' Ari .mm YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Behind the Ranges "Something hidden; go and find it; Go and look behind the ranges ..." Behind the Ranges Parentheses of Travel by F. G. Aflalo London Martin Seeker Number Five John Street Adelphi First published in 1911 "Non mm uni angulo natus; patria mea totm hie est mundus." Preface THERE is a discrepancy between the contents of this volume and the pro mise of its title, which may seem to lay me open to the charge of inveigling the reader under false pretences, so 1 hasten to admit that such commonplace travel as has fallen to my lot during the past twenty years is obviously foreign to what Rudyard Kipling had in mind when he wrote what for me is the most inspiring couplet in all his verse. It is in the spirit, rather than in the letter, that I have obeyed that ringing sum mons, and my tourist trails over five continents must seem hackneyed ground indeed to those who take their travel seriously. When Arthur Young distinguished two modes of writing travels — to register the journey itself, or to comment on its results — he may have over looked other methods of treatment, but at least he drew the straight line between the often dull veracity of the diary and the more picturesque inaccuracy of retrospect with no such check on its imagery. It is the happy fashion of reminis- Behind the Ranges cence to record, like the sundial, only the serene hours, rarely " dallying in maudlin regret over the past " ; and this unclouded optimism of retrospect often prejudices cooler judgment and bathes other scenes and other cliraates in rose tints brighter than the reality. Though sharing the opinion of Coryat, that " of all the pleasures in the world, travell is the sweetest and most delightfull," I have kept before myself and the reader its drawbacks as well as its delights, its duststorms as well as its sunsets, its mosquitoes as well as its butterflies, its illusions as well as the joy of it. For the eternal ego in these pages apology is freely offered ; and indeed, if I, who have had to put up with more than forty years of my own company in every corner of the globe, the one fragment of home from which there was no getting away, cannot sympathise profoundly with those who find far too much of me in these chapters, who should ? Yet it would have been difficult in any other fashion to have recalled a hundred thousand miles of travel with the same companion, and I can only ask the charity of those who find in these reminiscences more of my company than they bargained for. Preface Although the book has been entirely rewritten, portions of some of the essays have appeared in other form. Thus "Rivers Running to their Goal " is based on an article which first appeared in the Quarterly Review, and fragments of some others appeared in The Field, Chambers's Journal, The Outlook, and Travel and Eocploration. I am sincerely grateful to the editors and publishers for their kind permission to make use of the material. As regards the photographs, I could find but one in my own collection which suited the purpose of the book. For most of those reproduced I am indebted to Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond, who, with great kindness, searched among her unique col lection of beautiful negatives for the subjects needed; for one I have to thank Colonel Gorgas, the medical officer in charge of the mosquito-reduction operations in the Isthmus of Panama ; for another I am under obligation to Mr. Wallis, of Bishop's Teignton, and for the remaining one to Mr. H. S. Tuke, A.R.A., and the Autotype Company. F. G. A. Teignmouth, Midsummer, I9II. Contents PAGE PREFACE 9 1. TRAVEL AS AN EDUCATION 17 2. THE REFORM OF THE TOURIST 41 3. A GRUMBLER IN THE TRAIN 66 4. THE VOYAGE 77 6. CAKES AND ALE 111 6. THE HIGH PLACES 127 7. THE VOICE OF THE MOSQUITO 143 8. THE FISHERMAN'S MERCATOR 165 9. NATIVE SERVANTS IN MANY LANDS 179 10. THE MORNING BATHE 205 11. RIVERS RUNNING TO THEIR GOAL 221 12. SUNSHINE AND SHADOW OF TRAVEL 261 ENVOI 281 List of Illustrations " Something hidden ; go and find it ; Go AND look behind the ranges . . . " Frontispiece To face ^a£e "Throned on her hundred isles" 17 " Like brute beasts that have no understanding " 41 "Going by railroad i do not consider as travelling at all" 65 " I will go back to the great sweet mother, mother and lover of men, the sea" 77 "A tavola ronda non si contende" 111 " Ueher alien Oipfeln Ist Ruh" 127 " Sicut in stogno generantur vermes" 143 "Angling is somewhat like poetry ; men are to be born so '' 166 "The Garden op Allah" 179 "Del agua mansa me guarde Dios" 206 "In the innocence op its heart" 221 "Good horses make short miles" 231 " Sleep after toyle, port after stormib seas. Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please " 281 s Travel as an Education THE death of Sir Charles Dilke in January set me thinking of the lasting gain to him and to his country of that early tour of the world, which resulted not only in two books of first importance, but also in that breadth of view on questions of native treatment and overseas defence which so often lent rare distinction to debates in the House of Commons. It took my thoughts back also to a long interview that I had with him in Sloane Street twelve years earlier, when, referring generally to Mediterranean questions, and more particularly to the affairs of Morocco, to which I was just then going on a prolonged tour, he astonished me, even though I had been prepared for surprises, by his encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. Too few members of our present House of Commons travel widely by way of preparation for the public life. There is a greater proportion of travellers in the other Chamber, but I refrain from praising them for fear of giving offence to those severe folk who still apparently regard the bulk of our B 17 Behind the Ranges representative peers as conforming to the same standards of education and intelligence as in the reign of Edward VI, when an Act of Parliament allowed " benefit of clergy " for a first offence to such peers as could not read I The Grand Tour is no longer regarded, as in the days of Addison and Disraeh, as part and parcel of the education of every young man of birth and position. There are, indeed, many Englishmen who uphold the verdict of Sancho Panza that men might, instead of travelling, leam as much by staying dry shod at home. In a n easure, no doubt, this is true, but only in so far as it indicates that attentive men would learn more at home than careless observers on their travels. In other words, a wise man would find more wisdom in the Thousand and Orte Nights than a fool would see in Ecclesiastes. Yet there is much to be said for the Grand Tour as it was performed in those days. Its vogue became general about a century and a half ago, at a period of which Lecky tells us,* quoting a con temporary writer of 1772 : — Where one Englishman travelled in the reigns of the first two Georges, ten now go on a Grand Tour. Indeed, to such a pitch is the spirit of travelling come in the king dom, that there is scarce a citizen of large fortune but takes a flying view of France, Italy, and Germany in a summer's excursion. 1 8 ' England in the Eighteenth Century. Travel as an Education To this may be added the testimony of Gibbon, who was told, though he found it difficult to believe, that during the summer of 1783 upwards of forty thousand English people (servants in cluded) were travelling on the Continent. The foregoing quotation strikes a note of dis paragement, but many leading statesmen and writers of the day did not disdain the advantages of a tour abroad, and among the illustrious names which occur in this connection are those of Addi son, Horace Walpole, Gray, Macaulay, and Dis raeli. The effect of such an experience varies, as might be expected, with the man. Of Gray, Mr. Edmund Gosse writes : " The happy frivolities of France and Italy . . . made him bright and human." Addison, at the age of twenty-seven, obtained, mainly through the influence of Monta gue, a Crown pension of £300 to enlarge his experience by Continental travel in France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Holland. In his Remarks on Italy, always in those days the supreme objec tive of the Grand Tour, he praises that country, not only for its music and painting, but also for the opportunities which it then offered for the study of various forms of government. Not for another hundred and fifty years was the Italian nation to unite with its cry of ' Vogliamo I' Italia una I ' It is commonly alleged, as one of its 19 Behind the Ranges drawbacks, that foreign travel lessens a man's sympathy with his own land ; but can anyone famiUar with Sir Roger de Coverley admit for one moment that Addison's experiences abroad affected his pride in England? Walpole, at the age of twenty-two, made an extended tour through Paris, Reims, Geneva, Turin, Genoa, Florence, Rome, and Venice ; then, returning by sea from Genoa to France, he travelled overland by way of Orleans. Macaulay, who had pre viously spent three official years in India, made, in the thirty-eighth year of his life, an enjoyable tour in Italy. Disraeli has left an account of his travels in letters to his father and sister, and these are full of shrewd observations on men and lands, with many passages of florid description of scenery, of which perhaps the most characteristic is that of the Bosphorus : — Conceive the ocean not broader than the Thames at Gravesend, with shores with all the variety and beauty of the Rhine, covered with palaces, mosques, villages, groves of cypress and woods of Spanish chestnuts ; the view of the Euxine at the end is the most sublime thing I can re member. Reference has been made to the allegation that travel puts a man out of conceit with his own homeland. Before considering some ofthe benefits, it may be as well to examine how much of truth 20 Travel as an Education there is in this view, the classical expression of which is, of course, that in .^,y You Like It : — Farewell, Monsieur Traveller; look you lisp and wear strange suits, disable all the benefits of your own country, be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are. This fear, that the sympathies might be weaned from home, moved the great Lord of Burleigh to refuse all permit for foreign travel unless the applicant could first satisfy the Council that he knew sufficient of his own country. As a matter of fact, it is based on complete misconception of the truth, and those who share it are, for the most part, stay-at-home folk who can breathe only in the narrow atmosphere which surrounds the parish pump. If travel does anything, it engenders a closer affection for the motherland. Sydney Smith wrote to Lady Holland, when urging her to return home : — I have heard five hundred travelled people assert that there is no such agreeable house in Europe as Holland House. George Turberville, Secretary to the Embassy to the Tsar in 1568, wrote home to his friends : — Live still at home and covet not These barbarous coasts to see. It would be easy, but could serve no useful purpose, to multiply quotations almost indefinitely 21 Behind the Ranges in proof of the fact that travel, whether a master passion or a casual habit, makes the average Eng lishman more appreciative of his own home. The humble cottage and stately mansion may at times seem dull to those whose eyes know no other scenes, and we even see the word " homely " used (in the old country, though never in Canada, where it has far too sacred a meaning) to denote that which is plain and commonplace. Yet it is the burning days on camel-back beneath the palms, or the freezing tramps in snow-boots amid the pines, which bring the conviction of all that English country life is worth to those who have lost it. True, the appetite for travel is apt to grow with what it feeds on. Those only should indulge it who do not thereby shirk their obligations at home. It may breed discontent of a fixed residence. He who travels much acquires unrest as second nature. Rasf ich, so rosf ich ! is his motto, and he finds rest only when on the raove. This, no doubt, pushed to extremes, is an undesirable frame of mind, yet it contrasts not disagreeably with the opposite exaggeration of restfulness in some folks who seem to envy the snail that carries its house on its back and who, with the means and leisure to see the great world, are content to spend aU their hfe in the village until they make their one short journey to the churchyard. 22 Travel as an Education An appreciation of scenery is perhaps the great est boon of travel, and with it goes the fuller reading of the atlas. For the eye that cannot see, there is little meaning in a map, even though it embody all the skill of the cartographer and all the latest results of survey work with theodolite and chronometer. Very little has to do duty for much that is of necessity left to the imagination. Its symbols are so crowded that the fuller under standing is possible only to them that read between the lines. To the stay-at-home the map is a flat blank, but to the traveller it is as a page out of his diaries. The inch of caterpillar which stands for a mountain range recalls breathless climbs and glorious views. The worm-like symbol of a river brings back the flash of trout and the paddling of canoes. The little loop showing the site of some great city is vibrant with the roar of traffic or with the hum of bazaars. That is how a map should be read, but how it rarely is. Blessed are they with whom the worship of scenery is a creed. Those for whom the old gods live again will not find them wreathed in the smoke of cities, but must seek them in the woods and mountains and by the river, dancing to the pipes of Pan far from civilisation. So only may they chance on gentle Daphne hiding in the laurels, or boastful Arachne toiling at her web. For them, 23 Behind the Ranges the sickle moon, hurrying across the midnight sky, is still Diana's chariot ; for them, the tide rushing up some narrow estuary is still the impetuous Neptune hot on the trail of the nymph. Those who have in their soul the worship of tremendous things in nature are a brotherhood apart, yet they should feel no conceit of themselves, but rather give thanks for their faculties. There are thousands in whom scenery evokes no response. They would face the turmoil of Niagara with a shrug and only wonder why it never ceases. Others, only a little less callous, give the same faint praise of ill-chosen superlatives to the beauties of nature as they would to the works of art. To them there is no difference between the Canyon of Arizona and the Venus of the Capitol, the Madonna of del Sarto, or an oratorio by Handel. They confuse the miracles of nature with the achievement of the artist, forgetting that, while it was man who carved the Taj Mahal, it was God who painted sunrise on the Himalaya. He who worships scenery has joys that the blind, even though they have eyes that see, can never know. He can sit entranced before Niagara, his ears filled with the music of its voice, his eyes dazzled by the iridescence of its spray, and the mad ding crowd seems very far, for to those who have been face to face with Nature the affairs of man are 24 Travel as an Education but a trouble of ants. I remember coming from a solitary camp on the shores of Huron, where a single Redskin had been my companion night and day, to Montreal in all the pomp and circum stance of its Eucharistic Congress. The "Rome of the West" was all agog over the speeches of Cardinal Vanutelli and Father Bernard Vaughan. Father Vaughan was angry with someone — no unusual mood with him — and the city took him very seriously. Yet to me, fresh from the silent witchery of the Great Lakes, and the peaceful company of my morose Algonquin, his purple anger seemed very trivial. In those wild scenes it seemed to me that I had come a little closer to the eternal mystery of the Creation than was possible in that press of jewelled prelates. There is, in all scenery, nothing more baffling, more lovable, more human than a river. Sitting beside the dreamy Nile, or creeping Mississippi, or sacred Jordan, or tumultuous Rhone, a man may realise the beauty of those old legends of the river-gods, of Achelous and Scamander, swift to avenge themselves on all and sundry who insulted their divinity. How appalling is the majesty of the mountains, how soothing the mystery of the lake ! Worship of scenery, as taught by travel, is always informed with sense of the passing seasons. Only in the 25 Behind the Ranges equatorial jungle does the pageant of the year leave no glaring trail. The same birds seem to sing, the same flowers to bloom, in January as in June, and it would take one born in the land to tell the month at a glance. Elsewhere Nature holds two services for her worshippers. The vast Canadian prairie is at one season a waving sea and at another a frozen ocean. The quiet EngUsh woodlands are one day shaded by leafy trees and fuU of the music of traveUed birds ; on another, the exotic music is gone south, the boughs are leafless, the pale winter sun comes through a lattice on the frozen outworks of the rabbit and the fox. Nor will those who keenly realise the personaUty of scenery miss the influence of weather. How different is the river smiling under cloudless skies or frowning back at the gathering storm ! The mountain-tops, last seen in the hngering touch of an August dawn, are hardly recognisable sil houetted against the winter greyness that teUs of more snow to come. The purple moor, warm in a June sunset, can scarcely be the same as that which stretched dour and uninviting in a driving blizzard. Mountain or moorland, lake, river or sea, all are adorable, and all meet some answering mood in those whom such things move. To the rest they bring no message. These would rather rest their eyes on a London square or Paris boulevard than 26 Travel as an Education on the Rhone Glacier or Yosemite Valley. They would rather hear the clamour of street organs than the carolling of wUd birds ; sooner smell the sickly perfume of hothouse blooms than the sweet scent of young violets. These have no soul for Nature, in which one often sees the infinitely great in the infinitesimaUy small. They find more wonder in a square of Mechlin lace than in a spider's web. A cathedral steeple fills them with more reverence than the majesty of the Matter horn. To those more blest, the magic of Nature is irresistible, and travel brings the fullest enjoy ment of its speU. It drew Livingstone to Darkest Africa. It caUed Peary to the frozen North. Other motives they had, no doubt, but love of the wild was the real magnet. Ice of the arctic or steam of the jungle ; Far Eastern aisles of giant teak echoing the melancholy dirge of the hooluck, or Canadian sanctuaries of spruce, with timid moose peeping from the slippery banks of salmon rivers — here, everywhere is the roofless temple in which vdlling worshippers may look through Nature up to Nature's God. The Englishman who would bend the knee to Nature needs not travel across the seas. In the Lake Country, in the valley of the Wye, on the Devonshire moors and Cornish cliffs, in the wild mountains of Scotland and amid the dreamy 27 Behind the Ranges peace of Broadland, he has variety enough to last a lifetime. Is there, anywhere else in all the world, scenery quite like that seen from the Cornish cliffs, home of the cormorant and puffin, with the blue threshold of the ocean in front and in the background lean pastures and deserted mines ? The tameness of our Channel coast begins west of Brighton and reaches unto Dorset. To Calais and Dieppe we show towering white cliffs. Then, after the pine-clad sandhUls of Hampshire and the sterner chalk round Lulworth Cove, come the red earth of Devon and the granite walls of Corn wall, which is to its western neighbour, on the south at any rate, as Snowdon to Primrose HiU. The handshake of wave and rock is staged in a grim setting. Foreshore there is not, save on the few sandy beaches, as much as would give refuge to a canoe, and the boundary between land and water is so abrupt that the guillemot guards her egg on beetling ledges from which she can drop sheer into deep water. The birds are part and parcel of the scenery : gulls screaming as the skuas rob them of their pilchards; shags drying their wings on the rocks ; choughs following the plough ; jackdaws hopping among the stunted campion on the cUffs. The summer seas are calm, yet not with the deathly calm of southern lati tudes. Few craft hug the land by day, for the 28 Travel as an Education boats hereabouts are engaged in fishing, and the harvest of the Cornish seas is gathered only after dark, so that the red-winged fleet creeps out of the Uttle harbour only when the sun is down behind the Manacles. Silence is the music of this Cornish scenery ; sadness its spirit. There is some thing in it that is essentially un-English. These unflinching seawalls recall rather some half- forgotten corner of Brittany. The fisher-folk are a race apart, and their home is a home of legend, a mystic land of giants and pixies, of saints and sinners, of fable and fancy dating back to the days of the Round Table and the age of a chivalry that is fled. It is difficult, even for those who love scenery, to realise its instabUity. Only within the limits of the earthquake zone is its permanence visibly contested. The casual eye sees finality in the mountains, in the valleys, in the plains. River and lake, being subject to the variation of flood and drought, are less suggestive of eternity. The actual truth is that the mightiest ranges, handi work of marine animals visible only under the microscope, have come into being since the first quadrupeds roamed the plains in search of food. Rivers change their courses, lakes dry up, conti nents are joined and sundered, seas overrun the land or recede to lay bare fresh areas for the use 29 Behind the Ranges of man. Scenery, then, is but a phase of the moment and has no endurance. This considera tion is of the first importance in its bearing on the so-called migration of faunas within the bounds of geological time. It is only when we begin to realise that not only the faunas migrated, but their whole environment with them, that we come nearer to the dimmest understanding of so tre mendous a subject as the ancient history of animals. The lessons taught by travel are many, but the success of its teaching depends, like that of most schools, on the pupU. There are so many kinds of travellers. Sterne enumerated eleven, and he might have doubled the number, including the intelligent, sympathetic, and observant. Those who follow Byron's advice and travel only for amusement will learn no more than Sterne's noblemen, who bought two chaises to go the Grand Tour and got no further than Paris. That the spirit of the Grand Tour is not yet dead may be gathered from the fashion of sending heirs- apparent to the thrones of Europe on their travels. King George unquestionably owes much of his ready grasp of Colonial problems to his tour of the Empire when he was Prince of Wales. The Crown Prince of Germany, following in his iUus- trious sire's footsteps, has acquired from his 30 Travel as an Education Asiatic travels much experience that will stand him in good stead when he sits on the throne of the HohenzoUern. For those in humbler walks of life the school of travel has so wide a curriculum that it is not easy to define its Umits. At any rate, it offers classes, elementary and advanced, in the virtues of self-help and coolness in emergency, of minding your own business, of tolerance and of observation. Travel is a wonderful sharpener of the wits. There are folks who, never moving out of their native shire, do not know enough to come in when it rains. They are like fowls trying to cross a road in front of traffic, hesitating, wavering, without resource. It is not so often a case of danger as of discomfort. I remember on one occasion finding myself stranded in the city of Washington for some days with six shillings in my pocket. This, at the outset of a well-planned trip of three months in the Western Hemisphere, was disconcerting, but such contretemps will occur on the best-regulated holidays. This one arose out of the refusal of an hotel clerk to cash my cheque, and the delay was occasioned by the fact that it was a Saturday, in consequence of which my banker at home could not get my cablegram until the Monday. Ten years earlier so awkward a situation would have depressed me. Indeed, I 31 Behind the Ranges recollect being dismayed, ten years earUer, when I found myself in Sydney and learnt for the first time the insolvency of a colonial publishing house in which I had a financial interest at the time. Thanks, however, to the teachings of the road, I spent a very pleasant time at Washington, living on the best that the New WiUard's Hotel could offer, and even visiting President Roosevelt at the White House, where, to his amusement, 1 told him of my plight. Nor were my troubles over with the receipt of my cablegram at home and the prompt despatch of funds to meet the situation. Apprised by telephone of the arrival of my money, within an hour or two of the departure of my train for CaroUna on the Monday evening, I went to the bank on Pennsylvania Avenue to claim it, and was there asked for proof of my identity before they would hand me the notes. Proof of my identity 1 Could anything look simpler and be more difficult ? In vain I showed them the inscription inside a presentation watch. In vain I produced visiting-cards, letters, a signet- ring, and such other evidence as lay to my hand. The head clerk was bland, but firm, evidently imbued with the conviction that I had murdered myself and appropriated my own personal belong ings. Then I did the best thing of aU. I lost my temper, and vowed that, as the President was the 32 Travel as an Education only man in aU Washington who knew me, I