1864
THE FIRST CALL OF THE EAST
The year 1864 is sacred to me in that, although it called me away from
St. Petersburg, where I was so happy, it also called me to my first
taste—a mere glimpse—of that East which, old man as I am, still casts
its spell over me. When the time came for my holiday—not till October—I
had six weeks before me which I could call my own. It happened that at
that moment a messenger was wanted for Constantinople; I saw my chance
and volunteered. Vienna first, then down the Danube to the Black Sea.
Mr. (afterwards Sir Arthur) Cowell Stepney was my companion. A wonderful
journey, where language and costume carry the traveller back to the days
of Trajan, and the very names of the places are full of romance. “Unde
es, amice?” asks a Wallach, recognizing a friend—and invites him to sit
at the same “mensa” (not “tavola” or “table”) with him, and rates the
waiter because the cloth is not as “albo” (not “blanc” or “bianco”) as
it should be. The peasants, shaggy, bearded and untrimmed, were dressed
in tunics, fur caps, leggings and sandals, exactly like the prisoners on
Trajan’s arch. Fifty years ago the Latinity had been preserved in far
greater purity in Wallachia than in the true Latin countries, and poverty
of communication had prevented the demon of fashion from destroying the
old picturesque national costume.
A troglodyte colony of Circassians at Czernavoda, burrowing in the
earth like rabbits, a colony of Tartars herded in a loathsome mud town,
the gift of the Sultan to the Crim Tartars, seemed like creatures from
another hemisphere. Here we had some trouble with certain tatterdemalion
nondescripts who represented the Turkish authorities. They wanted to open
my Foreign Office bags. I rebelled; but knowing no Turkish, and they
being equally ignorant of any other language, the case seemed hopeless,
when all of a sudden I remembered Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. Kinglake
furnished me with the word of salvation. “Eltchi, Eltchi!” I shouted,
“touch my bags if you dare, you infernal scoundrels!” The last words,
except as ornaments, were pleonastic as abuse generally is. “Sesame”
itself had not more magic than the first. My canvas bags became an object
of veneration—the great seal as sacred as that of King Solomon in the
days of his glory.
At Kustendji we took ship, and after a stormy passage in that cruel sea
the name of which had to be changed in order to propitiate its evil
demons, made our way, like Jason and his Argonauts, through the Kuaneai
Symplegades, the dark, floating rocks between which the very dove that
they sent out as pioneer lost her tail, and found ourselves in the
Bosphorus, the identical bull’s ferry across which that wicked old god
Zeus carried the lovely Europa. We were now in the midst of the scenes
made famous by Homer and Hesiod; the home of gods and heroes, the land in
which all the poetry and all the romance of the Western world was born.
Beautiful is Constantinople, the great city of palaces, mosques, minarets
and cypresses; but how much more beautiful must that paradise have been
under the dispensation of Olympus, before the unspeakable Turk, and the
hardly more speakable Christian of those parts, had made it the centre of
their ignoble tussles, intrigues, cruelties, robberies and murders!
The day had not long broken when on a dismal morning—October 4th—we
escaped from a polychrome and polyglot crowd which besieged our ship, and
following our luggage borne by sturdy Hamals, made our way through mud
and slosh up the Grande Rue de Pera to Misseri’s Hotel. There was a magic
in the name, for had not old Misseri been made famous by Kinglake? Was he
not, _longo intervallo_, the second hero of that immortal book “Eothen?”
And was he not himself grown rich and fat and well-liking, a Pasha of
many tales, and all of them in honour of his old master, whom he loved,
and whom I was only to know many years later?
When I had ridden to Therapia and deposited my bags at the British
Embassy, where Mr. William Stuart was then the Ambassador’s vicegerent, I
went back to Constantinople. Stuart was an excellent official, famous for
having penetrated all those arcana of cookery in which Brillat Savarin
himself was not a greater adept. It is a study well worth the attention
of diplomatists, for who can say what difficulties an excellent dinner
has not smoothed over? And here let me, in passing, pay a tribute to my
greatest living friend among British Ambassadors, the prince of modern
diplomatists and experts in dining as a fine art. But I will say no more,
lest I should be suspected of fishing for an invitation—if only a sea
which I am never likely again to cross did not lie between him and me
that might be possible; as it is, I can meet accusation with firmness.
Of course we went to see all the sights of Stamboul—_non ragionam
di lor_. What delighted me far more than the mosques, the dancing
and howling dervishes, the tombs of magnificent Sultans, and all the
stock-in-trade of the dragoman, was wandering through by-ways in the
city, happening upon out-of-the-way, unsuspected, picturesque nooks and
corners—above all, certain old graveyards, with their quaint turbaned
memorial stones, over which the tall, solemn cypresses mount reverent
guard—warders watching over the peace of the dead Moslem. There was one
such cemetery hard by a tiny mosque, on one side of which the jealously
latticed window of a harem looked out, and I could picture to myself
Amina the ghoul, stealing out of her prison in the dark hours of the
night to practise her unholy rites among the mouldering dead. There were
still places in Constantinople where, far from the madding crowd of
frock-coated modernity, the glamour of the East retained its power.
