The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [33]
No matter how sluggish the pace of the dahabeah, he managed to keep busy all day long. After breakfast he joined his younger brother and sister for two hours of lessons with Bamie. She discovered that Teedie knew a great deal more than she did on most subjects. Later, “he would put on a large pair of spectacles and swing his gun over his shoulder and start on whatever small donkey was provided at the place we had stopped, and ruthlessly lope after whatever object he had in view, the donkey almost invariably crowding between any other two who might be riding together.” His habit, during these lopes, of allowing the loaded gun to bump and bounce about freely aroused considerable nervousness among his fellow hunters. Throughout the broiling afternoons, Corinne recalled, he would sit under the canopy on deck “surrounded by the brown-faced and curious sailors … and skin and stuff the products of his sport.”26 At sunset, when breezes cooled the desert, he would join the family in tours of the stupendous ruins that regularly drifted into view.
One such expedition, early in the New Year of 1873, shattered him.
In the evening we visited Harnak [sic] by moonlight. It was not beautiful only, it was grand, magnificent, and awe-inspiring. It seemed to take me back thousands of years, to the time of the Pharohs and to inspire thought which can never be spoken, a glimpse of the ineffable, of the unutterable.…27
With adolescent determination not to waste good purple prose, he repeated this entire passage, complete with ineffables and unutterables, in a letter to Aunt Annie two weeks later. Rather more characteristic of his mature humor is a postscript on Egyptian rural fashions: “I may as well mention that the dress of the inhabitants up to ten years of age is—nothing. After that they put on a shirt descended from some remote ancestor and never take it off until the day of their death.”28
The Roosevelts enjoyed their southward cruise so much that they were tempted, upon reaching the First Aswân Cataract, to continue on into the heartland of North Africa.29 But time was running out for Commissioner Roosevelt: he still had to escort his family through Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and Greece, before reporting for duty on 1 May at the Vienna Exposition. Reluctantly, he gave the order to turn downstream.
SIX DAYS LATER, after one of those sudden changes of pace and scene in which Theodore Senior delighted, the Roosevelts found themselves cantering on hired horses across the green fields of Palestine. They were accompanied on this leg of their Grand Tour by Nathaniel Thayer and August Jay, two of the young Harvard men they had met on the Nile. A pleased sense of adventure hung over the little party. Ahead of them lay a month’s exploration of the Levant, most of it on horseback. Tonight would be spent in a monastery, and most of the next few days in a Jerusalem hotel; but after that they planned to live like nomads, camping out in the wilderness.30
Toward sunset the party arrived at its destination, the Convent of Ramle, about fifteen miles inland from Jaffa. Theodore Senior had made reservations here, but the monks took one look at his women and curtly announced there was “no room.” This was not the sort of Biblical parallel he was looking for in the Holy Land, and he reacted with his usual aggressiveness. “A long talk ensued,” Teedie reported. “At last the monks said that they had rooms for the gentlemen but that ladies could not go inside the inner walls … this difficulty was also overcome in time.”31
A minor incident, perhaps, yet it haunts the imagination. Six tired women and children, two bewildered students; a gate, a darkening landscape, scowling bearded faces, and—dominating the whole scene—one determined man. Time and again Teedie was convinced, by experiences like this, that his father was all-powerful and irresistible; that forceful talk, combined with personal charm, would vanquish any opposition.
Riding on eastward the next day, Teedie began to get