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Mark Twain > Innocents Abroad > Chapter LXI

Innocents Abroad

Chapter LXI


In this place I will print an article which I wrote for the New York
Herald the night we arrived. I do it partly because my contract with my
publishers makes it compulsory; partly because it is a proper, tolerably
accurate, and exhaustive summing up of the cruise of the ship and the
performances of the pilgrims in foreign lands; and partly because some of
the passengers have abused me for writing it, and I wish the public to
see how thankless a task it is to put one's self to trouble to glorify
unappreciative people. I was charged with "rushing into print" with
these compliments. I did not rush. I had written news letters to the
Herald sometimes, but yet when I visited the office that day I did not
say any thing about writing a valedictory. I did go to the Tribune
office to see if such an article was wanted, because I belonged on the
regular staff of that paper and it was simply a duty to do it. The
managing editor was absent, and so I thought no more about it. At night
when the Herald's request came for an article, I did not "rush." In
fact, I demurred for a while, because I did not feel like writing
compliments then, and therefore was afraid to speak of the cruise lest I
might be betrayed into using other than complimentary language. However,
I reflected that it would be a just and righteous thing to go down and
write a kind word for the Hadjis--Hadjis are people who have made the
pilgrimage--because parties not interested could not do it so feelingly
as I, a fellow-Hadji, and so I penned the valedictory. I have read it,
and read it again; and if there is a sentence in it that is not fulsomely
complimentary to captain, ship and passengers, I can not find it. If it
is not a chapter that any company might be proud to have a body write
about them, my judgment is fit for nothing. With these remarks I
confidently submit it to the unprejudiced judgment of the reader:

     RETURN OF THE HOLY LAND EXCURSIONISTS--THE STORY OF THE CRUISE.

     TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD:

     The steamer Quaker City has accomplished at last her extraordinary
     voyage and returned to her old pier at the foot of Wall street.
     The expedition was a success in some respects, in some it was not.
     Originally it was advertised as a "pleasure excursion." Well,
     perhaps, it was a pleasure excursion, but certainly it did not look
     like one; certainly it did not act like one. Any body's and every
     body's notion of a pleasure excursion is that the parties to it will
     of a necessity be young and giddy and somewhat boisterous. They
     will dance a good deal, sing a good deal, make love, but sermonize
     very little. Any body's and every body's notion of a well conducted
     funeral is that there must be a hearse and a corpse, and chief
     mourners and mourners by courtesy, many old people, much solemnity,
     no levity, and a prayer and a sermon withal. Three-fourths of the
     Quaker City's passengers were between forty and seventy years of
     age! There was a picnic crowd for you! It may be supposed that the
     other fourth was composed of young girls. But it was not. It was
     chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors and a child of six years.
     Let us average the ages of the Quaker City's pilgrims and set the
     figure down as fifty years. Is any man insane enough to imagine
     that this picnic of patriarchs sang, made love, danced, laughed,
     told anecdotes, dealt in ungodly levity? In my experience they
     sinned little in these matters. No doubt it was presumed here at
     home that these frolicsome veterans laughed and sang and romped all
     day, and day after day, and kept up a noisy excitement from one end
     of the ship to the other; and that they played blind-man's buff or
     danced quadrilles and waltzes on moonlight evenings on the quarter-
     deck; and that at odd moments of unoccupied time they jotted a
     laconic item or two in the journals they opened on such an elaborate
     plan when they left home, and then skurried off to their whist and
     euchre labors under the cabin lamps. If these things were presumed,
     the presumption was at fault. The venerable excursionists were not
     gay and frisky. They played no blind-man's buff; they dealt not in
     whist; they shirked not the irksome journal, for alas! most of them
     were even writing books. They never romped, they talked but little,
     they never sang, save in the nightly prayer-meeting. The pleasure
     ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion
     without a corpse. (There is nothing exhilarating about a funeral
     excursion without a corpse.) A free, hearty laugh was a sound that
     was not heard oftener than once in seven days about those decks or
     in those cabins, and when it was heard it met with precious little
     sympathy. The excursionists danced, on three separate evenings,
     long, long ago, (it seems an age.) quadrilles, of a single set, made
     up of three ladies and five gentlemen, (the latter with
     handkerchiefs around their arms to signify their sex.) who timed
     their feet to the solemn wheezing of a melodeon; but even this
     melancholy orgie was voted to be sinful, and dancing was
     discontinued.

