THE GUN MULETHE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY
Three-fourths of the officers in the army of the Khedive are English boys, who rank as second lieutenants at home and as majors in Egypt. They are paid just twice what they are paid in the English army, and it is the Khedive who pays them and not the English. In this way England obtains three things: she is saved the cost of supporting that number of officers; she gets the benefit of their experience in Egypt, which is an excellent training-school, at the expense of the Egyptians; and she at the same time controls the Egyptian army by these same officers, and guards her own interests at Egypt's cost. And as if this were not enough, she plants an Army of Occupation upon the country, and with it menaces the native authority. The irrigation of Egypt has of late been carried on by Englishmen entirely and paid for by Egypt; her railroads are built by the English; her big contracts are given out to English firms and to English manufacturers; and the railroad which will be built to Kosseir on the Red Sea may have been designed in Egypt's interest to carry wheat, or it may have been planned to carry troops to the Red Sea in the event of the seizure of the Suez Canal or of any other impediment to the shortest route to India. We may not believe that the Egyptians are capable of governing themselves, we may believe that it is written that others than themselves shall always rule them and their country, but we must prefer that whoever do this should declare themselvesopenly, and act as conquerors who come and remain as conquerors, and not as "advisers" and restorers of order. Napoleon came to Cairo with flags flying and drums beating openly as an enemy; he did not come in the disguise of a missionary or an irrigation expert.
And there is always the question whether if left alone the Egyptians of the present day could not govern themselves. Those of the Egyptians I met who were in authority are not men who are likely to return to the debauchery and misrule of Ismail. They would be big men in any country; they are cultivated, educated gentlemen, who have served in different courts or on many important diplomatic missions, and whose tastes and ambitions are as creditable and as broad as are those of their English contemporaries.
The two most prominent advisers of the Khedive at present are his Prime-minister, Riaz Pasha, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tigrane Pasha. The first of these is a Turk, the second an Armenian and a Christian. It is told of Riaz that he was brought to Egypt when a boy as a slave. A man who can rise from such a beginning to be Prime-minister must have something in him. He showed his spirit and his desire for his country's good in the time of Ismail, whose extravagances both he and Nubar Pasha strenuously opposed, and his aid to the English in establishing Egyptian finance on a firmer footing was ready and invaluable. He has held almostevery position in the cabinet of Egypt, and is not too old a man to learn new methods, and if left alone is experienced and accomplished enough as a statesman to manage for himself.
LORD CROMERLORD CROMER,The English Diplomatic Agent in Egypt
Tigrane Pasha struck me as being more of a diplomat than a statesman, but he showed his strength by the fact that he understood the weak points of the Egyptians as well as their virtues. It is not the enthusiast who believes that all in his country is perfect who is the best patriot. To say that such a man as this—a man who has a better knowledge of many different governments than half of the English cabinet have of their own, and who wishes the best for his Khedive and his country—needs the advice or support of an English resident minister, is as absurd as to say that the French cabinet should govern themselves by the manifestoes of the Comte de Paris. These men are not barbarians nor despots; they have not gained their place in the world by favor or inheritance. Their homes are as rich in treasures of art and history and literature as are the homes of Lord Rosebery or SirHenry Drummond Wolff, and if they care for their country and the authority of their Khedive, it is certainly hard that they may not have the right of serving both undisturbed.
The Khedive himself has been very generally represented through the English press as a "sulky boy" who does not know what is best for him. It is just as easy to describe him as a plucky boy who wishes to govern his own country and his own people in his own way. And not only is he not allowed to do this, but he is treated with a lack of consideration by his protectors which adds insult to injury, and makes him appear as having less authority than is really his. He might very well say to Lord Cromer, "It was all very well to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me down-stairs?"
Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, and the ruling figure in Egypt, has served his country as faithfully and as successfully as any man in her debt to-day. He has been in Egypt from the beginning of these ten years, and he has been given almost unlimited power and authority by his own country, of which his nominal position of Consul-General and Diplomatic Agent is no criterion. He is a typical Englishman in appearance, broad-shouldered and big all over, with a smooth-shaven face, and the look of having just come fresh from a bath. In conversation he thinks much more of what he has to say than of how he says it; by that I mean that he is direct, and even abrupt; the Egyptians found him mostunpleasantly so. But were he more tactful, he would probably have been better liked personally, but would not have succeeded in doing what he has done so well.
