Robert Hichens

“ As one looks at Stamboul from the heights of Pera, it rises on its hills across the water, beyond the sea of the Golden Horn, like a wonderful garden city, warm, almost ruddy, full of autumnal beauty, with its red-brown roofs and its trees. And out of its rich-toned rusticity the mosques heave themselves up like leviathans that have nothing in common with it; the Mosque of Santa Sophia, of the Sultan Achmet, with its six exquisite minarets, of Mohammed the Conqueror, of Suleiman the Magnificent, and how many others! ”

“ As we drew near to the ancient shrine of Poseidon we left far behind us the habitations of men. At length the car stopped in the wilderness, and on a height to my left I saw the dazzling white marble columns of the Temple of Sunium.
Almost all the ruins I saw in Greece were weather-stained. Their original color was mottled with browns and grays, with saffron, with gold and red-gold. But the columns of Sunium have kept their brilliant whiteness, although they stand on a great, bare cliff above the sea, exposed to the glare of the sun and to the buffeting of every wind of heaven. ”

“ It is almost impossible to believe it as you stand on the Acropolis.
All Athens lies beneath you, pale, almost white, with hints of mauve and yellow, gray and brown, with its dominating palace, its tiny Byzantine churches, its tiled and flat roofs, its solitary cypress-trees and gardens. Lycabettus stands out, small, but bold, almost defiant. Beyond, and on every side, stretches the calm plain of Attica. That winding river of dust marks the Via Sacra, along which the great processions used to pass to Eleusis by the water. There are the dark groves of Academe, a place of rest in a bare land. ”

“ Nature has taken Olympia into her loving arms. She has shed her pine-needles and her leaves of the golden autumn upon the seats where the wrestlers reposed. She has set her grasses and flowers among the stones of the Temple of Zeus. Her vines creep down to the edge of that cup of her earth which holds gently, as a nurse holds a sleeping child, palaces, temples, altars, shrines of the gods and ways for the chariots. All the glory of men has departed, but something remains which is better than glory—peace, loveliness, a pervading promise of lasting things beyond. ”

“ As the Parthenon seems to be the soul of Athens, so the Hermes of Praxiteles seems to be the soul of Olympia, gathering up and expressing its aloofness from all ugly things, its almost reflective tenderness, its profound calm, and its far-off freedom from any sadness. When I stayed there I was the only traveler. Never did I see any human being among the beautiful ruins, or hear any voice to break their silence. Only the peasants of that region passed now and then on the winding track below the hill of Cronus, to lose themselves among the pine-trees. ”

“ Of the many wonderful haunts of the sea which I visited in Greece, Cape Sunium is perhaps the most memorable, though I never shall forget the glories of the magnificent drive along the mountains between Athens and Corinth. But Sunium has its ruined temple, standing on a great height. And in some of us a poet has wakened a wondering consciousness of its romance, perhaps when we sat in a Northern land beside the winter fire. And in some of us, too, an immortal painter has roused a longing to see it, when we never thought to be carried by our happy fate to Greece. ”

“ It is true that fewer columns are standing to bear witness to the old worship of the sea-god; but such places as Sunium are not injured when some blocks of marble fall, but when men begin to build. Still the noble promontory thrusts itself boldly forward into the sea from the heart of an undesecrated wilderness. Still the columns stand quite alone. All the sea-winds can come to you there, and all the winds of the hills—winds from the Ægean and Mediterranean, from crested Eubœa, from Melos, from Hydra, from Ægina, with its beautiful Doric temple, from Argolis and from the mountains of Arcadia. ”

“ What Greece is like in spring, I do not know, when rains have fallen, and round Athens the country is green, when the white dust perhaps does not whirl through Constitution Square and over the garden about the Zappeion, when the intensity of the sun is not fierce on the road to the bare Acropolis, and the guardians of the Parthenon, in their long coats the color of a dervish's hat, do not fall asleep in the patches of shade cast on the hot ground by Doric columns. ”

