1871
DAMASCUS AND RICHARD BURTON
It was on a lovely morning in the early spring of 1871 that I stood on a
spur of the Antilebanon, the famous “Dome of Victory,” and looked down
upon the plains of Damascus. I must have been close to the very spot
where Mahomet—then a poor camel-driver—gazing upon the too-enchanting
scene, resolutely turned his back upon it, saying: “There is but one
paradise, and that is in heaven—there may be no second upon earth.” In
these days, when men are agnostics in legend as well as in religion, it
is the fashion to assert that he never uttered such words. Why? Is it not
more likely that he, the man gifted with the seer’s burning imagination,
the prophet that was to hold the hearts, and order the faith, of
countless millions for centuries upon centuries, should have spoken thus,
than that some mean biographer should have coined so lofty and spiritual
a thought? Why attempt the impossible? Why try to prove a negative in
order to destroy a lovely legend?
Out of a fairylike lacework of apricot trees in full blossom the towers
and minarets and cupolas of that “rose-red city, half as old as time”[28]
pointed to heaven. Abana and Pharpar were threading their silvery way
among the blushing orchards, as they did when Abraham pitched the tents
of his tribe of wandering Arabs under the shade of the forest trees
fringing the river banks. Small wonder that Naaman the Syrian, when he
thought of his own sweet gardens lapped by these crystal streams, should
have shuddered at the thought of plunging into the mud of Jordan! Grim
and grey, the walls told of centuries—of tens of centuries—of sacred
history and medieval legends, stories of patriarchs, of saints Christian
and saints Mussulman, of steel-clad Crusaders and turbaned Saracen Emirs.
Above all, closing my eyes, I seemed to realize the vision of Saul,
“breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the
Lord,” when the great light “shined round about him,” and he fell to the
earth, stricken blind. Who can look upon Damascus for the first time and
remain unmoved?
We had reached this earthly paradise of Mahomet’s, as was fitting,
through Purgatory. The ride from Jerusalem northward had been disastrous.
It was raining when we struck our tents outside the Joppa Gate of the
Holy City. Day after day the rain came down pitilessly, hopelessly. When
the rain ceased, snow took its place; we were half frozen and drenched
to the skin, the water made jugs of our boots and the saddles were like
sponges. Our tents were soaked through and our camping-grounds had
been quagmires. It was everywhere the same: Gerizim, the mountain of
blessings, was no kinder than Ebal, the mountain of curses. At Nazareth,
where we lodged in the monastery, the kind Franciscan monks gave us a
pan of charcoal in the hopes that its very inadequate heat might help to
dry our clothes. Worse and worse: the fumes made us very ill, and one of
our party fell down asphyxiated, and for a while looked like death; we
carried him out into the air, and to our joy a little colour began to
come into his cheeks.
Our poor servants! The dragoman and his crew, who tended the horses and
looked after the baggage, were the picture of misery; the very horses
hung down their heads, dejected and dispirited; and so we went on until
we were about half a day’s journey from Damascus, when we met a damp
and sympathetic native, who gave us directions as to a route by which
we should save some distance, and the baggage would join us a little
later. Alas! We took his advice and the proverbial short cut. We lost
our way, the light began to fail, and we wandered on and on in darkness,
our jaded horses stumbling at every other step over what seemed to be a
barren, stony desert. There was nothing for it but to dismount and lead
them. We had no food, and the dragoman was in despair. At last, when it
was near midnight, we heard the baying of dogs in the distance. There
was a ray of hope—where there were dogs there would be men of some sort.
Worn out with fatigue and hunger, we struggled on till we came upon the
black tents of a Bedouin camp. We had heard ugly stories of the tribes
to the east of Jordan, but they must have been set about by the Father
of Lies. Nothing could have been kinder than these nomad Arabs. Even the
dogs, which sniffed about our legs a little suspiciously at first, ended
by being quite friendly. The Sheik gave us shelter in one of his tents,
and told off three or four of his young men to tend our horses, while he
fetched us milk and a sort of damper. Utterly worn out, we lay down in
our sopping clothes on a comfortable litter of dry straw, and in a moment
were fast asleep. How soon I know not, I was awakened by something warm
and soft and wet snuggling against my cheek—it was the nose of a calf,
two days old, which with its mother shared our quarters, or rather, I
should say, we shared theirs, for we, not they, were the intruders.
