CHAPTER XXXIV.
STORY OF THE GREEK LIEUTENANT.
Sixteen years ago, when the Allied Powers united to assist the Sultan in his conflict with old Mehemet Ali, then pasha of Egypt, and nominally his vassal, the insurgent garrison of Acre was successfully bombarded, as all the world knows, by the British fleet, under the flag of Commodore Sir Charles Napier, who on that occasion distinguished himself with his usual skill, bravery, and intrepidity. The fortress was taken in a few hours; but the destruction and slaughter were fearfully augmented by the explosion of a magazine of powder and live bombs, by which the venerable ramparts of St. John were reduced to a pile of blackened ruins. The roar of the exploding powder was appalling; from the low headland of Acre there ascended into the pure blue Syrian sky a mighty column of smoke and dust. The lonely Kishon was startled in its stony bed; every mosque, khan, and bazaar in the city rocked to its foundation, while the whole waters of the bay were agitated by the concussion and rolled in foamy ripples on the rocks of Cape Carmel.
In that explosion one thousand five hundred brave soldiers who had escaped the dangers and withstood the horrors of the bombardment were in a moment swept into eternity.
Of the many who perished, none was more universally regretted by the Egyptian garrison, and even by the British commander, than Demetrius Vidimo, a Greek captain, who served the Pasha, in mere hatred of the Sultan and of the Turks, who were the tyrants of his people—a hatred in which he was sustained by his wife, who was the daughter of a Sciote patriot of high rank. Demetrius had participated in all the horrors of the Greek struggle for independence, when the men of Missolonghi, after a year's siege of hardship unparalleled, and after defying all the united power of Turkey and of Egypt—after having a hundred thousand bombs and balls shot among them, buried themselves in the ruins of the city. He had seen the pyramid of Grecian skulls that rose near the grave of Bozzaris; he had seen the horrors of the massacre of Scio, when fifty thousand frantic Turks drenched the loveliest of the Ægean Isles in blood, slaying sixty thousand Sciotes in its streets, and carrying thirty thousand into hopeless slavery. He had seen the manly boys and beautiful girls of Greece sold at a dollar a-head in the streets of Smyrna. He had seen their mothers ripped open by the Turkish sabre and the handjiar, and the children torn reeking from the womb and dashed against the walls of Athens, for the wildest beasts of Africa or India were mild as tender lambs when compared to the merciless, brutal, and unglutted soldiery of Mahmoud the Second. He had seen the slave-market of Stamboul crowded with Grecian captives—brave men struggling and raving in their futile vengeance against the Osmanlies; and women—the pale virgin and the weeping mother—shrinking in the agonies of separation from all they loved, and in horror of their lewd and sensual purchasers, who bought them from the troops for the value of twelve cartridges, a pipe-stick, or a piastre, and dragged them away to slavery, and worse than slavery, in their harems, dens, and anderuns at Stamboul.
He had seen all these things, and the soul of Demetrius was fired by a thirst for undying vengeance upon the oppressors of his people.
He was an Albanian, and chief of one of the eight tribes of the Scutari mountains. Hardy, brave, reckless to a fault, and fired alike by enthusiasm and revenge, he had distinguished himself on a thousand occasions against the Turks; and at the previous storming of Acre—eight years before—when Ibrahim Pasha, at the head of forty thousand Egyptians and Arabs, besieged it for six months, the Grecian Captain Vidimo in every assault was conspicuous, both by his bravery and his picturesque Albanian costume; for wherever death was to be found or danger sought and glory won, there towered the figure of Vidimo, in his skull-cap, with his long hair flowing under it; his fleecy capote flung loosely over his shoulder; his white kilt and scarlet buskins, leading on the van of battle, and handling in rapid succession the long musket, the crooked sabre, deadly yataghan and pistols, which are the native weapons of the Albanian mountaineer.
But he perished in the explosion at Acre, and so there was an end of him, greatly to the regret of his comrades, and very much to the grief of the Yuze Bashi Hussein, who had set his whole heart upon taking the valiant Greek dead or alive, and laying his head at the feet of Mahmoud the Second, to claim the promised reward.
The Turks were furious! not even his body was to be found, though the Sultan had offered a princely sum for it; and amid all the heads hewn off after the bombardment, there was not one found that would pass muster as having belonged to Vidimo, whose face was well known by a peculiar sabre cut which he received at the defence of Missolonghi in 1826.
After the capture, Ali Pasha, and Hussein Ebn al Ajuz, with other officers of the corps of Bombardiers, enjoyed to their hearts' content the pleasure of slicing off the head of the dark Egyptians, or stuffing their pockets with tawny ears, and with something better still the various good things to be picked up in the bazaars, the great khan, the Franciscan monastery, the Greek church, the Armenian synagogue, and other places where the unbelieving dogs of Jews and Christians presumed to worship in any other fashion than that proscribed by the holy camel-driver.