Class Book I t j CopyrightN? COPYRrGHT DEPOSnV -in i 11 ii i nr SIX AND ONE ABROAD BY SIDNEY J. THOMAS AUTHOR OF "In-a-Sense Abroad," Etc. Printed by E. L. Steck 19 14 in i I I ii i nc COPYRIGHT 19 14 BY MRS. S. J. THOMAS JAN 12 1914 'CI,A361562 DEDICATED TO MY WIFE AND TWO SONS CHAPTER. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII. XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII. XXXIII. XXXIV. XXXV. XXXVI. CONTENTS. PAGE. The Sea and Its Moods 1 First Sight of Land 9 In Southern Spain 20 Gibraltar and Algiers 30 A Semi-Colon in the Journey 39 Athens — Its Ruins -^9 Some Dis-stink-tive Features of Constantinople 61 St. Sophia, the Bazars, and the Bosphorus 69 Two Rainy Days in Damascus 77 Lake Galilee and the City of Nazareth 89 From Joppa to Jerusalem 102 A Jerusalem Hotel 108 Bethlehem and the Manger HI Inside the Walls of Jerusalem 119 The AVilderness of Judea, the Dead Sea and the Jordan 131 Queer Egyptian Customs l-l-l The World 's Greatest Wonder 156 Street Life of Naples 166 Pompeii 1 ' 24:8 Kilometers to Rome 179 St. Peter's and the Vatican 187 The Tragedy of the Catacombs 195 The Colosseum by Moonlight 211 Guides Eliminated 219 Venice — Its Amphibious Life 221 Queen of the World's Marbles 235 Threading the Alps 238 Some Hotel Difficulties 242 Lucerne and Its Environs 245 A Boat Ride on the Rhine 249 The Cathedral of Cologne 257 Windmills and Petticoats 259 Seeing a Dutch City Before Breakfast 265 ^Moving Pictures 269 Swallowed by Paris at Midnight 278 The Cream of Parisians 279 ILLUSTRATIONS. The Sea Chapter I Three of Our Party — The Connoisseur with Hand on Hand Rail Chapter I Funehal, Madeira Chapter II. The First Sight of Land Chapter II. Coasting at Funehal Chapter II. A Madeira Cab Chapter II. A Tandem Team in Cadiz Chapter III. Our Train from Cadiz to Seville Chapter III. Chapel of Skeletons Chapter V. The Parthenon Chapter VI. The Pillars of the Parthenon Chapter VI. The Stadion of Athens Chapter VI. Theater of Dionysus Chapter VI. My Passport Into Turkey Chapter VII. Express System of Constantinople Chapter VII. Entrance to the Bazars of Constantinople Chapter VIII. Mohammedan Women Chapter VIII. The ''Street Called Straight" Chapter IX. Malchizedek Chapter IX. Lake Galilee and Tiberias Chapter X. Ploughing Near Nazareth Chapter X. Water Jugs, Nazareth Chapter X. Goat Skin Vessels Chapter XI. In the Garden of Notre Dame — The Nine Priests and Others Chapter XII. In a Sheik's Costume in a Jerusalem Photo Gal- lery Chapter XIII. The Manger Chapter XIII. Tomb of Rachel — Bethlehem in the Distance Chapter XIII. Jehosaphat Chapter XIII. Birdseye View of Jerusalem Chapter XIV. Lepers, Jerusalem Chapter XIV. Bethany Chapter XV. Going Up from Jerusalem to Jericho — Notice the Fine Road and Dearth of Trees Chapter XV. Illustrations. The Dead Sea Chapter XV. The River Jordan Chapter XV. A Street in Old Cairo... Chapter XVI. An Alfalfa Transport Coming Into Cairo Chapter XVII. Cast of a Man — ^Pompeii Chapter XIX. Cast of a Dog — Pompeii Chapter XIX. St. Peters... Chapter XXI. A Berth in the Catacombs of Rome Chapter XXII. A Street in the Catacombs of Rome Chapter XXII. Pyramids of Cestius Chapter XXII. The Colosseum Chapter XXIII. Interior of Colosseum Chapter XXIII. Bridge of Sighs Chapter XXV. Cathedral of Milan Chapter XXVI. The Lion of Lucerne Chapter XXIX. Chapel Bridge — Lucerne Chapter XXIX. INTRODUCTION. It is hard to condense the events of a twenty-thousand-mile trip into a single volume of travel stories, and yet, whether wisely or not, I have overcome the difficulties of such a task. It is still harder to avoid the well-worn track of travel writers and to discover and present for the reader's table an appetizing diet of something new in that line. I hope I have not been un- successful in accomplishing that purpose. The itinerary of the journej^ described in these sketches in- cluded interesting stops at various points on both sides of the Mediterranean, a sojourn in the Holy Land, and in Egypt, and, after doubling back to Naples, a visit to half the countries on the Continent of Europe. Some of the journey was rather hurried, notably so the swift swing we took north out of Switzer- land, by way of the Rhine, through AVestern Germany, Holland, and back to our first latitude at Paris. It was accidental, this excursion into the Netherlands, and therefore just that much surplus, for our program did not originally include it. It so happened that my lot was cast, quite providentially I suspect, with a party of Christian ministers who had planned their trip to the Old World by agreement together before their departure, and to that fortuitous circumstance is due the re- ligious if not strictly Biblical and orthodox viewpoint from which this book is written in certain of its parts. I was trav- eling alone except for such companionship as I should chance to form and with no particular plans and routes of travel, at any rate with none that were not subject to change to meet the almost dire necessity for companions on such a long trip in unknown lands. I was glad therefore to be invited to join the preachers' party, though their programme specified rather hurried journeys and short stops and economical husbandry of limited funds, in which, unless the hurried jaunts were objectionable, I easily enough concurred. The confederation was formed in mid-ocean and was composed according to the preachers' own designation of the mixture, of six preachers and one gentleman. Introd'uetion. Let me denote them more particularly : Dr. Stoplilet, a digni- fied Indiana divine, possessing a disposition as smooth as a February sea ; Dr. Lubbock, a Chicago pastor, encyclopaedic in matters of history and particularly well posted on all events applying to the ready-made route of our itinerary; Dr. Weld, of Minneapolis, a recent Princeton graduate whose journal — his fetich — was forever shocked by Texas levity; Dr. MattheAVS, of South Forks, Dakota, whose orthodoxy was without a flaw ; Dr. Haines, of New York, whose Presbyterian scruples were in- laid with g:ood cheer and who was himself as free of acerbity as his head was of hairs; Dr. Rawlings, of Danville, Virginia, now of Nashville, our spokesman because of his ready wit and ringing eloquence when called upon, especially at those functions aboard- ship that we had, notably on Lincoln's birthday. And I in- clude also in our company that genial spirit from Pittsburg, Col. McCurdy, who, though with us but a short while, con- tributed immensely to the general fund of enjoyment. The book is an album of travel-stories. Just my own pencil pictures. If they interest the reader I shall be very glad. If they prove to be helpful to him, ever so little, I shall be repaid for the trouble of their reproduction. Many of the illustrations are snap-shots of my own. From New York to Egypt I kept up a steady and unrelenting fire, until I exhausted every film which I had. S. J. T. CHAPTER I. The Sea and its Moods. The most interesting feature of a trip across the ocean is the ocean itself; its monotony and its beauty when it sleeps under a glittering sheen from horizon to horizon ; its violent demeanor when aroused by the winds from its radiant stupor ; the de- lightfulness of the ride upon its gentle swells, when the swells are gentle ; and the terrors of its fury in a storm ; its overwhelm- ing magnitude and boundlessness, and the resultant impression of helplessness that falls with crushing effect upon a traveler, and of his own inconsequential relation to the great scheme of the universe of which the sea, vast as it is and puis«ant as it is, he knows is but a small factor. On land or sea, personal conceit has little chance to survive the experiences of an observant traveler. With the varieties of races and tongues with which he comes in contact, the multi- tudes of people of diverse traits and customs, the absolute ignorance of the world of mankind of any certain single indi- vidual such as you or me, and therefore its positive indiffer- ence toward either of us; the sea — illimitable, unexplored, all- powerful ; the skies, just as vast, and vaster under contempla- tion, with their peopled worlds greater than ours and its uni- verses unnumbered ; what chance has the Ego to assert its little potentiality. Personally, I do not care for the sea, and I wonder what could have been the Almighty purpose in wasting three-fourths of the surface of the Globe by covering it with water. AVhen it is calm and smooth, it is monotonous and tiresome even if it be beautiful. When it is turbulent, even when "choppy," as the sailors say, it is aggravating and — nauseating. The first two days out from New York, on this particular voyage, the sea was comparatively smooth and the skies alter- nately clear and clouded. But during the night of the second day a fierce gale arose, of such intensity that it was epochal, both because of its own vehement turbulance and of certain Six and One Abroad drastic, ga?tric, consequences it entailed. For forty-eight hours there was a violent churning of our vessel and of everything in it and of our own anatomies and of everything in them. To be seasick is to be superlatively unhappy. Beginning in a sensation of teasing torture this crudest of all maladies car- ries its victim by rapid stages to the very ragged edge of de- spair where hope with poised wing all but takes its everlasting flight. It is a rebellion of every element of the anatomy amid- THE SEA. ships; a tangled agony of aches, a rumbling of threatenings within and a maudlin wretchedness of eruption without, with no remedy but endurance and no palliative but the grave. There is no caste so haughty and disdainful as the caste of the seasick and that of the upper stratum of the immune. These latter, as vain as peacocks, strut among the disconsolate wretches who are do^^^Ti and out, and parade their immunity, and out of the anarchy of his desperation the lower caste vic- tim longs, oh, so earnestly longs for a gun, a great gun from the The Sen and Its Moods S deck of a battleship, that he might train it on one of the upper caste imnnmes and l)lo\v him into fragments — not just mutilate him, but tear him into atoms, wriggling, agonizing, miserable myriads of atoms. In an early stage of my own convalescence, it happened during a stroll on the deck one day that I came upon a lady whom I knew casually as one of a company of courtly Carolinians. Reclining in a steamer chair and swathed insufficiently in a steamer shawl, hair fearfully disheveled, rib- bons disarranged and negligence apparent in her apparel from loosened bodice to untied shoes, pale unto death, this lady was a perfect picture of abject misery and despair. And, more- over, her head rested upon the shoulder of a man who was as ghastly as she. I should have known better, for I knew from drastic expe- rience that at that stage of the malady the patient wanted nothing but elimination, eradication, annihilation. Still it was not offensively intended when I asked the lady if 1 might be of some service to her, and to her husband, the melancholy gen- tleman who sustained her in unconscious agony. The purple lips parted, the eyes opened weakly, overcast with ochre, and with all the scornful emphasis she could hurl into her words, she replied: "That man is not my husband; I don't know whose husband he is and what is more, I do not care!" Desperation ; contempt ; unspeakable misery. It was nothing short of a calamity to be in the clutches of an epidemic, even in convalescence, during the prevalence of a storm at sea, and unable to properly appreciate the grandeur of the cataclysm of wind and wave. Overhead the gray canopy of cloud and mist Avas in a state of violent convulsion; beneath and all around, the tumultuous jargon of the clashing devils of the sea ; and everywhere the shrieking furies of the tempest. Great Titans of water, colored a deep indigo with- the venom of their own madness, rose and clashed and fell, and over the places where the duels were fought, the residue of their wrath was resolved into seething troughs of foam. Farther out, the scene was like unto the rise and fall of mountains, ten thousand ominous cones rising high out of the maddened main, their crests exploding in a fury of foam, and dying as others rose in Six and One Abroad their turbulent graves. While, throughout the fierce conflict our noble vessel maintained her course serenely, trundled some- times in the cradle of waves as high as her lofty masts, coasting sometimes the crystal declivities or plunging the lance of her bow into the vitals of a billow — not a halt in the long fretted furrow she was cutting from America to the African coast, and drawing majestically in her wake a train of blue overlaid with fantastic laces of foam. The sea can be just as. well-behaved as it can be obstreperous ; THREE OF OUR PARTY— THE CONNOISSEUR WITH HAND ON HAND RAIL. when it is good it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it is horrid. It has its moods like a great uneasy thing of life, at times ugly and dangerous, at times conspiring with sun and atmospheric conditions toward a sublime climax of beauty. In fair weather, in that delightful interim between the breaking of dawn and sunrise, before the mermaid — the sea girls for whom, we looked and looked and never so much as got a glimpse of one — have tinted their tresses in the colors of the new day The Sea and Its Moods and are combing them into exquisite curls and lustrous undula- tions; when the stars, one by one, put out their lights, and the sky begins to blush at the coming of its. chief, the gray of the dawn changing imperceptibly to violet, and quickly thence into purple, and to a radiant orange, and to crimson, and crimson into gold, which is the livery of the rising orb ; at such a time — the very beginning of the day — it is inexpressibly delightful to stand on the swaying prow of the steamer, its sharp edge opening a way through the trackless crystal and turning a foam- ing furrow, the great ship rising and falling with the breathing of the waves; and at such a vantage point to expand the lungs with deep draughts of the finest tonic ever brewed in the dis- pensaries of God or man ; and to watch the changing colors of the morning; and to wait for the coming of the sun when he shall appear at the spot on the horizon where the colors are deepest, and send his smiles on tripping feet along a glistening perspective like angels on the ladder of a Jacob's dream. Hardly less entrancing is the view at the close of a faultless day. Then, the disc of the sun grows to immoderate dimensions before he retires, and the same long glistening ladder of light as that of the early morning is alive with messages of adieu. If a retinue of clouds chance to attend the closing exercises the ef- fect is the more delightful by reason of their flaming livery — vestments of crimson and gold in which they lie against the gates of night. When we left New York, snow was twenty inches deep in the streets and a full grown and well matured blizzard was stabbi. g right and left with daggers of ice. Within 60 hours we were basking in temperate winds and under ardent skies. Yet we had not gone more than a hundred miles below New York's latitude. The source of the change was that amorous, hot- blooded child of the Mexican sea, which runs away from home and hurries, steaming, across the Atlantic, diffusing its warmth, but declining to mix with the water through which it makes its way. We could easily feel the difference, the delightful change, as it came on gradually, until one day we plumped right into the current and its steaming vapors rose in our faces. 6 Six and One Abroad To the north of this stream and out of the range of its influ- ence, the winters indulge in their severest moods. South of it and to the east, the favored nations smile under its balmy breath. North of it, there are icebergs and vi^hales and polar bears and dangerous fogs ; south, there is perpetual spring and summer and laziness and flying fish. And that reminds me. We w^ere disappointed in not seeing a single fl^dng fish. But in our meanderings, we flushed, one quiet, unclouded day, a queer specimen of marine fauna that was new to every one on board except the captain and crew. It did not rise and fly away at our approach as the flying fish would have done, nor with tail for propelling screw and fins for a rudder did it skee- daddle through the water, but on the surface of its natural element inflated itself with gas of its own generation until it was swollen up to a number of times its normal size — round as a circus balloon and colored all the tints of a soap bubble — it then committed itself to the winds and floated away. The course of this strange fish or whatever it was, was di- rectly in front of us, rising and falling as if an experienced hand were on the throttle of its movements. Presently it dropped slowly to the surface and by some sort of automatic puncturing device subsided into invisibility. This phenomenal little creature is known to the sailors as the "balloon fish." And whales, too — we had a fine company of them for our guests on Sunday afternoon, an occasion never to be forgotten. The keen eye of a mate made tine momentous discovery — momen- tous to us but ordinary to him, as was evident in his manner in pointing it out with a careless remark. All alert, I followed the direction of the pointing finger, but for the life of me I could not see the whale nor anything that might be construed into such a phenomenon. The trouble was, as afterwards de- veloped, I expected too much ; expected to see a column of water as large as an eruption of Vesuvius issuing from the forward end of a black, writhing, tremendous thing of life that cleaved the water into a frightful state of agitation, or lay flat, his whole length upon the glistening swells, a dangerous monster at rest. That was my idea of whales, and to save my life I could see nothing in the quiet prospect before us to justify the con- The Se:t and Its Moods elusion that we were in the vicinity of the big fish. At length, I took the trouble to carefully follow the index finger of the mate until it struck water away out some five miles, and be- hold, a little puff, as though some hunter had descried the big game first and discharged his gun at it. That little puff of spray was the nasal discharge of a whale, the mate said, but if it were indeed the output of a whale, the author of the spray kept provokingly out of sight. However, while we looked, another bit of spray shot up, in the intervening stretch of water, and disappeared, and another still nearer, and still an- other, another, sakes alive! and another right here at us and others here, there and yonder, the last one of them shooting his noiseless gun and the whole bunch presenting the appearance of pickets firing at random on the approach of danger. The interest in the plot was increasing fast ; things were hap- pening ; we had accidentally run into a school of the biggest game pf the ocean. Presently we were in their very midst, and I counted as many as thirty-two playing about our bow and stern. They were racing and chasing and threading the gentle swells like huge darning needles, but the provoking things would never come up on top and lie there full length till we could take their measure. Now a head would appear — a big awkward ellipse of shapeless black, slit with an enormous mouth like a Mississippi negro's — and then disappear, to be followed a sec- ond later by the tail, which rose a few feet while the forward end went fishing, or else barely came into view on the sur- face. A dozen pistols were fired at the visitors, and while it is unlikely that any took effect, it served to break up the recep- tion, and the whole party ran on ahead of us and out of sight, each leaking at the nose like a broken water pipe. Six and One Abroad CHAPTER II. First Si gilt of Land. The sight of land, after being out on the ocean waste for days, is calculated to excite interest in the most hlase traveler, but the novice on his first sea legs is delighted beyond measure — any land, so it be but a break in the monotony, the eternal monotony, of water, water, water. I happened to be up and walking the deck at dawn of the day that was to put a parenthesis of delight in the long, tedious sentence of our journey. A blue black washpot lay overturned upon the horizon. As we watched, slowly the outlines grew and slowly our expectations rose, till the dull surface began to take on tints and undulations ; till the physical topography of a fair and charming island lay outspread before us ; till from myste- rious tropic groves a perfume as sweet as the breath of Para- dise came to us on the tenders of the wind with a gracious and refreshing welcome. Higher and higher climbed the pleasing vision; eagerly and more eagerly we swept it with the eye. Gradually the curves of the rotund top were broken into sharp outlines of peaks, and the broun colors we had seen became their precipitous sides up- rearing from the water, and the green was the luxuriant vegeta- tion that thrived in their ravines. Then strips of white ap- peared and confused us until the wiser heads pronounced them waterfalls, that dropped like loosened bands of ribbon from sky to sea. Bye and bye the scene was dotted with spots of white and oc- casionally with broader splotches of white, which upon a nearer view were resolved into individual homes and little towns. And rectangles of different shades of green, little geometric figures, so even and regular, lined the mountain sides. Some one ven- tured the opinion that they were vineyards, but they looked more like multi-colored stair steps. As we ran alongside this stranger of the sea for thirty miles a panorama of beauty was unrolled such as is rarely seen on 10 Six and One Abroad highways of water. I do not believe it possible for f ny sight to be more nearly Edenic — mountains rising four thousand feet sheer from the waves that lazily lapped their feet ; covered from base to summit with foliage of every variety of restful green; riven with picturesque gorges whose depths were concealed un- der a riot of tangled vines ; cascades leaping down every de- pression and dropping their substance in a splashing spray of pearls at the edge of the sea. It was not long before we could THE FIRST SIGHT OF LAND. see the baby vineyards as they lay like so many thousands of cots, one above the other in methodical order, so little that one might easily step over them, it seemed, and yet hanging so precariously against the mountain's steep side, that should one of the terraces cave the least bit there would be danger of annihilating the whole grape crop of Madeira. Immediately after dropping anchor the water was alive with bobbing skiffs and naked brown bo.ys in them pleading with gestures and noisy cries for a chance to dive for coins. Not First Sifjht of Land 11 once, I think, did one of these boys fail, after following with careful eyes the course of a falling coin, to leap on its trail into the water with sprawling limbs and wide open eyes, and re- appear shortly with the trophy in his fingers upheld in tri- umph, tossing it ({uiekly thereafter in the bottom of the boat, wiping his eyes hurriedly and renewing his appeals for further trials. From the steamer, a couple of miles from shore, the white capital, Funchal, appeared as beautiful as a dream of a city in Fairyland, a cluster of diamonds glittering low on the emerald front of an apparition uprisen from the sea. And when we were landed by tenders on the primitive dock amidst a swarm of brown and scantily, yet plentifully, clad natives, underneath palms that never knew a frigid v^ind and among flowers that extended a welcome of decoration and fragrance, the secret of its charms was revealed. Tropical luxuriance of vegetation and prodigality of colore. Indolence, somnolence, apathy. Quaint aboriginal customs. Houses of wdiite and roofs of red, and natives in wdiite and red. AVhat a change and how sudden — from New York to Madeira, from civilization's front door to its back door. A score of upholstered and canopied bullock sleds, the only transportation facilities of the city, afforded a perfect climax to the unique situation — carriages and horses would have been entirely malapropos. The streets of Funchal are about as wide as the usual alley of an American city, running most often between walls of white- washed stone houses or the white walls of garden terraces, winding in and out like the convolutions of a corkscrew^ and paved with rounded pebbles the size of an egg, a pavement enduring enough but very trying on uninitiated feet. My own were bruised so that I could scarcely use them for a week aft- erward. In uumy places, notably in the public gardens and courts of the public buildings and best private homes, the pav- ing stones are arranged in artistic designs of black and white pebbles. The entire city — every street and passage — is paved in this peculiar way. The main business section lies next to the water, where the 12 Six and One Abroad COASTING AT FUNCHAL. First Sight of Land 13 grade is not so steep ; beyond the stores and shops the rise is almost precipitous. But disdaining the interference of altitude and gravity, the white walls in sinuous parallels climb the ab- rupt slopes and the white boxes of houses hold on with a ten- acity that is marvelous. In company with a guide I climbed a succession of these tor- tuous streets to the home — I almost said the aerie — of the Ameri- can consul. It was a strenuous undertaking for a tenderfoot — tender foot is the exact word — but the end fully justified the effort. Having attained to a commanding elevation by a nar- row, circuitous route of pebble pavement between walls of ter- raced homes and whatnot of this unique mountain city over which the foliage of assorted varieties of vegetation drooped in profusion, we were admitted through iron gates to the premises of this accommodating official, and from the veranda of his bungalow which lacked nothing to make it a veritable elysian resort surveyed the outspread scene of city and sea below, and gained from his lips interesting information which is combined with personal observation in the following story of Madeira : The island of ]\Iadeira is 38 miles long by 13 wide. Over 300 square miles of its roug^i and rugged surface has been put in cultivation by the natives, an undertaking that would have baffled them had they been as lazy as they look. The mountains all around are belted by a network of walled terraces such as have been mentioned, built to a considerable extent of pebbles gathered on the beach and carried up on the backs of donkeys. The amount of work required to construct these industrial forti- fications must have been prodigious, is almost incomprehensible. The thousands of little pocket farms are each about the size of a steamboat stateroom, upheld by walls eight to ten feet high, and every whit of the soil was carried there from the valleys in saddle-bags on the backs of donkeys. Great care has to be exercised by the natives when asleep at night, as Mark Twain has said of certain similar conditions elsewhere, lest in turning over they fall out of their farms and sustain serious injury. The population is 150,000, chiefly Portuguese, and yet the island is more densely settled than any other country except- ing Belgium and IMalta. A lady, formerly of Missouri, is the 14 Six and One Abroad only American resident. The thermometer registers only the slightest variation during the year. So prodigal is Nature in her gifts of climate and vegetation that the natives cannot im- agine anything more to be desired, and regard the utilities of our civilization as encroachments on their ease and never to be thought of in Madeira. The capital and only city has a population of 50,000 citizens, each and every