When daylight came we were the objects of much curiosity: from the
Sheik’s own tent there were great whisperings and peepings of his
womankind. Doubtless our dragoman, after the manner of his guild, had
spent all the wealth of Eastern hyperbole in reciting our magnitudes,
with which his audience must have felt that our sorry plight was hardly
in harmony. With much gratitude we took leave of the good Sheik, and set
out again through the pitiless rain into the wilderness. Like primitive
wanderers we travelled on, trusting to luck; for many miles we rode
through the desolation, without meeting a soul from whom we could gain
information.
It was getting dark when once more we heard the barking of dogs, and so
guided, we reached the filthiest village that it ever was my misfortune
to see—Jabat el Hashab, we were told, was its name. It consisted of
some forty or fifty mud huts, standing in a sea of indescribable dirt
and offal; and in the middle of the village there was a huge heap of
putrid carrion, carcases of sheep, horses and cattle festering in the
mud. A half-naked, ragged, sick-looking creature, who appeared to be a
sort of headman among the fever-stricken inhabitants, came out of one
of the huts and after some parleying with our dragoman assigned to us
a lodging for the night. We should have had, perhaps, better quarters
in the caves of the troglodytes. The hut into which we were shown was
a sort of apology for a stable or byre. At one end were stalled our
four horses; at the other end, on a mud platform about a foot high, we
were to lie carpetless, blanketless. Horses fed on karoub-beans are not
sweet bedfellows; they, combined with the carrion heap, which was just
outside our door, not to speak of the neighing and tramping and the
occasional barking of pariah dogs, made the night hideous. The smell was
appalling—that, with the serried battalions of creatures by which we were
attacked on all sides, murdered sleep.
The hours dragged on slowly indeed, but when at last daylight broke we
felt that our troubles were over. The sun, which we had not seen for many
days, rose gloriously, and we were cheered by the news that four or five
hours’ ride would bring us to Damascus, where we should find our baggage
and cleanliness. And so, forgetting all our very real discomfort and
misery, we set out in high spirits. The darkest hour which heralds the
dawn was past! But when we met our men, we found that one poor fellow had
died of cold and exhaustion. It had been really a terrible journey. How
often in after days did I and my two travelling companions, now alas!
both gone, laugh over the miseries of that foul night!
“Unpack the boxes swiftly, O dragoman! Let there be no delay! Carry fresh
clothes to the Turkish bath; let us too, like Naaman the Syrian, wash
and be clean.” With joy we cast off the horrible sponges which we had
worn night and day for forty-eight hours. Dirty? Yes, and very densely
colonized by undesirable aliens. We threw them off with glee, and gave
strict orders that they should be burned—those orders were probably
never obeyed; more likely were the wretched rags sold to the local
representatives of the triple-hatted traders of Whitechapel. At any rate
we saw them no more.
But I am treading upon dangerous ground. “Eothen” has been written these
seventy years, and there is no room for any other story of travel in
Syria and the Holy Land.
The British Consul at Damascus was at that time my old friend Richard
Burton, the famous traveller and linguist, one of the most notable men
of my time. We had become known to one another a dozen years before, when
I was a clerk in the African, or as it was then called, the Slave Trade,
Department of the Foreign Office. In 1861 a fight, anthropological,
zoological, and biological, was raging round Du Chaillu’s recently
published book on equatorial Africa, and especially upon the question
whether the gorilla was a reality or only a fabulous animal, like the
“men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.”
All the great lords of science, such as Sir Roderick Murchison and
Sir Richard Owen—who backed Du Chaillu—were in the lists, and Burton,
always eager for a fray, whether with pen or sword, was on fire to go
and ascertain the truth. He was, however, a captain in the Indian army,
and so long as he remained a soldier the thing was impossible; so he
contrived to be appointed consul at Fernando Po, severing his connection
with the authorities of the India Office, who never forgave him. Thus
it was that he had to come to the Slave Trade Department of the Foreign
Office to be coached up in the recent business of his consulate, and I
was able to be of some little use to him in supplying him with documents
and information. We became fast friends, I having the greatest admiration
for him. Indeed, he was a man possessed of a great power of awakening
enthusiasm. He did all that he could to persuade me to go with him to
Fernando Po. There was a small office vacant there, which I could easily
have obtained, but happily my father put his foot down, and I remained
in Downing Street. So far as gorillas were concerned, Burton might as
well have stayed behind also, for he found none. Du Chaillu, however, was
able to make good all that he had said, and his story was confirmed by a
French expedition in the following year.
