The presence of the widow caused us much annoyance whenever we camped for the night, because sleeping accommodation was usually scanty, and we always had to find a room for the lady before we turned in ourselves. Once, when we reached the village where we were going to camp for the night, we found that there were only two sleeping-rooms available for the whole party, so that we had to give one to the widow, and camp—all five of us—in the other. First we showed the lady to her apartment, and then we went to look at our own. It was not a cosy bedroom, with French bedsteads, dimity curtains on the windows, and roses creeping up the walls outside. On the contrary, it was a small, square room, that would have made an excellent dog-kennel. The floor was of mud, and in a corner there was a heap of dirty straw, on which lay two dead Turkish soldiers who had died of confluent small-pox. We put the bodies outside the house, and Denniston, Stoker, Morisot, and myself, with Williams the dragoman, all went to sleep on the straw.
As we travelled along day after day the glare on the snow was very trying to the eyes; and though we all wore blue goggles, we suffered a good deal of inconvenience, while our faces were dreadfully blistered by the sun. The Persian headman was always wanting to stop and rest his horses; so that what with perpetually working at him to keep him up to the mark, pacifying the Spanish widow, and foraging for our daily bread, we had plenty of occupation en route. All our drivers of course were eager to rob us whenever the opportunity offered; and in addition to the furs and turquoises which I had already lost through a pack-horse going over the precipice, I was also deprived of two very fine cats from the province of Van. I had purchased these creatures, which were very much like Persian cats, in Erzeroum, and I had hired a pack-horse specially to carry them. They were transported in a wooden box fixed to the pack-saddle, and Williams fed them with milk whenever we halted at a village. A couple of days before we reached Trebizond, however, my beautiful cats disappeared; and the only consolation that was vouchsafed me for my bereavement was the vague lie of a Persian driver, who averred that they had escaped from their box during the night. Of course he had planted them somewhere for subsequent conversion into ill gotten piastres.
When we commenced to get down towards Trebizond, we left the snow behind us on the mountains, and entered a tract of well timbered country, which was looking its best in the first flush of the early spring. The sides of the hills were gorgeous with pink cyclamen, and with a beautiful blue bulb which I could not identify. At last we entered the avenue of pear trees which were laden with juicy fruit when I passed up to Erzeroum six months previously. When I retraced my steps to Trebizond with new companions, I found the pear trees in full bloom. Since I had seen them bending under the burden of the ripening fruitage, fire and sword and frost and fever had brought many hundreds of men to death before my eyes, and I myself had been down to the very borders of the Valley of the Shadow. But now the war was over, the winter was done, and the scent of the white pear blossoms that filled all the valley blended with the first faint fragrance of the breezes from the ever nearing waters of the Black Sea.
Trebizond at last!
CHAPTER XVI.
CONCLUSION.
We fly from the Widow—Arrival at Constantinople—English Philanthropy—The Baroness Burdett-Coutts—First Acquaintance with a well known Actress—Osman Pasha back again—The Turkish Skobeleff—A much perforated Paletot—Captain Morisot's Career—A Romantic Escape—On Board the Gamboge—We reach Smyrna—Mr. and Mrs. Zohrab—A Sympathetic Englishwoman—Zara Dilber Effendi—Back in London—Patriotic Ditties—An Incredulous Music-hall Proprietor—Non é Vero—Bowling out a Story-teller.
We had time to call on Mr. Biliotti again, and to thank him for all his kindness; and then we went on board the Simois, which was ready to cast off her moorings and head out for Constantinople. Our Spanish widow was consistent to the last. The real hardships of the journey had not improved her temper; and when we resolutely declined to pay her passage to Constantinople in the steamer, she cursed us up and down Trebizond, each and severally, with the comprehensive particularity that was devoted to the historic cursing of the Jackdaw of Rheims. She was indeed that rare—or somewhat rare—phenomenon, an ungrateful woman.