Part 1

Produced by Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown, Julia Neufeld (illustrations were generously made available by The Internet Archive) and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber's note:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.

The Rulers

of

The Mediterranean

BY

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

AUTHOR OF

"THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW" "GALLEGHER" "VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

1894

Copyright, 1893, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

TO

HON. EDWARD C. LITTLE

EX-DIPLOMATIC-AGENT AND CONSUL-GENERAL

OF

THE UNITED STATES TO EGYPT

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 1

II TANGIER 37

III FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 72

IV CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 102

V THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 139

VI MODERN ATHENS 178

VII CONSTANTINOPLE 198

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT _Frontispiece_

THE MAN FROM DETROIT 5

THE ROCK FROM THE BAY 9

TYPES 13

GIBRALTAR AS SEEN ACROSS THE NEUTRAL GROUND 15

AN ENGLISH SENTRY 19

A SPANISH SENTRY 21

SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK 25

CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES 29

TEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERS 33

BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE 41

SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL 47

A WOMAN OF TANGIER 53

WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE 57

A STREET DANCER 63

IN THE PRISON 67

MALTESE PEDDLERS 75

STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA 79

BRINDISI 85

PILLAR OF CAESAR AT BRINDISI 89

APPROACH TO ISMAILIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL 93

STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL 97

BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS 105

GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL 109

A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS 117

SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS 123

A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID 129

DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO 135

EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS 141

RIAZ PASHA, PRIME-MINISTER OF EGYPT 145

AN EGYPTIAN LANCER 149

TIGRANE PASHA, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS 153

A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA 157

H. H. ABBAS II., KHEDIVE OF EGYPT 161

THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY 165

LORD CROMER, THE ENGLISH DIPLOMATIC AGENT IN EGYPT 169

A GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION 173

GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORM 179

GREEK PEASANT GIRL 181

THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS 183

ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN 186

ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN 187

GREEK PEASANT 188

ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS 189

POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL 191

AN OLD ATHENIAN OF THE PRESENT DAY 194

A GREEK SHEPHERD 195

GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE 201

ONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS 205

A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE 209

STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE 215

GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE MOSQUE 219

EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF ST. SOPHIA 225

I

THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR

If you have always crossed the Atlantic in the spring-time or in the summer months, as do most tourists, you will find that leaving New York in the winter is more like a relief expedition to the north pole than the setting forth on a pleasure tour to the summer shores of the Mediterranean.

There is no green grass on the hills of Staten Island, but there is, instead, a long field of ice stretching far up the Hudson River, and a wind that cuts into the face, and dashes the spray up over the tugboats in frozen layers, leaving it there like the icing on a cake. The Atlantic Highlands are black with bare branches and white with snow, and you observe for the first time that men who go down to the sea in ships know nothing of open fireplaces. An icy wind keeps the deck as clear as a master-at-arms could do it; and sudden storms of snow, which you had always before associated with streets or fields, and not at all with the decks of ships, burst over the side, and leave the wood-work wet and slippery, and cold to the touch.

And then on the third or fourth day out the sea grows calm, and your overcoat seems to have taken on an extra lining; and strange people, who apparently have come on board during the night, venture out on the sunlit deck and inquire for steamer chairs and mislaid rugs.

These smaller vessels which run from New York to Genoa are as different from the big North Atlantic boats, with their twin screws and five hundred cabin passengers, as a family boarding-house is from a Broadway hotel. This is so chiefly because you are sailing under a German instead of an English flag. There is no one so important as an English captain--he is like a bishop in gold lace; but a German captain considers his passengers as one large happy family, and treats them as such, whether they like their new relatives or not. The discipline on board the _Fulda_ was like that of a ship of war, where the officers and crew were concerned, but the passengers might have believed they were on their own private yacht.

