Scutari, with its nation of dead, its owl and dove-haunted
cypresses? First, let us slide down
the steep street that runs from Misseri's to
Tophana, the Arsenal-gate, and take boat. I
am in the caïque's cradle, I cross my legs, and
am jerked across the Bosphorus. I leap on
shore. I am in Scutari, just under Miss Nightingale's
Hospital, and the English burial-ground,
whose tombs range along the sea-cliff. I throw
some great copper pieces on the caïque cushions,
and the boatman lets them lie there as contemptuously
as the cabman regarded the shilling
I yesterday left for him on my door-step. I
scale the steep street of Scutari, buy a great
hatful of sticky grapes, and find at the door
of the fruit-stall, which the soldiers of the opposite
hospital (now cavalry barracks) much
patronise, some Turks sitting cross-legged,
dozing in the shade of a plane-tree. They are
enjoying the Turk's highest pleasure since opium-eating
has grown obsolete. They sit with the
mind asleep, but the body and eyes open; this is
what they call "taking kef," and they do it
when we should be cricketing, partridge-shooting,
riding, or boating. It is the miserable
resource of a worn-out race. If they were
driven back to get their bread by tilling the
desert paradises of Asia Minor, these Turks might
find less time for "taking kef," and more for
honest work. I strike high up to the right, passing
sleepy country-houses; generally painted a dull
Indian red, with windows projecting and shut
in with unpainted wooden lattices, close as canary
cages. I reach the skirt of the cypress woods
through an up-and-down bare parade seamed with
cracks in the earth; all this was once burial-ground
too, says tradition.

I shun a blue-coated, stunted Turkish regiment
on drill, just approaching, with yellow flags and
undulating bayonets, and I pierce in between the
cypresses, many of whose husky and flaking
stems are of gigantic size, and unspannable by
my arms. I see no owls, though I am told that
at night they fill these Acherontic woods with
demon hooting, such as YOU may hare heard in
the Incantation scene in Der Freischütz, when
Zamiel appears.

I find myself in a great region of death, sown
thick with sloping tombstones, every third one
crowned with a stone turban. There are literally
hundreds of thousands of them, in all stages of
gentle decay. They look as if death had, as a
ghastly joke, turned the place into a skittle-ground
for quiet moonlight evenings; a game
seems over, and the pins are not yet rearranged,
but remain tumbled about in dire confusion—
miles of tombstones, which are shot about at
all angles like so many crystals, like so many
white pages plucked by Azrael from the great
book of life, each with its square or round turban,
or its red painted fez and blue tassel, its ledger
lines of blue and gilt letters and Koran verses,
around us, everywhere, rise the black spires of
the cypresses, which receive the sun as the dusty
surface of a pall does.

An outlaw might remain hidden among these
tombs, and be seen by nobody for days; but still
there are great roads bisecting the burial-ground
— wide, dusty, silent tracts, with loose tombstones
paving them— fractured stone turbans rolling
about their banks like gathered fruit. Here and
there, even, at the edges, you come to a coffee-shed,
a Turk digging a grave solemnly, a dervish
praying and swaying and telling his beads over
a tomb, or a black slave rides past, dead asleep
on a donkey, or some soldiers lounge through
and talk to the people on their way to market.
Otherwise, all is death, though you are here
but half an hour from the heart of Stamboul.

But, burying in the city is not quite so rare as
some writers, partisans of the Turks merely because
they dislike the wily and dangerous Russians,
have declared. In dozens of quiet Stamboul
streets you suddenly find the shops fading out,
and a yellow dead wall taking their place, pierced
with gratings, through which are visible blue and
gilt tombstones shaded by plane-trees. Entering,
you find the tombs littered up with rags and old
boxes, and turned into dunghills, as bad as
anything your London church warden can show, or
hide. Then there are the mortuary chapels of the
sultans, which I shall refer to again, where you
are shown the royal coffins covered with gorgeous
Persian shawls, and decorated with royal turbans,
on which the agraffes of diamonds still glitter
starrily.

At Galata, too, half up that dreadful hill to
Misseri's, on the right hand side, is a dervishes'
burial-ground, where planes grow green and the
tombs display their inscribed tablets warningly
to your eyes.

But the greatest place of interment, next to
that at Scutari, is the long range of ground that
follows the triple ramparts from the Seven
Towers which look out on the Propontis to the
Palace of Blachernæ, which commands the Golden
Horn. It begins with vast levels of kitchen
garden, gradually giving way to turbaned tombs,
which border the carriage-road, as the graves
do the Pompeian road and the Appian Way.
There, where knots of young Greeks wrestle,
and run the gauntlet, and dance in rings, flows
the white river of tombs, out by the Janissary
barracks, and on the road to the Greek madhouses,
and down to where the street slopes to
Eyub (Job), that brave adherent of the Arab
Prophet, whose grave still makes the potters'
suburb of Stamboul a holy place.

The Third Journey of
THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER,
A SERIES OF OCCASIONAL JOURNEYS,
BY CHARLES DICKENS,
Will appear Next Week.