CHAPTER XIV

1864

THE FIRST CALL OF THE EAST

The year 1864 is sacred to me in that, although it called me away from St. Petersburg, where I was so happy, it also called me to my first taste—a mere glimpse—of that East which, old man as I am, still casts its spell over me. When the time came for my holiday—not till October—I had six weeks before me which I could call my own. It happened that at that moment a messenger was wanted for Constantinople; I saw my chance and volunteered. Vienna first, then down the Danube to the Black Sea. Mr. (afterwards Sir Arthur) Cowell Stepney was my companion. A wonderful journey, where language and costume carry the traveller back to the days of Trajan, and the very names of the places are full of romance. “Unde es, amice?” asks a Wallach, recognizing a friend—and invites him to sit at the same “mensa” (not “tavola” or “table”) with him, and rates the waiter because the cloth is not as “albo” (not “blanc” or “bianco”) as it should be. The peasants, shaggy, bearded and untrimmed, were dressed in tunics, fur caps, leggings and sandals, exactly like the prisoners on Trajan’s arch. Fifty years ago the Latinity had been preserved in far greater purity in Wallachia than in the true Latin countries, and poverty of communication had prevented the demon of fashion from destroying the old picturesque national costume.

A troglodyte colony of Circassians at Czernavoda, burrowing in the earth like rabbits, a colony of Tartars herded in a loathsome mud town, the gift of the Sultan to the Crim Tartars, seemed like creatures from another hemisphere. Here we had some trouble with certain tatterdemalion nondescripts who represented the Turkish authorities. They wanted to open my Foreign Office bags. I rebelled; but knowing no Turkish, and they being equally ignorant of any other language, the case seemed hopeless, when all of a sudden I remembered Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. Kinglake furnished me with the word of salvation. “Eltchi, Eltchi!” I shouted, “touch my bags if you dare, you infernal scoundrels!” The last words, except as ornaments, were pleonastic as abuse generally is. “Sesame” itself had not more magic than the first. My canvas bags became an object of veneration—the great seal as sacred as that of King Solomon in the days of his glory.

At Kustendji we took ship, and after a stormy passage in that cruel sea the name of which had to be changed in order to propitiate its evil demons, made our way, like Jason and his Argonauts, through the Kuaneai Symplegades, the dark, floating rocks between which the very dove that they sent out as pioneer lost her tail, and found ourselves in the Bosphorus, the identical bull’s ferry across which that wicked old god Zeus carried the lovely Europa. We were now in the midst of the scenes made famous by Homer and Hesiod; the home of gods and heroes, the land in which all the poetry and all the romance of the Western world was born.

Beautiful is Constantinople, the great city of palaces, mosques, minarets and cypresses; but how much more beautiful must that paradise have been under the dispensation of Olympus, before the unspeakable Turk, and the hardly more speakable Christian of those parts, had made it the centre of their ignoble tussles, intrigues, cruelties, robberies and murders!

The day had not long broken when on a dismal morning—October 4th—we escaped from a polychrome and polyglot crowd which besieged our ship, and following our luggage borne by sturdy Hamals, made our way through mud and slosh up the Grande Rue de Pera to Misseri’s Hotel. There was a magic in the name, for had not old Misseri been made famous by Kinglake? Was he not, _longo intervallo_, the second hero of that immortal book “Eothen?” And was he not himself grown rich and fat and well-liking, a Pasha of many tales, and all of them in honour of his old master, whom he loved, and whom I was only to know many years later?

When I had ridden to Therapia and deposited my bags at the British Embassy, where Mr. William Stuart was then the Ambassador’s vicegerent, I went back to Constantinople. Stuart was an excellent official, famous for having penetrated all those arcana of cookery in which Brillat Savarin himself was not a greater adept. It is a study well worth the attention of diplomatists, for who can say what difficulties an excellent dinner has not smoothed over? And here let me, in passing, pay a tribute to my greatest living friend among British Ambassadors, the prince of modern diplomatists and experts in dining as a fine art. But I will say no more, lest I should be suspected of fishing for an invitation—if only a sea which I am never likely again to cross did not lie between him and me that might be possible; as it is, I can meet accusation with firmness.

Of course we went to see all the sights of Stamboul—_non ragionam di lor_. What delighted me far more than the mosques, the dancing and howling dervishes, the tombs of magnificent Sultans, and all the stock-in-trade of the dragoman, was wandering through by-ways in the city, happening upon out-of-the-way, unsuspected, picturesque nooks and corners—above all, certain old graveyards, with their quaint turbaned memorial stones, over which the tall, solemn cypresses mount reverent guard—warders watching over the peace of the dead Moslem. There was one such cemetery hard by a tiny mosque, on one side of which the jealously latticed window of a harem looked out, and I could picture to myself Amina the ghoul, stealing out of her prison in the dark hours of the night to practise her unholy rites among the mouldering dead. There were still places in Constantinople where, far from the madding crowd of frock-coated modernity, the glamour of the East retained its power.

