CHAPTER XXII.
The Plague—Spread of the Pestilence—The Greek Victim—Self-Devotion—Death of the Plague Smitten—The Widow’s Walk—Plague Encampments—The Infected Family—The Greek Girl and her Lover—Non-Conductors—Plague—Perpetuators—Vultures—Melancholy Concomitants of the Pestilence—Carelessness of the Turks—The Pasha of Broussa—Rashness of the Poorer Classes—Universality of the Disease in the Capital.
Every one who has even heard of Constantinople is aware that it is a city of Plague and Fires. Of the latter I have already spoken, although slightly; for it is a singular fact that, although several extensive conflagrations occurred during our residence in the East, not only in the Capital but in its environs, it never was our fortune to witness one.
Of the still more frightful visitation of the Plague, I could not perhaps make mention at a more fitting moment than the present (the commencement of September) when, contrary to the prognostics of the soi-disant conversant in such matters, it has broken out with renewed violence in every direction. The Imperial Palace of Beglierbey is deserted in consequence of its having been visited by the Pestilence—The “Seven Towers” have become a Plague-Hospital for the Greeks. We presented ourselves with an order for admittance at the celebrated Seraglio at the Point, and found that here the scourge had preceded us, and that the gates were closed—Even Therapia, seated on the edge of the shore, and open to the healthful breezes from the Black Sea, is adding daily to the list of victims; and we were received by a friend at the extreme opposite end of the sofa on our return thence, (and even that reluctantly,) from a dread that we might prove to be Plague-conductors, and infect her family.
To the honour of our common nature it may be stated that even this direful visitation tends at times to bring out some of the noblest qualities of which frail humanity is susceptible. If man may be pardoned a feeling of absorbing selfishness, it is surely in the hour when he has before him the prospect of one of the most frightful of all deaths; but, even in the short month which has elapsed since the disease deepened, examples have not been wanting of that utter absence of selfishness—that self-sacrifice for the security of others—which gives to the fate of the victim almost the character of martyrdom.
Only a day or two since, a poor Greek inhabitant of Therapia was suddenly attacked with sickness, and, thinking that he recognised the symptoms of the malady, he immediately proceeded to his cottage; and, stopping ere he touched the threshold, called to his wife, who, astonished on seeing him at so unwonted an hour, and struck by the change in his appearance, was about to approach him, when he desired her to stand back; and then, calmly telling her that he was unwell, though he knew not from what cause, and that he was unwilling during a time of Plague to run the risk of infecting his family, or of compromising his house, he desired her to throw him his furred pelisse. “If it be a mere passing sickness,” he added, as he prepared to depart, “it will only cost me a night in the open air—If it be the Plague, you will at least save our few articles of clothing, and the few comforts of the cottage—Recommend me to the Virgin and St. Roch.”
And thus he left his home; and wandered, weak and heart-sick, to the mountains. He felt that the brand was on him; and he went to die alone, he knew not how—whether as a wild and frantic maniac, gathering strength from the fever which would turn his blood to fire, and howling out his anguish to the winds of midnight, without one kind voice to comfort, or one fond hand to guide him, until at length he dropped down to die upon the damp earth—or, as a shivering and palsied wretch, fainting from thirst, and quivering with sickness, to gaze hour after hour from his bed of withered leaves, or parched-up turf, upon the blue bright sky, and the myriad stars, until they went out one by one as his sight failed, and his pulse ebbed——
On the morrow the wife hastened to the mountains with food, in search of her husband. She had not taught herself to believe that the Plague had touched him, and she feared that he might suffer from hunger. She led one of her children by the hand—his favourite child—and they were long before they found him—for although the young clear voice of the boy shouting out his name was borne far away upon the elastic air of the mountain, there was no answer to the call—alas! there could be none—the father lay cold and stiff in a gully of the rock,-the Plague-smitten had ceased to suffer!
The anguish of the unfortunate woman may be conceived—In her first agony she sprang towards the body, but the shriek of her child recalled her to a sense of her peril, and the fate that she would entail upon her little ones. The struggle was long and bitter; and at length she turned away with the weeping boy, and returned into the village to proclaim her widowhood.
I have already mentioned the fact of my having on one occasion inadvertently ridden into the midst of a Plague-encampment. Such occurrences are, however, rare; as, in the event of several families being compromised and sent to the mountains, there is generally a military guard stationed at every avenue leading to their temporary dwellings, to prevent the approach of strangers, and to form their medium of subsistence.
