Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures

REQUIESCANT IN PACE

It is a friendly ordering of the world that the episodes of each man’s life come to him with so vivid a freshness that his own experience (which is nothing but the experience of all his fellows) might be unique in the history of the race. Providence is but an unskilful strategist, and having contrived one scheme to fill the three-score years and ten, she keeps a man to it, regardless of his disposition and of his desires. Sometimes, indeed, he forces her hand, wresting from her here a little more of power, there a sweeter burst of romance, making her blow a louder peal of warrior trumpets to herald him, and beat a longer roll of drums when he departs; sometimes he outwits her, dying before he has completed the task she set him, or disturbing her calculations by his obstinate vitality. But for the most part he is content to obey, and the familiar story takes its course until death abruptly closes the chapter, and sends the little universe of his deeds to roll unevenly down the centuries, balanced or unbalanced as he left it, with no hand more to modify its course. Familiar and yet never monotonous – though wherever you turn the air is full of memories everywhere the same, though the page of every historian repeats the same tale, though every poet sighs over it, and every human being on the earth lives it over again in his own person. A man will not complain of the want of originality; he is more likely to be cheered when he looks round him and sees his fellows suffering and rejoicing in like manner with himself, when he looks back and sees his predecessors absorbed by the same cares, urged forward by the same hopes. The experience of those who have passed before him along the well-trodden road will not hold him back or turn him aside; to each newcomer the way is new and still to be enjoyed – new and exciting the dangers and the difficulties, new the pleasant sensation of rest by the fountain at mid-day, new and terrible the hunger and the foot-soreness, new, with a grim unexpectedness, the forbidding aspect of that last caravanserai where he lays himself down to sleep out the eternal night. Yes, Death is newest of all and least considered in the counsels of men – Death, who comes silent-footed at all moments, who brushes us with his sleeve as he passes us by, who plucks us warningly by the cloak lest we should forget his presence – he, too, will surprise us at the last.

And if it were not so, small pleasure would be reaped from life. If the past were to stand for ever holding a mirror of the future before his eyes, many a man would refuse to venture forward – it is upon the unknown that he lays his trust – and if the universal presence of death had but once found a lodging in his mind, the whole world would seem to him to be but one vast graveyard, the cheerful fields but a covering for dead men’s bones, and the works of their hands but as tombstones under which the dead hands lie.

Yet at times they are good and quiet company, the dead; they will not interrupt your musings, but when they speak, whether they be Jews or Turks or heathens, they will speak in a tongue all can understand. There are even countries where the moving, breathing people are less intelligible, dwell in a world further apart from you, than that silent population under the earth. You may watch the medley of folk hurrying into Stamboul across the Galata Bridge – that causeway between East and West – and the Dervishes washing their feet under the arches of a mosque, and the eager bartering in the bazaars, without one feeling of fellowship with these men and women who look at you askance as you go by; you may pass between long rows of crumbling, closely-latticed houses without venturing to hazard the widest solution of the life within – without even knowing whether there be life at all, so inhospitable they seem, so undomestic. But, once beyond the walls, you have done with distinctions of race. From the high towers of Yedi Kuli on the topmost hill down to the glittering waters of the Golden Horn are scattered countless graves – on the one hand, the triple line of Constantine’s city wall, rent and torn, with cracking bastions and dismantled towers, in its hopeless decrepitude still presenting a noble front to all comers, save where the great breach tells of the inrush of the Turkish conquerors Judas-trees drop their purple flowers over the spot where Constantine Palæologus fell, red rose-bushes spring from the crevices, a timid army of lizards garrisons the useless forts. On the other hand, the great city of the dead – acre upon acre of closely-packed graves, regiment upon regiment of headstones, some with a rude turban carved atop, some (and these mark where women lie) unadorned, and all pushed awry by time and storms and the encroaching roots and stems of cypress-trees, all neglected, all desolate. Constantinople, the dying city, is girt about with graves – not more forgotten the names of those that rest there than her own glory on the lips of men. So they speak to you, these dead warriors, dead statesmen, dear dead women, and to the spiritual ear they speak in tragic tones.

The cypresses cast their shadows over this page of Turkish history, springing upwards in black and solemn luxuriance, nourished by dead bodies. The cypress-trees are like mutes, who follow the funeral procession clothed in mourning garments, but with sleek and well-fed faces. They rear their dark heads into the blue sky and beckon to their fellows in Scutari across the Bosphorus.

