LETTER XXX.
Turkish Military Life—A Visit to the Camp—Turkish Music—Sunsets—The Sea of Marmora.
Turkish Military Life—A Visit to the Camp—Turkish Music—Sunsets—The Sea of Marmora.
A half hour’s walk brought us within sight of the pacha’s camp. The green and white tents of five thousand Turkish troops were pitched on the edge of a stream, partly sheltered by a grove of noble oaks, and defended by wicker batteries at distances of thirty or forty feet. We were stopped by the sentinel on guard, while a message was sent in to the pacha for permission to wait upon him. Meantime a number of young officers came out from their tents, and commenced examining our dresses with the curiosity of boys. One put on my gloves, another examined the cloth of my coat, a third took from me a curious stick I had purchased at Vienna, and a more familiar gentleman took up my hand, and after comparing it with his own black fingers, stroked it with an approving smile that was meant probably as a compliment. My companions underwent the same review, and their curiosity was still unsated when a good-looking officer, with his cimetar under his arm, came to conduct us to the commander-in-chief.
The long lines of tents were bent to the direction of the stream, and, at short distances, the silken banner stuck in the ground under the charge of a sentinel, and a divan covered with rich carpets under the shade of the nearest tree, marked the tent of an officer. The interior of those of the soldiers exhibited merely a stand of muskets and a raised platform for bed and table, covered with coarse mats, and decked with the European accoutrements now common in Turkey. It was the middle of the afternoon, and most of the officers lay asleep on low ottomans, with their tent-curtains undrawn, and their long chibouques beside them, or still at their lips. Hundreds of soldiers loitered about, engaged in various occupations, sweeping, driving their tent-stakes more firmly into the ground, cleaning arms, cooking, or with their heels under them playing silently at dominoes. Half the camp lay on the opposite bank of the stream, and there was repeated the same warlike picture, the white uniform and the loose red cap with its gold bullion and blue tassel, appearing and disappearing between the rows of tents, and the bright red banners clinging to the staff in the breathless sunshine.
We soon approached the splendid pavilion of the pacha, unlike the rest in shape, and surrounded by a quantity of servants, some cooking at the root of a tree, and all pursuing their vocation with a singular earnestness. A superb banner of bright crimson silk, wrought with long lines of Turkish characters, probably passages from the Koran, stood in a raised socket guarded by two sentinels. Near the tent, and not far from the edge of the stream, stood a gaily-painted kiosk, not unlike the fantastic summer-houses sometimes seen in a European garden, and here our conductor stopped, and kicking off his slippers, motioned for us to enter.
We mounted the steps, and passing a small entrance-room filled with guards, stood in the presence of the commander-in-chief. He sat on a divan, cross-legged, in a military frock-coat wrought with gold on the collar and cuffs, a sparkling diamond crescent on his breast, and a cimetar at his side, with a belt richly wrought, and held by a buckle of dazzling brilliance. His aide sat beside him, in a dress somewhat similar, and both appeared to be men of about forty. The pacha is a stern, dark, soldier-like man, with a thick, straight beard as black as jet, and features which look incapable of a smile. He bowed without rising when we entered, and motioned for us to be seated. A little conversation passed between him and the consul’s son, who acted as our interpreter, and coffee came in almost immediately. There was an aroma about it which might revive a mummy. The small china-cups, with thin gold filagree sockets, were soon emptied and taken away, and the officer in waiting introduced a soldier to go through the manual exercise by way of amusing us.
He was a powerful fellow, and threw his musket about with so much violence, that I feared every moment the stock, lock, and barrel would part company. He had taken off his shoes before venturing into the presence of his commander, and looked oddly enough, playing the soldier in his stockings. I was relieved of considerable apprehension when he ordered arms, and backed out to his slippers.
The next exhibition was that of a military band. A drum-major, with a proper gold-headed stick, wheeled some sixty fellows with all kinds of instruments under the windows of the kiosk, and with a whirl of his baton, the harmony commenced. I could just detect some resemblance to a march. The drums rolled, the “ear-piercing fifes” fulfilled their destiny, and trombone, serpent, and horn showed of what they were capable. The pacha got upon his knees to lean out of the window, and as I rose from my low seat at the same time, he pulled me down beside him, and gave me half his carpet, patting me on the back, and pressing me to the window with his arm over my neck. I have observed frequently among the Turks this singular familiarity of manners both to strangers and to one another. It is an odd contrast with their habitual gravity.
The sultan, I think unwisely, has introduced the European uniform into his army. With the exception of the Tunisian cap, which is substituted for a thick and handsome turban, the dress is such as is worn by the soldiers of the French army. Their tailors are of course bad, and their figures, accustomed only to the loose and graceful costume of the East, are awkward and constrained. I never saw so uncouth a set of fellows as the five thousand Mussulmans in this army of the Dardanelles; and yet in their Turkish trowsers and turban, with the belt stuck full of arms, and their long moustache, they would be as martial-looking troops as ever followed a banner.
