In The Levant

We directed our steps over the bramble-grown plain to the hill Pion. I suppose Pion may have been the acropolis of Ephesus, the spot of the earliest settlement, and on it and around it clustered many of the temples and public buildings. The reader will recall Argos, and Athens, and Corinth, and a dozen other cities of antiquity, for which nature furnished in the midst of a plain such a convenient and easily defended hill-fortress. On our way thither we walked amid mounds that form a street of tombs; many of the sarcophagi are still in place, and little injured; but we explore the weed-hid ground with caution, for it is full of pitfalls.

North of the hill Pion is a low green valley, encircled with hills, and in the face of one of its ledges, accessible only by a ladder, we were pointed out the cave of the Seven Sleepers. This favorite myth, which our patriotism has transferred to the highlands of the Hudson in a modified shape, took its most popular form in the legend of the Seven Sleepers, and this grotto at Ephesus was for many centuries the object of Christian and Moslem pilgrimage. The Christian legend, that in the time of the persecution of Diocletian seven young men escaped to this cave and slept there two centuries, and awoke to find Christianity the religion of the empire, was adopted and embellished by Mohammed. In his version, the wise dog Ketmehr, or Al Rakiin as the Koran names him, becomes an important character.

“When the young men,” says Abd-el-Atti, “go along the side of the hill to the cave, the dog go to follow them. They take up stones to make him go back, for they ‘fraid of him bark, and let the people know where they hide. But the dog not to go back, he sit down on him hind, and him look berry wise. By and by he speak, he say the name of God.

“‘How did you know that?’ ask him the young men.

“‘I know it,’ the dog say, ‘before you born!’

“Then they see the dog he wise by Allah, and know great deal, and let him to go with ‘em. This dog, Ketmehr, he is gone, so our Prophet say, to be in Paradise; no other dog be there. So I hope.”

The names of the Seven Sleepers and Ketmehr are in great talismanic repute throughout the East; they are engraved upon swords and upon gold and precious stones, and in Smyrna you may buy these charms against evil.

Keeping round the hill Pion, we reached the ruins of the gymnasium, heaps of stone amid brick arches, the remains of an enormous building; near it is the north gate of the city, a fine marble structure, now almost buried. Still circling Pion we found ourselves in a narrow valley, on the other side of which was the long ridge of Conessus, which runs southward towards the sea. Conessus seems to have been the burial-place of the old town. This narrow valley is stuffed with remains of splendid buildings, of which nothing is now to be seen but heaps of fine marble, walls, capitals, columns, in prodigal waste. We stopped to admire a bit of carving, or to notice a Greek inscription, and passed on to the Stadium, to the Little Theatre, to the tomb of St. Luke. On one of the lintels of the entrance of this tomb, in white marble, as fresh as if carved yesterday, is a cross, and under it the figure of an Egyptian ox, the emblem of that saint.

We emerged from this gorge to a wide view of the plain, and a glimpse of an arm of the sea. On this plain are the scattered ruins of the old city, brick, stone, and marble,—absolute desolation. On the left, near the sea, is a conical hill, crowned by one of the towers of the ancient wall, and dignified with the name of the “prison of St. Paul.” In this plain is neither life nor cultivation, but vegetation riots over the crumbling remains of Ephesus, and fever waits there its chance human prey. We stood on the side of the hill Pion, amid the fallen columns and heaped walls of its Great Theatre. It was to this theatre that the multitude rushed when excited against Paul by Demetrius, the silversmith, who earned his religion into his business; and here the companions of Paul endeavored to be heard and could not, for “all with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” This amphitheatre for fifty thousand spectators is scooped out of the side of the hill, and its tiers of seats are still indicated. What a magnificent view they must have enjoyed of the city and the sea beyond; for the water then came much nearer; and the spectator who may have wearied of the strutting of the buskined heroes on the stage, or of the monotonous chant of the chorus, could rest his eye upon the purple slopes of Conessus, upon the colonnades and domes of the opulent city, upon the blue waves that bore the merchants’ ships of Rome and Alexandria and Berytus.

The theatre is a mine of the most exquisite marbles, and we left its treasures with reluctance; we saw other ruins, bases of columns, the remains of the vast city magazines for the storage of corn, and solid walls of huge stones once washed by the sea; we might have wandered for days amid the fragments, but to what purpose?

