LYCIA.
The war, for which I had waited in vain, broke out when I was far from
its alarms. It had long been arranged that I should report on ancient
sites in Lycia, for whose excavation certain scholars, jealous for the
fame of Fellows, proposed to found a fund. Three cities offered the
best hope of success, Xanthus, Pátara, and Myra, and to survey these I
left Athens with one companion as soon as I was free of Thessaly. We
reembarked at Smyrna on a Greek coaster, hoping to find a small sailing
vessel for hire in the first Lycian port of call; but deceived in
this, we had to keep on with the Greek, and try our luck in the busier
harbour of Castellórizo.
Of all the Greek isles Castellórizo lies most apart, outside the
Archipelago, and nearly a hundred miles east of Rhodes, its motherland.
The main coast over against it is the wildest of Anatolia, piled ridge
on ridge from surf to snow-line, and inhabited by few except wandering
shepherds. Descendants of sturdy Rhodians, who would not abide under
the Hospitallers, hold the barren rock, and live by exploiting the
sea. The Turk is overlord; but we found his representatives, a _mudir_
and half dozen excisemen, who were dependent on Greek keels for all
their communication with the mainland, chastened in demeanour and quick
to defer to quayside opinion. This set strongly in our favour; and
forbearing to demand our papers, they offered weak propitiatory coffee,
and withdrew to inactivity. Heavily sparred brigs and two-masted
caiques were packed that morning so close into the basin that a man
might cross it dryshod; but the magazines and counting-houses round
the port bore witness that these ships plied a gentler trade than that
which once made a Castellóriziote sail a terror in the Levant. In
fact, they traffic between the smaller Anatolian ports and Alexandria,
where you may often see their antique high-pooped hulls lying under
the Breakwater, and what they carry is chiefly firewood and charcoal,
cut and burned on the Lycian hills. “The mainland, then, is yours?” we
asked. “Ours, as much as anyone’s,” replied sons of corsairs. “We take
what we want. Whom should we pay?”
Just ten years before I had had a passing vision of the isle from the
deck of a rusty tramp steamer, which called in vain for freight, and
sheered off again ere I was well awake; and one thing especially I
had not forgotten, the beauty of the fisher-folk whom we had passed
drifting on a windless bay under the sunrise, “dark faces pale against
a rosy flame.” The type in Castellórizo is the finest among latter-day
Hellenes. There you will find Praxitelean heads in the flesh--find the
oval face, with brows spread broad and low beneath clustering hazel
hair. Grey-brown almond eyes lie wide, deep, long and liquid; noses
stand forth straight and faultless; upper lips and chins are short,
and mouths mobile and fine. But the straight fall of the skull behind
should warn you that the race is old, if a certain meagreness of tissue
and over-refinement of feature have not already betrayed its age.
Women, who had three-year babes at their knees, showed too much bone,
and little softness of outline in their faces; but none the less we
thought them very beautiful, gazing about us with as little discretion
as may be used in an Eastern society, and marvelling that painters and
sculptors had not happened on this dream of fair women. The men, when
they had shown us their pretentious marble church, garish with gilt
carvings and Russian icons, led on to the schools, and first to that of
the girls. It should have been holiday; but I suspect the classes were
warned as soon as we were seen to land, for no Greek can deny himself
the pleasure of showing his scholars to a western stranger. As we came
within the door the serried ranks arose, and the eyes of fifty maidens,
each fit to bear Athena’s _peplus_, looked into our own. Miserably we
heard a hymn, miserably stammered incoherent thanks, and miserably
fled. Who were we that we should patronise a choir of goddesses?
