The Eye of the Camel—Rocky Sepulchres—Virtue of an old
Passport, backed by Impudence—Temple of Cybele—Palace of
Crœsus—Ancient Church of Sardus—Return to Smyrna.
Unsightly as the camel is, with its long snaky neck, its frightful hump,
and its awkward legs and action, it wins much upon your kindness with a
little acquaintance. Its eye is exceedingly fine. There is a lustrous,
suffused softness in the large hazel orb that is the rarest beauty in a
human eye, and so remarkable is this feature in the camel, that I wonder
it has never fallen into use as a poetical simile. They do not shun the
gaze of man like other animals, and I pleased myself often when the
suridjee slackened his pace, with riding close to some returning
caravan, and exchanging steady looks in passing with the slow-paced
camels. It was like meeting the eye of a kind old man.
The face of Mount Sypilus, in its whole extent, is excavated into
sepulchres. They are mostly ancient, and form a very singular feature in
the scenery. A range of precipices, varying from one to three hundred
feet in height, is perforated for twenty miles with these airy
depositories for the dead, many of them a hundred feet from the plain.
Occasionally they are extended to considerable caves, hewn with great
labour in the rock, and probably from their numerous niches, intended as
family sepulchres. They are now the convenient eyries of great numbers
of eagles, which circle continually around the summits, and poise
themselves on the wing along the sides of these lonely mountains, in
undisturbed security.
We arrived early in the afternoon at Casabar, a pretty town at the foot
of Mount Tmolus. Having eaten a melon, the only thing for which the
place is famous, we proposed to go on to Achmet-lee, some three hours
farther. The suridjee, however, whose horses were hired by the day, had
made up his mind to sleep at Casabar, and so we were at issue. Our stock
of Turkish was soon exhausted, and the hajji was coolly unbuckling the
girths of the baggage-horse without condescending even to answer our
appeal with a look. The Mussulman idlers of the café opposite, took
their pipes from their mouths and smiled. The gay caféjee went about his
arrangements for our accommodation, quite certain that we were there for
the night. I had given up the point myself, when one of my companions,
with a look of the most confident triumph, walked up to the suridjee and
tapping him on the shoulder, held before his eyes a paper with the seal
of the pacha of Smyrna in broad characters at the top. After the
astonished Turk had looked at it for a moment, he commenced in good
round English, and poured upon him a volume of incoherent rhapsody,
slapping the paper violently with his hand and pointing to the road. The
effect was instantaneous. The girth was hastily rebuckled, and the
frightened suridjee put his hand to his head in token of submission,
mounted in the greatest hurry and rode out of the court of the
caravanserai. The caféjee made his salaam, and the spectators wished us
respectfully a good journey. The magic paper was an old passport, and
our friend had calculated securely on the natural dread of the
incomprehensible, quite sure that there was not one man in the village
that could read, and none short of Smyrna who could understand his
English.
The plain between Casabar and Achmet-lee, is quite a realisation of
poetry. It is twelve miles of soft, bright greensward, broken only with
clumps of luxurious oleanders, an occasional cluster of the “black tents
of Kedar” with their flocks about them, and here and there a loose and
grazing camel indolently lifting his broad foot from the grass as if he
felt the coolness and verdure to its spongy core. One’s heart seems to
stay behind as he rides onward through such places.
The village of Achmet-lee consists of a coffee-house with a single room.
We arrived about sunset, and found the fire-place surrounded by six or
seven Turks squatted on their hams, travellers like ourselves, who had
arrived before us. There was fortunately a second fire-place, which was
soon blazing with faggots of fir and oleander, and with, a pilaw between
us, we crooked our tired legs under us on the earthen floor, and made
ourselves as comfortable as a total absence of every comfort would
permit. The mingled smoke of tobacco and the chimney drove me out of
doors as soon as our greasy meal was finished, and the contrast was
enough to make one in love with nature. The moon was quite full, and
pouring her light down through the transparent and dazzling sky of the
East with indescribable splendour. The fires of twenty or thirty
caravans were blazing in the fields around, and the low cries of the
camels and the hum of voices from the various groups, were mingled with
the sound of a stream that came noiselessly down its rocky channel from
the nearest spur of Mount Tmolus. I walked up and down the narrow
camel-path till midnight; and if the kingly spirits of ancient Lydia did
not keep me company in the neighbourhood of their giant graves, it was
perhaps because the feet that trod down their ashes came from a world of
which Crœsus and Abyattis never heard.
