TURKISH TRAVELLING
IN two or three hours our party was ready; the servants, the Tatar, the
mounted Suridgees, {14a} and the baggage-horses, altogether made up a
strong cavalcade. The accomplished Mysseri, {14b} of whom you have heard
me speak so often, and who served me so faithfully throughout my Oriental
journeys, acted as our interpreter, and was, in fact, the brain of our
corps. The Tatar, you know, is a Government courier properly employed in
carrying despatches, but also sent with travellers to speed them on their
way, and answer with his head for their safety. The man whose head was
thus pledged for our precious lives was a glorious-looking fellow, with
the regular and handsome cast of countenance which is now characteristic
of the Ottoman race. {14c} His features displayed a good deal of serene
pride, self-respect, fortitude, a kind of ingenuous sensuality, and
something of instinctive wisdom, without any sharpness of intellect. He
had been a Janissary (as I afterwards found), and kept up the odd strut
of his old corps, which used to affright the Christians in former
times—that rolling gait so comically pompous, that a close imitation of
it, even in the broadest farce, would be looked upon as a very rough
over-acting of the character. It is occasioned in part by dress and
accoutrements. The weighty bundle of weapons carried upon the chest
throws back the body so as to give it a wonderful portliness, and,
moreover, the immense masses of clothes that swathe his limbs force the
wearer in walking to swing himself heavily round from left to right, and
from right to left. In truth, this great edifice of woollen, and cotton,
and silk, and silver, and brass, and steel is not at all fitted for
moving on foot; it cannot even walk without frightfully discomposing its
fair proportions; and as to running—our Tatar ran _once_ (it was in order
to pick up a partridge that Methley had winged with a pistol-shot), and
really the attempt was one of the funniest misdirections of human energy
that wondering man ever saw. But put him in his stirrups, and then is
the Tatar himself again: there he lives at his pleasure, reposing in the
tranquillity of that true home (the home of his ancestors) which the
saddle seems to afford him, and drawing from his pipe the calm pleasures
of his “own fireside,” or else dashing sudden over the earth, as though
for a moment he felt the mouth of a Turcoman steed, and saw his own
Scythian plains lying boundless and open before him.
It was not till his subordinates had nearly completed their preparations
for their march that our Tatar, “commanding the forces,” arrived; he came
sleek and fresh from the bath (for so is the custom of the Ottomans when
they start upon a journey), and was carefully accoutred at every point.
From his thigh to his throat he was loaded with arms and other implements
of a campaigning life. There is no scarcity of water along the whole
road from Belgrade to Stamboul, but the habits of our Tatar were formed
by his ancestors and not by himself, so he took good care to see that his
leathern water-flask was amply charged and properly strapped to the
saddle, along with his blessed _tchibouque_. And now at last he has
cursed the Suridgees in all proper figures of speech, and is ready for a
ride of a thousand miles; but before he comforts his soul in the marble
baths of Stamboul he will be another and a lesser man; his sense of
responsibility, his too strict abstemiousness, and his restless energy,
disdainful of sleep, will have worn him down to a fraction of the sleek
Moostapha that now leads out our party from the gates of Belgrade.
The Suridgees are the men employed to lead the baggage-horses. They are
most of them gipsies. Their lot is a sad one: they are the last of the
human race, and all the sins of their superiors (including the horses)
can safely be visited on them. But the wretched look often more
picturesque than their betters; and though all the world despise these
poor Suridgees, their tawny skins and their grisly beards will gain them
honourable standing in the foreground of a landscape. We had a couple of
these fellows with us, each leading a baggage-horse, to the tail of which
last another baggage-horse was attached. There was a world of trouble in
persuading the stiff angular portmanteaus of Europe to adapt themselves
to their new condition and sit quietly on pack-saddles, but all was right
at last, and it gladdened my eyes to see our little troop file off
through the winding lanes of the city, and show down brightly in the
plain beneath. The one of our party that seemed to be most out of
keeping with the rest of the scene was Methley’s Yorkshire servant, who
always rode doggedly on in his pantry jacket, looking out for
“gentlemen’s seats.”