The town, more regularly laid out than most of its kind, rises in a
horseshoe, tier on tier, from the port, whence radiate steep stone
ladders dividing the wedges of habitation, as in the _cavea_ of an
ancient theatre. We strolled from one horn of the bay to the other,
admiring such nice cleanliness of streets and houses as you may
see in the richer Cyclad isles, in Santorin, for example, and here
and there on the Turkish coast, but seldom or never on the Greek
mainland. In Castellórizo to be dirty is to confess social failure. The
housewife of the most speckless floor holds her head highest, and her
husband’s prodigality in whitewash and paint would delight a London
landlord. Blue balconies overhanging the roadway, and shutters and
doors of startling hue seemed fewer than in other Greek towns of like
pretension; and glimpses of interiors assured us that more than the
outside is here made clean. The windows look for the most part not on
the street, but on high-walled courts, in the secretive Moslem manner,
having been set thus perhaps in darker days, when the island was still
a pirate’s nest. But many a heavy street door was thrown wide that
morning to reveal the garden-fringes of orange and lemon and almond
trees which framed geometric patterns of many-coloured pebbles; and we
had to parry laughing invitations from women-folk, standing in holiday
velvet and lace by their entrance-ways.
At length we climbed out on to the saddle of the twin-peaked rock,
which is all the island. The southward slopes looked too naked for even
a goat’s subsistence, and our self-appointed guides said they had but
one precious spring of running water. To northward the Lycian seaboard,
rising to points and bars of snow, filled the distance. In the nearer
view lay the burnished strait of Antiphellus, with a fishing fleet
becalmed, and at our feet the white crescent of the town. Pointing
to the mainland, we asked what concern the islanders had there? They
pastured their few flocks, was the reply, cut wood, burned charcoal,
and owned orange and olive gardens or small farms. There were, indeed,
several little colonies of Castellóriziote squatters, and one large
village of their folk, Dembré, on the coast eastwards; but no one went
there “since the measuring.” The last words were said quickly and low,
and when we sought an interpretation of them, each man looked at his
neighbour, as the habit is on Ottoman soil when talk has chanced on
some public sore. Even we might be spies. We asked no more, knowing we
should learn presently whatever was to be learned; for Dembré lies near
ancient Myra, whither we were bound.
We found a fishing boat waiting approval at the quay, and the bargain
was soon struck. One-eyed Antóni, his son, and his nephew bound
themselves to do our pleasure for ten days at least, if they might
bring back a load of Fíneka oranges, should they chance to meet with
it. It sounded a pleasant cargo, and we agreed. In the early afternoon
we pushed off, the light breeze being reported fair; but in the open
the deceitful airs died away, and we fell to rocking on a sullen oily
swell, which was rolling up from south-west to hurl itself on the iron
coast, with a distant murmur of surf. There was nothing to do for hours
but to follow the shadow of the sail. Our Greek cook (the same who had
shared my vigil on the night of the mutiny at Canea) dived under the
half-deck, and was presently very sick. He had been engaged on his
word that he had served the Messageries Maritimes of France; but he
now explained between paroxysms that his service had been done in an
engineer’s house ashore. I doubt if even so much was true, for later
on I was to hear him through the thin wall of a hut brag to gaping
peasants that he was the bastard of a French general, and had known me
from my childhood! The one thing sure in his past was that he had sung
in cafés on the Galata quay, and the one thing certain in his future
that, except in the near neighbourhood of quays, he would prove useless
throughout the cruise.
In the waning day the sails filled, and the boat began to slip fast
and faster eastward before a whistling breeze, which had caught up the
swell. Cliffs loomed near, and in the last of the light a surf-washed
wall sheered up right ahead. Antóni smiled at my doubts, and held on
his course till it seemed we must crash ashore. Then the rock parted
this way and that: we twisted to left, to right, and to left again,
and lo! a great water and the long unruffled track of the moon on
the land-locked bosom of Kékova. We ran to a berth under a shaggy
hillock crowned with dim fantastic outlines of Lycian rock-tombs--the
forgotten cemetery of Aperlae--and spying a single light ashore, landed
to try the house for supplies. The Greek fishermen who inhabited it,
Castellóriziote colonists known to Antóni, sold us eggs and a fowl; but
they were strangely disturbed at sight of us, and dumbfoundered when
told we were bound for Dembré. I bethought me they might be smugglers
on occasion, and asked no questions, but feeling that something was not
well with Dembré, planned to avoid the village on the morrow by running
to the mouth of the Myra river and walking thence to the ruins. But
next morning the south-wester, which sped us merrily on an even keel
down the Kékova strait, was beating up so rough a sea in the open that
Antóni would not risk the longer run, and beaching us on the nearest
sand, sent his boat back to shelter.
