a little surprise by appearing at dinner in con-
ventional broadcloth and white breastplate.
Each of the other two members of the coterie
insensibly under the magnetism of Smith
had planned a like surprise. When we met at
table and surveyed one another, we laughed
aloud for the first time in three days in
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 117
Smith's presence. It was plain to see that
Smith approved of an elaborate dinner toilet,
and henceforth we adopted it.
Presently we were struck, and then began to
be appalled, by the accuracy, minuteness, and
comprehensiveness of Smith's knowledge of
London. It was encyclopaedic. He was a vital-
ized time-table of railroads and coaches and
steamboats, a walking, breathing directory to
all the shops, parks, churches, museums, and
theatres of the bewildering Babylon. He had,
stamped on his brain, a map of all the tangled
omnibus routes ; he knew the best seats in
every place of amusement, the exact moment
the performance began in each, and could put
his finger without hesitating a second on the
very virtuoso's collection you wanted to exam-
ine. This is not the half of his accomplish-
ments. I despair of stating them. I do not
see how he ever had the leisure to collect such
a mass of detail. It seems to substantiate a
theory I have that Smith has existed, with peri-
odic renewals of his superficial structure, from
the time of the Norman Conquest. Before
we discovered his almost wicked amplitude of
information, we used to consult him touching
intended pilgrimages, but shortly gave it up,
finding that our provincial plans generally fell
cold upon him. He was almost amused, one
Ii8 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
day, at our desire to ascertain the whereabouts
of that insignificant house in Cheapside it is
No. 17, if I remember in which Keats wrote
his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Our New
World curiosity as to certain localities which
possess no interest whatever to the Londoner
must often have struck Smith as puerile. His
protest or his disapproval I do not know how
to name it was always so evanescent and
shadowy that he cannot be said to have ex-
pressed it ; it was something in his manner, and
not in his words something as vague as a
fleeting breath on a window-glass ; but it damp-
ened us.
There is a singular puissance in a grave,
chilling demeanor, though it may be backed
by no solid quality whatever. Nothing so im-
poses on the world. I have known persons to
attain very high social and public distinction
by no other means than a guarded solemnity
of manner. Even when we see through its
shallowness, we are still impressed by it, just
as children are paralyzed by a sheeted comrade,
though they know all the while it is only one
of themselves playing ghost.
I suppose it was in the course of nature that
we should have fallen under the domination of
Smith, and have come to accept him with a
degree of seriousness which seems rather ab-
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 119
ject to me in retrospect. Without acknowledg-
ing it to ourselves, we were affected by his intan-
gible criticism. I would not have had it come to
his ears for a five-pound note that I had a habit
of eating a chop in a certain snuffy old coffee-
house near Temple Bar, whenever lunch-time
chanced to catch me in that vicinity.
" O plump head-waiter at The Cock,"
to which I most resorted, I should have been
ashamed to have Smith know that I had the
slightest acquaintance with you, though Tenny-
son himself has sung your praises ! Nor would
I have had Smith get wind of the low-bred ex-
cursion I made, one day, up the Thames, in a
squalid steamer crowded with grimy working-
men and their frowzy wives and their children.
I hid in my heart the guilty joy I took in two
damaged musicians aboard a violin and a
flageolet. The flageolet I am speaking of
the performer had such a delightfully dis-
reputable patch over his right eye ! By the
way, I wonder why it is that vagrant players
of wind-instruments in England usually have a
patch over one eye. Are they combative as
a class, or is it that they occasionally blow
out a visual organ with too assiduous practice
in early youth ? The violin-man, on the other
hand perhaps I ought to say on the other leg
120 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
was lame. Altogether the pair looked like
the remains of a band that had been blown up
by a steam-boiler explosion on some previous
trip on the river. They played a very doleful
tune ; full of unaccountable gruffnesses and
shrillnesses, which it was my mood to accept as
the ghostly replication of the cries and com-
plaints of their late comrades on the occasion
suggested. There was a rough crowd on board,
with a sprinkling of small shopkeepers, and
here and there a group of gaudily dressed young
women, not to be set down in the category of
doubtful characters. These persons were off
on a holiday, and it was curious to observe
the heavy, brutal way they took their pleasure,
turning it into a hardship. I got a near view
of a phase of English life not to be met with in
the rarefied atmosphere of Dover Street, and I
regret to admit that I have many a time enjoyed
myself less in better company. When I re-
turned to the hotel that night, Smith stood
rebukefully drying The Pall Mall Gazette for me
before the parlor fire.
