout, or they will either trample on some one
+or some one will as certainly trample on them. Camels and donkeys and
+open carriages and mounted police move through the torrent of
+pedestrians as though they were figures of the imagination, and had no
+feelings or feet. On the second story over each bazar is the home of its
+owner. The windows of this story are latticed, and bulge forward so that
+the women of the harem may look down without being themselves seen.
+Above these are square, heavy balconies of carved open wood-work, very
+old and very beautiful. Scattered through the labyrinth of the bazars
+are the mosques, with wide, dirty steps covered with the red and yellow
+shoes of the worshippers within, and with high minarets, and façades
+carved in relief with sentences from the Koran, or with the name of the
+Sultan to whom the temple is dedicated.
+
+[Illustration: GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL]
+
+The bazars are very much as one imagines they should be, the fact that
+impresses you most about them being, I think, that such beautiful things
+should come from such queer little holes of dirt and poverty, and that
+you should stand ankle-deep in mud while you are handling turquoises and
+gold filigree-work as delicate as that of Regent Street or Broadway. At
+the bazars to which the dragomen take tourists you will be invited to
+sit down on a cushion and to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, but you
+will pay, if you purchase anything, about a pound for each cup of coffee
+you take. The best bazars for bargains are those in Old Cairo, to which
+you should go alone. In either place it is the rule to offer one-third
+of what you are asked--as I found it was not the rule to do in
+Tangier--and it is not always safe to offer a third unless you want the
+article very much, as you will certainly get it at that price. You feel
+much more at home in the bazars and the cafés and in all of the
+out-of-door life of Cairo than in that of Tangier, owing to the
+good-nature of the Egyptian. The Moor resents your presence, and though
+that in itself is attractive, the absolute courtesy of the Egyptian,
+when it is not, as it seldom is, servility, has also its advantage. If
+you raised your stick to a Moorish donkey-boy, for instance, you would
+undoubtedly have as much rough-and-tumble fighting as you could attend
+to at one time; but you have to beat an Egyptian donkey-boy, or strike
+at him, or a dozen of him, if you want peace, and every time you hit him
+he comes up smiling, and with renewed assurances that the Flying
+Dutchman is a very good donkey, and that all the other donkeys are
+"velly sick." There is nothing so inspiring as the sight of a carefully
+bred American girl, who would feel remorse if she scolded her maid,
+beating eight or nine donkey-boys with her umbrella, until she breaks
+it, and so rides off breathless but triumphant. This shows that
+necessity knows no laws of social behavior.
+
+When you are weary of fighting your way through the noise and movement
+of the bazars, you can find equal entertainment on the terrace of your
+hotel. There are several hotels in Cairo. There is one to which you
+should certainly go if you like to see your name encompassed by those of
+countesses and princes, and of Americans who spell Smith with a "y" and
+put a hyphen between their second and third names. There are, as I say,
+a great many hotels in Cairo, but Shepheard's is so historical, and its
+terrace has been made the scene of so many novels, that all sorts of
+amusing people go there, from Sultans to the last man who broke the bank
+at Monte Carlo, and its terrace is like a private box at a mask ball.
+About the best way to see Cairo is in a wicker chair here under waving
+palms, something to smoke, and with a warm sun on your back, and the
+whole world passing by in front of you. Broadway, I have no doubt, is an
+interesting thoroughfare to those who do not know it. I should judge
+from the view one has of the soles of numerous boots planted against the
+windows of hotels along its course that Broadway to the visiting
+stranger is an infinite source of entertainment. But there are no camels
+on Broadway, and there are no sais.
+
+A camel by itself is one of the most interesting animals that has ever
+been created, but when it blocks the way of a dog-cart, and a smart
+English groom endeavors to drive around it, the incongruity of the
+situation appeals to you as nothing on Broadway can ever do. Mr.
+Laurence Hutton, who was in Cairo before I reached it, has pointed out
+that the camel is the real aristocrat of Egypt. The camel belongs to one
+of the very first families; he was there when Mena ruled, and he is
+there now. It does not matter to him whether it is a Pharaoh or a
+Mameluke or a Napoleon or a Mixed Tribunal that is in power, his gods
+are unchanged, and he and the palm-tree have preserved their ancient
+individuality through centuries. He shows that he knows this in the
+proud way in which he holds his head, and in his disdainful manner of
+waving and unwinding his neck, and in the rudeness with which he impedes
+traffic and selfishly considers his own comfort. These are the signs of
+ancient lineage all the world over. He is not the shaggy, moth-eaten
+object we see in the circus tent at home. He is nicely shaven, like a
+French poodle, and covered with fine trappings, and he bends and struts
+with the dignity of a peacock. He possesses also that uncertainty of
+conduct that is the privilege of a royal mind; fellahin and Arabs
+pretend they are his masters, and lead him about with a rope, but that
+never disturbs him nor breaks his spirit. When he wants to lie down he
+lies down, whether he is in the desert or in the Ezbekiyeh Road; and
+when he decides to get up he leaves you in doubt for some feverish
+seconds as to which part of him will get up first. To properly
+appreciate the camel you should ride him and experience his getting up
+and his sitting down. He never does either of these things the same way
+twice. Sometimes he breaks one leg in two or three places where it had
+never broken before, and sinks or rises in a northeasterly direction,
+and then suddenly changes his course and lurches up from the rear, and
+you grasp his neck wildly, only to find that he is sinking rapidly to
+one side, and rising, with a jump equal to that of a horse taking a
+fence, in the front. He can disjoint himself in more different places,
+than explorers have found sources for the river Nile, and there is no
+keener pleasure than that which he affords you in watching the
+countenance of a friend who is being elevated on his back for the first
+time. He and the palm-tree can make any landscape striking, and he and
+the sais are the most picturesque features of Cairo.
+
+The sais is a runner who keeps in front of a carriage and warns common
+people out of the way, and who beats them with a stick if they do not
+hurry up about it. He is a relic of the days when the traffic in all of
+the streets was so congested that he was an absolute necessity; now he
+makes it possible for a carriage to move forward at a trot, which
+without his aid it could not do. It is obvious that to do this he must
+run swiftly. Most men when they run bend their bodies forward and keep
+their mouths closed in order to save their wind. The sais runs with his
+shoulders thrown back and trumpeting like an enraged elephant. He holds
+his long wand at his side like a musket, and not trailing in his hand
+like a walking-stick, and he wears a soft shirt of white stuff, and a
+sleeveless coat buried in gold lace. His breeches are white, and as
+voluminous as a woman's skirts; they fall to a few inches above his
+knee; the rest of his brown leg is bare, and rigid with muscle. On his
+head he has a fez with a long black tassel, and a magnificent silk scarf
+of many colors is bound tightly around his waist. He is a perfect ideal
+of color and movement, and as he runs he bellows like a bull, or roars
+as you have heard a lion roar at feeding-time in a menagerie. It is not
+a human cry at all, and you never hear it, even to the last day of your
+stay in Cairo, without a start, as though it were a cry of "help!" at
+night, or the quick-clanging bell of a fire-engine. There is nothing
+else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are sometimes two sais
+running abreast, dressed exactly alike, and with the upper part of their
+bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their side, and with the
+ends of their scarf and the long tassel streaming out behind. As they
+yell and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people scramble out of their
+way until the carriage they precede has rolled rapidly by. Only
+princesses of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the heads of the
+Army of Occupation and the Egyptian army are permitted two sais; other
+people may have one. They appealed to me as much more autocratic
+appendages than a troop of lifeguards. The rastaquouère who first
+introduces them in Paris will make his name known in a day, and a Lord
+Mayor's show or a box-seat on a four-in-hand will be a modest and
+middle-class distinction in comparison.
+
+[Illustration: A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS]
+
+These camels and sais are but two of the things you see from your wicker
+chair on the marble terrace at Shepheard's. The others are hundreds of
+donkey-boys in blue night-gowns slit open at the throat and showing
+their bare breasts, and with them as many long-eared donkeys, rendered
+even more absurd than they are in a state of nature by fantastic
+clippings of their coats and strings of jangling brass and blue beads
+around their necks.
+
+There are also the women of Cairo, the enslaved half of Egypt, who have
+been brought, through generations of training and tradition, to look
+upon any man save their husband as their enemy, as a thing to be
+shunned. This has become instinct with them, as it is instinctive with
+women of Northern countries to turn to men for sympathy or support, as
+being in some ways stronger than themselves. But these women of Cairo,
+who look like an army of nuns, are virtually shut off from mankind, with
+the exception of one man, as are nuns, and they have not the one great
+consolation allowed the nun--they have no souls to be saved, nor
+religion, nor a belief in a future life.
+
+There was a young girl married while I was in Cairo. The streets around
+the palace of her father were hung with flags for a week; the garden
+about his house was enclosed with a tent which was worth in money twenty
+thousand dollars, and which was as beautiful to the eye as the interior
+of a mosque; for a week the sheiks who rented the estates of the high
+contracting parties were fed at their expense; for a week men sang and
+bands played and the whole neighborhood feasted; and on the last night
+everybody went to the wedding and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and
+listened to a young man singing Arabian love-songs. I naturally did not
+see the bride. The women who did see her described her as very
+beautiful, barely sixteen years old, and covered with pearls and
+diamonds. She was weeping bitterly; her mother, it appeared, had
+arranged the match. I did not see her, but I saw the bridegroom. He was
+fat and stupid, and over sixty, and he had white hair and a white beard.
+A priest recited the Koran before him at the door of the house, and a
+band played, and the people cheered the Khedive three times, and then
+the crowd parted, and the bridegroom was marched to the door which led
+to the stairs, at the top of which the girl awaited him. Two grinning
+eunuchs crouched on this dark staircase, with lamps held high above
+their heads, and closed the door behind him. His sixteen-year-old bride
+has him to herself now--him and his eunuchs--until he or she dies. We
+could show similitudes between this wedding and some others in civilized
+lands, but it is much too serious a matter to be cynical about.
+
+The women of Egypt are as much slaves as ever were the negroes of our
+South. They are petted and fattened and given a home, but they must look
+at life through barriers--barriers across their boxes at the opera, and
+barriers across the windows of their broughams when they drive abroad,
+and barriers across their very faces. As long as one-half of the
+Egyptian people are enslaved and held in bondage and classed as animals
+without souls, so long will an Army of Occupation ride over the land,
+and insult by its presence the khedival power. No country in these days
+can be truly great in which the women have no voice, no influence, and
+no respect. There are worse things in Egypt than bad irrigation, and the
+harem is the worst of them. If the Egyptians want to be free themselves,
+they should first free their daughters and their mothers. The educated
+Egyptian is ashamed of his national costume; but let him feel shame for
+some of his national customs. A frock-coat and a harem will not go
+together.
+
+The English, who have done so many fine things for Egypt's good, and who
+keep an army there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that any slave
+who comes to the office of the Consul-General and claims his protection
+can have it; but these slaves of the married men are not granted even
+this chance of escape.
+
+And so they live like birds in a cage. They eat and dress and undress,
+and expose their youth and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness,
+until they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago was, "Egypt for
+the Egyptians," and a very good cry it was, although the wrong man first
+started it. But there was another cry raised in the land of Egypt many
+hundreds of years before of "Let my people go," and the woman who can
+raise that again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of the East,
+will be doing a greater work than any woman is doing at the present time
+or has ever done.
+
+The women who pass before you in the procession at the foot of the
+terrace are of two classes only. There is no middle class in Egypt. The
+poor are huddled up in a black bag that hides their bodies from the
+crown of the head to the feet. What looks like the upper end of a black
+silk stocking falls over the face from the bridge of the nose and
+fastens behind the ears, and a brass tube about the size of a spool is
+tied between the eyes. You see in consequence nothing but their eyes,
+and as these are perhaps their best feature, they do not all suffer from
+their enforced disguise. The only women whose bare faces you can see,
+and from whom you may judge of the beauty of the rest, are the good
+women of the Coptic village, who form a sort of sisterhood, and the
+dancing-girls, who are not so good. Some of these have the straight
+nose, the narrow eyes, and the perfect figure of Cleopatra, as we
+picture her; but the faces of the majority are formless, with broad, fat
+noses, full lips, and their figures are without waists or hips, and
+their ankles are as round as a man's upper arm. When they are pretty
+they are very pretty, but those that are so are so few and are so
+covered with gold that one suspects they are very much the exception. Of
+the women of the upper class you see only a glimpse as they are swept by
+in their broughams, with the sais in front and a eunuch on the box and
+the curtains half lowered.
+
+[Illustration: SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS
+
+(From a Photograph taken on the top of the Pyramid just before sunset)]
+
+Besides these, much passes that is intended for your especial
+entertainment. Sellers of turquoises, which they dig out from various
+creases in their robes; venders of stuffed crocodiles and live monkeys;
+strange men from the desert with a jackal, which they throw, bound by
+all four legs, and snarling and snapping, on the marble at your feet;
+little girls who sing songs, and play accompaniments to them on their
+throats with the tips of their fingers; women conjurers, who draw
+strings of needles and burning flax from their mouths, and who swallow
+nasty little wriggling snakes, and hatch pretty fluffy little chickens
+out of the slabs of the terrace. Or else there is a troop of blue and
+white Egyptian soldiers marching by, or gorgeous young officers on polo
+ponies, or red-coated Tommies on donkeys, with their toes trailing in
+the dust and the ribbons of their Scotch caps floating out behind; and
+consuls-general with gorgeous guards in gold lace, and with
+wicked-looking curved silver swords; or the young Khedive himself, who
+comes with a great clatter of hoofs and bellowing sais before, and
+another galloping troop of cavalry in the rear, at the sound of which
+the people run to the curb and touch the fez, as he raises his hand to
+his, and rolls by in a cloud of dust.
+
+There are very good things to see, and with a companion on one side to
+explain them, and another on the other side to whom you can impart this
+information as though you had been born knowing it, you cannot spend a
+more entertaining afternoon. There is only one drawback, and that is a
+lurking doubt that you should be up and about seeing the show-places.
+Friday, in consequence, is the best day in Cairo, as all the things you
+ought to see are then closed, and you can sit still on the terrace with
+a clear conscience. Among the mosques and the tombs and the palaces and
+museums to which all good tourists go, and of which there are excellent
+descriptions, giving their various dimensions and other particulars, in
+the guide-books, there are the Citadel and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali.
+The Citadel is the fortress built on the hill above the city, but which,
+with the Oriental incompleteness of that time, was reared upon high but
+not upon the highest ground. The sequel to this naturally was that when
+Mehemet Ali wanted the city of Cairo he sought out the highest ground,
+and dropped cannon-balls into the fortress until it capitulated. He
+afterwards asked all the Mamelukes to dinner at the Citadel, and then
+had them treacherously killed--all but one, who rode his horse down the
+side of the Citadel and escaped. If you can imagine the reservoir at
+Forty-second Street placed upon the top of Madison Square Garden, and a
+man riding down the side of it, you can understand what a very difficult
+and dangerous thing this was to do. There is no doubt that he did it,
+for I saw a picture of him in the very act in a book of history when I
+was at school, and I also have seen the marks of his horse's hoofs in
+the stone parapet of the Citadel, and they are just as fresh as they
+were three years ago, when they were on the other side.
+
+The Mosque of Mehemet Ali surmounts the Citadel, and its twin minarets
+are the distinguishing mark of Cairo; they are as conspicuous for miles
+above the city as is the dome of St. Paul's over London, and they are as
+light and graceful as it is impressive and heavy. The men on guard tie
+big yellow shoes on your feet before they allow you to enter this
+mosque, the outer court-yard of which is floored with alabaster, over
+which you slide as though you were on a mirror or a sheet of ice. It is
+very beautiful, and one is as unwilling to walk on it as to tramp in
+muddy boots over a satin train. The floor of the mosque is covered with
+the most magnificent rugs, as wide-spreading as a sheet and as heavy as
+so much gold; alabaster pillars reach to the top of the square, empty
+building, and from these rise five domes, colored blue and red, and
+lightened with gilded letters. It is very rich-looking, gloomy, silent,
+and impressive. It is the best of the mosques. From the outside, on the
+ramparts, you can see Cairo stretching out below for miles in a level
+gray jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slender minarets, with
+the high walls of a palace here and the thick green of a park there to
+break the monotony; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting ribbon of
+silver; and beyond that rich green fields and canals and bunches of
+palm-trees; and seven miles away, where the green ceases and the desert
+begins, are three monuments of gray stone, looking, at that distance,
+disappointingly small and familiarly commonplace. It is not, I think,
+until you have seen them several times, and have climbed to their top
+and gazed up at them from below, that you appreciate the pyramids as you
+had expected to appreciate them; but after they have laid their charm
+upon you, you will find yourself twisting your neck to take another
+look, or going out of your way to see them again before the sun has said
+good-night to them, as it has done ever since it first climbed over the
+edge of the world and found them waiting there.
+
+There is a mosque on the outside of the city which people visit on
+certain days to see the howling dervishes go through their peculiar form
+of worship. This mosque consists of four square walls with a dome. It is
+whitewashed within, and bare and rude and old. The sunlight enters it
+through square holes cut in the dome, and beats upon thirty or forty men
+who stand in a semicircle facing the East. They are of all sorts, from
+Arabs of the desert with long hair and wild eyes, to fat,
+pleased-looking merchants from the bazars, and the beggars and
+water-carriers of the streets. Around them on chairs are the tourists
+and the residents, like the spectators at a play rather than the guests
+of a religious sect watching a religious ceremony. Most of the men wear
+their hats, and some of the women take careful notes and make sketches.
+They reminded me of medical students at a clinic when a man is being cut
+up. An archdeacon from one of our Western cities wore his hat, to show,
+probably, that he disapproved of the whole thing; but as he used to eat
+with his knife while on board the _Fulda_, his conduct in any place was
+not to be considered. The priest recites something from the Koran, and
+the men repeat it, moving their bodies back and forward as they do so
+with gradually increasing rapidity. What they may be saying is quite
+unintelligible, and the chorus they make resembles that of no human
+sound, but rather the gasping or panting of an animal. It is to the
+visitor absolutely without any religious significance; all that is
+impressive about it is its horrible earnestness and its at times
+repulsive results. As the voice of the priest grows more accentuated the
+bodies of the men swing farther and lower, until their hair sweeps the
+floor, and their eyes, when they throw their bodies back, are on a
+level with those of the spectators. A drum beats in quickening time to
+the voice of the priest and to the gasps of the dervishes, and a flute
+playing a weird accompaniment seems to mock at their fierce grunts and
+breathings. It was one of the most unpleasant exhibitions I ever
+witnessed, and affected one's nerves to such a degree that several of
+the women had to leave. The eyes of the men rolled in their sockets, and
+their lips parted, and through their clinched teeth came fiercer and
+louder gasps, until the chorus of sound reached you like the quick
+panting of an engine as it draws out of a station. The sweat ran from
+them like water from a sponge, and the veins stood out on their faces,
+showing in congested knots beneath the skin. Some of them groaned, and
+others shrieked and cried out, "Allah! Allah!" This acted like the
+strokes of a whip on the others, who rocked more and more violently, and
+swung themselves almost off their feet. Then, as the music grew fainter
+the motion of the bending bodies grew less vigorous and finally ceased,
+and the men stood rigid, some apparently unmoved and unconcerned, and
+others turning and reeling in a fit.
+
+While this was going forward, and you felt as though you were assisting
+at a heathen rite in which self-punishment was being inflicted as a bid
+for God's indulgence, two interesting things happened. An officer in the
+English Army of Occupation turned to his dragoman and cried at the top
+of his voice, angrily: "Do you call this worth ten piasters? Well, I
+don't. Now if you've got anything to show me, take me to see it. This
+isn't worth coming to see. You're a rank impostor."
+
+[Illustration: A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID]
+
+The other thing was the act of a native woman, who brought her child to
+the door and handed it to a priest, who took it in his arms and passed
+with it in front of the swinging, gasping, crazy semicircle of men. The
+child was about three years old, and was dying, and the mother had
+brought it there to be cured by the breath of the dervishes. As it
+passed before them, the hair of some of the men swept its arm, and it
+turned its frightened eyes up to those of the priest, who smiled gravely
+down upon the baby and bore him outstretched in his arms three times in
+front of the swinging crescent. The faith of the child's mother appealed
+to some of us more than did the Englishman's desire to get his money's
+worth. The incident is only of interest here as showing perhaps why the
+Army of Occupation is not as popular as it might be. This officer was no
+doubt an excellent soldier--the ribbons on his tunic showed that--and no
+one would have thought of questioning his ability to handle raw recruits
+or his knowledge of tactics. But in handling the Egyptian tactics do not
+count for so much as tact.
+
+There are several ways of reaching the pyramids, and it is eminently in
+keeping with the other incongruities of the place and time that the most
+popular way of visiting them is on a four-in-hand coach, with a guard in
+a red coat and a bell-shaped white beaver tooting on his horn, and a
+young gentleman with a boutonnière and an unhappy smile holding the
+reins and working his way in and out between long strings of camels.
+There is a very smart hotel about two hundred yards from the foot of the
+pyramids, and you take a donkey there or a camel and ride up a sandy
+road to the base of the Pyramid of Cheops. There are then several things
+that you may do. You can either climb to the top of this first pyramid,
+or crawl into its interior, or walk over to see the Sphinx, or make a
+tour of subterranean tombs and passageways of alabaster and polished
+stones, which are lighted for you by magnesium wire or stumps of
+candles.
+
+It seems absurd to say that the Sphinx is disappointing, but so many who
+have seen it say so that I feel I am one of many, and not individually
+lacking in reverence or imagination. In the first place, the approach to
+it is bad; you come at the Sphinx not from the front, but from the rear,
+where all you can see of it is a round ball of crumbling stone spreading
+out from a neck of broken outline, much smaller and meaner than you had
+imagined it would be. In the second place, instead of looking up at it,
+or having it look down at you, you view it first from a semicircular
+ridge of sand, at the bottom of which it reposes, and at such a near
+view that whatever outline or character of countenance it once possessed
+is lost. I have seen photographs of the Sphinx, taken while I was in
+Cairo, much more impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a hollow of
+the sand hills as it does, the farther you move away from it in order to
+get a better focus, the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to it
+it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a theatre when you are on
+the wrong side of the foot-lights. I know that that is an unpopular
+thing to say, and that there are many who feel thrills when they first
+look upon the face of the Sphinx, and who describe their emotions to you
+at length, and who write down their impressions in their diaries when
+they get back to the hotel. But they have come a long way expecting to
+be thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappointed. Some of the
+sphinxes in the museum of Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the
+pyramids, impressed me more than did the one great Sphinx, though they
+were indoors and surrounded by attendants and the cheap decoration of
+the museum, once a palace for the harem. They were of green stone and of
+huge proportions, and with "the curling lip and sneer of cold command";
+and if you look at them long enough you feel uncomfortable shivers down
+your back, and a perfectly irrational impulse to rush at them and beat
+them in the face and force them to tell you what they know and what they
+have kept back and have been keeping back for centuries and centuries.
+Their faces show that they know all that we know and much besides that
+we shall never know, and when the world at last comes to an end they
+will stretch themselves and smile at one another and say: "Now _they_
+know it, but we knew it all the while. We could have told had we liked,
+but we have enjoyed watching them fretting and fuming and prying about
+and tinkering at our faces with their little hammers, and blowing us up
+with saltpetre only to try and put us back again with steam. We who have
+kept our secret from Herodotus and Cæsar, are we likely to give it up to
+Ebers and Mark Twain?"
+
+But this same Sphinx by moonlight impressed me more than did anything I
+saw in the East. Not as one sees it by day, with tourists and
+photographers and donkey-boys making it cheap and familiar, but at
+night, when the tourists had gone to bed, and the donkey-boys had been
+paid to keep out of sight, and the moonlight threw the great negro face
+and the pyramids back of it into shadows of black and lines of silver,
+and the yellow desert stretched away on either side so empty and silent
+that I thought I was alone and back two thousand years in the past,
+discovering the great monuments for myself, and for the first time.
+
+Before you ascend the Pyramid of Cheops you must deal with a middle-man
+in the person of the sheik of the pyramids, who selects guides for you,
+and who acts as though the pyramids were his private show, and he was
+both sole proprietor and ticket-taker at the door. He lives in a village
+near by, and he and his forefathers have always been allowed a monopoly
+of the pyramids, and distribute their patronage to those guides who will
+pay them the highest percentage of what they receive from the visitors.
+You have three men to help you, two to pull, and one to push and to
+dilate on the view. It takes over ten minutes to climb to the top, with
+the men jerking at your wrists, and the third man shoving you from
+below. It is not a difficult feat, and women accomplish it every day,
+but it leaves you in a breathless state when you reach the summit, and
+you are stiff above the knees for a day or two after you have come down.
+When you have reached the summit the guides cheer feebly to give you the
+idea that you have accomplished something which has often been
+attempted before, but never so successfully; but you are not deceived,
+and you do not feel like cheering yourself. The view is worth the climb,
+however, and the sight of the shadow of the pyramid, spreading out over
+the villages and canals below like a black cloud, impresses you more
+with its immensity than the fact that it is a hundred feet higher than
+the top of the Diana on the Madison Square Garden tower. I am sure of
+this fact, because the man who built the Madison Square Garden assured
+me of it between breaths on the summit of the pyramid. While you are
+resting, the thing to do is to pay one of the guides to attempt to run
+down the pyramid you are on, cross the heavy sand to the pyramid beyond,
+and reach its top in eight minutes. When you give the word he disappears
+with a bound and drops into space, skipping and jumping and growing
+smaller and smaller as he goes, until he looks like a fluttering
+handkerchief; and when he reaches the sand he is as small as a child of
+three, and his ascent of the other pyramid suggests a white pigeon
+shuffling up the steep roof of a barn. It is distinctly on his part a
+sporting thing to do. The descent of the pyramid is very much worse than
+going up, and you need to go very slowly, and not to look too often at
+the people crawling about like ants below. Only four men, however, in
+six years have slipped and fallen during this descent, and one of them
+had been drinking. They were all killed. The more you see of the
+pyramids the more you want to see of them, although I think one
+ascent is all perhaps you will care about taking; but their dignity and
+the wonder of their being where they are, and for so long, increases
+with every look at them. You cannot grow too familiar with the pyramids.
+They will not have it.
+
+[Illustration: DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO]
+
+On the road back from the Pyramids of Gizeh there are other pyramids
+within sight of Cairo, but these are those with which the Sphinx is
+associated. You will see here one of the most beautiful sights of Cairo,
+the dahabeeyahs on the Nile. They and their white sails, especially when
+they come wing and wing before the wind, are the most beautiful of
+floating objects, and when there are hundreds of them coming towards you
+in lessening perspective, with the sun shining on the sails, and the
+banks on either side alive and moving with the palms, the river Nile
+becomes the best part of Cairo.
+
+There is another place on the Nile which you should visit, and to which
+tourists seldom go. This is the isle of Rodda, on the bank of which
+Moses was found, and where you may see the Nilometer. This is a well
+about sixteen feet in diameter, connected by a channel with the Nile. It
+is made of masonry, and down one side there runs a column on which are
+inscribed ancient Arabian and Cufic numerals, or what answer for
+numerals. It was dug many centuries ago, and it marks the rising and
+falling of the river, and at the same time the prosperity or dismay of
+Egypt. When the tide begins to rise, this rude instrument is watched
+hourly, and the hopes of the people rise and fall as the muddy water
+moves up or down the narrow well. When it reaches a certain height the
+sheik in charge declares that the time has come for cutting the banks
+and irrigating the land. In ancient days the rate of taxation was
+determined by the height of the inundation, and it is said that the
+sheik in charge of the Nilometer is still under the influence of the
+government, to whose advantage it is to make the fellahin believe that
+the inundation is favorable. It was the engineers under Napoleon who
+discovered that the Nilometer was being tampered with, but there is no
+likelihood of its being abused to-day under the English, whose
+improvement of the irrigation of Egypt has been their best work, and for
+the fellahin's best good. But it is interesting, nevertheless, to look
+down into the old well, overgrown with vines and surrounded by ruin and
+crumbling walls and broken lattices, and to think that for centuries it
+brought news of famine or of plenty, and that it was, primitive as its
+construction is, the pulse of Egypt.
+
+The pulse of Egypt to-day is not shown in the mere rising or falling of
+a body of water. It is less primitive in its construction, and no one
+knows which way it is going to jump. In the next chapter I shall try to
+tell something of the men who have their fingers on Egypt's pulse, and
+who are agreed in only one thing--that there are too many fingers for
+Egypt's good.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT
+
+
+When the visitor to Cairo first grasps the extent of his own ignorance
+of Egypt, and appreciates that if he is to understand its monuments and
+the signs of past times about him he must study the history of the whole
+world for forty centuries, he is apt to retreat precipitately. Later, as
+a compromise, he proposes skipping thirty-nine centuries and limiting
+his researches to the study of the political and social conditions of
+Egypt during the last ten years. And when he begins jauntily on this he
+finds that all that has gone before, from Rameses II. to Mehemet Ali, is
+as simple as the line of Popes in comparison with the anomalies and
+intricacies of government that have arisen within the last decade. Yet
+the very intricacies of the subject give to this study a fascination
+entirely apart from its rare picturesqueness, and no matter what manner
+of man he may be, he cannot but find some side of the situation which
+appeals to him. If his mind be constituted like that of a ready reckoner
+he can revel in unravelling the intricacies of the Caisse and the Laws
+of Liquidation; if it is judicial, he can perhaps elucidate the powers
+of the Mixed Tribunal; if romantic, he has the career of Ismail, the
+most magnificent of patriots and profligate of monarchs; and if it turns
+towards adventure and the clash of arms, he can read of the heroic
+fanaticism of Fuzzy Wuzzy, the son of the Mahdi, of the futile mission
+of Gordon, of Stewart's march across the desert, and of the desperate
+valor of the fight at Aboo-Klea.
+
+But it is the paradoxical nature of Egypt's present situation which
+gives it its chief interest, and lends to it the peculiar fascination of
+a puzzle, or one of Whistler's witticisms. For, while Egypt is not free,
+as is Morocco, nor under a protectorate, as is Tunis, she is still free
+and still protected. She is free to coin money, to maintain an army, and
+to make treaties; and yet she pays six million dollars a year tribute to
+Turkey as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and her army that she is allowed
+to maintain is officered by English soldiers, whom she is also allowed
+to maintain. She may not pay out the money she is allowed to coin
+without the consent of foreigners; she cannot punish the man who steals
+this money, be he Greek, English, or American, without the approval of
+these foreigners; and her official language is that of one foreign
+power, her ostensible protector is another, and her real protector is
+still another, whose commands are given under the irritating disguise of
+"advice."
+
+[Illustration: EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS]
+
+Alfred Milner, the late under-secretary for finance in Egypt, whose
+_England in Egypt_ is the best book on the subject, though it reads like
+a novel, has put it in this way: "It is not given to mortal intelligence
+to understand at one blow the complexities of Turkish suzerainty and
+foreign treaty rights; to realize the various powers of interference and
+obstruction possessed by consuls and consuls-general, by commissioners
+of the public debt, and other mixed administrations; to distinguish
+English officers who are English from English officers who are Egyptian,
+foreign judges of the international courts from foreign judges of the
+native courts; to follow the writhings of the Egyptian government in its
+struggle to escape from the fine meshes of the capitulations; to
+appreciate precisely what laws that government can make with the consent
+of only six powers, and for what laws it requires the consent of no less
+than fourteen."
+
+It seems rather unfair to saddle the responsibility for all of these
+burdens and for this remarkable condition of affairs, which is
+unequalled in history, upon the shoulders of one man, but one man is
+responsible for it directly and indirectly. He is still alive, a hanger
+on at the court of the Sultan of Turkey, he who was at one time the most
+picturesque monarch of the world. Ismail Pasha became Khedive a little
+before the time of the close of our Civil War. Egypt had never been more
+prosperous than then--owing but fifteen million dollars. In 1876, when
+Ismail was deposed and his son Tewfik Pasha put in his place, he had
+increased the debt of Egypt to four hundred and forty-five million
+dollars. Ismail was a typical Oriental ruler; he had the typical
+Oriental ruler's French veneer and education, a combination which has
+been found to produce most serious results. When an Oriental is left
+alone he is a barbarian, or he used to be; now, after he has been made
+the talk of Paris for nine days, and has been given a state dinner at
+Marlborough House, and a few stars for his coat, and called "cousin," he
+goes home with no particular disgust for his former eccentricities of
+mis-government, but with a quiver full of new tastes, desires, and
+ambitions, and thereafter plays his rôle of monarch with one eye on the
+grand stands of Europe. He wants their good opinion, but he wants to get
+it in his own way--the old way. He begins to build railroads and
+hospitals, but he continues, after his past custom, to draw the money
+for such improvements from licensed gambling-houses or from the sale of
+opium. He has a French cook, but he retains the kurbash; he puts up
+telephones, but he does not give up the bowstring.
+
+[Illustration: RIAZ PASHA,
+
+Prime-minister of Egypt]
+
+Ismail was the first Khedive who discovered that the easiest way to get
+money is to borrow it. He found that all one has to do is to sign a
+paper, and you get the money. It was very easy for Ismail to borrow
+money, because the credit of Egypt was good and sound in itself, and
+because foreigners, who even at that time swarmed in Egypt, knew that
+the repudiation of debts, while possible in a powerful or free
+government, was not to be feared from that country. So there began a
+reign of extravagance for which history has no parallel. If "money
+breeds money," it is also true that those who spend money freely are
+given more chances to do so than any one else. Adventurers, charlatans,
+rascals of every climate and every nationality, swarmed down upon Cairo,
+and fought with one another for a chance to glut themselves at the
+repast which this reckless profligate spread for all comers. No man
+probably was ever so basely cheated as was Ismail, or on so magnificent
+a scale. And nothing remains but ruins to show where the money spent on
+his own personal pleasure was bestowed. That other magnificent
+reprobate, William M. Tweed, left monuments like the Court House to
+commemorate his thefts of public money; but Ismail's palaces are falling
+in pieces, the rain has washed the paint off the boards, the tips of the
+crescents are broken, and great gardens filled with fountains and
+mosaic paths are choked with weeds and covered with fallen leaves and
+the dirt and dust of neglect and decay. You can walk over long marble
+floors which have sunk by their own weight through the rotten
+foundations, and see yourself at full length in bleared mirrors
+surrounded by the gilt borders and blue silken curtains of the Second
+Empire. Ismail ordered these palaces as men order hats, and threw them
+away as you toss an empty cartridge from a gun-barrel. And that was all
+the most of them ever were, empty cartridges, mere shells of wood
+painted to look like marble, and gilding and mirrors, as tasteless as
+the buildings at the Centennial Exposition, and lasting as long.
+
+And yet they pleased him, and he ordered more and more, so that wherever
+his eye might rest it would fall upon a palace which would serve as a
+fitting covering for his royal person, and as a testimony to his
+magnificence. He wanted many, and he wanted them at once. He had them
+built at night by the light of candles. The Palace of Gizeh, which is
+now a museum, was reared in this way while Cairo slept, and at a cost of
+twenty-four million dollars. The curtains ordered for its windows cost
+one thousand dollars each, and when it was found that they did not fit
+the windows, the entire front of the building was torn down, and a new
+front with windows to match the curtains was put in its place. He built
+an opera-house as fine as that of Covent Garden in six months, and a
+grotto as dark and cool as the Mammoth Cave, with stalactites of painted
+rope and rocks of papier-maché and mud, with its sides lined with
+aquariums, in which swam strange fish. The wind and the dust play
+through this grotto to-day; for he no sooner reared a palace in air than
+he turned from it to some new toy. These are the things you can see. You
+can hear stories--some of them true, some of them possible--of things
+that are past, such as his swimming-tanks where a hundred of the slaves
+of the harem bathed together for his edification; the pie out of which,
+when it was opened, there stepped a ballet-dancer; and the story of the
+disappearance of the Pasha who grew too rich. This is, unfortunately, a
+true story, and not one out of the _Arabian Nights_. This Pasha was
+invited by Ismail to see a new dahabeeyah, and never returned. But one
+of the attendants on the Khedive came back some weeks later with his
+finger bitten off at the joint. He and Ismail alone know where the Pasha
+who was too rich has gone.
+
+These extravagances and these eccentricities were all in keeping with
+our idea of what an Oriental despot should be, but it would be most
+unfair and ungenerous to give only this side of Ismail's character. He
+was a man of much mind and of large ideas, as well as a man with the
+tastes of a voluptuary, and the means, for a time, of a Count of Monte
+Cristo. It was he who built the harbor of Alexandria; and the railways
+and canals that others have completed were started under his régime. All
+of these things--railroads, palaces, canals, and grottos made of
+mud--cost money; and there were other expenses. Knights of industry and
+rascals of all degrees extorted vast fortunes from him in indemnities
+for supposed failures on his part to keep up with his agreements, and to
+stick to the letter of concessions. Some of these, like the payment of
+fifteen million dollars to the Suez Canal Company, were just enough; but
+there was also an enormous sum given in backsheesh to Turkey to gain the
+consent of the Porte to a proposed change in the line of succession and
+the establishment of the rule of primogeniture. Up to that time the
+eldest male member of the ruling family had always succeeded to power,
+but Ismail obtained a firman from the Sultan allowing his son to follow
+him. The gratification of this natural vanity or love of family was not
+obtained for the asking, and cost his people dear. They were already
+groaning under a multitude of taxes; the army was unpaid; the
+bureaucracy was rotten throughout; bribery and extortion, unfair
+taxation, and open seizure of the property of others had reduced the
+country almost to bankruptcy. Ismail in sixteen years had brought about
+a state of things that threatened utter ruin, to not only the native,
+but to the strangers within and without the gates. The strangers made
+the move for reform. I have told this much of Ismail not because it is
+new or unfamiliar, but because it shows how, through his misrule, the
+foreign element was able to obtain a footing upon the shore of Egypt,
+which footing has now grown to a trampling under foot of what is native
+and properly Egyptian. This entering wedge was called the Dual Control,
+and France and England were appointed receivers for Egypt, just as we
+appoint receivers for a badly managed railroad, and Ismail was deposed,
+his son Tewfik taking his place.
+
+[Illustration: AN EGYPTIAN LANCER]
+
+But although this was the first important and most official recognition
+of the right of the stranger to dictate to Egypt, he had already
+obtained peculiar rights in Egypt through capitulations, or those
+privileges granted in the past to foreign residents in Turkey and its
+dependent state of Egypt. In the sixteenth century the foreigners who
+traded in these Oriental countries stood in actual need of protection
+from the natives. Because they were foreigners they were regarded with
+such lack of consideration that, in order to balance the disadvantages
+of having their shops destroyed and their throats cut, the Sultan gave
+them certain privileges--such as immunity from taxation, immunity from
+arrest, the inviolability of domicile, and the exemption from the
+jurisdiction of the local courts.
+
+These privileges were unimportant when the foreign element in
+Constantinople was so little and so weak that the position of the
+Chinamen in San Francisco in '49 was that of a powerful aristocracy in
+comparison; but the snake warmed at the hearth-stone grew, and the
+Sultan's empire dwindled, and the privileges which were given to bribe
+the foreigner to come and to remain became a bane to Turkey and a curse
+to the weaker state of Egypt. The inviolability of domicile, for
+instance, is at this very day made use of by foreigners who are carrying
+on some wickedness or who have committed a crime for which they cannot
+be arrested by an Egyptian policeman unless he is accompanied by an
+official representative of the country to which the foreigner belongs.
+Let us suppose, for example, that the police of New York wished to raid
+a gambling-house. This, I know, is asking a good deal of the reader's
+intelligence, but we will suppose it to be a gambling-house which has
+not paid its assessment to the police regularly, and which should be
+given a lesson. All that the proprietor of the house would have to do,
+did capitulations extend in New York, would be to lease the house to an
+Italian, or to take out papers of naturalization from the British
+government. You can imagine the chagrin of an officer of the law who,
+when he goes to make an arrest, is confronted with a German who says he
+is an Englishman, and whose domicile is accordingly sacred. This, as you
+can imagine, would impede the wheels of justice.
+
+When I was in Cairo a Greek, who had taken out papers as an American
+citizen, flaunted this fact in the faces of the native police whenever
+they came to arrest him for keeping a gambling-house. They applied to
+our consul-general, Mr. E. C. Little, of Abilene, Kansas, who so far
+differed from the etiquette observed by some other consuls-general in
+Cairo as not to delay and not to warn the criminal. He sent his soldiers
+to be present at the arrest. The offender met this by bringing forth
+another American citizen of Greek parentage, to whom he claimed to have
+leased the house, and whose family were inside. Mr. Little, feeling that
+the American flag did not look well as a cloak for gambling-houses, and
+being a young man who has assisted at county-seat fights and who can
+pitch three curves, said that if the roulette tables were not out of the
+house in twenty-four hours he would himself break them into
+kindling-wood with an axe. This incident shows how the capitulations of
+the sixteenth century are acting as stumbling-blocks to the Egyptian of
+to-day, even when the consuls-general are willing to assist the native
+government, which is seldom.
+
+[Illustration: TIGRANE PASHA,
+
+Minister of Foreign Affairs]
+
+This is not all. The immunity from full taxation, now that the
+foreigners are among the richest inhabitants of Cairo, is most
+manifestly unjust; and though the mixed courts of an international
+judiciary have done away with trial of the foreign resident, or lack of
+trial, in civil cases, by the several consuls-general, the abuses of the
+capitulations are still a grievous and most unjust imposition by the
+great powers, ourselves included, upon a weaker one. To return to the
+Dual Control and to the story of the growth of the foreigners' hold on
+Egypt. The Dual Control was unpopular; so was the foreigner and his
+capitulations, who, waxing fat on the weaknesses of the country after
+Ismail's debauchery of its strength, grew insolent--so insolent that the
+cry raised by a general in the Khedive's army of "Egypt for the
+Egyptians" was taken up, and found expression in the Arabist movement or
+rebellion. Its leader was Arabi Pasha. He wanted what the Know-Nothing
+party of America wanted--his country for his countrymen. What else he
+wanted for himself does not matter here. He was, in the eyes of the
+Khedive, a rebel. In the eyes of some of the people he was the would-be
+preserver of his country against the plague of the foreign invasion.
+
+The trouble began at Alexandria, where the excited people attacked the
+foreign residents, killing some, and destroying valuable property.
+Men-of-war of the two powers represented in the Dual Control had already
+arrived to put down the rebellion. When the riot on shore was at its
+height, the English war-vessels bombarded the city. The bombarding of
+Alexandria was war, but it was not magnificent. There are certain things
+made to be bombarded--forts and ships of war--but cities are not built
+for that purpose or with that ultimate end in view. The English people,
+as a people, however, regret the bombardment of Alexandria as much as
+any one. The French war-vessels, for their part, refused to join the
+bombardment, and so were requested by the English admiral to sail away
+and give the other half of the Dual Control a clear field. Different
+people give you different reasons for the departure of the French fleet
+at this crisis. Some say that M. Clemenceau, who hated M. Freycinet and
+his policy, possibly raised the cry of the German wolf on the frontier,
+and pointed out the danger at home if the army and navy were engaged
+otherwise than in protecting the border. Others say that, like the good
+one of the two robbers in the _Babes in the Wood_, one of the Dual
+Control drew the line at murder or at the bombardment of a country she
+was supposed to protect. Plundering the Egyptians was possible, but not
+bombarding their city. They stopped at that. The English followed up the
+bombardment of Alexandria by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, which ended the
+rebellion. The Citadel of Cairo surrendered at their approach, and the
+Khedive's rule was again undisturbed. The English remained, however, to
+"restore order," and to see to the "organization of proper means for the
+maintenance of the Khedive's authority." They have been doing that now
+for ten years, and it is interesting to note that they have made so
+little progress that the last "disorder" in Cairo was due to the action
+of the British consul-general himself in allowing the young Khedive just
+twenty-four hours in which to dismiss one of his cabinet. This can
+hardly be described as "maintaining the authority of the Khedive," which
+the English had promised to do.
+
+[Illustration: A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA]
+
+After the battle of Tel-el-Kebir Great Britain stood undoubtedly in the
+position of the savior of the Khedive if not of Egypt. Her soldiers had
+crushed the rebellion, and as she had sent her Only General and one of
+the royal family and many thousands of good men to do it, and as she had
+lost not only men, but money, she thought she deserved something in
+return. The something she has taken in return has been taken gradually,
+and is the control of Egypt at the present day. It is possible that had
+the English not lost many more men and much more money in the campaign
+in the Soudan, which followed immediately after the suppression of
+Arabi, they might not have gone so far as they have gone in settling
+themselves in Egypt. But there was a not unnatural feeling that the
+Soudan campaign, which had cost so much, and which was a failure in all
+but in showing the bravery of the British troops, ought to be paid for,
+or made up to the English in some way. I should like to go into the
+story of this most picturesque and heroic of campaigns, but it would
+require a book by itself. Its history is briefly this: The religious
+and military chieftain known as "the Mahdi," shortly after the defeat of
+Arabi, threatened all Egypt from the Soudan, which rose under his
+leadership. General Hicks, an Englishman, with ten thousand men, in the
+service of the Khedive, was sent against him. He was killed, and most of
+the troops with him. The English, who were at that time the only power
+in Egypt with authority of any sort back of it, and who were virtually
+in control, felt that they should take the responsibilities of their
+position as well as its benefits, and avenge the massacre, drive back
+the Mahdi's forces, and, if possible, crush him and them for all time.
+The campaign was later further complicated by the presence at Khartoom
+of Major-General C. G. Gordon, who had gone there to lead back in safety
+the Egyptian troops still remaining in the Soudan. He was, after his
+arrival at Khartoom, virtually a prisoner at that place, which is a mud
+city on the banks of the Nile far above the fifth cataract. The attempts
+to rescue him and to suppress the Mahdi were equally unsuccessful.
+
+This is, in a few words, the story of a campaign which has been
+unequalled within the last twenty years in picturesqueness, heroism, and
+dramatic surprises. It had been said that the old days of personal
+bravery, of hand-to-hand slaughter, and of the attack and defence of man
+against man, were at an end; that owing to the new weapons of war, by
+which an enemy can be attacked when several miles distant from the
+attacking party, when the pressing of an electric button destroys an
+army corps, and when turning a handle will send three hundred bullets a
+minute into a mass of infantry, the necessity for personal courage was
+over. But seldom in history has there been as fierce personal encounters
+as in the Soudan, or as unusual methods of warfare. On the one hand were
+the naked supporters of the Mahdi, armed with their spears and knives,
+and protected only by bull-hide shields, but actuated by a religious
+fanaticism that drove them exulting at their enemies, and with no fear
+of death, but with the belief that through it they would gain joyous and
+proud immortality. Against them were the British troops, outnumbered ten
+to one, with hundreds of miles of sandy desert before, behind, and on
+every side of them, cut off from communication with the outside world,
+in a country barren and unfamiliar, and attacked by tens of thousands,
+who came when they pleased and where they pleased, rising as swiftly as
+a sand-storm rises, and disappearing again as suddenly into the desert.
+
+When I was in Cairo I was told of one of the Mahdi's men who continually
+rushed at a British square during an engagement holding his shield clear
+of his body as he advanced to throw a spear, and then retreated again.
+This looked like the worst form of foolhardiness to the English, until
+they saw that he was protecting with his shield his little boy, who was
+hiding behind it, and that when the chance offered, this child, who
+could not have been more than seven, and who was as naked of protection
+as his father, would throw a spear of his own. The father was wounded
+four times, but each time the bullet struck him he only shook himself,
+as a dog shakes off water, and once more rushed forward. When he fell
+for the last time the boy tumbled across him, unconscious from a wound
+in his thigh. The surgeons dressed this wound and bandaged it; but when
+the child came to and saw what they had done, he leaped up and tore the
+clothes from around him, and then, as the blood from the reopened wound
+ran out, fell over backwards dead. The English officer who told this
+story asked if fighting such men could be considered agreeable work from
+any point of view.
+
+[Illustration: H. H. ABBAS II.
+
+Khedive of Egypt]
+
+But the Soudan is only of interest here as showing how, having lost so
+much through it, the British did not feel more inclined than before to
+evacuate Egypt, although there were many who thought, as a few still
+think, that Egypt has cost them too much already, and more than they can
+ever get back. The loss of Gordon was perhaps the disaster of all the
+most keenly felt. How keenly is shown partly by the statue the English
+have placed to him in Trafalgar Square, surrounded by their kings and
+greatest generals. It shows him with one foot placed on the battlement
+of Khartoom, with his arms folded, and with the head thrown slightly
+forward, looking out, as he had done for so many weary months, for the
+relief that came too late. This monument is a reproach to those whose
+uncertainty of mind and purpose cost Gordon his life. It was doing a
+brave thing to put it up in a public place, being, as it is, a standing
+reminder of the neglect and half-heartedness that lost a valuable life,
+and one that had been risked again and again for his country. It is not
+only a monument to General Gordon, but to the English people, who have
+had the courage to admit in bronze and stone that they were wrong.
+
+For the last ten years the English have been as tardy in getting out of
+Egypt as they were in going after Gordon into the Soudan. They have
+repeatedly declared their intention of evacuating the country, not only
+in answer to questions in the House, but in answer to the inquiries of
+foreign powers. But they are still there. They have not been idle while
+there, and they have accomplished much good, and have brought benefits
+innumerable to Egypt. They have improved her systems of irrigation, upon
+which the prosperity of the land depends, have strengthened her army,
+have done away with the corvee, or tax paid on labor, and with the
+kurbash, or whip used in punishment, and, what is much the most
+wonderful, they have brought her out of ruin into such a condition of
+prosperity that she not only pays the interest on her enormous debt, but
+has a little left over for internal improvements. There has also been a
+marked change for the better in the condition of the courts of justice,
+and there has been an extension of a railroad up the Nile as far as
+Sirgeh.
+
+But the English to-day not only want credit for having done all this,
+but they want credit for having done it unselfishly and without hope or
+thought of reward, and solely for the good of mankind and of Egypt in
+particular. They remind me of those of the G. A. R. who not only want
+pensions and medals, but to be considered unselfish saviors of their
+country in her hour of need. There is no reason why a man should not be
+held in honor for risking his life for his country's sake, and honors,
+if he wants them, should be heaped upon him, but not money too. He
+either served his country because he was loyal and brave, or because he
+wanted money in return for taking certain risks. Let him have either the
+honors or the money, but he should not be so greedy as to want both.
+England has made a very good thing out of Egypt, and she has not yet got
+all she will get, but she wants the world to forget that and look upon
+her as an unselfish and enlightened nation that is helping a less
+prosperous and less powerful people to get upon their feet again. Of
+course it is none of our business (at least it is our policy to say so)
+when England stalks forth like a roaring lion seeking what she may
+devour all over the world. Americans travel chiefly upon the Continent,
+and unless they go into out-of-the-way corners of the world they have no
+idea how little there is left of it that has not been seized by the
+people of Great Britain. For my own part I find one grows a little tired
+of getting down and sailing forth and landing again always under the
+shadow of the British flag. If the United States should begin with
+Hawaii and continue to annex other people's property, we should find
+that almost all of the best corner lots and post-office sites of the
+world have been already pre-empted. Senator Wolcott once said to Senator
+Quay: "I understand, Quay, you want the chairmanship of the Library
+Committee. You seem to want the earth; if you don't look out you will
+interfere with my plans."
+
+If the United States had taken away the little princess's island from
+her and continued to plunder weaker nations, she would have found that
+England wants the earth too, and that she is in a fair way of getting it
+if some one does not stop her very soon. There are a number of good
+people in England who believe that for the last ten years their
+countrymen have spent their time and money in redeeming Egypt as a form
+of missionary work, and there are others quite as naïve who put the
+whole thing in a word by saying, "What would we do with our younger sons
+if it was not for Egypt?"
+
+[Illustration: THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY]
+
+Three-fourths of the officers in the army of the Khedive are English
+boys, who rank as second lieutenants at home and as majors in Egypt.
+They are paid just twice what they are paid in the English army, and it
+is the Khedive who pays them and not the English. In this way England
+obtains three things: she is saved the cost of supporting that number of
+officers; she gets the benefit of their experience in Egypt, which is an
+excellent training-school, at the expense of the Egyptians; and she at
+the same time controls the Egyptian army by these same officers, and
+guards her own interests at Egypt's cost. And as if this were not
+enough, she plants an Army of Occupation upon the country, and with it
+menaces the native authority. The irrigation of Egypt has of late been
+carried on by Englishmen entirely and paid for by Egypt; her railroads
+are built by the English; her big contracts are given out to English
+firms and to English manufacturers; and the railroad which will be built
+to Kosseir on the Red Sea may have been designed in Egypt's interest to
+carry wheat, or it may have been planned to carry troops to the Red Sea
+in the event of the seizure of the Suez Canal or of any other impediment
+to the shortest route to India. We may not believe that the Egyptians
+are capable of governing themselves, we may believe that it is written
+that others than themselves shall always rule them and their country,
+but we must prefer that whoever do this should declare themselves
+openly, and act as conquerors who come and remain as conquerors, and not
+as "advisers" and restorers of order. Napoleon came to Cairo with flags
+flying and drums beating openly as an enemy; he did not come in the
+disguise of a missionary or an irrigation expert.
+
+And there is always the question whether if left alone the Egyptians of
+the present day could not govern themselves. Those of the Egyptians I
+met who were in authority are not men who are likely to return to the
+debauchery and misrule of Ismail. They would be big men in any country;
+they are cultivated, educated gentlemen, who have served in different
+courts or on many important diplomatic missions, and whose tastes and
+ambitions are as creditable and as broad as are those of their English
+contemporaries.
+
+The two most prominent advisers of the Khedive at present are his
+Prime-minister, Riaz Pasha, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tigrane
+Pasha. The first of these is a Turk, the second an Armenian and a
+Christian. It is told of Riaz that he was brought to Egypt when a boy as
+a slave. A man who can rise from such a beginning to be Prime-minister
+must have something in him. He showed his spirit and his desire for his
+country's good in the time of Ismail, whose extravagances both he and
+Nubar Pasha strenuously opposed, and his aid to the English in
+establishing Egyptian finance on a firmer footing was ready and
+invaluable. He has held almost every position in the cabinet of Egypt,
+and is not too old a man to learn new methods, and if left alone is
+experienced and accomplished enough as a statesman to manage for
+himself.
+
+[Illustration: LORD CROMER,
+
+The English Diplomatic Agent in Egypt]
+
+Tigrane Pasha struck me as being more of a diplomat than a statesman,
+but he showed his strength by the fact that he understood the weak
+points of the Egyptians as well as their virtues. It is not the
+enthusiast who believes that all in his country is perfect who is the
+best patriot. To say that such a man as this--a man who has a better
+knowledge of many different governments than half of the English cabinet
+have of their own, and who wishes the best for his Khedive and his
+country--needs the advice or support of an English resident minister, is
+as absurd as to say that the French cabinet should govern themselves by
+the manifestoes of the Comte de Paris. These men are not barbarians nor
+despots; they have not gained their place in the world by favor or
+inheritance. Their homes are as rich in treasures of art and history and
+literature as are the homes of Lord Rosebery or Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, and if they care for their country and the authority of their
+Khedive, it is certainly hard that they may not have the right of
+serving both undisturbed.
+
+The Khedive himself has been very generally represented through the
+English press as a "sulky boy" who does not know what is best for him.
+It is just as easy to describe him as a plucky boy who wishes to govern
+his own country and his own people in his own way. And not only is he
+not allowed to do this, but he is treated with a lack of consideration
+by his protectors which adds insult to injury, and makes him appear as
+having less authority than is really his. He might very well say to Lord
+Cromer, "It was all very well to dissemble your love, but why did you
+kick me down-stairs?"
+
+Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, and the ruling figure in Egypt, has
+served his country as faithfully and as successfully as any man in her
+debt to-day. He has been in Egypt from the beginning of these ten years,
+and he has been given almost unlimited power and authority by his own
+country, of which his nominal position of Consul-General and Diplomatic
+Agent is no criterion. He is a typical Englishman in appearance,
+broad-shouldered and big all over, with a smooth-shaven face, and the
+look of having just come fresh from a bath. In conversation he thinks
+much more of what he has to say than of how he says it; by that I mean
+that he is direct, and even abrupt; the Egyptians found him most
+unpleasantly so. But were he more tactful, he would probably have been
+better liked personally, but would not have succeeded in doing what he
+has done so well.
+
+I do not like what he has done, but I want to be fair in showing that
+for the work he was sent to do he is probably the best man England could
+have selected. A man less self-reliant might have feared to compromise
+himself with home authorities, and would have temporized and lost where
+Lord Cromer bullied and browbeat and won. He is a very remarkable man.
+He studies for a half-hour every day after breakfast, and plays tennis
+in the afternoon. When he is in his own room, with a pipe in his mouth,
+he can talk more interestingly and with more exact knowledge of Egypt
+than any man in the world, and your admiration for him is unbounded. In
+the rooms of the legation, on the contrary, or, again, when advising a
+minister of the Khedive or the Khedive himself, he can be as intensely
+disagreeable in his manner and as powerfully aggressive as a polar-bear.
+During the last so-called "crisis" he gave the Khedive twenty-four hours
+in which to dismiss his Prime-minister. He did this with the assurance
+from the English Foreign Office that the home government would support
+him. He then cabled with one hand to Malta for troops and with the other
+stopped the Black Watch at Aden on their way to India, and called them
+back to Cairo, after which he went out in full sight of the public and
+banged tennis balls about until sunset. A man who can call out "forty,
+love!" "forty, fifteen!" in a calm voice two hours after sending an
+ultimatum to a Khedive and disarranging the movements of six thousand of
+her Majesty's troops will get what he wants in the end, and a boy of
+eighteen is hardly a fair match for him.
+
+As I have said, the English press have misrepresented the young Khedive
+in many ways. He is, in the first place, much older both in appearance
+and manner and thought than his age would suggest, and if he is sulky to
+Englishmen it is not to be wondered at. They could hardly expect his
+Highness to regard them as seriously as his friends as they regard
+themselves. The Khedive gave me a private audience at the Abdine Palace
+while I was in Cairo, and from what he said then and from what others
+who are close to him told me of him, I obtained a very different idea of
+his personality than I had received from the English.
+
+[Illustration: A GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION]
+
+He struck me as being distinctly obstinate--a characteristic which is so
+marked in our President that it can only be considered one of the
+qualifications for success, and is probably the quality in the Khedive
+which the English describe as sulkiness. What I liked in him most was
+his pride in his army and in the Egyptian people as Egyptians. It is
+always well that a ruler should be so enthusiastic over what is his own
+that he shows it even to the casual stranger, for if he exhibits it to
+him, how much more will he show it to his people! The Khedive has
+gentle tastes, and is said to find his amusement in his garden and among
+flowers and on the farm lands of his estates; he speaks several
+languages very well, and dresses and looks--except for the fez and his
+attendants--like any other young man of twenty-three or twenty-four in
+Paris or New York. His ministers, who know him best, describe him as
+having a high spirit, and one that, as he grows older and will be guided
+by greater experience, will lead him to firmer authority for his own
+good and for the good of his people.
+
+One remark of the Khedive's which is of interest to Americans was to the
+effect that the officers in his army who had been trained by Stone Bey,
+and those other American officers who entered the Egyptian army after
+the end of our Civil War, were, in his opinion, the best-trained men in
+their particular department in his army. This is the topographical work,
+and the making of maps and drawings; but those Americans who are in
+charge of Egyptian troops on the frontier are also well esteemed. It is
+the English, however, who have made the fighting part of the army what
+it is. Before they came the troops were unpaid, and badly treated by
+their officers, but now the infantry and the camel corps and artillery
+have no trouble in getting recruits.
+
+The Egyptian is not a natural fighter, as is the Soudanese, who fights
+for love of it, but he has shown lately that when properly officered and
+trained and well treated, he can defend a position or attack boldly if
+led boldly. I suggested to the Khedive that he should borrow some of our
+officers, those who have succeeded so well with the negroes of the Ninth
+Cavalry and with the Indians, for it seemed to me that this would be of
+benefit to both the officers and the Egyptian soldier. It was this
+suggestion that called forth the Khedive's admiration for the Americans
+of his army; but, as a matter of fact, the English would never allow
+officers of any other nationality than their own to control even a
+company of the Egyptian army. They cannot turn out those foreigners who
+are already in, but they can dictate as to who shall come hereafter, and
+they fill all the good billets with their own people; and if there is
+one thing an Englishman apparently holds above all else, it is a "good
+billet." I know a good many English officers who would rather be
+stationed where there was a chance of their taking part in what they
+call a "show," and what we would grandly call a "battle," than dwell at
+ease on the staff of General Wolseley himself; but, on the other hand,
+if I were to give a list of all the subalterns who have applied to me
+for "good billets in America," where they seem to think fortunes grow on
+hedges, half the regimental colors from London to Malta would fade with
+shame.
+
+And Egypt is full of "good billets." It is true the English have made
+them good, and they were not worth much before the English restored
+order; but because you have humanely stopped a runaway coach from going
+over a precipice, that is no reason why you should take possession of it
+and fill it both inside and out with your own friends and relations.
+That is what England has done with the Egyptian coach which Ismail drove
+to the brink of bankruptcy.
+
+It is true the Khedive still sits on the box and holds the reins, but
+Lord Cromer sits beside him and holds the whip.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MODERN ATHENS
+
+
+Perhaps the greatest charm of Athens and of the islands and mountains
+round about it lies in their power to lure back your belief in a great
+many fine people of whose remarkable deeds you had grown sceptical--of
+whose existence even you had begun to doubt. It is something very
+serious when one loses faith in so delightful a young man as Theseus,
+and it is worth while sailing under the lee shores of Crete, where he
+killed the Minotaur, if for no other purpose than to have your
+admiration for him restored. If we could only be as sure of restoring by
+travel all of those other people of whom our elders ceased telling us
+when we left the nursery, I would head an expedition to the north pole,
+not to discover open seas and altitudes and eclipses and such weighty
+things, but to locate that nice and kindly old gentleman, and his toy
+store and his reindeer, who used to come at Christmas-time, and who has
+stopped coming since I left school. It is certainly worth while going
+all the way to Greece to see the Hill of the Nymphs, and the very cave
+where Pan used to sleep in the hot midday, and to thrill over the four
+crossroads and the high, gloomy pass where the Sphinx lay in wait for
+OEdipus with her cruel claws and inscrutable smile.
+
+[Illustration: GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORM]
+
+The story that must always strike every child as most sad and
+unsatisfactory is the one which tells us how the father of Theseus
+killed himself when his son came sailing back triumphant, and so
+gallantly engaged in entertaining the beautiful Athenian maidens whose
+lives he had saved that he forgot to hoist the white sails, and caused
+his father to throw himself off the high rocks in despair.
+
+This used to appeal to me as one of the most pathetic incidents in
+history; but as time wore on my sympathy for the father and indignation
+against Theseus passed away, and I forgot about them both. But when they
+point out where the black sails were first seen entering the bay, and
+you stand on the rock from which the people watched for Theseus, and
+from which his father threw himself down, you feel just as sorry, and
+you rebel just as strongly against that morbid anticlimax, as you did
+when you first read the story in knickerbockers. It seems almost too sad
+to be true.
+
+They had such a delightful way of mixing up the histories of gods and
+mortals in those days that the imaginative person who visits Athens will
+find himself gazing as gratefully and as open-eyed at the rocks in which
+the Centaur hid as at those from which Demosthenes delivered his
+philippics, just as in London the room at the Charter House where
+Colonel Newcome said "Adsum" for the last time is much more real than
+that room in Edinburgh in which Rizzio was killed, or as the rock from
+which Monte Cristo sprang, at the base of the Château d'If, is so much
+more actual than the entire field of Waterloo. It is hard to know just
+which was real and which a delightful myth; and yet there has been so
+little change in Greece since then that you are brought nearer to
+Alcibiades and to Pericles than you can ever come, in this world at
+least, to Dr. Johnson and Dean Swift. You cannot recreate Grub Street
+and the debtors' prison, but Euboea still "looks on Marathon, and
+Marathon on the sea," and, if you are presumptuous, you can strut up and
+down the rocky plateau from which Demosthenes spoke, or take your seat
+in one of the marble chairs of the Theatre of Dionysus, and pretend you
+are a worthy citizen of Athens listening to a satire of Sophocles.
+
+[Illustration: GREEK PEASANT GIRL]
+
+The quiet and fresh cleanliness of modern Athens comes to you after the
+roar and dirt of Cairo's narrow lanes and dusty avenues like the touch
+of damask table linen and silver after the greasy oil-cloth of a
+Mediterranean coasting steamer. It is quiet, sunny, and well-bred. You
+do not fight your way through legions of donkey-boys and dragomans, nor
+are your footsteps echoed by swarms of guides and beggars. It is a
+pretty city, with the look of a water-color. The houses are a light
+yellow, and the shutters a watery green, and the tile roofs a delicate
+red, and the sky above a blue seldom shown to ordinary mortals, but
+reserved for the eyes of painters and poets, who have a sort of second
+sight, and so are always seeing it and using it for a background. Athens
+is a very new city, with new streets and new public buildings, and a new
+King and Royal Palace. It is like a little miniature. There is a little
+army, chiefly composed of officers, and a miniature cabinet, and a
+beautiful miniature university, and everybody knows everybody else; and
+when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard turns out and blows a
+bugle, and so all Athens, which is always sitting at the cafés around
+the square of the palace, nods its head and says, "The Queen is going
+for a drive," or, "Her Majesty has returned early to-day," and then
+continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mustache and to sip its
+coffee. Modern Athens tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of
+thought. The men have adopted his costume, and the women wear little
+flat curls like the French ladies in _Le Figaro_, and peaked bonnets and
+high heels.