One sight I am glad to have seen, and that was on Friday, the 7th of October, the Sultan Abdul Aziz going to the mosque. There was a great crowd of carriages full of ladies, and all the principal ministers and officers of State. The Sultan looked tired and intensely bored, as well he might, for already his extravagances had brought upon him ceaseless remonstrances from the other Powers. He began his reign well, industriously paving the road to Hell, but his paving-stones, excellent as they seemed to be, soon crumbled into dust. He became inoculated with the barbarous lust of military splendour and all those whims and appetites to which Sultans have fallen victims to the undoing of themselves and their people.

The sorry end came twelve years later (in 1876). How it came about remains a mystery of the women’s quarters. It was said at the time that a nip from a pair of sharp scissors opened a vein and the wretched man bled to death in the privacy of his own harem. Who did the deed none knew. Was it suicide? Was it a bribed eunuch? Was it one of the ladies? That is immaterial; his death was needed, and he died.

Three notable men were among the high officials in waiting: Aali Pasha, who was said to be greatly under the influence of M. de Moustiers, the French Ambassador; Omar Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Turkish army in the Crimea in 1855; and Fuad Pasha, who had been Lord Dufferin’s colleague on the commission which investigated the anti-Christian uprising in the Lebanon in 1860. I was glad to see him, for I had heard so much of him from Meade, who accompanied Lord Dufferin as secretary. That was Lord Dufferin’s first important mission; and very well he managed it.

When he first took his seat with the colleagues, his extremely youthful appearance made them think that they would be able to do what they pleased with him; they were mistaken; by the third sitting his cleverness and tact, combined with the most exquisite manners and firmness, had made him master of the situation, and his fame as a diplomatist was secured.

Fuad Pasha, like my old friend Khalil Pasha at St. Petersburg, was noted as a wit. A short time before I saw him he gave a ball to which the members of the Corps Diplomatique and their wives were invited. At a certain moment it was arranged that the ladies should go and pay a visit to Madame Fuad in the harem. A pert French _chargé d’affaires_ said that he should manage to smuggle himself inside the mystic doors. Fired with this ambition, at the given time he offered his arm to one of the ladies and tried to slip in with her. Fuad Pasha, who was standing by, stopped him, saying very quietly, “Pardon, mon cher, vous savez que vous n’êtes accrédité qu’auprès de la Porte.”

But after all, Constantinople, with its vaunted charms—charms so much vaunted that they have become almost familiar—was not the goal of our ambition. Our aim was to see something of Asia Minor and, above all, to explore the Trojan Plain. The difficulty was, how to get there? At last we heard of a Russian steamer, the _Grand Duke Constantine_, plying between Odessa and Alexandria—a craft as capricious as a fine lady. First she would, and then she wouldn’t, take us, and finally, “saying ‘no,’ consented.” But not for two days would she make up her mind to start. At last, on the 12th of October, we steamed away from the Golden Horn, leaving behind us the domes and minarets of Stamboul bathed in all the glory of a sunset that would have made Turner wild with delight, and which sent a whole shipload of Russian pilgrims bound for the Holy Land to their knees, piously crossing themselves at the last sight of St. Sophia, always a sacred shrine to the orthodox, in spite of having been for centuries defiled by the rites of Islam.

On the following morning we landed at the Dardanelles. The Consul was most kind, and helped us in every way. The trouble was that there were no horses to be had, so we spent a wet, stormy day in visiting the civil and military governors. The former was a delightful, fat old gentleman, brother-in-law to Fuad Pasha, with a very merry twinkle in his eye, almost as entertaining as Kinglake’s immortal Pasha, whose conversation is recorded in “Eothen.” He spoke much about the Prince of Wales, and declared that the Princess was “a gift of cream and honey specially sent by Allah for the good of the English people.” Those were the sentiments of the man of peace.

The man of war was not less emphatic over the pipes and coffee. He professed great admiration for Lord Palmerston, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and the bagpipes. If ever England should be in trouble Turkey would come to the rescue, with four hundred thousand men, and he would be the man to lead them. But alas! that was fifty-one years ago, in pre-Enver days! What was perhaps more to the purpose, by the help of the two governors we procured horses and a kavass named Hussein, a picturesque warrior bristling with arms, who was made personally responsible for our safety. The good Misseri had found us an excellent dragoman at Constantinople. I recommended him afterwards to Leighton—not yet President of the Royal Academy—who was delighted with him.