one of terra cotta color and lazy disposition. Lazy steers slowly dragging cano- pied sleds ; the drivers with prod and languid lingo keeping: them awake and on their feet ; a boy always attending the drive with a greas}^ rag which he slips under the runners of the sled periodically to ease the friction; uncomplaining donkeys in solemn procession doing the only real work; the slow moving streams of brown in the deep cut channels of trade ; the house- wives idling in the shade of palms; the priests in garb of shining black ; this is Funchal, set against a background that is a dupli- cate of Uden. It is as fair a spot as was ever kissed by a zephyr or laved in the lap of a sea. Grape culture and the production of wine are the chief in- dustries. The natives drink, all of them drink, and they drink all the time. But it is not wine that they drink ; this they ex- port for the money it brings. Sugar cane, strange as it may seem, is the national curse. Its juice is distilled into a nasty drink that they consume to the extreme of debauchery. Sta- tistics show that more alcohol is consumed per capita in Madeira than anywhere else in the world. Irish potatoes are grown ex- tensively, but they have been attacked by a disease that has re- duced the production 60 per cent in recent years and threatens the total destruction of the plant. Bananas are prolific and abundant, but the "West Indies and the Canary Islands, owing to better shipping facilities, have stolen the export trade of Madeira in this fruit, and it is now inconsiderable, whereas it was once important. Embroideries and ornamental needle work are a source of large revenue, as much as fifty tons of this exquisite stuff be- ing sold annually to the foreign trade. It is estimated that 15,000 women and girls are constantly employed in the work, much of it being done under contract at wages of 10 cents to First Sifjlif of Lnnd 15 50 cents a day. Girls as youno' as eiyht years are (juite expert in the art. I dare say, every home represented in our party is now decorated with some of this exquisite handiwork. A ride up the mountain on a cog road deveh^ped some rare views and experiences — moving vistas of emeraUl that were little more than steps of palms and bananas and cane and vines, terraces with their lapfuls of verdure tiin- on tier; valleys deep and narrow and rank and dank with luxuriant foliage; pro- found chasms throwing back against the mountain the echoes of the climbing train; below, the city radiant against the mount- ain side like red and white embroidery on a tunic of green, and beyond it the quiet expanse of the ocean like a mirror in a frame of blue. A Catholic church on the summit of an eminence at the terminus of the funicular road has among the usual con- tents of such sanctuaries a number of wax human limbs on its walls, placed there by the devotees of the Virgin out of grati- tude to her for healing the particular limbs represented in wax. To return to the city a ride in sleds over the thick-pebbled roads two miles down the mountain is exciting in the ex- treme. A native guides the vehicle on foot from behind with ropes, permitting it to glide with great speed. The road is very crooked and in the ride we took it looked at times as if we were to be dashed against the walls, but a dexterous manipu- lation of the reins sent us safely around the threatening bends and we landed right =ide up with care at the foot of the mount- ain, the driver sweating and blowing from the run. Time 9 minutes; fare two shillings and "if you please, 20 reis for a drink." In enumerating the industri-^s of the island, I have neglected to mention a most important and lucrative one — that of beg- ging. Every child there is a per-^istent Nemesis at your heels. "Penny, please; me so poor; need-a bread so bad." It is the only English they know and they know that sentence in French, German and Portuguese. Donate a penny to one of them and your munificence is heralded to the uttcn-most limits of the town and wherfn'er you go thereafter they swarm about you like a plague of Egyptian flies. In the midst of the contemplation 16 Six and One Abroad First Sight of Laud 17 of some sublime scene in which the soul rises into the empyrean, you are suddenly conscious of a collapse to sordid earth by the plea of a little pie-faced mendicant: "Penny, please; me so poor." Drivers beg, guides beg for tips and booze, women as- sume pathetic tones and pose? and beg ; all classes beg, not be- cause they are needy, for they need nothing except to be born again somewhere else and graded up, but because it's their business and it pays. Three small streams, originating in* the jmountain snows, run through the city in channels twenty feet deep by forty feet wide, the walls of which are of solid masonry. The women do the town washing in the beds of these channels and when they are at work in long irregular lines, with their brown prog- eny half-dressed, half exposed, on the rocks and their primi- tive linen outspread on branches and shrubs, the scene is a novel and interesting one. The milk supply of Funchal is derived from goats which are driven through the streets in small herds. The goats are milked at the residence or place of business of the customer and tbe goods delivered warm and unwatered. The streets are cleaned by two methods; with brush brooms at night and by pigs in daytime. At any time of the day and at almost any place a poorly dressed and poverty stricken native, usually a woman, may be seen holding a pig by a rope while it eats the refuse of the streets. Late in the afternoon pigs and drivers may be met in droves on their way home. The money of Madeira is reckoned in reis, a rey having a value equal to a tenth of an American copper cent. The first experience I had with this money was in trying to settle for a light repast of coffee and fruit at a cafe. I asked the amount of the bill and was informed that it was 200 reis. "How much?" I demanded in a shock of astonishment that well nigh gave me palpitation of the heart; "I do not want to buy your shop." The little coffee brewer appeared confused for the moment, but seeing my flustration wrote: "I charge you 200 reis for you eat." It was outrageous, but as I had been foolish enough to appropriate his wares before asking the price I realized the jig was up and there was nothing to do but come 18 Six and One Abroad to his terms, whereupon I tossed him my purse and begged him to take it and cancel the obligation. The purse contained one pound sterling in English gold, nothing less, nothing else. But imagine my surprise when the little native shelled out a lot of iron change that filled mine and McCurdy's hats, and our coat pockets. Honestly, the change I received for that sovereign must have weighed twenty pounds. Out of this swollen remnant of my purse I bought a piece of embroidery for which I paid 2000 reis and could have bought another with- out depleting th© purse entirely. It was to Funchal that Columbus followed a dark-eyed dam- sel of Madeira from Portugal and, winning her hand, married her and lived among her people several years prior to 1492. His wife is buried there now and a tablet setting out these facts is on the old house where the couple lived. It is not surprising that a land of such poetry of landscape, such harmonies of color and sun, such symphonies of indolent ease and luxury, should have been introduced to history by a heroic and pathetic romance. In 1334 a young Englishman of humble ancestry, Robert Machem by name, fell in love with Anna D'Arfet, a pretty French maiden of noble family. The addresses of Machem were warmly reciprocated by the young lady, but were opposed by her parents. The match was per- emptorily prohibited on penalty of disinheritance. Anna sacri- ficed her own heart 's feelings on the altar of parental obedience and accepted the proposal of another, a nobleman of her own country. The nuptials were fixed, but never took place, for on the eve of the loveless ceremony she met her first and only lover and they eloped under the cover of night in a boat. A storm caught the frail craft and drove it past the boundary of their reckoning. After drifting for several days they were stranded on this island which was then uninhabited and un- known. The fair young bride suffered severely from the ex- posure and shock of the storm, and in a short time died. Machem remained on the island for a year after the death of his wife and then he, too, passed away. In the year 1418, Zargo, the Portuguese explorer, landed on the island and found the grave of the ladj^, and on the rude tombstone was an inscription by First Sight of Land 19 the husband giving a brief aceonnt of the incident and request- ing that his bones, if they could be found, be laid beside those of his wife and a chapel reared over the double grave. This pious wish was granted and the chapel is there today, a memo- rial of the pathetic romance. IMadeira is little known to the world, and yet it is one of the world's beauty spots. Sailors say they know no place which so delights and astonishes at first sight. How I would like to spend a season in the midst of its incomparable beauties, in the simple luxury of its ease and restfulness. CHAPTER III. In Southern Spain. Pitifully handicapped by superstition and ignorance, Spain has in a hundred years fallen from the van of European na- tions to a laggard's place in the rear. She is in a stupor, a soporific condition from which she arouses herself at times only for a puff at a cigarette, a drink of liquor or to bend a reverent knee to Mary. With a soil as fertile as our own west- ern plains, with seasons regulated to every necessity of her varied flora and an atmosphere in which her fruit is incubated with little artificial help, the Andalusian hdlb and valleys alone, to say nothing of the rich lands of Central and Northern Spain, have possibilities of wealth that would choke the mar- kets of the world. But the energy and spirit of once proud and prosperous Spain are atrophied and dead. She is asleep, and our little pop call will not disturb her. Cadiz is the southern door, a white city that runs out into the sea on a flat tongue of land to welcome commerce and travel. It is very, very white, every building of any character what- soever being calcimined to a brilliant white. In the dawn from an approaching steamer it looks like a chalk city that soon en- larges and analyzes itself from a solid mass into individual chalk boxes, in rows, and then these boxes become studded with gems as the light of the rising sun falls upon the windows. It is an old city — the Tarshish of the Bible, say the preachers, for which Jonah took passage on that truancy of his in which a whale was the hero. Founded in 1150 B. C, by the Phoenicians, saith the diaries of the Doctors, it was regarded by them as the uttermost limit of the world. It was a dependency of Car- thage from 500 B. C. to the second Punic war, when it became, under Caesar, one of the impregnable fortresses of the Roman empire, and Roman writers are eloquent in praise of its palaces and aqueducts, its great commerce and mighty fleets. In the fifth century it fell into the hands of the Goths and later was a possession of the Moors. "When Spain was at her zenith^ In Southern Spain 21 following the discovery of America, a continuous flood of gold flowed into the tills of her traders and the treasury of her kings, until as late as 1770 when Cadiz, as the chief port, was reckoned the richest city on the globe. With Napoleon's ascend- ancy the first step in Spain's tragic decline was taken, and as her character was not strong enough to withstand the luxury of wealth, it was too weak to convalesce from the lethargy that wealth entailed. Cadiz now is therefore not the Cadiz of old. Like the rest of the country of which it is or ought to be an important port it is bedridden with a well-developed case of inertia and compli- cations. It is satisfied with its present status, which is the same as its past status, and contemplates no radical changes in its programme of inanition and lassitude. The quaint mediaeval thoroughfares are so at variance with everything western that the visitor seems to be wandering in his dreams among the peo- ple and things of the long past. They are so narrow that I supposed at first they were alleys, and kept wondering when we should pass out of them into a street. But the expected avenue never showed up and the alleys never grew in width except when we emerged into one of the numerous plazas of the city and in these delightful places, as if in compensation for the crowded inconveniences of the slits of streets, always there was delightful tropical luxuriance of tree and flower and delectable avenues of palms. In very few places was it possi- ble for carriages to pass, and frequently vehicles were com- peled to back to a cross street upon meeting others unexpectedly. As in most Latin towns, the cathedral is the all important building in Cadiz. Costing almost $2,000,000 it is a mystery how the money was secured from these poor natives. It must have well nigh bankrupted most of them, so imposing is it, so rich in decoration, so vast, so far excelling in cost and elegance any church edifice it had ever been my privilege to see in America. But it is a mistake. There is entirely too much money in it for poor folks. Nothing would do the preachers but that we should visit every cathedral and chapel in Cadiz, and do it first, lest some accident prevent, which would have been lamentable. Being 55 Six and One Abroad in a hopeless minority, I could only register a protest and vow revenge and follow. One of the majority was a connoisseur — that is, he had some of the symptoms. He could not help it, for he had caught it from somebody else. It is not natural for anybody to be a connoisseur. It is contracted like all conta- gious afflictions, from others similarly afflicted, during sup- puration. This particular member of the majority — one of the galaxy of reverends — was a painting connoisseur. He was the only A TANDEM TEAM IN CADIZ. one of the party who possessed the astonishing information that a certain little old church of Cadiz of medisevial origin contained a $100,000 painting by one Murillo, an artist of some repute in those parts. Fairly beaming with anticipation and other symptoms, we followed the connoisseur and a guide, whom we had adopted, into a wee bit of a. church, where, after sweeping with tense breath and soft step along the nave, past transept and other In Southern Spain 23 architectural landmarks, we brought up face to face with the famous picture. The guide halted reverently, inflated himself with an in- spiration of air, and began his interpretation. It was by jMurillo and therefore must be very, very fine. "And who was Murillor' I had the temerity to interrupt. "^lureel-yo! Don't-ee sobby grande Mureel-yo? Most big picture hombre in de world ! ' ' ''No, never heard of IMureel-yo in my life," I sorrowfully confessed amid pianissimo hisses from the connoisseur. It represented "The Marriage of St. Catherine." I did not know who St. Catherine was, and do not know yet, but that was unimportant, and I did not care to interrupt the pleasant little speech on unimportant details. However, I did venture this one further query: "Where is the gentleman that St. Catherine is supposed to be tying up with r ' It was a stunner, and he could do nothing to solve the problem, but sputtered a polyglot explanation one-eighth English and seven-eighths Spanish. A cherub from above was in the act of placing a ring upon Catherine's finger and a number of plump babes with sweet faces were tumbling gleefully in clouds overhead, while an austere man with bushy whiskers, almost an exact likeness of James Russell Lowell, brooded over the scene in misty indis- tinctness from the panel surmounting the picture. I hope I am not irreverent in the way I have stated this, for it was the painter's attempt to reproduce God Almighty. If I had an idea the Great Ruler of the Universe looked anything like :\Iurillo's $100,000 painting represents Him to be, I confess that I would have to readjust my view of Him. Bold, indeed, must be the brush that would venture into such a field. This picture has particular interest for connoisseurs, because it was the last of the celebrated painter. When he had given it the final touch he stepped back to inspect the result, and, missing his footing, fell from the scaffolding to the marble floor and was killed. (Diary of the Doctors, page 169.) In a museum close to this church, a sarcophagus, dug up re- cently in the sands of the city's suburbs, holds the gruesome 24 Six and One Abroad remains of a Phoenician of the ninth century before Christ. He is very old and but a skeleton of his former self. There are so many old things in this country that nothing with a history short of the Crusades stirred a ripple of interest in us. Only now and then did we encounter anything modern. For instance, the Andalusian Dance came in our way. There was nothing musty or obsolete in that performance. It was strictly up-to-date, up to the ceiling, up to the very meridian of high noon. A sprightly company of black-eyed, raven- locked senoritas were the performing stars, the dance consist- ing of a series of genuflections, contortions and kicks, super- inducing dimpled arms and rounded ankles and "ruffled cuffed absurdities," to the music of castanets and thrumming guitars. The skirts of these graceful damsels were visible to the naked eye. On the wall of the stage was a large painting of the boy Jesus sweeping out the shavings of his father's carpenter shop, which gave the performance a religious cast. The six reverends admired this painting very much and sat on the front row and studied it while I profanely watched the dancing. However, the dancing soon became tiresome by reason of its repetition and I retired to the outside while the preachers were so in- fatuated with the picture that they remained fully an hour longer. Every man and boy in aill Andalusia smokes — cigarettes chiefly, cigars to some extent, but they all smoke — and pos- sibly having acquired the habit here, they will continue to smoke in the hereafter. I had believed that Dewey achieved a remarkable victory at Manila and Schley at Santiago, but I know now that their boasted feats were but picnics with the toy manikins of a nursery. A company of diving boys from Madeira can run the whole of Southern Spain into the sea. I do not mean to be severe on this poor, miserable, decadent peo- ple and their sleepy, odoriferous, canyoned town, and I am charitable enough to confess that this severe opinion had its origin, possibly, in a barber chair, where I experienced a touch of the Spanish Inquisition. To locate the residence portion of the city was a puzzle : We had driven from one end of the town to another, and across a In Southern Spain 25 number of times, but not a single residence was to be seen. We had seen pretty brunette faces peeping through the bars of grated windows upstairs over the shops, but it had not occurred to us that these senoritas were at home. We were in error. The homes of the people were really over the stores and shops in the very busiest parts of town— three, four and five stories of them. I understand that a few wealthy families have real, sure enough homes, from the ground up, in the heart of the city. All doors are locked through a keyhole in the door facing, the doors themselves having no locks on them. The donkey is the beast of burden, in Cadiz; that itself is significant, for any race of people who associate intimately with the donkey sink to the donkey's level. That animal will not affiliate with his superiors; he is either on a level with them or above them. A two-wheeled cart with widespread sheet and big straw receptacle swinging from the axle s-eemed to be the means of freight transportation. If the load happened to be extra heavy more donkeys were hitched on, not side by side, as we do, but in front of each other, tandem style. I saw as many as sixteen of these Andalusian canaries pulling a single wagon, and the procession was a comedy of sixteen acts, each canary constituting a separate act. There is no room for street cars in Cadiz and little need for them, either, as the population is herded together in a very compact space, everybody living in his own work-shop and nobody going visiting. Ladies converse with their neighbors acrass the streets, thus paying calls without the necessity of going down stairs and across the dividing space. Still there is a street car line along the shore. There are 18,000,000 people in Spain; of these only 6,000 are protestants. (Diary of Doctors, page 172.) Seventy-five per cent of them can neither read nor write. They need to knock around a little ; to travel ; to spread out and let the sun- shine in; they need pepper, soap and school books, railroads and mules, machinery and electricity; to eliminate the jack- ass and trade off a few hundred thousand peacock-y soldiers for a hundred occidental school teachers, their lazy guitars for 26 Six and One Abroad lively cornets, their bull fights for base-ball, and cross up those beautiful women with a strain of western blood; and the re- sult would be a regenerated Spain, a renaissance of her former status as a first-rate power and people. Cadiz smells bad. It has a disagreeable odor like the back- door of a restaurant, and it was a relief always to file out of the shady gufehes to the quay and get a whiff of fresh air. For these and other reasons I was not sorry when the time OUR TRAIN FROM CADIZ TO SEVILLE. came to board the train for Seville, a larger and better city, ninety-five miles inland. And what a train! The engine about the size of an Ameri- can switch engine ; without a bell or cowcatcher ; the passenger coaches no longer than twelve feet and capable of holding in their two compartments less than two moderate-sized families. A gong sounds, a boj^ goes up and down the platform ringing a bell, the engine crows like a rooster, and we are off. Oh, goodness gracious ; are we on a sure enough railroad train ? It In Southern Spain is hard to believe it, for it does not look like one, neither does it feel like one, and the qneer thing rocks like an omnibus over a pavement. There is no stove, no water, no toilet on the whole train, and under our feet a funny little galvanized iron flounder of hot water for a heating system. No stations are called and we rattle along at the rate of about twenty miles an hour, passing first the ruins of a Roman aque- duct and a fine Roman road still amazingly preserved. Along the coast for .several miles are numerous vats of ocean water, and large pyramids of dirty salt standing like miniature Egyptian sentinels over a buried Thebes. And then we enter the farming district, amid blooming apricots and almonds, cab- bage and spinach gardens, white houses and rock fences, over undulations like the ocean when it rolls, and in tfie course of an hour stop at the town of San Fernando. By this time we have found a way to unlock our cabin door and we join the wholesale exodus into the open air. Every- body, men and women, seem moved by a common desire and head precipitately for a common place, the men disappearing under the sign ''eaballeros, " the ladies under the sign "senoras, " both compartments together but separated by par- titions of iron which are wonderful conductors of sound. This is absolutely the funniest thing I expect to see on the entire tour of the Old World. Theoretically, the Spaniards are right. The gong sounds, the boy rings his bell along the platform, the engine crows, and we are off again, this time penetrating at once the richest grape and wine section of Spain. The hills roll and swell as before ; every valley is a neighborhood of green gardens; every hill under cultivation; fruit trees are blooming, white houses are scattered promiscuously over the landscape; fences of cactus and century plant between thick gardens appear; and vineyards, orange and lemon groves and olive orchards ; now and then a straw hut with its half -savage, half-naked peons ; occasionally a small pasture where bulls are bred for the national sport ; macadamized roads, as smooth as a pavement and clean as a parlor ; haciendas bearing the names of their wealthy owners on their .white fronts ; and then the city 28 Six and One Abroad of Perez, 50,000 strong; and then the outpouring of the train's contents and the comedy aforesaid. Now we run into a series of plantations where the land is being broken for spring planting, the plow in use being a queer wooden one-handled affair pulled by oxen. After this we see much more plowing in progress, and everywhere the same old plow and oxen. A carload of riding planters would either revo- lutionize this country or frighten the population to death. Not a single wild tree have we seen since leaving Cadiz, but now a pine grove shows up, each individual pine being trimmed close up to its top. Lumber is a rarity here, and I honestly believe there is not enough timber in the houses of all Southern Spain to build an American hen house, and there is no such business anywhere as a lumber yard. The donkey is in evidence everywhere in the country as in the town, but the country burro usually has his back shaved into queer patterns and by this caprice is supposed by the gentry to be better than his urban brother. Suddenly those queer, old, decrepit trees that we have seen all along, full of knots and riven by age and storm, begin to increase in numbers until there is now an unbroken forest of them on both sides. If the Spaniard would put his oil in earthenware jars instead of goatskins it would be in greater demand and his commerce in this line would surpass that of any other country if he would push it. And now we are at Seville, a city of nearly 200,000. I would like to write of the cathedral of Seville, a structure second only to St. Peter's in size, the pillars of which are so vast that twenty men touching hands at full arms' length can scarcely reach around one of them; with its organ so costly that $1,000,- 000 was recently spent in repairs; with its exquisite carving in cedar ; and its criminal wealth in gold ; with the marble sarcoph- agus that contains the remains of Columbus, and the tomb of the great navigator's son; with its priceless paintings by Murillo, the ''Vision of St. Francis," from which the saint was cut out a few years ago and sold to Pierpont Morgan for $65,- 000 and afterwards returned by him to the church; with its weird service, its sublime arches, the grand music. In Southern Spain 29 I would like to take the reader through the old jNIoorish pal- ace, 700 years old, which, with its companion, the Alhambra, are the most exquisitely and delicately adorned structures in the world, its doors and ceiling of cedar inlaid with ivory and pearls, its walls of designs in mosaic; with its arches of frost work; its hall where Queen Isabella gave her jewels to Colum- bus; its rooms where in the midst of the most elegant and re- fined sculpture, some of the vilest crimes in Spain's bloody history were committed and with its Queen's bath tub 25x100 feet in size. I would like to take the reader, too, into the picture galleries, where Velasquez and INIurillo and other noted Spanish painters have left their best productions. But in a trip such as this and a book such as this, details are tiresome and minute descriptions a bore. ]\Ioreover, only the most gifted writer can portray those things so that the reader may see them and admire them through the writer's eyes. The life of the Spanish people is full of interest, for it is all strange to us. There is much to admire in their customs. The women are the prettiest in the world ; in all Spain I scarcely saw a single lady who was not prepossessing, if not actually