A winter pilgrimage 1901, p.1
A Winter Pilgrimage (1901), page 1
A Winter Pilgrimage (1901)
BEING AN ACCOUNT OF TRAVELS THROUGH PALESTINE, ITALY, AND THE ISLAND OF CYPRUS IN 1900
First published in 1901, the travel book recounts Haggard’s own real-life adventures across the Mediterannean. In this journey the author gathered research for several of his later novels.
Sir Theophilus Shepstone and his staff, with a youthful Haggard sat on the floor.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
DEDICATION
I offer these Pages
to
Mr. & Mrs. Hart Bennett
and all other Cyprian friends
whose hospitalities and kindness
have made my sojourn in the
Island so pleasant
to remember
Ditchingham, 1901.
CHAPTER I
MILAN CATHEDRAL
SURELY SOLOMON FORESAW these days when he set down that famous saying as to the making of many books. The aphorism, I confess, is one which strikes me through with shame whenever I chance to be called upon to read it aloud in the parish church on Sunday. Indeed it suggests to me a tale which has a moral — or a parallel. Some months ago I tarried at Haifa, a place on the coast of Syria with an abominable port. It was at or about the hour of midnight that a crowd of miserable travellers, of whom I was one, might have been seen cowering in the wind and rain at the gates of this harbour. There the judge and the officer bullied and rent them, causing them to fumble with damp hands and discover their tezkerehs in inaccessible pockets, which they did that the account given in those documents of their objects, occupations, past history, and personal appearance might be verified by a drowsy Turk seated in a box upon the quay. Not until he was satisfied on all these points, indeed, would he allow them the privilege of risking death by drowning in an attempt to reach a steamer which rolled outside the harbour.
At length the ordeal was done with and we were informed that we might embark. That is to say, we were graciously permitted to leap five feet from an unlit pier — the steps of which had been washed away in the gale of the previous night, but will, I am informed, be repaired next season — trusting to Providence to cause us to fall into a dark object beneath believed to be a boat. Another Turkish officer watched our departure suspiciously, though what he imagined we could be carrying out of his barren land is beyond my guessing.
“Cook, Cook, Cook!” we croaked in deprecatory tones as one by one we crept past him cowed and cold, fearing that he might invent some pretext to detain us. Therefore it was indeed that we hurried to bring to his notice the only name which seems to have power in Syria; that famous name of the hydra-headed, the indispensable, the world-wide Cook.
“Cook, Cook, Cook!” we croaked.
“Oh! yes,” answered the exasperated Turk in a tone not unlike that of a sleepy pigeon, “Coook, Coook, Coook! oh yes, all right! Coook, always Coook! Go to — Jericho — Coook!”
In the same way and with much the same feelings, thinking of the long line of works before me, I mutter to the reader now, “Book, Book, Book!”
Can he be so rude as to answer, after the example of the Haifa Turk —
“Oh! yes, all right! Boook, &c., &c.” The thought is too painful: I leave it.
To be brief, I write for various reasons. Thus from the era of the “Bordeau Pilgrim” who wrote in the year 333, the very first of those who set on paper his impressions of the Holy Land, to this day, from time to time among those who have followed in his steps, some have left behind them accounts of what they saw and what befell them. The list is long. There are St. Sylvia, and the holy Paula; Arculfus and St. Wilibad, Mukadasi and Bernard the Wise; Saewulf and the Abbot Daniel; Phocàs the Cretan and Theodoric; Felix Fabri; Sir John Mandeville, de la Brocquière and Maundrell — and so on down to Chateaubriand and our own times. But one thing they had in common. They — or most of them — were driven on by the same desire. Obedient to a voice that calls in the heart of so many, they travelled by land and sea to look upon the place where Jesus Christ was born — where the Master of mankind hung upon His cross at Calvary.
I will confess that I have a fancy to be numbered among their honourable company. So it may chance — this is my hope — that when another thousand years or more have gone by advancing the Holy Land thus far upon its future, and the Moslem has ceased to occupy the sacred places, my name may appear with their names. Thus perhaps I also may be accounted a link in the chain of those who dedicated some of their uncertain days to visiting and describing that grey stretch of mountain land which is the cradle of man’s hope in the darkness that draws near to every one of us.
My second reason is that I should like to say something about that neglected British possession, the fair island of Cyprus. To-day a Cinderella among our colonies, with a little more care — and capital — she might again become what she was of old, the Garden of the Mediterranean, a land of corn and wine, and in fact, as well as figuratively, a mine of wealth. Of Cyprus but few have written; travellers rarely think it worth the while to visit there, so in this particular at the least I trust that I may not be blamed.
There is, further, a last argument or excuse which I will venture to use, because it seems to me to have a very wide application, far wider, indeed, than is necessary to the instance of these humble pages. It is the fashion nowadays to say that everything is hackneyed; that the East itself, for instance, is practically exhausted; that the reader, who perchance has never travelled further than Ramsgate, can have little more to learn therefrom. “Give us some new things,” cries the tired world, as the Athenians cried of old. They ask in vain, on this side of the grave there is no new thing. We must make the best of the old material or give up thinking and reading, and the seeing of sights. Yet what a fallacy underlies the surface meaning of these words. Is not everything new to the eyes that can see and the ears that can hear? Are there not joys and wonders about us by the thousand which, being so blind and deaf, we seldom seize or value?
