 | Inklings of adventure |  |
2. PART II.
I had many unhappy thoughts about Miamuna. The
glance I had snatched on board the Trebizond slaver
left in my memory a pair of dark eyes full of uneasiness
and doubt, and I knew her elastic motions so well,
that there was something in her single step as she came
over the gang-way which assured me that she was dispirited
and uncertain of her errand. Who was the
old Turk who dragged her up the vessel's side with so
little ceremony? What could the child of a gipsy be
doing on the deck of a slaver from Trebizond?
With no very definite ideas as to the disposal of this
lovely child should I succeed in my wishes, I had insensibly
made up my mind that she could never be
happy without me, and that my one object in Constantinople
was to get her into my possession. I had a
delicacy in communicating the full extent of my design
to Job, for, aside from the grave view he would take
of the morality of the step, and her probable fate as a
woman, he would have painful and just doubts of my
ability to bear this additional demand upon my means.
Though entirely dependent himself, Job had that natural
contempt for the precious metals, that he could
happened to set a value on the amount in his pocket;
and this, I may say, was the one point which, between
my affectionate monster and myself, was not discussed
as harmoniously as the loves of Corydon and Alexis.
The account of his expenditure, which I regularly exacted
of him before he tied on his bandana at night,
was always more or less unsatisfactory; and though
he would not have hesitated to bestow a whole scudo
unthinkingly on the first dirty dervish he should meet,
he was still sufficiently impressed with the necessity
of economy to remember it in an argument of any
length or importance; and for this and some other
reasons I reserved my confidence upon the intended
addition to my suite.
Not far from the Burnt Column, in the very heart
of Stamboul, lived an old merchant in attar and jessamine,
called Mustapha. Every one who has been at
Constantinople will remember him and his Nubian
slave in a small shop on the right, as you ascend to
the Hippodrome. He calls himself essence-seller to
the Sultan, but his principal source of profit is the
stranger who is brought to his divans by the interpreters
in his pay; and to his credit be it said, that for the
courtesy of his dealings, and for the excellence of his
extracts, the stranger could not well fall into better
hands.
It had been my fortune, on my first visit to Mustapha,
to conciliate his good will. I had laid in my
small stock of spice-woods and essences on that occasion,
and the call which I made religiously every time
I crossed the Golden Horn was purely a matter of
friendship. In addition to one or two trifling presents,
which (with a knowledge of human nature) I
had returned in the shape of two mortal sins—a keg
of brandy and a flask of gin, bought out of the English
presents, I say, my large-trowsered friend had made
me many pressing offers of service. There was little
probability, it was true, that I should ever find occasion
to profit by them; but I nevertheless believed
that his hand was laid upon his heart in earnest sincerity,
and in the course of my reflections upon the fate of
Maimuna, it had occurred to me more than once that
he might be of use in clearing up the mystery of her
motions.
“Job!” said I, as we were dawdling along the street
of confectioners with our Jew behind us one lovely
morning, “I am going to call at Mustapha's.”
We had started to go to the haunt of the opium-eaters,
and he was rather surprised at my proposition,
but, with his usual amiableness, (very inconvenient
and vexatious in this particular instance,) he stepped
over the gutter without saying a word, and made for
the first turning to the right. It was the first time
since we had left New-England that I wished myself
rid of his company.
“But, Job,” said I, calling him back to the shady
side of the street, and giving him a great lump of candy
from the nearest stall (its Oriental name, by the way,
is “peace-to-your-throat,”) “I thought you were bent
on eating opium to-day?”
My poor friend looked at me for a minute, as if to
comprehend the drift of my remark, and as he arrived
by regular deduction at the result, I read very clearly
in his hideous physiognomy the painful embarrassment
it occasioned him. It was only the day before, that,
in descending the Bosphorus, we had seen a party of
the summary administrators of justice quietly suspending
a Turkish woman and her Greek paramour from
the shutters of a chamber window—intercourse with a
Christian in that country of liberal legislation being
punishable without trial or benefit of dervish. From
my adventures, Job had made up his mind, I well
knew, that my danger was more from Dalilah than the
Philistines; and while these victims of love were kicking
their silken trowsers in the air, I saw, by the look
of tender anxiety he cast upon me from the bottom of
the caique, that the moral in his mind would result in
an increased vigilance over my motions. While he
stood with his teeth stuck full of “peace-to-your-throat,”
therefore, forgetting even the instinct of mastication
in his surprise and sorrow, I well understood
what picture was in his mind, and what construction
he put upon my sudden desire to solitude.
