SWEARING TO A BARGAIN.The woman pays two metaleeks.

A few weeks later the same woman appears with another letter.

‘From whom is it?’ again the question.

‘Our husband,’ again the reply.

‘“Most beloved wife,”’ by way of variation, ‘“the weather is well. I am well. I wish you well.” What did you say your husband’s name is?’

‘Almoon.’

‘Ah, yes; Almoon. Your husband’s writer does not form his letters well.’

The woman pays two more metaleeks.

Some time later she returns again. The intelligent man of letters recognises her this time, and employs his trained memory.

‘“Most beloved of my wives,”’ he begins, ‘“I hope you are well. I am——”’

‘Effendi,’ the woman interrupts, ‘this letter, I think, is from my sister.’

‘Ah, you should have told me!’

Another hole in the wall, the keeper clinking coin—no doubt as to his race, he deals in money. He charges a piastre (twopence) for changing a lira, but silver coins are bought by him at current value. In Turkey a gold piece seems to have no fixed value; but actually it is the price of silver that varies. In Constantinople a pound Turkish is worth 103 piastres, in Salonica only 101, but in Uskub it brings 105, and in Monastir 107 or 108. Obviously the thing to do is to buy silver coin in Monastir and sell it in Salonica. Imagine getting twenty-three shillings in change for a pound in Liverpool, twenty-two in Manchester, and twenty in London!

Over the opening of a larger booth bunches of blood-coloured skull-caps hang by long black or blue tassels a foot or more in length, resembling at no great distance the scalps and scalp-locks of Red Indians. White Albanian caps and Turkish fezzes are also on sale, and a row of heavy brass blocks, like closed mouth of cannon, line the front of this formidable-looking shop. These last are presses for fezzes, which are put in shape for two metaleeks.

Lemonade booths, faced with rows of huge bottles containing green, red, and yellow drinks—limes, blood oranges, and lemons corking the respective bottles—and other permanent shops line the hill road and flank the covered bazaars. But the real fair is held only once a week on the open space above, where the Turkish garrison performs its silent target practice.

Tuesday is the market day in Uskub, and the scene behind the ancient fortress above the Vardar, in view of the surrounding country for many miles, is alone worth going to Turkey to see. The vast hilltop is littered with native goods for sale or exchange, and crowded with men and women in gay and gruesome garbs. Albanian shepherds and their lean dogs mind flocks of fat-tailed sheep, their spectral wives, in faded ghost gowns, sit selling hand-worked waistcoats of gaudy hue; Christian peasants who have come afoot or on asses or driving primitive ox-carts, display all sorts of country commodities, from new grain to ice (in the summer time) from the white peaks in the distance; Turks have a little rough lumber (there is not much in Macedonia); and Turkish soldiers, among the most ragged men in the concourse, dispose of horses, old boots, hunks of bread, gathered—who knows how? Tziganes are always on the horse market. A photograph shows a bargain being made, a third man, a Turk, swearing a Bulgarian and a gypsy to an exchange of cows.

Our defeat at Istip had not been forgotten. Since then we had awaited only a reasonable excuse for taking a reasonable risk. One of the Austrians came in with the account of a combat between a Servian band and a Turkish regiment, which had taken place two days before at a spot in the mountains above a hamlet named Pschtinia, several hours’ ride towards the Bulgarian border. This was justification for breaking the Turks’ cordon about us. Our papers had sent us many miles at heavy expense, and we must have exclusive news. Better reading, to be sure, is the cool, considered report of reports written at headquarters, but the true correspondent always prefers to date his stuff at the firing-line.

To assure ourselves that we were taking no unnecessary risk, that there was no chance of securing permission to seek the scene of this fight, we called on the Governor-General, who had duped and deceived us many times—no doubt to his quiet satisfaction, though he was always too much of a gentleman to display delight in our dilemma.

‘Ah,’ said Hussein Hilmi Pasha, as we sipped his coffee, ‘you went to Istip, and were prevented from visiting Garbintzi. I sent orders to turn you back. As I have often told you, effendi, it is dangerous in the interior; one cannot say where a “brigand”’—his excellency meant a Bulgarian insurgent—‘may be lurking to shoot the European. I have letters from the chiefs threatening to kill a consul. As you know, they hope to make trouble for us with the Powers.’

‘But, excellency, you may give us an escort.’

‘Even with escort one is unsafe. They can fire at you from a mountain side high up above. They are fiends, these brigands; they do not care if they are killed themselves.’

‘But we were permitted to cross a most lawless section of the country, and were stopped only when we sought to visit the scene of a fight. Surely, your excellency, this is a mistaken policy on your part; we must gather that there is something to hide from correspondents.’ We had put down this argument before.

‘There is nothing to hide. Come to me, and I shall tell you the truth about all affairs. But I can permit no more travelling in the interior.’

