The Innocents Abroad - (24)

Shortly we came upon an ancient stone aqueduct, built upon arches, and from that time forth we had ruins all about us--we were approaching our journey's end.  We could not see the Acropolis now or the high hill, either, and I wanted to follow the road till we were abreast of them, but the others overruled me, and we toiled laboriously up the stony hill immediately in our front--and from its summit saw another--climbed it and saw another!  It was an hour of exhausting work.  Soon we came upon a row of open graves, cut in the solid rock--(for a while one of them served Socrates for a prison)--we passed around the shoulder of the hill, and the citadel, in all its ruined magnificence, burst upon us!  We hurried across the ravine and up a winding road, and stood on the old Acropolis, with the prodigious walls of the citadel towering above our heads.  We did not stop to inspect their massive blocks of marble, or measure their height, or guess at their extraordinary thickness, but passed at once through a great arched passage like a railway tunnel, and went straight to the gate that leads to the ancient temples.  It was locked!  So, after all, it seemed that we were not to see the great Parthenon face to face. We sat down and held a council of war.  Result: the gate was only a flimsy structure of wood--we would break it down.  It seemed like desecration, but then we had traveled far, and our necessities were urgent.  We could not hunt up guides and keepers--we must be on the ship before daylight.  So we argued.  This was all very fine, but when we came to break the gate, we could not do it.  We moved around an angle of the wall and found a low bastion--eight feet high without--ten or twelve within.  Denny prepared to scale it, and we got ready to follow.  By dint of hard scrambling he finally straddled the top, but some loose stones crumbled away and fell with a crash into the court within.  There was instantly a banging of doors and a shout.  Denny dropped from the wall in a twinkling, and we retreated in disorder to the gate.  Xerxes took that mighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christ, when his five millions of soldiers and camp-followers followed him to Greece, and if we four Americans could have remained unmolested five minutes longer, we would have taken it too.
    The garrison had turned out--four Greeks.  We clamored at the gate, and they admitted us.  [Bribery and corruption.]
    We crossed a large court, entered a great door, and stood upon a pavement of purest white marble, deeply worn by footprints.  Before us, in the flooding moonlight, rose the noblest ruins we had ever looked upon--the Propylae; a small Temple of Minerva; the Temple of Hercules, and the grand Parthenon.  [We got these names from the Greek guide, who didn't seem to know more than seven men ought to know.] These edifices were all built of the whitest Pentelic marble, but have a pinkish stain upon them now.  Where any part is broken, however, the fracture looks like fine loaf sugar.  Six caryatides, or marble women, clad in flowing robes, support the portico of the Temple of Hercules, but the porticos and colonnades of the other structures are formed of massive Doric and Ionic pillars, whose flutings and capitals are still measurably perfect, notwithstanding the centuries that have gone over them and the sieges they have suffered.  The Parthenon, originally, was two hundred and twenty-six feet long, one hundred wide, and seventy high, and had two rows of great columns, eight in each, at either end, and single rows of seventeen each down the sides, and was one of the most graceful and beautiful edifices ever erected.
    Most of the Parthenon's imposing columns are still standing, but the roof is gone.  It was a perfect building two hundred and fifty years ago, when a shell dropped into the Venetian magazine stored here, and the explosion which followed wrecked and unroofed it.  I remember but little about the Parthenon, and I have put in one or two facts and figures for the use of other people with short memories.  Got them from the guide-book.
    As we wandered thoughtfully down the marble-paved length of this stately temple, the scene about us was strangely impressive.  Here and there, in lavish profusion, were gleaming white statues of men and women, propped against blocks of marble, some of them armless, some without legs, others headless--but all looking mournful in the moonlight, and startlingly human!  They rose up and confronted the midnight intruder on every side --they stared at him with stony eyes from unlooked-for nooks and recesses; they peered at him over fragmentary heaps far down the desolate corridors; they barred his way in the midst of the broad forum, and solemnly pointed with handless arms the way from the sacred fane; and through the roofless temple the moon looked down, and banded the floor and darkened the scattered fragments and broken statues with the slanting shadows of the columns.
    What a world of ruined sculpture was about us!  Set up in rows--stacked up in piles--scattered broadcast over the wide area of the Acropolis --were hundreds of crippled statues of all sizes and of the most exquisite workmanship; and vast fragments of marble that once belonged to the entablatures, covered with bas-reliefs representing battles and sieges, ships of war with three and four tiers of oars, pageants and processions --every thing one could think of.  History says that the temples of the Acropolis were filled with the noblest works of Praxiteles and Phidias, and of many a great master in sculpture besides--and surely these elegant fragments attest it.
