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.