The sin of late rising is seldom chargeable upon an earthen bed, and we
were in the saddle by sunrise, breathing an air that, after our smoky
cabin, was like a spice-wind from Arabia. Winding round the base of the
chain of mountains which we had followed for twenty or thirty miles, we
ascended a little, after a brisk trot of two or three hours, and came in
sight of the citadel of ancient Sardis, perched like an eagle’s nest on
the summit of a slender rock. A natural terrace, perhaps a hundred feet
above the plain, expanded from the base of the hill, and this was the
commanding site of the capital of Lydia. Dividing us from it ran the
classic and “golden-sanded” Pactolus, descending from the mountains in a
small, narrow valley, covered with a verdure so fresh, that it requires
some power of fancy to realise that a crowded empire ever swarmed on its
borders. Crossing the small, bright stream, we rode along the other
bank, winding up its ascending curve, and dismounted at the ruins of the
temple of Cybele, a heap of gigantic fragments strewn confusedly over
the earth, with two majestic columns rising lone and beautiful into the
air.
A Dutch artist, who was of our party, spread his drawing-board and
pencils upon one of the fallen Ionic capitals, the suridjee tied his
horses’ heads together, and laid himself at his length upon the grass,
and the rest of us ascended the long steep hill to the citadel. With
some loss of breath, and a battle with the dogs of a gipsy encampment,
hidden so as almost to be invisible among the shrubbery of the
hill-side, we stood at last upon a peak, crested with one tottering
remnant of a wall, the remains of a castle whose foundations have
crumbled beneath it. It looks as if the next rain must send the whole
mass into the valley.
It puzzled my unmilitary brain to conceive how Alexander and his
Macedonians climbed these airy precipices, if taking the citadel was a
part of his conquest of Lydia. The fortifications in the rear have a
sheer descent from their solid walls of two or three hundred
perpendicular feet, with scarce a vine clinging by the way. I left my
companions discussing the question, and walked to the other edge of the
hill, overlooking the immense plains below. The tumuli which mark the
sepulchres of the kings of Lydia, rose like small hills on the opposite
and distant bank of the Hermus. The broad fields, which were once the
“wealth of Crœsus,” lay still fertile and green along the banks of their
historic river. Thyatira and Philadelphia were almost within reach of my
eye, and I stood upon Sardis—in the midst of the sites of the Seven
Churches. Below lay the path of the myriad armies of Persia, on their
march to Greece; here Alexander pitched his tents after the battle of
Granicus, wiling away the winter in the lap of captive Lydia; and over
the small ruin just discernible on the southern bank of the Pactolus,
“the angel of the church of Sardis” brooded with his protecting wings
till the few who had “not defiled their garments,” were called to “walk
in white,” in the promised reward of the Apocalypse.
We descended again to the temple of Cybele, and mounting our horses,
rode down to the palace of Crœsus. Parts of the outer walls, the bases
of the portico, and the marble steps of an inner court, are all that
remain of the splendour that Solon was called upon in vain to admire.
With the permission of six or seven storks, whose coarse nests were
built upon the highest points of the ruins, we selected the broadest of
the marble blocks, lying in the deserted area, and spreading our
travellers’ breakfast upon it, forgot even the kingly builder in our
well-earned appetites.
There are three parallel walls remaining of the ancient church of
Sardis. They stand on a gentle slope, just above the edge of the
Pactolus, and might easily be rebuilt into a small chapel, with only the
materials within them. There are many other ruins on the site of the
city, but none designated by a name. We loitered about, collecting
relics, and indulging our fancies, till the suridjee reminded us of the
day’s journey before us, and with a drink from the Pactolus, and a
farewell look at the beautiful Ionic columns standing on its lonely
bank, we put spurs to our horses and galloped once more down into the
valley.
Our Turkish saddles grew softer on the third day’s journey, and we
travelled more at ease. I found the freedom and solitude of the wide and
unfenced country growing at every mile more upon my liking. The heart
expands as one gives his horse the rein and gallops over these wild
paths without toll-gate or obstacle. I can easily understand the feeling
of Ali Bey on his return to Europe from the East.
Our fourth day’s journey lay through the valley between Tmolus and
Semering—the fairest portion of the dominion of Timour the Tartar. How
gracefully shaped were those slopes to the mountains! How bright the
rivers! How green the banks! How like a new-created and still unpeopled
world it seemed, with every tree and flower and fruit the perfect model
of its kind!
Leaving the secluded village of Nymphi nested in the mountains on our
left, as we approached the end of our circuitous journey, we entered
early in the afternoon the long plains of Hadjilar, and with tired
horses and (_malgré_ romance) an agreeable anticipation of Christian
beds and supper, we dismounted in Smyrna at sunset.
* * * * *
* * * * *