should, ignoring the fact that it was close on his dinner hour, go right back to the White House and lay before him the obtuseness of the bank clerk. For some reason or other, this had the desired effect, and, after signing all manner of receipts and discharges, I was graciously allowed to take my own money in twenty-dollar bills. Another case of emergency, also in America, which comes back to my mind, is one in which I claim less credit for my sangfroid, since the trouble was none of mine, so that my bravery was rather Uke the coolness with which a crowd watches firemen risk their Uves in a burning building. A lady, who happened to be travelling in the same car on a small line out west, was in terrible trouble, having suddenly seen, when changing trains, that the trunk containing her jewellery had burst open, being held only by a knot of box-rope. With a forethought not unusual in her sex, she had, at the last moment, slipped her valuables into the tray, "so as to have them handy." They certainly were handy — of that there could be no doubt. With a resolute perversion of the truth, for which I have since admired myself, I set about comforting her, vowing that cases of pilferage on American baggage-cars were practically unheard of. The baggage-men, I vowed, might be rough, c 33 Behind the Ranges but were invariably honest. (May God and the baggage-men forgive me !) She dried her tears. She even smiled. She was one of those women whose smile is like a psalm. As the train drew near our common destination, I trembled for the result. If I were to prove a false prophet, I had better have gone further. For once, however, the Fates were kind. A hurried dash was made for the trunk the moment it was out of the train, and there, in the very middle of the tray, in company with I should blush to say what dainty articles of feminine apparel, lay the three Uttle Morocco cases that had caused so much misgiving. Tears of relief fell on their unresponsive leather, and I distracted the attention of the unconsciously virtuous baggage-man with a cigar. After which, as our acquaintance was not to end for an hour or two, I administered mild rebuke by quoting as much as I remembered of the sterling advice given by old Misson, nearly two hundred years ago, that "a TraveUer ought never to make a discovery of his Jewels or Money, for almost aU the Robberies and Murders that are committed on Passengers are occasioned by their Imprudence in betraying themselves." She took it in good part, and I sincerely trust that, wherever she may be with that pretty smile of hers, she has since acted on it. 34 Travel as an Education Some traveUers seem to have been born under a lucky star. Their very helplessness appears at times to be their best ally. A master of Win chester, whom, having last seen him at tea at the Bishop's Schools at Jerusalem, I met again a week later on the shores of Galilee, had, in the interval, a ludicrous experience, from which he emerged more comfortably than might have been expected. At our first meeting we had discussed the policy of carrying firearms when riding without escort across country, and I had advocated an automatic pistol of the kind that I always carried myself and that has since become notorious in connection with the murder of policemen in the East End. He declared, however, that these gentlemen of the road existed only in the heated imagination of American tourists, and that since, moreover, such weapons were quite out of his line, he would be quite as Ukely to shoot himself by accident as anyone else by design. Although he took only an aged muleteer with him on his ride to Tiberias, he preferred to go unarmed. As a matter of fact, he was, on the last afternoon of the outward journey, just turning over our conversation in his mind and smiUng over my warlike counsel, when, at a sudden bend in the road, the unexpected happened, for he found himself confronted by one of the Bedawin armed to the teeth and demanding baksheesh. As 35 Behind the Ranges the Duval of the desert had reined his mare across the road, the Englishman also came to a standstill. Then, impressed by the absurdity of a highwayman in modern times, he burst out laughing. Peal after peal he sent into the face of the astonished Gentleman of the Road until his laughter must have verged on hysteria. It was at any rate violent enough to terrify the robber, who, taking him for a madman, no doubt, wheeled about, clapped his spurs into his horse, and vanished in a whirlwind of dust. It was a very lucky escape, but not one to reckon on. The lesson of minding his own business is one which the traveUer is likely to learn far more effect uaUy than the stay-at-home, whose narrower outlook is in great measure filled with the curious pleasure of raking in his neighbour's dustheap. It is a lesson, by the way, which ninety-nine per cent of every civilised population go to the grave with out learning at all. Seeing how hard Ufe is become in these days of strenuous competition, the atten tion which people of both sexes (and particularly of one) find time to lavish on the affairs of the folks next door is nothing short of amazing. What with clergymen, lawyers, doctors, editors, tax- collectors, and undertakers, all meddUng by right of their professions, making it, in fact, the business of their life, there can surely be no need of a million 36 Travel as an Education lay-helpers. Unpaid busybodies are the curse of provincial life and of life on board ship, which is the most restricted phase of travel. It is a pity that some shipping line cannot have the courage to hang a notice in the companion somewhat to this effect : — KNOW THYSELF! MEN HAVE MADE FORTUNES BY MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS! Such an official reminder might have a wonderful effect on the social relations during the voyage. Yet the sea-traveUer is in this respect the worst offender of his class. Asa general rule, those who travel much are so constantly on the move, so frequently changing their neighbours, as to feel no impertinent interest in their affairs. The admir able habit of minding his own business, thus ac quired by the traveller on the road, remains with him even after his last tramp. A broad tolerance is another lesson taught by travel, for intolerance flourishes most luxuriantly round the village green, and travel is the surest corrective of the uncharitableness bred of in sularity. Those who, with Shakespeare, think ill of travel as hostile to patriotism easily fall into 37 Behind the Ranges the common error of hastily assuming that toler ance of foreign customs and manners necessarily implies disgust with those of the traveller's own land. Nothing could well be wider of the truth. An English epicure may be tolerant of French wines and friendly to German dishes without abating one jot of his preference for home brew and roast beef. He may admire the Rhine, yet prefer the Thames. He may see gaiety in the Champs Elysees, yet find something more admir able in the prospect of Hyde Park. What is so ludicrous to those of cosmopoUtan experience is the fatuous patriotism of men who, never having crossed the Straits of Dover, vow that the scenery, architecture, art and institutions generally of their own island have not their equal in aU the world. If, having seen the best that other countries have to show him, the Englishman should still prefer everything English, as with reason he may, then his opinion will at least have stood the test of actual comparison. He will not at any rate speak with ill-concealed contempt of " Dagos " and " Dutchmen," nor will the natives of Hindustan be alluded to as •' niggers." Perhaps, however, it is the faculty of observa tion that is most actively developed by travel. Every day brings fresh illustration of that favour ite story of our childhood, " Eyes and No Eyes." 38 Travel as an Education The comfort, and even safety, of him who goes up and down the long trail must so often depend on his keeping his eyes open for what he wants, either in cities, where he cannot, with his ignorance of strange languages, ask for it, or in solitudes, where there are none to ask, that he unconsciously acquires a wideawakeness taught in no other school. There are other lessons of travel. There is the inducement to win familiarity with foreign tongues, or at least to develop a resourcefulness which can in emergency dispense with such polyglot attain ments. There is the useful art of reading men, looking beneath the surface, which, like the title- page of a book, sometimes does more, sometimes less, than justice to that which lies within. But enough ! This self-reliance, this philosophy under rebuff, this cheery optimism, this gift of looking forward rather than backward, this allow ance for the foibles of others, this realisation, in short, of a greater brotherhood of man than that demarcated by the different colours on the poUtical maps in the atlas — is not the sum of these perhaps what a man may hope to find Behind the Ranges ? If so, it is well worth the seeking. 39 m ^^ j^K^r--" ¦ .,"Jkzf r i« j. fl ^j|9[ ^SIS^^^^R^h^^sS^^^^Ih fe^.g ..jk' a ^y^^^ ^_^^M i|;;- '"^WmS^ ^^kidl r^^l ¦^'i'-tsr /# '"^''!W ^ :§;.: ¦'^^^M ^m ^^mm^ 1*" - LLU -- ifv "¦ i '^^jSIQ ^^m^ i^Htf)^«« "¦¦^ ' -¦>% ,, ¦,¦;: BH^^^je^Afglf ' <¦ r--. ' 2^1iS I^^HK^^^^^I ^^SjE/BU ^^^ ¦ '¦': -~J» ©^ ..¦^..-:t' • " ¦;¦• ;V'%;i??-\ aIH lj^ap«i^--^ t ^., ..* ¦ -•.1 The Reform of the Tourist ^L THOUGH we have been called a /% "Nation of Shopkeepers," the samples / % of humanity that we send forth as tourists show curiously unbusinesslike indifference to the opinion of our neighbours. So long as we are represented in foreign capitals by these aggressive eccentrics, who dress like low comedians and behave in public places like gro tesques, all talk of disarmament is waste of words. Something has already been said of the Grand Tour. For all the pomp and circumstance of his costly progress, the Grand Tourist of the eighteenth century was at any rate a dignified representative of the leisured class of Englishmen qualifying for public life. No such claim can be preferred in respect of the Little Tourist of the twentieth. He is as cheap as the manner of his travel. He circulates in personally conducted parties by favour of coupons. His one ideal is, like the snail, to carry his dwelling about with him, making every place a " home from home," and thereby bringing 41 Behind the Ranges his quieter countrymen into ridicule by his assurance and his bad manners. Such is his sense of pro portion that he proclaims his citizenship of the Empire on which the sun never sets by pretending that it never rises on any other. He regards foreigners, even in their own countries, as the dirt beneath his feet, or at best as the entomologist views curious beetles under the microscope. Not the most fanatical Mohammedan in Anatolia is more contemptuous of those of other creed and race. These ultra-British travellers do not think that foreigners can be ladies or gentlemen ; indeed, they hardly give them credit for being men and women. Because they hold the Church of Rome to be opposed to the liberties of England, they regard Roman Catholics as Nonconformists, even in Venice or Madrid. As an old writer of travels puts it, an Englishman's head, like a bowl, has a natural bias, which makes him dislike everjrthing foreign. He goes abroad to conquer, and fails, whereas, if he only knew it, the whole art of enjoying travel is to be conquered by new sensations. The tripper is something more than merely comical. So long as he remains at home, he is only the domestic nuisance that he was already becoming in the Lake District in Wilberforce's time. When, however, he takes his impertinences abroad, they assume a graver aspect. AA'^hat is 42 The Reform of the Tourist to be done with the type ? Its improvement is everybody's business, and therefore nobody's. Incidentally, I may be told, it is none of mine. Yet I have suffered so often from trippers that I am goaded to protest against their security from criticism and interference. Folk of unobtrusive tastes are terrorised by their want of manners and their conspicuous clothes, and, apart from their evil influence on international relations, this is unreasonable. Can nothing be done ? I venture to make a suggestion that may, with some modification, be found to meet the require ments of the case. The Foreign Office issues passports for Continental travel. They cost only a few shillings. Less than a hundred years ago, according to Mariana Starke, they cost nothing at all, save a trifling gratuity to the hall-porter at the Embassy at which they were sought. In those days, however, they were more necessary than to-day, for postmasters in France were for bidden to let out vehicles to British subjects travelling vdthout one. IncidentaUy, though I have carried a passport for twenty years, I never found it of the slightest use, save in Turkish and Russian territory Such a document is, however, regarded (by those who receive the fees for its issue) as essential to the traveUer's safety and com fort from the moment he sets foot on foreign soil. 43 Behind the Ranges Why cannot the Foreign Office be of real use, and issue with each a brief digest of etiquette for His Majesty's subjects travelling abroad ? This code might be roughly divided under five headings :— 1. There are other countries besides Britain. Do not, in speaking of it to foreigners (and par ticularly in Berlin), put the accent on the Great. 2. Clothes appropriate to Christmas pantomime or musical comedy are not calculated to uphold the prestige of Englishmen and EngUshwomen travelling on the Continent. 3. Over-tipping is no evidence of generosity. 4. Foreign languages mispronounced are not made more inteUigible by shouting. 5. Reverence in mosques is not an avowal of disloyalty to the Church. Let me consider these major offences of the tripper at somewhat greater length. 1. Jingoism may — I venture to doubt it, but it may — be a fine mood for politicians to cultivate at home when money is needed for our national defences, but it can never be a desirable sentiment for individuals to air on foreign soil. To hear some folk talking in hotels or public vehicles, a man might imagine that there was no other country in the world but England. There is. In the first place, there are Scotland and Wales and Ireland. Over and above these, there are France, with finer 44 The Reform of the Tourist wines ; Germany, with more soldiers ; and Italy, with greater works of art. The English tripper is seen at his worst in Rome ; the German and American, in Palestine. On the strength of a remnant of school Latin, the Englishman takes possession of the forum and the catacombs. With Baedeker in his hand, he might be the freeholder of St. Peter's and the Vatican. If familiar with the fiction of the late Marion Crawford, he includes in his dreadful patronage the princely Rome that he sees of an afternoon driving on the Pincio — the Rome, in fact, which ignores his existence. It is well that he is patronising, for otherwise he would be hostile. Race-prejudice is his undoing. The whole of the Mediterranean races are dagos ; the Teutonic nations are " Dutchmen " ; while under the comprehensive head of "niggers" he lumps together the true African, the Arab, the natives of India, and the Red Men of America. There remain outside of these major categories the " Japs " and " Chings " and " Yankees," and, with these six terms of opprobrium, he summarises the non-British human race. His prejudices would almost be sublime if they were not ridiculous. He has a curious trick of forming preconceived opinions, though he is rarely so honest as that observant traveller, Arthur Young, who owned that, whereas he went to France fully prepared 45 Behind the Ranges to find the natives garrulous chatterboxes, he dis covered to his amazement that very many of them were taciturn. 2. The costume in which British tourists find their wicked delight seems past praying for. Anywhere between Pau and Venice, all over Switzerland and along the Riviera, we see sane and sober city magnates change, with dreadful levity, into chessboard knickerbockers and Terai hats, while their ladies wear ankle-short skirts and festoon their solid heads with yards of veiUng, drawing attention to features surely pleading for obscurity. To do them justice, it is unUkely that these misguided folk can realise the harm they do. Emancipated from the humdrum routine of the city office and semi-detached villa of their suburban paradise, and reasonably anxious to celebrate their holiday mood with festive raiment, they forget that, in dressing like buffoons at a fair, they are bringing their country into ridicule. The result may be seen from week to week in the hilarious pages of Pour Rire and Kladderadatsch. The demoralising effect of such material for cari cature is bad enough in all conscience on the Continent, but in the East it is infinitely more damaging, for Orientals attach more importance than people of the West to a dignified bearing. It may, I think, without fear of contradiction, 46 The Reform of the Tourist be asserted that the average beggar in the streets of Constantinople is more impressive in his manner than the average tourist. 3. Over-tipping is indulged in chiefly by Ameri cans, though Englishmen are not always free from blame. Unlike the quality of mercy, it is twice cursed, for it demoralises the recipient and it spoils the market for poorer travellers who come after. There is rarely any generosity about it whatever. It is inspired by either the craven fear of appear ing mean, or the vulgar ambition to seem liberal. The real nature of these prodigal folk may be gathered from the manner in which they give of their bounty. A gentleman can bestow a crown so gracefully as to atone for the insignificance of the gift, whereas I have seen American nouveaux riches shower gold on their toadies as one flings maize to hogs. The whole system of tipping, common nowadays to hotels and private houses, is a somewhat odious imposition, but we who lie under it should at least keep it within decent and reasonable bounds. It is at best a secret commis sion on services rendered or value received, in proof of which opinion I may mention that hard ened travellers generaUy give their cabin steward half of his gratuity on joining the ship, with the implied promise of the rest to follow at the end of the voyage if he should prove attentive. 47 Behind the Ranges 4. Englishmen are not, as a general rule, finished linguists. It is, more often than not, their wives or daughters who come to the rescue with a few timely sentences of Ollendorf acquired at some finishing pension in Brussels or Ziirich. Unfortu nately, Englishmen are sometimes the last to realise their own imperfections in this respect. Many, indeed, never realise them at all. Not satis fied with the failure of their Stratford-atte-Bowe accent to command attention, they thunder their barbarisms at the helpless waiters. In this way they score up another laugh against their country men, others of whom may be sitting elsewhere in the restaurant and smarting under the ridicule. There are, I know, English tourists who hold such self-consciousness in contempt. There are, in fact, more than enough of this opinion. Yet they might do well to bear in mind that a thick skin is no evidence of a big brain. The rhinoceros is a very short-sighted fool. 5. It is an amazing fact, but a fact none the less, that many English people who, at home, are intensely devotional on the Sabbath, seem to take with them on their travels a profound contempt for the worshippers of any and every creed but that to which they were brought up. That, by their staring and whispering, they profane St. Peter's during Mass, looking on the Confessionals 48 The Reform of the Tourist as sideshows included in their coupons, without extra charge, treating these sacred fanes as art galleries in which eccentric folk choose to pray, is bad enough. It would be worse, but for the certainty that our Latin neighbours have sp long become accustomed to this boorish irreverence, which sees even the churches of Italy (as Lord Chesterfield caUed it) " knicknackicaUy," that they shrug their shoulders and take no offence at this further evidence of EngUsh "spleen." Similar irreverence in the mosque may, however, be pro ductive of far other results. The recent episode of an Afghan worshipper shooting at a European woman in the Mosque of Omar, at Jerusalem, was regarded in newspapers at home as a fresh illustra tion of the ignorant fanaticism of the benighted Mohammedan. I confess that, having stood long ago in that imposing shrine of Islam, and having watched its worshippers prostrate on their praying- carpets, with no sign of rebuke or resentment on their part, I saw the matter differently. If I do the lady wrong, and if this should meet her eye, I ask her pardon. But I have seen others, at any rate, behave quite disgracefuUy in such temples. There are, in this Mosque of Omar, holy relics that may, to the sophisticated eye of the West, appear childish. The West trembles if it spills the salt, or if a black cat runs across the road. It D 49 Behind the Ranges holds membership of the " Thirteen Club " to be wanton flying in the face of Providence. Yet it can laugh uproariously if asked to believe that, by squeezing himself between two adjacent piUars in the Mosque of Omar, the " True BeUever " adds ten years to his life. It bows in reverent worship before the Holy Sepulchre, yet it has no charity when it sees Moslems trembling with emotion before a hair of the Prophet's beard, or the rock on which Abraham would have sacrificed his son. I do not for one moment, not having been present on the occasion, suggest that the victim of the Afghan's zeal actually laughed. Yet she may have looked as if she refrained with difficulty, and even a fleeting expression of merriment could not escape the jealous eye of a fanatical worshipper. We have trouble enough, as it is, to keep the peace in our Indian Empire, not only between Moslem and Hindu, but even among zealots of the Sunnite and Shiite factions of Islam. That vulgar trippers, the lowest common multiple of travellers, should aim their kodaks at the Jews who wail beside the walls of the Temple matters little, beyond offending good taste, because the remnant of the Chosen still inhabiting the Holy City is not informed with the fighting spirit of Judas Maccabasus. With Mohammedans, the case is otherwise. They love fighting for its own 50 The Reform of the Tourist sake. They are the Irishmen of the East. They are something more, for they hold nothing dearer than a blow struck for Islam. In any case, it is outrageous on the part of tourists to beard them in their very mosques, smiUng pityingly at their beliefs and even kicking off the slippers which alone keep their desecrating and dirty boots from contact with the beautiful mosaics of the floor. There may, to the Western ear and eye, be some thing very funny about the groans and gyrations of the dervishes at prayer, but Europeans who find it impossible to keep a serious face while these rites are in progress should stay away. Trippers going ashore at Smyrna or Stamboul on the Friday (the Mohammedan Sabbath) invariably repair, under the guidance of renegade dragomen, to one or other of these dervish mosques, which they attend as if they were watching turns in a music-haU. The vulgarity of it 1 An inborn aversion from idolatry is all very well in its way, but it should be tempered with discretion where "idolatry" is the estabUshed worship of the land. Religious differences should be left at home, where the spirit of Little Bethel may ramp without doing any harm. Tourists should bear in mind the admirable retort of Lord Shaftesbury. He had just said that " All men of sense are of the same religion," when SI Behind the Ranges a lady asked him what that religion was. " Men of sense, madam," was the reply, " never say ! " Respect for the reUgion of any country may, with advantage, be extended to its ways and cus toms. In many Continental countries it is the polite fashion for a man, on entering a shop in which women are serving, to raise his hat to them. Personally, I never found anything pecuUarly de grading in this harmless courtesy, an attitude pos sibly due to the foreign vintage in my veins ; but I have seen excellent Englishmen decline it with a heart-of-oak stubbornness which suggested that they were thereby safeguarding the British Em pire against invasion. Both English and American tourists might learn many a lesson in politeness from those of the Latin countries. From the German ? No ; for these are, if possible, even more uncouth than themselves. In the United States, it is true, unless a man act on the principle of returning good for evil, politeness is thrown away, save in a few Old-world commimities Uke those of New Orleans and Pasadena, where the courtesies are still held in esteem. In the rest of the Union, to be courteous is, Uke speaking Attic Greek to negroes, tendering a coin that has no currency. Travelling Americans neither give politeness nor expect it. Their object is to "get right there." It is a clear case of each for himself: 52 The Reform of the Tourist a rush for seats in the " Diner," a scramble for the balcony of the " Observation Car," and all manner of slim tricks for obtaining "lowers " in the Pullman. There are, of course, those who, perhaps with reason, will always maintain that courtesy is its own re ward, and that there is comfort in offering it even to boors. I confess, with reluctance, but also with conviction, that, after some little ex perience of railroad travel in the United States and Canada, I should derive as much satisfaction from doffing my hat to the mandrill at the Zoo, only to see him turn his rainbow aspect on me. 53 A Grumbler in the Train OF all the vehicles of travel, from gharry to biplane, few are invested with less romance than the railway train. Now and then an impressionist like Sir Frederick Treves does justice to the tremendous sensation of a train flying through the night, or an engineer, warming to his subject, may find poetry in the pulsing of valves and oiling of cranks ; but the romance of the railroad, whatever it may have been in the days that preceded its general use, is restricted at the present time to the sensational crimes or accidents in which it figures. Three- quarters of a century ago, when old Colonel Hawker regarded a speed of thirty-two miles an hour as " terrific travelling," there must have been poetry in such breakneck speed, which to-day would satisfy only tortoises. The railroad of to day is a necessity and will continue to be one until supplanted by the trackless travel of the air, and the only railway romance left invests the con struction of those vast transcontinental systems of 55 Behind the Ranges the New World, which, stretching from ocean to ocean, invade the solitudes of the primeval wild and involve the engineer in all manner of cUmatic and other problems which did not confront the road-builders of more temperate latitudes and more civilised States. Anyone with a taste for grumbling and an eye for the dark side of things may find abimdant material to his hand in railway travel, for, though the carrying companies have done much to ameUor- ate the passenger's condition, giving him faster speed and greater comfort for lower fares, his tribulations are stiU considerable, among the worst being the overcrowding of compartments, un- punctuality of trains, overheating and bad ven tilation, shortcomings of the commissariat and difficulties with luggage. The degree in which the travelling public is subjected to annoyance in respect of these matters varies in different countries. Speaking broadly, English railways are probably the most perfect in the world. I say this not without fear of contradiction, but certainly with out hesitation, after having travelled at least ten thousand miles on American and Canadian lines and several hundred on those of Continental countries. If I qualify the statement, it is only because I am unacquainted with the raUways of India and South Africa, though, from all accounts, 56 A Grumbler in the Train any such reservation is unnecessary. Americans, and in a lesser degree Canadians, are firmly per suaded that their railways are immeasurably superior to anything in Europe, but, while stoutly denying this claim, it is fair to remember the vast difficulties, of which long distances are only a part, which invest the problems of raUroad construction and maintenance in those regions. The immense distances preclude, to begin with, the laying of a double track throughout, in itself a fruitful source of accidents, or, as Americans prefer to call them, "wrecks." Some of the responsibility for those terrible coUisions so common in the United States must be put down to the hurry of the passengers to be "on time," rather than forego which they cheerfully take the risk of death or disablement. This attitude has inevitably informed the starters and signalmen with a culpable in difference to the sacrifice of human life. By comparison, we in this country are remarkably free from this danger, but an occasional serious mishap, like the recent tragedy at Kirkby Stephen, which happened in one of the most lonely parts of the island, serves to draw the public attention to the need of further precautions, notably to the special risk attaching to the antiquated system of lighting trains with gas and thereby exposing travellers to the ftirther danger of fire after collision. 