Part 5

There was at the Centennial Exposition the head of a woman cut in butter, which attracted much attention from the rural visitors. For this they passed by the women painted on canvas or carved in marble, they were too like the real thing, and the countrymen probably knew how difficult it is to make butter into moulds. For some reason Malta reminds you of this butter lady. It is a real city--with real houses and cathedral and streets, no doubt, but you have a feeling that they are not genuine, and that though it is very cleverly done, it is, after all, a city carved out of cheese or butter. Some of the cheese is mouldy and covered with green, and some of the walls have holes in them, as has aerated bread or _Schweitzerkase_, and the streets and the pavements, and the carved facades of the churches and opera-house, and the earth and the hills beyond--everything upon which your eye can rest is glaring and yellow, with not a red roof to relieve it; it is all just yellow limestone, and it looks like Dutch cheese. It is like no other place exactly that you have ever seen. The approach into the canal-like harbor under the guns and the search-lights of the fortifications, the moats and drawbridges, and the glaring monotony of the place itself, which seems to have been cut out of one piece and painted with one brush, suggest those little toy fortresses of yellow wood which appear in the shop windows at Christmas-time.

Of course the first and last thought one has of Malta is that the island was the home of the Order of the Knights of St. John, or Knights Hospitallers. This order, which was the most noble of those of the days of mediaeval chivalry, was composed of that band of warrior monks who waged war against the infidels, who kept certain vows, and who, under the banner of the white cross, became honored and feared throughout the then known world. Their headquarters changed from place to place during the four hundred years that stretched from the eleventh century, when the order was first established, up to 1530, when Charles V. made over Malta and all its dependencies in perpetual sovereignty to the keeping of these Knights. They had no sooner fortified the island than there began the nine months' siege of the Turks, one of the most memorable sieges in history. When it was ended, the Turks re-embarked ten thousand of the forty thousand men they had landed, and of the nine thousand Knights present under the Grand Master Jean de la Valette when the siege had opened, but six hundred capable of bearing arms remained alive.

The order continued in possession of their island until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the French, under General Bonaparte, took it with but little trouble. The French in turn were besieged by Maltese and English, and after two years capitulated. In 1814 the island was transferred to England. It now, in its monuments and its memories, speaks of the days of chivalry; but present and mixed with these is the ubiquitous red coat of the British soldier; and the eight-pointed Maltese cross, which suggests Ivanhoe, is placed side by side with the lion and the unicorn; the culverin has given way to the quick-throbbing Maxim gun, the Templar's sword to the Lee-Metford rifle, and the heroes of Walter Scott to the friends of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.

The most conspicuous relic of the French occupation is not a noble one. It is the penitential hood of the Maltese woman--a strangely picturesque article of apparel, like a cowl or Shaker bonnet, only much larger than the latter, and with a cape which hangs over the shoulders. The women hold the two projecting flaps of the hood together at the throat, and unless you are advancing directly towards them, their faces are quite invisible. The hoods and capes are black, and are worn as a penance for the frailty of the women of Malta when the French took the place and robbed the churches, and pillaged the storehouses of the Knights, and bore themselves with less restraint than the infidel Turks had done.

Malta retains a slight suggestion of mediaevalism in the garb of the Capuchin monks, whose tonsured heads and bare feet and roped waists look like a masquerade in their close proximity to the young officers in tweeds and varnished boots. But one gets the best idea of the past from the great Church of St. John, which is full of the trophies and gifts of the Grand Masters of the Order, and floored with two thousand marble tombs of the Knights themselves. Each Grand Master vied with those who had preceded him in enriching this church, and each Knight on his promotion made it a gift, so that to-day it is rich in these and wonderfully beautiful. This is the chief show-place, and the Governor's palace is another, and, to descend from the sublimity of the past to the absurdity of the present, so is also the guard-room of the officer of the day, which generations of English subalterns have helped to decorate. Each year a committee of officers go over the pictures on its walls and rub out the least amusing, and this survival of the fittest has resulted in a most entertaining gallery of black and white.

The Order of Jerusalem, or of St. John, still obtains in Europe, and those who can show fourteen quarterings on one side and twelve on the other are entitled to belong to it; but they are carpet knights, and wearing an enamel Maltese cross on the left side of an evening coat is a different thing from carrying it on a shield for Saracens to hack at.

