Chapter V: Part 5

In those coming days another feature of Constantinopolitan life will also have disappeared, which is now one of the most curious of her curiosities--the dogs. And, as this is a subject which really merits attention, I am going to devote some little space to it. Constantinople is one huge dog-kennel; every one can see this for himself as soon as he gets there. The dogs constitute a second population in the city, and, while they are less numerous than the first, they are hardly less interesting as a study. Every one knows how the Turks love and protect them, but just why they do so is not so easy to decide. I could not, for my own part, make out whether it is because the Koran recommends all men to be merciful to animals, or because they are supposed, like certain birds, to bring good luck, or because the Prophet loved them, or because they figure in their sacred books, or because, as some insist, when Muhammad the Conqueror made his victorious entry into the city through the breach in the gate of St. Romanus he was accompanied by a following composed principally of dogs. Be this as it may, the fact remains that many Turks leave considerable sums at their death for their maintenance, and when Sultan Abdul-Mejid had them all transported to the island of Marmora the people murmured, so that they were brought back amid public rejoicings, and the government has not attempted to interfere with them since. At the same time, the dog, having been pronounced by the Koran to be an unclean animal, not one out of all the innumerable hordes which infest Constantinople has an owner; any Turk harboring one would consider his house defiled. They are associated together in a great republic of freebooters, without collars or masters or kennels or homes or laws. Their entire lives are passed in the streets. There, scratching out little dens for themselves, they sleep and eat, are born, nourish their young, and die; and no one, at least in Stambul, interferes in the smallest degree with their occupations or their repose. They are the masters of the road. With us it is customary for the dogs to withdraw to allow horses and people to pass by. There it is quite different, people, camels, horses, donkeys, and vehicles making sometimes quite a considerable circuit in order not to disturb the dogs: sometimes in one of the most crowded quarters of Stambul four or five of them, curled up fast asleep directly in the middle of the street, will make the entire population turn out for half a day. And in Pera and Galata it is nearly as bad, only there it is done less out of respect for the dogs themselves than for their numbers. Were you to attempt to clear the road, you would have to keep up an uninterrupted series of blows and kicks from the moment you set out until your return. The utmost they will do voluntarily is, when they see a carriage and four coming like the wind down some level street, at the last moment, when there is no possible hope of its turning out and the horses’ hoofs are fairly grazing their backs, they will slowly and unwillingly drag themselves a couple of feet to one side, nicely calculating the least possible distance necessary to save their precious necks. Laziness is the distinguishing quality of the Constantinople dogs. They lie down in the middle of the street, five or six or a dozen of them in a row or group, curled up in such a manner as to look much more like heaps of refuse than living animals, and there they will sleep away the entire day, undisturbed by the din and clamor going on about them, and not rain or sun, wind or cold, has the least power to affect them. When it snows, they sleep under the snow; when it rains, they stay on until they are so completely covered with mud that when they finally get up they look like unfinished clay models of dogs, with nothing to indicate eyes, ears, or mouth.

The conditions of society, however, in Pera and Galata are not quite so favorable to the contemplative life as in Stambul, owing to the greater difficulty in obtaining food: in the latter place they live _en pension_, while in the former they eat _à la carte_. They take the place of scavengers, falling with joy upon refuse which hogs would decline as food, willing, in fact, to eat pretty much everything short of stones. No sooner have they swallowed sufficient to sustain life than they compose themselves to slumber, and continue to sleep until aroused again by the pangs of hunger. And they almost always sleep in the same spot. The canine population of Constantinople is divided into settlements and quarters, just as the human population is. Every street and neighborhood is inhabited, or rather held possession of, by a certain number of dogs, the relatives and friends of one family, who never leave it themselves or allow strangers to come in. They have a sort of police force, with outposts and sentries, who go the rounds and act as scouts. Woe to that dog who, emboldened by hunger, dares to adventure his person across the boundaries of his neighbors’ territory! A crowd of infuriated curs give chase the instant his presence is discovered; if he is caught, they make short work of him; otherwise he is pursued as far as the confines of their own quarter, but no farther, as the enemy’s country is nearly always both feared and respected. It would be impossible to convey any just idea of the skirmishes and pitched battles which arise over a disputed bone, a reigning belle, or an infringement of territorial rights. Two dogs encounter one another; a dispute follows, and instantly reinforcements pour in from every street, lane, and alley; nothing can be seen but a confused, moving mass enveloped in clouds of dust, out of which there issues such a deafening hurlyburly of howls, yelps, and snarls as would crack the ear-drums even of a deaf man. At last the group breaks up again, and, as the dust subsides, the bodies of the fallen may be seen extended on the ground. Love-passages, jealousies, duels, bloodshed, broken limbs, and lacerated skins are the affairs of every hour. Occasionally they assemble in such noisy troops in front of some shop that the owner and his assistants are obliged, in the interests of trade, to arm themselves with stools and bars and sally forth in approved military style, taking the enemy by storm; and then there follows a pandemonium of howls, yells, and lamentations mingling with the sound of cracked heads and ribs, enough to fairly make the welkin ring. In Pera and Galata especially these wretched beasts are so ill treated, so accustomed to expect a blow whenever they see a stick, that at the mere sound of a cane or umbrella on the sidewalk they make preparations for flight: even when they seem to be fast asleep they frequently have the corner of one eye, just the point of a pupil, open, with which to watch attentively, for a quarter of an hour at a time, the slightest movement of some distant object bearing a resemblance, no matter how slight, to a stick. So unused are they to humane treatment that if you pat the head of one of them in passing, a dozen others come running up, fawning and gambolling and wagging their tails, to receive a like caress, and accompany the generous patron all the way to the end of the street, their eyes shining with joy and gratitude.