57 Behind the Ranges In Canada and the northern States, the track is continually exposed during more than half the year to frost, and during the other half to the wash out of floods ; and in the southern States it is subject to obliteration by rank grasses or sand storms. In the wildest regions, where the main tenance of an efficient police is impossible, trains are always liable to be held up by bandits, another serious annoyance from which we in this much-abused England are happily free. These are some of the drawbacks of American and Canadian railway travel for which the boards of control can scarcely be held answerable. There are others, however, for which their curious ideals are to blame. One fetish of transatlantic railroad politics is one-class travel. Americans are nothing if not democratic. They are likewise nothing if not inconsistent, so that they cheerfully bow down to the magnates who travel in gilded private cars of their own, and, in the southern States at any rate, they sternly assign special accommodation to coloured folk. There is, strictly speaking, more than one class of travel, for there are Pullman cars and parlour cars. On the " P'ourth " and other public holidays, the company in every car ranges from A to Z. I recollect discussing this matter of class travel with a high official of the Southern Pacific Railroad in his office at San 58 A Grumbler in the Train Francisco. It was at the time when some of our companies at home were abolishing the Second Class, and he cited this as the first step in the direction of one class for all. That there were people in England wiUing to pay double the fare, not so much for any difference in upholstery as for better company and less of it, this worthy demo crat flatly refused to believe. Such snobbishness did not strike him as what he would have called a "business proposition" at aU. He thought meanly enough of poor, benighted, feudal England, but never so meanly as that. Then we fell to comparing the railroads of the two countries on general grounds, and the compromise we reached was that the best accommodation on a few of the fastest "Limited" trains in America was rather better than the best of our First Class at home. I left it at that, and am not inclined to dispute the verdict. What I did persuade him to admit was the absence of control exercised to exclude un desirables at any time, quite apart from public holidays, on which they are made free of the whole train by established right. Even the Pullman, nominaUy reserved for the use of those who have paid for the berths, is generaUy overrun by a crowd of short-distance passengers, many of them but " very imperfect ablutioners." The conductor is too sound a democrat to interfere on his own 59 Behind the Ranges initiative ; the passengers share his principles too honestly to appeal to him. This brotherhood of man is a lovely ideal on paper, but in a crowded car on a hot summer's day it is Gehenna. As a result of the larger population and fewer trains than in other civilised countries, " straphanging " is so widely recognised that an American patent was lately granted for a sanitary handle that guards against infection, in itself a significant indication of the patentee's appreciation of his feUow-passengers. The same unchecked over crowding is common on the street cars. I remember, one morning in April, occupying an outside seat on a crowded down-town car in New York. The fact that every seat was already occupied did not prevent the same number of aspirants boarding it as it slowed down at a corner near the Bowery. Most of the new-comers certainly stood, holding on as best they might, but a very friendly artisan, whose proximity indicated that he worked by the sweat of his brow, preferred, without so much as " By your leave," to sit in my lap. The car was only just moving, so, having no further use for such a burden, I suddenly straight ened my leg and shot him tenderly into the road. Looking round, I saw him, a little surprised, but otherwise unhurt, take his place on the car following ours. Such outrage is borne without a 60 A Grumbler in the Train murmur in the Land of Liberty, but now and then it is good, when in Rome, not to do as Rome does. I could not, unfortunately, assure the Traffic Manager of the Southern Pacific that overcrowd ing was unknown in our trains at home. As a matter of fact, there are trains and times in which it is scandalous, encouraged by the supine nervous ness of the victims. No doubt it needs moral courage — the courage, at any rate, of indifference to being caUed disagreeable — to protest against this dangerous and unhealthy breach of the regu lations. No doubt it is taking the line of least resistance to acquiesce in the intrusion of strap hangers. Yet some of us prefer unpopularity to suffocation, and are not afraid to call on the guard to evict the superfluous. Each carriage is built to seat a certain number of passengers, usually indicated on the walls. If I pay for a ticket to travel by first, second, or third class, I am legally entitled to a certain fraction, be it one-sixth or one-eighth, of the available accommodation, to no more and to no less. It is as fooUsh to feel any qualm about claiming my due as it would be to acquiesce in a perfect stranger occupying a seat in my motor-car or taxi-cab. There may be ex tenuating circumstances. A crowded last train is certainly one of them, and he would be a cur mudgeon who stood out for his rights on such 6i Behind the Ranges an occasion. There may, as at race meetings, be an abnormal crowd, with which the ordinary staff of officials is utterly unable to cope, and it would be unreasonable to expect it of them. On ordi nary occasions, however, it is monstrous to blame a traveller for insisting on his own comfort and asking for the exclusion of more than the carriage will hold, or of anyone obviously entitled to travel only by another class. Those who pay third-class fare and travel first should, if found out, take their punishment without grumbling. In the matter of speed, there are a few, a very few, trains in America which just pass our own, but they are in a sad minority, and few even of their " Limited " trains between the great cities can compare with, for instance, the Great Western daily non-stop run from Paddington to Plymouth. Their gigantic locomotives, beside which our en gines look like the painted toy models which amuse schoolboys, are built for freight-hauUng and endurance, not for short bursts of high speed. As regards sleeping accommodation, their PuUman cars, generally so overheated that passengers roast like pullets in an oven, are far inferior to the berths on our Scotch trains from Euston or King's Cross. Even on an important train Uke the " Sunset Express," which runs between New Orleans and San Francisco, the dressing-rooms 62 A Grumbler in the Train are miserable, and the women are in even worse case than the men. The ordinary " mixed " trains of America would shame our suburban lines at home. I remember travelling one night from Reno, in Nevada, to San Francisco, no side track, but on the main line from Salt Lake City and the East. The way was downhill, yet at no time could that train have done more than twenty-five miles an hour. It stood aside for cattle crossing the track and for freight trains coming behind. It was the soul of poUteness when anything wanted to pass in any direction. It was a very Chesterfield among trains. As a result of its high breeding, it reached its destination two hours late. Noblesse oblige ! For the moment, I take leave of American trains and come back to those of the Old World. The proper heating and ventilation of carriages is only now exercising the companies at home. In the absence of adequate provision, there is often wordy dispute between the advocates of the Open Window and those who shun fresh air more even than they do sin. There is no need to be inhumane on such occasions, and the victim of sore throat or toothache should always be given the benefit of the doubt and allowed to keep the windows up. Yet the companies might at once solve the problem of comfort for all sorts and 63 Behind the Ranges conditions by introducing a special compartment in each class for the few — these advocates of stuffiness dwindle daily in numbers — who fear fresh air. The windows might be permanently closed, and the outside could easily be marked with some such appropriate symbol as CO2. Or, if the windows were movable, as in other compartments, there should be a notice to the effect that they would be closed on the requisition of a single appUcant. Here would be asylum for aU the real and imaginary invalids, and such an innovation would exempt the more robust from the disagreeable alternative of appearing inhumane when insisting on a measure of ventilation indispensable to their health and comfort. Once we get such a conveni ence, we shall wonder why it was ever thought less necessary than compartments for " Smokers " and " Ladies Only." The present vague under standing that the choice of opening or closing the window rests with the passenger next to it and facing the engine is better perhaps than nothing at all, but, apart from the reluctance of a nervous traveller to insist on such a right, particularly if a neighbour should be more brawny than himself, it is also a fact that, with the wind blowing on that side of the train, the effect of a window opened too wide is more felt in the middle of the carriage than by the man in the corner seat. Occasionally 64 A Grumbler in the Train there is nothing for it but firmness. On a night journey through the Caucasus, from Tiflis to Batoum, I occupied a corner seat and faced the engine. The climate of that region in August is such as to make fresh air worth more than its weight in gold. My fellow-passengers, a Georgian and an Armenian, did not, however, take that view. They pulled up both windows and made themselves snug for the night. The carriage was hot and full of fleas, and my companions were, as the judicious Hooker says of another race, "rough and ouglie in their bodies." Even when I lowered my window half-way, there was not a breath of air in the carriage, but the Armenian muttered and the Georgian blustered. To make matters quite clear, I then let down the window to its full extent and kept my hand on the strap. For a moment they were taken aback. Then they quarreUed about it in some utterly unintelligible dialect — for aught I know, one was suggesting mur dering me ; and, if so, it was the Armenian suggest ing that the Georgian should do it — and finally they feU asleep and left me in peace. Next morning, as the train ran down to the sea shore, we were the best of friends. There are some latitudes and circumstances in which the policy of the Open Window is the reverse of admirable. Even in going through long tunnels at home, we pull up E 65 Behind the Ranges the windows to keep out the bad air, and elsewhere dust and mosquitoes must be excluded even at the risk of suffocation. There are sections of rail road in Louisiana, and even in Canada, on which to leave the windows open for only a few moments would mean a sleepless night in every berth ; and in the thirsty tracts of Arizona and New Mexico the hot sand is so penetrating as to cover everyone and everything inside the cars unless the win dows are kept shut while the train is in motion. Fortunately the coloured porters know just when to insist on this, and there is method in what many strangers in the land regard only as madness. The commissariat on trains is not as a rule such as to attract the epicure, and meals are taken on short journeys as much by way of passing the time as in any hope of enjoyment. In fact, the majority of distances in this country are so short — the whole run from Land's End to John o' Groat's takes only thirty-six hours, with fre quent stops by the way — that the arrangements for feeding passengers en route are obviously of less importance than on the long transcontinental journeys of Canada or the United States. The cuisine on our English " diners " is of unexciting quality, but the charges are at any rate moderate, absurdly so if reckoned by American standards. 66 A Grumbler in the Train On the other hand, the majority of our station buffets still leave much to be desired, and a few years ago they were a disgrace to civilisation. The mummified ham-sandwich, the Pleistocene sausage-roU, and the boiling hot cup of chicory and coffee are poor comfort for a hungry traveller with only five minutes to spare, and the soothing title of " restaurant " is wholly inappropriate to an establishment which provides no better fare. The longest journeys that I ever had to take, with no buffets on the train, were one of twenty-seven hours in Cuba, between Havana and Santiago, and another of fourteen in the Caucasus, from Batoum to Tiflis. The traveller journeying through Cuba by the daily train has to be satisfied with a very light breakfast at Santa Clara and a hurried lunch at Ciego di Avila, both provided by a Chinese caterer. The btiffet at Batoum is a primitive affair, and most of its material is fit only for hungry Kurds. Throughout Mohammedan countries, train travel is perpetual Ramadan, for Moslems do not apparently regard hunger as any hardship. Not only is no meal to be had on any train in Asiatic Turkey, but the food offered at most of the wayside stations is such as might teach a man to " starve right merrily." On the journey from Damascus to Beirut, which occupies a whole day, there is only a single badly served meal at Reyah, 67 Behind the Ranges the junction for Baalbek and Aleppo. On the other line, from the Syrian capital to Haifa, there is a similar opportunity near Samach, not far from Galilee. The Bagdad Railway has so far made no effort to cater on its trains, and even at so im portant a station as Ismidt, only three or four hours' run from Constantinople, the restaurant, which is kept by a Levantine Greek, is appaUing. Were it not for the ever-changing panorama without, a long train journey would be even more monotonous than a sea voyage, and it is always far more tiring. On the best American and Canadian trains, the boredom of passengers is somewhat mitigated by the presence of a man seUing sweet meats, magazines, and curios, as well as by the provision of a library and Observation Car. Some such resources would be not wholly unwelcome in this country, where, though the distances may be short, railway journeys can be very trying. With regard to his luggage (in America, " bag gage"), the Grumbler may have three distinct grievances : loss or detention of his property ; prohibition of small luggage in his compartment ; and insufficient supply of porters on arriving at his destination. Our own plan of consigning luggage to the van, •with no check or receipt for each package, appears to American and Continental travellers haphazard 68 A Grumbler in the Train and unbusinesslike, and so, no doubt, it is. The alternative is to check each piece through to its destination and to trouble no more about it. This system would be still more admirable if it did not occasionally fail. I am, however, a less fervent admirer of the checking plan than I might be if I had not suffered grievously from detention of my luggage in Germany, Italy, Florida and CaUfornia. The amount of small luggage aUowed with the passenger inside the carriage is very loosely inter preted on our own railways, where no restriction is imposed beyond the official intimation that only Ught articles must be put on the racks, the object being to exonerate the company in case of accident. The responsibility in case of damage has, however, been tested in the Courts, for a passenger claimed in the Manchester County Court for damage done to his hat by a faUing parcel. The owner of the parcel pleaded that the company should make good the damage, as the parcel was dislodged by the jolting of the train, but the Court did not take this view. As a matter of fact, only very imper fect control is exercised, and small, heavy packages are often placed on the rack, whereas, if large and light, they would attract notice and are therefore put in the van. Broadly speaking, the amount of luggage taken into the carriage in this country is 69 Behind the Ranges a matter of " first come, first served," so that a single occupant, who finds the racks vacant when entering the train, may occupy the whole of them with suit-cases, golf-clubs, umbreUa, hat, and other belongings. They manage these things better in France, where each passenger is allowed only so much of the rack as is over the seat he occupies. Luggage is in no case allowed on the seat, except to keep the owner's place if he should alight at a station. Suit-cases usually go under the seat, and it is weU, particularly in winter time, to make sure that the porter does not stow them away on the same side as the hot pipes. He is not, as a rule, endowed with sufficient common sense to put them under the opposite seat. For luggage in the guard's van the company is re sponsible as far as the destination to which it is labeUed. For that left in the carriage, it assumes no responsibility whatever, as it might otherwise find it difficult to establish contributory negligence on the part of a passenger who spent an hour in the dining-car, leaving his portmanteau unlocked in his carriage. On American railroads, very little indeed is allowed inside the Pullman, where there is no room to spare once the double rows of berths are made up for the night. A smaU bag, or " grip," only is permitted, though, in that land of inequality, money shouts where in Europe it ;o A Grumbler in the Train only whispers, and the traveller who drops an occasional dollar bill in the right direction (which is never far from the conductor's hand) may infringe the by-laws to his heart's content. The dearth of porters in American depots is a logical corollary of the irreducible minimum of hand-baggage with which Americans are com pelled to travel. As the heavier baggage is con veyed to the passenger's home or hotel by the agent of one or other of the Express Companies, who travels on the train, or joins it near the terminus, there is little or nothing for American porters to do. Railway stations in the cities have a small brigade of " red caps," but even these are so rarely requisitioned by the Americans, who form nine-tenths of the summer tourist traffic, that they are seldom on the spot when their services are needed. Even well-to-do Americans may be seen carrying their own " grips " along the platform, a survival, no doubt, from the days when they had to do so, for it is easier in that land to acquire wealth than the manner which goes with it, and the millionaire is slow to abandon those virtues of self-help which were his law not so long ago. With so little demand, therefore, porters are few and far between. Americans and Cana dians are aware of the scarcity and do not expect them, and even the visitor from Europe soon grows 71 Behind the Ranges accustomed to a state of affairs which he would vote intolerable at home. At first, however, it is difficult for him to realise that he must look after himself or be left. On my first visit to the United States, I had to change trains at a small station just over the frontier of North Carolina. It was a close thing, and the train that was to take me further stood, with steam up, at the further end of a long platform, and was due to start in five minutes. In vain I looked round for a porter, and most of the precious five minutes were spent in getting my suit-case, kit-bag, rugs, rods, and camera out of the carriage, in which the conductor at Washington had, possibly with mistaken kind ness, allowed me to stow them the night before. I should to a certainty have missed the connection, entaiUng a wait of five hours for the next train and reaching my destination after midnight, had not an unexpected ally come on the scene in the person of an enormous lady of colour, attached in some capacity or other to the staff, who calmly lifted the whole of my belongings and, but that I started off in the direction of the other train, would have carried me as well. When she had established me and my baggage in the other train, I handed her half a doUar in my gratitude for deliverance ; but with a smiling display of pearly teeth and a shake of the head, she handed it back. 72 A Grumbler in the Train Incomparable Amazon I Did she rescue me for my beauty, or merely from a sense of compassion for a tenderfoot unused to A merican ways ? Two years later I took the night train from Colon to Panama, reaching the Pacific port just before midnight. Yet, although the train con nected with the mail steamer for Callao, not a single porter met it, and my own bags were carried to the cab by an old nigger, who twice feU over them in his anxiety to earn a " quarter." Yet another time I arrived, also late at night, at Port Tampa, with the steamer for Cuba ready to cast off as soon as we were all aboard. On this occasion there was neither negro nor negress, and I had to make two journeys between the train and the gangway, laden with such a miscellany that I must have resembled a walking pantechnicon, a memory the more vivid because my belongings included a box, with an imperfectly fitting lid, containing two small but lively alligators which I had recently caught in Florida. Railway travel in France and Germany is, on the better lines, even a little more comfortable than our own, and the officials, particularly on the further side of the Rhine, are, if occasionally a little infected with miUtarism, generally forbearing with tourists who do not speak their language, and exceedingly civil to those who do. 73 Behind the Ranges Every traveller is, I suppose, asked at one time or another to say which was the worst train he ever travelled in. So many lines, at home and abroad, compete for pride of place, that the question is by no means easy to answer off-hand. The night train from Reno to San Francisco, to which aUu sion was made above, takes a deal of beating, but, on the other hand, the day train from Jaffa to Jerusalem does its best. So slow is it, even when going downhill on the return journey, that an hotel-keeper of .Jaffa beat it . on one occasion on his Arabian mare, with five minutes in hand. In addition to its tortoise pace, the track Ues through gloomy scenery, passing the vale in which David slew Goliath, and in the summer months, at any rate, it is impossible to open the windows on account of the dust. Another dreadful train is that between Alexandria and Cairo. The " Occupation " does not appear to have improved the train service. Of beautiful raUway journeys, on the other hand, with changing views of hUl- tops, moor and river, Scotland gives brief spells equal perhaps to anything of the kind on earth. Those who prefer their scenery on a grander scale than is available in these islands should take the westward journey from Quebec through the Canadian Rockies, which make an appalling im pression after the rolling levels of the prairies. 