After all this talk about the impossibility of travelling in the summer,
it augurs ill for our account of Adalia, to say that it was the very
heat and rage of summer when we landed there. But as we were not
volunteers on the occasion, we did not choose our own season. Like the
fifty thousand Cossacks who marched off to the East Indies, not because
they liked it, but because they were sent, we were saved all the trouble
of deliberation; and once arrived at the spot, we were sufficiently old
stagers to adapt ourselves to the ways and means of the place. I
remember that we were delighted at the start: catching at the prospect
of change, as at the hope of improvement. Certainly things were bad
enough with us in Smyrna bay at that time. The pitch was boiling in the
seams, the water was hissing along-side; the sky seemed an entire sun,
so truly were the fiery rays rendered back from every part of the
glowing concave. The sea-breeze, one's only solace under such
circumstances, was continually forgetting to come. In spite of the
common profession, that without the sea-breeze it would be impossible to
live hereaway, we continued to pant through days of breezeless
existence. At this time it was that I arrived at the conclusion which is
now established in the code of my economics, that the endurance at
Calcutta or Port Royal is a joke compared with what one has to undergo
in these milder latitudes. The dweller in Anatolia has no such range of
Fahrenheit to alarm him into defensive measures, and thus he falls
comparatively unprepared into the conflict with the dog-days. Your
Bengalee mounts defences of _tattees_ and punkahs that cool down a hot
wind, or whistle air into presence in a trice. Whereas in this part of
the world, as the Sirocco blows, so it must steal into your room,
parching your face, and covering you all over with a clammy stickiness,
through which you may distinctly feel the subdolent shudder of incipient
ague. When he has darkened his room, and spread cool mats on the floor,
the poor Smyrniot has nothing farther that he can do. And if such be the
case of those who dwell within the mansions of Ismir, who have at least
thick walls between them and the sun, what is likely to be the state of
those _disgraziatos_, who people the busy town of ships in the bay?--the
rash men
"--digitos a morte remotos
Quatuor aut septem."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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