Eothen | Page 8

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