Caught by the Turks

by Francis Yeats-Brown

"He hasn't got it," they said suddenly in chorus.

"Hasn't what?"

"Typhus, of course. Carry him in. He will be well in a week."

I doubted it, but the situation did not admit of argument. We carried him in, through a crowd of miserable men in every stage of disease, all clamouring for admittance. No one, I gathered, was allowed into that hospital merely for the dull business of dying. They could do that as well outside. Thankful for small mercies, therefore, I left my friend in the clutches of Humpty and Dumpty, and even as they had predicted, he was well within a week.

There is something rather marvellous about a Turkish doctor's diagnosis. Such trifles as the state of your temperature or tongue are not considered. They trust in the Lord and give you an emetic. Although unpleasant, their methods are often efficacious.

It was now my turn to fall ill, and I did it with startling suddenness and completeness. I was sitting at the window of the house in which we were confined in Aleppo, feeling perfectly well, when I began to shiver violently. In half an hour I was in a high fever. That night I was taken to Humpty and Dumpty. Next morning I was unconscious.

I will draw a veil over the next month of my life. Only two little incidents are worth recording.

The first occurred about a week after my admittance to hospital, when my disease, whatever it was, had reached its crisis. A diet of emetics is tedious, so also is the companionship of people suffering from delirium tremens when one wants to be quiet. An end, I felt, must be made of the present situation. Creeping painfully out of my bed, I went down the passage, holding against the wall for support. It was a dark, uneven passage, with two patches of moonlight from two windows at the far end. Near one of these pools of light I caught my foot in a stone, and slipped and fell. I was too weak to get up again. I cooled my head on the stones and wondered what would happen next. Then I began to think of seas and rivers. All the delightful things I had ever done in water kept flitting through my mind. I remembered crouching in the bow of my father's cat-boat as we beat up a reach to Salem (Massachusetts) with the spray in our faces. And I thought of the sparkling sapphire of the Mediterranean and the cool translucencies of Cuckoo-weir. . . . No one came to disturb my meditations. The moonlight shifted right across my body, and slowly, slowly, I felt the wells of consciousness were filling up again. I was, quite definitely, coming back to life. It was as if I had really been once more in America and Italy and by the Thames, living again in all memories connected with open waters, and as if their solace had somehow touched me. Their coolness had cured me, and I was now flying back through imperceptible ether to Aleppo. I was coming back to that passage in a Turkish hospital. . . .

Did I draw, I wonder, upon some banked reserve of vitality, or were my impressions a common phase of illness? Anyway, when I came to, I was a different man. The waters of the world had cured me.

Later, during the journey to Afion-kara-hissar, I had a relapse. This second incident of my illness was a spiritual experience. Having been carried by my friend to the railway station, I collapsed on the platform, while he was momentarily called away. So dazed and helpless was I that I lay inconspicuously on some sacks, a bundle of skin and bone that might not have been human at all. Some porters threw more sacks on the pile and I was soon almost covered. But I lay quite still: I was too tired to move or to cry out. As bodily weakness increased, so there came to me a sense of mental power, over and beyond my own poor endowments. I thrilled to this strange strength, which seemed to mount to the very throne of Time, where past and future are one. Call it a whimsy of delirium if you will, nevertheless, one of the scenes I saw in the cinema of clairvoyance was a scene that actually happened some three months later, at that same station where I lay. . . . I saw some hundred men, prisoners from Kut and mostly Indians, gathered on the platform. One of these men was sitting on this very heap of sacks; he was sitting there rocking himself to and fro in great agony, for one of the guards had struck him with a thick stick and broken his arm. But not only was his arm broken, the spirit within him (which I also saw) was shattered beyond repair. No hope in life remained: he had done that which is most terrible to a Hindu, for he had eaten the flesh of cows and broken the ordinances of caste. His companions had died in the desert without the lustral sacrifice of water or of fire, and he would soon die also, a body defiled, to be cast into outer darkness. For a time the terror and the tragedy of that alien brain was mine; I shared its doom and lived its death. Later I learnt that a party of men, coming out of the great tribulation of the desert, had halted at this station, and a Hindu soldier with a broken arm had died on those sacks. I record the incident for what it is worth.