Chapter Fifteen"Scenery to burst the heart!"
THE REBEL'S HYMN
The seeds that swell within enwrapping mould,Gray buds that color faintly in the northing sun,Deep roots that lengthen after winter's rest,The flutter of year's youth in April's breastAs young leaves in the warming hour unfold--These and my heart are one!
Go dam the river-course with carted earth;Or bind with iron bands that riven stoneThat century on century has sleptUntil into its heart a tendril crept,And in the quiet majesty of birthNew nature broke into her own!Or bid the sun stand still! Or fashion wingsTo herd the heaven's stars and make them beSubservient to will and rule and whim!Or rein the winds, and still the ocean's hymn!More surely ye shall manage all these thingsThan chain the Life in me!
Great mountains shedding the reluctant snow,Vision of the finish of the thing begun,Spirit of the beauty of the torrent's song,Unconquerable peal of carillon,And secrets that in conquest overflow--These and my heart are one!
Yet another night we were destined to spend on the Zeitoon road,for we had not the heart to leave behind us the stragglers who balkedfainting in the gut of the pass. Some were long past the stage whereanything less than threats could make impression on them, and onlyable to go forward in a dull dream at the best. But there were numbersof both men and women unexpectedly capable of extremes of heroism,who took the burden of misery upon themselves and exhibited highspirits based on no evident excuse. Nothing could overwhelm those,nothing discourage them.
"To Zeitoon!" somebody shouted, as if that were the very war-cryof the saints of God. Then in a splendid bass voice he began tosing a hymn, and some women joined him. So Fred Oakes fell to hisold accustomed task, and played them marching accompaniments on hisconcertina until his fingers ached and even he, the enthusiast, loathedthe thing's bray. In one way and another a little of the pall ofmisery was lifted.
Kagig sent us down bread and yoghourt at nightfall, so that thosewho had lived thus far did not die of hunger. Women brought thefood on their heads in earthen crocks--splendid, good-looking womenwith fearless eyes, who bore the heavy loads as easily as their mountainmen-folk carried rifles. They did not stay to gossip, for we hadno news but the stale old story of murder and plunder; and theirnews was short and to the point.
"Come along to Zeitoon!" was the burden of it, carried with a singsonglaugh. "Zeitoon is ready for anything!"
Before we had finished eating, each two of them gathered up a poorwretch from our helpless crowd and strode away into the mountainswith a heavier load than that they brought.
"Come along to Zeitoon!" they called back to us. But even Fred'sconcertina, and the hymns of the handful who were not yet utterlyspent, failed to get them moving before dawn.
We did not spend the night unguarded, although no armed men lay betweenus and the enemy. We could hear the Kurds shouting now and then,and once, when I climbed a high rock, I caught sight of the glowof their bivouac fires. Imagination conjured up the shrieks of torturedvictims, for we had all seen enough of late to know what would happento any luckless straggler they might have caught and brought to makesport by the fires. But there was no imagination about the callsof Kagig's men, posted above us on invisible dark crags and ledgesto guard against surprise. We slept in comfortable consciousnessthat a sleepless watch was being kept--until fleas came out of theground by battalions, divisions and army corps, making rest impossible.
But even the flea season was a matter of indifference to the haplessfolk who lay around us, and although we fussed and railed we couldnot persuade them to go forward before dawn broke. Then, though,they struggled to their feet and started without argument. But anhour after the start we reached the secret of the safety of Zeitoon,without which not even the valor of its defenders could have withstoodthe overwhelming numbers of the Turks for all those scores of years;and there was new delay.
The gut of the pass rose toward Zeitoon at a sharp incline--a rampof slippery wet clay, half a mile long, reaching across from buttressto buttress of the impregnable hills. It was more than a riddenmule could do to keep its feet on the slope, and we had to dismount.It was almost as much as we ourselves could do to make progress withthe aid of sticks, and we knew at last what Kagig had meant by hisboast that nothing on wheels could approach his mountain home. Thepoor wretches who had struggled so far with us simply gave up hopeand sat down, proposing to die there. The martyred biped copiedthem, except that they were dry-eyed and he shed tears. "To thinkthat I should come to this--that I should come to this!" he sobbed.Yet the fool must have come down by that route, and have gone upthat way once.
We should have been in a quandary but for the sound of axes ringingin the mountain forest on our left--a dense dark growth of pine andother evergreens commencing about a hundred feet above the nakedrock that formed the northerly side of the gorge. Where there wereaxes at work there was in all likelihood a road that men could marchalong, and our refugees sat down to let us do the prospecting.
