UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. SAN DIEGO 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT 
 HICHENS 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 BY 
 
 JULES GUERIN 
 
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 ^YNE S. VUClNlL^rt ^ c>P 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 
 
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 3 1822 02375 8287 
 
 GtiSa LIBRARY 
 
 UNiVERSiTY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DliGO 
 
 LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA 
 
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 THE NEAR EAST
 
 
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 THE MOSQUE OF SULEIMAN AT CONSTANTINOPLE
 
 Copyright, 19 13, by 
 The Century Co. 
 
 Published October, igij 
 
 THE DE VINNE PRESS
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter I 
 
 PACK 
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA i 
 
 Chapter II 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 49 
 
 Chapter III 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 95 
 
 Chapter IV 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 137 
 
 Chapter V 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 181 
 
 Chapter VI 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 225
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The Mosque of Suleiman at Constantinople Frontispiece 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 PAGB 
 
 The Roman Amphitheater at Pola 4 
 
 From a painting by Jules Gudrin 
 
 The Market-Place at Spalato 9 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 Zara — Piazza delle Erbe 14 
 
 The Harbor of Mezzo 17 
 
 Spalato — Peristilio 24 
 
 Trau — Vestibule of the Cathedral 27 
 
 Ragusa 32 
 
 The Rector's Palace and the Public Square at Ragusa . . . . 37 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 The Jesuits' Church and the Military Hospital, Ragusa .... 45 
 
 The Parthenon at Athens 52 
 
 From a painting by Jules Gu(5rin 
 
 The Acropolis, with a View of the Areopagus and Mount Hymettus, 
 
 from the West 55 
 
 vu
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The Theater of Dionysus on the southern slope of the Acropolis . 62 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Temple of the Olympian Zeus at Athens 65 
 
 From a jiainting by Jules Gudrin 
 
 In the Portico of the Parthenon 70 
 
 The Temple of Athene Nike at Athens 75 
 
 From a painting by Jules Gu^rin 
 
 The Stadium, Athens 82 
 
 The Academy, Mount Lycabettus in the background . . . . 87 
 The Acropolis at Athens, early morning 92 
 
 From a painting by Jules Gucrin 
 
 The Temple of Poseidon and Athene at Sunium 98 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 The Temple of Athene, Island or yEgina 103 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 The Theater of Dionysus, Athens 108 
 
 The Plain of Marathon 1 1 3 
 
 A Monastery at the foot of Hymettus 1 20 
 
 Ruins of the Great Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis . . . .125 
 The Odeum of Herodes Atticus in Athens 133 
 
 From a painting by Jules (}uerin 
 
 The Site of Ancient Delphi 140 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 viii
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Delphi — Gulf of Corinth in the distance 143 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Lion of Chaeronea, the Acropolis and Mount Parnassus . .150 
 
 Place of the famous Oracle, Delphi 154 
 
 View of Mount Parnassus 159 
 
 Ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi 165 
 
 The Temple of Hera at Olympia 170 
 
 Olympia — Entrance to the Athletic Pleld 175 
 
 The Grand Bazaar in Constantinople 184 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 The Bosphorous — Constantinople in the distance 190 
 
 Galata Bridge, which connects Galata and Pera 193 
 
 The Water-front of Stamboul, with Pera in the distance , . . 200 
 
 Looking down Step Street, Constantinople 203 
 
 Public Letter-writers in a Constantinople Street 208 
 
 The Courtyard of the "Pigeon's Mosque" 213 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 Street Scene in Constantinople 221 
 
 ix
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Mosque of the Yeni-VaHde-Jamissi, Constantinople . . . 228 
 
 From a paintin;^ by Jules Guerin 
 
 The Royal Gate leadin<j to the old Seraglio . . . .... 231 
 
 From a painting by Jules Gudrin 
 
 The Mosque of Santa Sophia . . " 238 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 In tlie Cemetery of Kyub, on the Golden Horn 241 
 
 From a painting by Jules Guerin 
 
 Interior of Santa Sophia 246 
 
 St. George's Greek Church, now a mosque, Constantinople . .251 
 Street vista in Galata from end of bridge, Constantinople . . .258 
 A view over Constantinople showing the Mosque of Santa Sophia 263
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA
 
 THE 'ROMAN AMPHITHEATER AT POLA
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 Chapter I 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 MIRAMAR faded across the pale waters of 
 the Adriatic, which lay like a dream at the 
 foot of the hills where Triest seemed 
 sleeping, all its activities stilled at the summons of 
 peace. Beneath its tower the orange-colored sail of 
 a fishing-boat caught the sunlight, and gleamed like 
 some precious fabric, then faded, too, as the ship 
 moved onward to the forgotten region of rocks and 
 islands, of long, gray mountains, of little cities and 
 ancient fortresses, of dim old churches, from whose 
 campanile the medieval voices of bells ring out the 
 angelus to a people still happily primitive, still un- 
 ashamed to be picturesque. By the way of the sea 
 we journeyed to a capital where no carriages roll 
 through the narrow streets, where there is not a rail- 
 way-station, where the citizens are content to go on 
 foot about their business, and where three quarters 
 of the blessings of civilization are blessedly un- 
 
 s
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 known. We had still to touch at Pola, in whose 
 great harhor the dull-green war-ships of Austria lay 
 almost in the shadow of the vast Roman amphi- 
 theater, which has lifted its white walls, touched 
 here and there with gold, above the sea for some six- 
 teen hundred years, curiously graceful despite its 
 gigantic bulk, the home now of grasses and thistles, 
 where twenty thousand spectators used to assemble 
 to take their pleasure. 
 
 But when Pola was left behind, the ship soon en- 
 tered the watery paradise. Miramar, Triest, were 
 forgotten. Dalmatia is a land of forgetting, seems 
 happily far away, cut off by the sea from many 
 banalities, many active annoyances of modern life. 
 
 Places that are, or that seem to be, remote often 
 hold a certain melancholy, a tristesse of "old, un- 
 happy, far-off things." But Dalmatia has a serene 
 atmosphere, a cheerful purity, a clean and a cozy 
 gaiety which reach out hands to the traveler, and 
 take him at once into intimacy and the breast of a 
 home. Before entering it the ship coasts along a 
 naked region, in which pale, almost flesh-colored 
 hills are backed by mountains of a ghastly grayness. 
 Flesh-color and steel are almost cruelly blended. 
 No habitations were visible. The sea, protected on 
 our right by lines of islands, was waveless. No birds 
 flew above it; no boats moved on it. We seemed to 
 be creeping down into the ultimate desolation. 
 
 6
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 But presently the waters widened out. At the 
 foot of the hills appeared here and there white 
 g"roups of houses. A greater warmth, like a breath 
 of hope, stole into the air. White and yellow sails 
 showed on the breast of the sea. Two sturdy men, 
 wearing red caps, and standing to ply their oars, 
 hailed us in the Slav dialect as they passed on their 
 way to the islands. The huge, gray Velebit Moun- 
 tains still bore us company on our voyage to the 
 South, but they were losing their almost wicked look 
 of dreariness. In the golden light of afternoon 
 romance was descending upon them. And now a 
 long spur of green land thrust itself far out, as if to 
 bar our way onward. The islands closed in upon us 
 again. A white town smiled on us far off at the edge 
 of the happy, green land. It looked full of promises, 
 a little city not to be passed without regretting. It 
 was Zara, the capital without a railway-station of 
 the forgotten country. 
 
 Zara, Trau, Spalato, Ragusa, Castelnuovo, Cat- 
 taro, Sebenico — these, with two or three other 
 places, represent Dalmatia to the average traveler. 
 Ragusa is, perhaps, the most popular and interest- 
 ing; Spalato the most populous and energetic; Cat- 
 taro the most remarkable scenically. Trau leaves a 
 haunting memory in the mind of him who sees it. 
 Castelnuovo is a little paradise marred in some de- 
 gree b}' the soldiers who infest it, and who seem 
 
 7
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 strangely out of place in its tiny ways and its tree- 
 shaded piazza on the hilltop. But Zara has a peculiar 
 charm, half gay, half brightly tender. And nowhere 
 else in all Dalmatia are such exquisite effects of light 
 wedded to water to be seen as on Zara's Canale. 
 
 Zara, like other sirens, is deceptive. The city has 
 a face which gives little indication of its soul. Along 
 the shore lie tall and cheerful houses, — almost 
 palaces they are, — solid and big, modern, with win- 
 dows opening to the sea, and separated from it only 
 by a broad walk, edged by a strip of pavement, from 
 which might be taken a dive into the limpid water. 
 And here, when the ship tied up, a well-dressed 
 throng of joyous citizens was taking the air. Chil- 
 dren were playing and laughing. Two or three row- 
 boats slipped through the gold and silver which the 
 sun, just setting behind the island of Ugljan oppo- 
 site, showered toward the city. Music came from 
 some place of entertainment. A simple liveliness 
 suggested prosperous homes, the well-being of a 
 community apart, which chose to live "out of the 
 world," away from railroads, motor-cars, and car- 
 riage traffic, but which knew how to be modern in its 
 own quiet and decorous way. 
 
 Yet Zara had a great soaring campanile — it had 
 been visible far off at sea — and tiny streets and old 
 buildings, San Donato, the duomo, San Simeone ; and 
 five fountains, — the cinque pozzi, — and a Venetian 
 
 8
 
 THE MARKET-PLACE AT SPALATO
 
 .^i*
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 tower, — the Torre di Buovo d'Antona, — and fortifi- 
 cation gardens, and lion gateways. Where were all 
 these? A sound of bells came from behind the pal- 
 aces. And these bells seemed to be proclaiming the 
 truth of Zara. 
 
 Bells ringing in hidden places behind the palaces; 
 bells calling across strange gardens lifted high on 
 mighty walls; bells whispering among pines and 
 murmuring across green depths of glass-like water; 
 bells chiming above the yellowing vines on tiny 
 islands! Who that remembers Zara remembers not 
 Zara's bells? 
 
 Walk a few steps from the sea, passing between 
 the big houses which front it into the Piazza delle 
 Erbe, and you come at once into a busy strangeness 
 of Croatia girdled about by Italy. Dalmatia has 
 been possessed wholly or in part by Romans, Goths, 
 Slavs, Hungarians, Turks, Venetians. Now smart 
 Austrian soldiers make themselves at home in Zara, 
 but Italy seems still to rule there, stretching hands 
 out of the past. Italian may be heard on all sides, 
 but the peasants who throng the calle and the mar- 
 ket-place and the harbor speak a Sbvonic dialect, 
 and in the piazza on any morning, almost in the 
 shadow of the Romanesque cathedral, and watched 
 over by a griffin perched on a high Corinthian col- 
 umn hung with chains, which announce its old ser- 
 vice as a pillory, you may hear their chatter, and 
 
 I I
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 see the gay colors of costumes which to the untrav- 
 eled might perhaps suggest comic opera. 
 
 There is a wildness of the near East in this me- 
 dieval Italian town, a wildness which blooms and 
 fades between tall houses of stone, facing each other 
 so closely that friend might almost clasp hand with 
 friend leaning from window to opposite window. 
 Against the somber grays and browns of faqades, 
 set in the deep shadows of the paved alleys which are 
 Zara's streets, move brilliant colors, scarlet and sil- 
 ver, blue and crimson and silver. Multitudes of 
 coins and curious heavy ornaments glitter on the 
 caps and the dresses of women. Enormous boys and 
 great, striding men, brave in embroidered jackets, 
 with bright-red caps too small for the head, silver 
 buttons, red sashes stuck full of weapons and other 
 impedimenta, gaiters, and pointed shoes, march 
 hither and thither, calmly intent on some business 
 which has brought them in from the outlying dis- 
 tricts. It varies, of course, with the changing sea- 
 sons. In the latter part of October and beginning of 
 November most of the male peasants were selling 
 very large hares. Live cocks and hens were being 
 disposed of by many of the women, and it is a com- 
 mon thing in Zara to see well-dressed people bearing 
 about with them bunches of puffed-out and drearily 
 blinking poultry, which they have bought casually 
 at some corner; by the great Venetian tower; or near 
 
 I 2
 
 x^
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 the round, two-storied church of San Donato, 
 founded on the spot where once stood a Roman 
 forum, whose pavement still remains; or perhaps by- 
 San Simeone, close to the palace of the governor, 
 where under the black eagles of Austria the sentry, 
 in blue and bright yellow, stands drowsily in the 
 sunshine before his black and yellow box. 
 
 Sometimes the peasants bring live stock to 
 church. One morning, on a week day, I went into 
 San Simeone, to which Queen Elizabeth of Hungary 
 gave the superb area of silver gilt which contains, it 
 is said, the remains of the saint. I found there a 
 number of peasants, men and women, all in charac- 
 teristic costumes. Only peasants were there. Some 
 were quietly sitting, some kneeling, some standing, 
 with their market-baskets set down on the pave- 
 ment beside them. In a hidden place behind the 
 high altar, above which is raised the great, carved 
 sarcophagus, priests were droning the office. A 
 peasant in red, with a gesture, invited me to sit be- 
 side him. I did so, and he whispered in my ear some 
 words I could not understand; but I gathered that 
 something very important was about to take place. 
 Every face was expectant. All eyes were earnestly 
 fixed upon the sarcophagus. A woman came in, 
 carrying in her arms a turkey, which looked anx- 
 ious-minded, crossed herself, and waited with us, 
 gazing. The droning voices ceased. A sort of caril- 
 
 ^5
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 Ion sounded brightly. We all knelt, the woman with 
 the turkey, too, as a priest in scarlet and white 
 mounted the steps which divide the altar from the 
 area. There was a moment of deep silence. Then 
 the great, glittering, and sloping lid, with its recum- 
 bent figure of the saint, slowly rose between the 
 bronze supporting figures. My peasant friend 
 touched me, stood up, and led the way toward the 
 altar. I followed him with the rest of the congrega- 
 tion, and we filed slowly up the steps, and one by one 
 gazed down into the dim cofiin. There I saw a skull, 
 and the vague brown remains of what had once been 
 a human being, lying in the midst of votive offer- 
 ings. On the fingers of one hand, which looked as if 
 made of tobacco leaf, were clusters of rings. The 
 fat, bronze faces on each side seemed smiling. But 
 the peasants stood in awe. And presently the great 
 lid sank down. All made the sign of the cross. The 
 market-baskets were picked up, and the turkey was 
 restored to the sunlight. 
 
 Close to San Simeone are the cinque pozzi — five 
 fountains in a row% with iron wheels above them. 
 They are between four and five hundred years old, 
 and lie almost at the foot of the Venetian tower, 
 near a Corinthian column and the fragments of a 
 Roman arch. Just behind them some steps lead up 
 to one of the delicious shady places of Zara. Mount 
 them, and you will have a happy surprise such as the 
 
 i6
 
 w 
 
 X 
 > 
 
 CO 
 
 O 
 
 2 
 
 W 
 N 
 N 
 O
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 little Dalmatian cities are always ready to give 
 you. 
 
 You have been walking- away from the sea, with 
 your back to the harbor, and here is another, but 
 minute, harbor nestling under a great fortress wall 
 above which, in a garden, some young soldiers are 
 idly leaning and laughing under trees with leaves of 
 gold and red-brown. Brightly painted vessels, 
 closely packed together, lie on the blue-green water. 
 Beyond them are the trees of Blazekovic Park. And 
 just beneath you, on your right, is the great, yellow 
 stone Porta di Terra Ferma, with its winged lion of 
 St. Mark. Beyond, over the narrow exit from the 
 harbor, the landlocked Canale di Zara, which some- 
 times, especially at evening, reminded me of the 
 Venice lagoons, lies glittering in the sun. And a 
 Venetian fort on the peak of Ugljan shows like a 
 strange and determined shadow against the blue of 
 the sky. 
 
 The great white campanile which dominates Zara, 
 and which from the sea looks lig"ht and graceful, is 
 the campanile of the duomo, Sant' Anastasia, and 
 was partly built by the Venetians, and completed 
 not many years ago. From the narrow street which 
 skirts the duomo this campanile, though majestic, 
 looks heavy and almost overwhelming, too huge, too 
 tremendously solid, for the little town in which it is 
 set. And its blanched hue, beautiful from the sea, 
 
 19
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 has a rather unpleasant effect against the deep, time- 
 worn color of the church, the facade of which, with 
 its two rose windows, one large, one small, its three 
 beautiful, mellow-toned doorways, and its curious 
 and somehow touching, though stolid, statues, is 
 very fine. The interior, not specially interesting, 
 contains some glorious Gothic stalls dating from the 
 fifteenth century. They are of black wood, relieved 
 with bosses and tiny statuettes of bright gold, and 
 above each one is the half-length of a gilded and 
 painted man, wearing a beard and holding a scroll. 
 The Porta Marina, through which the chief harbor 
 is gained, is remarkable for its carved, dark-gray 
 lion, companioned by two white cherubs of stone 
 brilliantly full of life despite their almost terrifying 
 obesity. One of the most beautiful things in Zara is 
 the delicate and lovely campanile of Santa Maria, 
 over six hundred years old. St. Grisogono, the 
 church of the city's patron saint, was in the hands of 
 workmen and could not be visited when I was in 
 Dalmatia. 
 
 Almost the whole of Zara is surrounded by water. 
 On the great walls of the ancient fortifications are 
 gardens, and from these gardens you look down on 
 quiet inlets of the sea. Old buildings, old walls and 
 gardens, tiny, medieval streets through which no 
 carriage ever passes, fountains, lion gateways, 
 painted boats lying on clear and apparently motion- 
 
 20
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 less waters shut in from the open sea by long lines 
 of mountainous islands, pine-trees and olives and 
 golden vineyards, and over all an ancient music of 
 bells. It is difficult to say good-by to Zara, even 
 though Spalato sends out a summons from the ri- 
 viera of red and of gold, even though Ragusa calls 
 from its leafy groves under the Fort Imperiale. 
 
 Bora, the v^ind of the dead, blew when our ship 
 rounded the lighthouse of Spalato long after dark- 
 ness had fallen. And the following day was the 
 ''giorno dei mortis The strange cathedral, octag- 
 onal without, circular within, once the mausoleum 
 of the Emperor Diocletian, was crowded with citi- 
 zens and peasants devoutly praying. Incense rose 
 between the dark, hoary walls, the columns of gran- 
 ite and porphyry, to the dome of brick. Outside in 
 the wind the black hornblende sphinx kept watch on 
 those who came and went, mourning for their de- 
 parted. The sky was a heavy gray, and the temple 
 was dark, and looked wrinkled and seared with age, 
 and sad despite its pagan frieze showing the wild 
 joys of the chase, despite the loveliness of its thir- 
 teenth-century pulpit of limestone and marble, 
 raised high on wonderfully graceful columns with 
 elaborately carved capitals. 
 
 Spalato is the biggest, most bustling town of Dal- 
 matia. Much of it is built into the great palace of 
 Diocletian, which lies over against the sea, huge. 
 
 21
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 massive, powerful, once probably noble, but now 
 disfigured by the paltry windows and the green 
 shutters of modern dwellings, by a triviality of com- 
 mon commercial life, sparrows where eagles should 
 be. When nature takes a ruin, she usually glorifies 
 it, or touches it with a tenderness of romance. But 
 when people in the wine trade lay hold upon it, hang 
 out their washing in it, and establish their cafes and 
 their bakeries and their butchers' shops in the midst 
 of its rugged walls, its arches, and its columns, the 
 ruin suffers, and the people in the wine trade seem to 
 lose in value instead of gaining in importance. 
 
 Spalato is a strange confusion of old and new. It 
 lacks the delicacy of Zara, the harmonious beauty of 
 Ragusa. One era seems to fight with another within 
 it. Here is a noble twelfth-century campanile, 
 nearly a hundred and eighty feet high, there a com- 
 mon row of little shops full of cheap and uninviting 
 articles. Turning a corner, one comes unexpectedly 
 upon a Corinthian temple. It is the Battistero di 
 San Giovanni, once perhaps the private temple of 
 Diocletian. For the moment no one is near it, and 
 despite the icy breath of Bora raging through the 
 city and crying, "This is the day of the dead!" a calm 
 of dead years infolds you as you enter the massive 
 doorway and pass into the shadow beneath the stone 
 wagon-roof. A few steps, and the smell of fish as- 
 sails you, hundreds of strings of onions greet your 
 
 22
 
 !^. 
 
 me^^.
 
 SPALATO— PRRISTILIO
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 eyes, and the heavy rolling of enormous barrels of 
 wine over stone pavements breaks through the noise 
 of the wind. You have come unexpectedly out 
 through a gateway of the palace on to the quay to 
 the south, and are in the midst of commercial ac- 
 tivities. The contrasts are picturesque, but they are 
 rough, and, when complicated by Bora, are confus- 
 ing, almost distressing. Nevertheless, Spalato is 
 well worth a visit. It contains a small, but remark- 
 able, museum, specially interesting for its sarco- 
 phagi found at Salona and its collection of inscrip- 
 tions. The sarcophagus showing the passage of the 
 Red Sea is very curious. Apart from the now disfig- 
 ured palace, the Battistero, the very interesting and 
 peculiar cathedral, with its vestibule, its rotunda, 
 and its Piazza of the Sphinx, like nothing else I have 
 seen, the town is full of picturesque nooks and cor- 
 ners; and its fruit market at the foot of the massive 
 octagonal Hrvoja Tower, which dates from 1481, is 
 perhaps even more animated, more full of strange- 
 ness and color, than Zara's Piazza delle Erbe. Here 
 may be seen turbans of crimson on the handsome 
 heads of men, elaborately embroidered crimson 
 jackets covering immense shoulders and chests, wo- 
 men dressed in blue and red, white and silver, or 
 with heads and busts draped in the most brilliant 
 shade of orange color. When Bora blows, the men 
 look like monks or Mephistopheles; for some — the 
 
 25
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 greater number — wrap themselves from head to 
 foot in long- cloaks and hoods of brown, while others 
 of a more lively temperament shroud themselves in 
 red. They are a handsome people, rustic-looking, 
 yet often noble, with kind yet bold faces, steady 
 eyes, and a magnificent physique. Their gait is large 
 and loose. There are giants in Dalmatia in our 
 days. And many of the women are not only pretty, 
 but have delightful expressions, open, pure, and gay. 
 There seems to be nothing to fear in Dalmatia. I 
 have driven through the wilds, and over the flanks of 
 the mountains, both in Dalmatia and Herzegovina, 
 in the dead of the night, and had no unpleasant ex- 
 perience. The peasants have a high reputation for 
 honesty and general probity as well as for courage. 
 And beggars are scarce, if they exist at all, in Dal- 
 matia. 
 
 Trau has a unique charm. The riviera of the Sette 
 Castelli stretches between it and Spalato, along the 
 shore of an inlet of the sea which is exactly like a 
 blue lake. And what a marvelous blue it is on a 
 cloudless autumn day! Every one knows what is 
 meant by a rapture of spring. Those who traverse 
 that riviera at the end of October, or even in the 
 opening days of November, will know what a rap- 
 ture of autumn can be. 
 
 Miles upon miles of bright-golden and rose-red 
 vineyards edge the startling blue of the sea. And 
 
 26
 
 TRALT — VESTIBULE OF THE CATHEDRAL
 
 the l>etruit Publishing Company
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 the vines are not stunted and ugly, but large, leafy, 
 growing with a rank luxuriance. Among them, 
 with trunks caught as it were in the warm embraces 
 of these troops of bacchantes, are thousands of sil- 
 ver-green olive-trees. And peasants in red, peasants 
 in orange-color, move waist-deep, sometimes shoul- 
 der-deep, through the glory, under the glory of the 
 sun. Here and there in a grass-grown clearing, like 
 a small islet in the ocean of vines, appears a hut of 
 brushwood and woven grasses, and under the trees 
 before it sit peasants eating the grapes they have 
 just picked warm from the plants. Now and then 
 a sportsman may be seen, in peasant costume, smok- 
 ing a cigarette, his gun over his shoulder, passing 
 slowly with his red-brown dog among the red-gold 
 vines. Xow and then a distant report rings out 
 among the olives. Then the w^arm silence falls again 
 over this rapture of autumn. And so, you come to 
 Trau. 
 
 Trau is a tiny town set on a tiny island ap- 
 proached by bridges, medieval, sleep}^ yet happy, al- 
 most drowsily joyous, in appearance, with that air 
 of half-gentle, half-blithe satisfaction with self 
 which makes so many Dalmatian places character- 
 istic and almost touching. How odd to live in Trau! 
 Yet might it not be a delicious experience to live in 
 dear little Trau with the right person, separated 
 from the world by the shining water, — for who 
 
 29
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 comes over the bridges, when all is said? — guarded 
 by the lion and the statue which crown the gateway, 
 cradled in peace and mellow fruitfulness? 
 
 The gateway passed, a narrow alley or two 
 threaded, a corner turned, and, lo! a piazza, a loggia 
 with fine old columns, a tiled roof and a clock-tower, 
 a campanile and a cathedral with a great porch, and 
 underneath the porch a marvel of a doorway! Can 
 tiny Trau on its tiny island really possess all this ? 
 
 The lion doorway of the duomo at Trau is cer- 
 tainly one of the finest things in Dalmatia. The 
 duomo dates from the thirteenth century, but has 
 been twice enlarged. It is not large now, but small 
 and high, dim, full of the smell of stale incense, 
 blackened by age, almost strangely silent, almost 
 strangely secluded. In the choir is a deep well with 
 an old well-head. There are many tombs in the 
 pavement. The finely carved pulpit, with its little 
 lion, and the fifteenth-century choir-stalls are well 
 worth seeing, and the roof of the chapel of St. Gio- 
 vanni Orsini, which contains a great marble tomb, 
 has been made wonderful by age, like an old face 
 made wonderful by wrinkles. But Radovan's door- 
 way is certainly the marvel of Trau. In color it is a 
 rich, deep, dusty brown, and it is elaborately and 
 splendidly carved with two big lions, with Adam on 
 a lion and with Eve on a lioness. The lioness is 
 grasping a lamb. There is a multiplicity of other de- 
 
 30
 
 p 
 <
 
 PICTURESQ^UE DALMATIA 
 
 tail. The two big lions, which stick out on each side 
 of the round-arched doorway, as if about to step 
 forth into the alleys of Trau, have a fine air of life, 
 though they both look tame. Their mouths are open, 
 but almost smiling. 
 
 When you leave the duomo, wander through the 
 Venetian streets of this wonderful little island city, 
 where Gothic windows and beautifully carved bal- 
 conies look out to, lean forth to, the calm, blue wa- 
 ters, edged by the red and the gold of the vines. For 
 this place is unique and has an unique charm. Peace 
 dwells here, and beauty has found a quiet abiding- 
 place, where it lingers, and will linger, I hope, for 
 many centuries yet, girdled by olive-groves, by vine- 
 yards, by sun-kissed waters, guarded by the lions of 
 Venice. 
 