Full of enthusiasm, the old poem stirring us to the very core, we wandered, Homer in hand, among the scenes made sacred for ever by the tale of the ten years’ siege. We looked out—as the homesick Greeks did—upon Imbros, Tenedos, Lemnos, Samothrace, and dimly saw far-away Athos; ahead of us was the glorious Ida range. Hardly a step could we take without treading upon broken marble and sherds of pottery, dumb witnesses of the vanished existence of a once teeming population, or probably three tiers of population—the men of King Priam’s time, the Romans, the Genoese. All have left their traces, all are now forgotten by the few poverty-stricken Turkish villagers who have ignorantly succeeded to their heritage.

The Scamander, long since diverted from its old course, was peaceful enough when we first crossed it; but there came a great storm, the God descended into the river, and in a couple of hours the sluggish stream had become a wild, tearing flood; to get back was out of the question, and we had to take refuge for the night in a Turkish farm-house, a very filthy haven of rest, or rather no-rest, where we were the prey of creeping and hopping creatures innumerable. In the dead of the night the wind howled, the crazy house shook, and a portion of the ceiling plaster fell upon me, and began, as it seemed, to take unto itself legs and crawl all over me. Furious as the weather was, I jumped up and fled into an outside shed, where, after a bath by moonlight in Scamander, I waited for the dawn, which came at last, breaking into a glorious day, its beauty enhanced a hundredfold by the memory of the horrors of the night.

As we sauntered over the hallowed plain, it needed no great play of the imagination to see the Grecian ships drawn up in line by the seashore; to picture to ourselves the hosts of Europe and Asia facing one another in battle array; to listen to the proud challenges of the leaders acclaimed by the shouts of their men; Ajax, “like the dread Ares in person, striding mightily, in his harness of flashing brass, shaking his long shafted spear;” to see the body of Hector being dragged in cruel revenge round yonder barrow, which is the tomb of Patroclus; to feel with the aged King Priam, praying for the ransom of his son’s remains; to mourn over the widowhood of Andromache! These are the very springs near which Hector was killed, still pouring their runlets of water into the natural basin at which the deep-bosomed Trojan women were wont to wash their linen.

It is good to remember those days spent amid traditions which three thousand years have not sufficed to strip of their glamour. If the plain still seemed to ring with the clash of arms, the slopes and wooded dells of “many fountained” Ida were so lovely, so full of poetry, that I half expected to see them peopled by lovely goddesses and shy dryads, hiding among the oaks and chestnuts and pines. But alas! Aphrodite, the Queen of Smiles (was she not born in the foam of the countless smiles of the sea?), has long since forsaken the haunts that she loved when the world was young—maybe the men of to-day are not so attractive as Anchises and Adonis, or as the lovely boy who drew down the chaste Artemis from her crescent in high heaven to steal a kiss on earth. The goddesses remain sedate and unkissing among the clouds of Olympus, and no longer condescend to entrance the solitudes of shepherds, nor plead for the palm of beauty before a mortal judge. But if the goddesses have fled for ever, the sacred groves which they loved still remain full of the magic of their beauty and of the olden time. It is only we who are unworthy to receive the divine afflatus—we degenerate—of the earth, earthy.

That Homer was himself and not a limited liability company of ballad-mongers—that he, too, wandered where we did—is proved by his accurate picture of the landscape of the Troad. Kinglake brings forward the relative positions of Imbros and Samothrace. Poseidon viewed the war from Samothrace, but on the map Imbros stands between it and the Asiatic shore. How was the god’s vision not masked? Then Kinglake looked, and saw that Samothrace towered high above Imbros, so that Poseidon had well chosen his watch-tower. Ida gives what I think is a still better proof that Homer saw—and described what he saw. He could not have been born blind.

Climbing Mount Ida, at first we rode through an enchanted forest, broken up by glades and pastures of rarest beauty, watered by crystal rills springing from the living rock, and babbling their way down to the plain, to join Scamander, through scenes befitting the divine mysteries sung by the poets. Higher up the vegetation becomes less luxuriant and more stern, until it dwindles into mere scrub and finally ceases altogether. Then comes a stiff ascent over loose shingle, up which we had to drag our horses, slipping back a yard for every two yards gained. The stones are bare and almost polished, scarcely so much as a lichen to be seen, but when at last we painfully reached the top of Gargarus, there burst upon our view a carpet of brilliant wild flowers, marking the spot where Here lulled to sleep the mighty Zeus as he sat brooding over the help to be given to Hector and to Troy. It was a war in which the gods themselves took sides, and fought and schemed on behalf of those whom they took under their wings.

Does not Homer tell us how, when Poseidon was helping the Greeks, the Queen of Heaven, the Lady Here, who was also on their side, saw her lord Zeus grimly watching from the heights of Ida over the Trojan host? How to close his eyes and gain time? The God of Sleep she suborns by promising to give him as his bride the beloved of his heart, the youngest of the Graces, fair Pasithae. The Goddess is Queen of all Majesty, yet she has but too good reason to know that Majesty by itself has lost its power over the Cloud-compeller; so she begs of Aphrodite the loan of her cestus, the magic girdle which holds the secret of all those alluring charms which make love irresistible. Armed with this and having Sleep as her ally, she seeks her lord, and with sweet dalliance beguiles him into oblivion on the mountain-top.

