The Innocents Abroad

What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that...

We cast up the account. It footed up pretty fairly. There was nothing more at Jerusalem to be seen, except the traditional houses of Dives and Lazarus of the parable, the Tombs...

A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is. The appearance...

The donkeys were all good, all handsome, all strong and in good condition, all fast and all willing to prove it. They were the best we had found any where, and the most 'recherc...

Home, again! For the first time, in many weeks, the ship's entire family met and shook hands on the quarter-deck. They had gathered from many points of the compass and from many...

We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds--a silent, mournful expanse, wherein we saw only three persons--Arabs, w...

Nazareth is wonderfully interesting because the town has an air about it of being precisely as Jesus left it, and one finds himself saying, all the time, “The boy Jesus has stoo...

The Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as a serpent. It is twenty or thirty feet long, and is narrow and deep, like a canoe; its sharp bow and st...

That was what the guide asked when we were looking up at the bronze horses on the Arch of Peace. It meant, do you wish to go up there? I give it as a specimen of guide-English....

The last twenty-four hours we staid in Damascus I lay prostrate with a violent attack of cholera, or cholera morbus, and therefore had a good chance and a good excuse to lie the...

Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not...

A week of buffeting a tempestuous and relentless sea; a week of seasickness and deserted cabins; of lonely quarterdecks drenched with spray--spray so ambitious that it even coat...

We anchored here at Yalta, Russia, two or three days ago. To me the place was a vision of the Sierras. The tall, gray mountains that back it, their sides bristling with pines--c...

We were standing in a narrow street, by the Tower of Antonio. “On these stones that are crumbling away,” the guide said, “the Saviour sat and rested before taking up the cross....

The next day was an outrage upon men and horses both. It was another thirteen-hour stretch (including an hour's “nooning.”) It was over the barrenest chalk-hills and through the...

From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns o...

One of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise, the national burying-ground of France, the honored resting-place of some of her greatest and best children, the last home of...

have sorrowed over many of his trials, he never complained--that is, he never complained but once. He, two others, and myself, started to the new silver mines in the Humboldt mo...

In this place I will print an article which I wrote for the New York Herald the night we arrived. I do it partly because my contract with my publishers makes it compulsory; part...

We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France. What a bewitching land it is! What a garden! Surely the leagues of bright green lawns are swept and brushed...

Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy--just the style of citi...

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's applause whenever and wherever they batt...

We descended from Mount Tabor, crossed a deep ravine, followed a hilly, rocky road to Nazareth--distant two hours. All distances in the East are measured by hours, not miles. A...

We took another swim in the Sea of Galilee at twilight yesterday, and another at sunrise this morning. We have not sailed, but three swims are equal to a sail, are they not? The...

We had a pleasant journey of it seaward again. We found that for the three past nights our ship had been in a state of war. The first night the sailors of a British ship, being...

Some of the __Quaker City__'s passengers had arrived in Venice from Switzerland and other lands before we left there, and others were expected every day. We heard of no casualti...

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand --and more especially I can not understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depo...

The next morning we were up and dressed at ten o'clock. We went to the 'commissionaire' of the hotel--I don't know what a 'commissionaire' is, but that is the man we went to--an...

This has been a stirring day. The Superintendent of the railway put a train at our disposal, and did us the further kindness of accompanying us to Ephesus and giving to us his w...

“See Naples and die.” Well, I do not know that one would necessarily die after merely seeing it, but to attempt to live there might turn out a little differently. To see Naples...

From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the Coliseum; and the dismal tombs of the Catacombs, I naturally pass to the picturesque horrors of the Capu...

They pronounce it Pom-pay-e. I always had an idea that you went down into Pompeii with torches, by the way of damp, dark stairways, just as you do in silver mines, and traversed...

From a little mound here in the plain issues a broad stream of limpid water and forms a large shallow pool, and then rushes furiously onward, augmented in volume. This puddle is...

All day long we sped through a mountainous country whose peaks were bright with sunshine, whose hillsides were dotted with pretty villas sitting in the midst of gardens and shru...

