ON TOUR WITH THE SULTAN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 67, 9 September 1911, Page 1 (Supplement)

ON TOUR WITH THE SULTAN.

AMUSING EXPERIENCES. (Daily Mail Correspondent.) A fortnight of sweltering heat, choking dust, monotonous bunting, and inexpressibly bad bands, of weary attempts to write in crawling railway carriages crammed with perspiring Levantines in varying styles of undress, or in the bedrooms of smelly Bulgarian hotels, where one's inertia was put to shame by the activity of the very vermin on the walls—these are the recollections which I shall always treasure of the Sultan's tour in Macedonia.

We started out filled with hope. There would be all sorts of incidents, we thought—political or personal. Some: of the optimists even talked encouragingly of. Bulgarian dynamiters, and though, in the pilot train going up to Uskub, 1 took a luncheoon basket, the conversation was continually of railway bomb outrages, and nobody seemed to have any appetite, while, on the other hand, a bottle of whisky belonging to a Frenchman was emptied in the first hour of the journey. Nothing, however, happened to vary the dull round of ceremonial. At Prishtina, where we were surrounded by 80,000 alleged fanatical Musssulmans, a flickering" interest was aroused by the possibility of the massacre of an American correspondent who had stoutly resisted the official desire that we .should all wear fezes. ,T reserved a plate in my camera for the fatal rush that should have overwhelmed him, but even his most aggresively American hat had failed to stir these faint-hearted Mahommedans to religious activity. The foreign Press was represented on this enterprise by an American, a Frenchman, and an Englishman, who all met in Saloniea in the haphazard but inevitable way that is the rule with journalists. There were also some mysterious Germans, who lived a life apart and were constantly huurrying to the telegraph office with accounts of long and important interviews with Ministers which they had just obtained, and which we had had the day before. There was a Bulgarian, too, who claimed to represent a Russian paper, but was afterwards identified as a well-known .Government spy from Constantinople. On learning that he was a spy, we sought to propitiate him with gifts, including the remnants of a tin of crumbly sardines, whose fragile symmetry had been destroyed by clumsy attempts at disinterment with crusts of bread.

The organisers 6f the tour had very sensibly provided us with police passes as a safeguard against the vigorous handling which the Turkish gendarmerie, in the excitement of having the safely of the Padisha on their hands, meted out to their own countrymen. These passports, which were in Turkish, formed a small illustrated biographical pamphlet and supplied the policeman to whom tliey were addressed with a chatty little sketch of one's career, beginning with one's father's name and ending with a series of personal details that were on the verge of libel. I myself got off lightly. I had been introduced to the police official by a Court functionary, and he tempered justice with mercy. But all the same 1, a modest man. have spent a fortnight submitting myself to the examination nf policeman in public places in different parts of Macedonia who have checked off', before an interested crowd and with the air of people who suspect you of having wilfully distorted your features to' deceive them, my approximation to the following specification: Figure Long. Kyes l'athcr doubtful. .Mouth Ordinary. Nose Drawn out. .Moustache Absent.

Ceneral appearance ..Ordinary. For the first eighty miles from Salonica our journeys in two directions up country have been over a wide, rolling anil practically cultivated plain, which needs, one would say, only the proper development of the irrigatory possibilities of the River Vanl.iv, which crosses if, to become fertile agricultural land. TJic peasants themselves we found drawn up in the wayside stations through which the [niperial train was to pass. They had waited (here in compact lines under a hot sun since daybreak, shepherded by gendarmes with Hxed bayonets and belts bulging with cartridges. The men—Turks and Bulgarians. easily distinguishable by their national dress—were drawn up in one place; the women stood apart and well behind the men.

As our train crept into the station at its best, speed of twelve miles an hour, the village, baud would begin to perpetrate the most fearful discords imaginable in our honor. The Turks have not the lease sense of harmony, and as they try to play by ear the result is tumult unspeakable. The children, gathered according to their schools, were the most pleasing part of the decorative scheme at these wayside halts. One good thing that the. Turks have learnt from Cennany is the use of uniform, arid I have seldom seen children looking prettier than these rows of brown-faced, big-eyed little girls in dresses of radiant white with crimson sashes, or the smart ranks of sturdy boys all in clean, cool, military uniforms of khaki linen and red fezes.

The invariable gravity of the Turkish children is absolutely uncanny. They never shout or fidget or laugh. If vou ask one of them its name the dignity of the reply makes you feel snubbed. Schoolmastering must be as easy an occupation in Turkey as it is trying in England. Nor is it the case with the Turks, who beat their horses and maltreat even their poultry in a way that makes one sick, have cowed their children into unobtrusiveness by strict discipline. The Turkish child is spoiled rather than corrected, and yet he never seems to lose for a moment the expression of sadness that fills his big, brown I contemplative eyes. As the train drew nearer to Albania the tumult of many-keyed brass instruments at the stations gradually made way for the strident wailing and shrieking of Albanian orchestras. The equipment of an Albanian band is three or four wooden (lutes shaped like the Pied Piper of Hamelin's instrument, each with .1 strong man behind it. Then there are two big side-drums, banged on the top with a flat piece of wood, and tickled underneath with a switch. The object of the drums seems to be to stimulate the efl'otrs of the pipers. There is no tune. The pipers, with cheeks bulging like over-ripe, red oranges, throw back their heads and rend the air with a noise like the top note of the bagpipes. The object is to keep the scream at as high a pitch as possible, and when the performers' aching lungs begin to relax their efforts the drummers urge them up the scale again with a violent passage on the ilunn. Each flautist has an attendant to wipe his streaming brow with a red cotton handkerchief, and the whole tumult always continued mercilessly without an instant's break, even if. as often happened, we waited in the station for half an hour. The music, of these warlike mountaineers, however, is not without its appeal. For one thing, it is a real fighting noise. Men do not want to go into battle fo the sound of carefully-thought-out harmonies. These wildly screeching pipes! are meant to work up the inar-

ticulate yell with which primitive people rush into hand-to-lmnd battle, neither seeing danger nor feeling pain. They have screamed among the wild, grey mountains of Albania, through the long centuries of unrecorded war. To their savage encouragement valley has fought valley in heroic and obscure battle and their tuneless wail is all that there is left to tell of braver acts than some of those to which epic and legend have given immortality.