[33] Marcze Záre = Wednesday witch, hags possessing peculiar power on Wednesday evenings, according to the Wallachs.
"Who are ye, and what are you doing here?" cried Clement the Clerk to the Wallachs, who hitherto had not taken the slightest notice of him.
"We are they of Marisel who have burned Marcze Záre," answered the peasants unanimously, with the grave faces of men who had just done something uncommonly wise.
"Well, be quick about it, and then come back to the village, for I am here by command of the Prince, my master, to put the usual questions to you."
"And I," put in Zülfikar, "am here by command of the mighty Ali Pasha of Grosswardein to levy a new tax."
The Wallachs watched the Patrol-officer till he was quite out of sight without uttering a word; but they shook their fists after him and exclaimed—"May Marcze Záre take him!"
Then, with the bagpiper in front, they formed into a long procession and marched, loudly singing, down towards the distant village.
It was a long, straggling, Wallachian hamlet at which the patrollers now arrived—one house exactly like another; low clay huts with lofty roofs and projecting eaves, surrounded by quick-set hedges, the doors so low that one had to stoop in order to enter. Every house consisted of a single room, in which the whole family, parents and children, goats and poultry, lived together. At the entrance of the village stood a gigantic triumphal arch made of marble blocks; over the principal portal was the torso of a Minerva; on the façade were battle-pieces in high relief, and beneath them this Latin inscription in large Roman letters—"This town has been built by the unconquerable Trajan as a memorial of his triumph!" And behind the arch a heap of wretched clay huts!
On the capitol of a fallen Corinthian column, in front of the village dead-house, sits the prefika, the oldest old woman in the place, lamenting with meretricious tears over the dead young maiden who lies within. On the side of a grass-grown hill close at hand one sees a round stone building, raised once upon a time, no doubt, in memory of some Roman hero; but the Wallachian population has turned it into a church, covered it with a pointed roof, and daubed the interior with hideous paintings.