Oh, jaded reader, go stand in a garden as I did to-night and watch the great cold moon creep up beyond the latticed trees, while the shadows grow before her feet. Listen to the last notes of the thrush that sways on the black bough of yonder beech, singing, with a heart touched by the breath of spring, such a song as God alone could teach her. And there, in the new-found light, look down at those pale flowers. Or if you prefer it, stand upon them, they are only primroses, that, as Lord Beaconsfield discovered, are very good in salad.
To drop the poetical — and the ultra-practical, which is worse — and take a safer middle way, I cannot for my part believe that this old world is so exhausted after all. I think that there is still plenty to be seen and more to be learned even at that Ramsgate of which I spoke just now. Therefore I will try to describe a few of the things I saw last winter as I saw them, and to chronicle their meanings as I caught and understood them, hoping that some will yet be found for whom they may have interest.
“Upon a certain foggy winter morning we stood at Charing Cross Station en route for Italy, Cyprus, and Syria, viâ the St. Gothard, &c.”
This, surely, is how I should begin, for it is bold to break away from the accepted formula of books of travel consecrated by decades of publication.
Still let me do so, and before we leave it, look round the station. It is a horrible, reeking place, Heaven knows, on such a morning as this of which I write. The most common of all sights to the traveller also, and one of the most unnoticed. And yet how interesting. In a sense even it is majestic. The great arching roof, a very cave of the winds; the heavy pencils of shadow flung across its grey expanse; the grimy, pervading mist; the lumps of black smoke edged with white propelled laboriously upwards; the fierce, sharp jets of steam; the constant echo of the clanging noises; the sense of bitted force in those animate machines that move in and out, vanishing there into the wet mist, appearing here in the soot-streaked gloom. Then the population of this vast unfriendly place, the servants of the great engines, and those whom the engines bear on their way to many lands. They come, they go, those multitudinous forms; they are seen, they disappear, those various faces, each of them, if you watch, dominated by some individual note — grief, joy, expectancy, regret, ennui even, as may chance.
That train steams out, and those who clustered round it have melted like last night’s snow. Some it has borne away; some, friends and spectators, having waved their last farewell, are departed upon their affairs. Now a new train arrives; other crowds appear, drawn from the vast reservoir of London, and with variations the scene repeats itself. This time we take an active part in the play, and presently steam out into the billows of black mist, and are lost behind the curtain of the swinging rain. There beneath us runs the inky Thames, sombre, mysterious-looking even, and to the eye, notwithstanding its creeping squalor — though why this should be so it is hard to say — endued with a grandeur that is not the property of many a nobler stream.
Next appear countless, sordid houses, the crowded, monotonous homes, if homes they can be called, for which tens of thousands of Englishmen abandon the wholesome country-side and the pure air of heaven, because — for those who can get it — here in London the wage is higher. They are done with. Now in their place is stretched the open English landscape, wet and wretched, its green fields showing almost grey beneath the embracing, ashen sky, the trees mere black dots, the roads yellow lines of mud. Yet in its own way it is beautiful, all of it, as the face of Nature is ever beautiful to those who love her, and knowing her moods, can sympathise with them and catch something of their meaning.
So through these familiar things onward to the sea.
“Moderate” was the report of the Channel weather at Charing Cross, which, as the Station-master explained mysteriously, might mean a good deal. In fact we find it blowing a gale, for the spray drives right over the train on to the unhappy passengers as they splash towards the boat quivering and livid, some of them, with anticipatory qualms. But the history of a bad crossing may well be spared. The boat did get out and it was accomplished — at a price — that is all.
If I were asked to devise a place of punishment for sinners of what I may chance to consider the direst decree, a first-class continental hotel is the purgatorial spot to which I would commit them — for a century at a time. Yes, and thither they should travel once a month (with family) in the waggon-lit of a train de luxe with all the steam-pipes turned on. And yet there are people who like hotels. I have known some wanderers even who inhabit them from choice. Americans, too, are very happy there. Strange it is that folk can be so differently constituted. Rather would I dwell — for a life choice — in a cottage in the country on a pound a week than free in those foreign, gorgeous hostelries, where every decoration strikes you like a blow, fed with messes such as the soul loathes, and quailing beneath the advancing shadow of a monstrous bill. The subject is a large one — it should be treated fitly in a book. “Hotel life and its influence on human character” would do for the title.
I think that I must have been somewhat unfortunate in my experience of continental travel — a kind of railway Jonah. The last time that I made this Italian journey, for instance, at two minutes’ notice my fellow-voyagers and I, in the exact dead of night, were dragged from our sleeping-berths, and on the top of the Alps in the midst of the snows of winter, were transferred to an icy railway-carriage with such of our belongings as we could grasp. One lady, I remember, in her hurry, lost a valuable sable cloak. The reason alleged for this performance was that the wheels of our sleeping-car had become heated, but the conductor informed me that the real cause was a quarrel between the directors of two lines of railway. Thrice in succession, it would appear, and at this very spot had the wheels become “heated,” and the travellers torn half-awakened from their berths.