We embarked at sunset to return to the ship. The shell-shaped caique, with her tall sharp extremities and fantastic sail, yielded to the rapid current of the Hellespont; and our two boatmen, as handsome a brace of Turks as were ever drawn in a picture, pulled their legs under them more closely, and commenced singing the alternate stanzas of a villainous duet. The helmsman’s part was rather humorous, and his merry black eye redeemed it somewhat, but his fellow was as grave as a dervish, and howled as if he were ferrying over Xerxes after his defeat.
If I were to live in the East as long as the wandering Jew, I think these heavenly sunsets, evening after evening, scarce varying by a shade, would never become familiar to my eye. They surprise me day after day, like some new and brilliant phenomenon, though the thoughts which they bring, as it were by a habit contracted of the hour, are almost always the same. The day, in these countries where life flows so thickly, is engrossed, and pretty busily too, by thepresent. Thepastcomes up with the twilight, and wherever I may be, and in whatever scene mingling, my heart breaks away, and goes down into the west with the sun. I amat homeas duly as the bird settles to her nest.
It was natural in paying the boatman, after such a musing passage, to remember the poetical justice of Uhland in crossing the ferry:—
“Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee!Take! I give it willingly;For, invisibly to thee,Spirits twain have crossed with me!”
“Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee!Take! I give it willingly;For, invisibly to thee,Spirits twain have crossed with me!”
“Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee!Take! I give it willingly;For, invisibly to thee,Spirits twain have crossed with me!”
“Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee!
Take! I give it willingly;
For, invisibly to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me!”
I should have paid for one other seat, at least, by this fanciful tariff. Our unmusical Mussulmans were content, however, and we left them to pull back against the tide, by a star that cast a shadow like a meteor.
The moon changed this morning, and the wind, that in this clime of fable is as constant to her as Endymion, changed too. The white caps vanished from the hurrying waves of the Dardanelles, and after an hour or two of calm, the long-expected breeze came tripping out of Asia, with oriental softness, and is now leading us gently up the Hellespont.
As we passed between the two castles of the Dardanelles, the commodore saluted the pacha with nineteen guns, and in half an hour we were off Abydos, where our friend from the south has deserted us, and we are compelled to anchor. It would be unclassical to complain of delay on so poetical a spot. It is beautiful, too. The shores on both the Asian and European sides are charmingly varied and the sun lies on them, and on the calm strait that links them, with a beauty worthy of the fair spirit of Hero. A small Turkish castle occupies the site of the “torch-lit tower” of Abydos, and there is a corresponding one at Sestos. The distance between looks little more than a mile—not a surprising feat for any swimmer, I should think. Lady-loves in our day, alas! are not won so lightly. The current of the Hellespont, however, remains the same, and so does the moral of Leander’s story. The Hellespont of matrimony may be crossed with the tide. The deuce is toget back!
Lampsacus on the starboard-bow, and a fairer spot lies on no river’s brink. Its trees, vineyards, and cottages, slant up almost imperceptibly from the water’s edge, and the hills around have the look “of a clean and quiet privacy,” with a rural elegance that might tempt Shakspeare’s Jaques to come and moralise. By the way, there have been philosophers here. Did not Alexander forgive the city its obstinate defence for the sake of Anaximenes? There was a sad dog of a deity worshipped here about that time.
I take a fresh look at it from the port, as I write. Pastures, every one with a bordering of tall trees, cattle as beautiful as the daughter of Ianchus, lanes of wild shrubbery, a greener stripe through the fields like the track of a stream, and smoke curling from every cluster of trees, telling as plainly as the fancy can read, that there is both poetry and pillaw at Lampsacus.
Just opposite stands the modern Gallipoli, a Turkish town of some thirty thousand inhabitants, at the head of the Hellespont. The Hellespont gets broader here, and a few miles farther up we open into the Sea of Marmora. A French brig-of-war, that has been hanging about us for a fortnight (watching our movements in this unusual cruise for an American frigate, perhaps), is just ahead, and a quantity of sail are stretching off on the southern tack, to make the best use of their new sea-room for beating up to Constantinople.
We hope to see Seraglio Point to-morrow. Mr. Hodgson, the secretary of our embassy to Turkey, has just come on board from the Smyrna packet, and the agreeable preparations for going on shore are already on the stir. I do not find that the edge of curiosity dulls with use. The prospect of seeing a strange city, to-morrow, produces the same quick-pulsed emotion that I felt in the diligence two years ago, rattling over the last post to Paris. The entrances to Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Athens, are marked each with as white a stone. He may “gather no moss” who rolls about the world; but that which the gold of the careful cannot buy—pleasure—when the soul is most athirst for it, grows under his feet. Of the many daily reasons I find to thank Providence, not the least is that of being what Clodio calls himself in the play, “ahere-and-there-ian.”
LETTER XXXI.
Gallipoli—Aristocracy of Beards—Turkish Shopkeepers—The Hospitable Jew and his lovely Daughter—Unexpected Rencontre—Constantinople—The Bosphorus, the Seraglio, and the Golden Horn.
Gallipoli—Aristocracy of Beards—Turkish Shopkeepers—The Hospitable Jew and his lovely Daughter—Unexpected Rencontre—Constantinople—The Bosphorus, the Seraglio, and the Golden Horn.
