The Innocents Abroad

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Innocents Abroad


The third cook, crowned with a resplendent tin basin and wrapped royally
in a table-cloth mottled with grease-spots and coffee stains, and bearing
a sceptre that looked strangely like a belaying-pin, walked upon a
dilapidated carpet and perched himself on the capstan, careless of the
flying spray; his tarred and weather-beaten Chamberlains, Dukes and Lord
High Admirals surrounded him, arrayed in all the pomp that spare
tarpaulins and remnants of old sails could furnish. Then the visiting
"watch below," transformed into graceless ladies and uncouth pilgrims, by
rude travesties upon waterfalls, hoopskirts, white kid gloves and
swallow-tail coats, moved solemnly up the companion way, and bowing low,
began a system of complicated and extraordinary smiling which few
monarchs could look upon and live. Then the mock consul, a
slush-plastered deck-sweep, drew out a soiled fragment of paper and
proceeded to read, laboriously:

"To His Imperial Majesty, Alexander II., Emperor of Russia:

"We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for
recreation,--and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial state--and
therefore, we have no excuse to tender for presenting ourselves before
your Majesty--"

The Emperor--"Then what the devil did you come for?"

--"Save the desire of offering our grateful acknowledgments to the lord
of a realm which--"

The Emperor--"Oh, d--n the Address!--read it to the police.
Chamberlain, take these people over to my brother, the Grand Duke's, and
give them a square meal. Adieu! I am happy--I am gratified--I am
delighted--I am bored. Adieu, adieu--vamos the ranch! The First Groom
of the Palace will proceed to count the portable articles of value
belonging to the premises."

The farce then closed, to be repeated again with every change of the
watches, and embellished with new and still more extravagant inventions
of pomp and conversation.

At all times of the day and night the phraseology of that tiresome
address fell upon our ears. Grimy sailors came down out of the foretop
placidly announcing themselves as "a handful of private citizens of
America, traveling simply for recreation and unostentatiously," etc.; the
coal passers moved to their duties in the profound depths of the ship,
explaining the blackness of their faces and their uncouthness of dress,
with the reminder that they were "a handful of private citizens,
traveling simply for recreation," etc., and when the cry rang through the
vessel at midnight: "EIGHT BELLS!--LARBOARD WATCH, TURN OUT!" the
larboard watch came gaping and stretching out of their den, with the
everlasting formula: "Aye-aye, sir! We are a handful of private citizens
of America, traveling simply for recreation, and unostentatiously, as
becomes our unofficial state!"

As I was a member of the committee, and helped to frame the Address,
these sarcasms came home to me. I never heard a sailor proclaiming
himself as a handful of American citizens traveling for recreation, but I
wished he might trip and fall overboard, and so reduce his handful by one
individual, at least. I never was so tired of any one phrase as the
sailors made me of the opening sentence of the Address to the Emperor of
Russia.

This seaport of Smyrna, our first notable acquaintance in Asia, is a
closely packed city of one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and,
like Constantinople, it has no outskirts. It is as closely packed at its
outer edges as it is in the centre, and then the habitations leave
suddenly off and the plain beyond seems houseless. It is just like any
other Oriental city. That is to say, its Moslem houses are heavy and
dark, and as comfortless as so many tombs; its streets are crooked,
rudely and roughly paved, and as narrow as an ordinary staircase; the
streets uniformly carry a man to any other place than the one he wants to
go to, and surprise him by landing him in the most unexpected localities;
business is chiefly carried on in great covered bazaars, celled like a
honeycomb with innumerable shops no larger than a common closet, and the
whole hive cut up into a maze of alleys about wide enough to accommodate
a laden camel, and well calculated to confuse a stranger and eventually
lose him; every where there is dirt, every where there are fleas, every
where there are lean, broken-hearted dogs; every alley is thronged with
people; wherever you look, your eye rests upon a wild masquerade of
extravagant costumes; the workshops are all open to the streets, and the
workmen visible; all manner of sounds assail the ear, and over them all
rings out the muezzin's cry from some tall minaret, calling the faithful
vagabonds to prayer; and superior to the call to prayer, the noises in
the streets, the interest of the costumes--superior to every thing, and
claiming the bulk of attention first, last, and all the time--is a
combination of Mohammedan stenches, to which the smell of even a Chinese
quarter would be as pleasant as the roasting odors of the fatted calf to
the nostrils of the returning Prodigal. Such is Oriental luxury--such is
Oriental splendor! We read about it all our days, but we comprehend it
not until we see it. Smyrna is a very old city. Its name occurs several
times in the Bible, one or two of the disciples of Christ visited it, and
here was located one of the original seven apocalyptic churches spoken of
in Revelations. These churches were symbolized in the Scriptures as
candlesticks, and on certain conditions there was a sort of implied
promise that Smyrna should be endowed with a "crown of life." She was to
"be faithful unto death"--those were the terms. She has not kept up her
faith straight along, but the pilgrims that wander hither consider that
she has come near enough to it to save her, and so they point to the fact
that Smyrna to-day wears her crown of life, and is a great city, with a
great commerce and full of energy, while the cities wherein were located
the other six churches, and to which no crown of life was promised, have
vanished from the earth. So Smyrna really still possesses her crown of
life, in a business point of view. Her career, for eighteen centuries,
has been a chequered one, and she has been under the rule of princes of
many creeds, yet there has been no season during all that time, as far as
we know, (and during such seasons as she was inhabited at all,) that she
has been without her little community of Christians "faithful unto
death." Hers was the only church against which no threats were implied
in the Revelations, and the only one which survived.

