The gates of the East: a winter in Egypt and Syria

Contents

PAGE.

Preface, - 5

I. From Italy to Egypt, - 9

Preface

We had started for the Pyramids before eight o'clock in the morning. This was not, it must be owned, to get a view of them by sunrise, but to avoid being detained on the wrong side of the Nile, by the opening of the drawbridge which connects Cairo and the west bank of the river, until late in the afternoon. But though our early rising had no better motive than our convenience, it had its own abundant reward. It was early in December, and the country, as we rode on through the chill morning air, was covered by a dense mist which made any object at the distance of a hundred yards all but invisible. We were under the shadow of the Pyramids, therefore, almost before we were aware of their neighborhood, and as we turned to find the Sphinx, a sudden parting

VI PREFACE.

of the dense vapors flashed its colossal outlines upon us with an effect which was almost uncomfortably startling.

Silently we stood and gazed. In our search we had become separated, and though but a few feet apart were viewing it from opposite angles.

"What a pure and graceful outline/' I exclaimed, " despite its colossal proportions."

My companion remained silent a moment longer, and then said, slowly :

" Scarcely pure or graceful, I should say. The lips are too full to suggest such an idea, and the expression, while gracious and serene, is distinctly African and somewhat coarse and animal."

And straightway there followed a controversy which was both long and heated. Suddenly it occurred to the two disputants to exchange places, and soon after it became apparent that we were in imminent danger of exchanging our opinions likewise.

This modest parable is perhaps a sufficient apology for the following pages. Books about the East, of a far less unambitious character than this little volume, are already abundant. But each man's reminiscences of travel give a view of more or less familiar

PREFACE. Vll

scenery from a comparatively fresh viewpoint. And so these recollections of what others have already seen and described in pages both grave and gay, may perhaps help to set some features of the East in less wonted, if more subdued, lights.

Their title is intended chiefly as a disclaimer of any pretensions to extended research. *As Jaffa and Alexandria, as they are described in the following pages, are the thresholds, respectively, of Egypt and Syria, so are the Egypt and Syria of to-day little more than the gates or portals of that vaster East which lies beyond them. To these still unfamiliar and, in some degree, unvisited regions, curiosity still turns most eagerly ; and, meantime, while waiting for the reports of the adventurous spirits who are exploring them, may perhaps be willing to divert itself with reminiscences of lands and peoples less unfamiliar. H. C. P.

I

The Parting -Place of Two Forms of Civilization — The Influence of Indian life upon English Manners and English Character,

The traveller who leaves Brindisi as a passenger on board one of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company's vessels, bound for Egypt, takes his last look at Italian shores as the stately ship creeps cautiously out of that ancient harbor at the hour of five in the morning. If the weather be fine, the first faint hints of daybreak will be flecking the distant East, and little by little as the vessel moves from her moorings the outlines of the town will be coming into view. At such a moment our traveller, if he be a tolerably quick observer, will discern, standing close to the water's edge, a low and ragged-looking structure, without either the dignity of age or

IO FROM ITALY TO EGYPT.

the fresher charms of youth, across whose face runs the legend in staring capitals, " English Welcome. " If he be in a cynical mood (as he is greatly apt to be if he has travelled since noon of the previous day without pause, having come through from Bologna to Brindisi, some four hundred miles, by means of an allnight ride in a railway carriage, which is not a Pullman palace sleeping-car), he will be very apt to mutter something not very complimentary to the Italian ingenuity which, by such beguiling words, would fain coax the homewardbound traveller into a dirty inn where he will be regaled with stale beer and sour wine.

And yet the words, after a rudely typical fashion, are at once expressive and true. The steamships that sail from Alexandria, in Egypt, to Brindisi, in Italy, are the carriers of the great tide of traffic between India and England, or, indeed, between Asia and Europe. And so, when the voyager from the East lands at last at that Italian port which was once the ancient Brindisium, he for the first time comes in contact with western civilization, and hears a European, and not unfrequently an English, welcome. In a word, in the experience of travel the port of Brindisi may be said to be the point at which the two civilizations part

FROM ITALY TO EGYPT. u

company ; and as I leaned over the taffrail of the good ship Hindostan, and read the slowlyfading words " English Welcome " over the door of the little Italian inn, I comprehended that they meant for me not welcome but farewell. The timbers beneath my feet were of English oak, and the commander who stood near me, issuing his few and brief orders, was unmistakably of English stock and training; but the crew who did his bidding were quite as unmistakably of another race. It did not require their Oriental costume, and quick, lithe movements, to betray them as Asiatics. There was in all that they did that wonderful absence of bustle or flurry which is one of the greatest charms of Eastern people. One could understand, while watching them, why it is that we Westerns have learned to turn to the East for rest. To a tired and fevered brain, fretted and fagged with the incessant hurry of our American ways, there is something inexpressibly soothing in the mere accidents of Oriental life. It is not only that the climate of the East itself disposes one to inactivity, but scarcely less, I am disposed to believe, because of that absence of nervous worry, of noise, of impatience, of sharp tones and pushing eagerness, which

