"If he is to be shot," said the American, "please put me in the firing squad!"
Emerging from the pass, they came to a steep, wooded ravine, and their path led through an aisle of tall pine trees. The feet of the soldiers made no noise on the carpet of fallen spines. They found four more dead Turks and picked up two that were wounded. After about an hour of forced marching the ravine spread out into a beautiful sunlit valley, whereon the new plowed ground lay in patches of rich brown, terra-cotta and black loam. The vines were just putting forth their pale green sprouts. The laborers had been surprised in the act of heaping conical mounds about the roots, and an occasional discarded mattock betokened hasty flight. Poppies lifted everywhere their slender-stemmed, scarlet beakers—such glasses in shape as are fit to hold the vintage of the Rhine. The little slopes were set thick with candelabras of the ghostly asphodel, whose clusters of pale-pinkish, waxen flowers seemed indeed to belong to regions where the dear sun is but a memory. Scattering fruit trees, in the full revel and glory of their snowy bloom called to each other with perfume.
It was some time after noon now, but they stopped neither to eat nor rest. Curtis' foot began to pain him fearfully, but he made no sign. In the midst of such desolation, he felt pain to be a trivial thing. The vines were here, but where were the toilers? The pear trees were in bloom, but where were the laughing children, the wives and maidens with wine and bread for the midday feast? Once they passed a shock-headed boy of fourteen, or possibly younger, lying dead in a vineyard, with his mattock beside him, and later in the day they came upon a plow in the unfinished furrow. One of the oxen was dead, and the other great beast had struggled to his feet and stood patiently beside the body of his mate.
After that their path led for a way through a field of half-grown wheat. Around nearly every shoot the sweet wild-pea had twined its graceful spiral, bravely lifting the pretty blue of the flowers among the pale green of the grain. When the wind swept over the field it looked like changeable silk.
Toward sunset they came within seeing distance of a white village on a mountain side. A vast olive orchard surrounded it and a dozen or more dark green cypress trees pointed heavenward among the houses, like spires.
"Voilà, Monsieur," cried Kostakes, gaily. "There we shall rest to-night, and shall find time to eat. Are you hungry?"
CHAPTER XVIII
A DESERTED TOWN
An air of indescribable sadness hangs over a deserted town. Any one who has ever passed through a shepherd village, from which the inhabitants have gone for the summer, expecting to return again when the first snows of autumn drive them down from the mountains, has experienced this feeling. Here is the fountain, where the slender, merry maidens met at sundown, to gossip and fill their water jars; here is the café, where the old men gathered together under the platane tree and smoked and dreamed of the long ago; here is a secret nook, guarded by sweet poverty vines, where lovers held tryst in the fragrant twilight. But all is lonely, lonely.
The waters splash with a melancholy sound, the tables and chairs are gone from under the platane tree and the lovers—let us hope they are fled together. The spirit of loneliness dwells where man has been and is not—in a tenantless house, in the chamber of death, by the embers of a camp fire in a vast wilderness. As you follow the streets of a deserted town you hear nothing but the splash, splash of the waters of the fountain or the enquiring twitter of some little bird. Perhaps a cat, tamed more by solitude than by hunger, tiptoes to meet you, purring with diplomatic fervor. But these sounds do not break the silence, they are its foil, its background.