ACCIDENTS OF AN ANTIQUARY’S LIFE
[Illustration]
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: FRENCH CORPORAL DRILLING CRETAN VILLAGE GUARDS (1898).
Frontispiece.
]
ACCIDENTS
OF AN
ANTIQUARY’S LIFE
BY
D. G. HOGARTH
AUTHOR OF ‘A WANDERING SCHOLAR,’ ETC.
WITH FORTY ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR
AND HIS COMPANIONS
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1910
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
PREFACE
Among many companions in these accidents who are not named in the
text, lest the book should become a string of names, I have to thank
five especially because they have allowed me to use photographs taken
when we were together. These are Mr. Alison V. Armour, owner of the
“Utowana,” Mr. Richard Norton, a comrade during the cruise of that
yacht and at Siut and in Syria, Messrs. A. W. Van Buren and C. D.
Curtis, members of the yachting party, and Mr. J. A. R. Munro, who
endured many things with me in Asia Minor in 1891. Four others, Dr.
A. C. Headlam, who was the third of Sir W. M. Ramsay’s party in 1890,
Mr. B. Christian, my companion in Thessaly before the Graeco-Turkish
war broke out, Mr. J. G. C. Anderson, who cruised with me to Lycia
in 1897, and Mr. A. E. Henderson, who did loyal service at Ephesus,
I cannot forbear to name. I have also to express thanks to the
proprietors and editors of three magazines, the _Monthly_, _Cornhill_,
and _Macmillan’s_, for their kind consent to my using, in five chapters
of this book, the second to the sixth, parts of articles which appeared
in their issues prior to 1905. Finally, my friend and critic, Charles
Robert Leslie Fletcher, who read this book in proof, knows how greatly
I am beholden to him.
D. G. H.
OXFORD, 1909.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTORY
APOLOGY OF AN APPRENTICE 1
I. AN INTERLUDE 21
II. LYCIA 43
III. CRETE 66
IV. NILE FENS 91
V. THE SATALIAN GULF 108
VI. CYRENE 123
VII. DIGGING 142
VIII. THE SAJUR 160
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
FRENCH CORPORAL DRILLING CRETAN VILLAGE GUARDS (1898) _Frontispiece_
THE WHITE CLIFFS OF HIERAPOLIS 6
THE VALLEY OF THE PONTIC LYCUS AT SUNRISE 18
A WRECKED MOSLEM VILLAGE OF CRETE 25
LYCIAN TOMBS 48
THE THEATRE OF MYRA 49
THE REPUTED TOMB OF ST. NICHOLAS AT MYRA 52
THE SAND-CHOKED THEATRE OF PATARA 54
THE DESPOILED HARPY TOMB 62
BLACKENED STUMPS AND PITS 67
SPONGE BOATS IN ZAKRO BAY 79
A BRIDAL BOWER AT GAIF 92
AN OLD FEN VILLAGE 99
THE LONE CONVENT OF GEMIANA 100
A FEN FISHERMAN 102
THE NORTHERNMOST HAMLET 105
CAMELS LOADING AT BALTIM 106
HALF BURIED PALM-FOREST, BALTIM 107
THE UTOWANA AT CNIDUS 108
PHASELIS AND TAKHTALY 113
THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS 118
IN THE THEATRE OF ASPENDUS 119
TURKS IN THE CORRIDOR AT ASPENDUS 120
THE THEATRE OF SIDÉ 121
THE ROCK ROAD FROM APOLLONIA TO CYRENE 126
TOMBS OF CYRENE 127
THE MUDIR OF CYRENE 129
THE APOLLO FOUNTAIN 133
BEDAWIS OF THE BENI HAASA 135
APOLLONIA IN STORM 138
RIGGING THE GREAT PUMP AT EPHESUS 150
THE TREASURE SPOT AND PUMPS 151
A SEALED GRAVE-DOOR 155
MODELS OF SERVANTS AT THEIR WORK BESIDE A COFFIN 158
EUPHRATES FROM THE MOUND OF CARCHEMISH 160
THE SAJUR VALLEY AT SUNSET FROM TELL BASHAR 164
TELL AHMAR ACROSS EUPHRATES 171
A EUPHRATEAN FERRY 173
HITTITE INSCRIPTION AT TELL AHMAR 174
FALLEN LION OF SHALMANESER II. AT TELL AHMAR 175
INTRODUCTORY.
APOLOGY OF AN APPRENTICE.
And ta’en the--_Antiquarian trade_
I think they call it.
_Burns._
I will not take the name of Antiquary without apology, and hereby,
_liberandi animam meam causa_, make it in an Introductory, to be passed
over if the reader pleases. Your true Antiquary is born, not made.
Sometimes an infirmity or awkwardness of body, which has disposed a boy
to shun the pursuits of his fellows, may help to detach the man for the
study of forgotten far off things; but it is essential that there be
inborn in him the type of mind which is more curious of the past than
the present, loves detail for its own sake, and cares less for ends
than means.
Nevertheless, accident may make an Antiquary, as good as another, out
of anybody whose boyish education has given him, willy nilly, some
knowledge of the elder world. Let him be thrown, for example, in early
manhood, much into lands whose ancient monuments conspicuously exalt
the past at the expense of the present. The necessary curiosity can
grow within him, disposing his mind to study antiquarian detail as a
duty, and, in time, a pleasure; and through apprenticeship he may learn
and love the trade to which he was not born.
I claim to be no better than this Antiquary made, and made none too
soon. Nothing disposed me to the trade in early years. If I was taken
as a child to minsters and abbeys, I endured their chill aisles in
lively hope of a pastrycook to come, and at our oldest Public School
had no feeling for the grey Gothic austerities among which live the
Foundationers, of whose number I was not. Nor was it until half my
Oxford course had been run that I discovered curiosity about any
ancient thing, and that curiosity was far from antiquarian. Scholar
of my College though I was, I had been better known as a freshman
for a gamester in a small way than for anything else; but some study
was forced upon me, and in the course of it I happened on Mommsen’s
panegyric of Caesar. The charm of guessing ancient motives from the
records of ancient deeds fascinated me--there is much in the pursuit to
appeal to a gambler--and I resolved to attempt a speculative biography
of some great man. Looking about me for another imperial figure, I
fixed, greatly daring, on Alexander the Great, foreswore cards and the
course, and stepped out of the strict lists of the schools into the
field of Macedonian history. The spacious world over which Alexander
moved fired my imagination and stirred a lust for discovery. As a child
my keenest joy was to announce the finding of an untrodden way in the
outskirts of a Lincolnshire townlet, and my best remembered grief was
to learn that it was already known and named.
I could write a good deal about Macedonians when I went into the
Schools, but barely enough on other matters to win salvation; and if I
was made presently a tutor and fellow of my College, it was less for
my actual scholarship than for hope of its future. I found academic
life not greatly to my liking at that age, and when an endowment for
scholarly travel abroad was set for competition, I entered in forlorn
hope of escape. To the equal surprise of others, I was chosen among
better scholars, and found myself in a quandary. If I was to research
abroad as a classical scholar, I wished to explore Alexander’s steps;
but to go up alone into Asia was beyond my means. A friend, who knew
my difficulty, told me that William Martin Ramsay, the well-known
traveller in Asia Minor, needed an apprentice. Asia Minor was not
Persia, but it was Asia, and fair field for a pioneer. I offered
myself, and was accepted, but on the sole condition, that I made some
preliminary study at the newly-founded Archaeological School in Athens.
I knew nothing of Greek archaeology, having never during six years
entered the Museum of my own Oxford; and thus, at an age when most
archaeologists are past masters of some branch of their trade, I had
to begin apprenticeship. Perhaps it may interest some to hear by what
accidents an antiquary of a sort was made out of a wandering scholar.