74 A Grumbler in the Train There are also, without so trying a probation of some of the most insipid scenery in the world, which could not rouse a moment's genuine enthu siasm in anyone but a farmer or a coyote, beautiful zigzag tracks in the mountains of Carolina, Jamaica, Java, and, nearer home, Spain, the views round Ronda, on the run from Madrid to Alge ciras, being magnificent in their wildness. Of sea views from the train, some of the most pleasing are to be obtained on the Italian coast, east of Genoa ; but for combination of mountain, lake and torrent there is probably nothing in the world quite equal to the best that Switzerland can give us. The trail of the tourist may drive the fasti dious elsewhere, but, to anyone who can shut his eyes to the vileness of tripping man, the prospect is truly a pleasing one. 75 " / will go back io the great sicect mother. Mother and lover of men, the Sea," The Voyage The nails that fasten together the planks of the boat's bow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world. Their iron does more than lead lightning out of heaven ; it leads love round the earth. RUSKIN'S noble words should come home to everyone at sea. The sea is the cradle of aU Ufe. It is alike the beginning and the end of everything. It came before the land; it will be after it. In the Holy Writings we see it at the Creation, in the Flood, in the coming of the Israelites out of bondage, in the shipwrecks of Jonah and of Paul. The Psalmist often employs it in the imagery of his immortal song. The classics give us memorable pictures of the Mediterranean and Black Sea in calm and storm, in the voyage of Ulysses, the shipwreck of Mne&s, the tempest that overtook Ovid on his way into exile. The sea has played a mighty part in the best prose of every land. Its brooding bitterness may be found in Edrisi, Von Humboldt, Hugo, De Amicis, Conrad. The mystery of its darkness, the glory of its dawn, meet the eye in 77 Behind the Ranges Pecheur d'Islande, in the Voyage en Orient, in Stevenson's Essays of Travel. Its storms shriek in The Cruise of the Midge, in Mr. Midshipman Easy, in The Wreck of the Grosvenor. Its calms brood in Masefield's Tarpaulin Muster and in BuUen's Sack of Shakings. Of shipping, too, there is a mighty literature. The change from sail to steam, of which more hereafter, is the theme of books by Clark Russell and other writers, and is referred to in Conrad's Mi7'ror of the Sea, in Van Dyke's Opal Sea, and in The Future of America by WeUs. Tourist Ufe on board ship is variously interpreted by Darwin, Dickens, Washington Irving and Kipling. In our poetry, the sea has hardly fiUed the place one might have expected. The only considerable sea poem in the language, if we except the artificial sentiment of Pelican Island, is William Morris's Life and Death of Jason. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for the inspiration of which he was in great measure indebted to Wordsworth, while he owed its sea lore to one Captain Thomas James, deals less with the phenomena of the sea than with the remorse and penance of a seaman who shot an unoffending albatross. Coleridge had no personal knowledge of the sea when he wrote the poem, save what he may have picked up in rambles on the beach, and it was not until a year 78 The Voyage later that he made his first short voyage. The best-known sea-piece in Tennyson, apart from the nautical atmosphere of Enoch Arden and the sea shore setting of Sea Dreams, is his Ballad ofthe Revenge, a fine work, but one that has suffered, Uke Macaulay 's Spanish Armada, from the affec tion of amateur reciters, whose lisping — At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay . . . is too often the prelude to a woeful exhibition of misplaced anxiety to entertain. On the whole, however, the sea books are better than the land books. Conrad and Noble, Mase- field and Bullen, Clark Russell and Marryat get smashing blows into their storms and infinite peace into their calms, and their magic carries to the heart of inland cities the hungry roar of the sea- wolves hounding down some luckless tramp, or the sensuous whisper of waves that brattle foolishly against shingle beaches. I commend the fore going very imperfect bibliography to all who are going on a long sea voyage, for the delight of reading such literature is multiplied tenfold be tween sea and sky, with no land in sight, and in these days of cheap reprints it should soon be possible to buy the whole boiling for a shilling I The interest of a voyage is dual : there is the human side of shipboard life, and there is the 79 Behind the Ranges mightier appeal of the ocean itself. Like all travel, its effect depends on temperament. Reduced to its lowest terms, it is a peaceful, jog-trot existence, free from fret and worry and without ambition, monotonous, uneventful, agreeable or the reverse, as we choose to order it. Weather is even more important to our pleasure than ashore. Heavy seas and leaden skies, searching winds and roUing decks, severe cold or blistering heat, aU aggravate the already considerable social difficulties of this strange little community of utter strangers thrown for the moment into closest intimacy. One dour passenger, with a genius for being objectionable, may infect the entire company with depression, for it is a small world between decks, a world over ready to talk scandal and take offence, foibles for which some excuse mayperhaps be found in its lack of occupation and the sameness of each day's routine. A port of call is a godsend, and on such coasting routes as those followed by the mailboats of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company to Morocco or the West Indies, or by those of the Messageries Maritimes among the isles of Greece and along the southern littoral of the Black Sea, I have seen less unpleasantness in two or three weeks of travel than in the week between Liver pool and New York or Quebec. In the East, particularly, the day ashore is, in more senses 80 The Voyage than one, a crowded experience, with its sudden gUmpses of minarets, its walk in shady alleys, or its bargaining in bazaars in which, as DisraeU says, men seU " everything, from diamonds to dates." The true lover of the sea may perhaps resent the interruption of these ports of call, yet, unless he go ashore with the rest, he must be prepared to endure the grime of coal-dust and the din of donkey-engines. Such as really find their pleasure in unbroken weeks of sea and sky should take passage in a saUing-ship to the Southern Ocean, now tearing through dancing waves, now, at the caprice of the winds, creeping over oily calms. To these hardy adventurers, taking their rest cure in the most dreadful isolation imaginable, is re vealed the true sea, which is hidden from those who voyage in liners. The sea known to the saUing ship has no code of honour. The weaker the foe, the greater its brutaUty. It is too cunning to put forth its futile strength against such levia thans as mock its fury between the Mersey and St. Lawrence. It prefers to save its cruelty for some feeble tramp which, in reality more helpless than many an old windjammer, angers it by pre tending to the dignity of steam. In these days of revolution, when the automobile has ousted the horse and is in its turn yielding its pride of place to the aeroplane, the land-traveller F 8l Behind the Ranges has continually to alter his perspective to suit an age of hurry. What is haste to-day wUl be stagnation to-morrow. The race is to the swift, and, as the beaten track is narrow, bounded by banks and hedges, the slow go to the wall. There is no question of the narrow way on the high seas, where there is room for all. Yet the decrees of a commercial generation are inexorable, and here also the old order of things gives place to the new. The remarkable revolution effected in sea life by the coming of steam is best perhaps under stood by reference to the conditions that are no more. Dampier, asked his opinion of the duration of an autumn voyage from London to Madagascar, suggested three months and a half, a period in which such a liner as the Empress of Ireland would steam round the world. In those days, however, apart from lack of inventiveness, time was no object. Vessels, provisioned for a voyage of indefinite duration, would gaily put to sea, passing out of human ken, with no notion of when they might reach their destination. How changed is all this to-day I The captain of a transatlantic mail-boat shapes his course from Liverpool to Sandy Hook as correctly and as unconcernedly as a motorist would steer from Park Lane to St. Pancras. Such machine-made travel is, of course, a boon alike to those so 82 The Voyage constituted as to hate the sea and to others whose hearts beat only normally in Wall Street or Throgmorton Street. Yet there are still a few unbusinesslike folk who echo the regret of Mr. Clark Russell when they think of the " shapes of beauty which have gone beyond the horizon to their graves, and haunt the ocean only as phantoms." It may be a fine achievement (it must very often be a neces sary one) to be able to rely on reaching New York in four days, some hours, some minutes, and a few seconds, but such precision has changed the whole aspect of sea travel. Doubtless the modern liner or battleship going full speed is a splendid com ment on our progress. Yet, though there be majesty in the sky-scraper, quiet eyes rest more happily on the humbler aspect of a moorland cottage. Still, we must honour utility in these times, find from this standpoint the story of navi gation is one almost continuous triumph of mind over matter. It is a struggle that has not been without its terrible reverses, but the passing of each century has brought us nearer to victory. The puny ship defies the pitiless waves, confident of its triumph. As an Italian writer makes it say, " Til sei immenso, ma sei un bruto ; io son piccolo, ma sono un genio." All over the western seas, the new order 83 Behind the Ranges has driven out the old. Galley and caravel, argosy and galleon are gone. Only the lateen sail of the storied Mediterranean is left as a reminder of the dark days when Arabs ruled the waves. Those, however, who adventure a little off the hackneyed highways of commerce may still find quaint relics of the dawn of shipbuilding, the wondrous art that links the gopher of the Ark with the armour of the Majestic. The coracle, which may still be seen mirrored in Welsh salmon rivers, has not appreciably altered since the day on which Csesar landed in Britain. The vanishing Chippewa still paddles his birchbark on Canadian lakes, and the kayak of the Esquimaux is in all probability much the same as when the Vikings first sighted America. Even the high seas of trade are not swept quite bare of these wooden ana chronisms. The Chinese junk seems to have re tained its hull and rig for a score of centuries, and on the beach of Trebizond I have seen such high- prowed shore-boats as may have been drawn up there when Xenophon and his remnant passed through Trapezium on the retreat to Scutari. As a curious illustration of the repetition of history, the introduction of steam into the art of naval warfare suggests a measure of return to the antiquated conditions of the trireme, which lost no opportunity of ramming her adversary. 84 The Voyage Yet the analogy is perhaps fanciful. The modern cruiser and the Phoenician warship of the Nineveh monuments no doubt have something in common in their independence of the wind, which meant so much to Nelson's fighting line. But the galley- slaves, at their best, were not, like steam, in exhaustible, nor, even for a short burst, could they move as swiftly as the modern battleship. The sailing ship, which came between, must have been a more effectual fighting-craft than the galley and trireme, else it would not have replaced them. Now it, too, is gone for ever from the pageant of sea-fights, which may, in the near future, be a contest between submarines and biplanes. Iron is our bulwark of Empire to-day, not oak. There is no longer any significance in the story told of ColUngwood, who used, when at home, to scatter acorns in likely spots, with a fervent prayer that, long after he was dust, they might furnish oak for the defeat of the French, his country's foes in days which had no thought of an Entente Cordiale. The sea is a good servant if flogged, but a bad master to those who cringe. It is, in short, a bully. It helps those only who help themselves. Mr. Filson Young might have done worse than remember this when he complained that it had done so little for Ireland. 85 Behind the Ranges To those of us who live our lives beside the sea, watching its unrest all day and listening to its reproaches all night, the long ocean voyage, with no land break in its monotony, brings no rest, but is rather an ordeal. Congenial company on board may do something to alleviate the tedium of it, but a single interesting day on shore is worth a week of sea and sky. Yet we can be grateful for the brevity and safety of modern crossings, the more so if we remember that, in 1776, Arthur Young took two days between Waterford and Milford Haven, while his boat aU but foundered on the passage. The mood in which the tourist embarks on every voyage is always the same. W^hat may be the sensations of exile faced for serious objects, the sudden summons to join a regiment on foreign service, the haste to see a dying friend, the anxiety to investigate financial ventures, or the pressing need of flying from justice, I may not guess, for I never yet fared overseas with any purpose sterner than the capture of a new fish or the sight of a fresh country, which between them contribute much to my perhaps eccentric notion of enjoy ment. The tourist mood, pure and simple, is no very complex psychological study. It begins with curiosity in the boat-express as to our feUow-pas- sengers, mingled with uncertainty whether some 86 The Voyage of them may, on closer acquaintance, prove better or worse company than they look at first sight. Then, perhaps, follows the reaUsation that the train is taking passengers for other boats than ours, and that some are bound for New York, whereas our destination is Quebec. As the brakes go on, and the train slows down in sight of the docks, there is much craning of necks in the corridor to see the steamers moored alongside the quay, with consequent speculation — at any rate, for those making their first voyage — whether their floating home is the great steamer with two funnels and three masts, or perhaps the huge one-lunged leviathan next to her. Then comes the breathless rush for the gangways, the porters struggling for the hand-baggage, while the passenger stoutly guards some fishing-rod or camera from their clumsy touch. The moment of transfer from train to steamboat does not, if the whole truth must be told, reveal either the fair or the brave at their best. To see their panic, one would imagine that it was the fashion of mail- boats to leave at the scheduled time, whereas an hour or more is usually lost in getting away, and those who fought like dogs and cats might, had they but known, have behaved like men and women. I have sometimes wondered whether some of those who become fast friends during the B7 Behind the Ranges ensuing days ever recall those dreadful moments of savagery in which the strong trample on the weak in their quite unnecessary anxiety to be first up the gangways. Of all the passengers, whether joining the ship or leaving her, the emigrants, or immigrants, are incomparably the most interesting. Herded up the ladders like sheep, they sit on deck dazed, amid their poor little scrap-heaps of " Settlers' Belongings," until the vessel moves off from the dock, and then they strain their tired eyes for a last glimpse of the motherland that was but a stepmother. Day after day, whUe at sea, they amuse themselves with simple deck sports, with quarrels, courtships, and a concert for the ship's charities, an entertainment which, if I may be frank, usually reveals greater talent, vrith less of self-consciousness, than that held in the first class. Then, when the new home comes in sight under the bow, how pathetically these human derelicts gaze on the land that holds all their trust in the future 1 God grant their hopes be fulfiUed ! It is easy to understand the enterprise of emigrants in the pride of youth, even of young mothers with babes at the breast, but what of the greybeards and grandams that form no small proportion of the average steerage crowd ? Was the Old Country so niggardly that they could not there eke out their 88 The Voyage few remaining days until they should be carried to the viUage churchyard and laid to rest beneath the grim old yews that gave shadow to the playtime of their chUdhood ? One day of life on board ship is, in the absence of ports of caU, the same as a week, an alternative of meals, gossip and sleep. There need be no thing actually disagreeable about this placid exist ence, but at the best it is silly, and at the worst it may be tiresome. People at sea are rarely their normal selves. They are more likely to grumble than even on land. Bad weather is the fault of the Captain. If the Officers keep themselves to themselves, the women vote them boors. If they mix with the passengers, the men vow that they are neglecting their duties. The Purser tries to please all and succeeds in pleasing none. There are few on board who are free from the conviction that the Chief Steward has a personal grudge against them. If the Bedroom Stewards are attentive, it is because they want tips ; if they are not, they do not know their work. Such can tankerous moods are, it is true, equally possible in an hotel, but visitors are not penned up, as they are in a ship, with no means of escape from uncongenial company, save imprisonment in the cabin or suicide in the sea. For this reason, if for no other, everyone should strive for the moment 89 Behind the Ranges to bury personal prejudice, to be friendly to all and sundry, sinking all distinction of race, religion, or caste. Such geniality works for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. On an English liner, the icicles of distrust usually take at least forty-eight hours to thaw, but matters are im proved by the presence of one or two seasoned travellers who are unafraid of losing caste by talking to perfect strangers without formal intro duction, and who know how to draw the line between civility and familiarity. During the first few days out, many keep to their state-rooms for reasons well known to themselves. The rest keep to themselves or their friends, as little inclined to mix with strangers as oil with water. Then, by some magic touch — no one knows how — the thaw sets in ; the ice is broken ; the frost is gone. It is April after March. It is, indeed, as if the " Third Floor Back " had passed fore and aft, leaving kind hearts and good fellowship in his path. Everyone is anxious henceforth to be and to do his best. Chairs are no longer thrust in the way of deck sports. Ladies are ready to perform at the concert; men give up their bridge for a dance on deck. Under such encouraging conditions, a week on a crowded mail-boat is not without its attractions. On a humble " intermediate," with a Umited company, the strain on one's bonhomie is greater. 90 The Voyage It is like a small house party, and each must do what he can for the general entertainment. Only peculiar circumstances can excuse aloofness from the crowd. I remember well a case in point. It was that of a Turkish youth of high standing, who, for a poUtical offence at the time of the counter revolution, was sentenced to be hanged in the streets. I traveUed on the same steamer up the Black Sea, and was struck at the outset by the pecuharity of his conduct. Still, as a fugitive from justice, seeing a possible informer in every stranger, he was hardly to blame for locking him self in his cabin all day, even at meal times, and taking the air on deck only during the night. Prostration from sea-sickness is another sufficient excuse for keeping apart, and overtures of sympathy, unless of the briefest, are misplaced kindness. When St. Paul, the finest gentleman in Scripture, said " Be of good cheer ! " to the terrified sailors in the storm off Malta, he brought the most splendid message of courage imaginable to men fearful of shipwreck, but the same words might easUy irritate a sufferer from sea-sickness ; and he who has the heart to chaff the victims of this malady is no better than the wag in Artemus Ward's book, who accosted one with a plate of pork swimming in gravy I Yet the tremendous interest of the protean sea 91 Behind the Ranges itself is immeasurably greater than that of the human aspect of a voyage. Even though time cannot stale the infinite variety ofthe ocean, a man's first considerable voyage is the memory of a life time. I can still, after the lapse of sixteen years, recall all the wonderful sensations of six weeks on the P. & O. Oceana, outward bound from Brindisi to Australia, and of eleven more by the Rakaia, a tramp chartered by the B.I. line, homeward from Brisbane by way of the Barrier Reef and Batavia. The shoals of the Red Sea, the sunsets of the Indian Ocean, the rollers of the Australian Bight, the sweet peace of Sydney Harbour, the calm beauty of Whitsunday Passage, the green prox imity of shores in Albany Pass, the crowded ports of Java and Ceylon — these, with the sharks and flying-fish and albatrosses and whales, made a series of impressions that are ineradicable. Other voyages in both hemispheres have since famUiarised me with the sea in all its changing moods, but I have never parted with the memory of my first handshake with the ocean. I am never certain whether the sea is more terrible in calm or in anger. Some men fear it more than others. Those fear it most who know it best. Addison might write glibly of the " agree able horror" of a storm at sea. Darwin might deride its terrors as overrated. Both were lands- 92 The Voyage men. Aristotle, a landsman also, but inspired to better purpose, knew better when he classed the sea with earthquakes as things all men must fear. There is an echo of the same sentiment in his countrymen, the Greek sailors in Eothen, who stood " pale and grim under their hooded capotes, like monks awaiting a massacre." The commonest error of landsmen is to fear it only in its wrath. They are cowed by the combers that hiss against the ship's sides or that fling themselves impotently against the granite buttresses of the land. They are terrified by those moving mountains of green water tipped with white, in which the vessel seems as if, every moment, she must broach to and founder. They hold their breath in presence of the gigantic paroxysm, and feel convinced that neither man's science nor his faith in God can avert the threatened doom. In the oily calm of the ocean their inexperienced eyes read no sinister warning. That there is something terrible in an angry sea is not to be denied, but to the mariner it is most to be dreaded in sight of land, where the landsman would fear it least. It is, in fact, in its grim aUiance with the rocks and shoals, that cruel compact by which the victors share the flotsam and jetsam of the fray, that the real danger of sea-travel is to be found. When we reckon the number of overdue vessels that have actually 93 Behind the Ranges foundered in mid-ocean, allowing that the holo caust of such as perish by fire is no fault of the sea, we shall find it insignificant by comparison with those which go to pieces on a lee shore. To the eye that knows it, the ocean is often most terrible in its calms. At such moments, the arch- deceiver is least to be trusted. Yet, knowing its treachery, men continue to embark their all . . . perfda, sed, quarnvis perfida, cara tamen . . . There are sinuous calms in which all Nature seems to hold its breath in speechless excitement. Viewed from a reeling deck between sea and sky, such stillness suggests the purring of a tiger before the spring. The claws are hidden in the velvet, but it needs only a rising gale to bare them for battle. Previous to the art of navigation, such deceit was, as Lucretius says, ineffectual, but since ships have sailed the main its successes have been terrible. The sailormen know the sea for their enemy, even as the mountain folk know the peaks. They go to it for a livelihood, because there are softer men to do the work ashore. The writers of every land have sung its wickedness in calm and in storm. Elie rugit, puis moutonne, wrote Hugo in Les Travailleurs de la Mer ; first the bellowing bull and then the bleating lamb ; 94 The Voyage always the enemy. That is why the silence of the sea is disconcerting. A blustering enemy is always less terrible than one who plots in silence. The calm to be trusted is that Avhich comes after the storm, for it is the exhaustion of the elements, the truce of the Titans. The wind dies away on far horizons. The sun breaks through dispersing clouds. " Peace be still ! " It is a mandate which the raging waters dare not disregard. It is a benediction. In the ghostly stillness that precedes a storm there is none of this natural peace. I have seen a hurricane break with ungovernable rage on the shores of Cuba within an hour of perfect calm. This was off Santiago, the last ditch of gallant Cervera, and was