CYRENE.
After coasting Cilicia and Cyprus for an idle week, the Utowana headed
out to sea once more. We were bound for Cyrene, or so near at least as
we might go to that long forbidden city. Had the party not been all
of American nationality but one, we should never perhaps have put our
luck to the test at all. But the Youngest Race sees no reason why it
should not go anywhere on earth, and so it came about that the Utowana
made the African shore late on a misty afternoon, and anchored off Ras
el-Tin.
Under a red bar of sunset, Cyrenaica looked a grim land. Shelving up
in low desert planes, treeless, houseless, tentless, it put us in mind
more of present danger from Bedawi landlopers and Senussi fanatics than
of the past glory of Cyrene. The latest news of the inner country,
which had been current in Europe, reported it closed to Christians
by a Government conscious that it could not guarantee them against
the Senussi Order, which it was unwilling to offend. This mysterious
Brotherhood was a bugbear of which we, like most people, knew very
little. Widely spread and greatly respected through all north Africa,
powerful in Mecca, and at one time, at any rate, not less powerful in
Stambul, it had long been credited with a fanatic hatred of Christians,
and indeed of all such Moslems as will make terms with Christendom,
even the Caliph himself. Two generations ago it fixed its chief seat
on Jebel Akhdar in Cyrenaica, attracted by the loneliness of the
well-watered highlands; and although, since 1876, its leaders have been
withdrawing by stages into the heart of Africa, we knew that two score
Senussi convents flourished still about Cyrene, and had drawn the local
Bedawis to them. In the early eighties, when Abdul Hamid was hoping to
push his Islamic policy by means of the Brotherhood, the real power
in Tripolitan Turkey was given into its hands; and Duveyrier, who set
himself to study its aims and work in the oases behind French Africa,
charged it with the constant endeavour to stay by robbery and murder
all Frank advance. Others took up his cry, and pointed in proof to the
killing of the Marquis de Morés by men of Ghadámes, as he was feeling
his way towards Kufra. Our latest forerunner in Cyrene had found the
Bedawis still as hostile to his presence as Murdoch Smith and James
Hamilton had found them to theirs; and nothing, to our knowledge, had
happened since to make the outlook more hopeful.
But, in fact, a certain change of good omen had taken place, as we
were to learn next day in Derna. Well received in that pleasant
half-Moorish town, whose coral beach and deep palm groves make it an
outpost of tropic Africa, while its clean alleys, fair gardens, and
grave, well-seeming Arabs, suggest an oasis town of Nejd, we heard
that Cretan colonists were newly come to Cyrenaica. A hundred refugee
families, it was said, had settled at Marsa Susa, and sixty about Ain
Shahát, as Arabs name the Apollo fountain at Cyrene; and beside each
colony a handful of Ottoman troops was encamped. True, Christians were
still forbidden to travel in the inner country; but with credentials
from Derna, said the Italian who flies our flag there on high days and
holidays, we might drop anchor at Marsa Susa, and ask an escort to Ain
Shahát. He himself had been there lately with a friend, and had found
the mudir a most liberal Turk, who would rejoice to see us. So there
was a mudir? Yes, a civilian officer who was gripping the Bedawis
tighter every day. And the Senussis, what of them? He replied that,
with the mudir on the spot and an escort to show that the Government
was for us, there would be no trouble. Indeed, in these days, he added,
the convents showed no ill-will to Europeans. He took us presently to
call on the Governor, a fat little Candiote of an inordinate garrulity
and a tremulous anxiety to please, who gave us the needful letter on
the spot and then, after his kind, repented him bitterly, and asked for
it again. But we held firm and, as we rowed out again to the yacht,
on a night too warm for the season, over waters which doubled every
star and the full globe of the moon, our minds were easy. There was no
telegraph then in Cyrenaica, and the yacht could drop down to Marsa
Susa many hours ahead of any mounted messenger from Derna.
