 | VIII. Inklings of adventure |  |
8. VIII.
The art of printing was introduced into the Mohammedan
Empire in the reigns of Achmet III. and
Louis XV. I seldom state a statistical fact, but this is
one I happen to know, and I mention it because the
most fanciful and romantic abode with which I am acquainted
in the world was originally built to contain
the first printing-press brought from the Court of Versailles
by Mehemet Effendi, Ambassador from the
“Brother of the Sun.” It is now a maison de plaisance
for the Sultan's favorite women, and in all the
dreams of perfect felicity which visit those who have
once seen it, it rises as the Paradise of retreats from
the world.
The serai of Khyat-Khana is a building of gold
and marble, dropped down unfenced upon the greensward
in the middle of a long emerald valley, more
like some fairy vision, conjured and forgotten to be
dissolved, than a house to live in, real, weather-proof,
and to be seen for the value of one and sixpence. The
Barbyses falls over the lip of a sea-shell, (a marble
cascade sculptured in that pretty device,) sending up
its spray and its perpetual music close under the gilded
lattice of the Sultana, and, following it back with the
eye, like a silver thread in a broidery of green velvet,
it comes stealing down through miles of the tenderest
verdure, without tree or shrub upon its borders, but
shut in with the seclusion of an enchanted stream and
valley by mountains which rise in abrupt precipices
from the edges of its carpet of grass, and fling their
irregular shadows across it at every hour save high
noon—sacred in the East to the sleep of beauty and
idleness.
In the loving month of May it is death to set foot in
the Khyat-Khana. The ascending caique is stopped
stationed a mounted eunuch with drawn sabre. The
Arab steeds of the Sultan are picketed on the low-lying
grass of the valley, and his hundred Circassians
come from their perfumed chambers in the seraglio,
and sun their untold loveliness on the velvet banks of
the Barbyses. From the Golden Horn to Belgrade,
twelve miles of greensward, (sheltered like a vein of
ore in the bosom of the earth, and winding away after
the course of that pebbly river, unseen, save by the
eye of the sun and stars,) are sacred in this passion-born
month from the foot of man, and, riding in their
scarlet arubas with the many-colored ribbons floating
back from the horns of their bullocks, and their own
snowy veils dropped from their guarded shoulders and
deep-dyed lips, wander, from sunrise to sunset, these
caged birds of a Sultan's delight, longing as wildly,
(who shall doubt?) to pass that guarded barrier into
the forbidden world, as we, who sigh for them without,
to fly from falsehood and wrong, and forget that same
world in their bosoms!
How few are content! How restless are even the
most spoiled children of Fortune! How inevitably
the heart sighs for that which it has not, even though
its only want is a cloud on its perpetual sunshine!
We were not of those—Job and I—for we were of
that school of philosophers[6]
who “had little and
wanted nothing;” but we agreed, as we sat upon the
marble bridge sprung like a wind-lifted cobweb over
the Barbyses, that the envy of a human heart would
poison even the content of a beggar! He is a fool
who is sheltered from hunger and cold and still complains
of fortune; but he is only not a slave or a seraph,
icy breath of Malice, utters his eternal malison on the
fiend who can neither be grappled with nor avoided.
I could make a paradise with loveliness and sunshine,
if Envy could be forbidden at the gate!
We had walked around the Serai and tried all its
entrances in vain, when Job spied, under the shelter
of the southern hill, a blood-red flag flying at the top
of a small tent of the Prophet's green—doubtless concealing
the Kervas, who kept his lonely guard over
the precincts. I sent my friend with a “pinch of piastres”
to tempt the trowsered infidel to our will, and
he soon came shuffling in his unmilitary slippers, with
keys, which, the month before, were guarded like the
lamp of Aladdin. We entered. We rambled over
the chambers of the chosen Houris of the East; we
looked through their lattices, and laid the palms of
our hands on the silken cushions dimmed in oval spots
by the moisture of their cheeks as they slept; we could
see by the tarnished gold, breast-high at the windows,
where they had pressed to the slender lattices to look
forth upon the valley; and Job, more watchfully alive
to the thrilling traces of beauty, showed me in the diamond-shaped
bars the marks of their moist fingers and
the stain as of lips between, betraying where they had
clung and laid their faces against the trellice in the indolent
attitude of gazers from a wearisome prison.
