It was lonely, for the stable where the servants were was a short distance off, and the khanji came several times to adjure me to keep the bolt of the door fastened, for his barley was in my keeping, and there was a gang of robbers on the road! I fell asleep, however, but was awakened at midnight by yells, shouts, tramplings, and a most violent shaking of my very insecure door. It was the Turkish post, who, being unable to get into the stable, was trying to bring his tired horses into my den for a little rest! Fine fellows these Turkish mail riders are, who carry the weekly mail from Trebizond into the interior. The post drives two horses loaded with the mail bags in front of him at a gallop, urging them with yells and his heavy whip, the zaptieh escort galloping behind, and at this pace they dash up and down mountains and over plains by day and night, changing at short intervals, and are only behind time in the very worst of weather.
Snow fell heavily all night, and until late in the afternoon of the following day, but we started soon after seven, and plodded steadily along in an atmosphere of mystery, through intricate defiles, among lofty mountains half-seen, strange sounds half-heard, vanishing ravines and momentary glimpses of villages on heights, fortress-crowned precipices, suggestive of the days of Genoese supremacy, as in the magnificent gorge of Kala, and long strings of camels magnified in the snow-mist, to the Kala village, with its dashing torrent, its fine walnut trees, and its immense camel stables, in and outside of which 700 camels were taking shelter from the storm. We pushed on, however, during that day and the next, through the beautiful and populous Gumushkhané valley to Kupru Bridge, having descended almost steadily for five days.
The narrow valley of the Kharshut is magnificent, and on the second day the snow was only lying on the heights. The traveller is seldom out of sight of houses, which are built on every possible projection above the river, and on narrow spurs in wild lateral ravines, and wherever there are houses there are walnut, pear, apple and apricot trees, with smooth green sward below, and the walnut branches often meet over the road. The houses are mostly large, often whitewashed, always brown-roofed, and much like Swiss châlets, but without the long slopes of verdure which make Switzerland so fair. Instead of verdure there is the wildest rock and mountain scenery, a congeries of rock-walls, precipices, and pinnacles, and the semblance of minarets and fortresses, flaming red, or burnt sienna, or yellow ochre, intermingled with bold fronts of crimson and pale blue rock, the crimson cliffs looking in the rain as if torrents of blood were pouring over them. The roadway has been both blasted out of the rock and built up from the river. Far up picturesque ravines oxen were ploughing the red friable soil on heights which looked inaccessible; there was the velvety greenness of winter wheat; scrub oak and barberry find root-hold in rocky rifts, and among crags high up among the glittering snows contorted junipers struggle for a precarious existence.
The road was enlivened by local as well as through traffic, and brightened by the varied costumes of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Lazes. The latter do not resemble the Turks in physiognomy or costume. All of them carry rifles and sabres, and two daggers in their girdles, one of which always has a cloven hilt. They are on their way to their native province of Lazistan with droves of horses, and are much dreaded by both the katirgis and khanjis on the road for their marauding habits. The Turkish Government has a very difficult task in ruling and pacifying the number of races which it has subjugated even in Asiatic Turkey. Between the Arabs of the Chaldæan Plains and the Lazes of the shores of the Black Sea I have met even in my limited travels with Sabeans, Jews, Armenians, Syrians, Yezidis, Kurds, Osmanlis, Circassians, and Greeks, alien and antagonistic in creed and race, but somehow held together and to some extent governed by a power which is, I think, by no means so feeble as she is sometimes supposed to be.
The Kharshut is crossed at Kupru Bridge by a very fine stone arch. This village, at the foot of the Zigana Mountain, is entirely composed of inferior khans, food shops, and smiths' shops. The clang of hammers lasted late into the night, for the road was reported as "icy," and more than 400 horses and mules were having their shoes roughed for the passage of the Zigana Mountain. I arrived late in the evening, when all the khans were full, and had to put up in a hovel, the door of which was twice attempted during the night by a band of Lazes, about whose proceedings Stephan, my katirgi, had been very suspicious. After the servants and katirgis, roused by my whistle, had rushed out of an opposite stable upon the marauders, I lay awake for some time trying to realise that my ride of 2500 miles was nearly at an end, and that European civilisation was only five days off; but it was in vain. I felt as if I should always be sleeping in stables or dark dens, always uttering the call to "boot and saddle" two hours before daylight, always crawling along mountain roads on a woolly horse, always planning marches, always studying Asiatic character, and always sinking deeper into barbarism!
