736 
SCUTARI. 
ceeded five miles, we passed the village of Gouzla, standing to 
our left on a promontory overhanging the sea. The termination 
of seven more brought us to Kandack, another little collection 
of marine habitations lying close to the water. Three addi¬ 
tional miles led us through Kartal, whence I despatched a man 
to apprise Sir Robert Liston, our ambassador at Constantinople, 
of my arrival; and to request the consul-general to make some 
arrangement for immediately passing my baggage without in¬ 
spection, into the English quarters. As we approached Scutari, 
the Asiatic suburb of the Ottoman capital, we found ourselves 
in the midst of its vast burying-ground ; a sad region of mortality, 
spreading right and left, and before us, to an extent only 
bounded to the eye by far-stretching woods of cypress, over¬ 
shadowing tombs without count, and graves of generation upon 
generation, from that of the child who was buried to-day, to the 
clay of the patriarch gathered to his fathers, centuries ago. The 
marble memorials over these dark chambers of the dead, rise 
even closer together than the thickly planted trees which form 
their gloomy canopies. This avenue to a capital which, not¬ 
withstanding its splendour, is considered the very city of the 
plague, was not calculated to inspire a European traveller with 
the most comfortable anticipations, particularly when every re¬ 
port he met, gave notice that the sometimes slumbering malady 
was then raging with more than customary fury; indeed, the 
number of green graves we passed, as well as hundreds of others 
gaping to receive their melancholy deposits, too truly proclaimed 
the direful mortality into which we were marching. Nearer to 
Scutari, the lines of the cemetery were here and there interrupted 
by masons’ yards, displaying tomb-stones of every size, shape, 
and decoration; and in multitudes answerable to the demand 
