We came a long way around from Algiers to "Malta and its dependencies," the little group of islands which lies between Sicily and the African coast. We have spent two days at sea, meantime, but they were rather profitable days, for when one goes capering among marvels, as we do ashore, he needs these ship days to get his impressions sorted out and filed for reference.
We were in the harbor of Valetta, Malta, when we woke this morning--a rather dull morning--and a whole felucca of boats--flotilla, I mean--had appeared in the offing to take us ashore. At least, I suppose they were in the offing-- I'm going to look that word up, by and by, in the ship dictionary, and see what it means. They have different boats in each of the places we have visited--every country preserving its native pattern. These at Malta are a sort of gondola with a piece sticking up at each end--for ornament, probably--I have been unable to figure out any use for the feature.
We leaned over the rail, watching them and admiring the boatmen while we tried to recognize the native language. The Diplomat came along and informed us that it was Arabic, mixed with Italian, the former heavily predominating. The Arabs had once occupied the island for two hundred and twenty years, he said, and left their language, their architecture, and their customs. He had been trying his Arabic on some natives who had come aboard and they could almost understand it.
The Patriarch, who had been early on deck, came up full of enthusiasm. There was a Phoenician temple in Malta which he was dying to visit. It was the first real footprint, thus far, of his favorite tribe, and though we have learned to restrain the Patriarch when he unlimbers on Phoenicians, we let him get off this time, softened, perhaps, by the thought of the ruined temple.
The Phoenicians had, of course, been the first settlers of Malta, he told us, thirty-five hundred years ago, when Rome had not been heard of and Greece was mere mythology; after which preliminary the Patriarch really got down to business.
"We are told by Sanchuniathon," he said, "in the Phoinikika, which was not only a cosmogony but a necrological diptych, translated into Greek by Philo of Byblus, with commentary by Porphyry and preserved by Eusebius in fragmentary form, that the Phoenicians laid the foundations of the world's arts, sciences, and religions, though the real character of their own faith has been but imperfectly expiscated. We are told--"