In The Levant

When the harem disappeared we found some consolation in a tall Croat, who strutted up and down the deck in front of us, that we might sicken with envy of his splendid costume. He wore tight trousers of blue cloth, baggy in the rear but fitting the legs like a glove, and terminating over the shoes in a quilled inverted funnel; a brilliant scarf of Syrian silk in loose folds about his loins; a vest stiff with gold-em broidery; a scarlet jacket decked with gold-lace, and on his head a red fez. This is the costly dress of a Croatian gardener, who displays all his wealth to make a holiday spectacle of himself.

We sailed close to the village of Kandili and the promontory under which and upon which it lies, a site which exhausts the capacity of the loveliness of nature and the skill of art. From the villas on its height one commands, by a shifted glance, the Euxine and the Marmora, and whatever is most lovely in the prospect of two continents; the purity of the air is said to equal the charm of the view. Above this promontory opens the valley down which flows the river Geuksoo (sky-water), and at the north of it stands a white marble kiosk of the Sultan, the most beautiful architectural creation on the strait. Near it, shaded by great trees, is a handsome fountain; beyond the green turf in the tree-decked vale which pierces the hill were groups of holiday-makers in gay attire. I do not know if this Valley of the Heavenly Water is the loveliest in the East, but it is said that its charms of meadow, shade, sweet water, and scented flowers are a substantial foretaste of the paradise of the true believer. But it is in vain to catalogue the charming villages, the fresh beauties of nature and art to which each revolution of the paddle-wheel carried us. We thought we should be content with a summer residence of the Khedive, on the European side below the lovely bay of Terapea, with its vast hillside of gardens and orchards and the long line of palaces on the water. Fanned by the invigorating breezes from the Black Sea, its summer climate must be perfect.

We landed at Beicos, and, in default of any conveyance, walked up through the straggling village, along the shore, to a verdant, shady meadow, sweet with clover and wild-flowers. This is in the valley of Hun-Kiar Iskelesi, a favorite residence of the sultans; here on a projecting rocky point is a reddish palace built and given to the Sultan by the Khedive. The meadow, in which we were, is behind a palace of old Mohammed Ali, and it is now used as a pasture for the Sultan’s horses, dozens of which were tethered and feeding in the lush grass and clover. The tents of their attendants were pitched on the plain, and groups of Turkish ladies were picnicking under the large sycamores. It was a charming rural scene. I made the silent acquaintance of an old man, in a white turban and flowing robes, who sat in the grass knitting and watching his one white lamb feed; probably knitting the fleece of his lamb of the year before.

We were in search of an araba and team to take us up the mountain; one stood in the meadow which we could hire, but oxen were wanting, and we despatched a Greek boy in search of the animals. The Turkish ladies of fashion delight in the araba when they ride into the country, greatly preferring it to the horse or donkey, or to any other carriage. It is a long cart of four wheels, without springs, but it is as stately in appearance as the band-wagon of a circus; its sloping side-boards and even the platform in front are elaborately carved and gilded. While we waited the motions of the boy, who joined to himself two others even more prone to go astray than himself, an officer of the royal stables invited us to take seats under the shade of his tent and served us with coffee. After an hour the boy returned with two lean steers. The rude, hooped top of the araba was spread with a purple cloth, a thick bedquilt covered the bottom, and by the aid of a ladder we climbed into the ark and sat or lay as we could best stow ourselves. A boy led the steers by a rope, another walked at the side gently goading them with a stick, and we rumbled along slowly through the brilliant meadows. It became evident after a time that we were not ascending the mountain, but going into the heart of the country; the cart was stopped and the wild driver was interrogated. I never saw a human being so totally devoid of a conscience. We had hired him to take us up to Giant’s Grave Mountain. He was deliberately cheating us out of it. At first he insisted that he was going in the right direction, but upon the application of the dragoman’s fingers to his ear, he pleaded that the mountain road was bad and that it was just as well for us to visit the Sultan’s farm up the valley. We had come seven thousand miles to see the view from the mountain, but this boy had not the least scruple in depriving us of it. We turned about and entered a charming glen, thoroughly New England in its character, set with small trees and shrubs and carpeted with a turf of short sweet grass. One needs to be some months in the Orient to appreciate the delight experienced by the sight of genuine turf.

As we ascended, the road, gullied by the spring torrents, at last became impassable for wheels, and we were obliged to abandon the araba and perform the last half-mile of the journey on foot. The sightly summit of the mountain is nearly six hundred feet above the water. There, in a lovely grove, we found a coffeehouse and a mosque and the Giant’s Grave, which the Moslems call the grave of Joshua. It is a flower-planted enclosure, seventy feet long and seven wide, ample for any hero; the railing about it is tagged with bits of cloth which pious devotees have tied there in the expectation that their diseases, perhaps their sins, will vanish with the airing of these shreds. From the minaret is a wonderful view,—the entire length of the Bosphorus, with all its windings and lovely bays enlivened with white sails, ships at anchor, and darting steamers, rich in villages, ancient castles, and forts; a great portion of Asia Minor, with the snow peaks of Olympus; on the south, the Islands of the Blest and the Sea of Marmora; on the north, the Cyanean rocks and the wide sweep of the Euxine, blue as heaven and dotted with a hundred white sails, overlooked by the ruin of a Genoese castle, at the entrance of the Bosphorus, built on the site of a temple of Jupiter, and the spot where the Argonauts halted before they ventured among the Symplegades; and immediately below, Terapea and the deep bay of Buyukdereh, the summer resort of the foreign residents of Constantinople, a paradise of palaces and gardens, of vales and stately plane-trees, and the entrance to the interior village of Belgrade, with its sacred forest unprofaned as yet by the axe.

