Theseus looks, at a short distance, as if it were just finished by Pericles.’ ‘Of all that I have visited,’ he added, ‘nothing has more completely realized all that I imagined and all that I could have wished than Athens.’25
All the houses in the city were, however, roofless and there were ‘hundreds of shells and cannon balls lying among the ruins’; while the surrounding country was desolate.
Happy are we to get a shed for nightly shelter [Disraeli told his father, having made an excursion to Marathon] and never have been fortunate enough to find one not swarming with vermin. My sufferings in this way are great. And the want of sleep from these vermin, and literally I did not sleep a wink the whole time I was out, is very bad, as it unfits you for daily exertion…We found a wild boar just killed at a little village and purchased half of it – but it is not as good as Bradenham pork.26
He was thankful when the wind changed and the Susan was able to set sail for Constantinople, of which he caught sight just as the sun was setting on 10 December 1830. ‘It baffled all description,’ he wrote of that first sight of it: ‘an immense mass of buildings, cupolas, cypress groves and minarets’. He felt an excitement which, so he said, he thought was dead.27
In Constantinople they found the British Ambassador, Sir Robert Gordon, welcoming, hospitable and – Disraeli was pleased to discover – as hostile to the Greeks as he was himself. A cousin of Byron and a future ambassador extraordinary in Vienna, Gordon was clearly delighted to have Disraeli and his friends as his guests and was much put out when they left after a visit lasting six weeks, pressing them to stay longer, offering them rooms in the embassy and, so Disraeli said, most reluctantly taking leave of them ‘in a pet’.
He made the most of them, however, while they were there:
Tell Ralph we are very gay here [Disraeli reported to his father], nothing but masquerade balls and diplomatic dinners. The Ambassador has introduced us everywhere. We had the most rollicking week at the Palace [the embassy] with romping of the most horrible description and things called ‘games of forfeits’. Gordon, out of the purest malice, made me tumble over head and heels!
Since descriptions were ‘an acknowledged bore’, he said that he would leave Constantinople to his father’s imagination. But he did describe it, all the same. He wrote of the bazaar, ‘perhaps a square mile of arcades intersecting each other in all directions and full of every product of the empire from diamonds to dates’.
Here in Constantinople [he went on, ready as always to describe an exotic wardrobe] every people have a characteristic costume. Turks, Greeks, Jews and Armenians are the staple population…The Armenians wear round and very unbecoming black caps and robes, the Jews a black hat wreathed with a white handkerchief, the Greeks black turbans. The Turks indulge in all manner of costume. The meanest merchant in the Bazaar looks like a sultan in an Eastern fairy tale. This is mainly to be ascribed to the marvellous brilliancy of their dyes…The Sultan [Mahmoud II] dresses like a European and all the young men have adopted the fashion. You see the young Turks in uniforms which would not disgrace one of our crack cavalry regiments, and lounging with all the bitterness of Royal illegitimates.28
What he called his ‘Turkish prejudices’ were ‘very much confirmed’ by his visit to Turkey. The life of the people greatly accorded with his taste, which was naturally ‘somewhat indolent and melancholy’, he told his friend, the novelist, Edward Lytton Bulwer. ‘To repose on voluptuous ottomans and smoke superb pipes, daily to indulge in the luxury of a bath which requires half a dozen attendants for its perfection; to court the air in a carved caique, by shores which are a perpetual scene; this is, I think, a far more sensible life than all the bustle of clubs, all the boring of drawing-rooms, and all the coarse vulgarity of our political controversies…I mend slowly but I mend.’29
In letters to his father, he was more specific about his health which, he said, continued improving. ‘In fact,’ he wrote, ‘I hope the early spring will return me to Bradenham in a very different plight to that in which I left it. I can assure you that I sigh to return altho’ in very agreeable company; but I have seen and done enough in this way.’
Prevented by contrary winds from landing on Rhodes, the Susan sailed on to Cyprus, where Disraeli and Clay spent a day, Meredith having now left them to go to Egypt. From Cyprus they went on to Jaffa and thence made the tiring and potentially hazardous journey on horseback to Jerusalem, where, since there were no hotels or inns in the Holy City, Disraeli and his party had to stay in the monastery of St Salvador, where they were ‘admitted into a court with all [their] horses and camels…and warmly welcomed by the most corpulent friars’ Disraeli had ever seen waddling around them.30
On their second night, one of the ‘best houses in Jerusalem’ was allotted to the visitors by these fat and jolly Franciscan friars who sent them provisions every day.
‘I could write half a dozen sheets on this week, the most delightful in all our travels,’ Disraeli recorded. ‘We dined every day on the roof of our house by moonlight and of course visited the Holy Sepulchre…an ingenious imposture of a comparatively recent date.’
Surprised at the number of remains in Jerusalem – tho’ some more ancient than Herod [Disraeli noted briefly]. The tombs of the Kings very fine. Weather delicious – mild summer heat…received visits from the Vicar General of the Pope, the Spanish Prior etc. Never more delighted in my life.
Disraeli also climbed the Mount of Olives and, so he said, ‘endeavoured to enter [the Mosque of Omar] at the hazard of my life. I was detected and surrounded by a horde of turbaned fanatics, and escaped with difficulty…I caught a glorious glimpse of splendid courts and light airy gates of Saracenic triumph, flights of noble steps, long arcades, and interior gardens, where silver fountains spouted their tall streams amid the taller cypresses.’31
It is impossible to say when I will be home [Disraeli wrote to his sister after his arrival in Egypt from Palestine], but I should think in three months. From Alexandria…I crossed the desert to Rosetta. It was a twelve hours job, and the whole way we were surrounded by a mirage of the most complete kind. I was perpetually deceived and always thought I was going to ride into the sea. At Rosetta I first saw the mighty Nile with its banks richly covered with palm groves.
In Egypt he met Mehemit Ali, the Pasha, who discussed with him the idea of introducing parliamentary democracy into the country. ‘I will have as many Parliaments as the King of England himself,’ the Pasha said to him. ‘But I have made up my mind, to prevent inconvenience, to elect them myself.’32
From Rosetta, Disraeli sailed up the Nile to Cairo and then on towards Thebes. And one day, as he wandered away from the moored boat, the sky darkened as columns of sand suddenly appeared and came rapidly towards him.
I rushed to the boat with full speed [he wrote] but barely quick enough. I cannot describe the horror and confusion. It was a Simoom [a hot, dry, suffocating sand-wind]. It was the most awful sound I ever heard. Five columns of sand taller than the Monument [the column, 202 feet high, built in ‘perpetual remembrance’ of the Great Fire of London] emptied themselves on our party.
Every sail was rent to pieces, men buried in the earth. Three boats sailing along overturned…the wind, the screaming, the shouting, the driving of the sand were enough to make you mad. We shut all the windows of the cabin, and jumped into bed, but the sand came in like fire.33
Having returned to Cairo, Disraeli and Clay remained there, waiting for Meredith to come back from a trip he had made on his own to Thebes, which Disraeli described in irritation as ‘the unseen relics of some unheard-of