I demanded of the Moolah Moustapha whither he was conveying us, but received no answer. Again and again I made the same request, each time with growing anger and vehemence, and each time adding threats of what our Government would say, or do, or require, curiously oblivious that I had, in my own person, outraged the civil and religious laws of Turkey, such as they are; but still the Moolah disdained to accord me the slightest answer or recognition, and sat, with his hands folded in his green robe and crossed upon his breast; his high felt cap pulled over his beetling brows; his keen and glittering eyes fixed upon the eastern quarter of the sky, where the dawn was shedding a rosy tinge over all the land and sea; and the rough galiondgis or boatmen, and the pistolled, sabred, tarbooshed, and bearded policemen of the Bostandgi Bashi were equally taciturn, though Zahroun scowled and swore at us from time to time.
Now I conceived that they might be conveying us to one of the old castles at the mouth of the Bosphorus, or perhaps to Constantinople, but the distance was rather too great to be traversed in an open boat at the season of the year.
Day dawned at last; morning brightened on the Grecian hills, and the outline of many a grim old tower and ruined temple, crowning the grey rocks and storm-beaten headlands, stood in dark relief against the blushing east.
Upon that sea, which mirrored all the morning sky, I gazed with a shudder of horror, for it was the grave of my poor Albanian girl, and her pale, wan face, her beautiful eyes, and angelic smile, came before me with painful distinctness; while, with a morbid grief, I endeavoured to imagine on what coral bed, in what deep and unfathomable rift or abyss of that huge watery tomb, on which the waves were shining in the orient sun, her charming form had found a last resting place.
Poor Iola! I could not yet realize her death, or the conviction that if I was to go back to Rodosdchig I would not meet her at the Ruined Hermitage, in the express cemetery, or in the silken-hung apartments of Hussein, where I had last spent an evening with her. The events of the last night still seemed all a hideous nightmare, or the memory of some terrible phantasmagoria.
'It is long before we become assured of the loss of those we value,' says a charming female writer; so her dying glance was still lingering before me, and shall be so, in years to come, when other memories may have been swept away and effaced, like footprints on the shore of an ebbing sea.
With emotions of rage and hatred, difficult alike to express and to control, I turned from her destroyers, and hid my face in my hands, as this bitterness was replaced by anguish and remorse.
The kochamba continued to run at great speed before a sharp breeze which blew direct from the narrow Dardanelles, and the rocky capes, the sandy bays, and wooded inlets opened and closed again in rapid succession, as we passed them with a flowing sheet, and ere long Callum and I recognised the flat-roofed town and barracks of Heraclea, with the old ruins of the age of Vespasian, and the white foam curling on the rocks of Palegrossa, where the timbers of the Vestal lay—a rent and weedy hull.
I now hoped that the Moolah and his ruffians meant to land us there, and deliver us up to our own commanding officer, and with this idea my spirit rose a little. The familiar faces of our mess came before me; rough Duncan Catanagh, with his old legends about Loch Lomond and stories of the Mahrattah war: frank Jack Belton, and others among whom I had felt happier than ever I hoped to be after the time I had laid my mother in her lonely Highland grave, and since I had been driven from Glen Ora into the wide and selfish world; but this gleam of liberty faded away, for the kochamba still bore on; her head was kept to the seaward, and in another hour Heraclea was left astern.
What could be the Moolah's object, and whither was he going?