Part 9

I shall never forget the night I got there. The train went no farther than Nicomedia in those days, and it took so long that you nearly died of old age on the way. But when the three red lights on the tail of it dwindled into the dark, I had the queerest sense of having been dropped into another world. It was the more so because one couldn't see an earthly thing--not a star, not even the Gulf which we were to cross. I only heard the lapping of it, close by, when the rumble of the train died out of the stillness. That and the crunch of steps on the sand were all there was to hear, and an occasional word I didn't catch. The men could hardly have been more silent if our lives had depended on it. I had no idea how many of them there were, or what they looked like--much less where they were taking me. They simply hoisted a sail and put off into the night. I would have sworn, too, that there was no wind. The sail filled, however: I could see the swaying pallor of it, and hear the ripple under the bow. And as my eyes got used to the darkness, I discovered an irregular silhouette in front of us, and a floating will-o'-the-wisp of a light. The silhouette grew taller and blacker till the boat grounded under it. Then, by the light of the will-o'-the-wisp, which was a sputtering oil lantern on shore, I made out some immense cypresses. You have no idea how eerie that landing was, in a waterside cemetery that was for all the world like Böcklin's Island of Death. The men moved like shadows about their Flying Dutchman of a boat, and their lantern just brought out the ghostliness of gravestones leaning between the columns of the cypresses. And I suddenly became aware of the strangest sound. I had no idea what it was or where it came from, but it was a sort of low moaning that fairly went into your bones. It grew louder when we started on again. We climbed an invisible trail where branches slashed at us in the dark, and all kinds of sharp and sweet and queer smells came put of it in waves. And nightingales began to sing like mad around us, and off in the distance somewhere jackals were barking, and under it all that low moaning went on and on and on. And at last we came out into an open space on top of the hill, where a bonfire made a hole in the black, and a couple of naked figures stood redly out in the penumbra of it, with a ring of faces flickering around them....

I found out afterwards that the bonfire business was nothing but a wrestling match--they had them almost every night on the _meidan_--and the moaning came from the mill-wheels in the valley. But I never quite got over that first impression--that sense of walking through all kinds of things without seeing them. No sooner would I begin to feel a bit at home than something would bring me up with a jerk and remind me that I was a stranger in a strange land. I suppose it was natural enough, considering that I had only just come out then. The place was nothing but a snarl of muddy lanes and mud shanties, tossed into a filbert valley where water tumbled down to the Gulf. It was only about fifty miles away from here, but it might have been five thousand and fifty. There was none of the contrast with Europe that is always bothering you here--though perhaps it really sets things off. The people were all Turks, and their village was Asia pure and simple. That extraordinary juxtaposition of care and neglect, of the exquisite and the nauseating, which begins to strike you in Italy, and which strikes you so much more here, simply went to the top notch there. It was under your eyes--and nose--every minute. There were rugs and tiles and brasses that you couldn't keep your hands off of, in houses plastered with cow-dung. And the people used the gutters for drains, and their principal business was making attar of rose. You should have seen what gardens there were, hidden away behind mud-walls!

What struck me most, though, was a something in it all which I never could lay my finger on. It seemed incredible that a country inhabited so long should show so few signs of it. The people might have camped in a clearing over night, and the woods were just waiting to cover up their tracks. But the wildness was not the good blank, unconscious wildness we have at home. There was a melancholy about it. The silence that hung over the place was really a little uncanny. The mills only cried it out, in that monotonous minor of theirs. They were picturesque old wooden things, all green with moss and maidenhair fern, that went grinding and groaning on forever, and making you wonder what on earth it was all about. I can't say that I ever found out, either. But I certainly got grist enough for my own mill.

