Volume 70 — LEVANTINE RAMBLES.[3]

LEVANTINE RAMBLES.^[3]

Egotism is a shoal upon which literary travellers are particularly apt to damage their barks. Before us are two cases in point, although of different degree. Monsieur Gerard de Nerval, a Frenchman of letters, Mr F. A. Neale, an Englishman attached to the consular service, have each written a couple of volumes concerning Syria and adjacent lands, visited at about the same period. We need hardly say that there is little resemblance between the books. The numerous points of dissimilarity between the French and English characters are never more strikingly elicited than upon the road. Set the travellers to write down their experiences, and you have the palpable exposition of the diverting contrast. In two respects, however, Messrs Neale and Nerval resemble each other. Both are very amusing; each is more or less of an egotist. The Frenchman is the more, the Englishman the less. Mr Neale’s egotism is artless and inoffensive. His book is a collection of notes made for the amusement of himself and friends, and which in course of years grew to considerable bulk. Long a resident and rambler in the country he writes about, he unites the advantages of an observant eye, an agreeable style, a happy discrimination of what is most likely to interest and prove novel to the public. His greatest fault is not to have more carefully weeded his manuscript of trivial personal incidents, quite in place in a letter to a friend, but which have no claim to the honours of type. Forgive this defect, and there is little else to pardon in a book that gives us an excellent notion of the aspect and mode of life of a country with which, considering its proximity to Europe, and the all-important events in sacred and profane history that have occurred upon its soil, we can hardly say that our acquaintance is as intimate as it ought to be. Monsieur de Nerval is a gentleman of far different pretensions from Mr Neale, whose faults are the result of literary inexperience, not of conceit or affectation. There is more of malice prepense about the Frenchman’s egotism. Quite as amusing as his English rival, he makes us laugh twice as much; but probably he would be the last man to suspect the chief motive of our mirth. Deeply sensible of the strong interest personally attaching to him, he keeps his most private feelings and proceedings constantly before the reader. Withdraw from his work all those passages in which Gerard de Nerval figures as the hero, and the corpulent octavos would shrink into pamphlets. As we read, fancy presents us with his portrait upon every page. It simpers at us out of a graceful vignette, or peeps through the fantastical wreaths of a decorative capital; draped in Oriental robes, surmounted with a Turkish head-dress, the scalp despoiled by Mahomedan razor of all its flowing honours, save one tress upon its summit, the beard trimmed in conformity with the latest fashion of Stamboul. Turn the page and behold him galloping, with drawn yataghan, and glowing with military ardour, in the suite of a prince of Lebanon, out for a foray amongst the Maronites. A little farther he languishes at the feet of the lovely daughter of a Druse Sheik, or exerts his influence—far from inconsiderable—to obtain the release of her captive parent. But however occupied, whether martially, amorously, or philanthropically, Gerard de Nerval is always before us, the principal figure upon his own canvass. He is nothing if not egotistical. As to the value and extent of his information concerning the countries he visited, it is impossible to rate them highly, since he admits that his knowledge of Arabic was for some time limited to the single word tayeb—it is good—which conveys, he says, an infinity of meanings, according to the tone of its utterance, and which he takes to be the root of the Arabic tongue. It is quite clear, from various passages of his book, that he attained no great proficiency in his oriental studies, and that for the greater portion, if not for the whole period, of his stay in the East, he was at the mercy of roguish dragomans and casual acquaintances. He began his peregrinations farther south than did Mr Neale. After an introduction, somewhat pedantic and not much to the purpose, addressed, as well as the epilogue, to a mythic Hibernian, one Timothy O’Neddy, he abruptly opens his book at Cairo, by informing us that there the women are more hermetically veiled than in any other of the Levantine towns. The ladies, it must be observed, play a most important part in the narrative of this gallant and airy Frenchman, and have supplied subordinate titles to his volumes, the first of which is called The Women of Cairo, the second The Women of Lebanon. At the Egyptian city he had projected a residence of six months, and was mortally disheartened by the dull aspect of the place when, upon the first day of his arrival, he had passed some hours in wandering, mounted on a jackass and escorted by a dragoman, through its confused labyrinth of narrow dusty streets. The dragoman, whose name is Abdallah, is a character, and deserves better than to be passed over without a paragraph. M. de Nerval, who desired to husband his travelling purse, soon began to fear that he was too magnificent an attendant for so small a personage as himself.

“It was at Alexandria,” says Abdallah’s employer, “on the deck of the Leonidas steamer, that he first appeared to me in all his glory. He came alongside in a boat of his own, with a little black to carry his long pipe, and a younger dragoman to bear him company. A flowing white tunic covered his clothes, and contrasted with the colour of his face, in which the Nubian blood tinted features borrowed from the head of some Egyptian sphynx. Doubtless he was the offspring of two mixed races. Large golden rings weighed down his ears, and his indolent gait in his long garments completed to my imagination the ideal portrait of some freedman of the lower empire.

“There were no English amongst the passengers, and Abdallah, rather vexed at this, attached himself to me for want of a better. We disembarked; he hired four asses for himself, for his suite, and for me, and took me straight to the English hotel, where they were good enough to take me in, at the rate of sixty piastres a-day; as for himself, he limited his pretensions to half that sum, out of which he undertook to keep the second dragoman and the little black. After dragging this imposing escort at my heels for a whole day, I was struck by the inutility of the second dragoman, and even of the little boy. Abdallah made no objection to dismiss his young colleague; as to the little black, he kept him at his own charges, reducing, at the same time, his own salary to twenty piastres (about five francs) a-day. Arrived at Cairo, the asses carried us straight to the English hotel on the Esbekieh Square; but I checked their ardour on learning that the charges at this hotel were the same as at the one in Alexandria.

“‘You prefer, then, to go to the Waghorn hotel in the Frank quarter?’ said honest Abdallah.

“‘I should prefer a hotel which was not English.’

“‘Well! there is Domergue’s French hotel.’

“‘Let us go to it.’

“‘Pardon me, I will accompany you thither, but I cannot remain there.’

“‘Why not?’

“‘Because it is an hotel that only charges forty piastres a-day; I cannot go to it.’

“‘But I find it quite good enough for me.’

“‘You are unknown; I belong to the town; I am accustomed to attend English gentlemen; I must keep up my rank.’

Nevertheless, I considered the price of this hotel tolerably high for a country where everything is about six times less dear than in France, and where a piastre, or five sous of our money, is a labourer’s daily wage.

“‘There is a way of arranging matters,’ said Abdallah. ‘You shall go to Domergue’s for two or three days, and I will visit you as a friend; during that time I will take a house for you in the town, and then there will be no obstacle to my remaining in your service.’

“On inquiry, I found that many Europeans take houses in Cairo if they propose remaining there any time, and, having ascertained this, I gave full powers to Abdallah.”

