Part 30

We may suppose that the Oriental life was not unpleasant, nor the position irksome to him, for he soon so far yielded to the temptations of the capital as to fall in love with a very pretty face which he saw daily in a bay-window of the street he traversed on the way to the Seraglio. Acquaintance, which sometimes precedes love, in this case followed it; the doctor declared his passion and was accepted by the willing maid. But an Oriental bay-window is the opportunity of the world, and the doctor, becoming convinced that his affianced was a desperate flirt, and yielding to the entreaties of his friends, broke off the engagement and left her free, in her eyry, to continue her observations upon mankind. This, however, did not suit the plans of the lovely and fickle girl. One morning, shortly after, he was summoned to see two Turkish ladies who awaited him in his office; when he appeared, the young girl (for it was she) and her mother threw aside their disguise, and declared that they would not leave the house until the doctor married the daughter, for the rupture of the engagement had rendered it impossible to procure any other husband. Whether her own beauty or the terrible aspect of the mother prevailed, I do not know, but the English chaplain was sent for; he refused to perform the ceremony, and a Greek priest was found who married them.

This marriage, which took the appearance of duress, might have been happy if the compelling party to it had left her fondness of adventure and variety at the wedding threshold; but her constancy was only assumed, like the Turkish veil, for an occasion; lovers were not wanting, and after the birth of three children, two sons and a daughter, she deserted her husband and went to live with a young Turk, who has since held high office in the government of the Sultan. It was in her character of Madame Mehemet Pasha that she wrote (or one of her sons wrote for her) a book well known in the West, entitled “Thirty Years in a Harem.” But her intriguing spirit was not extinct even in a Turkish harem; she attempted to palm off upon the pasha, as her own, a child that she had bought; her device was detected by one of the palace eunuchs, and at the same time her amour with a Greek of the city came to light. The eunuch incurred her displeasure for his officiousness, and she had him strangled and thrown into the Bosphorus! Some say that the resolute woman even assisted with her own hands. For these breaches of decorum, however, she paid dear; the pasha banished her to Kutayah, with orders to the guard who attended her to poison her on the way; but she so won upon the affection of the officer that he let her escape at Broussa. There her beauty, if not her piety, recommended her to an Imam of one of the mosques, and she married him and seems for a time to have led a quiet life; at any rate, nothing further was heard of her until just before the famous cholera season, when news came of the death of her husband, the Moslem priest, and that she was living in extreme poverty, all her beauty gone forever, and consequently her ability to procure another husband.

The pasha, Mehemet, lived in a beautiful palace on the eastern shore of the Bosphorus, near Kandili. During the great cholera epidemic of 1865, the pasha was taken ill. One day there appeared at the gate an unknown woman, who said that she had come to cure the pasha; no one knew her, but she spoke with authority, and was admitted. It was our adventuress. She nursed the pasha with the most tender care and watchful skill, so that he recovered; and, in gratitude for the preservation of his life, he permitted her and her daughter to remain in the palace. For some time they were contented with the luxury of such a home, but one day—it was the evening of Wednesday—neither mother nor daughter was to be found; and upon examination it was discovered that a large collection of precious stones and some ready money had disappeared with them. They had departed on the French steamer, in order to transfer their talents to the fields of Europe. The fate of the daughter I do not know; for some time she and her mother were conspicuous in the dissipation of Paris life; subsequently the mother lived with a son in London, and, since I heard her story in Constantinople, she has died in London in misery and want.

The further history of the doctor and his family may detain our curiosity for a moment. When his wife left him for the arms of the pasha, he experienced so much difficulty in finding any one in Constantinople to take care of his children that he determined to send them to Scotland to be educated, and intrusted them, for that purpose, to a friend who was returning to England. They went by way of Rome. It happened that the mother and sister of the doctor had some time before that come to Rome, for the sake of health, and had there warmly embraced the Roman Catholic faith. Of course the three children were taken to see their grandmother and aunt, and the latter, concerned for their eternal welfare, diverted them from their journey, and immured the boys in a monastery and the girl in a convent. The father, when he heard of this abduction, expressed indignation, but, having at that time only such religious faith as may be floating in the Oriental air and common to all, he made no vigorous effort to recover his children. Indeed, he consoled himself, in the fashion of the country, by marrying again; this time a Greek lady, who died, leaving two boys. The doctor was successful in transporting the offspring of his second marriage to Scotland, where they were educated; and they returned to do him honor,—one of them as the eloquent and devoted pastor of a Protestant church in Pera, and the other as a physician in the employment of the government.