A year or two of Smith would make it diffi-
cult for a man to dispense with him. With
Smith for a valet, one would have no distinct
wants to perplex one, for Smith's intuition
would head them off and supply them before
they were formulated. He was, as I have more
FROM PQNKAPOG TO PESTH 121
than hinted, an invaluable servant. Sometimes,
as I have looked at him, and reflected on his
unmurmuring acceptance of a life of servitude,
and the kind of sober grace he threw about its
indignity, I used to call to mind that disgrun-
tled, truculent waiter described by John Hay
in his charming Castilian Days. " I know a
gentleman in the West," says Mr. Hay, " whose
circumstances had forced him to become a
waiter in a backwoods restaurant. He bore a
deadly grudge at the profession that kept him
from starving, and asserted his unconquered
nobility of soul by scowling at his customers
and swearing at the viands he dispensed. I
remember the deep sense of wrong with which
he would growl, * Two buckwheats, be gawd ! ' "
As to Smith's chronic gloom, it really had
nothing of moroseness in it only an habitual
melancholy, a crystallized patience. We doubt-
less put it to some crucial tests with our Amer-
ican ideas and idioms. The earlier part of our
acquaintanceship was fraught with mutual per-
plexities. It was the longest time before we dis-
covered that ay ///meant Hay Hill Street, Smith
making a single mouthful of it, thus ayilL
One morning he staggered us by asking if we
would like "a hapricot freeze" for dessert. We
assented, and would have assented if he had
proposed iced hippopotamus ; but the nature of
122 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
the dish was a mystery to us, and perhaps
never, since the world took shape out of chaos,
was there a simple mould of apricot jelly looked
forward to in such poignant suspense. It is
scarcely permissible in so light a sketch as this
to touch on anything so heavy as philology ;
but I cannot forbear wondering what malign
spirit has bewitched the vowels of the lower-
class Englishman. When he finds it impossi-
ble to elide the vowel at the beginning of a
word, he invariably covers it with an // the
very letter that plays the deuce with him under
ordinary circumstances. An Oxford scholar
once informed me that this peculiarity was the
result of imperfect education, and left me to
settle it for myself why the peculiarity was
confined to England. Illiterate Americans
if there are any do not drop their /z's. But
as I have said, this is too heavy a text.
It seems almost an Irish bull to say that one
can be in London only once for the first time.
In other places you may renew first impres-
sions. A city on the Continent always remains
a foreign city to you, no matter how often you
visit it ; but that first time in London is an
experience which can never be made to repeat
itself. Whatever is alien to you fades away
under your earliest glances ; the place suddenly
takes homelike aspects ; certain streets and
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 123
courts where you never set foot before strike
you familiarly. It is a place where you might
have lived this great seething metropolis
where perhaps you once did live, in hose and
doubtlet or knightly harness, in some immemo-
rial century. I doubt if an American ever vis-
ited England without feeling in his bosom the
vibration, more or less distinct, of these invisi-
ble threads of attachment. Everywhere in the
lucid prose of Hawthorne's English Note-Books
and Our Old Home this sentiment lies embed-
ded, like a spray of fossilized fern.
The architecture, the language, and the cus-
toms are yours, or must have been yours long
ago. Smith himself dawns upon you as a former
acquaintance. Possibly he was one of your
retainers in the time of Henry VIII. (You
like to picture yourself with retainers ; for to
be an Englishman, and not a duke or an earl, is
to miss four fifths of the good luck.) Your
imagination gives you a long lease of existence
when you fall into reveries of this nature ; you
fancy yourself extant at various interesting
periods of English history ; it costs you no
effort, while you are about it, to have a hand
in a dozen different reigns. What a pictur-
esque, highly decorative, household-art sort of
life you may lead from the era of the Black
Prince down to the Victorian age ! How lightly
124 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
you assume the responsibility of prolonging
Smith through all this ! He holds the bridle
of an extra horse for you at Poitiers, and also at
that other bloody field of Agincourt ; and then,
somewhat later, sits on the box of your glass
coach (which Mr. Samuel Pepys, surveying it
from his chamber window, pronounces " mightily
fine ") as you drive through the shrewish winter
morning to the Palace of Whitehall to witness
the removal of Charles the First's head.