 From Spalato I visited the white ruins of Salona, 
 where the Emperor Diocletian was born, and near 
 which. In his palace at Spalato, he spent the last 
 eight years of his life, cultivating his garden, seek- 
 ing after philosophy, and, let us hope, repenting of 
 his bitter persecution of the Christians. From the 
 hill, on the site of the Basilica Urbana, I saw one of 
 those frigid and almost terrible lemon sunsets which 
 come with the wind of the dead. I stayed till night 
 despite the intense cold, till the fragments of the 
 city, scattered far over the sloping ground above the 
 riviera of the Sette Castelli, and creeping up to the 
 
 33
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 solitary dwelling-house built by Professor Bulic of 
 old Roman stones, took on sad and unnatural pallors 
 in the darkness, till lonely columns stood up like 
 watching specters, and fragments of wall were like 
 specters crouching. For a long while the lemon hue 
 persisted in the western sky, and the voice of the 
 wind rose with the night, crying among the burial- 
 places. 
 
 A few hours' voyage on a splendid ship, and you 
 step ashore at Gravosa, the port for Ragusa, the 
 most popular place in Dalmatia, and in many ways 
 the most attractive. For it is embowered in woods 
 and gardens; contains remarkable old buildings; is 
 girdled about by tremendous fortress walls, and by 
 forts perched on bastions of rock overlooking the sea 
 and the isle of Lacroma, where Richard Cceur de 
 Lion touched land and founded a monastery; is 
 thoroughly and deliciously medieval, yet full of Slav 
 and Austrian life; possesses a railway-station, many 
 well-built villas, and a good hotel, and is surrounded 
 by delightful country. Perhaps in all Dalmatia Ra- 
 gusa is the best center from which to take long walks 
 and make expeditions. It is cheery, cozy, and won- 
 derful at the same time. The terrific walls of the 
 fortresses do not appal or overwhelm, for all about 
 them cluster the gardens. Ivy climbs over the arch- 
 ways. In what was once a moat the grass grows 
 thickly, the flowers bloom, and many trees give 
 
 34
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 shade. This is a medieval paradise, and its inhabi- 
 tants have reason to rejoice in it and to say there is 
 no place like it. 
 
 Though small, it is intricate. At every moment 
 One is surprised by some unexpected view^, by some 
 marvel of masonry, militant or ecclesiastical; by a 
 fountain or a statue, an old doorw^ay, a courtyard, a 
 campanile, an exquisite facade, with arches and 
 lovely columns, balconies and carved w^indow- 
 frames; by cloisters, a strange alley ending in flights 
 of steps, which lead to a mountain from which a fort 
 looks down; by a secret harbor, or a secret garden, 
 or a little magical grove nestling beneath a protect- 
 ing wall which dates from the Middle Ages, when 
 Ragusa was a proud republic. 
 
 Was Burne-Jones ever in Ragusa? It is like one 
 of the little enchanted towns he loved to paint in the 
 backgrounds of his pictures. Was William Morris 
 ever there ? It is like a city in one of his poems. It is 
 full of churches, and their towers are full of bells. 
 Monks and priests pass perpetually through the nar- 
 row streets with smartly dressed Austrian soldiers. 
 And military music, the triumph of bugles and trum- 
 pets, the beat and rattle of drums, joins with the 
 drowsy sound of church organs, and the old voices 
 of clocks chiming the hours, to make the symphony 
 of Ragusa. Men and women from the Breno Valley, 
 from Canali the golden, where oaks grow among the 
 
 35
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 rocks, and the autumn vineyards are a wonder for- 
 ever to haunt the memory, from Melada and the 
 Stag Islands, from the Ombla and Herzegovina, pass 
 all day down ''the Stradone," stroll in the Brsalje, 
 a piazza with mulberry-trees overlooking the sea, 
 talk by the Amerling fountain, or sit on the wall by 
 Porta Pille under the statue of San Biagio, the 
 patron saint of the town. And each one is in a pic- 
 turesque, perhaps even a brilliant, costume. The 
 men often wear long chains, and carry handsomely 
 chased weapons and long, elaborate pipes. Some 
 have sheepskins flung jauntily over their shoulders, 
 and bright-red caps. The women wear golden orna- 
 ments, embroidered jackets, and marvelous aprons 
 almost like prayer-rugs, handsome pins, pleated 
 head-dresses, bright-colored handkerchiefs or tiny 
 caps, coins hanging on chains over their thickly 
 growing hair. 
 
 The chief hotels, the villas, and the railway-sta- 
 tion, where a row of victorias is drawn up, — for this 
 is no Zara, but a city which believes that it "moves 
 with the times," — lie among roses, oleanders, single 
 rhododendrons, trees, and masses of luxuriant vege- 
 tation outside Porta Pille. As soon as you have 
 passed beneath San Biagio and descended the hill, 
 you are in a bright, medieval world, in the heart of 
 one of the most original and fascinating little cities 
 that exists in Europe. 
 
 3^
 
 THE RECTOR'S PALACE AND THE PUBLIC 
 SQUARE AT RAGUS A
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 On the left of the Stradone, the chief street and 
 the newest, between two and three hundred years 
 old, at right angles to it, shadowed by tall and an- 
 cient houses, tiny alleys, ending in steep flights of 
 steps, lead up toward the mountain. On the flat to 
 its right is a happy maze of alleys, clean, strange, 
 old, yet never sad. A delicious cheerfulness reigns 
 in Ragusa. From the dimness of venerable door- 
 ways smiling faces look forth. They lean down 
 from carved stone balconies. Gay voices chatter at 
 the foot of frowning walls, huge bastions, mighty 
 watch-towers; before the statue of Roland, near the 
 Dogana which has a loggia and Gothic windows; by 
 the fine and massive Onofrio fountain, which for 
 over four hundred and seventy years has given wa- 
 ter to the inhabitants; among the doves by Porta 
 Place, which leads to the harbor. The wide, but 
 intimate, Stradone toward noon and evening is 
 thronged with cheerful and neatly dressed citizens, 
 strolling to and fro in the soft air between the de- 
 licious little shops full of fine rugs, weapons, chains, 
 and filigree ornaments. 
 
 Opposite the fountain of Onofrio are the church, 
 monastery, and cloisters of the Franciscans, with a 
 courtyard and an old pharmacy containing some 
 wonderful vases. At the east end of the Stradone, 
 away to the right, are the church of San Biagio, the 
 cathedral, and the Palazzo dei Rettori. On the other 
 
 39
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 side of the street are the miUtary hospital and the 
 church of the Jesuits. Not far away is the Domini- 
 can monastery. 
 
 Of these the most remarkable is the rector's pal- 
 ace. But the cloisters of the Franciscans are beauti- 
 ful and hold an extraordinary charm and peace. The 
 rector's palace is a noble Renaissance building, with 
 a courtyard containing a very handsome staircase, 
 and with a really splendid fifteenth-century colon- 
 nade fronting the piazza. The carving of the 
 capitals of the columns is wonderfully effective. 
 Three are said to be inferior to the remaining four, 
 which were the work of an architect of Naples, Ono- 
 frio. But all are remarkable. The little winged 
 boys have a tenderness and liveliness, a softness and 
 activity, which are quite exquisite. The windows of 
 Venetian Gothic are beautiful; and the whole effect 
 of this fagade, with its carved doorway, the round 
 arches, richly dark, with notes of white, the two tiers 
 of stone seats raised one above the other, and the 
 double rows of windows, square and arched, in the 
 shadow of the colonnade, is absolutely noble. 
 
 The cathedral is not very interesting, and the 
 "Assumption" over the high altar, though attrib- 
 uted to Titian, cannot be by him. Much more at- 
 tractive is a copy of the Madonna della Sedia of 
 Raphael. The treasury contains some remarkable 
 jewels and silver and many relics. 
 
 40
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 In the Dominican church there is a genuine Titian, 
 and there are some very curious and interesting pic- 
 tures by Nicolo Ragusano, a painter of Ragusa who 
 lived in the fifteenth century. The cloisters contain 
 a white well-head, guarded by graceful columns, 
 orange-trees, and flowers, above which peer the 
 small windows of the monks. But if one had to be a 
 monk in Ragusa, surely it would be wise to cast in 
 your lot with the Franciscans at the other end of the 
 street, whose Romanesque fourteenth-century clois- 
 ters with octagonal columns are quite beautiful and 
 in excellent preservation. The capitals of the col- 
 umns are carved with animals. Palms flourish there, 
 and roses. Above, a terrace, with a wonderful balus- 
 trade — a series of tiny arches resting on tiny col- 
 umns, a sort of stone echo of the arches and columns 
 below, — runs all round the court. The peace is 
 profound, but not sad. As one lingers there one can 
 understand, indeed one can scarcely help under- 
 standing, the very peculiar charm which must often 
 attach to the monkish life. 
 
 Ragusa contains some nine thousand inhabitants. 
 One of them remarked that eight hundred of these 
 were ecclesiastics. And he was unsympathetic 
 enough to add, "E molto troppo !" Perhaps his state- 
 ment was untrue. But certainly the ways of Ragusa 
 swarm with religious. Nevertheless, — one thinks of 
 Rome, with its crowds of priests and its crowds of 
 
 41
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 free-thinkers, — the inhabitants of Ragusa seem to 
 be very devout. In almost all of the many churches, 
 at all times of the day, people may be found pray- 
 ing, meditating, telling their beads, worshiping at 
 shrines of the saints. 
 
 Around Ragusa there are many beautiful walks, 
 on Lacroma, on Lapad by Gravosa, on Monte Ser- 
 gio, on Monte Petka. A really superb drive is the 
 expedition to Castelnuovo in the Bocche di Cattaro, 
 along the Dalmatian riviera, which is as fine as al- 
 most any part of the French riviera, and which is 
 still wild and natural, not yet turned into a vanity- 
 box. Those who take this glorious drive will cross 
 the frontier into Herzegovina, and, best of all, they 
 will pass by the wonderful vineyards of Canali, 
 which roll in waves of gold to the very feet of a chain 
 of naked and savage mountains. 
 
 The voyage from Ragusa to Cattaro is one of the 
 finest in Europe. The entrance into the bocche, the 
 journey through them, and the arrival at Cattaro, 
 hidden away like some precious thing that must not 
 be revealed to the dull gaze of the ordinary world, 
 almost, but mercifully not quite, under the giant 
 shadow of the Black Mountain, make for the voy- 
 ager what comes to seem at length a deliberately 
 planned, and triumphantly carried out, scenic cres- 
 cendo, which closes in sheer magic. 
 
 The coast of Dalmatia is guarded by chains of 
 
 42
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 islands and is pierced by many long and narrow in- 
 lets. During the voyage from Triest or Fiume to 
 the extreme south of the country, the ship, often for 
 many hours, seems to be traveling over a series of 
 lakes. Rarely does she emerge into open water. But 
 between Gravosa and the bocche there is open sea. 
 Nature has not neglected to make her preparations. 
 She gives you the stretch of open sea as a contrast to 
 what is coming. And just when you are beginning 
 to feel its monotony, the prow of the vessel veers to 
 the left, seems to be sensitively searching for some 
 unseen opening in the rugged coast. She finds that 
 opening between Punta d'Ostro and Punta d'Arza, 
 leaving the little isle of Rondoni, with its round, yel- 
 low fort, on the right and the open sea behind. 
 
 The mountains which guard the bocche are nearly 
 six thousand feet high, bare, cruelly precipitous, in 
 color a peculiar, almost ashy, gray. When you are 
 at a long distance from them they seem to descend 
 sheer into the water; but as you draw nearer over 
 the waveless sea, you find that along their bases runs 
 a strip of beautiful fertile country, green, thickly 
 wooded in many places, with gay little villages set 
 among radiant gardens, with a white highroad, 
 along which peasants are passing. There is Castel- 
 nuovo on its hill among leafy groves, with its old, 
 narrow fortress on the rock fought for by Turks and 
 Venetians; near by is Zelenika; and there another 
 
 43
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 large fortress, with the Austrian tlag above it. The 
 sensitive prow of the ship veers again, this time to 
 the southeast, where the ash-gray precipices surely 
 hold the sea forever in check. But the ship knows 
 better. The Canale di Kumbur shows Itself, leading 
 to the splendid Bay of Teodo surreptitiously ob- 
 served from afar by the mountains of Montenegro. 
 If you held your breath and listened, might you not 
 hear the boom of guns by the lake of Scutari? All 
 sense of being at sea fades from you as the ship pene- 
 trates ever more deeply into the secret recesses of 
 the mountains. This is like superb lake scenery, 
 austere, grand, almost terrible, and yet radiant. 
 Nature is even coquettish on this perfect morning of 
 autumn, for in these remoter regions she has cast a 
 swathe of the lightest and whitest possible mist, like 
 one of those scarfs of Tunis, over the cultivated land 
 wdiich edges the precipices. As the ship draws near, 
 the mist seems to disperse in a sparkle of gold, re- 
 vealing intimate beauties, full of charming detail: a 
 little Byzantine church with a pale-green cupola, a 
 priest In a sunny garden leaning over a creeper-cov- 
 ered wall, white horses trotting briskly along a 
 curly, white road, soldiers marching through a vil- 
 lage with a faint beat of drums, children perhaps 
 going to school through a riot of green. But the 
 mist Is ever there In the distance, part of the spirit of 
 autumn. 
 
 44
 
 THE JESUITS' CHURCH AND THE MILITARY 
 HOSPITAL, RAGUSA
 
 I-'roin a photo>,'rapti by the Detroit Publishins: Company
 
 PICTURESQUE DALMATIA 
 
 Do not miss the tiny twin islands with their two 
 little churches. One of them, Santa Maria dello 
 Scalpello, is a place of pilgrimage. Old, gray, mi- 
 nute yet dignified, with its few tall cypresses about 
 it, it so completely covers the island that you see only 
 a church with cypresses apparently floating upon 
 the water. Now there is a scatter of ivory-white 
 birds on the steel-colored surface, a glint of powder- 
 blue on the ridges made by the ship. Marvelous 
 harmonies of pearl color, gray, and blue, with here 
 and there faint dashes of primrose-yellow, make 
 magic in the distance before you. This is really an 
 enchanted place, home of a peace that seems touched 
 with eternity. And the ship creeps on, as if fearing 
 perhaps to disturb it, farther and farther into places 
 more secret still, and of a peace even more profound, 
 till the pearl color and the gray, with their hints of 
 yellow^ and blue, begin to give way to another 
 dominion. The last bay has been gained. The secret 
 of Cattaro is to be at length revealed. Through the 
 wondrous delicacies of the now rather suggested 
 than actually seen mist, and above them, dawns a 
 marvelous pageant of autumn, which bears a curi- 
 ously exact resemblance to one of Turner's superb 
 visions. 
 
 It Is like a dream, but a dream of ardor and power, 
 in which browns, reds, russets, greens, and many 
 shades of gold and of yellow march together from 
 
 47
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 the circle of the waters through cHmbing valleys to 
 the mountains, which here at last give pause to the 
 sea. And bells are ringing in this great, this tri- 
 umphant dream. And now surely faint outlines are 
 becoming visible, as of turrets and cupolas striving 
 to break in glory through the mist. The fires of 
 autumn glow more fiercely, like a furnace fanned. 
 Trails of smoke show here and there. Mist, smoke, 
 and fire — it is like a grand conflagration. The tur- 
 rets reveal themselves as great groups of trees. But 
 the smoke rises from household fires; the cupolas are 
 cupolas of churches; and the bells are the bells of 
 Cattaro, calling from this vale of enchantment to 
 the cannon which are thundering before Scutari be- 
 yond the mountains of Montenegro. 
 
 48
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS
 
 THE PARTHENON AT ATHENS
 
 Chapter II 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 WHAT Greece is like in spring, I do not know, 
 when rains have fallen, and round Athens 
 the country is green, when the white dust 
 perhaps does not whirl through Constitution Square 
 and over the garden about the Zappeion, when the 
 intensity of the sun is not fierce on the road to the 
 bare Acropolis, and the guardians of the Parthenon, 
 in their long coats the color of a dervish's hat, do not 
 fall asleep in the patches of shade cast on the hot 
 ground by Doric columns. I was there at the end of 
 the summer, and many said to me, ''You should 
 come in spring, when it is green." 
 
 Greece must be very different then, but can it be 
 much more beautiful ? 
 
 Disembark at the Piraeus at dawn, take a carriage, 
 and drive by Phalerum, the bathing-place of the 
 Athenians, to Athens at the end of the summer, and 
 though for just six months no rain has fallen, you 
 will enter a bath of dew. The road is dry and dusty, 
 but there is no wind, and the dust lies still. The 
 
 - '">
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 atmosphere is marvelously clear, as it is, say, at Is- 
 mailia in the early morning. The Hellenes, when 
 they are talking quite naturally, if they speak of 
 Europe, always speak of it as a continent in which 
 Greece is not included. They talk of ''going to 
 Europe." They say to the English stranger, "You 
 come to us fresh from Europe." And as you drive 
 toward Athens you understand. 
 
 This country is part of the East, although the 
 Greeks were the people who saved Europe from 
 being dominated by the races of Asia. All about you 
 — you have not yet reached Phalerum — you see 
 country that looks like the beginning of a desert, 
 that holds a fascination of the desert. The few 
 trees stand up like carved things. The small. East- 
 ern-looking houses, many of them with flat roofs, 
 earth-colored, white, or tinted with mauve and pale 
 colors, scattered casually and apparently without 
 any plan over the absolutely bare and tawny ground, 
 look from a distance as if they, too, were carved, as if 
 they were actually a part of the substance of their 
 environment, not imposed upon it by an outside 
 force. The moving figure of a man, wearing the 
 white fustanella, has the strange beauty of an Arab 
 moving alone in the vast sands. And yet there is 
 something here that is certainly not of Europe, but 
 that is not wholly of the East — something very deli- 
 cate, very pure, very sensitive, very individual, free 
 
 54
 
 > 
 
 X 
 
 > 
 n 
 
 o 
 
 ■-0 
 
 O 
 
 r 

 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 from the Eastern drowsiness, from the heavy East- 
 ern perfume which disposes the soul of man to 
 inertia. 
 
 It is the exquisite, vital, one might almost say in- 
 tellectual, freshness of Greece which, between Eu- 
 rope and Asia, preserves its eternal dewdrops — 
 those dewdrops which still make it the land of the 
 early morning-. 
 
 Your carriage turns to the right, and in a moment 
 you are driving along the shore of a sea without 
 wave or even ripple. In the distance, across the pur- 
 ple water, is the calm mountain of the island of 
 ^gina. Over there, along the curve of the sandy 
 bay, are the clustering houses of old Phalerum. This 
 is new Phalerum, with its wooden bath-houses, its 
 one great hotel, its kiosks and cafes, its shadeless 
 plage, deserted now except for one old gentleman 
 who, like almost every Greek all over the country, is 
 at this moment reading a newspaper in the sun. 
 
 Is there any special charm in new Phalerum, bare 
 of trees, a little cockney of aspect, any exceptional 
 beauty in this bay? When you have bathed there a 
 few times, when you have walked along the shore in 
 the quiet evening, breathing the exquisite air, when 
 you have dined in a cafe of old Phalerum built out 
 into the sea, and come back by boat through the sil- 
 ver of a moon to the little tram station whence you 
 return to Athens, you will probably find that there 
 
 57
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 is. And from what other bay can you see the tem- 
 ple of the Parthenon as you see it from the bay of 
 Phalerum? 
 
 You have your first vision of it now, as you look 
 away from the sea, lifted very high on its great rock 
 of the Acropolis as on a throne. Though far ofY, 
 nevertheless its majesty is essentially the same, 
 casts the same tremendous influence upon you here 
 as it does when you stand at the very feet of its 
 mighty columns. At once you know, not because of 
 the legend of greatness attaching to it, or because of 
 the historical associations clinging about it, but sim- 
 ply because of the feeling in your own soul roused 
 by its white silhouette in this morning hour, that the 
 soul of Greece — eternal majesty, supreme greatness, 
 divine calm, and that remoteness from which, per- 
 haps, no perfect thing, either God-made or, because 
 of God's breath in him, man-made, is wholly exempt 
 —is lifted high before you under the cloudless 
 heaven of dawn. 
 
 - You may even realize at once and forever, as you 
 send on your carriage and stand for a while quite 
 alone on the sands, gazing, that to you the soul of 
 Greece must always seem to be Doric. From afar 
 the Doric conquers. 
 
 The ancient Hellenes, divided, at enmity, inces- 
 santly warring among themselves, were united in 
 one sentiment: they called all the rest of the nations 
 
 S8
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 ''barbarians." The Parthenon gives them reason. 
 "Unintelligible folk" to this day must acknowledge 
 it, using the word "barbarian" strictly in our mod- 
 ern sense. 
 
 But the sun is higher, the morning draws on; you 
 must be gone to Athens. Down the long, straight, 
 new road, between row^s of pepper-trees, passing a 
 little church which marks the spot where a mis- 
 creant tried to assassinate King George, and always 
 through beautiful, bare country like the desert, you 
 drive. And presently you see a few houses, like the 
 houses of a quiet village; a few great Corinthian col- 
 umns rising up in a lonely place beyond an arch 
 tawny with old gold; a public garden looking new 
 but pleasant, — not unlike a desert garden at the 
 edge of the Suez Canal, — with a white statue (it is 
 the statue of Byron) before it; then a long, thick 
 tangle of trees stretching far, and separated from 
 the road and a line of large apartment-houses only 
 by an old and slight wooden paling; a big square 
 with a garden sunken below the level you are on, 
 and on your right a huge, bare white building rather 
 like a barracks. You are in Athens, and you have 
 seen already the Olympieion, the Arch of Hadrian, 
 the Zappeion garden, Constitution Square, and the 
 garden and the palace of the king. 
 
 Coming to Athens for the first time by this route, 
 it is difficult to believe one is in the famous capital, 
 
 59
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 even though one has seen the Acropohs. And I 
 never quite lost the feeling there that I was in a de- 
 lightful village, containing a cheery, bustling life, 
 some fine modern buildings, and many wonders of 
 the past. Yet Athens is large and is continually 
 growing. One of the best and most complete views 
 of it is obtained from the terrace near the Acropolis 
 Museum, behind the Parthenon. Other fine views 
 can be had from Lycabettus, the solitary and fierce- 
 looking hill against whose rocks the town seems al- 
 most to surge, like a wave striving to overwhelm it, 
 and from that other hill, immediately facing the 
 Acropolis, on which stands the monument of Philo- 
 pappos. 
 
 It is easy to ascend to the summit of the Acropolis, 
 even in the fierce heat of a summer day. A stroll up 
 a curving road, the mounting of some steps, and you 
 are there, five hundred and ten feet only above the 
 level of the sea. But on account of the solitary situa- 
 tion of the plateau of rock on which the temples are 
 grouped and of its precipitous sides, it seems very 
 much higher than it is. Whenever I stood on the 
 summit of the Acropolis I felt as if I were on the 
 peak of a mountain, as if from there one must be able 
 to see all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
 them. 
 
 What one does see is marvelously, almost ineffa- 
 bly beautiful. Herodotus called this land, with its 
 
 60
 
 From a ph<
 
 THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS ON THE SOUTHERN 
 SLOPE OF THE ACROPOLIS
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 stony soil and its multitudes of bare mountains, the 
 "rugged nurse of liberty." Though rugged, and 
 often naked, nevertheless its loveliness — and that 
 soft word must be used — is so great and so pure that, 
 as we give to Greek art the crown of wild olive, so we 
 must give it surely also to the scenery of Greece. It 
 is a loveliness of outline, of color, and above all of 
 light. 
 
 Almost everywhere in Greece you see mountains, 
 range upon range, closing about you or, more often, 
 melting away into far distances, into outlines of 
 shadows and dreams. Almost everywhere, or so it 
 seemed to me, you look upon the sea. And as the 
 outlines of the mountains of Greece are nearly al- 
 ways divinely calm, so the colors of the seas of 
 Greece are magically deep and radiant and varied. 
 And over mountains and seas fall changing wonders 
 of light, giving to outline eternal meanings, to color 
 the depth of a soul. ^ 
 
 When you stand upon the Acropolis you see not 
 only ruins which, taking everything into considera- 
 tion, are perhaps the most wonderful in the world, 
 but also one of the most beautiful views of the 
 world. It is asserted as a fact by authorities that the 
 ancient Greeks had little or no feeling for beauty of 
 landscape. One famous waiter on things Greek 
 states that "a fine view as such had little attraction 
 for them," that is, the Greeks. It is very difficult for 
 
 63
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 those who are famihar with the sites the Greeks se- 
 lected for their great temples and theaters, such as 
 the rock of the Acropolis, the heights at Sunium and 
 at Argos, the hill at Taormina in Sicily, etc., to feel 
 assured of this, however lacking in allusion to the 
 beauty of nature, unless in connection with sup- 
 posed animating intelligences, Greek literature may 
 be. It is almost impossible to believe it as you stand 
 on the Acropolis. 
 
 All Athens lies beneath you, pale, almost white, 
 with hints of mauve and yellow, gray and brown, 
 with its dominating palace, its tiny Byzantine 
 churches, its tiled and flat roofs, its solitary cypress- 
 trees and gardens. Lycabettus stands out, small, 
 but bold, almost defiant. Beyond, and on every side, 
 stretches the calm plain of Attica. That winding 
 river of dust marks the Via Sacra, along which the 
 great processions used to pass to Eleusis by the wa- 
 ter. There are the dark groves of Academe, a place 
 of rest in a bare land. The marble quarries gleam 
 white on the long flanks of Mount Pentelicus, and 
 the great range of Parnes leads on to ^galeos. 
 Near you are the Hill of the Nymphs, with its obser- 
 vatory; the rocky plateau from which the apostle 
 Paul spoke of Christ to the doubting Athenians; the 
 new plantation at the foot of Philopappos which 
 surrounds the so-called ''Prison of Socrates." 
 Honey-famed Hymettus, gray and patient, stretches 
 
 64
 
 THE TEMPLE OF THE OLYMPIAN ZEUS AT ATHENS
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 toward the sea — toward the shining Saronic Gulf 
 and the bay of Phalerum. And there, beyond Pha- 
 lerum, are the Piraeus and Salamis. Mount Elias 
 rules over the midmost isle of ^gina. Beneath the 
 height of Sunium, where the Temple of Poseidon 
 still lifts blanched columns above the passing mari- 
 ners who have no care for the sea-god's glory, lies 
 the islet of Gaidaronisi, and the mountains of Meg- 
 ara and of Argolis lie like dreaming shadows in the 
 sunlight. Very pure, very perfect, is this great view. 
 Nature here seems purged of all excesses, and even 
 nature in certain places can look almost theatrical, 
 though never in Greece. The sea shines with gold, 
 is decked with marvelous purple, glimmers afar with 
 silver, fades into the color of shadow. The shapes of 
 the mountains are as serene as the shapes of Greek 
 statues. Though bare, these mountains are not 
 savage, are not desolate or sad. Nor is there here 
 any suggestion of that ''oppressive beauty" against 
 which the American painter-poet Frederic Crownin- 
 shield cries out in a recent poem — of that beauty 
 which weighs upon, rather than releases, the heart 
 of man. *- 
 
 From this view you turn to behold the Parthenon. 
 A writer who loved Greece more than all other coun- 
 tries, who was steeped in Greek knowledge, and who 
 was deeply learned in archaeology, has left it on rec- 
 ord that on his first visit to the Acropolis he was 
 
 67
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 aware of a feeling of disappointment. His heart 
 bled over the ravages wrought by man in this sacred 
 place — that Turkish powder-magazine in the Par- 
 thenon which a shell from Venetians blew up, the 
 stolen lions which saw Italy, the marbles carried to 
 an English museum, the statues by Phidias which 
 clumsy workmen destroyed. 
 
