Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/19

Rh if we had done with the civilized world, held forth his hand—I met it with mine, and there was an end to Christendom for many a day to come.

We soon neared the southern bank of the river, but no sounds came down from the blank walls above, and there was no living thing that we could yet see, except one great hovering bird of the vulture race, flying low, and intent, and wheeling round and round over the Pest-accused city.

But presently there issued from the postern, a group of human beings,—beings with immortal souls, and possibly some reasoning faculties, but to me the grand point was this, that they had real, substantial, and incontrovertible turbans; they made for the point towards which we were steering, and when at last I sprang upon the shore, I heard, and saw myself now first surrounded by men of Asiatic race; I have since ridden through the land of the Osmanlees, from the Servian Border to the Golden Horn,—from the gulph of Satalieh to the tomb of Achilles; but never have I seen such ultra-Turkish looking fellows as those who received me on the banks of the Save; they were men in the humblest order of life, having come to meet our boat in the hope of earning something by carrying our luggage up to the city, but poor though they were, it was plain that they were Turks of the proud old school, and had not yet forgotten the fierce, careless bearing of the once victorious Ottomans.

Though the province of Servia generally has obtained a kind of independence, yet Belgrade, as being a place of strength on the frontier, is still garrisoned by Turkish troops, under the command of a Pasha. Whether the fellows who now surrounded us were soldiers, or peaceful inhabitants, I did not understand; they wore the old Turkish costume; vests and jackets of many brilliant colors divided from the loose petticoat-trowsers by masses of shawl, which were folded in heavy volumes around their waists, so as to give the meagre wearers something of the dignity of true corpulence. The shawl enclosed a whole bundle of weapons; no man bore less than one brace of immensely long pistols, and a yataghan (or cutlass), with a dagger or two, of various shapes and sizes; most of these arms were inlaid with silver, and highly burnished, so that they contrasted