رحلة إلى المشرق

by Alexander William Kinglake, محمود العابدي (المترجم)

I had come, as it were, to the end of this wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and havoc of the East.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, History, Middle East, Classics, Adventure, Read For School

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1844

About the author

Alexander William Kinglake was an English travel writer and historian.

He was born near Taunton, Somerset and educated at Eton College, Cambridge. He was called to the Bar in 1837, and built up a thriving legal practice, which in 1856 he abandoned in order to devote himself to literature and public life.

His first literary venture had been Eothen; or Traces of travel brought home from the East, (London: J. Ollivier, 1844), a very popular work of Eastern travel, apparently first published anonymously, in which he described a journey he made about ten years earlier in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, together with his Eton contemporary Lord Pollington. Elliot Warburton said it evoked "the East itself in vital actual reality" and it was instantly successful. However, his magnum opus was his Invasion of the Crimea, in 8 volumes, published from 1863 to 1887 by Blackwood, Edinburgh, one of the most effective works of its class. It has been accused of being too favourable to Lord Raglan, and unduly hostile to Napoleon III, for whom the author had an extreme aversion.

The town of Kinglake in Victoria, Australia, and the adjacent national park are named after him.

A Whig, Kinglake was elected at the 1857 general election as one of the two Members of Parliament (MP) for Bridgwater, having unsuccessfully contested the seat in 1852. He was returned at next two general elections, but the result of the 1868 general election in Bridgwater was voided on petition on 26 February 1869. No by-election was held, and after a Royal Commission found that there had extensive corruption, the town was disenfranchised in 1870.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is perhaps the best book ever written about a trip by a Western European to the Middle East before 1914. Author Alexander William Kinglake does not appear to have any axes to grind and writes vividly about what the Eastern Mediterranean was like during the waning days of the ottoman Empire. Eothen is a classic and deserves to be read today for its historical perspective on how that part of the world has changed so markedly in a scant hundred years.

[Juwairiya A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 .. كُتبت كمذكرات تصف ما يراه السائح وما يشعر به .. تستحق القراءة .

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Say what you will about the Victorians, they had self-confidence up the ying-yang. When Alexander Kinglake did his tour of the Middle East in the 1830's, he was essentially a glorified backpacker - an over-refined 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 plague-stricken 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, middle-aged, deserving, accomplished, pedantic, and pains-taking governess, Europe', and comparing it unfavourably to the the wildness and freedom of the East.

In short, an utterly charming book.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eothen is a rather witty guide book, it isn't so much a travelogue in the traditional sense, it is a memoir of a series events that happened around the author with most of the focus being on the author himself and how he handled those situations...he just sat there looking the part and let his "man" deal with things.  Kinglake has quite a modern sense of humour,  he doesn't see the point of doing the standard travel book because all those places have been visited and written about before, so go read one of those books if that's what your after.  With this book you're gonna get info on how to handle yourself like a true Englishman.  


I read this book during the Coronavirus lockdown and I found it interesting the similarities to Kinglake's journey through plague ridden Egypt, the social distancing is in effect there...use a donkey to charge at people whilst yelling at them to get out of the way...and the self isolation undertaken by some.  A surprising topic first book I read during the events here.

Kinglake is a very good story teller and this book is full of little stories that draw you in easily, every now and then he gets quite comical, for example describing his old headmaster as using his very bushy eyebrows as arms to direct pupils.  There is the odd satirical comment dotted here and there,  he mentions Britain using Egypt to plant her feet in her efforts to control India.  I did wonder at times how much of this was true, did he really get lost in the desert and instead of backtracking to safety he carried on regardless?  Whether it was true or not it made for some good reading.

The book is finished off with a mini biography by Hannah Rogerson, which was a nice edition, a chance to find out more about the man, relive a couple of his best jokes and to find out that he was one of the first people to be cremated...interesting pub quiz fact if they ever happen again.

Eland has managed to pluck another forgotten classic out of history to bring to the modern reader, so kudos to them for that and thanks to them also for this review copy.

Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2020...

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is almost 200 years since William Kinglake went travelling about the Ottoman Empire on the Balkan fringes before heading to Constantinople, Smyrna, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus. It is a world that has changed irrevocably since then; however, there are elements of that world still visible in ours. This almost wasn’t a book either, Kinglake had scribbled a few notes down on the back of a map for a friend who was considering taking a year off to travel too. Seven years later he had written this book.

