University of Virginia Library

99. LETTER XCIX.

I left Constantinople on horseback with a party of
officers, and two American travellers in the east, early
on one of nature's holyday mornings, for Belgrade.
We loitered a moment in the small Armenian cemetery,
the only suburb that separates the thickly crowded
street from the barren heath that stretches away
from the city on every side to the edge of the horizon.
It is singular to gallop thus from the crowded pavement,
at once into an uncultivated and unfenced desert.
We are so accustomed to suburban gardens that
the traveller wonders how the markets of this overgrown
and immense capital are supplied. A glance
back upon the Bosphorus, and toward the Asian shore,
and the islands of the sea of Marmora, explains the
secret. The waters in every direction around this
sea-girdled city are alive with boats, from the larger
kachambas and sandals to the egg-shell caique, swarming
into the Golden Horn in countless numbers, laden
with every vegetable of the productive east. It is
said, however, that it is dangerous to thrive too near the
eye of the sultan. The summary mode for rewarding
favorites and providing for the residence of ambassadors,
by the simple confiscation of the prettiest estate
desirably situated, is thought to have something to do
with the barrenness of the immediate neighborhood.

The Turks carry their contempt of the Christian
even beyond the grave. The funereal cypress, so singularly
beautiful in its native east, is permitted to
throw its dark shadows only upon turbaned tombstones.
The Armenian rayah, the oppressed Greek, and the
more hated Jew, slumber in their unprotected graves
on the open heath. It almost reconciles one to the
haughtiness and cruelty of the Turkish character,
however, to stand on one of the “seven hills” of
Stamboul, and look around upon their own beautiful
cemeteries. On every sloping hill side, in every rural
nook, in the court of the splendid mosque, stands a
dark nekropolis, a small city of the dead, shadowed so
thickly by the close-growing cypresses, that the light
of heaven penetrates but dimly. You can have no
conception of the beauty it adds to the landscape.
And then from the bosom of each, a slender minaret
shoots into the sky as if pointing out the flight of the
departed spirit, and if you enter within its religious
darkness, you find a taste and elegance unknown in
more civilized countries, the humblest headstone lettered
with gold, and the more costly sculptured into
forms the most sumptuous, and fenced and planted
with flowers never neglected.

In the east, the graveyard is not, as with us, a place
abandoned to its dead. Occupying a spot of chosen
loveliness it is resorted to by women and children, and
on holydays by men, whose indolent natures find hap

piness enough in sitting on the green bank around the
resting-place of their relatives and friends. Here,
while their children are playing around them, they
smoke in motionless silence, watching the gay Bosphorus
or the busier curve of the Golden Horn, one
of which is visible from every cemetery in the Stamboul.
Occasionally you see large parties of twenty or
thirty, sitting together, their slight feast of sweetmeats
and sherbet spread in some grassy nook, and the surrounding
headstones serving as leaning-places for the
women, or bounds for the infant gambols of the gayly-dressed
little mussulmans.

Whatever else we may deny the Turk, we must allow
him to possess a genuine love for rural beauty.
The cemeteries we have described, the choice of his
dwelling on the Bosphorus, and his habit of resorting,
whenever he has leisure, to some lovely scene to sit
the livelong day in the sunshine, are proof enough.
And then all over the hills, both in Anatolia and Roumelia,
wherever there is a fine view or a greener spot
than elsewhere, you find the small sairgah, the grassy
platform on which he spreads his carpet, and you may
look in vain for a spot better selected for his purpose.

Things are sooner seen than described (I wish it
were as agreeable to describe as to see them!) and all
this digression, and much more which I spare the
reader, is the fruit of five minutes' reflection while the
suridjee tightens his girths in the Armenian burying-ground.
The turbaned Turk once more in his saddle
then we will canter on some three miles, if you please,
over as naked a heath as the sun looks upon, to the
“Valley of Sweet Waters.” I have described this,
I think, before. We live to learn, and my intelligent
friend tells me, as we draw rein, and wind carefully
down the steep descent, that the site of the sultan's
romantic serai, in the bosom of the valley, was once
occupied by the first printing-press established in Turkey—the
fruit of an embassy to the court of Louis
the fifteenth, by Mehemet Effendi, in the reign of Achmet
the third. And thus having delivered myself of a
fact, a thing for which I have a natural antipathy in
writing, let us gallop up the velvet brink of the Barbyses.

We had kept our small Turkish horses to their
speed for a mile, with the enraged suridjee crying after
us at the top of his voice, “ya-wash! ya-wash!”
(slowly, slowly!) when, at a bend of the valley, right
through the midst of its velvet verdure, came rolling
along an aruba, loaded with ladies. This pretty word
signifies in Turkish a carriage, and the thing itself reminds
you directly of the fantastic vehicles in which
fairy queens come upon the stage. First appear two
gray oxen, with their tails tied to a hoop bent back
from the end of the pole, their heads and horns and
the long curve of the hoop decked with red and yellow
tassels so profusely, that it looks at a distance
like a walking clump of hollyhocks. As you pass
the poor oxen (almost lifted off their hind legs by the
straining of the hoop upon their tails), a four-wheeled
vehicle makes its appearance, the body and wheels
carved elaborately and gilt all over, and the crimson
cover rolled up just so far as to show a cluster of veiled
women, cross-legged upon cushions within, and
riding in perfect silence![27] A eunuch or a very old
Turk walks at the side, and thus the moslem ladies
“take kaif” as it is called—in other words go-a-pleasuring.
But a prettier sight than this gay affair rolling
noiselessly over the pathless green sward of the Valley
of Sweet Waters, you may not see in a year's travel.

