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, patient
Reason would have fought her slow battle against Asiatic prejudice,
and I am convinced that she would have established the possibility
(and perhaps even the propriety) of harnessing horses in a hundred
and fifty years; but in the meantime Mysseri, well seconded by our
Tatar, put a very quick end to the controversy by having the horses
put to.
It was a sore thing for me to see my poor comrade brought to this,
for young though he was, he was a veteran in travel. When scarcely
yet of age he had invaded India from the frontiers of Russia, and
that so swiftly, that measuring by the time of his flight the broad
dominions of the king of kings were shrivelled up to a dukedom and
now, poor fellow, he was to be poked into an araba: like a
Georgian girl! He suffered greatly, for there were no springs for
the carriage, and no road for the wheels; and so the concern jolted
on over the open country with such twists, and jerks, and jumps, as
might almost dislocate the supple tongue of Satan.
All day the patient kept himself shut up within the lattice-work of
the araba, and I could hardly know how he was faring until the end
of the day's journey, when I found that he was not worse, and was
buoyed up with the hope of some day reaching Constantinople.
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