LETTER XLI.

Unerring Detection of Foreigners—A Cargo of Odalisques—The Fanar, or Quarter of the Greeks—Street of the Booksellers—Aspect of Antiquity—Purchases—Charity for Dogs and Pigeons—Punishment of Canicide—A Bridal Procession—Turkish Female Physiognomy.

Pulling up the Golden Horn to-day in a caique without any definite errand (a sort of excursion particularly after my own heart), I was amused at the caikjee’s asking my companion, who shaves clean like a Christian, and has his clothes from Regent-street, and looks for aught I can see, as much like a foreigner in Constantinople as myself, “in what vessel I had arrived.” We asked him if he had ever seen either of us before. “No!” How then did he know that my friend, who had not hitherto spoken a word of Turkish, was not as lately arrived as myself? What is it that so infallibly, in every part of the world, distinguishes the stranger?

We passed under the stern of an outlandish-looking vessel just dropping her anchor. Her deck was crowded with men and women in singular costumes, and near the helm, apparently under the protection of a dark-visaged fellow in a voluminous turban, stood three young, and, as well as we could see, uncommonly pretty girls. The captain answered to our hail that he was from Trebizond, and his passengers were slaves for the bazaar. How redolent of the East! Were one but a Turk, now, to forestall the market and barter for a pair of those dark eyes while they are still full of surprise and innocence!

We landed at theFanar. Bow-windows crowded with fair faces, in enormous pink turbans, naked shoulders (which I am already so orientalised as to think very indecent), puffed curls and pinched waists, reminded us at every step that we were in a Christian quarter of Constantinople. From this paltry and miserable suburb, spring the modern princes of Greece, the Mavrocordatos, and Ghikas, the Hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia, the subtle, insinuating, intriguing, but talented and ever-successful Fanariotes. One hears so much of them in Europe, and so much is made of a stray scion from the very far-traced root of Palæologus or some equally boasted blood of the Fanar (I met a Fanariote princess G—— at the baths of Lucca last year, whom I except from every disparaging remark), that he is a little disappointed with the dirty alleys and the stuffed windows shown him as hereditary homes of these very sounding names. There are a hundred families at least in the Fanar, that trace their origin back to no less than an imperial stock, and there is not a house in the whole quarter that would pass in our country for a respectable barn. In personal appearance they are certainly very inferior to any other race of their own nation. The Albanians and the Greeks I saw at Napoli and in the Morea, were (except the North American Indians) the finest people, physically, I have ever been among; while it would be difficult to find a more diminutive and degenerate-looking body of men and women, than swarm in this nest of Grecian princes.

We re-entered our little bark, and gliding along leisurely through the crowd of piades, kachambas, and caïques, landed at Stamboul, and walked on toward the bazaar. Always discovering new passages in that labyrinth of shops, we found ourselves, after an hour’s rambling, in a long street of booksellers. This is rather the oldest and narrowest part of the bazaar, and the light of heaven meets with the additional interruption of two rows of pillars with arched friezes standing in the middle of the street. On entering the literary twilight of the passage in the rear of these columns, the classic nostril detects instantly the genuine odour of manuscript, black-letter, and ancient binding; and the trained eye, accustomed to the dim niches of libraries, wanders over the well-piled shelves with their quaint rows of volumes in vellum, and appreciates at once their varied riches. Here is nothing of the complexion of a shelf at the Harpers’, or the Hendees’, or the Careys’—no fresh and uncut novel, no new-born poem, no political pamphlet or gay souvenir! And the priceless treasures of learning are not here doled out by a talkative publisher or dapper clerk, skilled only in the lettered backs of the volumes he barters. But in sombre and uneven rows, or laid in heaps, whose order is not in their similarity of binding, but in the correspondence of their contents, lie venerable and much-thumbed tomes of Arabic or Persian; while the venerable bibliopole, seated motionless on his hams, with his grey beard reaching to his crossed slippers, peruses an illuminated volume of Hafiz, lifting his eyes from the page only to revolve some sweet image in his mind, and murmur a low “pekke!” of approbation.

We had stepped back into the last century. Here was the calamus still in use. The small, brown reed, not yet superseded by the more useful but less classic quill, stood in every clotted inkstand, and nothing less than the purchase of a whole scrivener’s furniture, from a bearded bookworm, whose benevolent face took my fancy, would suffice my enthusiasm. Not to waste all our oriental experience at a single stall, we strolled farther on to buy an illuminated Hafiz. We stopped simultaneously before an old Armenian who seemed, by his rusty calpack and shabby robe, to be something poorer than even his plainly-clad neighbours: for in Turkey, as elsewhere, he who lives in a world of his own, has but a slender portion in that of the vulgar. A choice-looking volume lay open upon one of the old man’s knees, while from a wooden bowl he was eating hastily a pottage of rice. His meal was evidently an interruption. He had not even laid aside his book.

There was something in his handling the volume, as he took down a pocket-sized Hafiz, that showed an affection for the author. He turned it over with a slight dilation of countenance, and opening it with a careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian. I took it from him open at the place, and marked the passage with my nail, to look for it in the translation.