One sight I am glad to have seen, and that was on Friday, the 7th of
October, the Sultan Abdul Aziz going to the mosque. There was a great
crowd of carriages full of ladies, and all the principal ministers
and officers of State. The Sultan looked tired and intensely bored,
as well he might, for already his extravagances had brought upon him
ceaseless remonstrances from the other Powers. He began his reign well,
industriously paving the road to Hell, but his paving-stones, excellent
as they seemed to be, soon crumbled into dust. He became inoculated
with the barbarous lust of military splendour and all those whims
and appetites to which Sultans have fallen victims to the undoing of
themselves and their people.
The sorry end came twelve years later (in 1876). How it came about
remains a mystery of the women’s quarters. It was said at the time that a
nip from a pair of sharp scissors opened a vein and the wretched man bled
to death in the privacy of his own harem. Who did the deed none knew. Was
it suicide? Was it a bribed eunuch? Was it one of the ladies? That is
immaterial; his death was needed, and he died.
Three notable men were among the high officials in waiting: Aali Pasha,
who was said to be greatly under the influence of M. de Moustiers, the
French Ambassador; Omar Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Turkish
army in the Crimea in 1855; and Fuad Pasha, who had been Lord Dufferin’s
colleague on the commission which investigated the anti-Christian
uprising in the Lebanon in 1860. I was glad to see him, for I had heard
so much of him from Meade, who accompanied Lord Dufferin as secretary.
That was Lord Dufferin’s first important mission; and very well he
managed it.
When he first took his seat with the colleagues, his extremely youthful
appearance made them think that they would be able to do what they
pleased with him; they were mistaken; by the third sitting his cleverness
and tact, combined with the most exquisite manners and firmness, had made
him master of the situation, and his fame as a diplomatist was secured.
Fuad Pasha, like my old friend Khalil Pasha at St. Petersburg, was noted
as a wit. A short time before I saw him he gave a ball to which the
members of the Corps Diplomatique and their wives were invited. At a
certain moment it was arranged that the ladies should go and pay a visit
to Madame Fuad in the harem. A pert French _chargé d’affaires_ said that
he should manage to smuggle himself inside the mystic doors. Fired with
this ambition, at the given time he offered his arm to one of the ladies
and tried to slip in with her. Fuad Pasha, who was standing by, stopped
him, saying very quietly, “Pardon, mon cher, vous savez que vous n’êtes
accrédité qu’auprès de la Porte.”
But after all, Constantinople, with its vaunted charms—charms so much
vaunted that they have become almost familiar—was not the goal of our
ambition. Our aim was to see something of Asia Minor and, above all,
to explore the Trojan Plain. The difficulty was, how to get there? At
last we heard of a Russian steamer, the _Grand Duke Constantine_, plying
between Odessa and Alexandria—a craft as capricious as a fine lady. First
she would, and then she wouldn’t, take us, and finally, “saying ‘no,’
consented.” But not for two days would she make up her mind to start.
At last, on the 12th of October, we steamed away from the Golden Horn,
leaving behind us the domes and minarets of Stamboul bathed in all the
glory of a sunset that would have made Turner wild with delight, and
which sent a whole shipload of Russian pilgrims bound for the Holy Land
to their knees, piously crossing themselves at the last sight of St.
Sophia, always a sacred shrine to the orthodox, in spite of having been
for centuries defiled by the rites of Islam.
On the following morning we landed at the Dardanelles. The Consul was
most kind, and helped us in every way. The trouble was that there were
no horses to be had, so we spent a wet, stormy day in visiting the civil
and military governors. The former was a delightful, fat old gentleman,
brother-in-law to Fuad Pasha, with a very merry twinkle in his eye,
almost as entertaining as Kinglake’s immortal Pasha, whose conversation
is recorded in “Eothen.” He spoke much about the Prince of Wales, and
declared that the Princess was “a gift of cream and honey specially sent
by Allah for the good of the English people.” Those were the sentiments
of the man of peace.
The man of war was not less emphatic over the pipes and coffee. He
professed great admiration for Lord Palmerston, Lord Stratford de
Redcliffe, and the bagpipes. If ever England should be in trouble
Turkey would come to the rescue, with four hundred thousand men, and he
would be the man to lead them. But alas! that was fifty-one years ago,
in pre-Enver days! What was perhaps more to the purpose, by the help
of the two governors we procured horses and a kavass named Hussein,
a picturesque warrior bristling with arms, who was made personally
responsible for our safety. The good Misseri had found us an excellent
dragoman at Constantinople. I recommended him afterwards to Leighton—not
yet President of the Royal Academy—who was delighted with him.
