Part 10

The bazaars in Constantinople are not so attractive: the crowds jostle you, the shopkeepers, throwing aside Oriental dignity, run after you and catch you by the sleeve, offering to show you Manchester cottons and coarse embroidered muslins. A fragrant savour, indeed, of fried meats and garlic hangs about the eating-shops, on whose counters appetizing mixtures of meat and rice are displayed, and bowls of a white substance like curds, into which a convenient spoon is sticking for the common use of all hungry passers-by, and under the high vaults of the carpet bazaar solemn merchants sit in state among their woven treasures, their silver, and their jewels.

We spent a morning among Persian and Circassian shopmen in Tiflis. There the better part of the bazaar is not roofed over, and the shops open on to a street inches deep in dust or in mud, according to the weather, as is the manner of the streets of Tiflis. They were full of lovely silver ornaments, and especially we noted the heavy silver belts which were hanging in every window and round the waist of every Circassian merchant. We fixed upon one which was being thus informally exhibited round a waist, and, in spite of the many protestations of its wearer, we succeeded in buying it from him. It had belonged to his father, he said, and I think that it was with some reluctance that he pocketed our gold pieces and saw us carrying off his family heirloom.

In Persia the usual order of shopping is reversed: you buy not when you stand in need, but when the merchants choose to come to you. Moreover, the process is very deliberative, and a single bargain may stretch out over months. The counters are the backs of mules, which animals are driven into your garden whenever their owners happen to be passing by. As you sit under the shadow of your plane-trees you become conscious of bowing figures before you, leading laden mules by the bridle; you signify to them that they may spread out their goods, and presently your garden-paths are covered with crisp Persian silks and pieces of minute stitching, with Turkoman tent-hangings, embroideries from Bokhara, and carpets from Yezd and Kerman, and the sunlight flickers down through the plane-leaves into the extemporary shop. There is a personal note about these charming materials which lends them an interest other than that which could be claimed by bright colours and soft textures alone. They speak of individual labour and individual taste. Those tiny squares of Persian work have formed part of a woman’s dress--in some andarun, years of a woman’s life were spent stitching the close intricate pattern in blended colours from corner to corner; those strips of linen on which the design of red flowers and green leaves is not quite completed, come from the fingers of a girl of Bokhara, who, when she married, threw aside her embroidery-needle and left her fancy-work thus unfinished.

The bargaining begins: you turn over the stuffs with careless fingers--this one is very dirty, that very coarse; you lift a corner of the carpets, and, examining the wrong side with what air of knowledge you can summon to your aid, you mutter that they are only partially silken, after all. Finally you make your offer, which is received with indignant horror on the part of the merchant. He sweeps his wares aside, and draws from the folds of his garments a box of turquoises, which he displays to you with many expressions of admiration, and which you return to him with contemptuous politeness: ‘Mal-e shuma!’--‘They are your possession!’ He packs up his bundles and retires. In a week or two he will return with reduced demands; you will raise your offer a toman or two, and after a few months of coming and going and of mutual concessions, the disputed carpet will be handed over to you at perhaps half the price that the owner originally asked; or perhaps the merchant will return in triumph and inform you that he has sold it to someone less grasping than you.

Urbane Persian phrases are confusing at first to the brusque European; it was not until we had made several mistakes that we grew accustomed to them.

As we were coming through the garden in the dusk one evening a somewhat ragged stranger accosted us and handed us a long-haired kitten. ‘Mal-e shuma!’ he said. We were surprised, but since we had been making inquiries for long-haired kittens, we thought that some kind acquaintance had heard of our wants and taken this opportunity of making us a present--presents from casual acquaintances being not uncommon in the East. We thanked the man and passed on with our mewing acquisition. But the Persian did not seem satisfied; he followed us with dogged persistence, and at length the thought struck us that it might not be a gift, after all. We turned and asked:

‘What is the cost?’

‘Out of your great kindness,’ he replied, ‘the cost of the cat is three tomans’ (about thirty shillings).

‘By Allah!’ we said, ‘in that case it is your possession still;’ and we gave the kitten back to him.

When you buy, you might think from the words that pass that you had gained, together with your purchase, a friend for life; and even when you refuse to buy, you veil the terms of your refusal in such a manner that the uninitiated would conclude that you were making a handsome present to your vagrant shopkeeper.