Burton, if not a great man, was at any rate a remarkable one; his
personality was striking; as he strode through the streets with his
crisp, staccato walk no one could help noticing him. He was not very
tall, probably not more than five feet ten inches, but his frame was that
of a Titan. His broad shoulders and highly-developed chest indicated
strength beyond the common. Until quite his last years he always looked
like an athlete in the pink of training. He was the only man that I ever
knew who could fire the old-fashioned elephant-gun from the shoulder
without a rest; his powers of endurance were simply marvellous, and
he could drink brandy with a heroism that would have satisfied Dr.
Johnson.[29] He had a fine, picturesque head, dark hair, burning black
eyes and features which would have been handsome but for the lower jaw,
which was too strong for beauty, and indeed almost tigerish, with a
ferocious expression belying his really kind nature. An accomplished
traveller, ignorant of fear, and in linguistic achievement almost
rivalling Cardinal Mezzofanti, who could preach in upwards of fifty
languages and dialects.
There was an article published in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ many years ago,
in which the writer proved to his satisfaction that any man who could
speak three languages must of necessity be a fool. Burton gave the lie
to that. Cardinal Mezzofanti, on the other hand, does not seem to have
been famous for intelligence in any province save that of the polyglot.
Indeed, he was said to be conspicuously stupid, and on one occasion he
gave evidence of his rare knowledge and equally rare ignorance in the
same breath. On making acquaintance at Venice with the Lord Meath of
his day, and being told that he was an Irish nobleman, he proceeded
to address him in the Erse tongue, in the full conviction that he was
speaking to him in the language current in his family.
As an official Burton was a failure. He was impatient of any control,
had no idea of discipline, and as for all conventionalities, he simply
scattered them to the winds. Says Thomas à Kempis: “Nemo secure præest
qui non libenter subest. Nemo secure præcipit nisi qui bene obedire
didicit.” Burton would never have made a good commander at that rate, but
he had probably never read the “De Imitatione Christi.”
As consul at Damascus he was continually in hot water, and his wife
was not the woman to make diplomatic relations easier. Her manner with
the Mohammedans among whom she lived, and whom it was her business to
conciliate so far as in her lay, was detestable. On one occasion I was
with her and one or two others in a very sacred mosque; a pious Moslem
was prostrate before the tomb of a holy saint. She did not actually
strike him with her riding-whip, but she made as though she were going to
do so, and insisted on the poor man making room for her to go up to the
tomb. What the man muttered I knew not, but I doubt his orisons having
taken the shape of blessings. I left the mosque in disgust. If actuated
by no higher motive, she should have reflected upon the harm which such
conduct needs must work upon her husband, to whom, to do her justice, she
was entirely and most touchingly devoted. It is only fair to Burton’s
memory to show how heavily he was handicapped. He was not responsible
for all the trouble that led to his removal a few months later from the
romance of the Damascus that he loved, to the deadly dullness of the
Trieste which he hated.
The day after we arrived in Damascus Burton came to breakfast. He was
excellent company, as of old, full of information and good stories of
adventures and stirring scenes in which truth was so richly embroidered
as almost to become fiction. One had to know one’s Burton, for the thing
which he loved above all others was to astonish, and for the sake of
that he would not hesitate to violate the virtue of the pure maiden who
dwells in a well. Take him with a grain of salt, which was quite what he
expected, and he was the best of boon companions.
We were dining together once at the mess of the 2nd Life Guards, the
guests of their then colonel, poor Fred Marshall. The conversation turned
upon feats of swordsmanship, and I happened to tell of the wonderful
skill of the chief executioner at Yedo, whom the dandy young Samurai used
to bribe to test their heavy swords upon the bodies of dead criminals; it
was said that he could put three corpses one on the top of the other on a
trestle and cut through the three in the small of the back at one blow;
this I have heard solemnly averred. “Ah!” said Burton, “it has always
been a matter of regret to me that I never quite succeeded in cutting a
man in two. I very nearly did once. I was alone in the desert and saw
that I was being pursued by three men; my horse was tired and they were
gaining upon me. As the leading man came up with me I drew my sword and
dealt him a furious blow on the shoulder, cutting him slantwise right
down to the waist; unfortunately I did not cut through the last bit of
skin, so the horse galloped off with half the man’s body hanging over the
saddle.”
