With a sergeant and thirty rank and file—one of whom was Callum Dhu, and with a piper playing at their head, I marched out of Heraclea, and by an old paved path of the Sultan Solyman, took the coast road to Rodosdchig. My men were in heavy marching order; their feather-bonnets cased in oilskins; their great-coats rolled; their wooden canteens, haversacks, and white gaiters on. We were accompanied by the portly Yuze Bashi; but as the day proved to be Friday, which is set apart by the Mohammedans for prayer and worship, he made it an excuse for being lazy, and instead of riding beside me on horseback, which, as a soldier, he ought to have done, he marched like a prince of Bourbon, i.e., travelled in his snug araba or Turkish carriage, where he sat, trussed up among soft cushions, and given up to dozing over his pipe and the Prophet.
Jack Belton accompanied me for three or four miles westward of the town, as far as an old Roman bridge, which crosses a river with a name that no jaws save those of a Believer were ever meant to compass; and there bidding me warmly adieu, he galloped back to breakfast and to morning parade.
We passed the head of the olive valley, where the poor Greek officer had been so barbarously executed; and all the terrible scene of that morning came fresh upon my memory. In the distance lay the sea and the grey rocks of Palegrossa, whereon was the rent and gaping hull of the Vestal.
The atmosphere soon became oppressively hot—singularly so for that season of the year, and consequently I seldom saw the round visage, or heard the guttural voice of the Yuze Bashi, save when he stormed at a passing carrier, whose string of laden mules raised a dust on the highway; or when he swore at the terrified Boba of some wayside khan, who was long in supplying him with sherbet or iced water, for which supplies, by the way, he seldom seemed to pay, save in threats and maledictions.
At one of these temporary halts near a khan, a poor old Jew, wearing the blue turban and blue boots enforced on those of his religion, approached with great timidity, and with a humility which to me—the son of a free soil—was painful and oppressive, offered some cigars and tobacco for sale.
'Do not buy of him,' said Hussein, pulling sharply back the curtains of his araba; 'he is a Jew, and will cheat you—they are all cheats, believing that, at most, they shall only endure for eleven months the fires of hell—for such is their accursed creed. Oho! is this you, Isaac Ebn Abraha, who keeps the little booth in the new Frank street of Stamboul?'
'The same, at the service of my lord,' replied the old Israelite, bending his white head.
'The gold of the English and French has been rattling into your coffers like hailstones, I have been told, Isaac?'
The Jew shook his head in dissent, and bent it lower, to conceal his cunning eyes.
'Oho! I lie, then, do I?' exclaimed this Turkish bully; 'had other than you done this, I had smote him on the mouth with the heel of my slipper! Begone,' he added, spitting full in the cigar vender's face.
I remonstrated, as a fierce gleam shot from the hollow eyes of the old Jew, and he slunk away.
'Bah!' said the Yuze Bashi; 'we tolerate the existence of Jews, Armenians, and Greeks, because, if we destroyed them, what would the true Believers do for slaves?'
'We meet few of them hereabout, at all events,' said I; 'the whole country seems to become more waste and barren as we advance.'
'True,' replied the puffing Osmanli, with a fierce flashing in his dark eye, and a sardonic grin under his grey moustache; 'where the Sultan's horse has trod there grows no grass.'
And, with this fatally true Turkish proverb, he sank back among his downy cushions, and left me to march on in silence or commune with Callum Dhu.
After passing Carga on our left, and Turcmeli on our right, after crossing one or two streams, and pursuing a road from which, upon our right flank, we had bright glimpses of the blue sea of Marmora; after passing many of those green tumuli, or old warrior-graves, which stud all the land of Roumelia; after seeing only flights of vultures, cranes, and storks, or an occasional string of laden mules, progressing towards Stamboul, a march of twenty miles found us in a beautiful little valley, watered by a stream which flowed from a fountain in the basement of a gilded mosque, and surrounded by beautiful groves of pale green olive-trees, the orange, and the mimosa, with the crisped foliage of the dwarf oak, the broad and luxuriant leaves of the wild vine, and the graceful acacia, which Mohammed—in his 56th chapter—promises shall bloom again in Paradise.
This was not far from Karacalderin, a small town on the right flank of the coast road.
