Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century

It is unnecessary to dwell on their address in the use of fire-arms and of their two-edged daggers. Armed only with the latter weapon, they were often known, during their long and heroic struggle for independence, to leap their horses over the Muscovite bayonets, stab the soldiers, and break up and put to flight their serried battalions. When surrounded in their forts or villages, and shut out from all hope of escape, they frequently sacrificed their wives and children – like the Jews in the last agonies of their war with Rome – set fire to their dwellings, and perished heroically in the flames. With true Oriental devotedness they stand by their dead and wounded to the last extremity, and fight with the most dogged courage to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy.

Madame de Hell is not disposed to endorse the reputation for beauty which so many writers have agreed in bestowing upon the Circassian women. She considers them even inferior, physically, to the men. "It is true," she says, "we were unable to visit any of the great centres of population, or to travel amongst the independent tribes, but we saw several aouls on the banks of the Kouban, and were entertained in a princely family, and nowhere did we meet with any of those surpassing beauties whom more fortunate travellers have celebrated." What she did observe in those daughters of the mountains was the elegance of their shape and the natural grace of their movements. A Circassian woman is never awkward. Dressed in rags or in brocade, she never fails to assume, spontaneously and without thought of display, the most graceful and picturesque attitudes. "In this respect," says Madame de Hell, "she is unquestionably superior to the highest efforts of fascination which Parisian art can achieve."

A visit to the family of a Circassian prince "at home" is thus narrated by our travellers:

The dwelling was a wretched mud hut, in front of which, on a mat, lay the prince in his shirt, and barefooted. He received his visitors very hospitably, and after the usual courtesies proceeded to make his toilette. He sent for his finest garments and costliest "leg gear," girded on his weapons, and then led the way into his "interior," which was as bare and unfurnished as any Connemara peasant's cabin, the only objects visible being a saddle, a few vessels, and a divan covered with reed matting. His guests having rested for a few minutes, the prince introduced them to his wife and daughter, who had been apprised of their arrival, and were anxious to see them.

These ladies occupied a hut of their own, consisting, like the prince's, of a single room. They rose at the entrance of their visitors, and saluted them with much grace; then, motioning them to be seated, the mother sat down in the Turkish fashion on her divan, while her daughter reclined against the couch on which the strangers had taken their places. They, when the reception was over, remarked with surprise that the prince had not crossed the threshold, but had simply put his head in at the door to answer their questions and converse with his wife. The explanation afforded was, that a Circassian officer cannot, consistently with honour, enter his wife's apartment during the day, and it seems that in all families with the slightest pretension to distinction this rule is rigorously observed.

A greater appearance of comfort was observable in the princess's apartment than in her husband's, as might well be the case. It contained two large divans, the silk cushions of which were gay with gold and silver embroidery, carpets of painted felt, several trunks, and a very pretty work-basket. A small Russian mirror and the prince's armorial trophies formed the decoration of the walls. But the floor was not boarded, the walls were rough plastered, and the only provision for light and air were two little holes furnished with shutters. The princess, a woman apparently between five-and-thirty and forty years of age, was by no means fitted to sustain the Circassian reputation for beauty. Her dress had a character of its own: under a brocaded pelisse, with short sleeves and laced seams, she wore a silk chemise, which displayed more of the bosom than European notions of decorum would approve. A velvet cap, trimmed with silver, smooth plaits of hair, cut heart-shape on the forehead, a white veil falling from the top of the head and covering over the bosom, and finally, a red shawl thrown carelessly over the lap —voilà tout! As for the daughter, she was charming. She wore a white robe fastened round the waist by a red kazavek. Her features were delicate; she had a complexion of exquisite fairness, revealing the play of "the pure and eloquent blood" which "spoke in her cheek, and so distinctly wrought that one might almost say her body thought;" and a profusion of glossy raven tresses escaped from under her cap.