The Cyanean rocks which Jason and his mariners regarded as floating islands, or sentient monsters, vanishing and reappearing, are harmlessly anchored now, and do not appear at all formidable, though they disappear now as of old when the fierce Euxine rolls in its storm waves. Por a long time and with insatiable curiosity we followed with the eye the line of the coast of the Pontus Euxinus, once as thickly set with towns as the Riviera of Italy,—cities of Ionian, Dorian, and Athenian colonies, who followed the Phoenicians and perhaps the Egyptians,—in the vain hope of extending our vision to Trebizond, to the sea fortress of Petra, renowned for its defence by the soldiers of Chosroes against the arms of Justinian, and, further, to the banks of the Pliasis, to Colchis, whose fabulous wealth tempted Jason and his sea-robbers. The waters of this land were so impregnated with particles of gold that fleeces of sheep were used to strain out the yellow metal. Its palaces shone with gold and silver, and you might expect in its gardens the fruit of the Hesperides. In the vales of the Caucasus, we are taught, our race has attained its most perfect form; in other days its men were as renowned for strength and valor as its women were for beauty,—the one could not be permanently subdued, the others conquered, even in their slavery. Early converts to the Christian faith, they never adopted its morals nor comprehended its metaphysics; and perhaps a more dissolute and venal society does not exist than that whose business for centuries has been the raising of maids for the Turkish harems. And the miserable, though willing, victims are said to possess not even beauty, until after a training in luxury by the slave-dealers.

We made our way, not without difficulty, down the rough, bush-grown hillside, invaded a new Turkish fortification, and at length found a place where we could descend the precipitous bank and summon a boat to ferry us across to Buyukdereh. This was not easy to obtain; but finally an aged Greek boatman appeared with a caique as aged and decayed as himself. The chances seemed to be that it could make the voyage, and we all packed ourselves into it, sitting on the bottom and filling it completely. There was little margin of boat above the water, and any sudden motion would have reduced that to nothing. We looked wise and sat still, while the old Greek pulled feebly and praised the excellence of his craft. On the opposite slope our attention was called to a pretty cottage, and a Constantinople lady, who was of the party, began to tell us the story of its occupant. So dramatic and exciting did it become that we forgot entirely the peril of our frail and overloaded boat. The story finished as we drew up to the landing, which we instantly comprehended we had not reached a moment too soon. Eor when we arose our clothes were soaked; we were sitting in water, which was rapidly filling the boat, and would have swamped it in five minutes. The landing-place of Buyukdereh, the bay, the hills and villas, reminded us of Lake Como, and the quay and streets were rather Italian than Oriental. The most soaked of the voyagers stood outside the railing of the pretty garden of the café to dry in the sun, while the others sat inside, under the vines, and passed out to the unfortunates, through the iron bars, tiny cups of coffee, and fed them with rahat-al-lacoom and other delicious sweetmeats, until the arrival of the steamer. The ride down was lovely; the sun made the barracks and palaces on the east shore a blaze of diamonds; and the minarets seen through the steamer’s smoke which, transfused with the rosy light, overhung the city, had a phantasmagorical aspect.

Constantinople shares with many other cities the reputation of being the most dissolute in the world. The traveller is not required to decide the rival claims of this sort of pre-eminence, which are eagerly put forward; he may better, in each city, acquiesce in the complaisant assumption of the inhabitants. But when he is required to see in the moral state of the Eastern capital signs of its speedy decay, and the near extinction of the Othman rule, he takes a leaf out of history and reflects. It is true, no doubt, that the Turks are enfeebled by luxury and sensuality, and have, to a great extent, lost those virile qualities which gave to their ancestors the dominion of so many kingdoms in Asia, Africa, and Europe; in short, that the race is sinking into an incapacity to propagate itself in the world. If one believes what he hears, the morals of society could not be worse. The women, so many of whom have been bought in the market, or are daughters of slaves, are educated only for pleasure; and a great proportion of the male population are adventurers from all lands, with few domestic ties. The very relaxation of the surveillance of the harem (the necessary prelude to the emancipation of woman) opens the door to opportunity, and gives freer play to feminine intrigue. One hears, indeed, that even the inmates of the royal harem find means of clandestine intercourse with the foreigners of Pera. The history of the Northern and Western occupation of the East has been, for fifteen centuries, only a repetition of yielding to the seductive influences of a luxurious climate and to soft and pleasing invitation.

But, heighten as we may the true and immoral picture of social life in Constantinople, I doubt if it is so loose and unrestrained as it was for centuries under the Greek Emperors; I doubt if the imbecility, the luxurious effeminacy of the Turks has sunk to the level of the Byzantine Empire; and when we are asked to expect in the decay of to-day a speedy dissolution, we remember that for a period of over a thousand years, from the partition of the Roman Empire between the two sons of Theodosius to the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II., the empire subsisted in a state of premature and perpetual decay. These Oriental dynasties are a long time in dying, and we cannot measure their decrepitude by the standards of Occidental morality.

The trade and the commerce of the city are largely in the hands of foreigners; but it has nearly always been so, since the days of the merchants and manufacturers of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. We might draw an inference of Turkish insecurity from the implacable hatred of the so-called Greek subjects, if the latter were not in the discord of a thousand years of anarchy and servitude. The history of the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean has been a succession of Turkish avarice and rapacity, horrible Greek revenge and Turkish wholesale devastation and massacre, repeated over and over again; but there appears as yet no power able either to expel the Turks or unite the Greeks. That the leaven of change is working in the Levant is evident to the most superficial observation, and one sees everywhere the introduction of Western civilization, of business habits, and, above all, of schools. However indifferent the Osmanlis are to education, they are not insensible to European opinion; and in reckoning up their bad qualities, we ought not to forget that they have set some portions of Christendom a lesson of religious toleration,—both in Constantinople and Jerusalem the Christians were allowed a freedom of worship in their own churches which was not permitted to Protestants within the sacred walls of Pontifical Rome.

One who would paint the manners or the morals of Constantinople might adorn his theme with many anecdotes, characteristic of a condition of society which is foreign to our experience. I select one which has the merit of being literally true. You who believe that modern romance exists only in tales of fiction, listen to the story of a beauty of Constantinople, the vicissitudes of whose life equal in variety if not in importance those of Theodora and Athenais. For obvious reasons, I shall mention no names.

There lives now on the banks of the Bosphorus an English physician, who, at the entreaty of Lord Byron, went to Greece in 1824 as a volunteer surgeon in the war of independence; he arrived only in time to see the poet expire at Missolonghi. In the course of the war, he was taken prisoner by the Egyptian troops, who in their great need of surgeons kept him actively employed in his profession. He did not regain his freedom until after the war, and then only on condition that he should reside in Constantinople as one of the physicians of the Sultan, Mohammed II.