Full of enthusiasm, the old poem stirring us to the very core, we
wandered, Homer in hand, among the scenes made sacred for ever by the
tale of the ten years’ siege. We looked out—as the homesick Greeks
did—upon Imbros, Tenedos, Lemnos, Samothrace, and dimly saw far-away
Athos; ahead of us was the glorious Ida range. Hardly a step could we
take without treading upon broken marble and sherds of pottery, dumb
witnesses of the vanished existence of a once teeming population, or
probably three tiers of population—the men of King Priam’s time, the
Romans, the Genoese. All have left their traces, all are now forgotten by
the few poverty-stricken Turkish villagers who have ignorantly succeeded
to their heritage.
The Scamander, long since diverted from its old course, was peaceful
enough when we first crossed it; but there came a great storm, the God
descended into the river, and in a couple of hours the sluggish stream
had become a wild, tearing flood; to get back was out of the question,
and we had to take refuge for the night in a Turkish farm-house, a very
filthy haven of rest, or rather no-rest, where we were the prey of
creeping and hopping creatures innumerable. In the dead of the night the
wind howled, the crazy house shook, and a portion of the ceiling plaster
fell upon me, and began, as it seemed, to take unto itself legs and crawl
all over me. Furious as the weather was, I jumped up and fled into an
outside shed, where, after a bath by moonlight in Scamander, I waited for
the dawn, which came at last, breaking into a glorious day, its beauty
enhanced a hundredfold by the memory of the horrors of the night.
As we sauntered over the hallowed plain, it needed no great play of the
imagination to see the Grecian ships drawn up in line by the seashore; to
picture to ourselves the hosts of Europe and Asia facing one another in
battle array; to listen to the proud challenges of the leaders acclaimed
by the shouts of their men; Ajax, “like the dread Ares in person,
striding mightily, in his harness of flashing brass, shaking his long
shafted spear;” to see the body of Hector being dragged in cruel revenge
round yonder barrow, which is the tomb of Patroclus; to feel with the
aged King Priam, praying for the ransom of his son’s remains; to mourn
over the widowhood of Andromache! These are the very springs near which
Hector was killed, still pouring their runlets of water into the natural
basin at which the deep-bosomed Trojan women were wont to wash their
linen.
It is good to remember those days spent amid traditions which three
thousand years have not sufficed to strip of their glamour. If the plain
still seemed to ring with the clash of arms, the slopes and wooded dells
of “many fountained” Ida were so lovely, so full of poetry, that I half
expected to see them peopled by lovely goddesses and shy dryads, hiding
among the oaks and chestnuts and pines. But alas! Aphrodite, the Queen
of Smiles (was she not born in the foam of the countless smiles of the
sea?), has long since forsaken the haunts that she loved when the world
was young—maybe the men of to-day are not so attractive as Anchises
and Adonis, or as the lovely boy who drew down the chaste Artemis from
her crescent in high heaven to steal a kiss on earth. The goddesses
remain sedate and unkissing among the clouds of Olympus, and no longer
condescend to entrance the solitudes of shepherds, nor plead for the
palm of beauty before a mortal judge. But if the goddesses have fled for
ever, the sacred groves which they loved still remain full of the magic
of their beauty and of the olden time. It is only we who are unworthy to
receive the divine afflatus—we degenerate—of the earth, earthy.
That Homer was himself and not a limited liability company of
ballad-mongers—that he, too, wandered where we did—is proved by his
accurate picture of the landscape of the Troad. Kinglake brings forward
the relative positions of Imbros and Samothrace. Poseidon viewed the war
from Samothrace, but on the map Imbros stands between it and the Asiatic
shore. How was the god’s vision not masked? Then Kinglake looked, and
saw that Samothrace towered high above Imbros, so that Poseidon had well
chosen his watch-tower. Ida gives what I think is a still better proof
that Homer saw—and described what he saw. He could not have been born
blind.
Climbing Mount Ida, at first we rode through an enchanted forest, broken
up by glades and pastures of rarest beauty, watered by crystal rills
springing from the living rock, and babbling their way down to the plain,
to join Scamander, through scenes befitting the divine mysteries sung
by the poets. Higher up the vegetation becomes less luxuriant and more
stern, until it dwindles into mere scrub and finally ceases altogether.
Then comes a stiff ascent over loose shingle, up which we had to drag our
horses, slipping back a yard for every two yards gained. The stones are
bare and almost polished, scarcely so much as a lichen to be seen, but
when at last we painfully reached the top of Gargarus, there burst upon
our view a carpet of brilliant wild flowers, marking the spot where Here
lulled to sleep the mighty Zeus as he sat brooding over the help to be
given to Hector and to Troy. It was a war in which the gods themselves
took sides, and fought and schemed on behalf of those whom they took
under their wings.
Does not Homer tell us how, when Poseidon was helping the Greeks, the
Queen of Heaven, the Lady Here, who was also on their side, saw her
lord Zeus grimly watching from the heights of Ida over the Trojan host?
How to close his eyes and gain time? The God of Sleep she suborns by
promising to give him as his bride the beloved of his heart, the youngest
of the Graces, fair Pasithae. The Goddess is Queen of all Majesty, yet
she has but too good reason to know that Majesty by itself has lost its
power over the Cloud-compeller; so she begs of Aphrodite the loan of her
cestus, the magic girdle which holds the secret of all those alluring
charms which make love irresistible. Armed with this and having Sleep as
her ally, she seeks her lord, and with sweet dalliance beguiles him into
oblivion on the mountain-top.