There was music for breakfast, dinner, and tea; music when the fingers of the trombonist were frozen and when the snow fell upon the taut surface of the big drum; and music at dawn to tell us it was Sunday, so that you awoke imagining yourself at church. There was also a ball, and the captain led an opening march, and the stewards stood at every point to see that the passengers kept in line, and "rounded up" those who tried to slip away from the procession. There were speeches, too, at all times, and lectures and religious services, and on the last night out a grand triumph of the _chef_, who built wonderful candy goddesses of Liberty smiling upon the other symbolic lady who keeps watch on the Rhine, and the band played "Dixie," which it had been told was the national anthem, and the portrait of the German Emperor smiled down upon us over his autograph. All this was interesting, because it was characteristic of the Germans; it showed their childish delight in little things, and the same simplicity of character which makes the German soldiers who would not move out of the way of the French bullets dance around a Christmas-tree. The American or the Englishman will not do these things, because he has too keen a sense of the ridiculous, and is afraid of being laughed at. So when he goes to sea he plays poker and holds auctions on the run.

There was only one passenger on board who objected to the music. He was from Detroit, and for the first three days remained lashed to his steamer chair like a mummy, with nothing showing but a blue nose and closed eyelids. The band played at his end of the deck, and owing to the fingers of the players being frozen, and to the sudden lurches of the ship, the harmony was sometimes destroyed. Those who had an ear for music picked up their steamer chairs and moved to windward; but this young man, being half dead and firmly lashed to his place, was unable to save himself.

On the morning of the fourth day, when the concert was over and the band had gone to thaw out, the young man suddenly sat upright and pointed his forefinger at the startled passengers. We had generally decided that he was dead. "The Lord knows I'm a sick man," he said, blinking his eyes feebly; "but if I live till midnight I'll find out where they hide those horns, and I'll drop 'em into the Gulf Stream, if it takes my dying breath." He then fell over backwards, and did not speak again until we reached Gibraltar.

There is something about the sight of land after one has been a week without it which supplies a want that nothing else can fill; and it is interesting to note how careless one is as to its name, or whether it is pink or pale blue on the maps, or whether it is ruled by a king or a colonial secretary. It is quite sufficient that it is land. This was impressed upon me once, on entering New York Harbor, by a young man who emerged from his deck cabin to discover, what all the other passengers already knew, that we were in the upper bay. He gave a shout of ecstatic relief and pleasure. "That," he cried, pointing to the west, "is Staten Island, but that," pointing to the right, "is LAND."

The first land you see on going to Gibraltar is the Azores Islands. They are volcanic and mountainous, and accompany the boat for a day and a half; but they could be improved if they were moved farther south about two hundred miles, as one has to get up at dawn to see the best of them. It is quite warm by this time, and the clothes you wore in New York seem to belong to a barbarous period and past fashion, and have become heavy and cumbersome, and take up an unnecessary amount of room in your trunk.

And then people tell you that there is land in sight again, and you find how really far you are from home when you learn that it is Portugal, and so a part of Europe, and not an island thrown up by a volcano, or stolen or strayed from its moorings at the mainland. Portugal is apparently a high red hill, with a round white tower on the top of it flying signal flags. Its chief industry is the arranging of these flags by a man. It is, on the whole, a disappointing country. After this, everybody begins to pack and to exchange visiting-cards; and those who are to get off at Gibraltar are pursued by stewards and bandmasters and young men with testimonials that they want signed, and by the weak in spirit, who, at the eleventh hour, think they will not go on to Genoa, but will get off here and go on to Tangier, and who want you to decide for them. And which do you think would pay best, and what is there to see in Tangier, anyway? And as that is exactly what you are going to find out, you cannot tell.

When I left the deck the last night out the stars were all over the heavens; and the foremast, as it swept slowly from side to side, looked like a black pendulum upside down marking out the sky and portioning off the stars. And when I woke there was a great creaking of chains, and I could see out of my port-hole hundreds of fixed lights and rows and double rows of lamps, so that you might have thought the ship during the night had run aground in the heart of a city.

