Читать книгу The Story Teller of the Desert—"Backsheesh!" or, Life and Adventures in the Orient - Thomas Wallace Knox - Страница 74

There was a heavy-sided Austrian who kept him company in such a fashion that I thought our boat had turned in to a high pressure one; and there was a Roumanian who had a fashion of dropping his jaw and biting off his snore every five minutes or so. In the first part of the night it was impossible to sleep, and our party turned to betting as to which of the performers would hold out the longest on a single spurt. We kept it up an hour or more, but the men we backed were so unreliable that we all lost money, and finally growing sleepy we gave up the game. Whether we added to the music when we fell asleep, I am unable to say, but I fancy that we did not diminish it. In the morning we heard that the boat was badly shaken at the stern, and the captain said she would have to lie up after the present trip. I will lay a wager that it was the old Servian that did the business.

We were aground in the night and detained by a fog, but the loss of time was a gain in sight-seeing. Without detention we should have passed Peterwarde in in the early morning; as it was we saw it after we had taken breakfast and were in a good mood for contemplation.

It is a picturesque fortress dominating the river and covering an escarped hill that shows a double façade pierced with portholes, with a complex arrangement of bastions, salient and reentering angles, casemates, and sheltered barracks. It can contain ten thousand men without serious crowding; its permanent garrison consists of about one-fourth that number. Here it was that Peter the Hermit assembled his soldiers for the first crusade, and it was from that religious enthusiast that the fortress received its modern name.

We saw here on this part of the Danube, as we had seen above, boats towed by horses, seven or eight in line, against the current; we saw droves of white cattle and we rarely saw any other color than white; we saw women working in the fields, and at Mohacs we saw them wheeling coal in barrows or carrying it in baskets. A little past noon we were looking ahead and saw a city perched on a hill above a fortress, and near it, and nearer to us, was another city on a low tongue of land.

The nearer city was Semlin—the more distant was Belgrade—they pronounce it with the accent on the last syllable and make it rhyme with “hard,” or very nearly so.

The river Save (rhymes with “halve”) here joins the Danube from the East and forms the boundary between Austro-Hungary on the one hand and Servia on the other. Semlin is on one side of the mouth of the Save and Belgrade on the other. Semlin is flat and low and offers nothing picturesque; Belgrade is elevated and pretty and merits the admiration which has been bestowed upon it.

The boat stopped a few moments at Semlin and then moved on to Belgrade, and the two Americans whose acquaintance I had made at Pesth determined to travel with me or I with them as we had a common object in view—to reach Constantinople. They were both reasonably well along in years; one was called “the Judge” for his fair round belly which he was accustomed to line with good capon or anything else that possessed the proper lining qualities. The other was called “the Doctor,” which we soon exchanged to “Doubter” for the reason that he doubted everything that he had not seen, and even after seeing it his doubts generally continued.

“I have known,” said the Judge one day, “a man that could lift a thousand pounds of lead at once.”

“I doubt it,” said the “Doubter.”

The Judge reduced the figure to eight hundred, then to six hundred, and so on down to fifty pounds, but still the doubt was maintained.

I remarked that it was once told of a man in Islip, Long Island, the steward of the Olympic Club, who, in the summer of 1872; had a tame oyster that could sing “The Star Spangled Banner” and fire a gun.

Particularity as to time, place, and circumstance generally carries conviction, but it failed in this instance.

The Judge laughed and made no response, but the “Doubter” shook his head incredulously.

We went ashore; a Servian official examined our passports and another took a hasty survey of our baggage, and then the twain released us. We gave over our baggage to a couple of porters or Hamals as they call them—possibly a corruption of the word camel; the name of the animal whose proclivities to bear burdens are well known.

In most parts of the Orient, particularly in Constantinople, the “Harnals” are a guild or labor-union, and are governed by rules like labor-unions in England or America. And they carry enormous burdens—iron, wood, stone, boxes, and bales, casks of wine, anything and everything goes on their backs, and is carried uphill or down hill to its destination. Remember that few streets of Oriental cities are practicable for wheeled vehicles but that everything to be moved must be moved by hand.

The dress of the hamal is peculiar, and he has a hard cushion slung by straps over his shoulder and resting just above the hips. {72}I have seen one of these fellows carry a load that would be sufficient for a one horse dray in New-York; I have seen another carry a bale of goods said to weigh three hundred and fifty pounds; and I have seen another carry my trunk, my friend’s trunk, and another friend’s trunk, all at once, from a hotel to a steamboat landing, where the respective weights ascertained on the company’s scales were seventy pounds, one hundred and fifty pounds, and one hundred and forty-five pounds, or three hundred and sixty-five pounds in all!