I do not like what he has done, but I want to be fair in showing that for the work he was sent to do he is probably the best man England could have selected. A man less self-reliant might have feared to compromise himself with home authorities, and would have temporized and lost where Lord Cromer bullied and browbeat and won. He is a very remarkable man. He studies for a half-hour every day after breakfast, and plays tennis in the afternoon. When he is in his own room, with a pipe in his mouth, he can talk more interestingly and with more exact knowledge of Egypt than any man in the world, and your admiration for him is unbounded. In the rooms of the legation, on the contrary, or, again, when advising a minister of the Khedive or the Khedive himself, he can be as intensely disagreeable in his manner and as powerfully aggressive as a polar-bear. During the last so-called "crisis" he gave the Khedive twenty-four hours in which to dismiss his Prime-minister. He did this with the assurance from the English Foreign Office that the home government would support him. He then cabled with one hand to Malta for troops and with the other stopped the Black Watch at Aden on their way to India, and called them back to Cairo, after which he went out in full sight of the public and banged tennisballs about until sunset. A man who can call out "forty, love!" "forty, fifteen!" in a calm voice two hours after sending an ultimatum to a Khedive and disarranging the movements of six thousand of her Majesty's troops will get what he wants in the end, and a boy of eighteen is hardly a fair match for him.
As I have said, the English press have misrepresented the young Khedive in many ways. He is, in the first place, much older both in appearance and manner and thought than his age would suggest, and if he is sulky to Englishmen it is not to be wondered at. They could hardly expect his Highness to regard them as seriously as his friends as they regard themselves. The Khedive gave me a private audience at the Abdine Palace while I was in Cairo, and from what he said then and from what others who are close to him told me of him, I obtained a very different idea of his personality than I had received from the English.
GUN OF THE MULE BATTERYA GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION
He struck me as being distinctly obstinate—a characteristic which is so marked in our President that it can only be considered one of the qualifications for success, and is probably the quality in the Khedive which the English describe as sulkiness. What I liked in him most was his pride in his army and in the Egyptian people as Egyptians. It is always well that a ruler should be so enthusiastic over what is his own that he shows it even to the casual stranger, for if he exhibits it to him, how much more will he show it to hispeople! The Khedive has gentle tastes, and is said to find his amusement in his garden and among flowers and on the farm lands of his estates; he speaks several languages very well, and dresses and looks—except for the fez and his attendants—like any other young man of twenty-three or twenty-four in Paris or New York. His ministers, who know him best, describe him as having a high spirit, and one that, as he grows older and will be guided by greater experience, will lead him to firmer authority for his own good and for the good of his people.
One remark of the Khedive's which is of interest to Americans was to the effect that the officers in his army who had been trained by Stone Bey, and those other American officers who entered the Egyptian army after the end of our Civil War, were, in his opinion, the best-trained men in their particular department in his army. This is the topographical work, and the making of maps and drawings; but those Americans who are in charge of Egyptian troops on the frontier are also well esteemed. It is the English, however, who have made the fighting part of the army what it is. Before they came the troops were unpaid, and badly treated by their officers, but now the infantry and the camel corps and artillery have no trouble in getting recruits.
The Egyptian is not a natural fighter, as is the Soudanese, who fights for love of it, but he has shown lately that when properly officered and trained and well treated, he can defend a positionor attack boldly if led boldly. I suggested to the Khedive that he should borrow some of our officers, those who have succeeded so well with the negroes of the Ninth Cavalry and with the Indians, for it seemed to me that this would be of benefit to both the officers and the Egyptian soldier. It was this suggestion that called forth the Khedive's admiration for the Americans of his army; but, as a matter of fact, the English would never allow officers of any other nationality than their own to control even a company of the Egyptian army. They cannot turn out those foreigners who are already in, but they can dictate as to who shall come hereafter, and they fill all the good billets with their own people; and if there is one thing an Englishman apparently holds above all else, it is a "good billet." I know a good many English officers who would rather be stationed where there was a chance of their taking part in what they call a "show," and what we would grandly call a "battle," than dwell at ease on the staff of General Wolseley himself; but, on the other hand, if I were to give a list of all the subalterns who have applied to me for "good billets in America," where they seem to think fortunes grow on hedges, half the regimental colors from London to Malta would fade with shame.