The first sight of Gibraltar is, I think, disappointing. It means so much, and so many lives have been given for it, and so many ships have been sunk by its batteries, and such great powers have warred for twelve hundred years for its few miles of stone, that its black outline against the sky, with nothing to measure it with but the fading stars, is dwarfed and spoiled. It is only after the sun begins to turn the lights out, and you are able to compare it with the great ships at its base, and you see the battlements and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds resting on its top, that you understand it; and then when the outline of the crouching lion, that faces all Europe, comes into relief, you remember it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, of which England holds the key. And even while you feel this, and are greedily following the course of each rampart and terrace with eyes that are tired of blank stretches of water, some one points to a low line of mountains lying like blue clouds before the red sky of the sunrise, dim, forbidding, and mysterious--and you know that it is Africa.

Spain, lying to the right, all green and amethyst, and flippant and gay with white houses and red roofs, and Gibraltar's grim show of battlements and war, become somehow of little moment. You feel that you have known them always, and that they are as you fancied they would be. But this other land across the water looks as inscrutable, as dark, and as silent as the Sphinx that typifies it, and you feel that its Pillar of Hercules still marks the entrance to the "unknown world."

Nine out of every ten of those who visit Gibraltar for the first time expect to find an island. It ought to be, and it would be one but for a strip of level turf half a mile wide and half a mile long which joins it to the sunny green hills of Spain. But for this bit of land, which they call "the Neutral Ground," Gibraltar would be an island, for it has the Mediterranean to the east, a bay, and beyond that the hills of Spain to the west, and Africa dimly showing fourteen miles across the sea to the south.

Gibraltar has been besieged thirteen times; by Moors and by Spaniards, and again by Moors, and again by Spaniards against Spaniards. It was during one of these wars between two factions in Spain, in 1704, that the English, who were helping one of the factions, took the Rock, and were so well pleased with it that they settled there, and have remained there ever since. If possession is nine points of the law, there was never a place in the history of the world held with nine as obvious points. There were three more sieges after the English took Gibraltar, one of them, the last, continuing for four years. The English were fighting America at the time, and rowing in the Nile, and so did not do much towards helping General George Elliot, who was Governor of the Rock at that time. It would appear to be, as well as one can judge from this distance, a case of neglect on the part of the mother-country for her little colony and her six thousand men, very much like her forgetfulness of Gordon, only Elliot succeeded where Gordon failed (if you can associate that word with that name), and so no one blamed the home government for risking what would have been a more serious loss than the loss of Calais, had Elliot surrendered, and "Gib" gone back to its rightful owners, that is, the owners who have the one point. The history of this siege is one of the most interesting of war stories; it is interesting whether you ever expect to visit Gibraltar or not; it is doubly interesting when you walk the pretty streets of the Rock to-day, with its floating population of twenty thousand, and try to imagine the place held by six thousand half-starved, sick, and wounded soldiers, living at times on grass and herbs and handfuls of rice, and yet carrying on an apparently forlorn fight for four years against the entire army and navy of Spain, and, at the last, against the arms of France as well.

We are apt to consider the Gibraltar of to-day as occupying the same position to the Mediterranean as Queenstown does to the Atlantic, a place where passengers go ashore while the mails are being taken on board, and not so much for their interest in the place itself as to again feel solid earth under their feet. There are passengers who will tell you on the way out that you can see all there is to be seen there in three hours. As a matter of fact, one can live in Gibraltar for many weeks and see something new every day. It struck me as being more different kinds of a place than any other spot of land I had ever visited, and one that changed its aspect with every shifting of the wind, and with each rising and setting of the sun. It is the clearing-house for three most picturesque peoples--the Moors, in their yellow slippers and bare legs and voluminous robes and snowy turbans; the Spaniards, with romantic black capes and cloaks and red sashes, the women with the lace mantilla and brilliant kerchiefs and pretty faces; and, mixed with these, the pride and glory of the British army and navy, in all the bravery of red coats and white helmets, or blue jackets, or Highland kilts. It is a fortress as imposing as the Tower of London, a winter resort as pretty as St. Augustine, and a seaport town of free entry, into which come on every tide people of many nations, and ships flying every flag.

