Night.

A Turkish Official.Night.As by day Constantinople is the most brilliant, so by night it is the gloomiest, city in Europe. Occasional street-lamps, placed at long distances one from the other, hardly suffice to pierce the gloom of the principal streets, while the others are as black as caves, and not to be ventured into by one who carries no light in his hand. Hence by nightfall the city is practically deserted: the only signs of life are the night-watchmen, prowling dogs, the skulking figure of some law-breaker, parties of young men coming out of a subterranean tavern, and mysterious lights which appear and vanish again likeignis fatuidown some narrow side-street or in a distant cemetery. This is the hour in which to look at Stambul from the heights of Pera or Galata. Each one of her innumerable little windows is illuminated, and, with the lights from the shipping, reflections in the water and the starry heavens, helps to light up four miles of horizon with a great quivering sea of sparkling points of fire, in which port, city, and sky melt imperceptibly one into another until they all seem to be part of one starry firmament. When it is cloudy, and through a break the moon appears, you see above the dark mass of the city, above the inky blots which mark the woods and gardens, the glittering rows of domes surmounting the imperial mosques, shining in the moonlight like great marble tombs,and suggesting the idea of a necropolis of giants. But most impressive of all is the view when there is neither moon nor star nor any light at all. Then one immense black shadow stretches from Seraglio Point to Eyûb, a great dark profile, the hills looking like mountains and their many pointed summits assuming all manner of fantastic shapes—forests and armies, ruined castles, rocky fortresses—so that one’s imagination travels off into the region of dreams and fairy tales. Gazing across at Stambul on some such night as this from a lofty terrace in Pera, one’s brain plays all sorts of mad pranks. In fancy you are carried into the great shadowy city; wander through those myriad harems, illuminated by soft, subdued lights: behold the triumphant beauty of the favorite, the dull despair of the neglected wife; watch the eunuch who hangs trembling and impotent outside the door; follow a pair of lovers as they thread some steep winding byway; wander through the deserted galleries of the Grand Bazâr; traverse the great silent cemeteries; lose yourself amid the interminable rows of columns in the subterranean cisterns; imagine that you have been shut up in the gigantic mosque of Suleiman, and make its shadowy corridors echo again with lamentations and shrieks of terror, tearing your hair and invoking the mercy of the Almighty; and then suddenly exclaim, “What utter nonsense! I am here on my friend Santoro’s terrace, and in the roombelow there not only awaits me a supper for a sybarite, but a gathering of the most amusing wits in Pera to help me eat it.”Constantinople Life.Every evening a large number of Italians gathered at the house of my good friend Santoro—lawyers, artists, doctors, and merchants—among whom I passed many a delightful hour. How the conversation flowed! Had I only understood stenography, I might easily have collected the materials for a delightful book out of the various anecdotes and bits of gossip told there night after night. The doctor, who had just been called to a patient in the harem; the painter, who was employed upon a pasha’s portrait somewhere on the Bosphorus; the lawyer, who was arguing a case before a tribunal; the high official, who had knotted the threads of an international love-affair,—each separate experience as they related it formed a complete and highly entertaining sketch illustrative of Oriental manners and customs. Each fresh arrival is the signal for something new. “Have you heard the news?” one exclaims on entering: “the government has just paid the employés’ salaries, due for over three months, and Galata is flooded with copper money.” Then another arrives: “What do you suppose happened this morning? The Sultan got mad at the minister of finance and threw an inkstand at his head!” Athird tells a story of a Turkish president of a tribunal. Provoked, it seems, by the wretched arguments employed by an unscrupulous French lawyer in defending a bad cause, he paid him this pretty compliment before the entire audience: “My dear advocate, it is really quite useless for you to take so much pains to try to make your case appear good. ——;” And here he pronounced Cambronne’s word in full: “no matter how you may turn and twist it, it is still——,” and he said it again.The conversation naturally covered geographical ground quite new to me. They used the same easy familiarity in talking of persons and events in Tiflis, Trebizond, Teheran, and Damascus as we do when it is a question of Paris, Vienna, or Geneva, in any one of which places they had friends or had lately been or were about going themselves. I seemed to be in the centre of another world, with new horizons opening out on all sides, and it was difficult to avoid a sinking feeling at the thought of the time when I would be obliged to take up once more the narrow and contracted routine of my ordinary life. “How will it ever be possible,” I would ask myself, “to settle down again to those commonplace occupations and threadbare topics?” This is the way every one feels who has spent any time in Constantinople. After leading the life of that place, all others must necessarily appear flat and colorless. Existence there is easier, gayer, more youthfulthan in any other city in Europe; it is as though one were encamped upon foreign soil, surrounded by an endless succession of strange and unexpected sights, an ever-changing, shifting scene which leaves upon one’s mind such a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all things human that you end by adopting something of the fatalistic creed of the Mussulman or else the reckless indifference of the adventurer.The apathy of that people is something incredible; they live, as a poet has said, in a sort of intimate familiarity with death, looking upon life as a pilgrimage too short to attempt, even were it worth their while anyhow, great undertakings requiring long and sustained effort; and sooner or later this fatalism attacks the European as well, inducing him to live in a certain sense from day to day, without troubling himself more than necessary about the future, and playing in the world, so far as lies in his power, the simple and reposeful part of a spectator. Then the constant intercourse with so many nationalities, whose language you must speak and whose views to a certain extent you must adopt, does away with many of those fixed rules and conventionalities which have in our countries become iron-bound laws governing society, and whose observance or non-observance causes endless vexations and heartburnings.The Mussulman population forms of itself a never-ending source of interest and curiosity, always at hand to be seen and studied, and so stimulating and enlivening to the imagination as to drive away all thought of ennui. The very plan of Constantinople helps to this end. Where in other cities the eye and mind are almost always imprisoned, as it were, in one street or narrow circuit, there every step presents a new outlet through which both may roam over immeasurable distances of space and scenes of entrancing beauty, and, finally, there is the absolute freedom of that life, governed by no one set of customs. One can do absolutely as he pleases; nothing is looked upon as out of the way, and the most astounding performances hardly cause a ripple of talk, forgotten almost as soon as told in that huge moral anarchy. Europeans live there in a sort of republican confederacy, enjoying a freedom from all restraint such as would only be possible in one of their own cities during some period of disorder. It is like a continual Carnival, a perpetual Shrove Tuesday, and it is this, even more than her beauty, which endears Constantinople so greatly to the foreigner, so that, thinking of her after long absence, one experiences a feeling almost amounting to home-sickness; while those Europeans who have made their homes there strike down deep roots and become as devotedly attached to her as her legitimate sons. The Turks are certainly not far wrong when they call her “the enchantress of a thousandlovers,” or say in their proverb that for him who has once drunk of the waters of Top-Khâneh there is no cure—he is infatuated for life.The Italians.The Italian colony at Constantinople, while it is one of the most numerous, is far from being the most prosperous there. It numbers among it but few rich persons, and many who are wretchedly poor, especially those who come from Southern Italy and are unable to find work: it is also the colony most poorly represented by the press, when indeed it is represented at all, its newspapers only making their appearance to promptly vanish again. When I was there the colony was awaiting the issue of theLevantino, and meanwhile a sample copy was put in circulation setting forth the academic titles and personal gifts of the editor: I made out seventy-seven in all, without counting modesty.One should walk down the Rue de Pera of a Sunday morning, when the Italian families are on their way to mass: you hear every dialect in Italy. Sometimes I used to enjoy it, but not always: it was too depressing to see so many of one’s fellow-countrymen homeless wanderers on the face of the earth; many of them, too, must have been cast up on those shores by storms of misfortune and strange, uncomfortable adventures. And then the old people who would never see Italy again; the children in whoseears that name meant nothing more than a place—dear, no doubt, but distant and unknown; and those young girls, many of whom must inevitably marry men of other nationalities and found families in which nothing Italian will survive beyond a proper name or two and the fond memories of the mother. I encountered pretty Genoese, looking as though they might just have come down from the gardens of Acquasola; charming Neapolitan faces; graceful little heads which I seemed to have seen a hundred times beneath the porticoes of Po or the Milanese arcades. I felt like gathering them all into a bunch, tying them together with rose-colored ribbons, and marching them two by two on shipboard, conveying them back to Italy at the rate of fifteen knots an hour. I would also have liked to take back with me, as a curiosity, a sample of the language spoken by those born in the Italian colony, especially those of the third or fourth generation. A Crusca academician, on hearing it, would have taken to his bed with a raging fever. A language formed by mingling the Italian spoken by a Piedmontese doorkeeper, a Lombardy hack-driver, and a Romagnol porter would, I think, be less outrageous than that spoken on the banks of the Golden Horn. It is Italian which, impure at the outset, has been mixed with four or five other languages, each impure in their turn; and the most singular part of it is that in the midst of all these barbarisms you suddenlycome plump upon some such scholarly word or phrase aspuote,imperocche,a ogni pie sospiuto,havvi,puossi, witnesses to the efforts made by some of our worthy compatriots, who by dipping into anthologies seek to preserve thecelestial Tuscan speech. But, as compared with the rest, these might well lay claim, as Cesari said, to a reputation for using choice language. Some of them can hardly be understood at all. One day I was being escorted, I don’t remember just where, by an Italian youth of sixteen or seventeen, a friend of a friend of mine, who was born in Pera. As we walked along I began asking him some questions, but soon found that he did not want to talk; he answered me in a low tone and as shortly as possible, growing red in the face as he did so and hanging his head; he was so evidently unhappy that I presently asked him what it was that troubled him so much. “Oh,” said he with a despairing sigh, “I talk so badly!” As we continued our conversation I found that he spoke indeed a strange dialect, full of outlandish words and strongly resembling the so-called Frank language, which, as a French wit once said, consists in pouring out as rapidly as possible a quantity of Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek nouns and tenses until you happen to strike one the listener understands. It is, however, seldom necessary to go to so much trouble in Pera or Galata, where almost every one, including the Turks, can speak, or at least understand,some Italian, though this language, if you can call it a language, is almost exclusively a spoken one, if you can call it speaking. The tongue generally employed for writing is French. Of Italian literature there is none. I recollect on one solitary occasion, in a Galata café crowded with merchants, finding at the foot of the commercial intelligence and quotations of the Bourse, printed in French and Italian, eight mournful little verses all about zephyrs and stars and sighs. Unhappy poet! it seemed as though I could see you before me, buried beneath huge piles of merchandise, composing those verses with your last breath.The Theatres.Any one who is blessed with a pretty strong stomach can pass his evenings while at Constantinople at the play: he may, moreover, choose among quite a number of almost equally wretched little theatres of various sorts, many of which are beer-gardens and wine-shops as well. At some one of these one can always find the Italian comedy, or rather a troupe of Italian actors, whose efforts frequently make one wish the whole arena could be converted into a vegetable market. The Turks, however, frequent by preference those theatres in which certain bare-necked, brazen-faced, painted French women sing light songs to the accompaniment of a wretched orchestra. One of these theatreswas the Alhambra, situated in the Grande Rue de Pera: it consisted of a long apartment, always crowded to the utmost, and red with fezzes from stage to entrance. The nature of those songs, and the bold gestures which those intrepid ladies employed in order to make their meaning perfectly clear, no one could either imagine or credit unless indeed he had been to theCapellanesat Madrid. At anything especially coarse or impudent all those great fat Turks, seated in long lines, broke into loud roars of laughter, and then the habitual mask of dignity and reserve would drop from their faces, exposing the depths of their real nature and every secret of their grossly sensual lives. There is nothing that the Turk conceals so habitually and effectually as the sensual nature of his tastes and manner of life. He never appears in public accompanied by a woman, rarely looks at, and never speaks to, one, and considers it almost an insult to be inquired of concerning his wives. Judging merely by outside appearances, one would take this to be the most austere and straitlaced