After the death of his second wife, the doctor—I can but tell the story as I heard it—became a changed man, and—married again; this time a Swiss lady, of lovely Christian character. In his changed condition, he began to feel anxious to recover his children from the grasp of Rome. He wrote for information, but his sister refused to tell where they were, and his search could discover no trace of them. At length the father obtained leave of absence from the Seraglio, and armed with an autograph letter from Abdul Aziz to Pius IX., he went to Rome. The Pope gave him an order for the restoration of his children. He drove first to the convent to see his daughter. In place of the little girl whom he had years ago parted with, he found a young lady of extraordinary beauty, and a devoted Romanist. At first she refused to go with him, and it was only upon his promise to allow her perfect liberty of conscience, and never to interfere with any of the observances of her church, that she consented. Not daring to lose sight of her, he waited for her to pack her trunk, and then, putting her into a carriage, drove to the monastery where he heard, after many inquiries, that his boys were confined. The monk who admitted him denied that they were there, and endeavored to lock him into the waiting-room while he went to call the Superior. But the doctor anticipated his movements, and as soon as the monk was out of sight, started to explore the house. By good luck the first door he opened led into a chamber where a sick boy was lying on a bed. The doctor believed that he recognized one of his sons; a few questions satisfied him that he was right. “I am your father,” he said to the astonished lad, “run quickly and call your brother and come with me.” Monastic discipline had not so many attractions for the boys as convent life for the girl, and the child ran with alacrity and brought his brother, just as the abbot and a score of monks appeared upon the scene. As the celerity of the doctor had given no opportunity to conceal the boys, opposition to the order of the Pope was useless, and the father hastened to the gate where he had left the carriage. Meantime the aunt had heard of the rescue, and followed the girl from the convent; she implored her, by tears and prayers, to reverse her decision. The doctor cut short the scene by shoving his sons into the carriage and driving rapidly away. Nor did he trust them long in Rome.

The subsequent career of the boys is not dwelt on with pleasure. One of them enlisted in the Turkish army, married a Turkish wife, and, after some years, deserted her, and ran away to England. His wife was taken into a pasha's family, who offered to adopt her only child, a boy of four years; but the mother preferred to bring him to his grandfather. None of the family had seen her, but she established her identity, and begged that her child might be adopted by a good man, which she knew his grandfather to be, and receive a Christian training. The doctor, therefore, adopted the grandchild, which had come to him in such a strange way, and the mother shortly after died.

The daughter, whose acquired accomplishments matched her inherited beauty, married, in time, a Venetian Count of wealth; and the idler in Venice may see on the Grand Canal, among those mouldy edifices that could reveal so many romances, their sumptuous palace, and learn, if he cares to learn, that it is the home of a family happy in the enjoyment of most felicitous fortune. In the gossip with which the best Italian society sometimes amuses itself, he might hear that the Countess was the daughter of a slave of the Sultan's harem. I have given, however, the true version of the romantic story; but I am ignorant of the social condition or the race of the mother of the heroine of so many adventures. She may have been born in the Caucasus.

XXVII.—FROM THE GOLDEN HORN TO THE ACROPOLIS.

OUR last day in Constantinople was a bright invitation for us to remain forever. We could have departed without regret in a rain-storm, but it was not so easy to resolve to look our last upon this shining city and marvellous landscape under the blue sky of May. Early in the morning we climbed up the Genoese Tower in Galata and saw the hundred crescents of Stamboul sparkle in the sun, the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, shifting panoramas of trade and pleasure, the Propontis with its purple islands, and the azure and snowy mountains of Asia. This massive tower is now a fire-signal station, and night and day watchmen look out from its battlemented gallery; the Seraskier Tower opposite in Stamboul, and another on the heights of the Asiatic shore, keep the same watch over the inflammable city. The guard requested us not to open our parasols upon the gallery for fear they would be hailed as fire-signals.

The day was spent in last visits to the bazaars, in packing and leave-takings, and the passage of the custom-house, for the government encourages trade by an export as well as an import duty. I did not see any of the officials, but Abd-el-Atti, who had charge of shipping our baggage, reported that the eyes of the customs inspector were each just the size of a five-franc piece. Chief among our regrets at setting our faces toward Europe was the necessity of parting with Abd-el-Atti and Ahmed; the former had been our faithful dragoman and daily companion for five months, and we had not yet exhausted his adventures nor his stores of Oriental humor; and we could not expect to find elsewhere a character like Ahmed, a person so shrewd and obliging, and of such amusing vivacity. At four o'clock we embarked upon an Italian steamer for Salonica and Athens, a four days' voyage. At the last moment Abd-el-Atti would have gone with us upon the least encouragement, but we had no further need of dragoman or interpreter, and the old man sadly descended the ladder to his boat. I can see him yet, his red fez in the stern of the caique, waving his large silk handkerchief, and slowly rowing back to Pera,—a melancholy figure.

