The wonderful adventures of Phra the Phoenician

Front matter

win Lester Arno mmt. •m pi

ELLIN'S FOOD

FOR INFANTS AND INVALIDS.

Introduction

By SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, K.C.I.E.

In the garden of my Japanese home in Tokyo I have jus^ perused the last sheets of my son's philosophical and historical romance ' Phra the Phoenician.'

Amid other scenes I might be led to analyse, to criticise, perhaps a little to argue about the singular hypothesis upon which he builds his story. Here, 'with a Buddhist temple at my gate, and with Japanese Buddhists around me, nothing seems more natural than that an author, sufficiently gifted with imagination and study, should follow his hero beyond the narrow limits of one little existence, down the chain of many lives, taken up link by link, after each long interval of rest and reward in the Paradise of J6-D6. I have read several chapters to my Asiatic friends, and they say, ' Oh, yes ! It is ingwa ! it is Karma ! That is all quite true. We, alsq have lived many times, and shall live many times more on this earth.' One of them opens the slioji to let a purple and silver butterfly escape into the sunshine. She thinks some day it will thank her — perhaps a million years hence.

Moreover, here is a passage which I lately noted, suggestive enough to serve as preface, even by itself, to the present book. Commenting on a line in my ' Song Celestial,' the writer thus remarks : ' The human soul should therefore be regarded as already in the present life connected at the same time with vi INTRODUCTION

two worlds, of which, so far as it is confined to personal unity to a body, the material only is clearly felt. It is, therefore, as good as proved, or, to be diffuse, it could easily be proved, or, better still, it will hereafter be proved (I know not where or when), that the human soul, even in this life, stands in indissoluble community with all immaterial natures of the spirit-world ; that it mutually acts upon them and receives from them impiessions, of which, howe-vei, as man it is unconscious, as long as all goes well. It is, therefore, truly one and the same subject, which belongs at the same time to the visible and to the invisible world, but not just the same person, since the representations of the one world, by reason of its different quality, are not associated with ideas of the other, and therefore what I think as spirit is not remembered by me as man.'

I, myself, have consequently taken the stupendous postulates of Phra's narrative with equanimity, if not acceptance, and derived from it a pleasure and entertainment too great to express, since the critic, in this case, is a well-pleased father.

The author of ' Phra ' has claimed, for Romance, the ancient license accorded to Poetry and to Painting —

He has supposed a young Phoenician merchant, full of the love of adventure, and endowed with a large and observant if very mystic philosophy — such as would serve for no bad stand-point whence to witness the rise and fall of religions and peoples. The Adventurer sets out for the ' tin islands,' or Cassiterides, at a date before the Eoman conquest of England. He dies and lives anew many times, but preserves his personal identity under the garb of half a dozen transmigrations. And yet, while renewing in each existence the characteristic passions and sentiments which constitute his individuality and preserve the unity of the narrative, the author seems to me to have

INTRODUCTION vii

adapted hhn to varying times and places with a vraisemblanca and absence of effort which are extremely effective.

A Briton in British days, the slave-consort of his Druid wife, he passes, by daring but convenient inventiveness, into the person of a Centurion in the household of a noble Eoman lady who illustrates in her surroundings the luxurious vices of the latter empire with some relics still of the older Bepublican virtues. Hence he glides again into oblivion, yet wakes from the mystical slumber in time to take part in King Harold's gallant but fatal stand against the Normans.

He enjoys the repose, as a Saxon thane, which the policy of the Conqueror granted to the vanquished ; but after some startling adventures in the vast oak woods of the South kingdom is rudely ousted from his homestead by the ' foreigners,' and in a neighbouring monastery sinks into secular forgetfulness once more of wife and children, lands and life.

On the return of consciousness he finds himself enshrined as a saint, thanks to the strange physical phenomena of his suspended animation, and learns from the Abbot that he has lain there in the odour of sanctity, according to indisputable church records, during 800 years.

He wanders off again, finding everything new and strange, and becomes an English knight under King Edward III. He is followed to Crecy by a damsel who from act to act of his long life-drama similarly renews an existence linked with his own, and who constantly seeks his love. She wears the armour of a brother knight, and on the field cf battle she sacrifices her life for his.

Yet once more, a long spell of sleep, which is not death, brings this much-wandering Bhra to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and it is there, after many and strange vicissitudes, he writes his experiences, and the curtain finally falls over the last passage of this remarkable record.