We may suppose that the Oriental life was not unpleasant, nor the position irksome to him, for he soon so far yielded to the temptations of the capital as to fall in love with a very pretty face which he saw daily in a bay-window of the street he traversed on the way to the Seraglio. Acquaintance, which sometimes precedes love, in this case followed it; the doctor declared his passion and was accepted by the willing maid. But an Oriental bay-window is the opportunity of the world, and the doctor, becoming convinced that his affianced was a desperate flirt, and yielding to the entreaties of his friends, broke off the engagement and left her free, in her eyry, to continue her observations upon mankind. This, however, did not suit the plans of the lovely and fickle girl. One morning, shortly after, he was summoned to see two Turkish ladies who awaited him in his office; when he appeared, the young girl (for it was she) and her mother threw aside their disguise, and declared that they would not leave the house until the doctor married the daughter, for the rupture of the engagement had rendered it impossible to procure any other husband. Whether her own beauty or the terrible aspect of the mother prevailed, I do not know, but the English chaplain was sent for; he refused to perform the ceremony, and a Greek priest was found who married them.

This marriage, which took the appearance of duress, might have been happy if the compelling party to it had left her fondness of adventure and variety at the wedding threshold; but her constancy was only assumed, like the Turkish veil, for an occasion; lovers were not wanting, and after the birth of three children, two sons and a daughter, she deserted her husband and went to live with a young Turk, who has since held high office in the government of the Sultan. It was in her character of Madame Mehemet Pasha that she wrote (or one of her sons wrote for her) a book well known in the West, entitled “Thirty Years in a Harem.” But her intriguing spirit was not extinct even in a Turkish harem; she attempted to palm off upon the pasha, as her own, a child that she had bought; her device was detected by one of the palace eunuchs, and at the same time her amour with a Greek of the city came to light. The eunuch incurred her displeasure for his officiousness, and she had him strangled and thrown into the Bosphorus! Some say that the resolute woman even assisted with her own hands. For these breaches of decorum, however, she paid dear; the pasha banished her to Kutayah, with orders to the guard who attended her to poison her on the way; but she so won upon the affection of the officer that he let her escape at Broussa. There her beauty, if not her piety, recommended her to an Imam of one of the mosques, and she married him and seems for a time to have led a quiet life; at any rate, nothing further was heard of her until just before the famous cholera season, when news came of the death of her husband, the Moslem priest, and that she was living in extreme poverty, all her beauty gone forever, and consequently her ability to procure another husband.

The pasha, Mehemet, lived in a beautiful palace on the eastern shore of the Bosphorus, near Kandili. During the great cholera epidemic of 1865, the pasha was taken ill. One day there appeared at the gate an unknown woman, who said that she had come to cure the pasha; no one knew her, but she spoke with authority, and was admitted. It was our adventuress. She nursed the pasha with the most tender care and watchful skill, so that he recovered; and, in gratitude for the preservation of his life, he permitted her and her daughter to remain in the palace. For some time they were contented with the luxury of such a home, but one day—it was the evening of Wednesday—neither mother nor daughter was to be found; and upon examination it was discovered that a large collection of precious stones and some ready money had disappeared with them. They had departed on the French steamer, in order to transfer their talents to the fields of Europe. The fate of the daughter I do not know; for some time she and her mother were conspicuous in the dissipation of Paris life; subsequently the mother lived with a son in London, and, since I heard her story in Constantinople, she has died in London in misery and want.

The further history of the doctor and his family may detain our curiosity for a moment. When his wife left him for the arms of the pasha, he experienced so much difficulty in finding any one in Constantinople to take care of his children that he determined to send them to Scotland to be educated, and intrusted them, for that purpose, to a friend who was returning to England. They went by way of Rome. It happened that the mother and sister of the doctor had some time before that come to Rome, for the sake of health, and had there warmly embraced the Roman Catholic faith. Of course the three children were taken to see their grandmother and aunt, and the latter, concerned for their eternal welfare, diverted them from their journey, and immured the boys in a monastery and the girl in a convent. The father, when he heard of this abduction, expressed indignation, but, having at that time only such religious faith as may be floating in the Oriental air and common to all, he made no vigorous effort to recover his children. Indeed, he consoled himself, in the fashion of the country, by marrying again; this time a Greek lady, who died, leaving two boys. The doctor was successful in transporting the offspring of his second marriage to Scotland, where they were educated; and they returned to do him honor,—one of them as the eloquent and devoted pastor of a Protestant church in Pera, and the other as a physician in the employment of the government.

After the death of his second wife, the doctor—I can but tell the story as I heard it—became a changed man, and—married again; this time a Swiss lady, of lovely Christian character. In his changed condition, he began to feel anxious to recover his children from the grasp of Rome. He wrote for information, but his sister refused to tell where they were, and his search could discover no trace of them. At length the father obtained leave of absence from the Seraglio, and armed with an autograph letter from Abdul Aziz to Pius IX., he went to Rome. The Pope gave him an order for the restoration of his children. He drove first to the convent to see his daughter. In place of the little girl whom he had years ago parted with, he found a young lady of extraordinary beauty, and a devoted Romanist. At first she refused to go with him, and it was only upon his promise to allow her perfect liberty of conscience, and never to interfere with any of the observances of her church, that she consented. Not daring to lose sight of her, he waited for her to pack her trunk, and then, putting her into a carriage, drove to the monastery where he heard, after many inquiries, that his boys were confined. The monk who admitted him denied that they were there, and endeavored to lock him into the waiting-room while he went to call the Superior. But the doctor anticipated his movements, and as soon as the monk was out of sight, started to explore the house. By good luck the first door he opened led into a chamber where a sick boy was lying on a bed. The doctor believed that he recognized one of his sons; a few questions satisfied him that he was right. “I am your father,” he said to the astonished lad, “run quickly and call your brother and come with me.” Monastic discipline had not so many attractions for the boys as convent life for the girl, and the child ran with alacrity and brought his brother, just as the abbot and a score of monks appeared upon the scene. As the celerity of the doctor had given no opportunity to conceal the boys, opposition to the order of the Pope was useless, and the father hastened to the gate where he had left the carriage. Meantime the aunt had heard of the rescue, and followed the girl from the convent; she implored her, by tears and prayers, to reverse her decision. The doctor cut short the scene by shoving his sons into the carriage and driving rapidly away. Nor did he trust them long in Rome.

