Читать книгу By Desert Ways to Baghdad - Louisa Jebb Wilkins - Страница 4

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DISENTANGLEMENT

It was our first night in camp; little mysterious hillocks shut us into a world of our own; we had it all to ourselves and only the stars overhead knew, and they seemed to be congratulating us on our escape; they twinkled and winked and beckoned. Constantin had lit a fire, and this at once became the centre of our world; the door of our tent looked out on it, the muleteers, the Zaptiehs, and our men sat round it, our supper was cooking on it, and we all thought about that; the horses and mules, tethered in a semicircle, turned that way and blinked at it; far away a jackal saw it and barked. It drew us all together, and its smoke went quietly up towards the beckoning stars.

They would be eating their dinner now in the hotel at Brusa just the same as last night; the thin young man who had asked us what we should do if it rained, the old lady who wanted to know if we were doing it for pleasure, and the middle-aged spinster who thought we had no business to expose ourselves to such dangers unless it were for missionary work. The waiters would be bustling about; good Madame Brot would be carving diligently at the side table with an anxious look; bells would be ringing; men and women would be coming and going and talking and laughing and scolding; down below in the hot kitchen the men wash one pile of dirty plates after another. … Yes, it is very quiet out here; the men speak in undertones and the fire crackles in the cool, still air. Constantin lifted the pot off the fire. "Mangez," he said. He was Greek but could speak a word or two of French. He ladled the onions and rice on to two plates and picked out the bits of mutton; then after handing us the plates, he began to beat up eggs for an omelette.

We had been stretched out on the ground; we drew ourselves up, and sitting cross-legged balanced the plates on our knees. The food tasted excellent although it had been cooked in one pot. Constantin had wanted to bring three pots; he had been camp cook to the best people on hunting expeditions—three courses for dinner, with clean plates and knives for each course. He looked the part: his clothes were European, except for the fez. He remained on the border-line of civilisation and reminded us of what we had left. We had had a scene with him before leaving Constantinople; he had accumulated a large assortment of saucepans and kettles, of pans for frying and pans for stewing, of pots for boiling and pots for washing; we had gone through them critically and disregarded everything but a stew-pan, a frying-pan, and one pot for boiling water. Constantin was in despair. "Pas possible, mademoiselle," he kept on ejaculating, "pas possible, comment faire cuisine?" But we were adamant; we wished to travel light and live largely on native food.

As it was we had a whole araba[1] loaded up with our belongings; there were the two tents for ourselves and the men, our camp-beds and sacks of clothes, and the cooking utensils. It all seemed a great deal now, and yet we were only taking necessaries. But then it had been so very hard to know what necessaries were; it is very hard to get disentangled from the forces of tradition. We had escaped now and would know better. Life was becoming extraordinarily easy, for we had left behind most things and forgotten all the injunctions and warnings of our friends.

But there was still Constantin in his European clothes and his aristocratic ideas and his broken French.

However, he does make delicious omelettes; we will forgive him for smuggling in that omelette-pan in defiance of our orders.

It is getting very dark; we could no longer see the hillocks, but we knew that they were there. We could hardly see the horses tethered beyond the fire, but we could hear them munching and stamping, and now and then one would neigh suddenly.

Constantin lit a lantern and hung it on a stick; then he washed up the dishes. The other men sat on by the fire and we looked through the smoke at them. There was Calphopolos. Now Calphopolos was a Greek, and he was a mistake. We have said that Constantin was on the border-line of civilisation and reminded us of what we had left. But Calphopolos was right in it without really being of it—so that when he was about one forgot that there was anything to be said for civilisation and only remembered its drawbacks. His unbrushed black clothes contrasted painfully with the native dress, especially when seen through the smoke of a camp-fire. He always carried about a little black handbag, out of which his tooth-brush was constantly falling. But his worst offence was that he spoke a language which we understood, and jabbered French at us from morning to night. He was in the employment of well-meaning friends whom he accompanied when they made business excursions into the interior. They had sent him to start us comfortably on the way; his knowledge of the amenities of life was to pave the road leading away from civilised methods of living.

Then there was Ibrahim, a long, lean Turk with a smiling face. He put up the tents and rode in attendance upon us, and haggled with the villagers over milk and eggs. They had told me earlier in the day that Ibrahim was troubled in his mind; "never before had a woman looked him straight in the face and shown him a watch." Two Eastern precepts had been violated, and I had been the unwitting offender. It was at Brusa, which we had left with such difficulty that morning. We had arranged the night before to start at 8 o'clock. But 8 came, and 8.30 came, and 9 came, and then the Zaptichs came who were to have come at 8 to escort us on the way; but there was no sign of our own retinue, of Constantin, of Ibrahim, of our own hired horses, of the arabas and muleteers with the baggage.

The news of our departure had got about and the people of the hotel gradually collected at the door. "Where is your dragoman?" they said; "why do you not send for him?" We confessed to having engaged no dragoman. "No dragoman! that was very rash. We could speak the language, then?" No, we had only a Turkish dictionary. They gave us up then as hopeless. Another individual pushed his way up to us. "You will never get your men to start or do anything else," he said; "you do not realise what these Turks are."