Such, briefly, is the framework of a creation which, while viii INTRODUCTION

it has certainly proved to me extremely seductive i^s a story, is full, I think, of philosophical suggestiveness. As long as men count mournfully the years of that human life which M. Eenan has declared to be so ridiculously short, so long their fancies will hover about the possibility of an elixir vita, of splendidly extended spans like those ascribed to the old patriarchs, and meditate with fascination the mystical doctrines of Buddhism, and the Vedantas. In such a spirit the Egyptians wrapped their dead in careful fashion, after filling the body with preservatives ; and if ancient tomes have the 1 Seven Sleepers ' of the Koran, the Danish King who dozes under the Castle of Elsinore, and our own undying King Arthur, do we not go to see ' Eip van Winkle ' at the play, and is not hybernation one among the problems of modern science which whispers that we might, if we liked, indefinitely adjourn the waste of corporeal tissue, and spread our seventy or eighty years over ever so many centuries ?

But to be charming an author is not obliged to be credible, or what would become of the ' Arabian Nights,' of ' Gulliver,' and of the best books in the library ? Personally I admire and I like ' Phra ' enormously, and, being asked to pen these few lines by way of introduction, I counsel everybody to read it, forgetting who it is that respectfully offers this advice until the end of the book, when I shall bo no longer afraid if they remember.

Tokyo, Japan : AjprU 14, 1890.

THE WONDERFUL ADVENTURES

OF

Prologue

Well and truly an inspired mind has written, ' One man in his time plays many parts,' but surely no other man ever played so many parts in the course of a single existence as I have.

My own narrative seems incredible to me, yet I am myself a witness of its truth. When I say that I have lived in this England more than one thousand years, and have seen her bud from the callowest barbarity to the height of a prosperity and honour with which the world is full, I shall at once be branded as a liar. Let it pass ! The accusation is familiar to my ears. I tired of resenting it before your fathers' fathers were born, and the scorn of your offended sense of veracity is less to me than the lisping of a child.

1 was, in the very distance of the beginning, a citizen of that ancient city whose dominion once stretched from the blue waters of the Mge&n round to and beyond the broad stream of the Nile herself. Your antiquities were then my household gods, your myths were my beliefs ; those facts and fancies on the very fringe of records about which you marvel were the commonplace things of my commencement. Yes ! and those dusty relics of humanity that you take with unholy zeal from the silent chambers of sarcophagi and pyramids were my boon companions, the jolly revellers I knew long ago — the good fellows who drank and sang with me through warm, long-- forgotten nights — they were the great princes to whom I bent an always duteous knee, and the fair damsels who tripped our sunny streets when Sidon existed and Tyre was not a matter of speculation, or laughed at their own dainty reflections, in the golden leisure of that forgotten age, where the black-legged ibis stood sentinel among the blue lotus-flowers of the temple ponds.

Since then, what have I not done ! I have travelled to the corners of the world, and forgotten my own land in the love of another. I have sat here in Britain at the tables of Eoman Centurions, and the last of her Saxon Kings died in my arms. I have sworn hatred of foreign tyrants in the wassail bowls of serfs, and bestrode Norman chargers in tiltyards and battlefields. The kingdoms of the misty western islands which it was my wonderful fortune to see submerged by alternate tides of conquest, I have seen emerge triumphant, with all their conquerors welded into one. I have seen more battles than I can easily recall, and war in every shape ; I have enjoyed all sorts of peace, from the rudest to the most cultivated.

I have lived, in fact, more than one thousand years in this seagirt island of yours ; and so strange and grim and varied have been my experiences that I am tempted to set them down with a melancholy faith in my own uniqueness. Though it is more than probable few will believe me, yet for this I care nothing, nor do I especially seek your approval of my labours. I, who have tasted a thousand pleasures and am hoary with disappointments, can afford to hold your censure as lightly as I should your commendation.

Here, then, are my adventures, and this is how they commenced.

Chapter I

Regarding {he exact particulars of my earliest wanderings, I do confess I am somewhat uncertain. This may tempt you to reply that one whose memory is so far-reaching and capacious as mine will presently prove might well have stored up everything that befell him from Ms very beginning. All I can say is, things are as I set them down ; and those facts which you cannot believe you must continue to doubt. The first thirty years of my life, it will be guessed in extenuation, were full of the frailties and shortcomings of an ordinary mortal ; while those years which followed have impressed themselves indelibly upon my mind by right of being curious past experience and credibility.

Looking back, then, into the very remote past is like looking upon a country which a low sun at once illuminates and blurs. I dimly perceive in the golden haze of the ancient time a fair city rising, tier upon tier, out of the blue waters of the midland sea. A splendid harbour frames itself out of the mellow uncertainty — a harbour whereof the long white arms are stretched out to welcome the commerce of all the known world ; and under the white fronts and at the temple steps of that ancient city, Commerce poured into the lap of Luxury every commodity that could gratify cupidity or minister to human pleasure.