The subsequent career of the boys is not dwelt on with pleasure. One of them enlisted in the Turkish army, married a Turkish wife, and, after some years, deserted her, and ran away to England. His wife was taken into a pasha’s family, who offered to adopt her only child, a boy of four years; but the mother preferred to bring him to his grandfather. None of the family had seen her, but she established her identity, and begged that her child might be adopted by a good man, which she knew his grandfather to be, and receive a Christian training. The doctor, therefore, adopted the grandchild, which had come to him in such a strange way, and the mother shortly after died.

The daughter, whose acquired accomplishments matched her inherited beauty, married, in time, a Venetian Count of wealth; and the idler in Venice may see on the Grand Canal, among those mouldy edifices that could reveal so many romances, their sumptuous palace, and learn, if he cares to learn, that it is the home of a family happy in the enjoyment of most felicitous fortune. In the gossip with which the best Italian society sometimes amuses itself, he might hear that the Countess was the daughter of a slave of the Sultan’s harem. I have given, however, the true version of the romantic story; but I am ignorant of the social condition or the race of the mother of the heroine of so many adventures. She may have been born in the Caucasus.

XXVII.—FROM THE GOLDEN HORN TO THE ACROPOLIS

OUR last day in Constantinople was a bright invitation for us to remain forever. We could have departed without regret in a rain-storm, but it was not so easy to resolve to look our last upon this shining city and marvellous landscape under the blue sky of May. Early in the morning we climbed up the Genoese Tower in Galata and saw the hundred crescents of Stamboul sparkle in the sun, the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, shifting panoramas of trade and pleasure, the Propontis with its purple islands, and the azure and snowy mountains of Asia. This massive tower is now a fire-signal station, and night and day watchmen look out from its battlemented gallery; the Seraskier Tower opposite in Stamboul, and another on the heights of the Asiatic shore, keep the same watch over the inflammable city. The guard requested us not to open our parasols upon the gallery for fear they would be hailed as fire-signals.

The day was spent in last visits to the bazaars, in packing and leave-takings, and the passage of the custom-house, for the government encourages trade by an export as well as an import duty. I did not see any of the officials, but Abd-el-Atti, who had charge of shipping our baggage, reported that the eyes of the customs inspector were each just the size of a five-franc piece. Chief among our regrets at setting our faces toward Europe was the necessity of parting with Abd-el-Atti and Ahmed; the former had been our faithful dragoman and daily companion for five months, and we had not yet exhausted his adventures nor his stores of Oriental humor; and we could not expect to find elsewhere a character like Ahmed, a person so shrewd and obliging, and of such amusing vivacity. At four o’clock we embarked upon an Italian steamer for Salonica and Athens, a four days’ voyage. At the last moment Abd-el-Atti would have gone with us upon the least encouragement, but we had no further need of dragoman or interpreter, and the old man sadly descended the ladder to his boat. I can see him yet, his red fez in the stern of the caique, waving his large silk handkerchief, and slowly rowing back to Pera,—a melancholy figure.

As we steamed out of the harbor we enjoyed the view we had missed on entering: the Seraglio Point where blind old Dandolo ran his galley aground and leaped on shore to the assault; the shore of Chalcedon; the seven towers and the old wall behind Stamboul, which Persians, Arabs, Scythians, and Latins have stormed; the long sweeping coast and its minarets; the Princes’ Islands and Mt. Olympus,—all this in a setting sun was superb; and we said, “There is not its equal in the world.” And the evening was more magnificent,—a moon nearly full, a sweet and rosy light on the smooth water, which was at first azure blue, and then pearly gray and glowing like an amethyst.

Smoothly sailing all night, we came at sunrise to the entrance of the Dardanelles, and stopped for a couple of hours at Chanak Kalessi, before the guns of the Castle of Asia. The wide-awake traders immediately swarmed on board with their barbarous pottery, and with trays of cooked fish, onions, and bread for the deck passengers. The latter were mostly Greeks, and men in the costume which one sees still in the islands and the Asiatic coasts, but very seldom on the Grecian mainland; it consists of baggy trousers, close at the ankles, a shawl about the waist, an embroidered jacket usually of sober color, and, the most prized part of their possessions, an arsenal of pistols and knives in huge leathern holsters, with a heavy leathern flap, worn in front. Most of them wore a small red fez, the hair cut close in front and falling long behind the ears. They are light in complexion, not tall, rather stout, and without beauty. Though their dress is picturesque in plan, it is usually very dirty, ragged, and, the last confession of poverty, patched. They were all armed like pirates; and when we stopped a cracking fusillade along the deck suggested a mutiny; but it was only a precautionary measure of the captain, who compelled them to discharge their pistols into the water and then took them from them.

Passing out of the strait we saw the Rabbit Islands and Tene-dos, and caught a glimpse of the Plain of Troy about as misty as its mythic history; and then turned west between Imbros and Lemnos, on whose bold eastern rock once blazed one of the signal-fires which telegraphed the fall of Troy to Clytemnestra. The first women of Lemnos were altogether beautiful, but they had some peculiarities which did not recommend them to their contemporaries, and indeed their husbands were accustomed occasionally to hoist sail and bask in the smiles of the damsels of the Thracian coast. The Lemnian women, to avoid any legal difficulties, such as arise nowadays when a woman asserts her right to slay her partner, killed all their husbands, and set up an Amazonian state which they maintained with pride and splendor, permitting no man to set foot on the island. In time this absolute freedom became a little tedious, and when the Argonauts came that way, the women advanced to meet the heroes with garlands, and brought them wine and food. This conduct pleased the Argonauts, who made Lemnos their headquarters and celebrated there many a festive combat. Their descendants, the Minyæ, were afterwards overcome by the Pelasgians, from Attica, who, remembering with regret the beautiful girls of their home, returned and brought back with them the willing and the lovely. But the children of the Attic women took on airs over their superior birth, which the Pelasgian women resented, and the latter finally removed all cause of dispute by murdering all the mothers of Attica and their offspring. These events gave the ladies of Lemnos a formidable reputation in the ancient world, and furnish an illustration of what society would be without the refining and temperate influence of man.