With Ephesus, forty miles from here, where was located another of the
seven churches, the case was different. The "candlestick" has been
removed from Ephesus. Her light has been put out. Pilgrims, always
prone to find prophecies in the Bible, and often where none exist, speak
cheerfully and complacently of poor, ruined Ephesus as the victim of
prophecy. And yet there is no sentence that promises, without due
qualification, the destruction of the city. The words are:

"Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and
do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will
remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent."

That is all; the other verses are singularly complimentary to Ephesus.
The threat is qualified. There is no history to show that she did not
repent. But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that
one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong
man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason. Both the cases I
have just mentioned are instances in point. Those "prophecies" are
distinctly leveled at the "churches of Ephesus, Smyrna," etc., and yet
the pilgrims invariably make them refer to the cities instead. No crown
of life is promised to the town of Smyrna and its commerce, but to the
handful of Christians who formed its "church." If they were "faithful
unto death," they have their crown now--but no amount of faithfulness and
legal shrewdness combined could legitimately drag the city into a
participation in the promises of the prophecy. The stately language of
the Bible refers to a crown of life whose lustre will reflect the
day-beams of the endless ages of eternity, not the butterfly existence
of a city built by men's hands, which must pass to dust with the
builders and be forgotten even in the mere handful of centuries
vouchsafed to the solid world itself between its cradle and its grave.

The fashion of delving out fulfillments of prophecy where that prophecy
consists of mere "ifs," trenches upon the absurd. Suppose, a thousand
years from now, a malarious swamp builds itself up in the shallow harbor
of Smyrna, or something else kills the town; and suppose, also, that
within that time the swamp that has filled the renowned harbor of Ephesus
and rendered her ancient site deadly and uninhabitable to-day, becomes
hard and healthy ground; suppose the natural consequence ensues, to wit:
that Smyrna becomes a melancholy ruin, and Ephesus is rebuilt. What
would the prophecy-savans say? They would coolly skip over our age of
the world, and say: "Smyrna was not faithful unto death, and so her crown
of life was denied her; Ephesus repented, and lo! her candle-stick was
not removed. Behold these evidences! How wonderful is prophecy!"

Smyrna has been utterly destroyed six times. If her crown of life had
been an insurance policy, she would have had an opportunity to collect on
it the first time she fell. But she holds it on sufferance and by a
complimentary construction of language which does not refer to
her. Six different times, however, I suppose some infatuated
prophecy-enthusiast blundered along and said, to the infinite disgust of
Smyrna and the Smyrniotes: "In sooth, here is astounding fulfillment of
prophecy! Smyrna hath not been faithful unto death, and behold her
crown of life is vanished from her head. Verily, these things be
astonishing!"

Such things have a bad influence. They provoke worldly men into using
light conversation concerning sacred subjects. Thick-headed commentators
upon the Bible, and stupid preachers and teachers, work more damage to
religion than sensible, cool-brained clergymen can fight away again, toil
as they may. It is not good judgment to fit a crown of life upon a city
which has been destroyed six times. That other class of wiseacres who
twist prophecy in such a manner as to make it promise the destruction and
desolation of the same city, use judgment just as bad, since the city is
in a very flourishing condition now, unhappily for them. These things
put arguments into the mouth of infidelity.

