LETTER XXXVIII.
Belgrade—The Cottage of Lady Montagu—Turkish Cemeteries—Natural Taste of the Moslems for the Picturesque—A Turkish Carriage—Washerwomen Surprised—Gigantic Forest Trees—The Reservoir—Return to Constantinople.
I left Constantinople on horseback with a party of officers, and two American travellers in the East, early on one of nature’s holiday mornings, for Belgrade. We loitered a moment in the small Armenian cemetery, the only suburb that separates the thickly crowded street from the barren heath that stretches away from the city on every side to the edge of the horizon. It is singular to gallop thus from the crowded pavement, at once into an uncultivated and unfenced desert. We are so accustomed to suburban gardens that the traveller wonders how the markets of this overgrown and immense capital are supplied. A glance back upon the Bosphorus, and toward the Asian shore, and the islands of the sea of Marmora, explains the secret. The waters in every direction around this sea-girdled city are alive with boats, from the larger kachambas and sandals to the egg-shell caique, swarming into the Golden Horn in countless numbers, laden with every vegetable of the productive East. It is said, however, that it is dangerous to thrive too near the eye of the sultan. The summary mode for rewarding favourites and providing for the residence of ambassadors, by the simple confiscation of the prettiest estate desirably situated, is thought to have something to do with the barrenness of the immediate neighbourhood.
The Turks carry their contempt of the Christian even beyond the grave. The funereal cypress, so singularly beautiful in its native East, is permitted to throw its dark shadows only upon turbaned tombstones. The Armenian rayah, the oppressed Greek, and the more hated Jew, slumber in their unprotected graves on the open heath. It almost reconciles one to the haughtiness and cruelty of the Turkish character, however, to stand on one of the “seven hills” of Stamboul, and look around upon their own beautiful cemeteries. On every sloping hill-side, in every rural nook, in the court of the splendid mosque, stands a dark necropolis, a small city of the dead, shadowed so thickly by the close growing cypresses, that the light of heaven penetrates but dimly. You can have no conception of the beauty it adds to the landscape. And then from the bosom of each, a slender minaret shoots into the sky as if pointing out the flight of the departed spirit, and if you enter within its religious darkness, you find a taste and elegance unknown in more civilised countries; the humblest headstone lettered with gold, and the more costly sculptured into forms the most sumptuous, and fenced and planted with flowers never neglected.
In the East, the grave-yard is not, as with us, a place abandoned to its dead. Occupying a spot of chosen loveliness, it is resorted to by women and children, and on holidays by men, whose indolent natures find happiness enough in sitting on the green bank around the resting-place of their relatives and friends. Here, while their children are playing around them, they smoke in motionless silence, watching the gay Bosphorus or the busier curve of the Golden Horn, one of which is visible from every cemetery in the Stamboul. Occasionally you see large parties of twenty or thirty, sitting together, their slight feast of sweetmeats and sherbet spread in some grassy nook, and the surrounding head-stones serving as leaning-places for the women, or bounds for the infant gambols of the gaily-dressed little Mussulmans.
Whatever else we may deny the Turk, we must allow him to possess a genuine love for rural beauty. The cemeteries we have described, the choice of his dwelling on the Bosphorus, and his habit of resorting, whenever he has leisure, to some lovely scene to sit the livelong day in the sunshine, are proof enough. And then all over the hills, both in Anatolia and Roumelia, wherever there is a finer view or greener spot than elsewhere, you find the small sairgah, the grassy platform on which he spreads his carpet, and you may look in vain for a spot better selected for his purpose.
Things are sooner seen than described (I wish it were as agreeable to describe as to see them!) and all this digression, and much more which I spare the reader, is the fruit of five minutes’ reflection while the suridjee tightens his girths in the Armenian burying-ground. The turbaned Turk once more in his saddle, then we will canter on some three miles, if you please, over as naked a heath as the sun looks upon, to the “Valley of Sweet Waters.” I have described this, I think, before. We five to learn, and my intelligent friend tells me, as we draw rein, and wind carefully down the steep descent, that the site of the Sultan’s romantic serai, in the bosom of the valley, was once occupied by the first printing-press established in Turkey—the fruit of an embassy to the Court of Louis the Fifteenth, by Mehemet Effendi, in the reign of Achmet the Third. And thus having delivered myself of a fact, a thing for which I have a natural antipathy in writing, let us gallop up the velvet brink of the Barbyses.
We had kept our small Turkish horses to their speed for a mile, with the enraged suridjee crying after us at the top of his voice, “Ya-wash! ya-wash!” (slowly, slowly!) when, at a bend of the valley, right through the midst of its velvet verdure, came rolling along an aruba, loaded with ladies. This pretty word signifies in Turkish a carriage, and the thing itself reminds you directly of the fantastic vehicles in which fairy queens come upon the stage. First appear two grey oxen, with their tails tied to a hoop bent back from the bend of the pole, their heads and horns and the long curve of the hoop decked with red and yellow tassels so profusely, that it looks at a distance like a walking clump of hollyhocks. As you pass the poor oxen (almost lifted off their hind legs by the straining of the hoop upon their tails), a four-wheeled vehicle makes its appearance, the body and wheels carved elaborately and gilt all over, and the crimson cover rolled up just so far as to show a cluster of veiled women, cross-legged upon cushions within, and riding in perfect silence.[[17]] A eunuch or a very old Turk walks at the side, and thus the Moslem ladies “take kaif,” as it is called—in other words go a pleasuring. But a prettier sight than this gay affair rolling noiselessly over the pathless greensward of the Valley of Sweet Waters, you may not see in a year’s travel.