“Then the divine earth sent up a carpet thick and soft of newly-budding
grass, dew-sprinkled lotos, crocus and hyacinth” (Iliad, XIV.). Homer
must have seen this wonder and invented the pretty fable of Here’s wiles
to account for this unexpected garden of wildings.
To deny Homer or Shakespeare is a crime of high treason against the
Majesty of Genius. For my part, in these days of acute criticism, when
all faith is shattered and torn to shreds, I am not ashamed to confess
that I am yet old-fashioned enough to believe in Homer, and to love the
old fables of the gods and goddesses, call them sun-myths or moon-myths,
or what you will. To me Agamemnon, Achilles and Ajax; Priam, Hector,
Andromache, Paris and dear, beautiful, naughty Helen, _teterrima belli
causa_, are still real actors on the world’s stage, who among these
glades and forests and sweetly watered dells and plains played their
parts in a great drama which has been the joy of countless generations
and will be the joy of generations that are yet to come. Of how much
pleasure and beauty does not too much learning rob us! Is it not enough
that a thing is beautiful? Why turn diamonds into charcoal? If we might
reverse the process there would be some sense in it.
At a pass on the top of a spur of the mountain range we came upon an
excellent illustration of the eight-hours’ system. At a point where
caravans cross the mountain there was a little hut with a tiny vegetable
garden. It was occupied by three Zebecs, guardians of the peace, and in
some fashion customs officers. They divided the twenty-four hours between
them. While one slept, another mounted guard, and the third robbed any
unarmed travellers who might pass that way. We had luncheon in their
hut; the coffee and cigarettes were of the best—manifestly the spoils of
the Egyptian. Refreshed and enriched with a store of happy memories, we
came down upon the Bay of Adramyttium. The richly wooded gorges of the
southern slope of the mountain were, if possible, even more beautiful
than the Trojan side. We slept at Ardjelar, and next day took boat to
Assos.
We had now left the enchanted haunts of gods and goddesses, the
battlefields of heroes, to linger for a while in the footsteps of the
Holy Apostles. The Military Pasha at the Dardanelles had given us a
letter for the Bimbashi in command, who was very civil and showed us over
the ruins of the old Greek town, then said to be the most perfect in
existence, but even fifty-one years ago fast disappearing under the hand
of the destroyer, who must needs carry off the grand old masonry to build
fortifications. The Bimbashi was wrecking the old town with ardour, for
our friend the Pasha had written him an indignant despatch complaining
that the hidden treasures which were supposed to exist had not been
found, and he begged us to write to the Pasha, assuring him that all
search had proved barren and there was no treasure trove.
We were now eager to get on, so, in spite of dismal forebodings from our
crew, we insisted on setting sail in an open caique, meaning to reach
Aivali as soon as possible; but wind and weather were too much for our
poor little craft: we were promptly driven over to Lesbos, and it was
forty-eight hours before we managed to reach our destination, after
beating about the bay half starved and sleepless.
There was a British Vice-Consul in the place—a Greek—who treated us most
kindly, though it was rather a disappointment to two starvelings, after
having doubled St. Paul’s experience of “a night and day in the deep,” to
be offered, Turkish fashion, a teaspoonful of jam and a glass of water.
However, a bountiful meal followed as soon as it could be cooked. We
had a great disappointment about horses; there were none to be had, and
it was all the more provoking as we knew that we must be causing much
trouble to our good host; but we did not find out till afterwards, and
then to our great confusion, that he actually turned his wife and his
mother-in-law out of doors in order to lodge us.
The next day at extortionate prices we procured horses and set out for
Pergamos, riding through cotton-fields and olive-groves, past a cemetery
devoted to the remains of victims murdered by a band of brigands who,
until twelve months earlier, had infested that part of the country. But
now they themselves had been caught and entered upon the inheritance of
their final six feet of earth, so we had no fear. We reached Pergamos
that night, a quaint and beautiful old town full of ruins and relics
of the past, and lodged in a _khan_ which Rembrandt would have etched
with delight. What effects he would have produced with the variously
and picturesquely dressed men, the camels and the horses, all dimly
visible, scarcely more than guessed at, under the half light shed by an
old-fashioned horn lantern. In two more days, on the 28th of October,
we arrived at Smyrna, where we spent a most delightful week under the
auspices of Mr. Cumberbatch, the British Consul.
Before finally parting with our _kavass_, Hussein, we wished to have a
photograph of him. To this he strongly objected. Photography was not in
those days so common in Turkey, at any rate in the out-of-the-way parts
to which he belonged, as it is at present, and he considered that its
practice must be in no very remote way connected with black magic; when,
on looking into the camera he saw the figures upside down, then he was
persuaded that it could not be other than the work of Shaitan. However,
at length he was persuaded. He was a merry, picturesque creature,
beguiling his time on the march by singing. George, the dragoman, gave
me a translation of one of his songs. “The falcon looks to the water,
but I cannot see my Lady. She wounds me, but I know not how to cure the
wound. The falcon loves to descend upon the peacock, and I long to kiss
the white throat of my Lady. She has a knife in her hand; she is about to
murder me. Yah! Hah! White are your legs, oh! my Lady!”
