Part 7

Toward sunset we descended to the Golden Horn, and, taking our places in a four-oared käik, had scarcely pronounced the word “Galata!” before the graceful little boat was already in mid-stream. Of all varieties of boats which skim over the surface of the water, there is certainly none so delightful as the käik. Longer than the gondola, but narrower and lighter, carved, painted, and gilded, it is without seats or rudder; you sit in the bottom upon a cushion or bit of carpet, only your head and shoulders visible above the sides; both ends are shaped alike, so that it can be propelled in either direction, and it is easily upset by any sudden movement. Shooting out from the shore like an arrow from the bow, it seems to fly like a swallow, barely touching the water; overtakes and passes all other craft, and disappears in the distance, its bright and varied colors reflected in the waves like a dolphin flying from its pursuer. Our oarsmen were a couple of good-looking young Turks dressed in white trousers, light blue shirts, and red fezzes, with bare arms and legs--a pair of lusty athletes of twenty or so, bronzed, clean, cheerful, and frank. At each stroke the boat bounds forward its whole length. Other käiks fly by, hardly seen before they are lost sight of; we pass flocks of ducks; large covered barges filled with veiled women; clouds of birds circle over our heads; from time to time the tall sea-grass shuts out everything from view.

Seen thus from the other end of the Golden Horn and at that hour, the city presents an entirely new aspect. The Asiatic coast, owing to the bend of the shore, is entirely hidden, Seraglio Point shutting in the Golden Horn as though it were a great lake. The hills on either bank seem to have grown larger, and Stambul, far, far away, is a blending of delicate blues and grays, huge and indistinct. Like an enchanted city, it seems to float upon the water and lose itself among the clouds. The käik flies on; the two banks recede, inlet after inlet, grove after grove, suburb after suburb; our surroundings widen out. The colors of the city grow dim, the horizon seems to be on fire, the water is full of purple and gold reflections; on and on, until at last a profound lethargy steals over us, a sense of boundless content, in which we remain silent and happy, until finally the boatman is obliged to call in our ears, “_Monsù! arrivar!_” before we can arouse ourselves sufficiently to know where we are.

THE GREAT BAZÂR.

After giving a superficial glance over all of Constantinople, including both banks of the Golden Horn, it seemed now time to penetrate into the heart of Stambul, to explore that world-embracing, perpetual fair, that hidden city, dim, mysterious, crammed with associations, wonders, and treasures, which, extending from the Nùri Osmaniyeh to the Serasker hill, is called The Great Bazâr.

We will start from the square in front of the Validêh Sultan mosque. Here the epicurean reader may like possibly to pause long enough to inspect the Baluk Bazâr, that fish-market famous ever since the days of thrifty old Andronicus Palæologus, who, we are told, met the entire culinary expenses of his court with the profits made from fish caught only along the walls of the city, where, indeed, they are still most plentiful, and, seen on one of its principal days, the Baluk Bazâr would afford as succulent and tempting a subject for the author of the _Ventre de Paris_ as one of those well-covered tables one sees in old Dutch pictures. The venders, almost without exception Turks, are drawn up all around the square behind their fish, which are spread out on mats stretched upon the ground or else on long tables, around which a crowd of customers and an army of dogs fight for precedence. Here may be found the delicious mullet of the Bosphorus, four times the size it attains to in our waters; oysters from the island of Marmora, which the Greeks and Armenians alone understand how to cook properly, broiling them on the live coals; sprats and tunnies, the salting of which is an industry confined almost entirely to the Jews; anchovies, which the Turks have learned how to put up in the Marseillaise fashion; sardines, with which Constantinople provides the entire Archipelago; the _loufer_, that most delicious of all the Bosphorus fish, which is caught by moonlight; mackerel from the Black Sea, which make seven invasions successively into the waters of the city, accompanied by a noise so loud that it can be heard in the towns on both shores; the colossal _isdaurid_; enormous sword-fish; turbots, or, as they are called by the Turks, _kalkau-baluk_; shellfish, and a thousand and one other varieties of the smaller kinds of fish which dart and frisk about from one to the other of the two seas, chased by dolphins and _falianos_, and preyed upon by innumerable kingfishers, from whose very mouths the booty is often snatched by the _piombini_.

Cooks from great houses, old Mussulman bons-vivants, slaves, and young employés from the various restaurants surround the tables, examine the fish with a meditative air, bargain in monosyllables, and walk off, each carrying his purchase suspended by a bit of twine, grave, taciturn, self-contained as though it were the head of an enemy. By mid-day the square is deserted and the venders have repaired to the various cafés in the neighborhood, where they will sit with their backs against the wall and the mouthpiece of a narghileh between their lips, in a sort of waking sleep, until sunset.

