Part 4

Chapter 44,167 wordsPublic domain

It had chanced that on the day before a fellow countryman of Belzoni’s, the Chevalier Frediani, had come to visit Gizeh; he had proved a pleasant guest, and the giant had invited him to remain for the opening of the pyramid. This second Italian now joined the little group lifting the portcullis. It was now high enough for Belzoni to crawl under, and he did so, followed by the Chevalier.

Over a thousand years, perhaps more, had passed since the tunnels into which they crawled had echoed to the sound of human voices. Belzoni led the way, carrying a light; Frediani, too, had a torch. The huge shadow of Belzoni followed along the walls; the granite twinkled in the first light of ten long centuries. At the end of the passage was an open pit which they descended along a rope, and at the depth of the pit were passages thick with dark and silence. Ghostlike arborisations of nitre hung on these lower walls, some projecting in fantastic ropes. Belzoni went off on one trail, Frediani on another. Presently the giant arrived at the door of the chamber of the tomb.

“I walked slowly two or three paces, and then stood still to contemplate the place where I was. Whatever it might be, I certainly considered myself in the centre of that pyramid which from time immemorial had been the subject of the obscure conjecture of many hundred travellers, ancient and modern. My Torch, formed of a few wax candles, gave but a faint light.”

He heard a sound of footsteps, and Frediani entered with his candles.

But the treasure of the pyramid? The sarcophagus of Khaf-ra, King of Egypt, was cut in the floor, the lid was awry, and the stone coffin “full of a great quantity of earth and stones.” Who had violated it in the long course of history’s four thousand years? No one knows. There is evidence that the Caliph Al Mamun had forced the pyramid, but there is no evidence that he found the mummy in its place. There are old Arabic tales of kings encased in figures of gold, with magical golden snakes on their crowns which spread their hoods in anger, hissed, and struck at the intruders. All is legend and myth. The forced tunnel, however, had certainly once entered the original passages, but later on the violated masonry had fallen in, and barred the way.

Europe of the Dark Ages had never known of the attempt; the East had forgotten. The musing mind sees Al Mamun at the pyramid, mounted on a nervous Arab horse which paws the ancient sand; his mounted attendants and bodyguard have reined up behind him—Arabs with thin dark faces fierce as desert hawks. Captives, Christians for the most part, are digging away at the side of the great mass,—men of Byzantium, fair-haired Norman sailors blown on the African coast by a storm, little Spaniards from the mountain kingdoms which are so valiantly battling the Moors. And King Khaf-ra, whom the Greeks called Chephren, sleeps he within in “the dark house of the counting of the years?”

There were Arabic inscriptions on the walls, written with charcoal, but the characters were nearly imperceptible, and rubbed off into dust at the slightest touch. Belzoni thought he discerned an inscription which may be thus translated, “The Master Mohamed Ahmed has opened them, and the Master Othman attended this, and the King Ali Mohamed at first ... to the closing up.” Sir Richard Burton, however, perhaps the greatest of all Arabic scholars, will have it that the Arabic characters as Belzoni transcribed them are for the most part unintelligible. And there the matter rests.

The Belzonis spent two more years in Egypt, and returned to London in September, 1819.

Oh, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Benin One comes out where three goes in.

—_Old British Navy Song._

Green pleasant England again, the white cliffs of Dover, and the autumn fog drifting down on London and the ships. Belzoni’s fame had gone before him to the capital. His popular title of “Signor,” which both Italianised him and linked him with his mountebank past, now fell into disuse, and it was as “Mr.” Belzoni that he faced a new life of dignity and prestige. Winter found the traveller and his Sarah living happily in London lodgings, visited and consulted by the learned and the great. Belzoni kept his head. With his usual commonsense he was busily at work arranging an exhibition.

