Eothen | Page 9

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. Such seems to be
the view of Major Keppell, who looked on it towards the east with the
eye of a soldier, and certainly in the Sophia Pass, which I followed,
there is no narrow defile, and no ascent sufficiently difficult to stop, or
delay for long time, a train of siege artillery.
Before we reached Adrianople, Methley had been seized with we knew
not what ailment, and when we had taken up our quarters in the city he
was cast to the very earth by sickness. Adrianople enjoyed an English
consul, and I felt sure that, in Eastern phrase, his house would cease to
be his house, and would become the house of my sick comrade. I
should have judged rightly under ordinary circumstances, but the
levelling plague was abroad, and the dread of it had dominion over the
consular mind. So now (whether dying or not, one could hardly tell),
upon a quilt stretched out along the floor, there lay the best hope of an
ancient line, without the material aids to comfort of even the humblest
sort, and (sad to say) without the consolation of a friend, or even a
comrade worth having. I have a notion that tenderness and pity are
affections occasioned in some measure by living within doors; certainly,
at the time I speak of, the open-air life which I have been leading, or
the wayfaring hardships of the journey, had so strangely blunted me,
that I felt intolerant of illness, and looked down upon my companion as
if the poor fellow in falling ill had betrayed a want of spirit. I
entertained too a most absurd idea--an idea that his illness was partly
affected. You see that I have made a confession: this I hope--that I may
always hereafter look charitably upon the hard, savage acts of peasants,
and the cruelties of a "brutal" soldiery. God knows that I strived to melt
myself into common charity, and to put on a gentleness which I could
not feel, but this attempt did not cheat the keenness of the sufferer; he
could not have felt the less deserted because that I was with him.
We called to aid a solemn Armenian (I think he was) half soothsayer,
half hakim, or doctor, who, all the while counting his beads, fixed his

eyes steadily upon the patient, and then suddenly dealt him a violent
blow on the chest. Methley bravely dissembled his pain, for he fancied
that the blow was meant to try whether or not the plague were on him.
Here was really a sad embarrassment--no bed; nothing to offer the
invalid in the shape of food save a piece of thin, tough, flexible,
drab-coloured cloth, made of flour and mill-stones in equal proportions,
and called by the name of "bread"; then the patient, of course, had no
"confidence in his medical man," and on the whole, the best chance of
saving my comrade seemed to lie in taking him out of the reach of his
doctor, and bearing him away to the neighbourhood of some more
genial consul. But how was this to be done? Methley was much too ill
to be kept in his saddle, and wheel carriages, as means of travelling,
were unknown. There is, however, such a thing as an "araba," a vehicle
drawn by oxen, in which the wives of a rich man are sometimes
dragged four or five miles over the grass by way of recreation. The
carriage is rudely framed, but you recognise in the simple grandeur of
its design a likeness to things majestic; in short, if your carpenter's son
were to make a "Lord Mayor's coach" for little Amy, he would build a
carriage very much in the style of a Turkish araba. No one had ever
heard of horses being used for drawing a carriage in this part of the
world, but necessity is the mother of innovation as well as of invention.
I was fully justified, I think, in arguing that there were numerous
instances of horses being used for that purpose in our own country--that
the laws of nature are uniform in their operation over all the world
(except Ireland)--that that which was true in Piccadilly, must be true in
Adrianople--that the matter could not fairly be treated as an
ecclesiastical question, for that the circumstance of Methley's going on
to Stamboul in an araba drawn by horses, when calmly and
dispassionately considered, would appear to be perfectly consistent
with the maintenance of the Mahometan religion as by law established.
Thus poor, dear,