people in the world, but it is only in appearance. The same Turk who colors to the tips of his ears if one so much as asks if his wife is well, sends his boys, and his girls too, to listen to the coarse jests ofKara-gyuz, corrupting their minds before their senses are fairly awakened, while he himself is fully capable of abandoning the peaceful enjoyments of his own harem for such excessesas Bayezid the Thunderbolt set the first example of, and Mahmûd the Reformer was doubtless not the last to follow. And, indeed, were proof needed of the profound corruption which lurks beneath this mask of seeming austerity, one need go no farther than to that selfsameKara-gyuz. It is a grotesque caricature of a middle-class Turk, a sort ofombra chinese, whose head, arms, and legs are made to accompany with appropriate gestures the developments of some extravagant burlesque having usually a love-intrigue for its plot. The marionette is worked behind a transparent curtain, and resembles a depraved Pulcinello, coarse, cynical, and cunning. Sensual as a satyr, foul-mouthed as a fishwife, he throws his audience into paroxysms of laughter and enthusiasm by every sort of indecent jest and extravagant gesture. Before the censorship curbed to some small extent the hitherto unbridled looseness of this performance, the figure was made to give visible proof of its corporeal resemblance to Priapus, and not infrequently upon this lofty and elevating point the whole plot hinged.Turkish Cooking.Wishing to investigate for myself the Turkish manner of cooking, I got my good friends of Pera to take me to a restaurantad hocwhere every kind of Turkish dish is to be had, from the most delicious delicacies of the Seraglio to camel’s meat preparedas the Arabians eat it, and horseflesh dressed according to the Turkoman fashion. Santoro ordered the breakfast, severely Turkish from the opening course to the fruit, and I, invoking the names of all those intrepid spirits who have faced death in the cause of science, conscientiously swallowed a part of each without so much as a groan. There were upward of twenty dishes, the Turks being a good deal like children in their liking to peck at a quantity of different kinds of food, rather than satisfy their appetite with a few solid dishes. Shepherds of the day before yesterday, they seem to disdain a simple table as though it were a trait of rustic niggardliness. I cannot give a clear account of each dish, many of them being now no more than a vague and sinister memory. I do, however, remember thekibab, which consisted of little scraps of mutton roasted on the coals, seasoned with a great deal of pepper and cloves, and served on two soft, greasy biscuits—a dish not to be named among the lesser sins. I can also recall vividly the odor of thepilav, thesine quâ nonof a Turkish meal, consisting of rice and mutton, meaning to the Turk what maccaroni does to the Neapolitan orcuscussuto the Arab orpucheroto the Spaniard. I have not forgotten either—and it is the sole pleasant memory connected with that repast—therosh’ab, which is sipped with a spoon at the end of the meal: it is composed of raisins, plums, apples, cherries, and other fruits, cooked in water with agreat deal of sugar, and flavored with essence of musk, citron, and rose-water. Then there were numberless other preparations of mutton and lamb, cut in small pieces and boiled until no flavor remained; fish swimming in oil; rice-balls wrapped in grape-leaves; sugar syrups; salads served in pastry; compôtes; conserves; sauces, flavored with every sort of aromatic herb—a list as long as the articles of the penal code for relapsed criminals; and finally the masterpiece of some Arabian pastry-cook, a huge dish of sweetmeats, among which were conspicuous a steamboat, a fierce-looking lion, and a sugar house with grated windows. When all was over I felt a good deal as though I had swallowed the contents of a pharmacist’s shop or assisted at one of those feasts which children prepare with powdered brickdust, chopped grass, and stale fruit—not unattractive-looking when seen at a distance. All the dishes are served rapidly, four or five at a time. The Turks dive into each with their fingers, the knife and spoon only, being in common use among them, and one drinking-goblet serves for the whole company, the waiter keeping it constantly filled with flavored water.These customs, however, were not followed by the party who were breakfasting at the table adjoining ours. They were evidently Turks who valued their ease, even to the extent of poising their slippers upon the table: each had a plate to himself, andthey plied their forks very skilfully, drinking liquors freely in despite of Mahomet. I observed, moreover, that they failed to kiss the bread before beginning to eat, as every good Mussulman should, and that more than one longing glance was sent in the direction of our bottles, although the muftis pronounce it a sin to so much as cast the eye upon a bottle of wine. There is, indeed, no doubt that this “father of abominations,” one drop of which is sufficient to bring down upon the head of the sinning Mussulman the “curses of every angel in heaven and earth,” gains new disciples among the Turks every day, and that nothing but the fear of public opinion prevents its open use. Were a thick cloud to descend upon Constantinople some day, and after an hour suddenly be lifted, I have little doubt that the sun would surprise fifty thousand Turks, each one in the act of lifting the bottle to his lips. In this, as in almost every other shortcoming of the Turks, it was the sultans who were the stone of stumbling and rock of offence. Singular to relate, it is that very dynasty which rules over a people among whom it is considered a sin in the sight of God to drink wine at all, which has produced more drunkards than any other line of rulers in Europe; so sweet is forbidden fruit even in the estimation of the “shadow of God upon earth.” It was, we are told, Bayezid I. who headed the long list of imperial tipplers, and here, as in the case of the first sin,woman was the temptress, the wife of this Bayezid, a daughter of the king of Servia, offering her husband his first glass of Tokay. Next Bayezid II. got intoxicated on Cypress and Schiraz wines; then the selfsame Suleiman I. who fired every ship in the port of Constantinople that was laden with wine, and poured molten lead down the throats of those who drank the forbidden liquor, himself died when drunk, shot by one of his own archers. Then comes Selim II., surnamed themessth(sot), whose debauches lasted three days, and during whose reign men of the law and men of religion drank openly. In vain did Muhammad III. thunder against this “abomination devised by Satan;” in vain did Ahmed I. close all the taverns and destroy every wine-press in Stambul; in vain did Murad IV. patrol the city accompanied by an executioner, who beheaded in his presence every unfortunate whose breath witnessed against him, while he himself, ferocious hypocrite that he was, staggered about the apartments of the seraglio like any common frequenter of the pothouse. Since his day the bottle, like some gay little black imp, has crept into the seraglio, lurks in the bazâr, hides beneath the pillow of the soldier, thrusts its little silver or purple neck from beneath the divan of the beauty, and, crossing the threshold of the very mosques themselves, has stained the yellow pages of the Koran with sacrilegious drops.Turbeh of Sultan Selim II in St. Sophia.Mohammed.Speaking of religion, while wandering about the streets and byways of Constantinople I used often to wonder whether, were it not for the voice of the muezzin, Christians would see anything to remind them that there was any difference between the religion of this people and their own. The Byzantine architecture of the mosques makes them seem very like churches; of the Islam rites there is no external evidence; while Turkish soldiers may be seen escorting the viaticum through the streets. An uneducated Christian might remain a year in Constantinople without being aware that Mohammed, not Christ, claimed the allegiance of the greater part of the population; and this led me on to reflect upon the slight nature of the fundamental difference—the blade of grass, as the Abyssinian Christians called it in speaking to the first followers of Mohammed—which divides the two religions, and the trifling cause which led Arabia to adopt Islamism instead of Christianity, or, if not Christianity, at all events something so closely resembling it that, even had it never developed into that outright, it would have seriously altered the destinies of the entire Eastern world. This slight cause was nothing more or less than the voluptuous nature of a certain handsome young Arabian, tall, fair, ardent, with black eyes and musical voice—he lacked the force to dominate his ownpassions, and so, instead of cutting at the root of his people’s prevailing sin, he contented himself with pruning the branches, and in lieu of proclaiming conjugal unity as he proclaimed the unity of God, merely confined within somewhat narrower bounds, and then proceeded to give the countenance of religion to, the dissolute selfishness of men. No doubt he would have had to encounter a more determined opposition in the one case than in the other, but that it was in his power to succeed who can question when it is remembered that in order to establish the worship of one sole God among a people given over to idolatry he was obliged to first overthrow an enormous superstructure of tradition and superstition, including innumerable grants and privileges all closely interlaced, the result of centuries of growth, and that he made them accept, as one of the dogmas of his religion for which millions of believers subsequently died, a paradise which at its first announcement aroused a universal feeling of scorn and indignation? Unfortunately, however, this handsome young Arab temporized with his passions, and as a consequence the face of half the globe is changed, since polygamy was, without doubt, the besetting vice of his rule and the principal cause of the decadence of all those races who have adopted his religion. It is the degradation of one sex for the benefit of the other, the open sanction of a glaring injustice which disturbs the entire course of human rights, corrupts therich, oppresses the poor, encourages ignorance, breaks up the family, and by causing endless complications in the rights of birth among the reigning dynasties overturns kingdoms and states, finally placing an insuperable barrier in the way of the union of Mussulman society with the people of other faiths who populate the East. If, to return to the original proposition, that handsome young Arab had only been endowed with a little more strength of character, had the spiritual in his nature but outweighed, by ever so small an amount, the animal, who knows?—perhaps we would now have an Orient orderly, well-governed, and the world be a century nearer universal civilization.Ramazan.Happening to be in Constantinople in the month of Ramazân, the ninth month in the Turkish calendar, in which the twenty-eight days’ fast falls, I was able to enjoy every evening a spectacle so exceedingly comical that I think it merits a description. Throughout the entire fast the Turks are forbidden to eat, drink, or smoke from sunrise to sunset. Most of them make it up by feasting all night, but as long as the sun is shining the rule is very generally observed, and no one dares, in public at any rate, to transgress it.One morning my friend and I went to call upon a friend of ours, a young aide-de-camp of the Sultan,who prided himself upon his liberal views. We found him in one of the rooms on the ground floor of the imperial palace with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Why,” said Yunk, “how do you dare to drink coffee hours after sunrise?” The young man shrugged his shoulders, and remarked carelessly that he did not care a fig for Ramazân or the fast; but just at that moment, a door near by suddenly opening, he was in such a hurry to hide the telltale cup that half its contents were spilled at his feet. One can readily imagine from this incident how rigorously all those must abstain whose entire day is passed beneath the public eye, the boatmen for instance. To get a really good idea of it one should stand on the Sultan Validéh bridge at about sunset. What with the boats at the landings and those which are going from one place to another, the ones near at hand and those in the distance, there must be very nearly a thousand in sight. Every boatman has fasted since sunrise, and by this time is ravenously hungry. His supper is all ready in the käik, and his eyes travel constantly from it to where the sun is nearing the horizon, and then back again, while he has the restless, uneasy air of a wild animal who paces about his cage as the feeding-hour approaches. Sunset is announced by the firing of a gun, and until that signal is heard not so much as a crumb of bread or drop of water crosses the lips of one of them. Sometimes in a retired spotin the Golden Horn we would try to induce our boatman to eat something, but the invariable answer was, “Jok! jok! jok!” (No! no! no!), accompanied by an uneasy gesture toward the western horizon. When the sun gets about halfway down behind the mountains the men begin to finger their pieces of bread, inhaling its smell voluptuously. Then it gets so low that nothing can be seen but a golden arc, and the rowers lay down their oars. Those who are busy and those who are idle, some midway across the Golden Horn, some lying in retired inlets, others on the Bosphorus, others over near the Asiatic shore, others, again, who are plying on the Sea of Marmora, one and all, turning toward the west, remain immovable, their eyes fixed on the fast-disappearing disk with mouth open, kindling eye, and bread firmly clasped in the right hand. Now nothing can be seen but a tiny point of fire: a thousand hunks of bread are held close to a thousand mouths, and then the fiery eye drops out of sight, the cannons thunders, and on the instant thirty-two thousand teeth tear a thousand huge mouthsful from a thousand loaves! But why say a thousand, when in every house and café and restaurant a similar scene is being enacted at precisely the same moment, and for a short time the Turkish city is nothing but a huge monster whose hundred thousand jaws are all tearing and devouring at once?Ancient Constantinople.But think what this city must have been in the great days of the Ottoman glory! I kept thinking of that all the time. How it must have looked when not a single cloud of smoke arose from the Bosphorus, all white with sails, to make ugly, black marks against the blue of sky and water! In the port and the inlets of the Sea of Marmora, among the picturesque battle-ships of that period with their lofty carved prows, silver crescents, violet standards, and gilded lanterns, floated the battered and