What an image of life it is! The good ship dashes bravely on her course—the spray flies from her prow—her sheets are steady and full—to look up to her spreading canvass, and feel her springing away beneath, you would not give her “for the best horse the sun has in his stable.” The next moment, hey! the foresail is aback! the wind baffles and dies, the ripples sink from the sea, the ship loses her “way,” and the pennant drops to the mast in a breathless calm! “Clear away the anchor!” and here we are till this “crab in the ascendant” that makes “all our affairs go backwards,” yields to our better stars.
We went ashore to take a stroll through the streets of Gallipoli (the ancient Gallipoli of Thrace) as a sop to our patience. A deeply-laden Spanish merchant lay off the pier, with a crew of red-capped and olive-complexioned fellows taking in grain from a Turkish caique, and a crowd of modern Thracians, in the noble costumes and flowing beards of the country, closed around us as we stepped from the boat.
A street of cafés led from the end of the pier, and as usual, they were all crowded with Turks, leaning forward over their slippers, and crossing their long chibouques as they conversed together. It is odd that even the habit of a life can make their painful and unnatural posture an agreeable one. Yet they will sit with their legs crooked under them, in a way that strains the unaccustomed knee till it cracks again, motionless by the hour together.
I had no idea till I came to Turkey how rare a beauty is a handsome beard. Here no man shaves, and there is as great a difference in beards as in stature. The men of rank that we have seen, might have been picked out anywhere by their superior beauty in this respect. It grows vilely, it seems to me, on scoundrels. The beggars ashore, the low Jews who board us with provisions, the greater part of the soldiers and petty shop-keepers of the towns, have all some mark in their beards, that nature never intended them for gentlemen. Your smooth chin is a great leveller, trust me!
These Turkish towns have a queer look altogether. Gallipoli is so seldom touched by a Christian foot, that it preserves all its peculiarities entire, and is likely to do so for the next century. We walked on, ascending a narrow street completely shut in by the roofs of the low houses meeting above. There are no carriages or carts, and the Turks glide over the stones in their loose slippers with an indolent shuffle that seems rather to add to the silence. You hear no voice, for they seldom speak, and never above the key of a bassoon; and what with the odd costumes, long beards, grave faces, and twilight darkness all about you, it is like a scene on the stage when the lights are lowered in some incantation scene.
Each street is devoted to some one trade. We first got among the grocers. Every shop was a fellow to the other, containing an old Turk, squatted among soap, jars of oil, raisins, olives, pickled fish, and sweetmeats, and everything within his reach. He would sell you his whole stock in trade without taking his pipe from his mouth, or disturbing his yellow slipper.
The next turn brought us into the Jews’ quarter. They were all tailors, and their shops were as dark as Erebus. The light crept through the chinks in the roof, falling invariably on the same aquiline nose and ragged beard, with now and then a pair of copper spectacles, while in the back of the dim tenement sat an old woman with a group of handsome little Hebrews, (they are always handsome when very young, with their clear skins and dark eyes) the whole family stitching away most diligently. It was laughable to see how every shop in the street presented the same picture.
We then got among the slipper-makers, and vile work they turned out. We were hesitating between two turnings when an old Jew, with a high lamb’s-wool cap and long black caftan, rather shabby for wear, addressed me in a sort oflingua Franca, half Italian, half French, with a sprinkling of Spanish, and inquiring whether I belonged to the frigate in the harbour, offered to supply us with provisions, &c. &c. I declined his services, and he asked us directly to his house to take coffee—as plump anon sequituras I have met in my travels.
We followed the old man to a very secluded part of the town, stopping a moment by the way to look at the remains of an old fort built by the Genoese in the stout times of Andrea Doria. (Where be their galleys now?) Hajji (so he was called, he said from having been to Jerusalem) stopped at last at the door of a shabby house, and throwing it open with a hospitable smile, bade us welcome. We mounted a creaking stair, and found things within better than the promise of the exterior. One half the floor of the room was raised perhaps a foot, and matted neatly, and a nicely carpeted and cushioned divan ran around the three sides, closed at the two extremities by a lattice-work like the arm of a sofa. The windows were set in fantastical arabesque frames, the upper panes coarsely coloured, but with a rich effect, and the view hence stretched over the Hellespont toward the south, with a delicious background of the valleys about Lampsacus. No palace window looks on a fairer scene. The broad Strait was as smooth as the amber of the old Hebrew’s pipe, and the vines that furnished Themistocles with wine during his exile in Persia, looked of as golden a green in the light of the sunset, as if the honour of the tribute still warmed their classic juices.
