CHAPTER XLI.--THE CARAVANSERAI.

I pursued the old road just described, urging my horse to a trot where I dare do so, but often being compelled--by the rough construction and nature of the way, and at times by my painful doubts as to whether I was pursuing the right one--to moderate his pace to a walk. Frequently, too, I had to dismount and lead him by the bridle, especially at such parts as those steps of wood and stone by the Merdven or Devil's Staircase, when after passing through forests of beech and elm, walnut and filbert trees, I found myself on the summit of a rock, which I have since learned is two thousand feet above the Euxine, and from whence the snow-capped summits of the Caucasus can be seen when the weather is clear. Around me were the mountains of Yaila, rising in peaks and cliffs of every imaginable form, and fragments of rock like inverted stalactites started up here and there amidst the star-lighted scenery. Anon the way lay through a forest entirely of oaks, where the fallen leaves of the past year lay deep, and the heavy odour of their decay filled all the atmosphere. The country seemed very lonely; no shepherd's cot appeared in sight, and an intense conviction of utter solitude oppressed me. Frequently I reined in my horse and hearkened for a sound, but in vain. I knew a smattering of Arabic and that polyglot gibberish which we call Hindostani, but feared that neither would be of much service to me if I met a Tartar; and as for a Greek or Cossack, the revolver would be the only means of conferring with them. Once the sound of a distant bell struck my ear, announcing some service by night in a church or monastery among the hills; and soon, on my left, towered up the range of which Mangoup-Kaleh is the chief, crowned with the ruins of a deserted Karaite or Jewish tower, and which overlooks Sebastopol on one side, and Sebastopol on the other. After a time I came to a place where some buffaloes were grazing, beside a fountain that plashed from a little archway into a basin of stone. This betokened that some habitation must be in the vicinity; but that which perplexed me most, was the circumstance that there the old road was crossed by another: thus I was at a loss which to pursue. One might lead me to the shore of the Black Sea; another back towards Sebastopol, or to the Russian pickets in the valley of Inkermann; and the third, if it failed to be the way to Kokoz, might be a path to greater perils still.

While in this state of doubt, a light, hitherto unnoticed, attracted my attention. It glimmered among some trees about a mile distant on my left, and I rode warily towards it, prepared to fight or fly, as the event might require. Other lights rapidly appeared, and a few minutes more brought me before a long rambling building of Turkish aspect, having large windows filled in with glass, a tiled roof, and broad eaves. On one side was a spacious yard enclosed by a low wall, wherein were several horses, oxen, and buffaloes tethered to the kabitkas or quaintly-constructed country carts; on the other was a kind of open shed like a penfold, where lighted lanterns were hanging and candles burning in tin sconces; and by these I could perceive a number of bearded Armenians and Tartars seated with chibouks and coffee before them, chatting gaily and laughing merrily at the somewhat broad and coarse jokes of a Stamboul Hadji, a pretended holy mendicant, whose person was as unwashed and whose attire was as meagre and tattered as that of any wandering Faquir I had ever seen in Hindostan. His beard was ample, and of wonderful blackness; his glittering eyes, set under beetling brows, were restless and cunning; his turban had once been green, the sacred colour; and he carried a staff, a wallet, a sandal-wood rosary of ninety-nine beads, and a bottle, which probably held water when nothing stronger could be procured. The Tartars, six in number, were lithe, active, and gaily-dressed fellows, with large white fur caps, short jackets of red or blue striped stuff, and loose, baggy, dark blue trousers, girt by scarlet sashes, wherein were stuck their daggers and brass-butted pistols; for, though all civilians, they were nevertheless well armed.