+
+[Illustration: THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS]
+
+The national costume of the Greeks is taken from the Albanians, but it
+is much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Like all
+national costumes, it is only worn, except for political effect and
+before a camera, by the lower classes, and also by three regiments of
+the army. You see it in the streets, but it is not so universally
+popular as one would suppose from the pictures of Athens in the
+illustrated papers and by the photographs in the shop-windows. It is a
+most remarkable costume, and as widely different from the flowing robe
+and short skirt of the early Greeks as men in accordion petticoats and
+heavy white tights and a Zouave jacket must evidently be. In the country
+it still obtains, and it is the farmers and peasants and their wives and
+the soldiers who supply the picturesque element of dress to the streets
+of the city.
+
+It is an inscrutable problem why, with all the national costumes in the
+world to choose and pick from, the world should have decided upon the
+dress of the Frank, that is, of the foreigner--ourselves. In Spain the
+peasants have discarded their knickerbockers and short jackets, even in
+the country, for the long trousers and ill-fitting ready-made clothing
+of a French "sweater," and the Moors cover their robes with overcoats
+from Manchester, and the Arabs and Chinese and Swiss and Turks are
+giving up the picturesque garments that are comfortable and becoming to
+them, and look exceedingly ugly and uncomfortable in our own modern
+garb, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable of national costumes
+yet devised by men or tailors. If you judge by the uniforms of the army
+of officers and by the dress of the women of Athens, you would think
+you were in a French city and among French people. It seems a pity that
+this should be so; that Athens, of all cities, should be built of
+Italian villas, inhabited by people who ape the French, and governed by
+a King from Denmark; still, they did not make a success of it when they
+tried, fifty years ago, to govern themselves. It is perhaps hardly fair
+to expect the Greeks, or even the Athenians, to live up to the great
+rock and the monuments that crown it, and the people of Greece are no
+doubt as fine as those of other little kingdoms or principalities
+scattered about Europe; but then the other kingdoms and principalities
+have not the history of early Greece to call their own nor the Acropolis
+to look up to.
+
+[Illustration: ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN]
+
+[Illustration: ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN]
+
+The rock of the Acropolis is hardly more a part of modern Greece than
+the Rock of Gibraltar is a part of Spain. Geographically it is, but it
+belongs as much to the visitor as to the native, so little inspiration
+has he apparently drawn from it, and so little has it served to bring
+out in him to-day those qualities that made demigods of his ancestors. I
+think I represent the average intelligence, and yet at this moment I
+cannot think of any Greek within the last hundred years who has gained
+world-wide renown, either as a sculptor, an artist, a soldier, a writer
+of comedies and satires, a statesman, nor even as an archæologist; the
+very historians of Greece and the exponents of its secrets and the most
+distinguished of its excavators are of other countries. They have many
+heroes of their own; you see their portraits or their photographs in
+every shop-window; but they are not as familiar to you as the faces and
+histories of those other Greeks who sighed because there were no more
+worlds, and whose fame has lasted long after the other worlds were
+discovered. One would think that some young Greek, on arising in the
+morning and seeing the Acropolis against the sky, would say to himself,
+"To-day I shall do something worthy of that." And were he to say that
+often enough, and try to live up to the fortress and the temple above
+him, he might help to make Greece in this known world what she was in
+the smaller world of her day of glory. It is not because the world has
+grown and given her more with which to compete that she has fallen into
+lesser and lesser significance; for though the world has increased in
+latitude and longitude, it has not yet carved another Hermes like that
+of Praxiteles; and though it has added three continents since his day,
+it has never equalled in marbles the fluttering draperies of the Flying
+Victory, nor the carvings over the doorway of the Erechtheum.
+
+[Illustration: GREEK PEASANT]
+
+[Illustration: ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS]
+
+But, as far as in him lies, the Greek has endeavored to copy the
+traditions of his ancestors. He holds Olympic games in the ancient arena
+which King George has had excavated, and if victorious receives a wreath
+of wild olives from the hands of the King; and he builds the new market
+where the old market stood, and the new military hospital as near as is
+possible to the hospital of Æsculapius. But he cannot restore to the
+market-place that very human citizen who cast in his shell against
+Aristides because he was aweary of hearing him called the Just; nor can
+either his games or his hospital bring back the perfect figure and
+health of the men whose figures and profiles have set the model for all
+time. He has, however, retained the Greek language, which is very
+creditable to him, as it is a language one learns only after much
+difficulty, and then forgets at once. He even goes so far as to put up
+the names of the streets in Greek, which strikes the bewildered tourist
+trying to find his way back to his hotel as a trifle pedantic, and he
+prints his daily newspaper in this same tongue. This is, perhaps, going
+a little too far, as it leaves you in some doubt as to whether you have
+been reading of the Panama scandal or a reprint on the battle of
+Marathon.
+
+Baron Sina, a Greek banker, has shown the most public-spirited and
+patriotic generosity, and taste as well, in erecting the buildings of
+the university at his own expense and giving them to the city. They are
+reproductions in many ways of different parts of the temples of the
+Acropolis in miniature. The Polytechnic is almost an exact copy of the
+front of the Parthenon. There is a picture of it from a photograph given
+in this article, but it can supply no idea of the beauty of the modern
+reproduction of this temple. The lines and measurements are the same in
+degree; and the Polytechnic, besides, is colored and gilded as was the
+original Parthenon, and for the first time makes you understand how
+brilliant reds and beautiful blues and gold and black on marble can be
+combined with the marble's purity and help rather than cheapen it. It is
+a lesson in loveliness, and is as wonderful and brilliantly beautiful a
+building as the marble and gold monument to the Prince Consort in Hyde
+Park is vulgar and atrocious. If this copy in miniature, this working
+model of the Parthenon, moves one as it does, it can be understood how
+great must be the strength and purity of the Parthenon, even in
+ruins, with its gilt washed to a dull brown and its colors and
+bass-reliefs stripped from its pediment. I shall certainly not attempt
+to describe it.
+
+[Illustration: POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL]
+
+There are very few tourists who visit Athens in proportion to those who
+visit far less momentous ruins; thousands go to Rome and see the
+Colosseum, to Egypt and view the storied walls of the great rude temples
+along the Nile, and as many more make the tour of the English cathedral
+towns; but in Athens it is almost difficult to find a guide. There are
+not more than a half-dozen, I am sure, in the whole city, and the
+Acropolis is yours if you wish, and you are often as much alone as
+though you had been the first to climb its sides. I do not mean by this
+that it is neglected, or that relic-hunters may chip at it or carry away
+pieces of its handiwork, or broken bits of the Turkish shells that have
+shattered it, but the guards are unobtrusive, and you are free to wander
+in and out in this forest of marble and fallen trunks of columns as
+though you were the ghost of some Athenian citizen revisiting the scenes
+of his former life.
+
+There is no question that half of the pleasure you receive in wandering
+over the top of this great wind-blown rock, with the surrounding
+snow-touched mountains on a level with your eye, and the great temples
+rearing above you or lying broken at your feet, magnificent even there,
+is due to your seeing them alone, to the fact that no guide's
+parrot-like volubility harasses you, no guard's scornful gloom chills
+your enthusiasm. The great bay of turquoise-blue and the green fields
+and the bunches of cactus and groves of dark olive-trees below are
+unspoiled by modern innovations, and the hills are still dotted with
+sheep and shepherds, as they were in the days of Sappho.
+
+[Illustration: AN OLD ATHENIAN OF THE PRESENT DAY]
+
+Overhead is the blue sky, with the ivory columns between, far below you
+is the steep naked rock, or, on the other hand, the two semicircles of
+marble seats cushioned with velvet moss and carpeted with daisies and
+violets, and beyond the limits of the yellow town and its red roofs and
+dark green gardens stretches the green plain until it touches the sea,
+or is blocked by Mount Hymettus or Mount Pentelicus, beyond which latter
+lies the field of Marathon. Sitting on the edge of the rock, you can
+imagine the actors strutting out into the theatre below, and the
+acquiescent chorus chanting its surprise or horror, and almost see the
+bent shoulders and heads of the people filling the half-circle and
+leaning forward to catch each word of the play as it comes to them
+through the actors' masks.
+
+[Illustration: A GREEK SHEPHERD]
+
+Sounds, no matter how far afield, drift to you drowsily, like the voice
+of one reading aloud on a summer's day--the bleating of the sheep in the
+valley where Plato argued, and the jangling of a goat's bell, or the
+laughter of children flying kites on the Pnyx, a quarter of a mile away.
+And beyond the reach of sound is the Ægean Sea weltering in the sun,
+with little three-cornered sails, like tops, or a great vessel drawing a
+chalk-line after it through the still surface of the water. All things
+are possible at such a time in this place. You can almost hear the bees
+on Mount Hymettus, and you would receive the advance of a Centaur as
+calmly as Alice noted the approach of the White Rabbit. You believe in
+nymphs and satyrs. They have their homes there in those caves, and in
+the thick green, almost black, woods at the base of the Parnes range,
+and you love the bravery of St. Paul, who dared to doubt such things
+when he stood on the rock at your feet and told the men of Athens that
+they were in many things too superstitious. It is something to have seen
+the ribs cut in the rock on the top of the Acropolis which kept the
+wheels of the chariots from slipping when the Panathenaic procession
+moved along the Via Sacra to the Eleusinian mysteries, to have looked
+upon the caryatides of the Erechtheum, and to have wanted back as a lost
+part of your own self, for the time being, the Elgin marbles. When
+Napoleon stole the Venus of Milo he placed her in the Louvre, where
+every one will see her sooner or later; for if he is good he goes to
+Paris when he dies, and if he is bad he is sure to go there in his
+lifetime. But _who_ has ever been to the British Museum? One would as
+soon think of visiting Pentonville prison. And how do the marbles look
+under the soot-stained windows or the gray of London fog? Like the few
+Lord Elgin did not want, and that stand out like ivory in their proper
+height against the soft sky that knows and loves them? When the people
+of Great Britain have returned the Elgin marbles to Greece, and the Rock
+of Gibraltar to Spain, and the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, and Egypt to
+the Egyptians, they will be a proud and haughty people, and will be able
+to hold their heads as high as any one.
+
+One cannot help feeling that the King of Greece has a much greater
+responsibility than he knows. Other monarchs must look after their
+boundaries; he must not only look after his boundaries, but his
+sky-line. Another such affront to good taste as the observatory on the
+Hill of the Nymphs, and the sky-line of Athens will be unrecognizable.
+And the tall chimneys at the Piræus are not half as attractive to the
+view as the spars of the ships. It is much better not to have
+manufactories that must have chimneys than to spoil a view which no
+other kingdom can equal. Any king can put up a chimney; very few are
+given the care of an Acropolis; and if the King and Queen of Greece wish
+to be remembered as kindly by the rest of the world as they are loved
+dearly by their adopted people, they will guard the treasure put in
+their keeping, and sweep observatories from sacred hills, and continue
+to limit the guides on the Acropolis, and so win the gratitude of a
+civilized world.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CONSTANTINOPLE
+
+
+A little Italian steamer drew cautiously away from the Piræus when the
+waters of the bay were quite black and the quays looked like a row of
+foot-lights in front of the dark curtain of the night. She grazed the
+anchor chains of H. M. S. the _Colossus_, where that ship of war's broad
+white deck lay level with the water, as heavy and solid as a stone pier.
+She seemed to rise like an island of iron from the very bottom of the
+bay. Her sailors, as broad and heavy and clean as the decks, raised
+their heads from their pipes as we passed under the glare of the
+man-of-war's electric lights, and a bugle call came faintly from
+somewhere up in the bow. It sounded as though it were a quarter of a
+mile away. Our lower deck was packed with Greeks and Albanians and
+Turks, lying as closely together on the hard planks as cartridges in the
+front of a Circassian's overcoat. They were very dirty and very
+handsome, in rakish little black silk pill-box caps, with red and gold
+tops, and the initials "H. I." worked in the embroidery; their canvas
+breeches were as baggy and patched and muddy as those of a
+football-player, and their sleeveless jackets and double waistcoats of
+red and gold made them look like a uniformed soldiery that had seen very
+hard service. Priests of the Greek Church, with long hair and black
+formless robes, and hats like stovepipes with the brim around the upper
+end, paraded the narrow confines of the second cabin, and German
+tourists with red guide-books, and the Italian ship's officers with a
+great many medals and very bad manners, stamped up and down the
+main-deck and named the shadowy islands that rose from the sea and
+dropped out of sight again as we steamed past them.
+
+In the morning the islands had disappeared altogether, and we were
+between high banks--higher than, but not so steep as the Palisades; rows
+of little scrubby trees ran along their fronts in lateral lines, and at
+their base mud forts with mud barracks and thatched roofs pointed little
+cannon at us from every jutting rock. We were so near that one could
+have hit the face of the high hills with a stone. These were the
+Dardanelles, the banks that nature has set between the Sea of Marmora
+and the Mediterranean to protect Constantinople from Mediterranean
+squadrons. We pass between these banks for hours, or between the high
+bank of Roumelia on one side and the low hilly country of Asia where
+Troy once stood on the other, until, at sunset, we are halted in the
+narrowest strait of the Dardanelles, between the Castle of Asia and the
+Castle of Europe, "the Lock of the Sea"--that sea of which Gibraltar is
+the key. That night we cross through the Sea of Marmora, and by sunrise
+are at Constantinople.
+
+Constantinople is such a long word, and so few of the people you know
+have visited it in comparison with those who have wintered at Cairo or
+at Rome, or who have spent a season at Vienna, or taken music-lessons in
+Berlin, that you approach it with a mind prepared for surprises and with
+the hope of the unexpected. I had expected that the heart of the Ottoman
+Empire would be outwardly a brilliant and flashing city of gilded domes
+and minarets, a cluster of colored house fronts rising from the dancing
+waters of the Bosporus, and with the banks lined with great white
+palaces among gardens of green trees. There are more gilded domes in New
+York city and in Boston than in Constantinople. In New York there are
+three, and in Boston there is the State House, which looks very fine
+indeed from the new bridge across the Charles when the river is blocked
+with gray ice, and a setting sun is throwing a light on the big yellow
+globe. But Constantinople is all white and gray; the palaces that line
+the Bosporus are of a brilliant white stucco, and the mosques like
+monster turtles, which give the city its chief distinction, are a dull
+white. In the Turkish quarter the houses are more sombre still, of a
+peculiar black wood, and built like the old log forts in which our
+great-great-grandfathers took refuge from the Indians--square
+buildings with an overhanging story from which those inside could
+fire down upon the enemy below. The jutting balcony on the Turkish
+houses is for the less serious purpose of allowing the harem to look
+down upon the passers-by.
+
+[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE]
+
+Constantinople is a fair-weather city, and needs the sun and the blue
+sky and the life of the waters about it, which give to the city its real
+individuality. It misses in winter the pleasure-yachts of the summer
+months, the white uniforms of the thousands of boatmen, and the brighter
+dressing of the awnings and flags of the ships and steamers. But the
+waters about Constantinople are its best part, and are fuller and busier
+and brighter than either those around the Battery or those below the
+Thames Embankment, and by standing on its wide wooden bridge, over which
+more people pass in a day than over any other (save London Bridge) in
+the world, one can see a procession of all the nations of the East.
+
+Constantinople is a much more primitive city than one would expect the
+largest of all Eastern cities to be. It impresses you as a city without
+any municipal control whatsoever, and you come upon a building with the
+stamp of the municipal palace upon it with as much surprise as you would
+feel in finding an underwriter's office at the north pole. In many ways
+it is the most primitive city that I have ever been in. In all that
+pertains to the Sultan, to the religion of the people, of which he is
+the head, and to the army, the recognition due them is rigidly and
+impressively observed. But in what regards the local life of the people
+there seems to be absolutely no interest and no responsibility. There is
+no such absolute power in Europe, not excepting that of the Czar or of
+the young Emperor, as is that exercised by the Sultan; and the mosques
+of the faithful are guarded and decorated and held more highly in
+reverence than are many churches of a more civilized people; and the
+army impresses you as one you would much prefer to lead than one from
+which you would elect to run away. But the comfort of the inhabitants of
+Constantinople is little considered. There is nothing that one can see
+of what we call public spirit, unless building a mosque and calling it
+after yourself, in a city already supplied with the most magnificent of
+such temples, can be called public-spirited. Of course one does not go
+to Constantinople to see electric lights and asphalt pavements, nor to
+gather statistics on the poor-rate, but it is interesting to find people
+so nearly in touch with the world in many things, and so far away from
+it in others. As long as I do not have to live in Constantinople, I find
+its lack of municipal spirit quite as interesting a feature of the city
+as its mosques.
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS]
+
+Constantinople, for example, is a city with as large a population as has
+Berlin or Vienna, and its fire department is what you see in the
+illustration accompanying this chapter. They are very handsome men, as
+you can note for yourself, and very smart-looking, but when they go to a
+fire they make a bargain with the owner of the building before they
+attempt to save his property. The great fire-tower in this capital of
+the Ottoman Empire is in Galata, and from it watchmen survey the city
+with glasses, and at the first sight of a blazing roof one of them runs
+down the tower and races through the uneven streets, calling out the
+fact that a house is burning, and where that house may be. Each watchman
+he meets takes up the cry, and continues calling out that the house is
+burning, even though the house is three miles away, until it burns down
+or is built up again, or the watchman is retired for long service and
+pensioned. Besides these amateur firemen there are two real fire
+companies, but they can do little in a city of 880,000 people.
+
+The police who guard Constantinople at night are an equally primitive
+body of men. They carry a heavy club, about five feet long and as thick
+as a man's wrist, and with this they beat the stones in the streets to
+assure people that they are attending strictly to their work, and are
+not sleeping in doorways. The result of this is that no one can get to
+sleep, and all evil-minded persons can tell exactly where the
+night-watchman is, and so keep out of his way. The watchman under my
+window seemed to act on the idea of the gentleman who, on taking his
+first trip on a sleeping-car, declared that if he couldn't sleep no one
+else should, and acted accordingly.
+
+There is nothing, so far as I can see, in which the Oriental delights as
+much as he does in making a noise. It is most curious to find a whole
+people without nerves, who cannot talk without shouting, and who cannot
+shout without giving you the idea that they are in great pain, and that
+unless relief comes promptly they will die, and that it will be your
+fault. Those of them who sell bread or fruits or fish or beads, or
+whatever it may be, in the streets, bellow rather than shout, or cry in
+sharp, agonizing shrieks, high and nasal and fierce. They apparently
+never "move on." They always meet under your window or at the corners of
+a street, and there all shout at once, and no one pays the least
+attention to them. They might be lamp-posts or minarets, for all the
+notice they receive. I can imagine no fate or torture so awful as to be
+ill in Constantinople and to have to lie helpless and listen to the
+street cries, to the tin horns of the men who run ahead of the
+streetcars--which incidentally gives you an idea of the speed of these
+cars--and to the snarling and barking of the thousands of street dogs.
+
+[Illustration: A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE]
+
+There are three or four intensely interesting ceremonies and many
+show-places in Constantinople which are unlike anything of the same sort
+in any other city. Apart from these and the bazars, which are very
+wonderful, there is nothing in the city itself which makes even the
+Oriental seek it in preference to his own mountains or plains or native
+village. Constantinople, so far as its population is to be considered,
+is standing still. It impresses you as stagnant before your statistical
+friend or the oldest member of the diplomatic corps or the oldest
+inhabitant tells you that it is so. You can very well imagine the
+Frank's finding a long residence in Cairo possible, or in pretty little
+Athens, where the boulevards and the classics are so strangely jumbled,
+but one cannot understand a man's settling down in Constantinople. Where
+there are no women there can be no court, and the few rich Greek
+residents and still fewer of the pashas and the diplomats make the
+society of the city. Even these last find it far from gay, for it so
+happens that the ambassadors are all either bachelors, widowers, or the
+husbands of invalid wives, and the result is a society which depends
+largely on a very smart club for its amusement. In the wintertime, when
+the snow and rain sweep over the three hills, and the solitary street of
+Galata is a foot deep in slush and mud, and the china stoves radiate a
+candle-like heat in a room built to let in all the air possible, I can
+imagine few less desirable places than the capital of the Ottoman
+Empire. This is in the winter only; as I have said, it is a fair-weather
+city, and I did not see it at its best.
+
+There are three things to which one is taken in Constantinople--the
+mosque of St. Sophia, the treasures of the Sultan, and the Sultan going
+to pray in his own private mosque. The Sultan's own mosque is situated
+conveniently near his palace, not more than a few hundred feet distant.
+Once every Friday he rides this distance, and once a year journeys as
+far as the mosque of St. Sophia. With these outings he is content, and
+on no other occasions does he show himself to his people or leave his
+palace. This is what it is to be a sovereign of many countries in
+Europe, Asia, and Africa, the head of the Mussulman religion; and the
+ruler of nations and lands conquered by your ancestors, of which you see
+less than a donkey-boy in Cairo or the owner of a caïque on the
+Bosporus. We used to sing in college,
+
+  "The Sultan better pleases me;
+  His life is full of jollity."
+
+The jollity of a life which the possessor believes to be threatened by
+assassination in every form and at any moment is of a somewhat ghastly
+nature.
+
+You obtain tickets for the Selamlik, as the ceremony of the Sultan's
+visit to his mosque is called, and you are requested, as you are
+supposed to be the guest of the Sultan on these occasions, not to bring
+opera-glasses. But it is nevertheless strongly suggestive of a
+theatrical performance. The mosque is on one side of a wide street; the
+houses in which the spectators sit, like the audience in a grand-stand,
+are on the other. One end of the street is blocked by a great square,
+and the other by the gateway of the palace from which the Sultan comes.
+The street is not more than a hundred yards in length. A band of music
+enters this square first and plays the overture to the ceremony. The
+musicians are mounted on horseback and followed by a double line of
+cavalrymen on white horses, and each carrying a lance at rest with a
+red pennant. There are thousands of these; they stretch out like
+telegraph poles on the prairie to an interminable length, their scarlet
+pennants flapping and rustling in the sharp east wind like a forest of
+autumn leaves. You begin to suspect that they are going around the
+square and returning again many times, as the supers do in "Ours." Then
+the horses turn black and the overcoats of the men change from gray to
+blue, and more scarlet pennants stretch like an arch of bunting along
+the street leading to the palace, until they have all filed into the
+open square and halt there stirrup to stirrup, a moving mass of four
+thousand restless horses and four thousand scarlet flags. And then more
+bands and drums and bugle-calls come from every point of the city, and
+regiment after regiment swarms up the hill on which the palace rests,
+the tune of one band of music breaking in on the tune of the next, as do
+those of the political processions at home, until every approach to the
+gate of the palace is blocked from curb to curb with armed men, and you
+look out and down upon the points of five thousand bayonets crushed into
+a space not one-fifth as large as Madison Square. There is no populace
+to see this spectacle, only those of the faithful who stop on their way
+to Mecca to catch this glimpse of the head of their religion, and a few
+women who have brought petitions to present to him and who are allowed
+within the lines of soldiers.
+
+[Illustration: STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE]
+
+But pashas and beys and other high dignitaries are arriving every moment
+in full regalia, for this is like a drawing-room at Buckingham Palace,
+or a levee at St. James's, and every one must leave all other matters to
+attend it. Twenty men with twenty carts rush out suddenly from the
+curtain of Zouaves and sailors, and scatter soft gravel on the fifty
+yards of roadway over which the Sultan intends to drive. They remind you
+of the men in the circus who spread sawdust over the ring after the
+horses' hoofs have torn it. And then, high above the heads of the nine
+thousand soldiers and the few thousand more dignitaries, diplomats, and
+spectators, a priest in a green turban calls aloud from the top of the
+minaret. It is a very beautiful cry or call, in a strong, sweet tenor
+voice, inexpressibly weird and sad and impressive. It is answered by a
+bugle call given slowly and clearly like a man speaking, and at a
+certain note the entire nine thousand soldiers salute. It is done with a
+precision and shock so admirable that you would think, except for the
+volume of the noise, that but one man had moved his piece. The voice of
+the priest rises again, and is answered by triumphant strains of brass,
+and the gates of the palace open, and a glittering procession of
+officers and princes and pashas moves down the broad street, encircling
+a carriage drawn by two horses and driven by servants in gold. At the
+sight of this the soldiers cry "Long live the Sultan" three times. It is
+like the roar of a salute of cannon, and has all the feeling of a cheer.
+The Sultan sits in the back of the open carriage, a slight,
+tired-looking man, with a pale face and black beard. He is dressed in a
+fur overcoat and fez. As he passes, the men of his army--and they _are_
+men--salute him, and the veiled women stand on tiptoe behind them and
+stretch out their petitions, and the pashas and chamberlains and cabinet
+officers bend their bodies and touch the hand to the heart, lip, and
+forehead, and drop it again to the knee. The pilgrims to Mecca fall
+prostrate on their faces, and the Sultan bows his head and touches his
+hand to his fez. Opposite him sits Osman Pasha, the hero of the last
+war, and one of the greatest generals of the world, his shoulders
+squared, his heart covered with stars, and his keen, observant eyes
+wandering from the pale face of his sovereign to the browned,
+hardy-looking countenances of his men.
+
+The Sultan remains a half-hour in the mosque, and on his return drives
+himself back to the palace in an open landau. This was the first time I
+had seen the Turkish soldier in bulk, and he impressed me more than did
+any other soldier I had seen along the shores of the Mediterranean. I
+had seen the British troops repulse an imaginary attack upon the rock of
+Gibraltar, and half of the Army of Occupation in Egypt dislodge an
+imaginary enemy from the sand hills around Cairo, and I had seen French
+and Italian and Greek soldiers in lesser proportion and in lesser
+activity. But to me none of these had the build or the bearing or the
+ready if rough look of these Turks. The French Zouaves of Algiers came
+next to them to my mind, and it may be that the similarity of the
+uniform would explain that; but as I heard the Sultan's troops that
+morning marching up the hills to their outlandish music, and looked into
+eyes that had never been shaded from the sun, and at the spring and
+swing of legs that had never worn civilized trousers, I recalled several
+notable battles of past history, and the more recent lines of Mr.
+Rudyard Kipling where he pays his compliments to the Russian on the
+frontier:
+
+  "I'm sorry for Mr. Bluebeard,
+  I'd be sorry to cause him pain;
+  But a hell of a spree
+  There is sure to be
+  When he comes back again."
+
+[Illustration: GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE]
+
+The Oriental is one of those people who do things by halves. He has a
+fine army, but the bulk of his navy has not left the Golden Horn for
+many years, and it is doubtful if it could leave it; his palace walls
+are of mosaic and wonderfully painted tiles, and the roofs of rusty tin;
+his sons are given the questionable but expensive education of Paris,
+and his daughters are not allowed to walk abroad unless guarded by
+servants, and with the knowledge that every policeman spies upon them,
+knowing that, could he detect them in an indiscretion, he would be
+rewarded and gain promotion. Consequently it does not surprise you
+when you find the Sultan's treasures heaped together under dirty glass
+cases, and treated with the indifference a child pays to its last year's
+toys.
+
+The crown-jewels and regalia kept at the Tower, itself under iron bars
+and guarded by Beefeaters, are not half as impressive as are the jewels
+of the Sultan, which lie covered with dust under a glass show-case, and
+guarded by a few gloomy-looking effendis in frock-coats. All the
+presents from other monarchs and all the gifts of lesser notables who
+have sought some Sultan's favor, all the arms and trophies of
+generations of wars, are piled together in this treasury with less care
+than one would give to a rack of pipes. It is a very remarkable
+exhibition, and it is magnificent in its Oriental disregard for wealth
+through long association with it. Bronze busts of emperors, jewelled
+swords, imperial orders, music-boxes, gun-cases, weapons of gold instead
+of steel, precious stones, and silver dressing-cases are all heaped
+together on dusty shelves, without order and classification and without
+care. You can see here handfuls of uncut precious stones on china
+plates, or dozens of gold and silver pistols thrown in a corner like
+kindling-wood. And the most remarkable exhibition of all is the
+magnificent robes of those Sultans who are dead, with the jewels and
+jewelled swords and belts and insignia worn by them, placed on dummies
+in a glass case, as though they were a row of stuffed birds or specimens
+of rock. In the turbans of one of these figures there are pearls as
+large as a woman's thumb, and emeralds and rubies as large as eggs, and
+ropes of diamonds. This sounds like a story from the _Arabian Nights_;
+but then these are the heroes of the _Arabian Nights_--the Sultans who
+owned the whole northern coast of Africa and Asia, and who spent on
+display and ornament what we put into education and railroads.
+
+The present Sultan, Abd-ul-Hammed II., so far differs from those who
+have preceded him that he as well as ourselves spends money on education
+and railroads and all that they imply. As the head of a religion and of
+an empire he may not cheapen himself by being seen too often by his
+people, but his interests spread beyond even the great extent of his own
+boundaries, and his money is given to sufferers as far apart in all but
+misfortune as the Johnstown refugees and the victims of the earthquakes
+of Zante and Corfu. And his protection is extended to the American
+missionaries who enter his country to preach a religion to which he is
+opposed. While I was in Constantinople he showed the variety of his
+interests in the outside world by making two presents. To the Czar of
+Russia he gave a book of photographs of the vessels in his navy, and in
+contrast to this grimly humorous recognition of Russia's ambitions he
+presented to our government an emblem in gold and diamonds,
+commemorating in its design and inscription the discovering of this
+country, worth, intrinsically, many thousands of dollars. He was, I
+believe, the only sovereign who showed a personal interest in our
+national celebration, and his gift was properly one of the government's
+most conspicuous exhibits at the Columbian Fair.
+
+The Mosque of St. Sophia is one of the first things you are taken to see
+in Constantinople. It is to the Mussulman what St. Peter's is to the
+good Catholic, although Justinian built it, and the cross still shows in
+many parts of the great building. Three times during the year this
+mosque is illuminated within and without, and every good Mussulman
+attends there to worship.
+
+There is something very fine about the religion of Mohammed--you do not
+have to know much about it to appreciate the faith of its followers,
+whether you know what it is they believe or not. In their outward
+observance, at least, of the rules laid down for them in the Koran, they
+show a sincerity which teaches a great lesson. You can see them at any
+hour of the day or in any place going through their devotions. A soldier
+will kneel down in a band stand, where a moment before he has been
+playing for the regiment, and say his prayers before two thousand
+spectators; and I have had some difficulty in getting my trunks on the
+Orient Express, because the porters were at another end of a crowded,
+noisy platform bowing towards the East. Once a year they fast for a
+month, the season of Ramazan, and as I was in Eastern countries during
+that month I know that they fast rigidly. Ramazan begins in Egypt when
+the new moon appears in a certain well near Cairo. Two men watch this
+well, and when they see the reflection of the new moon on its surface
+they run into Cairo with the news, and Ramazan begins. There is nothing
+which so well illustrates the unchangeableness of the East and its
+customs as the sight of these men running through the streets of Cairo,
+with its dog-carts and electric lights, its calendars and almanacs, to
+tell that the moon has again reached that point that it had reached for
+many hundreds of years before, when all the faithful must fast and pray.
+
+[Illustration: EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF ST. SOPHIA]
+
+On one of the last days of Ramazan I went to the door of St. Sophia, and
+was led up a winding staircase in one of its minarets--a minaret-tower
+so broad and high that the staircase within it has no steps, but is
+paved smoothly like a street. It seemed as though we had been climbing
+nearly ten minutes before we stepped out into a great gallery, and
+looked down upon thousands of turbaned figures bowing and kneeling and
+rising again in long rows like infantry in close order. Between these
+worshippers and ourselves were fifty circles of floating tapers swinging
+from chains, and hanging like a smoky curtain of fire between us and the
+figures below. The voice of the priest rose in a high, uncanny cry, and
+the sound of the thousands of men falling forward on their faces and
+arms was like the rumble of the waves breaking on the shore. Outside,
+the tops of minarets were circled with lights and lamps strung on long
+ropes, with the ends flying free, and swinging to and fro in the night
+wind like necklaces of stars. This was the most beautiful of all the
+sights of Constantinople; and as a matter of opinion, and not of fact, I
+think the best part of Constantinople is that part of it that is in the
+air.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before ending this last chapter, I should like to make two suggestions
+to the reader who has not yet visited the Mediterranean and who thinks
+of doing so. Let him not be deterred, in the first place, by any idea of
+the difficulties of the journey, for he can go from Gibraltar along the
+entire northern coast of Africa and into Greece and Italy with as little
+trouble and with as much comfort as it is possible for him to make the
+journey from New York to Chicago. And in the second place, should he go
+in the winter or spring, let him not be misled by "Italian skies," or
+"the blue Mediterranean," or "the dancing waters of the Bosporus," into
+imagining that he is going to be any warmer on the northern coast of
+Africa than he is in New York. I wore exactly the same clothes in Italy
+that I wore the day I left the North River blocked with ice, and I
+watched a snow-storm falling on "the dancing waters of the Bosporus".
+There are some warm days, of course, but it is well to follow that good
+old-fashioned rule in any part of the world, that it is cold in winter
+and warm in summer, and people who spend their lives in trying to dodge
+this fact might as well try running away from death and the postal
+system. To any one who has but a little time and a little money to
+spend on a holiday, I would suggest going to Gibraltar, and from there
+to Spain and Morocco. This is the only place, perhaps, in the world
+where three so widely different people and three such picturesque people
+as the Moor, the British soldier, and the Spaniard can be found within
+two hours of one another.
+
+Morocco, from political causes, is less civilized than any other part of
+the northern part of Africa; and it can be seen, and with it the
+southern cities of Spain and the Rock of Gibraltar, in five or six
+weeks, and at a cost of a very few hundred dollars. This was to me the
+most interesting part of the Mediterranean, chiefly, of course--for it
+possesses few of the beauties or monuments or historical values of the
+other shores of that sea--because it was unknown to tourists and
+guide-books. A visit to the rest of the Mediterranean is merely
+verifying for yourself what you have already learned from others.
+
+
+THE END
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Inconsistent hyphenation remains as in the original.
+
+Spelling has been made consistent throughout where the author's
+preference could be ascertained.
+
+Punctuation has been normalized.
+
+Page 203: "It all that pertains to the Sultan"
+
+"It all" has been changed to "In all".
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rulers of the Mediterranean, by 
+Richard Harding Davis
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+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Rulers of the Mediterranean, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+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 Rulers of the Mediterranean
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2012 [EBook #39522]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown, Julia Neufeld
+(illustrations were generously made available by The
+Internet Archive) and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><br /><br /><br /><a name="ONE_OF_THE_CAMEL_CORPS_OF_EGYPT" id="ONE_OF_THE_CAMEL_CORPS_OF_EGYPT"></a>
+<img src="images/frontispiece.jpg" width="400" height="588" alt="ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT" title="ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT" />
+<span class="caption">ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT</span>
+</div>
+
+<h1>
+The Rulers<br />
+
+of<br />
+
+The Mediterranean</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>RICHARD HARDING DAVIS</h2>
+
+<p class="center">AUTHOR OF<br />
+
+"THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW" "GALLEGHER"<br />
+"VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS" ETC.<br />
+
+ILLUSTRATED</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 100px;">
+<img src="images/titlepagedeco.jpg" width="100" height="120" alt="Publisher&#39;s Logo" title="Publisher&#39;s Logo" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+
+HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS<br />
+
+1894</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p class="center">Copyright, 1893, by <span class="smcap">Harper &amp; Brothers</span>.<br />
+
+<i>All rights reserved.</i></p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p class="center">TO<br />
+
+HON. EDWARD C. LITTLE<br />
+
+EX-DIPLOMATIC-AGENT AND CONSUL-GENERAL<br />
+
+OF<br />
+
+THE UNITED STATES TO EGYPT
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents">
+<tr><td align="right"><small>CHAP.</small></td><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I</td><td align="left">THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">II</td><td align="left">TANGIER</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">III</td><td align="left">FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IV</td><td align="left">CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">V</td><td align="left">THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_139">139</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VI</td><td align="left">MODERN ATHENS</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_178">178</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VII</td><td align="left">CONSTANTINOPLE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Illustrations">
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#ONE_OF_THE_CAMEL_CORPS_OF_EGYPT">ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT</a></td><td align="right"><i>Frontispiece</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#THE_MAN_FROM_DETROIT">THE MAN FROM DETROIT</a></td><td align="right">5</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#THE_ROCK_FROM_THE_BAY">THE ROCK FROM THE BAY</a></td><td align="right">9</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#TYPES">TYPES</a></td><td align="right">13</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#GIBRALTAR_AS_SEEN_ACROSS_THE_NEUTRAL_GROUND">GIBRALTAR AS SEEN ACROSS THE NEUTRAL GROUND</a></td><td align="right">15</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#AN_ENGLISH_SENTRY">AN ENGLISH SENTRY</a></td><td align="right">19</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_SPANISH_SENTRY">A SPANISH SENTRY</a></td><td align="right">21</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#SIGNAL_STATION_ON_TOP-OF_THE_ROCK">SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK</a></td><td align="right">25</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#CANNONS_MASKED_BY_BUSHES">CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES</a></td><td align="right">29</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#TEA_IN_THE_OFFICERS_QUARTERS">TEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERS</a></td><td align="right">33</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#BREAD_MERCHANTS_AT_THE_GATE">BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE</a></td><td align="right">41</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#SANITARY_OUTFIT_DUMPING_REFUSE_OVER_THE_WALL">SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL</a></td><td align="right">47</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_WOMAN_OF_TANGIER">A WOMAN OF TANGIER</a></td><td align="right">53</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#WATER-VENDER_AT_THE_DOOR_OF_A_PRIVATE_HOUSE">WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE</a></td><td align="right">57</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_STREET_DANCER">A STREET DANCER</a></td><td align="right">63</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#IN_THE_PRISON">IN THE PRISON</a></td><td align="right">67</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#MALTESE_PEDDLERS">MALTESE PEDDLERS</a></td><td align="right">75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#STREET_OF_SANTA_LUCIA_MALTA">STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA</a></td><td align="right">79</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#BRINDISI">BRINDISI</a></td><td align="right">85</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#PILLAR_OF_CAESAR_AT_BRINDISI">PILLAR OF CÆSAR AT BRINDISI</a></td><td align="right">89</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#APPROACH_TO_ISMAILIA_BY_THE_SUEZ_CANAL">APPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL</a></td><td align="right">93</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#STEAM-DREDGE_AT_WORK_IN_THE_SUEZ_CANAL">STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL</a></td><td align="right">97</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#BAZAR_OF_A_WORKER_IN_BRASS">BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS</a></td><td align="right">105</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#GROUP_OF_NATIVES_IN_FRONT_OF_SHEPHEARDS_HOTEL">GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL</a></td><td align="right">109</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_BRITISH_SQUARE_FORMED_IN_FRONT_OF_THE_PYRAMIDS">A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS</a></td><td align="right">117</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#SHADOW_OF_THE_PYRAMID_OF_CHEOPS">SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS</a></td><td align="right">123</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_SECTION_OF_THE_PYRAMID">A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID</a></td><td align="right">129</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#DAHABEEYAHS_ON_THE_NILE_BEFORE_CAIRO">DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO</a></td><td align="right">135</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#EGYPTIAN_INFANTRY_IN_THEIR_DIFFERENT_UNIFORMS">EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS</a></td><td align="right">141</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#RIAZ_PASHA_PRIME-MINISTER_OF_EGYPT">RIAZ PASHA, PRIME-MINISTER OF EGYPT</a></td><td align="right">145</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#AN_EGYPTIAN_LANCER">AN EGYPTIAN LANCER</a></td><td align="right">149</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#TIGRANE_PASHA_MINISTER_OF_FOREIGN_AFFAIRS">TIGRANE PASHA, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS</a></td><td align="right">153</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_CAMEL_CORPS_PATROL_AT_WADI_HALFA">A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA</a></td><td align="right">157</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#H._H._ABBAS_II._KHEDIVE_OF_EGYPT">H. H. ABBAS II., KHEDIVE OF EGYPT</a></td><td align="right">161</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#THE_GUN_MULE_OF_THE_MULE_BATTERY">THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY</a></td><td align="right">165</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#LORD_CROMER_THE_ENGLISH_DIPLOMATIC_AGENT_IN_EGYPT">LORD CROMER, THE ENGLISH DIPLOMATIC AGENT IN EGYPT</a></td><td align="right">169</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_GUN_OF_THE_MULE_BATTERY_IN_ACTION">A GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION</a></td><td align="right">173</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#GREEK_SOLDIER_IN_THE_NATIONAL_ALBANIAN_UNIFORM">GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORM</a></td><td align="right">179</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#GREEK_PEASANT_GIRL">GREEK PEASANT GIRL</a></td><td align="right">181</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#THE_UNIVERSITY_OF_ATHENS">THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS</a></td><td align="right">183</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#ALBANIAN_PEASANT_WOMAN">ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN</a></td><td align="right">186</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#ALBANIAN_PEASANT_WOMAN2">ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN</a></td><td align="right">187</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#GREEK_PEASANT">GREEK PEASANT</a></td><td align="right">188</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#ALBANIAN_PEASANT_IN_THE_STREETS_OF_ATHENS">ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS</a></td><td align="right">189</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#POLYTECHNIC_SCHOOL">POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL</a></td><td align="right">191</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#AN_OLD_ATHENIAN_OF_THE_PRESENT_DAY">AN OLD ATHENIAN OF THE PRESENT DAY</a></td><td align="right">194</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_GREEK_SHEPHERD">A GREEK SHEPHERD</a></td><td align="right">195</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#GENERAL_VIEW_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE">GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE</a></td><td align="right">201</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#ONE_OF_THE_SULTANS_PALACES_ON_THE_BOSPORUS">ONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS</a></td><td align="right">205</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#A_FIRE_COMPANY_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE">A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE</a></td><td align="right">209</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#STREET_DOGS_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE">STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE</a></td><td align="right">215</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#GUARD_OF_CAVALRY_PRECEDING_THE_SULTAN_TO_THE_MOSQUE">GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE</a></td><td align="right">219</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><a href="#EXTERIOR_OF_THE_MOSQUE_OF_ST._SOPHIA">EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF ST. SOPHIA</a></td><td align="right">225</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/illus-001.jpg" width="400" height="153" alt="THE RULERS OF THE
+MEDITERRANEAN" title="THE RULERS OF THE
+MEDITERRANEAN" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR</h3>
+
+<p>If you have always crossed the Atlantic
+in the spring-time or in
+the summer months, as do
+most tourists, you will find
+that leaving New York in the
+winter is more like a relief
+expedition to the north pole
+than the setting forth on a
+pleasure tour to the summer
+shores of the Mediterranean.</p>
+
+<p>There is no green grass on
+the hills of Staten Island, but
+there is, instead, a long field of ice stretching far
+up the Hudson River, and a wind that cuts into
+the face, and dashes the spray up over the tugboats
+in frozen layers, leaving it there like the
+icing on a cake. The Atlantic Highlands are
+black with bare branches and white with snow,
+and you observe for the first time that men
+who go down to the sea in ships know nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+of open fireplaces. An icy wind keeps the deck
+as clear as a master-at-arms could do it; and sudden
+storms of snow, which you had always before
+associated with streets or fields, and not at all
+with the decks of ships, burst over the side, and
+leave the wood-work wet and slippery, and cold
+to the touch.</p>
+
+<p>And then on the third or fourth day out the
+sea grows calm, and your overcoat seems to have
+taken on an extra lining; and strange people, who
+apparently have come on board during the night,
+venture out on the sunlit deck and inquire for
+steamer chairs and mislaid rugs.</p>
+
+<p>These smaller vessels which run from New
+York to Genoa are as different from the big
+North Atlantic boats, with their twin screws
+and five hundred cabin passengers, as a family
+boarding-house is from a Broadway hotel.
+This is so chiefly because you are sailing under
+a German instead of an English flag. There
+is no one so important as an English captain&mdash;he
+is like a bishop in gold lace; but a German
+captain considers his passengers as one large
+happy family, and treats them as such, whether
+they like their new relatives or not. The discipline
+on board the <i>Fulda</i> was like that of a
+ship of war, where the officers and crew were
+concerned, but the passengers might have believed
+they were on their own private yacht.</p>
+
+<p>There was music for breakfast, dinner, and tea;
+music when the fingers of the trombonist were
+frozen and when the snow fell upon the taut surface<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
+of the big drum; and music at dawn to tell
+us it was Sunday, so that you awoke imagining
+yourself at church. There was also a ball, and
+the captain led an opening march, and the stewards
+stood at every point to see that the passengers
+kept in line, and "rounded up" those who
+tried to slip away from the procession. There
+were speeches, too, at all times, and lectures and
+religious services, and on the last night out a
+grand triumph of the <i>chef</i>, who built wonderful
+candy goddesses of Liberty smiling upon the
+other symbolic lady who keeps watch on the
+Rhine, and the band played "Dixie," which it
+had been told was the national anthem, and the
+portrait of the German Emperor smiled down
+upon us over his autograph. All this was interesting,
+because it was characteristic of the Germans;
+it showed their childish delight in little
+things, and the same simplicity of character
+which makes the German soldiers who would not
+move out of the way of the French bullets dance
+around a Christmas-tree. The American or the
+Englishman will not do these things, because he
+has too keen a sense of the ridiculous, and is
+afraid of being laughed at. So when he goes to
+sea he plays poker and holds auctions on the
+run.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one passenger on board who
+objected to the music. He was from Detroit,
+and for the first three days remained lashed to
+his steamer chair like a mummy, with nothing
+showing but a blue nose and closed eyelids. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+band played at his end of the deck, and owing to
+the fingers of the players being frozen, and to
+the sudden lurches of the ship, the harmony was
+sometimes destroyed. Those who had an ear for
+music picked up their steamer chairs and moved
+to windward; but this young man, being half
+dead and firmly lashed to his place, was unable
+to save himself.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of the fourth day, when the
+concert was over and the band had gone to thaw
+out, the young man suddenly sat upright and
+pointed his forefinger at the startled passengers.
+We had generally decided that he was dead.
+"The Lord knows I'm a sick man," he said, blinking
+his eyes feebly; "but if I live till midnight
+I'll find out where they hide those horns, and I'll
+drop 'em into the Gulf Stream, if it takes my dying
+breath." He then fell over backwards, and
+did not speak again until we reached Gibraltar.</p>
+
+<p>There is something about the sight of land after
+one has been a week without it which supplies
+a want that nothing else can fill; and it is
+interesting to note how careless one is as to its
+name, or whether it is pink or pale blue on the
+maps, or whether it is ruled by a king or a colonial
+secretary. It is quite sufficient that it is land.
+This was impressed upon me once, on entering
+New York Harbor, by a young man who emerged
+from his deck cabin to discover, what all the other
+passengers already knew, that we were in the upper
+bay. He gave a shout of ecstatic relief and
+pleasure. "That," he cried, pointing to the west,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
+"is Staten Island, but that," pointing to the right,
+"is <span class="smcap">Land</span>."</p>
+
+<p>The first land you see on going to Gibraltar
+is the Azores Islands. They are volcanic and
+mountainous, and accompany the boat for a day
+and a half; but they could be improved if they
+were moved farther south about two hundred
+miles, as one has to get up at dawn to see the
+best of them. It is quite warm by this time, and
+the clothes you wore in New York seem to belong
+to a barbarous period and past fashion, and
+have become heavy and cumbersome, and take up
+an unnecessary amount of room in your trunk.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;">
+
+<a name="THE_MAN_FROM_DETROIT" id="THE_MAN_FROM_DETROIT"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-005.jpg" width="400" height="327" alt="THE MAN FROM DETROIT" title="THE MAN FROM DETROIT" />
+<span class="caption">THE MAN FROM DETROIT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And then people tell you that there is land in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
+sight again, and you find how really far you are
+from home when you learn that it is Portugal,
+and so a part of Europe, and not an island
+thrown up by a volcano, or stolen or strayed from
+its moorings at the mainland. Portugal is apparently
+a high red hill, with a round white tower
+on the top of it flying signal flags. Its chief industry
+is the arranging of these flags by a man.
+It is, on the whole, a disappointing country.
+After this, everybody begins to pack and to exchange
+visiting-cards; and those who are to get
+off at Gibraltar are pursued by stewards and bandmasters
+and young men with testimonials that
+they want signed, and by the weak in spirit, who,
+at the eleventh hour, think they will not go on
+to Genoa, but will get off here and go on to Tangier,
+and who want you to decide for them. And
+which do you think would pay best, and what is
+there to see in Tangier, anyway? And as that
+is exactly what you are going to find out, you
+cannot tell.</p>
+
+<p>When I left the deck the last night out the
+stars were all over the heavens; and the foremast,
+as it swept slowly from side to side, looked like
+a black pendulum upside down marking out the
+sky and portioning off the stars. And when I
+woke there was a great creaking of chains, and I
+could see out of my port-hole hundreds of fixed
+lights and rows and double rows of lamps, so that
+you might have thought the ship during the
+night had run aground in the heart of a city.</p>
+
+<p>The first sight of Gibraltar is, I think, disappointing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
+It means so much, and so many
+lives have been given for it, and so many ships
+have been sunk by its batteries, and such great
+powers have warred for twelve hundred years
+for its few miles of stone, that its black outline
+against the sky, with nothing to measure it with
+but the fading stars, is dwarfed and spoiled. It
+is only after the sun begins to turn the lights
+out, and you are able to compare it with the
+great ships at its base, and you see the battlements
+and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds
+resting on its top, that you understand it; and
+then when the outline of the crouching lion, that
+faces all Europe, comes into relief, you remember
+it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean,
+of which England holds the key. And even while
+you feel this, and are greedily following the course
+of each rampart and terrace with eyes that are
+tired of blank stretches of water, some one points
+to a low line of mountains lying like blue clouds
+before the red sky of the sunrise, dim, forbidding,
+and mysterious&mdash;and you know that it is
+Africa.</p>
+
+<p>Spain, lying to the right, all green and amethyst,
+and flippant and gay with white houses and
+red roofs, and Gibraltar's grim show of battlements
+and war, become somehow of little moment.
+You feel that you have known them always,
+and that they are as you fancied they
+would be. But this other land across the water
+looks as inscrutable, as dark, and as silent as the
+Sphinx that typifies it, and you feel that its Pillar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+of Hercules still marks the entrance to the
+"unknown world."</p>
+
+<p>Nine out of every ten of those who visit Gibraltar
+for the first time expect to find an island. It
+ought to be, and it would be one but for a strip
+of level turf half a mile wide and half a mile long
+which joins it to the sunny green hills of Spain.
+But for this bit of land, which they call "the Neutral
+Ground," Gibraltar would be an island, for it
+has the Mediterranean to the east, a bay, and beyond
+that the hills of Spain to the west, and Africa
+dimly showing fourteen miles across the sea
+to the south.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 690px;"><a name="THE_ROCK_FROM_THE_BAY" id="THE_ROCK_FROM_THE_BAY"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-009.jpg" width="690" height="400" alt="THE ROCK FROM THE BAY" title="THE ROCK FROM THE BAY" />
+<span class="caption">THE ROCK FROM THE BAY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Gibraltar has been besieged thirteen times; by
+Moors and by Spaniards, and again by Moors,
+and again by Spaniards against Spaniards. It
+was during one of these wars between two factions
+in Spain, in 1704, that the English, who
+were helping one of the factions, took the Rock,
+and were so well pleased with it that they settled
+there, and have remained there ever since. If
+possession is nine points of the law, there was
+never a place in the history of the world held
+with nine as obvious points. There were three
+more sieges after the English took Gibraltar, one
+of them, the last, continuing for four years. The
+English were fighting America at the time, and
+rowing in the Nile, and so did not do much towards
+helping General George Elliot, who was
+Governor of the Rock at that time. It would
+appear to be, as well as one can judge from this
+distance, a case of neglect on the part of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+mother-country for her little colony and her six
+thousand men, very much like her forgetfulness
+of Gordon, only Elliot succeeded where Gordon
+failed (if you can associate that word with that
+name), and so no one blamed the home government
+for risking what would have been a more
+serious loss than the loss of Calais, had Elliot
+surrendered, and "Gib" gone back to its rightful
+owners, that is, the owners who have the one
+point. The history of this siege is one of the
+most interesting of war stories; it is interesting
+whether you ever expect to visit Gibraltar or not;
+it is doubly interesting when you walk the pretty
+streets of the Rock to-day, with its floating population
+of twenty thousand, and try to imagine
+the place held by six thousand half-starved, sick,
+and wounded soldiers, living at times on grass
+and herbs and handfuls of rice, and yet carrying
+on an apparently forlorn fight for four years
+against the entire army and navy of Spain, and,
+at the last, against the arms of France as well.</p>
+
+<p>We are apt to consider the Gibraltar of to-day
+as occupying the same position to the Mediterranean
+as Queenstown does to the Atlantic, a place
+where passengers go ashore while the mails are
+being taken on board, and not so much for their
+interest in the place itself as to again feel solid
+earth under their feet. There are passengers
+who will tell you on the way out that you can
+see all there is to be seen there in three hours.
+As a matter of fact, one can live in Gibraltar for
+many weeks and see something new every day.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+It struck me as being more different kinds of a
+place than any other spot of land I had ever visited,
+and one that changed its aspect with every
+shifting of the wind, and with each rising and setting
+of the sun. It is the clearing-house for three
+most picturesque peoples&mdash;the Moors, in their
+yellow slippers and bare legs and voluminous
+robes and snowy turbans; the Spaniards, with
+romantic black capes and cloaks and red sashes,
+the women with the lace mantilla and brilliant
+kerchiefs and pretty faces; and, mixed with these,
+the pride and glory of the British army and navy,
+in all the bravery of red coats and white helmets,
+or blue jackets, or Highland kilts. It is a fortress
+as imposing as the Tower of London, a winter
+resort as pretty as St. Augustine, and a seaport
+town of free entry, into which come on every tide
+people of many nations, and ships flying every
+flag.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 200px;">
+
+<a name="TYPES" id="TYPES"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-013a.jpg" width="200" height="347" alt="A TYPE" title="A TYPE" />
+<span class="caption">A TYPE</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 250px;">
+<img src="images/illus-013b.jpg" width="250" height="317" alt="A TYPE" title="A TYPE" />
+<span class="caption">A TYPE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Around its base are the ramparts, like a band
+of stone and steel; above them the town, rising
+like a staircase, with houses for steps&mdash;yellow
+houses, with light green blinds sticking out at
+different angles, and with sloping red roofs meeting
+other lines of red roofs, and broken by a carpeting
+of green where the parks and gardens
+make an opening in the yellow front of the town,
+and from which rise tall palms and palmettoes,
+and rows of sea-pines, and fluttering union-jacks
+which mark the barracks of a regiment. Above
+the town is the Rock, covered with a green
+growth of scrub and of little trees below, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+naked and bare above, stretching for several miles
+from north to south, and rearing its great bulk
+up into the sky until it loses its
+summit in the clouds. It is never
+twice the same. To-day it may
+be smiling and resplendent under
+a warm, brilliant sun that spreads
+out each shade of green, and
+shows each terrace and rampart
+as clearly as though one saw it
+through a glass; the sky becomes
+as blue as the sea and the bay,
+and the white villages of Spain
+seem as near to one as the red
+soldier smoking his pipe on the
+mountings half-way up the Rock.
+And to-morrow the whole top of the Rock may
+be lost in a thick curtain of gray clouds, and the
+waters of the bay will be tossing and covered with
+white-caps, and the lands
+about disappear from sight
+as though they had sunk into
+the sea during the night and
+had left you alone on an
+island. At times a sunset
+paints the Rock a martial
+red, or the moonlight softens
+it, and you see only the tall
+palms and the graceful balconies
+and the gardens of
+plants, and each rampart becomes a terrace and
+each casemate a balcony. Or at night, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+the lamps are lit, you might imagine yourself on
+the stage of a theatre, walking in a scene set for
+<i>Fra Diavolo</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There are no such streets or houses outside of
+stage-land. It is only in stage cities that the
+pavements and streets are so conspicuously clean,
+or that the hanging lamps of beaten iron-work
+throw such deep shadows, or that there are such
+high, heavily carved Moorish doorways and mysterious
+twisting stairways in the solid rock, or
+shops with such queer signs, or walls plastered
+with such odd-colored placards&mdash;streets where
+every footfall echoes, and where dark figures suddenly
+appear from narrow alleyways and cry
+"Halt, there!" at you, and then "All's well" as
+you pass by.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 567px;"><a name="GIBRALTAR_AS_SEEN_ACROSS_THE_NEUTRAL_GROUND" id="GIBRALTAR_AS_SEEN_ACROSS_THE_NEUTRAL_GROUND"></a>
+
+
+<img src="images/illus-015.jpg" width="567" height="400" alt="GIBRALTAR" title="GIBRALTAR" />
+<span class="caption">GIBRALTAR AS SEEN ACROSS THE NEUTRAL GROUND</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Gibraltar has one main street running up and
+clinging to the side of the hill from the principal
+quay to the most southern point of the Rock.
+Houses reach up to it from the first level of the
+ramparts, and continue on up the hill from its
+other side. On this street are the bazars of the
+Moors, and the English shops and the Spanish
+cafés, and the cathedral, and the hotels, and the
+Governor's house, and every one in Gibraltar is
+sure to appear on it at least once in the twenty-four
+hours. But the color and tone of the street
+are military. There are soldiers at every step&mdash;soldiers
+carrying the mail or bearing reports, or
+soldiers in bulk with a band ahead, or soldiers
+going out to guard the North Front, where lies
+the Neutral Ground, or to target practice, or to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+play football; soldiers in two or threes, with their
+sticks under their arms, and their caps very much
+cocked, and pipes in their mouths. But these
+make slow progress, for there is always an officer
+in sight&mdash;either a boy officer just out from England
+riding to the polo field near the Neutral
+Ground, or a commanding officer in a black tunic
+and a lot of ribbons across his breast, or an officer
+of the day with his sash and sword; and each
+of these has to be saluted. This is an interesting
+spectacle, and one that is always new. You
+see three soldiers coming at you with a quick
+step, talking and grinning, alert and jaunty, and
+suddenly the upper part of their three bodies becomes
+rigid, though their legs continue as before,
+apparently of their own volition, and their hands
+go up and their pipes and grins disappear, and
+they pass you with eyes set like dead men's eyes,
+and palms facing you as though they were trying
+to learn which way the wind was blowing. This
+is due, you discover, to the passing of a stout
+gentleman in knickerbockers, who switches his
+rattan stick in the air in reply. Sometimes when
+he salutes the soldier stops altogether, and so his
+walks abroad are punctuated at every twenty
+yards. It takes an ordinary soldier in Gibraltar
+one hour to walk ten minutes.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody walks in the middle of the main
+street in Gibraltar, because the sidewalks are only
+two feet wide, and because all the streets are as
+clean as the deck of a yacht. Cabs of yellow
+wood and diligences with jangling bells and red<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
+worsted harness gallop through this street and
+sweep the people up against the wall, and long
+lines of goats who leave milk in a natural manner
+at various shops tangle themselves up with long
+lines of little donkeys and longer lines of geese,
+with which the local police struggle valiantly.
+All of these things, troops and goats and yellow
+cabs and polo ponies and dog-carts, and priests
+with curly-brimmed hats, and baggy-breeched
+Moors, and huntsmen in pink coats and Tommies
+in red, and sailors rolling along in blue, make the
+main street of Gibraltar as full of variety as a
+mask ball.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Gibraltar militant, the fortress and the
+key to the Mediterranean, you can see but the
+little that lies open to you and to every one
+along the ramparts. Of the real defensive works
+of the place you are not allowed to have even a
+guess. The ramparts stretch all along the western
+side of the rock, presenting to the bay a high
+shelving wall which twists and changes its front
+at every hundred yards, and in such an unfriendly
+way that whoever tried to scale its slippery surface
+at one point would have a hundred yards of
+ramparts on either side of him, from which two
+sides gunners and infantry could observe his
+efforts with comfort and safety to themselves;
+and from which, when tired of watching him slip
+and scramble, they could and undoubtedly would
+blow him into bits. But they would probably
+save him the trouble of coming so far by doing
+that before he left his vessel in the bay. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
+northern face of the
+Rock&mdash;that end
+which faces Spain,
+and which makes
+the head of the
+crouching lion&mdash;shows
+two long
+rows of teeth cut in
+its surface by convicts
+of long ago.
+You are allowed to
+walk through these
+dungeons, and to
+look down upon
+the Neutral Ground
+and the little Spanish
+town at the end
+of its half-mile over
+the butts of great
+guns. And you will
+marvel not so much
+at the engineering skill of whoever it was who
+planned this defence as at the weariness and the
+toil of the criminals who gave up the greater part
+of their lives to hewing and blasting out these
+great galleries and gloomy passages, through
+which your footsteps echo like the report of cannon.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 250px;"><a name="AN_ENGLISH_SENTRY" id="AN_ENGLISH_SENTRY"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-019.jpg" width="250" height="414" alt="AN ENGLISH SENTRY" title="AN ENGLISH SENTRY" />
+<span class="caption">AN ENGLISH SENTRY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lower down, on the outside of this mask of
+rock, are more ramparts, built there by man,
+from which infantry could sweep the front of
+the enemy were they to approach from the only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+point from which a land attack is possible. The
+other side of the Rock, that which faces the
+Mediterranean, is unfortified, except by the big
+guns on the very summit, for no man could scale
+it, and no ball yet made could shatter its front.
+To further protect the north from a land attack
+there is at the base of the Rock and below the
+ramparts a great moat, bridged by an apparently
+solid piece of masonry. This roadway, which
+leads to the north gate of the fortress&mdash;the one
+which is closed at six each night&mdash;is undermined,
+and at a word could be blown into pebbles,
+turning the moat into a great lake of water,
+and virtually changing the Rock of Gibraltar
+into an island. I never crossed this roadway
+without wondering whether the sentry underneath
+might not be lighting his pipe near the
+powder-magazine, and I generally reached the
+end of it at a gallop.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><a name="A_SPANISH_SENTRY" id="A_SPANISH_SENTRY"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-021.jpg" width="200" height="255" alt="A SPANISH SENTRY" title="A SPANISH SENTRY" />
+<span class="caption">A SPANISH SENTRY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is still another protection to the North
+Front. It is only the protection which a watch-dog
+gives at night; but a watch-dog is most important.
+He gives you time to sound your burglar-alarm
+and to get a pistol from under your pillow.
+A line of sentries pace the Neutral Ground,
+and have paced it for nearly two hundred years.
+Their sentry-boxes dot the half-mile of turf, and
+their red coats move backward and forward night
+and day, and any one who leaves the straight and
+narrow road crossing the Neutral Ground, and
+who comes too near, passes a dead-line and is
+shot. Facing them, a half-mile off, are the white<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+adobe sentry-boxes of Spain and another row of
+sentries, wearing long blue coats and queer little
+shakos, and smoking cigarettes. And so the
+two great powers watch each other unceasingly
+across the half-mile of turf, and say, "So far shall
+you go, and no farther; this belongs to me."
+There is nothing more significant than these two
+rows of sentries; you notice it whenever you
+cross the Neutral Ground for a ride in Spain.
+First you see the English sentry, rather short
+and very young, but very clean and rigid, and
+scowling fiercely over the chin strap of his big
+white helmet. His shoulder-straps shine with
+pipe-clay and his boots with blacking, and his
+arms are burnished and oily. Taken alone, he is
+a little atom, a molecule; but he is complete in
+himself, with his food and lodging on his back, and
+his arms ready to his
+hand. He is one of a
+great system that obtains
+from India to
+Nova Scotia, and from
+Bermuda to Africa
+and Australia; and he
+shows that he knows
+this in the way in
+which he holds up his
+chin and kicks out his
+legs as he tramps back
+and forward guarding
+the big rock at his
+back. And facing him,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+half a mile away, you will see a tall handsome man
+seated on a stone, with the tails of his long coat
+wrapped warmly around his legs, and with his
+gun leaning against another rock while he rolls a
+cigarette; and then, with his hands in his pockets,
+he gazes through the smoke at the sky above
+and the sea on either side, and wonders when he
+will be paid his peseta a day for fighting and
+bleeding for his country. This helps to make
+you understand how six thousand half-starved
+Englishmen held Gibraltar for four years against
+the army of Spain.</p>
+
+<p>This is about all that you can see of Gibraltar
+as a fortress. You hear, of course, of much more,
+and you can guess at a great deal. Up above,
+where the Signal Station is, and where no one,
+not even an officer in uniform not engaged on the
+works, is allowed to go, are the real fortifications.
+What looks like a rock is a monster gun painted
+gray, or a tree hides the mouth of another. And
+in this forbidden territory are great cannon
+which are worked from the lowest ramparts.
+These are the present triumphs of Gibraltar.
+Before they came, the clouds which shut out the
+sight of the Rock as well as the rest of the world
+from its summit rendered the great pieces of artillery
+there as useless in bad weather as they are
+harmless in times of peace. The very elements
+threatened to war against the English, and a
+shower of rain or a veering wind might have altered
+the fortunes of a battle. But a clever man
+named Watkins has invented a position-finder,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+by means of which those on the lowest ramparts,
+well out of the clouds, can aim the great guns on
+the summit at a vessel unseen by the gunners
+lost in the mist above, and by electricity fire a
+shot from a gun a half-mile above them so that
+it will strike an object many miles off at sea. It
+will be a very strange sensation to the captain of
+such a vessel when he finds her bombarded by
+shells that belch forth from a drifting cloud.</p>
+
+<p>No stranger has really any idea of the real
+strength of this fortress, or in what part of it its
+real strength lies. Not one out of ten of its
+officers knows it. Gibraltar is a grand and grim
+practical joke; it is an armed foe like the army
+in <i>Macbeth</i>, who came in the semblance of a
+wood, or like the wooden horse of Troy that
+held the pick of the enemy's fighting-men.