* * * * *
I went to Athens early in 1887, as raw a neophyte as ever entered
Academe. The British School, then in its first youth, was not yet
assured of its place in the local republic of science, and held little
converse with other Schools. The famous Antiquary who directed it
could have guided better, though not more gladly, a student of Attic
architecture than a would-be explorer of Asia, and the library held
few books, though, heaven knows, enough that I had not read. My one
fellow-student helped me much, and would have helped me more, had I
been in the temper to learn. But I had come to Athens as a man should
not, if he is to love her--come without trained taste for the ancient
art, which is her only wealth, and without instinctive reverence for
her soil. I gaped at her monuments like any other tourist, though with
less than the common understanding, fled from German lectures on her
topography, and took refuge in studying her inscriptions as students
of history will who are brought unworthy into the presence of her art.
For pastime, beside visiting a few neighbouring spots of which I knew
not enough to find them interesting, I roamed mean streets and dusty
suburbs, regretting the world I had left, and longing for another in
the east, with a prospect of Asiatic travel for my sole comfort.
Two months passed drearily, and I escaped to Macedonia. The rickety
vessel broke down for the third time at the second sunrise, and,
wakened by the stoppage, I climbed sleepily on deck to find myself in
a world of fog. A sudden gleam pierced the mist: I turned to see a
patch of heaven, and in it, immeasurably high, one hard rose-red cloud.
“_Olympe!_” said a deck hand. The peak stood revealed a moment only;
but I had seen the seat of the Gods.
Salonica, _sale unique_, as the skipper punned, received me for ten
days, and, with its camel-trains and Jews, black-bearded and cruel-eyed
as men that kill prophets offered a foretaste of the East. It was in
days before the railway had come down the Vardar valley and before the
Great Fire, and the town, packed more close than now into its frame of
white wall, was more odorous, less Italianized, less passable. Under
the aegis of a Turk-loving Consul I hunted inscriptions in alleys and
courts and stone-cutters’ yards and the purlieus of an unreformed
_konak_, and, beginning to feel the explorer’s itch, would go up to
Vodhena to find what might be left of Aegae; but Consul and Pasha
forbade lest another Briton be captured by the bands that had taken
Synge and Souttar. I was too innocent then to discount official fears,
still believing, indeed, that one should walk, revolver on hip, even
in Salonica streets; and in the end I proposed no more than to drive
to the site of Pella. I went off with a young consular assistant and
a guard, rumbling along, gensdarmes to right and gensdarmes to left,
as I should never journey again in Turkey. There were soldiers at the
coffee-halts, soldiers at the _khans_, soldiers guarding the bridge
which crossed the slow-turning eddies of the Vardar, and soldiers
holding Yenije, where astute bugs, who found saucers of water barring
their usual access, painfully climbed the leprous walls and dropped
from ceiling to pillow. The Yenije gravestones are mostly blocks
brought from Pella, and on the site of the ancient city itself lie
others, with two fragments of fluted Doric shafts, near a fountain
still called Pel. For the rest, Pella has vanished as though it had
never been. Out of dusty undulating fields; out of half a dozen
barrows; out of a low marshy plain to west and south; out of a glorious
horseshoe of hills with the snowy saddle of Olympus at one horn--out of
these you must conjure your vision of Philip’s home.
It was the middle of May when I was free of Athens, and, passing over
to Smyrna, found Ramsay about to start. A third member of the party
arrived two days later, an adventurous fellow who had spent part of
his youth in Albania and Montenegro, and, knowing little of ancient
things, cared less, so he had a good horse to ride and an unknown
track to follow. The apparatus of travel, which we gathered at Smyrna,
was of the simplest,--a single tent and a few pots and pans, but no
canned stores; and two simple villagers were hired to serve us. The
qualifications of the one chosen to cook became manifest on the second
night in camp. We had left railhead at Seraikeuy, and ridden up the
Lycus valley to the foot of the white cliffs of Hierapolis. Mehmet
bought a turkey of the peasants of Pambuk Kalessi, and was bidden to
have it ready for the next night’s supper. Early on the morrow we
went up to the site, and all that day, under a broiling sun and among
some of the best preserved Roman tombs in Asia Minor, I entered on an
arduous apprenticeship to the best epigraphist in Europe. Sharpset at
nightfall we hurried down expectant of our turkey. Mehmet sat placid,
the bird at his feet. It was a corpse, indeed, but no more, not even a
plucked one. “What am I to do with this?” said Mehmet.
He learned better as time went on; but throughout that journey we had
little except sodden messes to eat, faring worse than any traveller
need fare. It was partly because our leader cared little what he ate,
but more because, like his followers, he journeyed on a slender purse.
Ramsay had made to himself a European reputation as an explorer of Asia
Minor at a cost which another man would think scarcely sufficient for
the tour of Germany; and it had become his principle, as, for similar
reasons it has become Petrie’s, to suffer none but the barest means to
his end. If both have pushed their practice to exceeding discomfort,
both have taught several young Britons how little is necessity and how
much superfluity: and it is not the least of my many debts to Ramsay
that I gained in my first tour of exploration the will and the capacity
to go farther at less cost than perhaps anyone but my master.
[Illustration: THE WHITE CLIFFS OF HIERAPOLIS.]
This part of my education had begun at once: for while we were still in
Smyrna, Ramsay, wanting information about two sites lying north of the
Aidin railway, had suggested that I should visit them alone, all raw
as I was, and rejoin him at railhead. Feeling like a boy packed off to
his first school, I agreed, and took the train to Nazli. I knew very
little Greek, and less Turkish, but the Nazli stationmaster, christened
Achilles, was reported to speak my tongue. He so far justified his
fame as to greet me, stranded forlorn on the tracks, with “How you do,
my boy?” When my Oxford manner had readjusted itself, we conversed
sufficiently in French; and he found me a dancing stallion and sent me
off astride a deep and angular military saddle with my knees level with
my hips, the centre of a curvetting escort of the youth of Nazli. My
first site proved to be a large hillock once surrounded by walls, and
still bearing ruins of Roman baths, towards which an aqueduct straggled
across the valley. It certainly looked like the ancient Mastaura which
I had come out to see; and all doubt was soon settled by an inscription
of that town which, on my return, I found built into a church wall at
Nazli, and copied as best I might. After a sleepless night, stiff,
sore, and with less skin than had left Smyrna, I went to the second
site, and thence, proud but thankful, took train to railhead.
When our modest caravan had left Hierapolis, it wandered awhile on
either bank of the upper Maeander, sometimes dropping a thousand feet
to the stream, but for the most part keeping the high ground. The land
flowed with milk and honey if not much else, and I learned the grave
courtesy of the Anatolian peasant. Twice we were called to shelter
from the noonday sun in the portico of a mosque, and whatever the
_ayan_, patron of strangers in that ordered village society, could
procure of the best, was set before us. Our main purpose was to find
inscriptions, and I was taught by precept and example how a villager
may be induced to guide an inquisitive _giaur_ into the recesses of his
_haremlik_, or grub up the headstone of his forefather, or even saw
away the floor of his mosque. But it was not always plain sailing; and
how we used the wisdom of the serpent, and what reward was ours at one
Maeander village, Badinlar, I have told already in another book.
I soon became interested in the simple arts of antiquarian travel, the
seeking, the copying, the noting, the measuring, and the mapping, but
it was some time before I could practise them in any comfort. The food
or the climate, or both, caused at the first severe saddle-boils, for
whose easing there were no long halts. To a rider in such plight it
means much if his horse trip on stony tracks, lash out at his fellow,
plunge and burst his girths in a bog, incontinently roll on a chance
sandpatch, or calmly sit down in a ford to cool his haunches. A sorry
steed, bought in my innocence at eight pounds English, and dear at
two, introduced me to each and all of these packhorse tricks. But the
spacious landscapes, the dry warm airs, the novelty of man, beast, bird
and flower, kept me going; and was I not in the land where I would be?