October 29th.—I was very anxious to see the monument of Sesostris, a
memorial of his victories, described by that beloved old traveller
Herodotus, which is at Nif, within reach of Smyrna. A longish excursion.
Herodotus mentions two such monuments, but so far as I know only this one
has been discovered. We started at five o’clock in the morning with Mr.
Cumberbatch, escorted by his _kavass_ and a mounted policeman. Even had
there been no object of profound historic and artistic interest to be
seen, the beauty of the excursion would have amply repaid our trouble. As
the day broke we were met by successions of gorgeously lovely landscapes.
The valley along which our road lay was hemmed in by mountains richly
clothed with fruit trees, pines, cypresses and oaks, enfolded in the
graceful drapery of vines and curtained with the festoons of climbing
plants; wild flowers carpeted the “floor of the forest,” and fragrant
shrubs perfumed the fresh morning air.
In spring, when the cherries and other fruit trees are in blossom, this
must be a happy valley indeed, but we saw it at its second moment of
supreme beauty, when the woodland was aflame with what the Japanese call
the brocade of the autumn tints. Nestled in the midst of these feasts
for the eye lies the picturesque little town of Nif, or Nymphi. As we
saw it, the market-place, with its stalls surrounding a noble group of
Oriental plane trees, and filled with a busy, kaleidoscopic crowd still,
at that time, clothed in Eastern garb, was like a scene devised by some
cunning stage artist. We ate the food which we had brought with us in
an ancient _khan_, itself a picture of the East, and then went to visit
the Governor, whom the Consul knew. For a while we lingered in the inner
court of the great man’s palace, a study such as Alma Tadema would have
loved to paint, with its marble floor, its plashing fountain, fringed
with oleanders, and the arches of its cloister decked with orange and
lemon trees.
Two milk-white goats, his Excellency’s special pets, came up
confidentially to be stroked and coaxed. Presently the great man received
us in an inner sanctum. Pipes, coffee, and phrases followed as usual,
and then we went our way. Living the life of ease dear to the Turk in
such surroundings—his home a gem in the loveliest setting—I felt that
the Pasha must have realized the Italian dream of the sweetness of doing
nothing.
A ride of about two hours from the town brought us to our goal. It would
not be an easy matter for a traveller to find the effigy without a guide,
so well is it hidden among the brushwood some three hundred yards above
a pretty little mountain burn which comes tumbling down to the road.
Would that it had been still better screened, for though there seemed
to be people in Smyrna who had never heard of it, others there were who
had found their way thither and thought it no sin to deface this hoary
monument by graving their names in large letters all over the rock. One
ruffian, a schoolmaster as I was told, had immortalized his vulgarity by
chiselling his name deeply on the arm which lies across the arm of the
old king. Had I been an autocrat I would have caused him to be soundly
flogged by his own pupils. They would have enjoyed a rich, topsy-turvy
treat and he would have met with a punishment befitting the crime.
The rock was originally sloping, but was cut into the perpendicular from
the bottom upwards, leaving at the base a ledge which served as a seat
where a pilgrim might rest in comfort. The figure is carved in deep
relief and is seven feet and seven inches high, measuring four feet
from the right elbow to the left hand. The features are much worn and
the letters which were on the breast have disappeared. The left hand
holds the spear and the right the bow. Here the description of Herodotus,
otherwise correct, goes astray, for he reverses these positions. A very
intelligible mistake if he wrote from memory on his return home from the
expedition; or possibly his account may have been taken from the other
figure which he mentions. The conical cap, with a badge in front and a
sort of brim to it, the spear and bow, the greaves on the thigh and a
projection which must once have been the handle of a sword, are quite
distinct.
We stayed for some time in contemplation of this record, between forty
and fifty centuries old, of the pride of the old Egyptian king, and then,
mounting our horses, turned their heads westward, sad that this day of
beauty had come to an end. It remains on my memory as a rare experience,
a flawless holiday, fitly crowned by a sunset that seemed to wreathe
Smyrna in flames and turn its beauteous bay into a great lake of liquid
fire.
October 30th, Sunday.—A day of rest much needed, for since we landed at
the Dardanelles we had been a good deal knocked about, far more than
appears in these pages, so after church we lounged lazily about Smyrna
and drank in the glory of the view from the citadel, where the old
Genoese towers stand among the ruins that were once a stronghold built by
some Cyclopean Vauban. Here, too, is a small mosque on a site where the
Christian Church of the Revelation is said to have stood; hard by must
have been “the synagogue of Satan.”[50] Very impressive, moreover, is the
Turkish cemetery with its old and stately cypresses, finer even, as it
seemed to us, than those of Constantinople.