At Ephesus we encountered no living thing. Man has deserted it, silence reigns over the plain, nature slowly effaces the evidence of his occupation, and the sea even slinks away from it. No great city that I have seen is left to such absolute desolation; not Pæstum in its marsh, not Thebes in its sand, not Ba’albek, not even Memphis, swept clean as it is of monuments, for its site is vocal with labor and bounteous in harvests. Time was, doubtless, when gold pieces piled two deep on this ground could not have purchased it; and the buyers or sellers never imagined that the city lots of Ephesus could become worth so little as they are to-day.

If one were disposed to muse upon the vagaries of human progress, this would be the spot. No civilization, no religion, has been wanting to it. Its vast Cyclopean foundations were laid by simple pagans; it was in the polytheistic belief of the Greeks that it attained the rank of one of the most polished and wealthy cities of antiquity, famed for its arts, its schools of poetry, of painting and sculpture, of logic and magic, attracting to its opportunities the devout, the seekers of pleasure and of wisdom, the poets, the men of the world, the conquerors and the defeated; here Artemisia sheltered the children of Xerxes after the disaster of Salamis; here Alexander sat for his portrait to Apelles (who was born in the city) when he was returning from the capture of Sardis; Spartans and Athenians alike, Lysander and Alcibiades, sought Ephesus, for it had something for all; Hannibal here conferred with Antiochus; Cicero was entertained with games by the people when he was on his way to his province of Cilicia; and Antony in the character of inebriate Bacchus, accompanied by Cleopatra, crowned with flowers and attended by bands of effeminate musicians, made here one of the pageants of his folly. In fact, scarcely any famous name of antiquity is wanting to the adornment of this hospitable city. Under the religion of Christ it has had the good fortune to acquire equal celebrity, thanks to the residence of Paul, the tent-maker, and to its conspicuous position at the head of the seven churches of Asia. From Ephesus went forth the * news of the gospel, as formerly had spread the rites of Diana, and Christian* churches and schools of philosophy succeeded the temples and gymnasia of the polytheists. And, in turn, the cross was supplanted by the crescent; but it was in the day when Islamism was no longer a vital faith, and except a few beautiful ruins the Moslem occupation has contributed nothing to the glory of Ephesus. And now paganism, Christianity, and Moslemism seem alike to have forsaken the weary theatre of so much brilliant history. As we went out to the station, by the row of booths and coffee-shops, a modern Greek, of I do not know what religion, offered to sell me an image of I do not know what faith.

There is great curiosity at present about the relics and idols of dead religions, and a brisk manufacture of them has sprung up; it is in the hands of sceptics who indifferently propagate the images of the Virgin Mary or of the chaste huntress Diana.

The swift Asiatic train took us back to Smyrna in a golden sunset. We had been warned by the agent not to tarry a moment beyond eight o’clock, and we hurried breathless to the boat. Fortunately the steamer had not sailed; we were in time, and should have been if we had remained on shore till eight the next morning. All night long we were loading freight, with an intolerable rattling of chains, puffing of the donkey-engine, and swearing of boatmen; after the novelty of swearing in an Oriental tongue has worn off, it is no more enjoyable than any other kind of profanity.

XII.—THE ADVENTURERS

WE sailed away from Smyrna Sunday morning, with the Achille more crowded than when we entered that port. The second-class passengers still further encroached upon the first-class. The Emir of Damascus, with all his rugs and beds, had been pushed farther towards the stern, and more harems occupied temporary pens on our deck, and drew away our attention from the natural scenery.

The venerable, white-bearded, Greek bishop of Smyrna was a passenger, also the tall noble-looking pasha of that city, just relieved and ordered to Constantinople, as pashas are continually, at the whim of the Sultan. We had three pashas on board,—one recalled from Haifa, who had been only twenty days at his post. The pasha of Smyrna was accompanied by his family, described on the register as his wife and “four others,” an indefinite expression to define an indefinite condition. The wife had a room below; the “four others” were penned up in a cushioned area on the saloon deck, and there they squatted all day, veiled and robed in white, poor things, without the least occupation for hand or mind. Near them, other harems of Greeks and Turks, women, babies, slaves, all in an Oriental mess, ate curds and green lettuce.

We coasted along the indented, picturesque shore of Asia, having in view the mountains about ancient Pergamus, the seat of one of the seven churches; and before noon came to Mitylene, the ancient Lesbos, a large island which bears another Mount Olympus, and cast anchor in the bay upon which the city stands.

