When the diary resumes on 1 May, after its eventful break, it is to record that Doughty is moving on from Naples to the nearby resort of Castagneto, and another small guesthouse. ‘A worthy family – good entertainment,’ he notes – and, more importantly, a place where he could be alone with his books.
In his manner, he was still the archetypal crusty English gentleman abroad, complaining in his diary and no doubt to his host about the water, the weather and the scenery – but it was agreeable enough for him to spend some four months there, concentrating on his books and enjoying the home comforts of the lodging house. He left a case and a portmanteau of books with his landlord, Signor Cavalieri, and his family, to be picked up on his way home – which, he now suggested for the first time, might be after another two or three years.
It marks a significant change in his travelling: Castagneto is the last place at which the diary mentions either books or studies until Doughty embarked on his Arabic lessons in Damascus three years later. Whatever his plans had been when he left England, from now on he devoted more time to the places he was visiting, and to the various languages with which he came into contact. The focus of his attention had shifted. For the rest of his travels he is more gypsy – his own word – than travelling scholar, more an observer of the world around him than a student poring over his books.
From Castagneto he returned to Vesuvius, presumably to see the after-effects of the eruption, and then, after a couple of days’ wanderings among the ruins of Pompeii, he took the ferry to Sicily. It was an evening journey, the sea calm, ‘the night starry but vaporous, the eye looking … into a depth or thickness of stars …’ Alone on the deck, as the ferry left its luminous trail across the dark sea, he could relax.
It was, predictably, not the people of Sicily who had attracted him – ‘the lower sort dull, unintelligent, and half savage manners’ – but the volcano. After his experiences on Vesuvius, Doughty wanted to see Etna, which was also rumbling ominously.
It was a starry, moonlit night, with a chill wind blowing clouds of smoke down from the volcano upon Doughty and his guide as they struggled up towards the crater, their breath catching with the reek of sulphur. For someone who had already witnessed the flaming rocks and molten lava of Vesuvius, it must have been a terrifying experience. There were occasional muffled explosions deep within the mountain, and sudden belches of smoke and gas from the summit, while a layer of new-fallen sand which covered everything around the crater seemed to suggest that a new eruption was imminent – but the same detachment which left Doughty immune to the beauty of many of the places through which he passed quashed any fear for his own safety, leaving him as calm and aloof as if he had been in a laboratory, rather than on the summit of a rumbling volcano.
Edge of crater a soft, moist mould, wet with sulphurous vapours which rise everywhere. Saw no yellow colour, or gathering of sulphur, but everywhere the like brown mould; the walls of the crater of the same – no ribs of rocks, nor horrible rendings as at present in Vesuvius, but terraced and easy to be descended into on a cord …
The last temptation, that of being lowered into the smoking crater of a rumbling volcano, he resisted – but he set off down the mountainside calmly and at his own pace. On the way, indeed, he stopped to admire the dawn, sketching the edge of the sun and its ‘deep ruddy and heavenly hues’ as it peeped above the horizon out at sea – and, as the sun rose, so another Doughty, a sensitive, appreciative observer, took over.
Many miles of thick white clouds, much like some Arctic sea with towering icebergs – a strange spectacle … Opposite the arising sun, the immense shadow of the mountain, as it were another Etna raised into the air in a perfect sharpened pyramid, presently with the increasing light seemed to spread along the ground,
he wrote, finishing his sketch. That image of the volcano’s shadow stayed with him for over fifty years, until, in the revised edition of Mansoul, he described ‘a summer night of stars’, and a journey up the mountainside. The plan, he says, was to
reach, ere day, his cragged utmost crest,
And from those horrid cliffs, surview far out
Trinacria, and great Italia’s mighty foot,
And Etna’s immense shadow on the Dawn-mist
That sunrising should cast … 12
The journey downhill took him some four hours, including stops to inspect an old smoking fissure in the mountainside near the foot of the cone, and then the Roman ruins of the Torre del Filosofo.
The circular foundations remain – the bottom of a pillar, or stonework cemented in the midst of the passage of so many centuries – not buried under falling sand, but remains as at the first!!! Desert of black sand and water – 4 or 5 poor plants. The way all a waste of sand and lavas – with many wild craters on either hand …
Like the rest of the notebook, they are, of course, merely rough jottings. But, especially when compared with the bland, conventional judgements Doughty makes about towns and architecture, it is impossible to miss the enthusiasm with which he turns to the immensity either of time or of open spaces – the huge shadow of Etna or the centuries of history of the stone foundations. As a writer and as a traveller, his mental horizons are vast, his sense of time almost geological in its scope. It is the sight of human creativity and endeavour set against a background of desolation which suddenly brings his imagination to life.
His enthusiasm is sparked by ruins and remains, by the thought that buildings – or, for that matter, languages or peoples – may still bear some relation to the way they were hundreds of years ago. It is a conventional enough romantic response – half a century before, Shelley had described how ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert’ – all that remained of the magnificent statue of the proud King Ozymandias. Had Doughty been the ‘traveller from an antique land’ in Shelley’s poem, his description of the statue might have stressed the same sense of hubris in the dead king, and the same all-pervading bleakness in the landscape. But there is nothing to suggest that Doughty had ever paid any attention to Shelley or any other romantic writers; this is his own emotional response. Conventional as it may be, it is one of the first signs of genuine interest or involvement in his travelling.
In his observation of the people whom he met, his broader judgements and generalizations are often almost comical in their smug dismissiveness. But occasionally, his notes pick out the minutiae of habits or behaviour with a precision that can bring individuals to life like the detail of a Brueghel painting. ‘The countryman’s salutation “Benedici”, their feet in sandals or unshod. The Sicilian curiously daubed carts, with saints and Bible stories. The Sicilians ride on a pack saddle without stirrups (staffe).’ The eye roves over the peasants as they go by, registering specific points apparently at random, seeming to note their friendliness and devout Christianity almost in passing. But each individual item is significant – the religious greeting, the biblical paintings on their wagons, their humble way of travelling around. And while Doughty determinedly remains an outsider – the carts are ‘curiously’ daubed – the pedantic little Italian translation shows how his appreciation of the people will grow through his observations, and also through an understanding of their language. It was the same painstaking, word-by-word linguistic technique which had led him to pore over Latin and Anglo-Saxon grammars in the Bodleian, and which would later see him quizzing his Arab companions about the exact distinctions between different Arabic expressions.
By now the winter was drawing in, the weather ‘rough and uncertain’, and Doughty was giving up hope of finding suitable accommodation on the island to see him through the winter. His initial plan had been to take a passage to Spain, but, failing to find a direct service, he decided to explore Malta instead, travelling by boat to Syracuse, where he would join the ferry for Valetta. For a gentleman traveller, the winter storms were a nuisance; for the impoverished local fishermen, they could be disastrous. ‘Took up two fishermen and a boy whose boat was overturned after a storm of rain and wind one hour before. They were sitting in their boat which was full of water ten miles from the shore. Syracuse at 3.30 p.m.…’
Once