“Belzoni’s Exhibition,”—the words were magical a hundred years ago. All London came to the hall on Piccadilly when the doors opened in the spring of 1821. The old red-faced generals who had fought Napoleon came to stare at Pasht and Osiris, egad, the port-sipping gentlemen of substance, the fine ladies, and the sober citizens linking arms with their bonneted wives. To please them, Belzoni had reproduced two of the principal chambers in the tomb of Seti I, painting, sculptures and all, and displayed “idols, coins, mummies, scarabœi, articles of dress and adornment, lachrymatories, and a splendid mass of papyrus.” The tomb of Seti was “lit within by lamps,” and made a tremendous impression. And there was a poem by Horace Smith, “Address to a Mummy in Belzoni’s Exhibition” which all the world was reading. Now and then the giant moved towering through the throng, and mothers would bid their little flaxen-haired boys and girls to look at the man who had opened the pyramid.

A season in Paris followed the year in London, and then came the last great adventure.

The fever of exploring woke again within his veins, and he determined to cross the great African desert, and make his way to the almost fabulous city of Timbuctoo. He would land in Morocco, go south through the Moroccan possessions, and then join a caravan bound for the fateful city. The plan seemed practical enough, and on an autumn morning in 1822, the roving Titan bade farewell to his faithful amazon, and followed his boxes and baggages aboard a vessel for Gibraltar.

In Fez, the Moroccan capital, they seem to have played with him for a while, for the Emperor first gave him a permission to go through the country, and then withdrew consent. The failure may have been due to intrigue, as Belzoni imagined, or to the deep-rooted native distrust of Europeans; it was probably a combination of the two. Much chagrined, the explorer now returned to Gibraltar, and there determined on a course which did honor to his courage and perseverance. The way south to Timbuctoo being barred, he would make his way along the African coast to the city of Great Benin, and then struggle northward to his goal. It was a route to daunt any explorer, for it led into one of the darkest and most dangerous areas of unknown Africa.

Sailing in trading ships and little vessels of one sort or another, the adventurer slowly made his way south along the west African shore to the English station of Cape Castle on the Guinea Coast. There Sir R. Mends, commanding the British naval squadron on the African west coast, befriended him and sent him to Benin in His Majesty’s Gunbrig _Swinger_. On the 20th of October, 1823, the brig arrived off the bar of Benin River.

The brig _Providence_ was lying off Obobi, and Belzoni boarded her at the invitation of her master, Captain John Hodgson. A month later, a “Fantee canoe” belonging to the ship is lowered overside; it contains Hodgson and Belzoni. The poor giant seemed “a little agitated,” particularly when the crew, to each of whom he had made a present, gave him three loud cheers on his stepping out of his vessel. “God bless you, my fine fellows,” cried the explorer, “and send you a happy sight of your country and friends.” He was clad in his eastern dress and turban, and still wore his great, black beard.

A few days later word comes to the sailors that the guest whom they had so cherished, loved, even, as a shipmate, is lying ill at Benin. Good Hodgson hurried inland, and found the giant dying of African dysentery in Benin city. In a palanquin, they hurry him down the river to Gwato, hoping to get him to the coast and the sea air. But the end is at hand, an end calmly envisaged; the last of his strength he spends trying to write a letter to his wife; he entrusts Hodgson with a ring for her and a message full of the most touching affection, then yields the ghost. They buried him at Gwato under a great tree, and there he lies in the dark of Africa.

So ends the tale of the monk who passed from the peace of a monastery to an acrobat’s stage in a village square. The young Italian had accepted his destiny calmly, and made the best of it, yet never bowed his head. Thrust violently from the most retired of lives into the most bohemian, he had remained,—_Belzoni_. There is something amusing, something rather fine as well, in the way that he sailed through life like a fine ship sent by the fates of the sea on dubious voyages. And what a sense of achievement and honest adventure he had won from it all; it had all been so well worth while.

History will remember him as the first of modern explorer-archæologists. “One of the most remarkable men in the whole history of Egyptology,” says Mr. Howard Carter, who found the Tutankhamen tomb.

Belzoni the giant! What sounds run through his life—the sniping of a barber’s shears, the ringing of convent bells, the talk and endless brook-like chatter of crowds at a fair, the songs of laborers along the Nile, the shuffle of camels in the sand, and the squeak and grind of levers raising the portcullis of Chephren’s pyramid!