Methley and I had English saddles, but I think we should have done just
as well (I should certainly have seen more of the country) if we had
adopted saddles like that of our Tatar, who towered so loftily over the
scraggy little beast that carried him. In taking thought for the East,
whilst in England, I had made one capital hit which you must not forget—I
had brought with me a pair of common spurs. These were a great comfort
to me throughout my horseback travels, by keeping up the cheerfulness of
the many unhappy nags that I had to bestride; the angle of the Oriental
stirrup is a very poor substitute for spurs.
The Ottoman horseman, raised by his saddle to a great height above the
humble level of the back that he bestrides, and using an awfully sharp
bit, is able to lift the crest of his nag, and force him into a strangely
fast shuffling walk, the orthodox pace for the journey. My comrade and
I, using English saddles, could not easily keep our beasts up to this
peculiar amble; besides, we thought it a bore to be _followed_ by our
attendants for a thousand miles, and we generally, therefore, did duty as
the rearguard of our “grand army”; we used to walk our horses till the
party in front had got into the distance, and then retrieve the lost
ground by a gallop.
We had ridden on for some two or three hours; the stir and bustle of our
commencing journey had ceased, the liveliness of our little troop had
worn off with the declining day, and the night closed in as we entered
the great Servian forest. Through this our road was to last for more
than a hundred miles. Endless, and endless now on either side, the tall
oaks closed in their ranks and stood gloomily lowering over us, as grim
as an army of giants with a thousand years’ pay in arrear. One strived
with listening ear to catch some tidings of that forest world within—some
stirring of beasts, some night-bird’s scream, but all was quite hushed,
except the voice of the cicalas that peopled every bough, and filled the
depths of the forest through and through, with one same hum
everlasting—more stilling than very silence.
At first our way was in darkness, but after a while the moon got up, and
touched the glittering arms and tawny faces of our men with light so pale
and mystic, that the watchful Tatar felt bound to look out for demons,
and take proper means for keeping them off; forthwith he determined that
the duty of frightening away our ghostly enemies (like every other
troublesome work) should fall upon the poor Suridgees, who accordingly
lifted up their voices, and burst upon the dreadful stillness of the
forest with shrieks and dismal howls. These precautions were kept up
incessantly, and were followed by the most complete success, for not one
demon came near us.
Long before midnight we reached the hamlet in which we were to rest for
the night; it was made up of about a dozen clay huts, standing upon a
small tract of ground hardly won from the forest. The peasants that
lived there spoke a Slavonic dialect, and Mysseri’s knowledge of the
Russian tongue enabled him to talk with them freely. We took up our
quarters in a square room with white walls and an earthen floor, quite
bare of furniture, and utterly void of women. They told us, however,
that these Servian villagers lived in happy abundance, but that they were
careful to conceal their riches, as well as their wives.
The burthens unstrapped from the pack-saddles very quickly furnished our
den; a couple of quilts spread upon the floor, with a carpet-bag at the
head of each, became capital sofas—portmanteaus, and hat-boxes, and
writing-cases, and books, and maps, and gleaming arms soon lay strewed
around us in pleasant confusion. Mysseri’s canteen too began to yield up
its treasures, but we relied upon finding some provisions in the village.
At first the natives declared that their hens were mere old maids and all
their cows unmarried; but our Tatar swore such a grand sonorous oath, and
fingered the hilt of his yataghan with such persuasive touch, that the
land soon flowed with milk, and mountains of eggs arose.
And soon there was tea before us, with all its unspeakable fragrance, and
as we reclined on the floor, we found that a portmanteau was just the
right height for a table; the duty of candlesticks was ably performed by
a couple of intelligent natives; the rest of the villagers stood by the
open doorway at the lower end of the room, and watched our banqueting
with grave and devout attention.
The first night of your first campaign (though you be but a mere peaceful
campaigner) is a glorious time in your life. It is so sweet to find
one’s self free from the stale civilisation of Europe! Oh, my dear ally,
when first you spread your carpet in the midst of these Eastern scenes,
do think for a moment of those your fellow-creatures, that dwell in
squares, and streets, and even (for such is the fate of many!) in actual
country houses; think of the people that are “presenting their
compliments,” and “requesting the honour,” and “much regretting,”—of
those that are pinioned at dinner-tables, or stuck up in ballrooms, or
cruelly planted in pews,—ay, think of these, and so remembering how many
poor devils are living in a state of utter respectability, you will glory
the more in your own delightful escape.
