THE ROAD TO STAMBOUL
Wasso Mikali was a very wise man. He questioned Nikka closely
concerning our situation, and this was his verdict:
"When you fight with thieves you must use thieves' tricks. You did
right to come to me. Now I will secure fitting garments for you, my
sister's son, and for your Amerikansky friend, Jakka. For him also I
will brew a dye of walnut bark and chestnut leaves that will make him
as dark as our people, so that men will not turn and stare at him on
the road.
"After that I think we had best go away from this place as soon as
possible. You have traveled rapidly and shaken off your enemies'
pursuit. It is well to take every advantage of an opportunity.
Moreover, we must go across the Rhodopes to the place where the tribe
have hidden some horses we got from a Roumanian boyar. We will
collect the horses, together with some of my young men who can handle
a knife, and go on to Stamboul. All men go to Stamboul, and who will
notice a Tzigane band?"
"But it was not my thought that you should abandon the affairs of the
tribe, and come and fight with me," remonstrated Nikka.
"Are you not the son of my sister?" rejoined the old Gypsy. "If you
had not elected to go to Buda with your violin would you not be chief
of the band? Do I not stand in your place? Well, then, light of my
eyes, we will do for you all that we may."
And he produced a battered silver tobacco box, and rolled himself a
cigarette, sitting back on his haunches with the lithe grace of a
cat. Nikka flung me a proud glance as he translated the pledge.
"It's all right," I admitted with due humility. "And I was all
wrong, but I didn't know the Middle Ages were still with us."
Nikka laughingly repeated my remark, and his uncle's twinkling eyes
and mocking smile conveyed his retort before it was translated:
"Say to my young friend Jakka that if a tribe cannot stand by their
own then these days are worse than the old times."
With that he left us, and Nikka and I secured another hour's sleep.
When he returned he was accompanied by a younger edition of himself,
who carried two bundles which were disclosed as complete suits of
Tzigane dress. He, himself, carried a pot of warm, brown liquid, and
he proceeded to apply the stain to me with a small paintbrush. Hair,
mustache, face and body were darkened to a mellow brown. The stuff
dried quickly, and I was soon able to pull on the strange garments,
which Nikka showed me how to adjust and fasten.
I could not help laughing at my reflection in the mirror of the cheap
French bureau de toilette. The tight trousers, the short jacket and
the big turban increased my height, and the gaudy colors of turban
and waist-sash gave me a bizarre appearance that was startlingly
unfamiliar. I felt uncomfortable, as though I had dressed for a
fancy-dress ball, and overdone the part. But there was none of this
effect in Nikka's get-up. With the donning of his Gypsy costume he
discarded his last visible link with the West. He looked the Gypsy,
the Oriental, a kingly vagabond.
"You belong," I said. "But I feel like an imposter."
"You'll grow used to it," he answered, folding in the ends of his
sash. "Did they give you a knife?" I exhibited the horn-handled,
eight-inch blade, with its sheath hooked to a leather belt that
encircled my waist beneath the sash. "Good! Got your automatic and
spare clips?"
"And these clothes?"
I pointed to the civilized garments we had discarded.
"Kostabidjian will send them on to Constantinople in a few days." He
sighed. "Personally, Jack, I don't care if I never wear them again.
I can earn a thousand dollars an hour with my fiddle, but what's it
worth compared with this? Rawhide on your feet that flexes with your
soles; clothing that covers you, but doesn't bind; and the open road
ahead! Civilization is a fraud, Jack. I was a fool ever to quit the
Gypsy life.'
"Well, you're back in it again," I replied, "and perhaps you'll be
feeling you were a fool to return to it. I know I feel like a fool.
Let's go."
It was still dark when we left the house. Kostabidjian and his
servant were awaiting us in the courtyard. They had saddled two
horses, and a mule was loaded with bulky packs, food, and blankets,
tarpaulins and several cooking utensils. The Armenian kept himself
in the background. He seemed in deadly fear of Wasso Mikali, who
treated him as though he was a cur to be kicked into the gutter if he
interfered. And indeed, there was something singularly imposing
about the old Tzigane, who strode around with the air of one used to
taking as he desired and giving as he pleased.
But just as we were leaving, the dumb servant having swung open the
outer door, Kostabidjian mustered sufficient courage to press to
Nikka's side.
"Everything was satisfactory?" he inquired timidly. "I have served--"
"Well enough," returned Nikka, swinging into the saddle of one of the
horses, "except that you talk too much. Guard your tongue if you
would keep it. Your servant there--"
He shrugged significantly. Even by the starlight I could see the
pallor that blanched the Armenian's face. He took the threat in
sober earnest.
"You shall have no cause to blame! All shall be as you wish. I will
remit the charges for the last distribution. Take your horse,
Monseigneur, both horses--the mule! Take all!"
Nikka gave him a single look, and he subsided.
"Heidi, Jakka!" called Wasso Mikali.
"Mount, Jack," added Nikka. "The other horse is for you. We must
hasten. My uncle does not like to be seen entering or leaving the
town."