 But so incomparably noble, so majestically grand 
 is this sublime ruin, that the first near view of it must 
 surely fill many hearts with an awe which can leave 
 no room for any other feeling. It is incomplete, but 
 not the impression it creates. 
 
 The Parthenon, as it exists to-day, shattered, al- 
 most entirely roofless, deprived of its gilding and 
 color, its glorious statues, its elaborate and wonder- 
 ful friezes, its lions, its golden oil-jars, its Athene 
 Parthenos of gold and ivory, the mere naked shell of 
 what it once was, is stupendous. No memory of the 
 gigantic ruins of Egypt, however familiarly known, 
 can live in the mind, can make even the puniest fight 
 for existence, before this Doric front of Pentelic 
 marble, simple, even plain, but still in its devastation 
 supreme. The size is great, but one has seen far 
 greater ruins. The fluted columns, lifted up on the 
 marble stylobate which has been trodden by the feet 
 of Pericles and Phidias, are huge in girth, and rise to 
 a height of between thirty and forty feet. The archi- 
 trave above their plain capitals, with its projecting 
 
 68
 
 IN THE PORTICO OF THE PARTHENON
 
 IK AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 molding, is tremendously massive. The walls of the 
 cella, or sanctuary of the temple, where they still 
 remain, are immense. But now, where dimness 
 reigned, — for in the days when the temple was com- 
 plete no light could enter it except through the 
 doorway, — the sunlight has full possession. And 
 from what was once a hidden place the passing trav- 
 eler can look out over land and sea. 
 
 Some learned men have called the Parthenon 
 severe. It is wonderfully simple, so simple that it is 
 not easy to say exactly why it produces such an 
 overpowering impression of sublimity and grandeur. 
 But it is not severe, for in severity there is something 
 repellent, something that frowns. It seems to me 
 that the impression created by the Parthenon as a 
 building is akin to that created by the Sphinx as a 
 statue. It suggests — seems actually to send out like 
 an atmosphere — a tremendous calm, far beyond the 
 limits of any severity. 
 
 The whole of the Parthenon, except the founda- 
 tions, is of Pentelic marble. And this marble is so 
 beautiful a substance now after centuries of ex- 
 posure on a bare height to the fires of the sun, to the 
 sea-winds and the rains of winter, that it is impos- 
 sible to wish it gilded, and painted with blue and 
 crimson. From below in the plain, and from a long 
 distance, the temple looks very pale in color, often 
 indeed white. But when you stand on the Acropolis, 
 
 71
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 you find that the marble holds many hues, among 
 others pale yellow, cocoa color, honey color, and old 
 gold. I have seen the columns at noonday, when 
 they were bathed by the rays of the sun, glow with 
 something of the luster of amber, and look almost 
 transparent. I have seen them, when evening was 
 falling, look almost black. 
 
 The temple, which is approached through the 
 colossal marble Propylsea, or state entrance, with 
 Doric colonnades and steps of marble and black and 
 deep-blue Eleusinian stone, is placed on the very 
 summit of the Acropolis, at the top of a slope, now 
 covered with fragments of ruin, scattered blocks of 
 stone and marble, sections of columns, slabs which 
 once formed parts of altars, and broken bits of 
 painted ceiling, but which w^as once a place of 
 shrines and of splendid statues, among them the 
 great statue of Athena Promachos, in armor, and 
 holding the lance whose glittering point was visible 
 from the sea. The columns are all fluted, and all 
 taper gradually as they rise to the architrave. And 
 the flutes narrow as they draw nearer and nearer to 
 the capitals of the columns. The architrave was 
 once hung with wreaths and decorated with shields. 
 The famous frieze of the cella, which represented in 
 marble a great procession, and which ran round the 
 external wall of the sanctuary, is now in pieces, 
 some of which are in the British Museum, and some 
 
 72
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 in Athens. A portion of this frieze may still be seen 
 on the west front of the temple. The cella had a ceil- 
 ing of painted wood. On one of its inner walls I saw 
 traces of red Byzantine figures, one apparently a 
 figure of the Virgin. These date from the period 
 when the Parthenon was used as a Christian church, 
 and was dedicated to Mary the mother of God, be- 
 fore it became a mosque, and, later, a Turkish pow- 
 der-magazine. The wdiite marble floor, which is 
 composed of great blocks perfectly fitted together, 
 and without any joining substance, contrasts 
 strongly with the warm hues of the inner flutes of 
 the Doric columns. Here and there in the marble 
 walls may be seen fragments of red and of yellow 
 brick. From within the Parthenon, looking out be- 
 tween the columns, you can see magnificent views 
 of country and sea. 
 
 Two other temples form part of the Acropolis, 
 with the Propylsea and the Parthenon, the Temple 
 of Athene Nike and the Erechtheum. They are 
 absolutely different from the profoundly masculine 
 Parthenon, and almost resemble two beautiful 
 female attendants upon it, accentuating by their 
 delicate grace its majesty. 
 
 The Temple of Nike is very small. It stands on a 
 jutting bastion just outside the Propylsea, and has 
 been rebuilt from the original materials, which were 
 dug up out of masses of accumulated rubbish. It is 
 
 73
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 Ionic, has a colonnade, is made of Pentelic marble, 
 and was once adorned with a series of winged vic- 
 tories in bas-relief. 
 
 Ionic like the Temple of Nike, but much larger, 
 the Erechtheum stands beyond the Propylsea, and 
 not far from the Parthenon, at the edge of the 
 precipice beneath which lies the greater part of 
 Athens. A marvelously personal element attaches 
 to it and makes it unique, giving it a charm which 
 sets it apart from all other buildings. To find this 
 you must go to the southwest, to the beautiful Porch 
 of the Caryatids, which looks toward the Parthenon. 
 There are six of these caryatids, or maidens, 
 standing upon a high parapet of marble and sup- 
 porting a marble roof. Five of them are white, and 
 one is a sort of yellowish black in color, as if she had 
 once been black, but, having been singled out from 
 her fellows, had been kissed for so many years by 
 the rays of the sun that her original hue had become 
 changed, brightened by his fires. Four of the maid- 
 ens stand in a line. Two stand behind, on each side 
 of the portico. They wear flowing draperies, their 
 hair flows down over their shoulders, and they sup- 
 port their burden of marble with a sort of exquisite 
 submissiveness, like maidens choosing to perform a 
 grateful and an easy task that brings with it no loss 
 of self-respect. 
 
 I once saw a great English actress play the part of 
 
 74
 
 THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE NIKE AT ATHENS
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 a slave girl. By her imaginative genius she suc- 
 ceeded in being more than a slave: she became a 
 poem of slavery. Everything ugly in slavery was 
 eliminated from her performance. Only the beauty 
 of devoted service, the willing service of love, — and 
 slaves have been devoted to their masters, — was 
 shown in her face, her gestures, her attitudes. ]\Iuch 
 of what she imagined and reproduced is suggested 
 by these matchlessly tender and touching figures ; so 
 soft that it is almost incredible that they are made of 
 rnarble, so strong that no burden, surely, would be 
 too great for their simple, yet almost divine, cour- 
 age. They are watchers, these maidens, not alertly, 
 but calmly watchful of something far beyond our 
 seeing. They are alive, but with a restrained life 
 such as we are not worthy to know, neither fully 
 human nor completely divine. They have some- 
 thing of our wistfulness and something also of that 
 attainment toward wdiich we strive. They are full 
 of that strange and eternal beauty that is in all the 
 greatest things of Greece, from wdiich the momen- 
 tary is banished, in which the perpetual is enshrined. 
 Contemplation of them only seems to make more 
 deep their simplicity, more patient their strength, 
 and more touching their endurance. Retirement 
 from them does not lessen, but almost increases, the 
 enchantment of their very quiet, very delicate spell. 
 Even when their faces can no longer be distin- 
 
 77
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 guished and only their outlines can be seen, they do 
 not lose one ray of their soft and tender vitality. 
 They are among the eternal things in art, lifting up 
 more than marble, setting free from bondage, if only 
 for a moment, many that are slaves by their sub- 
 mission. 
 
 About two years ago this temple v^as carefully 
 cleaned, and it is very white, and looks almost like a 
 lovely new building not yet completed. Here and 
 there the white surface is stained with the glorious 
 golden hue which beautifies the Parthenon, the Pro- 
 pylsea, the Odeum of Herodes, the Temple of The- 
 seus, the Arch of Hadrian, and the Olympieion. The 
 interior of the temple is full of scattered blocks of 
 marble. In the midst of them, and as it were faith- 
 fully protected by them, I found a tiny tree carefully 
 and solemnly growing, with an air of self-respect. 
 Above the doorway of the north front is some very 
 beautiful and delicate carving. This temple was 
 once adorned with a frieze of Eleusinian stone and 
 with white marble sculpture. Its Ionic columns are 
 finely carved, and look almost strangely slender, if 
 you come to them immediately after you have been 
 among the columns of the Parthenon. Majesty and 
 charm are supremely expressed in these two tem- 
 ples, the Parthenon and the Erechtheum, the smaller 
 of which is on a lower level than the greater. One 
 thinks again of the happy slave who loves her lord. 
 
 78
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 The group of magnificent, gold-colored Greco- 
 Roman columns which is called the Olympieion 
 stands in splendid isolation on a bare terrace at the 
 edge of the charming Zappeion garden. In this gar- 
 den, full of firs and pepper-trees, acacias, palms, con- 
 volvulus, and pink oleanders, I saw many Greek 
 soldiers, wearied out with preparations for the Bal- 
 kan w^ar against Turkey, which was declared while 
 I was in Athens, sleeping on the wooden seats, or 
 even stretched out at full length on the light, yellow 
 soil. For there is no grass there. Beyond the Olym- 
 pieion there is a stone trough in which I never saw 
 one drop of water. This trough is the river-bed of 
 the famous Ilissus! 
 
 The columns are very splendid, immense in height, 
 singularly beautiful in color, — they are made of 
 Pentelic marble, — and with Corinthian capitals, 
 nobly carved. Those which are grouped closely to- 
 gether are raised on a platform of stone. But there 
 are two isolated columns which look even grander 
 and more colossal than those which are united by a 
 heavy architrave. The temple of which they are the 
 remnant was erected in the reign of Hadrian to the 
 glory of Zeus, and was one of the most gigantic 
 buildings in the world. 
 
 From the Zappeion garden you can see in the dis- 
 tance the snow-white marble Stadium where the 
 modern Olympic and Pan-Hellenic games take 
 
 79
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 place. It is gigantic. When full, it can hold over 
 fifty thousand people. The seats, the staircases, the 
 pavements are all of dazzling-v^hite marble, and as 
 there is of course no roof, the effect of this vastness 
 of white, under a bright-blue sky, and bathed in 
 golden fires, is almost blinding. All round the Sta- 
 dium cypress-trees have been planted, and their 
 dark-green heads rise above the outer w^alls, like 
 long lines of spear-heads guarding a sacred in- 
 closure. Two comfortable arm-chairs for the king 
 and queen face two stelae of marble and the far-off 
 entrance. The earthen track where the sports take 
 place is divided from the spectators by a marble bar- 
 rier about five feet high, and till you descend into 
 it, it looks small, though it is really very large. 
 The entrance is a propylaeum. It is a great 
 pity that immediately outside this splendid 
 building the hideous panorama should be allowed 
 to remain, cheap, vulgar, dusty, and despicable. 
 I could not help saying this to a Greek acquaint- 
 ance. He thoroughly agreed with me, but told 
 me that the Athenians were very fond of their 
 panorama. 
 
 In a straight line with the beautiful Arch of 
 Hadrian, and not far off, is the small and terribly 
 defaced, but very graceful. Monument of Lysicrates, 
 a circular chamber of marble, with small Corinthian 
 columns, an architrave, and a frieze. It is sur- 
 
 80
 
 V5 
 
 12; 
 h 
 
 
 h
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 rounded by a railing, and stands rather forlornly in 
 the midst of modern houses. 
 
 The Temple of Theseus, or more properly of Her- 
 cules, on the other side of the town, is a beautifully 
 preserved building, lovely in color, very simple, very 
 complete. It is small, and is strictly Doric and very 
 massive. Many people have called it tremendously 
 impressive, and have even compared it with the Par- 
 thenon. It seems to me that to do this is to exag- 
 gerate, to compare the very much less with the very 
 much greater. There really is something severe in 
 great massiveness combined with small proportions, 
 and I find this temple, noble though it is, severe. 
 
 Athens contains several very handsome modern 
 buildings, and one that I think really beautiful, espe- 
 cially on a day of fierce sunshine or by moonlight. 
 This is the Academy, which stands in the broad and 
 airy University Street, at whose mouth are the two 
 cafes which Athenians call "the Dardanelles." It is 
 in a line with the university and the national library, 
 is made of pure white marble from Pentelicus, and is 
 very delicately and discreetly adorned with a little 
 bright gold, the brilliance of which seems to add to 
 the virginal luster of the marble. The central sec- 
 tion is flanked by two tall and slender detached col- 
 umns crowned with statues. Ionic colonnades 
 relieve the classical simplicity of the fagade, with 
 some marble and terra-cotta groups of statuary. 
 
 83
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 The general effect is very calm, pure, and dignified, 
 and very satisfying. The Athenians are proud, and 
 with reason, of this beautiful building, which they 
 owe to the generosity of one of their countrymen. 
 
 Modern Athens, despite its dust, is a delightful 
 city to dwell in. Nobody in it looks rich, — that 
 dreadful look! — and scarcely anybody looks poor. 
 The king and the princes stroll casually about the 
 streets, or may be met on the Acropolis or walking 
 by the sea at Phalerum. I was allowed to wander 
 all over the palace gardens, which are full of palms 
 and great trees, and which resemble a laid-out wood. 
 A Rumanian friend of mine told me that one day 
 when he was in the garden, on turning a corner, he 
 came upon the king and queen, with the crown- 
 princess, who had just come down from the terrace 
 in front of the royal apartments. All the center of 
 the palace was burned out more than a year ago, and 
 is now being slowdy rebuilt. Greece is the home of 
 genuine democrats, but democracy is delightful in 
 Greece. Nobody thinks about rank, and everybody 
 behaves like a gentleman. The note of Athens is a 
 perfectly decorous liveliness, which is never marred 
 by vulgarity. The stranger is welcomed and treated 
 with the greatest possible courtesy, and he is never 
 bothered by objectionable people such as haunt 
 many of the cities of Italy, and of other lands where 
 travelers are numerous. Athens indeed is one of the 
 
 84
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 most simpatica of cities, wonderfully cheerful, sim- 
 ply gay, of a perfect behavior, yet unceremonious. 
 
 I have said that the Greeks are democrats. Never- 
 theless, like certain other democrats of whom one 
 has heard, there are Greeks who love to think that 
 they are not quite as all other Greeks. America, I 
 am informed, has her ''four hundred." Greece has 
 her ''fifty-two." In New York the "four hundred" 
 consider themselves the advance-guard of fashion, 
 if not of civilization. In Athens the "fifty-two" 
 rejoice in a similar conviction. They do daring 
 things sometimes. There is a card-game beloved of 
 the Greeks called "Mouse." The fifty-two have in- 
 troduced bridge and despise "Mouse." In Athens 
 they frequent one another's houses. In the summer 
 they "remove" to Kephisia in the pine-woods, where 
 there are many pleasant, and some very fantastic, 
 villas, and where picnics, tennis, and card-parties, 
 theatrical performances and dances, fleet the hours, 
 which are always golden, away. They are some- 
 times criticized by the "outsiders," for even gods are 
 subject to criticism. People say now and then, 
 "What will the fifty-two do next?" or, "Really there 
 is no end to the folly of the fifty-two !" But have not 
 similar remarks been heard even at Newport or upon 
 Fifth Avenue pavements ? Nevertheless, despite the 
 fifty-two, you have only to look at the thin and 
 decrepit palings of King George's garden to realize 
 
 8.5
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 that at last you have found the true democracy, and 
 a democracy sensible enough to understand the ad- 
 vantage of possessing a royal family. Every society 
 needs a leader, and royalty leads far more effectively 
 than any one else, hov^ever self-assured, hov^ever 
 glittering. The Greeks are not without wisdom. 
 
 Their manners are charming and excellent. I had 
 an unusual opportunity of putting them to the test. 
 I was in Athens just before and just after the dec- 
 laration of war against Turkey, when spies were 
 everywhere, when a Turkish spy was discovered in 
 Athens disguised as a Greek priest, and a woman 
 was caught near Lycabettus in the act of poisoning 
 the water-supply of the city. One morning early, 
 when I was on the sea near Salamis in a small boat 
 with a Greek fisherman, I was arrested on suspicion 
 of being a spy, and was brought before the admiral 
 in supreme command of the fleet. My passport was 
 in Athens at my hotel, the admiral evidently disbe- 
 lieved my explanations, and I was handed over to 
 the police at the Piraeus, accompanied by a report 
 from the admiral in which, as was afterward made 
 known to me, he stated that I was "a very suspicious 
 character." And now to the test of Hellenic good 
 manners. 
 
 Eventually a guard of police carrying rifles was 
 sent to convey me from the Piraeus to Athens, and in 
 the middle of the afternoon I was obliged to walk as 
 
 86
 
 THE ACADEMY, MOUNT LYCABETTUS IN 
 THE BACKGROUND
 
 From a photOKrapli, copyright, by I'liderwocd & Indcrw .1, N. \.
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 a prisoner through the streets of the Piraeus, to take 
 the tram to Phalerum, to get out there and wait for 
 half an hour at a railway-station, and to travel in the 
 train to Athens. In Athens I was made to walk three 
 times, always guarded closely, through the prin- 
 cipal streets and squares of the city, and twice past 
 my hotel in the Constitution Square during the most 
 busy hour of the day. Eventually, at night, I was 
 released. Now, the Hellenes are considered by 
 many people to be very inquisitive. During my pub- 
 lic exposure as a prisoner I met with no really dis- 
 agreeable curiosity from the crowd. Many people 
 discreetly inquired of my guards who I was and 
 what I had done, and naturally a great many more 
 stared at me. But nobody followed me and my at- 
 tendants as we marched on our way from one police 
 station to another, to the War Office, etc. There was 
 no pushing or jostling, such as there would certainly 
 have been in an English town if a prisoner with 
 guards was exposed to the public gaze. Curiosity 
 was, as a rule, almost carefully dissembled, and in- 
 quiries were made with a charming discretion. I 
 confess I felt grateful to the Greeks that day, though 
 not to the admiral who had me arrested, or to the 
 police who put me to so much inconvenience. And 
 I was grateful for one thing more, that I was re- 
 leased just in time to see King George's arrival 
 in Athens on the eve of the war. 
 
 • 89
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 The Hellenes are not an enthusiastic people, as a 
 rule. They are critical, intellectual, sometimes 
 rather cynical. But that night they gave way to 
 emotion. Great crowds were lined up in Constitu- 
 tion Square, and were massed on the brow of the 
 hill before the palace, when at length the police let 
 me go. Darkness had long since fallen, but the 
 square was illuminated brightly. All the balconies 
 were packed with people. The terrace before the 
 Grande Bretagne was black with sight-seers. And 
 everywhere in the forefront were rows of eager, 
 vivacious Greek children, many of them the soldiers 
 of the future. 
 
 We had to wait for a very long time. But at last 
 the king came in an open carriage, driving with ''the 
 Diadochos," as the crown-prince is always called in 
 Greece. Both were in uniform. There was no cere- 
 monial escort, so the people formed an unceremonial 
 one. They ran with the carriage, shouting, waving 
 their hats and handkerchiefs, cheering till they were 
 hoarse, and crying, "War! War!" The great square 
 rang with the clapping of thousands of hands. 
 "Never before," said a Greek to me, "has the king 
 had such a reception." When the carriagjes contain^ 
 ing the rest of the royal family and the ministers had 
 gone by, we ran in our thousands to the palace. 
 Above the great entrance porch there is a balcony, 
 and after a short time slim King George stepped out, 
 
 qo

 
 FHE ACROPOTJS AT ATHENS, EARLY MORNING
 
 IN AND NEAR ATHENS 
 
 rather cautiously, I thought, upon it, followed by all 
 the princes and princesses. It was very dark, but a 
 footman accompanied his Majesty, holding an elec- 
 tric light, and we had our speech. 
 
 The king read the first part of it in a loud, unemo- 
 tional voice, bending sometimes to the light. But at 
 the close he spoke a few words extempore, com- 
 mending the Hellenic cause, if war should come, to 
 the mercy of God. And then, again with precaution, 
 he retired into the palace amid a storm of cheers. 
 
 I was afterward told that, with the whole of the 
 royal family, his Majesty had been standing upon 
 some loose planks which spanned an abyss. The 
 royal palace, owing to the disastrous fire, is not yei 
 what it seems. Fortunately, the Greek army has 
 proved more solid, and the God of battles, so sol- 
 emnly invoked by their king, has been favorable to 
 the arms of the Greeks. No one, I think, who was in 
 Greece during that time of acute tension, who saw 
 the feverish preparations, the devotion of the toiling 
 soldiers, the ardor of the volunteers; no one who wit- 
 nessed, as I did, the return to Athens of the ''Amer- 
 ican Greeks," who gave up everything and crossed 
 the ocean to fight for their little, splendid country, 
 could wish it otherwise. 
 
 The descendants of those who made the Par- 
 thenon have shown something of that Doric soul 
 which is surely the soul of Greece. 
 
 93
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS
 
 *^
 
 THE TEMPLE OF POSEIDON AND ATHENE AT SUNIUM
 
 Chapter III 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 UPON the southern slope of the Acropolis, 
 beneath the limestone precipices and the 
 great golden-brown walls above which the 
 Parthenon shows its white summit, are many ruins; 
 among them the Theater of Dionysus and the 
 Odeum of Herodes Atticus, the rich Marathonian 
 who spent much of his money in the beautification 
 of Athens, and who taught rhetoric to two men who 
 eventually became Roman emperors. The Theater 
 of Dionysus, in which ^schylus, Sophocles, and 
 Euripides produced their dramas, is of stone and 
 silver-white marble. Many of the seats are arm- 
 chairs, and are so comfortable that it is no uncom- 
 mon thing to see weary travelers, who have just 
 come down from the Acropolis, resting in them with 
 almost unsuitable airs of unbridled satisfaction. 
 
 It is evident to any one who examines this great 
 theater carefully that the Greeks considered it im- 
 portant for the body to be at ease while the mind was 
 at work; for not only are the seats perfectly adapted 
 
 99
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 to their purpose, but ample room is given for the feet 
 of the spectators, the distance between each tier and 
 the tier above it being v^ide enough to do av^ay with 
 all fear of crowding and inconvenience. The marble 
 arm-chairs were assigned to priests, whose names 
 are carved upon them. In the theater I saw one high 
 arm-chair, like a throne, with lion's feet. This is 
 Roman, and was the seat of a Roman general. The 
 fronts of the seats are pierced with small holes, 
 which allow the rain-water to escape. Below the 
 stage there are some sculptured figures, most of 
 them headless. One which is not is a very striking 
 and powerful, though almost sinister, old man, in a 
 crouching posture. His rather round forehead re- 
 sembles the very characteristic foreheads of the 
 Montenegrins. 
 
 Herodes Atticus restored this theater. Before his 
 time it had been embellished by Lycurgus of Athens, 
 the orator, and disciple of Plato. It is not one of the 
 gloriously placed theaters of the Greeks, but from 
 the upper tiers of seats there is a view across part of 
 the Attic plain to the isolated grove of cypresses 
 where the famous Schliemann is buried, and beyond 
 to gray Hymettus. 
 
 Standing near by is another theater, Roman- 
 Greek, not Greek, the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, 
 said to have been built by him in memory of his wife. 
 This is not certain, and there are some authorities 
 
 loo
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 who think that, like the beautiful arch near the 
 Olympieion, this peculiar, very picturesque struc- 
 ture was raised by the Emperor Hadrian, who was 
 much fonder of Athens than of Rome. 
 
 The contrast between the exterior, the immensely 
 massive, three-storied fagade with Roman arches, 
 and the interior, or, rather, what was once the inte- 
 rior, of this formerly roofed-in building, is very 
 strange. They do not seem to belong to each other, 
 to have any artistic connection the one with the 
 other. 
 
 The outer walls are barbarically huge and heavy, 
 and superb in color. They gleam with a fierce red- 
 gold, and are conspicuous from afar. The almost 
 monstrous, but impressive, solidity of Rome, heavy 
 and bold, indeed almost crudely imperious, is shown 
 forth by them — a solidity absolutely different from 
 the Greek massiveness, which you can study in the 
 Doric temples, and far less beautiful. When you 
 pass beyond this towering faqade, which might well 
 be a section of the Colosseum transferred from 
 gladiatorial Rome to intellectual Athens, you find 
 yourself in a theater which looks oddly, indeed, al- 
 most meanly, small and pale and graceful. With a 
 sort of fragile timidity it seems to be cowering be- 
 hind the flamboyant walls. When all its blanched 
 marble seats were crowded with spectators it con- 
 tained five thousand persons. As you approach the 
 
 lOI
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 outer walls, you expect to find a building that might 
 accommodate perhaps twenty-five thousand. There 
 is something bizarre in the two colors, fierce and 
 pale, in the two sizes, huge and comparatively small, 
 that are united in the odeum. Though very remark- 
 able, it seems to me to be one of the most inharmo- 
 nious ruins in Greece. 
 
 The modern Athenians are not very fond of hard 
 exercise, and except in the height of summer, when 
 many of them go to Kephisia and Phalerum, and 
 others to the islands, or to the baths near Corinth for 
 a ''cure," they seem well content to remain within 
 their city. They are governed, it seems, by fashion, 
 like those who dwell in less-favored lands. When I 
 was in Athens the weather was usually magnificent 
 and often very hot. Yet Phalerum, perhaps half an 
 hour by train from Constitution Square, was de- 
 serted. In the vast hotel there I found only two or 
 three children, in the baths half a dozen swimmers. 
 The pleasure-boats lay idle by the pier. I asked the 
 reason of this — why at evening dusty Athens was 
 crammed with strollers, and the pavements were 
 black with people taking coffee and ices, while de- 
 lightful Phalerum, with its cooler air and its limpid 
 waters, held no one but an English traveler? 
 
