IN THE WAKE OF THE RISING SUN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 3, 17 January 1901, Page 2

IN THE WAKE OF THE RISING SUN.

TUNIS AND CARTHAGE.

By ' Viator.'

S.S. Syrian Prince, November 26, 1900. Wb are thrre — onr purpose to visit Palestine and kneel on the sacred soil of the Holy Land, to kiss the places made sacred beyond exprenmon by the life and labors and teachings and suffering 1 of Him Who by Hia name fills all time, past, present, and to oome. No othor name than that of .Throb fill<* bII spnoe, rover* all time, in reproach, in warning, in white robed hope, in salvation, through joy and tears and blood and victory to the ends of the earth. The privilege of a lifetime, if so it be that our hopes and purpose meet reality, this pilgrimage to the cradle of Christianity, to the soil moistened by the tears, dyed by the blood of God Incarnate. In the true spirit of Catholic pilgrims, bent on kneeling at the shrines that mark the Gospel scenes, we turn our backs on the old country on November 11. In the Syrian Prince along the gloomy bank* of the Manchester ship canal, out into the Mersey and down channel we steam, away past the big ships, the Campania of pleasant memories, the giant Oceanic, and smaller craft in numbers, out, out to sea past the Soilly Isles till we toss to heart's content on the merry breakers of the Bay of Biscay. And now while our good ship the Syrian Prince is scudding along dancing betimes to the weird music of the sea, I will go back to our starting point and bring your readers with us from the Sal ford Docks. It will be a gratification for us who are much to New Zealand to make your readers, if they do us the favor of reading these notes, Bhare in the delights of a visit to the Eastern lands, and to give at first hand to the Tablet the impressions made as we visit in turn places familiar in name from childhood, and written down deep in the folds of memory. LONDON TO GIBRALTAR. The run down from London to Manchester was a pleasure in the forenoon of the 10th November and a visit to Liverpool filled in the evening before taking up our quarters on board. The ' Syrian Prince ' is a steamer of the ' Prince Line,' trading to the East. We are 14 saloon passengers, variously assorted, but all courteously bent with the gentle civility of the old world on making the time we pass together — casual meeting as it is on the highway of the seas— as easy and pleasant as may be. And be it added, it is a pleasant time and a trip so far full to the brim and pressed down and flowing over with peace and ease and interest and solace while we skim over the multitudinous Beas about 11 knots to the hoar. The Provincial of the Marist Fathers— Very Rev. Michael J. Watters, S.M. — was at St Pancras Station on the morning of Saturday, the 10th November to bid us farewell, and shed a parting benediction on our pilgrimage. The weather clear and cold. There is a medical officer on board in tasteful uniform, charged with the health of the ship's company. It will be of interest to readers of the Tablet that said officer is none other than Dr. Patrick Mackin, of Wellington, who, with his amiable wife and your correspondent complete the ' three ' who ou pilgrimage bent are following 'in the wake of the Rising Sun.' But now we are across the Bay of Biscay, and here for the first time and the last the sea-god exacted tribute from the weak and haunted them for hours with contending feelings and some malaise, the fear of death in sickness, the hope that sicsnesß would give some ease and resolve itself into ' eternal rest.' But they were the weaker vessels, the finer clay not seasoned by travel. Sturdy and robust and much travelled, we smile at the foibles of those who are pale and prostrate at the first uplifting of Neptune's trident. Skirt* ing close the coast of Spain and Portugal, and running under the lee of the shore, we could discern the slopes and heights and field* and rivers of these lands of the evening while we make for the golden lands of the rising sun. At Gibraltar and Ceuta— opposing ports of the Straits — we had a good view of both coasts, and then by the courtesy of the Bkipper we ran in under the frowning, rugged rock of Gibraltar towards the afternoon of Saturday, 17th November, and from the deok easily scanned this jealous outpost of Home. Barren it looks, and ' horrid ' with bristling ports and lowering guns and menacing cannon, and turrets, and sentries, and barracks — all redolent of warlike man. But this is the iron key of the Mediterranean and the East, watched from the land of Spain and jealously held as chief outpost of the Empire. My host and companion reminds me that watch and ward is held over the rook by one of our countrymen from the ' Black North ' — Sir George White— one of the builders of the Empire. IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. So far we have oovered 1,300 miles of water, and now, smart and taut, we steam gallantly into the blue waves of the Mediterranean. Steamers from east and south and an occasional man-of-war passed freely, and often on port and starboard, proving that we are, indeed, on the highway of the mercantile marine, on the huntinggrounds of the merchantman service. In the golden sunshine, drinking deep of the glorious breeze, bounding over a Bappbire sea, we exult in being alive, and thank God for a freshening of vigour, and an exhilaration not to be found amid the giddiest delights of the land. Now we are hugging the coast of Algiers, and from the bridgeto which the captain gives ' white card ' without form or ceremony— we note the fertile coast where French muscles and industry hare delved out a foreign France. Red-tiled houses, and farm yards, and cattle plains, and vineyards, and cornfields, and orchards chase one another up from the foreshore to the hills — a flourishing settlement or colony, it seems — and ever and always tapers aloft in the villages the church steeple, pointing aloft and soaring with the hopes of the people to fairer regions beyond the land-mark of time. A railroad.