Within five hours she was anchored there off the old city of Apollonia,
which is become an heap; and in two more half her passengers, with an
escort of seven soldiers and our Derniote friend’s _kavass_ for guide,
were mounted on two spavined white mares, two donkeys, and a camel. The
yacht was left to rock on the treacherous roadstead outside the reefs,
and the Owner, turning his back on his beautiful ship, put up a prayer
that the land-wind which had followed the fair but fickle southerly
breeze of the day before, might hold till the morrow. We had yet to
learn that in Cyrenaica the _Khamsin_ of Egypt is apt to pass into the
dread _Gharbís_, a gale veering between south-west and north, from
whose wrath there is no safe shelter at Marsa Susa, or indeed anywhere
else on the coast for some hundreds of miles; so we kicked up our
beasts and jogged merrily inland past plots of red tillage, and feeding
flocks, and Cretan shepherds leaning on old Belgian rifles, towards the
foot of the scarp up which a rock road of the ancients leads to Cyrene.
Forgotten highways always seem to me haunted places: and, since even
second sight can be sharpened by realities, the better preserved a
highway is, the better you see its ghosts. Therefore, if you would
be fey, ride alone and by night from Apollonia to Cyrene through
tangled forests and across deserted glades, treading pavements which
dead men have worn. This strange way in the wilderness is not heaped
up like a Roman road, but chiselled squarely out of living rock. Its
raised side-walks still align it on either hand, and the tracks of
Greek chariots and Libyan carts are cut deep on its face. For twenty
centuries it has borne its witness to the grandeur that was once
Cyrene, and it will bear it still for unnumbered centuries to come.
[Illustration: THE ROCK ROAD FROM APOLLONIA TO CYRENE.]
[Illustration: TOMBS OF CYRENE.]
Except for the stirring sight of it, we found our ride to Cyrene an
irksome exercise. The sky was clouded with coming scirocco, the air
hung heavy, and there was no water by the way for our flagging beasts
or the marching escort of Syrian soldiers. But here a ruined
fort guarding a pass, there a group of sarcophagi, and everywhere the
curves and cuttings of the road fed imagination, and shortened the
hours, till, at an elbow of the climbing track, we came suddenly in
sight of the tombs of Cyrene. There was yet a mile to go through the
suburb of the dead, and with every step our wonder grew. Fresh from
the carved cliffs of Lycia, we were not prepared for a finer spectacle
in Africa. Terraced from top to bottom of the mountain buttresses,
the pillared rock-graves of Cyrene rise in Doric, Ionic, and hybrid
styles. Yet the more splendid fronts amaze one less than the endless
tiers of commoner graves, mere rock-pits with gabled lids, which are
cut out by thousands, with hardly a foot’s breadth between them, on
the hill sides. When later on we entered a larger tomb here and there,
we often found behind one narrow façade a catacomb parcelled out in
niches for half a hundred dead, whose beds have been used again and
again. In modern days we set our cemeteries apart within walls and in
remote spots, fearing the corpse as we might a vampire, and rarely make
the houses of the dead an embellishment of cities. But the Greek, and
the Roman after him, who held serried graves to be the noblest civic
avenue, lavished art on the last homes of hero-spirits to make them the
chief glories of their towns; and Death must have lost half its sting
for those who knew they would lie beside the main road in tombs seen of
all wayfaring men and praised in distant lands.
Among the myriad mansions of the dead we heard the first sounds of
men. Voices cried to us from tombs opening high on a hillside below a
thin crown of pines; but the two or three troglodytes, who came out
to view, went back at sight of our soldiers. Unmet and unsaluted, we
followed the splendid curves and counter-curves of the road, till at
last it ran out on a level stretch; and there near a single hut of
rough stones, under the bloody flag of Turkey, we came on the booted
mudir himself in council with four spearmen of the Haasa. He looked
up in some astonishment and trouble, for few and far between are
European visitors to Cyrene. But the breeding of a Turk, the custom
of Islam, and the sight of our _Iradé_, secured us hospitality in his
bullet-proof room, built above a Roman sepulchre.
