May The Saddle Beneath Him Glide Down To The Gates Of The
Happy City, Like A Boat Swimming On The
Third river of Paradise.
May he sleep the sleep of a child, when his friends are around him;
and the
While that his enemies are abroad, may his eyes flame red
through the darkness - more red than the eyes of ten tigers!
Farewell!
Dragoman. - The Pasha wishes your Excellency a pleasant journey.
So ends the visit.
CHAPTER II - TURKISH TRAVELLING
In two or three hours our party was ready; the servants, the Tatar,
the mounted Suridgees, and the baggage-horses, altogether made up a
strong cavalcade. The accomplished Mysseri, of whom you have heard
me speak so often, and who served me so faithfully throughout my
Oriental journeys, acted as our interpreter, and was, in fact, the
brain of our corps. The Tatar, you know, is a government courier
properly employed in carrying despatches, but also sent with
travellers to speed them on their way, and answer with his head for
their safety. The man whose head was thus pledged for our precious
lives was a glorious-looking fellow, with the regular and handsome
cast of countenance which is now characteristic of the Ottoman
race. {4} His features displayed a good deal of serene pride,
self-respect, fortitude, a kind of ingenuous sensuality, and
something of instinctive wisdom, without any sharpness of
intellect. He had been a Janissary (as I afterwards found), and
kept up the odd strut of his old corps, which used to affright the
Christians in former times - that rolling gait so comically pompous,
that a close imitation of it, even in the broadest farce, would be
looked upon as a very rough over-acting of the character. It is
occasioned in part by dress and accoutrements. The weighty bundle
of weapons carried upon the chest throws back the body so as to
give it a wonderful portliness, and moreover, the immense masses of
clothes that swathe his limbs force the wearer in walking to swing
himself heavily round from left to right, and from right to left.
In truth, this great edifice of woollen, and cotton, and silk, and
silver, and brass, and steel is not at all fitted for moving on
foot; it cannot even walk without frightfully discomposing its fair
proportions; and as to running - our Tatar ran ONCE (it was in order
to pick up a partridge that Methley had winged with a pistol-shot),
and really the attempt was one of the funniest misdirections of
human energy that wondering man ever saw. But put him in his
stirrups, and then is the Tatar himself again: there he lives at
his pleasure, reposing in the tranquillity of that true home (the
home of his ancestors) which the saddle seems to afford him, and
drawing from his pipe the calm pleasures of his "own fireside," or
else dashing sudden over the earth, as though for a moment he felt
the mouth of a Turcoman steed, and saw his own Scythian plains
lying boundless and open before him.
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