With this strange story hovering in my mind, and the Yuze Bashi asleep in the cushioned recess of his araba, I paraded and marched off my detachment from the valley at the first peep of early dawn next day. I bade farewell to the old moolah Moustapha—the ex-corporal of Scherif Bey—and gave him one of the small Turkish notes (which are printed on thin yellow paper, and are worth about ten shillings sterling) for the benefit of his mosque; and feared that if he was not slightly defective in brain, he had at least but a slight acquaintance with the goddess whose billet is popularly said to be at the bottom of a well.
Along a road bordered by rare plants and gorgeous flowers; between groves of orange, lemon, and fig trees, all growing in wild luxuriance, and among myrtle-scented fields, we continued our march by the shore of the sea of Marmora, the voices of my thirty soldiers all uniting at times in one merry chorus, as they trod the old paved causeway of the great Sultan Solymon, many of whose works are, by the ignorant, ascribed to the Genii—just as our Scottish peasantry aver their old ruins to be the work of Picts or of the fairies—and before mid-day, we saw the little town of Rodosdchig rise before us, with the blue sea washing its old grey walls; with its dark cypresses and white minarets; its harbour full of quaint caiques; and its old castle of the Greeks, on which was the red Turkish standard, with an oval centre, bearing the three crescents of the Prophet.
As we marched in, the drum beat at the guard-house, and a guard of lubberly Turkish militiamen scrambled from around a logwood fire, where they had been toasting kabobs and dough-balls; they stood to their arms, and gave us a military salute. The officer at their head still retained at his neck the ancient gilt gorget, now long disused in our service.
We were immediately beset by Greek kabob-roasters, and sherbet-venders, from the arched gates of the bazaars, and a crowd of wondering Osmanlies, whom the strange sound of the Highland warpipe brought forth from every door, where they had been squatted on carpets, dozing over opium, coffee, and chibouques; yet though louder, more martial, and more shrill, our pipe is almost similar to the instrument now used by the kilted mountaineers of Albania.
Not a woman was visible, though at times a veiled head and two brilliant eyes appeared at the wire lattices which opened to the unpaved and unlighted streets.
We marched into the old castle, of which the Yuze Bashi was commandant, governor, or suzerain, and as such was the terror of all Rodosdchig. He was the only officer there at present, though the quaint old Greek towers of the last emperor were garrisoned by his company of Bombardiers, and were mounted by ten iron twenty-four pounders and two ten-inch mortars. On the walls towards the sea were several old and useless, but enormous, brass guns, covered with Turkish letters and pious sentences, with piles of moss-grown marble shot between them. The stockades in many places had disappeared, for our thrifty commandant had sold them when his piastres became scarce, to the kabob-roasters, for firewood.
On resuming his command, the first act of Hussein was to cudgel—almost to death—the chaoush of the main-guard, for some real or imaginary fault; an act which gave us an odd idea of Turkish discipline.
'What think you of this, Callum?' said I, with smile; 'suppose an officer were to cudgel you?'
'I would drive my skene into his heart with as little remorse as I would gralloch a dead deer,' was the reply of my henchman, frowning at the idea.
My men occupied a portion of the miserable Turkish barrack, and I had rooms assigned to me in a tower, the windows of which faced the sea; and as the furniture was furnished by the government of His Majesty the Sultan, it could scarcely be expected to be much more luxurious than the birch-table, two Windsor-chairs, the iron coal-box and elegant pair of bellows usually issued from the stores of Her Brittanic Majesty to an officer in garrison.
That evening I dined—or supped—which you please (for the hour rendered the meal dubious)—with the Yuze Bashi, whose portion of the castle was magnificently fitted up. His servants were black slave girls. We had neither forks, chairs, nor a table. We sat on cushions, and ate pillaff and paties of Gallipoli oysters with our fingers, from platters placed on little stools; we tore the fragrant kabobs from their wooden skewers with our teeth—rent the fowls asunder by the simple process of inserting the finger and thumb; drank sherbet of sugar and musk dashed with French brandy; then came iced Grecian wine, and, lighting our pipes, we gave thanks to the Prophet for the good things of this land, and subsided among the silken cushions with a sigh of satisfaction.