By the bend of the bay and the opposite coast, the town is charmingly land-locked. The site of Mitylene, like so many of these island cities, is an amphitheatre, and the mountain-slopes, green and blooming with fruit-trees, are dotted with white houses and villages. The scene is Italian rather than Oriental, and gives one the general impression of Castellamare or Sorrento; but the city is prettier to look at than to explore, as its broad and clean streets, its ordinary houses and European-dressed inhabitants, take us out of our ideal voyaging, and into the regions of the commonplace. The shops were closed, and the country people, who in all countries appear to derive an unexplained pleasure in wandering about the streets of a city hand in hand, were seeking this mild recreation. A youthful Jew, to whom the Sunday was naught, under pretence of showing us something antique, led us into the den of a Greek, to whom it was also naught, and whose treasures were bags of defaced copper coins of the Roman period.

Upon the point above the city is a fine mediaeval fortress, now a Turkish fort, where we encountered, in the sentinel at the gate, the only official in the Orient who ever refused backsheesh; I do not know what his idea is. From the walls we looked upon the blue strait, the circling, purple hills of Asia, upon islands, pretty villages, and distant mountains, soft, hazy, serrated, in short, upon a scene of poetry and peace, into which the ancient stone bastion by the harbor, which told of days of peril, and a ruined aqueduct struggling down the hill back of the town,—the remnant of more vigorous days,—brought no disturbance.

In Lesbos we are at the source of lyric poetry, the Æolian spring of Greece; here Alcæus was born. Here we come upon the footsteps of Sappho. We must go back to a period when this and all the islands of these heavenly seas were blooming masses of vegetation, the hills hung with forests, the slopes purple with the vine, the valleys laughing with flowers and fruit, and everywhere the primitive, joyful Greek life. No doubt, manners were somewhat rude, and passions, love, and hate, and revenge, were frankly exhibited; but in all the homely life ran a certain culture, which seems to us beautiful even in the refinement of this shamefaced age. The hardy youth of the islands sailed into far seas, and in exchange for the bounty of their soil brought back foreign fabrics of luxury. We know that Lesbos was no stranger to the Athenian influence, its scholars had heard Plato and Aristotle, and the warriors of Athens respected it both as a foe and an ally. Charakos, a brother of Sappho, went to Egypt with a ship full of wine, and returned with the beautiful slave Doricha, as part at least of the reward of his venture.

After the return of Sappho and her husband from their flight into Sicily, the poet lived for many years at Mitylene; but she is supposed to have been born in Eresso, on the southwestern point of the island, where the ruins of the acropolis and remains of a sea-wall still mark the site of the famous town. At any rate, she lived there, with her husband Kerkylas, a landed proprietor and a person of consequence, like a dame of noble birth and gentle breeding as she was; and in her verse we have a glimpse of her walking upon the sandy shore, with her little daughter, the beautiful child whom she would not give up for the kingdom of Lydia, nor for heavenly Lesbos itself. That Sappho was beautiful as her image on the ancient coins represents her, and that she was consumed by passion for a handsome youth, the world likes to believe. But Maximus of Tyre says that she was small and dark;—graces are not so plenty, even in heaven, that genius and beauty can be lavished upon one person. We are prone to insist that the poet who revels in imagination and sounds the depth of passion is revealing his own heart, and that the tale that seems so real must be a personal experience. The little glimpse we have of Sappho’s life does not warrant us to find in it the passionate tempest of her burning lyrics, nor is it consistent with her social position that she should expose upon the market-place her passion for the handsome Phaon, like a troubadour of the Middle Ages or a Zingara of Bohemia. If that consuming fire was only quenched in the sea at the foot of “Leucadia’s far-projecting rock of woe,” at least our emotion may be tempered by the soothing knowledge that the leap must have been taken when the enamored singer had passed her sixtieth year.

We did not see them at Mitylene, but travellers into the interior speak of the beautiful women, the descendants of kings’ daughters, the rewards of Grecian heroes; near old Eresso the women preserve the type of that indestructible beauty, and in the large brown eyes, voluptuous busts, and elastic gait one may deem that he sees the originals of the antique statues.