the only occasion on which, in skies roofing a hundred degrees of latitude, I ever saw the cloud literally no bigger than a man's hand come up from the rim of the sea and burst in fury over the land. Once, too, on the low shores of Florida, I saw the Gulf of Mexico change in a quarter of an hour from the calm of death to screaming fury, and in this case the gale came out of a cloudless sky, no uncommon phenomenon in the tropics, and the low trees that fringe the coral keys gave no warning rustle before the entire scene was pandemonium. One other memory of sudden sea storm comes back to me over many years from 95 Behind the Ranges the coast of Queensland. I see again the great steamer anchored in the open roads off one of the ports a few miles south of the sheltering Barrier Reef A continuous file of lighters moves between her and the quay, laden with wool and gold, with which to feed her yawning hatches. It is a sultry evening of September, the Pacific hushed in a silence as of the grave, and blue lightnings stab bing the blackness that hangs low over the land. The calm of the ocean is such as might weU de ceive any landsman unfamiliar with those latitudes. But the Captain knows better. An order is tele graphed from bridge to engine-room in the nick of time. Of a sudden, the wind comes whistling out of the south-east, a white line spreads across the blackness of the ocean and bears swiftly down upon us. The trained eye of the master mariner has read the sinister signs aright, and, instead of dragging her anchors and drifting on the shore, Rakaia steams jauntily northward, paying no heed to the catspaws that slap her starboard side, and leaving the half-empty lighters to get back as best they may and await the coming of the next vessel in a fortnight's time. The delay may anger Bradford, which wiU be waiting for its wool, but better keep Bradford waiting for a couple of weeks than go for ever to a destination where manifestos and bills of lading do not run 1 96 The Voyage It was the fancy of the ancients to name new seas after the mood in which they first found them. The seas do not always live up to their reputation. There are days on which parts of the Pacific are a maelstrom of liquid madness. The Greeks, in a moment of unwonted frankness, called the Black) Sea Axeinos. Then their poUteness got the better of their judgment and they changed its name to Euxeinos. First impressions, however, were best. In winter time, so I was told at Samsoun and Trebizond, its wrath is terrible to behold even from the shore, for it is lashed to fury by the January gales that drape Stamboul in snow for weeks together. In all the five hundred and fifty mUes of its southern shore, Batoum is the only port. At Ineboli, Kerassund and the rest, the Messageries and Paquet steamers must roll in open roads, while ponderous lighters are rowed to and fro by brawny Lazes. In summer time, however, matters are quieter, and there is rare beauty along that Anatolian coast, the little villages perched amid the cliffs recaUing scenes in Cornwall. In these days of universal tourist travel, every kind of voyage, short or long, in cold seas or through the tropics, in open water or in zigzag course among islands, is available. Those who seek a short speU of ocean travel of a hundred hours' duration should take one of the Union G 97 Behind the Ranges Castle boats, like the Avondale Castle, from South ampton to Madeira. Three days and four nights in mid- Atlantic are a wonderful tonic for a jaded system, and Funchal in springtime is whoUy de lightful. Two sea voyages in great favour with tourists are those organised by the Royal MaU Steam Packet Company to Morocco and the West Indies, and both of them combine all that is most enjoyable in ocean travel and coasting, with fre quent ports of call. The run to Morocco, touching at four or five ports, and home by the islands, occupies a month and is exceedingly moderate in its fares. It affords a glimpse of the Nearest East — the East which on the map is West— now, alas ! losing much of its romance in European hands, and of an archipelago ruled by Spain and Portugal. The longer trip is to New York by way of the West Indies and Spanish Main, one of the most delightful sea jaunts in the world. It begins and ends with days of sea and sky, while the time between is filled with almost daily ports of call : breezy Bridgetown, hot Trinidad, the steep hills of La Guaira, the white streets of Cartagena, rich in memories of Drake and the Inquisition, the steaming avenues of Colon, with a glance at the Canal and a night in cooler Panama, then Kingston, a phoenix newly risen from the ashes, and, last, the bracing hustle of New York. 98 The Voyage As has been said, the Gulf of Mexico is pecu liarly liable to sudden fits of rage. Crossing it from the Isthmus to New Orleans, or from Tampa to Key West, the traveller remembers that he is passing through the Gulf Stream, which, originating on the West Coast of Africa, crosses and recrosses the Atlantic, finally losing its indi viduality a little west of Britain. From the Isthmus of Panama to the mouths of the Missis sippi I travelled on board a little fruit steamer that loaded bananas for New Orleans at Port Limon- At the port of Costa Rica we took in over a quarter of a million bunches in the day, fed into the open hatches along endless bands, which took them off the trains that ran alongside the quay. Having gorged this stupendous meal, the little Preston lurched gallantly northward into the mud brought down by the Missouri and moored along side the old French city. The great Southern Ocean, which heaves between Australia and the South Pole, is perhaps the most appalling of them all. Though less feared by mariners than the Atlantic, it leaves a more tremendous impression of loneliness, and the great liner, rolling helpless in the Bight, with her restless convoy of wheeling albatrosses and scream ing moUymauks, seems, after having had the upper hand in all her earlier struggles, the merest play- 99 Behind the Ranges thing of the ocean until she turns the corner of Cape Howe. Even then there are days on which the Pacific rollers fling themselves against the mighty fabric of Sydney Heads with all the violence of which Nature in her naked savagery is capable. North, south, east and west the sea weaves its witchery. It is a cunning enemy, and one that can afford to wait. It plays with men and ships as a cat plays with mice. It purrs, then scratches, then kills. Its treachery is sublime. On land, there is no treachery to compare with it. Earth quakes and volcanoes take their sudden toU, but only in well-defined zones, within which those who choose to rebuild their homes in defiance of the elemental forces do so at their own risk. This might also, no doubt, be said of those who go down to the sea in ships, but, as a rule, they have no choice. One of these days the conquest of the air may offer an alternate route free from danger, and then the tyrant will be robbed of a portion of its prey. Yet, apart from the survival of fisheries and other traffic, there must always, so long as human nature is greedy of gain, be aged tramps that continue to ply for low rates, affording un principled folk a chance of gambling in men's lives. The sea, the unsympathetic, malignant, boundless, wanton sea, will still suck down its IOO The Voyage victims, still levy tribute from the sons of man, stiU leave the wives and sweethearts red-eyed beside empty hearths. Such is its hateful pleasure. It guards our shores, no doubt, but, guarding, pounds them, pulverising the cliffs, undermining the coast towns with irresistible erosion. As the author ofthe Faerie Queene has it — . . . the seas . , , by often beating. Doe pearce the rockes, and hardest marble weare. Going to sea for pleasure is a wholly modern development, virtually dating from the introduc tion of steam. In the reign of William and Mary, the Channel passage, between Dover and Calais, cost five shillings, with as much again for the use of the cabin, and a third sum of like amount in fees to customs officers, ferrymen, and boatmen on landing. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu paid five guineas for a special saUing boat to avoid crossing at night. As late as 1800, Monsieur D'Arblay was detained for days in a storm off Margate ; and on another occasion Madame D'Arblay was compelled to wait for six weeks at Dunkirk while the captain touted for more passen gers ! Compared with such privations, the precision and comfort of modern sea travel is remarkable, and a few words on the practical aspects of a voyage may bring this chapter to a close. Much of the traveller's comfort at sea will lOI Behind the Ranges depend on the size and position of his cabin, or (as it is more pretentiously styled nowadays) state room. Its size varies with the price paid, but the position is largely a matter of choice, and some knowledge goes to the choosing. When travelling in temperate latitudes due east or west, as between Liverpool and New York, one side of the ship is practically as good as the other, though the cabins on the port (or left) side wiU obviously (remembering that the sun is south at noon) be warmer on the outward and cooler on the home ward journey than those on the starboard (or right) side. For the same reason, passengers on south bound ships voyaging to Australia or the West Indies, should likewise choose a port cabin, with one on the starboard side for the return trip, as this selection assures a cool cabin at night, which may, in hot weather, be a boon. The choice between upper or lower berth, always supposing that it is necessary to share the cabin with another, is a matter of taste. On a Pullman car there can be little doubt about the lower berth being the more comfortable, for it not only dispenses with the clamber up a rickety ladder held by a negro, but it also, as a rule, commands the only window. Where, however, as is often the case, the upper berth in the cabin has the porthole, it is to be preferred, but those who suffer from sea-sickness 102 The Voyage should, for the sake of all concerned, occupy the lower. When the ship is full, and two, or even three, have to share the cabin, much tact is called for unless it is to be a bear-garden, and, as a matter of fact, the arrangement which throws perfect strangers into such intimacy is very bar barous. Get as near amidships as possible. The question of luggage is a complex one. There are few more reliable indications of an indi vidual's character than the luggage he travels with, and nothing but long experience can teach just the right quality and quantity to take on a sea voyage. It should in any case be very plainly marked, and the various labels supplied by the company, indicating whether it is to go in the cabin or hold, and whether it is likely to be wanted before the end of the voyage, should be securely affixed to each package. The amount allowed inside the cabin is, for obvious reasons, strictly limited, and the passenger is not, in fact, legally entitled to more than a single cabin-trunk (approximately 2 ft. 8 in. long, 1 ft. 6 in. broad, and 1 ft. 2 in. deep) that can be stowed away under his berth. An obliging steward and ac quiescent fellow-passenger occasionally make this allowance an elastic quantity, but the traveller should be prepared to make shift with the regula tion allowance. 103 Behind the Ranges If I say a passing word on the subject of sea sickness, it is, since I have never suffered from it myself, only in sincere sympathy with its victims. Though the ship's doctor has drugs capable of alleviating the worst degrees of misery, the perfect cure has yet to be invented. In mild cases, de termination counts for something. If the patient feel hopeless, there is nothing for it but to stay in the cabin, full length in the bunk, face to the wall, eyes closed, if possible asleep. The golden rule of prevention is to avoid looking at the sea or at anything moving, like a swing-lamp. If possible, the port should be kept open, but cur tained. F'resh air and subdued light are enemies to sea-sickness. The sufferer should make an effort to go on deck, as the open air is better than a stuffy cabin, but the deck-chair should be turned round so as not to face the sea. Any foolhardy resolve to go down to meals, come what may, is martyr dom for all concerned. It is only possible to keep fit during a sea voyage by feeding in moderation and taking exercise. Otherwise, the conditions would demoraUse Sandow himself It is wisdom to realise as early in the voyage as possible that the Captaui is master on board his own ship. His powers are, in theory, almost greater than those of the Tsar of all the Russias, 104 The Voyage though, on passenger boats at any rate, he usually exercises them with great moderation. He is, while at sea, the only magistrate on board. He can marry you, bury you, or put you under arrest. He is Csesar, and discontented people appeal to him on the most trivial pretexts. He is also, for his sins, regarded as a living "Enquire Within on Ever5rthing," and is therefore the recipient of many ridiculous questions that would soon throw anyone less level-headed into an ungoveoiable rage. Here are half a dozen hints that may be foui?d worth acting on. 1. Do not talk scandal. It is better to be its object than its purveyor. 2. Do not (unless you are a very attractive woman) worry the Captain with foolish questions about weather, whales and waterspouts. 3. Do not introduce second-class passengers on the first-class deck. Do not, if travelling in the first-class, intrude in the second or third, as if you had come to see the animals feed. 4. Do not play practical jokes. Yoit may be in high spirits yourself, but many people suffer, while at sea, from what Sir Ernest Shackleton calls " Arctic temper," and they have a right to be left in peace. 5. Whenever the ship is in port, keep your loS Behind the Ranges cabin door locked and the ports screwed down, particularly in the Mediterranean or along the Spanish Main, where the distinction between mine and thine is hazy. The stewards and quarter masters are too busy to do policemen's work. 6. Be good friends with the Captain, Purser, Doctor, and Chief Steward. Be good friends with everyone else. At journey's ending comes the peace of the harbour. In reaUty, it is often less peace than pandemonium, for people are in as great a hurry to leave the ship on the last day of the voyage as they were to join her on the first. Yet, of itself, this coming to port should be a restful ending, and the approach to the vessel's anchorage affords opportunity of speculating on the extent to which the harbour reflects the hinterland. As a matter of experience, the coast scenery is rarely any clue to what lies behind, for it either promises much that is unfulfilled, or it does less than justice to the interior of the country. In the case of estuary ports, since the majority of rivers degenerate in their tidal reaches, the harbour is inferior to the background. Yet something must always depend on the traveller's taste, and at the end of a long and tedious sea voyage the barest inland land scape wiU be preferable to the finest scenery on the coast, and a sensation of repose will in such 1 06 The Voyage cases invest the most homely scenes with a charm not appreciated by residents. Sydney Harbour, perhaps the most beautiful anchorage in all the world, does nothing to prepare the immigrant for the desolation that awaits him inland. Nowhere else in the State of New South Wales, unless it be in the distant Blue Mountains or on the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury, is there any beauty to compare with that of " our Harbour," and the low and barren shores of Botany Bay would make a far more appropriate introduction to the tedium of the bush. It is on the Queensland coast that we find unpretentious gateways, like Moreton Bay and the estuary of the Fitzroy River, more in keeping with the homeliness of Brisbane and the drab environs of Rockhampton. Whether for better or for worse, the harbour is rarely any guide to the scenes it leads to. Not the most patriotic Englishman could find in the Thames below bridges, or in Southampton Water, any hint of the peace of Berkshire orchards or of the fairyland in the New Forest. In Java, again, we find the converse of the condition noticed at Sydney, for whUe entering the city slums by way of Sydney Harbour is like passing some alabaster Moorish gate, only to find a refuse heap nosed by pariahs, those who come to the mountains of Java through the mangrove- fringed port of Tanjong 107 Behind the Ranges Priak will rather feel as if they had been brought through some humble side-postern full on the appalling majesty of St. Peter's. The malarial harbour holds out no invitation to visit the quaint streets of Batavia or the gorgeous gardens of Buitenzoorg. Even Marseilles, with here and there a dominant note in the church on the hUltop, or the ruined Chateau d'lf, gives little promise of the beauties of the Rhone valley or of the pictur esqueness of Montelimar, Aries and Avignon. The lovely sweep of Naples Bay has nothing compar able in the wretched environs of the city ; on the other hand, the homely features of Leghorn would never suggest the beauty of the hills that guard Florence. Algiers is as alluring as its hinterland is severe, but Tangier gives early promise of the eternal desert, for the steamer's deck is dusted with hot sand even before her anchor is down. Hamburg is more in keeping with the sober Prussian character of its joyless surroundings. I remember, on one occasion in March, taking twenty hours to plough patiently through a frozen Elbe, between Cuxhaven and Altona, and in such mood the river was more than ever characteristic of the scenery I found inland. Calais, like Hamburg, is in harmony with what lies behind, the flat ugliness of Northern France. So, for the matter of that, is DoA'er, with its noble io8 The Voyage chffs, a fitting portal for the orchards and hop- fields of fertile Kent. The contrast between Dover and Calais marks the difference between Kent and Artois. The peace of the harbour comes with the tur moil of creaking cordage, the rattling of chains, the whistling of tugboats, and the shouting of orders. It is journey's ending. According to circum stances, it is a crowded moment of regret or relief. And, within a few minutes, the staunch old ship that has been our citadel on the waters passes out of memory. Such is human gratitude. 109 tavola ronda non si contende," Cakes and Ale PEACHAM, writing of France in The Compleat Gentleman (1634), says : — Concerning their Dyet it is nothing so good or plentiful! as ours, they contenting themselves many times with meane viandes ... as for the poor Paisant, he is faine oftentimes to make up his meale with a Mush- rome, or his Grenoilles (in English, Frogs), the which are in Paris and many other places commonly sold in the Market. The French cuisine must have changed in the last two and a half centuries if a travelling tutor of that day could fairly describe it as "meane viandes " ! Yet, even to-day, there are many to whom a leg of mutton, boiled with capers, or a rib of beef, half-roasted, with horseradish, stands for delight beyond the magic of Benoist. These preferences are a matter of taste, and there is nothing to sneer at in such honest yeoman's fare, which is certainly more nourishing and less harm ful than the " pretty little tiny kickshaws " of foreign tables. There are likewise honest souls who would rather read the prose of Miss Emma III Behind the Ranges Jane Worboise than that of Balzac, and who see more beauty in the stanzas of Miss Ann Taylor (e.g. "Thank you, pretty cow, that made Pleasant milk to soak my bread ") than in Les Nuits of de Musset. There are in sular epicures who chafe at the bare mention of foreign cookery, regarding it, with Colonel Peter Hawker, as "messes of butter, sugar, and Lord knows what . . . greasy, sugary, salt, and acid. ..." They would go round the world cheerfully on a daily diet of chops and bottled beer, and in Austria, at any rate, they should in future find food to tickle their patriotic palates, for the Minister of Public Works has organised a course of State instruction in foreign cookery for hotel-keepers. The bliss of eating a haggis in a restaurant of Vienna, or a Cornish pasty at a window-table in Budapest, is not one to be lightly dismissed I On the whole, no doubt, this wholesome English fare is safest, and even in his food it is probable that the traveller wiU always return to his first love. Moreover, English cooking is vastly im proved, and those who travel on liners need no longer ask, with Thackeray, why they should always put mud in the coffee, or why the tea should generally taste of boiled boots. At the same time, it should be part of the traveller's 112 Cakes and Ale experience to try the dishes and wines of such countries as he visits. There is ample opportunity for eating eggs and bacon and drinking elderberry wine at home. A nation's food is an index to its character quite as much as its literature, its music, or its art. A mayonnaise of sturgeon, fresh from the Black Sea, eaten in a shady verandah of Batoum, and washed down with a bottle of the amber wine of the Caucasus, gives one clue, at any rate, to modern Georgian taste, and those who would realise the Creole ideal of hospitality must be prepared to eat " pepper-pot " and drink rum. He who cannot at least feign enthusiasm over such food of the country is a killjoy. This intelligent interest in other dishes than our own is not greed, and entails none of the reproach which troubled the conscience of Sydney Smith in his calculation of the food that he had eaten in his lifetime. It is the difference between the gourmand and the gourmet, between the hoggish appetite for quantity and the artistic appreciation of art. If there is one national dish that puzzles the understanding of those who eat their meals in the neutral climate of Britain, it is the curry of India. They cannot understand why a dish so highly spiced should be indispensable in so hot a climate. A Madras curry at Mount Lavinia, a rice tag at Batavia, or a pepper-pot (the West H 113 Behind the Ranges Indian equivalent of curry) at Port of Spain or Kingston seems as incomprehensible to them as the notion of Captain Scott eating ice-cream at the South Pole. The explanation of the curry's popularity is, of course, the stimulus to jaded appetites. There are, even at home, rare days in summer when people feel little relish for their dinner, and the combination of a high thermo meter and the freshly killed meat alone procurable in the East makes such condiments absolutely necessary. The word " curry," by the way, is an interesting illustration of the Asiatic parentage of so many European words. As we know it to-day, it is generally regarded as the English form of the Tamil kari. Yet there is a MS. cookery-book of the reign of Richard II, the title of which runs : " A forme of cury compiled of the chef maister cokes of King Richard the Secunde." As its hundred and ninety-six recipes include boiled porpoise, it is evident that the word " cury " denoted any sort of cooking. One of the best-known dishes of Western Europe is the Marseilles bouillabaisse, that won derful fish-chowder of which Thackeray inaccu rately enumerates the ingredients as Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace. I doubt whether any of these three fish ever 114 Cakes and Ale figures in the dish. Red muUets and rascasses (i.e. sea-scorpions), with crayfish, lobster, and various molluscs, are the basis of bouillabaisse, which is served with a saffron sauce. Many's the time I have sat at a little side-table at the unpre tentious Caf^ des Phocdens, in the Rue des R^col- lettes, kept by Isnard, and eaten more than enough of this appetising hotch-potch. The Marseillaise take legitimate pride in their national dish, but unfortunately, misled by the praise which foreigners ungrudgingly bestow on their one culinary achieve ment, they run away with the idea that their cooking generally is the last word in the art beloved of Brillat-Savarin, whereas, if the whole truth must be told, much of it is the crudest conjuring with garlic and onions. The full enjoy ment of bouillabaisse does not, it must be confessed, encourage pretty manners at table. Not even a Chesterfield could eat this mess of broken fish and bread dipped in saffron broth with any approach to elegance ; and he is happiest who, when busy chez Isnard, has no acquaintance in Marseilles above the social rank of the whiskered waiter who hangs on his eloquent praises of the fare. It is never, I think, an acquired taste. Some essay it once, from a sense of duty, but never return to it. I have even seen very English Englishmen push it away untried, revolted perhaps by the sight of such "5 Behind the Ranges debris, which certainly suggests to the unfriendly eye the salvage from a submarine earthquake. Un like caviare or olives, it has no insidious spell with which to win the reluctant palate. It takes a man by storm, or leaves him cold. It is love at first sight, or antipathy for life. I am not among its passionate admirers, and some of its charm for myself lies in its difference from any dish one gets at home. But then I would, for the sake of a new sensation, cheerfully eat lobscouse in the foc'sle. Mention has been made of " pepper-pot," and the Caribbean cookery, of which it is typical, is less crude than some travellers would have us beUeve. Inexpensive it is, because in the first place the resources of the West Indian larder are restricted, and, in the second, much of the glory of those pleasant islands is departed and residents have to exercise economy. They could not therefore afford such a dish as delighted Vitellius, with its flamingoes' tongues, mackerels' livers, peacocks' brains, and the " milk " of lampreys, an ingredient that should be more costly than radium. But only vulgarians nowadays