“My dear Philip!” he began, speaking with difficulty
from the stickiness of the candy in his teeth,
“your respected mother—”
At this instant a kervas, preceding a Turk of rank,
jostled suddenly against him, and as the mounted Mussulman,
with his train of runners and pipe-bearers,
came sweeping by, I took the opportunity of Job's surprise
to slip past with the rest, and, turning down an
alley, quietly mounted one of the saddle-horses standing
for hire at the first mosque, and pursued my way
alone to the shop of the attar-merchant. To dismount
and hurry Mustapha into his inner and private apartment,
with an order to the Nubian to deny me to everybody
who should inquire, was the work of a minute,
but it was scarcely done before I heard Job breathless
at the door.
“Ha visto il signore?” he exclaimed, getting to the
back of the shop with a single stride.
“Effendi, no!” said the imperturbable Turk, and he
laid his hand on his heart, as he advanced, and offered
him with grave courtesy the pipe from his lips.
The Jew had come puffing into the shop with his
slippers in his hand, and dropping upon his hams near
the door, he took off his small grey turban, and was
when Job darted again into the street with a
sign to him to follow. The look of despair and exhaustion
with which he shook out his baggy trowsers
and made after the striding Yankee, was too much even
for the gravity of Mustapha. He laid aside his pipe,
and, as the Nubian struck in with the peculiar cackle
of his race, I joined myself in their meriment with a
heartiness to which many a better joke might have
failed to move me.
While Mustapha was concluding his laugh between
the puffs of his amber pipe, I had thrown myself along
the divan, and was studying with some curiosity the
inner apartment in which I had been concealed. A
curtain of thick but tarnished gold cloth (as sacred
from intrusion in the East as the bolted and barred
doors of Europe) separated from the outer shop a
small octagonal room, that, in size and furniture, resembled
the Turkish boudoirs, which, in the luxurious
palaces of Europe, sometimes adjoin a lady's chamber.
The slippered foot was almost buried in the rich carpets
laid, but not fitted to the floor. The divans were
covered with the flowered and lustrous silk of Brusa,
and piled with vari-colored cushions. A perpetual
spice-lamp sent up its thin wreaths of smoke to the
black and carved ceiling, diffusing through the room a
perfume which, while it stole to the innermost fibres of
the brain with a sense of pleasure, weighed on the eyelids
and relaxed the limbs; and as the eye became more
accustomed to the dim light which struggled in from a
window in the arched ceiling, and dissolved in the luxurious
and spicy atmosphere, heaps of the rich shawls
of the East became distinguishable with their sumptuous
dyes, and, in a corner, stood a cluster of crystal
narghiles, faintly reflecting the light in their dim globes
of rose water, while costly pipes, silver-mounted pistols,
added gorgeousness to the apartment.
Mustapha was a bit of a philosoper in his way, and
he had made his own observations on the Europeans
who came to his shop. The secluded and oriental luxuriousness
of the room I have described was one of
his lures to that passion for the picturesque which he
saw in every traveler; and another was his gigantic
Nubian, who, with bracelets and anklets of gold, a
white turban, and naked legs and arms, stood always
at the door of his shop, inviting the passers-by---not to
buy essences and pastilles---but to come in and take
sherbet with his master. You will have been an hour
upon his comfortable divans, have smoked a pipe or
two, and eaten a snowy sherbet or a dish of rice-paste
and sugar, before Mustapha nods to his slave, and produces
his gold-rimmed jars of essences, from which,
with his fat forefinger, he anoints the palm of your
hand, or, with a compliment to the beauty of your hair,
throws a drop into the curl on your temples. Meanwhile,
as you smoke, the slave lays in the bowl of your
pipe a small pastille wrapped in gold leaf, from which
presently arrives to your nostrils a perfume that might
delight a Sultan; and then, from the two black hands
which are held to you full of cubical-edged phials with
gilded stoppers, you are requested with the same bland
courtesy to select such as in size or shape suit your
taste and convenience---the smallest of them, when
filled with attar, worth near a gold piastre.
This is not very ruinous, and your next temptation
comes in the shape of a curiously-wrought censer,
upon the filagree grating of which is laid strips of odorent
wood which, with the heat of the coals beneath,
give out a perfume like gums from Araby. This,
Mustapha swears to you by his beard, has a spell in its
spicy breath provocative as a philtre, and is to be burnt
in your lady's chamber. It is worth its weight in
to pay a price which would freight a caique
with cinnamon. Then come bracelets, and amulets,
and purses, all fragrant and precious, and, while you
hesitate, the Nubian brings you coffee that would open
the heart of Shylock, and you drink and purchase.
