{113}
Jaunts Abroad.—Other Travels.—At the Pyramids.—Up the Nile.—Fingers Made Before Forks!—Incidents in Palestine.—The Dead Sea.—Cæsarea Phillippi.
On a steam boat on the Lake of Como was an Austrian gentleman in plain clothes, accompanied by his daughter, a very beautiful woman. Two Scotch officers said to us, “You see that man with his daughter; he’s a Government spy; he will have his eye on us English all the time we are in Milan”; and, sure enough, the next day he passed our hotel several times. When we entered the train at Camerlata, a military official took our passports from us, and gave us a printed paper in place of them on which was printed in several languages, “You must call at the police station within 24 hours after your arrival in Milan, or you will be liable to a fine or imprisonment.” Every small village we passed through we were compelled to show our passports; the surveillance was most annoying. Then the thorough overhauling of one’s luggage at the Customs House was no mere form, but a thorough searching, to be sure travellers had no political pamphlets.
{114} We spent the Sunday in Milan, and it was the hottest day I ever experienced in my life. On our return home a returned missionary from Jamaica told us that the heat that Sunday in England was equal to the average heat in Jamaica.
We crossed into Switzerland by the St. Gothard Pass in a hired carriage, the road the first day skirting the Lake of Lugano. My companions could not agree about the colour of the water, one saying it was one colour, another the other. It is said, “Onlookers see the most,” and it certainly was so in this case. I settled the latter for them by saying “It has been all the colours in dispute in turn, according to the surroundings on the bank changing—according to whether they were trees or stone.”
From Lugano we went to the Bellinzona, then to Airolo, where Neville, sometime before having found a large green lizard, and not knowing what to do with it, deposited it before we left the hotel in an urn standing on the sideboard. An American party having arrived just as we were leaving, we wondered how they would enjoy their tea flavoured with lizard!
We crossed the St. Gothard. Going from Airolo to the summit we saw a wagon laden with heavy goods. The drag-chain having broken, the weight behind the horses had pushed two of them into the roaring torrent, and they, with the harness, were being churned into mincemeat. The telegraph wires were also knocked down. From the {115} Furea we went to Lucerne, at which place I parted with my companions, I going by diligence to Berne (there were no railroads in Switzerland for more than ten miles in the whole country), from Berne to Vevey, on to Martigny, still by diligence over the Tete Noir, on horse to Chamounix, then by diligence to Geneva, Geneva to Dijon, and then by rail to Paris. All through the Jura the cholera was raging. One village was pointed out to us where most of the people had died.
On arriving in Paris I was joined by my wife, father, Mr. George Brown, Mr. and Mrs. Bates, of Godmanchester, and their two daughters. We saw the Emperor’s fete day, went to the mill-stone quarry town, etc., and then returned home.
My next journey was, I think, to Switzerland, in 1856, accompanied by my wife, and Miss Martha Ekins, afterwards Mrs. Arthur Ruston.
I have been to Switzerland about fourteen times in all, sometimes accompanied by the Rev. Thomas Lloyd, Congregational minister of St. Ives, once with my wife, Rev. John Hart, and the Rev. James Harcourt.
Another expedition was to Munich, Salsburgh, Ischyll, Gmunden, Linz, by the Danube to Vienna; then on to Buda-Pesth, the object of this journey being to inspect the large corn mills at this latter place.
I also visited Switzerland, Venice, etc., with Mrs. George Brown and her brother, {116} Mr. Walter Dixon, on another occasion (in 1865).
I also several times have visited South Italy, Rome, Naples, and Florence, once with my wife, Mrs. Crichton, and the late Rev. J. Steadman Davis, who was then my minister at Trinity Congregational Church, Huntingdon (in 1880).
My greatest tour was to Egypt and the Holy Land in 1875 and 1876, accompanied by my wife, Mr. Neville Goodman, and Mrs. George Brown. This journey occupied about six months.