“ No more do the human cries sound in the midst of that darkness which is created by our misunderstanding. No longer do the frantic footfalls go by. The golden age has returned, with its knowledge of what is not needed—a knowledge that we have lost.
I looked up from Hermes and the little brother, and, in the distance, through the doorway of the museum, I saw a tiny picture of Elis bathed in soft, golden light; a calm hillside, some green and poetic country, and, in the foreground, like a message, a branch of wild olive. ”

“ At once you know, not because of the legend of greatness attaching to it, or because of the historical associations clinging about it, but simply because of the feeling in your own soul roused by its white silhouette in this morning hour, that the soul of Greece—eternal majesty, supreme greatness, divine calm, and that remoteness from which, perhaps, no perfect thing, either God-made or, because of God's breath in him, man-made, is wholly exempt—is lifted high before you under the cloudless heaven of dawn. ”

“ But, oh, the bright simplicity of the life and the country along the way to Marathon! It was like an early world. One looked, and longed to live in those happy woods like the Turkish Gipsies. Could life offer anything better? The pines are small, exquisitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as if it had been deftly arranged by a consummate artist. They curl over the slopes with a lightness almost of foam cresting a wave. Their color is quite lovely. The ancient Egyptians had a love color: well, the little pine-trees of Greece are the color of happiness. ”

“ And as the outlines of the mountains of Greece are nearly always divinely calm, so the colors of the seas of Greece are magically deep and radiant and varied. And over mountains and seas fall changing wonders of light, giving to outline eternal meanings, to color the depth of a soul.
When you stand upon the Acropolis you see not only ruins which, taking everything into consideration, are perhaps the most wonderful in the world, but also one of the most beautiful views of the world. It is asserted as a fact by authorities that the ancient Greeks had little or no feeling for beauty of landscape. ”

“ In striving to become "Greek," too many unhappy ones become nothing at all. Standing before the Hermes of Olympia, one realizes as never before the meaning, the loveliness, of restraint, of the restraint of a great genius, one who could be what he chose to be, and who has chosen to be serene. This it is to be Greek. Desire of anything else fails and lies dead. In the small and silent room, hidden away from the world in the green wilderness of Elis, one has found that rare sensation, a perfect satisfaction. ”

“ In the choir is a deep well with an old well-head. There are many tombs in the pavement. The finely carved pulpit, with its little lion, and the fifteenth-century choir-stalls are well worth seeing, and the roof of the chapel of St. Giovanni Orsini, which contains a great marble tomb, has been made wonderful by age, like an old face made wonderful by wrinkles. But Radovan's doorway is certainly the marvel of Trau. In color it is a rich, deep, dusty brown, and it is elaborately and splendidly carved with two big lions, with Adam on a lion and with Eve on a lioness. ”

“ Beneath the height of Sunium, where the Temple of Poseidon still lifts blanched columns above the passing mariners who have no care for the sea-god's glory, lies the islet of Gaidaronisi, and the mountains of Megara and of Argolis lie like dreaming shadows in the sunlight. Very pure, very perfect, is this great view. Nature here seems purged of all excesses, and even nature in certain places can look almost theatrical, though never in Greece. The sea shines with gold, is decked with marvelous purple, glimmers afar with silver, fades into the color of shadow. ”

“ And the gentle hills, the olive- and pine-groves, the stretching vineyards, seemed to echo his cry.
What is the magic of pastoral Greece? What is it that gives to you a sensation of being gently released from the cares of life and the boredom of modern civilization, with its often unmeaning complications, its unnecessary luxuries, its noisy self-satisfactions? This is not the tremendous, the spectacular release of the desert, an almost savage tearing away of bonds. Nothing in the Greece I saw is savage; scarcely anything is spectacular. ”

“ Along the exquisite marble walls, in the mellow dimness, while Stamboul just outside is buying and selling, is giving itself to love and to crime, the murmur of Islam's devotion steals almost perpetually, mysterious as some faint and wide-spread sound of Nature. The great mosque seems to be breathing out its message to the Almighty, and another message—to man. The echoes are not clear, but dim as the twilight under the arches of marble and beneath the ceilings of gold. They mingle without confusion in a touching harmony, as all things mingle in this mosque of the great repose. ”

