Chapter Chapter 14 · XIV. The Port of Marseilles--“All aboard, all aboard!”

. XIV. The Port of Marseilles--“All aboard, all aboard!”

UPON the 1st of December 18--, in clear, brilliant, splendid weather,

under a south winter sun, the startled inhabitants of Marseilles beheld

a Turk come down the Canebiere, or their Regent Street. A Turk, a

regular Turk--never had such a one been seen; and yet, Heaven knows,

there is no lack of Turks at Marseilles.

The Turk in question--have I any necessity of telling you it was the

great Tartarin of Tarascon?--waddled along the quays, followed by

his gun-cases, medicine-chest, and tinned comestibles, to reach the

landing-stage of the Touache Company and the mail steamer the Zouave,

which was to transport him over the sea.

With his ears still ringing with the home applause, intoxicated by the

glare of the heavens and the reek of the sea, Tartarin fairly beamed as

he stepped out with a lofty head, and between his guns on his shoulders,

looking with all his eyes upon that wondrous, dazzling harbour of

Marseilles, which he saw for the first time. The poor fellow believed he

was dreaming. He fancied his name was Sinbad the Sailor, and that he

was roaming in one of those fantastic cities abundant in the “Arabian

Nights.” As far as eye could reach there spread a forest of masts and

spars, cris-crossing in every way.

Flags of all countries floated--English, American, Russian, Swedish,

Greek and Tunisian.

The vessels lay alongside the wharves--ay, head on, so that their

bowsprits stuck up out over the strand like rows of bayonets. Over it,

too, sprawled the mermaids, goddesses, madonnas, and other figure-heads

in carved and painted wood which gave names to the ships--all worn by

sea-water, split, mildewed, and dripping. Ever and anon, between the

hulls, a patch of harbour like watered silk splashed with oil. In the

intervals of the yards and booms, what seemed swarms of flies prettily

spotted the blue sky. These were the shipboys, hailing one another in

all languages.

On the waterside, amidst thick green or black rivulets coming down

from the soap factories loaded with oil and soda, bustled a mass of

custom-house officers, messengers, porters, and truckmen with their

bogheys, or trolleys, drawn by Corsican ponies.

There were shops selling quaint articles, smoky shanties where sailors

were cooking their own queer messes, dealers in pipes, monkeys,

parrots, ropes, sailcloth, fanciful curios, amongst which were mingled

higgledy-piggledy old culverins, huge gilded lanterns, worn-out

pulley-blocks, rusty flukeless anchors, chafed cordage, battered

speaking-trumpets, and marine glasses almost contemporary with the Ark.

Sellers of mussels and clams squatted beside their heaps of shellfish

and yawped their goods. Seamen rolled by with tar-pots, smoking

soup-bowls, and big baskets full of cuttlefish, from which they went to

wash the ink in the milky waters of the fountains.

Everywhere a prodigious collection of all kinds of goods: silks,

minerals, wood in stacks, lead in pigs, cloths, sugars, caruba wood

logs, colza seed, liquorice sticks, sugar-canes. The East and the West

cheek by jowl, even to pyramids of Dutch cheeses which the Genoese were

dyeing red by contact with their hands.

Yonder was the corn market: porters discharging sacks down the shoots

of lofty elevators upon the pier, and loose grain rolling as a golden

torrent through a blonde dust. Men in red skullcaps were sifting it as

they caught it in large asses’-skin sieves, and loading it upon carts

which took their millward way, followed by a regiment of women and

youngsters with wisps and gleaning baskets. Farther on, the dry docks,

where large vessels were laid low on their sides till their yards dipped

in the water; they were singed with thorn-bushes to free them of sea

weed; there rose an odour of pitch, and the deafening clatter of the

sheathers coppering the bottoms with broad sheets of yellow metal.

At whiles a gap in between the masts, in which Tartarin could see the

haven mouth, where the vessels came and went: a British frigate off for

Malta, dainty and thoroughly washed down, with the officer in primrose

gloves, or a large home-port brig hauling out in the midst of uproar and

oaths, whilst the fat captain, in a high silk hat and frockcoat, ordered

the operations in Provencal dialect. Other craft were making forth under

all sail, and, still farther out, more were slowly looming up in the

sunshine as if they were sailing in the air.

All the time a frightful riot, the rumbling of carts, the “Haul all,

haul away!” of the shipmen, oaths, songs, steamboat whistles, the bugles

and drums in Forts Saint Jean and Saint Nicolas, the bells of the Major,

the Accoules, and Saint Victor; with the mistral atop of all, catching

up the noises and clamour, and rolling them up together with a furious

shaking, till confounded with its own voice, which intoned a mad, wild,

heroic melody like a grand charging tune--one that filled hearers with a

longing to be off, and the farther the better--a craving for wings.

It was to the sound of this splendid blast that the intrepid Tartarin

Tarasco of Tarascon embarked for the land of lions.

EPISODE THE SECOND, AMONG “THE TURKS”