To the northward lifted itself the bare back of Samothrace, and beyond the dim outline of Thasos, ancient gold-island, the home of the poet Archilochus, one of the few Grecian islands which still retains something of its pristine luxuriance of vegetation, where the songs of innumerable nightingales invite to its deep, flowery valleys. Beyond Thasos is the Thracian coast and Mt. Pangaus, and at the foot of it Philippi, the Macedonian town where republican Rome fought its last battle, where Cassius leaned upon his sword-point, believing everything lost. Brutus transported the body of his comrade to Thasos and raised for him a funeral pyre; and twenty days later, on the same field, met again that spectre of death which had summoned him to Philippi. It was only eleven years after this victory of the Imperial power that a greater triumph was won at Philippi, when Paul and Silas, cast into prison, sang praises unto God at midnight, and an earthquake shook the house and opened the prison doors.

In the afternoon we came in sight of snowy Mt. Athos, an almost perpendicular limestone rock, rising nearly six thousand four hundred feet out of the sea. The slender promontory which this magnificent mountain terminates is forty miles long and has only an average breadth of four miles. The ancient canal of Xerxes quite severed it from the mainland. The peninsula, level at the canal, is a jagged stretch of mountains (seamed by chasms), which rise a thousand, two thousand, four thousand feet, and at last front the sea with the sublime peak of Athos, the site of the most conspicuous beacon-fire of Agamemnon. The entire promontory is, and has been since the time of Constantine, ecclesiastic ground; every mountain and valley has its convent; besides the twenty great monasteries are many pious retreats. All the sects of the Greek church are here represented; the communities pay a tribute to the Sultan, but the government is in the hands of four presidents, chosen by the synod, which holds weekly sessions and takes the presidents, yearly, from the monasteries in rotation. Since their foundation these religious houses have maintained against Christians and Saracens an almost complete independence, and preserved in their primitive simplicity the manners and usages of the earliest foundations. Here, as nowhere else in Europe or Asia, can one behold the architecture, the dress, the habits of the Middle Ages. The good devotees have been able to keep themselves thus in the darkness and simplicity of the past by a rigorous exclusion of the sex always impatient of monotony, to which all the changes of the world are due. No woman, from the beginning till now, has ever been permitted to set foot on the peninsula. Nor is this all; no female animal is suffered on the holy mountain, not even a hen. I suppose, though I do not know, that the monks have an inspector of eggs, whose inherited instincts of aversion to the feminine gender enable him to detect and reject all those in which lurk the dangerous sex. Few of the monks eat meat, half the days of the year are fast days, they practise occasionally abstinence from food for two or three days, reducing their pulses to the feeblest beating, and subduing their bodies to a point that destroys their value even as spiritual tabernacles. The united community is permitted to keep a guard of fifty Christian soldiers, and the only Moslem on the island is the solitary Turkish officer who represents the Sultan; his position cannot be one generally coveted by the Turks, since the society of women is absolutely denied him. The libraries of Mt. Athos are full of unarranged manuscripts, which are probably mainly filled with the theologic rubbish of the controversial ages, and can scarcely be expected to yield again anything so valuable as the Tischendorf Scriptures.

At sunset we were close under Mt. Athos, and could distinguish the buildings of the Laura Convent, amid the woods beneath the frowning cliff. And now was produced the apparition of a sunset, with this towering mountain cone for a centre-piece, that surpassed all our experience and imagination. The sea was like satin for smoothness, absolutely waveless, and shone with the colors of changeable silk, blue, green, pink, and amethyst. Heavy clouds gathered about the sun, and from behind them he exhibited burning spectacles, magnificent fireworks, vast shadow-pictures, scarlet cities, and gigantic figures stalking across the sky. From one crater of embers he shot up a fan-like flame that spread to the zenith and was reflected on the water. His rays lay along the sea in pink, and the water had the sheen of iridescent glass. The whole sea for leagues was like this; even Lemnos and Samothrace lay in a dim pink and purple light in the east. There were vast clouds in huge walls, with towers and battlements, and in all fantastic shapes,—one a gigantic cat with a preternatural tail, a cat of doom four degrees long. All this was piled about Mt. Athos, with its sharp summit of snow, its dark sides of rock.

It is a pity that the sounding and somewhat sacred name of Thessalonica has been abbreviated to Salonica; it might better have reverted to its ancient name of Therma, which distinguished the Macedonian capital up to the time of Alexander. In the early morning we were lying before the city, and were told that we should stay till midnight, waiting for the mail. From whence a mail was expected I do not know; the traveller who sails these seas with a cargo of ancient history resents in these classic localities such attempts to imitate modern fashions. Were the Dardanians or the Mesians to send us letters in a leathern bag? We were prepared for a summons from Calo-John, at the head of his wild barbarians, to surrender the city; and we should have liked to see Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat and King of Thessalonica, issue from the fortress above the town, the shields and lances of his little band of knights shining in the sun, and answer in person the insolent demand. We were prepared to see the troop return, having left the head of Boniface in the possession of Calo-John; and if our captain had told us that the steamer would wait to attend the funeral of the Bulgarian chief himself, which occurred not long after the encounter with Boniface, we should have thought it natural.

The city lies on a fine bay, and presents an attractive appearance from the harbor, rising up the hill in the form of an amphitheatre. On all sides, except the sea, ancient walls surround it, fortified at the angles by large round towers and crowned in the centre, on the hill, by a respectable citadel. I suppose that portions of these walls are of Hellenic and perhaps Pelasgic date, but the most are probably of the time of the Latin crusaders’ occupation, patched and repaired by Saracens and Turks. We had come to Thessalonica on St. Paul’s account, not expecting to see much that would excite us, and we were not disappointed. When we went ashore we found ourselves in a city of perhaps sixty thousand inhabitants, commonplace in aspect, although its bazaars are well filled with European goods, and a fair display of Oriental stuffs and antiquities, and animated by considerable briskness of trade. I presume there are more Jews here than there were in Paul’s time, but Turks and Greeks, in nearly equal numbers, form the bulk of the population.

