companionship with the generations behind us. One April afternoon, as
we were walking down the steep streets of Trebizond, looking round us
with curious eyes, there fell upon our ears a continuous tinkling of
bells. We listened: there was no sound of feet, but the bells came
nearer and nearer, and at last from one of the narrow streets emerged a
camel, and behind him more camels and more, marching on with noiseless
padded tread, with impassive Oriental faces and outstretched necks,
round which the rows of tiny bells swung backwards and forwards with
every step. By their side trudged their drivers, noiselessly, too, in
sandalled feet, their faces half hidden by huge caps of long-haired
fur, and wearing an expression less human than that of the beasts
over which they cracked their whips. ‘Look,’ said our guide; ‘it is
a caravan from Tabriz,’ and he pushed us back out of the road, for
camels have an evil reputation, and are apt to enliven the way by a
fretful biting at any person they may happen to encounter. So we stood,
without noticing where we had retreated, and watched the long caravan
as it passed us with even, measured tread--so slowly that we fell to
wondering how many hundred hundred thousand of those deliberate steps
had marked the dust and crunched upon the stones across the mountains
and valleys and deserts between Trebizond and Tabriz. And though their
caravanserai was in sight, the camels never mended their pace, and
though they had come so many hundred miles, they did not seem weary
with their journey or glad to reach their goal; but as they passed they
turned their heads and looked us in the eyes, and we knew that they
were thinking that we were only Westerns, and could not understand
their placid Oriental ways. When they had passed we glanced down,
and found that we were standing upon a grave mound; behind us sprang
cypress-trees, and the stone upon which we were leaning bore the dead
man’s turban carved upon it. There he lay upon the edge of the great
road which he too, perhaps, had trodden from end to end in his day--lay
now at rest with the cypresses to shade his head, and the caravans
moving ceaseless past him, away and away into the far East. May he rest
in peace, the dead man by the living road!
To such charming Turkish sepulchres we looked back as to hallowed
resting-places when we had come to know the Persian graveyards. The
stretch of dusty stony earth outside the mud walls of the town, the
vacant space in the heart of the village where the gravestones were
hardly to be distinguished from the natural rockiness of the earth,
the home of evil smells, untrodden by living feet, though it lay in
the centre of the village life--those shallow graves seemed to us
ill-suited to eternal rest. From many of them, indeed, the occupants
were to suffer a premature resurrection. After a few months’ sleep they
would be rudely awakened, wrapped in cloths, and carried on the backs
of mules to the holy places. Men who have met these caravans of the
dead winding across the desert say that their hearts stood still as
that strange and mournful band of wayfarers passed them silently by.
But the pang of sorrow is only for the living. Though we find it hard
enough to dissociate sensation from the forms which have once felt
like ourselves, the happy dead people are no longer concerned with the
fate of the outer vestments they have cast off. They fear no more the
heat of the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages; the weary journey to
Kerbela is nothing to them, nor whether they lie under cypresses, whose
silent fingers point to heaven, or under marble domes, of out in the
bare desert. Wherever they rest, they rest in peace.
_THE CITY OF KING PRUSIAS_
AT the foot of the Bithynian Olympus lies a city founded, says
tradition, by Cyrus. Philip, the son of Demetrius, gave it to Prusias,
King of Bithynia, the friend of Hannibal; Prusias rebuilt it, calling
it after himself, and for over two hundred years it was the capital of
the Bithynian kingdom. In the first century after Christ it fell into
the hands of the Romans; Roman governors took up their abode in Brusa,
the younger Pliny described to Trajan the agora, the library, the baths
of sulphur, which gave it an honoured place in the civilization of
Rome. During the ensuing centuries many men fought and fell for its
possession; the cry of battle raged perpetually about its walls. Turks
and Christians contended for Brusa, Theodore Lascaris, the Roumanian
despot, held it, Orkan ravished it from the Greeks, Timur overwhelmed
it with his shepherd warriors from distant Tartary; finally the Turks
reconquered it and turned the capital of King Prusias into the capital
of the Ottoman Empire.
