Start for Trebizond.--Personal Appearance of the Author.--Mountain
Pass.--Reception at Beyboort.--Misfortunes of Mustapha.--Pass of
Zigana Dagh.--Arrival at Trebizond.
On the 27th of December, all preparations being completed, I started
on my journey over the mountains to Trebizond. Kiamili Pasha had
prepared an order to all and sundry, great and small, upon the road,
to give me every assistance, and, with this and a powerful firman
from the Sultan, I had authority to do whatever I pleased in that
part of the world. About twenty attendants accompanied me, besides
a certain levy from every village I passed, who were to march to
the next village every day to clear the roads, move the snow, and
pick us out of it when we tumbled in, &c. These villagers were all
armed with the peculiar dagger of Circassia, called a cama, a most
efficient tool as well as weapon, and a short, heavy rifle, generally
beautifully made, with which they hit objects at very long distances,
400 yards not being considered out of shot. My personal appearance
must have been remarkable: I had a long beard, and so thin a face
that my nose was translucent, if not transparent. I had a Persian cap
upon my head, and over other garments a toilet of my own invention,
which vested me with a dignity peculiar to myself: this was a large
eider down quilt, of bright green silk, in the middle of which I had
caused a hole to be made, through which I put my head; the two ends
of the quilt hung down before and behind, like a chasuble or a poncho;
round it I tied a girdle. My general appearance must have been rather
striking to the beholder, and was probably considered by the natives
on the road as the official costume of an Elchi Bey. I was so weak
that when I was bundled into the takterawan I could not turn round,
and was nearly smothered in my own feathers, till somebody turned me
on the right side upward, when I was able to bid adieu to all the
principal Europeans and others who had kindly assembled to see me
off. A number of people accompanied me for some distance out of the
town; and Colonel Williams came as far as Elijè, about three hours
in the snow, which ended my first day's march.
On the next day, December 28th, we got to Meymansoor, a village at
the foot of the first mountain pass, called Hoshapoona, a terrible
place at all times, but frightful in the depth of winter, and under
the circumstances I was in. Only two or three days before it had been
rendered practicable, by driving a thousand horses, belonging to the
caravans which were snowed up at the foot of the pass, up and down
the road to make a track. This road is what is called a scala; that
is, a series of holes, each about a foot deep, sometimes two feet,
about eighteen inches in diameter, and the same in distance from one
another. From long practice, the horses put their feet very cleverly
into these holes without tripping over the intervening ridges of
hardened snow. Men on foot usually step on the ridges, which is
like walking on the rounds of a ladder for a few hundred miles,
the probabilities of not breaking your leg if you slip into the hole
before or behind you being very slight. As in many places this road was
slantindicular, going up and down at an angle of 45°, I was reclining
in the litter alternately on my head and on my heels--mostly on my
head going up hill. My mules were held upon their feet by as many
men as could stand on each side, where the road was wide enough;
most of it was a ledge on a precipice, about eighteen inches wide,
when the men supported my equipage with ropes, a strong body hopping
and stumbling behind and before, at the rate of about one mile an
hour. My glass windows were smashed with the least possible delay,
but we repaired them the next day with oiled paper. At the top of
the pass we came upon a party of Persians, who were going the other
way toward Erzeroom; they were seated in a row, on the ledge of the
precipice, looking despairingly at a number of their baggage-horses
which had tumbled over, and were wallowing in the snow many hundred
feet below. They did not seem to be killed, as far as I could see,
as the snow had broken their fall. The drift covered the precipitous
rock from the bottom to within twenty or thirty feet of the top, and
they slid down this till they popped into a deep hole in the snow,
like a well, in the valley below. It did not appear that there was
any probability of their getting up again. The poor Persians crammed
themselves into nooks and little hollows on the ledge to make room for
us to pass. I presume their horses were frozen to death before we had
left them very long. This was an awful spot altogether. We had started
before light in the morning, and arrived in a dreary mountain valley,
at a hovel called Zaza Khan, in the evening. During one part of the
day, the danger to the takterawan was so great that I was plucked out,
and a tall, good-natured man, called Beyragdar (the standard-bearer),
carried me like a baby in his arms, one or two others supporting him,
across a tremendous ledge. I was light enough to carry, but was such a
great bundle of fluff that he could not see over me, and another man
helped him along, and showed him where to put his feet. We were very
fortunate in a fine sunny day for our journey over this tremendous
mountain. On the last day of the year 1843 we arrived at the town of
Beyboort. Though I had sent two horsemen on to say that I was coming,
no one came out of the town to meet me, and on proceeding to the
palace or house of the Bey, the governor of the place I was refused
admittance, though he had received orders before to pay me every
attention. I at last was taken in by the Cadi, in whose comfortable
house I was kindly entertained. The next day we met a tatar, a
government courier, on the road from Trebizond. I sent letters by him
to Erzeroom, complaining of my reception by the Bey of Beyboort; and so
rapidly were matters conducted by my friend the Pasha, that the Bey was
turned out of his government, and another Bey appointed to succeed him,
before I and my party arrived at Trebizond. This was sharp practice,
and doubtless had a good effect. The chiefs of the other villages, and
the one town of Gumush Khannè, treated me always with great kindness
and civility. On the 2d of January, at a hovel called Khaderach Khan,
I met a rich Persian merchant coming from Constantinople with his
wife and family. He had been eighteen days on the road from Trebizond,
which is thirty-two hours of tatar-posting; from hence, at this rate,
he would be six months on his journey to Teheran, to which place he
was bound. He was a remarkably gentleman-like man, as most Persian
gentlemen are. He had a great train of servants and attendants, well
dressed and well armed, each with a silver tass, or drinking-cup,
slung over his shoulder, and a handsome cama dangling by a narrow strap
from the front of his girdle, and his waist squeezed till he could
hardly shut his mouth, in true Circassian style. He had numbers of
curious contrivances for comfort and convenience: little fire-places,
hanging to the stirrup, for hot coals, to light the caleoons, &c. His
son, a smart youth, spoke French, and we passed a very pleasant hour
together, though I had turned him out of the best hole in the hovel,
into which Beyragdar laid me down softly in the corner; and I was so
much exhausted that I knew nothing of the confusion I had made till I
had had a cup of blazing hot Russian tea, with a slice of lemon in it
instead of cream, and had taken the diversion of wondering at an odd
sort of partridge which one of my men had knocked over with a stone,
for which act I presented him with the sum of 5 1/2d. sterling.
