Jungle of Stone Page 10

  Kremlin in Moscow.

  What followed for Stephens was an arduous, sometimes exhilarating four-month journey. He had turned his back on the easy route to Paris for a long, roundabout passage through Russia and Poland. At the start, he was so impressed with the sophistication and quality of Odessa—a city built, he wrote, seemingly overnight on command of the czar—that he couldn’t help comparing Russia with the United States. Both were young nations bursting with energy, he said, with cities like Odessa emerging out of nowhere—not unlike Rochester, Buffalo, and Cincinnati.

  The next part of his journey—the longest and hardest—was over the steppes of Russia, the unending grasslands north of the Black Sea. Stephens was accompanied by an Englishman he had met in Odessa, and a quarrelsome Frenchman they hired as a servant-interpreter. They went by carriage at breakneck pace through the unbroken grasslands, traveling night and day with only post stops for new horses and food, and covered the nearly nine hundred miles to Moscow in fifteen days, with a four-day stopover in the city of Kiev. It was a journey of sweeping vistas and astonishing monotony, and Stephens was one of the first Americans to undertake it, or at least write about it in detail.

  In Moscow, he returned several times to the holy ground of the Kremlin. He was struck by the grandeur and beauty of the palaces and domed churches, and haunted by a vision of Moscow only twenty-three years earlier, eerily quiet, empty, abandoned by the Russians as Napoleon’s army marched in on September 14, 1812. Within a day of their occupation, fires erupted in different quarters and soon the mostly wooden city began to burn.

  I knew that the magnificent city at my feet had been a sheet of fire. Napoleon, driven from his quarters in the suburbs, hurried to the Kremlin, ascended the steps, and entered the door at which I sat. At midnight again the whole city was in a blaze; and while the roof of the Kremlin was on fire . . . the panes of the window against which he leaned were burning to the touch. Napoleon watched the course of the flames, and exclaimed, “What a tremendous spectacle! These are Scythians indeed!” Amid the volume of smoke and fire, his eyes blinded by the intense heat and his hands burned in shielding his face from its fury, traversing the streets arched with fire, he escaped from the burning city.

  Napoleon’s glorious victory over the Russians, won just days earlier not far from Moscow in the Battle of Borodino, was irrevocably lost in the flames.

  Later, far to the west near the Polish border, Stephens came to a crossroads where Napoleon’s demoralized army suffered its final crushing blow. He had been a young boy in New York at the time. But he knew his history. Now it was late summer when he arrived with a traveling companion at the small town of Borosoff, along the Berezina River. While awaiting fresh horses for their carriage, they dined at the post house near a wooden church on the town’s square. Then they strolled to the bridge that crossed the river.

  “It was a beautiful afternoon, and we lingered on the bridge,” Stephens wrote. “Crossing it, we walked up the bank on the opposite side toward the place where Napoleon erected his bridges for the passage of his army.” It was here in the freezing days of late November 1812 that the Russians slaughtered thousands of retreating French soldiers. The Russians had burned the only bridge spanning the river, momentarily trapping Napoleon in Borosoff. As a Russian army was approaching on the opposite side, French engineers worked night and day in the icy waters to construct two bridges to carry their beaten army across. Constantly harassed and attacked in its retreat from Moscow, Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which that summer had crossed into Russia 400,000 strong, was already reduced to ragged packs of exhausted, starving men fighting for mere survival as an early and particularly brutal Russian winter closed in on them. Napoleon, his Imperial Guard, and two-thirds of the little that remained of his army got across the river before the two Russian armies attacked and trapped the French on both sides. As the French rear guard tried to cross the temporary bridges they were mowed down by Russian artillery and musket fire. By the time it was over Napoleon lost well over half the thirty thousand men he still had who were capable of fighting. But it was the army’s thousands of stragglers and camp followers who fared the worst. Most drowned in panic trying to cross the river or were massacred by Russian Cossacks along its banks. It was a scene of horror that had etched itself into Stephens’s imagination as a young boy while the Napoleonic epic was still unfolding. And now, as he walked along the peaceful river on a summer afternoon, he visualized the carnage, the blood-soaked ground, fresh details of which had been imparted to him just days earlier by several retired Russian officers he met in St. Petersburg who had lived through the battle.