With my cheaply-bought treasures in my pockets, we turned up the street of the diamond merchants, and making a single purchase more in the bazaar, of a tesbih or Turkish rosary of spice-wood, emerged to the open air in the neighbourhood of the mosque of Sultan Bajazet.

Whether slipping the pagan beads through my fingers affected me devoutly, or whether it was the mellow humour of the moment, I felt a disposition to forgive my enemies, and indulge in an act of Mohammedan piety—feeding the unowned dogs of the street. We stepped into a baker’s shop, and laid out a piastre in bread, and were immediately observed and surrounded, before we could break a loaf, by twenty or thirty as ill-looking curs, as ever howled to the moon. Having distributed about a dozen loaves, and finding that our largess had by no means satisfied the appetites of the expecting rabble, we found ourselves embarrassed to escape. Nothing but the baker’s threshold prevented them from jumping upon us, in their eagerness, and the array of so many formidable mouths ferocious with hunger, was rather staggering. The baker drew off the hungry pack at last, by walking round the corner with a loaf in his hand, while we made a speedy exit, patted on the back in passing by several of the assembled spectators.

It is surprising that the Turks can tolerate this filthy breed of curs, in such extraordinary numbers. They have a whimsical punishment for killing one of them. The dead dog is hung by his heels, so that his nose just touches the ground, and thecanicideis compelled to heap wheat about him, till he is entirely covered; the wheat is then given to the poor, and the dog buried at the expense of the culprit. There are probably five dogs to every man in Constantinople, and besides their incessant barking, they often endanger the lives of children and strangers. MacFarlane, I think, tells the story of a drunken sea-captain, who was entirely devoured by the dogs at Tophana; nothing being found of him in the morning but his “indigestible pig-tail!”

We entered the court of Sultan Bajazet, and found the majestic plane-trees that shadow its arabesque fountains, bending beneath the weight of hundreds of pensionary pigeons. Here, as at several of the mosques, an old man sits by the gate, whose business it is to expend the alms given him in distributing grain to these sacred birds. Not to be outdone in piety, my friend gave the blind Turk a piastre; and, as he arose and unlocked the box beneath him, the pigeons descended about us in such a cloud, as literally to darken the air. Handful after handful was then thrown among them, and the beautiful creatures ran over our feet and fluttered round us with a fearlessness that sufficiently proved the safety in which they haunted the sacred precincts. In a few minutes they soared altogether again to the trees, and their Mussulman-feeder resumed his seat upon the box to wait for another charity.

A crowd of women at the harem gate, in the rear of the seraskier’s palace, attracted our attention. Upon inquiry, we found that he had married a daughter to one of the sultan’s military officers, and the bridal party was expected presently to come out in arubas, and make the tour of the Hippodrome, on the way to the house of the bridegroom. We wiled away an hour returning the gaze of curiosity bent upon us from the idle and bright eyes of a hundred women, and the first of the gilded vehicles made its appearance; though in the same style of ornament with the one I have already described, it differed in being drawn by horses, and having a frame top, with small round mirrors set in the corners. Within sat four very young women, one of whom was the bride; but which, we found no one who could tell us. It is no description of a face in the East to say, that the eyes were dark, and the nose regular—all that the jealous yashmack permitted us to ascertain of the beauty of the bride. Their eyes arealldark, and their noses areallregular; the Turkish nose differing from the Grecian, as that of the Antinous from the Apollo, only in its more voluptuous fulness, and a nostril less dilated. Four darker pairs of eyes, however, and four brows of whiter orb, never pined in a harem, or were reflected in those golden-rimmed mirrors; and as the twelve succeeding arubas rattled by, and in each suite four young women, with the same eternal dark eyes, “full of sleep,” and the same curved and pearly forehead, and noses like the Antinous, I thought oftoujours perdrix, and felt that if there had been butonewith a slight toss in that prominent member, it would not have been displeasing.

In a conversation with a Greek lady the other day, she remarked that the veils of the Turkish ladies conceal no charms. Their mouths, she says, are generally coarse, and their teeth, from the immoderate use of sweetmeats, or neglect, or some other cause, almost universally defective. How far the interest excited by these hidden features may have jaundiced the eyes of my fair informer, I cannot say; but, as a general fact, uneducated women, whatever other beauties they may possess, have rarely expressive or agreeable mouths. Nature forms and colours the nose, the eyes, the forehead, and the complexion; but the character, from the cradle up, moulds gradually to its own inward changes, the plastic and passion-breathing lines of the lips. Allowing this, it would be rather surprising if there was a mouth in all Turkey that had more than a pretty silliness at the most—the art of dyeing their finger nails, and painting their eyebrows, being the highest branches of female education. How they came by these “eyes that teach us what the sun is made of,” the vales of Georgia and Circassia best can tell.

And so having rambled away a sunny autumn day, and earned some little appetite, if not experience, we will get out of Stamboul, before the sunset guard makes us prisoners, and climb up to our dinner in Pera.

LETTER XLII.