At Kalé Khan I had given leave to one Mustapha, my kawass bashi,
or captain of the kawasses, to go and see his family, who lived in
a village a short distance off the road; he had not seen them for a
long time, and went on his way rejoicing. At a place called Porda
Bakchelari, where I was resting on the 3d, he made his appearance
again; he was so altered in looks that I did not know him at first;
so much so, that I asked him who he was, and what he wanted with
me. His history, poor fellow! was as follows:
When he arrived at his village, he rode up to the door of his own
house, thinking to give a happy surprise to his wife and children,
whose names he called out as he stopped his horse in the little
street. No one answered, when he called again, and knocked loudly at
the door several times. At last an old woman put her head out of the
door of another house, and screamed to him to know what he was making
such a noise about.
"I want such a one," said he, naming his wife.
"What, Eyesha?" said the old woman; "who are you? You must be a
stranger to this place not to know that she died of the fever and
was buried two weeks ago."
"And where is Hassan?" said the poor kawass, asking for his eldest son.
"Oh, he died three months ago."
"And the two little ones?" he asked.
"They were buried, I forget how long it is since," said the old woman;
"the fever got into that house; the people are all dead. You had better
not go in, stranger, for it has been locked up by the cadi, and the
owner, Mustapha Aga, lives a long way off at Erzeroom. Inshalla! he
will come some day, and the cadi will deliver the key to him."
Mustapha kawass never dismounted from his horse in his native village;
he turned slowly away, and rode back to the track of the mules and
horses of my followers till he caught us up at Bakchelari Khan.
"Allahkerim!" (God is merciful!) said his companions, when he had told
us this sad history. His family was swept from the face of the earth;
there was not a servant left, not one old well-remembered face to
greet him in his visit to the village where he had passed his childish
days. He had heard nothing of the fever or of the infliction which
had fallen upon his house, and suddenly he found himself alone in the
wide world. We were all grieved for him, but what could we do? every
one looked grave as we plodded on again through the snow and ice,
and smoked the pipe of reflection in silence on our weary way.
On the 7th we got into a fix near a place called Madem Khanlari, in
the pass of Zigana Dagh, a worse place than Even Hoshabounar: we had
been all day scrambling about in rocky ledges, and crossing torrents
and snow-drifts, each of which seemed impassable till we went at it
with a will: a number of villagers, with axes and ropes, came with
us, and worked valiantly in clearing the ice off the narrow shelves
of rock, and leading the horses through the most difficult places,
where they could hardly stand; sometimes the horses were almost lifted
by the men. By the greatest care and exertion, none as yet fell over
the precipices. My takterawan was surrounded by a posse of zealous,
active mountaineers, clinging to each other, and putting the mules'
feet into the holes which they cut for them with their axes. At
last we got to a place where there was a sudden turn at the narrow
edge of a gorge or cleft of rock: the length of the litter, with one
mule before and another behind, made it impossible to turn without
going over. Somehow, by the help of a number of men, the front mule
was carried by main force round the corner, till we were in such a
position that the hinder mule was being dragged over the precipice
by the poles of the takterawan, to which it was harnessed. Without
a drawing it is difficult to describe the position we had got into;
but it may be partly understood by the fact that, out of whichever
side of the takterawan I looked, there was nothing under me, for
perhaps two hundred feet, till you arrived at a brawling torrent,
which kept itself alive by violent exercise, in jumping, leaping,
and tumbling over the rocks and cascades at the bottom of the ravine,
so that it was the only thing not frozen hard and still in the dead
landscape of thick ice, and snow, and shattered rock, and the clean,
smooth precipice towered up from the little merry stream to hundreds
of feet above our heads, where an edge of snow and a fringe of icicles
shone in the bright sky upon the topmost margin of the cliffs. Some of
the men now sat down, with their legs hanging over the precipice; they
were supported by other men, while, in their turn, they held the legs
of the mules, who were beginning to get frightened, or perhaps choked,
and gave utterance to curious exclamations. My friend Beyragdar made a
bridge of his long body, by leaning over from the inner angle of the
road to the side of the takterawan. As for me, beyond peeping like
an old rat out of a cage, I could not move, so I lay still till I was
pulled out by two men over Beyragdar's back, handed like a bundle over
the foremost mule, and stuck upon a horse a little farther on. The
mules were, somehow or other, saved and released from the shafts of
the takterawan, which I never saw again; they could get it no further,
and the rest of the journey I made on horseback, supported by a man
on each side when the road was wide enough, by one when it was too
narrow for two, and, when there was only room for the horse alone,
Beyragdar carried me in his arms till we got to the Strada Reale,
good two feet wide, when I was put upon a horse again.
In this way, by slow degrees, we scrambled on our way, till, on the
10th of January, after fifteen days' journey through the intense cold
of the mountains, I arrived, in better health and strength than when
I started, at the edge of the table-land, from whence I saw the blue
waters of the sea, and at 11 o'clock A.M. I was seated in my room in
the quarantine station at Trebizond.