Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, vol 1 | Page 8

the sentiments
with which a tedious sail used to invest it. "Gib" is, probably, better
known to you, by Theophile Gautier and Eliot Warburton, than the
regions about Cornhill; besides which, you anchor under the Rock
exactly long enough to land and to breakfast. Malta, too, wears an old
familiar face, which bids you order a dinner and superintend the iceing
of claret (beginning of Oriental barbarism), instead of galloping about

on donkey-back through fiery air in memory of St. Paul and
White-Cross Knights. But though our journey might be called
monotonous, there was nothing to complain of. The ship was in every
way comfortable; the cook, strange to say, was good, and the voyage
lasted long enough, and not too long. On the evening of the thirteenth
day after our start, the big-trowsered pilot, so lovely in his deformities
to western eyes, made his appearance, and the good screw "Bengal"
found herself at anchor off the Headland of Clay.[FN#8]
Having been invited to start from the house of a kind friend, John W.
Larking, I disembarked with him, and
[p.8]rejoiced to see that by dint of a beard and a shaven head I had
succeeded, like the Lord of Geesh, in "misleading the inquisitive spirit
of the populace." The mingled herd of spectators before whom we
passed in review on the landing-place, hearing an audible
"Alhamdolillah"[FN#9] whispered "Muslim!" The infant population
spared me the compliments usually addressed to hatted heads; and
when a little boy, presuming that the occasion might possibly open the
hand of generosity, looked in my face and exclaimed
"Bakhshish,"[FN#10] he obtained in reply a "Mafish;"[FN#11] which
convinced the bystanders that the sheep-skin covered a real sheep. We
then mounted a carriage, fought our way through the donkeys, and in
half an hour found ourselves, chibuk in mouth and coffee-cup in hand,
seated on the diwan of my friend Larking's hospitable home.
Wonderful was the contrast between the steamer and that villa on the
Mahmudiyah canal! Startling the sudden change from presto to adagio
life! In thirteen days we had passed from the clammy grey fog, that
atmosphere
[p.9]of industry which kept us at anchor off the Isle of Wight, through
the loveliest air of the Inland Sea, whose sparkling blue and purple haze
spread charms even on N. Africa's beldame features, and now we are
sitting silent and still, listening to the monotonous melody of the
East-the soft night-breeze wandering through starlit skies and tufted
trees, with a voice of melancholy meaning.

And this is the Arab's Kayf. The savouring of animal existence; the
passive enjoyment of mere sense; the pleasant languor, the dreamy
tranquillity, the airy castle-building, which in Asia stand in lieu of the
vigorous, intensive, passionate life of Europe. It is the result of a lively,
impressible, excitable nature, and exquisite sensibility of nerve; it
argues a facility for voluptuousness unknown to northern regions,
where happiness is placed in the exertion of mental and physical
powers; where Ernst ist das Leben; where niggard earth commands
ceaseless sweat of face, and damp chill air demands perpetual
excitement, exercise, or change, or adventure, or dissipation, for want
of something better. In the East, man wants but rest and shade: upon
the banks of a bubbling stream, or under the cool shelter of a perfumed
tree, he is perfectly happy, smoking a pipe, or sipping a cup of coffee,
or drinking a glass of sherbet, but above all things deranging body and
mind as little as possible; the trouble of conversations, the displeasures
of memory, and the vanity of thought being the most unpleasant
interruptions to his Kayf. No wonder that "Kayf" is a word
untranslatable in our mother-tongue![FN#12]
"Laudabunt alii claram Rhodon aut Mytelenen."
Let others describe the once famous Capital of
[p.10]Egypt, this City of Misnomers, whose dry docks are ever wet,
and whose marble fountain is eternally dry, whose "Cleopatra's
Needle"[FN13] is neither a needle nor Cleopatra's; whose "Pompey's
Pillar" never had any earthly connection with Pompey; and whose
Cleopatra's Baths are, according to veracious travellers, no baths at all.
Yet it is a wonderful place, this "Libyan suburb" of our day, this
outpost of civilisation planted upon the skirts of barbarism, this Osiris
seated side by side with Typhon, his great old enemy. Still may be said
of it, "it ever beareth something new[FN#14];" and Alexandria, a
threadbare subject in Bruce's time, is even yet, from its perpetual
changes, a fit field for modern description.[FN#15]
[p.11]The better to blind the inquisitive eyes of servants and visitors,
my friend, Larking, lodged me in an out-house, where I could revel in
the utmost freedom of life and manners. And although some Armenian

Dragoman, a restless spy like all his race, occasionally remarked voila
un Persan diablement degage, none, except those who were entrusted
with the secret,