I am bound to confess, however, that with all its charms a mud floor
(like a mercenary match) does certainly promote early rising. Long
before daybreak we were up, and had breakfasted; after this there was
nearly a whole tedious hour to endure whilst the horses were laden by
torchlight; but this had an end, and at last we went on once more.
Cloaked, and sombre, at first we made our sullen way through the
darkness, with scarcely one barter of words; but soon the genial morn
burst down from heaven, and stirred the blood so gladly through our
veins, that the very Suridgees, with all their troubles, could now look
up for an instant, and almost seem to believe in the temporary goodness
of God.
The actual movement from one place to another, in Europeanised countries,
is a process so temporary—it occupies, I mean, so small a proportion of
the traveller’s entire time—that his mind remains unsettled, so long as
the wheels are going; he may be alive enough to external objects of
interest, and to the crowding ideas which are often invited by the
excitement of a changing scene, but he is still conscious of being in a
provisional state, and his mind is constantly recurring to the expected
end of his journey; his ordinary ways of thought have been interrupted,
and before any new mental habits can be formed he is quietly fixed in his
hotel. It will be otherwise with you when you journey in the East. Day
after day, perhaps week after week and month after month, your foot is in
the stirrup. To taste the cold breath of the earliest morn, and to lead,
or follow, your bright cavalcade till sunset through forests and mountain
passes, through valleys and desolate plains, all this becomes your MODE
OF LIFE, and you ride, eat, drink, and curse the mosquitoes as
systematically as your friends in England eat, drink, and sleep. If you
are wise, you will not look upon the long period of time thus occupied in
actual movement as the mere gulf dividing you from the end of your
journey, but rather as one of those rare and plastic seasons of your life
from which, perhaps, in after times you may love to date the moulding of
your character—that is, your very identity. Once feel this, and you will
soon grow happy and contented in your saddle-home. As for me and my
comrade, however, in this part of our journey we often forgot Stamboul,
forgot all the Ottoman Empire, and only remembered old times. We went
back, loitering on the banks of Thames—not grim old Thames of “after
life,” that washes the Parliament Houses, and drowns despairing girl—but
Thames, the “old Eton fellow,” that wrestled with us in our boyhood till
he taught us to be stronger than he. We bullied Keate, and scoffed at
Larry Miller, and Okes; we rode along loudly laughing, and talked to the
grave Servian forest as though it were the “Brocas clump.”
Our pace was commonly very slow, for the baggage-horses served us for a
drag, and kept us to a rate of little more than five miles in the hour,
but now and then, and chiefly at night, a spirit of movement would
suddenly animate the whole party; the baggage-horses would be teased into
a gallop, and when once this was done, there would be such a banging of
portmanteaus, and such convulsions of carpet-bags upon their panting
sides, and the Suridgees would follow them up with such a hurricane of
blows, and screams, and curses, that stopping or relaxing was scarcely
possible; then the rest of us would put our horses into a gallop, and so,
all shouting cheerily, would hunt, and drive the sumpter beasts like a
flock of goats, up hill and down dale, right on to the end of their
journey.
The distances at which we got relays of horses varied greatly; some were
not more than fifteen or twenty miles, but twice, I think, we performed a
whole day’s journey of more than sixty miles with the same beasts.
When at last we came out from the forest our road lay through scenes like
those of an English park. The green sward unfenced, and left to the free
pasture of cattle, was dotted with groups of stately trees, and here and
there darkened over with larger masses of wood, that seemed gathered
together for bounding the domain, and shutting out some “infernal”
fellow-creature in the shape of a newly made squire; in one or two spots
the hanging copses looked down upon a lawn below with such sheltering
mien, that seeing the like in England you would have been tempted almost
to ask the name of the spendthrift, or the madman who had dared to pull
down “the old hall.”