 "The season is over," was the only reply I re- 
 ceived, delivered with a grave air of finality. I tried 
 to argue the matter, and suggested that anxiety 
 
 I02
 
 THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE, ISLAND OF ^GINA
 
 V
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 about the war had something to do with it. But I 
 was informed that the "season" closed on a certain 
 day, and that after that day the Athenians gave up 
 going to Phalerum. 
 
 The season for many things seemed "over" wdien 
 I was in Athens. Round about the city, and within 
 easy reach of it, there is fascinating country — coun- 
 try that seems to call you with a smiling decision to 
 enjoy all Arcadian delights; country, too, that has 
 great associations connected with it. From Athens 
 you can go to picnic at Marathon or at Salamis, or 
 you can carry a tea-basket to the pine-woods which 
 slope down to the Convent of Daphni, and come' 
 back to it after paying a visit to Eleusis. Or, if you 
 are not afraid of a "long day," you can motor out 
 and lunch in the lonely home of the sea-god under 
 the columns at Sunium. If you wish to go where a 
 king goes, you can spend the day in the thick woods 
 at Tato'i. If you are full of social ambition, and aim 
 at "climbing," a train in not many minutes will set 
 you down at Kephisia, the summer home of "the 
 fifty-two" on the slope of a spur of Mount Pen- 
 telicus. 
 
 Thither I went one bright day. But, as at Pha- 
 lerum, I found a deserted paradise. The charming 
 gardens and arbors were empty. The villas, Rus- 
 sian, Egyptian, Swiss, English, French, and even 
 now and then Greek in style, were shuttered and
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 closed. All in vain the waterfalls sang, all in vain 
 the silver poplars and the yellow-green pines gave 
 their shade. No one was there. I went at length to 
 a restaurant to get something to eat. Its door was 
 unlocked, and I entered a large, deserted room, with 
 many tables, a piano, and a terrace. No one came. 
 I called, knocked, stamped, and at length evoked a 
 thin elderly lady in a gray shawl, who seemed 
 alarmed at the sight of me, and in a frail voice 
 begged to know what I wanted. When I told her, 
 she said there was nothing to eat except what they 
 were going to have themselves. The season was 
 over. Eventually she brought me mastika and part 
 of her own dinner to the terrace, which overlooked 
 a luxuriant and deserted garden. And there I spent 
 two happy, golden hours. I had sought the heart of 
 fashion, and found the exquisite peace that comes to 
 places when fashion has left them. Henceforth I 
 shall always associate beautiful Kephisia with si- 
 lence, flowers, and one thin old woman in a gray 
 shawl. 
 
 Greece, though sparsely inhabited, is in the main 
 a very cheerful-looking country. The loneliness of 
 much of it is not depressing, the bareness of much of 
 it is not sad. I began to understand this on the day 
 when I went to the plain of Marathon, which, for- 
 tunately, lies away from railroads. One must go 
 there by carriage or motor or on horseback. The 
 
 io6
 
 rron, a photograph, copyright, l.y L .M.ru d .V L„derwood. N. Y.
 
 THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS, ATHENS
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 road is bad both for beasts and machinery, but it 
 passes through country which is typical of Greece, 
 and through which it would be foolish to go in haste. 
 Go quietly to Marathon, spend two hours there, or 
 more, and when you return in the evening to Athens 
 you will have tasted a new joy. You will have lived 
 for a little while in an exquisite pastoral — a pastoral 
 through which, it is true, no pipes of Pan have fluted 
 to you, — I heard little music in Greece, — but which 
 has been full of that lightness, brightness, sim- 
 plicity, and delicacy peculiar to Greece. The soil of 
 the land is light, and I believe, though Hellenes have 
 told me that in this belief I am wrong, that the heart 
 of the people is light. Certainly the heart of one 
 traveler was as he made his way to Marathon along 
 a white road thickly powdered with dust. 
 
 Has not each land its representative tree? Amer- 
 ica has it maple. England its oak, France its poplar, 
 Italy its olive, Turkey its cypress, Egypt its palm, 
 and so on. The representative tree of Greece is the 
 pine. I do not forget the wild olive, from which in 
 past days the crowns were made, nor the fact that 
 the guide-books say that in a Greek landscape the 
 masses of color are usually formed by the silver- 
 green olive-trees. It seemed to me, and it seems to 
 me still in remembrance, that the lovely little pine is 
 the most precious ornament of the Grecian scene. 
 
 Marathon that day was a pastoral of yellow and 
 
 109
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 blue, of pines and sea. On the way I passed through 
 great oHve-groves, in one of which long since some 
 countrymen of mine were taken by brigands and 
 carried away to be done to death. And there were 
 mighty fig-trees, and mulberry-trees, and acres and 
 acres of vines, with here and there an almost black 
 cypress among them. But the pines, more yellow 
 than green, and the bright blue sea made the picture 
 that lives in my memory. 
 
 Not very long after we were clear of the town we 
 passed not far from the village of "Louis," w^ho won 
 the first Marathon race that was run under King 
 George's scepter, Marousi, where the delicious water 
 is found that Athens loves to drink. And then away 
 we went through the groves and the little villages, 
 where dusty soldiers were buying up mules for the 
 coming war; and Greek priests were reading news- 
 papers; and olive-skinned children, with bright, yet 
 not ungentle, eyes, were coming from school; and 
 outside of ramshackle cafes, a huddle of wood, a 
 vine, a couple of tables, and a few bottles, old gentle- 
 men, some of them in native dress, with the white 
 fustanella, a sort of short skirt not reaching to the 
 knees, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented 
 with big black tassels, were busily talking politics. 
 Carts, not covered with absurd but lively pictures, 
 as they are in Sicily, lumbered by in the dust. Peas- 
 ants, sitting sidewise with dangling feet, met us on 
 
 I lO
 
 THE ENVIROiNS OF ATHENS 
 
 trotting donkeys. Now and then a white dog dashed 
 out, or a flock of thin turkeys gobbled and stretched 
 their necks nervously as they gave us passage. Wo- 
 men, with rather dingy handkerchiefs tied over their 
 heads, were working in the vineyards or washing 
 clothes here and there beside thin runlets of water. 
 Two German beggars, with matted hair uncovered 
 to the sun, red faces, and fingers with nails like the 
 claws of birds, tramped by, going to Athens. And 
 farther on we met a few Turkish Gipsies, swarthy 
 and full of a lively malice, whose tents were visible 
 on a hillside at a little distance, in the midst of a 
 grove of pines. All the country smiled at us in the 
 sunshine. One jovial man in a fustanella leaned 
 down from a cart as we passed, and shouted in 
 Greek: "Enjoy yourselves! Enjoy yourselves!" And 
 the gentle hills, the olive- and pine-groves, the 
 stretching vineyards, seemed to echo his cry. 
 
 What is the magic of pastoral Greece? What is it 
 that gives to you a sensation of being gently re- 
 leased from the cares of life and the boredom of 
 modern civilization, with its often unmeaning com- 
 plications, its unnecessary luxuries, its noisy self- 
 satisfactions? This is not the tremendous, the 
 spectacular release of the desert, an almost savage 
 tearing away of bonds. Nothing in the Greece I saw 
 is savage ; scarcely anything is spectacular. But, oh, 
 the bright simplicity of the life and the country 
 
 III
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 along the way to Marathon! It was like an early 
 world. One looked, and longed to live in those 
 happy woods like the Turkish Gipsies. Could life 
 offer anything better? The pines are small, exqui- 
 sitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as if it 
 had been deftly arranged by a consummate artist. 
 They curl over the slopes with a lightness almost of 
 foam cresting a wave. Their color is quite lovely. 
 The ancient Egyptians had a love color: well, the 
 little pine-trees of Greece are the color of happiness. 
 You smile involuntarily when you see them. And 
 when, descending among them, you are greeted by 
 the shining of the brilliant-blue sea, which stretches 
 along the edge of the plain of Marathon, you know 
 radiance purged of fierceness. 
 
 The road winds down among the pines till, at 
 right angles to it, appears another road, or rough 
 track just wide enough for a carriage. This leads to 
 a large mound which bars the way. Upon this 
 mound a habitation was perched. It was raised high 
 above the ground upon a sort of tripod of poles. It 
 had yellow walls of wheat, and a roof and floor of 
 brushwood and maize. A ladder gave access to it, 
 and from it there was a wide outlook over the whole 
 crescent-shaped plain of Marathon. This dwelling 
 belonged to a guardian of the vineyards, and the 
 mound is the tomb of those who died In the great 
 battle. 
 
 112
 
 THE PLAIN OF MARATHON
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 I sat for a long time on this strange tomb, in the 
 shadow of the rustic watch-house, and looked out 
 over the plain. It is quite flat, and is now cultivated, 
 though there are some bare tracts of unfruitful 
 ground. In all directions I saw straggling vines. 
 Not far away was one low, red-tiled house belonging 
 to a peasant, whose three small, dirty, and un- 
 healthy-looking children presently approached, and 
 gazed at me from below. In the distance a man on a 
 white horse rode slowly toward the pine-woods, and 
 to my left I saw a group of women bending mysteri- 
 ously to accomplish some task unknown to me. No 
 other figures could I see between me and the bright- 
 blue waters that once bore up the fleet of Persia. 
 Behind me were stony and not very high hills, end- 
 ing in the slopes down which Miltiades made his sol- 
 diers advance ''at a running pace." One hundred 
 and ninety-two brave men gone to dust beneath me; 
 instead of the commemorative lion, the little watch- 
 house of brushwood and wheat and maize; silence 
 the only epitaph. The mound, of hard, sun-baked 
 earth, was yellow and bare. On one side a few rusty- 
 looking thorn-bushes decorated it harshly. But 
 about it grew aloes, and the wild oleander, with its 
 bright-pink flowers, and near by were many great 
 fig-trees. A river intersects the plain, and its course 
 is marked by sedges and tall reeds. Where the land 
 is bare, it takes a tawny-yellow hue. Some cluster- 
 
 115
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 ini;- low houses far off under the hills form the Al- 
 hanian village of Marathon. Just twenty-two miles 
 \vo\u Athens, this place of an ancient glory, this 
 tcMul) oi men who, I suppose, will not be forgotten so 
 long as the Hellenic kingdom lasts, seems very far 
 awav, hidden from the world between woods and 
 waters, solitary, but not sad. Beyond the plain and 
 the sea are ranges of mountains and the island of 
 Euboea. 
 
 A figure slowly approaches. It is the guardian of 
 the vineyards, coming back to his watch-house 
 above the grave of his countrymen, smiling, with a 
 cigarette between his white teeth. As I go, he calls 
 out ''Addio!" Then he mounts his ladder carefully 
 and withdraws to his easy work. How strange to be 
 a watcher of vineyards upon the tumulus of Mar- 
 athon! 
 
 If you care at all for life in the open, if you have 
 the love of camping in your blood, Greece will call to 
 you at every moment to throw off the dullness of 
 houses, to come and stay under blue heaven and be 
 happy. Yet I suppose the season for all such joys 
 was over when I was in Greece, for I never met any 
 citizens of Athens taking their pleasure in the sur- 
 rounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near 
 any large town, when the weather is hot and fine, 
 one may see cheerful parties of friends making 
 merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or 
 
 ii6
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 men dreaming idly in nooks that might have made 
 old Omar's delight, shaded, and sung to by a stream. 
 In Greece it is not so. Once you are out in the coun- 
 try, you come upon no one but peasants, shepherds, 
 goatherds, Gipsies, turkey-drivers, and, speaking 
 generally, "sons of the soil." 
 
 In the very height of summer, I am told, the 
 Athenians do condescend to go to the pine-woods. 
 They sleep during part of the day, and stay out of 
 doors at night, often driving into the country, and 
 eating under the trees or by the sea. But even in the 
 heat of a rainless September, if I may judge by my 
 own experience, they prefer Constitution Square 
 and ''the Dardanelles" to any more pastoral pleas- 
 ures. 
 
 I did not imitate them, but followed the Via Sacra 
 one morning, past the oldest olive-tree in Greece, a 
 small and corrugated veteran said to have been 
 planted in the time of Pericles, to the Convent of 
 Daphni, now fallen into a sort of poetic decay. 
 
 Once more I was among pine-trees. They 
 thronged the almost park-like slopes under ^ga- 
 leos. They crowded toward the little Byzantine 
 church, which stands on the left of the road on the 
 site of a vanished temple of Apollo, with remains of 
 its once strongly fortified walls about it. Lonely, 
 but smiling, as though with a radiant satisfaction at 
 its own shining peace, is the country in whose bosom 
 
 1 17 
 
 in '
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 the church Hes. A few sheep, small, with shaggy 
 coats of brown and white, were grazing near it; a 
 doe- lav stretched out in the sun; and some lean, 
 long-tailed horses were standing with bowed heads, 
 as if drowsing. An ancient and very deep well was 
 close by. In the marble well-head the friction of 
 many drawn cords has cut grooves, some of them 
 nearly an inch in depth. The court of the convent is 
 roughly paved and is inclosed within rough walls. 
 In it are a few trees, an acacia or two, a wild pepper- 
 tree, and one gigantic cypress. From a branch near 
 the entrance a big bell hung by a chain. But the 
 only sound of bells came to me from without the 
 walls, where some hidden goats were moving to a 
 pasture. Fragments of broken columns and two or 
 three sarcophagi lay on the hot ground at my feet. 
 To my right, close to the church, a flight of very old 
 marble steps led to a rustic loggia with wooden sup- 
 ports, full of red geraniums and the flowers of a 
 plant like a very small convolvulus. From the log- 
 gia, which fronted her abiding-place, a cheerful, 
 kindly-faced woman came down and let me into the 
 church and left me with two companions, a black 
 kitten playing with a bee under the gilded cupola. 
 
 The church, like almost all the Byzantine churches 
 I saw in Greece, is very small, but it is tremendously 
 solid and has a tall belfry. The exterior, stained by 
 weather, is now a sort of earthy yellow; the cupola 
 
 ii8
 
 
 > 
 
 < 
 
 o
 
 >■
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 is covered with red tiles. The interior walls look 
 very ancient, and are blackened in many places by 
 the fingers of Time. IMade more than eight hundred 
 years ago, the remains of the Byzantine mosaics are 
 very curious and interesting. In the cupola, on a 
 gold ground, is a very large head of a Christ ("Chris- 
 tos Pantokrator"), which looks as if it were just 
 finished. The face is sinister and repellent, but ex- 
 pressive. There are several other mosaics, of the 
 apostles, of episodes in the life of the Virgin, and of 
 angels. None of them seemed to me beautiful, 
 though perhaps not one looks so wicked as the Chris- 
 tos, which dominates the whole church. Until com- 
 paratively recent times there were monks attached 
 to this convent, but now they are gone. 
 
 I passed through a doorway and came into a sort 
 of tiny cloister, shaded by a huge and evidently very 
 ancient fig-tree with enormous leaves. Here I found 
 the remains of an old staircase of stone. As I re- 
 turned to the dim and massive little church, glim- 
 mering with gold where the sunlight fell upon the 
 mosaics, the eyes of the Christos seemed to rebuke 
 me from the lofty cupola. The good-natured woman 
 locked the door behind me with a large key, handed 
 to me a bunch of the flowers I had noticed grow- 
 ing in the loggia, and bade me "Addio!" And soon 
 the sound of the goat-bells died away from my ears 
 as I went on my way back to Eleusis. 
 
 1 21
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 There is nothing mysterious about this road 
 which loads to the site of the Temple of the Mys- 
 teries. It winds down through the pine-woods and 
 rocks of the Pass of Daphni into the cheerful and 
 well-cultivated Thriasian plain, whence across a 
 brilliant-blue stretch of water, which looks like a 
 lake, but which is the bay of Eleusls, you can see 
 lunises and, alas! several tall chimneys pouring forth 
 smoke. The group of houses is Eleusis, now an 
 Albanian settlement, and the chimneys belong to a 
 factory where olive-oil soap is made. The road 
 passes between the sea and a little salt lake, which 
 latter seems to be prevented from submerging it 
 only by a raised coping of stone. The color of this 
 lake is a brilliant purple. In the distance is the 
 mountainous and rocky island of Salamis. 
 
 When I reached the village, I found it a cheery lit- 
 tle place of small white, yellow, and rose-colored 
 houses, among which a few cypress-trees grow. Al- 
 though one of the most ancient places in Greece, it 
 now looks very modern. And it is difficult to believe, 
 as one glances at the chimneys of the soap factory, 
 and at two or three black and dingy steamers lying 
 just off the works to take in cargo, that here Demeter 
 was worshiped with mysterious rites at the great 
 festival of the Eleusinia. Yet, according to the leg- 
 end, it W2LS here that she came, disguised as an old 
 hag, in search of her lost Persephone; here that she 
 
 122
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 taught Triptolemus how to sow the plain, and to 
 reap the first harvest of yellow wheat, as a reward 
 for the hospitable welcome given to her by his father 
 Celeus. 
 
 The ruins at Eleusis are disappointing to the ordi- 
 nary traveler, though interesting to the archaeolo- 
 gist. They have none of the pathetic romance which, 
 notwithstanding the scoldings of many vulgar per- 
 sons set forth in a certain visitors' book, broods 
 gently over poetic Olympia. Above the village is a 
 vast confusion of broken columns, defaced capitals, 
 bits of wall, bits of pavement, marble steps, fallen 
 medallions, vaults, propylaea, substructures, scraps 
 of architraves carved with inscriptions, and subter- 
 ranean store-rooms. In the pavement of the proces- 
 sional way, by which the chariots came up to the 
 Temple of Demeter, the chief glory and shrine of 
 Eleusis, are the deep ruts made by the chariot- 
 wheels. The remnants of the hall of the initiated 
 bears witness to the long desire of poor human 
 beings in all ages to find that peace which passeth 
 our understanding. Of beauty there is little or none. 
 Nevertheless, even now, it is not possible in the 
 midst of this tragic debacle to remain wholly un- 
 moved. Indeed, the very completeness of the disas- 
 ter that time and humanity have wrought here 
 creates emotion, when one remembers that here 
 great men came, such men as Cicero, Sophocles, and 
 
 123
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 Plato: that here they worshiped and adored under 
 cover of the darkness of night; that here, seeking, 
 they found, as has been recorded, peace and hope to 
 sustain them when, the august festival over, they 
 took their way back into the ordinary world along 
 the shores of sea and lake. Eleusis is no longer 
 beautiful. It is a home of devastation. It is no 
 longer mysterious. A successful man is making a 
 fortune out of soap there. But it is a place one can- 
 not easily forget. And just above the ruins there is a 
 small museum which contains several very interest- 
 ing things, and one thing that is superb. 
 
 This last is the enormous and noble upper part of 
 the statue of a woman wearing ear-rings. I do not 
 know its history, though some one assured me that 
 it was a caryatid. It was dug up among the ruins, 
 and the color of it is akin to that of the earth. The 
 roughly undulating hair is parted in the middle of a 
 majestic, goddess-like head. The features are pure 
 and grand; but the two things that most struck me, 
 as I looked at this great work of art, were the expres- 
 sion of the face, and the deep bosom, as of the earth- 
 mother and all her fruitfulness. In few Greek 
 statues have I seen such majesty and power, com- 
 bined with such intensity, as this nameless woman 
 shows forth. There is indeed almost a suggestion of 
 underlying fierceness in the face, but it is the fierce- 
 ness that may sometimes leap up in an imperial 
 
 I 24
 
 RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF Vlt'A* ' 
 
 MYSTERIES AT ELEUSIS
 
 RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF THE 
 MYSTERIES AT ELEUSIS
 
 " La 
 
 photograph. copyriK'ht. by rnaerwnn<l cV I'lKierwoDil. N. "i .
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 nature. Are there not royal angers which flame out 
 of the pure furnaces of love? This noble woman 
 seems to me to be the present glory of Eleusis. 
 
 The mountainous island of Salamis, long and 
 calm, with gray and orange rocks, lies like a sentinel 
 keeping guard over the harbor of the Piraeus. It is 
 so near to the mainland that the sea between the two 
 shores looks like a lake, lonely and brilliant, with the 
 two-horned peak called ''the throne of Xerxes" 
 standing out characteristically behind the low-lying 
 bit of coast where the Greeks have set up an arsenal. 
 Whether Xerxes did really watch the famous battle 
 from a throne placed on the hill with which his name 
 is associated is very doubtful. But many travelers 
 like to believe it, and the kind guides of Athens are 
 quite ready to stiffen their credulity. 
 
 The shores of this beautiful inclosed bit of sea are 
 wild. The water is wonderfulh^ clear, and is shot 
 with all sorts of exquisite colors. The strip of main- 
 land, against which the liquid maze of greens and 
 blues and purples seems to lie motionless, like a 
 painted marvel, is a tangle of wild myrtle and dwarf 
 shrubs growing in a sandy soil interspersed with 
 rocks. Gently the land curves, forming a series of 
 little shallow bays and inlets, each one of which 
 seems more delicious than the last as 3^ou coast 
 along in a fisherman's boat. But, unfortunately, the 
 war-ships of Greece often lie snug in harbor in the 
 
 127
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 slKuUnv of Salamis not far from the arsenal, and, as 
 1 have hinted already, their commander-in-chief has 
 liltlo sympathy with the inquiring traveler. I shall 
 not easily forget the expression that came into his 
 faee when, in reply to his question, "What did you 
 come here for?" I said, ''To visit the scene of the 
 celebrated battle." A weary incredulity made him 
 suddenly look very old; and I believe it was then 
 that, taking a pen, he wrote on the margin of his re- 
 port about me that I was ''a very suspicious person." 
 
 It is safer, especially in war-time, to keep away 
 from Salamis; but if you care for smiling wild places 
 where the sea is, where its breath gives a vivid sense 
 of life to the wilderness, you may easily forget her 
 myrtle-covered shores and the bays of violet and 
 turquoise. 
 
 Of the many wonderful haunts of the sea which I 
 visited in Greece, Cape Sunium is perhaps the most 
 memorable, though I never shall forget the glories 
 of the magnificent drive along the mountains be- 
 tween Athens and Corinth. But Sunium has its 
 ruined temple, standing on a great height. And in 
 some of us a poet has wakened a wondering con- 
 sciousness of its romance, perhaps when we sat in a 
 Northern land beside the winter fire. And in some 
 of us, too, an immortal painter has roused a longing 
 to see it, when we never thought to be carried by our 
 happy fate to Greece. 
 
 128
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 In going to Sunium I passed through the famous 
 mining district of Laurium, where now many con- 
 victs work out their sentences. In ancient times 
 slaves toiled there for the benefit of those citizens 
 who had hereditary leases granted by the state. 
 They worked the mines for silver, but now lead is 
 the principal product. It happened that just as we 
 were in the middle of the dingy town, or village, 
 where the miners and their families dwell, — for only 
 some of them are convicts, — a tire of the motor 
 burst. This of course delayed us, and I was able to 
 see something of the inhabitants. In Athens I had 
 heard that they were a fierce and ill-mannered 
 population. I found them, on the contrary, as I found 
 almost all those whom I met in Greece, cheerful, 
 smiling, and polite. Happy, if rather dirty, children 
 gathered round us, delighted to have something to 
 look at and wonder about. Men, going to or com- 
 ing from the works, paused to see what was the mat- 
 ter and to inquire where I came from. From the 
 windows of the low, solid-looking houses women 
 leaned eagerly out with delighted faces. Several of 
 the latter talked to me. I could not understand what 
 they said, and all they could understand was that I 
 came from London, a circumstance which seemed 
 greatly to impress them, for they called it out from 
 one to another up the street. We carried on inter- 
 course mainly by facial expression and elaborate 
 
 I 29
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 i;csturc, assisted genially by the grubby little boys. 
 Ami when I got into the car to go we were all the 
 best of friends. The machine made the usual irri- 
 table noises, but from the good people of Laurium 
 came only cries of good-will, among them that 
 pleasant admonition which one hears often in 
 Greece : ''Enjoy yourself ! Enjoy yourself !" 
 
 When Laurium was left behind we were soon in 
 wild and deserted country. Now and then we passed 
 an Albanian on horseback, with a gun over his 
 shoulder, a knife stuck in his belt, or we came upon a 
 shepherd watching his goats as they browsed on the 
 low scrub which covered the hills. All the people in 
 this region are Albanians, I was told. They ap- 
 peared to be very few. As we drew near to the an- 
 cient shrine of Poseidon we left far behind us the 
 habitations of men. At length the car stopped in 
 the wilderness, and on a height to my left I saw 
 the dazzling white marble columns of the Temple of 
 Sunium. 
 
 Almost all the ruins I saw in Greece were weather- 
 stained. Their original color was mottled with 
 browns and grays, with saffron, with gold and red- 
 gold. But the columns of Sunium have kept their 
 brilliant whiteness, although they stand on a great, 
 bare cliff above the sea, exposed to the glare of the 
 sun and to the buffeting of every wind of heaven. 
 They are raised not merely on this natural height, 
 
 130
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 but also on a great platform of the famous Poros- 
 stone. In the time of Byron there were sixteen col- 
 umns standing. There are now eleven, with a good 
 deal of architrave. These columns are Doric, and 
 are about twenty feet in height. They have not the 
 majesty of the Parthenon columns, but, on the con- 
 trary, have a peculiar delicacy and even grace, which 
 is lacking both in the Parthenon and in the Theseum. 
 They do not move you to awe or overwhelm you; 
 they charm and delight you. In their ivory-white 
 simplicity, standing out against the brilliant blue of 
 sea and sky on the white and gray platform, there is 
 something that allures. 
 
 Upon one of the columns I found the name of 
 Byron carved in bold letters. But I looked in vain 
 for the name of Turner. Byron loved the Cape of 
 Sunium. Fortunately, nothing has been done to 
 make it less wonderful since his time. It is true that 
 fewer columns are standing to bear witness to the 
 old worship of the sea-god; but such places as Su- 
 nium are not injured when some blocks of marble 
 fall, but when men begin to build. Still the noble 
 promontory thrusts itself boldly forward into the 
 sea from the heart of an undesecrated wilderness. 
 Still the columns stand quite alone. All the sea- 
 winds can come to you there, and all the winds of the 
 hills—winds from the yEgean and Mediterranean, 
 from crested Eubcea, from Melos, from Hydra, from 
 
 131
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 .i:£rina, with its beautiful Doric temple, from Argo- 
 lis and from the mountains of Arcadia. And it 
 seems as if all the sunshine of heaven were there to 
 bathe you in golden fire, as if there could be none left 
 over for the rest of the world. The coasts of Greece 
 stretch away beneath you into far distances, curving 
 in bays, thrusting out in promontories, here tawny 
 and volcanic, there gray and quietly sober in color, 
 but never cold or dreary. White sails, but only two 
 or three, are dreaming on the vast purple of Posei- 
 don's kingdom — white sails of mariners who are 
 bound for the isles of Greece. Poets have sung of 
 those isles. Who has not thought of them with emo- 
 tion ? Now, between the white marble columns, you 
 can see their mountain ranges, you can see their 
 rocky shores. 
 