[Illustration: LYCIAN TOMBS.]
[Illustration: THE THEATRE OF MYRA.]
We had to make our way, therefore, towards the village by an
unfrequented path through the gardens, and we met no man. The streets
were very silent, and reaching a coffee-house we turned into it to seek
a guide. A group of Greeks stared at us open-mouthed, and scarcely
replying to our salutations, slunk one by one away; nor was the
obsequious host less perturbed. In less than a minute a heavy footfall
sounded without, and first one police-trooper and then another strode
in. Who were we? We told our nationality. Had we papers? Yes, and in
order for the coast so far as Adalia. What might be our business here?
To see the ruins of Myra. How had we come? By boat, we said. Where
was that boat? It had run to Kékova. Then back you go to it at once,
said they. I replied that we were come to see Myra, would certainly
see it, and must, moreover, sleep the night here, for it would be too
long a tramp back to the boat, which was lying we knew not exactly
where. _Olmáz? Yasák!_ they said in one breath. Impossible! It is
forbidden! Where, then, was their superior officer? Up country, they
answered. Well, I said, rising, you will send our papers up to him,
and meanwhile we walk on to Myra. And so we did, none hindering us,
but none agreeing to guide; and unmobbed for once, we roamed about the
vaults and horseshoe of the great Theatre, and climbed unwatched the
rock-cut stairway which leads to the great carved cliff of tombs. Thus
some hours passed pleasantly before we saw a trooper and an unmounted
man coming across the fields. The trooper brought word that since we
were here and said we would not go away, we might stay the night, and
his companion, a Greek, would house us. Whereafter both settled down
to stay beside us; but the trooper, tired by his gallop inland, soon
fell asleep in the shade, and the Greek, following me out of earshot,
unfolded at last the mystery of the Measuring of Myra.
Dembré, it appeared, has two titles to fame, over and above the fact
that it once was Myra. It is the nearest considerable village to the
great Kékova harbour, and it possesses, in the half-buried church of
the martyr Nicholas, a shrine to which the Orthodox communities of the
world pay no small reverence. Now, from time to time European warships
find their way into the Kékova pool, and more than one has chanced to
make some stay. Their visits have passed not unremarked by the Ottoman
government. If Russia, or Austria, or England should seek a Levantine
harbour, what better than Kékova? When Russia holds out the Gospel in
front, Turks look for a sword at her back, and therefore uneasiness
became panic when it was reported that a Russian consul had bought of
a Greek farmer the shell of the church of Saint Nicholas and the land
about it. It was said he was proceeding to excavate the shrine, to set
it in order, and to arrange for the resumption of the holy office, and
already was in treaty for the sites of two other churches which stand
amid the ruins of Andráki, close to the eastern mouth of Kékova. The
Porte resolved to act. A commission of three officials appeared in
Dembré, proclaiming a mandate to “measure” the village, its houses and
its lands, with a view to readjusting its contribution to the Imperial
Exchequer; and measure they did with admirable deliberation, living
the while at the charges of the farmers. Here be it observed that the
Ottoman Law, as it was then, warned all men to leave buildings, lands,
or other real estate untouched during such interval, usually short
enough, as must elapse between the making of a survey and the final
notification of assessment. Neither might any kind of property be
bought or sold, nor could a barn, a house, a fence be built or even
repaired. Two years ago the measurers had vanished from Dembré, and
from that day to the hour of our arrival the village had heard no word
of its assessment.
