The Turks are utilitarians indeed!
The scene was a singular one; the large hall in which we stood was entirely over-canopied with ropes of macaroni, and surrounded by presses and rollers.—A major was deciding on the merits of the flour—a lieutenant was superintending the working of the machine—a couple of sergeants were suspending the paste to dry—and a fatigue party were turning the wheels.
Hear this, ye Grenadiers and Coldstream! ye exquisites of Bond Street and the Ring! There was no ennui here—all was grinding, and sifting, and rolling, and drying, and selling—yes, selling—The Imperial Guard of his Sublime Highness have no occasion to kill time; they rather seek customers. The whitest and finest of the paste supplies the kitchen of the Sultan: the darkest and coarsest finds its way to that of the soldiers; but “more remains behind;” and if you are inclined to feast on Imperial macaroni, you have but to draw out your purse, and pay it in piastres!
What a well-imagined antidote to the weariness of a garrison life—What a triumph for utilitarianism!
I shall say nothing of the forest-like cemetery; I have spoken of it elsewhere. The dark cypresses were flinging their long shadows across the road; and the hill which we slowly ascended on quitting the manufactory was called “The Rise of the Vines.” The name is appropriate; for the houses that fringe it on the left hand overlook a wide extent of orchard and vineyard, interspersed with kiosks, and groups of flowering acacias. The view was bounded by the sea, and the tall mountains above Broussa: and flowers were blossoming by the wayside, and wild-birds were singing among the boughs. No wonder that the nature-loving Turks are attached to Scutari.
A small building to the left of the road attracted my attention, and I alighted to examine it. It proved to be the tomb of a Saint; and I distinguished, through the closely-latticed casement, a wooden sarcophagus surmounted by a green turban, and surrounded by the prayer-carpets of the priests. The wire-work of the window was knotted all over with rags; shreds of cotton, woollen, and silk—morsels of ribbon and tape—and fragments of every description. They had been fastened there by sick and suffering persons, who had firmly believed that their trouble, whether mental or physical, would remain attached to the rag, and that they should themselves “return each to his home clean.”
We avoided the town, for the Plague was there; that omnipresent but invisible enemy which stretches its clammy hand over the East, and sweeps down its prey, unchecked by the groans of the bereaved, or the pangs of the smitten—the deadly Plague, which spares neither sex, nor age, nor condition, but makes one universal harvest of mankind.
Nothing ever thrilled me more than when I once came suddenly, during my wanderings, upon an encampment of the Plague-smitten. The huts are generally erected on a hill-side, and the tents pitched among them; and you see the families of the infected basking in the sunshine within their prescribed limits, and gazing eagerly at the chance passenger, whom his ignorance of their vicinity may conduct past their temporary dwellings; the children rolling half-naked upon the grass; and the sallow and careworn parents hanging out the garments of the patients on the trees of the neighbourhood. Such was precisely the case with that into which I had unconsciously intruded; and whence I was very hastily dislodged by the shouts of the guard, stationed to enforce the quarantaine of the mountain colony; and the alarmed exclamations of my companions.
It is difficult to look upon such a scene, and upon such a sky, and to believe in the existence of this frightful scourge! It is the canker at the core of the forest-tree—the serpent in the garden of Eden.
The sun was setting ere we prepared to traverse the Golden Horn, in order to reach the European side before the firing of the evening gun; the shadows were lying long upon the water: a yellow gleam was settling on the domes and houses of Stamboul, and a thick vapour lowered over the sky. The twilight of the East is fleeting as a thought—and the outline of the city ere long loomed out from amid the gathering darkness, like a spectre of the past. One line of light still glimmered across the waves like a thread of gold, linking the shores of Europe and of Asia; but, even as I pointed it out, it faded; softening down to a faint yellow, like the lip of a primrose—and in another instant, it was gone; while, as it disappeared, the hoarse cannon pealed over the ripple, and told that another day was spent.