Sketches and Travels in London

by William Makepeace Thackeray

in your gardens, and ride about on a camel; but, after all, I was

  anxious to know what were the particular excitements of Eastern

  life, which detained J-, who is a town-bred man, from his natural

  pleasures and occupations in London; where his family don't hear

  from him, where his room is still kept ready at home, and his name

  is on the list of his club; and where his neglected sisters tremble

  to think that their Frederick is going about with a great beard and

  a crooked sword, dressed up like an odious Turk. In a "lark" such

  a costume may be very well; but home, London, a razor, your sister

  to make tea, a pair of moderate Christian breeches in lieu of those

  enormous Turkish shulwars, are vastly more convenient in the long

  run. What was it that kept him away from these decent and

  accustomed delights?

  It couldn't be the black eyes in the balcony--upon his honour she

  was only the black cook, who has done the pilaff, and stuffed the

  cucumbers. No, it was an indulgence of laziness such as Europeans,

  Englishmen, at least, don't know how to enjoy. Here he lives like

  a languid Lotus-eater--a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life. He

  was away from evening parties, he said: he needn't wear white kid

  gloves, or starched neckcloths, or read a newspaper. And even this

  life at Cairo was too civilised for him: Englishmen passed

  through; old acquaintances would call: the great pleasure of

  pleasures was life in the desert,--under the tents, with still more

  nothing to do than in Cairo; now smoking, now cantering on Arabs,

  and no crowd to jostle you; solemn contemplations of the stars at

  night, as the camels were picketed, and the fires and the pipes

  were lighted.

  The night-scene in the city is very striking for its vastness and

  loneliness. Everybody has gone to rest long before ten o'clock.

  There are no lights in the enormous buildings; only the stars

  blazing above, with their astonishing brilliancy, in the blue

  peaceful sky. Your guides carry a couple of little lanterns which

  redouble the darkness in the solitary echoing street. Mysterious

  people are curled up and sleeping in the porches. A patrol of

  soldiers passes, and hails you. There is a light yet in one

  mosque, where some devotees are at prayers all night; and you hear

  the queerest nasal music proceeding from those pious believers. As

  you pass the madhouse, there is one poor fellow still talking to

  the moon--no sleep for him. He howls and sings there all the

  night--quite cheerfully, however. He has not lost his vanity with

  his reason: he is a Prince in spite of the bars and the straw.

  What to say about those famous edifices, which has not been better

  said elsewhere?--but you will not believe that we visited them,

  unless I bring some token from them. Here is one:- {2}

  That white-capped lad skipped up the stones with a jug of water in

  his hand, to refresh weary climbers; and squatting himself down on

  the summit, was designed as you see. The vast flat landscape

  stretches behind him; the great winding river; the purple city,

  with forts, and domes, and spires; the green fields, and palm-

  groves, and speckled villages; the plains still covered with

  shining inundations--the landscape stretches far far away, until it

  is lost and mingled in the golden horizon. It is poor work this

  landscape-painting in print. Shelley's two sonnets are the best

  views that I know of the Pyramids--better than the reality; for a

  man may lay down the book, and in quiet fancy conjure up a picture

  out of these magnificent words, which shan't be disturbed by any

  pettinesses or mean realities,--such as the swarms of howling

  beggars, who jostle you about the actual place, and scream in your

  ears incessantly, and hang on your skirts, and bawl for money.

  The ride to the Pyramids is one of the pleasantest possible. In

  the fall of the year, though the sky is almost cloudless above you,

  the sun is not too hot to bear; and the landscape, refreshed by the

  subsiding inundations, delightfully green and cheerful. We made up

  a party of some half-dozen from the hotel, a lady (the kind soda-

  water provider, for whose hospitality the most grateful compliments

  are hereby offered) being of the company, bent like the rest upon

  going to the summit of Cheops. Those who were cautious and wise,

  took a brace of donkeys. At least five times during the route did

  my animals fall with me, causing me to repeat the desert experiment

  over again, but with more success. The space between a moderate

  pair of legs and the ground, is not many inches. By eschewing

  stirrups, the donkey could fall, and the rider alight on the

  ground, with the greatest ease and grace. Almost everybody was

  down and up again in the course of the day.