     The pilgrims played dominoes when too much Josephus or Robinson's
     Holy Land Researches, or book-writing, made recreation necessary--
     for dominoes is about as mild and sinless a game as any in the
     world, perhaps, excepting always the ineffably insipid diversion
     they call croquet, which is a game where you don't pocket any balls
     and don't carom on any thing of any consequence, and when you are
     done nobody has to pay, and there are no refreshments to saw off,
     and, consequently, there isn't any satisfaction whatever about it--
     they played dominoes till they were rested, and then they
     blackguarded each other privately till prayer-time. When they were
     not seasick they were uncommonly prompt when the dinner-gong
     sounded. Such was our daily life on board the ship--solemnity,
     decorum, dinner, dominoes, devotions, slander. It was not lively
     enough for a pleasure trip; but if we had only had a corpse it would
     have made a noble funeral excursion. It is all over now; but when I
     look back, the idea of these venerable fossils skipping forth on a
     six months' picnic, seems exquisitely refreshing. The advertised
     title of the expedition--"The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion"--
     was a misnomer. "The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession" would have
     been better--much better.

     Wherever we went, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation,
     and, I suppose I may add, created a famine. None of us had ever
     been any where before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a
     wild novelty to us, and we conducted ourselves in accordance with
     the natural instincts that were in us, and trammeled ourselves with
     no ceremonies, no conventionalities. We always took care to make it
     understood that we were Americans--Americans! When we found that a
     good many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a
     good many more knew it only as a barbarous province away off
     somewhere, that had lately been at war with somebody, we pitied the
     ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot of our importance.
     Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere will
     remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of
     our Lord 1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to
     imagine in some unaccountable way that they had a right to be proud
     of it. We generally created a famine, partly because the coffee on
     the Quaker City was unendurable, and sometimes the more substantial
     fare was not strictly first class; and partly because one naturally
     tires of sitting long at the same board and eating from the same
     dishes.

     The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They
     looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of
     America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes.
     They noticed that we looked out for expenses, and got what we
     conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the
     mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes
     and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in
     making those idiots understand their own language. One of our
     passengers said to a shopkeeper, in reference to a proposed return
     to buy a pair of gloves, "Allong restay trankeel--may be ve coom
     Moonday;" and would you believe it, that shopkeeper, a born
     Frenchman, had to ask what it was that had been said. Sometimes it
     seems to me, somehow, that there must be a difference between
     Parisian French and Quaker City French.

     The people stared at us every where, and we stared at them. We
     generally made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with
     them, because we bore down on them with America's greatness until we
     crushed them. And yet we took kindly to the manners and customs,
     and especially to the fashions of the various people we visited.
     When we left the Azores, we wore awful capotes and used fine tooth
     combs--successfully. When we came back from Tangier, in Africa, we
     were topped with fezzes of the bloodiest hue, hung with tassels like
     an Indian's scalp-lock. In France and Spain we attracted some
     attention in these costumes. In Italy they naturally took us for
     distempered Garibaldians, and set a gunboat to look for any thing
     significant in our changes of uniform. We made Rome howl. We could
     have made any place howl when we had all our clothes on. We got no
     fresh raiment in Greece--they had but little there of any kind. But
     at Constantinople, how we turned out! Turbans, scimetars, fezzes,
     horse-pistols, tunics, sashes, baggy trowsers, yellow slippers--Oh,
     we were gorgeous! The illustrious dogs of Constantinople barked
     their under jaws off, and even then failed to do us justice. They
     are all dead by this time. They could not go through such a run of
     business as we gave them and survive.