A chance visit to Sandukli brought me into my earliest collision with
Ottoman authority. It was in the hungry month of Ramazan, and two of
us had ridden in from camp to buy what supplies we might in the early
hours of morning. As we were about remounting, the police accosted
us, and roughly bade us wait on the governor. Led to the _konak_, we
were told his beyship was abed, and we must stay till he had eaten at
sundown. To spend a whole day in dusty Sandukli was bad, but worse to
spend it waiting on a Bey’s pleasure. We sent word that we gave him
half an hour to appear, and, admired by all the loafers of the _bazar_,
stalked up and down, watch in hand, in all the insolence of Britain
abroad. The governor came not, but on the call of time sent a deputy,
nervously offering excuse, and begging us go in peace. Ours is not a
gracious race, but it usually gets what it wants.
Passing north-eastward through Afium Kara Hissar in mid June, we went
up to our goal in the Phrygian Monument country, and for all the rest
of the month were busied in exploring its pleasant shaggy valleys and
carven cliffs. I have seen since no region so thickly set with strange
memorials of the past, and none to which I would more joyfully return.
Some day when diggers uncover the relics of that Midaean monarchy
which seemed to the early Greeks of Asia the eldest and most god-like
of powers, may I be there to see! The haunted valley of Ayazin, where
we grubbed mole-like under the face of a fallen tomb, and, prone in
the shallow pit we had made, sketched the most curious of Phrygian
reliefs: the sheer acropolis of Kumbet, where we planned a mysterious
rock-house which may be of any antiquity; the gorges of Bakshish and
Yapuldak, whose sculptured tombs, fashioned like houses of the living,
are seen suddenly through the pines: that stupendous curtain of carved
and written stone hung before the gate of death by which Midas the
King passed to the Great Mother; all his desolate, impregnable city
above it, with inscribed altars and rock-reliefs--of these is woven my
“_féerie du premier voyage_.” I was the photographer of the expedition,
equipped with a camera which I had borrowed of an amateur in Smyrna and
manipulated for the space of one afternoon under his patient eye--so
unready was I for my trade; and I was an assistant surveyor, who having
plotted painfully and with many lapses my half of the fortifications
of the Midas City, was well enough satisfied with my botched work to
question my master’s survey of the other half. He has long forgiven me.
A strenuous and somewhat nervous week we spent there under the Midaean
crags. Unwarned of modern tenants, we found a new settlement of
Circassians, who in those days had a bad name all over Asia Minor for
a certain lawless truculence, born of pride of race, and fostered by
the official perfidy with which they were often treated. But Mehmet
Bey, the chief, received us cordially with _samovar_ and smooth words.
On the morrow he followed our operations among the monuments with very
lively interest, and at evening came down to the camp and roundly
proposed to share profits. We told him once and again there was no
gold in our hopes; but we talked to deaf ears, and at last, to be rid
of him, said we would halve such treasure as we might find. This, we
well knew, was to sow trouble for early reaping, in a land where all
believe that the Frank spirits bullion out of earth and rocks, though
one see it ever so little; and we were not comforted by our muleteers’
tales of a recent killing, for which the Ottoman government was holding
Mehmet Bey to account. But the local police, who had kept track of us,
summoned the Bey to Karahissar on the third day, and thus nothing
worse befell than a cooling of cordiality between camp and village as
the days went by without our doing anything but draw lines on paper and
squint through sights.
When, at last, we had done what we came to do, we thought it well to
ride fast and far, almost to Karahissar again. Thereafter we became two
bands, Ramsay making for home, and his two scholars setting forth for
the Cilician shore with no more baggage than might be carried on their
saddle-horses and a third bestridden by a single servant. How first one
of us and then the other fell ill, but neither so ill as he thought;
what in our ignorance and inexperience we did and saw; how we came over
Taurus in a waggon and took ship, I have already told elsewhere.
I did not return to Asia for three years, though within a twelvemonth
I was wandering within sight of her snows. I had gone to Cyprus as one
of four to dig, and I stayed alone to travel during the torrid summer
of 1888, visiting almost every village of the island, and trying to do,
with not half his science, what I had seen my master do on my prentice
journey. What indeed I did do I wrote in a book, little known and less
read, whose title, _Devia Cypria_, has deceived more than once, I am
told, sanguine buyers of Erotica. Of the part I bore in the excavation
of Paphos I will say little. I knew nothing of the digger’s art at the
beginning, and very little at the end. Our leader had studied in the
Egyptian school of Petrie, but the rest of us were so raw as not to
know if there were any science of the spade at all. We had for mentor
Gregori of Larnaca, who has become more famous since, and I doubt if
we did much harm. But I doubt too if we found nearly all we ought
to have found on that immemorial site. Some experience in handling
unskilled Greeks, a fluent use of their rustic tongue, an inkling of
how much I had to learn--this, however, I took away from Paphos.
Less than two years later I was with Ramsay in Asia again. The railhead
of the Aidin line had been pushed in the meantime to Dineir, and we
could make our start from far inland. It is often disputed which of two
courses be best, to buy transport or to hire. The hirer must wrangle
morning and night with muleteers, who use every trick of their trade
to shorten and ease the day’s work. The buyer will be cheated when
he buys, cheated when he feeds, cheated when he sells again, and he
takes all risk of horse thieves. Our lot on this journey was rare and
happy. The animals we had were none of ours; but their owner, unwilling
to take the road, sent a Greek hireling in his stead. A month later,
after many bickerings and a final fight with his Moslem fellows, the
Christian took to his heels, leaving his master’s horses on our hands.
Quit of responsibility we rode them another three months from one end
of Asia Minor to the other, and though the two best were lifted by
Circassians at a late stage of the journey, the owner, advised long ago
of his hireling’s flight, was so amazed to see any beasts of his again,
that, as we told their hire into his hand, he refrained himself from
cursing and blessed us for honest men.
We rode off into the hills of Pisidia to pick up inscriptions here and
there, but more often to revise texts that Ramsay had seen in earlier
years. There were few or no adventures to vary the daily round of a
copyist, cynosure of an adhesive crowd in graveyards, or desired of
raging dogs in the houses and courts. One noon the sun was eclipsed,
and, at the moment of deepest shadow, we rode nervously into a remote
village to find ourselves neither incensed for gods nor stoned for
devils, but wholly neglected for the heavenly phenomenon, which was
being calmly observed through smoked glass.
By the lovely lake of Egerdir came a fever-fiend to try the first of
many bouts with me. It was a malign freak of fortune. Our waggon, with
all baggage and medical comforts, had been sent by ferry across the
lake to a point where, by riding round the southern bight, we might
meet it on the second day; but failing to pass a rocky ridge, it
fetched a wide compass to the north and made for another goal beyond
the mountains. My fever began on the first afternoon, and sitting like
a sack on a tired horse, with a sense of dull blows falling on the
nape of my neck, I followed the pack-train till dusk up a wild valley
where was said to be a hamlet. It proved ruinous and void, and almost
supperless we had to pass the chill night in the open, lying on the
soil with saddles under our heads. It sounds a romantic bivouac; but in
sober fact a saddle that has clung to a hot and ill-groomed horse for
a summer’s day makes a very sorry pillow: and lift stones as you may
from the bosom of mother earth, she will privily thrust up as many more
against your salient parts all the uneasy night.
Next morning we were away betimes, but doomed to wander for many
hours behind ignorant or knavish guides in tangles of the Pisidian
hills, I slaking an insatiate thirst at every torrent and spring. It
was nightfall when we reached the bourne of our journey, the site of
Adada at Kara Baulo, whose modern name must survive from some church
of Paul the Apostle, built perhaps in commemoration of a halt made by
the first mission to the Gentiles on its way from Perga of Pamphylia
to Pisidian Antioch. There I slept once more on mother earth under the
stars, having supped, loathing, on broth in which floated shell-less
unborn eggs. On the morrow I could do little but lie in the shade,
while the rest explored the forest-girt ruins: but by noon their work
was done, and I had to mount and follow to a hamlet in a low pass above
the Eurymedon gorge. We lodged in a shed, and I read in my diary “cold
and very lumpy lying.” The fourth stage, over nine hours long, took
us across Eurymedon and up towards the snow-streaked crest of Anamás
Dagh; for on we had to press for fear our waggoners should give us up
for lost and trundle back to Dineir. Night found us lying on naked rock
within a low circle of rough stones near an Alpine _yaila_ or summer
camp. We had been fed by the hospitable shepherds and given screens of
felt against the bitter wind; but fever and its ague pains shooting
through loins and legs banished sleep, and I sat up or paced till dawn.
