Part 2 (2/2)
I know we went ash.o.r.e somehow or other, and that we could hardly see for the shouting and yelling! We felt fortunate in having a Mrs Deputy-Commissioner for a companion, for she was bubbling over with humour and anecdote. She and G. promptly began shopping, and certainly succeeded in getting two rather becoming topees, flatter and prettier than any I have yet seen--you might call them Romney topees; one may appear in sketches further on. I sketched of course--always keep ”screeb, screeb, screebling all day long,” as an irate German lady once put it to me, ”screebled” a cafe scene; on the left you see a native, who calls himself Jock Furgusson, trying to pa.s.s off a ”Genuine Egyptian Scarab” to a tourist. Jock Furgusson is infinitely more wonderful and artistic to me than the pyramids, for he can imitate accents so as to make you gasp; he spots anyone's nationality instantaneously--before you have opened your lips he knows your county! I believe he can distinguish between the English of a Lowland Scot and a Highlander, which is more than '_Punch_' does after all these years of practice. ”Ah'm, Jock Furgusson frae Auchtermurrchty and Achterlony, longest maun in the forty twa,” he begins--but somebody help me--I've forgotten how he goes on, a long rigmarole in broadest Doric; the words and intonation so perfect, you can so little believe your eyes that you are landed with a scarab or a string of beads before you have recovered, and he is off to another pa.s.senger, clippin' 'is g's and r's and puttin' in h's to some Englishmen.
The inhabitants of Port Said, we are told, represent the scourings of the Levant; too bad for Cairo, and black-balled for h.e.l.l. All the same G. and I went ash.o.r.e by ourselves after dinner, rather proud of our courage, for several pa.s.sengers said it wasn't safe. It used not to be safe, I know, but I asked the Chief-Engineer what he thought, and he took his right hand in his left, all but the very tip of the little finger which he measured off with his left thumb nail, and said, ”a black maun's heart's no as big as that.” So we went ash.o.r.e and had no adventures at all, but sat in a balcony and listened to pretty good music, and noted the few drowsy figures in the side streets, the glow of lamp or brazier on their heavy draperies, contrasting with the starlight and the deep velvety shadows--moth-like colouring, and intense repose, after the glittering, howling day.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A Cafe, Port Said]
Looking back over these notes, and the Orient and Pacific Guide Book, and the Acts of the Apostles, I observe that I have made no note about Corsica and Sardinia, Lipari Islands, and Stromboli, or of the Straits of Messina and Etna--have barely mentioned Crete! In the Lipari Islands we saw lights ash.o.r.e, and down the Straits of Messina; and Stromboli we discovered easily enough by the glow of hot red up in the sky, and a sloping line of red that went glittering downwards. It was too dark to distinguish anything more.
We saw Crete, enough to swear by, the white top of Mount Ida, and realized where Fair Haven and Phenice and Clauda must lie, and that we were actually in the seas where the Apostle Paul was caught in the Euroclydon. By the way what is a Euroclydon; is it a Levanter?
Was there ever a voyage so vividly described, in more concentrated and pithy words? In eight verses you have a complete dramatic account of a tragedy at sea, from a pa.s.senger's point of view. It would be curious and interesting to learn what the owner thought, and said, when the prisoner suggested that he, and his sailing master, and the Centurion, were all wrong in a question of navigation; and how it came about that shortly after this difference of opinion the prisoner was master of the commissariat, and how, after heavy weather and fasting fourteen days on a rocky coast, 276 souls were saved on bits of wreckage without the loss of one life! The Board of Trade and Life Saving Societies might enquire into this, and report.
CHAPTER VI
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The Ca.n.a.l.--If I had not seen Mr Talbot Kelly's book on Egypt I could hardly have believed it possible that the delicate schemes of colour we see in the desert as we pa.s.s through the ca.n.a.l could be painted and reproduced in colour in a book. He has got the very bloom of the desert, and the beauty of Egypt without its ugliness; the heat and sparkle and brightness in his pictures are so vivid one can almost breathe the exhilarating desert air--and smell the Bazaars! But Egypt is ugly a pin's p.r.i.c.k beneath its beauty. It is so old and covered with bones and decayed ideas. The Nile is a.s.sociated with Moses, and it is long it is true, but it is also very narrow and shallow, and its banks are monotonous to a degree; a mile or so of green crop on either side, then stones, sand, bits of crockery, human bones and rags, then desert sand--a cross between a cemetery and a kitchen garden. The ruins are _awfully_ ugly! ”Think of their age!” people say, and you look at the exquisite spirals of sh.e.l.ls in the lime stones with which these heaps are made! But the saddest thing in Egypt is the fine art debased in the temples, in these ponderous monuments of their officialism; for here and there in them you see exquisite bits of low relief carving, that a Greek would have been proud of, hidden away in interminable hieroglyphic histories spread indiscriminately over grotesque pillars and vast walls, as regardlessly of decorative effect as advertis.e.m.e.nts in a newspaper's columns. The open desert is the best of Egypt, and this thread of blue ca.n.a.l strung with lakes through its sand is very pretty and interesting all the way. We come to a swing bridge. It is open and our modern hotel and modern people slowly steam right through the middle of a Biblical caravan of Arabs on camels; some have crossed into the Egyptian side, the remainder are waiting on the Arabian side, their camels are feeding on the grey-green bushes. The pa.s.sengers just give them a glance and go on with their books. Have we not seen it all long ago in nursery books on Sundays. But, in the nursery in our Sunday books we did not see or feel the glitter and heat of the day, some of which, children to-day can get in Mr Kelly's book.