esteem a dish for its cost, and I have messed at clubs in the AVest Indies on such fare as might reasonably tempt a fakir to break his vows in Ramadan. A dish of flying-fish in Barbados, a roasted lappe in Trinidad, a crab- ii6 Cakes and Ale back or pastel in Jamaica would earn the praise of connoisseurs, east or west. Fish lends itself peculiarly to the curious arts of the chef, though the fish course has lost some of its importance in modern times. We no longer, like the Roman senators, pay fifty sovereigns for a red mullet, nor, having espoused the Simple Life, do we expect our cook to commit suicide, as Vatel did, if the fish should come too late for dinner. We still, however, set a value on fresh fish well served. The flying-fish of Barbados, cooked straight from the nets and then eaten right off the grid, is better than sole or salmon. Having, on one occasion, eaten the greater part of a shoal at the Bridgetown Club, I sang its praises for two years. At the end of that time I found myself at table in an hotel on the island, and on this occasion I did not get beyond one mouthful of the first fish, for it was stale. Worse still, I had around me a company of disgusted shipmates, whom I had prepared for the surprise of their lives. They got it. I was unpopular for a week after. One of the most agreeable fish dinners I ever sat down to was in the French quarter of New Orleans. The dudes of New York pretend to despise the cuisine of the Southern States, yet not for all the dollars in Wall Street could Sherry's or Delmonico 's set before its guests a more appetising "7 Behind the Ranges meal of river-shrimps, served with red peppers on powdered ice, and boiled pompano, most deUcate fish in all the Gulf of Mexico, than may be had any evening at Antoine's. The cooking in the North combines quaUty and quantity. A menu a la carte in a fashionable New York restaurant is a formidable document, even to a greedy man. It may offer the choice of thirty salads and a dozen soups, with such startling contrasts to spur the jaded appetite as highly spiced dishes served on ice, or ice-cream surrounded with a boiling sauce. As an instance of the latter, I recollect, at Delmonico's, a famous sweet that was named Peche rosadelle, in memory of a deceased wife of the proprietor of that famous establishment. The stone of the peach was re moved and the cavity filled with strawberry ice cream, the whole being served with hot chocolate sauce. Here, surely, was a nightmare among sweets, calculated to shock the stranger of simple tastes, but it was delicious all the same. Iced water is drunk at table, even by many of the smart set. I would I could add that it is also drunk at other times, but, as a matter of fact, the average American reserves his teetotalism for the pubUcity of the restaurant. In America, even more than in England, it is not so much what you do as what others see you do. ii8 Cakes and Ale By way of contrast with these modern eccentri cities of the American table, the Near East has some ancient dishes of perhaps greater interest to the student of table history. Oil and spices are important ingredients, and disguise is their keynote. Pilaf, in some form or other, is found on every Turkish table. Like the kous-kous of Morocco, it is a mess of flesh or fowl served with boiled rice or other grain, and it sometimes takes the form of kebabs, balls of forced meat, in a steaming heap of rice. Although the use of knives and forks has become more general in Turkey since the Constitution, the Turks still like their eating made easy, and a dish like mous- saka, consisting of chopped meat cooked with beans, is not only easily eaten, but makes all sorts of meat passable which, served au naturel, would offend a vulture. Herein also lies the attraction of the dohna, sometimes called yalandji, or " the liar." Subtly as a yashmak veils the pale face of some Circassian beauty, so does the crumpled vine leaf of the dohna hide the exact proportion of the meat, oils and spices that go to make it. Mackerel and other small fish of the Bosphorus are also boned and stuffed with a savoury season ing of onions and peppers. The Turk does not, in fact, approve of the whole boiled fish, or warmed bird, which finds favour on English 119 Behind the Ranges tables. He prefers mystery even in his meals. It is a sound principle of cookery, of which con cealment is the art ; and those who think such disguise superfluous might as weU pry into the secrets of the kitchen and watch their food being prepared. Among lighter dishes, the Turk has a weakness for his kaimak and yagurt, the former clotted cream, the latter an acid version of Devon shire junket. Of all the food of his wanderings, the traveUer wiU probably recall with least effort the dessert. The passion-fruit of AustraUa, often eaten with sherry or other wine, is a pleasant but, to my mind, overrated deUcacy. The sickly mango of the West Indies I dislike as much as I cherish the ripe green fig of the Levant. The durian is a fruit which smells like drains, but he who, having some control over his nose, can eat it without regard to its frightful aroma is said to win a prize. Personally, I tried and failed. Fruit grown under kinder skies than ours may be had at prices at which even suburban greengrocers would wince. I have bought a large, ripe Jamaica pineapple for one penny, a clothes-basket fuU of ripe white-heart cherries in Asia Minor for a franc, oranges in Jaffa and bananas at Brisbane for little more than the asking. Before the Turks became civilised by contact 120 Cakes and Ale with Europeans, they were total abstainers, though the upper class, including several Sultans, partook too freely of the national spirit, raki, which, by a deUghtful casuistry, is not, like wine, specificaUy condemned by the Koran. Even to-day, the rank and file, at any rate outside the Greek quarter of the cities, stUl prefer tea or coffee. The tea is vile, and the coffee superb. Those officers, however, who have served with German regiments drink their champagne, claret, or beer in public places as they would not have dared when the spies of Yildiz lurked behind every piUar. Mention of alcoholic drink reminds me of the curious contrast I found in the public attitude towards it on two visits to the United States, a wave of prohibition having in the meanwhile rolled from New York State south and west, over prairie and savannah, reaching even to the Gulf Coast and Pacific Slope. Congress had apparently found itself in the same predicament as the Old Woman who Uved in a Shoe, and was determined to bring up its vast family of mixed parentage by the terror of the law. Disraeli once said of Brougham that the lawyer had spoilt the states man, and the same criticism would have applied to half the men in Congress at the time. Seattle and St. Louis forbade the sale of cigarettes ; Texas and Arizona prohibited liquor on the trains. 121 Behind the Ranges Horse-racing was banished on all sides. Laws were introduced penalising kissing. As we of older and saner communities foresaw, these maniacs in pursuit of the millennium achieved only a very moderate measure of success. W^here, personaUy, I anticipated inconvenience, I found evasion so easy as to be unattractive. During three days on the southern railroads which traverse the Prohibition States, I drank wine freely and without interference, though it had to be white wine, and I had furthermore, for appearance' sake, to drink it from a cup, so that to the prying eye of any sanctimonious busybody it might suggest cold bouillon. At Seattle I bought a hundred cigarettes in three days, pretending the while to be purchasing cigars in case some detective might be hanging about the entrance to the store. The storekeeper would spread a newspaper casuaUy over the counter, and, while 1 was ostensibly look ing at the cigars laid upon it, he was passing me packets of cigarettes underneath, begging me sotto voce not to light up until I had turned the next corner. Such tricks are worthy of monkeys, but what are you to do when the State interferes with your harmless indulgences ! Yet, these faUures notwithstanding, our American friends take pathetic pride in the success of their morality by legislation, contrasting it comfortably with 122 Cakes and Ale their own conception of English society, according to which it is rare for any member of the British aristocracy to appear in public unless he is intoxi cated. When I was last in the Dominion, the Prohibition mania had also infected the Lower Provinces, and it was very difficult to procure wine or spirits at all, and quite impossible to do so without all manner of humiliating subterfuge. Under more charitable auspices, wines of the country are an interesting study. Madeira is the home of an extraordinary variety of vintages, and I remember how a friend and myself, having nothing better to do, once started at opposite ends of the wine list at Reid's hotel, keeping strictly to wines of the island and not even sampling the Collares of the mother country. We met, near the middle, at a wine, the name of which I have forgotten. Anyhow, its bouquet struck us simul taneously, and we took it during the rest of our stay, to cool us on hot days, to cheer us on cold, aut qucelibet altera causa, until at last we exhausted the bin and had to fall back on the next best. Turkey has no native wine, unless we count as such the red and white Balkan made in the country by Germans. The Caucasus, on the other hand, has a few excellent wines, and I recall with gratitude an amber- 123 Behind the Ranges coloured Wassipoff that was nectar in the suffoca ting August heat of Tiflis and that, not far, indeed, from the frontier of his native land, made me recall Fitzgerald's version of old 'Umar Al Khay yam— ... I often wonder what the Vintners buy One half so precious as the Goods they sell ! After the wine, the tobacco, and of all my memories of nicotine, the nargileh, or hubble- bubble, which I first smoked in the pubhc bath at Damascus, is perhaps the strangest. It is just a hookah, or water-pipe, the tobacco, which lies in a little bowl, being lighted with a smaU red-hot coal. I do not remember that I particularly enjoyed it, but it was a bit of local colouring that I could not resist, and I took it from the attendant rather than ask for the cheap and excellent Regie cigarettes (first quality, twenty for eightpence ! ) that I should have preferred. Ten years earlier I had tried a similar experiment, and with even less success, smoking Indian hemp in a INIoorish kief-pipe. The kief-pipe is fitted with a tiny bowl, or shkaf of baked clay and with a wooden stem, or sibsi, beautifully ornamented. The kief or hashich, is supposed to bring rapturous visions of those peer less houris of musk who people Paradise for the everlasting entertainment of the Faithful. For the sake of greater security from the public eye, 124 Cakes and Ale and uncertain how such apparitions might affect me, I locked myself in my room at the hotel with all the apparatus for my essay. Then, with due solemnity, I smoked my first pipeful of kief. The houris stayed away, and the stuff tasted vile. Fighting down my distaste for it, however, I deliberately smoked a second pipeful. That did it. I obtained a result — I was sick. That was the beginning and end of my kief-smoking, and the reader may Uke to profit by my experience. The retrospect is not edifying, and I turn with relief to the sweeter fragrance that is wafted across the years, that themselves have vanished like its blue smoke, from a perfect Havana cigar which 1 smoked with Mr. Upmann as we watched the girls trooping out of his factory at the ending of a summer's day. It only needed the strains of an orchestra to make a most realistic setting of a familiar scene in Carmen. Those who consider a temperate interest in the affairs of the table less artistic than swinish will, I hope, have passed over this chapter and sought me in more congenial mood. Personally, however, I never felt any more shame in enjoying a good meal than in looking at a beautiful picture or listening to divine music. It is an appeal to one sense and not to the others, and a well-laid table is scenery for the stomach. After all, we eat 125 Behind the Ranges moderately enough nowadays. What would twenty-one people say if they were asked to sit down to such a dinner as was served to Peter the Great at the King's Arms, Godalming? The menu included five ribs of beef weighing forty -two pounds ; one sheep, ditto fifty pounds ; item, three quarters of lamb ; item, a shoulder and loin of veal ; item, eighty pullets and eight rabbits I These trifles were washed down with a dozen of claret and two-and-a-half dozen of sack. That was work for able-bodied trenchermen indeed. But the quiet appreciation of good cooking is a very different matter. Even so fastidious a person as DisraeU wrote to his sister from Alexandria, telling her how he had enjoyed the " substantial fame " ofthe exceUent dinners given to him by a wealthy resident out of compliment to his father, who, in those early days, was more celebrated than the son. A man may appreciate the wine of a country in moderation, yet he need not approach it with a thirst that dwells fondly on the wine-waggons that run into Paris on the P.T^.M. railway. 126 Uber alien Gipfeln ist Kith," The High Places Two Voices are there ; one is of the sea. One of the mountains ; each a mighty voice. In both from age to age thou didst rejoice. They were the chosen music, liberty. TO him who lacks poetic imagination, this vaunted liberty of sea and mountains amounts to very little, for they are the tyrants of Nature and beget tyrants as violent as themselves. True, the mountaineers of every land defend their eyries with savage bravery against invaders, but they are dreaded tyrants to the feebler men of the plains. True, the Sea Powers of the eighteenth century were the pioneers of Uberty, but the sea cradled the pirates and buccaneers of every age. The sea is the worst autocrat in aU Nature, and the mountains are deadly enemies to man. Yet, for all their treach ery, there is, it is not to be denied, a sensation of freedom for him who can win it, climbing some towering peak and standing at the summit of creation, where he may breathe the rarer ether and look down on the little things of earth. Such a 127 Behind the Ranges one is uplifted by the freedom of the peaks more sublimely than even by the grandeur of the ocean. Is there any delight of travel greater than that of riding for days into the hiUs ? The Hill Diffi cult is the abiding challenge of life. The cUmb against odds whets the appetite for achievement. I would that I could recaU the joys of genuine mountaineering. Alas I the alpine passion, with all its accessories of axe and rope, has left me cold. Fear and laziness have combined to keep me from the narrow paths that wind into cloud- land, and I have been content to wander in the saddle on such wider tracks as could be trusted on horseback, much in the same spirit as those hunting folk who go by the lanes, leaving the hedges to the brave. We cannot aU be heroes, and it was never my ambition to moulder in a crevasse. Into the hills, then, I have ridden in several continents, and ever with the same relish of purpose constantly baffled, but always attain able, the promise of the something hidden behind the ranges. There is little danger in such excur sions, but on one occasion I was nearly the some thing myself It was in the hiUs which look down on the arid plain of Jericho. Through a glorious gorge, overlooked by an ancient Greek monastery, runs the little Wady Kelt, said to be Elijah's Brook Cherith, where the prophet was fed by 128 The High Places ravens. After bathing and fishing in the river, I got on my horse and took a short cut back to the high road, which nearly proved to be the longest "short cut" in all my experience, for the sorry hireUng of Jerusalem stumbled at the edge of a precipice, and, vrith another inch or two of side slip, I should have ridden straight into eternity. On another occasion, in the Atlas Mountains, one of the soldiers who formed my native escort, a man born and bred in the neigh bourhood, suddenly vanished over the edge, horse and aU. It was one of those sickening moments of catastrophe when time seems to stand still, but the man managed, miraculously as it seemed, to clutch at a dwarfed bush growing on the brink and to snatch his slippered feet from the long stirrups, and he hauled himself back to safety. The un fortunate horse went down a couple of thousand feet, food for the vultures that would quickly gather for the feast. This is the dreadful enmity of the mountains, treacherous even to their own children, who love them only as a refuge against other enemies, but never for themselves. The children of the valleys love them even less, for they not only harbour fierce tribesmen who raid their homesteads, but, while they may guard their pastures from de vastating winds, they also send down avalanches I 129 Behind the Ranges to overwhelm them. Indeed, the superstitious peasants of the Swiss valleys hold the evil spirits of the summits responsible for the dreadful scourge of cretinism, the infectious idiocy bred in such regions. For all their beauty, the High Places are always terrible. As Gray wrote of the Scotch mountains — None but these monstrous children of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. Johnson professed to find much of this High land scenery contemptible, but Burt struck a more usual note when he described it as hor rible. As has been said, the risk of such mountaineer ing on horseback is not very great, but it is curious how it sometimes terrifies otherwise fearless horse men unaccustomed to its perspective. I remember being much amused, when staying for some weeks in Madeira, with the manner in which a fiiend of mine, a man who has hunted his three days a week at home in every sort of country, would unobtru sively dismount and lead his horse whenever we rode round the Grand Curral or elsewhere in the hills, whereas I, a wretched horseman, one whose horse more often than not What thing upon its back had got. Did wonder more and more. 130 The High Places slid down the tracks on a stocky roan pony quite unconcerned, thanks to early experiences else where. Yet the deUght always exceeds the danger. The snow- covered peak, which at sunrise seemed within easy distance, is as far away at nightfall, and at the ending of another day a great red moon still hangs like a lamp behind its receding grim ness. It is this will-o'-the-wisp quality which makes the mountains so fascinating an objective. Fifteen thousand feet, with gradual ascent among the foothiUs, the summit may tower above the ocean, not the sharp and symmetrical peak of conventional scenery, but a jagged and irregular cluster of minor points, which man never yet trod and possibly never will. Yet the surveyor's theo dolite bears no false witness, and by simple processes of trigonometry we know the height to a yard, without ever setting foot on the summit. Even a modest ride in the lower spurs brings curious con tempt for the ease with which the cartographer etches half an inch of caterpillar as the symbol of a long day's arduous progress over broken ground. Unless a man be fired with the passion that has made great reputations for the Conways, Whym- pers and Dents, he will take such lesser heights as stand in his path merely as a welcome departure from the dead level of everyday adventure. There 131 Behind the Ranges may, of course, be other motives for a clamber. Some wild goat or sheep, with a coveted trophy on its forehead, will take men into the eternal snows. Some shrinking alpine plant will lure the botanist. The student of the Beginning will climb that he may better study the rock masses in which their story is graven. There are even men who climb for climbing's sake, and not even in the hope of describing a new record in the journals of the Alpine Club. Their spirits rise as the aneroid falls, and, their holiday ended, they come back to the plains the better for their visit to the heights. The vogue of scientific mountaineering for pas time is not, I think, much more than half a century old, though even in olden times a few enthusiasts would now and again climb a modest height for a new sensation, as when Trajan ascended Mount Etna to see the sunrise from its summit, or when Petrarch climbed a mountain near Vaucluse "to see what the top of a hill was like." As Ruskin says, this depends on the mood of the observer. The perspective changes with every upward step. The senses are sharpened. The eye grows keener, the ear more sensitive. He who looks down from the high places sweeps a wide horizon, but loses detail. Even in a theatre, the audience in the upper tiers, while missing much of the by-play enjoyed by those in the stalls, must nevertheless 132 The High Places obtain a series of impressions in the form of tableaux which probably elude those at the lower level. Even the watcher on the sea chffs, mere molehills compared with the alpine peaks, has full view of an opposite coast or a distant vessel hidden from those who spy from the beach. Seen from the decks of fishing-smacks in the bay, the cliffs, so lofty to those who climb them, look mere heaps of sand or chalk, and the fishermen do not envy those on high their wider range, though they may occasionally be glad of guidance from " huers " on the look out for the shoals. The difference between the mountains and the vaUeys is even greater. Seen from the summit, the city of the plains, teeming with a hundred thousand natives, suggests no more than an ash heap, with no sound or movement to reveal the pulsing life of its alleys and bazaars. To reaUse the full significance of Ruskin 's view, we must shake the dust of the plains from off our feet. If we are footsore and weary, the hills ahead frown derisively ; but if, full of hope and high desire, we scramble above the clouds on paths that glitter with freshly fallen snow, then we are ffiled with peace and contentment, looking on the lammergeiers wheeUng above the green valleys as if they were but chafers over a lawn. A sudden bend in the track gives a backward glimpse of the plains, and the bird's-eye view is as the index to a 133 Behind the Ranges book. Greater scope is vouchsafed, but little detail ; broad areas of maize and barley, with the deeper green of fig trees, or the paler verdure of an olive grove, gradually merging in a colourless blur scarce distinguishable from the grey crags that starve the humblest lichens. He who does his mountaineering on horseback has at any rate the advantage of being able to set full value on each point of view. I imagine that the real alpine climber, who trusts to his own feet to scale the pathless waUs that reach aloft, must devote all his energies and faculties to the accom plishment of his splendid purpose. He who is content to ride along winding goat tracks has leisure to look around him instead of anxiously keeping his eyes fixed on high. The more he looks at the scenery, and the less he concerns himself with his horse, the better, for at such altitudes the animal is best left to pick its own way. He looks on the summits with neither cringing fear nor the apathy born of ignorance. No patch of scrub, no remnant of ruined castle, escapes his watchful eye. He might be reconnoitring for an attack on the stronghold of revolted mountaineers. When the hills close around him, shutting out the sight of lower things, cutting off his retreat, hm-rying him upward and onward, he may, in a moment of rebellion against their magic, draw rein to gaze on 134 The High Places the magnificent upheaval, picturing himself on the petrified battlefield of some old fight in Asgard, the raging giants struck lifeless in their defiance of the mandate to be still. It is the calm after the storm, the enduring record of dreadful moments in which the earth was still molten, cooling after its ffight through space. Henceforth, apart from the accident of earthquake, only one normal force was to humble the pride of the mountains, and that was the wear and tear of little streams cradled in their summits. Eyes are the windows of the mind, not only betraying its thoughts, but also conveying the impressions from the world without, and even to eyes normally focussed on the commonplace these high places bring, if not great thoughts, at least a finer appreciation than is inspired by the plains. Thus it was that the Harz brought balm to the embittered soul of Heine as he gazed spellbound on that wondrous Brocken sunrise that moved him to cry aloud — Liebllche Kuhle und traiimerisches Quellengemurmel ! Tyndall, ordinarily, as I well remember him, the coldest and most calculating of men when conducting experiments in the physical laboratory, with a master mind that could move in milligrams and an eye that quivered in response to the least vibration of the chemical balance, was so uplifted 135 Behind the Ranges by the moral oxygen of the Alps that he rhapso dised over a world that seemed to worship " with the flush of adoration on every mountain head." The Canadian Rockies and the Caucasus I have known chiefly from the windows of trains rushing through their gorges, a point of view from which it is impossible to do justice to any mountain range, yet even such panoramic glimpses revealed something of their grandeur. Of the real Rockies of the hunter's trail, where so many of my friends had camped and shot, I know no more than of the real Caucasus of Littledale and Buxton. Never theless, though denied the fuUer satisfaction of such close intimacy, it was something to look even on the outer waUs of the haunts of grizzly and mountain sheep of which I had heard so much from the mighty hunters who had made the heights their playground. The botanist and geolo gist may deny the faintest resemblance between the two regions, yet to my roving eye there was surely much in common between the backbone of the Western Hemisphere