And when you have spent all your money, you go away
delighted with Mustapha, and quite persuaded that you
are vastly obliged to him. And, all things considered,
so you are!
When Mustapha had finished his prayers, (did I say
that it was noon?) he called in the Nubian to roll up
the sacred carpet, and then closing the curtain between
us and the shop, listened patiently to my story of the
Gipsy, which I told him faithfully from the beginning.
When I arrived at the incident on board the slaver, a
sudden light seemed to strike upon his mind.
“Pekhe, filio mio! pekhe!” he exclaimed, running
his forefinger down the middle of his beard, and pouring
out a volume of smoke from his mouth and nostrils
which obscured him for a moment from my sight.
(I dislike the introduction of foreign words into a
story, but the Turkish dissyllable in the foregoing sentence
is as constantly on an Eastern lip as the amber
of the pipe.)
He clapped his hands as I finished my narration,
and the Nubian appeared. Some conversation passed
between them in Turkish, and the slave tightened his
girdle, made a salaam, and, taking his slippers at the
outer door, left the shop.
We shall find her at the slave market,” said Mustapha.
I started. The thought had once or twice passed
through my mind, but I had as often rejected it as impossible.
A freeborn Zingara, and on a confidential
errand from her own mother!---I did not see how her
freedom, if there were danger, should have been so
carelessly put in peril.
“And if she is there!” said I; remembering, first,
that it was against the Mahommedan law for a Christian
to purchase a slave, and next, that the price, if it did
not ruin me at once, would certainly leave me in a situation
rather to lessen than increase my expenses.
“I will buy her for you,” said Mustapha.
The Nubian returned at this moment, and laid at my
feet a bundle of wearing apparel. He then took from
a shelf a shaving apparatus, with which he proceeded
to lather my forehead and temples, and after a short
argument with Mustapha, in which I pleaded in vain
for two very seducing clusters of curls, those caressed
minions dropped into the black hand of the slave, and
nothing was left for the petits soins of my thumb and
forefinger in their leisure hours save a well-coaxed and
rather respectable moustache. A skull-cap and turban
completed the transformation of my head, and then,
with some awkardness, I got into a silk shirt, big trowsers,
jacket, and slippers, and stood up to look at myself
in the mirror. I was as like one of the common Turks
of the street as possible, save that the European cravat
and stockings had preserved an unoriental whiteness in
my neck and ankles. This was soon remedied with
a little brown juice, and after a few cautions from
Mustapha as to my behavior, I settled my turban and
followed him into the street.
It is a singular sensation to be walking about in a
strange costume, and find that nobody looks surprised.
I could not avoid a slight feeling of mortification at
the rude manner with which every dirty Mussulman
took the wall of me. After long travel in foreign
lands, the habit of everywhere exciting notice as a
stranger, and the species of consequence attached to
the person and movements of a traveler, become
rather pleasures than otherwise, and it is not without
people. I have not yet returned to my own land,
(Slingsby is an American, gentle reader,) and cannot
judge, therefore, how far this feeling is modified by
the pleasures of a recovered home; but I was vexed
not to be stared at when playing the Turk at Constantinople,
and, amusing as it was to be taken for an
Englishman on first arriving in England, (different as
it is from every land I have seen, and still more different
from my own,) I must confess to have experienced
again a feeling of lessened consequence, when, on my
first entrance into an hotel in London, I was taken for
an Oxonian “come up for a lark” in term time. Perhaps
I have stumbled in this remark upon one of those
unconfessed reasons why a returned traveler is proverbially
discontented with his home.
Whether Mustapha wished to exhibit his new pipe-bearer
to his acquaintances, or whether there was fun
enough in his obese composition to enjoy my difficulties
in adapting myself to my new circumstances, I
cannot precisely say; but I soon found that we were
not going straight to the slave-market. I had several
times forgotten my disguise so far as to keep the narrow
walk till I stood face to face with the bearded
Mussulmen, who were only so much astonished at my
audacity that they forgot to kick me over the gutter;
and passing, in the bazaar of saddle-cloths, an English
officer of my acquaintance, who belonged to the
corvette lying in the Bosphorus, I could not resist the
temptation of whispering in his ear the name of his
sweetheart, (which he had confided to me over a bottle
at Smyrna,) though I rather expected to be seized
by the turban the next moment, with the pleasant consequences
of a mob and an exposure. My friend was
so thoroughly amazed, however, that I was deep in
the crowd before he had drawn breath, and I look
daily now for his arrival in England, (I have not seen
a “blackguard Turk” knew anything of the lock of
hair he carried in his waistcoat pocket.
