Loe raamatut: «In The Levant», lehekülg 20

XIX.—THROUGH SUMMER SEAS.—RHODES

AT daylight next morning we could just discern Cyprus sinking behind us in the horizon. The day had all the charm with which the poets have invested this region; the sea was of the traditional indigo blue,—of which the Blue Grotto of Capri is only a cheap imitation. No land was in sight, after we lost Cyprus, but the spirit of the ancient romance lay upon the waters, and we were soothed with the delights of an idle existence. As good a world as can be made with a perfect sea and a perfect sky and delicious atmosphere we had.

Through this summer calm voyages our great steamer, a world in itself, an exhibition, a fair, a fête, a camp-meeting, cut loose from the earth and set afloat. There are not less than eight hundred pilgrims on board, people known as first-class and second-class stowed in every nook and corner. Forward of the first cabin, the deck of the long vessel is packed with human beings, two deep and sometimes crossed, a crowd which it is almost impossible to penetrate. We look down into the hold upon a mass of bags and bundles and Russians heaped indiscriminately together,—and it is very difficult to distinguish a Russian woman from a bundle of old clothes, when she is in repose. These people travel with their bedding, their babies, and their cooking utensils, and make a home wherever they sit down.

The forward passengers have overflowed their limits and extend back upon our portion of the deck, occupying all one side of it to the stern, leaving the so-called privileged class only a narrow promenade on the starboard side. These intruders are, however, rather first-class second-class. Parties of them are camped down in small squares, which become at once miniature seraglios. One square is occupied by wealthy Moslems from Damascus, and in another is a stately person who is rumored to be the Prince of Damascus. These turbaned and silk-clad Orientals have spread their bright rugs and cushions, and lounge here all day and sleep here at night; some of them entertain themselves with chess, but the most of them only smoke and talk little. Why should they talk? has not enough already been said in the world? At intervals during the day, ascertaining, I do not know how, the direction of Mecca, these grave men arise, spread their prayer-carpets, and begin in unison their kneelings and prostrations, servants and masters together, but the servants behind their masters. Next to them, fenced off by benches, is a harem square, occupied by veiled women, perhaps the wives of these Moslems and perhaps “some others.” All the deck is a study of brilliant costume.

A little later the Oriental prince turns out to be only a Turkish pasha, who has a state-room below for himself, and another for his harem; but in another compartment of our flower-bed of a deck is a merchant-prince of Damascus, whose gorgeousness would impose upon people more sophisticated than we.

“He no prince; merchant like me,” explains Achmed, “and very rich, God be merciful.”

“But why don’t you travel about like that, Achmed, and make a fine display?”

“For why? Anybody say Mohammed Achmed any more respect? What for I show my rich? Take my advice. When I am dragoman, I am servant; and dress [here a comico-sarcastic glance at his plain but handsome dragoman apparel] not in monkey shine, like Selim—you remember him—at Jaffa, fierce like a Bedawee. I make business. When I am by my house, that is another thing.”

The pasha has rooms below, and these contiguous squares on deck are occupied, the one by his suite and the other by their ladies and slaves, all veiled and presumably beautiful, lolling on the cushions in the ennui that appears to be their normal condition. One of them is puffing a cigarette under her white veil at the risk of a conflagration. One of the slaves, with an olive complexion and dark eyes, is very pretty, and rather likes to casually leave her face uncovered for the benefit of the infidels who are about; that her feet and legs are bare she cares still less. This harem is, however, encroached upon by Greek women, who sprawl about with more freedom, and regard the world without the hindrance of a veil. If they are not handsome, they are at least not self-conscious, as you would think women would be in baggy silk trousers and embroidered jackets.

In the afternoon we came in sight of the ancient coasts of Pamphylia and Lycia and a lovely range of what we took to be the Karamanian mountains, snow-covered and half hid in clouds, all remote and dim to our vision as the historical pageant of Assyrian, Persian, and Roman armies on these shores is to our memory. Eastward on that rugged coast we know is Cilicia and the Tarsus of Paul and Haroun al Raschid. The sunset on the Lycian mountains was glorious; the foot by the water was veiled in golden mist; the sea sank from indigo to purple, and when the light waves broke flecks of rose or blood flowed on the surface.

