OFF TO AFRICA.
‘Africa’ has not a very taking sound about it. When I told my friends
and acquaintances that I was going to Africa, they had visions of lions
and snakes, and jungles and swamps, and they insisted on my taking with
me an armoury of guns and rifles, and a pharmacy of drugs and antidotes.
I am going, however, to keep as much out of the track of the lions as
possible; at least, I shall avoid the lions that have to be attacked
with firearms, but the lions that you attack with a visiting-card I
certainly hope I shall encounter. I have a beautiful letter of
introduction to the reigning sovereign of Morocco, which I hope to
present to him in his imperial palace (Dar Dabiba) when I go to
Fez-al-jadeed and Fez-al-baleed, and I am assured that he will give me a
royal reception, and trot out his dancing dervishes and his snake
charmers for my edification. I have also a letter of introduction to a
great Moorish General, a direct descendant of Othello, who will provide
me with an escort of soldiers when I go to Wazan, which is a long way up
country, and where I am bound to go, as I have a little business with
the Grand Shereef, who resides there. I shall be obliged to have an
escort, because the people of that district are so fanatical that there
is no knowing what they might do to me. Mogador, Tetuan, and Tangiers
are also on my visiting list, so that you may expect a great deal of
Oriental imagery and barbaric splendour in these pages. In Algeria I
shall sojourn awhile also, and I may pay a flying visit to Carthage,
where I am desirous of making a few inquiries with regard to the career
of a young lady named Salammbo. This is my programme as it is at present
shaped in my mind’s eye, Horatio. Whether I shall be enabled to carry it
out, of course, depends on circumstances; but I shall get over a good
deal of the ground mentioned, and I have no doubt I shall see some very
wonderful things, and meet with many exciting adventures.
At present the Fates have brought me no further than Marseilles; but
even the short distance from the capital of France to the Mediterranean
seaport was not accomplished without a struggle. We were unable in Paris
to secure seats in the ‘train of luxury’ one January night, but I was
told there was another train at 7.15 which would do the journey to
Marseilles in fifteen hours twenty-seven minutes by the time-table. The
platform was crowded with dukes and duchesses with their footmen, and
ladies’ maids and lap-dogs, who, like myself, had not been able to get
seats in the ‘train de luxe,’ and who were going by the 7.15, which was
a first-class express with sleeping-cars, and all that we should miss
would be the restaurant and the smoking-saloon. I brightened up at this
information, and we called several porters to take our luggage and
secure us a berth in the sleeping-car. The porters looked at us as
though we had asked for a bit of the sun to put in our pockets to keep
our hands warm. ‘A berth in the sleeping-car, monsieur!’ exclaimed the
first porter who recovered his breath. ‘Ha, ha! monsieur is joking; why,
they are all booked a week in advance to Marseilles at this season of
the year.’ ‘Well, then,’ I said savagely, ‘at least find us two corner
seats in a smoking-carriage.’ ‘I will try, monsieur,’ replied the
porter, and away he sped. In a few minutes he returned, shrugged his
shoulders apologetically, and delivered himself of the following elegant
sentence: ‘It touches me to the heart, and causes me profound sorrow, to
have to inform monsieur that every corner seat is taken.’
It was true. I had heard a good deal about the fight for seats in the
Marseilles express, but I realized it for the first time then. We were
dragged up the train and down the train; we got on this step and on
that, and peered into compartment after compartment. It was the same
tale everywhere. Every coach was jammed as full as a cattle truck. At
last there was a crowd of about fifty passengers for Marseilles all
clamouring for seats, and there was not a single vacant place. Then the
Chef de Gare most condescendingly informed me that he would put on
another carriage. We felt deeply grateful. Having paid £4 4s. for a
seat, we felt that the company was placing us under a life-long
obligation by giving us one for our money. So we bowed to the ground to
the station-master, and begged him to accept the assurance of our most
distinguished consideration. He accepted it. Then we offered handfuls of
francs to the railway porters, and these were also accepted. In return
for our largesse, we told them we required them, when the extra carriage
was joined on, to hold the crowd back until we had jumped in and secured
the corners. When that extra carriage came, it was Waterloo all over
again. But the arms of England (mine and Albert Edward’s) were finally
victorious, and we beat back four Frenchmen, a Russian, a German, two
Poles, a couple of Arabs, and a Greek, and captured two corners.
Directly we were seated the crowd poured in upon us, and at 7.15 we
steamed out of the station--eight in the compartment, and about fourteen
portmanteaux, nine hat-boxes, eight bundles of rugs, and ten parcels
piled up to the ceiling on the top of us. It was an hour before we had
sorted ourselves, and got the hand luggage packed away in the nets above
and under the seats. By this time we were stifling. Both the windows
were shut, the foot-warmers were burning hot, and the place was the
Black Hole of Calcutta multiplied by eight. Albert Edward requested the
permission of our fellow travellers to have the window a little way
down, as we were nearly asphyxiated. Albert Edward asked the French
passengers in French, the Germans in German, the Arabs in Arabic, and
the Russians in Russian; and they all admired his linguistic
attainments, but absolutely declined to allow the windows to be opened
one inch, or for one second. They inquired in their various languages if
he desired their immediate death. He replied that he did not; but that
was the catastrophe he wished to avoid for me. I joined in gently but
firmly, and brilliantly distinguished myself in all the languages except
the Russian. But the enemy remained immovable.
Suddenly Albert Edward had an idea. His German-Arab features relaxed
into an expression of sardonic glee. When everybody was dropping off to
sleep he put it into execution. He struck a whole box of Vesuvians, one
after the other. There was a simultaneous sneeze, six sleepers leapt to
their feet coughing and gesticulating and swearing, and in an instant
both windows were pulled down with a bang, and the fresh, pure air of
heaven rushed into the black hole.
