D. G. Hogarth

“ To Psychró, therefore, I betook myself with a few trained men, some stone-hammers, mining-bars, blasting powder, and the rest of a cave-digger’s plant. The villagers proved willing, nay eager, belying my fear that a cold reception awaited anyone who came to poach this preserve of illicit searchers. Just then Lasithi, like all Crete, was anxious before all things to justify its new won freedom in European eyes, and Psychró was not less alive than any other Greek village would have been, to the glory to be shed on its little self by notable discoveries in its Cave. ”

“ The town, more regularly laid out than most of its kind, rises in a horseshoe, tier on tier, from the port, whence radiate steep stone ladders dividing the wedges of habitation, as in the cavea of an ancient theatre. We strolled from one horn of the bay to the other, admiring such nice cleanliness of streets and houses as you may see in the richer Cyclad isles, in Santorin, for example, and here and there on the Turkish coast, but seldom or never on the Greek mainland. In Castellórizo to be dirty is to confess social failure. ”

“ We cajoled despair with the most insignificant discoveries—with patches of bare pavement, with scraps of Roman inscriptions chipped out of masses of Byzantine concrete, with a few sherds of Greek vases and broken terra-cottas sifted out of the bedding of the temple-steps built in Alexander’s day. In a world where the absolute is never attained, the relative, thank heaven! can always please, and Nature, of her pity, with a little of your contributory good will, will blind you to relativity. ”

“ NILE FENS. The Delta is unvisited by the thousands who seek their pleasure winter by winter on the Nile, although a glimpse of the fringe of its fens is everyone’s earliest and most vivid impression of Egypt. As the train speeds south from Alexandria, a vista slips past of level mere and copper-green fields and ant-hill villages breaking the line of an amber sky; or, more at leisure, between Port Said and Ismailia, you may look from the hurricane-deck over a silent lagoon, with flocks of waders standing at gaze, or trailing like far-blown smoke across the setting sun. ”

“ Unmet and unsaluted, we followed the splendid curves and counter-curves of the road, till at last it ran out on a level stretch; and there near a single hut of rough stones, under the bloody flag of Turkey, we came on the booted mudir himself in council with four spearmen of the Haasa. He looked up in some astonishment and trouble, for few and far between are European visitors to Cyrene. But the breeding of a Turk, the custom of Islam, and the sight of our Iradé, secured us hospitality in his bullet-proof room, built above a Roman sepulchre. ”

“ When nothing more could be seen in the crevices, which had been scrutinised twice and thrice, and we had dredged the pool’s bed as far as wading men could reach, I called off the workers, who were falling sick of the damp and chill; and two days later we left silent and solitary the violated shrine of the God of Dicte. The digger’s life is a surfeit of surprises, but his imagination has seldom been provoked so sharply as in that dim chasm. One seemed to come very near indeed to men who lived before history. ”

“ How many artists of two generations would have seen the Harpy reliefs in their place? The Theatre, whose curve is so oddly broken to avoid a pillar-tomb, is one tangle of brushwood; but the great four-square stela, inscribed in the strange Lycian character, on all its marble faces, stands yet clear and unhurt; and you may walk eastwards from it all the length of the main street to a wide paved area, from which lesser flagged ways run right and left. The whole ground-plan of the city is there, and more of it evidently survives from the earliest days than on any other Anatolian site. ”

“ Patches of stagnant water, catching the level rays, glistened here and there like gold foil on the poisonous greenness of the hollow; while other patches, grey in shadow and golden-brown in light, gradually resolved themselves into ruins standing in deep marsh. A tethered horse grazing on the rim of the slough, a faint tinkling of goat bells, and three black tents near a pine-log shelter alone betrayed the presence of man on the holiest site of Lycia. ”

