The problem was—how to introduce an artificial spring into the very waist and middle of autumn, and then to get the tulip-bulbs to take September for May, and set about flowering there and then.
First of all he set about preparing a special forcing-bed of his own invention, in which he carefully mingled together the most nourishing soil formed among the Mountains of Lebanon from millennial deposits of cedar-tree spines, antelope manure, so heating and stimulating to vegetation, that wherever it falls on the desert, tiny oases, full of flowers and verdure, immediately spring up amidst the burning, drifting sand-hills, and burnt and pulverized black marble which is only to be found in the Dead Mountains. A judicious intermingling of this mixture produces a soft, porous, and exceedingly damp soil, and in this soil the Kapudan Pasha very carefully planted out his tulips with his own hands. He selected the bulbs resulting from last spring's blooms, making a hole for each of them, one by one, with his index-finger, and banking them up gingerly with earth as soft as fresh bread crumbs.
Then he had snow fetched from the summits of the Caucasus, where it remains even all through the summer—whole ship loads of snow by way of the Black Sea—and kept the tulip-bulbs well covered with it, adding continually layers of fresh snow as the first layers melted, so that the hoodwinked tulips really believed it was now winter; and when towards the end of August the snow was allowed to melt altogether, they fancied spring had come, and poked their gold-green shoots out of their well-warmed, well-moistened bed.
On the eve of the Prophet's birthday about fifty plants had begun to bloom, all of which had been named after battles in which the Mussulmans had triumphed, or after fortresses which their arms had captured. Then, however, the Kapudan Pasha was obliged to go to sea and command the fleet, in other words, he was constrained to leave his beloved tulips at the most interesting period of their existence.
On the very evening when the Sultan arrived at Scutari, one of the Kapudan Pasha's gardeners came to him with the joyful intelligence that Belgrade, Naples, Morea, and Kermanjasahan would blossom on the morrow.
The Kapudan Pasha was wild with impatience. There they all were, just on the point of blooming, and he would be unable to see it. How he would have liked a contrary wind to have kept back the fleet for a day or two.
But what the wind would not do for him, the Sultan's birthday gave him the opportunity of doing for himself. The day of rest appointed for the morrow permitted the Kapudan Pasha to get himself rowed across to his summer palace at Chengelköi, where his marvellous tulips were about to bloom at the beginning of autumn.
What a spectacle awaited him! All four of them, yes, all four, were in full bloom!
Belgrade was pale yellow with bright green stripes, those of the stripes which were pale green on the lower were rose-coloured on the upper surface, and those of them which were bright green above died gradually away into a dark lilac colour below.
Naples was a very full tulip, whose confusingly numerous angry-red leaves, with yellow edges, symbolized, perhaps, the fifteen hundred Venetians who had fallen at its name-place beneath the arms of the Ottomans.