Sicily showed itself for a few hours while the boat continued on its way to Brindisi; and as that day happened to be the 4th of March, the captain of the _Sutlej_ was asked to make a calculation for which there will be no further need for four years to come. This calculation showed at what point in the Mediterranean ocean the _Sutlej_ would be when a President was being inaugurated in Washington, and at the proper time the passengers were invited to the cabin, and the fact that a government was changing into the hands of one who could best take care of it was impressed upon them in different ways. And later, after dinner, the captain of the _Sutlej_ made a speech, and said things about the important event (which he insisted on calling an election) which was then taking place in America, and the English cheered and drank the new President's health, and the two Americans on board, who fortunately were both good Democrats, felt not so far from home as before.

You must touch at Brindisi, which is situated on the heel of the boot of Italy, if you wish to go a part of the way by land from the East to London or from London to the East. And as many people prefer travelling forty-eight hours across the Continent to rounding Gibraltar, one hears often of Brindisi, and pictures it as a shipping port of the importance of Liverpool or Marseilles. Instead of which it is as desolate as a summer resort in midwinter, and is like that throughout the year. There was a long, broad stone wharf, and tall stucco houses behind, and banks of coal which suggested the rear approach to Long Island City, and the soft blue Italian skies of which we had read were steely blue, and most of us wore overcoats. We lay bound fast to the wharf, with a plank thrown from the boat's side to the quay, for the day, and we had free permission to learn to walk on streets again for full twenty-four hours; but after facing the wind, and dodging guides who had nothing to show, we came back by preference to the clean deck and the steamer-chair. Desperate-looking Italian soldiers with feathers in their hats, and custom-house officers, and gendarmes paraded up and down the quay for our delectation, and a wicked little boy stood on the pier-head and sang "Ta-ra-ra-boom-chi-ay," pointedly varying this knowledge of our several nationalities by crying: "I _say_, buy box matches. Get out." This show of learning caused him to be regarded by his fellows with much envy, and they watched us to see how far we were impressed.

There are two things which need no newspaper advertising and which recognize no geographical lines; one is a pretty face and the other is a good song. I have seen photographs for sale of Isabelle Irving and Lillian Russell in as different localities as Santiago in Cuba, and Rotterdam, and I saw a play-bill in San Antonio, Texas, upon which the Countess Dudley and the Duchess of Leinster were reproduced under the names of the Walsh Sisters. A good song will travel as far, changing its name, too, perhaps, and its words, but keeping the same melody that has pleased people in a different part of the world. When the moon came out at Brindisi and hid the heaps of coal, and showed only the white houses and the pillar of Caesar, a party of young men with guitars and mandolins gathered under the bow and sang a song called "Oh, Caroline," which I had last heard Francis Wilson sing as a part of the score of "The Lion-tamer," to very different words. As the scene of "The Lion-tamer" is laid in Sicily, the song was more or less in place; but the contrast between the dark-browed Italian and Mr. Wilson's genial countenance which the song brought back was striking. And on the night after we had left Brindisi, when the crew gave a concert, one of them sang "Oh, promise me," and some one asked if the song had yet reached America. I did not undeceive him, but said it had.

After Brindisi the hands of the clock go back a few thousand years, and we see Cethdonia, where Ulysses owned much property, and Crete, from whence St. Paul set sail, with its long range of mountains covered with snow, and then we come back to the present near the island of Zante, where the earthquake moved a month ago and swallowed up the homes of the people.

The _Sutlej_ had been going out of her course all of the fourth day in order to dodge possible islands thrown up by the earthquake, and she was late. That night, as she steamed forward at her best speed, the level oily sea fell back from her bows with a steady ripple as she cut it in two and turned it back out of the way. A light on the horizon, like a policeman's lantern, which changed to the burnt-out end of a match and back again to a bull's-eye, told us that beyond the light lay the level sands of Egypt, almost as far-reaching and monotonous as the sea that touched its shore.