As we wandered homeward we came down upon the track of the Smyrna and
Aidin Railway. Wonderful are the caprices of fashion! What the Sweet
Waters of Europe are to the ladies of Constantinople, that to the fair
dames of Smyrna were the less romantic rails of the new road. They were
the fashionable promenade of the Sabbath-keeping _bourgeoisie_—the line
was thronged by numbers of Turkish ladies in many-coloured dresses; far
more closely veiled in their ghostly white yashmaks than their more
emancipated sisters in Stamboul. Greek, Armenian and Frankish beauties,
in bright French or pseudo-French raiment—many of them radiant with the
beauty for which Ismir is famous—made a motley crowd; while sedate old
Turks sat sipping their coffee and smoking their narghilehs in silent
dignity under the orange and citron trees which fringe the cafés,
watching from under their sleepy lids the brilliant colouring and glowing
eyes of the Ionian dames and damsels.
Waiting for a ship, or indeed for anything, is but dreary work, but there
was no feeling dull at Smyrna, for there was much to be seen and done,
and we lingered luxuriously over the little that was left of a joyous
holiday.
Of course we went to Ephesus, where Mr. Wood, acting for the British
Museum, had not yet made his great discoveries, though in his first
year’s work he had unearthed much that was of interest. The modern
village of Ayazaluk is almost entirely built up of the stones of the
old city all huddled together higgledy-piggledy. Rarely carved capitals
of pillars turned topsy-turvy form incongruous bases for fir posts,
supporting the verandahs of mud-built shops in which fruiterers, pastry
cooks and tobacconists ply their trade. A ruined mosque is a beautiful
relic of old Moorish architecture, inside of which ancient Greek pillars
have been adapted. The very stones in the graveyard are fragments of
old columns and Turkish marbles of the middle ages. But what a noble
position! And how glorious must Ephesus have been in the days of St.
Paul, when it was a seaport and its imposing citadel overlooked the sea,
now (in 1864) owing to alluvial deposits some four miles away!
Barring Damascus, no place is more full of associations and memories
connected with St. Paul than Ephesus. It is strange indeed that so little
should be known of the life of a saint whose ministry wrought more for
the world than that of any other man before or since. Yet here are the
remains of the very buildings among which he lived for years. It cannot
be said of Ephesus as Lucan said of Troy “etiam periere ruinæ.” Neither
Goths nor Turks have entirely wiped them out.
Here is the great amphitheatre where the apostle “fought with beasts,”
where some twenty-five thousand spectators would assemble for such a
sight, and where Demetrius the silversmith raised the riot against him
and “the whole city was filled with confusion.” Here, too, is a little
square building of stupendous antiquity, which tradition says was his
prison; and why should it not have been? I am old-fashioned and simple
enough to have faith in tradition, which is often as trustworthy as the
written word, just as I humbly accept the letter written by St. Paul “to
the saints which are at Ephesus,” when he was “an ambassador in bonds,”
at Rome, and pay no heed to the learned hair-splittings of scholastic
commentators, to whom I would say, in the famous words of Lord Melbourne,
“Why can’t you leave it alone?”
Seven years later I was again at Ephesus with Lord Stafford and George
Crawley, and this time we found Mr. Wood triumphant. He had just reaped
the fruit of eight years of assiduous labour—labour hindered by many
difficulties, lack of funds, discouragement, and, last not least, the
pestilent atmosphere of the fever swamps among which he had to work.
This second visit was deeply interesting, nor was it devoid of a
certain element of fun. That time we arrived at Smyrna from Beirut
in a small Russian coasting steamer which was carrying pilgrims from
the Holy Land back to Odessa—always a curious and interesting lot of
passengers, as I often found. We had to face a succession of gales, to
the great discomfiture of the poor zealots. One fat old pilgrimess told
me pathetically that she would have died had she not thought of the
inconvenience that her death would cause on board, and so in the spirit
of self-sacrifice she resisted and consented to live.
In the saloon, such as it was, we had as shipmate a certain elderly
American general, who told us that he was an attorney, own correspondent
to seven transatlantic newspapers, and that his journals were looked
forward to by some of the leading families in various cities, unknown
to me. As a man of letters he greatly admired Shakespeare. “Yes, sir!”
he said, “Shakespeare is quite an institution. Emerson can write some
poetry, but I guess he can’t come up to that. With the Bible, Shakespeare
and Webster’s Dictionary, a man can get along. They are as good documents
as a man need have for a library.” A dear, innocent, unsophisticated
man was the Attorney-General, very good-natured, and a source of great
amusement during all the time that he remained sticking to us with the
affection of a burr.
Our lucky star was in the ascendant, for almost the first person whom
we met in Smyrna was Mr. Wood, who most kindly agreed to go with us to
Ephesus the next morning. When we reached the ruins, he showed us all
his plans and explained his discoveries, setting forth the work of his
eight years in an hour’s pregnant talk. When he had made all clear, the
good General said, “Then, sir, I gather from your conversation that the
Temple of Diana was a round building.” “Round, sir, round!” said Mr.
Wood, “haven’t I been telling you all the time that it was square?”