For that matter, I don't imagine that I was precisely an open book myself. In this part of the world they haven't got our passion for poking around where we don't belong: perhaps they've had more time to find out how little there is in it. And for a mysterious individual from lands beyond the sea, whose servant can't be prevented from bragging of the splendor in which he lives at Constantinople, to bury himself in a wild country village, must mean something queer. Does one give up a _konak_ on the Bosphorus for a _khan_ in the Marmora? And are there no teachers of Turkish in Stamboul? I believe it didn't take long for the _Moutessarif_ of Nicomedia to find out I was there, and for him to ascertain in ways best known to himself what I was up to. I have often wondered what his version of it was. At all events it didn't prevent the great men of the village from smoking cigarettes of peace with me in a little vine-shaded coffee-house at the top of the hill. There was the _Mudir_, a plump and harmless _effendi_ of a governor; and the _Naïb_, who was some kind of country justice; and a charming old _Imam_ in a green turban and a white beard and a rose-colored robe; and a _Tchaouche_, an officer of police, all done up in yellow braid and brass whistles; and various other personages. And I couldn't imagine where in the world they had all picked up their courtliness and conversation. The _Mudir_ was from town, and one or two of the others had been there; but if such things were to be had for a visit to town they'd be a little more common at home. Of course, I was asked a good many questions, and some of them were pretty personal. That is a part of Oriental etiquette, you will find. It was marvelous, though, what a _savoir faire_ they had, to say nothing of a sense of life and a few other things. I couldn't make them out--taken with their vile village and their half-tamed fields. The thing used to bother me half to death, too. I thought all I had to do was to sit down and look pleasant and turn them inside out at my leisure. Whereas more than once I had a vague feeling, after it was over, of having been turned inside out myself. Altogether it makes me grin when I remember what an idiotic young ostrich I was. I have been at the business quite a while now, and to this day I am never sure of my man--how that Asiatic head of his will work in any given case. I can only console myself by remembering that I'm not the only one. In the last two generations I presume there must have been as many as four Anglo-Saxons--and three of those, Englishmen--who didn't more or less make jackasses of themselves when they ran up against Asia. And I fancy it took them rather more than a year to arrive at even that negative degree of comprehension.

However, various things went into my hopper first and last, to the tune of the mill-wheels in the valley--particularly last.... It was lucky for me that the wireless telegraphy I sometimes felt about me allowed the _Mudir_ to cultivate his natural inclinations. He was bored enough in his exile, and I think he was genuinely glad that his advices from headquarters made him free of my company. I certainly am. I have never come into just such relations with any of the officials here. He was a grave, mild, suave personage who might have made an excellent _Cadi_ of tradition if he had never heard of Paris. As it was, I'm afraid he took less thought for his peasants' troubles than of the extent to which they could be made to repay him for his own. He liked to practise his French on me as much as I liked to practise my Turkish on him, and on such occasions as I had the honor of squatting at his little round board, his knowledge of the Occident would manifest itself in an incredible profusion of spoons. I also discovered that he was by no means averse to sampling my modest cellar. He didn't care so much about being found out, though. They are tremendous prohibitionists, you know, and while the pashas have accepted champagne with their tight trousers, they're not so public about it. Just watch when you go to your first court dinner.

A person of whom I thought more than the _Mudir_, and who interested me more as a type, was the _Imam_. A more kindly, honest, simple, delightful old man it has seldom been my luck to meet. He was a Turk of the old school, without an atom of Europe in his composition. I wish they were not getting so confoundedly rare. They are worth a million times more than these Johnnies who pick up the Roman alphabet and a few half-baked ideas about what we are pleased to call progress. I took daily lessons from him. He was a mighty theologian--made me read the Koran, and all that, and was much interested in what I had to tell him of our own beliefs. He used to make me ashamed of knowing so little about them. Before he got through with me, he taught me rather more than was in the bond, I fancy. I had always cherished a notion that because a Turk could have four wives, and didn't think much of my chances for the world to come, and was somewhat free in the use of antidotes to human life, his morality wasn't worth talking about. But I got something of an eye-opener on that point.

Altogether, I managed to have a very decent time of it. My pill of learning the most of the language in the least possible time was so ingeniously sugared that the business was one prolonged picnic. In fact, living in a _khan_, as I did at first, is nothing but camping. They're all about the same, you know. You can see the model any day over in Stamboul--a rambling stack of galleries round a court of cattle and wheels, and big bare rooms where twenty people could live. They often do, too. You spread your own bedding on the wooden divan surrounding two or three sides of the room, and your servant cooks for you in a series of little charcoal pits under the huge chimney. It's rather amusing for a while, if you're not too fussy about smells and crawling things. I suppose I must have been, for the _Mudir_ eventually persuaded me to rent a house from an absentee rose-growing pasha. It was about the only wooden one in the place--a huge rattlety-bang old affair that stood on the edge of the bluff, a little apart from the town. It leaked so villainously that I had to sit under an umbrella every time there was a shower, but the view and the garden made up for it. I used to prowl around the country a good deal, though. Everything was so strange to me--the faces, the costumes, the curious implements, the hairy black buffaloes, the fat-tailed sheep with their dabs of red dye, the solid-wheeled carts that lamented more loudly, if less continuously, than the water-wheels, the piratish-looking caravels strutting up and down the Gulf under a balloon of a mainsail. I took them by the day, sometimes, to go fishing or exploring. All of which must have been highly incomprehensible to my astonished neighbors. I believe my man had to invent some legend of a doctor and a cure to account for so eccentric a master. It was only when I came more and more to spend my days among the cypresses on the edge of the beach that I became less an object of suspicion; for while a Turk is little of a sportsman and less of mere aimless sight-seer, he likes nothing better than sitting philosophically under the greenwood tree.