From the summit of the Zigana Mountain to Trebizond is a steady descent of twelve hours. The ascent from Kupru Bridge occupied five hours and a half. It was a much more serious affair than crossing the Kop Dagh, for the snowstorm had lasted for three days, the snow was from four to nine feet deep on the summit, and the thawing of its surface at the lower altitudes, succeeded by keen frost, had resulted in the production of slopes of ice, over which I had to walk for two hours, as Boy could scarcely keep on his feet.
The early snow has a witchery of its own, and it may be that the Zigana Mountain and the views from it are not so beautiful as I think them, but under the circumstances in which I saw them, I was astonished with the magnificence of the scenery, and with the vast pine forests which clothe the mountain sides. Villages of châlets, with irregular balconies, and steep roofs projecting from two to six feet, are perched on rocky heights, or nestle among walnuts with a blue background of pines, above which tower spires and peaks of unsullied snow; ridges rise into fantastic forms and mimicries of minarets and castles; pines, filling gigantic ravines with their blue gloom, stand sentinels over torrents silenced for the winter; and colossal heights and colossal depths, an uplifted snow world of ceaseless surprises under a blue sky full of light, make one fancy oneself in Switzerland, till a long train of decorated camels or a turbaned party of armed travellers dissipates the dream.
The last hour of the ascent was very severe. The wind was strong and keen, and the drifting snow buffeted us unmercifully. The mercury fell to 3° below zero, and the cold was intense. Murphy complained of "trembles" in his knees and severe pain in his legs, and when we reached the summit was really ill. The drift was not only blinding and stinging but suffocating. I was quite breathless, and felt a chill round my heart. I could not even see Boy's neck, and he cowered from the blast; but just as all things were obliterated I found myself being helped to dismount in the shelter of a camel stable full of Lazes, but was so benumbed that I could not stand. Some zaptiehs had the humanity to offer me the shelter of a hovel nearly buried in the snow, and made a fire and some coffee, and I waited there till the wind moderated. It came in such fierce gusts as actually to blow two of the baggage horses over on their sides. Murphy was really ill of fever for two days from the cold and exposure. The altitude of the pass is about 6627 feet.
The first part of the descent was made on foot, for the snow had drifted on the road to a height of fully twenty feet, leaving only a path of shelving ice on the brink of a precipitous slope. Earlier in the day twenty laden camels had gone over, and were heaped in the ravine below, not all dead. The road dips with some suddenness into a deep glen, dark with pine and beech forests; large rhododendrons and the Azalea pontica forming a dense undergrowth. Long gray lichen hung from the branches, Christmas roses and premature primroses bloomed in sheltered places, the familiar polypody and the Asplenium adiantum nigrum filled every crevice, soft green moss draped the rocks, there was a delicious smell of damp autumn leaves, and when we reached the Greek village of Hamzikeuy clouds were rolling heavily up the valley from the not far distant ocean.
The two days which followed were easy and pleasant, through a prosperous and peopled valley brightened by the rushing waters of the Surmel, the ancient Pyxites. Orchards and tillage beautify the lower slopes of the mountains, the road is excellent, the homesteads are in good repair, the people are bright and cheery-looking, and Greek villages with prominent churches on elevated spurs add an element of Christian civilisation to the landscape. The exceeding beauty of natural forests, of soft green sward starred with the straw-coloured blossoms of the greater hellebore, of abounding ferns and trailers, of "the earth bringing forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the tree yielding fruit after his kind," of prosperous villages with cheerful many-windowed houses and red-tiled deep-eaved roofs, can only be fully appreciated by the traveller who has toiled over the burning wastes of Persia with their mud villages and mud ruins, and across the bleak mountains and monotonous plateaux of the Armenian highlands, with their ant-hill dwellings, and their poverty-stricken population for ever ravaged by the Kurd.