  When Stephens reached Warsaw he once again fell ill. He dutifully took his medicine, rebounded with his usual irrepressible energy, and took in a number of historic Polish sites. As with Russia and Greece, a page of history had been turned recently in Poland. Only four years earlier the Poles had risen against their Russian occupiers, but their revolution was short-lived and violently suppressed. Stephens was taken to the battlefield outside the city where thousands of the Polish resisters had fallen repulsing waves of Russians attacks. And he visited the celebrated site of Vola, five miles outside Warsaw, where the country’s nobles traditionally camped and elected each new Polish king. Now, Stephens noted, most of Poland’s leaders were dead or in exile. And the country’s population, still fiercely proud, was deeply demoralized by the continuing Russian occupation.

  “I felt all the time I was in Warsaw, that though the shops and coffee-houses were open and crowds thronged the streets, a somber air hung over the whole city; and if for a moment this impression left me, a company of Cossacks, with their wild music, moving to another station, or a single Russian officer riding by in a drosky, wrapped in his military cloak, reminded me that the foot of the conqueror was on the necks of the inhabitants of Warsaw.”

  Stephens’s next stop was Krakow, and there he abruptly ends his travel account. The full story of his journey takes up more than five hundred pages in Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia and Poland, a book he published three years later.36

  He left no account of his next months in central Europe. We know only that he arrived at Paris sometime in the fall of 1835 with the apparent intention of returning home to New York but something changed his mind. He decided instead to risk a trip to Egypt. Stephens’s biographer Victor Wolfgang von Hagen speculates that his new plan may have been prompted by a book he found in Paris by two Frenchmen describing their exploration of the mysterious ancient city of Petra, located today in southern Jordan. Also in Paris, Stephens undoubtedly learned that the plague in Egypt had abated. And he was about to turn thirty. For many men of that era, thirty was no longer young. Most of Stephens’s friends had already settled into careers and marriage. Stephens for the moment was free of such encumbrances but a life of conventional respectability like his father’s was looming before him. As was his unsatisfying mistress: the law. Egypt and Petra must have represented one last escape.

  Whatever the reason, his change of plans would prove momentous, another turning point in his life, and would have more to do with his becoming an explorer and author than anything that had come before. “It was also to change the course of American archaeological history,” wrote Von Hagen.37 Stephens boarded a steamer in Marseilles for the island of Malta. There he was again quarantined in a lazaretto, this time for a month. He finally landed in Alexandria in December 1835.

  Like his ramblings through Greece, Russia, and Poland, Stephens’s adventures in the Near East—his journey up the Nile and trek across the Sinai desert—would provide rich, entertaining material for a book. Like many other “gentleman travelers” of the nineteenth century, he was, in effect, a tourist, traveling to see the sights. Yet he was also a preternaturally keen observer and compulsive note taker. And when he later sat down and worked his notes into books, he understood the value of being selective. He was conscious that readers were interested in novelty, in being taken to places they had never
been, or at least had not already read about. So he left out all detail of his travels through England, France, Italy, and Germany, which must have filled more than a few notebooks. He wrote about countries few had visited and, like a true journalist, timely places—Greece soon after its war with the Turks, Poland after its revolt against the Russians—and novel, historic figures: he describes in sharp detail a personal interview in Cairo with Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s all-powerful pasha who had gained world renown at the time for bloodthirsty ruthlessness. Stephens also found in these places that he himself was a novelty, one of the first Americans on the scene. And he would be the first American, with an American perspective, to report back to his young country what he found.

  Yet in deciding to travel to the stone city of Petra—and he would be the first American to do so—Stephens understood that the stakes were especially high. Only a handful of Europeans had visited the isolated ruins and lived to tell of it. The sprawling site filled with classical architecture lay hidden in a deep canyon for nearly two thousand years, occupied and guarded by the possessive Bedouin tribes of the surrounding desert. It was finally “rediscovered” by the Swiss explorer Johann Burckhardt in 1812, and afterward only six other Europeans had dared to venture there.

