From sketch-book and diary. Elizabeth Butler
for the particular effect to come round again. An artist I heard of thought he had “bested” the Irish weather and its wiles when he set up this clever system: six canvasses he spread out before him on the ground in a row, each with a given arrangement of light and shade sketched out ready. But when the psychological moment arrived he was so flurried, that while he was wildly running his hand up and down the row of canvasses for the right one he could never find it in time.
A nice dance you are led, sketching in Ireland, altogether! You are, for instance, intent on dashing down the plum-like tones of a distant mountain, when lo! that mountain which in its purple mystery seemed some fifteen miles away, in a moment flashes out into such vivid green that, as the saying is here, “you might shake hands with it,” so close has it come. Even its shape is changed, for peaks and buttresses start forth in the sunburst where you imagined unbroken slopes a few minutes before. Shadowed woods spring into dark prominence by the sudden illumination of the fields behind them and as suddenly are engulfed in the golden haze of a shaft of light that pierces the very clouds whose shadows had a minute before given them such a startling prominence on the light background. Unsuspected lovelinesses leap forth while those we saw before are snatched away, and the sunlight for ever wanders up and along the mountain sides, as some one has finely said, “like the light from a heavenly lantern.”
What those changes from beauty to beauty do towards sunset I leave you to imagine. I have never seen Ireland at all worthily painted. I think we ought to leave her to her poets and to the composers of her matchless music.
II
EGYPT
CHAPTER I
CAIRO
TO the East! What a thrill of pleasure those words caused me when they meant that I was really off for Egypt. The East has always had for me an intense fascination, and it is one of the happiest circumstances of my life that I should have had so much enjoyment of it.
My childish sketch-books, as you remember, are full of it, and so are my earliest scribblings. To see the reality of my fervid imaginings, therefore, was to satisfy in an exquisite way the longing of all my life.
The Gordon expedition was my opportunity, and it was a bold and happy conception of W.’s that of my going out with the two eldest little ones to join him on the Nile when the war should be over. I may say I – and the British Army – had the Nile pretty well to ourselves, for few tourists went up the year I was there. But I had to wait some time at Cairo and at Luxor before all trouble had been put an end to by the battle of Ginniss, which closed the recrudescence of rebellion that burst out after the great Khartoum campaign.
The emotion on seeing the East for the first time can never be felt again. The surprise can never be repeated, and holds a type of pleasure different from that which one feels on revisiting it, as I have so often done since.
One knows the “gorgeous East” at first only in pictures; one takes it on trust from Delacroix, Decamps, Gérôme, Müller, Lewis, and a host of others. You arrive, and their pictures suddenly become breathing realities, and in time you learn, with exquisite pleasure, that their most brilliant effects and groups are no flights of fancy but faithful transcripts of every-day reality.
But at first you ask, “Can those figures in robes and turbans be really going about on ordinary business? Are they bringing on that string of enormous camels to carry real hay down that crowded alley; are those bundles in black and in white wrappers, astride of white asses caparisoned in blue and silver, merely matter-of-fact ladies of the harem taking their usual exercise? That Pasha’s curvetting white Arab horse’s tail is dyed a tawny red, and what is this cinder-coloured, bare-headed, jibbering apparition, running along, clothed in rattling strings of sea-shells and foaming at the mouth? A real fanatic? That water-seller by Gérôme has moved; he is selling a cup of water to that gigantic negro in the white robe and yellow slippers, and is pocketing the money quite in an ordinary way. And there is a praying man by Müller, not arrested in mid-prayer, but going through all the periods with the prescribed gestures, his face to the East, and the declining sun adding an ever-deepening flush to the back of his amber-coloured robe.”
It takes two or three days to rid oneself of the idea that the streets are parading their colours and movement and their endless variety of Oriental types and costumes for your diversion only, on an open-air stage.
Cairo in ‘85, ‘86, was only at the beginning of its mutilations by occidentalism, and the Oriental cachet was dominant still. To sit on the low shady terrace of the old Shepheard’s hotel under the acacias and watch the pageant of the street below was to me an endless delight.
The very incongruity of the drama unrolling itself before one’s eyes had a charm of its own. Look at that Khedivial officer in sky-blue, jerkily riding his pretty circus Arab. There follows him a majestic and most genuine Bedouin in camel’s hair burnoos, deigning not the turn of an eyelash as he passes our frivolous throng on the terrace; two Greek priests, their long hair gathered up in knots under the tall black cap and flowing veil, equal him in quiet dignity, and a mendicant friar rattles his little money-box, like an echo of the water-seller’s cups over the way, as a hint to our charity. An Anglo-Indian officer of high degree is driven up to our steps in a ‘bus under a pile of baggage. He has just arrived from India and is impressively escorted by various Sikhs, whose immense puggarees are conceived in a totally different spirit from that of the native turbans. A British hussar, smart as only a British soldier can be, trots by on a wiry Syrian horse; a cab full of Highlanders out for a spree bumps along the unpaved roadway. I confess I was disappointed with the effect of our honoured British red. What did it look like where the red worn by the natives was always of the most harmonious tones!
See that string of little donkeys cheerily toddling along, all but extinguished under their loads of sugar-canes that sweep the ground with their long leaves; humble peasant donkeys, meeting a flashing brougham with windows rigidly closed, through which the almond eyes of veiled ladies of some high Pasha’s harem glance up at us and take us all in in that devouring sweep of vision. Double syces run before such equipages.
French bugles tell us an Egyptian regiment is coming, and, meeting it, will go by with a dull rumble a string of English baggage-waggons drawn by mules and driven by Nubians, escorted by British soldiers in dusty khaki uniforms; stout fellows going to the front, a good many of them to stay there – under the sand.
About 5.30 P.M. weird music and flaring torches brings us out again on the terrace, and we see a tumultuous crowd of pilgrims just arrived from Mecca by the five o’clock Suez train. They gather the crowd by their unearthly din and sweep it along with them. Beggars, flower-sellers, snake-charmers, tourists, and touts are all rolling along in a continuous buzz of various noises. Perhaps the full escort of cavalry jingles past our point of observation and the native crowd salutes the Khedive. Not so the British officers on the terrace, who keep their seats.
But what was all this to diving into the old city, and in a ten minutes’ donkey ride to find oneself in the Middle Ages; in the real, breathing, moving, sounding life of the Arabian Nights? Then when inclined to come back to our time and its comforts, which I am far from despising, ten minutes’ return ride and the glimpse into the old life of the East became as a vision. For what I call the pageant of the street in front of Shepheard’s was much too much mixed with modernity to allow of so complete a transformation of ideas.
The bazaars of Cairo have been painted and written about more than those of any other Oriental city. The idea of my having “a try” at them seems to come a little late! But if it is true that, as some croakers say, Old Cairo is gradually dying, I feel impelled to lay one flower of appreciation beside the grave which is ere long to close.
What a treat, to put it in that way, it was to rove about in the reality of the true East, to meet beauty of form and colour and light and shade and movement wherever one’s eyes turned, without being brought up with a nasty jar by some modern hideosity or other. This was contentment. You know what a bit of colour in sun or luminous shade does for me. Think of my feelings when I walked through the narrow streets where the rays of the sun slanted down through gaps in the masonry, or, as in some, through chinks in the overhead matting – now on a white turban, now on a rose-coloured robe relieved