When a true genius appears
in the world you may know him by this sign;
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift
"Thoughts on Various
Subjects," The Battle of the Books and Other Short Pieces,
1697
~
When I did abstracts, I ran out of ideas. But the world of nature is
so varied. I can't possibly ever begin to scratch the surface.
Robert Bateman
Canadian wildlife artist Acreage Life, Spring
2007, 25.
~
"Give me a standing place," said Archimedes, "and I will
move the world" - Goethe has changed the postulate in to the precept.
"Make good thy standing place, and move the world."
Samuel Smiles 1812-1904
_______________________________________________
The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain, 1869
[An account of his trip
to Europe and the Holy Land in the 19th century]
Chapter 8 (Tangier)
This is royal! Let those who went up through Spain make the best of
it
--these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well
enough. We have had enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the present.
Tangier is the spot we have been longing for all the time. Elsewhere
we
have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always
with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before,
and
so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force. We wanted
something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign--foreign from top
to
bottom--foreign from center to circumference--foreign inside and outside
and all around--nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness
--nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the
sun.
And lo! In Tangier we have found it. Here is not the slightest thing
that ever we have seen save in pictures--and we always mistrusted the
pictures before. We cannot anymore. The pictures used to seem
exaggerations--they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. But
behold, they were not wild enough--they were not fanciful enough--they
have not told half the story. Tangier is a foreign land if ever there
was one, and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save
The Arabian Nights. Here are no white men visible, yet swarms of
humanity are all about us. Here is a packed and jammed city enclosed
in
a massive stone wall which is more than a thousand years old. All the
houses nearly are one-and two-story, made of thick walls of stone,
plastered outside, square as a dry-goods box, flat as a floor on top,
no
cornices, whitewashed all over--a crowded city of snowy tombs! And the
doors are arched with the peculiar arch we see in Moorish pictures;
the
floors are laid in varicolored diamond flags; in tesselated, many-colored
porcelain squares wrought in the furnaces of Fez; in red tiles and broad
bricks that time cannot wear; there is no furniture in the rooms (of
Jewish dwellings) save divans--what there is in Moorish ones no man
may
know; within their sacred walls no Christian dog can enter. And the
streets are oriental--some of them three feet wide, some six, but only
two that are over a dozen; a man can blockade the most of them by
extending his body across them. Isn't it an oriental picture?
...
What a funny old town it is! It seems like profanation to laugh and
jest
and bandy the frivolous chat of our day amid its hoary relics. Only
the
stately phraseology and the measured speech of the sons of the Prophet
are suited to a venerable antiquity like this. Here is a crumbling wall
that was old when Columbus discovered America; was old when Peter the
Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first
Crusade; was old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted
castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the
olden
time; was old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood
where
it stands today when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and
sold in the streets of ancient Thebes!
The Phoenicians, the Carthagenians, the English, Moors, Romans, all
have
battled for Tangier--all have won it and lost it. Here is a ragged,
oriental-looking Negro from some desert place in interior Africa, filling
his goatskin with water from a stained and battered fountain built by
the
Romans twelve hundred years ago. Yonder is a ruined arch of a bridge
built by Julius Caesar nineteen hundred years ago. Men who had seen
the
infant Saviour in the Virgin's arms have stood upon it, maybe.
Near it are the ruins of a dockyard where Caesar repaired his ships
and
loaded them with grain when he invaded Britain, fifty years before the
Christian era.
Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged with the
phantoms of forgotten ages. My eyes are resting upon a spot where stood
a monument which was seen and described by Roman historians less than
two
thousand years ago, whereon was inscribed:
"WE ARE THE CANAANITES. WE ARE THEY THAT
HAVE BEEN DRIVEN OUT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN
BY THE JEWISH ROBBER, JOSHUA."
Joshua drove them out, and they came here. Not many leagues from here
is
a tribe of Jews whose ancestors fled thither after an unsuccessful revolt
against King David, and these their descendants are still under a ban
and
keep to themselves.
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