The same old story. We left the pasha’s presence pretending disappointment. But his threat of Bulgarian ‘brigands’ did not disturb us, and we were willing to take the chance of encountering Albanians. We were going to Pschtinia. The game was not difficult; it required simply coolness and courage and a knowledge of the ways of the Turk. The Englishman possessed sufficient of the first two requisites, and I had dealt with the Ottoman authorities for more than a year.

Late that evening we sent our dragoman for a Turkish coachman, and hired him to be on hand the following morning at nine o’clock, Turkish time, to take us to Kalkandele, an Albanian town about the same distance off as is Pschtinia, but in the opposite direction. We knew the native coachman’s ways.

A jingle of many bells announced the arrival of our carriage next morning at ten o’clock Turkish (about 5.30), the hour at which we planned to leave. The bells were for the purpose of warning other vehicles coming the opposite way along steep roads, but they would also have the effect of disturbing sleeping guardhouses and apprising them of the fact that we were bound on a country journey. The danger of collision was the minor risk, and we ordered the driver to relieve his ponies of their noisy necklaces. The Turk protested, and commenced to discuss the matter, but there was no time for argument. Having got the bells safe under a seat, we told him to drive to Pschtinia.

‘You hired me to go to Kalkandele.’

‘We have changed our minds.’‘But I have told the police you were going to Kalkandele.’

Exactly; and without doubt the first guardhouse on the road to the west had instructions to turn us back.

Our Turk soon learned that we were no meek and native Christians, and rather than lose his job altogether he obeyed our commands. We drove quietly through the deserted streets, the ponies’ hoofs pattering softly in the thick cushion of dust, the lucky beads on their harness rattling, one wheel of our shandrydan maintaining a rhythmic creak—but no one speaking. Drowsy patrols who had fallen asleep by the wayside looked up from the corners as we drove by, but our Turk on the box served us as a passport. Even the guardhouse at the far side of the Vardar was content to let us pass at this sleepy hour, seeing that our team was not equipped with country bells. We passed under the barracks observed only by the sentinel on the crest of the cliff, who blinked his heavy eyes and stared stupidly down like a waking owl, his head swinging a mechanical half-circle as we came into view and passed out again. A mile and a half through a million gravestones, stretching from the crooked roadway on either side across the sweep of a broad plateau—this was nerve-racking. We were in full view from the citadel, the barracks, the Konak, and several minarets—a black beetle crawling along a crooked chalk line drawn through a never-weeded prairie of white stone stalks and sheaves. We urged the driver to lay on the lash and crawl quicker, and we took turns in casting sly glances behind. But the end of this drear graveyard came at last. We switched sharply on a waggon trail to the left, and plunged into the hills, in a stroke clipping dreamy Uskub from the scene. We breathed freer; we were fairly started on our journey long before the guardhouse on the road to Kalkandele had given us up and reported our failure to pass their way.

From time to time our driver became unruly, slowing his pace and refusing to use his whip, protesting that his horses would not last to Pschtinia at the rate at which we were going. We promised to let him give them a long rest at our destination, to drive back to Uskub at his own pace, and to raise his fee a mijidieh, all of which, with occasional promptings, kept the horses to their fugitive gait. Our rattle-trap dashed through the cornfields, terrified the peasants in their harvesting, drew the shepherds’ dogs, and scattered grazing sheep, rolled down the mountain sides, making desperate swerves, and climbed up empty, assisted by its passengers. We passed Albanians and Bulgarians, who may have been brigands and insurgents, and questions were asked our driver, but he was out of temper and did not stop to reply. We made Pschtinia at eleven—the wonder, only a trace broke!—the Turk in a rage, and the sweat pouring from his panting steeds.

We chuckled at the expense of Hilmi Pasha, and drew visions of his wrath; he would permit us to see no more of the interior for ourselves. We grew bold here and planned to march on foot across Macedonia, from Uskub east to Djuma-bala, and from there on the Bulgarian border to Drama near the sea, a distance, all told, of three hundred miles, and you shall see whether we carried out this resolution.

The inhabitants of Pschtinia, many bandaged and limping, gathered round us and kissed our hands, thinking we were foreign Consuls come to inquire into their grievances. After the fight the Turks had passed through Pschtinia on their way back to barracks at Koumanova, stopped and beaten the peasants for having harboured the insurgents (which they protested they had not), and carried off the headmen to prison at the town. The old men insisted on showing us the welts on their backs and bruises on their legs, inflicted by the Turks with heavy sticks, and said that the villagers worst mauled had been taken to Koumanova to the doctor, and were now in the gaol there.

