The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:
At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta. Very stormy.
Terrible death to be talked to death. The storm has blown two small
land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. Sea full of
flying-fish.
That is all. There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which
a little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide,
Benunes, still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts. This
side-trip is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents,
and the only account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of
October 24th:
We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus
dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all
night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled
vehicle), and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve
at night. That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part
of our trip and somewhat tired. Since then we have taken things
comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and
attracting a good deal of attention--for I guess strangers do not
wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain
often. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza were possible characters.
But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was
under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that--but then when
one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the
Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to
overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
them.
We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but
it will never be written now. A night or two before the vessel reached
New York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion,
at Mrs. Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses. They were not
especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but
one prophetic stanza is worth remembering. In the opening lines the
passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:
Lo! other ships of that parted fleet
Shall suffer this fate or that:
One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,
Or ground on treacherous flat.
Some shall be famed in many lands
As good ships, fast and fair,
And some shall strangely disappear,
Men know not when or where.
The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark
Twain found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The
fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York
Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and
Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry,
they came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling,
tiresome travel-letters of that period. They preached a new gospel in
travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a
gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine,
and ridicule to the things considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark
Twain would continue to preach during his whole career. It became his
chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message.
Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever
source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception
and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander
chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.
Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;
old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages
to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins
beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the
fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked
the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were
vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.
This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before,
but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing
mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy
Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional
crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,
the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or
two of that word-picture:
After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was
so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not
of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as
never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient.
If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking
toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing
but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything
of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the
wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and
destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose
progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy
and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five
thousand slow-revolving years....
The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of
all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when
we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did
not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.
We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old
land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and
through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and
refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of
Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those
Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad
shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but
because they were the chosen savages of God.
The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented
the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever
written--one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long
as human nature remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is
rarely, reverently told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in
the voluminous literature of that solemn land:
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of
a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.
Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn
sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing
exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs
motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and
scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises
refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of
Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds
only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the
accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left
it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in
their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to
remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's
presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks
by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,
is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and
is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer
there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the
wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is
gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the
Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode
at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,
was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its
borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;
Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have
vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them
where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate
the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?
Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
It would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from
Gibraltar to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march.
In time he would write technically better. He would avoid solecism, he
would become a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the
years ahead he would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of
those fresh, first impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need
to mention the humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule
of old masters and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept
familiar with much repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle,
more restrained; the burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the
ridicule so frank and good-natured, that even the old masters themselves
might have enjoyed it, while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded
by bigotry, would find in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival,
and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily satirical and
personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten,
for it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly
people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all
past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and
stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous
have all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still
farther voyage. Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and
lightly, tenderly recall their old-time journeying.