Imagine those years. The village was frozen as by a spell. A special
police-post was established landwards, and all neighbours were
searched as they approached or left the suspect community. The weekly
market ceased, and all commerce of men whatsoever. Houses gaped to
wind and rain, but they might not be made good; and lands went out
of cultivation for lack of seed. This state of things endured weeks,
months, a year, till, sick with hope deferred, some householders,
abandoning all they had, slipped away of dark nights aboard
Castellóriziote caiques, and passed on to free Greek soil, fearful of
being retrieved from their mother-isle. Round the remainder in Dembré
the cordon was drawn closer; but a few others managed to flee as time
went on, leaving their houses tenantless and their gardens to the riot
of weeds. Outsiders, even kinsmen, shunned the banned village, and
were shunned in turn, if bold enough to enter, lest suspicion attach
of trafficking or plotting escape. No formal taxes were levied, but
the police had to live, which came to the same thing, or to more, in
the end; and currency grew rarer and rarer in the village, little or
none coming from without. It was the survivors of a lately prosperous
community that we had seen hanging about the streets, fearful to act or
speak, watching for a release that never came. My informant supposed
nothing could be done to help them. He himself would suffer, of course,
as soon as we were gone, for his entertainment of us to-night, forced
though it was. His plaint was uttered less in anger than with a
certain air of apology, as a man, conscious of futility, might complain
of the weather or any other act of God. The idea that the Common Law
had been shamefully abused to his undoing, had probably never occurred
to him, his view of Law being that of most poor folk, that it is wholly
external, the voice of an irresponsible will to be endured or evaded
like any other tyranny. And his Padishah had only acted as Kings have
ever acted in the East, from the Great King, the King of Assyria, to
the latest Sultan or Shah.
Afterwards we visited that fatal church. It is claimed for it (perhaps
extravagantly) that it is the same in which the great Bishop of
Myra, who is become the patron saint of fishermen, and inspires the
Christmas dreams of children over half the world, ministered and was
buried. St. Nicholas lies at Bari now; but the violated place of his
first rest is shown at Dembré in a recess fenced from the northern
aisle of the basilica by a low screen of varied marbles somewhat more
recent in date than the saint’s day. The apse retains the form of
the original Tribunal, with the stone throne set in a semicircle of
seats, moss-grown and stained with green slime; and taken for all in
all, this church is the most interesting memorial of the early days
of Christianity, in the land where Paul conducted the first Christian
mission.
[Illustration: THE REPUTED TOMB OF ST. NICHOLAS AT MYRA.]
Our host entertained us as well as his poor means allowed, and spread
long rugs on his low divans. In the morning light I was struck with
the beauty of their hues, and asked their age, which seemed to be
some seventy years. The owner whispered to my servant, Would I buy?
He wished to sell all he had, gather a little privy cash, and make
his escape, and he asked no more than a fair price. He was willing to
carry the load five or six rugged miles, and I have those rugs still.
We found the boat in a sheltered cove of Kékova, and tacking down the
strait, brought up under the shore of deserted Dóliché, where we fished
and ate our catch under the moon, and cradled on the gentle swell,
slept careless of cockroaches and fleas.
On the morrow Antóni set sail westward, but we made slow way, for
the wind was contrary, and it was not till three days later that,
after revisiting Castellórizo, we stood in to Kalamáki bay about
the third hour. With difficulty horses were hired for the road to
Pátara and Xanthus, and we stumbled out of the little _scala_ early
in the afternoon; but ill mounted on a rough road, we did not sight
the vale of Pátara till the sun was low. Patches of stagnant water,
catching the level rays, glistened here and there like gold foil on the
poisonous greenness of the hollow; while other patches, grey in shadow
and golden-brown in light, gradually resolved themselves into ruins
standing in deep marsh. A tethered horse grazing on the rim of the
slough, a faint tinkling of goat bells, and three black tents near a
pine-log shelter alone betrayed the presence of man on the holiest site
of Lycia.
Certain of swampy ground ahead, we dismounted; for most Anatolian
horses, whether from heredity or from early experience of bogland, will
fall into a paroxysm of terror at the sight of water in the path, and
I have known the most battered pack-jade rear and prance like Job’s
war-horse rather than pass a gutter. So afoot we went down to see
Pátara. These cumbered sites of dead cities may refresh the soul, but
surely they vex the body. The curse of Lost Paradise seems to brood
over them, bidding the longest thorns and the stoutest thistles grow
and multiply between their stones. Snakes and scorpions wait for the
unwary hand in every cranny, and all blocks seem to have fallen edge
uppermost or to be ready to turn under a hasty foot.