_Three_: EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY

About a hundred years ago, on a pleasant summer morning, two young Englishmen came down to the water front of the Italian port of Leghorn, got into a boat, and rowed off to look at the shipping in the bay. The two venturers made an odd pair, for the oarsman was a tall, powerfully built fellow with piercing blue eyes, thick black hair, and the features of an Arab, whilst the other was slender, boyish and yellow-haired, and had innocent blue eyes, and a schoolboy’s innocence of beard.

The first vessel round which they rowed, a Greek trader, displeased them, for she was dirty of deck and sail, but beyond her lay a graceful full-rigged ship flying the Stars and Stripes. At the sight of this fine vessel, the following conversation took place. It has been set down word by word, for one does not take liberties with the phrases of the great.

“It is but a step,” said the oarsman, “from these ruins of worn-out Greece to the New World; let’s board the American clipper.”

“I had rather not have any more of my hopes and illusions mocked by sad realities,” protested his companion with a smile.

“You must allow,” returned the other, “that that graceful craft was designed by a man who had a poet’s feeling for things beautiful. Come, let us go aboard; the Americans are a free and easy people, and will not consider our visit an intrusion.”

A turn, a few strokes, and the boat approached the American ship. By the gangway, an American salt with a quid of tobacco squirrelled in his cheek, was busy at something or other, and every now and then this honest fellow walked to the rail to spit calmly overside into the historic Mediterranean. While thus pleasantly engaged, he caught sight of the small boat coming alongside, and shouted, “Boat ahoy!” A mate came to the rail.

“May we go aboard?” said the dark, Arab-looking man.

“Wal, I don’t see why not,” answered the American mate, cheerfully and without ceremony.

“You have a beautiful vessel,” said the first speaker, once he had gained the deck. “We have been rowing about looking at the ships, and admiring yours.”

“I do expect now we have our new copper on, she has a look of the brass sarpent,” agreed the American.

“She seems so beautiful,” said the first speaker, “that we have been wishing we might have a vessel like her.”

“Then I calculate you must go to Boston or Baltimore to git one,” replied the ship’s officer. “There’s no one this side the water can do the job. We have our freight all ready and are homeward bound; we have elegant accommodation, and you will be across before your young friend’s beard is ripe for a razor. Come down and take an observation of the state cabin.”

The hospitable seaman now led his guests to the state cabin, and would not let them go till they had drunk a toast under the Star-Spangled Banner to the memory of Washington and the prosperity of the American commonwealth. Peach brandy was the drink. The toast concluded, the mate rummaged for a moment in a locker, and then offered his visitors a gift right from an old time sailor’s heart.

“There, gentlemen,” said the sailor. “Guess you don’t see nuthin’ like this in these parts!”

“Plug tobacco,” said the dark man.

“Yes sirree, Mister,” replied the mate. “And real old Virginia cake. Jest you set your teeth in that, Mister,” he continued offering the plug to the fair-haired guest, “and tell me if you’ve tasted anything so good since the big wind.”

The fair-haired visitor, however, refused both the brandy and “the chaw,” but managed to quaff a glass of weak grog to the memory of the first of presidents. The blue eyes gathered a strange fire.

“Washington,” said this other visitor, “as a warrior and a statesman he was righteous in all he did, and unlike all who have lived before or since, he never used his power but for the benefit of his fellow creatures.

He fought For truth and freedom, foremost of the brave, Him glory’s idle glances dazzled not; ’Twas his ambition generous and great. A life to life’s great end to consecrate.”

“Stranger,” said the American, studying the speaker, his shrewd eye bright with honest pleasure, “truer words were never spoken. There is dry rot in all the timbers of the old world, and none of you will do any good till you are docked, refitted and annexed to the new. You must log that song you sang; there ain’t many Britishers will say as much of the man that whipped them, so just set down those lines in the log or it won’t go for nothing.”