12 FR03I ITALY TO EGYPT.

contribute so largely, though often so insensibly, to wear upon one's nerves in connection with tasks and responsibilities that may not be exceptionally great or grave. During the progress of .our voyage the wind sprang up suddenly, as it is so apt to do on the Mediterranean, and it became necessary to lower the ample awning which had been spread over the deck, and to do it with the utmost rapidity. The dullest imagination can easily depict to itself the amount of bluster and profanity on the part of superiors, and of clamor and blundering on the part of the crew, with which, on a ship manned as we are ordinarily accustomed to see them manned, this would have been accomplished. But as it was, there was something in the swift, silent, and unerring rapidity with which, amid the utter darkness of the evening, these Asiatics began and finished their task, which was almost ghost-like.

But it is not alone by the crew that one is reminded that he has turned his back upon the civilization and the customs of the West. The viands that appear upon the ship's table — among them "Bombay duck," which is a kind of dried fish, eaten as bread with one's curry, and Madras biscuit, in which assafcetida

FROM ITALY TO EGYPT. 1 3

is a prominent ingredient — the punka which hangs suspended over our heads as we partake of these novel delicacies ; the currency in which the smoker pays for his cigars, the price of which, as he is informed, is " ten for a rupee w ; the slatted partitions of our state-rooms, arranged so as to make the ship a vast sieve through which the air can fully play — all these things tell us that we have left behind us wellnigh everything that is distinctive of European life.

And of this we are reminded not less forcibly as we come to know and identify our fellow passengers. There is, it is true, a sprinkling of tourists— travellers who are going to the East in search of rest, of novelty, or of a more sunny climate; but, as a rule, the ship's list is made up of persons who have homes or duties in the far East, and who are hastening back, after a Summer in England, to hard work in Bombay or Calcutta. There are judges and military men, wellbronzed and nobly-bearded subalterns in the Indian civil service ; there is a missionary, a bride, and a Roman archbishop of Calcutta; and, most interesting to those of us who have homes and children, there are parents whom the hard exigencies of the Indian climate

14 FROM ITALY TO EGYPT

have compelled to leave behind in England their children, and who are putting weary years and thousands of miles between them and all that is dearest to them. But whatever may be their private histories, almost all of them are, as travelled Englishmen so universally are, delightful companions and most kindly and intelligent fellow-travellers. It is surely one of the lesser boons of India to England that it has rubbed off from so many English people the somewhat narrow and insular characteristics which make English men and women sometimes not altogether lovely to their American cousins. We shall probably never see these fellow-voyagers of ours again ; but we shall remember them, I fancy, for many a day to come.

Crossing the Mediterranean Sea is apt to be a troubled and turbulent experience ; but our voyage from shore to shore (I write these lines within sight of that modern Pharos which lights the way to the port of Alexandria) has been as serene as a journey by steamboat up the Hudson ; and in the evening, when the main deck, lighted, under its vast awning, with huge globe lamps hung at intervals along its whole length, is thronged with the gay groups that have come up from our 6 o'clock

FROM ITALY TO EGYPT.

dinner, it is hard to realize that one is at sea at all. There is not even the usual ocean swell, and the level sea, with the moon just rising behind the hills of Candia — that Crete which, to the Christian hearts, will forever be consecrated by its association with its first Bishop, the devout and zealous Titus — combines to make a scene at once unique and picturesque. To any one seeking repose, such a life at sea, could it last long enough, would be simply perfect ; and as one of our party, a lady of somewhat nervous temperament, confesses to having slept twelve hours without awaking, it may safely be recommended as a " soft nepenthe " for irritated and tired nervous organizations.

But I am warned that it is time to stop. A soft-voiced and comely-looking personage in a flowing costume of dark blue, with a brilliant sash and turban, appears unexpectedly at my elbow, and informs me that we are to go ashore at Alexandria without delay, and that he is commissioned to escort our party as far as Cairo. He is Hassan Speke by name, and he bears credentials from honored New Yorkers, which encourage us to confide ourselves to his guidance with entire assurance. A short row in an open boat, a parting glance at our good ship Hindostan, and our feet are on Egyptian soil and our ears saluted with the babel of tongues which mark an Eastern seaport.