This is not really about the places that he travels through on his journey. It is more about the people that he meets of his travels and his experiences which were quite varied from charging across a desert alone on a camel, being in a city whose population is dropping like flies with the plague, meets with an ex-pat called Lady Hester Stanhope, that knew his mother, see the Pyramids for the first time and marvels at the Sphinx.

This is the time when there are no cars or other mechanised transport so the art of travelling is a much drawn-out process. The language is quite different from our modern phrasing, but then it was written over 150 years ago. It took me a few chapters of the book to get into his style, but when he reached the desert I found that the writing was vastly better. He is a strange character in lots of ways, he has some respect for some of the people that he meets and for others, he can be quite condescending to the people he is travelling with as companions and those that he has employed to help him. Even though some of his attitudes are very alien from a modern perspective, I did like this and I can see why it is seen as a classic of travel writing.

[فهد الفهد · Rating 1 out of 5]

رحلة إلى المشرق

لدي ضعف شديد تجاه كتب السير الذاتية وكتب الرحلات، تبدو لي ممتعة ومثيرة دوماً، ولكن هذا الكتاب كان استثناءً، لم يعجبني، لم أشعر برحلة المؤلف ولم أعشها، ربما لأنه فقير في طاقته التعبيرية والوصفية، وربما لأنني تضايقت من عجرفته وعنصريته.

على أي حال، الرحالة هو آ. و. كينغلك، رجل بريطاني قام برحلته هذه في سنة 1833 م، حيث تنقل بين الشام وفلسطين ومصر، التي كانت حينها تحت حكم الدولة العثمانية، مسجلاً لقائه مع الليدي هستر ستانهوب، وهي امرأة إنجليزية مخبولة، تعيش في دير قديم يبعد عن بيروت مسافة يوم واحد كما قال المؤلف، وقد أحسن المترجم عندما أضاف للكتاب ملحقين حول هذه السيدة وسيرتها الغريبة، ولكن للأسف لم تتم إضافة الملحقين كالعادة إلى نهاية الكتاب، وإنما أضيفا بعد الفصل الذي كتبه المؤلف، وهذا مشتت للقارئ نوعاً ما.

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Pasha now gave us a generous feast. Our promised horses were brought without much delay. I gained my loved saddle once more, and when the moon got up and touched the heights of Taurus, we were joyfully winding our way through the first of his rugged defiles.”
Excerpt from the book. Need I say more?

[Suzannah Rowntree · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Dalrymple, surely the most entertaining travel writer of recent years, cites 1830s traveller Alexander William Kinglake as one of his inspirations. Since Kinglake also roamed through the Levant, stopping at Smyrna, Cyprus, Nablus, Cairo, and Damascus, I decided to read his account of his journey. The prospect was tempting on account of being a look at travel in the Levant before the upheavals of the twentieth century, but I was a little surprised by how very entertaining it was.

It is the plague, and the dread of the plague, that divide the one people from the other. All coming and going stands forbidden by the terrors of the yellow flag. If you dare to break the laws of the quarantine, you will be tried with military haste; the court will scream out your sentence to you from a tribunal some fifty yards off; the priest, instead of gently whispering to you the sweet hopes of religion, will console you at duelling distance; and after that you will find yourself carefully shot, and carelessly buried in the ground of the lazaretto.

Armed with this dry wit, a small army of long-suffering servants, and the kind of swagger that Englishmen abroad could command in those days (which has now transferred itself to the Americans), Kinglake sets out on his journey into the Ottoman Empire. He spends an evening with the famously peculiar Lady Hester Stanhope in her ancient monastery in the Lebanon. He gets lost and almost starves on the east side of the Jordan, is told off by a Franciscan friar in Jerusalem for not joining a clerical brawl with the Greek Orthodox, sightsees in Cairo during a plague epidemic that kills half the population, and pretty much has the time of his life.

(Full review at Vintage Novels)

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed a 'classic' more.
Kinglake reminded me a surprising amount of Bill Bryson, in tone if not in verbosity.
His ending seemed abrupt -- there was a much better end-point a chapter or two previous (but I suppose it makes sense to finish your travelogue where your travels actually ended).

