The Towers of Trebizond

by Rose Macaulay

  So when I had finished reading these newspapers and Halide's letters, I put the camel away and read Vere's, which was about Greek islands and the yacht of the press lord, and how this yacht was presently going to the Dodecanese islands and Rhodes and then along the Antalya coast to Alexandretta, and could I not manage to be in Alexandretta in about three weeks and wait for it? I did not see how I could, because of money, which was running out; in fact by now I was getting pretty short, and had only twenty pounds left in travellers' cheques, and there was no one in Trebizond to borrow from, the vice consul seeming quite selfish. I could not afford to go to Istanbul, nor, really, to go on staying at the Yessilyurt, though it was pretty cheap as Turkish hotels go. I explained this to my Turkish friend Odobasiogli, and asked him if he knew of any cheap room where I could lodge for a few days, and he told me of one, which was above a blacksmith's forge, so I took it and moved in. I thought I would spend the rest of that week there, in case any news of aunt Dot came through, and then ride south for Alexandretta, which would take a long time, and I would have to raise some money for it.

  I began to live very cheaply, not eating at the Yessilyurt restaurant any more, but in low cafés, and sometimes I fried the fish I caught on the little cooker I had. I grew pretty hungry sometimes, and was vexed that I could not afford some of the good Turkish food I read about in my phrase book, except when sometimes Odobasiogli asked me to dine with him at the Yessilyurt, but he was partly away at Samsun on business. The hero of my phrase book, a very greedy man, would order, one after the other, young marrows stuffed with minced mutton and herbs, rice rissoles fried in egg batter, aubergine and chopped meat fried separately and braised together in own gravy, rice cooked with raisins, pine kernels and chopped liver, pieces of mutton fat roasted on spit, layers of pastry placed between layers of onions and pine kernel and baked in butter, vine leaves stuffed with minced meat and cooked in butter, chicken breast cooked to a pulp with milk and sugar, and other delicacies, any of which would have made a rich meal for me. But while he hogged away at it, washing it down with exotic wines (and I hoped it made him sick), I had to do with bread, cheese, soup, yoghourt, and an occasional egg. I wondered if I could get myself bought as a slave; I supposed they would have at least fed me, to keep up my strength. The camel did better, because it was used to roots and it got roots.

  Meanwhile, I was going through aunt Dot's, and even Father Chantry-Pigg's, things. Rightly or wrongly, and I knew it was wrongly, but I had to get to Alexandretta and see Vere, I was going to sell a lot of them. This would not only bring me money, but would lessen the things I had to carry about with me, which worried both me and the camel. I decided to get rid of the tent, which was a heavy encumbrance, and most of the cooking utensils, as I only needed a small cooker. Then I put aside for sale aunt Dot's little travelling clock, her Lilo mattress and sleeping-bag, her painting things, two pairs of pyjamas, some day clothes, a bottle of hair tonic, a good many bottles called "The Mixture ", which I thought the chemist would buy, a spare wrist watch, a Thermos, eight Anglican missals and six copies of Why I am an Anglican, which I thought I would try on the Imam, so that he should know what he was up against, and a straw hat with a Liberty scarf, which I knew Atatürk would have wished me to sell to one of the veiled women.

  Father Chantry-Pigg had left his camera behind, which was probably a good thing for him as well as for me. I took out the used films, and decided that some shop would give me a good price for it. He also had his Lilo, some shirts, a clock, a fountain pen, a dog-collar, and some of his relics and little pictures. I knew a small crypto-Greek shop which sold such religious accessories under the counter. It seemed to me better that they should be used here, in this ancient home of Byzantine Christianity, than taken travelling among infidels. It seemed rather much to sell his personal belongings, but this is what happens when you have to get across Turkey to see your lover. When I had sold all these things, and some of my own, I ought to have enough to get to Alexandretta, and I should ride much lighter than before.