On the present occasion we met with a somewhat similar experience. Leaving Basle in the hope and expectation of reaching Milan that night, at Lucerne we were informed that the St. Gothard was blocked by a train which had gone off the line. So in that beautiful but cold and expensive town we must remain for four-and-twenty hours.
Once I climbed the St. Gothard, now over thirty years ago, when a brother and I walked from Fluellen to the top of the pass with the purpose of bidding farewell to another brother who was travelling across it by coach upon his way to India. In those far-off days there was no railway, and the tunnel was not even completed. I recollect little of the trudge except that I grew footsore, and that my brother and senior by a year or two sang songs to me to keep up my spirits. About half-way up the pass we slept at some village on the road. Here the innkeeper had a pretty servant who — strange entertainment — took us to a charnel-house attached to the church, where amongst many others she pointed out a shining skull which she informed us was that of her own father. This skull and its polished appearance I remember well; also some other incidents connected with the arrival and departure of the coach upon the summit.
Of the scenery, however, I recall little or nothing — I do not think that views have great attractions for youth, at any rate they had few for me. When I was a “soaring human boy” my father took me up the Rhine by boat with the hope and expectation that my mind would be improved in contemplating its lovely and historic banks. Wearying of this feast, very soon I slipped down to the cabin to enjoy one more congenial, that of “Robinson Crusoe,” in a Tauchnitz edition. But some family traitor betrayed me, and protesting, even with tears, that “I hated views,” I was dragged to the deck again. “I have paid six thalers,” shouted my justly indignant parent, as he hauled me up the steamer stairs, “for you to study the Rhine scenery, and whether you like it or not, young man, study it you shall!” That was — eheu fugaces labuntur anni! — in or about 1867.
To return to the year 1900, so it came about that to all intents and purposes, the St. Gothard was to me a new experience. Therefore I was the more disappointed when on steaming out of Lucerne station we found ourselves in the midst of a raging snowstorm, so fierce and thick indeed that I began to fear that for a second time we should be stopped in our attempt to cross the Alps.
Yet that snow had its compensations, for in it the observer understood, better perhaps than he might otherwise have done, the vastness of the panorama which lay outstretched beneath him. First, all seen through that veil of flying flakes, appear forests of firs growing tier above tier upon the face of a precipice so steep that almost it might be a titanic wall. Then the pines vanish and are replaced by thousands of delicate birch-trees, hanging like white hair about some bald, gigantic head, while beneath them roars a torrent, its waters cream-thick with snow. These vanish also as the white curtain grows too dense for the eye to pierce. Suddenly it thins and lifts, and there, far down below, appears a toy town with a toy wood-built church. Next an enormous gulf, and in its depths a torrent raging. And always a sense of mountains, invisible indeed but overhanging, impending, vast.
Now a little hut is seen and by it a blue-robed woman, signal-flag in hand. There, heedless of the bitter wind and weather she stands, like the wife of Lot, stone-still and white with snow. We rush past her into mile upon mile of tunnel, to pull up at last by some mountain station where the drifts lie deep.
Here I beheld an instance of true politeness. Two Italian gentlemen, one old, one young, were engaged at the useful task of clearing the rails with long-handled shovels and depositing the snow in barrows for removal. Presently the younger of the pair, giving way to some sudden sportive impulse, shot a whole spadeful of snow over his companion’s head. Imagine how such an expected compliment would have been received by the average English navvy! Next morning the police-courts would have rung with it. As it was, remembering the fiery southern blood, I expected to see knives flash in the mountain air. But not so. The older person merely coughed, shook the snow from his grizzled locks, and with a deep bow and splendid sweeping gesture — pointed to the barrow. Could reproof have been more gentle or more effective?
Beyond the tunnels to our joy the snow is much thinner, mere patches indeed, lying in the hollows of enormous, bold-shouldered mountains whose steep flanks are streaked with white ropes of water, or here and there by the foam of some great fall. In the kloofs also cling lumps and lines of dense mist, like clouds that have sunk from heaven and rested there. Down in the valley where the railway runs, begin to appear evidences of a milder climate, for vines, grown upon a trellis-work of poles, are seen in plots, and by the stream bank flourish willows, alders, and poplars. So through changing scenes we run southwards into Italy and welcome a softer air.
I have visited many cathedrals in various parts of the world, but I cannot remember one that struck me more than the interior of that of Milan, which I now explored for the first time. I say the interior advisedly, since the exterior, with its unnumbered pinnacles and thousands of statues, does not particularly appeal to my taste in architecture, such as it may be. The grand proportions of the building as viewed from within, the tall fluted columns, the rich windows, the lace-worked roof of the marble dome — an effect produced by painting, as a loquacious and disturbing cicerone insisted upon informing us, with many other details which we did not seek — the noble cruciform design; all such beauties are familiar to many readers and doubtless may be equalled, if not surpassed, elsewhere. As it happened, however, we found more than these, or being fortunate in the time and circumstances of our visit, to me they suggested more.