And Egypt is full of "good billets." It is true the English have made them good, and they were not worth much before the English restored order; but because you have humanelystopped a runaway coach from going over a precipice, that is no reason why you should take possession of it and fill it both inside and out with your own friends and relations. That is what England has done with the Egyptian coach which Ismail drove to the brink of bankruptcy.
It is true the Khedive still sits on the box and holds the reins, but Lord Cromer sits beside him and holds the whip.
Perhaps the greatest charm of Athens and of the islands and mountains round about it lies in their power to lure back your belief in a great many fine people of whose remarkable deeds you had grown sceptical—of whose existence even you had begun to doubt. It is something very serious when one loses faith in so delightful a young man as Theseus, and it is worth while sailing under the lee shores of Crete, where he killed the Minotaur, if for no other purpose than to have your admiration for him restored. If we could only be as sure of restoring by travel all of those other people of whom our elders ceased telling us when we left the nursery, I would head an expedition to the north pole, not to discover open seas and altitudes and eclipses and such weighty things, but to locate that nice and kindly old gentleman, and his toy store and his reindeer, who used to come at Christmas-time, and who has stopped coming since I left school. It is certainly worth whilegoing all the way to Greece to see the Hill of the Nymphs, and the very cave where Pan used to sleep in the hot midday, and to thrill over the four crossroads and the high, gloomy pass where the Sphinx lay in wait for Œdipus with her cruel claws and inscrutable smile.
NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORMGREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORM
The story that must always strike every child as most sad and unsatisfactory is the one which tells us how the father of Theseus killed himself when his son came sailing back triumphant, and so gallantly engaged in entertaining the beautiful Athenian maidens whose lives he had saved that he forgot to hoist the white sails, and caused his father to throw himself off the high rocks in despair.
This used to appeal to me as one of the most pathetic incidents in history; but as time wore on my sympathy for the father and indignation against Theseus passed away, and I forgot about them both. But when they point out where theblack sails were first seen entering the bay, and you stand on the rock from which the people watched for Theseus, and from which his father threw himself down, you feel just as sorry, and you rebel just as strongly against that morbid anticlimax, as you did when you first read the story in knickerbockers. It seems almost too sad to be true.
They had such a delightful way of mixing up the histories of gods and mortals in those days that the imaginative person who visits Athens will find himself gazing as gratefully and as open-eyed at the rocks in which the Centaur hid as at those from which Demosthenes delivered his philippics, just as in London the room at the Charter House where Colonel Newcome said "Adsum" for the last time is much more real than that room in Edinburgh in which Rizzio was killed, or as the rock from which Monte Cristo sprang, at the base of the Château d'If, is so much more actual than the entire field of Waterloo. It is hard to know just which was real and which a delightful myth; and yet there has been so little change in Greece since then that you are brought nearer to Alcibiades and to Pericles than you can ever come, in this world at least, to Dr. Johnson and Dean Swift. You cannot recreate Grub Street and the debtors' prison, but Eubœa still "looks on Marathon, and Marathon on the sea," and, if you are presumptuous, you can strut up and down the rocky plateau from which Demosthenes spoke, or take your seat in one ofthe marble chairs of the Theatre of Dionysus, and pretend you are a worthy citizen of Athens listening to a satire of Sophocles.
