ARMINIUS VAMBERY

THE EXPLORER OF ASIA

1832-1915

(INTRODUCTORY NOTE)

Arminius Vámbéry was born in Austria in 1832, and wrote his own autobiography some fifty years later in 1883. He was among the first Europeans to traverse Asia in the disguise of a dervish, or holy man. The son of poor peasants, Vámbéry was early forced to shift for himself, and endured the most rigorous privations in the pursuit of learning, for which he ardently yearned. Languages appealed to him most strongly, and at sixteen he was proficient in all the European tongues and many of the Asiatic. Always devoured by the desire to travel, "to see Far Lands," he spent his vacations from school wandering as a gypsy over his native Europe, and soon seized an opportunity of journeying to Constantinople, the key to the East. Here he imbibed that knowledge of the Oriental character and customs which enabled him later to

travel through the East in the guise of a dervish. Thus he saw the people and studied their mode of life, he learned their ideals and ambitions as no earlier European had done. He lived to be very old, and was a noted critic and professor in the great Hungarian University at Budapest at the outbreak of the great World War.

The call of the wanderlust breathes from the pages of Vámbéry's memoirs. He possessed to a high degree that ambition to see strange sights, to travel in distant countries, which lives in the heart of every man and leaps up in longing at the sight of some old tramp steamer or quaint garbed foreigner, replete with the charm of the unknown and the lure of the mysterious. Tales of adventure find always an eager audience and Vámbéry's adventures, with danger, unique incidents and old legends, breathe an exotic scent, which entrances the imagination and sends it wandering among the mazes of a veritable Arabian Nights. But there is another appeal in the memoirs of this European dervish. He was a philosopher, a kindly human philosopher; and his knowledge of the hearts of the strange races among whom he lived surpassed even his interest in their customs. His wide culture and extensive travel gave him unusual opportunities for studying and valuing the emotions

and thoughts of men, and his judgments and reflections on the Asiatic character and the eternal brotherhood of man are of lasting interest and value.

LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF VAMBERY

I

WHEN my father died in 1832 I was but a few months old. My mother was poor, very poor indeed. By marrying again, however, she fondly hoped she might be enabled to give her helpless and fatherless orphans a better bringing up. But in this expectation she was sadly mistaken. Our stepfather, although a very excellent man, did but very little towards relieving the pressing needs of our small household. In due time, too, our family circle got fresh additions; the number of the little ones who stood in need of food and clothing was increasing. The consequence was that our parents, in their solicitude for the welfare of the smaller children, turned the older ones adrift to seek the best way they could their own livelihood as soon as they were supposed to have attained an age ripe enough to take care of themselves.

My turn came when twelve years old. My mother then thought I had reached a period of my life when I ought to look after myself. Although I had been afflicted since my birth with a lameness from which I began to suffer when three years old, and which compelled me to carry a crutch under my left arm up to the time my mother declared me to be of mature age, I was yet, on the whole, a tolerably hearty and healthy boy. The simple fare, often barely sufficient to still the cravings of hunger, the exceedingly scanty clothing allowed to me, and my want of familiarity with even the meanest comforts of life had, already, at this early stage of my life, hardened my body, and inured it to the most adverse climatic conditions.

I had then been attending school for about three years; and as my teachers were lavish in their praises of my extraordinary memory, enabling me to learn by heart, with great ease, almost anything, even passages in Latin which I did not understand at all, I thought of going on with the pursuit of my studies, in order to become a physician or