THROUGH ORIENTAL LANDS.
It was "blowing great guns," and the sea was white with foam, when on
the ninety-eighth anniversary of Washington's birthday into another
world, December 14th, 1867, the steamer _Euphrates_, of the M. I.
Company, left Marseilles. The iron ship was staunch, though not
overclean. On the deck were boxed up eight carriages for Turks who had
been visiting Paris. The captain amused himself, in hours which ought
not to have been those of leisure, with embroidery. After a run
through the Sardinian straits, they had clear sea room to Sicily.
Stromboli was quiet, but Vesuvius was lively. At Messina they took on
coal, oranges, five Americans, and one Englishman. On learning
Carleton's plan to travel eastward to San Francisco, the Queen's
subject remarked, with surprise:
"There was a time when we Englishmen had the routes of travel pretty
much all to ourselves, but I'll be hanged if you Americans haven't
crowded us completely off the sidewalk. We can't tie your
shoe-strings."
Greece was sighted at sunrise. With Carleton's mental picture of the
great naval victory of Navarino, by which the murderous Turk was
driven off the sea, rose boyhood's remembrances of the fashionable
"Navarino bonnets," with their colossal flaring fronts, with beds of
artificial flowers set between brims and cheeks, making rivalry of
color amid vast ostentation of bows and ribbon. With his glass, he
could discern, at one point upon the hillside, the hut of a hermit,
who had discovered that man cannot live upon history alone, but that
beans and potatoes are desirable. The practical hermit cultivated a
garden.
Arrival at Piraeus was at 2 A. M. The party of passengers descended the
ladder into a boat, and there sat shivering in their shawls, where
they were likely to be left to historic meditation until the
custom-house opened, except for the well-known fact that silver often
conquers steel. One franc, held up before the gaze of a highly
important personage possessed of a sword and much atmosphere of
authority, secured smiles and welcome to the sacred soil of Greece,
immunity from search, and direction to a cafe where all was warm and
comfortable, and from which, in due time, hotel accommodations were
secured.
In the city of Pericles, they saw the play of "Antigone" in the
theatre of Herod Atticus. On visiting the Parthenon, with its
marvellous sculpture, which Turkish soldiers had so often used as a
target, they found that the chief inhabitants of the ruin were crows.
They met the missionaries who were influential in the making of the
new Grecian nation. From Athens they went to Constantinople, where Dr.
Cyrus Hamlin, in Robert College, was lighting the beacon of hope for
the Christians in the Turkish empire.
Leaving Europe at that end of it on which the Turks have encamped
during four centuries, and where they are still blasting and
devouring, Carleton visited Africa, the old house of bondage. At
Alexandria his first greeting was a cry for bakshish. Within half an
hour after landing, most of his childhood's illusions were dispelled.
A drenching rain fell. The delta of the Nile had been turned into one
vast cotton field which looked like a mass of snow. The clover was in
bloom along the railway to Cairo. In this land of the donkey and of
the Arabian Nights Entertainments, he received several practical
lessons in the art of comparative swindling, soon learning that in
roguery both Christians and the followers of the prophet are one.
In studying his Bible amid the lands which are its best commentary,
Carleton concluded that the crossing of the Red Sea by the fugitive
slaves from Egypt, over an "underground railway made by the order of
God himself," "instead of being in the domain of the miraculous, is
under natural law." At Suez, one of the half-way houses of the world,
he was amused at the jollity of the Mohammedans, who had just broken
their long lenten fast from tobacco and smoke, and who were very happy
in their own way.
In thirty hours after leaving Alexandria, the party, now joined by
Rev. E. B. Webb, had its first view of Palestine,--a sandy shore, low,
level as a Western prairie, tufted with palms, green with olives,
golden with orange orchards, and away in the distance an outline of
gray mountains. Soon, in Jerusalem, he was among the donkeys, dogs,
pilgrims, and muleteers. Out on the Mount of Olives and in starlit
Bethlehem, by ancient Hebron, and then down to low-lying Jericho and
at the Dead Sea, he was refreshing memory and imagination, shedding
old fancies and traditions, discriminating as never before between
figures of rhetoric and figures of rock and reality, while feeding his
faith and cheering his spirit. Then from Jerusalem, after a twenty
days' stay, the party rode northward to Shechem, the home of the
Samaritan, and over the plain of Esdraelon. There Carleton's military
eye revelled in the scene, and he made mind-pictures of the battles
fought there during all the centuries. Then, after tarrying at
Nazareth and Beyrout, we find him, April 11th, at Suez, on board a
steamer for the East.
At Paris he had seen De Lesseps, amid tumultuous applause, receive
from Napoleon III. a gold medal.
