University of Virginia Library

107. LETTER CVII.

Unsightly as the camel is, with its long snaky
neck, its frightful hump, and its awkward legs and action,
it wins much upon your kindness with a little
acquaintance. Its eye is exceedingly fine. There is
a lustrous, suffused softness in the large hazel orb that
is the rarest beauty in a human eye, and so remarkable
is this feature in the camel, that I wonder it has
never fallen into use as a poetical simile. They do
not shun the gaze of man like other animals, and I
pleased myself often when the suridjee slackened his
pace, with riding close to some returning caravan, and
exchanging steady looks in passing with the slow-paced
camels. It was like meeting the eye of a kind old
man.

The face of Mount Sypilus, in its whole extent, is
excavated into sepulchres. They are mostly ancient,
and form a very singular feature in the scenery. A
range of precipices, varying from one to three hundred
feet in height, is perforated for twenty miles with these
airy depositories for the dead, many of them a hundred
feet from the plain. Occasionally they are extended
to considerable caves, hewn with great labor in
the rock, and probably from their numerous niches,
intended as family sepulchres. They are now the
convenient eyries of great numbers of eagles, which
circle continually around the summits, and poise
themselves on the wing along the sides of these lonely
mountains, in undisturbed security.

We arrived early in the afternoon at Casabar, a
pretty town at the foot of Mount Tmolus. Having
eaten a melon, the only thing for which the place is
famous, we proposed to go on to Achmet-lee, some
three hours farther. The suridjee, however, whose
horses were hired by the day, had made up his mind
to sleep at Casabar, and so we were at issue. Our
stock of Turkish was soon exhausted, and the haji
was coolly unbuckling the girths of the aphorse
without condescending even to answer our appeal
with a look. The mussulman idlers of the café
opposite, took their pipes from their mouths and
smiled. The gay caféjee went about his arrangements
for our accommodation, quite certain that we were
there for the night. I had given up the point myself,
when one of my companions, with a look of the most

confident triumph, walked up to the suridjee, and tapping
him on the shoulder, held before his eyes a paper
with the seal of the pacha of Smyrna in broad characters
at the top. After the astonished Turk had
looked at it for a moment, he commenced in good
round English, and poured upon him a volume of incoherent
rhapsody, slapping the paper violently with
his hand and pointing to the road. The effect was instantaneous.
The girth was hastily rebuckled, and
the frightened suridjee put his hand to his head in token
of submission, mounted in the greatest hurry and
rode out of the court of the caravanserai. The caféjee
made his salaam, and the spectators wished us respectfully
a good journey. The magic paper was an
old passport, and our friend had calculated securely on
the natural dread of the incomprehensible, quite sure
that there was not more than one man in the village
that could read, and none short of Smyrna who could
understand his English.

The plain between Casabar and Achmet-lee, is quite
a realization of poetry. It is twelve miles of soft,
bright green-sward, broken only with clumps of luxuriant
oleanders, an occasional cluster of the “black
tents of Kedar” with their flocks about them, and here
and there a loose and grazing camel indolently lifting
his broad foot from the grass as if he felt the coolness
and verdure to its spongy core. One's heart seems
to stay behind as he rides onward through such
places.

The village of Achmet-lee consists of a coffee-house
with a single room. We arrived about sunset,
and found the fireplace surrounded by six or seven
Turks squatted on their hams, travellers like ourselves,
who had arrived before us. There was fortunately a
second fireplace, which was soon blazing with fagots
of fir and oleander, and with a pilaw between us, we
crooked our tired legs under us on the earthen floor,
and made ourselves as comfortable as a total absence
of every comfort would permit. The mingled smoke
of tobacco and the chimney drove me out of doors as
soon as our greasy meal was finished, and the contrast
was enough to make one in love with nature.
The moon was quite full, and pouring her light down
through the transparent and dazzling sky of the east
with indescribable splendor. The fires of twenty or
thirty caravans were blazing in the fields around, and
the low cries of the camels and the hum of voices
from the various groups, were mingled with the sound
of a stream that came noisily down its rocky channel
from the nearest spur of Mount Tmolus. I walked
up and down the narrow camel-path till midnight;
and if the kingly spirits of ancient Lydia did not keep
me company in the neighborhood of their giant graves,
it was perhaps because the feet that trod down their
ashes came from a world of which Crœsus and Abyattis
never heard.