and that other range which overshadowed the cradle of our race, where every step farther east is another backward into the mists of time. Less grand than either, less beautiful, it may be, than scenes I know in the green Atlas or in the fern-clad mountains of Java, it seems that the 136 The High Places mountain section of Carolina has left the most enduring impression in my memories. They call it " Land of the Sky " and " Sapphire Country," and it is weU named, for its abiding note is sky and colour, the green of its woods blending with the blue of its lakes and the greys of its mountain mists. Its timbers are a joy : white pine, jack pine, slender poplar, spreading chestnut, restless birch, with maple blushing red against the pale dogwood, and between the trees are sunny dells carpeted with wood-sorrel and other flowers. Through the leafy screen may be caught gleams of three lakes down in the valley, all well stocked with trout, and the chief of them called Toxaway, the Indian name for the Cardinal Bird. Down the steep gorge goes the Horse Pasture River, with a clatter that can be heard for mUes. Time was when the Cherokee Indian was lord of all he surveyed, but he is gone. He dreamed away his proud inheri tance, looking down from the sunlit peaks on the fertile vaUeys of Tennessee and awakened from his reverie by the shriU call-note of the klonteska, or hiU-grouse, which palefaces since miscaU the " pheasant." Then his heritage was taken from him, and he went to the hunting grounds, leaving no more abiding memory than others of his stock, no architecture more enduring than a wigwam, no written history, no record to mark his stay on 137 Behind the Ranges earth. Yet he had his rhythmic name for every hoary giant that towers to far horizons, re- christened, alas, with less of euphony in the American survey. Eno's Plott for Sunneehaw! Chingman's Dome for Nagestonah ! To the mis chief with Eno and Chingman that they must needs substitute their painful patronymics for the older music of the Redskin ! Among these foot hills of the Ottaray the brawUng Tuckaseegee leaps to the plains about Asheville, forcing its way through forest and over rock as it tumbles to sea- level. A million squirrels, that might be birds in fur coats, flirt from branch to branch or race across the glittering tracks. Woodpeckers tap incessantly on the trunks that hide their larder. The mocking-bird sings lustily from his love bower. A startled deer shows for a moment in a clearing, then bounds to safety. There are lovely mountain views also in Jamaica, one of them on the road out of the Moneague, along which I remember riding early one morning in .lune to breakfast with a hos pitable penkeeper. Up the valley, to my right, rolled a silent sea of mist, great combers surging over hill and dale without a sound, rushing up the mountain slopes like the surf that laps the cliffs of Devon. All the mountains of this Caribbean island are' strangely green, and round about their 138 The High Places feet we have built roads that would not have shamed the Romans. Towards me, that June morning, came the black folk in twos and threes, the women walking with that graceful swing from the hips which is the birthright of the daughters of Africa, and with arms outstretched to balance the loads of fruit they bore upon their woolly heads. Singing and laughing, displaying their perfect teeth in the grin that parts their homely faces from ear to ear, came these freed slaves, overgrown children, pathetic in their simplicity, yet full of animal spirits and asking pity of no man. The staunch little nag bore me bravely under trees that hid their noisy orchestra of pet- charies, tom-fools, humming-birds, and parrakeets, a brass band rather than the softer music of strings, yet in tune with the glare and merriment of the scene. There is little soUtude in these mountains of Jamaica, though elsewhere solitude is the keynote of the high tops. Everywhere are thatched vil lages or roofless, tatterdemalion shacks peeping from out the tangle of cane and banana, and often the horseman must draw rein on coming round a bend of the road lest his horse trample on a sprawling piccaninny crowing in the dust. The cattle of the mountain pens are magnificent beasts. Red Devons and white-faced Herefords, with a 139 Behind the Ranges few of Indian breed, wallow luxuriously in the waterholes or munch the coarse guinea-grass that grows beside the road. Alas, their life is no bed of roses ever since E spent brought his mongoose to destroy the ground-birds that formerly kept the vexatious ticks from multipljdng out of num ber. At nightfall, which comes swiftly in the Caribbean, the planters smoke their native cigars in the cool verandahs, lazily watching the moving lamps of fireffies and perchance, in homesick moments, recalling the fairies tripping in the shadow of St. Stephen's in lolanthe. The moun tains are hidden then, unless a great summer moon hangs in the cloudless sky to light a memory worth carrying to the grave. Not unlike these mountains of the West Indies are those of Java, though, situated ten degrees nearer the Equator, they dress more richly in tree- fern and in palm, which creep up their sloping sides until, just as their feathery greenness looks no greater than the neck plumage of some gigantic bird, they fall away, unable to breathe the thinner oxygen of the heights, and leave the giants bare headed in the golden dawn. Many of the traveller's fondest mountain memories are of the sunrise, and two of these I hope that I may never forget. The first was in these same mountains of Java, 140 The High Places as, one October daybreak, the rising sun crimsoned the timbered slopes of Gunung Salak, a sleeping volcano that towers a mile above a murmuring river in which little satin-skinned Javanese mothers wash their brown babes and gay sarongs. I had sat patiently in the verandah of the " Belle Vue " at Buitenzoorg since three in the morning, waiting for a sight that had been praised by no mean judge of such impressions, and it proved to be sleep well lost. Bathing the summit in a sudden blaze, the golden glory crept down the bare shoul ders of the rock, reaching its forest girdle, then broadening over miles of hanging jungle until it warmed the thatched roofs of little villages in the steaming valley and sent the native women and their babies toddling into the shade. Then, as I watched, came a sudden shower, a shower out of a cloudless sky, very typical of the Equator, which hung festoons of pearls on the limbs of the trees and blotted out my dreamland in a veil of iridescent gossamer. My other sunrise took me of a sudden three thousand feet up in the Atlas, beside the bubbling springs of Imintella. Through the deep blue of the African sky the first golden arrows shot over the forbidding crest of Gundafi, dispeUing a morn ing mist that had drenched the hawthorn and recalled Scotch corries in the grouse month. 141 Behind the Ranges My Moorish escort had no eye for the beauty of the scene, but merely dismounted for the morn ing prayer and spread their Ump blue haiks to dry in the welcome rays. Most of them retired some little distance and prayed in silence. It was my headman, Mohammed, who, always with an eye to picturesqueness in his orisons, flung himself prone on his face, within a yard of where I stood, and pronounced audibly the ninety-nine attributes of Allah. And as he whined through his prayers, I gazed reverently on the Lord of the East. 142 a.0 c/5 The Voice of the Mosquito IN aU the pageant of travel, no other class of animal life assumes the same importance as the insects. Four-legged beasts and two- legged birds have their place in the traveller's memories. The brutish camel and the patient ass, the graceful seagull and the wheeUng albatross, the majestic lammergeier of the mountains and the gross turkey-buzzard of the plains, jackals barking in the foothills, or deer standing sil houetted on the sky-line, are familiar objects of travel in many lands or on many seas. Snakes, too, that glide all day in the rustling underwood, and sleek frogs that sing the livelong night at the edge of the moonlit marsh, are the coldest memories of the tropics. Yet it is the animals on six legs, winged or otherwise, innumerable and insatiable, that bulk largest in the miseries of the open road. Canada has its black flies and midges, so maddening at their worst as to discount most of the thin-skinned sportsman's pleasure in the easy capture of splendid trout. Africa has ants that strip a camp in less than no time of its provisions. 143 Behind the Ranges The East, both Near and Far, suppUes fleas and bugs in such profusion as to make the beds sug gestive, as Thackeray said, of anything rather than sleep. Some folks are less sensitive to their company than others, but few are endowed with the sweet philosophy of Pepys, who, putting up for the night, with some ladies, at a rustic inn near Stonehenge, and finding the beds "lousy," adds the brief but significant comment, "which made us merry." Of greater importance than the rest, more dreaded because of the after-effects of their bite, more irritating because, even when powerless to bite, they keep their victims awake with their maddening song, more companionable, more patient, equaUy domestic in their habits, but less amenable to the corrective of cleanliness than other bedfellows of the same class, are the mos quitoes. Everyone knows nowadays, thanks to the propaganda of various Schools of Tropical Medi cine, that these insects are the Carter Patersons of diseases like yellow fever and malaria ; but my first - remembered experiences of them, on the Baltic in 1890 and in the Mediterranean the following year, were long before this aspect of their activity was common knowledge. We associated their bite with nothing more serious 144 The Voice ofthe Mosquito than passing irritation, and, as we were not in fected, the aggressors must have been the harmless Culex, or at any rate they could not have pre viously bitten fever patients. Northern Europe is, indeed, overrun in summer time with these pests, a fact very generally over looked by those who associate them only with tropical regions. To suggest that even malarial mosquitoes are present in parts of England is to run the same risk of ridicule as to point to the occurrence of sharks in British seas. Yet, previous to the draining of the fens, which destroyed many of their favourite breeding haunts, these insects were a constant source of trouble in this country, and malaria was rife. A species known to science as Anopheles bifurcatus, one of the recognised carriers of malaria, has been taken in woods near Cambridge during the month of May, and I have also been shown an example of A. nigripes, another offender, in Cornwall. Another species known in this country is A. maculipennis, regarded by Italian experts as the most active of them all in spreading the disease, though it is comforting to learn from Theobald's admirable Monograph of the Culicidce, published in 1901 by the Trustees of the British Museum, that this particular gnat has never been known to attack human beings in this country. In spite of these facts, and of the equally well- K 145 Behind the Ranges known abundance of these insects in Germany and the Low Countries (where they decimated our troops in the famous Walcheren Expedition), there is a deep-rooted belief in the exclusively tropical range of mosquitoes. Yet Mr. Harvie- Brown records how he was continually troubled with them as far north as the Petchora ; and even in Lapland they are the bane both of fishermen and of the reindeer, which periodically crouch in the doors of the native huts for the sake of the acrid peat-smoke that is fatal to their persecutors. Major Ronald Ross, c.b., in his Pi-evention of Malaria, and Sir Rubert Boyce, f.r.s., in 3Iosguito or 3Ian 1 * have given an entertaining account of our present knowledge of mosquitoes, and of the painstaking research by which their crimes have been established beyond all doubt. A brief sum mary of the results may be helpful to those who wish to understand the precise part played by the mosquito in the health of the tropics. These are no longer the " White Man's Grave," since aU manner of measures have been taken by way of reducing the mosquitoes and rendering human dwellings proof against their attacks. Yet it will be long before this source of danger is finally destroyed, if, indeed, such a result can be said to lie within the bounds of practical politics. * Both works are published by Mr. Murray. 146 The Voice of the Mosquito These insects breed in the water, and the eggs hatch out in a day or two, the larvce, which live only in the water, changing to the pupal stage in about a week. The pupa then floats at the surface for two or three days, after which the perfect insect emerges and flies away. Mosquitoes rarely travel any great distance from their birthplace, but winds may carry them far afield, and even in still weather they are apt to travel half a mile or more in search of food. The one condition which they must have is water. A hot, moist atmosphere favours their increase, whereas dry, cold climates are hostile to them. Other checks on their activity are such natural enemies as bats, birds, fishes, dragon-flies, and spiders, and these should always therefore be protected in mosquito country. Not only drought, but also wind, is fatal to them, and in still weather fans and punkahs are useful in keeping them away. The importance of mosquitoes is enormously in creased by the fact that they convey the parasites of yeUow fever, malaria, and other diseases, a dis covery for which the world is indebted to the patient and devoted researches of a long list of workers, from Dr. Nott, of Mobile, who published his notes in 1848, and Beauperthuy, a Frenchman who traveUed in Venezuela in 1854, down to such enthusiasts of to-day as Finlay, Ross, Manson, Boyce and others in Italy and elsewhere. At no 147 Behind the Ranges small risk to themselves, and usually with little or no encouragement from the authorities, these men have, with an ingenuity which Scotland Yard might envy, accumulated evidence against these winged suspects until, with no flaw of merely circumstantial evidence, they have revealed them as the only agents by which those diseases can be carried from infected patients to healthy subjects. Mosquitoes cannot, it is true, originate the mala dies. They must first find a human being who suf fers from malaria, and then they convey the parasite Plasmodia from his blood to that of another per son. The parasite makes itself at home in its new quarters, burrowing into the red corpuscles of the blood, and there it multipUes by throwing off spores. The only drug capable of destroying these organisms is quinine, which was first brought from South America to Europe for the purpose of curing fever in 1640, Five grains of sulphate of quinine, taken daily for four months, is a practically sure preventive. A brindled mosquito (Stegomyia) conveys the parasite of yellow fever in the same way ; and we now know that one of the tsetse flies {Glossi?ia palpalis) is equally and simUarly responsible for the spread of sleeping-sickness. As, however, Sir Frederick Treves points out in an interesting chapter of his book on Uganda, the tsetse prefers dark skins, and immunity may 148 The Voice of the Mosquito therefore be virtually ensured by wearing white clothing. There is, so far as is known, no case of original infection with malaria that is not directly trace able to the agency of the mosquito, for outbreaks which occur at sea, or in regions on land from which the harmful and necessary Anopheles is absent, are cases of relapse. It may, of course, be asked : " But how about the first case of malaria ? how about the first infected patient to which the first mosquito had to resort for its supply of para sites ? " This sort of question is not much more profitable than that about the first hen and the first egg. What does matter is that at the present day, so far as we are aware, three conditions are essential to the propagation of malaria or yellow fever — an infected patient, a healthy subject, and, as link between the two, a mosquito of the right species to effect the inoculation. Though malaria is rarely fatal — I have had it in my bones, as they say, these many years — it is one of the worst scourges of the tropics, if only because its attacks keep so much native labour idle. For this reason alone its effectual suppression is a problem of paramount importance in any scheme for the de velopment of tropical enterprise. Quinine and mosquito-nets are, so far as the private individual is concerned, the chief preven- 149 Behind the Ranges tives. Quinine is easily taken, and the palate soon grows accustomed to its bitter taste. Major Ross even mentions a patient of his who was a victim to its fascination, acquiring it as a drug habit. He must have been hard put to it for a new sensation, but, as a matter of fact, the clean, bitter taste is not disagreeable, and I remember taking ten grains daily with my moming coffee during the fortnight that my steamer was loading wool in a Queensland estuary. With the single exception of Barbados, which has, as I understand from Archdeacon Bindley, sometime Principal of Codrington College, no suitable breeding areas for the mosquitoes, malaria is very prevalent throughout the West Indies. In the plantations of Trinidad, Cuba, and Jamaica, it is still a scourge, though extensive drainage and other measures have done much in the way of reduction. It is the female mosquito only which sings at night and feeds on human blood, the male being a harmless creature nourished by vegetable juices. In spite of all that has been done to spread useful knowledge of the Ufe story of these insects, a number of curious fallacies stUl persist in the popular belief, among them that they are confined to tropical latitudes, a mistake already referred to, and also that their activity is restricted to the ISO The Voice of the Mosquito summer months, to night time, and to sea- level. "With regard to the first of these, mosquitoes do their evU work in the tropics all through the year, and there is even as far north as Ontario an anopheUne form known, from its occurrence at that season, as the " winter mosquito." It is undeniable that, if only for the manner in which their humming prevents people sleeping, mosquitoes are, on the whole, most troublesome at night, and they are at any rate more noticeable then than during the day. I have, however, been severely bitten in broad daylight in many parts of the world, notably in the harbour of Salonika and in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. These pests are so ferocious a little east of Vancouver that the platelayers on the Canadian Pacific Rail road have to veil their faces like Touaregs, a form of protection which leads many tourists to mistake them for beekeepers. Whether the mosquitoes actually fiy out from the town of Salonika to the anchorages of steamers a mile away, or whether, as seems more likely, they make the journey on the lighters and launches that ply continually be tween the ships and the shore, I had no means of ascertaining ; but they certainly came on board in great numbers, and, instead of being blown out of the ship as soon as she got under way, which is 151 Behind the Ranges the usual condition of affairs, they stayed with us for two days. The explanation of their persistence probably lies in the fact that the Messageries boats hug the coast and bum no more coal than is necessary, so that there was not perhaps breeze enough to blow the insects out of the ship. There are many ways in which insects are carried from one place to another, and I fancy that the streets and shops of Samsoun, on the Black Sea, are so full of files because these are introduced into the town on the bodies of the draught buUocks, which are always bringing in cartloads of produce from the countryside. The beUef in the exclusively nocturnal activity of mosquitoes may possibly have arisen from their preference for attacking human beings indoors, and therefore during the night, when all is still, rather than in the open air, where any wind, be it Gregale, Sirocco, or Levanter, is the deadly enemy of their race. Nor are they by any means confined to regions at sea-level. I have been bitten by them in the hills of Java, fully a thousand feet above the coast. Just as these insects Uke stiU air for their meals, so for their nurseries they prefer stagnant water, without any tide or current. It is, however, a mistake, which may cost dear, to regard them as unable to frequent running water, and a camping site should not be chosen in view of any such 152 The Voice of the Mosquito disability. More than fifty years ago, Livingstone found them in Africa on the banks of muddy streams, although, it is true, they were wanting in the vicinity of clear rivers. The manner in which their hatred of wind banishes them from ships in motion has just been referred to. During two voyages along the Spanish Main, I found that, whereas they invaded the cabins at every port of call, they were invariably blown out again within an hour or two of leaving. At one port only in the Near East did I fail to see a single mosquito, and that was at Batoum. It may be that the petroleum of Baku, exported in " tankers " from Batoum, though in small quantities to-day com pared with the volume of trade before the last Revolution, has so impregnated every pool and ditch in the neighbourhood of the port as to make the water untenable for these insects. My worst experience with mosquitoes was at Montego Bay, in Jamaica, where, some years ago, I stayed for a week's fishing, living in an hotel on the hUl overlooking the town. The side ofthe hill was covered with tall and waving grass in which the insects had their hammocks, and these they would desert after a downpour of warm rain and come into the rooms in their hundreds, waiting until darkness brought their opportunity. One moming, after a night of torture, in the course of 153 Behind the Ranges which I killed a score or two, I counted no fewer than one hundred and sixty-two of them (including sixty of malarial anophelines) clinging to the waUs. The torn mosquito-curtains of the hotel availed little against their patient search for food, and I had unfortunately left my own netting down at Kingston, relying on finding efficient protection in an island so infested. There are in the West Indies very minute black mosquitoes capable of getting through any curtains inside which a man could breathe, but the kinds that carry malaria are of larger build and can be kept out. My wrists and ankles were raw, for when the mosquitoes left off, I began, the maddening irritation making it impossible for me to keep my nails off the wounds. Nor was the trouble confined to the nights in bed. I played lawn tennis in a garden overlooking the bay, and even the usually effective bonfire of pimento leaf was useless, so that I enjoyed the agreeable sensation of being bitten in the face at the moment of returning a half- volley. After the first year, settlers in Jamaica, unless abnormaUy thin-skinned, pay no further attention to mosquito bites, but this indifference must apply only to the temporary irritation caused by them, as so short a probation could hardly bring lasting immunity from fever. I had found the mosquitoes both numerous and thirsty in Florida a fortnight earlier, 154 The Voice of the Mosquito but fortunately I had my own bed curtains there, and these did what was expected of them and kept the bloodthirsty intruders at a respectful distance, humming their grace before meals to ears that soon grew indifferent to their unanswered prayers. Mosquitoes are very troublesome in Morocco. IMany parts of the country are too drought-smitten to support them, but the great cities are well supplied with water from the hills, and the native domestic economy is such as to produce conditions very favourable to mosquito colonies. There was a large tank in my garden, not indeed stagnant, since it was always filling and emptying, and it was a wonderful hatchery for namoos, which came forth and spoiled the stranger, though the Moors took little notice of it. Indeed, since everything is comparative, I found that, with the livelier excite ment of scorpions on the premises, I too grew curiously indifferent to the lesser evil. On the whole, I fancy that the coast region of Queensland was perhaps the worst mosquito country 1 ever travelled in, and while a tramp steamer, by which I returned to Europe via the Barrier Reef, lay in various ports and estuaries, taking wool and gold into her cavernous hold, the insects came on board in hordes, though, owing to regular dosing with quinine, not one of us went down with fever. 