The rich Turkish coffee was brought in by an old woman, who left her slippers below as she stepped upon the mat, and our host followed with chibouques and a renewed welcome. A bright pair of eyes had been peeping for some time from one of the chambers, and with Hajji’s permission I called out a graceful creature of fourteen, with a shape like a Grecian Cupidon and a timid sweetness of expression that might have descended to her from the gentle Ruth of Scripture. There are lovely beings all over the world. It were a desert else. But I did not think to find such a diamond in a Hebrew’s bosom. I have forgotten to mention her hair, which was very remarkable. I thought at first it was dyed with henna. It covered her back and shoulders in the greatest profusion, braided near the head, and floating below in glossy and silken curls of a richness you would deny nature had you seen it in a painting. The colour was of the deep burnt brown of a berry, almost black in the shade, but catching the light at every motion like threads of gold. In my life I have seen nothing so beautiful. It was the “hair lustrous and smiling” of quaint old Burton.[13]There was something in it that you could scarce avoid associating with the character of the wearer—as if it stole its softness from some inborn gentleness in her heart. I shall never thread my fingers through such locks again!
We shook our kind host by the hand, and stepped gingerly down in the fading twilight to our boat. As we were crossing an open space between the bazaars, two gentlemen in a costume half European, half Oriental, with spurs and pistols, and a quantity of dust on their moustaches, passed, and immediately turned and called me by name. The last place in which I should have looked for acquaintances, would be Gallipoli. They were two French exquisites whom I had known at Rome, travelling to Constantinople with no more serious object, I dare be sworn, than to return with long beards from the East. They had just arrived on horseback, and were looking for a khan. I commended them to my old friend the Jew, who offered at once to lodge them at his house, and we parted in this by-corner of Thrace, as if we had but met for the second time in a morning stroll to St. Peter’s.
We lay till noon in the glassy harbour of Gallipoli, and then the breeze came slowly up the Hellespont, its advancing edge marked by a crowd of small sail keeping even pace with its wings. We soon opened into the extending sea of Marmora, and the cloudy island of the same name is at this moment on our lee. The sun is setting gorgeously over the hills of Thrace, and thankful for sea-room once more, and a good breeze, we make ourselves certain of seeing Constantinople to-morrow.
We were ten miles distant when I came on deck this morning. A long line of land with a slightly waving outline began to emerge from the mist of sunrise, and with a glass I could distinguish the clustering masses and shining eminences of a distant and far extending city. We were approaching it with a cloud of company. A Turkish ship-of-war, with the crescent and star fluttering on her blood-red flag, a French cutter bearing the handsome tricolor at her peak, and an uncounted swarm of merchantmen, taking advantage of the newly-changed wind, were spreading every thread of canvass, and stretching on as eagerly as we toward the metropolis of the East. There was something in the companionship which elated me. It seemed as if all the world shared in my anticipations—as if all the world were going to Constantinople.
I approached the mistress of the East with different feelings from that which had inspired me in entering the older cities of Europe. The interest of the latter sprang from the past. Rome, Florence, Athens, were delightful from the store of history and poetry I brought with me and had accumulated in my youth—from what they once were, and for that of which they preserved the ruins. Constantinople, on the contrary, is still the gem of the Orient—still the home of the superb Turk, and the resort of many nations of the East—still all that fires curiosity and excites the imagination in the descriptions of the traveller. I was coming to a living city, full of strange people and strange costumes, language, and manners. It was, to the places I had seen, like the warm and breathing woman perfect in life, to the interesting but lifeless and mutilated statue.
As the distance lessened, the tall, slender, glittering minarets of a hundred mosques were first distinguishable. Towers, domes, and dark spots of cypresses next emerged to the eye, and a sea of buildings, followed undulating in many swells and widening along the line of the sea as if we were approaching a continent covered to its farthest limits with one unbroken city.
We kept on with unslackened sail to the shore which seemed closed before us. A few minutes opened to us a curving bay, winding in and lost to the eye behind a swelling eminence, and as if mosques, towers, and palaces, had spread away and opened to receive us into their bosom, we shot into the heart of a busy city, and dropped anchor at the feet of a cluster of hills, studded from base to summit with buildings of indescribable splendour.
An American gentleman had joined us in the Dardanelles, and stood with us, looking at the transcendent panorama. “What is this lovely point, gemmed with gardens and fantastic palaces, and with every variety of tree and building on its gentle slope descending so gracefully to the sea?”The Seraglio!“What is this opening of bright water, crowded with shipping, and sprinkled with these fairy boats so gaily decked and so slender, shooting from side to side like the crossing flight of a thousand arrows?”The Golden Horn, that winds up through the city and terminates in the valley of Sweet Waters! “And what is this other stream, opening into the hills to the east, and lined with glittering palaces as far as the eye can reach?”The Bosphorus.“And what is this, and that, and the other exquisite and surpassing beauty—features of a scene to which the earth surely has no shadow of a parallel?” Patience! patience! We have a month before us, and we will see.
[13]
“Hair lustrous and smiling. The trope is none of mine. Æneas Sylvius hathcrines ridentes.”—Anatomy of Melancholy.
LETTER XXXII.
Constantinople—An Adventure with the Dogs of Stamboul—The Sultan’s Kiosk—The Bazaars—Georgians—Sweetmeats—Hindoostanee Fakeers—Turkish Women and their Eyes—The Jews—A Token of Home—The Drug Bazaar—Opium Eaters.
Constantinople—An Adventure with the Dogs of Stamboul—The Sultan’s Kiosk—The Bazaars—Georgians—Sweetmeats—Hindoostanee Fakeers—Turkish Women and their Eyes—The Jews—A Token of Home—The Drug Bazaar—Opium Eaters.