The Armenians seemed to be itinerant merchants, or pedlars, as their packages were close beside them; and two Tartar women--the wife and daughter probably of the keeper of the khan--who were in attendance, bringing fresh relays of coffee, cakes, and tobacco, wore each a white feredji, which permitted nothing of their form to be seen, save the sparkling dark eyes and yellow-booted feet, as it covered them so completely that each looked like nothing else than a walking and talking bundle of white linen. The whole group, as I came upon it thus suddenly, when seen by the flickering light of the candles and lanterns, had a very picturesque effect; but the idea flashed upon me, that as all these men were, too probably, subjects of the Russian empire, I ran some risk among them; and on my unexpected appearance the Tartars started, eyed each other and me, in doubt how to act, and instinctively laid hands on their weapons, like men who were wont to use them. The Armenians changed colour and laid down their pipes, fearing that I was but the precursor of a foraging party; and even the Hadji paused in his story, and placed a hand under his short cloak, where no doubt a weapon was concealed. All seemed doubtful what to make of me. I heard "Bashi-bazouk" (Irregular) muttered, and "Frank," too. My gray greatcoat enabled me, in their unprofessional eyes, to pass for anything. If a Russian officer, they feared me; if one of the Allies, I was the friend--however unworthy an instrument--of the successor of Mahomet; one of those who had come to fight his battles against the infidels of the Russian-Greek church; so either way I was pretty secure of the Tartars' good will; and boldly riding forward, I proceeded to "air" some of the Arabic I had picked up in the East, by uttering the usual greeting; to which the keeper of the khan replied by a low salaam, bending down as if to take the dust from my right boot and carry it to his lips, while more than once he said,

"Hosh ghieldiniz!" (i. e., Welcome!)

Then a Tartar, as a token of goodwill, took a pipe from his mouth and presented it to me, while another offered me sliced water-melon on an English delph-plate.

"Aan coon slaheet nahss?" (Have you any coppers?) whined the Hadji.

I gave him a five-piastre piece, on which he salaamed to the earth again and again, saying,

"Kattel herac! kattel herac!" (Thank you, sir.)

The meeting was a narrow escape, for I might have fallen among Russians; but fortunately not one of their nation happened at that moment to be about the place. I laid some money on the low board around which they were seated, and asked for coffee and a chibouk, which were brought to me, when I dismounted. However, I remained near my horse, that I might vault into the saddle and be off on the shortest notice. On inquiring if I was on the right road for Kokoz, the host of the establishment shook his head, and informed me that I was several versts to the left of it. I next asked whether there were any Russian troops in the immediate neighbourhood. Still eyeing me keenly and dubiously, several of the Tartars replied in the affirmative; and the tattered Hadji, whose goodwill I had won by my peace-offering, told me that a party of Cossacks were now hovering in the Baidar Valley, the very place through which I had passed, and must have to repass, unless for safety I remained with Canrobert's flying column. But then my orders were to return with his answer, and without delay. Here was a pleasant predicament! After mature consideration I resolved to wait for daylight, when the Hadji promised to be my guide to the Tartar village, where the Franks were posted, and which he led me to understand was nearer the base of Mangoup-Kaleh than the town of Kokoz; and in the meantime, he added, he should resume a story, in the narration of which he had been interrupted by my arrival. This announcement was greeted with a hearty clapping of hands; the women came nearer; all adjusted themselves in attitudes of attention, for oral storytelling is the staple literature of the East. Thus their thoughts, suspicions, and conjectures were drawn from me; and as all seemed good-humoured, I resolved to make the best of the situation and remain passive and patient, though every moment expecting to hear the clank of hoofs or the jingle of accoutrements, and to see the glitter of Cossack lances; and while I sat there, surveying the singular group of which I formed one, the quaint aspect of the caravanserai on one side, the dark forest lands and starlit mountains on the other, my thoughts, in spite of me, reverted to the news I had so lately heard--to her I had now lost for ever, and who, in her splendid English home, was far away from all such wild scenes and stirring perils as those which surrounded me.