We rode out in single-file, first Wasso Mikali, then Nikka, then
myself, last the young Tzigane, leading the pack-mule. The Gypsies
set a pace that made the horses trot to keep up with them, a long,
slack-kneed shamble, ungainly in appearance, but tremendously
effective. By sunrise we had left the town behind the first
mountain-ridge, and were heading north towards the waste of mountains
that fringed the Bulgarian frontier. Hour after hour we plodded
along. More than once I suggested a rest, for I knew our escorts had
been afoot all night. But they would not hear of it. Neither would
they consent to sharing the horses with us turn-about, and in this
Nikka upheld them.
"Our feet are soft," he pointed out. "We could never maintain such a
speed, and it is best to put as long a distance as possible between
us and Seres, lest our trailers should pick up the scent."
During the early part of the day we passed frequent villages,
melancholy collections of hovels that had been scorched by the awful
visitation of wars the Balkans had known for a decade. But in the
afternoon we departed from the main road, and struck off across the
hills. Occasionally we saw farmhouses or sheepfolds, but when night
came we made camp in a lonely ravine with the stars for roof. There
was not a light on the horizon, not even the barking of dogs to
indicate a human habitation.
The next day it was practically the same. The trail we followed was
a mere trace that sometimes disappeared. Toward evening we entered a
vast forest, and finally halted on the banks of a stream where a
campfire blazed. Against the flames showed gaunt, turbanned figures.
"Are these our friends?" I asked.
"They are Pomaks," said Nikka.
He spat contemptuously.
"What--"
"Moslems! Swine!"
While Wasso Mikali and the young Tzigane, whose name was Sacha, made
the fire under a bowlder, Nikka and I led our tired animals down to
the stream to drink. Several of the Pomaks, dirty, shifty-eyed
fellows in the same gaudy raiment that the Tziganes affected, lounged
up to us. One of them stepped in Nikka's path, and Nikka promptly
kicked him. The man turned like a flash, his knife out, and Nikka
dropped the bridle he was holding, and closed with him. Two of the
Pomaks jumped for me, knives wheeling.
I did what I had done in the fight in the Gunroom, hit out with my
fists. The first man I knocked into the water, and the second yelled
for help, circling me cautiously the while. Nikka, after one click
of blades, stabbed his man in the shoulder, and we stood back to
back, half a dozen Pomaks pelting up from their fire.
"Wait," said Nikka, as I drew my automatic.
There was a scurry in the shadows, and Wasso Mikali thrust his way
into the group surrounding us. He said nothing, but stood there
where they could see him in the firelight, and they muttered together
and slunk away, the man Nikka had wounded clutching his bloody arm.
"What is your uncle? A justice of the peace?" I inquired facetiously.
"He is Wasso Mikali," answered Nikka, wiping his knife-blade on the
grass. "Now I feel better, Jack. It is still the same. The Pomak
curs crawl to heel when the Gypsy speaks. I wondered if it could be
just as in my boyhood, after all that has happened in the world."
"If you ask me," I returned, "I don't believe anything has happened
in this world of yours."
"Much has happened. But the Gypsy is always the same--and so
likewise, it seems, is the Pomak. God, but it felt good to kick that
pig!"
I regarded my friend with a recurrence of that amazement which he had
stirred in me several times before. The quiet, self-contained
musician, the artist, the efficient subaltern of the Foreign Legion,
the cultured man-about-town had been replaced by an arrogant forest
princeling, savagely contemptuous of all but his own kind.
The Pomaks gave us a wide birth, and early as we were afoot in the
morning, they were off before us; but we heard from them again. We
were threading a forest defile, where the pine-trees grew thick to
the cliff edges, when we heard a shout overhead, I looked up at a
stocky man in a brown uniform, with a round fur cap, emblazoned with
a rampant lion. He held a rifle in his hands.
"A Bulgarian forester," muttered Nikka.
Wasso Mikali climbed up to the forester's perch, and held a brief
conversation with him, at the conclusion of which he dug something
bright out of his sash and dropped it in the forester's hand. Then
he slid down into the ravine again, and we resumed our journey. The
Pomaks had complained to the forester that we were smuggling
rose-water essence, but he readily admitted that we were going the
wrong way to be handling such a traffic. The lefa piece in his hand
was to salve his conscience for not reporting the stabbing of the
Pomak by Nikka.
As we progressed that day the mountains became wilder and more
barren. Once we saw a lumber-camp on the lower slope of a ridge we
traversed. Again, in the early afternoon, I saw what I took to be a
castle perched atop of a huge crag miles away across a tumbled mass
of peaks. But Nikka explained that it was one of those fortified
monasteries which kept the fires of learning alight during the gloomy
centuries when the Turk's rule ran as far as the Danube.