blood-stained hulks of Spanish, Genoese, and Venetian galleys. No bridges spanned the Golden Horn, which was covered with myriads of gayly-decorated boats plying constantly from one shore to the other, among which could be distinguished afar off the snowy-white launches of the Seraglio, covered with gold-fringed scarlet hangings and propelled by rowers dressed in silk. Skutari was then no more than a village: seen from Galata, she only appeared to have a few houses scattered about on the hillside; no lofty palaces as yet reared their heads above the hilltops of Pera; the appearance of the city was doubtless less impressive than now, but far more Oriental in character: the law prescribing the use of colors being then in full force, one could determine accurately the religion of the occupant from the color of each house. Except for its public andsacred edifices, which were white as snow, Stambul was entirely red and yellow; the Armenian quarters were light, and the Greek quarters dark gray; the Hebrew quarter, purple. As in Holland, the passion for flowers was universal, so that the gardens were like huge bouquets of hyacinths, tulips, and roses. The exuberant vegetation not having been as yet checked on the surrounding hillsides by the growth of new suburbs, Constantinople presented the appearance of a city built in a forest. The public thoroughfares were nothing but lanes and alleys, but they were rendered picturesque by the varied and brilliant crowds which thronged them. The huge turbans worn by the men lent them all an air of dignity and importance. The women, with the single exception of the Sultan’s mother, were so rigorously veiled as to show nothing but the eyes, and so formed a population apart, anonymous, enigmatical, which lent to the entire city a certain air of secresy and mystery. Severe laws controlled the dress of every individual, so that from the shape of his turban or color of his caftan one could tell the precise rank, occupation, office, or condition of every one he met, as though the city had been one great court. The horse being as yet almost “man’s only coach,” thousands of cavaliers filled the crowded streets, while long files of camels and dromedaries belonging to the army traversed the city in all directions, giving it something of the savage and imposing air ofan ancient Asiatic metropolis. Gilded arabas, drawn by oxen, passed carriages hung with the green cloth of theulemior scarlet cloth of thekâdi-aschieri, and lighttalikehung with satin and fantastically painted. Troops of slaves marched along, representing every country from Polonia to Ethiopia, clanking the chains riveted on them in the field of battle. On the street-corners, in the squares and the courtyards of the mosques, groups of soldiers collected, clad in glorious rags, displaying their battered arms and scars still fresh from wounds received at Vienna, Belgrade, Rodi, and Damascus. Hundreds of orators recounted to rapt and enthusiastic audiences the heroic deeds and brilliant victories achieved by the army fighting at a distance of three months’ march from Stambul. Pasha, bey, agha, musselim, numberless dignitaries and personages of high rank, clad with theatrical display and accompanied by throngs of attendants, made their way through the crowds, who bowed before them like grain before the wind. Ambassadors representing every court in Europe, accompanied by princely retinues, who had come to Stambul to sue for peace or arrange an alliance, swept by. Caravans laden with propitiatory gifts from Asiatic and African kings filed slowly along the principal thoroughfares. Companies ofsilidarsandspahis, haughty and insolent, swaggered by, their sabres stained with the blood of twenty different nations, while the handsomeGreek and Hungarian Seraglio pages, dressed like little kings, pushed haughtily through the obsequious multitude, who, recognizing in them the unnatural caprices of their lord, respected them accordingly. Here and there a trophy of knotted clubs before some doorway indicated the presence of a corps of Janissaries, who at that time acted as police in the interior of the city. Parties of Hebrews would be seen hurrying to the Bosphorus with the dead bodies of the victims of justice. Every morning a body would be found in the Baluk Bazâr, lying with the head under the right armpit, a stone holding in place the sentence affixed to the breast. Law-breakers to whom summary justice had been meted out would dangle from a beam or hook in the public highway, while after nightfall one was liable to stumble over the body of some unfortunate who, after having his hands and feet pounded with clubs, had been thrown from the window of the torture-chamber. In the broad light of day merchants, caught in the act of cheating, would be nailed through the ear to their own shop-doors, and, there being no law controlling the free right of sepulture, the work of digging graves and burying the dead was carried on at all hours and in all places—in the gardens, in the lanes and open squares, and before the doors of dwellings. The cries of lambs and sheep could be heard from the courtyards where they were being slaughtered in sacrifice to Allah onthe occasion of a circumcision or a birth. From time to time a troop of eunuchs, galloping by with warning cries, would be the signal for a general stampede; the streets would become deserted; doors and windows fly to, blinds be drawn down, and an entire neighborhood suddenly assume the look and air of a city of the dead. Then in long procession files of gorgeously-decorated coaches filled with the ladies of the imperial harem would pass by, scattering around them an atmosphere of perfume and laughter. Sometimes it would happen that an official of the court, making his way through some thoroughfare, would suddenly encounter six quite ordinary-looking individuals about to enter a shop, and at that sight grow unaccountably pale. These six, however, would be the Sultan, four officers of his court, and an executioner making their rounds from shop to shop in order to verify the weights and measures.Interior of Mosque of Ahmed.Throughout the whole of the city’s huge body there coursed an exuberant and feverish life; the treasury overflowed with jewels, the arsenal with arms, the barracks with soldiers, the caravanseries with strangers; the slave-market was thronged with merchants and lofty personages come to inspect the crowds of beautiful slaves. Scholars pressed to examine the archives of the great mosques; long-winded viziers prepared for the delectation of future generations the interminable annals of the Empire;poets, pensioned by the Seraglio, assembled in the baths, where they sang the imperial loves and wars; swarms of Bulgarian and Armenian workmen toiled at the erection of mighty mosques, employing huge blocks of granite and Paros marble, while by sea, columns from the temples of the Archipelago, and by land, spoils from the churches of Pesth and Ofen, were brought to contribute to their splendor. In the harbor a fleet of three hundred sail made ready to carry terror and dismay to every coast in the Mediterranean; between Stambul and Adrianapolis companies of falconers and gamekeepers, to the number of seven thousand, were stationed; and in the intervals between military uprisings at home, foreign wars, and conflagrations which would reduce twenty thousand houses to ashes in a single night, revels would be celebrated, lasting thirty days, in honor of the representatives of every court in Asia, Africa, and Europe. On these occasions the glorifications of the Mussulmans degenerated into folly: sham battles were fought by the Janissaries in the presence of the Sultan and the court, amid hugepalme di nozzeladen with birds, mirrors, and fruits of various kinds, in order to make room for which walls and houses were ruthlessly destroyed; and processions of lions and sugar mermaids, borne on horses whose trappings were of silver damask, and mountains of royal gifts sent from every part of the Empire and every court in the world; dervishesexecuted their furious dances, and bloody massacres of Christian prisoners were followed by public banquets where ten thousand dishes ofcuscussùwere served to the populace; trained elephants and giraffes danced in the Hippodrome, while bears and wolves, with fireworks tied to their tails, were let loose among the people; allegorical pantomimes, grotesque masquerades, wanton dances, fantastic processions, games, comedies, symbolic cars, rustic dances, followed each other in rapid succession. Little by little as night descended the festival degenerated into a mad orgy, and then the lights from five hundred brilliantly illuminated mosques spread a great aureole of fire over the entire city and announced to the watching shepherds on the mountain-heights of Asia and the wayfarers on the Propontis the revels of this new Babylon.Such was once Stambul, a haughty sultaness, voluptuous, formidable, wanton, as compared with which the city of to-day is little more than some weary old queen, peevish and hypochondriacal.The Armenians.Absorbed as I was by the Turks, I had, as may be readily understood, but little time left in which to study the characteristics of the three other nationalities—Armenian, Greek, and Hebrew—which go to make up the population of Constantinople—a study requiring a certain amount of time, too, sinceall of these people, while preserving to a certain extent their national character, have outwardly conformed to the prevailing Mussulman coloring around them, now in its turn fading into a uniform tint of European civilization. Thus it is as difficult to catch a vivid impression of any one of the three as it would be of a view that was constantly changing. This is true in a special sense of the Armenians, “Christians in spirit and faith, Asiatic Mussulmans by birth and carnal nature,” whom it is not only hard to study intimately, but even to distinguish at sight, since those among them who have not adopted the European costume dress like Turks in all except some very minor points. All of them have abandoned the ancient felt cap which was formerly, with certain special colors, the distinctive sign of their nation. In appearance they closely resemble the Turks, being for the most part tall, robust, and corpulent, with a grave, sedate carriage, but their complexion is light, and the two striking points of their national character can usually be read in their faces—the one, a quick, open, industrious, and persevering spirit, which fits them in a peculiar way to commercial enterprises; and the other that adaptability, called by some servility, which enables them to gain a foothold among whatever people they may be thrown with from Hungary to China, and renders them particularly acceptable to the Turks, whose confidence they readily succeed in winning, making them faithfulsubjects and obsequious friends. There is nothing heroic or bellicose either about their appearance or disposition: formerly this may have been otherwise. Those parts of Asia whence they came are at present inhabited by a people, descendants of a common stock, who, it is said, resemble them but little. Certainly those members of the race who have been transplanted to the shores of the Bosphorus are a prudent and managing people, moderate in their manner of life, intent only upon their trade, and more sincerely religious, it is affirmed, than any other nation which inhabits Constantinople. They are called by the Turks the “camels of the Empire,” and the Franks assert that every Armenian is born an accountant. These two sayings are, to a great extent justified by the facts, since, thanks to their great physical strength and their quickness and intelligence, they furnish, in addition to a large proportion of her architects, engineers, doctors, and clever and painstaking mechanics, the greater part of Constantinople’s bankers and porters, the former amassing fabulous fortunes, and the latter carrying enormous loads. At first sight, though, one would hardly be aware that there was an Armenian population in Constantinople, so completely has the plant, so to speak, assumed the color of the soil. Their women, on whose account the house of the Armenian is almost as rigorously closed to strangers as that of the Mussulman, have likewise adopted the Turkishdress, and none but the most expert eye could distinguish them among their Mohammedan neighbors. They are generally fair and stout, with the aquiline Oriental profile, large eyes and long lashes; many of them are tall, with matronly figures, and, surmounted by turbans, might well be mistaken for handsome sheiks. They are universally modest and dignified in their bearing, and if anything is lacking it is the intelligence which beams from the eyes of their Greek sisters.The Greeks.Difficult as it may be to single out the Armenian at sight, there is no such trouble about the Greek, who differs so essentially in character, bearing, appearance, everything, from all the other subjects of the Empire that he can be told at once without even looking at his dress. To appreciate this diversity, or rather contrast, one need only watch a Turk and a Greek who happen to be seated beside one another on board a steamboat or in a café. They may be about the same age and rank, both dressed in the European fashion, and even resemble each other somewhat in feature, and yet it is quite impossible to mistake them. The Turk sits perfectly motionless; his face wears a look of quietude and repose, void of all expression, like a fed animal; if by any chance some shadow of a thought appears, it seems to be a reflection as lifeless and inert as hisbody; he looks at no one, and is apparently quite unconscious that any one is looking at him, expressing by his entire bearing an utter indifference to his surroundings, a something of the resigned melancholy of a slave and the cold pride of a despot; hard, closed, completed, he seems incapable of altering any resolution once taken, and it would drive any one to the verge of madness who should undertake the task of persuading him to any course. In short, he appears to be a being hewn out of a single block, with whom it would only be possible to live either as master or servant, and no amount of intercourse with whom would ever justify the taking of a liberty. With the Greek it is altogether different. His mobile features express every thought that passes through his mind, and betray a youthful, almost childish ardor, while he tosses his head with the free action of an uncurbed and restive horse. On finding himself observed he at once strikes an attitude, and if no one looks at him he tries to attract attention; he seems to be always wanting or imagining something, and his whole person breathes of shrewdness and ambition. There is something so attractive and sympathetic about him that you are inclined to give him your hand even when you would hesitate about trusting him with your purse. Seen side by side, one can readily understand how it is that one of