It was worth a kingdom to be at sea again. It was a relief to drop all anxiety whatsoever--all questions as to where we should go; how long we should stay; whether it were worth...

We returned to Constantinople, and after a day or two spent in exhausting marches about the city and voyages up the Golden Horn in caiques, we steamed away again. We passed thro...

For months the great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land was chatted about in the newspapers everywhere in America and discussed at countless firesides. It was a nove...

We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We had heard of it before. It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are. We recognized the brown...

We plowed along bravely for a week or more, and without any conflict of jurisdiction among the captains worth mentioning. The passengers soon learned to accommodate themselves t...

We voyaged by steamer down the Lago di Lecco, through wild mountain scenery, and by hamlets and villas, and disembarked at the town of Lecco. They said it was two hours, by carr...

When I last made a memorandum, we were at Ephesus. We are in Syria, now, encamped in the mountains of Lebanon. The interregnum has been long, both as to time and distance. We br...

We left Milan by rail. The Cathedral six or seven miles behind us; vast, dreamy, bluish, snow-clad mountains twenty miles in front of us,--these were the accented points in the...

We passed the Fourth of July on board the __Quaker City__, in mid-ocean. It was in all respects a characteristic Mediterranean day--faultlessly beautiful. A cloudless sky; a ref...

We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley of Lebanon. It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had seemed from the hill-sides. It was a...

Taking it “by and large,” as the sailors say, we had a pleasant ten days' run from New York to the Azores islands--not a fast run, for the distance is only twenty-four hundred m...

We are camped near Temnin-el-Foka--a name which the boys have simplified a good deal, for the sake of convenience in spelling. They call it Jacksonville. It sounds a little stra...

About the first adventure we had yesterday afternoon, after landing here, came near finishing that heedless Blucher. We had just mounted some mules and asses and started out und...

little harrows are drawn by men and women; small windmills grind the corn, ten bushels a day, and there is one assistant superintendent to feed the mill and a general superinten...

The narrow canon in which Nablous, or Shechem, is situated, is under high cultivation, and the soil is exceedingly black and fertile. It is well watered, and its affluent vegeta...

This is royal! Let those who went up through Spain make the best of it --these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well enough. We have had enough of Spain...

The ship is lying here in the harbor of Naples--quarantined. She has been here several days and will remain several more. We that came by rail from Rome have escaped this misfor...

We are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility. We are getting reconciled to halls and bedchambers with unhomelike stone floors and no carpets--floors that ring to the tre...

We left a dozen passengers in Constantinople, and sailed through the beautiful Bosporus and far up into the Black Sea. We left them in the clutches of the celebrated Turkish gui...

VERSAILLES! It is wonderfully beautiful! You gaze and stare and try to understand that it is real, that it is on the earth, that it is not the Garden of Eden--but your brain gro...

We inquired, and learned that the lions of Smyrna consisted of the ruins of the ancient citadel, whose broken and prodigious battlements frown upon the city from a lofty hill ju...

We visited all the holy places about Jerusalem which we had left unvisited when we journeyed to the Jordan and then, about three o'clock one afternoon, we fell into procession a...

Occasionally, during the following month, I dropped in at 117 Wall Street to inquire how the repairing and refurnishing of the vessel was coming on, how additions to the passeng...

All day Sunday at anchor. The storm had gone down a great deal, but the sea had not. It was still piling its frothy hills high in air “outside,” as we could plainly see with the...

Ten or eleven o'clock found us coming down to breakfast one morning in Cadiz. They told us the ship had been lying at anchor in the harbor two or three hours. It was time for us...

We have got so far east, now--a hundred and fifty-five degrees of longitude from San Francisco--that my watch can not “keep the hang” of the time any more. It has grown discoura...

We were at sea now, for a very long voyage--we were to pass through the entire length of the Levant; through the entire length of the Mediterranean proper, also, and then cross...

This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomp...

So far, good. If any man has a right to feel proud of himself, and satisfied, surely it is I. For I have written about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lio...