GREEK PEASANT GIRLGREEK PEASANT GIRL
The quiet and fresh cleanliness of modern Athens comes to you after the roar and dirt of Cairo's narrow lanes and dusty avenues like the touch of damask table linen and silver after the greasy oil-cloth of a Mediterranean coasting steamer. It is quiet, sunny, and well-bred. You do not fight your way through legions of donkey-boysand dragomans, nor are your footsteps echoed by swarms of guides and beggars. It is a pretty city, with the look of a water-color. The houses are a light yellow, and the shutters a watery green, and the tile roofs a delicate red, and the sky above a blue seldom shown to ordinary mortals, but reserved for the eyes of painters and poets, who have a sort of second sight, and so are always seeing it and using it for a background. Athens is a very new city, with new streets and new public buildings, and a new King and Royal Palace. It is like a little miniature. There is a little army, chiefly composed of officers, and a miniature cabinet, and a beautiful miniature university, and everybody knows everybody else; and when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard turns out and blows a bugle, and so all Athens, which is always sitting at the cafés around the square of the palace, nods its head and says, "The Queen is going for a drive," or, "Her Majesty has returned early to-day," and then continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mustache and to sip its coffee. Modern Athens tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of thought. The men have adopted his costume, and the women wear little flat curls like the French ladies inLe Figaro, and peaked bonnets and high heels.
THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENSTHE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS
The national costume of the Greeks is taken from the Albanians, but it is much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Like all national costumes, it is only worn, except forpolitical effect and before a camera, by the lower classes, and also by three regiments of the army. You see it in the streets, but it is not so universally popular as one would suppose from the pictures of Athens in the illustrated papers and by the photographs in the shop-windows. It is a most remarkable costume, and as widely different from the flowing robe and short skirt of the early Greeks as men in accordion petticoats and heavy white tights and a Zouave jacket must evidently be. In the country it still obtains, and it is the farmers and peasants and their wives and the soldiers who supply the picturesque element of dress to the streets of the city.
It is an inscrutable problem why, with all the national costumes in the world to choose and pick from, the world should have decided upon the dress of the Frank, that is, of the foreigner—ourselves. In Spain the peasants have discarded their knickerbockers and short jackets, even in the country, for the long trousers and ill-fitting ready-made clothing of a French "sweater," and the Moors cover their robes with overcoats from Manchester, and the Arabs and Chinese and Swiss and Turks are giving up the picturesque garments that are comfortable and becoming to them, and look exceedingly ugly and uncomfortable in our own modern garb, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable of national costumes yet devised by men or tailors. If you judge by the uniforms of the army of officers and by the dress of the women of Athens, you wouldthink you were in a French city and among French people. It seems a pity that this should be so; that Athens, of all cities, should be built of Italian villas, inhabited by people who ape the French, and governed by a King from Denmark; still, they did not make a success of it when they tried, fifty years ago, to govern themselves. It is perhaps hardly fair to expect the Greeks, or even the Athenians, to live up to the great rock and the monuments that crown it, and the people of Greece are no doubt as fine as those of other little kingdoms or principalities scattered about Europe; but then the other kingdoms and principalities have not the history of early Greece to call their own nor the Acropolis to look up to.
ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMANALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN
ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMANALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN
The rock of the Acropolis is hardly more a part of modern Greece than the Rock of Gibraltar is a part of Spain. Geographically it is, but it belongs as much to the visitor as to the native, so little inspiration has he apparently drawn fromit, and so little has it served to bring out in him to-day those qualities that made demigods of his ancestors. I think I represent the average intelligence, and yet at this moment I cannot think of any Greek within the last hundred years who has gained world-wide renown, either as a sculptor, an artist, a soldier, a writer of comedies and satires, a statesman, nor even as an archæologist; the very historians of Greece and the exponents of its secrets and the most distinguished of its excavators are of other countries. They have many heroes of their own; you see their portraits or their photographs in every shop-window; but they are not as familiar to you as the faces and histories of those other Greeks who sighed because there were no more worlds, and whose fame has lasted long after the other worlds were discovered. One would think that some young Greek, on arising in the morning and seeing the Acropolis against the sky, would say to himself, "To-day I shall do something worthy of that." And were he to say that oftenenough, and try to live up to the fortress and the temple above him, he might help to make Greece in this known world what she was in the smaller world of her day of glory. It is not because the world has grown and given her more with which to compete that she has fallen into lesser and lesser significance; for though the world has increased in latitude and longitude, it has not yet carved another Hermes like that of Praxiteles; and though it has added three continents since his day, it has never equalled in marbles the fluttering draperies of the Flying Victory, nor the carvings over the doorway of the Erechtheum.