  We passed through the Ezbekieh and by the suburbs of the town,

  where the garden-houses of the Egyptian noblesse are situated, to

  Old Cairo, where a ferry-boat took the whole party across the Nile,

  with that noise and bawling volubility in which the Arab people

  seem to be so unlike the grave and silent Turks; and so took our

  course for some eight or ten miles over the devious tract which the

  still outlying waters obliged us to pursue. The Pyramids were in

  sight the whole way. One or two thin silvery clouds were hovering

  over them, and casting delicate rosy shadows upon the grand simple

  old piles. Along the track we saw a score of pleasant pictures of

  Eastern life:- The Pasha's horses and slaves stood caparisoned at

  his door; at the gate of one country-house, I am sorry to say, the

  Bey's GIG was in waiting,--a most unromantic chariot; the

  husbandmen were coming into the city, with their strings of donkeys

  and their loads; as they arrived, they stopped and sucked at the

  fountain: a column of red-capped troops passed to drill, with

  slouched gait, white uniforms, and glittering bayonets. Then we

  had the pictures at the quay: the ferryboat, and the red-sailed

  river-boat, getting under way, and bound up the stream. There was

  the grain market, and the huts on the opposite side; and that

  beautiful woman, with silver armlets, and a face the colour of

  gold, which (the nose-bag having been luckily removed) beamed

  solemnly on us Europeans, like a great yellow harvest moon. The

  bunches of purpling dates were pending from the branches; grey

  cranes or herons were flying over the cool shining lakes, that the

  river's overflow had left behind; water was gurgling through the

  courses by the rude locks and barriers formed there, and

  overflowing this patch of ground; whilst the neighbouring field was

  fast budding into the more brilliant fresh green. Single

  dromedaries were stepping along, their riders lolling on their

  hunches; low sail-boats were lying in the canals; now, we crossed

  an old marble bridge; now, we went, one by one, over a ridge of

  slippery earth; now, we floundered through a small lake of mud. At

  last, at about half-a-mile off the Pyramid, we came to a piece of

  water some two-score yards broad,
where a regiment of half-naked

  Arabs, seizing upon each individual of the party, bore us off on

  their shoulders, to the laughter of all, and the great perplexity

  of several, who every moment expected to be pitched into one of the

  many holes with which the treacherous lake abounded.

  It was nothing but joking and laughter, bullying of guides,

  shouting for interpreters, quarrelling about sixpences. We were

  acting a farce, with the Pyramids for the scene. There they rose

  up enormous under our eyes, and the most absurd trivial things were

  going on under their shadow. The sublime had disappeared, vast as

  they were. Do you remember how Gulliver lost his awe of the

  tremendous Brobdingnag ladies? Every traveller must go through all

  sorts of chaffering, and bargaining, and paltry experiences, at

  this spot. You look up the tremendous steps, with a score of

  savage ruffians bellowing round you; you hear faint cheers and

  cries high up, and catch sight of little reptiles crawling upwards;

  or, having achieved the summit, they come hopping and bouncing down

  again from degree to degree,--the cheers and cries swell louder and

  more disagreeable; presently the little jumping thing, no bigger

  than an insect a moment ago, bounces down upon you expanded into a

  panting Major of Bengal cavalry. He drives off the Arabs with an

  oath,--wipes his red shining face with his yellow handkerchief,

  drops puffing on the sand in a shady corner, where cold fowl and

  hard eggs are awaiting him, and the next minute you see his nose

  plunged in a foaming beaker of brandy and soda-water. He can say

  now, and for ever, he has been up the Pyramid. There is nothing

  sublime in it. You cast your eye once more up that staggering

  perspective of a zigzag line, which ends at the summit, and wish

  you were up there--and down again. Forwards!--Up with you! It

  must be done. Six Arabs are behind you, who won't let you escape

  if you would.

  The importunity of these ruffians is a ludicrous annoyance to which

  a traveller must submit. For two miles before you reach the

  Pyramids they seize on you and never cease howling. Five or six of

  them pounce upon one victim, and never leave him until they have

  carried him up and down. Sometimes they conspire to run a man up

  the huge stair, and bring him, half-killed and fainting, to the

  top. Always a couple of brutes insist upon impelling you

  sternwards; from whom the only means to release yourself is to kick

  out vigorously and unmercifully, when the Arabs will possibly

  retreat. The ascent is not the least romantic, or difficult, or

  sublime: you walk up a great broken staircase, of which some of

  the steps are four feet high. It's not hard, only a little high.

  You see no better view from the top than you behold from the

  bottom; only a little more river, and sand, and ricefield. You

  jump down the big steps at your leisure; but your meditations you

  must keep for after-times,--the cursed shrieking of the Arabs

  prevents all thought or leisure.