Now Carleton was on the steamship _Baroda_, moving down the Red Sea,
once thought to be an arm of the Indian Ocean, but which we now know
to be only a portion of "the great rift valley,"--the longest and
deepest and widest trough on the earth's surface, which extends from
the base of Mount Lebanon and the Sea of Galilee, through the Jordan
Valley, the Dead Sea, the dried up wadies, the Red Sea, and the chain
of lakes and Nyanzas discovered in recent years in the heart of
Africa, and extending nearly to Zanzibar. Passing by Great Britain's
garrisons, lighthouses, and coaling stations, which guard her pathway
to India, Bombay was reached April 27th.
In the interior, in the distressing hot weather of India, Carleton
found this the land of punkas, tatties, and odors both sweet and
otherwise. He was impressed with the amount of jewelry seen, not in
the bazaars, but on the persons of the women. "Through all ages India
has swallowed up silver, and the absorption is as great as ever
to-day." He was amused at the little men's big heads, covered with a
hundred and fifty feet, or more, of turban material, which made so
many of them look like exaggerated tulips. He noticed the phenomena of
religion, the trees smeared with paint, the Buddhist caves, the
Parsee Towers of Silence, the phallic emblems of nature-worship.
Evidently he was not converted to cremation, for he wrote, "The earth
is our mother, and it is sweeter to lie on her bosom amid blooming
flowers or beneath bending elms and sighing pines in God's Acre." He
noticed how rapidly the railways were breaking down caste. "The
locomotive, like a ploughshare turning the sward of the prairies, is
cutting up a faith whose roots run down deep into bygone ages.... The
engine does not turn out for obstructions, such as in former days
impeded the car of progress."
Though caste was stronger than the instincts of humanity, this relic
of the brutishness of conquest was not allowed to have sway in railway
carriages.
Carleton sums up his impressions of the religions of India in this
sentence: "The world by wisdom knew not God." He found his
preconceived ideas of central India all wrong. Instead of jungles,
were plateaus, forest-covered mountains, groves, and bamboo. With the
thermometer at 105 deg. in the shade, the woodwork shrunk so that the
drivers of the dak or ox-cart wound the spokes of the wheels with
straw and kept them wet, so that Carleton noticed them "watering their
carriage as well as horses." Whether it was his head that swelled or
his hat which shrunk, he found the latter two sizes too small at
night. In India, between June and October, little business is done.
The demand for cotton, caused by the American war, had set India
farmers to growing the bolls over vast areas, but the cost of carriage
to the seaboard was so great that new roads had to be built.
"Sahib Coffin" at the garrison towns was amused at both the young
British officers, with their airs, and at the old veterans, who were
as dignified as mastiffs. Living in the central land of the world's
fairy tales, he enjoyed these legends which "give perfume to
literature, science, and art." At Allahabad, in the middle of the
fort, he saw a pillar forty-two feet high, erected by King Asoka, 250
B. C., bearing an inscription commanding kindness to animals. In one
part of India, at the golden pagoda of Benares, he found the monkeys
worshipped as gods, or at least honored as divine servants, while in
the North they were pests and thieves, the enemy of the farmer.
Among other hospitalities enjoyed, was a dinner with an American, Mr.
C. L. Brown, who represented the Tudor Ice Company, of Boston, and who
sold solidified water from Wenham Lake. The piece that clinked in the
glass of Carleton, "sparkling and bright in its liquid light," had
been harvested in 1865, three years before. He described it as a
"piece of imprisoned cold, fragment of a bygone winter," which called
up "bright pictures of boys and girls with their rosy cheeks and
flashing skates,--a breeze of old associations." At Benares, various
root ideas of Hindoo holiness were illustrated, including the linga
worship and the passion for motherhood in that strange phallic cult
which, from India to Japan, has survived all later forms of religion.
In Calcutta, Old India had already been forgotten in the newer and
more Christian India. He visited especially the American Union Mission
Home, where Miss Louise Hook and Miss Britton were training the girls
of India to nobler ideals and possibilities of life. After seeing the
school, Carleton wrote: "Theirs is a great work. Educate the women of
India, and we withdraw two hundred millions from gross idolatry. This
mighty moral leverage obtained, the whole substratum of society will
be raised to a higher level. The mothers of America fought the late
war through to its glorious end. They sustained the army by their
labor, their sympathy, their heroic devotion. The mothers of India are
keeping the idols on their pedestals."
Personal accidents in India were minor and amusing, mostly. Crossing
the Bay of Bengal on the _Clan Alpine_, one of England's opium
steamers bound to China, a boiler blew up. The "priming" of the iron,
the life of the metal, having been burned out in passing from fresh to
salt water, was the cause of the trouble. Nineteen persons, eighteen
natives and a Scotsman, were killed or badly scalded. Carleton rushed
out from his stateroom, amid clouds of steam that made his path nearly
invisible, and was happy in finding his wife safe on deck at the
stern. At sunset the Christian was given the rites of burial. The dead
Hindoos, not being used to religious attentions paid to corpses, were
heaved into the sea, and the voyage continued. This was not the first
or the last time that Carleton experienced the sensation of being
blown up while on a steamboat.