I was young then, no doubt, nor need I say a fool ; and very likely the sight of a thousand strange sails at my father's door excited my daily wonder, while the avarice which recognises no good fortune in a present having was excited by the silks and gems, the rich stuffs and the gums, the quaint curiosities of human ingenuity and the frolic things of nature, which were piled up there. More than all, my imagination must have been fired by the sea-captains' tales of wonder or romance, and, be the cause what it may, I made up my mind to adventure like them, and carried out my wilful fancy.

It is a fitting preface to all I have learnt since that my first real remembrance should be one of vanity. Yet so it was. More than a thousand years ago — I will not lower my record by a single lustre to propitiate your utmost unbelief — I set out on a first voyage. It might be yesterday, so well it comes before nie — with my youthful pride as the spirit of a man was born within, and I felt the strong beat of the fresh salt waves of the open sea upon my trading-vessel's prow, and knew, as I stood there by her steering-oar, that she was stuffed with a hundred bales of purple cloth from my father's vats along the shore, and bound whither I listed. Who could have been prouder than I ? — who could have heard finer songs of freedom in the merry hum of the warm southern air in the brown cordage overhead, or the frothy prattle of the busy water alongside, as we danced that day out of the white arms of Tyre, the queenly city of the ancient seas, and saw the young world unfurl before us, full of magnificent possibilities ?

It is not my wish or intention to writa of my early travels,

4 WONDERFUL ADVENTURES CP

were it possible. On this voyage (or it may be on some others that followed, now merged into the associations of the first) we traded east and west with adventure and success. The adventure was sure enough, for the great midland sea was then the centre of the world, and, what between white-winged argosies of commerce, the freebooters of a dozen nations who patrolled its bays and corners, and rows of royal galleys sailing to the conquest of empires, it was a lively and perilous place enough. As for the profit, it came quickly to those who opened a hundred virgin markets in the olden days.

We sailed into the great Egyptian river up to Heliopolis, bartering stuffs for gold-dust and ivory ; at another time we took Trinacrian wine and oranges into Ostia — a truly magnificent port, with incredible capacities for all the fair and pleasant things of life. Then we sailed among the beautiful Achaian islands with corn and olives ; and so, profiting everywhere, we lived, for long, a jolly, uncertain life, full of hardship and pleasure.

For the most part we hugged the coasts and avoided the open sea. It was from the little bays, whose mouths we thus crossed, that the pirates we greatly dreaded dropped down upon merchantmen, like falcons from their perches. When they took a vessel that resisted, the crew, at those rough hands, got scant mercy. I have come across a galley drifting idly before the wind, with all her crew, a grim row of skeletons, hanging in a row along her yard and swinging this way and that, and rattling drearily against the sail and each other in melancholy unison with the listless wallow of their vessel. At another time, a Roman trireme fell upon a big pirate of Merita and stormed and captured her. The three hundred men on board were too ugly and wicked to sell, so the Romans drove them overboard like sheep, and burned the boat. When we sailed over the spot at sundown the next day, she was still spluttering and hissing, with the water lapping over the edge of her charred side, and round among the curls of yellow smoke overhead a thousand gulls were screeching, while a thousand more sat gorged and stupid upon the dead pirates. Not for many nights did we forget the evil picture of retribution, and how the setting sun flooded the sea with blood, and how the dead villains, in all their horror, swirled about in twos and threes in that crimson light, and fell into our wake, drawn by the current, and came jostling and grinning, and nodding after us, though we made all sail to outpace them> in a gloomy procession for a mile or so.

It often seemed to me in those days there were more freebooters afloat than honest men. At times we ran from these, at times we fought them, and again we would give a big marauder a share of cargo to save the ship from his kindred who threatened us. It was a dangerous game, and one never knew on rising where his couch would be at night, nor whether the prosperous merchant of the morning might not be the naked slave of the evening, storing his own wealth in a robber cave under the lash of some savage sea-tyrant.

Yet even these cruel rovers did me a good turn. We were short of water, and had run down along a lonely coast to a green spring we knew of to fill water-butts and skins. When we let go in the little inlet where the well was to be found, another vessel, and, moreover, a pirate, lay anchored before us. However, we were consciously virtuous, and, what was of more consideration, a larger vessel and crew than the other, so we went ashore and made acquaintance round the fresh water with as villainous a gang of sea-robbers as ever caused the blood of an honest trader to run cold in his veins. The very air of their neighbourhood smelled so of treachery and cruelty we soon had but one thought — to load up and be gone.

