His People
Welcomed Us Most Cordially To His Abode, And The Ladies And The
Luggage (Objects Of Our Solicitude) Were Led Up Many Stairs And
Across Several Terraces To A Most Comfortable Little Room, Under A
Dome Of Its Own, Where The Representative Of Russia Sat.
Women
with brown faces and draggle-tailed coats and turbans, and
wondering eyes, and no stays, and blue beads and gold coins hanging
round their necks, came to gaze, as they passed, upon the fair neat
Englishwomen.
Blowsy black cooks puffing over fires and the
strangest pots and pans on the terraces, children paddling about in
long striped robes, interrupted their sports or labours to come and
stare; and the consul, in his cool domed chamber, with a lattice
overlooking the sea, with clean mats, and pictures of the Emperor,
the Virgin, and St. George, received the strangers with smiling
courtesies, regaling the ladies with pomegranates and sugar, the
gentlemen with pipes of tobacco, whereof the fragrant tubes were
three yards long.
The Russian amenities concluded, we left the ladies still under the
comfortable cool dome of the Russian consulate, and went to see our
own representative. The streets of the little town are neither
agreeable to horse nor foot travellers. Many of the streets are
mere flights of rough steps, leading abruptly into private houses:
you pass under archways and passages numberless; a steep dirty
labyrinth of stone-vaulted stables and sheds occupies the ground-
floor of the habitations; and you pass from flat to flat of the
terraces; at various irregular corners of which, little chambers,
with little private domes, are erected, and the people live
seemingly as much upon the terrace as in the room.
We found the English consul in a queer little arched chamber, with
a strange old picture of the King's arms to decorate one side of
it: and here the consul, a demure old man, dressed in red flowing
robes, with a feeble janissary bearing a shabby tin-mounted staff,
or mace, to denote his office, received such of our nation as came
to him for hospitality. He distributed pipes and coffee to all and
every one; he made us a present of his house and all his beds for
the night, and went himself to lie quietly on the terrace; and for
all this hospitality he declined to receive any reward from us, and
said he was but doing his duty in taking us in. This worthy man, I
thought, must doubtless be very well paid by our Government for
making such sacrifices; but it appears that he does not get one
single farthing, and that the greater number of our Levant consuls
are paid at a similar rate of easy remuneration. If we have bad
consular agents, have we a right to complain? If the worthy
gentlemen cheat occasionally, can we reasonably be angry? But in
travelling through these countries, English people, who don't take
into consideration the miserable poverty and scanty resources of
their country, and are apt to brag and be proud of it, have their
vanity hurt by seeing the representatives of every nation but their
own well and decently maintained, and feel ashamed at sitting down
under the shabby protection of our mean consular flag.
The active young men of our party had been on shore long before us,
and seized upon all the available horses in the town; but we relied
upon a letter from Halil Pasha, enjoining all governors and pashas
to help us in all ways: and hearing we were the bearers of this
document, the cadi and vice-governor of Jaffa came to wait upon the
head of our party; declared that it was his delight and honour to
set eyes upon us; that he would do everything in the world to serve
us; that there were no horses, unluckily, but he would send and get
some in three hours; and so left us with a world of grinning bows
and many choice compliments from one side to the other, which came
to each filtered through an obsequious interpreter. But hours
passed, and the clatter of horses' hoofs was not heard. We had our
dinner of eggs and flaps of bread, and the sunset gun fired: we
had our pipes and coffee again, and the night fell. Is this man
throwing dirt upon us? we began to think. Is he laughing at our
beards, and are our mothers' graves ill-treated by this smiling
swindling cadi? We determined to go and seek in his own den this
shuffling dispenser of infidel justice. This time we would be no
more bamboozled by compliments; but we would use the language of
stern expostulation, and, being roused, would let the rascal hear
the roar of the indignant British lion; so we rose up in our wrath.
The poor consul got a lamp for us with a bit of wax-candle, such as
I wonder his means could afford; the shabby janissary marched ahead
with his tin mace; the two laquais-de-place, that two of our
company had hired, stepped forward, each with an old sabre, and we
went clattering and stumbling down the streets of the town, in
order to seize upon this cadi in his own divan. I was glad, for my
part (though outwardly majestic and indignant in demeanour), that
the horses had not come, and that we had a chance of seeing this
little queer glimpse of Oriental life, which the magistrate's
faithlessness procured for us.
As piety forbids the Turks to eat during the weary daylight hours
of the Ramazan, they spend their time profitably in sleeping until
the welcome sunset, when the town wakens: all the lanterns are
lighted up; all the pipes begin to puff, and the narghiles to
bubble; all the sour-milk-and-sherbet-men begin to yell out the
excellence of their wares; all the frying-pans in the little dirty
cookshops begin to friz, and the pots to send forth a steam:
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 38 of 64
Words from 38123 to 39125
of 65663
