We had seen the shadow of Crete in the north, and the next noon our ship
was somewhere off the Nile. Despite its antiquity the sky was still in
its first bloom, and the sea was its perfect reflection. It was easy to
feel older than the sky and the sea, for our ship was solitary in the
very waters where, out of the traffic in ideas and commodities between
Knossos and Memphis, had grown the Athens of Pericles, and Rome and
Paris, London and New York. If there is anything to be said of that awful
thought, perhaps it would never do to say it here. It may be altogether
too late in the day to brood with fond and kindling eye upon the cradle
of that particular deep which rocked our childhood into the beginnings of
Chicago and Manchester. Let us say nothing about it.
The next sunrise it was the skipper himself who called me. This was a
genuinely surprising event. His white figure was even startling, for to
me then he had become a senior master mariner in a service so august as
our blue funnel, the house flag of which is, I suspect, east of Suez,
more potent than the emblems of not a few proud states. The honor was
unusual enough to cause me to strike my forehead against the opened port
as I sat up respectfully. Our master has been at sea for forty years, so
his appearance of weariness and of ironic understanding may mean that
his experience of men has been extensive, or it may mean nothing. “We
are entering Egypt,” was all he said, while his lean hands rested on
the edge of the bunk; he then turned away as if he supposed this sort of
thing would never end. But possibly he had been up all night.
[Illustration: _A Group of Chinese Firemen_]
There was an apparition of a city over the sea ahead of us. It was so
delicate that the primrose of sunrise, deepened in inclosed and quiet
waters, might in that place have conspired to produce a mirage of one’s
bright expectations. That was the gate to all that romantic folk with a
meaning eager but scarcely articulate call the Orient. Yet which of us
is not romantic when we see it for the first time? I watched that gate
heighten and become material as our ship insensibly approached it, till
I could read on the seaward brow of this entrance to romance the famous
legends, “Topman’s Tea” and “Macgregor’s Whisky.” Port Said, you soon
discover, is just like that.
If it is anything at all it is more West than East. A somber flotilla
of barges manned by a multitude of dark fiends was waiting for us, and
our ship hardly had way off her before she became Tophet with coal
dust, unholy activity, and frightful jubilation. It is the privilege of
civilized men to give their appetites and repulsions the sanction of
reason with its logic, and therefore I did not accept Port Said because I
did not like it. It is certainly not the Orient, and I hoped it was not
even its gate. Its address and its manners are as abrupt and threatening
as is the Stock Exchange to a timid stranger who has misadventured within
its sacred precincts. I went ashore, but soon returned to the ship, for
I fancied that our Chinamen might be closer to a simple heart than the
oblique calculation of that port.
For what are the significant things in travel? Let travelers candidly
own up. He is a wise traveler who has few doubts about that, and such a
man would be silent, of course, being wise. Who would believe him if he
spoke? There was, for example, the French mail steamer close to us at
Port Said, homeward bound. Her saloon passengers, the ultimate Parisian
reflection of the grandeur that was Rome, surveyed in aloof elegance and
in static hauteur the barbaric coarseness of Port Said. But for a chance
hint I would most certainly have saluted, as is the Anglo-Saxon habit,
the refinement and pride of the folk on the Frenchman’s promenade deck as
the very luster—which is so hard to attain—of Western civilization’s most
exquisite stuff. But my glance drew away to the Frenchman’s forward deck,
and there I saw something which tumbled down my hitherto unquestioned
convictions about those qualities which make, as we should put it, the
right folk. That deck was loaded with passengers from Cambodia and
Cochin China, people of quite another culture—or of no culture. They did
not seem to be travelers by deliberation or decision, like ourselves.
It was easy to guess they had merely obeyed, like little children, the
stern directing finger of fate. They showed no curiosity in us, or in
Port Said. They were as still, and as watchful or as indifferent, as
delightful images. They stayed where they had been placed. Yet if the
French ladies were beautiful, then what shall we say of those little
figures? By what means, by what habitual, tranquil, and happy thoughts,
did they attain without wish or effort to a countenance which made the
refinement and haughty demeanor of the first-class passengers above them
identical with the barbaric challenge and insolence of Port Said? It did
not surprise me that for our exhibition of Western enterprise and energy
those children of another clime had but shy and mild astonishment. One of
them, who might have been an attractive piece of craftsmanship in ivory
and ebony, did give to the busy and heated scene the faintest of smiles.
A doubt as to what made him smile blurred for me later the enduring
testimony to Western skill and activity in the Suez Canal, and even the
still more remarkable evidence of our energy at Kantara, a wilderness
of abandoned railways and earthworks, with square miles of abandoned
airdromes and rusting and sand-blown wreckage, where Anglo-Saxon genius
for scientific organization, and British wealth, had built the camp and
engines for the last conquest of the Holy Land. It is most disquieting to
get a hint that the established way of life of one’s kin may be foolish
after all, and that there are other ways.
Why should a Cambodian smile have so haunted me that my hope and
endurance in travel were not rewarded with the satisfaction I had a right
to expect, when witnessing the marvels in foreign lands created there
by the superior culture of my dominant race? Did I go to sea for that?
Nothing like it. And next morning, when I looked out from my cabin port,
there still was the mere canal. Beyond it was the desert, and over that
gray and vacant plain was an announcement of the coming sun. The sky was
empty, like the desert. Nothing unusual was expected, evidently. But
it was only with the first half-awakened glance that I guessed it was
the common sun which was to come. In another instant I was aware that
that hushed and obscure land was humbly awaiting its lord. The majestic
presence suddenly blazed, and ascended to overlook his dominion. A
terrifying spectacle! It would have frightened even a poet in the mood to
hail the beneficence of one of man’s earliest gods. The glances of that
celestial incandescence were as direct as white blades.
In the south, to which we were headed, a high range of Africa’s stark
limestone crags stood over a burnished sea. The sun looked straight at
them. And just above them, parted from their yellow metallic sheen by
a narrow band of sky, was the full globe of the declining moon; and
the moon herself was no more distant and no more spectral than earth’s
bright rocks beneath her. It was not surprising that that scene was
motionless and constant. There was no wind, there was no air, or all
would have vanished like a vision of what has departed. Those luminous
bergs shone like copper. Their markings were as clear and fine as the
far landscape of a newly risen harvest moon. Suez was not far away,
and its lilac shadows were as unearthly as the desert. But there was
substance alongside our ship. Some villas were immediately below, arbored
in tamarisk and cassia. A few trees in that green mass were in crimson
flower. I could smell the burning ashore of aromatic wood. A child in
a cerise gown stood under a tree, but she was so still that, like the
polished water, like the hills of brass and the city built of tinted
shades, she might have been the deceit of an enchantment.
A tugboat rounded a point, shattered the glass of the sea, and the child,
released from the spell, moved from under the tree. Men in our ship were
shouting. Mail bags for Singapore, Hongkong, Shanghai, and other places
as well defined were thrown aboard. Life began to circulate. These men
gave no attention to dead hills and the tyrant in the heavens. I am
prepared to believe they would have been incredulous concerning any town
about there built of lilac shadows. Our ship rounded away into the Gulf
of Suez, the northern corner of the Red Sea.