GREEK PEASANTGREEK PEASANT
ALBANIAN PEASANTALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS
But, as far as in him lies, the Greek has endeavored to copy the traditions of his ancestors. He holds Olympic games in the ancient arena which King George has had excavated, and if victorious receives a wreath of wild olives from the hands of the King; and he builds the new market where the old market stood, and the new military hospital as near as is possible to thehospital of Æsculapius. But he cannot restore to the market-place that very human citizen who cast in his shell against Aristides because he was aweary of hearing him called the Just; nor can either his games or his hospital bring back the perfect figure and health of the men whose figures and profiles have set the model for all time. He has, however, retained the Greek language, which is very creditable to him, as it is a language one learns only after much difficulty, and then forgets at once. He even goes so faras to put up the names of the streets in Greek, which strikes the bewildered tourist trying to find his way back to his hotel as a trifle pedantic, and he prints his daily newspaper in this same tongue. This is, perhaps, going a little too far, as it leaves you in some doubt as to whether you have been reading of the Panama scandal or a reprint on the battle of Marathon.
Baron Sina, a Greek banker, has shown the most public-spirited and patriotic generosity, and taste as well, in erecting the buildings of the university at his own expense and giving them to the city. They are reproductions in many ways of different parts of the temples of the Acropolis in miniature. The Polytechnic is almost an exact copy of the front of the Parthenon. There is a picture of it from a photograph given in this article, but it can supply no idea of the beauty of the modern reproduction of this temple. The lines and measurements are the same in degree; and the Polytechnic, besides, is colored and gilded as was the original Parthenon, and for the first time makes you understand how brilliant reds and beautiful blues and gold and black on marble can be combined with the marble's purity and help rather than cheapen it. It is a lesson in loveliness, and is as wonderful and brilliantly beautiful a building as the marble and gold monument to the Prince Consort in Hyde Park is vulgar and atrocious. If this copy in miniature, this working model of the Parthenon, moves one as it does, it can be understood how great must be the strength andpurity of the Parthenon, even in ruins, with its gilt washed to a dull brown and its colors and bass-reliefs stripped from its pediment. I shall certainly not attempt to describe it.
POLYTECHNIC SCHOOLPOLYTECHNIC SCHOOL
There are very few tourists who visit Athens in proportion to those who visit far less momentous ruins; thousands go to Rome and see the Colosseum, to Egypt and view the storied walls of the great rude temples along the Nile, and as many more make the tour of the English cathedral towns; but in Athens it is almost difficult to find a guide. There are not more than a half-dozen, I am sure, in the whole city, and the Acropolis is yours if you wish, and you are often as much alone as though you had been the first to climb its sides. I do not mean by this that it is neglected, or that relic-hunters may chip at it or carry away pieces of its handiwork, or broken bits of the Turkish shells that have shattered it, but the guards are unobtrusive, and you are free to wander in and out in this forest of marble and fallen trunks of columns as though you were the ghost of some Athenian citizen revisiting the scenes of his former life.
There is no question that half of the pleasure you receive in wandering over the top of this great wind-blown rock, with the surrounding snow-touched mountains on a level with your eye, and the great temples rearing above you or lying broken at your feet, magnificent even there, is due to your seeing them alone, to the fact that no guide's parrot-like volubility harasses you, noguard's scornful gloom chills your enthusiasm. The great bay of turquoise-blue and the green fields and the bunches of cactus and groves of dark olive-trees below are unspoiled by modern innovations, and the hills are still dotted with sheep and shepherds, as they were in the days of Sappho.
AN OLD ATHENIANAN OLD ATHENIAN OF THE PRESENT DAY
Overhead is the blue sky, with the ivory columns between, far below you is the steep naked rock, or, on the other hand, the two semicircles of marble seats cushioned with velvet moss and carpeted with daisies and violets, and beyond the limits of the yellow town and its red roofs and dark green gardens stretches the green plain until it touches the sea, or is blocked by Mount Hymettus or Mount Pentelicus, beyond which latter lies the field of Marathon. Sitting on the edge of the rock, you can imagine the actors strutting out into the theatre below, and the acquiescent chorus chanting its surprise or horror, and almost see the bent shoulders and heads of the people filling the half-circle and leaning forward to catch each word of the play as it comes to them through the actors' masks.