Whilst this most dignified of dragomans was house-hunting, M. de Nerval passed his time as well as he could at the despised French hotel, which he found very comfortable, and which is built round a square white-washed court, covered with a light trellis-work, overgrown with vines. In an upper gallery of this court, a French artist, talented and amiable, but very deaf, had established his easel and his daguerreotype, and there he studied and sketched the forms of the principal Egyptian races. He had no difficulty in obtaining models amongst the lower classes of the Cairo women, most of whom, however, were exceedingly punctilious in veiling their features, however much of their persons they might be induced to expose to the artist’s gaze. The face is the last refuge of Oriental modesty. Besides the resource of the painter’s society, M. de Nerval found a very fair table d’hôte at the hôtel Domergue, several Anglo-Indians to laugh at, a piano, and a billiard-table. He began to think he might almost as well have remained at Marseilles. Impatient to commence a more Oriental mode of life, he allowed Abdallah to conduct him to various houses that were to let. House-rent is almost nominal in Cairo. He found that he might have a palace for about three pounds a-year. Abdallah showed him several such—stately mansions many stories high, with marble-paved halls and cooling fountains, with galleries and staircases as in Genoese and Venetian palaces, with courts surrounded by columns, and gardens shaded by rare trees. An army of slaves and servants was all that was needed to make them fitting residences for a prince. The engagement of such a retinue not entering into M. de Nerval’s calculations, he was glad to take a much smaller house, with glazed windows, (there was not a pane of glass in any of the palaces,) which had recently been occupied by an Englishman. Hiring a house in Cairo is rather a complicated operation. An act was drawn up in Arabic, and paid for; presents were made to the Sheik of the quarter, to the lawyer, and to the chief of the nearest guard-house; the scribes and servants had also to be fee’d. When M. de Nerval had complied with all these forms, the Sheik handed him the key. This was a piece of wood “like a baker’s tally, at one end of which five or six nails were driven in as if at random; but there was no random in the matter: this strange key is introduced into a hole in the door, the nails correspond with little holes, invisible from without, pass through them, and raise a wooden bolt.” In possession of the key, the next thing to be done was to furnish the house. Little money and less time sufficed to accomplish this. Some cotton and cloth were bought at a bazaar, and converted, in a few hours, into divan cushions, which served as mattresses at night. A basket-maker put together a sort of bedframe of palm twigs; a little round table, some cups and pipes—and the house was furnished and fit to receive the best company in Cairo. M. de Nerval’s first visitor was an officious Jew, a breeder of silk-worms, who established himself on one of the divans, took coffee and a pipe, and undertook to prove that his host had been swindled by Abdallah and the merchant at the bazaar, and had paid twice too much for everything he had bought. The Jew was followed by the Sheik, who came early the next morning and waited in the opposite coffee-house till M. de Nerval was up. He was a venerable old man with a white beard, and was attended by his secretary and negro pipe-bearer. When he was installed upon a divan, and supplied with the inevitable pipe and coffee, he informed M. de Nerval, through the medium of Abdallah, that he had brought him back the money he had paid for the house. It was an intimation that he was not approved of as a tenant. Greatly astonished, the Frenchman asked the reason. “His morality was suspicious,” was the reply; “he had no wife or female slave.” This was quite contrary to the custom of the country. He must supply the deficiency or quit the premises. His neighbours, who were better provided, would be uneasy at the proximity of a bachelor resident. In short, he had the option given him to marry or move. For the latter he had no fancy, when he had just furnished a house that suited him well; he was averse to matrimony, and his European scruples opposed the purchase of a female slave. Doubting the Sheik’s right to compel him to decamp or conjugate, he requested the functionary to take patience for a few days whilst he consulted his friends, to do which he at once sallied forth. We need hardly inform the discerning reader that this dilemma is the peg upon which the ingenious and facetious Frenchman contrives to hang a whole volume. On his way to seek advice from his countryman the painter, he falls in with a Turk, whose acquaintance he had made on board the steamboat, confides his difficulty to him, and the conversation that ensues fills a chapter. Then, whilst rambling about with the deaf artist, he gets into an adventure with two veiled ladies, whom he follows home, and who prove to be Frenchwomen, wife and sister-in-law of a renegade French officer. But the most practical information he obtained on the knotty point of acquiring a harem was from Yusef, the Jew silk-grower, who came daily to take a pipe on his divan and improve himself in the French language. From him he ascertained that there are four ways of contracting marriage at Cairo. The first and least binding is with a Cophtic woman before a Turkish santon; a union that, in fact, amounts exactly to nothing, the contracting parties being both Christians, and the officiating priest Mahometan. Then there is the marriage before a Cophtic priest, which admits of divorce on payment of a small sum in compensation; a third sort is binding so long as the husband remains in the country; whilst the fourth (celebrated both at the Cophtic church and Franciscan convent) gives the wife a right to follow him, and is a bonâ fide and permanent union—too permanent for M. de Nerval’s taste; who, considering the other three modes as merely so many recognised forms of concubinage, ended by purchasing, for twenty-five pounds sterling, a yellow slave of Malay or Javanese origin, with a sun tatooed upon her breast and forehead, and a lance-head upon her chin, and who had a hole through her left nostril, intended to receive a nose-ring. Having made this precious acquisition, he found she had pretensions to be treated as a cadine, (lady,) and esteemed it quite below her dignity to attend to domestic matters; and, in short, the unlucky Frenchman’s ill-advised acquiescence in Eastern customs brought upon him a host of troubles and annoyances, of which he makes the most for the benefit of his readers. The whole account of the author’s Egyptian proceedings reads more like a fantastical tale, invented at leisure, than a narrative of actual events; but in a note at the end of his work he protests that all he has written down really occurred. He had reckoned on making a considerable stay at Cairo; but notwithstanding the extraordinary cheapness of that city, he soon found his purse getting very low, as a consequence of the extravagance and caprices of the yellow woman, of his disorderly mode of housekeeping, and of the inexactness and roguery of most of those with whom he had any dealings. So he was obliged to shorten his term of residence, lest he should find himself without sufficient funds to reach Syria, which was his next destination. Having resolved on departure, he offered her liberty to the slave, whose name was Zeynab, if she chose to remain at Cairo. This proposal, instead of being gratefully received, excited the indignation of the cadine. What was she to do with her liberty? She requested him to sell her again to Abd-el-Kerim, the wealthy slave-dealer from whom he had bought her. But although he had not scrupled to buy her, he could not make up his mind to take money for human flesh and blood, and began to philosophise on the strange state of a country where slaves would not accept their freedom. Meanwhile Zeynab wept at the prospect of starvation, for she could do nothing to earn her bread, and was too proud to take service. The European, by aping the Turkish manner of life, had got himself into a perfect labyrinth of embarrassments. He had changed his dress and his diet, and had taken the first step towards the formation of a harem; but he would not change his religion, nor could he divest himself of certain civilised ideas, incompatible with the conditions of his new existence. He found all the inconveniences of his ambiguous manner of life, and evidently, although he does not care to confess it, wished he had abstained from his social experiments, and had followed the example of the sober-sided English, whom he laughs at for their constancy to roast-beef, porter, and potatoes, and whom he ludicrously sketches wandering about Cairo on donkeys, with long legs nearly touching the ground, with green veils fastened to their white hats, and blue spectacles protecting their eyes, with India-rubber overcoats, long sticks to keep off suspicious Arabs, and a groom and a dragoman on their right hand and on their left. The die was cast, however; he was too compassionate to leave the gold-coloured incubus to her fate; and the upshot was, that she was allowed to follow him to Syria, causing him, upon the way, almost as many annoyances as she had occasioned him at Cairo. The voyage was accomplished on board of a Levantine vessel, the Santa Barbara, commanded by a Greek named Nicholas. This was a one-masted craft, with a black, collier-like hull, a long yard, and a single triangular sail, manned by Turks, and laden with rice. The deck was encumbered with boxes of poultry—provisions for the voyage. The little den known as the captain’s cabin, for the use of which M. de Nerval had bargained, was infested with enormous red beetles, so that he was glad to resign his claim, and to establish himself in the longboat. This was suspended before the mast, and, with the help of cotton cushions and sail-cloth awning, it was converted into a very tolerable refuge, so long as the weather continued fine. A young Armenian scribe, who composed verses, and was in quest of employment, and to whom M. de Nerval had given a passage in his boat down the Nile, had also embarked in the Santa Barbara, and supplied the place of Abdallah as an interpreter. Captain Nicholas, an easy-going, hospitable, lubberly mariner, who had been half a pirate in the time of the Greek war, invited his passenger to partake of his pillau and Cyprus wine, and confided to him all his affairs. The indolent Greek passed his time in strumming one invariable tune on an old guitar, and in playing at chess with the pilot; his nautical talents were anything but brilliant, and his compass was out of order, so that it was hardly to be wondered at that, on the third day of the voyage, when they should have sighted Syria, Syria was nowhere to be seen. There was little or no wind; now and then a puff of air filled the sail, but soon died away, and the canvass flapped idly against the mast. Captain Nicholas troubled not his head about the matter: he had his chessmen and his guitar; they sufficed to occupy his attention. The Armenian was not quite so tranquil, and that evening he communicated to his French acquaintance the cause of his uneasiness. Although but three days from port, they were running short of water. M. de Nerval could not credit this.

