The Ship-Dwellers: A Story of a Happy CruisePaine, Albert Bigelow
General
The Ship-Dwellers: A Story of a Happy Cruise
Paine, Albert Bigelow
Middle East -- Description and travel
We passed little recesses where artizans of all kinds were at work with
crude implements on what seemed unimportant things. We passed a
cubby-hole where a man was writing letters in the curious Arabic
characters for men who squatted about and waited their turn. We saw the
pettiest merchants in the world--men with half a dozen little heaps of
fruit and vegetables on the ground, not more than three or four
poor-looking items in each heap. In a land where fruit and vegetables
are the most plentiful of all products, a whole stock in trade like that
could not be worth above three or four cents. I wonder what sort of a
change they make when they sell only a part of one of those pitiful
heaps.
We were at the foot of the hill and out of that delightful Arab quarter
all too soon. But we could not stay. Our carriages were waiting there,
and we were in and off and going gaily through very beautiful streets to
reach the hotel where we were to lunch.
Neither shall I dwell on the governor's palace which we visited, though
it is set in a fair garden; nor on the museum, with the exception of
just one thing. That one item is, I believe, unique in the world's list
of curiosities. It is a plaster cast of the martyr Geronimo in the agony
of death. The Algerines put Geronimo alive into a soft mass of concrete
which presently hardened into a block, and was built into a fort. This
was in 1569, and about forty years later a Spanish writer described the
event and told exactly how that particular block could be located.
The fort stood for nearly three hundred years. Then in 1853 it was torn
down, the block was identified and broken open, and an almost perfect
mould of the dead martyr was found within. They filled the mould with
plaster, and the result--a wonderful cast--lies there in the museum
to-day, his face down as he died, hands and feet bound and straining,
head twisted to one side in the supreme torture of that terrible
martyrdom. It is a gruesome, fascinating thing, and you go back to look
at it more than once, and you slip out betweentimes for a breath of
fresh air.
Remembering the story and looking at that straining figure, you realize
a little of the need he must have known, and your lungs contract and you
smother and hurry out to the sky and sun and God-given oxygen of life.
He could not have lived long, but every second of consciousness must
have been an eternity of horror, for there is no such thing as time
except as to mode of measurement, and a measurement such as that would
compass ages unthinkable. If I lived in Algiers and at any time should
sprout a little bud of discontent with the present state of affairs--a
little sympathy with the subjugated population--I would go and take a
look at Geronimo, and forthwith all the discontent and the sympathy
would pass away, and I would come out gloating in the fact that France
can crack the whip and that we of the West can ride them down.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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