Over the agonies of that long night of intermittent suffocation I draw a
partial veil. Now and again by some violent expedient, such as fancying
we heard an accident, or pretending that we had run over a man, or that
Mount Vesuvius in a state of eruption was distinctly visible on our
left, we succeeded in getting a window down for a minute or two; but
from 7.15 p.m. until 10.42 a.m. we were mercilessly smashed and stifled
in a compartment which was not a first-class carriage, but a tin of
compressed humanity.
At a little after eight o’clock in the morning we reached Avignon, and
here we had five minutes for refreshment. I should like to have been an
artist, to have made a sketch of the station as it appeared when the
passengers alighted and dashed wildly at a little table set out with
basins of hot coffee and rolls of bread a yard long. The ladies looked
lovely, as they always do, but the circumstances were trying.
Complexions are not at their best, nor is the coiffure at its apogee of
excellence, when you have been sitting all night long in your clothes in
a hermetically sealed railway-carriage. And the dirt and grime of travel
will stain the most delicate cheek, and the flying grit of the engine
will lodge occasionally on the most aristocratic nose, and get into the
most lustrous and beautiful eyes. I say it without disrespect, but we
were a seedy, pallid, untidy and unkempt lot that turned out on the
platform of Avignon in the morning sunlight, and scalded our throats
with coffee out of pudding-basins, and fought our way through the crowd
at the buffet with the three feet rolls that were at once weapons of
attack and defence. I was much interested in the duchesses _en
deshabille_, also in the footmen in chimney-pot hats, and in the ladies’
maids with smashed bonnets, who flew up and down the platform, vainly
trying to arrange their mistresses’ hair, and put them a little to
rights, with a bowl of hot coffee in one hand, and a roll in the other.
One clever maid put her coffee on the platform, and held her roll
between her teeth, while with her two hands she dexterously arranged her
lady’s back hair in an ornamental and chaste design, and stabbed it with
hairpins at the rate of ten a second.
But the most charming feature of that five minutes’ wait was to me the
way in which the dukes and earls and millionaires from the coupés and
the sleeping-cars were deprived of their coffee and roll by their
obedience to the will of their wives. A duchess said to her husband:
‘John, I think Fido wants a walk.’ And with her own fair hands she
dragged a big black poodle from under the seat, and gave him to the
duke. The duke accepted Fido without a murmur, and led him up and down
the platform by his chain for the whole five minutes. Another lady
handed her husband a little black-and-tan terrier to be exercised in a
similar manner. Before the bell rang I counted seven husbands all
walking their wives’ pet dogs up and down the platform, and some even
went outside the station with the dogs in order that the little dears
might not fancy themselves debarred by surrounding circumstances from
any of the privileges of the usual morning run at home.
All things come to an end in this world, and so did our journey to
Marseilles, which I have related to show that the troubles of African
explorers often begin much nearer home; but it is a wonder we didn’t
come to an end first. When, however, at noon I lounged on the harbour
quays, amid such a wild, dark, picturesque crowd as few other European
towns could produce, I was amply compensated for all my trials on the
road. I never saw such a collection of flashing eyes and coal-black hair
and sunburnt faces in my life. There were Italians and Spaniards and
Greeks, and all the fierce and dusky sons of the Levant; there were
Turks and Arabs and Egyptians and Syrians and African blacks, and the
natives added to the picturesqueness of the crowd with their swarthy
faces, fierce eyes, and splendid hair; and I stood with the motley crowd
and lolled with my back against the wall, sunning myself as they did,
and feeling beautifully Bohemian and lamentably lazy. It was such a
treat, after the harsh travelling of the North, to find one’s self wooed
by the warm breeze and kissed by the burning sun, that I couldn’t have
taken my hands out of my pockets and left off lolling against that south
wall if the Archbishop of Canterbury, or any other of my most intimate
friends, had come by. For a whole two hours did I and Albert Edward loll
about and frizzle and shut one eye, like dogs going to sleep, but I kept
my other eye open wide enough to take a few observations, and make a
note of them.
The Eastern custom of standing in a circle largely prevailed with the
crowd of idlers. Here was a group of Greeks in full costume in a circle;
there a group of Italians in a circle. The Marseilles sailors and
labourers, and the Marseilles old ladies and the Marseilles young
ladies, ‘circled’ also; they all stood and screamed at each other, and
shouted at the top of their voices (this is conversation in Marseilles),
but no one ever broke the circle.
The groups and the crowds of swarthy sons and daughters of the South
were not exactly the sort of groups and crowds one would like to be
alone in, with the Bank of England in one’s pockets. I should say one
might have manned a dozen pirate ships at any one quay in five minutes.
Knives were worn handy, and there was a flash of steel more than once
when argument became high. But for all that the men and women themselves
wore a good deal of common jewellery; watch-chains by the score I
counted across the woollen waistcoats of the sailors, and most of the
men had heavy earrings in their ears. The scarlet sashes worn round the
waists, the blue and green plush trousers, and the bright orange and red
handkerchiefs twisted over the heads of some of the women, turban
fashion, imparted to portions of the crowd an operatic look, and I
expected every minute to hear them commence a chorus.
I had my boots blacked on the Quay du Port, and a marvellous boy in rags
performed the office. Murillo might have been tempted to come out of his
grave to paint him. When everything else fails, and I am quite tired of
respectable life, I shall come to Marseilles, and spend the rest of my
days in lolling on the quay and basking in the sun.
Yet perhaps I had better wait before I finally make up my mind on the
subject of Marseilles, for down the harbour on my right there lies at
anchor the ship which is to carry me across the blue Mediterranean to
the African shore. And who knows?--I might like Algiers better.