The story told by the Hadji referred to a piece of court scandal, which, had he related it somewhere nearer the Golden Horn, might have cost him his head; and to me it became chiefly remarkable from the circumstance that, soon after the Crimean War, a portion of it actually found its way as news from the East into the London papers; but all who heard it in the khan listened with eyes dilated and mouth agape, for it was replete with that treachery and lust of cruelty which are so peculiarly oriental. After extolling in flowing and exaggerated terms the beauty of Djemila Sultana, whom he called the third and youngest daughter of the Sultan Abdul Medjid, the Hadji told us that he had been present when she was bestowed in marriage upon Mahmoud Jel-al-adeen Pasha, to whom, notwithstanding the charms of this royal lady, the possession of her hand was anything but enviable, as oriental princesses usually treat worse than slaves their husbands, leading them most wretched lives, in consequence of their tyrannical spirit, their caprice, pride, and jealousy of other women. Now the Sultana Djemila was no exception to this somewhat general rule, and having discovered by the aid of her royal papa's chief astrologer, the Munadjim Bashee, that her husband had purchased and secluded in a pretty little kiosk near the waterside at Pera a beautiful Circassian, whom he was wont to visit during pretended absences on military duty, she found means to have the girl carried off, and ordered the Capi Aga, or chief of the White Eunuchs, an unscrupulous Greek, to decapitate her; an operation which he performed by one stroke of his sabre, for the neck of the victim was very slender, and shapely as that of a white swan. Not contented with this, she resolved still farther to be revenged upon her husband the Pasha when he returned to dinner.

Seating herself in the divan-hanee while the meal of which the Pasha was to partake alone--as women, no matter what their rank may be, never eat with men in the East--was being spread, she rose up at his entrance, and rendering the usual homage accorded by wives (much to his astonishment), she then clapped her white hands, on which the diamonds flashed, as a signal to serve up the dinner. Crushed and abashed by a long system of domestic tyranny and despair, Mahmoud Jel-al-adeen, who feared his wife as he had never feared the Russians, against whom he had fought valiantly at Silistria, failed to perceive the malignant light that glittered in the beautiful black eyes of Djemila. But a fear of coming evil was upon him, as on that day, when he had ridden past the great Arsenal, he had seen a crow fly towards him; in the East an infallible sign of something about to befall him, as it was a crow that first informed Adam that Abel was slain.

"So I pray you, Djemila, neither to taunt nor revile me to-day," said he, "for a strange gloom is upon me."

She laughed mockingly, and Mahmoud shivered, for this laugh was often the precursor of taunts that could never be recalled or forgotten, and of having his beard rent, his turban knocked off, and his lips--the same lips at whose utterance his brigade of three thousand Mahomediyes trembled--beaten with the heel of her tiny slipper. But she began to storm as was her wont; and then, while her husband's fingers went into the pillau from time to time, there began their usual taunting discussion, with quotations from the Koran, "which, as all the world knows, or ought to know," continued the Hadji, "is the one and only book for laws, civil, moral, religious, and domestic."

"Doth not the Prophet say," she exclaimed, closing the slender tips of her henna-dyed fingers, "in the fourth chapter entitled 'Women,' and revealed at Mecca, act with equity towards them?"

"Yes; but he adds, 'If ye act not with equity towards orphans of the female sex, take in marriage such other as please you, two, three, or four; but not more."

"So--so; and your fancy was for a slave!"

"Was?" stammered Mahmoud; then he added, defiantly, yet tremulous with apprehension the while, "A Circassian, whose skin is as the egg of an ostrich--her hair as a shower of sunbeams."

"This to me!" she exclaimed; and starting from the divan, she smote him thrice on the mouth with the heel of her embroidered slipper.

The eyes of the Pasha flashed fire; yet remembering who she was, he sighed and restrained his futile wrath, and said,

"If you will quote the Prophet, remember that he says in chapter iv., 'Men shall have pre-eminence above women, because of those advantages wherein God hath caused one of them to excel the other.'"

Djemila laughed derisively and fanned herself.

"Who dared to tell you of this slave girl?" asked Mahmoud, glancing nervously at the pretty little slipper; "who, I demand?"