+What looks like a solid face of rock is a hanging
+curtain that masks a battery; the blue waters
+of the bay are treacherous with torpedoes; and
+every little smiling village of Spain has been
+marked down for destruction, and has had its
+measurements taken as accurately as though the
+English batteries had been playing on it already
+for many years. The Rock is undermined and
+tunnelled throughout, and food and provisions
+are stored away in it to last a siege of seven
+years. Telephones and telegraphs, signal stations
+for flagging, search-lights, and other such
+devilish inventions, have been planted on every
+point, and only the Governor himself knows what
+other modern improvements have been introduced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
+into the bowels of this mountain or distributed
+behind bits of landscape gardening on
+its surface.</p>
+
+<p>On the 25th of February, at half-past ten in
+the morning, three guns were fired in rapid succession
+from the top of the Rock, and the windows
+shook. Three guns mean that Gibraltar is
+about to be attacked by a fleet of war-ships, and
+that "England expects every man to do his
+duty." So I went out to see him do it. Men
+were running through the streets trailing their
+guns, and officers were galloping about pulling at
+their gloves, and bodies of troops were swinging
+along at a double-quick, which always makes
+them look as though they were walking in tight
+boots, and bugles were calling, and groups of
+men, black and clearly cut against the sky, were
+excitedly switching the air with flags from every
+jutting rock and every rampart of the garrison.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 614px;"><a name="SIGNAL_STATION_ON_TOP-OF_THE_ROCK" id="SIGNAL_STATION_ON_TOP-OF_THE_ROCK"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-025.jpg" width="614" height="400" alt="SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK" title="SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK" />
+<span class="caption">SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Behind the ramparts, quite out of sight of the
+vessels in the bay, were many hundreds of infantrymen
+with rifles in hand, and only waiting
+for a signal to appear above the coping of the
+wall to empty their guns into the boats of the
+enemy. The enlisted men, who enjoy this sort
+of play, were pleased and interested; the officers
+were almost as calm as they would be before a
+real enemy, and very much bored at being called
+out and experimented with. The real object of
+the preparation for defence that morning was to
+learn whether the officers at different points could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
+communicate with the governor as he rode rapidly
+from one spot to another. This was done
+by means of flags, and although the officer who
+did the flagging for the Governor's party had
+about as much as he could do to keep his horse
+on four legs, the experiment was most successful.
+It was a very pretty and curious sight to see
+men talking a mile away to a party of horsemen
+going at full gallop.</p>
+
+<p>The life of a subaltern of the British army,
+who belongs to a smart regiment, and who is
+stationed at such a post as Gibraltar, impresses
+you as being as easy and satisfactory a state
+of existence as a young and unmarried man could
+ask. He has always the hope that some day&mdash;any
+day, in fact&mdash;he will have a chance to see
+active service, and so serve his country and distinguish
+his name. And while waiting for this
+chance he enjoys the good things the world
+brings him with a clear conscience. He has
+duties, it is true, but they did not strike me as
+being wearing ones, or as threatening nervous
+prostration. As far as I could see, his most trying
+duty was the number of times a day he had
+to change his clothes, and this had its ameliorating
+circumstance in that he each time changed
+into a more gorgeous costume. There was one
+youth whom I saw in four different suits in two
+hours. When I first noticed him he was coming
+back from polo, in boots and breeches; then he
+was directing the firing of a gun, with a pill-box
+hat on the side of his head, a large pair of field-glasses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+in his hand, and covered by a black and
+red uniform that fitted him like a jersey. A
+little later he turned up at a tennis party at the
+Governor's in flannels; and after that he came
+back there to dine in the garb of every evening.
+When the subaltern dines at mess he wears a
+uniform which turns that of the First City Troop
+into what looks in comparison like a second-hand
+and ready-made garment. The officers of
+the 13th Somerset Light Infantry wore scarlet
+jackets at dinner, with high black silk waistcoats
+bordered with two inches of gold lace. The
+jackets have gold buttons sewed along every
+edge that presents itself, and offer glorious
+chances for determining one's future by counting
+"poor man, rich man, beggar-man, thief."
+When eighteen of these jackets are placed
+around a table, the chance civilian feels and
+looks like an undertaker.</p>
+
+<p>Dining at mess is a very serious function in a
+British regiment. At other times her Majesty's
+officers have a reticent air; but at dinner, when
+you are a guest, or whether you are a guest or
+not, there is an intent to please and to be
+pleased which is rather refreshing.</p>
+
+<p>We have no regimental headquarters in America,
+and owing to our officers seeking promotion
+all over the country, the regimental <i>esprit de
+corps</i> is lacking. But in the English army regimental
+feeling is very strong; father and son follow
+on in the same regiment, and now that they
+are naming them for the counties from which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+they are recruited, they are becoming very close
+corporations indeed. At mess the traditions of
+the regiment come into play, and you can learn
+then of the actions in which it has been engaged
+from the engravings and paintings around
+the walls, and from the silver plate on the table
+and the flags stacked in the corner.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 657px;"><a name="CANNONS_MASKED_BY_BUSHES" id="CANNONS_MASKED_BY_BUSHES"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-029.jpg" width="657" height="350" alt="CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES" title="CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES" />
+<span class="caption">CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>When a man gets his company he presents
+the regiment with a piece of plate, or a silver
+inkstand, or a picture, or something which commemorates
+a battle or a man, and so the regimental
+headquarters are always telling a story
+of what has been in the past and inspiring fine
+deeds for the future. Each regiment has its
+peculiarity of uniform or its custom at mess,
+which is distinctive to it, and which means more
+the longer it is observed. Those in authority
+are trying to do away with these signs and differences<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+in equipment, and are writing themselves
+down asses as they do so.</p>
+
+<p>You will notice, for instance, if you are up in
+such things, that the sergeants of the 13th Light
+Infantry wear their sashes from the left shoulder
+to the right hip, as officers do, and not from the
+right shoulder, as sergeants should. This means
+that once in a great battle every officer of the
+13th was killed, and the sergeants, finding this out,
+and that they were now in command, changed
+their sashes to the other shoulder. And the officers
+ever after allowed them to do this, as a
+tribute to their brothers in command who had
+so conspicuously obliterated themselves and distinguished
+their regiment. There are other traditions,
+such as that no one must mention a
+woman's name at mess, except the title of one
+woman, to which they rise and drink at the end
+of the dinner, when the sergeant gives the signal
+to the band-master outside, and his men play
+the national anthem, while the bandmaster
+comes in, as Mr. Kipling describes him in "The
+Drums of the Fore and Aft," and "takes his
+glass of port-wine with the orfficers." The Sixtieth,
+or the Royal Rifles, for instance, wear no
+marks of rank at the mess, in order to express
+the idea that there they are all equal. This
+regiment had once for its name the King's
+American Rifles, and under that name it took
+Quebec and Montreal, and I had placed in front
+of me at mess one night a little silver statuette
+in the equipment of a Continental soldier, except<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+that his coat, if it had been colored, would
+have been red, and not blue. He was dated
+1768. In the mess-room are pictures of the regiment
+swarming over the heights of Quebec,
+storming the walls of Delhi, and running the
+gauntlet up the Nile as they pressed forward
+to save Gordon. All of this goes to make a subaltern
+feel things that are good for him to feel.</p>
+
+<p>Every day at Gibraltar there is tennis, and
+bands playing in the Alameda, and parades, or
+riding-parties across the Neutral Ground into
+Spain, and teas and dinners, at which the young
+ladies of the place dance Spanish dances, and
+twice a week the members of the Calpe Hunt
+meet in Spain, and chase foxes across the worst
+country that any Englishman ever rode over in
+pink. There are no fences, but there are ravines
+and cañons and precipices, down and up and over
+which the horses scramble and jump, and over
+which they will, if the rider leaves them alone,
+bring him safely.</p>
+
+<p>And if you lose the rest of the field, you can go
+to an old Spanish inn like that which Don Quixote
+visited, with drunken muleteers in the court-yard,
+and the dining-room over the stable, and with
+beautiful dark-eyed young women to give you
+omelet and native wine and black bread. Or,
+what is as amusing, you can stop in at the officer's
+guard-room at the North Front, and cheer
+that gentleman's loneliness by taking tea with
+him, and drying your things before his fire while
+he cuts the cake, and the women of the party<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+straighten their hats in front of his glass, and
+two Tommies go off for hot water.</p>
+
+<p>There was a very entertaining officer guarding
+the North Front one night, and he proved so entertaining
+that neither of us heard the sunset gun,
+and so when I reached the gate I found it locked,
+and the bugler of the guard who take the keys to
+the Governor each night was sounding his bugle
+half-way up the town. There was a dark object
+on a wall to which I addressed all my arguments
+and explanations, which the object met with repeated
+requests to "move on, now," in the tone
+of expostulation with which a London policeman
+addresses a very drunken man.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 558px;"><a name="TEA_IN_THE_OFFICERS_QUARTERS" id="TEA_IN_THE_OFFICERS_QUARTERS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-033.jpg" width="558" height="400" alt="TEA IN THE OFFICERS&#39; QUARTERS" title="TEA IN THE OFFICERS&#39; QUARTERS" />
+<span class="caption">TEA IN THE OFFICERS&#39; QUARTERS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I knew that if I tried to cross the Neutral
+Ground I would be shot at for a smuggler; for,
+owing to Gibraltar's being a free port of entry,
+these gentlemen buy tobacco there, and carry it
+home each night, or run it across the half-mile of
+Neutral Ground strapped to the backs of dogs.
+So I wandered back again to the entertaining
+officer, and he was filled with remorse, and sent
+off a note of entreaty to his Excellency's representative,
+to whom he referred as a D. A. A. G.,
+and whose name, he said, was Jones. We then
+went to the mess of the officers guarding the
+different approaches, and these gentlemen kindly
+offered me their own beds, proposing that they
+themselves should sleep on three chairs and a
+pile of overcoats; all except one subaltern, who
+excused his silence by saying diffidently that he
+fancied I would not care to sleep in the fever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+officer of the keys pass every night, and the
+guards turn out to salute the keys, and I had
+rather imagined that it was more or less of a
+form, and that the pomp and circumstance were
+all there was of it. I did not believe that the
+Rock was really closed up at night like a safe
+with a combination lock. But I know now that
+it is. A note came back from the mysterious
+D. A. A. G. saying I could be admitted at eleven;
+but it said nothing at all about sentries, nor
+did the entertaining officer. Subalterns always
+say "Officer" when challenged, and the sentry
+always murmurs, "Pass, officer, and all's well,"
+in an apologetic growl. But I suppose I did
+not say "Officer" as I had been told to do, with
+any show of confidence, for every sentry who appeared
+that night&mdash;and there seemed to be a
+regiment of them&mdash;would not have it at all, and
+wanted further data, and wanted it quick. Even
+if you have an order from a D. A. A. G. named
+Jones, it is very difficult to explain about it
+when you don't know whether to speak of him
+as the D. A. A. G. or as General Jones, and
+especially when a young and inexperienced
+shadow is twisting his gun about so that the
+moonlight plays up and down the very longest
+bayonet ever issued by a civilized nation. They
+were not nice sentries, either, like those on the
+Rock, who stand where you can see them, and
+who challenge you drowsily, like cabmen, and
+make the empty streets less lonely than otherwise.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>They were, on the contrary, fierce and in a
+terrible hurry, and had a way of jumping out of
+the shadow with a rattle of the gun and a shout
+that brought nerve-storms in successive shocks.
+To make it worse, I had gone over the post,
+while waiting for word from the D. A. A. G., to
+hear the sentries recite their instructions to the
+entertaining officer. They did this rather badly,
+I thought, the only portion of the rules, indeed,
+which they seemed to have by heart being those
+which bade them not to allow cows to trespass
+"without a permit," which must have impressed
+them by its humor, and the fact that when approached
+within fifty yards they were "to fire
+low." I found when challenged that night that
+this was the only part of their instructions that I
+also could remember.</p>
+
+<p>This was the only trying experience of my
+stay in Gibraltar, and it is brought in here as a
+compliment to the force that guards the North
+Front. For of them, and the rest of the inhabitants
+and officers of the garrison, any one who
+visits there can only think well; and I hope
+when the Rock is attacked, as it never will be,
+that they will all cover themselves with glory.
+It never will be attacked, for the reason that the
+American people are the only people clever
+enough to invent a way of taking it, and they
+are far too clever to attempt an impossible
+thing.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span></p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h3>TANGIER</h3>
+
+
+<p>A great many thousand years ago
+Hercules built the mountain of Abyla
+and its twin mountain which we
+call Gibraltar. It was supposed to
+mark the limits of the unknown
+world, and it would seem from casual inspection,
+as I suggested in the last chapter, that it serves
+the same purpose to this day. Men have crept
+into Africa and crept out again, like flies over a
+ceiling, and they have gained much renown at
+Africa's expense for having done so. They have
+built little towns along its coasts, and run little
+rocking, bumping railroads into its forests, and
+dragged launches over its cataracts, and partitioned
+it off among emperors and powers and
+trading companies, without having ventured into
+the countries they pretend to have subdued.
+But from Paul du Chaillu to W. A. Chanler, "the
+Last Explorer," as he has been called, just how
+much more do we know of Africa than did the
+Romans whose bridges still stand in Tangier?</p>
+
+<p>The "Last Explorer" sounds well, and is distinctly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+a <i>mot</i>, but there will be other explorers
+to go, and perhaps to return. There are still a
+few things for us to learn. The Spaniards and
+the Pilgrim fathers touched the unknown world
+of America only four hundred years ago, and to-day
+any commercial traveller can tell you, with
+the aid of an A B C railroad guide, the name of
+every town in any part of it. But Turks and
+Romans and Spaniards, and, of late, English and
+Germans and French, have been pecking and
+nibbling at Africa like little mice around a
+cheese, and they are still nibbling at the rind,
+and know as little of the people they "protect,"
+and of the countries they have annexed and colonized,
+as did Hannibal and Scipio. The American
+forests have been turned into railroad ties
+and telegraph poles, and the American Indian
+has been "exterminated" or taught to plough
+and to wear a high hat. The cowboy rides freely
+over the prairies; the Indian agent cheats the
+Indian&mdash;the Indian does not cheat him; the
+Germans own Milwaukee and Cincinnati; the
+Irish rule everywhere; even the much-abused
+Chinaman hangs out his red sign in every corner
+of the country. There is not a nation of the
+globe that has not its hold upon and does not
+make fortunes out of the continent of America;
+but the continent of Africa remains just as it
+was, holding back its secret, and still content to
+be the unknown world.</p>
+
+<p>You need not travel far into Africa to learn
+this; you can find out how little we know of it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+at its very shore. This city of Tangier, lying
+but three hours off from Gibraltar's civilization,
+on the nearest coast of Africa, can teach you
+how little we or our civilized contemporaries understand
+of these barbarians and of their barbarous
+ways.</p>
+
+<p>A few months since England sent her ambassador
+to treat with the Sultan of Morocco; it
+was an untaught blackamoor opposed to a diplomat
+and a gentleman, and a representative
+of the most civilized and powerful of empires;
+and we have Stephen Bonsal's picture of this
+ambassador and his suite riding back along the
+hot, sandy trail from Fez, baffled and ridiculed
+and beaten. So that when I was in Tangier,
+half-naked Moors, taking every white stranger
+for an Englishman, would point a finger at me
+and cry, "Your Sultana a fool; the Sultan only
+wise." Which shows what a superior people we
+are when we get away from home, and how well
+the English understand the people they like to
+protect.</p>
+
+<p>Tangier lies like a mass of drifted snow on the
+green hills below, and over the point of rock on
+which stands its fortress, and from which waves
+the square red flag of Morocco. It is a fine
+place spoiled by civilization. And not a nice
+quality of civilization either. Back of it, in
+Tetuan or Fez, you can understand what Tangier
+once was and see the Moor at his best.
+There he lives in the exclusiveness which his religion
+teaches him is right&mdash;an exclusiveness to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+which the hauteur of an Englishman, and his
+fear that some one is going to speak to him on
+purpose, become a gracious manner and suggest
+undue familiarity. You see the Moor at his best
+in Tangier too, but he is never in his complete
+setting as he is in the inland cities, for when
+you walk abroad in Tangier you are constantly
+brought back to the new world by the presence
+and abodes of the foreign element; a French
+shop window touches a bazar, and a Moor in his
+finest robes is followed by a Spaniard in his
+black cape or an Englishman in a tweed suit,
+for the Englishman learns nothing and forgets
+nothing. He may live in Tangier for years, but
+he never learns to wear a burnoose, or forgets
+to put on the coat his tailor has sent him from
+home as the latest in fashion. The first thing
+which meets your eye on entering the harbor at
+Tangier is an immense blue-and-white enamel
+sign asking you to patronize the English store
+for groceries and provisions. It strikes you as
+much more barbarous than the Moors who come
+scrambling over the vessel's side.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><a name="BREAD_MERCHANTS_AT_THE_GATE" id="BREAD_MERCHANTS_AT_THE_GATE"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-041.jpg" width="400" height="658" alt="BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE" title="BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE" />
+<span class="caption">BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>They come with a rush and with wild yells before
+the little steamer has stopped moving, and
+remind you of their piratical ancestors. They
+look quite as fierce, and as they throw their
+brown bare legs over the bulwarks and leap and
+scramble, pushing and shouting in apparently
+the keenest stage of excitement and rage, they
+only need long knives between their teeth and a
+cutlass to convince you that you are at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+mercy of the Barbary pirates, and not merely of
+hotel porters and guides.</p>
+
+<p>My guide was a Moor named Mahamed. I
+had him about a week, or rather, to speak quite
+correctly, he had me. I do not know how he effected
+my capture, but he went with me, I think,
+because no one else would have him, and he accordingly
+imposed on my good-nature. As we
+say a man is "good-natured" when there is absolutely
+nothing else to be said for him, I hope
+when I say this that I shall not be accused of
+trying to pay myself a compliment. Mahamed
+was a tall Moor, with a fine array of different-colored
+robes and coats and undercoats, and a
+large white turban around his fez, which marked
+the fact that he was either married or that he
+had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He followed
+me from morning until night, with the fidelity of
+a lamb, and with its sheeplike stupidity. No
+amount of argument or money or abuse could
+make him leave my side. Mahamed was not
+even picturesque, for he wore a large pair of
+blue spectacles and Congress gaiters. This hurt
+my sense of the fitness of things very much.
+His idea of serving me was to rush on ahead
+and shove all the little donkeys and blind beggars
+and children out of my way, at which the
+latter would weep, and I would have to go back
+and bribe them into cheerfulness again. In this
+way he made me most unpopular with the
+masses, and cost me a great deal in trying to buy
+their favor. I was never so completely at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+mercy of any one before, and I hope he found
+me "intelligent, courteous, and a good linguist."</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, there is very little need of
+a guide in Tangier. It has but few show places,
+for the place itself is the show. You can find
+your best entertainment in picking your way
+through its winding, narrow streets, and in wandering
+about the open market-places. The highways
+of Tangier are all very crooked and very
+steep. They are also very uneven and dirty, and
+one walks sometimes for hundreds of yards in a
+maze of dark alleys and little passageways walled
+in by whitewashed walls, and sheltered from the
+sun by archways and living-rooms hanging from
+one side of the street to the other. Green and
+blue doorways, through which one must stoop
+to enter, open in from the street, and you are
+constantly hearing them shut as you pass, as
+some of the women of the household recognize
+the presence of a foreigner. You are never quite
+sure as to what you will meet in the streets or
+what may be displayed at your elbow before the
+doors of the bazars. The odors of frying meat
+and of fresh fruit and of herbs, and of soap in
+great baskets, and of black coffee and hasheesh,
+come to you from cafés and tiny shops hardly as
+big as a packing-box. These are shut up at
+night by two half-doors, of which the upper one
+serves as a shield from the sun by day and the
+lower as a pair of steps. In the wider streets
+are the bazars, magnificent with color and with
+the glitter of gold lace and of brass plaques and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+silver daggers; handsome, comfortable-looking
+Moors sit crossed-legged in the middle of their
+small extent like soldiers in a sentry-box, and
+speak leisurely with their next-door neighbor
+without gesture, unless they grow excited over a
+bargain, and with a haughty contempt for the
+passing Christian. There is always something
+beneficial in feeling that you are thoroughly despised;
+and when a whole community combines
+to despise you, and looks over your head gravely
+as you pass, you begin to feel that those Moors
+who do not apparently hold you in contempt are
+a very poor and middle-class sort of people, and
+you would much prefer to be overlooked by a
+proud Moor than shaken hands with by a perverted
+one. But the pride of the rich Moorish
+gentlemen is nothing compared to the fanatic intolerance
+of the poor farmers from the country
+of the tribes who come in on market-day, and
+who hate the Christian properly as the Koran
+tells them they should. They stalk through the
+narrow street with both eyes fixed on a point far
+ahead of them, with head and shoulders erect
+and arms swinging. They brush against you as
+though you were a camel or a horse, and had
+four legs on which to stand instead of two.
+Sometimes a foreigner forgets that these men
+from the desert, where the foreign element has
+not come, are following out the religious training
+of a lifetime, and strikes at one of them with
+his riding-whip, and then takes refuge in a consulate
+and leaves on the next boat.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>I find it very hard not to sympathize with the
+Moors. The Englishman is always preaching
+that an Englishman's house is his castle, and yet
+he invades this country, he and his French and
+Spanish and American cousins, and demands
+that not only he shall be treated well, but that
+any native of the country, any subject of the
+Sultan, who chooses to call himself an American
+or an Englishman shall be protected too. Of
+course he knows that he is not wanted there;
+he knows he is forcing himself on the barbarian,
+and that all the barbarian has ever asked of him
+is to be let alone. But he comes, and he rides
+around in his baggy breeches and varnished
+boots, and he gets up polo games and cricket
+matches, and gallops about in a pink coat after
+foxes, and asks for bitter ale, and complains because
+he cannot get his bath, and all the rest
+of it, quite as if he had been begged to come
+and to stop as long as he liked. Sometimes you
+find a foreigner who tries to learn something of
+these people, a man like the late Mr. Leared or
+"Bébé" Carleton, who can speak all their dialects,
+and who has more power with the Sultan
+than has any foreign minister, and who, if the
+Sultan will not pay you for the last shipment of
+guns you sent him, or for the grand-piano for
+the harem, is the man to get you your money.
+But the average foreign resident, as far as I can
+see, neither adopts the best that the Moor has
+found good, nor introduces what the Moor most
+needs, and what he does not know or care<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+enough about to introduce for himself. Tangier,
+for instance, is excellently adapted by nature
+for the purposes of good sanitation, but
+the arrangements are as bad and primitive as
+they were before a foreigner came into the
+place. They consist in dumping the refuse of
+the streets, into which everything is thrown, over
+the sea-wall out on the rocks below, where the
+pigs gather up what they want, and the waves
+wash the remainder back on the coast.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><a name="SANITARY_OUTFIT_DUMPING_REFUSE_OVER_THE_WALL" id="SANITARY_OUTFIT_DUMPING_REFUSE_OVER_THE_WALL"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-047.jpg" width="400" height="193" alt="SANITARY OUTFIT" title="SANITARY OUTFIT" />
+<span class="caption">SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>If some of the foreign ministers would use
+their undoubted influence with the Bashaw to
+amend this, instead of introducing point-to-point
+pony races, they might in time show some reason
+for their invasion of Morocco other than the
+curious and obvious one that they all grow rich
+there while doing nothing. The foreign resident
+has a very great contempt for the Moor. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+says the Moor is a great liar and a rogue. When
+people used to ask Walter Scott if it was he who
+wrote the Waverley Novels he used to tell them
+it was not, and he excused this afterwards by saying
+that if you are asked an impertinent or impossible
+question you have the right not to answer
+it or to tell an untruth. The very presence
+of the foreigner is an impertinence in the eyes
+of the Moor, and so he naturally does not feel
+severe remorse when he baffles the foreign invader,
+and does it whenever he can.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, the foreign invader at
+Tangier is not, in a number of cases, in a position
+in which he can gracefully throw down
+gauntlets. There is something about these hot,
+raw countries, hidden out of the way of public
+opinion and police courts and the respectability
+which drives a gig, that makes people forget the
+rules and axioms laid down in the temperate
+zone for the guidance of tax-payers and all reputable
+citizens. As the sailors say, "There is no
+Sunday south of the equator." It is hard to tell
+just what it is, but the sun, or the example of
+the barbarians, or the fact that the world is so
+far away, breeds queer ideas, and one hears
+stories one would not care to print as long as
+the law of libel obtains in the land. You have
+often read in novels, especially French novels, or
+have heard men on the stage say: "Come, let us
+leave this place, with its unjust laws and cruel
+bigotry. We will go to some unknown corner
+of the earth, where we will make a new home.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+And there, under a new flag and a new name, we
+will forget the sad past, and enter into a new
+world of happiness and content."</p>
+
+<p>When you hear a man on the stage say that,
+you can make up your mind that he is going to
+Tangier. It may be that he goes there with
+somebody else's money, or somebody else's wife,
+or that he has had trouble with a check; or, as
+in the case of one young man who was fêted and
+dined there, had robbed a diamond store in
+Brooklyn, and is now in Sing Sing; or, as in the
+case of a recent American consul, had sold his
+protection for two hundred dollars to any one
+who wanted it, and was recalled under several
+clouds. And you hear stories of ministers who
+retire after receiving an income of a few hundred
+pounds a year with two hundred thousand dollars
+they have saved out of it, and of cruelty and
+bursts of sudden passion that would undoubtedly
+cause a lynching in the chivalric and civilized
+states of Alabama or Tennessee. And so when
+I heard why several of the people of Tangier had
+come there, and why they did not go away again,
+I began to feel that the barbarian, whose forefathers
+swept Spain and terrorized the whole of
+Catholic Europe, had more reason than he knew
+for despising the Christian who is waiting to give
+to his country the benefits of civilization.</p>
+
+<p>Tangier's beauty lies in so many different
+things&mdash;in the monk-like garb of the men and
+in the white muffled figures of the women; in the
+brilliancy of its sky, and of the sea dashing upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
+the rocks and tossing the feluccas with their
+three-cornered sails from side to side; and in the
+green towers of the mosques, and the listless
+leaves of the royal palms rising from the centre
+of a mass of white roofs; and, above all, in the
+color and movement of the bazars and streets.
+The streets represent absolute equality. They
+are at the widest but three yards across, and
+every one pushes, and apparently every one has
+something to sell, or at least something to say,
+for they all talk and shout at once, and cry at
+their donkeys or abuse whoever touches them.
+A water-carrier, with his goat-skin bag on his
+back and his finger on the tube through which
+the water comes, jostles you on one side, and a
+slave as black and shiny as a patent-leather boot
+shoves you on the other as he makes way for his
+master on a fine white Arabian horse with brilliant
+trappings and a huge contempt for the donkeys
+in his way. It is worth going to Tangier if
+for no other reason than to see a slave, and to
+grasp the fact that he costs anywhere from a hundred
+to five hundred dollars. To the older generation
+this may not seem worth while, but to
+the present generation&mdash;those of it who were
+born after Richmond was taken&mdash;it is a new and
+momentous sensation to look at a man as fine and
+stalwart and human as one of your own people,
+and feel that he cannot strike for higher wages,
+or even serve as a parlor-car porter or own a barbershop,
+but must work out for life the two hundred
+dollars his owner paid for him at Fez.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>There is more movement in Tangier than I
+have ever noticed in a place of its size. Every
+one is either looking on cross-legged from the
+bazars and coffee-shops, or rushing, pushing, and
+screaming in the street. It is most bewildering;
+if you turn to look after a particularly magnificent
+Moor, or a half-naked holy man from the
+desert with wild eyes and hair as long as a horse's
+mane, you are trodden upon by a string of donkeys
+carrying kegs of water, or pushed to one
+side by a soldier with a gun eight feet long.</p>
+
+<p>There is something continually interesting in
+the muffled figures of the women. They make
+you almost ashamed of the uncovered faces of the
+American women in the town; and, in the lack of
+any evidence to the contrary, you begin to believe
+every Moorish woman or girl you meet is
+as beautiful as her eyes would make it appear
+that she is. Those of the Moorish girls whose
+faces I saw were distinctly handsome; they were
+the women Benjamin Constant paints in his pictures
+of Algiers, and about whom Pierre Loti goes
+into ecstasies in his book on Tangier. Their robe
+or cloak, or whatever the thing is that they affect,
+covers the head like a hood, and with one hand
+they hold one of its folds in front of the face as
+high as their eyes, or keep it in place by biting
+it between their teeth.</p>
+
+<p>The only time that I ever saw the face of
+any of them was when I occasionally eluded
+Mahamed and ran off with a little guide called
+Isaac, the especial protector of two American<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+women, who farmed him out to me when they
+preferred to remain in the hotel. He is a particularly
+beautiful youth, and I noticed that
+whenever he was with me the cloaks of the women
+had a fashion of coming undone, and they
+would lower them for an instant and look at
+Isaac, and then replace them severely upon the
+bridge of the nose. Then Isaac would turn towards
+me with a shy conscious smile and blush violently.
+Isaac says that the young men of Tangier
+can tell whether or not a girl is pretty by
+looking at her feet. It is true that their feet are
+bare, but it struck me as being a somewhat reckless
+test for selecting a bride. I will recommend
+Isaac to whoever thinks of going to Tangier.
+He speaks eight languages, is eighteen years old,
+wears beautiful and barbarous garments, and is
+always happy. He is especially good at making
+bargains, and he entertained me for many half-hours
+while I sat and watched him fighting over
+two dollars more or less with the proprietors of
+the bazars. He was an antagonist worthy of the
+oldest and proudest Moor in Tangier. He had
+no respect for their rage or their contempt or
+their proffered bribes or their long white beards.
+Sometimes he would laugh them to scorn&mdash;them
+and their prices; and again he would talk to them
+sadly and plaintively; and again he would stamp
+and rage and slap his hands at them and rush off
+with a great show of disgust, until they called him
+back again, when he and they would go over the
+performance once more with unabated interest.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+Mahamed always paid them what they asked,
+and got his commission from them later, as a
+guide should; but Isaac would storm and finally
+beat them down one-half. Isaac can be found at
+the Calpe Hotel, and is welcome to whatever this
+notice may be worth to him.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 350px;"><a name="A_WOMAN_OF_TANGIER" id="A_WOMAN_OF_TANGIER"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-053.jpg" width="350" height="333" alt="A WOMAN OF TANGIER" title="A WOMAN OF TANGIER" />
+<span class="caption">A WOMAN OF TANGIER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I had read in books on Morocco and had been
+given to understand that when you were told
+that the price of anything in a bazar was worth
+three dollars, you should offer one, and that then
+the Moor would cry aloud to Allah to take note
+of the insult, and would ask you to sit down and
+have a cup of coffee, and that he would then beat
+you up and you would beat him down, and that
+at the end of two or three hours you would get
+what you wanted for two dollars. It struck me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+that this, if one had several months to spare and
+wanted anything badly enough, might be rather
+amusing. The first thing I saw that I wanted
+badly was a long gun, for which the Moor asked
+me twelve dollars. I offered him eight. I then
+waited to see him tear his beard and unwrap his
+turban and cry aloud to Allah; but he did none
+of these things. He merely put the gun back in
+its place and continued the conversation, which I
+had so flippantly interrupted, with a long-bearded
+friend. And no further remarks on my part affected
+him in the least, and I was forced to go
+away feeling very much ashamed and very mean.
+The next day a man at the hotel brought in the
+gun, having paid fourteen dollars for it, and said
+he would not sell it for fifty. We would pay
+much more than that for it at home, which shows
+that you cannot always follow guide-books.</p>
+
+<p>There are only five things the guides take you
+to see in Tangier&mdash;the café chantant, the governor's
+palace, the prisons, and the harem, to which
+men are not admitted. They also take you to
+see the markets, but you can see them for yourself.
+The markets are bare, open places covered
+with stones and lined with bazars, and on market-days
+peopled with thousands of muffled figures
+selling or trying to sell herbs and eggs and everything
+else that is eatable, from dates to haunches
+of mutton. It is a wonderfully picturesque sight,
+with the sun trickling through the palm-leaf mats
+overhead on the piles of yellow melons at your
+feet, and with strings of camels dislocating their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+countenances over their grain, and dancing-men
+and snake-charmers and story-tellers, as eloquent
+as actors, clamoring on every side.</p>
+
+<p>The café chantant is a long room lined with
+mats, and with rugs scattered over the floor, on
+which sit musicians and the regular customers of
+the place, who play cards and smoke long pipes,
+with which they rap continually on the tin ash-holders.
+The music is very strange, to say the
+least, and the singing very startling, full of sudden
+pauses, and beginning again after one of these
+when you think the song is over. It is not a particularly
+exciting place to visit, but there is no
+choice between that and the hotel smoking-room.
+Tangier is not a town where one can move about
+much at night. There is also a place where the
+guests tell you that you can see Moorish women
+dance the dance which so startled Paris in the
+Algerian exhibit at the exposition. As I had no
+desire to be startled in that way again, I did not
+go to see them, and so cannot say what they are
+like. But it is quite safe to say that any visitor
+to Tangier who thinks he is seeing anything that
+is real and native to the home life of the people,
+and that is not a show gotten up by the guides,
+is going to be greatly taken in. The harem to
+which they lead women is not a harem at all, but
+the home of the widow of an ex-governor, who
+sits with her daughters for strange women to
+look at. It is a most undignified proceeding on
+the part of the widow of a dead Bashaw, and no
+one but the guides know what she is doing. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+came to find out about it through some American
+women who went there with Isaac in the morning,
+and were taken to call at the same place by
+an English lady resident in the afternoon. The
+English woman laughed at them for thinking
+they had seen the interior of a harem, and they
+did not tell her that they had already visited her
+friends and paid their franc for admittance to
+their society.</p>
+
+<p>The other show places are the governor's palace
+and the prisons. The palace is a very handsome
+Moorish building, and the prisons are very
+dirty. All that the tourist can see of them is the
+little he can discern through a hole cut in the
+stout wooden door of each, which is the only exit
+and entrance. You cannot see much even then,
+for the prisoners, as soon as they discover a face at
+the opening, stick it full of the palm-leaf baskets
+that they make and sell in order to buy food.
+The government gives them neither water, which
+is expensive in Tangier, nor bread, unless they
+are dying for want of it, but expects the family
+or friends of each criminal to see that he is kept
+alive until he has served out his term of imprisonment.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><a name="WATER-VENDER_AT_THE_DOOR_OF_A_PRIVATE_HOUSE" id="WATER-VENDER_AT_THE_DOOR_OF_A_PRIVATE_HOUSE"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-057.jpg" width="400" height="652" alt="WATER-VENDER" title="WATER-VENDER" />
+<span class="caption">WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>A great deal has been written about these prisons
+of the Sultan, and of the cruelty shown to
+the inmates, notably of late by a Mr. Mackenzie
+in the London <i>Times</i>. You are told that in Tangier,
+within the four square walls of the prison,
+there are madmen and half-starved murderers
+and rebels, loaded with chains, dying of disease<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
+and want, who are tortured and starved until
+they die. For this reason no one in Morocco is
+sentenced for more than ten or twelve years, so
+you are told, because he is sure to die before that
+time has expired. It seemed to me that if this
+were true it would be worth while to visit the
+prison and to tell what one saw there. When I
+was informed that, with the exception of two
+residents of Tangier, no one has been allowed to
+enter the Sultan's prison for the last <i>ten years</i>, I
+suspected that there must be something there
+which the Sultan did not want seen: it was not
+a difficult deduction to make. So I set about
+getting into the prison. It is not at all necessary
+to go into the details of my endeavors, or to tell
+what proposals I made; it is quite sufficient to
+say that in every way I was eminently unsuccessful.
+It was interesting, however, to find a people
+to whom the arguments and inducements which
+had proved effective with one's own countrymen
+were foolish and incomprehensible. For two
+days I haunted the outer walls of the prison, and
+was smiled upon contemptuously by the Bashaw's
+counsellors, who sat calmly in the cool hallway of
+the palace, and watched me kicking impatiently
+at the stones in the court-yard and broiling in the
+sun, while the governor or Bashaw returned me
+polite expressions of his regret. I finally dragged
+the Consul-General into it, and brought things to
+such a pass that I could see no way out of it but
+my admittance to the prison or a declaration of
+war from the United States.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>Either event seemed to promise exciting and
+sensational developments. Colonel Mathews, the
+Consul-General, did not, however, share my views,
+but arranged that I should have an audience with
+the Bashaw, during the course of which he promised
+he would bring up the question of my admittance
+to the prison.</p>
+
+<p>On board the <i>Fulda</i>, I had had the pleasure of
+sitting at table next to the Rev. Dr. Henry M.
+Field, the editor of the <i>Evangelist</i>, and a distinguished
+traveller in many lands. While on the
+steamer I had twitted the doctor with not having
+seen certain phases of life with which, it seemed
+to me, he should be more familiar, and I offered,
+on finding we were making the same tour for the
+same purpose, to introduce him to bull-fights and
+pig-sticking and cafés chantants, and other incidents
+of foreign travel, of which he seemed to be
+ignorant. He refused my offer with dignity, but
+I think with some regret. I was, nevertheless,
+glad to find that he was in Tangier, and that he
+was to be one of the party to call at the governor's
+palace. On learning of my desire to visit the
+prison Dr. Field added his petition to mine, and
+I am quite sure that Colonel Mathews wished we
+were both in the United States.</p>
+
+<p>We first called upon the Sultan's Minister of
+Foreign Affairs, who received us in a little room
+leading from a pretty portico near the street entrance.
+It was furnished, I was pained to note,
+not with divans and rugs, but with a set of red
+plush and walnut sofas and chairs, such as you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+would find in the salon of a third-rate French
+hotel. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was a
+dear, kindly old gentleman, with a fine white
+beard down to his waist, but he had a cold in
+his head, and this kept him dabbing at his nose
+with a red bandanna handkerchief rolled up in a
+ball, which was not in keeping with the rest of
+his costume, nor with the dignity of his appearance.
+He and Dr. Field got on very well; they
+found out that they were both seventy years of
+age, and both highly esteemed in their different
+churches. Indeed, the Minister of Foreign Affairs
+was good enough to say, through Colonel
+Mathews, that Dr. Field had a good face, and
+one that showed he had led a religious life. He
+rather neglected me, and I was out of it, especially
+when both the doctor and the cabinet minister
+began hoping that Allah would bless them
+both. I thought it most unorthodox language
+for Dr. Field to use.</p>
+
+<p>We then walked up the hill upon which stand
+the fort, the prisons, the treasury, and the governor's
+palace, and were received at the entrance
+to the latter by the same gentlemen who had for
+the last two days been enjoying my discomfiture.
+They were now most gracious in their
+manner, and bowed proudly and respectfully to
+Colonel Mathews as we passed between two rows
+of them and entered the hall of the palace. We
+went through three halls covered with colored
+tiles and topped with arches of ornamental scrollwork
+of intricate designs. At the extreme end<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+of these rooms the Bashaw stood waiting for us.
+He was the finest-looking Moor I had seen; and
+I think the Moorish gentleman, though it seems
+a strange thing to say, is the most perfect type
+of a gentleman that I have seen in any country.
+He is seldom less than six feet tall, and he carries
+his six feet with the erectness of a soldier
+and with the grace of a woman. The bones of
+his face are strong and well-placed, and he looks
+kind and properly self-respecting, and is always
+courteous. When you add to this clothing as
+brilliant and robes as clean and soft and white as
+a bride's, you have a very worthy-looking man.
+The Bashaw towered above all of us. He wore
+brown and dark-blue cloaks, with a long under-waistcoat
+of light-blue silk, yellow shoes, and a
+white turban as big as a bucket, and his baggy
+trousers were as voluminous as Letty Lind's divided
+skirts. He could not speak English, but
+he shook hands with us, which Moors do not do
+to one another, and walked on ahead through
+court-yards and halls and up stairways to a little
+room filled with divans and decorated with a
+carved ceiling and tiled walls. There we all sat
+down, and a soldier in a long red cloak and with
+numerous swords sticking out of his person gave
+us tea, and sweet cakes made entirely of sugar.
+As soon as we had finished one cup he brought in
+another, and, noticing this, I indulged sparingly;
+but the doctor finished his first, and then refused
+the rest, until the Consul-General told him he
+must drink or be guilty of a breach of etiquette.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><a name="A_STREET_DANCER" id="A_STREET_DANCER"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-063.jpg" width="400" height="566" alt="A STREET DANCER" title="A STREET DANCER" />
+<span class="caption">A STREET DANCER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>The Bashaw and
+Colonel Mathews
+talked together,
+and we paid the
+governor long and
+laborious compliments,
+at which he
+smiled indulgently.
+He did not strike
+me as being at all
+overcome by them;
+he had, on the contrary,
+very much
+the air of a man
+of the world, and
+seemed rather to
+be bored, but too
+polite to say so. He looked exactly like Salvini
+as Othello. While the tea-drinking was going
+on we were making asides to Colonel Mathews,
+and urging him to propose our going into the
+prison, which he said he would do, but that it
+must be done diplomatically. We told him we
+would give all the prisoners bread and water,
+or a lump sum to the guards, or whatever he
+thought would please the Bashaw best. He
+and the Bashaw then began to talk about it,
+and the doctor and I looked consciously at the
+ceiling. The Bashaw said that never since he had
+been governor of Tangier had he allowed either
+a native or a foreigner to enter the prison; and
+that if a European did so, he would be torn to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+pieces by the fanatics imprisoned there, who
+would think they were pleasing Allah by abusing
+an unbeliever. Colonel Mathews also added, on
+his own account, that we would probably catch
+some horrible disease. The more they did not
+want us to go, the more we wanted to go, the
+doctor rising to the occasion with a keenness and
+readiness of resource worthy of a New York reporter
+after a beat. I can pay him no higher
+compliment. After a long, loud, and excited debate
+the Bashaw submitted, and the Consul-General
+won.</p>
+
+<p>The first prison they showed us was the county
+jail, in which men are placed for a month or more.
+It was dirty and uninteresting, and we protested
+that it was not the one which the Bashaw had described,
+and asked to be shown the one where
+the enemies of the government were incarcerated.
+Colonel Mathews called back the Bashaw's
+soldiers, and we went on to the larger prison immediately
+adjoining. Some time ago the inmates
+of this made a break for liberty, and forced open
+the one door which bars those inside from the
+outer world. The guards fired into the mass of
+them, and the place shows where the bullets
+struck. To prevent a repetition of this, three
+heavy bars were driven into the masonry around
+the door, so close together that it is impossible
+for more than one man to leave or enter the
+prison at one time even when the door is open.
+And the opening is so small that to do this he
+must either crawl in on his hands and knees, or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+lift himself up by the crossbar and swing himself
+in feet foremost. It impressed me as a particularly
+embarrassing way to make an entrance
+among a lot of people who meditated tearing
+you to pieces. I pointed this out to the doctor,
+but he was determined, though pale. So the
+guards swung the door in, and the first glimpse
+of a Christian gentleman the prisoners had in ten
+years was a pair of yellow riding-boots which
+shot into space, followed by a young man, and a
+moment later by an elderly gentleman with a
+white tie. We made a combined movement to
+the middle of the prison, which was lighted from
+above by a square opening in the roof, protected
+by iron bars. This was the only light in the
+place. All around the four sides of the patio or
+court were rows of pillars supporting a portico,
+and back of these was a second and outer corridor
+opening into the porticos, and so into the
+patio. The whole place&mdash;patio, porticos, and
+outer corridor&mdash;was about as big as the stage of
+a New York theatre. It was paved with dirt and
+broken slabs, and littered with straw. There was
+no furniture of any sort. With the exception of
+the sink upon which we stood, directly under the
+opening in the roof, the place was in almost complete
+darkness, although the sun was shining brilliantly
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>I think there must have been about fifty or
+sixty men in the prison, and for a short time not
+one of them moved. They were apparently, to
+judge by the way they looked at us, as much<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+startled as though we had ascended from a trap
+like goblins in a pantomime, and then half of
+them, with one accord, came scrambling towards
+us on their hands and knees. They were half
+naked, and their hair hung down over their eyes;
+and this, and their crawling towards us instead of
+walking, made them look more or less like animals.
+As they came forward there was a clanking
+of chains, and I saw that it was because their
+legs were fettered that they came as they did,
+and not standing erect like human beings. The
+guard who followed us in was over two minutes
+in getting the door fastened behind him, and my
+mind was more occupied with this fact than with
+what I saw before me; for it seemed to me that
+if there was any tearing to pieces to be gone
+through with, I should hate to have to wait that
+long while the door was being opened again. This
+thought, with the shock of seeing thirty wild men
+moving upon us out of complete darkness on
+their hands and knees, was the only sensation of
+any interest that I received while visiting the
+prison.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><a name="IN_THE_PRISON" id="IN_THE_PRISON"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-067.jpg" width="400" height="616" alt="IN THE PRISON" title="IN THE PRISON" />
+<span class="caption">IN THE PRISON</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The inmates looked exactly like the poorer of
+the Moors outside, except that their hair was
+longer and their clothing was not so white. There
+was one man, however, quite as well dressed as
+any of the Sultan's counsellors, and he seemed to
+be the only one who objected to our presence.
+The rest did nothing except to gratify their curiosity
+by staring at us; they did not even hold
+out their hands for money. They were very dirty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+and poorly clothed, and their long imprisonment
+had made them haggard and pale, and the iron
+bars around their legs gave them a certain interest.
+The atmosphere of the place was horribly
+foul, but not worse than the atmosphere of either
+the men's or women's ward at night in a precinct
+station-house in New York city. Indeed, I was
+not so much impressed with the horrors of the
+Sultan's prison as with the fact that our own are
+so little better, considering our advanced civilization.
+I do not mean our large prisons, but the
+cells and the vagrants' rooms in the police stations.
+There the vagrant is given a sloping board
+and no ventilation. In Tangier he is given straw
+and an opening in the roof. To be fair, you must
+compare a prisoner's condition in jail with that
+which he is accustomed to in his own home, and
+the homes of the Moors of the lower class are as
+much like stables as their stables are like pigsties.
+The poor of Tangier are allowed, through
+the kindness of the Sultan, to sleep on the bare
+stones around the entrance to one of the mosques.
+For the poor sick there has been built a portico,
+about as large as a Fifth Avenue omnibus, opposite
+this same mosque. This is called the hospital
+of Tangier. It is considered quite good enough
+for sick people and for those who have no homes.
+And every night you will see bundles of rags lying
+in the open street or under the narrow roof of the
+portico, exposed to the rain and to the bitter cold.
+If this, in the minds of the Moors, is fair treatment
+of the sick and the poor, one cannot expect them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+to give their criminals and murderers white bread
+and a freshly rolled turban every morning.</p>
+
+<p>If I had seen horrible things in the Sultan's
+prison&mdash;men starving, or too sick to rise, or
+chained to the walls, or half mad, or loathsome
+with disease&mdash;I should certainly have been glad
+to call the attention of other people to it, not
+from any philanthropic motives perhaps, but as
+a matter of news interest. I did not, however,
+see any of these things. Dr. Field, I believe, was
+differently impressed, and is of the opinion that
+the outer corridor contained many things much
+too horrible to believe possible. He compared
+this to Dante's ninth circle of hell, and made a
+point of the fact that the guard had called me
+back when I walked towards it. I, however, went
+into it while the doctor and the guard were getting
+the door open for us to return, and saw
+nothing there but straw. It seemed to me to be
+the place where the men slept when the rain,
+coming through the opening in the roof, made it
+unpleasant for them to remain in the court.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem that my persistence in visiting the
+prison is inconsistent with what I have said of
+foreigners forcing themselves into places in Morocco
+where they are not wanted, but I am quite
+sure that, had any one heard the stories told me
+of the horror of these jails, he would have considered
+himself justified in learning the truth
+about them; and I cannot understand why, if
+the members of the legations who tell these stories
+believe them, they have not used their influence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+to try and better the condition of the
+prisoners, rather than to introduce game-laws
+for the protection of partridges and wild-boars.
+It is, perhaps, gratifying to note that the two
+gentlemen of whom I spoke as having visited
+the prison in the last ten years were the American
+Consul-General and another resident American.
+Both of these contributed food to the prisoners,
+and reported what they had seen to our
+government.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, Tangier impresses one as a fine
+thing spoiled by civilization. Barbarism with
+electric lights at night is not attractive. Tangier
+to every traveller should be chiefly interesting as
+a stepping-stone towards Tetuan or Fez. Tetuan
+can be reached in a day's journey, and there the
+Moor is to be seen pure and simple, barbarous
+and beautiful.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span></p>
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<h3>FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO</h3>
+
+
+<p>There are certain places and things
+with which the English novel has made
+us so familiar that it is not necessary
+for us to go far afield or to study guide-books
+in order to feel that we have
+known them intimately and always. We know
+Paddington Station as the place where the detective
+interrogates the porter who handled the
+luggage of the escaping criminal, and as the spot
+from which the governess takes her ticket for the
+country-house where she is to be persecuted by
+its mistress and loved by all the masculine members
+of the household. We also know that a P.
+and O. steamer is a means of conveyance almost
+as generally used by heroes and heroines of English
+fiction as a hansom cab. It is a vessel upon
+which the heroine meets her Fate, either in the
+person of a young man on his way home from
+India, or by being shipwrecked on a desert island
+on her way to Australia, and where the only
+other surviving passenger tattooes his will upon
+her back, leaves her all his fortune, and considerately<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
+dies. Long ago a line of steamers ran to
+the Peninsula of Spain; later they shortened their
+sails, as the Romans shortened their swords, and,
+like the Romans, extended their boundaries to the
+Orient. This line is now an institution with traditions
+and precedents and armorial bearings and
+time-hallowed jokes, and when you step upon the
+deck of a P. and O. steamer for the first time you
+feel that you are not merely an ordinary passenger,
+but a part of a novel in three volumes, or of
+a picture in the London <i>Graphic</i>, and that all sorts
+of things are imminent and possible. It may not
+have occurred to you before embarking, but you
+know as soon as you come over the side that you
+expected to find the deck strewn with laces and
+fans and daggers from Tangier, and photographs
+of Gibraltar, and such other trifles for possible
+purchase by the outbound passengers, and that
+the crew would be little barefooted lascars in red
+turbans and long blue shirts, with a cumberband
+about their persons, and that you would be called
+to tiffin instead of to lunch.</p>
+
+<p>A fat little lascar balanced himself in the jolly-boat
+outlined against the sky and held aloft a red
+flag until the hawser swung clear of the propeller,
+when he raised a white flag above him and stood
+as motionless as the Statue of Liberty, while
+the <i>Sutlej</i> cleared Europa Point of Gibraltar and
+headed towards the East. Then he pattered
+across the deck and leaned over the side and
+crooned in a lazy, barbarous monotone to the
+waves. The sun fell upon the boat like a spell<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+and turned us into sleepy and indolent fixtures
+wherever it first found us, and showed us the
+white-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada of
+Spain to the north, and the dim blue mountains
+of Africa to the south. The deck below was
+scrubbed as white as a bread-board, and the masts
+and rigging threw black shadows on the awning
+overhead, and on every side the blue Mediterranean
+and the bluer Mediterranean sky met and
+sparkled and reflected each other's brilliancy like
+mirrors placed face to face.</p>
+
+<p>For four days the sun greeted the <i>Sutlej</i> by
+day and the moon by night, and the coast of
+Africa played hide-and-seek along her starboard
+side, disappearing in a white mist of cloud for an
+hour or so, and then running along with us again
+in comfortable proximity. On the other side
+boats passed at almost as frequent intervals, and
+at such friendly range that one could count the
+people on the decks and read their flag signals
+without a glass. The loneliness of the North
+Atlantic, where an iceberg stands for land, and
+only an occasional tramp steamer rests the eye, is
+as different to this sea as a railroad journey over
+the prairie is to the jaunt from New York to
+Washington. On the second night out we see
+Algiers, glowing and sparkling in the night like a
+million of fire-flies, and with the clear steady eye
+of the light-house warning us away, as though
+the quarantine had not warned some of us away
+already. And on the third night we pass Cape
+Bon, and can imagine Tunis lying tantalizingly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+near us, behind its light-house, shut off also by
+the quarantine that the cholera at Marseilles has
+made imperative wherever the French line of
+steamers touch. By this time the twoscore passengers
+have foregathered as they would never
+have done had they all been Americans, or had
+there been three hundred of them, and their place
+of meeting the deck of a transatlantic steamer
+instead of one of this picturesque fleet, upon
+which you expect strange things to happen.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 350px;"><a name="MALTESE_PEDDLERS" id="MALTESE_PEDDLERS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-075.jpg" width="350" height="507" alt="MALTESE PEDDLERS" title="MALTESE PEDDLERS" />
+<span class="caption">MALTESE PEDDLERS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>When an American goes to sea, he reads books,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+or he calculates the number of tons of coal it is
+taking to run the vessel at that rate of speed, and
+he determines that rate of speed by counting the
+rise and fall of the piston-rod, with his watch in
+his hand; and when this ceases to amuse him he
+plays cards in the smoking-room or holds pools
+on the run and on the pilot's number. The
+Englishman joins in these latter amusements, because
+nothing better offers. But when his foot
+is on his native heath or on the deck of one of
+his own vessels, he demonstrates his preference
+for that sort of entertainment which requires
+exercise and little thought. If it is at a country-house,
+he plays games which entail considerable
+running about, and at picnics he enjoys "Throw
+the handkerchief," and on board ship he plays
+cricket and other games dear to the heart of the
+American at the age of five. This is partly because
+he always exercises and likes moving about,
+as Americans do not, and because the reading of
+books (except such books as <i>Mr. Potter of Texas</i>,
+which, I firmly believe, every Englishman I ever
+met has read, and upon which they have bestowed
+the most unqualified approval as the truest picture
+of American life and character they have ever
+found) entertains him for but a very short period
+at a time.</p>
+
+<p>So a netting is placed about the upper deck
+for him, and he plays cricket; not only he, but
+his wife and his sister and his mother and the
+unattached young ladies under the captain's care,
+who are going out to India, presumably to be met<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+at the wharf by prospective husbands. There is
+something most charming in the absolute equality
+which this sport entails, and the seriousness with
+which the English regard it. We could not in
+America expect a white-haired lady with spectacles
+to bowl overhand, or to see that it is considered
+quite as a matter of course that she should
+do it by the member of the last Oxford eleven,
+nor would our young women be able to hold a
+hot ball, or to take it with the hands crossed and
+only partly open, and not palm to palm and wide
+apart. An American, as a rule, walks in order
+that he may reach a certain point, but the Englishman
+walks for the sake of the walking. And
+he plays games, also, apparently for the exercise
+there is in them; games in which people sit in a
+circle and discuss whether love or reason should
+guide them in going into matrimony do not appeal
+to him so strongly as do "Oranges and lemons,"
+or "Where are you, Jacob?" which is a very
+fine game, in which an early training in sliding to
+bases gives you a certain advantage. It is certainly
+instructive to hear a captain who got his
+company through storming Fort Nilt last year in
+the Pamir inquire, anxiously, "Oranges or lemons?
+Yes, I know. But <i>which</i> should I say, old
+chap? I'm a little rusty in the game, you know."
+If people can get back to the days when they
+were children by playing games, or in any other
+way, no one can blame them.</p>
+
+<p>The island of Gozo rose up out of the sea on
+the fourth day&mdash;a yellow rib of rock on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+right, with houses and temples on it&mdash;and demonstrated
+how few days of water are necessary
+to rob one's memory of the usual look of a
+house. One would imagine by the general interest
+in them that we had spent the last few
+years of our lives in tents, or in the arctic regions
+under huts of snow and ice. And then
+the ship heads in towards Malta, and instead
+of dropping anchor and waiting for a tender,
+glides calmly into what is apparently its chief
+thoroughfare. It is like a Venice of the sea, and
+you feel as though you were intruding in a gentleman's
+front yard. The houses and battlements
+and ramparts lie close on either side, so near that
+one could toss a biscuit into the hands of the
+Tommies smoking on the guns, or the natives
+lounging on the steps that run from the front
+doors into the sea itself. The yard-arms reach
+above the line of the house-tops, and the bowsprit
+seems to threaten havoc with the window-panes
+of the custom-house. We are not apparently
+entering a harbor, but steaming down the
+main street of a city&mdash;a city of yellow limestone,
+with streets, walls, houses, and waste places all of
+yellow limestone. We might, for all the disturbance
+we are making, be moving forward in a bark
+canoe, and not in an ocean steamer drawing
+twenty-five feet of water. And then when the
+anchor drops, dozens of little boats, yellow and
+green and blue, with high posts at the bow and
+sterns like those on gondolas, shoot out from the
+steps, and their owners clamor for the proud<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+privilege of carrying us over the few feet of water
+which runs between the line of houses and the
+ship's sides.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 300px;"><a name="STREET_OF_SANTA_LUCIA_MALTA" id="STREET_OF_SANTA_LUCIA_MALTA"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-079.jpg" width="300" height="635" alt="STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA" title="STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA" />
+<span class="caption">STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There was at the Centennial Exposition the
+head of a woman cut in butter, which attracted
+much attention from the rural visitors. For this
+they passed by the women painted on canvas
+or carved in marble, they were too like the real
+thing, and the countrymen probably knew how
+difficult it is to make butter into moulds. For
+some reason Malta reminds you of this butter
+lady. It is a real city&mdash;with real houses and cathedral
+and streets, no doubt, but you have a feeling
+that they are not genuine, and that though it
+is very cleverly done, it is, after all, a city carved
+out of cheese or butter. Some of the cheese is
+mouldy and covered with green, and some of the
+walls have holes in them, as has aerated bread
+or <i>Schweitzerkase</i>, and the streets and the pavements,
+and the carved façades of the churches
+and opera-house, and the earth and the hills
+beyond&mdash;everything upon which your eye can
+rest is glaring and yellow, with not a red roof to
+relieve it; it is all just yellow limestone, and it
+looks like Dutch cheese. It is like no other
+place exactly that you have ever seen. The approach
+into the canal-like harbor under the guns
+and the search-lights of the fortifications, the
+moats and drawbridges, and the glaring monotony
+of the place itself, which seems to have
+been cut out of one piece and painted with one
+brush, suggest those little toy fortresses of yellow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+wood which appear in the shop windows at
+Christmas-time.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the first and last thought one has
+of Malta is that the island was the home of the
+Order of the Knights of St. John, or Knights
+Hospitallers. This order, which was the most
+noble of those of the days of mediæval chivalry,
+was composed of that band of warrior monks
+who waged war against the infidels, who kept
+certain vows, and who, under the banner of
+the white cross, became honored and feared
+throughout the then known world. Their headquarters
+changed from place to place during the
+four hundred years that stretched from the
+eleventh century, when the order was first established,
+up to 1530, when Charles V. made
+over Malta and all its dependencies in perpetual
+sovereignty to the keeping of these Knights.
+They had no sooner fortified the island than
+there began the nine months' siege of the Turks,
+one of the most memorable sieges in history.
+When it was ended, the Turks re-embarked ten
+thousand of the forty thousand men they had
+landed, and of the nine thousand Knights present
+under the Grand Master Jean de la Valette
+when the siege had opened, but six hundred capable
+of bearing arms remained alive.</p>
+
+<p>The order continued in possession of their
+island until the beginning of the nineteenth century,
+when the French, under General Bonaparte,
+took it with but little trouble. The French in
+turn were besieged by Maltese and English, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
+after two years capitulated. In 1814 the island
+was transferred to England. It now, in its
+monuments and its memories, speaks of the days
+of chivalry; but present and mixed with these is
+the ubiquitous red coat of the British soldier;
+and the eight-pointed Maltese cross, which suggests
+Ivanhoe, is placed side by side with the
+lion and the unicorn; the culverin has given
+way to the quick-throbbing Maxim gun, the Templar's
+sword to the Lee-Metford rifle, and the heroes
+of Walter Scott to the friends of Mr. Rudyard
+Kipling.</p>
+
+<p>The most conspicuous relic of the French occupation
+is not a noble one. It is the penitential
+hood of the Maltese woman&mdash;a strangely picturesque
+article of apparel, like a cowl or Shaker
+bonnet, only much larger than the latter, and with
+a cape which hangs over the shoulders. The
+women hold the two projecting flaps of the hood
+together at the throat, and unless you are advancing
+directly towards them, their faces are quite
+invisible. The hoods and capes are black, and
+are worn as a penance for the frailty of the women
+of Malta when the French took the place and
+robbed the churches, and pillaged the storehouses
+of the Knights, and bore themselves with less
+restraint than the infidel Turks had done.</p>
+
+<p>Malta retains a slight suggestion of mediævalism
+in the garb of the Capuchin monks, whose
+tonsured heads and bare feet and roped waists
+look like a masquerade in their close proximity to
+the young officers in tweeds and varnished boots.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+But one gets the best idea of the past from the
+great Church of St. John, which is full of the trophies
+and gifts of the Grand Masters of the Order,
+and floored with two thousand marble tombs of
+the Knights themselves. Each Grand Master
+vied with those who had preceded him in enriching
+this church, and each Knight on his promotion
+made it a gift, so that to-day it is rich in
+these and wonderfully beautiful. This is the
+chief show-place, and the Governor's palace is another,
+and, to descend from the sublimity of the
+past to the absurdity of the present, so is also
+the guard-room of the officer of the day, which
+generations of English subalterns have helped to
+decorate. Each year a committee of officers go
+over the pictures on its walls and rub out the
+least amusing, and this survival of the fittest has
+resulted in a most entertaining gallery of black
+and white.</p>
+
+<p>The Order of Jerusalem, or of St. John, still
+obtains in Europe, and those who can show fourteen
+quarterings on one side and twelve on the
+other are entitled to belong to it; but they are
+carpet knights, and wearing an enamel Maltese
+cross on the left side of an evening coat is a different
+thing from carrying it on a shield for Saracens
+to hack at.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 634px;"><a name="BRINDISI" id="BRINDISI"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-085.jpg" width="634" height="350" alt="BRINDISI" title="BRINDISI" />
+<span class="caption">BRINDISI</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sicily showed itself for a few hours while the
+boat continued on its way to Brindisi; and as
+that day happened to be the 4th of March, the
+captain of the <i>Sutlej</i> was asked to make a calculation
+for which there will be no further need for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
+four years to come. This calculation showed at
+what point in the Mediterranean ocean the <i>Sutlej</i>
+would be when a President was being inaugurated
+in Washington, and at the proper time the
+passengers were invited to the cabin, and the fact
+that a government was changing into the hands
+of one who could best take care of it was impressed
+upon them in different ways. And later,
+after dinner, the captain of the <i>Sutlej</i> made a
+speech, and said things about the important
+event (which he insisted on calling an election)
+which was then taking place in America, and the
+English cheered and drank the new President's
+health, and the two Americans on board, who
+fortunately were both good Democrats, felt not
+so far from home as before.</p>
+
+<p>You must touch at Brindisi, which is situated
+on the heel of the boot of Italy, if you wish to go
+a part of the way by land from the East to London
+or from London to the East. And as many
+people prefer travelling forty-eight hours across
+the Continent to rounding Gibraltar, one hears
+often of Brindisi, and pictures it as a shipping
+port of the importance of Liverpool or Marseilles.
+Instead of which it is as desolate as a summer
+resort in midwinter, and is like that throughout
+the year. There was a long, broad stone wharf,
+and tall stucco houses behind, and banks of coal
+which suggested the rear approach to Long Island
+City, and the soft blue Italian skies of which
+we had read were steely blue, and most of us
+wore overcoats. We lay bound fast to the wharf,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+with a plank thrown from the boat's side to the
+quay, for the day, and we had free permission to
+learn to walk on streets again for full twenty-four
+hours; but after facing the wind, and dodging
+guides who had nothing to show, we came back
+by preference to the clean deck and the steamer-chair.
+Desperate-looking Italian soldiers with
+feathers in their hats, and custom-house officers,
+and gendarmes paraded up and down the quay
+for our delectation, and a wicked little boy stood
+on the pier-head and sang "Ta-ra-ra-boom-chi-ay,"
+pointedly varying this knowledge of our several
+nationalities by crying: "I <i>say</i>, buy box
+matches. Get out." This show of learning
+caused him to be regarded by his fellows with
+much envy, and they watched us to see how far
+we were impressed.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 220px;"><a name="PILLAR_OF_CAESAR_AT_BRINDISI" id="PILLAR_OF_CAESAR_AT_BRINDISI"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-089.jpg" width="220" height="600" alt="PILLAR OF CÆSAR AT BRINDISI" title="PILLAR OF CÆSAR AT BRINDISI" />
+<span class="caption">PILLAR OF CÆSAR AT BRINDISI</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are two things which need no newspaper
+advertising and which recognize no geographical
+lines; one is a pretty face and the other is a good
+song. I have seen photographs for sale of Isabelle
+Irving and Lillian Russell in as different localities
+as Santiago in Cuba, and Rotterdam, and
+I saw a play-bill in San Antonio, Texas, upon
+which the Countess Dudley and the Duchess of
+Leinster were reproduced under the names of the
+Walsh Sisters. A good song will travel as far,
+changing its name, too, perhaps, and its words,
+but keeping the same melody that has pleased
+people in a different part of the world. When
+the moon came out at Brindisi and hid the heaps
+of coal, and showed only the white houses and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+the pillar of Cæsar, a party of young men with
+guitars and mandolins gathered under the bow
+and sang a song called "Oh, Caroline," which I
+had last heard Francis Wilson sing as a part of
+the score of "The Lion-tamer," to very different
+words. As the scene of "The Lion-tamer" is
+laid in Sicily, the song was more or less in place;
+but the contrast between the dark-browed Italian
+and Mr. Wilson's genial countenance which the
+song brought back was striking. And on the
+night after we had left Brindisi, when the crew
+gave a concert, one of them sang "Oh, promise
+me," and some one asked if the song had yet
+reached America. I did not undeceive him, but
+said it had.</p>
+
+<p>After Brindisi the hands of the clock go back
+a few thousand years, and we see Cethdonia,
+where Ulysses owned much property, and Crete,
+from whence St. Paul set sail, with its long range
+of mountains covered with snow, and then we
+come back to the present near the island of
+Zante, where the earthquake moved a month ago
+and swallowed up the homes of the people.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Sutlej</i> had been going out of her course
+all of the fourth day in order to dodge possible
+islands thrown up by the earthquake, and she
+was late. That night, as she steamed forward at
+her best speed, the level oily sea fell back from
+her bows with a steady ripple as she cut it in two
+and turned it back out of the way. A light on
+the horizon, like a policeman's lantern, which
+changed to the burnt-out end of a match and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+back again to a bull's-eye, told us that beyond
+the light lay the level sands of Egypt, almost as
+far-reaching and monotonous as the sea that
+touched its shore.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 350px;"><a name="APPROACH_TO_ISMAILIA_BY_THE_SUEZ_CANAL" id="APPROACH_TO_ISMAILIA_BY_THE_SUEZ_CANAL"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-093.jpg" width="350" height="608" alt="APPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL" title="APPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL" />
+<span class="caption">APPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The force of habit is very strong on many people,
+and if they approach the land of the Pharaohs
+and of Cleopatra an hour after their usual
+bedtime, they feel no inclination to diverge from
+their usual habits on that account. When you
+consider how many hours there are for slumber,
+and how many are given to dances, you would
+think one hour of sleep might be spared out of a
+lifetime in order that you could see Port Said at
+night. There was a long line of lamps on the
+shore, like a gigantic row of footlights or a prairie
+fire along the horizon, and we passed towards
+this through buoys with red and green lights,
+with a long sea-wall reaching out on one side,
+and the natural reef of jagged rocks rising black
+out of the sea in the path of the moon on the
+other. Then black boats shot out from the shore
+and assailed us with strange cries, and men in
+turbans and long robes, and negroes in what
+looked like sacking, and which probably was sacking,
+but which could not hide the suppleness and
+strength of their limbs, climbed up over the high
+sides. These were the coal-trimmers making way
+for the black islands, filled with black coal and
+blacker men, who made fast to the side and began
+feeding the vessel through a blazing hole like
+an open fireplace in her iron side. Four braziers
+filled with soft coal burnt with a fierce red flame<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
+from the corners of the barges, and in this light
+from out of the depths half-naked negroes ran
+shrieking and crying with baskets of coal on their
+shoulders to the top of an inclined plank, and
+stood there for a second in the full glare of the
+opening until one could see the whites of their
+eyes and the sweat glistening on the black faces.