 Behind and below me I heard a slight movement. 
 I got up and looked. And there on a slab of white 
 marble lay a snow-white goat warming itself in the 
 sun. White, gold, and blue, and far off the notes of 
 white were echoed not only by the mariner's sails, 
 but by tiny Albanian villages inland, seen over miles 
 of bare country, over flushes of yellow, where the 
 pines would not be denied. 
 
 There is an ineffable charm in the landscape, in 
 the atmosphere, of Greece. No other land that I 
 know possesses an exactly similar spell. Wildness 
 and calm seem woven together, a warm and almost 
 
 132
 
 THE ODEUM OF HERODES ATTICUS IN ATHENS
 
 THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS 
 
 caressing wildness with a calm that is full of 
 romance. There the wilderness is indeed a haven to 
 long after, and there the solitudes call you as if with 
 the voices of friends. 
 
 As I turned at last to go away from Poseidon's 
 white marble ruin, a one-armed man came up to me, 
 and in English told me that he was the guardian of 
 the temple. 
 
 ''But where do you live?" I asked him, looking 
 over the vast solitude. 
 
 Smiling, he led the w^ay down to a low white- 
 washed bungalow at a little distance. There, in a 
 rough but delicious loggia, paved and fronting the 
 sea, I found two brown women sitting with a baby 
 among some small pots -of flowers. Remote from 
 the world, with only the marble columns for neigh- 
 bors, with no voice but the sea's to speak to them, 
 dwell these four persons. The man lived and worked 
 for many years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 
 he lost his arm in some whirring machinery. Now 
 he has come home and entered the sea-god's service. 
 Pittsburgh and the Hellenic wilderness — what a 
 contrast! But my one-armed friend takes it philo- 
 sophically. He shrugs his shoulder, points to his 
 stump, and says, "I guess I could n't go on there like 
 this, so I had to quit, and they put me here." 
 
 They put him ''here," on Cape Sunium, and on 
 Cape Sunium he has built himself a house and made 
 
 135
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 \ov himself a loggia, white, cool, brightened with 
 tlowcrs, face to face with the purple sea, and the isles 
 and the mountains of Greece. And at Sunium he in- 
 tends to remain because, unfortunately, having lost 
 an arm, he is no longer wanted in Pittsburgh. 
 
 I gave him some money, accepted the baby's wav- 
 ering but insistent hand, and left him to his good or 
 ill fortune in the exquisite wilderness. 
 
 136
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA
 
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 -^..j^^- ^'
 
 THE SITK OP ANCIENT DELPHI
 
 Chapter IV 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 THERE are two ways of going from Athens 
 to Delphi: by sea from the Piraeus to Itea 
 and thence by carriage; or by motor. De- 
 spite the rough surfaces of the roads and the terrors 
 of dust, I chose the latter; and I was well rewarded. 
 For the drive is a glorious one, though very long and 
 fatiguing, and it enabled me to see a grand monu- 
 ment which many travelers miss — the Lion of Chse- 
 ronea, which gazes across a vast plain in a solitary 
 place between Thebes and Delphi. 
 
 Leaving Athens early one morning, I followed the 
 Via Sacra, left Eleusis behind me, traversed the 
 Thriasian plain, the heights of Mount Geraneia, and 
 the rich cultivated plain of Boeotia, passed through 
 the village of Kriekouki, and arrived at Thebes. 
 There I halted for an hour. After leaving Thebes, 
 the journey became continually more and more in- 
 teresting as I drew near to Parnassus: over the plain 
 of Livadia, through the village and khan of Gravia, 
 where one hundred and eighty Greeks fought he- 
 
 12 ^
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 roically against three thousand Turks in 1821, over 
 the magnificent Pass of Amblema, across the de- 
 lightful oHve-covered plain of Krissa, and up the 
 mountain to Delphi. 
 
 Throughout this wonderful journey, during which 
 I saw country alternately intimate and wild, genial 
 and majestic, and at one point almost savage, I had 
 only one deception: that was on the Pass of Am- 
 blema, which rises to more than eight thousand feet 
 above the level of the sea. Delphi, I felt, ought to be 
 there. Delphi, I believed, must be there, hidden 
 somewhere among the rocks and the fir-woods, 
 where wolves lurk, and where the eagle circles and 
 swoops above peaks which are cold and austere. 
 Only when we began to descend in serpentine 
 curves, when I saw far below me great masses of 
 olive-trees, and the distant shining of the sea, did I 
 realize that I was mistaken, and that Delphi lay 
 beyond, in a region less tragically wild, more rustic, 
 even more tender. 
 
 During this journey of, I believe, about three hun- 
 dred kilometers or more, I realized fully the lone- 
 liness that happily shadows a great part of Greece. 
 We seemed to be almost perpetually in the midst of 
 a delightful desolation, gloriously alone with nature, 
 now far up on bare flanks of the hills, now traveling 
 through deserted pine-woods or olive-groves, now 
 upon plains which extended to shadowy ranges of 
 
 142
 
 X 
 
 O 
 
 a 
 
 r 
 
 C 
 
 n 
 o 
 
 S 
 
 
 >
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 mountains, and which here and there reminded me 
 of the plains of Palestine. Strange it seemed to 
 come upon an occasional village of Greeks or Al- 
 banians, strayed, surely, and lost and forgotten in 
 the wilderness; stranger still to see now and then 
 some tiny Byzantine church, perhaps with a few 
 cypresses about it, perched on a mountain height 
 that looked as if it never had been trodden by foot of 
 man. The breezes that met us were alive with a 
 tingling purity of hilltop and sea, or sweet and 
 wholesome with the resinous odor of pine. And the 
 light that lay over the face of the land made nearly 
 all things magical. 
 
 Again we met Turkish Gipsies. In Greece they 
 have made the wild life their own. No longer one 
 hears of brigands, though only a few years ago these 
 highways were dangerous, and men traversed them 
 armed and at their own peril. Now the Gipsies are 
 in happy possession, and travel from place to place 
 in small caravans, with their mules, donkeys, and 
 dogs, and their tiny peaked tents, telling the bonne 
 aventure to the superstitious, and, so the Greeks de- 
 clare, stealing whatever they can lay their dark 
 hands on. They look wild and smiling, crafty rather 
 than ferocious; and they greet you with loud cries in 
 an unknown tongue, and with gestures expressive of 
 the perpetual desire to receive which seems inherent 
 in all true vagabonds. They pitch their tents usually 
 
 145
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 on the outskirts of the villages, staying for days or 
 weeks, as the luck serves them. And, so far as I 
 could judge, people receive them with good nature, 
 perhaps grateful for the excitement they hring into 
 lives that know little variation as season follows sea- 
 son and year glides into year. Just outside Thebes 
 1 found eleven of their tents set upon some rough 
 ground, the beasts tethered, the dogs on guard, the 
 babies toddling and sprawling, while their mothers 
 were cooking some mysterious compound, and the 
 men were away perhaps on some nefarious errand 
 among the excited Thebans. For that day Greek 
 officers were visiting the town, and in front of the 
 cafe, among the trees, and above the waterside, 
 where we stopped to lunch, there was a parade of 
 horses, mules, and donkeys from all the neighbor- 
 hood. War was taking its toll of the live-stock, and 
 the whole population was abroad to see the fun. 
 
 As soon as I had descended from the car and be- 
 gun to unpack my provisions, an elderly man came 
 up, asked whether we were from Athens, and then 
 put the question that is forever on the lips of the 
 Greek, ''What is the news ?" Every Greek has a pas- 
 sion for the latest news. Often, when I was travel- 
 ing through the country, people I passed on the way 
 called out to me, ''What is the news?" or, "Can you 
 give us a newspaper?" 
 
 Thebes, where, according to legend, Hercules was 
 
 146
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 born; where the stones gathered themselves to- 
 gether when Amphion struck his lyre; where blind 
 Tiresias prophesied; and, seated upon a block of 
 stone, the Sphinx asked her riddle of the passers-by 
 and slew them; where CEdipus ruled and suffered his 
 hideous fate; where the Epigoni took their ven- 
 geance; and Epaminondas showed how one man can 
 lift a city and set it on a throne above all the cities 
 of its fatherland — Thebes, where letters were first 
 brought into use among the Greeks, and where 
 weak-voiced Demosthenes by his eloquence per- 
 suaded the people to march to their glorious death 
 against Philip of Macedon, is now just a busy village 
 on the flank of a hill. Frequently devastated by 
 earthquakes, which are the scourge of this region, it 
 looks newly built, fairly clean and neat. It domi- 
 nates the plain in which Plutarch was born, and the 
 murmur of its waters is pleasant to the ear in a dry 
 and thirsty land. But though Thebes is not specially 
 Interesting, below it, in that plain once celebrated 
 for its flowers, — iris and lily, narcissus and rose, — > 
 beyond all sound of the voices of chattering peasants 
 or determined soldiers, solitary in its noble rage and 
 grief, is that most moving of monuments, the Lion 
 of Chseronea. 
 
 I came upon it unexpectedly. If I had not hap- 
 pened to be looking toward the left my chauffeur 
 would have driven me on 'without pause to Parnas- 
 
 147
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 sus, the mighty flanks of which were already visible 
 in the distance. When he pulled up we were already 
 almost out of sight of the lion. And I was glad as I 
 walked back alone, still more glad when I stood be- 
 fore it in solitude, surrounded by the great silence of 
 the plain. 
 
 There where the Hon sits, raised now on a high 
 pedestal and with cypresses planted about him, was 
 fought the great battle of Chseronea between the 
 Greeks and Philip of Macedon; and there the Greeks 
 lost much, but not their honor. Had it been other- 
 wise, would the lion be there now after so many cen- 
 turies, testifying to the grief of men long since dead, 
 to their anger, even to their despair, but not to their 
 cowardice or shame? I have heard people say that 
 the face of the lion does express shame. It seems to 
 me nobly passionate, loftily angry and sad, but not 
 ashamed. The Thebans raised it to commemorate 
 those of their comrades in arms who died on the 
 battle-field. What shame can attach to such men? 
 For long years the lion lay broken in pieces and 
 buried in the earth. Only in 1902 were the frag- 
 ments fitted together, though long before that they 
 had lain above ground, where many noted travelers 
 had seen them. The restoration has been splendidly 
 successful, and has given to Greece one of the most 
 memorable manifestations in marble of a state of 
 soul that exists not merely in Greece, but in the 
 
 148
 
 From a photograph, copyright, by Underwood & 1 luierwood, N. Y.
 
 I'HK LION OF CH.tRONEA, THE ACROPOLIS 
 AND MOUNT PARNASSUS
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 world. Lion-hearted men are superbly commemo- 
 rated by this lion. 
 
 The height of the statue from the top of the 
 pedestal is about twenty feet. The material of which 
 it is made, marble of Boeotia, was once, I believe, 
 blue-gray. It is now gray and yellow. The lion is 
 sitting, but in an attitude that suggests fierce vital- 
 ity. Both the huge front paws seem to grasp the 
 pedestal almost as if the claws were extended in an 
 impulse of irresistible anger. The head is raised. 
 The expression on the face is wonderful. There is 
 in it a savage intensity of feeling that is rarely to be 
 found in anything Greek. But the savagery is en- 
 nobled in some mysterious way by the sublime art 
 of the sculptor, is lifted up and made ideal, eternal. 
 It is as if the splendid rage in the souls of all men 
 who ever have died fighting on a losing side had been 
 gathered up by the soul of the sculptor, and con- 
 veyed by him whole into his work. The mysterious 
 human spirit, breathed upon from eternal regions, 
 glows in this divine lion of Greece. 
 
 Various writers on the scenery of Greece have de- 
 scribed it as "alpine" in character. One has even 
 used the word in connection with some of the moun- 
 tain-ranges that may be seen from the plain of 
 Attica. Such distracting visions of Switzerland did 
 not beset my spirit as I traveled through a more 
 beautiful and far more romantic land, absolutely
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 different from the contented republic which has 
 been chosen by Europe as its playground. But 
 there were moments, as we slowly ascended the Pass 
 of Amblema, when I thought of the North. For the 
 delicate and romantic serenity of the Greek land- 
 scape did here give wa}^ to something that was al- 
 most savage, almost spectacular. The climbing 
 forests of dark and hardy firs made me think of 
 snow, which lies among them deep in winter. The 
 naked peaks, the severe uplands, the precipices, the 
 dim ravines, bred gloom in the soul. There was sad- 
 ness combined with wildness in the scene, which a 
 premature darkness was seizing, and the cold wind 
 seemed to go shivering among the rocks. 
 
 It was then that I thought of Delphi, and believed 
 that we must be nearing the home of the oracle. As 
 we climbed and climbed, and the cold increased, and 
 the world seemed closing brutally about us, I felt no 
 longer in doubt. We must be close to Delphi, old re- 
 gion of mysteries and terror, where the god of the 
 dead was thought to be hidden, where Apollo fought 
 with Python, where men came with fear in their 
 hearts to search out the future. 
 
 But presently we began to descend, and I learned 
 that we were still a long way from Delphi. The sun 
 set, and evening was falling when we were once 
 more down on the sea-level, traversing one of the 
 most delightful and fertile regions of Greece, the 
 
 152
 
 ^.. 
 
 Frrini a i.hnt.. 
 
 i-M. \>\ rii.lerw.x.d .V Uiidt-riv.
 
 PLACE OF THE FAMOUS ORACLE, DELPHI
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 lovely plain of Krissa, which extends to the sea. The 
 great olive-gardens stretch away for miles on every 
 hand, interspersed here and there with plane-trees, 
 mulberry-trees, medlars, cypresses, and the wild 
 oleander. Many battles have been fought in that 
 sylvan paradise, which now looks the home of peace, 
 a veritable Garden of Eden lying between moun- 
 tains and sea. Pilgrims traveling to Delphi were 
 forced to pay toll there, and eventually the extortion 
 became so intolerable that it led to war. That even- 
 ing, as we drove along a road cut straight through 
 the heart of the olive-woods, the whole region 
 seemed sunk in a dream. We met no one; we heard 
 no traffic, no voices, no barking of dogs. The thou- 
 sands of splendid trees, planted symmetrically, were 
 moved by no breeze. Warmth and an odorous calm 
 pervaded the shadowy alleys between them. Here 
 and there a soft beam of light shone among the trees 
 from the window of a guardian's dwelling. And 
 once we stopped to take Turkish coffee under a vine- 
 trimmed arbor, solitary and lost in the sweet silence, 
 in the silver dusk of the forest. A lodge in the 
 wilderness! As I looked at the dark, bright-eyed 
 man who served us, I, perhaps foolishly, envied him 
 his life, his strange little home, remote, protected by 
 his only companions, the trees. 
 
 In this plain camels are used for transport, and, I 
 believe, for plowing and other work. They are to be 
 
 ^55
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 found nowhere else in Greece. I saw none that 
 night; but one morning, after leaving Delphi, I met 
 a train of them pacing softly and disdainfully along 
 the dusty road, laden with bales and with mysterious 
 bundles wrapped round with sacking. 
 
 In the dark we began to climb up once more. At 
 last we were actually on Parnassus, were approach- 
 ing the ''navel of the earth." But I was not aware of 
 any wildness, such as that of Amblema, about us. 
 The little I could see of the landscape did not look 
 savage. I heard goat-bells tinkling now and then 
 not far off. Presently some lights beamed out above 
 us, as if in welcome. We passed through a friendly 
 village street, came out on the mountain-side, and 
 drew up before a long house, which stood facing 
 what was evidently a wide view, now almost en- 
 tirely hidden, though a little horned moon hung in 
 the sky, attended by the evening star. The village 
 was Kastri; the long house was the "Hotel d'Apol- 
 lon Pythien." 
 
 Delphi is memorable, but not because of wildness 
 or terror. In retrospect it rises in my mind as a 
 lonely place of light, gleaming on volcanic rocks and 
 on higher rocks that are gray ; of a few mighty plane- 
 trees, pouring a libation of green toward olive-trees 
 on the slopes beneath them; of a perpetual sweet 
 sound of water. And beside the water travelers from 
 the plain of Krissa, and travelers from Arachova, 
 
 156
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 that wonderfully placed Parnassian village, re- 
 nowned for its beautiful women, are pausing. They 
 get down from their horses and mules to lave their 
 hands and to drink. They cross themselves before 
 the little Christian shrine under the trees by the 
 roadside. They sit down in the shadows to rest. 
 
 It is very sweet to rest for long hours by the Cas- 
 talian fountain of Delphi, remote from all habita- 
 tions upon the great southern slope of Parnassus, 
 under the tree of Agamemnon; to listen to the voice 
 of the lustral wave. There, in the dead years, the 
 pilgrims piously sprinkled themselves before con- 
 sulting the oracle; there, now, the brown women of 
 the mountains chatter gaily as they wash their 
 clothes. The mountain is bare behind the shrine, 
 where perhaps is a figure of Mary with Christ in her 
 arms, or some saint with outspread wings. Its great 
 precipices of rock are tawny. They bloom with 
 strong reds and yellows, they shine with scars of 
 gold. Among the rocks the stream is only a thread 
 of silver, though under the bridge it flows down 
 through the olive-gardens, a broad band of singing 
 happiness. 
 
 Delphi has a mountain charm of remoteness, of 
 lofty silence; it has also a seduction of pastoral 
 warmth and gentleness and peace. Far up on the 
 slope of gigantic Parnassus, it faces a narrow valley, 
 or ravine, and a bare, calm mountain, scarred by 
 
 157
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 zigzag- paths, which look almost like lines sharply 
 cut in the volcanic soil with an instrument. In the 
 distance, away to the right, the defile opens out into 
 tlic plain of Krissa, at the edge of which lies a section 
 of sea, like a huge uncut turquoise lying in a cup of 
 the land. Beyond are ranges of beautiful, delicate 
 mountains. 
 
 The ruins of Delphi lie above the highroad to the 
 left of it, between Kastri and the Castalian fountain, 
 unshaded, in a naked confusion, but free from mod- 
 ern houses and in a fine loneliness. Once, and not 
 very long ago, the village of Kastri stood close to the 
 ruins, and some of it actually above them. But when 
 excavations were undertaken seriously, all the houses 
 were pulled down, and set up again where they stand 
 to-day. Like the ruins at Eleusis and Olympia, the 
 remains at Delphi are fragmentary. The ancient 
 Hellenes believed that the center of the earth was at 
 a certain spot within the Temple of Apollo at Del- 
 phi, where the eagles of Zeus, flying from the two 
 ends of the earth, had met. The foundations, and 
 some portions of the walls of this celebrated shrine, 
 in which two golden eagles stood, may be visited, 
 but very little of It remains. On the foundation has 
 been set up a large Roman column, upon which once 
 stood a statue. The fallen blocks of Doric columns 
 are gigantic, and from them It Is possible to gain 
 some faint idea of the temple's Immense size and 
 
 158
 
 VIKW OF MOUNT PARNASSUS
 
 From a photograph, copyriirht. liy Uiulcrwooii .t Underwood. N. Y.
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 massiveness. In the midst of a pit of stone, not far 
 from the columns, I found a soHtary fig-tree grow- 
 ing. It is interesting to notice that the huge outer 
 wall of the temple was constructed of quantities of 
 blocks, each one differing in shape from its neigh- 
 bors. These were ingeniously fitted close together 
 w^ithout the aid of any joining material. Although 
 it is impossible not to wonder at and admire the 
 cleverness shown in this wall, it produced on my 
 mind an impression of confusion that was almost 
 painful. The multitudes of irregular lines distressed 
 my eyes. There is little repose in a puzzle, and this 
 wall is like a mighty puzzle in stone. 
 
 Among the masses of broken fragments whicli 
 cover much of the hillside stands out a small, solid 
 building of Parian marble, very pure, very clean, 
 almost shining under the rays of the sun. It resem- 
 bles a great marble casket in which something very 
 precious might be placed and sealed up. This is the 
 treasury of the Athenians, which has been recon- 
 structed since Kastri was moved from the fragments 
 of the original temple. It is, in fact, a tiny Doric 
 temple. The marble, of a beautiful ycllow-whitc 
 color, is mingled here and there willi UniestDnc. 
 This little temple stands on a platform, witli llic 
 clearly defined Sacred Wny windiii-- up tlic hill be- 
 side it. The front of it is aj)proaclic(l by two stci)s, 
 and it lins two Doric mlnmns, containing, however, 
 
 i6t
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 only two blocks of the original marble, brown, with 
 touches of old gold. The remaining blocks of these 
 columns are of white Poros marble, brought from a 
 distance, and they look rough and almost glaring. 
 Poros marble may always be recognized by the mi- 
 nute shining grains, like specks of gold, that are 
 scattered through it. Although a fine substance, it 
 looks vulgar when placed beside Parian marble. 
 
 The semicircular places in which the priests of 
 Delphi used to sit may still be seen, facing a fine 
 view. The sea is hidden by a shoulder of the moun- 
 tain, but the rolling slopes beyond the road are cov- 
 ered thickly with olive-trees, among which the 
 goat-bells chime almost perpetually; and on the far 
 side of the narrow valley the bare slopes, with their 
 tiny, red paths, lead calmly toward rocky summits. 
 To the left the highroad turns sharply round a rock 
 in the direction of the Castalian fountain. 
 
 In the fairly well-preserved theater to the north- 
 west, quantities of yellow flowers were growing, 
 with some daisies. Among the gray limestone 
 blocks of the orchestra I found a quantity of excel- 
 lent blackberries. Where once was the stage, there 
 are now brown grasses dried up by the sun. This 
 theater is very steep, and above it towers a precipice. 
 Near by, between the theater and the stadium, Par- 
 nassus gives back to your cry a swift and sharp echo. 
 The gold, red-gold, and^ray stadium, which lies 
 
 162
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 farther up the mountain than the theater, is partly 
 ruined, but in parts is well preserved. As I stood in 
 it, thinking of the intellectual competitions that 
 used to take place there, of the poems recited in it, 
 of the music the lyre gave forth, and of the famous 
 Pythian games, which, later, used to be celebrated in 
 this strange mountain fastness, I saw eagles wheel- 
 ing over me far up in the blue, above the wild gray 
 and orange peaks. 
 
 In the museum, which stands in a splendid posi- 
 tion on the mountain-side, with a terrace before it, 
 there are many fine things. Delphi in the time of its 
 greatness contained thousands of statues, great 
 numbers of which were in bronze. Nero, Constan- 
 tine, and others carried hundreds of them away. 
 One which they left, a bronze charioteer in a long 
 robe, faces you as you enter the museum. It is mar- 
 velously alive, almost seems to glow with vitality. 
 The feet should be specially noticed. They are bare, 
 and are miracles of sensitiveness. Farther on there 
 is a splendid Antinous, robust, sensual, egoistic, a 
 type of muscular beauty and crude determination, 
 without heart or any sparkle of intellect. Two other 
 statues which I thought exceptionally interesting 
 are of a sturdy, smiling child and of a headless and 
 armless woman. The latter, numbered 1817 in the 
 catalogue, is very gracious and lovely. The back 
 of the figure and the drapery, especially that part of 
 
 t6'^
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 it which flows from under the left arm to the heel of 
 the right foot, are exceptionally beautiful. 
 
 There is a very fine view from the terrace. To- 
 ward evening it becomes wonderfully romantic. 
 Far off, the village of Arachova, perched on its high 
 ridge, bounds the horizon. It is a view closed in by 
 mountains yet not oppressive; for there is width 
 between the two ranges, and the large volcanic 
 slopes are splendidly spacious. Here and there on 
 these slopes are large wine-colored splashes such as 
 you see often on the mountains of Syria, and these 
 splashes give warmth to the scene. Above the Cas- 
 talian fountain the two peaks of the Phaedriadse, a 
 thousand feet high, stand up magnificently. Be- 
 tween them is the famous cleft from which the cold 
 stream issues, to flow down through the olive- 
 groves. 
 
 When evening falls, follow the winding white 
 road a little way toward Arachova. From the soft 
 dusk of the defile that spreads out into the plain of 
 Krissa the goat-bells still chime melodiously. I have 
 heard them even very late in the night. The section 
 of sea that was turquoise now looks like solid silver. 
 Behind it the mountains, velvety and black, flow 
 away in delicate shapes. They are dreamlike, but 
 beyond them rise other ethereal ranges which seem 
 to you, as you gaze on them, impalpable, fluid al- 
 most, like a lovely imagination of mountains sum- 
 
 164
 
 RUINS OF THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT DELPHI
 
 pyriKht, by I'liderwood & Underwood. N. V.
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 moned up in your mind. Black-green is the plain. 
 Under the tree of Agamemnon glows a tiny light, 
 like an earth-bound star. Where once the pilgrims 
 gathered who knew only the gods, Christian hands 
 have tended the lamp before the holy picture. And 
 a little farther on, among the foliage of the olive- 
 trees, shines another of these Christian stars, which, 
 in the darkness of Delphi's solitudes, shed their light, 
 faintly perhaps, but faithfully, upon a way once 
 often trodden by pagans who now sleep the last long 
 sleep. To what changes in the human soul do these 
 earth-bound stars bear witness! I sat beneath 
 Agamemnon's tree, listening to the cry of the foun- 
 ,tain, watching the little lights, till the night was 
 black about me. 
 
 I must always think of Olympia as the poetic 
 shrine of one of the most poetic statues in the world. 
 As the Parthenon seems to be the soul of Athens, so 
 the Hermes of Praxiteles seems to be the soul of 
 Olympia, gathering up and expressing its aloofness 
 from all ugly things, its almost reflective tenderness, 
 its profound calm, and its far-off freedom from any 
 sadness. When I stayed there I was the only trav- 
 eler. Never did I see any human being among the 
 beautiful ruins, or hear any voice to break their si- 
 lence. Only the peasants of that region passed now 
 and then on the winding track below the hill of 
 Cronus, to lose themselves among the pine-trees. 
 
 167
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 And I heard at a distance the wonderful sound, eter- 
 nity's murmur withdrawn, that the breeze makes 
 among their branches, as I sat by the palace of Nero. 
 
 Nature has taken Olympia into her loving arms. 
 She has shed her pine-needles and her leaves of the 
 golden autumn upon the seats where the wrestlers 
 reposed. She has set her grasses and flowers among 
 the stones of the Temple of Zeus. Her vines creep 
 down to the edge of that cup of her earth which 
 holds gently, as a nurse holds a sleeping child, pal- 
 aces, temples, altars, shrines of the gods and ways 
 for the chariots. All the glory of men has departed, 
 but something remains which is better than glory — 
 peace, loveliness, a pervading promise of lasting 
 things beyond. 
 
