Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/69

 and the Greeks have it to a great degree, for they can be per- fectly patient under a narrative of two or three hours' duration. These long stories are mostly founded upon Oriental topics, and in one of them I recognized with some alterations an old friend of the " Arabian Nights ; " I inquired as to the source from which the story had been derived, and the crew all agreed that it had been handed down unwritten from Greek to Greek ; their account of the matter does not, perhaps, go very far towards showing the real origin of the tale, but when I afterwards took up the " Arabian Nights," I became strongly impressed with a notion that they must have sprung from the brain of a Greek. It seems to me that these stories, whilst they disclose a complete and habitual knowledge of things Asiatic, have about them so much of freshness and life, so much of the stirring and volatile European character, that they cannot have owed their concep- tion to a mere Oriental, who, for creative purposes, is a thing dead and dry — a mental mummy that may have been a live King just after the flood, but has since lain balmed in spice. At the time of the Caliphat the Greek race was familiar enough to Bagdad ; they were the merchants, the pedlars, the barbers, and intriguers-general of South-western Asia, and therefore the Oriental m.aterials with which the Arabian tales are wrought, must have been completely at the command of the inventive people to whom I would attribute their origin.

We were nearing the isle of Cyprus, when there arose half a gale of wind, with a heavy, chopping sea ; my Greek seamen considered that the weather amounted not to a half, but to an integral gale of wind at the very least, so they put up the helm, and scudded for twenty hours ; when we neared the main land of Anadoli, the gale ceased, and a favorable breeze sprang up, which brought us off Cyprus once more. Afterwards the wind changed again, but we were still able to lay our course by sail- ing close-hauled.

We were, at length, in such a position, that by holding on our course for about half an hour, we should get under the lee of the island, and find ourselves ia smooth water, but the wind had been gradually freshening ; it 114 w blew hard, and there was a heavy sea running.