A melancholy tale was related to me by a lady at Therapia, who had watched from day to day the proceedings of one of these little mountain colonies through a telescope. It consisted of a miserable family; the father gray-haired and feeble, and the mother bent and palsied—The children died first, one by one, for the disease drank their young blood more eagerly than the chill stream which moved sluggishly through the veins of the aged parents; and at length the old couple were left alone.
They used to sit side by side for hours under a tree facing their village—the birth-place of their dead ones, whom they had put into the earth with their own hands—but within a week the childless mother sickened in her turn and the gray old man dragged a wretched mattress to the foot of the tree from beneath which his stricken wife had no longer power to move; and he held the water to her lips, and he put the bread into her grasp; but all his care availed her nothing—and with his lean and trembling hands he scratched her a grave under the shadows of the tree that she had loved in life; and, when the earth had hidden her from his sight, he lay down across the narrow mound to die in his turn. His worldly toils were ended!
Scarcely less affecting was the devotion of a young Greek girl, whose lover, smitten with plague, was conveyed to the temporary hospital at the Seven Towers. No sooner had she ascertained whither they had carried him, than without saying a word to her parents, who would, as she well knew, have opposed her design, she left her home, and presented herself at the portal of the infected fortress as the nurse of the young Greek caïquejhe who had been received there on the previous day. In vain did the governor, imagining from her youth, and the calm and collected manner in which she offered herself up an almost certain victim to the pestilence, that she was not aware of her danger, endeavour to dissuade her from her project. She was immoveable; and was ultimately permitted to approach the bedside of the dying sufferer.
Not a tear, not a murmur escaped her, as she took her place beside his pillow, and entered upon her desperate office. In the paroxysms of his madness, as the poison was feeding upon his strength, and grappling at his brain, he spoke of her fondly—he talked to her—he stretched forth his arms to clasp her—and then he thrust her from him as he yelled out his agony, and his limbs writhed beneath the torture of the passing spasm.
And she bore it all unshrinkingly; and even amid her misery she felt a thrill of joy as she discovered that pain and madness had alike failed to blot her image from his memory. But there were moments less cruel than these, in which reason resumed her temporary sway, and the devoted girl was pressed to the fevered bosom of her fated lover; and in these, brief as they were, she felt that she was over-paid for all.
But the struggle even of youth and strength against the most baneful of all diseases could not last for ever—The patient expired in the arms of his devoted mistress; and as he breathed his last, bequeathed to her at once his dying smile, and the foul poison which was coursing through his veins. She saw him laid in his narrow grave; and then she turned away with the conviction that she, too, was plague-smitten!
She did not return to her home: but she stood a few paces from one of the companions of her youth, and bade her bear to her aged parents her blessing and her prayers: and this done she fled to the mountains, and sought out a solitary spot wherein to die—None knew how long she lingered, for she was never seen again in life; but her body was found a few days afterwards beneath a ledge of earth, in a doubled-up position, as though the last spasm had been a bitter one.
She who had sacrificed herself to smooth the last hours of him whom she had loved, perished alone, miserably, in the wild solitude of the Asian hills; and her almost Roman virtue has met with no other record than the brief one in which I have here attempted to perpetuate the memory of her devotion and her fate.
It seems as though men apprehended contagion in the very name of the plague, for they have adopted terms that render its repetition needless. Should you inquire for a family which has become compromised, you are told that “they are gone to the mountains,” and you understand at once that they are infected; and when numbers are daily dying about you, in reply to your desire to learn the amount of the evil, you are answered that there are so many, or so many “accidents.”
Every respectable house, and every public establishment, has in its court, or its outer hall, a small wooden erection, precisely like a sentry box raised on rollers, into which you are obliged to enter during a period of plague, before you are admitted into the interior of the building; and where you stand upon a latticed flooring, while aromatic herbs are burnt beneath, whose dense and heavy vapour soon envelops you in a thick smoke, which is said to prevent contagion.
Every competent authority declares the disease to be propagated by contact; and it is singular to see the care with which every individual passing along the public streets avoids all collision with his fellow-passengers. The lower order of Turks are the greatest sufferers from the plague, in consequence of the filthy personal habits of the men employed as street-porters and labourers; their law only requiring them to wash their hands and feet before entering their mosques, or repeating their prayers; while I have good authority for stating that this class of individuals purchase an inner garment of dark and coarse material, which they retain day and night without removing it, until it falls to pieces.