 Among the ruins of Nero's palace I watched white 
 butterflies flitting among feathery, silver grasses 
 and red and white daisies. Lizards basked on the 
 altar of Zeus. At the foot of the Herseum, the most 
 ancient temple that may be seen in Greece at this 
 time, a jackal whined in its dwelling. Sheep-bells 
 were sounding plaintively down the valley beyond 
 the arch leading to the walled way by which the 
 great stadium, where the games took place, was en- 
 tered. When I got up presently to stroll among the 
 ruins, I set my foot on the tiny ruts of an uneven 
 pavement, specially constructed so that the feet of 
 contending athletes should not slip upon it. 
 
 i68
 
 < 
 
 < 

 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 The ruins lie in a sheltered and remote valley far 
 away from the sea, and surrounded by gentle hills, 
 woods, and delightful pastoral country. At some 
 distance is the last railway station of the Peloponne- 
 sian railway line, which connects with the main line 
 at Pyrgos. Between the station and the low hill on 
 which stand the hotel and the museum is strung out 
 a small, straggling hamlet of peasants' houses. It is 
 very difficult to realize that this remote sanctuary, 
 hidden away in the green glades and amid the pas- 
 tures of Elis, where the waters of Cladeus and Al- 
 pheus glide among reeds and rushes, was ever 
 crowded with people from all parts of Greece; that 
 emperors dwelled there; that there the passions of 
 the mob were roused to intense expression; that 
 there men gained the desire of their hearts or were 
 exposed to the sneers and opprobrium of their fel- 
 lows. For Olympia to-day looks like an ideal home 
 for the great god Pan. 
 
 I have called the ruins beautiful, and I think them 
 so, partly because of their situation, with which they 
 seem to me to combine harmoniously, and partly be- 
 cause of nature's collaboration with them, which is 
 lacking from the ruins at Eleusis and even at Delphi. 
 At Olympia many trees grow among the remains of 
 the temples. A river runs by them. Excavations, 
 though usually interesting, are often both dusty and 
 ugly. At Olympia they are pastoral. Dryads might 
 
 171
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 love them. Pan might sit happily on almost any bit 
 of the walls and play his pipe. They form a unique 
 sylvan paradise, full of wonderful associations, in 
 which one is tempted to rest for hours, whereas from 
 many ruins one wishes only to get away once they 
 have been examined. And yet Olympia is so frag- 
 mentary that many persons are bitterly disap- 
 pointed with what they find there, as the visitors' 
 book in the little hotel bears witness. 
 
 In all the mass of remains, and they cover a very 
 large extent of ground, I think I saw only four com- 
 plete columns standing. Two of these were columns 
 of the Herseum, in which the Hermes of Praxiteles 
 was found lying among the remnants. They are 
 golden-brown in color, and are of course Doric, very 
 massive and rather squat. The temple, the base of 
 which is very clearly marked, must have looked very 
 powerful, but, I should think, heavy rather than 
 really majestic. I cannot imagine the wonderfully 
 delicate Hermes standing within it. It is believed 
 that the original columns of the Herseum were of 
 wood, and that when they began to rot away the 
 stone columns were put up in their places. Much of 
 the temple was made of brick. The Hermes stood 
 between two of the columns. 
 
 It will be evident to any one who examines care- 
 fully all that is left of the Temple of Zeus that it 
 must have been very grand. Fragments of the shafts 
 
 172
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 of its columns, which are heaped in confusion on the 
 ground, are enormous. One block, which I found 
 poised upright on its rounded edge, was quite six 
 feet high. This temple was made of limestone, 
 which is now of a rather dreary, almost sinister, 
 gray color. Exposure to the weather has evidently 
 darkened it. The foundations are terrific. They 
 suggest titanic preparations for the bearing up of a 
 universe of stone. It seems to me that from what is 
 left of this celebrated building, which stands in the 
 middle of the sacred precinct, and which once con- 
 tained Phidias's statue of Zeus, about forty feet 
 high, one can gather something of what was the 
 builders' conception of the chief of all the gods of 
 Olympus. To them he must surely have been sim- 
 ply the Thunderer, a deity terrific and forbidding, to 
 whose worship must be raised a temple grand but 
 probably almost repellent. Legend relates that 
 when Phidias had completed his great statue of 
 Zeus, and it had been placed in position, Zeus sent 
 down a thunderbolt which struck the ground close 
 to the statue. The Greeks considered the thunder- 
 bolt to be the god's characteristic expression of con- 
 tent. Instead of the eagles of Zeus, I saw hovering 
 over, and perching upon, this ruin black and white 
 birds, with long tails, not unlike magpies. The 
 statue of Zeus has disappeared. It is known to have 
 been taken to Constantinople, and in that tempes- 
 
 173
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 tuous city it vanished, like so much else. In the time 
 .of Olympia's glory the temple was elaborately deco- 
 rated, with stucco, painting, gilding, marble tiles, 
 shields, and vases, as well as with many statues. But 
 despite this, I think it must have been far less satis- 
 fying than the calm and glorious Parthenon, in 
 which seems to dwell rather the spirit of a goddess 
 than the spirit of any human builders. 
 
 Earthquakes are frequent at Olympia, and have 
 been so since the most ancient times. One destroyed 
 the greater part of Zeus's temple about four hundred 
 years after Christ. By that time the Olympic games 
 had ceased to be held, and no doubt the place was 
 beginning to fall into the neglect which, with the 
 lapse of the centuries, has become so romantic. 
 After it was forgotten by men, nature began to re- 
 member and love it. Very little of the famous sta- 
 dium has been excavated. I found flocks of sheep 
 and goats feeding peacefully above it, and near by a 
 small, barefooted boy, with a little gun, out after 
 quail. 
 
 On the first day of my visit to Olympia, after 
 spending a few hours alone among the ruins I 
 crossed the river, where I saw some half-naked men 
 dragging for fish with hand-nets, and mounted the 
 hill to the museum, which looks out over the deli- 
 cious valley, and is attended by some umbrella- 
 pines. It was closed, but the keeper came smiling 
 
 174
 
 o 
 r 
 
 > 
 
 n 
 
 H 
 O 
 
 X 
 w 
 
 > 
 H 
 
 n 

 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 from his dwelling close by to let me in. He did not 
 follow me far, but sat down in the vestibule among 
 the Roman emperors. 
 
 On my right I saw the entrance to what seemed a 
 small gallery, or perhaps a series of small rooms. In 
 front of me was a large, calm, well-lighted hall, with 
 a wooden roof and walls of a deep, dull red, round 
 which were ranged various objects. My eyes were 
 attracted immediately to one figure, a woman ap- 
 parently almost in flight, radiantly advancing, with 
 thin draperies floating back from an exquisitely vital 
 form — the celebrated ''Victory" of Pseonius, now 
 more than two thousand years old. Beyond this 
 marvel of suggested motion I saw part of another 
 room very much smaller than the hall and appar- 
 ently empty. It drew me on, as in certain Egyptian 
 temples the dim holy of holies draws the wanderer 
 onward w^ith an influence that may not be resisted. 
 I took no more heed of the ''Victory," of Hercules 
 winning the apples of the Hesperides, or of anything 
 else, but walked forward, came into the last room, 
 and found myself alone with the Hermes of 
 Olympia. 
 
 The room in which the Hermes stands — alone 
 save for the little child on his arm — is exactly oppo- 
 site the distant entrance of the museum. The 
 keeper, when letting me in, had left the big door 
 wide open. In my heart I thanked him, but not at 
 
 177
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 that moment, for just then I did not notice it. I was 
 looking at the Hermes. 
 
 A great deal of sad nonsense is talked in our day 
 by critics of art, music, and literature about ''re- 
 straint." With them the word has become a mere 
 parrot cry, a most blessed word, like Mesopotamia. 
 They preach restraint very often to those who have 
 little or nothing to restrain. The result is nullity. 
 In striving to become ''Greek," too many unhappy 
 ones become nothing at all. Standing before the 
 Hermes of Olympia, one realizes as never before the 
 meaning, the loveliness, of restraint, of the restraint 
 of a great genius, one who could be what he chose to 
 be, and who has chosen to be serene. This it is to be 
 Greek. Desire of anything else fails and lies dead. 
 In the small and silent room, hidden away from the 
 world In the green wilderness of Elis, one has found 
 that rare sensation, a perfect satisfaction. 
 
 Naked the Hermes stands, with his thin robe put 
 off, and flowing down over the trunk of a tree upon 
 which he lightly leans. He is resting on his way to 
 the nymphs, but not from any fatigue. Rather, per- 
 haps, because he is in no haste to resign his little 
 brother Dionysus to their hands for education. 
 Semele, the mother, is dead, and surely this gracious 
 and lovely child, touching because of his innocent 
 happiness, his innocent eagerness in pleasure, looks 
 to Hermes as his protector. He stretches out one 
 
 178
 
 DELPHI AND OLYMPIA 
 
 soft arm in an adorable gesture of desire. The other 
 clings to the shoulder of Hermes. And Hermes 
 watches him with an expression of divine, half-smil- 
 ing gentleness, untouched by sadness, by any mis- 
 giving, such as we often feel about the future of a 
 little child we love; Hermes watches him, contem- 
 plative, benign, celestial. 
 
 There is a pause in the hurry, in the sorrow, of this 
 travailing world; there is a hush. No more do the 
 human cries sound in the midst of that darkness 
 which is created by our misunderstanding. No 
 longer do the frantic footfalls go by. The golden 
 age has returned, with its knowledge of what is not 
 needed — a knowledge that we have lost. 
 
 I looked up from Hermes and the little brother, 
 and, in the distance, through the doorway of the 
 museum, I saw a tiny picture of Elis bathed in soft, 
 golden light; a calm hillside, some green and poetic 
 countr}^ and, in the foreground, like a message, a 
 branch of wild olive. 
 
 That is what we need, what secretly we desire, our 
 branch, perhaps our crown, of wild olive. And all 
 the rest is as nothing. 
 
 179
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE
 
 ti 
 
 JH
 
 THE GRAND BAZAAR IN CONSTANTINOPLE
 
 Chapter V 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 CONSTANTINOPLE is beautiful and hate- 
 ful. It fascinates and it repels. And it 
 bewilders — how it bewilders ! No other city 
 that I have seen has so confused and distressed me. 
 For days I could not release myself from the obses- 
 sion of its angry tumult. Much of it seems to be in a 
 perpetual rage, pushing, struggling, fighting, full of 
 ugly determination to do — what? One does not 
 know, one cannot even surmise what it desires, what 
 is its aim, if, indeed, it has any aim. These masses of 
 dark-eyed, suspicious, glittering people thronging 
 its streets, rushing down its alleys, darting out of its 
 houses, calling from its windows, muttering in its 
 dark and noisome corners, gathering in compact, 
 astonishing crowds in its great squares before its 
 mosques, blackening even its waters, amid fierce 
 noises of sirens from its innumerable steamers and 
 yells from its violent boatmen, what is it that they 
 want? Whither are they going in this brutal haste, 
 these Greeks, Corsicans, Corfiotes, Montenegrins, 
 
 185
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 Armenians, Jews, Albanians, Syrians, Egyptians, 
 Arabs, Turks? They have no time or desire to be 
 courteous, to heed any one but themselves. They 
 push you from the pavement. They elbow you in 
 the road. Upon the two bridges they crush past 
 you, careless if they tread upon you or force you into 
 the mud. If you are in a caique, traveling over the 
 waters of the Golden Horn, they run into you. 
 Caique bangs into caique. The boatmen howl at one 
 another, and somehow pull their craft free. If you 
 are in a carriage, the horses slither round the sharp 
 corners, and you come abruptly face to face with 
 another carriage, dashing on as yours is dashing, 
 carelessly, scornfully, reckless apparently of traffic 
 and of human lives. There seems to be no plan in 
 the tumult, no conception of anything wanted 
 quietly, toward which any one is moving with a 
 definite, simple purpose. The noise is beyond all 
 description. London, even New York, seems to me 
 almost peaceful in comparison with Constantinople. 
 There is no sound of dogs. They are all dead. But 
 even their sickly howling, of which one has heard 
 much, must surely have been overpowered by the 
 uproar one hears to-day, except perhaps in the dead 
 of night. 
 
 Soldiers seem to be everywhere. To live in Con- 
 stantinople is like living in some vast camp. When I 
 was there, Turkey was preparing feverishly for war. 
 
 i86
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 The streets were blocked with trains of artillery. 
 The steamers in the harbor w^ere vomiting forth 
 regiments of infantry. Patrols of horsemen paraded 
 the city. On my first night in Pera, when, weary 
 with my efforts to obtain some general conception 
 of what the spectacular monster really was, what it 
 wanted, what it meant, what it was about to do, I 
 had at length fallen asleep toward dawm, I was wak- 
 ened by a prolonged, clattering roar beneath my 
 windows. I got up, opened the shutters, and looked 
 out. And below me, in the semi-darkness, I saw in- 
 terminable lines of soldiers passing: officers on 
 horseback, men tramping with knapsacks on their 
 backs and rifles over their shoulders; then artillery, 
 gun-carriages, with soldiers sitting loosely on them 
 holding one another's hands; guns, horses, more 
 horses, with officers riding them; then trains of 
 loaded mules. On and on they went, and always 
 more were coming behind. I watched them till I 
 was tired, descending to the darkness of Galata, to 
 the blackness of old Stamboul. 
 
 Gradually, as the days passed by, I began to im- 
 derstand something of the city, to realize never what 
 it wanted or what it really meant, but something of 
 what it was. It seemed to me then like a person 
 with two natures uneasily housed in one perturbed 
 body. These two natures were startlingly different 
 the one from the otlicr. One was to me hateful — 
 
 187
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 Pera, with Galata touching it. The other was not to 
 be understood by me, but it held me with an indiffer- 
 ent grasp, and from it to me there flowed a strange 
 and ahiiost rustic melancholy that I cared for — 
 Stamboul. And between these two natures a gulf 
 was fixed — the gulf of the Golden Horn. 
 
 Pera is a mongrel city, set on a height and stream- 
 ing blatantly to Galata; a city of tall, discolored 
 houses not unlike the houses of Naples; of embassies 
 and churches; of glaring shops and cafes glittering 
 with plate-glass, through which crafty, impudent 
 eyes are forever staring out upon the passers-by; of 
 noisy, unattractive hotels and wizen gardens, where 
 bands play at stated hours, and pretentious, painted 
 women from second-rate European music-halls pos- 
 ture and squall under the light of electric lamps. 
 There is no rest, no peace in Pera. There seems to 
 be no discipline. Motor-cars make noises there even 
 in the dead of night, and when standing still, such as 
 I never before heard or imagined. They have a spe- 
 cial breed of cars in Pera. Bicyclists are allowed to 
 use motor sirens to clear the way before them. One 
 Sunda}^ when, owing to a merciful strike of the 
 coachmen, there was comparative calm, I saw a boy 
 on horseback going at full gallop over the pavement 
 of the Grande Rue. He passed and repassed me five 
 times, lashing his horse till it was all in a lather. No- 
 body stopped him. You may do anything, it seems, 
 
 i88
 
 ^^"^' BOSPHOROUS— CON^'^^^'^IXOPLK FN THE DISTANCE
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 in Pera, if it is noisy, brutal, objectionable. Pera has 
 all that is odious of the Levant: impudence, ostenta- 
 tion, slyness, indelicacy, uproar, a glittering com- 
 monness. It is like a blazing ring of imitation 
 diamonds squeezing a fat and dirty finger. But it is 
 wonderfully interesting simply because of the vari- 
 ety of human types one sees there. The strange 
 thing is that this multitude of types from all over the 
 East and from all the nations of Europe is reduced, 
 as it were, by Pera to a common, a very common, 
 denominator. The influence of place seems fatal 
 there. 
 
 Stamboul is a city of wood and of marble, of 
 dusty, frail houses that look as if they had been run 
 up in a night and might tumble to pieces at any mo- 
 ment, and of magnificent mosques, centuries old, 
 solid, huge, superb, great monuments of the sultans. 
 The fire-tower of Galata looks toward the fire-tower 
 of Stamboul across a forest of masts; but no watch- 
 fulness, no swiftness of action, can prevent flames 
 from continually sweeping through Stamboul, leav- 
 ing waste places behind them, but dying at the feet 
 of the mosques. As one looks at Stamboul from the 
 heights of Pera, it rises on its hills across the water, 
 beyond the sea of the Golden Llorn, like a wonderful 
 garden city, warm, almost ruddy, full of autumnal 
 beauty, with its red-brown roofs and its trees. And 
 out of its rich-toned rusticity the mosques heave 
 
 16 191
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 themselves up like leviathans that have nothing in 
 common with it; the Mosque of Santa Sophia, of the 
 Sultan Achmet, with its six exquisite minarets, of 
 Mohammed the Conqueror, of Suleiman the Mag- 
 nificent, and how many others! 
 
 There is no harmony hetween the mosques of 
 Stamboul and the houses of Stamboul. The former 
 are enduring and grand; the latter, almost like 
 houses of cards. And yet Stamboul is harmonious, 
 is very beautiful. Romance seems brooding over it, 
 trailing lights and shadows to clothe it with flame 
 and with darkness. It holds you, it entices you. It 
 sheds upon you a sense of mystery. What it has 
 seen, Stamboul! What it has known! What a core of 
 red violence that heart has and always has had! 
 When the sunset dies away among the autumnal 
 houses and between the minarets that rise above the 
 city like prayers; when the many cypresses that echo 
 the minarets in notes of dark green become black, 
 and the thousands of houses seem to be subtly run 
 together into a huge streak of umber above the 
 lights at the waterside; when Seraglio Point 
 stretches like a shadowy spear toward the Bosporus 
 and the Black Sea, and the coasts of Asia fade away 
 in the night, old Stamboul murmurs to you with a 
 voice that seems to hold all secrets, to call you away 
 from the world of Pera to the world of Aladdin's 
 lamp. Pera glitters in the night and cries out to 
 
 192
 
 GALATA BRIDGE, WHICH CONNECTS GALATA AND PERA
 
 m 
 
 li, copyright, by Underwood & Underwood, N. V.
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 heaven. Old Stamboul wraps itself in a black veil 
 and withdraws where you may not follow. 
 
 When I think of Constantinople as a whole, as 
 seen, say, from the top of the Galata tower, set up by 
 the Genoese, I think of it as the most wonderful, the 
 most beautiful, and the most superbly situated city 
 I ever have seen. 
 
 It is an Eastern city of the sea, pierced by water at 
 its heart, giving itself to the winds from Marmora, 
 from the Golden Horn, from the Bosporus, from the 
 Black Sea. The snows of Asia look upon it across 
 the blue waters of Marmora, where the lies des 
 Princes sleep in a flickering haze of gold. Stamboul 
 climbs, like Rome, to the summits of seven hills, and 
 gazes over the great harbor, crowded with a forest 
 of masts, echoing with sounds of the sea, to Galata, 
 and to Pera on the height. And the Golden Horn 
 narrows to the sweet waters of Europe, but broad- 
 ens toward Seraglio Point into the Bosporus, that 
 glorious highway of water between Europe and 
 Asia, lined with the palaces and the villas of sultans 
 and pashas, of Eastern potentates and of the Euro- 
 pean Powers: Yildiz, and Dolma bagtche, Beylcr- 
 bey, and Cheragan, the great palace of the Khedive 
 of Egypt's mother, with its quay upon the water, 
 facing the villa of her son, which stands on the Asian 
 shore, lifted high amid its woods, the palace of the 
 "sweet waters of Asia," the gigantic red-roofed
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 palace where Ismail died in exile. Farther on toward 
 Therapia, where stand the summer embassies of the 
 Powers, Robert College, dignified, looking from afar 
 almost like a great gray castle, rises on its height 
 above its sloping gardens. Gaze from any summit 
 upon Constantinople, and you are amazed by the 
 wonder of it, by the wonder of its setting. There is a 
 vastness, a glory of men, of ships, of seas, of moun- 
 tains, in this grand view which sets it apart from all 
 other views of the world. Two seas send it their 
 message. Two continents give of their beauty to 
 make it beautiful. Two religions have striven to 
 sanctify it with glorious buildings. In the midst of 
 its hidden squalor and crime rises what many con- 
 sider the most beautiful church — now a mosque — in 
 the world. Perhaps no harbor in Europe can com- 
 pare with its harbor. For human and historical 
 interest it can scarcely be equaled. In the shadow of 
 its marvelous walls, guarded by innumerable towers 
 and girdled by forests of cypresses, it lies like some 
 great magician, glittering, mysterious, crafty, pray- 
 ing, singing, intriguing, assassinating, looking to 
 East and West, watchful, and full of fanaticism. 
 
 I crossed the new bridge. The famous old timl)er 
 bridge, which rocks under your feet, has been moved 
 up the Golden Horn, and now spans the sea by the 
 marine barracks. Evening was falling; a wind had 
 brought clouds from the Black Sea. The waters 
 
 196
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 were colorless, and were licked into fretful wavelets, 
 on which the delicate pointed caiques swayed like 
 leaves on a tide. Opposite to me, at the edge of 
 Stamboul, the huge Mosque of Yeni-Valide-Jamissi 
 rose, with its crowd of cupolas large and small and 
 its prodigious minarets. Although built by two 
 women, it looked stern and male, seemed to be 
 guarding the bridge, to be proclaiming to all the 
 mongrels from Galata and Pera, who hurried from 
 shore to shore, that Stamboul will make no compro- 
 mise with the infidel, that in the great space before 
 this mosque the true East in Europe begins. 
 
 Russia was in the wind, I thought. The breath of 
 the steppes was wandering afar to seek — what ? The 
 breath of the desert ? The great mosque confronted 
 it, Islam erect, and now dark, forbidding tmder the 
 darkening sky. Even the minarets had lost their 
 delicate purity, had become fierce, prayers calling 
 down destruction on unbelievers. And all the cries 
 of Stamboul seemed to gather themselves together 
 in my ears, keening over the sea above which I stood 
 — voices of many nations; of Turks, Arabs, Circas- 
 sians, Persians, of men from the wilds of Asia and 
 the plains of India; voices of bashi-bazouks and of 
 slaves; even, thin high voices of eunuchs. From the 
 quays to right and left of the bridge crow^ds of peo- 
 ple rose to my sight and hurried away; to them 
 crowds of people descended, sinking out of my sight. 
 
 197
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 Soldiers and hamals passed, upright and armed, 
 bending beneath the weight of incredible loads. 
 Calls of Albanian boatmen came up from the sea. 
 From the city of closely packed fishermen's vessels 
 rose here and there little trails of smoke. On their 
 decks dim figures crouched about wavering fires. A 
 gnarled beggar pushed me, muttering, then whining 
 uncouth words. Along the curving shore, toward 
 the cypress-crowned height of Eyub, lights were 
 strung out, marking the waterside. Behind me tall 
 Pera began to glitter meretriciously. The Greek 
 barbers, I knew, were standing impudently before 
 the doors of their little saloons, watching the 
 evening pageant as it surged slowly through the 
 Grande Rue and toward the Taxim Garden. Diplo- 
 mats were driving home from the Sublime Porte in 
 victorias. The ''cinemas" were gathering in their 
 mobs. Tokatlian's was thronged with Levantines 
 whispering from mouth to mouth the current lies of 
 the day. Below, near the ships, the business men of 
 Galata were rushing out of their banks, past the 
 large round-browed Montenegrins who stand on the 
 steps, out of their offices and shops, like a mighty 
 swarm of disturbed bees. The long shriek of a siren 
 from a steamer near Seraglio Point tore the gloom. 
 I went on, despite menacing Valide Sultan, I lost 
 myself in the wonderful maze of Stamboul. 
 
 Stamboul near the waterside is full of contrasts so 
 
 198
 
 From a photograph, copyright, by I'liderw.j.d &• I'lulerwood. N. Y.
 
 THE WATER-FRONT Oi'^-sf:'\'N*lBOUL, WITH PERA 
 IN THE, :D1STANCE
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 sharp, so strange that they bewilder and charm, and 
 sometimes render uneasy even one who has wan- 
 dered alone through many towns of the East. Sor- 
 did and filthy, there is yet something grandiose in it, 
 something hostile and threatening in the watchful 
 crowds that are forever passing by. Between the 
 houses the sea-wind blows up, and you catch 
 glimpses of water, of masts, of the funnels of steam- 
 ers. Above the cries of the nations rise the long- 
 drawn wails and the hootings of sirens. The traffic 
 of the streets is made more confusing by your con- 
 stant consciousness of the traffic of the sea, em- 
 braced by it, almost mingling with it. Water and 
 wind, mud and dust, cries of coachmen and seamen, 
 of motor-cars and steamers, and soldiers, soldiers, 
 soldiers passing, always passing. Through a win- 
 dow-pane you catch a glitter of jewels and a glitter 
 of Armenian eyes gazing stealthily out. You pass 
 by some marble tombs sheltered by weary trees, 
 under the giant shadow of a mosque, and a few steps 
 farther on you look through an arched doorway 
 and see on the marble floor of a dimly lighted hall 
 half-naked men, with tufts of black hair drooping 
 from partly shaved heads and striped towels girt 
 round their loins, going softly to and fro, or bending 
 about a fountain from which w^ater gushes with a 
 silvery noise. This is a Turkish bath. Throughout 
 Stamboul there are bath-houses with little cupolas 
 
 20I
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 on their roofs, and throughout Stamboul there are 
 tombs; but the uneasy and watchful crowds throng 
 the quarters near the waterside and the great ba- 
 zaars and the spaces before the principal mosques. 
 They are not spread throughout the city. Many 
 parts of Stamboul are as the waste places of the 
 earth, abandoned by men. 
 
 By night they are silent and black; by day they 
 look like the ways of a great wooden village from 
 which the inhabitants have fled. In their open 
 spaces, patches of waste ground, perhaps a few 
 goats are trying to browse among rubbish and 
 stones, a few little children are loitering, two or three 
 silent men may be sitting under a vine by a shed, 
 which is a Turkish cafe. There is no sound of steps 
 or of voices. One has no feeling of being in a great 
 city, of being in a city at all. Little there is of 
 romance, little of that mysterious and exquisite 
 melancholy which imaginative writers have de- 
 scribed. Dullness and shabbiness brood over every- 
 thing. Yet an enormous population lives in the 
 apparently empty houses. Women are watching 
 from the windows behind the grilles. Life is fer- 
 menting in the midst of the dust, the discomfort, the 
 almost ghastly silence. 
 