In modern Salonica there is not much respect for pagan antiquities, and one sees only the usual fragments of columns and sculptures worked into walls or incorporated in Christian churches. But those curious in early Byzantine architecture will find more to interest them here than in any place in the world except Constantinople. We spent the day wandering about the city, under the guidance of a young Jew, who was without either prejudices or information. On our way to the Mosque of St. Sophia, we passed through the quarter of the Jews, which is much cleaner than is usual with them. These are the descendants of Spanish Jews, who were expelled by Isabella, and they still retain, in a corrupt form, the language of Spain. In the doors and windows were many pretty Jewesses; banishment and vicissitude appear to agree with this elastic race, for in all the countries of Europe Jewish women develop more beauty in form and feature than in Palestine. We saw here and in other parts of the city a novel head-dress, which may commend itself to America in the revolutions of fashion. A great mass of hair, real or assumed, was gathered into a long slender green bag, which hung down the back and was terminated by a heavy fringe of silver. Otherwise, the dress of the Jewish women does not differ much from that of the men; the latter wear a fez or turban, and a tunic which reaches to the ankles, and is bound about the waist by a gay sash or shawl.

The Mosque of St. Sophia, once a church, and copied in its proportions and style from its namesake in Constantinople, is retired, in a delightful court, shaded by gigantic trees and cheered by a fountain. So peaceful a spot we had not seen in many a day; birds sang in the trees without disturbing the calm of the meditative pilgrim. In the portico and also in the interior are noble columns of marble and verd-antique, and in the dome is a wonderfully quaint mosaic of the Transfiguration. We were shown also a magnificent pulpit of the latter beautiful stone cut from a solid block, in which it is said St. Paul preached. As the Apostle, according to his custom, reasoned with the people out of the Scriptures in a synagogue, and this church was not built for centuries after his visit, the statement needs confirmation; but pious ingenuity suggests that the pulpit stood in a subterranean church underneath this. I should like to believe that Paul sanctified this very spot with his presence; but there is little in its quiet seclusion to remind one of him who had the reputation when he was in Thessalonica of one of those who turn the world upside down. Paul had a great affection for the brethren of this city, in spite of his rough usage here, for he mingles few reproaches in his fervent commendations of their faith, and comforts them with the assurance of a speedy release from the troubles of this world, and the certainty that while they are yet alive they will be caught up into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Happily the Apostle could not pierce the future and see the dissensions, the schisms, the corruptions and calamities of the Church in the succeeding centuries, nor know that near this spot, in the Imperial Hippodrome, the sedition of the citizens would one day be punished by the massacre of ninety thousand,—one of the few acts of inhumanity which stains the clemency and the great name of Theodosius. And it would have passed even the belief of the Apostle to the Gentiles could he have foreseen that, in eighteen centuries, this pulpit would be exhibited to curious strangers from a distant part of the globe, of which he never heard, where the doctrines of Paul are the bulwark of the Church and the stamina of the government, by a descendant of Abraham who confessed that he did not know who Paul was.

The oldest church in the city is now the Mosque of St. George, built about the year 400, if indeed it was not transformed from a heathen temple; its form is that of the Roman Pantheon. The dome was once covered with splendid mosaics; enough remains of the architectural designs, the brilliant peacocks and bright blue birds, to show what the ancient beauty was, but the walls of the mosque are white and barn-like. Religions inherit each other’s edifices in the East without shame, and we found in the Mosque of Eske Djuma the remains of a temple of Venus, and columns of ancient Grecian work worthy of the best days of Athens. The most perfect basilica is now the Mosque of St. Demetrius (a name sacred to the Greeks), which contains his tomb. It is a five-aisled basilica; about the gallery, over the pillars of the centre aisle, are some fine mosaics of marble, beautiful in design and color. The Moslems have spoiled the exquisite capitals of the pillars by painting them, and have destroyed the effect of the aisles by twisting the pulpit and prayer-niche away from the apse, in the direction of Mecca. We noticed, however, a relaxation of bigotry at all these mosques: we were permitted to enter without taking off our shoes; and, besides the figures of Christian art left in the mosaics, we saw some Moslem pictures, among them rude paintings of the holy city Mecca.

On our way to the citadel we stopped to look at the Arch of Constantine before the Gate of Cassander,—a shabby ruin, with four courses of defaced figures, carved in marble, and representing the battles and triumphs of a Roman general. Fortunately for the reader we did not visit all the thirty-seven churches of the city; but we made the acquaintance in a Greek church, which is adorned with quaint Byzantine paintings, of St. Palema, who lies in public repose, in a coffin of exquisite silver filigree-work, while his skull is enclosed in solid silver and set with rubies and emeralds. This may please St. Palema, but death is never so ghastly as when it is adorned with jewelry that becomes cheap in its presence.

The view from the citadel, which embraces the Gulf of Salonica and Mt. Olympus, the veritable heaven of the Grecian pantheon, and Mt. Ossa and Mt. Pelion, piercing the blue with their snow-summits, is grand enough to repay the ascent; and there is a noble walk along the wall above the town. In making my roundabout way through modern streets, back to the bazaars, I encountered a number of negro women, pure Africans, who had the air and carriage of the aristocracy of the place; they rejoiced in the gay attire which the natives of the South love, and their fine figures and independent bearing did not speak of servitude.

This Thessalonica was doubtless a healthful and attractive place at the time Cicero chose to pass a portion of his exile here, but it has now a bad reputation for malaria, which extends to all the gulf,—the malaria seems everywhere to have been one of the consequences of the fall of the Roman Empire. The handbook recommends the locality for its good “shooting”; but if there is any part of the Old World that needs rest from arms, I think it is this highway of ancient and modern conquerors and invaders.

In the evening, when the lights of the town and the shore were reflected in the water, and a full moon hung in the sky, we did not regret our delay. The gay Thessalonians, ignorant of the Epistles, were rowing about the harbor, circling round and round the steamer, beating the darabouka drum, and singing in that nasal whine which passes for music all over the East. And, indeed, on such a night it is not without its effect upon a sentimental mind.