beautiful. But I wonder how they live and manage to maintain such charms without a wilderness of shrubbery, rib- bons and birds on their heads. There are millinery stores in Spain; one in Cadiz, two in Seville, and there is said to be a fourth in Madrid; but these are modern establishments to meet the demands of foreign lady travelers only. The senoras and senoritas do not wear bonnets and hats, but a modest mantilla, black, white or cream to suit the individual taste or the occa- sion and which is thrown over the head when in the sun or dropped down upon the shoulders in shaded streets. CHAPTER ly. Gibraltar and Algiers. A giant sentinel, grave, stolid, imperious, at the gateway of the great mid-continent sea, Gibraltar is the most valuable, if, indeed, it is not the strongest natural fortress in the world. From the Atlantic its outline is an abrupt slope that is not par- ticularly imposing, but a closer view, such as is possible from the harbor inside the bay, brings out the grim, defiant features and establishes the splendid commanding position it occupies. A solid mass of limestone three miles in length, seven in girth and three-quarters only at its greatest breadth, this colossal rock, in its isolation, is the result of some dynamic force that tore it loose from its original connection with the Sierra Nevadas and projected it into the sea as if in abortive attempt to dam the strait. On the north it is connected with the mainland of Spain by a valley but a little higher than sea level, and on that side the rock shows to best advantage. Full 1,400 feet, this adamantine chief rears his pompadoured head and sweeps the Mediterranean Sea and Spanish hills with never sleeping eye. It is not hard to imagine this bold climax as a recumbent lion with uplifted head and sloping posterior — an ossified emblem of the great nation that holds it. Around this famous pile the navies of the world have battled for advantage and the floor of the sea is strewn with the wrecks of the conflicts. Gibraltar took its name from the word Gabel, the Moorish term for mountain, and Tarik, the Moorish chief, who in 711 A. D. was the first to occupy it as a stronghold. From that date to the present it has been taken and surrendered fourteen times, the Moors holding it altogether 726 years. It is related of Queen Isabella of Spain, she w%o purchased America for a ring and a necklace, and a few other jewels, that she was so intense in her desire to recover Gibraltar from the Moors that she seated herself on a certain rock in the vicinity now called ''Queen's Chair," and asserted her determination never to Gihridtar and Algiers 31 move until the Spanish flag should float from the fortress. The story goes that the Spanish arms were so ineffectual that she was about to perish on her stony seat when the Moorish commander gallantly ran down his own flag for a few moments and supplanted it with the colors of Spain, allowing the foolish sovereign to save her face. But the most miserable of all the sieges that have tried the merit of Gibraltar's bulwarks and the mettle of its defenders was the last one, th;it of 1770, when Spain, mortified and all but heartbroken at the loss of her cherished fort, brought the full force of her great resources to bear upon it. For four years the isolation was complete and the bombardment con- tinuous, but British endurance and sagacity was a match for the attacking guns ; the siege was a failure, and from then till now England has been in undisputed control. During that war the English dug a tunnel, technically termed a gallery, in the solid rock, to bring a flanking fire on the enemy without ex- posing themselves. Since then the gallery has been extended and others constructed until today there are seven miles of them. It was my privilege to walk through a portion of this under- ground network of conununication. The rough, ragged walls of solid rock; the resounding echoes of feet and voices; the damp, dark and sinuous passageways; every twenty or thirty feet a powerful dog of war, silent, severe and threatening, with his muzzled nose through the windows of the rock; the very presence of the uniformed soldiers in charge of our party; gr(>at precipitous depths underneath ; the uplifted tremendous heights above and the great guns visible there — all together conspired to give an impression of powerful latent military possibilities, of the terrors of war, of Britain's unstinted ef- forts to perpetuate her prestige behind the greatest navy and army and the greatest fortifications in the world. Gibraltar is bristling Avith cannon whose location is a military 'eeret and if the men behind the guns be any marksmen at all, no fleet could run the gauntlet of their batteries. Between the rock and Spanish soil a strip of neutral ground 200 yards wide is fixed, which by agreement is not to be used or occupied by any nation. Near this point are located the 32 Six mid One Abroad cricket and tennis grounds of the soldiers, and a cemetery holds in its solemn vaults the fruits of a dozen wars. On the west side of the hill the town of Gibraltar is located, tier upon tier, pell mell and promiscuous among the rocks. On its main street there is a constant stream of men of many nationalities — a rare opportunity for the student of ethnology. Such a cosmopolitan mixture of breeds cannot be seen any- where else in the world. Europe, Asia, Africa and the isles of the sea jostle each other in a confusion of costumes and faces and a Babel of tongues; tall, stately, slow-pacing Moors from Morocco ; red-f ezzed Turks from the Levant ; thick-lipped ne- groes from Ethiopia; gabardined Jews; red coated British sol- diers, and fine looking Americans. The city consists entirely of military officials' residences, their quarters and barracks, and thie homes of those necessary for supplying and serving the garrison. Of the total population of 25,000, 6,000 are soldiers. No one is allowed to establish a residence or business there ex- cept to supply the wants of the garrison, and for this purpose a government permit is indispensible. At six o'clock each aft- ernoon a signal gun is fired and all foreigners are routed out like sheep and at that time the Spaniards may be seen in droves going to their homes at Linea, a town across the neutral strip. Then the gates of the city are locked and no one is ad- mitted except on special order. The rock abounds in caves, the largest of which is 1,000 feet above the sea, has a hall 220 feet long, 90 feet wide and 70 feet high, supported by stalactite pillars. This cave presents a most beautiful effect when lighted up. It contains a fathom- less gulf which recently became the tomb of a couple of English officers who fell into it. It is believed by many that through a subterranean passage at the bottom of this abyss, the apes which infest the Rock came there originally from Africa. These apes are respected and protected by the soldiers and roam over the mountain with impunity and absolute immunity, as they have done from time immemorial. From Gibraltar, Trafalgar Bay is plainly visible, for it is only a few miles distant. This was the site, it will be remem- bered, of the battle between Admiral Nelson's and Napoleon's Gibraltar and Algiers 33 navies, resulting in a victory for the English and in Nelson's death. At night no lights on the seaward side of the mountain are allowed, but the illmnination of the town on the landward side, when seen from a ship in the bay, is almost equal to that of Funchal, Maderia. The British government has fine dry docks, and while we were there a warship was high and dry in the hands of machinists and painters. The visitor is always shown the beautiful Alameda Park, but as he is not at Gibral- tar hunting flowers he feels almost insulted when shrubbery is mentioned. There is also a Moorish cathedral, a thousand years old, but the visitor is likewise averse to mixing religion and war, and passes up the church for the guns. The constant blare of trumpets, the marching of troops, the galloping of mounted officers, the frowning of the engines of destruction, and others still that we know are ready for use concealed be- hind barriers and bastions, the men-of-war in the harbor, the sentries, the walls, everything proclaims the military character of the place. Gibraltar is strong, but when to its natural impregnability is added the military skill and dogged endurance of the British soldier, it becomes, as it has become, a synonym of all the super- latives of stability. And yet it is doubtful if Gibraltar will ever be more to England than a place to sink her money and to harbor and coal her ships. It is the opinion of experts that war vessels could pass through the strait unharmed under fire from the fort, by hugging the African coast, and if it be use- less for this purpose there is no excuse for its maintenance ex- cept as a matter of pride and coaling of vessels. At midnight we lifted anchor and silently stole past the sentries, unnoticed by the watch dogs of the mountain em- brazures, or augjit else so far as we could tell, save the revolving signal light that threw its searching rays full and fair upon us. The great lion lay still with his shaggy head turned alert and menacing tov/ard the unhappy people who were his last enemies. The shadow of the world 's best expression of strength and stability fell athwart the Mediterranean far out, and the moon traced its outlines in the water, as it had done since the 34 Six and One Abroad morning stars sang together and Gibraltar was born in the labor of a world. For thirty hours we traversed the trackless thoroughfare that had borne the commerce of every age of man and had been the scene of conflicts of galleys, triremes and ironclads that changed the trend of history time and time again. This part of the Mediterranean, however, is noted particularly for the piracy that prevailed here unchecked for centuries. The Arabs who overran Northern Africa in the dark ages, preyed upon com- merce in the Mediterranean with a rapacity and cruelty and to an extent almost unthinkable. Imprisonment, torture and murder followed upon their depredations — a horrible orgie of blood and misery and a long nightmare of terror to civiliza- tion. The ghastly record they made may be surmised from the statement that 3,000 vessels were known to have fallen into the hands of these ruffians of the desert and 600,000 people, citi- zens, of every nation and of every rank in society, suffered the nameless horrors of bondage, of whom only the smallest pro- portion ever escaped or were ransomed. In six years England alone lost 350 ships and 6,000 of her citizens. We were approaching the old nest of these bandits of the past, and had already pictured it in our minds as a desolate and forbidding stronghold overlooking the sea and flanked by the sand dunes of Sahara, a fit and becoming habitation of des- perate characters. The low African hills were mantled to their feet in sand, sand that was wholly unrelieved except where it was pinned down in occasional folds by a boulder or cactus. Surely on all such a coast there was no fit place for civilization to harbor its commerce or to rear tolerable homes for its men of trade. The ruffled sheen of the blue Mediterranean glided by in charming monotony; the unoccupied hills rose and fell in graceful undulations; and night came at length and shut out the prospect and played its drama of dreams. Only a few of the ship's company besides the six preachers and the minority were awake and up when at early dawn we entered an expansive and very placid harbor, where, in the center of its crescent base, a vision rose and developed through Gihrultar find Algiers 5- the haze — a succession of spectacular surprises. A chain of blue-black mountains with crests of snow was the background first visible. As the steamer approached, a range of hills de- tached themselves from the darker mass, and on their front a white city appeared and gradually grew — a city so white that it seemed the hills had uncovered their bosoms to display their alabaster charms. Nearer, the scene resolved itself into white houses, tier on tier from the water up the steep acclivities — square and boxlike, as if they had been molded of plaster, and glistening in the rising sun and colored by it into an allegorical likeness of maidens with pearly teeth and sunny smiles and dresses of white. It was Algiers, atoning in penitence of beauty for its way- ward past. In the bay a number of large ships at anchor and a score of fishing vessels were spreading their white wings for the work of the day. Landing by tenders, we pushed our way through a crowd of strangely dressed men who surveyed us and stalked us with gaping curiosity, our guide himself being the most strikingly grotesque of them all, a fat, turbaned Arab with trousers that dragged the ground in the rear, their ample folds drawn to- gether below the knee. This necessary evil had been bargained for by wire and met us at the wharf by appointment. He wore a merry and rather intelligent face and in this respect differed from his companions on the pier who were a picturesque gang of cut-throats unless their faces belied their characters. First to the left and up a long grade, then to the right and up, and again to the left and up, and once again to the right and up, it was a fascinating, route that we were forced to follow from the water to the city's high level, or rather to its last stratum of tiers, and it was a surprisingly modern reception we were treated to after we had accomplished the picturesque ascent — a fine, wide, paved boulevard, electric cars with uni- formed motormen, and modern mercantile establishments. There was nothing to indicate that we were in an African town of former barbarian ownership and occupancy, except the strange and polychromatic dress of some of the pedestrians. French 36 Six and One Abroad enterprise and skill had reared a duplicate of Paris in white stone on the ruins of the old Arab lair. But Algiers was not to be estimated altogether by its water front; it was partly western and partly eastern; partly France and partly desert. Just three minutes from the evolutions of our entry the boulevard upon which we clattered formed a noisy junction with a great unpaved, beautifully shaded thor- oughfare that was thronged with quaintly dressed, queerly mannered and curiously engaged natives. It was easy to guess that this place was the great market street of Algiers, its main artery of supplies from the desert world of which it was the port of shipment, where tired and dusty caravans dropped their bundles of tropic stuff and after a rest loaded up again with the commerce of Europe. The camels with pondrous awkward strides came and went in this interesting place with lazy indifference to the prancing bobbed steeds of the soldiers and the modern caravans of the rail and sea. Again the scene changed, and almost as quickly, from Be- douins in their resplendent array, by way of rapturously shaded and verdure-scented streets, to Jardin D'Essai, which is about the loveliest park that has happened since Adam was dispossessed of Eden. The contrast was striking between the irridescent display of primitive love of ornamentation by the natives and Nature's best efforts at luxuriant growth and happy blending of colors and shades. Angular-limbed rubber trees with dense canopies of foliage, sequestered retreats with pillars of palms and architraves of abounding vines, groves of lemon, banana and orange, rippling streamlets, and every flower that blooms in the summer sun — a very wilderness of verdure and bloom ; there cannot anywhere be a prettier spot. Amen ! saith the preachers. It was a pity to have to leave this place where one could almost "hear the voice of God walking in the garden," but we were to see yet more beautiful things than even this incom- parable garden. Big Breeches (by which uncanonical term the preachers had in an irresponsible moment dubbed the grotesquely attired Corsair who was our chaperon) had us at his mercy and he declared he would show us prettier scenery GibraJtar and Algiers 37 than, as he put it, "the Devil showed Jesus from the Mount." Here the French have constructed a magnificent turnpike around the ravines of the overhanging hills and on either side of its devious course the homes of Algiers are located. Swinging along this road, now far inside a depression where we felt the fragrant breath of the dells and where numerous rills sang in chorus and gulches yawned in accidental discord, and every jagged shoulder of cliff was hung with rarest tropic drapery, now doubling the bold projection of a mountain, always climb- ing, always above the glistening city, always winding, twisting and curving, the ascent to ]\Iustapha Superieur, as the climax of the tortuous scenic way is called, was an ecstatic and unusual experience. Quaint, rustic villas which had been erected, in most novel and seductive fashion, by the commercial kings and the idle rich of Europe for winter homes, occupied every avail- able site along the charming drive ; draped most often, these paradises from red roof to rustic approach with, cataracts of vines, the white walls scarcely visible through the verdure, and the merest sprinkle of sun finding its way through the foliage of orange, aloes and palms and the radiant assortment of tropic growth to the velvet underneath. But prettiest of all, and sublimest of all, and absolutely ravish- ing, was the view from the lofty summit. From this altitude in proximity to the bluest of skies and where the scenery and situation was reinforced and overwhelmed with luxuriant veg- etable growth of every resplendent color and every delicate shade known to the southern sun, looking down from this se- raphic environment upon the milk-white city sparkling in the sunlight far below, and out upon the blue, arching sea, and up at the polished dome of the sky, a picture was spread that sur- passed even Maderia, and I dare say has few superiors any- where. Amen and amen, saith the preachers. And this was Algiers, the city of the desert. Astounded beyond measure, bewildered as if startled from a dream, we were taken back to the business section of the city where, after formally noting the evidence of French commer- cial invasion, we were shown the old Arab quarter of the town. In those funky-smelling alleys and the long, narrow stairs of 38 Six and One Abroad streets, where ''every prospect pleases and every scent is vile," old Moors in the soiled and ragged robes of post-diluvian styles and in morose, embittered resentment of French occupation, emerged from half-concealed openings and sauntered past us frowning; women muffied to the eyes with tea towels and draped in sheets, silent and ghostly as disembodied spirits, flitted from place to place ; mysterious veiled figures glided softly as if to inaudible music ; all so weird and so strange that it seemed like a seance of spooks. Everything alarmingly quiet, so solemn and sepulchral. We felt as if we were treading upon the crust of a treacherous volcano that would erupt a fiery flood of long- contained fury were an opening to be found in the crust of French occupation. In the little shops swarthy-hooded men sat on the floor and when customers made purchases reached for the goods and delivered them without rising. No policy; no dissembling of their implacable hatred for the entire white race. Every Arab denizen of the town, including this remnant of the once virile and predatory INFoorish race, had sore eyes, and m^ost of them were short at least one optic. From what I could see of the women, and that was very little, I thought they did the proper thing in concealing their features. Algiers has a population of 160,000, of whom two-thirds are Europeans. The State of Algiers has 5,000,000 people, almost unanimously Bedouins and Moors, and in many places the state is fertile, well watered and has fine seasons. The city has a great foreign trade, is growing rapidly and bids fair to become the chief port of the Mediterranean. In 1815 Commodore De- catur, with an American fleet, first brought the pirates to time, and later France completed their overthrow and occupied their country. Under her magnificent management the native and his customs are fast disappearing, and will soon be swallowed up and lost in the new and progressive civilization swarming around him. CHAPTER V. A Semi-Colon in the Journey. And while iItc day was coining on, Paid be-ought them all to take meat, saying. This day is the fourteenth day that ye have tarried and continued fasting, having taken nothing. — Acts 27:33. The Apostle Paul was a tent-maker before he was a lawyer; he was a persecutor of Christians before he was a Christian himself, and he was all these before he was a sailor. It is a matter of record (Acts 27:33) above quoted that the great first and foremost champion of Christianity was a victim of a protracted spell of seasickness when as a prisoner on board a Roman ship he was carrying his case up on appeal to Caesar, the last trip he ever took on the water, so far as we know. 1 submit to any one who has ever been in a storm at sea that nothing less than seasickness would have prevented passengers and crew from eating for fourteen days. The record nowhere implies that they were religiously fasting. Luke in his artful description of this aggravating feature of the voyage graciously refrains from details, and the story reads very much like Paul had edited the manuscript and cut out all that he considered not germain to his serious purposes. AVith a feeling of deep reverence and of profound respect for the noble hero of the cross, I stood in the place "where two seas met, ' ' and with the story in sacred print before me, recalled the incidents of the wreck and its interesting sequel — the break- ing in two of the ship, the purpose of the soldiers to kill the prisoners, the interference of the kind centurion M-hom Paul's diplomacy had won, the swim to shore and Paul on a broken timber drifting in, the camp fire built by the natives to dry and warm the passengers, the serpent, etc. On a rock marking the landing place of the stranded party, known now as St. Paul's Bay, stands a tall monument in memory of the incident and in honor of the chief actor in it. Malta is about as big as a semi--colon, and to the ordinary traveler just about as important. The pause there for a day 40 Six and One Abroad was strictly clerical and in no sense gentlemanly. The preach- ers were wonderfully eye-singled to matters pertaining to their calling. Due in Athens in a couple of days, they were going there — not because Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes, Homer, Herod- otus and others lived there and wrought; not to see the Acropolis and the Parthenon, but — to see the Areo- pagus or Mars' Hill, where St. Paul preached, and to try to lo- cate somewhere in the piles of ruins the market place where the Apostle disputed with the logicians and others. Upon arriving at Malta, which I was assured by them was the Mileta of the Acts of the Apostles, they did not halt for one ten-minutes precious bit of time at Valetta, the capital and site of the sec- ond greatest of England's great line of fortifications, but hur- ried under a full head of steam for the place where the "two seas met," plumb across the island. And having satisfied their curiosity there and taken fifty snapshots and innumerable notes, and packed their satchels with pebbles for their congregations at home, a pebble for each member, we had to back up circuit- ously to the place of beginning, which was really the only im- portant physicial feature of the island. Upon leaving St. Paul's Bay we followed a beautiful mili- tary road, eight miles inland, to the ''Home of Publius, " where Paul and his party were entertained for three months. Over the reputed site of this home stands a Catholic chapel in which an altar marks the spot where Paul held mass each morning while a guest there, the important information to that effect being given in a Latin legend on the altar. Having made it a rule to comply with the Pauline injunction to "believe all things" on this trip, there was nothing else to do but to cudgel into subjection a robust and insubordinate doubt that arose at this juncture. A grotto in the chalky rock under this chapel contains a room, said to be the one where Paul slept and dreamed for three long months of the future of the great gospel he preached. I did not learn why he was given accommodations underground, but it may have been because he was a prisoner. In the chapel a marble slab relates in Latin how Publius, A Semi-Colon in the Journey 41 after conversion to the Christian belief, became the first bishop of the island and lost his head in the cause. Hard by, a cathedral, dating back to the misty past, contains numerous paintings, in most of which Paul and Publius are conspicuous features. The attending priest here lighted a taper on the end of a pole and held it high over an altar sacred to ]\Iary. First drojiping to his knees in obeisance, he arose forth- with and withdrew a curtain, disclosing a medallion of the Virgin ; and in soft and exultant jMaltese informed us the paint- ing was the work of Paul's secretary, Luke. Here credulity again had hard sledding, but the preachers themselves were this time on the brake. Then by a flight of stone steps we descended into a subter- ranean graveyard. As far as we went in these remarkable cata- combs, every grave had been despoiled of its bones and was va- cant. In the 6,000 little state-rooms of the dead there were upper and lower berths, berths for adults and smaller ones for children, berths for the lean and wider ones for the corpulent. There were ground floors, basements and galleries and a be- Maldering labyrinth of aisles, at every foot or so a solemn va- cant bed. The early Christians were buried there, many of them martyrs in the days of wholesale persecution. I confess to a failing for souvenirs, and I picked up what I supposed in the darkness to be a piece of stone from the walls, but which proved in the light to be a bone. I wonder what a story of sorrow it would tell could it only speak of the days when it lived in the upholstery of flesh. All these things, the Chapel of Publius, the cathedral and catacombs, were at Citta Vecchia, the old former capital of IMalta, a dismal, deserted, haunted hamlet of very ancient stone. Cicero in one of his best orations arraigned Verres, praetor of Sicily, on a charge of plundering the temples and robbing the wealthy citizens of Citta Vecchia, and stated in the same con- nection that Verres had factories there for the manufacture of cotton goods. The outlook from Citta Vecchia, wdiich is the highest point on the island (750 feet), is unique and interesting, revealing a wilderness of stones that are erected into fence-walls around 42 Six and One Abroad countless little patches of green, a veritable honey-comb effect all the way to the water's edge and in every direction, not a tree nor any obstruction of the view, but the natural undula- tions of the surface. It is a crazy-quilt of rock and vegetation, without order and without break in the continuity of patches except where an occasional fort rises prominent in a command- ing locality. Valetta, the capital and chief city, is quite modern — any- thing in this part of the world that is less than a couple of thousands of years old is regarded as in its kilts — and a fine city it is, splendidly located on a hill of rock rising abruptly out of the sea. The fortifications, said to be more formidable than those of Gibraltar, constitute one of three Mediterranean links in the chain that unites England to her eastern possessions. Malta bears the reputation of being the most densely popu- lated country in the world, unless Belgium be an exception, the average being 2,000 people to