We were not minded, however, to sit long over a mudir’s coffee, and
presently went forth again to see something of the city before dark
fell. The scirocco had not yet veiled, though it dimmed, the distance,
and we could understand, if not echo, the rapture of lucky travellers,
who in clear weather have looked across the cemeteries to the cornlands
of the lower plateau. The sea swelled grey to the horizon, confounded
with the dun northward sky; and in the nearer view stretched the
broad belt of ruddy soil, now not half ploughed, which was once the
pride of Cyrene. A green ribband, spreading fanwise as it sloped,
marked the course of the Apollo waters, captured and distributed by
the Senussis; and a sinuous line of scarps and tree-tops, winding
westward, was, we were told, the vaunted Wady bil-Ghadir, the Happy
Valley, where are other tombs as splendid as any which we had seen. The
greater monuments, such as the Theatre and the Apollo Temple itself,
of which last little is visible except the platform on which the main
building once stood, lie along the higher course of the Apollo stream.
Southward, also, the view from the crest of the plateau is amazing,
not for ruins of the city, of which little enough stands up now out of
the corn, but for the immensity of the site. Cyrene was built at the
summit of a slope which falls steeply to the sea but gently inland,
melting southward into steppe at the limit of vision, and for miles
and miles is dotted with fragments of grey ruin. The Bedawis say that
it is six camel-hours from one end to another of “Grené,” as the name
“Kyrene” has been softened in their mouths. No site of antiquity so
well suggests how a large city of our own day will seem when at last
deserted by man.
[Illustration: THE MUDIR OF CYRENE.]
All that we saw then in fast fading light we should see better on the
morrow, and it was not worth while to do more than climb the height
above the Apollo Fountain, which was surely the acropolis of the
city. A Cretan came out of a tomb, and showed us this and that bit of
moulding or sculpture, betraying a Greek’s brain below his turban;
but such Bedawis as we crossed in the way saluted the mudir only. The
latter, obviously careful on the return to guide us into a bypath out
of sight of the Senussi convent, walked quickly and nervously; but,
once returned to his windowless room, became at ease, showing the
keepsakes and trinkets with which he kept Stambuline life in mind in
this wild place. He was a young Cypriote, mild-eyed, and, naturally,
I should judge, of good parts and disposition; but full of wistful
envy of Frankish culture, of which he had had a taste in boyhood at
Nicosia, and in later youth at the French _lycée_ of Galata. This kind
of Turk makes rather a melancholy figure. Latin Europe does little
for him beyond bringing _cafés chantants_ and lewd photographs within
his ken; and by robbing him of his implicit reliance on the law and
custom of Islam, it throws him upon his own individuality, unsupported
by the social code to which he was born. How, then, shall he keep his
hands clean in some solitary seat of petty power? He may endure for a
while; but, lacking pride of self and all faith, why should he refrain
from picking and stealing and grinding the face of the poor? Hoping
and approving the best way, he is bound sooner or later to follow the
worst; and probably from his type develop the most evil of governors,
those who are cruel for no other reason than that they feel weak and
alone.
He was kind to us, however, putting all and sundry of his possessions
at our service, even his single bedstead. But as the three of us would
have filled a Great Bed of Ware, we settled precedence by stretching
ourselves cheek by jowl on the floor; and so passed an unquiet night
in the close air of the barred room. I slipped the bolts in the small
hours of morning, and looked out over Cyrene. A pallid moon was sailing
high within an iridescent ring, and mirk and scud were blowing up fast
and faster from the west. We might count ourselves in luck if there
were still some southing in the gale by the time we could reach the
ship; but come what might, we must give a morning to Cyrene.
We began with the eastern cemetery, and were guided to the few painted
tombs which earlier explorers have left unspoiled. The outer hall of
the best shows a curious frieze of agonistic pictures in a very dim
light. The funeral feasts and games, the foot races, chariot races,
wrestling, and so forth, are rudely done in a late and coarse style;
but they have this of interest, that many, indeed most, of the figures
are painted of black complexion, while clad in gay Athenian garments.