II

First Impressions of the East — The Bible and the Arabian Nights — Aladdin Buying his Lamp.

There is undoubtedly one advantage in a Custom House which has never been adequately recognized. It is a singularly efficient check upon a traveller's excessive enthusiasm. The world will probably never know how many glowing utterances have been stifled and silenced by the petty vexations of " passing " one's luggage. The voyager from the West who sails into the harbor of Alexandria will be dull, indeed, if both memory and imagination are not aroused by the sight of its towers and mosques and minarets. His mind will first recall the grand Macedonian conqueror whose name it bears, and if he be a Christian student he will not less vividly remember its once matchless library, and the story of the translations of the Septuagint. Not less vividly will rise the history of the Church in Alexandria and of the great names whose genius Kingsley has inwoven into the thread of his greatest novel, "Hypatia." And .then the nearer history of later days, of the conquests of the Turk and of the Corsican — it is very easy to see that there is a great deal of material here for " fine " writing and " gushing " enthusiasm ; but it is astonishing how rapidly this enthusiasm evaporates ■ in the presence of a preternaturally solemn-looking African gentleman, whose compound expression of self-consequence and stupidity makes one recall instinctively some early fruits of the Fifteenth Amendment, who challenges your trunks as they are landed from the feluccas, and whose vigilance in their examination will depend, absolutely and invariably, upon the very practical question whether you approach him beforehand with one rupee or two. You know, and you know that he knows, that the Egyptian customs laws exempt all passengers' luggage of whatever sort, and that he has not the slightest right to do more than assure himself of what is obvious enough, that you are a traveller and not a trader ; and this knowledge does not contribute to the serenity of your temper while he commands you to open one portmanteau after another, his blundering and bungling scrutiny of which indicates most plainly that he would not be able to recognize a contraband article if he should see it.

The ordeal produces one effect with unerring certainty. By the time you have got through with the ebony guardian of the Khedive's revenue (whose tint implies his Nubian rather than Egyptian extraction), every vestige of sentimental enthusiasm has evaporated, and you are in a fine state of indifference as to every historic association or monument of antiquity by which Alexandria is distinguished.

Perhaps it is as well that it is so, for otherwise the sights that greet one who passes for the first time through the thronged and narrow streets of this busy seaport would be almost too much for his equanimity. Alexandria is undoubtedly one of the least eastern of eastern cities. Its own national customs and characteristics have been so overlaid with those of other races and lands that in some parts of the town there is little that is not distinctively French or English or Italian. There are shops and signs and posters on the walls representing each and all of these nations and their speech. But all this does not extinguish, if it does much more than most imperfectly modify, the intensely unfamiliar look of that which your first drive or walk reveals to you. The open shops, with their cross-legged proprietors sitting so close to the carriage-way that one might reach out his hand and reap a harvest of commercial turbans without leaving his seat; the water-carriers, with their skins filled with water and borne upon their shoulders; the microscopic donkeys, bearing personages so rotund and portly that one wonders why Mr. Bergh has never moved eastward with his merciful work of prevention ; the veiled women, who look so mysterious, and whose costumes are so perfect a type, in their hideous shapelessness, of their harder lot of seclusion and inferiority ; the tropical fruits and flowers, which by their endless profusion make vulgar and valueless the rarest exotics of the hot-houses of European princes ; all these things come upon one with a force of surprise and fascination which no familiarity derived from books or the spoken reminiscences of others can in the slightest degree diminish. Indeed, all the descriptions of books and the glowing tales of travellers are alike forgotten, with two memorable exceptions — one of these is the Bible, and the other is the "Arabian Nights." I shall never forget the suddenness with which, when for the first time I saw an Arab set's, or runner, flying, a very figure of Mercury, with his flowing and wing-like sleeves, his long, slender wand, and his indescribably graceful, elastic, and at the same time fleet and tireless, gait — there sprung to my lips the passage, " And Elijah girded up his loins and ran before the chariot of Ahab, even to the entrance of Jezreel."

So scarcely less of scenes from the " Arabian Nights." I passed, one day, the shop or booth of a dealer in lamps, and in the attitude of a young Egyptian, who stood critically scrutinizing a brass lamp, which, from its material and shape, looked as if it might have been made a thousand years ago, there was something which made me exclaim,

" Aladdin ! " as if on the instant the marvels of the wonderful lamp were waiting to be repeated. There is a strange excitement in scenes like these, when they are met for the first time, which makes one almost doubt, for the moment, his own identity.