The condition of a dog in Pera and Galata is worse, all said, than that of a spider in Holland, and their’s is usually admitted to be the most persecuted race in all the animal kingdom. When one sees the existence led by these miserable dogs, it is impossible not to think that there must be for them, as well, some compensation in another world. Like everything else in Constantinople, the sight of them recalled an historical reminiscence, but in their case it seemed like the bitterest irony to picture the life of Bayezid’s famous hunting-pack, who ran about the imperial forests of Olympia wearing purple trappings and collars set with pearls. What a contrast of social conditions! Their unfortunate state has no doubt a great deal to do with their hideous appearance, but, apart from that, they are almost all of the mastiff breed or wolf-dogs, bearing some resemblance to both foxes and wolves, or rather they do not bear a resemblance to anything, but are a horrible race of mongrels, spotted over with strange colors--about as large as the so-called butcher’s dog, and so thin that each rib can be counted twenty feet off. Most of them, moreover, have become so reduced in the course of a life of incessant warfare that if you did not see them moving about you would be apt to take them for the mutilated remains of dogs. You find them with their tails cut off, ears torn, with skinned backs, sides laid open, blind in one eye, lame in two legs, covered with wounds, devoured by flies, reduced to the last possible stages to which a living dog can be brought--veritable types of war, famine, and pestilence. The tail may be spoken of, in connection with them, as an article of luxury: rare is it, indeed, for a Constantinople dog to enjoy the possession of one for more than a couple of months, at most, of public life. Poor creatures! they would move a heart of stone to pity, and yet at times they are so grotesquely maimed and altered, you see them going along with such a singular gait, such odd, ungainly movements, that it is almost impossible not to laugh outright. And, after all, neither hunger nor blows, nor even warfare, constitutes their most serious trial, but a cruel custom which has prevailed for some time in Pera and Galata. Sometimes in the middle of the night the peaceful inhabitants of a quarter are aroused from their slumbers by a diabolical uproar: rushing to their windows, they behold a crowd of dogs leaping and dancing about in agony, bounding high in the air, striking their heads against the walls, or rolling over and over in the dust: presently the uproar subsides, and in the morning, by the early light, the street is seen all strewn with dead bodies. It is the doctor or apothecary of the quarter, who, being in the habit of studying at night, has distributed a handful of pills in order to obtain a fortnight’s quiet. Through these and other means it happens that there is some slight decrease in the number of dogs in Pera and Galata; but what does this avail, since at Stambul they are so rapidly on the increase that it is merely a question of time when the supply of food there will prove insufficient for their support, and colonists will be sent over to the other shore to supply the places of those families which have been exterminated and fill up all blanks caused by war, famine, or poison.

THE EUNUCHS.

