Unlock Now Eothen: Traces Of Travel Brought Home From The East Devised By Alexander William Kinglake Available As Paperback

what you will about the Victorians, they had selfconfidence up the yingyang, When Alexander Kinglake did his tour of the Middle East in the's, he was essentially a glorified backpacker an overrefined product of a bumptious, imperialistic culture.
Still, you can't help but marvel at the insouciance with which he charms and blusters his way across the Ottoman empire, browbeating corrupt pashas, strolling nonchalantly through plaguestricken cities, and busting out of tiresome quarantines all in the firm conviction that nothing can touch him because.
. . well, because he's an English gentleman, And nothing does!

As a writer, Kinglake has a freshness, a colloquial vivacity that you don't often associate with the nineteenth century though you see it in Byron's letters and a few other 'unofficial' writings of the period.
Even when he indulges his taste for purplish lyricism, he has a disarmingly modern trick of ironizing himself, mocking his own pretensions and inviting the reader to snicker along with him.
At the same time, he enjoys throwing the odd, sarcastic barb at the conventional idiocies of the civilization he has fled, referring to it at one point as 'that poor, dear, middleaged, deserving, accomplished, pedantic, and painstaking governess, Europe', and comparing it unfavourably to the the wildness and freedom of the East.


In short, an utterly charming book,

Oh boy. Selfcongratulatory, Eurocentrizing travel writing of the first rate, Kinglake has blithe assumptions about women, "Asiatics," "Orientals," and many more, which at times blind or otherwise limit him, Implicitly the story of "how I had freedom and got my own way in everything," Eothen is both a repelling book and an uninteresting one.
أدب الرحلات ورحلة إلى المشرق العربي. . رحلة ممتعة بين سوريا و الأردن و فلسطين و مصر. . تحكي أحوال الشرقيين وطبائعهم و عن تعصب المسلمين وحقد المسيحيين ونفاق اليهود. . كتبت كمذكرات تصف ما يراه السائح وما يشعر به. . تستحق القراءة. الكتاب خيب أملي توقعته افضل من ذلك بكثير.

يتحدث الرحالة ألكسندر كينقلك عن شوقه وولعه للذهاب إلى المشرق والشرق الأوسط على وجه الخصوص وهذا أمر شائع لدى الانجليز في القرن الثامن عشر ميلادي. كان هدفة الاساسي لصلاة في الكنيسة العذراء التي تقع في القدس فلسطين. لكن حدثت في تلك الرحلة بعض العقبات التي هي مصدرها الشك والقلق والنظرة العنصرية التي يكنها لفقراء الشرق. وبدأ رحتلة ما بين عامين ١٨٣٣ ١٨٣٤ وعند وصوله تعرف على شخصية مثيرة وغريبة.

أسم الشخصية: هولست ستانهوب وهي امرأة ولدت عام ١٧٧٦ وهي ابنت اللورد ستانهوب الملقب "اللورد الثائر" بسبب تصديه لدفاعة عن الثورة الفرنسية وغلوه في الديمقراطية وجدها من امها هو اللورد شاتام وأشتهر بمقاومته لخطط نابليون. في وقت ما سكنت مع أخوها وعندما مات تغير مجرى حياتها رأسا على عقب فذهبت إلى الشرق وتجولت في ارجائها كمصر ومالطة وتركيا وفي ترحالها تحطمت سفينتها واعطاها احد الجنود الاتراك لباسه وبعد ما ارتدته اصبحت لا تلبس سوى اللباس الذكوري. ونتج عن هذا لبسها للعمامة العربية. وبعد تغولها في المنطقة اجرت بعض الاعراب وقيل انهم من قبيلة عنزة العربية الشهيرة وذهبت تحت حمايتهم إلى مدينة "تدمر" وبعد فترة ليست بكثيرة اصبحت ملكة تلك المدينة وأصبح لها شأنها عند العرب. أحبت الدروز ولاحقا حرضتهم على العثمانيين وكانوا الدراويش يأتونها ويقدسونها واشتهرت بالسحر والشعوذة. هجرت عادات وتقاليد اسلافها الانجليز وتبنت الحياة اهل الرعي وكانت تملك الكنوز والمال الوفير لتشتري بما تحتاج من العبيد والخدم والحراس. وتوفيت في بيروت سنة ١٨٣٩ميلادي وفي عام ١٩١١ ميلادي تذكرت الحكومة الانجليزية بأمرها فبنوا لها ضريحا.