The soaring minarets, the white domes of mosques and baths, lie amid
cypresses and plane-trees at the foot of the mountain. The streams
of Olympus, many-fountained like its neighbour Ida, water the town
and the surrounding country with such profusion that every inch of
ground yields fruit and flowers in tenfold abundance; the hot steam of
the sulphur springs diffuses a drowsy warmth through the atmosphere;
the city is full of the sound of tinkling fountains and murmuring
plane-leaves, and of the voices of black-eyed Turkish children--no
wonder if the eagerness of men for its possession drove peace for so
many hundred years from its vineyards and olive-groves.
It is said that of the Romans no trace remains. If this be so, the
spirit of the Roman builders must have lingered on among Byzantine
masons. There is a gateway at the southern side of the town from which
part of the stone casing has fallen away, revealing that exquisite
brickwork whose secret was known to the Romans only--an entablature of
long, narrow bricks, set into arches of complicated pattern, with the
sure eye and the even hand that ennoble the commonest materials, and
make Roman bricks and plain Roman stonework as beautiful in their way
as frieze, or fresco, or marble-casing. Pliny’s baths, however, are
gone; the present buildings are of Turkish origin. They lie a little to
the east of the town, in fields which vine and olive share with irises
and great scarlet poppies. You enter, and find yourself under the dome
of a large hall, round the walls of which are railed off compartments
where, upon piles of cushions, the bathers rest after the exertion of
the bath, smoking a narghileh and drinking a cup of coffee. Beyond this
is another and smaller hall, with a fountain of clear cold water in the
midst of it, and through various chambers of different temperatures
you reach the farthest and hottest of all. The air is thick and heavy
with the steam which rises from the blue-tiled basin, where, when the
process of washing is over, the Turkish youths swim in the hot water of
the sulphur springs, while through the mist the sunlight glimmers down
on them from the windows in the dome.
The mosques share the indescribable charm of Brusa--a charm in
which the luxuriant fertility of the land and the accumulated arts
of many nations bear an equal part. The tomb of Orkan the Conqueror
owes its beauty to the Byzantines, for it lies in the church they
reared and dedicated to the prophet Elijah. Before the Green Mosque
is a fountain, one of those exquisite fountains of Olympus, shaded by
huge plane-trees, and protected by a pointed roof rising on delicate
columns, and arches with the Moorish curve in them; and on the mosque
itself, the colour of leaves with the sun shining through them is
rivalled by the brilliant green of the tiles which encase the dome,
and the tracery of laden branches against the sky by the carving
round the doorway, until you cannot tell which is the most successful
decorator, man or nature. Sultan Mahmud employed Christian workmen
in the mosque he built; its architecture wears a curious likeness to
that of the West, and the Christian vines and fig-trees are wreathed
round the capitals of the Mohammedan shafts. In the big mosque in
the centre of the town the builders seem to have recognised that the
beauty of curving roofs and the splendour of coloured tiles could go
no further--they have called in Heaven to their aid. The entrance,
indeed, is vaulted over, the floor is strewn with carpets, and the
walls glow with colour; but the central court is open to the sky, and
a fountain plashes under the blaze of light and sunshine which falls
through the opening. Round the edge of the basin beggars sit washing
their feet, grave elders dip their hands and bathe their faces in the
cool water; in the columned darkness beyond, bands of Turkish children
play at hide-and-seek between the pillars, so noiselessly that they do
not disturb the quiet worshippers and the groups of men chatting in
undertones, or drown the delicious sound of water and the whispering of
the outer airs which fill the building.
Above the town Olympus rears his lofty head: his feet are planted in
groves of plane-trees, among the soaring dark spires of cypresses and
the white spires of the minarets, beech thickets cover his flanks, and
on his shoulders lies a mantle of snow, which narrows and narrows as
the summer climbs upwards, but which never entirely disappears.
As we ascended the mountain on our lean ponies, we felt as though we
were gradually leaving Turkey behind us, and climbing up into Greece.