As we steamed out of the harbor we enjoyed the view we had missed on entering: the Seraglio Point where blind old Dandolo ran his galley aground and leaped on shore to the assault; the shore of Chalcedon; the seven towers and the old wall behind Stamboul, which Persians, Arabs, Scythians, and Latins have stormed; the long sweeping coast and its minarets; the Princes' Islands and Mt. Olympus,—all this in a setting sun was superb; and we said, “There is not its equal in the world.” And the evening was more magnificent,—a moon nearly full, a sweet and rosy light on the smooth water, which was at first azure blue, and then pearly gray and glowing like an amethyst.

Smoothly sailing all night, we came at sunrise to the entrance of the Dardanelles, and stopped for a couple of hours at Chanak Kalessi, before the guns of the Castle of Asia. The wide-awake traders immediately swarmed on board with their barbarous pottery, and with trays of cooked fish, onions, and bread for the deck passengers. The latter were mostly Greeks, and men in the costume which one sees still in the islands and the Asiatic coasts, but very seldom on the Grecian mainland; it consists of baggy trousers, close at the ankles, a shawl about the waist, an embroidered jacket usually of sober color, and, the most prized part of their possessions, an arsenal of pistols and knives in huge leathern holsters, with a heavy leathern flap, worn in front. Most of them wore a small red fez, the hair cut close in front and falling long behind the ears. They are light in complexion, not tall, rather stout, and without beauty. Though their dress is picturesque in plan, it is usually very dirty, ragged, and, the last confession of poverty, patched. They were all armed like pirates; and when we stopped a cracking fusillade along the deck suggested a mutiny; but it was only a precautionary measure of the captain, who compelled them to discharge their pistols into the water and then took them from them.

Passing out of the strait we saw the Rabbit Islands and Tene-dos, and caught a glimpse of the Plain of Troy about as misty as its mythic history; and then turned west between Imbros and Lemnos, on whose bold eastern rock once blazed one of the signal-fires which telegraphed the fall of Troy to Clytemnestra. The first women of Lemnos were altogether beautiful, but they had some peculiarities which did not recommend them to their contemporaries, and indeed their husbands were accustomed occasionally to hoist sail and bask in the smiles of the damsels of the Thracian coast. The Lemnian women, to avoid any legal difficulties, such as arise nowadays when a woman asserts her right to slay her partner, killed all their husbands, and set up an Amazonian state which they maintained with pride and splendor, permitting no man to set foot on the island. In time this absolute freedom became a little tedious, and when the Argonauts came that way, the women advanced to meet the heroes with garlands, and brought them wine and food. This conduct pleased the Argonauts, who made Lemnos their headquarters and celebrated there many a festive combat. Their descendants, the Minyæ, were afterwards overcome by the Pelasgians, from Attica, who, remembering with regret the beautiful girls of their home, returned and brought back with them the willing and the lovely. But the children of the Attic women took on airs over their superior birth, which the Pelasgian women resented, and the latter finally removed all cause of dispute by murdering all the mothers of Attica and their offspring. These events gave the ladies of Lemnos a formidable reputation in the ancient world, and furnish an illustration of what society would be without the refining and temperate influence of man.

To the northward lifted itself the bare back of Samothrace, and beyond the dim outline of Thasos, ancient gold-island, the home of the poet Archilochus, one of the few Grecian islands which still retains something of its pristine luxuriance of vegetation, where the songs of innumerable nightingales invite to its deep, flowery valleys. Beyond Thasos is the Thracian coast and Mt. Pangaus, and at the foot of it Philippi, the Macedonian town where republican Rome fought its last battle, where Cassius leaned upon his sword-point, believing everything lost. Brutus transported the body of his comrade to Thasos and raised for him a funeral pyre; and twenty days later, on the same field, met again that spectre of death which had summoned him to Philippi. It was only eleven years after this victory of the Imperial power that a greater triumph was won at Philippi, when Paul and Silas, cast into prison, sang praises unto God at midnight, and an earthquake shook the house and opened the prison doors.

