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secreted in the mountains, and carefully avoid the vicinity of the 

 great roads ; it is a well-known statistical phenomenon, that the most 

 inaccessible districts are the most populous and the richest. This will 

 be easily understood, when it is told, that the passage of troops 

 through a district is a pest more dreaded that the fatal plague itself. 

 The once flourishing and magnificent plains of Eske-Scher have been 

 deserts since the Sultan Amurath traversed them, at the head of 

 300,000 men, to lay siege to Bagdad. His passage was marked by 

 all the devastating effects of the hurricane. When a body of those 

 horsemen called Delhis, who are attached to the suite of every Pacha, 

 enters a village, the consternation is general, and followed by a system 

 of exaction that to the unfortunate villager is equivalent to ruin. To 

 complain to the Pacha would be to court instant destruction. From 

 this we can conceive the horror of the peasantry of Australia at the 

 passage of large bodies of troops through their country, and conse- 

 quently the obstacles a European army would encounter which 

 should ever be masters of the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The 

 Turcomans, a Nornase tribe, who sometimes pitch their tents on the 

 shores of the Archipelago, and who pay but a moderate tribute to 

 the Porte, are also another cause of devastation. But the Musseleins, 

 the farmers of the Pacha it is, who are the oppressors par excellence; 

 they are always present to despoil the unfortunate fellah, to leave 

 him, to use a common expression in the mouths of this oppressed 

 race, " but eyes wherewith to weep." The welfare of the people, 

 respect for the orders of the Porte, are things to them of the utmost 

 indifference ; to govern, is to raise men and taxes ; to obey, is to fear. 

 Thus the law of force reigns almost exclusively at forty or fifty 

 leagues from the capital. But on approaching the Euphrates the 

 dissolution of every social tie becomes more striking, we find our- 

 selves amid the independent tribes the cruel Cendes ; among the 

 Tezdis a people who adore the spirit of Erib. Towards the North 

 we fall in with the Lazzi, and all those fierce natives who are en- 

 trenched, like vultures, amid the fastnesses of the Caucasus. Again, 

 in the South, we discover the wandering Arabs, the pirates of the 

 desert, and the mountaineers of Lebanon, who live in a state of per- 

 petual discord. Over this immense line of countries centuries have 

 passed, and left no trace behind ; all that the ancients and the cru- 

 saders have related to us of them, is typical of their condition at this 

 day. The bows and arrows, the armour, exhibited as objects of 

 curiosity in our museums, are still in use among them. It is only by 

 chance, or by profiting by their intestine divisions, that the authority 

 of the Porte is recognised. The Pachas are mostly hereditary, and 

 live in a state of perpetual insurrection. Thus from the shores of the 

 Archipelago to the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris, civiliza- 

 tion and vegetation appear to obey the same law of decrease. 



It is incontestable, that Syria and the Pachalicks, on the confines 

 of Upper Asia, are of no real importance to the Sultan ; and that the 

 pride of this monarch would be the only sufferer by their loss. Deso- 

 lation has reached such a point in the Ottoman Empire, that it is 

 almost impossible to regenerate her, unless the branches of the tree, 

 lopped of all those parts so eccentric by their position are detached 