To reach the Great Bazâr we take a street opening out of the fish-market, so narrow that the projecting parts of the opposite houses almost touch one another; on either side are rows of low, ill-lighted tobacconist shops, that “fourth support of the tent of voluptuousness,” coming after coffee, opium, and wine, or “the fourth of pleasure’s couches,” as it is sometimes called. Like coffee, tobacco has been blasted by imperial edicts and denounced by the _mufti_, with the usual result of adding fresh zest to its use and making it a fruitful source of tumult and punishment; and now this entire street is devoted to traffic in it alone. The tobacco is displayed upon long shelves in pyramids and round piles, each one surmounted by a lemon. All kinds are to be found here: _latakia_ from Antioch; Seraglio tobacco as fine and smooth as spun silk; tobacco for pipe and cigarette of every grade of strength and flavor, from that smoked by the gigantic porter of Galata to that used by the indolent _odalisques_ of the Seraglio to put them to sleep. There is the _tombeki_, so powerful that it would set the head of even a veteran smoker spinning did its fumes not reach his mouth first purified by the water of the narghileh, and which is kept in glass jars like a drug. The tobacconists are all Greeks or Armenians, with ceremonious manners, somewhat inclined to give themselves airs. The customers assemble before the shops in groups. Many of them are employés of the various foreign ambassadors or of the Seraskerat, and occasionally one sees some personage of importance. It is a great place for gossip of all kinds; politics are discussed; the doings of the great world talked over; and merely to walk through this little, retired, aristocratic bazâr leaves a strong impression upon one’s mind of the joys to be obtained from conversation _and_ tobacco.

We now pass beneath an old arched doorway festooned with vines, and come out opposite a large stone edifice, from which opens a long, straight, covered street lined with dimly-lighted shops and filled with people, packing-boxes, and heaps of merchandise. Entering this, we are immediately assailed by an odor so powerful as to fairly knock one down: this is the Egyptian Bazâr, where are deposited all the wares of India, Syria, Egypt, and Arabia, which later on, converted into essences, pastilles, powders, and ointments, serve to color little hands and faces, perfume apartments and baths and breaths and beards, reinvigorate worn-out pashas, dull the senses of unhappy married people, stupefy smokers, and spread dreams, oblivion, and insensibility throughout the whole of the vast city. After going but a short distance in this bazâr your head begins to feel dull and heavy, and you get out of it as fast as you can; but the effect of that hot, close atmosphere and those penetrating odors clings long to your clothing, and remains for all time in your memory as one of the most vivid and characteristic impressions of the East.

After escaping from the Egyptian Bazâr you pass among a crowd of noisy coppersmiths’ shops, Turkish restaurants, from which issue endless nauseous smells, and all manner of wretched booths, shops, and stands, dark little dens containing trash of all sorts, and finally come to the Great Bazâr itself, not, however, before you have been obliged to defend yourself from a vigorous attack.

About a hundred feet from the main entrance there lie in ambush like so many cutthroats the agents or middlemen of the merchants and the agents of the agents. These fellows are so well up in their business that at a single glance they learn not only that this is your first visit to the bazâr, but usually make so clever a guess as to your nationality that they rarely make a mistake in the language which they first address you in.

Approaching, fez in hand, they proceed, with an engaging smile, to offer their services.

There usually then follows a conversation something like this: the traveller, declining the proffered service, remarks,

“I do not propose to make any purchases.”

“Oh, sir, what difference does that make? I only want to show you the bazâr.”

“I don’t care to see the bazâr.”

“But I will escort you gratis.”

“I don’t wish to be escorted gratis.”

“Very well; then I will just go to the end of the street with you, merely to give you certain points, which you will find very useful some other day when you come to buy.”

“But suppose I don’t want to even hear you talk about buying?”

“Very well, then, let us talk about something else. How long have you been in Constantinople? Is your hotel comfortable? Have you gotten permits to visit the mosques?”

“But when I tell you that I don’t want to talk about anything--that I wish, in short, to be alone--”

“All right; then I will leave you alone, and follow a dozen steps behind you.”

“But why should you follow me at all?”

“Merely to prevent you from being cheated in the shops.”

“But I tell you I am not going into the shops.”

“Well, then, to save you from annoyance on the street.”

And so you must finally either pause to take breath and collect your ideas, or else yield and allow him to accompany you.