In the afternoon we came in sight of snowy Mt. Athos, an almost perpendicular limestone rock, rising nearly six thousand four hundred feet out of the sea. The slender promontory which this magnificent mountain terminates is forty miles long and has only an average breadth of four miles. The ancient canal of Xerxes quite severed it from the mainland. The peninsula, level at the canal, is a jagged stretch of mountains (seamed by chasms), which rise a thousand, two thousand, four thousand feet, and at last front the sea with the sublime peak of Athos, the site of the most conspicuous beacon-fire of Agamemnon. The entire promontory is, and has been since the time of Constantine, ecclesiastic ground; every mountain and valley has its convent; besides the twenty great monasteries are many pious retreats. All the sects of the Greek church are here represented; the communities pay a tribute to the Sultan, but the government is in the hands of four presidents, chosen by the synod, which holds weekly sessions and takes the presidents, yearly, from the monasteries in rotation. Since their foundation these religious houses have maintained against Christians and Saracens an almost complete independence, and preserved in their primitive simplicity the manners and usages of the earliest foundations. Here, as nowhere else in Europe or Asia, can one behold the architecture, the dress, the habits of the Middle Ages. The good devotees have been able to keep themselves thus in the darkness and simplicity of the past by a rigorous exclusion of the sex always impatient of monotony, to which all the changes of the world are due. No woman, from the beginning till now, has ever been permitted to set foot on the peninsula. Nor is this all; no female animal is suffered on the holy mountain, not even a hen. I suppose, though I do not know, that the monks have an inspector of eggs, whose inherited instincts of aversion to the feminine gender enable him to detect and reject all those in which lurk the dangerous sex. Few of the monks eat meat, half the days of the year are fast days, they practise occasionally abstinence from food for two or three days, reducing their pulses to the feeblest beating, and subduing their bodies to a point that destroys their value even as spiritual tabernacles. The united community is permitted to keep a guard of fifty Christian soldiers, and the only Moslem on the island is the solitary Turkish officer who represents the Sultan; his position cannot be one generally coveted by the Turks, since the society of women is absolutely denied him. The libraries of Mt. Athos are full of unarranged manuscripts, which are probably mainly filled with the theologic rubbish of the controversial ages, and can scarcely be expected to yield again anything so valuable as the Tischendorf Scriptures.

At sunset we were close under Mt. Athos, and could distinguish the buildings of the Laura Convent, amid the woods beneath the frowning cliff. And now was produced the apparition of a sunset, with this towering mountain cone for a centre-piece, that surpassed all our experience and imagination. The sea was like satin for smoothness, absolutely waveless, and shone with the colors of changeable silk, blue, green, pink, and amethyst. Heavy clouds gathered about the sun, and from behind them he exhibited burning spectacles, magnificent fireworks, vast shadow-pictures, scarlet cities, and gigantic figures stalking across the sky. From one crater of embers he shot up a fan-like flame that spread to the zenith and was reflected on the water. His rays lay along the sea in pink, and the water had the sheen of iridescent glass. The whole sea for leagues was like this; even Lemnos and Samothrace lay in a dim pink and purple light in the east. There were vast clouds in huge walls, with towers and battlements, and in all fantastic shapes,—one a gigantic cat with a preternatural tail, a cat of doom four degrees long. All this was piled about Mt. Athos, with its sharp summit of snow, its dark sides of rock.

It is a pity that the sounding and somewhat sacred name of Thessalonica has been abbreviated to Salonica; it might better have reverted to its ancient name of Therma, which distinguished the Macedonian capital up to the time of Alexander. In the early morning we were lying before the city, and were told that we should stay till midnight, waiting for the mail. From whence a mail was expected I do not know; the traveller who sails these seas with a cargo of ancient history resents in these classic localities such attempts to imitate modern fashions. Were the Dardanians or the Mesians to send us letters in a leathern bag? We were prepared for a summons from Calo-John, at the head of his wild barbarians, to surrender the city; and we should have liked to see Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat and King of Thessalonica, issue from the fortress above the town, the shields and lances of his little band of knights shining in the sun, and answer in person the insolent demand. We were prepared to see the troop return, having left the head of Boniface in the possession of Calo-John; and if our captain had told us that the steamer would wait to attend the funeral of the Bulgarian chief himself, which occurred not long after the encounter with Boniface, we should have thought it natural.

The city lies on a fine bay, and presents an attractive appearance from the harbor, rising up the hill in the form of an amphitheatre. On all sides, except the sea, ancient walls surround it, fortified at the angles by large round towers and crowned in the centre, on the hill, by a respectable citadel. I suppose that portions of these walls are of Hellenic and perhaps Pelasgic date, but the most are probably of the time of the Latin crusaders' occupation, patched and repaired by Saracens and Turks. We had come to Thessalonica on St. Paul's account, not expecting to see much that would excite us, and we were not disappointed. When we went ashore we found ourselves in a city of perhaps sixty thousand inhabitants, commonplace in aspect, although its bazaars are well filled with European goods, and a fair display of Oriental stuffs and antiquities, and animated by considerable briskness of trade. I presume there are more Jews here than there were in Paul's time, but Turks and Greeks, in nearly equal numbers, form the bulk of the population.