The Perfection of Bathing—Pipes—Downy Cushions—Coffee—Rubbing Down—“Circular Justice,” as displayed in the Retribution of Boiled Lobsters—A Deluge of Suds—The Shampoo—Luxurious helps to the Imagination—A Pedestrian Excursion—Story of an American Tar, burdened with Small Change—Beauty of the Turkish Children—A Civilised Monster—Glimpse of Sultan Mahmoud in an Ill-Humour.

“Time is (not) money” in the East. We were three hours to-day at the principal bath of Constantinople, going through the ordinary process of the establishment, and were outstayed, at last, by two Turkish officers who had entered with us. During this time, we had each the assiduous service of an attendant, and coffee, lemonade, and pipesad libitum, for the consideration of half a Spanish dollar.

Although I have once described a Turkish bath, the metropolitan “pomp and circumstance” so far exceed the provincial in this luxury, that I think I shall be excused for dwelling a moment upon it again. The dressing-room opens at once from the street. We descended half a dozen steps to a stone floor, in the centre of which stood a large marble fountain. Its basin was kept full by severaljets d’eau, which threw their silver curves into the air, and the edge was set round withnarghilés(or Persian water-pipes with glass vases), ready for the smokers of the mild tobacco of Shiraz. The ceiling of this large hall was lofty, and the sides were encircled by three galleries, one above the other, with open balustrades, within which the bathers undressed. In a corner sat several attendants, with only a napkin around their waists, smoking till their services should be required; and one who had just come from the inner bath, streaming with perspiration, covered himself with cloths, and lay crouched, upon a carpet till he could bear, with safety, the temperature of the outer air.

A half-naked Turk, without his turban, looks more a Mephistopheles than a Ganymede, and I could scarce forbear shrinking as this shaven-headed troop of servitors seized upon us, and, without a word, pulled off our boots, thrust our feet into slippers, and led us up into the gallery to undress. An ottoman, piled with cushions, and overhung, on the wall, by a small mirror, was allotted to each, and with the assistance of my familiar (who was quite too familiar!) I found myself stripped,nolens volens, and a snowy napkin, with gold and embroidered edge, twisted into a becoming turban around my head.

We were led immediately into the first bath, a small room, in which the heat, for the first breath or two, seemed rather oppressive. Carpets were spread for us on the warm marble floor, and crossing our legs, with more ease than when cased in our unoriental pantaloons, we were served with pipes and coffee of a delicious flavour.

After a half hour, the atmosphere, so warm when we entered, began to feel chilly, and we were taken by the arm, and led by our speechless Mussulman, through an intermediate room, into the grand bath. The heat here seemed to me, for a moment almost intolerable. The floor was hot, and the air so moist with the suffocating vapour, as to rest like mist upon the skin. It was a spacious and vaulted room, with perhaps fifty small square windows in the dome, and four arched recesses in the sides, supplied with marble seats, and small reservoirs of hot and cold water. In the centre was a broad platform, on which the bather was rubbed and shampooed, occupied, just then, by two or three dark-skinned Turks, lying on their backs, with their eyes shut, dreaming, if one might judge by their countenances, of Paradise.

After being left to walk about for half an hour, by this time bathed in perspiration, our respective demons seized upon us again, and led us to the marble seats in the recesses. Putting a rough mitten on the right hand, my Turk then commenced upon my breast, scouring me without water or mercy, from head to foot, and turning me over on my face or my back, without the least “by your leave” expression in his countenance, and with an adroitness which, in spite of the novelty of my situation, I could not but admire. I hardly knew whether the sensation was pleasurable or painful. I was less in doubt presently, when he seated me upright, and, with the brazen cup of the fountain, dashed upon my peeled shoulders a quantity of half boiling water. If what Barnacle, in the play, calls “a circular justice,” existed in the world, I should have thought it a judgment for eating of lobsters. My familiar was somewhat startled at the suddenness with which I sprang upon my feet, and, turning some cold water into the reservoir, laid his hand on his breast, and looked an apology. The scalding was only momentary, and the qualified contents of the succeeding cups highly grateful.

We were left again, for a while, to our reflections, and then reappeared our attendants, with large bowls of the suds of scented soap, and small bunches of soft Angora wool. With this we were tenderly washed, and those of my companions who wished it were shaved. The last operation they described as peculiarly agreeable, both from the softened state of the skin and dexterity of the operators.

Rinsed once more with warm water, our snowy turbans were twisted around our heads again, cloths were tied about our waists, and we returned to the second room. The transition from the excessive heat within, made the air, that we had found oppressive when we entered, seem disagreeably chilly. We wrapped ourselves in our long cloths, and, resuming our carpets, took coffee and pipes as before. In a few minutes we began to feel a delightful glow in our veins, and then our cloths became unpleasantly warm, and by the time we were taken back to the dressing-room, its cold air was a relief. They led us to the ottomans, and piling the cushions so as to form a curve, laid us upon them, covered with clean white cloths, and bringing us sherbets, lemonade, and pipes, dropped upon their knees, and commenced pressing our limbs all over gently with their hands. My sensations during the half hour we lay here were indescribably agreeable, I felt an absolute repose of body, a calm, half-sleepy languor in my whole frame, and a tranquillity of mind, which, from the busy character of the scenes in which I was daily conversant, were equally unusual and pleasurable. Scarce stirring a muscle or a nerve, I lay the whole hour, gazing on the lofty ceiling, and listening to the murmur of the fountain, while my silent familiar pressed my limbs with a touch as gentle as a child’s, and it seemed to me as if pleasure was breathing from every pore of my cleansed and softened skin. I could willingly have passed the remainder of the day upon the luxurious couch. I wonder less than ever at the flowery and poetical character of the oriental literature, where the mind is subjected to influences so refining and exhilarating. One could hardly fail to grow a poet, I should think, even with this habit of eastern luxury alone. If I am to conceive a romance, or to indite an epithalamium, send me to the bath on a day of idleness, and, covering me up with their snowy and lavendered napkins, leave me till sunset!