My greenwood was, as I have said, a cemetery. Heaven knows how long it had been there. The cypresses were enormously tall and thick and dark. And the stones under them--with their carved turbans and arabesques, and their holes and rain-hollows for restless or thirsty ghosts--were all gray and lichened with time, and pitched every which way between the coiling roots. You may think it a queer kind of place to sit around in, but it took my fancy enormously. I don't know--there was something so still and old about it, and the spring had such a look between the black trees. It wasn't quite still, either, for that strange, low minor of the water-wheels was always in your ears. It ran on and on, like the sound of the quiet and the sunshine and the cypresses and the ancient stones. And it made all sorts of things go through your head. I presume that first impression had something to do with it. You wondered whether the trees would have lived so long if so many dead people had not lain among their roots. You wondered--I don't know what you didn't wonder.

As hot weather came on, I used to pack a hammock and reading and writing and cooking things on a donkey nearly every day, and drop down through the filberts to my cypresses. There was fairly decent bathing there, over an outrageous bottom of stones and sea-urchins. What I liked best, though, was simply to lie around and watch the world go by. Not that much of it does go by the Gulf of Nicomedia. If it hadn't been for a sail every now and then, you would have supposed that people had forgotten all about that little blue pocket of a firth leading nowhere between its antique hills. Then there were two or three trains a day, whose black you could just make out, crawling through the green of the opposite shore. And there was a steamer a day each way that it was as much as your life was worth to put your foot into. You wouldn't think so, though, to see the people who packed the decks. Sometimes I used to go down to the landing for the pleasure of the contrast they made, solemnly huddled up in their picturesque rags, with the noisy modern steamer. It was a miracle where so many of them came from and went to. That's the wildest part of the Marmora, you know, for all their railroad on the north shore. Some day, I suppose, when German expresses go thundering through to the Persian Gulf, it'll be all factory chimneys and summer hotels, like the rest of the world. But now there's nothing worse than vineyards and tobacco plantations. On the south coast there's hardly that. The hills stand up pretty straight out of the water, and they're wooded down to the rocks. You might think it virgin forest if you didn't know the Nicene Creed came out of it--to say nothing of invisible villages, and eyes looking out at you without your knowing. It all gave one such an idea of the extraordinary wreckage that has been left on the shores of that old Greek Sea. Only you don't get it as you do here, where races and creeds march past you on the Bridge while you stand by and admire. There's something more secret and ancient about it--more like Homer and the Bible and the Arabian Nights.

The caravans gave the most telling touch. You don't often see camels up here any longer, but they're still common enough in the interior. I could hardly believe my eyes the first time a procession of them appeared on my beach. First came a man on horseback, with a couple of Persian saddle-bags to make your mouth water, and then the long string of camels roped together like barges in a tow. What an air they had--the fantastic tawny line of them swinging against the blue of the Gulf! And how softly they padded along the shingle, with the picturesque ruffians in charge of them throned high among their mysterious bales! They passed without so much as a turn of the eye, my Wise Men of the East, and disappeared behind the point as silently as they came. It gave me the strangest sensation. I had felt something of the same before. I could scarcely help it, looking out between those tragic trees at the white strip of beach and the blue strip of sea and the green strip of hills that were so much like other hills and seas and beaches and yet so different. But there had never come to me before quite such a sense of the strangeness of this world where so many things had been buried from the time of Jason and the Argo--of this world of which I knew nothing and to which I was nothing.

You may believe that I was delighted when I went back to the village that night and found it full of camels. The air was sizzling with bonfires and _kebabs_--you know those bits of lamb they broil on a long wooden spit?--and strange faces were at every corner. They filled the coffee-house, too, when I finally got there. By that time it was too dark to stare as hard as I would have liked. But perhaps the scene was all the more picturesque for the shadowy figures scattered under the vine in the dusk, and the bubble of nargilehs filling the intervals of talk. A feature would come saliently out here and there in the red of a cigarette--a shining eye, a hawk nose, a bronzed cheek-bone. And out on the _meidan_ were groups around fires, with their little pipes that have all the trouble of the East in them, and their little tomtoms of such inimitable rhythms.

