Part 10

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.

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 AEgean 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 Acropolis which 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. But _who_ has 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 chimneys at the Piraeus 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.

VII

CONSTANTINOPLE

A little Italian steamer drew cautiously away from the Piraeus 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. the _Colossus_, 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." worked in 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 of Asia 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 buildings with 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.

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.

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 building before 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 people without 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.

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 tells you that it is so. You can very well imagine the 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, and on 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 caique on the Bosporus. We used to sing in college,

"The Sultan better pleases me; His life is full of jollity."

The jollity of a life which the possessor believes to be threatened by assassination in every form and at any moment is of a somewhat ghastly nature.

You obtain tickets for the Selamlik, as the ceremony of the Sultan's visit to his mosque is called, and you are requested, as you are supposed to be the guest of the Sultan on these occasions, not to bring opera-glasses. But it is nevertheless strongly suggestive of a theatrical performance. The mosque is on one side of a wide street; the houses in which the spectators sit, like the audience in a grand-stand, are on the other. One end of the street is blocked by a great square, and the other by the gateway of the palace from which the Sultan comes. The street is not more than a hundred yards in length. A band of music enters this square first and plays the overture to the ceremony. The musicians are mounted on horseback and followed by a double line of cavalrymen on white horses, and each carrying a lance at rest with a red pennant. There are thousands of these; they stretch out like telegraph poles on the prairie to an interminable length, their scarlet pennants flapping and rustling in the sharp east wind like a forest of autumn leaves. You begin to suspect that they are going around the square and returning again many times, as the supers do in "Ours." Then the horses turn black and the overcoats of the men change from gray to blue, and more scarlet pennants stretch like an arch of bunting along the street leading to the palace, until they have all filed into the open square and halt there stirrup to stirrup, a moving mass of four thousand restless horses and four thousand scarlet flags. And then more bands and drums and bugle-calls come from every point of the city, and regiment after regiment swarms up the hill on which the palace rests, the tune of one band of music breaking in on the tune of the next, as do those of the political processions at home, until every approach to the gate of the palace is blocked from curb to curb with armed men, and you look out and down upon the points of five thousand bayonets crushed into a space not one-fifth as large as Madison Square. There is no populace to see this spectacle, only those of the faithful who stop on their way to Mecca to catch this glimpse of the head of their religion, and a few women who have brought petitions to present to him and who are allowed within the lines of soldiers.

But pashas and beys and other high dignitaries are arriving every moment in full regalia, for this is like a drawing-room at Buckingham Palace, or a levee at St. James's, and every one must leave all other matters to attend it. Twenty men with twenty carts rush out suddenly from the curtain of Zouaves and sailors, and scatter soft gravel on the fifty yards of roadway over which the Sultan intends to drive. They remind you of the men in the circus who spread sawdust over the ring after the horses' hoofs have torn it. And then, high above the heads of the nine thousand soldiers and the few thousand more dignitaries, diplomats, and spectators, a priest in a green turban calls aloud from the top of the minaret. It is a very beautiful cry or call, in a strong, sweet tenor voice, inexpressibly weird and sad and impressive. It is answered by a bugle call given slowly and clearly like a man speaking, and at a certain note the entire nine thousand soldiers salute. It is done with a precision and shock so admirable that you would think, except for the volume of the noise, that but one man had moved his piece. The voice of the priest rises again, and is answered by triumphant strains of brass, and the gates of the palace open, and a glittering procession of officers and princes and pashas moves down the broad street, encircling a carriage drawn by two horses and driven by servants in gold. At the sight of this the soldiers cry "Long live the Sultan" three times. It is like the roar of a salute of cannon, and has all the feeling of a cheer. The Sultan sits in the back of the open carriage, a slight, tired-looking man, with a pale face and black beard. He is dressed in a fur overcoat and fez. As he passes, the men of his army--and they _are_ men--salute him, and the veiled women stand on tiptoe behind them and stretch out their petitions, and the pashas and chamberlains and cabinet officers bend their bodies and touch the hand to the heart, lip, and forehead, and drop it again to the knee. The pilgrims to Mecca fall prostrate on their faces, and the Sultan bows his head and touches his hand to his fez. Opposite him sits Osman Pasha, the hero of the last war, and one of the greatest generals of the world, his shoulders squared, his heart covered with stars, and his keen, observant eyes wandering from the pale face of his sovereign to the browned, hardy-looking countenances of his men.

The Sultan remains a half-hour in the mosque, and on his return drives himself back to the palace in an open landau. This was the first time I had seen the Turkish soldier in bulk, and he impressed me more than did any other soldier I had seen along the shores of the Mediterranean. I had seen the British troops repulse an imaginary attack upon the rock of Gibraltar, and half of the Army of Occupation in Egypt dislodge an imaginary enemy from the sand hills around Cairo, and I had seen French and Italian and Greek soldiers in lesser proportion and in lesser activity. But to me none of these had the build or the bearing or the ready if rough look of these Turks. The French Zouaves of Algiers came next to them to my mind, and it may be that the similarity of the uniform would explain that; but as I heard the Sultan's troops that morning marching up the hills to their outlandish music, and looked into eyes that had never been shaded from the sun, and at the spring and swing of legs that had never worn civilized trousers, I recalled several notable battles of past history, and the more recent lines of Mr. Rudyard Kipling where he pays his compliments to the Russian on the frontier:

"I'm sorry for Mr. Bluebeard, I'd be sorry to cause him pain; But a hell of a spree There is sure to be When he comes back again."

The Oriental is one of those people who do things by halves. He has a fine army, but the bulk of his navy has not left the Golden Horn for many years, and it is doubtful if it could leave it; his palace walls are of mosaic and wonderfully painted tiles, and the roofs of rusty tin; his sons are given the questionable but expensive education of Paris, and his daughters are not allowed to walk abroad unless guarded by servants, and with the knowledge that every policeman spies upon them, knowing that, could he detect them in an indiscretion, he would be rewarded and gain promotion. Consequently it does not surprise you when you find the Sultan's treasures heaped together under dirty glass cases, and treated with the indifference a child pays to its last year's toys.