“And what became of the other two Arabs?” somebody asked.
“Oh! they made off!” And then Burton winked at me. As for the young
subalterns, it would be hard to say whether their eyes or their mouths
were the more open. Burton had dared and done more almost than any man
living; that, however, was not enough for him. He was compelled to
invent more. But his little inventions were almost childlike in their
transparent simplicity.
After breakfast Burton took me to see Lady Ellenborough. So many stories
had been told about her and her strange life as the wife of an Arab
chief, that I expected to see a grand and commanding figure living in
a sort of tawdry barbarism, something like the Lady Hester Stanhope
of “Eothen,” and Lamartine; an imposing personage, mystic, wonderful,
half queen, half sybil—Semiramis and Meg Merrilies rolled into one,
ruling by the force of the eye a horde of ignoble, ragged dependants,
trembling but voracious. No two people could be more unlike. I found
Lady Ellenborough—Mrs. Digby, as she now called herself—living in a
European house, furnished, so far, at any rate, as the rooms in which
we were received were concerned, like those of an English lady; in the
desert, with the tribe, she would be altogether Arab. Her tables were
covered with the miniatures, knick-knacks and ornaments indigenous to
Mayfair—quite out of tune with Damascus.
The owner was like her belongings; a little old-fashioned, a relic of the
palmy days of Almack’s; dressed in quite inconspicuous Paris fashion,
and very nice to look upon, for though past seventy years of age, she
had the remains of great good looks and the most beautiful and gracious
old-world manners. She had been a fair beauty, but in deference to the
Arabs’ superstitious fear of the evil eye, her hair and eyebrows were
dyed black. She was very much interested in hearing about England, and
asked many questions about friends whom she had known in old days. She
seemed to think that the world had stood still since she left it, for
she spoke of people who, if not dead, were quite old folk, as if they
were still in the heyday of blooming youth. She asked after the old Lord
Clanwilliam—grandfather of the present Earl. How was he? “Wonderful,” I
said, “cutting us all out skating at Highclere two or three months ago.”
Lady Ellenborough looked puzzled. “But why should he not?” she asked.
“Well!” I answered, “you must remember that he is past seventy years of
age.” “Dear me! is it possible? That handsome young man!” Her old friends
remained in her mind just as she had known them—Lady Palmerston, Lady
Jersey, Lady Londonderry—still reigning beauties, queens of Almack’s. It
was strange to hear a delicately-nurtured English lady talking of her
life in the desert with “her” tribe. She told us how, the summer before,
a hostile tribe had raided them and stolen some of their mares, and
how, this next summer, they must ride out to avenge the outrage and get
back the lost treasures. There would be fierce fighting, she said, and
she must be there to nurse the chief should anything happen to him. “In
fact,” she added, “we have one foot in the stirrup, for we must start for
the desert to-morrow morning.”
We had a long talk, for she was a keen questioner, and then she insisted
on taking us to an adjoining paddock to see the horses. There we were
joined by her husband, Sheik Medjwal, the brother of the head of the
clan Mizrab, a branch of the Anazel tribe. The Sheik was not an imposing
personage—indeed, anything but one’s ideal of a great lord of the desert;
as a matter of fact, he was quite an ordinary, common-looking little man.
Nevertheless she seemed very fond and proud of him, and evidently in this
wild, nomad life between the desert and Damascus she had found a happy
haven of rest after the adventures of her stormy youth. When at last
she let us go she made me promise to go back to Damascus and visit her
again. When, after many years, I did go back, poor Lady Ellenborough was
no more. As we came away, I asked Burton whether she was safe with these
people. He assured me that she was quite secure, if only for the reason
that she had a few hundreds a year of her own—perhaps £1,500—and that
was, of course, a fortune for the tribe, and a brevet of safety for her.
There was living at Damascus at that time one man whom, above all others,
I was eager to see, and that man was the great Emir Abd el Kader. Burton,
who knew him well, was able to introduce me to him. Probably to the
present generation his name is hardly known; but in my boyhood the Arab
chieftain, who from 1832 to 1847 resisted army after army of the French,
was as famous as Saladin himself. Fearless as the steel of his own
scimitar, the soul of honour, with all the glamour and mystery of the
East wedded to the chivalry of the West. What a portrait would Sir Walter
Scott have painted of him!