"The wire of the Infidels, that passes over men's houses, and reveals the secrets of all things therein--even those of the harem," said she, laughing, but with fierce triumph now; "yea, telling more than is known by the Munadjim Bashee himself."

The Pasha knew not what to say to this; he quaffed some sherbet to keep himself cool, and then ground his teeth, resolving, if he dared, to have all the telegraph wires in his neighbourhood cut down; indeed, about this time, such was the terror the Turks had of those mysterious speaking wires, that in Constantinople, to prevent their destruction as telltales, a few human heads were placed upon the supporting poles by order of Stamboul Effendi, or chief of the police.

"Thou shalt be stoned by order of my brother, and according to the holy law!" said Djemila, her proud lips curling and quivering.

"Woman, she is but a slave--an odalisque!"

"Whom you would marry before the kadi?"

"Yes," said Mahmoud, through his teeth, for his temper was rising fast.

"And you love her?"

"Alas, yes--God and the Prophet alone know how well!" said the Pasha, whose head drooped as he mentally compared the sweet gentleness of his Circassian girl with the fiery fury of the royal bride he had been compelled to espouse, as a cheap reward for his military services.

"Chabauk!" exclaimed Djemila. "Serve the next dish. Eat, eat, I say, and no more of this!"

The cover was removed by a trembling servant, and there lay before the Pasha Mahmoud the head of the poor Circassian girl--the masses of golden hair he had so frequently caressed, the eyes, now glazed, he had loved to look on, and the now pale lips he had kissed a thousand times in that lonely kiosk beside the sea.

"There is your dessert--alfiert olsun!" (May it do you good!) exclaimed Djemila, with flashing eyes and set teeth.

Mahmoud, horror-struck, had only power to exclaim, as he threw his hands and turned his eyes upward, "My love--my murdered love--Allah bereket versin!" (May God receive your soul!) and then fell back on his divan, and expired.

As he had prior to this drunk some sherbet, it was whispered abroad, ere long, that the poor Pasha had been poisoned; but as no examination after death took place, the high rank of his wife precluding it, it was given out that he had died of apoplexy. So he was laid in the Place of Sleep, with his turban on, his toes tied together, and his face turned towards Mecca, and there was an end of it with him; but not so with the Capi Aga, whom the Sultan, for being guilty of obeying Djemila's order to execute the odalisque, subjected to an old Turkish punishment now, and long before that day, deemed as obsolete. He was taken to the Sirdan Kapussi, or Dungeon Gate of Stamboul, close by the Fruit Market, and placed in a vaulted room, where he was stripped of all his clothes by the Capidgi Bashi, who then brought in a large copper plate or table, supported by four pedestals of iron, and underneath which was a grate of the same metal, containing a fire of burning coals, at the sight of which a shriek of despair escaped the miserable Greek. When the plate of copper had become quite hot, the executioner took the turban-cloth of the doomed man, unwound it, and placing it round his waist, by the aid of two powerful hamals had it drawn tight, until his body was compressed into the smallest possible place. Then by one blow of his sabre he slashed the hapless wretch in two, and placing his upper half instantly upon the burning copper, the hissing blood was staunched thereby, and he was kept alive, but in exquisite torture, till the time for which he was ordained to endure it was fulfilled. He was then lifted off, and instantly expired.

Eagerly, with fixed eyes, half-open mouths, and in hushed silence, forgetting even to smoke, and permitting their chibouks to die out, his audience listened to this most improbable story, which the cunning Hadji related with wonderful spirit and gesticulation; and so "having supped full with horrors," at its close they showered coins--kopecs, paras, and even English pennies--upon the narrator. The whole story was a hoax, the Sultan having no such daughter as Djemila, the names of the three sultanas being quite unlike it; but that made as little difference then in Crim Tartary as it did afterwards nearer Cornhill; and Charley Gwynne and others of ours to whom I mentioned it were wont to call it "the bounce of the cold chop and the hot plate."