  At the end of the week I was ready to leave. I gave the Post Office some addresses for sending on letters, first to Kayseri, then to Iskenderon, which are the names the Turks have given to Caesaraea Mazaca and to Alexandretta, and which Father Chantry-Pigg would never use. I went up on my last evening to the citadel, and told the Greek sorcerer that I was going south. He told me that I would come back one day. I supposed that I would. Then I offered him for sale a collection of aunt Dot's anonymous bottles and pill boxes. He looked at the labels, smelt them, and enquired what they were. I said I did not know, but that they were very good for all kinds of diseases and pains. He asked what I wanted for them. I suggested five liras for the lot, which was practically, I said, giving them away. He suggested five kurus instead. I laughed heartily, and began to put the bottles back in my rucksack. He said eight kurus, and I laughed still more heartily, and showed him a bottle which was labelled "The Elixir" as a change from The Mixture. It was, I said, the Elixir of Life; there could be no talk of kurus for it. At that, his eyes grew thoughtful. He retired into his lean-to and I supposed he was sulking, but he came out again carrying a bottle full of a green liquid, which he held up against the sunset sky and ejaculated, "Ah!" in a tone of adulation, and it was obvious that he was showing me something very special. For my bottles and pills, he said, he would give me eight kurus plus this, which I assumed from his exalted manner to be a magic potion of some power. I did not want to bargain or argue any more, only to get rid of my bottles for whatever I could get, so I handed him my lot, and he gave me eight kurus and his green potion. To show me how good it was, he fetched two small wine glasses from his shed and poured some of it into each, so that we could drink together. From his talk and gestures, I perceived that it was not merely wine he was giving me, but a drink that would do something very marvellous for me. What, he asked, did I desire? To reach Alexandretta, I said. And I added that it would be very nice too to be emperor of Trebizond, as Don Quixote and others had been used to wish that they were. At that he waved his wand and stood looking like an elderly Comus as he offered me the charming-cup, and I thought it might transform me into the inglorious likeness of a beast, or chain up my nerves in alabaster and make me a statue, or root-bound as Daphne was that fled Apollo. Or it might be like an oblivion pill, or like another pill that was going about London just then which made people remember their infancies and their lives in the womb. Or it might be good for the Turkey sickness, which our ancestors who travelled in Turkey used to get, and of which I had had touches myself. Or of course it might be a love potion, and I did not really need that, rather the contrary, but it is very popular among Turks, who do not really need it either, and the enchanter might suppose that any one would be glad of it.

  Anyhow, I lifted my glass to him and drank the potion in three swallows, and it was very strong and sweet, and then I sat down under the fig tree to think about it, for I felt rather dizzy, and I shut my eyes. The evening was very warm and still, and smelt sweetly of shrubs and flowers and woods, and a long way down I heard the sea sighing on the shore and someone singing in a boat. I was sitting in the banqueting hall, under the row of pointed windows, and the floor was white marble with golden mosaics, and the roof was painted with golden stars, and the four high walls were glorious with bright frescos of emperors and saints and Christ, all the Comneni looking down on their golden-bearded representative sitting on his jewelled throne. Courtiers stood about the door; ecclesiastics with long Byzantine faces sat together, disputing with hieratic gestures about the aphthartocathartic heresy, in which Justinian had died, and which, it seemed, often rose again to disturb the Church. Marble pillars supported the starry roof; marble porticoes were seen dwindling in graceful perspective into the golden-fruited orchard and balsam-sweet woods; slim-railed balconies supported on delicate columns ran round outside the windows. Through open doors one saw other frescoed rooms, the chapel, the library, the audience hall, and beyond them a great range of towere
d walls swept down to the ravine. Through the windows I saw the circle of the Circassian mountains, indigo and brown and peach-pink in the sunset, and down their slopes a caravan of camels wound with their packs from the east. On the other side a fleet of cargo ships lay in the bay. On divans in the banqueting hall tall princesses reclined, and slaves knelt before them with palm-frond fans. In one corner of the hall a young man sat playing chess with an ape, which brooded over its moves like a man, and chattered its teeth in anger when it lost a piece. A group of sorcerers and jugglers and astrologers and alchemists were doing cozening tricks to entertain some of the ladies and courtiers, and one of them looked like my Greek sorcerer.

