With officers on board, who announced that the strictest
orders had been received for maintaining a quarantine of three
weeks against all vessels coming from Syria, and directed
accordingly that no one from the vessel should disembark. In reply
we sent a message to the Pasha, setting forth the rank and titles
of the General, and requiring permission to go ashore. After a
while the boat came again alongside, and the officers declaring
that the orders received from Constantinople were imperative and
unexceptional, formally enjoined us in the name of the Pasha to
abstain from any attempt to land.
I had been hitherto much less impatient of our slow voyage than my
gallant friend, but this opposition made the smooth sea seem to me
like a prison, from which I must and would break out. I had an
unbounded faith in the feebleness of Asiatic potentates, and I
proposed that we should set the Pasha at defiance. The General had
been worked up to a state of most painful agitation by the idea of
being driven from the shore which smiled so pleasantly before his
eyes, and he adopted my suggestion with rapture.
We determined to land.
To approach the sweet shore after a tedious voyage, and then to be
suddenly and unexpectedly prohibited from landing - this is so
maddening to the temper, that no one who had ever experienced the
trial would say that even the most violent impatience of such
restraint is wholly inexcusable.