The invariable “Where am I?” with which a traveller awakes at morning was to me never more agreeably answered.At Constantinople!The early ship-of-war summons to “turn out,” was obeyed with alacrity, and with the first boat after breakfast I was set ashore at Tophana, the landing place of the Frank quarter of Stamboul.
A row of low-built cafés, with a latticed enclosure and a plentiful shade of plane-trees on the right; a large square, in the centre of which stood a magnificent Persian fountain, as large as a church, covered with lapis-lazuli and gold, and endless inscriptions in Turkish; a mosque buried in cypresses on the left; a hundred indolent-looking, large-trousered, moustached, and withal very handsome men, and twice the number of snarling, wolfish, and half-starved dogs, are some of the objects which the first glance, as I stepped on shore, left on my memory.
I had heard that the dogs of Constantinople knew and hated a Christian. By the time I had reached the middle of the square, a wretched puppy at my heels had succeeded in announcing the presence of a stranger. They were upon me in a moment from every heap of garbage, and every hole and corner. I was beginning to be seriously alarmed, standing perfectly still, with at least a hundred infuriated dogs barking in a circle around me, when an old Turk, selling sherbet under the shelter of the projecting roof of the Persian fountain, came kindly to my relief. A stone or two well aimed, and a peculiar cry, which I have since tried in vain to imitate, dispersed the hungry wretches, and I took a glass of the old man’s raising water, and pursued my way up the street. The circumstance, however, had discoloured my anticipations; nothing looked agreeably to me for an hour after it.
I ascended through narrow and steep lanes, between rows of small wooden houses, miserably built and painted, to the main street of the quarter of Pera. Here live all Christians and Christian ambassadors, and here I found our secretary of legation, Mr. H., who kindly offered to accompany me to old Stamboul.
We descended to the water-side, and stepping into an egg-shell caique, crossed the Golden Horn, and landed on a pier between the sultans green kiosk and the seraglio. I was fortunate in a companion who knew the people and spoke the language. The red-trousered and armed kervas, at the door of the kiosk, took his pipe from his mouth, after a bribe and a little persuasion, and motioned to a boy to show us the interior. A circular room, with a throne of solid silver embraced in a double colonnade of marble pillars, and covered with a roof laced with lapis lazuli and gold, formed the place from which Sultan Mahmoud formerly contemplated, on certain days, the busy and beautiful panorama of his matchless bay. The kiosk is on the edge of the water, and the poorest caikjee might row his little bark under its threshold, and fill his monarch’s eye, and look on his monarch’s face with the proudest. The green canvass curtains, which envelop the whole building, have, for a long time, been unraised, and Mahmoud is oftener to be seen on horseback, in the dress of a European officer, guarded by troops in European costume and array. The change is said to be dangerously unpopular.
We walked on to the square of Sultana Valide. Its large area was crowded with the buyers and sellers of a travelling fair—a sort of Jews’ market held on different days in different parts of this vast capital. In Turkey every nation is distinguished by its dress, and almost as certainly by its branch of trade. On the right of the gate, under a huge plane-tree, shedding its yellow leaves among the various wares, stood the booths of a group of Georgians, their round and rosy-dark faces (you would know their sisters must be half houris) set off with a tall black cap of curling wool, their small shoulders with a tight jacket studded with silk buttons, and their waist with a voluminous silken sash, whose fringed ends fell over their heels as they sat cross-legged, patiently waiting for custom. Hardware is the staple of their shops, but the cross-pole in front is fantastically hung with silken garters and tasselled cords, and their own Georgian caps, with a gay crown of cashmere, enrich and diversify the shelves. I bought a pair or two of blushing silk garters of a young man, whose eyes and teeth should have been a woman’s, and we strolled on to the next booth.
Here was a Turk, with a table covered by a broad brass waiter, on which was displayed a tempting array of mucilage, white and pink, something of the consistency of blanc-mange. A dish of sugar, small gilded saucers, and long-handled, flat, brass spoons, with a vase of rose-water, completed his establishment. The grave Mussulman cut, sugared, and scented the portions for which we asked, without condescending to look at us or open his lips, and, with a glass of mild and pleasant sherbet from his next neighbour, as immovable a Turk as himself, we had lunched, extremely to my taste, for just five cents American currency.
