In one of the foul and dirty quarters of the Syrian Seleucia, the port
for Antioch on the shores of the Inner Sea, narrow and tortuous alleys
debouched into a market-place lying along the quays. The sea-horizon
was invisible, so thick was the throng of masts and the tangle of
rigging. The houses were a mass of miserable little shells,
whitewashed within and encumbered with furniture. Their fronts were
garnished with tattered carpets, dirty fragments of cloth, and
ravelled matting. In every nook and hovel and crowded court, along
kennels and gutters of dirty fever-stricken water from laundries and
baths of the poor, there lay seething in its penury and hunger a
populace strangely cosmopolitan.
The sun, after thoroughly baking the earth, had just descended below
the horizon; wide-winged twilight was settling slowly down; a stifling
heat of dust and fog still weighed on the spirits of the city. From
the market square breathed a suffocating atmosphere of flesh and
vegetables, becoming rotten through lying all day in the blaze of the
sun. Half-naked slaves were carrying bales of merchandise from the
ships. Their heads were close-shaven; through their rags could be seen
horrible blotches on the skin; and the greater number bore on their
faces, in brandings by red-hot iron, the Latin letters C. F., that is
to say _Cave Furem_ ('ware thief!).
Braziers were being slowly lighted. But notwithstanding the approach
of night, traffic and discussion gave no sign of ceasing in the
network of alleys. From a neighbouring forge piercing blows of the
hammer resounded on bars of iron, and flames shot up the sooty
draught-hole. Hard by, slaves of a bakery, naked, covered from head to
foot in flour-dust, and with eyelids inflamed by heat, were putting
loaves into an oven. A shoemaker sat in his open-air stall, amid an
insupportable smell of cobbler's glue and leather, stitching shoes by
the light of a smoky lamp. He was squatting on his heels, and chanting
desert songs at the top of his voice. Two old hags like witches, with
hair streaming in the wind, were slowly passing across the little
square in front of a row of hovels. They were yelling at each other,
wrangling and threatening each other with fists and stones. The
subject of dispute was the ownership of a cord on which to dry linen.
A huckster, from a distant village, was hurrying along to be in time
for the morning market. He was mounted on an old mare, flanked with
wicker paniers, each heaped with rotting fish; the fetid smell of his
load made passers-by edge off to a distance. A loutish urchin, with
red hair and skin, was solacing his soul by beating on a great pan,
while other children, a sickly multitude coming into the world and
leaving it by hundreds daily, marched amidst this scene of poverty,
grunting like pigs, round the pools of the quay. The water was full of
orange-peel and egg-shells. In yet more villainous passages, inhabited
by thieves, the smell of sour wine came from wine-shops, and sailors
from every beach of the world marched along arm in arm, shouting
drunken songs.
Surrounding all that noise, that filth and spilth of human misery,
there murmured, sighed, and grumbled, the infinite, distant, and
invisible sea.
Directly over against the subterranean kitchen windows of a Phoenician
dealer, ragged gamblers were playing at knuckle-bones, and gossiping.
From the kitchen warm gusts of boiling gravy, game, and spices
ascended, greedily snuffed-up, with closed eyes, by the hungry
gamesters.
A certain Christian, a dyer of purple, dismissed for theft from a rich
factory at Tyre, was murmuring, as he hungrily sucked a mallow-leaf
thrown away by the cook,--
"And at Antioch, my friends, what's going on there makes one shiver at
nights, just to think of it. Why, a few days ago the hungry folk tore
in pieces the Prefect Theophilus--and for what reason? Nobody knows!
When the thing was done they remembered too late that the poor wretch
was a good sort of fellow and a respectable man. I suggested that
perhaps the Emperor had pointed him out for punishment."