But this was a somewhat longer process than we wished, as our friends had baled the little spring dry, and we had to wait its refilling. While we did so, I strolled over to a group of miserable slaves turned out for an airing, and cowering on the black and shadeless rocks. There were in that abject group captives from every country that fared upon those seas, and some others besides. The dusky peasant of Boeotia, that fronts the narrow straits, wrung her hands by the faircheeked girl snapped up from the wide Gulf of Narbo ; the dark Numidian pearl-fisher cursed his patron god ; and the tall Achaian from the many islands of Peloponnesian waters grit his teeth as he cowered beneath his rags and bemoaned the fate that threw him into the talons of the sea-hawks.

I looked upon them with small interest, for new-taken slaves were no great sight to me, until I chanced, a little way from the others, upon such a captive as I had rarely or never seen. She struck me at once as being the fiercest and most beautiful creature that mortal eyes had ever lit upon. Never was Umbrian or Iberian girl like that ; never was Cyprian

Aphrodite served by a maid so pink and white. Her hair was fiery red gold, gleaming in the sunshine like the locks of the young goddess Medusa. Her face was of ruddy ivory, and her native comeliness gleamed through the unwashed dust and tears of many long days and nights. Her eyes were as blue under her shaggy wild hair as the sky overhead, and her body — grimy under its sorrow-stains — was still as fair as that of some dainty princess.

Knowing the pirate captain would seek a long price for his property, I determined to use a little persuasion with him. I went back to my men, and sent one of them, proficient in the art of the bowstring, to look at the slaves. Then I drew the unsuspecting scoundrel up there for a bargain, and, well out of sight of his gang, we faced the red-haired girl and discussed her price. The rascal's first figure was three hundred of your modern pounds, a sum which would then have fetched the younger daughter of a sultan, full of virtue and accomplishments. As this girl very likely had neither one nor the other, I did not see why it was necessary to pay so much, and stroking my beard, in an agreed signal, with my hand, as my man was passing behind the old pirate he slipped a length of twisted cloth over bis wicked neck and tightened it with a jerk that nearly started the eyes from his head, and brought him quickly to his knees.

' Now, delicately minded one,' I said, ' I don't want to fight you and your crew for this maid here, on whom I have set my heart, but you know we are numerous and well armed, so let us have a peaceful and honest bargain. Give me a fairer price ; ' and obedient to my signal the band was loosened.

' Not a sesterce will I take off,' spluttered the wretch, ' not a drachma, not an ounce.'

' Come ! come ! think again,' I said persuasively, ' and the cloth shall help you.' Thereon another turn was taken, and my henchman turned his knuckles into the nape of the swarthy villain's neck, until the veins on his forehead stood out like cordage and the blood ran from his nose and eyes.

In a minute the rover threw up his hands and signed he had enough, and when he got his breath we found he had knocked off a hundred pounds. We gave him the cord again, and brought him down, twist by twist, to fifty. By this time he was almost at his last gasp, and I was contented, paying the coins out on a r--1 — J 1— -' — +1 — iU — —'+1- +1— — rue

PJIRA THE PIKEX1CIAN <j

well bound. I was always honest, though, as became the times, a trifle hard at bargains.

Then I cut the red maid loose and took her by the elbow and led her down to the beach, where we were secretly picked up by my fellows, and shortly afterwards we set sail again for the open main.

Thus was acquired the figure-head of my subsequent adventures— the Siren who lured me to that coast where I have lived a thousand years and more.

It was the inscrutable will of Destiny that those shining coins I paid down on the bare hot African rock should cost me all my wealth, my cash and credit at many ports, and that that fair slave, who I deemed would serve but to lighten a voyage or two, should mock my forethought, and lead my fate into the strangest paths that ever were trodden by mortal foot.

In truth, that sunny virago bewitched me. She combined such ferocity with her grace, and was so pathetic in her reckless grief at times, that I, the immovable, was moved, and softened the rigour of her mischance as time went on so much as might be. At once, on this, like some caged wild creature, which forgives to one master alone the sorrows of captivity, she softened to me ; and before many days were over she had bathed, and, discarding her rags for a length or two of cloth, had tied up her hair with a strand of ribbon she found, and, looking down at her reflection in a vessel of water (her only mirror, for we carried women but seldom), she smiled for the first time.