Beyond all praise was the geniality of the two ladies. About the country of their visitors, their calling, and the objects of their journey, they put a thousand questions. The European costume, and especially the straw hats, interested them greatly. Yet there was a certain air of coldness and impassiveness about them, and not once did the princess smile, until a long curtain accidentally fell, and shut her out for a moment from her guests. After a short but rapid conversation the visitors asked the princess's permission to take her portrait and sketch the interior of her abode. She offered no objection. When the drawings were finished, a collation was served, consisting of fruits and cheese-cakes. In the evening, the strangers took their leave, and, on coming out of the hut, they found all the inhabitants of the aoul assembled to witness their departure and do them honour.

We must resume our narrative of Madame de Hell's journey. On their way to Stavropol, they experienced a mountain-storm, one of the grandest and most terrible they had ever witnessed. The roar of the thunder, repeated by every echo in cavern and ravine, mingled with the groaning and jarring of the great trees, with the loud gusts of the furious wind, with all those mysterious voices of the tempest which come we know not whence, but deeply stir the heart, and have so potent a harmony and such a sublimity and force of sound that the least superstitious mind involuntarily awaits some supernatural manifestation, some message from the other world. We have ourselves listened to a storm in a Highland glen – the wind sweeping down the rugged declivities with terrible impetuosity, and the thunder-peals reverberating from peak to peak, while the clouds

"From many a horrid rift abortive pouredFierce rain with lightning mixed, water with fire,"

until the sense of an eerie and mysterious Presence has forced itself upon our mind, and we have been able to understand the emotions in which originated the visions of wraith and phantom of the bards of old. Our travellers, however, passed through the gale unhurt. A tremendous outburst of rain, the final effort of the tempest, cleared the sky, which towards the west was gradually lighted up with gleams of purple light, contrasting gloriously with the darkness of the rest of the firmament. A gorgeous rainbow, one foot of which rested on the highest peak of the Caucasus, while the other was enveloped in the mists of evening, rose before them for a few moments, like an image of hope, and then slowly faded into thin air. At length they reached the station, but in an unpleasant condition – wet, weary, dazed, and not a little surprised to find themselves safe and sound after the adventures of the day.

Descending the last spurs of the Caucasus, our travellers next day entered upon the region of the plains. The road was thronged with vehicles of all kinds, horsemen, and pedestrians, all hurrying to the great fair of Stavropol, and every variety of type which characterizes the peoples of the Caucasus: Circassians, Cossacks, Turcomans, Tartars, Georgians – some in brilliant costumes, caracolling on their high-bred Persian horses, others huddled up with their families in hide-covered carts, others again driving before them immense herds of sheep and swine, and others gravely leading a train of loaded camels. Madame de Hell particularly noticed a handsome young Circassian, mounted on a richly caparisoned horse, who rode constantly by the side of an unusually elegant pavosk (a kind of litter), the curtains of which were kept down. This carriage stimulated her curiosity, and, in such a country, was well adapted to suggest to a lively fancy the outlines of a romance. No doubt, she thought, the pavosk contained a young and beautiful Circassian, whose charms would fascinate some Oriental prince, and place a queen's diadem upon her brow. At an inn, in Stavropol, Madame de Hell again fell in with the Circassian and his mysterious charge, but the latter was veiled from head to foot "The young mountaineer," she says, "prepared a divan with cushions and pillows very like our own, and, a few moments afterwards, returned, carrying in his arms a woman completely shrouded in her veil; he placed her very delicately upon the divan, and seated himself by her side with every mark of tenderness. Occasionally he lifted the young girl's veil to question her in the most respectful manner. The whole scene was invested with a poetic charm which I vainly endeavour to express. In the attitudes, the costume, the physiognomy of this little group, there was an Oriental grace which would have impressed a painter. Not only was the picture pleasant to the eye, but it was suggestive to the imagination. Unfortunately, the delightful vision disappeared like a dream. A few minutes, and in came our host in search of the mysterious couple, to conduct them to a private apartment. Infinite precautions were taken in the removal of the unknown lady, who seemed to be on the brink of the grave. Next morning we questioned our host in reference to the incident, but he replied very vaguely, and all we could gather was, that the young girl had come to Stavropol to consult a famous physician respecting her condition, which offered but little hope. We could gain no information from them as to the relations existing between her and the young chief, the moral causes of her malady, or, in a word, the interesting part of the story."