too, threading its serpentine length along the coast, we descry, and cunningly know that it finds its termini west and east from Oran to Tunis. Behind still reigns the nomadio Arab. TUNIS. On Wednesday morning the Captain calls us early — he had been on the bridge all night— to see our first port of call, for we are slowing down off Goulette. the port of Tunis. ' Bon jour M'sieur.' '11 chandV • Fait bon voyage ll 11I 1 and we are at the instant at Ihome, freely calling up onr best French, and with sly vanity impressing the foreigner with a due sense of onr importftnoe. and speaking the language of the country as 'to the manor born.' They •re none too oomuiuuioative, the health officer, pilot and officials, for they look with distrust on all who hail from the restless shores of • perfide Albion.' But all the world is ours for the time, and we enter the canal — nine miles long — to the city of Tunis with light hearts, and survey the sandy beaches that lint the waterway to the city. The soldiers at the port turn out and beat the ' rat-tan ' after the manner of French soldiers, and make the echo of the ' aery shell ' resound to the blare of trumpet oall. We respond airily to the Balute and steam ahead for Tunis. It is now breakfast-time, or half past eight of the clock. Coming on deck we find anchor dropped in the Btream and the busy boats round the steamer tell ue we are at Tunis. Tunis is a replique of a southern French city, and in its buildings, cathedral— all of glaring white stone -boulevards, and language remind one of Marseilles on a smaller scale. There are here in all some 200,000 souls, made up of 80,000 Europeans 40,000 Jews, and 80,000 Arabs— for there id here an Arab quarter which changeth not. We stay not long in the city, for we have a olassic eye for the remnants of a glorious past, and are soon bowling along in open chaise behind two wiry Arab steeds in quest of CARTHAGE. The ruins before us will show how ruthlessly was carried ou the fell resolve of the Roman senate, Delenda est Carthago 1 Now Carthage, though overhanging the sea, is some 10 good miles from Tunis, but provisioned with some knowledge and a good local guide we hie to the city we read of when lumbering through the pages of Virgil — and with more toil than discernment at length knew that 'all kept silence on the hills of Dido, 1 and that the Tyrian Queen longed to hear from the lips of the sea-worn iEneas the story of his harrassing woes and of the « lamentable ' kingdom. Then from his lofty couch was told in the great epic the story of the fates, and fortunes, and woes of Troy. We thrill as we near the classic ground and see beaming from high hill the noble church erected by Cardinal Lavigerie to the ever-green memory of Saint Louiß, King of France, who, in the battle for the Cross, fell here in fight with the swarthy Saracen. We are in Carthage— a soil redolent of great things and great people, and great deeds done in the misty past. There ia abundant evidence, too. here of generations of great people. No mere conjecture — for the state of Punio and Roman and early Christian settlements are unmistakably and artistically marked in the soil of the Tyrian City. Cardinal Lavigerie, of happy and saintly memory, has done much to establish the claims of the past, and excavations made, and still being made, have unearthed wonderful and startling proofs of great and glorious records. CLASSIC GROUNDS. G We visited, on the brow of the hill, topped by the nobl cathedral, the amphitheatre where, among others, St. Perpetua wo her palm of martyrdom, the acropolis with many sarcophagi an cinerary urns, the house marked by tradition as the home o Hannibal, so long the terror of