... I must try to tell you something of all we have been seeing. We left Athens on Tuesday at five o’clock in the morning, having engaged a carriage to take us to Thebes. It was an exquisite morning, and we drove by Eleusis thro’ a pass of Cithæron, supposed to be that of Eleuthera. We saw the ruins of the fortress of the ancient Greeks guarding the Attic end of the pass. As we came down on the Bœotian side, a magnificent view of Parnassus opened on our left; the site of Platæa was in sight; but nothing remains to mark it, as seen from a distance; far away to the East we saw the grand snow-covered range of mountains in Eubœa, and the beautiful peak of Delphi (Delphi in Eubœa) rising highest in the chain. When we got to Thebes, which stands very picturesquely on a hill, we drove thro’ its main street, thro’ the savage barking of fierce dogs, and rather wild-looking people. Mr. Petousi, the deputy to whose care Mr. Noel had recommended us, was away; so we drove on to the house of Mrs. Theagenes, to whom Dr. Hill had given us an introduction. We were quite unexpected, but were at once received most kindly, and arrangements were made for us to stay all night. Mrs. Theagenes is the widow of the Colonel who tried to help about the freedom of those young Englishmen near Marathon, and who went to see the brigands about them. He felt the matter so deeply, that it is said to have caused his death.... He seems to have been a man of culture, and thought and principle, and a friend of General Church and the early Greek patriots. His books and pictures remain; and his widow and son and daughter were most kind.... They took us out to see the town, which was dirty, and looked neglected. We did not come upon traces of any progress or life. Of course we may be wrong; and we were most touched by their kindness; but the town did not inspire one with hope. Next day we had a splendid drive across to Chalcis; the road, an excellent one, leads down in sight of the Euripus and Eubœan mountains. The fortifications at Chalcis are very picturesque. |MR. NOEL’S HOUSE IN EUBŒA| We slept at Chalcis at the house of a Mr. Boudouris, whose sister was carried off by brigands many years ago from there, but very kindly treated, till ransomed.... From Chalcis we started next morning at daybreak, on mules, under the charge of a sort of head man of Mr. Noel’s, not the steward but another, and a second servant. It was a very impressive journey, and gave one an idea of remoteness. For eight hours we went steadily on over hills and along ravines, beyond all roads, with nothing but rough bridle paths. The forests were beautiful, the mountains grand, the sea fair and smooth as a lake in the distance, but not a house, nor a trace of man did we pass for hours. We came along beside a lovely half stream, half river, in a deep ravine, set with fir and plane, and oak trees, and with great bushes of white heath. At last we came upon a sort of clearance in the forest, like an English village, only without any road to it, and in sight, and quite near, of mountains on three sides, one covered with snow. Here and there among the wooded hills there were cleared fields of corn, maize, and vine, well-built stone houses, very small, but with tiled roofs clustered at the foot of one wooded hill, on the slope of which, above the cottages but below the trees which crown it, stood the house we are now in, with its wide vine-covered trellised verandah, its walled garden and great well. We rode up and alighted in the great yard, round which the long stone houses for grain, the stables, and houses for oxen, and the wood-sheds are built. We were led into the drawing-room, and then into our bedroom, which looked like that in an English country house. We looked out on the park-like scenery