LETTER XXX.
Turkish Military Life—A Visit to the Camp—Turkish Music—Sunsets—The Sea of Marmora.
A half hour’s walk brought us within sight of the pacha’s camp. The green and white tents of five thousand Turkish troops were pitched on the edge of a stream, partly sheltered by a grove of noble oaks, and defended by wicker batteries at distances of thirty or forty feet. We were stopped by the sentinel on guard, while a message was sent in to the pacha for permission to wait upon him. Meantime a number of young officers came out from their tents, and commenced examining our dresses with the curiosity of boys. One put on my gloves, another examined the cloth of my coat, a third took from me a curious stick I had purchased at Vienna, and a more familiar gentleman took up my hand, and after comparing it with his own black fingers, stroked it with an approving smile that was meant probably as a compliment. My companions underwent the same review, and their curiosity was still unsated when a good-looking officer, with his cimetar under his arm, came to conduct us to the commander-in-chief.
The long lines of tents were bent to the direction of the stream, and, at short distances, the silken banner stuck in the ground under the charge of a sentinel, and a divan covered with rich carpets under the shade of the nearest tree, marked the tent of an officer. The interior of those of the soldiers exhibited merely a stand of muskets and a raised platform for bed and table, covered with coarse mats, and decked with the European accoutrements now common in Turkey. It was the middle of the afternoon, and most of the officers lay asleep on low ottomans, with their tent-curtains undrawn, and their long chibouques beside them, or still at their lips. Hundreds of soldiers loitered about, engaged in various occupations, sweeping, driving their tent-stakes more firmly into the ground, cleaning arms, cooking, or with their heels under them playing silently at dominoes. Half the camp lay on the opposite bank of the stream, and there was repeated the same warlike picture, the white uniform and the loose red cap with its gold bullion and blue tassel, appearing and disappearing between the rows of tents, and the bright red banners clinging to the staff in the breathless sunshine.
We soon approached the splendid pavilion of the pacha, unlike the rest in shape, and surrounded by a quantity of servants, some cooking at the root of a tree, and all pursuing their vocation with a singular earnestness. A superb banner of bright crimson silk, wrought with long lines of Turkish characters, probably passages from the Koran, stood in a raised socket guarded by two sentinels. Near the tent, and not far from the edge of the stream, stood a gaily-painted kiosk, not unlike the fantastic summer-houses sometimes seen in a European garden, and here our conductor stopped, and kicking off his slippers, motioned for us to enter.
We mounted the steps, and passing a small entrance-room filled with guards, stood in the presence of the commander-in-chief. He sat on a divan, cross-legged, in a military frock-coat wrought with gold on the collar and cuffs, a sparkling diamond crescent on his breast, and a cimetar at his side, with a belt richly wrought, and held by a buckle of dazzling brilliance. His aide sat beside him, in a dress somewhat similar, and both appeared to be men of about forty. The pacha is a stern, dark, soldier-like man, with a thick, straight beard as black as jet, and features which look incapable of a smile. He bowed without rising when we entered, and motioned for us to be seated. A little conversation passed between him and the consul’s son, who acted as our interpreter, and coffee came in almost immediately. There was an aroma about it which might revive a mummy. The small china-cups, with thin gold filagree sockets, were soon emptied and taken away, and the officer in waiting introduced a soldier to go through the manual exercise by way of amusing us.
He was a powerful fellow, and threw his musket about with so much violence, that I feared every moment the stock, lock, and barrel would part company. He had taken off his shoes before venturing into the presence of his commander, and looked oddly enough, playing the soldier in his stockings. I was relieved of considerable apprehension when he ordered arms, and backed out to his slippers.
The next exhibition was that of a military band. A drum-major, with a proper gold-headed stick, wheeled some sixty fellows with all kinds of instruments under the windows of the kiosk, and with a whirl of his baton, the harmony commenced. I could just detect some resemblance to a march. The drums rolled, the “ear-piercing fifes” fulfilled their destiny, and trombone, serpent, and horn showed of what they were capable. The pacha got upon his knees to lean out of the window, and as I rose from my low seat at the same time, he pulled me down beside him, and gave me half his carpet, patting me on the back, and pressing me to the window with his arm over my neck. I have observed frequently among the Turks this singular familiarity of manners both to strangers and to one another. It is an odd contrast with their habitual gravity.
The sultan, I think unwisely, has introduced the European uniform into his army. With the exception of the Tunisian cap, which is substituted for a thick and handsome turban, the dress is such as is worn by the soldiers of the French army. Their tailors are of course bad, and their figures, accustomed only to the loose and graceful costume of the East, are awkward and constrained. I never saw so uncouth a set of fellows as the five thousand Mussulmans in this army of the Dardanelles; and yet in their Turkish trowsers and turban, with the belt stuck full of arms, and their long moustache, they would be as martial-looking troops as ever followed a banner.
