There are many who do not fear death; but they are habituated to associate it in their minds with an accustomed home, and watching friends, and anxious tenderness; all accessories tending to soften the pang of disease, and to smooth the path of dissolution—Few are they who could contemplate calmly the death-hour of the plague-smitten—the hunted from his home—haunting the hills in his polluted solitude; and contaminating the pure air of Heaven by the fetid breathings of pestilence—shrieking out his madness to the mocking moon,—and dying in his despair on the bare earth; a loathsome thing, to which even a grave is sometimes denied!
And yet, terrible as is the picture which I have drawn almost despite myself, it is surprising how little caution is observed by the Turks to escape from so direful a visitation. They have an absurd superstition that all True Believers who die, either by the hand of the Sultan, or by the visitation of the plague, go straight to Paradise, and to the arms of the Houri, without the intervention of any purgatorial quarantaine; and they account very satisfactorily for the infrequency of plague-cases among the Franks, by declaring that Allah does not love them sufficiently to grant them so desirable a privilege; without troubling themselves to remark the precautions taken by Europeans to prevent the spread of the disease, all of which are utterly neglected by the natives of the country. It is indeed astonishing how blindly the Orientals run the greatest risks, in the most unnecessary and apparently wilful manner.
The Pasha of Broussa was informed by his family physician that his Chiboukjhe, or pipe-bearer, who had been in his service from his boyhood, and to whom he was much attached, had discovered symptoms of plague, which would render it necessary for his Excellency to take such precautions as might tend to ensure the safety of the other members of his family; and accordingly he gave immediate orders for the removal of the harem to a village in the mountains; and ordered all the linen of the inmates of the salemliek to be washed, and their woollen clothing carefully aired and fumigated, ere it was transported thither, together with the male members of his establishment.
The Chiboukjhe, hearing of the intended removal of the household, begged to see his master once more ere he left the city; and the Pasha complied with his request without scruple, as a couple of yards intervening between the plague-patient and his visitor are sufficient to prevent contagion. But the kind-hearted Pasha had not calculated upon his own powers of resistance; and, when the favourite domestic upbraided him with his cruelty in leaving him to die alone, and recalled to his memory a score of circumstances in which he had proved his attachment and devotedness to the welfare of his master; the Pasha, with a recklessness perfectly incomprehensible, ordered that fresh linen should be put upon the patient: that his own garments should be destroyed and replaced by new ones; and that he should be forthwith comfortably placed in an araba, and conveyed to the village whither all the rest of the establishment had been previously removed.
The order was obeyed; and the infected man arrived on the evening of the second day at the mountain-retreat, bringing with him the deadly disease which was rapidly sapping his life-blood. Four-and-twenty hours had not elapsed when the favourite wife of the Pasha, a beautiful girl of sixteen, expired, in a fit of raging madness, upon her cushions: the pestilence had wrought so rapidly in her young and delicate frame that no time had been afforded for precaution or help; the weak blindness of the Pasha had sacrificed his wife, compromised his house, and endangered the whole family. He rushed from one apartment to another like a maniac, but the bolt had fallen; and at midnight his youngest child lay a corpse on its dead mother’s bosom.
They were buried hurriedly beneath the tall trees of the garden; and the earth was but newly scattered over their graves when another of the Pasha’s wives breathed her last—Suffice it that in the space of ten days, out of a harem consisting of nineteen persons, there remained only an aged negress and two infant children; while the salemliek had also suffered severely, although not in the same proportion.
I could pile anecdote on anecdote upon the same melancholy theme, but my heart sickens as I record them; and that which I have just narrated will sufficiently demonstrate the improbability of this terrific scourge ever being expelled the country by the precautionary measures of the natives. On the subject of the plague the Turks appear to possess neither prudence nor judgment. Their belief in predestination deepens their natural want of energy; and thus the malady is suffered to run its deadly course almost unchecked, and to sweep off its thousands yearly, amid pangs at which humanity shudders.
Another circumstance which must tend to perpetuate the pestilence in the East, exists in the fact that, when the local authorities have ascertained the existence of plague in a dwelling, the house becomes what is termed “compromised;” and after the family of the smitten has been ejected, and sent to the mountains, it is painted throughout its whole interior, cleansed, and fumigated; a process which, owing to the risk incurred by the individuals employed in the work, and the species of quarantaine to which they are subjected during its continuance, is sufficiently expensive to deter the poorer portions of the population from declaring the presence of the disease in their families; as, combined with their forty days of exile in the mountains, during which time they are, of course, unable to earn any thing for the future support of the survivors, it subjects them to want and misery, which they seek to evade by running a greater, but, as they fondly hope, less certain risk. They trust to their felech, or constellation, that the infection will not spread, and are undoubtedly, in many cases, the more readily induced to do this, that they have at least the melancholy satisfaction of closing the eyes of their dead, and of seeing them expire amid their “household gods;” instead of knowing that their last hour was one of despairing abandonment, as well as of acute agony; and having to search for their bodies in the desolate spots to which their wretchedness might have driven them.
It has been ascertained that atmospherical changes have no influence on the plague. It rages amid the snow-storm as virulently as beneath the scorching suns of summer. Diet does not affect it—The street-porter, living upon black bread, and fruit frequently immature, and the Effendi, whose tray is spread with culinary delicacies, are alike liable to be smitten.
Its origin and its cure are both unknown—It is the hair-suspended sword ever ready to do its work of death; and none can foretell the moment in which the blow may come.—It chases the haughty Sultan from his Palace; and the labourer from his hut—It is in the close and thickly-peopled streets of the city, and on board the majestic vessels that ride the blue waves of the Bosphorus—And there is not a sojourner in the East who can forget the first occasion on which, when he asked the meaning of the gloom that hung upon men’s brows, and the mysterious murmur that ran through the crowd on a new outbreak of the malady, he was answered by some passer-by,—“It is the Plague!”