“Then the divine earth sent up a carpet thick and soft of newly-budding grass, dew-sprinkled lotos, crocus and hyacinth” (Iliad, XIV.). Homer must have seen this wonder and invented the pretty fable of Here’s wiles to account for this unexpected garden of wildings.

To deny Homer or Shakespeare is a crime of high treason against the Majesty of Genius. For my part, in these days of acute criticism, when all faith is shattered and torn to shreds, I am not ashamed to confess that I am yet old-fashioned enough to believe in Homer, and to love the old fables of the gods and goddesses, call them sun-myths or moon-myths, or what you will. To me Agamemnon, Achilles and Ajax; Priam, Hector, Andromache, Paris and dear, beautiful, naughty Helen, _teterrima belli causa_, are still real actors on the world’s stage, who among these glades and forests and sweetly watered dells and plains played their parts in a great drama which has been the joy of countless generations and will be the joy of generations that are yet to come. Of how much pleasure and beauty does not too much learning rob us! Is it not enough that a thing is beautiful? Why turn diamonds into charcoal? If we might reverse the process there would be some sense in it.

At a pass on the top of a spur of the mountain range we came upon an excellent illustration of the eight-hours’ system. At a point where caravans cross the mountain there was a little hut with a tiny vegetable garden. It was occupied by three Zebecs, guardians of the peace, and in some fashion customs officers. They divided the twenty-four hours between them. While one slept, another mounted guard, and the third robbed any unarmed travellers who might pass that way. We had luncheon in their hut; the coffee and cigarettes were of the best—manifestly the spoils of the Egyptian. Refreshed and enriched with a store of happy memories, we came down upon the Bay of Adramyttium. The richly wooded gorges of the southern slope of the mountain were, if possible, even more beautiful than the Trojan side. We slept at Ardjelar, and next day took boat to Assos.

We had now left the enchanted haunts of gods and goddesses, the battlefields of heroes, to linger for a while in the footsteps of the Holy Apostles. The Military Pasha at the Dardanelles had given us a letter for the Bimbashi in command, who was very civil and showed us over the ruins of the old Greek town, then said to be the most perfect in existence, but even fifty-one years ago fast disappearing under the hand of the destroyer, who must needs carry off the grand old masonry to build fortifications. The Bimbashi was wrecking the old town with ardour, for our friend the Pasha had written him an indignant despatch complaining that the hidden treasures which were supposed to exist had not been found, and he begged us to write to the Pasha, assuring him that all search had proved barren and there was no treasure trove.

We were now eager to get on, so, in spite of dismal forebodings from our crew, we insisted on setting sail in an open caique, meaning to reach Aivali as soon as possible; but wind and weather were too much for our poor little craft: we were promptly driven over to Lesbos, and it was forty-eight hours before we managed to reach our destination, after beating about the bay half starved and sleepless.

There was a British Vice-Consul in the place—a Greek—who treated us most kindly, though it was rather a disappointment to two starvelings, after having doubled St. Paul’s experience of “a night and day in the deep,” to be offered, Turkish fashion, a teaspoonful of jam and a glass of water. However, a bountiful meal followed as soon as it could be cooked. We had a great disappointment about horses; there were none to be had, and it was all the more provoking as we knew that we must be causing much trouble to our good host; but we did not find out till afterwards, and then to our great confusion, that he actually turned his wife and his mother-in-law out of doors in order to lodge us.

The next day at extortionate prices we procured horses and set out for Pergamos, riding through cotton-fields and olive-groves, past a cemetery devoted to the remains of victims murdered by a band of brigands who, until twelve months earlier, had infested that part of the country. But now they themselves had been caught and entered upon the inheritance of their final six feet of earth, so we had no fear. We reached Pergamos that night, a quaint and beautiful old town full of ruins and relics of the past, and lodged in a _khan_ which Rembrandt would have etched with delight. What effects he would have produced with the variously and picturesquely dressed men, the camels and the horses, all dimly visible, scarcely more than guessed at, under the half light shed by an old-fashioned horn lantern. In two more days, on the 28th of October, we arrived at Smyrna, where we spent a most delightful week under the auspices of Mr. Cumberbatch, the British Consul.

Before finally parting with our _kavass_, Hussein, we wished to have a photograph of him. To this he strongly objected. Photography was not in those days so common in Turkey, at any rate in the out-of-the-way parts to which he belonged, as it is at present, and he considered that its practice must be in no very remote way connected with black magic; when, on looking into the camera he saw the figures upside down, then he was persuaded that it could not be other than the work of Shaitan. However, at length he was persuaded. He was a merry, picturesque creature, beguiling his time on the march by singing. George, the dragoman, gave me a translation of one of his songs. “The falcon looks to the water, but I cannot see my Lady. She wounds me, but I know not how to cure the wound. The falcon loves to descend upon the peacock, and I long to kiss the white throat of my Lady. She has a knife in her hand; she is about to murder me. Yah! Hah! White are your legs, oh! my Lady!”