Another famous woman flits for a moment before us at Lesbos. It is the celebrated Empress Irene, whose cruelty was hardly needed to preserve a name that her talent could have perpetuated. An Athenian virgin and an orphan, at seventeen she became the wife of Leo IV. (a. d. 780), and at length the ruler of the Eastern Empire. Left the guardian of the empire and her son Constantine VI., she managed both, until the lad in his maturity sent his mother into retirement. The restless woman conspired against him; he fled, was captured and brought to the palace and lodged in the porphyry chamber where he first had seen the light, and where he last saw it; for his eyes were put out by the order of Irene. His very existence was forgotten in the depths of the palace, and for several years the ambitious mother reigned with brilliancy and the respect of distant potentates, until a conspiracy of eunuchs overturned her power, and she was banished to Lesbos. Here history, which delights in these strokes of poetic justice, represents the empress earning her bread by the use of her distaff.

As we came from Mitylene into the open sea, the view was surpassingly lovely, islands green and poetic, a coast ever retreating and advancing, as if in coquetry with the blue waves, purple robing the hills,—a voyage for poets and lotus-eaters. We were coming at night to Tenedos, to which the crafty Greeks withdrew their fleet when they pretended to abandon the siege, and to old Troy, opposite; we should be able to feel their presence in the darkness.

Our steamer, as we have intimated, was a study of nationalities and languages, as well as of manners. We were English, American, Greek, Italian, Turkish, Arab, Russian, French, Armenian, Egyptian, Jew, Georgian, Abyssinian, Nubian, German, Koor-land, Persian, Kurd; one might talk with a person just from Mecca or Medina, from Bagdad, from Calcutta, from every Greek or Turkish island, and from most of the capitals of Europe. A couple of Capuchins, tonsured, in brown serge with hanging crosses, walked up and down amid the throng of Christians, Moslems, and pagans, withdrawn from the world while in it, like beings of a new sex. There was a couple opposite us at table whom we could not make out,—either recently married or recently eloped, the man apparently a Turkish officer, and his companion a tall, showy woman, you might say a Frenchman’s idea of physical beauty, a little like a wax Madonna, but with nothing holy about her; said by some to be a Circassian, by others to be a French grisette on an Eastern tour; but she spoke Italian, and might be one of the Continental countesses.

The square occupied by the emir and his suite—a sort of bazaar of rugs and narghilehs—had music all day long; a soloist, on three notes, singing, in the Arab drawl, an unending improvised ballad, and accompanying himself on the mandolin. When we go to look at and listen to him, the musician betrays neither self-consciousness nor pride, unless you detect the latter in a superior smile that plays about his lips, as he throws back his head and lets his voice break into a falsetto. It probably does not even occur to his Oriental conceit that he does well,—that his race have taken for granted a thousand years,—and he could not be instructed by the orchestra of Von Bulow, nor be astonished by the Lohengrin of Wagner.

Among the adventurers on board—we all had more or less the appearance of experiments in that odd assembly—I particularly liked the French prestidigitateur Caseneau, for his bold eye, utter self-possession, and that indefinable varnish upon him, which belonged as much to his dress as to his manner, and suggested the gentleman without concealing the adventurer. He had a taste for antiquities, and wore some antique gems, which had I know not what mysterious about them, as if he had inherited them from an Ephesian magician or a Saracenic doctor of the black art. At the table after dinner, surrounded by French and Italians, the conjurer exhibited some tricks at cards. I dare say they were not extraordinary, yet they pleased me just as well as the manifestations of the spiritists. One of them I noted. The trickster was blindfolded. A gentleman counted out a pack of cards, and while doing so mentally fixed upon one of them by number. Caseneau took the pack, still blinded, and threw out the card the gentleman had thought of. The experiment was repeated by sceptics, who suspected a confederate, but the result was always the same.

The Circassian beauty turned out to be a Jewess from Smyrna. I believe the Jewesses of that luxurious city imitate all the kinds of beauty in the world.

In the evening the Italians were grouped around the tables in the saloon, upon which cards were cast about, matched, sorted, and redistributed, and there were little piles of silver at the corners, the occasional chinking of which appeared to add to the interest of the amusement. On deck the English and Americans were singing the hymns of the Protestant faith; and in the lull of the strains of “O mother dear, Jerusalem,” you might hear the twang of strings and the whine of some Arab improvisatore on the forward deck, and the chink of changing silver below. We were making our way through a superb night,—a thousand people packed so closely that you could not move without stepping into a harem or a mass of Greek pilgrims,—singing hymns, gambling, listening to a recital of the deeds of Antar, over silver waves, under a flooding moon, and along the dim shores of Asia. That mysterious continent lay in the obscurity of the past; here and there solitary lights, from some shepherd’s hut in the hills or fortress casemate by the shore, were the rents in the veil through which we saw antiquity.