     And then we went to see the Emperor of Russia. We just called on
     him as comfortably as if we had known him a century or so, and when
     we had finished our visit we variegated ourselves with selections
     from Russian costumes and sailed away again more picturesque than
     ever. In Smyrna we picked up camel's hair shawls and other dressy
     things from Persia; but in Palestine--ah, in Palestine--our splendid
     career ended. They didn't wear any clothes there to speak of. We
     were satisfied, and stopped. We made no experiments. We did not
     try their costume. But we astonished the natives of that country.
     We astonished them with such eccentricities of dress as we could
     muster. We prowled through the Holy Land, from Cesarea Philippi to
     Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, a weird procession of pilgrims, gotten
     up regardless of expense, solemn, gorgeous, green-spectacled,
     drowsing under blue umbrellas, and astride of a sorrier lot of
     horses, camels and asses than those that came out of Noah's ark,
     after eleven months of seasickness and short rations. If ever those
     children of Israel in Palestine forget when Gideon's Band went
     through there from America, they ought to be cursed once more and
     finished. It was the rarest spectacle that ever astounded mortal
     eyes, perhaps.

     Well, we were at home in Palestine. It was easy to see that that
     was the grand feature of the expedition. We had cared nothing much
     about Europe. We galloped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the
     Ufizzi, the Vatican--all the galleries--and through the pictured and
     frescoed churches of Venice, Naples, and the cathedrals of Spain;
     some of us said that certain of the great works of the old masters
     were glorious creations of genius, (we found it out in the guide-
     book, though we got hold of the wrong picture sometimes,) and the
     others said they were disgraceful old daubs. We examined modern and
     ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, Rome, or any where
     we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn't we said
     we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of
     America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We fell
     into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor
     and at Nazareth; we exploded into poetry over the questionable
     loveliness of Esdraelon; we meditated at Jezreel and Samaria over
     the missionary zeal of Jehu; we rioted--fairly rioted among the holy
     places of Jerusalem; we bathed in Jordan and the Dead Sea, reckless
     whether our accident-insurance policies were extra-hazardous or not,
     and brought away so many jugs of precious water from both places
     that all the country from Jericho to the mountains of Moab will
     suffer from drouth this year, I think. Yet, the pilgrimage part of
     the excursion was its pet feature--there is no question about that.
     After dismal, smileless Palestine, beautiful Egypt had few charms
     for us. We merely glanced at it and were ready for home.

     They wouldn't let us land at Malta--quarantine; they would not let
     us land in Sardinia; nor at Algiers, Africa; nor at Malaga, Spain,
     nor Cadiz, nor at the Madeira islands. So we got offended at all
     foreigners and turned our backs upon them and came home. I suppose
     we only stopped at the Bermudas because they were in the programme.
     We did not care any thing about any place at all. We wanted to go
     home. Homesickness was abroad in the ship--it was epidemic. If the
     authorities of New York had known how badly we had it, they would
     have quarantined us here.

     The grand pilgrimage is over. Good-bye to it, and a pleasant memory
     to it, I am able to say in all kindness. I bear no malice, no ill-
     will toward any individual that was connected with it, either as
     passenger or officer. Things I did not like at all yesterday I like
     very well to-day, now that I am at home, and always hereafter I
     shall be able to poke fun at the whole gang if the spirit so moves
     me to do, without ever saying a malicious word. The expedition
     accomplished all that its programme promised that it should
     accomplish, and we ought all to be satisfied with the management of
     the matter, certainly. Bye-bye!

                                             MARK TWAIN.


I call that complimentary. It is complimentary; and yet I never have
received a word of thanks for it from the Hadjis; on the contrary I speak
nothing but the serious truth when I say that many of them even took
exceptions to the article. In endeavoring to please them I slaved over
that sketch for two hours, and had my labor for my pains. I never will
do a generous deed again.

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