'The gold of the English and French has been rattling into your coffers like hailstones, I have been told, Isaac?'
The Jew shook his head in dissent, and bent it lower, to conceal his cunning eyes.
'Oho! I lie, then, do I?' exclaimed this Turkish bully; 'had other than you done this, I had smote him on the mouth with the heel of my slipper! Begone,' he added, spitting full in the cigar vender's face.
I remonstrated, as a fierce gleam shot from the hollow eyes of the old Jew, and he slunk away.
'Bah!' said the Yuze Bashi; 'we tolerate the existence of Jews, Armenians, and Greeks, because, if we destroyed them, what would the true Believers do for slaves?'
'We meet few of them hereabout, at all events,' said I; 'the whole country seems to become more waste and barren as we advance.'
'True,' replied the puffing Osmanli, with a fierce flashing in his dark eye, and a sardonic grin under his grey moustache; 'where the Sultan's horse has trod there grows no grass.'
And, with this fatally true Turkish proverb, he sank back among his downy cushions, and left me to march on in silence or commune with Callum Dhu.
After passing Carga on our left, and Turcmeli on our right, after crossing one or two streams, and pursuing a road from which, upon our right flank, we had bright glimpses of the blue sea of Marmora; after passing many of those green tumuli, or old warrior-graves, which stud all the land of Roumelia; after seeing only flights of vultures, cranes, and storks, or an occasional string of laden mules, progressing towards Stamboul, a march of twenty miles found us in a beautiful little valley, watered by a stream which flowed from a fountain in the basement of a gilded mosque, and surrounded by beautiful groves of pale green olive-trees, the orange, and the mimosa, with the crisped foliage of the dwarf oak, the broad and luxuriant leaves of the wild vine, and the graceful acacia, which Mohammed—in his 56th chapter—promises shall bloom again in Paradise.
This was not far from Karacalderin, a small town on the right flank of the coast road.