October 29th.—I was very anxious to see the monument of Sesostris, a memorial of his victories, described by that beloved old traveller Herodotus, which is at Nif, within reach of Smyrna. A longish excursion. Herodotus mentions two such monuments, but so far as I know only this one has been discovered. We started at five o’clock in the morning with Mr. Cumberbatch, escorted by his _kavass_ and a mounted policeman. Even had there been no object of profound historic and artistic interest to be seen, the beauty of the excursion would have amply repaid our trouble. As the day broke we were met by successions of gorgeously lovely landscapes.

The valley along which our road lay was hemmed in by mountains richly clothed with fruit trees, pines, cypresses and oaks, enfolded in the graceful drapery of vines and curtained with the festoons of climbing plants; wild flowers carpeted the “floor of the forest,” and fragrant shrubs perfumed the fresh morning air.

In spring, when the cherries and other fruit trees are in blossom, this must be a happy valley indeed, but we saw it at its second moment of supreme beauty, when the woodland was aflame with what the Japanese call the brocade of the autumn tints. Nestled in the midst of these feasts for the eye lies the picturesque little town of Nif, or Nymphi. As we saw it, the market-place, with its stalls surrounding a noble group of Oriental plane trees, and filled with a busy, kaleidoscopic crowd still, at that time, clothed in Eastern garb, was like a scene devised by some cunning stage artist. We ate the food which we had brought with us in an ancient _khan_, itself a picture of the East, and then went to visit the Governor, whom the Consul knew. For a while we lingered in the inner court of the great man’s palace, a study such as Alma Tadema would have loved to paint, with its marble floor, its plashing fountain, fringed with oleanders, and the arches of its cloister decked with orange and lemon trees.

Two milk-white goats, his Excellency’s special pets, came up confidentially to be stroked and coaxed. Presently the great man received us in an inner sanctum. Pipes, coffee, and phrases followed as usual, and then we went our way. Living the life of ease dear to the Turk in such surroundings—his home a gem in the loveliest setting—I felt that the Pasha must have realized the Italian dream of the sweetness of doing nothing.

A ride of about two hours from the town brought us to our goal. It would not be an easy matter for a traveller to find the effigy without a guide, so well is it hidden among the brushwood some three hundred yards above a pretty little mountain burn which comes tumbling down to the road. Would that it had been still better screened, for though there seemed to be people in Smyrna who had never heard of it, others there were who had found their way thither and thought it no sin to deface this hoary monument by graving their names in large letters all over the rock. One ruffian, a schoolmaster as I was told, had immortalized his vulgarity by chiselling his name deeply on the arm which lies across the arm of the old king. Had I been an autocrat I would have caused him to be soundly flogged by his own pupils. They would have enjoyed a rich, topsy-turvy treat and he would have met with a punishment befitting the crime.

The rock was originally sloping, but was cut into the perpendicular from the bottom upwards, leaving at the base a ledge which served as a seat where a pilgrim might rest in comfort. The figure is carved in deep relief and is seven feet and seven inches high, measuring four feet from the right elbow to the left hand. The features are much worn and the letters which were on the breast have disappeared. The left hand holds the spear and the right the bow. Here the description of Herodotus, otherwise correct, goes astray, for he reverses these positions. A very intelligible mistake if he wrote from memory on his return home from the expedition; or possibly his account may have been taken from the other figure which he mentions. The conical cap, with a badge in front and a sort of brim to it, the spear and bow, the greaves on the thigh and a projection which must once have been the handle of a sword, are quite distinct.

We stayed for some time in contemplation of this record, between forty and fifty centuries old, of the pride of the old Egyptian king, and then, mounting our horses, turned their heads westward, sad that this day of beauty had come to an end. It remains on my memory as a rare experience, a flawless holiday, fitly crowned by a sunset that seemed to wreathe Smyrna in flames and turn its beauteous bay into a great lake of liquid fire.

October 30th, Sunday.—A day of rest much needed, for since we landed at the Dardanelles we had been a good deal knocked about, far more than appears in these pages, so after church we lounged lazily about Smyrna and drank in the glory of the view from the citadel, where the old Genoese towers stand among the ruins that were once a stronghold built by some Cyclopean Vauban. Here, too, is a small mosque on a site where the Christian Church of the Revelation is said to have stood; hard by must have been “the synagogue of Satan.”[50] Very impressive, moreover, is the Turkish cemetery with its old and stately cypresses, finer even, as it seemed to us, than those of Constantinople.