It is easy to shape any kind of chimera out
of that yellowish London fog. Immediately
after this epoch, however, your impressions
of having been personally associated with the
events of English history become dimmer, if
not altogether confused ; possibly your spirit
was about that time undergoing certain or-
ganic changes, necessary to the metempsychosis
which befell you later.
You break from your abstraction to the con-
sciousness that you are a stranger in your native
land. The genius loci does not recognize you ;
you are an altered man. You are an American.
Yet a little while ago the past of England was
as much your past as it is Smith's, or that of
any Briton of them all. But you have altered,
and forfeited it. Smith has not altered : he is
the same tall, efficient serving-man he was in
the time of the Plantagenets. He has that air
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 125
of having been carefully handed down which
stamps so many things in England. (If this
has been said before, I beg somebody's pardon ;
I am treading on much-walked-over ground.)
There, indeed, Nature seems careful of the
type. The wretched woman who murders
Kathleen Mavourneen in the street under your
window shares this quality of permanency with
Smith. She, or one precisely like her, has been
singing ballads for ages, and will go on doing
it. Endless generations of American tourists,
lodging temporarily at Jones's perpetual Hotel,
will give her inexhaustible shillings, and Smith
will carry them out to her on his indestructible
waiter. The individual Smith may occasionally
die, but not the type, not the essence. My
mind can take in Macaulay's picture of the
New Zealander sitting on a broken buttress of
London Bridge, and cynically contemplating
the debris " a landscape with figure," as the
catalogues would put it but I am unable to
grasp the idea of the annihilation of anything
so firmly established by precedent as Smith.
I fancy that even out of the splintered masonry
his respectful, well-modulated chest voice would
be heard saying (through sheer force of habit),
" Will you 'ave a look at the hevening paper,
sir ? " or, " If you please, sir, the 'ansom is at
the door!"
VIII
A DAY IN AFRICA
I AM not immodest enough to assume to speak
for other readers, but for my own part I have
become rather tired of African travellers. One
always knows beforehand what they have in
their pack, and precisely the way in which they
will spread out their wares. The victorious
struggle with the lion and the hairbreadth
escape from death at the hands of the native
chiefs are matters easily anticipated ; and that
romantic young savage who attaches himself
body and soul to the person of the adventurer,
and invariably returns with him to civilization
what a threadbare figure that is ! How well
we know him under his various guttural aliases !
Yet what would six months in Africa amount
to without this lineal descendant of Robinson
Crusoe's man Friday ?
I may seem to display a want of tact in dis-
paraging African travellers, being, in a humble
fashion, an African traveller myself, but I have
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 127
a rare advantage over everybody who has ever
visited that country, and written about it I
remained there only one day. The standpoint
from which I view the Dark Continent is thus
unique. If I had remained a year, or even a
fortnight, I should have ceased to be original.
I should naturally have killed my lion, tempted
the appetite of the anthropophagite, and brought
home a little negro boy. I did none of these
things, and instead of obscurely falling in at
the tail end of a long line of African explorers,
I claim to stand quite alone, and in an attitude
so wholly unconventional as to entitle it to copy-
right. So far as I am aware, the idea never
before entered the head of any man to travel
five thousand miles to Africa, and then to stay
there only twenty-four hours.
I must admit, however, that this idea did not
take quite that definite form in my mind in the
first instance. A visit to Tangier was not
down in my itinerary at all, but on reaching
Gibraltar, after prolonged wandering through
the interior of Spain, Africa threw itself in my
way, so to speak. There, just across the nar-
row straits, lay the tawny barbaric shore.
Standing at an embrasure of one of those mar-
vellous subterranean batteries which render
Gibraltar impregnable long galleries tunnelled
in the solid rock, and winding up to the very
128 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
summit of the vast pile I almost fancied I
could make out the lion-colored line of the Bar-
bary coast. A magical sea-haze that morning,
together with a strip of dun cloud lying low
against the horizon, encouraged the illusion.