I recognised him as a professional dragoman offered to us by Cook the week before. But he was only telling us what everybody else out of the trade had been dinning into our ears ever since we planned the journey.

I repaired to the inn where the men and horses had been collected the night before. In the open yard stood the araba, unpacked and horseless. Constantin sat on a roll of baggage near by, with a resigned expression and a settled look, as if he had been sitting there for hours.

"Pas possible, mademoiselle," he said.

Ibrahim stood in the stable door, smoking complacently, and our muleteers were squabbling violently over the roping of a box.

It was at this moment that I stepped up to Ibrahim and showed him my watch. He looked at me with a startled expression, his jaw dropped, and he turned hastily on the muleteers. But it was not till later that I learnt how his inmost susceptibilities had been roused. One is at a decided disadvantage with no knowledge of a suitable language, but by dint of gesticulating with my riding-whip and pointing at everybody in turn, I managed, at the end of another half-hour, to get the araba and the men under way, and mounting my own horse rode behind them to the hotel. In another five minutes we had sallied out on our road. X and I rode ahead with Ibrahim and Calphopolos and the two Zaptiehs, then came the araba with our baggage and the muleteers, then Constantin with bulging saddle-bags suggesting the intrusion of various forbidden cooking utensils.

Our road ran unshaded and dusty through the outskirts of Brusa, with Mount Olympus towering above us. Bit by bit we left behind the staring tourists, the staring native children, the unconcerned stall-keepers displaying their wares of Brusa silk and printed cottons from England; then we passed the country people riding in on mules with their vegetables and chickens; we passed the little cultivated patches and got amongst the larger fields, stretching away on each side of the road. "Tutun," said Ibrahim, pointing at them with his riding-whip. I looked at him inquiringly. He tapped his cigarette and pointed again at the field.

"Tutun," he repeated. "Tobacco, you understand, mademoiselle, tobacco—such as he is now smoking." Calphopolos always would insist on explaining the obvious. The day got hotter and the road got dustier. At midday we skirted a willow plantation, and a stream gurgled through the damp green patch, inviting us to come in and rest. We crawled out of the sun under the low willow bushes, and the men tied the horses to the stronger branches. This first lunching place will always remain indelibly printed on my memory: the slices of brown bread thickly spread with solid cream; the watermelons and the grapes; the men grouped about amongst the willows, eating great hunches of bread and cheese; the horses breaking loose and straying about, browsing the finer herbage which sprang up through the dried and yellow tufts of older grass; the joy of being out of the sun and the dust; the cool sound of the water in the brook; the sense of rest and freedom, the sense of having really escaped at last. … On recalling this lunch with X, after many adventures had made it seem very remote, I found that she retained equally vivid recollections of it. I heard her murmur reflectively to herself, "And we thought it was always going to be like that!"

Then we had reluctantly left it all, the unwilling horses were pulled and dragged away, snatching at last bites, and we rode off on the dusty road again, until we reached the village near which we had arranged to camp. We had ridden round and chosen this site in the middle of the mysterious hillocks, which shut us out so effectually from everything except the stars.

We were destined to spend many more such nights in camp; but perhaps none can give you exactly the same thrill as the one on which for the first time you sleep out in the open.

It is full of surprises; you expect it to be quiet, and you find the darkness and stillness is full of noise. Nothing escapes you: the breathing of men and animals, the crackling of the fire, the rustling of leaves and grass: there seems to be a continuous movement very close to you. You sit up many times expecting to see something in your tent; it all makes you very wakeful. You drop off into a disturbed sleep very late, and are awakened before sunrise by the stir in the camp. You are positive you have not slept all night and that strange people have been prowling round you in the dark.

Yet as one lay in this semi-wakeful state of excitement and mystery, one's strongest impression was that of wanting protection merely against a few primitive forces; with the wild beasts we shared the dangers of cold and hunger and attacks from man. Slowly and painfully you have crawled out of the net in which you have all this time been unconsciously enveloped, and emerging stripped and bewildered grope about for what is actually going to serve and protect you in this primeval state of battling against the primitive forces of nature; a state, moreover, where protection against the dictates of an organised society is no longer needed. To those who are confronted with this problem for the first time, it is almost impossible to walk straight out of the net and have an impartial look round. Tradition still clings to us in little bits, and we grope hopelessly about, wondering what will be an essential and what will not.

Looking back now on these first few days of preparation for our journey in the wilderness, I realise that by far the hardest part of the journey was this initial disentanglement from the forces of tradition. If you are about to alter fundamentally your method of living, you must take care that you are discarding all those accessories which are due to tradition; you must either adopt those evolved by the tradition of the races among which you are about to travel, or you must bring abstract science to bear on the question of how to provide for your immediate wants under the changed conditions. A bare tent in a country where weather is still an interesting topic is a safe place for such reflections; the realities of the situation make one strictly practical. On getting out of bed our clothes were damp with dew and the grass was cold to our bare feet; at the next town we bought the strip of carpet, the idea of which we had rejected at Constantinople.