At sunrise a peasant offered to show a painted cave, and hearing it was
but a step along the hillside I offered to visit it. On we trudged;
farther fled the cave; and not until the best part of an hour had
passed were we halted before the mouth of a mean little Byzantine
shrine. The sun was already high, and the morning windless. Bathed in
sweat I scarcely dragged myself back over the rough path, and reached
camp with a livid face. My companions lifted me into the saddle and
hurried me across the pass, doubting, as they told me later, if I
should live to taste quinine again. But as the day wore on, the fever
began to abate. The sweat under the early sun had broken it, and I
was in a fair way to be cured, not killed, when we found the waggon
awaiting us at the edge of the eastern plain.
I remained weak, however, and altogether indifferent to the work I had
to do. Two years before, while alone in Cyprus, I had thought myself an
antiquary, who explored ancient things for the love of science. Now I
found them infinitely tedious, and moodily confessed I was no antiquary
yet, not even a wandering scholar, but just a hunter at hazard. I did
what my master wished of me: but my interest was in matters outside
his work, in the incidents of the camp, in the means of travel, in the
wildness of nature and man about us, in the beauty of the Beysheher
lake seen through mist from a hill-top one morning, in the old boar,
whom I flushed, as I was scrambling down again, and blessed that he
did not charge. We went down from Konia into Cilicia, and in the hot
valley of the Calycadnus and hotter coastlands near the Corycian Cave,
where we were fain to sit in the pungent smoke of dung to escape worse
torture of mosquitoes, my ill humour grew and I hated life until we
doubled back to the heights, and the last memory of fever left me on
the table-land of Kaisariyeh.
One of the party tarried with the American missionaries at Talas
to recover of a worse Job’s plague than had vexed me three years
before, while Ramsay took me over Anti-Taurus to copy the Hittite
inscriptions of Gurun. Some of the incidents of this journey I have
told already, especially the buying of the Bor Stone and its sequel;
and other incidents must remain untold here if I am to make an
end of these early wanderings. Sufficient to say that after we had
recrossed Anti-Taurus, where boars came grunting one night almost to
the camp-fires, which shone on their watering-place, and after we had
discovered the Hittite relief of Fraktin, I left Ramsay to go home with
the waggon, and, joined by the sick man from Kaisariyeh half cured but
wholly undeterred, passed beneath the mighty wall of Ala Dagh to the
foothills of Taurus. With the Hittite inscription of Bulgar Maden (how
ill I copied it!) and the lower half of the Bor Stone to our credit,
we set our faces homeward over the great Plains. On Dindymus I took a
second fever of the kind that swells the limbs, and was brought by my
comrade very sick to the railway and Dineir again.
This was to be the end of my apprenticeship in archaeological travel to
the man who has made it a science. I was to have met Ramsay again in
Cilicia the following year; but it was late in June before, scarcely
recovered from another fever caught in Salonica, I landed at Mersina
to find he had fled the coming heat. So I had to organize my own train
and go up across the steaming Aleian plain to the Taurus with one
companion, a traveller of infinite patience, as he had need to be that
year. For little but mishap and delay was in store for us.
The first fortnight went well enough. We passed the mountains by way
of the robber town of Hajin, where we spent a pleasant evening with
two American mission ladies, who were to be caught by Kurds a week
later, robbed, stripped, and lashed to trees: and near Comana we
set ourselves to our first serious task, the tracing of the great
military road which Severus made under the northward face of Taurus
from Caesarea Mazaca to the standing camp of the “Thundering” Legion
at Melitene. By the ruin of its embankment lie milestones of some ten
Emperors, in groups of five or six, which Gregori, whom I had picked
up in Cyprus, taught the peasants to lever over so we might read their
inscriptions. Missing at every mile Ramsay’s skill in decipherment and
his knowledge of things Roman, we did what we could to unravel the
tangled epigraphs--a rude week’s work which left us little to learn
about Roman milestones, and able to write a report which would win the
heart of Mommsen.
The task was done at last at Arabissus, and we could turn off to
Albistan to see a Hittite obelisk, and thence strike southward through
Taurus, by way of stubborn Zeitun, to Marash in Commagene, where
misfortune lay in wait. The Hittite stones which we had come down to
see had been spirited away (I was not to see them till many years later
in New York), and before we could fly the July heat of Syria, I was
badly hurt by a fall, and laid on my back in a kindly missionary’s
house for two long weeks--a martyrdom of idleness for my luckless
comrade. Then came cholera, raiding north from Aleppo, and thinking
we might yet escape the quarantine cordon on the northern frontier
of the province, we bolted through Taurus again, though I was still
unable to walk. I had a nightmare ride up and down the rock ladders
of the Pyramus gorge, my throbbing ankle supported on an improvised
crutch; nor did time pass more gratefully for the companionship of an
ill-looking Armenian doctor, whom we had been begged to take under
our wing. Accused (falsely, we were told) of illicit commerce with a
patient, he went in fear of his life from two Circassian bravos set
by her brothers on his track, and we could not refuse to shield him;
but I have heard since that he deserved whatever fate he escaped. And
after all the cordon caught us and bade us camp on a bare hillside a
few miles south of Derendeh for six torrid days till our captors’ eyes
could be opened (or closed) by practical but gentle methods of suasion.
Not that the delay was time all lost; we passed on with my ankle almost
sound, and another Hittite inscription added to our bag.
In Sivas it was my companion’s turn to fall sick, and summer was far
gone before we could enter on the last stage. We rode up the Halys
valley to Zara and the scene of Pompey’s victory at Nicopolis, and
having turned thence down the course of the Pontic Lycus, through a
pleasant Swiss region of pine forests and pine huts, inhabited by
Shiahs, kindly to the _giaur_ because despised by Sunnis for “red-head”
heretics, came to the Black Sea by way of Neocaesarea and Comana
Pontica and the Iris valley and Amasia and the baths of Phazemon. By
the way we picked up some unconsidered trifles of Roman milestones and
landmarks of Imperial Estates and the like, which we put on record long
ago in a publication of the Royal Geographical Society; and from first
to last, when not on the track of Hittites, we seemed to be following
the footsteps of Rome. What has happened to the records of Persian and
Greek dominion in Cappadocia? The Hittite and the Roman alone have set
their marks on the rocks.
[Illustration: THE VALLEY OF THE PONTIC LYCUS AT SUNRISE.]
When I went back to Oxford I had some claim to be a wandering
scholar, but less to be an archaeological digger than was credited
by those who asked me two years later to take charge of excavations
promoted by the Egypt Exploration Fund. I ought not to have agreed,
but, having so agreed, because the call of the East compelled me,
I should have begun humbly at the bottom of the long ladder of
Egyptology. But I was a young man in a great hurry, unwilling to enter
fresh indentures, and finding myself not needed on the confused site
of Hatshepsut’s temple at Der el-Bahri, I evaded the obligation by
making work among such Greek things as are in Egypt. I had no great
success, and it was the best result of my Egyptian years that two
Oxford scholars, who searched with me for papyrus scraps in the Fayûm
desert one winter, were encouraged thereafter by my patrons to embark
on a course which has led them to European fame. Clinging still to
my old love Asia, I diverted my interest from Nile to Euphrates by
making between seasons a journey which I have related in my _Wandering
Scholar_; and, sure at last that my heart would never be in Egyptian
work, I broke with my patrons after three years.
If, however, I had done little for them, I had done much for myself.
