CHAPTER I.
Departure for Broussa—Rocky Coast—Moudania—The Custom House—Translation of the word Backshich—The Archbishop of Broussa—The Boatman’s House—The Dead and the Living—Laughable Cavalcade—Dense Mists—Fine Country—Flowers, Birds, and Butterflies—The Coffee Hut—The Turkish Woman—Broussa in the Distance—The Dried-up Fountain—Immense Plains—Bohemian Gipsies—Mountain Streams—Turkish Washerwomen—Fine Old Wall—The Jews’ Quarter—The Turkish Kiosk—Oriental Curiosity—A Dream of Home.
Having decided on visiting Broussa, we hired an island caïque with four stout rowers, and provided ourselves with plenty of coats and cloaks, a basket of provisions, and a few volumes of French classics; and thus we set sail from the Golden Horn on the last day of May, leaving Stamboul all splendour and sunshine.
A brisk northerly wind carried us rapidly out into the Propontis; all sails were set; my father and myself comfortably established among “the wraps,” our Greek servant ensconced between two baskets, the steersman squatted upon the poop of the boat grinning applause, and revealing in his satisfaction a set of teeth as white as ivory; and, ere long, excepting this last, our attendant, and myself, every soul on board was asleep.
In less than two hours, Stamboul had vanished like a vision, and could only be traced by the line of heavy mist which skirted the horizon. The coast of Asia Minor was darkening as we advanced, wearing the dense drapery of vapour woven by the excessive heat—the mountain chain, fantastic in outline, stretched far as the eye could reach, and we had already left behind us the two quaint rocks which form so peculiar an object from the heights above Constantinople. But here the wind failed us altogether; the slumbering caïquejhes were awakened, the oars were plied, and we moved over the Sea of Marmora, of which I had such horrible memories, from the night of pain and peril that I had passed upon it on my way to Turkey, as though we had been traversing a lake.
Twilight darkened over us thus; and then a light breeze tempted us again to set the sails, and we glided along smoothly, skirting the rocky coast until we reached the point opposite Broussa; which, sloping rapidly downwards to the beach, suddenly revealed to us the glorious moon, that was rising broad and red immediately on our track, and tracing a line of light along the ripple which gleamed like gold.
After having sated myself with the bright moon, the myriad stars, and the mysterious mountains, at whose base the waves had hollowed caverns, through which they dashed with a noise like thunder, and once or twice almost deluded me into a belief that I could distinguish the sound of human voices issuing from their depths, I at length yielded to the excessive fatigue that overpowered me; and, wrapping myself closely in my mantle, I stretched myself along the bottom of the caïque, and did not again awaken until the boatmen announced our arrival at Moudania.
It was an hour past midnight, and not a sound came to us from the town. A score of Arabian barks were anchored off the shore, whose seaward houses overhang the water; the white minarets of the mosques were in strong relief upon the tall, dark, thickly-wooded mountains which rose immediately behind them, and whence the song of the nightingales swept sweetly and sadly over the ripple; and had we not been drenched with the heavy dew that had fallen during the night, I should have been quite satisfied to remain until daylight in the caïque, which soon entered a little creek in the centre of the town.
But, previously to casting anchor, we were obliged to pull considerably higher up the gulf in order to show ourselves at the Custom House, and to exhibit our Teskarè, or Turkish passport, as well as to submit our two travelling portmanteaux, and our provision-hamper, to the inspection of the examining officer. After a vast deal of knocking and calling, an individual was at length awakened, who came yawning into the caïque with a paper-lantern in his hand, and his eyes only half open; and who, after looking drowsily about him, murmured out “backschish,” and prepared to depart; upon which a few piastres were given to him, and he returned on shore.
The word backshich is the first of which a traveller learns the meaning in Turkey; it signifies fee, or present. The Pasha receives backshich for procuring a place or a pension for some petitioner; then, of course, it is a present, and precisely as unwelcome as it is unexpected: the boy who picks up your glove or your whip, as you ride along the street, demands backshich—he must be fee’d for his civility. Nothing is to be done in the country without backshich.