By the inquiring Callum Dhu I was given to understand that my friend the Yuze Bashi had a wife; but, as it would have been discourteous to have asked for her, as he studiously avoided ever recurring to the circumstance of her existence; and, moreover, as a Turk can never introduce his wife to any man save a most intimate friend, and then only on receiving his solemn word of honour never to mention so singular a departure from the established Mohammedan custom, I had no hope of being blessed by seeing even the slipper of the commandant's earthly helpmate; and so I thought no more about it—besides, wives are most brittle and perilous ware to meddle with in Turkey.
Several weeks passed away monotonously at the castle of Rodosdchig. I soon knew every street, bazaar, mosque, bezestien, coffee-house, khan, and kabobki in the place as well as if they were my own property; the old Greek ruins in the neighbourhood; the dumpy Doric columns of what had been a temple, when beauty was worshipped in Thessaly and Thrace, lying among a wilderness of luxurious weeds and plants, with the snakes crawling over them, had all been, again and again, delineated in my sketchbook; the round towers of the old castle that overhung the sea; the sea itself, with its Greek caiques, Turkish xebeques, and quaint fisherboats, soon became as familiar to me as the murmur of its waves on the lucks below my barrack-room window.
To divert my ennui, fortunately for myself, as my after-adventures proved, I applied all my energies to the study of the monotonous and crack-jaw gibberish of the Turks; and, with the assistance of 'Madden's Grammar,' &c., was able to master the sonnets of the old Pasha, or General, Sermet Effendi; and of Partiff, whose rhymes in honour of the Sultan and of Omar Pasha are to be seen gilded above the gates of all the edifices erected by the Government; Jachiened, the Gulistan, or 'Rose Garden of Sadi of Shiraz,' and the 'Pleasing Tales of Khoja (Master) Nazir-il-adeen Efendi;' and I still remember one charming old Persian story of the Garden of Paradise, which was described as being still extant in Asia, but concealed among remote and inaccessible mountains, and to be reached only through long caverns and by a subterranean river; and therein were ever summer bloom and floral beauty, and all the animals were tame and loving, as before the fall of our first parents—the lamb lying down beside the lion, and the panther beside the goat, as some old dervish, who—like my friend the corporal—had been there, called upon every hair in his silver beard to testify.
The morning and evening parades of my little party followed each other in unvarying succession; but the riotous, bloodthirsty, and insurrectionary Greeks, of whom the Yuze Bashi had spoken so much at our mess in Heraclea, were as quiet as the plodding denizens of the most rural district in England.
The bluff Yuze Bashi Hussein (may his shadow never be less!) was now my crowning bore, and I soon saw enough of him to make me avoid his friendship, and to inspire me with a dislike for him, still stronger than even the story of the Greek Lieutenant Vidimo had done.
Though the rent of his government, exclusive of his pay, was one hundred and twenty purses, or about 600l. per annum, Hussein had a large garden, which he forced the soldiers of the Sultan to cultivate, and the produce of which he sold to the inhabitants at his own prices, which were always rising and never falling. By this means he nearly doubled his pay; while, by selling the powder and shot of the batteries to Levant coasters and Greek pirates, he nearly trebled it; and then, to make up the deficiency at head quarters, the returns of his garrison for 'ball-practice' were enormous.
Then he had secured a handsome sum for the head of his younger brother, which, like a good and loyal servant of the Prophet's earthly shadow, he had transmitted to the Seraglio gate in a jar of salt; for this unlucky brother, having fled from Stamboul, where he had been engaged in an intrigue with a lady of the Household, and having wounded the Kislar Aga with his handjiar, became well worth a thousand piastres, dead or alive.
Such was Hussein Ebn al Ajuz. He was a man utterly devoid of scruple or principle.
'A Greek,' said he, 'once dared to dispute with me on religion—but I soon silenced him.'
'How?' I asked.
'By running my handjiar into his heart.'
'The devil!—that was a convincing argument.'
'A sharp one, at all events,' was the cool reply.