The grass was green and soft as velvet; a thousand wild flowers studded its verdure, and loaded with perfume the southern breeze that breathed up the valley from the sea of Marmora, and proved to us all delightful as a cold bath after our hot day's march.
Evening was approaching now; the giant poplars and cypresses that surrounded the little mosque, which marked where some dead Santon lay, were throwing their lengthening shadows far across the valley; and on my announcing that I would halt here for the night, my soldiers gladly threw off their knapsacks and piled their arms; Callum lighted a large fire, with all the adroitness of a Highland huntsman, and with some jest about there 'being little chance of firing the heather here,' heaped on the branches of the dwarf oaks, which we hewed remorselessly down by our bill-hooks.
The Yuze Bashi, though he grumbled savagely under his beard at the annoyance of having to halt (as he feared to proceed alone through a district full of armed and unscrupulous Greek peasantry), was compelled to make the best of our delightful little bivouac, and while my men made a meal of the cold meat which had been brought in their haversacks, he shared with me a cold pillaff of fowl and rice, and a jolly magnum bonum of Kirklissa wine.
Discovering another in the recesses of the araba, I abstracted it sans ceremonie, and despite all Hussein's angry remonstrances, handed it to my soldiers, and as it proved to be well dashed with brandy, they passed it from man to man until each had his share, and then they all began to talk, sing, and be merry.
'Bless their hearts!' says Charles Lever, 'a little fun goes a long way in the army;' and any man who has ever spent an hour in the company of soldiers will find it so.
They were all happy as crickets round that bivouac fire, for actual service softens cold etiquette, and relaxes the iron band of discipline without impairing it, especially among Scots and Irishmen; and while the blaze of the ruddy flame shot upward, and tipped the olive-trees with light as fresh fuel was heaped upon it, while the orient sunset died away and deepened into azure night, on the calm Grecian sea and lovely classic shore, we sat in that romantic valley clad in the same martial garb our hardy sires had worn in the days of Remus and Romulus, telling old stories of our native land, or singing those songs, which, when we were so far away from it, made the hearts within us melt to tenderness, or swell with pride and fire.
While the old, gross, and sensual Yuze Bashi lay half hidden among the down cushions of his araba and dozed away over his narguillah of rose-water, I sang a mess-room stave or two to amuse my men; and by doing so won their hearts still more, I am assured, than even my previous and studied kindness to them had done. Then I called on Callum Dhu for his quota of amusement, and at once his fine bold manly voice made the valley ring, as he gave us that fiery song in which his warlike ancestor, Ian Lom Mac Donel, the Bard of Keppoch, has embalmed the victory of the great Montrose at Inverlochy.
He sang it in his native Gaelic, and as he poured it forth his swarthy cheek was seen to glow and his eyes to flash—ay, even the muscles of his bare legs, on which fell the glow of the wavering watch-fire, seemed to quiver and be strung anew with energy as all the fire of Ian Lom filled the heart of his descendant—for through (my nurse) his mother, Callum came of Ian's race.
The song cannot be known to my English readers; but as it is in that bold ballad style they love so well, I may be pardoned in quoting two verses of it from a little historical work that may never cross the Tweed;[*] and as he sang, the voices of his thirty comrades united with singular force and harmony in the chorus:—
'Heard ye not! heard ye not!
How that whirlwind the Gael,—
Through Lochaber swept down
From Lochness to Loch Eil?—
And the Campbells to meet them
In battle array,
Came on like the billow—
And broke like its spray!
Long, long shall our war song exult in that day!
'Through the Braes of Lochaber
A desert were made,
And Glen Roy should be lost
To the plough and the spade;
Though the bones of my kindred,
Unhonoured, unurned,
Marked the desolate path
Where the Campbells have burned.—
Be it so! from that foray they never returned!' &c.
[*] See Turner's Collection.
So intent were we on the song—so much had it absorbed our faculties and fixed our hearts and eyes, that we had not heard the challenge of Donald Roy, who was stationed as a sentinel near the road; nor until its conclusion did we perceive that a stranger had joined us, and was standing propped upon a long and knotty staff, surveying us with eyes of wonder, and with an interest that was not unfriendly, for a smile lighted all his features as I rose to greet him. on recognising the wandering Moolah Moustapha, whom I had met at the Khan in Heraclea, and who had officiated on the morning when the Greek Lieutenant, Constantine Vidimo, was shot.