Meanwhile, Dickson and his companions were in the hospitable hands of a party of Hadji Michali's men, and at about eight A.M. came down the road into view of the ambush, escorted by a guard of honor of insurgents, none the worse for their adventure, and bringing back our beasts and baggage; but nothing would induce the Turkish officer to go the mile separating him from the insurgent outpost which had fired on us.
While Hadji told his story to his admiring companions (he was an excellent raconteur, and put the whole of his barbaric soul into the narration, though his respect for the Effendi kept his voice low and quieted a little his camp manner), one or the other of the three made my cigarettes and brought me fire, and only when the sun began to sink from the meridian did we move on.
As we passed the blockhouse, I found that the General-in-Chief had preceded me, and given orders that the honors due to a consular personage—the same as those paid to a superior officer in their own army—should be carefully observed, and so we had the whole garrison of each blockhouse on the way out at the "Present arms!" The road not only zigzags going from Lakus to the plain of Omalos, but makes such ascents and descents as well accounted for the fruitlessness of so many attempts to enter the plain, which is a sort of portico to Samaria. But now a fair artillery road followed the ridges up to the very plain, and blockhouses covered with their fire every point where an ambush could be made, and those little glens, famous in Cretan tradition for extermination of Turkish detachments, will never again help native heroism against organized conquest. We passed, in one of the wildest gorges through which the road passes, a blockhouse perched high on a hill-top like an eyrie, a peripatetic atom on the parapet of which caught my eye, as a wild goat might have done amongst the cliffs around. As we came into sight, looking again, I saw the garrison swarming down the hillside amongst the rocks like ants, wondered what they were at, and rode on, when at another turn the officer said, "They salute, Effendi!" I looked around, and, only on his indication, saw drawn up in rank, hundreds of feet above me, a line of animalcules, which, by good eyesight, I could perceive was the whole garrison presenting arms, and they so continued presenting until, after turn upon turn of the road, they disappeared from view definitively, when I suppose they swarmed back to their fastness.
We passed through the ravine of Phokes, where Hadji Michali once caught a small detachment which incautiously attempted to penetrate to Omalos. I had heard the story of the fight, told at the time by an Albanian who was in it, in a brief but graphic way. The Christians waited invisible, he said, till the troops were in the bottom of the ravine, and then began to fire from many directions. The troops stopped, made a show of resistance, and then broke and made for the blockhouse at Lakus; "and those who couldn't run well never got there," he interjected laconically. He frankly admitted that he was so far in advance that he saw very little actual fighting, and made no halt, nor did any others, Mussulman or Christian, till they arrived at the door of the blockhouse, which he was surprised at their shutting in time to keep out the Christians.
It was well into the afternoon when we entered the plain of Omalos, evidently a filled-up crater, its level about five thousand feet above the sea. The snows and rains of winter and spring flood it, and as no stream runs from it the waters disappear by a Katavothron—a gloomy Acherontic recess—into whose crooked recesses the eye cannot pierce, and down whose depths is heard a perpetual cavernous roaring of water.
In the plain was no vestige of human habitation visible, except the tents of a battalion of regulars, and a two-story blockhouse on a spur of hill which projected into the plain. We rode into the camp, and were received with emphasis by the Pasha, who, with true Eastern diplomacy, expressed unbounded, surprise at my visit, "so entirely unexpected;" and, learning the result of my attempts at feeding in Lakus, called to the mess-boy to bring me the remains of the breakfast, apologizing abundantly, and informing me that I should be expected to dine with him and the commander of the post at eight. The residual breakfast, supplemented by a plate of kibaubs, the mutton-chop of the East, despatched; the ceremonial pipes and coffee finished, and the more than usually complimentary speeches said, the shadows meanwhile falling longer on the plain; I accepted the Pasha's offer of a fresh horse, and rode across to the famous descent into the glen of Samaria, the Xyloscala, so-called from a zigzag colossal staircase made with fir-trunks, and formerly the only means of descent into the glen. There was a detachment of troops building a blockhouse to command the upper part of the glen, and the commander kept me salaaming, coffee-taking, etc., until I saw that the sunlight was getting too red to give me time to explore the ravine, and I contented myself with a look from the brink down into the blue depths.
I doubt if, in the range of habitual travel, there is another such scene. It was as if the mountains had gaped to their very bases. In front of me were bare stony peaks 7,000 to 8,000 feet high, whose precipitous slopes plunged down unbrokenly, the pines venturing to show themselves in increasing number as the slope ascended, and ended in a narrow gorge. At the side, the rock rose like the aiguilles of Chamouny, cloven and guttered, with the snow still lying in its clefts, and broad fields of it on the opposite eastern peaks. I looked down through the pines and cedars that clung in the crevices of the rocks below me, and the bottom of the glen looked blue and faint in their interstices. The Xyloscala, destroyed by the insurgents at the beginning of the insurrection, was replaced by a laborious zigzag road, which sidled off under crags, and came back along slopes, blasted out of rock, and buttressed up with pines, seeming to me, where I stood, as if it finally launched off into mid-air, and would only help another Dædalus into the mystery of the labyrinth of pines and rock gorges below.
As I watched, the flame of the sunlight crept up the peaks across the glen, the purple-blue shadow following it up, changing the snow-fields from rosy to blue, and the peaks of pale-gray rock to russet, as the day died away. The chill of night reminded me to put my overcoat on. We rode back across the plain in the twilight, accompanied by the building gang, whose polyglot murmur was as cheerful and full of mirth as though they were peasants going home from the vintage.
Nothing can surpass the good-humor and patience of the Turkish soldier. Brutal and barbarous they doubtless were when their fanaticism and the rage of battle united to excite them, but in camp and in peace I have found them always models of the purely physical man.
Our dinner was luxurious, and in the true Eastern manner. The Pasha, the Bey commanding the place, and his aide-de-camp made four with me, and one dish, placed in the middle of the table, served our fingers or spoons according as the viand was dressed, each one of the four scrupulously adhering to his quadrant of the copper circle. The dinner was almost interminable; it was dark and cold when the end did come.