The Towers of Trebizond Read Online Free PDF

end to look more like a columned citadel. Charles looked pretty distant about Tennyson and Œnone, but he made allowances for Father Chantry-Pigg's generation. We climbed about the citadel, with a guide who darted out of the museum and showed us round, and there was the ghost of a theatre, and what the guide maintained was Priam's palace, with thrones and rooms and walls, but the walls were too little and too late, for they were all of the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Troy, and there had been no excavations since 1932, and everything was grown over with grass and thistles and looked very neglected, and Schliemann, though he had been a disorderly man himself, would have hated to see it. Father Chantry-Pigg, who had been a good classic before he took up with Byzantine Greek and monks' Latin, began to recite the Aeneid, Book II, lamenting over poor Priam and Troy in flames. " Haec finis Priam fator um " he said, " hic exitus ilium sorte tulit, Trojam incensam et prolapsa videntem Per gama ," and so on. However late and little and ill-tended were Troy's remains, it was exciting and beautiful to be there, looking down over the plain to the sea, which must have gone back some way since the Greek ships lay there and the Greeks looked up at the battlements where Helen walked round.
    But aunt Dot could only think how Priam and Hecuba would have been vexed to see the state it had all got into, and no one seeming to care any more. She thought the nations ought to go on working at it and dig it all up again, and perhaps do some reconstruction, for she belonged to the reconstruction school, and would have liked to see Troy's walls and towers rising once more against the sky like a Hollywood Troy, and the wooden horse standing beside them, opening mechanically every little while to show that it was full of armed Greeks.
    But I thought there were enough cities standing about the world already, and that those which had disappeared had better be let alone, lying under the grass and asphodel and brambles, with the wind sighing over them and in the distance the sea where the Greek ships had lain waiting ten years for Trojam incensam , and behind them Mount Ida, from which the unfair and partial gods had watched the whole affair.
    Father Chantry-Pigg, of course, remarked, " jam seges est ubi Troia fuit " and Charles, who was vexed about our all coming to Troy, said, well, hardly seges, just grass and things, and anyhow Troy had probably never stood there at all. Meanwhile the museum guide had scampered on to more rocks and walls, and we all followed him except the policeman, who was blasé about Trua, which he no doubt had to visit too often, so that he looked at it in a bored, supercilious kind of way, as if he did not see why he should have had to come, and we did not see why either, because it hardly seemed like a military zone, and we had not met a single soldier on the way. Anyhow, to Turks the Great Siege had been an affair between Greeks and Trojans and the Grecian dame, of which they knew nothing, it was too long pre-Turk and too Greek, and Turks are not brought up, as Europeans are (or were) to the Trojan legend. The Trojan cycle, the Roman de Troie, the Arthurian cycle, the cycle of Charlemagne, the cycle of Roland, the cycle of Christ—these are the European folk-tales which filled the Middle Ages, and still echo down the modern ages, but not for Turks, who have, presumably their own folk-tales, of Mahomet, of Caliphs, Sultans, Seljuks, Mamelukes, Ottomans, and Kemal Atatürk, and these have shaped the minds of the Turkish police, in so far as they have been shaped at all, which is not really much.
    Presently Father Chantry-Pigg said we would now drive on to Alexandria Troas, twenty miles south of Troy. It seemed that his father, who had been a dean interested in St. Paul, had visited this place in 1880, in order to follow up St. Paul's doings there, and had said ever since that its ruins were among the most beautiful Roman ruins