In The Levant 44

In The Levant 44

XX.--AMONG THE ÆGEAN ISLANDS.

 

|OUR sail all day among the Ægean islands was surpassingly lovely;

our course was constantly changing to wind among them; their beautiful

outlines and the soft atmosphere that enwrapped them disposed us to

regard them in the light of Homeric history, and we did not struggle

against the illusion. They are all treeless, and for the most part have

scant traces of vegetation, except a thin green grass which seems rather

a color than a substance. Here are the little islands of Chalce and

Syme, once seats of Grecian culture, now the abode of a few thousand

sponge-fishers. We pass Telos, and Nisyros, which was once ruled by

Queen Artemisia, and had its share in the fortunes of the wars of Athens

and Sparta. It is a small round mass of rock, but it rises twenty-two

hundred feet out of the sea, and its volcanic soil is favorable to the

grape. Opposite is the site of the ruins of Cnidus, a Dorian city of

great renown, and famous for its shrine of Venus, and her statue by

Praxiteles. We get an idea of the indentation of this coast of Asia

Minor (and its consequent accessibility to early settlement and

civilization) from the fact that Cnidus is situated on a very narrow

peninsula ninety miles long.

 

Kos is celebrated not only for its size, loveliness, and fertility, but

as the birthplace of Apelles and of Hippocrates; the inhabitants still

venerate an enormous plane-tree under which the good physician is said

to have dispensed his knowledge of healing. The city of Kos is on a fine

plain, which gradually slopes from the mountain to the sea and is well

covered with trees. The attractive town lies prettily along the shore,

and is distinguished by a massive square mediaeval fortress, and by

round stone windmills with specially long arms.

 

As we came around the corner of Kos, we had a view, distant but

interesting, of the site of Halicarnassus, the modern town of Boudroum,

with its splendid fortress, which the Turks wrested from the Knights of

St. John. We sail by it with regret, for the student and traveller in

the East comes to have a tender feeling for the simple nature of the

father of history, and would forego some other pleasant experiences to

make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Herodotus. Here, also, was born

the historian Dionysius. And here, a few years ago, were identified the

exact site and rescued the remains of another of the Seven Wonders, the

Tomb of Mausolus, built in honor of her husband by the Carian Artemisia,

who sustained to him the double relation of sister and queen. This

monument, which exhibited the perfection of Greek art, was four hundred

and eleven feet in circumference and one hundred and forty feet high.

It consisted of a round building, surrounded by thirty-six columns

surmounted by a pyramid, and upon the latter stood a colossal group of

a chariot and four horses. Some of the beautiful sculpture of this

mausoleum can be seen in the British Museum.

 

We were all the afternoon endeavoring to get sight of Patinos, which

the intervening islands hid from view. Every half-hour some one was

discovering it, and announcing the fact. No doubt half the passengers

will go to their graves comforted by the belief that they saw it. Some

of them actually did have a glimpse of it towards night, between the

islands of Lipso and Arki. It is a larger island than we expected to

see; and as we had understood that the Revelations were written on a

small rocky island, in fact a mere piece of rock, the feat seemed less

difficult on a good-sized island. Its height is now crowned by the

celebrated monastery of St. John, but the island is as barren and

uninviting as it was when the Romans used it as a place of banishment.

 

We passed Astypatæa, Kalyminos, Leros, and a sprinkling of islets (as if

a giant had sown this sea with rocks), each of which has a history, or

is graced by a legend; but their glory is of the past. The chief support

of their poor inhabitants is now the sponge-fishery. At sunset we had

before us Icaria and Samos, and on the mainland the site of Miletus, now

a fever-smitten place, whose vast theatre is almost the sole remains of

the metropolis of the Ionic confederacy. Perhaps the centre of Ionic art

and culture was, however, the island of Samos, but I doubt not the fame

of its Samian wine has carried its name further than the exploits of its

warriors, the works of its artists, or the thoughts of its philosophers.

It was the birthplace of Pythagoras; it was once governed by Polycrates;

there for a time Antony and Cleopatra established their court of love

and luxury. In the evening we sailed close under its high cliffs, and

saw dimly opposite Icaria, whose only merit or interest lies in its

association with the ill-judged aerial voyage of Icarus, the soil of

Daedalus.

 

Although the voyager amid these islands and along this historic coast

profoundly feels the influence of the past, and, as he reads and looks

and reflects, becomes saturated with its half-mysterious and delicious

romance, he is nevertheless scarcely able to believe that these denuded

shores and purple, rocky islets were the homes of heroes, the theatres

of world-renowned exploits, the seats of wealth and luxury and power;

that the marble of splendid temples gleamed from every summit and

headland; that rich cities clustered on every island and studded the

mainland; and that this region, bounteous in the fruits of the liberal

earth, was not less prolific in vigorous men and beautiful women,

who planted adventurous and remote colonies, and sowed around the

Mediterranean the seeds of our modern civilization. In the present

desolation and soft decay it is difficult to recall the wealth, the

diversified industry, the martial spirit, the refinement of the races

whose art and literature are still our emulation and despair. Here,

indeed, were the beginnings of our era, of our modern life,--separated by

a great gulf from the ancient civilization of the Nile,--the life of the

people, the attempts at self-government, the individual adventure, the

new development of human relations consequent upon commerce, and the

freer exchange of products and ideas.

