_The American Dragoman narrates to the Second Secretary_
I shall never forget the night I got there. The train went no farther
than Nicomedia in those days, and it took so long that you nearly died
of old age on the way. But when the three red lights on the tail of
it dwindled into the dark, I had the queerest sense of having been
dropped into another world. It was the more so because one couldn't
see an earthly thing--not a star, not even the Gulf which we were to
cross. I only heard the lapping of it, close by, when the rumble of the
train died out of the stillness. That and the crunch of steps on the
sand were all there was to hear, and an occasional word I didn't catch.
The men could hardly have been more silent if our lives had depended
on it. I had no idea how many of them there were, or what they looked
like--much less where they were taking me. They simply hoisted a sail
and put off into the night. I would have sworn, too, that there was
no wind. The sail filled, however: I could see the swaying pallor of
it, and hear the ripple under the bow. And as my eyes got used to the
darkness, I discovered an irregular silhouette in front of us, and a
floating will-o'-the-wisp of a light. The silhouette grew taller and
blacker till the boat grounded under it. Then, by the light of the
will-o'-the-wisp, which was a sputtering oil lantern on shore, I made
out some immense cypresses. You have no idea how eerie that landing
was, in a waterside cemetery that was for all the world like Böcklin's
Island of Death. The men moved like shadows about their Flying
Dutchman of a boat, and their lantern just brought out the ghostliness
of gravestones leaning between the columns of the cypresses. And I
suddenly became aware of the strangest sound. I had no idea what it was
or where it came from, but it was a sort of low moaning that fairly
went into your bones. It grew louder when we started on again. We
climbed an invisible trail where branches slashed at us in the dark,
and all kinds of sharp and sweet and queer smells came put of it in
waves. And nightingales began to sing like mad around us, and off in
the distance somewhere jackals were barking, and under it all that low
moaning went on and on and on. And at last we came out into an open
space on top of the hill, where a bonfire made a hole in the black, and
a couple of naked figures stood redly out in the penumbra of it, with a
ring of faces flickering around them....
I found out afterwards that the bonfire business was nothing but a
wrestling match--they had them almost every night on the _meidan_--and
the moaning came from the mill-wheels in the valley. But I never quite
got over that first impression--that sense of walking through all kinds
of things without seeing them. No sooner would I begin to feel a bit at
home than something would bring me up with a jerk and remind me that
I was a stranger in a strange land. I suppose it was natural enough,
considering that I had only just come out then. The place was nothing
but a snarl of muddy lanes and mud shanties, tossed into a filbert
valley where water tumbled down to the Gulf. It was only about fifty
miles away from here, but it might have been five thousand and fifty.
There was none of the contrast with Europe that is always bothering you
here--though perhaps it really sets things off. The people were all
Turks, and their village was Asia pure and simple. That extraordinary
juxtaposition of care and neglect, of the exquisite and the nauseating,
which begins to strike you in Italy, and which strikes you so much more
here, simply went to the top notch there. It was under your eyes--and
nose--every minute. There were rugs and tiles and brasses that you
couldn't keep your hands off of, in houses plastered with cow-dung. And
the people used the gutters for drains, and their principal business
was making attar of rose. You should have seen what gardens there
were, hidden away behind mud-walls!
What struck me most, though, was a something in it all which I never
could lay my finger on. It seemed incredible that a country inhabited
so long should show so few signs of it. The people might have camped
in a clearing over night, and the woods were just waiting to cover up
their tracks. But the wildness was not the good blank, unconscious
wildness we have at home. There was a melancholy about it. The silence
that hung over the place was really a little uncanny. The mills only
cried it out, in that monotonous minor of theirs. They were picturesque
old wooden things, all green with moss and maidenhair fern, that went
grinding and groaning on forever, and making you wonder what on earth
it was all about. I can't say that I ever found out, either. But I
certainly got grist enough for my own mill.
For that matter, I don't imagine that I was precisely an open book
myself. In this part of the world they haven't got our passion for
poking around where we don't belong: perhaps they've had more time to
find out how little there is in it. And for a mysterious individual
from lands beyond the sea, whose servant can't be prevented from
bragging of the splendor in which he lives at Constantinople, to bury
himself in a wild country village, must mean something queer. Does one
give up a _konak_ on the Bosphorus for a _khan_ in the Marmora? And
are there no teachers of Turkish in Stamboul? I believe it didn't take
long for the _Moutessarif_ of Nicomedia to find out I was there, and
for him to ascertain in ways best known to himself what I was up to. I
have often wondered what his version of it was. At all events it didn't
prevent the great men of the village from smoking cigarettes of peace
with me in a little vine-shaded coffee-house at the top of the hill.