He made his hatred of the Greeks a never-failing source of revenue. If a merchant of that humbled race gave an entertainment, and our commandant was not invited, he would send an onbashi and three soldiers, with fixed bayonets, to extinguish the lights, disperse the guests, and bring before him the master of the house, who was therefore ordered to pay down so many piastres, as a fine, for disturbing the neighbourhood—for the ponderous Turk is lord of the soil, while the lively and more intelligent Greek is but its serf and villein—being what the Englishman was to the Norman knight eight hundred years ago.
I avoided the Yuze Bashi, no difficult matter, as he spent half the day, seated on a carpet in a corner, smoking his bubbling narguillah and drinking brandy-and-water; and now having no resource but my own thoughts, or Callum Dhu, whose conversation was generally of old and regretful memories, my spirits began to sink, for I had no longer the daily good fellowship of our merry little mess, or the frank joviality of Jack Belton to bear me up. Left thus entirely to myself in that gloomy old castle of the Greeks, my mind reverted to other days and other scenes, and the face of Laura—lost to me for ever!—came frequently before me with a distinctness that made my heart ache, though I sought—but in vain—to thrust the painful thought and winning image from me.
One evening, according to my usual wont since I had become wayward and moody, alone (as Callum was on guard), but accoutred with my claymore, dirk, and loaded revolver (for in this district nobody ventures abroad unarmed), I wandered beyond the walls of Rodosdchig, to a grove of cypresses, where the wild grapes grew in luxuriance, and where I could pluck them with the dew of evening on their purple clusters. A little farther on lay one of those quiet Mohammedan cemeteries which are so poetically named by the Orientals the Cities of the Silent. There the ghost of each true Believer is supposed by the superstitious to sit invisibly at the head of its own grave.
Near this burial-place were the ruins of what had been an old Greek hermitage, in the days when poor anchorites 'sought to merit heaven' by drinking cold water and chewing dry peas.
On this evening the City of the Silent rang with the merry voices of a group of Turkish ladies. Clad in bright-coloured dresses, they were sitting on carpets, among the green resting places, drinking sherbet, eating bon-bons, and smoking pretty little chibouques, while a few slaves and sullen eunuchs hovered near them in attendance. As I passed these veiled fair ones, I heard a few shrill exclamations of wonder, while their dark rolling eyes seemed to sparkle with peculiar lustre through the holes in their snow-white yashmacks.
On the verge of this cemetery, and apart from the group, I passed a solitary lady, who was culling a bouquet of flowers from among the turbanned headstones; and who, in pursuit of this innocent object, had wandered to some distance from her companions. Attracted by the singular grace which pervaded all her actions, I hovered near her, and affected to read the epitaphs gilded on the marble tombs; but perceiving that her bracelet—which was composed of those magnificent opals which dart fire, and by the Orientals are believed to be found only where thunder has fallen—was lying on the grass, I hastened to restore it, and to clasp it on her wrist. With a hurried bow, and a sweet smile sparkling in her eyes, she permitted me to perform this little act; and while doing so, I was charmed by the delicate beauty of her arm and gloveless hand.
The bracelet was clasped, and I was on the point of touching my cap and retiring, when, either by accident or design—from all I knew of Turkish wives, I half suspected the latter—her bouquet fell from her hand, and the flowers were scattered about her.
'Mashallah!' she exclaimed, and laughed.
Though I knew well that if seen near her, or with her, a dose of bamboo-canes or a bullet, perhaps, might repay my temerity, I deliberately gathered up the flowers, and tieing them with a ribbon, presented them to her, with a few Turkish compliments, and begged permission to retain a rose, as a gift from her.
She at once accorded it, giving me, at the same time, a full, deep, and piercing glance through the square opening of her yashmack.
Oh, those speaking eyes! How well this woman knew their dangerous power!
I see them yet in imagination, for heaven never created aught more beautiful than the eyes of this Turkish damsel. She touched my hand slightly, and said, while casting a hurried glance about her,
'Where shall we meet again?'
The 'we' made my heart leap!
'Meet again?—at this hour to-morrow evening—among these ruins,' said I, entering recklessly into what might prove a dangerous rendezvous; and then, waving a kiss to me, my beautiful Unknown hurried through the cypress-grove and rejoined her gay companions.
It was all arranged and over in a moment!