If filth be a plague-conductor, it is not, consequently, surprising, that great numbers of these persons are invariably carried off during the year; and the same cause doubtlessly accounts for the excessive mortality among the Jews; who frequently increase the spread of the evil by possessing themselves of the garments of the plague-victims, which they buy secretly from the relatives; reckless, in the event of a good bargain, of the fatal consequences which may ensue alike to themselves and to others.
This may appear to be an excess of madness almost incredible; but it is, nevertheless, an incontrovertible fact.
I know not whether it be a common occurrence for vultures to haunt the environs of the city during the prevalence of plague, but it is certain that we never saw one until its commencement; and that before we left they were to be met with in numbers, in the very centre of the shipping, preying upon the offal that had been flung into the port, or winging their heavy flight along the mountains, as though scenting their revolting banquet.
There is, to me, something frightful in the terror with which, in a season of virulent pestilence, each individual avoids all human contact, and looks upon his best friends as vehicles of destruction.—In the shrinking of relatives from each other, and the unwonted selfishness of usually free and generous spirits. Nor is the sensation a comfortable one, with which you remember that you are yourself considered as infected, and treated with distrust accordingly; and in moments of depression find yourself speculating in your own mind the probability of the fear being well-grounded. Does your head ache?—It is a symptom of plague—Are you sick and faint from heat?—It is even thus that the pestilence frequently declares itself in the first instance—If you take cold upon the Bosphorus, you have laid the corner-stone of the malady—and over-fatigue may induce the exhaustion which lends strength to the incipient evil. It is impossible to describe the effect of this continual necessity for caution: but even this is trifling beside the constant dread of contact with infection. It is vain to affect a mad courage leading you to set at defiance these accumulated dangers; there are moments when an unconquerable dread will creep over the heart, and sicken the spirit.
There are many who do not fear death; but they are habituated to associate it in their minds with an accustomed home, and watching friends, and anxious tenderness; all accessories tending to soften the pang of disease, and to smooth the path of dissolution—Few are they who could contemplate calmly the death-hour of the plague-smitten—the hunted from his home—haunting the hills in his polluted solitude; and contaminating the pure air of Heaven by the fetid breathings of pestilence—shrieking out his madness to the mocking moon,—and dying in his despair on the bare earth; a loathsome thing, to which even a grave is sometimes denied!
And yet, terrible as is the picture which I have drawn almost despite myself, it is surprising how little caution is observed by the Turks to escape from so direful a visitation. They have an absurd superstition that all True Believers who die, either by the hand of the Sultan, or by the visitation of the plague, go straight to Paradise, and to the arms of the Houri, without the intervention of any purgatorial quarantaine; and they account very satisfactorily for the infrequency of plague-cases among the Franks, by declaring that Allah does not love them sufficiently to grant them so desirable a privilege; without troubling themselves to remark the precautions taken by Europeans to prevent the spread of the disease, all of which are utterly neglected by the natives of the country. It is indeed astonishing how blindly the Orientals run the greatest risks, in the most unnecessary and apparently wilful manner.
The Pasha of Broussa was informed by his family physician that his Chiboukjhe, or pipe-bearer, who had been in his service from his boyhood, and to whom he was much attached, had discovered symptoms of plague, which would render it necessary for his Excellency to take such precautions as might tend to ensure the safety of the other members of his family; and accordingly he gave immediate orders for the removal of the harem to a village in the mountains; and ordered all the linen of the inmates of the salemliek to be washed, and their woollen clothing carefully aired and fumigated, ere it was transported thither, together with the male members of his establishment.
The Chiboukjhe, hearing of the intended removal of the household, begged to see his master once more ere he left the city; and the Pasha complied with his request without scruple, as a couple of yards intervening between the plague-patient and his visitor are sufficient to prevent contagion. But the kind-hearted Pasha had not calculated upon his own powers of resistance; and, when the favourite domestic upbraided him with his cruelty in leaving him to die alone, and recalled to his memory a score of circumstances in which he had proved his attachment and devotedness to the welfare of his master; the Pasha, with a recklessness perfectly incomprehensible, ordered that fresh linen should be put upon the patient: that his own garments should be destroyed and replaced by new ones; and that he should be forthwith comfortably placed in an araba, and conveyed to the village whither all the rest of the establishment had been previously removed.