these men considers the other a proud, overbearing, brutal savage, and is looked down uponin his turn as a light creature, untrustworthy, mischievous, and the cause of endless trouble, and how they mutually despise and hate one another from the bottom of their hearts, finding it impossible to live together in peace. And so with the women. It is with a distinct feeling of gratification and pleasure that one first encounters amid the handsome, florid Turkish and Armenian types, appealing more to the senses than the mind, the pure and exquisite features of the Greek women, illuminated by those deep serious eyes whose every glance recalls an ode, while their exquisite shapes inspire an immediate desire to clasp them in one’s arms—with the object of placing them on pedestals, however, rather than in the harem. Among them can still be occasionally found one or two who, wearing their hair after the ancient fashion—that is, hanging over the shoulders in long wavy locks, with one thick coil wound around the top of the head like a diadem—are so noble-looking, so beautiful and classic, that they might well be taken for statues fresh from the chisel of a Praxiteles or a Lysippus, or for youthful immortals discovered after twenty centuries in some forgotten valley of Laconia or unknown island of the Egean. But even among the Greeks these examples of queenly beauty are exceedingly rare, and are found only in the ranks of the old aristocracy of the Empire, in the silent and melancholy quarter of Fanar, where the spirit of ancient Byzantium has taken refuge. There onemay occasionally see one of these magnificent women leaning on the railing of a balcony or against the grating of some lofty window, her eyes fixed upon the deserted street in the attitude of an imprisoned queen; and when a crowd of lackeys is not lounging idly before the door of one of these descendants of the Palæologi and the Comneni, one may, watching her from some place of observation, fancy that a rift in the clouds has revealed for an instant the face of an Olympian goddess.The Hebrews.With regard to the Hebrews I am prepared to assert, having been to Morocco myself, that those of Constantinople have nothing in common with their fellows of the northern coast of Africa, where observing experts say they have discovered in all its primitive purity the original Oriental type of Hebrew beauty. In the hope of finding some traces of this same beauty, I summoned up all my courage and thoroughly explored the vast Ghetto of Balata, which winds like an unclean reptile along the banks of the Golden Horn. I penetrated into the most wretched purlieus, among hovels “encrusted with mould” like the shores of the Dantesque pool; through passageways which nothing would induce me to enter again except on stilts, and, holding my nose; I peered through windows hung with filthy rags into dark, malodorous rooms; paused beforedamp courtyards exhaling a smell of mould and decay strong enough to take one’s breath away; pushed my way through groups of scrofulous children; brushed up against horrible old men who looked as though they had died of the plague and come to life again; avoiding now a dog covered with sores, now a pool of black mud, dodging under rows of loathsome rags hung from greasy cords, or stumbling over heaps of decaying stuff whose smell was enough to make one faint outright. And, after all, my heroism met with no reward. Among all the many women whom I encountered wearing the national kalpak—an article resembling a sort of elongated turban, covering the hair and ears—I saw, it is true, some faces in which could be discovered that delicate regularity of feature and the expression of gentle resignation which are supposed to characterize the Constantinopolitan Jewess; some vague profiles of a Rebecca or a Rachel, with almond-shaped eyes full of a soft sweetness; an occasional graceful, erect figure standing in Raphaelesque attitude in an open doorway, with one delicate hand resting lightly on the curly head of a child; but for the most part my investigations revealed nothing but discouraging evidences of the degradation of the race. What a contrast between those pinched faces and the piercing eyes, brilliant coloring, and well-rounded forms which aroused my admiration a year later in theMellàof Tangiers and Fez!And the men—thin, yellow, stunted, all their vitality seems centred in their bright cunning eyes, never still for a moment, but which roll restlessly about as though constantly attracted by the sound of chinking money.At this point I am quite prepared to hear my kind critics among the Israelites—who have already rapped me over the knuckles in regard to their co-religionists of Morocco—take up the burden of their song, laying all the blame of the degeneration and degradation of the Hebrews of Constantinople at the door of the Turkish oppressor. But it should be remembered that the other non-Mussulman subjects of the Porte are all on a precisely similar footing, both political and civil, with themselves; and, even were it otherwise, they would find some difficulty in proving that the filthy habits, early marriages, and complete abandonment of every sort of hard work, considered as primal causes of that degeneration, are the logical results of the loss of liberty and independence. And should they assert that it is not so much Turkish oppression as the universal scorn and petty persecutions which they have had to endure on all hands that have brought about such complete loss of self-respect, let them pause and first ask themselves if the exact opposite may not be nearer the truth, and the general obloquy in which they are held be not so much the cause as the result of their manner of life; and then, instead of trying to coverup the sore, themselves be the ones to apply the knife.The Bath.After making the tour of Balata the most appropriate thing to take next seems to be a Turkish bath. The bath-houses may be easily recognized from without: they are small, mosque-shaped buildings, without windows, surmounted by cupolas, and have high conical chimneys, from which smoke is constantly rising. So much for the exterior, but he who desires to penetrate farther and explore the mysteries of the interior would do well to pause and ask himself,Quid valeant humeri?since not every one is able to endure theaspro governoto which he who enters those salutary walls must be subjected. I am free to confess that, after all I had been told, I approached them with some feeling of trepidation, which I think the reader will admit was not wholly unjustifiable before he has done. As I recall it all now, two great drops of perspiration stand out on my forehead, ready to roll down when I shall be in the heat of my description. Here then is what was done to my unhappy person. Entering timidly, I find myself in a large apartment which leaves one in doubt for a few moments as to whether he has gotten by mistake into a theatre or a hospital. A fountain plays in the centre, decorated on top with flowers; a wooden gallery runs all around the walls,upon which some Turks, stretched upon mattresses and enveloped from head to foot in snow-white cloths, either slumber profoundly or smoke in a dreamy state between waking and sleeping. Looking about for some attendant, I become suddenly aware of two robust mulattoes, stripped to the waist, who appear from nowhere like spectres and ask in deep tones and both together, “Hammamun?” (bath?). “Evvet” (yes), I reply in a very weak voice. Motioning me to follow, they lead the way up a small wooden stair to a room filled with mats and cushions, where I am given to understand that I must undress, after which they proceed to wrap a strip of blue and white stuff about my loins, tie my head up in a piece of muslin, and, placing a pair of huge slippers on my feet, grasp me under the arms like a drunken man, and conduct, or rather drag, me into another room, warm and half lighted, where, after laying me on a rug, they stand with arms akimbo, waiting until my skin shall have become moist. These preparations, so distressingly suggestive of some approaching punishment, fill me with a vague uneasiness, which changes into something even less admirable when the two cutthroats, after touching me on the forehead, exchange a meaning glance, as who should say, “Suppose he resists?” and then, as though exclaiming, “To the rack!” again seize me by the arms and lead me into a third room. This apartment makes a verysingular impression at first sight: it is as though one found himself in a subterranean temple, where, through clouds of vapor, high marble walls, rows of columns, arches, and a lofty vaulted roof, can be indistinctly seen, colored green and blue and crimson by the rays of light falling from the cupola, white spectral figures slide noiselessly back and forth close to the walls. In the centre half-naked forms are extended upon the pavement, while others, also half naked, bend over them in the attitude of doctors making an autopsy. The temperature is such that no sooner have we entered than I break out into a profuse perspiration, and it seems most probable that should I ever get out at all it will be in the form of a running stream like the lover of Arethusa.The two mulattoes convey my body to the centre of the room and deposit it upon a sort of anatomical table consisting of a raised slab of white marble, beneath which are the stoves. The marble, being extremely hot, burns me and I see stars, but, as long as I am there, there is no choice but to go through with the penalty. My two attendants accordingly begin thevivisection, and, chanting a sort of funeral dirge the while, pinch my arms and legs, stretch my muscles, make my joints crack, pound me, rub me, maul me, and then, rolling me over on my face, begin over again, only to put me on my back later and recommence the whole process. They knead and work me like a dough figure to which they wantto give a certain form they have in mind, and, not succeeding, have grown angry with; a slight pause for breath is only followed by renewed pinching, pulling, and pounding, until I begin to fear that my last hour is drawing near; and then finally, when my entire body is streaming with perspiration like a wet sponge, the blood coursing furiously through my veins, and it has become evident that I have reached the last limit of endurance, they gather up my remains from that bed of torment and carry them to a corner, where in a small alcove are a basin and two spigots from which hot and cold water are running. But, alas! fresh martyrdom awaits me here; and really the affair at this point begins to assume so serious an aspect that, joking aside, I consider whether it would not be possible to strike out to right and left, and, just as I am, make a break for life and liberty. It is too late, though: one of my tormentors, putting on a camel’s-hair glove, has fallen to rubbing my back, breast, arms, and legs with the same cheerful energy a lively groom might employ in currying a horse; after this has been prolonged for fully five minutes a stream of tepid water is poured down my back, and I take breath and return devout thanks to Heaven that it is all over at last. I soon find, however, that this is premature: that ferocious mulatto, taking the glove off, promptly falls to once more with his bare hand, until, losing all patience, I sign to him to stop, with the resultthat, exhibiting his hand, he proves to his own entire satisfaction and my complete bewilderment that he must still continue, and does so. Next follows another deluge of water, and after that a fresh operation: each of them, now taking a piece of tow cloth, rubs a quantity of Candia soap upon it, and then proceeds to soap me well from head to foot; then another torrent of perfumed water, followed by the tow cloths again, but, Heaven be praised! without soap this time, and the process is one of drying me off. When this has been accomplished they tie up my head again, wrap the cloth about my body, and then, enveloping me in a large sheet, reconduct me to the second room, where I am allowed to rest a few moments before being taken to the first; here a warm mattress is in readiness, upon which I stretch myself luxuriously. The two instruments of justice give a few final pinches to equalize the circulation of blood throughout all my members, and then, placing an embroidered cushion under my head, a white covering over me, a pipe in my mouth, and a glass of lemonade at my side, depart, leaving me light, fresh, airy, perfumed, with a mind serene, a contented heart, and such a sense of youth and vitality that I feel as though, like Venus, I had just been born from the foam of the sea, and seem to hear the wings of the loves fluttering above my head.The Serasker Tower.Feeling thus “airy and meet for intercourse with the stars,” one could not do better than ascend to the top of that stone Titan called the Serasker Tower. I think that should Satan again undertake to offer a view of the kingdoms of the world by way of a temptation, his best course would be to select this spot for the enterprise. The tower, built in the reign of Mahmûd II., is planted upon the summit of the most lofty hill in Stambul, on that spot in the centre of the vast courtyard of the War Office called by the Turks theumbilicusof the city. It is constructed mainly of white Marmora marble, on the plan of a regular polygon with sixteen sides, and rears itself aloft, erect, and graceful as a column, overtopping to a considerable extent the gigantic minarets of the adjacent mosque of Suleiman. Ascending a winding stair lighted here and there by square windows, you catch fleeting views now of Galata, now of Stambul or the villages on the Golden Horn, and before you are halfway to the top seem already to have reached the region of the clouds. It may happen that a slight noise is heard directly over your head, and almost at the same instant a something flashes by, apparently an object of some sort being hurled headlong from above; but, in reality, one of the guards stationed day and night on the summit to watch for fires and give the alarm, who, having discovered at somedistant point of the horizon a cloud of suspicious-looking smoke, is taking word to the seraskier. After mounting about two hundred steps you reach a sort of covered terrace running all around the tower and enclosed with glass, where an attendant is always at hand to serve visitors with coffee. On first finding yourself in that transparent cage, suspended as it were between heaven and earth, with nothing to be seen but an immense blue space, and the wind howling and rattling the panes of glass and making the boards strain and creak, you are very apt to be attacked with vertigo and to feel strongly tempted to give up the view; but at sight of the ladder which leads to the window in the roof courage returns, and, climbing up with a beating heart, a cry of astonishment escapes you. It is an overpowering moment, and for a little while you remain silent and transfixed.