At early light of a cloudless morning we were going easily down the Gulf of Therma or Salonica, having upon our right the Pierian plain; and I tried to distinguish the two mounds which mark the place of the great battle near Pydna, one hundred and sixty-eight years before Christ, between Æmilius Paulus and King Perseus, which gave Macedonia to the Roman Empire. Beyond, almost ten thousand feet in the air, towered Olympus, upon whose “broad” summit Homer displays the ethereal palaces and inaccessible abode of the Grecian gods. Shaggy forests still clothe its sides, but snow now, and for the greater part of the year, covers the wide surface of the height, which is a sterile, light-colored rock. The gods did not want snow to cool the nectar at their banquets. This is the very centre of the mythologie world; there between Olympus and Ossa is the Yale of Tempe, where the Peneus, breaking through a narrow gorge fringed with the sacred laurel, reaches the gulf, south of ancient Heracleum. Into this charming but secluded retreat the gods and goddesses, weary of the icy air, or the Pumblechookian deportment of the court of Olympian Jove, descended to pass the sunny hours with the youths and maidens of mortal mould; through this defile marks of chariot-wheels still attest the passages of armies which flowed either way, in invasion or retreat; and here Pompey, after a ride of forty miles from the fatal field of Pharsalia, quenched his thirst. Did the Greeks really believe that the gods dwelt on this mountain in clouds and snow? Did Baldwin II. believe that he sold, and Louis IX. of France that he bought, for ten thousand marks of silver, at Constantinople, in the thirteenth century, the veritable crown of thorns that the Saviour wore in the judgment-hall of Pilate?

At six o’clock the Cape of Posilio was on our left, we were sinking Olympus in the white haze of morning, Ossa, in its huge silver bulk, was near us, and Pelion stretched its long white back below. The sharp cone of Ossa might well ride upon the extended back of Pelion, and it seems a pity that the Titans did not succeed in their attempt. We were leaving, and looking our last on the Thracian coasts, once rimmed from Mt. Athos to the Bosphorus with a wreath of prosperous cities. What must once have been the splendor of the Ægean Sea and its islands, when every island was the seat of a vigorous state, and every harbor the site of a commercial town which sent forth adventurous galleys upon any errand of trade or conquest! Since the fall of Constantinople, these coasts and islands have been stripped and neglected by Turkish avarice and improvidence, and perhaps their naked aspect is attributable more to the last owners than to all the preceding possessors; it remained for the Turk to exhaust Nature herself, and to accomplish that ruin, that destruction of peoples, which certainly not the Athenian, the Roman, or the Macedonian accomplished, to destroy that which survived the contemptible Byzantines and escaped the net of the pillaging Christian crusaders. Yet it needs only repose, the confidence of the protection of industry, and a spirit of toleration, which the Greeks must learn as well as the Turks, that the traveller in the beginning of the next century may behold in the Archipelago the paradise of the world.

We sailed along by the peninsula of Magnesia, which separates the Ægean from the Bay of Pagasæus, and hinders us from seeing the plains of Thessaly, where were trained the famous cavalry, the perfect union of horse and man that gave rise to the fable of centaurs; the same conception of double prowess which our own early settlers exaggerated in the notion that the Kentuckian was half horse and half alligator. Just before we entered the group of lovely Sporades, we looked down the long narrow inlet to the Bay of Maliacus and saw the sharp snow-peaks of Mt. OEta, at the foot of which are the marsh and hot springs of Thermopylae. We passed between Skiathos and Skopelos,—steep, rocky islands, well wooded and enlivened with villages perched on the hillsides, and both draped in lovely color. In the strait between Skiathos and Magnesia the Greek vessels made a stand against the Persians until the defeat at Thermopylae compelled a retreat to Salamis. The monks of the Middle Ages, who had an eye for a fertile land, covered the little island with monasteries, of which one only now remains. Its few inhabitants are chiefly sailors, and to-day it would be wholly without fame were it not for the beauty of its women. Skopelos, which is larger, has a population of over six thousand,—industrious people who cultivate the olive and produce a good red wine, that they export in their own vessels.

Nearly all day we sailed outside and along Euboea; and the snow dusting its high peaks and lonely ravines was a not unwelcome sight, for the day was warm, oppressively so even at sea. All the elements lay in a languid truce. Before it was hidden by Skopelos, Mt. Athos again asserted its lordship over these seas, more gigantic than when we were close to it, the sun striking the snow on its face (it might be the Whiteface of the Adirondacks, except that it is piled up more like the Matterhorn), while the base, bathed in a silver light, was indistinguishable from the silver water out of which it rose. The islands were all purple, the shores silver, and the sea around us deeply azure. What delicious color!

Perhaps it was better to coast along the Euboean land and among the Sporades, clothed in our minds with the historic hues which the atmosphere reproduced to our senses, than to break the dream by landing, to find only broken fragments where cities once were, and a handful of fishermen or shepherds the only inheritors of the homes of heroes. We should find nothing on Ikos, except rabbits and a hundred or two of fishers, perhaps not even the grave of Peleus, the father of Achilles; and the dozen little rocky islets near, which some giant in sportive mood may have tossed into the waves, would altogether scarcely keep from famine a small flock of industrious sheep. Skyros, however, has not forgotten its ancient fertility; the well-watered valleys, overlooked by bold mountains and rocky peaks (upon one of which stood “the lofty Skyros” of Homer’s song) still bear corn and wine, the fig and the olive, the orange and the lemon, as in the days when Achilles, in woman’s apparel, was hidden among the maidens in the gardens of King Lycomedes. The mountains are clothed with oaks, beeches, firs, and plane-trees. Athens had a peculiar affection for Skyros, for it was there that Cymon found the bones of Theseus, and transported them thence to the temple of the hero, where they were deposited with splendid obsequies, Æschylus and Sophocles adding to the festivities the friendly rivalry of a dramatic contest. In those days everything was for the state and nothing for the man; and naturally—such is the fruit of self-abnegation—the state was made immortal by the genius of its men.