In those three seasons, largely through becoming known to Petrie, and
living with men who had served apprenticeship to him, I had learned to
dig. When I set foot first in Egypt, I had no method in such search,
nor any understanding that the common labourer’s eyes and hands and
purpose must be extensions of one’s own. If an excavator, deaf to the
first and greatest commandment of his calling, take no care to make his
labourers better than unskilled navvies, what should he find except the
things that a navvy could not miss in the dark? No strengthening of
his European staff, no unwearied watching of native fools and knaves,
will secure to the excavator the half of the precious things which lie
in his soil. If the labourer, who is a fool, cannot see what is being
turned over under his eyes, you at his side will see it no better,
because you are not turning it over. The labourer who is a knave
will see, but take good care you do not. Unless your men be seeking
consciously and with intelligence in an interest which is theirs as
well as yours, better leave the hiding places of ancient things alone.
For every digger, who turns over a site without finding what is in it,
destroys great part of what he should have found.
Moreover, in handling remains of imperishable antiquity in the Nile
land, I learned to observe as an antiquary must. And some of his
spirit was breathed into me; for when I went back to Egypt for a few
weeks in 1897, I found myself regarding her ancient life more than her
modern. But I was not to be won to Egyptian studies at the eleventh
hour. Already designated Director, where I had been an unworthy student
ten years before, I sailed for Athens, intending to take stock of the
duties which were to be mine in the coming autumn, and to follow my
proper trade by exploring a coast of Greek Asia. But temptation met me,
and turned me out of the Antiquary’s path.
CHAPTER I.
AN INTERLUDE.
I found the representative of a great British journal in a difficulty.
It was his hard task to gather news of several Balkan states, which
one and all seemed determined to set about making history at the same
moment. Crete was already ablaze; a Macedonian war was promised by
Greece, and Bulgaria moved restlessly behind her frontier. Who knew
what the others would hazard on flank and rear? I could speak fair
Greek. Would I help him by undertaking Crete? It need not be for long.
The Powers would soon make its peace, and deport the Greek soldiers
who had just landed under the very guns of our ships. His actual
correspondent, a Greek, was colouring his despatches to London white
and blue. Would I replace him awhile? My temptation was brief. I had
never been in Crete, and a scholar may rarely watch war.
I had not long to wait for it. As we drew to our anchorage inside the
warships off Canea there were houses to be seen afire two miles inshore
and rifles spitting up and down the slopes behind the town. The Turks
had thought to revictual their threatened lines in peace during the
hour of the Sunday office; but priests and people came out of church
to fight. It was a small and desultory affair, from which less than
a score of killed and wounded men were borne back at evening to the
gates--patient Anatolian peasants for the most part, who had long
served out their due time and fought without heat or reasoning why.
Along with them came the corpses of two or three _bashibazuk_ Cretans,
Greek in feature and Greek in speech, Moslems by chance and all but
ignorant of the faith which they had died to uphold. They were the
first men slain in anger that I had seen.
I was to know Canea well in coming years; but that morning it looked
very strange, with its mediaeval ways darkly shuttered and patrolled
by smart marines of half a dozen nations and by slouching, thick-set
Turks. The day might have been the morrow of a sack, so silent and
desolate were the shops and houses about the quays, and so ruinous the
inner streets. The great incendiary fires in the Christian quarter
had been subdued only a day or two before, and the oil vats in the
basements still smoked and stank. To this day, when I smell burning
oil, I see Canea as I saw it first. As we ran up the harbour, the
blackened shell of the Ottoman _Konak_ on the heights to the left
prepared us for what we were to see in the town. Our bluejackets
and marines, we were told, had saved a part of the block, less with
than despite the help of the frenzied Turks, among whom a certain
grey-bearded Pasha had showed such erratic energy with a leaky hose,
that it became necessary for our drenched marines to stay his zeal.
Their commander called up his most respectable sergeant, and, pointing
out the old gentleman as a person of consequence, bade his man wait
a chance to withdraw the hose without offence. The sergeant saluted,
wheeled, marched straight on the offender, and tapping him on the
shoulder, remarked, with a genial but unprintable term of endearment
and an even less printable counsel, that none of his sort was wanted
there, and left him agape with empty dripping hands.
Canea was no pleasant abode at that moment. All inns, cookshops and
coffee-houses, except the meanest, were burned or barred, and no cook
or body-servant was for hire. The consuls, smoked out of Halépa a few
days before, had broken into a deserted inn on the quayside, where
their wives were setting before them such victuals as could be begged
from the fleet. The journalists, who landed from every passing boat,
lodged where and how men might in a ravished town, and a famous limner
of battles kept life in him for the first few days with little but
cauliflowers, oranges, and Greek brandy. Mine was a better fate. An old
acquaintance of Cyprus days was commanding the Albanian police, and I
found lodgment with him in the only tenanted house outside the walls,
except one. In this last Chermside was living, who, like my host,
sustained the British name for cool courage and quiet discharge of
duty in those unquiet weeks. He showed me the lie of the land, talking
of things Turkish as few men may talk, and franked me through the
inner lines, where we found shoeless gunners with rags bound on feet
and legs, stedfastly serving antique field-pieces with the slouch of
woodmen who handle ox-carts on Anatolian hills.
The outposts lay fiercely beleaguered on a ridge further south,
under the Sphakian summits--that dazzling background to the Venetian
quadrilateral of Canea, which one sees from the sea like an
embastioned city in a mediaeval illumination. Hapless outposts! They
were the cause of all the bickerings between admirals and insurgents
which it was to be my lot for three weeks to record. The Turks, too few
to hold the outer lines in force, were not suffered by the Admirals to
withdraw their pickets, lest the rebels, once on the crests, should
shell the ships and the town. Yet no admiral would land his own men
to support the defence and so lessen his fighting strength in the
face of a faithful ally anchored alongside. So together and singly
the leaders of the Powers held endless converse with bearded giants
in broidered coats, and black-hatted men in sponge-bag suitings,
who dubbed themselves captains and chiefs, and answered in halting
French for the respect of the line; and Admirals vowed, in even less
intelligible French, to shoot if the promises were broken. And broken
they ever were, and once and again the Admirals shot, and Attic
journals with inflammatory headlines, “Anti-Navarino,” or “England
massacres Christendom,” egged on mobs to hoot the nameboard on the
Grande Bretagne Hotel, and demand that the sanctuary of Hellenism on
the Acropolis be closed for ever to the Barbarians of the West. Nor was
Athens less than right according to her lights. True enough, it was
we who led the shooting, and we who did almost all the blockading in
Crete, for no other reason than that our gunners could shoot the best
and our coal bunkers were kept full, and our crews did not mutiny for
shore-leave where it could not be granted, and we alone had on the spot
many war-craft of light draught and high speed.
[Illustration: A WRECKED MOSLEM VILLAGE OF CRETE.]
But those bombardments ought never to have been necessary. With a
few European bluejackets on guard at each blockhouse, the lines
would never have been molested at all. The Admirals should have known
Greeks better than to trust them on such vicarious parole as was given
by caps and black hats, whether on the heads of chiefs or no. No
Greek may answer surely for any other Greek, since individualism and
intolerance of discipline are in the blood of the race. In the stormy
history of Levantine religious warfare you may note one unvaried law of
consequence. Where the Moslem has prevailed, the votaries of the two
creeds have resumed peaceful life as of old, the Christian knowing that
Moslems act under orders as one man, and that when Islam is triumphant
its Gibeonites are secure of their lives. But if Christians gain their
freedom, the Moslem leaves the land of his birth. For whatever pledges
the new authorities may give, he knows for his part that, since Eastern
Christianity supplies no social discipline, each Christian will act on
occasion as seems best in his own eyes.
I had been in Canea three days when trouble arose in the town itself.
Bairam was near, and the hundred and a half armed Albanian policemen,
who were commanded for the nonce by my messmate and an Arnaut colonel,
had been begging during some days, as their yearly custom was, an
instalment of ready money for the feast. But the Turkish Treasury was
empty, and the Powers supplied no funds. Put off, therefore, with
vague answers to a demand which was no worse than fair, seeing they
had touched no pay for months, some of the Albanians left their duty,
and, rifles in hand, beset their commander with ever louder clamour for
arrears. It is no British way to yield to threats. Weapons, they were
told, must first be laid down, and then that should be done which could
be. But Albanians part hardly with their arms, and these had often
been deceived. Force must be used.
