we sailed away from smyrna sunday morning, with the achille more crowded than when we entered that port. the second-class passengers still further encroached upon the first-class. the emir of damascus, with all his rugs and beds, had been pushed farther towards the stern, and more harems occupied temporary pens on our deck, and drew away our attention from the natural scenery.
the venerable, white-bearded, greek bishop of smyrna was a passenger, also the tall noble-looking pasha of that city, just relieved and ordered to constantinople, as pashas are continually, at the whim of the sultan. we had three pashas on board,—one recalled from haifa, who had been only twenty days at his post. the pasha of smyrna was accompanied by his family, described on the register as his wife and "four others," an indefinite expression to define an indefinite condition. the wife had a room below; the "four others" were penned up in a cushioned area on the saloon deck, and there they squatted all day, veiled and robed in white, poor things, without the least occupation for hand or mind. near them, other harems of greeks and turks, women, babies, slaves, all in an oriental mess, ate curds and green lettuce.
we coasted along the indented, picturesque shore of asia, having in view the mountains about ancient pergamus, the seat of one of the seven churches; and before noon came to mitylene, the ancient lesbos, a large island which bears another mount olympus, and cast anchor in the bay upon which the city stands.
by the bend of the bay and the opposite coast, the town is charmingly land-locked. the site of mitylene, like so many of these island cities, is an amphitheatre, and the mountain-slopes, green and blooming with fruit-trees, are dotted with white houses and villages. the scene is italian rather than oriental, and gives one the general impression of castellamare or sorrento; but the city is prettier to look at than to explore, as its broad and clean streets, its ordinary houses and european-dressed inhabitants, take us out of our ideal voyaging, and into the regions of the commonplace. the shops were closed, and the country people, who in all countries appear to derive an unexplained pleasure in wandering about the streets of a city hand in hand, were seeking this mild recreation. a youthful jew, to whom the sunday was naught, under pretence of showing us something antique, led us into the den of a greek, to whom it was also naught, and whose treasures were bags of defaced copper coins of the roman period.
upon the point above the city is a fine mediaeval fortress, now a turkish fort, where we encountered, in the sentinel at the gate, the only official in the orient who ever refused backsheesh; i do not know what his idea is. from the walls we looked upon the blue strait, the circling, purple hills of asia, upon islands, pretty villages, and distant mountains, soft, hazy, serrated, in short, upon a scene of poetry and peace, into which the ancient stone bastion by the harbor, which told of days of peril, and a ruined aqueduct struggling down the hill back of the town,—the remnant of more vigorous days,—brought no disturbance.
in lesbos we are at the source of lyric poetry, the 苚lian spring of greece; here alc鎢s was born. here we come upon the footsteps of sappho. we must go back to a period when this and all the islands of these heavenly seas were blooming masses of vegetation, the hills hung with forests, the slopes purple with the vine, the valleys laughing with flowers and fruit, and everywhere the primitive, joyful greek life. no doubt, manners were somewhat rude, and passions, love, and hate, and revenge, were frankly exhibited; but in all the homely life ran a certain culture, which seems to us beautiful even in the refinement of this shamefaced age. the hardy youth of the islands sailed into far seas, and in exchange for the bounty of their soil brought back foreign fabrics of luxury. we know that lesbos was no stranger to the athenian influence, its scholars had heard plato and aristotle, and the warriors of athens respected it both as a foe and an ally. charakos, a brother of sappho, went to egypt with a ship full of wine, and returned with the beautiful slave doricha, as part at least of the reward of his venture.
after the return of sappho and her husband from their flight into sicily, the poet lived for many years at mitylene; but she is supposed to have been born in eresso, on the southwestern point of the island, where the ruins of the acropolis and remains of a sea-wall still mark the site of the famous town. at any rate, she lived there, with her husband kerkylas, a landed proprietor and a person of consequence, like a dame of noble birth and gentle breeding as she was; and in her verse we have a glimpse of her walking upon the sandy shore, with her little daughter, the beautiful child whom she would not give up for the kingdom of lydia, nor for heavenly lesbos itself. that sappho was beautiful as her image on the ancient coins represents her, and that she was consumed by passion for a handsome youth, the world likes to believe. but maximus of tyre says that she was small and dark;—graces are not so plenty, even in heaven, that genius and beauty can be lavished upon one person. we are prone to insist that the poet who revels in imagination and sounds the depth of passion is revealing his own heart, and that the tale that seems so real must be a personal experience. the little glimpse we have of sappho's life does not warrant us to find in it the passionate tempest of her burning lyrics, nor is it consistent with her social position that she should expose upon the market-place her passion for the handsome phaon, like a troubadour of the middle ages or a zingara of bohemia. if that consuming fire was only quenched in the sea at the foot of "leucadia's far-projecting rock of woe," at least our emotion may be tempered by the soothing knowledge that the leap must have been taken when the enamored singer had passed her sixtieth year.