Of the three proud flagstaffs erected in front of St. Mark’s, one, for a long time, bore the banner of Euboea, or Negropont, symbol of the Venetian sovereignty for nearly three centuries over this island, which for four centuries thereafter was to be cursed by the ascendency of the crescent. From the outer shore one can form little notion of the extraordinary fertility of this land, and we almost regretted that a rough sea had not driven us to take the inner passage, by Rootia and through the narrow Euripus, where the Venetian-built town and the Lion of St. Mark occupy and guard the site of ancient Chalkis. The Turks made the name of Negropont odious to the world, but with the restoration of the Grecian nationality the ancient name is restored, and slowly, Euboea, spoiled by the Persians, trampled by Macedonians and Romans, neglected by Justinian (the depopulator of the Eastern Empire), drained by the Venetians, blighted by the Osmanlis, is beginning to attract the attention of capital and travel, by its unequalled fertility and its almost unequalled scenery.

Romance, mythology, and history start out of the waves on’ either hand; at twilight we were entering the Cyclades, and beginning to feel the yet enduring influence of a superstition which so mingled itself with the supremest art and culture, that after two thousand years its unreal creations are nearly as mighty as ever in the realms of poetry and imagination. These islands are still under the spell of genius, and we cannot, if we would, view them except through the medium of poetic history. I suppose that the island of Andros, which is cultivated largely by Albanians, an Illyrian race, having nothing in common with the ancient Ionians, would little interest us; if we cared to taste its wine, it would be because it was once famous throughout Greece, and if we visited the ruins of its chief city, it would be to recall an anecdote of Herodotus: when Themistocles besieged the town and demanded tribute, because the Andrians had been compelled to join the fleet of Xerxes at Salamis, and threatened them with the two mighty deities of Athens, Persuasion and Necessity, the spirited islanders replied that they were protected by two churlish gods, Poverty and Inability.

It was eleven o’clock at night when we sailed between Keos and Helena, the latter a long barren strip that never seems to have been inhabited at all, except from the tradition that Helen once landed there; but Keos and its old town of Iulis was the home of legends and poets, and famous for its code of laws, one of which tended to banish sickness and old age from its precincts, by a provision that every man above sixty should end his life by poison. Its ancient people had a reputation for purity and sobriety, which was probably due to the hegira of the nymphs, who were frightened away to the mainland by a roaring lion. The colossal image of the lion is still to be seen in marble near the ruins of the old city. The island of the Cyclades, which we should have liked most to tread, but did not see, is Delos, the holy, the religious and political centre of the Greek confederation, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, the seat of the oracle, second only to that of Delphi, the diminutive and now almost deserted rock, shaken and sunken by repeated earthquakes, once crowned with one of the most magnificent temples of antiquity, the spot of pilgrimage, the arena of games and mystic dances and poetic contests, and of the joyous and solemn festivities of the Delian Apollo.

We were too late to see, though we sat long on deck and watched for it by the aid of a full moon, the white Doric columns of the temple of Minerva on Sunium, which are visible by daylight a long distance at sea. The ancient mariners, who came from Delos or from a more adventurous voyage into the Ægean, beheld here, at the portals of Attica, the temple of its tutelary deity, a welcome and a beacon; and as they shifted their sails to round the cape, they might have seen the shining helmet of the goddess herself,—the lofty statue of Minerva Promachus on the Acropolis.

XXVIII.—ATHENS

IN the thought of the least classical reader, Attica occupies a space almost as large as the rest of the world. He hopes that it will broaden on his sight as it does in his imagination, although he knows that it is only two thirds as large as the little State of Rhode Island. But however reason may modify enthusiasm, the diminutive scale on which everything is drawn is certain to disappoint the first view of the reality. Who, he asks, has made this little copy of the great Athenian picture?

When we came upon deck early in the morning, the steamer lay in the land-locked harbor of the peninsula of Piræus. It is a round, deep, pretty harbor; several merchant and small vessels lay there, a Greek and an Austrian steamer, and a war-vessel, and the scene did not lack a look of prosperous animation. About the port clusters a well-to-do village of some ten thousand inhabitants, many of whom dwell in handsome houses. It might be an American town; it is too new to be European. There, at the entrance of the harbor, on a low projecting rock, are some ruins of columns, said to mark the tomb of Themistocles; sometimes the water nearly covers the rock. There could be no more fitting resting-place for the great commander than this, in sight of the strait of Salamis, and washed by the waves that tossed the broken and flying fleet of Xerxes. Beyond is the Bay of Phalerum, the more ancient seaport of the little state. And there—how small it seems!—is the plain of Athens, enclosed by Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes. This rocky peninsula of Piræus, which embraced three small harbors, was fortified by Themistocles with strong walls that extended, in parallel lines, five miles to Athens. Between them ran the great carriage-road, and I suppose the whole distance was a street of gardens and houses.

A grave commissionnaire,—I do not know but he would call himself an embassy,—from one of the hotels of Athens, came off and quietly took charge of us. On our way to the shore with our luggage, a customs officer joined us and took a seat in the boat. For this polite attention on the part of the government our plenipotentiary sent by the officer (who did not open the trunks) three francs to the treasury; but I do not know if it ever reached its destination. We shunned the ignoble opportunity of entering the classic city by rail, and were soon whirling along the level and dusty road which follows the course of the ancient Long Wall. Even at this early hour the day had become very warm, and the shade of the poplar-trees, which line the road nearly all the way, was grateful. The fertile fields had yet the freshness of spring, and were gay with scarlet poppies; the vines were thrifty. The near landscape was Italian in character: there was little peculiar in the costumes of the people whom we met walking beside their market-wagons or saw laboring in the gardens; turbans, fezes, flowing garments of white and blue and yellow, all had vanished, and we felt that we were out of the Orient and about to enter a modern city. At a half-way inn, where we stopped to water the horses, there was an hostler in the Albanian, or as it is called, the Grecian national, costume, wearing the fustanella and the short jacket; but the stiff white petticoat was rumpled and soiled, and I fancied he was somewhat ashamed of the half-womanly attire, and shrank from inspection, like an actor in harlequin dress, surprised by daylight outside the theatre.