+Then they pitched the coal forward into the
+lighted opening, as though they were feeding a
+fire, and disappeared with a jump downward into
+the pit of blackness. The coal dust rose in great
+curtains of mist, through which the figures of the
+men and the red light showed dimly and with
+wavering outline, like shadows in an iron-mill,
+and through it all came their cries and shouts,
+and the roar of the coal blocks as they rattled
+down into the hold.</p>
+
+<p>Port Said occupies the same position to the
+waters of the world as Dodge City once did to the
+Western States of America&mdash;it is the meeting-place
+of vessels from every land over every water,
+just as Dodge City was the meeting-place of the
+great trails across the prairies. When a cowboy
+reached Dodge City after six months of constant
+riding by day and of sleeping under the stars by
+night, and with wild steers for company, he wanted
+wickedness in its worst form&mdash;such being the
+perversity of man. And you are told that Port
+Said offers to travellers and crew the same attractive
+features after a month or weeks of rough
+voyaging that Dodge City once offered to the
+trailsmen. In <i>The Light that Failed</i> we are told<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+that Port Said is the wickedest place on earth,
+that it is a sink of iniquity and a hole of vice, and
+a wild night in Port Said is described there with
+pitiless detail. Almost every young man who
+leaves home for the East is instructed by his
+friends to reproduce that night, or never return to
+civilization. And every sea-captain or traveller
+or ex-member of the Army of Occupation in
+Egypt that I met on this visit to the East either
+smiled darkly when he spoke of Port Said or raised
+his eyes in horror. They all agreed on two things&mdash;that
+it was the home of the most beautiful woman
+on earth, which is saying a good deal, and that
+it was the wickedest, wildest, and most vicious
+place that man had created and God forgotten.
+One would naturally buy pocket-knives at Sheffield,
+and ginger ale in Belfast, and would not lay
+in a stock of cigars if going to Havana; and so
+when guides in Continental cities and in the East
+have invited me to see and to buy strange things
+which caused me to doubt the morals of those
+who had gone before, I have always put them
+off, because I knew that some day I should visit
+Port Said. I did not want second-best and imitation
+wickedness, but the most awful wickedness
+of the entire world sounded as though it might
+prove most amusing. I expected a place blazing
+with lights, and with gambling-houses and <i>cafés
+chantants</i> open to the air, and sailors fighting
+with bare knives, and guides who cheated and
+robbed you, or led you to dives where you could
+be drugged and robbed by others.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 600px;"><a name="STEAM-DREDGE_AT_WORK_IN_THE_SUEZ_CANAL" id="STEAM-DREDGE_AT_WORK_IN_THE_SUEZ_CANAL"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-097.jpg" width="600" height="246" alt="STEAM-DREDGE" title="STEAM-DREDGE" />
+<span class="caption">STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>So I went on shore and gathered the guides
+together, and told them for the time being to
+sink their rivalry and to join with loyal local
+pride in showing me the worst Port Said could
+do. They consulted for some time, and then
+said that they were sorry, but the only gambling-house
+in the place closed at twelve, and so did
+the only <i>café chantant</i>; and as it was now nearly
+half-past twelve, every one was properly in bed.
+I expressed myself fully, and they were hurt, and
+said that Egypt was a great country, and that
+after I had seen Cairo I would say so. So I told
+them I had not meant to offend their pride of
+country, and that I was going to Cairo in order
+to see things almost as old as wickedness, and
+much more worth while, and that all I asked of
+Port Said was that it should live up to its name.
+I told them to hire a house, and wake the people
+in Port Said up, and show me the very worst,
+lowest, wickedest, and most vicious sights of
+which their city boasted; that I would give them
+four hours in which to do it, and what money
+they needed. I should like to print what, after
+long consultation, the five guides of Port Said&mdash;which
+is a place a half-mile across, and with which
+they were naturally acquainted&mdash;offered me as
+the acme of riotous dissipation. I do not do so,
+not because it would bring the blush to the cheek
+of the reader, but to the inhabitants of Port Said,
+who have enjoyed a notoriety they do not deserve,
+and who are like those desperadoes in the
+West who would rather be considered "bad"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+than the nonentities that they are. I bought photographs,
+a box of cigarettes, and a cup of black
+coffee at Port Said. That cannot be considered
+a night of wild dissipation. Port Said may have
+been a sink of iniquity when Mr. Kipling was
+last there, but when I visited it it was a coaling
+station. I would hate to be called a coaling
+station if I were Port Said, even by me.</p>
+
+<p>When I awoke after my night of riot at Port
+Said the <i>Sutlej</i> was steaming slowly down the
+Suez Canal, and its waters rippled against its
+sandy banks and sent up strange odors of fish
+and mud. On either side stretched long levels
+of yellow sand dotted with bunches of dark green
+grass, like tufts on a quilt, over which stalked an
+occasional camel, bending and rocking, and scorning
+the rival ship at its side. You have heard so
+much of the Suez Canal as an engineering feat
+that you rather expect, in your ignorance, to find
+the banks upheld by walls of masonry, and to
+pass through intricate locks from one level to another,
+or at least to see a well-beaten towpath at
+its side. But with the exception of dikes here
+and there, you pass between slipping sandy banks,
+which show less of the hand of man than does a
+mill-dam at home, and you begin to think that
+Ferdinand de Lesseps drew his walking-stick
+through the sand from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean,
+and twenty thousand negroes followed
+him and dug a ditch. On either side of this ditch
+you see reproduced in real life the big colored
+prints which hung on the walls of the Sunday-School.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+There are the buffaloes drawing the
+ploughs of wood, and the wells of raw sun-baked
+clay, and the ditches and water-works of two
+cog-wheels and clay pots for irrigating the land,
+and the strings of camels, and the veiled women
+carrying earthen jars on the left shoulder. And
+beyond these stretches the yellow sand, not white
+and heavy, like our own, but dun-colored and
+fine, like dust, and over it amethyst skies bare of
+clouds, and tall palms. And then the boat stops
+again at Ismaïlia to let you off for Cairo, and the
+brave captains returning from leave, and the
+braver young women who are going out to work
+in hospitals, and the young wives with babies
+whom their fathers have not seen, and the commissioners
+returning to rule and bully a native
+prince, pass on to India, and you are assaulted
+by donkey-boys who want you to ride "Mark
+Twain," or "Lady Dunlo," or "Two-Pair-of-Black-Eyes-Oh-What-a-Surprise-Grand-Ole-Man."
+A jerky, rumbling train carries you from
+Ismaïlia past Tel-el-Kebir station, where the
+British army surprised the enemy by a night
+march and took a train back to Cairo in three
+hours. And then, after a five hours' ride, you
+stop at Cairo, and this chapter ends.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE</h3>
+
+
+<p>As a rule, when you visit the capital of
+a country for the first time it is sufficient
+that you should have studied
+the history of that particular country
+in order that you may properly
+appreciate the monuments and the show-places
+of its chief cities; it is not necessary that you
+should be an authority on the history of Norway
+and Sweden to understand Paris or New York.
+For a full appreciation of most of the great cities
+of the world one finds a single red-bound volume
+of Baedeker to be all-sufficient; but when you go
+to Cairo, in order that you may understand all
+that lies spread out for your pleasure, you should
+first have mastered the Old and the New Testament,
+a complete history of the world, several of
+Shakespeare's plays, and the files of the London
+<i>Times</i> for the past ten years. Almost every
+man who was great, not only in the annals of his
+own country, but in the history of the world, has
+left his mark on this oldest country of Egypt, as
+tourists to the Colosseum have scratched their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+initials on its stones, and so hope for immortality.
+You are shown in Cairo the monuments of great
+monarchs and of a great people, who were not
+known beyond the limits of their own country in
+contemporaneous history only because there was
+no contemporaneous history, and of those who
+came thousands of years later. The isle of Rodda,
+between the two banks of the Nile at Cairo,
+marks where Moses was found in the bulrushes;
+a church covers the stones upon which Mary and
+Joseph rested; in the city of Alexandria is the
+spot where Alexander the Great scratched his
+name upon the sands of Egypt; the mouldering
+walls of Old Cairo are the souvenirs of Cæsar, as
+are the monuments upon which the Egyptians
+carved his name with "Autocrator" after it. At
+Actium and Alexandria you think of Antony
+and of the two women, so widely opposed and
+so differently beautiful, whom Sarah Bernhardt
+and Julia Neilson re-embody to-day in Paris and
+in London, and to whom Shakespeare and Kingsley
+have paid tribute. Mansoorah marks the
+capture of Saint-Louis of France, and the crescent
+and star which is floating over Cairo at this
+minute speak of Osman Sultan Selim I., with
+whom began the dependence of Egypt as a part
+of the Ottoman Empire. From there you see
+the windmills and bake-ovens of Napoleon, which
+latter, stretching for miles across the desert, mark
+the march of his army. Abukir speaks of Nelson
+and the battle of the Nile; and after him
+come the less momentous names Tel-el-Kebir<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+and "England's Only General," Wolseley, and
+the fall of Khartoom and the loss of Gordon.
+The history of Egypt is the history of the Old
+World.</p>
+
+<p>Moses, Rameses II., Darius, Alexander, Cæsar,
+Napoleon, Mehemet Ali, and Nelson&mdash;these are
+all good names; and yet what they failed to do
+is apparently being done to-day by an Army of
+Occupation without force, but with the show of
+it only: not by a single great military hero, but
+by a lot of men in tweed suits who during business
+hours irrigate land and add up columns of
+irritating figures, and in their leisure moments
+solemnly play golf at the very base of the pyramids.
+The best of Cairo lies, of course, in that
+which is old, and not in what has been imported
+from the New World, and its most amusing features
+are the incongruities which these importations
+make possible. I am speaking of Cairo now
+from a tourist's point of view, and not from that
+of a political economist. He would probably be
+interested in the improved sanitation and the
+Mixed Tribunal.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 448px;"><a name="BAZAR_OF_A_WORKER_IN_BRASS" id="BAZAR_OF_A_WORKER_IN_BRASS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-105.jpg" width="448" height="469" alt="WORKER IN BRASS" title="WORKER IN BRASS" />
+<span class="caption">BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I had pictured Cairo as an Oriental city of
+much color, with beautiful minarets piercing the
+sky-line, and with much richness of decoration
+on the outside of its palaces and mosques. Cairo
+is divided into two parts, that which is old and
+decaying and that which is European and modern;
+the prevailing colors of both are gray, a dull
+yellow, and white. The mosques are of gray
+stone, the houses of dirty white, and in the new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+part the palaces and residences remind one of
+white Italian villas. These are surrounded by
+tropical gardens, which alone save the city from
+one monotonous variation of sombre colors. It
+is not, therefore, the buildings, either new or
+old, which make Cairo one of the most picturesque
+and incongruous and entertaining of cities
+in the whole world; it is the people who live in
+it and who move about in it, and who are so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
+constantly in the streets that from the Citadel
+above the city its roar comes to you like the roar
+of London. In that city it is the voice of traffic
+and steam and manufactures, but in Cairo it
+emanates from the people themselves, who talk
+and pray and shout and live their lives out-of-doors.
+These people are the natives, the European
+residents, the Army of Occupation, and,
+during the winter months, the tourists. When
+you say natives you include Egyptians, Arabians,
+Copts, Syrians, negroes from the Upper Nile,
+and about a hundred other subdivisions, which
+embrace every known nationality of the East.</p>
+
+<p>Mixed with these are the residents, chiefly
+Greek and French and Turks, and the Army of
+Occupation, who, when they are not in beautiful
+uniforms, are in effective riding-clothes, and their
+wives and sisters in men's shirts and straw hats
+or Karkee riding-habits. The tourists, for their
+part, wear detective cameras and ready-made ties
+if they are Americans, and white helmets and
+pugarees floating over their necks and white umbrellas
+if they are English. This latter tropical
+outfit is spoiled somewhat by the fact that they
+are forced to wear overcoats the greater part of
+the time; but as they always take the overcoats
+off when they are being photographed at the
+base of the pyramids, their envious friends at
+home imagine they are in a warm climate.</p>
+
+<p>The longer you remain in Cairo the more satisfying
+it becomes, as you find how uninterruptedly
+the old, old life of the people is going on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+about you, and as you discover for yourself bazars
+and mosques and tiny workshops and open cafés of
+which the guide-books say nothing, and to which
+there are no guides. You can see all the show-places
+in Cairo of which you have read in a week,
+and yet at the end of the week you feel as though
+what you had seen was not really the city, but just
+the goods in the shop-window. So keep away
+from show-places. Lose yourself in the streets,
+or sit idly on the terrace of your hotel and watch
+the show move by, feeling that the best of it,
+after all, lies in the fact that nothing you see is
+done for show; that it is all natural to the people
+or the place; that if they make pictures of themselves,
+they do so unconsciously; and that no
+one is posing except the tourist in his pith helmet.</p>
+
+<p>The bazars in Cairo cover much ground, and
+run in cliques according to the nature of the
+goods they expose for sale. From a narrow
+avenue of red and yellow leather shoes you come
+to another lane of rugs and curtains and cloth,
+and through this to an alley of brass&mdash;brass
+lamps and brass pots and brass table-tops&mdash;and
+so on into groups of bookbinders, and of armorers,
+and sellers of perfumes. These lanes are
+unpaved, and only wide enough at places for
+two men to push past at one time; at the widest
+an open carriage can just make its way slowly,
+and only at the risk of the driver's falling off his
+box in a paroxysm of rage. The houses and
+shops that overhang these filthy streets are as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+primitive and old as the mud in which you tramp,
+but they are fantastically and unceasingly beautiful.
+On the level of the street is the bazar&mdash;a
+little box with a show-case at one side, and at
+the back an oven, or a forge, or a loom, according
+to the nature of the thing which is being
+made before your eyes. Goldsmiths beat and
+blow on the raw metal as you stand at their
+elbow; bakers knead their bread; laundrymen
+squirt water over the soiled linen; armorers hammer
+on a spear-head, which is afterwards to be
+dug up and sold as an assegai from the Soudan;
+and the bookbinders to the Khedive paste and
+tool the leather boxes for his Highness with the
+dust from the street covering them and their
+work, with two dogs fighting for garbage at their
+feet, and the uproar of thousands of people ringing
+in their ears. The Oriental cannot express
+himself in the street without shouting. Everybody
+shouts&mdash;donkey-boys and drivers, venders
+of a hundred trifles, police and storekeepers, auctioneers
+and beggars. They do not shout occasionally,
+but continually. They have to shout,
+or they will either trample on some one or some
+one will as certainly trample on them. Camels
+and donkeys and open carriages and mounted
+police move through the torrent of pedestrians
+as though they were figures of the imagination,
+and had no feelings or feet. On the second story
+over each bazar is the home of its owner. The
+windows of this story are latticed, and bulge forward
+so that the women of the harem may look<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+down without being themselves seen. Above
+these are square, heavy balconies of carved open
+wood-work, very old and very beautiful. Scattered
+through the labyrinth of the bazars are the
+mosques, with wide, dirty steps covered with the
+red and yellow shoes of the worshippers within,
+and with high minarets, and façades carved in
+relief with sentences from the Koran, or with
+the name of the Sultan to whom the temple is
+dedicated.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 600px;"><a name="GROUP_OF_NATIVES_IN_FRONT_OF_SHEPHEARDS_HOTEL" id="GROUP_OF_NATIVES_IN_FRONT_OF_SHEPHEARDS_HOTEL"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-109.jpg" width="600" height="307" alt="GROUP OF NATIVES" title="GROUP OF NATIVES" />
+<span class="caption">GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD&#39;S HOTEL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The bazars are very much as one imagines they
+should be, the fact that impresses you most
+about them being, I think, that such beautiful
+things should come from such queer little holes
+of dirt and poverty, and that you should stand
+ankle-deep in mud while you are handling turquoises
+and gold filigree-work as delicate as that
+of Regent Street or Broadway. At the bazars
+to which the dragomen take tourists you will be
+invited to sit down on a cushion and to drink
+coffee and smoke cigarettes, but you will pay, if
+you purchase anything, about a pound for each
+cup of coffee you take. The best bazars for bargains
+are those in Old Cairo, to which you should
+go alone. In either place it is the rule to offer
+one-third of what you are asked&mdash;as I found it
+was not the rule to do in Tangier&mdash;and it is not
+always safe to offer a third unless you want the
+article very much, as you will certainly get it at
+that price. You feel much more at home in the
+bazars and the cafés and in all of the out-of-door
+life of Cairo than in that of Tangier, owing to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+the good-nature of the Egyptian. The Moor
+resents your presence, and though that in itself
+is attractive, the absolute courtesy of the Egyptian,
+when it is not, as it seldom is, servility, has
+also its advantage. If you raised your stick to
+a Moorish donkey-boy, for instance, you would
+undoubtedly have as much rough-and-tumble
+fighting as you could attend to at one time;
+but you have to beat an Egyptian donkey-boy, or
+strike at him, or a dozen of him, if you want
+peace, and every time you hit him he comes up
+smiling, and with renewed assurances that the
+Flying Dutchman is a very good donkey, and
+that all the other donkeys are "velly sick."
+There is nothing so inspiring as the sight of a
+carefully bred American girl, who would feel
+remorse if she scolded her maid, beating eight or
+nine donkey-boys with her umbrella, until she
+breaks it, and so rides off breathless but triumphant.
+This shows that necessity knows no
+laws of social behavior.</p>
+
+<p>When you are weary of fighting your way
+through the noise and movement of the bazars,
+you can find equal entertainment on the terrace
+of your hotel. There are several hotels in Cairo.
+There is one to which you should certainly go if
+you like to see your name encompassed by those
+of countesses and princes, and of Americans
+who spell Smith with a "y" and put a hyphen
+between their second and third names. There
+are, as I say, a great many hotels in Cairo, but
+Shepheard's is so historical, and its terrace has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
+been made the scene of so many novels, that all
+sorts of amusing people go there, from Sultans
+to the last man who broke the bank at Monte
+Carlo, and its terrace is like a private box at a
+mask ball. About the best way to see Cairo is
+in a wicker chair here under waving palms, something
+to smoke, and with a warm sun on your
+back, and the whole world passing by in front of
+you. Broadway, I have no doubt, is an interesting
+thoroughfare to those who do not know it.
+I should judge from the view one has of the soles
+of numerous boots planted against the windows
+of hotels along its course that Broadway to the
+visiting stranger is an infinite source of entertainment.
+But there are no camels on Broadway,
+and there are no sais.</p>
+
+<p>A camel by itself is one of the most interesting
+animals that has ever been created, but when
+it blocks the way of a dog-cart, and a smart
+English groom endeavors to drive around it, the
+incongruity of the situation appeals to you as
+nothing on Broadway can ever do. Mr. Laurence
+Hutton, who was in Cairo before I reached it,
+has pointed out that the camel is the real aristocrat
+of Egypt. The camel belongs to one of the
+very first families; he was there when Mena
+ruled, and he is there now. It does not matter
+to him whether it is a Pharaoh or a Mameluke or
+a Napoleon or a Mixed Tribunal that is in power,
+his gods are unchanged, and he and the palm-tree
+have preserved their ancient individuality
+through centuries. He shows that he knows this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
+in the proud way in which he holds his head, and
+in his disdainful manner of waving and unwinding
+his neck, and in the rudeness with which he
+impedes traffic and selfishly considers his own
+comfort. These are the signs of ancient lineage
+all the world over. He is not the shaggy, moth-eaten
+object we see in the circus tent at home.
+He is nicely shaven, like a French poodle, and
+covered with fine trappings, and he bends and
+struts with the dignity of a peacock. He possesses
+also that uncertainty of conduct that is the
+privilege of a royal mind; fellahin and Arabs
+pretend they are his masters, and lead him about
+with a rope, but that never disturbs him nor
+breaks his spirit. When he wants to lie down
+he lies down, whether he is in the desert or in
+the Ezbekiyeh Road; and when he decides to
+get up he leaves you in doubt for some feverish
+seconds as to which part of him will get up first.
+To properly appreciate the camel you should
+ride him and experience his getting up and his
+sitting down. He never does either of these
+things the same way twice. Sometimes he breaks
+one leg in two or three places where it had never
+broken before, and sinks or rises in a northeasterly
+direction, and then suddenly changes
+his course and lurches up from the rear, and you
+grasp his neck wildly, only to find that he is sinking
+rapidly to one side, and rising, with a jump
+equal to that of a horse taking a fence, in the
+front. He can disjoint himself in more different
+places, than explorers have found sources for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+river Nile, and there is no keener pleasure than
+that which he affords you in watching the countenance
+of a friend who is being elevated on his
+back for the first time. He and the palm-tree
+can make any landscape striking, and he and the
+sais are the most picturesque features of Cairo.</p>
+
+<p>The sais is a runner who keeps in front of a
+carriage and warns common people out of the
+way, and who beats them with a stick if they do
+not hurry up about it. He is a relic of the days
+when the traffic in all of the streets was so congested
+that he was an absolute necessity; now he
+makes it possible for a carriage to move forward
+at a trot, which without his aid it could not do.
+It is obvious that to do this he must run swiftly.
+Most men when they run bend their bodies forward
+and keep their mouths closed in order to
+save their wind. The sais runs with his shoulders
+thrown back and trumpeting like an enraged
+elephant. He holds his long wand at his side
+like a musket, and not trailing in his hand like a
+walking-stick, and he wears a soft shirt of white
+stuff, and a sleeveless coat buried in gold lace.
+His breeches are white, and as voluminous as a
+woman's skirts; they fall to a few inches above
+his knee; the rest of his brown leg is bare, and
+rigid with muscle. On his head he has a fez
+with a long black tassel, and a magnificent silk
+scarf of many colors is bound tightly around his
+waist. He is a perfect ideal of color and movement,
+and as he runs he bellows like a bull, or
+roars as you have heard a lion roar at feeding-time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+in a menagerie. It is not a human cry at
+all, and you never hear it, even to the last day
+of your stay in Cairo, without a start, as though
+it were a cry of "help!" at night, or the quick-clanging
+bell of a fire-engine. There is nothing
+else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are
+sometimes two sais running abreast, dressed exactly
+alike, and with the upper part of their
+bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their
+side, and with the ends of their scarf and the
+long tassel streaming out behind. As they yell
+and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people
+scramble out of their way until the carriage they
+precede has rolled rapidly by. Only princesses
+of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the
+heads of the Army of Occupation and the Egyptian
+army are permitted two sais; other people
+may have one. They appealed to me as much
+more autocratic appendages than a troop of lifeguards.
+The rastaquouère who first introduces
+them in Paris will make his name known in a
+day, and a Lord Mayor's show or a box-seat on
+a four-in-hand will be a modest and middle-class
+distinction in comparison.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 573px;"><a name="A_BRITISH_SQUARE_FORMED_IN_FRONT_OF_THE_PYRAMIDS" id="A_BRITISH_SQUARE_FORMED_IN_FRONT_OF_THE_PYRAMIDS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-117.jpg" width="573" height="450" alt="A BRITISH SQUARE" title="A BRITISH SQUARE" />
+<span class="caption">A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>These camels and sais are but two of the things
+you see from your wicker chair on the marble
+terrace at Shepheard's. The others are hundreds
+of donkey-boys in blue night-gowns slit open at
+the throat and showing their bare breasts, and
+with them as many long-eared donkeys, rendered
+even more absurd than they are in a state of
+nature by fantastic clippings of their coats and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
+strings of jangling brass and blue beads around
+their necks.</p>
+
+<p>There are also the women of Cairo, the enslaved
+half of Egypt, who have been brought,
+through generations of training and tradition, to
+look upon any man save their husband as their
+enemy, as a thing to be shunned. This has
+become instinct with them, as it is instinctive
+with women of Northern countries to turn to
+men for sympathy or support, as being in some
+ways stronger than themselves. But these women
+of Cairo, who look like an army of nuns, are
+virtually shut off from mankind, with the exception
+of one man, as are nuns, and they have not
+the one great consolation allowed the nun&mdash;they
+have no souls to be saved, nor religion, nor a
+belief in a future life.</p>
+
+<p>There was a young girl married while I was in
+Cairo. The streets around the palace of her father
+were hung with flags for a week; the garden
+about his house was enclosed with a tent which
+was worth in money twenty thousand dollars,
+and which was as beautiful to the eye as the interior
+of a mosque; for a week the sheiks who
+rented the estates of the high contracting parties
+were fed at their expense; for a week men sang
+and bands played and the whole neighborhood
+feasted; and on the last night everybody went
+to the wedding and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes
+and listened to a young man singing
+Arabian love-songs. I naturally did not see the
+bride. The women who did see her described<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+her as very beautiful, barely sixteen years old,
+and covered with pearls and diamonds. She was
+weeping bitterly; her mother, it appeared, had
+arranged the match. I did not see her, but I
+saw the bridegroom. He was fat and stupid,
+and over sixty, and he had white hair and a
+white beard. A priest recited the Koran before
+him at the door of the house, and a band played,
+and the people cheered the Khedive three times,
+and then the crowd parted, and the bridegroom
+was marched to the door which led to the stairs,
+at the top of which the girl awaited him. Two
+grinning eunuchs crouched on this dark staircase,
+with lamps held high above their heads, and
+closed the door behind him. His sixteen-year-old
+bride has him to herself now&mdash;him and his
+eunuchs&mdash;until he or she dies. We could show
+similitudes between this wedding and some others
+in civilized lands, but it is much too serious a
+matter to be cynical about.</p>
+
+<p>The women of Egypt are as much slaves as
+ever were the negroes of our South. They are
+petted and fattened and given a home, but they
+must look at life through barriers&mdash;barriers across
+their boxes at the opera, and barriers across the
+windows of their broughams when they drive
+abroad, and barriers across their very faces. As
+long as one-half of the Egyptian people are enslaved
+and held in bondage and classed as animals
+without souls, so long will an Army of
+Occupation ride over the land, and insult by
+its presence the khedival power. No country<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+in these days can be truly great in which the
+women have no voice, no influence, and no respect.
+There are worse things in Egypt than
+bad irrigation, and the harem is the worst of
+them. If the Egyptians want to be free themselves,
+they should first free their daughters
+and their mothers. The educated Egyptian is
+ashamed of his national costume; but let him
+feel shame for some of his national customs. A
+frock-coat and a harem will not go together.</p>
+
+<p>The English, who have done so many fine
+things for Egypt's good, and who keep an army
+there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that
+any slave who comes to the office of the Consul-General
+and claims his protection can have it;
+but these slaves of the married men are not granted
+even this chance of escape.</p>
+
+<p>And so they live like birds in a cage. They
+eat and dress and undress, and expose their youth
+and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness, until
+they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago
+was, "Egypt for the Egyptians," and a very good
+cry it was, although the wrong man first started it.
+But there was another cry raised in the land of
+Egypt many hundreds of years before of "Let my
+people go," and the woman who can raise that
+again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of
+the East, will be doing a greater work than any
+woman is doing at the present time or has ever
+done.</p>
+
+<p>The women who pass before you in the procession
+at the foot of the terrace are of two classes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
+only. There is no middle class in Egypt. The
+poor are huddled up in a black bag that hides
+their bodies from the crown of the head to the
+feet. What looks like the upper end of a black
+silk stocking falls over the face from the bridge
+of the nose and fastens behind the ears, and a
+brass tube about the size of a spool is tied between
+the eyes. You see in consequence nothing
+but their eyes, and as these are perhaps their best
+feature, they do not all suffer from their enforced
+disguise. The only women whose bare faces you
+can see, and from whom you may judge of the
+beauty of the rest, are the good women of the
+Coptic village, who form a sort of sisterhood, and
+the dancing-girls, who are not so good. Some
+of these have the straight nose, the narrow eyes,
+and the perfect figure of Cleopatra, as we picture
+her; but the faces of the majority are formless,
+with broad, fat noses, full lips, and their figures
+are without waists or hips, and their ankles are
+as round as a man's upper arm. When they are
+pretty they are very pretty, but those that are
+so are so few and are so covered with gold that
+one suspects they are very much the exception.
+Of the women of the upper class you see only a
+glimpse as they are swept by in their broughams,
+with the sais in front and a eunuch on the box
+and the curtains half lowered.</p>
+
+
+<div>
+<img src="images/illus-123top2.jpg" width="281" height="191" alt="SHADOW_OF_THE_PYRAMID_OF_CHEOPS" title="Shadow of the Pyramid" class="splitlt" />
+
+
+<a name="SHADOW_OF_THE_PYRAMID_OF_CHEOPS" id="SHADOW_OF_THE_PYRAMID_OF_CHEOPS"></a>
+
+
+<img src="images/illus-123bottom2.jpg" width="485" height="162" alt="Shadow of Pyramid" title="" class="splitlb" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="caption">SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS<br />
+
+(From a Photograph taken on the top of the Pyramid just before sunset)
+<br />
+</div>
+
+<p>Besides these, much passes that is intended
+for your especial entertainment. Sellers of turquoises,
+which they dig out from various creases
+in their robes; venders of stuffed crocodiles and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+live monkeys; strange men from the desert with
+a jackal, which they throw, bound by all four
+legs, and snarling and snapping, on the marble
+at your feet; little girls who sing songs, and play
+accompaniments to them on their throats with
+the tips of their fingers; women conjurers, who
+draw strings of needles and burning flax from
+their mouths, and who swallow nasty little wriggling
+snakes, and
+hatch pretty fluffy
+little chickens out of
+the slabs of the terrace.
+Or else there
+is a troop of blue
+and white Egyptian
+soldiers marching by, or gorgeous young officers
+on polo ponies, or red-coated Tommies on donkeys,
+with their toes trailing in the dust and the
+ribbons of their Scotch caps floating out behind;
+and consuls-general with gorgeous guards in
+gold lace, and with wicked-looking curved silver<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+swords; or the young Khedive himself, who
+comes with a great clatter of hoofs and bellowing
+sais before, and another galloping troop of
+cavalry in the rear, at the sound of which the
+people run to the curb and touch the fez, as he
+raises his hand to his, and rolls by in a cloud of
+dust.</p>
+
+<p>There are very good things to see, and with a
+companion on one side to explain them, and another
+on the other side to whom you can impart
+this information as though you had been born
+knowing it, you cannot spend a more entertaining
+afternoon. There is only one drawback, and
+that is a lurking doubt that you should be up
+and about seeing the show-places. Friday, in
+consequence, is the best day in Cairo, as all the
+things you ought to see are then closed, and you
+can sit still on the terrace with a clear conscience.
+Among the mosques and the tombs and the palaces
+and museums to which all good tourists go,
+and of which there are excellent descriptions,
+giving their various dimensions and other particulars,
+in the guide-books, there are the Citadel
+and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali. The Citadel
+is the fortress built on the hill above the city, but
+which, with the Oriental incompleteness of that
+time, was reared upon high but not upon the
+highest ground. The sequel to this naturally was
+that when Mehemet Ali wanted the city of Cairo
+he sought out the highest ground, and dropped
+cannon-balls into the fortress until it capitulated.
+He afterwards asked all the Mamelukes to dinner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+at the Citadel, and then had them treacherously
+killed&mdash;all but one, who rode his horse down the
+side of the Citadel and escaped. If you can imagine
+the reservoir at Forty-second Street placed
+upon the top of Madison Square Garden, and a
+man riding down the side of it, you can understand
+what a very difficult and dangerous thing
+this was to do. There is no doubt that he did
+it, for I saw a picture of him in the very act in a
+book of history when I was at school, and I also
+have seen the marks of his horse's hoofs in the
+stone parapet of the Citadel, and they are just as
+fresh as they were three years ago, when they
+were on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>The Mosque of Mehemet Ali surmounts the
+Citadel, and its twin minarets are the distinguishing
+mark of Cairo; they are as conspicuous
+for miles above the city as is the dome of St.
+Paul's over London, and they are as light and
+graceful as it is impressive and heavy. The
+men on guard tie big yellow shoes on your feet
+before they allow you to enter this mosque, the
+outer court-yard of which is floored with alabaster,
+over which you slide as though you
+were on a mirror or a sheet of ice. It is very
+beautiful, and one is as unwilling to walk on it
+as to tramp in muddy boots over a satin train.
+The floor of the mosque is covered with the
+most magnificent rugs, as wide-spreading as a
+sheet and as heavy as so much gold; alabaster
+pillars reach to the top of the square, empty
+building, and from these rise five domes, colored<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+blue and red, and lightened with gilded letters.
+It is very rich-looking, gloomy, silent, and impressive.
+It is the best of the mosques. From
+the outside, on the ramparts, you can see Cairo
+stretching out below for miles in a level gray
+jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slender
+minarets, with the high walls of a palace here
+and the thick green of a park there to break the
+monotony; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting
+ribbon of silver; and beyond that rich green fields
+and canals and bunches of palm-trees; and seven
+miles away, where the green ceases and the desert
+begins, are three monuments of gray stone, looking,
+at that distance, disappointingly small and
+familiarly commonplace. It is not, I think, until
+you have seen them several times, and have
+climbed to their top and gazed up at them from
+below, that you appreciate the pyramids as you
+had expected to appreciate them; but after
+they have laid their charm upon you, you will
+find yourself twisting your neck to take another
+look, or going out of your way to see
+them again before the sun has said good-night
+to them, as it has done ever since it first climbed
+over the edge of the world and found them waiting
+there.</p>
+
+<p>There is a mosque on the outside of the city
+which people visit on certain days to see the
+howling dervishes go through their peculiar form
+of worship. This mosque consists of four square
+walls with a dome. It is whitewashed within,
+and bare and rude and old. The sunlight enters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+it through square holes cut in the dome, and
+beats upon thirty or forty men who stand in a
+semicircle facing the East. They are of all sorts,
+from Arabs of the desert with long hair and wild
+eyes, to fat, pleased-looking merchants from the
+bazars, and the beggars and water-carriers of the
+streets. Around them on chairs are the tourists
+and the residents, like the spectators at a play
+rather than the guests of a religious sect watching
+a religious ceremony. Most of the men wear
+their hats, and some of the women take careful
+notes and make sketches. They reminded me
+of medical students at a clinic when a man is
+being cut up. An archdeacon from one of our
+Western cities wore his hat, to show, probably,
+that he disapproved of the whole thing; but as
+he used to eat with his knife while on board the
+<i>Fulda</i>, his conduct in any place was not to be
+considered. The priest recites something from
+the Koran, and the men repeat it, moving their
+bodies back and forward as they do so with gradually
+increasing rapidity. What they may be saying
+is quite unintelligible, and the chorus they
+make resembles that of no human sound, but
+rather the gasping or panting of an animal. It
+is to the visitor absolutely without any religious
+significance; all that is impressive about it is its
+horrible earnestness and its at times repulsive results.
+As the voice of the priest grows more
+accentuated the bodies of the men swing farther
+and lower, until their hair sweeps the floor, and
+their eyes, when they throw their bodies back,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+are on a level with those of the spectators. A
+drum beats in quickening time to the voice of the
+priest and to the gasps of the dervishes, and a
+flute playing a weird accompaniment seems to
+mock at their fierce grunts and breathings. It
+was one of the most unpleasant exhibitions I
+ever witnessed, and affected one's nerves to such
+a degree that several of the women had to
+leave. The eyes of the men rolled in their sockets,
+and their lips parted, and through their
+clinched teeth came fiercer and louder gasps,
+until the chorus of sound reached you like the
+quick panting of an engine as it draws out of
+a station. The sweat ran from them like water
+from a sponge, and the veins stood out on their
+faces, showing in congested knots beneath the
+skin. Some of them groaned, and others shrieked
+and cried out, "Allah! Allah!" This acted like
+the strokes of a whip on the others, who rocked
+more and more violently, and swung themselves
+almost off their feet. Then, as the music
+grew fainter the motion of the bending
+bodies grew less vigorous and finally ceased, and
+the men stood rigid, some apparently unmoved
+and unconcerned, and others turning and reeling
+in a fit.</p>
+
+<p>While this was going forward, and you felt as
+though you were assisting at a heathen rite in
+which self-punishment was being inflicted as a bid
+for God's indulgence, two interesting things happened.
+An officer in the English Army of Occupation
+turned to his dragoman and cried at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+the top of his voice,
+angrily: "Do you
+call this worth ten
+piasters? Well, I
+don't. Now if you've
+got anything to
+show me, take me
+to see it. This isn't
+worth coming to see.
+You're a rank impostor."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 200px;"><a name="A_SECTION_OF_THE_PYRAMID" id="A_SECTION_OF_THE_PYRAMID"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-129.jpg" width="200" height="637" alt="A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID" title="A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID" />
+<span class="caption">A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The other thing
+was the act of a
+native woman, who
+brought her child to
+the door and handed
+it to a priest, who
+took it in his arms
+and passed with it in
+front of the swinging,
+gasping, crazy
+semicircle of men.
+The child was about
+three years old, and
+was dying, and the
+mother had brought
+it there to be cured
+by the breath of the
+dervishes. As it
+passed before them,
+the hair of some of
+the men swept its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
+arm, and it turned its frightened eyes up to those
+of the priest, who smiled gravely down upon the
+baby and bore him outstretched in his arms three
+times in front of the swinging crescent. The
+faith of the child's mother appealed to some of
+us more than did the Englishman's desire to get
+his money's worth. The incident is only of interest
+here as showing perhaps why the Army
+of Occupation is not as popular as it might be.
+This officer was no doubt an excellent soldier&mdash;the
+ribbons on his tunic showed that&mdash;and no
+one would have thought of questioning his ability
+to handle raw recruits or his knowledge of
+tactics. But in handling the Egyptian tactics do
+not count for so much as tact.</p>
+
+<p>There are several ways of reaching the pyramids,
+and it is eminently in keeping with the
+other incongruities of the place and time that the
+most popular way of visiting them is on a four-in-hand
+coach, with a guard in a red coat and a
+bell-shaped white beaver tooting on his horn, and
+a young gentleman with a boutonnière and an
+unhappy smile holding the reins and working his
+way in and out between long strings of camels.
+There is a very smart hotel about two hundred
+yards from the foot of the pyramids, and you
+take a donkey there or a camel and ride up a
+sandy road to the base of the Pyramid of Cheops.
+There are then several things that you may do.
+You can either climb to the top of this first pyramid,
+or crawl into its interior, or walk over to see
+the Sphinx, or make a tour of subterranean tombs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+and passageways of alabaster and polished stones,
+which are lighted for you by magnesium wire or
+stumps of candles.</p>
+
+<p>It seems absurd to say that the Sphinx is disappointing,
+but so many who have seen it say so
+that I feel I am one of many, and not individually
+lacking in reverence or imagination. In the
+first place, the approach to it is bad; you come
+at the Sphinx not from the front, but from the
+rear, where all you can see of it is a round ball of
+crumbling stone spreading out from a neck of
+broken outline, much smaller and meaner than
+you had imagined it would be. In the second
+place, instead of looking up at it, or having it
+look down at you, you view it first from a semicircular
+ridge of sand, at the bottom of which it
+reposes, and at such a near view that whatever
+outline or character of countenance it once possessed
+is lost. I have seen photographs of the
+Sphinx, taken while I was in Cairo, much more
+impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a
+hollow of the sand hills as it does, the farther you
+move away from it in order to get a better focus,
+the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to
+it it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a
+theatre when you are on the wrong side of the
+foot-lights. I know that that is an unpopular
+thing to say, and that there are many who feel
+thrills when they first look upon the face of the
+Sphinx, and who describe their emotions to you
+at length, and who write down their impressions
+in their diaries when they get back to the hotel.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+But they have come a long way expecting to be
+thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappointed.
+Some of the sphinxes in the museum of
+Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the pyramids,
+impressed me more than did the one great
+Sphinx, though they were indoors and surrounded
+by attendants and the cheap decoration of the
+museum, once a palace for the harem. They
+were of green stone and of huge proportions, and
+with "the curling lip and sneer of cold command";
+and if you look at them long enough
+you feel uncomfortable shivers down your back,
+and a perfectly irrational impulse to rush at them
+and beat them in the face and force them to tell
+you what they know and what they have kept
+back and have been keeping back for centuries
+and centuries. Their faces show that they know
+all that we know and much besides that we shall
+never know, and when the world at last comes
+to an end they will stretch themselves and smile
+at one another and say: "Now <i>they</i> know it, but
+we knew it all the while. We could have told
+had we liked, but we have enjoyed watching
+them fretting and fuming and prying about and
+tinkering at our faces with their little hammers,
+and blowing us up with saltpetre only to try and
+put us back again with steam. We who have kept
+our secret from Herodotus and Cæsar, are we likely
+to give it up to Ebers and Mark Twain?"</p>
+
+<p>But this same Sphinx by moonlight impressed
+me more than did anything I saw in the East.
+Not as one sees it by day, with tourists and photographers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+and donkey-boys making it cheap
+and familiar, but at night, when the tourists had
+gone to bed, and the donkey-boys had been paid
+to keep out of sight, and the moonlight threw the
+great negro face and the pyramids back of it into
+shadows of black and lines of silver, and the yellow
+desert stretched away on either side so empty
+and silent that I thought I was alone and back
+two thousand years in the past, discovering the
+great monuments for myself, and for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>Before you ascend the Pyramid of Cheops you
+must deal with a middle-man in the person of the
+sheik of the pyramids, who selects guides for you,
+and who acts as though the pyramids were his
+private show, and he was both sole proprietor
+and ticket-taker at the door. He lives in a village
+near by, and he and his forefathers have always
+been allowed a monopoly of the pyramids,
+and distribute their patronage to those guides
+who will pay them the highest percentage of
+what they receive from the visitors. You have
+three men to help you, two to pull, and one to
+push and to dilate on the view. It takes over
+ten minutes to climb to the top, with the men
+jerking at your wrists, and the third man shoving
+you from below. It is not a difficult feat,
+and women accomplish it every day, but it leaves
+you in a breathless state when you reach the summit,
+and you are stiff above the knees for a day
+or two after you have come down. When you
+have reached the summit the guides cheer feebly
+to give you the idea that you have accomplished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+something which has often been attempted before,
+but never so successfully; but you are not
+deceived, and you do not feel like cheering yourself.
+The view is worth the climb, however, and
+the sight of the shadow of the pyramid, spreading
+out over the villages and canals below like a
+black cloud, impresses you more with its immensity
+than the fact that it is a hundred feet higher
+than the top of the Diana on the Madison Square
+Garden tower. I am sure of this fact, because
+the man who built the Madison Square Garden
+assured me of it between breaths on the summit
+of the pyramid. While you are resting, the thing
+to do is to pay one of the guides to attempt to
+run down the pyramid you are on, cross the heavy
+sand to the pyramid beyond, and reach its top in
+eight minutes. When you give the word he disappears
+with a bound and drops into space, skipping
+and jumping and growing smaller and smaller
+as he goes, until he looks like a fluttering
+handkerchief; and when he reaches the sand he
+is as small as a child of three, and his ascent of
+the other pyramid suggests a white pigeon shuffling
+up the steep roof of a barn. It is distinctly
+on his part a sporting thing to do. The descent
+of the pyramid is very much worse than going up,
+and you need to go very slowly, and not to look
+too often at the people crawling about like ants
+below. Only four men, however, in six years
+have slipped and fallen during this descent, and
+one of them had been drinking. They were all
+killed. The more you see of the pyramids the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+more you want to see of them, although I think
+one ascent is all perhaps you will care about taking;
+but their dignity and the wonder of their
+being where they are, and for so long, increases
+with every look at them. You cannot grow too
+familiar with the pyramids. They will not have it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><a name="DAHABEEYAHS_ON_THE_NILE_BEFORE_CAIRO" id="DAHABEEYAHS_ON_THE_NILE_BEFORE_CAIRO"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-135.jpg" width="400" height="589" alt="DAHABEEYAHS" title="DAHABEEYAHS" />
+<span class="caption">DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>On the road back from the Pyramids of Gizeh
+there are other pyramids within sight of Cairo,
+but these are those with which the Sphinx is associated.
+You will see here one of the most
+beautiful sights of Cairo, the dahabeeyahs on the
+Nile. They and their white sails, especially when
+they come wing and wing before the wind, are
+the most beautiful of floating objects, and when
+there are hundreds of them coming towards you
+in lessening perspective, with the sun shining on
+the sails, and the banks on either side alive and
+moving with the palms, the river Nile becomes
+the best part of Cairo.</p>
+
+<p>There is another place on the Nile which you
+should visit, and to which tourists seldom go.
+This is the isle of Rodda, on the bank of which
+Moses was found, and where you may see the
+Nilometer. This is a well about sixteen feet in
+diameter, connected by a channel with the Nile.
+It is made of masonry, and down one side there
+runs a column on which are inscribed ancient
+Arabian and Cufic numerals, or what answer for
+numerals. It was dug many centuries ago, and
+it marks the rising and falling of the river, and at
+the same time the prosperity or dismay of Egypt.
+When the tide begins to rise, this rude instrument<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+is watched hourly, and the hopes of the
+people rise and fall as the muddy water moves up
+or down the narrow well. When it reaches a
+certain height the sheik in charge declares that
+the time has come for cutting the banks and irrigating
+the land. In ancient days the rate of
+taxation was determined by the height of the inundation,
+and it is said that the sheik in charge
+of the Nilometer is still under the influence of
+the government, to whose advantage it is to make
+the fellahin believe that the inundation is favorable.
+It was the engineers under Napoleon who
+discovered that the Nilometer was being tampered
+with, but there is no likelihood of its being
+abused to-day under the English, whose improvement
+of the irrigation of Egypt has been their
+best work, and for the fellahin's best good. But it
+is interesting, nevertheless, to look down into the
+old well, overgrown with vines and surrounded
+by ruin and crumbling walls and broken lattices,
+and to think that for centuries it brought news
+of famine or of plenty, and that it was, primitive
+as its construction is, the pulse of Egypt.</p>
+
+<p>The pulse of Egypt to-day is not shown in the
+mere rising or falling of a body of water. It is
+less primitive in its construction, and no one
+knows which way it is going to jump. In the
+next chapter I shall try to tell something of the
+men who have their fingers on Egypt's pulse,
+and who are agreed in only one thing&mdash;that there
+are too many fingers for Egypt's good.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span></p>
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT</h3>
+
+
+<p>When the visitor to Cairo first grasps
+the extent of his own ignorance of
+Egypt, and appreciates that if he is
+to understand its monuments and
+the signs of past times about him
+he must study the history of the whole world
+for forty centuries, he is apt to retreat precipitately.
+Later, as a compromise, he proposes
+skipping thirty-nine centuries and limiting his researches
+to the study of the political and social
+conditions of Egypt during the last ten years.
+And when he begins jauntily on this he finds that
+all that has gone before, from Rameses II. to
+Mehemet Ali, is as simple as the line of Popes in
+comparison with the anomalies and intricacies of
+government that have arisen within the last decade.
+Yet the very intricacies of the subject give
+to this study a fascination entirely apart from its
+rare picturesqueness, and no matter what manner
+of man he may be, he cannot but find some side
+of the situation which appeals to him. If his mind
+be constituted like that of a ready reckoner he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
+can revel in unravelling the intricacies of the
+Caisse and the Laws of Liquidation; if it is judicial,
+he can perhaps elucidate the powers of the
+Mixed Tribunal; if romantic, he has the career
+of Ismail, the most magnificent of patriots and
+profligate of monarchs; and if it turns towards
+adventure and the clash of arms, he can read of
+the heroic fanaticism of Fuzzy Wuzzy, the son
+of the Mahdi, of the futile mission of Gordon, of
+Stewart's march across the desert, and of the desperate
+valor of the fight at Aboo-Klea.</p>
+
+<p>But it is the paradoxical nature of Egypt's
+present situation which gives it its chief interest,
+and lends to it the peculiar fascination of a puzzle,
+or one of Whistler's witticisms. For, while
+Egypt is not free, as is Morocco, nor under a
+protectorate, as is Tunis, she is still free and still
+protected. She is free to coin money, to maintain
+an army, and to make treaties; and yet she
+pays six million dollars a year tribute to Turkey
+as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and her army
+that she is allowed to maintain is officered by English
+soldiers, whom she is also allowed to maintain.
+She may not pay out the money she is allowed
+to coin without the consent of foreigners; she
+cannot punish the man who steals this money, be
+he Greek, English, or American, without the approval
+of these foreigners; and her official language
+is that of one foreign power, her ostensible
+protector is another, and her real protector is still
+another, whose commands are given under the
+irritating disguise of "advice."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 607px;"><a name="EGYPTIAN_INFANTRY_IN_THEIR_DIFFERENT_UNIFORMS" id="EGYPTIAN_INFANTRY_IN_THEIR_DIFFERENT_UNIFORMS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-141.jpg" width="607" height="350" alt="EGYPTIAN INFANTRY" title="EGYPTIAN INFANTRY" />
+<span class="caption">EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>Alfred Milner, the late under-secretary for finance
+in Egypt, whose <i>England in Egypt</i> is the
+best book on the subject, though it reads like a
+novel, has put it in this way: "It is not given
+to mortal intelligence to understand at one blow
+the complexities of Turkish suzerainty and foreign
+treaty rights; to realize the various powers
+of interference and obstruction possessed by
+consuls and consuls-general, by commissioners
+of the public debt, and other mixed administrations;
+to distinguish English officers who are
+English from English officers who are Egyptian,
+foreign judges of the international courts from
+foreign judges of the native courts; to follow
+the writhings of the Egyptian government in its
+struggle to escape from the fine meshes of the
+capitulations; to appreciate precisely what laws
+that government can make with the consent of
+only six powers, and for what laws it requires the
+consent of no less than fourteen."</p>
+
+<p>It seems rather unfair to saddle the responsibility
+for all of these burdens and for this remarkable
+condition of affairs, which is unequalled
+in history, upon the shoulders of one man, but
+one man is responsible for it directly and indirectly.
+He is still alive, a hanger on at the
+court of the Sultan of Turkey, he who was at
+one time the most picturesque monarch of the
+world. Ismail Pasha became Khedive a little
+before the time of the close of our Civil War.
+Egypt had never been more prosperous than then&mdash;owing
+but fifteen million dollars. In 1876, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+Ismail was deposed and his son Tewfik Pasha put
+in his place, he had increased the debt of Egypt to
+four hundred and forty-five million dollars. Ismail
+was a typical Oriental ruler; he had the typical
+Oriental ruler's French veneer and education,
+a combination which has been found to produce
+most serious results. When an Oriental is left
+alone he is a barbarian, or he used to be; now,
+after he has been made the talk of Paris for nine
+days, and has been given a state dinner at Marlborough
+House, and a few stars for his coat, and
+called "cousin," he goes home with no particular
+disgust for his former eccentricities of mis-government,
+but with a quiver full of new tastes, desires,
+and ambitions, and thereafter plays his rôle
+of monarch with one eye on the grand stands of
+Europe. He wants their good opinion, but he
+wants to get it in his own way&mdash;the old way. He
+begins to build railroads and hospitals, but he continues,
+after his past custom, to draw the money
+for such improvements from licensed gambling-houses
+or from the sale of opium. He has a
+French cook, but he retains the kurbash; he puts
+up telephones, but he does not give up the bowstring.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 250px;"><a name="RIAZ_PASHA_PRIME-MINISTER_OF_EGYPT" id="RIAZ_PASHA_PRIME-MINISTER_OF_EGYPT"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-145.jpg" width="250" height="309" alt="RIAZ PASHA" title="RIAZ PASHA" />
+<span class="caption">RIAZ PASHA,<br />
+
+Prime-minister of Egypt</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ismail was the first Khedive who discovered
+that the easiest way to get money is to borrow
+it. He found that all one has to do is to sign a
+paper, and you get the money. It was very easy
+for Ismail to borrow money, because the credit
+of Egypt was good and sound in itself, and because
+foreigners, who even at that time swarmed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
+in Egypt, knew that the repudiation of debts,
+while possible in a powerful or free government,
+was not to be feared from that country. So there
+began a reign of extravagance for which history
+has no parallel. If
+"money breeds money,"
+it is also true
+that those who spend
+money freely are given
+more chances to
+do so than any one
+else. Adventurers,
+charlatans, rascals of
+every climate and
+every nationality,
+swarmed down upon
+Cairo, and fought
+with one another
+for a chance to glut
+themselves at the repast
+which this reckless
+profligate spread
+for all comers. No man probably was ever so
+basely cheated as was Ismail, or on so magnificent
+a scale. And nothing remains but ruins to
+show where the money spent on his own personal
+pleasure was bestowed. That other magnificent
+reprobate, William M. Tweed, left monuments
+like the Court House to commemorate
+his thefts of public money; but Ismail's palaces
+are falling in pieces, the rain has washed
+the paint off the boards, the tips of the crescents<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
+are broken, and great gardens filled with fountains
+and mosaic paths are choked with weeds and
+covered with fallen leaves and the dirt and dust
+of neglect and decay. You can walk over long
+marble floors which have sunk by their own
+weight through the rotten foundations, and see
+yourself at full length in bleared mirrors surrounded
+by the gilt borders and blue silken curtains
+of the Second Empire. Ismail ordered
+these palaces as men order hats, and threw them
+away as you toss an empty cartridge from a gun-barrel.
+And that was all the most of them ever
+were, empty cartridges, mere shells of wood painted
+to look like marble, and gilding and mirrors,
+as tasteless as the buildings at the Centennial
+Exposition, and lasting as long.</p>
+
+<p>And yet they pleased him, and he ordered
+more and more, so that wherever his eye might
+rest it would fall upon a palace which would
+serve as a fitting covering for his royal person,
+and as a testimony to his magnificence. He
+wanted many, and he wanted them at once. He
+had them built at night by the light of candles.
+The Palace of Gizeh, which is now a museum,
+was reared in this way while Cairo slept, and
+at a cost of twenty-four million dollars. The
+curtains ordered for its windows cost one thousand
+dollars each, and when it was found that
+they did not fit the windows, the entire front of
+the building was torn down, and a new front
+with windows to match the curtains was put in
+its place. He built an opera-house as fine as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
+that of Covent Garden in six months, and a grotto
+as dark and cool as the Mammoth Cave, with
+stalactites of painted rope and rocks of papier-maché
+and mud, with its sides lined with aquariums,
+in which swam strange fish. The wind and
+the dust play through this grotto to-day; for he
+no sooner reared a palace in air than he turned
+from it to some new toy. These are the things
+you can see. You can hear stories&mdash;some of
+them true, some of them possible&mdash;of things that
+are past, such as his swimming-tanks where a
+hundred of the slaves of the harem bathed together
+for his edification; the pie out of which,
+when it was opened, there stepped a ballet-dancer;
+and the story of the disappearance of the
+Pasha who grew too rich. This is, unfortunately, a
+true story, and not one out of the <i>Arabian Nights</i>.
+This Pasha was invited by Ismail to see a new
+dahabeeyah, and never returned. But one of
+the attendants on the Khedive came back some
+weeks later with his finger bitten off at the joint.
+He and Ismail alone know where the Pasha who
+was too rich has gone.</p>
+
+<p>These extravagances and these eccentricities
+were all in keeping with our idea of what an
+Oriental despot should be, but it would be most
+unfair and ungenerous to give only this side of
+Ismail's character. He was a man of much mind
+and of large ideas, as well as a man with the
+tastes of a voluptuary, and the means, for a time,
+of a Count of Monte Cristo. It was he who
+built the harbor of Alexandria; and the railways<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+and canals that others have completed were
+started under his régime. All of these things&mdash;railroads,
+palaces, canals, and grottos made of
+mud&mdash;cost money; and there were other expenses.
+Knights of industry and rascals of all
+degrees extorted vast fortunes from him in indemnities
+for supposed failures on his part to
+keep up with his agreements, and to stick to the
+letter of concessions. Some of these, like the payment
+of fifteen million dollars to the Suez Canal
+Company, were just enough; but there was also
+an enormous sum given in backsheesh to Turkey
+to gain the consent of the Porte to a proposed
+change in the line of succession and the establishment
+of the rule of primogeniture. Up to
+that time the eldest male member of the ruling
+family had always succeeded to power, but Ismail
+obtained a firman from the Sultan allowing his
+son to follow him. The gratification of this natural
+vanity or love of family was not obtained
+for the asking, and cost his people dear. They
+were already groaning under a multitude of
+taxes; the army was unpaid; the bureaucracy
+was rotten throughout; bribery and extortion,
+unfair taxation, and open seizure of the property
+of others had reduced the country almost to
+bankruptcy. Ismail in sixteen years had brought
+about a state of things that threatened utter ruin,
+to not only the native, but to the strangers within
+and without the gates. The strangers made the
+move for reform. I have told this much of Ismail
+not because it is new or unfamiliar, but because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+it shows how, through his misrule, the foreign
+element was able to obtain a footing upon the
+shore of Egypt, which footing has now grown to
+a trampling under foot of what is native and
+properly Egyptian. This entering wedge was
+called the Dual Control, and France and England
+were appointed receivers for Egypt, just as we
+appoint receivers for a badly managed railroad,
+and Ismail was deposed, his son Tewfik taking
+his place.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 450px;"><a name="AN_EGYPTIAN_LANCER" id="AN_EGYPTIAN_LANCER"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-149.jpg" width="450" height="535" alt="AN EGYPTIAN LANCER" title="AN EGYPTIAN LANCER" />
+<span class="caption">AN EGYPTIAN LANCER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But although this was the first important and
+most official recognition of the right of the
+stranger to dictate to Egypt, he had already obtained
+peculiar rights in Egypt through capitulations,
+or those privileges granted in the past to
+foreign residents in Turkey and its dependent
+state of Egypt. In the sixteenth century the
+foreigners who traded in these Oriental countries
+stood in actual need of protection from the natives.
+Because they were foreigners they were
+regarded with such lack of consideration that, in
+order to balance the disadvantages of having
+their shops destroyed and their throats cut, the
+Sultan gave them certain privileges&mdash;such as immunity
+from taxation, immunity from arrest, the
+inviolability of domicile, and the exemption from
+the jurisdiction of the local courts.</p>
+
+<p>These privileges were unimportant when the
+foreign element in Constantinople was so little
+and so weak that the position of the Chinamen in
+San Francisco in '49 was that of a powerful aristocracy
+in comparison; but the snake warmed at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+the hearth-stone grew, and the Sultan's empire
+dwindled, and the privileges which were given to
+bribe the foreigner to come and to remain became
+a bane to Turkey and a curse to the weaker state
+of Egypt. The inviolability of domicile, for instance,
+is at this very day made use of by foreigners
+who are carrying on some wickedness or who
+have committed a crime for which they cannot
+be arrested by an Egyptian policeman unless he is
+accompanied by an official representative of the
+country to which the foreigner belongs. Let us
+suppose, for example, that the police of New York
+wished to raid a gambling-house. This, I know,
+is asking a good deal of the reader's intelligence,
+but we will suppose it to be a gambling-house
+which has not paid its assessment to the police
+regularly, and which should be given a lesson.
+All that the proprietor of the house would have to
+do, did capitulations extend in New York, would
+be to lease the house to an Italian, or to take out
+papers of naturalization from the British government.
+You can imagine the chagrin of an officer
+of the law who, when he goes to make an arrest,
+is confronted with a German who says he is an
+Englishman, and whose domicile is accordingly
+sacred. This, as you can imagine, would impede
+the wheels of justice.</p>
+
+<p>When I was in Cairo a Greek, who had taken
+out papers as an American citizen, flaunted this
+fact in the faces of the native police whenever
+they came to arrest him for keeping a gambling-house.
+They applied to our consul-general,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+Mr. E. C. Little, of Abilene, Kansas, who
+so far differed from the etiquette observed by
+some other consuls-general in Cairo as not to
+delay and not to warn the criminal. He sent
+his soldiers to be present at the arrest. The offender
+met this by bringing forth another American
+citizen of Greek parentage, to whom he
+claimed to have leased the house, and whose
+family were inside. Mr. Little, feeling that the
+American flag did not look well as a cloak
+for gambling-houses,
+and being a young
+man who has assisted
+at county-seat
+fights and who can
+pitch three curves,
+said that if the roulette
+tables were not
+out of the house in
+twenty-four hours he
+would himself break
+them into kindling-wood
+with an axe.
+This incident shows
+how the capitulations
+of the sixteenth
+century are acting as
+stumbling-blocks to
+the Egyptian of to-day, even when the consuls-general
+are willing to assist the native government,
+which is seldom.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 250px;"><a name="TIGRANE_PASHA_MINISTER_OF_FOREIGN_AFFAIRS" id="TIGRANE_PASHA_MINISTER_OF_FOREIGN_AFFAIRS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-153.jpg" width="250" height="321" alt="TIGRANE PASHA" title="TIGRANE PASHA" />
+<span class="caption">TIGRANE PASHA,<br />
+
+Minister of Foreign Affairs</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is not all. The immunity from full taxation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
+now that the foreigners are among the richest
+inhabitants of Cairo, is most manifestly unjust;
+and though the mixed courts of an international
+judiciary have done away with trial of the foreign
+resident, or lack of trial, in civil cases, by the several
+consuls-general, the abuses of the capitulations
+are still a grievous and most unjust imposition
+by the great powers, ourselves included, upon
+a weaker one. To return to the Dual Control and
+to the story of the growth of the foreigners' hold
+on Egypt. The Dual Control was unpopular; so
+was the foreigner and his capitulations, who, waxing
+fat on the weaknesses of the country after Ismail's
+debauchery of its strength, grew insolent&mdash;so
+insolent that the cry raised by a general in the
+Khedive's army of "Egypt for the Egyptians" was
+taken up, and found expression in the Arabist
+movement or rebellion. Its leader was Arabi
+Pasha. He wanted what the Know-Nothing
+party of America wanted&mdash;his country for his
+countrymen. What else he wanted for himself
+does not matter here. He was, in the eyes of
+the Khedive, a rebel. In the eyes of some of the
+people he was the would-be preserver of his country
+against the plague of the foreign invasion.</p>
+
+<p>The trouble began at Alexandria, where the
+excited people attacked the foreign residents, killing
+some, and destroying valuable property. Men-of-war
+of the two powers represented in the Dual
+Control had already arrived to put down the rebellion.
+When the riot on shore was at its height,
+the English war-vessels bombarded the city. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+bombarding of Alexandria was war, but it was
+not magnificent. There are certain things made
+to be bombarded&mdash;forts and ships of war&mdash;but
+cities are not built for that purpose or with that
+ultimate end in view. The English people, as
+a people, however, regret the bombardment of
+Alexandria as much as any one. The French
+war-vessels, for their part, refused to join the
+bombardment, and so were requested by the
+English admiral to sail away and give the other
+half of the Dual Control a clear field. Different
+people give you different reasons for the departure
+of the French fleet at this crisis. Some say
+that M. Clemenceau, who hated M. Freycinet and
+his policy, possibly raised the cry of the German
+wolf on the frontier, and pointed out the danger
+at home if the army and navy were engaged
+otherwise than in protecting the border. Others
+say that, like the good one of the two robbers in
+the <i>Babes in the Wood</i>, one of the Dual Control
+drew the line at murder or at the bombardment
+of a country she was supposed to protect. Plundering
+the Egyptians was possible, but not bombarding
+their city. They stopped at that. The
+English followed up the bombardment of Alexandria
+by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, which ended
+the rebellion. The Citadel of Cairo surrendered
+at their approach, and the Khedive's rule was
+again undisturbed. The English remained, however,
+to "restore order," and to see to the "organization
+of proper means for the maintenance
+of the Khedive's authority." They have been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
+doing that now for ten years, and it is interesting
+to note that they have made so little progress
+that the last "disorder" in Cairo was due to the
+action of the British consul-general himself in
+allowing the young Khedive just twenty-four
+hours in which to dismiss one of his cabinet.
