Part 9

In other parts of the Great Bazâr it is as well for a stranger not to venture unless he is accompanied by a dragoman or one of the shopkeepers. Those are the interior parts of the various districts into which this strange city is divided--the islands, as it were, about which wind and twist the rapid currents of streets and byways. If it is a difficult matter to keep from losing your way among the main thoroughfares, in here it is quite impossible. From passage-ways scarcely wider than a man’s shoulders, where it is necessary to stoop to avoid striking your head, you come out upon tiny courtyards encumbered with bales and boxes, where hardly so much as a single ray of light can penetrate. Feeling your way down flights of wooden steps, you come to other courts lighted only by lanterns, from which you descend below ground, or, climbing up again into what passes for the light of day, stumble with bent head through long, winding corridors, beneath damp roofs and between black and moss-grown walls, to come at last upon some small hidden doorway, and suddenly find yourself exactly where you started. Everywhere shadowy forms are seen coming and going; dusky shapes stand immovable in dark corners, outlines of persons handling merchandise or counting money; lights which flash ahead of you at one moment, and the next, disappear; a sound of hurrying footsteps, of low, eager voices, coming from you don’t know where; reflections thrown from unseen lights; suspicious encounters; strange odors like those one might expect to escape from a witch’s cave; and apparently no possible means of escape from it all. The dragoman is very apt to conduct his victim through these quarters on his way to those shops, usually somewhat apart, which contain a little of everything, like Great Bazârs in miniature or a superior sort of second-hand shop, extremely curious and interesting, but extremely perilous as well, since they contain such a variety of rare and attractive objects as to woo the money out of the pocket of the veriest miser. The shopkeepers here are great solemn knaves, thoroughly well versed in every art appertaining to their business, and, polyglot like their brothers of the trade, have a certain dramatic power which they employ in the most entertaining manner to tempt people to buy, sometimes rising to the level of genuinely good acting. Their shops usually consist of dark little holes cluttered up with boxes and chests of drawers, where lights have to be lit in order to see anything, and there is barely enough space to turn around in. After displaying a few trifles inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, some bits of Chinese porcelain, a Japanese vase or two, and some other things of the same sort, the shopkeeper informs you with an impressive air that he sees what sort of person you are, and will now bring out something especially suited to you. He then proceeds to pull out a certain drawer, whose contents he empties upon the table. There are all manner of knick-knacks and gewgaws--a peacock-feather fan, a bracelet made of old Turkish coins, a little leather cushion with the Sultan’s monogram embroidered upon it in gold, a Persian hand-glass painted with a scene from the _Book of Paradise_, one of those tortoise-shell spoons with which Turks eat cherry compôte, an ancient decoration of the Order of Osmanieh. You don’t care for any of these, either? Very well. He turns out the contents of another, and this is a drawer which, as a matter of fact, was being reserved for your eye alone. There is a broken elephant’s tusk; a Trebizond bracelet, looking as though it had been made from a lock of silver hair; a Japanese idol; a sandal-wood comb from Mecca; a large Turkish spoon, chased and filigreed; an antique silver narghileh, gilded and inscribed; bits of mosaic from St. Sophia; a heron’s feather, which once ornamented the turban of Selim III.: for the truth of this last statement the merchant, as a man of honor, is willing to vouch. And still there is nothing which suits your fancy? Here, then, is another drawer, crammed full of treasures--an ostrich egg from Sahara; a Persian inkstand; a chased ring; a Mingrelian bow, with its quiver made out of an elk’s skin; a Circassian two-pointed head-piece; a jasper rosary; a smelling-bottle of beaten gold; a Turkish talisman; a camel-driver’s knife; a box of _attar-gul_. In Heaven’s name, is there still nothing that tempts you? Have you no presents to make? no beloved relatives? no dear friends? Perhaps, though, your tastes run to stuffs and carpets. Well, here too he can assist you as a friend. “Behold, milor, this striped Kurdistan mantle, this lion skin; yonder rug is from Aleppo, with its little steel fastenings, while this _Casablanca_ carpet, three fingers thick, is guaranteed to last for four generations; here, Your Excellency, are old cushions, old brocade scarfs, old silken coverlids, a little faded, a little frayed out at the edges, it is true, but such embroidery as you could not get in these days, even if you were to offer a fortune. You, _caballero_, have been brought here by a friend of mine, and for that reason I am going to let you have this ancient sash for the sum of five napoleons, and live myself on bread and garlic for one week in order to make up the loss.” Should even this magnificent offer fail to move you, he whispers in your ear that he has in his possession, and is moreover willing to sell, the very rope with which the terrible Seraglio mutes strangled Nassuh Pasha, Muhammad Third’s grand vizier. And if you laugh in his face and decline to swallow it, he gives it up at once like a sensible man, and proceeds to make his final effort, displaying before you, in rapid succession, a horse’s tail such as were once carried before and after every pasha; a janissary’s helmet, spattered with blood, which his own father picked up on the day of the famous massacre; a scrap of one of the flags carried in the Crimea, showing the silver star and crescent; a wash-basin studded with agates; a brazier of beaten copper; a dromedary-collar with its shells and bells; a eunuch’s whip made of hippopotamus leather; a gold-bound Koran; a Khorassan scarf; a pair of slippers from a kadyn’s wardrobe; a candlestick made from the claw of an eagle,--until at length your imagination is fired. The longing to possess breaks forth, and you are seized with a mad impulse to throw down your purse, watch, overcoat, everything you have, and fill your pockets with booty. One must indeed be an uncommonly well-balanced person, a very mountain of wisdom, to be able to withstand the temptations of this place, whence many an artist has come forth as poor as Job, and where more than one rich man has thrown away his fortune.

