The grass was green and soft as velvet; a thousand wild flowers studded its verdure, and loaded with perfume the southern breeze that breathed up the valley from the sea of Marmora, and proved to us all delightful as a cold bath after our hot day's march.
Evening was approaching now; the giant poplars and cypresses that surrounded the little mosque, which marked where some dead Santon lay, were throwing their lengthening shadows far across the valley; and on my announcing that I would halt here for the night, my soldiers gladly threw off their knapsacks and piled their arms; Callum lighted a large fire, with all the adroitness of a Highland huntsman, and with some jest about there 'being little chance of firing the heather here,' heaped on the branches of the dwarf oaks, which we hewed remorselessly down by our bill-hooks.
The Yuze Bashi, though he grumbled savagely under his beard at the annoyance of having to halt (as he feared to proceed alone through a district full of armed and unscrupulous Greek peasantry), was compelled to make the best of our delightful little bivouac, and while my men made a meal of the cold meat which had been brought in their haversacks, he shared with me a cold pillaff of fowl and rice, and a jolly magnum bonum of Kirklissa wine.
Discovering another in the recesses of the araba, I abstracted it sans ceremonie, and despite all Hussein's angry remonstrances, handed it to my soldiers, and as it proved to be well dashed with brandy, they passed it from man to man until each had his share, and then they all began to talk, sing, and be merry.
'Bless their hearts!' says Charles Lever, 'a little fun goes a long way in the army;' and any man who has ever spent an hour in the company of soldiers will find it so.
They were all happy as crickets round that bivouac fire, for actual service softens cold etiquette, and relaxes the iron band of discipline without impairing it, especially among Scots and Irishmen; and while the blaze of the ruddy flame shot upward, and tipped the olive-trees with light as fresh fuel was heaped upon it, while the orient sunset died away and deepened into azure night, on the calm Grecian sea and lovely classic shore, we sat in that romantic valley clad in the same martial garb our hardy sires had worn in the days of Remus and Romulus, telling old stories of our native land, or singing those songs, which, when we were so far away from it, made the hearts within us melt to tenderness, or swell with pride and fire.
While the old, gross, and sensual Yuze Bashi lay half hidden among the down cushions of his araba and dozed away over his narguillah of rose-water, I sang a mess-room stave or two to amuse my men; and by doing so won their hearts still more, I am assured, than even my previous and studied kindness to them had done. Then I called on Callum Dhu for his quota of amusement, and at once his fine bold manly voice made the valley ring, as he gave us that fiery song in which his warlike ancestor, Ian Lom Mac Donel, the Bard of Keppoch, has embalmed the victory of the great Montrose at Inverlochy.
He sang it in his native Gaelic, and as he poured it forth his swarthy cheek was seen to glow and his eyes to flash—ay, even the muscles of his bare legs, on which fell the glow of the wavering watch-fire, seemed to quiver and be strung anew with energy as all the fire of Ian Lom filled the heart of his descendant—for through (my nurse) his mother, Callum came of Ian's race.
The song cannot be known to my English readers; but as it is in that bold ballad style they love so well, I may be pardoned in quoting two verses of it from a little historical work that may never cross the Tweed;[*] and as he sang, the voices of his thirty comrades united with singular force and harmony in the chorus:—
'Heard ye not! heard ye not!
How that whirlwind the Gael,—
Through Lochaber swept down
From Lochness to Loch Eil?—
And the Campbells to meet them
In battle array,
Came on like the billow—
And broke like its spray!
Long, long shall our war song exult in that day!