_A MURRAY OF THE FIRST CENTURY_

THERE are few more curious subjects for observation than the continuity of human life in a given place. Generations of men will go on living on the same spot, though it does not offer them any particular advantages--even though, living there, they must be content with poverty, with insignificance, with a station outside the great swing of the world. ‘Some little town by river or sea-shore’ is all their universe--not theirs only, but their children’s and their children’s children’s from century to century. You are tempted to believe that these anchored people, who cling like limpets to the rock on which they find themselves, are no more conscious of their own vitality than the limpets their counterparts; rather, it is the town which knows that it exists; with living eyes it watches the coming and going of races, the ebb and flow of the tide of history, trusting in its own immortality, and careless whether Greek or Barbarian, washed up to it on the wave of a folk wandering, fill its walls.

The truth is that man is a stationary animal, and that which seems a backwater of life is the stagnant mid-ocean, after all--that is the first lesson which the East writes in her big wise book, which you may read and read and never reach the last chapter. For the most part, he is unenterprising; he prefers to remain with the evils he knows rather than risk worse fortune in the hope of better, and unless he be driven forth by hunger or by the sword, he will not seek fresh woods and pastures new. It has been said before, and repeated until it should be familiar, that the swift current of Western life is an exception to the general rule, and not the rule itself--said and repeated, and yet when you are brought face to face with tiny towns and remote fishing villages, for whose birth there seems to be no reason but caprice, for whose continuance even caprice can scarcely be alleged, and which may yet boast two thousand years of life, you will stand aghast at such hoar conservative antiquity. Where is progress? Where is the march of civilization? Where the evolution of the race?... You have passed beyond the little patch of the globe where these laws bear sway; they are not eternal, still less are they universal, the great mass of mankind is untouched by them, and if you must generalize, you will come nearer the truth in saying that man is stationary than that he is progressive.

On the southern shores of the Black Sea, where the mountains of Anatolia drop their wooded flanks into the water, cluster villages to which the name of progress is unknown; the Greek colonists laid their foundation stones--wanderers they, a seafaring folk of unexampled activity. In those steep valleys and on the open stretches of beach two thousand five hundred years have slipped past almost unnoticed. The Greek names, indeed, have been mutilated by barbarian tongues, and other gods are worshipped on those coasts; the temples of Amisus are buried among brushwood, Mars finds no honour in the island of Aretias, nor does the most adventurous of travellers follow in the steps of Hercules through the mouth of the Acherusian cavern; the slender columns of minarets shoot upwards over the flat white roofs, and the Turk is master in the Bithynian waters. For the rest, what difference? Still from sheltered beaches the rude fishing-boats put forth; still the hard oaks are felled in the mountains and sold in the Byzantium of to-day; still the people till their fields of millet, and gather the wild fruits on the fertile lower slopes; still the harbour of Sinope is filled with the sound of the building of ships, as it was when the Milesian navy anchored behind Cape Syrias. Nay, more--you may journey here with the latest guide-book in one hand and Strabo in the other, and the Murray of the first century will furnish you with more minute information than he of the nineteenth.

For Strabo knew this country well; it was the land of his birth. ‘Amaseia, my native place,’ lay not far away on the banks of the river Iris, which the Turks call Jeschil Irmak. He praises its fertility, he unfolds its riches, he enumerates every village it contains. He is much occupied, too, with its past history, and to his elaborate researches there is little to be added even to-day, save here and there the story of a Genoese and a Venetian settlement, or of a Byzantine church, and of the final invasion of the Turkish conquerors. He collects much conflicting evidence concerning the origin of divers tribes along the coast--a question which it would puzzle the most learned ethnologist to decide with the materials that lay to Strabo’s hand; he notes the boundary of the dominions of Mithridates, and the manner in which the Roman emperors divided the kingdom of Pontus in later times; he sketches the history of Heracleia, the Eregli of to-day, and the birth of the colony of Amastris, which the Turks call Sesamyos, and which was formed by Queen Amastris, niece of Darius and wife of Dionysius the Tyrant, out of four cities--Sesamus, Cytorum (whose green box groves have been famous since the days of Homer), Cromna, and Tieum, the Turkish Tilijos. Above all, he catches at any allusion in the Homeric poems: from these mountains, sings the poet, the warriors marched forth to the defence of Troy; ‘From Cromna and Ægialus and the lofty Erythini’ they came, they left their country where the wild mules breed, they left the banks of the Sangarius and of that Parthenius stream whose name was tribute to its virgin beauty. I fear the wild mules breed no longer by the river Sakaria, but Ægialus is still to be found under the name of Kara Agatsch, and the lofty Erythini still lift their rocky heads out of the sea.