I think the Azores must be very little known in America. Out of our whole ship's company there was not a solitary individual who knew anything whatever about them. Some of the p...

“The Joy of the Whole Earth”--Description of Jerusalem--Church of the Holy Sepulchre--The Stone of Unction--The Grave of Jesus--Graves of Nicodemus and Joseph of Armattea--Place...

Rebellion in the Camp--Charms of Nomadic Life--Dismal Rumors--En Route for Jericho and The Dead Sea--Pilgrim Strategy--Bethany and the Dwelling of Lazarus--“Bedouins!”--Ancient...

Ascent of Mount Vesuvius Continued--Beautiful View at Dawn--Less Beautiful in the Back Streets--Ascent of Vesuvius Continued--Dwellings a Hundred Feet High--A Motley Procession-...

At Sea Once More--The Pilgrims all Well--Superb Stromboli--Sicily by Moonlight--Scylla and Charybdis--The “Oracle” at Fault--Skirting the Isles of Greece Ancient Athens--Blockad...

Down Through Italy by Rail--Idling in Florence--Dante and Galileo--An Ungrateful City--Dazzling Generosity--Wonderful Mosaics--The Historical Arno--Lost Again--Found Again, but...

The Cholera by way of Variety--Hot--Another Outlandish Procession--Pen and-Ink Photograph of “Jonesborough,” Syria--Tomb of Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter--The Stateliest Ruin of All...

The Happiness of being at Sea once more--“Home” as it is in a Pleasure Ship--“Shaking Hands” with the Vessel--Jack in Costume--His Father's Parting Advice--Approaching Egypt--As...

CHANTER XXIII. The Famous Gondola--The Gondola in an Unromantic Aspect--The Great Square of St. Mark and the Winged Lion--Snobs, at Home and Abroad--Sepulchres of the Great Dead...

Summer Home of Royalty--Practising for the Dread Ordeal--Committee on Imperial Address--Reception by the Emperor and Family--Dresses of the Imperial Party--Concentrated Power--C...

The “Sorrowful Way”--The Legend of St. Veronica's Handkerchief --An Illustrious Stone--House of the Wandering Jew--The Tradition of the Wanderer--Solomon's Temple--Mosque of Oma...

“Recherche” Donkeys--A Wild Ride--Specimens of Egyptian Modesty--Moses in the Bulrushes--Place where the Holy Family Sojourned--Distant view of the Pyramids--A Nearer View--The...

A Tempest at Night--Spain and Africa on Exhibition--Greeting a Majestic Stranger--The Pillars of Hercules--The Rock of Gibraltar--Tiresome Repetition--“The Queen's Chair”--Seren...

A Holiday Flight through France--Summer Garb of the Landscape--Abroad on the Great Plains--Peculiarities of French Cars--French Politeness American Railway Officials--“Twenty Mi...

Picturesque Horrors--The Legend of Brother Thomas--Sorrow Scientifically Analyzed--A Festive Company of the Dead--The Great Vatican Museum Artist Sins of Omission--The Rape of t...

Curious Remnant of the Past--Shechem--The Oldest “First Family” on Earth --The Oldest Manuscript Extant--The Genuine Tomb of Joseph--Jacob's Well --Shiloh--Camping with the Arab...

Extracts from Note-Book--Mahomet's Paradise and the Bible's--Beautiful Damascus the Oldest City on Earth--Oriental Scenes within the Curious Old City--Damascus Street Car--The S...

“Do You Wiz zo Haut can be?”--La Scala--Petrarch and Laura--Lucrezia Borgia--Ingenious Frescoes--Ancient Roman Amphitheatre--A Clever Delusion--Distressing Billiards--The Chief...

The Buried City of Pompeii--How Dwellings Appear that have been Unoccupied for Eighteen hundred years--The Judgment Seat--Desolation--The Footprints of the Departed--“No Women A...

The Modern Roman on His Travels--The Grandeur of St. Peter's--Holy Relics --Grand View from the Dome--The Holy Inquisition--Interesting Old Monkish Frauds--The Ruined Coliseum--...