- After this progress was rapid, and, though at first we could only with difficulty make ourselves understood, yet she soon picked up something of the Southern tongue from me, while I very fairly acquired the British language of this comely tutoress. Of her I learnt she was of that latter country, where her father was a chief; how their coast-village had been surprised by a Southern rover's foray ; she knew not how many of the people slain or made captive, and herself carried off. Afterwards she had fallen into the hands of other pirates by an act of sea barter, and they were taking her to Alexandria, hoping, as I guessed, in that luxurious city to obtain a higher price than in the ordinary markets of Gaul or Italy.

What I heard of Britain from these warm lips greatly fired my curiosity, and. after +.nnpV.ir.« at several ports and ..,«• .. .^vi*v«iii my resolution.

We had sailed northward with a cargo of dates, and on the sixth day ran in under the high promontory of Massilia, which you moderns call Marseilles. Here I rid myself of my fruit at a very good profit, and, after talking to a brother merchant I met by chance upon the quay, fully determined to load up with oil, wine, stuffs, and such other things as he recommended, and sail at once for Britain.

Little did I think how momentous this hasty decision would be ! It was brought about partly as I have explained, and partly by the interest which just then that country was attracting. All the weapons and things of Britain were then in good demand : no tin and gold, the smiths roundly swore, were like the British ; no furs in winter, the Boman ladies vowed, were so warm as those ; while no patrician from Tarentum to the Tiber held his house well furnished unless a red-haired slave-girl or two from that remote place idled sad and listlessly in his painted porticoes.

In these slaves there was a brisk and increasing traffic. I went into the market that ran just along inside the harbour one day, and saw there an ample supply of such curious goods suitable for every need.

All down the middle of a wide street rough booths of sail-cloth had been run up, and about and before these crouched slaves of every age and condition. There were old men and young men — fierce and wild-looking barbarians, in all truthsome with the raw, red scars on chest and limbs they had taken a few weeks before in a last stand for liberty, and some groaning in the sickness that attended the slaver's lash and their condition.

There were lank-haired girls submitting with sullen hate to the appraising fingers of purchasers laughing and chatting in Latin or Gaulish, as they dealt with them no more gently than a buyer deals with sheep when mutton is cheap. Mothers, again — sick and travel- stained themselves — were soothing the unkempt little ones who cowered behind them and shrunk from every Roman footstep as the quails shrink from a kestrel's shadow. Some of these children were very flowers of comeliness, though trodden into the mire of misfortune. I bought a little girl to attend upon her upon my ship, who, though she wore at the time but one sorry cloth, and was streaked with dirt and dust, had eyes clear as the southern sky overhead, and hair that £.':':„:" '.:; .. ' ".,.. ...".,.,,. on her shoulders like a tissue of golden threads. Her mother was loth to part with her, and fought like a tiger when we separated them. It was only after the dealer's lash had cut a dozen red furrows into her back, and a bystander had beat her on the head with the flat of his sword, that she gave in and swooned, and I led the weeping little one away.

So we loaded up again with Eastern things, such as the barbarians might be supposed to like, and in a few weeks started once more. We sailed down the green coast of Hispania, through the narrow waters of Herculis Fretum, and then, leaving the undulating hills of that pleasant strait behind, turned northward through the long waves of the black outer sea.

For many days we rolled up a sullen and dangerous coast, but one morning our pilot called me from my breakfast of fruit and millet cakes, and, pointing over the green expanse, told me yonder white surf on the right was breaking on the steep rocks of Armorica, while the misty British shore lay ahead.

So I called out Blodwen the slave, and told her to snuff the wind and find what it had to say. She knew only too well, and was vastly delighted, wistfully scanning the long grey horizon ahead, and being beside herself with eagerness.

We steered westwardly towards the outer islands, called Cassiterides, where most of our people collected and bought their tin, but we were fated not to reach them. On the morrow so fierce a gale sprang out of the deep we could by no means stand against it, but turned and fled through the storm and over such a terrible expanse of mighty billows as I never saw the like of.

To my surprise, my girl thought naught of the wind and sea, but came constantly to the groaning bulwarks, where the angry green water swirled and gleamed like a cauldron, and, holding on by a shroud, looked with longing but familiar eyes at the rugged shore we were running down. At one time I saw her smile to recognise, close in shore, and plunging heavily towards some unknown haven, half a dozen of her own native fisher-boats. Later on, Blodwen brightened up even more as the savage cliffs of the west gave way to rolling downs of grass, and when these, as we fled with the sea-spume, grew lower, and were here and there clothed with woods, and little specks amonc +v>™~ -e ~_ . . _. ;:. shouted with joy, and,