As we wandered homeward we came down upon the track of the Smyrna and Aidin Railway. Wonderful are the caprices of fashion! What the Sweet Waters of Europe are to the ladies of Constantinople, that to the fair dames of Smyrna were the less romantic rails of the new road. They were the fashionable promenade of the Sabbath-keeping _bourgeoisie_—the line was thronged by numbers of Turkish ladies in many-coloured dresses; far more closely veiled in their ghostly white yashmaks than their more emancipated sisters in Stamboul. Greek, Armenian and Frankish beauties, in bright French or pseudo-French raiment—many of them radiant with the beauty for which Ismir is famous—made a motley crowd; while sedate old Turks sat sipping their coffee and smoking their narghilehs in silent dignity under the orange and citron trees which fringe the cafés, watching from under their sleepy lids the brilliant colouring and glowing eyes of the Ionian dames and damsels.

Waiting for a ship, or indeed for anything, is but dreary work, but there was no feeling dull at Smyrna, for there was much to be seen and done, and we lingered luxuriously over the little that was left of a joyous holiday.

Of course we went to Ephesus, where Mr. Wood, acting for the British Museum, had not yet made his great discoveries, though in his first year’s work he had unearthed much that was of interest. The modern village of Ayazaluk is almost entirely built up of the stones of the old city all huddled together higgledy-piggledy. Rarely carved capitals of pillars turned topsy-turvy form incongruous bases for fir posts, supporting the verandahs of mud-built shops in which fruiterers, pastry cooks and tobacconists ply their trade. A ruined mosque is a beautiful relic of old Moorish architecture, inside of which ancient Greek pillars have been adapted. The very stones in the graveyard are fragments of old columns and Turkish marbles of the middle ages. But what a noble position! And how glorious must Ephesus have been in the days of St. Paul, when it was a seaport and its imposing citadel overlooked the sea, now (in 1864) owing to alluvial deposits some four miles away!

Barring Damascus, no place is more full of associations and memories connected with St. Paul than Ephesus. It is strange indeed that so little should be known of the life of a saint whose ministry wrought more for the world than that of any other man before or since. Yet here are the remains of the very buildings among which he lived for years. It cannot be said of Ephesus as Lucan said of Troy “etiam periere ruinæ.” Neither Goths nor Turks have entirely wiped them out.

Here is the great amphitheatre where the apostle “fought with beasts,” where some twenty-five thousand spectators would assemble for such a sight, and where Demetrius the silversmith raised the riot against him and “the whole city was filled with confusion.” Here, too, is a little square building of stupendous antiquity, which tradition says was his prison; and why should it not have been? I am old-fashioned and simple enough to have faith in tradition, which is often as trustworthy as the written word, just as I humbly accept the letter written by St. Paul “to the saints which are at Ephesus,” when he was “an ambassador in bonds,” at Rome, and pay no heed to the learned hair-splittings of scholastic commentators, to whom I would say, in the famous words of Lord Melbourne, “Why can’t you leave it alone?”

Seven years later I was again at Ephesus with Lord Stafford and George Crawley, and this time we found Mr. Wood triumphant. He had just reaped the fruit of eight years of assiduous labour—labour hindered by many difficulties, lack of funds, discouragement, and, last not least, the pestilent atmosphere of the fever swamps among which he had to work.

This second visit was deeply interesting, nor was it devoid of a certain element of fun. That time we arrived at Smyrna from Beirut in a small Russian coasting steamer which was carrying pilgrims from the Holy Land back to Odessa—always a curious and interesting lot of passengers, as I often found. We had to face a succession of gales, to the great discomfiture of the poor zealots. One fat old pilgrimess told me pathetically that she would have died had she not thought of the inconvenience that her death would cause on board, and so in the spirit of self-sacrifice she resisted and consented to live.

In the saloon, such as it was, we had as shipmate a certain elderly American general, who told us that he was an attorney, own correspondent to seven transatlantic newspapers, and that his journals were looked forward to by some of the leading families in various cities, unknown to me. As a man of letters he greatly admired Shakespeare. “Yes, sir!” he said, “Shakespeare is quite an institution. Emerson can write some poetry, but I guess he can’t come up to that. With the Bible, Shakespeare and Webster’s Dictionary, a man can get along. They are as good documents as a man need have for a library.” A dear, innocent, unsophisticated man was the Attorney-General, very good-natured, and a source of great amusement during all the time that he remained sticking to us with the affection of a burr.

Our lucky star was in the ascendant, for almost the first person whom we met in Smyrna was Mr. Wood, who most kindly agreed to go with us to Ephesus the next morning. When we reached the ruins, he showed us all his plans and explained his discoveries, setting forth the work of his eight years in an hour’s pregnant talk. When he had made all clear, the good General said, “Then, sir, I gather from your conversation that the Temple of Diana was a round building.” “Round, sir, round!” said Mr. Wood, “haven’t I been telling you all the time that it was square?” Nothing abashed, the General looked round him and said: “Waal! if this was the site of the City of Ephesus, I’m glad to know it. It was quite considerable of a city, and the men that built it had some snap in ’em.”

