AN OUTPOST OF ASIA.
BROWN, white, and green, in every kind of shade, are the colours for a traveller to use in painting in his memory the picture of Yanina : white birds against the green light of sunset and of sunrise, brown walls rising from the bright green waters of a shallow lake, white domes encircled by mountains the rocks of which are golden brown. But thus he can recall a lifeless image only of the appearance of the town; and from Yanina, besides strong memories of material loveli- ness, he brings away with him memories still stronger of an intangible atmosphere of magic and fascination. It is at first sight that a traveller's mind is best able to feel the true
influence of a place which is strange and beautiful; so to revive the impressions which he felt there he must remember how he approached it, and how he saw it first.
In the recesses of Mount Pindus there liven a race of nomads who claim descent from the soldiers of Hadrian. Because they speak a Latin language like Roumanian, their neighbours call them Vlachs (Wallachs). They are a slight, graceful people, and in youth, before hardship and oppression have marked them, beautiful with the rare spiritual beauty which haunted Prerapbaelite painters. There is an air of mystery about them. Their villages are placed high up on the remote passes and shoulders of the bills. The women live there in seclusion all the year round, unseen by strangers; but the men and boys stay with them during the winter only and in summer leave their homes to wander through the valleys with their goats, sleeping among the rocks. When the snow melts and spring begins, they appear guiding their flocks down the dry river-beds to browse upon the underbush, or resting in the shade of the plane trees while they beguile the long heat of the day with warbling soliloquies upon rough pipes made of stems of oleander. Their dress is all of thin white linen, white leggings and fustanella, white shirt and fez ; and when a group of the tall figures is seen outlined against the blue sky upon some overhanging rock, these ghostly clothes and their sensitive faces and great lustrous eyes make them look so like lost angels imprisoned in this burnt-up land, that there would be no surprise in seeing them spread iridescent wings and dart circling up into the air. Their ethereal aspect and shy, melancholy habits give them in the eyes of the Turks an almost sacred position; and for the same characteristics the Greeks treat them as harmless imbeciles. Both nations accordingly allow them the privi- leges of obscurity, and employ them as carriers to pass . to and fro across the debateable land of the border, neFar which no Greek or Turk would dare to venture. At the Meteora Monasteries the traveller says good-bye to his Greek guards, and thence to Yanina he rides in company with a band of them, their white figures flitting round him as the way winds into a wilderness of sunlit valleys and brown mountain domes, their musical voices calling to hidden friends, who answer from above upon the hillside. The Vlachs are great lovers of antiphonal song. Their signal-shouts have traditional forms which distinguish family from family, so that when the answering call is heard to complete the phrase which the signaller has begbn it is known that a friend is near. Sometimes the whole escort catch up the strain and continue it through a part of the long ballad which is the epic of their ancestors. The story is always about love and war. Each voice takes the part of some character: the lover and his lady, the wicked Turkish Bey, the cruel Klepht or Arnaut, the heroic Vlach leader. Perhaps a distant goatherd or passing muleteer joins in the quavering nasal chant, singing in rivalry the exploits of his own relations. Once at a place where a cool stream swirled under the hollow of a cliff a Vlach boy scrambled out of the water, and, throwing his sheepskin round him, trotted alongside for a mile or two, chatting to an acquaintance. During the midday halt these two sang together a long song, rising and falling interminably in the minor cadences which sound so strange to Western ears. It was the tragedy of two friends parted by death. "Five years," they sang, "five years we walked together. All winter long the same roof covered us. All summer long we slept under the same stars. Five years our enemies beset us in' vain "—the tenor voice stopped, and the treble descended in a wail of hopeless sorrow—" but now, now I walk alone." The route from Meteors to Yanina runs up the Greek river Alplieus to the frontier on a high pass, and thence into Turkish Epirus down deep gorges cht by the bead-wateis of Acheron. Through these defiles Ali, the leonine tyrant of Yanina, once made a military road, and paved it with broad flagstones, and built bridges for the passage of his cannon. Now the paving is broken by earthquakes and the cannon- wheels, and the Turks out of policy have blown up the middle span of all his bridges. But the ruins of the great road remain to suggest the history of this country: how by miracles of cruelty and valour All united Albania and threw off the yoke of the Sultan; how by his personal force be reigned forty years at Yanina, allying himself with Danton and Napoleon and Pitt; how in his schools he educated the Greeks, and thus, and by the blow he dealt to Turkish influ- ence, set afoot the Greek war of independence ; and how, as his strength failed, the flood of Turkish power flowed again, and he died cruelly, but still lives in the memory of Albania as the personification of its wild passion and furious valour and tameless love of war and liberty. For t4o days the traveller follows Ali's road. At sunset on the second day he rides out of the foothills of the Pindus Range, and finds himself on the edge of a great forest of tall, flowering reedit which join the brown earth to the green lake with a fringe of less vivid green and withered brown. A canal cut through the forest yields passage for a boat to the open water beyond. On either side the feathery surface of the reed-bed undulates in swift waves as the little wind that comes at nightfall rushes softly over them. The plash of oars raises a host of water- fowl, which stream and drift off clamouring towards the coming twilight, a dove-grey cloud flashing with gleams of white and scarlet in the level rays of the sun. And when the boat reaches the end of the canal, and the reeds are left behind, Yanina is seen for the first time, far off across the lake.
A long peninsula projects from the opposite shore. Upon its extreme end a circle of fortifications rises from the water's edge, and above their square outlines the domes and minarets of a number of large mosques gleam in brilliant relief against the hills behind. The lake shines below them with lights as pure and clear as those of the sunset sky above. Its waters hold in suspension numberless small crystals of olivine, which are washed down from the serpentine rock of the mountain; and where the direct rays are reflected from the surface they become affected by interference in the tiny particles, producing opal halos and zones of delicate prismatic tints. Thus the sky seems to surround the buildings with a universal glow of liquid radiance. The dark band of the shore behind stretches across them like a layer of heavy clouds banging in mid-air, and the towers and walls stand only upon tremulous reflections of themselves. The city floats in the sky, as if supported by al spell; and above it, and again behind it, the eye is caught and carried forward by the sunset light itself. From beryl to emerald, the sky glows with changing shades of green, ever deepening and gm/ring more luminous towards the Western horizon. At a great height a flock of little clouds still catches the light and reflects it downwards. Where this feeble illumination touches the earth it reveals, isolated in the haze of distance, a region of desolate ranges, the higher peaks of which are disclosed rising from the mists which hide the fastnesses of Northern Albania. They stand isolated in the haze of digtance, distinguished only by a clearer definition in the play of light and shade upon their sides from the sea of shining air and vapour which surrounds them.
As the rim of the sun sinks out of sight- a high thin cry comes vibrating across the water from the town, the last sum- mons of the Muezzin, softened by distance to a single repeated syllable, "'lab, lab, 'lab." The voice swells and sinks, quaver- ing in the same minor cadences and with the same nasal tones that were heard in the song of the Vlachs. Like their song, it has a mournful sound; but there is in it also a quality of fierce enthusiasm, half suggested under its calm note of triumph and security. The traveller seems to hear in it the voice of Yanbla itself, telling him the secret of its mystery and charm; that before him lies the first outpost of Asia in Europe ; that he is rowing from the Western into the Eastern world.
Previous page