With a dinner in prospect at a friend’s house, six or eight miles up the Bosphorus, we started in the morning on foot, with the intention of seeing Sultan Mahmoud go to mosque, by the way. We stopped a moment to look into the marble pavilion, containing the clocks of the mosque of Tophana, and drank at the opposite pavilion, from the brass cup chained in the window, and supplied constantly from the fountain within, and then kept on through the long street to the first village of Dolma-baktchi, or the Garden of Gourds.

Determined, with the day before us, to yield to every temptation on the road, we entered a small café, overlooking a segment of the Bosphorus, and while the acorn-sized cups were simmering on the manghal, my friend entered into conversation in Arabic with a tawny old Egyptian, who sat smoking in the corner. He was a fine specimen of the “responsible-looking” Oriental, and had lately arrived from Alexandria on business. Pleasant land of the East! where, to be the pink of courtesy, you must pass your snuff-box, or your tobacco-pouch to the stranger, and ask him those questions of his “whereabouts,” so impertinent in more civilised Europe!

After a brief dialogue, which was Hebrew to me, our Alexandrian, knocking the ashes from his pipe, commenced a narration with a great deal of expressive gesture, at which my friend seemed very provokingly amused. I sipped my coffee, and wondered what could have led one of these silent grey-beards into an amusing story, till a pause gave me an opportunity to ask a translation. Hearing that we were Americans, the Egyptian had begun by asking whether there was a superstition in our country against receiving back money in change. He explained his question by saying that he was in a café, at Tophana, when a boat’s crew, from the American frigate, waiting for some one at the landing, entered, and asked for coffee. They drank it very quietly, and one of them gave the caféjee a dollar, receiving in change a handful of the shabby and adulterated money of Constantinople. Jack was rather surprised at getting a dozen cups of coffee, and so much coin for his dollar, and requested the boy, by signs, to treat the company at his expense. This was done, the Turks all acknowledging the courtesy by laying their hands upon their foreheads and breast, and still Jack’s money lay heavy in his hands. He called for pipes, and they smoked awhile; but finding still that his riches were not perceptibly diminished, he hitched up his trowsers, and with a dexterous flirt, threw his piastres and paras all round upon the company, and rolled out of the café. From the gravity of the other sailors at this remarkable flourish, the old Egyptian and his fellow cross-legs had imagined it to be a national custom!

Idling along through the next village, we turned to admire a Turkish child, led by an Abyssinian slave. There is no country in the world where the children are so beautiful, and this was a cherub of a boy, like one of Domenichino’s angels. As we stopped to look at him, the little fellow commenced crying most lustily.

“Hush! my rose!” said the Abyssinian, “these are good Franks! these are not the Franks that eat children! hush!”

It certainly takes the nonsense out of one to travel. I should never have thought it possible, if I had not been in Turkey, that I could be made a bugbear to scare a child!

We passed the tomb of Frederick Barbarossa, getting, between the walls of the palaces on the water’s edge, continual and incomparable views of the Bosphorus, and arrived at Beshiktash (or the marble cradle), just as the troops were drawn up to the door of the mosque. We took our stand under a plane-tree, in the midst of a crowd of women, and presently the noisy band struck up the sultan’s march, and the led horses appeared in sight. They came on with their grooms and their rich housings, a dozen matchless Arabians, scarce touching the ground with their prancings! Oh, how beautiful they were! Their delicate limbs, their small, veined heads and fiery nostrils, their glowing, intelligent eyes, their quick, light, bounding action, their round bodies, trembling with restrained and impatient energy, their curved, haughty necks, and dark manes flowing wildly in the wind! El Borak, the mare of the prophet, with the wings of a bird, was not lighter or more beautiful.

The sultan followed, preceded by his principal officers, with a stirrup-holder running at each side, and mounted on a tame-looking Hungarian horse. He wore the red Fez cap, and a cream-coloured cloak, which covered his horse to the tail. His face was lowering, his firm, powerful jaw, set in an expression of fixed displeasure, and his far-famed eye had a fierceness within its dark socket, from which I involuntarily shrank. The women, as he came along, set up a kind of howl, according to their custom, but he looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed totally unconscious of any one’s existence but his own. He was quite another-looking man from the Mahmoud I had seen smiling in his handja-bash on the Bosphorus.