Steered by our learned pilot, we visited all the wonders that his patience and science had revealed—the Odeion, a beautiful little building with white marble steps decorated with carved lions’ feet—the Wool Exchange, a most ingenious discovery—the marble tomb of Androclus. I have already spoken of the theatre, the stadium and other great witnesses of the past. Did we pass by the tomb of Mary Magdalene, that sweet woman whom the great Pope Gregory, for no earthly reason and without one scintilla of evidence, came to identify with the woman “which was a sinner”? Did we see the tomb of St. Luke, who told that unnamed sinner’s touching story? Again I say, why not? These are secrets which will not be revealed until the Last Day, when the graves shall give up their dead. But even an Evangelist must die somewhere, and what is more probable than that the early Christians, knowing where his remains lay in some place outside the city, should have brought them hither with pious pomp and reburied them in yonder round building, faced with marble and bearing as its device the bull, or buffalo, surmounted with a cross?

Mr. Wood’s great find, then (in 1871) a discovery not very many days old, was the undoubted site of the great Temple of Diana. Careful study and reasoning led Mr. Wood to begin excavating at a spot where he discovered the angle of the peribolus which was thrown by Augustus ὑιός θεοῦ, the Son of God. (How like the Chinese imperial title, Tien Tzě, the son of Heaven!) Here were inscriptions bearing the name of the architect, the one partially the other wholly erased. This tallies with an edict which has been found ordering that the name of this man, who had fallen into disgrace, should be obliterated.

Having found the angle, Mr. Wood went to work with new enthusiasm and energy, and was rewarded some two months before our arrival by the unearthing of a huge white marble column of exquisite workmanship _in situ_. Thus was the vexed question of the site of the mighty temple set at rest and Mr. Wood’s work crowned with success. Much has been done since his time; but he showed the way, a successful pioneer. When we considered the vastness of the inclosure and the magnificent proportions of the column we understood the cry, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”

While Mr. Wood was giving us a lecture of surpassing interest, I began to think that even the General was touched by the sacred fire of enthusiasm, but I was reckoning without my General. He was destined once more to put his foot in it. Like Sydney Smith’s silent man, he rudely broke the spell. When Mr. Wood had finished speaking, he looked for a moment or two pensively at the column, and then picking up a great stone, said: “Waal now! Do think! If that piece of marble was part of the Temple of Diana, I guess I’m bound to have a chunk of it,” and was just about to chip off as large a piece as he could, when Mr. Wood, who was nothing if not peppery, flew at him viciously; the tiger that lies sleeping in every man was aroused, and I verily believe that had Mr. Wood held a deadly weapon in his hand our poor Attorney-General would have had but a faint chance of surviving. As it was he collapsed under the great discoverer’s architectonic fury and remained sadly silent for the rest of the day. What manner of report, I wonder, did the seven newspapers receive of our Ephesian expedition!

The next morning at breakfast we took leave of our General. We were bound for Constantinople and our ship was to sail at noon. He was bound heaven knows whither in search of paragraphs. After breakfast he announced his intention of going up to the citadel of Smyrna. “I am informed,” he told us, “that there air up there some Cyclopean walls. Now Cyclops lived quite a long while ago, and I’m not going to miss seeing what he built.” It was rather a shame to disillusion the poor gentleman, but I thought of the seven across the Atlantic and was stony-hearted. When I explained to him the meaning of Cyclopean building the General was disenchanted, but he went up to the citadel nevertheless, and I have no doubt made a very pretty story out of the great one-eyed builder.

* * * * *

And now let me go back seven years and start again on Gunpowder Plot Day, 1864, when we left the radiantly beautiful bay of Smyrna for England on board the Austrian Lloyd’s ship _Messina_. Twenty-six hours’ steam brought us to the Island of Syra, where, after being roasted for a day and a night on that sun-scorched rock, where no trace of vegetation is to be seen—to all appearance an island of bumboat-men and evil smells—on the 7th we shipped on board the _Calcutta_, also an Austrian Lloyd’s ship, bound for Trieste.