the square mile (not, of course, including the city). The day's experiences carried us across it from shore to shore in two directions, for it is not over ten miles across the widest portion. Never was a ride more replete with interest ; never were views more picturesque, nor customs more quaint. The island is a rock upheaved from the bed of the ocean, and it is nothing but rock, rock from base to rugged summit and to fretted perimeter, except that a thin soil has settled upon it somehow from somewhere. The roads are carved from the rock and beveled and drained by military engineers and are not surpassed anywhere. As in Madeira, only more so, every available inch of surface is fenced with rock walls and culti- vated for all there is in it. The common design of the cities of Malta is similar to those of Spain and all Eastern cities, so far as I have seen — narrow streets, white houses, the people upstairs over shops and stores. The inhabitants are of mixed Al'ab and Italian origin, chiefly of the former, and are known throughout the IMediterranean as a plucky, temperate and industrious people. Maltese artificers in gold and silver are without peers and the dreamy creations in lace that come from the deft fingers A Semi-Colon in the Journey 43 of ^Maltese women are esteemed above all others the world over. T!lie decks of our ship were lined with this exquisite finery during the time we were anchored in the harbor, and there must have been enough in the aggregate to have taken one woman a thousand years to create. It was a battle royal between the shrewd salesmen and the bargaining lady buyers. Holding up an ethereal collar a lady with a 98c demeanor would inquire "how much?" and the shrewd native, divining the inevitable "jewing," fixed his price up in the clouds. The feminine hands went up in surprise and surrender. But the trader had only begun the combat which his customer had sum- marily forsaken. "How much?" was his w^ary challenge to further negotiations and the lady, knowing the prestige of Mal- tese manufacture and confirmed in her estimate of its value by the high price named, readily offered one-half the figure, and it was her property. She boasted of her bargain, and he of a sale at twice the price in the shops of Valetta. A certain class of the women of Malta wear a peculiar head- dress, called a faldetta, that is invariably black and shaped like a sun bonnet with one side extended into a very large, stiff loop that reaches to the waist. Only one-tenth of the people can read and write, and this to the shame of England, who in the past hundred years has spent a hundred millions on her fortifications and hardly a farthing on the education of her wards. The law permits the marriage of children, and it is fre- quently the case that parents have large families before they are themselves 21 years of age. The prevailing ignorance, the great density of population and early marriages contribute to an infant mortality that is appalling. Catholicism is practically the only religion that has a foot- hold on the island, and it is said that in this church there are 2,000 clergy, or one to every twenty families. The Phoenicians were the first inhabitants of this minute bit of land. They were succeeded by the Romans in 259 B. C. ; by the Vandals in 534 A. D. ; by the Arabs in 870 ; by the Knights of St. John in 1530 ; by Napoleon in 1800, and by ths English from that year to the present. The Knights of St. M Six and One Abroad A Semi-Colon in the Journey 45 John, or Kniijhts of INFalta, as they are best known, were or- ganized at Jerusalem in 1048 as a military and religious secret order; they were confirmed by the Pope; removed to Rhodes in 1300, and to Malta about 1550, their numbers increasing in the meantime and their battles on land and sea being an almost unbroken chain of victories. Their struggles were mainly di- rected against the piratical ravages of the Turks and repeated attempts of the barbarians to overrun Europe. Their gallantry elicited the admiration of the Christian world. Under La Va- letta, the most famous of the grand masters of the secret or- der, the city bearing his name was founded and a series of fortifications were begun that have long been without parallel. Two of the cardinal tenets of this order were temperance and chastity, but with the growth of power and wealth the Knights fell from grace in these respects, and their virility as an active force declined. No page in history is more romantic than that which relates the thrilling story of the Knights of Malta. The Church of St. John at Valetta, is a remarkable basilica. In its architecture there are a hundred marble monuments to the Knights, and in its vaults many curious emblems of their days of chivalry. It is venerable with hundreds of years of age and history and is rich with architectural ornamentation and medieval paintings and needle and loom work. To the native the chief treasures of this church are four notable frauds which are guarded Avith great care and supreme concern, namely: A thorn from the Savior's crown, stones with which Stephen was slain, some bones of the apostles, and the right hand of John the Baptist, the latter a little the worse for wear, but still wonderfully preserved. On a finger of the cadaver there was once a diamond ring which the great herald of Christianity was supposed to have worn. Think of that, will you? John the Baptist in camel's hair clothing and living on a fare of locusts — John the Baptist wearing a diamond ring. I doubt it. I do not charge anybody with deception, but there is a mistake somewhere, that is all. When Napoleon captured thb city in 1800 he took the diamond ring from the finger and threw the withered hand aside in disgust, exclaiming, "Keep the carrion." And they kept it. 46 Six and One Abroad But a yet more startling apartment in this remarkable edifice is a chapel whose walls and ceiling are lined with grinning human skulls. This gruesome decoration of bones is not dis- posed at random and in sparse bits here and there, but is ar- ranged with artistic skill into all sorts of designs, shaped into full framed skeletons that leer at you with ghastly smiles, into curves of arm bones and arches of clavicles and windows and wainscottings of ribs. In the world, civilized and savage, there is not another such a gruesome and appalling spectacle. It was a clever artist who assembled these, the relics of the sturdy Knights of Malta, into such extraordinary schemes of drapery and friezes and ornaments — here an arm bone finished off with finger joints and meeting another of the same kind and together holding a grinning skull as the keystone of an arch; yonder a row of columns with their tops decorated with skulls. I can see now plainly in memory that awful collection of bones, and I cannot help wondering now, as I wondered then, what a rattling and shuffling there will be in that old church on Resurrection Day. A skull will jump off its pillar and roll around in search of the spinal column to which it once be- longed, and ribs will be nudging each other looking for their mates; and there will altogether be an interesting time when all the bones have their reunion, and the Master upholsters them, and they sail away in the skies singing: "Oh, Grave, where is thy victory; Oh, Death, where is thy sting?" In the Church of the Monks, not far distant, is a scene al- most as horrible as this chapel of skeletons, for the bodies of all the monks of Mklta lie there unburied in the various dried and twisted stages of decay without decomposition, and wear- ing the cloaks they wore in life. A story is told of a young man who playfully pinned the dress of a lady to one of these cloaks. When she moved the skeleton seemed to rise and fol- low her, and the shock destroyed her reason. But all these superstitions and follies are partially offset by the splendid frugal habits of the people. Education will in time remove these horrible nightmares. Let us think of that day rather than of poor Malta 's present moral and mental plight. Let us dwell on the marvelous pluck of her people, upon her A Semi-Colon in the Journey 47 illustrious past, upon her commerce of $5,000,000 annually, upon the pleasing- fact that in her savings banks, where the inhabi- tants deposit their earnings, there is $20 for each of them, even to the babes, and all this earned off bleak, rocky hillsides that would not support a goat in Texas, and which it would be im- pudent to offer for sale there at any price. And now farewell, Malta, with thy crazy streets of stairs, with thy darling, delicate, woolly dogs and dove-coated, soft- eyed cats, thy ethereal lace and smart tradesmen, and thy wilder- ness of rocks and commerce of sacred frauds. Hail, lovely, historic Athens, with thy marble ruins and glorious past. 48 Six and One Abroad ' '^^^^^ll "i CHAPTER VI. AtheuL — lis liiiins. It was a cold, stormy morning when our ship steamed into Phalaeron Bay and in the enfolding cre'cent of historic hills found a haven beyond the reach of the elements. To the right a range cf mountains, turbaned with snow behind veil,-; of blue, .stood up and out of the sea. To the left a rocky promontory reached out into the water after the similitude of a quay piled high with white boxes, later developing into the homes and busi- ness houses of a little village by the sea. In the foreground a great basin held in its emerald lap, as if they had been pitched into it, a confusion of white houses with red roofs, and as the surge rose and fell on the low receding shore an engine and train of cars ran swiftly along like a needle sewing lace on a garment of green. A broad thoroughfare ran from the water's edge along the shore until it found an opening, and disappeared behind the hills. But more striking than any other feature of the view, an athletic mountain rose boldly in the foreground under an im- posing crown of ruins. Upon this prominent and striking ruin every glass was trained and every mind intent, for it was none other than that grand old veteran, that incomparable survivor of the centuries, the Parthenon. We were in Greece, a little water-gashed, mountain-ribbed country that lies upon one of the toes of Europe like a nail. Shivering in the cold wind, we stood on the shore a few moments and tried to reconcile the steam of a passing train with the marble of the past; and then drove for four miles along a well-paved road to the ancient city. Every knoll and vale on the route, every Greek-lettered house and passing na- tive was the subject of interest to us because of its relation to the great race that made illustrious history there. Even the drivers of our carriages might have been descendants of men who spoke with the tongues of angels. We did not graduate our observations in Athens by holding 50 Six and One Abroad in reserve the best cf the city's features until we had seen the minor things as is the usual method of procedure, but grati- j&ed curiosity at once by proceeding direct to the biggest and best that Athens has — The Acropolis. To lift the eyes from the mean and mercenary surroundings, at the base of this noble old hill, along its great sweep of rock THE PILLARS OF THE PARTHENON. as it rises like ancient Greece itself above the present, to its cli- max of art in sculpture — the shell of its departed glory — and having with divers interesting experiences mounted by the zigzag and almost precipitous route to the summit where sits in such majesty this heirloom of Greece, to ramble reflectively among its marbles, far above the din and cry of unseemly com- merce, under the same blue sky that spread its canopy above the patriots and scholars of the olden time — there is no fitter spot upon the earth to realize the impotency of man and the Athens — Its Ruins 51 providence of God, the sic transit gloria of all things here be- low. Museum vandals have despoiled the Parthenon of its statues and carried them away into uncongenial captivity to consort with antiquities of less repute and without repute, and many others have been violated by barbarians who knew them only as pearls are kno\\'n to swine. Not one has been left, and scarcely any of its friezes, the highest attainment of plastic art, remain to chasten the dull and dolorous front of its lofty portals. All are gone, and only the imperishable, immovable frame of the great fabric has withstood the dismantling crowbars of the museum thieves and the outrages of the barbarians. The pillars and lintels are yellow — the mellowy yellow of age — but they are good for a thousand years yet against cor- rosion and will no dovibt withstand to the end of time any destroying force but dynamite and earthquake. The whole surface of the hilltop is a confusion of wrecked marble columns, enough to build many a block of costly man- sions. Guards are disposed about the hill to keep watchful eyes upon the tourist lest he attempt to chip a souvenir from a column or a step. A reckless member of our party of preac h- ers lagged behind the rest and, supposing no one was look- ing, hammered upon a broken monolith and put the result of his depredations into his pocket. But no sooner had he done so than a guard appeared from in hiding and arrested him for his vandalism. He was promptly arraigned in the magistrate's court, where with much trepidation and diffi- culty of making himself understood he pleaded his innocence of intended violation of law and urged that he should be dis- charged because there were no prohibitory signs posted to w^arn against such acts. He was discharged, but as he turned to go an officer gave him a kick from behind. When he protested gainst the treatment, the officer reasoned that he had a right to administer a kick because there was no sign upon his back prohibiting it. The incident was worthy of the day of Diogenes and was a wholesome lesson to the souvenir fiend. It is hardly necessary to add that the of- fender in this case was our Connoisseur. 52 Six and One Abroad Athens — Its Bnins 53 From the Acropolis the eye is ravished on every hand by views as splendid as the world affords. The white dome of ]\It. Hymettiis, famed for its honey and its muses, rises sublime and majestic on the east; little farther to the northeast is Pentelicon with its quarries of marble from which two cities have been built, and beyond it is Marathon, where one of the world's decisive battles was fought; Lycabettus rises abruptly out of the heart of the modern city higher than the Acropolis, and a white convent glistens on its summit like a crown; the city of Corinth is barely visible in the blue beyond the hills; to the west the Plains of Attica, green with growing crops, sweep gracefully to the sea; to the southeast the harbor of Pi- raeus, which held the navies of ancient Greece, is filled now with the fleets of commerce; Salamis Bay, esteemed for the defeat of Xerxes there, is in plain view; the blue Aegean stretches far away to the southern horizon ; and a marble city of 350,000 swings in the hammocks of the encircling val- leys. At the base of the Acropolis there is an ancient theater, call- ed now the Theater of Dionysus, the large-st place of that character in ancient Athens. It is in the form of an ampithe- ater, with a stage and orchestra space on level marble floors, and seats of marble in semi-circular tiers on the hillside. Ac- cording to the historian this theater accommodated 30,000 spec- tators. There was no roof and no galleries, and when a rain blew up during a performance the audience and the players would retire to a capacious shelter erected for the purpose near by. Several hundred of the marble seats are still in a good state of preservation. These particular seats have marble backs and evidently constituted the parquet. The dignitaries of the city had special reserved seats on which their names were cut, directly in front of the stage. Those holding gen- eral admission tickets must have carried cushions with them, otherwise they could never have gone to sleep on the perform- ance. This theater was discovered accidentally during exca- vations only about fifty years ago. Another theater, the Odeon of Herodus Atticus, has recently been uncovered at the base of the Acropolis. Those posted in such matters aver that 54 Six and One Abroad it was an exception to the usual custom, in having a roof, and that its seating capacity was 6,000. At both places the sea- son was closed during our visit and there was nothing doing except when a flock of tourists entered in charge of a guide, like a lot of chicks about a clucking, hen, receiving without question the morsels of instruction doled out to them with great pomposity and eclat. Through the preachers on the ship I learned that there was a place in Athens called Mars' Hill, and that Paul once deliv- ered a sermon there. On the ship for hours before our ar- rival whenever a preacher was in sight on deck, in state-room or in meditation over the railing, he invariably had his Bible and it was open invariably at the seventeenth chapter of Acts. Paul was certainly a favorite with the clergy, and I doubt not the clergy were just in their judgment of him. The great apostle was powerful in argument, uncompromising, desperate- ly serious. He wielded the sledge hammer of logic rather than plied the brush of rhetoric. Unlike Christ, he rarely used il- lustrations. Christ was a man of sentiment and of keen appre- ciation of the beauties of both nature and art. Paul walked among the lilies of the field unconscious of their beauty or that they might fitly adorn a moral or point a sermon. Sur- rounded, during his stay in Athens, by the finest productions of the golden ag^ of Grecian art, he yet never saw in the peer- less Acropolis aught but the dwelling place of idols nor in the statues that lined the streets nor the graceful columns of tem- ples anything worthy of note or comment. Christ and Him crucified was the burden of his mind and of every deliverance. As I stood with the preachers on Mars' Hill and heard one of them read aloud the seventeenth chapter of Acts, I wished with all my heart that I could feel the thrill of emotion that swept over them as they stood in spirit with Paul that day: "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious ; for as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription: To the Unknown God. Whom there- fore ye ignorantly worship him declare I unto you." I stood with these reverend and worthy gentlemen again in the old market place, hard by Mars' Hill and the Acropolis, Athens — Its Ruins 55 in the low ground at their base, where Paul met and disputed "daily with them that met with him," but not being so thor- oughly in the spirit as they, while they were discussing script- ure here, I stole away and examined an old water clock that was used by the Athenians in the time of Paul and to which he no doubt often referred when he wished to cut short his re- ligious discussions for a hot lunch at midday. The Temple of Jupiter Olympus is one of the most magnifi- cent of the ruins of Athens. Originally, this temple possessed more than one hundred marble columns, each sixty feet high and four feet in diameter, arranged in double rows of twenty each on the sides, and triple rows of eight each at the ends. Only twelve remain standing; three lie prone on the ground and broken into sections. The size of the temple was 350 by 134 feet and was exceeded by that of Diana at Ephesus, only. The best preserved of all the old edifices of Athens seem to be the Theseum which retains its first form and parts with the exception only of its original roof, its friezes and its contents. All the massive columns are intact and the golden yellow of their weather beaten marble, their grace, and the whole digni- fied and solemn outline make an impressive picture. "Within a stone's throw from the Theseum is the old Hill of the Pnyx, a great artificial area 395 by 212 feet, which formed the place of assembly of the Athenians. From a rock which is still preserved there Demosthenes thundered his Philippics and Pericles persuaded with his eloquence. A cave is shown near this point where it is said Socrates was imprisoned and drank the fatal hemlock, and on an eminence stands a fine monument, well preserved, of a Roman consul who died about 100 A. D. We saw among other interesting places, the "exact spot" where Diogenes worked in his tub, and if the locality is not apocryphal it was there that he uttered the fine piece of philoso- phy in answer to Alexander: "If you please, sir, get out of my light." And lo, the Stadion ! Who has not heard of the great anthro- podrome? Of the Olympic games? Paul was perhaps not an enthusiastic Stadion fan, but that he attended the races there 56 Six and One Abroad Athens — Its Buins 57 is indicated plainly in Hebrews 12:1, where he says: "Where- fore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and fin- isher of our faith." Quod erat demonstrandum. Notice the Apostle's intimate acquaintance with the races of the stadium. The "cloud of witnesses" was the great throng in the bleach- ers; every weight was the tunic and sandals and weights used for practice; the besetting sin was the habit of drinking which athletes had to forego in order to strengthen muscle and create endurance, or smoking, or late hours, or sexual indulgencies, or any or all those habits of life that so easily beset one and hurt the physique ; the ' ' patience ' ' exhorted was the steady gait of a runner as contrasted ^vith another who started off in a spurt in the lead and was likely to become winded — the steady, pa- tient runner always won ; ' ' looking unto Jesus, ' ' as the runner always looked with anxious eyes to his sweetheart in the bleachers, or his mother, who watched him with consuming concern. The first of these athletic grounds was constructed 350 B. C. in a natural hollow where it was only necessary to erect seats in tiers against the hills on three sides, without artificial sup- ports. It w^ent down in the collapse of all the best there was in Greece and remained under the debris until a few years ago when a rich citizen of Alexandria rebuilt the whole Sta- dion on the exact spot where the old one stood, and in the same splendid style, at a cost of half a million dollars. The amphi- theater is of white marble and will seat 60,000 persons. The length of the race course is 1340 feet and of course the marble amphitheater is much larger. The Stadion, rehabilitated and resplendent, is one of the charming features of modern Greece and one in which she approximates her former excellence. While we were leaping the marble seats and rimning against time in the race course, a miniature demonstration broke loose from a party of Canadians who cheered the name of their country-man who won the chief prize there in a great inter- 58 Six and One Abroad national meet, when the guide mentioned the incident in his story of the performance. What a history Athens has. How inexhaustible the stories of its struggles to the light, its struggles for the right, its hero- ism, its superb and enduring achievements in every field of refined endeavor. In poetry Homer has never been surpassed; in history Macauley has not equalled Heroditus, nor Thucy- dides; Solon and Lycurgus are the world's greatest lawgivers; Demosthenes by general consent holds the palm of superiority in oratory ; Aristotle was the first great mathematician ; Soc- rates and Plato are supreme in the realm of philosophy; Phy- dias in sculpture ; Pericles in statesmanship ; Miltiades in war ; and Sophocles and Aristophanes in drama. There is no other such record; no other such list of immortals. Modern Athens, like the first, is a city of marble, for it should be known that marble is so plentiful that the very streets are paved and curbed with it. Some of the inhabitants, it is said, have marble hearts. The streets are wider than those of most oriental towns and are cleaner. The people are thrifty, and beggars, thank the Lord, are scarce. The old town around the Acropolis is filthy and the natives are repulsive, but the new town is made up of splendid stores and a cultured, intelli- gent and ambitious class of people. The ancient dress of kilts, as worn by the soldiers and some of the peasants now, is much like that of the Highland Scotch and is quite attractive and novel. The natives in the city, have, as a rule, discarded this costume for th^e western styles. The fire of their ancestors is not dead in the breasts of these plucky Greeks. Listen. In this little kingdom of about the size of New Jersey there are 2,500 schools, besides numerous colleges. In proportion to its size it far surpasses the United States in its liberal support of education. There is one univer- sity in Athens with 3,000 students and with a library of 100,- 000 volumes. In religion, the people are adherents of the Greek church,, which is a Catholic church Avithout a pope, but with a govern- ing board of four archbishops who live, one each in Moscow, Constantinople, Athens and Jerusalem. AfJtciis — Its Buhhs 59 King George is a democratic gentleman and is beloved by his people. He is a substantial friend and patron of all progres- sive and enlightened enterprises. This is explained in the fact that he is neither Latin nor Oriental, for it is impossible for a Latin or an Oriental to rise any higher than the dunghill from which he springs. Before returning to our boat we waited in the city until nightfall for a view of the Acropolis by moonlight. From the crest of Mars' Hill we saw the western skies stained crimson and orange by the dying sun and its last rays fell upon the ruins like the kiss of a parent upon the forehead of a child that is dead. And then the outlines grew dim and dimmer in the gloaming, and from pale to livid against the sky, until it looked like the great rich sarcophagus of a king. But just when Night was in the act of throwing her mantle upon the ruin as she had done for so many centuries, the moon rose and threw her face full and fair upon the scene, and in the track of the long shadows the Night crouched and hid herself. Along the ponderous beams a current of silver ran and a flood of splendor poured upon the stately pillars and the marble floors. A grand and rather gloomy scene it was, productive of queer sensations. We almost expected to see the old heroes of ancient Greece materialize in the moonlight. 