We went to Brindisi, leaving that place at about 5 o’clock on a Monday morning, arriving at Alexandria at noon on Thursday. We went to see Pompey’s Pillar and the Needle, now on the Thames Embankment, but then (1876) lying in a dead ditch just outside the city.
From Alexandria by rail to Cairo, we were amused to see the flat-roofed houses, various new sorts of birds to us, and camels and beasts of burden. In one field we saw an ass and an ox yoked together ploughing, breaking the command given to the Jews in mercy to the weaker animal that they should not be so unequally yoked. We caught the first view of the Pyramids on our right hand before arriving at Cairo, and afterwards visited them; engaged a “DahabeeahA large sailing-boat, used by travellers on the Nile (OED)” for our Nile expedition of fully three months. Before leaving Cairo engaged a dragoman, by name “Ali Hassan,” a fine, tall, stout, hand-{117}some man, dressed in gay-coloured clothes. He was also very good-natured, but was naturally a timid man. Ali had been married three times, but had divorced his first two wives, the one because she quarrelled with his father, and the other because “he did not like the shape of her nose!” A man, unless he is a relative as near as a first cousin, never sees a woman’s face before he is married, so he did not know what his wife’s nose was like until after marriage. A man can divorce his wife when he likes by simply giving her a paper. He is then bound to find her three months’ sustenance, after which he is done with her entirely. I said to Ali Hassan “Should you know your first wife if you saw her in the street?” (veiled, remember). He replied, if walking behind her, he should know her among a thousand women. His third wife was a young girl about 14 years of age. I said, “You will divorce her some day.” He said, “Never; she is so pretty, and I love her so.” After leaving Cairo, we made the first 24 hours about 60 miles; then we were delayed by contrary winds at a place called Benisooef for five days. The neighbourhood of RenisooefBenisooef (as in the previous sentence) seems to be correct. was so like our Fens that I said if the palm trees were cut down, and anyone was taken there blindfolded, and the covering removed from their eyes, and they were asked where they were, they would say, “In the English Fens.” While there one night, a man on a trading Dahabeeah was killed while defending his boat and goods from the attack of a robber. From the above place {118} we went to Assiout, and took donkeys to see some tombs on the side of the town, the furthest off the river. It was an amusing ride; the stirrups, where the feet went in, were in the shape of ash pans, and the stirrup leathers were not a fixture, as with us, on each side of the saddle, but worked through the saddle, so that if you pressed on one side more than the other your leg went on that side. Coming back to the town, my donkey fell, and a man, being on each side of the donkey, lifted him and me up, as though we were one animal. In this town we saw about twelve prisoners being taken off to the Court to be tried. They were all chained together by the ankle, also with chains round their wrists; it was a pitiable sight. We stopped at some towns where there were public ovens to have the crew’s bread baked. After being baked, it was placed on the deck of our boat, and dried in the hot sun.
We stayed at Luxor, and while there visited the ruins at Thebes; also the tombs of the Kings; then to Karnack to inspect the ruins of the great temples there. We had our Consul, an Arab gentleman, to dinner; then we all went to see the howling Dervishes, and, when the performance began, were surprised to see our dragoman, Ali Hassan, was one of them. I said, “Why, Ali, you do not howl or bend your body as much as the others.” He only laughed, and appeared to think the affair a good joke. From Luxor we went to Assouan, and from there ascended the first Cataract, visited the {119} island of Philœ and its temples, then proceeded to the second Cataract, inspecting the great temple of Aboo Simbel on the way. Then we began to descend the stream, and, finally, reached Cairo in safety.