Some of the places which Strabo mentions were sufficiently unimportant even in his day to have escaped all observation less accurate than his own. Concerning Ak Liman, an anchoring place to the west of Sinope, he quotes a joking proverb: ‘He who had nothing to do built a wall about Armene.’ Some have fallen from a higher estate, as Sinope itself, which was a naval power of repute in the first century, and the Colchian coast at the eastern end of the Black Sea, which, as he justly remarks, must have been celebrated in the earliest antiquity, as is shown by the story of Jason’s voyage thither in search of the Golden Fleece. He explains the legend of the Golden Fleece, by the way, quite in the modern spirit: the torrents of the Caucasus, he says, bring down gold; the Barbarians collect their waters in troughs pierced with holes and lined with the fleeces of sheep, which catch and hold the dust.

Such memories were our travelling companions as we coasted along the wooded shores towards the latter end of the spring. They came rushing in upon us one evening when our ship stopped at a tiny port built at the bottom of a valley sloping down to the water. Intercourse with the outer world is limited to such passing visits of steamers; the inhabitants of the Black Sea villages grow nearly all the necessaries of life in their fertile valleys, and content themselves with a small exchange of wood and dried fruits for cloth and sugar and a few of the luxuries of civilization, amongst which, oddly enough, tombstones are an important item. As we watched the wide Turkish boats, rising high out of the water at stem and stern, which came dancing out towards us over the swell of the waves and poised round us like great sea-birds while the tombstones and the bundles of goods were dropped into them, we fell to wondering, while the evening light faded from land and sea, what the meagre history of Ineboli could be--so remote it seemed, so forgotten--and it presently occurred to us to consult the learned Strabo. There in his book it was duly mentioned: ‘Abonteichos, a small city,’ ‘the modern Ineboli,’ added a commentator, and we gazed with different eyes at the small city which was backed by such a long line of experiences.

Next day we reached Samsoun, Strabo’s ‘Amisus, which Mithridates adorned with temples.’ A number of Turks, who were passengers on our ship, disembarked there, for what reason Heaven only knows--Mithridates’ pomp has been long since forgotten, and one would think that a man must be hard pressed for occupation before he would seek it in Samsoun. The town lies on sloping ground, rising gently upwards; on the hill behind it we could see the broad road which leads to Diabekir and the people walking in it; the sound of Armenian church bells came to us across the water, and from hour to hour a clock tolled out Turkish time, though no one seemed to heed it. Some Armenian women came on board to examine the ship, and ran up and down the companion ladders, looking at everything with curious eyes and much loud laughter. They were dressed in very bright colours and unveiled, which struck us as indecent in a woman.

Very early on the following morning we woke to find ourselves outside Kerasounde, the Greek Pharnacia--‘a small fortified city,’ says Strabo. It was a charming little place, just waking under the misty morning sunshine. Its irregular streets dropped down to the water’s edge, and even beyond, for some of the wide-roofed houses were planted out on stakes in the shallow bay. The mountain-side against which it nestled was white with blossoming fruit-trees, and behind it the higher peaks were still white with snow. As for the fortifications, they seem to have disappeared, and, indeed, what foe would turn his arms against Kerasounde?

Towards mid-day we reached Trebizond, and greeted it with almost as much enthusiasm as Xenophon must have displayed when he and his Ten Thousand saw it lying at their feet with the blue sea beyond, and knew that an end was set at last to their weary march. Greek and Roman and Genoese merchant have successively borne sway in Trebizond; fortress walls, churches and monasteries tell of their rule. The Turk has encamped himself now within the fortified limits of the old town, but a large Armenian suburb, half hidden under plane-trees, holds to the religion which he displaced.

It happened that on that day the foundations of an Armenian church were being laid, and the Christian town wore a festive air. We watched the ceremony, standing among a crowd of men dressed in their shabby European best, and of women wrapped in white feridgis, with beautiful caps of coins upon their heads. It was not very attractive. A priest was reading prayers before a gaudy picture of the Virgin, a troop of little boys droned Gregorian chants, their discordant voices led by an old man in a fez and blue spectacles, and with no ear for music, who was apparently the choirmaster. Higher up, on the top of the hill overlooking the town, we came upon an interesting and beautiful Byzantine monastery, walled about like a fort--though the walls were in ruins--and with a chapel cut into the solid rock. The chapel walls were covered with frescoes, the half-effaced portraits of saints and of Greek emperors--those banished Comneni who ruled in Trebizond; a pleasant smell of incense hung about the courtyard, round which were built the cells of the monks--rather dilapidated indeed, but still charming under their roofs of red tiles; blue starch hyacinths lifted their prim heads beneath the apple trees which stood in full flower in the rocky gardens on the hillside, and from the summit of the peaceful walls we could see far inland towards the valleys where the Amazons dwelt, and where, says Strabo, quoting Homer, were the silver mines. Silver is still to be found there, but the Amazons are gone; they might have troubled the good monks in their lodging on the hill-top.