The order was obeyed; and the infected man arrived on the evening of the second day at the mountain-retreat, bringing with him the deadly disease which was rapidly sapping his life-blood. Four-and-twenty hours had not elapsed when the favourite wife of the Pasha, a beautiful girl of sixteen, expired, in a fit of raging madness, upon her cushions: the pestilence had wrought so rapidly in her young and delicate frame that no time had been afforded for precaution or help; the weak blindness of the Pasha had sacrificed his wife, compromised his house, and endangered the whole family. He rushed from one apartment to another like a maniac, but the bolt had fallen; and at midnight his youngest child lay a corpse on its dead mother’s bosom.
They were buried hurriedly beneath the tall trees of the garden; and the earth was but newly scattered over their graves when another of the Pasha’s wives breathed her last—Suffice it that in the space of ten days, out of a harem consisting of nineteen persons, there remained only an aged negress and two infant children; while the salemliek had also suffered severely, although not in the same proportion.
I could pile anecdote on anecdote upon the same melancholy theme, but my heart sickens as I record them; and that which I have just narrated will sufficiently demonstrate the improbability of this terrific scourge ever being expelled the country by the precautionary measures of the natives. On the subject of the plague the Turks appear to possess neither prudence nor judgment. Their belief in predestination deepens their natural want of energy; and thus the malady is suffered to run its deadly course almost unchecked, and to sweep off its thousands yearly, amid pangs at which humanity shudders.
Another circumstance which must tend to perpetuate the pestilence in the East, exists in the fact that, when the local authorities have ascertained the existence of plague in a dwelling, the house becomes what is termed “compromised;” and after the family of the smitten has been ejected, and sent to the mountains, it is painted throughout its whole interior, cleansed, and fumigated; a process which, owing to the risk incurred by the individuals employed in the work, and the species of quarantaine to which they are subjected during its continuance, is sufficiently expensive to deter the poorer portions of the population from declaring the presence of the disease in their families; as, combined with their forty days of exile in the mountains, during which time they are, of course, unable to earn any thing for the future support of the survivors, it subjects them to want and misery, which they seek to evade by running a greater, but, as they fondly hope, less certain risk. They trust to their felech, or constellation, that the infection will not spread, and are undoubtedly, in many cases, the more readily induced to do this, that they have at least the melancholy satisfaction of closing the eyes of their dead, and of seeing them expire amid their “household gods;” instead of knowing that their last hour was one of despairing abandonment, as well as of acute agony; and having to search for their bodies in the desolate spots to which their wretchedness might have driven them.
It has been ascertained that atmospherical changes have no influence on the plague. It rages amid the snow-storm as virulently as beneath the scorching suns of summer. Diet does not affect it—The street-porter, living upon black bread, and fruit frequently immature, and the Effendi, whose tray is spread with culinary delicacies, are alike liable to be smitten.
Its origin and its cure are both unknown—It is the hair-suspended sword ever ready to do its work of death; and none can foretell the moment in which the blow may come.—It chases the haughty Sultan from his Palace; and the labourer from his hut—It is in the close and thickly-peopled streets of the city, and on board the majestic vessels that ride the blue waves of the Bosphorus—And there is not a sojourner in the East who can forget the first occasion on which, when he asked the meaning of the gloom that hung upon men’s brows, and the mysterious murmur that ran through the crowd on a new outbreak of the malady, he was answered by some passer-by,—“It is the Plague!”
There can be no doubt that at the present time,[9] the pestilence has spread farther and faster than it might otherwise have done from the extreme scarcity, indeed, I may almost say, want of water in the Capital. The poorer classes, whose means render them unable to purchase this necessary of life at an exorbitant price from the individuals who established an extemporaneous trade, by freighting their caïques with water at the European villages on the Channel, and vending it in the city, being necessitated to make use of foul and stagnant pools for the purpose of preparing their food; and to dispense almost entirely with a beverage generally taken to excess by both sexes.