XXIII.—THROUGH THE DARDANELLES

THE Achille, which has a nose for freight, but none for poetry, did not stop at Tenedos, puffed steadily past the plain of Troy, turned into the broad opening of the Dardanelles, and by daylight was anchored midway between the Two Castles. On such a night, if ever, one might see the evolution of shadowy armies upon the windy plain,—if, indeed, this conspicuous site was anything more than the theatre of Homer’s creations,—the spectators on the walls of Ilium, the Greeks hastily embarking on their ships for Tenedos, the joyful procession that drew the fatal gift into the impregnable walls.

There is a strong current southward through the Dardanelles, which swung the vessel round as we came to anchor. The forts which, with their heavy modern guns, completely command this strait, are something less than a mile and a half apart, and near each is a large and handsome town,—Khilid-bahri on the European shore and Chanak-Kalesi on the Asiatic. The latter name signifies the pottery-castle, and is derived from the chief manufactory of the place; the town of a couple of thousand houses, gayly painted and decorated in lively colors, lies upon a sandy flat and presents a very cheerful appearance. It is a great Asiatic entrepôt for European products, and consular flags attest its commercial importance.

When I came upon deck its enterprising traders had already boarded the steamer, and encumbered it with their pottery, which found a ready market with the pilgrims, for it is both cheap and ugly. Perhaps we should rather say fantastic than ugly. You see specimens of it all over the East, and in the bazaars of Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus it may be offered you as something rare. Whatever the vessel is,—a pitcher, cup, vase, jar, or cream-pot,—its form is either that of some impossible animal, some griffin, or dragon, or dog of the underworld, or its spout is the neck and head of some fantastic monster. The ware is painted in the most startling reds, greens, yellows, and blacks, and sometimes gilt, and then glazed. It is altogether hideous, and fascinating enough to drive the majolica out of favor.

Above these two towns the strait expands into a sort of bay, formed on the north by a promontory jutting out from the Asiatic shore, and upon this promontory it is now agreed stood old Abydos; it is occupied by a fort which grimly regards a corresponding one on the opposite shore, not a mile distant. Here Leander swam to Hero, Byron to aquatic fame, and here Xerxes laid his bridge. All this is plain to be seen; this is the narrowest part of the passage; exactly opposite this sloping site of Abydos is a depression between two high cliffs, the only point where the Persian could have rested the European extremity of his bridge; and it surely requires no stretch of the imagination to see Hero standing upon this projecting point holding the torch for her lover.

The shore is very pretty each side, not bold, but quiet scenery; and yet there is a contrast: on the Asiatic horizon are mountains, rising behind each other, while the narrow peninsula, the Thracian Chersonesus of the ancients, which forms the western bank of the Dardanelles, offers only a range of moderate hills. What a beautiful stream, indeed, is this, and how fond history has been of enacting its spectacles upon it! How the civilizations of the East and West, in a continual flow and reflow, push each other across it! With a sort of periodic regularity it is the scene of a great movement, and from age to age the destinies of the race have seemed to hang upon its possession; and from time to time the attention of the world is concentrated upon this water-street between two continents. Under whatever name, the Oriental civilization has been a misfortune, and the Western a blessing to the border-land; and how narrowly has Europe, more than once, from Xerxes to Chosroes, from Omar to the Osmanlis, seemed to escape the torrent of Eastern slavery. Once the culture of Greece passed these limits, and annexed all Asia Minor and the territory as far as the Euphrates to the empire of intelligence. Who shall say that the day is not at hand when the ancient movement of free thought, if not of Grecian art and arms, is about to be renewed, and Europe is not again to impose its laws and manners upon Little Asia? The conquest, which one sees going on under his eyes, is not indeed with the pomp of armies, but by the more powerful and enduring might of commerce, intercourse, and the weight of a world’s opinion diffused by travel and literature. The Osmanli sits supinely and watches the change; the Greeks, the rajahs of all religions, establish schools, and the new generation is getting ready for the revolution; the Turk does not care for schools. That it may be his fate to abandon European Turkey and even Constantinople, he admits. But it is plain that if he goes thus far he must go farther; and that he must surrender a good part of the Roman Eastern Empire. For any one can see that the Hellespont could not be occupied by two powers, and that it is no more possible to divide the control of the Bosphorus than it is that of the Hudson or the Thames.