A little farther on I was struck with the appearance of two men, who stood bargaining with a Jew. My friend knew them immediately asfakeers, or religious devotees from Hindoostan. He addressed them in Arabic, and, during their conversation of ten minutes, I studied them with some curiosity. They were singularly small, without any appearance of dwarfishness, their limbs and persons slight, and very equally and gracefully proportioned. Their features were absolutely regular, and, though small as a child’s of ten or twelve years, were perfectly developed. They appeared like men seen through an inverted opera-glass. An exceedingly ashy, olive complexion, hair of a kind of glittering black, quite unlike in texture and colour any I have ever before seen; large, brilliant, intense black eyes, and lips (the most peculiar feature of all), of lustreless black,[14]completed the portraits of two as remarkable-looking men as I have anywhere met. Their costume was humble, but not unpicturesque. A well-worn sash of red silk enveloped the waist in many folds, and sustained trowsers tight to the legs, but of the Turkish ampleness over the hips. Their small feet, which seemed dried up to the bone, were bare. A blanket, with a hood marked in a kind of arabesque figure, covered their shoulders, and a high quilted cap, with a rim of curling wool, was pressed down closely over the forehead. A crescent-shaped tin vessel, suspended by a leather strap to the waist, and serving the two purposes of a charity-box, and a receptacle for bread and vegetables, seemed a kind of badge of their profession. They were lately from Hindoostan, and were begging their way still farther into Europe. They received our proffered alms without any mark of surprise or even pleasure, and laying their hands on their breasts, with countenances perfectly immoveable, gave us a Hindoostanee blessing, and resumed their traffic. They see the world, these rovers on foot! And I think, could I see it myself in no other way, I would e’en take sandal and scrip, and traverse it as a dervish or beggar!
The alleys between the booths were crowded with Turkish women, who seemed the chief purchasers. The effect of their enveloped persons, and eyes peering from the muslin folds of theyashmack, is droll to a stranger. It seemed to me like a masquerade, and the singular sound of female voices, speaking through several thicknesses of a stuff, bound so close on the mouth as to show the shape of the lips exactly, perfected the delusion. It reminded me of the half-smothered tones beneath the masks in carnival-time. A clothes-bag with yellow slippers would have about as much form, and might be walked about with as much grace as a Turkish woman. Their fat hands, the finger-nails dyed with henna, and their unexceptionably magnificent eyes, are all that the stranger is permitted to peruse. It is strange how universal is the beauty of the eastern eye. I have looked in vain hitherto, for a small or inexpressive one. It is quite startling to meet the gaze of such large liquid orbs, bent upon you from their long silken fringes, with the unwinking steadiness of look common to the females of this country. Wrapped in their veils, they seem unconscious of attracting attention, and turn and look you full in the face, while you seek in vain for a pair of lips to explain by their expression the meaning of such particular notice.
The Jew is more distinguishable at Constantinople than elsewhere. He is compelled to wear the dress of his tribe (and its “badge of sufferance,” too), and you will find him, wherever there is trafficking to be done, in a small cap, not ungracefully shaped, twisted about with a peculiar handkerchief of a small black print, and set back so as to show the whole of his national high and narrow forehead. He is always good humoured and obsequious, and receives the curse with which his officious offers of service are often repelled, with a smile, and a hope that he may serve you another time. One of them, as we passed his booth, called our attention to some newly-opened bales, bearing the stamp, “TREMONT MILL, LOWELL, MASS.” It was a long distance from home to meet such familiar words!
We left the square of the sultan mother, and entered a street ofconfectioners. The East is famous for its sweetmeats, and truly a more tempting array never visited the Christmas dream of a schoolboy. Even Felix, thepatissier nonpareilof Paris, might take a lesson in jellies. And then for “candy” of all colours of the rainbow (not shut enviously in with pitiful glass cases, but piled up to the ceiling in a shop all in the street, as it might be in Eutopia, with nothing to pay), it is like a scene in the Arabian Nights. The last part of the parenthesis is almost true, for with a small coin of the value of two American cents, I bought of a certain kind called, in Turkish, “peace to your throat” (they call things by such poetical names in the East), the quarter of which I could not have eaten, even in my best “days of sugar candy.” The women of Constantinople, I am told, almost live on confectionery. They eat incredible quantities. The sultan’s eight hundred wives and women employ five hundred cooks, and consumetwo thousand five hundred pounds of sugar daily! It is probably the most expensive item of the seraglio kitchen.
A turn or two brought us to the entrance of a long dark passage, of about the architecture of a covered bridge in our country. A place richer in the oriental and picturesque could scarce be found between the Danube and the Nile. It is the bazaar ofdrugs. As your eye becomes accustomed to the light, you distinguish vessels of every size and shape, ranged along the receding shelves of a stall, and filled to the uncovered brim with the various productions of the Orient. The edges of the baskets and jars are turned over with rich coloured papers (a peculiar colour to every drug), and broad spoons of boxwood are crossed on the top. There is thehenna, in a powder of deep brown, with an envelope of deep Tyrian purple, and all the precious gums in their jars, golden-leafed, and spices and dyes and medicinal roots, and above hang anatomies of curious monsters, dried and stuffed, and in the midst of all, motionless as the box of sulphur beside him, and almost as yellow, sits a venerable Turk, with his beard on his knees, and his pipe-bowl thrust away over his drugs, its ascending smoke-curls his only sign of life. This class of merchants is famous for opium eaters, and if you pass at the right hour, you find the large eye of the silent smoker dilated and wandering, his fingers busy in tremulously counting his spice-wood beads, and the roof of his stall wreathed with clouds of smoke, the vent to every species of eastern enthusiasm. If you address him, he smiles, and puts his hand to his forehead and breast, but condescends to answer no question till it is thrice reiterated, and then in the briefest word possible, he answers wide of your meaning, strokes the smoke out of his moustache, and slipping the costly amber between his lips, abandons himself again to his exalted revery. I write this after being a week at Constantinople, during which the Egyptian bazaar has been my frequent and most fancy-stirring lounge. Of its forty merchants, there is not one whose picturesque features are not imprinted deeply in my memory. I have idled up and down in the dim light, and fingered the soft henna, and bought small parcels of incense-wood for my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable faces of the unconscious old Mussulmans, till my mind became somehow tinctured of the East, and (what will be better understood) my clothes steeped in the mixed and agreeable odours of the thousand spices. Where are the painters, that they have never found this mine of admirable studies? There is not a corner of Constantinople, nor a man in its streets, that were not a novel and a capital subject for the pencil. Pray, Mr. Cole, leave things that have been painted so often, as aqueducts and Italian ruins (though youdomake delicious pictures, and could never waste time or pencils onanything), and come to the East for one single book of sketches! How I have wished I was a painter since I have been here!