There you have hybrid Cyrene, that colony which earliest made a
practice of mixing Hellenic and barbarian blood, and had a history more
Libyan than Greek. For the rest, we could do little more than visit
a few larger tombs, and photograph the more curious of the pillared
façades, which stand above the barley on the terraces; and though there
was little light in the olive sky, we were able to get some pictures of
the carved hillsides.
During three succeeding hours spent in rambling over the plateau
above--hours which the poor mudir found slow-footed indeed--we learned
how little of the great city is left above ground, and how much the
excavators of 1861 left to be done. Murdoch Smith and Porcher, with
the five blacks employed in their first season, and the thirty whom
they considered a full gang in their second, did no more than scratch
the skin of Cyrene. All that is most precious there, the spoil of the
true Hellenic age, is still to seek. But the digger of the future,
while enjoying greater security, will not have the free hand of the
pioneers, for the Cretans are ploughing what the Senussi Arabs left
fallow, and almost the whole site, when we saw it, stood thick with
corn. So masked is it, at least in the spring-time, that the outline of
the Stadium, the low ridge of the southern city wall, a few heaped up
columns and other architectonic members of Byzantine churches, and the
vast vaulted reservoirs of late Roman date are about all the ruins of
whose character one can be sure in the eastern half of the city. Beyond
the hollow, up which ran the main road from the Great Theatre and the
Temple of Apollo, the western half of the site contains the Odeum or
Smaller Theatre and a fine wreck of a Hellenic tower, placed on the
brink of the deep Wady Buhayat, at the point where the inward wall of
the acropolis dips to join the outer wall of the city. The Roman castle
stood at the north-western angle of Cyrene, which is the only point
within the walls where the ground swells from the general level of the
plateau into something like a hill. West, north, and east this angle
breaks away in low cliffs, from whose foot the three main fountains of
Cyrene spring, among them that of Apollo high up on the north-eastward
face. With running streams on three sides, this commanding knoll seems
alone to answer to that “place among waters” promised to the first
colonists by the oracle; and if ever it be my fortune to search for
the earliest Cyrene, I shall dig on that knoll, and not in the eastern
city, where slopes are easy, and the spoil-heaps of former diggers
alone break the level.
But here, as elsewhere, we scanned the few bare spaces in vain for
potsherds of early style. Thick layers of late ruin and silt lie
over them, and the three-foot corn-stalks stand above all. Only one
noteworthy marble appeared on the surface, a pedestal with four
reliefs, described by James Hamilton and other travellers. It is of
fair workmanship, and inscribed with a greatly perished dedication not
earlier than the age of the later Ptolemies. In the hollow between
the two halves of the city, and over a wide area outside the walls,
both south and north, innumerable dressed blocks stand upright, one
behind another. With a field-glass one may see these puzzling files
radiating from the city far out over the lower plain, ranged seemingly
at random, as a baby might set toy bricks on end. I guessed at first
they might be unwritten head-stones of poor graves; but, seeing they
occurred within the walls, and mostly in the lower lying places--for
instance, about the upper part of the central hollow, below the vaulted
reservoirs--I came to suspect they had once carried wooden pipes, which
distributed the Apollo waters over the lower plain and the contents of
the reservoirs to a part of the upper city; and I still can find no
better reading of their riddle.
[Illustration: THE APOLLO FOUNTAIN.]
