Accidents of an antiquary's life

by D. G. Hogarth

A chance visit to Sandukli brought me into my earliest collision with Ottoman authority. It was in the hungry month of Ramazan, and two of us had ridden in from camp to buy what supplies we might in the early hours of morning. As we were about remounting, the police accosted us, and roughly bade us wait on the governor. Led to the konak, we were told his beyship was abed, and we must stay till he had eaten at sundown. To spend a whole day in dusty Sandukli was bad, but worse to spend it waiting on a Bey’s pleasure. We sent word that we gave him half an hour to appear, and, admired by all the loafers of the bazar, stalked up and down, watch in hand, in all the insolence of Britain abroad. The governor came not, but on the call of time sent a deputy, nervously offering excuse, and begging us go in peace. Ours is not a gracious race, but it usually gets what it wants.

Passing north-eastward through Afium Kara Hissar in mid June, we went up to our goal in the Phrygian Monument country, and for all the rest of the month were busied in exploring its pleasant shaggy valleys and carven cliffs. I have seen since no region so thickly set with strange memorials of the past, and none to which I would more joyfully return. Some day when diggers uncover the relics of that Midaean monarchy which seemed to the early Greeks of Asia the eldest and most god-like of powers, may I be there to see! The haunted valley of Ayazin, where we grubbed mole-like under the face of a fallen tomb, and, prone in the shallow pit we had made, sketched the most curious of Phrygian reliefs: the sheer acropolis of Kumbet, where we planned a mysterious rock-house which may be of any antiquity; the gorges of Bakshish and Yapuldak, whose sculptured tombs, fashioned like houses of the living, are seen suddenly through the pines: that stupendous curtain of carved and written stone hung before the gate of death by which Midas the King passed to the Great Mother; all his desolate, impregnable city above it, with inscribed altars and rock-reliefs—of these is woven my “féerie du premier voyage.” I was the photographer of the expedition, equipped with a camera which I had borrowed of an amateur in Smyrna and manipulated for the space of one afternoon under his patient eye—so unready was I for my trade; and I was an assistant surveyor, who having plotted painfully and with many lapses my half of the fortifications of the Midas City, was well enough satisfied with my botched work to question my master’s survey of the other half. He has long forgiven me.

A strenuous and somewhat nervous week we spent there under the Midaean crags. Unwarned of modern tenants, we found a new settlement of Circassians, who in those days had a bad name all over Asia Minor for a certain lawless truculence, born of pride of race, and fostered by the official perfidy with which they were often treated. But Mehmet Bey, the chief, received us cordially with samovar and smooth words. On the morrow he followed our operations among the monuments with very lively interest, and at evening came down to the camp and roundly proposed to share profits. We told him once and again there was no gold in our hopes; but we talked to deaf ears, and at last, to be rid of him, said we would halve such treasure as we might find. This, we well knew, was to sow trouble for early reaping, in a land where all believe that the Frank spirits bullion out of earth and rocks, though one see it ever so little; and we were not comforted by our muleteers’ tales of a recent killing, for which the Ottoman government was holding Mehmet Bey to account. But the local police, who had kept track of us, summoned the Bey to Karahissar on the third day, and thus nothing worse befell than a cooling of cordiality between camp and village as the days went by without our doing anything but draw lines on paper and squint through sights.

When, at last, we had done what we came to do, we thought it well to ride fast and far, almost to Karahissar again. Thereafter we became two bands, Ramsay making for home, and his two scholars setting forth for the Cilician shore with no more baggage than might be carried on their saddle-horses and a third bestridden by a single servant. How first one of us and then the other fell ill, but neither so ill as he thought; what in our ignorance and inexperience we did and saw; how we came over Taurus in a waggon and took ship, I have already told elsewhere.

I did not return to Asia for three years, though within a twelvemonth I was wandering within sight of her snows. I had gone to Cyprus as one of four to dig, and I stayed alone to travel during the torrid summer of 1888, visiting almost every village of the island, and trying to do, with not half his science, what I had seen my master do on my prentice journey. What indeed I did do I wrote in a book, little known and less read, whose title, Devia Cypria, has deceived more than once, I am told, sanguine buyers of Erotica. Of the part I bore in the excavation of Paphos I will say little. I knew nothing of the digger’s art at the beginning, and very little at the end. Our leader had studied in the Egyptian school of Petrie, but the rest of us were so raw as not to know if there were any science of the spade at all. We had for mentor Gregori of Larnaca, who has become more famous since, and I doubt if we did much harm. But I doubt too if we found nearly all we ought to have found on that immemorial site. Some experience in handling unskilled Greeks, a fluent use of their rustic tongue, an inkling of how much I had to learn—this, however, I took away from Paphos.