As he dismounted and entered the mosque, we went on our way, moralising sagely on the novel subject of human happiness—our text, the cloud on the brow of a sultan, and the quiet sunshine in the bosoms of two poor pedestrians by the way-side.

LETTER XLIII.

Punishment of Conjugal Infidelity—Drowning in the Bosphorus—Frequency of its occurrence accounted for—A Band of Wild Roumeliotes—Their Picturesque Appearance—Ali Pacha, of Yanina—A Turkish Funeral—Fat Widow of Sultan Selim—A Visit to the Sultan’s Summer Palace—A Travelling Moslem—Unexpected Token of Home.

A Turkish woman was sacked and thrown into the Bosphorus this morning. I was idling away the day in the bazaar and did not see her. The ward-room steward of the “United States,” a very intelligent man, who was at the pier when she was brought down to the caique, describes her as a young woman of twenty-two or three years, strikingly beautiful; and with the exception of a short quick sob in her throat, as if she had wearied herself out with weeping, she was quite calm and submitted composedly to her fate. She was led down by two soldiers, in her usual dress, her yashmack only torn from her face, and rowed off to the mouth of the bay, where the sack was drawn over her without resistance. The plash of her body in the sea was distinctly seen by the crowd who had followed her to the water.

It is horrible to reflect on these summary executions, knowing as we do, that the poor victim is taken before the judge, upon the least jealous whim of her husband or master, condemned often upon bare suspicion, and hurried instantly from the tribunal to this violent and revolting death. Any suspicion of commerce with a Christian particularly, is, with or without evidence, instant ruin. Not long ago, the inhabitants of Arnaout-keni, a pretty village on the Bosphorus, were shocked with the spectacle of a Turkish woman and a young Greek, hanging dead from the shutters of a window on the water’s side. He had been detected in leaving her house at daybreak, and in less than an hour the unfortunate lovers had met their fate. They are said to have died most heroically, embracing and declaring their attachment to the last.

Such tragedies occur every week or two in Constantinople, and it is not wonderful, considering the superiority of the educated and picturesque Greek to his brutal neighbour, or the daring and romance of Europeans in the pursuit of forbidden happiness. The liberty of going and coming, which the Turkish women enjoy, wrapped only in veils, which assist by their secrecy, is temptingly favourable to intrigue, and the self-sacrificing nature of the sex, when the heart is concerned, shows itself here in proportion to the demand for it.

An eminent physician, who attends the seraglio of the sultan’s sister, consisting of a great number of women, tells me that their time is principally occupied in sentimental correspondence, by means of flowers, with the forbidden Greeks and Armenians. These platonic passions for persons whom they have only seen from their gilded lattices, are their only amusement, and they are permitted by the sultana, who has herself the reputation of being partial to Franks, and, old as she is, ingenious in contrivances to obtain their society. My intelligent informant thinks the Turkish women, in spite of their want of education, somewhat remarkable for their sentiment of character.

With two English travellers, whom I had known in Italy, I pulled out of the bay in a caique, and ran down under the wall of the city, on the side of the sea of Marmora. For a mile or more we were beneath the wall of the seraglio, whose small water-gates, whence so many victims have found

“Their way to Marmora without a boat,”

are beset, to the imaginative eye of the traveller, with thedramatis personæof a thousand tragedies. One smiles to detect himself gazing on an old postern, with his teeth shut hard together, and his hair on end, in the calm of a pure, silent, sunshiny morning of September!

We landed some seven miles below, at the Seven Towers, and dismissed our boat to walk across to the Golden Horn. Our road was outside of the triple walls of Stamboul, whose two hundred and fifty towers look as if they were toppling after an earthquake, and are overgrown superbly with ivy. Large trees, rooted in the crevices, and gradually bursting the thick walls, overshadow entirely their once proud turrets, and for the whole length of the five or six miles across, it is one splendid picture of decay. I have seen in no country such beautiful ruins.

At the Adrianople gate, we found a large troop of horsemen, armed in the wild manner of the East, who had accompanied a Roumeliote chief from the mountains. They were not allowed to enter the city, and, with their horses picketed upon the plain, were lying about in groups, waiting till their leader should conclude his audience with the seraskier. They were as cut-throat looking a set as a painter would wish to see. The extreme richness of eastern arms, mounted showily in silver, and of shapes so cumbersome, yet picturesque, contrasted strangely with their ragged capotes, and torn leggings, and their way-worn and weary countenances. Yet they were almost without exception fine-featured, and with a resolute expression of face, and they had flung themselves, as savages will, into attitudes that art would find it difficult to improve.

Directly opposite this gate stand five marble slabs, indicating the spots in which are buried the heads of Ali Pacha, of Albania, his three sons and grandson. The inscription states, that the rebel lost his head for having dared to aspire to independence. He was a brave old barbarian, however, and, as the worthy chief of the most warlike people of modern times, one stands over his grave with regret. It would have been a classic spot had Byron survived to visit it. No event in his travels made more impression on his mind than the pacha’s detecting his rank by the beauty of his hands. His fine description of the wild court of Yanina, in “Childe Harold,” has already made the poet’s return of immortality, but had he survived the revolution in Greece, with his increased knowledge of the Albanian soldier and his habits, and his esteem for the old chieftain, a hero so much to his taste would have been his most natural theme. It remains to be seen whether the age or the language will produce another Byron to take up the broken thread.