A Turkish Official.

A Turkish Official.

As by day Constantinople is the most brilliant, so by night it is the gloomiest, city in Europe. Occasional street-lamps, placed at long distances one from the other, hardly suffice to pierce the gloom of the principal streets, while the others are as black as caves, and not to be ventured into by one who carries no light in his hand. Hence by nightfall the city is practically deserted: the only signs of life are the night-watchmen, prowling dogs, the skulking figure of some law-breaker, parties of young men coming out of a subterranean tavern, and mysterious lights which appear and vanish again likeignis fatuidown some narrow side-street or in a distant cemetery. This is the hour in which to look at Stambul from the heights of Pera or Galata. Each one of her innumerable little windows is illuminated, and, with the lights from the shipping, reflections in the water and the starry heavens, helps to light up four miles of horizon with a great quivering sea of sparkling points of fire, in which port, city, and sky melt imperceptibly one into another until they all seem to be part of one starry firmament. When it is cloudy, and through a break the moon appears, you see above the dark mass of the city, above the inky blots which mark the woods and gardens, the glittering rows of domes surmounting the imperial mosques, shining in the moonlight like great marble tombs,and suggesting the idea of a necropolis of giants. But most impressive of all is the view when there is neither moon nor star nor any light at all. Then one immense black shadow stretches from Seraglio Point to Eyûb, a great dark profile, the hills looking like mountains and their many pointed summits assuming all manner of fantastic shapes—forests and armies, ruined castles, rocky fortresses—so that one’s imagination travels off into the region of dreams and fairy tales. Gazing across at Stambul on some such night as this from a lofty terrace in Pera, one’s brain plays all sorts of mad pranks. In fancy you are carried into the great shadowy city; wander through those myriad harems, illuminated by soft, subdued lights: behold the triumphant beauty of the favorite, the dull despair of the neglected wife; watch the eunuch who hangs trembling and impotent outside the door; follow a pair of lovers as they thread some steep winding byway; wander through the deserted galleries of the Grand Bazâr; traverse the great silent cemeteries; lose yourself amid the interminable rows of columns in the subterranean cisterns; imagine that you have been shut up in the gigantic mosque of Suleiman, and make its shadowy corridors echo again with lamentations and shrieks of terror, tearing your hair and invoking the mercy of the Almighty; and then suddenly exclaim, “What utter nonsense! I am here on my friend Santoro’s terrace, and in the roombelow there not only awaits me a supper for a sybarite, but a gathering of the most amusing wits in Pera to help me eat it.”

Every evening a large number of Italians gathered at the house of my good friend Santoro—lawyers, artists, doctors, and merchants—among whom I passed many a delightful hour. How the conversation flowed! Had I only understood stenography, I might easily have collected the materials for a delightful book out of the various anecdotes and bits of gossip told there night after night. The doctor, who had just been called to a patient in the harem; the painter, who was employed upon a pasha’s portrait somewhere on the Bosphorus; the lawyer, who was arguing a case before a tribunal; the high official, who had knotted the threads of an international love-affair,—each separate experience as they related it formed a complete and highly entertaining sketch illustrative of Oriental manners and customs. Each fresh arrival is the signal for something new. “Have you heard the news?” one exclaims on entering: “the government has just paid the employés’ salaries, due for over three months, and Galata is flooded with copper money.” Then another arrives: “What do you suppose happened this morning? The Sultan got mad at the minister of finance and threw an inkstand at his head!” Athird tells a story of a Turkish president of a tribunal. Provoked, it seems, by the wretched arguments employed by an unscrupulous French lawyer in defending a bad cause, he paid him this pretty compliment before the entire audience: “My dear advocate, it is really quite useless for you to take so much pains to try to make your case appear good. ——;” And here he pronounced Cambronne’s word in full: “no matter how you may turn and twist it, it is still——,” and he said it again.

The conversation naturally covered geographical ground quite new to me. They used the same easy familiarity in talking of persons and events in Tiflis, Trebizond, Teheran, and Damascus as we do when it is a question of Paris, Vienna, or Geneva, in any one of which places they had friends or had lately been or were about going themselves. I seemed to be in the centre of another world, with new horizons opening out on all sides, and it was difficult to avoid a sinking feeling at the thought of the time when I would be obliged to take up once more the narrow and contracted routine of my ordinary life. “How will it ever be possible,” I would ask myself, “to settle down again to those commonplace occupations and threadbare topics?” This is the way every one feels who has spent any time in Constantinople. After leading the life of that place, all others must necessarily appear flat and colorless. Existence there is easier, gayer, more youthfulthan in any other city in Europe; it is as though one were encamped upon foreign soil, surrounded by an endless succession of strange and unexpected sights, an ever-changing, shifting scene which leaves upon one’s mind such a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all things human that you end by adopting something of the fatalistic creed of the Mussulman or else the reckless indifference of the adventurer.

The apathy of that people is something incredible; they live, as a poet has said, in a sort of intimate familiarity with death, looking upon life as a pilgrimage too short to attempt, even were it worth their while anyhow, great undertakings requiring long and sustained effort; and sooner or later this fatalism attacks the European as well, inducing him to live in a certain sense from day to day, without troubling himself more than necessary about the future, and playing in the world, so far as lies in his power, the simple and reposeful part of a spectator. Then the constant intercourse with so many nationalities, whose language you must speak and whose views to a certain extent you must adopt, does away with many of those fixed rules and conventionalities which have in our countries become iron-bound laws governing society, and whose observance or non-observance causes endless vexations and heartburnings.

The Mussulman population forms of itself a never-ending source of interest and curiosity, always at hand to be seen and studied, and so stimulating and enlivening to the imagination as to drive away all thought of ennui. The very plan of Constantinople helps to this end. Where in other cities the eye and mind are almost always imprisoned, as it were, in one street or narrow circuit, there every step presents a new outlet through which both may roam over immeasurable distances of space and scenes of entrancing beauty, and, finally, there is the absolute freedom of that life, governed by no one set of customs. One can do absolutely as he pleases; nothing is looked upon as out of the way, and the most astounding performances hardly cause a ripple of talk, forgotten almost as soon as told in that huge moral anarchy. Europeans live there in a sort of republican confederacy, enjoying a freedom from all restraint such as would only be possible in one of their own cities during some period of disorder. It is like a continual Carnival, a perpetual Shrove Tuesday, and it is this, even more than her beauty, which endears Constantinople so greatly to the foreigner, so that, thinking of her after long absence, one experiences a feeling almost amounting to home-sickness; while those Europeans who have made their homes there strike down deep roots and become as devotedly attached to her as her legitimate sons. The Turks are certainly not far wrong when they call her “the enchantress of a thousandlovers,” or say in their proverb that for him who has once drunk of the waters of Top-Khâneh there is no cure—he is infatuated for life.

The Italian colony at Constantinople, while it is one of the most numerous, is far from being the most prosperous there. It numbers among it but few rich persons, and many who are wretchedly poor, especially those who come from Southern Italy and are unable to find work: it is also the colony most poorly represented by the press, when indeed it is represented at all, its newspapers only making their appearance to promptly vanish again. When I was there the colony was awaiting the issue of theLevantino, and meanwhile a sample copy was put in circulation setting forth the academic titles and personal gifts of the editor: I made out seventy-seven in all, without counting modesty.

One should walk down the Rue de Pera of a Sunday morning, when the Italian families are on their way to mass: you hear every dialect in Italy. Sometimes I used to enjoy it, but not always: it was too depressing to see so many of one’s fellow-countrymen homeless wanderers on the face of the earth; many of them, too, must have been cast up on those shores by storms of misfortune and strange, uncomfortable adventures. And then the old people who would never see Italy again; the children in whoseears that name meant nothing more than a place—dear, no doubt, but distant and unknown; and those young girls, many of whom must inevitably marry men of other nationalities and found families in which nothing Italian will survive beyond a proper name or two and the fond memories of the mother. I encountered pretty Genoese, looking as though they might just have come down from the gardens of Acquasola; charming Neapolitan faces; graceful little heads which I seemed to have seen a hundred times beneath the porticoes of Po or the Milanese arcades. I felt like gathering them all into a bunch, tying them together with rose-colored ribbons, and marching them two by two on shipboard, conveying them back to Italy at the rate of fifteen knots an hour. I would also have liked to take back with me, as a curiosity, a sample of the language spoken by those born in the Italian colony, especially those of the third or fourth generation. A Crusca academician, on hearing it, would have taken to his bed with a raging fever. A language formed by mingling the Italian spoken by a Piedmontese doorkeeper, a Lombardy hack-driver, and a Romagnol porter would, I think, be less outrageous than that spoken on the banks of the Golden Horn. It is Italian which, impure at the outset, has been mixed with four or five other languages, each impure in their turn; and the most singular part of it is that in the midst of all these barbarisms you suddenlycome plump upon some such scholarly word or phrase aspuote,imperocche,a ogni pie sospiuto,havvi,puossi, witnesses to the efforts made by some of our worthy compatriots, who by dipping into anthologies seek to preserve thecelestial Tuscan speech. But, as compared with the rest, these might well lay claim, as Cesari said, to a reputation for using choice language. Some of them can hardly be understood at all. One day I was being escorted, I don’t remember just where, by an Italian youth of sixteen or seventeen, a friend of a friend of mine, who was born in Pera. As we walked along I began asking him some questions, but soon found that he did not want to talk; he answered me in a low tone and as shortly as possible, growing red in the face as he did so and hanging his head; he was so evidently unhappy that I presently asked him what it was that troubled him so much. “Oh,” said he with a despairing sigh, “I talk so badly!” As we continued our conversation I found that he spoke indeed a strange dialect, full of outlandish words and strongly resembling the so-called Frank language, which, as a French wit once said, consists in pouring out as rapidly as possible a quantity of Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek nouns and tenses until you happen to strike one the listener understands. It is, however, seldom necessary to go to so much trouble in Pera or Galata, where almost every one, including the Turks, can speak, or at least understand,some Italian, though this language, if you can call it a language, is almost exclusively a spoken one, if you can call it speaking. The tongue generally employed for writing is French. Of Italian literature there is none. I recollect on one solitary occasion, in a Galata café crowded with merchants, finding at the foot of the commercial intelligence and quotations of the Bourse, printed in French and Italian, eight mournful little verses all about zephyrs and stars and sighs. Unhappy poet! it seemed as though I could see you before me, buried beneath huge piles of merchandise, composing those verses with your last breath.

Any one who is blessed with a pretty strong stomach can pass his evenings while at Constantinople at the play: he may, moreover, choose among quite a number of almost equally wretched little theatres of various sorts, many of which are beer-gardens and wine-shops as well. At some one of these one can always find the Italian comedy, or rather a troupe of Italian actors, whose efforts frequently make one wish the whole arena could be converted into a vegetable market. The Turks, however, frequent by preference those theatres in which certain bare-necked, brazen-faced, painted French women sing light songs to the accompaniment of a wretched orchestra. One of these theatreswas the Alhambra, situated in the Grande Rue de Pera: it consisted of a long apartment, always crowded to the utmost, and red with fezzes from stage to entrance. The nature of those songs, and the bold gestures which those intrepid ladies employed in order to make their meaning perfectly clear, no one could either imagine or credit unless indeed he had been to theCapellanesat Madrid. At anything especially coarse or impudent all those great fat Turks, seated in long lines, broke into loud roars of laughter, and then the habitual mask of dignity and reserve would drop from their faces, exposing the depths of their real nature and every secret of their grossly sensual lives. There is nothing that the Turk conceals so habitually and effectually as the sensual nature of his tastes and manner of life. He never appears in public accompanied by a woman, rarely looks at, and never speaks to, one, and considers it almost an insult to be inquired of concerning his wives. Judging merely by outside appearances, one would take this to be the most austere and straitlaced people in the world, but it is only in appearance. The same Turk who colors to the tips of his ears if one so much as asks if his wife is well, sends his boys, and his girls too, to listen to the coarse jests ofKara-gyuz, corrupting their minds before their senses are fairly awakened, while he himself is fully capable of abandoning the peaceful enjoyments of his own harem for such excessesas Bayezid the Thunderbolt set the first example of, and Mahmûd the Reformer was doubtless not the last to follow. And, indeed, were proof needed of the profound corruption which lurks beneath this mask of seeming austerity, one need go no farther than to that selfsameKara-gyuz. It is a grotesque caricature of a middle-class Turk, a sort ofombra chinese, whose head, arms, and legs are made to accompany with appropriate gestures the developments of some extravagant burlesque having usually a love-intrigue for its plot. The marionette is worked behind a transparent curtain, and resembles a depraved Pulcinello, coarse, cynical, and cunning. Sensual as a satyr, foul-mouthed as a fishwife, he throws his audience into paroxysms of laughter and enthusiasm by every sort of indecent jest and extravagant gesture. Before the censorship curbed to some small extent the hitherto unbridled looseness of this performance, the figure was made to give visible proof of its corporeal resemblance to Priapus, and not infrequently upon this lofty and elevating point the whole plot hinged.