"It would puzzle Napoleon to bring cannon over this approach, andthe Turks don't breed Napoleons nowadays!" Fred shouted cheerily."Give me a hundred good men and I'll hold this pass forever! Waithere while I scout for a way round."
He tried first along the lower edge of the line of timber, encouragedby ringing axes, falling trees, and men shouting in the distance.
"It looks as if there once had been a road here," he shouted downto us, "but nothing less than fire would clear it now, and everythingis sopping wet. I never saw such a tangle of roots and rocks. Adog couldn't get thought!"
Will volunteered to cross to the right-hand side and hunt over therefor a practicable path. Gloria stayed beside me, and I had my firstopportunity to talk with her alone. She was very pale from the effectsof the wound in her wrist, which was painful enough to draw her youngface and make her eyes burn feverishly. Even so, one realized thatas an old woman she would still be beautiful.
I watched the eagles for a minute or two, wondering what to say toher, and she did not seem to object to silence, so that I forcedan opening at last as clumsily as Peter Measel might have done it.
"What is it about Will that makes all women love him?" I asked her.
"Oh, do they all love him?"
"Looks like it!" said I.
She still wore the bandolier they had stripped from the man withthe bandaged feet, although Will had relieved her of the rifle'sweight. To the bottom of the bandolier she had tied the little bagof odds and ends without which few western women will venture a milefrom home. Opening that she produced a small round mirror abouttwice the size of a dollar piece, and offered it to me with a smilethat disarmed the rebuke.
"Perhaps it's his looks," she suggested.
I took the mirror and studied what I saw in it. In spite of a crackingheadache due to that and the gaining sun (for I had lost my hat whenthe Kurd rode me down with his lance) the episode of Rustum Khancarrying me back out of death's door on his bay mare had not lingeredin memory. There had been too much else to think about. Now forthe first time I realized how near that lance-point must have cometo finishing the chapter for me. I had washed in the Jihun whenwe bivouacked, but had not shaved; later on, my scalp had bled anew,so that in addition to unruly hair tousled and matted with dry bloodI had a week-old beard to help make me look like a graveyard ghoul.
"I beg pardon!" I said simply, handing her the mirror back.
At that she was seized with regret for the unkindness, and utterlyforgot that I had blundered like a bullock into the sacred sanctuaryof her newborn relationship to Will.
"Oh, I don't know which of you is best!" she said, taking my handwith her unbandaged one. "You are great unselfish splendid men.Will has told me all about you! The way you have always stuck toyour friend Monty through thick and thin--and the way you are followinghim now to help these tortured people--oh, I know what you are--Willhas told me, and I'm proud--"
The embarrassment of being told that sort of thing by a young andvery lovely woman
, when newly conscious of dirt and blood andhalf-inch-long red whiskers, was apparently not sufficient for themirth of the exacting gods of those romantic hills. There cameinterruption in the form of a too-familiar voice.
"Oh, that's all right, you two! Make the most of it! Spoon allyou want to! My girl's in the clutches of an outlaw! Kiss her ifyou want to--I won't mind!"
I dropped her hand as if it were hot lead. As a matter of fact Ihad hardly been conscious of holding it.
"Oh, no, don't mind me!" continued the "martyred biped" in a tonecombining sarcasm, envy and impudence.
"Shall I kill him?" I asked.
"No! no!" she said. "Don't be violent--don't--"
Peter Measel, whom we had inevitably utterly forgotten, was sittingup with his back propped against a stone and his legs stretched straightin front of him, enjoying the situation with all the curiosity ofhis unchastened mind. I hove a lump of clay at him, but missed,and the effort made my headache worse.
"If you think you can frighten me into silence you're mistaken!"he sneered, getting up and crawling behind the rock to protect himself.But it needed more than a rock to hide him from the fury that tookhold of me and sent me in pursuit in spite of Gloria's remonstrance.
Viewed as revenge my accomplishment was pitiful, for I had to chasethe poor specimen for several minutes, my headache growing worseat every stride, and he yelling for mercy like a cur-dog shown thewhip, while the Armenians--women and little children as well asmen--looked on with mild astonishment and Gloria objected volubly.He took to the clay slope at last in hope that his light weight wouldgive him the advantage; and there at last I caught him, and clappeda big gob of clay in his mouth to stop his yelling.
Even viewed as punishment the achievement did not amount to much.I kicked him down the clay slope, and he was still blubbering andpicking dirt out of his teeth when Will shouted that he had founda foot-track.
"Do you understand why you've been kicked?" I demanded.
"Yes. You're afraid I'll tell Mr. Yerkes!"
"Oh, leave him!" said Gloria. "I'm sorry you touched him. Let's go!"
"It was as much your fault as his, young woman!" snarled the biped,getting crabwise out of my reach. "You'll all be sorry for this beforeI'm through with you!"