The essence-seller had stopped in the book-bazaar,
and was condescendingly smoking a pipe, with his
legs crossed on the counter of a venerable Armenian,
who sat buried to the chin in his own wares, when
who should come pottering along (as Mrs. Butler would
say) but Job with his Jew behind him. Mustapha
(probably unwilling to be seen smoking with an Armenian)
had ensconced himself behind a towering
heap of folios, and his vexed and impatient pipe-bearer
had taken his more humble position on the narrow
base of one of the chequered columns which are peculiar
to the bazaar devoted to the bibliopolists. As
my friend came floundering along “all abroad” with
his legs and arms, as usual, I contrived, by an adroit
insertion of one of my feet between his, to spread him
over the musty tomes of the Armenian in a way calculated
to derange materially the well-ordered sequence
of the volumes.
“Allah! Mashallah!” exclaimed Mustapha, whose
spreading lap was filled with black-letter copies of the
Khoran, while the bowl of his pipe was buried in the
fallen pyramid.
“Bestia Inglese!” muttered the Armenian, as Job
put one hand in the inkstand in endeavoring to rise,
and with the next effort laid his blackened fingers on
a heap of choice volumes bound in snowy vellum.
The officious Jew took up the topmost copy, marked
like a cinq-foil with his spreading thumb and fingers,
and quietly asked the Armenian what Il Signore would
be expected to pay. As I knew he had no money in
his pocket, I calculated safely on this new embarrassment
to divert his anger from the original cause of his
overthrow.
“Tre colonati,” said the bookseller.
Job opened the book, and his well-known guttural
of surprise and delight assured me that I might come
out from behind the column and look over his shoulder.
It was an illuminated copy of Hafiz, with a
Latin translation,—a treasure which his heart had
been set upon from our first arrival in the East,
and for which I well knew he would sell his coat
off his back without hesitation. The desire to give
it him passed through my mind, but I could see
no means, under my present circumstances, either
of buying the book or relieving him from his embarrassment;
and as he buried his nose deeper between
the leaves, and sat down on the low counter,
forgetful alike of his dilemma and his lost friend, I
nodded to Mustapha to get off as quietly as possible,
and, fortunately slipping past both him and the
Jew unrecognized, left him to finish the loves of
Gulistan and settle his account with the incensed
Armenian.
2. II.
As we entered the gates of the slave-market, Mustapha
renewed his cautions to me with regard to my conduct,
reminded me that, as a Christian, I should see the
white female slaves at the peril of my life, and immediately
assumed, himself, a sauntering and poco-curante
manner, equally favorable to concealment and to his
interests as a purchaser. I followed close at his heels
with his pipe, and, as he stopped to chat with his acquaintances,
I now and then gave a shove with the bowl
between his jacket and girdle, rendered impatient to the
last degree by the sight of the close lattices on every side
of us, and the sounds of the chattering voices within.
I should have been interested, had I been a mere
spectator, in the scene about me, but Mustapha's unnecessary
and provoking delay, while, (as I thought possible,
be bartered for at that moment within, wound my rage
to a pitch at last scarcely endurable.
We had come up from a cellar to which one of Mustapha's
acquaintances had taken him to see a young
white lad he was about to purchase, and I was hoping
that my suspense was nearly over, when a man came forward
into the middle of the court, ringing a hand-bell,
and followed by a black girl, covered with a scant blanket.
Like most of her race (she was an Abyssinian,) her
head was that of a brute, but never were body and limbs
more exquisitely moulded. She gazed about without
either surprise or shame, stepping after the crier with
an elastic, leopard-like tread, her feet turned in like
those of the North American Indian, her neck bent
gracefully forward, and her shoulders and hips working
with that easy play so lost in the constrained dress and
motion of civilized women. The Mercury of Giovanni
di Bologna springs not lighter from the jet of the fountain
that did this ebon Venus from the ground on which
she stood.
I ventured to whisper to Mustapha, that, under cover
of the sale of the Abyssinian, we might see the white
slaves more unobserved.
A bid was made for her.