Wishing to investigate for myself the Turkish manner of cooking, I got my good friends of Pera to take me to a restaurantad hocwhere every kind of Turkish dish is to be had, from the most delicious delicacies of the Seraglio to camel’s meat preparedas the Arabians eat it, and horseflesh dressed according to the Turkoman fashion. Santoro ordered the breakfast, severely Turkish from the opening course to the fruit, and I, invoking the names of all those intrepid spirits who have faced death in the cause of science, conscientiously swallowed a part of each without so much as a groan. There were upward of twenty dishes, the Turks being a good deal like children in their liking to peck at a quantity of different kinds of food, rather than satisfy their appetite with a few solid dishes. Shepherds of the day before yesterday, they seem to disdain a simple table as though it were a trait of rustic niggardliness. I cannot give a clear account of each dish, many of them being now no more than a vague and sinister memory. I do, however, remember thekibab, which consisted of little scraps of mutton roasted on the coals, seasoned with a great deal of pepper and cloves, and served on two soft, greasy biscuits—a dish not to be named among the lesser sins. I can also recall vividly the odor of thepilav, thesine quâ nonof a Turkish meal, consisting of rice and mutton, meaning to the Turk what maccaroni does to the Neapolitan orcuscussuto the Arab orpucheroto the Spaniard. I have not forgotten either—and it is the sole pleasant memory connected with that repast—therosh’ab, which is sipped with a spoon at the end of the meal: it is composed of raisins, plums, apples, cherries, and other fruits, cooked in water with agreat deal of sugar, and flavored with essence of musk, citron, and rose-water. Then there were numberless other preparations of mutton and lamb, cut in small pieces and boiled until no flavor remained; fish swimming in oil; rice-balls wrapped in grape-leaves; sugar syrups; salads served in pastry; compôtes; conserves; sauces, flavored with every sort of aromatic herb—a list as long as the articles of the penal code for relapsed criminals; and finally the masterpiece of some Arabian pastry-cook, a huge dish of sweetmeats, among which were conspicuous a steamboat, a fierce-looking lion, and a sugar house with grated windows. When all was over I felt a good deal as though I had swallowed the contents of a pharmacist’s shop or assisted at one of those feasts which children prepare with powdered brickdust, chopped grass, and stale fruit—not unattractive-looking when seen at a distance. All the dishes are served rapidly, four or five at a time. The Turks dive into each with their fingers, the knife and spoon only, being in common use among them, and one drinking-goblet serves for the whole company, the waiter keeping it constantly filled with flavored water.

These customs, however, were not followed by the party who were breakfasting at the table adjoining ours. They were evidently Turks who valued their ease, even to the extent of poising their slippers upon the table: each had a plate to himself, andthey plied their forks very skilfully, drinking liquors freely in despite of Mahomet. I observed, moreover, that they failed to kiss the bread before beginning to eat, as every good Mussulman should, and that more than one longing glance was sent in the direction of our bottles, although the muftis pronounce it a sin to so much as cast the eye upon a bottle of wine. There is, indeed, no doubt that this “father of abominations,” one drop of which is sufficient to bring down upon the head of the sinning Mussulman the “curses of every angel in heaven and earth,” gains new disciples among the Turks every day, and that nothing but the fear of public opinion prevents its open use. Were a thick cloud to descend upon Constantinople some day, and after an hour suddenly be lifted, I have little doubt that the sun would surprise fifty thousand Turks, each one in the act of lifting the bottle to his lips. In this, as in almost every other shortcoming of the Turks, it was the sultans who were the stone of stumbling and rock of offence. Singular to relate, it is that very dynasty which rules over a people among whom it is considered a sin in the sight of God to drink wine at all, which has produced more drunkards than any other line of rulers in Europe; so sweet is forbidden fruit even in the estimation of the “shadow of God upon earth.” It was, we are told, Bayezid I. who headed the long list of imperial tipplers, and here, as in the case of the first sin,woman was the temptress, the wife of this Bayezid, a daughter of the king of Servia, offering her husband his first glass of Tokay. Next Bayezid II. got intoxicated on Cypress and Schiraz wines; then the selfsame Suleiman I. who fired every ship in the port of Constantinople that was laden with wine, and poured molten lead down the throats of those who drank the forbidden liquor, himself died when drunk, shot by one of his own archers. Then comes Selim II., surnamed themessth(sot), whose debauches lasted three days, and during whose reign men of the law and men of religion drank openly. In vain did Muhammad III. thunder against this “abomination devised by Satan;” in vain did Ahmed I. close all the taverns and destroy every wine-press in Stambul; in vain did Murad IV. patrol the city accompanied by an executioner, who beheaded in his presence every unfortunate whose breath witnessed against him, while he himself, ferocious hypocrite that he was, staggered about the apartments of the seraglio like any common frequenter of the pothouse. Since his day the bottle, like some gay little black imp, has crept into the seraglio, lurks in the bazâr, hides beneath the pillow of the soldier, thrusts its little silver or purple neck from beneath the divan of the beauty, and, crossing the threshold of the very mosques themselves, has stained the yellow pages of the Koran with sacrilegious drops.

Turbeh of Sultan Selim II in St. Sophia.

Turbeh of Sultan Selim II in St. Sophia.

Speaking of religion, while wandering about the streets and byways of Constantinople I used often to wonder whether, were it not for the voice of the muezzin, Christians would see anything to remind them that there was any difference between the religion of this people and their own. The Byzantine architecture of the mosques makes them seem very like churches; of the Islam rites there is no external evidence; while Turkish soldiers may be seen escorting the viaticum through the streets. An uneducated Christian might remain a year in Constantinople without being aware that Mohammed, not Christ, claimed the allegiance of the greater part of the population; and this led me on to reflect upon the slight nature of the fundamental difference—the blade of grass, as the Abyssinian Christians called it in speaking to the first followers of Mohammed—which divides the two religions, and the trifling cause which led Arabia to adopt Islamism instead of Christianity, or, if not Christianity, at all events something so closely resembling it that, even had it never developed into that outright, it would have seriously altered the destinies of the entire Eastern world. This slight cause was nothing more or less than the voluptuous nature of a certain handsome young Arabian, tall, fair, ardent, with black eyes and musical voice—he lacked the force to dominate his ownpassions, and so, instead of cutting at the root of his people’s prevailing sin, he contented himself with pruning the branches, and in lieu of proclaiming conjugal unity as he proclaimed the unity of God, merely confined within somewhat narrower bounds, and then proceeded to give the countenance of religion to, the dissolute selfishness of men. No doubt he would have had to encounter a more determined opposition in the one case than in the other, but that it was in his power to succeed who can question when it is remembered that in order to establish the worship of one sole God among a people given over to idolatry he was obliged to first overthrow an enormous superstructure of tradition and superstition, including innumerable grants and privileges all closely interlaced, the result of centuries of growth, and that he made them accept, as one of the dogmas of his religion for which millions of believers subsequently died, a paradise which at its first announcement aroused a universal feeling of scorn and indignation? Unfortunately, however, this handsome young Arab temporized with his passions, and as a consequence the face of half the globe is changed, since polygamy was, without doubt, the besetting vice of his rule and the principal cause of the decadence of all those races who have adopted his religion. It is the degradation of one sex for the benefit of the other, the open sanction of a glaring injustice which disturbs the entire course of human rights, corrupts therich, oppresses the poor, encourages ignorance, breaks up the family, and by causing endless complications in the rights of birth among the reigning dynasties overturns kingdoms and states, finally placing an insuperable barrier in the way of the union of Mussulman society with the people of other faiths who populate the East. If, to return to the original proposition, that handsome young Arab had only been endowed with a little more strength of character, had the spiritual in his nature but outweighed, by ever so small an amount, the animal, who knows?—perhaps we would now have an Orient orderly, well-governed, and the world be a century nearer universal civilization.

Happening to be in Constantinople in the month of Ramazân, the ninth month in the Turkish calendar, in which the twenty-eight days’ fast falls, I was able to enjoy every evening a spectacle so exceedingly comical that I think it merits a description. Throughout the entire fast the Turks are forbidden to eat, drink, or smoke from sunrise to sunset. Most of them make it up by feasting all night, but as long as the sun is shining the rule is very generally observed, and no one dares, in public at any rate, to transgress it.

One morning my friend and I went to call upon a friend of ours, a young aide-de-camp of the Sultan,who prided himself upon his liberal views. We found him in one of the rooms on the ground floor of the imperial palace with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Why,” said Yunk, “how do you dare to drink coffee hours after sunrise?” The young man shrugged his shoulders, and remarked carelessly that he did not care a fig for Ramazân or the fast; but just at that moment, a door near by suddenly opening, he was in such a hurry to hide the telltale cup that half its contents were spilled at his feet. One can readily imagine from this incident how rigorously all those must abstain whose entire day is passed beneath the public eye, the boatmen for instance. To get a really good idea of it one should stand on the Sultan Validéh bridge at about sunset. What with the boats at the landings and those which are going from one place to another, the ones near at hand and those in the distance, there must be very nearly a thousand in sight. Every boatman has fasted since sunrise, and by this time is ravenously hungry. His supper is all ready in the käik, and his eyes travel constantly from it to where the sun is nearing the horizon, and then back again, while he has the restless, uneasy air of a wild animal who paces about his cage as the feeding-hour approaches. Sunset is announced by the firing of a gun, and until that signal is heard not so much as a crumb of bread or drop of water crosses the lips of one of them. Sometimes in a retired spotin the Golden Horn we would try to induce our boatman to eat something, but the invariable answer was, “Jok! jok! jok!” (No! no! no!), accompanied by an uneasy gesture toward the western horizon. When the sun gets about halfway down behind the mountains the men begin to finger their pieces of bread, inhaling its smell voluptuously. Then it gets so low that nothing can be seen but a golden arc, and the rowers lay down their oars. Those who are busy and those who are idle, some midway across the Golden Horn, some lying in retired inlets, others on the Bosphorus, others over near the Asiatic shore, others, again, who are plying on the Sea of Marmora, one and all, turning toward the west, remain immovable, their eyes fixed on the fast-disappearing disk with mouth open, kindling eye, and bread firmly clasped in the right hand. Now nothing can be seen but a tiny point of fire: a thousand hunks of bread are held close to a thousand mouths, and then the fiery eye drops out of sight, the cannons thunders, and on the instant thirty-two thousand teeth tear a thousand huge mouthsful from a thousand loaves! But why say a thousand, when in every house and café and restaurant a similar scene is being enacted at precisely the same moment, and for a short time the Turkish city is nothing but a huge monster whose hundred thousand jaws are all tearing and devouring at once?