“‘You have no notion of the carelessness of these people,’ said the Armenian. ‘To obtain fresh water, they must have sent a boat as far as Damietta, that at the mouth of the Nile being salt; and as the town was in quarantine, they dreaded the forms—at least, that is the reason they give; but the fact is, they never thought about it.’

“‘Astonishing!’ said I; ‘and yonder is the captain, singing as if our situation were the most natural in the world;’ and I went with the Armenian to question him on the subject.

“Captain Nicholas rose and showed me the water-casks, which were entirely empty, with the exception of one, which might still contain some five or six bottles of water; then he resumed his seat upon the poop, took up his guitar, and resumed his eternal song, lolling back his head against the bulwarks.

“The next morning I awoke early, and walked forward, thinking it might be possible to discern the shores of Palestine. But in vain did I polish the glasses of my telescope; the line of sea at the extreme horizon was as sharp and unbroken as the curved blade of a Damascus sabre. It was probable we had hardly changed our place since the previous evening. I returned towards the stern of the vessel. Everybody was fast asleep, with the exception of the cabin-boy, who was copiously washing his hands and face in water which he drew from our last cask of potable liquid!”

Fortunately a light westerly breeze sprang up in the evening. The next morning, so said Nicholas, the blue peaks of Mount Carmel would be visible in the horizon. Suddenly shouts of horror and consternation were heard. “A fowl overboard!” was the cry. M. de Nerval was disposed to treat this misfortune pretty lightly. Not so the owner, a Turkish sailor, who was in despair, and with whom his messmates warmly sympathised. The fowl floated astern, making signals of distress; the Turk had to be forcibly held, to prevent him jumping overboard; and, to M. de Nerval’s astonishment and disgust, the captain, after a moment’s hesitation, ordered the vessel to be brought to. After two days’ calm, and when running short of water, this seemed a singular way of profiting by a favourable breeze. M. de Nerval hoped to accelerate matters by giving the bereaved sailor a couple of piastres, a sum for which an Arab would at any time risk his life. The man’s countenance brightened, he pocketed the coins, pulled off his clothes, jumped into the sea, swam a prodigious distance, and returned in half-an-hour, so exhausted, that he had to be lifted on board, but bringing back his chicken, which he rubbed and warmed with as much care as if it had been an only child, and which at last he had the satisfaction of seeing hop about the deck. Once more sail was made, and the ship advanced. “The devil take the hen!” quoth the exasperated Nerval, “we have lost an hour. I have plenty of fowls, and would have given him several for that one.” The Armenian explained. It was a religious, or at least a superstitious question. The sailor had been on the point of cutting his fowl’s throat, when it flew away over his left shoulder. According to Turkish belief, had it been drowned, its owner had not three days to live. M. de Nerval began to weary of ship and crew, and his weariness became anger when he discovered that one of the sailors, an elderly Turk who had great influence over the others, as being a hadji or pilgrim returned from Mecca, was endeavouring to persuade the yellow woman that a Christian had no right to own a Mahometan slave of white blood, (she was the colour of saffron.) Captain Nicholas, as a Greek Christian, had little real authority over his Turkish crew, and that little he showed himself indisposed to exercise. Some rather animated scenes ensued, which were near ending in a fight between the Frenchman and the hadji. A sort of sullen hollow truce was brought about, but M. de Nerval’s position was not very agreeable, nor perhaps quite safe, when he suddenly remembered that he had in his pocket-book a letter of recommendation to Méhmed Réchid, pasha of Acre, from a Turkish friend of his who for some time had been member of the divan at Constantinople. He himself had been acquainted with the Pasha during his abode at Paris as member of the Turkish embassy, and, as luck would have it, all this was duly set forth in the letter, which was properly indited in Arabic, and which the Armenian, after placing it on his head in token of respect, read aloud to the captain and crew. It so happened that the ship was now off Acre, where she was compelled to put in for water; and the bastinado which M. de Nerval had threatened to procure for the crew, on their arrival in that port, no longer appeared to them in the light of an empty menace. The hadji and his shipmates drew in their horns, and were all humility; the Greek master apologised for the little vigour he had shown in repressing their insolence; and as to the yellow slave—“since you are the friend of Méhmed Pasha, who shall say she is not lawfully yours; who would dare to contend against the favour of the great?” So spoke Captain Nicholas, a true modern Greek in falseness and servility. And Zeynab, who had been refractory and had called her master a giaour, was sent for a short space to keep company with the beetles in the captain’s cabin.

However delightful may be a cruise in the Levant, on board a well-found vessel and with a competent crew, it is unpleasant, and at times almost perilous, in native craft, and with the deceitful and ignorant Greek and Arab captains. Mr Neale gives a shocking picture of his discomforts in an Arab felucca, on board which he coasted from Gaza to Caipha, and again from Caipha to Sidon. By special stipulation, he and his servant were to be the sole passengers. “Allah Rassi (by my head) it shall be as you desire,” vowed the lying Reis, when entering into his agreement in presence of the quarantine authorities; but when the “only passenger” went on board, he found the little vessel crowded with men, women, and children, and passed a night of extreme discomfort and irritation. Most of his journeys were by land. Starting from Gaza, the southernmost port of Syria, he made excursions to Hebron, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, returned to Gaza, and then went northwards along the coast, branching off inland to visit Antioch, Aleppo, and other places, and concluding with a trip into Asia Minor. Some of the Syrian towns he appears to have visited repeatedly during the eight years he spent in the country, and in most of them he made some stay. To any traveller proposing to visit Syria, his book will serve as a useful itinerary. He had, over M. de Nerval, the advantage of being well acquainted with Arabic. Like him, he has a fling at the eccentricities of English tourists, and exposes the rogueries of dragomans. He gives a ludicrous account of the proceedings of these worthies at Gaza, where he passed some months. The new Lazaretto and quarantine establishment at that place form a vast edifice, situated on a plain, about three hours’ journey from the Egyptian frontier. The construction was completed in the spring of 1850, at great expense to the Turkish government. The apartments allotted to Europeans are airy and wholesome in summer, warm and comfortable in winter; the charges made are very trifling; and the term of detention is but five days, including the day of entry and that of pratique: so that, waiving the question of the expediency of quarantine against Egypt, travellers might fairly be expected to submit patiently, and with a good grace, to the brief incarceration within walls thirty feet high. And so they for the most part do. The refractory ones, almost without exception, are natives of the British isles. In 1850, the Nazir, or director of the quarantine, was Achmet Effendi, an affable Turkish gentleman who had been educated in Italy, spoke and wrote Italian fluently, was a good musician, and altogether a civilised and agreeable person, very different from the usual run of pompous pipe-smoking Syrian effendis. The medical officer was Doctor Esperon, from whose plan and under whose directions the Lazaretto had been built. These two gentlemen made heavy complaints of the trouble occasioned by the majority of their English visitors.