Rome, and other places of interest, as the mansion of Scipio Africanus, the temple of Venus the ruins marking the site of the capital of Regulus, and other land-marks of Roman rule up to the first peep of history, when Dido • not a stranger to misfortune had learned to help the woestricken.' • Haud ignara mali, miteris svervrrere disco.' There were giants in those days. The mausoleum raised to the memory of St. Louis is falling into decay — a modern amid ancient ruina — but the name and the cause and the country of this hero of France are perpetuated in the magnificent church that, rising in grandeur on the hill-top, marks the triumph of the Cross, the protecting genius of modern Carthage gathering under its shadow. All around the base the ocean runs clear as crystal, blue as sapphire and green as malachite, rolls in soft mu9ic as it did in earlier days when acrosß the sea, • Scylla wept and chid her barking waves into attention, and fell Charybdis murmured soft applause.' This is the home and centre of the ' White Fathers ' who minister through darker Africa, and in monastery, church, museum, have written on the site of an earlier classic age the victory of the Faith which conquereth the world. The museum is richly stored with proofs of this ' earlier age ' and unfolds in mosaics, coins, lamps, jewellery, statues, pillars, sarcophagi, skulls, bones, cinerary urns, some of the riches of the generations of robust, heroic, cultured souls that are ■wept into the hereafter. ' . . . I was awe-struck, • And as I passed, I worshipt ; if those you seek, ' It were a journey like the path of heaven, 1 To help you find them.' Below the hill, repugnant to the classic memories writ bo deep and wide, winds the modern railway and at a simple wayside station pitched ia the sand and scrub you read in blatant letters, ' Carthage.' The oountry about seems arid, dry, sandy, dreary, covered in patohes here and there with flooks of black and tawny goat* and fat-tailed, mud-colored sheep with a camel now and again to relieve, all in charge of lonely shepherds with crook and cloak and flowing robes, as you see pictured in scenes which tell of pastoral simplicity in the East. Oxen are here, too, yoked to primitive plough* and larily scratch the soil— silent witnesses of an age and a people that change not much. After a kind reception by the good White Fathers' and a hasty visit to the noble cathedral we are off

on the high road to Tunis, madly careering behind the magic power of our tall, imposing, silent Jehu, what time the said labored ox ' In his loose traces from the furrow came, ' And the unasked lodger at his supper sat.' Before reaching Tunis we tarried to visit the Jewish cemetery where flagstones, all horizontal, tell the departed worth of the Semite. A novel scene and a pathetic greeted us. On many tombstones were groups of Jewesses, white-robed, with lofty coifs, dark and obese, lamenting the departed. In sobs and wails, rising and falling-, they droned their dreary dirge, swaying to and fro with their emotions, and dewing the flagstones with copious tears. But our riVingr sympathies met a rude shock when we were told that this function of wailing or ' keening ' is a business, and mouth by month are the professionals retained to wail and lament on the tombstones of the Semites who have passed over to the majority. Still was it a novel sight. ' Their part was more than human as they lay ; I took it for a fairy vision.' A visit to the Cathedral of Tunis — new, imposing, handsome a drive through the bazaars, a look at the ancient slave-market, a glance down the gay boulevards, a peep at the slummy Arab quarters, and we are aboard the Syrian Prince, bound for Malta.