It was purely an illusion, for it is three good
hours and a half by steamer from the boat-
landing at the foot of Waterport Street to the
dismantled, God-forsaken Mole at Tangier.
ii
I do not believe there is a dirtier little
steamer in the world than the one that plies
between Gibraltar and Morocco, and I am posi-
tive that since Noah's ark no vessel ever put to
sea with a more variegated and incongruous lot
of passengers than saluted my eyes as I stepped
on board the Jackal one April afternoon. The
instant I set foot on deck I had passed out of
Europe. Here were the squalor and the glitter
of the Orient the solemn dusky faces that
look out on the reader from the pages of the
Arabian Nights, and the thousand and one
disagreeable odors of which that fascinating
chronicle makes no mention. Such a chatter-
ing in Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Ara-
bic ! Such queer brown-legged figures in
pointed hoods and yellow slippers ! Though
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 129
there were first and second class fares, there
appeared to be no distinction in the matter of
accommodation. From stem to stern the long
narrow deck was crowded with Moors, Arabs,
negroes, Jews, and half-breeds, inextricably mix-
ing themselves up with empty fruit crates,
bamboo baskets, and bales of merchandise. I
speculated as to what would become of all that
loose luggage if we were to encounter a blow
outside ; for this placid-looking summer sea has
a way of lashing itself into an ungovernable
rage without any perceptible provocation. In
case of wet weather there was no shelter except
a stifling cabin between-decks, where the thirsty
were waited upon by a fez-crowned man carved
out of ebony, who dispensed a thin sour wine
from a goatskin, which he carried under his
arm like a bagpipe. Not liking the look of the
water tank 'midships, I tested this wine early
in the voyage, and came to the conclusion that
death by thirst was not without its advan-
tages.
The steamer had slipped her moorings and
was gliding out of the bay before I noticed the
movement, so absorbed had I been in studying
the costumes and manners of my fellow-voy-
agers. What a gayly colored, shabby, pictur-
esque crowd J It was as if some mad masquer-
ade party had burst the bounds of a ballroom
130 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
and run away to sea. Here was a Tangier
merchant in sky-blue gaberdine, with a Persian
shawl twisted around his waist, and a black
velvet cap set on the back of his head ; there
a Moor, in snowy turban and fleecy caftan, with
a jewel-hilt ed, crescent-bladed knife at his gir-
dle. Tall slim Arabs, in dingy white robes
like those worn by Dominicans, stalked up and
down between the heaps of luggage, or leaned
over the taffrail in the pitiless sunshine, gazing
listlessly into the distance. Others stowed
themselves among the freight, and went to
sleep. If you seated yourself by chance on
what appeared to be a bit of old sail, something
stirred protestingly under you, and a bronze
visage slowly unshelled itself from the hood
of a burnoose. Everywhere was some strange
shape. In the bow of the vessel a fat negro
from the Soudan sat cross-legged, counting his
money, which he arranged in piles on a rug in
front of him, the silver on one side and the
copper on the other. He looked like a Hindu
idol, with his heavy -lidded orbs and baggy
cheeks, the latter sagging almost down to the
folds of flesh that marked his triple chin, those
rings of the human oak. Near him, but not
watching him, and evidently not caring for any-
thing, stood a bareheaded, emaciated old man.
His cranium, as polished and yellow as ancient
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 131
ivory, was covered with a delicate tracery of
blue veins, and resembled a geographical globe.
At his girdle hung a leather pouch, apparently
containing a few coins. Both this person and
the negro, as well as the majority of their com-
panions, were returning from a commercial
visit to Gibraltar. The chief trade of Tangier
and the outlying districts consists in supplying
the English garrison and the cities of Cadiz
and Lisbon with cattle, fowls, fruits, and green
stuff. I saw none of these traders on the streets
of Gibraltar, however. They probably hugged
the water-front, where the markets are, and did
not venture into the upper town. With their
graceful dress they would not have been out of
place among the Highland kilts and scarlet
coats that light up the alameda of a pleasant
afternoon.
Already the huge Rock of Gibraltar, which is
looked upon with such envious and hopeless
eyes by the Spaniards, had shrunk to half its
proportions. It lay there, gray, grim, and fan-
tastic, like some necromancer's castle on the
edge of the sea. Before us was nothing but
twinkling sunshine and salt water. At our right
were vague purple peaks and capes, beyond the
point of one of which stood the Trafalgar light-
house, invisible to us ; but who can pass within
twenty leagues of it and not think of England's
132 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
great admiral ? The sea was crisped by a re
freshing westerly breeze ; over us the sky
sprung its pale cerulean arch, festooned here
and there with shapeless silvery clouds like
cobwebs. Fitful odors blown from unseen
groves of palm and orange sweetened the air.
