Eothen | Page 2

to leave us in the centre of a space between them and
the "compromised" officer. The latter then advanced, and asking once
more if we had done with the civilised world, held forth his hand. I met
it with mine, and there was an end to Christendom for many a day to
come.
We soon neared the southern bank of the river, but no sounds came
down from the blank walls above, and there was no living thing that we
could yet see, except one great hovering bird of the vulture race, flying
low, and intent, and wheeling round and round over the pest-accursed
city.
But presently there issued from the postern a group of human

beings--beings with immortal souls, and possibly some reasoning
faculties; but to me the grand point was this, that they had real,
substantial, and incontrovertible turbans. They made for the point
towards which we were steering, and when at last I sprang upon the
shore, I heard, and saw myself now first surrounded by men of Asiatic
blood. I have since ridden through the land of the Osmanlees, from the
Servian border to the Golden Horn--from the Gulf of Satalieh to the
tomb of Achilles; but never have I seen such ultra-Turkish looking
fellows as those who received me on the banks of the Save. They were
men in the humblest order of life, having come to meet our boat in the
hope of earning something by carrying our luggage up to the city; but
poor though they were, it was plain that they were Turks of the proud
old school, and had not yet forgotten the fierce, careless bearing of their
once victorious race.
Though the province of Servia generally has obtained a kind of
independence, yet Belgrade, as being a place of strength on the frontier,
is still garrisoned by Turkish troops under the command of a Pasha.
Whether the fellows who now surrounded us were soldiers, or peaceful
inhabitants, I did not understand: they wore the old Turkish costume;
vests and jackets of many and brilliant colours, divided from the loose
petticoat-trousers by heavy volumes of shawl, so thickly folded around
their waists as to give the meagre wearers something of the dignity of
true corpulence. This cincture enclosed a whole bundle of weapons; no
man bore less than one brace of immensely long pistols, and a yataghan
(or cutlass), with a dagger or two of various shapes and sizes; most of
these arms were inlaid with silver, and highly burnished, so that they
contrasted shiningly with the decayed grandeur of the garments to
which they were attached (this carefulness of his arms is a point of
honour with the Osmanlee, who never allows his bright yataghan to
suffer from his own adversity); then the long drooping mustachios, and
the ample folds of the once white turbans, that lowered over the
piercing eyes, and the haggard features of the men, gave them an air of
gloomy pride, and that appearance of trying to be disdainful under
difficulties, which I have since seen so often in those of the Ottoman
people who live, and remember old times; they seemed as if they were
thinking that they would have been more usefully, more honourably,
and more piously employed in cutting our throats than in carrying our

portmanteaus. The faithful Steel (Methley's Yorkshire servant) stood
aghast for a moment at the sight of his master's luggage upon the
shoulders of these warlike porters, and when at last we began to move
up he could scarcely avoid turning round to cast one affectionate look
towards Christendom, but quickly again he marched on with steps of a
man, not frightened exactly, but sternly prepared for death, or the
Koran, or even for plural wives.
The Moslem quarter of a city is lonely and desolate. You go up and
down, and on over shelving and hillocky paths through the narrow
lanes walled in by blank, windowless dwellings; you come out upon an
open space strewed with the black ruins that some late fire has left; you
pass by a mountain of castaway things, the rubbish of centuries, and on
it you see numbers of big, wolf-like dogs lying torpid under the sun,
with limbs outstretched to the full, as if they were dead; storks, or
cranes, sitting fearless upon the low roofs, look gravely down upon you;
the still air that you breathe is loaded with the scent of citron, and
pomegranate rinds scorched by the sun, or (as you approach the bazaar)
with the dry, dead perfume of strange spices. You long for some signs
of life, and tread the ground more heavily, as though you would wake
the sleepers with the heel of your boot; but the foot falls noiseless upon
the crumbling soil of an Eastern city,