A portion of the city is pretty exclusively Turkish; the Jews have a
quarter to themselves; the Franks another quarter; so, also, with the
Armenians. The Armenians, of course, are Christians. Their houses are
large, clean, airy, handsomely paved with black and white squares of
marble, and in the centre of many of them is a square court, which has in
it a luxuriant flower-garden and a sparkling fountain; the doors of all
the rooms open on this. A very wide hall leads to the street door, and
in this the women sit, the most of the day. In the cool of the evening
they dress up in their best raiment and show themselves at the door.
They are all comely of countenance, and exceedingly neat and cleanly;
they look as if they were just out of a band-box. Some of the young
ladies--many of them, I may say--are even very beautiful; they average a
shade better than American girls--which treasonable words I pray may be
forgiven me. They are very sociable, and will smile back when a stranger
smiles at them, bow back when he bows, and talk back if he speaks to
them. No introduction is required. An hour's chat at the door with a
pretty girl one never saw before, is easily obtained, and is very
pleasant. I have tried it. I could not talk anything but English, and
the girl knew nothing but Greek, or Armenian, or some such barbarous
tongue, but we got along very well. I find that in cases like these, the
fact that you can not comprehend each other isn't much of a drawback.
In that Russia n town of Yalta I danced an astonishing sort of dance an
hour long, and one I had not heard of before, with a very pretty girl,
and we talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one ever
knew what the other was driving at. But it was splendid. There were
twenty people in the set, and the dance was very lively and complicated.
It was complicated enough without me--with me it was more so. I threw in
a figure now and then that surprised those Russians. But I have never
ceased to think of that girl. I have written to her, but I can not
direct the epistle because her name is one of those nine-jointed Russian
affairs, and there are not letters enough in our alphabet to hold out.
I am not reckless enough to try to pronounce it when I am awake, but I
make a stagger at it in my dreams, and get up with the lockjaw in the
morning. I am fading. I do not take my meals now, with any sort of
regularity. Her dear name haunts me still in my dreams. It is awful on
teeth. It never comes out of my mouth but it fetches an old snag along
with it. And then the lockjaw closes down and nips off a couple of the
last syllables--but they taste good.

Coming through the Dardanelles, we saw camel trains on shore with the
glasses, but we were never close to one till we got to Smyrna. These
camels are very much larger than the scrawny specimens one sees in the
menagerie. They stride along these streets, in single file, a dozen in a
train, with heavy loads on their backs, and a fancy-looking negro in
Turkish costume, or an Arab, preceding them on a little donkey and
completely overshadowed and rendered insignificant by the huge beasts.
To see a camel train laden with the spices of Arabia and the rare fabrics
of Persia come marching through the narrow alleys of the bazaar, among
porters with their burdens, money-changers, lamp-merchants, Al-naschars
in the glassware business, portly cross-legged Turks smoking the famous
narghili; and the crowds drifting to and fro in the fanciful costumes of
the East, is a genuine revelation of the Orient. The picture lacks
nothing. It casts you back at once into your forgotten boyhood, and
again you dream over the wonders of the Arabian Nights; again your
companions are princes, your lord is the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid, and
your servants are terrific giants and genii that come with smoke and
lightning and thunder, and go as a storm goes when they depart!




CHAPTER XXXIX.

We inquired, and learned that the lions of Smyrna consisted of the ruins
of the ancient citadel, whose broken and prodigious battlements frown
upon the city from a lofty hill just in the edge of the town--the Mount
Pagus of Scripture, they call it; the site of that one of the Seven
Apocalyptic Churches of Asia which was located here in the first century
of the Christian era; and the grave and the place of martyrdom of the
venerable Polycarp, who suffered in Smyrna for his religion some eighteen
hundred years ago.

We took little donkeys and started. We saw Polycarp's tomb, and then
hurried on.

The "Seven Churches"--thus they abbreviate it--came next on the list. We
rode there--about a mile and a half in the sweltering sun--and visited a
little Greek church which they said was built upon the ancient site; and
we paid a small fee, and the holy attendant gave each of us a little wax
candle as a remembrancer of the place, and I put mine in my hat and the
sun melted it and the grease all ran down the back of my neck; and so now
I have not any thing left but the wick, and it is a sorry and a
wilted-looking wick at that.

Several of us argued as well as we could that the "church" mentioned in
the Bible meant a party of Christians, and not a building; that the Bible
spoke of them as being very poor--so poor, I thought, and so subject to
persecution (as per Polycarp's martyrdom) that in the first place they
probably could not have afforded a church edifice, and in the second
would not have dared to build it in the open light of day if they could;
and finally, that if they had had the privilege of building it, common
judgment would have suggested that they build it somewhere near the town.
But the elders of the ship's family ruled us down and scouted our
evidences. However, retribution came to them afterward. They found that
they had been led astray and had gone to the wrong place; they discovered
that the accepted site is in the city.

Riding through the town, we could see marks of the six Smyrnas that have
existed here and been burned up by fire or knocked down by earthquakes.
The hills and the rocks are rent asunder in places, excavations expose
great blocks of building-stone that have lain buried for ages, and all
the mean houses and walls of modern Smyrna along the way are spotted
white with broken pillars, capitals and fragments of sculptured marble
that once adorned the lordly palaces that were the glory of the city in
the olden time.

The ascent of the hill of the citadel is very steep, and we proceeded
rather slowly. But there were matters of interest about us. In one
place, five hundred feet above the sea, the perpendicular bank on the
upper side of the road was ten or fifteen feet high, and the cut exposed
three veins of oyster shells, just as we have seen quartz veins exposed
in the cutting of a road in Nevada or Montana. The veins were about
eighteen inches thick and two or three feet apart, and they slanted along
downward for a distance of thirty feet or more, and then disappeared
where the cut joined the road. Heaven only knows how far a man might
trace them by "stripping." They were clean, nice oyster shells, large,
and just like any other oyster shells. They were thickly massed
together, and none were scattered above or below the veins. Each one was
a well-defined lead by itself, and without a spur. My first instinct was
to set up the usual--
NOTICE:

"We, the undersigned, claim five claims of two hundred feet each,
(and one for discovery,) on this ledge or lode of oyster-shells,
with all its dips, spurs, angles, variations and sinuosities, and
fifty feet on each side of the same, to work it, etc., etc.,
according to the mining laws of Smyrna."

They were such perfectly natural-looking leads that I could hardly keep
from "taking them up." Among the oyster-shells were mixed many fragments
of ancient, broken crockery ware. Now how did those masses of
oyster-shells get there? I can not determine. Broken crockery and
oyster-shells are suggestive of restaurants--but then they could have
had no such places away up there on that mountain side in our time,
because nobody has lived up there. A restaurant would not pay in such a
stony, forbidding, desolate place. And besides, there were no champagne
corks among the shells. If there ever was a restaurant there, it must
have been in Smyrna's palmy days, when the hills were covered with
palaces. I could believe in one restaurant, on those terms; but then how
about the three? Did they have restaurants there at three different
periods of the world?--because there are two or three feet of solid
earth between the oyster leads. Evidently, the restaurant solution will
not answer.

The hill might have been the bottom of the sea, once, and been lifted up,
with its oyster-beds, by an earthquake--but, then, how about the
crockery? And moreover, how about three oyster beds, one above another,
and thick strata of good honest earth between?

That theory will not do. It is just possible that this hill is Mount
Ararat, and that Noah's Ark rested here, and he ate oysters and threw the
shells overboard. But that will not do, either. There are the three
layers again and the solid earth between--and, besides, there were only
eight in Noah's family, and they could not have eaten all these oysters
in the two or three months they staid on top of that mountain. The
beasts--however, it is simply absurd to suppose he did not know any more
than to feed the beasts on oyster suppers.

It is painful--it is even humiliating--but I am reduced at last to one
slender theory: that the oysters climbed up there of their own accord.
But what object could they have had in view?--what did they want up
there? What could any oyster want to climb a hill for? To climb a hill
must necessarily be fatiguing and annoying exercise for an oyster. The
most natural conclusion would be that the oysters climbed up there to
look at the scenery. Yet when one comes to reflect upon the nature of an
oyster, it seems plain that he does not care for scenery. An oyster has
no taste for such things; he cares nothing for the beautiful. An oyster
is of a retiring disposition, and not lively--not even cheerful above the
average, and never enterprising. But above all, an oyster does not take
any interest in scenery--he scorns it. What have I arrived at now?
Simply at the point I started from, namely, those oyster shells are
there, in regular layers, five hundred feet above the sea, and no man
knows how they got there. I have hunted up the guide-books, and the gist
of what they say is this: "They are there, but how they got there is a
mystery."