Our walk brought us at last to the Apollo fountain, the cause and
centre of Cyrenian life. The cliff, from whose foot its stream flows
forth, has been cut back and scarped. A gable-mark some twenty feet up
its face bears witness that a portico once shadowed the basin, and a
rock-inscription on the short returning face records its restoration
in the early Imperial age. The stream can be followed upwards for some
distance into the rock, if one cares to crawl among stalagmites; but
the tunnel has narrowed since former days. The Bedawis say the water is
each year less. As we drank of it and bathed our tired feet, we found
it cool, not cold, and even on an April morning, in scirocco weather,
only a few degrees below the air. Two or three Bedawis, who were
washing their cotton garments, withdrew at our approach, and no women
were visible. Other Bedawis, armed with long guns or spears and driving
laden beasts, were passing to and fro on the path of the Senussi
convent, the focus of modern Cyrene, which has created a broad belt of
garden ground, frayed out over the lower plain.
Whatever may be dark regarding this Brotherhood, one thing at least is
clear, that it has made the waste places of Cyrenaica bloom again, and
fostered trade and settled life among the Bedawis. The Senussis “spare
no effort,” said James Hamilton in 1851, “to turn the property they
have acquired (partly by purchase, but more largely by donation) to
good account.” Their convents are as much hostels as retreats, mansions
where the Moslem wayfarer finds safety for his person and wares during
at least three days. If the Arabs whom we met in Cyrene were dour and
silent, so are almost all nomads at first sight of a stranger. They
offered no sign of active hostility to us, who, for our part, were
careful to keep outside the fence of the convent. We could see that the
mudir hoped we would not transgress it; but in his frankest moments he
spoke of Senussis not only without fear, but without any apparent sense
that they mattered greatly. They were pious men, he said, the best of
the local _Muslamin_, learned and peaceful. This particular convent of
Ain Shahat got an evil name from the writings of Hamilton and Murdoch
Smith, both of whom found the notorious long-living fanatic, Sidi
Mustafa, in command; but when an Italian commercial mission reached
Cyrene in 1884, it was received courteously by his successor.
[Illustration: BEDAWIS OF THE BENI HAASA.]
On the whole, when one weighs what European travellers on the one hand,
and educated Arabs on the other, have said about the Senussi Order, and
also the known facts of its history since the founder, Sidi Muhammad,
settled in Cyrenaica, one cannot but think that it has been taken too
seriously in the West. The Order is not a sect, much less does it
profess a religion of its own, for its members are of the Malekite
school of Sunni believers. Only one confraternity among many in the
world of Islam, it is sworn to practise a certain rigour of life--as an
Arab understands rigour--in conformity with the letter of the Earliest
Law; and, like most confraternities, it has assumed and paraded a
certain secrecy. The founder had, however, this distinguishing idea,
that the perfect life can best be led in temporal independence; and,
therefore, he chose deserted Cyrenaica for the first home of his
Order. As the Osmanli’s grip tightened on the coast, and his braided
officers became ubiquitous, Muhammad’s successor, pursuing the same
idea, withdrew from the district, first to the oasis of Jarabub in the
southern waste, and then to Kufra. There he and his Order led a free
and quiet life in the practice of pious exercises and the enjoyment of
all pleasures which are not banned by the gospel of Gabriel--a life
not too ascetic. Wine, tobacco, and coffee Senussis may not taste,
but tea--what Word has forbidden it? That blessed drink, sings a poet
of the sheikhly Senussi family, makes food sweet in the belly, and
prolongs amorous passion; and what good things, he asks, need a man
ensue more than these? It is credible that the Order, whether bidden
from headquarters or inspired by local zeal, has kicked against the
pricks now and then, and in doing what it could to stay the inroad
of Christians, has set its face especially against Frenchmen in the
Tunisian _hinterland_, and Britons in the Libyan oases and the western
Sudan; but the painful withdrawals of the Senussi chiefs from the fair
uplands of the coast farther and yet farther into torrid Africa have
apparently been inspired only by a desire for a quiet Arabian life
where Turks and Franks are not; and who shall blame them for that
desire?