The force of habit is very strong on many people, and if they approach the land of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra an hour after their usual bedtime, they feel no inclination to diverge from their usual habits on that account. When you consider how many hours there are for slumber, and how many are given to dances, you would think one hour of sleep might be spared out of a lifetime in order that you could see Port Said at night. There was a long line of lamps on the shore, like a gigantic row of footlights or a prairie fire along the horizon, and we passed towards this through buoys with red and green lights, with a long sea-wall reaching out on one side, and the natural reef of jagged rocks rising black out of the sea in the path of the moon on the other. Then black boats shot out from the shore and assailed us with strange cries, and men in turbans and long robes, and negroes in what looked like sacking, and which probably was sacking, but which could not hide the suppleness and strength of their limbs, climbed up over the high sides. These were the coal-trimmers making way for the black islands, filled with black coal and blacker men, who made fast to the side and began feeding the vessel through a blazing hole like an open fireplace in her iron side. Four braziers filled with soft coal burnt with a fierce red flame from the corners of the barges, and in this light from out of the depths half-naked negroes ran shrieking and crying with baskets of coal on their shoulders to the top of an inclined plank, and stood there for a second in the full glare of the opening until one could see the whites of their eyes and the sweat glistening on the black faces. Then they pitched the coal forward into the lighted opening, as though they were feeding a fire, and disappeared with a jump downward into the pit of blackness. The coal dust rose in great curtains of mist, through which the figures of the men and the red light showed dimly and with wavering outline, like shadows in an iron-mill, and through it all came their cries and shouts, and the roar of the coal blocks as they rattled down into the hold.

Port Said occupies the same position to the waters of the world as Dodge City once did to the Western States of America--it is the meeting-place of vessels from every land over every water, just as Dodge City was the meeting-place of the great trails across the prairies. When a cowboy reached Dodge City after six months of constant riding by day and of sleeping under the stars by night, and with wild steers for company, he wanted wickedness in its worst form--such being the perversity of man. And you are told that Port Said offers to travellers and crew the same attractive features after a month or weeks of rough voyaging that Dodge City once offered to the trailsmen. In _The Light that Failed_ we are told that Port Said is the wickedest place on earth, that it is a sink of iniquity and a hole of vice, and a wild night in Port Said is described there with pitiless detail. Almost every young man who leaves home for the East is instructed by his friends to reproduce that night, or never return to civilization. And every sea-captain or traveller or ex-member of the Army of Occupation in Egypt that I met on this visit to the East either smiled darkly when he spoke of Port Said or raised his eyes in horror. They all agreed on two things--that it was the home of the most beautiful woman on earth, which is saying a good deal, and that it was the wickedest, wildest, and most vicious place that man had created and God forgotten. One would naturally buy pocket-knives at Sheffield, and ginger ale in Belfast, and would not lay in a stock of cigars if going to Havana; and so when guides in Continental cities and in the East have invited me to see and to buy strange things which caused me to doubt the morals of those who had gone before, I have always put them off, because I knew that some day I should visit Port Said. I did not want second-best and imitation wickedness, but the most awful wickedness of the entire world sounded as though it might prove most amusing. I expected a place blazing with lights, and with gambling-houses and _cafes chantants_ open to the air, and sailors fighting with bare knives, and guides who cheated and robbed you, or led you to dives where you could be drugged and robbed by others.

So I went on shore and gathered the guides together, and told them for the time being to sink their rivalry and to join with loyal local pride in showing me the worst Port Said could do. They consulted for some time, and then said that they were sorry, but the only gambling-house in the place closed at twelve, and so did the only _cafe chantant_; and as it was now nearly half-past twelve, every one was properly in bed. I expressed myself fully, and they were hurt, and said that Egypt was a great country, and that after I had seen Cairo I would say so. So I told them I had not meant to offend their pride of country, and that I was going to Cairo in order to see things almost as old as wickedness, and much more worth while, and that all I asked of Port Said was that it should live up to its name. I told them to hire a house, and wake the people in Port Said up, and show me the very worst, lowest, wickedest, and most vicious sights of which their city boasted; that I would give them four hours in which to do it, and what money they needed. I should like to print what, after long consultation, the five guides of Port Said--which is a place a half-mile across, and with which they were naturally acquainted--offered me as the acme of riotous dissipation. I do not do so, not because it would bring the blush to the cheek of the reader, but to the inhabitants of Port Said, who have enjoyed a notoriety they do not deserve, and who are like those desperadoes in the West who would rather be considered "bad" than the nonentities that they are. I bought photographs, a box of cigarettes, and a cup of black coffee at Port Said. That cannot be considered a night of wild dissipation. Port Said may have been a sink of iniquity when Mr. Kipling was last there, but when I visited it it was a coaling station. I would hate to be called a coaling station if I were Port Said, even by me.

