Things are sooner seen than described (I wish it were as agreeable to describe as to see them!) and all this digression, and much more which I spare the reader, is the fruit of five minutes’ reflection while the suridjee tightens his girths in the Armenian burying-ground. The turbaned Turk once more in his saddle, then we will canter on some three miles, if you please, over as naked a heath as the sun looks upon, to the “Valley of Sweet Waters.” I have described this, I think, before. We five to learn, and my intelligent friend tells me, as we draw rein, and wind carefully down the steep descent, that the site of the Sultan’s romantic serai, in the bosom of the valley, was once occupied by the first printing-press established in Turkey—the fruit of an embassy to the Court of Louis the Fifteenth, by Mehemet Effendi, in the reign of Achmet the Third. And thus having delivered myself of a fact, a thing for which I have a natural antipathy in writing, let us gallop up the velvet brink of the Barbyses.
We had kept our small Turkish horses to their speed for a mile, with the enraged suridjee crying after us at the top of his voice, “Ya-wash! ya-wash!” (slowly, slowly!) when, at a bend of the valley, right through the midst of its velvet verdure, came rolling along an _aruba_, loaded with ladies. This pretty word signifies in Turkish a carriage, and the thing itself reminds you directly of the fantastic vehicles in which fairy queens come upon the stage. First appear two grey oxen, with their tails tied to a hoop bent back from the bend of the pole, their heads and horns and the long curve of the hoop decked with red and yellow tassels so profusely, that it looks at a distance like a walking clump of hollyhocks. As you pass the poor oxen (almost lifted off their hind legs by the straining of the hoop upon their tails), a four-wheeled vehicle makes its appearance, the body and wheels carved elaborately and gilt all over, and the crimson cover rolled up just so far as to show a cluster of veiled women, cross-legged upon cushions within, and riding _in perfect silence_.[17] A eunuch or a _very_ old Turk walks at the side, and thus the Moslem ladies “take kaif,” as it is called—in other words _go a pleasuring_. But a prettier sight than this gay affair rolling noiselessly over the pathless greensward of the Valley of Sweet Waters, you may not see in a year’s travel.