in your gardens, and ride about on a camel; but, after all, I was
anxious to know what were the particular excitements of Eastern
life, which detained J-, who is a town-bred man, from his natural
pleasures and occupations in London; where his family don't hear
from him, where his room is still kept ready at home, and his name
is on the list of his club; and where his neglected sisters tremble
to think that their Frederick is going about with a great beard and
a crooked sword, dressed up like an odious Turk. In a "lark" such
a costume may be very well; but home, London, a razor, your sister
to make tea, a pair of moderate Christian breeches in lieu of those
enormous Turkish shulwars, are vastly more convenient in the long
run. What was it that kept him away from these decent and
accustomed delights?
It couldn't be the black eyes in the balcony--upon his honour she
was only the black cook, who has done the pilaff, and stuffed the
cucumbers. No, it was an indulgence of laziness such as Europeans,
Englishmen, at least, don't know how to enjoy. Here he lives like
a languid Lotus-eater--a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life. He
was away from evening parties, he said: he needn't wear white kid
gloves, or starched neckcloths, or read a newspaper. And even this
life at Cairo was too civilised for him: Englishmen passed
through; old acquaintances would call: the great pleasure of
pleasures was life in the desert,--under the tents, with still more
nothing to do than in Cairo; now smoking, now cantering on Arabs,
and no crowd to jostle you; solemn contemplations of the stars at
night, as the camels were picketed, and the fires and the pipes
were lighted.
The night-scene in the city is very striking for its vastness and
loneliness. Everybody has gone to rest long before ten o'clock.
There are no lights in the enormous buildings; only the stars
blazing above, with their astonishing brilliancy, in the blue
peaceful sky. Your guides carry a couple of little lanterns which
redouble the darkness in the solitary echoing street. Mysterious
people are curled up and sleeping in the porches. A patrol of
soldiers passes, and hails you. There is a light yet in one
mosque, where some devotees are at prayers all night; and you hear
the queerest nasal music proceeding from those pious believers. As
you pass the madhouse, there is one poor fellow still talking to
the moon--no sleep for him. He howls and sings there all the
night--quite cheerfully, however. He has not lost his vanity with
his reason: he is a Prince in spite of the bars and the straw.
What to say about those famous edifices, which has not been better
said elsewhere?--but you will not believe that we visited them,
unless I bring some token from them. Here is one:- {2}
That white-capped lad skipped up the stones with a jug of water in
his hand, to refresh weary climbers; and squatting himself down on
the summit, was designed as you see. The vast flat landscape
stretches behind him; the great winding river; the purple city,
with forts, and domes, and spires; the green fields, and palm-
groves, and speckled villages; the plains still covered with
shining inundations--the landscape stretches far far away, until it
is lost and mingled in the golden horizon. It is poor work this
landscape-painting in print. Shelley's two sonnets are the best
views that I know of the Pyramids--better than the reality; for a
man may lay down the book, and in quiet fancy conjure up a picture
out of these magnificent words, which shan't be disturbed by any
pettinesses or mean realities,--such as the swarms of howling
beggars, who jostle you about the actual place, and scream in your
ears incessantly, and hang on your skirts, and bawl for money.
The ride to the Pyramids is one of the pleasantest possible. In
the fall of the year, though the sky is almost cloudless above you,
the sun is not too hot to bear; and the landscape, refreshed by the
subsiding inundations, delightfully green and cheerful. We made up
a party of some half-dozen from the hotel, a lady (the kind soda-
water provider, for whose hospitality the most grateful compliments
are hereby offered) being of the company, bent like the rest upon
going to the summit of Cheops. Those who were cautious and wise,
took a brace of donkeys. At least five times during the route did
my animals fall with me, causing me to repeat the desert experiment
over again, but with more success. The space between a moderate
pair of legs and the ground, is not many inches. By eschewing
stirrups, the donkey could fall, and the rider alight on the
ground, with the greatest ease and grace. Almost everybody was
down and up again in the course of the day.