“Fifteen piastres!” said the attar-seller, wholly absorbed
in the sale, and not hearing a syllable I said to
him, “She would be worth twice as much to gild my
pastilles!” And handing me his pipe, he waddled into
the centre of the court, lifted the blanket from the slave's
shoulders, turned her round and round, like a Venus
on a pivot, looked at her teeth and hands, and after a
conversation aside with the crier, he resumed his pipe,
and the black disappeared from the ground.
“I have bought her!” he said, with a salacious grin,
Italian execration in his ear.
The idea that Maimuna might have become the
property of that gross and sensual monster just as easily
as the pretty negress he had bought, sent my blood boiling
for an instant to my cheek. Yet I had seen this
poor savage of seventeen sold without a thought, save
mental congratulation that she would be better fed and
clad. What a difference one's private feelings make
in one's sympathies!
I was speculating, in a kind of tranquil despair, on
the luxurious evils of slavery, when Mustapha called to
him an Egyptian, in a hooded blue cloak, whom I remembered
to have seen on board the Trebisondian.
He was a small-featured, black-lipped, willowy Asiatic,
with heavy-lidded eyes, and hands as dry and rusty as
the claws of a harpy. After a little conversation, he
rose from the platform on which he had crossed his
legs, and taking my pro-tempore master by the sleeve,
traversed the quadrangle to a closed door in the best-looking
of the miserable houses that surrounded the
court. I followed close upon his heels with a beating
heart. It seemed to me as if every eye in the crowded
market-place must penetrate my disguise. He knocked,
and answering to some one who spoke from within,
the door was opened, and the next moment I found myself
in the presence of a dozen veiled women, seated in
various attitudes on the floor. At the command of our
conductor, carpets were brought for Mustapha and himself;
and, as they dropped upon their hams, every veil
was removed, and a battery of staring and unwinking
eyes was levelled full upon us.
“Is she here?” said Mustapha to me in Italian, as I
stooped over to hand him his eternal pipe.
“Dio mio! no!”
I felt insulted, that with half a glance at the Circassian
me the question. Yet they were handsome! Red
cheeks, white teeth, black eyes, and youth could scarce
compose a plain woman; and thus much of beauty
seemed equally bestowed on all.
“Has he no more?” I asked, stooping to Mustapha's
ear.
I looked around while he was getting the information
I wanted in his own deliberate way; and, scarce
knowing what I did, applied my eye to a crack in the
wall, through which had been coming for some time a
strong aroma of coffee. I saw at first only a small dim
room, in the midst of which stood a Turkish manghal,
or brazier of coals, sustaining the coffee-pot from which
came the agreeable perfume I had inhaled. As my
eye became accustomed to the light, I could distinguish
a heap of what I took to be shawls lying in the centre
of the floor; and presuming it was the dormitory of one
of the slave-owners, I was about turning my head away,
when the coffee on the manghal suddently boiled over,
and at the same instant started, from the heap at which
I had been gazing, the living form of Maimuna!
“Mustapha!” I cried, starting back, and clasping
my hands before him.
Before I could utter another word, a grasp upon my
ankle, that drew blood with every nail, restored me to
my self-possession. The Circassians began to giggle,
and the wary old Turk, taking no apparent notice of
my agitation, ordered me, in a stern tone, to fill his
pipe, and went on conversing with the Egyptian.
I leaned with an effort at carelessness against the
wall, and looked once more through the crevice. She
stood by the manghal, filling a cup with a small filagree-holder
from the coffee-pot, and by the light of the
fire I could see every feature of her face as distinctly
as daylight. She was alone, and had been sitting
now fallen to her shoulders, drawn over her till it concealed
her feet. A narrow carpet was beneath her,
and as she moved from the fire, a slight noise drew my
attention downward, and I saw that she was chained by
the ankle to the floor. I stooped to the ear of Mustapha,
told him in a whisper of my discovery, and implored
him, for the love of heaven, to get admission
into her apartment.
“Pekhe! pekhe! filio mio!” was the unsatisfactory
answer to my impatience, while the Egyptian rose and
proceeded to turn round, in the light of the window,
the fattest of the fair Circassians, from whom he had
removed every article of dress save her slippers and
trousers.