60 Six and One Abroad MY PASSPORT INTO TURKEY. CHAPTER VII. Some Dis-stink-tive Features of Constantinople. The Aegean Sea is dotted with islands so thickly on the map, that they appear to be only stepping stones between Europe and Asia. But from the deck of a steamer in their midst the perspective widens, and in the absence of continents from the physical vision, they are more like jewels in the azure brooch of the Mediterranean — rising in the shadowy blue, passing in the golden sunlight and fading in the dreamy haze. And each single pearl in the cluster sparkles with some charming legend or lustrous historic fact — Melos, where the Venus de Milo was found ; Paros with its quarries of the world 's best marble ; Chios, one of the seven birthplaces of Homer ; Demos, the cradle of Apollo ; Patmos, where the Apostle John saw the vision of the Apocalypse and wrote his Revelation, and others. Threading these gems of the sea the Arabic with unerring instinct wound her sinuous course from the shores of cla.ssic Greece till she carried us to the gateway of the Dardanelles and along the surface of this peerless lapis-lazula, past the plains of ancient Troy, to the capital of the Ottoman Empire. All night long and the day before we had been going north, and when we entered the famous straits it was in the face of a blizzard that bristled and snarled at us as a watch dog on the southern outposts of Islam. The liquid surface of the channel through which we glided was waved and grained into a fascinating negligee like a maiden's flowing tresses. On either side the mountains sat shoulder to shoulder, their laps full of forts and the forts full of batteries, their ranks unbroken except ^vhere once they retired that the waters might spread into the round blue sea of Marmora, and then again they crowded close to- gether that they might guard the crystal approach to the great Moslem metropolis. The Turk is so suspicious and so cowardly that he searches every vessel that enters his territory. Before leaving New York we were forced to obtain passports which so far as we could 62 Six and One Abroad road them, seem to be written guarantees upon our part not to Ixidnap the sultan or elope with his harem. That wicked little instrument was a description of our persons, with a detailed statement of the size and undulations of the nose, color of the eyes and hair, the convolutions of the ear, height, weight, race, color and mental condition, all sworn to before a notary, signed by the Secretary of State and endorsed by the Turkish minister at Washington. Our steamer had to halt at the entrance to the Dardanelles and undergo inspection by officials with red fezzes and unmentionable breeches, and at Constantinople no sooner had our anchor grappled the mud of the harbor than a force of guards came aboard and took possession of our passports. A great city lay before us — a city of pinnacles, minarets and domes, of towering business houses coming down to the water's edge where they seemed to stop and brace themselves with effort to keep from sliding into the water — a city of a swarming million and more, a city ensanguined by the blood of warring religions and yet beautiful in its physical settings of hills and waters. The harbor was alive with ocean craft of all kinds from the barge to the ocean liner, and there was an air of business and prosperity that impressed us favorably and threatened to re- verse in a measure our preconceived notions of the place. Suddenly some one caught sight of an American flag and ripped out a lusty yell. It was flying from a boat that carried the American consul and was heading in our direction, and then a chorus of cheers for the red, white and blue rolled up from the decks of the Arabic and were repeated by the hills. In distant lands there is nothing that gives the traveler more pleasure than the sight of his national flag, for it is the symbol of the home and native land that he loves and an assurance of protection, a consoling parental guardianship that is backed by army and navy and millions of men. God bless the Ameri- can flag — I never knew what the old muslin rag meant before — and speed the day when it will take a million bales of Texas cotton a year and a million pounds of Ohio wool to decorate the tops of American ships in the ports of the world. It was nearly night when the Turkish officers concluded their inspection of passports, and only a few passengers ven- Features of Constantinople 63 tared into the city when at dark permission was given. At rest in the harbor we read from the books of the library the inter- esting history of Constantinople — of Byzantium, the first city, foimded by the Greeks 700 years B. C. ; how Constantine came with the "In hoc signo vinces" of a new Rome and the Chris- tian religion ; of the building of a great city and its adornment with the riches and treasured art of the decaying civilizations of the East; of Justinian and his famous Pandects; of Chrysos- tom, the silver tongued expounder of the gospel ; of the match- less Hippodrome and its fetes and riots ; of St. Sophia the peer- less church ; of the vicissitudes of the empire, its struggles against the hordes of the western woods who pounded its forti- fications so long in vain; its brave fall; its occupation for half a thousand years by the Mohammedans ; of the queer customs of this strange people, their religion and government. And with the recollection of this history brooding like a nightmare over our pillows, we abided the coming of the day and its visual revelations. During the night the Unseen Hand, the same that through the centuries has guided the destinies of men and nations in a way past mortal understanding and yet for the best, threw a mantle of pure white over the city to hide its most patent de- formities, and in the morning through the showering flakes it appeared as charming and chaste as a virgin in her veil. Wrapped and with overcoats buttoned to our chins, we set foot upon the pier. A throng of Turks, of the unspeakable variety and of the vintage of the twelfth century, red topped and with that in- comprehensible surplus of baggy cloth pendant from their seats, gazed curiously at us, the infidels of the West, as we landed and fought our way through them and an advance guard of the in- evitable post card vendors. Yes, even in Constantinople the post card agitator measures his insanity with the insanity of the western tourist — the Occident crazy to buy, the orient crazy to sell. It is a universal epidemic. We were not surprised at the sloppy condition of the water front, for such places are liable to be foul in any city, especially in a snow storm. But we expected better of the streets and Six and One Abroad were astounded when we drove through them and found that they were filthy in the superlative degree. The sweepings from the stores, the slops from the eating house, the refuse of men and animals, the grinning cadavers of extinct cats and dogs, and the accumulated rubbish from everywhere, all dumped by common consent into the street, there to decompose and raise a litter of smells — this was the threshold of Constantinople and its first dis-stink-tive feature. The management of our ship, with wise forethought, had pro- vided every necessary thing for our comfort, except clothespins for the nose in Constantinople. I have looked in the diction- aries and synonym books under the heads of "offensive," "foul," "vile," "horrible," and similar terms to find a word to fitly describe this carnival of odors, this riot of filth, but no living English word is rank enough for the purpose. There is but one comprehensive, terse and violent definition — it is Turkish. And what better place in all the world, not only for Turks, but for an asylum for dogs? Here the dog has found his heaven. Respected far above the foreigner who invades the city, he is all but sacred as long as he lives and is sainted when he shuffles off his coil. And frankly, if I were a Turk, I, too, would revere the dog next to my Mohammed and pray that he might be fruitful and multiply, for in the absence of sewerage and a street cleaning system, he is the only barrier between the people and pestilence. As we drove through the streets — and an oriental street is always a narrow odoriferous canyon — the driver picked his way carefully through the herds of dogs lest he injure one and incur the displeasure of Allah. Most of these animals were curled up in groups on the little sidewalks; others were moping about without any effort to avoid the traffic. A remarkable thing was the way the traffic gave the lazy, stuffed beasts a courteous right of way. Please do not get the idea that these are ordinary dogs, or that their appearance or disposition on the streets is anything short of the extraordinary. They occupy the entire city, forty- odd thousand of them, and are so distributed that no locality is congested, and the supply does not exceed the demand. They Features of Constantinople 65 operate with system, dividing the city between them, and woe to the canine that strays into quarters not his own, for he is promptly set upon and killed by his kind, unless he be swift enough to escape. This is a law that prevails among them and is said to be strictly enforced. The history of these animals, especially with reference to their origin and the time and cause of their migration, if they did migrate, and their establishment and multiplication in Con- stantinople, would be interesting. It has been written by some .story tellers that under the present Sultan the dogs have been banished from the capital city, but these story tellers are telling a story. The dogs doze all day and prowl and howl all night. It is the howl and trait of the coyote and not of the dog. An Ameri. can who lives in Constantinople was annoyed by a specially vicious dog in his vicinity ; and in the midst of his vexation, he shot at the animal. A furious mob of Turks surrounded him at once, and he was arrested by officers and thrown into jail on a charge of ''carrying arms with malicious intent to murder a dog" against the peace and odor of the city. It is a grave misdemeanor to kill a dog, with a maximum penalty of three years' imprisonment. In all the world there is not another such sight as the dogs of Constantinople. The city that was so charming from the ship was disagree- able from the carriage, and as we slowly moved along the crooked lanes of slush and putrifying refuse we were thor- oughly disillusioned. On every side were the oriental streets of stairs with the ascending and descending throngs, and every- where groups of sleeping or drowsing dogs. The current of humanity was like a river of red, as far as the eye could reach, a vista of bobbing, crimson fezzes; the larger current where we cautiously pushed our way reinforced by cataracts of humanity that tumbled into it from the steep side streets. T think the fez is the neatest and most attractive headdress worn by any nationality of men. I am also of the opinion that the Turks are the most able-bodied specimens of physical manhood to be found on the globe. Ah, but they are fine looking fellows, of brawny limb^, broad shoulders and tall powerful forms. As a 66 Six and One Abroad EXPRESS SYSTEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE. Features of Constantinople 67 rule they luive a ])ad eye, but it is no wonder snch an irresistible momentum of muscle overran the effete legions of Constantine even beliind their battlements of granite. It is a nation of giants and, properly led and properly trained, they can whip any other country. The wonder of it is how such an uphol- stery of physical strength and stature can be attained in such a foul environment. See those big boned fellows, doing the duty of express wagons and teams; how they are bending under the great burdens on their backs. Notice that one particularly; there must be 400 pounds of heavy boxed freight on his back; how the ligaments of his brown face stand out like cable strands of iron ; how firmly he plants his foot on the muddy pavement ; who is he? The freight and package delivery system of the city. There are no express wagons nor moving vans; just the backs and muscles of men. Every now and then we passed a fountain where persons were filling vessels, usually empty Standard Oil cans, or drink- ing from cups, and some one usually officiating in the distri- bution of the water. We learned that the city was full of these fountains, most of them built by the municipality, but many erected by private capital and actually endowed. At these lat- ter an attendant is paid to serve the liquid free to all comers and keep things in repair. One of the precepts of Mohammed deserves to be specially commended, and in that precept is found the secret of the health of the people and of their superb physiques. He inveighs against the drinking of intoxicants as a sin against Allah, and it is one of the astonishing proofs of the restraining force of their religion that one hundred and eighty millions of IMohammedans have faithfully obeyed this law 1,300 years. Say what you will about the Turk, but give him credit for the finest example of sobriety among the races of men. Constantinople is divided by a narrow arm of the Bosphorus called the Golden Horn. On the northern side is a section called Galata where there are as many Europeans as natives, and an- other section called Pera which is strictly European. On the southern side, the old city of Stamboul, which is Turkish to the core, is located. The long bridge connecting the two divisions 68 Six and One Abroad is the main throbbing artery of the metropolis, where two cur- rents of humanity sweep past each other from dawn till dark. I drove across this popular connection in a blinding snow storm and later in the day sought it out again on foot for a study of the complex life of the people. It is a drawbridge and at stated times is lifted to permit the passage of ships. It is also a toll bridge and must yield the government a marvelous harvest of coin. In the quiet waters on either side there were forests of masts and ships' rigging, skimming row boats and red-hatted men bending to the oars. On the bridge, a continuous rumble of wheels and clatter of horses' hoofs, a veritable Bosphorus of agitated fezzes, a cyclorama of startling costumes, a masquer- ade of sects and classes and nations — the aristocrat in braid and gilded display, the tattooed beggar in his wrap of rags, the pompous soldier, the woman spook with her face in eclipse, the Jew, the Greek, the Arab, the gaping tourist, the native porter bending under his burden, the toll taker — the whole com- posing a stirring and amazing potpourri of color and condi- tions that is unsurpassed anywhere unless it be in Cairo. In Stamboul the buildings were low and the citizens unpro- gressive, and but for a tram car that made semi-occasional trips along the twisted streets we could have easily imagined we were in the dawn following the midnight of the dark ages. This car was pulled by horses and was preceded by a herald on foot who blew a horn, and that horn the crumpled output of a ram. As the main street was only about fifteen feet wide a con- stant glut of humanity and vehicles was inevitable. In this section mosques were numerous and the devout citizenship had mounted their homes with low domes in imitation of their churches. After an hour of slow driving, innumerable stops and incessant "hiyi's" from our driver we drew up at a museum which proved to be quite a store house of crippled antiquities and mutilated statues, the magnificent marble sarcophagus of -Alexander the Great being the chief attraction. CHAPTER VIII. St. Sopliia, the Bazars, and the Bosphoriis. The city of Constantinople is so old and the besom of strife has swept over it so often and so fiercely that scarcely a vestige of its early history remains to tell the tragic tale of its rise and fall — only the gray walls, useless now, and a few monuments, and that splendid pile of the world's best second-hand sculpture — St. Sophia, beautiful even in its Ottoman setting and against its background of crimsoned history. Justinian built it at the enormous cost of $60,000,000 contributed for the purpose by all classes of and from all parts of the empire. The most skillful builders of the age were employed to construct it upon plans revealed to the emperor by an angel in a dream. (The angel and dream part of this story was perhaps an interpolation of Justinian's to match the cross-in-the-clouds mirage of Constan- tine). After six years, during which time all other matters were forgotten in the one absorbing project, the temple was completed and the emperor, on Christmas eve, 537, laid aside his crown and exclaimed, "Solomon, I have surpassed thee." I had heard much of this building — no doubt had heard too much. The books blossomed with adjectives in its description, and those who had seen it painted it in such glowing colors that we approached it from the architectural desert of old Stamboul with great expectations. In charge of an orthodox guide, we passed by way of a narrow, sloppy introduction of street into a tower wherein we were wound around and up by a spiral footway till we were discharged into a gallery over- looking the main floor. "Ah, me! Finest specimen of Byzantine art in the world! Lovely columns; grand arches," was the ecstatic exordium of our conductor. True ; to some extent ; but the view was blotched by forty- eleven-dozen Turkish rugs that curled rudely at their edges and made a mess of the clean marble floor, and by the Mo- hammedans in head rags and extension breeches and bare, brown 70 Six and One Abroad feet squatted around and going through the genuflections of worship. ''Magnificent dome! Beautiful mosaics!" continued the guide in an effusion of mangled English. True; but the grace- ful sweep of the dome and the labyrinth of arches that sup- ported it were blurred by a flock of pigeons that roosted in the cloisters and left the stain of their droppings on every floor and balustrade and pillar. Strange idea that of making ENTRANCE TO THE BAZARS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. a pigeon roost of so noble a sanctuary, but it is the Turkish way. The only wonder is that dogs, too, are not kenneled there. From a dozen positions in the balconies the guide spun his skein of ecstacy and exaggeration, and we, his dupes, wondered and retrospected. Then stepping again into the spiral hopper, we unwound the quaint old elevator to the starting point. No infidel can touch the holy floor of a mosque unless he be shod in No. 12 goat skin slippers ; and in these gondolas we slided St. Sophia, Bazars, and Bosphoriis 71 ill aud glided about in a comic farce — all of us except those who wore rubbers, which were deemed sufficient to prevent con- tamination. It was hard in this ridiculous equipment to ap- preciate the real merit of the imposing old structure. But look up ! High up and above the distracting interpolations of su- perstition, up to the stately arches and crowning archivolts, up to the sweeping, canopy of gold and catch the tints that are penciled there, remembering that it is the romance and witchery of the early Aladdins of art and that the porphyry columns are the same that supported the unrivaled Temple of Diana at Ephesus! It was beautiful, in a way, but it was a beauty that was tinged with sadness, and to save my life I could not work up a spark of enthusiasm over such a minor matter as archi- tectural technique for thinking of the dreadful carnage that marked the transition of the place from a temple of the Savior to a moscfue of the later Prophet, when twenty thousand Chris- tians were butchered there, in the very place where we were standing, and their blood ran in streams on the floor. It is a short drive and an abrupt mental lapse from St. Sophia to the bazars. As the IMohammedans look forward to a pil- grimage to Mecca, so our ladies looked forward to a visit to the bazars of Constantinople. ^Marvelous city within a city, these bazars ! Four thousand two hundred shops under a single roof; nine miles of narrow, unspeakable streets and they glutted to the last limit with a mass of trading, yelling, smell- ing humanity that jostled itself in a general promiscuous mix- up — a prospect that would have been too much for any foreign civilized woman except an American, and even for her upon any mission but shopping. The Turk, as eager to sell as our dames were to buy, opened the way out of the street to hi^} shop that was a concern no larger than a steamboat cabin, and a steamboat cabin is the smallest thing I can think of. In many of the shops the keepers sat cross-legged on the floor (for be it known there is no such a nuisance as a chair in all orthodox Turkeydom) and when bargaining with native customers, would make sales and wrap and deliver the goods without moving from their easy position. But the moment a bunch of American women would storm the little hole in the wall they would rise Six and One Abroad and prepare for the inevitable battle of price and counter price. The bazar area was sectioned off so that wares were sold only on streets assigned to that class of goods — rugs, laces and kindred material on one street, shoes on another, jewelry on another, etc. The upshot of such an arrangement was that we trousered sons of Adam had to traverse the entire nine miles of alleys to accommodate the omnivorous purchasing penchant of the ladies. We rubbed joints with donkeys, butted into the baggy declivities of Turks, elbowed mysterious veiled women, collided with robed Arabs, dodged eunuchs — those curios, pre- posterous, elongated, harmless burnt-cork obelisks who were out with children of the aristocracy on shopping and airing mis- sions; saw narghalies in operation, those queer Oriental pipes of lofty stature and vermiform appendix — ran into covies of vagrant odors, and finally, loaded down with shawls, opera bags, cushions, embroidery, mother of pearl boxes, brass bowls, rugs, silks, fans, dirks, sabers, fezzes, veils, shoes, and other miscellaneous et ceteras, we issued from the long, dark tunnels into the light. Just then, in front of us in full view, a muezzin appeared on the balcony of a minaret and called out in melodious baritone the appeal to devotions. Immediately others were heard in the distance, like echoes of the first one, and still others and others in all parts of the city. The sound of the combined voices was like unto the whangey music of a bagpipe. A shopkeeper turned his face to the southeast — toward Mecca — and began to pray. Others did likewise, but only a few paid any attention to the call as long as there was a chance to sell something. The great major- ity kept right on in their work of separating piasters from the in- fidel and in non-devotional pursuits. The song of the muezzin was, of course, in the native tongue, but translated into Eng- lish it was: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. Come to prayers ; come to prayers. ' ' Five times a day this call is made from every minaret in Turkey and Tur- key's dependencies. All devout Mohammedans drop secular matters and repair at once to the nearest mosque to pray. Some perform their devotions from any place where they may chance to be at the time of the call, but prayers are not deemed of St. Sophia, Bazars, and Bosphorus 73 iniich consequence outside the sacred atmosphere of the sanct- uary. The women of Turkey are slaves to the queerest and most ridiculous fashion in the world. It was all I could do to keep from, accidentally or somehow else, lifting one of those queer, grotesque veils and peeping at the prisoner inside. Indeed, I did venture to get close to one of these spooks, one afternoon on the Galata bridge, and looked rudely through her figured mask of gauze, and I saw that her features were comely and that she was smiling unresentfully at my impudence. But just when I was becoming interested, a big, red-hatted officer tapped me on the shoulder and broke up the seance. A Turkish woman is never seen on the streets with a man, and no man is ever al- lowed to see the face of a woman except he be her father, hus- band, son or brother. In that benighted land there is no such thing as courtship. And what a deprivation ! What, indeed, is marriage without the delightful prelude of smiles and tete-a-tetes, the golden mo- ment of engagement, the rapture of anticipation and the in- effable plannings for the life where arithmetic is shattered and one and one make three and sometimes half a dozen? In Tur- key there is no wooing, no love, except such as is wrought out in the home after the nuptials. The father chooses his son-in- law, and groom and bride see each other's faces for the first time only when their lives have been united for better or worse. A male visitor in a Turkish home can never see the face of his hostess and cannot enter her apartments, even though he be a relative. Out in the street, although a Turkish woman may not show her features, it is parliamentary for her to exhibit her ankles, and I noticed that she was always strictly parliamentary in that respect. Women and men are not allowed to sit to- gether, in the home, in the mosque nor street car, nor anywhere. More than that women must, as near as possible, be out of sight to the opposite sex. To insure absolute privacy and se- clusion, the windows of the female apartments of a home are screened with close lattice, so that the curious feminine eye may look upon the passing crowds and yet be invisible to any pro- 74 Six and One Abroad ^7 Mohammedan Women. Wohammeftttntrrfic £-vrt»u>»i. .Fenimes Missuhnai MOHAMMEDAN WOMEN. St. Sophia, Bazars, and Bospliorus 75 fane nuisciiline optic. On trains, in waiting rooms, steamboats and street ears, there are separate compartments where parti- tion walls come to the assistance of the ladies' veils in effecting their complete isolation. Birds, as are dogs, are mnch respected in Constantinople and it is a crime to kill them. Above the trellised rigging of the ships in the harbor the air was alive with the white wings of gulls, and myriads of wild ducks rode the waves and dived, conscious of their immunity. Here again the Koran has a bright page and again is evident its influence upon its obedient believers. It proclaims the taking of animal life a sin and to comply with its precepts many devout Turks refrain from eat- ing meat. A strange mixture of gentleness and brutality is the Koran — a bible that holds sacred the innocent lives of birds and beasts and yet bestows the prize of blissful immortality upon the hook-nosed Turk who sheds the blood of the ''infidel." I shall never forget the bright, cheery Sunday morning when we lifted anchor at Constantinople and headed for the Black Sea, along the course of the incomparable Bosphorus. It was early morning. The antiquated town of Stamboul, with its minarets and domes, its cypress groves and white walls, its Sophia of noble pedigree and sad and sanguinary history, was the first to retire before the retreating disorder of houses and hills ; the multitude of water craft marched and countermarched in the confusion of escape ; the great yellow rows of buildings in Galata ran together and in a jumbled mass deployed out of sight behind the banks of the Golden Horn ; the sun rose from his sumptuous Asian bed and sent a shower of silver arrows into the harbor ; and the Bosphorus opened her plump, brown arms and folded us to her pulsing bosom — the bosom of the Venus of waters. Upon the surface of this beautiful stream the craft of mythological legend and of the great armies of ancient his- tory, of Xerxes, Darius, Mahomet, Godfrey and Tancred, have moved on missions that changed the story of the world. Legend and history have been swept in succession into the crypt of Time, Init still the noble, incomparable stream flows on and flows as pure and chaste as when from the passion of two seas it was born to bless and perpetuate their union. 