The ruins of Pátara lie round its silted harbour, which is become
a reedy morass. A fortress of the Byzantine age has been the last
permanent habitation; and along the broken crenellations of its walls
we followed clumsily the soft-shod feet of an agile Yuruk boy. It was
no holiday ramble. The wall was a mere _arête_ between inky depths
to left and a slimy jungle to right; it was often broken and always
unsafe, and over its rottenest parts passage had to be forced through
clumps of rank vegetation. We made slow progress, marked by the
splashing of loose stones into the pool and the scurrying of its myriad
gruesome tenants, and when we had struggled to dry land, near the
sand-choked ruin of the Theatre, it was high time to seek some lodging
for the night.
[Illustration: THE SAND-CHOKED THEATRE OF PATARA.]
Far up the marsh the cry of a goatherd driving his flock to higher
ground sounded faintly amid a responsive jangle of gathering bells;
and loud in our ears sang the first mosquitoes of sundown. What pests
must rise from that rotting slough of a summer night, making a camp
intolerable, even on the heights above! But in chill April weather
one might hope to pass the dark hours well enough. We made for the
pine-log shelter and the three black booths, and finding the first
full of dung, wherein fleas and ticks unnumbered lay in wait, sent our
Greek ahead to parley with the Yuruks. This was a tactical mistake.
Hospitality, even in the East, is more often enforced by public opinion
than offered out of the fulness of the heart. Therefore, you should
meet your possible host half-way without the hesitancy which the polite
code of the West prescribes: appeal boldly to his tribal conscience;
identify yourself with his dwelling or his kin; touch his beard, his
knees, his head, his salt, his tent-rope. All nomads are encased in
tribal selfishness, and among the most exclusive are the Yuruks, who
wander under the shadow of a government wholly external to them, that
takes all it can and gives nothing in exchange. What do they want
with the apparatus of official Ottoman civilisation, with police,
only seen at the heels of the publican, with the local _mairie_, only
entered at the heels of the police, with new roads and spidery bridges
which their sagacious asses avoid? All these things they curse in one
breath with the provinces of Yemen and Hasa, to which their sons are
spirited as conscripts. Such men offer no spontaneous welcome to the
casual stranger--a tax-gatherer as likely as not, or a spy of the local
assessor--who knows?; and a party like ours, not strange enough in gait
or guise to rouse that curiosity which overmasters suspicion, will fare
ill if it waits an invitation.
The Greek came back to say we were among bad men, and had best go back
to Kalamáki, night though it was. But we had no mind to remount our
jaded beasts and stumble for four hours over that execrable path, and
the Yuruks looked honest folk enough. So doing last what we should have
done first, we walked straightway into the largest tent and sat down by
the ashes of its hearth. No one showed surprise. We were within our
social right by the code, and the owner had no choice but to follow and
speak the customary words of welcome. But suspicion clouded his simple
mind, and we had to go through that exasperating Ollendorfian dialogue,
which, in one language or another, must be held on arrival wherever men
have been taught by long experience to conceal their wealth.
“Have you barley for our beasts?”
“We have no barley.”
“But we give money.” (_Chins jerked and tongues clicked to imply
incredulity and denial._)
“Well--have you chopped straw?”
“There is none, Wallah!”
“Good--nor eggs?”
“_We_ have no eggs.” (_Abundance in the next camp._)
“Nor milk?”
“To-day, none.” (_Yesterday and to-morrow, never to-day._)
“Nor butter, nor bread, nor anything?”
“Not anything, by the head of God!”
“But these fowls, they are barren?”
“Ai-i! they lay eggs, God be praised!”
“And those nanny-goats, they are all dry?”
“Wallah! They make milk.”
“Then, by God’s will, we stay. Quick! barley, milk, eggs! We stay.”
And in nine cases out of ten your simple wants will be supplied; and
although sooner or later you must parry the inevitable prayer for those
rejuvenating philtres, of which all Franks are understood to hold the
secret, you will part best of friends at dawn from unwilling hosts of
the evening before.