As we were poring over the Turkish inscription, four men, apparently quite intoxicated, came running and hallooing from the city gate, bearing upon their shoulders a dead man in his bier. Entering the cemetery, they went stumbling on over the foot-stones, tossing the corpse about so violently, that the helpless limbs frequently fell beyond the limits of the rude barrow, while the grave-digger, the only sober person, save the dead man, in the company, followed at his best speed, with his pick-axe and shovel. These extraordinary bearers set down their burden not far from the gate, and, to my surprise, walked laughing off like men who had merely engaged in a moment’s frolic by the way, while the sexton, left quite alone, composed a little the posture of the disordered body, and sat down to get breath for his task.

My Constantinopolitan friend tells me that the Koran blesses him who carries a dead body forty paces on its way to the grave. The poor are thus carried out to the cemeteries by voluntary bearers, who, after they have completed their prescribed paces, change with the first individual whose reckoning with heaven may be in arrears.

The corpse we had seen so rudely borne on its last journey, was, or had been, a middle-aged Turk. He had neither shroud nor coffin, but

“Lay like a gentleman taking a snooze,”

in his slippers and turban, the bunch of flowers on his bosom the only token that he was dressed for any particular occasion. We had not time to stay and see his grave dug, and “his face laid toward the tomb of the prophet.”

We entered the Adrianople gate, and crossed the triangle, which old Stamboul nearly forms, by a line approaching its hypothenuse. Though in a city so thickly populated, it was one of the most lonely walks conceivable. We met, perhaps, one individual in a street; and the perfect silence, and the cheerless look of the Turkish houses, with their jealously closed windows, gave it the air of a city devastated by the plague. The population of Constantinople is only seen in the bazaars or in the streets bordering on the Golden Horn. In the extensive quarter occupied by dwelling-houses only, the inhabitants, if at home, occupy apartments opening on their secluded gardens, or are hidden from the gaze of the street by their fine dull-coloured lattices. It strikes one with melancholy after the gay balconies and open doors of France and Italy!

We passed the Eskai Serai, the palace in which the imperial widows wear their chaste weeds in solitude; and, weary with our long walk, emerged from the silent streets at the bazaar of wax-candles, and took caique for theArgentopolisof the ancients, theSilver Cityof Galatia.

The thundering of guns from the whole Ottoman fleet in the Bosphorus announced, some days since, that the sultan had changed his summer for his winter serai, and the commodore received yesterday a firman to visit the deserted palace of Beylerbey.

We left the frigate at an early hour, our large party of officers increased by the captain of the “Acteon,” sloop-of-war, some gentlemen of the English ambassador’s household, and several strangers who took advantage of the commodore’s courtesy to enjoy a privilege granted so very rarely.

As we pulled up the Strait, some one pointed out the residence, on the European shore, of the once favourite wife, and now fat widow, of Sultan Selim. She is called by the Turks, the “boneless sultana,” and is the model of shape by the oriental standard. The poet’s lines,

“Who turned that little waist with so much care,And shut perfection in so small a ring?”

“Who turned that little waist with so much care,

And shut perfection in so small a ring?”

though a very neat compliment in some countries, would be downright rudeness in the East. Near this jelly in weeds lives a venerable Turk, who was once ambassador to England. He came back too much enlightened, and the mufti immediately procured his exile, for infidelity. He passes his day, we are told, in looking at a large map hung on the wall before him, and wondering at his own travels.

We were received at the shining brazen gate of Beylerbey, by Hamik Pacha (a strikingly elegant man, just returned from a mission to England), deputed by the sultan to do the honours. A side-door introduced us immediately to the grand hall upon the lower floor, which was separated only by four marble pillars, and a heavy curtain rolled up at will, from the gravel walk of the garden in the rear. We ascended thence by an open staircase of wood, prettily inlaid, to the second floor, which was one long suite of spacious rooms, built entirely in the French style, and thence to the third floor, the same thing over again. It was quite like looking at lodgings in Paris. There was no furniture, except, an occasional ottoman turned with its face upon another, and a prodigious quantity of French musical clocks, three or four in every room, and all playing in our honour with an amusing confusion. One other article, by the way—a large, common, American rocking-chair! The poor thing stood in a great gilded room all alone, looking pitiably home-sick. I seated myself in it,malgréa thick coat of dust upon the bottom, as I would visit a sick countryman in exile.

The harem was locked, and the polite pacha regretted that he had no orders to open it. We descended to the gardens, which rise by terraces to a gimcrack temple and orangery, and having looked at the sultan’s poultry, we took our leave. If his pink palace in Europe is no finer than his yellow palace in Asia, there is many a merchant in America better lodged than the padishah of the Ottoman empire. We have not seen theoldseraglio, however, and in its inaccessible recesses, probably, moulders that true oriental splendour which this upholsterer monarch abandons in his rage, for the novel luxuries of Europe.