With another journalist I was warned privily that at a certain hour the
Albanians would be surrounded in their barrack by European marines,
who, however, were not to shoot. Should the Albanians still refuse to
be disarmed, they would be charged with the bayonet. So to the barracks
a little before the appointed time we two went, and posted ourselves
on the stairway at the end of the large entrance hall behind the
squatting Albanians, who watched curiously one squad of marines after
another deploy into the courtyard, as for some review. Presently all
was ready. The officers appeared from the guardroom, and once more bade
the Albanians give up their arms. The men jumped to their feet, and
a voice shouted in Turkish, _Verma!_--“Give not!” A squad of marines
with fixed bayonets advanced to the door--nervous Italians, to whom
the seniority of their Admiral secured pride of place. Two or three
Albanians fired at sight, and hit an Italian with two balls. Instantly,
its orders to charge forgotten, the whole Italian squad blazed point
blank into the hall. We were standing two or three steps above the mass
of the mutineers, and the rifles threw high. I was conscious all in a
moment of jets of puffed flame, of shimmering blue blades, of a bullet
humming by my ear, of a long scar ripped suddenly in the wall plaster
at my side, of a big Albanian writhing at the stairfoot; and then we
two non-combatants were skipping up the steps, taking three at a stride.
On the upper floor, where the temporary offices of government were,
we found Armenian clerks frantically upsetting tables and bureaus,
and thrusting them against doors. The rifles still barked below, and
we thought for an instant of dropping from a window; but suddenly
all firing ceased. Forcing a way back to the stairhead through a
distracted crowd, which prayed us to say what was coming, we listened
a moment, and then gingerly stepped down, I for one sore afraid of
seeming afraid. In the hall all was very still. The cowed Albanians
were flattening themselves against the walls, as though they would pass
through the solid stones; a sound of groaning came from a barrack-room
on the left, and two figures lay motionless in the middle of the floor.
The Italians still fidgetted outside, with rifles levelled through
windows and doorways, ready to fire. I walked out as slowly as I
thought decent, and turning the flank of the Italian squad, went across
to our own Marines, who were in fighting formation, the front rank on
the knee. “Better out o’ that, old man,” called out a private. “What’s
their bag?” said a boy with a sword. I told him as well as I knew.
“Pretty poor!” he grumbled. “Those fellows can’t shoot for nuts!”
The leading squad got the word, entered at the charge, and met no
resistance. I followed, and found that the loyal Albanian colonel
had been shot twice, and, it was said, by his own men. He held out
only a few minutes more. The Albanians’ arms were passed outside; the
mutineers, if mutineers they should be called, were marshalled into one
room, and, as all seemed over except the caring for the wounded, the
laying out of dead, and the arresting of ringleaders, I went off to the
telegraph office, meeting belated and raging colleagues at every few
yards, and wrote a despatch for London with not too firm a hand.
A wrangle ensued over the disposal of the prisoners. My messmate, who
held his temporary commission from the Sultan, stood out long for a
word from Constantinople before he would hand them over to the Powers;
but the Admirals overruled him. I went to see the men tied up and
marched to the boats. Some of them, who knew me by sight as one who
understood a little of their speech, appealed to me, asking what their
crime had been. Indeed, I could not exactly say. They had asked, after
their customary manner, for the bread due to them, and been given
lead. I liked the business little, and I knew my messmate, who held by
his men as they held by him, liked it less. He had stipulated there
should be no shooting by the marines (nor would there have been had the
leading squad been men of our own corps), and the death of a friend,
the Albanian colonel, lay heavy on his soul.
The Turkish soldiery and the _bashibazuk_ Cretans were reported enraged
by the killing of the Sultan’s men, and a vendetta was feared from the
Albanian remnant. My messmate thought it better to stay at his post
in the town, and I had to pass the night of the mutiny without him in
the lonely house without the walls. A howling storm dashed rain on the
windows. The Greek cook, forecasting a dismal fate for himself and
all his kind on the morrow, lifted up his voice and wept. I lay in my
clothes, listening for shots, and hearing them now and then, probably
in the hills. Once and again I braved the rain and looked out from the
roof to the dark town, and the wheeling beams of searchlights darting
from Suda Bay to the crests of the hills; and the dismal dawn came none
too soon.
Little else would break the monotony of life in Canea. The rescue of
the beleagured Moslems of Kandanos by a landing party of all tongues
had been worth seeing, if one could have got there. But the ships
slipped away round the island by night, leaving journalists in the
lurch and nothing in the harbour that steamed, except a little Greek
tug. We all bargained for her; but one rose in the night, while his
colleagues slept, and embarked on her alone. Savage was the joy on
the quay when some hours later she was espied steaming back, having
failed to make headway against a south-west gale, and succeeded in
making her passenger sorely sick. Only one consul saw the affair. Like
all the rest Biliotti was given at dead of night two hours’ warning
of the sailing of the ships. His colleagues went sleepily to the
telegraph office and blocked the wires with demands for instruction
from ambassadors, who were snug abed in Pera; but Biliotti, asking no
man’s leave, stepped into his consular boat, and had the conduct of all
negotiations at Kandanos. The action was of a piece with everything he
did. No more fearless or self-reliant servant of Britain has ever lived
than this son of the Levant, who has no drop of British blood in his
veins.
For the rest the daily round was full of rather common tasks--of
eternal _quid nunc?_ of lobbying, of begging crumbs from official
tables. The fame of the great newspaper which I served gained me the
best consideration that consuls and commanders afloat and ashore will
show to a journalist, and I was also so fortunate as to be known
privately to more than one of those in power. But they grew almost as
weary of my constant calls as I, and if they were often irritable and
always reticent, who can blame them? Least of all would I blame the
commanders at sea, who had to rock at anchor month in and month out,
with nothing to do ashore, and crews cramped, confined, and murmuring
for lack of leave. The Cretan Moslems were too jealous of their women
for bluejackets to be let loose, and more than one French crew went to
the verge of mutiny. Later on, when Latin troops came to be quartered
in Canea, things reached such a pass that it was thought well to send
oversea for a bunch of less forbidden fruit. It came in charge of a
portly dame. But the Turk, who was still in nominal command of the
port, refused in the name of Islam to admit these earthy houris; and
the Great Christian Powers, by their representatives assembled, invoked
the Concert of Europe to secure the landing of four Levantine light o’
loves.
My fellow-journalists were for the most part a genial crew, which
looked on the wine when it was red, or indeed of any other hue, and
took life as it came. A few were tiros like myself; the others had seen
many campaigns and much of the habitable world, where they had learned
a little of most men and tongues by the way. But I found that almost
all had tried other callings, and taken at the last to their actual
trade, less in love of it than in disgust of all others. Our common
talk was of warriors and war, when it was not of our despatches and
their effect on the civilised world. In this company one was taken at
the value one set upon oneself, and all was held fair that might serve
the interest of a master at the other end of a wire.
When all the Moslems were collected under the guns of the ships, and
the Christians held willy nilly to truce, there was less than ever
for us all to do. The eyes of Europe had already turned from Crete to
Thessaly, and before March was half spent almost all my colleagues
were gone to Greece. I followed them late in the month, and, halting
at Athens again, was over-persuaded to resume my service on the Greek
frontier. But it could not be for long. I had laid plans with a fellow
antiquary to go to Lycia, and the fair season for a southerly coast
would soon be on the wane.