If you like travelogues, this is available for free ebook download on amazon.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a graceful, provocative book with some startling sentences. It is one of those books that challenges you to rethink the familiar.

I have frequently quoted his reflection on the use of middlemen vs. market bargaining to determine the value of goods.

[Michael Lipsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A trip through the middle-east in 1850, Not a travel book at all. He just described, hilariously, exactly what he saw and heard. The writing is fresh. Worth reading just for his descriptions of what people wore before Nike and Levis ruled the world.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked how earnestly excited he was to explore these places

[Faris Almaghlouth · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 رأساً 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 ولاحقاً 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 ضريحاً.

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

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 springwell-sources 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 bank-accounts 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 must-read for anyone who likes history, the middle east, or Churchill-- this was apparently one of his favorite books.

[False · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 Blackwood 1904 copy. 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."

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Text so well written that the reader gets a tactile and scented visit back in time to Colonial Middle East when British aristocracy found a welcome with all of the strata of population between Turkey and Egypt. The actual tour took place in 1834 when Alexander William Kinglake was finishing his studies. He describes the tremendous separation between Europe and Asia in his beginning chapter, and with the astounding help of his loyal hired servants journeys to places which hold much meaning for Christians, Jews and Muslims.
For much of the book, the author gives the impression that he finds his travels to be enlightening and with people he values although culturally different. However, the next to the last chapter gives the reader a peek into his genuine feeling of turning toward home and the West. His second paragraph doesn’t hold back as he says he is leaving a place where time has stood still and old ideas seem entrenched to go back to the West where there is movement and progress.

[Scott Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Victorian travel journals is an exercise that requires some practice! While Kinglake's delight in his experiences has to be found somewhere beneath his cocky colonial attitude, not only toward those from the "East" that he meets but also toward other Europeans. At times, you'd almost mistake it for satire but realize that he was being serious in his assessment. This is not a long or complicated read, so it is worth the effort. It is also important to remember that Kinglake's account opened up the East to many of his contemporaries and inevitably encouraged a greater fascination with Syria, Lebanon and the Holy Lands.

[Mumbler · Rating 4 out of 5]

hard to rate right now, at the moment of finishing, cause it tails off. the last several chapters are heavier on the insulting of the local people & rulers. lacking the charm of most of the book.

and perhaps the disconnectedness of all the episodes pays off with a lesser satisfaction at the close.

but I frequently loved it. maybe with time I will have a clearer opinion on whether or how much I hold this book dear.

[Leif · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh boy. Self-congratulatory, 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.

[Lemar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This first hand account of travel in the 1830'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 sub-culture had their own dress and customs; fascinating read, shower after recommended.

[Johnny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed only one or two chapters "The Desert" XVII and the following "Cairo and the Plague" which were very evocative of the desert its dangers the arduousness of travel by camel. Snapshots of characters also pretty good but largely a period piece of import for being first of any sense of "modern" in travel writing.

[k · Rating 2 out of 5]

Won't finish this book, got about 2/3rds through. Fun to read "topical and of-the-times" writing (it's a travelogue) from a different era, just to see the style and the horrible racism and narrowness that strikes Kinglake as totally normal, not to mention the crappy practicalities of travel (Ebola quarantines have nothing on this). Still, a bit of a bore.

[Cynthia Frazer · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is difficult to know how to pitch this, a must (ish) read book that has moments of brilliance but a little hard work at times also - I read it imagining some fascination with Hester Stanhope and am disillusioned there

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alexander William Kinglake’s travelogue Eothen (1844) is bookended by plague. It opens with a grim view from the Austrian-held 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 nineteenth-century 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 would-be 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 pre-Enlightenment 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 Kinglake’s visit to Lady Hester Stanhope in the mountains of Lebanon, where the elderly London society girl now lives a hermit’s 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 half-expected 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. Kinglake’s 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 we’ve 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 devil-may-care indifference which might stand him instead of creeds – to such one every rag that shivers in the breeze of a plague-stricken 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. Don’t 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.”

[BananaBerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Tony Ramirez · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best travel book ever written, Winston Churchill's favorite. Recently re-read.

[S]

"droll elegance"

[Campangolin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, ironic and, as the introduction says, "deliciously nasty".

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable read of the travels across the Middle East during the 1834 at the time of the plague. Loved the passion and curiosity to see the world that transcended cultural norms and fears.