  Boat on the Nile in Cairo. Illustration from Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land, 1837.

  On his journey up the Nile, in contrast, Stephens was the classic sightseer, albeit a pioneering one whose writings would open a path for the thousands who would follow. Few Westerners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had penetrated Egypt and Arabia while those areas were under the control of the Turkish Ottoman Empire—until Napoleon landed his army in Alexandria in 1798. Bonaparte insisted that a large group from the French academy—eminent scientists, linguists, geographers, and artists—accompany him on his conquest of Egypt. In the decades afterward, the French were followed by a hardy band of proto-archaeologists, treasure hunters, and artists like Rifaud, Belzoni, Wilkinson, Hay, and Stephens’s eventual traveling partner, Catherwood, all of whose visual and textual works began to reveal in great detail the wonders along the Nile.

  Stephens knew he was traveling over well-covered ground. And he understood, when he later sat down to write, that any contribution he could make would not be scholarly or artistic, but rather to make Egypt accessible, readable. For most Americans and Europeans, Egypt was still intriguingly exotic. Thus the ancient temples would provide a first-rate backdrop to his personal story—the hiring of a boat and its ten-man crew, his loneliness (homesickness again?) and struggle to communicate, his frustration over surprisingly cold nights and the maddening headwinds on the river, his eager encounters with other English-speaking travelers, his attempt to mount a caravan to the “great oasis” in the Sahara thwarted by yet another attack of his old sickness. He rambled through Luxor, Karnak, Philae, Edfu, and other well-documented sites, crawled deep into a shaft inside the Great Pyramid at Giza, and visited the catacombs of the sacred birds near Memphis. And, like any good chatty tourist, he talked about ease and comfort—and prices:

  For myself, being alone, and not in very good health, I had some heavy moments; but I have no hesitation in saying that, with a friend, a good boat well fitted up, books, guns, plenty of time . . . a voyage on the Nile would exceed any traveling within my experience. The perfect freedom from all restraint, and from the conventional trammels of civilized society, form an episode in a man’s life that is vastly agreeable and exciting. Think of not shaving for two months, of washing your shirts in the Nile, and wearing them without being ironed. You may go ashore whenever you like, and stroll through the little villages, and be stared at by the Arabs, or walk along the banks of the river till darkness covers the earth; . . . and then it is so ridiculously cheap an amusement. You get your boat with ten men for thirty or forty dollars a month, fowls for three piasters (about a shilling) a pair, a sheep for half or three-quarters of a dollar and eggs almost for the asking. You sail under your own country’s banner; and when you walk along the river, if the Arabs look particularly black and truculent, you proudly feel that there is safety in its folds. From time to time you hear that a French or English flag has passed so many days before you, and you meet your fellow-voyagers with a freedom and cordiality which exists nowhere but on the Nile.

  Stephens did not invent this type of personal storytelling. By the middle of the nineteenth century such travel writing had become a well-worn genre, the writing pedestrian and formal. In Stephens’s hands it was much more—natural and refreshing.

  Visiting Petra, however, was no tourist stroll around pyramids. It was dangerous exploration, thrilling and infectious—a true adventure that would reorient Stephens’s life and help explain why, a few years later, he would be standing in the heart of the Central American jungle, in Copán, in the middle of a civil war.

  To get to Petra, Stephens would have to cross the harsh desert east of Cairo and risk his life among the nomads of Arabia Petraea, fierce Bedouin tribesmen whose reputation for robbery and murder were hard earned. He planned to stop first at Aqaba, travel north to Petra, and then cross through a region known as Idumea to Palestine, his final destination. Travel through Idumea presented another danger, and one he did not take lightly. To do so, he had been told, would mean defying an old biblical curse at the risk of death. According to the Hebrew prophets, the ancient inhabitants of Idumea, the Edomites, had provoked God’s wrath and were destroyed, and a curse was laid upon their land “that none shall pass through it forever and ever.”38 Stephens was determined to risk it. He had no intention of following the usual safe route through Gaza to Jerusalem, which he learned would force him to endure another lengthy quarantine.