والمؤلف يسرد بعض التفاصيل حول حياة اهل البادية وعاداتهم وتقالديهم واكلهم ومشروبهم الشاهي اللذيذ. وذكر خلال مسيرته إلى القدس مشوا محاذاة البحر الميت لكن شعروا بقدوم فرسان إبراهيم باشا ثم هروبوا وبعد ما زال عنهم الخطر جلسوا عند قبيلة فقيرة للأسف الكاتب نعتهم بالتعساء ثم استعانوا بالشيخ علي الجربان واعوانه لكي يرشدوهم إلى فلسطين. وبعد صلاته في كنسية العذراء ذهب إلى مصر ليشاهد الاثار القديمة كأبو الهول ومعبد أبو سمبل وغيرهما من الآثار حتى بلغ موطنه يحمل الذكريات التي دونها وشاركنا بها في هذا الكتاب Alexander William Kinglakes travelogue Eothenis bookended by plague, It opens with a grim view from the Austrianheld side of the Sava river to Ottoman Belgrade on the other bank, where the yellow flag of contagion flies above the battlements.
It ends in the epidemic hell of Cairo where every other person Kinglake meets will be dead in three days,

Between these two chapters Eothen unfolds with an authentic air of early nineteenthcentury Romanticism, Through haunted Balkan woods and the crowded alleys of ancient eastern cities, through desert wastes and trackless mountains of red stone, Kinglake and his small band press on.
He visits ruined temples and holy sites, He smokes from narghiles in the palaces of the mighty and dines in the tents of the Bedouin, He risks life and limb his own and those of his hired companions on more occasions than one,

Along the way he reinvents travel writing, or at least he's commonly credited with doing so, Kinglake is determined not be your tour guide and Eothen is not a guidebook for wouldbe vacationers, He will not inform, uplift, or humor you, In his introduction he writes:

“I have endeavored to discard from my book all valuable matter derived from the works of others, and it appears to me that my efforts in this direction have been attended with great success I believe that I may truly acknowledge that from all details of geographical discovery or antiquarian research, from all display of sound learning and religious knowledge, from all historical and scientific illustrations, from all useful statistics, from all political disquisitions, and from all good moral reflections, the volume is thoroughly free.


”

What he provides in place of these is the straightforward occasionally "insolent" record of his personal experience and impressions, His book is less an education than an entertainment, In this respect, although Eothen strongly influenced so much of the travel writing that followed it, it's not really so much a reinvention of the travel book but a return to the sort of preEnlightenment travelogues of Marco Polo or Sir John Mandeville assuming the latter was a real person.


The most memorable parts of the book, I think, include the chapter describing Kinglakes visit to Lady Hester Stanhope in the mountains of Lebanon, where the elderly London society girl now lives a hermits life in a fortified monastery with a small army at her command, and with a strong belief in her own occult powers and divine nature.


In another favorite passage, Kinglake describes the psychological inversion he experienced stepping into the very landscape of myth near the site of Troy:

“You force yourself hardily into the material presence of a mountain or river whose name belongs to poetry and ancient religion, rather than to the external world your feelings, wound up and kept ready for some sort of halfexpected rapture, are chilled and borne for the time under all this load of real earth and water but let these once pass out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into distance that the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to mythology.
”

The chapters covering Cairo in a season of plague, however, feel especially timely just now, as we wrap up hopefully our own season of COVID.
Kinglakes story illustrates, at least, how much worse things can get in an epidemic, “The fear of the plague is its forerunner,” he writes, and though weve had, on balance, much less to fear than Kinglake himself and the residents of Cairo at the time, we see that fear may also be the last symptom to finally quit us.
Then, as now, there were the fatalistic, the careless, and the paranoid, Kinglake describes the constant terror suffered by those convinced the plague may be spread by touch, before the germ theory of disease proved them right:

