CHAPTER I. THE FEAST OF RAMAZAN
A cool breeze slipped ahead of the dawn. It blew dim
the calm Greek stars, stirred the intricate branches of
olive-trees inlaid in the rose-pearl fagade of sky, bowed
the tall, coral-lipped oleanders lining the rivulets, and
crisped the soft wash of the gulf-tide. It lifted the
strong bronze curls on the brow of a sleeping man who
lay on the sea-beach covered with a goatskin.
George Gordon woke and looked about him: at the
pallid, ripple-ridged dunes, the murmuring clusters of
reeds; at the dead fire on which a kid had roasted the
night before ; at the forms stretched in slumber around
it Suliotes in woolen kirtles and with shawl girdles
stuck with silver-handled pistols, an uncouth and savage body-guard; at his only English companion, John Hobhouse, who had travelled with him through Albania and to-morrow was to start back to London, asleep now with a saddle for a pillow. While he gazed, day broke effulgent, like light at the first hour, and the sun rose, pouring its crimson wine into the goblet of the sea's blue crystal.
For a full year Gordon had roughed it in the wilderness, sleeping one night in a pasha's palace, the next in a cow-shed a strange choice, it seemed, for a peer of twenty-two, who had taken his seat in the House of Lords and published a book that had become the talk of London. Yet now, as he rose to his feet and threw back his square-set shoulders, his colorless face and deep gray-blue eyes whetted with keen zest.
"This is better than England," he muttered. "How
the deuce could anybody make such a world as that, I
wonder ? For what purpose were there ordained dandies
and kings and fellows of colleges and women of a
certain age and peers and myself, most of all ?" His
thought held an instant's thin edge of bitterness as his
look fell : his right boot had a thicker sole than the left, and he wore an inner shoe that laced tightly under the shrunken foot.
Stepping gingerly lest he waken his comrade he
threaded the prostrate forms to the shambling rockpath that led, through white rushes and clumps of cochineal cactus, to the town. A little way along, it crossed a ledge jutting from the heel of the hill. Under this shelf the water had washed a deep pool of limpid emerald. He threw off his clothing and plunged into the tingling surf. He swam far out into the sea, under the sky's lightening amethyst, every vein beating with delight.
Before he came from the water, the sunrise had
gilded the tops of the mountains; while he dressed on
the rock it was kindling golden half-moons on the
minarets of Missolonghi, a mile away.
As his eyes wandered over the scene the strange
stern crags, the nearer fields hroidered with currantbushes, the girdling coast steeped in the wild poignant beauty of an Ionian October they turned with a darker meaning to the town, quiet enough now, though at sunset it had blazed with Mussulman festivity, while its Greek citizens huddled in shops and houses behind barred doors. It was the feast of Ramazan a time for the Turks of daily abstinence and nightly carousal, a long fast for lovers, whose infractions were punished rigorously with bastinado and with the fatal sack. Till the midnight tolled from the mosques the shouts and muskets of the faithful had blasted the solitude. And this land was the genius-mother of .the world, in the grip of her Turkish conqueror, who defiled her cities with his Moslem feasts and her waters with the bodies of his drowned victims !
Would it always be so? Gordon thought of a roll
of manuscript in his saddle-bag verses written on the
slopes of those mountains and in the fiery shade of
these shores. Into the pages he had woven all that old
love for this shackled nation which had been one of
.the pure enthusiasms of his youth and had grown and
deepened with his present sojourn. Would the old spirit
of Marathon ever rearise ?
He went back to the sandy beach, sat down, and
drawing paper from his pocket, began to write, using his knee for a desk. The spell of the place and hour was upon him. Lines flowed from his pencil: