The Autobiography of a Journalist Volume II Part 7

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

MORATSHA

Niksich was full of smallpox and fever, and, as there was a great abundance of tents captured with the city, I took one, with an extra baggage-horse and his leader, and started for Moratsha. The wide plain into which we entered after leaving the hills above Niksich was a great pasture land, mottled as I never saw land before with mushrooms.

The abundance was extraordinary, but nothing would induce a Montenegrin to eat one. We halted for our first night on the edge of a magnificent natural meadow, where a shepherd had built his hut and was feeding his flocks, and we took advantage of his presence to enjoy some security against the wolves, pitching our tent in a little grove close to him and picketing our horses between the tent and his hut. He and his sons were on guard by turns all night, and the howling of the tantalized wolves came clearly to us at times with, at long intervals, the reports of the guns which were fired to keep them at a distance.

They were so near at one time that I got up and fired my fowling-piece out of the tent, and we kept lights burning all night to prevent them from attacking our horses. In the course of the night a thunderstorm came up, and, as we had pitched the tent in a hollow to secure freedom from stones in our beds, the rain, washed out our tent-pegs, and the tent came down on us in our sleep. In the morning I sent to the shepherd for a lamb for breakfast for the men, and he sent us what I took for a full-grown sheep, so large and fat was it, and I sent it back, asking for a lamb. He replied that it was a spring lamb, and the smallest he had. The price of it was about two shillings, and for another he offered to dress it for us.

From there we sent back the tent, and the following night we slept at Velje Duboko, at the bottom of one of the ravines which make the surprises of traveling in that country so great. You proceed along a rolling plain with no suspicion of the canon before you, and suddenly find yourself on the verge of a cliff, looking down into a valley hundreds of feet deep. Duboko lay by the river's margin fifteen hundred feet below us, to be reached only by a winding journey of an hour, though the shepherds carried on conversation from cliff to cliff above. Here a momentary surprise by the Turkish bands has now and then been possible, but never an occupation of the country. The picturesqueness of the valley of the Duboko above the village can be rarely surpa.s.sed by wild landscape, and the whole section, the centre of which is the stronghold of Moratsha, is of a most interesting character, utterly unlike the Czernagora proper.

At the convent of Moratsha I found civilization and comfort. The hegumenos, a Dalmatian by birth, but a patriot of the first quality, and a very militant Christian, made me most welcome. I had some money from the English and Russian committees to distribute amongst the needy wounded and the families of the killed, and the grat.i.tude of the nave hearts was touching to a degree I never saw in richer countries.

But what most surprised them was that some of it came from the English. "Why, English!" exclaimed one old woman, as she started back when told that I was English; "they are a kind of Turk." All the world there thought only of the English as the allies of the Turks, but the hospitality they felt, and could show only in trifles, was unbounded.

I had brought with me a battle-axe I had found in the stores of Niksich and taken as my part of the booty, but had not noticed that it had never been sharpened, so that it was useless for cutting. One of the men at the convent took it, and with a common whetstone (for there was nothing in the nature of a grindstone in the place) brought it to razor edge,--a job which a carpenter alone can appreciate; and, when I tried to give him something for it, he put his hands behind him and then ran out of sight. A little fellow, not over four years old, stumbled upstairs to my room to bring me an ear of green maize, the greatest delicacy they know, and another ran to me in the road to offer me a huge and fine potato he was nursing with pride. The walnuts were just then eatable, and one of the men brought me a quant.i.ty in his closed hands so that I should not see what he had, and, emptying them into my hands, ran away with all speed lest I should give him something in return. They had been carefully cracked and removed from the sh.e.l.ls, as the most delicate attention he could show me.

The convent is an old-time stronghold, but, dominated on three sides by hills which look down into its quadrangle, it would be untenable to rifle fire. It was founded by Stefan Nemanides, son of Bolkan, Prince of the Zeta (a term which comprised all Montenegro and the Berdas), and eldest son of Stefan, Emperor of Servia. The Romanesque church, which occupies the centre of the quadrangle, was built about A.D.

1250, but, having been burnt out by the Turks, it was restored in 1400, the walls being uninjured, and it has never been since damaged; and the frescoes in the chapel, which are older than those in the church, are dated 1420. There are some in the church painted later by a monk from Mount Athos, but decidedly inferior to those in the little chapel.

I was hardly in shelter at the convent when the rains set in, and for nearly two weeks I was weather-bound, for in that wild country, with no roads but the tracks the horses wear in the ground, traveling in the mud of rainy weather is out of the question. In a lull of actual downpour we made an excursion to Kolashin, four hours away, pa.s.sing through the scene of the defeat of Mehemet Ali Pasha. The hegumenos, who commanded the half battalion of the monastery, showed me the line of the fighting, and described the battle, and certainly it was one of the most extraordinary battles even in the history of this fighting people.

The Turks came from Kolashin by a road which debouches into the valley by a steep descent of about five hundred feet, and they had crowned the heights and planted their battery before the clans could gather, since these had been scattered along a line of thirty or forty miles, uncertain what point would be attacked. Voivode Vucovich, hereditary chief of the Wa.s.soivich, with half a battalion of his own people, was watching and following the Turks from a distance, and, when he saw that the movement was intended for the convent, he sent runners to Peiovich in Drobniak and warned the convent, where was a half battalion of local forces. The regulars formed on the ridge, intrenched themselves, and sent the irregulars, Albanians of the tribe of the Mirdites, down to lead the attack. As soon as these were well entangled in the intricacies of the valley, seeing only the half battalion of Moratsha posted in front of them, Vucovich led an attack down the slope in their rear, getting between them and the regulars, and the Moratshani made a sortie from the convent, which is inclosed by a strong wall, and attacked in front. The Albanians fought desperately for a short time, but, attacked on both sides, though by forces much inferior in the aggregate to their own, they finally broke in panic. A large body ran into a ravine, which proved a _cul de sac_, for the end up which they hoped to escape was so precipitous that few escaped the infuriated Montenegrins following them, who, when the fight was over, counted eleven hundred dead. The rest of the Albanians continued their flight to Kolashin, the panic involving the regulars, who insisted on returning, and, in spite of all remonstrances of the officers, went back.

The hegumenos, Mitrofan Banovich, whose name deserves record as well as any I heard of in this land of heroes, introduced to me the captain of the Moratsha battalion, who had taken part in the fight. He had lost his son in it, and of his four hundred men twenty-five had been killed and forty put _hors de combat_ from wounds which disabled them from fighting. The Wa.s.soivich had exhausted their ammunition and the unwounded of the Moratshani were only enough to carry away the wounded; had the Turkish regulars maintained the attack, there could have been no further resistance, the way would have been open to take the Montenegrins about Danilograd in the rear, and Suleiman would have had a clear course.

The captain told me of one brave Albanian who had fallen wounded from his horse and taken shelter in a crevice of the rocks, and who had killed two Montenegrins and wounded a third before he was disposed of by one of them getting behind him and shooting him through a crevice in the sheltering rocks. The manner of his death and that of those of his a.s.sailants ill.u.s.trate the war manners of the Montenegrins so completely that I was interested in the case more than in other heroic details of the fight. The Montenegrin makes a question of _amour propre_ in attacking his enemies face to face and by preference with the cold steel. Enemies who fall in the general melee by rifle-shot he never considers his "heads;" he claims only those he has killed in hand-to-hand combat. This Albanian was the standard-bearer of his clan, i.e. the hereditary chieftain, and to kill him in hand-to-hand combat was the ambition of the three who attacked him in succession, the shooting from behind being only a matter of necessity.

I remembered at that moment a correspondence I had had years before with Virchow, on the Pelasgi, and their probable relation with the Albanians, whom he regarded as the descendants of the Pelasgi; and, thinking of his collection of skulls, I asked the captain if he knew the spot where the body of the Albanian lay, and if the bones were still there, and when he a.s.sured me that they were where he fell, I offered him two florins to bring me the skull, which he did. It was of a man in the prime of life, with the sutures scarcely closed, and only two teeth lacking, and none unsound, and I sent it on to the great craniologist, who replied with warm thanks. The skull, he said, was the finest for intellectual development in his collection, and he read a paper on it before the Imperial German Academy. He was so impressed by its character that he was disposed to consider it as an exceptional skull, and wrote to one of the Austrian officers in Montenegro to ask him to make an effort to send some more, and these, though not, like that of the standard-bearer, of unquestionably pure Albanian stock,--for the aristocracy never intermarry with any other blood than that of their cla.s.s and race,--all possessed the same intellectual characteristics, justifying him in placing the Albanian at the head of the races of Europe for intellectual capacity.

We reconnoitred Kolashin, and found it an almost open fortress, which was commanded by hills around, and so near that it could be made untenable by rifle fire, which could have been poured in from both sides of the river that ran by it, which, though then a swollen torrent, was under ordinary conditions fordable anywhere. The Turks seemed indisposed to provoke an exchange of shots, and did not trouble us, though we went within easy rifle-shot inspecting the works through my field-gla.s.s, and, before leaving, took our luncheon in full sight of the garrison, who were working on some trenches intended for protection from a _coup de main_ from the river. I made a sketch of the fortress, and we withdrew tranquilly. In fact, the Turkish garrisons, so far as my own experience went, were never disposed to begin a fight, and if not molested they never annoyed us by firing on us. The poor fellows only wanted to be left alone. They were, when prisoners, the most amiable people possible, and at one time I saw many in Cettinje, prisoners taken in the fights about Podgoritza, enjoying the freedom of the place and making themselves useful to the women, bringing wood and water, and as inoffensive as children. Many of them, probably young men without domestic ties, refused to return when the treaty of peace was signed, but, with a docility which was as remarkable as their obedience under the atrocious treatment of their own government, only asked for their bread and toleration. I have seen in Cettinje, when the men were all on the frontier fighting, Turkish prisoners enough to take possession of the place if they had been disposed to rise and make a fight with sticks and stones. This was one of the most touching phases of that curious war, a warfare such as the world will hardly see again.

The day after our trip to Kolashin the rain set in again, and we pa.s.sed nearly a fortnight more at the convent before the weather broke and I was able to set out, taking with me a gang of men to make the roads pa.s.sable for my horse, so much had the rains wrought havoc with the face of the land. The flooded state of the country and unfordable rivers forbade the trip to Wa.s.soivich, and I was obliged, to my great regret, to relinquish it and to go back to Cettinje, having lost nearly three weeks in the rain at Moratsha. Returning by a different route from that by which I came, I crossed the Duboko at a point much lower down than that of my first striking it, where it makes the most magnificent trout stream I have ever seen. The trout from it feed the Moratsha and the Lake of Scutari. In the Duboko they are caught, according to the statement of a native of the district, as heavy as forty pounds; and Mr. Green, the English consul at Scutari, told me that they were sometimes caught much larger in the lake. There were plenty in the Zeta at Niksich and at Danilograd, and I saw one brought to the Prince's tent one day, during the siege, which weighed twenty-two pounds, shot by one of the men, for they refused all kinds of bait, and were only taken by shooting or the net; or, horrible to relate, by dynamite, the ruinous effects of which on the population of the river the Prince was too easygoing to forbid. I have seen one of the spring basins, from which the Zeta takes its rise, carpeted by tiny trout and other fishes, killed by the explosions of dynamite, which rarely killed, but only stunned, the larger fish, of which few were retrieved even when stunned or killed. I one day remonstrated indignantly with the Prince for this barbarous butchery, and told him that if he permitted his men to carry it on his son would reign in a fishless country, and he promised to forbid it; but the matter pa.s.sed from his memory in a day. The Duboko was a safe nursery for the fry, for it was such a torrent that dynamite was useless, since it would have been impossible to retrieve a fish if killed.

Our road lay through the district of Rovtcha, which is considered the poorest for the agriculturist in all the Berdas. It is very hilly, and the rock is, where we pa.s.sed, a rotten slate which the rains and the torrents cut away rapidly, carrying the alluvium down to the plains and Lake of Scutari. Digging and bridging, we reached, early in the afternoon, the village of Gornje-Rovtcha, and were then informed that it would be impossible to reach another habitation that day, and that the road pa.s.sed through an immense forest infested by wolves, in which we should be compelled to sleep if we held on. This I had no desire to try, remembering our experience with the shepherds on the first night out from Niksich. So we pa.s.sed the hours to the dark in shooting at a mark, and went to bed early. The house which was selected to be honored by my repose, the best in the village, was of one room, from which the animals were excluded, with the usual floor of beaten earth.

A huge bedstead of small fir poles, the only important piece of furniture in it, was a.s.signed to me, and the family--all women and children--spread their rugs on the ground. After eating a supper brought from the convent, and some potatoes, the only provision, except a little coa.r.s.e maize bread which the house afforded, we went to bed. The bedstead was abundantly provided with straw, but nought beside, and the fleas routed me from my first sleep and compelled me to evacuate the premises. I took my mattress and went out where my pony was picketed, and, spreading it in his lee, to break the cold north wind fresh from the mountain, I tried to sleep.

The poor horse had supped miserably; a little barley from the convent and some musty hay furnished by the woman of the house, but which even in his hunger he refused to eat, left him ill-compensated for a hard day's walk, and he turned his head to me now and then with a coaxing whinney which was as plain a supplication for something to eat as I could have made myself, but the only effect of which was to break my doze as soon as begun, until I lost my patience with him, and gave him a sound box on the ear, when he turned his head from me, and lay down again. It made my heart ache to be unkind to him, for he was the gentlest and most serviceable friend I had in Montenegro, but I could get nothing to give him if I had paid a guinea the pound for it, and he would not let me sleep. The intelligent brute felt what language could not tell him, and ceased his complaint, though the blow I gave him would hardly have killed a gad-fly on his hair; but it sufficed, and gave me more discomfort than him, for I did not cease to reproach myself for the ungrateful return for his fidelity. But I slept no more, and watched the stars in their courses till the dawn.

A gla.s.s of milk and a crust of the bread I had brought from the convent made my breakfast, and we pushed on to our next stopping-place, the convent of Piperski Celia. The road lay for the first hour through a forest of beeches and firs, the former the finest, as timber, I ever saw--straight trunks, thirty or forty feet to the first limb; in some places the beech being the exclusive wood, and in others the fir, but all a luxuriant growth. Properly worked, this forest would have made a great revenue for the princ.i.p.ality.

Before the war it had been leased to a French company, and many trees were lying in all stages of preparation for rafting down the Moratsha.

This was succeeded by a forest entirely of firs, also splendid trees, and then we came into a region which was beyond all my experience or imagination,--a wide and barren waste of rock, gray, glistening in the now burning sun, and without a trace of vegetation that could be recognized by the casual vision. There was no soil, and apparently never had been any, and the silvery-gray of the lichenous limestone blinded one with its glare in the sunlight. Midway in it we came on an old Roman road, one of the finest pieces of antique engineering I ever saw. In some places it was cut out of the solid rock like a dry ca.n.a.l, the banks being nearly as high as our heads, and the ruts of the chariot wheels were still there to show that the utter barrenness of the land had existed the same from ancient time. It was probably the great road from Dyrrachium to the upper Danube.

We reached the convent too late to get to Danilograd that night, considering the condition of the roads, and I asked for shelter for the night. Here, for the first time in my experience with Orthodox convents, lodgings were refused me by the old hegumenos, and I instantly ordered the horses to be loaded again, without attempting to soften his surliness. A few minutes' talk with the captain who was my escort showed him that I was a person too much in favor with the Prince to be treated with such derision, and he came to offer me a place to spread my mattress on a balcony exposed to the south wind and the rain; then, having begun to relent, he went further, and offered me a room, which I refused, and finally his own bed; but even that did not break my inflexible resentment. When he became pathetic in his repentance, however, I accepted a balcony whence I could look down on the fortress of Spuz, within easy range of its sleeping batteries; and then he offered me a supper, which I accepted, and we made peace. In the morning he had become humanized, and he gave me breakfast and showed me the body of St. Stephen, which is kept here in great reverence (not the proto-martyr, but a Montenegrin of the same name).

The saint lay in state in a magnificent coffin, as if embalmed, and in his hand was an old and time-yellowed embroidered handkerchief which looked as if it might have been there a century or two. Remembering a dear friend in the Orthodox church to whom the relics of its saints were precious, I asked the hegumenos to sell me this handkerchief. He replied that he dared not take it, but if I had the courage to do so he would not prevent me, so I took the relic and put a twenty franc piece in the treasury of the convent, and went my way.

I found the Prince in his villa at Orealuk, contemplating new movements in a distant future, and, there being evidently nothing to keep me there, I decided to go back to Cettinje and await what was evidently the operation in view,--the movement on Antivari. My poor little pony like myself, only half fed for days, was not in a condition for rapid travel, and, though we pushed on in the rain, which began again, as well as we could, when we reached Rieka it was nearly sunset. Finding no preparation in the little house, our usual shelter there, for any guest, after giving the horse what small ration the village afforded, I resumed the journey at sunset. The horse had come the last few miles very heavily; I had been in the saddle twelve to fourteen hours each of the last two days, and the food I could get for him was insufficient even for a Herzegovinian mountain pony, so that it was hard work to get him to a pace above a slow walk as we approached Rieka; but when we left the place he seemed to realize that he had a work of necessity before him, and that the light would not see him through it, and he showed that he understood the case, for he needed neither spur nor whip to make his best pace over the very rough and difficult road. In spite of his best efforts, the darkness fell on us half way to Cettinje, with rain and a fog which made it impossible to see the way before me, or even to see the horse's ears.

There was on that road, on the mountain which frames on that side the plain of Cettinje, a pa.s.sage of the bridle-path which even the Montenegrins, used to it, pa.s.sed always on foot; a sharp ridge, almost an _arete_ of rock, which carries a path hardly wide enough for two horses to pa.s.s each other on it, and on each side of which the rock falls away in a steep precipice high enough to leave no hope of survival from a fall down it. If I had dismounted I could not have seen the path before me; to stop and pa.s.s the night there, drenched and cold as I was, would have been fatal, for we were in the early cold of autumn in a high country; there was nothing for it but to trust to the horse, and I threw the bridle on his neck and left him to himself. A false step was certain death for us both, but I had no choice. He picked his way as if he were walking amongst eggs, slowly but surely, and we descended into the plain of Cettinje at 10 P.M.

without a slip or an attempt on my part to interfere with the discretion of my pony. If I had possessed even an acre of pasture or a settled home where I could have turned out that good beast for the rest of his days, I should never have allowed him to go to another owner, for I knew that I owed him my life.

Of the following campaign, which resulted in the taking of Antivari and Dulcigno, I saw nothing. The jealousy of Jonine had been so excited by my always forestalling him with the news of the war, that he persuaded the Prince not to advise me of the movement; so, while I was waiting at Cettinje for the promised summons to join the staff, the army moved across the country to Rieka secretly, and the first warning we had of the movement was the firing of guns at Antivari. As the Prince gave me no further thought, I waited comfortably, "at mine ease in mine inn," for diplomacy to tie the ends of the well-spun out controversy. Fighting was practically over and my campaign ended.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

THE LEVANT AGAIN

The end of the official war and the hopelessness of seeking to reestablish myself in a literary career in London, as well as the desire of my wife to try a residence in a climate and surroundings more attractive than those of the Isle of Wight--the fact, too, of being without local ties--led to the determination to find a residence for a time abroad, and the family came to meet me at Turin, _en route_ for Corfu, where we decided to pa.s.s the winter. If I had hoped to escape political agitation there, I was mistaken. The Greeks had hung fire in joining in the Balkan movement, hoping that the powers would include them in the arrangements for a final settlement of the Eastern question. When, in the negotiations which accompanied the conclusion of peace, Greece found that she was ignored, the inflammable public opinion broke out in a violent demonstration against the treaty of peace. When the Russian government had decided to declare war, it proposed to Greece that if a Greek army were sent across the frontiers for even a fruitless attack on Turkey when that of Russia entered on the other side, Greece should partic.i.p.ate in the benefits of the settlement. Greece did nothing, and the offer was renewed at a later period, when the war was evidently tending to the complete triumph of Russia, but still there was no action at Athens, and Greece was consequently ignored by Russia when the treaty was negotiated.

Desperate at this delusion of all their hopes, the Greeks demanded that the invasion of Epirus and Thessaly should be at once undertaken, the semblance of an army corps was formed for the latter destination, and the insurrectionary committees organized (if the word can be applied to the huddling together of a ma.s.s of volunteers without organization) the invasion of Epirus from the coast. A few hundred men of many nations, amongst whom were a number of gallant Italians, full of h.e.l.lenic enthusiasm, were landed at Aghia Saranda, a port opposite Corfu and in sight of the city, a scant allowance of food and ammunition was thrown on sh.o.r.e with them, and the steamer which brought them steamed away, leaving them to their fate, which was to be butchered under the eyes of the spectators at Corfu, looking on with horror. Only a few of the hapless volunteers escaped under the guidance of one of the Greeks, who knew the country and guided a party through the mountains to the Gulf of Corinth, the rest being killed almost without resistance, no provision for their escape by sea having been thought of. At the other extremity of the frontier the same tactics were successful in raising a brief insurrection about Volo, which collapsed after a few days' fighting, during which a correspondent of the "Times," Mr. Ogle, was killed by the Turkish troops. The Greek ministry, in the dilemma of acting or being left out of the settlement, decided that the army to cross the frontier should be commanded by the King in person, but the King so earnestly declined the honor put upon him that the plan was abandoned. One of the ministers a.s.sured me that the King with tears in his eyes begged to be excused from going. He had never been popular in the country, and this failure to realize a step in the Panh.e.l.lenic policy made him for the time the object of all the popular indignation. But he probably realized that nothing was ready for such a movement and that it was certain to end in disaster.

The real cause of failure was in the general indifference to all preparation, in which the government was supported by the nation. The overweening confidence in themselves, which was so great as to permit them to believe that without any organization or discipline they were more than a match for the Turkish army, has always been their fatal weakness. One of the leaders of the war party said to me a little later, "The Greeks are so clever that they do not need to be trained; they can fight without it well enough to beat the Turks." We saw at Corfu how ill-prepared they were, for the cla.s.ses were called out to go to the frontier of Epirus, and those of Corfu marched through the streets to the place of embarkation weeping as if they went to death. This delusion as to their natural military capacity was never dispelled until the later disaster in Thessaly. The army did in fact cross the frontier, but within forty-eight hours they were obliged to return to Greek territory for want of provisions--the commissariat had been forgotten!

Outside of political agitation we found living in Corfu delightful, and I question if there is, within the limits of the north temperate zone, any more delightful winter residence than was that of Corfu in the period we were there. What remained of the advanced civilization of the English garrison period gave the island a distinct advantage over all the other Greek isles, and even over Crete with its superior natural advantages. Greek enterprise and civilization are so far superior to that found anywhere in the Turkish territory that they are capable of maintaining the substantial progress which the English occupation achieved in Corfu; and, though we found the peasantry not largely inoculated by the fever of progress, the better cla.s.ses of the city population succeed in supporting the better condition attained to. But the obstinacy of the conservatism retained by the agricultural cla.s.ses is equal to that in the least frequented islands of the Aegean. A relative, on whose estate we pa.s.sed a part of the winter, remote from the city of Corfu, had tried to introduce improvements in the culture of his olives; but the laborers not only refused to cooperate with him, but opposed the introduction of laborers who would lend themselves to his operations. As the olives had been gathered in the days of Nausicaa they should be gathered still, and so should the oil be made, and he was obliged to yield. But as we from the west suffer not a little from over-civilization and artifice, it is grateful to repose the eyes and the aesthetic sense in a land where there still remains something of the antique simplicity and picturesque uncouthness, and the winter in Scheria remains one of the grateful memories of a wandering life.

Leaving Corfu with freedom from any local obligations, and a keen enjoyment of the change from life in England, we decided to establish ourselves for a time in Florence, where we pa.s.sed the whole of the summer. In October a son was born to us, and we took a house and furnished it. I took a studio, too, and returned to painting, as well as the long interval permitted me to gather up the threads of habit.

Art is not to be followed in that way, and there is no cause for surprise, nor, perhaps, for regret, that literature had the stronger hold on my mind; and that, between the "Times," letters for which were provoked by so many themes of interest to the English public, and archaeology, especially the study of the prehistoric monuments of central Italy, so important in their yet hardly determined relations to the cla.s.sical world, the pencil found less attraction than the pen.

To my wife, whose enjoyment of Italian art was intense, Florence was an ideal residence; and on some accounts I still regret the circ.u.mstances which drove us out of the lily city,--to me still the most desirable residence I have ever known, when one is able to adapt one's self to the life there. After the first summer we found the Italian Alps one of the most delectable of retreats, Cadore and Auronzo, with Cortina and Landro,--all places full of picturesque and natural fascination. And now, as the strength wanes and we live more in memory than in act, the recollection of the summers pa.s.sed in the land of t.i.tian remains a gallery of the most delightful pictures.

At Cortina I met and first knew Browning, who, with his sister Sariana, our old and dear friend, came to stay at the inn where we were. I am not much inclined to reckon intellectual greatness as a personal charm, for experience has shown me that the relation is very remote; but Browning always impressed me--and then and after I saw a good deal of him--as one of the healthiest and most robust minds I have ever known, sound to the core, and with an almost unlimited intellectual vitality and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armor, but with no aggressive quality. His was a nature of utter sincerity, and what had seemed to me, reading his poetry before knowing him, to be more or less an affectation of obscurity, a cultivation of the cryptic sense, I found to be the pure expression of his individuality. He made short cuts to the heart of his theme, perhaps more unconscious than uncaring that his line of approach could not be followed by his general readers, as a mathematician leaves a large hiatus in his demonstration, seeing the result the less experienced must work out step by step.

At Cortina, too, I saw again Gladstone, late in the summer, when the place was abandoned by the general crowd. I had begun a study of running water, over which I lingered as long as the weather permitted, when he came with Mrs. Gladstone and his son Herbert and daughter Helen. The old man was full of physical and mental energy, and we had several moderate climbs in the mountains of the vicinity. They had not come out to be together as at home, and each took generally a different walk. Gladstone was a good walker, and talked by the way,--which not all good walkers can do,--but I do not remember his ever talking of himself; and in this he was like Ruskin,--he a.s.sumed himself as an element in the situation, and thought no more about it; never in our conversations obtruding his views as of more importance than the conversation demanded, and never opinionated, not even dogmatic, but always inquiring, and more desirous of hearing of the things that had interested him than of expressing his own views about them. It was a moment in which, for some reason I do not now recall, Beaconsfield was much in evidence, and we discussed him on one of our walks; on his part with the most dispa.s.sionate appreciation and kindness of manner. I had said of his great rival that he had struck a blow at the prestige of the English aristocracy, from which it would never recover, and he asked with a quickened interest what that might be, and when I replied that it was by his putting himself at the head of it, he thought a moment and replied, nodding his head, "That is true."

He was very fond of talking with the people of the valley, who are Italians, and his Italian was better than one is accustomed to hear from English people, even from those who live in Italy. We pa.s.sed a fountain one day, at which a washerwoman was washing her linen, and he stopped to talk to her, and asked her, among other questions, if she had always been a washerwoman. No, she replied, she had been a _balia_ (nurse) once. He was struck by her p.r.o.nunciation of the word _balia_ and walked on; but presently he said, "I thought that that word was p.r.o.nounced _balia_" and, when I explained that there were two words--_balia_ which meant a nurse, and _balia_, which came from the same root as our "bailiff," and meant a charge, custody,--he seemed annoyed, and made no more remarks during the continuation of our climb. It was evident that he was vexed, not at me, who corrected him, but at his not having known the trivial detail of a language efficiency in which he prided himself on. It was the only foible I detected in him. He was very much interested in America, and asked many questions about our politics. Two things, he said, in the future of America, seemed to him ominous of evil: the condition of our civil service, and the amount of our Western lands going into mortmain through the gifts to the great railway systems.

It would be, perhaps, unjustifiable to form a firm opinion on a man of Gladstone's calibre from the few days of our intercourse, even in the freedom and openness of mind of a mountain walk, politics and Parliament forgotten; but the final impression he gave me was that of a man, on the whole, immensely greater than I had taken him to be, but with conflicting elements of greatness which neutralized each other to a certain extent. He had in him the Platonist, the Statesman, and the Theologian, of each enough for an ordinary man, and one crowded the other in action. The Platonist crowded the Statesman, and, at certain dangerous moments, the broad humanitarian feeling overlooked the practical dangers of the critical juncture in which he had to act. His idealism took off the point of his statecraft, and what has always seemed, and still seems, to me his aberration in the artificial problems of our ecclesiastical theology, is the only thing I cannot yet understand in so great a man.

That winter I had a commission from the "Century" (then "Scribner's") to make an archaeological and literary venture in Greek waters, the results of which in a series of papers in the magazine were afterwards published in a volume ent.i.tled "On the Track of Ulysses."

Accompanied by Mr. H.M. Paget, the artist, I went to Corfu and hired the Kestrel, my old friend of the Cretan days, and I decided to follow the track of Ulysses in his return to Ithaca from Troy. Beginning at Santa Maura we examined every point in the Ionian Islands to which any illusion is made in the "Odyssey" as far as Cerigo and Cerigotto, meeting a storm off the former island which might well have ended our trip. A well-found Greek brig foundered only a short distance from us in the gale, and we drifted all day and till early in the morning of the day following, when we managed to make the port of Cerigo, during which time we could neither eat a meal nor even get a cup of coffee.

Paget made a capital sailor, and, though the old Maltese captain of former days was dead, his two sons, lads then, were dexterous sailors in the rough-and-ready, rule-of-thumb manner of the Levantine boatman, knowing nothing of navigation and little more of geography than Ulysses himself. We had no charts, and only a very primitive compa.s.s, but we all had the antique love of adventure and indifference to danger. Leaving Cerigotto, an island out of the line of traditional or historic interest, but, curious for its fine and extensive Pelasgic remains, we laid our course for Crete, starting with the breeze that at nightfall generally blows towards the land, which was visible from where we took our departure, and counted on being at Canea with the morning.

But the Aegean is a tricky sea, and furnishes many surprises, as St.

Paul knew, and, when not more than ten miles from the shelter of the Cretan coast, it came on to blow from the southwest with such violence that we were unable to beat up to the shelter of the Cretan highlands, and under a mere rag of canvas had to run before the wind, wherever it might drive us. I was the only one on board who knew anything of the Archipelago, and I had to decide the course, which it was possible to vary only a point or two either way, for the yacht would only run free, or, under favorable weather, with a beam wind. I had to guess our course, which from my knowledge of the islands I saw could only be directly to Milo, about forty miles away. If we hit the harbor, well and good, for it gives excellent shelter in all weather, but if we missed it we had two chances--to find an opening between the islands and reefs, or to hit a lee sh.o.r.e and go on it, for there was no hope of clawing off. I set the course, left the boys in charge, and went to bed. The boat was jumping through the sea with a shock at each wave she struck, as if she had leaped out of the water, and it seemed as if she must be showing her keel with each jump. I awoke in the night and, getting out of my berth to take a look outside, put my feet in the water which had risen to cover the cabin floor. All hands at the pumps kept it down, but it was clear that the old craft, nearly twenty years older than when I first saw her, was no longer seaworthy, and we had no hope of the weather lifting, for these southwesterly gales generally blow at least a day. I went back to bed again, for there was nothing to be done but wait on fortune, and be glad that we should make Milo by daylight.

My previsions justified themselves, for in the course of the afternoon we made the entrance to the harbor, and ran in before such a sea as I never saw in those waters before. The waves broke against the great pillar of rock that stands in the entrance of the harbor, sending the spray to its very summit, and as we ran to the anchorage off the little port the whole population poured down to see the arrival, wondering what sent the tiny craft out in such weather. The old pilot said that it had been the worst gale of forty years, which I could well believe. The weather having abated, we ran over to Crete, where I found the island laboring with reforms, a const.i.tution, and a Christian governor, in the person of my old friend Photiades Pasha. We were invited to dine at the Konak, and of the company was Edhem Pasha, a charming, intelligent, and thoroughly civilized Turk, by far the most liberal and progressive of his race I had met, with the single exception of A'ali Pasha. We played at "Admiration" that evening, a game which puts a series of questions as to the qualities one admires.

In reply to the question "What kind of courage do you admire?" the pasha, turning to me, replied, "I admire the courage of that gentleman in going to sea in so small a boat in such weather," and he admitted laughingly that his courage was not at that level.

I found in the place of my old friend d.i.c.kson, consul for England and colleague of the Cretan days, since dead, Humphrey Sandwith, a n.o.ble and faithful representative of the dignity and humanity of his nation, and for many years subsequently my intimate friend, who has disappeared while I write from the lessening list of living friends, but who will ever keep his place in my regards as a n.o.ble, just, and humane representative of his race, as of his government. In the years of the subsequent Cretan difficulties, Sandwith was always the good and wise friend of the islanders. It is good to remember such a representation of the power and dignity of England in lands where his colleagues have not always honored England or humanity, and I shall always think of Sandwith with greater respect for his nation.

The results of the "Century" expedition were nothing in respect of excavation, and the records of the tracing of the route of the Great Ithacan were written out in the Dolomites in the course of the summer.

We found that excavation was a matter beyond achievement with the limited funds at my disposal, but Photiades was munificent in promises of support if I wished to return for serious undertaking in that direction. In the following winter I was accordingly requested to take charge, for the American Archaeological Inst.i.tute, of an expedition for research and if possible for excavation. Trusting to the benevolent promises of the pasha, I accepted the mission. He renewed his a.s.surances of aid, and showed me the greatest cordiality and benevolence, invited me to dinner and to spend the evening, and treated me generally with a friendliness which astonished the old Turkish element, who considered me the devil of the island. (In fact, my appearance was considered the omen of trouble, and the Mussulmans said when they saw me, "Are we going to have another war?") It was easy to see, however, that the elements of trouble in the island had not been eliminated by the appointment of a Christian governor or the concessions which had been made to the Christian majority. So long as the power of rendering ineffective any reforms, or blocking the way to progress of the higher civilization of the island, remained at Constantinople, the Turkish minority in the island would retain their faculty of making the concessions to the majority fallacious.

Photiades Pasha, an amiable and very intelligent man, recognized the dominant fact of his position to be the necessity of keeping the favor of the Mussulman oligarchy at the capital, and he could not offend the Mussulmans of the island by even a maintenance of equal justice between the two religions. He was therefore obliged to satisfy the leaders of the Christian agitators by the concession of minor advantages in the local conflicts, oftener of Christian against Christian than of the same against the Turk, and finally he was obliged to resort to the inciting of feud and jealousy between the clans, villages, and provinces in the island, to keep them from uniting against him. He found it convenient to employ me as a tub to the whale, and, having first excited the insular jealousy against archaeological intrusion by foreigners, and inducing his clique of subordinate intriguers to oppose my operations, though the Christian population in general were in favor of permitting me to excavate wherever I liked, he made them the concession of refusing me the permission I sought. Therefore, while he promised me all things and urged me to go at once to select my locality, he wrote to the Porte advising the refusal of the firman, which had been applied for directly by the Inst.i.tute, through the minister at Constantinople.

My a.s.sistant, Mr. Haynes, who had been sent by the Inst.i.tute to take his first lessons in archaeology and photography, having arrived, we went to Candia to select our site. We decided on attacking a ruin on the acropolis of Gnossus, already partially exposed by the searches of local diggers for antiques. It had a curiously labyrinthine appearance, and on the stones I found and described the first discovered of the characters whose nature has since been made the subject of the researches of Mr. Evans. I made an agreement with the Turkish proprietor of the land, and prepared to set to work when the firman should arrive. After more than one letter from Photiades, a.s.suring me in unqualified terms that I might confidently count on the reception of the firman, I received a communication from the minister at Constantinople, that on the advice of Photiades Pasha the firman was refused. I had selected as the alternative locality the cave known as the burial-place of Zeus, on the summit of Mount Yuctas, not far from Gnossus, in the excavation of which I am convinced that archaeology will one day receive great light on early Cretan myth. The importance of the locality in the prehistoric research in which Crete is one of the most important sections of our field of study, will, I am convinced, one day justify my anxiety to attack it; and the subsequent discoveries, so important, made by Halbherr in the companion cave on Mount Ida, where Zeus was believed to have been hidden and nursed, confirm my conviction of the value of the evidence still hidden on Yuctas.