Chapter 4

On November eighteenth, Melville finally set sail, passing Cape St. Vincent and Cape Trafalgar, entering the Straits of Gibraltar about a week later, and skirting along the coast of Africa. Throughout this journey, his eyes were keen and eager: when Gibraltar stands lit up by the sun, and casts a shadow over the rest of the scene, he thinks of England casting the rest of the world in shade; and when Algiers lies before him, he remembers a passage in Don Quixote. As the boat sails out, the town in the distance looks “like a sloping rock covered with bird-lime.” In Greece, the scene became fantastic and memorable: the pantaloons and male petticoats, the embroidered jackets, the noble faces and ferocious moustachios—it is the Greece of Edmond About—and the town itself, dirty, grimly picturesque, with old men who look like Pericles reduced to a charbonnier.

From Syra to Salonica: at daybreak Melville came on deck to see Mt. Olympus, covered with snow, and Ossa and Pelion to the south, with Mt. Atlas, rather conical, on the opposite shore. In port, the same welter of picturesqueness, dirt, modern needs, ancient beauty. The remains of a Roman triumphal arch across a street and the fragments of a noble Greek edifice, three columns and part of a pediment, used as a gateway and support to the outhouse of a Jew’s abode. The English resident comes aboard ship: he has that cockney confidence in the rights and privileges of God’s Englishman that makes the English so comical and so efficient wherever they go. He tells Melville he has been for a day’s shooting in the Vale of Tempe. Ye Gods! Whortleberrying on Olympus! The countryside: hot-houses and trellises. The monastery where Melville was served with sweetmeats, fruit, and coffee, under an ancient sycamore. Under all these little odd stimulations, the palate becomes less jaded and the eyes are refreshed; the spirit itself becomes eager.

When, finally, the ship sets out for Constantinople, Olympus shows in the moonlight like a ship of white cloud. On deck, the rich Turkish effendis, in their long, furred robes of yellow, attended by their harems, securely guarded in tents, give Melville other things to think about. Orientals have no hearth, no bed, and never blush! The women are pretty; for the Mohammedan religion disdains the corset, along with a good part of Western ethics and religion. These creatures are lazy, gracious, voluptuous; in Constantinople Melville finds that women with ugly faces are rare, and that every other window shows faces, Jewish, Grecian, Armenian, which in America would be a cynosure in a ballroom. Does Melville suspect that enjoyment of the rites of sex, skill and wisdom in that enjoyment, have contributed by sexual selection and general good health to this beauty? No: this is one aspect of life where, as we shall again see later, he observes the facts, but finds no clues.

As the ship approaches Constantinople, the contrasts pile up: the sail up the Hellespont is exhilarating, although spoiled a little by the mists: at night, as the ship is lying by in a fog, he hears only the bells of the neighbouring ships, and the sharp bark of the pariah dogs on the shore. The passengers endure sea-sickness, discomfort, and damp for two days. Melville turns to an old Turk and says: This is very bad. The Turk answers: God’s will is good, and smokes his pipe in cheerful resignation. That is the East’s answer to our Western fretfulness, to our desire to discipline the elements and remove all the natural obstacles to man’s existence and happiness: but the East pays its price for it: the beauties of Constantinople are shrouded in dank, odourous streets that are unmarked and unnamed and lead nowhere: the priests in the Mosque of St. Sophia sell the precious mosaics as they fall to the floor, not endeavouring to repair the scaling walls of that superb interior: the bazaars are a wilderness of traffic. Melville loses himself and is confounded and bewildered by the din, the barbaric confusion, of the whole city. At night he does not dare to leave the hotel, for fear of being assassinated for the sake of a watch or a ring. In short, failing to struggle against God’s will, the East puts up, in the same easy spirit, with every species of human roguery: that is no answer to the White Whale! Indeed, Melville scarcely dares walk the streets in the daylight without keeping his hand on his purse: for no discoverable reason whatever, he was followed about for two or three hours by an infernal Greek and his confederates, whom he could neither intimidate nor elude. He began to feel nervous, remembering that the fearful intent of Schiller’s ghost scene hangs upon being followed in Venice by an Armenian; and he was thankful when he finally escaped.