+This can hardly be described as "maintaining the
+authority of the Khedive," which the English
+had promised to do.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><a name="A_CAMEL_CORPS_PATROL_AT_WADI_HALFA" id="A_CAMEL_CORPS_PATROL_AT_WADI_HALFA"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-157.jpg" width="400" height="578" alt="CAMEL CORPS PATROL" title="CAMEL CORPS PATROL" />
+<span class="caption">A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>After the battle of Tel-el-Kebir Great Britain
+stood undoubtedly in the position of the savior of
+the Khedive if not of Egypt. Her soldiers had
+crushed the rebellion, and as she had sent her
+Only General and one of the royal family and
+many thousands of good men to do it, and as
+she had lost not only men, but money, she
+thought she deserved something in return. The
+something she has taken in return has been
+taken gradually, and is the control of Egypt at
+the present day. It is possible that had the
+English not lost many more men and much more
+money in the campaign in the Soudan, which followed
+immediately after the suppression of Arabi,
+they might not have gone so far as they have gone
+in settling themselves in Egypt. But there was
+a not unnatural feeling that the Soudan campaign,
+which had cost so much, and which was a
+failure in all but in showing the bravery of the
+British troops, ought to be paid for, or made up
+to the English in some way. I should like to go
+into the story of this most picturesque and heroic
+of campaigns, but it would require a book by itself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
+Its history is briefly this: The religious and
+military chieftain known as "the Mahdi," shortly
+after the defeat of Arabi, threatened all Egypt
+from the Soudan, which rose under his leadership.
+General Hicks, an Englishman, with ten thousand
+men, in the service of the Khedive, was sent
+against him. He was killed, and most of the
+troops with him. The English, who were at that
+time the only power in Egypt with authority of
+any sort back of it, and who were virtually in
+control, felt that they should take the responsibilities
+of their position as well as its benefits,
+and avenge the massacre, drive back the Mahdi's
+forces, and, if possible, crush him and them for
+all time. The campaign was later further complicated
+by the presence at Khartoom of Major-General
+C. G. Gordon, who had gone there to lead
+back in safety the Egyptian troops still remaining
+in the Soudan. He was, after his arrival at
+Khartoom, virtually a prisoner at that place, which
+is a mud city on the banks of the Nile far above
+the fifth cataract. The attempts to rescue him
+and to suppress the Mahdi were equally unsuccessful.</p>
+
+<p>This is, in a few words, the story of a campaign
+which has been unequalled within the last
+twenty years in picturesqueness, heroism, and
+dramatic surprises. It had been said that the old
+days of personal bravery, of hand-to-hand slaughter,
+and of the attack and defence of man against
+man, were at an end; that owing to the new
+weapons of war, by which an enemy can be attacked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
+when several miles distant from the attacking
+party, when the pressing of an electric
+button destroys an army corps, and when turning
+a handle will send three hundred bullets a
+minute into a mass of infantry, the necessity for
+personal courage was over. But seldom in history
+has there been as fierce personal encounters
+as in the Soudan, or as unusual methods of warfare.
+On the one hand were the naked supporters
+of the Mahdi, armed with their spears and
+knives, and protected only by bull-hide shields,
+but actuated by a religious fanaticism that drove
+them exulting at their enemies, and with no
+fear of death, but with the belief that through it
+they would gain joyous and proud immortality.
+Against them were the British troops, outnumbered
+ten to one, with hundreds of miles of sandy
+desert before, behind, and on every side of them,
+cut off from communication with the outside
+world, in a country barren and unfamiliar, and
+attacked by tens of thousands, who came when
+they pleased and where they pleased, rising as
+swiftly as a sand-storm rises, and disappearing
+again as suddenly into the desert.</p>
+
+<p>When I was in Cairo I was told of one of the
+Mahdi's men who continually rushed at a British
+square during an engagement holding his shield
+clear of his body as he advanced to throw a spear,
+and then retreated again. This looked like the
+worst form of foolhardiness to the English, until
+they saw that he was protecting with his shield
+his little boy, who was hiding behind it, and that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+when the chance offered,
+this child, who
+could not have been
+more than seven, and
+who was as naked of
+protection as his father,
+would throw a
+spear of his own. The
+father was wounded
+four times, but each
+time the bullet struck
+him he only shook
+himself, as a dog
+shakes off water, and
+once more rushed forward. When he fell for the
+last time the boy tumbled across him, unconscious
+from a wound in his thigh. The surgeons dressed
+this wound and bandaged it; but when the child
+came to and saw what they had done, he leaped up
+and tore the clothes from around him, and then,
+as the blood from the reopened wound ran out,
+fell over backwards dead. The English officer
+who told this story asked if fighting such men
+could be considered agreeable work from any
+point of view.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><a name="H._H._ABBAS_II._KHEDIVE_OF_EGYPT" id="H._H._ABBAS_II._KHEDIVE_OF_EGYPT"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-161.jpg" width="300" height="313" alt="H. H. ABBAS II." title="H. H. ABBAS II." />
+<span class="caption">H. H. ABBAS II.<br />
+
+Khedive of Egypt</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the Soudan is only of interest here as showing
+how, having lost so much through it, the
+British did not feel more inclined than before to
+evacuate Egypt, although there were many who
+thought, as a few still think, that Egypt has cost
+them too much already, and more than they can
+ever get back. The loss of Gordon was perhaps<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+the disaster of all the most keenly felt. How
+keenly is shown partly by the statue the English
+have placed to him in Trafalgar Square, surrounded
+by their kings and greatest generals. It
+shows him with one foot placed on the battlement
+of Khartoom, with his arms folded, and with
+the head thrown slightly forward, looking out, as
+he had done for so many weary months, for the
+relief that came too late. This monument is a
+reproach to those whose uncertainty of mind and
+purpose cost Gordon his life. It was doing a
+brave thing to put it up in a public place, being,
+as it is, a standing reminder of the neglect and
+half-heartedness that lost a valuable life, and one
+that had been risked again and again for his
+country. It is not only a monument to General
+Gordon, but to the English people, who have had
+the courage to admit in bronze and stone that
+they were wrong.</p>
+
+<p>For the last ten years the English have been as
+tardy in getting out of Egypt as they were in
+going after Gordon into the Soudan. They have
+repeatedly declared their intention of evacuating
+the country, not only in answer to questions in
+the House, but in answer to the inquiries of foreign
+powers. But they are still there. They
+have not been idle while there, and they have accomplished
+much good, and have brought benefits
+innumerable to Egypt. They have improved
+her systems of irrigation, upon which the prosperity
+of the land depends, have strengthened her
+army, have done away with the corvee, or tax<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+paid on labor, and with the kurbash, or whip used
+in punishment, and, what is much the most wonderful,
+they have brought her out of ruin into
+such a condition of prosperity that she not only
+pays the interest on her enormous debt, but has a
+little left over for internal improvements. There
+has also been a marked change for the better in
+the condition of the courts of justice, and there
+has been an extension of a railroad up the Nile
+as far as Sirgeh.</p>
+
+<p>But the English to-day not only want credit
+for having done all this, but they want credit for
+having done it unselfishly and without hope or
+thought of reward, and solely for the good of
+mankind and of Egypt in particular. They remind
+me of those of the G. A. R. who not only
+want pensions and medals, but to be considered
+unselfish saviors of their country in her hour of
+need. There is no reason why a man should not
+be held in honor for risking his life for his country's
+sake, and honors, if he wants them, should
+be heaped upon him, but not money too. He
+either served his country because he was loyal
+and brave, or because he wanted money in return
+for taking certain risks. Let him have either the
+honors or the money, but he should not be so
+greedy as to want both. England has made a
+very good thing out of Egypt, and she has not
+yet got all she will get, but she wants the world
+to forget that and look upon her as an unselfish
+and enlightened nation that is helping a less prosperous
+and less powerful people to get upon their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+feet again. Of course it is none of our business
+(at least it is our policy to say so) when England
+stalks forth like a roaring lion seeking what she
+may devour all over the world. Americans travel
+chiefly upon the Continent, and unless they go
+into out-of-the-way corners of the world they have
+no idea how little there is left of it that has not
+been seized by the people of Great Britain. For
+my own part I find one grows a little tired of
+getting down and sailing forth and landing again
+always under the shadow of the British flag. If
+the United States should begin with Hawaii and
+continue to annex other people's property, we
+should find that almost all of the best corner lots
+and post-office sites of the world have been
+already pre-empted. Senator Wolcott once said
+to Senator Quay: "I understand, Quay, you want
+the chairmanship of the Library Committee. You
+seem to want the earth; if you don't look out you
+will interfere with my plans."</p>
+
+<p>If the United States had taken away the little
+princess's island from her and continued to plunder
+weaker nations, she would have found that England
+wants the earth too, and that she is in a fair
+way of getting it if some one does not stop her
+very soon. There are a number of good people in
+England who believe that for the last ten years
+their countrymen have spent their time and money
+in redeeming Egypt as a form of missionary work,
+and there are others quite as naïve who put the
+whole thing in a word by saying, "What would we
+do with our younger sons if it was not for Egypt?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><a name="THE_GUN_MULE_OF_THE_MULE_BATTERY" id="THE_GUN_MULE_OF_THE_MULE_BATTERY"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-165.jpg" width="400" height="497" alt="THE GUN MULE" title="THE GUN MULE" />
+<span class="caption">THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>Three-fourths of the officers in the army of the
+Khedive are English boys, who rank as second
+lieutenants at home and as majors in Egypt.
+They are paid just twice what they are paid in
+the English army, and it is the Khedive who
+pays them and not the English. In this way
+England obtains three things: she is saved the
+cost of supporting that number of officers; she
+gets the benefit of their experience in Egypt,
+which is an excellent training-school, at the expense
+of the Egyptians; and she at the same
+time controls the Egyptian army by these same
+officers, and guards her own interests at Egypt's
+cost. And as if this were not enough, she plants
+an Army of Occupation upon the country, and
+with it menaces the native authority. The irrigation
+of Egypt has of late been carried on by
+Englishmen entirely and paid for by Egypt;
+her railroads are built by the English; her big
+contracts are given out to English firms and to
+English manufacturers; and the railroad which
+will be built to Kosseir on the Red Sea may
+have been designed in Egypt's interest to carry
+wheat, or it may have been planned to carry
+troops to the Red Sea in the event of the
+seizure of the Suez Canal or of any other impediment
+to the shortest route to India. We
+may not believe that the Egyptians are capable
+of governing themselves, we may believe that it
+is written that others than themselves shall always
+rule them and their country, but we must
+prefer that whoever do this should declare themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+openly, and act as conquerors who come
+and remain as conquerors, and not as "advisers"
+and restorers of order. Napoleon came to Cairo
+with flags flying and drums beating openly as an
+enemy; he did not come in the disguise of a
+missionary or an irrigation expert.</p>
+
+<p>And there is always the question whether if
+left alone the Egyptians of the present day could
+not govern themselves. Those of the Egyptians
+I met who were in authority are not men who
+are likely to return to the debauchery and misrule
+of Ismail. They would be big men in any
+country; they are cultivated, educated gentlemen,
+who have served in different courts or on
+many important diplomatic missions, and whose
+tastes and ambitions are as creditable and as
+broad as are those of their English contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>The two most prominent advisers of the Khedive
+at present are his Prime-minister, Riaz
+Pasha, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tigrane
+Pasha. The first of these is a Turk, the
+second an Armenian and a Christian. It is told
+of Riaz that he was brought to Egypt when a
+boy as a slave. A man who can rise from such a
+beginning to be Prime-minister must have something
+in him. He showed his spirit and his desire
+for his country's good in the time of Ismail,
+whose extravagances both he and Nubar Pasha
+strenuously opposed, and his aid to the English
+in establishing Egyptian finance on a firmer footing
+was ready and invaluable. He has held almost<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+every position in the cabinet of Egypt, and
+is not too old a man to learn new methods, and if
+left alone is experienced and accomplished enough
+as a statesman to manage for himself.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 300px;"><a name="LORD_CROMER_THE_ENGLISH_DIPLOMATIC_AGENT_IN_EGYPT" id="LORD_CROMER_THE_ENGLISH_DIPLOMATIC_AGENT_IN_EGYPT"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-169.jpg" width="300" height="387" alt="LORD CROMER" title="LORD CROMER" />
+<span class="caption">LORD CROMER,<br />
+
+The English Diplomatic Agent in Egypt</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Tigrane Pasha struck me as being more of a
+diplomat than a statesman, but he showed his
+strength by the fact that he understood the weak
+points of the Egyptians as well as their virtues.
+It is not the enthusiast who believes that all in
+his country is perfect who is the best patriot.
+To say that such a man as this&mdash;a man who has
+a better knowledge of many different governments
+than half of the English cabinet have of
+their own, and who wishes the best for his Khedive
+and his country&mdash;needs the advice or support
+of an English resident minister, is as absurd as to
+say that the French
+cabinet should govern
+themselves by
+the manifestoes of
+the Comte de Paris.
+These men are not
+barbarians nor despots;
+they have not
+gained their place in
+the world by favor or
+inheritance. Their
+homes are as rich in
+treasures of art and
+history and literature
+as are the homes of
+Lord Rosebery or Sir<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
+Henry Drummond Wolff, and if they care for
+their country and the authority of their Khedive,
+it is certainly hard that they may not have the
+right of serving both undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>The Khedive himself has been very generally
+represented through the English press as a "sulky
+boy" who does not know what is best for him.
+It is just as easy to describe him as a plucky boy
+who wishes to govern his own country and his
+own people in his own way. And not only is he
+not allowed to do this, but he is treated with a
+lack of consideration by his protectors which adds
+insult to injury, and makes him appear as having
+less authority than is really his. He might very
+well say to Lord Cromer, "It was all very well to
+dissemble your love, but why did you kick me
+down-stairs?"</p>
+
+<p>Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, and the
+ruling figure in Egypt, has served his country as
+faithfully and as successfully as any man in her
+debt to-day. He has been in Egypt from the
+beginning of these ten years, and he has been
+given almost unlimited power and authority by
+his own country, of which his nominal position of
+Consul-General and Diplomatic Agent is no criterion.
+He is a typical Englishman in appearance,
+broad-shouldered and big all over, with a
+smooth-shaven face, and the look of having just
+come fresh from a bath. In conversation he
+thinks much more of what he has to say than of
+how he says it; by that I mean that he is direct,
+and even abrupt; the Egyptians found him most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
+unpleasantly so. But were he more tactful, he
+would probably have been better liked personally,
+but would not have succeeded in doing what
+he has done so well.</p>
+
+<p>I do not like what he has done, but I want to
+be fair in showing that for the work he was sent
+to do he is probably the best man England could
+have selected. A man less self-reliant might
+have feared to compromise himself with home
+authorities, and would have temporized and lost
+where Lord Cromer bullied and browbeat and
+won. He is a very remarkable man. He studies
+for a half-hour every day after breakfast, and
+plays tennis in the afternoon. When he is in
+his own room, with a pipe in his mouth, he
+can talk more interestingly and with more exact
+knowledge of Egypt than any man in the world,
+and your admiration for him is unbounded. In
+the rooms of the legation, on the contrary, or,
+again, when advising a minister of the Khedive
+or the Khedive himself, he can be as intensely
+disagreeable in his manner and as powerfully
+aggressive as a polar-bear. During the last so-called
+"crisis" he gave the Khedive twenty-four
+hours in which to dismiss his Prime-minister.
+He did this with the assurance from the English
+Foreign Office that the home government would
+support him. He then cabled with one hand to
+Malta for troops and with the other stopped the
+Black Watch at Aden on their way to India, and
+called them back to Cairo, after which he went
+out in full sight of the public and banged tennis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+balls about until sunset. A man who can call
+out "forty, love!" "forty, fifteen!" in a calm voice
+two hours after sending an ultimatum to a Khedive
+and disarranging the movements of six thousand
+of her Majesty's troops will get what he
+wants in the end, and a boy of eighteen is hardly
+a fair match for him.</p>
+
+<p>As I have said, the English press have misrepresented
+the young Khedive in many ways.
+He is, in the first place, much older both in appearance
+and manner and thought than his age
+would suggest, and if he is sulky to Englishmen
+it is not to be wondered at. They could hardly
+expect his Highness to regard them as seriously
+as his friends as they regard themselves.
+The Khedive gave me a private audience at the
+Abdine Palace while I was in Cairo, and from
+what he said then and from what others who are
+close to him told me of him, I obtained a very
+different idea of his personality than I had received
+from the English.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 541px;"><a name="A_GUN_OF_THE_MULE_BATTERY_IN_ACTION" id="A_GUN_OF_THE_MULE_BATTERY_IN_ACTION"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-173.jpg" width="541" height="400" alt="GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY" title="GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY" />
+<span class="caption">A GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>He struck me as being distinctly obstinate&mdash;a
+characteristic which is so marked in our President
+that it can only be considered one of the qualifications
+for success, and is probably the quality in
+the Khedive which the English describe as sulkiness.
+What I liked in him most was his pride
+in his army and in the Egyptian people as Egyptians.
+It is always well that a ruler should be so
+enthusiastic over what is his own that he shows
+it even to the casual stranger, for if he exhibits it
+to him, how much more will he show it to his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+people! The Khedive has gentle tastes, and is
+said to find his amusement in his garden and
+among flowers and on the farm lands of his estates;
+he speaks several languages very well, and
+dresses and looks&mdash;except for the fez and his attendants&mdash;like
+any other young man of twenty-three
+or twenty-four in Paris or New York. His
+ministers, who know him best, describe him as
+having a high spirit, and one that, as he grows
+older and will be guided by greater experience,
+will lead him to firmer authority for his own good
+and for the good of his people.</p>
+
+<p>One remark of the Khedive's which is of interest
+to Americans was to the effect that the officers
+in his army who had been trained by Stone
+Bey, and those other American officers who entered
+the Egyptian army after the end of our Civil
+War, were, in his opinion, the best-trained men in
+their particular department in his army. This is
+the topographical work, and the making of maps
+and drawings; but those Americans who are in
+charge of Egyptian troops on the frontier are also
+well esteemed. It is the English, however, who
+have made the fighting part of the army what it
+is. Before they came the troops were unpaid,
+and badly treated by their officers, but now the
+infantry and the camel corps and artillery have
+no trouble in getting recruits.</p>
+
+<p>The Egyptian is not a natural fighter, as is the
+Soudanese, who fights for love of it, but he has
+shown lately that when properly officered and
+trained and well treated, he can defend a position<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
+or attack boldly if led boldly. I suggested to the
+Khedive that he should borrow some of our officers,
+those who have succeeded so well with the
+negroes of the Ninth Cavalry and with the Indians,
+for it seemed to me that this would be of
+benefit to both the officers and the Egyptian
+soldier. It was this suggestion that called forth
+the Khedive's admiration for the Americans of
+his army; but, as a matter of fact, the English
+would never allow officers of any other nationality
+than their own to control even a company
+of the Egyptian army. They cannot turn out
+those foreigners who are already in, but they can
+dictate as to who shall come hereafter, and they
+fill all the good billets with their own people;
+and if there is one thing an Englishman apparently
+holds above all else, it is a "good billet." I
+know a good many English officers who would
+rather be stationed where there was a chance of
+their taking part in what they call a "show," and
+what we would grandly call a "battle," than dwell
+at ease on the staff of General Wolseley himself;
+but, on the other hand, if I were to give a list of
+all the subalterns who have applied to me for
+"good billets in America," where they seem to
+think fortunes grow on hedges, half the regimental
+colors from London to Malta would fade with
+shame.</p>
+
+<p>And Egypt is full of "good billets." It is
+true the English have made them good, and
+they were not worth much before the English
+restored order; but because you have humanely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+stopped a runaway coach from going over a precipice,
+that is no reason why you should take
+possession of it and fill it both inside and out
+with your own friends and relations. That is
+what England has done with the Egyptian coach
+which Ismail drove to the brink of bankruptcy.</p>
+
+<p>It is true the Khedive still sits on the box and
+holds the reins, but Lord Cromer sits beside him
+and holds the whip.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>MODERN ATHENS</h3>
+
+
+<p>Perhaps the greatest charm of Athens
+and of the islands and mountains
+round about it lies in their
+power to lure back your belief in
+a great many fine people of whose
+remarkable deeds you had grown sceptical&mdash;of
+whose existence even you had begun to doubt.
+It is something very serious when one loses faith
+in so delightful a young man as Theseus, and it is
+worth while sailing under the lee shores of Crete,
+where he killed the Minotaur, if for no other purpose
+than to have your admiration for him restored.
+If we could only be as sure of restoring
+by travel all of those other people of whom our
+elders ceased telling us when we left the nursery,
+I would head an expedition to the north pole,
+not to discover open seas and altitudes and
+eclipses and such weighty things, but to locate
+that nice and kindly old gentleman, and his toy
+store and his reindeer, who used to come at
+Christmas-time, and who has stopped coming
+since I left school. It is certainly worth while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+going all the way to
+Greece to see the
+Hill of the Nymphs,
+and the very cave
+where Pan used to
+sleep in the hot midday,
+and to thrill
+over the four crossroads
+and the high,
+gloomy pass where
+the Sphinx lay in
+wait for &OElig;dipus
+with her cruel claws
+and inscrutable
+smile.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><a name="GREEK_SOLDIER_IN_THE_NATIONAL_ALBANIAN_UNIFORM" id="GREEK_SOLDIER_IN_THE_NATIONAL_ALBANIAN_UNIFORM"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-179.jpg" width="300" height="464" alt="NATIONAL
+(ALBANIAN) UNIFORM" title="NATIONAL
+(ALBANIAN) UNIFORM" />
+<span class="caption">GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL
+(ALBANIAN) UNIFORM</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The story that
+must always strike
+every child as most
+sad and unsatisfactory
+is the one which
+tells us how the father
+of Theseus killed himself when his son came
+sailing back triumphant, and so gallantly engaged
+in entertaining the beautiful Athenian maidens
+whose lives he had saved that he forgot to hoist
+the white sails, and caused his father to throw
+himself off the high rocks in despair.</p>
+
+<p>This used to appeal to me as one of the most
+pathetic incidents in history; but as time wore
+on my sympathy for the father and indignation
+against Theseus passed away, and I forgot about
+them both. But when they point out where the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
+black sails were first seen entering the bay, and
+you stand on the rock from which the people
+watched for Theseus, and from which his father
+threw himself down, you feel just as sorry, and
+you rebel just as strongly against that morbid
+anticlimax, as you did when you first read the
+story in knickerbockers. It seems almost too sad
+to be true.</p>
+
+<p>They had such a delightful way of mixing up
+the histories of gods and mortals in those days
+that the imaginative person who visits Athens
+will find himself gazing as gratefully and as open-eyed
+at the rocks in which the Centaur hid as
+at those from which Demosthenes delivered his
+philippics, just as in London the room at the
+Charter House where Colonel Newcome said
+"Adsum" for the last time is much more real
+than that room in Edinburgh in which Rizzio was
+killed, or as the rock from which Monte Cristo
+sprang, at the base of the Château d'If, is so
+much more actual than the entire field of Waterloo.
+It is hard to know just which was real and
+which a delightful myth; and yet there has been
+so little change in Greece since then that you are
+brought nearer to Alcibiades and to Pericles than
+you can ever come, in this world at least, to Dr.
+Johnson and Dean Swift. You cannot recreate
+Grub Street and the debtors' prison, but Eub&oelig;a
+still "looks on Marathon, and Marathon on the
+sea," and, if you are presumptuous, you can
+strut up and down the rocky plateau from which
+Demosthenes spoke, or take your seat in one of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+the marble chairs of the Theatre of Dionysus,
+and pretend you are a worthy citizen of Athens
+listening to a satire of Sophocles.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 350px;"><a name="GREEK_PEASANT_GIRL" id="GREEK_PEASANT_GIRL"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-181.jpg" width="350" height="480" alt="GREEK PEASANT GIRL" title="GREEK PEASANT GIRL" />
+<span class="caption">GREEK PEASANT GIRL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The quiet and fresh cleanliness of modern
+Athens comes to you after the roar and dirt of
+Cairo's narrow lanes and dusty avenues like the
+touch of damask table linen and silver after the
+greasy oil-cloth of a Mediterranean coasting
+steamer. It is quiet, sunny, and well-bred. You
+do not fight your way through legions of donkey-boys<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+and dragomans, nor are your footsteps
+echoed by swarms of guides and beggars. It is a
+pretty city, with the look of a water-color. The
+houses are a light yellow, and the shutters a
+watery green, and the tile roofs a delicate red, and
+the sky above a blue seldom shown to ordinary
+mortals, but reserved for the eyes of painters and
+poets, who have a sort of second sight, and so are
+always seeing it and using it for a background.
+Athens is a very new city, with new streets and
+new public buildings, and a new King and Royal
+Palace. It is like a little miniature. There is a
+little army, chiefly composed of officers, and a
+miniature cabinet, and a beautiful miniature university,
+and everybody knows everybody else; and
+when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard
+turns out and blows a bugle, and so all Athens,
+which is always sitting at the cafés around the
+square of the palace, nods its head and says,
+"The Queen is going for a drive," or, "Her
+Majesty has returned early to-day," and then
+continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mustache
+and to sip its coffee. Modern Athens
+tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of
+thought. The men have adopted his costume,
+and the women wear little flat curls like the
+French ladies in <i>Le Figaro</i>, and peaked bonnets
+and high heels.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><a name="THE_UNIVERSITY_OF_ATHENS" id="THE_UNIVERSITY_OF_ATHENS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-183.jpg" width="400" height="135" alt="THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS" title="THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS" />
+<span class="caption">THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The national costume of the Greeks is taken
+from the Albanians, but it is much more honored
+in the breach than in the observance. Like all
+national costumes, it is only worn, except for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+political effect and before a camera, by the lower
+classes, and also by three regiments of the army.
+You see it in the streets, but it is not so universally
+popular as one would suppose from the pictures
+of Athens in the illustrated papers and by
+the photographs in the shop-windows. It is a
+most remarkable costume, and as widely different
+from the flowing robe and short skirt of the early
+Greeks as men in accordion petticoats and heavy
+white tights and a Zouave jacket must evidently
+be. In the country it still obtains, and it is the
+farmers and peasants and their wives and the soldiers
+who supply the picturesque element of dress
+to the streets of the city.</p>
+
+<p>It is an inscrutable problem why, with all
+the national costumes in the world to choose
+and pick from, the world should have decided
+upon the dress of the Frank, that is, of the foreigner&mdash;ourselves.
+In Spain the peasants have
+discarded their knickerbockers and short jackets,
+even in the country, for the long trousers and
+ill-fitting ready-made clothing of a French "sweater,"
+and the Moors cover their robes with overcoats
+from Manchester, and the Arabs and Chinese
+and Swiss and Turks are giving up the picturesque
+garments that are comfortable and becoming
+to them, and look exceedingly ugly and uncomfortable
+in our own modern garb, which is
+the ugliest and most uncomfortable of national
+costumes yet devised by men or tailors. If you
+judge by the uniforms of the army of officers and
+by the dress of the women of Athens, you would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+think you were in a French city and among
+French people. It seems a pity that this should
+be so; that Athens, of all cities, should be built of
+Italian villas, inhabited by
+people who ape the French,
+and governed by a King
+from Denmark; still, they
+did not make a success of
+it when they tried, fifty years
+ago, to govern
+themselves. It is
+perhaps hardly
+fair to expect the
+Greeks, or even
+the Athenians,
+to live up to the
+great rock and
+the monuments
+that crown it,
+and the people
+of Greece are no
+doubt as fine as
+those of other little kingdoms or principalities
+scattered about Europe; but then the other kingdoms
+and principalities have not the history of
+early Greece to call their own nor the Acropolis
+to look up to.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><a name="ALBANIAN_PEASANT_WOMAN" id="ALBANIAN_PEASANT_WOMAN"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-186.jpg" width="250" height="321" alt="ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN" title="ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN" />
+<span class="caption">ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 250px;"><a name="ALBANIAN_PEASANT_WOMAN2" id="ALBANIAN_PEASANT_WOMAN2"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-187.jpg" width="250" height="313" alt="ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN" title="ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN" />
+<span class="caption">ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The rock of the Acropolis is hardly more a
+part of modern Greece than the Rock of Gibraltar
+is a part of Spain. Geographically it is, but it
+belongs as much to the visitor as to the native, so
+little inspiration has he apparently drawn from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
+it, and so little has it served to bring out in him
+to-day those qualities that made demigods of his
+ancestors. I think I represent the average intelligence,
+and yet at this moment I cannot think of
+any Greek within the last hundred years who has
+gained world-wide renown, either as a sculptor, an
+artist, a soldier, a writer of comedies and satires,
+a statesman, nor even as an archæologist; the
+very historians of Greece and the exponents of
+its secrets and the most distinguished of its excavators
+are of other countries.
+They have many heroes of their
+own; you see their portraits or
+their photographs in every shop-window;
+but they are not as familiar
+to you as the faces and
+histories of those
+other Greeks who
+sighed because
+there were no
+more worlds, and
+whose fame has
+lasted long after
+the other worlds
+were discovered.
+One would think
+that some young
+Greek, on arising
+in the morning
+and seeing the Acropolis against the sky, would
+say to himself, "To-day I shall do something
+worthy of that." And were he to say that often<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
+enough, and try to live up to the fortress and the
+temple above him, he might help to make Greece
+in this known world what she was in the smaller
+world of her day of glory. It is not because the
+world has grown and given
+her more with which to
+compete that she has fallen
+into lesser and lesser
+significance; for though
+the world has increased
+in latitude and longitude,
+it has not yet carved another
+Hermes like that
+of Praxiteles; and though
+it has added three continents
+since his day, it has
+never equalled in marbles
+the fluttering draperies
+of the Flying Victory,
+nor the carvings over the
+doorway of the Erechtheum.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 200px;"><a name="GREEK_PEASANT" id="GREEK_PEASANT"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-188.jpg" width="200" height="334" alt="GREEK PEASANT" title="GREEK PEASANT" />
+<span class="caption">GREEK PEASANT</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 250px;"><a name="ALBANIAN_PEASANT_IN_THE_STREETS_OF_ATHENS" id="ALBANIAN_PEASANT_IN_THE_STREETS_OF_ATHENS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-189.jpg" width="250" height="323" alt="ALBANIAN PEASANT" title="ALBANIAN PEASANT" />
+<span class="caption">ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But, as far as in him
+lies, the Greek has endeavored
+to copy the traditions
+of his ancestors.
+He holds Olympic games in the ancient arena
+which King George has had excavated, and if
+victorious receives a wreath of wild olives from
+the hands of the King; and he builds the new
+market where the old market stood, and the new
+military hospital as near as is possible to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
+hospital of Æsculapius. But he cannot restore
+to the market-place that very human citizen who
+cast in his shell against Aristides because he
+was aweary of hearing him called the Just; nor
+can either his games or his hospital bring back
+the perfect figure and health of the men whose
+figures and profiles have set the model for all
+time. He has, however, retained the Greek language,
+which is very creditable to him, as it is a
+language one learns only after much difficulty,
+and then forgets at once. He even goes so far<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
+as to put up the names of the streets in Greek,
+which strikes the bewildered tourist trying to find
+his way back to his hotel as a trifle pedantic, and
+he prints his daily newspaper in this same tongue.
+This is, perhaps, going a little too far, as it leaves
+you in some doubt as to whether you have been
+reading of the Panama scandal or a reprint on the
+battle of Marathon.</p>
+
+<p>Baron Sina, a Greek banker, has shown the most
+public-spirited and patriotic generosity, and taste
+as well, in erecting the buildings of the university
+at his own expense and giving them to the city.
+They are reproductions in many ways of different
+parts of the temples of the Acropolis in miniature.
+The Polytechnic is almost an exact copy
+of the front of the Parthenon. There is a picture
+of it from a photograph given in this article, but
+it can supply no idea of the beauty of the modern
+reproduction of this temple. The lines and measurements
+are the same in degree; and the Polytechnic,
+besides, is colored and gilded as was the
+original Parthenon, and for the first time makes
+you understand how brilliant reds and beautiful
+blues and gold and black on marble can be combined
+with the marble's purity and help rather
+than cheapen it. It is a lesson in loveliness, and
+is as wonderful and brilliantly beautiful a building
+as the marble and gold monument to the Prince
+Consort in Hyde Park is vulgar and atrocious.
+If this copy in miniature, this working model of
+the Parthenon, moves one as it does, it can be
+understood how great must be the strength and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
+purity of the Parthenon, even in ruins, with its
+gilt washed to a dull brown and its colors and
+bass-reliefs stripped from its pediment. I shall
+certainly not attempt to describe it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 600px;"><a name="POLYTECHNIC_SCHOOL" id="POLYTECHNIC_SCHOOL"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-191.jpg" width="600" height="208" alt="POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL" title="POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL" />
+<span class="caption">POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are very few tourists who visit Athens in
+proportion to those who visit far less momentous
+ruins; thousands go to Rome and see the Colosseum,
+to Egypt and view the storied walls of the
+great rude temples along the Nile, and as many
+more make the tour of the English cathedral
+towns; but in Athens it is almost difficult to find
+a guide. There are not more than a half-dozen,
+I am sure, in the whole city, and the Acropolis is
+yours if you wish, and you are often as much
+alone as though you had been the first to climb
+its sides. I do not mean by this that it is neglected,
+or that relic-hunters may chip at it or
+carry away pieces of its handiwork, or broken bits
+of the Turkish shells that have shattered it, but
+the guards are unobtrusive, and you are free to
+wander in and out in this forest of marble and
+fallen trunks of columns as though you were the
+ghost of some Athenian citizen revisiting the
+scenes of his former life.</p>
+
+<p>There is no question that half of the pleasure
+you receive in wandering over the top of this
+great wind-blown rock, with the surrounding
+snow-touched mountains on a level with your
+eye, and the great temples rearing above you or
+lying broken at your feet, magnificent even there,
+is due to your seeing them alone, to the fact that
+no guide's parrot-like volubility harasses you, no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+guard's scornful gloom chills your enthusiasm.
+The great bay of turquoise-blue and the green
+fields and the bunches of cactus and groves of
+dark olive-trees below are unspoiled
+by modern innovations,
+and the hills are still
+dotted with sheep and shepherds,
+as they were in the
+days of Sappho.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><a name="AN_OLD_ATHENIAN_OF_THE_PRESENT_DAY" id="AN_OLD_ATHENIAN_OF_THE_PRESENT_DAY"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-194.jpg" width="200" height="454" alt="AN OLD ATHENIAN" title="AN OLD ATHENIAN" />
+<span class="caption">AN OLD ATHENIAN OF
+THE PRESENT DAY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Overhead is the blue sky,
+with the ivory columns between,
+far below you is the
+steep naked rock, or, on the
+other hand, the two semicircles
+of marble seats cushioned
+with velvet moss and carpeted
+with daisies and violets, and
+beyond the limits of the yellow
+town and its red roofs and
+dark green gardens stretches
+the green plain until it touches
+the sea, or is blocked by
+Mount Hymettus or Mount
+Pentelicus, beyond which latter
+lies the field of Marathon.
+Sitting on the edge of the rock, you can imagine
+the actors strutting out into the theatre below,
+and the acquiescent chorus chanting its surprise
+or horror, and almost see the bent shoulders and
+heads of the people filling the half-circle and
+leaning forward to catch each word of the play
+as it comes to them through the actors' masks.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 200px;"><a name="A_GREEK_SHEPHERD" id="A_GREEK_SHEPHERD"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-195.jpg" width="200" height="365" alt="A GREEK SHEPHERD" title="A GREEK SHEPHERD" />
+<span class="caption">A GREEK SHEPHERD</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sounds, no matter how far afield, drift to you
+drowsily, like the voice of one reading aloud on
+a summer's day&mdash;the bleating of the sheep in the
+valley where Plato argued, and the jangling of a
+goat's bell, or the laughter of children flying kites
+on the Pnyx, a quarter of a mile away. And beyond
+the reach of sound is the Ægean Sea weltering
+in the sun, with little
+three-cornered sails, like tops,
+or a great vessel drawing a
+chalk-line after it through the
+still surface of the water. All
+things are possible at such
+a time in this place. You
+can almost hear the bees on
+Mount Hymettus, and you
+would receive the advance of
+a Centaur as calmly as Alice
+noted the approach of the
+White Rabbit. You believe
+in nymphs and satyrs. They
+have their homes there in
+those caves, and in the thick
+green, almost black, woods at
+the base of the Parnes range,
+and you love the bravery of
+St. Paul, who dared to doubt
+such things when he stood on
+the rock at your feet and told
+the men of Athens that they were in many things
+too superstitious. It is something to have seen
+the ribs cut in the rock on the top of the Acropolis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+which kept the wheels of the chariots from slipping
+when the Panathenaic procession moved along the
+Via Sacra to the Eleusinian mysteries, to have
+looked upon the caryatides of the Erechtheum,
+and to have wanted back as a lost part of your own
+self, for the time being, the Elgin marbles. When
+Napoleon stole the Venus of Milo he placed her in
+the Louvre, where every one will see her sooner or
+later; for if he is good he goes to Paris when he
+dies, and if he is bad he is sure to go there in his
+lifetime. But <i>who</i> has ever been to the British
+Museum? One would as soon think of visiting
+Pentonville prison. And how do the marbles
+look under the soot-stained windows or the gray
+of London fog? Like the few Lord Elgin did
+not want, and that stand out like ivory in their
+proper height against the soft sky that knows
+and loves them? When the people of Great
+Britain have returned the Elgin marbles to
+Greece, and the Rock of Gibraltar to Spain, and
+the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, and Egypt to
+the Egyptians, they will be a proud and haughty
+people, and will be able to hold their heads as
+high as any one.</p>
+
+<p>One cannot help feeling that the King of
+Greece has a much greater responsibility than he
+knows. Other monarchs must look after their
+boundaries; he must not only look after his
+boundaries, but his sky-line. Another such affront
+to good taste as the observatory on the
+Hill of the Nymphs, and the sky-line of Athens
+will be unrecognizable. And the tall chimneys<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
+at the Piræus are not half as attractive to the
+view as the spars of the ships. It is much better
+not to have manufactories that must have chimneys
+than to spoil a view which no other kingdom
+can equal. Any king can put up a chimney;
+very few are given the care of an Acropolis; and
+if the King and Queen of Greece wish to be remembered
+as kindly by the rest of the world as
+they are loved dearly by their adopted people,
+they will guard the treasure put in their keeping,
+and sweep observatories from sacred hills, and
+continue to limit the guides on the Acropolis,
+and so win the gratitude of a civilized world.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>CONSTANTINOPLE</h3>
+
+
+<p>A little Italian steamer drew cautiously
+away from the Piræus when
+the waters of the bay were quite
+black and the quays looked like a
+row of foot-lights in front of the
+dark curtain of the night. She grazed the anchor
+chains of H. M. S. the <i>Colossus</i>, where that ship of
+war's broad white deck lay level with the water,
+as heavy and solid as a stone pier. She seemed
+to rise like an island of iron from the very bottom
+of the bay. Her sailors, as broad and heavy and
+clean as the decks, raised their heads from their
+pipes as we passed under the glare of the man-of-war's
+electric lights, and a bugle call came faintly
+from somewhere up in the bow. It sounded as
+though it were a quarter of a mile away. Our
+lower deck was packed with Greeks and Albanians
+and Turks, lying as closely together on the hard
+planks as cartridges in the front of a Circassian's
+overcoat. They were very dirty and very handsome,
+in rakish little black silk pill-box caps, with
+red and gold tops, and the initials "H. I." worked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+in the embroidery; their canvas breeches were as
+baggy and patched and muddy as those of a football-player,
+and their sleeveless jackets and double
+waistcoats of red and gold made them look like a
+uniformed soldiery that had seen very hard service.
+Priests of the Greek Church, with long hair
+and black formless robes, and hats like stovepipes
+with the brim around the upper end, paraded
+the narrow confines of the second cabin,
+and German tourists with red guide-books, and
+the Italian ship's officers with a great many medals
+and very bad manners, stamped up and down
+the main-deck and named the shadowy islands
+that rose from the sea and dropped out of sight
+again as we steamed past them.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning the islands had disappeared altogether,
+and we were between high banks&mdash;higher
+than, but not so steep as the Palisades; rows of
+little scrubby trees ran along their fronts in lateral
+lines, and at their base mud forts with mud barracks
+and thatched roofs pointed little cannon at
+us from every jutting rock. We were so near that
+one could have hit the face of the high hills with
+a stone. These were the Dardanelles, the banks
+that nature has set between the Sea of Marmora
+and the Mediterranean to protect Constantinople
+from Mediterranean squadrons. We pass between
+these banks for hours, or between the high bank
+of Roumelia on one side and the low hilly country
+of Asia where Troy once stood on the other,
+until, at sunset, we are halted in the narrowest
+strait of the Dardanelles, between the Castle of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+Asia and the Castle of Europe, "the Lock of the
+Sea"&mdash;that sea of which Gibraltar is the key.
+That night we cross through the Sea of Marmora,
+and by sunrise are at Constantinople.</p>
+
+<p>Constantinople is such a long word, and so few
+of the people you know have visited it in comparison
+with those who have wintered at Cairo or
+at Rome, or who have spent a season at Vienna,
+or taken music-lessons in Berlin, that you approach
+it with a mind prepared for surprises and
+with the hope of the unexpected. I had expected
+that the heart of the Ottoman Empire would
+be outwardly a brilliant and flashing city of gilded
+domes and minarets, a cluster of colored house
+fronts rising from the dancing waters of the Bosporus,
+and with the banks lined with great white
+palaces among gardens of green trees. There are
+more gilded domes in New York city and in Boston
+than in Constantinople. In New York there
+are three, and in Boston there is the State House,
+which looks very fine indeed from the new bridge
+across the Charles when the river is blocked with
+gray ice, and a setting sun is throwing a light on
+the big yellow globe. But Constantinople is all
+white and gray; the palaces that line the Bosporus
+are of a brilliant white stucco, and the
+mosques like monster turtles, which give the city
+its chief distinction, are a dull white. In the
+Turkish quarter the houses are more sombre still,
+of a peculiar black wood, and built like the old
+log forts in which our great-great-grandfathers
+took refuge from the Indians&mdash;square buildings<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+with an overhanging story from which those inside
+could fire down upon the enemy below. The
+jutting balcony on the Turkish houses is for the
+less serious purpose of allowing the harem to
+look down upon the passers-by.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 600px;"><a name="GENERAL_VIEW_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE" id="GENERAL_VIEW_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-201.jpg" width="600" height="242" alt="GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE" title="GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE" />
+<span class="caption">GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Constantinople is a fair-weather city, and needs
+the sun and the blue sky and the life of the waters
+about it, which give to the city its real individuality.
+It misses in winter the pleasure-yachts of
+the summer months, the white uniforms of the
+thousands of boatmen, and the brighter dressing
+of the awnings and flags of the ships and steamers.
+But the waters about Constantinople are its
+best part, and are fuller and busier and brighter
+than either those around the Battery or those below
+the Thames Embankment, and by standing
+on its wide wooden bridge, over which more
+people pass in a day than over any other (save
+London Bridge) in the world, one can see a procession
+of all the nations of the East.</p>
+
+<p>Constantinople is a much more primitive city
+than one would expect the largest of all Eastern
+cities to be. It impresses you as a city without
+any municipal control whatsoever, and you come
+upon a building with the stamp of the municipal
+palace upon it with as much surprise as you would
+feel in finding an underwriter's office at the north
+pole. In many ways it is the most primitive city
+that I have ever been in. In all that pertains to
+the Sultan, to the religion of the people, of which
+he is the head, and to the army, the recognition
+due them is rigidly and impressively observed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
+But in what regards the local life of the people
+there seems to be absolutely no interest and no
+responsibility. There is no such absolute power
+in Europe, not excepting that of the Czar or of the
+young Emperor, as is that exercised by the Sultan;
+and the mosques of the faithful are guarded
+and decorated and held more highly in reverence
+than are many churches of a more civilized people;
+and the army impresses you as one you
+would much prefer to lead than one from which
+you would elect to run away. But the comfort
+of the inhabitants of Constantinople is little
+considered. There is nothing that one can see
+of what we call public spirit, unless building a
+mosque and calling it after yourself, in a city already
+supplied with the most magnificent of such
+temples, can be called public-spirited. Of course
+one does not go to Constantinople to see electric
+lights and asphalt pavements, nor to gather statistics
+on the poor-rate, but it is interesting to find
+people so nearly in touch with the world in many
+things, and so far away from it in others. As long
+as I do not have to live in Constantinople, I find
+its lack of municipal spirit quite as interesting a
+feature of the city as its mosques.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 600px;"><a name="ONE_OF_THE_SULTANS_PALACES_ON_THE_BOSPORUS" id="ONE_OF_THE_SULTANS_PALACES_ON_THE_BOSPORUS"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-205.jpg" width="600" height="231" alt="ONE OF THE SULTAN&#39;S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS" title="ONE OF THE SULTAN&#39;S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS" />
+<span class="caption">ONE OF THE SULTAN&#39;S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Constantinople, for example, is a city with as
+large a population as has Berlin or Vienna, and its
+fire department is what you see in the illustration
+accompanying this chapter. They are very handsome
+men, as you can note for yourself, and very
+smart-looking, but when they go to a fire they
+make a bargain with the owner of the building<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
+before they attempt to save his property. The
+great fire-tower in this capital of the Ottoman
+Empire is in Galata, and from it watchmen survey
+the city with glasses, and at the first sight of
+a blazing roof one of them runs down the tower
+and races through the uneven streets, calling out
+the fact that a house is burning, and where that
+house may be. Each watchman he meets takes
+up the cry, and continues calling out that the
+house is burning, even though the house is three
+miles away, until it burns down or is built up
+again, or the watchman is retired for long service
+and pensioned. Besides these amateur firemen
+there are two real fire companies, but they can
+do little in a city of 880,000 people.</p>
+
+<p>The police who guard Constantinople at night
+are an equally primitive body of men. They
+carry a heavy club, about five feet long and as
+thick as a man's wrist, and with this they beat
+the stones in the streets to assure people that
+they are attending strictly to their work, and are
+not sleeping in doorways. The result of this is
+that no one can get to sleep, and all evil-minded
+persons can tell exactly where the night-watchman
+is, and so keep out of his way. The watchman
+under my window seemed to act on the idea
+of the gentleman who, on taking his first trip on
+a sleeping-car, declared that if he couldn't sleep
+no one else should, and acted accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing, so far as I can see, in which
+the Oriental delights as much as he does in making
+a noise. It is most curious to find a whole people<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
+without nerves, who cannot talk without shouting,
+and who cannot shout without giving you the
+idea that they are in great pain, and that unless
+relief comes promptly they will die, and that it will
+be your fault. Those of them who sell bread or
+fruits or fish or beads, or whatever it may be, in
+the streets, bellow rather than shout, or cry in
+sharp, agonizing shrieks, high and nasal and fierce.
+They apparently never "move on." They always
+meet under your window or at the corners of a
+street, and there all shout at once, and no one
+pays the least attention to them. They might
+be lamp-posts or minarets, for all the notice they
+receive. I can imagine no fate or torture so
+awful as to be ill in Constantinople and to have
+to lie helpless and listen to the street cries, to the
+tin horns of the men who run ahead of the streetcars&mdash;which
+incidentally gives you an idea of the
+speed of these cars&mdash;and to the snarling and
+barking of the thousands of street dogs.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 600px;"><a name="A_FIRE_COMPANY_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE" id="A_FIRE_COMPANY_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-209.jpg" width="600" height="391" alt="A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE" title="A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE" />
+<span class="caption">A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are three or four intensely interesting
+ceremonies and many show-places in Constantinople
+which are unlike anything of the same sort
+in any other city. Apart from these and the
+bazars, which are very wonderful, there is nothing
+in the city itself which makes even the Oriental
+seek it in preference to his own mountains or
+plains or native village. Constantinople, so far
+as its population is to be considered, is standing
+still. It impresses you as stagnant before your
+statistical friend or the oldest member of the
+diplomatic corps or the oldest inhabitant tells
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
+the Frank's finding a long residence in Cairo possible,
+or in pretty little Athens, where the boulevards
+and the classics are so strangely jumbled,
+but one cannot understand a man's settling down
+in Constantinople. Where there are no women
+there can be no court, and the few rich Greek
+residents and still fewer of the pashas and the
+diplomats make the society of the city. Even
+these last find it far from gay, for it so happens
+that the ambassadors are all either bachelors,
+widowers, or the husbands of invalid wives, and
+the result is a society which depends largely on a
+very smart club for its amusement. In the wintertime,
+when the snow and rain sweep over the
+three hills, and the solitary street of Galata is a
+foot deep in slush and mud, and the china stoves
+radiate a candle-like heat in a room built to let in
+all the air possible, I can imagine few less desirable
+places than the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
+This is in the winter only; as I have said,
+it is a fair-weather city, and I did not see it at
+its best.</p>
+
+<p>There are three things to which one is taken
+in Constantinople&mdash;the mosque of St. Sophia,
+the treasures of the Sultan, and the Sultan going
+to pray in his own private mosque. The Sultan's
+own mosque is situated conveniently near his
+palace, not more than a few hundred feet distant.
+Once every Friday he rides this distance, and
+once a year journeys as far as the mosque of St.
+Sophia. With these outings he is content, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>
+on no other occasions does he show himself to
+his people or leave his palace. This is what it is
+to be a sovereign of many countries in Europe,
+Asia, and Africa, the head of the Mussulman religion;
+and the ruler of nations and lands conquered
+by your ancestors, of which you see less
+than a donkey-boy in Cairo or the owner of a
+caïque on the Bosporus. We used to sing in
+college,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"The Sultan better pleases me;</span>
+<span class="i0">His life is full of jollity."</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The jollity of a life which the possessor believes
+to be threatened by assassination in every form
+and at any moment is of a somewhat ghastly
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>You obtain tickets for the Selamlik, as the ceremony
+of the Sultan's visit to his mosque is called,
+and you are requested, as you are supposed to be
+the guest of the Sultan on these occasions, not
+to bring opera-glasses. But it is nevertheless
+strongly suggestive of a theatrical performance.
+The mosque is on one side of a wide street; the
+houses in which the spectators sit, like the audience
+in a grand-stand, are on the other. One
+end of the street is blocked by a great square,
+and the other by the gateway of the palace from
+which the Sultan comes. The street is not more
+than a hundred yards in length. A band of music
+enters this square first and plays the overture to
+the ceremony. The musicians are mounted on
+horseback and followed by a double line of cavalrymen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+on white horses, and each carrying a lance
+at rest with a red pennant. There are thousands
+of these; they stretch out like telegraph poles on
+the prairie to an interminable length, their scarlet
+pennants flapping and rustling in the sharp east
+wind like a forest of autumn leaves. You begin
+to suspect that they are going around the square
+and returning again many times, as the supers do
+in "Ours." Then the horses turn black and the
+overcoats of the men change from gray to blue,
+and more scarlet pennants stretch like an arch of
+bunting along the street leading to the palace,
+until they have all filed into the open square and
+halt there stirrup to stirrup, a moving mass of
+four thousand restless horses and four thousand
+scarlet flags. And then more bands and drums
+and bugle-calls come from every point of the
+city, and regiment after regiment swarms up the
+hill on which the palace rests, the tune of one
+band of music breaking in on the tune of the
+next, as do those of the political processions at
+home, until every approach to the gate of the
+palace is blocked from curb to curb with armed
+men, and you look out and down upon the points
+of five thousand bayonets crushed into a space
+not one-fifth as large as Madison Square. There
+is no populace to see this spectacle, only those of
+the faithful who stop on their way to Mecca to
+catch this glimpse of the head of their religion,
+and a few women who have brought petitions to
+present to him and who are allowed within the
+lines of soldiers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 400px;"><a name="STREET_DOGS_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE" id="STREET_DOGS_OF_CONSTANTINOPLE"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-215.jpg" width="400" height="547" alt="STREET DOGS" title="STREET DOGS" />
+<span class="caption">STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But pashas and beys and other high dignitaries
+are arriving every moment in full regalia, for this
+is like a drawing-room at Buckingham Palace, or
+a levee at St. James's, and every one must leave
+all other matters to attend it. Twenty men with
+twenty carts rush out suddenly from the curtain
+of Zouaves and sailors, and scatter soft gravel on
+the fifty yards of roadway over which the Sultan
+intends to drive. They remind you of the men
+in the circus who spread sawdust over the ring
+after the horses' hoofs have torn it. And then,
+high above the heads of the nine thousand soldiers
+and the few thousand more dignitaries, diplomats,
+and spectators, a priest in a green turban
+calls aloud from the top of the minaret. It is
+a very beautiful cry or call, in a strong, sweet tenor
+voice, inexpressibly weird and sad and impressive.
+It is answered by a bugle call given slowly and
+clearly like a man speaking, and at a certain note
+the entire nine thousand soldiers salute. It is
+done with a precision and shock so admirable that
+you would think, except for the volume of the
+noise, that but one man had moved his piece.
+The voice of the priest rises again, and is answered
+by triumphant strains of brass, and the gates of
+the palace open, and a glittering procession of
+officers and princes and pashas moves down the
+broad street, encircling a carriage drawn by two
+horses and driven by servants in gold. At the
+sight of this the soldiers cry "Long live the Sultan"
+three times. It is like the roar of a salute
+of cannon, and has all the feeling of a cheer. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+Sultan sits in the back of the open carriage, a
+slight, tired-looking man, with a pale face and
+black beard. He is dressed in a fur overcoat
+and fez. As he passes, the men of his army&mdash;and
+they <i>are</i> men&mdash;salute him, and the veiled
+women stand on tiptoe behind them and stretch
+out their petitions, and the pashas and chamberlains
+and cabinet officers bend their bodies and
+touch the hand to the heart, lip, and forehead,
+and drop it again to the knee. The pilgrims to
+Mecca fall prostrate on their faces, and the Sultan
+bows his head and touches his hand to his
+fez. Opposite him sits Osman Pasha, the hero
+of the last war, and one of the greatest generals
+of the world, his shoulders squared, his
+heart covered with stars, and his keen, observant
+eyes wandering from the pale face of his sovereign
+to the browned, hardy-looking countenances of
+his men.</p>
+
+<p>The Sultan remains a half-hour in the mosque,
+and on his return drives himself back to the palace
+in an open landau. This was the first time
+I had seen the Turkish soldier in bulk, and he
+impressed me more than did any other soldier I
+had seen along the shores of the Mediterranean.
+I had seen the British troops repulse an imaginary
+attack upon the rock of Gibraltar, and half of the
+Army of Occupation in Egypt dislodge an imaginary
+enemy from the sand hills around Cairo,
+and I had seen French and Italian and Greek soldiers
+in lesser proportion and in lesser activity.
+But to me none of these had the build or the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+bearing or the ready if rough look of these Turks.
+The French Zouaves of Algiers came next to
+them to my mind, and it may be that the similarity
+of the uniform would explain that; but as I
+heard the Sultan's troops that morning marching
+up the hills to their outlandish music, and looked
+into eyes that had never been shaded from the
+sun, and at the spring and swing of legs that had
+never worn civilized trousers, I recalled several
+notable battles of past history, and the more recent
+lines of Mr. Rudyard Kipling where he pays
+his compliments to the Russian on the frontier:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"I'm sorry for Mr. Bluebeard,</span>
+<span class="i0">I'd be sorry to cause him pain;</span>
+<span class="i0">But a hell of a spree</span>
+<span class="i0">There is sure to be</span>
+<span class="i0">When he comes back again."</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 600px;"><br /><br /><a name="GUARD_OF_CAVALRY_PRECEDING_THE_SULTAN_TO_THE_MOSQUE" id="GUARD_OF_CAVALRY_PRECEDING_THE_SULTAN_TO_THE_MOSQUE"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-219.jpg" width="600" height="355" alt="GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE" title="GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE" />
+<span class="caption">GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Oriental is one of those people who do
+things by halves. He has a fine army, but the
+bulk of his navy has not left the Golden Horn
+for many years, and it is doubtful if it could leave
+it; his palace walls are of mosaic and wonderfully
+painted tiles, and the roofs of rusty tin; his sons
+are given the questionable but expensive education
+of Paris, and his daughters are not allowed
+to walk abroad unless guarded by servants, and
+with the knowledge that every policeman spies
+upon them, knowing that, could he detect them
+in an indiscretion, he would be rewarded and gain
+promotion. Consequently it does not surprise<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+you when you find the Sultan's treasures heaped
+together under dirty glass cases, and treated with
+the indifference a child pays to its last year's toys.</p>
+
+<p>The crown-jewels and regalia kept at the Tower,
+itself under iron bars and guarded by Beefeaters,
+are not half as impressive as are the jewels
+of the Sultan, which lie covered with dust under
+a glass show-case, and guarded by a few gloomy-looking
+effendis in frock-coats. All the presents
+from other monarchs and all the gifts of lesser
+notables who have sought some Sultan's favor,
+all the arms and trophies of generations of wars,
+are piled together in this treasury with less care
+than one would give to a rack of pipes. It is a
+very remarkable exhibition, and it is magnificent
+in its Oriental disregard for wealth through long
+association with it. Bronze busts of emperors,
+jewelled swords, imperial orders, music-boxes,
+gun-cases, weapons of gold instead of steel, precious
+stones, and silver dressing-cases are all
+heaped together on dusty shelves, without order
+and classification and without care. You can see
+here handfuls of uncut precious stones on china
+plates, or dozens of gold and silver pistols thrown
+in a corner like kindling-wood. And the most
+remarkable exhibition of all is the magnificent
+robes of those Sultans who are dead, with the
+jewels and jewelled swords and belts and insignia
+worn by them, placed on dummies in a glass case,
+as though they were a row of stuffed birds or
+specimens of rock. In the turbans of one of
+these figures there are pearls as large as a woman's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+thumb, and emeralds and rubies as large as
+eggs, and ropes of diamonds. This sounds like a
+story from the <i>Arabian Nights</i>; but then these
+are the heroes of the <i>Arabian Nights</i>&mdash;the Sultans
+who owned the whole northern coast of
+Africa and Asia, and who spent on display and
+ornament what we put into education and railroads.</p>
+
+<p>The present Sultan, Abd-ul-Hammed II., so
+far differs from those who have preceded him
+that he as well as ourselves spends money on education
+and railroads and all that they imply.
+As the head of a religion and of an empire he
+may not cheapen himself by being seen too often
+by his people, but his interests spread beyond
+even the great extent of his own boundaries, and
+his money is given to sufferers as far apart in all
+but misfortune as the Johnstown refugees and
+the victims of the earthquakes of Zante and
+Corfu. And his protection is extended to the
+American missionaries who enter his country to
+preach a religion to which he is opposed. While
+I was in Constantinople he showed the variety
+of his interests in the outside world by making
+two presents. To the Czar of Russia he gave a
+book of photographs of the vessels in his navy,
+and in contrast to this grimly humorous recognition
+of Russia's ambitions he presented to our
+government an emblem in gold and diamonds,
+commemorating in its design and inscription the
+discovering of this country, worth, intrinsically,
+many thousands of dollars. He was, I believe,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
+the only sovereign who showed a personal interest
+in our national celebration, and his gift was
+properly one of the government's most conspicuous
+exhibits at the Columbian Fair.</p>
+
+<p>The Mosque of St. Sophia is one of the first
+things you are taken to see in Constantinople.
+It is to the Mussulman what St. Peter's is to the
+good Catholic, although Justinian built it, and
+the cross still shows in many parts of the great
+building. Three times during the year this
+mosque is illuminated within and without, and
+every good Mussulman attends there to worship.</p>
+
+<p>There is something very fine about the religion
+of Mohammed&mdash;you do not have to know much
+about it to appreciate the faith of its followers,
+whether you know what it is they believe or not.
+In their outward observance, at least, of the rules
+laid down for them in the Koran, they show a sincerity
+which teaches a great lesson. You can see
+them at any hour of the day or in any place going
+through their devotions. A soldier will kneel
+down in a band stand, where a moment before he
+has been playing for the regiment, and say his
+prayers before two thousand spectators; and I
+have had some difficulty in getting my trunks on
+the Orient Express, because the porters were at
+another end of a crowded, noisy platform bowing
+towards the East. Once a year they fast for a
+month, the season of Ramazan, and as I was in
+Eastern countries during that month I know that
+they fast rigidly. Ramazan begins in Egypt
+when the new moon appears in a certain well near<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
+Cairo. Two men watch this well, and when they
+see the reflection of the new moon on its surface
+they run into Cairo with the news, and Ramazan
+begins. There is nothing which so well illustrates
+the unchangeableness of the East and its customs
+as the sight of these men running through the
+streets of Cairo, with its dog-carts and electric
+lights, its calendars and almanacs, to tell that the
+moon has again reached that point that it had
+reached for many hundreds of years before, when
+all the faithful must fast and pray.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter bord" style="width: 550px;"><a name="EXTERIOR_OF_THE_MOSQUE_OF_ST._SOPHIA" id="EXTERIOR_OF_THE_MOSQUE_OF_ST._SOPHIA"></a>
+<img src="images/illus-225.jpg" width="550" height="361" alt="EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE" title="EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE" />
+<span class="caption">EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF ST. SOPHIA</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>On one of the last days of Ramazan I went to
+the door of St. Sophia, and was led up a winding
+staircase in one of its minarets&mdash;a minaret-tower
+so broad and high that the staircase within it has
+no steps, but is paved smoothly like a street. It
+seemed as though we had been climbing nearly
+ten minutes before we stepped out into a great
+gallery, and looked down upon thousands of turbaned
+figures bowing and kneeling and rising
+again in long rows like infantry in close order.
+Between these worshippers and ourselves were
+fifty circles of floating tapers swinging from chains,
+and hanging like a smoky curtain of fire between
+us and the figures below. The voice of the priest
+rose in a high, uncanny cry, and the sound of the
+thousands of men falling forward on their faces
+and arms was like the rumble of the waves
+breaking on the shore. Outside, the tops of minarets
+were circled with lights and lamps strung
+on long ropes, with the ends flying free, and
+swinging to and fro in the night wind like necklaces<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+of stars. This was the most beautiful of all
+the sights of Constantinople; and as a matter of
+opinion, and not of fact, I think the best part of
+Constantinople is that part of it that is in the air.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Before ending this last chapter, I should like
+to make two suggestions to the reader who has
+not yet visited the Mediterranean and who thinks
+of doing so. Let him not be deterred, in the first
+place, by any idea of the difficulties of the journey,
+for he can go from Gibraltar along the entire
+northern coast of Africa and into Greece and
+Italy with as little trouble and with as much comfort
+as it is possible for him to make the journey
+from New York to Chicago. And in the second
+place, should he go in the winter or spring, let
+him not be misled by "Italian skies," or "the
+blue Mediterranean," or "the dancing waters of
+the Bosporus," into imagining that he is going
+to be any warmer on the northern coast of Africa
+than he is in New York. I wore exactly the same
+clothes in Italy that I wore the day I left the
+North River blocked with ice, and I watched a
+snow-storm falling on "the dancing waters of the
+Bosporus". There are some warm days, of course,
+but it is well to follow that good old-fashioned rule
+in any part of the world, that it is cold in winter
+and warm in summer, and people who spend their
+lives in trying to dodge this fact might as well
+try running away from death and the postal system.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+To any one who has but a little time and
+a little money to spend on a holiday, I would
+suggest going to Gibraltar, and from there to
+Spain and Morocco. This is the only place, perhaps,
+in the world where three so widely different
+people and three such picturesque people as the
+Moor, the British soldier, and the Spaniard can
+be found within two hours of one another.</p>
+
+<p>Morocco, from political causes, is less civilized
+than any other part of the northern part of Africa;
+and it can be seen, and with it the southern cities
+of Spain and the Rock of Gibraltar, in five or six
+weeks, and at a cost of a very few hundred dollars.
+This was to me the most interesting part
+of the Mediterranean, chiefly, of course&mdash;for it
+possesses few of the beauties or monuments or
+historical values of the other shores of that sea&mdash;because
+it was unknown to tourists and guide-books.
+A visit to the rest of the Mediterranean
+is merely verifying for yourself what you have
+already learned from others.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+<div class="tn">
+<h3>Transcriber's note:</h3>
+<p>The illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up
+paragraphs, thus the
+page number of the illustration might not match the page number in the
+List of Illustrations.</p>
+<p>Inconsistent hyphenation remains as in the original.</p>
+<p>Spelling has been made consistent throughout where the author's preference could be ascertained.</p>
+
+<p>Punctuation has been normalized.</p>
+<p>Page 203: "It all that pertains to
+the Sultan"</p>
+
+<p>"It all" has been changed to "In all".</p>
+
+</div>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="400" height="493" alt="cover" title="cover" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rulers of the Mediterranean, by 
+Richard Harding Davis
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN ***
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Rulers of the Mediterranean, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+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 Rulers of the Mediterranean
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2012 [EBook #39522]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown, Julia Neufeld
+(illustrations were generously made available by The
+Internet Archive) and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
+
+Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
+
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT]
+
+  The Rulers
+
+  of
+
+  The Mediterranean
+
+  BY
+
+  RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
+
+  AUTHOR OF
+
+  "THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW" "GALLEGHER"
+  "VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS" ETC.