The harnals walk at a dignified pace—you could hardly expect them to run—they look healthy, but either the work is not salubrious or the gods love them, as they die young.

We followed the porters up the hill to the Hotel de Paris, and as soon as we had settled into our rooms and looked through the house we sauntered out to see the city.

In front of the hotel is a public square with a fountain, where people fill water jars or idle away a sunny afternoon. Belgrade is a sort of meeting-place of the Occident and the Orient; the costumes of the lower classes are Oriental, and those of the richer inhabitants were likewise Oriental until within the past ten or twenty years. In the strides which Servia has made towards an existence independent of Turkey, she has looked leaningly and lovingly toward the West and put on some of its customs and habits. Thus you see the lower classes wearing the baggy breeches, the loose jacket, and the red cap of Turkey, while the well-to-do citizen dresses in coats, and vests, and trowsers from the slopshops of Vienna and Paris. He is proud to be thus appareled, though his clothes fit him like ready-made garments everywhere, only a little more so, and he feels not altogether comfortable in them and sometimes sighs for the garments of his youth. There is a good deal of dignity about the Servians of all classes, and you might explode a fire-cracker in the ear of one of them without getting him to move with any rapidity.

We took a short walk to the fortress of Belgrade—a fortress that has made a great deal of noise in the world and has been a bony bone of contention for several centuries. In the fifteenth century it was accounted one of the first citadels in Europe, and in 1521 it was taken by the Turks. Since then it has been captured no less than eight times, and it has been twice transferred by reason of treaties. It is a powerful fortress, even against the artillery of to-day, and occupies a commanding position on a promontory jutting out between the Danube and the Save.

The view from the esplanade is one of the finest on the Danube, and embraces a wide range. Northward stretches the broad plain of Hungary; to the West is the Save and its fertile valleys; in the south there is a landscape of river, plain, and mountain; and at our feet lies the flowing Danube rolling away towards the Draw Gate and the dark waters of the Euxine. The fort encloses a pretty garden and miniature park, and a house where once lived the Turkish pasha. By the side of the house there is a mosque rapidly going to ruin, as also are many parts of the fortress. A crowd of forçats in chains and guarded by half a dozen soldiers, are at work on the bridge which leads across the moat; they make way for us to pass, and the soldiers of the guard honor us with a salute.

From the fortress we drove through the town and out upon a macadamized road to Topchidere, or Valley of the Artillerists. It is nearly two miles from Belgrade to Topchidere, but the view is well worth the journey. There is a pretty park and garden covering quite an extent of ground; trees are arranged in rows, in circles, and in other ways, according to the fancy of the gardener; there are fountains and shaded walks, carriage and bridle paths, and there are numerous and easy seats where one may rest when he is weary. In the centre of the park is the house inhabited by Miloch Obrenovitch, Prince of Servia, who died in 1860, and was deeply and justly mourned.

The house, and particularly the room where he died, is in the same condition as when he left it. He preferred the rude furniture to the most costly palace of modern times, and he set an example of frugality that has been of no small benefit to his people. They showed us the room where he died, with his cane, his shoes, his fez and other articles, just as they were when his physicians declared that Miloch was no more.

In the same building is the room where his son Michael died in 1868, mortally wounded by the shots of assassins in the park where he was riding. The blood-stains remain upon the floor, the bed and bedding, and also upon the table where he was laid when the physicians examined the wound. The place of the assassination is half a mile or more from the house and is marked by a plain monument.

The story is the old, old tale of princely and kingly murders; an intrigue was set on foot by an aspirant to the throne of Servia, Alexander Karageorgevitch, and was assisted by a scandal which had a woman in the case. Karageorgevitch had ruled in Servia, not once, but twice, and naturally he wanted to be there again. He had many friends in Servia, and up to the time of the assassination his return was not impossible. After the murder of Michael there was a judicial inquiry which declared Karageorgevitch instigator of the assassination, and condemned him to perpetual banishment.