We passed through the Ezbekieh and by the suburbs of the town,
where the garden-houses of the Egyptian noblesse are situated, to
Old Cairo, where a ferry-boat took the whole party across the Nile,
with that noise and bawling volubility in which the Arab people
seem to be so unlike the grave and silent Turks; and so took our
course for some eight or ten miles over the devious tract which the
still outlying waters obliged us to pursue. The Pyramids were in
sight the whole way. One or two thin silvery clouds were hovering
over them, and casting delicate rosy shadows upon the grand simple
old piles. Along the track we saw a score of pleasant pictures of
Eastern life:- The Pasha's horses and slaves stood caparisoned at
his door; at the gate of one country-house, I am sorry to say, the
Bey's GIG was in waiting,--a most unromantic chariot; the
husbandmen were coming into the city, with their strings of donkeys
and their loads; as they arrived, they stopped and sucked at the
fountain: a column of red-capped troops passed to drill, with
slouched gait, white uniforms, and glittering bayonets. Then we
had the pictures at the quay: the ferryboat, and the red-sailed
river-boat, getting under way, and bound up the stream. There was
the grain market, and the huts on the opposite side; and that
beautiful woman, with silver armlets, and a face the colour of
gold, which (the nose-bag having been luckily removed) beamed
solemnly on us Europeans, like a great yellow harvest moon. The
bunches of purpling dates were pending from the branches; grey
cranes or herons were flying over the cool shining lakes, that the
river's overflow had left behind; water was gurgling through the
courses by the rude locks and barriers formed there, and
overflowing this patch of ground; whilst the neighbouring field was
fast budding into the more brilliant fresh green. Single
dromedaries were stepping along, their riders lolling on their
hunches; low sail-boats were lying in the canals; now, we crossed
an old marble bridge; now, we went, one by one, over a ridge of
slippery earth; now, we floundered through a small lake of mud. At
last, at about half-a-mile off the Pyramid, we came to a piece of
water some two-score yards broad,
where a regiment of half-naked
Arabs, seizing upon each individual of the party, bore us off on
their shoulders, to the laughter of all, and the great perplexity
of several, who every moment expected to be pitched into one of the
many holes with which the treacherous lake abounded.
It was nothing but joking and laughter, bullying of guides,
shouting for interpreters, quarrelling about sixpences. We were
acting a farce, with the Pyramids for the scene. There they rose
up enormous under our eyes, and the most absurd trivial things were
going on under their shadow. The sublime had disappeared, vast as
they were. Do you remember how Gulliver lost his awe of the
tremendous Brobdingnag ladies? Every traveller must go through all
sorts of chaffering, and bargaining, and paltry experiences, at
this spot. You look up the tremendous steps, with a score of
savage ruffians bellowing round you; you hear faint cheers and
cries high up, and catch sight of little reptiles crawling upwards;
or, having achieved the summit, they come hopping and bouncing down
again from degree to degree,--the cheers and cries swell louder and
more disagreeable; presently the little jumping thing, no bigger
than an insect a moment ago, bounces down upon you expanded into a
panting Major of Bengal cavalry. He drives off the Arabs with an
oath,--wipes his red shining face with his yellow handkerchief,
drops puffing on the sand in a shady corner, where cold fowl and
hard eggs are awaiting him, and the next minute you see his nose
plunged in a foaming beaker of brandy and soda-water. He can say
now, and for ever, he has been up the Pyramid. There is nothing
sublime in it. You cast your eye once more up that staggering
perspective of a zigzag line, which ends at the summit, and wish
you were up there--and down again. Forwards!--Up with you! It
must be done. Six Arabs are behind you, who won't let you escape
if you would.
The importunity of these ruffians is a ludicrous annoyance to which
a traveller must submit. For two miles before you reach the
Pyramids they seize on you and never cease howling. Five or six of
them pounce upon one victim, and never leave him until they have
carried him up and down. Sometimes they conspire to run a man up
the huge stair, and bring him, half-killed and fainting, to the
top. Always a couple of brutes insist upon impelling you
sternwards; from whom the only means to release yourself is to kick
out vigorously and unmercifully, when the Arabs will possibly
retreat. The ascent is not the least romantic, or difficult, or
sublime: you walk up a great broken staircase, of which some of
the steps are four feet high. It's not hard, only a little high.
You see no better view from the top than you behold from the
bottom; only a little more river, and sand, and ricefield. You
jump down the big steps at your leisure; but your meditations you
must keep for after-times,--the cursed shrieking of the Arabs
prevents all thought or leisure.