But there are other beings in Constantinople who arouse a far more profound sentiment of pity than the dogs. The eunuchs, who were first introduced among the Turks in spite of the clear and unmistakable voice of the Koran, which denounced this infamous form of degradation in no measured terms, continue to exist in defiance of recent legislation prohibiting the inhuman traffic, since stronger than either law or religion are the abominable thirst for gold which induces the crime and the cowardly egotism which derives advantage from it. These unfortunates are to be met at every street-corner, just as they are encountered on every page of history. In the background of every historical scene in Turkey may be traced one of these sinister forms grasping the threads of a conspiracy, laden with gold, or stained with blood--victim, favorite, or instrument of vengeance; if not openly formidable, secretly so; standing like a spectre in the shadow of the throne or blocking the approach to some mysterious doorway. And the same way in Constantinople: in the midst of a crowded bazâr, among the throng of pleasure-seekers at the Sweet Waters, beneath the columns of the mosques, beside the carriages, on the steamboats, in käiks, at all the festivals, wherever people are assembled together, one sees these phantoms of men, these melancholy countenances, like a dark shadow thrown across every aspect of gay Oriental life. With the decline of the absolutism of the Sultan their political power has waned, just as the relaxing of Oriental jealousy has diminished their importance in private life; the advantages they once enjoyed have consequently become greatly reduced, and it is only with considerable difficulty that they are now able to acquire sufficient wealth or power to in any measure compensate them for their misfortune. No Ghaznefér Aghà would now be forthcoming to submit voluntarily to mutilation in order to become chief of the white eunuchs; all those of the present day are unwilling victims, and victims who receive no adequate compensation. Bought or stolen as children in Abyssinia or Syria, about one in every three survives the infamous knife, to be sold in defiance of the law, and with a pretence of secresy far more revolting than if it were done openly. There is no need to have them pointed out: any one can recognize them at a glance. They are usually tall, fat, and flabby, with smooth, colorless faces, short waists, and long legs and arms. They wear fezzes, long black coats, and European trousers, and carry a whip made of hippopotamus skin, their badge of office, walking with long strides, and softly like big children. When on duty they accompany their mistresses on foot or horseback, sometimes preceding, sometimes following after, the carriage, either singly or in pairs, and looking around them with an ever-watchful eye, which, at the slightest suggestion of disrespect either by look or gesture on the part of a passer-by, becomes so full of angry menace as to send a cold chill down one’s backbone; but, except in some such case as this, they have either no expression at all or else an utter weariness of everything in the world. I cannot recollect ever having seen one of them laugh. Some among them, while very young, look fifty years old, and others, again, give one the impression of youths who have suddenly, in the course of a few hours, grown into old men; many of them, sleek, soft, and well-rounded, look like carefully-fattened animals. They wear fine clothing, and are as scrupulously neat and redolent of perfume as some vain young girl. There are men so heartless as to laugh in the faces of these unhappy creatures as they pass them on the street; possibly they imagine that, having been accustomed to it from infancy, they are unconscious or nearly so of the gulf which divides them from the rest of the human family. But it is perfectly well known that this is not the case; and, indeed, who, after giving the subject a moment’s thought, could suppose that it was? To belong to neither sex; to be merely the phantom of a man; to live in the midst of life, and yet not of it; to feel the billows of human passion surging all about you and be obliged to remain cold, impassive, unmoved, like a reef in the storm; to have your very thoughts, the natural, promptings of your whole being, held in check by an iron band that no amount of virtuous effort on your part will ever avail to bend or break; to have constantly presented before your eyes a picture of happiness toward which all around you tends, the centre about which everything circulates, the illuminating cause of all the conditions of life, and to know yourself immeasurably far away in the outside darkness, in a cold immensity of space, like some wandering spirit accursed of God; and to be, moreover, yourself the guardian of that happiness in which you can never participate, the actual barrier which the jealousy of man has reared between his own felicity and the outside world, the bolt with which he makes fast his door, the cloth he uses to conceal his treasures; to be obliged to live in the very midst of that sensuous, perfumed existence of youth and beauty and enjoyment, with shame upon your brow and fury in your soul, despised, set aside, without name, without family, without a mother or so much as one tender memory, cut off from the common ties of nature and humanity,--who could doubt for one instant that theirs is a life of torment which the mind is powerless to grasp, like living with a dagger thrust into one’s heart?

And this outrage still continues: these unhappy creatures walk the streets of a European city, live among men, and, wonderful to relate, refrain from tearing, biting, stabbing, spitting in the face of that cowardly humanity which dares to look them in the eye without either shame or pity, while it busies itself with international associations for the protection of dogs and cats! Their whole existence is nothing but a series of tortures: as soon as the women of the harem find that they are unwilling to connive at their intrigues, they look upon them as spies and jailers, and hate them accordingly, punishing them by every device of coquetry that lies in their power until they sometimes drive them quite beyond all bounds, as in the case of the poor black eunuch in the _Lettere persiane_, who put his mistress in the bath. The very names they bear are a bitter irony, being called after flowers and perfumes, in allusion to the ladies whose guardians they are, as _possessors of hyacinths, guardians of lilies, custodians of roses and of violets_. And sometimes, poor wretches! they fall in love and are jealous and chafe, and become shedders of blood, or, seeing that some ardent glance directed toward their lady is returned, they lose their heads altogether and strike, as happened once during the Crimean War, when a eunuch struck a French officer in the face, and had his own head cut open in consequence by the other’s sword. Who can tell what they suffer or how the mere sight of beauty must sometimes torture them, a caress enrage, a smile torment them, the sound of a kiss given and returned cause their hands to steal toward the dagger’s hilt? It is hardly to be wondered at that in their great empty hearts little flourishes beside the cold passions of hate, revenge, and ambition; that they grow up embittered, cowardly, envious, and savage; that they have either the dumb, unreasoning devotion of an animal for their owners, or else are cunning and treacherous; or that, when they do get into power, they use it to revenge themselves upon mankind for the affront put upon them. The more desolate and isolated their lot, so much the more do they seem to feel a necessity for female companionship. Unable to be her lover, they seek to be the friend of woman. They even marry, sometimes choosing for their wives women who are pregnant, as Sunbullin, Ibrahim’s chief eunuch, did, so as to have a child to love as his own, or, like the head eunuch of Ahmed II., they have harems filled with virgins in order that they may enjoy the contemplation and society of female loveliness; others adopt young girls, so that in old age they may have a female breast upon which to recline and not go down to the grave ignorant of all tenderness and loving care, having had nothing all their lives but scorn and contempt, or at best indifference. It is not uncommon for those who have grown wealthy at court or in some princely establishment, where they have combined with the duties of chief eunuch those of intendant, to purchase in old age a pretty villa on the Bosphorus, and there to pass the remainder of their days in feasting and gayety, seeking by these means to blot out the recollection of their misfortune.