76 Six and One Abroad The hills, symmetrical and uniform, inclined gracefully to the water, not one out of line, and were crowned with beautiful villas and castles. Evergreens and vines colored the picture, and at one place the palace of the Sultan, isolated by a wall that climbed the acclivities and wound around the hillsides, added interest to the view. At another, Koberts College was promi- nent. As we passed this institution the 400 students, who had been apprised of our coming, waved their handkerchiefs in wel- come and ran up an American flag in our honor, and the six hundred irresponsibles of our steamer returned the salute vo- ciferously. At the entrance of the Black Sea we looked far out to the cold, cheerless coasts of Russia, toward Crimea and Balaklava, where another six hundred rode boldly and well. And then, doubling back on our course, we came again to the open sea. CHAPTER IX. Tiro Rainij Bays in Damascus. Damascus is the oldest city of the world, having maintained a continuous existence almost from the Creation to the present time. It was ancient when Jerusalem was founded; it was hoary with age when Komulus and Remus laid the foundation of Rome; it was an old city when IMoses led the Israelites out of Egypt; and had been standing for centuries when Abraham moved his tented settlement from Ur of the Chaldees down into Canaan. Its longevity is due to its location in a plain that is fed by two everlasting streams of water, making it a fertile resort in the midst of a forbidding desert. In all the Orient there is not a place more favored by nature for the perpetuation of a city. The Barada (the Abana of Scripture) gushes out of the side of a mountain a few miles north of the city, a full grown river from its very origin. The valley through which it runs is green with vegetation, and when it reaches the city it plunges into the very heart of it and dies— dies in motherhood, the birth of an oasis, the remnant dribbling away in streamlets and van- ishing in the sand of the desert. The Pharpa, another noble stream, heads at the base of Mount Hermon, and running along the southern limits of the oasis, shares with the Barada the credit for its sustenance. Damascus has a population of 250,000 and there has scarcely been a time in its existence when it did not contain a popula- tion as large or larger. Founded by Uz, the grandson of Shem, it is mentioned a number of times in Genesis as an important city in the days immediately following the flood. Its commer- cial prestige has always been due principally, of course, to its situation in a fertile oasis in the midst of a desert, but also to its location midway between the great territories of Persia and Arabia to the east and the ports of the Mediterranean to the west. All the caravan roads of Northern Syria converge here. 78 Six and One Abroad Two Rainij Dnys in Da))iascus 79 Daniaseiis from time immemorial has been noted for the superior excellency of certain wares it produced. No linen is as good as the damadv of Dama.scus. Its rng.s are even superior to those of Persia and Smyrna, and its looms are noted for the splendid quality and tone of the silks they weave. Its silver- and gold-smiths create exquisite things in filigree that are the envy of the jewelers of the world. Its hammered brass adorns the homes cf people of every land and clime. Its steel has been famous for forty centuries. The artisans and shopkeepers of Damascus are shrewder and more industrious than the business men anywhere else in the Orient. As in Constantinople and other places of Turkey and Turkey's dependencies, most of the shops and business estab- lishments of Damascus are grouped together under the motherly wing of one vast roof, but nowhere el*e are these "bazars" so interesting as here; nowhere else is there such a quaint and curious conglomeration of races. I happened to be in the ''bazars" on a Friday and that being the Sabbath or holy day of the Mohammedans, the afternoon was a holiday for all the craftsmen and they poured into the streets in great numbers. Only with difficulty could I push my way through the jostling crowds; Greek and Jew merchants were noisily auctioning fabrics and Arabs with their heads wrapped in heavy robes and legs and feet bare were bidding against each other for the articles. It was either raining or making an assault with attempt to rain the entire time of the two days we spent in this remarkable city and the narrow defiles which could only be termed streets by the widest stretch of metaphor were sloppy and intensely odoriferous. In filthiness and foulness they were in every re- spect a counterpart of the streets of Constantinople. On either side of the tortuous course of this Broadway the "skyscrapers" lifted their square shoulders fully ten feet above the stream of humanity that drifted by in bloomers and blouses and fezzes and turbans. And, mirable dictu ! an electric car ripped a seam in this agitated crazy quilt of men. It had been in opera- tion but a short time and was still a novelty to the natives who looked upon it with distrust. Electricity and steam in the 80 Six and One Abroad Orient will yet accomplish what missionaries have striven for in vain for hundreds of years. A cross between these plunging stallions of civilization and the dams of Turkish superstition will be a freak at first, but in all events will be an improvement on the present stock, and the gradual breeding up will be one of the miracles of the twentieth century. Please mark this prophecy. There are no gongs on the street car of Damascus, but a ram's horn is contantly blown by the motorman. Because the Mohammedan religion inveighs against bells and gongs these sonorous things are never heard in all the great extent of ter- ritory that Turkey controls — excepting only Jerusalem where Christians are privileged to ring mass bells. There are no bells even on the few locomotives that run in and out of Constanti- nople, Smyrna and Damascus. There is no music of any kind in the myriads of mosques, no sweet sounding instruments in their homes, for music, too, is of the devil and is forbidden. In all Asia Minor there is no desolation so acute as the dearth of melody — of voice and of instrument — only the songs of the birds and the occasional note of the unorthodox shepherd in the mountains. And there are no pictures, for pictures are a viola- tion of the command of God not to make a likeness of any created thing. This is especially true of the paintings of ani- mals, birds or men, and the Mohammedan who would hang in his home the image of any such, be it ever so beautiful, would be dealt with severely. For that reason the kodak is looked upon with aversion and cannot under any circumstances be taken into a mosque. For that reason, too, upon the rugs and exquisite fabrics they weave you will never find the interwoven outlines of birds or animals, and not even the figures of flowers or foliage or vines, but only the incoherent designs of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. The only two side walks in Damascus are on each side of the above noted street car street (the streets in the cities of Tur- key are never named), and are just wide enough for two Arabs but not wide enough for an Arab and an American. I sauntered along this avenue with one foot squashing in the mire and the other on the walk, noting the queer sights in the winding sue- Tivo Rainy Days in Damascus 81 cession of dens ; Turks making narghalies of cane and cocoanut shells; adjoining, perhaps, a khan where camels were fed, and odors rushed out; shops where brawny arms were hammering brass ; ovens where unclean cooks were preparing slab^ of pastry which were to be carried away by boys in their dirty hands and sold on the streets; second-hand caravan equipments, camel bells and saddles and even second-hand clothing ; groups of Turks playing checkers while they sipped coffee or held the snake-like stems of narghalies in their mouths; companies gath- ered around second-hand iron things spread out for sale in the streets; those indecent lavatories in full view where a little stream of water issued from the wall and ran down into the mud; men and boys spinning silk and linen thread and wind- ing it upon bobbins with the most rudimentary contrivances; old time looms running it into cloth; wood-workmen sitting on their heels, with queer saws and a string attached to them and looped around a piece of lumber to do service as a turning lathe ; places where Irish potatoes were stored in large quantities, and sometimes wheat; and so on. A Mohammedan cemetery, the oldest and most noted in Damascus, quite in the heart of the city, was a striking sight. The graves of this strange city of the dead were so close to- gether that there was scarcely standing room between them, being mounds of mud and straw, some thirty inches high, with an upright monument of mud at the head surmounted with a Turkish fez of the same material, if the deceased were a lay- man, and by a figure of the headgear peculiar to his station or office if he were an official. In a mud house here upon the payment of a fee, we were permitted to see the tomb of Fatima, daughter of Mohammed, and mother of the most distinguished descendants of the Prophet. A short drive through a narrow street that was knee deep to the horses in mire and filth and vile with offensive scents brought us to an old wall, which like so many other things in Damascus has held its own for ages against the changes of time. Here the odors of the city which had been growing in geometri- cal progression reached their climax, and I could not at first think of the events of history connected with the spot for the Six and One Abroad overpowering spectacle of half a dozen huge pyramids of ma- nure that riveted attention through the sense of smell. < It was the public dumping ground. A native was just then emptying a couple of saddle-bags of stuff from the back of a donkey and another was alongside our carriage on his way to the forming mound on a similar mission. A third was digging into the largest pyramid and filling a brace of pouches with the stuff for sale to the poorer classes for fuel. On the wall here, where it juts out and forms an angle, there is a squatty little house that marks the place where St. Paul was let down in a basket by his friends to escape the fury of the Jews. The angle, I suppose, served to obscure the basket and its occupant from the watch- men and make escape possible, and the Apostle's diminutive size no doubt enabled him to huddle up securely in the little ele- vator. Within a stone's throw from this point stands the house of Naaman, the leper, the wealthy nobleman who availed himself of the services of the prophet Elisha. It will be remembered that he raised a vigorous objection to the bath in the muddy Jordan prescribed by the Prophet while the clear waters of the Abana and Pharpa were rippling by his door at Damascus. And that he offered the prophet a bit of baksheesh and was surprised at his refusal to accept it. The house is now a home for lepers and we were satisfied with a long distance view of it. In the same vicinity in what is known as the Christian quar- ter, we visited the reputed home of Ananias, not him of the unsavory reputation for veracity, but the man of God who was told to go to the house of Judas in the Street called Straight and there inquire for Saul of Tarsus, who had lost his sight that day mysteriously in the glare of the light from heaven. The home is underground and its ancient aspect, if nothing else, favors its authenticity. I suppose the accumulations and changes of 1900 years one way and another will account for the house being underground. The preachers accepted it as genuine and I went with the majority. It didn't matter much, anyway. The Street called Straight is straighter than the letter Z, but not as straight as the letter S. Luke was not much given to facetious expression, but there is a dash of fun in the way Two Bfu'uij Days in Damascus 83 he speaks of this angular, zigzag and crinkled thoroughfare as a "Street called Straight," and as we rode along it for a mile the clever turn of his irony was apparent in the many crooks and corners. The most fanatical Mohammedans in the world are those of Damascus, and they hate a Christian like a Russian hates a Jew, or a woman another of her kind whom her husband says is pretty. I didn't like the looks of the natives of Da- mascus a bit ; they were surly, sober and serious and leered at us foreigners with a what-business-have-you-got-here expres- sion that was not very reassuring. We were in the great mosque of the Hyphenated-Arabic- Syllables on Friday — that is as near as 1 can translate the name of the mosque into English — and were hurried through it with expedition, for it was worship day and no strangers were allowed during services. We had to wear snow shoes similar to the equipment forced upon us in St. Sophia at Constanti- nople. They were so much too large that one of them came off my foot and without intending any disrespect I took a few steps before getting into it again. It was a serious blunder, for a watchful guard was upon me in an instant, and I have no doubt a repetition of it w^ould have prolonged my stay in the city. The church stands upon the site of the house of Rimmon mentioned in the Bible narrative of the cure of Naaman above noted, (so said the preachers and I'll bet on their accuracy of Biblical statement), and contains a magnificent shrine under which the head of John the Baptist is said to be interred. This Bible character has an arm in Malta, his trunk is buried in Samaria, and his head in Damascus, but I am sure the sepa- ration of his bones occasions no inconvenience now, as the great martyr has long ago acquired a new suit of upholstery and has no further use for the old. In the court of the mosque near the exit stands a mausoleum of Saladin, the Moslem gen- eral who crushed the crusades and who was the greatest hero of the chivalry of the middle ages. The tomb is of wood and is covered with black broadcloth, embroidered with silver, and fine cashmere shawls. At the head is a glass globe con- 84 Six and One Abroad MALCHIZEDEK. Two Rainy Days in Damascus 85 taining the faded bouquet presented by the emperor of Ger- many on the occasion of his visit in 1S98. After the emperor's return home he sent an ornamental wreath of gold and silver to replace the bouquet, but because a Greek cross was a part of the design it could not be allowed in the temple. This trouble was overcome by the erection of a bay window in the temple to contain it. The houses of Damascus are diminutive affairs built of mud and held together and strengthened with straw. From many of them there are projections of wooden sleepers upon which bay windows are built. Practically all the residences are flat- roofed, furnishing a comfortable place for sleeping in the hot summer and a place to hang out the family laundry to dry. The streets are narrow and unspeakable channels of mud. If there are any gardens in Damascus I did not see them. If there are any parks they escaped my most searching investi- gation. If there is anything in Damascus to produce a flux of flattery such as the tourist writers have who visit the city, I did not see it. I A\dsh to do Damascus full justice. We were there in the middle of March when winter yet dallied in the lap of spring, and winter and spring together were making a mess of it. The foliage was just peeping from the l)ursting buds. It was at its worst, in the rain and in its barrenness, but granting all this, it can never be more than a dirty, water-riven foul smell- ing city of disreputable houses and people, outspread upon a carpet of green, a sight fair enough to the camel-sick traveler who has come upon it from the Syrian waste, but not very prepossessing to one right off the Bosphorus. Its charms at its ])est are comparative and not elementary. The view from the mountain on the south, where a suburb of closely packed white mud houses have the advantage of an elevated position, is good. The city looks better from a dis- tance, as all things oriental do. The sun broke from the heavy portierres of cloud while we looked, and the city of mud was transfigured for a moment into a great brooch of thick set pearls pendant from the mountains by the silver Abana. But it was only for an instant. From where we stood Mahomet 86 Six and One Abroad saw the white city and said: "It is not permitted to man to enter but one paradise and mine is above." And he declined to enter upon the scene that fascinated him more than any he had ever before beheld. To Mahomet, perhaps, mud was an accessory to beauty, and filth no detraction from its charms. It is probable that the view from the mountains was splendid to Mahomet, just in from the Arabian desert, and he never knew what ugly underclothes the pretty overskirts hid from his eyes. In the distance, some miles away, a little village is dis- tinctly visible from the mountain, where Paul was abruptly and strenuously converted while on his way to Damascus, ''breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the dis- ciples of the Lord." It was all I could do to prevail upon the clerical majority not to undertake the trip to this spot, so infatuated were they with the great Apostle and anything by the merest inference and conjecture connected with his career. A tradition to which all Moslems accede fixes the Garden of Eden in this oasis and has the Abana and Pharpa as the Euphrates and Tigris of Scripture, and really I am inclined with all humility to believe the tradition is correct. It is the best opportunity for an Eden in all that section for hundreds of miles. Adam is reputed to have hung on the outskirts of the oasis after his expulsion and his grave is now upon the mountain where we "stood and viewed the landscape o'er." I do not claim kinship with any Mohammedan, but I do claim a hereditary interest in Adam, and it was with much regret that I was unable, owing to limited time, to trace these tradi- tions back and verify them. Damascus, in rainy weather in March begins with a "Dam" and ends with a "cus." It was cold when we were there and we had no fire in the hotel and altogether we were most un- favorably impressed with the oldest city in the world. "We were aroused at half past four in the morning of the day of our departure, to take a train for the south, and while we stood shivering on the heel of Mahomet, as the site of the location of the station is called, a brilliant and most impres- sive spectacle charmed us from the eastern skies. The night Tivo Rainy Bays in Damascus 87 had just begun to fold her sable tent like the Arab and silently steal aAvay. There was no obstruction of cloud or mist nor vague suggestion of either. The morning star, dazzling and in the full splendor of its perihelion, negligenth^ irregular, as though the hand of God had thrown a bit of plastic glory against the blue east wall, glowed and palpitated from its place, Avhile the golden crescent moon sought to reach it with extended graceful arms. This beautiful picture suggested the present ascendency of the Mohammedan religion in the East and the supremacy of the Star and Crescent. But in a short time the purple and crimson heralds of the King of Day ap- peared, and when he arose in majesty and threw all lesser lights into eclipse, I thought of the time that is surely coming, it may be soon or it may be long, when the sun of the Chris- tian religion will arise upon the land of Mohammedanism and throw its religion into total and eternal eclipse. Six and One Abroad CHAPTEE X. Lake Galilee and the City of Nazareth. A desolation of treeless hills and imwatered valleys stretches from the southern limits of the plain of Damascus to the north- ern boundary of Galilee, or the Holy Land proper. It is a desert, uninhabited save by wanderling bands of Bedouins except in an occasional spot where water is found in sufficient quantities to sustain a village. The greater part of the country lying along the route of the railroad is covered with limestone boulders so numerous often that they seem to have been sown broadcast. Sometimes a herd of sheep and a lone and lonesome keeper relieve the monotony of the waste, and sheepfolds of boulders rudely thrown together are its only architecture. Caravan roads, those trackless highways that have existed unchanged and unimproved since the time of Abraham, wind around the mountains and across the "waddies," and anon in the distance upon these primitive trails slow moving lines of camels may be seen half hidden in the clouds of dust they raise. The camel is a queer and interesting beast. Grotesque and ludicrous in aspect, as dignified as a judge, as pompous and haughty as a king, as humble and retiring as a barn roof be- hind, with abnormal commissary bumps on his middle and the whole superstructure mounted upon a slender and lofty scaf- folding, it is difficult to conceive of nature producing such a freak in any other light than that of a burlesque. A train of these caricatures seen in the distance have the appearance of a line of turtles slowly creeping along on stilts. At closer range they resemble the ostrich. Near at hand when wearing a single bridle rein that drops from the vicinity of the bulging eyes in a loop to the hand of the rider, and chewing its cud, never did a liarrister with glasses and chain and complacent mien look more judicial than this philosopher of the desert. At Darat fifty miles out from Damascus, during a delay caused by a change of engines, our party started toward a 90 Six and One Ahroad mud town about half a mile distant, which we were informed was the capital of the old district of Bashan, noted in the Bible for its bulls, saith the majority. On the way we encountered several detachments of camels carrying^ bags of wheat from the mud village to the railroad station for shipment. We held up a section of this transportation line and compelled a wee bit of an Arab who was in charge to convey us back to the station. The ride was a unique experience. The camel has often been called the ship of the desert, and really it has all the motions of a ship at sea, and sea sickness inevitably fol- lows a long ride upon one of them by a novice. Arriving at the station platform, we alighted in a novel manner. At a signal from the driver and a jerk at the halter, the camels each in turn dropped to their knees and proceeded to fold up like a knife until they were settled in a bundle on the ground, en- abling us to step off easily from their hurricane decks. At Darat the great Haj highway, which the railroad follows from Damascus, veers off to the left and proceeds to Mecca. This is the route taken once a year by devout Mohammedans who desire to visit the birthplace of the prophet, and the pil- grimage always begins at the "Heel of the Prophet" in Damascus. The railroad ran into the mountains shortly after leaving Darat and began a circuitous descent toward the valley of the Jordan and the Plain of Jezreel. For a distance of fifty miles the scenery was as grand as aaiy in the Rockies of America. The hills which had been hovering threateningly in our front for some time came together at length in an effort to block our progress, but we dodged them by perilous leaps and nu- merous burrowing and turnings and twistings, and forced an entry through and around them until we finally ran into, high up against the mountains, a picturesque canyon, in the channel of which the Yarmuk foamed and fretted turbulently. Deep tributary gorges complained violently at our intrusion and the echoes rolled along their abysmal hallways like the lamenta- tions of the lost. The mountains manoeuvered in magnificent disorder. Not a tree nor a shrub interrupted the graceful drapery in which the canyon's sides were clad, but when, as Lake Galilee and Nazaretli 91 was the case soiuetiuies, these emerald cloaks were thrown back, fantastic foriualious in stone and strata were disclosed — elaborate decorations of weather and strata not unlike the friezes and has reliefs of ancient temples. After executing' all kinds of loops and bow-knots, and threading mountain after mountain through artificial eyes the railroad dropped by circuitous gradients to the level of the stream. Then the mountains threw open their doors, the echoes were quieted, and the train muffled its querulous din out of respect for the most hallowed spot and the most beautiful site in all the Orient. The hills, recumbent, venerable, sedate, were grouped around an esplanade, in the midst of which a river, in travail from the northern snows, Avas accouched of a delect- able sea. It was Galilee, child of the Jordan, noted in sacred story and teeming with sacred memories. Of course we left the train here. It was at the close of a cloudless day. AVe stood for a few moments in mute admira- tion of this beautiful babe of the Jordan and of its cradle of mountains, and as we looked, the sun kissed it and left it for the night to the enfolding mountains and to us. So intent Avere we upon the splendid scene and prospect that we did not stop to take note of the disreputable mud town that hung like a barnacle on the green bank nor of the slovan aborigines who sought to sell us their dirks and cigarette boxes as souvenirs of the holy place, but with hurried accord flocked to the pier and to the boats that were tethered there for a sail upon the pretty loch in the hush of the twilight. The more fastidious of the party who left the train here took passage in the steamboat, the only vessel of that char- acter on the lake, while the inseparable six and one shipped, with others, in a large row boat after the manner, we imagined, of the craft of Peter and Zebedee's children, the trio of Jews who once ran a fishing business here in partnership. (Luke V, 19). The oar*men of our little boat were three swarthy Mohammedan lads and a gray veteran who acted as mnnager and baksheesh collector, all of them diked out in their best clothes in honor of our visit. It is worthy of mention, too, and should l)e lianded down in history, that their feet were 92 Six and One Abroad clean and their toenails manicured and shining like polished tortoise shell. When we were well out upon the waters and the boat was rising and falling with the rhythmic inflections of the waves and the oars splashing with uniform melody, the Arab boat- men began to sing in their native tongue, the grave old gentle- man forward hymning line after line and the lads chiming in after each line with the chorus: "He-ya mana la-ya man." I had one of the boys, the most intelligent of the lot, to write the chorus in Arabic characters in my notebook, and after- wards had it translated by our dragoman into these splendid words: "Those who believe in God will be saved." The words of the song were not intelligible to us, but the melody was of no mean order. At its conclusion our own party, filled through and through with the aptness of the tune, broke into song and the hills caught up the refrain and repeated it in musical echoes : "Oh, Galilee, sweet Galilee, Come sing thy song again to me." In the gathering darkness, with every noted sight out of view, the incidents of early Christian history so many of which occurred on the shores of this beautiful lake, seemed to come to us liked winged messages from those vague and distant times, and were almost as distinct as a present and visual reality. Did the Christ, upheld by an unseen hand, walk upon these waters when they threatened His disciples? It was here that the demonstration of His divinity was made. Did the disciples grow disheartened in their efforts to land a lunch of fish from the water? It was here that the Christ supplemented their weakness with His omnipotence. Did the Great Teacher grow tired in His humanity when the need}^ and astonished throngs sought His services continually? It was upon the bosom of this lake that He found the succor of privacy and rest. It was dark when we landed at Tiberias, after a sail of six miles, and in a monastery of the Greek church, one of the few clean and airy buildings of the town, we found lodging for the night. Lake Galilee and Nazaretli 93 Tiberias has a population of 8,000, and is the only survivor of the numerous cities that existed around Galilee in the time of Christ. It was founded by Herod Antipas, a tetrarch of Galilee, as a pleasure resort and his palace was its principal feature. His brother Philip had built a city and called it after the daughter Caesar, and Herod in a spirit of greater servility built this one and called it after Caesar himself. During its con.struction a Jewish cemetery was disturbed and for that reason no Jews would ever live in or enter the city. Christ himself never visited it, though most of His life was spent in its vicinity. Herod was a dissolute old Avretch, and among his many improper acts he conceived an attachment for Herodias, his sister in law, though he was married at the time to an attractive daughter of an Arab sheik. The law would not per- mit a second marriage, nevertheless he brought the woman, Herodias, with her consent, into his home, and thereupon his wife indignantly packed her wardrobe and returned to her father's home in the mountains. The old