Mirrors and ottomans were the only furniture; and
never, for me, would the wand of Cornelius Agrippa
have been more welcome, than to wave back into
those senseless mirrors the images of beauty they had
lost.
I sat down on a raised corner of the divan, probably
the privileged seat of the favorite of the hour. Job
stood with his lips apart, brooding in speechless poeticalness
on his own thoughts.
“Do you think, after all,” said I, reverting to the
matter-of-fact vein of my own mind, which was paramount
usually to the romantic; “do you think really,
Job, that the Zuleikas and Fatimas who have by turns
pressed this silken cushion with their crossed feet were
not probably inferior in attraction to the most third-rate
belle of New-England? How long would you
love a woman that could neither read, nor write, nor
think five minutes on any given theme? The utmost
exertion of intellect in the loveliest of these deep-eyed
Circassians is probably the language of flowers, and,
good heavens! think how one of your della Cruscan
sentiments would be lost upon her! And yet here you
are, ready to go mad with romantic fancies about
women that were never taught even their letters.”
Job began to hum a stave of his favorite song,
which was always a sign that he was vexed and disenchanted
of himself.
“How little women think,” said I, proceeding with
my unsentimental vein, while Job looked out of the
window and the Kervas smoked his pipe on the Sultana's
ottoman; “how little women think that the
birch and the dark closet, and the thumbed and dogeared
spelling-book, (or whatever else more refined
torments their tender years in the shape of education,)
was, after all, the ground-work and secret of their fascination
over men! What a process it is to arrive at
love! `D-o-g, dog,—c-a-t,cat!' If you had not
learned this, bright Lady Melicent, I fear Captain Augustus
Fitz-Somerset would never have sat, as I saw
him last night, cutting your initials with a diamond
ring on the purple claret-glass which had just poured
a bumper to your beauty!”
“You are not far wrong,” said Job, after a long
pause, during which I had delivered myself, unheard,
of the above practical apostrophe; “you are not far
would be considerable bores if they had not learned,
in their days of bread-and-butter, to read, write, and
reason. But, for the woman of the softer South and
East, I am by no means clear that education would
not be inconsistent with the genius of the clime. Take
yourself back to Italy, for example, where, for two
mortal years, you philandered up and down between
Venice and Amalfi, never out of the sunshine or away
from the feet of women, and, in all that precious episode
of your youth, never guilty, I will venture to presume,
of either suggesting or expressing a new thought.
And the reason is, not that the imagination is dull, but
that nobody thinks, except upon exigency, in these
latitudes. It would be violent and inapt to the spirit
of the hour. Indolence, voluptuous indolence of body
and mind, (the latter at the same time lying broad
awake in its chamber, and alive to every pleasurable
image that passes uncalled before its windows,) is the
genius, the only genius, of the night and day. What
would be so discordant as an argument by moonlight
in the Coliseum? What so ill-bred and atrocious as
the destruction by logic of the most loose-spun theory
by the murmuring fountains of the Pamfili? To live
is enough in these lands of the sun. But merely to live,
in ours, is to be bound, Prometheus-like, to a rock,
with a vulture at our vitals. Even in the most passionate
intercourse of love in your northern clime, you
read to your mistress, or she sings to you, or you think
it necessary to drive or ride; but I know nothing that
would more have astonished your Venetian bionda
than, when the lamp was lit in the gondola that you
might see her beauty on the lagune in the starless
night, to have pulled a book from your pocket, and
read even a tale of love from Boccaccio. And that is
why I could be more content to be a pipe-bearer in
a judge's ermine in England, to wear a scrivener's
rags, and sit in the shade of a portico, writing love-letters
for the peasant-girls of Rome. Talk of republics,
—your only land of equality is that in which to breathe
is the supreme happiness. The monarch throws open
his window for the air that comes to him past the brow
of a lazzaroni, and the wine on the patrician's lip intoxicates
less than the water from the fountain that is
free to all, though it gush from the marble bosom of a
nymph. If I were to make a world, I would have the
climate of Greece, and no knowledge that did not
come by intuition. Men and women should grow
wise enough, as the flowers grow fair enough, with
sunshine and air, and they should follow their instincts
like the birds, and go from sweet to sweet with as little
reason or trouble. Exertion should be a misdemeanor,
and desire of action, if it were not too monstrous
to require legislation, should be treason to the
state.”
“Long live King Job!”
| VIII. Inklings of adventure | |