LETTER XLIV.

Farewell to Constantinople—Europe and the East compared—The Departure—Smyrna, the great Mart for Figs—An Excursion into Asia Minor—Travelling Equipments—Character of the Hajjis—Encampment of Gipsies—A Youthful Hebe—Note—Horror of the Turks for the “Unclean Animal”—An Anecdote.

I have spent the last day or two in farewell visits to my favourite haunts in Constantinople. I galloped up the Bosphorus, almost envyingles ames damnéesthat skim so swiftly and perpetually from the Symplegades to Marmora, and from Marmora back to the Symplegades. I took a caique to the Valley of Sweet Waters, and rambled away an hour on its silken sward. I lounged a morning in the bazaars, smoked a parting pipe with my old Turk in the bezestein, and exchanged a last salaam with the venerable Armenian bookseller, still poring over his illuminated Hafiz. And last night, with the sundown boat waiting at the pier, I loitered till twilight in the small and elevated cemetery between Galata and Pera, and, with feelings of even painful regret, gazed my last upon the matchless scene around me. In the words of the eloquent author of “Anastasius,” when taking the same farewell, “For the last time, my eye wandered over the dimpled hills, glided along the winding waters, and dived into the deep and delicious dells, in which branch out its jagged shores. Reverting from these smiling outlets of its sea-beat suburbs to its busy centre, I surveyed, in slow succession, every chaplet of swelling cupolas, every grove of slender minarets, and every avenue of glittering porticoes, whose pinnacles dart their golden shafts from between the dark cypress-trees into the azure sky. I dwelt on them as on things I never was to behold more; and not until the evening had deepened the veil it cast over the varied scene from orange to purple, and from purple to the sable hue of night, did I tear myself away from the impressive spot. I then bade the city of Constantine farewell for ever, descended the high-crested hill, stepped into the heaving boat, turned my back upon the shore, and sank my regrets in the sparkling wave, across which the moon had already flung a trembling bar of silvery light, pointing my way, as it were, to other unknown regions.”

There are few intellectual pleasures like that of finding our own thoughts and feelings well described by another!

I certainly would not live in the East; and when I sum up its inconveniences and deprivations to which the traveller from Europe, with his refined wants, is subjected, I marvel at the heart-ache with which I turn my back upon it, and the deep dye it has infused into my imagination. Its few peculiar luxuries do not compensate for the total absence ofcomfort; its lovely scenery cannot reconcile you to wretched lodgings; its picturesque costumes and poetical people, and golden sky, fine food for a summer’s fancy as they are, cannot make you forget the civilised pleasures you abandon for them—the fresh literature, the arts and music, the refined society, the elegant pursuits, and the stirring intellectual collision of the cities of Europe.

Yet the world contains nothing like Constantinople! If we could compel all our senses into one, and live by the pleasures of the eye, it were a paradise untranscended. The Bosphorus—the superb, peculiar, incomparable Bosphorus! the dream-like, fairy-built seraglio! the sights within the city so richly strange, and the valleys and streams around it so exquisitely fair! the voluptuous softness of the dark eyes haunting your every step on shore, and the spirit-like swiftness and elegance of your darting caique upon the waters! In what land is the priceless sight such a treasure? Where is the fancy so delicately and divinely pampered?

Every heave at the capstan-bars drew upon my heart; and when the unwilling anchor at last let go its hold, and the frigate swung free with the outward current, I felt as if, in that moment, I had parted my hold upon a land of faëry. The dark cypresses and golden pinnacles of Seraglio Point, and the higher shafts of Sophia’s sky-touching minarets were the last objects in my swiftly-receding eye, and, in a short hour or two, the whole bright vision had sunk below the horizon.

We crossed Marmora, and shot down the rapid Dardanelles in as many hours as a passage up had occupied days, and, rounding the coast of Anatolia, entered between Mitylene and the Asian shore, and, on the third day, anchored in the bay of Smyrna.

“Everybody knows Smyrna,” says MacFarlane, “it is such a place for figs!” It is a low-built town, at the head of the long gulf, which bears its name, and, with the exception of the high rock immediately over it, topped by the ruins of an old castle, said to embody in its walls the ancient Christian church, it has no very striking features. Extensive gardens spread away on every side, and, without exciting much of your admiration for its beauty, there is a look of peace and rural comfort about the neighbourhood that affects the mind pleasantly.

Almost immediately on my arrival, I joined a party for a few days’ tour in Asia Minor. We were five, and, with a baggage-horse, and a mounted suridjee, our caravan was rather respectable. Our appointments were orientally simple. We had each a Turkish bed (alias, a small carpet), a nightcap, and a “copy-hold” upon a pair of saddle-bags, containing certain things forbidden by the Koran, and therefore not likely to be found by the way. Our attendant was a most ill-favoured Turk, whose pilgrimage to Mecca (he was a hajji, and wore a green turban) had, at least, imparted no sanctity to his visage. If he was not a rogue, nature had mis-labelled him, and I shelter my want of charity under the Arabic proverb: “Distrust thy neighbour if he has made a hajji; if he has made two, make haste to leave thy house.”