 The great bazaar of Stamboul is a city within a 
 city. As you stand before its entrance you think of 
 a fortress full of immured treasures. And there are 
 
 202
 
 LOOKING DOWN STEP STREET, CONSTANTINOPLE
 
 l.)ri.;lil, by I'.lde
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 treasures of price under the heavy arches, in the 
 long roofed-over lanes. The bazaars of Tunis seem' 
 minute, of Damascus ephemeral, of Cairo dressed 
 up, of Jerusalem crushed together and stifling, when 
 compared with the vast bazaars of Stamboul, whicli 
 have a solidity, a massiveness, unshared by their 
 rivals. I saw there many cheap goods such as T have 
 seen on certain booths in the East End of London,, 
 but they were surrounded with a certain pomp and 
 dignity, with a curious atmosphere of age. Some 
 parts of the bazaars are narrow. Others are broad 
 and huge, with great cupolas above them, and, far 
 up, wooden galleries running round them. Now 
 and then you come upon an old fountain of stained 
 marble and dim faience about which men are squat- 
 ting on their haunches to wash their faces and hands, 
 and their carefully bared arms. The lanes are paved 
 and are often slippery. Just under the lofty roof 
 there are windows of wdiite glass, and about them, 
 and on arches and walls, there are crude decorations 
 in strong blues and purples, yellows and greens. 
 The serious merchants from many lands do not 
 beset you with importunities as you pass; but some- 
 times a lustrous pair of eyes invites you to pause, or 
 a dark and long-fingered hand gently beckons you 
 toward a jewel, a prayer-carpet, a weapon, or some- 
 thing strange in silver or gold or ivory. 
 
 One day a man from Bagdad invited me to buy a 
 
 17 %}
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 picture as I drew near to him. It was the portrait of 
 a dervish's cap worked in silk. The cap, orange- 
 colored and silver, w^as perched upon a small table 
 (in the picture) above which hung curtains in two 
 shades of green. A heavy gilt frame surrounded 
 this "old master" of the East. We bargained. The 
 merchant's languages were broken, but at length I 
 understood him to say that the cap was a perfect 
 likeness. I retorted that all the dervishes' caps I had 
 seen upon living heads were the color of earth. The 
 merchant, I believe, pitied my ignorance. His eyes, 
 hands, arms, and even his shoulders were eloquent 
 of compassion. He lowered the price of the picture 
 by about half a farthing in Turkish money, but I 
 resisted the blandishment and escaped into the jewel 
 bazaar, half regretting a lost opportunity. 
 
 Many Turkish women come to the bazaars only 
 to meet their lovers. They cover a secret desire by a 
 pretense of making purchases. From the upper floor 
 of the yellow-blue-and-red kiosk, in which Turkish 
 sweets are sold, and you can eat the breasts of chick- 
 ens cooked deliciousl}^ in cream and served with 
 milk and starch, I have watched these subtle truants 
 passing in their pretty disguises suggestive of a 
 masked ball. They look delicate and graceful in 
 their thin and shining robes, like dominoes, of black 
 or sometimes of prune-color, with crape dropping 
 
 206
 
 From a photograph, copyrig^ht, by I'liderwood & Underwood, N. Y.
 
 PUBIJr r TT^-nn p wpi^^kw*; lv ,\ rviV^'PANTiV'^i'i k sIRKF'I
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 over their faces and letting you see not enough; for 
 many Turkish women are pretty. 
 
 One day I was in the upper room of a photogra- 
 pher's shop when two Turkish w^omen came in and 
 removed their veils, standing with their backs to the 
 English infidel. One was obviously much younger 
 than the other, and seemed to have a beautiful fig- 
 ure. I was gazing at it, perhaps rather steadily, 
 when, evidently aware of my glance, she turned 
 slowly and deliberately round. For two or three 
 minutes she faced me, looking to right and left of 
 me, above me, even on the floor near my feet, with 
 her large and beautiful blue-gray eyes. She was 
 lovely. Young, perhaps eighteen, she was slightly 
 painted, and her eyebrows and long curling lashes 
 were blackened. Her features were perfect, her 
 complexion was smooth and brilliant, and her ex- 
 pression was really adorable. It seemed to say to 
 me quietly: 
 
 "Yes, you are right. It is foolish ever to conceal 
 such a face as this with a veil when really there is not 
 too much beauty in the world. Mais que voulez- 
 vous? Les Turcs!" And the little hanum surely 
 moved her thin shoulders contemptuously. But 
 her elderly companion pulled at her robe, and slowly 
 she moved away. As the two women left the room, 
 the photographer, a Greek, looked after them, smil- 
 ing. Then he turned to me, spread out his thin 
 
 209
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 hands, and said, with a shrug, "Encore des desen- 
 chantees!" 
 
 I thought of the disenchanted one day as I sat 
 among the letter-writers in the large and roughly 
 paved court of the ''Pigeon's Mosque," or Mosque of 
 Bajazet II. For hours I had been wandering on foot 
 through the upper quarters of old Stamboul, and I 
 could not release my mind from the dull pressure of 
 its influence. All those wooden houses, silent, ap- 
 parently abandoned, shuttered — streets and streets 
 of them, myriads of them ! Now and then above the 
 carved wood of a lattice I had seen a striped curtain, 
 cheap, dusty, hanging, I guessed, above a cheap and 
 dusty divan. The doors of the houses were large 
 and solid, like prison doors. Before one, as I slowly 
 passed by, I had seen an old Turk in a long quilted 
 coat of green, with a huge key in his hand, about to 
 enter. He glanced to right and left, then thrust the 
 key into the door. I had felt inclined to stop and say 
 to him: 
 
 "That house has been abandoned for years. Every 
 one has migrated long ago from this quarter of 
 Stamboul. If you stay here, you will be quite alone." 
 But the old Turk knew very well that all the houses 
 were full of people, of imprisoned women. What a 
 fate to be one of the prisoners! 
 
 That was my thought as I looked at the sacred 
 pigeons, circling in happy freedom over the garden 
 
 2IO
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 where Bajazet slumbers under his catafalque, flut- 
 tering round the cupolas of their mosque, and be- 
 neath the gray-pink-and-white arcade, with its 
 dull-green and plum-colored columns, or crowding 
 together upon the thin branches of their plane-tree. 
 A pure wind blew through the court and about the 
 marble fountain. The music made by the iridescent 
 wings of the birds never ceased, and their perpetual 
 cooing was like the sweet voice of content. The sun- 
 shine streamed over the pavement and penetrated 
 under the arches, making the coral beads of a rosary 
 glow and its gold beads glitter, giving to the amber 
 liquid carried on a tray by a boy to a barber beneath 
 his awning a vivacity almost of flame. Beside me a 
 lover was dictating a letter to a scribe, who squatted 
 before his table, on which were arranged a bright- 
 blue inkstand and cup, a pile of white paper, and a 
 stand with red pens and blue pencils. Farther on, 
 men were being shaved, and were drinking coffee as 
 they lounged upon bright-yellow sofas. Near me a 
 very old Turk, with fanatical, half-shut eyes, was 
 sitting on the ground and gazing at the pink feet of 
 the pigeons as they tripped over the pavement, upon 
 which a pilgrim to the mosque had just flung some 
 grain. As he gazed, he mechanically fingered his 
 rosary, swiftly shifting the beads on and on, beads 
 after beads, always two at a time. Some incense 
 smoldered in a three-legged brazier, giving out its 
 
 2 I I
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 peculiar and drowsy smell. On the other side of the 
 court a fruit-seller slept by a pile of yellow melons. 
 The grain thrown by the pilgrim was all eaten now, 
 and for a moment the sunshine was dimmed by the 
 cloud of rising and dispersing birds, gray and green, 
 with soft gleams like jewels entangled in their plum- 
 age. Some flew far to the tall white-and-gray 
 minaret of their mosque, others settled on the cupola 
 above the fountain. A few, venturous truants, dis- 
 appeared in the direction of the seraskierat wall, not 
 far off. The greater number returned to their plane- 
 tree on the right of the lover and the scribe. And as 
 the lover suggested, and the scribe wrote from right 
 to left, the pigeons puffed out their breasts and 
 cooed, calling other pilgrims to remember that even 
 the sacred have their carnal appetites, and to honor 
 the poor widow's memory before going up to the 
 mosque to pray. 
 
 One day I went up the hill toward Yildiz to see the 
 Selamlik. That morning the sultan was going to 
 pray in the mosque of wood which Abdul Hamid 
 built close to the mysterious, walled-in quarter of 
 palaces, harems, kiosks, gardens, barracks, and 
 parks which he made his prison. From the Bosporus 
 you can see it extending from the hilltop almost to 
 the sea, a great property, outside the city, yet domi- 
 nating it, with dense groves of trees in which. wild 
 animals were kept, with open spaces, with solitary 
 
 2 12
 
 THE COURTYARD OF THE "PIGEQN'S MOSQUE"
 
 -jilyncr.: 
 
 <.■: 
 
 ><^ 
 ".V- 
 
 ^\^*-:
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 buildings and lines of roofs, and the cupola of the 
 mosque ot the soldiers. All about it are the high 
 walls which a coward raised up to protect him and 
 his fear. The mosque is below the great entrance- 
 gates on a steep hillside beyond the walls. A large 
 modern house, white, with green shutters, in which 
 Abdul Hamid used to grant audiences and, I believe, 
 to give banquets, looks down on it. From the upper 
 windows of this dwelling the Turks say the ex-sul- 
 tan often stared at his city through powerful glasses. 
 The mosque is not large. It is yellow and white, 
 with a minaret of plaster on the side next the sea, 
 and a graveled courtyard surrounded by green iron 
 railings and planted with a few trees. On the side 
 next to Yildiz is a steep bank. A road runs up the 
 hill to the left of the mosque as you face Yildiz, and 
 another hidden road descends from the gates and 
 gives access to the courtyard behind the mosque. 
 The sultan has therefore a choice of two routes, and 
 nobody seems to know beforehand which way he 
 will come. There were very few tourists in Constan- 
 tinople when I was there. People were afraid of 
 war, and before I left the Orient express had ceased 
 to run. But I found awaiting the padishah many 
 Indian pilgrims, a large troop of pilgrims from 
 Trebizond who were on their way to Mecca, several 
 Persians wearing black toques, and a good many 
 Turks. These were in the courtyard close to the 
 
 215
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 mosque, where I was allowed to stand by the aris- 
 tocratic young- chief of police, who wore a woolly,, 
 gray, fez-shaped cap. Outside the railings stood a 
 dense crowc} of veiled women. 
 
 Soon after I arrived a squadron of the body-guard 
 rode up from the city, carrying red-and-green pen- 
 nons on long staffs, and halted before the gates of 
 the palace. And almost at the same moment the 
 palace musicians, in dark-blue, red, and gold, wear- 
 ing short swords, and carrying shining brass instru- 
 ments, marched into the inclosure. They stood still, 
 then dropped their instruments on the ground, 
 moved away, and sat down on the bank, lolling in 
 easy attitudes. Time slipped by, and important 
 people strolled in, officers, court officials, attendants. 
 Eunuchs shambled loosely past in wonderfully fit- 
 ting, long frock-coats, wearing turquoise rings on 
 their large weak hands, and looking half-piteously 
 impudent. Men hurried into the mosque carrying 
 brown Gladstone bags. Nazim Pasha, weary and 
 grave, the weight of war already on his shoulders, 
 talked with the master of the ceremonies beside 
 some steps before which lay a bright-yellow carpet. 
 
 This is the sultan's entrance to the mosque. It is 
 not imposing. The two flights of steps curve on 
 right and left to a trivial glass porch which reminded 
 me of that bulbous addition to certain pretentious 
 houses which is dignified by the name '^winter gar- 
 
 2l6
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 den." Some smart, very strong Turkish sailors 
 lined up opposite me. Not far from the porch stood 
 a gTOUp of military doctors in somber uniforms. A 
 second yellow carpet was unrolled to cover the flight 
 of steps on the left of the porch, more eunuchs went 
 by, more Gladstone bags were carried past me. 
 Then came soldiers in yellowish brown, and palace 
 officials in white and blue, with red collars. Two 
 riding-horses were led by two grooms toward the 
 back of the mosque. The musicians rose languidly 
 from the bank, took up their instruments, turned 
 round, and faced toward Yildiz. Through the 
 crowd, like a wind, went that curious stir which al- 
 ways precedes an important event for which many 
 people are waiting. Nazim Pasha spoke to the chief 
 of police, slowly moving his white-gloved hands, 
 and then from the hilltop came a rhythmical, boom- 
 ing noise of men's voices, very deep, very male: the 
 soldiers before the gates were acclaiming their sov- 
 ereign. I saw a fluttering movement of pennons; 
 the sultan had emerged from the palace and was 
 descending by the hidden road to perform his devo- 
 tions. 
 
 In perhaps five minutes an outrider appeared from 
 behind the mosque, advancing slowly parallel with 
 the bank, followed by a magnificent victoria, cov- 
 ered with gold and lined, I think, with satin, drawn 
 by two enormous brown horses the harness of which 
 
 18 217
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 was plated with gold. They were driven from the 
 box by a gorgeous coachman, who was standing. 
 The musicians, turning once more, struck up the 
 ''Sultan's Hymn," the soldiers presented. arms; the 
 brown horses wheeled slowly round, a,nd I saw 
 within a few paces of me, sitting alone in the victoria 
 in a curious, spread-out attitude, a bulky and weary 
 old man in a blue uniform, wearing white kid gloves 
 and the fez. He was staring straight before him, 
 and on his unusually large fair face there was no 
 more expression than there is on a white envelop. 
 Women twittered. Men saluted. The victoria 
 stopped beside the bright-yellow carpet. After a 
 moment's pause, as if emerging from a sort of 
 trance, the Calif of Islam got up and stepped slowly 
 and heavily out, raising one hand to his fez. Then, 
 as if with an abrupt effort to show alertness, he 
 walked almost quTckly up the steps to the glass 
 porch, turned just before entering it, stood for an 
 mstant looking absolutely blank, again saluted, 
 swung round awkwardly, and disappeared. Almost 
 immediately afterward one of his sons, a rather 
 short and fair young man with a flushed face, at- 
 tended by an officer, hurried past me and into the 
 mosque by another entrance. 
 
 A few persons went away while his Majesty was 
 praying; but all the pilgrims stayed, and I stayed 
 with them. Several of the officials walked about on 
 
 2l8
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 the gravel, talked, smoked, and drank orangeade, 
 which a servant brought to them on a silver tray. 
 Now and then from within the mosque came to us 
 the loud murmur of praying voices. The soldiers of 
 the body-guard descended the hill from the gates of 
 Yildiz on foot, leading their horses, and assembled 
 outside the courtyard. They were followed by a 
 brilliant squadron of cavalry in dark-blue-and-red 
 uniforms, with green-and-red saddle-cloths; their 
 blood-red flag was borne before them, and their own 
 music accompanied them. The soldiers in yellowish 
 brown had piled arms and were standing at ease, 
 smoking and talking. Twenty minutes perhaps 
 went by, then a Gladstone bag was carried out of the 
 mosque. We all gazed at it with reverence. What 
 was in it? Or, if there was nothing, what had been 
 recently taken out of it ? I never shall know. As the 
 bag vanished, a loud sound of singing came from 
 within, and a troop of palace guards in vivid-red 
 uniforms, with white-and-red toques trimmed with 
 black astrakhan, marched into the court led by an 
 officer. Some gendarmes followed them. Then the 
 chief of police tripped forward with nervous agility, 
 and made us all cross over and stand with our backs 
 to the bank in a long line. An outrider, dressed in 
 green and gold, and holding a l)ig whip, rode in on 
 a huge strawberry-roan horse. Behind him came 
 a green-and-red brougham with satin cushions, 
 
 219
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 drawn by a pair of strawberry roans. A smart 
 coachman and footman sat on the box, and on each 
 side rode two officers on white horses. 
 
 Now the singing- ceased in the mosque. People 
 began to come out. The sultan's son, less flushed, 
 passed by on foot, answering swiftly the salutes of 
 the people. The brougham was drawn up before the 
 bright-yellow carpet. Nazim Pasha once more stood 
 there talking with several officials. The soldiers had 
 picked up their arms, the sailors were standing at 
 attention. 
 
 Then there was a very long wait. 
 
 ''The sultan is taking coffee." 
 
 Another five minutes passed. 
 
 ''The sultan is sleeping." 
 
 On this announcement being made to me, I 
 thought seriously of departing in peace; but a Greek 
 friend, who had spoken to an official, murmured in 
 my ear: 
 
 "The sultan is awake and is changing his clothes." 
 
 This sounded promising, and I decided to wait. 
 
 It seemed to me that his Majesty was a very long 
 time at his toilet; but at last we were rewarded. 
 Abruptly from the glass porch he appeared in Euro- 
 pean dress, with very baggy trousers much too long 
 in the leg and a voluminous black frock-coat. He 
 stood for a moment holding the frock-coat with 
 both hands, as if wishing to wrap himself up in it. 
 
 220
 
 STREET SCENE JN CONSTANTINOPLE
 
 From a phrito(,'rn|)li, copyri ylit. by Uiulerwood & UiKittwood, N. Y.
 
 IN CONSTANTINOPLE 
 
 Then, still grasping it, he walked quickly down the 
 steps, his legs seeming almost to ripple beneath 
 the weight of his body, and stepped heavily into the 
 brougham, wdiich swung upon its springs. The 
 horses moved, the carriage passed close to me, and 
 again I gazed at this mighty sovereign, while the 
 Eastern pilgrims salaamed to the ground. Mechan- 
 ically he saluted. His large face w^as still un- 
 naturally blank, and yet somehow it looked kind. 
 And I felt that this old man w^as weary and sad, that 
 his long years of imprisonment had robbed him of all 
 vitality, of all power to enjoy; that he was unable to 
 appreciate the pageant of life in which now, by the 
 irony of fate, he was called to play the central part. 
 All alone he sat in the bright-colored brougham, car- 
 rying a flaccid hand to his fez and gazing blankly 
 before him. The carriage passed out of the court- 
 yard, but it did not go up the hill to the palace. 
 
 ''The sultan," said a voice, ''is going out into the 
 country to rest and to divert himself." 
 
 To rest, perhaps; but to divert himself! 
 
 After that day I often saw before me a large white 
 envelop, and the most expressive people in the world 
 were salaaming before it. 
 
 223
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES
 
 THE MOSQUE OF THE YENI-VALIDE-JAMISSI, 
 CONSTANTINOPLE
 
 Chapter VI 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 STAMBOUL is wonderfully various. Com- 
 pressed between two seas, it contains sharp, 
 even brutal contrasts: of beauty and ugliness, 
 grandeur and squalor, purity and filth, silence and 
 uproar, the most delicate fascination and a fierce- 
 ness that is barbaric. It can give you peace or a 
 sw^ord. The sword is sharp and cruel; the peace is 
 profound and exquisite. 
 
 Every day early I escaped from the uproar of Pera 
 and sought in Stamboul a place of forgetfulness. 
 There are many such places in the city and on its 
 outskirts: the mosques, the little courts and gardens 
 of historic tombs; the strange and forgotten Byzan- 
 tine churches, lost in the maze of wooden houses; the 
 cemeteries vast and melancholy, where the dead 
 sleep in the midst of dust and confusion, guarded by 
 giant cypresses; the lonely and shadowed ways by 
 the walls and the towers; the poetic glades and the 
 sun-kissed terraces of Seraglio Point. 
 
 Santa Sophia stands apart from all other build- 
 
 22Q 
 
 19 ^
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 ings, unique in beauty, with the faint face of the 
 Christ still visible on its wall; Christian in soul 
 though now for so long dedicated to the glory of 
 Allah and of his prophet. I shall not easily forget 
 my disappointment when I stood for the first time in 
 its shadow. I had been on Seraglio Point, and, 
 strolling by the famous Royal Gate to look at the 
 lovely fountain of Sultan Ahmed, I saw an enor- 
 mous and ugly building decorated with huge stripes 
 of red paint, towering above me as if fain to obscure 
 the sun. The immensity of it was startling. I asked 
 its name. 
 
 ''Santa Sophia." 
 
 I looked away to the fountain, letting my eyes 
 dwell on its projecting roof and its fretwork of gold, 
 its lustrous blue and green tiles, splendid ironwork, 
 and plaques of gray and brown marble. 
 
 It was delicate and enticing. Its mighty neighbor 
 was almost repellent. But at length — not without 
 reluctance, for I feared perhaps a deeper disappoint- 
 ment — I went into the mosque by the Porta Basilica, 
 and found myself in the midst of a vast harmony, so 
 wonderful, so penetrating, so calm, that I was con- 
 scious at once of a perfect satisfaction. 
 
 At first this happy sense of being completely satis- 
 fied seemed shed upon me by shaped space. In no 
 other building have I had this exact feeling, that 
 space had surely taken an inevitable form and was 
 
 230
 
 I'HE ROYAL GATE LEADING TP, THE OLD SERAGLIO
 
 » - ^ 
 
 
 A-'-a-
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 announcing itself to me. I stood beneath the great 
 dome, one hundred and seventy-nine feet in height, 
 and as I gazed upward I felt both possessed and re- 
 leased. 
 
 For a long time I was fully aware of nothing but 
 the vast harmony of Santa Sophia, descending upon 
 me, wrapping me round. I saw moving figures, tiny, 
 yet full of meaning, passing in luminous distances, 
 pausing, bending, kneeling; a ray of light falling 
 upon a white turban; an Arab in a long pink robe 
 leaning against a column of dusky red porphyry; a 
 dove circling under the dome as if under the sky. 
 But I could not be strongly conscious of any detail, 
 or be enchanted by any separate beauty. I was in 
 the grasp of the perfect whole. 
 
 The voice of a child disturbed me. 
 
 Somewhere far off in the mosque a child began to 
 sing a great tune, powerfully, fervently, but boy- 
 ishly. The voice was not a treble voice; it was 
 deeper, yet unmistakably the voice of a boy. And 
 the melody sung was bold, indeed almost angry, and 
 yet definitely religious. It echoed along the walls 
 of marble, which seemed to multiply it mysteriously, 
 adding to it wide murmurs which were carried 
 through all the building, into the dimmest, remotest 
 recesses. It became in my ears as the deep-toned 
 and fanatical thunder of Islam, proclaiming posses- 
 sion of the church of Divine Wisdom which had been 
 
 233
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 dedicated to Christ. It put me for a time definitely 
 outside of the vast harmony. I was able at last to 
 notice details both architectural and human. 
 
 Santa Sophia has nine gates leading to it from a 
 great corridor or outer hall, lined with marble and 
 roofed with old-gold mosaic. As you enter from the 
 Porta Basilica you have an impression of pale yel- 
 low, gold, and gray; of a pervading silvery glimmer, 
 of a pervading glean, of delicate primrose, brightly 
 pure and warm. You hear a sound of the falling of 
 water from the two fountains of ablution, great 
 vases of gray marble which are just within the 
 mosque. 
 
 Gray and gold prevail in the color scheme, a beau- 
 tiful combination of which the eyes are never tired. 
 But many hues are mingled with them: yellow and 
 black, deep plum-color and red, green, brown, and 
 very dark blue. The windows, which are heavily 
 grated, have no painted glass, so the mosque is not 
 dark. It has a sort of lovely and delicate dimness, 
 touching as the dimness of twilight. It is divinely 
 calm, almost as Nature can be when she would bring 
 her healing to the unquiet human spirit. We know 
 that during the recent war Santa Sophia was 
 crowded with suffering fugitives, with dying sol- 
 diers and cholera patients. I feel that even upon 
 them in their agony it must have shed rays of com- 
 fort, into their hearts a belief in a far-off compassion 
 
 234
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 waiting- the appointed time to make itself fully 
 manifest. 
 
 The great dome is of gold, and of either black or 
 very deep blue. Myriads of chandeliers, holding 
 tiny glass cups, hang from the roof. Pale yellow 
 matting covers the plain of the floor. The silvery 
 glimmer comes from the thousands of cups, the 
 primrose gleam from the matting. The walls are 
 lined with slabs of exquisite marble of many pat- 
 terns and colors. Gold mosaic decorates the roof 
 and the domes. Galleries, supported by marble 
 arcades, and leaning on roofs of dim gold, run round 
 a great part of the mosque; which is subtly broken 
 up, and made mysterious, enticing, and various by 
 curved recesses of marble, by innumerable arches, 
 some large and heavy, some fragile and delicate, by 
 screens, and by forests of columns. Two-storied 
 aisles flank the vast nave, through which men wan- 
 der looking almost like little dolls. So huge is the 
 mosque that the eyes are deceived within it, and can 
 no longer measure heights or breadths with ac- 
 curacy. When I first stood in the nave I thought 
 the chandeliers were hanging so near to the ground 
 that it must be dangerous for a tall man to try to 
 pass underneath them. They are, of course, really 
 far higher than the head of a giant. 
 
 In Santa Sophia intricacy, by some magical pro- 
 cess of genius, results in simplicity. Everything 
 
 235
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 seems gently but irresistibly compelled to become a 
 minister to the beauty and the calmness of the 
 whole: the arcades of gray marble and gold; the 
 sacred mosaics of Holy Mary, and of the six-winged 
 Seraphim, which still testify to another age and an- 
 other religion; the red columns of porphyry from 
 Baalbec's Temple of the Sun; the Ephesus columns 
 of verde antico; the carved capitals and the bases of 
 shining brass; the gold and gray pulpit, with its long 
 staircase of marble closed by a gold and green cur- 
 tain, and its two miraculously beautiful flags of 
 pearly green and faint gold, by age made more won- 
 derful than when they first flew on the battle-field, 
 or were carried in sacred processions; the ancient 
 prayer-rugs fixed to the walls; the Sultanas box, a 
 sort of long gallery, ending in a kiosk with a gilded 
 grille, and raised upon marble pillars; the great 
 doors and the curtains of dull red wool; the piled 
 carpets that are ready against the winter, when the 
 cool yellow matting is covered up; the great green 
 shields in the pendentives, bearing their golden 
 names of God and his prophet, of Ali, Osman, Omar, 
 and Abu-Bekr. Everything slips into the heart of 
 the great harmony, however precious, however sim- 
 ple, even however crude. There are a few ugly 
 things in Santa Sophia: whitewash covering mo- 
 saics, stains of fierce yellow, blotches of plaster 
 which should be removed. They do not really mat- 
 
 236
 
 /sf^^
 
 THE MOSQUE OF SANTA SOPHIA
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 ter; one cannot heed them when one is immersed in 
 such almost mysterious beauty. 
 
 Men and birds are at ease in Santa Sophia. Doves 
 have made their home in the holy place. They fly 
 under the long arcades, they circle above the gal- 
 leries, they rest against blocks of cool marble the 
 color of which their plumage resembles. And all 
 day long men pass in through the gateways, and 
 become at once little, yet strangely significant in the 
 vastness which incloses and liberates them. They 
 take off their shoes and carry them, or lay them 
 down in the wooden trays at the edges of those wide, 
 railed-in platforms covered with matting, called 
 masbata, which are characteristic of mosques, and 
 which are supposed to be for the use of readers of the 
 Koran. Then they are free of the mosque. Some of 
 them wander from place to place silently gazing; 
 others kneel and pray in some quiet corner; others 
 study, or sing, or gossip, or sink into reverie or slum- 
 ber. Many go up to the masbata, take off their outer 
 garments and hang them over the rails, hang their 
 handkerchiefs beside them, tuck their legs under 
 their bodies, and remain thus for hours, staring 
 straight before them with solemn eyes as if hyp- 
 notized. Children, too, go to the masbata, settle 
 cozily down and read the Koran aloud, interspersing 
 their study with gay conversation. On one of them 
 I found my singing boy. Small, fanatical, with head 
 
 239
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 thrown back and the fez upon it, he defiantly poured 
 forth his tune, while an older companion, opposite 
 to him and looking not unlike an idol in its shrine, 
 stared impassively as if at the voice. 
 