There is nothing about the exterior of the Great Bazâr to either attract the eye or give the faintest idea of what it is within. It is an immense stone edifice in the Byzantine style, irregular in form and surrounded by high gray walls, lighted by means of hundreds of small lead-covered domes in the roof. The principal entrance is through a high, vaulted doorway of no architectural pretensions. Outside, in the neighboring streets, no sounds can be heard of what is going on within, and half a dozen steps away from the entrance one might easily believe that only silence and solitude reigned within those prison-like walls; once inside, however, this delusion is quickly dispelled. You find yourself not in a building at all, but in a labyrinth of streets with vaulted roofs, lined with columns and carved pilasters--a veritable city, with mosques and fountains, thoroughfares and open squares, pervaded with the dim, subdued light of the forest, where no ray or gleam of sunshine ever penetrates, and thronged with immense crowds of people. Every street is a bazâr, generally leading out of the principal thoroughfare--a street covered by a roof composed of white and black stone arches and decorated with arabesques like the nave of a mosque. Processions of horses, camels, and carriages pass up and down the dimly-lighted streets, in the midst of the throng of foot-passengers, with a deafening, reverberating noise. On all sides attempts are being made by word and gesture to attract your attention. The Greek merchant hails you with loud, imperious voice, while his Armenian rival, by far the greater knave of the two, assumes a modest, retiring manner, addressing you in soft, obsequious tones; the Jew murmurs gently in your ear; while the Turk, silent and reserved as ever, squats on a cushion in his doorway and contents himself with addressing you solely with his eye, leaving the results to Fate. Ten voices appeal to you at once: “Monsieur! captain! caballero! signore! eccelenza! kyrie! milor!” Down every cross-street you catch glimpses of new vistas, long lines of columns and pilasters, corridors, other streets opening out of these again, arcades and galleries, confused far-off views of new bazârs, shops, merchandise suspended on the walls and from the roofs, bustling merchants, heavily-laden porters, figures of veiled women, noisy groups, which constantly form, dissolve, and form again--a mingling of sights, sounds, colors, and movement to set one’s head in a whirl. The confusion, however, is only apparent: in reality, this enormous mart is arranged with as much system and order as a barracks, and it takes but a few hours for one to become sufficiently at home in it to find his way to any object without difficulty or the help of a dragoman. Every separate kind of merchandise has its own especial quarter, its little street, corridor, and square; there are a hundred small bazârs opening one into another like the rooms in some vast suite of apartments, and each bazâr is at the same time a museum, a promenade, a market, and a theatre, in which you can look at all without buying anything, can drink your cup of coffee, enjoy the open air, chat in a dozen different languages, and make eyes at the prettiest girls to be found in the East.

Dropping at random into any one of these bazârs, half a day goes by without your so much as knowing it: take, for instance, the bazâr of stuffs and costumes. Here are displayed such a dazzling array of beautiful and rare objects that you at once lose your head, to say nothing of your purse, and the chances are that, should you in any unguarded moment be tempted to satisfy some small caprice, you will end by having to telegraph home for assistance. You pass between pyramids and heaps of Bagdad brocades; rugs from Caramania; Brusa silks; India linens; muslins from Bengal; shawls from Madras; Indian and Persian cashmeres: the variegated fabrics of Cairo; gold-embroidered cushions; silken veils striped with silver; striped blue and red gauze scarfs, so light and transparent as to look like clouds; stuffs of every variety of color and design, in which blue and green, crimson and yellow, all the colors which disagree most violently, are combined and blended together in a harmony so perfect and exquisite that you can only gaze in open-mouthed admiration; table-covers of all sizes upon whose background of red or white cloth are outlined intricate silken designs of flowers, verses from the Koran, and imperial monograms, which it would take a day to examine, like a wall in the Alhambra. Here one has as good an opportunity to see and admire, one by one, each of the various articles which go to make up the costume of a Turkish lady as though it were the alcove of a harem, from the green or orange or purple mantles which are thrown over everything in public down to the silken chemise, gold-embroidered kerchief, and even the satin girdle upon which no eye of man other than that of the husband or eunuch is ever allowed to fall. Here may be seen red-velvet caftans edged with ermine and covered with stars; yellow satin bodices; trousers of rose-colored silk; white damask undervests thickly covered with gold flowers; wedding veils sparkling with silver spangles; little greencloth jackets edged with swan’s down; Greek, Armenian, Circassian costumes of a thousand fantastic shapes, so thickly covered with ornamentation as to be as hard and glittering as breastplates; and mixed in with all this magnificence the sombre, commonplace, serviceable stuffs of England and France, producing much the same effect upon the mind as would the sight of a tailor’s bill introduced into the pages of a volume of poems. If there is a woman anywhere in the world whom you care for, you cannot walk through this bazâr without longing to be a millionaire or else feeling the passion for plunder blaze up within you, if only for a moment.