  Everyone he consulted in Cairo tried to dissuade him from going. Their warnings in particular about Idumea only spurred him on. He had learned that none of the earlier Petra explorers had risked traveling all the way through desolate Idumea. This fact alone was the most salient for Stephens. Unlike his earlier travels, here was the chance to accomplish a real first. Yet he knew the odds of success did not look good. He still had not fully recovered his health. There were ruthless Bedouin to contend with. He could not speak Arabic. The desert itself could be treacherous and unforgiving. And he would be alone except for his interpreter, Paolo Nuozzo, from Malta, “who, instead of leading me on and sustaining me when I faltered, was constantly torturing himself with idle fears, and was very reluctant to accompany me at all.”

  None of it mattered. The temptation to set a precedent, to face down the dangers, even the wrath of God, was simply too great. It was a pivotal moment for Stephens. He could return home a tourist, or go forward, overcome all obstacles, and carve out at least a footnote in history.

  There was one stop, however, Stephens felt compelled to make before reaching Petra. It would lead him miles out of his way, but as a lawyer it was a detour he had to take. And after ten days of traveling across the Sinai Peninsula by camel, surviving a blinding sandstorm, going without water for days, and camping along the shore of the Red Sea where Moses led his people through the parted waters, Stephens finally arrived at the mountain where God had handed down his laws—the Ten Commandments. “Can it be, or is it a mere dream?” he asked in wonder, standing on the summit of Mount Sinai. “Can this naked rock have been the witness of that great interview between man and his maker? Where, amid thunder and lightning, and fearful quaking of the mountains, the Almighty gave to his chosen people the precious tables of his law . . . ?”

  Stephens arrived next at the fortress at Aqaba, exhausted and sick again with his old ailment. This time, however, he felt bad enough to self-medicate with everything he could find in his medicine case, doubling the dosage. He was so ill that he half-fell from his dromedary before the fort’s gate and was carried to an open room in the fortress where the Bedouin crowded in day and night to see the curiosity—the white man with the red beard. Approaching Aqaba, which is located at the tip of northeastern branch of the
Red Sea, Stephens had been warned by his Arab guides that they were entering a district of dangerous tribes and must “look to our weapons.” Stephens broke out the disguise he had been carrying with him: a Turkish outfit designed to make him look like a merchant from Cairo. It consisted of a red silk gown over baggy white pants, a green and yellow striped cloth twisted like a turban around the red felt tarboosh on his head, and yellow slippers covered by red shoes. He wore around his waist a wide sash, which held his sword and two large Turkish pistols. He was immediately complimented by his guides for his “improved” appearance. But the Bedouin of Aqaba were not fooled. By this time news that he was coming had reached the fort. They pushed and shoved their way to view him lying on his sickbed like some exotic, wounded animal.

  “Merchant of Cairo with pistols and sabre.” Stephens adopted the look

  —including the weapons.

  He already had misgivings about staying the course to Petra, and now, with his health failing, he was utterly despondent. Earlier he saw a Turk in a caravan of pilgrims on their way to Mecca die in the desert, and he wondered if he, too, would meet a stranger’s death in a foreign land. It was the lowest point in his travels. “I was sick body and soul,” he wrote. “I was ten days from Cairo; to go there in person was impossible: and if I should send, I could not obtain the aid of a physician in less that twenty-five or thirty days, if at all; and before that I might be past his help.”

  He passed a wretched night and felt even worse in the morning. He was laboring under the effects of a double emetic, “annoyed to death by seeing twenty or thirty pairs of fiery black eyes constantly fixed upon me,” and then, seemingly out of nowhere Sheik El Alouin appeared. Stephens had met the sheik weeks earlier in Cairo, where the tribal leader agreed that if Stephens made it to Aqaba he would provide him with an escort to Petra. “He looked surprised and startled when he saw me,” Stephens wrote. “But, with a glimmering of good sense, though, as I thought, with unnecessary harshness, told me I would die if I stayed there . . .” Stephens agreed, thinking it would be better to die in a tent in the desert than spend another night in the fortress. His spirits rose when the sheik told him that he had brought Stephens an Arabian horse of the very best blood. “He could not have given me more grateful intelligence for the bare idea of again mounting my dromedary deprived me of all energy and strength.”