Should an Eastern depart from his indifferent reserve and greet you
cordially at first sight, beware of him. He meditates some particular
motive of self-interest. A few years ago certain official assessors of
land-tax on their way up the left bank of the Nile suddenly found the
obstruction, which had embittered their earlier progress, yield to a
spirit of frank hospitality. Sheikhs and notables came forth to greet
them. The best of the village was at their service, and the fullest
revelation was made at once of the wealth of each community, and
especially the high value of its lands. Meanwhile another Commission,
advancing _pari passu_ up the contrary bank, was equally surprised by
a like change in the peasants’ demeanour. Its business was to purchase
ground for the track of a State Railway, and lo! field after field
along the proposed line was hardly worth an old song. Thus for awhile
were both Commissions in clover. Then weeping and wailing broke out
behind them, and obstruction became more dogged than ever in front. The
assessors had been mistaken for the railway surveyors, the surveyors
for the assessors.
With us, however, all would now go well. Neither our clothes nor, truth
to tell, our halting Turkish reminded the old Yuruk of any publican
he had ever known. Pine-logs were heaped on the embers, tobacco-boxes
offered and accepted, buttermilk and unleavened dampers brought in
by the wrinkled dame. The patriarch, readily unbosoming his griefs
after the manner of his kind, told how he had broken up and sowed a
bit of Noman’s land, and promptly found it assessed as a field under
irrigation; how his last plough-ox had been taken to discharge a debt
not half its value, and his son, the support of his age, was gone
to the Yemen--never, God be witness, to return. Wallah! _he_ knew
the Government! The tale sounded pathetic to our ears, and we tried
awkwardly to sympathise with the teller; but we got no help from our
Greek, reassured by this time, and well aware how light such woes lie
on the bird-like souls of wanderers who are here to-day, dispersed
to-morrow, and fatalist above the settled folk. He chimed in with
ribald pleasantries, reminiscent of his Gálata days, to the delight of
the patriarch and his son, little used to urban wit.
His indecencies, but half understood, seemed no affair of mine, and
thankful to be discharged from the talk, I ceased to listen. The night
had fallen luminous, with a rising moon, and profoundly still. Not a
needle stirred in the pine fronds. Only the flat note of a bell sounded
now and again from the fold as a beast turned in his lair; and in the
pauses of talk one might hear even the faint intermittent crepitation
of stones, trees, and earth, respiring the heat of the past day. But
whenever, to the relief of unaccustomed eyes, the smoky fire died down,
a strident column of mosquitoes would sail in by the door to dispute
our persons with the fleas.
Such tent-dwellers seem lighter of heart than the men of Turkish towns
and villages, merrier perhaps for having less between them and the sky.
There is this to be said for tent-life in a warm clime--it exhilarates,
like the casting off of clothing; and perhaps for this reason civilised
men of other climes have so much hankering for it, despite its
insecurity and its plague of blowing dust, and the noonday heat and the
cold in the dawn. But the canvas booth is not meant for house-dwellers
who carry with them much furniture and many scattered possessions, and
would sit high and stand upright. It should be low to cheat the wind,
and empty of all that may gather dust--a mere canvas burrow, such a
shelter from draught and sun and dew as suits the simplicity and the
poverty of minds in which want of occupation and variety in life leaves
no void to be filled by the morbid introspection dear to civilised
solitaries.
The woman took no part in the discourse, nor did she share the meal
with her husband after his guests were satisfied. But having tendered
him the bowl with the gentlest motion of one palm towards her breast,
in obedience to an immemorial instinct of reverence for the male, she
sank on her heels to coax the fire and croon over the ashes, throwing
now and again a question at us, till some pastoral duty called her
outside the tent. It was perfect domestic accord. Man and woman without
friction, question or strife, evidently sufficed together for all the
necessary functions of existence. She, in her constant performance
of physical labours, had probably never known the woes of either
her toiling or her idle Western sisters: for her no sexual cravings
unappeased, no assumption of the manly part, no fear of loneliness in
middle life or age. If she must be obedient in all things, even to
stripes, the inexorable opinion of a simple society would protect her
from physical tyranny. For in the nomad’s tent the rod is held a fool’s
weapon, and shame is on him who can rule his household with no other,
or fails to pay in a multitude of punctilious ways due honour to his
wife.
