- And This Is All You Have To Tell About The Pyramids?
Oh!
For
shame! Not a compliment to their age and size? Not a big phrase,-
-not a rapture? Do you mean to say that you had no feeling of
respect and awe? Try, man, and build up a monument of words as
lofty as they are - they, whom "imber edax" and "aquilo impotens"
and the flight of ages have not been able to destroy.
- No: be that work for great geniuses, great painters, great
poets! This quill was never made to take such flights; it comes of
the wing of a humble domestic bird, who walks a common; who talks a
great deal (and hisses sometimes); who can't fly far or high, and
drops always very quickly; and whose unromantic end is, to be laid
on a Michaelmas or Christmas table, and there to be discussed for
half-an-hour - let us hope, with some relish.
* * *
Another week saw us in the Quarantine Harbour at Malta, where
seventeen days of prison and quiet were almost agreeable, after the
incessant sight-seeing of the last two months. In the interval,
between the 23rd of August and the 27th of October, we may boast of
having seen more men and cities than most travellers have seen in
such a time:- Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta, Athens, Smyrna,
Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo. I shall have the carpet-bag,
which has visited these places in company with its owner,
embroidered with their names; as military flags are emblazoned, and
laid up in ordinary, to be looked at in old age. With what a
number of sights and pictures, - of novel sensations, and lasting
and delightful remembrances, does a man furnish his mind after such
a tour! You forget all the annoyances of travel; but the pleasure
remains with you, through that kind provision of nature by which a
man forgets being ill, but thinks with joy of getting well, and can
remember all the minute circumstances of his convalescence. I
forget what sea-sickness is now: though it occupies a woful
portion of my Journal. There was a time on board when the bitter
ale was decidedly muddy; and the cook of the ship deserting at
Constantinople, it must be confessed his successor was for some
time before he got his hand in. These sorrows have passed away
with the soothing influence of time: the pleasures of the voyage
remain, let us hope, as long as life will endure. It was but for a
couple of days that those shining columns of the Parthenon glowed
under the blue sky there; but the experience of a life could
scarcely impress them more vividly. We saw Cadiz only for an hour;
but the white buildings, and the glorious blue sea, how clear they
are to the memory! - with the tang of that gipsy's guitar dancing in
the market-place, in the midst of the fruit, and the beggars, and
the sunshine. Who can forget the Bosphorus, the brightest and
fairest scene in all the world; or the towering lines of Gibraltar;
or the great piles of Mafra, as we rode into the Tagus? As I write
this, and think, back comes Rhodes, with its old towers and
artillery, and that wonderful atmosphere, and that astonishing blue
sea which environs the island. The Arab riders go pacing over the
plains of Sharon, in the rosy twilight, just before sunrise; and I
can see the ghastly Moab mountains, with the Dead Sea gleaming
before them, from the mosque on the way towards Bethany. The black
gnarled trees of Gethsemane lie at the foot of Olivet, and the
yellow ramparts of the city rise up on the stony hills beyond.
But the happiest and best of all the recollections, perhaps, are
those of the hours passed at night on the deck, when the stars were
shining overhead, and the hours were tolled at their time, and your
thoughts were fixed upon home far away. As the sun rose I once
heard the priest, from the minaret of Constantinople, crying out,
"Come to prayer," with his shrill voice ringing through the clear
air; and saw, at the same hour, the Arab prostrate himself and
pray, and the Jew Rabbi, bending over his book, and worshipping the
Maker of Turk and Jew. Sitting at home in London, and writing this
last line of farewell, those figures come back the clearest of all
to the memory, with the picture, too, of our ship sailing over the
peaceful Sabbath sea, and our own prayers and services celebrated
there. So each, in his fashion, and after his kind, is bowing
down, and adoring the Father, who is equally above all. Cavil not,
you brother or sister, if your neighbour's voice is not like yours;
only hope that his words are honest (as far as they may be), and
his heart humble and thankful.
Footnotes:
{1} Saint Paul speaking from the Areopagus, and rebuking these
superstitions away, yet speaks tenderly to the people before him,
whose devotions he had marked; quotes their poets, to bring them to
think of the God unknown, whom they had ignorantly worshipped; and
says, that the times of this ignorance God winked at, but that now
it was time to repent. No rebuke can surely be more gentle than
this delivered by the upright Apostle.
{2} Thackeray's drawing is shown at this point in the book.
{3} At Derrynane Beg, for instance.
End of From Cornhill to Grand Cairo by William Makepeace Thackeray
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