So with regret we returned to our ship, and quitted the cypresses and the plane trees of Trebizond, taking our way ‘to Phasis, where ships end their course,’ as Strabo quotes (or very near it), thence to pursue our journey by means other than those which the primitive Murray recommends, and through countries which he knew only by hearsay.

_TRAVELLING COMPANIONS_

ALL the earth is seamed with roads, and all the sea is furrowed with the tracks of ships, and over all the roads and all the waters a continuous stream of people passes up and down--travelling, as they say, for their pleasure. What is it, I wonder, that they go out for to see? Some, it is very certain, are hunting the whole world over for the best hotels; they will mention with enthusiasm their recent journey through Russia, but when you come to question them, you will find that they have nothing to tell except that in Moscow they were really as comfortable as if they had been at home, and even more luxurious, for they had three varieties of game at the table of their host. Some have an eye fixed on the peculiarities of foreign modes of life, that they may gratify their patriotic hearts by condemning them when they differ (as they not infrequently do) from the English customs which they have left, and to which their thoughts turn regretfully; as I have heard the whole French nation summarily dismissed from the pale of civilization because they failed to perceive that boiled potatoes were an essential complement to the roast. To some travelling is merely the traversing of so many hundred miles; no matter whether not an inch of country, not an object of interest, remains in the eye of the mind--they have crossed a continent, they are travellers. These bring back with them only the names of the places they have visited, but are much concerned that the list should be a long one. They will cross over to Scutari that they may conscientiously say they have been in Asia, and traverse India from end to end that they may announce that they have visited all the tombs. They are full of expedients to lighten the hardships of a road whose varied pleasures have no charm for them. They will exhibit with pride their bulky luncheon-baskets, and cast withering glances at that humble flask of yours which has seen so many adventures over the edge of your coat-pocket. ‘Ah,’ they will say, ‘when you have travelled a little you will begin to learn how to make yourself comfortable.’ And you will hold your peace, and hug your flask and your adventures the closer to your heart.

All these, and more also, are not travellers in the true sense of the word; they might as well have stayed at home and read a geography-book, or turned over a volume of photographs, and engaged a succession of cooks of different nationalities; but the real travellers, what pleasures are they seeking in fresh lands and strange cities? Reeds shaken in the wind are a picturesque foreground, but scarcely worth a day’s journey into the wilderness; men clothed in soft raiment are not often to be met with in hotel or caravanserai, and as for prophets, there are as many at home, maybe, as in other places.

Well, every man carries a different pair of eyes with him, and no two people would answer the question in the same fashion. For myself, I am sometimes tempted to believe that the true pleasure of travel is to be derived from travelling companions. Such curious beings as you fall in with, and in such unexpected places! Although your acquaintance may be short in hours, it is long in experience; and when you part you feel as intimate as if you had shared the same slice of bread-and-butter in your nursery, and the same bottle of claret in your college hall. The vicissitudes of the road have a wonderful talent for bringing out the fine flavour of character. One day may show a man in as many different aspects as it would take ten years of the customary life to exhibit. Moreover, time goes slowly on a ship or in a railway train, and a man is apt to better its pace by relating the incidents of his career to a sympathetic listener. In this manner the doors of palaces and of secret chambers in remote corners of the world fly open to you, and though you may have crossed no more unfamiliar waters than those of the North Sea, you pass through Petersburg and Bokhara, Poland and Algeria, on your way to Antwerp. English people are not so communicative, even abroad, and what they have to tell is of less interest if you are athirst for unknown conditions; their tales lack the charm of those which fall from the lips of men coming, as it were, out of a dream-world, crossing but once the glow of solid reality which lights your own path, and vanishing as suddenly as they came into space. Like packmen, we unfasten our wares, open our little bundle of experiences, spread them out and finger them over: the ship touches at the port, the silks and tinsel are gathered up and strapped upon our backs and carried--God knows where!