From the Scutari hill-top the eye is greeted by one of the most enchanting prospects the world has to show – the blue waters of Marmora traversed by greener Bosphorus currents, light mists resting along the foot of the hill-bound coast of Asia, a group of islands floating on the surface of the water, the Golden Horn glimmering away northwards, with the marble walls of the Seraglio stretching a long white finger between it and the sea, Stamboul crowned with minarets and domes. Flocks of gray birds flit aimlessly across the water – the restless souls of women, says Turkish legend – the waves lap round the tower of Leander, the light wind comes whispering down between the exquisite Bosphorus shores, bringing the breath of Russian steppes to shake the plane-leaves in Scutari streets. Constantinople the Magnificent gathers her rags round her, throws over her shoulders her imperial robe of sunshine, and sits in peaceful state with her kingdom of blue waters at her feet… But all around you the dead speak and command your ears. The ground is thick with the graves of men who died fighting, who died of cold and hunger in bleak Crimea; under your feet are great pits filled with unhonoured bones, and the white stones which strew the grass cry aloud the story of struggle and fight into the quiet air. Beyond them the dark canopy of cypresses shadows countless thousands of Turkish graves; the surface of the ground is broken and heaped up as though the dead men had not been content to sleep, but had turned and twisted in their shallow covering of earth, knocking over their tombstones in the effort to force a way out of the cold and the dark into the beautiful world a foot or two above their heads. ‘Remember us – remember us!’ they cried, as we passed under the cypress-trees. But no one remembered them, and their forgotten sorrows could only send a thrill of vague pity through our hearts.

Not less pitiful in their magnificence are the tombs of the Sultans in Stamboul itself. Here under marble domes, adorned with priceless tiles and hung round with inlaid armour, you may sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, and as you tell of poison and of dagger, of unfaithful wives and treacherous sons, each splendid sarcophagus will serve as illustration to your words. The graves of the dead Sultans are strewn with costly hangings, and set about with railings of mother-of-pearl and precious woods; plumed and jewelled turbans stand over their heads, their wives lie round them like a bodyguard, but gold and pearl and precious stones all serve to blazon forth the tragic histories of those men who lie buried in such mournful state.

With the glitter of this vain pomp before our eyes, we idled on a windy Friday through one of the poorer quarters of the town. A bazaar was being held in Kassim Pasha; women were bargaining over their weekly purchases of dried fruits and grains and household goods; copper pots lay in shining rows among the coarse crockery and the flowers and cheap luxuries of the poor; the sun shone upon veils and turbans and bronzed faces. It was the hour of mid-day prayer, the little mosque at the end of the street was full to overflowing, the people were kneeling all down the sunny outer steps, rising and falling, bowing their heads upon the stone at the name of God. We paused a moment, and went on round the mosque. In the shadow of a neglected corner behind it, supported on a couple of trestles, lay something swathed in coarse blue linen, with a stick planted into the ground at its head, and surmounted by a discoloured fez. It was the corpse of a man which lay waiting there until the mid-day prayers should be concluded, and his relations could find time for his burial. The wind flapped the corners of his blue cotton coverings to and fro, and shook the worn-out fez, but the dead man waited patiently upon the pleasure of the living – perhaps he knew that he was already forgotten and was content.

In Turkish cities the graves are scattered up and down and anywhere; the stone lattice-work of a saint’s tomb breaks the line of houses in every street of Stamboul; wherever there is a little patch of disused ground, there spring a couple of cypresses under which half a dozen tombstones lean awry, and solemn Turkish children play in and out among the graves. We, too, scrambled down the slopes between the half-obliterated mounds, and stood under the shadow of their guardian trees, until the nodding stone turbans wore to us as familiar an aspect as the turbaned heads before the coffee shop in the street.