* * * * *
I must have fallen into uneasy sleep, for, when roused by the cold,
as much as by insect legions, I found the talk ceased and the talkers
slumbering, feet to fire. A sea-wind, rising gustily, fanned an
intermittent glow in the heart of the embers, and their dusky gleam
revealed the old Yuruk a moment, lying supine, with his head on the lap
of his dame, who sat stark asleep against the tent-pole. Seen thus,
the two looked less like human beings than gnomes, or survivors of
some primaeval race which worshipped other gods. And so, in a sense,
they were. Though the Yuruks profess Islam, Allah has not the best
of their private allegiance; and under his name they revere, without
ritual or articulate creed, some private tribal god, with whom they
feel the possibility of more intimate communion. The All-Father of
the Arabs has no more chased the petty gods of place and tribe out of
the Nearer East than He of the Hebrews. He has been accepted, indeed,
as a strictly constitutional monarch, or rather, perhaps, as a Judge
of Appeal who may resolve now and then those age-long feuds in which
tribal gods involve their human kin; but, for the rest, accepted only
in so far as he prescribes no duty but towards himself. He is an
immaterial Allah, without parts or earthly semblance, not because he is
a spirit, but because he is a shadow. Nothing of that real sense of the
omnipresence and omnipotence of a Divine Being, which seems to possess
the most stolid of settled Moslems and elevates their creed at its best
into one of the purest forms of monotheism conceivable, is present to
the wanderers. They are as careless of Allah as, they take it, he is
careless of them. When he first made the world, say Bedawis, he ordered
Creation during six days, and, very weary on the seventh, was composing
himself to sleep, when a man stood before him and said: “Thou hast
apportioned the world, but to us given nothing. Behold us still in the
desert!” And the Creator looked and saw the Bedawis indeed forgotten
in the Waste; but he would not disturb what he had done. “This I give
you,” he replied; “since ye dwell in what is no man’s, ye may take what
is any man’s. Go your way.” And his way from that hour has the Bedawi
gone, careless of Creation and Creator.
It was deep night still, and the moon, sinking to the sea-rim, threw
an image of the tent-door across the fire, bleaching the glow of the
wood embers. Little by little the pale light crept up the old dame’s
face. She opened her eyes suddenly as a waking animal, shuffled her
knees sideways from under the man’s shoulders, gently lowered his head
to a saddlebag, and yawning, left the tent. I heard her gathering fuel
without, with which presently she made up the fire. Then she went down
towards the fold, where a continuous jangle told of uneasy udders and
prescience of coming day.
The fresh warmth to my feet made me drowsy again, and when I woke once
more, the dusk of dawn was in the tent, but the dame had not returned.
Still milking and tending the herd, she at least showed little enough
of that indolent habit with which we credit the East.
I scrambled to my feet, stiff with cramp and cold, and stood in the
tent-door. The great wolf-dogs, who had bayed me over night, recognised
a temporary adoption into the family by sidling silently out of range,
and settling watchful again on the gossamers. During the chill hours a
false impalpable sea had streamed inland, and, filling the hollow where
Pátara lay, had submerged all but the higher dunes; but above its smoky
limit, the true sea could be seen swelling to the horizon in palest
tints of mauve and green. The profile of a shaggy range, beyond the
Xanthus river, grew harder and harder against the brightening sky, rib
after rib detaching itself on the ample slopes; and led upwards along
its crest towards the parent chain of Taurus, my eyes caught the first
flush of day on a pinnacle of snow. The old Yuruk stretched himself
once or twice, rose, spat, pushed through the door, and, leaving his
dame to set milk and cheese before us, strode off without a word of
farewell.