and the busy village below, and felt what a work had been done. Here, forty-six years ago, came three young foreigners quite alone. Mr. Noel was but twenty. The place was all forest. The few people in straw huts had gone to the other side of the estate, fifty miles off, to be away from the road—this little bridle path—to get away from the Turks. They had built their doors low that the Turks mightn’t lead their horses in. Hardly could the peasants be persuaded to come back, so frightened were they. Fever seized first the brother-in-law, then Mr. Noel, who was lifted on to his horse by Mr. Müller, and taken to Chalcis. The brother-in-law died. Dr. Hill, then in Athens, heard there were two young men ill at Chalcis, took a boat, as there were no steamers, and came and fetched them, took them to his own house, and nursed Mr. Noel for a year. “No doubt he saved Noel’s life,” says Mr. Müller quietly, quite unconscious of the spiritedness of their own action. They returned, built, planted, encouraged, watched, and have made of this a little sort of oasis in the desert, in its life, like that gathered round an English landlord. And yet, oh how different! The life here reminds me very much of that led by Flora MacIvor and her brother. The same loyalty to Mr. Frank Noel appears to prevail among the people; the same distance from law makes him the judge among them; the same wild habits seem to prevail; the same virtues, and those only.... There is no road to this place; and when Mrs. F. Noel was married she wanted a piano. “How did you get it here?” I asked. “We had it brought in a small boat to the sea-shore, about three hours from here; and some fête day, when the men were not working, Mr. Noel went out among them and said that I wanted my piano, and which of them would go and carry it? Thirty-six of them sprang up to go, and they carried it for three hours over the open country in relays of twelve. |INFLUENCE OF THE NOELS| Mr. Noel and I, of course, went too. In the evening they came in, and we had a good supper, and I played to them. They would have been much hurt if we had offered to pay.” Another time Mr. Noel came in from seeing some of the tenants, and said, “—— has been to me to ask me to lend him one of my field guards to help him to carry off by force the girl he was engaged to, who has broken off the affair with her parents’ (consent). I told him it wouldn’t do, but that they must return the presents.” “And double them,” added Mr. Müller. “Certainly,” said Mr. Noel. “A girl has been waiting here all day to see you,” said Mr. Noel, “she has brought a large bottle for you to give her some medicine; the gendarmes came to take her husband; and her blood is quite cold ever since.” And this sort of thing goes on incessantly. One hears too of one man, who lost his presence of mind when one of the great forest fires surrounded the seventy villagers, and Mr. Noel, who had been three days and three nights trying to stop it. He lay on the ground, and would not stir; Mr. Noel raised him and dragged him on and on, and, as the man says, saved his life. It is beautiful to see young Mrs. Noel among them all, so gentle and brave and stately. It was such a picture last night, as she stood near the house door in the great yard. The great oxen were feeding or lying about; about twenty men and women, in the beautiful costume of the country, stood about listening to her, and watching her one little child, a girl of nearly two years old, who was carried about and petted, first by one and then another. It was near sunset; and the long sloping rays fell on the group. Mr. Noel was away for some days; and she and the tiny child were the only representatives of the race that rules here by education and gentleness. The rest just look, love, and obey.