 Santa Sophia is mystical in its twilight beauty. 
 Its vastness, its shape, its arrangement, its beauti- 
 fully blended colors, the effects of light and of sound 
 within it, unite in creating an atmosphere that dis- 
 poses the mind to reverie and inclines the soul to 
 prayer. Along the exquisite marble walls, in the 
 mellow dimness, while Stamboul just outside is buy- 
 ing and selling, is giving itself to love and to crime, 
 the murmur of Islam's devotion steals almost per- 
 petually, mysterious as some faint and wide-spread 
 sound of Nature. The great mosque seems to be 
 breathing out its message to the Almighty, and an- 
 other message — to man. The echoes are not clear, 
 but dim as the twilight under the arches of marble 
 and beneath the ceilings of gold. They mingle with- 
 out confusion in a touching harmony, as all things 
 mingle in this mosque of the great repose. 
 
 And yet not all things! 
 
 One day I saw standing alone in the emperor's 
 doorway a child in blood-colored rags. The muezzin 
 had called from the minaret the summons to the 
 midday prayer, and far off before the mihrab, and 
 the sacred carpet on which the prophet is said to 
 have knelt, the faithful were ranged in long lines: 
 
 240
 
 IN THE CEMETERY OF EYUB, ON THE GOLDEN HORN
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 pilgrims on the way to Mecca; Turks in quilted coats 
 and in European dress; two dervishes with small, 
 supple limbs and pale faces smoldering with reverie; 
 and some hard-bitten, sun-scorched soldiers, per- 
 haps bound for the battle-fields of the Balkan War. 
 Moving almost as one man they bent, they kneeled, 
 they touched the floor with their foreheads, leaned 
 back and again bowed down. Their deep and 
 monotonous voices were very persistent in prayer. 
 And the echoes, like secret messengers, bore the 
 sound along the arcades, carried it up into the vast 
 space of the dome, under the transverse arches and 
 the vaulted openings of the aisles, past the faint 
 Christ on the wall, and the ''Hand of the Con- 
 queror," with horrible outspread fingers, the Sweat- 
 ing Column, and the Cradle of Jesus, to the child in 
 the blood-red rags. He stood there where Theophi- 
 lus entered, under the hidden words, ''I am the Light 
 of the World," gazing, listening, unconscious of the 
 marvelous effect his little figure was making, the one 
 absolutely detached thing in the mosque. The doves 
 flew over his head, vanishing down the marble vis- 
 tas, becoming black against golden distances. The 
 murmur of worship increased in power, as more and 
 more of the faithful stole in, shoeless, to join the 
 ranks before the mihrab. Like incense from a 
 thurible, mysticism floated through every part of 
 the mosque, seeming to make the vast harmony 
 
 243
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 softer, to involve in it all that was motionless there 
 and all that was moving, except the child in the em- 
 peror's doorway, who was unconsciously defiant, 
 like a patch of fresh blood on a pure white garment. 
 The prayers at last died away, the echoes withdrew 
 into silence. But the child remained where he was, 
 crude, almost sinister in his wonderful colored rags. 
 Close to Santa Sophia in the Seraglio grounds is 
 the old Byzantine Church of Saint Irene, now 
 painted an ugly pink, and used by the Turks as an 
 armory and museum. It contains many spoils taken 
 by the Turks in battle, which are carefully arranged 
 upon tables and walls. Nothing is disdained, noth- 
 ing is considered too paltry for exhibition. I saw 
 there flags riddled with bullets; but I saw also odd 
 boots taken from Italian soldiers in Tripoli; caps, 
 belts, water-bottles, blood-stained tunics and cloaks, 
 saddles, weapons, and buttons. Among relics from 
 Yildiz Kiosk was a set of furniture which once 
 belonged to Abdul Hamid, and which he is said to 
 have set much store by. It shows a very distinctive, 
 indeed a somewhat original taste, being made of red 
 plush and weapons. The legs of the tables and 
 chairs are guns and revolvers. As I looked at the 
 chairs I could not help wondering whether ambassa- 
 dors were invited to sit in them, after they had been 
 loaded to their muzzles, or whether they were re- 
 served for subjects whom the ex-Sultan suspected 
 
 244
 
 I <S; I'nderwood, N. V.
 
 INTERIOR OF SANTA SOPHIA
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 of treachery. Near them were several of Abdul 
 Hamid's favorite walking-sticks containing revol- 
 vers, a cane with an electric light let into the knob, 
 his inkstand, the mother-of-pearl revolver which 
 was found in his pocket, and the handkerchief which 
 fell from his hand when he was taken prisoner by the 
 Young Turks, who have since brought their country 
 to ruin. 
 
 In a series of galleries, under arches and ceilings 
 of yellow and white, stands, sits, reclines, and 
 squats, in Eastern fashion, a strange population of 
 puppets, dressed in the costumes of the bygone cen- 
 turies during which Turkey has ruled in Europe. 
 Those fearful ex-Christians, the Janissaries, who 
 were scourges of Christianity, look very mild now 
 as they stand fatuously together, no longer either 
 Christian or Mussulman but fatally Madame Tus- 
 saud. Once they tucked up their coats to fight for 
 the "Father" who had ravished them away from 
 their fathers in blood. Now, even the wicked man, 
 who flees when no one pursueth, could scarcely fear 
 them. Near them the chief eunuch, a plump and 
 piteous gentleman, reclines absurdly upon his divan, 
 holding his large black pipe, and obsequiously at- 
 tended by a bearded dwarf in red, and by a thin 
 aide-de-camp in green. The Sheikh-ul-Islam bends 
 beneath the coiled dignity of his monstrous turban; 
 a really lifelike old man, with a curved gray beard 
 
 247
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 and a green and white turban, reads the Koran per- 
 petually; and soldiers with faces made of some sub- 
 stance that looks like plaster return blankly the gaze 
 of the many real soldiers who visit this curious show. 
 
 One day, when I was strolling among the puppets 
 of Saint Irene, some soldiers followed me round. 
 They w^ere deeply interested in all that they saw, 
 and at last became interested in me. Two or three 
 of them addressed me in Turkish, which alas! I could 
 not understand. I gathered, however, that they 
 were seriously explaining the puppets to me, and 
 were giving me information about the Janissaries, 
 and Orchan, who was the founder of that famous 
 corps. I responded as well as I could with gestures, 
 which seemed to satisfy them, for they kept close 
 beside me, and one, a gigantic fellow with pugna- 
 cious mustaches, frequently touched my arm, and 
 once even took me by the hand to draw my attention 
 to a group which he specially admired. All this was 
 done with gravity and dignity, and with a childlike 
 lack of self-consciousness. We parted excellent 
 friends. I distributed cigarettes, which were re- 
 ceived with smiling gratitude, and went on my way 
 to Seraglio Point, realizing that there is truth in the 
 saying that every Turk is a gentleman. 
 
 Upon Seraglio Point I found many more soldiers, 
 resting in groups by the edge of the sea, upon the 
 waste ground that lies at the foot of the walls, 
 
 248
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 beyond the delightful abandoned glades that are left 
 to run wild and to shelter the birds. If you wish to 
 understand something of the curious indifference 
 that hangs, like moss, about the Turk, visit Seraglio 
 Point. There, virtually in Stamboul, is one of the 
 most beautifully situated bits of land in the world. 
 Though really part of a great city, much of it has 
 not been built upon. Among the trees on the ridge, 
 looking to Marmora and Asia, to the Bosporus and 
 the palaces, to the Golden Horn, Galata, and Pera, 
 lie the many buildings and courts of the Old Se- 
 raglio, fairy-like in their wood. The snowy cupolas, 
 the minarets, and towers look ideally Eastern. They 
 suggest romantic and careless lives, cradled in 
 luxury and ease. In that white vision one might 
 dream away the days, watching from afar the 
 pageant of the city and the seas, hearing from afar 
 the faint voices of the nations, listening to strange 
 and monotonous music, toying with coffee and rose- 
 leaf jam in the jewel-like Kiosk of Bagdad, and 
 dreaming, always dreaming. There once the Sultan 
 dwelt in the Eski-Serai, which exists no longer, and 
 there was built the great Summer Palace, which 
 was inhabited by Suleiman I, and by his successors. 
 Hidden in the Old Seraglio there are many treasures, 
 among them the magnificent Persian throne, which 
 is covered with gold and jewels. Beyond this neg- 
 lected wonder-world the woods extend toward the 
 
 249
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 waters; hanging woods by the sea — and the Turks 
 care nothing about them. One may not wander 
 through them; one may not sit in them; one may 
 only look at them, and long to lose oneself in their 
 darkness and silence, to vanish in their secret re- 
 cesses. The Turk leaves them alone, to rot or to 
 flourish, as Allah and Nature will it. 
 
 On the third of Stamboul's seven hills stands the 
 Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, all glorious 
 without, as Santa Sophia is not, but disappointing 
 within, despite its beautiful windows of jeweled 
 glass from Persia, and the plaques of wonderful tiles 
 which cover the wall on either side of the mihrab. 
 Somber and dark, earth-colored and gray, dark- 
 green and gold, it has a poorly painted cupola and 
 much plastered stone which is ugly. But there is 
 fascination in its old dimness, in its silence and de- 
 sertion. More than once I was quite alone within it, 
 and was able undisturbed to notice its chief internal 
 beauty, the exquisite proportions which trick you at 
 first into believing it to be much smaller than it is. 
 
 When seen from without it looks colossal. It is 
 splendid and imposing, but it is much more, for it 
 has a curiously fantastic, and indeed almost whim- 
 sical charm, as if its builder, Sinan, had been a play- 
 ful genius, full of gaiety and exuberance of spirit, 
 who made this great mosque with joy and with 
 lightness of heart, but who never forgot for a mo- 
 
 250
 
 ST. (iEORGE'S C^REEK CHURCH, NOW A MOSQUE, 
 CONSTANTINOPLE
 
 I roin a photo^'raph, copyright, by Underwood it I'nderivood. N. 'S'.
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 ment his science, and who could not be vulgar even 
 in his most animated moments of invention. Mas- 
 siveness and grace are blended together in this 
 beautiful exterior. Round the central dome multi- 
 tudes of small domes — airy bubbles throw^n up on 
 the surface of the mosque — are grouped with de- 
 lightful fantasy. Four minarets, the two farthest 
 from the mosque smaller than their brethren, soar 
 above the trees. They are gray, and the walls of the 
 mosque are gray and white. In the forecourt there 
 is a fine fountain covered with a cupola; the roof of 
 the cloisters which surround it is broken up into 
 twenty-four little domes. A garden lies behind the 
 mosque, and the great outer court is planted with 
 trees. 
 
 In the garden are the turbehs, or tombs, of Sulei- 
 man the Magnificent and of Roxalana, "the joyous 
 one,'* that strange captive from Russia, who by her 
 charm and the power of her temperament subdued a 
 nation's ruler, who shared the throne of the sultan, 
 who guided his feet in the ways of crime, and who to 
 the day of her death was adored by him. For Rox- 
 alana's sake, Suleiman murdered his eldest son by 
 another wife, and crept out from behind a curtain to 
 look upon him dead; and for Roxalana's sake that 
 son's son was stabbed to death in his mother's arms. 
 Now the fatal woman sleeps in a great octagonal 
 marble tomb near the tomb of her lord and slave. 
 
 253
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 An atmosphere of peace and of hoary age broods 
 over these tombs and the humble graves that crowd 
 close about them. Mulberry-trees, fig-trees, and 
 cypresses thrown patches of shade on the rough gray 
 pavement, in w^hich is a small oval pool, full of water 
 lest the little birds should go thirsty. A vine strag- 
 gles over a wall near by; weeds and masses of bright 
 yellow flowers combine their humble efforts to be 
 decorative; and the call to prayer drops down from 
 the mighty minarets to this strange garden of 
 stones, yellow flowers, and weeds, where the lovers 
 rest in the midst of Stamboul, which once feared and 
 adored them. They were two criminals, but there 
 was strength in their wickedness, strength in their 
 pride and their passion. Romance attended their 
 footsteps, and romance still lingers near them. 
 
 One morning, as I sat beneath the noble fig-tree 
 which guards Roxalana's tomb, and listened to the 
 voice of the muezzin floating over old Stamboul, and 
 watched the birds happily drinking at the edge of 
 their little basin In the pavement, I thought of the 
 influence of cities. Does not Stamboul forever incite 
 to intrigue, to lawlessness, to bloodshed? The 
 muezzin calls to prayer, but from old Stamboul 
 arises another voice sending forth an opposing sum- 
 mons. Suleiman heard it echoed by Roxalana, and 
 slew his son ; Roxalana heard and obeyed it ; and how 
 many others have listened and been fatally moved 
 
 254
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 by it! It has sounded even across the waters of the 
 sea and over the forests of Yildiz; and Armenians 
 have been slain by thousands while Europe looked 
 on. And perhaps in our day, and after we are gone, 
 old Stamboul will command from its seven hills and 
 will be horribly obeyed. 
 
 I shall always remember, among many less fa- 
 mous buildings, the small mosque of Rustem Pasha 
 near the Egyptian Bazaar, with its beautiful arcade 
 and its strangely confused interior, full of loveliness 
 and bad taste, of atrocious modern painting and 
 oleographic horrors, mingled with exquisite marble 
 and perfect tiles. The wall of the arcade gleams 
 with lustrous faience, purple and red, azure and 
 milk-white, and with patterns of great flowers with 
 green centers and turquoise leaves. I recall, too, the 
 Mosaic Mosque, once the church of the monastery of 
 the Chora, w^hich stands on a hill from which Stam- 
 boul looks like a beautiful village embowered in 
 green, cheerful and gaily fascinating. The church 
 is ugly outside, yellow and lead-colored, with a 
 white plaster minaret, and it is surrounded by 
 wooden shanties like booths. But its mosaics are 
 very interesting and beautiful, and its chief muezzin, 
 Mustafa Effendi, is a delight in his long golden robe 
 and his yellow turban. 
 
 Mustafa Effendi was born near Brusa in Asia 
 Minor, but for forty-two years he has held the office
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 of chief muezzin at the Mosaic Mosque, on which all 
 his thoughts seem centered. He speaks English a 
 little, and has an almost inordinate sense of humor. 
 As he pointed out the mosaics to me with his wrin- 
 kled hand he abounded in comment, and more than 
 once his thin voice was almost overwhelmed by ill- 
 suppressed laughter. He seemed specially enter- 
 tained as he drew my attention to two birds on the 
 wall — ''Monsieur Peacock and Madame Peahen"; 
 and he was obliged to abandon all dignity and to 
 laugh outright when we came to a company of saints 
 and angels. 
 
 The most sacred mosque in Turkey lies outside of 
 Stamboul, at Eyub, far up the Golden Horn and not 
 very distant from the "sweet waters of Europe." In 
 it, on their accession, the sultans are solemnly girded 
 with Osman's sword instead of being crowned. 
 Eyub is a place of tombs. Chief eunuchs and grand 
 vizirs sleep near the sea in great mausoleums in- 
 closed within gilded railings, and some of them sur- 
 rounded by gardens; on the hillside above them 
 thousands of the faithful rest under cypresses in 
 graves marked by dusty headstones leaning awry. 
 
 The center or heart of Eyub is a pleasant village, 
 which gathers closely about the mosque, and is full 
 of a quietly cheerful life. Just beyond the court of 
 the mosque is a Turkish bath, where masseurs, with 
 shaven heads and the usual tuft, lounge in the sun- 
 
 256
 
 I r m a photojr iph, cupyriy^lu, by Uiulerwood & Underwood, N. Y.
 
 STREET VTSTA IN GALATA FROM END OF BRIDCiF 
 CONSTANTINOPLE
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 shine while waiting- for customers. Near by are 
 many small shops and cafes. In one of the latter I 
 ate an excellent meal of rice and fat mutton, cooked 
 on a spit which revolved in the street. If you stray 
 from the center of the village toward the outskirts 
 you find yourself in a deserted rummage of tombs, 
 of white columns, white cupolas, cloisters, rooms for 
 theological students, mausoleums of white and pink 
 marble. No footsteps resound on the pavement of 
 the road, no voices are heard in the little gardens, no 
 eyes look out through the railings. As I wandered 
 through the sunshine to the small stone platform, 
 where the Sultan descends from his horse when he 
 comes to be girded with the sword, I saw no sign of 
 life; and the only noise that I heard was the per- 
 sistent tap of a hammer near the sea, where his Maj- 
 esty is building an imperial mosque of white stone 
 fromTrebizond. 
 
 Presently, growing weary of the white and silent 
 streets of the tombs, I turned into a narrow alley 
 that ran by a grated wall, above which great trees 
 towered, climbing toward heaven with the minaret 
 of the Mosque of Eyub, but failing in their journey 
 a little below the muezzin's balcony. They were 
 cypresses, and creepers climbed affectionately with 
 them. Just beyond them I came into the court of the 
 mosque, and found myself in the midst of a crowd of 
 pilgrims before the tomb of Abu Eyub, which is cov- 
 
 259
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 ered with gilding and faience. Near it is a fountain 
 protected by magnificent plane-trees which are sur- 
 rounded by iron railings decorated with dervish 
 caps. 
 
 I had been told more than once that the Christian 
 dog is unwelcome in Eyub, and I was soon made 
 aware of it. In the facade of the tomb there is a hole 
 through which one can look into the interior. Tak- 
 ing my turn among the pilgrims, I presently stood 
 in front of this aperture, and was about to peep in 
 discreetly when a curtain was sharply drawn across 
 it by some one inside. I waited for a moment, but in 
 vain; the curtain was not drawn back, so at last I 
 meekly went on my way, feeling rather humiliated. 
 A Greek friend afterward told me that an imam was 
 stationed within the tomb, and that no doubt he had 
 drawn the curtain against me because I was an un- 
 believer. 
 
 Duly chastened by this rebuff, I nevertheless went 
 on to the mosque, and was allowed to go in for a mo- 
 ment on making a payment. The attendant was 
 very rough and suspicious in manner, and watched 
 me as if I were a criminal; and the pilgrims who 
 thronged the interior stared at me with open hostil- 
 ity. I thought it wiser, therefore, to make only a 
 cursory examination of the handsome marble in- 
 terior, with its domes and semi-domes, and after- 
 ward, with a sense of relief, took my way up the 
 
 260
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 hillside, to spend an hour among the leaning grave- 
 stones in the shade of the cypresses. Each stone 
 above the grave of a man was carved with a fez, each 
 woman's stone with a flower; and tiny holes formed 
 receptacles to collect the rain-water, so that the 
 birds might refresh themselves above the dust of the 
 departed. 
 
 The great field of the dead was very tranquil that 
 day. I saw only two closely veiled women moving 
 slowly in the distance near the small tekkeh of the 
 Mevlevi dervishes, and an old Turk sitting with a 
 child, at the edge of the hill before a cafe. The wo- 
 men, who were shrouded in black, disappeared 
 among the gigantic cypresses, seeking perhaps 
 among the thousands of graves one stone with a 
 flower or a fez that was dear to their hearts because 
 of the sleeper beneath it. The old Turk rolled a 
 cigarette in his knotty fingers, looking dreamily 
 down at the child, who sat with his little legs under 
 him silently staring at the water below, upon which 
 no vessels, no caiques were moving. On the bare hill 
 to my left I saw the white gleam of the stones in a 
 Jewish cemetery; and, beneath, the pale curve of the 
 Golden Horn, ending not far off in the peace of the 
 desolate country. Red-roofed Eyub, shredding out 
 into blanched edges of cupolas and tombs by the 
 sultan's landing-place, marked the base of the hill; 
 and, beyond, in the distance, mighty Stamboul, 
 
 261
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 brown, with red lights here and there where the sun 
 struck a roof, streamed away to SeragHo Point. The 
 great prospect was closed by the shadowy moun- 
 tains of Asia, among which I divined, rather than 
 actually saw, the crest of Olympus. 
 
 In these Turkish cemeteries there is a romantic 
 and poignant melancholy such as I have found in no 
 other places of tombs. They breathe out an atmo- 
 sphere of fatalism, of bloodless resignation to the in- 
 evitable. Their dilapidation suggests rather than 
 mere indifference a sense of the uselessness of care. 
 Dust unto dust — and there an end! But far off in 
 Stamboul the minarets contradict the voices that 
 whisper over the fields of the dead. For the land of 
 the Turk is the home of contradictions; and among 
 them there are some that are welcome. 
 
 To rid myself of the clinging impression of sad- 
 ness that stole over me among the cypresses of 
 Eyub, I took a boat, later in the day, to the shore of 
 Asia, and visited the English graveyard at Haidar 
 Pasha, where long ago Florence Nightingale estab- 
 lished her hospital for soldiers wounded in the 
 Crimean War, and where now Germans have built 
 an elaborate station from which some day we shall 
 be able to set out for Bagdad. Already smart cor- 
 ridor cars, with white roofs and spotlessly clean cur- 
 tains, and with ''Bagdad" printed in large letters 
 upon them, are running from the coast to myste- 
 
 262
 
 A VIEW OVER CONSTANTINOPLE SHOWING THE 
 MOSQUE OF SANTA SOPHIA
 
 1 r.ui ., |.nwi.,^,,,|.ii. .pyni;!!!. I .y t liucrw. ..d A' I M.kTw...i(t, \. ^-.
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 rious places in the interior of Asia. In the excellent 
 restaurant beer flows freely. If the mystic word 
 "Verboten" were not absent from the walls, one 
 might fancy himself in Munich on entering the sta- 
 tion at Haidar Pasha. On the hill just above the 
 station lies the English cemetery, a delightful gar- 
 den of rest, full of hope and peace. It is beautifully 
 kept, and contains the home of the guardian, a Brit- 
 ish soldier, who lives with his wife and daughters in 
 a cozy stone bungalow fronted by flower-beds and 
 trees. Close to his house is a grave with a broken 
 column, raised on a platform which is approached by 
 three steps and surrounded by a circular grass-plot. 
 Here I found a serious Montenegrin, one of the 
 workers in the cemetery, busily employed. He had 
 spread sheets of paper all over the grass-plot, and up 
 the steps of the grave, and had scattered above them 
 a great mass of wool which suggested a recent 
 sheep-shearing. When I came up he was adding 
 more wool to the mass with a sort of grave ardor. I 
 asked him wdiat the wool was for and why he was 
 spreading it out. He glanced up solemnly and re- 
 plied: 
 
 "It is for my bed. I live in that shed over there 
 and am preparing my mattress for the winter." 
 
 And he continued quietly and dexterously to scat- 
 ter the wool over the tomb. 
 
 The cemetery, which looks out over the sea and 
 
 265
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 the beautiful shores of Europe, is full of the graves 
 of soldiers who died of wounds received in the 
 Crimean War, or of maladies caught in camp and in 
 the trenches. Among them lie the bodies of many 
 devoted women who worked to allay their suffer- 
 ings. 
 
 Bent perpetually on escape from the uproar of 
 Pera, in which at night I was forced to dwell, I made 
 more than one excursion to the walls and the seven 
 towers of Stamboul. There are three sets of walls: 
 the land, the sea, and the harbor walls. The seven 
 towers, Yedi Kuleh, are very near to the Sea of 
 Marmora, and are now unused and deserted; the 
 home no longer of imprisoned ambassadors, of sul- 
 tans and vizirs, but of winds from the islands and 
 from Asia, of grass, yellow wild-flowers, and the 
 fallen leaves of the autumn. When I went there I 
 was alone, save for one very old man, the peaceful 
 successor of the Janissaries who long ago garrisoned 
 this marvelous place of terror and crime. With him 
 at my heels I wandered among the trees of the de- 
 serted inclosure surrounded by gray and crenellated 
 walls, above which the towers rose up grimly toward 
 the windy sky; I penetrated through narrow corri- 
 dors of stone; I crawled through gaps and clambered 
 over masses of rubble and fallen masonry; I visited 
 tiny and sinister chambers inclosed in the thickness 
 of the walls; peered through small openings; came 
 
 266
 
 STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES 
 
 out unexpectedly on terraces. And the old man. 
 muttered and mumbled in my ears, monotonously 
 and without emotion, the history of crime connected 
 with the place. Here some one was starved to 
 death; here another was strangled by night; in this 
 chamber a French ambassador was held captive; the 
 blood of a sultan dyed these stones red; at the foot 
 of this bit of wall there was a massacre; just there 
 some great person was blinded. And, with the voice 
 in my ears, I looked and I saw white butterflies flit- 
 ting, with their frivolous purity, among the leaves 
 of acacia-trees, and snails crawling lethargically 
 over rough gray stones. Near the Golden Gate, 
 where an earthquake has shaken down much of the 
 wall, and the Byzantine dove of carved stone still 
 remains — ironically? — as an emblem of peace, was a 
 fig-tree giving green figs ; Marmora shone from afar; 
 in the waterless moat, that stretches at the feet of 
 the walls, the grasses were waving, the ivy grew 
 thickly, here and there big patches of vegetables 
 gave token of the forethought and industry of men. 
 And beyond, stretching away as far as eye could see, 
 the cemeteries without the city disappeared into dis- 
 tances, everywhere shadowed by those tremendous, 
 almost terrible, cypresses that watch over the dead 
 in the land of the Turk. 
 
 Beauty and sadness, crime and terror, wonderful 
 romance, and a ghastly desolation seemed brooding 
 
 267
 
 THE NEAR EAST 
 
 over this strange region beyond the reach of the 
 voices of the city. Even the ancient man was silent 
 at last. He had recited all the horrors his old mem- 
 ory contained, and at my side he stood gazing, with 
 bleary eyes, across the moat and the massy cy- 
 presses, and, with me, he turned to capture the 
 shining of Marmora. 
 
 On the farther verge of the moat three dogs, 
 which had somehow escaped the far-flung nets, wan- 
 dered slowly seeking for offal; some women hovered 
 darkly among the graves; a thin, piercing cry, that 
 was not without a wild sweetness, rose to me from 
 somewhere below. I looked down and there, among 
 the rankly growing grasses of the moat, I saw a 
 young girl, very thin, her black hair hanging and 
 bound with bright handkerchiefs, sketching vaguely 
 a danse du ventre. As I looked she became more 
 precise in her movements, and her cries grew more 
 fierce and imperative. From some hovel, hidden 
 among the walls, other children streamed out, with 
 cries and contortions, to join her. For here, among 
 the ruins, the Turkish Gipsies have made their home. 
 I threw down some coins and turned away. And as 
 I went, returning through the old places of assas- 
 sination, I was pursued by a whining of pipes and a 
 thrumming of distant guitars. The Gipsies of old 
 Stamboul were trying to lure me down from my 
 fastness to make merry with them among the tombs. 
 
 268
 
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