On entering the creek we despatched the servant and one of the caïquejhes to the house of the Greek Archbishop of Broussa, to whom we had brought a letter, and who had removed to the coast for the benefit of sea-bathing; but his Holiness was from home, and there was consequently no ingress for us. In this dilemma, for hotels there are none, we had no alternative but to accept for a few hours the hospitality of one of the boatmen, until we could procure horses to carry us on to Broussa; and we consequently made our debût in Asia Minor in an apartment up two flights of rickety stairs, walled with mud, and shivering under our footsteps. But it suffices to state that the caïquejhe was a Greek, for it to be understood at once by every Eastern traveller that the house was cleanly to perfection; and our reception by the hostess, even at that untoward hour, courteous and attentive.
Before the servant had brought the luggage up stairs, my father, worn out by fatigue, was sound asleep upon the divan; and, when the attendant had withdrawn, I also gladly prepared myself for the enjoyment of a few hours’ repose; and, casting off my shoes, and winding a shawl about my head, I took possession of the opposite side of the sofa, and should soon have followed his example, when I was aroused by the light foot of the caïquejhe’s wife in the apartment, who, opening a small chest, cast over me a sheet and coverlet as white as snow, and then retired as quietly as she came.
But that sheet and coverlet changed the whole tide of my feelings—the chest in which they had been kept was of cypress wood—they were strongly impregnated with its odour—I was exhausted by fatigue and excitement—and a thousand visions of death and the grave came over me in the half dreamy state in which I lay, that by no means added to my comfort.
With a morbidity of imagination to which I am unhappily subject, I followed up at length one fantastic and gloomy image, until I began to believe myself in a state of semi-existence, habiting with the dead; but the delusion was brief, for I was soon as disagreeably convinced that my affair was at present altogether with the living. I had been warned that Broussa was as celebrated for its bugs as for its baths, but I had never contemplated such martyrdom at Moudania! I sprang from the sofa, shook my habit with all my strength, and then, folding my fur pelisse for a pillow, I stretched myself on the carpet, and left the luxuries of the cushioned divan to my father; who, fortunately for him, proved to be a sounder sleeper than myself.
At five o’clock, the horses came to the door; and after partaking sparingly of the provisions which we had brought with us, we drank a cup of excellent coffee, prepared by our hostess, and descended to the street; where my European saddle, by no means a common sight at Moudania, had collected a crowd of idlers.
Had Cruikshank been by when we started, we should assuredly not have escaped his pungent pencil. My father led the van, mounted on a high-peaked country saddle, with a saddle-cloth of tarnished embroidery, and a pair of shovel stirrups; I followed, perched above a coarse woollen blanket, with my habit tucked up to preserve it from the stream of filth that was sluggishly making its way through the street; after me came our Greek servant, sitting upon a pile of cloaks and great coats, holding his pipe in one hand, and his umbrella in the other; and he was succeeded in his turn by the serudjhe who had charge of our luggage, and who rode between the portmanteaux, balancing the provision basket before him, dressed in a huge black turban, ample drawers of white cotton, and a vest of Broussa silk. The procession was completed by three attendants on foot, the owners of the horses; and thus we defiled through the narrow and dirty streets of Moudania, on our way to the ancient capital of the Ottoman Empire.
For a time the mists were so dense that, although we had the sea-sand beneath the hoofs of our horses, we could not distinguish the water; and, as we turned suddenly to the right, and traversed a vineyard all alive with labourers, the vapours were rolling off the sides of the hills immediately in front of us. Feathered even to their summits with trees, they appeared to rest against the thick folds of heavy white mist in which they had been enveloped during the night, and presented the most fantastic shapes. I never traversed a more lovely country; vineyards were succeeded by mulberry plantations and olive groves, gardens of cucumber plants, beet-root, and melons, stretches of rich corn land, and immense plains, hemmed in by gigantic mountains, of which the unredeemed portions were a perfect garden.
I have spoken, in my little work on Portugal, of the beauty of the wild flowers in that country, but I found that those of Asia even transcended them. Delicate flowing shrubs, herbs of delicious perfume, and blossoms of every dye, were about our path: the bright lilac-coloured gum-cistus, with a drop of gold in its centre—the snowy privet, with its scented cone—the wild hollyhock—the bindweed, as transparent and as variously coloured as in an European parterre—the mallow, with its pale petals of pink and white—the turquoise, as blue as a summer sky, and as large as a field-daisy—the foxglove, springing from amid the rocky masses by the wayside, like virtue struggling with adversity, and seeming doubly beautiful from the contrast; the bright yellow blossom which owes to its constantly vibrating petals the vulgar name of “woman’s tongue”—the sweet-scented purple starch-flower—wild roses, woodbine, and, above all, the passion-flower, somewhat smaller than that cultivated in Europe, but retaining perfectly its pale tints and graceful character, were mingled with a thousand others that were new to me.