I don’t know if it is my fault, or the strong preconceived impression, or the absence of sun; but this place feels to me like a cursed or doomed one, a city of corruption and decay. It doesn’t strike me as the least beautiful.

We went on Sunday, which was the Greek Easter Eve, to the midnight service here. We got capital places in the part railed off for the priests, where no ladies are allowed, nor the congregation. At midnight the old tradition says that fire comes down from heaven.

There seems to be no distinct belief in that, as a miracle, here; but it was a beautiful service. The priest came out at midnight with the light; and rapidly every single soul there lighted the taper he held, the light spreading from the priests with wonderful rapidity. The church was crowded with earnest, rather rugged looking men. They read the Gospel on Easter Sunday in eight languages. They go out at night to look for Christ, and come back saying, “He is risen.” There was a good deal of dress and ceremony, but a good deal of fervour.

We have seen a great deal since I wrote to you,—the large silent mosques with their space and simplicity, the triple walls which surround the town, with ancient Greek inscriptions built into them. The Golden Gate in them, thro’ which the emperors made triumphal entry; the walled-up gate, so dealt with because the Turks believe the Christians will re-enter by that gate; wonderful old Christian churches now converted into mosques, with the crosses and Christian symbols mutilated—one, however, very beautiful, where the mosaics were preserved. Then we have seen the large vault underground, supported by 1001 columns in old times, built to supply Byzantium with water; the strange cemeteries of the Turks, the dismallest of places; the stones high and narrow are tumbling about in every direction like ninepins; the graves are in quite untold numbers by the road sides, on banks, in ditches, anywhere and everywhere, without fence, without protection, without reverence; even the cypress trees among them look forlorn, and the stones much more forlorn because of the vermilion and emerald green and cobalt and gold, which once made them gay. It was such a contrast to cross to Skutari, where the British dead, who fell in the Crimea, lie. The ground is enclosed with a well-built wall; it is quite bright with flowering trees and shrubs, and lies on the sunniest slope overlooking the blue sea. Comparatively few graves have any stone, or name, or record; but the greenest, brightest, sunniest, best cared-for turf covers them. The inscriptions suggest such stories; here the record of two brothers about 20, surviving one another 4 days; several erected by brother officers, one to a private by his companions, one by a young sister to her brother, who, she says, “cheerfully surrendered his life to his country”; nineteen, twenty, even eighteen once or twice, are frequent ages for the dead. The hospital, where Miss Nightingale worked, stands just above and looks so good, and solid, and in order. We went a ride yesterday round by the Sweet Waters of Europe, all round the Golden Horn. We came back thro’ the Greek quarter. It was such a comfort to see the windows clean and bright, and without the dismal wooden lattice work, which shuts in the Turkish houses, and the women with bright, uncovered faces sitting at the windows sewing.

I think so constantly of you all, tho’ I write nothing about it.

I am sitting on board one of the Danube steamers in the twilight writing to you. We are lying at Turn Severin for the night, because they want daylight to go thro’ the Iron Gates. We had a good passage from Constantinople to Varna; the Bosphorus was very beautiful as we sailed up. Just beyond Therapia the population on its shores seems almost suddenly to cease. It makes one feel how it is only the overflow from Constantinople. Beyond Therapia one sees little but Genoese castles, a light-house or two, and a very few tiny villages, cliffs, bare heights and points. It is strange to see the fortified narrowest part, kept by such different nations, and a point where Byzantine and Turk of old looked at one another across the narrow water from their respective fortresses, and measured their respective strength. Varna has no good port; they say it is as far from the steamer as Jaffa, and the passage horrid in rough weather, because no mole is built; but happily it was calm, when we went on shore in a large boat with four rowers. I was interested to land in Bulgaria. One wonders what these young nations are going to be, somewhat as one does about children. The country looked strange and very uninhabited; but it was much more beautiful than I expected. We went by railway thro’ it to Rustchuk. First we went thro’ the flat bottom of a valley, bounded by low wooded hills. A river flowed thro’ it, which often spread into what looked like lakes, they might be floods. Further on, we seemed to mount and pass over hills—I suppose low spurs of the Balkans. There we saw miles and miles of the most exquisite spring-green woods, spreading over waves and waves of hill away to the far distance. We came to downs too, great stretches of swelling hills and hollows of green grass that had never been cultivated; on them here and there we saw herds of buffaloes and horses feeding. At Rustchuk we came upon this boat. We sailed between Roumania and Bulgaria first; then we came to Servia on the right bank of the river, and soon we shall come to Austria on the left. It has been exquisitely beautiful to watch the great stretches of river, with the sky reflected in them, to walk up and down the deck and watch the sun rise and set, to pass the willowy islands, and note the great tracts of uninhabited land, decreasing, I suppose, as we get higher up the river. Yesterday we passed numbers of wild-looking Servians. I never saw any people look so like savages. They were in funny boats just made of a trunk of a tree hollowed out, and cut short off at either end. They looked heavy and clumsy and very primitive; the men had little clumsy wooden paddles, and were dressed so strangely, and looked so poor and crushed down with labour. They were mostly fishing; those on the shore were dressed in something exactly the colour of the sandy banks. I wondered such people could exist on the shores of a great water highway like this. A gentleman on board told me they were “all robbers and murderers,” which made me very angry, for I don’t think he knew anything about them. I was glad to remember Miss Irby, and to be able to say a quiet word about knowing a lady who had worked among them for years; and that I did not believe she had found them such dreadful hardened people as he seemed to think. “Oh,” he said, “she probably lives in one of the towns, and has a dragoman to intervene between her and the people.” “No,” I replied, “I believe not; I think she has travelled all over the country, she is working about schools there, and, I fancy, knows the people.”