In the early years of the nineteenth century Algiers was a nest of
pirates, the terror of the Mediterranean. When the French remonstrated
in defence of their coral fishers, who were in continual danger of being
robbed, murdered, or sold as slaves, the Dey haughtily refused to receive
their message, and even went so far as to strike their Consul. He had to
pay the penalty. But when at last the victorious French were masters of
Algiers, their work was but half accomplished. The Dey was beaten—the
pirate-ships were taken or destroyed—yet in the interior, in the
unmeasurable desert, the wild Arab tribes were gathering to defend their
liberties and independence which they saw threatened by the presence of
the Giaour on their coast. For centuries they had been under the yoke
first of the Romans, then of the Turks. The Ottoman power was now broken,
and they would be no slaves to the hated infidel. The moment for gaining
freedom had come.
There was one man in Mascara, Sidi Muhijeddin, who by his ancient
lineage, his valour and his piety was indicated as the supreme commander.
To him the united tribes addressed themselves, praying him to raise his
standard as their leader. He, being then in his seventieth year, pleaded
old age, which would unfit him for the struggle. But he added that his
third son, a youth of twenty-five, would be the most fitting man for
the supreme command. This was Abd el Kader, who, young as he was, had
already earned a reputation for learning, sound judgment and piety, and
to his hands the tribes entrusted their cause. They could not have chosen
better, though the ultimate issue was hardly doubtful.
Abd el Kader was born in 1807 and was educated by his father, whose
position at the head of a priestly family of princely rank was of the
highest. In very early life the young man had been forced to take
refuge in Egypt from the jealousy of the Dey of Algiers, and this led
to his undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca which gave him the prestige
of the holy title of Hadji. He was but a youngster when, on his return
to his father’s house, he was called upon to face the gigantic task of
organizing the wild children of the desert. It must have needed no small
measure of tact and firmness to compose the jealousies of the rival
chiefs over whom he had to play the king; but he had a strong grip, and
he succeeded so well that for fifteen years he led his undisciplined
hordes against army after army, General after General, that the French
Government sent out in the vain attempt to sweep them off the face of the
earth. At first Abd el Kader had but some four hundred horsemen under
his command, but by degrees his patriotism, his chivalrous valour, and
the religious fervour of the Hadji, brought recruits in hundreds to his
standard and he was soon at the head of a mighty army.
Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost; his first great reverse was in
1837, when he was defeated by Marshal Bugeaud (whose fame, so long as
there is a bugler left in France, will be trumpeted in “La Casquette du
Père Bugeaud”) at the river Taafra; but nobody knew better than Bugeaud
himself that this was no decisive defeat and so he concluded a treaty
with the Arab chief which Vallée, the Governor-General of Algiers,
promptly took occasion to violate in a specially insulting manner. Once
more Abd el Kader drew his sword and the result was continuous warfare
and harassing of the French which lasted for another ten years, until
at last in 1847 Abd el Kader, whose power had been much weakened and
who was in Morocco, where the Sultan turned against him, surrendered to
General Lamoricière, and there was comparative peace in the land, though
Pélissier and St. Arnaud were never allowed to be idle.[30]
Abd el Kader was sent to France as a prisoner of war. I never saw him
there; but I can well remember a picturesque group of his captains,
dressed in their long white burnouses, with the camel’s hair fastening
to their flowing white head-dresses, riding in haughty unconcern and
thinking the unfathomable thoughts of Orientals, in the Place de la
Concorde.
Abd el Kader was sent to France, where he lived, of course, as a
prisoner, but treated with the greatest consideration, until in 1852
Louis Napoléon very generously gave him his liberty with an allowance
of £4,000 a year. He took up his residence first at Broussa and then at
Damascus, where during the Christian massacres of 1860 he played a noble
part, doing all that was in his power to protect the wretched Maronites.
Many a night he slept on the threshold of his house door with his drawn
scimitar by his side, that he, holy Hadji as he was, might be ready to
give succour and refuge to any hunted infidel who might pass that way.
For his services in those troublous times the French Emperor sent him the
Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour; right well had he earned it.