  - And this is all you have to tell about the Pyramids? Oh! for

  shame! Not a compliment to their age and size? Not a big phrase,-

  -not a rapture? Do you mean to say that you had no feeling of

  respect and awe? Try, man, and build up a monument of words as

  lofty as they are--they, whom "imber edax" and "aquilo impotens"

  and the flight of ages have not been able to destroy.

  - No: be that work for great geniuses, great painters, great

  poets! This quill was never made to take such flights; it comes of

  the wing of a humble domestic bird, who walks a common; who talks a

  great deal (and hisses sometimes); who can't fly far or high, and

  drops always very quickly; and whose unromantic end is, to be laid

  on a Michaelmas or Christmas table, and there to be discussed for

  half-an-hour--let us hope, with some relish.

  * * *

  Another week saw us in the Quarantine Harbour at Malta, where

  seventeen days of prison and quiet were almost agreeable, after the

  incessant sight-seeing of the last two months. In the interval,

  between the 23rd of August and the 27th of October, we may boast of

  having seen more men and cities than most travellers have seen in

  such a time:- Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Malta, Athens, Smyrna,

  Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo. I shall have the carpet-bag,

  which has visited these places in company with its owner,

  embroidered with their names; as military flags are emblazoned, and

  laid up in ordinary, to be looked at in old age. With what a

  number of sights and pictures,--of novel sensations, and lasting

  and delightful remembrances, does a man furnish his mind after such

  a tour! You forget all the annoyances of travel; but the pleasure

  remains with you, through that kind provision of nature by which a

  man forgets being ill, but thinks with joy of getting well, and can

  remember all the minute circumstances of his convalescence. I

  forget what sea-sickness is now: though it occupies a woful

  portion of my Journal. There was a time on board when the bitter

  ale was decidedly muddy; and the cook of the ship deserting at

  Constantinople, it must be confessed his successor was for some

  time before he got his hand in. These sorrows have passed away

  with the soothing influence of time: the pleasures of the voyage

  remain, let us hope, as long as life will endure. It was but for a

  couple of days that those shining columns of the Parthenon glowed

  under the blue sky there; but the experience of a life could

  scarcely impress them more vividly. We saw Cadiz only for an hour;

  but the white buildings, and the glorious blue sea, how clear they

  are to the memory!--with the tang of that gipsy's guitar dancing in

  the market-place, in the midst of the fruit, and the beggars, and

  the sunshine. Who can forget the Bosphorus, the brightest and

  fairest scene in all the world; or the towering lines of Gibraltar;

  or the great piles of Mafra, as we rode into the Tagus? As I write

  this, and think, back comes Rhodes, with its old towers and

  artillery, and that wonderful atmosphere, and that astonishing blue

  sea which environs the island. The Arab riders go pacing over the

  plains of Sharon, in the rosy twilight, just before sunrise; and I

  can see the ghastly Moab mountains, with the Dead Sea gleaming

  before them, from the mosque on the way towards Bethany. The black

  gnarled trees of Gethsemane lie at the foot of Olivet, and the

  yellow ramparts of the city rise up on the stony hills beyond.

  But the happiest and best of all the recollections, perhaps, are

  those of the hours passed at night on the deck, when the stars were

  shining overhead, and the hours were tolled at their time, and your

  thoughts were fixed upon home far away. As the sun rose I once

  heard the priest, from the minaret of Constantinople, crying out,

  "Come to prayer," with his shrill voice ringing through the clear

  air; and saw, at the same hour, the Arab prostrate himself and

  pray, and the Jew Rabbi, bending over his book,
and worshipping the

  Maker of Turk and Jew. Sitting at home in London, and writing this

  last line of farewell, those figures come back the clearest of all

  to the memory, with the picture, too, of our ship sailing over the

  peaceful Sabbath sea, and our own prayers and services celebrated

  there. So each, in his fashion, and after his kind, is bowing

  down, and adoring the Father, who is equally above all. Cavil not,

  you brother or sister, if your neighbour's voice is not like yours;

  only hope that his words are honest (as far as they may be), and

  his heart humble and thankful.

  Footnotes:

  {1} Saint Paul speaking from the Areopagus, and rebuking these

  superstitions away, yet speaks tenderly to the people before him,

  whose devotions he had marked; quotes their poets, to bring them to

  think of the God unknown, whom they had ignorantly worshipped; and

  says, that the times of this ignorance God winked at, but that now

  it was time to repent. No rebuke can surely be more gentle than

  this delivered by the upright Apostle.

  {2} Thackeray's drawing is shown at this point in the book.

  {3} At Derrynane Beg, for instance.