I returned to the crevice. Maimuna had drunk her
coffee, and stood, with her arms folded, thoughtfully
gazing on the fire. The expression in her beautiful
and youthful face was one I could scarcely read to my
satisfaction. The slight lips were firmly but calmly
compressed, the forehead untroubled, the eye alone
strained, and unnaturally fixed and lowering. I
looked at her with the heart beating like a hammer in
my bosom, and an impatience in my trembling limbs
which it required every consideration of prudence to
suppress. She moved slowly away at last, and sinking
again to her carpet, drew out the chain from beneath
her, and drawing the shawl once more over her
head, lay down, and sunk apparently to sleep.
Mustapha left the Circassian, whose beauties he had
risen to examine more nearly, and came to my side.
“Are you sure that it is she?” he asked, in an almost
inaudible whisper.
“Si!”
He took the pipe from my hand, and requested me,
in the same suppressed voice, to return to his shop.
“And Maimuna”—
His only answer was to point to the door, and thinking
it best to obey his orders implicitly, I made the
best of my way out of the slave-market, and was soon
drinking a sherbet in his inner apartment, and listening
to the shuffle of every passing slipper for the coming
of the light step of the Gipsy.
3. III.
The rules of good-breeding discountenance in society
what is usually called “a scene.” I detest it as
well on paper. There is no sufficient reason, apparent
to me, why my sensibilities should be drawn upon
at sight, as I read, any more than when I please myself
by following my own devices in company. Violent
sensations are, abstractly as well as conventionally,
ill-bred. They derange the serenity, fluster the manner,
and irritate the complexion. It is for this reason
that I forbear to describe the meeting between Maimuna
and myself after she had been bought for forty
pounds by the wily and worthy seller of essences and
pastilles—how she fell on my neck when she discovered
that I, and not Mustapha, was her purchaser and master—how
she explained, between her hysterical sobs,
that the Turk who had sold her to the slave-dealer was
a renegade gipsy, and her mother's brother (to whom
she had been on an errand of affection)—and how she
sobbed herself to sleep with her face in the palms of
my hands, and her masses of raven hair covering my
knees and feet like the spreading fountains of San Pietro—and
how I pressed my lips to the starry parting
of those raven tresses on the top of her fairest head,
and blessed the relying child as she slept—are circumstances,
you will allow, my dear Madam! that could
not be told passably well without moving your amiable
tenderness to tears. You will consider this paragraph,
the awkward angles of my story, than as a polite and
praise-worthy consideration of your feelings and complexion.
Flushed eyelids are so very unbecoming!
4. IV.
My confidential interviews with Job began to take
rather an unpleasant coloring. The forty pounds I
had paid for Miamuna's liberty, with the premium to
Mustapha, the suit of European clothes necessary to
disguise my new companion, and the addition of a third
person in our European lodgings at Pera, rather
drove my finances to the wall. Job cared very little
for the loss of his allowance of pocket-money, and
made no resistance to eating kibaubs at a meat-shop,
instead of his usual silver fork and French dinner at
Madame Josepino's. He submitted with the same resignation
to a one-oared caique on the Bosphorus, and
several minor reductions in his expenses, thinking
nothing a hardship, in short, which I shared cheerfully
with him. He would have donned the sugar-loaf hat
of a dervish, and begged his way home by Jerusalem
or Mecca, so only I was content. But the morality of
the thing!
“What will you do with this beautiful girl when
you get to Rome? how will you dispose of her in
Paris? how will your friends receive a female, already
arrived at the age of womanhood, who shall have traveled
with you two or three years on the continent?
how will you provide for her? how educate her? how
rid yourself of her, with any Christian feeling of compassion,
when she has become irrevocably attached to
you?”
We were pulling up to the Symplegades while my
plain-spoken Mentor thrust me these home questions,
and Maimuna sat coiled between my feet in the bottom
seemed as if they would search my very soul for the
cause of my emotion. We seldom spoke English in
her presence, for the pain it gave her when she felt
excluded from the conversation amounted in her all-expressive
features to a look of anguish that made it
seem to me a cruelty. She dared not ask me, in
words, why I was vexed; but she gathered from Job's
tone that there was reproof in what he said, and
flashing a glance of inquiring anger at his serious face,
she gently stole her hand under the cloak to mine, and
laid the back of it softly in my palm. There was a
delicacy and a confidingness in the motion that started
a tear into my eye; and as I smiled through it, and
drew her to me and impressed a kiss on her forehead,
I inwardly resolved, that, as long as that lovely creature
should choose to eat of my bread, it should be
free to her in all honor and kindness, and, if need
were, I would supply to her, with the devotion of my
life, the wrong and misconstruction of the world.
