The Actual Movement From One Place To Another, In Europeanised
Countries, Is A Process So Temporary - It Occupies, I Mean,
So small
a proportion of the traveller's entire time - that his mind remains
unsettled, so long as the wheels are
Going; he may be alive enough
to external objects of interest, and to the crowding ideas which
are often invited by the excitement of a changing scene, but he is
still conscious of being in a provisional state, and his mind is
constantly recurring to the expected end of his journey; his
ordinary ways of thought have been interrupted, and before any new
mental habits can be formed he is quietly fixed in his hotel. It
will be otherwise with you when you journey in the East. Day after
day, perhaps week after week and month after month, your foot is in
the stirrup. To taste the cold breath of the earliest morn, and to
lead, or follow, your bright cavalcade till sunset through forests
and mountain passes, through valleys and desolate plains, all this
becomes your MODE OF LIFE, and you ride, eat, drink, and curse the
mosquitoes as systematically as your friends in England eat, drink,
and sleep. If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period
of time thus occupied in actual movement as the mere gulf dividing
you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare
and plastic seasons of your life from which, perhaps, in after
times you may love to date the moulding of your character - that is,
your very identity. Once feel this, and you will soon grow happy
and contented in your saddle-home. As for me and my comrade,
however, in this part of our journey we often forgot Stamboul,
forgot all the Ottoman Empire, and only remembered old times. We
went back, loitering on the banks of Thames - not grim old Thames of
"after life," that washes the Parliament Houses, and drowns
despairing girls - but Thames, the "old Eton fellow," that wrestled
with us in our boyhood till he taught us to be stronger than he.
We bullied Keate, and scoffed at Larrey Miller, and Okes; we rode
along loudly laughing, and talked to the grave Servian forest as
though it were the "Brocas clump."
Our pace was commonly very slow, for the baggage-horses served us
for a drag, and kept us to a rate of little more than five miles in
the hour, but now and then, and chiefly at night, a spirit of
movement would suddenly animate the whole party; the baggage-horses
would be teased into a gallop, and when once this was done, there
would be such a banging of portmanteaus, and such convulsions of
carpet-bags upon their panting sides, and the Suridgees would
follow them up with such a hurricane of blows, and screams, and
curses, that stopping or relaxing was scarcely possible; then the
rest of us would put our horses into a gallop, and so all shouting
cheerily, would hunt, and drive the sumpter beasts like a flock of
goats, up hill and down dale, right on to the end of their journey.
The distances at which we got relays of horses varied greatly; some
were not more than fifteen or twenty miles, but twice, I think, we
performed a whole day's journey of more than sixty miles with the
same beasts.
When at last we came out from the forest our road lay through
scenes like those of an English park. The green sward unfenced,
and left to the free pasture of cattle, was dotted with groups of
stately trees, and here and there darkened over with larger masses
of wood, that seemed gathered together for bounding the domain, and
shutting out some "infernal" fellow-creature in the shape of a
newly made squire; in one or two spots the hanging copses looked
down upon a lawn below with such sheltering mien, that seeing the
like in England you would have been tempted almost to ask the name
of the spend-thrift, or the madman who had dared to pull down "the
old hall."
There are few countries less infested by "lions" than the provinces
on this part of your route. You are not called upon to "drop a
tear" over the tomb of "the once brilliant" anybody, or to pay
your "tribute of respect" to anything dead or alive. There are no
Servian or Bulgarian litterateurs with whom it would be positively
disgraceful not to form an acquaintance; you have no staring, no
praising to get through; the only public building of any interest
that lies on the road is of modern date, but is said to be a good
specimen of Oriental architecture; it is of a pyramidical shape,
and is made up of thirty thousand skulls, contributed by the
rebellious Servians in the early part (I believe) of this century:
I am not at all sure of my date, but I fancy it was in the year
1806 that the first skull was laid. I am ashamed to say that in
the darkness of the early morning we unknowingly went by the
neighbourhood of this triumph of art, and so basely got off from
admiring "the simple grandeur of the architect's conception," and
"the exquisite beauty of the fretwork."
There being no "lions," we ought at least to have met with a few
perils, but the only robbers we saw anything of had been long since
dead and gone. The poor fellows had been impaled upon high poles,
and so propped up by the transverse spokes beneath them, that their
skeletons, clothed with some white, wax-like remains of flesh,
still sat up lolling in the sunshine, and listlessly stared without
eyes.
One day it seemed to me that our path was a little more rugged than
usual, and I found that I was deserving for myself the title of
Sabalkansky, or "Transcender of the Balcan." The truth is, that,
as a military barrier, the Balcan is a fabulous mountain.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 6 of 87
Words from 5356 to 6366
of 89094