MADAME HOMMAIRE DE HELL

II

From Stavropol, a pleasant and lively town, the capital of the Caucasus, our travellers journeyed toward the Don with singular rapidity, accomplishing the distance of 316 versts,5 in two-and-twenty hours. They ate and slept in their carriage, and did not alight until they reached the river-side, where every kind of tribulation lay in wait for them. Madame de Hell would afterwards remark on the strange tenacity with which ill-luck adheres to us when it has overtaken us. At ten o'clock at night, when they were still at some distance from the Don, they were informed that the bridge across it was in a dangerous condition, and that probably they would be compelled to wait till the next day before they could cross. For such a delay they were unprepared, having calculated on a good supper and a good bed that night under a friendly roof in Rostov. Another reason for haste was the change in the weather, which had suddenly turned cold; so, disregarding the information given them, they continued to push forward until they reached the bridge. There the signs of its insecure condition were too numerous to be denied. Several carts stood unyoked, and peasants lay beside them, calmly waiting for daylight. Then was repeated the bad news which had already discouraged our travellers, and it seemed clear that they would have to spend some hours in the britchka, exposed to the chill night air, while, once on the other side, they could reach Rostov in a couple of hours.

So influential a consideration carried the day. They would not halt; they would cross the bridge – though not without taking all due precautions. Alighting from the carriage, they allowed it to go forward, the coachman driving slowly, while the Cossack, with his lantern, pointed out all the dangerous places. "I do not think," says Madame de Hell, "that in the whole course of my travels we were ever in so alarming a situation. The danger was urgent and real. The cracking of the woodwork, the darkness, the noise of waters dashing through the decayed floor that bent and trembled under their tread, and the cries of alarm uttered every moment by the coachman and the Cossack might well have filled us with apprehension; yet I do not think that the thought of death ever occurred, or, rather, my mind was too confused to formulate any thought at all. Frequently the wheels sank between the broken planks, and these were moments of terrible anxiety; but at last, by dint of patient effort, we reached the opposite bank in safety, after a passage of more than an hour. I could not have held out much longer; the water on the bridge was over our ankles. The reader will understand with what satisfaction we again took our places in the carriage. We were then better able to realize the nature of the perils we had incurred, and for a moment almost doubted our actual safety. For awhile we seemed to hear the dash of the waters breaking against the bridge; but this feeling was soon dispelled by others – the night's adventures were by no means at an end.

"At some versts from the Don," continues Madame de Hell, "our unlucky star threw us into the hands of a drunken driver, who, after losing his way, and jolting us over ditches and ploughed fields, actually brought us back in sight of the dreadful bridge, the thought of which still made us shudder. We would fain have persuaded ourselves that we were mistaken, but the truth was beyond dispute; there before us rolled the Don, and yonder stood Axai, the village through which we had passed after reseating ourselves in the britchka. Conceive our indignation at having floundered about for two hours only to find ourselves again at our point of departure! The sole resource we could think of was to pass the night in a peasant's cabin, but our abominable coachman, whom the sight of the river had suddenly sobered, and, perhaps, the fear of a sound thrashing, threw himself on his knees, and so earnestly implored us to try the road again, that we consented. The difficulty was, how to get back into the road, and many a false start was made before we effected it. In crossing a ditch the carriage was so violently shaken, that the coachman and our dragoman were thrown from their seats, the latter falling upon the pole in such a way that he was not easily extricated. His cries for help, and his grimaces when my husband and the Cossack had set him on his feet, were so desperate, that one might have supposed half his bones to be broken, though, in reality, he had sustained only a few bruises. As for the yemshik, he picked himself up very composedly, and climbed into his seat again as if nothing unusual had befallen him. From the quiet way in which he resumed the reins, one might have thought that he had just risen from a bed of roses; such is the uniform apathy of the Russian peasant!"