The local saints held themselves aloof, but a group of some forty armed
Bedawis gathered to see us go. Squatting, eagle-beaked and narrow-eyed,
like so many vultures on a rocky ledge, they set us thinking whether
they could have found a use for their long guns and spears in some
gully of the downward road, had we given them a little longer time for
thought. As it was, we felt no fear, and gave back their stare. The
Beni Haasa must be very pure Arab. I have noticed no finer type, even
among the Bedawis who have come from Nejd itself within short historic
memory. A few of their gipsy-like wives, seen not then but next day in
the plain of Apollonia, showed the same high breeding in their unveiled
faces.
The mudir added himself and his orderly to our cavalcade, and led us
back briskly down the rock road towards the sea, the Syrian soldiers
swinging alongside without any sign of tiring. Near the brink of the
lower shelf we got glimpses right and left into the great gorges hewn
in it, which have been for any number of ages haunts of cave-dwelling
men; but their grandeur seemed to us somewhat below the enthusiasm of
earlier travellers. Perhaps the thick, sunless air of that afternoon
robbed them of their due effect. Perhaps we had come too lately from
the splendid Lycian valleys and peaks to find the Cyrenaica all that
those have found it whose eyes had first been blistered and blinded by
the sun and sands of the Syrtis.
Our only fear was for the yacht. As we left the shelter of the forest
and drew rein on the edge of the last steep, we knew how fierce a
gale drove across the path. White wrinkles of surf alone betrayed the
sea, for the mirk of the scirocco lay on the plain; and half an hour
later, when we came to the Cretan huts, we could see no farther than
the reefs, and had to be assured by the soldiers on the beach that the
yacht was really gone. She had put out to sea the night before, they
said, and appeared again with the sun; but since noon she had sheered
off, and Allah knew where she might be now. If He willed, she had found
peace behind Ras Hilal.
It was Wednesday at four of the afternoon, and not till Saturday, a
little after midday, should we see her again. But for the doubt of her
safety, which weighed most heavily on the Owner, and the certainty, to
which we were all alive, that, should the gale haul to north or east
of north, she must run from the Cyrenaic shore altogether, leaving us
marooned for many days, we found ourselves in no very evil plight.
True, we had slender baggage chosen for the needs of one night, not
five; but how soon one forgets to change raiment even for sleep, and
finds happiness far from a bath! The captain of the little post made
over to us his guest-room, a roofed recess in a quarry, and thither his
woman folk sent cushions and quilts, and trays of meat and rice and
sticky pastry seasoned with curdled milk and garnished with herbs from
the garden, which our host and the mudir helped us to clear with finger
and thumb. There was good water; for the source a few miles inland,
which used to keep Apollonia alive, has been led into an aqueduct
again by the Cretans; and we found tobacco, which would at least burn,
and _rahat_, peace, all the day long. What more, said the genial old
soldier, do your hearts desire?
More, however, they did desire. We were Western men, with an itch to
be doing, and we tried to fulfil our souls a little among the fallen
churches and rock-tombs of Apollonia. But, with all our leisure,
we made no great discovery there; and I doubt if the best thing we
found were not wild watercress growing thickly in the conduit, which
we taught the Cretans and the soldiers to relish. What is left of
Apollonia is only a long landward slice of the city, which in Christian
times outstripped dying Cyrene. All the seaward face of it, with the
harbour-wall and gate and port, has been eaten by the waves. There is
no doubt the coast has sunk here since Roman times, and is probably
sinking still, and that the shallow bay, all rocks and shoals, in which
we had made a difficult landing, is not any part of the old harbour of
Apollonia, but was dry land when that harbour was sought by shipping.
The reefs and islets, out at sea, over which the surf was now breaking
so wildly, remain perhaps from the old foreshore. Further westward we
found tombs into whose doors the waves flowed freely, and, had it been
fairer weather, we might have espied others altogether submerged; for
the calm sea on this coast is of such a wonderful clearness that when
our leadsman was dipping for an anchorage on the first evening off Ras
el-Tin, he could see a bottom of rock and sand, which, nevertheless,
his plummet could not reach.