A beautiful Englishwoman, mounted (if I may dare
to write it) on a more beautiful Arabian, came flying
toward us as we approached the head of the valley, the
long feathers in her riding-cap all but brushing our
admiring eyes out as she passed, and other living thing
met we none till we drew up in the edge of the forest
of Belgrade. A half hour brought us to a bold descent,
and through the openings in the wood we caught
a glimpse of the celebrated retreat of Lady Montague,
a village, tossed into the lap of as bright a dell as the
sun looks upon in his journey. A lively brook, that
curls about in the grass like a silver flower worked into
the green carpet, overcomes at last its unwillingness
to depart, and vanishes from the fair scene under a
clump of willows; and, as if it knew it was sitting for its
picture, there must needs be a group of girls with
their trowsers tucked up to the knee, washing away so
busily in the brook, that they did not see that half a
dozen Frank horsemen were upon them, and their forgotten
yashmacks all fallen about their shoulders!

We dismounted, and finding (what I never saw before)
a red-headed Frenchman, walking about in his
slippers, we inquired for the house of Lady Montague.
He had never heard of her! A cottage, a little separated
from the village, untenanted, and looking as if it
should be hers, stood on a swell of the valley, and we
found by the scrawled names and effusions of travellers
upon the gates, that we were not mistaken in selecting
it for the shrine of our sentiment.

I am sorry to be obliged to add, that in the romantic
forest of Belgrade, we listened to the calls of mortal
hunger. With some very sour wine, however,
we did drink to the memory of Lady Mary and the
“fair Fatima,” washing down with the same draught
as brown bread as ever I saw, and some very indifferent
filberts.

We mounted once more, and followed our silent
guide across the brook, politely taking it below the
spot where our naiads of the stream were washing,
and following its slender valley for a mile, arrived at one
of the gigantic bendts, for which the place is famous.
To give romance its proper precedence over reality,
however, I must first mention, that on the soft bank
of the artificial lake, which I shall presently describe,
Constantine Ghika, disguised as a shepherd, stole an
interview with the fair Veronica, and in the wild forest
to the right, they wandered till they lost their way;
an adventure of which they only regretted the sequel,
finding it again! If you have not read “The Armenians,”
this pretty turn in my travels is thrown away
upon you.

The valley of Belgrade widens and rounds into a
lake-shaped hollow just here, and across it, to form a
reservoir for the supply of the city by the aqueducts
of Valens and Justinian, is built a gigantic marble wall.
There is no water just now, which, for a lake, is rather
a deficiency; but the vast white wall only stands up
against the sky, bolder and more towering, and coming
suddenly upon it in that lonely place, you might take
it, if the “fine phrensy” were on you, for the barrier
of some enchanted demesne.

We passed on into the forest, winding after an almost
invisible path, up hill and down dale, till we came
to the second bendt. This, and the third, which is
near by, are larger and of more ornamental architecture
than the first, and the forest around them is one in
which, if he turned his back on the lofty walls, a wild
Indian would feel himself at home. I have not seen
such trees since I left America; clear of all underwood,
and the long vistas broken only by the trunk of some
noble oak, fallen aslant, it has for miles the air of a
grand old wilderness, unprofaned by axe or fire. In
the midst of such scenery as this, to ride up to the
majestic bendt, faced with a front like a temple, and
crowned by a marble balustrade, with a salient and raised
crescent in the centre, like a throne for some monarch
of the forest, it must be a more staid imagination
than mine that would not feel a touch of the knight

of La Mancha, and spur up to find a gate, and a bugle
to blow a blast for the warder! It is just the looking
place I imagined for an enchanted castle, when reading
my first romances.

Farther on in the forest we found several circular
structures, like baths, sunk in the earth, with flights
of steps winding to the bottom, but with the same gigantic
trees growing at their very rim, and nothing
near them to show the purpose of their costly masonry.
We stopped to form a conjecture or two with the
aid of the genus loci, but the surly suridjee, probably
at a loss to comprehend the object of looking into a
hole full of dead leaves, chose to put his horse to a
gallop; and having no Veronica to make a romance
of a lost path, we left our conjectures to gallop after.

We reached the waste plains above the city at sunset,
and turned a little out of our way to enter through
the Turkish cemetery (poetically called by Mr. MacFarlane
“death's coronal”), on the summit and sides
of the hill behind Pera. Broad daylight, as it was
still without, it was deep twilight among its thick-planted
cypresses; and our horses, starting at the tall,
white tombstones, hurried through its damp hollows
and emerged on a brow overlooking the bright and
crowded Bosphorus, bathed at the moment in a flood
of sunset glory. I said again, as I reined in my horse
and gazed down upon those lovely waters, there is no
such scene of beauty in the world! And again I say,
“poor Slingsby” never was here!