They spent a week with their friends at Taganrog, and thence proceeded to Odessa, the great commercial entrepôt of the Euxine. In one night the grim blasts of the Ural had swept away all that October had spared. The weather was still sunny when they arrived on the shores of the Sea of Azov; but next day the sky wore that sombre chilly hue which always precedes the metels, or snow-storms. All nature seemed to be prepared for the reception of winter – that eternal ruler of the North. Its advent was indicated by the thin ice-crust that covered the beach, the harsh winds, the frost bound soil, and the increasing lurid gloom of the atmosphere; symptoms which made our travellers apprehensive of possible suffering on their road to Odessa, their intended winter-quarters, whence they were distant about 900 versts.

It was indeed the worst season for travelling in Russia. Travellers have good reason to fear the first snows, which, as they are not firm enough to bear a sledge, are almost every year the cause of many accidents. The winds, too, at this season are excessively violent, and raise the drifts in terrific whirling snow-storms, which threaten the destruction of the traveller. Madame de Hell and her husband, however, accomplished their journey in safety, though not without enduring considerable pain and anxiety. Nothing can be more awful than the snowy wastes they were compelled to traverse, swept and ravaged as they were by furious blasts. All trace of man's existence – all trace of human labour – is buried beneath the great cold white billows, which lie heaped upon one another, like breakers on a stormy coast.

Madame de Hell and her husband spent the winter at Odessa; and in the following May departed on a visit to the Crimea, on board a brig belonging to the consul of the Netherlands. Their voyage was short, but it was not unmarked by incident, by sea-sickness and sudden squalls, by calm moonlit nights, by something of all the pain and pleasure of the sea. At sunrise on the second morning, the voyagers first caught sight of the coast of that gloomy peninsula which the ancients stigmatized as inhospitable, in allusion to the cruel custom of its inhabitants to massacre every stranger whose ill-fortune led him thither. The woes of Orestes, as depicted by the Greek poet, have for ever made the Tauris famous. Who does not remember the painful beauty of that grand sad drama, in which the vengeful cries of the Furies seem to echo along this wild and desert shore? As soon as Madame de Hell could distinguish the line of rocks that traced the vague horizon, she began to look for Cape Partheniké, the traditional site of the altar of the goddess, to whom the young priestess Iphigenia was on the point of sacrificing her brother. Assisted by the captain, she at length descried on a rocky headland a solitary chapel, dedicated, she was told, to the Virgin Mother. "What a contrast," she naturally remarks, "between the gentle worship of Mary and that of the sanguinary Taura, who was not content with the mariners' prayers and offerings, but demanded human victims!"

All this part of the coast is barren and bleak; a barrier of rock seems to shut out the stranger from the celebrated peninsula which warlike nations have ravaged and commercial nations coveted. Richly gifted by Nature's liberal hand, it has always been an object of desire to the people of Europe and Asia. Pastoral races have lusted after its green mountain ranges; commercial nations have striven to gain possession of its ports and straits; warrior tribes have pitched their tents in its fertile valleys; and all have craved a foothold in that land to which cling so many glorious memories of the Greek civilization. But in the eighteenth century the contention came to an end, at least so far as political observers can determine, for ages, and under the rule of the Russian Czar, the Crimea has long enjoyed a profound tranquillity.6

"So that," as Mr. Kinglake puts it, "the peninsula which divides the Euxine from the Sea of Azov was an almost forgotten land, lying out of the chief paths of merchants and travellers, and far away from all the capital cities of Christendom. Rarely went thither any one from Paris, or Vienna, or Berlin; to reach it from London was a harder task than to cross the Atlantic; and a man of office receiving in this distant province his orders despatched from St. Petersburg, was the servant of masters who governed him from a distance of a thousand miles.