" O happy ship,
To rise and dip,
With the blue crystal at your lip 1 "
The heat of the sun was no longer intolerable.
The man at the wheel had thrown back his
capote, and was smoking a cigarette. The
noisy group of Arabs huddled together round
the capstan had ceased their chatter. The fat
negro, his pitiful coins counted and laid away,
was leaning his head against a coil of rope, and
staring with glazed eyeballs at nothing. A
hush, a calm, that was not lethargy for it
partook of the nature of a dream seemed to
have fallen upon all.
There were several Europeans aboard besides
myself, if I may pass for a European a Mar-
seillaise gentleman about to join his wife, the
guest of her brother, the French consul at
Tangier; an Italian gentleman travelling for
pleasure (not that the other was not) ; a Dutch
painter from Antwerp, with an amazing porce-
lain pipe ; and last, but not least, a Briton,
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 133
among whose luggage was a circular tin bath-
tub, concerning which the Mohammedan mind
had swamped itself in vain conjecture. Was
it a piece of defensive armor a shield, for ex-
ample or was it a gigantic frying-pan ? These
Christian dogs, they have such outlandish fash-
ions ! No Arab passed it without a curious
glance, and at intervals quite a little crowd
would gather about it. From time to time a
Jew, who knew what the article was, though he
had never used it, smiled superciliously.
We had been under way an hour or more,
when I observed the Englishman in deep con-
verse with a personage who had greatly im-
pressed me as I caught a glimpse of him on
the gangway at Gibraltar before the boat
started. I had lost him a moment afterward,
and reluctantly concluded that he had gone
ashore again. But there he was, wherever he
came from. By the gracious dignity of his
manner and the richness of his dress, he might
have been Haroun-al-Raschid himself. He was
Moorish, but clearly of finer material than the
rest. His burnoose, of some soft indigo stuff,
was edged with gold, liquid threads of which
also ran through the gossamer veil bound about
his turban. The two ends of this scarf flowed
over his shoulders, and crossed themselves on
his breast, forming an effective frame for his
134 FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH
handsome features. His legs were bare, but
the half-slippers covering his feet were of costly
make. If he was not a person of consequence,
he looked it. I was wondering whether he was
a cadi or a pasha, and what he was doing with-
out attendants, when he quitted the English-
man and went to the water-tank, where the
loungers respectfully made room for him. He
then performed an act which suggested unut-
terable things touching that water-tank. In-
stead of helping himself brutally, as the others
had done, he gracefully covered his mouth with
one of the ends of his scarf, and drank through
that. I had been drinking this water unfil-
tered, making an aquarium of myself.
A few minutes later I was surprised to see
the man approaching the rear deck, where I
occupied a camp-stool, captured and retained
after unheard-of struggles. It was plainly his
intention to address me. I rose from my seat
to receive the card which he held out politely.
I here print it in full, for the benefit of future
explorers, to whom I heartily commend the
Hadji Caddor Sahta, 1 dragoman, king's courier,
and gentleman at large
1 The title of Hadji indicates that the bearer has made the
pilgrimage to Mecca.
FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH 135
HADJI CADDOR SAHTA
GUIDE AND INTERPRETER
Fully conversant with the French, English, Italian, Spanish,
and Arabic languages
Is likewise disposed to accompany travellers to the interior
of
MOROCCO
FULLY SECURITY OFFERED
TANGIER
The Hadji Caddor who was better than his
prospectus, for he spoke unexceptionable English
was organizing a party to visit the ancient city
of Fez, and begged the honor of my company.
"The senor doubtless knows," he said, "that
a caravan leaves for Fez in the course of a few
days. But to travel with a caravan is to travel
with cattle. It is not so with me ; we have our
own tents and slaves and armed escort, and go
as gentlemen and princes, thanks be to God
and my personal supervision ! "
I explained to the Hadji that my modest
purpose was simply to spend a day in Africa,
and that Tangier was the limit of my desire.
Upon this he remarked that his preparations
would detain him in the town until the end of