sheik, in resentment of the insult to his daughter, gathered his clans and made war upon Herod, pressing his army so close that he was forced to move to his castle a.t Macherus, near the Dead Sea. At this juncture John the Baptist, in a series of out-door sermons, was taking Herod severely to task for his adultery. Herod himself cared little for the criticism, but Herodias demanded John's arrest, and Salome, her daughter, requested and secured his head. An interesting sequel to this story is to the effect that Salome married a Roman general, who was afterwards trans- ferred to Spain, and that while skating on the ice of a river there, she fell through and her head was severed from her body by the sharp edges of the ice. This may or may not be true ; it is immaterial now. I stood in the early morning on the pier that juts out into the lake at Tiberias, in company with several ladies and among a number of Arabs of both sexes who had been fishing and had just brought in the results of their operations. The fish, of a uniform size and weight, were dumped on the pier in a pal- pitating mound several feet high. This was the city market, and a brisk business in live fish was being done. The natives 94 Six and One Abroad Lake Galilee and Nazareth 95 came in tlirong.s. The scales used were a primitive affair, and the weights were rocks of different sizes. The morning was damp and exceedingly chilly. The natives had their heads and trunks swarthed in an abundance of cloth, hut their shins and feet were bare. Presently a stalwart Arab removed his headgear and laid it aside, then untied his girdle and dropped it, and was in the act of taking off the only remain- ing garment, when it occurred to the lady visitors that it was time to return to the hotel. They had scarcely turned their back when the scalawag stripped stark naked, and unabashed in the presence of the women and children of his o\\ti kind, plunged into the water. He was back shortly with his skiff and offering to take us for an ante-breakfast ride. Til)erias is a typical Arab and Turkish town ; that is, it is unclean and offensive, and the inhabitants are about as low in the scale of civilization as mankind ever gets. It was a supreme delight to leave the fetid streets and to embark in row boats upon the pure bosom of the waters and under skies neither of which the degradation of man could contaminate. Directly across on the opposite side, in the edge of a desert place, was the locality where Jesus fed the 5,000, while the throng sat upon the grass and wondered at the multiplication of the menu. To the right were the hills where the swine, inoculated with the devils of the Gadarene lunatic, ran down into the sea and were choked. To the left, through a depression in the basin. Mount Hermon, white wath snow from summit to base and forty-five miles away, was visible. A mass of ruins on the northern slope where the mountains once retired to give place to a great city was all that was left of Capernaum, the home of Christ when He lived by the sea. Verily the curse that he pronounced upon it for infidelity and wickedness, has been literally fulfilled: ''It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judg- ment than for Capernaum." Bethsaida and Chorazin have completely vanished, without a wreck or ruin to tell the story of their desolation, and the home of jMary Magdalene, called Magdala, were better extinct 96 Six and One Abroad than to have declined to the level to which the Bedouins have brought it now. As we cruised from point to point it seemed somehow unreal and as if we were in a mystic barque in fancyland. And yet the stirring scenes on this the frontier of Christianity assumed a reality that we had never known before, and it was not hard to rehabilitate the dead cities and people them with the cos- mopolitan throngs of the gospel. It was a consoling thought, too, that while squalor and superstition had violated most of the sacred places of the Holy Land, virgin Galilee had not sur- rendered her chastity. The lake is thirteen miles long, four to six miles wide and 680 feet below the sea level. In the sum- mer the atmosphere becomes very humid at times, and the rapid evaporation develops sudden squalls such as came upon the disciples when Jesus was taking a nap "in the hinder part of a ship on a pillow." (Mark 4:38.) Speaking of squalls, we had an experience with one when we were preparing to leave the lake for Nazareth. Melchizedek (such was our abbrevation of the unpronouncable name of our dragoman) had provided hacks and teams for our conveyance, and we had occupied them and were waiting his pleasure to go. But the commissary stores had been delayed somehow, and when they appeared presently, Melchizedek and another son of Esau, his assistant, at once went into a state of violent physical and verbal eruption. Red hot sulphurous Arabic flew thick and fast ; they shook each other and all but came to blows ; they screamed and grew red in the face ; and it was apparent that one of them would soon draw a deadly knife and plunge the blade deep into the other's vitals. Every man in the party jumped out and ran to separate them, and then, seeing our alarm, the belligerants subsided abruptly and broke into laugh- ter. Melchizedek explained that they were not mad, were not even quarreling, but only consulting as to the proper vehicle in which to store the provisions. That is the Arab's way. I have seen them fuss to the ragged edge of murder many times, but never yet have I seen them fight, much as I hoped they would sometimes. It is six hours from Tiberias to Nazareth. Distance in the Lake Galilee and Nazareth 97 East is computed l\y time and not by lineal measurement, and time is regulated by the donkey, whose gait is as regular as the swing of a pendulum. The ascent of the mountain over- hanging Galileo consumed two hours' time, during which one of our vehicles overturned, horses, hack and four Catholic priests executing a complete somersault without an injury or scratch, but which developed another tempest of words be- tween jMelchizedek and the driver, which was worse. The soil of Galilee is a rich mucilaginous loam of chocolate color and as fertile as the delta of the Nile. The natives tickle it with a caricature they call a plow and it smiles with a rip- pling wealth of grain. The valleys at the time of our visit were veritable hanging gardens of green and brown, the moun- tains being the velvet covered supports from which they swung, and the whole irregular undulating surface was literally cov- ered with white and crimson anemones — the scriptural lilies of the valley. In the midst of this landscape of chromatic fields, of emerald cones and devious vales and glade:?:, a few miles out from Galilee, the Mount of Beatitudes rose superbly. I had seen cathedrals until recollection of them was a night- mare — they were all so frightfully melancholy and oppressive, so suggestive of the tomb — and what a relief it was to stand in God's own cathedral in Galilee, with its nave of light and transept of tlowers, its dome the outstretched canopy of the sky, its incense the swinging cups of the lilies of the valley, its light the golden radiant sun, and its floors spread wdth a carpet woven by invisible looms ! From a pulpit here Jesus spoke the incomparal)le sermon on the mount, a deliverance in which there is more condensed wisdom than in any that ever fell from the lips of man. Our reveries at this point were abruptly dissipated by a bunch of blue-shirted children who came on the run mysteri- ously from somewhere with extended hands for baksheesh, and an irreverent old pilgrim jumped upon a rock and quoted that beautiful invitation of Jesus: ''Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." At noon we halted at a pond for lunch, and while we were struggling with leather-upholstered chicken legs and petrified 98 Six and One Abroad rye bread, Mielchizedek mounted a boulder and explained as near as we could make it out, that a man by the name of Con- rad, who was a ''Sherman," led a crusade through this sec- tion of country, and that the Turks whittled on him at the spot where we were stopping, until nothing was left of him but a toe nail and a jaw tooth. That was the literal transla- tion of his harangue and explanatory gestures. Melchizedek WATER JUGS, NAZARETH. was an accomplished linguist; he prided himself on his ability to speak nine different languages; and he could, bat the trou- ble was he spoke them all at the same time. He wore a gorge- ous robe on this trip which he claimed was given him by Em- peror William for carrying his cigarette box during his visit in 1898. We have never yet seen a dragoman in the Holy Land Mdio did not figure conspicuously in the retinue of the emperor at that time. Emperor William's visit was a god-send to Palestine. Roads Lake Galilee and Nazareth 99 were repaired for the first time in 1,972 years; bridges were built, and city streets were cleaned. A fine road from Nazareth to the "bloody pool" where we dined, was built by the sultan for his royal guest, and we certainly enjoyed it after flounder- ing, bumping and churning through the mud from Tiberias. Two hours before reaching Nazareth we came upon the vil- lage of Cana, where at a wedding Jesus performed his first miracle. It is a hamlet of the usual cluster of mud huts with- out windows or apertures, the same never-swept lanes, the same sore-eyed aggregation of human nondescripts. A Catholic chapel stands over the ruins of an old house claimed to be the home where the marriage occurred. There is a fountain in the midst of it and an altar over which there is a display of Latin, a part of which translated is: "What God has joined together let not man put asunder." The Greek priests have the place located in a different part of town, and in their chapel are two of the very stone jars that contained the vine that blushed when Jesus spoke. You pay your money and take your choice. A little rock house, in this vicinity, cross-crowned, marks the alleged spot where Nathaniel lived. An English mission is a bright resort where we saw a school of Arab urchins with clean noses and heard them sing the songs of Him who was their Savior as well as ours. The road left Cana through a lane of cactus hedges and coiled upward through the mountains, a long white serpentine stretch of natural pavement, until it reached Nazareth, the boyhood home of Jesus. There we ran into a nest of superstition and religious fool- ishness. But the town was so clean and the inhabitants so much more intelligent than any we had seen in this part of the moral vineyard that we fell in love with it. The houses were built of stone and there was an air, a little whiff at least, of civilization about the place. We spent the night at a monastery, a three-story structure capable of accommodating 300 guests and operated by monks in brown robes, shaved heads and long beards, Franciscans I think. 100 Six and One Abroad Nazareth is situated liigh up in the mountains and contains a population of about 10,000. Its location is determined by a great spring known as Mary's Fountain. Springs are the town builders of the Bast; let this one at Nazareth cease to flow and the population would decamp before sundown, and the buildings would quickly lapse into decay. At this foun- tain we saw the life of our Savior's city; women washing; others carrying jars of water atilt on their heads ; children at play in the mud; and men leading camels and donkeys to the trough beneath the spouting stream. It is the hub of the town ; its assembly grounds. Along narrow winding streets we were led by Melchizedek to the various points of interest, first visiting the Church of the Annunciation, a Catholic institution over the spot where they believe the Virgin was notified of her mission by the angel G-abriel. There are really ruins of an ancient house in this place that may have been the home of Mary and Joseph, a flight of steps leading down into it. A cave it is, more than a residence. Here, in what is called the Chapel of the Angel, we were shown a marble slab worn deep with kisses of the believing through the ages, indicating the spot where the an- nouncing angel stood, and a marble column is miraculously suspended from the ceiling where Mary sat when she heard the news. The ''Kitchen of the Virgin" is a dark cavern where Mary prepared the family meals. The Greek Orthodox people have a rival annunciation place at the Spring. And so again we are forced to arbitrate between these factions. The preachers I think decided in favor of the Latins, and I will not dissent. It makes no difference what little old underground joint was the real exact place of the Savior's abode when he was a citizen of Nazareth. It is enough that the hills are the same, the flowers the same family of bright spirits that welcomed Him as He passed among them. Perhaps some of the natives them- selves are descendants of Jesus. There is always a great deal of sentiment in a spring, a bubbling spring. Youthful fancies and foibles are associated intimately with such places, and any man whose early life does not involve a spring as well as a wash hole deserves sympathy. It is boyhood's trysting place; the Lake Galilee and Nazareth loi source of consolation after heated spasms of play; the rendez- vous of plotting juvenile clans. Wonder if Jesus used to sit on the rocks of this fine old spring of Nazareth and splash His feet in the water and plan boyish pranks with his associates. I guess He did, for there is nothing un-divine in any of it. It is certain that He drank from it thousands of times. CHAPTER XI. From Joppoi to Jerusalem. "Hail-ee, Hail-ee, El-oo-Eezer." This was the chorus of the song of the boatmen who piloted us over the mischievous waves from our steamer, two miles out, to the landing at Joppa. It meant: "Hail, Hail to Jesus," and was sung by bare-foot, turbaned, baggy-trousered Moham- medans as a kind cf welcome to us to the land where the author of Christianity lived. Our visit meant piasters to them and therefore, and therefore only, were we welcome. Joppa is an old town and is now, as it was in the time of Solomon, the shipping port of Jerusalem and Palestine. It was from Joppa that Jonah sailed on his truancy from duty, bound for Tarshish (now Cadiz, Spain), and in the Mediterranean somewhere nearby he had his three days submarine outing in the commissary department of a great sea fish especially pre- pared for his accommodation. It was at Joppa that Peter saw the vision that impressed upon him the universal scope of Christianity. If tradition be true, I saw the house of Simon the Tanner, and stood on the flat roof where Peter saw "heaven opened and a certain vessel descending unto him as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts and creeping things." It is a very old place "by the seaside," and could very well, so far as appearances go, be the identical home of the hospitable tanner. Confirmatory evidence is found also in the fact that that part of the town is even today occu- pied by numerous tanneries, many of them no doubt with a lineage running back to the days of the apostles. Sore eyes seem to be epidemic in Joppa and blindness and defective sight the rule to which there are few exceptions. Melchizedek explained that this affliction of his race was due to the glare of the sun upon the limestone rocks, but a better reason is found in their personal uncleanliness. I think I have in this series of letters somewhere intimated that From Joppa to Jerusalem 103 the towns of Turkey and Syria are dirty and foul. If so I will merely ditto Joppa in that respect. Picking our way among assorted nuisances from Simon's house, with trousers upturned and skirts hoisted, beggars in all stages of misery and deformity blocking our progress and even appealing to us from upstairs windows with extended hands, we proceeded by way of an enclosed passage, such as are seen so often in the East, to an open square where the sun beat down upon hundreds of indolent squatting natives and drove every insinuating odor back into the alleys. Here oranges in large quantities were on sale in little chicken coop shops, and their buxom, rotund and cheerful forms contrasted agree- ably with the tawdry other stuff that was on sale. Nowhere have we seen a more refreshing sight than the orange groves of Joppa. This particular section is well favored for the gjrowing not only of oranges, but also of lemons, dates, apri- cots, pomegranates, and figs, and tropical vegetation of almost every variety flourishes luxuriantly, for a few feet under the surface of the soil there is an inexhaustible supply of water. The hotel at which we stopped was located in a tropical garden where parrots sc^uawked in the rank foliage and pet monkeys s^^■^mg from the trees. Perfumed zephyrs swept the prome- nades, and everything was lovely except at such times as we chanced to stroll upon the streets and encountered the semper sideant and sore-eyed populace. A queer feature of the life of the city was the goatskin ves- sels used for the transportation of water. A native was filling one of these vessels at the well of the house of Simon the Tanner while we were there. It was the entire hide of a black goat, minus only the head and tail, sewed together. AVhen being filled at the neck end, the billy showed signs of coming to life, the sides expanding, the legs becoming rigid, and the thing when full looked like a bloated cadaver a week old. No water for us in Joppa; we sucked oranges instead. A tomb reputed to be that of Tabitha, and the room where Peter "gave her his hand and lifted her up, and it was known throughout all Joppa and many believed in the Lord," are pre- served in the Greek church here. 104 Six and One Abroad GOAT SKIN VESSELS. Fro)u Jopp'i to JcrKsaleni 105 But Joppa was strictly an accidental stop and both the cleri- cal and lay members of our party tolerated it only until time for the train to leave for Jerusalem. A railroad from Jcppa to Jerusalem ! Did any prophet or seer cf the old days, any judge or king, any but Christ himself foresee such a road of steel? And did any but He ever forsee a steam-winged caravan upon the rocky waste where Goliath fought and fell and David wielded his sling, and Samson plied his mighty muscle and loved and wrought his own destruction? What a bedlam of noise at the railroad station ! AVhat a medley of curious costumes and people ! The whirling car- riages with antique drivers and modern passengers ; the brown porters in their immensity of breeches tottering under tower- ing loads of trunks; natives tugging at bundles in the hands of prssengers and begging for an opportunity to earn a tip; the train men excited and explosive ; the women ghosts in pairs and groups peering over white face-scarfs at the strange dress of their Western sisters. And over the whole tumult and mix- ture a family of palms holding their plumed umbrellas. I should have said our own party was scarcely less excited and noisy than the natives outside. The long expected was about to happen ; Jerusalem was only four hours away. Anticipa- tion was boiling in every vein and sizzling on every lip. We are off. For a couple of miles we run through a belt of orange groves where the trees are bending under burdens of golden globes and the air is fragrant with the breath of flowers. Then we enter the Plain of Sharon, where wheat and fresh sod alter- nate in a checkerboard of green and brown rectangles, the same beautiful variety all the way to thi^ distant purple hills; camels are pulling obsolete plows in the sun swept fields, and gay- robed, bare-legged natives are guiding the meandering curiosities with one hand on the single handle and the other gripping a goad. We know now why the Savior spoke of putting the ''hand" and not the "Lands" to the plow. This is every whit sacred ground, once the home of the Philistines and the battle- field where Israel strove for its possession. On the summit of vender hill a monastery marks the site of Zora, the birth- 106 Six and One Abroad place of Samson. Eucalyptus trees in a parallel follow a cara- van road, the great highway from Syria to Egypt, where it crosses our route at right-angles, and hedges of cactus divide the little farms. Intermittent hamlets of mud, their roofs ver- dant with the spring growth of grass, and each with a single minaret to relieve the monotony of its scant architecture, soil the comely surface of the plain. Now we pass the village of Ramleli, the reputed home of Joseph of Aramathea, and a crowd of children offer bunches of brilliant nosegays for a penny and a basket of oranges for a piaster (6 cents). After thirty miles of level surface, the whole of it in culti- vation, the plain begins to slope upward to the mountains and the green foothills are radiant with lilies-of-the-valley and roses of Sharon, with now and then a vineyard and a watch tower. Occasionally a hill Math less of rock and more of soil is ter- raced to the top with baby vineyards ; on a ledge of rock high up a stork solemnly awaits the opportunity to drop an Arab kidlet or a hawk scans the honey-combed hill for a hare. Mel- chizedek passes through the car and pompously announces our arrival at a station where the Philistines kept the Ark of the Covenant during the time it was in their possession, and we get out for a '^ stretch" and observation. The engine has made this stop to catch its wind for the pull to Jerusalem, which from now on is exceedingly steep. With a shrill screech of confidence, it plunges immediately into a canyon and the reverberation multiplies against the overhang- ing hills. We are now in a dry rocky channel and will follow it fifteen miles to its source in the hills of the holy city. Mel- chizedek, omniscient on all points of biblical topography, has Mr. McCurdy, the Pittsburg Irishman who joined us miracu- lously at Joppa after an absence of two weeks on other trips^ to open the Scriptures at the sixteenth and seventeenth chap- ters of I. Samuel and read the story of the battle between the Philistines and the Israelites, of David and his journey from Bethlehem, and of his unequal duel with Goliath and its sur- prising result. Right here in this channel, says he, is where the thrilling events occurred, and from this brook he took the fatal pebble; on the mountain side here the contending hosts From Joppa to Jerusalem 107 were gathered. How contracted the fighting space, fit only for a battle with spears and bows, or for a railroad track, or for goats, numbers of which are crawling like black ants high up on the rocky slopes yonder. And now at last, after many a turn and many a groan of complaining wheels, the little engine is panting in the suburbs of a town. No one has announced it, but the noisy multitude of hack-men, the imposing aggregation of limestone houses, can have but one meaning — we are at Jerusalem. The sun has set, and from a cab driven by a reckless Jehu we glimpse the old city in silhouette against the gray evening sky. And now it is in full view across the deep valley — a con- fusion of Avhite rock and steeples and domes cramped within enclosing walls, while a generous overflow of structures of every shape and color runs down into the valley and clings to the slopes of adjacent hills. It is beautiful; it could not be other- wise in such a commanding location. In the awe of twilight it seems like a vision — a resurrection of history — and as we behold and dream and recall, the pathetic lamentation of Jesus comes to us in memory : ' * Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophet and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings and ye would not. Behold, your house is left unto you desolate." CHAPTEE XII. A Jerusalem Hotel. The Holy Land is one of the favorite objective points of travel; not, indeed, of that vast annual migratory host that ebbs and flows with the seasons in quest of pleasure ; but of that lesser and more substantial and sensible contingent which finds its pleasure in observation of historic places. Pleasure turns up its nose at Palestine. It was the time in the calendar of travel when visitors are most numerous in Jerusalem. Accommodations were ^scarce, and in lieu of anything better we secured quarters at the Notre Dame de France, an enormous building just outside the walls, the largest in Jerusalem with the exception of the Russian Hospice. It was the rainy season and the weather, while not severely cold, was exceedingly penetrating and disagreeable, Jerusalem's great altitude bringing out all the rigor there is in a winter or early spring. The hotel was of stone without a single bit of wood anywhere in its composition that we were able to discover. I doubt if there is enough lumber in all the houses of the city of Jerusa- lem to build a chicken coop. The floors were stone, weather- stained stone; the walls were unplastered stone exuding damp- ness at every pore ; the ceilings were clammy stone ; the stairs — steps and railings — hard unfeeling stone; our bed itself was an assault and battery of stone. There was no stove in any of the 300 rooms, for M^hich de- linquency, however, there was a good excuse in the price of wood which was 35 cents a pound and nothing but olive roots to be had at that price. A tallow candle tinted the darkness of our den with the faint- est suggestion of a light. The hotel, in fact, was a monastery that served as a religious hermitage half the year and during the other half was converted into an inn, the monks retaining a wing for themselves. These A Jerusalem Hotel 109 Franciscans took possession of the adjacent garden dnring in- tervals of sun, and when flitting about or sitting in their long black robes and hoods looked like phantom creations of Dore. Nine American priests were our companion guests, and a jollier set of fellows never went abroad. A separate table in the dining hall was assigned to them and to us and a couple of ladies who were sisters to as many of the priests. Now a Jerusalem bill of fare is a curious collection of dishes. IN THE GARDEN OF NOTRE DAME— THE NINE PRIESTS AND OTHERS. Breakfast is a mere formality, consisting of coffee, which is coffee in name and not in substance, and a baseball bat that serves the purpose of bread. Luncheon and dinners are more substantial and edible entities, three varieties of meat being served at these two meals. Usually we had goat chops, the violently aromatic oriental kind, sometimes camel — a palatable piece of hump or a slice of the receding rear. On one occasion porterhouse was served, but it had a peculiar grain and the consistency of caoutchouc. Our waiter was a Turk who was 110 Six and One Abroad supposed to speak English, and could almost do so at times, and when we requested him to translate the meat into English he explained that it was donkey porterhouse, whereupon one of the Catholic fathers humorously observed: "Ladies and gentlemen, let us bray." IN A SHEIK'S COSTUME IN A JERUSALEM PHOTO GALLERY. CHAPTER XIII. Bctlilelicm and the Manger. It was a suggestion of the priests that we see Jerusaelm and vicinity in chronological conformity with the New Testament story, and we readily assented to the arrangement, but we never did, not in a single instance did we ever get up early enough to join the fathers in a visit to any of the sacred places. They were always diligently up with the five o'clock matin bells and off to mass somewhere, continuing thence their program for th,e day. In agreement with the chronological program and ignorant until the time to start on the journey that our Catholic friends had gone on ahead in the wee small hours to mass service, we arranged before seeing the city, so full of interesting sights and so hallowed by history— to visit first the birthplace of Him who was its central figure and greatest personality. In- cidentally, the chronological sequence