There was the _Mudir_, a plump and harmless _effendi_ of a governor;
and the _Naïb_, who was some kind of country justice; and a charming
old _Imam_ in a green turban and a white beard and a rose-colored
robe; and a _Tchaouche_, an officer of police, all done up in yellow
braid and brass whistles; and various other personages. And I couldn't
imagine where in the world they had all picked up their courtliness and
conversation. The _Mudir_ was from town, and one or two of the others
had been there; but if such things were to be had for a visit to town
they'd be a little more common at home. Of course, I was asked a good
many questions, and some of them were pretty personal. That is a part
of Oriental etiquette, you will find. It was marvelous, though, what a
_savoir faire_ they had, to say nothing of a sense of life and a few
other things. I couldn't make them out--taken with their vile village
and their half-tamed fields. The thing used to bother me half to death,
too. I thought all I had to do was to sit down and look pleasant and
turn them inside out at my leisure. Whereas more than once I had a
vague feeling, after it was over, of having been turned inside out
myself. Altogether it makes me grin when I remember what an idiotic
young ostrich I was. I have been at the business quite a while now, and
to this day I am never sure of my man--how that Asiatic head of his
will work in any given case. I can only console myself by remembering
that I'm not the only one. In the last two generations I presume there
must have been as many as four Anglo-Saxons--and three of those,
Englishmen--who didn't more or less make jackasses of themselves when
they ran up against Asia. And I fancy it took them rather more than a
year to arrive at even that negative degree of comprehension.
However, various things went into my hopper first and last, to the tune
of the mill-wheels in the valley--particularly last.... It was lucky
for me that the wireless telegraphy I sometimes felt about me allowed
the _Mudir_ to cultivate his natural inclinations. He was bored enough
in his exile, and I think he was genuinely glad that his advices from
headquarters made him free of my company. I certainly am. I have never
come into just such relations with any of the officials here. He was a
grave, mild, suave personage who might have made an excellent _Cadi_
of tradition if he had never heard of Paris. As it was, I'm afraid he
took less thought for his peasants' troubles than of the extent to
which they could be made to repay him for his own. He liked to practise
his French on me as much as I liked to practise my Turkish on him,
and on such occasions as I had the honor of squatting at his little
round board, his knowledge of the Occident would manifest itself in an
incredible profusion of spoons. I also discovered that he was by no
means averse to sampling my modest cellar. He didn't care so much about
being found out, though. They are tremendous prohibitionists, you know,
and while the pashas have accepted champagne with their tight trousers,
they're not so public about it. Just watch when you go to your first
court dinner.
A person of whom I thought more than the _Mudir_, and who interested
me more as a type, was the _Imam_. A more kindly, honest, simple,
delightful old man it has seldom been my luck to meet. He was a Turk
of the old school, without an atom of Europe in his composition. I
wish they were not getting so confoundedly rare. They are worth a
million times more than these Johnnies who pick up the Roman alphabet
and a few half-baked ideas about what we are pleased to call progress.
I took daily lessons from him. He was a mighty theologian--made me
read the Koran, and all that, and was much interested in what I had to
tell him of our own beliefs. He used to make me ashamed of knowing so
little about them. Before he got through with me, he taught me rather
more than was in the bond, I fancy. I had always cherished a notion
that because a Turk could have four wives, and didn't think much of
my chances for the world to come, and was somewhat free in the use of
antidotes to human life, his morality wasn't worth talking about. But I
got something of an eye-opener on that point.
Altogether, I managed to have a very decent time of it. My pill of
learning the most of the language in the least possible time was so
ingeniously sugared that the business was one prolonged picnic. In
fact, living in a _khan_, as I did at first, is nothing but camping.
They're all about the same, you know. You can see the model any day
over in Stamboul--a rambling stack of galleries round a court of
cattle and wheels, and big bare rooms where twenty people could live.