There are few countries less infested by “lions” than the provinces on
this part of your route. You are not called upon to “drop a tear” over
the tomb of “the once brilliant” anybody, or to pay your “tribute of
respect” to anything dead or alive. There are no Servian or Bulgarian
litterateurs with whom it would be positively disgraceful not to form an
acquaintance; you have no staring, no praising to get through; the only
public building of any interest that lies on the road is of modern date,
but is said to be a good specimen of Oriental architecture; it is of a
pyramidical shape, and is made up of thirty thousand skulls, contributed
by the rebellious Servians in the early part (I believe) of this century:
I am not at all sure of my date, but I fancy it was in the year 1806 that
the first skull was laid. {23} I am ashamed to say that in the darkness
of the early morning we unknowingly went by the neighbourhood of this
triumph of art, and so basely got off from admiring “the simple grandeur
of the architect’s conception,” and “the exquisite beauty of the
fretwork.”
There being no “lions,” we ought at least to have met with a few perils,
but the only robbers we saw anything of had been long since dead and
gone. The poor fellows had been impaled upon high poles, and so propped
up by the transverse spokes beneath them, that their skeletons, clothed
with some white, wax-like remains of flesh, still sat up lolling in the
sunshine, and listlessly stared without eyes.
One day it seemed to me that our path was a little more rugged than
usual, and I found that I was deserving for myself the title of
Sabalkansky, or “Transcender of the Balcan.” The truth is, that, as a
military barrier, the Balcan is a fabulous mountain. Such seems to be
the view of Major Keppell, who looked on it towards the east with the eye
of a soldier, and certainly in the Sophia Pass, which I followed, there
is no narrow defile, and no ascent sufficiently difficult to stop, or
delay for long time, a train of siege artillery.
Before we reached Adrianople, Methley had been seized with we knew not
what ailment, and when we had taken up our quarters in the city he was
cast to the very earth by sickness. Andrianople enjoyed an English
consul, and I felt sure that, in Eastern phrase, his house would cease to
be his house, and would become the house of my sick comrade. I should
have judged rightly under ordinary circumstances, but the levelling
plague was abroad, and the dread of it had dominion over the consular
mind. So now (whether dying or not, one could hardly tell), upon a quilt
stretched out along the floor, there lay the best hope of an ancient
line, without the material aids to comfort of even the humblest sort, and
(sad to say) without the consolation of a friend, or even a comrade worth
having. I have a notion that tenderness and pity are affections
occasioned in some measure by living within doors; certainly, at the time
I speak of, the open-air life which I have been leading, or the wayfaring
hardships of the journey, had so strangely blunted me, that I felt
intolerant of illness, and looked down upon my companion as if the poor
fellow in falling ill had betrayed a want of spirit. I entertained, too,
a most absurd idea—an idea that his illness was partly affected. You see
that I have made a confession: this I hope—that I may always hereafter
look charitably upon the hard, savage acts of peasants, and the cruelties
of a “brutal” soldiery. God knows that I strived to melt myself into
common charity, and to put on a gentleness which I could not feel, but
this attempt did not cheat the keenness of the sufferer; he could not
have felt the less deserted because that I was with him.
We called to aid a solemn Armenian (I think he was), half soothsayer,
half hakim or doctor, who, all the while counting his beads, fixed his
eyes steadily upon the patient, and then suddenly dealt him a violent
blow on the chest. Methley bravely dissembled his pain, for he fancied
that the blow was meant to try whether or not the plague were on him.
Here was really a sad embarrassment—no bed; nothing to offer the invalid
in the shape of food save a piece of thin, tough, flexible, drab-coloured
cloth, made of flour and mill-stones in equal proportions, and called by
the name of “bread”; then the patient, of course, had no “confidence in
his medical man,” and on the whole, the best chance of saving my comrade
seemed to lie in taking him out of the reach of his doctor, and bearing
him away to the neighbourhood of some more genial consul. But how was
this to be done? Methley was much too ill to be kept in his saddle, and
wheel carriages, as means of travelling, were unknown. There is,
however, such a thing as an “araba,” a vehicle drawn by oxen, in which
the wives of a rich man are sometimes dragged four or five miles over the
grass by way of recreation. The carriage is rudely framed, but you
recognise in the simple grandeur of its design a likeness to things
majestic; in short, if your carpenter’s son were to make a “Lord Mayor’s
coach” for little Amy, he would build a carriage very much in the style
of a Turkish araba. No one had ever heard of horses being used for
drawing a carriage in this part of the world, but necessity is the mother
of innovation as well as of invention. I was fully justified, I think,
in arguing that there were numerous instances of horses being used for
that purpose in our own country—that the laws of nature are uniform in
their operation over all the world (except Ireland)—that that which was
true in Piccadilly, must be true in Adrianople—that the matter could not
fairly be treated as an ecclesiastical question, for that the
circumstance of Methley’s going on to Stamboul in an araba drawn by
horses, when calmly and dispassionately considered, would appear to be
perfectly consistent with the maintenance of the Mahometan religion as by
law established. Thus poor, dear, patient Reason would have fought her
slow battle against Asiatic prejudice, and I am convinced that she would
have established the possibility (and perhaps even the propriety) of
harnessing horses in a hundred and fifty years; but in the meantime
Mysseri, well seconded by our Tatar, put a very quick end to the
controversy by having the horses put to.