was broken after this first trip, for the protestant majority seceded into an excur- sion into Samaria and left ]\TcCurdy and me without benefit of clergy, to see Jerusalem with unorthodox eyes. Bethlehem was four miles distant to the south, and the road led to it over the backbone of a mountain — a splendid road of natural pavement of rock. For this trip we engaged the serv- ices of a new guide. We regretted to part with Melchizedek — he was so interesting, and we had become attached to him, but he had another engagement and was not available. This latest acquisition was a dignified Syrian in European dress, with the exception of a bright red fez that decorated the terminus of his tall form. His name was a quadruple- jointed title that we could not pronounce, and so we dubbed him Jehoshaphat for short. Jehoshaphat rode with the driver, and at all points of in- terest slowly and pompously doled out his valuable informa- tion. A carob tree by the roadside he averred to be the va- rietv that bore the husks "the swine did eat" and with which 112 Six and One Ah road Bethlehem and the Manger 113 the prodigal son woukl fain have filled his stomach. We had a kind of Sunday School notion that the prodigal son was driven to the necessity of eating corn husks, and he had there- fore always had our earnest sympathy. But notwithstanding the revision of our opinion of his diet, the wayward boy is still entitled to some commisseration, for the carob husk is about as unpalatable as a liveoak acorn. Three miles out we came upon a little patch of ground lit- erally covered with pebbles, Avhich Jehoshaphat claimed were miraculously produced. According to his story, a man was sowing seed broadcast on the spot and Jesus, passing by, asked him what he was sowing. The man insolently replied that he was sowing stones, and Jesus, to punish him for his imperti- nence, actually turned the seeds to stones. The fact that this does not appear in Scripture threw some doubt upon it in our minds, but Jehoshaphat insisted that the stones were there to speak for themselves. From the top of the hill the town of Bethlehem came into sight. A considerable village it was, and quite picturesque. To the left, deep down in a narrow valley half covered with rocks was the site of the field of Boaz, where Ruth went a- gleaning and a-husband-hunting ; and here squarely by the roadside was the tomb of Rachel, the favorite wife of Jacob. It will be remembered that she died at Bethlehem while Jacob was en route to Hebron. The tomb is an imj^osing one, and there is little reason to doubt its authenticity. Bethlehem has a population of 8,000, though you would not think it from a distance. Ten people live in a space in the East that would be stuffy quarters for a single American. Everything is on a small scale. We drove along a narrow lane of rock houses until we came to an open square, where the entire population of the town seemed to be collected. Leaving the carriage we were conducted by Jehoshaphat, we ignorantly supposed, to the great attraction of Bethlehem, for he led us in devious paths, along by munching camels and through crowds packed compactly in the streets to — not the Manger, but a curio shop. The impudent rascal. It was with the greatest difficulty that we could restrain an impulse to hurl him from 114 Six and One Abroad BethJeliem and the Manger 115 yonder cliff down into Boaz' field. Had we come all the way across the ocean and a sea to buy an olive pin tray or a mnssel shell scarf pin? It was only three minutes to the church of the Nativity. The front of this edifice was a high blank wall of indifferent con- struction, and the entrance a doorway so small and unpreten- tious that it appeared to be an accidental hole that the builders forgot. Stooping low, we entered and groped along a narrow passage way till we stood with uncovered heads inside an old chapel that was erected by Constantine away back in 330. The floor was of rock, worn concave and irregular by the tramp of millions of feet ; its columns were monoliths that had been slicked and soilcid by millions of hands. Its solemn and ven- erable aspect was emphasized by the darkness and even by the light that was strained into a faint glow through the trans- lucent transoms. The church is owned by no one, unless it be by the Turkish government, which keeps a guard of soldiers on hand to pre- vent the Christian sects from flying at each other's throats as they have done more than once. The Roman Catholics, the Orthodox Greeks and Armenians are assigned certain portions of the floor space over which they may spread their rugs, hang their lamps and burn their candles, and to encroach upon for- bidden territory is a crime that calls for arrest. Jehoshaphat pointed to a nail in the wall. Some years ago the Latins put it there for the purpose of hanging a picture. The Greeks objected and a furious riot followed. The Turkish soldiers quelled the disturbance and set a sentry to watch the nail. To extract it would be to take sides with the Latins, and so it remains as a sad reminder of the bitterness of the rival sects, and the little foolish nail is watched as carefully now as are the transgressions upon the forbidden floor space. A short flight of steps leads to a grotto, the stable where Joseph and Mary stopped for want of room in the inn, and where the most memorable event in history occurred, unless the event of Calvary thirty-three years later be more important. Half a hundred quaint lamps of olive oil are burning dimly there. Under an altar a silver star laid in the pavement marks 116 Six and One Abroad JEHOSHAPHAT. Bethleliem and the Manger 117 the alleged exact spot whore the Savior was born, announced in these Latin words: "Hie de Virgine Maria Jesus Cliristns Natus est." The Latins own the star, while the Greeks control the place of the manger a few feet to one side. The manger itself, genuine or fraudulent, was removed hundreds of years ago to Rome and is preserved there to this day in a Catholic cathedral. The place where it lay is a niche in the rock lined with marble and is almost concealed by a profusion of lamps, tinseled trappings and wire grating. There is ver^' little room to doubt that this is the spot where Jesus was born, and that He lay in the very manger there. We know that the location of Bethlehem is the same today as then; we know that Jesus was born in a stable and that the stable was connected with a cave ; we know that there is but one cave in the village ; and so the chain of evidence is complete. In addition to this chain of physical circumstances, St. Jerome who officed in the grotto for thirty years in the fourth cen- tury, asserted positively that it was the birthplace of the Sav- ior. The tomb of Jerome is cut in the solid rock and the faithful old Christian has been asleep there for 1600 years. In the grotto adjoining the tomb of Jerome is shown the Chapel of the Innocents, where several thousand of the little ones are said to have been butchered by Herod (Matthew 2:16). Outside once again, it was a short walk to the crest of a hill on the outskirts of the village, whence we looked down upon the little plain where the shepherds are said to have received "the good tidings of great joy." And then to David's well. It will be remembered that Bethlehem was the home of David ; that it later fell into the hands of the Philistines, and that David craved a drink from it much as we today crave a drink out of the gourd from the old spring of our boyhood. These are his words : ' ' Oh, that one would give me a drink of the water of Bethlehem which is by the gate." The curio venders of Bethlehem waste enough energy to con- vert every goat path in Judea into a railroad. They sell every- thing that can be made out of chalky rock or mother of pearl, 118 Six and One Abroad and all but knock you down and force you to buy. One article they sell I am inclined to believe is a fraud. A hill near the cavern of the manger is said to have been permeated by milk from the overflowing breasts of Mary and thereby became sanc- tified. For centuries there has been a superstition among the women of the town that a fragment of this rock dissolved in milk or water will promote fertility and increase the flow of mother's milk. The sale of these tablets is one of the leading industries of the town. Most of the inhabitants of Bethlehem are believers in Christ — I will not say they are all Christians. There are less than one hundred Mohammedans, and Jews are not allowed to reside there — an unwritten law that the Jews do not dare to violate. The women are rather attractive ; they are cleanly, and what a delight it was to feast our eyes upon a native woman of the Holy Land who was not ashamed of her face, whose countenance and feet were clean, hair given some attention, and who wore clean and neat fltting clothes. The married women have a tow- ering headgear that is not unbecoming. Then, too, it is a cus- tom for the young ladies to wear their dowries on their fore- heads — their fortune, their separate property; those who do this are the aristocrats of Bethlehem, and well may they be envied, for the string of coins upon a feminine brow often amounts to as much as three dollars and six-bits. Bethlehem is clean — not exactly as clean as a horse lot, but cleaner than a livery stable, and that is more than can be said of any other town I have seen in the Orient so far. And there is not an unsavory odor in the town. It is pleasing to know that the Home of David, the place where the romance of Ruth was enacted and the motherlj^ Rachel lies sleeping and Jesus was born, is in the hands of the most intelligent and industrious little colony of people in Palestine. CHAPTER XIV. Inside the Walls of Jerusalem. There is no sleeping after five o'clock in the morning in Je- rusalem, for at that early hour an epidemic of prematnre mel- ody breaks out in a dozen or maybe a score of places, and no- where else, unless it be in Rome, is there such another jangling nuisance of pounding bells. Thus awakened on the first morn- ing, I arose and ascended the lofty tower of the Notre Dame, where the loudest of the bells had been ringing, and looked down upon the city and vicinity outspread in beautiful pano- rama of limestone and landscape. Inside the walls the scene was a jumbled confusion of houses that were box-like concerns with flat roofs and parapets, evi- dently the summer sleeping places of the inhabitants, and each of them having somewhere on its top a dome resembling an inverted washbowl. No streets were visible, but I imagined the shadowy rifts running irregularly between the buildings indicated these. Every foot of available space was occupied by some structure of stone, there being no such a remarkable condition as a vacant lot or a piece of ground upon which to hang the least prospect of a real estate boom. An idea of the crowded condition inside the walls may be gathered from the statement that there are 40,000 people who live and do business in a little compressed area half a mile square, and that there are a large number of chapels, mosques and churches besides. The houses have two stories as a rule, in addition to the fresh air roof garden arrangement on top. The first floor is occupied as a shop, the other for family living purposes, and the entii'e structure is rarely more than fifteen feet high. The city outside the walls, quite as populous as the one in- side, had more space to air itself, the buildings were more com- modious — some of them even modern — and the streets were of generous width for an eastern town. Blount Zion and Aloriah Avere surrounded, except on the north, by deep and precipitous valleys, and a depression through the midst of the walled city 120 Six and One Ahroad separated these two eminences. Directly east across the Valley of Jehoshaphat, through which the brook Kedron runs when it rains, majestically rose the Mount of Olives, the largest of the mountain neighborhood. The general view in every direction was one of rugged moun- tains and ravines, a wilderness of rock, and in all the wide expanse of hills and valleys there was not a solitary tree to soften the hard outlines except a few olives here and there that were preserved perhaps in memory of some sacred event. Our company, excepting the priests who sight-saw by them- selves, went into consultation with Jehoshaphat and planned a tour of visitation ; and when we issued in a body from the door of the Notre Dame a hundred or more fakirs, representing every phase of Jerusalem mendicancy and trade, flew at us with appeals. Gnarled and twisted beggars held out gallon tin cans which they rattled with noisy importunity, and shop- keepers jerked our sleeves and insisted on showing us into their places of business. In the doors of these shops the goods were displayed in the most tempting manner. There was no monopoly in Jerusalem curios ; competition was not only active, it was rampant and riotous. Damascus shawls glittered in tinsel from racks, Turkish artillery bristled from tables, olive- wood camels sat complacently in full view and begged for a change of ownership, and all along the line Syrians were leap- ing up out of the squalling crowd and beckoning us to visit them. Jehoshaphat, filling as he did the dual role as our guide and as agent for every curio concern in the city, insisted that we visit the shops "just to see the many beautiful things." But we rebelled with such vigor that he led us without further parleying through the mob and into the gate of the wall. The streets inside the walls were only a few feet wide, in- differently paved with rocks, and closely crowded on both sides by low houses that were occupied for any purpose from a stuffy joint to a church. Following the inexorable course of these channels whithersoever they led, we came presently to a rather abrupt dip in the topography and descended by a narrow and devious passageway more like the steps of a mysterious hall than a street till we emerged in an open court where gangs Inside the Walls of Jerusalem 121 of folks in strange dress sat in the midst of beads and trinkets that were offered for sale. The beads, which predominated over other stntf, were of a bine color and possessed the virtne of keeping off the "evil eye," a sorcery of the spirits which is dreaded in the East. They are worn npon the arms and ankles, and even the horses, donkeys and camels are protected by them from bewitchery when worn npon their heads or necks. We were at the entrance of the Church of the Holy Sepul- chre. In a niche to the left of the door of this noted clmrch, inside, a company of Turks were playing at a game, callously indifferent to the throngs that came and went. Their duty was to interfere in ease of a quarrel or a fight between the rival fanatics, and the fact that numerous riots have occurred there and that the sects still entertain exceeding bitterness toward each other makes their constant presence a necessity and not a mere formality. In front of us under lamps and aboriginal gewgaws was the Stone of Unction, which we were informed by Jehoshaphat Avas the identical stone upon which Christ was laid after his crucifixion. A Russian Pilgrim was at that mo- ment kneeling before it with his hands uplifted and a look of passionate devotion upon his face. How reverently he kissed the slab ; how tenderly he pressed his lips against it ; how his shock of unkempt yellow hair fell upon it and trembled with the fervency of the adoration ! While we watched curiously, this pathetic fellow drew from his long, heavy cloak a bunch of beads and rubbed them upon the stone, and likewise a number of handkerchiefs, to sanctify them and absorb the virtue of the holy thing that he might use them in his far-off home to heal his loved ones in case of sickness. And then he drew away regretfully to seek another object on which to spend his high-wrought veneration; and others came, and still they kept coming, crowds of ignorant, superstitious pilgrims and natives to go through the same pious routine. The rock is a fraud. About once every hundred years it wears away and is replaced ; but the new one is kissed and venerated with undiminished fervor. A few paces to the right up a slope of the floor in a dark 122 Six and One Abroad Inside the Walls of Jerusalem, 123 apartment is the reputed place of the crucihxion. For aught we know it may be the real Calvary. Over this sacred ground lamps are burning and there are altars, one dedicated to Je- sus, another to ^lary. In the hilltop through the open floor are revealed three holes encased in silver wherein stood ( ?) 1900 years ago the crosses of Christ and the thieves. In the rock, which is part of the hill, exposed to view through an opening and protected by iron grating, is a fissure alleged to have been made by an earthquake following the crucifixion ; and through this crevice our guide, who believes all things, informed us the blood of Christ ran from his pierced side upon the head of Adam who was buried directly underneath, in that way becoming effective ex post facto upon Adam's sins. A room cut from the rock in the side of this alleged Calvary is pointed out as the place whence, as a sort of headquarters, the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, in the fourth cen- tury prosecuted her search for the three cro-^ses. The crosses were found, in a cave in the side of the hill ; and it is said of this pious woman, all of which is implicitly believed by the simple people who worship there, that in order to determine which of the three crosses was the one upon which Christ was crucified, she had a woman who was incurably ill placed upon tliem ; that the invalid was thrown into convulsions on two of the crosses, but that the third restored her to perfect health. A portion of the column to which Jesus was bound during the scourging is preserved in a niche under a lattice screen. The devout pilgrims, unable to kiss this object, do the next best thing— push a stick, which is kept for the purpose, against the column and communicate their caresses through that me- dium. The footprints of Jesus are shown in the rock, and the stocks in which his feet were placed. There are all kinds of chapels, altars and contraptions erected over the supposed localities where the various events incident to the crucifixion occurred. There are: The Chapel of Part- ing the Raiment, of the Invention of the Cross where the crosses were found, of the Crowning with Thorns, of the Derision, of the Raising of the Cross, of the Agony, of the Nailing to the Cross, of the Apparition where Christ appeared to Mary after 124 Six and One Abroad the resurrection, and last and most important, the Holy Sep- ulchre. The Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, the main feature of the church, stands upon an elevated platform to which there is a small ante-room called the Chapel of the Angel. Here we waited half an hour for a chance to enter, and when we finally managed to crowd in, bending almost to our knees at the door, we were conscious of other feelings than those of idle curiosity, for there are good grounds for believing it to be the place where Jesus' body was actually laid, and where, too, it became the first fruit of the resurrection. Fifteeen lamps were burning in this little place and it was hot to the perspiration point. In the center, protected by a glass case from vandalism and kisses, the stone was shown which the angels rolled away from the tomb. Even the glass case over this stone showed the wasting effect of superstitious affection; indeed it is entirely worn away in time by the constant contact with lips of the ultra-devout and has to be frequently replaced. Stooping low and per- spiring freely, we peered into the room of the sepulchre where a priest was sprinkling holy water on the heads of Russian pilg^rims who were reverently, passionately, lingeringly kissing the spot where the Savior lay. After the Russians had retired with sorrow like that of a mother taking last leave of a child at the grave, we entered. There was room for only four or five persons. The neverwfailing lamps were burning, forty- three in all, thirteen belonging each to the Latins, Greeks and Armenians, and four to the Copts. The tomb, which is two feet high, three feet wide and six feet, four inches long, was cut in the rock, and was veneered with marble to protect it from vandalism and the disintegrating effect of kisses. Apertures in the ceiling of the chapel allowed the smoke of the lamps to escape, but the heat was intense. In the side of the chapel we saw the holes through which the holy fire was given out on Greek Easter. The tombs of Nicodemus and of Joseph of Aramathea are near the Holy Sepulchre, and the two marble circles indicate where Mary and Jesus stood on the morning of the Resurrec- tion. In a large room;, unoccupied for any other purpose, a Inside the Walls of Jerusalem 125 rounded stone marks the exact center of the world, for it is part of the orthodoxy of Jerusalem that the world is flat, and it is the prevailing belief that imaginary lines drawn diagonal- ly across this old globe from its four corners cross at this rock. I have not yet mentioned the Chapel of Longinus — the Roman soldier who thrust his spear into Jesus' side, and who, after repenting of the deed, earned a place in this Westminster Ab- bey of superstition — nor the Chapel of Adam whose bones the resourceful church officials have comprehended in the limits of this comprehensive sanctuary, nor the tomb of Melchisedec, nor scores of other chapels and sacred sites, enumeration and description of which would fill a volume. But there are two objects in the Church about which there is no doubt — only these two — the tombs respectively of Godfrey de Bouillon and Bald- win I, noble misguided crusaders who led a foolish fanaticism that is bearing fruit to this day. In a chapel adjacent we were allowed to look upon the sword and spurs of Godfrey. Upon leaving the Church we proceeded along the route of the Via Dolorosa, a narrow, crooked way leading to Calvary through a part of the business section from the place where the condemnation of Christ occured. There are fourteen stations along the route marked in Latin: "Station I," "Station II," and so on, each of the fourteen representing some fiction of the procession to the cross, or some real incident such as the transfer of the cross to the back of Simon the Cyrene, etc. At this latter station, which is No. VI, if I remember correctly, there is a depression in the wall, now worn to quite a cavity by the kisses of the faithful, which it is claimed was made by Jesus' hand as he fell under the weight of the cross. Why should the way from the Roman Governor's palace to Calvary be regarded as a Via Dolorosa? Why should Chris- tians weep at the tomb' of the Savior ? Why should they sorrow upon observing these historic sites or in mental recapitulation of the incidents of the arrest, trial, condemnation, the flagel- lation, mockery, the journey, the jeers, the cross? It must have been real pleasure for Jesus to suffer the attempted scheme of his humiliation. It did not humiliate him to spit in his face, nor to press a crown of thorns on his brow. He 126 Six and One Abroad LEPERS, JERUSALEM. Inside the Walls of Jcnisalon 127 did not mind the beating, and the burden of cross-bearing was even sweet when he knew it was part of a divine plan. The death on Ihc cress was not hard. John Jacob Astor went to his death on the Titanic with a smile on his lips in order that his wife rnd unborn child and other ladies of the ship might live, and many a man and many a woman has suffered worse tortures and a more grievous death than Jesus and did it, too, heroically, sublimely, even joyfully. It is nothing to die. The most hardened desperado can die. Suffering is worse than death, and yet it is little to suffer, for many a woman suffers agonies of body and spirit vastly greater than those to which Jesus was subjected. And I have no sympathy with those pictures that represent my Savior with sad and dejected and hopeless, abject and pitiful expression, for I know he with- stood the taunts and whips with courageous mien and de- meanor and that there was an air of triumphant assurance in his conduct. The way to the Cross then was a way of triumph; a great plan was in labor and a great purpose was bom on Calvary. Tell me that Jesus minded the little insigniticant incident of death ! It must be about 300 yards from Calvary by the Via Dolorosa to the House of Pilate, and after traversing this gloomy, dol- orous, devious way, part of the time in dank and dark and rancid, covered, streets — for some of the streets of Jerusalem are covered — it Avas a relief to find in the House of Pilate something that appealed to our credulity as being genuine. Under the floor of a convent which stands at this place, sev- eral feet below the surface of the street, we could see a frag- ment of an ancient pavement; and if this be in fact Pilate's palace, there can be no doubt that the pavement is the Gabat- tha of John 19:13. The chequered rocks upon which the soldiers played their games of dice are visible yet. Connecting with this old palace by the Ecce Homo Arch is the Castle of Antonia, where Paul adroitly pleaded his Roman citizenship to escape a whipping (Acts 21:37), and which is occupied as a garrison now as it was then. At this point we secured the attendance of a Turk guard — an absolute requirement — and stepped inside the Temple Area, 128 Six and One Abroad a rare and welcome experience after being crowded and jammed in stuffy channels and rooms that differed little from catacombs. This noted holy place seemed like a convent cam- pus, with its two imposing buildings and its extravagance of grass and open and unoccupied space — just space — and its merciless circuit of walls ; walls within walls ; a kind of holy of holies. I almost shouted with delight at the sight of this little park of thirteen acres in the midst of crowded Jerusa- lem ; and the green grass was so clean, so pure and inviting, so very different from the poor dirty, ignorant, superstitious folks who controlled it, so suggestive, by its universality, of home, so hospitable-like its wide-spread carpet of welcome. There was no exclusive sanctity in this — God's carpet — and no special shoes were required to insulate alien feet. Jehoshaphat began at once a peripatetic lecture on the his- tory of Herod's and Solomon's temples, which we abruptly terminated — we could get all the history we wanted in books —and made our way toward the great central and commanding feature, the Mosque of Omar. The old temple in which Christians are most interested was destroyed long ago, and not one stone was left upon another — a literal fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy; a part of the original pavement of the court doubtless remains, and a fragment of the wall that enclosed it — only these and nothing more. The Mosque of Omar was erected in 691, as a Mohammedan fane, and has remained such ever since, except for a few spas- modic epochs when crusaders were in possession of the city. It is a marble structure in the form of an octagon, each of the eight sides being sixty-six feet wide, and hovering over it a monstrous dome that is crowned with a gilded crescent. This is regarded by many travelers who are capable judges as the most beautiful structure in the world. I think the esti- mate the wildest kind of an exaggeration. Certainly there can be nothing specially charming in the exterior except in com- parison with other architecture of degenerate Jerusalem. Donning the inevitable snowshoes, we passed through the in- evitable door curtains into a circular room that was more re- markable for what it contained than for its beauty. Squarely Inside the Walls of Jerusalem 129 under the dome was a roelc, unhewn and irre