The next year a son of Mr. Frean, of the firm of Peak, Frean and Co., biscuit makers, went up the Nile in the same Dahabeeah as we had, viz., “The Rip-Van-Winkle,” and when he had got safely back to Cairo, and had, fortunately, removed all his belongings, it sunk at its moorings the same night. We knew it was an old one, but did not know it was so unseaworthy. From Cairo we went to Ismaila by rail, then took the little toy mail steamer to Port Said by the Suez Canal, slept at that place, and at four o’clock in the afternoon went in a Russian steamer to Jaffa, the ancient Joppa. We rode on horseback to Jerusalem, visited Bethlehem, Jericho, and the Dead Sea, then passed through the country to Bethel, Shiloh, Sheckem, Nain, Shunem, Nazareth, Tiberias, Sea of Galilee, the site of Capurnaum, Safed, Cæsarea Phillippi, Hashbeya, Rasheia, and so on to Damascus. Then to Baalbek and over the Lebanon to Beyrout; took steamer to Smyrna, train to Ephesus, afterwards to Athens, Constantinople, over the Black Sea to Varna, then partly by the Danube, partly by rail to Vienna, then to Paris, and so home.
While in Egypt we went one evening to dinner with a Sheik, a friend of our dragoman. He had sent a horse for me, and don-{120}keys for the others of the party. On arriving at his residence we were received with a salute of guns. The house looked like a good English outhouse. We went up a considerable number of steps into a high balcony, then into the dining room. There were no chairs, but a divan ran right round the room, and a circular table, about one foot high, was in the centre. Before dinner an attendant came with an ewer in one hand and a basin in the other. He had a belt round his waist, in which was a towel. We held our hands over the basin, and he poured the water from the ewer over them, dried our hands with the towel (“Except they wash oft they eat not”). The company consisted of our host, Neville Goodman, Susanna and Bateman Brown, the Mudir or Governor of the District, and a local Judge. We all sat or squatted round the circular table. The first course was a bowl of soup placed in the middle of the table, from which, with a spoon, each guest helped himself direct from the bowl into his mouth; second course, mutton chops, in centre of table, swimming in gravy. Our host took them one after the other by the bone and handed one in turn to each guest; third course, a large roast turkey. Our host had no carving knife and fork, but in place of those utensils pulled off joint after joint with his hands and passed them to his guests. Then he dug his fingers into the breast of the bird, detached a large piece of flesh, and gave it to me. This mode of carving was dexterously done; at the same time, it did not have the effect of {121} stimulating my appetite, but, on the contrary, rather disgusted me. Our host, noticing that I did not eat much, guessed the reason, and said, pointing to my wife, that she was a whole Arab; then, pointing with his mutilated forefinger (or trigger finger) to Neville Goodman, he said he was a half-Arab; and, pointing to me, he said I was no Arab at all.
To understand what the mutilated forefinger means, I must explain that the natives, to prevent being pressed into the military service of the Khedive, would cut off the first joint of the forefinger, which is used for pulling the trigger of a gun. It is said that in Ibrahim Pasha’s time they would actually put out one of their eyes to escape service. But he was level with them by forming a “one-eyed” regiment! After the above dinner, our host, for our amusement, provided a number of dancing girls to perform.
We returned across the open fields to our Dahabeeah by torchlight.
Mrs. G. W. Brown did not accompany us to the dinner, as she was tired out with the day’s excursion, as she had had a long day in visiting the tombs of the Kings. Indeed, when our dragoman announced this excursion to us on our return from our day’s work, we all felt sorry it had been planned for us. But, nevertheless, we should have been sorry to have missed the experience of what an Arab dinner party was like.
{122} Walking along a street in Jerusalem one day, we came upon a small corn market. When we appeared upon the scene, a woman was squatting on the ground with a bag tied around her neck, buying a measure of corn. A man was measuring it out to her as follows:—There was a heap of corn on the ground, from which he filled the measure with his hands. When it was half-full he took it up and shook it to make it settle. Then he added more corn to the measure, after which he knocked it with his knuckles. He not only filled the measure full, but filled it up until it formed a cone. Then he took a double handful of corn and poured it on to the cone. Some adhered, but the greater part fell to the ground; then he poured the measure of corn into the bag hanging on the woman’s bosom.