They often do, too. You spread your own bedding on the wooden divan
surrounding two or three sides of the room, and your servant cooks for
you in a series of little charcoal pits under the huge chimney. It's
rather amusing for a while, if you're not too fussy about smells and
crawling things. I suppose I must have been, for the _Mudir_ eventually
persuaded me to rent a house from an absentee rose-growing pasha. It
was about the only wooden one in the place--a huge rattlety-bang old
affair that stood on the edge of the bluff, a little apart from the
town. It leaked so villainously that I had to sit under an umbrella
every time there was a shower, but the view and the garden made up for
it. I used to prowl around the country a good deal, though. Everything
was so strange to me--the faces, the costumes, the curious implements,
the hairy black buffaloes, the fat-tailed sheep with their dabs of
red dye, the solid-wheeled carts that lamented more loudly, if less
continuously, than the water-wheels, the piratish-looking caravels
strutting up and down the Gulf under a balloon of a mainsail. I took
them by the day, sometimes, to go fishing or exploring. All of which
must have been highly incomprehensible to my astonished neighbors. I
believe my man had to invent some legend of a doctor and a cure to
account for so eccentric a master. It was only when I came more and
more to spend my days among the cypresses on the edge of the beach
that I became less an object of suspicion; for while a Turk is little
of a sportsman and less of mere aimless sight-seer, he likes nothing
better than sitting philosophically under the greenwood tree.
My greenwood was, as I have said, a cemetery. Heaven knows how long it
had been there. The cypresses were enormously tall and thick and dark.
And the stones under them--with their carved turbans and arabesques,
and their holes and rain-hollows for restless or thirsty ghosts--were
all gray and lichened with time, and pitched every which way between
the coiling roots. You may think it a queer kind of place to sit around
in, but it took my fancy enormously. I don't know--there was something
so still and old about it, and the spring had such a look between the
black trees. It wasn't quite still, either, for that strange, low minor
of the water-wheels was always in your ears. It ran on and on, like the
sound of the quiet and the sunshine and the cypresses and the ancient
stones. And it made all sorts of things go through your head. I presume
that first impression had something to do with it. You wondered whether
the trees would have lived so long if so many dead people had not lain
among their roots. You wondered--I don't know what you didn't wonder.
As hot weather came on, I used to pack a hammock and reading and
writing and cooking things on a donkey nearly every day, and drop down
through the filberts to my cypresses. There was fairly decent bathing
there, over an outrageous bottom of stones and sea-urchins. What I
liked best, though, was simply to lie around and watch the world go
by. Not that much of it does go by the Gulf of Nicomedia. If it hadn't
been for a sail every now and then, you would have supposed that people
had forgotten all about that little blue pocket of a firth leading
nowhere between its antique hills. Then there were two or three trains
a day, whose black you could just make out, crawling through the green
of the opposite shore. And there was a steamer a day each way that it
was as much as your life was worth to put your foot into. You wouldn't
think so, though, to see the people who packed the decks. Sometimes I
used to go down to the landing for the pleasure of the contrast they
made, solemnly huddled up in their picturesque rags, with the noisy
modern steamer. It was a miracle where so many of them came from and
went to. That's the wildest part of the Marmora, you know, for all
their railroad on the north shore. Some day, I suppose, when German
expresses go thundering through to the Persian Gulf, it'll be all
factory chimneys and summer hotels, like the rest of the world. But
now there's nothing worse than vineyards and tobacco plantations. On
the south coast there's hardly that. The hills stand up pretty straight
out of the water, and they're wooded down to the rocks. You might
think it virgin forest if you didn't know the Nicene Creed came out of
it--to say nothing of invisible villages, and eyes looking out at you
without your knowing. It all gave one such an idea of the extraordinary
wreckage that has been left on the shores of that old Greek Sea. Only
you don't get it as you do here, where races and creeds march past you
on the Bridge while you stand by and admire. There's something more
secret and ancient about it--more like Homer and the Bible and the
Arabian Nights.
The caravans gave the most telling touch. You don't often see camels
up here any longer, but they're still common enough in the interior.
I could hardly believe my eyes the first time a procession of them
appeared on my beach. First came a man on horseback, with a couple
of Persian saddle-bags to make your mouth water, and then the long
string of camels roped together like barges in a tow. What an air
they had--the fantastic tawny line of them swinging against the blue
of the Gulf! And how softly they padded along the shingle, with the
picturesque ruffians in charge of them throned high among their
mysterious bales! They passed without so much as a turn of the eye, my
Wise Men of the East, and disappeared behind the point as silently as
they came. It gave me the strangest sensation. I had felt something of
the same before. I could scarcely help it, looking out between those
tragic trees at the white strip of beach and the blue strip of sea and
the green strip of hills that were so much like other hills and seas
and beaches and yet so different. But there had never come to me before
quite such a sense of the strangeness of this world where so many
things had been buried from the time of Jason and the Argo--of this
world of which I knew nothing and to which I was nothing.