One more trait of the generous old hero’s character. When France at the
end of 1870 was bleeding at every pore, the Arabs thought that their
opportunity had come for a rising in Algiers. It was said that Abd el
Kader’s son and his people were brewing trouble. This roused the old
man’s wrath; he sent a fierce message to his son, in which he said that
in his youth he had resisted the French with all his might for many
years. For nearly a quarter of a century now he had been at peace with
them, and they had treated him as a friend. He would disown any son
of his who might take a mean advantage of their trouble and break the
honourable peace which he had concluded.
Spurred by memories of childhood and early youth, I was keen—mad-keen—to
see that wonderful warrior, a sort of Oriental Garibaldi whose life had
been one long romance. We were admitted at rather a shabby entrance door
with nothing to distinguish it from those of the neighbouring houses—a
dark passage led us into one of those delightful courtyards which are the
chief fascination of an Eastern gentleman’s dwelling. A marble verandah,
with oleanders in huge tubs placed here and there—in the open space the
music of a plashing fountain.
In this sunlit court the great Emir received us. He was then a man of
sixty-four years. He was dressed in a white robe in the old Arab fashion,
with the cord of camel’s hair tied round his head-dress. His beard was
shaved and dyed to resemble that of a young man, his eyebrows were
blackened, and his cheeks were slightly rouged. Before him stood one of
those X-shaped book-rests inlaid with mother of pearl with which Liberty
has made us all familiar, and on it rested a scroll in the study of which
he was deeply engrossed. It was a book on MAGIC! Wonderful still are the
ways of the East.
The Emir was not a tall man, not more than five feet seven inches or five
feet eight inches, as I should judge, in height. In his youth he must
have been singularly handsome, and indeed that was his reputation. Now
in his old age, and in spite of the little sacrifices to vanity of which
I have spoken, he had that rare look of distinction and race which is
perhaps never seen so conspicuously as in the highest type of Oriental
beauty. His was the figure and expression of a king of men; such must
have been the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the judges, the kings of Bible
story. His reception of us was the very poetry of good manners.
Burton had much conversation with him, for they were good friends. As for
me, after exchanging a few commonplace civilities, Burton interpreting,
I was content to watch and think, and throw my mind back many years and
across the seas to the desert, drawing pictures of the great gathering of
its children rallying round the standard of the glorious youth who was
to lead them in their vain but noble struggle for faith, independence,
and country. Presently our host, who, as a solitary, was eager for news,
began to question me about European affairs, and more especially about
France, which at that moment was in a state of chaos more terrible than
at any other period of the great war. He spoke of his former foes with
that generous sympathy and admiration which we might have expected from
his chivalrous nature. He even talked of gratitude.
In the middle of our conversation he clapped his hands and an attendant
appeared, bearing, not as I should have expected, _chibouques_ and
coffee—but a cup of fragrant tea; such tea as is drunk in Russia and in
China—never in England.
When we took our leave he thanked us for our visit, which he courteously
said had given him great pleasure; and indeed I think it may have
done; for his questions showed a considerable grip of politics and of
the convulsion by which the world was being stirred. When he spoke of
the war, his eye blazed with the fire of battle, and I could not but
feel how dearly even then he would have loved to lead a charge of his
white-cloaked warriors against the Prussian Uhlans. He and his sword
belonged to the past, his mind was shaped in a mould which the nineteenth
century has shivered to atoms and thrown away.
I had heard much of Abd el Kader, as I have related elsewhere, from the
Duc d’Aumale, that gayest of soldiers and raconteurs, who was never weary
of speaking of him with admiration. I could now fully appreciate the
sympathy of the European conqueror for his fallen Eastern foe; the Duc
d’Aumale, who to his finger-tips felt the poetry of the bivouac fire and
the rousing crackle of the trumpet, saw in the great Emir the highest
expression of that patriotic spirit of which he himself gave so royal an
example.
Damascus, “the eye of the East,” as Julian the apostate called it, could
never have looked more beautiful than it did on that day when Burton
led me through the old city and took me to see one or two of its famous
interiors. The great trees draped and garlanded with climbing roses,
the perfumed groves of oranges and citrons and flowering shrubs, the
sparkle of the sweet waters dancing in the rays of a delicious sunshine,
banished the dreary memories of sleet and snow and biting winds. It was
indeed a garden city. We went to call upon a friend of Burton’s, one
Abdullah Bey, who lived in an ancient house which in its palmy days must
have represented all the luxury of the Oriental magnate a set scene for
a story like that of the three ladies of Bagdad. Haroun Al Raschid,
with his Vizier Giafar, and Mesrour the chief of the Eunuchs, must have
knocked at just such a door on that most famous of their nightly rounds.
