The Story Teller of the Desert—"Backsheesh!" / or, Life and Adventures in the Orient

by Thomas Wallace Knox

A moment later he apologized for his intimation that my countrymen were universally profane; but reiterated his assertion that every Englishman visiting Sevastopol goes at once to the cemetery, while every American prefers to do something else. I can well understand this. So many English were buried there, that every British visitor is sure to have occasion to look after the grave of a relative or friend; or, at all events, he has been requested to look out the burial-place of somebody and report its condition. Few Americans are likely to have anything more than ordinary curiosity to attract them to the cemetery at Sevastopol.

In a little while the carriage and guide were ready, and we started. The guide was a Greek—he may have been a Greek brigand—who had not been long in Sevastopol, and didn’t know enough about the place to hurt himself to any alarming extent. He spoke English fairly, but not over elegantly, and was, on the whole, satisfactory.

We drove off along the street leading upward from the hotel, and in the direction of the Malakoff and other fortresses of the days of the war. We were soon on the edge of the bluff overlooking the southern harbor, and could gaze down almost perpendicularly on the ships at anchor there. As we looked toward the end of the harbor, we discovered just beyond it a new building, and I asked what it was.

“That is the railway station,” was the guide’s reply. “The government is building a railway from Sevastopol to connect with the line from the Sea of Azof to Moscow and St. Petersburg. They have surveyed all the line, and a good deal of it is finished. They are going to lay the track all round this harbor, so that ships can be loaded right from the trains and the trains from the ships.”

I looked and saw the grading ready for the rails on both sides of the harbor and sweeping round the hill-side toward Inkermann.

Had this railway existed twenty years ago the allies would have failed to capture Sevastopol. It was their primitive mode of transportation more than anything else that caused Russia’s defeat. She learned then the importance of railways, and has since been putting her knowledge into practice.

We climbed to the top of the Malakoff, where a single Russian soldier holds peaceful possession of what thousands were once unable to defend. From the summit of the casemate we looked over the field, traced the lines of the contending armies, and then turned toward Inkermann and the defenses in that direction. The ground all round is cut and torn with rifle-pits, trenches, approaches, and defenses, and is a picture of desolation. Sevastopol is a mass of ruins; its inhabited dwellings are not a tenth the number of the fallen or falling walls, and you can ride or walk through whole squares of what were once rows of handsome edifices, but are now nothing but heaps of stones. It is more like Pompeii than any modern city I have ever seen.

Sevastopol must have been beautiful twenty years ago; she is the reverse of beautiful now, and I do not wonder that the Russian who walks through her half silent and almost deserted streets vows with compressed lips and lowering brow that Sevastopol must be avenged. She is majestic in her ruins. One feels her greatness, or what it must have been, at every step he takes; and no one can call Russia a barbarous nation when he looks at the remains of her dockyards, which were her pride and glory. To destroy these docks required months of labor on the part of French and English engineers. What must have been the labor to create them!

There had been much talk about a new kind of gunboat then at Sevastopol, and by the kindness of Admiral Popoff, the inventor of the system, I was permitted to visit and examine the Novgorod, as the pioneer vessel is called. She was built at Nicolayeff, on the River Bug, and was brought to Sevastopol to be finished. Another boat of the same class, but larger, to be called the Popofka was under construction, and intended to be followed by several others. The Novgorod is something like our monitors, though with a difference. When the original Monitor came out we were told to imagine a cheese-box on a raft; in the present instance you may imagine a cheese-box without any raft. The Novgorod is circular, and about a hundred feet in diameter; her sides where they rise above the water are perpendicular, but they do not rise very high—not more than a couple of feet. From the edge toward the centre there is a gentle incline, and this incline is covered with small cleats of wood to enable one to preserve his foothold. About twenty-five feet from the edge there is a circular wall of iron, fifteen inches thick, forming a turret like that of one of our monitors. This turret is fixed and made as firm as possible; inside of it is a movable turret, containing the guns, and pierced with two holes, through which the guns are to be discharged. The turret is firmly fastened to the platform which sustains the guns, and it can be raised or lowered at will by means of machinery. The guns are eleven-inch breech-loaders, and are very well finished; the carriages are of an improved pattern, and altogether the turret and its contents are highly creditable to their designers and makers.

Workmen were busy both in and out of the boat, and there was an unsatisfactory lot of fresh paint on nearly everything, so that it was necessary to be cautious in one’s movements.