Richard Harding Davis

“ There is more movement in Tangier than I have ever noticed in a place of its size. Every one is either looking on cross-legged from the bazars and coffee-shops, or rushing, pushing, and screaming in the street. It is most bewildering; if you turn to look after a particularly magnificent Moor, or a half-naked holy man from the desert with wild eyes and hair as long as a horse's mane, you are trodden upon by a string of donkeys carrying kegs of water, or pushed to one side by a soldier with a gun eight feet long. ”

“ It is the best of the mosques. From the outside, on the ramparts, you can see Cairo stretching out below for miles in a level gray jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slender minarets, with the high walls of a palace here and the thick green of a park there to break the monotony; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting ribbon of silver; and beyond that rich green fields and canals and bunches of palm-trees; and seven miles away, where the green ceases and the desert begins, are three monuments of gray stone, looking, at that distance, disappointingly small and familiarly commonplace. ”

“ The women of Egypt are as much slaves as ever were the negroes of our South. They are petted and fattened and given a home, but they must look at life through barriers—barriers across their boxes at the opera, and barriers across the windows of their broughams when they drive abroad, and barriers across their very faces. As long as one-half of the Egyptian people are enslaved and held in bondage and classed as animals without souls, so long will an Army of Occupation ride over the land, and insult by its presence the khedival power. ”

“ The quiet and fresh cleanliness of modern Athens comes to you after the roar and dirt of Cairo's narrow lanes and dusty avenues like the touch of damask table linen and silver after the greasy oil-cloth of a Mediterranean coasting steamer. It is quiet, sunny, and well-bred. You do not fight your way through legions of donkey-boys [182] and dragomans, nor are your footsteps echoed by swarms of guides and beggars. It is a pretty city, with the look of a water-color. ”

“ You can see all the show-places in Cairo of which you have read in a week, and yet at the end of the week you feel as though what you had seen was not really the city, but just the goods in the shop-window. So keep away from show-places. Lose yourself in the streets, or sit idly on the terrace of your hotel and watch the show move by, feeling that the best of it, after all, lies in the fact that nothing you see is done for show; that it is all natural to the people or the place; that if they make pictures of themselves, they do so unconsciously ”

“ There are very few tourists who visit Athens in proportion to those who visit far less momentous ruins; thousands go to Rome and see the Colosseum, to Egypt and view the storied walls of the great rude temples along the Nile, and as many more make the tour of the English cathedral towns; but in Athens it is almost difficult to find a guide. There are not more than a half-dozen, I am sure, in the whole city, and the Acropolis is yours if you wish, and you are often as much alone as though you had been the first to climb its sides. ”

“ It is never twice the same. To-day it may be smiling and resplendent under a warm, brilliant sun that spreads out each shade of green, and shows each terrace and rampart as clearly as though one saw it through a glass; the sky becomes as blue as the sea and the bay, and the white villages of Spain seem as near to one as the red soldier smoking his pipe on the mountings half-way up the Rock. ”

“ Constantinople is a much more primitive city than one would expect the largest of all Eastern cities to be. It impresses you as a city without any municipal control whatsoever, and you come upon a building with the stamp of the municipal palace upon it with as much surprise as you would feel in finding an underwriter's office at the north pole. In many ways it is the most primitive city that I have ever been in. In all that pertains to the Sultan, to the religion of the people, of which he is the head, and to the army, the recognition due them is rigidly and impressively observed. ”

“ There is a little army, chiefly composed of officers, and a miniature cabinet, and a beautiful miniature university, and everybody knows everybody else; and when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard turns out and blows a bugle, and so all Athens, which is always sitting at the cafés around the square of the palace, nods its head and says, "The Queen is going for a drive," or, "Her Majesty has returned early to-day," and then continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mustache and to sip its coffee. Modern Athens tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of thought. ”

“ There is nothing else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are sometimes two sais running abreast, dressed exactly alike, and with the upper part of their bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their side, and with the ends of their scarf and the long tassel streaming out behind. As they yell and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people scramble out of their way until the carriage they precede has rolled rapidly by. Only princesses of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the heads of the Army of Occupation and the Egyptian army are permitted two sais; other people may have one. ”

“ The houses are a light yellow, and the shutters a watery green, and the tile roofs a delicate red, and the sky above a blue seldom shown to ordinary mortals, but reserved for the eyes of painters and poets, who have a sort of second sight, and so are always seeing it and using it for a background. Athens is a very new city, with new streets and new public buildings, and a new King and Royal Palace. ”

“ They always meet under your window or at the corners of a street, and there all shout at once, and no one pays the least attention to them. They might be lamp-posts or minarets, for all the notice they receive. I can imagine no fate or torture so awful as to be ill in Constantinople and to have to lie helpless and listen to the street cries, to the tin horns of the men who run ahead of the streetcars—which incidentally gives you an idea of the speed of these cars—and to the snarling and barking of the thousands of street dogs. ”

“ What looks like a rock is a monster gun painted gray, or a tree hides the mouth of another. And in this forbidden territory are great cannon which are worked from the lowest ramparts. These are the present triumphs of Gibraltar. Before they came, the clouds which shut out the sight of the Rock as well as the rest of the world from its summit rendered the great pieces of artillery there as useless in bad weather as they are harmless in times of peace. The very elements threatened to war against the English, and a shower of rain or a veering wind might have altered the fortunes of a battle. ”