A beautiful Englishwoman, mounted (if I may dare to write it) on a more beautiful Arabian, came flying toward us as we approached the head of the valley, the long feathers in her riding cap all but brushing our admiring eyes out as she passed, and other living thing met we none till we drew up in the edge of the forest of Belgrade. A half hour brought us to a bold descent, and through the openings in the wood we caught a glimpse of the celebrated retreat of Lady Montagu, a village, tossed into the lap of as bright a dell as the sun looks upon in his journey. A lively brook, that curls about in the grass like a silver flower worked into the green carpet, overcomes at last its unwillingness to depart, and vanishes from the fair scene under a clump of willows; and, as if it knew it was sitting for its picture, there must needs be a group of girls with their trowsers tucked up to the knee, washing away so busily in the brook, that they did not see that half a dozen Frank horsemen were upon them, and their forgotten yashmacks all fallen about their shoulders!
We dismounted, and finding (what I never saw before) a red-headed Frenchman, walking about in his slippers, we inquired for the house of Lady Montagu. He had never heard of her! A cottage, a little separated from the village, untenanted, and looking as if it should be hers, stood on a swell of the valley, and we found by the scrawled names and effusions of travellers upon the gates, that we were not mistaken in selecting it for the shrine of our sentiment.
I am sorry to be obliged to add, that in the romantic forest of Belgrade, we listened to the calls of mortal hunger. With some very sour wine, however, we did drink to the memory of Lady Mary and the “fair Fatima,” washing down with the same draught as brown bread as ever I saw, and some very indifferent filberts.
We mounted once more, and followed our silent guide across the brook, politely taking it below the spot where our naiads of the stream were washing, and following its slender valley for a mile, arrived at one of the gigantic bendts, for which the place is famous. To give romance its proper precedence over reality, however, I must first mention, that on the soft bank of the artificial lake, which I shall presently describe, Constantine Ghika, disguised as a shepherd, stole an interview with the fair Veronica, and in the wild forest to the right, they wandered till they lost their way; an adventure of which they only regretted the sequel, finding it again! If you have not read “The Armenians,” this pretty turn in my travels is thrown away upon you.
The valley of Belgrade widens and rounds into a lake-shaped hollow just here, and across it, to form a reservoir for the supply of the city by the aqueducts of Valens and Justinian, is built a gigantic marble wall. There is no water just now, which, for a lake, is rather a deficiency; but the vast white wall only stands up against the sky, bolder and more towering, and coming suddenly upon it in that lonely place, you might take it, if the “fine phrensy” were on you, for the barrier of some enchanted demesne.
We passed on into the forest, winding after an almost invisible path, up hill and down dale, till we came to the second bendt. This, and the third, which is near by, are larger and of more ornamental architecture than the first, and the forest around them is one in which, if he turned his back on the lofty walls, a wild Indian would feel himself at home. I have not seen such trees since I left America; clear of all underwood, and the long vistas broken only by the trunk of some noble oak, fallen aslant, it has for miles the air of a grand old wilderness, unprofaned by axe or fire. In the midst of such scenery as this, to ride up to the majestic bendt, faced with a front like a temple, and crowned by a marble balustrade, with a salient and raised crescent in the centre, like a throne for some monarch of the forest, it must be a more staid imagination than mine that would not feel a touch of the knight of La Mancha, and spur up to find a gate, and a bugle to blow a blast for the warder! It is just the looking place I imagined for an enchanted castle, when reading my first romances.
Farther on in the forest we found several circular structures, like baths, sunk in the earth, with flights of steps winding to the bottom, but with the same gigantic trees growing at their very rim, and nothing near them to show the purpose of their costly masonry. We stopped to form a conjecture or two with the aid of the genus loci; but the surly suridjee, probably at a loss to comprehend the object of looking into a hole full of dead leaves, chose to put his horse to a gallop; and having no Veronica to make a romance of a lost path, we left our conjectures to gallop after.
We reached the waste plains above the city at sunset, and turned a little out of our way to enter through the Turkish cemetery (poetically called by Mr. MacFarlane “death’s coronal”), on the summit and sides of the hill behind Pera. Broad daylight, as it was still without, it was deep twilight among its thick-planted cypresses; and our horses, starting at the tall, white tombstones, hurried through its damp hollows and emerged on a brow overlooking the bright and crowded Bosphorus, bathed at the moment in a flood of sunset glory. I said again, as I reined in my horse and gazed down upon those lovely waters, there is no such scene of beauty in the world! And again I say, “poor Slingsby” never was here!
| [17] | Whether the difficulty of talking through the yashmack, which is drawn tight over the mouth and nose, may account for it, or whether they have another race of the sex in the East, I am not prepared to say, but Turkish women are remarkable for their taciturnity. |