“ Yet with all its sameness and deadness one likes the land. The breeze blows hard and clear off sea and lagoon—hard and clear, as through the bolt ropes about a mast—, and the flats have the mysterious charm of all large and free horizons.
102
To the soapy bogs and salt lagoons fall drains and canals, which have sprung far up the Delta to die at last unregarded under the face of the dunes; and there is also a network of forgotten waterways of Ptolemaic and Roman days which now wander unguided. A day will often be half spent in seeking a ford from one of their crumbling banks to the other. ”

“ Our waggon, with all baggage and medical comforts, had been sent by ferry across the lake to a point where, by riding round the southern bight, we might meet it on the second day; but failing to pass a rocky ridge, it fetched a wide compass to the north and made for another goal beyond the mountains. My fever began on the first afternoon, and sitting like a sack on a tired horse, with a sense of dull blows falling on the nape of my neck, I followed the pack-train till dusk up a wild valley where was said to be a hamlet. ”

“ The forest straggled to meet us in clumps of holm-oak and plane on the floor of the ravine, but spread a thicker mantle of pine and fir up the steepening slopes, till checked by cornices of angry volcanic crag. It is not often that one walks in Turkey so free of police or fear of land-lopers, among unfamiliar flowers and birds and butterflies. The guide talked of the chase as a Lycian farmer, sportsman in grain, will always talk, telling tales of bears which come down into the little plain to forage on winter nights ”

“ Our host, who had opened his heart at last, took shadowy promises and solid silver with equal zest, and sent his blessing with us as we rode towards a white bluff honeycombed with ancient tombs, beyond whose butt a great water gleamed. Hollow echoes awoke in the cliff, half a dozen eagles flapped from their eyries, and we beheld Euphrates once more. Three or four mounds broke the eastern line of horizon, of which the nearest, rising from the river’s edge, was that Tell Ahmar, where we were to seek the “writing like nails.” ”

“ The lake floor here has so slight a slope that a mile from its marge the water is still only inches deep, and the grounded feluccas must discharge their freights on to camels, which are trained against nature to receive their loads standing and wade unconcerned to the shore. Naked children splash all day in the shoal-water, plying tiny javelins and little casting-nets, so far out as to seem no bigger than gulls; and there could be no healthier or happier babes than this amphibious brood, whose playground is the Lagoon. ”

“ The site lies on the rocky roots of Taurus, just where the Eurymedon escapes from a gorge whose fringing scarps lead the eye step by step into the farthest blue of the hills. The mountain screen, which shuts off the central Anatolian lakes, is more boldly carved into peak and buttress behind Aspendus than I have seen it elsewhere, and is more nobly wooded to the verge of the spring snows. Few palaces have so fair a prospect as the Castle of Queen Balkís. ”

“ Their fathers and mothers seem to pass the day on the vast stretch of sandy beach, coopering boats, buying and selling fish, chattering, sleeping in the sun. It is astonishing to see so clean a life in Egypt, a life unfouled by the viscous107 ink of the Nile mud. Even the huts are not built of clay, but of ancient Roman bricks dug out of mounds south of the Lagoon, and long ago mellowed to a dusky red that tones to admiration with the yellow dunes and the dark greenery of the palms. ”

“ Their winter camp lay beside our farther road, a huddle of black tents and bamboo huts, of yapping puppy-dogs, squalling babies, elfin women and sooty kettles, among which we drew rein to gaze a moment on the distant bulk of the Theatre of Aspendus—to gaze from the ephemeral dwellings of a society which defies Time towards the imperishable monument of a society which Time has long ago destroyed. ”

“ The fishy wealth of the Lagoon is amazing. Silvery shapes leap in air by tens and twenties, and passing shoals leave wakes in every direction. Boats at anchor, boats adrift, boats under full sail, multiply as one runs northward; and out of the horizon spring groves of poles crossed by poles aslant, masts and yards of invisible hulls moored by invisible islets, whose sandy levels are all but awash. There must be hundreds of craft plying on Lake Burullos, and its fisher-folk are legion—men of blond colouring, active and somewhat silent, with the refined facial type common to old inbred races. ”