The Prince of Servia at the time I write is Milan Obrenovitch IV., a young man who attained his majority in 1872, and consequently has had little opportunity to make his name famous. He is said to be intelligent, and willing to listen to advice; as his country has a constitution and a Congress—called in Servian Skoupchina—he could not take it far on the road to ruin, supposing he wished to do so. He has made journeys to Paris and Vienna, where he was warmly received, and it was his reception at Vienna that made trouble between Turkey and Austria in 1873, and came near plunging the two nations into war. Turkey wanted to know, you know, why Austria had made so much fuss over the Prince of Servia; Austria said it was none of Turkey’s business; Turkey said it was an unfriendly action; Austria said “you’re another;” Turkey pouted, and Austria actually fished out from the pigeon-holes the passports of the Sultan’s representative at Vienna, and was on the point of sending them to that functionary with a first-class ticket (meals and cabin included, wines extra) to Constantinople, when the affair was smoothed over and war was prevented.

Servia lies between Turkey and Austria, and contains about a thousand geographical square miles. It has a population of about a million and a quarter, and of this population all are Christians, with the exception of less than twenty thousand. The country is agreeably diversified with plain and mountain, and the soil is fertile, though far less productive than it should be. The inhabitants are not very enterprising, and have given little attention to public works; the roads in the interior are not generally good, and up to the present time there are no railways. A change is about to come over Servia’s dream in this respect, as she has determined upon the construction of a line of railway southeasterly from Belgrade to connect with the Turkish railway at the frontier, to form the connecting link between the Austrian and Turkish network of railways. When this is completed there will be a through route from London to Constantinople, and the present long but picturesque line of travel will become unpopular. The practical spirit of the age is playing sad havoc with the poetry of the olden time. There is a story that an old sailor exclaimed as he looked at an ocean steamer, “There’s an end of seamanship.” And he wasn’t so far out of the way. The romance and charm of the sea are knocked on the head by our new-fangled inventions.

Servia adopted a new constitution in 1869, and is now a constitutional, hereditary monarchy. The person of the prince is inviolable, but his ministers are not let off so easily. There are two kinds of legislatures, or skaupchinas, the ordinary and the extraordinary; the former meeting once a year, and the latter summoned under extraordinary circumstances. The members are elected by the people, and the constitution guarantees equality before the law, civil and religious liberty, freedom of the press, and the abolition of confiscation. The religion is principally Greek orthodoxy. Roman Catholics abound, but are not numerous, and there are a few Jews—less than two thousand—who are compelled to live in Belgrade, as the law will not permit them to dwell in the interior. Here is religious liberty with a vengeance! There are a few Mohammedans, but the number is steadily diminishing. Belgrade, at the time of my visit, contained twelve Mohammedans and nineteen mosques, some of the latter in ruins and the rest getting that way—a great deal of bread to a little sack! Giving each mosque a single worshipper there would still be seven mosques like the little lions in the boy’s picture of the prophet Daniel—they wouldn’t get any!

The army contains about five thousand regulars and one hundred thousand militia. The finances are in excellent condition; there is no public debt, and the taxes, light in comparison with those of some European countries, generally bring a revenue in excess of the disbursements. Three cheers for Servia. Hip, hip, hooray!!

All this time I have kept you standing waiting in the Topchidere

Park, while I have been droning along about Servia and her government, for which you don’t care any more than a cat does for existence. Well, let us get out of the park and return to the city, where we will dine comfortably and drink the wine of the country, and the less said about it the better. Wine culture in Servia is in its infancy, and there is no occasion to go into ecstacies about the native products.

While we are at dinner a gentleman tells us of the old style of executions and their contrast with the present. When the Turks ruled here, a man sentenced to execution was thrown down a bank about ten feet high, upon half a dozen spikes that stood upright. If one of the spikes entered a vital part and killed him instantly, or in a few minutes, his friends had reason to thank fortune. Sometimes a victim would be caught in the fleshy part of the arm or leg, and in this case he might be days in dying. No food nor drink could be given to him, but he must lie there and perish of hunger and thirst and the inflammation of the wound caused by the pitiless iron. My informant said that less than ten years ago a victim of the law lay thus for five days before death came to his relief, and for the first forty-eight hours his screams were so loud that they could be heard, especially in the stillness of the night, half over the city of Belgrade.

Since the Turks went away a more humane method has been adopted. The criminal condemned to death is fed on the best that the city contains for a month previous to the execution of the sentence of the law. On the fatal day he is allowed as much spirit as he chooses to drink, and in this condition he is taken to a valley outside of the town. There the death warrant is read, and as its last words are pronounced there is a report of a couple of pistols and the man falls dead, shot through the heart. Just before my visit two men were thus executed; they went to their death in a hilarious condition, and were singing and shouting as they marched through the town.