But before the Great Bazâr closes let us take a turn around to see how it looks at the end of the day. The crowd moves along more hurriedly; shopkeepers call out to you and gesticulate more imperiously than ever; Greeks and Armenians run through the streets calling aloud, with shawls or rugs hung over their arms, or form into groups, bargaining and discussing as they move about, then break up and form again into other groups farther off; horses, carriages, beasts of burden, all moving in the direction of the gateway, pass by in endless files. At this hour all those tradespeople with whom you have had fruitless negotiations during the day start to life again, circling around you in the dusk like so many bats: you see them peeping out from behind columns; come suddenly upon them at every turn; they cross in front of you or pass close by you gazing abstractedly in the air, to remind you by their presence of that certain rug or that bit of jewelry, and, if possible, reawaken your desire to possess it. Sometimes you are followed by a whole troop of them at once: if you stop, they do the same; if you slip down a side street, you find them there before you; turning suddenly, you are aware of a dozen sharp eyes fixed upon you which seem to fairly devour you whole. But already the fading light warns the crowd to disperse. Beneath the vaulted roof can be heard the voice of an invisible muezzin announcing the sunset from some wooden minaret. Some Turks have spread strips of carpet in the street before their shop-doors and are murmuring the evening prayer; others perform their ablutions at the fountains. The centenarians of the armor bazâr have already shut to their great iron doors; the smaller bazârs are empty; the farther ends of the corridors are lost in shadow, and the openings of the side streets look like the mouths of caves. Camels suddenly loom up close to you in the uncertain light; the voices of the water-carriers echo distantly among the arched roofs; the Turk quickens his step and the eunuch’s eyes grow more alert; strangers are seen hurrying away; the entrance is closed; the day ended.

And now on all sides I can hear the questions: What about St. Sophia? and the old Seraglio? and the Sultan’s palaces? and the Castle of the Seven Towers? and Abdul-Aziz? and the Bosphorus. All in good time: each one of them shall be fully described in turn, but for still a little while longer let us wander here and there about the city, touching at every page upon some new theme just as some new idea strikes our fancy at every step.

LIFE IN CONSTANTINOPLE.

THE LIGHT.