    We walked out into the grass-grown, fragment-strewn court beyond the Parthenon.  It startled us, every now and then, to see a stony white face stare suddenly up at us out of the grass with its dead eyes.  The place seemed alive with ghosts.  I half expected to see the Athenian heroes of twenty centuries ago glide out of the shadows and steal into the old temple they knew so well and regarded with such boundless pride.
    The full moon was riding high in the cloudless heavens, now.  We sauntered carelessly and unthinkingly to the edge of the lofty battlements of the citadel, and looked down--a vision!  And such a vision!  Athens by moonlight!  The prophet that thought the splendors of the New Jerusalem were revealed to him, surely saw this instead!  It lay in the level plain right under our feet--all spread abroad like a picture--and we looked down upon it as we might have looked from a balloon.  We saw no semblance of a street, but every house, every window, every clinging vine, every projection was as distinct and sharply marked as if the time were noon-day; and yet there was no glare, no glitter, nothing harsh or repulsive--the noiseless city was flooded with the mellowest light that ever streamed from the moon, and seemed like some living creature wrapped in peaceful slumber.  On its further side was a little temple, whose delicate pillars and ornate front glowed with a rich lustre that chained the eye like a spell; and nearer by, the palace of the king reared its creamy walls out of the midst of a great garden of shrubbery that was flecked all over with a random shower of amber lights --a spray of golden sparks that lost their brightness in the glory of the moon, and glinted softly upon the sea of dark foliage like the pallid stars of the milky-way.  Overhead the stately columns, majestic still in their ruin--under foot the dreaming city--in the distance the silver sea --not on the broad earth is there an other picture half so beautiful!
    As we turned and moved again through the temple, I wished that the illustrious men who had sat in it in the remote ages could visit it again and reveal themselves to our curious eyes--Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Socrates, Phocion, Pythagoras, Euclid, Pindar, Xenophon, Herodotus, Praxiteles and Phidias, Zeuxis the painter.  What a constellation of celebrated names!  But more than all, I wished that old Diogenes, groping so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously for one solitary honest man in all the world, might meander along and stumble on our party.  I ought not to say it, may be, but still I suppose he would have put out his light.
    We left the Parthenon to keep its watch over old Athens, as it had kept it for twenty-three hundred years, and went and stood outside the walls of the citadel.  In the distance was the ancient, but still almost perfect Temple of Theseus, and close by, looking to the west, was the Bema, from whence Demosthenes thundered his philippics and fired the wavering patriotism of his countrymen.  To the right was Mars Hill, where the Areopagus sat in ancient times and where St. Paul defined his position, and below was the market-place where he “disputed daily” with the gossip-loving Athenians.  We climbed the stone steps St. Paul ascended, and stood in the square-cut place he stood in, and tried to recollect the Bible account of the matter--but for certain reasons, I could not recall the words.  I have found them since:
    “Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given up to idolatry.  Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him. * * * * * * * * * “And they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is? * * * * * * * * * “Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious; For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription: To THE UNKNOWN GOD.  Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.”--Acts, ch. xvii.”
    It occurred to us, after a while, that if we wanted to get home before daylight betrayed us, we had better be moving.  So we hurried away.  When far on our road, we had a parting view of the Parthenon, with the moonlight streaming through its open colonnades and touching its capitals with silver.  As it looked then, solemn, grand, and beautiful it will always remain in our memories.
    As we marched along, we began to get over our fears, and ceased to care much about quarantine scouts or any body else.  We grew bold and reckless; and once, in a sudden burst of courage, I even threw a stone at a dog.  It was a pleasant reflection, though, that I did not hit him, because his master might just possibly have been a policeman.  Inspired by this happy failure, my valor became utterly uncontrollable, and at intervals I absolutely whistled, though on a moderate key.  But boldness breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a Vineyard, in the full light of the moon, and captured a gallon of superb grapes, not even minding the presence of a peasant who rode by on a mule.  Denny and Birch followed my example.
    Now I had grapes enough for a dozen, but then Jackson was all swollen up with courage, too, and he was obliged to enter a vineyard presently.  The first bunch he seized brought trouble.  A frowsy, bearded brigand sprang into the road with a shout, and flourished a musket in the light of the moon!  We sidled toward the Piraeus--not running you understand, but only advancing with celerity.  The brigand shouted again, but still we advanced.  It was getting late, and we had no time to fool away on every ass that wanted to drivel Greek platitudes to us.  We would just as soon have talked with him as not if we had not been in a hurry.  Presently Denny said, “Those fellows are following us!”