I half expected to find the one-eyed calenders seated in the court-yard
with our host, recounting their strange adventures amid the orange and
citron trees heavily scented and the oleanders not yet in bloom. The
pavement was of marble, the finest Persian tiles set in mosaic decorated
the walls, rugs, any one of which would be a treasure to a museum, were
strewn under the arcade of pure white marble, and of course there was
the gentle tinkling rhythm of a fountain. It was all lovely, luxurious;
the almost too voluptuous atmosphere of Eastern magnificence—but alas!
all decaying for the lack of a little care and a few piastres’ worth of
cement! It seems to be against the nature of the Turk to repair or even
to maintain. _Kismet_ explains all—where the Turk is there is decay. The
fatalist says, “It is decreed,” and is content.
Those were delightful days that I spent with Burton in Damascus; there
never was such another cicerone. We used to wander through the city
penetrating into all sorts of nooks and hidden places unexplored by
tourists; sometimes he would take me to visit some Turkish or Arab
friend of his, giving me a glimpse of that Oriental life to which only
such men as himself, versed in all the mysteries of faith and manners,
have access. In these he, the man who had accomplished the pilgrimage to
Mecca, was of course past master, and the light that he could throw upon
matters which are riddles to most men, even to old residents among Moslem
peoples, was a revelation.
It was when talking upon such subjects that he was at his best. It was
upon his knowledge of ritual and ceremonial that he chiefly relied for
the success of his venturesome pilgrimage. There are so many nations
professing Mohammedanism that an imperfection in language or accent might
be of small account. But the slightest error in ritual would have led
to immediate detection and death. One such occasion did occur. He was
detected, but it was not he that was killed. I asked him whether the
story was true; his answer was: “Well! they do say the man died.” But
then Burton would delight in making people believe that he had committed
a murder. If the tale was true it was a case of his life or that of the
spy. So he was perhaps justified.
One morning he came to me with a roll of MSS. under his arm. “There,”
he said, “you shall have the first sight of this.” It was the first two
or three chapters of his translation of the “Arabian Nights.” He assured
me that he had shown the translation to nobody. Privately printed, it
brought him in ten thousand pounds.
During several years after he was appointed to Trieste I saw him but
seldom, and only from time to time when he came home on leave. But in
1890 I spent part of the winter in Algiers, and found myself in the same
hotel with him in Mustapha Supérieur. He was then sadly broken in health,
having had some sort of stroke which made it difficult for him to walk;
but he used to hold a kind of Court every evening in the hall of the
hotel, surrounded by a number of visitors upon whom he could lavish some
of his most amazing tales.
There were times when he and I would be alone together, and then he
talked a great deal about his future prospects and consulted me as to
sending in his resignation and taking his pension. He harped upon this
over and over again.
At last one day he brought me a sealed packet, put it into my hands and
said: “There! you were the first man to whom nineteen years ago I showed
the ‘Arabian Nights;’ now you must look at this; no one else has seen
it; keep it under lock and key till you give it back to me.” I took it
upstairs. It was the much talked of “Scented Garden” which Lady Burton
afterwards at his death destroyed. I gave it back to him the next day.
“What do you think of it?” he asked. “Well, my dear Burton, if you really
mean to print that, I should advise you to wait till you have resigned
and secured your pension.” Burton was delighted with the answer. “Yes,”
he said, with conscious pride, “I think I have shocked Mrs. Grundy this
time.”
It was the old story! Always the uncontrollable desire to startle and to
shock! There is, or used to be, a club in Paris called “Les Épatants.”
What a fitting president of such a club Burton would have made! To
_épater_ was meat and drink to him.
After that winter in Algiers I never saw Burton again. He died a few
months afterwards and was buried at Mortlake; where with my friend, Mr.
Edmund Gosse, I visited his tomb last year. He lies buried in the Roman
Catholic cemetery, and his monument is in the shape of an Arab tent
which was raised to his memory by his friends. His wife is buried beside
him.