Nothing abashed, the General looked round him and said: “Waal! if this
was the site of the City of Ephesus, I’m glad to know it. It was quite
considerable of a city, and the men that built it had some snap in ’em.”
Steered by our learned pilot, we visited all the wonders that his
patience and science had revealed—the Odeion, a beautiful little building
with white marble steps decorated with carved lions’ feet—the Wool
Exchange, a most ingenious discovery—the marble tomb of Androclus. I have
already spoken of the theatre, the stadium and other great witnesses
of the past. Did we pass by the tomb of Mary Magdalene, that sweet
woman whom the great Pope Gregory, for no earthly reason and without
one scintilla of evidence, came to identify with the woman “which was a
sinner”? Did we see the tomb of St. Luke, who told that unnamed sinner’s
touching story? Again I say, why not? These are secrets which will not be
revealed until the Last Day, when the graves shall give up their dead.
But even an Evangelist must die somewhere, and what is more probable than
that the early Christians, knowing where his remains lay in some place
outside the city, should have brought them hither with pious pomp and
reburied them in yonder round building, faced with marble and bearing as
its device the bull, or buffalo, surmounted with a cross?
Mr. Wood’s great find, then (in 1871) a discovery not very many days old,
was the undoubted site of the great Temple of Diana. Careful study and
reasoning led Mr. Wood to begin excavating at a spot where he discovered
the angle of the peribolus which was thrown by Augustus ὑιός θεοῦ, the
Son of God. (How like the Chinese imperial title, Tien Tzě, the son of
Heaven!) Here were inscriptions bearing the name of the architect, the
one partially the other wholly erased. This tallies with an edict which
has been found ordering that the name of this man, who had fallen into
disgrace, should be obliterated.
Having found the angle, Mr. Wood went to work with new enthusiasm and
energy, and was rewarded some two months before our arrival by the
unearthing of a huge white marble column of exquisite workmanship _in
situ_. Thus was the vexed question of the site of the mighty temple set
at rest and Mr. Wood’s work crowned with success. Much has been done
since his time; but he showed the way, a successful pioneer. When we
considered the vastness of the inclosure and the magnificent proportions
of the column we understood the cry, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”
While Mr. Wood was giving us a lecture of surpassing interest, I began to
think that even the General was touched by the sacred fire of enthusiasm,
but I was reckoning without my General. He was destined once more to
put his foot in it. Like Sydney Smith’s silent man, he rudely broke the
spell. When Mr. Wood had finished speaking, he looked for a moment or
two pensively at the column, and then picking up a great stone, said:
“Waal now! Do think! If that piece of marble was part of the Temple of
Diana, I guess I’m bound to have a chunk of it,” and was just about to
chip off as large a piece as he could, when Mr. Wood, who was nothing if
not peppery, flew at him viciously; the tiger that lies sleeping in every
man was aroused, and I verily believe that had Mr. Wood held a deadly
weapon in his hand our poor Attorney-General would have had but a faint
chance of surviving. As it was he collapsed under the great discoverer’s
architectonic fury and remained sadly silent for the rest of the day.
What manner of report, I wonder, did the seven newspapers receive of our
Ephesian expedition!
The next morning at breakfast we took leave of our General. We were bound
for Constantinople and our ship was to sail at noon. He was bound heaven
knows whither in search of paragraphs. After breakfast he announced his
intention of going up to the citadel of Smyrna. “I am informed,” he told
us, “that there air up there some Cyclopean walls. Now Cyclops lived
quite a long while ago, and I’m not going to miss seeing what he built.”
It was rather a shame to disillusion the poor gentleman, but I thought of
the seven across the Atlantic and was stony-hearted. When I explained to
him the meaning of Cyclopean building the General was disenchanted, but
he went up to the citadel nevertheless, and I have no doubt made a very
pretty story out of the great one-eyed builder.
* * * * *
And now let me go back seven years and start again on Gunpowder Plot Day,
1864, when we left the radiantly beautiful bay of Smyrna for England
on board the Austrian Lloyd’s ship _Messina_. Twenty-six hours’ steam
brought us to the Island of Syra, where, after being roasted for a day
and a night on that sun-scorched rock, where no trace of vegetation is to
be seen—to all appearance an island of bumboat-men and evil smells—on the
7th we shipped on board the _Calcutta_, also an Austrian Lloyd’s ship,
bound for Trieste.
It is something to have seen Navarino and to have passed Ithaca, even
in the night; but what gave especial interest to our cruise was meeting
Count Ungern Sternberg (or was he a Baron? I forget), a Russian who was a
relation of many people whom I had known well in St. Petersburg. Though
a general in the army, he was one of those travelling agents who in
those days used to wander over Europe apparently charged with no special
mission, but keeping their ears and eyes open everywhere, and doubtless
finding many an opportunity of rendering some underground service to
the rather tortuous policy in which the Russian Foreign Office in those
days delighted. Now that the Gortchakoffs and Ignatieffs have carried
their diplomacy into another and let us hope a better world, there is
perhaps no room for the political knight errant of whom Ungern Sternberg
was at that time a rather famous representative. I knew him well by
name, though we had never met, and he was a most agreeable companion.