    We turned, and, sure enough, there they were--three fantastic pirates armed with guns.  We slackened our pace to let them come up, and in the meantime I got out my cargo of grapes and dropped them firmly but reluctantly into the shadows by the wayside.  But I was not afraid.  I only felt that it was not right to steal grapes.  And all the more so when the owner was around--and not only around, but with his friends around also.  The villains came up and searched a bundle Dr. Birch had in his hand, and scowled upon him when they found it had nothing in it but some holy rocks from Mars Hill, and these were not contraband.  They evidently suspected him of playing some wretched fraud upon them, and seemed half inclined to scalp the party.  But finally they dismissed us with a warning, couched in excellent Greek, I suppose, and dropped tranquilly in our wake.  When they had gone three hundred yards they stopped, and we went on rejoiced.  But behold, another armed rascal came out of the shadows and took their place, and followed us two hundred yards.  Then he delivered us over to another miscreant, who emerged from some mysterious place, and he in turn to another!  For a mile and a half our rear was guarded all the while by armed men.  I never traveled in so much state before in all my life.
    It was a good while after that before we ventured to steal any more grapes, and when we did we stirred up another troublesome brigand, and then we ceased all further speculation in that line.  I suppose that fellow that rode by on the mule posted all the sentinels, from Athens to the Piraeus, about us.
    Every field on that long route was watched by an armed sentinel, some of whom had fallen asleep, no doubt, but were on hand, nevertheless.  This shows what sort of a country modern Attica is--a community of questionable characters.  These men were not there to guard their possessions against strangers, but against each other; for strangers seldom visit Athens and the Piraeus, and when they do, they go in daylight, and can buy all the grapes they want for a trifle.  The modern inhabitants are confiscators and falsifiers of high repute, if gossip speaks truly concerning them, and I freely believe it does.
    Just as the earliest tinges of the dawn flushed the eastern sky and turned the pillared Parthenon to a broken harp hung in the pearly horizon, we closed our thirteenth mile of weary, round-about marching, and emerged upon the sea-shore abreast the ships, with our usual escort of fifteen hundred Piraean dogs howling at our heels.  We hailed a boat that was two or three hundred yards from shore, and discovered in a moment that it was a police-boat on the lookout for any quarantine-breakers that might chance to be abroad.  So we dodged--we were used to that by this time--and when the scouts reached the spot we had so lately occupied, we were absent.  They cruised along the shore, but in the wrong direction, and shortly our own boat issued from the gloom and took us aboard.  They had heard our signal on the ship.  We rowed noiselessly away, and before the police-boat came in sight again, we were safe at home once more.
    Four more of our passengers were anxious to visit Athens, and started half an hour after we returned; but they had not been ashore five minutes till the police discovered and chased them so hotly that they barely escaped to their boat again, and that was all.  They pursued the enterprise no further.
    We set sail for Constantinople to-day, but some of us little care for that.  We have seen all there was to see in the old city that had its birth sixteen hundred years before Christ was born, and was an old town before the foundations of Troy were laid--and saw it in its most attractive aspect.  Wherefore, why should we worry?
    Two other passengers ran the blockade successfully last night.  So we learned this morning.  They slipped away so quietly that they were not missed from the ship for several hours.  They had the hardihood to march into the Piraeus in the early dusk and hire a carriage.  They ran some danger of adding two or three months' imprisonment to the other novelties of their Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.  I admire “cheek.”--[Quotation from the Pilgrims.]--But they went and came safely, and never walked a step.
    CHAPTER XXXIII.
    From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and deserted--a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all Greece in these latter ages.  We saw no ploughed fields, very few villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and hardly ever an isolated house.  Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently.  What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.
    I suppose that ancient Greece and modern Greece compared, furnish the most extravagant contrast to be found in history.  George I., an infant of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and generals of the Golden Age of Greece.  The fleets that were the wonder of the world when the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly handful of fishing-smacks now, and the manly people that performed such miracles of valor at Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered slaves to-day.  The classic Illyssus has gone dry, and so have all the sources of Grecian wealth and greatness.  The nation numbers only eight hundred thousand souls, and there is poverty and misery and mendacity enough among them to furnish forty millions and be liberal about it.  Under King Otho the revenues of the State were five millions of dollars--raised from a tax of one-tenth of all the agricultural products of the land (which tenth the farmer had to bring to the royal granaries on pack-mules any distance not exceeding six leagues) and from extravagant taxes on trade and commerce.  Out of that five millions the small tyrant tried to keep an army of ten thousand men, pay all the hundreds of useless Grand Equerries in Waiting, First Grooms of the Bedchamber, Lord High Chancellors of the Exploded Exchequer, and all the other absurdities which these puppy-kingdoms indulge in, in imitation of the great monarchies; and in addition he set about building a white marble palace to cost about five millions itself. The result was, simply: ten into five goes no times and none over.  All these things could not be done with five millions, and Otho fell into trouble.