From time to time, indeed, we remembered the strangeness of this companionship with the generations behind us. One April afternoon, as we were walking down the steep streets of Trebizond, looking round us with curious eyes, there fell upon our ears a continuous tinkling of bells. We listened: there was no sound of feet, but the bells came nearer and nearer, and at last from one of the narrow streets emerged a camel, and behind him more camels and more, marching on with noiseless padded tread, with impassive Oriental faces and outstretched necks, round which the rows of tiny bells swung backwards and forwards with every step. By their side trudged their drivers, noiselessly, too, in sandalled feet, their faces half hidden by huge caps of long-haired fur, and wearing an expression less human than that of the beasts over which they cracked their whips. ‘Look,’ said our guide; ‘it is a caravan from Tabriz,’ and he pushed us back out of the road, for camels have an evil reputation, and are apt to enliven the way by a fretful biting at any person they may happen to encounter. So we stood, without noticing where we had retreated, and watched the long caravan as it passed us with even, measured tread – so slowly that we fell to wondering how many hundred hundred thousand of those deliberate steps had marked the dust and crunched upon the stones across the mountains and valleys and deserts between Trebizond and Tabriz. And though their caravanserai was in sight, the camels never mended their pace, and though they had come so many hundred miles, they did not seem weary with their journey or glad to reach their goal; but as they passed they turned their heads and looked us in the eyes, and we knew that they were thinking that we were only Westerns, and could not understand their placid Oriental ways. When they had passed we glanced down, and found that we were standing upon a grave mound; behind us sprang cypress-trees, and the stone upon which we were leaning bore the dead man’s turban carved upon it. There he lay upon the edge of the great road which he too, perhaps, had trodden from end to end in his day – lay now at rest with the cypresses to shade his head, and the caravans moving ceaseless past him, away and away into the far East. May he rest in peace, the dead man by the living road!

To such charming Turkish sepulchres we looked back as to hallowed resting-places when we had come to know the Persian graveyards. The stretch of dusty stony earth outside the mud walls of the town, the vacant space in the heart of the village where the gravestones were hardly to be distinguished from the natural rockiness of the earth, the home of evil smells, untrodden by living feet, though it lay in the centre of the village life – those shallow graves seemed to us ill-suited to eternal rest. From many of them, indeed, the occupants were to suffer a premature resurrection. After a few months’ sleep they would be rudely awakened, wrapped in cloths, and carried on the backs of mules to the holy places. Men who have met these caravans of the dead winding across the desert say that their hearts stood still as that strange and mournful band of wayfarers passed them silently by.

But the pang of sorrow is only for the living. Though we find it hard enough to dissociate sensation from the forms which have once felt like ourselves, the happy dead people are no longer concerned with the fate of the outer vestments they have cast off. They fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages; the weary journey to Kerbela is nothing to them, nor whether they lie under cypresses, whose silent fingers point to heaven, or under marble domes, of out in the bare desert. Wherever they rest, they rest in peace.

THE CITY OF KING PRUSIAS

At the foot of the Bithynian Olympus lies a city founded, says tradition, by Cyrus. Philip, the son of Demetrius, gave it to Prusias, King of Bithynia, the friend of Hannibal; Prusias rebuilt it, calling it after himself, and for over two hundred years it was the capital of the Bithynian kingdom. In the first century after Christ it fell into the hands of the Romans; Roman governors took up their abode in Brusa, the younger Pliny described to Trajan the agora, the library, the baths of sulphur, which gave it an honoured place in the civilization of Rome. During the ensuing centuries many men fought and fell for its possession; the cry of battle raged perpetually about its walls. Turks and Christians contended for Brusa, Theodore Lascaris, the Roumanian despot, held it, Orkan ravished it from the Greeks, Timur overwhelmed it with his shepherd warriors from distant Tartary; finally the Turks reconquered it and turned the capital of King Prusias into the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

The soaring minarets, the white domes of mosques and baths, lie amid cypresses and plane-trees at the foot of the mountain. The streams of Olympus, many-fountained like its neighbour Ida, water the town and the surrounding country with such profusion that every inch of ground yields fruit and flowers in tenfold abundance; the hot steam of the sulphur springs diffuses a drowsy warmth through the atmosphere; the city is full of the sound of tinkling fountains and murmuring plane-leaves, and of the voices of black-eyed Turkish children – no wonder if the eagerness of men for its possession drove peace for so many hundred years from its vineyards and olive-groves.