The path we followed was eccentric in the extreme. In fact, there
was no path. We climbed a succession of gullies and ravines opening
out of one another, and at dusk emerged upon a sheltered valley,
buried deep between precipitous slopes draped in a virgin covering of
conifers, chestnut and beech. A little rivulet foamed down the
middle, dammed at the foot by a crude barrier of rocks. Horses and
mules and a few sheep and goats grazed on the banks. Against the
mountain-wall on either side were built a number of rough
log-shelters, part houses, part caves. Children, naked for the most
part, played about. Women were washing in the brook or tending
several open fires. A dozen men were lying or sitting on the ground.
"They don't seem surprised to see us," I commented to Nikka, whose
brooding eyes were drinking in the picture.
"They know we must be friends," he answered. "Else the lookouts down
the path would have signaled them we were coming--and we should not
have come," he added with a flitting smile.
"Do you know this place?"
"As well as--how shall I put it?--As well as Hugh knows Castle
Chesby. No, I was not born here. My mother lay on the floor-boards
of a caravan-cart in the Bukowina. My father was looking for likely
ponies to trade with Bulgarian officers. But they brought me back
here, and here I grew to boyhood. Do you see that first hovel on
this bank? That was where I was taught to fiddle. And there--"
Wasso Mikali, striding in front of us, raised his voice in a great
shout, and the men by the houses jumped to their feet and crowded
toward us. The old Gypsy added something in which Nikka's name was
repeated two or three times, and they cried out in astonishment. In
the next moment they were swarming around us, and sinewy hands were
clasping ours, rows of white teeth were gleaming in welcoming smiles,
and Nikka was being greeted with a heart-warming mixture of affection
and respect.
Once they discovered I could not talk their language they let me
alone, but Nikka they plied with questions until the women summoned
us to the fires for the evening meal. Their attitude toward him was
extraordinary. He was one of themselves--several were his cousins,
most of them were related to him in some remote degree of
consanguinity; he had lived amongst them for years. Yet to them, as
to the rest of the world, he was also the great master, the violinist
who could charm multitudes, upon whose bounty, too, they and others
like them had been sustained in periods of want.
While the women served us with stew and bread, Nikka introduced me to
them, and they promptly manifested a naïve interest in my person and
career. They all called me Jakka. They were amazed to learn that I
made my living by drawing plans of houses for people. Who, they
inquired with frank disbelief, needed to have somebody draw for him
the plan of his house? It was absurd. You simply took logs and
boards or bricks and stone, if you were in a city, and you put them
together. They even insisted upon dragging me away from the fire to
the nearest house to illustrate what they meant. They were
determined to convince me how superfluous was my profession.
I, in my turn, was surprised by the idyllic security of this retired
valley, and I asked them, through Nikka, if it had never been
penetrated even in wartime. No, they replied, only once a party of
Franks in pot-hats--by which, it seemed, they meant Germans--had come
upon it by accident, and of the Franks not one had escaped. Of
course, occasional attempts had been made to drive them out by other
outlaw bands; but none had ever succeeded, in consequence of the
vigilance of their watch and the tortuous approach through a network
of defiles.
Their community persisted in defiance of civilization, an anomalous
relic of the stone age, of nomad barbarism; and they assured me that
here and there all over the Balkans other similar Gypsy communities
still held out, in spite of the havoc of destruction wrought by the
War.
We remained in the valley for one day, just long enough for Wasso
Mikali to pick the six men he intended to take with him, select
horseflesh for ostensible trading purposes, and made the necessary
arrangements for leaving the tribe so long without his guidance. It
interested me that he appointed as sub-chief his wife, a wrinkled old
beldame, who boasted a complete mouthful of yellowed teeth and rolled
cigarettes with one hand. And it was significant of the conditions
under which they lived that we stole away by twilight, so that our
exit might not be observed by chance spies of rival bands, who would
thus learn of the reduction of their garrison.
Two days' journey to the east carried us into the colorful stream of
traffic on a main-traveled highway. Caravans of pack-ponies jingled
along. Bands of itinerant Gypsies like ourselves; camel trains,
endless processions of ox-carts, and very rarely, an automobile or a
fiacre, moved in both direction. Monks from the mountain monasteries
looked askance at Pomak and Tzigane. The Balkan races in their
varied garb jangled and wrangled by. But not too close to the Greek
frontier we swerved into a byway, and gave the custom houses a safe
margin.
After that it was the same story for more than a week. True, when we
abandoned the mountains and dipped into the rolling plains of Thrace,
we left behind us the trappings of barbarism. But the air we
breathed and the scenes that unrolled before us belonged to the
Orient. We had occasional minor adventures, fights with keepers of
roadside khans, disputes with other parties and attempts to steal our
horses. But Wasso Mikali was a prince of the road. He met stealth
with guile, force with nerve. He was never defeated.
Two hundred and fifty miles we traveled, south and east, and at last
there came a day when we passed the Tchataldya barrier, and from a
hillock caught a glimpse of a skyline of towers and floating domes
and soaring minarets and beyond them to the right a hint of blue that
was the meeting-place of the Bosphorus and the Marmora.
"It looks like a fairy city!" I exclaimed.
"It will stink in your nostrils," replied Nikka curtly. "It is
Stamboul--the last stand of the Turk."