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Ere I am five kilometres from Tatar Bazardjik the rain begins to descend, and there is neither house nor other shelter visible anywhere ahead. The peasants' villages are all on the river, and the road leads for mile after mile through fields of wheat and rye.
In the first days of May, the Christians of those parts, angered by the increase of misrule and fired with hope by the example of the Herzegovinians, had been guilty of acts of insubordination; and at Tatar Bazardjik a few Turkish officials were killed. The movement was of no importance, as the Christians were nearly all unarmed.
A whole day in the southern gorges of the Balkan Mountains the slow train went tearing its way through many a mile of bind-weed tendrils, a continuous curtain, flaming with large flowers, but sombre as the falling shades of night, rather resembling jungles of Ceylon and the Filipinas; and she, that day, lying in the single car behind, where I had made her a little yatag-bed from Tatar Bazardjik, continually played the kittur, barely touching the strings, and crooning low, low, in her rich contralto, eternally the same air, over and over again, crooning, crooning, some melancholy tune of her own dreaming, just audible to me through the slow-travailing monotony of the engine; till I was drunken with so sweet a woe, my God, a woe that was sweet as life, and a dolour that lulled like nepenthe, and a grief that soothed like kisses, so sweet, so sweet, that all that world of wood and gloom lost locality and realness for me, and became nothing but a charmed and pensive Heaven for her to moan and lullaby in; and from between my fingers streamed plenteous tears that day, and all that I could keep on mourning was 'O Leda, O Leda, O Leda, till my heart was near to break.
Ere many miles of this level valley-road are ridden over, a dozen pointed minarets loom up ahead, and at four o'clock I dismount at the confines of the well nigh impassable streets of Tatar Bazardjik, quite a lively little city in the sense that Oriental cities are lively, which means well-stocked bazaars thronged with motley crowds.
Several villages of gypsies are camped on the banks of the Maritza, just outside the limits of Tatar Bazardjik; a crowd of bronzed, half-naked youngsters wantonly favor me with a fusillade of stones as I ride past, and several gaunt, hungry-looking curs follow me for some distance with much threatening clamor.
A reputation for coolness in danger, like other reputations, is often got without much deserving. At the time of the Russo-Turkish war, the railway had its terminus a few miles beyond Tatar Bazardjik. I was travelling north with a party of English doctors and we alighted at the station there for refreshment.
A shake of the head, which with us means a negative answer, means exactly the reverse with the people of the Maritza Valley; and it puzzled me not a little more than once yesterday afternoon when inquiring whether I was on the right road, and when patronizing fruit-stalls in Tatar Bazardjik.
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