Upon one spot on this plain I saw the richest clump of vegetation that I ever met with in my life, it was a small mound near the road-side, covered with dwarf aloes and arum; I made one of the seridjhes tear up a plant of the latter for me to examine, and it was perfectly gigantic; the blossom measured eighteen inches from the base of the calyx to the extremity of the petal; the colour was a deep, rich ruby, and the stem was five or six feet in height. I need scarcely add that the stench which it emitted was intolerable, and we were obliged to rub our hands with wild chamomile to rid ourselves of it.
The butterflies were small, sober-coloured, and scarce; but the birds which surrounded us were various and interesting—the bulfinch, the elegant black-cap, the nightingale, making the air vocal; and the cuckoo, whose sharp, quick note cut shrilly through the sweet song with which it could not assimilate—the skylark, revelling in light, and drinking in the sunshine—the partridge, half hidden amid the corn, or winging its way along the valley, kept us constant company; while the majestic storks sailed over our heads, with their long thin legs folded back, and their long thin necks stretched forward, steering themselves by their feet; or remained, gravely standing near the road-side, eyeing us as we passed with all the confidence of impunity.
After rising a tolerably steep hill, we descended into a plain of vast extent, through which brawled a rapid river crossed by a bridge of considerable span, wherein a herd of buffaloes were cooling themselves; some lying on their sides wallowing in the mud, and others standing up to their noses in water, and defying the fierce beams of a sun under which we were almost fainting. As I pulled up for an instant to observe them, a kingfisher darted from a clump of underwood overhanging the bank, glittering in the light, and looking as though it had pilfered the rainbow.
Having passed the plain, we again descended, and stopped mid-way of the mountain before a little hut of withered boughs, tenanted by a superb-looking Turk, who dispensed coffee and pipes to travellers; beside the hut a handsome fountain of white granite poured forth a copious stream of sparkling rock water: and on the other side of the road a very fine walnut tree overshadowed a bank covered with grass. Upon this bank the servant spread our mat; and, having removed the large flapping hats of leg-horn which we wore, we revelled in the dense shade and refreshing coolness; nor were we the only individuals to whom they had proved welcome, for a portion of the space was already occupied by a Turkish woman, whose husband was in the coffee-hut, and who accepted readily a part of our luncheon, although she could not partake of it with us, the presence of my father preventing the removal of her yashmac. I felt glad that she received the offer in the spirit in which it was made, for the Turks are so universally hospitable that my obligations to them on this score are weighty; and, singularly enough, this was the first occasion on which I had ever had an opportunity of returning the compliment.
We lingered on this sweet spot nearly an hour, and then, continuing our descent, and crossing a little stream at its foot, we clomb a lofty mountain, whence we looked down upon a scene of surpassing beauty. Before us towered a chain of rocks, whose peaks were clothed with snow; and beneath us spread a valley dotted with mulberry and walnut trees, green with corn and vineyards, and gay with scattered villages. At the base of the highest mountain lay Broussa, and even in the distance we could distinguish the gleaming out of the white buildings from among the dense foliage which embosomed them.
From this point a new feature of beauty was added to the landscape: fountains rose on all sides, the overflowing of whose basins had frequently worn a deep channel across the road, where the waters rushed glittering and brawling along. With the form of one of these fountains I was particularly struck; it was evidently of considerable antiquity, and was overshadowed by a majestic lime-tree, whose long branches stretched far across the road; but its source was dried, and it was rapidly falling to decay.
I hesitated for an instant whether I should sketch the fountain, or again lend to it for an instant the voice that it had lost. I decided on the latter alternative—and, seating myself upon the edge of the basin, I hastily scratched the following stanzas in my note-book.
THE DRIED-UP FOUNTAIN.
The emblem of a heart o’er-tried,
I stand amid the waste;
My sparkling source has long been dried;
And the worn pilgrim, to whose ear
My gushing stream was once so dear,
Passes me by in haste.