“Spanish grandees, Italian nobles, German barons, and Frenchmen, whose families had pedigrees more antediluvian than Noah, were wont to submit calmly to the rules and regulations of the establishment, and quitted it on an intimate footing of friendship with the authorities; but no sooner was the proximity of a caravan of Englishmen announced than every one was thrown into a state of excitement, and all the twenty soldiers, with their truculent lieutenant, were immediately drawn up in battle array. The two hundred guardians looked hot and fierce; ferocious-looking camel-drivers were pressed into the service. The Nazir twirled his huge mustachios; and the doctor, to be prepared for an emergency, had a table placed in the gateway, on which he made a diabolical display of surgical instruments. After a great deal of excitement and impatience, a little cloud of dust proclaimed the arrival of the dreaded individuals. First came a couple of guardians, with drawn swords and very hoarse voices, having been wrangling with the dragoman all the way from the outposts. Then one, or perhaps two, nondescript animals, in costumes hitherto unheard of, with sinister faces and mustachios nine inches from point to point. These were the dragomans, or interpreters, who always accompany ‘milords’ on their travels, speaking a little English, just sufficient to misunderstand what you say, and making themselves a little useful at times, in amends for which sacrifices they are exceedingly skilled in the art of fleecing or plucking their employers. After these, the milords themselves heave in sight, generally wearing large felt hats, covered with calico, the whiteness of which contrasts admirably with their own highly inflamed countenances. Once opposite the quarantine gates, a violent argument instantly ensues. The orator on these occasions is generally the dragoman, for the travellers are too weary and hot to take any active part. The first concession for which the fiery interpreter contends is, that they may be permitted to pitch their own tents in the vicinity of the quarantine, and be allowed to stroll as far as the beach (accompanied by guardians) for the sake of healthful recreation. This point is vainly combated by the authorities, who ‘show cause why’ such privileges should not be allowed them—viz., such as the wind accidentally blowing a bit of straw or a rag against some passenger, causing the said unhappy individual to be immediately arrested and incarcerated as impure. Finally, the camels on which the tents are laden are forcibly seized and dragged into the quarantine, which act settles this question eternally; but there are others to be arranged, and these are disputed step by step, and inch by inch. The first set of guardians who are placed to guard the separate apartments of the strangers are forthwith kicked out of their rooms. But the uproar that ensues when the travellers and their servants are disarmed, and their guns, pistols, and swords taken from them and lodged in the armoury—this, I was told, beggars all description. The interpreters on such occasions become maniacs; they lie on the flat of their backs, and kick and bite like monkeys, until, overcome by numbers and their injured feelings, they go into fits, and come out of them again, the very points of their mustachios hanging down in despair, and then slink about like dogs in a strange street, ‘effendi-ing’ and cringing to every one they come across.”

The riotous proceedings thus humorously described by Mr Neale were often the fault of the dragomans alone, whose employers, ignorant of any other language than English, and completely at their mercy, were unwittingly made accomplices of their turbulent and vexatious manœuvres. The helplessness of Englishmen abroad, when they get off those beaten tracks along which their language is considered the necessary accomplishment of hotel-waiters and railway-clerks, is notorious and laughable, and is not likely to diminish until a good practical knowledge of at least one foreign language is set down as an indispensable part of the most ordinary education. Both in purse and comfort, Englishmen pay dearly for their lingual deficiencies, and for the apparent stiffness and reserve which are their inevitable consequences. Travelling in the course of the year perhaps as much as all the rest of Europe put together, they are the helpless and often unsuspicious victims of guides, interpreters, valets-de-place, and innkeepers. It is notorious that in most parts of the Continent there are two tariffs—one for the English, and one for all other foreigners. The practice extends even to Syria. At Beyrout, M. de Nerval, attracted by savoury odours, walked one day into the trattoria of the Signor Battista, then the only Frank hotel-keeper in the place, which he had previously abstained from visiting, from a dread of exorbitant charges. Upon that occasion, however, he thought he would venture to try the table d’hôte, which was spread upon a terrace beneath a red and white awning. Upon an adjacent door he read the following inscription: Qui si paga 60 piastres per giorno. Sixty piastres, or fifteen francs, for every twenty-four hours’ board and lodging at a Beyrout hotel, seemed to him rather a heavy price. He took his seat, however, and ate his dinner, side by side with an English missionary, who had been on a converting expedition into the mountains, and who triumphantly exhibited to him a book full of the signatures of proselytes, one of the most brilliant of whom, a lad from the vicinity of Bagdad, he had with him in the double capacity of a servant and of a sample of his success. After dinner, on leaving the hotel, “I was surprised to have only ten piastres (two francs and a half) to pay for my meal. Signor Battista took me aside, and reproached me in a friendly manner for not having gone to stay at his hotel. I pointed to the inscription announcing sixty piastres a-day to be the price of admission, which was at the rate of eighteen hundred piastres a-month. ‘Ah! corpo di me!’ cried he, ‘that is for the English, who have a great deal of money, and are all heretics; but for the French, and other Romans, it is only five francs.’” “Beyrout,” says Mr Neale, “is a very expensive place to live in, and a very easy one to die in.” It is a most flourishing town, although an unpleasant residence. Mr Neale visited it many times during his stay in Syria, and always found it increasing in wealth, population, and dimensions. In a commercial point of view, it is the capital of Syria; it contains more European inhabitants than any other town, is the residence of the various consuls-general, and the place of adjustment of the oft-recurring disputes between the Druses and Maronites of the Lebanon. The scenery around it is beautiful. M. de Nerval was in raptures with the place. “A landscape all freshness, shade and silence; a view of the Alps taken from the bosom of a Swiss lake. Such,” he says, “is Beyrout.” Mr Neale says little about the surrounding scenery, but dwells at some length upon the creature-comforts of the place, its social resources and mercantile advantages, its hosts of fleas and mosquitoes, and horribly noisy barracks, the two greatest nuisances in the town, in whose very centre, close to the dwellings of some of the most respectable merchants, the latter are situated.

Released from quarantine, M. de Nerval engaged a lodging in the house of a Maronite family, half a league from the town. During his brief residence beneath the shadow of the yellow flag, he had taken it into his head, or rather the blundering Greek Nicholas had made him believe, that an attachment had sprung up between the young Armenian scribe and the yellow slave. With a base affectation of magnanimity, but evidently with secret delight at the prospect of getting rid of the tatooed beauty whom he had so imprudently associated with his fortunes, he declared her emancipated, and told the Armenian to marry her. The poor scribe, whose only possessions were the clothes he stood in, and the copper inkhorn suspended at his girdle, had never dreamed of falling in love—far less of marrying; and as to Zeynab, she was monstrously offended at its being supposed she could bestow a thought upon a mere raya, the servant alternately of Turks and Franks. M. de Nerval found he had been misled by the officious Greek, and by his own very imperfect knowledge of the Oriental tongues. The Maronites with whom he went to lodge strongly advised him to sell his encumbrance, and proposed to fetch a Turk who would buy her; but he could not bring himself to do this, and ended by sending her to board with a Marseilles lady who kept a school at Beyrout, and who promised to treat her kindly, and convert her to Christianity. This matter settled, M. de Nerval started for the mountains. A few days previously, a young Emir, or Christian prince of a district of Lebanon, had come to lodge in the same house with himself—had sought his acquaintance, and had asked him to go and pass a few days with him in the interior of the country; an invitation which he eagerly accepted, and which consoled him in some measure for being compelled to abandon a tour in Palestine, marked upon his itinerary.

“For the five purses,” he mournfully exclaims, “expended in the purchase of this gold-coloured daughter of the Malaccas, I could have visited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the Dead Sea and the Jordan! Like the prophet whom God punished, I pause upon the frontier of the Promised Land, of which I can scarcely obtain, from the mountain’s summit, a distant and dejected view. Grave people will here say that it is always wrong to act differently from everybody else, and to attempt to play the Turk, when one is but a mere Nazarene from Europe. Are they perhaps in the right?—Who knows?”

And the eccentric rambler, trying to persuade himself that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, suggests the probability of his five purses becoming the spoil of Bedouins during his journey across the desert, talks of the fatality attaching to all things Eastern, mounts a hired nag purveyed for him by the conscientious Battista, and gallops off with his friend Abou Miran, Emir of Lebanon, belonging to the most illustrious family in the district of Kesrawan, and lord of ten villages, who smiles good-humouredly at the Frenchman’s difficulty in riding Arab fashion, perched on a high saddle, with legs doubled up and brass stirrups as big as fire-shovels. “We had ridden about a league when they showed me the grotto whence had issued the famous dragon which was on the point of devouring the daughter of the King of Beyrout, when St. George pierced it with his lance. The place is held in great reverence by the Greeks, and even by the Turks, who have built a little mosque on the spot where the combat occurred.” For its afternoon meal, the cavalcade halted in the village of Bethmeria, situated on a mountain platform. Here was evidence of the constant feuds between Maronites and Druses.