I was sorry already, for I had had experience enough of the worldto know that decency and manners are not taught to that sort of specimenin any other way than by letting him go the length of his disgracefulcourse. Carking self-contempt must be trusted to do the businessfor him in the end. Gloria was right in the first instance. I shouldhave let him alone.
However, it was not possible to take his threat seriously, and morethan any man I ever met he seemed to possess the knack of fallingout of mind. One could forget him more swiftly than the birds forgeta false alarm. I don't believe any of us thought of him again untilthat night in Zeitoon.
The path Will had discovered was hardly a foot wide in places, andmules could only work their way along by rubbing hair off their flanksagainst the rock wall that rose nearly sheer on the right hand.From the point of view of an invading army it was no approach at all,for one man with a rifle posted on any of the overhanging crags couldhave held it against a thousand until relieved. It was a mysterywhy Kagig, or some one else, had not left a man at the foot of theclay slope to tell us about this narrow causeway; but doubtlessKagig had plenty to think about.
He and most of his men had gone struggling up the clay slope, aswe could tell by the state of the going. But they were old handsat it and knew the trick of the stuff. We had all our work cut outto shepherd our poor stragglers along the track Will found, and eventhe view of Zeitoon when we turned round the last bend and saw theplace jeweled in the morning mist did not do much to increase the speed.
As Kagig had once promised us, it was "scenery to burst the heart!"Not even the Himalayas have anything more ruggedly beautiful to show,glistening in mauve and gold and opal, and enormous to the eye becausethe summits all look down from over blowing cloud-banks.
There were moss-grown lower slopes, and waterfalls plunging downwet ledges from the loins of rain-swept majesty; pine trees loomingblue through a soft gray fog, and winds whispering to them, weepingto them, moving the mist back and forth again; shadows of cloudsand eagles lower yet, moving silently on sunny slopes. And up aboveit all was snow-dazzling, pure white, shading off into the cold blueof infinity.
Men clad in goat-skin coats peered down at us from time to time fromcrags that looked inaccessible, shouting now and then curt recognitionbefore leaning again on a modern rifle to resume the ancient vigilof the mountaineer, which is beyond the understanding of theplains-man because it includes attention to all the falling watervoices, and the whispering of heights and deeps.
We came on Zeitoon suddenly, rising out of a gorge that was filledwith ice, or else a raging torrent, for six months of the year.Over against the place was a mountainside so exactly suggesting paintedscenery that the senses refused to believe it real, until the roarand thunder of the Jihun tumbling among crags dinned into the earsthat it was merely wonderful, and not untrue.
The one approach from the southward--that gorge up which we trudged--wasoverlooked all along its length by a hundred inaccessiblefastnesses from which it seemed a handful of riflemen could havedisputed that right of way forever. The only other line of accessthat we could see was by a wooden bridge flung from crag to cragthree hundred feet high across the Jihun; and the bridge was overlookedby buildings and rocks from which a hail of lead could have beenmade to sweep it at short range.
Zeitoon itself is a mountain, next neighbor to the Beirut Dagh, notas high, nor as inaccessible; but high enough, and inaccessibleenough to give further pause to its would-be conquerors. Not inanything resembling even rows, but in lawless disorder from the baseto the shoulder of the mountain, the stone and wooden houses go pilingskyward, overlooking one another's roofs, and each with an unobstructedview of endless distances. The picture was made infinitely lovelyby wisps of blown mist, like hair-lines penciled in the violet air.
Distances were all foreshortened in that atmosphere, and it wasmid-afternoon before we came to a halt at last face to face withblank wall. The track seemed to have been blocked by half the mountainsitting down across it. We sat down to rest in the shadow of theshoulder of an overhanging rock, and after half an hour some onelooked down on us, and whistled shrilly. Kagig with a rifle acrosshis knees looked down from a height of a hundred and fifty feet,and laughed like a man who sees the bitter humor of the end of shams.
"Welcome!" he shouted between his hands. And his voice came echoingdown at us from wall to wall of the gorge. Five minutes later hesent a man to lead us around by a hidden track that led upward,sometimes through other houses, and very often over roofs, acrossridiculously tiny yards, and in between walls so closely set togetherthat a mule could only squeeze through by main force.
We stabled the mules in a shed the man showed us, and after thatKagig received us four, and Anna, Gloria's self-constituted maid,in his own house. It was bare of nearly everything but sheernecessities, and he made no apology, for he had good taste, andperfect manners if you allowed for the grim necessity of being curtand the strain of long responsibility.