As I turned over that leaf in my heart, there crept
through it a breath of peace, and I felt that my
good angel had taken me into favor. Job began
to fumble for the lunch, and the dancing caique shot
forth merrily into the Black Sea.
“My dearest chum!” said I, as we sat round our
brown paper of kibaubs on the highest point of the
Symplegades, “you see yourself here at the outermost
limit of your travels.”
His mouth was full, but as soon as he could conveniently
swallow, he responded with the appropriate sigh.
“Six thousand miles, more or less, lie between you
and your spectacled and respectable mother; but
nineteen thousand, the small remainder of the earth's
circumference, extending due east from this paper
of cold meat, remain to you untraveled!”
Job fixed his eye on a white sea-bird apparently
asleep on the wing, but diving away eastward into the
sky, as if it were the heart within us sped onward with
our boundless wishes.
“Do you not envy him?” he asked enthusiastically.
“Yes; for nature pays his traveling expenses, and
I would our common mother were as considerate to
me! How soon, think you, he will see Trebisond,
posting at that courier speed?”
“And Shiraz, and Isaphan, and the valley of Cashmere!
To think how that stupid bird will fly over
them, and, spite of all that Hafiz, and Saadi, and Tom
Moore have written on the lands that his shadow may
glide through, will return, as wise as he went, to Marmora!
To compound natures with him were a nice
arrangement, now!”
“You would be better looking, my dear Job!”
“How very unpleasant you are, Mr. Slingsby! But
really, Philip, to cast the slough of this expensive and
il-locomotive humanity, and find yourself afloat with
all the necessary apparatus of life stowed snugly into
breast and tail, your legs tucked quietly away under you,
and, instead of coat and unmentionables to be put off
and on and renewed at such inconvenient expense, a
self-renewing tegument of cleanly feathers, brushed
and washed in the common course of nature by wind
and rain—no valet to be paid and drilled—no dressing-case
to be supplied and left behind—no tooth-brushes
to be mislaid—no tight boots—no corns—no passports
nor posthorses! Do you know, Phil, on reflection, I
find this `mortal coil' a very inferior and inconvenient
apparatus!
“If you mean your own, I quite agree with you.”
“I am surprised, Mr. Slingsby, that you, who value
yourself on knowing what is due from one highly-civilized
individual to another, should indulge in these
very disagreeable reflections!”
Maimuna did not quite comprehend the argument,
but she saw that the tables were turned, and, without
ill-will to Job, she paid me the compliment of always
taking my side. I felt her slender arm around my
neck, and as she got upon her knees behind me and
put forward her little head to get a peep at my lips, her
clear bird-like laugh of enjoyment and triumph added
visibly to my friend's mortification. A compunctious
visiting stole over me, and I began to feel that I should
scarce have revenged myself for what was, after all,
but a kind severity;
“Do you know, Job,” said I, (anxious to restore his
self-complacency without a direct apology for my rudeness,)
“do you know there is a very deep human truth
hidden in the familiar story of `Beauty and the Beast?'
I really am of opinion, that, between the extremes of
hideousness and the highest perfection of loveliness,
there is no face which, after a month's intercourse,
does not depend exclusively on its expression (or, in
other words, on the amiable qualities of the individual)
for the admiration it excites. The plainest features
become handsome unaware when associated only with
kind feelings, and the loveliest face disagreeable when
linked with ill-humor or caprice. People should remember
this when selecting a face which they are to
see every morning across the breakfast-table for the remainder
of their natural lives.”
Job was appeased by the indirect compliment contained
in this speech; and, gathering up our kibaubs,
we descended to the caique, and pulling around the
easternmost point of the Symplegades, bade adieu to
the Orient, and took the first step westward with the
smile of conciliation on our lips.
We were soon in the strong current of the Bosphorus,
and shot swiftly down between Europe and Asia,
by the light of a sunset that seemed to brighten the
West for our return. It was a golden path homeward.
our far-away kinsmen seemed sent to us on those purpling
clouds, winning us back. Beneath that kindling
horizon---below that departed sun---lay the fresh and
free land of our inheritance. The light of the world
seemed gone over to it. These, from which the day
had declined, were countries of memory---ours, of
hope. The sun, that was setting on these, was dawning
gloriously on ours.
On ordinary occasions, Job would have given me a
stave of “Hail, Columbia!” after such a burst of patriotism.
The cloud was on his soul, however.
“We have turned to go back,” he said, in a kind of
musing bitterness, “and see what we are leaving behind!