 

What these islands and this variegated and genial coast of Asia Minor

might become under a government that did not paralyze effort and rob

industry, it is impossible to say; but the impression is made upon the

traveller that Nature herself is exhausted in these regions, and that it

will need the rest or change of a geologic era to restore her pristine

vigor. The prodigality and avarice of thousands of years have left the

land--now that the flame of civilization has burned out--like the crater

of an extinct volcano. But probably it is society and not nature that

is dead. The island of Rhodes, for an example, might in a few years of

culture again produce the forests that once supplied her hardy sons

with fleets of vessels, and her genial soil, under any intelligent

agriculture, would yield abundant harvests. The land is now divided into

petty holdings, and each poor proprietor scratches it just enough to

make it yield a scanty return.

 

During the night the steamer had come to Chios (Scio), and I rose at

dawn to see--for we had no opportunity to land--the spot almost equally

famous as the birthplace of Homer and the land of the Chian wine.

The town lies along the water for a mile or more around a shallow bay

opening to the east, a city of small white houses, relieved by a minaret

or two; close to the water's edge are some three-story edifices, and

in front is an ancient square fort, which has a mole extending into the

water, terminated by a mediaeval bastion, behind which small vessels

find shelter. Low by the shore, on the north, are some of the sturdy

windmills peculiar to these islands, and I can distinguish with a glass

a few fragments of Byzantine and mediaeval architecture among the common

buildings. Staring at us from the middle of the town were two big signs,

with the word "Hotel."

 

To the south of the town, amid a grove of trees, are the white stones

of the cemetery; the city of the dead is nearly as large as that of the

living. Behind the city are orange orchards and many a bright spot

of verdure, but the space for it is not broad. Sharp, bare, serrated,

perpendicular ridges of mountain rise behind the town, encircling it

like an amphitheatre. In the morning light these mountains are tawny and

rich in color, tinged with purple and red. Chios is a pretty picture in

the shelter of these hills, which gather for it the rays of the rising

sun.

 

It is now half a century since the name of Scio rang through the

civilized world as the theatre of a deed which Turkish history itself

can scarcely parallel, and the island is vigorously regaining its

prosperity. It only needs to recall the outlines of the story. The

fertile island, which is four times the extent of the Isle of Wight, was

the home of one hundred and ten thousand inhabitants, of whom only six

thousand were Turks. The Greeks of Scio were said to differ physically

and morally from all their kindred; their merchants were princes at home

and abroad, art and literature flourished, with grace and refinement of

manner, and there probably nowhere existed a society more industrious,

gay, contented, and intelligent. Tempted by some adventurers from Samos

to rebel, they drew down upon themselves the vengeance of the Turks, who

retaliated the bloody massacre of Turkish men, women, and children by

the insurrectionists, with a universal destruction. The city of Scio,

with its thirty thousand inhabitants, and seventy villages, were reduced

to ashes; twenty-five thousand of all ages and both sexes were slain,

forty-five thousand were carried away as slaves, among them women

and children who had been reared in luxury, and most of the remainder

escaped, in a destitute state, into other parts of Greece. At the end

of the summer's harvest of death, only two thousand Sciotes were left on

the island. An apologist for the Turks could only urge that the Greeks

would have been as unmerciful under like circumstances.

 

None of the first-class passengers were up to see Chios,--not one for

poor Homer's sake; but the second-class were stirring for their own,

crawling out of their comfortables, giving the babies a turn, and the

vigilant flea a taste of the morning air. When the Russian peasant, who

sleeps in the high truncated frieze cap, and in the coat which he

wore in Jerusalem,--a garment short in the waist, gathered in pleats

underneath the shoulders, and falling in stiff expanding folds

below,--when he first gets up and rubs his eyes, he is an astonished

being. His short-legged wife is already astir, and beginning to collect

the materials of breakfast. Some of the Greeks are making coffee; there

is a smell of coffee, and there are various other unanalyzed odors.

But for pilgrims, and pilgrims so closely packed that no one can stir

without moving the entire mass, these are much cleaner than they might

be expected to be, and cleaner, indeed, than they can continue to be,

and keep up their reputation. And yet, half an hour among them, looking

out from the bow for a comprehensive view of Chios, is quite enough. I

wished, then, that these people would change either their religion or

their clothes.

 

Last night we had singing on deck by an extemporized quartette of young

Americans, with harmonious and well-blended voices, and it was a most

delightful contrast to the caterwauling, accompanied by the darabouka,

which we constantly hear on the forward deck, and which the Arabs call

singing. Even the fat, good-humored little Moslem from Damascus, who