The snow still lay low enough (for it was in the early summer) to
prevent our reaching the summit, yet we could see over the shoulders of
the hills the spurs of the beautiful range of Ida, and where the plain
of Troy might be on clearer days, with Lake Aphnitis, the furthest
boundary of the Troad, gleaming on its edge--‘Aphneian Trojans,’ says
Homer in his catalogue of warriors, ‘who inhabit Zeleia at the furthest
extremity of Ida, and drink the dark waters of Æsepus.’ We could see,
too, the long stretch of Marmora and the peninsula of Cyzicus, whose
king met with such dire ill-fortune at the hands of Jason, and though
this was not that Olympus which was crowned with the halls of Zeus, we
comforted ourselves by imagining that Homer may have had the slopes of
the Bithynian mountain in the eye of his mind when he wandered singing
through the Troad. The beech coppices whispered graceful legends in
our ears, the glades, thickset with flowers, seemed to us to be marked
with the impress of divine feet--it was the Huntress and her train who
had stirred the fritillary bells, Pan’s pregnant footing had called
the golden crocuses to life, the voices of the nymphs who charmed
away Hylas the Argonaut still floated on the air, and through the
undergrowth what glimpse was that of flying robe and unloosed shining
locks?... We rode upward beyond the region of sheltered, flower-strewn
glades, beyond the pines, until we came to rough, stony ground,
sprinkled with juniper-bushes--and to the very edge of the snow. The
mountain-top was all bare and silent; no clash of battle rises now
above the plain of Troy; in the blue peaks of Ida, Œnone’s cries are
hushed; Paris is dead, of Helen’s beauty there is nothing but the name;
Zeus no longer watches the tide of war from the summit of the Bithynian
Olympus, and the nymphs have fled....
The day was nearly over when we descended, the cypresses of Brusa
cast long shadows between the white domes--it was the magic moment
when the sun, like a second Midas, turns all he touches into gold. The
western sky was a sheet of pure gold, the broad plane-leaves hung in
golden patterns upon the boughs, the low light lay in a carpet of gold
upon the grass, the very air breathed incantations, and on the lowest
slope of the mountain we found Ganymede awaiting us. There he sat under
a tree by the roadside; he had clothed himself in the semblance of an
old Turkish beggar, and hidden his yellow curls beneath a scarlet fez,
and the nectar he offered us was only Turkish coffee; but we knew him,
in spite of his disguise, when he put one of the tiny cups into our
hands, for no coffee brewed by mortal could have tasted so ambrosial or
mingled so divine a fragrance with the sweet flowery smell of evening.
We sat down on the grass round the primitive brazier--a mere dishful
of charcoal set on a shaky iron tripod. The heavenly cup-bearer was
well versed in the arts of coffee-making; he kept half a dozen of his
little copper pots a-boiling on the tray of charcoal, which he blew to
a red glow round them, and when the coffee frothed up over the edges,
he poured it in the nick of time into the cups which we held out to
him. The sun flooded our Olympian hall of plane-trees with soft light;
we lay in grateful silence upon our couch of grass while the coffee
bubbled up over the charcoal fire and frothed steaming into our cups.
At length we rose, handed our Ganymede some Turkish coins, at which he
must have chuckled in his Greek heart, and rode away in the twilight
through the streets of Brusa.
_SHOPS AND SHOPKEEPERS_
‘WE lived together for the space of a month,’ related the second of
the three ladies of Baghdad to Haroun al Rashid, Ja’far the Wezir,
and Mesroor the Executioner, ‘after which I begged my husband that he
would allow me to go to the bazaar to purchase some stuffs for dress.’
She went, accompanied by the inevitable old woman, to the house of
a young merchant whose father had recently died, leaving him great
wealth. ‘He produced all we wanted, and we handed him the money, but
he refused to take it, saying: “It is an offer of hospitality for your
visit.” I said: “If he will not take the money, I will return to him
the stuffs.” But he would not receive it again, and exclaimed: “By
Allah! I will take nothing from you; all this is a present from me for
a single kiss, which I will value more than the contents of my whole
shop.”’ The Khalifeh, when the story was concluded--it went on through
many and surprising adventures--expressed no astonishment at the young
man’s generosity. Such an exaggerated view of hospitality seemed
to him quite natural on the part of a shopkeeper, nor did he pause
to inquire whether the inflammable young man found that the wealth
which his father had left him increased with any rapidity through his
transactions with pretty ladies.