It is said that of the Romans no trace remains. If this be so, the spirit of the Roman builders must have lingered on among Byzantine masons. There is a gateway at the southern side of the town from which part of the stone casing has fallen away, revealing that exquisite brickwork whose secret was known to the Romans only – an entablature of long, narrow bricks, set into arches of complicated pattern, with the sure eye and the even hand that ennoble the commonest materials, and make Roman bricks and plain Roman stonework as beautiful in their way as frieze, or fresco, or marble-casing. Pliny’s baths, however, are gone; the present buildings are of Turkish origin. They lie a little to the east of the town, in fields which vine and olive share with irises and great scarlet poppies. You enter, and find yourself under the dome of a large hall, round the walls of which are railed off compartments where, upon piles of cushions, the bathers rest after the exertion of the bath, smoking a narghileh and drinking a cup of coffee. Beyond this is another and smaller hall, with a fountain of clear cold water in the midst of it, and through various chambers of different temperatures you reach the farthest and hottest of all. The air is thick and heavy with the steam which rises from the blue-tiled basin, where, when the process of washing is over, the Turkish youths swim in the hot water of the sulphur springs, while through the mist the sunlight glimmers down on them from the windows in the dome.

The mosques share the indescribable charm of Brusa – a charm in which the luxuriant fertility of the land and the accumulated arts of many nations bear an equal part. The tomb of Orkan the Conqueror owes its beauty to the Byzantines, for it lies in the church they reared and dedicated to the prophet Elijah. Before the Green Mosque is a fountain, one of those exquisite fountains of Olympus, shaded by huge plane-trees, and protected by a pointed roof rising on delicate columns, and arches with the Moorish curve in them; and on the mosque itself, the colour of leaves with the sun shining through them is rivalled by the brilliant green of the tiles which encase the dome, and the tracery of laden branches against the sky by the carving round the doorway, until you cannot tell which is the most successful decorator, man or nature. Sultan Mahmud employed Christian workmen in the mosque he built; its architecture wears a curious likeness to that of the West, and the Christian vines and fig-trees are wreathed round the capitals of the Mohammedan shafts. In the big mosque in the centre of the town the builders seem to have recognised that the beauty of curving roofs and the splendour of coloured tiles could go no further – they have called in Heaven to their aid. The entrance, indeed, is vaulted over, the floor is strewn with carpets, and the walls glow with colour; but the central court is open to the sky, and a fountain plashes under the blaze of light and sunshine which falls through the opening. Round the edge of the basin beggars sit washing their feet, grave elders dip their hands and bathe their faces in the cool water; in the columned darkness beyond, bands of Turkish children play at hide-and-seek between the pillars, so noiselessly that they do not disturb the quiet worshippers and the groups of men chatting in undertones, or drown the delicious sound of water and the whispering of the outer airs which fill the building.

Above the town Olympus rears his lofty head: his feet are planted in groves of plane-trees, among the soaring dark spires of cypresses and the white spires of the minarets, beech thickets cover his flanks, and on his shoulders lies a mantle of snow, which narrows and narrows as the summer climbs upwards, but which never entirely disappears.

As we ascended the mountain on our lean ponies, we felt as though we were gradually leaving Turkey behind us, and climbing up into Greece. The snow still lay low enough (for it was in the early summer) to prevent our reaching the summit, yet we could see over the shoulders of the hills the spurs of the beautiful range of Ida, and where the plain of Troy might be on clearer days, with Lake Aphnitis, the furthest boundary of the Troad, gleaming on its edge – ‘Aphneian Trojans,’ says Homer in his catalogue of warriors, ‘who inhabit Zeleia at the furthest extremity of Ida, and drink the dark waters of Æsepus.’ We could see, too, the long stretch of Marmora and the peninsula of Cyzicus, whose king met with such dire ill-fortune at the hands of Jason, and though this was not that Olympus which was crowned with the halls of Zeus, we comforted ourselves by imagining that Homer may have had the slopes of the Bithynian mountain in the eye of his mind when he wandered singing through the Troad. The beech coppices whispered graceful legends in our ears, the glades, thickset with flowers, seemed to us to be marked with the impress of divine feet – it was the Huntress and her train who had stirred the fritillary bells, Pan’s pregnant footing had called the golden crocuses to life, the voices of the nymphs who charmed away Hylas the Argonaut still floated on the air, and through the undergrowth what glimpse was that of flying robe and unloosed shining locks?.. We rode upward beyond the region of sheltered, flower-strewn glades, beyond the pines, until we came to rough, stony ground, sprinkled with juniper-bushes – and to the very edge of the snow. The mountain-top was all bare and silent; no clash of battle rises now above the plain of Troy; in the blue peaks of Ida, Œnone’s cries are hushed; Paris is dead, of Helen’s beauty there is nothing but the name; Zeus no longer watches the tide of war from the summit of the Bithynian Olympus, and the nymphs have fled…