A little shy, perhaps, yet glad that his words had given pleasure, the youth with the yellow hair sat down to write. The quill pen made almost no sound; and the faint noises of the harbor,—the voices of sailors heard across the water from other ships, the chuckling of little waves alongside, and the passing of bare feet on the deck overhead,—filled the polite quiet. Yielding to some fancy or inspiration, the visitor did not enter the lines he had quoted, but some others which pleased him even more. This done, the Englishmen parted from their Yankee host, and regained the dust, the street cries, the uniforms, and the hot yellow sun of the old Italian town.

A musing mind pauses to wonder as to what might have been the name of this Yankee ship anchored in Leghorn bay sometime in 1822. The hospitable mate, “a smart specimen of a Yankee,” who was he? And above all, what became of the ship’s log? Did it vanish from earthly eyes in the stormy tumult and breaking timbers of a wreck, was it tossed away as old rubbish, or does it still lie at the bottom of a sea chest in the piney dark of some attic in New England, an attic whose roof is brushed by elm boughs on windy summer days? Will the little mystery ever be solved? What a log book it would be to possess! For the young man with the crown of mutinous fair hair who wrote the lines and refused the plug tobacco was Shelley, and the Arab-looking oarsman his friend and companion, Edward John Trelawny.

A mysterious fellow, this “good friend Tre” of the piercing eyes. A word from Shelley’s comrade and admirer, Edward Elliker Williams, had served him as an introduction to the Shelley group, and his first visit to them had taken place late one evening while the family was at Pisa. One sees the Italian room in lamplight, a room to which sensible Mary Shelley must have given something of an English air; one hears the English voices through the quiet of provincial Italy. Trelawny enters, and the surprised Shelleys see a personage who is not at all English-looking; their visitor is a character out of Byronic romance, blazing eyes, pirate brows, bronzed skin and all. He looked like “a young Othello.” The newcomer, for his part, saw a rather bookish family gathered about a bookish young man “habited like a boy in a black jacket and trousers which he seemed to have outgrown”; it is Shelley he sees, reading as always, slender, bent a little, and “extraordinarily juvenile.”

“Is it possible that this mild, beardless boy can be the monster at war with all the world?” thought the young Othello.

While Shelley, as was his custom, went in and out of the room, as silently and strangely as a spirit, Mrs. Shelley asked Trelawny of news from London and Paris,—the new books and the operas, the new bonnets and the new styles, the marriages and the murders. A domestic scene. When Trelawny had gone, they spoke of him. Where had Mr. Williams encountered this remarkable person? In Switzerland. And was he not a sailor? Yes, he had been a sailor, and some said a pirate. A pirate, indeed! He could tell the most wonderful stories of gory battles on the Java seas, and expeditions to native strongholds in the jungles of Malaysia. Quite a remarkable person, “our friend Tre.”

“Trelawny,” says a distinguished biographer of Byron, “was a liar and a cad.” The judgment is prejudiced and severe. Whatever his faults, the man acted a leading rôle in one of the most romantic episodes in English literary history, and was well liked and respected by the great figures of the play. The world recalls his association with Shelley and Byron, his recovery of Shelley’s body after the storm, and the cremation in classical style he arranged on the sands of Villareggio; it remembers his flight with Byron to the aid of rebellious Greece. A marvellous chapter, but only one of a life romance which is still something of an enigma.

Sailor? Pirate? Byronic stage-player? Let us see.

The known, the traceable, history of Edward John Trelawny begins with his birth in London in 1792, and comes to an abrupt end some seventeen years afterward. His father, Lt. Colonel Charles Trelawny, was a middle aged army officer who had retired to economise his wife’s fortune, the relics of his own, and play the rôle of stern, Roman father on the stage of family life. Both family and family name were Cornish, and the boy began life with the heritage of those of Cornish blood, the heritage of an ancient and separate race whose antiquity runs past the pillars of Stonehenge into the dawn of time. There was a Celtic streak in Trelawny; the joy of battle was his, the quickening fire, the strange madness, and even the Celt’s power over the souls of words.

Something darker and far more ancient, however, had fought its way back to life in Trelawny’s veins. The boy was born a warrior, but not a warrior of Celtic Arthur’s kind. The true comrades of his spirit were the heroes of the primitive Gaels, the mighty men whose blood seemed to “run up into their fiery hair,” during the exultation of killing and war.