You may believe that I was delighted when I went back to the village
that night and found it full of camels. The air was sizzling with
bonfires and _kebabs_--you know those bits of lamb they broil on a long
wooden spit?--and strange faces were at every corner. They filled the
coffee-house, too, when I finally got there. By that time it was too
dark to stare as hard as I would have liked. But perhaps the scene was
all the more picturesque for the shadowy figures scattered under the
vine in the dusk, and the bubble of nargilehs filling the intervals of
talk. A feature would come saliently out here and there in the red of
a cigarette--a shining eye, a hawk nose, a bronzed cheek-bone. And out
on the _meidan_ were groups around fires, with their little pipes that
have all the trouble of the East in them, and their little tomtoms of
such inimitable rhythms.
I found my friends established as usual in the seat of honor--an old
sofa in the corner of the café--and as usual they made place for me
amongst them. When the ceremony of their welcome subsided, the _Mudir_
took occasion to whisper to me that the leader of the caravan, an
excellent fellow who had stopped there before, was telling stories. I
then recognized, in the light of the _cafedij's_ lamp, the man I had
seen that afternoon on horseback. He sat on a stool in front of the
divan of honor, and behind him were crowded all the other stools and
mats in the place. Although he had not deigned, before, to turn his
head toward me, he now testified by the depth of his salaam to the
honor he felt in such an addition to his circle. He was a curiously
handsome chap, burnt and bearded, with the high-hung jaw of his people,
the arched brow, the almost Roman nose. And, shaky as I still was in
the language, he didn't leave me long to wonder why he was the center
of the circle. He was a born _raconteur_--one of those story-tellers
who in the East still carry on the tradition of the troubadours. Not
that he sang to us, or recited poetry--although the _Imam_ told me with
pride that the man was a dictionary of the Persian poets. But he went
on with a story he had begun before my entrance. It was one of those
endless old eastern tales that are such a charming mixture of serpent
wisdom and childish _naïveté_. And he told it with a vividness of
gesture and inflection that you never get from print.
Well, you can imagine! I always had a fancy for that sort of thing,
but it's so deuced hard to get at--at least, for people like us. And
after that queer turn the first sight of the caravan gave me, down
by the water, it made me feel as if I were really beginning to lay
my hand on things at last. So I was disappointed enough when at the
end of the story the party began to break up. Upon my signifying as
much to my neighbor, the _Mudir_, however, he said that nothing would
be easier than to summon the man to a private session. If I would do
him the honor to come to the _konak_--I was tickled enough to take
up with the idea, provided the meeting should take place at my house
instead. I knew there would be bakshish, which I didn't like to put the
_Mudir_ in for, after all he had done. Moreover, I had a whim to get
the camel-driver under my own roof--by way of nailing the East, so to
speak!
So the upshot of the business was that we made a night of it. Oh, I
don't mean any of your wild and woolly ones. To be sure, we did wet
things down a trifle more than is the custom of the country. There
happened to be a decanter on the table, which the camel-driver looked
at as if he wouldn't mind knowing what it contained; and being a bit
awkward at first, I knew no better than to trot it out. The _Mudir_, to
whom of course I offered it first, wouldn't have any. I suppose he had
his reputation to keep up before an inferior. I was rather surprised,
all the same, for it was plain enough that the camel-driver was by
no means the kind of man the name implies, and a little Greek wine
wouldn't hurt a baby. Moreover, I had heard of this _raki_ of theirs,
which is so much fire-water, and I didn't take their temperance very
seriously. As for the camel-driver, he was rather amusing.
"You tempt me to my death!" he laughed, taking the glass I poured
out for him. "Do you know that my men would kill me if they saw me
now? These country people have not the ideas of the _effendi_ and
myself. They follow blindly the Prophet, not realizing how many rooms
there are in the house of a wise man. They found out that I had been
affording opportunity for the forgiveness of God, and they took it
quite seriously. They threatened to kill me if I did not make a public
confession. And I had to do it, to please them. On the next Friday I
made a solemn confession of my sins in mosque, and swore never to smell
another drop."
At this I didn't know just what to do. I looked at the _Mudir_, and the
_Mudir_ looked at the camel-driver. The latter, however, waved his hand
with a smile of goodfellowship.
"There is no harm now," he said. "We break caravan to-morrow at
Nicomedia. Moreover, I do not drink saying it is right. I should
blaspheme God, who has commanded me not to drink. But I acknowledge
that I sin. Great be the name of God!" With which he tipped the glass
into his mouth. "My soul!" he exclaimed, "That is better than a
cucumber in August!"
These people are democratic, you know, to a degree of which we haven't
an idea--for all our declaration of independence. Yet there are certain
invisible lines which are sure to trip a foreigner up and which made
me mighty uncertain what to do with the governor of a _mudirlik_ and
the leader of a caravan. But the latter proceeded to look out for that.
Such a jolly good fellow you never saw in your life, with his stories,
and the way he had with him, and the things he had been up to. It
turned out that he knew western Asia a good deal better than I know
western Europe. Tabriz, Tashkend, Samarkand, Cabul, to say nothing of
Mecca and Cairo and Tripoli--such names dropped from him as Liverpool
and Marseilles might from me. Where camel goes he had been, and for
him Asia Minor was no more than a sort of ironic tongue stuck out at
Europe by the huge continent behind. It gave me my first inkling of how
this empire is tied up. It seems to hang so loosely together, without
the rails and wires that put Sitka and St. Augustine in easier reach
of each other than Constantinople and Bagdad. I began to learn then
that wires and rails are not everything--that there are stronger nets
than those. Altogether it was a momentous occasion. To sit there in
that queer old house, in a wild hill village of the Marmora, and speak
familiarly with that camel-driver who carried the secrets of Asia in
his pocket--it brought me nearer than I had ever dreamed to that life
which was always so tantalizing me by my inability to get at it.
When the man finally withdrew, and the _Mudir_ after him, I was in no
mood to go to bed. They had opened to me their ancient world, with all
its poetry and mystery, and I did not want to lose it again. I could
see it stretching dimly beyond the windows where the water-wheels went
moaning under the moon. I went out into it. The night was--you have no
idea what those nights could be. They had such a way of swallowing up
the squalidness of things, and bringing out all their melancholy magic.
The rose season was at its height, and the air was one perfume from the
hidden gardens. Then the nightingales were at that heart-breaking music
of theirs. And the moon! It wasn't one of those glaring round things,
like a coachman's button or a butcher's boy with the mumps, by which
young ladies are commonly put into spasms; but it was an old wasted
one, with such a light!
It was all the more extraordinary because not a creature was
about--except a man who lay asleep on the ground, not far from the
door. Apparently they dropped off wherever they happened to be, down
there, and I used to envy them for it. I stood still for a while, in
the shadow of the house, taking it all in. Don't you know, it happens
once in a while that you have a mood, and that your surroundings come
up to it? It doesn't happen very often, either--at least, to workaday
people like us. So I stood there, looking and listening and breathing.
And when I saw the edge of the shadow of the house crumble up at one
place, without any visible cause, and creep out into the moonlight,
I--I only looked at it. Nothing had any visible cause in that strange
world of mine, and I watched the slowly lengthening finger of shadow
with the passivity of a man who has seen too many wonders to wonder any
more. But then I made out a darker darkness winding back toward the
house. And--I don't know--I thought of the man on the ground. I looked
at him.
It was my camel-driver, dead as Darius, with the blood running out
of a hole in his back like water out of a spout. For the moment I
was still too far away from every day to be startled, or even very
much surprised. It was only a part of that mysterious world, with its
mysterious people and mysterious ways that I never could understand.
What was he doing there dead, who had been so full of life a little
while before? Was it one of his jokes? The night was the most
enchanting you could imagine, the air was heady with the breath of
rose-gardens, the nightingales were singing in the trees (down in the
valley I heard, low, low, the weary water-wheels), and here was the
prince of story-tellers with his tongue stopped forever, and the blood
of him making a snaky black trail across the moonlight....
* * * * *
What happened next? My dear fellow, you remind me of these kids who
will never let you finish their story! Nothing happened next. That was
the beauty of it. I guess I got one pretty good case of the jim-jams
after a while, and when I got through wondering whether I was going
to be elected next, I began to wonder whether they wouldn't think I'd
done it. Of course, I had done it, as a matter of fact, and that didn't
tend to composure of mind. Neither did my speculations as to what the
_Mudir_ might or might not have noticed when he left me that evening.
But, if you will believe it, nobody ever lifted a finger. The next
morning the caravan was gone and apparently everything was the same as
before. If anything, they were more decent than before. That was the
worst of it. I don't believe I'd have minded so much if they'd stoned
me and ridden me out on a rail and set the Government after me and
raised the devil generally. I should at least have felt less at sea. As
it was--hello, there's Carmignani! Let's take him over to Tokatlian's.