“We passed a large house, whose crumbling roof and blackened beams told of a recent conflagration. The prince informed me that the Druses had set fire to the building, whilst several Maronite families were celebrating a wedding within its walls. Fortunately, the inmates had time to escape, but the strangest circumstance was that the incendiaries were inhabitants of the same village. Bethmeria contains a mixed population of about a hundred and fifty Maronites and sixty Druses, with an interval of scarcely two hundred paces between the houses of the two sects. In consequence of the aggressions of the Druses, a bloody struggle took place, and the Pasha hastened to interpose between the hostile divisions of the village a little camp of Albanians, who lived at the expense of the rival populations. We had just finished our repast, consisting of curdled milk and fruit, when the Sheik of the village returned home. After the first salutations, he began a long conversation with the prince, complaining bitterly of the presence of the Albanians, and of the general disarming that had been enforced in his district. He seemed to think that this measure should have been enforced upon the Druses only, as they had been guilty of the nocturnal attack and incendiarism. Whilst continuing our march, my guide informed me that the Maronite Christians of the province of El Garb, in which we were, had endeavoured to expel the Druses scattered through several villages, and that the latter had called to their assistance their co-religionists of the Anti-Lebanon. Hence one of those struggles which so often occur. The great strength of the Maronites is in the province of Kesrawan, situated behind Djebaïl and Tripoli, whilst the largest masses of the Druses inhabit the provinces that extend from Beyrout to St Jean d’Acre. The Sheik of Bethmeria complained to the prince that, in the recent circumstances I have spoken of, the people of Kesrawan had not stirred; but they had had no time, the Turks having set up the hue and cry with a promptitude very unusual on their part. The quarrel had occurred just at the moment of paying the miri. Pay first, said the Turks; afterwards you may fight as much as you please. It would certainly be rather difficult to collect tribute from people who were ruining themselves and cutting each other’s throats at the very moment of the harvest.”

M. de Nerval was invited to take coffee with the Turkish commandant, of whom he inquired whether he could safely visit the Druse portion of the village. “In all safety,” was the reply. “These people are very peaceable since our arrival, otherwise you would have had to fight for the one or the other—for the white cross or the white hand;” the emblems that distinguish the banners of the two parties, both having red grounds. M. de Nerval’s predilection is evidently for the Maronites, who acknowledge the spiritual authority of the Pope, and are particularly patronised by France and Austria. But he did the Druses less than justice if he anticipated other than a good reception at their hands, and soon he was compelled to admit and admire their patriarchal hospitality. He was kindly greeted as he passed, attended only by a lad, before their gardens and houses; the women brought him fresh water and new milk, and positively refused reward. He was delighted with this “more than Scottish hospitality.” At the further end of the village he sat down in the shadow of a wall. He was weary, and the sun was scorching hot.

“An old man came out of the house and pressed me to go in and rest myself. I thanked him, but declined, for it was growing late, and I feared my companions might be uneasy at my absence. Seeing that I also refused refreshment, he said I must not leave him without accepting something, and he went indoors, and fetched some little apricots and gave them me; then he insisted upon accompanying me to the end of the street. He appeared vexed to learn from Moussa that I had breakfasted with the Christian Sheik. ‘’Tis I who am the true Sheik,’ he said, ‘and I have a right to show hospitality to strangers.’ Moussa told me that this old man had been the Sheik or lord of the village in the time of the Emir Béchir; but having espoused the cause of the Egyptians, the Turkish authorities refused any longer to recognise him, and the election had fallen on a Maronite.”

The day after his arrival at the Emir’s castle—a Gothic pile with a vast internal court—M. de Nerval was presented to the ladies of the family. They were two in number, and were magnificently dressed for the occasion, with heavy girdles of jewellery, and ornaments of diamonds and rubies, a species of luxurious display carried to a great extent in Syria even amongst women of rank inferior to these.

“As to the horn which the mistress of the house balanced upon her forehead, and which made her movements resemble those of a swan, it was of chased enamel studded with turquoises; her hair flowed down upon her shoulders in tresses intermingled with clusters of sequins, according to the fashion prevalent in the Levant. The feet of these ladies, doubled up upon the divan, were stockingless, which is usual in this country, and gives to beauty an additional charm, very remote from our ideas. Women who hardly ever walk, who perform, several times a day, perfumed ablutions, and whose toes are uncramped by shoes, succeed, as may be imagined, in rendering their feet as charming as their hands. The henna dye, which reddens the nails, and the ankle-rings, rich as bracelets, complete the grace and charm of this portion of the female person, in Europe rather too much sacrificed to the glory of shoemakers.

After the first day, etiquette and display were laid aside; the ladies resumed their ordinary attire, and superintended their household, then busy gathering in the silk-harvest. Hundreds of women and children were engaged in winding off the cocoons, which hung like golden olives upon sheaves of cut branches piled together in the huts. M. de Nerval soon found himself at home in the Emir’s hospitable castle, and on friendly terms with the ladies, who asked him many questions about Europe, and spoke of several travellers who had visited them. The ideas of the Syrians concerning the state of France and other European countries are not generally very clear or correct. Mr Neale, when at Latachia, (a name of aromatic sound to smokers,) draws a lamentable picture of their geographical ignorance.

“The chart of the world,” he says, “depicted in their mind’s eye, consists of Constantinople, Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, and various remote islands, situated in the centre of a vast ocean. From these islands all Franks are presumed to come. They consider the nations of the earth to consist of the Jews, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and the Franks, who, according to their notions, form one empire, speak one tongue, and are of one religion. As for the different flags, they ascribe this variety solely to the conflicting tastes of the different consular agents.”

With respect to politics, the people of Lebanon have derived many contradictory ideas from their European visitors, a large proportion of whom are French Legitimists on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The feuds and divisions of the Franks can have no very strong interest for these Turk-governed Christians and Druses, engrossed as they are by their own dissensions. M. de Nerval had passed some time with his mountaineer friends, hawking, banqueting, and making excursions to convents and other objects of interest, when one evening, just as he was thinking of redescending into the plain, news came of an inroad of the Druses into the districts which had been disarmed by orders of the Pasha of Beyrout. The province of Kesrawan, which belongs to the pashalik of Tripoli, had kept its arms, and Prince Abou Miran mustered his men to march to the assistance of his co-religionists. M. de Nerval accompanied him, planning exploits which were to immortalise his name. These reduced themselves, however, to a fierce onslaught upon a cactus-hedge, which he gallantly cut in pieces with his yataghan, thus opening a passage to some Maronite horsemen who accompanied him, and who, finding no enemy, began to wreak their vengeance upon mulberry and olive trees, the chief wealth of the unfortunate Druses. The Frenchman presently discovered, to his shame and regret, that the plantations thus ravaged were part of the very village in which he had been so hospitably treated on his first arrival in the mountains. The Emir came up and checked the work of brutal destruction; the alarm proved false; the Druses were quiet and had made no incursion, and M. de Nerval was defrauded of his anticipated glory. He returned to Beyrout, and went to call on Madame Carlès, in whose care he had left the yellow slave. Zeynab was gentle and contented, but would do little or nothing. She picked up a few words of French from the children of the school, but would learn nothing useful, for fear she should be made to work, and thus degraded to the rank of a servant. Her progress towards the religion of Rome was very slow. When shown a picture of the Virgin, she reminded her instructor that it had been written, “Thou shalt not worship images.” M. de Nerval set it down as a hopeless case. Madame Carlès was still sanguine of success. The versatile traveller’s attention, however, was quickly distracted from Zeynab by the fair-haired, taperfingered daughter of a Druse Sheik, then in prison at Beyrout for refusing to recognise the Turkish government, and for non-payment of the tribute. His property had been sequestrated, and all had abandoned him except the beautiful Saléma, who boarded with Madame Carlès, and went every day to see her father. M. de Nerval, whose imagination was excited by the romantic and unusual scenes he had lately passed through, fell in love with this Arab damsel, went to visit her father, who was an akkal, a sort of sage and saint; and after much conversation, and receiving a long account of Hakem, the founder of the Druse religion, he embarked for Acre to obtain from the Pasha the pardon of his future father-in-law. For he had made up his mind to marry Saléma.