"Along the course of the little rivers which seamed the ground, there were villages and narrow belts of tilled land, with gardens and fruitful vineyards; but for the most part this neglected Crim-Tartary was a wilderness of steppe or of mountain-range, much clothed towards the west with tall stiff grasses, and the stems of a fragrant herb like southernwood. The bulk of the people were of Tartar descent, but no longer what they had been in the days when nations trembled at the coming of the Golden Horde; and although they yet hold to the Moslem faith, their religion has lost its warlike fire. Blessed with a dispensation from military service, and far away from the accustomed battle-fields of Europe and Asia, they lived in quiet, knowing little of war except what tradition could faintly carry down from old times in low monotonous chants. In their husbandry they were more governed by the habits of their ancestors than by the nature of the land which had once fed the people of Athens, for they neglected tillage and clung to pastoral life. Watching flocks and herds, they used to remain on the knolls very still for long hours together, and when they moved, they strode over the hills in their slow-flowing robes with something of the forlorn majesty of peasants descended from warriors."7

Into this secluded and remote peninsula Madame de Hell and her husband carried their rare powers of observation and description. They landed at Balaklava, since so famous in the annals of the British army, for it was there that "the thin red line" resisted unmoved all the fury and force of the Muscovite hosts. Its appearance from the sea is very attractive, for its port is surrounded with mountains, the highest of which still retains a memorial of the old Genoese dominion, while in part of its blue expanse lies the pretty Greek town, with its balconied houses and masses of foliage rising in terraces one above the other. Above it towers a ruined castle, whence the Genoese, in their days of supremacy, scanned with vulture-gaze the sweep of sea, prepared to pounce upon any hapless vessel wind-driven into these waters. It was Sunday when our travellers arrived, and the whole population were holiday making on the green shore or greener heights. Groups of mariners, Arnaouts in their quaint costume, and girls as graceful of shape as those who of old joined in the choric dances of Cytherea, wound their way up the steep path to the fortress, or tripped in mirthful measures to the shrill music of a balalaika.

The day after their arrival at Balaklava they undertook a boating excursion to explore the geological formation of the coast, and landed in a delightful little cove, embowered amid flowering trees and shrubs. On their return the boatmen decked themselves and their boat with wreaths of hawthorn and blossoming apple sprays, so that they entered the harbour with much festal pomp. In her poetic enthusiasm, Madame de Hell, as she gazed upon the cloudless sky and the calm blue sea and the Greek mariners, who thus, on a foreign shore, and after the lapse of so many centuries, retained the graceful customs of their ancestors, could not but be reminded of the deputations that were wont every year to enter the Piræus, the prows of their vessels bright with festoons of flowers, to share in the gorgeous festivals of Athens.

From Balaklava the travellers proceeded to Sevastopol, of which Madame de Hell supplies an excellent description, necessarily rendered valueless, however, by the events of the Crimean war. She speaks of its harbour as one of the most remarkable in Europe. It owes all its excellence to Nature, which has here, without assistance from the science of the engineer, provided a magnificent roadstead, the branches of which form a number of basins admirably adapted for the requirements of a great naval station. The whole expanse of this noble harbour is commanded from the upper part of the town. The roadstead first catches the eye; it stretches east and west, penetrates inland to a depth of four miles and three-quarters, with a mean breadth of 1,000 yards; and forms the channel of communication between Sevastopol and the interior of the peninsula. The northern shore is girt by a line of cliffs; the southern shore, broken up by numerous natural basins. To the east, at the very foot of the hill on which the town stands, lies South Bay, nearly two miles in length, and completely sheltered by high limestone cliffs. Beyond lies the dockyard, and the dock, which is of great extent; and to the west may be seen Artillery Bay.

In spite of the historical interest which now attaches to Sevastopol, as the scene of the crowning struggle between Russia and the Western Powers, the most remarkable place in the Chersonese is Bagtche Serai, "that ancient city which, prior to the Muscovite conquest of the peninsula, might compete in wealth and power with the great cities of the East." Beautiful exceedingly is the approach to it, by a road running parallel with a chain of heights, and clothed with luxuriant orchards, studded with village and farm, and brightened by the sheen of brooks. Owing to an ukase of Catherine II., which allowed the Tartars to keep possession of their ancient capital, Bagtche Serai retains to this day its individuality of aspect. It is neither modernized nor Russianized. Sauntering through its narrow streets, and looking upon its mosques, shops, and cemeteries, the traveller feels that the atmosphere of the East is around him. And amid the courts and gardens of the old palace he may well believe himself transported to an "interior" in Bagdad or Aleppo.