A GREEK SHEPHERDA GREEK SHEPHERD
Sounds, no matter how far afield, drift to you drowsily, like the voice of one reading aloud on a summer's day—the bleating of the sheep in the valley where Plato argued, and the jangling of a goat's bell, or the laughter of children flying kites on the Pnyx, a quarter of a mile away. And beyond the reach of sound is the Ægean Sea weltering in the sun, with little three-cornered sails, like tops, or a great vessel drawing a chalk-line after it through the still surface of the water. All things are possible at such a time in this place. You can almost hear the bees on Mount Hymettus, and you would receive the advance of a Centaur as calmly as Alice noted the approach of the White Rabbit. You believe in nymphs and satyrs. They have their homes there in those caves, and in the thick green, almost black, woods at the base of the Parnes range, and you love the bravery of St. Paul, who dared to doubt such things when he stood on the rock at your feet and told the men of Athens that they were in many things too superstitious. It is something to have seen the ribs cut in the rock on the top of the Acropoliswhich kept the wheels of the chariots from slipping when the Panathenaic procession moved along the Via Sacra to the Eleusinian mysteries, to have looked upon the caryatides of the Erechtheum, and to have wanted back as a lost part of your own self, for the time being, the Elgin marbles. When Napoleon stole the Venus of Milo he placed her in the Louvre, where every one will see her sooner or later; for if he is good he goes to Paris when he dies, and if he is bad he is sure to go there in his lifetime. Butwhohas ever been to the British Museum? One would as soon think of visiting Pentonville prison. And how do the marbles look under the soot-stained windows or the gray of London fog? Like the few Lord Elgin did not want, and that stand out like ivory in their proper height against the soft sky that knows and loves them? When the people of Great Britain have returned the Elgin marbles to Greece, and the Rock of Gibraltar to Spain, and the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, and Egypt to the Egyptians, they will be a proud and haughty people, and will be able to hold their heads as high as any one.
One cannot help feeling that the King of Greece has a much greater responsibility than he knows. Other monarchs must look after their boundaries; he must not only look after his boundaries, but his sky-line. Another such affront to good taste as the observatory on the Hill of the Nymphs, and the sky-line of Athens will be unrecognizable. And the tall chimneysat the Piræus are not half as attractive to the view as the spars of the ships. It is much better not to have manufactories that must have chimneys than to spoil a view which no other kingdom can equal. Any king can put up a chimney; very few are given the care of an Acropolis; and if the King and Queen of Greece wish to be remembered as kindly by the rest of the world as they are loved dearly by their adopted people, they will guard the treasure put in their keeping, and sweep observatories from sacred hills, and continue to limit the guides on the Acropolis, and so win the gratitude of a civilized world.
A little Italian steamer drew cautiously away from the Piræus when the waters of the bay were quite black and the quays looked like a row of foot-lights in front of the dark curtain of the night. She grazed the anchor chains of H. M. S. theColossus, where that ship of war's broad white deck lay level with the water, as heavy and solid as a stone pier. She seemed to rise like an island of iron from the very bottom of the bay. Her sailors, as broad and heavy and clean as the decks, raised their heads from their pipes as we passed under the glare of the man-of-war's electric lights, and a bugle call came faintly from somewhere up in the bow. It sounded as though it were a quarter of a mile away. Our lower deck was packed with Greeks and Albanians and Turks, lying as closely together on the hard planks as cartridges in the front of a Circassian's overcoat. They were very dirty and very handsome, in rakish little black silk pill-box caps, with red and gold tops, and the initials "H. I." workedin the embroidery; their canvas breeches were as baggy and patched and muddy as those of a football-player, and their sleeveless jackets and double waistcoats of red and gold made them look like a uniformed soldiery that had seen very hard service. Priests of the Greek Church, with long hair and black formless robes, and hats like stovepipes with the brim around the upper end, paraded the narrow confines of the second cabin, and German tourists with red guide-books, and the Italian ship's officers with a great many medals and very bad manners, stamped up and down the main-deck and named the shadowy islands that rose from the sea and dropped out of sight again as we steamed past them.