So reckless a disposition is no longer to be found among Eastern
merchants; shopping is now conducted purely on business principles,
though it is not without a charm which is absent from Western counters.
Instead of the sleek young man, indistinguishable from his fellows, you
have the turbaned Turk, bundled up in multitudinous baggy garments,
which he holds round him with one hand, while he takes down his goods
with the other; or the keen-featured Persian, from whom you need hope
to make no large profit, wrapped in closely-hanging robes, his white
linen shirt buttoned neatly across his brown chest; or the specious
Armenian in his red fez, cunning and voluble, an easy liar, asking
impossible prices for worthless objects, and hoping to ingratiate
you by murmuring with a leer that he remembers seeing your face in
Spitalfields last time he was there. Shopping with these merchants is
not merely the going through of certain forms for the acquisition of
necessary commodities--it is an end in itself, an art which combines
many social arts, an amusement which will not pall, though many hours
be devoted to it, a study in character and national characteristics.
It was in Brusa that we went out to purchase some ‘stuffs for
dress’--not that we contemplated making for ourselves ten robes each
to the value of a thousand golden pieces, like the lady of Baghdad,
but that we had heard rumours of certain of the Brusa silks which
were suited to less extravagant requirements. It was a hot, steaming
afternoon; we hired diminutive donkeys and rode down Brusa streets
and under the many domes of the bazaar. The quick, short steps of the
donkeys clicked over the cobble stones; we looked round us as they went
at the rows and rows of shop-counters, the high vaults which arched
away to right and left ward, the courtyards open to the sky, set round
with shops, grown over with vines, gleaming with sunshine at the end
of some dark narrow passage, the people standing about in leisurely
attitudes, and the donkeys, which walked diligently up and down,
carrying now a veiled woman sitting astride on her padded saddle, now a
turbaned Turk, and now a bale of merchandise. At length we came to the
street of the silk merchants, and dismounted before the shop of an old
Turk who was sitting cross-legged within.
He rose, and with many polite salaams begged us to enter, and set
chairs for us round the low enamelled table. We might have been paying
a morning call: we talked--those of us who could speak Turkish--of
Sa’di and the musical glasses, we sipped our cups of delicious coffee,
we puffed our narghilehs--those of us who could derive any other
pleasure from a narghileh than that of a strong taste of charcoal
flavoured with painted wood. Presently the subject of silks was
broached, and set aside again as unworthy of discussion; after a few
more minutes our--host, shall I say?--laid before us a bundle of
embroideries, which we examined politely, complimenting him upon his
possessions. At length, as if the idea had just struck him, though he
knew perfectly well the object of our visit, he pulled a roll of silk
from a corner of the shop and laid it before us. We asked tentatively
whether he would not permit us to see more, and the business of the
afternoon began. The stuffs were certainly charming. There were the
usual stripes of silk and cotton, there were muslins woven with tinsel
lines, coarse Syrian cottons, and the brocades for which Brusa is
famous, mixtures of cotton and silk woven in small patterns something
like a Persian pattern, yellow on white, gold on blue, orange on
yellow. No doubt we paid more for our purchases than they were worth,
but not more than the pleasure of a delightful afternoon spent in the
old Turk’s company was worth to us.
On our way home we stopped before a confectioner’s shop and
invited him to let us taste of his preserves. He did not, like the
confectioner in the Arabian Nights, prepare for us a delicious dish of
pomegranate-seeds, but he gave us Rahat Lakoum, and slices of sugared
oranges, and a jelly of rose-leaves (for which cold cream is a good
European substitute), and many other delicacies, ending with some round
white objects, which I take to have been sugared onions, floating in
syrup--after we had tasted them we had small desire to continue our
experimental repast.
The bazaars in Constantinople are not so attractive: the crowds jostle
you, the shopkeepers, throwing aside Oriental dignity, run after you
and catch you by the sleeve, offering to show you Manchester cottons
and coarse embroidered muslins. A fragrant savour, indeed, of fried
meats and garlic hangs about the eating-shops, on whose counters
appetizing mixtures of meat and rice are displayed, and bowls of a
white substance like curds, into which a convenient spoon is sticking
for the common use of all hungry passers-by, and under the high vaults
of the carpet bazaar solemn merchants sit in state among their woven
treasures, their silver, and their jewels.