  Suddenly a palace revolution, that occupational disease of Byzantine imperial families, blew up. I saw it blow; it swept through the palace and into the banqueting hall; all was noise, bustle and confusion. Two young princes were dragged in in chains; the executioner put their eyes out while they shrieked and the ladies held their palm fans before their faces.

  "Remove them," said the emperor, with a wave of his hand. "And bring on the dancing girls."

  The palace revolution was quelled. The dancing girls, who looked like Circassian slaves, danced and sang, till the emperor yawned and said it was time to go to the hippodrome. He was carried out on a golden litter, sitting very upright and calm, and the priests walked beside him chanting. The courtiers and the sorcerers and the dancers followed after, chattering in a queer Greek, and I supposed it was the Greek of Trebizond in the fourteenth century.

  The chatter died away to murmurs, and became the voices of the sorcerer and his wife and the mutter of the long grass in the evening breeze.

  The sorcerer asked me if I had had pleasant dreaming, and I said I had.

  "You like it?" he asked, lifting up the green bottle.

  I said I did, and took it from him and put it in my bag. We shook hands and parted, and it was thus that I said goodbye to the glories of Byzantium and the ancient empire of Trebizond.

  Chapter 15

  For the first part of my journey south I rode westward along the shore, because the road running inland for Kayseri seemed to start from the port of Giresun, about eighty miles west of Trebizond, and I thought it would be nice to keep by the sea as long as possible. Giresun was supposed to be the ancient Cerasus, where the cherries came from, and the boys were fattened on boiled chestnuts, and Xenophon's army had made it from Trebizond in three days, or so Xenophon said, so I supposed the camel could make it in two, if he kept up a good pace. But a geologist in a book I had, who was called Hamilton, and had set out from Trebizond on a baggage horse in 1836, said that the Ten Thousand, at the pace armies go and over mountainous country, could not possibly have done it in less than about ten days, so he had to move the site of Cerasus much nearer to Trebizond, and would have it that Giresun had not been Cerasus at all. But what with this rearranging the sites of ancient cities, and what with the slowness of his baggage horse, and the amount of his baggage, none of which he had sold in Trebizond, and the number of heavy stones that geologists have to pick up and travel about with (for he made a large collection of rocks and minerals as he went along, and this makes for delay), and what with turning aside to see mines on the way, this Hamilton must have been a slow traveller, which was probably why he thought Xenophon's army would take ten days to Giresun. He himself was told that he would meet with many difficulties, owing to the impracticable state of the roads and the ignorance of the natives. But, as the camel found very few roads impracticable, and as the ignorance of the natives never seemed to slow me down much, since I seldom tried to plumb it, and as I never collected rocks or minerals or turned aside to see mines, for there is nothing I can more easily pass without turning aside, and as I do not even do much about rearranging the sites of ancient cities, though I feel that this would be a charming pastime if one had time, I thought we could make Giresun in about two days and a half.