Fanny Kemble saw Trelawny in his later years during his visit to the United States, and divined the dark side of his inheritance. “Mr. Trelawny’s countenance,” she wrote, “was habitually serene, occasionally sweet in its expression, but sometimes savage with the fierceness of a wild beast.”

When a young savage comes into the world, the problem of how to civilize him usually commands attention, but no one bothered his head about Edward John Trelawny. The savagery of neglected boyhood was allowed to grow wild in the congenial soil of the boy’s obscure and primitive inheritance. It was not a pretty childhood, and the following anecdote preserves its quality.

The Trelawny urchins had an enemy, a tame raven “with ragged wings and a grave antique aspect,” who used to drive them away from some fruits they coveted. This old demon had a trick of rushing at the children with outstretched wings, and though they threw stones, he carried the day. Little Edward John, however, having courage and the warrior instinct, kept up the fight, and presently managed to wound the enemy. Shouting and yelling, the children raced to the gruesome execution, and a final curtain descended on Edward John hanging the horrible blood-stained old mass of feathers in a noose made of a sash borrowed from his little sister!

Spelling lessons were battles. “Spell your name, you young savage,” shouts the Roman father. “Spell, sir?” The boy, becoming confused, misplaces the vowels. At this, the Roman father “arose in wrath, overturned the table, and bruised his shins in an attempt to kick me as I dodged him, and rushed out of the room.”

From the bosom of this peppery homelife, the great, bony, awkward boy was kicked into a school. There he encountered floggings, canings, and hideous practical jokes. The young Cornish Celt with the black hair and the wild blue eyes fought the savagery with savagery. His Roman father countered by handing him over to the Royal Navy. The new life was the school all over again, save that the sea-hazing was more brutal and the practical jokes even more atrocious. A strange trait, that English liking for practical jokes! Then followed a season at Dr. Burney’s Naval Academy at Greenwich, a voyage on a frigate during whose course “Tre” revenged himself on a persecutor by jabbing him with a pen knife, and then a long world cruise on a sloop of war.

Brutalised at home, brutalised at school, brutalised in the Navy, it is a wonder that the young savage remained reasonably human. With the arrival of adolescence a sense of injustice and an urge to rebellion struck root in his mind. Rebellion was his only outlet, and in rebelling, he was most his primitive self. For the boy was only primitive, not vicious. Presently he decided that he had had enough, and made up his mind to desert.

The neglected sailor whelp, whom no one had received with affection or troubled to civilise, was now seventeen years old, he stood six feet tall, and was strongly built, though of a certain adolescent gauntness. “My face was bronzed, my hair black, my features perfectly Arab.” The loneliness of adolescence troubled him, his parents’ “hard usage and abandonment” gnawed at his heart; he felt “alienated” from his “family and kindred.” He would follow a new trail, and “seek the love of strangers in the wide world.”

The phrases are almost sentimental, and doubtless reflect genuine feeling, but the young savage was still the young savage in his way of life. Having determined to jump ship, the demon midshipman prepared to pay off an old score. A lieutenant of his ship, a Scotchman, had been nagging him, and “Tre” fell upon the man with the supreme strength which is born of anger. The ship being at Bombay, the encounter took place in a billiard room ashore frequented by naval officers. It was a ferocious business of blows, kicks, bruises, blood, cries and broken teeth. The lieutenant attempted to beg off. Tre’s narrative then continues,—

“‘What,—you white-livered scoundrel? Can no words move you? Then blows shall!’ And I struck him with the hilt of my sword in the mouth, and kicked him, and trampled on him. I tore his coat off and rent it to fragments...” Thus the young savage spoke and fought.

So ends that chapter of Trelawny’s early life which is traceable. A certain use, to be sure, has here been made of his thinly disguised autobiography, but the use has been scrupulous, and the borrowings confined to an incident or two which are accepted as historic. Now comes mystery. After his desertion in Bombay, all trace of him disappears for some seven or eight years. What was he doing all this while, and what regions of the earth and sea were filled with his adventures?