[14]
I have since met many of them in the streets of Constantinople, and I find it a distinguishing feature of their race. They look as if their lips were dead—as if the blood had dried beneath the skin.
LETTER XXXIII.
The Sultan’s Perfumer—Etiquette of Smoking—Temptations for Purchasers—Exquisite Flavour of the Turkish Perfumes—The Slave Market of Constantinople—Slaves from various Countries, Greek, Circassian, Egyptian, Persian—African female Slaves—An Improvisatrice—Exposure for Sale—Circassian Beauties prohibited to Europeans—First sight of one, eating a Pie—Shock to romantic Feelings—Beautiful Arab Girl chained to the Floor—The Silk Merchant—A cheap Purchase.
The Sultan’s Perfumer—Etiquette of Smoking—Temptations for Purchasers—Exquisite Flavour of the Turkish Perfumes—The Slave Market of Constantinople—Slaves from various Countries, Greek, Circassian, Egyptian, Persian—African female Slaves—An Improvisatrice—Exposure for Sale—Circassian Beauties prohibited to Europeans—First sight of one, eating a Pie—Shock to romantic Feelings—Beautiful Arab Girl chained to the Floor—The Silk Merchant—A cheap Purchase.
An Abyssinian slave, with bracelets on his wrists and ankles, a white turban, folded in the most approved fashion around his curly head, and a showy silk sash about his waist, addressed us in broken English as we passed a small shop on the way to the Bozestein. His master was an old acquaintance of my polyglot friend, and, passing in at a side door, we entered a dimly-lighted apartment in the rear, and were received, with a profusion of salaams, by the sultan’s perfumer. For a Turk, Mustapha Effendi was the most voluble gentleman in his discourse that I had yet met in Stamboul. A sparse grey beard just sprinkled a pair of blown-up cheeks, and a collapsed double chin that fell in curtain folds to his bosom, a moustache, of seven or eight hairs on a side, curled demurely about the corners of his mouth, his heavy oily black eyes twinkled in their pursy recesses, with the salacious good humour of a satyr; and, as he coiled his legs under him on the broad ottoman in the corner, his boneless body completely lapped over them, knees and all, and left him, apparently, bolt upright on his trunk, like a man amputated at the hips. A string of beads in one hand, and a splendidnarghilé, or rose-water pipe in the other, completed as fine a picture of a mere animal as I remember to have met in my travels.
My learned friend pursued the conversation in Turkish, and in a few minutes, the black entered, with pipes of exquisite amber filled with the mild Persian tobacco. Leaving his slippers at the door, he dropped upon his knee, and placed two small brass dishes in the centre of the room to receive the hot pipe bowls, and, with a showy flourish of his long, naked arm, brought round the rich mouth-pieces to our lips. A spicy atom of some aromatic composition, laid in the centre of the bowl, removed from the smoke all that could offend the most delicate organs, and, as I looked about the perfumer’s retired sanctum, and my eye rested on the small heaps of spice-woods, the gilded pastilles, the curious bottles of attar of roses and jasmine, and thence to the broad soft divans extending quite around the room, piled in the corners with cushions of down, I thought Mustapha, the perfumer, among those who lived by traffic, had the cleanliest and most gentlemanlike vocation.
Observing that I smoked but little, Mustapha gave an order to his familiar, who soon appeared, with two small gilded saucers; one containing a jelly of incomparable delicacy and whiteness, and the other a candied liquid, tinctured with quince and cinnamon. My friend explained to me that I was to eat both, and that Mustapha said, “on his head be the injury it would do me.” There needed little persuasion. The cook to a court of fairies might have mingled sweets less delicately.
For all this courtesy Mustapha finds his offset in the opened hearts of his customers, when the pipes are smoked out, and there is nothing to delay the offer of his costly wares. First calling for a jar of jessamine, than which the sultan himself perfumes his beard with no rarer, he turned it upside down, and, leaning towards me, rubbed the moistened cork over my nascent moustache, and waited with a satisfied certainty for my expression of admiration as it “ascended me into the brain.” There was no denying it was of celestial flavour. He held up his fingers: “One? two? three? ten? How many bottles shall your slave fill for you?” It was a most lucid pantomime. An interpreter would have been superfluous.