Twenty-five years ago, a multitude of people in America put on their
ascension robes, took a tearful leave of their friends, and made ready to
fly up into heaven at the first blast of the trumpet. But the angel did
not blow it. Miller's resurrection day was a failure. The Millerites
were disgusted. I did not suspect that there were Millers in Asia Minor,
but a gentleman tells me that they had it all set for the world to come
to an end in Smyrna one day about three years ago. There was much
buzzing and preparation for a long time previously, and it culminated in
a wild excitement at the appointed time. A vast number of the populace
ascended the citadel hill early in the morning, to get out of the way of
the general destruction, and many of the infatuated closed up their shops
and retired from all earthly business. But the strange part of it was
that about three in the afternoon, while this gentleman and his friends
were at dinner in the hotel, a terrific storm of rain, accompanied by
thunder and lightning, broke forth and continued with dire fury for two
or three hours. It was a thing unprecedented in Smyrna at that time of
the year, and scared some of the most skeptical. The streets ran rivers
and the hotel floor was flooded with water. The dinner had to be
suspended. When the storm finished and left every body drenched through
and through, and melancholy and half-drowned, the ascensionists came down
from the mountain as dry as so many charity-sermons! They had been
looking down upon the fearful storm going on below, and really believed
that their proposed destruction of the world was proving a grand success.

A railway here in Asia--in the dreamy realm of the Orient--in the fabled
land of the Arabian Nights--is a strange thing to think of. And yet they
have one already, and are building another. The present one is well
built and well conducted, by an English Company, but is not doing an
immense amount of business. The first year it carried a good many
passengers, but its freight list only comprised eight hundred pounds of
figs!

It runs almost to the very gates of Ephesus--a town great in all ages of
the world--a city familiar to readers of the Bible, and one which was as
old as the very hills when the disciples of Christ preached in its
streets. It dates back to the shadowy ages of tradition, and was the
birthplace of gods renowned in Grecian mythology. The idea of a
locomotive tearing through such a place as this, and waking the phantoms
of its old days of romance out of their dreams of dead and gone
centuries, is curious enough.

We journey thither tomorrow to see the celebrated ruins.




CHAPTER XL.

This has been a stirring day. The Superintendent of the railway put a
train at our disposal, and did us the further kindness of accompanying us
to Ephesus and giving to us his watchful care. We brought sixty scarcely
perceptible donkeys in the freight cars, for we had much ground to go
over. We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line
of the railroad, that can be imagined. I am glad that no possible
combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish
enough to attempt it.

At ancient Ayassalook, in the midst of a forbidding desert, we came upon
long lines of ruined aqueducts, and other remnants of architectural
grandeur, that told us plainly enough we were nearing what had been a
metropolis, once. We left the train and mounted the donkeys, along with
our invited guests--pleasant young gentlemen from the officers' list of
an American man-of-war.

The little donkeys had saddles upon them which were made very high in
order that the rider's feet might not drag the ground. The preventative
did not work well in the cases of our tallest pilgrims, however. There
were no bridles--nothing but a single rope, tied to the bit. It was
purely ornamental, for the donkey cared nothing for it. If he were
drifting to starboard, you might put your helm down hard the other way,
if it were any satisfaction to you to do it, but he would continue to
drift to starboard all the same. There was only one process which could
be depended on, and it was to get down and lift his rear around until his
head pointed in the right direction, or take him under your arm and carry
him to a part of the road which he could not get out of without climbing.
The sun flamed down as hot as a furnace, and neck-scarfs, veils and
umbrellas seemed hardly any protection; they served only to make the long
procession look more than ever fantastic--for be it known the ladies were
all riding astride because they could not stay on the shapeless saddles
sidewise, the men were perspiring and out of temper, their feet were
banging against the rocks, the donkeys were capering in every direction
but the right one and being belabored with clubs for it, and every now
and then a broad umbrella would suddenly go down out of the cavalcade,
announcing to all that one more pilgrim had bitten the dust. It was a
wilder picture than those solitudes had seen for many a day. No donkeys
ever existed that were as hard to navigate as these, I think, or that had
so many vile, exasperating instincts. Occasionally we grew so tired and
breathless with fighting them that we had to desist,--and immediately the
donkey would come down to a deliberate walk. This, with the fatigue, and
the sun, would put a man asleep; and soon as the man was asleep, the
donkey would lie down. My donkey shall never see his boyhood's home
again. He has lain down once too often. He must die.