+
+  ILLUSTRATED
+
+  [Illustration: Publisher's Logo]
+
+  NEW YORK
+
+  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+
+  1894
+
+  Copyright, 1893, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
+
+  _All rights reserved._
+
+
+  TO
+
+  HON. EDWARD C. LITTLE
+
+  EX-DIPLOMATIC-AGENT AND CONSUL-GENERAL
+
+  OF
+
+  THE UNITED STATES TO EGYPT
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                                                            PAGE
+
+    I THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR                                           1
+
+   II TANGIER                                                        37
+
+  III FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO                                        72
+
+   IV CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE                                         102
+
+    V THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT                                       139
+
+   VI MODERN ATHENS                                                 178
+
+  VII CONSTANTINOPLE                                                198
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+  ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT                        _Frontispiece_
+
+  THE MAN FROM DETROIT                                                5
+
+  THE ROCK FROM THE BAY                                               9
+
+  TYPES                                                              13
+
+  GIBRALTAR AS SEEN ACROSS THE NEUTRAL GROUND                        15
+
+  AN ENGLISH SENTRY                                                  19
+
+  A SPANISH SENTRY                                                   21
+
+  SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK                              25
+
+  CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES                                           29
+
+  TEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERS                                      33
+
+  BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE                                        41
+
+  SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL                       47
+
+  A WOMAN OF TANGIER                                                 53
+
+  WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE                        57
+
+  A STREET DANCER                                                    63
+
+  IN THE PRISON                                                      67
+
+  MALTESE PEDDLERS                                                   75
+
+  STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA                                       79
+
+  BRINDISI                                                           85
+
+  PILLAR OF CAESAR AT BRINDISI                                        89
+
+  APPROACH TO ISMAILIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL                             93
+
+  STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL                             97
+
+  BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS                                        105
+
+  GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL                    109
+
+  A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS                  117
+
+  SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS                                   123
+
+  A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID                                          129
+
+  DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO                              135
+
+  EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS                     141
+
+  RIAZ PASHA, PRIME-MINISTER OF EGYPT                               145
+
+  AN EGYPTIAN LANCER                                                149
+
+  TIGRANE PASHA, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS                        153
+
+  A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA                                157
+
+  H. H. ABBAS II., KHEDIVE OF EGYPT                                 161
+
+  THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY                                  165
+
+  LORD CROMER, THE ENGLISH DIPLOMATIC AGENT IN EGYPT                169
+
+  A GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION                               173
+
+  GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORM                  179
+
+  GREEK PEASANT GIRL                                                181
+
+  THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS                                          183
+
+  ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN                                            186
+
+  ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN                                            187
+
+  GREEK PEASANT                                                     188
+
+  ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS                         189
+
+  POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL                                                191
+
+  AN OLD ATHENIAN OF THE PRESENT DAY                                194
+
+  A GREEK SHEPHERD                                                  195
+
+  GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE                                    201
+
+  ONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS                       205
+
+  A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE                                  209
+
+  STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE                                     215
+
+  GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE               219
+
+  EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF ST. SOPHIA                              225
+
+[Illustration: THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN]
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR
+
+[Illustration: Gibraltar]
+
+
+If you have always crossed the Atlantic in the spring-time or in the
+summer months, as do most tourists, you will find that leaving New York
+in the winter is more like a relief expedition to the north pole than
+the setting forth on a pleasure tour to the summer shores of the
+Mediterranean.
+
+There is no green grass on the hills of Staten Island, but there is,
+instead, a long field of ice stretching far up the Hudson River, and a
+wind that cuts into the face, and dashes the spray up over the tugboats
+in frozen layers, leaving it there like the icing on a cake. The
+Atlantic Highlands are black with bare branches and white with snow, and
+you observe for the first time that men who go down to the sea in ships
+know nothing of open fireplaces. An icy wind keeps the deck as clear as
+a master-at-arms could do it; and sudden storms of snow, which you had
+always before associated with streets or fields, and not at all with the
+decks of ships, burst over the side, and leave the wood-work wet and
+slippery, and cold to the touch.
+
+And then on the third or fourth day out the sea grows calm, and your
+overcoat seems to have taken on an extra lining; and strange people, who
+apparently have come on board during the night, venture out on the
+sunlit deck and inquire for steamer chairs and mislaid rugs.
+
+These smaller vessels which run from New York to Genoa are as different
+from the big North Atlantic boats, with their twin screws and five
+hundred cabin passengers, as a family boarding-house is from a Broadway
+hotel. This is so chiefly because you are sailing under a German instead
+of an English flag. There is no one so important as an English
+captain--he is like a bishop in gold lace; but a German captain
+considers his passengers as one large happy family, and treats them as
+such, whether they like their new relatives or not. The discipline on
+board the _Fulda_ was like that of a ship of war, where the officers and
+crew were concerned, but the passengers might have believed they were on
+their own private yacht.
+
+There was music for breakfast, dinner, and tea; music when the fingers
+of the trombonist were frozen and when the snow fell upon the taut
+surface of the big drum; and music at dawn to tell us it was Sunday, so
+that you awoke imagining yourself at church. There was also a ball, and
+the captain led an opening march, and the stewards stood at every point
+to see that the passengers kept in line, and "rounded up" those who
+tried to slip away from the procession. There were speeches, too, at all
+times, and lectures and religious services, and on the last night out a
+grand triumph of the _chef_, who built wonderful candy goddesses of
+Liberty smiling upon the other symbolic lady who keeps watch on the
+Rhine, and the band played "Dixie," which it had been told was the
+national anthem, and the portrait of the German Emperor smiled down upon
+us over his autograph. All this was interesting, because it was
+characteristic of the Germans; it showed their childish delight in
+little things, and the same simplicity of character which makes the
+German soldiers who would not move out of the way of the French bullets
+dance around a Christmas-tree. The American or the Englishman will not
+do these things, because he has too keen a sense of the ridiculous, and
+is afraid of being laughed at. So when he goes to sea he plays poker and
+holds auctions on the run.
+
+There was only one passenger on board who objected to the music. He was
+from Detroit, and for the first three days remained lashed to his
+steamer chair like a mummy, with nothing showing but a blue nose and
+closed eyelids. The band played at his end of the deck, and owing to
+the fingers of the players being frozen, and to the sudden lurches of
+the ship, the harmony was sometimes destroyed. Those who had an ear for
+music picked up their steamer chairs and moved to windward; but this
+young man, being half dead and firmly lashed to his place, was unable to
+save himself.
+
+On the morning of the fourth day, when the concert was over and the band
+had gone to thaw out, the young man suddenly sat upright and pointed his
+forefinger at the startled passengers. We had generally decided that he
+was dead. "The Lord knows I'm a sick man," he said, blinking his eyes
+feebly; "but if I live till midnight I'll find out where they hide those
+horns, and I'll drop 'em into the Gulf Stream, if it takes my dying
+breath." He then fell over backwards, and did not speak again until we
+reached Gibraltar.
+
+There is something about the sight of land after one has been a week
+without it which supplies a want that nothing else can fill; and it is
+interesting to note how careless one is as to its name, or whether it is
+pink or pale blue on the maps, or whether it is ruled by a king or a
+colonial secretary. It is quite sufficient that it is land. This was
+impressed upon me once, on entering New York Harbor, by a young man who
+emerged from his deck cabin to discover, what all the other passengers
+already knew, that we were in the upper bay. He gave a shout of ecstatic
+relief and pleasure. "That," he cried, pointing to the west, "is Staten
+Island, but that," pointing to the right, "is LAND."
+
+The first land you see on going to Gibraltar is the Azores Islands. They
+are volcanic and mountainous, and accompany the boat for a day and a
+half; but they could be improved if they were moved farther south about
+two hundred miles, as one has to get up at dawn to see the best of them.
+It is quite warm by this time, and the clothes you wore in New York seem
+to belong to a barbarous period and past fashion, and have become heavy
+and cumbersome, and take up an unnecessary amount of room in your trunk.
+
+[Illustration: THE MAN FROM DETROIT]
+
+And then people tell you that there is land in sight again, and you
+find how really far you are from home when you learn that it is
+Portugal, and so a part of Europe, and not an island thrown up by a
+volcano, or stolen or strayed from its moorings at the mainland.
+Portugal is apparently a high red hill, with a round white tower on the
+top of it flying signal flags. Its chief industry is the arranging of
+these flags by a man. It is, on the whole, a disappointing country.
+After this, everybody begins to pack and to exchange visiting-cards; and
+those who are to get off at Gibraltar are pursued by stewards and
+bandmasters and young men with testimonials that they want signed, and
+by the weak in spirit, who, at the eleventh hour, think they will not go
+on to Genoa, but will get off here and go on to Tangier, and who want
+you to decide for them. And which do you think would pay best, and what
+is there to see in Tangier, anyway? And as that is exactly what you are
+going to find out, you cannot tell.
+
+When I left the deck the last night out the stars were all over the
+heavens; and the foremast, as it swept slowly from side to side, looked
+like a black pendulum upside down marking out the sky and portioning off
+the stars. And when I woke there was a great creaking of chains, and I
+could see out of my port-hole hundreds of fixed lights and rows and
+double rows of lamps, so that you might have thought the ship during the
+night had run aground in the heart of a city.
+
+The first sight of Gibraltar is, I think, disappointing. It means so
+much, and so many lives have been given for it, and so many ships have
+been sunk by its batteries, and such great powers have warred for twelve
+hundred years for its few miles of stone, that its black outline against
+the sky, with nothing to measure it with but the fading stars, is
+dwarfed and spoiled. It is only after the sun begins to turn the lights
+out, and you are able to compare it with the great ships at its base,
+and you see the battlements and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds
+resting on its top, that you understand it; and then when the outline of
+the crouching lion, that faces all Europe, comes into relief, you
+remember it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, of which
+England holds the key. And even while you feel this, and are greedily
+following the course of each rampart and terrace with eyes that are
+tired of blank stretches of water, some one points to a low line of
+mountains lying like blue clouds before the red sky of the sunrise, dim,
+forbidding, and mysterious--and you know that it is Africa.
+
+Spain, lying to the right, all green and amethyst, and flippant and gay
+with white houses and red roofs, and Gibraltar's grim show of
+battlements and war, become somehow of little moment. You feel that you
+have known them always, and that they are as you fancied they would be.
+But this other land across the water looks as inscrutable, as dark, and
+as silent as the Sphinx that typifies it, and you feel that its Pillar
+of Hercules still marks the entrance to the "unknown world."
+
+Nine out of every ten of those who visit Gibraltar for the first time
+expect to find an island. It ought to be, and it would be one but for a
+strip of level turf half a mile wide and half a mile long which joins it
+to the sunny green hills of Spain. But for this bit of land, which they
+call "the Neutral Ground," Gibraltar would be an island, for it has the
+Mediterranean to the east, a bay, and beyond that the hills of Spain to
+the west, and Africa dimly showing fourteen miles across the sea to the
+south.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROCK FROM THE BAY]
+
+Gibraltar has been besieged thirteen times; by Moors and by Spaniards,
+and again by Moors, and again by Spaniards against Spaniards. It was
+during one of these wars between two factions in Spain, in 1704, that
+the English, who were helping one of the factions, took the Rock, and
+were so well pleased with it that they settled there, and have remained
+there ever since. If possession is nine points of the law, there was
+never a place in the history of the world held with nine as obvious
+points. There were three more sieges after the English took Gibraltar,
+one of them, the last, continuing for four years. The English were
+fighting America at the time, and rowing in the Nile, and so did not do
+much towards helping General George Elliot, who was Governor of the Rock
+at that time. It would appear to be, as well as one can judge from this
+distance, a case of neglect on the part of the mother-country for her
+little colony and her six thousand men, very much like her forgetfulness
+of Gordon, only Elliot succeeded where Gordon failed (if you can
+associate that word with that name), and so no one blamed the home
+government for risking what would have been a more serious loss than the
+loss of Calais, had Elliot surrendered, and "Gib" gone back to its
+rightful owners, that is, the owners who have the one point. The history
+of this siege is one of the most interesting of war stories; it is
+interesting whether you ever expect to visit Gibraltar or not; it is
+doubly interesting when you walk the pretty streets of the Rock to-day,
+with its floating population of twenty thousand, and try to imagine the
+place held by six thousand half-starved, sick, and wounded soldiers,
+living at times on grass and herbs and handfuls of rice, and yet
+carrying on an apparently forlorn fight for four years against the
+entire army and navy of Spain, and, at the last, against the arms of
+France as well.
+
+We are apt to consider the Gibraltar of to-day as occupying the same
+position to the Mediterranean as Queenstown does to the Atlantic, a
+place where passengers go ashore while the mails are being taken on
+board, and not so much for their interest in the place itself as to
+again feel solid earth under their feet. There are passengers who will
+tell you on the way out that you can see all there is to be seen there
+in three hours. As a matter of fact, one can live in Gibraltar for many
+weeks and see something new every day. It struck me as being more
+different kinds of a place than any other spot of land I had ever
+visited, and one that changed its aspect with every shifting of the
+wind, and with each rising and setting of the sun. It is the
+clearing-house for three most picturesque peoples--the Moors, in their
+yellow slippers and bare legs and voluminous robes and snowy turbans;
+the Spaniards, with romantic black capes and cloaks and red sashes, the
+women with the lace mantilla and brilliant kerchiefs and pretty faces;
+and, mixed with these, the pride and glory of the British army and navy,
+in all the bravery of red coats and white helmets, or blue jackets, or
+Highland kilts. It is a fortress as imposing as the Tower of London, a
+winter resort as pretty as St. Augustine, and a seaport town of free
+entry, into which come on every tide people of many nations, and ships
+flying every flag.
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE]
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE]
+
+Around its base are the ramparts, like a band of stone and steel; above
+them the town, rising like a staircase, with houses for steps--yellow
+houses, with light green blinds sticking out at different angles, and
+with sloping red roofs meeting other lines of red roofs, and broken by a
+carpeting of green where the parks and gardens make an opening in the
+yellow front of the town, and from which rise tall palms and palmettoes,
+and rows of sea-pines, and fluttering union-jacks which mark the
+barracks of a regiment. Above the town is the Rock, covered with a green
+growth of scrub and of little trees below, and naked and bare above,
+stretching for several miles from north to south, and rearing its great
+bulk up into the sky until it loses its summit in the clouds. It is
+never twice the same. To-day it may be smiling and resplendent under a
+warm, brilliant sun that spreads out each shade of green, and shows each
+terrace and rampart as clearly as though one saw it through a glass; the
+sky becomes as blue as the sea and the bay, and the white villages of
+Spain seem as near to one as the red soldier smoking his pipe on the
+mountings half-way up the Rock. And to-morrow the whole top of the Rock
+may be lost in a thick curtain of gray clouds, and the waters of the bay
+will be tossing and covered with white-caps, and the lands about
+disappear from sight as though they had sunk into the sea during the
+night and had left you alone on an island. At times a sunset paints the
+Rock a martial red, or the moonlight softens it, and you see only the
+tall palms and the graceful balconies and the gardens of plants, and
+each rampart becomes a terrace and each casemate a balcony. Or at night,
+when the lamps are lit, you might imagine yourself on the stage of a
+theatre, walking in a scene set for _Fra Diavolo_.
+
+There are no such streets or houses outside of stage-land. It is only in
+stage cities that the pavements and streets are so conspicuously clean,
+or that the hanging lamps of beaten iron-work throw such deep shadows,
+or that there are such high, heavily carved Moorish doorways and
+mysterious twisting stairways in the solid rock, or shops with such
+queer signs, or walls plastered with such odd-colored placards--streets
+where every footfall echoes, and where dark figures suddenly appear from
+narrow alleyways and cry "Halt, there!" at you, and then "All's well" as
+you pass by.
+
+[Illustration: GIBRALTAR AS SEEN ACROSS THE NEUTRAL GROUND]
+
+Gibraltar has one main street running up and clinging to the side of the
+hill from the principal quay to the most southern point of the Rock.
+Houses reach up to it from the first level of the ramparts, and continue
+on up the hill from its other side. On this street are the bazars of the
+Moors, and the English shops and the Spanish cafes, and the cathedral,
+and the hotels, and the Governor's house, and every one in Gibraltar is
+sure to appear on it at least once in the twenty-four hours. But the
+color and tone of the street are military. There are soldiers at every
+step--soldiers carrying the mail or bearing reports, or soldiers in bulk
+with a band ahead, or soldiers going out to guard the North Front, where
+lies the Neutral Ground, or to target practice, or to play football;
+soldiers in two or threes, with their sticks under their arms, and their
+caps very much cocked, and pipes in their mouths. But these make slow
+progress, for there is always an officer in sight--either a boy officer
+just out from England riding to the polo field near the Neutral Ground,
+or a commanding officer in a black tunic and a lot of ribbons across his
+breast, or an officer of the day with his sash and sword; and each of
+these has to be saluted. This is an interesting spectacle, and one that
+is always new. You see three soldiers coming at you with a quick step,
+talking and grinning, alert and jaunty, and suddenly the upper part of
+their three bodies becomes rigid, though their legs continue as before,
+apparently of their own volition, and their hands go up and their pipes
+and grins disappear, and they pass you with eyes set like dead men's
+eyes, and palms facing you as though they were trying to learn which way
+the wind was blowing. This is due, you discover, to the passing of a
+stout gentleman in knickerbockers, who switches his rattan stick in the
+air in reply. Sometimes when he salutes the soldier stops altogether,
+and so his walks abroad are punctuated at every twenty yards. It takes
+an ordinary soldier in Gibraltar one hour to walk ten minutes.
+
+Everybody walks in the middle of the main street in Gibraltar, because
+the sidewalks are only two feet wide, and because all the streets are as
+clean as the deck of a yacht. Cabs of yellow wood and diligences with
+jangling bells and red worsted harness gallop through this street and
+sweep the people up against the wall, and long lines of goats who leave
+milk in a natural manner at various shops tangle themselves up with long
+lines of little donkeys and longer lines of geese, with which the local
+police struggle valiantly. All of these things, troops and goats and
+yellow cabs and polo ponies and dog-carts, and priests with
+curly-brimmed hats, and baggy-breeched Moors, and huntsmen in pink coats
+and Tommies in red, and sailors rolling along in blue, make the main
+street of Gibraltar as full of variety as a mask ball.
+
+Of the Gibraltar militant, the fortress and the key to the
+Mediterranean, you can see but the little that lies open to you and to
+every one along the ramparts. Of the real defensive works of the place
+you are not allowed to have even a guess. The ramparts stretch all along
+the western side of the rock, presenting to the bay a high shelving wall
+which twists and changes its front at every hundred yards, and in such
+an unfriendly way that whoever tried to scale its slippery surface at
+one point would have a hundred yards of ramparts on either side of him,
+from which two sides gunners and infantry could observe his efforts with
+comfort and safety to themselves; and from which, when tired of watching
+him slip and scramble, they could and undoubtedly would blow him into
+bits. But they would probably save him the trouble of coming so far by
+doing that before he left his vessel in the bay. The northern face of
+the Rock--that end which faces Spain, and which makes the head of the
+crouching lion--shows two long rows of teeth cut in its surface by
+convicts of long ago. You are allowed to walk through these dungeons,
+and to look down upon the Neutral Ground and the little Spanish town at
+the end of its half-mile over the butts of great guns. And you will
+marvel not so much at the engineering skill of whoever it was who
+planned this defence as at the weariness and the toil of the criminals
+who gave up the greater part of their lives to hewing and blasting out
+these great galleries and gloomy passages, through which your footsteps
+echo like the report of cannon.
+
+[Illustration: AN ENGLISH SENTRY]
+
+Lower down, on the outside of this mask of rock, are more ramparts,
+built there by man, from which infantry could sweep the front of the
+enemy were they to approach from the only point from which a land
+attack is possible. The other side of the Rock, that which faces the
+Mediterranean, is unfortified, except by the big guns on the very
+summit, for no man could scale it, and no ball yet made could shatter
+its front. To further protect the north from a land attack there is at
+the base of the Rock and below the ramparts a great moat, bridged by an
+apparently solid piece of masonry. This roadway, which leads to the
+north gate of the fortress--the one which is closed at six each
+night--is undermined, and at a word could be blown into pebbles, turning
+the moat into a great lake of water, and virtually changing the Rock of
+Gibraltar into an island. I never crossed this roadway without wondering
+whether the sentry underneath might not be lighting his pipe near the
+powder-magazine, and I generally reached the end of it at a gallop.
+
+[Illustration: A SPANISH SENTRY]
+
+There is still another protection to the North Front. It is only the
+protection which a watch-dog gives at night; but a watch-dog is most
+important. He gives you time to sound your burglar-alarm and to get a
+pistol from under your pillow. A line of sentries pace the Neutral
+Ground, and have paced it for nearly two hundred years. Their
+sentry-boxes dot the half-mile of turf, and their red coats move
+backward and forward night and day, and any one who leaves the straight
+and narrow road crossing the Neutral Ground, and who comes too near,
+passes a dead-line and is shot. Facing them, a half-mile off, are the
+white adobe sentry-boxes of Spain and another row of sentries, wearing
+long blue coats and queer little shakos, and smoking cigarettes. And so
+the two great powers watch each other unceasingly across the half-mile
+of turf, and say, "So far shall you go, and no farther; this belongs to
+me." There is nothing more significant than these two rows of sentries;
+you notice it whenever you cross the Neutral Ground for a ride in Spain.
+First you see the English sentry, rather short and very young, but very
+clean and rigid, and scowling fiercely over the chin strap of his big
+white helmet. His shoulder-straps shine with pipe-clay and his boots
+with blacking, and his arms are burnished and oily. Taken alone, he is a
+little atom, a molecule; but he is complete in himself, with his food
+and lodging on his back, and his arms ready to his hand. He is one of a
+great system that obtains from India to Nova Scotia, and from Bermuda to
+Africa and Australia; and he shows that he knows this in the way in
+which he holds up his chin and kicks out his legs as he tramps back and
+forward guarding the big rock at his back. And facing him, half a mile
+away, you will see a tall handsome man seated on a stone, with the tails
+of his long coat wrapped warmly around his legs, and with his gun
+leaning against another rock while he rolls a cigarette; and then, with
+his hands in his pockets, he gazes through the smoke at the sky above
+and the sea on either side, and wonders when he will be paid his peseta
+a day for fighting and bleeding for his country. This helps to make you
+understand how six thousand half-starved Englishmen held Gibraltar for
+four years against the army of Spain.
+
+This is about all that you can see of Gibraltar as a fortress. You hear,
+of course, of much more, and you can guess at a great deal. Up above,
+where the Signal Station is, and where no one, not even an officer in
+uniform not engaged on the works, is allowed to go, are the real
+fortifications. What looks like a rock is a monster gun painted gray, or
+a tree hides the mouth of another. And in this forbidden territory are
+great cannon which are worked from the lowest ramparts. These are the
+present triumphs of Gibraltar. Before they came, the clouds which shut
+out the sight of the Rock as well as the rest of the world from its
+summit rendered the great pieces of artillery there as useless in bad
+weather as they are harmless in times of peace. The very elements
+threatened to war against the English, and a shower of rain or a veering
+wind might have altered the fortunes of a battle. But a clever man named
+Watkins has invented a position-finder, by means of which those on the
+lowest ramparts, well out of the clouds, can aim the great guns on the
+summit at a vessel unseen by the gunners lost in the mist above, and by
+electricity fire a shot from a gun a half-mile above them so that it
+will strike an object many miles off at sea. It will be a very strange
+sensation to the captain of such a vessel when he finds her bombarded by
+shells that belch forth from a drifting cloud.
+
+No stranger has really any idea of the real strength of this fortress,
+or in what part of it its real strength lies. Not one out of ten of its
+officers knows it. Gibraltar is a grand and grim practical joke; it is
+an armed foe like the army in _Macbeth_, who came in the semblance of a
+wood, or like the wooden horse of Troy that held the pick of the enemy's
+fighting-men. What looks like a solid face of rock is a hanging curtain
+that masks a battery; the blue waters of the bay are treacherous with
+torpedoes; and every little smiling village of Spain has been marked
+down for destruction, and has had its measurements taken as accurately
+as though the English batteries had been playing on it already for many
+years. The Rock is undermined and tunnelled throughout, and food and
+provisions are stored away in it to last a siege of seven years.
+Telephones and telegraphs, signal stations for flagging, search-lights,
+and other such devilish inventions, have been planted on every point,
+and only the Governor himself knows what other modern improvements have
+been introduced into the bowels of this mountain or distributed behind
+bits of landscape gardening on its surface.
+
+On the 25th of February, at half-past ten in the morning, three guns
+were fired in rapid succession from the top of the Rock, and the windows
+shook. Three guns mean that Gibraltar is about to be attacked by a fleet
+of war-ships, and that "England expects every man to do his duty." So I
+went out to see him do it. Men were running through the streets trailing
+their guns, and officers were galloping about pulling at their gloves,
+and bodies of troops were swinging along at a double-quick, which always
+makes them look as though they were walking in tight boots, and bugles
+were calling, and groups of men, black and clearly cut against the sky,
+were excitedly switching the air with flags from every jutting rock and
+every rampart of the garrison.
+
+[Illustration: SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK]
+
+Behind the ramparts, quite out of sight of the vessels in the bay, were
+many hundreds of infantrymen with rifles in hand, and only waiting for a
+signal to appear above the coping of the wall to empty their guns into
+the boats of the enemy. The enlisted men, who enjoy this sort of play,
+were pleased and interested; the officers were almost as calm as they
+would be before a real enemy, and very much bored at being called out
+and experimented with. The real object of the preparation for defence
+that morning was to learn whether the officers at different points
+could communicate with the Governor as he rode rapidly from one spot
+to another. This was done by means of flags, and although the officer
+who did the flagging for the Governor's party had about as much as he
+could do to keep his horse on four legs, the experiment was most
+successful. It was a very pretty and curious sight to see men talking a
+mile away to a party of horsemen going at full gallop.
+
+The life of a subaltern of the British army, who belongs to a smart
+regiment, and who is stationed at such a post as Gibraltar, impresses
+you as being as easy and satisfactory a state of existence as a young
+and unmarried man could ask. He has always the hope that some day--any
+day, in fact--he will have a chance to see active service, and so serve
+his country and distinguish his name. And while waiting for this chance
+he enjoys the good things the world brings him with a clear conscience.
+He has duties, it is true, but they did not strike me as being wearing
+ones, or as threatening nervous prostration. As far as I could see, his
+most trying duty was the number of times a day he had to change his
+clothes, and this had its ameliorating circumstance in that he each time
+changed into a more gorgeous costume. There was one youth whom I saw in
+four different suits in two hours. When I first noticed him he was
+coming back from polo, in boots and breeches; then he was directing the
+firing of a gun, with a pill-box hat on the side of his head, a large
+pair of field-glasses in his hand, and covered by a black and red
+uniform that fitted him like a jersey. A little later he turned up at a
+tennis party at the Governor's in flannels; and after that he came back
+there to dine in the garb of every evening. When the subaltern dines at
+mess he wears a uniform which turns that of the First City Troop into
+what looks in comparison like a second-hand and ready-made garment. The
+officers of the 13th Somerset Light Infantry wore scarlet jackets at
+dinner, with high black silk waistcoats bordered with two inches of gold
+lace. The jackets have gold buttons sewed along every edge that presents
+itself, and offer glorious chances for determining one's future by
+counting "poor man, rich man, beggar-man, thief." When eighteen of these
+jackets are placed around a table, the chance civilian feels and looks
+like an undertaker.
+
+Dining at mess is a very serious function in a British regiment. At
+other times her Majesty's officers have a reticent air; but at dinner,
+when you are a guest, or whether you are a guest or not, there is an
+intent to please and to be pleased which is rather refreshing.
+
+We have no regimental headquarters in America, and owing to our officers
+seeking promotion all over the country, the regimental _esprit de corps_
+is lacking. But in the English army regimental feeling is very strong;
+father and son follow on in the same regiment, and now that they are
+naming them for the counties from which they are recruited, they are
+becoming very close corporations indeed. At mess the traditions of the
+regiment come into play, and you can learn then of the actions in which
+it has been engaged from the engravings and paintings around the walls,
+and from the silver plate on the table and the flags stacked in the
+corner.
+
+[Illustration: CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES]
+
+When a man gets his company he presents the regiment with a piece of
+plate, or a silver inkstand, or a picture, or something which
+commemorates a battle or a man, and so the regimental headquarters are
+always telling a story of what has been in the past and inspiring fine
+deeds for the future. Each regiment has its peculiarity of uniform or
+its custom at mess, which is distinctive to it, and which means more the
+longer it is observed. Those in authority are trying to do away with
+these signs and differences in equipment, and are writing themselves
+down asses as they do so.
+
+You will notice, for instance, if you are up in such things, that the
+sergeants of the 13th Light Infantry wear their sashes from the left
+shoulder to the right hip, as officers do, and not from the right
+shoulder, as sergeants should. This means that once in a great battle
+every officer of the 13th was killed, and the sergeants, finding this
+out, and that they were now in command, changed their sashes to the
+other shoulder. And the officers ever after allowed them to do this, as
+a tribute to their brothers in command who had so conspicuously
+obliterated themselves and distinguished their regiment. There are other
+traditions, such as that no one must mention a woman's name at mess,
+except the title of one woman, to which they rise and drink at the end
+of the dinner, when the sergeant gives the signal to the band-master
+outside, and his men play the national anthem, while the bandmaster
+comes in, as Mr. Kipling describes him in "The Drums of the Fore and
+Aft," and "takes his glass of port-wine with the orfficers." The
+Sixtieth, or the Royal Rifles, for instance, wear no marks of rank at
+the mess, in order to express the idea that there they are all equal.
+This regiment had once for its name the King's American Rifles, and
+under that name it took Quebec and Montreal, and I had placed in front
+of me at mess one night a little silver statuette in the equipment of a
+Continental soldier, except that his coat, if it had been colored,
+would have been red, and not blue. He was dated 1768. In the mess-room
+are pictures of the regiment swarming over the heights of Quebec,
+storming the walls of Delhi, and running the gauntlet up the Nile as
+they pressed forward to save Gordon. All of this goes to make a
+subaltern feel things that are good for him to feel.
+
+Every day at Gibraltar there is tennis, and bands playing in the
+Alameda, and parades, or riding-parties across the Neutral Ground into
+Spain, and teas and dinners, at which the young ladies of the place
+dance Spanish dances, and twice a week the members of the Calpe Hunt
+meet in Spain, and chase foxes across the worst country that any
+Englishman ever rode over in pink. There are no fences, but there are
+ravines and canyons and precipices, down and up and over which the horses
+scramble and jump, and over which they will, if the rider leaves them
+alone, bring him safely.
+
+And if you lose the rest of the field, you can go to an old Spanish inn
+like that which Don Quixote visited, with drunken muleteers in the
+court-yard, and the dining-room over the stable, and with beautiful
+dark-eyed young women to give you omelet and native wine and black
+bread. Or, what is as amusing, you can stop in at the officer's
+guard-room at the North Front, and cheer that gentleman's loneliness by
+taking tea with him, and drying your things before his fire while he
+cuts the cake, and the women of the party straighten their hats in
+front of his glass, and two Tommies go off for hot water.
+
+There was a very entertaining officer guarding the North Front one
+night, and he proved so entertaining that neither of us heard the sunset
+gun, and so when I reached the gate I found it locked, and the bugler of
+the guard who take the keys to the Governor each night was sounding his
+bugle half-way up the town. There was a dark object on a wall to which I
+addressed all my arguments and explanations, which the object met with
+repeated requests to "move on, now," in the tone of expostulation with
+which a London policeman addresses a very drunken man.
+
+[Illustration: TEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERS]
+
+I knew that if I tried to cross the Neutral Ground I would be shot at
+for a smuggler; for, owing to Gibraltar's being a free port of entry,
+these gentlemen buy tobacco there, and carry it home each night, or run
+it across the half-mile of Neutral Ground strapped to the backs of dogs.
+So I wandered back again to the entertaining officer, and he was filled
+with remorse, and sent off a note of entreaty to his Excellency's
+representative, to whom he referred as a D. A. A. G., and whose name, he
+said, was Jones. We then went to the mess of the officers guarding the
+different approaches, and these gentlemen kindly offered me their own
+beds, proposing that they themselves should sleep on three chairs and a
+pile of overcoats; all except one subaltern, who excused his silence by
+saying diffidently that he fancied I would not care to sleep in the
+fever camp, of which he had charge. I had seen the officer of the
+keys pass every night, and the guards turn out to salute the keys, and I
+had rather imagined that it was more or less of a form, and that the
+pomp and circumstance were all there was of it. I did not believe that
+the Rock was really closed up at night like a safe with a combination
+lock. But I know now that it is. A note came back from the mysterious D.
+A. A. G. saying I could be admitted at eleven; but it said nothing at
+all about sentries, nor did the entertaining officer. Subalterns always
+say "Officer" when challenged, and the sentry always murmurs, "Pass,
+officer, and all's well," in an apologetic growl. But I suppose I did
+not say "Officer" as I had been told to do, with any show of confidence,
+for every sentry who appeared that night--and there seemed to be a
+regiment of them--would not have it at all, and wanted further data, and
+wanted it quick. Even if you have an order from a D. A. A. G. named
+Jones, it is very difficult to explain about it when you don't know
+whether to speak of him as the D. A. A. G. or as General Jones, and
+especially when a young and inexperienced shadow is twisting his gun
+about so that the moonlight plays up and down the very longest bayonet
+ever issued by a civilized nation. They were not nice sentries, either,
+like those on the Rock, who stand where you can see them, and who
+challenge you drowsily, like cabmen, and make the empty streets less
+lonely than otherwise.
+
+They were, on the contrary, fierce and in a terrible hurry, and had a
+way of jumping out of the shadow with a rattle of the gun and a shout
+that brought nerve-storms in successive shocks. To make it worse, I had
+gone over the post, while waiting for word from the D. A. A. G., to hear
+the sentries recite their instructions to the entertaining officer. They
+did this rather badly, I thought, the only portion of the rules, indeed,
+which they seemed to have by heart being those which bade them not to
+allow cows to trespass "without a permit," which must have impressed
+them by its humor, and the fact that when approached within fifty yards
+they were "to fire low." I found when challenged that night that this
+was the only part of their instructions that I also could remember.
+
+This was the only trying experience of my stay in Gibraltar, and it is
+brought in here as a compliment to the force that guards the North
+Front. For of them, and the rest of the inhabitants and officers of the
+garrison, any one who visits there can only think well; and I hope when
+the Rock is attacked, as it never will be, that they will all cover
+themselves with glory. It never will be attacked, for the reason that
+the American people are the only people clever enough to invent a way of
+taking it, and they are far too clever to attempt an impossible thing.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+TANGIER
+
+
+A great many thousand years ago Hercules built the mountain of Abyla and
+its twin mountain which we call Gibraltar. It was supposed to mark the
+limits of the unknown world, and it would seem from casual inspection,
+as I suggested in the last chapter, that it serves the same purpose to
+this day. Men have crept into Africa and crept out again, like flies
+over a ceiling, and they have gained much renown at Africa's expense for
+having done so. They have built little towns along its coasts, and run
+little rocking, bumping railroads into its forests, and dragged launches
+over its cataracts, and partitioned it off among emperors and powers and
+trading companies, without having ventured into the countries they
+pretend to have subdued. But from Paul du Chaillu to W. A. Chanler, "the
+Last Explorer," as he has been called, just how much more do we know of
+Africa than did the Romans whose bridges still stand in Tangier?
+
+The "Last Explorer" sounds well, and is distinctly a _mot_, but there
+will be other explorers to go, and perhaps to return. There are still a
+few things for us to learn. The Spaniards and the Pilgrim fathers
+touched the unknown world of America only four hundred years ago, and
+to-day any commercial traveller can tell you, with the aid of an A B C
+railroad guide, the name of every town in any part of it. But Turks and
+Romans and Spaniards, and, of late, English and Germans and French, have
+been pecking and nibbling at Africa like little mice around a cheese,
+and they are still nibbling at the rind, and know as little of the
+people they "protect," and of the countries they have annexed and
+colonized, as did Hannibal and Scipio. The American forests have been
+turned into railroad ties and telegraph poles, and the American Indian
+has been "exterminated" or taught to plough and to wear a high hat. The
+cowboy rides freely over the prairies; the Indian agent cheats the
+Indian--the Indian does not cheat him; the Germans own Milwaukee and
+Cincinnati; the Irish rule everywhere; even the much-abused Chinaman
+hangs out his red sign in every corner of the country. There is not a
+nation of the globe that has not its hold upon and does not make
+fortunes out of the continent of America; but the continent of Africa
+remains just as it was, holding back its secret, and still content to be
+the unknown world.
+
+You need not travel far into Africa to learn this; you can find out how
+little we know of it at its very shore. This city of Tangier, lying but
+three hours off from Gibraltar's civilization, on the nearest coast of
+Africa, can teach you how little we or our civilized contemporaries
+understand of these barbarians and of their barbarous ways.
+
+A few months since England sent her ambassador to treat with the Sultan
+of Morocco; it was an untaught blackamoor opposed to a diplomat and a
+gentleman, and a representative of the most civilized and powerful of
+empires; and we have Stephen Bonsal's picture of this ambassador and his
+suite riding back along the hot, sandy trail from Fez, baffled and
+ridiculed and beaten. So that when I was in Tangier, half-naked Moors,
+taking every white stranger for an Englishman, would point a finger at
+me and cry, "Your Sultana a fool; the Sultan only wise." Which shows
+what a superior people we are when we get away from home, and how well
+the English understand the people they like to protect.
+
+Tangier lies like a mass of drifted snow on the green hills below, and
+over the point of rock on which stands its fortress, and from which
+waves the square red flag of Morocco. It is a fine place spoiled by
+civilization. And not a nice quality of civilization either. Back of it,
+in Tetuan or Fez, you can understand what Tangier once was and see the
+Moor at his best. There he lives in the exclusiveness which his religion
+teaches him is right--an exclusiveness to which the hauteur of an
+Englishman, and his fear that some one is going to speak to him on
+purpose, become a gracious manner and suggest undue familiarity. You see
+the Moor at his best in Tangier too, but he is never in his complete
+setting as he is in the inland cities, for when you walk abroad in
+Tangier you are constantly brought back to the new world by the presence
+and abodes of the foreign element; a French shop window touches a bazar,
+and a Moor in his finest robes is followed by a Spaniard in his black
+cape or an Englishman in a tweed suit, for the Englishman learns nothing
+and forgets nothing. He may live in Tangier for years, but he never
+learns to wear a burnoose, or forgets to put on the coat his tailor has
+sent him from home as the latest in fashion. The first thing which meets
+your eye on entering the harbor at Tangier is an immense blue-and-white
+enamel sign asking you to patronize the English store for groceries and
+provisions. It strikes you as much more barbarous than the Moors who
+come scrambling over the vessel's side.
+
+[Illustration: BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE]
+
+They come with a rush and with wild yells before the little steamer has
+stopped moving, and remind you of their piratical ancestors. They look
+quite as fierce, and as they throw their brown bare legs over the
+bulwarks and leap and scramble, pushing and shouting in apparently the
+keenest stage of excitement and rage, they only need long knives between
+their teeth and a cutlass to convince you that you are at the mercy
+of the Barbary pirates, and not merely of hotel porters and guides.
+
+My guide was a Moor named Mahamed. I had him about a week, or rather, to
+speak quite correctly, he had me. I do not know how he effected my
+capture, but he went with me, I think, because no one else would have
+him, and he accordingly imposed on my good-nature. As we say a man is
+"good-natured" when there is absolutely nothing else to be said for him,
+I hope when I say this that I shall not be accused of trying to pay
+myself a compliment. Mahamed was a tall Moor, with a fine array of
+different-colored robes and coats and undercoats, and a large white
+turban around his fez, which marked the fact that he was either married
+or that he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He followed me from morning
+until night, with the fidelity of a lamb, and with its sheeplike
+stupidity. No amount of argument or money or abuse could make him leave
+my side. Mahamed was not even picturesque, for he wore a large pair of
+blue spectacles and Congress gaiters. This hurt my sense of the fitness
+of things very much. His idea of serving me was to rush on ahead and
+shove all the little donkeys and blind beggars and children out of my
+way, at which the latter would weep, and I would have to go back and
+bribe them into cheerfulness again. In this way he made me most
+unpopular with the masses, and cost me a great deal in trying to buy
+their favor. I was never so completely at the mercy of any one before,
+and I hope he found me "intelligent, courteous, and a good linguist."
+
+As a matter of fact, there is very little need of a guide in Tangier. It
+has but few show places, for the place itself is the show. You can find
+your best entertainment in picking your way through its winding, narrow
+streets, and in wandering about the open market-places. The highways of
+Tangier are all very crooked and very steep. They are also very uneven
+and dirty, and one walks sometimes for hundreds of yards in a maze of
+dark alleys and little passageways walled in by whitewashed walls, and
+sheltered from the sun by archways and living-rooms hanging from one
+side of the street to the other. Green and blue doorways, through which
+one must stoop to enter, open in from the street, and you are constantly
+hearing them shut as you pass, as some of the women of the household
+recognize the presence of a foreigner. You are never quite sure as to
+what you will meet in the streets or what may be displayed at your elbow
+before the doors of the bazars. The odors of frying meat and of fresh
+fruit and of herbs, and of soap in great baskets, and of black coffee
+and hasheesh, come to you from cafes and tiny shops hardly as big as a
+packing-box. These are shut up at night by two half-doors, of which the
+upper one serves as a shield from the sun by day and the lower as a pair
+of steps. In the wider streets are the bazars, magnificent with color
+and with the glitter of gold lace and of brass plaques and silver
+daggers; handsome, comfortable-looking Moors sit crossed-legged in the
+middle of their small extent like soldiers in a sentry-box, and speak
+leisurely with their next-door neighbor without gesture, unless they
+grow excited over a bargain, and with a haughty contempt for the passing
+Christian. There is always something beneficial in feeling that you are
+thoroughly despised; and when a whole community combines to despise you,
+and looks over your head gravely as you pass, you begin to feel that
+those Moors who do not apparently hold you in contempt are a very poor
+and middle-class sort of people, and you would much prefer to be
+overlooked by a proud Moor than shaken hands with by a perverted one.
+But the pride of the rich Moorish gentlemen is nothing compared to the
+fanatic intolerance of the poor farmers from the country of the tribes
+who come in on market-day, and who hate the Christian properly as the
+Koran tells them they should. They stalk through the narrow street with
+both eyes fixed on a point far ahead of them, with head and shoulders
+erect and arms swinging. They brush against you as though you were a
+camel or a horse, and had four legs on which to stand instead of two.
+Sometimes a foreigner forgets that these men from the desert, where the
+foreign element has not come, are following out the religious training
+of a lifetime, and strikes at one of them with his riding-whip, and then
+takes refuge in a consulate and leaves on the next boat.
+
+I find it very hard not to sympathize with the Moors. The Englishman is
+always preaching that an Englishman's house is his castle, and yet he
+invades this country, he and his French and Spanish and American
+cousins, and demands that not only he shall be treated well, but that
+any native of the country, any subject of the Sultan, who chooses to
+call himself an American or an Englishman shall be protected too. Of
+course he knows that he is not wanted there; he knows he is forcing
+himself on the barbarian, and that all the barbarian has ever asked of
+him is to be let alone. But he comes, and he rides around in his baggy
+breeches and varnished boots, and he gets up polo games and cricket
+matches, and gallops about in a pink coat after foxes, and asks for
+bitter ale, and complains because he cannot get his bath, and all the
+rest of it, quite as if he had been begged to come and to stop as long
+as he liked. Sometimes you find a foreigner who tries to learn something
+of these people, a man like the late Mr. Leared or "Bebe" Carleton, who
+can speak all their dialects, and who has more power with the Sultan
+than has any foreign minister, and who, if the Sultan will not pay you
+for the last shipment of guns you sent him, or for the grand-piano for
+the harem, is the man to get you your money. But the average foreign
+resident, as far as I can see, neither adopts the best that the Moor has
+found good, nor introduces what the Moor most needs, and what he does
+not know or care enough about to introduce for himself. Tangier, for
+instance, is excellently adapted by nature for the purposes of good
+sanitation, but the arrangements are as bad and primitive as they were
+before a foreigner came into the place. They consist in dumping the
+refuse of the streets, into which everything is thrown, over the
+sea-wall out on the rocks below, where the pigs gather up what they
+want, and the waves wash the remainder back on the coast.
+
+[Illustration: SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL]
+
+If some of the foreign ministers would use their undoubted influence
+with the Bashaw to amend this, instead of introducing point-to-point
+pony races, they might in time show some reason for their invasion of
+Morocco other than the curious and obvious one that they all grow rich
+there while doing nothing. The foreign resident has a very great
+contempt for the Moor. He says the Moor is a great liar and a rogue.
+When people used to ask Walter Scott if it was he who wrote the Waverley
+Novels he used to tell them it was not, and he excused this afterwards
+by saying that if you are asked an impertinent or impossible question
+you have the right not to answer it or to tell an untruth. The very
+presence of the foreigner is an impertinence in the eyes of the Moor,
+and so he naturally does not feel severe remorse when he baffles the
+foreign invader, and does it whenever he can.
+
+As a matter of fact, the foreign invader at Tangier is not, in a number
+of cases, in a position in which he can gracefully throw down gauntlets.
+There is something about these hot, raw countries, hidden out of the way
+of public opinion and police courts and the respectability which drives
+a gig, that makes people forget the rules and axioms laid down in the
+temperate zone for the guidance of tax-payers and all reputable
+citizens. As the sailors say, "There is no Sunday south of the equator."
+It is hard to tell just what it is, but the sun, or the example of the
+barbarians, or the fact that the world is so far away, breeds queer
+ideas, and one hears stories one would not care to print as long as the
+law of libel obtains in the land. You have often read in novels,
+especially French novels, or have heard men on the stage say: "Come, let
+us leave this place, with its unjust laws and cruel bigotry. We will go
+to some unknown corner of the earth, where we will make a new home. And
+there, under a new flag and a new name, we will forget the sad past, and
+enter into a new world of happiness and content."
+
+When you hear a man on the stage say that, you can make up your mind
+that he is going to Tangier. It may be that he goes there with somebody
+else's money, or somebody else's wife, or that he has had trouble with a
+check; or, as in the case of one young man who was feted and dined
+there, had robbed a diamond store in Brooklyn, and is now in Sing Sing;
+or, as in the case of a recent American consul, had sold his protection
+for two hundred dollars to any one who wanted it, and was recalled under
+several clouds. And you hear stories of ministers who retire after
+receiving an income of a few hundred pounds a year with two hundred
+thousand dollars they have saved out of it, and of cruelty and bursts of
+sudden passion that would undoubtedly cause a lynching in the chivalric
+and civilized states of Alabama or Tennessee. And so when I heard why
+several of the people of Tangier had come there, and why they did not
+go away again, I began to feel that the barbarian, whose forefathers
+swept Spain and terrorized the whole of Catholic Europe, had more reason
+than he knew for despising the Christian who is waiting to give to his
+country the benefits of civilization.
+
+Tangier's beauty lies in so many different things--in the monk-like garb
+of the men and in the white muffled figures of the women; in the
+brilliancy of its sky, and of the sea dashing upon the rocks and
+tossing the feluccas with their three-cornered sails from side to side;
+and in the green towers of the mosques, and the listless leaves of the
+royal palms rising from the centre of a mass of white roofs; and, above
+all, in the color and movement of the bazars and streets. The streets
+represent absolute equality. They are at the widest but three yards
+across, and every one pushes, and apparently every one has something to
+sell, or at least something to say, for they all talk and shout at once,
+and cry at their donkeys or abuse whoever touches them. A water-carrier,
+with his goat-skin bag on his back and his finger on the tube through
+which the water comes, jostles you on one side, and a slave as black and
+shiny as a patent-leather boot shoves you on the other as he makes way
+for his master on a fine white Arabian horse with brilliant trappings
+and a huge contempt for the donkeys in his way. It is worth going to
+Tangier if for no other reason than to see a slave, and to grasp the
+fact that he costs anywhere from a hundred to five hundred dollars. To
+the older generation this may not seem worth while, but to the present
+generation--those of it who were born after Richmond was taken--it is a
+new and momentous sensation to look at a man as fine and stalwart and
+human as one of your own people, and feel that he cannot strike for
+higher wages, or even serve as a parlor-car porter or own a barbershop,
+but must work out for life the two hundred dollars his owner paid for
+him at Fez.
+
+There is more movement in Tangier than I have ever noticed in a place of
+its size. Every one is either looking on cross-legged from the bazars
+and coffee-shops, or rushing, pushing, and screaming in the street. It
+is most bewildering; if you turn to look after a particularly
+magnificent Moor, or a half-naked holy man from the desert with wild
+eyes and hair as long as a horse's mane, you are trodden upon by a
+string of donkeys carrying kegs of water, or pushed to one side by a
+soldier with a gun eight feet long.
+
+There is something continually interesting in the muffled figures of the
+women. They make you almost ashamed of the uncovered faces of the
+American women in the town; and, in the lack of any evidence to the
+contrary, you begin to believe every Moorish woman or girl you meet is
+as beautiful as her eyes would make it appear that she is. Those of the
+Moorish girls whose faces I saw were distinctly handsome; they were the
+women Benjamin Constant paints in his pictures of Algiers, and about
+whom Pierre Loti goes into ecstasies in his book on Tangier. Their robe
+or cloak, or whatever the thing is that they affect, covers the head
+like a hood, and with one hand they hold one of its folds in front of
+the face as high as their eyes, or keep it in place by biting it between
+their teeth.
+
+The only time that I ever saw the face of any of them was when I
+occasionally eluded Mahamed and ran off with a little guide called
+Isaac, the especial protector of two American women, who farmed him out
+to me when they preferred to remain in the hotel. He is a particularly
+beautiful youth, and I noticed that whenever he was with me the cloaks
+of the women had a fashion of coming undone, and they would lower them
+for an instant and look at Isaac, and then replace them severely upon
+the bridge of the nose. Then Isaac would turn towards me with a shy
+conscious smile and blush violently. Isaac says that the young men of
+Tangier can tell whether or not a girl is pretty by looking at her feet.
+It is true that their feet are bare, but it struck me as being a
+somewhat reckless test for selecting a bride. I will recommend Isaac to
+whoever thinks of going to Tangier. He speaks eight languages, is
+eighteen years old, wears beautiful and barbarous garments, and is
+always happy. He is especially good at making bargains, and he
+entertained me for many half-hours while I sat and watched him fighting
+over two dollars more or less with the proprietors of the bazars. He was
+an antagonist worthy of the oldest and proudest Moor in Tangier. He had
+no respect for their rage or their contempt or their proffered bribes or
+their long white beards. Sometimes he would laugh them to scorn--them
+and their prices; and again he would talk to them sadly and plaintively;
+and again he would stamp and rage and slap his hands at them and rush
+off with a great show of disgust, until they called him back again, when
+he and they would go over the performance once more with unabated
+interest. Mahamed always paid them what they asked, and got his
+commission from them later, as a guide should; but Isaac would storm and
+finally beat them down one-half. Isaac can be found at the Calpe Hotel,
+and is welcome to whatever this notice may be worth to him.
+
+[Illustration: A WOMAN OF TANGIER]
+
+I had read in books on Morocco and had been given to understand that
+when you were told that the price of anything in a bazar was worth three
+dollars, you should offer one, and that then the Moor would cry aloud to
+Allah to take note of the insult, and would ask you to sit down and have
+a cup of coffee, and that he would then beat you up and you would beat
+him down, and that at the end of two or three hours you would get what
+you wanted for two dollars. It struck me that this, if one had several
+months to spare and wanted anything badly enough, might be rather
+amusing. The first thing I saw that I wanted badly was a long gun, for
+which the Moor asked me twelve dollars. I offered him eight. I then
+waited to see him tear his beard and unwrap his turban and cry aloud to
+Allah; but he did none of these things. He merely put the gun back in
+its place and continued the conversation, which I had so flippantly
+interrupted, with a long-bearded friend. And no further remarks on my
+part affected him in the least, and I was forced to go away feeling very
+much ashamed and very mean. The next day a man at the hotel brought in
+the gun, having paid fourteen dollars for it, and said he would not sell
+it for fifty. We would pay much more than that for it at home, which
+shows that you cannot always follow guide-books.
+
+There are only five things the guides take you to see in Tangier--the
+cafe chantant, the governor's palace, the prisons, and the harem, to
+which men are not admitted. They also take you to see the markets, but
+you can see them for yourself. The markets are bare, open places covered
+with stones and lined with bazars, and on market-days peopled with
+thousands of muffled figures selling or trying to sell herbs and eggs
+and everything else that is eatable, from dates to haunches of mutton.
+It is a wonderfully picturesque sight, with the sun trickling through
+the palm-leaf mats overhead on the piles of yellow melons at your feet,
+and with strings of camels dislocating their countenances over their
+grain, and dancing-men and snake-charmers and story-tellers, as eloquent
+as actors, clamoring on every side.
+
+The cafe chantant is a long room lined with mats, and with rugs
+scattered over the floor, on which sit musicians and the regular
+customers of the place, who play cards and smoke long pipes, with which
+they rap continually on the tin ash-holders. The music is very strange,
+to say the least, and the singing very startling, full of sudden pauses,
+and beginning again after one of these when you think the song is over.
+It is not a particularly exciting place to visit, but there is no choice
+between that and the hotel smoking-room. Tangier is not a town where one
+can move about much at night. There is also a place where the guests
+tell you that you can see Moorish women dance the dance which so
+startled Paris in the Algerian exhibit at the exposition. As I had no
+desire to be startled in that way again, I did not go to see them, and
+so cannot say what they are like. But it is quite safe to say that any
+visitor to Tangier who thinks he is seeing anything that is real and
+native to the home life of the people, and that is not a show gotten up
+by the guides, is going to be greatly taken in. The harem to which they
+lead women is not a harem at all, but the home of the widow of an
+ex-governor, who sits with her daughters for strange women to look at.
+It is a most undignified proceeding on the part of the widow of a dead
+Bashaw, and no one but the guides know what she is doing. I came to
+find out about it through some American women who went there with Isaac
+in the morning, and were taken to call at the same place by an English
+lady resident in the afternoon. The English woman laughed at them for
+thinking they had seen the interior of a harem, and they did not tell
+her that they had already visited her friends and paid their franc for
+admittance to their society.
+
+The other show places are the governor's palace and the prisons. The
+palace is a very handsome Moorish building, and the prisons are very
+dirty. All that the tourist can see of them is the little he can discern
+through a hole cut in the stout wooden door of each, which is the only
+exit and entrance. You cannot see much even then, for the prisoners, as
+soon as they discover a face at the opening, stick it full of the
+palm-leaf baskets that they make and sell in order to buy food. The
+government gives them neither water, which is expensive in Tangier, nor
+bread, unless they are dying for want of it, but expects the family or
+friends of each criminal to see that he is kept alive until he has
+served out his term of imprisonment.
+
+[Illustration: WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE]
+
+A great deal has been written about these prisons of the Sultan, and of
+the cruelty shown to the inmates, notably of late by a Mr. Mackenzie in
+the London _Times_. You are told that in Tangier, within the four square
+walls of the prison, there are madmen and half-starved murderers and
+rebels, loaded with chains, dying of disease and want, who are
+tortured and starved until they die. For this reason no one in Morocco
+is sentenced for more than ten or twelve years, so you are told, because
+he is sure to die before that time has expired. It seemed to me that if
+this were true it would be worth while to visit the prison and to tell
+what one saw there. When I was informed that, with the exception of two
+residents of Tangier, no one has been allowed to enter the Sultan's
+prison for the last _ten years_, I suspected that there must be
+something there which the Sultan did not want seen: it was not a
+difficult deduction to make. So I set about getting into the prison. It
+is not at all necessary to go into the details of my endeavors, or to
+tell what proposals I made; it is quite sufficient to say that in every
+way I was eminently unsuccessful. It was interesting, however, to find a
+people to whom the arguments and inducements which had proved effective
+with one's own countrymen were foolish and incomprehensible. For two
+days I haunted the outer walls of the prison, and was smiled upon
+contemptuously by the Bashaw's counsellors, who sat calmly in the cool
+hallway of the palace, and watched me kicking impatiently at the stones
+in the court-yard and broiling in the sun, while the governor or Bashaw
+returned me polite expressions of his regret. I finally dragged the
+Consul-General into it, and brought things to such a pass that I could
+see no way out of it but my admittance to the prison or a declaration of
+war from the United States.
+
+Either event seemed to promise exciting and sensational developments.
+Colonel Mathews, the Consul-General, did not, however, share my views,
+but arranged that I should have an audience with the Bashaw, during the
+course of which he promised he would bring up the question of my
+admittance to the prison.
+
+On board the _Fulda_, I had had the pleasure of sitting at table next to
+the Rev. Dr. Henry M. Field, the editor of the _Evangelist_, and a
+distinguished traveller in many lands. While on the steamer I had
+twitted the doctor with not having seen certain phases of life with
+which, it seemed to me, he should be more familiar, and I offered, on
+finding we were making the same tour for the same purpose, to introduce
+him to bull-fights and pig-sticking and cafes chantants, and other
+incidents of foreign travel, of which he seemed to be ignorant. He
+refused my offer with dignity, but I think with some regret. I was,
+nevertheless, glad to find that he was in Tangier, and that he was to be
+one of the party to call at the governor's palace. On learning of my
+desire to visit the prison Dr. Field added his petition to mine, and I
+am quite sure that Colonel Mathews wished we were both in the United
+States.
+
+We first called upon the Sultan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, who
+received us in a little room leading from a pretty portico near the
+street entrance. It was furnished, I was pained to note, not with divans
+and rugs, but with a set of red plush and walnut sofas and chairs, such
+as you would find in the salon of a third-rate French hotel. The
+Minister of Foreign Affairs was a dear, kindly old gentleman, with a
+fine white beard down to his waist, but he had a cold in his head, and
+this kept him dabbing at his nose with a red bandanna handkerchief
+rolled up in a ball, which was not in keeping with the rest of his
+costume, nor with the dignity of his appearance. He and Dr. Field got on
+very well; they found out that they were both seventy years of age, and
+both highly esteemed in their different churches. Indeed, the Minister
+of Foreign Affairs was good enough to say, through Colonel Mathews, that
+Dr. Field had a good face, and one that showed he had led a religious
+life. He rather neglected me, and I was out of it, especially when both
+the doctor and the cabinet minister began hoping that Allah would bless
+them both. I thought it most unorthodox language for Dr. Field to use.
+
+We then walked up the hill upon which stand the fort, the prisons, the
+treasury, and the governor's palace, and were received at the entrance
+to the latter by the same gentlemen who had for the last two days been
+enjoying my discomfiture. They were now most gracious in their manner,
+and bowed proudly and respectfully to Colonel Mathews as we passed
+between two rows of them and entered the hall of the palace. We went
+through three halls covered with colored tiles and topped with arches of
+ornamental scrollwork of intricate designs. At the extreme end of these
+rooms the Bashaw stood waiting for us. He was the finest-looking Moor I
+had seen; and I think the Moorish gentleman, though it seems a strange
+thing to say, is the most perfect type of a gentleman that I have seen
+in any country. He is seldom less than six feet tall, and he carries his
+six feet with the erectness of a soldier and with the grace of a woman.
+The bones of his face are strong and well-placed, and he looks kind and
+properly self-respecting, and is always courteous. When you add to this
+clothing as brilliant and robes as clean and soft and white as a
+bride's, you have a very worthy-looking man. The Bashaw towered above
+all of us. He wore brown and dark-blue cloaks, with a long
+under-waistcoat of light-blue silk, yellow shoes, and a white turban as
+big as a bucket, and his baggy trousers were as voluminous as Letty
+Lind's divided skirts. He could not speak English, but he shook hands
+with us, which Moors do not do to one another, and walked on ahead
+through court-yards and halls and up stairways to a little room filled
+with divans and decorated with a carved ceiling and tiled walls. There
+we all sat down, and a soldier in a long red cloak and with numerous
+swords sticking out of his person gave us tea, and sweet cakes made
+entirely of sugar. As soon as we had finished one cup he brought in
+another, and, noticing this, I indulged sparingly; but the doctor
+finished his first, and then refused the rest, until the Consul-General
+told him he must drink or be guilty of a breach of etiquette.
+
+[Illustration: A STREET DANCER]
+
+The Bashaw and Colonel Mathews talked together, and we paid the governor
+long and laborious compliments, at which he smiled indulgently. He did
+not strike me as being at all overcome by them; he had, on the contrary,
+very much the air of a man of the world, and seemed rather to be bored,
+but too polite to say so. He looked exactly like Salvini as Othello.
+While the tea-drinking was going on we were making asides to Colonel
+Mathews, and urging him to propose our going into the prison, which he
+said he would do, but that it must be done diplomatically. We told him
+we would give all the prisoners bread and water, or a lump sum to the
+guards, or whatever he thought would please the Bashaw best. He and the
+Bashaw then began to talk about it, and the doctor and I looked
+consciously at the ceiling. The Bashaw said that never since he had been
+governor of Tangier had he allowed either a native or a foreigner to
+enter the prison; and that if a European did so, he would be torn to
+pieces by the fanatics imprisoned there, who would think they were
+pleasing Allah by abusing an unbeliever. Colonel Mathews also added, on
+his own account, that we would probably catch some horrible disease. The
+more they did not want us to go, the more we wanted to go, the doctor
+rising to the occasion with a keenness and readiness of resource worthy
+of a New York reporter after a beat. I can pay him no higher compliment.
+After a long, loud, and excited debate the Bashaw submitted, and the
+Consul-General won.
+
+The first prison they showed us was the county jail, in which men are
+placed for a month or more. It was dirty and uninteresting, and we
+protested that it was not the one which the Bashaw had described, and
+asked to be shown the one where the enemies of the government were
+incarcerated. Colonel Mathews called back the Bashaw's soldiers, and we
+went on to the larger prison immediately adjoining. Some time ago the
+inmates of this made a break for liberty, and forced open the one door
+which bars those inside from the outer world. The guards fired into the
+mass of them, and the place shows where the bullets struck. To prevent a
+repetition of this, three heavy bars were driven into the masonry around
+the door, so close together that it is impossible for more than one man
+to leave or enter the prison at one time even when the door is open. And
+the opening is so small that to do this he must either crawl in on his
+hands and knees, or lift himself up by the crossbar and swing himself
+in feet foremost. It impressed me as a particularly embarrassing way to
+make an entrance among a lot of people who meditated tearing you to
+pieces. I pointed this out to the doctor, but he was determined, though
+pale. So the guards swung the door in, and the first glimpse of a
+Christian gentleman the prisoners had in ten years was a pair of yellow
+riding-boots which shot into space, followed by a young man, and a
+moment later by an elderly gentleman with a white tie. We made a
+combined movement to the middle of the prison, which was lighted from
+above by a square opening in the roof, protected by iron bars. This was
+the only light in the place. All around the four sides of the patio or
+court were rows of pillars supporting a portico, and back of these was a
+second and outer corridor opening into the porticos, and so into the
+patio. The whole place--patio, porticos, and outer corridor--was about
+as big as the stage of a New York theatre. It was paved with dirt and
+broken slabs, and littered with straw. There was no furniture of any
+sort. With the exception of the sink upon which we stood, directly under
+the opening in the roof, the place was in almost complete darkness,
+although the sun was shining brilliantly outside.
+
+I think there must have been about fifty or sixty men in the prison, and
+for a short time not one of them moved. They were apparently, to judge
+by the way they looked at us, as much startled as though we had
+ascended from a trap like goblins in a pantomime, and then half of them,
+with one accord, came scrambling towards us on their hands and knees.
+They were half naked, and their hair hung down over their eyes; and
+this, and their crawling towards us instead of walking, made them look
+more or less like animals. As they came forward there was a clanking of
+chains, and I saw that it was because their legs were fettered that they
+came as they did, and not standing erect like human beings. The guard
+who followed us in was over two minutes in getting the door fastened
+behind him, and my mind was more occupied with this fact than with what
+I saw before me; for it seemed to me that if there was any tearing to
+pieces to be gone through with, I should hate to have to wait that long
+while the door was being opened again. This thought, with the shock of
+seeing thirty wild men moving upon us out of complete darkness on their
+hands and knees, was the only sensation of any interest that I received
+while visiting the prison.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE PRISON]
+
+The inmates looked exactly like the poorer of the Moors outside, except
+that their hair was longer and their clothing was not so white. There
+was one man, however, quite as well dressed as any of the Sultan's
+counsellors, and he seemed to be the only one who objected to our
+presence. The rest did nothing except to gratify their curiosity by
+staring at us; they did not even hold out their hands for money. They
+were very dirty and poorly clothed, and their long imprisonment had
+made them haggard and pale, and the iron bars around their legs gave
+them a certain interest. The atmosphere of the place was horribly foul,
+but not worse than the atmosphere of either the men's or women's ward at
+night in a precinct station-house in New York city. Indeed, I was not so
+much impressed with the horrors of the Sultan's prison as with the fact
+that our own are so little better, considering our advanced
+civilization. I do not mean our large prisons, but the cells and the
+vagrants' rooms in the police stations. There the vagrant is given a
+sloping board and no ventilation. In Tangier he is given straw and an
+opening in the roof. To be fair, you must compare a prisoner's condition
+in jail with that which he is accustomed to in his own home, and the
+homes of the Moors of the lower class are as much like stables as their
+stables are like pigsties. The poor of Tangier are allowed, through the
+kindness of the Sultan, to sleep on the bare stones around the entrance
+to one of the mosques. For the poor sick there has been built a portico,
+about as large as a Fifth Avenue omnibus, opposite this same mosque.
+This is called the hospital of Tangier. It is considered quite good
+enough for sick people and for those who have no homes. And every night
+you will see bundles of rags lying in the open street or under the
+narrow roof of the portico, exposed to the rain and to the bitter cold.
+If this, in the minds of the Moors, is fair treatment of the sick and
+the poor, one cannot expect them to give their criminals and murderers
+white bread and a freshly rolled turban every morning.
+
+If I had seen horrible things in the Sultan's prison--men starving, or
+too sick to rise, or chained to the walls, or half mad, or loathsome
+with disease--I should certainly have been glad to call the attention of
+other people to it, not from any philanthropic motives perhaps, but as a
+matter of news interest. I did not, however, see any of these things.
+Dr. Field, I believe, was differently impressed, and is of the opinion
+that the outer corridor contained many things much too horrible to
+believe possible. He compared this to Dante's ninth circle of hell, and
+made a point of the fact that the guard had called me back when I walked
+towards it. I, however, went into it while the doctor and the guard were
+getting the door open for us to return, and saw nothing there but straw.