“To people entertaining such opinions as these respecting the fatal effect of contact, the narrow and crowded streets of Cairo were terrible as the easy slope that leads to Avernus.
The roaring ocean and the beetling crags owe something of their sublimity to this that if they be tempted they can take the warm life of a man.
To the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final causes, having no faith in destiny, nor in the fixed will of God, and with none of the devilmaycare indifference which might stand him instead of creeds to such one every rag that shivers in the breeze of a plaguestricken city has this sort of sublimity.
If, by any terrible ordinance, he be forced to venture forth, he sees death dangling from every sleeve, and as he creeps forward, he poises his shuddering limbs between the imminent jacket that is stabbing at his right elbow, and the murderous pelisse that threatens to mow him clean down as it sweeps along his left.
”

Go ahead: remove your mask, if you dare, Take a deep breath. Dont be afraid. Masked or unmasked, you never know what you'll meet on the road ahead, “Death,” writes Kinglake, is “the last and greatest of all the fine sights that there be, ” This first hand account of travel in the's is a gold mine of first hand experience, Unfortunately is is tempered by rampant racism sadly endemic at the time, Nevertheless if one can put on extra thick boots and wade through it is a well written travel journal of travel from a time when each small subculture had their own dress and customs fascinating read, shower after recommended.
This Englishman's perspective on the middle east the middle east that we know today, Palestine and Israel and Syria and Egypt, in all their old Ottoman wildnesses is fascinating in more ways than one.
Kingslake is an immensely likeable writer, and he writes from an immensely appealing point of view: that of the young twentysomething traveler trotting out across the desert with a bold and shockingly careless opinion of everyone and everything he comes across.

He writes with such authenticity about such simple and realistic things that it is nearly impossible not to like him, Even when he skims uncaring through stricken populations of plagued and poor humans, and even when he looks on with only mild discomfort as his servants beat and bully and oppress on all sides and obtain him gifts and provisions at no cost from an unwilling native population, and even when he castigates, with racism oozing out of every pore, the character of every nationality he happens to fall in with, Kingslake is alive and enjoyable.

This is the unadulterated worldview of the England of his era, and it is simply fascinating, Also fascinating are the hints and snips of information which seem to carry, across time, the roots and springwellsources of today's troubles out from the past.
The descriptions of the natives who hope with such surety that their salvation will come from Europe, and who know that their lords and masters dangle from European bankaccounts like marrionettes from strings, ring particularly doomful today.
Particularly wretched are the Christians who come begging for Kingslake, a mere traveler, to step in and solve thier local problems,

A mustread for anyone who likes history, the middle east, or Churchill this was apparently one of his favorite books, Interesting to hear the memoir for it is very informal English, based on letters written home to a dear friend of a British subject defy quarantine based on rank, hear comments about tribesman in the hills of Afghanistan to be mobilized at a moment's notice.
accounts of christians and mohammadeans living uneasily in the same locales, . . the very best armchair traveling, in a time machine, I picked this book up in January, put it down after a short read, then finished it today as it was due back and was an interlibrary loan copy, i.
e. not easily acquired. I didn't want to have to check it out again, My copy was the first edition Blackwoodcopy, Since that isn't on Book Reads, I would have had to photograph it, edit it, post the picture and fill in all of the data pertinent to a newly entered book, and to be honest, I just didn't have the time or mindset to get into that, so I'm using this rest stop.


The book is considered a travel writing classic, I have to admit it didn't work for me, and it wasn't archaic language or dated ideas, If anything I would welcome that, Exploring unknown lands to English eyes, I hoped for something more insightful or poetic, I did enjoy the short chapters on Lady Hester Stanhope, a renowned traveler herself, as well as the Pyramids and the Sphinx, He mentions how you see these images all of your life, on paper, but to stand at their base and feel the rough stone makes their history and meaning finally come alive.


If you like to read travel books, then this is certainly in the canon of a "must read, ".