To free yourself from these unhallowed desires you have but turn a little to one side and you find yourself in the pipe-bazâr, where the soul is gently conducted back to more tranquil pastures. Here you come upon collections of cherry, maple, rosewood, and jessamine pipes, and of yellow amber mouth-pieces from the Baltic Sea, polished until they shine like crystal, and of every grade of color and transparency, some of them set with diamonds or rubies; pipes from Cæsarea, their stems wrapped with silk and gold thread; tobacco-pouches from Lybia decorated with many-colored lozenges and gorgeous embroidery; silver, steel, and Bohemian glass narghilehs of exquisite antique shapes, engraved and chased and studded with precious stones, their morocco tubes glittering with rings and gilding, all wrapped in raw cotton and under the constant surveillance of two glittering eyes whose gaze never wavers; but let any one short of a vizier or a pasha who has spent years in bleeding some province of Asia Minor approach, and the pupils dilate in such a manner as to cause the modest inquiry as to the price to die away upon one’s lips. Here the purchaser must be some envoy of the sultana anxious to present a slight token of her appreciation to the pliable grand vizier; or a high court dignitary, who on assuming the cares of his new office is obliged, in order to maintain his dignity, to expend the sum of fifty thousand francs upon a rack of pipes; or a newly-appointed foreign ambassador who on departing for some European court wishes to take to its royal master a magnificent memento of Stambul. The Turk of modest means gazes mournfully upon these treasures and passes by on the other side, paraphrasing for his consolation that saying of the Prophet, “The flames of the infernal regions shall rage like the bellowing of the camel in the stomach of him who shall _smoke a pipe_ of gold or silver.”

Passing from here into the perfumery bazâr, we once more find ourselves beset with temptations. It is one of the most distinctively Oriental in character of all the bazârs, and its wares were very dear to the heart of the Prophet, who classes together women, children, and perfumes as the three things which gave him the greatest pleasure. Here are to be had those famous Seraglio pastilles designed to perfume kisses; packages of the scented gum prepared by the hardy daughters of Chio to be used in strengthening the gums of delicate Mussulman women; exquisite essence of jessamine and of bergamont and powerful attar of roses, enclosed in red-velvet, gold-embroidered cases, and sold at prices that make one’s hair stand on end; here can be bought ointment for the eyebrows, antimony for the eyes, henne for the nails, soap to soften the Syrian beauty’s skin, and pills to prevent hair from growing on the face of the too masculine Circassian; cedar and orange-water, scent-bags of musk, sandal oil, ambergris, aloes to perfume cups and pipes--a myriad of different powders, pomatums, and waters with fanciful names and destined to uses undreamed of in the prosaic West, each one representing in itself some amorous fancy or seductive caprice, the very refinement of voluptuousness, and exhaling, all together, an odor at once penetrating and sensual, and dreamily suggestive of great languid eyes, soft caressing hands, and the subdued murmur of sighs and embraces.

These fancies are quickly dispelled on turning into the jewelry bazâr, a narrow, dark, deserted street, flanked by wretched-looking little shops, the last places on earth where one would expect to find the fabulous treasures which, as a matter of fact, they do contain. The jewels are kept in oaken coffers, hooped and bound with iron, which stand in the front of the shops under the ever-watchful gaze of the merchant, some old Turk or Hebrew with long beard, and piercing eyes which seem to penetrate into the very recesses of your pocket and examine the contents of your purse; occasionally one or another of them, standing erect before his door, as you pass close by first regards you fixedly in the eye, and then with a rapid movement flashes before your face a diamond of Golconda, a sapphire from Ormus, or a ruby of Gramschid, which at the slightest negative movement on your part is as quickly withdrawn from sight. Others, circulating slowly about, stop you in the middle of the street, and, after casting a suspicious glance all around, draw forth from their bosoms a dirty bit of rag in whose folds is hidden a fine Brazilian topaz or Macedonian turquoise, watching like some tempting demon to see its effect upon you. Others, again, after scrutinizing you closely, come to the conclusion that you have not the precious-stones look, as it were, and do not trouble themselves to offer you anything, and you may wear the face of a saint or the airs of a Crœsus, and it will not avail to open those oaken boxes. The opal necklaces, emerald stars and pendants, the coronets and crescents of pearls of Ophir, the dazzling heaps of beryls, agates, garnets, of crystals, aventurine, and lapis lazuli remain inexorably hidden from the eyes of the curious, provided he has no money, or, at all events, from those of a poor devil of an Italian writer. The utmost such an one can accomplish is to ask the price of a coral or sandal-wood or amber _tespi_ which he runs through his fingers, as the Turk does, to pass away the time in the intervals of his forced labors.