By Desert Ways to Baghdad. Louisa Jebb Wilkins
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.
CHAPTER II
BRIGANDAGE
Brigandage. The capture of Miss Stone, ancient history as it now is, has served to give a vivid meaning to this word in the public mind. We were being continually asked if we wished to emulate Miss Stone. Travelling second-class through Bulgaria on our way to Constantinople our fellow-passengers, rough, good-natured farmers, joked about it; but they always added, "No, it will not happen to you." Then they would look at one another and laugh. The capture of Miss Stone did not seem to be looked upon seriously out there.
Then there was the Embassy at Constantinople. They were horribly nervous about international complications. As a matter of fact capture for ransom is a decided danger in the neighbourhood of larger towns in Asiatic Turkey. Not that there are any professional brigands prowling about, but there is a certain class of native ready to become a brigand on the spur of the moment, should they get wind of suitable prey. They are not Turks—no Turk would be bothered; they are, as a rule, Greeks, and always Christians. It is as well, therefore, on any expedition, not to make very great preparations and talk too much of your line of route; but as quietly and expeditiously as possible to get hold of your horses and men and start off before news of your movements has been noised abroad.
It was not at all in our favour that X bore a name well known to fortune hunters; one of her uncles was in the habit of big-game shooting in this district, and his means were fabulously exaggerated.
Calphopolos had been sent with us partly because he could be so thoroughly trusted to take all precautions. He certainly earned his reputation; he seemed to have been born with the fear of brigands in his soul; mere conversation about them caused him to break out into a profuse perspiration. He had talked to us very seriously on leaving Constantinople, as we sat on the deck of the steamer which took us across the Sea of Marmora on our way to Brusa.
"Pour l'amour de Dieu, mesdemoiselles, soyez secrètes; la secrécé, c'est tout."
"La secrécé" became his by-word. If there was one thing he was more afraid of than anything else on earth it was X's surname. He implored her not to use it, but to call herself Miss Victoria. He had all our luggage labelled Miss Victoria; and if in casual conversation the dreaded name leaked out, beads of perspiration rolled down his face and he would glance nervously round to see who was within earshot.
X was rather a reprobate on the subject. On our arrival at Madame Brot's well-known hotel at Brusa, from where we were making our final departure the next day, she marched up to Madame Brot and said, "I think you know my uncle"—mentioning him by name. Calphopolos, who was just behind, explaining that our name was Victoria pure and simple, turned green with horror. With bent back and staring eyes, shaking the same finger in warning which his subconscious self was trying to put on his lips, he endeavoured to attract X's attention from behind Madame Brot's broad back. But X went glibly on, quite oblivious of the panic she was creating. Calphopolos turned to me with the resigned expression of a man on whom death-sentence has been passed. "It is all over now," he said, "everybody in Brusa will know about us in half an hour. Mesdemoiselles, did I not implore you for the love of God to respect the secrecy? Ah, mon Dieu, mon Dieu, quelles demoiselles!"
And then poor old Calphopolos, who was not without his sense of fun, laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks. "The only thing left to do," he went on, when he had sufficiently recovered to speak again, "is to pretend we are going to Angora and put them off the scent. Mesdemoiselles, for the love of God please try and remember that it is Angora you are going to. Tell everybody you are going to Angora. The secrecy it is everything."
It must be confessed it was very difficult at that time to feel seriously alarmed about brigandage, for we seemed to be moving in ordinary respectable society, and Calphopolos's treatment of the subject merely caused us to think of it as a joke. Still, we fully realised that it was a real risk, against which it would not do to neglect taking ordinary precautions; and this sense was heightened by the extreme alarm of the Vice-Consul at Brusa to whom we applied for the escort of Zaptiehs, without whom one is not permitted to travel in Turkey with any guarantee of safety. He could not understand why we would not drive through to Nicæa in a landau in one day, like the ordinary tourist; this, with a suitable escort, made the journey quite safe, and it is a common thing for travellers to do. But to ride there in three days with our camp, sleeping on the way, was another matter. Every extra hour spent loitering in any one district heightened the risk of being attacked by brigands. X tried to explain that it was for the sake of her health, which only made him more bewildered; surely a landau was more suitable for invalids!
Finding us, however, unmoved by his arguments, he promised to send us two men the next morning and implored us never to leave their sides for a moment. He must have rubbed the same instructions well into the Zaptiehs, for during the seven days which they accompanied us as far as Mekidje on the Anatolian Railway, they never were more than a couple of yards away from us, day and night. This certainly detracted from the sense of freedom we were otherwise experiencing. It seemed at first as if we had only escaped from one form of bondage to fall into another. But the fact that the men were unable to speak any language we understood prevented it from becoming irksome, and one was soon able to become nearly oblivious of the clanking sword at one's elbow.
Calphopolos, however, was not so easily ignored. He had a sort of feeling that we were always running away from him, and tried to check this pernicious tendency on our part by engaging us in constant conversation in his broken French. The more we edged our horses away from his side and tried to put a silent Zaptieh between him and ourselves, the more persistently would he pursue us, propounding some new problem which required an answer. Our behaviour on breaking camp that morning had probably given rise to his state of mind. We had ordained that the start should be made at eight o'clock; but the usual procrastinations had ensued and the men seemed totally unable to get off. Calphopolos kept packing and unpacking