In the morning the islands had disappeared altogether, and we were between high banks—higher than, but not so steep as the Palisades; rows of little scrubby trees ran along their fronts in lateral lines, and at their base mud forts with mud barracks and thatched roofs pointed little cannon at us from every jutting rock. We were so near that one could have hit the face of the high hills with a stone. These were the Dardanelles, the banks that nature has set between the Sea of Marmora and the Mediterranean to protect Constantinople from Mediterranean squadrons. We pass between these banks for hours, or between the high bank of Roumelia on one side and the low hilly country of Asia where Troy once stood on the other, until, at sunset, we are halted in the narrowest strait of the Dardanelles, between the Castle ofAsia and the Castle of Europe, "the Lock of the Sea"—that sea of which Gibraltar is the key. That night we cross through the Sea of Marmora, and by sunrise are at Constantinople.
Constantinople is such a long word, and so few of the people you know have visited it in comparison with those who have wintered at Cairo or at Rome, or who have spent a season at Vienna, or taken music-lessons in Berlin, that you approach it with a mind prepared for surprises and with the hope of the unexpected. I had expected that the heart of the Ottoman Empire would be outwardly a brilliant and flashing city of gilded domes and minarets, a cluster of colored house fronts rising from the dancing waters of the Bosporus, and with the banks lined with great white palaces among gardens of green trees. There are more gilded domes in New York city and in Boston than in Constantinople. In New York there are three, and in Boston there is the State House, which looks very fine indeed from the new bridge across the Charles when the river is blocked with gray ice, and a setting sun is throwing a light on the big yellow globe. But Constantinople is all white and gray; the palaces that line the Bosporus are of a brilliant white stucco, and the mosques like monster turtles, which give the city its chief distinction, are a dull white. In the Turkish quarter the houses are more sombre still, of a peculiar black wood, and built like the old log forts in which our great-great-grandfathers took refuge from the Indians—square buildingswith an overhanging story from which those inside could fire down upon the enemy below. The jutting balcony on the Turkish houses is for the less serious purpose of allowing the harem to look down upon the passers-by.
GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLEGENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE
Constantinople is a fair-weather city, and needs the sun and the blue sky and the life of the waters about it, which give to the city its real individuality. It misses in winter the pleasure-yachts of the summer months, the white uniforms of the thousands of boatmen, and the brighter dressing of the awnings and flags of the ships and steamers. But the waters about Constantinople are its best part, and are fuller and busier and brighter than either those around the Battery or those below the Thames Embankment, and by standing on its wide wooden bridge, over which more people pass in a day than over any other (save London Bridge) in the world, one can see a procession of all the nations of the East.
Constantinople is a much more primitive city than one would expect the largest of all Eastern cities to be. It impresses you as a city without any municipal control whatsoever, and you come upon a building with the stamp of the municipal palace upon it with as much surprise as you would feel in finding an underwriter's office at the north pole. In many ways it is the most primitive city that I have ever been in. In all that pertains to the Sultan, to the religion of the people, of which he is the head, and to the army, the recognition due them is rigidly and impressively observed.But in what regards the local life of the people there seems to be absolutely no interest and no responsibility. There is no such absolute power in Europe, not excepting that of the Czar or of the young Emperor, as is that exercised by the Sultan; and the mosques of the faithful are guarded and decorated and held more highly in reverence than are many churches of a more civilized people; and the army impresses you as one you would much prefer to lead than one from which you would elect to run away. But the comfort of the inhabitants of Constantinople is little considered. There is nothing that one can see of what we call public spirit, unless building a mosque and calling it after yourself, in a city already supplied with the most magnificent of such temples, can be called public-spirited. Of course one does not go to Constantinople to see electric lights and asphalt pavements, nor to gather statistics on the poor-rate, but it is interesting to find people so nearly in touch with the world in many things, and so far away from it in others. As long as I do not have to live in Constantinople, I find its lack of municipal spirit quite as interesting a feature of the city as its mosques.
ONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUSONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS
Constantinople, for example, is a city with as large a population as has Berlin or Vienna, and its fire department is what you see in the illustration accompanying this chapter. They are very handsome men, as you can note for yourself, and very smart-looking, but when they go to a fire they make a bargain with the owner of the buildingbefore they attempt to save his property. The great fire-tower in this capital of the Ottoman Empire is in Galata, and from it watchmen survey the city with glasses, and at the first sight of a blazing roof one of them runs down the tower and races through the uneven streets, calling out the fact that a house is burning, and where that house may be. Each watchman he meets takes up the cry, and continues calling out that the house is burning, even though the house is three miles away, until it burns down or is built up again, or the watchman is retired for long service and pensioned. Besides these amateur firemen there are two real fire companies, but they can do little in a city of 880,000 people.
The police who guard Constantinople at night are an equally primitive body of men. They carry a heavy club, about five feet long and as thick as a man's wrist, and with this they beat the stones in the streets to assure people that they are attending strictly to their work, and are not sleeping in doorways. The result of this is that no one can get to sleep, and all evil-minded persons can tell exactly where the night-watchman is, and so keep out of his way. The watchman under my window seemed to act on the idea of the gentleman who, on taking his first trip on a sleeping-car, declared that if he couldn't sleep no one else should, and acted accordingly.
There is nothing, so far as I can see, in which the Oriental delights as much as he does in making a noise. It is most curious to find a whole peoplewithout nerves, who cannot talk without shouting, and who cannot shout without giving you the idea that they are in great pain, and that unless relief comes promptly they will die, and that it will be your fault. Those of them who sell bread or fruits or fish or beads, or whatever it may be, in the streets, bellow rather than shout, or cry in sharp, agonizing shrieks, high and nasal and fierce. They apparently never "move on." They always meet under your window or at the corners of a street, and there all shout at once, and no one pays the least attention to them. They might be lamp-posts or minarets, for all the notice they receive. I can imagine no fate or torture so awful as to be ill in Constantinople and to have to lie helpless and listen to the street cries, to the tin horns of the men who run ahead of the streetcars—which incidentally gives you an idea of the speed of these cars—and to the snarling and barking of the thousands of street dogs.
A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLEA FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE
There are three or four intensely interesting ceremonies and many show-places in Constantinople which are unlike anything of the same sort in any other city. Apart from these and the bazars, which are very wonderful, there is nothing in the city itself which makes even the Oriental seek it in preference to his own mountains or plains or native village. Constantinople, so far as its population is to be considered, is standing still. It impresses you as stagnant before your statistical friend or the oldest member of the diplomatic corps or the oldest inhabitant tellsthe Frank's finding a long residence in Cairo possible, or in pretty little Athens, where the boulevards and the classics are so strangely jumbled, but one cannot understand a man's settling down in Constantinople. Where there are no women there can be no court, and the few rich Greek residents and still fewer of the pashas and the diplomats make the society of the city. Even these last find it far from gay, for it so happens that the ambassadors are all either bachelors, widowers, or the husbands of invalid wives, and the result is a society which depends largely on a very smart club for its amusement. In the wintertime, when the snow and rain sweep over the three hills, and the solitary street of Galata is a foot deep in slush and mud, and the china stoves radiate a candle-like heat in a room built to let in all the air possible, I can imagine few less desirable places than the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This is in the winter only; as I have said, it is a fair-weather city, and I did not see it at its best.
There are three things to which one is taken in Constantinople—the mosque of St. Sophia, the treasures of the Sultan, and the Sultan going to pray in his own private mosque. The Sultan's own mosque is situated conveniently near his palace, not more than a few hundred feet distant. Once every Friday he rides this distance, and once a year journeys as far as the mosque of St. Sophia. With these outings he is content, andon no other occasions does he show himself to his people or leave his palace. This is what it is to be a sovereign of many countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the head of the Mussulman religion; and the ruler of nations and lands conquered by your ancestors, of which you see less than a donkey-boy in Cairo or the owner of a caïque on the Bosporus. We used to sing in college,