At Semlin I still was encompassed by the scenes and the sounds of
familiar life; the din of a busy world still vexed and cheered me;
the unveiled faces of women still shone in the light of day. Yet,
whenever I chose to look southward, I saw the Ottoman's fortress -
austere, and darkly impending high over the vale of the Danube -
historic Belgrade. I had come, as it were, to the end of this
wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and
havoc of the East.
The two frontier towns are less than a cannon-shot distant, and yet
their people hold no communion. The Hungarian on the north, and
the Turk and Servian on the southern side of the Save are as much
asunder as though there were fifty broad provinces that lay in the
path between them. Of the men that bustled around me in the
streets of Semlin there was not, perhaps, one who had ever gone
down to look upon the stranger race dwelling under the walls of
that opposite castle. It is the plague, and the dread of the
plague, that divide the one people from the other. All coming and
going stands forbidden by the terrors of the yellow flag. If you
dare to break the laws of the quarantine, you will be tried with
military haste; the court will scream out your sentence to you from
a tribunal some fifty yards off; the priest, instead of gently
whispering to you the sweet hopes of religion, will console you at
duelling distance; and after that you will find yourself carefully
shot, and carelessly buried in the ground of the lazaretto.
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