As the wells and tanks of the nearest hamlets failed, the water-sellers extended their voyages even to Therapia; and their demands became comparatively extravagant. Men watched the clouds in vain—the sun set in a blaze of gold and purple; and morning broke in blushes from behind the Asian mountains—the noon-day sky was blue and bright—not a vapour passed across its beauty—and no rain fell. Women crowded about the fountains in the vain hope that each moment the exhausted spring might well out afresh—Children wept, and asked vainly for their accustomed draught; the marble basins of the city remained empty, and the bright sunbeams played upon the smooth surface of the glittering stone.
On the Asian shore, the waters had not yet failed; and the famous fountain of Scutari, fed by a mighty volume descending from the dusky mountain of Bulgurlhu, still poured forth its flashing stream; but, from some superstition, whose nature I was unable to ascertain, the authorities did not permit the transfer of water from the Asiatic to the European shore; and this noble fountain, which would have supplied all the wants of the city, was suffered to flow on, and waste its stream in the channel.
I shall not easily forget the constant succession of busy human beings, who, from day-dawn to dusk, thronged the mouth of a well not a hundred paces from our residence at Yenikeuÿ. Every cistern in the lower quarter of the village had become exhausted; but this solitary well, fed from a mountain source, still held out; and it was only by the necessity of lengthening the ropes to which the buckets were affixed, and the consequent increase of labour required to raise them, that any diminution of the water could be perceived.
Children of ten or twelve years of age could no longer, as heretofore, accomplish this portion of the household toil: nor would they, even had their strength sufficed to the effort, have been able to make it: for as the demand for water increased on all sides, the battle was truly to the strong at the village well. Men who met as friends, and greeted each other kindly as they approached it, strove and struggled for precedence, until they at length parted in wrath, and frequently with blows; while the owners of the neighbouring cottages, to whose exclusive use this spring had hitherto been considered sacred, murmured in vain at the intrusion on their privileges, and were fain to strive and struggle like the strangers.
The reason adduced by the Greeks for the abundance of water in this well, was the sanctity conferred on it by the priesthood at the close of the previous vintage; when they had made a solemn procession to its mouth, and flung in a handful of small silver coins, contributed for the purpose by the poorer inhabitants of the village, a small vase of holy water, and a pinch of consecrated salt!
While the drought was at its height, a community of Turning Dervishes made a pilgrimage to the Sweet Waters; where the Barbyses, always a very inconsiderable stream, had shrunk to half its accustomed volume; and there, having previously prostrated themselves in prayer, they performed their evolutions round the principal cistern of the valley; and at a certain point of the ceremony flung into the air small vessels of red clay, fresh from the potter’s hands, while, as they fell back, they besought that every empty tank might overflow, and every goblet be filled.
The spectacle was a very striking one; and it was followed by the observance of another yet more touching. At dusk the village children, walking two and two, and each carrying a bunch of wild flowers, drew near the cistern in their turn; and sang, to one of the thrilling melodies of the country, a hymn of supplication; while at the conclusion of each stanza, they scattered a portion of the blossoms over the shattered fragments of the vases flung into the basin by the Dervishes.
Nothing could be more affecting! Man, shrinking under a consciousness of his unworthiness, put his prayer into the mouth of innocent infancy; as though he trusted to the supplication uttered by pure lips and guileless hearts, when he dared not hope for mercy through his own agency. Every evening during the drought, that “linked chain” of childhood repaired to the same spot, and raised the same song of entreaty to an all-powerful Creator; and the echoes of the Valley flung back the infant voices of the choir as they swelled upon the wind of evening with a pathos which affected me to tears. It was only on the day preceding that of our departure from Constantinople that the prayer was answered; and, as the light vapoury rain fell upon the parched and yawning earth, my thought instantly reverted to the infant choristers of the Sweet Waters; whose artless hymn may be freely translated as follows:—
HYMN OF THE TURKISH CHILDREN.
Allah! Father! hear us;
Our souls are faint and weak:
A cloud is on our mother’s brow,
And a tear upon her cheek.
We fain would chase that cloud away,
And dry that sadd’ning tear;
For this it is to-night we pray—
We seek the cooling fountain,
Alas! we seek in vain;
The cloud that crowns the mountain
Melts not away in rain.
The stream is shrunk which through our plain
Once glided bright and clear;
Oh! ope the secret springs again—
Allah! Father! hear.
We bring thee flowers, sweet flowers,
All withered in their prime;
No moisture glistens on their leaves,
They sickened ere their time.
And we like them shall pass away
Ere wintry days are near;
Shouldst thou not hearken as we pray—
Allah! Father! hear.