On resuming his command, the first act of Hussein was to cudgel—almost to death—the chaoush of the main-guard, for some real or imaginary fault; an act which gave us an odd idea of Turkish discipline.
'What think you of this, Callum?' said I, with smile; 'suppose an officer were to cudgel you?'
'I would drive my skene into his heart with as little remorse as I would gralloch a dead deer,' was the reply of my henchman, frowning at the idea.
My men occupied a portion of the miserable Turkish barrack, and I had rooms assigned to me in a tower, the windows of which faced the sea; and as the furniture was furnished by the government of His Majesty the Sultan, it could scarcely be expected to be much more luxurious than the birch-table, two Windsor-chairs, the iron coal-box and elegant pair of bellows usually issued from the stores of Her Brittanic Majesty to an officer in garrison.
That evening I dined—or supped—which you please (for the hour rendered the meal dubious)—with the Yuze Bashi, whose portion of the castle was magnificently fitted up. His servants were black slave girls. We had neither forks, chairs, nor a table. We sat on cushions, and ate pillaff and paties of Gallipoli oysters with our fingers, from platters placed on little stools; we tore the fragrant kabobs from their wooden skewers with our teeth—rent the fowls asunder by the simple process of inserting the finger and thumb; drank sherbet of sugar and musk dashed with French brandy; then came iced Grecian wine, and, lighting our pipes, we gave thanks to the Prophet for the good things of this land, and subsided among the silken cushions with a sigh of satisfaction.
By the inquiring Callum Dhu I was given to understand that my friend the Yuze Bashi had a wife; but, as it would have been discourteous to have asked for her, as he studiously avoided ever recurring to the circumstance of her existence; and, moreover, as a Turk can never introduce his wife to any man save a most intimate friend, and then only on receiving his solemn word of honour never to mention so singular a departure from the established Mohammedan custom, I had no hope of being blessed by seeing even the slipper of the commandant's earthly helpmate; and so I thought no more about it—besides, wives are most brittle and perilous ware to meddle with in Turkey.
Several weeks passed away monotonously at the castle of Rodosdchig. I soon knew every street, bazaar, mosque, bezestien, coffee-house, khan, and kabobki in the place as well as if they were my own property; the old Greek ruins in the neighbourhood; the dumpy Doric columns of what had been a temple, when beauty was worshipped in Thessaly and Thrace, lying among a wilderness of luxurious weeds and plants, with the snakes crawling over them, had all been, again and again, delineated in my sketchbook; the round towers of the old castle that overhung the sea; the sea itself, with its Greek caiques, Turkish xebeques, and quaint fisherboats, soon became as familiar to me as the murmur of its waves on the lucks below my barrack-room window.
To divert my ennui, fortunately for myself, as my after-adventures proved, I applied all my energies to the study of the monotonous and crack-jaw gibberish of the Turks; and, with the assistance of 'Madden's Grammar,' &c., was able to master the sonnets of the old Pasha, or General, Sermet Effendi; and of Partiff, whose rhymes in honour of the Sultan and of Omar Pasha are to be seen gilded above the gates of all the edifices erected by the Government; Jachiened, the Gulistan, or 'Rose Garden of Sadi of Shiraz,' and the 'Pleasing Tales of Khoja (Master) Nazir-il-adeen Efendi;' and I still remember one charming old Persian story of the Garden of Paradise, which was described as being still extant in Asia, but concealed among remote and inaccessible mountains, and to be reached only through long caverns and by a subterranean river; and therein were ever summer bloom and floral beauty, and all the animals were tame and loving, as before the fall of our first parents—the lamb lying down beside the lion, and the panther beside the goat, as some old dervish, who—like my friend the corporal—had been there, called upon every hair in his silver beard to testify.
The morning and evening parades of my little party followed each other in unvarying succession; but the riotous, bloodthirsty, and insurrectionary Greeks, of whom the Yuze Bashi had spoken so much at our mess in Heraclea, were as quiet as the plodding denizens of the most rural district in England.
The bluff Yuze Bashi Hussein (may his shadow never be less!) was now my crowning bore, and I soon saw enough of him to make me avoid his friendship, and to inspire me with a dislike for him, still stronger than even the story of the Greek Lieutenant Vidimo had done.