It is something to have seen Navarino and to have passed Ithaca, even in the night; but what gave especial interest to our cruise was meeting Count Ungern Sternberg (or was he a Baron? I forget), a Russian who was a relation of many people whom I had known well in St. Petersburg. Though a general in the army, he was one of those travelling agents who in those days used to wander over Europe apparently charged with no special mission, but keeping their ears and eyes open everywhere, and doubtless finding many an opportunity of rendering some underground service to the rather tortuous policy in which the Russian Foreign Office in those days delighted. Now that the Gortchakoffs and Ignatieffs have carried their diplomacy into another and let us hope a better world, there is perhaps no room for the political knight errant of whom Ungern Sternberg was at that time a rather famous representative. I knew him well by name, though we had never met, and he was a most agreeable companion. We talked a great deal about our common friends in London, Paris, St. Petersburg (I cannot yet bring myself to talk of Petrograd). On politics, for some reason best known to himself, he was, as he would have put it, _très boutonné_; but when we reached Corfu and he saw the remains of the blown-up forts his excitement got the better of his diplomacy, and he could not conceal his joy at the loss which England had sustained, or his wonder at the short-sightedness which prompted it. “What was your Lord Russell about?” he said. “See how many combinations may make England regret this step. For instance, suppose that France and Italy—no impossible contingency—were united against her; what a stronghold they would have at Corfu!”

This was much the opinion that Lord Palmerston professed in 1850, but in 1863 he yielded to Lord Russell, and, apparently without a misgiving, gave up what he once considered too important a naval and military post ever to be abandoned by us. Lord Russell, as usual, was outwitted; he believed in a plebiscite and that a people should belong to masters of their own choosing; he could not see that, in this case, the plebiscite was an engine worked largely by ecclesiastical means at the disposal of Russia—in fact, a political and clerical intrigue.

A very intelligent Roman Catholic priest told me that the islanders, having been led by Mr. Gladstone, in 1858, to believe that England would never give up the protectorate, thought that they were quite safe in declaring for annexation to Greece, as they were urged to do by their priests. They would in that way save their face with the Orthodox Church, while they would still enjoy the material prosperity for which they had to thank England. They thought that their true interest was to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. The Greek Archbishop used all his power to further the plans of Russia, and during the time of voting was nightly closeted in secret conference with the Russian Consul. When the end came, His Grace received a high decoration from the Tsar, from whom it was even said that he was actually in receipt of pay.

Curiously enough, the party that had been hottest for annexation with Greece under King Otho would not vote for it under King George. The reason alleged was that the revolution against Otho had been the work of England, and that King George being the nominee of England, annexation with Greece would put the islands more than ever under the thumb of Great Britain. My priest went on to deplore the ruin which their mistaken nationalism had brought upon the unhappy people. Many of the principal business houses in Corfu were practically bankrupt and new failures daily expected. The poorer people found no sale for their fish and the produce of the farms, gardens and orchards. The market, which did a roaring trade daily, sometimes as much as two or three hundred pounds changing hands in a morning, was a thing of the past. Now there was no English Government House, no prosperous officials, no garrison, and with the departure of the last redcoat the happy days of plenty had gone. “Oh!” he cried, “if you would only come back again!”

We went to the principal hotel in the great square. The landlord received us with many expressions of joy. We ordered luncheon and a carriage. “I will go and cook at once,” said he. “Eh! Gentlemen! Six months ago I had a cook and waiters and maids, two coachmen and plenty of horses. Now I must go and dress the luncheon. I must serve it; and when you have finished I shall harness the carriage and drive you out! and I shall make your beds if you sleep here to-night.” Perfectly good-humoured the poor man was, and that made his story all the more pathetic.

When we got home, after a drive through the lovely garden scenery, he made the beds, for we were not to sail till the next day. More talk in the evening. The distress was beyond belief, and it was no mere temporary distress—bad times with the hope of better things in the future. The olive harvest, for instance, was in deadly straits, for the proprietors could not pay a wage of five shillings a day for the gathering, and the labourers were the masters of the situation and could demand what they chose. In this way did the small landowners who helped in working the plebiscite reap the reward of their folly. Humble civil servants who used to be paid to the hour had to wait a week or a fortnight for the salary upon which their daily food depended. Cultivation looked as though it must die out, for the four or five hundred wretched Greek soldiery who had replaced the English garrison spent their scanty pay on tobacco alone; no one knew how they lived. Corfu was desolate and England had lost a stronghold that never can be replaced. No wonder the Ungern Sternbergs rejoiced!

It is perhaps one of the signs of England’s greatness that she has been able so far to survive the foreign policy of Lord Russell. Yet even to-day, in 1915, she is paying the penalty and at what a price! I wonder whether if he were still alive he would tell us, as he did at Blairgowrie more than fifty years ago, to “Rest and be thankful.”

Nov. 11.—Our last day’s cruise was delightful. The calendar told us that we were in November. The weather said June. Our skipper being a native of Dalmatia intimately knowing the coast and all its snares dared to take his big ship inside the islands, so we had a view of lovely scenery usually only possible for the smallest of craft. At a point on the shore stood a little house and in front of it a group consisting of his wife and children, on the watch to wave him Godspeed; possibly the chance of a glimpse of those dear ones weighed more with him than the desire to show us the beauties of the Dalmatian coast—at any rate, we were the gainers.

At Trieste we said good-bye to our good friend the Russian, whom we left still chuckling over Lord Russell and the Ionian Islands.