155 Behind the Ranges Thanks to the champions of science versus " fakirism," as Major Ross caUs the official ignor ance which disdains the modern developments of medical research, the intimate connection between mosquitoes and malaria is universaUy recognised. It is, however, interesting to remember that within comparatively recent years this relation of cause and effect was either flatly ignored, or at the most vaguely suspected. We need not even go back as far as Disraeli, who never had any suspicion of the connection between the Cairo mosquitoes and the fever which attacked his travelling com panion in that city. Much more recently than this. Englishmen doubted a fact said to have been known to the Sinhalese fourteen centuries ago, and many living writers were ignorant of the true significance of a mosquito bite. Selous, writing in 1881, mentions mosquitoes and fever as occurring together, but without any apparent notion of the relation between the two. Six teen years later, the late A. H. Neumann could Ukewise have had no idea of the truth, for though, during his stay on the shores of Lake Rudolph, constantly attacked by mosquitoes, he attributed the resulting attack of fever to a chiU and more particularly to the faulty treatment of a broken limb. In the same year (1897), Sir H. H. Johnston got "very warm," as children say when playing 1 56 The Voice of the Mosquito "Hide the Thimble," for he referred to the mosquito as an undoubted source of illness in Africa, and said that it seemed " to introduce some unwholesome substance into the blood." Yet the case against these insects was by no means gener ally admitted, for a year previous to the appearance of his book on British Central Africa, Mr. Scott Elliott (in A Naturalist in Mid-Africa) had pro fessed himself a sceptic of the theory then gaining ground, citing Tanganyika as a spot where fever was very bad, though mosquitoes were " almost or altogether absent," and, on the other hand. Salt Lake as a locality abounding in mosquitoes, though fever was " not present at all or very rare." Something has been said of the preventives available to the tourist, and of the extended work of mosquito-reduction as undertaken by Govern ments with vested interests in the tropics, it is unnecessary to write, since these larger operations of drainage and screening are altogether outside the scope of the individual and aim rather at making those regions less uninhabitable for whites. To the tourist, however, 1 venture, in addition to what has already been suggested, to offer a few simple hints, the result of somewhat varied ex perience of these " winged serpents " over the greater part of their range. 1. He should use mosquito-curtains, not only 157 Behind the Ranges in his sleeping-quarters, but also in his living-room or tent, iinmediately after sunset. Even when at rest during the extreme heat of the day (which is, however, not invariably the case), these insects always resume their activity at sunset. The brief twilight of the tropics, the time, it may be, of the evening meal in camp, is a most dangerous period. The wrists and ankles are too often exposed to attack, care being taken only to protect the head, and if artificial light be used, it is a beacon to these bloodsuckers which they never ignore. Excessive heat may preclude all idea of closing the windows or tent flaps, but a mosquito-curtain can usually, with very little ingenuity, be so arranged as to screen those who sit at table. At night, such protection is indispensable. It may make the sleeper hot, but it is better to Ue awake hot than to sleep while mosquitoes are poisoning the blood. 2. He should anoint his hands, face, neck and ankles, the most vulnerable parts exposed to these insects, with some substance distasteful to them. Not all the preparations advertised as efficient do what is promised. Against the mild and unenter prising namoos of Morocco, whose energies are probably impaired by the dry summer climate in which alone I knew it, I found essential oil of clove, lavender, or eucalyptus sufficient provision, 158 The Voice of the Mosquito but the fiercer mosquitoes of Jamaica treated it with contempt as a mere dash of Angostura bitters to whet the appetite. The patent dressing known as "Muskatol"is often excellent, and a stronger, though more disagreeable preparation of it by the same maker, will even keep the deadly blackffies of Canada at bay, which says much for its beastli ness. Even so, it is preferable to the ointment of tar and tallow used by anglers on the banks of rivers in Newfoundland, where the flies and midges are, from all accounts, nothing short of murderous. These preparations are supplied in bottles with a spray attached, but it is better to use them with a swab of cotton wool, which may be fitted inside the cork ; and it is of the utmost importance to apply them very frequently, as they evaporate rapidly, particularly in warm climates, and soon lose their strength. 3. He should exercise great care in choosing the sites for his camps, and should never leave this to his native servants. While it is desirable to camp not too far from water, there is no need to pitch the tents close to a lake or well, which his natives will invariably do if left to their own devices, if only to save long journeys in fetching water for the camp. For the same reason native villages, particularly in Africa or in tropical America, should be systematically given a wide berth, as 159 Behind the Ranges they are certain to be centres of infection, harbour ing malarial patients on whom the mosquitoes must feed before conveying the fever to Europeans. This is so important that I would put it even before the danger of stagnant water. Another considera tion of importance in pitching the tents for the night is that they should have their openings towards the direction from which the wind is blowing, or likely to blow. It is the greatest mistake, at any rate in mosquito country, to be afraid of a little wind. The widespread dread of fresh air is probably responsible for half the Uls of our city Ufe, the spread of phthisis included, and medical men have lately been defending, even the much-abused draught as a probable aid to health. If it be a blessing in disguise in temperate lati tudes, it is nothing short of salvation where there are mosquitoes on the prowl. The tourist should not therefore aUow his men to pitch the camp, as they are fond of doing, in the lee of a waU, or close to a sheltering clump of windward trees. It should be out in the open, where the blessed wind can rattle the canvas and blow the mosquitoes away. One writer on the practical aspects of tropical travel even goes so far as to advise those who visit the jungle to choose only such paths as are patrolled by dragon-flies, which, as we know, are deadly enemies of the mosquito. This, how- i6o The Voice of the Mosquito ever, is a counsel of perfection, for the traveller in the tropical forest takes the shortest route to his goal, anxious to reach the next camping ground before dark, and does not stroll at random, looking for dragon-flies, as he might on Chestnut Sunday in Bushey Park I 4. He should see that the inside of the tents is well fumigated, and that the operation is swiftly followed up by a well-directed attack on the stupefied insects. The material used for smoking out the mosquitoes will in great measure depend on what is available. In Jamaica they burn pimento leaf. In Canada the " smudge-pot " is fiUed with birchbark and other kindling. The acrid smoke which arises from such material is very trying to the eyes, and it is usual to remove the " smudge " and to kill as many of the insects as can be seen before retiring for the night, the greatest care being taken not to light a lamp or candle inside the tent before closing the flaps. Prevention, always better than cure, is doubly desirable where it is as easy as in dealing with malaria. Even if the bites of these scourges cannot always be avoided by the precautions sug gested above, it is still possible, by the judicious use of that admirable prophylactic, quinine, to avert any worse result than temporary irritation, L i6i Behind the Ranges which may, in turn, be allayed by touching the bites at once with ammonia or even with the juice of a freshly cut lime. It is, however, important to remember that it may be too late to take the quinine once the mischief is done, or even on first arriving in mosquito country. He who con templates a visit to the tropics should prepare beforehand, slowly and surely, taking five-grain doses daily for two or three weeks before leaving England and also on the voyage out. My first encounter with malaria was in Ceylon, sixteen years ago, and, thanks to unbounded faith in quinine, it has troubled me very little since then. If all these efforts be frustrated, if, in spite of such measures, malaria ensue, there is nothing for it but increasing doses of quinine. These should, if possible, be administered by a medical man, but as much as thirty grains may be taken daily in extreme cases, a regimen usuaUy combined with the simplest of food, total abstinence from alcohol, and the corrective of slight aperients to counteract the properties of the drug. While the voice and bite of these detestable insects are among the least happy memories of travel, so many of their misdemeanours and of the weak joints in their armour have been laid bare by enthusiastic workers in the field of tropical medicine that the tourist has no excuse for allow- 162 The Voice of the Mosquito ing them to interfere seriously with his pleasure, or in any degree to constitute a menace to his health. If "forewarned is forearmed," then he who nowadays makes holiday in the tropics, being, indeed, less susceptible to their diseases than residents, should, so far at any rate as mosquitoes are concerned, be as invulnerable as the immortals. The most remarkable work in the way of mos quito-reduction is that carried out by Colonel Gorgas on the Isthmus of Panama. I remember staying a night in his quarters at Aucon in 1906 and another night in the hotel at Panama two years later. On neither occasion were mosquito- curtains needed, though the Tagus, moored along side at Colon, was infested with the insects, which swarmed in every cabin. The photograph facing this chapter shews the brigade which carries out this beneficent work on the Isthmus. 163 'Angling is somewhat like poetry ; men are to be born so," The Fisherman's Mercator THE sportsman, once his wanderings are over, and gout or poverty chains him by the leg, must find what comfort he can in an arm-chair and an atlas. At any rate, the maps mean more to him than to those who never shot or fished in other continents. The little worms of rivers, the blue patches of lakes, bring back the pull of salmon and the leaping of trout. The caterpiUar tracery of mountain ranges is tipped with snow and recaUs trophies on the sky line, arduous clambers, the suppressed excitement of native stalkers. Why, even the London railway stations have their meaning for the fisherman : Euston or King's Cross speaks to him of salmon ; Waterloo of Test trout or Christchurch pike ; Liverpool Street of Broadland bream and roach. The seaports are to him but gateways to his play grounds overseas : Liverpool points the way to black bass and muskallonge and ouananiche ; Southampton to tarpon ; Plymouth to snapper and stompneus. For myself the Mercator chart has golden i6s Behind the Ranges memories, though, praise be, I am not yet reduced to its companionship. In the two decades between 1890 and 1910, I can enter a variety of dates as far apart as Vancouver and Tasmania, as the cold Baltic and sunny Gulf of California, as the treacher ous Black Sea and slumbering Caribbean. My most eccentric geographical feat with the rod was when I fished in two oceans on the same morning : off Colon at daybreak, and off Panama at noon. It has always been a pleasant episode to me, though the catch was very slight; but to bait one's hook in the Atlantic and Pacific within six hours must, I imagine, be a somewhat uncommon ex perience. Nine different expeditions are brought back to me by this old Mercator, and if fish and fishing were not in every case the avowed object, they were of all the dearest purpose. To the Baltic in 1890, where, it is true, I incidentally entered myself as a student at a German University and attended lectures on agricultural chemistry ; to the Mediterranean the year after, where I read ItaUan authors and murdered the works of composers unable to retaliate ; to far AustraUa in 1895, where I made acquaintance with many native writers and artists ; to Morocco, by way of Biarritz and Gibraltar, in 1899, where I was received at the Moorish Court by both Abd-ul-Aziz and his gi'eat 1 66 The Fisherman's Mercator Vizier, since dead. These were incidental results of my earlier odysseys ; yet shall I not rather remem ber the curious mixed fishing in the Baltic, with sea and river fish in company ? or the night fishing off Leghorn, with a crooked little barber for com panion ? or the black bream and schnapper of the distant Colonies, then only dreaming of a federated Commonwealth ? or the red mullet of Tangier Bay and the barbel of the Tensift River ? Later expeditions were wholly concerned with fishing : Madeira in 1905, where I fished for tunny and caught murasnas ; Florida in 1906, with side tracks to Carolina and Jamaica, and the capture of both tarpon and malaria, the last rather a recapture, since it had evaded me since I first caught it in 1895 ; California and Canada in 1908, with the sport of Catalina and my first acquaintance with the black bass ; the Near East in 1909, taking toll of waters fresh and salt, from the sea of Galilee to the Gulf of Ismidt ; and the Near West in 1910, my last futile raid on the tuna, of which the memories are still too vivid to be altogether agree able. It is good to fight the old battles again, and to let the careless eye roam to and fro between 50° on either side of the Equator, or 150° either side of Greenwich, conjuring up visions of the good fish that died and of the better that went free. Memory, following the line of least resistance, 167 Behind the Ranges dwells first on recent scenes and thence ranges back to the hazier views of earlier travel. Such lazy retrospect, wandering back along life's road, takes me in zigzag fashion over the map, starting from the easternmost section of Canada and ending in the Baltic Provinces of Germany. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were the scene of operations in 1910, with grilse and trout, all on a clumsily thrown fly, in the merry Miramichi, and, alas ! without tuna in the bays of Cape Breton Island, the trip finishing with a few good black bass in a backwater of Lake Huron known as Georgian Bay, a lovable and lonely mere far from the haunts of man. My blank Mercator spares but a quarter of an inch for dreary Cape Breton, with its frowning cliffs and windswept bays, its indented coast, often veiled in fog from the Newfoundland banks, its lean farms and hubby roads. Yet on that quarter of an inch I spent five summer weeks in vain pursuit of a monstrous fish that would have none of my blandishments. An earlier tour through Canada, from west to east, two years previous, had given me trout in a won derful lake beyond the Rocky Mountains and black bass in another lake within easy distance of Montreal. In the lake outside Kamloops I caught trout so easUy that the sport almost lost its savour after the first hour of each day. Yet i68 The Fisherman's Mercator how often, when wooing the unresponsive fish of waters nearer home, have I recalled those facile trout with vain regret I In Lake Broom I caught not only bass, but also pickerel, perch, chub, and several other kinds. It was, in fact, more like an aquarium, so varied was the stock. A third lake was fished on that occasion. It lay in the shadow of the Rockies, and was named after the Devil. I trolled in it for an hour or two and hooked what may possibly have been His Majesty's tail-tuft. At any rate, something, fortunately unseen, nearly broke my Tweed salmon-rod and then went on its way. Canada is a marvellous playground for fishermen and blackflies, and the latter cease their merriment in August. Unfortunately, the food, outside of the cities, is terrible and would aU but turn the stomach of a starving ostrich. Even Washington Irving, ordinarily a philosophic travel ler, tasted of its horrors and resented them. It is, I know, the fashion (on paper) to scorn good fare and other comfort as foreign to the spirit of sport. " Roughing it " is vaguely supposed to add to the glory of every trip. Yet I have always held that pigging is no part of a properly planned hoUday, and I would as soon brag of wearing dirty linen as of being satisfied with such garbage for my meals. How different from the deserted forests and 169 Behind the Ranges lonely lakes of the Dominion were the teeming alleys of Stamboul and the scented bazaars of Damascus ! I confess to loving better, as the human background of my travels, the robed pay- nim of the cradle of our race than the adopted children of the New World ; better the sun of Syria than the fog of Newfoundland ; better the gay bazaars of Cairo than the Yankee stores of Montreal and Winnipeg ; better the lateen-saUed felucca than the dugout canoe ; better GalUee than Ontario ; better the Nile than the Hudson. For these and other reasons of more personal interest will 1909 and my Mercator square, bounded by 20° N. and 20° E., always hold sweeter associations for me than the square bounded by 40° N. and 40° W. in which is inscribed 1910. Perhaps it is the call of the blood. At any rate, the Holy Land and Egypt sing in my heart, where the Dominion and the Union are silent, for these be new lands, kind, no doubt, to many who seek their protection, but to myself without any attraction beyond the brief limits of a summer hoUday. On this old Mercator is a tiny notch, scarce visible, that marks the Gulf of Ismidt. What a puny diagram for that glorious landlocked sea, its southern shore guarded by the proud summits of Anatolia and red with the cherry orchards of Deirmend^r^, while on the north side are the silk 170 The Fisherman's Mercator factory of H^rdkd and the minarets of Ismidt ! Here, in a little inn belonging to the much dis cussed Bagdad Railway, now the pivot of the Near Eastern policy of four Powers, I stayed two months, enjoying such sport with bass as elsewhere men only dream of, the infinite peace of a perfect summer broken only by visits from Armenian fisher men, Turkish gardeners, and occasional friends who came in their yachts from Constantinople, fifty miles away. Earlier that year I had fished in the muddy Jordan, in sacred Galilee, and in the mystic Nile. The sport and scenery of the eastern end of the Mediterranean may fall short of Canada's best, but give it me again and keep the other. It is like playing once more in the nursery. of child hood, and it fills the pUgrim with very tender thoughts. The retrospect of 1908, which takes me west again, embraced, in addition to Canada, of which enough has been said, the Spanish Main and West Indies, which I had visited two years earlier, the Panama Canal, or so much of it as was then accom plished, and the glorious State of California. With flying-fish on my plate at Barbados, where, being stale, they were less satisfactory than on a previous encounter, and with white bass and yellowtail on my rod at Santa Catalina and trout in Lake Tahoe, it was a pageant of fishing from start to finish. 171 Behind the Ranges The Caribbean, with infinite variety of sea-fish, from tarpon downwards, should be a wonderful haunt of sea-anglers, but, for some reason or other, possibly the dread of earthquakes or of the delays of quarantine, it is woefully neglected by them. Yet I can assure those who care to know it that the waters round Cartagena and Savanilla are simply ahve with splendid fish, and, angling from the difficult position of an upper deck during a few hours at a time, I have had my strongest tackle repeatedly smashed. Had a dinghy been available, I must have had such sport as rarely falls to the lot of those on a sea voyage. Nineteen hundred and six takes me once again under the Tropic of Cancer, with giant rays and sUvery tarpon leaping in the summer sunshine off the low keys of Florida. It is a joy for ever and a day to recall some of my hundred-pounders, leaping again and again in the air, fiashing in the brazen midday sun or in the softer radiance of a May moon, or heard only and not seen in the pitch darkness of moonless nights. How they tore the line off the screaming reel, then charged back to the boat, rallying just when they seemed safe on the beach, flying from a pursuing shark, dodging the great gaff again and again until at length the splendid bodies lay on the sloping sand, and the fight was over ! Where the trout springs two 172 The Fisherman's Mercator feet, the tarpon jumps twenty, and if it were not for these gymnastics it would tire the fisherman out in every case. That was the fishing of my life, and the map of the Gulf of Mexico brings back precious memories of those sunlit days in the Pass of Boca Grande, varied by alUgator hunts and glimpses of shy egrets. The scenery of the Gulf coast is not equal to its sport, but the spring climate is delightful, and the mosquitoes are not unbearable until the coming of summer. Those were golden days. Alas, they are no more ! Memory falters back another seven years, the interval having, with the exception of one brief and unsuccessful raid on the tunny of Madeira, been spent among the bass and pheasants at home. The faded diaries of '99 show whiting fishing off Biarritz in the company of Basques, sport with red mullet and with bass off Cape Spartel with a Moor or Spaniard for gillie, black-mouthed dog fish off Casablanca, and muddy barbel in the eddies of the swift Tensift where it rushed beneath a bridge of many arches an hour's ride out of Morocco City. Thus far reminiscence halts north of the Equator, but, reaching back to 1895, it takes a sudden dip south as far as 45°, and I am fishing once again under the Southern Cross, on the rest less Pacific, or in creeks fringed with gum trees 173 Behind the Ranges and wattles, the edge of the lonely AustraUan bush. The Commonwealth, as it is now called, is no paradise for the fisherman, save in some few spots where trout have been introduced. Else where, it is the ocean which furnishes the sport, and I fished for trumpeter off Hobart, for black bream and snapper round Sydney, and for giant perch in an estuary of northern Queensland. Of the wonderful fishes within the Barrier Reef, which sail among their grottoes like birds of paradise in eastern jungles, I caught only a hurried gUmpse as the ship forged slowly northward. The Mer cator shows nothing of the quiet peace behind the Barrier, or of the sheltered fairyland called Sydney Harbour, but these are scenes so lovely that memory needs no aid. Sea and sky were but different shades of blue. Clouds were as rare as the visits of angels. Back another four years, 40° N. instead of 40°S., and the summer of 1891 finds me at Leghorn, a modern seaport of no beauty, but the scene of my earliest essays in the most historic of seas. All manner of small game, from octopus to grey mullet, came my way, and while I fished with the rod, or with fine elastic lines of horsehair, my Italian friends preferred the speedier harvest of dynamite or the bila?icia net. Leghorn is the only city in which I have caught sea fish in the street. 174 The Fisherman's Mercator Beneath my window in the Scali degli Olandesi ran a salt-water canal, harbouring fat mullet that were not too coy, but only now and then did I angle for them from the pavement at an early hour when the beggars were still asleep in gate ways. Later in the day I preferred the privacy of the dockyard, of which the Government Engi neer made me free throughout the summer. The grey mullet, a leisurely fish even in our cold northern waters, is a veritable lazzarone in the sunny Mediterranean, loving to bask like any carp alongside weed-grown piles and making a poor fight of it when tried for his life. It needs the bracing air of Margate to bring out fighting mettle that tests the angler's delicate touch and fine tackle. One more year of looking backward, a dozen degrees further north on the same parallel of longitude, takes me to the limit of this retrospect on the cold shores of the Baltic, known to Ger mans as the "East Sea," as little subject to tides as the Mediterranean, but both colder and less saline. So great, indeed, is the proportion of fresh water that I often caught marine and river fish together within ten minutes, the most extraordi nary harvest of an angler's hour that I ever gathered. So much, then, for what is gone. But that 175 Behind the Ranges these pages are concerned with other seas and lands, ten years might have been added to this retrogression, so as to include the earUest days of my apprenticeship to the sport of sports, days on the locks and weirs of Thames, or on the sleepy Norfolk Broads, on Dagenham Lake, or on a dozen piers, schoolboy memories of small ambi tions easily realised, yet affording fully as much satisfaction as the more elaborate operations of maturity. There is, for one still free from what newspaper advertisements pleasantly term the " gouty habit," another agreeable exercise, with the old Mercator still open, and that is the building of castles in the water, misty St. Michael's Mounts of dreamland, planning raids, perchance inchoate, on the fish of untried regions. Playgrounds, the equal of any I have known, remain new to me. There is the Cape of Good Hope, with the finest shore-fishing in all the world, with great kabeljaaww in the lagoons and mighty "mussel-crackers" to be caught in deeper water from boats. To the reader of newspapers, the Persian Gulf figures chiefly as the scene of gun-running, but to myself it holds out alluring promise of unrivalled sport with bass and with grey muUet, both of which flourish ex ceedingly in that historic inlet. A little further east, again, my finger lingers on the coast-line 176 The Fisherman's Mercator of India, and I turn to maddening letters from friends about trolling for seer and bahmin and begti, all of them very worthy fishes that I should love to fight. West of Greenwich, too, there are blest isles set in deep water that my baits have yet to try : the Azores, the Cape Verde group and Bermuda, all with a great reputation for fish that few have tried to catch for profit and even fewer for sport. It may be that my wanderings are not yet over. It may be that, one of these days, I may yet fill in a Uttle blank here and there. I still treasure a letter in which, some years ago, Rudyard Kipling bade me compile a sea-fishing Baedeker for the world. To that modest programme I never expect to be equal, but, with health and luck, I may yet get a step or two nearer to the whole truth. But these are vain dreams, and so away with the Mercator and once more to the memory of the things that were ! M 177 <0 Native Servants in Many Lands Minor e.