‘Africa’ has not a very taking sound about it. When I told my friends and acquaintances that I was going to Africa, they had visions of lions and snakes, and jungles and swamps, and they insisted on my taking with me an armoury of guns and rifles, and a pharmacy of drugs and antidotes. I am going, however, to keep as much out of the track of the lions as possible; at least, I shall avoid the lions that have to be attacked with firearms, but the lions that you attack with a visiting-card I certainly hope I shall encounter. I have a beautiful letter of introduction to the reigning sovereign of Morocco, which I hope to present to him in his imperial palace (Dar Dabiba) when I go to Fez-al-jadeed and Fez-al-baleed, and I am assured that he will give me a royal reception, and trot out his dancing dervishes and his snake charmers for my edification. I have also a letter of introduction to a great Moorish General, a direct descendant of Othello, who will provide me with an escort of soldiers when I go to Wazan, which is a long way up country, and where I am bound to go, as I have a little business with the Grand Shereef, who resides there. I shall be obliged to have an escort, because the people of that district are so fanatical that there is no knowing what they might do to me. Mogador, Tetuan, and Tangiers are also on my visiting list, so that you may expect a great deal of Oriental imagery and barbaric splendour in these pages. In Algeria I shall sojourn awhile also, and I may pay a flying visit to Carthage, where I am desirous of making a few inquiries with regard to the career of a young lady named Salammbo. This is my programme as it is at present shaped in my mind’s eye, Horatio. Whether I shall be enabled to carry it out, of course, depends on circumstances; but I shall get over a good deal of the ground mentioned, and I have no doubt I shall see some very wonderful things, and meet with many exciting adventures.

At present the Fates have brought me no further than Marseilles; but even the short distance from the capital of France to the Mediterranean seaport was not accomplished without a struggle. We were unable in Paris to secure seats in the ‘train of luxury’ one January night, but I was told there was another train at 7.15 which would do the journey to Marseilles in fifteen hours twenty-seven minutes by the time-table. The platform was crowded with dukes and duchesses with their footmen, and ladies’ maids and lap-dogs, who, like myself, had not been able to get seats in the ‘train de luxe,’ and who were going by the 7.15, which was a first-class express with sleeping-cars, and all that we should miss would be the restaurant and the smoking-saloon. I brightened up at this information, and we called several porters to take our luggage and secure us a berth in the sleeping-car. The porters looked at us as though we had asked for a bit of the sun to put in our pockets to keep our hands warm. ‘A berth in the sleeping-car, monsieur!’ exclaimed the first porter who recovered his breath. ‘Ha, ha! monsieur is joking; why, they are all booked a week in advance to Marseilles at this season of the year.’ ‘Well, then,’ I said savagely, ‘at least find us two corner seats in a smoking-carriage.’ ‘I will try, monsieur,’ replied the porter, and away he sped. In a few minutes he returned, shrugged his shoulders apologetically, and delivered himself of the following elegant sentence: ‘It touches me to the heart, and causes me profound sorrow, to have to inform monsieur that every corner seat is taken.’

It was true. I had heard a good deal about the fight for seats in the Marseilles express, but I realized it for the first time then. We were dragged up the train and down the train; we got on this step and on that, and peered into compartment after compartment. It was the same tale everywhere. Every coach was jammed as full as a cattle truck. At last there was a crowd of about fifty passengers for Marseilles all clamouring for seats, and there was not a single vacant place. Then the Chef de Gare most condescendingly informed me that he would put on another carriage. We felt deeply grateful. Having paid £4 4s. for a seat, we felt that the company was placing us under a life-long obligation by giving us one for our money. So we bowed to the ground to the station-master, and begged him to accept the assurance of our most distinguished consideration. He accepted it. Then we offered handfuls of francs to the railway porters, and these were also accepted. In return for our largesse, we told them we required them, when the extra carriage was joined on, to hold the crowd back until we had jumped in and secured the corners. When that extra carriage came, it was Waterloo all over again. But the arms of England (mine and Albert Edward’s) were finally victorious, and we beat back four Frenchmen, a Russian, a German, two Poles, a couple of Arabs, and a Greek, and captured two corners. Directly we were seated the crowd poured in upon us, and at 7.15 we steamed out of the station—eight in the compartment, and about fourteen portmanteaux, nine hat-boxes, eight bundles of rugs, and ten parcels piled up to the ceiling on the top of us. It was an hour before we had sorted ourselves, and got the hand luggage packed away in the nets above and under the seats. By this time we were stifling. Both the windows were shut, the foot-warmers were burning hot, and the place was the Black Hole of Calcutta multiplied by eight. Albert Edward requested the permission of our fellow travellers to have the window a little way down, as we were nearly asphyxiated. Albert Edward asked the French passengers in French, the Germans in German, the Arabs in Arabic, and the Russians in Russian; and they all admired his linguistic attainments, but absolutely declined to allow the windows to be opened one inch, or for one second. They inquired in their various languages if he desired their immediate death. He replied that he did not; but that was the catastrophe he wished to avoid for me. I joined in gently but firmly, and brilliantly distinguished myself in all the languages except the Russian. But the enemy remained immovable.

Suddenly Albert Edward had an idea. His German-Arab features relaxed into an expression of sardonic glee. When everybody was dropping off to sleep he put it into execution. He struck a whole box of Vesuvians, one after the other. There was a simultaneous sneeze, six sleepers leapt to their feet coughing and gesticulating and swearing, and in an instant both windows were pulled down with a bang, and the fresh, pure air of heaven rushed into the black hole.