The sin of late rising is seldom chargeable upon an
earthen bed, and we were in the saddle by sunrise,
breathing an air that, after our smoky cabin, was like
a spice-wind from Arabia. Winding round the base
of the chain of mountains which we had followed for
twenty or thirty miles, we ascended a little, after a
brisk trot of two or three hours, and came in sight of
the citadel of ancient Sardis, perched like an eagle's
nest on the summit of a slender rock. A natural terrace,
perhaps a hundred feet above the plain, expanded
from the base of the hill, and this was the commanding
site of the capital of Lydia. Dividing us
from it ran the classic and “golden-sanded” Pactolus,
descending from the mountains in a small, narrow valley,
covered with a verdure so fresh, that it requires
some power of fancy to realize that a crowded empire
ever swarmed on its borders. Crossing the small,
bright stream, we rode along the other bank, winding
up its ascending curve, and dismounted at the ruins
of the temple of Cybele, a heap of gigantic frag
ments strewn confusedly over the earth, with two majestic
columns rising lone and beautiful into the air.

A Dutch artist, who was of our party, spread his
drawing-board and pencils upon one of the fallen
Ionic capitals, the suridjee tied his horses' heads together,
and laid himself at his length upon the grass,
and the rest of us ascended the long steep hill to the
citadel. With some loss of breath, and a battle with
the dogs of a gipsy encampment, hidden so as almost
to be invisible among the shrubbery of the hill-side,
we stood at last upon a peak, crested with one tottering
remnant of a wall, the remains of a castle whose
foundations have crumbled beneath it. It looks as if
the next rain must send the whole mass into the valley.

It puzzled my unmilitary brain to conceive how
Alexander and his Macedonians climbed these airy
precipices, if taking the citadel was a part of his conquest
of Lydia. The fortifications in the rear have a
sheer descent from their solid walls of two or three
hundred perpendicular feet, with scarce a vine clinging
by the way. I left my companions discussing the
question, and walked to the other edge of the hill,
overlooking the immense plains below. The tumuli
which mark the sepulchres of the kings of Lydia, rose
like small hills on the opposite and distant bank of the
Hermus. The broad fields, which were once the
“wealth of Crœsus,” lay still fertile and green along
the banks of their historic river. Thyatira and Philadelphia
were almost within reach of my eye, and I
stood upon Sardis — in the midst of the sites of the
Seven Churches. Below lay the path of the myriad
armies of Persia, on their march to Greece; here
Alexander pitched his tents after the battle of Granicus,
wiling away the winter in the lap of captive
Lydia: and over the small ruin just discernible on the
southern bank of the Pactolus, “the angel of the
church of Sardis” brooded with his protecting wings
till the few who had “not defiled their garments,” were
called to “walk in white,” in the promised reward of
the apocalypse.

We descended again to the temple of Cybele, and
mounting our horses, rode down to the palace of
Crœsus. Parts of the outer walls, the bases of the
portico, and the marble steps of an inner court, are all
that remain of the splendor that Solon was called upon
in vain to admire. With the permission of six or
seven storks, whose coarse nests were built upon the
highest points of the ruins, we selected the broadest
of the marble blocks, lying in the deserted area, and
spreading our traveller's breakfast upon it, forgot even
the kingly builder in our well-earned appetites.

There are three parallel walls remaining of the ancient
church of Sardis. They stand on a gentle slope,
just above the edge of the Pactolus, and might easily
be rebuilt into a small chapel, with only the materials
within them. There are many other ruins on the site
of the city, but none designated by a name. We loitered
about, collecting relics, and indulging our fancies,
till the suridjee reminded us of the day's journey
before us, and with a drink from the Pactolus, and a
farewell look at the beautiful Ionic columns standing
on its lonely bank, we put spurs to our horses and galloped
once more down into the valley.

Our Turkish saddles grew softer on the third day's
journey, and we travelled more at ease. I found the
freedom and solitude of the wide and unfenced country
growing at every mile more upon my liking. The
heart expands as one gives his horse the rein and gallops
over these wild paths without toll-gate or obstacle.
I can easily understand the feeling of Ali Bey
on his return to Europe from the east.

Our fourth day's journey lay through the valley between
Tmolus and Semering — the fairest portion of
the dominion of Timour the Tartar. How gracefully
shaped were those slopes to the mountains! How
bright the rivers! How green the banks! How like

a new created and still unpeopled world it seemed,
with every tree and flower and fruit the perfect model
of its kind!

Leaving the secluded village of Nymphi nested in
the mountains on our left, as we approached the end
of our circuitous journey, we entered early in the afternoon
the long plains of Hadjilar, and with tired
horses and (malgré romance) and an agreeable anticipation
of Christian beds and supper, we dismounted
in Smyrna at sunset.