Of course, this reminded us of our Saviour’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, “Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, shall men give unto your bosoms,” though we never knew before that these words were descriptive of the manner of measuring corn in Palestine. In England the seller is not only in his own interest careful not to shake the bushel while measuring, but also, instead of piling it up, he strikes the corn off level with the top of the bushel with a straight-edged piece of wood or a roller, and that is not only a legal, but an honest, measure as between buyer and seller.
It is quite true what Murray’s Guide says: {123} “That the water is so buoyant you cannot sink in it.” Neville Goodman and I bathed in it. Not only could we not sink, but it was so buoyant that when we tried to swim we struck with our legs and hands in the air instead of the water. Neville afterwards swam across the Jordan.
Passing through Palestine, on getting to the backbone of a mountain, and looking before us, I said to Neville, “How much richer the land looks before us than that behind us.” He said, “Of course it is; that before us is the country of Ephraim.”
While at Jacob’s Well it came on a sudden thunderstorm. The hailstones were so large they hurt my knuckles almost as much as if someone had struck them with a stick, and in ten minutes a lowlying road we had crossed was a raging torrent. A poor native woman was in great distress because she had lost her child, and she was afraid it had been carried away by the torrent. The next day, as we were staying at Shechem, we went to enquire, and, fortunately, the woman had found her child.
A young English lady, who was accompanied by her brother, was ascending from the plain of Esdraelon into the mountains on which Nazareth is situated, and was pounced upon by some Bedouins, who robbed her of her money, watch, and jewellery, and afterwards her outer garments, her brother having gone on a little in advance of her, and so left her unprotected. A day or so afterwards, when we were encamped at Tiberias, {124} our Vice-Consul from Jerusalem had arrived there to examine 10 or 20 Arabs who had been taken into custody. The Consul was a Turk, and I am afraid, from an Englishman’s point of view, I gave him some very unconstitutional advice, “Hang them tonight, and try them to-morrow morning!” A six months’ residence amongst an inferior race certainly has a bad influence upon one as regards right and justice. We never heard whether the prisoners had the robbery brought home to them.
On arriving at the mid-day luncheon place, we found it in the possession of a company of armed civilians. When we sat down they took our water jar and helped themselves. Then they asked for some coffee, which we thought it policy to give them. They were out on an expedition to discover a murderer, the nearest of kin to the murdered person being amongst them.
On entering Cæsarea a murdered man was just being brought from the mountains into the village. His murderer had just become of age, and the dead man having killed the living man’s father 20 years previously, the son had discovered his father’s murderer and had just killed him, though he was a perfect stranger to him. So that custom of the nearest of kin avenging the murder of a relative has descended to the present time.
We called with the dragoman on the Sheik to ask for a guard of two or four soldiers for the night, as was usual, the Sheik being responsible for our luggage, etc., at {125} night. We were shown into a small room. He was not in, but presently arrived. It was his hour of prayer, so he took no more notice of us than if we had not been in the room. His attendant washed his hands, as previously described at a dinner in Egypt. Then the Sheik did his praying, and when it was finished appeared as if he had seen us for the first time, and enquired of our dragoman what we wanted. Then he asked if the Great Powers were going to partition Turkey. On our replying we thought not, the next question was, “Is England going to annex the country?” We said, “No”; then we asked why he put these questions. He replied because he had received instructions to press every able-bodied man into the Army. This was the year immediately preceding the war between Turkey and Russia. As we were afterwards going up the Danube, we saw fifty thousand Turkish soldiers under canvas (Spring of 1876).
When we came away Ali Hassan said, “I think that old Sheik is what you call in England a great swell.” I asked why, and he replied, “He neither shook hands nor gave you any coffee.”
One of the nights while we were encamped at Cæsarea our tent was broken into, but we awoke, so nothing was stolen. The thieves’ intention no doubt was to carry off our luggage.