I took to myself, therefore, a helper, whom I had met at Athens eager
for the front, and we went up together to Thessaly with all speed. At
Volo we found good cheer and great clamour for war, and in every open
space Reservists marshalled, who, if ever they had known soldier craft,
had forgotten it. At Velestino, too, all was fair, and men gathered
thick about us with cheers for England, who, as report said, had just
checkmated a German plan to block Piraeus. But before we sighted the
minarets of Larissa (it is the one Greek town whose mean outline is
still ennobled by their slender dignity), a northerly gale swept down,
and rain began. Chilled to the bone and spattered with filth of unpaved
streets, we came to the only hotel to find no lying room, even in a
passage way. Our servant went out to seek some decent lodging, but in
vain; and just at dark we took refuge in a wretched peasants’ inn,
where two soldiers were bribed to set free a single room for the three
of us. Bugs were making their laboured but hopeful way over the floor
towards the beds, and, lifting the coverlets, we found myriads already
gathered in clusters on the mattresses. But if they waited there, they
were cheated: for we spread sheets of rubber, knowing their distaste
of its smell, and veiling our faces and hands, lay on the floor in our
clothes. In the morning a Larissean, fearful who might be billeted on
him, was glad to offer us a house far from soldiers’ quarters, and we
made ourselves comfortable enough in two empty but wholesome rooms.
There were some sixteen thousand soldiers in Larissa at that time, and
during a fortnight I saw no man drunk and no common woman ply for hire.
It was the Greek warrior’s simple joy to stroll the streets, his little
finger locked in a comrade’s, and to sing in not unmusical harmony. Yet
if he was a peaceable soldier, he was a lawless one. Once I heard a
colonel reprove a strolling group which would have passed him without
any gesture of salute. “Who are we that we are bidden to do such
things?” said one, as the group moved on. When a battalion was being
inspected before marching to the front, I watched man after man break
rank to chat at ease with the bystanders, while the general was passing
down the lines, and heard them laugh at his reproof. _Peitharcheia_,
discipline,--what is that to a free-born Greek, whose birthright is
to think for himself, and for you? It is said that the officer who,
some weeks later, was ordered to blow up the Peneius bridge behind the
retreating army exclaimed, “Am I a Vandal?” and the Turks found the
bridge unhurt.
All here cried, “To Constantinople!” and mingled mutiny with their
prayers. The King, they said, would not declare war because his
Russian Queen had been forbidden by the Tsar. But if he would not, the
voluntaries would. All southern Macedonia was waiting a sign to fall
on the Turks, and in the space of a night the way would be clear to
Salonica and beyond. If we went up to the outposts we should see in
what heart were the Greeks and in what fear the Turks.
So on the second day we set out for the Malúna pass above Elassóna.
At Tirnovo the carriage seemed already to have passed out of Greece,
so Turkish looked the little town with its shaded bazar and mosques
and baths. At Ligária, where some two hundred kilted men were dancing
before their tents in the morning sun and chanting war-songs, we were
set on Hungarian cavalry horses, and escorted up the pass, with Olympus
swelling grandly on the right. Two blockhouses and two batteries faced
each other on the summit, and far below lay Turkish Elassóna, a dark
patch within a white ring of tents. The officers (one red bearded,
unlike a Greek), who had been watching this ring grow wider day by day,
held more sober talk than we had heard in Larissa. “They are many more
than we,” said they, “and our beginning will perhaps be hard.” “But,”
added the younger of the two, who was sweeping the Haliacmon valley
with his glass, “all there wait to join us, and the end will be easy.”
I asked safe conduct to the Turkish blockhouse, and was passed over the
line. Two colleagues, or rivals, of whom we had heard nothing since
their better-horsed carriage had overtaken us before Tírnovo, proved
to be already seated in the little room, and plying the Albanian major
with questions through a Greek interpreter. The latest come is ever
most honoured by Turkish courtesy, and at sight of me the major made
room on the divan at his side. I seated myself, and greeted him in my
sorry Turkish. Overjoyed to be done with the Greek, the Albanian lapsed
into his proper military speech, and sent for coffee. But the others
took it ill, growled that we were now too many, swung out of the hut,
and, when my visit was over, took me to task for having come between
them and their news. Meanwhile the major had fenced with my inquiries
about the Elassóna troops, and I had parried his about the muzzling
of Moslems in Crete, and we parted as good friends as we had met, and
about as wise. The officers of the kilted men at Ligária invited us to
their midday meal, where was not overmuch to eat, but plenty of rough
wine and the cheerful company of some French journalists, halting on
their way to the crest. King George’s health was drunk “if he allows
us to make war,” and then that of “all Powers who love Greece.” Great
Britain was the favourite of the hour, and the proposer of the toast
breathed a fervent hope that “English guns were hungering for Russian
meat.” As a Briton who spoke Greek I was put up to reply, and I trust
I bore the French love of Russia in mind; but I cannot say now what
exactly may have passed, and have only a confused memory of driving
away amid cheers, and becoming very drowsy on the Larissa road.
It remained to see how the case stood at the western end of the
Cambunian lines; and on the following day we were trundling over the
road to Tríkkala, with blockhouses, now Greek, now Turkish, always in
sight on the crests to north. Except for a tedious ferry over Peneius
and a noontide halt at the khan of Zarkos, near the scene of the only
stout stand the Greeks would make on the frontier in the weeks to
come, there was nothing to vary the monotony of a long drive between
low hills and marshy plain. But the prospect of Pindus, one unbroken
wall of snow, relieved the last hours. Tríkkala, with its spacious
square and imposing houses, promised better quarters than eventually
we found in a tiny, dubious chamber, and we chose to pass much of our
night in talking to one Greek officer or another. The five thousand
men who were waiting here showed less rawness in their mien than the
army of Larissa, and seemed better equipped for a coming war: but an
officer anticipated all criticism by saying that Greece had no use for
regulars. She was freed by guerilla fighters of the hills, and would
conquer by the same. Forbearing to object that the campaign might take
place chiefly in the open Thessalian plain, I asked an artilleryman if
there were many of his service who could speak Turkish? “Not I, for
one,” he answered scornfully, “but our guns there can say what a Turk
will understand.” I hope they could, for probably they are in Turkey
now.
From Kalabaka five kilted men were sent next day to escort us on a
long march to the outposts above Diskáta. They were true soldiers of
the hillman kind, lean, long-stepping, untiring, to whom the admirable
Greek schools had given intelligence and interests little like those of
our Highlanders. We talked, for example, as we strode together, about
the Emperor Hadrian. The way lay under the Metéora rocks, and halting
below the chief monastery, we summoned with loud shouts the “fishers of
men.” But their windlass remained still, and the kilted men, growing
impatient, began to fire upwards. One or two bullets skimmed the
prior’s tiles, and a monk appeared at an opening to ask our pleasure.
We called to him to let down the net, but pleading that his fellows
were all at meat, he offered us no more than the cranky ladders of a
perilous chain, which swayed in the wind against the overhanging cliff.
We had neither stomach nor head for such escalade; but two of the
soldiers dared it, and, once aloft, soon had the windlass manned and
the net lowered. The rope had plainly seen many and better days, but
up we must go. We lay down together in the meshes, which were gathered
and hooked above; the rope strained, the net tightened, and we slowly
rose, locked in an inextricable embrace, like a pair of bagged ferrets,
spun, bumped the cliff, spun again for an eternity, till gaffed and
drawn into the entry, we realised that we yet breathed.
The monks bade us coldly welcome, though we gave them time to finish
meat while we looked at the dark church, whose only interest lies in
its age, and climbed to the rounded summit of the rock, where fed
eleven snow-white sheep and one coal-black, in memory, I suppose, of
the apostolic Twelve. The keys of the Treasury were said to be with the
Bishop elsewhere; but I suspect we might have been shown the precious
things had it not been for the presence of our kilted guards, who
treated the fathers with scant respect, and were evidently feared.
The Prior bemoaned the coming war, complaining that no one would turn
_kaloyer_ now; he had but five monks all told. But the Bursar was a
better patriot, who would breathe fire and slaughter, if the men of
Athens did not make war. Where was Constantine tarrying who should lead
the Greeks? Ah! who knew? he asked darkly.