No wild bird dips its weary wing
In my pure waters now;
No blushing flowers in beauty spring,
Fed by the gentle dews, that erst
Taught each fair blossom how to burst
With a yet brighter glow.
The nightingale responds no more
Since my glad sound was hushed,
As she was wont to do of yore,
To the continuous flow, which oft,
When leaves were rife, and winds were soft,
Like her own music gushed.
Still wave the lime-boughs, whose sweet shade
Was o’er my waters cast,
When high in Heaven the sunbeams played;
But o’er my dried-up basin now
Vainly is spread each leafy bough;
It but recalls the past—
And thus the human heart no less,
In its young ardent years,
Pours forth its gushing tenderness
Freely, as though time could not fling
A gloom around each lovely thing,
And turn its smiles to tears.
And thus, like me, it too must prove
How soon the spell goes by;
How falsehood follows fast on love,
Treachery on trust, and guile on truth;
Until the heart, so full in youth,
In age is waste and dry
Worn heart, and dried-up fount—for ye
The world is fair in vain;
Birds sing, boughs wave, and winds are free;
But song, nor shade, nor breath, can more
Your joyful gush of life restore—
It will not flow again!
A great stretch of road, after we had passed the exhausted fountain, traversed another of those immense plains for which this part of the country is celebrated. No monotony, however, renders them irksome to the traveller; on the contrary, they are characteristic and various in the extreme. Gigantic walnut trees, laden with fruit; fig trees, almost bending beneath their own produce; little wildernesses of gum cistus, carpeting the earth with their petals; woods of mulberry trees; stretches of dwarf oak, with here and there timber of larger size overtopping them; grass land, gay with tents, pitched for the accommodation of those who guard the droves of horses grazing in their vicinity; camels browzing on the young shoots of the forest trees; herds of buffaloes, with their flat and crescent-shaped horns folding backward, and their coarse and scantily-covered hides caked with the mud in which they have been wallowing; and flocks of goats as wild and as agile as the chamois, keep the eye and the imagination alike employed.
Now and then a native traveller, mounted on his high-peaked saddle, with a brace of silver-mounted pistols and a yataghan peeping from amid the folds of the shawl that binds his waist; his ample turban descending low upon his brow, and his yellow boots resting upon a pair of shovel stirrups; his velvet jacket slung at his back, and the long pendent sleeves of his striped silk robe hanging to his bridle-rein, passes you by. His horse is, nine times out of ten, scarcely one remove from a pony, but it can go like the wind; and, as it tosses its well-formed head, expands its eager nostril, and scours along with its long tail streaming in the wind, you are immediately reminded that both the animal and his rider are, although remotely, of Tartar origin. Of course, the horse has his charm against the Evil Eye, as well as his master; and, moreover, perhaps, his brow-band, or breeching, prettily embroidered with small cowries, and his saddle-cloth gay with the tarnished glories of past splendour.
At times you are met by a party of Greek serudjhes returning to Moudania with a band of hired horses, which, although they have probably tired the patience and wearied the whip of their strange riders, are now racing along amid the shouts and laughter of their owners, as though they were engaged in a steeple-chase. A cloud of dust in the distance heralds the approach of a train of rudely-shaped waggons, frequently formed of wicker-work, drawn by oxen or buffaloes, and generally laden with tobacco; while, nearer the city, gangs of donkeys, carrying neatly-packed piles of mulberry boughs for the use of the silk-worms, which form the staple trade of the neighbourhood, complete the moving picture.
The river which traverses the plain is spanned by a bridge of five beautifully-formed arches. When we passed, it was so shrunken that an active leaper might have cleared it at a bound; but the current was frightfully rapid, and the channel, heaped with flints and sand, had evidently been insufficient to contain its volume during the winter, as the land, for a wide space on either side, bore traces of having been flooded.
On the edge of the plain stands the fountain of Adzim Tzèsmèssi, overshadowed by three fine maple trees, and in itself exceedingly picturesque. A rudely-constructed kiosk, raised a couple of steps from the ground, and surrounded by seats, protects the small basin of granite into which the water rises, and whence it afterwards escapes by pipes into two exterior reservoirs: that which is shaded by the maples being reserved for the use of travellers, and the other for the supply of cattle.
Here, of course, we found a caféjhe, surrounded by a group of smokers; and procured some excellent coffee and cherries.