But think what this city must have been in the great days of the Ottoman glory! I kept thinking of that all the time. How it must have looked when not a single cloud of smoke arose from the Bosphorus, all white with sails, to make ugly, black marks against the blue of sky and water! In the port and the inlets of the Sea of Marmora, among the picturesque battle-ships of that period with their lofty carved prows, silver crescents, violet standards, and gilded lanterns, floated the battered and blood-stained hulks of Spanish, Genoese, and Venetian galleys. No bridges spanned the Golden Horn, which was covered with myriads of gayly-decorated boats plying constantly from one shore to the other, among which could be distinguished afar off the snowy-white launches of the Seraglio, covered with gold-fringed scarlet hangings and propelled by rowers dressed in silk. Skutari was then no more than a village: seen from Galata, she only appeared to have a few houses scattered about on the hillside; no lofty palaces as yet reared their heads above the hilltops of Pera; the appearance of the city was doubtless less impressive than now, but far more Oriental in character: the law prescribing the use of colors being then in full force, one could determine accurately the religion of the occupant from the color of each house. Except for its public andsacred edifices, which were white as snow, Stambul was entirely red and yellow; the Armenian quarters were light, and the Greek quarters dark gray; the Hebrew quarter, purple. As in Holland, the passion for flowers was universal, so that the gardens were like huge bouquets of hyacinths, tulips, and roses. The exuberant vegetation not having been as yet checked on the surrounding hillsides by the growth of new suburbs, Constantinople presented the appearance of a city built in a forest. The public thoroughfares were nothing but lanes and alleys, but they were rendered picturesque by the varied and brilliant crowds which thronged them. The huge turbans worn by the men lent them all an air of dignity and importance. The women, with the single exception of the Sultan’s mother, were so rigorously veiled as to show nothing but the eyes, and so formed a population apart, anonymous, enigmatical, which lent to the entire city a certain air of secresy and mystery. Severe laws controlled the dress of every individual, so that from the shape of his turban or color of his caftan one could tell the precise rank, occupation, office, or condition of every one he met, as though the city had been one great court. The horse being as yet almost “man’s only coach,” thousands of cavaliers filled the crowded streets, while long files of camels and dromedaries belonging to the army traversed the city in all directions, giving it something of the savage and imposing air ofan ancient Asiatic metropolis. Gilded arabas, drawn by oxen, passed carriages hung with the green cloth of theulemior scarlet cloth of thekâdi-aschieri, and lighttalikehung with satin and fantastically painted. Troops of slaves marched along, representing every country from Polonia to Ethiopia, clanking the chains riveted on them in the field of battle. On the street-corners, in the squares and the courtyards of the mosques, groups of soldiers collected, clad in glorious rags, displaying their battered arms and scars still fresh from wounds received at Vienna, Belgrade, Rodi, and Damascus. Hundreds of orators recounted to rapt and enthusiastic audiences the heroic deeds and brilliant victories achieved by the army fighting at a distance of three months’ march from Stambul. Pasha, bey, agha, musselim, numberless dignitaries and personages of high rank, clad with theatrical display and accompanied by throngs of attendants, made their way through the crowds, who bowed before them like grain before the wind. Ambassadors representing every court in Europe, accompanied by princely retinues, who had come to Stambul to sue for peace or arrange an alliance, swept by. Caravans laden with propitiatory gifts from Asiatic and African kings filed slowly along the principal thoroughfares. Companies ofsilidarsandspahis, haughty and insolent, swaggered by, their sabres stained with the blood of twenty different nations, while the handsomeGreek and Hungarian Seraglio pages, dressed like little kings, pushed haughtily through the obsequious multitude, who, recognizing in them the unnatural caprices of their lord, respected them accordingly. Here and there a trophy of knotted clubs before some doorway indicated the presence of a corps of Janissaries, who at that time acted as police in the interior of the city. Parties of Hebrews would be seen hurrying to the Bosphorus with the dead bodies of the victims of justice. Every morning a body would be found in the Baluk Bazâr, lying with the head under the right armpit, a stone holding in place the sentence affixed to the breast. Law-breakers to whom summary justice had been meted out would dangle from a beam or hook in the public highway, while after nightfall one was liable to stumble over the body of some unfortunate who, after having his hands and feet pounded with clubs, had been thrown from the window of the torture-chamber. In the broad light of day merchants, caught in the act of cheating, would be nailed through the ear to their own shop-doors, and, there being no law controlling the free right of sepulture, the work of digging graves and burying the dead was carried on at all hours and in all places—in the gardens, in the lanes and open squares, and before the doors of dwellings. The cries of lambs and sheep could be heard from the courtyards where they were being slaughtered in sacrifice to Allah onthe occasion of a circumcision or a birth. From time to time a troop of eunuchs, galloping by with warning cries, would be the signal for a general stampede; the streets would become deserted; doors and windows fly to, blinds be drawn down, and an entire neighborhood suddenly assume the look and air of a city of the dead. Then in long procession files of gorgeously-decorated coaches filled with the ladies of the imperial harem would pass by, scattering around them an atmosphere of perfume and laughter. Sometimes it would happen that an official of the court, making his way through some thoroughfare, would suddenly encounter six quite ordinary-looking individuals about to enter a shop, and at that sight grow unaccountably pale. These six, however, would be the Sultan, four officers of his court, and an executioner making their rounds from shop to shop in order to verify the weights and measures.

Interior of Mosque of Ahmed.

Interior of Mosque of Ahmed.

Throughout the whole of the city’s huge body there coursed an exuberant and feverish life; the treasury overflowed with jewels, the arsenal with arms, the barracks with soldiers, the caravanseries with strangers; the slave-market was thronged with merchants and lofty personages come to inspect the crowds of beautiful slaves. Scholars pressed to examine the archives of the great mosques; long-winded viziers prepared for the delectation of future generations the interminable annals of the Empire;poets, pensioned by the Seraglio, assembled in the baths, where they sang the imperial loves and wars; swarms of Bulgarian and Armenian workmen toiled at the erection of mighty mosques, employing huge blocks of granite and Paros marble, while by sea, columns from the temples of the Archipelago, and by land, spoils from the churches of Pesth and Ofen, were brought to contribute to their splendor. In the harbor a fleet of three hundred sail made ready to carry terror and dismay to every coast in the Mediterranean; between Stambul and Adrianapolis companies of falconers and gamekeepers, to the number of seven thousand, were stationed; and in the intervals between military uprisings at home, foreign wars, and conflagrations which would reduce twenty thousand houses to ashes in a single night, revels would be celebrated, lasting thirty days, in honor of the representatives of every court in Asia, Africa, and Europe. On these occasions the glorifications of the Mussulmans degenerated into folly: sham battles were fought by the Janissaries in the presence of the Sultan and the court, amid hugepalme di nozzeladen with birds, mirrors, and fruits of various kinds, in order to make room for which walls and houses were ruthlessly destroyed; and processions of lions and sugar mermaids, borne on horses whose trappings were of silver damask, and mountains of royal gifts sent from every part of the Empire and every court in the world; dervishesexecuted their furious dances, and bloody massacres of Christian prisoners were followed by public banquets where ten thousand dishes ofcuscussùwere served to the populace; trained elephants and giraffes danced in the Hippodrome, while bears and wolves, with fireworks tied to their tails, were let loose among the people; allegorical pantomimes, grotesque masquerades, wanton dances, fantastic processions, games, comedies, symbolic cars, rustic dances, followed each other in rapid succession. Little by little as night descended the festival degenerated into a mad orgy, and then the lights from five hundred brilliantly illuminated mosques spread a great aureole of fire over the entire city and announced to the watching shepherds on the mountain-heights of Asia and the wayfarers on the Propontis the revels of this new Babylon.

Such was once Stambul, a haughty sultaness, voluptuous, formidable, wanton, as compared with which the city of to-day is little more than some weary old queen, peevish and hypochondriacal.

Absorbed as I was by the Turks, I had, as may be readily understood, but little time left in which to study the characteristics of the three other nationalities—Armenian, Greek, and Hebrew—which go to make up the population of Constantinople—a study requiring a certain amount of time, too, sinceall of these people, while preserving to a certain extent their national character, have outwardly conformed to the prevailing Mussulman coloring around them, now in its turn fading into a uniform tint of European civilization. Thus it is as difficult to catch a vivid impression of any one of the three as it would be of a view that was constantly changing. This is true in a special sense of the Armenians, “Christians in spirit and faith, Asiatic Mussulmans by birth and carnal nature,” whom it is not only hard to study intimately, but even to distinguish at sight, since those among them who have not adopted the European costume dress like Turks in all except some very minor points. All of them have abandoned the ancient felt cap which was formerly, with certain special colors, the distinctive sign of their nation. In appearance they closely resemble the Turks, being for the most part tall, robust, and corpulent, with a grave, sedate carriage, but their complexion is light, and the two striking points of their national character can usually be read in their faces—the one, a quick, open, industrious, and persevering spirit, which fits them in a peculiar way to commercial enterprises; and the other that adaptability, called by some servility, which enables them to gain a foothold among whatever people they may be thrown with from Hungary to China, and renders them particularly acceptable to the Turks, whose confidence they readily succeed in winning, making them faithfulsubjects and obsequious friends. There is nothing heroic or bellicose either about their appearance or disposition: formerly this may have been otherwise. Those parts of Asia whence they came are at present inhabited by a people, descendants of a common stock, who, it is said, resemble them but little. Certainly those members of the race who have been transplanted to the shores of the Bosphorus are a prudent and managing people, moderate in their manner of life, intent only upon their trade, and more sincerely religious, it is affirmed, than any other nation which inhabits Constantinople. They are called by the Turks the “camels of the Empire,” and the Franks assert that every Armenian is born an accountant. These two sayings are, to a great extent justified by the facts, since, thanks to their great physical strength and their quickness and intelligence, they furnish, in addition to a large proportion of her architects, engineers, doctors, and clever and painstaking mechanics, the greater part of Constantinople’s bankers and porters, the former amassing fabulous fortunes, and the latter carrying enormous loads. At first sight, though, one would hardly be aware that there was an Armenian population in Constantinople, so completely has the plant, so to speak, assumed the color of the soil. Their women, on whose account the house of the Armenian is almost as rigorously closed to strangers as that of the Mussulman, have likewise adopted the Turkishdress, and none but the most expert eye could distinguish them among their Mohammedan neighbors. They are generally fair and stout, with the aquiline Oriental profile, large eyes and long lashes; many of them are tall, with matronly figures, and, surmounted by turbans, might well be mistaken for handsome sheiks. They are universally modest and dignified in their bearing, and if anything is lacking it is the intelligence which beams from the eyes of their Greek sisters.