I dared not sketch the desert scenes; it was in too high a key for me, but I made so bold as to do this sketch of a scene on deck at night: an effect I have not heard described, though it must be familiar to those who go this road. I am sorry it is not reproduced here in colour.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The searchlight on the bow plays on the sandbanks and desert beyond, and makes the land like a snow-field, and the slow movement of the white light intensifies the darkness and silence of the desert. In contrast to the cold blue light and snow-white sand, is the group of figures on deck in bright dresses, dancing. It made quite an _evident_ subject. The figure leaning on the rail is not ill. It is only a little j.a.panese maid thinking of home perhaps.
Suez was a few lights in the darkness over the glow of our pipes, then bed, and in the morning we were sailing down the top, west branch, of the Red Sea, otherwise the Gulf of Suez, with a fresh north wind behind us.
It is extremely charming and refres.h.i.+ng, as I've already remarked, to look out of a port in the morning and see the glittering, tumbling, blue sea alongside. On this occasion the blue is capped with many soft white horses chasing south, and the serrated barren hills of Egypt are slipping away north. They are coloured various tints of pale, faded leather, light buff, and light red, and the sun glares brilliantly over all, ”drying up the blue Red Sea at the rate of twenty three feet per year,” this from the Orient-Pacific Guide; you can yourself almost fancy you hear the sea fizzling with the heat. The Arabian sh.o.r.e is almost the same as the Egyptian, with a larger margin of swelling stretches of sand between the sea and the foot of the hills.
”Gaunt and dreary run the mountains, With black gorges up the land Up to where the lonely desert Spreads her burning, dreary sand.”
There are occasions when circ.u.mstances make it really a pleasure to be an artist, to-day for example; the air is so full of colour, the sea deepest turquoise, with emerald showing when the crests burst white and mix with the blue, and there is a glint of reddish colour reflected from the Arabian sand, and the shadows in the clefts in the sand-hills to the north are as blue as the sea. I was trying to put this down when my friend from the West Country, who helps the engines, told me he had got me one of these exquisite cla.s.sic earthenware vases from Port Said, which he decorates with cigar labels and blue and gold enamel. I had a chat with him in his rather nice cabin--made a study of the flagon, _i.e._ drew its cork. It was full of deep purple Italian wine, like Lacrima Christie or Episcopio Rosso; the wine was good enough, but its deep rose colour with the bright blue reflected on it through the port was splendid. He didn't like it himself, said ”it drew his mouth,” and he gave me both the bottle and the wine as a present because of our love for Dalriada, and I have to give him a ”wee bit sketch” for his cabin.
I will smuggle the jar under our table--G. and I both like Italian wine--and we will use it as a water bottle afterwards, for we have only one decanter at our table amongst eleven thirsty people.
It was just such dark red wine as this, I suppose, that Ulysses and his friends in these seas took in skinfuls to wash down venison, an excellent menu I must say, but it would have been more seamanlike if they had slept off the effects on board, instead of lying out all night on the beach; then, when Morning the rosy-fingered turned up, they'd have been quicker getting under way, and would have got home sooner in the end. How much superior were the Fingalian heroes; they would sail and fight all day and pa.s.s round the uisquebaugh in the evening at the feast of sh.e.l.ls, and never get fuddled and never feared anything under water or above land, and were beholden to neither G.o.ds nor men.
But I did once know a descendant of theirs, in their own country who was overcome by red wine. ”It was perfectly excusable,” he said, for he had never tasted it before--or since! He was a fine, tall man called Callum Bhouie, from his yellow hair when he was a youth; he was old when I knew him--six feet two and thin as a rake and strong, with the face of Wellington and an eye like a hawk. He and his friend were going home to his croft from their occupations one morning early, round the little Carsaig Bay opposite Jura, where he had a still up a little burn there, and they fell in with a cask on the sand and there was red wine in it, port or Burgundy, I do not know. Callum said he knew all about it and it was but weak stuff, so they took bowls and saucers and drank the weak stuff more and more. I think it must have been port; and they lay where they were on the sand and slept till the morning after. When dawn, the rosy-fingered, found them she must have thought them quite h.e.l.lenic; and the minister followed later, and I would not think it right to repeat what he thought it right to say. The sands and the bay and the burn are there to-day, and, as they say in the old tales, if Callum were not dead he would be alive to prove the truth of the story. The still I've never seen, but Callum I knew, and his croft; alas the roof of it fell in a few years ago; and it was the last inhabited house of a Carsaig clachan.
You see the land is ”improved” now, for sheep, and it's all in one big farm instead of small crofts, and little greasy, black-faced sheep climb the loose stone walls and nibble the green gra.s.s short as a carpet where Callum and his wife lived so long.
May I go on to the end of Callum's story; though it is rather a far cry from this hot Red Sea to the cool Sound of Jura?
He and his wife were to be taken to the poor house in winter, and on the long drive across Kintyre they were told that they would be separated, and there was then and there such a crying and fighting on the road that they were both driven back to the croft--and I was not surprised, for where Callum Bhouie was fighting there would not be a stronger man of his age. So they lived on in the but-and-ben, with the lonely, tall ash standing over it, and the view of Jura, the sweetest I know, in front, and he died very old indeed, and his wife followed him in two or three days, so they were not separated even by death for long.
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