Around its base are the ramparts, like a band of stone and steel; above them the town, rising like a staircase, with houses for steps--yellow houses, with light green blinds sticking out at different angles, and with sloping red roofs meeting other lines of red roofs, and broken by a carpeting of green where the parks and gardens make an opening in the yellow front of the town, and from which rise tall palms and palmettoes, and rows of sea-pines, and fluttering union-jacks which mark the barracks of a regiment. Above the town is the Rock, covered with a green growth of scrub and of little trees below, and naked and bare above, stretching for several miles from north to south, and rearing its great bulk up into the sky until it loses its summit in the clouds. It is never twice the same. To-day it may be smiling and resplendent under a warm, brilliant sun that spreads out each shade of green, and shows each terrace and rampart as clearly as though one saw it through a glass; the sky becomes as blue as the sea and the bay, and the white villages of Spain seem as near to one as the red soldier smoking his pipe on the mountings half-way up the Rock. And to-morrow the whole top of the Rock may be lost in a thick curtain of gray clouds, and the waters of the bay will be tossing and covered with white-caps, and the lands about disappear from sight as though they had sunk into the sea during the night and had left you alone on an island. At times a sunset paints the Rock a martial red, or the moonlight softens it, and you see only the tall palms and the graceful balconies and the gardens of plants, and each rampart becomes a terrace and each casemate a balcony. Or at night, when the lamps are lit, you might imagine yourself on the stage of a theatre, walking in a scene set for _Fra Diavolo_.

There are no such streets or houses outside of stage-land. It is only in stage cities that the pavements and streets are so conspicuously clean, or that the hanging lamps of beaten iron-work throw such deep shadows, or that there are such high, heavily carved Moorish doorways and mysterious twisting stairways in the solid rock, or shops with such queer signs, or walls plastered with such odd-colored placards--streets where every footfall echoes, and where dark figures suddenly appear from narrow alleyways and cry "Halt, there!" at you, and then "All's well" as you pass by.

Gibraltar has one main street running up and clinging to the side of the hill from the principal quay to the most southern point of the Rock. Houses reach up to it from the first level of the ramparts, and continue on up the hill from its other side. On this street are the bazars of the Moors, and the English shops and the Spanish cafes, and the cathedral, and the hotels, and the Governor's house, and every one in Gibraltar is sure to appear on it at least once in the twenty-four hours. But the color and tone of the street are military. There are soldiers at every step--soldiers carrying the mail or bearing reports, or soldiers in bulk with a band ahead, or soldiers going out to guard the North Front, where lies the Neutral Ground, or to target practice, or to play football; soldiers in two or threes, with their sticks under their arms, and their caps very much cocked, and pipes in their mouths. But these make slow progress, for there is always an officer in sight--either a boy officer just out from England riding to the polo field near the Neutral Ground, or a commanding officer in a black tunic and a lot of ribbons across his breast, or an officer of the day with his sash and sword; and each of these has to be saluted. This is an interesting spectacle, and one that is always new. You see three soldiers coming at you with a quick step, talking and grinning, alert and jaunty, and suddenly the upper part of their three bodies becomes rigid, though their legs continue as before, apparently of their own volition, and their hands go up and their pipes and grins disappear, and they pass you with eyes set like dead men's eyes, and palms facing you as though they were trying to learn which way the wind was blowing. This is due, you discover, to the passing of a stout gentleman in knickerbockers, who switches his rattan stick in the air in reply. Sometimes when he salutes the soldier stops altogether, and so his walks abroad are punctuated at every twenty yards. It takes an ordinary soldier in Gibraltar one hour to walk ten minutes.

Everybody walks in the middle of the main street in Gibraltar, because the sidewalks are only two feet wide, and because all the streets are as clean as the deck of a yacht. Cabs of yellow wood and diligences with jangling bells and red worsted harness gallop through this street and sweep the people up against the wall, and long lines of goats who leave milk in a natural manner at various shops tangle themselves up with long lines of little donkeys and longer lines of geese, with which the local police struggle valiantly. All of these things, troops and goats and yellow cabs and polo ponies and dog-carts, and priests with curly-brimmed hats, and baggy-breeched Moors, and huntsmen in pink coats and Tommies in red, and sailors rolling along in blue, make the main street of Gibraltar as full of variety as a mask ball.