We spent a morning among Persian and Circassian shopmen in Tiflis.
There the better part of the bazaar is not roofed over, and the shops
open on to a street inches deep in dust or in mud, according to the
weather, as is the manner of the streets of Tiflis. They were full
of lovely silver ornaments, and especially we noted the heavy silver
belts which were hanging in every window and round the waist of every
Circassian merchant. We fixed upon one which was being thus informally
exhibited round a waist, and, in spite of the many protestations of
its wearer, we succeeded in buying it from him. It had belonged to his
father, he said, and I think that it was with some reluctance that he
pocketed our gold pieces and saw us carrying off his family heirloom.
In Persia the usual order of shopping is reversed: you buy not when
you stand in need, but when the merchants choose to come to you.
Moreover, the process is very deliberative, and a single bargain may
stretch out over months. The counters are the backs of mules, which
animals are driven into your garden whenever their owners happen to
be passing by. As you sit under the shadow of your plane-trees you
become conscious of bowing figures before you, leading laden mules
by the bridle; you signify to them that they may spread out their
goods, and presently your garden-paths are covered with crisp Persian
silks and pieces of minute stitching, with Turkoman tent-hangings,
embroideries from Bokhara, and carpets from Yezd and Kerman, and the
sunlight flickers down through the plane-leaves into the extemporary
shop. There is a personal note about these charming materials which
lends them an interest other than that which could be claimed by bright
colours and soft textures alone. They speak of individual labour and
individual taste. Those tiny squares of Persian work have formed part
of a woman’s dress--in some andarun, years of a woman’s life were spent
stitching the close intricate pattern in blended colours from corner to
corner; those strips of linen on which the design of red flowers and
green leaves is not quite completed, come from the fingers of a girl of
Bokhara, who, when she married, threw aside her embroidery-needle and
left her fancy-work thus unfinished.
The bargaining begins: you turn over the stuffs with careless
fingers--this one is very dirty, that very coarse; you lift a corner of
the carpets, and, examining the wrong side with what air of knowledge
you can summon to your aid, you mutter that they are only partially
silken, after all. Finally you make your offer, which is received with
indignant horror on the part of the merchant. He sweeps his wares
aside, and draws from the folds of his garments a box of turquoises,
which he displays to you with many expressions of admiration, and which
you return to him with contemptuous politeness: ‘Mal-e shuma!’--‘They
are your possession!’ He packs up his bundles and retires. In a week or
two he will return with reduced demands; you will raise your offer a
toman or two, and after a few months of coming and going and of mutual
concessions, the disputed carpet will be handed over to you at perhaps
half the price that the owner originally asked; or perhaps the merchant
will return in triumph and inform you that he has sold it to someone
less grasping than you.
Urbane Persian phrases are confusing at first to the brusque European;
it was not until we had made several mistakes that we grew accustomed
to them.
As we were coming through the garden in the dusk one evening a
somewhat ragged stranger accosted us and handed us a long-haired
kitten. ‘Mal-e shuma!’ he said. We were surprised, but since we had
been making inquiries for long-haired kittens, we thought that some
kind acquaintance had heard of our wants and taken this opportunity
of making us a present--presents from casual acquaintances being not
uncommon in the East. We thanked the man and passed on with our mewing
acquisition. But the Persian did not seem satisfied; he followed us
with dogged persistence, and at length the thought struck us that it
might not be a gift, after all. We turned and asked:
‘What is the cost?’
‘Out of your great kindness,’ he replied, ‘the cost of the cat is three
tomans’ (about thirty shillings).
‘By Allah!’ we said, ‘in that case it is your possession still;’ and we
gave the kitten back to him.
When you buy, you might think from the words that pass that you had
gained, together with your purchase, a friend for life; and even when
you refuse to buy, you veil the terms of your refusal in such a manner
that the uninitiated would conclude that you were making a handsome
present to your vagrant shopkeeper.
_A MURRAY OF THE FIRST CENTURY_