The Levantines are unable to comprehend the squirrel-like restlessness of the Franks, remarks M. de Nerval, whilst pacing to and fro the deck of the English brig on which he had taken his passage, and occasionally stumbling over the legs of a Turk or Bedouin who lay upon his mattress in the shadow of the bulwarks, and who removed his pipe from his lips to curse the clumsiness of the Christian. The English missionary was also a passenger; but M. de Nerval barely tolerates the English, and fancied that the evangelical gentleman treated him coldly because he consorted with a second-class passenger, a talkative bagman from Marseilles, who had got a curious theory, exaggerated but not unfounded, concerning the very small number of pure Turks remaining in Turkey.

“I have just come from Constantinople,” he said: “one sees nothing there but Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Marseillese. All the Turks they can find they make into cadis, ulemas, pashas, or they send them to Europe to show them. All their children die; it is a race that is becoming extinguished. People talk of the Sultan’s armies—of what do they consist? Of Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Kurds; the sailors are Greeks; only the officers are of Turkish race. You take them out to fight; they all run away at the first cannon-shot, as has often been seen—unless the English are behind them with their bayonets, as in the Syrian affair.”

In Syrian waters, and with the shattered minarets of Acre looming in the distance, a Frenchman might be excused for showing a little irritability. M. de Nerval behaves very well upon the occasion, and spares the unfortunate English, doubtless thinking he is sufficiently hard upon them in other parts of his book, especially when he excludes them from the European family, as dwellers “upon an island apart;” a separation upon which, considering the very turbulent and divided state of that family, they have certainly of late years had much reason to congratulate themselves. Fresh from the semi-feudal magnificence of the Lebanon Emir’s castle, and dreaming of the proud battlements of the Templars’ famous city, the last rampart of the crusades, M. de Nerval gazed mournfully on the heaps of ruins revealed to him by the rising sun a few hours after his arrival in the port of Acre. It may console him to learn from Mr Neale, who was there last year, that the fortifications are being rapidly repaired, and that soon there will remain but few traces of the ravages of British shot and shell. But the French traveller was too engrossed by the main object of his visit to Acre to dwell long upon such dry matters as broken battlements. He could not but feel moved, however, when at daybreak the Marseillese awoke him and showed him the morning star shining just over the village of Nazareth, only eight leagues distant. He proposed to his new acquaintance to make an excursion thither, but the matter-of-fact bagman threw cold water upon the project. “It is a pity,” he said, “that the Virgin’s house is no longer there. Of course you know that angels transported it in a single night to Loretto, near Venice. Here they show its site—that is all. It is not worth while going so far to see a thing that is no longer there.” Whilst thus damping his companion’s enthusiasm, the prosaic child of Provence made himself very useful by his knowledge of Turkish habits. On learning that M. de Nerval had known the Pasha of Acre at Paris, and had a letter of recommendation to him, which he was about to present, he advised him to resume his European dress, as likely to procure him an earlier audience. In those latitudes, the bagman was as good as a court-guide. He had known the Pasha at Constantinople, where he went by the nickname of Guezluk, or the spectacle-wearer. And he begged M. de Nerval to tell him that he had for sale a musical clock, which played airs out of numerous Italian operas, and which had birds on the top of it, who sang and flapped their wings. This was exactly the thing, he said, to delight the Turks. Duly black-coated, but retaining his Turkish tarbusch to cover his shaven head, M. de Nerval presented himself at the summer kiosk then occupied by the Pasha. His European garb drew all eyes upon him; by refusing to take off his boots at the door, he further increased his importance; his letter was taken in to the Pasha, and he was at once admitted in preference to a crowd of persons who were waiting for that honour.

“I expected a European reception, but the Pasha confined himself to making me sit down near him on a divan which extended round part of the saloon. He affected to speak only Italian, although I had heard him speak French at Paris; and, having addressed to me the customary phrase: ‘Is your kef good?’ that is to say, do you find yourself well? he ordered the chibouque and coffee to be brought to me. Some commonplace remarks composed our conversation. Then the Pasha repeated, ‘Is your kef good?’ and another cup of coffee was brought. I had been walking the streets of Acre all the morning, and had crossed the plain without falling in with anything like an eating-house; I had even refused a piece of bread and a slice of Arles sausage offered me by the Marseillese, reckoning a little on Mussulman hospitality; but who shall depend upon the friendship of the great? Our conversation continued, without the Pasha’s offering me anything more substantial than tobacco smoke and sugarless coffee. For the third time he repeated, ‘Is your kef good?’ I rose to take leave. Just then noon struck upon a clock suspended over my head, and which forthwith began to play a tune; almost immediately a second clock struck, and began a different air; a third and a fourth set off in their turn. The discordant effect may be imagined. Accustomed as I was to Turkish eccentricities, I could not understand the assemblage of so many clocks in one room. The Pasha seemed enchanted with the noise, and proud to show a European his love of progress and civilisation. The commission given to me by the Marseillese occurred to me, but the negotiation appeared so much the more difficult that the four clocks were symmetrically placed, each on one of the four sides of the apartment. Where could a fifth be put? I said nothing about it. Neither did I deem it an opportune moment to broach the business of the captive Sheik, but kept this delicate matter for another visit, when the Pasha should perhaps receive me less coldly. Alleging business in the town, I took my leave. As I passed through the court, an officer came up to me, and said that the Pasha had ordered two cavass to accompany me whithersoever I went. I did not exaggerate to myself the value of this attention, which generally amounts to a heavy bakshish to be given to each of the said attendants.”

Once more in the town, M. de Nerval, feeling ravenous, asked his guard of honour where he could get breakfast. They stared, and said it was not yet the hour, but, as he insisted, they asked him for a Spanish dollar to purchase fowls and rice, which they proposed cooking in the nearest guard-house. This appeared to him both an expensive and a complicated manner of obtaining a meal, and he went to the French Consulate; but the Consul lived on the other side of the bay, on the skirts of Mount Carmel.

“Acre, during the summer months,” says Mr Neale, “is considered the most fatal residence for Europeans on the western coast of the Mediterranean. Its fevers are so pernicious that few survive an attack for a longer space than forty-eight hours. So trivial are the causes which give rise to this malignant disease, that the smallest deviation from a temperate regimen, or the slightest exposure to heat or cold, renders one liable to an immediate attack, and, as the doctor coolly told me, ensuite vous succombez.”