- And this is all you have to tell about the Pyramids? Oh! for
shame! Not a compliment to their age and size? Not a big phrase,-
-not a rapture? Do you mean to say that you had no feeling of
respect and awe? Try, man, and build up a monument of words as
lofty as they are--they, whom "imber edax" and "aquilo impotens"
and the flight of ages have not been able to destroy.
- No: be that work for great geniuses, great painters, great
poets! This quill was never made to take such flights; it comes of
the wing of a humble domestic bird, who walks a common; who talks a
great deal (and hisses sometimes); who can't fly far or high, and
drops always very quickly; and whose unromantic end is, to be laid
on a Michaelmas or Christmas table, and there to be discussed for
half-an-hour--let us hope, with some relish.
* * *
Another week saw us in the Quarantine Harbour at Malta, where
seventeen days of prison and quiet were almost agreeable, after the
incessant sight-seeing of the last two months. In the interval,
between the 23rd of August and the 27th of October, we may boast of
having seen more men and cities than most travellers have seen in
such a time:- Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta, Athens, Smyrna,
Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo. I shall have the carpet-bag,
which has visited these places in company with its owner,
embroidered with their names; as military flags are emblazoned, and
laid up in ordinary, to be looked at in old age. With what a
number of sights and pictures,--of novel sensations, and lasting
and delightful remembrances, does a man furnish his mind after such
a tour! You forget all the annoyances of travel; but the pleasure
remains with you, through that kind provision of nature by which a
man forgets being ill, but thinks with joy of getting well, and can
remember all the minute circumstances of his convalescence. I
forget what sea-sickness is now: though it occupies a woful
portion of my Journal. There was a time on board when the bitter
ale was decidedly muddy; and the cook of the ship deserting at
Constantinople, it must be confessed his successor was for some
time before he got his hand in. These sorrows have passed away
with the soothing influence of time: the pleasures of the voyage
remain, let us hope, as long as life will endure. It was but for a
couple of days that those shining columns of the Parthenon glowed
under the blue sky there; but the experience of a life could
scarcely impress them more vividly. We saw Cadiz only for an hour;
but the white buildings, and the glorious blue sea, how clear they
are to the memory!--with the tang of that gipsy's guitar dancing in
the market-place, in the midst of the fruit, and the beggars, and
the sunshine. Who can forget the Bosphorus, the brightest and
fairest scene in all the world; or the towering lines of Gibraltar;
or the great piles of Mafra, as we rode into the Tagus? As I write
this, and think, back comes Rhodes, with its old towers and
artillery, and that wonderful atmosphere, and that astonishing blue
sea which environs the island. The Arab riders go pacing over the
plains of Sharon, in the rosy twilight, just before sunrise; and I
can see the ghastly Moab mountains, with the Dead Sea gleaming
before them, from the mosque on the way towards Bethany. The black
gnarled trees of Gethsemane lie at the foot of Olivet, and the
yellow ramparts of the city rise up on the stony hills beyond.
But the happiest and best of all the recollections, perhaps, are
those of the hours passed at night on the deck, when the stars were
shining overhead, and the hours were tolled at their time, and your
thoughts were fixed upon home far away. As the sun rose I once
heard the priest, from the minaret of Constantinople, crying out,
"Come to prayer," with his shrill voice ringing through the clear
air; and saw, at the same hour, the Arab prostrate himself and
pray, and the Jew Rabbi, bending over his book,
and worshipping the
Maker of Turk and Jew. Sitting at home in London, and writing this
last line of farewell, those figures come back the clearest of all
to the memory, with the picture, too, of our ship sailing over the
peaceful Sabbath sea, and our own prayers and services celebrated
there. So each, in his fashion, and after his kind, is bowing
down, and adoring the Father, who is equally above all. Cavil not,
you brother or sister, if your neighbour's voice is not like yours;
only hope that his words are honest (as far as they may be), and
his heart humble and thankful.
Footnotes:
{1} Saint Paul speaking from the Areopagus, and rebuking these
superstitions away, yet speaks tenderly to the people before him,
whose devotions he had marked; quotes their poets, to bring them to
think of the God unknown, whom they had ignorantly worshipped; and
says, that the times of this ignorance God winked at, but that now
it was time to repent. No rebuke can surely be more gentle than
this delivered by the upright Apostle.
{2} Thackeray's drawing is shown at this point in the book.
{3} At Derrynane Beg, for instance.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Sketches and Travels in London
(Series: # )
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