It is difficult to give an estimate of Burton’s character; it was a
network of contradictions; even physically, with the torso of a Hercules
and the hands of a young girl, he was a contradiction. Much that he
wrote should never have been written; there is no need to specify; at
the same time I believe, having good warranty for the belief, that his
life was morally without stain; he was a model husband, and his wife
adored him; he would proclaim himself an Agnostic, and he died in the
odour of sanctity under the protection of the Roman Catholic Church,
the confession to which his wife belonged; he wished to be considered a
savage, and he was one of the most tender-hearted of men. He was kindness
itself, and to his friends loving, faithful and generous in good service;
but how angry he would have been if one of those friends had dared to
accuse him of amiability! They would have been pulling down the whole
structure which he had been at such pains to build up,—they would have
been frustrating his lifelong endeavours to prove himself beyond the
pale. Only with those who did not know him did he succeed in keeping up
the imposture.
In spite of his marvellous talents and knowledge he did not achieve a
literary success; nobody could say that Burton was not a scholar in many
tongues; yet strange to say, his books lacked the quality of scholarship
and his English was poor. His talk, on the other hand, infinitely
superior to his writing, was learned, various and good to listen to. He
was an amazing companion. Of all his many books, only the translation of
the “Arabian Nights” achieved fame and brought in money. For that there
were adequate if not altogether blameless reasons. As a human document
the book will live.
* * * * *
Once again, more than twenty years later, I was at Damascus. But what a
change those two decades had wrought! Over the old city, which, when I
first knew it, had kept through the centuries so much of the glamour of
the Biblical and Medieval East, the Philistines had passed the levelling
steam-roller of the nineteenth century. Turbans and flowing robes had
disappeared, swept into rag and bone shops. Yellow and scarlet slippers
had been discarded in favour of infidel patent leather boots with side
springs.
No longer did the fragrant fumes of Laodicea[31] cunningly mixed with
spices and apple paste curl up out of the bubbling _narghilehs_ scenting
the air. The long-stemmed _chibouques_, with their jewelled amber
mouth-pieces, were no more seen, and the _chibouqueji’s_ occupation
was gone. As in Bond Street, so also in “the Street which is called
Straight,”[32] the cigarette ruled supreme. When the Muezzin—blind lest,
as happened to King David, his impious eyes should fall upon the unveiled
mysteries of an adjoining harem—called the faithful to prayer from his
high minaret, it was but a mean, commonplace, tatterdemalion crowd that
assembled to his cry. The prose of the Giaour had banished colour and
romance out of the true believer’s life. I gazed upon the old buildings
and upon the holy places, trying to call up once more the feelings that
they had awakened in bygone days. But it was all in vain; the charm was
broken and the spell was gone. The mystic halo which of yore hovered so
hauntingly over the ancient walls had vanished like a ghost into thin
air, and the glory of Damascus had departed.
Of those remarkable people who had given such an interest to my first
visit, not one remained. The Burtons were dead, Lady Ellenborough dead,
Abd el Kader dead, and laid with his fathers, far away in Algeria. All
dead! as dead as Abraham and Eliezer of Damascus himself. I felt inclined
to cry with Jeremiah, “Damascus is waxed feeble.... How is the city of
praise not left, the city of my joy!” (Jeremiah, xlix., 24).
Sadly I left the gates, turning the horses’ heads westward towards the
Lebanon range, hoping to spend an hour dreaming over the past among the
stately ruins of Baalbek. But there too the sacrilegious profanity of the
nineteenth century had been at work: the Temple of the Sun was strewn
with sandwich papers, empty bottles bearing the scarlet pyramid which
is the sign manual of Bass, oily sardine-tins, fragments of biscuits,
half-smoked cigarettes; all the ugly litter of Ascot Heath on the
Saturday after the race week. I am an old man now, and my travelling
days are over; but I bless my stars that most of my wanderings were
accomplished while the East was still the East. I am happy to have seen
the eternal Sphinx and the Great Pyramid—now mere trysting-places for
picnics and flirtations—when they were still wrapped in the mystery of
the Pharaohs: when men still trembled at the very mention of the Afrits
and Jins who mounted guard over the buried secrets of King Solomon; when
men by black arts sought to raise the dead and even to summon Shaitan
himself, robed in all the majesty of terror.
It is another East that “calls” now. A thick varnish of sham Western
civilization has besmirched the picture; its poetry has been wiped out,
and I am content to sit by my fireside, humbly cultivating prose, like
Monsieur Jourdain.