Over the agonies of that long night of intermittent suffocation I draw a partial veil. Now and again by some violent expedient, such as fancying we heard an accident, or pretending that we had run over a man, or that Mount Vesuvius in a state of eruption was distinctly visible on our left, we succeeded in getting a window down for a minute or two; but from 7.15 p.m. until 10.42 a.m. we were mercilessly smashed and stifled in a compartment which was not a first-class carriage, but a tin of compressed humanity.

At a little after eight o’clock in the morning we reached Avignon, and here we had five minutes for refreshment. I should like to have been an artist, to have made a sketch of the station as it appeared when the passengers alighted and dashed wildly at a little table set out with basins of hot coffee and rolls of bread a yard long. The ladies looked lovely, as they always do, but the circumstances were trying. Complexions are not at their best, nor is the coiffure at its apogee of excellence, when you have been sitting all night long in your clothes in a hermetically sealed railway-carriage. And the dirt and grime of travel will stain the most delicate cheek, and the flying grit of the engine will lodge occasionally on the most aristocratic nose, and get into the most lustrous and beautiful eyes. I say it without disrespect, but we were a seedy, pallid, untidy and unkempt lot that turned out on the platform of Avignon in the morning sunlight, and scalded our throats with coffee out of pudding-basins, and fought our way through the crowd at the buffet with the three feet rolls that were at once weapons of attack and defence. I was much interested in the duchesses en deshabille, also in the footmen in chimney-pot hats, and in the ladies’ maids with smashed bonnets, who flew up and down the platform, vainly trying to arrange their mistresses’ hair, and put them a little to rights, with a bowl of hot coffee in one hand, and a roll in the other. One clever maid put her coffee on the platform, and held her roll between her teeth, while with her two hands she dexterously arranged her lady’s back hair in an ornamental and chaste design, and stabbed it with hairpins at the rate of ten a second.

But the most charming feature of that five minutes’ wait was to me the way in which the dukes and earls and millionaires from the coupÉs and the sleeping-cars were deprived of their coffee and roll by their obedience to the will of their wives. A duchess said to her husband: ‘John, I think Fido wants a walk.’ And with her own fair hands she dragged a big black poodle from under the seat, and gave him to the duke. The duke accepted Fido without a murmur, and led him up and down the platform by his chain for the whole five minutes. Another lady handed her husband a little black-and-tan terrier to be exercised in a similar manner. Before the bell rang I counted seven husbands all walking their wives’ pet dogs up and down the platform, and some even went outside the station with the dogs in order that the little dears might not fancy themselves debarred by surrounding circumstances from any of the privileges of the usual morning run at home.

All things come to an end in this world, and so did our journey to Marseilles, which I have related to show that the troubles of African explorers often begin much nearer home; but it is a wonder we didn’t come to an end first. When, however, at noon I lounged on the harbour quays, amid such a wild, dark, picturesque crowd as few other European towns could produce, I was amply compensated for all my trials on the road. I never saw such a collection of flashing eyes and coal-black hair and sunburnt faces in my life. There were Italians and Spaniards and Greeks, and all the fierce and dusky sons of the Levant; there were Turks and Arabs and Egyptians and Syrians and African blacks, and the natives added to the picturesqueness of the crowd with their swarthy faces, fierce eyes, and splendid hair; and I stood with the motley crowd and lolled with my back against the wall, sunning myself as they did, and feeling beautifully Bohemian and lamentably lazy. It was such a treat, after the harsh travelling of the North, to find one’s self wooed by the warm breeze and kissed by the burning sun, that I couldn’t have taken my hands out of my pockets and left off lolling against that south wall if the Archbishop of Canterbury, or any other of my most intimate friends, had come by. For a whole two hours did I and Albert Edward loll about and frizzle and shut one eye, like dogs going to sleep, but I kept my other eye open wide enough to take a few observations, and make a note of them.

The Eastern custom of standing in a circle largely prevailed with the crowd of idlers. Here was a group of Greeks in full costume in a circle; there a group of Italians in a circle. The Marseilles sailors and labourers, and the Marseilles old ladies and the Marseilles young ladies, ‘circled’ also; they all stood and screamed at each other, and shouted at the top of their voices (this is conversation in Marseilles), but no one ever broke the circle.

The groups and the crowds of swarthy sons and daughters of the South were not exactly the sort of groups and crowds one would like to be alone in, with the Bank of England in one’s pockets. I should say one might have manned a dozen pirate ships at any one quay in five minutes. Knives were worn handy, and there was a flash of steel more than once when argument became high. But for all that the men and women themselves wore a good deal of common jewellery; watch-chains by the score I counted across the woollen waistcoats of the sailors, and most of the men had heavy earrings in their ears. The scarlet sashes worn round the waists, the blue and green plush trousers, and the bright orange and red handkerchiefs twisted over the heads of some of the women, turban fashion, imparted to portions of the crowd an operatic look, and I expected every minute to hear them commence a chorus.

I had my boots blacked on the Quay du Port, and a marvellous boy in rags performed the office. Murillo might have been tempted to come out of his grave to paint him. When everything else fails, and I am quite tired of respectable life, I shall come to Marseilles, and spend the rest of my days in lolling on the quay and basking in the sun.

Yet perhaps I had better wait before I finally make up my mind on the subject of Marseilles, for down the harbour on my right there lies at anchor the ship which is to carry me across the blue Mediterranean to the African shore. And who knows?—I might like Algiers better.