The café-chantant artiste was the only artist known to this enlightened official.
We had thought that all the live insurgents had left Salonica and we were going on their trail. But one desperate dynamiter had remained in town, and was doomed to die before we left. He chose the hour and place himself: about two o’clock of the day before we left, within a stone’s throw of the Angleterre. It was a rainy day, and we—the whole corps of correspondents—were lingering over our lunch at the time, idly speculating on ‘What next?’ when several shots rang out almost in front of the place. At the first everyone jumped up, expecting either a dynamite attack on ‘Europeans’ or a massacre of Christians. We were both. But the firing stopped almost the instant it had begun, and we moved towards the door. There the crowd hesitated for a moment, but those—of us behind—forced the front file out into the street. Curiosity soon got the better of fear, and three minutes after the shooting we were ‘on the spot.’
It was only seventy yards up the street from the Hôtel d’Angleterre. The body of a boy some eighteen or twenty years of age lay pale and lifeless in a gutter half full of dirty water. There was a short pause before anyone ventured to approach him; there was an infernal machine under his coat. Then a black soldier went up, felt the body carefully and relieved it of an iron bomb and two sticks of dynamite. He had no sooner done this than two other Asiatics approached the body, and one, with blood trickling down his face, set upon it with the bayonet, muttering Turkish—curses, I imagine—through his clenched teeth. Before he had struck many blows, however, an officer caught hold of his sword arm and violently pushed him back; and for a moment there was a rapid argument, followed by a tussle. The other white soldier raised his gun, butt downwards, to smash in the victim’s face, but the negro thrust him back too. In a few minutes four soldiers and the officer came and dragged the body through the mire across the street, and the now freed Asiatic, with drawn bayonet, unable to control himself, began again his curses, and dealt three blows at the stomach of the victim trailing through the mud. Then he put his bayonet between his teeth and took hold of the feet, and helped to throw the dead Bulgar upon a Jew’s cart standing by. The old Jew drove off rapidly; he had cut a cabman out of a job.
The slaughtered youth was said to have come from a small town up the railroad. He was a Bulgarian school teacher. In his attempt to blow up the telegraph office (this was his object) he went down to the place dressed as a European. He loitered about his goal, which aroused suspicion, and when he collected his courage and started to enter, one of the sentries at the door challenged him. The young man, holding a paper in his hand and feigning indignation, is said to have exclaimed, ‘Let me pass! I want to send off this telegram.’ The guard answered, ‘I must search you before you go in.’ Here the young Bulgar thrust his hand into his pocket for a bomb, but before he could withdraw it, the stalwart guard, who was twice the size of the Bulgar, grabbed him by the throat, threw him on his back, and sent two balls into him. A letter was found on the boy’s body stating that he had successfully carried out one piece of dynamiting and hoped to accomplish this.
CHAPTER VIII
MONASTIR AND THE GREEKS
The train to Monastir is very slow: it takes the best part of a day to go about a hundred miles. The conductor, somewhat of a wag, informed us that, as the natives are accustomed to paying for transportation by the hour, they would probably drive if the railways charged more than the carriage-man’s rate per hour. But this is not the only reason the journey consumes such a length of time. Wherever there are two ways between towns the track invariably takes the longer. This, we were told, is due to the fact that while the Sultan seeks to limit the number and the terminal lengths of railways in his dominions, the Sublime Porte sees fit to subsidise these undertakings of foreign companies according to the mileage covered.
Our train pulled slowly out of Salonica at 8 A.M., and dragged slowly into Monastir at 5.45 P.M., half an hour late in spite of the liberal time-table. The trip, however, was most interesting. There is a line of old Roman watch-towers along the coast, dilapidated things resembling Roman ruins in England. They are now inhabited by Turkish frontier guards, to whom Greek smugglers must pay tribute in order to bring in goods duty free. Behind these towers, across the bay, stands Olympus. The historic mountain, already forty miles away, is still to remain in view until we cross the Vardar Valley and burrow into the hills. We had got to know Olympus well, and looked upon him as a sort of sentinel of civilisation here on the border ’twixt East and West. The old fellow had carried us back to schooldays, and jogged our memories of the ancient Greeks. Of course, we appreciated his company on this journey inland, and admired the majestic manner in which our old friend travels. He goes along with the train just as the moon does; passing over minor objects, towns, forests, and insignificant things, and keeping steady pace with you, until a close range of unworthy hills suddenly cuts him off from view. Distance lends enchantment, but proximity makes importance.
After leaving the plain the train begins to climb over a watershed, and gradually winds a tortuous way, up, up, up to the snow and the clouds. In a few hours the line is a succession of alternating tunnels and bridges—passages through the mountain-tops and spans across the chasms. At every tunnel’s mouth and at every bridge was a little group of tents and brush huts, from which ragged guards emerged to get the bag of bread the train dropped off. A sea of mountains rolls away on all sides. On the nearer slopes rectangular carpets of yellow corn and red and white poppies spread out at irregular intervals. On the second line the fields are less distinct. Further off the mountains blur out into blue and grey, and finally mix colour with the clouds. Shortly after midday the train threads the eye of a high peak and emerges in sight, across a far valley, of Vodena—Watertown. It does not descend to the plain and climb again, for that, besides being impracticable, is the most direct route to the town. Around the mountain sides the train winds for an hour through more tunnels and over more bridges, but in view, when in the open, of a score of slender silver ribbons trailing down a precipice that falls abruptly from the town’s edge. Passing back of Vodena the track crosses the mountain streams, which tumble through the streets of the town on their way to the fantastic falls.