    The Greek throne, with its unpromising adjuncts of a ragged population of ingenious rascals who were out of employment eight months in the year because there was little for them to borrow and less to confiscate, and a waste of barren hills and weed-grown deserts, went begging for a good while.  It was offered to one of Victoria's sons, and afterwards to various other younger sons of royalty who had no thrones and were out of business, but they all had the charity to decline the dreary honor, and veneration enough for Greece's ancient greatness to refuse to mock her sorrowful rags and dirt with a tinsel throne in this day of her humiliation--till they came to this young Danish George, and he took it. He has finished the splendid palace I saw in the radiant moonlight the other night, and is doing many other things for the salvation of Greece, they say.
    We sailed through the barren Archipelago, and into the narrow channel they sometimes call the Dardanelles and sometimes the Hellespont.  This part of the country is rich in historic reminiscences, and poor as Sahara in every thing else.  For instance, as we approached the Dardanelles, we coasted along the Plains of Troy and past the mouth of the Scamander; we saw where Troy had stood (in the distance,) and where it does not stand now--a city that perished when the world was young.  The poor Trojans are all dead, now.  They were born too late to see Noah's ark, and died too soon to see our menagerie.  We saw where Agamemnon's fleets rendezvoused, and away inland a mountain which the map said was Mount Ida.  Within the Hellespont we saw where the original first shoddy contract mentioned in history was carried out, and the “parties of the second part” gently rebuked by Xerxes.  I speak of the famous bridge of boats which Xerxes ordered to be built over the narrowest part of the Hellespont (where it is only two or three miles wide.) A moderate gale destroyed the flimsy structure, and the King, thinking that to publicly rebuke the contractors might have a good effect on the next set, called them out before the army and had them beheaded.  In the next ten minutes he let a new contract for the bridge.  It has been observed by ancient writers that the second bridge was a very good bridge.  Xerxes crossed his host of five millions of men on it, and if it had not been purposely destroyed, it would probably have been there yet.  If our Government would rebuke some of our shoddy contractors occasionally, it might work much good.  In the Hellespont we saw where Leander and Lord Byron swam across, the one to see her upon whom his soul's affections were fixed with a devotion that only death could impair, and the other merely for a flyer, as Jack says. We had two noted tombs near us, too.  On one shore slept Ajax, and on the other Hecuba.
    We had water batteries and forts on both sides of the Hellespont, flying the crimson flag of Turkey, with its white crescent, and occasionally a village, and sometimes a train of camels; we had all these to look at till we entered the broad sea of Marmora, and then the land soon fading from view, we resumed euchre and whist once more.
    We dropped anchor in the mouth of the Golden Horn at daylight in the morning.  Only three or four of us were up to see the great Ottoman capital.  The passengers do not turn out at unseasonable hours, as they used to, to get the earliest possible glimpse of strange foreign cities. They are well over that.  If we were lying in sight of the Pyramids of Egypt, they would not come on deck until after breakfast, now-a-days.
    The Golden Horn is a narrow arm of the sea, which branches from the Bosporus (a sort of broad river which connects the Marmora and Black Seas,) and, curving around, divides the city in the middle.  Galata and Pera are on one side of the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn; Stamboul (ancient Byzantium) is upon the other.  On the other bank of the Bosporus is Scutari and other suburbs of Constantinople.  This great city contains a million inhabitants, but so narrow are its streets, and so crowded together are its houses, that it does not cover much more than half as much ground as New York City.  Seen from the anchorage or from a mile or so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen.  Its dense array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and spreads over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel. Constantinople makes a noble picture.
    But its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesqueness.  From the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, he execrates it.  The boat he goes in is admirably miscalculated for the service it is built for.  It is handsomely and neatly fitted up, but no man could handle it well in the turbulent currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water. It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a knife blade at the other.  They make that long sharp end the bow, and you can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about.  It has two oars, and sometimes four, and no rudder.  You start to go to a given point and you run in fifty different directions before you get there.  First one oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are going ahead at once.  This kind of boating is calculated to drive an impatient man mad in a week.  The boatmen are the awkwardest, the stupidest, and the most unscientific on earth, without question.
    Ashore, it was--well, it was an eternal circus.  People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of.  There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted.  No two men were dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes--every struggling throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts.  Some patriarchs wore awful turbans, but the grand mass of the infidel horde wore the fiery red skull-cap they call a fez.  All the remainder of the raiment they indulged in was utterly indescribable.