To avoid which unpleasant eventuality, the European residents have country houses. Little disposed to go as far as Mount Carmel for a breakfast, M. de Nerval went to the bazaar, and hunted up the Marseillese, whom he found in the act of selling to a Greek merchant an assortment of those old warming-pan watches, now out of fashion in Europe, but which the Turks greatly prefer to the modern flat ones. With them the value of a watch is estimated by its size. The Marseillese produced the never-failing sausage, upon which, and upon unleavened bread, the only sort obtainable, the hungry Parisian made an indifferent repast. They offered some sausage to the two cavass, who refused, from a religious scruple. “Poor devils!” said the bagman, contemptuously, “they think it is pork; they do not know that Arles sausage is made of mule’s flesh.” A fact which may also be rather novel to some of the English consumers of the monster sausages sold in Italian warehouses, into many of which not a morsel of pig enters. Rendered expansive by his meal, M. de Nerval confided to the Marseillese the story of his love for the Druse maiden, and the object of his visit to Acre. The dealer in clocks and watches, who, for common sense, was worth ten of his companion, evidently thought him a fool for his pains, and, with a view to discourage his folly, told him curious anecdotes of the religious practices of certain Druse sects, practices certainly well calculated to scandalise a European. The day wore on, and when the hour of dinner approached, M. de Nerval was informed by his attendants that he was expected at the Pasha’s table. This was unexpected by him, but a matter of course—so his bagman informed him—since the Pasha had given him an escort. When he reached the kiosk the levee had long been over. Passing through the clock-room, he found the Pasha smoking, seated upon the window-ledge of the apartment beyond. The Turk rose on his approach, held out his hand, and asked him how he was, in excellent French. M. de Nerval could not conceal his surprise. “You must excuse me,” said his host, “if I received you this morning en pasha. Those worthy people who were waiting for an audience would never have forgiven me had I been wanting in etiquette with a Frangi. At Constantinople, every one would understand it; but here we are in a country town.” Méhmet Pasha had studied at the artillery school at Metz, and spoke French exceedingly well. He was amiable, affable, and courteous. He and his guest dined tête-à-tête, at a table, and seated on chairs, in the European fashion. M. de Nerval, in his passion for Orientalism, would rather have squatted on a cushion upon the floor. After dinner, instead of the introduction of dancing-girls, or some other Eastern amusement, he was taken down stairs to a billiard-room, where the Pasha made him play till one in the morning.

“I let myself be beaten as much as I could, amidst the shouts of laughter of the Pasha, who was delighted at this return to the amusements of Metz. ‘A Frenchman—a Frenchman who lets himself be beaten!’ cried he. ‘I admit,’ said I, ‘that St Jean d’Acre is not favourable to our arms; but here you fight alone, and the former Pasha of Acre had the cannons of England.’ At last we separated. They conducted me into a very large apartment, lighted by a wax-candle, fixed in an enormous candlestick, and placed upon the ground in the centre of the room. This was a return to local customs. The slaves made me a bed with cushions upon the ground; upon which they spread sheets, sewn on one side to the blankets. I was moreover accommodated with a great nightcap of yellow quilted silk, with quarters like a melon.”

Greatly diverted was the good natured Pasha on being made acquainted with his guest’s matrimonial designs, and with the countless annoyances he had brought upon his head by the imprudent purchase of a yellow slave, whom he now scrupled to send away, to sell, or to abandon to her fate. To evade these scruples, the Pasha proposed a barter: he would give him a horse for Zeynab. Even this would not do. The fate of the Druse Sheik depended more upon the governor of Beyrout than upon Méhmet Pasha, who, however, interposed his good offices, and the saintly father of Saléma was released and allowed to return to his country. He was informed, at the same time, that he owed his liberty to M. de Nerval’s intercession with the Pasha of Acre. His manner of returning thanks struck his deliverer as strange. “If you wished to be useful,” he said, “you have done but what is every man’s duty; if you had an interested motive, why should I thank you?” This was grateful and encouraging. Nevertheless, M. de Nerval accompanied the old gentleman and his daughter to their abode, a village embowered in vines and mulberry trees, within a day’s journey of Damascus. He is kind enough to suppress the history of his courtship, merely mentioning that the amiable Saléma presented him with a red tulip, and planted in her father’s garden an acacia sapling, which was to have some mysterious connection with their loves. The period of their marriage was fixed, and not very remote, when the future bridegroom was attacked by one of those Syrian fevers which, if they do not carry off the patient in less time, often last for months and even for years. In hopes of regaining his health, he went to Beyrout, which enjoys the reputation of one of the least feverish places in Syria, without on that account, according to Mr Neale, having much to boast of in the way of salubrity. It did not restore M. de Nerval, who with difficulty mustered sufficient strength to proceed, by an Austrian packet, to Smyrna and Constantinople. There he gradually recovered his health. Profiting by the opportunities for cool reflection afforded by a long convalescence, he weighed the advantages and disadvantages of his projected marriage, and finally wrote to the Sheik to declare off. A narrow escape, cheaply purchased at the price of a fever.

Whilst tracing the vagaries of this fantastical Frenchman, we have given less than his share of space to Mr Neale, whose experience of Syria is more recent, and his acquaintance with the country more general and complete. Travel in Syria is not without its perils and inconveniences, even for Englishmen, to whom the events of 1840 have secured, especially along the sea-board, a peculiar degree of civility and consideration.

“The general opinion of an English traveller,” says Mr Neale, referring particularly to the lower classes, “is, that he is either a lunatic or a magician;—a lunatic, if on closely watching his movements, they discover that he pays little attention to anything around him;—a confirmed lunatic, if he goes out sketching, and spends his time in spoiling good paper with scratches and hieroglyphics;—and a magician, when inquisitive about ruins, and given to picking up stones and shells, gathering sticks and leaves of bushes, or buying up old bits of copper, iron, and silver. In these cases he is supposed, by aid of his magical powers, to convert stones and shells into diamonds of immense price; and the leaves and sticks are charms, by looking at which he can bestow comforts upon his friends, and snakes and pestilence upon his luckless enemies. If a traveller pick up a stone, and examine it carefully, he will be sure to have at his heels a host of malapert little boys deriding him, though keeping at a very respectful distance, in deference to his magical powers. Should he, indeed, turn round suddenly, and pursue them a few steps, they fly in an agony of fear, the very veins in their naked little legs almost bursting; and they never stop to look back till they have got well amongst the crowd again, where, panting for breath, they recount to their auditors the dreadful look that devil of a Frank gave them, making fire come out of his eyes, and adders out of his mouth.”

There are places in Syria where Europeans are subject to far more serious annoyances than these. At Latachia, for instance, although it is a place of considerable intercourse with Europe, in the way both of trade and travellers, the Turkish inhabitants are furious fanatics, and have several times assembled in mobs, and attacked and maltreated European and native Christians, compelling them to seek safety in flight. Not more than three years ago, the Roman Catholic inhabitants were besieged within the walls of the Latin monastery, whilst hearing mass in its chapel, by a mob of bigoted Turks, who were escorting a renegade Christian to the mosque. At this fellow’s instigation a plan was formed to storm the convent, and put to death all its inmates. The gates were not strong enough long to resist the desperate assault made upon them; so the congregation, by means of a ladder, got through a window of the adjacent French Consulate, and through a garden to the sea-side, where they took boat for the little island of Ruad, the usual refuge of the Latachia Christians when thus molested. Satisfaction was demanded and obtained by a French man-of-war, and the ringleaders of the riot were bastinadoed and sent into exile, which checked for a while the violence of the Turks; but they are still very insolent to Christians, and Mr Neale declares he should never feel altogether secure at Latachia, “so long as many of the Ayans and Effendis are permitted to carry on their intrigues and machinations with impunity.” But for this drawback, Latachia would be one of the most desirable residences in Syria. “The environs are extremely beautiful, and abound with delicious apricot and peach trees. Mulberry plantations and vineyards are also very plentiful; and the melon and watermelon here attain great perfection. The dark-leaved pomegranate, with its deep vermilion blossoms, intertwines with its fairer neighbour, the orange-tree, and behind them rises the stately poplar, over which peeps the more stately minaret, making altogether a charming picture.” Minarets abound. This little town, of about five thousand inhabitants, “contains upwards of a dozen mosques, each endeavouring to surpass the other in the beauty of its architecture and the quaint elegance of its cupolas and minarets. The other public buildings are also fine structures, and the gardens teem with rich-scented flowers and shrubs.” Water is very scarce, and to get it pure the Latachians are compelled to send daily to a distance of six miles. The climate is excellent, and fever, so general in Syria, would there scarcely be known, but for the uncleanly ways of the people. The streets are the receptacle for skins of fruit, decayed vegetables, dead cats, rats, and dogs. The atmosphere thus generated may be imagined. In vain has the quarantine doctor endeavoured to work a reform by urgent representations to the governor of the town. “Peki,” (very good,) says that dignitary, touching the side of his turban with his hand; but that is the whole extent of his co-operation. The doctor is approved of, his wishes are acceded to, but the streets remain foul. Turkish activity seldom gets beyond peki. Once, however, some men really were set to play the scavenger. They swept all the offal into heaps at the street-crossings; and having thus stirred up the filth, and concentrated the nuisance, considered their duty done, and retired, proud of their exertions.