“ Only the flat note of a bell sounded now and again from the fold as a beast turned in his lair; and in the pauses of talk one might hear even the faint intermittent crepitation of stones, trees, and earth, respiring the heat of the past day. But whenever, to the relief of unaccustomed eyes, the smoky fire died down, a strident column of mosquitoes would sail in by the door to dispute our persons with the fleas.
Such tent-dwellers seem lighter of heart than the men of Turkish towns and villages, merrier perhaps for having less between them and the sky. ”

“ I was encamped in front of a large magazine, the only building upon the beach, about a quarter of a mile from the mouth of a river which comes down from the upland shelves of Sitía. The noble gorge of its middle course, cleft sheer as a Pacific cañon, was set so thick with old trees and tangled undergrowth, when I saw it first, that a man could scarcely pass along its floor; in the broad upper valley above high-water mark, complots, orchards, and terraced gardens flourished abundantly, and the deltaic plain about the mouth was even more fertile still. ”

“ The traveller in Turkey, who must eat most of his bread at noon and night amid the odours of villages and under the unflinching regard of scornful eyes, remembers with blessing his rare meals by wayside fountains. There he has no questions to answer and none to ask. The sunshine is his, and his the best of the shade. Lolling at his western ease, with no eastern punctilio to bear in mind, he forgets for a moment those twin spoilsports of the Levant, suspicion and bakshish. ”

“ The famous Antiquary who directed it could have guided better, though not more gladly, a student of Attic architecture than a would-be explorer of Asia, and the library held few books, though, heaven knows, enough that I had not read. My one fellow-student helped me much, and would have helped me more, had I been in the temper to learn. But I had come to Athens as a man should not, if he is to love her—come without trained taste for the ancient art,4 which is her only wealth, and without instinctive reverence for her soil. ”

“ In every other Roman theatre, which I have seen, some part of the cavea is perished, the uppermost tiers at any rate being merged so irregularly into the hillside that one may hardly know where seats end and naked rock begins; or else jungle intrudes on the auditorium, and the scena wall, even if so perfect as at Orange, stands a dreary skeleton, with not only its marble statues lost, but all marble mouldings and casing whatsoever. Thus, whether one look up or down, all illusion that the building might still serve its first purpose, is cheated. ”

“ The last lock is left far behind, and you pass beyond all hamlets into an amphibious Limbo where no life of man abides. The canal has no longer dykes on either hand, and its rims sink below your gunwale. Drop down a mile or two more. The flood brims bank high, and slops on to the flats, and, before you are105 well aware, the Nile land has slid under its own waters. You are out on a Lagoon, boundless and bottomless to all appearance, so low are its shores, and so turbid its harassed waves. Yet, in fact, when a tall man lets himself down in mid-lake, the ripples hardly wash his breast. ”

“ Cyrene was built at the summit of a slope which falls steeply to the sea but gently inland, melting southward into steppe at the limit of vision, and for miles and miles is dotted with fragments of grey ruin. The Bedawis say that it is six camel-hours from one end to another of “Grené,” as the name “Kyrene” has been softened in their mouths. No site of antiquity so well suggests how a large city of our own day will seem when at last deserted by man. ”

“ To rob a tomb appears, in fact, to be held dastardly or laudable according as the tenancy of the corpse has been long or short. I once explored a Graeco-Roman cemetery near Alexandria with as willing a Moslem gang as heart could desire. But one of my men ate apart from his companions and had no fellowship with them. He was by far the best digger of them all; none so light of hand as he, so deft to extricate fragile objects from one grave, and to find his way into another. ”

“ The very packhorses, sorry jades that they were, felt the spur of spring:167 they hinnied, squealed, headed off the track to gallantry and combat, till at last they broke into a frenzy of kicking and galloping which brought their packs about their heels and their panting drivers’ fists about their heads. A packhorse, who fancies himself Pegasus, is the most laughable beast on earth till he begins to scatter your bedding, your instruments, your garments and your food over a mile of rock or bog. ”