When we had eaten of the eggs and brown bread, and drunk of milk provided by different villagers, we climbed to the battlefield with two guides who had escaped mauling. It was a forlorn place for a last stand against overwhelming odds—a vast gravel dome, barren but for dwarfed yellow shrubs, and out of sight of every human habitation, even the village it sheltered. The band had been discovered some distance to the north, and chased by an ever-increasing pack of pursuers until driven to bay at this high peak. The insurgents attempted evidently to reach a forest on a neighbouring height, but the Turks cut them off before they could reach it. Little piles of stone a foot high, showing the haste with which they had been thrown together, were still standing, behind each a dark brown spot, a bloody rag or two, a scattering of empty Mauser cartridge-cases. On the slope of the dome we picked up Martini cases. ‘Turk,’ said the peasants. That was evident. The calibre was stamped in Turkish characters. Holes in the pink earth, with bits of cast iron firmly embedded in the rock, marked the places where the dynamite bombs had struck at the last charge, when the soldiers stormed the crest and the end of the insurgents was a matter of seconds.

Some time after the soldiers had withdrawn, and the dome was desolate again, a few peasants ventured to the top. They found the bodies of twenty-four Servians, battered and disfigured, and completely stripped; the Turks had taken away their own dead. Not so much of value as an old shoe remained on the battlefield. The next day the strong outfits of the insurgents, which had come from Belgrade, were sold by the soldiers on the market place at Koumanova. The peasants of Pschtinia rolled the bodies in coarse striped buffalo blankets, carried them down to the village, and buried them in the cemetery, the village priest performing the burial service. A rough wooden cross was raised over each grave. The villagers said the soldiers came back to Pschtinia and tore the crosses down; but they reared them again when the Turks were gone.

‘Are you Servians?’ we asked the peasants.

‘Bulgarians, effendi.’

‘Then this band was an enemy to your party?’

‘But they were Christians.’

On descending to the village we found our Turk already harnessing his team. He had been fed, and so had his horses, and they were all in a more tractable mood. The villagers, hale and halt, gathered around our carriage as we prepared to start, and poured forth their blessings on our Christian heads. Several small boys brought us dirty little fried fish, about two inches long, as a parting gift. We took the fish, rewarding the young villagers, and, as we crossed the stream, deposited the smoky carcases whence they had been drawn wriggling an hour before.

Our driver took us home by a different route, more direct, he said, with a great ‘something’ to see. He had noted that the Englishman gave backsheesh, and was wont to put us in his countrymen’s way. He himself belonged to the world-fraternity of cab-men, whose instincts vary nowhere, East or West; but his cousin, to whom he took us, was a Turkish peasant, a man who, when the spirit of war is without his soul, is as true a gentleman as Occident or Orient produces.

In crossing a trackless moor to the road that led where our Turk would take us, we lost the road, and for an hour wandered aimlessly till we met an armed man with a woman who covered her face at sight of us. The armed man asked the usual questions of our Turk, and gave him directions.

It was five o’clock when we arrived at a great wall of mud bricks, infinitely higher and better built than those surrounding the average Macedonian dwelling, but dilapidated and showing long want of care. The walls enclosed a vast irregular area, and entirely obscured the view within. We drove round wondering and asking questions of our Turk, which he ignored with a smile. Finally, we approached a high gate designed after the fashion of that leading to the Sublime Porte. Our driver stood up on the box and began a hallooing, which burst like trumpet blasts on the still surroundings. It was some time before a far-off answer came over the walls. The call and the reply were continued, the latter drawing gradually nearer, and after some minutes a man spoke through a keyhole not less than five inches high. Our Turk descended from the carriage-box, was recognised by him within, and told to wait until the key was fetched. We then peered through the keyhole, and after a brief interval spied the inmate returning from the house toiling under the weight of an iron key of robust diameter and a foot and a half long.

The huge oak gate was swung back, and we entered, greeted with a dignified salaam and a shake of the hand. There are no social classes among the Turks across which the hand-shake is debarred. Deference is shown superiors only in the salaam, a pasha receiving a lower bow with an extra twist of the hand than that given a bey, and a bey a lower dip of hand and head than a bimbashee, a bimbashee than an ordinary mortal effendi.

The Turk who welcomed us was the keeper, and, with his wife, the only occupant of this vast estate, the empty home of an exiled bey. The house was shown to us by both the keeper and his wife, who, though, of course, a Mohamedan woman, wore no veil. The house was handsome for this part of the country, but depleted even of furniture. The only pictures on the walls were common paintings on the plaster now cracked and falling. The harem, where marble divans for five wives were built in nooks, was filled with newly harvested grain. A bold rooster, the only lord of the manor, cackled to half a dozen happy hens and scattered the corn. We helped the keeper eject the usurper and his feminine following.

A bridge, resembling the Bridge of Sighs, led out of the harem into the dwelling of the exiled lord, bare like the other house. We climbed the creaky, dust-covered stairs to a turret at the point of the roof, which overlooked the surrounding walls and afforded a view of the encircling mountains. A brilliant southern sun was setting in an Oriental sky, and a train of three buffalo teams, silhouetted in the glow, crept along the sky-line.