+It seemed to me to be the place where the men slept when the rain,
+coming through the opening in the roof, made it unpleasant for them to
+remain in the court.
+
+It may seem that my persistence in visiting the prison is inconsistent
+with what I have said of foreigners forcing themselves into places in
+Morocco where they are not wanted, but I am quite sure that, had any one
+heard the stories told me of the horror of these jails, he would have
+considered himself justified in learning the truth about them; and I
+cannot understand why, if the members of the legations who tell these
+stories believe them, they have not used their influence to try and
+better the condition of the prisoners, rather than to introduce
+game-laws for the protection of partridges and wild-boars. It is,
+perhaps, gratifying to note that the two gentlemen of whom I spoke as
+having visited the prison in the last ten years were the American
+Consul-General and another resident American. Both of these contributed
+food to the prisoners, and reported what they had seen to our
+government.
+
+On the whole, Tangier impresses one as a fine thing spoiled by
+civilization. Barbarism with electric lights at night is not attractive.
+Tangier to every traveller should be chiefly interesting as a
+stepping-stone towards Tetuan or Fez. Tetuan can be reached in a day's
+journey, and there the Moor is to be seen pure and simple, barbarous and
+beautiful.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO
+
+
+There are certain places and things with which the English novel has
+made us so familiar that it is not necessary for us to go far afield or
+to study guide-books in order to feel that we have known them intimately
+and always. We know Paddington Station as the place where the detective
+interrogates the porter who handled the luggage of the escaping
+criminal, and as the spot from which the governess takes her ticket for
+the country-house where she is to be persecuted by its mistress and
+loved by all the masculine members of the household. We also know that a
+P. and O. steamer is a means of conveyance almost as generally used by
+heroes and heroines of English fiction as a hansom cab. It is a vessel
+upon which the heroine meets her Fate, either in the person of a young
+man on his way home from India, or by being shipwrecked on a desert
+island on her way to Australia, and where the only other surviving
+passenger tattooes his will upon her back, leaves her all his fortune,
+and considerately dies. Long ago a line of steamers ran to the
+Peninsula of Spain; later they shortened their sails, as the Romans
+shortened their swords, and, like the Romans, extended their boundaries
+to the Orient. This line is now an institution with traditions and
+precedents and armorial bearings and time-hallowed jokes, and when you
+step upon the deck of a P. and O. steamer for the first time you feel
+that you are not merely an ordinary passenger, but a part of a novel in
+three volumes, or of a picture in the London _Graphic_, and that all
+sorts of things are imminent and possible. It may not have occurred to
+you before embarking, but you know as soon as you come over the side
+that you expected to find the deck strewn with laces and fans and
+daggers from Tangier, and photographs of Gibraltar, and such other
+trifles for possible purchase by the outbound passengers, and that the
+crew would be little barefooted lascars in red turbans and long blue
+shirts, with a cumberband about their persons, and that you would be
+called to tiffin instead of to lunch.
+
+A fat little lascar balanced himself in the jolly-boat outlined against
+the sky and held aloft a red flag until the hawser swung clear of the
+propeller, when he raised a white flag above him and stood as motionless
+as the Statue of Liberty, while the _Sutlej_ cleared Europa Point of
+Gibraltar and headed towards the East. Then he pattered across the deck
+and leaned over the side and crooned in a lazy, barbarous monotone to
+the waves. The sun fell upon the boat like a spell and turned us into
+sleepy and indolent fixtures wherever it first found us, and showed us
+the white-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada of Spain to the north, and
+the dim blue mountains of Africa to the south. The deck below was
+scrubbed as white as a bread-board, and the masts and rigging threw
+black shadows on the awning overhead, and on every side the blue
+Mediterranean and the bluer Mediterranean sky met and sparkled and
+reflected each other's brilliancy like mirrors placed face to face.
+
+For four days the sun greeted the _Sutlej_ by day and the moon by night,
+and the coast of Africa played hide-and-seek along her starboard side,
+disappearing in a white mist of cloud for an hour or so, and then
+running along with us again in comfortable proximity. On the other side
+boats passed at almost as frequent intervals, and at such friendly range
+that one could count the people on the decks and read their flag signals
+without a glass. The loneliness of the North Atlantic, where an iceberg
+stands for land, and only an occasional tramp steamer rests the eye, is
+as different to this sea as a railroad journey over the prairie is to
+the jaunt from New York to Washington. On the second night out we see
+Algiers, glowing and sparkling in the night like a million of
+fire-flies, and with the clear steady eye of the light-house warning us
+away, as though the quarantine had not warned some of us away already.
+And on the third night we pass Cape Bon, and can imagine Tunis lying
+tantalizingly near us, behind its light-house, shut off also by the
+quarantine that the cholera at Marseilles has made imperative wherever
+the French line of steamers touch. By this time the twoscore passengers
+have foregathered as they would never have done had they all been
+Americans, or had there been three hundred of them, and their place of
+meeting the deck of a transatlantic steamer instead of one of this
+picturesque fleet, upon which you expect strange things to happen.
+
+[Illustration: MALTESE PEDDLERS]
+
+When an American goes to sea, he reads books, or he calculates the
+number of tons of coal it is taking to run the vessel at that rate of
+speed, and he determines that rate of speed by counting the rise and
+fall of the piston-rod, with his watch in his hand; and when this ceases
+to amuse him he plays cards in the smoking-room or holds pools on the
+run and on the pilot's number. The Englishman joins in these latter
+amusements, because nothing better offers. But when his foot is on his
+native heath or on the deck of one of his own vessels, he demonstrates
+his preference for that sort of entertainment which requires exercise
+and little thought. If it is at a country-house, he plays games which
+entail considerable running about, and at picnics he enjoys "Throw the
+handkerchief," and on board ship he plays cricket and other games dear
+to the heart of the American at the age of five. This is partly because
+he always exercises and likes moving about, as Americans do not, and
+because the reading of books (except such books as _Mr. Potter of
+Texas_, which, I firmly believe, every Englishman I ever met has read,
+and upon which they have bestowed the most unqualified approval as the
+truest picture of American life and character they have ever found)
+entertains him for but a very short period at a time.
+
+So a netting is placed about the upper deck for him, and he plays
+cricket; not only he, but his wife and his sister and his mother and the
+unattached young ladies under the captain's care, who are going out to
+India, presumably to be met at the wharf by prospective husbands. There
+is something most charming in the absolute equality which this sport
+entails, and the seriousness with which the English regard it. We could
+not in America expect a white-haired lady with spectacles to bowl
+overhand, or to see that it is considered quite as a matter of course
+that she should do it by the member of the last Oxford eleven, nor would
+our young women be able to hold a hot ball, or to take it with the hands
+crossed and only partly open, and not palm to palm and wide apart. An
+American, as a rule, walks in order that he may reach a certain point,
+but the Englishman walks for the sake of the walking. And he plays
+games, also, apparently for the exercise there is in them; games in
+which people sit in a circle and discuss whether love or reason should
+guide them in going into matrimony do not appeal to him so strongly as
+do "Oranges and lemons," or "Where are you, Jacob?" which is a very fine
+game, in which an early training in sliding to bases gives you a certain
+advantage. It is certainly instructive to hear a captain who got his
+company through storming Fort Nilt last year in the Pamir inquire,
+anxiously, "Oranges or lemons? Yes, I know. But _which_ should I say,
+old chap? I'm a little rusty in the game, you know." If people can get
+back to the days when they were children by playing games, or in any
+other way, no one can blame them.
+
+The island of Gozo rose up out of the sea on the fourth day--a yellow
+rib of rock on the right, with houses and temples on it--and
+demonstrated how few days of water are necessary to rob one's memory of
+the usual look of a house. One would imagine by the general interest in
+them that we had spent the last few years of our lives in tents, or in
+the arctic regions under huts of snow and ice. And then the ship heads
+in towards Malta, and instead of dropping anchor and waiting for a
+tender, glides calmly into what is apparently its chief thoroughfare. It
+is like a Venice of the sea, and you feel as though you were intruding
+in a gentleman's front yard. The houses and battlements and ramparts lie
+close on either side, so near that one could toss a biscuit into the
+hands of the Tommies smoking on the guns, or the natives lounging on the
+steps that run from the front doors into the sea itself. The yard-arms
+reach above the line of the house-tops, and the bowsprit seems to
+threaten havoc with the window-panes of the custom-house. We are not
+apparently entering a harbor, but steaming down the main street of a
+city--a city of yellow limestone, with streets, walls, houses, and waste
+places all of yellow limestone. We might, for all the disturbance we are
+making, be moving forward in a bark canoe, and not in an ocean steamer
+drawing twenty-five feet of water. And then when the anchor drops,
+dozens of little boats, yellow and green and blue, with high posts at
+the bow and sterns like those on gondolas, shoot out from the steps, and
+their owners clamor for the proud privilege of carrying us over the
+few feet of water which runs between the line of houses and the ship's
+sides.
+
+[Illustration: STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA]
+
+There was at the Centennial Exposition the head of a woman cut in
+butter, which attracted much attention from the rural visitors. For this
+they passed by the women painted on canvas or carved in marble, they
+were too like the real thing, and the countrymen probably knew how
+difficult it is to make butter into moulds. For some reason Malta
+reminds you of this butter lady. It is a real city--with real houses and
+cathedral and streets, no doubt, but you have a feeling that they are
+not genuine, and that though it is very cleverly done, it is, after all,
+a city carved out of cheese or butter. Some of the cheese is mouldy and
+covered with green, and some of the walls have holes in them, as has
+aerated bread or _Schweitzerkase_, and the streets and the pavements,
+and the carved facades of the churches and opera-house, and the earth
+and the hills beyond--everything upon which your eye can rest is glaring
+and yellow, with not a red roof to relieve it; it is all just yellow
+limestone, and it looks like Dutch cheese. It is like no other place
+exactly that you have ever seen. The approach into the canal-like harbor
+under the guns and the search-lights of the fortifications, the moats
+and drawbridges, and the glaring monotony of the place itself, which
+seems to have been cut out of one piece and painted with one brush,
+suggest those little toy fortresses of yellow wood which appear in the
+shop windows at Christmas-time.
+
+Of course the first and last thought one has of Malta is that the island
+was the home of the Order of the Knights of St. John, or Knights
+Hospitallers. This order, which was the most noble of those of the days
+of mediaeval chivalry, was composed of that band of warrior monks who
+waged war against the infidels, who kept certain vows, and who, under
+the banner of the white cross, became honored and feared throughout the
+then known world. Their headquarters changed from place to place during
+the four hundred years that stretched from the eleventh century, when
+the order was first established, up to 1530, when Charles V. made over
+Malta and all its dependencies in perpetual sovereignty to the keeping
+of these Knights. They had no sooner fortified the island than there
+began the nine months' siege of the Turks, one of the most memorable
+sieges in history. When it was ended, the Turks re-embarked ten thousand
+of the forty thousand men they had landed, and of the nine thousand
+Knights present under the Grand Master Jean de la Valette when the siege
+had opened, but six hundred capable of bearing arms remained alive.
+
+The order continued in possession of their island until the beginning of
+the nineteenth century, when the French, under General Bonaparte, took
+it with but little trouble. The French in turn were besieged by Maltese
+and English, and after two years capitulated. In 1814 the island was
+transferred to England. It now, in its monuments and its memories,
+speaks of the days of chivalry; but present and mixed with these is the
+ubiquitous red coat of the British soldier; and the eight-pointed
+Maltese cross, which suggests Ivanhoe, is placed side by side with the
+lion and the unicorn; the culverin has given way to the quick-throbbing
+Maxim gun, the Templar's sword to the Lee-Metford rifle, and the heroes
+of Walter Scott to the friends of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
+
+The most conspicuous relic of the French occupation is not a noble one.
+It is the penitential hood of the Maltese woman--a strangely picturesque
+article of apparel, like a cowl or Shaker bonnet, only much larger than
+the latter, and with a cape which hangs over the shoulders. The women
+hold the two projecting flaps of the hood together at the throat, and
+unless you are advancing directly towards them, their faces are quite
+invisible. The hoods and capes are black, and are worn as a penance for
+the frailty of the women of Malta when the French took the place and
+robbed the churches, and pillaged the storehouses of the Knights, and
+bore themselves with less restraint than the infidel Turks had done.
+
+Malta retains a slight suggestion of mediaevalism in the garb of the
+Capuchin monks, whose tonsured heads and bare feet and roped waists look
+like a masquerade in their close proximity to the young officers in
+tweeds and varnished boots. But one gets the best idea of the past from
+the great Church of St. John, which is full of the trophies and gifts of
+the Grand Masters of the Order, and floored with two thousand marble
+tombs of the Knights themselves. Each Grand Master vied with those who
+had preceded him in enriching this church, and each Knight on his
+promotion made it a gift, so that to-day it is rich in these and
+wonderfully beautiful. This is the chief show-place, and the Governor's
+palace is another, and, to descend from the sublimity of the past to the
+absurdity of the present, so is also the guard-room of the officer of
+the day, which generations of English subalterns have helped to
+decorate. Each year a committee of officers go over the pictures on its
+walls and rub out the least amusing, and this survival of the fittest
+has resulted in a most entertaining gallery of black and white.
+
+The Order of Jerusalem, or of St. John, still obtains in Europe, and
+those who can show fourteen quarterings on one side and twelve on the
+other are entitled to belong to it; but they are carpet knights, and
+wearing an enamel Maltese cross on the left side of an evening coat is a
+different thing from carrying it on a shield for Saracens to hack at.
+
+[Illustration: BRINDISI]
+
+Sicily showed itself for a few hours while the boat continued on its way
+to Brindisi; and as that day happened to be the 4th of March, the
+captain of the _Sutlej_ was asked to make a calculation for which there
+will be no further need for four years to come. This calculation
+showed at what point in the Mediterranean ocean the _Sutlej_ would be
+when a President was being inaugurated in Washington, and at the proper
+time the passengers were invited to the cabin, and the fact that a
+government was changing into the hands of one who could best take care
+of it was impressed upon them in different ways. And later, after
+dinner, the captain of the _Sutlej_ made a speech, and said things about
+the important event (which he insisted on calling an election) which was
+then taking place in America, and the English cheered and drank the new
+President's health, and the two Americans on board, who fortunately were
+both good Democrats, felt not so far from home as before.
+
+You must touch at Brindisi, which is situated on the heel of the boot of
+Italy, if you wish to go a part of the way by land from the East to
+London or from London to the East. And as many people prefer travelling
+forty-eight hours across the Continent to rounding Gibraltar, one hears
+often of Brindisi, and pictures it as a shipping port of the importance
+of Liverpool or Marseilles. Instead of which it is as desolate as a
+summer resort in midwinter, and is like that throughout the year. There
+was a long, broad stone wharf, and tall stucco houses behind, and banks
+of coal which suggested the rear approach to Long Island City, and the
+soft blue Italian skies of which we had read were steely blue, and most
+of us wore overcoats. We lay bound fast to the wharf, with a plank
+thrown from the boat's side to the quay, for the day, and we had free
+permission to learn to walk on streets again for full twenty-four hours;
+but after facing the wind, and dodging guides who had nothing to show,
+we came back by preference to the clean deck and the steamer-chair.
+Desperate-looking Italian soldiers with feathers in their hats, and
+custom-house officers, and gendarmes paraded up and down the quay for
+our delectation, and a wicked little boy stood on the pier-head and sang
+"Ta-ra-ra-boom-chi-ay," pointedly varying this knowledge of our several
+nationalities by crying: "I _say_, buy box matches. Get out." This show
+of learning caused him to be regarded by his fellows with much envy, and
+they watched us to see how far we were impressed.
+
+[Illustration: PILLAR OF CAESAR AT BRINDISI]
+
+There are two things which need no newspaper advertising and which
+recognize no geographical lines; one is a pretty face and the other is a
+good song. I have seen photographs for sale of Isabelle Irving and
+Lillian Russell in as different localities as Santiago in Cuba, and
+Rotterdam, and I saw a play-bill in San Antonio, Texas, upon which the
+Countess Dudley and the Duchess of Leinster were reproduced under the
+names of the Walsh Sisters. A good song will travel as far, changing its
+name, too, perhaps, and its words, but keeping the same melody that has
+pleased people in a different part of the world. When the moon came out
+at Brindisi and hid the heaps of coal, and showed only the white houses
+and the pillar of Caesar, a party of young men with guitars and
+mandolins gathered under the bow and sang a song called "Oh, Caroline,"
+which I had last heard Francis Wilson sing as a part of the score of
+"The Lion-tamer," to very different words. As the scene of "The
+Lion-tamer" is laid in Sicily, the song was more or less in place; but
+the contrast between the dark-browed Italian and Mr. Wilson's genial
+countenance which the song brought back was striking. And on the night
+after we had left Brindisi, when the crew gave a concert, one of them
+sang "Oh, promise me," and some one asked if the song had yet reached
+America. I did not undeceive him, but said it had.
+
+After Brindisi the hands of the clock go back a few thousand years, and
+we see Cethdonia, where Ulysses owned much property, and Crete, from
+whence St. Paul set sail, with its long range of mountains covered with
+snow, and then we come back to the present near the island of Zante,
+where the earthquake moved a month ago and swallowed up the homes of the
+people.
+
+The _Sutlej_ had been going out of her course all of the fourth day in
+order to dodge possible islands thrown up by the earthquake, and she was
+late. That night, as she steamed forward at her best speed, the level
+oily sea fell back from her bows with a steady ripple as she cut it in
+two and turned it back out of the way. A light on the horizon, like a
+policeman's lantern, which changed to the burnt-out end of a match and
+back again to a bull's-eye, told us that beyond the light lay the level
+sands of Egypt, almost as far-reaching and monotonous as the sea that
+touched its shore.
+
+[Illustration: APPROACH TO ISMAILIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL]
+
+The force of habit is very strong on many people, and if they approach
+the land of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra an hour after their usual
+bedtime, they feel no inclination to diverge from their usual habits on
+that account. When you consider how many hours there are for slumber,
+and how many are given to dances, you would think one hour of sleep
+might be spared out of a lifetime in order that you could see Port Said
+at night. There was a long line of lamps on the shore, like a gigantic
+row of footlights or a prairie fire along the horizon, and we passed
+towards this through buoys with red and green lights, with a long
+sea-wall reaching out on one side, and the natural reef of jagged rocks
+rising black out of the sea in the path of the moon on the other. Then
+black boats shot out from the shore and assailed us with strange cries,
+and men in turbans and long robes, and negroes in what looked like
+sacking, and which probably was sacking, but which could not hide the
+suppleness and strength of their limbs, climbed up over the high sides.
+These were the coal-trimmers making way for the black islands, filled
+with black coal and blacker men, who made fast to the side and began
+feeding the vessel through a blazing hole like an open fireplace in her
+iron side. Four braziers filled with soft coal burnt with a fierce red
+flame from the corners of the barges, and in this light from out of
+the depths half-naked negroes ran shrieking and crying with baskets of
+coal on their shoulders to the top of an inclined plank, and stood there
+for a second in the full glare of the opening until one could see the
+whites of their eyes and the sweat glistening on the black faces. Then
+they pitched the coal forward into the lighted opening, as though they
+were feeding a fire, and disappeared with a jump downward into the pit
+of blackness. The coal dust rose in great curtains of mist, through
+which the figures of the men and the red light showed dimly and with
+wavering outline, like shadows in an iron-mill, and through it all came
+their cries and shouts, and the roar of the coal blocks as they rattled
+down into the hold.
+
+Port Said occupies the same position to the waters of the world as Dodge
+City once did to the Western States of America--it is the meeting-place
+of vessels from every land over every water, just as Dodge City was the
+meeting-place of the great trails across the prairies. When a cowboy
+reached Dodge City after six months of constant riding by day and of
+sleeping under the stars by night, and with wild steers for company, he
+wanted wickedness in its worst form--such being the perversity of man.
+And you are told that Port Said offers to travellers and crew the same
+attractive features after a month or weeks of rough voyaging that Dodge
+City once offered to the trailsmen. In _The Light that Failed_ we are
+told that Port Said is the wickedest place on earth, that it is a sink
+of iniquity and a hole of vice, and a wild night in Port Said is
+described there with pitiless detail. Almost every young man who leaves
+home for the East is instructed by his friends to reproduce that night,
+or never return to civilization. And every sea-captain or traveller or
+ex-member of the Army of Occupation in Egypt that I met on this visit to
+the East either smiled darkly when he spoke of Port Said or raised his
+eyes in horror. They all agreed on two things--that it was the home of
+the most beautiful woman on earth, which is saying a good deal, and that
+it was the wickedest, wildest, and most vicious place that man had
+created and God forgotten. One would naturally buy pocket-knives at
+Sheffield, and ginger ale in Belfast, and would not lay in a stock of
+cigars if going to Havana; and so when guides in Continental cities and
+in the East have invited me to see and to buy strange things which
+caused me to doubt the morals of those who had gone before, I have
+always put them off, because I knew that some day I should visit Port
+Said. I did not want second-best and imitation wickedness, but the most
+awful wickedness of the entire world sounded as though it might prove
+most amusing. I expected a place blazing with lights, and with
+gambling-houses and _cafes chantants_ open to the air, and sailors
+fighting with bare knives, and guides who cheated and robbed you, or led
+you to dives where you could be drugged and robbed by others.
+
+[Illustration: STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL]
+
+So I went on shore and gathered the guides together, and told them for
+the time being to sink their rivalry and to join with loyal local pride
+in showing me the worst Port Said could do. They consulted for some
+time, and then said that they were sorry, but the only gambling-house in
+the place closed at twelve, and so did the only _cafe chantant_; and as
+it was now nearly half-past twelve, every one was properly in bed. I
+expressed myself fully, and they were hurt, and said that Egypt was a
+great country, and that after I had seen Cairo I would say so. So I told
+them I had not meant to offend their pride of country, and that I was
+going to Cairo in order to see things almost as old as wickedness, and
+much more worth while, and that all I asked of Port Said was that it
+should live up to its name. I told them to hire a house, and wake the
+people in Port Said up, and show me the very worst, lowest, wickedest,
+and most vicious sights of which their city boasted; that I would give
+them four hours in which to do it, and what money they needed. I should
+like to print what, after long consultation, the five guides of Port
+Said--which is a place a half-mile across, and with which they were
+naturally acquainted--offered me as the acme of riotous dissipation. I
+do not do so, not because it would bring the blush to the cheek of the
+reader, but to the inhabitants of Port Said, who have enjoyed a
+notoriety they do not deserve, and who are like those desperadoes in the
+West who would rather be considered "bad" than the nonentities that
+they are. I bought photographs, a box of cigarettes, and a cup of black
+coffee at Port Said. That cannot be considered a night of wild
+dissipation. Port Said may have been a sink of iniquity when Mr. Kipling
+was last there, but when I visited it it was a coaling station. I would
+hate to be called a coaling station if I were Port Said, even by me.
+
+When I awoke after my night of riot at Port Said the _Sutlej_ was
+steaming slowly down the Suez Canal, and its waters rippled against its
+sandy banks and sent up strange odors of fish and mud. On either side
+stretched long levels of yellow sand dotted with bunches of dark green
+grass, like tufts on a quilt, over which stalked an occasional camel,
+bending and rocking, and scorning the rival ship at its side. You have
+heard so much of the Suez Canal as an engineering feat that you rather
+expect, in your ignorance, to find the banks upheld by walls of masonry,
+and to pass through intricate locks from one level to another, or at
+least to see a well-beaten towpath at its side. But with the exception
+of dikes here and there, you pass between slipping sandy banks, which
+show less of the hand of man than does a mill-dam at home, and you begin
+to think that Ferdinand de Lesseps drew his walking-stick through the
+sand from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and twenty thousand negroes
+followed him and dug a ditch. On either side of this ditch you see
+reproduced in real life the big colored prints which hung on the walls
+of the Sunday-School. There are the buffaloes drawing the ploughs of
+wood, and the wells of raw sun-baked clay, and the ditches and
+water-works of two cog-wheels and clay pots for irrigating the land, and
+the strings of camels, and the veiled women carrying earthen jars on the
+left shoulder. And beyond these stretches the yellow sand, not white and
+heavy, like our own, but dun-colored and fine, like dust, and over it
+amethyst skies bare of clouds, and tall palms. And then the boat stops
+again at Ismailia to let you off for Cairo, and the brave captains
+returning from leave, and the braver young women who are going out to
+work in hospitals, and the young wives with babies whom their
+fathers have not seen, and the commissioners returning to rule and
+bully a native prince, pass on to India, and you are assaulted
+by donkey-boys who want you to ride "Mark Twain," or "Lady Dunlo," or
+"Two-Pair-of-Black-Eyes-Oh-What-a-Surprise-Grand-Ole-Man." A jerky,
+rumbling train carries you from Ismailia past Tel-el-Kebir station,
+where the British army surprised the enemy by a night march and took a
+train back to Cairo in three hours. And then, after a five hours' ride,
+you stop at Cairo, and this chapter ends.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE
+
+
+As a rule, when you visit the capital of a country for the first time it
+is sufficient that you should have studied the history of that
+particular country in order that you may properly appreciate the
+monuments and the show-places of its chief cities; it is not necessary
+that you should be an authority on the history of Norway and Sweden to
+understand Paris or New York. For a full appreciation of most of the
+great cities of the world one finds a single red-bound volume of
+Baedeker to be all-sufficient; but when you go to Cairo, in order that
+you may understand all that lies spread out for your pleasure, you
+should first have mastered the Old and the New Testament, a complete
+history of the world, several of Shakespeare's plays, and the files of
+the London _Times_ for the past ten years. Almost every man who was
+great, not only in the annals of his own country, but in the history of
+the world, has left his mark on this oldest country of Egypt, as
+tourists to the Colosseum have scratched their initials on its stones,
+and so hope for immortality. You are shown in Cairo the monuments of
+great monarchs and of a great people, who were not known beyond the
+limits of their own country in contemporaneous history only because
+there was no contemporaneous history, and of those who came thousands of
+years later. The isle of Rodda, between the two banks of the Nile at
+Cairo, marks where Moses was found in the bulrushes; a church covers the
+stones upon which Mary and Joseph rested; in the city of Alexandria is
+the spot where Alexander the Great scratched his name upon the sands of
+Egypt; the mouldering walls of Old Cairo are the souvenirs of Caesar, as
+are the monuments upon which the Egyptians carved his name with
+"Autocrator" after it. At Actium and Alexandria you think of Antony and
+of the two women, so widely opposed and so differently beautiful, whom
+Sarah Bernhardt and Julia Neilson re-embody to-day in Paris and in
+London, and to whom Shakespeare and Kingsley have paid tribute.
+Mansoorah marks the capture of Saint-Louis of France, and the crescent
+and star which is floating over Cairo at this minute speak of Osman
+Sultan Selim I., with whom began the dependence of Egypt as a part of
+the Ottoman Empire. From there you see the windmills and bake-ovens of
+Napoleon, which latter, stretching for miles across the desert, mark the
+march of his army. Abukir speaks of Nelson and the battle of the Nile;
+and after him come the less momentous names Tel-el-Kebir and "England's
+Only General," Wolseley, and the fall of Khartoom and the loss of
+Gordon. The history of Egypt is the history of the Old World.
+
+Moses, Rameses II., Darius, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Mehemet Ali, and
+Nelson--these are all good names; and yet what they failed to do is
+apparently being done to-day by an Army of Occupation without force, but
+with the show of it only: not by a single great military hero, but by a
+lot of men in tweed suits who during business hours irrigate land and
+add up columns of irritating figures, and in their leisure moments
+solemnly play golf at the very base of the pyramids. The best of Cairo
+lies, of course, in that which is old, and not in what has been imported
+from the New World, and its most amusing features are the incongruities
+which these importations make possible. I am speaking of Cairo now from
+a tourist's point of view, and not from that of a political economist.
+He would probably be interested in the improved sanitation and the Mixed
+Tribunal.
+
+[Illustration: BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS]
+
+I had pictured Cairo as an Oriental city of much color, with beautiful
+minarets piercing the sky-line, and with much richness of decoration on
+the outside of its palaces and mosques. Cairo is divided into two parts,
+that which is old and decaying and that which is European and modern;
+the prevailing colors of both are gray, a dull yellow, and white. The
+mosques are of gray stone, the houses of dirty white, and in the new
+part the palaces and residences remind one of white Italian villas.
+These are surrounded by tropical gardens, which alone save the city from
+one monotonous variation of sombre colors. It is not, therefore, the
+buildings, either new or old, which make Cairo one of the most
+picturesque and incongruous and entertaining of cities in the whole
+world; it is the people who live in it and who move about in it, and who
+are so constantly in the streets that from the Citadel above the city
+its roar comes to you like the roar of London. In that city it is the
+voice of traffic and steam and manufactures, but in Cairo it emanates
+from the people themselves, who talk and pray and shout and live their
+lives out-of-doors. These people are the natives, the European
+residents, the Army of Occupation, and, during the winter months, the
+tourists. When you say natives you include Egyptians, Arabians, Copts,
+Syrians, negroes from the Upper Nile, and about a hundred other
+subdivisions, which embrace every known nationality of the East.
+
+Mixed with these are the residents, chiefly Greek and French and Turks,
+and the Army of Occupation, who, when they are not in beautiful
+uniforms, are in effective riding-clothes, and their wives and sisters
+in men's shirts and straw hats or Karkee riding-habits. The tourists,
+for their part, wear detective cameras and ready-made ties if they are
+Americans, and white helmets and pugarees floating over their necks and
+white umbrellas if they are English. This latter tropical outfit is
+spoiled somewhat by the fact that they are forced to wear overcoats the
+greater part of the time; but as they always take the overcoats off when
+they are being photographed at the base of the pyramids, their envious
+friends at home imagine they are in a warm climate.
+
+The longer you remain in Cairo the more satisfying it becomes, as you
+find how uninterruptedly the old, old life of the people is going on
+about you, and as you discover for yourself bazars and mosques and tiny
+workshops and open cafes of which the guide-books say nothing, and to
+which there are no guides. You can see all the show-places in Cairo of
+which you have read in a week, and yet at the end of the week you feel
+as though what you had seen was not really the city, but just the goods
+in the shop-window. So keep away from show-places. Lose yourself in the
+streets, or sit idly on the terrace of your hotel and watch the show
+move by, feeling that the best of it, after all, lies in the fact that
+nothing you see is done for show; that it is all natural to the people
+or the place; that if they make pictures of themselves, they do so
+unconsciously; and that no one is posing except the tourist in his pith
+helmet.
+
+The bazars in Cairo cover much ground, and run in cliques according to
+the nature of the goods they expose for sale. From a narrow avenue of
+red and yellow leather shoes you come to another lane of rugs and
+curtains and cloth, and through this to an alley of brass--brass lamps
+and brass pots and brass table-tops--and so on into groups of
+bookbinders, and of armorers, and sellers of perfumes. These lanes are
+unpaved, and only wide enough at places for two men to push past at one
+time; at the widest an open carriage can just make its way slowly, and
+only at the risk of the driver's falling off his box in a paroxysm of
+rage. The houses and shops that overhang these filthy streets are as
+primitive and old as the mud in which you tramp, but they are
+fantastically and unceasingly beautiful. On the level of the street is
+the bazar--a little box with a show-case at one side, and at the back an
+oven, or a forge, or a loom, according to the nature of the thing which
+is being made before your eyes. Goldsmiths beat and blow on the raw
+metal as you stand at their elbow; bakers knead their bread; laundrymen
+squirt water over the soiled linen; armorers hammer on a spear-head,
+which is afterwards to be dug up and sold as an assegai from the Soudan;
+and the bookbinders to the Khedive paste and tool the leather boxes for
+his Highness with the dust from the street covering them and their work,
+with two dogs fighting for garbage at their feet, and the uproar of
+thousands of people ringing in their ears. The Oriental cannot express
+himself in the street without shouting. Everybody shouts--donkey-boys
+and drivers, venders of a hundred trifles, police and storekeepers,
+auctioneers and beggars. They do not shout occasionally, but
+continually. They have to shout, or they will either trample on some one
+or some one will as certainly trample on them. Camels and donkeys and
+open carriages and mounted police move through the torrent of
+pedestrians as though they were figures of the imagination, and had no
+feelings or feet. On the second story over each bazar is the home of its
+owner. The windows of this story are latticed, and bulge forward so that
+the women of the harem may look down without being themselves seen.
+Above these are square, heavy balconies of carved open wood-work, very
+old and very beautiful. Scattered through the labyrinth of the bazars
+are the mosques, with wide, dirty steps covered with the red and yellow
+shoes of the worshippers within, and with high minarets, and facades
+carved in relief with sentences from the Koran, or with the name of the
+Sultan to whom the temple is dedicated.
+
+[Illustration: GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL]
+
+The bazars are very much as one imagines they should be, the fact that
+impresses you most about them being, I think, that such beautiful things
+should come from such queer little holes of dirt and poverty, and that
+you should stand ankle-deep in mud while you are handling turquoises and
+gold filigree-work as delicate as that of Regent Street or Broadway. At
+the bazars to which the dragomen take tourists you will be invited to
+sit down on a cushion and to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, but you
+will pay, if you purchase anything, about a pound for each cup of coffee
+you take. The best bazars for bargains are those in Old Cairo, to which
+you should go alone. In either place it is the rule to offer one-third
+of what you are asked--as I found it was not the rule to do in
+Tangier--and it is not always safe to offer a third unless you want the
+article very much, as you will certainly get it at that price. You feel
+much more at home in the bazars and the cafes and in all of the
+out-of-door life of Cairo than in that of Tangier, owing to the
+good-nature of the Egyptian. The Moor resents your presence, and though
+that in itself is attractive, the absolute courtesy of the Egyptian,
+when it is not, as it seldom is, servility, has also its advantage. If
+you raised your stick to a Moorish donkey-boy, for instance, you would
+undoubtedly have as much rough-and-tumble fighting as you could attend
+to at one time; but you have to beat an Egyptian donkey-boy, or strike
+at him, or a dozen of him, if you want peace, and every time you hit him
+he comes up smiling, and with renewed assurances that the Flying
+Dutchman is a very good donkey, and that all the other donkeys are
+"velly sick." There is nothing so inspiring as the sight of a carefully
+bred American girl, who would feel remorse if she scolded her maid,
+beating eight or nine donkey-boys with her umbrella, until she breaks
+it, and so rides off breathless but triumphant. This shows that
+necessity knows no laws of social behavior.
+
+When you are weary of fighting your way through the noise and movement
+of the bazars, you can find equal entertainment on the terrace of your
+hotel. There are several hotels in Cairo. There is one to which you
+should certainly go if you like to see your name encompassed by those of
+countesses and princes, and of Americans who spell Smith with a "y" and
+put a hyphen between their second and third names. There are, as I say,
+a great many hotels in Cairo, but Shepheard's is so historical, and its
+terrace has been made the scene of so many novels, that all sorts of
+amusing people go there, from Sultans to the last man who broke the bank
+at Monte Carlo, and its terrace is like a private box at a mask ball.
+About the best way to see Cairo is in a wicker chair here under waving
+palms, something to smoke, and with a warm sun on your back, and the
+whole world passing by in front of you. Broadway, I have no doubt, is an
+interesting thoroughfare to those who do not know it. I should judge
+from the view one has of the soles of numerous boots planted against the
+windows of hotels along its course that Broadway to the visiting
+stranger is an infinite source of entertainment. But there are no camels
+on Broadway, and there are no sais.
+
+A camel by itself is one of the most interesting animals that has ever
+been created, but when it blocks the way of a dog-cart, and a smart
+English groom endeavors to drive around it, the incongruity of the
+situation appeals to you as nothing on Broadway can ever do. Mr.
+Laurence Hutton, who was in Cairo before I reached it, has pointed out
+that the camel is the real aristocrat of Egypt. The camel belongs to one
+of the very first families; he was there when Mena ruled, and he is
+there now. It does not matter to him whether it is a Pharaoh or a
+Mameluke or a Napoleon or a Mixed Tribunal that is in power, his gods
+are unchanged, and he and the palm-tree have preserved their ancient
+individuality through centuries. He shows that he knows this in the
+proud way in which he holds his head, and in his disdainful manner of
+waving and unwinding his neck, and in the rudeness with which he impedes
+traffic and selfishly considers his own comfort. These are the signs of
+ancient lineage all the world over. He is not the shaggy, moth-eaten
+object we see in the circus tent at home. He is nicely shaven, like a
+French poodle, and covered with fine trappings, and he bends and struts
+with the dignity of a peacock. He possesses also that uncertainty of
+conduct that is the privilege of a royal mind; fellahin and Arabs
+pretend they are his masters, and lead him about with a rope, but that
+never disturbs him nor breaks his spirit. When he wants to lie down he
+lies down, whether he is in the desert or in the Ezbekiyeh Road; and
+when he decides to get up he leaves you in doubt for some feverish
+seconds as to which part of him will get up first. To properly
+appreciate the camel you should ride him and experience his getting up
+and his sitting down. He never does either of these things the same way
+twice. Sometimes he breaks one leg in two or three places where it had
+never broken before, and sinks or rises in a northeasterly direction,
+and then suddenly changes his course and lurches up from the rear, and
+you grasp his neck wildly, only to find that he is sinking rapidly to
+one side, and rising, with a jump equal to that of a horse taking a
+fence, in the front. He can disjoint himself in more different places,
+than explorers have found sources for the river Nile, and there is no
+keener pleasure than that which he affords you in watching the
+countenance of a friend who is being elevated on his back for the first
+time. He and the palm-tree can make any landscape striking, and he and
+the sais are the most picturesque features of Cairo.
+
+The sais is a runner who keeps in front of a carriage and warns common
+people out of the way, and who beats them with a stick if they do not
+hurry up about it. He is a relic of the days when the traffic in all of
+the streets was so congested that he was an absolute necessity; now he
+makes it possible for a carriage to move forward at a trot, which
+without his aid it could not do. It is obvious that to do this he must
+run swiftly. Most men when they run bend their bodies forward and keep
+their mouths closed in order to save their wind. The sais runs with his
+shoulders thrown back and trumpeting like an enraged elephant. He holds
+his long wand at his side like a musket, and not trailing in his hand
+like a walking-stick, and he wears a soft shirt of white stuff, and a
+sleeveless coat buried in gold lace. His breeches are white, and as
+voluminous as a woman's skirts; they fall to a few inches above his
+knee; the rest of his brown leg is bare, and rigid with muscle. On his
+head he has a fez with a long black tassel, and a magnificent silk scarf
+of many colors is bound tightly around his waist. He is a perfect ideal
+of color and movement, and as he runs he bellows like a bull, or roars
+as you have heard a lion roar at feeding-time in a menagerie. It is not
+a human cry at all, and you never hear it, even to the last day of your
+stay in Cairo, without a start, as though it were a cry of "help!" at
+night, or the quick-clanging bell of a fire-engine. There is nothing
+else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are sometimes two sais
+running abreast, dressed exactly alike, and with the upper part of their
+bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their side, and with the
+ends of their scarf and the long tassel streaming out behind. As they
+yell and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people scramble out of their
+way until the carriage they precede has rolled rapidly by. Only
+princesses of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the heads of the
+Army of Occupation and the Egyptian army are permitted two sais; other
+people may have one. They appealed to me as much more autocratic
+appendages than a troop of lifeguards. The rastaquouere who first
+introduces them in Paris will make his name known in a day, and a Lord
+Mayor's show or a box-seat on a four-in-hand will be a modest and
+middle-class distinction in comparison.
+
+[Illustration: A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS]
+
+These camels and sais are but two of the things you see from your wicker
+chair on the marble terrace at Shepheard's. The others are hundreds of
+donkey-boys in blue night-gowns slit open at the throat and showing
+their bare breasts, and with them as many long-eared donkeys, rendered
+even more absurd than they are in a state of nature by fantastic
+clippings of their coats and strings of jangling brass and blue beads
+around their necks.
+
+There are also the women of Cairo, the enslaved half of Egypt, who have
+been brought, through generations of training and tradition, to look
+upon any man save their husband as their enemy, as a thing to be
+shunned. This has become instinct with them, as it is instinctive with
+women of Northern countries to turn to men for sympathy or support, as
+being in some ways stronger than themselves. But these women of Cairo,
+who look like an army of nuns, are virtually shut off from mankind, with
+the exception of one man, as are nuns, and they have not the one great
+consolation allowed the nun--they have no souls to be saved, nor
+religion, nor a belief in a future life.
+
+There was a young girl married while I was in Cairo. The streets around
+the palace of her father were hung with flags for a week; the garden
+about his house was enclosed with a tent which was worth in money twenty
+thousand dollars, and which was as beautiful to the eye as the interior
+of a mosque; for a week the sheiks who rented the estates of the high
+contracting parties were fed at their expense; for a week men sang and
+bands played and the whole neighborhood feasted; and on the last night
+everybody went to the wedding and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and
+listened to a young man singing Arabian love-songs. I naturally did not
+see the bride. The women who did see her described her as very
+beautiful, barely sixteen years old, and covered with pearls and
+diamonds. She was weeping bitterly; her mother, it appeared, had
+arranged the match. I did not see her, but I saw the bridegroom. He was
+fat and stupid, and over sixty, and he had white hair and a white beard.
+A priest recited the Koran before him at the door of the house, and a
+band played, and the people cheered the Khedive three times, and then
+the crowd parted, and the bridegroom was marched to the door which led
+to the stairs, at the top of which the girl awaited him. Two grinning
+eunuchs crouched on this dark staircase, with lamps held high above
+their heads, and closed the door behind him. His sixteen-year-old bride
+has him to herself now--him and his eunuchs--until he or she dies. We
+could show similitudes between this wedding and some others in civilized
+lands, but it is much too serious a matter to be cynical about.
+
+The women of Egypt are as much slaves as ever were the negroes of our
+South. They are petted and fattened and given a home, but they must look
+at life through barriers--barriers across their boxes at the opera, and
+barriers across the windows of their broughams when they drive abroad,
+and barriers across their very faces. As long as one-half of the
+Egyptian people are enslaved and held in bondage and classed as animals
+without souls, so long will an Army of Occupation ride over the land,
+and insult by its presence the khedival power. No country in these days
+can be truly great in which the women have no voice, no influence, and
+no respect. There are worse things in Egypt than bad irrigation, and the
+harem is the worst of them. If the Egyptians want to be free themselves,
+they should first free their daughters and their mothers. The educated
+Egyptian is ashamed of his national costume; but let him feel shame for
+some of his national customs. A frock-coat and a harem will not go
+together.
+
+The English, who have done so many fine things for Egypt's good, and who
+keep an army there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that any slave
+who comes to the office of the Consul-General and claims his protection
+can have it; but these slaves of the married men are not granted even
+this chance of escape.
+
+And so they live like birds in a cage. They eat and dress and undress,
+and expose their youth and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness,
+until they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago was, "Egypt for
+the Egyptians," and a very good cry it was, although the wrong man first
+started it. But there was another cry raised in the land of Egypt many
+hundreds of years before of "Let my people go," and the woman who can
+raise that again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of the East,
+will be doing a greater work than any woman is doing at the present time
+or has ever done.
+
+The women who pass before you in the procession at the foot of the
+terrace are of two classes only. There is no middle class in Egypt. The
+poor are huddled up in a black bag that hides their bodies from the
+crown of the head to the feet. What looks like the upper end of a black
+silk stocking falls over the face from the bridge of the nose and
+fastens behind the ears, and a brass tube about the size of a spool is
+tied between the eyes. You see in consequence nothing but their eyes,
+and as these are perhaps their best feature, they do not all suffer from
+their enforced disguise. The only women whose bare faces you can see,
+and from whom you may judge of the beauty of the rest, are the good
+women of the Coptic village, who form a sort of sisterhood, and the
+dancing-girls, who are not so good. Some of these have the straight
+nose, the narrow eyes, and the perfect figure of Cleopatra, as we
+picture her; but the faces of the majority are formless, with broad, fat
+noses, full lips, and their figures are without waists or hips, and
+their ankles are as round as a man's upper arm. When they are pretty
+they are very pretty, but those that are so are so few and are so
+covered with gold that one suspects they are very much the exception. Of
+the women of the upper class you see only a glimpse as they are swept by
+in their broughams, with the sais in front and a eunuch on the box and
+the curtains half lowered.
+
+[Illustration: SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS
+
+(From a Photograph taken on the top of the Pyramid just before sunset)]
+
+Besides these, much passes that is intended for your especial
+entertainment. Sellers of turquoises, which they dig out from various
+creases in their robes; venders of stuffed crocodiles and live monkeys;
+strange men from the desert with a jackal, which they throw, bound by
+all four legs, and snarling and snapping, on the marble at your feet;
+little girls who sing songs, and play accompaniments to them on their
+throats with the tips of their fingers; women conjurers, who draw
+strings of needles and burning flax from their mouths, and who swallow
+nasty little wriggling snakes, and hatch pretty fluffy little chickens
+out of the slabs of the terrace. Or else there is a troop of blue and
+white Egyptian soldiers marching by, or gorgeous young officers on polo
+ponies, or red-coated Tommies on donkeys, with their toes trailing in
+the dust and the ribbons of their Scotch caps floating out behind; and
+consuls-general with gorgeous guards in gold lace, and with
+wicked-looking curved silver swords; or the young Khedive himself, who
+comes with a great clatter of hoofs and bellowing sais before, and
+another galloping troop of cavalry in the rear, at the sound of which
+the people run to the curb and touch the fez, as he raises his hand to
+his, and rolls by in a cloud of dust.
+
+There are very good things to see, and with a companion on one side to
+explain them, and another on the other side to whom you can impart this
+information as though you had been born knowing it, you cannot spend a
+more entertaining afternoon. There is only one drawback, and that is a
+lurking doubt that you should be up and about seeing the show-places.
+Friday, in consequence, is the best day in Cairo, as all the things you
+ought to see are then closed, and you can sit still on the terrace with
+a clear conscience. Among the mosques and the tombs and the palaces and
+museums to which all good tourists go, and of which there are excellent
+descriptions, giving their various dimensions and other particulars, in
+the guide-books, there are the Citadel and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali.
+The Citadel is the fortress built on the hill above the city, but which,
+with the Oriental incompleteness of that time, was reared upon high but
+not upon the highest ground. The sequel to this naturally was that when
+Mehemet Ali wanted the city of Cairo he sought out the highest ground,
+and dropped cannon-balls into the fortress until it capitulated. He
+afterwards asked all the Mamelukes to dinner at the Citadel, and then
+had them treacherously killed--all but one, who rode his horse down the
+side of the Citadel and escaped. If you can imagine the reservoir at
+Forty-second Street placed upon the top of Madison Square Garden, and a
+man riding down the side of it, you can understand what a very difficult
+and dangerous thing this was to do. There is no doubt that he did it,
+for I saw a picture of him in the very act in a book of history when I
+was at school, and I also have seen the marks of his horse's hoofs in
+the stone parapet of the Citadel, and they are just as fresh as they
+were three years ago, when they were on the other side.
+
+The Mosque of Mehemet Ali surmounts the Citadel, and its twin minarets
+are the distinguishing mark of Cairo; they are as conspicuous for miles
+above the city as is the dome of St. Paul's over London, and they are as
+light and graceful as it is impressive and heavy. The men on guard tie
+big yellow shoes on your feet before they allow you to enter this
+mosque, the outer court-yard of which is floored with alabaster, over
+which you slide as though you were on a mirror or a sheet of ice. It is
+very beautiful, and one is as unwilling to walk on it as to tramp in
+muddy boots over a satin train. The floor of the mosque is covered with
+the most magnificent rugs, as wide-spreading as a sheet and as heavy as
+so much gold; alabaster pillars reach to the top of the square, empty
+building, and from these rise five domes, colored blue and red, and
+lightened with gilded letters. It is very rich-looking, gloomy, silent,
+and impressive. It is the best of the mosques. From the outside, on the
+ramparts, you can see Cairo stretching out below for miles in a level
+gray jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slender minarets, with
+the high walls of a palace here and the thick green of a park there to
+break the monotony; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting ribbon of
+silver; and beyond that rich green fields and canals and bunches of
+palm-trees; and seven miles away, where the green ceases and the desert
+begins, are three monuments of gray stone, looking, at that distance,
+disappointingly small and familiarly commonplace. It is not, I think,
+until you have seen them several times, and have climbed to their top
+and gazed up at them from below, that you appreciate the pyramids as you
+had expected to appreciate them; but after they have laid their charm
+upon you, you will find yourself twisting your neck to take another
+look, or going out of your way to see them again before the sun has said
+good-night to them, as it has done ever since it first climbed over the
+edge of the world and found them waiting there.
+
+There is a mosque on the outside of the city which people visit on
+certain days to see the howling dervishes go through their peculiar form
+of worship. This mosque consists of four square walls with a dome. It is
+whitewashed within, and bare and rude and old. The sunlight enters it
+through square holes cut in the dome, and beats upon thirty or forty men
+who stand in a semicircle facing the East. They are of all sorts, from
+Arabs of the desert with long hair and wild eyes, to fat,
+pleased-looking merchants from the bazars, and the beggars and
+water-carriers of the streets. Around them on chairs are the tourists
+and the residents, like the spectators at a play rather than the guests
+of a religious sect watching a religious ceremony. Most of the men wear
+their hats, and some of the women take careful notes and make sketches.
+They reminded me of medical students at a clinic when a man is being cut
+up. An archdeacon from one of our Western cities wore his hat, to show,
+probably, that he disapproved of the whole thing; but as he used to eat
+with his knife while on board the _Fulda_, his conduct in any place was
+not to be considered. The priest recites something from the Koran, and
+the men repeat it, moving their bodies back and forward as they do so
+with gradually increasing rapidity. What they may be saying is quite
+unintelligible, and the chorus they make resembles that of no human
+sound, but rather the gasping or panting of an animal. It is to the
+visitor absolutely without any religious significance; all that is
+impressive about it is its horrible earnestness and its at times
+repulsive results. As the voice of the priest grows more accentuated the
+bodies of the men swing farther and lower, until their hair sweeps the
+floor, and their eyes, when they throw their bodies back, are on a
+level with those of the spectators. A drum beats in quickening time to
+the voice of the priest and to the gasps of the dervishes, and a flute
+playing a weird accompaniment seems to mock at their fierce grunts and
+breathings. It was one of the most unpleasant exhibitions I ever
+witnessed, and affected one's nerves to such a degree that several of
+the women had to leave. The eyes of the men rolled in their sockets, and
+their lips parted, and through their clinched teeth came fiercer and
+louder gasps, until the chorus of sound reached you like the quick
+panting of an engine as it draws out of a station. The sweat ran from
+them like water from a sponge, and the veins stood out on their faces,
+showing in congested knots beneath the skin. Some of them groaned, and
+others shrieked and cried out, "Allah! Allah!" This acted like the
+strokes of a whip on the others, who rocked more and more violently, and
+swung themselves almost off their feet. Then, as the music grew fainter
+the motion of the bending bodies grew less vigorous and finally ceased,
+and the men stood rigid, some apparently unmoved and unconcerned, and
+others turning and reeling in a fit.
+
+While this was going forward, and you felt as though you were assisting
+at a heathen rite in which self-punishment was being inflicted as a bid
+for God's indulgence, two interesting things happened. An officer in the
+English Army of Occupation turned to his dragoman and cried at the top
+of his voice, angrily: "Do you call this worth ten piasters? Well, I
+don't. Now if you've got anything to show me, take me to see it. This
+isn't worth coming to see. You're a rank impostor."
+
+[Illustration: A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID]
+
+The other thing was the act of a native woman, who brought her child to
+the door and handed it to a priest, who took it in his arms and passed
+with it in front of the swinging, gasping, crazy semicircle of men. The
+child was about three years old, and was dying, and the mother had
+brought it there to be cured by the breath of the dervishes. As it
+passed before them, the hair of some of the men swept its arm, and it
+turned its frightened eyes up to those of the priest, who smiled gravely
+down upon the baby and bore him outstretched in his arms three times in
+front of the swinging crescent. The faith of the child's mother appealed
+to some of us more than did the Englishman's desire to get his money's
+worth. The incident is only of interest here as showing perhaps why the
+Army of Occupation is not as popular as it might be. This officer was no
+doubt an excellent soldier--the ribbons on his tunic showed that--and no
+one would have thought of questioning his ability to handle raw recruits
+or his knowledge of tactics. But in handling the Egyptian tactics do not
+count for so much as tact.
+
+There are several ways of reaching the pyramids, and it is eminently in
+keeping with the other incongruities of the place and time that the most
+popular way of visiting them is on a four-in-hand coach, with a guard in
+a red coat and a bell-shaped white beaver tooting on his horn, and a
+young gentleman with a boutonniere and an unhappy smile holding the
+reins and working his way in and out between long strings of camels.
+There is a very smart hotel about two hundred yards from the foot of the
+pyramids, and you take a donkey there or a camel and ride up a sandy
+road to the base of the Pyramid of Cheops. There are then several things
+that you may do. You can either climb to the top of this first pyramid,
+or crawl into its interior, or walk over to see the Sphinx, or make a
+tour of subterranean tombs and passageways of alabaster and polished
+stones, which are lighted for you by magnesium wire or stumps of
+candles.
+
+It seems absurd to say that the Sphinx is disappointing, but so many who
+have seen it say so that I feel I am one of many, and not individually
+lacking in reverence or imagination. In the first place, the approach to
+it is bad; you come at the Sphinx not from the front, but from the rear,
+where all you can see of it is a round ball of crumbling stone spreading
+out from a neck of broken outline, much smaller and meaner than you had
+imagined it would be. In the second place, instead of looking up at it,
+or having it look down at you, you view it first from a semicircular
+ridge of sand, at the bottom of which it reposes, and at such a near
+view that whatever outline or character of countenance it once possessed
+is lost. I have seen photographs of the Sphinx, taken while I was in
+Cairo, much more impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a hollow of
+the sand hills as it does, the farther you move away from it in order to
+get a better focus, the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to it
+it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a theatre when you are on
+the wrong side of the foot-lights. I know that that is an unpopular
+thing to say, and that there are many who feel thrills when they first
+look upon the face of the Sphinx, and who describe their emotions to you
+at length, and who write down their impressions in their diaries when
+they get back to the hotel. But they have come a long way expecting to
+be thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappointed. Some of the
+sphinxes in the museum of Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the
+pyramids, impressed me more than did the one great Sphinx, though they
+were indoors and surrounded by attendants and the cheap decoration of
+the museum, once a palace for the harem. They were of green stone and of
+huge proportions, and with "the curling lip and sneer of cold command";
+and if you look at them long enough you feel uncomfortable shivers down
+your back, and a perfectly irrational impulse to rush at them and beat
+them in the face and force them to tell you what they know and what they
+have kept back and have been keeping back for centuries and centuries.
+Their faces show that they know all that we know and much besides that
+we shall never know, and when the world at last comes to an end they
+will stretch themselves and smile at one another and say: "Now _they_
+know it, but we knew it all the while. We could have told had we liked,
+but we have enjoyed watching them fretting and fuming and prying about
+and tinkering at our faces with their little hammers, and blowing us up
+with saltpetre only to try and put us back again with steam. We who have
+kept our secret from Herodotus and Caesar, are we likely to give it up to
+Ebers and Mark Twain?"
+
+But this same Sphinx by moonlight impressed me more than did anything I
+saw in the East. Not as one sees it by day, with tourists and
+photographers and donkey-boys making it cheap and familiar, but at
+night, when the tourists had gone to bed, and the donkey-boys had been
+paid to keep out of sight, and the moonlight threw the great negro face
+and the pyramids back of it into shadows of black and lines of silver,
+and the yellow desert stretched away on either side so empty and silent
+that I thought I was alone and back two thousand years in the past,
+discovering the great monuments for myself, and for the first time.
+
+Before you ascend the Pyramid of Cheops you must deal with a middle-man
+in the person of the sheik of the pyramids, who selects guides for you,
+and who acts as though the pyramids were his private show, and he was
+both sole proprietor and ticket-taker at the door. He lives in a village
+near by, and he and his forefathers have always been allowed a monopoly
+of the pyramids, and distribute their patronage to those guides who will
+pay them the highest percentage of what they receive from the visitors.
+You have three men to help you, two to pull, and one to push and to
+dilate on the view. It takes over ten minutes to climb to the top, with
+the men jerking at your wrists, and the third man shoving you from
+below. It is not a difficult feat, and women accomplish it every day,
+but it leaves you in a breathless state when you reach the summit, and
+you are stiff above the knees for a day or two after you have come down.
+When you have reached the summit the guides cheer feebly to give you the
+idea that you have accomplished something which has often been
+attempted before, but never so successfully; but you are not deceived,
+and you do not feel like cheering yourself. The view is worth the climb,
+however, and the sight of the shadow of the pyramid, spreading out over
+the villages and canals below like a black cloud, impresses you more
+with its immensity than the fact that it is a hundred feet higher than
+the top of the Diana on the Madison Square Garden tower. I am sure of
+this fact, because the man who built the Madison Square Garden assured
+me of it between breaths on the summit of the pyramid. While you are
+resting, the thing to do is to pay one of the guides to attempt to run
+down the pyramid you are on, cross the heavy sand to the pyramid beyond,
+and reach its top in eight minutes. When you give the word he disappears
+with a bound and drops into space, skipping and jumping and growing
+smaller and smaller as he goes, until he looks like a fluttering
+handkerchief; and when he reaches the sand he is as small as a child of
+three, and his ascent of the other pyramid suggests a white pigeon
+shuffling up the steep roof of a barn. It is distinctly on his part a
+sporting thing to do. The descent of the pyramid is very much worse than
+going up, and you need to go very slowly, and not to look too often at
+the people crawling about like ants below. Only four men, however, in
+six years have slipped and fallen during this descent, and one of them
+had been drinking. They were all killed. The more you see of the
+pyramids the more you want to see of them, although I think one
+ascent is all perhaps you will care about taking; but their dignity and
+the wonder of their being where they are, and for so long, increases
+with every look at them. You cannot grow too familiar with the pyramids.
+They will not have it.
+
+[Illustration: DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO]
+
+On the road back from the Pyramids of Gizeh there are other pyramids
+within sight of Cairo, but these are those with which the Sphinx is
+associated. You will see here one of the most beautiful sights of Cairo,
+the dahabeeyahs on the Nile. They and their white sails, especially when
+they come wing and wing before the wind, are the most beautiful of
+floating objects, and when there are hundreds of them coming towards you
+in lessening perspective, with the sun shining on the sails, and the
+banks on either side alive and moving with the palms, the river Nile
+becomes the best part of Cairo.
+
+There is another place on the Nile which you should visit, and to which
+tourists seldom go. This is the isle of Rodda, on the bank of which
+Moses was found, and where you may see the Nilometer. This is a well
+about sixteen feet in diameter, connected by a channel with the Nile. It
+is made of masonry, and down one side there runs a column on which are
+inscribed ancient Arabian and Cufic numerals, or what answer for
+numerals. It was dug many centuries ago, and it marks the rising and
+falling of the river, and at the same time the prosperity or dismay of
+Egypt. When the tide begins to rise, this rude instrument is watched
+hourly, and the hopes of the people rise and fall as the muddy water
+moves up or down the narrow well. When it reaches a certain height the
+sheik in charge declares that the time has come for cutting the banks
+and irrigating the land. In ancient days the rate of taxation was
+determined by the height of the inundation, and it is said that the
+sheik in charge of the Nilometer is still under the influence of the
+government, to whose advantage it is to make the fellahin believe that
+the inundation is favorable. It was the engineers under Napoleon who
+discovered that the Nilometer was being tampered with, but there is no
+likelihood of its being abused to-day under the English, whose
+improvement of the irrigation of Egypt has been their best work, and for
+the fellahin's best good. But it is interesting, nevertheless, to look
+down into the old well, overgrown with vines and surrounded by ruin and
+crumbling walls and broken lattices, and to think that for centuries it
+brought news of famine or of plenty, and that it was, primitive as its
+construction is, the pulse of Egypt.
+
+The pulse of Egypt to-day is not shown in the mere rising or falling of
+a body of water. It is less primitive in its construction, and no one
+knows which way it is going to jump. In the next chapter I shall try to
+tell something of the men who have their fingers on Egypt's pulse, and
+who are agreed in only one thing--that there are too many fingers for
+Egypt's good.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT
+
+
+When the visitor to Cairo first grasps the extent of his own ignorance
+of Egypt, and appreciates that if he is to understand its monuments and
+the signs of past times about him he must study the history of the whole
+world for forty centuries, he is apt to retreat precipitately. Later, as
+a compromise, he proposes skipping thirty-nine centuries and limiting
+his researches to the study of the political and social conditions of
+Egypt during the last ten years. And when he begins jauntily on this he
+finds that all that has gone before, from Rameses II. to Mehemet Ali, is
+as simple as the line of Popes in comparison with the anomalies and
+intricacies of government that have arisen within the last decade. Yet
+the very intricacies of the subject give to this study a fascination
+entirely apart from its rare picturesqueness, and no matter what manner
+of man he may be, he cannot but find some side of the situation which
+appeals to him. If his mind be constituted like that of a ready reckoner
+he can revel in unravelling the intricacies of the Caisse and the Laws
+of Liquidation; if it is judicial, he can perhaps elucidate the powers
+of the Mixed Tribunal; if romantic, he has the career of Ismail, the
+most magnificent of patriots and profligate of monarchs; and if it turns
+towards adventure and the clash of arms, he can read of the heroic
+fanaticism of Fuzzy Wuzzy, the son of the Mahdi, of the futile mission
+of Gordon, of Stewart's march across the desert, and of the desperate
+valor of the fight at Aboo-Klea.
+
+But it is the paradoxical nature of Egypt's present situation which
+gives it its chief interest, and lends to it the peculiar fascination of
+a puzzle, or one of Whistler's witticisms. For, while Egypt is not free,
+as is Morocco, nor under a protectorate, as is Tunis, she is still free
+and still protected. She is free to coin money, to maintain an army, and
+to make treaties; and yet she pays six million dollars a year tribute to
+Turkey as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and her army that she is allowed
+to maintain is officered by English soldiers, whom she is also allowed
+to maintain. She may not pay out the money she is allowed to coin
+without the consent of foreigners; she cannot punish the man who steals
+this money, be he Greek, English, or American, without the approval of
+these foreigners; and her official language is that of one foreign
+power, her ostensible protector is another, and her real protector is
+still another, whose commands are given under the irritating disguise of
+"advice."
+
+[Illustration: EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS]
+
+Alfred Milner, the late under-secretary for finance in Egypt, whose
+_England in Egypt_ is the best book on the subject, though it reads like
+a novel, has put it in this way: "It is not given to mortal intelligence
+to understand at one blow the complexities of Turkish suzerainty and
+foreign treaty rights; to realize the various powers of interference and
+obstruction possessed by consuls and consuls-general, by commissioners
+of the public debt, and other mixed administrations; to distinguish
+English officers who are English from English officers who are Egyptian,
+foreign judges of the international courts from foreign judges of the
+native courts; to follow the writhings of the Egyptian government in its
+struggle to escape from the fine meshes of the capitulations; to
+appreciate precisely what laws that government can make with the consent
+of only six powers, and for what laws it requires the consent of no less
+than fourteen."
+
+It seems rather unfair to saddle the responsibility for all of these
+burdens and for this remarkable condition of affairs, which is
+unequalled in history, upon the shoulders of one man, but one man is
+responsible for it directly and indirectly. He is still alive, a hanger
+on at the court of the Sultan of Turkey, he who was at one time the most
+picturesque monarch of the world. Ismail Pasha became Khedive a little
+before the time of the close of our Civil War. Egypt had never been more
+prosperous than then--owing but fifteen million dollars. In 1876, when
+Ismail was deposed and his son Tewfik Pasha put in his place, he had
+increased the debt of Egypt to four hundred and forty-five million
+dollars. Ismail was a typical Oriental ruler; he had the typical
+Oriental ruler's French veneer and education, a combination which has
+been found to produce most serious results. When an Oriental is left
+alone he is a barbarian, or he used to be; now, after he has been made
+the talk of Paris for nine days, and has been given a state dinner at
+Marlborough House, and a few stars for his coat, and called "cousin," he
+goes home with no particular disgust for his former eccentricities of
+mis-government, but with a quiver full of new tastes, desires, and
+ambitions, and thereafter plays his role of monarch with one eye on the
+grand stands of Europe. He wants their good opinion, but he wants to get
+it in his own way--the old way. He begins to build railroads and
+hospitals, but he continues, after his past custom, to draw the money
+for such improvements from licensed gambling-houses or from the sale of
+opium. He has a French cook, but he retains the kurbash; he puts up
+telephones, but he does not give up the bowstring.
+
+[Illustration: RIAZ PASHA,
+
+Prime-minister of Egypt]
+
+Ismail was the first Khedive who discovered that the easiest way to get
+money is to borrow it. He found that all one has to do is to sign a
+paper, and you get the money. It was very easy for Ismail to borrow
+money, because the credit of Egypt was good and sound in itself, and
+because foreigners, who even at that time swarmed in Egypt, knew that
+the repudiation of debts, while possible in a powerful or free
+government, was not to be feared from that country. So there began a
+reign of extravagance for which history has no parallel. If "money
+breeds money," it is also true that those who spend money freely are
+given more chances to do so than any one else. Adventurers, charlatans,
+rascals of every climate and every nationality, swarmed down upon Cairo,
+and fought with one another for a chance to glut themselves at the
+repast which this reckless profligate spread for all comers. No man
+probably was ever so basely cheated as was Ismail, or on so magnificent
+a scale. And nothing remains but ruins to show where the money spent on
+his own personal pleasure was bestowed. That other magnificent
+reprobate, William M. Tweed, left monuments like the Court House to
+commemorate his thefts of public money; but Ismail's palaces are falling
+in pieces, the rain has washed the paint off the boards, the tips of the
+crescents are broken, and great gardens filled with fountains and
+mosaic paths are choked with weeds and covered with fallen leaves and
+the dirt and dust of neglect and decay. You can walk over long marble
+floors which have sunk by their own weight through the rotten
+foundations, and see yourself at full length in bleared mirrors
+surrounded by the gilt borders and blue silken curtains of the Second
+Empire. Ismail ordered these palaces as men order hats, and threw them
+away as you toss an empty cartridge from a gun-barrel. And that was all
+the most of them ever were, empty cartridges, mere shells of wood
+painted to look like marble, and gilding and mirrors, as tasteless as
+the buildings at the Centennial Exposition, and lasting as long.
