Whose like will bloom no more. O how to help it!
The wind of death blew out in the lantern
The light of the feast of life. O how to help it!
In bitterness his eye swells with tears
That are like the tide of the sea. O how to help it!
In bitterness was written the verse of the number of the year:
Hüsseïna has gone away! O how to help it!
Behind the house of the lepers a trail branches away into the most lonely part of this strange forest, ultimately leading down a hill, too rough for any but the most adventurous carriage, to a quaint little stone arch mysteriously called Bloody Bridge that spans a thread of water beside a giant plane-tree. On this southward-looking slope the cypresses attain a symmetry, a slenderness, a height, a thickness of texture and richness of colour unmatched in Stamboul. They grow in squares, many of them, or in magic circles. The stones under them are older than the others, and more like things of nature in the flowered grass. On certain happy afternoons, when the sun brings a fairy depth and softness of green out of the cypresses, when their shadows fall lance-like across bare or mossy aisles, and the note of a solitary bird echoes between them, it is hard not to imagine oneself in an enchanted wood.
In the eyes of most comers from afar the dervishes, those who are ignorantly called the howling dervishes, stand for Scutari and all its works. And the fact always irritates me because it indicates so perfect a blindness to the treasures of the City of Gold—and something else that no sightseer ever pardons in another. The tourists are not in the least interested in dervishes in general. The subject of mysticism and its Oriental ramifications is not one they would willingly go into. They do not dream that Scutari is full of other kinds of dervishes. They have never heard of the Halveti, as it were the descendants of the Sleepless Ones of the Studion, who consider it a lack of respect to the Creator to sleep lying down, or even to cross their legs, and who repeat every night in the year the temjid, the prayer for pity of insomnia, which is heard elsewhere only in Ramazan. No one has ever taken a tourist to see so much as the beautiful ironwork of the tomb of the holy Aziz Mahmoud Hüdaï, who lived eighteen years in a cell of the ancient mosque of Roum Mehmed Pasha. They do not even know that Roufaï is the true name of the dervishes they go to stare at, and that there is more than one tekkeh of them in Scutari. The traditional “howling” is all that concerns them. And if I were the sheikh of that tekkeh I would shut its doors to all tourists—or at least to more than one or two of them at a time. They make more noise than the dervishes.