I found my friends established as usual in the seat of honor--an old sofa in the corner of the café--and as usual they made place for me amongst them. When the ceremony of their welcome subsided, the _Mudir_ took occasion to whisper to me that the leader of the caravan, an excellent fellow who had stopped there before, was telling stories. I then recognized, in the light of the _cafedij's_ lamp, the man I had seen that afternoon on horseback. He sat on a stool in front of the divan of honor, and behind him were crowded all the other stools and mats in the place. Although he had not deigned, before, to turn his head toward me, he now testified by the depth of his salaam to the honor he felt in such an addition to his circle. He was a curiously handsome chap, burnt and bearded, with the high-hung jaw of his people, the arched brow, the almost Roman nose. And, shaky as I still was in the language, he didn't leave me long to wonder why he was the center of the circle. He was a born _raconteur_--one of those story-tellers who in the East still carry on the tradition of the troubadours. Not that he sang to us, or recited poetry--although the _Imam_ told me with pride that the man was a dictionary of the Persian poets. But he went on with a story he had begun before my entrance. It was one of those endless old eastern tales that are such a charming mixture of serpent wisdom and childish _naïveté_. And he told it with a vividness of gesture and inflection that you never get from print.

Well, you can imagine! I always had a fancy for that sort of thing, but it's so deuced hard to get at--at least, for people like us. And after that queer turn the first sight of the caravan gave me, down by the water, it made me feel as if I were really beginning to lay my hand on things at last. So I was disappointed enough when at the end of the story the party began to break up. Upon my signifying as much to my neighbor, the _Mudir_, however, he said that nothing would be easier than to summon the man to a private session. If I would do him the honor to come to the _konak_--I was tickled enough to take up with the idea, provided the meeting should take place at my house instead. I knew there would be bakshish, which I didn't like to put the _Mudir_ in for, after all he had done. Moreover, I had a whim to get the camel-driver under my own roof--by way of nailing the East, so to speak!

So the upshot of the business was that we made a night of it. Oh, I don't mean any of your wild and woolly ones. To be sure, we did wet things down a trifle more than is the custom of the country. There happened to be a decanter on the table, which the camel-driver looked at as if he wouldn't mind knowing what it contained; and being a bit awkward at first, I knew no better than to trot it out. The _Mudir_, to whom of course I offered it first, wouldn't have any. I suppose he had his reputation to keep up before an inferior. I was rather surprised, all the same, for it was plain enough that the camel-driver was by no means the kind of man the name implies, and a little Greek wine wouldn't hurt a baby. Moreover, I had heard of this _raki_ of theirs, which is so much fire-water, and I didn't take their temperance very seriously. As for the camel-driver, he was rather amusing.

"You tempt me to my death!" he laughed, taking the glass I poured out for him. "Do you know that my men would kill me if they saw me now? These country people have not the ideas of the _effendi_ and myself. They follow blindly the Prophet, not realizing how many rooms there are in the house of a wise man. They found out that I had been affording opportunity for the forgiveness of God, and they took it quite seriously. They threatened to kill me if I did not make a public confession. And I had to do it, to please them. On the next Friday I made a solemn confession of my sins in mosque, and swore never to smell another drop."

At this I didn't know just what to do. I looked at the _Mudir_, and the _Mudir_ looked at the camel-driver. The latter, however, waved his hand with a smile of goodfellowship.

"There is no harm now," he said. "We break caravan to-morrow at Nicomedia. Moreover, I do not drink saying it is right. I should blaspheme God, who has commanded me not to drink. But I acknowledge that I sin. Great be the name of God!" With which he tipped the glass into his mouth. "My soul!" he exclaimed, "That is better than a cucumber in August!"

These people are democratic, you know, to a degree of which we haven't an idea--for all our declaration of independence. Yet there are certain invisible lines which are sure to trip a foreigner up and which made me mighty uncertain what to do with the governor of a _mudirlik_ and the leader of a caravan. But the latter proceeded to look out for that. Such a jolly good fellow you never saw in your life, with his stories, and the way he had with him, and the things he had been up to. It turned out that he knew western Asia a good deal better than I know western Europe. Tabriz, Tashkend, Samarkand, Cabul, to say nothing of Mecca and Cairo and Tripoli--such names dropped from him as Liverpool and Marseilles might from me. Where camel goes he had been, and for him Asia Minor was no more than a sort of ironic tongue stuck out at Europe by the huge continent behind. It gave me my first inkling of how this empire is tied up. It seems to hang so loosely together, without the rails and wires that put Sitka and St. Augustine in easier reach of each other than Constantinople and Bagdad. I began to learn then that wires and rails are not everything--that there are stronger nets than those. Altogether it was a momentous occasion. To sit there in that queer old house, in a wild hill village of the Marmora, and speak familiarly with that camel-driver who carried the secrets of Asia in his pocket--it brought me nearer than I had ever dreamed to that life which was always so tantalizing me by my inability to get at it.