In this fairly-shaped boat you are gliding like a
dream down the Bosphorus. The curving shore of
Therapia yonder is fringed for miles with the pleasure-loving
inhabitants of this delicious land, who think a
life too short, of which the highest pleasure is to ramble
on the edge of these calm waters with their kinsmen
and children. Is there a picture in the world
more beautiful than that palace-lined shore? Is there
a city so magnificent under the sun as that in which it
terminates? Are there softer skies, greener hills,
simpler or better people, to live among, than these?
Oh, Philip! ours, with all its freedom, is a `working-day'
land. There is no idleness there! The sweat is
ever on the brow, the `serpent of care' never loosened
about the heart! I confess myself a worshipper of leisure:
I would let no moment of my golden youth go by
unrecorded with a pleasure. Toil is ungodlike, and unworthy
of the immortal spirit, that should walk unchained
through the world. I love these idle Orientals.
Their sliding and haste-forbidding slippers, their flowing
and ungirded habiliments, are signs most expressive
of their joy in life. Look around, and see how on
every hill-top stands a maison de plaisance; how every
of their habits of enjoyment! Rich or poor,
their pleasures are the same. The open air, freedom
to roam, a caique at the water-side, and a sairgah on
the hill---these are their means of happiness, and they
are within the reach of all; they are nearer Utopia
than we, my dear Philip! We shall be more like
Turks than Christians in Paradise!”
“Inglorious Job!”
“Why? Because I love idleness? Are there
braver people in the world than the Turks? Are there
people more capable of the romance of heroism?
Energy, though it sound a paradox, is the child of idleness.
All extremes are natural and easy; and the
most indolent in peace is likely to be the most fiery in
war. Here we are, opposite the summer serai of Sultan
Mahmoud; and who more luxurious and idle?
Yet the massacre of the Janissaries was one of the
boldest measures in history. There is the most perfect
Orientalism in the description of the Persian beauty by
Hafiz:---
`Her heart is full of passion, and her eyes are full of sleep.'
analysis of the character of what is called an indolent
man. With all the tastes I have just professed, my
strongest feeling on leaving the Symplegades, for example,
was, and is still, an unwillingness to retrace my
steps. `Onward! onward!' is the perpetual cry of
land, so only that every successive one was new. Italy
will be old to us; France, Germany, can scarce lure
the imagination to adventure, with the knowledge we
have; and England, though we have not seen it, is so
familiar to us from its universality that it will not seem,
even on a first visit, a strange country. We have satiety
before us, and the thought saddens me. I hate to
go back. I could start now, with Maimuna for a
guide, and turn gipsy in the wilds of Asia.”
“Will you go with him, Maimuna?”
“Signor, no!”
I am the worst of story-tellers, gentle reader; for I
never get to the end. The truth is, that in these rambling
papers, I go over the incidents I describe, not as
they should be written in a romance, but as they occurred
in my travels: I write what I remember. There
are, of course, long intervals in adventure, filled up
sometimes by feasting or philosophy, sometimes with
idleness or love; and, to please myself, I must unweave
the thread as it was woven. It is strange how, in the
memory of a traveler, the most wayside and unimportant
things are the best remembered. You may
have stood in the Parthenon, and, looking back upon
it through the distance of years, a chance word of the
companion who happened to be with you, or the attitude
of a Greek seen in the plain below, may come up
more vividly to the recollection than the immortal
sculptures on the frieze. There is a natural antipathy
in the human mind to fulfil expectations. We wander
from the thing we are told to admire, to dwell on
something we have discovered ourselves. The child
in church occupies itself with the fly on its prayerbook,
and “the child is father of the man.” If I indulge
in the same perversity in story-telling, dear
reader,---if, in the most important crisis of my tale, I
close even, the climax seem incomplete, and the moral
vain,---I plead, upon all these counts, an adherence to
truth and nature. Life---real life---is made up of half-finished
romance. The most interesting procession of
events is delayed, and travestied, and mixed with the
ridiculous and the trifling, and at the end, oftenest left
imperfect. Who ever saw, off the stage, a five act
tragedy, with its proprieties and its climax?
All around Constantinople are seen what are called sairgahs—
small greensward platforms levelled in the side of a hill, and usually
commanding some lovely view, intended as spots on which those who
are abroad for pleasure may spread their carpets. I know nothing so
expressive as this of the simple and natural lives led by these gentle
Orientals.
| Inklings of adventure | |