And first of all I must speak of the light. One of my chief pleasures at Constantinople was to watch the sun rise and set from the bridge of the Validéh Sultan. At daybreak in the autumn there is almost always a light fog hanging over the Golden Horn, through which the city can only be seen indistinctly, as though one were looking through those thin gauze curtains which are lowered across the stage of a theatre in order to hide the details of some grand spectacular effect. Skutari is quite invisible; only her hills, a vague outline, can be faintly traced against the eastern sky. The bridge, as well as both banks, is deserted. Constantinople is buried in slumber, and the profound silence and solitude lend solemnity and impressiveness to the scene. Presently behind the Skutari hills the sky begins to show streaks of gold, and, one by one, against that luminous background, the inky points of the cypress trees stand out clear and defined, like a company of giants drawn up in battle-array on the heights of her vast cemetery. Now a single ray of light flashes from one end to the other of the Golden Horn, like the first faint sigh of returning consciousness, as the great city stirs and slowly awakens once more to life. Then, behind the cypresses on the Asiatic shore, a fiery eye shines forth, and immediately upon the white summits of St. Sophia’s four minarets an answering blush is seen. In rapid succession from hill to hill, from mosque to mosque, to the farthest end of the Golden Horn, every minaret turns to rose, every dome to silver. The crimson flush creeps down from one terrace to another; the light increases, the veil is lifted, and all of Stambul lies revealed, rosy and resplendent on the heights, tinged with blue and violet shadows on the water’s edge, but everywhere fresh and sparkling as though just risen from the waves. In proportion as the sun rises higher and higher the delicacy of the first coloring disappears, swallowed up in the flood of dazzling light, which becomes so white and blinding as in turn to slightly obscure everything, until toward evening, when the glorious spectacle recommences. So clear does the atmosphere then become that from Galata you can easily distinguish each separate tree on the farthermost point of Kadi-keui. The huge profile of Stambul is thrown out against the sky with such distinctness and accuracy of detail that it would be quite possible to note one by one every minaret, every spire and cypress tree, that crowns her heights from Seraglio Point to the cemetery of Eyûb. The waters of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn turn to a marvellous ultramarine; the sky, of the color of amethysts in the east, grows fiery as it reaches Stambul, lighting up the horizon with a hundred tints of crimson and gold, making one think of the first day of creation. Stambul grows dim, Galata golden, while Skutari, receiving the full blaze of the setting sun upon her thousand casements, looks like a city devoured by flames. And this is the most perfect moment in all the twenty-four hours in which to see Constantinople. It is a rapid succession of the most exquisite tints--pale gold, rose, and lilac--mingling and blending one with another on the hillsides and water’s surface, lending to first one part of the city and then to another the finishing touch to its perfect beauty, and revealing a thousand modest charms of hill- and country-side, which were too shy to thrust themselves into notice beneath the blaze of the noonday sun. It is then that you see the great melancholy suburbs losing themselves amid the shadows of the valleys--little purple-tinted hamlets smiling on the hilltops; towns and villages which languish and droop as though their life were ebbing away; others disappear from view, as you look at them, like fires which have been suddenly extinguished; others, again, apparently quite dead, come unexpectedly to life again, all aglow, and sparkle joyously for still some moments longer in the last rays of the sun. Finally, however, nothing remains but two shining summits on the Asiatic shore--Mt. Bûlgurlù and the point of the cape which guards the entrance to the Propontis. At first they are two golden coronets, then two little crimson caps, then two rubies; and then Constantinople is plunged in shadow, while ten thousand voices from ten thousand minarets announce that the sun has set.

THE BIRDS.

Constantinople possesses a grace and gayety all her own emanating from her myriads of birds of every species, objects of especial veneration and affection among the Turks. Mosque and grove, ancient wall and garden, palace and courtyard, are full of song, of the cheerful sound of twittering and chirping; everywhere there is the rush of wings, everywhere the busy, active little lives go on. Sparrows come boldly into the houses and eat from the women’s and children’s hands; swallows build their nests over the doorways of cafés and beneath the roofs of bazârs; innumerable flocks of pigeons, maintained by means of legacies from different sultans as well as private individuals, form black and white garlands around the cornices of the domes and terraces of the minarets; gulls circle joyously about the granaries; thousands of turtle-doves bill and coo among the cypress trees in the cemeteries; all around the Castle of the Seven Towers ravens croak and vultures hover significantly; kingfishers come and go in long lines between the Black Sea and Sea of Marmora; while storks may be seen resting upon the domes of solitary mausoleums. For the Turk each one of these birds possesses some pleasing quality or lucky influence. The turtle-dove is the patron of lovers; the swallow will protect from fire any building where her nest is built; the stork performs a yearly pilgrimage to Mecca; while the halcyon carries the souls of the faithful to Paradise. Hence they feed and protect them both from religious motives and from gratitude, and in return the birds make a continual festival around their houses, on the water, and among the tombs. In every quarter of Stambul they soar and circle about, grazing against you in their noisy flights, and filling the entire city with something of the joyous freedom of the open country, constantly bringing up before one’s mind images of nature.

ASSOCIATIONS.