A small bench took the place of a table in the main large room.There was a fireplace with a wide stone chimney at one end, and somestools, and also folded skins intended to be sat on, and shiny placeson the wall where men in goat-skin coats had leaned their backs.
Two or three of the gipsy women were hanging about outside, and oneof the gipsies who had been with him in the room in the khan at Tarsusappeared to be filling the position of servitor. He brought us yoghourtin earthenware bowls--extremely cool and good it was; and afterwe had done I saw him carry down a huge mess more of it to the housebelow us, where many of the stragglers we had brought along werequartered by Kagig's order.
"Where's Monty?" Fred demanded as soon as we entered the room.
"Presently!" K
agig answered--rather irritably I thought. He seemedto have adopted Monty as his own blood brother, and to resent allother claims on him.
The afternoon was short, for the shadow of the surrounding mountainsshut us in. Somebody lighted a fire in the great open chimney-place,and as we sat around that to revel in the warmth that rests tiredlimbs better than sleep itself, Kagig strode out to attend to a millionthings--as the expression of his face testified.
Then in came Maga, through a window, with self-betrayal in mannerand look of having been watching us ever since we entered. She wentup to Will, who was squatted on folded skins by the chimney corner,and stood beside him, claiming him without a word. Her black hairhung down to her waist, and her bare feet, not cut or bruised likemost of those that walk the hills unshod, shone golden in the firelight.I looked about for Peter Measel, expecting a scene, but he had takenhimself off, perhaps in search of her.
She had eyes for nobody but Gloria, and no smile for any one. Gloriastared back at her, fascinated.
"You married?" she asked; and Gloria shook her head. "You 'eardme, what I said back below there!"
Gloria nodded.
"You sing?"
"Sometimes."
"You dance?"
"Oh, yes. I love it."
"Ah! You shall sing--you shall dance--against me! First you sing--thenI sing. Then you dance--then I dance--to-night--you understan'?If I sing better as you sing--an' if I dance better as you dance--thenI throw you over Zeitoon bridge, an' no one interfere! But if yousing better as I sing--an' if you dance better as I dance--then youshall make a servant of me; for I know you will be too big foolan' too chicken 'earted to keel me, as I would keel you! You understan'?"
It rather looked as if an issue would have to be forced there andthen, but at that minute Gregor entered, and drove her out with anoath and terrific gesture, she not seeming particularly afraid ofhim, but willing to wait for the better chance she foresaw was coming.Gregor made no explanation or apology, but fastened down the leatherwindow-curtain after her and threw more wood on the fire.
Then back came Kagig.
"Where the devil's Monty?" Fred demanded.
"Come!" was the only answer. And we all got up and followed himout into the chill night air, and down over three roofs to a longshed in which lights were burning. All the houses--on every sideof us were ahum with life, and small wonder, for Zeitoon was harboringthe refugees from all the district between there and Tarsus, to saynothing of fighting men who came in from the hills behind to lenda hand. But we were bent on seeing Monty at last, and had no patiencefor other matters.
However, it was only the prisoners he had led us out to see, andnothing more.
"Look, see!" he said, opening the heavy wooden door of the shed asan armed sentry made way for him. (Those armed men of Zeitoon didnot salute one another, but preserved a stoic attitude that includedrecognition of the other fellow's right to independence, too.) "Lookin there, and see, and tell me--do the Turks treat Armenian prisonersthat way?"
We entered, and walked down the length of the dim interior, passingbetween dozens of prisoners lying comfortably enough on skins andblankets. As far as one could judge, they had been fed well, andthey did not wear the look of neglect or ill-treatment. At the end,in a little pen all by himself, was the colonel whom Rustum Khanhad made a present of to Gloria.
"What's the straw for?" Fred demanded.
"Ask him!" said Kagig. "He understands! If there should be treacherythe straw will be set alight, and he shall know how pigs feel whenthey are roasted alive! Never fear--there will be no treachery!"
We followed him back to his own house, he urging us to make goodnote of the prisoners' condition, and to bear witness before theworld to it afterward.
"The world does not know the difference between Armenians and Turks!"he complained again and again.
Once again we arranged ourselves about his open chimney-place, thistime with Kagig on a foot-stool in the midst of us. Heat, weariness,and process of digestion were combining to make us drowsily comfortable,and I, for one, would have fallen asleep where I sat. But at lastthe long-awaited happened, and in came Monty striding like a Norman,dripping with dew, and clean from washing in the icy water of somemountain torrent.
"Oh, hello, Didums!" Fred remarked, as if they had parted about anhour ago. "You long-legged rascal, you look as if you'd been havingthe time of your life!"
"I have!" said Monty. And after a short swift stare at him Fredlooked glum. Those two men understood each other as the clapperunderstands the bell.