The Figaro of the Turks is a caféjee, who, besides shaving, making coffee, and bleeding, is supposed to be capable of every office required by man. He is generally a Greek, the Mussulman seldom having sufficient facility of character for the vocation. In a few minutes, then, the nearest Figaro was produced, who scarce dissembling his surprise at the improvidence of travellers who went about without pot or kettle, bag of rice or bottle of oil, led the way with his primitive lamp to our apartment. We might have our choice of twenty. Having looked at the other nineteen, we came back to the first, reconciled to it by sheer force of comparison. Of its two windows, one alone had a shutter that would fulfill its destiny. It contained neither chair, table, nor utensil of any description. Its floor had not been swept, nor its walls whitewashed since the days of Timour the Tartar. “Kalo! Kalo!” (Greek for you will be very comfortable), cried our commissary, throwing down some old mats to spread our carpets upon. But the mats were alive with vermin, and, for sweeping the room, the dust would not have been laid till midnight. So we threw down our carpets upon the floor, and driving from our minds the too luxurious thoughts of clean straw, and a corner in a warm barn, sat down, by the glimmer of a flaring taper, to wait, with what patience we might, for a chicken still breathing freely on his roost, and turn our backs as ingeniously as possible on a chilly December wind, that came in at the open window, as if it knew the caravanserai were free to all comers. There is but one circumstance to add to this faithful description—and it is one which, in the minds of many very worthy persons, would turn the scale in favour of the hotels of the East, with all its disadvantages—there was nothing to pay!
Ali Bey, in his travels, predicts the fall of the Ottoman empire from the neglected state of the khans; this inattention to the public institutions of hospitality, being a falling away from the leading Mussulman virtue. They never gave the traveller more than a shelter, however, in their best days; and to enter a cold, unfurnished room, after a day’s hard travel, even if the floor were clean, and the windows would shut, is rather comfortless. Yet such is Eastern travel, and the alternative is to take “the sky for a great coat,” and find as soft a stone as possible for your pillow.
We gathered around our pilaw, which came in the progress of time, and consisted of a chicken, buried in a handsomely-shaped cone of rice and butter, forming, with a large crater-like black bowl in which it stood, the cloud of smoke issuing from its peak, and the lava of butter flowing down its sides, as pretty a miniature Vesuvius as you would find in a modeller’s window in the Toledo. Encouraging that sin in Christians, which they would not commit themselves, they brought us some wine of the country, the sin of drinking which, one would think, was its own sufficient punishment. With each a wooden spoon, the immediate and only means of communication between the dish and the mouth, we soon solved the doubtful problem of the depth of the crater, and then casting lots who should lie next the window to take off the edge of the December blast, we improved upon some hints taken from the fig-packers of Smyrna, and with an economy of exposed surface which can only be learned by travel, disposed ourselves in a solid body to sleep.
The tinkling of the camels’ bells awoke me as the day was breaking, and my toilet being already made, I sprang readily up and descended to the court of the caravanserai. It was an eastern scene, and not an unpoetical one. The patient and intelligent camels were kneeling in regular ranks to receive their loads, complaining in a voice almost human, as the driver flung the heavy bales upon the saddles too roughly, while the small donkey, no larger than a Newfoundland dog, leader of the long caravan, took his place at the head of the gigantic file, pricking back his long ears as if he were counting his spongy-footed followers, as they fell in behind him. Here and there knelt six or seven, with their unsightly humps still unburdened, eating with their peculiar deliberateness from small heaps of provender, and scattered over the adjacent fields, wandered separately the caravan of some indolent driver, browsing upon the shrubs, and looking occasionally with intelligent expectation toward the khan, for the appearance of their tardy master. Over all rose the mingled music of the small bells with which their gay-covered harness was profusely covered, varied by the heavy beat of the larger ones borne at the necks of the leading and last camels of the file, while the retreating sounds of the caravans already on their march, came in with the softer tones which completed its sweetness.
In a short time my companions joined me, and we started for a walk in the town. The necessity of attending the daylight prayers makes all Mussulmans early risers, and we found the streets already crowded, and the merchants and artificers as busy as at noon. Turning a corner to get out of the way of a row of butchers, who were slaughtering sheep revoltingly in front of their stalls, we met two old Turks coming from the mosque one of whom, with the familiarity of manners which characterises the nation, took from my hand a stout English riding-whip which I carried, and began to exercise it on the bag-like trowsers of his friend. After amusing himself a while in this manner, he returned the whip, and, patting me condescendingly on the cheek, gave me two figs from his voluminous pocket, and walked on. Considering that I stand six feet in my stockings, an unwieldy size, you may say, for a pet, this freak of the old Magnesian would seem rather extraordinary. Yet it illustrates the Turkish manners, which, as I have often had occasion to notice, are a singular mixture of profound gravity and the most childish simplicity.
We found a few fine old marble columns in the porches of the mosques, but one Turkish town is just like another, and after an hour or two of wandering about among the wooden houses and narrow streets, we returned to the khan, and, with a cup of coffee, mounted and resumed our journey.
I have never seen a finer plain than that of Magnesia. With an even breadth of seven or eight miles, its length cannot be less than fifty or sixty, and throughout its whole extent it is one unbroken picture of fertile field and meadow, shut in by two lofty ranges of mountains, and watered by the full and winding Hermus. Without fence, and almost without human habitation, it is a noble expanse to the eye, possessing all the untrammelled beauty of a wilderness without its detracting inutility. It is literally “clothed with flocks.” As we rode on under the eastern brow of Mount Sypilus, and struck out more into the open plain, as far as we could distinguish by the eye, spread the snowy sheep in hundreds, at merely separating distances, checkered here and there by a herd of the tall jet-black goats of the East, walking onward in slow and sober procession, with the solemn state of a funeral. The road was lined with camels coming into Smyrna by this grand highway of nature, and bringing all the varied produce of Asia Minor to barter in its busy mart. We must have passed a thousand in our day’s journey.