We talked a great deal about our common friends in London, Paris, St.
Petersburg (I cannot yet bring myself to talk of Petrograd). On politics,
for some reason best known to himself, he was, as he would have put it,
_très boutonné_; but when we reached Corfu and he saw the remains of
the blown-up forts his excitement got the better of his diplomacy, and
he could not conceal his joy at the loss which England had sustained,
or his wonder at the short-sightedness which prompted it. “What was
your Lord Russell about?” he said. “See how many combinations may make
England regret this step. For instance, suppose that France and Italy—no
impossible contingency—were united against her; what a stronghold they
would have at Corfu!”
This was much the opinion that Lord Palmerston professed in 1850, but in
1863 he yielded to Lord Russell, and, apparently without a misgiving,
gave up what he once considered too important a naval and military post
ever to be abandoned by us. Lord Russell, as usual, was outwitted; he
believed in a plebiscite and that a people should belong to masters of
their own choosing; he could not see that, in this case, the plebiscite
was an engine worked largely by ecclesiastical means at the disposal of
Russia—in fact, a political and clerical intrigue.
A very intelligent Roman Catholic priest told me that the islanders,
having been led by Mr. Gladstone, in 1858, to believe that England would
never give up the protectorate, thought that they were quite safe in
declaring for annexation to Greece, as they were urged to do by their
priests. They would in that way save their face with the Orthodox Church,
while they would still enjoy the material prosperity for which they had
to thank England. They thought that their true interest was to run with
the hare and hunt with the hounds. The Greek Archbishop used all his
power to further the plans of Russia, and during the time of voting was
nightly closeted in secret conference with the Russian Consul. When the
end came, His Grace received a high decoration from the Tsar, from whom
it was even said that he was actually in receipt of pay.
Curiously enough, the party that had been hottest for annexation with
Greece under King Otho would not vote for it under King George. The
reason alleged was that the revolution against Otho had been the work of
England, and that King George being the nominee of England, annexation
with Greece would put the islands more than ever under the thumb of Great
Britain. My priest went on to deplore the ruin which their mistaken
nationalism had brought upon the unhappy people. Many of the principal
business houses in Corfu were practically bankrupt and new failures daily
expected. The poorer people found no sale for their fish and the produce
of the farms, gardens and orchards. The market, which did a roaring trade
daily, sometimes as much as two or three hundred pounds changing hands in
a morning, was a thing of the past. Now there was no English Government
House, no prosperous officials, no garrison, and with the departure of
the last redcoat the happy days of plenty had gone. “Oh!” he cried, “if
you would only come back again!”
We went to the principal hotel in the great square. The landlord received
us with many expressions of joy. We ordered luncheon and a carriage.
“I will go and cook at once,” said he. “Eh! Gentlemen! Six months ago
I had a cook and waiters and maids, two coachmen and plenty of horses.
Now I must go and dress the luncheon. I must serve it; and when you have
finished I shall harness the carriage and drive you out! and I shall make
your beds if you sleep here to-night.” Perfectly good-humoured the poor
man was, and that made his story all the more pathetic.
When we got home, after a drive through the lovely garden scenery, he
made the beds, for we were not to sail till the next day. More talk in
the evening. The distress was beyond belief, and it was no mere temporary
distress—bad times with the hope of better things in the future. The
olive harvest, for instance, was in deadly straits, for the proprietors
could not pay a wage of five shillings a day for the gathering, and
the labourers were the masters of the situation and could demand what
they chose. In this way did the small landowners who helped in working
the plebiscite reap the reward of their folly. Humble civil servants
who used to be paid to the hour had to wait a week or a fortnight for
the salary upon which their daily food depended. Cultivation looked
as though it must die out, for the four or five hundred wretched Greek
soldiery who had replaced the English garrison spent their scanty pay on
tobacco alone; no one knew how they lived. Corfu was desolate and England
had lost a stronghold that never can be replaced. No wonder the Ungern
Sternbergs rejoiced!
It is perhaps one of the signs of England’s greatness that she has been
able so far to survive the foreign policy of Lord Russell. Yet even
to-day, in 1915, she is paying the penalty and at what a price! I wonder
whether if he were still alive he would tell us, as he did at Blairgowrie
more than fifty years ago, to “Rest and be thankful.”
Nov. 11.—Our last day’s cruise was delightful. The calendar told us that
we were in November. The weather said June. Our skipper being a native
of Dalmatia intimately knowing the coast and all its snares dared to
take his big ship inside the islands, so we had a view of lovely scenery
usually only possible for the smallest of craft. At a point on the shore
stood a little house and in front of it a group consisting of his wife
and children, on the watch to wave him Godspeed; possibly the chance of a
glimpse of those dear ones weighed more with him than the desire to show
us the beauties of the Dalmatian coast—at any rate, we were the gainers.
At Trieste we said good-bye to our good friend the Russian, whom we left
still chuckling over Lord Russell and the Ionian Islands.