A judicious intermingling of this mixture
produces a soft, porous, and exceedingly damp soil, and in this soil the
Kapudan Pasha very carefully planted out his tulips with his own hands.
He selected the bulbs resulting from last spring's blooms, making a hole
for each of them, one by one, with his index-finger, and banking them up
gingerly with earth as soft as fresh bread crumbs.
Then he had snow fetched from the summits of the Caucasus, where it
remains even all through the summer--whole ship loads of snow by way of
the Black Sea--and kept the tulip-bulbs well covered with it, adding
continually layers of fresh snow as the first layers melted, so that the
hoodwinked tulips really believed it was now winter; and when towards
the end of August the snow was allowed to melt altogether, they fancied
spring had come, and poked their gold-green shoots out of their
well-warmed, well-moistened bed.
On the eve of the Prophet's birthday about fifty plants had begun to
bloom, all of which had been named after battles in which the Mussulmans
had triumphed, or after fortresses which their arms had captured. Then,
however, the Kapudan Pasha was obliged to go to sea and command the
fleet, in other words, he was constrained to leave his beloved tulips at
the most interesting period of their existence.
On the very evening when the Sultan arrived at Scutari, one of the
Kapudan Pasha's gardeners came to him with the joyful intelligence that
Belgrade, Naples, Morea, and Kermanjasahan would blossom on the morrow.
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