“ When full, it can hold over fifty thousand people. The seats, the staircases, the pavements are all of dazzling-white marble, and as there is of course no roof, the effect of this vastness of white, under a bright-blue sky, and bathed in golden fires, is almost blinding. All round the Stadium cypress-trees have been planted, and their dark-green heads rise above the outer walls, like long lines of spear-heads guarding a sacred inclosure. Two comfortable arm-chairs for the king and queen face two stelæ of marble and the far-off entrance. ”

“ On the bare hill to my left I saw the white gleam of the stones in a Jewish cemetery; and, beneath, the pale curve of the Golden Horn, ending not far off in the peace of the desolate country. Red-roofed Eyub, shredding out into blanched edges of cupolas and tombs by the sultan's landing-place, marked the base of the hill; and, beyond, in the distance, mighty Stamboul, brown, with red lights here and there where the sun struck a roof, streamed away to Seraglio Point. ”

“ In the midst of its hidden squalor and crime rises what many consider the most beautiful church—now a mosque—in the world. Perhaps no harbor in Europe can compare with its harbor. For human and historical interest it can scarcely be equaled. In the shadow of its marvelous walls, guarded by innumerable towers and girdled by forests of cypresses, it lies like some great magician, glittering, mysterious, crafty, praying, singing, intriguing, assassinating, looking to East and West, watchful, and full of fanaticism. ”

“ Places that are, or that seem to be, remote often hold a certain melancholy, a tristesse of "old, unhappy, far-off things." But Dalmatia has a serene atmosphere, a cheerful purity, a clean and a cozy gaiety which reach out hands to the traveler, and take him at once into intimacy and the breast of a home. Before entering it the ship coasts along a naked region, in which pale, almost flesh-colored hills are backed by mountains of a ghastly grayness. Flesh-color and steel are almost cruelly blended. No habitations were visible. The sea, protected on our right by lines of islands, was waveless. ”

“ Black-green is the plain. Under the tree of Agamemnon glows a tiny light, like an earth-bound star. Where once the pilgrims gathered who knew only the gods, Christian hands have tended the lamp before the holy picture. And a little farther on, among the foliage of the olive-trees, shines another of these Christian stars, which, in the darkness of Delphi's solitudes, shed their light, faintly perhaps, but faithfully, upon a way once often trodden by pagans who now sleep the last long sleep. To what changes in the human soul do these earth-bound stars bear witness! ”

“ At every moment one is surprised by some unexpected view, by some marvel of masonry, militant or ecclesiastical; by a fountain or a statue, an old doorway, a courtyard, a campanile, an exquisite façade, with arches and lovely columns, balconies and carved window-frames; by cloisters, a strange alley ending in flights of steps, which lead to a mountain from which a fort looks down; by a secret harbor, or a secret garden, or a little magical grove nestling beneath a protecting wall which dates from the Middle Ages, when Ragusa was a proud republic. ”

“ One may not wander through them; one may not sit in them; one may only look at them, and long to lose oneself in their darkness and silence, to vanish in their secret recesses. The Turk leaves them alone, to rot or to flourish, as Allah and Nature will it.
On the third of Stamboul's seven hills stands the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, all glorious without, as Santa Sophia is not, but disappointing within, despite its beautiful windows of jeweled glass from Persia, and the plaques of wonderful tiles which cover the wall on either side of the mihrab. ”

“ Many parts of Stamboul are as the waste places of the earth, abandoned by men.
By night they are silent and black; by day they look like the ways of a great wooden village from which the inhabitants have fled. In their open spaces, patches of waste ground, perhaps a few goats are trying to browse among rubbish and stones, a few little children are loitering, two or three silent men may be sitting under a vine by a shed, which is a Turkish café. There is no sound of steps or of voices. One has no feeling of being in a great city, of being in a city at all. ”