But the views! The scenes from the steamer up the Bosphorous to Buykudesh: magnificent! the whole panorama is one pomp of art and nature. Europe and Asia are here shown at their best: a gallery of ports and harbours formed by the interchange of promontory and bay: porpoises sport in the blue, and large flights of pigeons overhead go through evolutions like those of armies, whilst ships anchor at the foot of ravines, deep among green basins, where the only canvas one would expect would be tents. No wonder the Czars have always coveted the capital of the Sultans: no wonder the Russian, among his firs, sighs for these myrtles, cedars, cypresses. The green minarets of the cypress contrast with the gold minarets of the Mosque: so nature and man, so death and life, intermingle, too. Kiosk and fountain, dark trees and daisies tipped with crimson, stand out with the jewelled clearness of a Persian miniature: one would think that these scenes would melt away like some castle of confectionery if the elements treated them rudely.

Nearer, Melville is in the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights: the aspect of the first bridge, coming back, is like that of a Grand Fancy Dress Ball: the air is an immense Persian rug: 1,500,000 men are the actors in a vast and endless procession, pedlars, beggars, confectionery sellers, malefactors chained together with iron necklaces and rings; porters with immense burdens, military officers, ladies in yellow slippers, black eunuchs followed by white servants, sherbet sellers, Georgians, shepherds marching in sheep’s clothing, sheep, droves of donkeys followed by animated little boys poking them assiduously, boys with Arabian Nights names, Yusef, Hassan, Hamet. But if it has the beauty of some colossal London pantomime, it also has its defect: Melville cannot step over the footlights. He sees these Turks, Armenians, Georgians, Greeks: he would like to know them better: but for conversation he must turn to the captain or the English resident, or the fellow tourist. He wearies of this spectatorial attitude, these long days when he cannot talk to a sympathetic soul. Melville had got nearer to the Typees by living among them than he did with these closer brethren. After six days in Constantinople, he set off by steamer for Alexandria, via Smyrna; for, though he makes what he can of these profane diversions, the chief end of these travels is Terra Sancta itself.

The vessel stopped at Smyrna, and Melville had his first smell of the nearer East: camel-dung drying against the walls of the houses, for fuel, and the camel himself, the supercilious ambassador of this civilization, with his neck out like a tortoise, and his tail like an eel, by which the driver directed him, the swaying of the rider increasing with the motion of the camel, as in the mast of a ship, the higher one climbs. What a unique creature: he carries his neck like a clergyman in a stiff cravat, his feathery forelegs, his long lank hind ones, and his spongy hoofs, ploughing through the muddy lanes like four mops—in short, a cross between an ostrich and a grasshopper! Melville was thrilled by the curious appearance of strings of laden camels passing through the narrow, crowded ways of the bazaar—and he learned that these gorgeous Turkish clothes, many of them, were made of cotton and silk imported into Lancashire and reproduced and sent back to the native land, to the ruin of Turkish manufacturers, and the misery of the Manchester operative, just as pure copper was sent to England, and after being alloyed and cheapened was returned as unstamped coin to Constantinople.

The ship steamed out of Smyrna and passed the bleak islands that had once meant so much in history, Delos, flowery in fable, but desolate at best and now quite sterile; and Patmos, another disenchanting isle; and Timos, with its small hamlets and the little churches sticking perkily out mid the low huts of the villages. Christmas Day Melville spent at Syra again: he mentions the captain’s mild observance of the feast in a glass of champagne; but he put in the notebook no private or domestic memory. Perhaps he took to heart the advice he had already framed in Pierre: “With a continent and an ocean between him and his wife—thus sundered from her by whatever imperative cause for a long term of years:—the husband, if passionately devoted to her and by nature broodingly sensitive of soul were wise to forget her till he embrace again.”

Melville contrasted these bleak, desolate Aegean Islands with those of the Polynesian archipelago: the former had lost their virginity, whilst the latter were as fresh as at their first creation. Melville knew that withered feeling. To look upon the yellow of Patmos, who would believe that a god had been there; and, one may add, to look upon the sear tint of Melville’s soul, during the strained years that had just passed, who would believe that a god had once reposed there, either?