After dark, and before we were abreast of old Xanthus, we descried the famous natural light which is almost as mysterious to the moderns as it was to the ancients. The Handbook says of it: “About two miles from the coast, through a fertile plain, and then ascending a woody glen, the traveller arrives at the Zanar, or volcanic flame, which issues perpetually from the mountain.” Pliny says: “Mount Chimaera, near Phaselis, emits an unceasing flame that burns day and night.” Captain Beaufort observed it from the ship during the night as a small but steady light among the hills. We at first mistook it for a lighthouse. But it was too high above the water for that, and the flame was too large; it was rather a smoky radiance than a point of light, and yet it had a dull red centre and a duller luminous surrounding. We regarded with curiosity and some awe a flame that had been burning for over twenty centuries, and perhaps was alight before the signal-fires were kindled to announce the fall of Troy,—Nature’s own Pharos to the ancient mariners who were without compass on these treacherous seas.

Otherwise, this classic coast is dark, extinguished is the fire on the altar of Apollo at Patera, silent is the winter oracle of this god, and desolate is the once luxurious metropolis of Lycia. Even Xanthus, the capital, a name disused by the present inhabitants, has little to show of Greek culture or Persian possession, and one must seek the fragments of its antique art in the British Museum.

Coming on deck the next morning at the fresh hour of sunrise, I found we were at Rhodes. We lay just off the semicircular harbor, which is clasped by walls—partly shaken down by earthquakes—which have noble round towers at each embracing end. Rhodes is, from the sea, one of the most picturesque cities in the Mediterranean, although it has little remains of that ancient splendor which caused Strabo to prefer it to Rome or Alexandria. The harbor wall, which is flanked on each side by stout and round stone windmills, extends up the hill, and, becoming double, surrounds the old town; these massive fortifications of the Knights of St. John have withstood the onsets of enemies and the tremors of the earth, and, with the ancient moat, excite the curiosity of this so-called peaceful age of iron-clads and monster cannon. The city ascends the slope of the hill and passes beyond the wall. Outside and on the right towards the sea are a picturesque group of a couple of dozen stone windmills, and some minarets and a church-tower or two. Higher up the hill is sprinkled a little foliage, a few mulberry-trees, and an isolated palm or two; and, beyond, the island is only a mass of broken, bold, rocky mountains. Of its forty-five miles of length, running southwesterly from the little point on which the city stands, we can see but little.

Whether or not Rhodes emerged from the sea at the command of Apollo, the Greeks expressed by this tradition of its origin their appreciation of its gracious climate, fertile soil, and exquisite scenery. From remote antiquity it had fame as a seat of arts and letters, and of a vigorous maritime power, and the romance of its early centuries was equalled if not surpassed when it became the residence of the Knights of St. John. I believe that the first impress of its civilization was given by the Phoenicians; it was the home of the Dorian race before the time of the Trojan war, and its three cities were members of the Dorian Hexapolis; it was in fact a flourishing maritime confederacy, strong enough to send colonies to the distant Italian coast, and Sybaris and Parthenope (modern Naples) perpetuated the luxurious refinement of their founders. The city of Rhodes itself was founded about four hundred years before Christ, and the splendor of its palaces, its statues and paintings, gave it a pre-eminence among the most magnificent cities of the ancient world. If the earth of this island could be made to yield its buried treasures as Cyprus has, we should doubtless have new proofs of the influence of Asiatic civilization upon the Greeks, and be able to trace in the early Doric arts and customs the superior civilization of the Phoenicians, and of the masters of the latter, in science and art, the Egyptians.

Naturally, every traveller who enters the harbor of Rhodes hopes to see the site of one of the seven wonders of the world, the Colossus. He is free to place it on either mole at the entrance of the harbor, but he comprehends at once that a statue which was only one hundred and five feet high could never have extended its legs across the port. The fame of this colossal bronze statue of the sun is disproportioned to the period of its existence; it stood only fifty-six years after its erection, being shaken down by an earthquake in the year 224 b.c., and encumbering the ground with its fragments till the advent of the Moslem conquerors.

When we landed, the town was not yet awake, except the boatmen and the coffee-houses by the landing-stairs. The Greek boatman, whom we accepted as our guide, made an unsuccessful excursion for bread, finding only a black uneatable mixture, sprinkled with aromatic seeds; but we sat under the shelter of an old sycamore in a lovely place by the shore, and sipped our coffee, and saw the sun coming over Lycia, and shining on the old towers and walls of the Knights.