Summer in Mid-Atlantic--An Eccentric Moon--Mr. Blucher Loses Confidence --The Mystery of “Ship Time”--The Denizens of the Deep--“Land Hoh” --The First Landing on a Foreign Shore...

Going Home--A Demoralized Note-Book--A Boy's Diary--Mere Mention of Old Spain--Departure from Cadiz--A Deserved Rebuke--The Beautiful Madeiras --Tabooed--In the Delightful Bermu...

French National Burying--Ground--Among the Great Dead--The Shrine of Disappointed Love--The Story of Abelard and Heloise--“English Spoken Here”--“American Drinks Compounded Here...

War--The American Forces Victorious--” Home Again”--Italy in Sight The “City of Palaces”--Beauty of the Genoese Women--The “Stub-Hunters” --Among the Palaces--Gifted Guide--Chur...

Scarcity of Morals and Whiskey--Slave-Girl Market Report--Commercial Morality at a Discount--The Slandered Dogs of Constantinople --Questionable Delights of Newspaperdom in Turk...

Boyhood of the Saviour--Unseemly Antics of Sober Pilgrims--Home of the Witch of Endor--Nain--Profanation--A Popular Oriental Picture--Biblical Metaphors Becoming steadily More I...

Modern Greece--Fallen Greatness--Sailing Through the Archipelago and the Dardanelles--Footprints of History--The First Shoddy Contractor of whom History gives any Account--Ancho...

Vandalism Prohibited--Angry Pilgrims--Approaching Holy Land!--The “Shrill Note of Preparation”--Distress About Dragomans and Transportation --The “Long Route” Adopted--In Syria-...

Flying Through Italy--Marengo--First Glimpse of the Famous Cathedral --Description of some of its Wonders--A Horror Carved in Stone----An Unpleasant Adventure--A Good Man--A Ser...

“Butchered to Make a Roman Holiday”--The Man who Never Complained --An Exasperating Subject--Asinine Guides--The Roman Catacombs The Saint Whose Fervor Burst his Ribs--The Mirac...

Naples--In Quarantine at Last--Annunciation--Ascent of Mount Vesuvius--A Two Cent Community--The Black Side of Neapolitan Character--Monkish Miracles--Ascent of Mount Vesuvius C...

The Pilgrims Becoming Domesticated--Pilgrim Life at Sea --“Horse-Billiards”--The “Synagogue”--The Writing School--Jack's “Journal” --The “Q. C. Club”--The Magic Lantern--State B...

Getting used to it--No Soap--Bill of Fare, Table d'hote--“An American Sir”--A Curious Discovery--The “Pilgrim” Bird--Strange Companionship --A Grave of the Living--A Long Captiv...

The Ancient Baths--Ye Apparition--A Distinguished Panorama--The Last Battle of the Crusades--The Story of the Lord of Kerak--Mount Tabor --What one Sees from its Top--Memory of...

Dan--Bashan--Genessaret--A Notable Panorama--Smallness of Palestine --Scraps of History--Character of the Country--Bedouin Shepherds--Glimpses of the Hoary Past--Mr. Grimes's Be...

The Works of Bankruptcy--Railway Grandeur--How to Fill an Empty Treasury--The Sumptuousness of Mother Church--Ecclesiastical Splendor --Magnificence and Misery--General Execrati...

Return to Constantinople--We Sail for Asia--The Sailors Burlesque the Imperial Visitors--Ancient Smyrna--The “Oriental Splendor” Fraud --The “Biblical Crown of Life”--Pilgrim Pr...

“Jacksonville,” in the Mountains of Lebanon--Breakfasting above a Grand Panorama--The Vanished City--The Peculiar Steed, “Jericho”--The Pilgrims Progress--Bible Scenes--Mount He...

“Jack's Adventure”--Joseph's Pit--The Story of Joseph--Joseph's Magnanimity and Esau's--The Sacred Lake of Genessaret--Enthusiasm of the Pilgrims--Why We did not Sail on Galilee...