The day was far spent when we saw the blockhouses at last, Greek to
right, and Turk to left, on a low ridge. The way had lain through a
wild and ill-tracked country, where were a few Vlach villages, of evil
fame for past raiding and present brigandage; and from the frontier we
looked north over a yet more savage prospect. Diskáta lay hidden by a
shoulder of the hill, and nothing but a rough mule path came up from
it. There were no such proofs of Turkish assembly visible from this
point, as we had seen from Malúna, and the half dozen infantrymen who
squatted on the Turkish side of the line were tatterdemalions. The
Haliacmon basin lay in deep purple shadow, and beyond it a tumbled sea
of mountain waves, swelling to west and north, broke here and there in
snows: on the other hand the bastions of Pindus rose against the sunset
out of a blue-grey mist, which hid their roots and all the plain. But
such beauties had lost any charm they may ever have had for our hosts,
the two Greek officers in charge of the blockhouse. It was very lonely,
they said, and how long would they be left there? One who had been on
the hills fourteen months showed himself a more doubtful prophet even
than the men of Malúna. Would Macedonia indeed rise? If not, could the
thin Greek line hold the Malakás pass, and how should he alone stem the
unknown flood which might well up from Diskáta? Small blame to him for
his doubts, with that five hour march over rough paths and unbridged
streams to his nearest support!
The two were as lavish of good cheer as glad of our coming, and one
kept the caraffe of _raki_ replenished and the wine flowing free, while
the other took his turn to patrol. After which surfeit, fevered already
by our long tramp, we had broken sleep in a clean, cold soldier’s room,
and were up and about in good time to watch the first blush of day
on the Pindus snows, and begin the tramp to Kalabáka again. We went
back to Larissa by railway, and at the junction of Velestino I spied,
to my surprise, a banker of my former acquaintance in Alexandria. I
asked him what he did in this far province? “Business,” he said, “in
Kalabáka--some men to see there.” The men, though I knew it not, were
those voluntaries who would raid over the frontier some weeks later
and compel war; and it was this banker, as kindly and brave a man as
I have known, who financed that fatal venture of fanatic Hellenism.
The following evils broke his heart, it was said, and he died not many
months later.
In Larissa once more I had news both of the purpose of the Powers to
prevent war, and of the exceeding unwillingness of the Greek court to
yield to the desire of the mob. Prince Constantine was to come in a few
days, but I was warned his mission was to hinder, not hasten outbreak.
I resolved to await at least his coming, and busied myself with one
more visit to the outposts, this time at the eastern end, by Rapsáni
near Tempe; but we got little thereby except a sight of the Vale, and
a deeper sense of the unfitness of the trailing conscripts met upon
the road. It was strange to see Thessalian Turks peaceably tilling
their fields, as the soldiers passed; and, maybe, they looked for war
as little as I. The Prince came at last, to be met with salvoes of
artillery and a solemn assurance “in the name of the Church of Larissa
and the great martyrs of Crete” that all the hope of Greece was in him;
but when he paraded the garrison, it was said he liked it ill. In any
event weeks must yet pass before war would be declared (if ever), and
my time was up. I yielded my place to my companion, and shipped at Volo
with a heady pack of Greek patriots, each of whom, finding at dinner
a Briton who understood his speech, exhorted the rest to be calm, and
forthwith fell into frenzy. Let all Europe come on! Greece in her turn
would blockade Europe. “Ah! what you really fear is Hellenism, the
Great Power to be! England covets Crete--that is the secret cause of
all!” I had heard more than enough by coffee time, and sought peace on
deck watching the hills darken behind Thermopylae, where once upon a
time Greeks died in silence.
* * * * *
I was to play the journalist once more about a month later, when
returned from Lycia to find the war begun and, indeed, all but over.
Faithful news was wanted from Crete concerning both the plans of
the rebels in that day of Greek despair and the state of the Moslem
islanders, now almost all gathered into Candia within a fence of
British and Italian tents. I was bound for home, but agreed to take
Crete on the way; and landing at Canea, I was allowed to go out to
the rebel outposts on Akrotíri, with an Italian bugler and a stalwart
Highlander of our Seaforths, whose native brae was Wapping. The rebels
swarmed out of their shelters at the bugle’s note, and, after brief
parley, let me pass in. Except for black Cretan kerchiefs bound about
their heads, they were all in serge clothing of sailor fashion, got
I know not how or whence, and all had Belgian arms. They led me to a
shady spot, set chairs, and began to talk in Greek. But presently the
chief, a man of consequence who had been in the Island Council under
the Pact of Halépa, came up in haste, and finding all speaking at once,
proposed French. Thus question and answer passed in quiet, and babel
arose only when my words were summarised in the common speech from
time to time with more rhetoric than I had used. The sum of an hour’s
converse was this. The rebels were more set than ever on rebellion.
If one army of the Greeks had run, another would stand, and the fleet
was undefeated still. Had the Cretans ships, they would send fifteen
thousand men to defend their Mother; for how could they desert her in
her sorrow? They did not wish to stand alone in insular freedom, for
there was none in Crete fit to govern, and they feared treachery of one
to another. If the Powers occupied the island, the British would fall
out presently with the Russians and call the Turks back. “Vassos and
his Greeks may stay or go--we care not. We shall fight on. We have food
enough here, though little corn, but in the western parts there is some
dearth. Still the blockade can be cheated. What have we to lose now by
holding out or to gain by giving in? Most of us have lost long ago all
we had. The Moslem Cretans must leave the island, for their hate is too
fierce for peace.” It came to this--they defied us, well knowing that
no one Power would be suffered by the rest to land enough men to sweep
their hills: and I rose convinced that union with the Hellenic kingdom
is the inborn hope of a Cretan. He sucks it in with his mother’s milk,
and breathes it at her knee; reason is powerless against his sentiment,
and to use it worse than vain. We parted in peace, and my Wapping Scot,
though apparently he had kept his eyes front all the hour with the
wooden rigour of a snuff-seller’s ensign, remarked on every detail of
each rebel’s dress and arms as we trudged back over the rocks.
I went on to Candia, and could find no clean lodging. The Christian
houses were shut and barred, and, as the whole town was unquiet and
every native Moslem a _bashibazuk_ armed to his teeth, it seemed wise
to live near the harbour. I applied to our vice-consul, a Cretan Greek,
who was to perish in the massacre of the following year. He had a
house, he replied, of his own, hard by the quay, and very clean. It
was let to a Corfiote, who was not very well; but he and his wife kept
to one room, and doubtless would gladly hire me the others. I asked
nothing better, and went off to view. The house seemed both clean and
convenient and I passed from room to room, till I reached a closed door
in the upper storey. A woman, who answered my knock, said her husband
would be glad to arrange the matter. He was in bed, and not very well;
but would I be pleased to enter and talk to him? I stepped in, and
sat some minutes by his bed-head in the close air. He looked wasted,
and at last I asked if it were fever of the country he had? “No,”
said he. “Smallpox. This is the twelfth day.” I fled, and expecting
the deadly rash to break out any day, found another house, wherein I
tried to make shift. But the windows looked on the Cathedral yard, in
which an Italian regiment of very young soldiers bivouacked each night,
drinking, singing, and fighting from dusk to dawn: and in the end I
pitched a tent on the ramparts, near the camp of a Mountain Battery of
ours. The days were spent in watching the route-marching of our troops,
listening to all that commandants would tell me, and riding out towards
the rebel lines. On these excursions I visited Cnossus for the first
time, and dreamed of digging in the Palace of Minos, some of whose
lettered stones already stood revealed. Indeed I was offered a squad of
sappers, who might begin the search there and then; but I refused it
for lack of time and in distrust of soldier diggers, whom I had known
in Alexandria for the best navvies but the worst finders of antiques in
the world. The lesser Bairam, the feast of Abraham’s sacrifice, was at
hand, and I waited only for it. If ever the town was to rise and hurl
itself on the exultant cordon of rebels, it would be then. But in the
end the feast passed without any worse incident than the firing of many
bullets from the town over our camp, perhaps at hazard, but, perhaps,
also in our despite; and by the middle of May I could bid farewell for
ever, as I thought, to the island of Crete.