The ruins of two fine Apollonian churches are marked by magnificent
monoliths of _cipollino_, which it would pay some marble merchant to
ship away; but lack of moulded fragments and inscriptions shows that
almost everything on the surface, except bits of black glazed pottery
and stamped Samian ware, is of a very base age. Without powerful tackle
one could not hope to get below that mass of fallen blocks, honeycombed
by the blown sea salts. The landward wall, however, is in great part
of the Greek time, remaining probably from the first foundation of the
city, and seen from the hollow plain, it stands up finely. Somewhat,
but not much later are the remains of an Ionic temple and of a
theatre, which faces seawards without the wall. Here the work of the
waves may be well admired, for the stage buildings are now awash and
the surf runs up into the horseshoe of the seats.
[Illustration: APOLLONIA IN STORM.]
The daily life of the little garrison was good to watch. The old
commander had turned farmer. With the water-conduit under his control
and thirty of the sturdiest knaves in the Levant at his orders, he was
making more out of the red plain than any of the Cretans whom he had
come to guard. The full privates hoed his garden: the corporal drove
up his ewes at nightfall; and under the moon the old man himself would
tuck his braided cuffs, tie half a dozen milky mothers head to tail,
and tug at their teats. The soldiers, peasant conscripts born to such a
life, seemed only too happy to go back to it, and the field-work filled
their time and thoughts, and kept them in the rude health of shepherds.
Most of our time, however, we spent in watching sea and sky and
uttering hopeful prophecies, which were slow to be fulfilled. All the
scirocco died out of the weather by the first midnight, and a hard
north-wester brought a livelier air, with rain and thunder and an
ever-rising sea. By the third morning a surf was running both within
and without the reefs, in which only a well-manned lifeboat could have
lived; and at last, unwillingly resigning hope that the yacht would
return to take us off, we did what should have been done at least a day
earlier--we found a trusty Bedawi, and sent him eastward down the coast
to Ras Hilal. He came back at evening with a scrawl from our skipper,
and the Owner ate a heartier meal than he had made yet in Marsa Susa.
With the fourth dawn the wind was falling, but the sea ran very high
still. The old Turk spoke of _rahat_ for yet another day, but we would
have no more of it; and, yielding to our entreaty, he called out an
escort, and led us eastward to find the ship. There proved to be a fair
path, used by the Cretans when they go to Derna. One of the refugees
went ahead of us on a huge bull-camel, which could pick his way among
rocks, and stride up the sides of gorges like a camel of Anatolia.
When the track entered a wood, the rider would swing himself off by
the first overhanging bough, and get back to the saddle again from the
last, while his great beast never paused, feeling the burden of him
hardly so much as to know if he were off or on. Much of the path led
over red soil and under wild charubs and conifers, but thrice it was
cut by sheer gullies, whose glassy limestone sides were bossed as if
glaciers had passed. Two Bedawi tents were all the habitations we saw,
and neither man nor woman was met; but once the path turned sharply
to avoid a cluster of many graves, of which one was fresh mould. The
tenting folk seem to bury in one spot, and not at hazard, as one might
expect; and, indeed, they carry their dead many days’ journey to
particular wayside cemeteries. Would they spare the Awakening Angel the
labour of collecting stragglers on the Last Day, or do the dead Bedawis
love council and coffee-fellowship as much as the living?
On the cliffs of Ras Hilal we bade good-bye to the clean-living fellows
who had escorted us and quietly refused our rewards. Gladly would
the Owner have done them the honours of his ship, but this their old
captain would not allow. In the latter’s debt, too, we remained; for
after he had been got aboard the swinging, pitching yacht at risk of a
broken leg or a cracked skull, he pleaded to be let go again at once,
and was put with difficulty back on shore. The western current which
sweeps this iron-bound coast, was holding the ship broadside to the
seas, and with wind and wave coming hour by hour more directly from
the north, the open bay of Marsa Hilal was no place to ride in longer.
Steam was got up, a course was set for Sicily, and by sunset the
mountain of Cyrene lay on the horizon like a low cloud.