When the weather kept us from the sea, I amused myself on shore in looking for rare and new plants. Sometimes by way of exercise, I walked round the island, dragging with me a Franciscan friar, a capital young fellow, but, though young, very fat and unaccustomed to exertion. He had gone with me as a companion from the monastery at Pera. One day, as I was walking fast to warm myself, he followed me with difficulty, puffing and blowing, ‘What need is there,’ he would cry, ‘for such a hurry? We are not running for our lives or chasing anybody! Are we postmen charged with letters of importance?’ This went on till the sweat broke out in his back through his clothes in a great round patch. When we returned to our lodging, he made the house echo with his groans and lamentations, and threw himself on his bed, crying out he was done for. ‘What harm,’ he exclaimed, ‘have I ever done you that you should try to kill me before my time?’ And it was only by dint of much pressing that we could induce him to come to supper.
Occasionally friends from Constantinople and Pera and some Germans of Ali’s household paid us a visit. When I asked them ‘Whether the plague was abating?’ one of them replied, ‘Yes, in a marked degree.’ ‘What is the daily death-rate then?’ quoth I, ‘About five hundred,’ said he. ‘Good God,’ I exclaimed, ‘do you call this the plague abating? How many used to die when it was at its height?’ ‘About a thousand or twelve hundred,’ he answered.
The Turks imagine that the time and manner of each man’s death is inscribed by God on his forehead, and that therefore they have no power of avoiding the fatal hour, and that till that time there is no need for fear. This belief renders them indifferent to the dangers of the plague, but does not secure them against its attacks. And so they handle the clothes and sheets in which plague-stricken people have expired, while they are still reeking with their death-sweat, and even rub their faces with them. ‘If God,’ say they, ‘has decreed that I shall die thus, it must happen; if not, it cannot injure me.’ This of course is just the way to spread contagion, and sometimes whole households perish to a man.
While I lived in the islands I made friends with the Metropolitan[239] Metrophanes, who was abbot of a monastery in Chalcis, one of the islands, a polite and well-educated man, who was very anxious for a union of the Latin and Greek Churches. In this he differed from the views entertained by Greeks generally, for they will hold no communion with members of the Latin Church, which they consider an impure and profane sect. This shows how strong is each man’s conviction of the truth of his own faith.