The attar of roses stood next on the shelf. It was the best ever sent from Adrianople. Bottle after bottle of different extracts were passed under nasal review; each, one might think, the triumph of the alchemy of flowers, and of each a specimen was laid aside for me in a slender vial, dexterously capped with vellum, and tied with a silken thread by the adroit Abyssinian. I escaped emptying my purse by a single worthless coin, the fee I required for my return boat over the Golden Horn—but I had seen Mustapha the perfumer.
My friend led the way through several intricate windings, and passing through a gateway, we entered a circular area, surrounded with a single building divided into small apartments, faced with open porches. It was the slave-market of Constantinople. My first idea was to look round for Don Juan and Johnson. In their place we found slaves of almost every eastern nation, who looked at us with an “I wish to heaven that somebody would buy us” sort of an expression, but none so handsome as Haidee’s lover. In a low cellar, beneath one of the apartments, lay twenty or thirty white men chained together by the legs, and with scarce the covering required by decency. A small-featured Arab stood at the door, wrapped in a purple-hooded cloak, and Mr. H. addressing him in Arabic, inquired their nations. He was not their master, but the stout fellow in the corner, he said, was a Greek by his regular features, and the boy chained to him was a Circassian by his rosy cheek and curly hair, and the black-lipped villain with the scar over his forehead, was an Egyptian doubtless, and the two that looked like brothers were Georgians or Persians, or perhaps Bulgarians. Poor devils! they lay on the clay floor with a cold easterly wind blowing in upon them, dispirited and chilled, with the prospect of being sold to a taskmaster for their best hope of relief.
A shout of African laughter drew us to the other side of the bazaar. A dozen Nubian damsels, flat-nosed and curly-headed, but as straight and fine-limbed as pieces of black statuary, lay around on a platform in front of their apartment, while one sat upright in the middle, and amused her companions by some narration, accompanied by grimaces irresistibly ludicrous. Each had a somewhat scant blanket, black with dirt, and worn as carelessly as a lady carries her shawl. Their black, polished frames were disposed about, in postures a painter would scarce call ungraceful, and no start or change of attitude when we approached, betrayed the innate coyness of the sex. After watching theimprovisatriceawhile, we were about passing on, when a man came out from the inner apartment, and beckoning to one of them to follow him, walked into the middle of the bazaar. She was a tall, arrow-straight lass of about eighteen, with the form of a nymph, and the head of a baboon. He commenced by crying in a voice that must have been educated in the gallery of a minaret, setting forth the qualities of the animal at his back, who was to be sold at public auction forthwith. As he closed his harangue, he slipped his pipe back into his mouth, and lifting the scrimped blanket of the ebon Venus, turned her twice round, and walked to the other side of the bazaar, where his cry and the exposure of the submissive wench were repeated.
We left him to finish his circuit, and walked on in search of the Circassian beauties of the market. Several turbaned slave-merchants were sitting round amanghal, or brass vessel of coals, smoking or making their coffee, in one of the porticoes, and my friend addressed one of them with an inquiry on the subject. “There were Circassians in the bazaar,” he said, “but there was an express firman, prohibiting the exposing or selling of them to Franks, under heavy penalties.” We tried to bribe him. It was of no use. He pointed to the apartment in which they were, and, as it was upon the ground floor, I took advice of modest assurance, and approaching the window, sheltered my eyes with my hand, and looked in. A great fat girl, with a pair of saucer-like black eyes, and cheeks as red and round as a cabbage-rose, sat facing the window, devouring a pie most voraciously. She had a small carpet spread beneath her, and sat on one of her heels, with a row of fat, red toes, whose nails were tinged with henna, just protruding on the other side from the folds of her ample trousers. The light was so dim that I could not see the features of the others, of whom there were six or seven in groups in the corners. And so faded the bright colours of a certain boyish dream of Circassian beauty! A fat girl eating a pie!
As we were about leaving the bazaar, the door of a small apartment near the gate opened, and disclosed the common cheerless interior of a chamber in a khan. In the centre burned the almost extinguished embers of a Turkishmanghal, and, at the moment of my passing, a figure rose from a prostrate position, and exposed, as a shawl dropped from her face in rising, the exquisitely small features and bright olive skin of an Arab girl. Her hair was black as night, and the bright braid of it across her forehead seemed but another shade of the warm dark eye that lifted its heavy and sleepy lids, and looked out of the accidentally-opened door as if she were trying to remember how she had dropped out of “Araby the blest” upon so cheerless a spot. She was very beautiful. I should have taken her for a child, from her diminutive size, but for a certain fulness in the limbs and a womanly ripeness in the bust and features. The same dusky lips which give the males of her race a look of ghastliness, either by contrast with a row of dazzlingly white teeth, or from their round and perfect chiselling, seemed in her almost a beauty, I had looked at her several minutes before she chose to consider it as impertinence. At last she slowly raised her little symmetrical figure (the “Barbary shape” the old poets talk of), and slipping forward to reach the latch, I observed that she was chained by one of her ankles to a ring in the floor. To think that only a “malignant and turbaned Turk” may possess such a Hebe! Beautiful creature! Your lot,