The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (Vol. 1&2). Lady Isabel Burton
was on guard.
He looked at me as though he read me through and through in a moment, and started a little. I was completely magnetized, and when we had got a little distance away I turned to my sister, and whispered to her, "That man will marry me." The next day he was there again, and he followed us, and chalked up, "May I speak to you?" leaving the chalk on the wall, so I took up the chalk and wrote back, "No, mother will be angry;" and mother found it—and was angry; and after that we were stricter prisoners than ever. However, "destiny is stronger than custom." A mother and a pretty daughter came to Boulogne, who happened to be a cousin of my father's; they joined the majority in the Society sense, and one day we were allowed to walk on the Ramparts with them. There I met Richard, who—agony!—was flirting with the daughter; we were formally introduced, and the name made me start. I will say why later.
I did not try to attract his attention; but whenever he came to the usual promenade I would invent any excuse that came, to take another turn to watch him, if he was not looking. If I could catch the sound of his deep voice, it seemed to me so soft and sweet, that I remained spell-bound, as when I hear gypsy-music. I never lost an opportunity of seeing him, when I could not be seen, and as I used to turn red and pale, hot and cold, dizzy and faint, sick and trembling, and my knees used to nearly give way under me, my mother sent for the doctor, to complain that my digestion was out of order, and that I got migraines in the street, and he prescribed me a pill which I put in the fire. All girls will sympathize with me. I was struck with the shaft of Destiny, but I had no hopes (being nothing but an ugly schoolgirl) of taking the wind out of the sails of the dashing creature, with whom he was carrying on a very serious flirtation.
In early days Richard had got into a rather strong flirtation with a very handsome and very fast girl, who had a vulgar, middle-class sort of mother. One day he was rather alarmed at getting a polite but somewhat imperious note from the mother, asking him to call upon her. He obeyed, but he took with him his friend Dr. Steinhaüser, a charming man, who looked as if his face was carved out of wood. After the preliminaries of a rather formal reception, in a very prim-looking drawing-room, the lady began, looking severely at him, "I sent for you, Captain Burton, because I think it my dooty to ask what your intentions are, with regard to my daughter?" Richard put on his most infantile face of perplexity as he said, "Your dooty, madam—" and, then, as if he was trying to recall things, and after a while suddenly seizing the facts of the case, he got up and said, "Alas! madam, strictly dishonourable," and shaking his head as if he was going to burst into tears at his own iniquities, "I regret to say, strictly dishonourable;" and bowed himself out with Dr. Steinhaüser, who never moved a muscle of his face. Richard had never done the young lady a scrap of harm, beyond talking to her a little more than the others, because she was so "awfully jolly," but the next time he met her he said, "Look here, young woman, if I talk to you, you must arrange that I do not have 'mamma's dooty' flung at my head any more." "The old fool!" said the girl, "how like her!"
The only luxury I indulged in was a short but heartfelt prayer for him every morning. I read all his books, and was seriously struck as before by the name when I came to the Játs in Scinde—but this I will explain later on. My cousin asked him to write something for me, which I used to wear next to my heart. One night an exception was made to our dull rule of life. My cousins gave a tea-party and dance, and "the great majority" flocked in, and there was Richard like a star amongst rushlights. That was a Night of nights; he waltzed with me once, and spoke to me several times, and I kept my sash where he put his arm round my waist to waltz, and my gloves. I never wore them again. I did not know it then, but the "little cherub who sits up aloft" is not only occupied in taking care of poor Jack, for I came in also for a share of it.
Mecca.
His Famous Journey to Mecca and El Medinah.
Whilst leading this sort of life, on a long furlough, Richard determined to carry out a project he had long had in his head, to study thoroughly the "inner life of the Moslem." He had long felt within himself the qualifications, both mental and physical, which are needed for the exploration of dangerous regions, impossible of access, and of disguises difficult to sustain. His career as a dervish in Scinde greatly helped him. His mind was both practical and imaginative; he set himself to imagine and note down every contingency that might arise, and one by one he studied each separate thing until he was master of it. As a small sample he apprenticed himself to a blacksmith; he learned to make horseshoes and shoe his horse.
To accomplish a journey to Mecca and Medinah quite safely in those days (1853) was almost an impossibility, for the discovery that he was not a Mussulman would have been avenged by a hundred Khanjars. It meant living with his life in his hand, and amongst the strangest and wildest companions, adopting their unfamiliar manners, and living for perhaps nine months in the hottest and most unhealthy climate, upon repulsive food, complete and absolute isolation from all that makes life tolerable, from all civilization, from all his natural habits—the brain at high tension, never to depart from the rôle he had adopted.
He obtained a year's leave on purpose, and left London as a Persian, for, during the time, he had to assume and sustain several Oriental characters. Captain Grindlay, who was in the secret, travelled to Southampton and Alexandria as his English interpreter. John Thurburn, who, curiously to say, was also the host of Burckhardt till he died, and was buried in Cairo, received Richard at Alexandria. He and his son-in-law, John Larking, of the Firs, Lee, Kent, were the only persons throughout the perilous expedition who knew of his secret. He went to Cairo as a dervish, and he lived there as a native, till (as he told me) he actually believed himself to be what he represented himself to be, and then he felt he was safe, and he practised on his own country-people the finding out that he was unrecognizable. He had wished to cross the whole length of Arabia, but the Russian War had caused disturbances, which might have delayed him over his year's leave.
In those days it was almost impossible to visit the Holy City as one of the Faithful. First, there was the pilgrim-ship to embark on; then there were long desert caravan marches, with their privations and their dangers; then there was the holy shrine, the Ka'abah, to be visited, and all the ceremonies to be gone through, like a Roman Catholic Holy Week at Rome. Burckhardt, the Swiss traveller, did get in, but he never could see the Ka'abah, and he confessed afterwards that he was so nervous that he was unable to take notes, and unable to write or sketch for fear of being detected, whereas Richard was sketching and writing in his white burnous the whole time he was prostrating and kissing the holy Stone. He did not go in mockery, but reverentially. He had brought his brain to believe himself one of them. Europeans, converted Moslems, have of late gone there, but they have been received with the utmost civility, consistent with coldness, have been admitted to outward friendship, but have been carefully kept out of what they most wished to know and see, so that Richard was thus the only European who had beheld the inner and religious life of the Moslems as one of themselves.
Amongst the various Oriental characters that Richard assumed, the one that suited best was half-Arab, half-Iranian, such as throng the northern shores of the Persian Gulf. With long hair falling on his shoulders, long beard, face and hands, arms and legs browned and stained with a thin coat of henna, Oriental dress, spear in hand, and pistols in belt, Richard became Mirza Abdullah, el Bushiri. Here he commenced his most adventurous and romantic life, explored from North to South, from East to West, mixed with all sorts of people and tribes without betraying himself in manners, customs, or speech, when death must often have ensued, had he created either dislike or suspicion.
I here give a slight sketch from his private notes, and for fuller details refer the reader to his "Pilgrimage to Mecca and El Medinah," 3 vols., with coloured illustrations, published in 1855, and which made a great sensation. Although he has been the author of some eighty books and pamphlets, I think that this original edition of three volumes is the one that his name should live by, and it will be the first of the Uniform Library with the Meccan Press. The Uniform Library means a reproduction of all his hitherto published works, and eventually his unpublished ones, so that the world may lose nothing of what he has ever written.
As I have said, on the night of the 3rd of April, 1853, a Persian Mirza, accompanied by an English interpreter, Captain Henry Grindlay, of the Bengal Cavalry, left London for Southampton,