Less than two years later I was with Ramsay in Asia again. The railhead of the Aidin line had been pushed in the meantime to Dineir, and we could make our start from far inland. It is often disputed which of two courses be best, to buy transport or to hire. The hirer must wrangle morning and night with muleteers, who use every trick of their trade to shorten and ease the day’s work. The buyer will be cheated when he buys, cheated when he feeds, cheated when he sells again, and he takes all risk of horse thieves. Our lot on this journey was rare and happy. The animals we had were none of ours; but their owner, unwilling to take the road, sent a Greek hireling in his stead. A month later, after many bickerings and a final fight with his Moslem fellows, the Christian took to his heels, leaving his master’s horses on our hands. Quit of responsibility we rode them another three months from one end of Asia Minor to the other, and though the two best were lifted by Circassians at a late stage of the journey, the owner, advised long ago of his hireling’s flight, was so amazed to see any beasts of his again, that, as we told their hire into his hand, he refrained himself from cursing and blessed us for honest men.

We rode off into the hills of Pisidia to pick up inscriptions here and there, but more often to revise texts that Ramsay had seen in earlier years. There were few or no adventures to vary the daily round of a copyist, cynosure of an adhesive crowd in graveyards, or desired of raging dogs in the houses and courts. One noon the sun was eclipsed, and, at the moment of deepest shadow, we rode nervously into a remote village to find ourselves neither incensed for gods nor stoned for devils, but wholly neglected for the heavenly phenomenon, which was being calmly observed through smoked glass.

By the lovely lake of Egerdir came a fever-fiend to try the first of many bouts with me. It was a malign freak of fortune. Our waggon, with all baggage and medical comforts, had been sent by ferry across the lake to a point where, by riding round the southern bight, we might meet it on the second day; but failing to pass a rocky ridge, it fetched a wide compass to the north and made for another goal beyond the mountains. My fever began on the first afternoon, and sitting like a sack on a tired horse, with a sense of dull blows falling on the nape of my neck, I followed the pack-train till dusk up a wild valley where was said to be a hamlet. It proved ruinous and void, and almost supperless we had to pass the chill night in the open, lying on the soil with saddles under our heads. It sounds a romantic bivouac; but in sober fact a saddle that has clung to a hot and ill-groomed horse for a summer’s day makes a very sorry pillow: and lift stones as you may from the bosom of mother earth, she will privily thrust up as many more against your salient parts all the uneasy night.

Next morning we were away betimes, but doomed to wander for many hours behind ignorant or knavish guides in tangles of the Pisidian hills, I slaking an insatiate thirst at every torrent and spring. It was nightfall when we reached the bourne of our journey, the site of Adada at Kara Baulo, whose modern name must survive from some church of Paul the Apostle, built perhaps in commemoration of a halt made by the first mission to the Gentiles on its way from Perga of Pamphylia to Pisidian Antioch. There I slept once more on mother earth under the stars, having supped, loathing, on broth in which floated shell-less unborn eggs. On the morrow I could do little but lie in the shade, while the rest explored the forest-girt ruins: but by noon their work was done, and I had to mount and follow to a hamlet in a low pass above the Eurymedon gorge. We lodged in a shed, and I read in my diary “cold and very lumpy lying.” The fourth stage, over nine hours long, took us across Eurymedon and up towards the snow-streaked crest of Anamás Dagh; for on we had to press for fear our waggoners should give us up for lost and trundle back to Dineir. Night found us lying on naked rock within a low circle of rough stones near an Alpine yaila or summer camp. We had been fed by the hospitable shepherds and given screens of felt against the bitter wind; but fever and its ague pains shooting through loins and legs banished sleep, and I sat up or paced till dawn.

At sunrise a peasant offered to show a painted cave, and hearing it was but a step along the hillside I offered to visit it. On we trudged; farther fled the cave; and not until the best part of an hour had passed were we halted before the mouth of a mean little Byzantine shrine. The sun was already high, and the morning windless. Bathed in sweat I scarcely dragged myself back over the rough path, and reached camp with a livid face. My companions lifted me into the saddle and hurried me across the pass, doubting, as they told me later, if I should live to taste quinine again. But as the day wore on, the fever began to abate. The sweat under the early sun had broken it, and I was in a fair way to be cured, not killed, when we found the waggon awaiting us at the edge of the eastern plain.