The actual movement from one place to another, in Europeanised countries, is a process so temporary—­it occupies, I mean, so small a proportion of the traveller’s entire time—­that his mind remains unsettled, so long as the wheels are going; he may be alive enough to external objects of interest, and to the crowding ideas which are often invited by the excitement of a changing scene, but he is still conscious of being in a provisional state, and his mind is constantly recurring to the expected end of his journey; his ordinary ways of thought have been interrupted, and before any new mental habits can be formed he is quietly fixed in his hotel.  It will be otherwise with you when you journey in the East.  Day after day, perhaps week after week and month after month, your foot is in the stirrup.  To taste the cold breath of the earliest morn, and to lead, or follow, your bright cavalcade till sunset through forests and mountain passes, through valleys and desolate plains, all this becomes your mode of life, and you ride, eat, drink, and curse the mosquitoes as systematically as your friends in England eat, drink, and sleep.  If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period of time thus occupied in actual movement as the mere gulf dividing you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare and plastic seasons of your life from which, perhaps, in after times you may love to date the moulding of your character—­that is, your very identity.  Once feel this, and you will soon grow happy and contented in your saddle-home.  As for me and my comrade, however, in this part of our journey we often forgot Stamboul, forgot all the Ottoman Empire, and only remembered old times.  We went back, loitering on the banks of Thames—­not grim old Thames of “after life,” that washes the Parliament Houses, and drowns despairing girls—­but Thames, the “old Eton fellow,” that wrestled with us in our boyhood till he taught us to be stronger than he.  We bullied Keate, and scoffed at Larrey Miller, and Okes; we rode along loudly laughing, and talked to the grave Servian forest as though it were the “Brocas clump.”

Our pace was commonly very slow, for the baggage-horses served us for a drag, and kept us to a rate of little more than five miles in the hour, but now and then, and chiefly at night, a spirit of movement would suddenly animate the whole party; the baggage-horses would be teased into a gallop, and when once this was done, there would be such a banging of portmanteaus, and such convulsions of carpet-bags upon their panting sides, and the Suridgees would follow them up with such a hurricane of blows, and screams, and curses, that stopping or relaxing was scarcely possible; then the rest of us would put our horses into a gallop, and so all shouting cheerily, would hunt, and drive the sumpter beasts like a flock of goats, up hill and down dale, right on to the end of their journey.

The distances at which we got relays of horses varied greatly; some were not more than fifteen or twenty miles, but twice, I think, we performed a whole day’s journey of more than sixty miles with the same beasts.