It was a sore thing for me to see my poor comrade brought to this, for
young though he was, he was a veteran in travel. When scarcely yet of
age he had invaded India from the frontiers of Russia, and that so
swiftly, that measuring by the time of his flight the broad dominions of
the king of kings were shrivelled up to a dukedom, and now, poor fellow,
he was to be poked into an araba, like a Georgian girl! He suffered
greatly, for there were no springs for the carriage, and no road for the
wheels; and so the concern jolted on over the open country with such
twists, and jerks, and jumps, as might almost dislocate the supple tongue
of Satan.
All day the patient kept himself shut up within the lattice-work of the
araba, and I could hardly know how he was faring until the end of the
day’s journey, when I found that he was not worse, and was buoyed up with
the hope of some day reaching Constantinople.
I was always conning over my maps, and fancied that I knew pretty well my
line, but after Adrianople I had made more southing than I knew for, and
it was with unbelieving wonder, and delight, that I came suddenly upon
the shore of the sea. A little while, and its gentle billows were
flowing beneath the hoofs of my beast; but the hearing of the ripple was
not enough communion, and the seeing of the blue Propontis was not to
know and possess it—I must needs plunge into its depth and quench my
longing love in the palpable waves; and so when old Moostapha (defender
against demons) looked round for his charge, he saw with horror and
dismay that he for whose life his own life stood pledged was possessed of
some devil who had driven him down into the sea—that the rider and the
steed had vanished from earth, and that out among the waves was the
gasping crest of a post-horse, and the ghostly head of the Englishman
moving upon the face of the waters.
We started very early indeed on the last day of our journey, and from the
moment of being off until we gained the shelter of the imperial walls we
were struggling face to face with an icy storm that swept right down from
the steppes of Tartary, keen, fierce, and steady as a northern conqueror.
Methley’s servant, who was the greatest sufferer, kept his saddle until
we reached Stamboul, but was then found to be quite benumbed in limbs,
and his brain was so much affected that when he was lifted from his horse
he fell away in a state of unconsciousness, the first stage of a
dangerous fever.
Our Tatar, worn down by care and toil, and carrying seven heavens full of
water in his manifold jackets and shawls, was a mere weak and vapid
dilution of the sleek Moostapha, who scarce more than one fortnight
before came out like a bridegroom from his chamber to take the command of
our party.
Mysseri seemed somewhat over-wearied, but he had lost none of his
strangely quiet energy. He wore a grave look, however, for he now had
learnt that the plague was prevailing at Constantinople, and he was
fearing that our two sick men, and the miserable looks of our whole
party, might make us unwelcome at Pera.
We crossed the Golden Horn in a caïque. As soon as we had landed, some
woebegone-looking fellows were got together and laden with our baggage.
Then on we went, dripping, and sloshing, and looking very like men that
had been turned back by the Royal Humane Society as being incurably
drowned. Supporting our sick, we climbed up shelving steps and threaded
many windings, and at last came up into the main street of Pera, humbly
hoping that we might not be judged guilty of plague, and so be cast back
with horror from the doors of the shuddering Christians.
Such was the condition of our party, which fifteen days before had filed
away so gaily from the gates of Belgrade. A couple of fevers and a
north-easterly storm had thoroughly spoiled our looks.
The interest of Mysseri with the house of Giuseppini was too powerful to
be denied, and at once, though not without fear and trembling, we were
admitted as guests.