Just because words can so poorly reproduce such impressions, I shall not be guilty of the impertinence of describing what so many others have seen and sketched before, and what art has made even more familiar than have letters. Of course every newcomer in Egypt goes to see Pompey's Pillar and Cleopatra's Needle, and equally of course, if he is moved to think about them at all, resents the mistaken tradition which associates the former with a name which it was not reared to commemorate, and despises the latter as so contemptible a memorial of so famous a woman ; but I think that those of us who went sight-seeing together for the first time in Alexandria found our foremost object of interest in a very different direction, and in a far more modern structure. Some of us had heard of the Hospital of the Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth, and we were anxious to see something, if possible, of their work. Of our visit I shall have some account to give in another chapter.

III

First Days in Egypt — Perpetually Unclouded Skies — Conversation Minus the Weather — The Deaconesses' Hospital Work.

The day of our arrival in Alexandria happened, fortunately, to be one of the two days in the week when the Hospital of the Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth is open to visitors, and upon driving to the gateway we were at once admitted to the wards. A more striking contrast to the scenes which we had left without it would not be easy to conceive. A few moments before we had stood at the base of the pillar which, known as Pompey's, commemorates the victories of Diocletian, amid surroundings which appealed with equal orTensiveness to almost all our senses. It was just at the edge of a huge cemetery, whose living fringe consisted of a straggling line of hovels, so mean and dreary that one felt instinctively that the living must daily envy the happier and more decent lot of the dead who slept beside them. The Egyptians have a passion for sitting, eating, sleeping, and working on the ground, which to our western eyes is as filthy as it is unintelligible; and then the flies and the heat and the decaying debris of vegetable matter — all this made a condition so degraded and pitiful that it seemed almost an affront to be passively looking upon it, instead of straightway setting to work to better it.

It was from such spectacles that we passed in an instant to the roomy, cool, and spotlesslyclean precincts of the Deaconesses' Hospital. I had made it my business while in the great cities of Europe to inspect their hospitals with especial reference to the two points of arrangement and ventilation. In these respects, and no less in many others, nothing could be better than the Kaiserswerth Hospital at Alexandria. The Germans have a happy gift of making the houses in which they live look cosey and home-like ; and in the wards, as we passed on through the hospital, there were so many nameless little tokens of thoughtfulness and refinement that we recognized at once the

24 THE LAND OF THE SUM

presence of womanly taste and painstaking. It being visitors' day, the patients were, some of them, enjoying the visits of friends, and there was something indescribably pathetic in the brightening and grateful looks which they, and those persons who sat beside them, turned upon the sister who accompanied us from ward to ward.

Mission-work, so far as it has been an attempt to convert them from their ancient faith, has been proverbially slow and disheartening work among Mohammedan races, and missionaries have found how almost invincible are the prejudices of a people who cling so tenaciously to the religious traditions of their past ; but one could not help thinking that if anything could efficiently translate to the Egyptian the spirit of the religion of Jesus Christ, and, at the same time, win a way for it to the hearts of these disciples of the Moslem prophet, it would be the incomparable beauty and benignity of this work of the Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth.

A work more devoid of sentimentalism, and yet more heroic in its unrecorded self-denials, it would be hard to imagine. The diseases which bring patients to the hospital are often of the most distressing and loathesome kind.

and a life of such ministrations, in a debilitating climate, far from home and friends, is one that only the loftiest inspirations could make endurable. And yet the simple, robust, practical way in which the deaconesses went about their work was a positive refreshment to behold. There was an utter absence of a complaining or whining or sanctimonious tone, an open-eyed and straightforward candor in mien and speech and gesture, which might well be imitated by the members of religious orders everywhere. Yet these women can feel, and feel intensely; for when one of the visitors, upon leaving, placed in the hand of the sister who had attended us a substantial token of interest in the work, her face, as she received it, and her voice, as she said in broken and stammering English, " Surely the Lord will reward you," were surcharged with intensest emotion.

As we passed out of the hospital gate we were greeted with a scene which most forcibly recalled to us our Oriental surroundings. Seated on the ground just beside the road was a woman draped in black from head to foot, and surrounded by a circle of female figures. We found, upon inquiry, that it was a mother who had lost her son (the lad having just died in the hospital), and whose friends had come to mourn with her. Here, as before, we found ourselves thinking of descriptions in the Bible, and the picture of Job's friends sitting at the first as these women were sitting, in a common and unbroken silence, became a living reality. We could not help hoping that here the resemblance might end, and that, unlike the Patriarch in his grief, the bereaved mother might not be tortured by the impertinent attempts of her friends to interpret to her the dealings of God.