Passing from the quay through a highly ornamented Gothic gateway, we ascended the famous historic street, still called the Street of the Knights, the massive houses of which have withstood the shocks of earthquakes and the devastation of Saracenic and Turkish occupation. At this hour the street was as deserted as it was three centuries and a half ago, when the Knights sorrowfully sailed out of the harbor in search of a new home. Their four months’ defence of the city., against the overwhelming force of Suleiman the Magnificent, added a new lustre to their valor, and extorted the admiration of the victor and the most honorable terms of surrender. With them departed the prosperity of Rhodes. This street, of whose palaces we have heard so much, is not imposing; it is not wide, its solid stone houses are only two stories high, and their fronts are now disfigured by cheap Arab balconies, but the façades are gray with age. All along are remains of carved windows. Gothic sculptured doorways, and shields and coats of arms, crosses and armorial legends, are set in the walls, partially defaced by time and accident; for the Moslems, apparently inheriting the respect of Suleiman for the Knights, have spared the mementos of their faith and prowess. I saw no inscriptions that are intact, but made out upon one shield the words voluntas mei est. The carving is all beautiful.

We went through the silent streets, waking only echoes of the past, out to the ruins of the once elegant church of St. John, which was shaken down by a powder-explosion some thirty years ago, and utterly flattened by an earthquake some years afterwards. Outside the ramparts we met, and saluted frith the freedom of travellers, a gorgeous Turk who was taking the morning air, and whom our guide in bated breath said was the governor. In this part of the town is the Mosque of Suleiman; in the portal are two lovely marble columns, rich with age; the lintels are exquisitely carved with flowers, arms, casques, musical instruments, the crossed sword and the torch, and the mandolin, perhaps the emblem of some troubadour knight. Wherever we went we found bits of old carving, remains of columns, sections of battlemented roofs. The town is saturated with the old Knights. Near the mosque is a foundation of charity, a public kitchen, at which the poor were fed or were free to come and cook their food; it is in decay now, and the rooks were sailing about its old round-topped chimneys.

There are no Hellenic remains in the city, and the only remembrance of that past which we searched for was the antique coin, which has upon one side the head of Medusa and upon the other the rose (rhoda) which gave the town its name. The town was quiet; but in pursuit of this coin in the Jews’ quarter we started up swarms of traders, were sent from Isaac to Jacob, and invaded dark shops and private houses where Jewish women and children were just beginning to complain of the morning light. Our guide was a jolly Greek, who was willing to awaken the whole town in search of a silver coin. The traders, when we had routed them out, had little to show in the way of antiquities. Perhaps the best representative of the modern manufactures of Rhodes is the wooden shoe, which is in form like the Damascus clog, but is inlaid with more taste. The people whom we encountered in our morning walk were Greeks or Jews.

The morning atmosphere was delicious, and we could well believe that the climate of Rhodes is the finest in the Mediterranean, and also that it is the least exciting of cities.

“Is it always so peaceful here?” we asked the guide.

“Nothing, if you please,” said he, “has happened here since the powder-explosion, nothing in the least.”

“And is the town as healthy as they say?”

“Nobody dies.”

The town is certainly clean, if it is in decay. In one street we found a row of mulberry-trees down the centre, but they were half decayed, like the street. I shall always think of Rhodes as a silent city,—except in the Jews’ quarter, where the hope of selling an old coin set the whole hive humming,—and I suspect that is its normal condition.

XX.—AMONG THE ÆGEAN ISLANDS

OUR sail all day among the Ægean islands was surpassingly lovely; our course was constantly changing to wind among them; their beautiful outlines and the soft atmosphere that enwrapped them disposed us to regard them in the light of Homeric history, and we did not struggle against the illusion. They are all treeless, and for the most part have scant traces of vegetation, except a thin green grass which seems rather a color than a substance. Here are the little islands of Chalce and Syme, once seats of Grecian culture, now the abode of a few thousand sponge-fishers. We pass Telos, and Nisyros, which was once ruled by Queen Artemisia, and had its share in the fortunes of the wars of Athens and Sparta. It is a small round mass of rock, but it rises twenty-two hundred feet out of the sea, and its volcanic soil is favorable to the grape. Opposite is the site of the ruins of Cnidus, a Dorian city of great renown, and famous for its shrine of Venus, and her statue by Praxiteles. We get an idea of the indentation of this coast of Asia Minor (and its consequent accessibility to early settlement and civilization) from the fact that Cnidus is situated on a very narrow peninsula ninety miles long.