We embarked at sunset to return to the ship. The shell-shaped caique, with her tall sharp extremities and fantastic sail, yielded to the rapid current of the Hellespont; and our two boatmen, as handsome a brace of Turks as were ever drawn in a picture, pulled their legs under them more closely, and commenced singing the alternate stanzas of a villainous duet. The helmsman’s part was rather humorous, and his merry black eye redeemed it somewhat, but his fellow was as grave as a dervish, and howled as if he were ferrying over Xerxes after his defeat.
If I were to live in the East as long as the wandering Jew, I think these heavenly sunsets, evening after evening, scarce varying by a shade, would never become familiar to my eye. They surprise me day after day, like some new and brilliant phenomenon, though the thoughts which they bring, as it were by a habit contracted of the hour, are almost always the same. The day, in these countries where life flows so thickly, is engrossed, and pretty busily too, by the present. The past comes up with the twilight, and wherever I may be, and in whatever scene mingling, my heart breaks away, and goes down into the west with the sun. I am at home as duly as the bird settles to her nest.
It was natural in paying the boatman, after such a musing passage, to remember the poetical justice of Uhland in crossing the ferry:—
“Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee!
Take! I give it willingly;
For, invisibly to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me!”
I should have paid for one other seat, at least, by this fanciful tariff. Our unmusical Mussulmans were content, however, and we left them to pull back against the tide, by a star that cast a shadow like a meteor.
The moon changed this morning, and the wind, that in this clime of fable is as constant to her as Endymion, changed too. The white caps vanished from the hurrying waves of the Dardanelles, and after an hour or two of calm, the long-expected breeze came tripping out of Asia, with oriental softness, and is now leading us gently up the Hellespont.
As we passed between the two castles of the Dardanelles, the commodore saluted the pacha with nineteen guns, and in half an hour we were off Abydos, where our friend from the south has deserted us, and we are compelled to anchor. It would be unclassical to complain of delay on so poetical a spot. It is beautiful, too. The shores on both the Asian and European sides are charmingly varied and the sun lies on them, and on the calm strait that links them, with a beauty worthy of the fair spirit of Hero. A small Turkish castle occupies the site of the “torch-lit tower” of Abydos, and there is a corresponding one at Sestos. The distance between looks little more than a mile—not a surprising feat for any swimmer, I should think. Lady-loves in our day, alas! are not won so lightly. The current of the Hellespont, however, remains the same, and so does the moral of Leander’s story. The Hellespont of matrimony may be crossed with the tide. The deuce is to get back!
Lampsacus on the starboard-bow, and a fairer spot lies on no river’s brink. Its trees, vineyards, and cottages, slant up almost imperceptibly from the water’s edge, and the hills around have the look “of a clean and quiet privacy,” with a rural elegance that might tempt Shakspeare’s Jaques to come and moralise. By the way, there have been philosophers here. Did not Alexander forgive the city its obstinate defence for the sake of Anaximenes? There was a sad dog of a deity worshipped here about that time.
I take a fresh look at it from the port, as I write. Pastures, every one with a bordering of tall trees, cattle as beautiful as the daughter of Ianchus, lanes of wild shrubbery, a greener stripe through the fields like the track of a stream, and smoke curling from every cluster of trees, telling as plainly as the fancy can read, that there is both poetry and pillaw at Lampsacus.
Just opposite stands the modern Gallipoli, a Turkish town of some thirty thousand inhabitants, at the head of the Hellespont. The Hellespont gets broader here, and a few miles farther up we open into the Sea of Marmora. A French brig-of-war, that has been hanging about us for a fortnight (watching our movements in this unusual cruise for an American frigate, perhaps), is just ahead, and a quantity of sail are stretching off on the southern tack, to make the best use of their new sea-room for beating up to Constantinople.
We hope to see Seraglio Point to-morrow. Mr. Hodgson, the secretary of our embassy to Turkey, has just come on board from the Smyrna packet, and the agreeable preparations for going on shore are already on the stir. I do not find that the edge of curiosity dulls with use. The prospect of seeing a strange city, to-morrow, produces the same quick-pulsed emotion that I felt in the diligence two years ago, rattling over the last post to Paris. The entrances to Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Athens, are marked each with as white a stone. He may “gather no moss” who rolls about the world; but that which the gold of the careful cannot buy—pleasure—when the soul is most athirst for it, grows under his feet. Of the many daily reasons I find to thank Providence, not the least is that of being what Clodio calls himself in the play, “a here-and-there-ian.”