He Went Through His Duties With Untiring
Assiduity, And With A Kind Of Gracefulness, Which By Mere
Description Can Scarcely Be Made Intelligible To Those Who Are
Unacquainted With The Manners Of The Asiatics.
The boy's address
resembled a little that of a highly polished and insinuating Roman
Catholic priest, but had more of girlish gentleness.
It was
strange to hear him gravely and slowly enunciating the common and
extravagant compliments of the East in good Italian, and in soft,
persuasive tones. I recollect that I was particularly amused at
the gracious obstinacy with which he maintained that the house in
which I was so hospitably entertained belonged not to his father,
but to me. To say this once was only to use the common form of
speech, signifying no more than our sweet word "welcome," but the
amusing part of the matter was that, whenever in the course of
conversation I happened to speak of his father's house or the
surrounding domain, the boy invariably interfered to correct my
pretended mistake, and to assure me once again with a gentle
decisiveness of manner that the whole property was really and
exclusively mine, and that his father had not the most distant
pretensions to its ownership.
I received from my host much, and (as I now know) most true,
information respecting the people of the mountains, and their power
of resisting Mehemet Ali. The chief gave me very plainly to
understand that the mountaineers, being dependent upon others for
bread and gunpowder (the two great necessaries of martial life),
could not long hold out against a power which occupied the plains
and commanded the sea; but he also assured me, and that very
significantly, that if this source of weakness were provided
against, THE MOUNTAINEERS WERE TO BE DEPENDED UPON; he told me that
in ten or fifteen days the chiefs could bring together some fifty
thousand fighting men.
CHAPTER XXIX - SURPRISE OF SATALIEH
Whilst I was remaining upon the coast of Syria I had the good
fortune to become acquainted with the Russian Sataliefsky, {47} a
general officer, who in his youth had fought and bled at Borodino,
but was now better known among diplomats by the important trust
committed to him at a period highly critical for the affairs of
Eastern Europe. I must not tell you his family name; my mention of
his title can do him no harm, for it is I, and I only, who have
conferred it, in consideration of the military and diplomatic
services performed under my own eyes.
The General as well as I was bound for Smyrna, and we agreed to
sail together in an Ionian brigantine. We did not charter the
vessel, but we made our arrangement with the captain upon such
terms that we could be put ashore upon any part of the coast that
we might choose. We sailed, and day after day the vessel lay
dawdling on the sea with calms and feeble breezes for her portion.
I myself was well repaid for the painful restlessness which such
weather occasions, because I gained from my companion a little of
that vast fund of interesting knowledge with which he was stored,
knowledge a thousand times the more highly to be prized since it
was not of the sort that is to be gathered from books, but only
from the lips of those who have acted a part in the world.
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