we did not see them at mitylene, but travellers into the interior speak of the beautiful women, the descendants of kings' daughters, the rewards of grecian heroes; near old eresso the women preserve the type of that indestructible beauty, and in the large brown eyes, voluptuous busts, and elastic gait one may deem that he sees the originals of the antique statues.
another famous woman flits for a moment before us at lesbos. it is the celebrated empress irene, whose cruelty was hardly needed to preserve a name that her talent could have perpetuated. an athenian virgin and an orphan, at seventeen she became the wife of leo iv. (a. d. 780), and at length the ruler of the eastern empire. left the guardian of the empire and her son constantine vi., she managed both, until the lad in his maturity sent his mother into retirement. the restless woman conspired against him; he fled, was captured and brought to the palace and lodged in the porphyry chamber where he first had seen the light, and where he last saw it; for his eyes were put out by the order of irene. his very existence was forgotten in the depths of the palace, and for several years the ambitious mother reigned with brilliancy and the respect of distant potentates, until a conspiracy of eunuchs overturned her power, and she was banished to lesbos. here history, which delights in these strokes of poetic justice, represents the empress earning her bread by the use of her distaff.
as we came from mitylene into the open sea, the view was surpassingly lovely, islands green and poetic, a coast ever retreating and advancing, as if in coquetry with the blue waves, purple robing the hills,—a voyage for poets and lotus-eaters. we were coming at night to tenedos, to which the crafty greeks withdrew their fleet when they pretended to abandon the siege, and to old troy, opposite; we should be able to feel their presence in the darkness.
our steamer, as we have intimated, was a study of nationalities and languages, as well as of manners. we were english, american, greek, italian, turkish, arab, russian, french, armenian, egyptian, jew, georgian, abyssinian, nubian, german, koor-land, persian, kurd; one might talk with a person just from mecca or medina, from bagdad, from calcutta, from every greek or turkish island, and from most of the capitals of europe. a couple of capuchins, tonsured, in brown serge with hanging crosses, walked up and down amid the throng of christians, moslems, and pagans, withdrawn from the world while in it, like beings of a new sex. there was a couple opposite us at table whom we could not make out,—either recently married or recently eloped, the man apparently a turkish officer, and his companion a tall, showy woman, you might say a frenchman's idea of physical beauty, a little like a wax madonna, but with nothing holy about her; said by some to be a circassian, by others to be a french grisette on an eastern tour; but she spoke italian, and might be one of the continental countesses.
the square occupied by the emir and his suite—a sort of bazaar of rugs and narghilehs—had music all day long; a soloist, on three notes, singing, in the arab drawl, an unending improvised ballad, and accompanying himself on the mandolin. when we go to look at and listen to him, the musician betrays neither self-consciousness nor pride, unless you detect the latter in a superior smile that plays about his lips, as he throws back his head and lets his voice break into a falsetto. it probably does not even occur to his oriental conceit that he does well,—that his race have taken for granted a thousand years,—and he could not be instructed by the orchestra of von bulow, nor be astonished by the lohengrin of wagner.
among the adventurers on board—we all had more or less the appearance of experiments in that odd assembly—i particularly liked the french prestidigitateur caseneau, for his bold eye, utter self-possession, and that indefinable varnish upon him, which belonged as much to his dress as to his manner, and suggested the gentleman without concealing the adventurer. he had a taste for antiquities, and wore some antique gems, which had i know not what mysterious about them, as if he had inherited them from an ephesian magician or a saracenic doctor of the black art. at the table after dinner, surrounded by french and italians, the conjurer exhibited some tricks at cards. i dare say they were not extraordinary, yet they pleased me just as well as the manifestations of the spiritists. one of them i noted. the trickster was blindfolded. a gentleman counted out a pack of cards, and while doing so mentally fixed upon one of them by number. caseneau took the pack, still blinded, and threw out the card the gentleman had thought of. the experiment was repeated by sceptics, who suspected a confederate, but the result was always the same.
the circassian beauty turned out to be a jewess from smyrna. i believe the jewesses of that luxurious city imitate all the kinds of beauty in the world.
in the evening the italians were grouped around the tables in the saloon, upon which cards were cast about, matched, sorted, and redistributed, and there were little piles of silver at the corners, the occasional chinking of which appeared to add to the interest of the amusement. on deck the english and americans were singing the hymns of the protestant faith; and in the lull of the strains of "o mother dear, jerusalem," you might hear the twang of strings and the whine of some arab improvisatore on the forward deck, and the chink of changing silver below. we were making our way through a superb night,—a thousand people packed so closely that you could not move without stepping into a harem or a mass of greek pilgrims,—singing hymns, gambling, listening to a recital of the deeds of antar, over silver waves, under a flooding moon, and along the dim shores of asia. that mysterious continent lay in the obscurity of the past; here and there solitary lights, from some shepherd's hut in the hills or fortress casemate by the shore, were the rents in the veil through which we saw antiquity.