As we rode back to our inn, the clouds which had been gathering broke, and we were disposed to grumble at the inconvenience to which the shower seemed likely to subject us ; but we were silenced when our dragoman told us that it was the first rain that Alexandria had had for a year ! When, after it was over, and the evening closed down upon us, we looked out from our balcony upon such a night as one sees nowhere else in the world, we had a fresh surprise. A friend in Paris had charged us to provide ourselves with an astronomical chart, and we were thankful that we had heeded the suggestion. Such a contrast to the skies of Europe it is simply impossible to imagine. Among our travelling

THE LAND OF THE SUN. 2 J

companions in crossing the Mediterranean was a distinguished American whose official residence is in Germany, and who mentioned that he had not seen the sun in Berlin for five weeks. It was not surprising, therefore, to hear him say that when he glided out of the Mont Cenis Tunnel into the sunny air of Italy, " it was like coming into heaven ; " but even the sun and the sky of Italy seem pale beside those of Egypt; and when the night comes it has a soft and luminous charm which makes going to bed seem almost profanity. In Alexandria, moreover, our surroundings made sleep nearly as impossible as it seemed irreverent ; for, whether it was a consequence of the situation of our inn, or of the exigencies of some Mohammedan feast or fast, our ears were saluted all night long with the call of the muezzin to prayer, and whether his call was the ancient one, " Prayer is better than sleep," or some other, we were unanimous in the conclusion that nothing could have been worse than such wretched sleep as was ours.

But, in spite of all such minor annoyances — and, of course, it is only in exceptional situations that they are to be encountered — the climate of Egypt has a perpetual and matchless charm. Its airs are not softer, nor its skies sunnier, perhaps, than those of parts of our own land or many others. But to the invalid, its unbroken equilibrium, if I mayuse the phrase, must be an unspeakable comfort. The American inhabitants of Egypt whom I have seen declare that its Summer heats are less excessive than those of New York, while its serene and sunny Winters, where storms are simply impossible, make living a perpetual delight. The effect it has, however, of withdrawing from active circulation a large part of the most useful small change of western conversation is at once amusing and awkward. Coming from England, where, at the close of a great ecclesiastical gathering, lasting for a week, during the whole of which the sun was visible for just five hours, I nevertheless heard the mayor of the city felicitating the members of the assembly upon the fact that they had been "favored with such remarkably fine weather," one naturally remarks the dawn Of a sunshiny morning. But to an inhabitant it 'is, apparently, quite unmeaning to speak of it. If you say it is a fine day, he stares at you w T ith an air of curious interrogation which shows that he does not quite grasp your meaning. It is as much a truism as if you had said " there is a sun in the heavens." To him it is as much the function of the sun to shine in an absolutely unclouded sky as it is that of the earth to turn upon its axis. I am not sure that so much sunshine might not grow monotonous at last, but as a change from harsher and gloomier skies it is certainly most delightful. As one experiences it for the first time, his wonder is not that there has been one Lady Duff Gordon with her home upon the banks of the Nile, but rather that the whole English people in a body do not flock to the land of whose great commercial highway they have so lately and so wisely possessed themselves.

IV

j)aij$ in ©rnrxu

Odd Phases of Mohammedan Character — The Remedy for Egypfs Ills,

It is an ignominious approach to Cairo to find your way into it by means of an English railway carriage. If one has read Eden's descriptions of the approach to the city, as seen from the Nile, or from the back of a camel, he realizes that he is purchasing comfort at a very large sacrifice of picturesqueness as he runs into the Cairo station. The station itself wears the air of a stoppingplace on the Pacific Railway, with the addition of a slight French veneer. There is nothing Oriental in the omnibus, or in the steeds that draw it, and one has to drive a block or two before he realizes that he is in an Oriental city.

The first thing that conspicuously indicates that is a drinking fountain erected by the present Khedive's mother, and indicating on the part of that estimable old lady a thoughtfulness for the comfort of the common people which has not always been the distinguishing characteristic of her royal son. Nothing could be more utterly unlike a European or American drinking fountain than this one in Cairo. It looks, instead, like a bank or a prison, and is as difficult of approach as if it were a post-office. In order to get your cup of water you have to climb a steep flight of steps and apply at one of a series of windows, which are closed by massive iron gratings, through which the water is warily passed. And such a sight makes one straightway appreciate the preciousness of pure water. I realized it in another way when I was told that an officer in high rank in the government indicated his especial confidence in his second wife (who, it appears, is far more of a favorite than any of the other three) by entrusting to her keeping the key of his water-jar. Could there be a more expressive indication, incidentally, of the life of wariness and suspicion which an Oriental personage of rank so often leads, expecting to be poisoned by the hands of the persons who owe him the most loyal