  I did not know where I should spend the two nights. Hamilton had got a Tartar with him, who got him rooms in a comfortable konak whenever he wished to stop. At Platana, just out of Trebizond, he got a konak in a café on the beach, which must have been very nice, and at Giresun, when at last he reached it, he established himself in some empty rooms above a café, and it did not sound as if he had asked any one if he might, but this comes of travelling with a Tartar. However, I was very happy to be riding along the Pontine shore, where, if the Argo had gone by three thousand odd years later than it did, I should have seen it sailing along, keeping well in to shore, though nervous of the natives, who then were not only ignorant but fierce. The road climbed up and down hills and ravines, among forests and myrtle and cistus, and rocky promontories jutted out into the sea, and the camel trotted along at about ten m.p.h., or cantered at about fifteen when we got a nice level stretch. I was delighted to be on so quick a racing camel, not on a baggage horse. We did forty miles the first day, and spent the night in a little port just round Cape Yeros. There did not seem to be any konaks or khans or beach cafés with rooms, but this saved money, and my nineteenth century Murray seemed to think most khans were very poor and dirty. But then Murray used to think all but quite a few places for sleeping in abroad were poor and dirty; he says this of the Yessilyurt (when it was the Hotel des Voyageurs, which I think it must have been), and it is not poor and dirty now and perhaps it never was, but British standards in the last century were very high, and, feeling dirt as much as they did, it was very brave of them to get about so often and so far, really oftener and further than anybody else, though they suffered more too. Anyhow, I slept on the bank of a stream that ran into a little cove by Cape Yeros, in my sleeping-bag among myrtle bushes. It was fine and warm; Hamilton complained that the climate of Trebizond was "backward", and liable to sudden changes, owing to the cold winds and fog from the Russian side of the Pontus, but he thought most things in Asia Minor pretty backward. He soon got tired of jogging along on his backward baggage horse, and at Tirebolu he got into a flat-bottomed Argo-like boat for Samsun, which he thought would be quicker, geologists always being in a hurry to get to important places and read the important papers they have written about stones.

  I got to Giresun late at night on the second day, the camel having got into one of its excited, galloping moods, perhaps it had been eating azalea pontica the night before. So early on the third morning we took the road that ran inland to Sivas. I was sorry to leave, the Black Seaside. I would like to have ridden all along it slowly and seen all the little ports; but there was no time for that now. It was a long way to Iskenderon, and I was thinking of ways to get more money for the journey. It occurred to me that I might offer lifts to people walking on the roads. I knew enough Turkish phrases by now to be able to make it clear to them that these rides would not be free; I thought I would charge so many kurus per mile, according to how many kurus the people looked as if they had; whatever I charged, it would be much less than they would have had to pay for a much shorter camel ride at the Zoo. I did not expect to have much luck with the women, there was probably something in the Koran against accepting lifts from strangers on camels, but men Turks, owing to thinking there is something in the Koran about how they must not tire themselves, and quite likely there is, the Koran being most odd, are usually ready to be carried by anything that will carry them. So I supposed that I should get enough out of them to pay for some of the food I wanted to eat and drink during the fortnight or so I expected it to take to get to Iskenderon.

  It had become August, and extremely hot. I adopted the Turkish fashion of riding with an umbrella over my head when convenient. But the road from Giresun climbed up into forests quite soon after leaving the town, and a nice stream ran beside it, and the pines and oaks and chestnuts and cherry trees met across it, and the great rhododendron bushes made a deep, pleasant gloom, and we lurched up the mossy track, which was part of the old caravan road from Erzerum, very comfortably. Seeing ahead a man walking, with a woman walking fifty feet behind him carrying the bagga
ge, I rode up as far as the man and asked him how far he was going. He said to the next village, which was two kilometres away up the hill. I asked if he would like a ride, for five kurus. Perhaps his wife too, I suggested. At that he jerked back his head and said, "Yok" and smiled contemptuously at the notion of his wife having a ride. But he himself could do with one; he said they had walked from Giresun, after a trip by sea from Samsun, and he seemed to be saying that he was tired. He fished out four kurus and held them out. I said five, and after a little argument on his part, which I did not know the Turkish to answer, but still repeated five, he agreed and gave them to me, and I made the camel kneel down and he climbed on to its hump. I pointed to the luggage which his wife was carrying; she had stopped some way behind us, covering her face. I said "Esayim?" which means luggage. He said "yok" to that; I would have taken it for nothing, but he said yok, because that was what his wife was for.