At last the Alexandrian lighthouse came into view; and shortly after that Pompey’s pillar, looking like a huge stick of candy that had long been sucked. Melville made a quick excursion to Cairo; and spent two nights there, wandering through the streets, where the houses seemed a collection of old orchestras, organs, proscenium boxes, or like masses of old grotesque furniture, lumbering a garret, and covered with dust: the streets, so narrow, through the projection of the upper storeys, that they seemed almost tunnels, made noon itself dim: in the lonelier parts of the city many of the houses were uninhabited and had a ghoulish look: but the city itself, for all these desolate houses and stoved-in domes and rubbish-filled alleys, was alive with bargain and chaffer and shouting camel drivers and whining blind men: desert and verdure clashed together like splendour and squalor, like gloom and gaiety: such violent chiaroscuro in all the senses bewildered one like strong wine on an empty stomach.

The Pyramids completed the effect of this exploration. Together, they made a magnificent, a terrible, an unforgettable day. From the distance, the Pyramids jutted over the sand like purple mountains. To ascend the great Pyramid, there were as many different routes as there are for crossing the Alps: precipice on precipice, cliff on cliff. Nothing in Nature but the sea gives such an idea of vastness; the very grass that grows around the Pyramids does not touch them, as if in awe of them. Exhausted a little with his climb, a pain in his chest, Melville found the Arab guides tender: as he hurried on, for none but the phlegmatic could scale this mound deliberately, the Arabs in their white flowing robes might have been angels conducting him up to heaven. One old man fainted halfway up and had to be brought down: he essayed to go inside and fainted again: it was too much for him.

Well, it was almost too much for Melville: it was not the sense of height but the sense of immensity that was stirred: with all other architecture, however vast, the eye is gradually inured to the sense of magnitude by passing from part to part: but here there was no storey or stage: it was all or nothing, not height or breadth or length or depth but unspeakable vastness, less like courses of masonry than like strata of rocks, a long slope of crags and precipices. As with the ocean, you learned as much of its vastness by the first glance as you would in a month. The great Pyramid refused to be studied or adequately comprehended. Nor had it lost by the tearing away of its casing, though it had scaled enough stone to build a walled town; on the contrary, when it presented a smooth plane it must have lost as much in impressiveness as the ocean does when unfurrowed—a dead calm of masonry. A feeling of awe and terror gradually came over Melville: the Arabs were no longer angels, but seemed, in their soft, imperturbable way, somehow malign. Stooping and doubling in the interior, as in a coal shaft, Melville shuddered at the ancient Egyptians: they had a mixture of the cunning and the awful. Moses learned his lore from the Egyptians: the awful idea of Jehovah was born there. They must needs have been terrible inventors, those ancient wise men: as out of the crude forms of the natural earth they could evoke by art the Pyramids, so, out of the dull elements of the insignificant thoughts that are in all men, they could by analogous art rear the transcendent conception of God. Indeed, the Egyptians had outwitted mortality. The Pyramids were conceived out of an energy as mighty as Nature’s: nought but an earthquake or a geological revolution could smother it up. That was something like an answer to the White Whale—albeit such a distant answer. The pyramidical energy, as well as the pyramidical scorn, were both lacking in Melville now, high though they had towered in Moby-Dick.

Back in his high-ceilinged room of Shepherd’s Hotel, with its almost monkish barrenness, the Pyramids still loomed before Herman Melville—something vast, indefinite, uncomfortable, and awful. Nothing that he met in the holy ways of Jerusalem, on the Mount of Temptation or in the Garden of Gethsemane, compared with the powerful impression left on him by the Pyramids. Did his instinct at last tell him that power was necessary, but that power alone was not enough, that Power and Love must work together, harmoniously married, as in one of the oldest of mythic figures, before man’s triumph is anything but evanescent? The issue of power and love, knowledge and sympathy, contrivance and imagination, is art; and the highest product of art is not a painting, a statue, a book, a pyramid, but a human personality. When power and love were divorced in the personality, love became impotent, and power became malign and unlovely; and the personality itself mouldered, mouldered into a Jackson, a Timon, an Ahab, a Maria Glendinning, a Pierre, an Isabel. The Egyptians certainly had not forgotten love; and the Nile itself, which spread greenness when its floods receded, was the symbol of its benign fertility. Did some hint of this touch Melville in Egypt or in Palestine? Apparently, yes; for in Clarel we shall see the germs of a new feeling about life, and the source of that feeling is love, a clear and unambiguous love.