In no other city of Europe do the sites and monuments, either legendary or historical, act so forcibly upon the imagination as at Stambul, because in no other spot do they record events at once so recent and so picturesque. Elsewhere, in order to get away from the prose of modern every-day life, one is obliged to go back for several centuries; at Stambul a few years suffice. Legend, or what has all the character and force of legend, dates from yesterday. It is not many years since, in the square of Et-Meidan, the celebrated massacre of the Janissaries took place; not many years since the waters of the Sea of Marmora cast up upon the banks of the imperial gardens those twenty sacks containing each the body of a beauty of Mustafa’s harem; not long since Brancovano’s family was executed in the Castle of the Seven Towers, or European ambassadors were pinioned between two _kapuji-basci_ in the presence of the Grand Seigneur, upon whose half-averted countenance there glowed a mysterious light; or within the walls of the old Seraglio that life--so extraordinary--a mingling of horrors, love, and folly, ceased finally to exist, which now seems to belong to such a far-distant past. Wandering about the streets of Stambul and reflecting upon all these things, you cannot help a feeling of astonishment at the calm, cheerful aspect of the city, gay with color and vegetation. “Ah, traitoress!” you cry, “what have you done with all those mountains of heads, those lakes of blood? How is it possible that everything has been so cleverly concealed, so wiped out and obliterated, that not a trace remains?”

On the Bosphorus, beneath the Seraglio walls and just opposite Leander’s Tower, which rises from the water like a lover’s monument, you may still behold the inclined plane down which the bodies of the unfaithful beauties of the harem were rolled into the sea; in the middle of the Et-Meidan the serpentine column still bears witness to the force of Muhammad the Conqueror’s famous sabre; on the Mahmûd bridge the spot is still pointed out on which the fiery sultan annihilated at a single blow the adventurous dervish who had dared to fling an anathema in his face; in the Holy Well of the Balukli church the miraculous fish still swim about which foretold the fall of the City of the Palæologi; beneath the trees of the Sweet Waters of Asia you can visit those shady retreats where a dissolute sultana was wont to bestow upon the favorite of the hour that fatal love whose certain sequence was death. Every doorway, every tower, every mosque and park and open square, records some strange event--a tragedy, a love-story, a mystery, the absolutism of a padishah or the reckless caprice of a sultana; everything has a history of its own, and wherever you turn the near-by objects, the distant view, the balmy perfumed air, the silence, all unite to transport him whose mind is stored with these histories of the past out of himself, his era, and the city of to-day, so that not infrequently, when suddenly confronted with the suggestion that it is high time to think of returning to the hotel, he asks himself confusedly what it means, how can there be a “hotel.”

RESEMBLANCES.

In those early days, fresh from reading masses of Oriental literature, I kept recognizing in the people I met on the streets famous personages who figure in the legends and history of the East: sometimes they answered so entirely to the picture I had drawn in my own mind of some celebrated character that I would find myself stopping short in the street to gaze after them. How often have I seized my friend’s arm, and, pointing out some passer-by, exclaimed, “There he goes, by Jove! Don’t you recognize him?” In the square of the Sultan Validéh I have many a time seen the gigantic Turk who hurled down rocks and stones upon the heads of Baglione’s soldiers before the walls of Nicea; near one of the mosques I came across Unm Dgiemil, the old witch of Mecca who sowed thorns and brambles in front of Mohammed’s house; coming out of the book bazâr one day, I ran against Digiemal-eddin, the great scholar of Brusa, who knew all the Arabian dictionary by heart, walking along with a volume tucked under his arm; I have passed close enough to Ayesha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, to receive a steady look from those eyes “like twin stars reflected in a well.” I recognized in the Et-Meidan the beautiful and unfortunate Greek killed at the foot of the serpentine column by a ball from the huge guns of Orban; turning a sharp corner of one of the narrow streets of Phanar, I found myself suddenly face to face with Kara-Abderrahman, the handsomest young Turk of the days of Orkhan; I have seen Coswa, Mohammed’s she-camel, and recognized Kara-bidut, Selim’s black charger; I have encountered poor Fighani, the poet, who was condemned to go about Stambul harnessed to an ass for having made Ibrahim’s grand vizier the subject of a lampoon; I saw in one of the cafés the unwieldy form of Soliman, the fat admiral, whom the united efforts of four powerful slaves could with difficulty drag up from his divan; and Ali, the grand vizier, who failed to find throughout all Arabia a horse fit to carry him; and Mahmûd Pasha, that ferocious Hercules who strangled Suleiman’s son; and, established before the entrance of the copyists’ bazâr near the Bayezid square, that stupid Ahmed II., who would say nothing all day but “_Kosc! kosc!_” (Very well! very well!) Every character in the _Thousand and One Nights_--the Aladdins, the Zobeids, the Sinbads, the Gulnars, the old Jew dealers with their magic lamps and their enchanted carpets for sale--passed before me one after another like a procession of so many phantoms.

COSTUMES.