During our halt, a party of Bohemian gipsies, on their way to the coast, stopped to refresh themselves and their donkeys at the mountain spring; they were about thirty in number, and the men were remarkably tall and well-looking, but formidable enough, with their pistols and yataghans peeping from their girdles; they had two or three sickly, weary children in their train, who appeared half dead with heat and toil; and half a dozen withered old women, who might have sat for the originals of Macbeth’s witches, they were so “grim and grisly;” but there was one female among them, a dark-eyed, rosy-lipped maiden of sixteen, or thereabouts, who was the perfection of loveliness. For a while she stood apart, but, as the rest of the tribe, attracted by my riding-dress, clustered about me, and assailed me by questions to which I was utterly unable to reply, she at length took courage and joined the party. As her wild and timid glance wandered from me to her companions, I found that it invariably rested upon one individual, and I had little difficulty in filling up the romance suggested by her earnest looks. Nor was I deceived; for when the tribe moved away, the bridle of her donkey was held by the tall, sunburnt youth to whom she had attracted my attention; and as they passed the stream, he did not relinquish it though he trod knee-deep in water, when he might have traversed the little bridge without wetting the soles of his feet; but in recompense of his devotion, he feasted, as he went, on the smiles of his fair mistress, and the cherries which I had poured into her lap. After their departure, I made a hasty sketch of the fountain, and then quitted with reluctance a spot so redolent of beauty.
The plain at this point appeared to be set in one uninterrupted frame-work of mountains—the river ran shimmering and sparkling through its centre—the mulberry and walnut trees were scattered thickly over its entire surface—the clouds, as they flitted by, created a thousand beautiful varieties of light and shade; and the soft wind that sighed through the maple leaves almost made me forget my fatigue.
What rills of water we passed through after we left the plain! Every quarter of a mile we encountered a fountain; and for upwards of a league we rode through the heart of a mulberry plantation, fringed with noble walnut trees. At some of the fountains, groups of women were washing; and it was amusing to see them hastily huddling on their yashmacs as they remarked the approach of our party. In many cases, the water which escaped from the basins provided for it, ran rippling along the road, and covering the whole surface for a considerable distance, ere it buried itself among the long grass that skirted the plantation. The mulberry wood was succeeded by gardens; and the rich, rank vegetation reminded me strongly of Portugal, than which I never saw any country more similar.
At a short distance from Broussa, a fine old wall, based on the living rock, rose in its stern hoary decay immediately before our path; clusters of mouldering towers, half overgrown with parasites, from among which gleamed out the modern and many-gabled palace of some Turkish noble, all apparently growing out of its grey remains, varied the outline; nor did we lose sight of them until, on reaching the gate of the city, we turned sharply to the right, in order to escape the Jews’ quarter; and, on arriving in that appropriated to the Greeks, took possession of a furnished house, which had been prepared for us by the polite attention of Mr. Z——, an Armenian merchant, to whom we had a letter: when, on approaching the window, I found that the view was bounded by the same old wall, crowned by a charming kiosk, with its trelliced terrace and domed temple, overhung with roses; while the rock, and even the wall itself, were thickly covered with wild vines, trailing their long branches like garlands; flowering rock-plants in abundance, and white jessamine and other parasites, rooted in the garden above, and mingling their blossoms with those which Nature alone had planted.
A stately Turk was seated at the open window of the kiosk, smoking his chibouk, and attended by his pipe-bearer; who, when he had satisfied his own curiosity, slowly withdrew, and was shortly replaced by a female, closely veiled, and followed by a couple of slaves. I fell asleep on the sofa without obtaining a glimpse of her face; and, on awaking, found that she had departed in her turn, and that a party of solemn-looking Musselmauns had established themselves in the temple from which they could overlook the whole of our apartment, where they were smoking, and drinking large goblets of water.
I do not know when the party broke up, as I retreated to the other side of the house, and took possession of a room whose windows looked into a court enclosed by high walls painted in fresco, and containing two pretty fountains, whose ceaseless murmurings soon lulled me once more to sleep. A fine lime tree threw its shade far into the apartment—a female voice was singing in the distance—and as I cast myself on the divan, and closed my eyes, a feeling of luxury crept over me which influenced my dreams.——
No wonder that my visions were of home, and of the best of mothers!—I was in her arms—on her heart.
My first hour’s dream at Broussa was worth a waking day!