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"On matters of religion and philosophy he was fond, too, of discoursing. There I could argue with him and hold my own, for he was not really profound; and always at the bottom of his materialistic professions I found a groundwork of belief in the supernatural which refused to face thought's ultimate conclusions. I came at last to look upon him as less dangerous than he seemed, and even to be in certain aspects of his mind, a 'sheep in wolf's clothing.' The clothing, however, was a very complete disguise, and as I have said he was not a man to play with, sitting alone with him far into the night, especially in such an atmosphere as Buenos Aires then could boast, when men were shot almost nightly in the streets. Burton was a grim being to be with at the end of his second bottle with a gaucho's navaja handy to his hand.
"His visit to the Pampas ended tamely enough in his crossing it with 'The Claimant,' the two inside the ordinary diligence, to Mendoza and thence on mules to the Pacific. As to Aconcagua' (he always insisted that the mountain should be pronounced with an accent on the last syllable) we heard no more of it, after the appearance of a final paragraph in the Buenos Aires 'Standard' making fun of it and him. 'The great traveller Burton, it is said, has just completed his final preparations for his exploration of the Pampas and Andes. Among his latest acquisitions with this object are, we understand, a small field-piece to be mounted on the roof of the diligence in which he proposes to travel and a few torpedoes for use in crossing rivers.'
"The Buenos Aires 'Standard' of those days was the creation of a cheerful and irresponsible Irishman named Mulhall, to whose office I used now and then to go for a quarter of an hour's gossip about local matters, when he would ask me to lend him a hand with his 'copy' and turn a 'paragraph.' I am not sure that the paragraph just quoted was not one of mine. Mulhall afterwards rose to eminence in the world as a statistician, to the surprise, I imagine, of everyone who in 1868 knew him at Buenos Aires.
"Such is my personal recollection of Burton when he must have been forty-eight years old as I was twenty-eight. He seemed to me then already a broken man, physically, nor did he impress me very strongly on his intellectual side. For that reason, perhaps, I have never been able to rate him as highly as have done most of his contemporaries, the friends who knew him. I am aware that I saw him at his worst, but from a literary point of view, too, he seems to me second-rate. His prose style is certainly of a poor order, and his verse as bad. As an oriental linguist he was no doubt great, and in his youth he had powers of simulating Eastern character in various disguises. His face was one that lent itself to this, for it had little of the European, and there must certainly have been a cross in his blood, gipsy or other. At the same time in his talks with me, and also in his books, he showed little true sympathy with the Arabs he had come to know so well. He would at any time, I am sure, have willingly betrayed then to further English, or his own professional interests. His published accounts of Arabia and the Arabs are neither sympathetic not true. His 'Pilgimage to Medina' is largely made up with literary padding, and as a narrative reads to me insincere. It certainly exaggerates the difficulty of the undertaking which in those days was comparatively easy to anyone who would profess Islam, even without possessing any great knowledge of Eastern tongues. At Damascus, when I was there in 1878, he had left a poor reputation, having managed to get into hot water with every native class - Turk, Arab, Syrian, Christian and Moslem alike - though this I believe was greatly his wife's fault. She was indeed a very foolish woman, and did him at least as much harm in his career as good. Her published Life of him, however, which has the ring of a true wife's devotion, redeems her in my eyes, and it is a fine trait in his character that he should have borne with her absurdities for the sake of her love so long."
My Diaries. Being a personal narrative of events 1888-1914. By William Scawen Blunt
LONDON Martin Secker 1919 & 1920
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