Kos is celebrated not only for its size, loveliness, and fertility, but as the birthplace of Apelles and of Hippocrates; the inhabitants still venerate an enormous plane-tree under which the good physician is said to have dispensed his knowledge of healing. The city of Kos is on a fine plain, which gradually slopes from the mountain to the sea and is well covered with trees. The attractive town lies prettily along the shore, and is distinguished by a massive square mediaeval fortress, and by round stone windmills with specially long arms.

As we came around the corner of Kos, we had a view, distant but interesting, of the site of Halicarnassus, the modern town of Boudroum, with its splendid fortress, which the Turks wrested from the Knights of St. John. We sail by it with regret, for the student and traveller in the East comes to have a tender feeling for the simple nature of the father of history, and would forego some other pleasant experiences to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Herodotus. Here, also, was born the historian Dionysius. And here, a few years ago, were identified the exact site and rescued the remains of another of the Seven Wonders, the Tomb of Mausolus, built in honor of her husband by the Carian Artemisia, who sustained to him the double relation of sister and queen. This monument, which exhibited the perfection of Greek art, was four hundred and eleven feet in circumference and one hundred and forty feet high. It consisted of a round building, surrounded by thirty-six columns surmounted by a pyramid, and upon the latter stood a colossal group of a chariot and four horses. Some of the beautiful sculpture of this mausoleum can be seen in the British Museum.

We were all the afternoon endeavoring to get sight of Patinos, which the intervening islands hid from view. Every half-hour some one was discovering it, and announcing the fact. No doubt half the passengers will go to their graves comforted by the belief that they saw it. Some of them actually did have a glimpse of it towards night, between the islands of Lipso and Arki. It is a larger island than we expected to see; and as we had understood that the Revelations were written on a small rocky island, in fact a mere piece of rock, the feat seemed less difficult on a good-sized island. Its height is now crowned by the celebrated monastery of St. John, but the island is as barren and uninviting as it was when the Romans used it as a place of banishment.

We passed Astypatæa, Kalyminos, Leros, and a sprinkling of islets (as if a giant had sown this sea with rocks), each of which has a history, or is graced by a legend; but their glory is of the past. The chief support of their poor inhabitants is now the sponge-fishery. At sunset we had before us Icaria and Samos, and on the mainland the site of Miletus, now a fever-smitten place, whose vast theatre is almost the sole remains of the metropolis of the Ionic confederacy. Perhaps the centre of Ionic art and culture was, however, the island of Samos, but I doubt not the fame of its Samian wine has carried its name further than the exploits of its warriors, the works of its artists, or the thoughts of its philosophers. It was the birthplace of Pythagoras; it was once governed by Polycrates; there for a time Antony and Cleopatra established their court of love and luxury. In the evening we sailed close under its high cliffs, and saw dimly opposite Icaria, whose only merit or interest lies in its association with the ill-judged aerial voyage of Icarus, the soil of Daedalus.

Although the voyager amid these islands and along this historic coast profoundly feels the influence of the past, and, as he reads and looks and reflects, becomes saturated with its half-mysterious and delicious romance, he is nevertheless scarcely able to believe that these denuded shores and purple, rocky islets were the homes of heroes, the theatres of world-renowned exploits, the seats of wealth and luxury and power; that the marble of splendid temples gleamed from every summit and headland; that rich cities clustered on every island and studded the mainland; and that this region, bounteous in the fruits of the liberal earth, was not less prolific in vigorous men and beautiful women, who planted adventurous and remote colonies, and sowed around the Mediterranean the seeds of our modern civilization. In the present desolation and soft decay it is difficult to recall the wealth, the diversified industry, the martial spirit, the refinement of the races whose art and literature are still our emulation and despair. Here, indeed, were the beginnings of our era, of our modern life,—separated by a great gulf from the ancient civilization of the Nile,—the life of the people, the attempts at self-government, the individual adventure, the new development of human relations consequent upon commerce, and the freer exchange of products and ideas.