+
+And yet they pleased him, and he ordered more and more, so that wherever
+his eye might rest it would fall upon a palace which would serve as a
+fitting covering for his royal person, and as a testimony to his
+magnificence. He wanted many, and he wanted them at once. He had them
+built at night by the light of candles. The Palace of Gizeh, which is
+now a museum, was reared in this way while Cairo slept, and at a cost of
+twenty-four million dollars. The curtains ordered for its windows cost
+one thousand dollars each, and when it was found that they did not fit
+the windows, the entire front of the building was torn down, and a new
+front with windows to match the curtains was put in its place. He built
+an opera-house as fine as that of Covent Garden in six months, and a
+grotto as dark and cool as the Mammoth Cave, with stalactites of painted
+rope and rocks of papier-mache and mud, with its sides lined with
+aquariums, in which swam strange fish. The wind and the dust play
+through this grotto to-day; for he no sooner reared a palace in air than
+he turned from it to some new toy. These are the things you can see. You
+can hear stories--some of them true, some of them possible--of things
+that are past, such as his swimming-tanks where a hundred of the slaves
+of the harem bathed together for his edification; the pie out of which,
+when it was opened, there stepped a ballet-dancer; and the story of the
+disappearance of the Pasha who grew too rich. This is, unfortunately, a
+true story, and not one out of the _Arabian Nights_. This Pasha was
+invited by Ismail to see a new dahabeeyah, and never returned. But one
+of the attendants on the Khedive came back some weeks later with his
+finger bitten off at the joint. He and Ismail alone know where the Pasha
+who was too rich has gone.
+
+These extravagances and these eccentricities were all in keeping with
+our idea of what an Oriental despot should be, but it would be most
+unfair and ungenerous to give only this side of Ismail's character. He
+was a man of much mind and of large ideas, as well as a man with the
+tastes of a voluptuary, and the means, for a time, of a Count of Monte
+Cristo. It was he who built the harbor of Alexandria; and the railways
+and canals that others have completed were started under his regime. All
+of these things--railroads, palaces, canals, and grottos made of
+mud--cost money; and there were other expenses. Knights of industry and
+rascals of all degrees extorted vast fortunes from him in indemnities
+for supposed failures on his part to keep up with his agreements, and to
+stick to the letter of concessions. Some of these, like the payment of
+fifteen million dollars to the Suez Canal Company, were just enough; but
+there was also an enormous sum given in backsheesh to Turkey to gain the
+consent of the Porte to a proposed change in the line of succession and
+the establishment of the rule of primogeniture. Up to that time the
+eldest male member of the ruling family had always succeeded to power,
+but Ismail obtained a firman from the Sultan allowing his son to follow
+him. The gratification of this natural vanity or love of family was not
+obtained for the asking, and cost his people dear. They were already
+groaning under a multitude of taxes; the army was unpaid; the
+bureaucracy was rotten throughout; bribery and extortion, unfair
+taxation, and open seizure of the property of others had reduced the
+country almost to bankruptcy. Ismail in sixteen years had brought about
+a state of things that threatened utter ruin, to not only the native,
+but to the strangers within and without the gates. The strangers made
+the move for reform. I have told this much of Ismail not because it is
+new or unfamiliar, but because it shows how, through his misrule, the
+foreign element was able to obtain a footing upon the shore of Egypt,
+which footing has now grown to a trampling under foot of what is native
+and properly Egyptian. This entering wedge was called the Dual Control,
+and France and England were appointed receivers for Egypt, just as we
+appoint receivers for a badly managed railroad, and Ismail was deposed,
+his son Tewfik taking his place.
+
+[Illustration: AN EGYPTIAN LANCER]
+
+But although this was the first important and most official recognition
+of the right of the stranger to dictate to Egypt, he had already
+obtained peculiar rights in Egypt through capitulations, or those
+privileges granted in the past to foreign residents in Turkey and its
+dependent state of Egypt. In the sixteenth century the foreigners who
+traded in these Oriental countries stood in actual need of protection
+from the natives. Because they were foreigners they were regarded with
+such lack of consideration that, in order to balance the disadvantages
+of having their shops destroyed and their throats cut, the Sultan gave
+them certain privileges--such as immunity from taxation, immunity from
+arrest, the inviolability of domicile, and the exemption from the
+jurisdiction of the local courts.
+
+These privileges were unimportant when the foreign element in
+Constantinople was so little and so weak that the position of the
+Chinamen in San Francisco in '49 was that of a powerful aristocracy in
+comparison; but the snake warmed at the hearth-stone grew, and the
+Sultan's empire dwindled, and the privileges which were given to bribe
+the foreigner to come and to remain became a bane to Turkey and a curse
+to the weaker state of Egypt. The inviolability of domicile, for
+instance, is at this very day made use of by foreigners who are carrying
+on some wickedness or who have committed a crime for which they cannot
+be arrested by an Egyptian policeman unless he is accompanied by an
+official representative of the country to which the foreigner belongs.
+Let us suppose, for example, that the police of New York wished to raid
+a gambling-house. This, I know, is asking a good deal of the reader's
+intelligence, but we will suppose it to be a gambling-house which has
+not paid its assessment to the police regularly, and which should be
+given a lesson. All that the proprietor of the house would have to do,
+did capitulations extend in New York, would be to lease the house to an
+Italian, or to take out papers of naturalization from the British
+government. You can imagine the chagrin of an officer of the law who,
+when he goes to make an arrest, is confronted with a German who says he
+is an Englishman, and whose domicile is accordingly sacred. This, as you
+can imagine, would impede the wheels of justice.
+
+When I was in Cairo a Greek, who had taken out papers as an American
+citizen, flaunted this fact in the faces of the native police whenever
+they came to arrest him for keeping a gambling-house. They applied to
+our consul-general, Mr. E. C. Little, of Abilene, Kansas, who so far
+differed from the etiquette observed by some other consuls-general in
+Cairo as not to delay and not to warn the criminal. He sent his soldiers
+to be present at the arrest. The offender met this by bringing forth
+another American citizen of Greek parentage, to whom he claimed to have
+leased the house, and whose family were inside. Mr. Little, feeling that
+the American flag did not look well as a cloak for gambling-houses, and
+being a young man who has assisted at county-seat fights and who can
+pitch three curves, said that if the roulette tables were not out of the
+house in twenty-four hours he would himself break them into
+kindling-wood with an axe. This incident shows how the capitulations of
+the sixteenth century are acting as stumbling-blocks to the Egyptian of
+to-day, even when the consuls-general are willing to assist the native
+government, which is seldom.
+
+[Illustration: TIGRANE PASHA,
+
+Minister of Foreign Affairs]
+
+This is not all. The immunity from full taxation, now that the
+foreigners are among the richest inhabitants of Cairo, is most
+manifestly unjust; and though the mixed courts of an international
+judiciary have done away with trial of the foreign resident, or lack of
+trial, in civil cases, by the several consuls-general, the abuses of the
+capitulations are still a grievous and most unjust imposition by the
+great powers, ourselves included, upon a weaker one. To return to the
+Dual Control and to the story of the growth of the foreigners' hold on
+Egypt. The Dual Control was unpopular; so was the foreigner and his
+capitulations, who, waxing fat on the weaknesses of the country after
+Ismail's debauchery of its strength, grew insolent--so insolent that the
+cry raised by a general in the Khedive's army of "Egypt for the
+Egyptians" was taken up, and found expression in the Arabist movement or
+rebellion. Its leader was Arabi Pasha. He wanted what the Know-Nothing
+party of America wanted--his country for his countrymen. What else he
+wanted for himself does not matter here. He was, in the eyes of the
+Khedive, a rebel. In the eyes of some of the people he was the would-be
+preserver of his country against the plague of the foreign invasion.
+
+The trouble began at Alexandria, where the excited people attacked the
+foreign residents, killing some, and destroying valuable property.
+Men-of-war of the two powers represented in the Dual Control had already
+arrived to put down the rebellion. When the riot on shore was at its
+height, the English war-vessels bombarded the city. The bombarding of
+Alexandria was war, but it was not magnificent. There are certain things
+made to be bombarded--forts and ships of war--but cities are not built
+for that purpose or with that ultimate end in view. The English people,
+as a people, however, regret the bombardment of Alexandria as much as
+any one. The French war-vessels, for their part, refused to join the
+bombardment, and so were requested by the English admiral to sail away
+and give the other half of the Dual Control a clear field. Different
+people give you different reasons for the departure of the French fleet
+at this crisis. Some say that M. Clemenceau, who hated M. Freycinet and
+his policy, possibly raised the cry of the German wolf on the frontier,
+and pointed out the danger at home if the army and navy were engaged
+otherwise than in protecting the border. Others say that, like the good
+one of the two robbers in the _Babes in the Wood_, one of the Dual
+Control drew the line at murder or at the bombardment of a country she
+was supposed to protect. Plundering the Egyptians was possible, but not
+bombarding their city. They stopped at that. The English followed up the
+bombardment of Alexandria by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, which ended the
+rebellion. The Citadel of Cairo surrendered at their approach, and the
+Khedive's rule was again undisturbed. The English remained, however, to
+"restore order," and to see to the "organization of proper means for the
+maintenance of the Khedive's authority." They have been doing that now
+for ten years, and it is interesting to note that they have made so
+little progress that the last "disorder" in Cairo was due to the action
+of the British consul-general himself in allowing the young Khedive just
+twenty-four hours in which to dismiss one of his cabinet. This can
+hardly be described as "maintaining the authority of the Khedive," which
+the English had promised to do.
+
+[Illustration: A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA]
+
+After the battle of Tel-el-Kebir Great Britain stood undoubtedly in the
+position of the savior of the Khedive if not of Egypt. Her soldiers had
+crushed the rebellion, and as she had sent her Only General and one of
+the royal family and many thousands of good men to do it, and as she had
+lost not only men, but money, she thought she deserved something in
+return. The something she has taken in return has been taken gradually,
+and is the control of Egypt at the present day. It is possible that had
+the English not lost many more men and much more money in the campaign
+in the Soudan, which followed immediately after the suppression of
+Arabi, they might not have gone so far as they have gone in settling
+themselves in Egypt. But there was a not unnatural feeling that the
+Soudan campaign, which had cost so much, and which was a failure in all
+but in showing the bravery of the British troops, ought to be paid for,
+or made up to the English in some way. I should like to go into the
+story of this most picturesque and heroic of campaigns, but it would
+require a book by itself. Its history is briefly this: The religious
+and military chieftain known as "the Mahdi," shortly after the defeat of
+Arabi, threatened all Egypt from the Soudan, which rose under his
+leadership. General Hicks, an Englishman, with ten thousand men, in the
+service of the Khedive, was sent against him. He was killed, and most of
+the troops with him. The English, who were at that time the only power
+in Egypt with authority of any sort back of it, and who were virtually
+in control, felt that they should take the responsibilities of their
+position as well as its benefits, and avenge the massacre, drive back
+the Mahdi's forces, and, if possible, crush him and them for all time.
+The campaign was later further complicated by the presence at Khartoom
+of Major-General C. G. Gordon, who had gone there to lead back in safety
+the Egyptian troops still remaining in the Soudan. He was, after his
+arrival at Khartoom, virtually a prisoner at that place, which is a mud
+city on the banks of the Nile far above the fifth cataract. The attempts
+to rescue him and to suppress the Mahdi were equally unsuccessful.
+
+This is, in a few words, the story of a campaign which has been
+unequalled within the last twenty years in picturesqueness, heroism, and
+dramatic surprises. It had been said that the old days of personal
+bravery, of hand-to-hand slaughter, and of the attack and defence of man
+against man, were at an end; that owing to the new weapons of war, by
+which an enemy can be attacked when several miles distant from the
+attacking party, when the pressing of an electric button destroys an
+army corps, and when turning a handle will send three hundred bullets a
+minute into a mass of infantry, the necessity for personal courage was
+over. But seldom in history has there been as fierce personal encounters
+as in the Soudan, or as unusual methods of warfare. On the one hand were
+the naked supporters of the Mahdi, armed with their spears and knives,
+and protected only by bull-hide shields, but actuated by a religious
+fanaticism that drove them exulting at their enemies, and with no fear
+of death, but with the belief that through it they would gain joyous and
+proud immortality. Against them were the British troops, outnumbered ten
+to one, with hundreds of miles of sandy desert before, behind, and on
+every side of them, cut off from communication with the outside world,
+in a country barren and unfamiliar, and attacked by tens of thousands,
+who came when they pleased and where they pleased, rising as swiftly as
+a sand-storm rises, and disappearing again as suddenly into the desert.
+
+When I was in Cairo I was told of one of the Mahdi's men who continually
+rushed at a British square during an engagement holding his shield clear
+of his body as he advanced to throw a spear, and then retreated again.
+This looked like the worst form of foolhardiness to the English, until
+they saw that he was protecting with his shield his little boy, who was
+hiding behind it, and that when the chance offered, this child, who
+could not have been more than seven, and who was as naked of protection
+as his father, would throw a spear of his own. The father was wounded
+four times, but each time the bullet struck him he only shook himself,
+as a dog shakes off water, and once more rushed forward. When he fell
+for the last time the boy tumbled across him, unconscious from a wound
+in his thigh. The surgeons dressed this wound and bandaged it; but when
+the child came to and saw what they had done, he leaped up and tore the
+clothes from around him, and then, as the blood from the reopened wound
+ran out, fell over backwards dead. The English officer who told this
+story asked if fighting such men could be considered agreeable work from
+any point of view.
+
+[Illustration: H. H. ABBAS II.
+
+Khedive of Egypt]
+
+But the Soudan is only of interest here as showing how, having lost so
+much through it, the British did not feel more inclined than before to
+evacuate Egypt, although there were many who thought, as a few still
+think, that Egypt has cost them too much already, and more than they can
+ever get back. The loss of Gordon was perhaps the disaster of all the
+most keenly felt. How keenly is shown partly by the statue the English
+have placed to him in Trafalgar Square, surrounded by their kings and
+greatest generals. It shows him with one foot placed on the battlement
+of Khartoom, with his arms folded, and with the head thrown slightly
+forward, looking out, as he had done for so many weary months, for the
+relief that came too late. This monument is a reproach to those whose
+uncertainty of mind and purpose cost Gordon his life. It was doing a
+brave thing to put it up in a public place, being, as it is, a standing
+reminder of the neglect and half-heartedness that lost a valuable life,
+and one that had been risked again and again for his country. It is not
+only a monument to General Gordon, but to the English people, who have
+had the courage to admit in bronze and stone that they were wrong.
+
+For the last ten years the English have been as tardy in getting out of
+Egypt as they were in going after Gordon into the Soudan. They have
+repeatedly declared their intention of evacuating the country, not only
+in answer to questions in the House, but in answer to the inquiries of
+foreign powers. But they are still there. They have not been idle while
+there, and they have accomplished much good, and have brought benefits
+innumerable to Egypt. They have improved her systems of irrigation, upon
+which the prosperity of the land depends, have strengthened her army,
+have done away with the corvee, or tax paid on labor, and with the
+kurbash, or whip used in punishment, and, what is much the most
+wonderful, they have brought her out of ruin into such a condition of
+prosperity that she not only pays the interest on her enormous debt, but
+has a little left over for internal improvements. There has also been a
+marked change for the better in the condition of the courts of justice,
+and there has been an extension of a railroad up the Nile as far as
+Sirgeh.
+
+But the English to-day not only want credit for having done all this,
+but they want credit for having done it unselfishly and without hope or
+thought of reward, and solely for the good of mankind and of Egypt in
+particular. They remind me of those of the G. A. R. who not only want
+pensions and medals, but to be considered unselfish saviors of their
+country in her hour of need. There is no reason why a man should not be
+held in honor for risking his life for his country's sake, and honors,
+if he wants them, should be heaped upon him, but not money too. He
+either served his country because he was loyal and brave, or because he
+wanted money in return for taking certain risks. Let him have either the
+honors or the money, but he should not be so greedy as to want both.
+England has made a very good thing out of Egypt, and she has not yet got
+all she will get, but she wants the world to forget that and look upon
+her as an unselfish and enlightened nation that is helping a less
+prosperous and less powerful people to get upon their feet again. Of
+course it is none of our business (at least it is our policy to say so)
+when England stalks forth like a roaring lion seeking what she may
+devour all over the world. Americans travel chiefly upon the Continent,
+and unless they go into out-of-the-way corners of the world they have no
+idea how little there is left of it that has not been seized by the
+people of Great Britain. For my own part I find one grows a little tired
+of getting down and sailing forth and landing again always under the
+shadow of the British flag. If the United States should begin with
+Hawaii and continue to annex other people's property, we should find
+that almost all of the best corner lots and post-office sites of the
+world have been already pre-empted. Senator Wolcott once said to Senator
+Quay: "I understand, Quay, you want the chairmanship of the Library
+Committee. You seem to want the earth; if you don't look out you will
+interfere with my plans."
+
+If the United States had taken away the little princess's island from
+her and continued to plunder weaker nations, she would have found that
+England wants the earth too, and that she is in a fair way of getting it
+if some one does not stop her very soon. There are a number of good
+people in England who believe that for the last ten years their
+countrymen have spent their time and money in redeeming Egypt as a form
+of missionary work, and there are others quite as naive who put the
+whole thing in a word by saying, "What would we do with our younger sons
+if it was not for Egypt?"
+
+[Illustration: THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY]
+
+Three-fourths of the officers in the army of the Khedive are English
+boys, who rank as second lieutenants at home and as majors in Egypt.
+They are paid just twice what they are paid in the English army, and it
+is the Khedive who pays them and not the English. In this way England
+obtains three things: she is saved the cost of supporting that number of
+officers; she gets the benefit of their experience in Egypt, which is an
+excellent training-school, at the expense of the Egyptians; and she at
+the same time controls the Egyptian army by these same officers, and
+guards her own interests at Egypt's cost. And as if this were not
+enough, she plants an Army of Occupation upon the country, and with it
+menaces the native authority. The irrigation of Egypt has of late been
+carried on by Englishmen entirely and paid for by Egypt; her railroads
+are built by the English; her big contracts are given out to English
+firms and to English manufacturers; and the railroad which will be built
+to Kosseir on the Red Sea may have been designed in Egypt's interest to
+carry wheat, or it may have been planned to carry troops to the Red Sea
+in the event of the seizure of the Suez Canal or of any other impediment
+to the shortest route to India. We may not believe that the Egyptians
+are capable of governing themselves, we may believe that it is written
+that others than themselves shall always rule them and their country,
+but we must prefer that whoever do this should declare themselves
+openly, and act as conquerors who come and remain as conquerors, and not
+as "advisers" and restorers of order. Napoleon came to Cairo with flags
+flying and drums beating openly as an enemy; he did not come in the
+disguise of a missionary or an irrigation expert.
+
+And there is always the question whether if left alone the Egyptians of
+the present day could not govern themselves. Those of the Egyptians I
+met who were in authority are not men who are likely to return to the
+debauchery and misrule of Ismail. They would be big men in any country;
+they are cultivated, educated gentlemen, who have served in different
+courts or on many important diplomatic missions, and whose tastes and
+ambitions are as creditable and as broad as are those of their English
+contemporaries.
+
+The two most prominent advisers of the Khedive at present are his
+Prime-minister, Riaz Pasha, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tigrane
+Pasha. The first of these is a Turk, the second an Armenian and a
+Christian. It is told of Riaz that he was brought to Egypt when a boy as
+a slave. A man who can rise from such a beginning to be Prime-minister
+must have something in him. He showed his spirit and his desire for his
+country's good in the time of Ismail, whose extravagances both he and
+Nubar Pasha strenuously opposed, and his aid to the English in
+establishing Egyptian finance on a firmer footing was ready and
+invaluable. He has held almost every position in the cabinet of Egypt,
+and is not too old a man to learn new methods, and if left alone is
+experienced and accomplished enough as a statesman to manage for
+himself.
+
+[Illustration: LORD CROMER,
+
+The English Diplomatic Agent in Egypt]
+
+Tigrane Pasha struck me as being more of a diplomat than a statesman,
+but he showed his strength by the fact that he understood the weak
+points of the Egyptians as well as their virtues. It is not the
+enthusiast who believes that all in his country is perfect who is the
+best patriot. To say that such a man as this--a man who has a better
+knowledge of many different governments than half of the English cabinet
+have of their own, and who wishes the best for his Khedive and his
+country--needs the advice or support of an English resident minister, is
+as absurd as to say that the French cabinet should govern themselves by
+the manifestoes of the Comte de Paris. These men are not barbarians nor
+despots; they have not gained their place in the world by favor or
+inheritance. Their homes are as rich in treasures of art and history and
+literature as are the homes of Lord Rosebery or Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, and if they care for their country and the authority of their
+Khedive, it is certainly hard that they may not have the right of
+serving both undisturbed.
+
+The Khedive himself has been very generally represented through the
+English press as a "sulky boy" who does not know what is best for him.
+It is just as easy to describe him as a plucky boy who wishes to govern
+his own country and his own people in his own way. And not only is he
+not allowed to do this, but he is treated with a lack of consideration
+by his protectors which adds insult to injury, and makes him appear as
+having less authority than is really his. He might very well say to Lord
+Cromer, "It was all very well to dissemble your love, but why did you
+kick me down-stairs?"
+
+Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, and the ruling figure in Egypt, has
+served his country as faithfully and as successfully as any man in her
+debt to-day. He has been in Egypt from the beginning of these ten years,
+and he has been given almost unlimited power and authority by his own
+country, of which his nominal position of Consul-General and Diplomatic
+Agent is no criterion. He is a typical Englishman in appearance,
+broad-shouldered and big all over, with a smooth-shaven face, and the
+look of having just come fresh from a bath. In conversation he thinks
+much more of what he has to say than of how he says it; by that I mean
+that he is direct, and even abrupt; the Egyptians found him most
+unpleasantly so. But were he more tactful, he would probably have been
+better liked personally, but would not have succeeded in doing what he
+has done so well.
+
+I do not like what he has done, but I want to be fair in showing that
+for the work he was sent to do he is probably the best man England could
+have selected. A man less self-reliant might have feared to compromise
+himself with home authorities, and would have temporized and lost where
+Lord Cromer bullied and browbeat and won. He is a very remarkable man.
+He studies for a half-hour every day after breakfast, and plays tennis
+in the afternoon. When he is in his own room, with a pipe in his mouth,
+he can talk more interestingly and with more exact knowledge of Egypt
+than any man in the world, and your admiration for him is unbounded. In
+the rooms of the legation, on the contrary, or, again, when advising a
+minister of the Khedive or the Khedive himself, he can be as intensely
+disagreeable in his manner and as powerfully aggressive as a polar-bear.
+During the last so-called "crisis" he gave the Khedive twenty-four hours
+in which to dismiss his Prime-minister. He did this with the assurance
+from the English Foreign Office that the home government would support
+him. He then cabled with one hand to Malta for troops and with the other
+stopped the Black Watch at Aden on their way to India, and called them
+back to Cairo, after which he went out in full sight of the public and
+banged tennis balls about until sunset. A man who can call out "forty,
+love!" "forty, fifteen!" in a calm voice two hours after sending an
+ultimatum to a Khedive and disarranging the movements of six thousand of
+her Majesty's troops will get what he wants in the end, and a boy of
+eighteen is hardly a fair match for him.
+
+As I have said, the English press have misrepresented the young Khedive
+in many ways. He is, in the first place, much older both in appearance
+and manner and thought than his age would suggest, and if he is sulky to
+Englishmen it is not to be wondered at. They could hardly expect his
+Highness to regard them as seriously as his friends as they regard
+themselves. The Khedive gave me a private audience at the Abdine Palace
+while I was in Cairo, and from what he said then and from what others
+who are close to him told me of him, I obtained a very different idea of
+his personality than I had received from the English.
+
+[Illustration: A GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION]
+
+He struck me as being distinctly obstinate--a characteristic which is so
+marked in our President that it can only be considered one of the
+qualifications for success, and is probably the quality in the Khedive
+which the English describe as sulkiness. What I liked in him most was
+his pride in his army and in the Egyptian people as Egyptians. It is
+always well that a ruler should be so enthusiastic over what is his own
+that he shows it even to the casual stranger, for if he exhibits it to
+him, how much more will he show it to his people! The Khedive has
+gentle tastes, and is said to find his amusement in his garden and among
+flowers and on the farm lands of his estates; he speaks several
+languages very well, and dresses and looks--except for the fez and his
+attendants--like any other young man of twenty-three or twenty-four in
+Paris or New York. His ministers, who know him best, describe him as
+having a high spirit, and one that, as he grows older and will be guided
+by greater experience, will lead him to firmer authority for his own
+good and for the good of his people.
+
+One remark of the Khedive's which is of interest to Americans was to the
+effect that the officers in his army who had been trained by Stone Bey,
+and those other American officers who entered the Egyptian army after
+the end of our Civil War, were, in his opinion, the best-trained men in
+their particular department in his army. This is the topographical work,
+and the making of maps and drawings; but those Americans who are in
+charge of Egyptian troops on the frontier are also well esteemed. It is
+the English, however, who have made the fighting part of the army what
+it is. Before they came the troops were unpaid, and badly treated by
+their officers, but now the infantry and the camel corps and artillery
+have no trouble in getting recruits.
+
+The Egyptian is not a natural fighter, as is the Soudanese, who fights
+for love of it, but he has shown lately that when properly officered and
+trained and well treated, he can defend a position or attack boldly if
+led boldly. I suggested to the Khedive that he should borrow some of our
+officers, those who have succeeded so well with the negroes of the Ninth
+Cavalry and with the Indians, for it seemed to me that this would be of
+benefit to both the officers and the Egyptian soldier. It was this
+suggestion that called forth the Khedive's admiration for the Americans
+of his army; but, as a matter of fact, the English would never allow
+officers of any other nationality than their own to control even a
+company of the Egyptian army. They cannot turn out those foreigners who
+are already in, but they can dictate as to who shall come hereafter, and
+they fill all the good billets with their own people; and if there is
+one thing an Englishman apparently holds above all else, it is a "good
+billet." I know a good many English officers who would rather be
+stationed where there was a chance of their taking part in what they
+call a "show," and what we would grandly call a "battle," than dwell at
+ease on the staff of General Wolseley himself; but, on the other hand,
+if I were to give a list of all the subalterns who have applied to me
+for "good billets in America," where they seem to think fortunes grow on
+hedges, half the regimental colors from London to Malta would fade with
+shame.
+
+And Egypt is full of "good billets." It is true the English have made
+them good, and they were not worth much before the English restored
+order; but because you have humanely stopped a runaway coach from going
+over a precipice, that is no reason why you should take possession of it
+and fill it both inside and out with your own friends and relations.
+That is what England has done with the Egyptian coach which Ismail drove
+to the brink of bankruptcy.
+
+It is true the Khedive still sits on the box and holds the reins, but
+Lord Cromer sits beside him and holds the whip.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MODERN ATHENS
+
+
+Perhaps the greatest charm of Athens and of the islands and mountains
+round about it lies in their power to lure back your belief in a great
+many fine people of whose remarkable deeds you had grown sceptical--of
+whose existence even you had begun to doubt. It is something very
+serious when one loses faith in so delightful a young man as Theseus,
+and it is worth while sailing under the lee shores of Crete, where he
+killed the Minotaur, if for no other purpose than to have your
+admiration for him restored. If we could only be as sure of restoring by
+travel all of those other people of whom our elders ceased telling us
+when we left the nursery, I would head an expedition to the north pole,
+not to discover open seas and altitudes and eclipses and such weighty
+things, but to locate that nice and kindly old gentleman, and his toy
+store and his reindeer, who used to come at Christmas-time, and who has
+stopped coming since I left school. It is certainly worth while going
+all the way to Greece to see the Hill of the Nymphs, and the very cave
+where Pan used to sleep in the hot midday, and to thrill over the four
+crossroads and the high, gloomy pass where the Sphinx lay in wait for
+OEdipus with her cruel claws and inscrutable smile.
+
+[Illustration: GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORM]
+
+The story that must always strike every child as most sad and
+unsatisfactory is the one which tells us how the father of Theseus
+killed himself when his son came sailing back triumphant, and so
+gallantly engaged in entertaining the beautiful Athenian maidens whose
+lives he had saved that he forgot to hoist the white sails, and caused
+his father to throw himself off the high rocks in despair.
+
+This used to appeal to me as one of the most pathetic incidents in
+history; but as time wore on my sympathy for the father and indignation
+against Theseus passed away, and I forgot about them both. But when they
+point out where the black sails were first seen entering the bay, and
+you stand on the rock from which the people watched for Theseus, and
+from which his father threw himself down, you feel just as sorry, and
+you rebel just as strongly against that morbid anticlimax, as you did
+when you first read the story in knickerbockers. It seems almost too sad
+to be true.
+
+They had such a delightful way of mixing up the histories of gods and
+mortals in those days that the imaginative person who visits Athens will
+find himself gazing as gratefully and as open-eyed at the rocks in which
+the Centaur hid as at those from which Demosthenes delivered his
+philippics, just as in London the room at the Charter House where
+Colonel Newcome said "Adsum" for the last time is much more real than
+that room in Edinburgh in which Rizzio was killed, or as the rock from
+which Monte Cristo sprang, at the base of the Chateau d'If, is so much
+more actual than the entire field of Waterloo. It is hard to know just
+which was real and which a delightful myth; and yet there has been so
+little change in Greece since then that you are brought nearer to
+Alcibiades and to Pericles than you can ever come, in this world at
+least, to Dr. Johnson and Dean Swift. You cannot recreate Grub Street
+and the debtors' prison, but Euboea still "looks on Marathon, and
+Marathon on the sea," and, if you are presumptuous, you can strut up and
+down the rocky plateau from which Demosthenes spoke, or take your seat
+in one of the marble chairs of the Theatre of Dionysus, and pretend you
+are a worthy citizen of Athens listening to a satire of Sophocles.
+
+[Illustration: GREEK PEASANT GIRL]
+
+The quiet and fresh cleanliness of modern Athens comes to you after the
+roar and dirt of Cairo's narrow lanes and dusty avenues like the touch
+of damask table linen and silver after the greasy oil-cloth of a
+Mediterranean coasting steamer. It is quiet, sunny, and well-bred. You
+do not fight your way through legions of donkey-boys and dragomans, nor
+are your footsteps echoed by swarms of guides and beggars. It is a
+pretty city, with the look of a water-color. The houses are a light
+yellow, and the shutters a watery green, and the tile roofs a delicate
+red, and the sky above a blue seldom shown to ordinary mortals, but
+reserved for the eyes of painters and poets, who have a sort of second
+sight, and so are always seeing it and using it for a background. Athens
+is a very new city, with new streets and new public buildings, and a new
+King and Royal Palace. It is like a little miniature. There is a little
+army, chiefly composed of officers, and a miniature cabinet, and a
+beautiful miniature university, and everybody knows everybody else; and
+when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard turns out and blows a
+bugle, and so all Athens, which is always sitting at the cafes around
+the square of the palace, nods its head and says, "The Queen is going
+for a drive," or, "Her Majesty has returned early to-day," and then
+continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mustache and to sip its
+coffee. Modern Athens tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of
+thought. The men have adopted his costume, and the women wear little
+flat curls like the French ladies in _Le Figaro_, and peaked bonnets and
+high heels.
+
+[Illustration: THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS]
+
+The national costume of the Greeks is taken from the Albanians, but it
+is much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Like all
+national costumes, it is only worn, except for political effect and
+before a camera, by the lower classes, and also by three regiments of
+the army. You see it in the streets, but it is not so universally
+popular as one would suppose from the pictures of Athens in the
+illustrated papers and by the photographs in the shop-windows. It is a
+most remarkable costume, and as widely different from the flowing robe
+and short skirt of the early Greeks as men in accordion petticoats and
+heavy white tights and a Zouave jacket must evidently be. In the country
+it still obtains, and it is the farmers and peasants and their wives and
+the soldiers who supply the picturesque element of dress to the streets
+of the city.
+
+It is an inscrutable problem why, with all the national costumes in the
+world to choose and pick from, the world should have decided upon the
+dress of the Frank, that is, of the foreigner--ourselves. In Spain the
+peasants have discarded their knickerbockers and short jackets, even in
+the country, for the long trousers and ill-fitting ready-made clothing
+of a French "sweater," and the Moors cover their robes with overcoats
+from Manchester, and the Arabs and Chinese and Swiss and Turks are
+giving up the picturesque garments that are comfortable and becoming to
+them, and look exceedingly ugly and uncomfortable in our own modern
+garb, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable of national costumes
+yet devised by men or tailors. If you judge by the uniforms of the army
+of officers and by the dress of the women of Athens, you would think
+you were in a French city and among French people. It seems a pity that
+this should be so; that Athens, of all cities, should be built of
+Italian villas, inhabited by people who ape the French, and governed by
+a King from Denmark; still, they did not make a success of it when they
+tried, fifty years ago, to govern themselves. It is perhaps hardly fair
+to expect the Greeks, or even the Athenians, to live up to the great
+rock and the monuments that crown it, and the people of Greece are no
+doubt as fine as those of other little kingdoms or principalities
+scattered about Europe; but then the other kingdoms and principalities
+have not the history of early Greece to call their own nor the Acropolis
+to look up to.
+
+[Illustration: ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN]
+
+[Illustration: ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN]
+
+The rock of the Acropolis is hardly more a part of modern Greece than
+the Rock of Gibraltar is a part of Spain. Geographically it is, but it
+belongs as much to the visitor as to the native, so little inspiration
+has he apparently drawn from it, and so little has it served to bring
+out in him to-day those qualities that made demigods of his ancestors. I
+think I represent the average intelligence, and yet at this moment I
+cannot think of any Greek within the last hundred years who has gained
+world-wide renown, either as a sculptor, an artist, a soldier, a writer
+of comedies and satires, a statesman, nor even as an archaeologist; the
+very historians of Greece and the exponents of its secrets and the most
+distinguished of its excavators are of other countries. They have many
+heroes of their own; you see their portraits or their photographs in
+every shop-window; but they are not as familiar to you as the faces and
+histories of those other Greeks who sighed because there were no more
+worlds, and whose fame has lasted long after the other worlds were
+discovered. One would think that some young Greek, on arising in the
+morning and seeing the Acropolis against the sky, would say to himself,
+"To-day I shall do something worthy of that." And were he to say that
+often enough, and try to live up to the fortress and the temple above
+him, he might help to make Greece in this known world what she was in
+the smaller world of her day of glory. It is not because the world has
+grown and given her more with which to compete that she has fallen into
+lesser and lesser significance; for though the world has increased in
+latitude and longitude, it has not yet carved another Hermes like that
+of Praxiteles; and though it has added three continents since his day,
+it has never equalled in marbles the fluttering draperies of the Flying
+Victory, nor the carvings over the doorway of the Erechtheum.
+
+[Illustration: GREEK PEASANT]
+
+[Illustration: ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS]
+
+But, as far as in him lies, the Greek has endeavored to copy the
+traditions of his ancestors. He holds Olympic games in the ancient arena
+which King George has had excavated, and if victorious receives a wreath
+of wild olives from the hands of the King; and he builds the new market
+where the old market stood, and the new military hospital as near as is
+possible to the hospital of AEsculapius. But he cannot restore to the
+market-place that very human citizen who cast in his shell against
+Aristides because he was aweary of hearing him called the Just; nor can
+either his games or his hospital bring back the perfect figure and
+health of the men whose figures and profiles have set the model for all
+time. He has, however, retained the Greek language, which is very
+creditable to him, as it is a language one learns only after much
+difficulty, and then forgets at once. He even goes so far as to put up
+the names of the streets in Greek, which strikes the bewildered tourist
+trying to find his way back to his hotel as a trifle pedantic, and he
+prints his daily newspaper in this same tongue. This is, perhaps, going
+a little too far, as it leaves you in some doubt as to whether you have
+been reading of the Panama scandal or a reprint on the battle of
+Marathon.
+
+Baron Sina, a Greek banker, has shown the most public-spirited and
+patriotic generosity, and taste as well, in erecting the buildings of
+the university at his own expense and giving them to the city. They are
+reproductions in many ways of different parts of the temples of the
+Acropolis in miniature. The Polytechnic is almost an exact copy of the
+front of the Parthenon. There is a picture of it from a photograph given
+in this article, but it can supply no idea of the beauty of the modern
+reproduction of this temple. The lines and measurements are the same in
+degree; and the Polytechnic, besides, is colored and gilded as was the
+original Parthenon, and for the first time makes you understand how
+brilliant reds and beautiful blues and gold and black on marble can be
+combined with the marble's purity and help rather than cheapen it. It is
+a lesson in loveliness, and is as wonderful and brilliantly beautiful a
+building as the marble and gold monument to the Prince Consort in Hyde
+Park is vulgar and atrocious. If this copy in miniature, this working
+model of the Parthenon, moves one as it does, it can be understood how
+great must be the strength and purity of the Parthenon, even in
+ruins, with its gilt washed to a dull brown and its colors and
+bass-reliefs stripped from its pediment. I shall certainly not attempt
+to describe it.
+
+[Illustration: POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL]
+
+There are very few tourists who visit Athens in proportion to those who
+visit far less momentous ruins; thousands go to Rome and see the
+Colosseum, to Egypt and view the storied walls of the great rude temples
+along the Nile, and as many more make the tour of the English cathedral
+towns; but in Athens it is almost difficult to find a guide. There are
+not more than a half-dozen, I am sure, in the whole city, and the
+Acropolis is yours if you wish, and you are often as much alone as
+though you had been the first to climb its sides. I do not mean by this
+that it is neglected, or that relic-hunters may chip at it or carry away
+pieces of its handiwork, or broken bits of the Turkish shells that have
+shattered it, but the guards are unobtrusive, and you are free to wander
+in and out in this forest of marble and fallen trunks of columns as
+though you were the ghost of some Athenian citizen revisiting the scenes
+of his former life.
+
+There is no question that half of the pleasure you receive in wandering
+over the top of this great wind-blown rock, with the surrounding
+snow-touched mountains on a level with your eye, and the great temples
+rearing above you or lying broken at your feet, magnificent even there,
+is due to your seeing them alone, to the fact that no guide's
+parrot-like volubility harasses you, no guard's scornful gloom chills
+your enthusiasm. The great bay of turquoise-blue and the green fields
+and the bunches of cactus and groves of dark olive-trees below are
+unspoiled by modern innovations, and the hills are still dotted with
+sheep and shepherds, as they were in the days of Sappho.
+
+[Illustration: AN OLD ATHENIAN OF THE PRESENT DAY]
+
+Overhead is the blue sky, with the ivory columns between, far below you
+is the steep naked rock, or, on the other hand, the two semicircles of
+marble seats cushioned with velvet moss and carpeted with daisies and
+violets, and beyond the limits of the yellow town and its red roofs and
+dark green gardens stretches the green plain until it touches the sea,
+or is blocked by Mount Hymettus or Mount Pentelicus, beyond which latter
+lies the field of Marathon. Sitting on the edge of the rock, you can
+imagine the actors strutting out into the theatre below, and the
+acquiescent chorus chanting its surprise or horror, and almost see the
+bent shoulders and heads of the people filling the half-circle and
+leaning forward to catch each word of the play as it comes to them
+through the actors' masks.
+
+[Illustration: A GREEK SHEPHERD]
+
+Sounds, no matter how far afield, drift to you drowsily, like the voice
+of one reading aloud on a summer's day--the bleating of the sheep in the
+valley where Plato argued, and the jangling of a goat's bell, or the
+laughter of children flying kites on the Pnyx, a quarter of a mile away.
+And beyond the reach of sound is the AEgean Sea weltering in the sun,
+with little three-cornered sails, like tops, or a great vessel drawing a
+chalk-line after it through the still surface of the water. All things
+are possible at such a time in this place. You can almost hear the bees
+on Mount Hymettus, and you would receive the advance of a Centaur as
+calmly as Alice noted the approach of the White Rabbit. You believe in
+nymphs and satyrs. They have their homes there in those caves, and in
+the thick green, almost black, woods at the base of the Parnes range,
+and you love the bravery of St. Paul, who dared to doubt such things
+when he stood on the rock at your feet and told the men of Athens that
+they were in many things too superstitious. It is something to have seen
+the ribs cut in the rock on the top of the Acropolis which kept the
+wheels of the chariots from slipping when the Panathenaic procession
+moved along the Via Sacra to the Eleusinian mysteries, to have looked
+upon the caryatides of the Erechtheum, and to have wanted back as a lost
+part of your own self, for the time being, the Elgin marbles. When
+Napoleon stole the Venus of Milo he placed her in the Louvre, where
+every one will see her sooner or later; for if he is good he goes to
+Paris when he dies, and if he is bad he is sure to go there in his
+lifetime. But _who_ has ever been to the British Museum? One would as
+soon think of visiting Pentonville prison. And how do the marbles look
+under the soot-stained windows or the gray of London fog? Like the few
+Lord Elgin did not want, and that stand out like ivory in their proper
+height against the soft sky that knows and loves them? When the people
+of Great Britain have returned the Elgin marbles to Greece, and the Rock
+of Gibraltar to Spain, and the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, and Egypt to
+the Egyptians, they will be a proud and haughty people, and will be able
+to hold their heads as high as any one.
+
+One cannot help feeling that the King of Greece has a much greater
+responsibility than he knows. Other monarchs must look after their
+boundaries; he must not only look after his boundaries, but his
+sky-line. Another such affront to good taste as the observatory on the
+Hill of the Nymphs, and the sky-line of Athens will be unrecognizable.
+And the tall chimneys at the Piraeus are not half as attractive to the
+view as the spars of the ships. It is much better not to have
+manufactories that must have chimneys than to spoil a view which no
+other kingdom can equal. Any king can put up a chimney; very few are
+given the care of an Acropolis; and if the King and Queen of Greece wish
+to be remembered as kindly by the rest of the world as they are loved
+dearly by their adopted people, they will guard the treasure put in
+their keeping, and sweep observatories from sacred hills, and continue
+to limit the guides on the Acropolis, and so win the gratitude of a
+civilized world.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CONSTANTINOPLE
+
+
+A little Italian steamer drew cautiously away from the Piraeus when the
+waters of the bay were quite black and the quays looked like a row of
+foot-lights in front of the dark curtain of the night. She grazed the
+anchor chains of H. M. S. the _Colossus_, where that ship of war's broad
+white deck lay level with the water, as heavy and solid as a stone pier.
+She seemed to rise like an island of iron from the very bottom of the
+bay. Her sailors, as broad and heavy and clean as the decks, raised
+their heads from their pipes as we passed under the glare of the
+man-of-war's electric lights, and a bugle call came faintly from
+somewhere up in the bow. It sounded as though it were a quarter of a
+mile away. Our lower deck was packed with Greeks and Albanians and
+Turks, lying as closely together on the hard planks as cartridges in the
+front of a Circassian's overcoat. They were very dirty and very
+handsome, in rakish little black silk pill-box caps, with red and gold
+tops, and the initials "H. I." worked in the embroidery; their canvas
+breeches were as baggy and patched and muddy as those of a
+football-player, and their sleeveless jackets and double waistcoats of
+red and gold made them look like a uniformed soldiery that had seen very
+hard service. Priests of the Greek Church, with long hair and black
+formless robes, and hats like stovepipes with the brim around the upper
+end, paraded the narrow confines of the second cabin, and German
+tourists with red guide-books, and the Italian ship's officers with a
+great many medals and very bad manners, stamped up and down the
+main-deck and named the shadowy islands that rose from the sea and
+dropped out of sight again as we steamed past them.
+
+In the morning the islands had disappeared altogether, and we were
+between high banks--higher than, but not so steep as the Palisades; rows
+of little scrubby trees ran along their fronts in lateral lines, and at
+their base mud forts with mud barracks and thatched roofs pointed little
+cannon at us from every jutting rock. We were so near that one could
+have hit the face of the high hills with a stone. These were the
+Dardanelles, the banks that nature has set between the Sea of Marmora
+and the Mediterranean to protect Constantinople from Mediterranean
+squadrons. We pass between these banks for hours, or between the high
+bank of Roumelia on one side and the low hilly country of Asia where
+Troy once stood on the other, until, at sunset, we are halted in the
+narrowest strait of the Dardanelles, between the Castle of Asia and the
+Castle of Europe, "the Lock of the Sea"--that sea of which Gibraltar is
+the key. That night we cross through the Sea of Marmora, and by sunrise
+are at Constantinople.
+
+Constantinople is such a long word, and so few of the people you know
+have visited it in comparison with those who have wintered at Cairo or
+at Rome, or who have spent a season at Vienna, or taken music-lessons in
+Berlin, that you approach it with a mind prepared for surprises and with
+the hope of the unexpected. I had expected that the heart of the Ottoman
+Empire would be outwardly a brilliant and flashing city of gilded domes
+and minarets, a cluster of colored house fronts rising from the dancing
+waters of the Bosporus, and with the banks lined with great white
+palaces among gardens of green trees. There are more gilded domes in New
+York city and in Boston than in Constantinople. In New York there are
+three, and in Boston there is the State House, which looks very fine
+indeed from the new bridge across the Charles when the river is blocked
+with gray ice, and a setting sun is throwing a light on the big yellow
+globe. But Constantinople is all white and gray; the palaces that line
+the Bosporus are of a brilliant white stucco, and the mosques like
+monster turtles, which give the city its chief distinction, are a dull
+white. In the Turkish quarter the houses are more sombre still, of a
+peculiar black wood, and built like the old log forts in which our
+great-great-grandfathers took refuge from the Indians--square
+buildings with an overhanging story from which those inside could
+fire down upon the enemy below. The jutting balcony on the Turkish
+houses is for the less serious purpose of allowing the harem to look
+down upon the passers-by.
+
+[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE]
+
+Constantinople is a fair-weather city, and needs the sun and the blue
+sky and the life of the waters about it, which give to the city its real
+individuality. It misses in winter the pleasure-yachts of the summer
+months, the white uniforms of the thousands of boatmen, and the brighter
+dressing of the awnings and flags of the ships and steamers. But the
+waters about Constantinople are its best part, and are fuller and busier
+and brighter than either those around the Battery or those below the
+Thames Embankment, and by standing on its wide wooden bridge, over which
+more people pass in a day than over any other (save London Bridge) in
+the world, one can see a procession of all the nations of the East.
+
+Constantinople is a much more primitive city than one would expect the
+largest of all Eastern cities to be. It impresses you as a city without
+any municipal control whatsoever, and you come upon a building with the
+stamp of the municipal palace upon it with as much surprise as you would
+feel in finding an underwriter's office at the north pole. In many ways
+it is the most primitive city that I have ever been in. In all that
+pertains to the Sultan, to the religion of the people, of which he is
+the head, and to the army, the recognition due them is rigidly and
+impressively observed. But in what regards the local life of the people
+there seems to be absolutely no interest and no responsibility. There is
+no such absolute power in Europe, not excepting that of the Czar or of
+the young Emperor, as is that exercised by the Sultan; and the mosques
+of the faithful are guarded and decorated and held more highly in
+reverence than are many churches of a more civilized people; and the
+army impresses you as one you would much prefer to lead than one from
+which you would elect to run away. But the comfort of the inhabitants of
+Constantinople is little considered. There is nothing that one can see
+of what we call public spirit, unless building a mosque and calling it
+after yourself, in a city already supplied with the most magnificent of
+such temples, can be called public-spirited. Of course one does not go
+to Constantinople to see electric lights and asphalt pavements, nor to
+gather statistics on the poor-rate, but it is interesting to find people
+so nearly in touch with the world in many things, and so far away from
+it in others. As long as I do not have to live in Constantinople, I find
+its lack of municipal spirit quite as interesting a feature of the city
+as its mosques.
+
+[Illustration: ONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS]
+
+Constantinople, for example, is a city with as large a population as has
+Berlin or Vienna, and its fire department is what you see in the
+illustration accompanying this chapter. They are very handsome men, as
+you can note for yourself, and very smart-looking, but when they go to a
+fire they make a bargain with the owner of the building before they
+attempt to save his property. The great fire-tower in this capital of
+the Ottoman Empire is in Galata, and from it watchmen survey the city
+with glasses, and at the first sight of a blazing roof one of them runs
+down the tower and races through the uneven streets, calling out the
+fact that a house is burning, and where that house may be. Each watchman
+he meets takes up the cry, and continues calling out that the house is
+burning, even though the house is three miles away, until it burns down
+or is built up again, or the watchman is retired for long service and
+pensioned. Besides these amateur firemen there are two real fire
+companies, but they can do little in a city of 880,000 people.
+
+The police who guard Constantinople at night are an equally primitive
+body of men. They carry a heavy club, about five feet long and as thick
+as a man's wrist, and with this they beat the stones in the streets to
+assure people that they are attending strictly to their work, and are
+not sleeping in doorways. The result of this is that no one can get to
+sleep, and all evil-minded persons can tell exactly where the
+night-watchman is, and so keep out of his way. The watchman under my
+window seemed to act on the idea of the gentleman who, on taking his
+first trip on a sleeping-car, declared that if he couldn't sleep no one
+else should, and acted accordingly.
+
+There is nothing, so far as I can see, in which the Oriental delights as
+much as he does in making a noise. It is most curious to find a whole
+people without nerves, who cannot talk without shouting, and who cannot
+shout without giving you the idea that they are in great pain, and that
+unless relief comes promptly they will die, and that it will be your
+fault. Those of them who sell bread or fruits or fish or beads, or
+whatever it may be, in the streets, bellow rather than shout, or cry in
+sharp, agonizing shrieks, high and nasal and fierce. They apparently
+never "move on." They always meet under your window or at the corners of
+a street, and there all shout at once, and no one pays the least
+attention to them. They might be lamp-posts or minarets, for all the
+notice they receive. I can imagine no fate or torture so awful as to be
+ill in Constantinople and to have to lie helpless and listen to the
+street cries, to the tin horns of the men who run ahead of the
+streetcars--which incidentally gives you an idea of the speed of these
+cars--and to the snarling and barking of the thousands of street dogs.
+
+[Illustration: A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE]
+
+There are three or four intensely interesting ceremonies and many
+show-places in Constantinople which are unlike anything of the same sort
+in any other city. Apart from these and the bazars, which are very
+wonderful, there is nothing in the city itself which makes even the
+Oriental seek it in preference to his own mountains or plains or native
+village. Constantinople, so far as its population is to be considered,
+is standing still. It impresses you as stagnant before your statistical
+friend or the oldest member of the diplomatic corps or the oldest
+inhabitant tells you that it is so. You can very well imagine the
+Frank's finding a long residence in Cairo possible, or in pretty little
+Athens, where the boulevards and the classics are so strangely jumbled,
+but one cannot understand a man's settling down in Constantinople. Where
+there are no women there can be no court, and the few rich Greek
+residents and still fewer of the pashas and the diplomats make the
+society of the city. Even these last find it far from gay, for it so
+happens that the ambassadors are all either bachelors, widowers, or the
+husbands of invalid wives, and the result is a society which depends
+largely on a very smart club for its amusement. In the wintertime, when
+the snow and rain sweep over the three hills, and the solitary street of
+Galata is a foot deep in slush and mud, and the china stoves radiate a
+candle-like heat in a room built to let in all the air possible, I can
+imagine few less desirable places than the capital of the Ottoman
+Empire. This is in the winter only; as I have said, it is a fair-weather
+city, and I did not see it at its best.
+
+There are three things to which one is taken in Constantinople--the
+mosque of St. Sophia, the treasures of the Sultan, and the Sultan going
+to pray in his own private mosque. The Sultan's own mosque is situated
+conveniently near his palace, not more than a few hundred feet distant.
+Once every Friday he rides this distance, and once a year journeys as
+far as the mosque of St. Sophia. With these outings he is content, and
+on no other occasions does he show himself to his people or leave his
+palace. This is what it is to be a sovereign of many countries in
+Europe, Asia, and Africa, the head of the Mussulman religion; and the
+ruler of nations and lands conquered by your ancestors, of which you see
+less than a donkey-boy in Cairo or the owner of a caique on the
+Bosporus. We used to sing in college,
+
+  "The Sultan better pleases me;
+  His life is full of jollity."
+
+The jollity of a life which the possessor believes to be threatened by
+assassination in every form and at any moment is of a somewhat ghastly
+nature.
+
+You obtain tickets for the Selamlik, as the ceremony of the Sultan's
+visit to his mosque is called, and you are requested, as you are
+supposed to be the guest of the Sultan on these occasions, not to bring
+opera-glasses. But it is nevertheless strongly suggestive of a
+theatrical performance. The mosque is on one side of a wide street; the
+houses in which the spectators sit, like the audience in a grand-stand,
+are on the other. One end of the street is blocked by a great square,
+and the other by the gateway of the palace from which the Sultan comes.
+The street is not more than a hundred yards in length. A band of music
+enters this square first and plays the overture to the ceremony. The
+musicians are mounted on horseback and followed by a double line of
+cavalrymen on white horses, and each carrying a lance at rest with a
+red pennant. There are thousands of these; they stretch out like
+telegraph poles on the prairie to an interminable length, their scarlet
+pennants flapping and rustling in the sharp east wind like a forest of
+autumn leaves. You begin to suspect that they are going around the
+square and returning again many times, as the supers do in "Ours." Then
+the horses turn black and the overcoats of the men change from gray to
+blue, and more scarlet pennants stretch like an arch of bunting along
+the street leading to the palace, until they have all filed into the
+open square and halt there stirrup to stirrup, a moving mass of four
+thousand restless horses and four thousand scarlet flags. And then more
+bands and drums and bugle-calls come from every point of the city, and
+regiment after regiment swarms up the hill on which the palace rests,
+the tune of one band of music breaking in on the tune of the next, as do
+those of the political processions at home, until every approach to the
+gate of the palace is blocked from curb to curb with armed men, and you
+look out and down upon the points of five thousand bayonets crushed into
+a space not one-fifth as large as Madison Square. There is no populace
+to see this spectacle, only those of the faithful who stop on their way
+to Mecca to catch this glimpse of the head of their religion, and a few
+women who have brought petitions to present to him and who are allowed
+within the lines of soldiers.
+
+[Illustration: STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE]
+
+But pashas and beys and other high dignitaries are arriving every moment
+in full regalia, for this is like a drawing-room at Buckingham Palace,
+or a levee at St. James's, and every one must leave all other matters to
+attend it. Twenty men with twenty carts rush out suddenly from the
+curtain of Zouaves and sailors, and scatter soft gravel on the fifty
+yards of roadway over which the Sultan intends to drive. They remind you
+of the men in the circus who spread sawdust over the ring after the
+horses' hoofs have torn it. And then, high above the heads of the nine
+thousand soldiers and the few thousand more dignitaries, diplomats, and
+spectators, a priest in a green turban calls aloud from the top of the
+minaret. It is a very beautiful cry or call, in a strong, sweet tenor
+voice, inexpressibly weird and sad and impressive. It is answered by a
+bugle call given slowly and clearly like a man speaking, and at a
+certain note the entire nine thousand soldiers salute. It is done with a
+precision and shock so admirable that you would think, except for the
+volume of the noise, that but one man had moved his piece. The voice of
+the priest rises again, and is answered by triumphant strains of brass,
+and the gates of the palace open, and a glittering procession of
+officers and princes and pashas moves down the broad street, encircling
+a carriage drawn by two horses and driven by servants in gold. At the
+sight of this the soldiers cry "Long live the Sultan" three times. It is
+like the roar of a salute of cannon, and has all the feeling of a cheer.
+The Sultan sits in the back of the open carriage, a slight,
+tired-looking man, with a pale face and black beard. He is dressed in a
+fur overcoat and fez. As he passes, the men of his army--and they _are_
+men--salute him, and the veiled women stand on tiptoe behind them and
+stretch out their petitions, and the pashas and chamberlains and cabinet
+officers bend their bodies and touch the hand to the heart, lip, and
+forehead, and drop it again to the knee. The pilgrims to Mecca fall
+prostrate on their faces, and the Sultan bows his head and touches his
+hand to his fez. Opposite him sits Osman Pasha, the hero of the last
+war, and one of the greatest generals of the world, his shoulders
+squared, his heart covered with stars, and his keen, observant eyes
+wandering from the pale face of his sovereign to the browned,
+hardy-looking countenances of his men.
+
+The Sultan remains a half-hour in the mosque, and on his return drives
+himself back to the palace in an open landau. This was the first time I
+had seen the Turkish soldier in bulk, and he impressed me more than did
+any other soldier I had seen along the shores of the Mediterranean. I
+had seen the British troops repulse an imaginary attack upon the rock of
+Gibraltar, and half of the Army of Occupation in Egypt dislodge an
+imaginary enemy from the sand hills around Cairo, and I had seen French
+and Italian and Greek soldiers in lesser proportion and in lesser
+activity. But to me none of these had the build or the bearing or the
+ready if rough look of these Turks. The French Zouaves of Algiers came
+next to them to my mind, and it may be that the similarity of the
+uniform would explain that; but as I heard the Sultan's troops that
+morning marching up the hills to their outlandish music, and looked into
+eyes that had never been shaded from the sun, and at the spring and
+swing of legs that had never worn civilized trousers, I recalled several
+notable battles of past history, and the more recent lines of Mr.
+Rudyard Kipling where he pays his compliments to the Russian on the
+frontier:
+
+  "I'm sorry for Mr. Bluebeard,
+  I'd be sorry to cause him pain;
+  But a hell of a spree
+  There is sure to be
+  When he comes back again."
+
+[Illustration: GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE]
+
+The Oriental is one of those people who do things by halves. He has a
+fine army, but the bulk of his navy has not left the Golden Horn for
+many years, and it is doubtful if it could leave it; his palace walls
+are of mosaic and wonderfully painted tiles, and the roofs of rusty tin;
+his sons are given the questionable but expensive education of Paris,
+and his daughters are not allowed to walk abroad unless guarded by
+servants, and with the knowledge that every policeman spies upon them,
+knowing that, could he detect them in an indiscretion, he would be
+rewarded and gain promotion. Consequently it does not surprise you
+when you find the Sultan's treasures heaped together under dirty glass
+cases, and treated with the indifference a child pays to its last year's
+toys.
+
+The crown-jewels and regalia kept at the Tower, itself under iron bars
+and guarded by Beefeaters, are not half as impressive as are the jewels
+of the Sultan, which lie covered with dust under a glass show-case, and
+guarded by a few gloomy-looking effendis in frock-coats. All the
+presents from other monarchs and all the gifts of lesser notables who
+have sought some Sultan's favor, all the arms and trophies of
+generations of wars, are piled together in this treasury with less care
+than one would give to a rack of pipes. It is a very remarkable
+exhibition, and it is magnificent in its Oriental disregard for wealth
+through long association with it. Bronze busts of emperors, jewelled
+swords, imperial orders, music-boxes, gun-cases, weapons of gold instead
+of steel, precious stones, and silver dressing-cases are all heaped
+together on dusty shelves, without order and classification and without
+care. You can see here handfuls of uncut precious stones on china
+plates, or dozens of gold and silver pistols thrown in a corner like
+kindling-wood. And the most remarkable exhibition of all is the
+magnificent robes of those Sultans who are dead, with the jewels and
+jewelled swords and belts and insignia worn by them, placed on dummies
+in a glass case, as though they were a row of stuffed birds or specimens
+of rock. In the turbans of one of these figures there are pearls as
+large as a woman's thumb, and emeralds and rubies as large as eggs, and
+ropes of diamonds. This sounds like a story from the _Arabian Nights_;
+but then these are the heroes of the _Arabian Nights_--the Sultans who
+owned the whole northern coast of Africa and Asia, and who spent on
+display and ornament what we put into education and railroads.
+
+The present Sultan, Abd-ul-Hammed II., so far differs from those who
+have preceded him that he as well as ourselves spends money on education
+and railroads and all that they imply. As the head of a religion and of
+an empire he may not cheapen himself by being seen too often by his
+people, but his interests spread beyond even the great extent of his own
+boundaries, and his money is given to sufferers as far apart in all but
+misfortune as the Johnstown refugees and the victims of the earthquakes
+of Zante and Corfu. And his protection is extended to the American
+missionaries who enter his country to preach a religion to which he is
+opposed. While I was in Constantinople he showed the variety of his
+interests in the outside world by making two presents. To the Czar of
+Russia he gave a book of photographs of the vessels in his navy, and in
+contrast to this grimly humorous recognition of Russia's ambitions he
+presented to our government an emblem in gold and diamonds,
+commemorating in its design and inscription the discovering of this
+country, worth, intrinsically, many thousands of dollars. He was, I
+believe, the only sovereign who showed a personal interest in our
+national celebration, and his gift was properly one of the government's
+most conspicuous exhibits at the Columbian Fair.
+
+The Mosque of St. Sophia is one of the first things you are taken to see
+in Constantinople. It is to the Mussulman what St. Peter's is to the
+good Catholic, although Justinian built it, and the cross still shows in
+many parts of the great building. Three times during the year this
+mosque is illuminated within and without, and every good Mussulman
+attends there to worship.
+
+There is something very fine about the religion of Mohammed--you do not
+have to know much about it to appreciate the faith of its followers,
+whether you know what it is they believe or not. In their outward
+observance, at least, of the rules laid down for them in the Koran, they
+show a sincerity which teaches a great lesson. You can see them at any
+hour of the day or in any place going through their devotions. A soldier
+will kneel down in a band stand, where a moment before he has been
+playing for the regiment, and say his prayers before two thousand
+spectators; and I have had some difficulty in getting my trunks on the
+Orient Express, because the porters were at another end of a crowded,
+noisy platform bowing towards the East. Once a year they fast for a
+month, the season of Ramazan, and as I was in Eastern countries during
+that month I know that they fast rigidly. Ramazan begins in Egypt when
+the new moon appears in a certain well near Cairo. Two men watch this
+well, and when they see the reflection of the new moon on its surface
+they run into Cairo with the news, and Ramazan begins. There is nothing
+which so well illustrates the unchangeableness of the East and its
+customs as the sight of these men running through the streets of Cairo,
+with its dog-carts and electric lights, its calendars and almanacs, to
+tell that the moon has again reached that point that it had reached for
+many hundreds of years before, when all the faithful must fast and pray.
+
+[Illustration: EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF ST. SOPHIA]
+
+On one of the last days of Ramazan I went to the door of St. Sophia, and
+was led up a winding staircase in one of its minarets--a minaret-tower
+so broad and high that the staircase within it has no steps, but is
+paved smoothly like a street. It seemed as though we had been climbing
+nearly ten minutes before we stepped out into a great gallery, and
+looked down upon thousands of turbaned figures bowing and kneeling and
+rising again in long rows like infantry in close order. Between these
+worshippers and ourselves were fifty circles of floating tapers swinging
+from chains, and hanging like a smoky curtain of fire between us and the
+figures below. The voice of the priest rose in a high, uncanny cry, and
+the sound of the thousands of men falling forward on their faces and
+arms was like the rumble of the waves breaking on the shore. Outside,
+the tops of minarets were circled with lights and lamps strung on long
+ropes, with the ends flying free, and swinging to and fro in the night
+wind like necklaces of stars. This was the most beautiful of all the
+sights of Constantinople; and as a matter of opinion, and not of fact, I
+think the best part of Constantinople is that part of it that is in the
+air.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before ending this last chapter, I should like to make two suggestions
+to the reader who has not yet visited the Mediterranean and who thinks
+of doing so. Let him not be deterred, in the first place, by any idea of
+the difficulties of the journey, for he can go from Gibraltar along the
+entire northern coast of Africa and into Greece and Italy with as little
+trouble and with as much comfort as it is possible for him to make the
+journey from New York to Chicago. And in the second place, should he go
+in the winter or spring, let him not be misled by "Italian skies," or
+"the blue Mediterranean," or "the dancing waters of the Bosporus," into
+imagining that he is going to be any warmer on the northern coast of
+Africa than he is in New York. I wore exactly the same clothes in Italy
+that I wore the day I left the North River blocked with ice, and I
+watched a snow-storm falling on "the dancing waters of the Bosporus".
+There are some warm days, of course, but it is well to follow that good
+old-fashioned rule in any part of the world, that it is cold in winter
+and warm in summer, and people who spend their lives in trying to dodge
+this fact might as well try running away from death and the postal
+system. To any one who has but a little time and a little money to
+spend on a holiday, I would suggest going to Gibraltar, and from there
+to Spain and Morocco. This is the only place, perhaps, in the world
+where three so widely different people and three such picturesque people
+as the Moor, the British soldier, and the Spaniard can be found within
+two hours of one another.
+
+Morocco, from political causes, is less civilized than any other part of
+the northern part of Africa; and it can be seen, and with it the
+southern cities of Spain and the Rock of Gibraltar, in five or six
+weeks, and at a cost of a very few hundred dollars. This was to me the
+most interesting part of the Mediterranean, chiefly, of course--for it
+possesses few of the beauties or monuments or historical values of the
+other shores of that sea--because it was unknown to tourists and
+guide-books. A visit to the rest of the Mediterranean is merely
+verifying for yourself what you have already learned from others.
+
+
+THE END
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Inconsistent hyphenation remains as in the original.
+
+Spelling has been made consistent throughout where the author's
+preference could be ascertained.
+
+Punctuation has been normalized.
+
+Page 203: "It all that pertains to the Sultan"
+
+"It all" has been changed to "In all".
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rulers of the Mediterranean, by
+Richard Harding Davis
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