“ Men were running through the streets trailing their guns, and officers were galloping about pulling at their gloves, and bodies of troops were swinging along at a double-quick, which always makes them look as though they were walking in tight boots, and bugles were calling, and groups of men, black and clearly cut against the sky, were excitedly switching the air with flags from every jutting rock and every rampart of the garrison. ”

“ The Oriental cannot express himself in the street without shouting. Everybody shouts—donkey-boys and drivers, venders of a hundred trifles, police and storekeepers, auctioneers and beggars. They do not shout occasionally, but continually. They have to shout, or they will either trample on some one or some one will as certainly trample on them. Camels and donkeys and open carriages and mounted police move through the torrent of pedestrians as though they were figures of the imagination, and had no feelings or feet. ”

“ The history of this siege is one of the most interesting of war stories; it is interesting whether you ever expect to visit Gibraltar or not; it is doubly interesting when you walk the pretty streets of the Rock to-day, with its floating population of twenty thousand, and try to imagine the place held by six thousand half-starved, sick, and wounded soldiers, living at times on grass and herbs and handfuls of rice, and yet carrying on an apparently forlorn fight for four years against the entire army and navy of Spain, and, at the last, against the arms of France as well. ”

“ It is not the enthusiast who believes that all in his country is perfect who is the best patriot. To say that such a man as this—a man who has a better knowledge of many different governments than half of the English cabinet have of their own, and who wishes the best for his Khedive and his country—needs the advice or support of an English resident minister, is as absurd as to say that the French cabinet should govern themselves by the manifestoes of the Comte de Paris. ”

“ I have seen photographs of the Sphinx, taken while I was in Cairo, much more impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a hollow of the sand hills as it does, the farther you move away from it in order to get a better focus, the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to it it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a theatre when you are on the wrong side of the foot-lights. ”

“ Nine out of every ten of those who visit Gibraltar for the first time expect to find an island. It ought to be, and it would be one but for a strip of level turf half a mile wide and half a mile long which joins it to the sunny green hills of Spain. But for this bit of land, which they call "the Neutral Ground," Gibraltar would be an island, for it has the Mediterranean to the east, a bay, and beyond that the hills of Spain to the west, and Africa dimly showing fourteen miles across the sea to the south. ”

“ It is answered by a bugle call given slowly and clearly like a man speaking, and at a certain note the entire nine thousand soldiers salute. It is done with a precision and shock so admirable that you would think, except for the volume of the noise, that but one man had moved his piece. The voice of the priest rises again, and is answered by triumphant strains of brass, and the gates of the palace open, and a glittering procession of officers and princes and pashas moves down the broad street, encircling a carriage drawn by two horses and driven by servants in gold. ”

“ There are only five things the guides take you to see in Tangier—the café chantant, the governor's palace, the prisons, and the harem, to which men are not admitted. They also take you to see the markets, but you can see them for yourself. The markets are bare, open places covered with stones and lined with bazars, and on market-days peopled with thousands of muffled figures selling or trying to sell herbs and eggs and everything else that is eatable, from dates to haunches of mutton. ”

“ It is only after the sun begins to turn the lights out, and you are able to compare it with the great ships at its base, and you see the battlements and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds resting on its top, that you understand it; and then when the outline of the crouching lion, that faces all Europe, comes into relief, you remember it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, of which England holds the key. ”

“ The Khedive has gentle tastes, and is said to find his amusement in his garden and among flowers and on the farm lands of his estates; he speaks several languages very well, and dresses and looks—except for the fez and his attendants—like any other young man of twenty-three or twenty-four in Paris or New York. His ministers, who know him best, describe him as having a high spirit, and one that, as he grows older and will be guided by greater experience, will lead him to firmer authority for his own good and for the good of his people. ”

“ It is not, therefore, the buildings, either new or old, which make Cairo one of the most picturesque and incongruous and entertaining of cities in the whole world; it is the people who live in it and who move about in it, and who are so [106] constantly in the streets that from the Citadel above the city its roar comes to you like the roar of London. ”

“ There is nothing that one can see of what we call public spirit, unless building a mosque and calling it after yourself, in a city already supplied with the most magnificent of such temples, can be called public-spirited. Of course one does not go to Constantinople to see electric lights and asphalt pavements, nor to gather statistics on the poor-rate, but it is interesting to find people so nearly in touch with the world in many things, and so far away from it in others. ”

“ Almost every man who was great, not only in the annals of his own country, but in the history of the world, has left his mark on this oldest country of Egypt, as tourists to the Colosseum have scratched their [103] initials on its stones, and so hope for immortality. You are shown in Cairo the monuments of great monarchs and of a great people, who were not known beyond the limits of their own country in contemporaneous history only because there was no contemporaneous history, and of those who came thousands of years later. ”

“ Overhead is the blue sky, with the ivory columns between, far below you is the steep naked rock, or, on the other hand, the two semicircles of marble seats cushioned with velvet moss and carpeted with daisies and violets, and beyond the limits of the yellow town and its red roofs and dark green gardens stretches the green plain until it touches the sea, or is blocked by Mount Hymettus or Mount Pentelicus, beyond which latter lies the field of Marathon. ”

“ It is only in stage cities that the pavements and streets are so conspicuously clean, or that the hanging lamps of beaten iron-work throw such deep shadows, or that there are such high, heavily carved Moorish doorways and mysterious twisting stairways in the solid rock, or shops with such queer signs, or walls plastered with such odd-colored placards—streets where every footfall echoes, and where dark figures suddenly appear from narrow alleyways and cry "Halt, there!" ”