Leaving Damascus.—Arrival at Beyrout.—Trip to Aleppo.—Enters Asia Minor.—The Scenery and People.—The Hills of Lebanon.—Beautiful Scenes about Brousa.—Enters Constantinople.—A Prophesy.—Return to Smyrna.—Again in Italy.—Visits his German Friend at Gotha.—The Home of his Second Love.—Goes to London.—Visits Gibraltar.—Cadiz.—Seville.—Spanish History. “Upon the glittering pageantries
Of gay Damascus streets I look
As idly as a babe, that sees
The painted pictures of a book.”
—Taylor’s Oriental Idyl.
From Damascus Mr. Taylor journeyed to Baalbec, where are the most imposing ruins to be found in Syria, and where stand six of the most symmetrical and exquisitely carved columns to be seen in Asia or Europe. He described the temples and fragments so vividly, that travellers who have taken his “Lands of the Saracen” for a guide have seldom been disappointed or mistaken in their anticipations, the actual scene they look upon being so like the image they formed in their minds while reading his description. The gift of portraying through the combination of words and sentences an accurate picture of a city existing in a[195] strange land and amid a strange people, is a rare gift, and the number is very few of those who are found to possess it. Mr. Taylor was one of those privileged ones. In his description we see the columns, cornices, pediments, walls, platforms, broken pillars, and falling pavilions as distinctly as they appear when we afterwards look upon those romantic piles with the natural eye. To him, as to others, it was a study to determine, if possible, how such enormous blocks of stone, sixty-two feet long and ten feet in diameter, could have been transported and placed in the buildings. It is beyond all the skill of to-day to move nine thousand tons of stone in a single block with the conveniences of that time.
From Baalbec he ascended the Lebanon range of mountains, and looked over the land from the snowy peak of one of its lofty summits. He visited the sacred cedars which have lived on the mountain-side for three thousand years, and then rode on through chasms, along cliffs, and by the sweetest and richest dells, until he descended to the plain of Beyrout.
His appreciation of the hills of Lebanon is more clearly seen in his poetry than in his prose. For, when writing of them afterwards, he said:—
“Lebanon, thou mount of story,
Well we know thy sturdy glory,
Since the days of Solomon;
Well me know the Five old Cedars,
Scarred by ages,—silent pleaders,
[196]
Preaching in their gray sedateness,
Of thy forest’s fallen greatness,
Of the vessels of the Tyrian
And the palaces Assyrian
And the temple on Moriah
To the High and Holy One!
Know the wealth of thy appointment—
Myrrh and aloes, gum and ointment;
But we knew not, till we clomb thee,
Of the nectar dropping from thee,—
Of the pure, pellucid Ophir
In the cups of vino d’oro,
On the hills of Lebanon!”
In that city he laid his plans for the future, and abandoned his purposed trip to the Euphrates and Tigris. He relinquished the design to visit Assyria with great reluctance, and decided to pass through the interior of Asia Minor to Constantinople. Acting immediately upon this resolution, without an apparent doubt of being able to traverse safely the unknown interior of Asia Minor, he engaged a vessel and sailed up the coast to the Orontes River, and thence to Aleppo. In that city, by a ludicrous mistake, Mr. Taylor and his travelling companion were invited to the house of one of the wealthiest merchants, and were treated with the greatest hospitality by the owner, who supposed they were titled Englishmen. But when the mistake was revealed, Mr. Taylor had become such an agreeable visitor that his host insisted upon entertaining them during their stay in Aleppo. He had been there but a few days before he became such a general favorite,[197] that he was invited to call on the nobility, was urged to attend feasts, balls, and weddings, and when he left the city, the friendly regrets of hundreds of Moslems and Christians followed him.
Leaving Aleppo early in June, he followed the shore of the Mediterranean around to the plain of Issus, where Alexander the Great won his great victory, and thence to Tarsus, the birthplace of the Apostle Paul. It may have been “no mean city” when Paul was born, but it was a most insignificant village when Mr. Taylor was there. But as the magnificent mountains of the Taurus range loomed up along the northern horizon, his attention was taken from rags, beggary, and ruined fortresses, to snowy cliffs, over which he had a passion for clambering.
Those persons who have ascended the Alps at the Simplon pass, have a very good idea of the Taurus mountains, and can realize somewhat of Mr. Taylor’s satisfaction as he rode up the gorges and peered into the deep valleys. He loved the mountains anywhere. But the Taurus seemed then, in the glow of his return to perfect health and with all the profusion of nature’s living beauties blooming about him, and the eternal snows gleaming above him, to be the most attractive landscape in the world.
“O deep, exulting freedom of the hills!
O summits vast, that to the climbing view,
In naked glory stand against the blue!
O cold and buoyant air, whose crystal fills
[198]
Heaven’s amethystine bowl! O speeding streams,
That foam and thunder from the cliffs below!
O slippery brinks and solitudes of snow,
And granite bleakness, where the vulture screams!”
His visit to Konia (Iconium), the capital of Karamania, was full of little episodes and personal incidents, which he told afterwards in print in his own inimitable manner. But nothing of unusual moment occurred until he reached ancient Phrygia, where the ruins of olden cities and fortresses interested him much. Their history was almost as unknown as the story of the temples of Yucatan, and consequently had a mysterious appearance which charms in a bewildering way the study of a poet.
Riding on over hills and mountains, across delightful streams, through fertile valleys, associating with the Turks on friendly terms, and studying their habits and language, Mr. Taylor pushed fearlessly into the very heart of Asia Minor. Visiting Oezani in its debris, and the valley of Rhyndacus, they traversed the primeval forests on the Mysian Olympus, and true to his instincts he sought the heights of Olympus, twin mountain, in size and literature, with its Grecian namesake. From that point to Brousa, near the Sea of Marmora, it was but a day’s journey, and seems to have been the most delightful ride of the whole tour. Gardens, orchards, grain-fields, thickets of clematis and roses, patches of beech and oak woodland, and brilliant streams pleased the eye, while the songs of birds and of happy[199] harvesters charmed the ear. Grand mountains pierced the skies, covered with dense forests, behind them, and the plain stretched away—a Garden of Eden—to the shore of a placid inland sea.
They entered Brousa in excellent health and spirits, having seen no unusual fatigue and been in no great danger during the whole journey through a country then almost lost and unknown to the civilized world.
From Brousa, the party descended to the Sea of Marmora, and taking a sail-boat were wafted by the Golden Horn into the interminable fleets of Constantinople. During his stay in that city he witnessed the display of the Turkish holidays, saw the Sultan on his throne, entered the mosque of Saint Sophia, ran to the numerous conflagrations, and unravelled to his satisfaction some of the social and political problems connected with the Sultan’s rule and the state of popular discontent. He foretold a war with Russia, and a contest between the latter and England over the coveted gem of the East and the gate to the Black Sea. His predictions have already been proven to be true, showing an insight into po............