* * * * *
The Yuruk guide of yesterday led us out northward through a triple
Roman archway, and along a street of tombs. The Xanthus river rushed
a mile or two to our left, red with the melted snows of Ak Dagh, and
the rudely paved path wound over spongy swards and across soft reedy
channels towards the neck of the plain. One would have known it for
a poisonous place, even had it not earned ill-fame by killing two of
Fellows’ men. After an hour or two we reached a bridge, and beyond the
outlet of the eastern swamp, entered a region of scattered fields,
gnarled olives, and solitary farms, holdings of the “Turks” of Gunuk,
who are sons of the old Lycians, county gentlemen in a small way,
sportsmen always, and brigands now and then. Every man we met went
armed, and the Bey, at whose house we dismounted under the steep of
Xanthus, kept a guard of three.
[Illustration: THE DESPOILED HARPY TOMB.]
The ruins, far seen on a sunlit slope since the first hour of our
ride, lie on the first shelf of the mountains, high above the river at
the point where it issues into the plain. Little seemed changed since
Fellows’ day, and the stakes, with which he propped the roof of the
“Harpy Tomb” after stripping the frieze, still uphold it. If you feel
a momentary pang of shame before the mutilated pillar, look round
at the poisonous marsh and the wild hills and wilder men and you will
not blame Fellows. How many artists of two generations would have seen
the Harpy reliefs in their place? The Theatre, whose curve is so oddly
broken to avoid a pillar-tomb, is one tangle of brushwood; but the
great four-square stela, inscribed in the strange Lycian character, on
all its marble faces, stands yet clear and unhurt; and you may walk
eastwards from it all the length of the main street to a wide paved
area, from which lesser flagged ways run right and left. The whole
ground-plan of the city is there, and more of it evidently survives
from the earliest days than on any other Anatolian site. Some day a
digger will get a rich booty at Xanthus, and gather his first-fruits, I
dare wager, on that jutting shelf shored up by cyclopean walling behind
the Theatre, where a temple of the Xanthian Apollo or of Sarpedon stood
as an outpost towards the sea, and struggling barley reveals, by the
variety of its growth, the outline of a great oblong building. But the
day of digging Xanthus seems no nearer. First Crete, and then Sparta
have drawn off our explorers, and Lycia must still wait.
The ride round the eastern side of the swamp to Kalamáki I have endured
twice since that day, and I know it for one of the most painful in
Anatolia, so rough and broken is the paved path, and so dank the air. I
shall not revive its memory. No sumptuous yacht was ever a more welcome
sight than Antóni’s little craft rocking in the evening light under the
cliffs of Kalamáki. The south-wester had lulled at last, and we ran out
before a light land breeze. We had no mind to go back to Castellórizo,
unless we could do no better; for what with blockade-running in Crete,
and waiting on the chance of a Turkish war, the Greek coasters could
no longer be trusted to call. A week or so even in that fortunate
isle would hang too heavy on our hands. So we lay to off the western
point, Antóni promising to run to Rhodes, for the first time in his
little boat’s history, should a fair wind spring up by the next noon.
As luck would have it, a north-easter began to blow at dawn, and he
kept his word, as always. We woke to find the boat heeling over at
racing pace with the mouth of the Xanthus astern and the bluffs of the
Seven Capes sliding forward one behind another. As we hissed through
the white-caps of the open gulf, I liked Antóni better than ever. He
cuddled the tiller of his little boat like a lover, talking of the fame
which should be hers in Castellórizo if she could run the eighty miles
to Rhodes before sundown. And she did her best. The harbour was well in
sight when the wind died away, leaving a light night-air to waft us,
after some hours of calm, to the windmills, which have stood on the
mole of Rhodes since the Hospitallers came.
In the first of the morning we heard the news--the Greeks had crossed
the Thessalian border, and it was war. Some Jewish loafer on the quay
must have reported that we were speaking Greek aboard; for the port
authority roundly refused to accept our British passports, and set a
watch over us at our inn. At the same time Antóni and his boat found
themselves under arrest. It mattered little, however; for our acting
consul knew me, and the Governor General of the Isles, who when _vali_
of Adana had furthered my party some years before, was then in Rhodes,
and had not forgotten. The embargo was lifted with a genial counsel to
us not to run about the sea with Greeks till better times; and Antóni,
paid as we loved him, which was well, picked up a cargo, and spread his
sail for Castellórizo to tell the tale of the cruise.