What these islands and this variegated and genial coast of Asia Minor might become under a government that did not paralyze effort and rob industry, it is impossible to say; but the impression is made upon the traveller that Nature herself is exhausted in these regions, and that it will need the rest or change of a geologic era to restore her pristine vigor. The prodigality and avarice of thousands of years have left the land—now that the flame of civilization has burned out—like the crater of an extinct volcano. But probably it is society and not nature that is dead. The island of Rhodes, for an example, might in a few years of culture again produce the forests that once supplied her hardy sons with fleets of vessels, and her genial soil, under any intelligent agriculture, would yield abundant harvests. The land is now divided into petty holdings, and each poor proprietor scratches it just enough to make it yield a scanty return.

During the night the steamer had come to Chios (Scio), and I rose at dawn to see—for we had no opportunity to land—the spot almost equally famous as the birthplace of Homer and the land of the Chian wine. The town lies along the water for a mile or more around a shallow bay opening to the east, a city of small white houses, relieved by a minaret or two; close to the water’s edge are some three-story edifices, and in front is an ancient square fort, which has a mole extending into the water, terminated by a mediaeval bastion, behind which small vessels find shelter. Low by the shore, on the north, are some of the sturdy windmills peculiar to these islands, and I can distinguish with a glass a few fragments of Byzantine and mediaeval architecture among the common buildings. Staring at us from the middle of the town were two big signs, with the word “Hotel.”

To the south of the town, amid a grove of trees, are the white stones of the cemetery; the city of the dead is nearly as large as that of the living. Behind the city are orange orchards and many a bright spot of verdure, but the space for it is not broad. Sharp, bare, serrated, perpendicular ridges of mountain rise behind the town, encircling it like an amphitheatre. In the morning light these mountains are tawny and rich in color, tinged with purple and red. Chios is a pretty picture in the shelter of these hills, which gather for it the rays of the rising sun.

It is now half a century since the name of Scio rang through the civilized world as the theatre of a deed which Turkish history itself can scarcely parallel, and the island is vigorously regaining its prosperity. It only needs to recall the outlines of the story. The fertile island, which is four times the extent of the Isle of Wight, was the home of one hundred and ten thousand inhabitants, of whom only six thousand were Turks. The Greeks of Scio were said to differ physically and morally from all their kindred; their merchants were princes at home and abroad, art and literature flourished, with grace and refinement of manner, and there probably nowhere existed a society more industrious, gay, contented, and intelligent. Tempted by some adventurers from Samos to rebel, they drew down upon themselves the vengeance of the Turks, who retaliated the bloody massacre of Turkish men, women, and children by the insurrectionists, with a universal destruction. The city of Scio, with its thirty thousand inhabitants, and seventy villages, were reduced to ashes; twenty-five thousand of all ages and both sexes were slain, forty-five thousand were carried away as slaves, among them women and children who had been reared in luxury, and most of the remainder escaped, in a destitute state, into other parts of Greece. At the end of the summer’s harvest of death, only two thousand Sciotes were left on the island. An apologist for the Turks could only urge that the Greeks would have been as unmerciful under like circumstances.

None of the first-class passengers were up to see Chios,—not one for poor Homer’s sake; but the second-class were stirring for their own, crawling out of their comfortables, giving the babies a turn, and the vigilant flea a taste of the morning air. When the Russian peasant, who sleeps in the high truncated frieze cap, and in the coat which he wore in Jerusalem,—a garment short in the waist, gathered in pleats underneath the shoulders, and falling in stiff expanding folds below,—when he first gets up and rubs his eyes, he is an astonished being. His short-legged wife is already astir, and beginning to collect the materials of breakfast. Some of the Greeks are making coffee; there is a smell of coffee, and there are various other unanalyzed odors. But for pilgrims, and pilgrims so closely packed that no one can stir without moving the entire mass, these are much cleaner than they might be expected to be, and cleaner, indeed, than they can continue to be, and keep up their reputation. And yet, half an hour among them, looking out from the bow for a comprehensive view of Chios, is quite enough. I wished, then, that these people would change either their religion or their clothes.

Last night we had singing on deck by an extemporized quartette of young Americans, with harmonious and well-blended voices, and it was a most delightful contrast to the caterwauling, accompanied by the darabouka, which we constantly hear on the forward deck, and which the Arabs call singing. Even the fat, good-humored little Moslem from Damascus, who lives in the pen with the merchant-prince of that city, listened with delight and declared that it was tyeb kateer. Who knows but these people, who are always singing, have some appreciation of music after all?