We wound our way slowly out of the narrow and ill-paved streets of Smyrna, and passing through the suburban gardens, yellow with lemons and oranges, crossed a small bridge over the Hermus. This is the favourite walk of the Smyrniotes, and if its classic river, whose “golden sands” (here, at least), are not golden, and its “Bath of Diana” near by, whose waters would scarce purify her “silver bow,” are something less than their sounding names; there is a cool, dark cemetery beyond, less famous, but more practicable for sentiment, and many a shadowy vine and drooping tree in the gardens around, that might recompense lovers, perhaps, for the dirty labyrinth of the intervening suburb.

We spurred away over the long plain of Hadjilar, leaving to the right and left the pretty villages, ornamented by the summer residences of the wealthy merchants of Smyrna, and in two or three hours reached a small lone café, at the foot of its bounding range of mountains. We dismounted here to breathe our horses, and while coffee was preparing, I discovered, in a green hollow hard by, a small encampment of gipsies. With stones in our hands, as the caféjee told us the dogs were troublesome, we walked down into the little round-bottomed dell, a spot selected with “a lover’s eye for nature,” and were brought to bay by a dozen noble shepherd-dogs, within a few yards of their outer tent.

The noise brought out an old sun-burnt woman, and two or three younger ones, with a troop of boys, who called in the dogs, and invited us kindly within their limits. The tents were placed in a half circle, with their doors inward, and were made with extreme neatness. There were eight or nine of them, very small and low, with round tops, the cloth stretched tightly over an inner frame, and bound curiously down on the outside with beautiful wicker-work. The curtains at the entrance were looped up to admit the grateful sun, and the compactly-arranged interiors lay open to our prying curiosity. In the rounded corner farthest from the door, lay uniformly the same goat-skin beds, flat on the ground, and in the centre of most of them, stood a small loom, at which the occupant plied her task like an automaton, not betraying by any sign a consciousness of our presence. They sat cross-legged like the Turks, and had all a look of habitual sternness, which, with their thin, strongly-marked gipsy features, and wild eyes, gave them more the appearance of men. It was the first time I had ever remarked such a character upon a class of female faces, and I should have thought I had mistaken their sex, if their half-naked figures had not put it beyond a doubt. The men were probably gone to Smyrna, as none were visible in the encampment. As we were about returning, the curtain of the largest tent, which had been dropped on our entrance, was lifted cautiously, by a beautiful girl, of perhaps thirteen, who, not remarking that I was somewhat in the rear of my companions, looked after them a moment, and then fastening back the dingy folds by a string, returned to her employment of swinging an infant in a small wicker hammock, suspended in the centre of the tent. Her dark, but prettily-rounded arm, was decked with a bracelet of silver pieces, and just between two of the finest eyes I ever saw, was suspended by a yellow thread, one of the small gold coins of Constantinople. Her softly-moulded bust was entirely bare, and might have served for the model of a youthful Hebe. A girdle round her waist sustained loosely a long pair of full Turkish trousers, of the colour and fashion usually worn by women in the East, and caught over her hip, hung suspended by its fringe the truant shawl that had been suffered to fall from her shoulders and expose her guarded beauty. I stood admiring her a full minute, before I observed a middle-aged woman in the opposite corner, who, bending over her work, was fortunately as late in observing my intrusive presence. As I advanced half a step, however, my shadow fell into the tent, and starting with surprise, she rose and dropped the curtain.

We remounted, and I rode on, thinking of the vision of loveliness I was leaving in that wild dell. We travel a great way to see hills and rivers, thought I, but, after all, a human being is a more interesting object than a mountain. I shall remember the little gipsy of Hadjilar, long after I have forgotten Hermus and Sypilus.

Our road dwindled to a mere bridle-path, as we advanced, and the scenery grew wild and barren. The horses were all sad stumblers, and the uneven rocks gave them every apology for coming down whenever they could forget the spur, and so we entered the broad and green valley of Yackerhem (I write it as I heard it pronounced), and drew up at the door of a small hovel, serving the double purpose of a café and a guard-house.

A Turkish officer of the old régime, turbanned and cross-legged, and armed with pistols and ataghan, sat smoking on one side the brazier of coals, and the caféjee exercised his small vocation on the other. Before the door, a raised platform of greensward and a marble slab, facing toward Mecca, indicated the place for prayer; and a dashing rider of a Turk, who had kept us company from Smyrna, flying past us and dropping to the rear alternately, had taken off his slippers at the moment we arrived, and was commencing his noon devotions.

We gathered round our commissary’s saddle-bags and shocked our Mussulman friends, by producing the unclean beast[18]and the forbidden liquor, which, with the delicious Turkey coffee, never better than in these way-side hovels, furnished forth a traveller’s meal.

[18]

Talking of hams, two of the Sultan’s chief eunuchs applied to an English physician, a friend of mine at Constantinople, to accompany them on board the American frigate. I engaged to wait on board for them on a certain day, but they did not make their appearance. They gave, as their apology, that they could not defile themselves by entering a ship polluted by the presence of that unclean animal, the hog.

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