Difficult as it may be to single out the Armenian at sight, there is no such trouble about the Greek, who differs so essentially in character, bearing, appearance, everything, from all the other subjects of the Empire that he can be told at once without even looking at his dress. To appreciate this diversity, or rather contrast, one need only watch a Turk and a Greek who happen to be seated beside one another on board a steamboat or in a café. They may be about the same age and rank, both dressed in the European fashion, and even resemble each other somewhat in feature, and yet it is quite impossible to mistake them. The Turk sits perfectly motionless; his face wears a look of quietude and repose, void of all expression, like a fed animal; if by any chance some shadow of a thought appears, it seems to be a reflection as lifeless and inert as hisbody; he looks at no one, and is apparently quite unconscious that any one is looking at him, expressing by his entire bearing an utter indifference to his surroundings, a something of the resigned melancholy of a slave and the cold pride of a despot; hard, closed, completed, he seems incapable of altering any resolution once taken, and it would drive any one to the verge of madness who should undertake the task of persuading him to any course. In short, he appears to be a being hewn out of a single block, with whom it would only be possible to live either as master or servant, and no amount of intercourse with whom would ever justify the taking of a liberty. With the Greek it is altogether different. His mobile features express every thought that passes through his mind, and betray a youthful, almost childish ardor, while he tosses his head with the free action of an uncurbed and restive horse. On finding himself observed he at once strikes an attitude, and if no one looks at him he tries to attract attention; he seems to be always wanting or imagining something, and his whole person breathes of shrewdness and ambition. There is something so attractive and sympathetic about him that you are inclined to give him your hand even when you would hesitate about trusting him with your purse. Seen side by side, one can readily understand how it is that one of these men considers the other a proud, overbearing, brutal savage, and is looked down uponin his turn as a light creature, untrustworthy, mischievous, and the cause of endless trouble, and how they mutually despise and hate one another from the bottom of their hearts, finding it impossible to live together in peace. And so with the women. It is with a distinct feeling of gratification and pleasure that one first encounters amid the handsome, florid Turkish and Armenian types, appealing more to the senses than the mind, the pure and exquisite features of the Greek women, illuminated by those deep serious eyes whose every glance recalls an ode, while their exquisite shapes inspire an immediate desire to clasp them in one’s arms—with the object of placing them on pedestals, however, rather than in the harem. Among them can still be occasionally found one or two who, wearing their hair after the ancient fashion—that is, hanging over the shoulders in long wavy locks, with one thick coil wound around the top of the head like a diadem—are so noble-looking, so beautiful and classic, that they might well be taken for statues fresh from the chisel of a Praxiteles or a Lysippus, or for youthful immortals discovered after twenty centuries in some forgotten valley of Laconia or unknown island of the Egean. But even among the Greeks these examples of queenly beauty are exceedingly rare, and are found only in the ranks of the old aristocracy of the Empire, in the silent and melancholy quarter of Fanar, where the spirit of ancient Byzantium has taken refuge. There onemay occasionally see one of these magnificent women leaning on the railing of a balcony or against the grating of some lofty window, her eyes fixed upon the deserted street in the attitude of an imprisoned queen; and when a crowd of lackeys is not lounging idly before the door of one of these descendants of the Palæologi and the Comneni, one may, watching her from some place of observation, fancy that a rift in the clouds has revealed for an instant the face of an Olympian goddess.

With regard to the Hebrews I am prepared to assert, having been to Morocco myself, that those of Constantinople have nothing in common with their fellows of the northern coast of Africa, where observing experts say they have discovered in all its primitive purity the original Oriental type of Hebrew beauty. In the hope of finding some traces of this same beauty, I summoned up all my courage and thoroughly explored the vast Ghetto of Balata, which winds like an unclean reptile along the banks of the Golden Horn. I penetrated into the most wretched purlieus, among hovels “encrusted with mould” like the shores of the Dantesque pool; through passageways which nothing would induce me to enter again except on stilts, and, holding my nose; I peered through windows hung with filthy rags into dark, malodorous rooms; paused beforedamp courtyards exhaling a smell of mould and decay strong enough to take one’s breath away; pushed my way through groups of scrofulous children; brushed up against horrible old men who looked as though they had died of the plague and come to life again; avoiding now a dog covered with sores, now a pool of black mud, dodging under rows of loathsome rags hung from greasy cords, or stumbling over heaps of decaying stuff whose smell was enough to make one faint outright. And, after all, my heroism met with no reward. Among all the many women whom I encountered wearing the national kalpak—an article resembling a sort of elongated turban, covering the hair and ears—I saw, it is true, some faces in which could be discovered that delicate regularity of feature and the expression of gentle resignation which are supposed to characterize the Constantinopolitan Jewess; some vague profiles of a Rebecca or a Rachel, with almond-shaped eyes full of a soft sweetness; an occasional graceful, erect figure standing in Raphaelesque attitude in an open doorway, with one delicate hand resting lightly on the curly head of a child; but for the most part my investigations revealed nothing but discouraging evidences of the degradation of the race. What a contrast between those pinched faces and the piercing eyes, brilliant coloring, and well-rounded forms which aroused my admiration a year later in theMellàof Tangiers and Fez!

And the men—thin, yellow, stunted, all their vitality seems centred in their bright cunning eyes, never still for a moment, but which roll restlessly about as though constantly attracted by the sound of chinking money.

At this point I am quite prepared to hear my kind critics among the Israelites—who have already rapped me over the knuckles in regard to their co-religionists of Morocco—take up the burden of their song, laying all the blame of the degeneration and degradation of the Hebrews of Constantinople at the door of the Turkish oppressor. But it should be remembered that the other non-Mussulman subjects of the Porte are all on a precisely similar footing, both political and civil, with themselves; and, even were it otherwise, they would find some difficulty in proving that the filthy habits, early marriages, and complete abandonment of every sort of hard work, considered as primal causes of that degeneration, are the logical results of the loss of liberty and independence. And should they assert that it is not so much Turkish oppression as the universal scorn and petty persecutions which they have had to endure on all hands that have brought about such complete loss of self-respect, let them pause and first ask themselves if the exact opposite may not be nearer the truth, and the general obloquy in which they are held be not so much the cause as the result of their manner of life; and then, instead of trying to coverup the sore, themselves be the ones to apply the knife.

After making the tour of Balata the most appropriate thing to take next seems to be a Turkish bath. The bath-houses may be easily recognized from without: they are small, mosque-shaped buildings, without windows, surmounted by cupolas, and have high conical chimneys, from which smoke is constantly rising. So much for the exterior, but he who desires to penetrate farther and explore the mysteries of the interior would do well to pause and ask himself,Quid valeant humeri?since not every one is able to endure theaspro governoto which he who enters those salutary walls must be subjected. I am free to confess that, after all I had been told, I approached them with some feeling of trepidation, which I think the reader will admit was not wholly unjustifiable before he has done. As I recall it all now, two great drops of perspiration stand out on my forehead, ready to roll down when I shall be in the heat of my description. Here then is what was done to my unhappy person. Entering timidly, I find myself in a large apartment which leaves one in doubt for a few moments as to whether he has gotten by mistake into a theatre or a hospital. A fountain plays in the centre, decorated on top with flowers; a wooden gallery runs all around the walls,upon which some Turks, stretched upon mattresses and enveloped from head to foot in snow-white cloths, either slumber profoundly or smoke in a dreamy state between waking and sleeping. Looking about for some attendant, I become suddenly aware of two robust mulattoes, stripped to the waist, who appear from nowhere like spectres and ask in deep tones and both together, “Hammamun?” (bath?). “Evvet” (yes), I reply in a very weak voice. Motioning me to follow, they lead the way up a small wooden stair to a room filled with mats and cushions, where I am given to understand that I must undress, after which they proceed to wrap a strip of blue and white stuff about my loins, tie my head up in a piece of muslin, and, placing a pair of huge slippers on my feet, grasp me under the arms like a drunken man, and conduct, or rather drag, me into another room, warm and half lighted, where, after laying me on a rug, they stand with arms akimbo, waiting until my skin shall have become moist. These preparations, so distressingly suggestive of some approaching punishment, fill me with a vague uneasiness, which changes into something even less admirable when the two cutthroats, after touching me on the forehead, exchange a meaning glance, as who should say, “Suppose he resists?” and then, as though exclaiming, “To the rack!” again seize me by the arms and lead me into a third room. This apartment makes a verysingular impression at first sight: it is as though one found himself in a subterranean temple, where, through clouds of vapor, high marble walls, rows of columns, arches, and a lofty vaulted roof, can be indistinctly seen, colored green and blue and crimson by the rays of light falling from the cupola, white spectral figures slide noiselessly back and forth close to the walls. In the centre half-naked forms are extended upon the pavement, while others, also half naked, bend over them in the attitude of doctors making an autopsy. The temperature is such that no sooner have we entered than I break out into a profuse perspiration, and it seems most probable that should I ever get out at all it will be in the form of a running stream like the lover of Arethusa.

The two mulattoes convey my body to the centre of the room and deposit it upon a sort of anatomical table consisting of a raised slab of white marble, beneath which are the stoves. The marble, being extremely hot, burns me and I see stars, but, as long as I am there, there is no choice but to go through with the penalty. My two attendants accordingly begin thevivisection, and, chanting a sort of funeral dirge the while, pinch my arms and legs, stretch my muscles, make my joints crack, pound me, rub me, maul me, and then, rolling me over on my face, begin over again, only to put me on my back later and recommence the whole process. They knead and work me like a dough figure to which they wantto give a certain form they have in mind, and, not succeeding, have grown angry with; a slight pause for breath is only followed by renewed pinching, pulling, and pounding, until I begin to fear that my last hour is drawing near; and then finally, when my entire body is streaming with perspiration like a wet sponge, the blood coursing furiously through my veins, and it has become evident that I have reached the last limit of endurance, they gather up my remains from that bed of torment and carry them to a corner, where in a small alcove are a basin and two spigots from which hot and cold water are running. But, alas! fresh martyrdom awaits me here; and really the affair at this point begins to assume so serious an aspect that, joking aside, I consider whether it would not be possible to strike out to right and left, and, just as I am, make a break for life and liberty. It is too late, though: one of my tormentors, putting on a camel’s-hair glove, has fallen to rubbing my back, breast, arms, and legs with the same cheerful energy a lively groom might employ in currying a horse; after this has been prolonged for fully five minutes a stream of tepid water is poured down my back, and I take breath and return devout thanks to Heaven that it is all over at last. I soon find, however, that this is premature: that ferocious mulatto, taking the glove off, promptly falls to once more with his bare hand, until, losing all patience, I sign to him to stop, with the resultthat, exhibiting his hand, he proves to his own entire satisfaction and my complete bewilderment that he must still continue, and does so. Next follows another deluge of water, and after that a fresh operation: each of them, now taking a piece of tow cloth, rubs a quantity of Candia soap upon it, and then proceeds to soap me well from head to foot; then another torrent of perfumed water, followed by the tow cloths again, but, Heaven be praised! without soap this time, and the process is one of drying me off. When this has been accomplished they tie up my head again, wrap the cloth about my body, and then, enveloping me in a large sheet, reconduct me to the second room, where I am allowed to rest a few moments before being taken to the first; here a warm mattress is in readiness, upon which I stretch myself luxuriously. The two instruments of justice give a few final pinches to equalize the circulation of blood throughout all my members, and then, placing an embroidered cushion under my head, a white covering over me, a pipe in my mouth, and a glass of lemonade at my side, depart, leaving me light, fresh, airy, perfumed, with a mind serene, a contented heart, and such a sense of youth and vitality that I feel as though, like Venus, I had just been born from the foam of the sea, and seem to hear the wings of the loves fluttering above my head.

Feeling thus “airy and meet for intercourse with the stars,” one could not do better than ascend to the top of that stone Titan called the Serasker Tower. I think that should Satan again undertake to offer a view of the kingdoms of the world by way of a temptation, his best course would be to select this spot for the enterprise. The tower, built in the reign of Mahmûd II., is planted upon the summit of the most lofty hill in Stambul, on that spot in the centre of the vast courtyard of the War Office called by the Turks theumbilicusof the city. It is constructed mainly of white Marmora marble, on the plan of a regular polygon with sixteen sides, and rears itself aloft, erect, and graceful as a column, overtopping to a considerable extent the gigantic minarets of the adjacent mosque of Suleiman. Ascending a winding stair lighted here and there by square windows, you catch fleeting views now of Galata, now of Stambul or the villages on the Golden Horn, and before you are halfway to the top seem already to have reached the region of the clouds. It may happen that a slight noise is heard directly over your head, and almost at the same instant a something flashes by, apparently an object of some sort being hurled headlong from above; but, in reality, one of the guards stationed day and night on the summit to watch for fires and give the alarm, who, having discovered at somedistant point of the horizon a cloud of suspicious-looking smoke, is taking word to the seraskier. After mounting about two hundred steps you reach a sort of covered terrace running all around the tower and enclosed with glass, where an attendant is always at hand to serve visitors with coffee. On first finding yourself in that transparent cage, suspended as it were between heaven and earth, with nothing to be seen but an immense blue space, and the wind howling and rattling the panes of glass and making the boards strain and creak, you are very apt to be attacked with vertigo and to feel strongly tempted to give up the view; but at sight of the ladder which leads to the window in the roof courage returns, and, climbing up with a beating heart, a cry of astonishment escapes you. It is an overpowering moment, and for a little while you remain silent and transfixed.

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