When I awoke after my night of riot at Port Said the _Sutlej_ was steaming slowly down the Suez Canal, and its waters rippled against its sandy banks and sent up strange odors of fish and mud. On either side stretched long levels of yellow sand dotted with bunches of dark green grass, like tufts on a quilt, over which stalked an occasional camel, bending and rocking, and scorning the rival ship at its side. You have heard so much of the Suez Canal as an engineering feat that you rather expect, in your ignorance, to find the banks upheld by walls of masonry, and to pass through intricate locks from one level to another, or at least to see a well-beaten towpath at its side. But with the exception of dikes here and there, you pass between slipping sandy banks, which show less of the hand of man than does a mill-dam at home, and you begin to think that Ferdinand de Lesseps drew his walking-stick through the sand from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and twenty thousand negroes followed him and dug a ditch. On either side of this ditch you see reproduced in real life the big colored prints which hung on the walls of the Sunday-School. There are the buffaloes drawing the ploughs of wood, and the wells of raw sun-baked clay, and the ditches and water-works of two cog-wheels and clay pots for irrigating the land, and the strings of camels, and the veiled women carrying earthen jars on the left shoulder. And beyond these stretches the yellow sand, not white and heavy, like our own, but dun-colored and fine, like dust, and over it amethyst skies bare of clouds, and tall palms. And then the boat stops again at Ismailia to let you off for Cairo, and the brave captains returning from leave, and the braver young women who are going out to work in hospitals, and the young wives with babies whom their fathers have not seen, and the commissioners returning to rule and bully a native prince, pass on to India, and you are assaulted by donkey-boys who want you to ride "Mark Twain," or "Lady Dunlo," or "Two-Pair-of-Black-Eyes-Oh-What-a-Surprise-Grand-Ole-Man." A jerky, rumbling train carries you from Ismailia past Tel-el-Kebir station, where the British army surprised the enemy by a night march and took a train back to Cairo in three hours. And then, after a five hours' ride, you stop at Cairo, and this chapter ends.

IV

CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE

As a rule, when you visit the capital of a country for the first time it is sufficient that you should have studied the history of that particular country in order that you may properly appreciate the monuments and the show-places of its chief cities; it is not necessary that you should be an authority on the history of Norway and Sweden to understand Paris or New York. For a full appreciation of most of the great cities of the world one finds a single red-bound volume of Baedeker to be all-sufficient; but when you go to Cairo, in order that you may understand all that lies spread out for your pleasure, you should first have mastered the Old and the New Testament, a complete history of the world, several of Shakespeare's plays, and the files of the London _Times_ for the past ten years. Almost every man who was great, not only in the annals of his own country, but in the history of the world, has left his mark on this oldest country of Egypt, as tourists to the Colosseum have scratched their initials on its stones, and so hope for immortality. You are shown in Cairo the monuments of great monarchs and of a great people, who were not known beyond the limits of their own country in contemporaneous history only because there was no contemporaneous history, and of those who came thousands of years later. The isle of Rodda, between the two banks of the Nile at Cairo, marks where Moses was found in the bulrushes; a church covers the stones upon which Mary and Joseph rested; in the city of Alexandria is the spot where Alexander the Great scratched his name upon the sands of Egypt; the mouldering walls of Old Cairo are the souvenirs of Caesar, as are the monuments upon which the Egyptians carved his name with "Autocrator" after it. At Actium and Alexandria you think of Antony and of the two women, so widely opposed and so differently beautiful, whom Sarah Bernhardt and Julia Neilson re-embody to-day in Paris and in London, and to whom Shakespeare and Kingsley have paid tribute. Mansoorah marks the capture of Saint-Louis of France, and the crescent and star which is floating over Cairo at this minute speak of Osman Sultan Selim I., with whom began the dependence of Egypt as a part of the Ottoman Empire. From there you see the windmills and bake-ovens of Napoleon, which latter, stretching for miles across the desert, mark the march of his army. Abukir speaks of Nelson and the battle of the Nile; and after him come the less momentous names Tel-el-Kebir and "England's Only General," Wolseley, and the fall of Khartoom and the loss of Gordon. The history of Egypt is the history of the Old World.

Moses, Rameses II., Darius, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Mehemet Ali, and Nelson--these are all good names; and yet what they failed to do is apparently being done to-day by an Army of Occupation without force, but with the show of it only: not by a single great military hero, but by a lot of men in tweed suits who during business hours irrigate land and add up columns of irritating figures, and in their leisure moments solemnly play golf at the very base of the pyramids. The best of Cairo lies, of course, in that which is old, and not in what has been imported from the New World, and its most amusing features are the incongruities which these importations make possible. I am speaking of Cairo now from a tourist's point of view, and not from that of a political economist. He would probably be interested in the improved sanitation and the Mixed Tribunal.