The tobacco commonly known in Europe as Latachia, is shipped at that port, but grown at or around the pretty little town of Gibili, a short distance to the south. The Gibili tobacco, and the Aboo Reah, or father of essences, are renowned all over the East, and esteemed the finest and most aromatic tobaccoes in the world. The fields in which they are grown are manured with goats’ dung, and more or less watered according to the strength of tobacco required. The less the water, the stronger the flavour of the weed. When gathered, the leaves are exposed for three nights to the dew, then strung together, hung up to dry, packed in bales and sent in feluccas to Latachia, where they are stored in dry warehouses until exported. The port of Latachia, which retains the town’s ancient name of Laodicea, was once of great capacity, and could contain, it is said, six hundred vessels; but time and earthquakes, warfare and neglect, have played havoc with it. Rocks and ruins have rolled into the basin; and although its surface is still spacious, its depths are treacherous; and it is not deemed safe and convenient for more than thirty vessels, averaging two hundred and fifty to three hundred tons each. The commercial importance of the town would be likely to increase considerably, were the road from Aleppo less steep and dangerous for camels, whose drivers consequently demand exorbitant rates for the carriage of goods to Latachia, and take them on much easier terms to the more northerly port of Scanderoon or Alexandretta, through which passes the whole commerce of northern Syria. Independently of the better road, Scanderoon is nearer than Latachia to Aleppo, and is its natural port; otherwise its abominable climate would alone suffice to make commercial residents prefer its rival.

“The first thing that strikes a stranger on arriving at Alexandretta is the complexion of the inhabitants, natives as well as Europeans. They have a strange unearthly yellow tinge, with deep sunken eyes and a shrivelled frame, facts which speak more than volumes for the pernicious effects of marsh miasma. Fever and ague have set their seal on every face; and with so indelible a mark, that a Scanderoon is easily distinguished in any other city, and immediately pointed out.”

The wretched aspect of these “churchyard deserters,” as an English merchant captain called them, is traceable to the most brutal Turkish folly and obstinacy. Alexandretta is encircled for miles with pestilential marshes. On approaching the port from Aleppo, an ancient Roman road, infamously out of repair, brought Mr Neale and his guide to “a very rickety old bridge, spanning a canal, filled from a small but restless spring, whose waters, (which never cease trickling,) finding no adequate outlet, have created those baneful marshes which surround the town, extending over nearly the whole plain. The canal was originally cut by Ibrahim Pasha, at the instigation of an intelligent Italian, who acted as consul for several European states, Mr Martinelli, and it still retains his name.” So long as the Egyptian viceroy was paramount in Syria, this canal was kept in good order, and duly cleansed of mud and weeds by an English machine. Then came the evacuation of Syria. Before marching away, the Egyptian soldiery destroyed the machine. The canal, which had already in great measure drained the marshes, and had proved a blessing to the feverridden population, was neglected by the Turks, is now choked up, and will soon altogether disappear. The merchants of Aleppo and the European consuls have done all in their power to get the Turkish government to resume the work of drainage. “Some soi-disant engineers were sent to form an estimate of what the cost would be: these employés, the bane of Turkey as far as useful works are concerned, estimated what ought to be their gains, and the sum frightened the authorities, who, as they always do upon like occasions, religiously concealed the estimate under the divan cushions, and there the matter rested.” In 1844, the European residents in Scanderoon got up a subscription amongst themselves, and actually began to drain. What did the Turkish authorities? Threatened the labourers with the bastinado, which effectually stopped the good work. The motive assigned was that “the Franks, when the work was completed, would probably lay claim to the recovered land!” Thus are matters managed in Syria, and thus are replenished the graveyards of Scanderoon. The self-same Turks, whose parsimony and paltry jealousy prohibit the sanitary measure so greatly needed, are martyrs to fever and ague, whilst the poor peasants, thanks to unwholesome diet, damp lodgings, and the ridiculously long and rigid fasts prescribed by the Greek church, are subject, in addition to those two maladies, to dropsy and various other diseases. The unwillingness of the local authorities to aid or even to sanction any amelioration of the wretched state of Scanderoon, arises partly from the blundering arrangement by which that port and Aleppo are in different Pashaliks. As the custom-dues are paid at Aleppo, the Pasha of Adana, under whose sway is Scanderoon, takes little interest in the welfare of a port from which he derives no revenue, great though its trade is. “The whole male population of Alexandretta are occupied in landing, weighing, and rolling to the warehouses the cargoes of Manchester bales brought by the different vessels. It is impossible to imagine a scene more bustling and discordant.” Clamorous muleteers and camel-drivers load and unload their beasts, custom-house officers and factors continually dispute, masters of merchantmen are anxious to land their goods, or eager to settle and depart; “cadaverous Italian skippers, who have been three months ‘on the berth’ for Leghorn, and have as yet about as many bales of wool on board, make frantic inquiries about their Syrian consignee’s intentions, and being pacified with stout promises, return on board, and catch fish for the crew till dinner-time.” All are busy, and all foreigners long to get away from a place where, if they stop but a day too long, they may remain for ever, tenants of a grave in its marshy and feverish soil. The loading of the camels is an especially ticklish matter, and leads to much wrath amongst the drivers. “Two bales must be found of equal weight; these are not always to be secured, and the struggle that ensues amongst the cameliers for such a couple defies description.” The Turkoman camel, a much finer animal than the Syrian, will carry, equally poised, two bales weighing together half a ton. “I have seen at times as many as one thousand camels leave Alexandretta for Aleppo in one day, bearing high aloft upon their backs two thousand Manchester iron-bound bales of twist and manufactures.” A sight to rejoice the heart of Cobden, and to reconcile even that peace-loving agitator to the bombardments and skirmishings by which so important a débouché was secured for the produce of the city of his affections. It might interest him to calculate at what rate per quarter, when a loaf of bread costs twopence at Alexandretta, (Neale’s Syria, ii. 212,) Syrian wheat might be delivered in Liverpool by way of returns for the camel-borne Manchester cottons. If it is easy to die at Scanderoon, it is certainly cheap to live there. Mutton costs twopence the pound, fresh butter less than a penny, and other articles of food are at proportionably low prices. So says Mr F. A. Neale, who must be held excellent authority, since he was long resident at Scanderoon, where he was never entirely free from ague, but passed his time swallowing quinine, and thought himself the happiest of mortals when he enjoyed three weeks of uninterrupted health.

No book of the class of Mr Neale’s ought to be issued to the public unaccompanied by a map. A small one would suffice, and it need comprise little more than the outline of the coast, the definition of boundaries, the course of large rivers and mountain ranges, and those towns and villages referred to in the text. Such means of reference and elucidation add greatly to the interest and value of a narrative of travel and description of a country. Only a minority of readers are likely to have an atlas always at hand, or to possess such great familiarity with geographical details as may render one unnecessary. Authors and publishers of books of travels are prone to expend upon lithographed landscapes and other embellishments—things glanced at for a moment, and regarded no more—money which might be laid out to the greater advantage of their readers and of themselves in the engraving of maps. We cannot make an exception to this general rule, even in favour of the two pretty sketches of Gaza and Nargheslik, which face the title-pages of Mr Neale’s agreeable volumes.

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