We pass by little villages with minarets, and red roofs, and then for miles not a house again, only the great river going on and on; sometimes we pass a funny raft, sometimes a Greek steamer or tug; always every change in sky or shore reflects itself in this great river.

The morning after I wrote this, I was up at 3 o’clock, because the steamer was said to start before the dawn, and I wanted to see the Iron Gates. I came up on deck, and all was very still; the stars reflected in the water. The shore of each bank was still quite flat; but, in front, one saw the hills. Just as the sun rose with its round globe out of the water, the boat started. In what seemed but a few minutes after we had been in the flat plain, the gates of the hills appeared just in front of us. The morning sun lighted the great cliffs on one side of the water-paved ravine, and left the other walls of rock in deep blue shadow, while just in the place where the rocks on either side looked as if they met and closed the passage, a wreath of rose-coloured morning mist lay, which, gently rising with the sun’s heat, spread itself in faint, thin, lovely streaks along the wooded hills, rising gradually and losing themselves in the blue sky. Everything was reflected in the sheet of smooth water. The river is almost at its fullest, I believe. This same large steamer can come from Rustchuk to Pesth. I believe the ice is melted, and had not yet reached the sea, as it were; so we saw less of the rapids than if it had been later in the year; but, here and there, the river was all churned into foam; and, in places, a great line of white breakers showed where a great ridge of rock ran right across the channel. Nothing could exceed the beauty of that sunrise scene; but the scenery is even grander further up, in what is called the Defile of Kasan. It was very interesting to see distinctly the remains of Trajan’s road. What a work to make a road thro’ such a defile, without gunpowder! One sees the strong hand of the Roman, as one watches the road cut on the buttresses of the great cliffs above the deep, wild water, and traces still the clear-cut holes in which wooden supports were placed; and there is the Latin inscription still on the rocks. After we had passed thro’ the wonderful defile we came where the Danube spreads out almost like a lake; and, since then, we have come on and on, up and up it, watching sunrise and sunset, and moonlight and thunderstorm; seeing the fortresses that guard it, the very few villages and towns on its banks, that is to say very few in comparison with the miles of uninhabited shore, lovely woods, of island after island covered with thick woods, of great plains over which the cloud shadows float. It has been a most interesting and most delightful life. Miss Y. took a private cabin, where we have all our things as comfortably about us as if we were at home, and can make our tea or lie down within view of the river; but mainly we use the higher deck as our sitting-room; there we have two easy chairs, and our work, our books, our writing by us. Or we pace the deck till the stars come out. We shall be quite sorry when it comes to an end. The tourists go by train now, the great bulk of them at least; a few come on board just to see the Iron Gates, but they leave at Orsova, and don’t even see the Defile of Kasan; nor can they realise anything of the great history of the river, how it lives till it reaches the Gates; of its course thro’ this great Hungarian plain, past the high sandy cliffs which protect its tiny villages on the one shore from the great floods which must break at times violently over its low left bank. They do not see its free towns, still exempt from military service, except in time of war; nor note the mouths of the Drave and the Theiss, and the thousands of streams that feed and swell the Danube. They do not see the floods out, and the people in their flat-bottomed boats sailing about over the meadows, nor the herds of grey cattle, nor the vineyards on the slopes, nor the reedy banks, nor the lonely stacks of wood in the forests, nor mount the paddle-box and see the country people on the fore part of the ship, Servians, and Hungarians and Bulgarians, the strange costumes, the funny German life; nor see the local fête, the fireworks from the boats on the flooded meadows, the corn-grinding mills in the middle of the river; they cannot watch these, with the free cool air blowing all round them, and the sun shining, and every mist and wreath and change of cloud visible all round in the whole space of sky. I wish we did not get to Pesth to-day. But we shall have some more of the Danube between Vienna and Linz. I do not the least know what we shall do beyond Dresden. I must write when we have fixed, with fresh directions about letters. I think of you so often, dear Mama, and wish you were here. I fancy you would enjoy the kind of thing so much.

We shall post this at Pesth. I suppose some day they will prevent the floods here. It is beautiful to see how much of the earth has still to be filled with happy home life; and, near lovely things, this is not the impression one gets in England.