Among all the various tales and anecdotes which were told me about these unfortunate beings one stands out with peculiar clearness in my memory. It was related by a young doctor of Pera in denial of the statement, sometimes made, that eunuchs do not suffer.

“One evening,” said he, “I was leaving the house of a wealthy Mussulman, one of whose four wives was ill with heart disease; it was my third visit, and on coming away, as well as on entering, I was always preceded by a tall eunuch who called aloud the customary warning, ‘Women, withdraw,’ in order that the ladies and female slaves might know that there was a man in the harem and keep out of sight. On reaching the courtyard the eunuch returned, leaving me to make my way out alone. On this occasion, just as I was about to open the door, I felt a light touch on my arm: turning around, I found, standing close by me, another eunuch, a good-looking youth of eighteen or twenty, who stood gazing silently at me, his eyes filled with tears. Finding that he did not speak, I asked him what I could do for him. He hesitated a moment, and then, clasping my hand convulsively in both of his, he said in a hoarse voice, in which there was a ring of despair, ‘Doctor, you know some remedy for every malady; tell me, is there none for mine?’ I cannot express to you the effect those simple words produced upon me: I wanted to answer him, but my voice seemed to die away, and finally, not knowing what to do or say, I pulled the door open and fled. But all that night and for many days after I kept seeing his face and hearing those mournful words; and I can tell you that more than once I could feel the tears rising at the recollection.”

Philanthropists, journalists, ministers, ambassadors, and you, gentlemen, deputies to the Stambul Parliament and senators of the Crescent, raise an outcry in God’s name that this hideous ignominy, this black stain on the honor of mankind, may in the twentieth century be merely another dreadful memory like the Bulgarian atrocities.

THE ARMY.

Although I was fully aware before going to Constantinople that no traces of the magnificent army of former days were still to be seen, nevertheless, as soldiers are always a source of lively interest to me, I had no sooner arrived than I began to look about for them with eager curiosity. What I found, however, fell short of even what I had been led to expect. In place of the ancient costume, flowing, picturesque, and eminently warlike, they have adopted an ugly, forlorn uniform, consisting of red trousers, little scant jackets, stripes like a lackey’s livery, belts like those of college students, and on every head, from the Sultan’s down to the lowest man in the ranks, that miserable fez, which, besides being undignified and puerile, especially when perched on the head of a big, stout Mussulman, is the direct cause of any amount of ophthalmia and headache. The brilliancy of the Turkish army is lost, without any of that which belongs to the European military having been gained. The soldiers looked to me a mournful, half-hearted, dirty set of men. They may be brave, but they are certainly not impressive; and as to the nature of their training, one may form some idea of that from seeing officers and men employing their fingers in the street in place of handkerchiefs. One day I saw the soldier on guard at the bridge, where smoking is not allowed, bring this fact to the knowledge of a vice-consul by snatching the cigar out of his mouth; and on another occasion, in the mosque of the Dancing Dervishes, on the Rue de Pera, a soldier informed three Europeans that they were expected to uncover by knocking their hats off before my eyes: I knew very well that to raise a protesting voice on such occasions would mean nothing less than being seized and carried off bodily, like a bundle of old rags, to the guard-house. Hence throughout my entire stay at Constantinople my attitude toward the military was one of profound deference. On the other hand, one ceases to wonder at the uncouthness of the soldiers after seeing what sort of people they are before donning the uniform. One day in Skutari a hundred or so recruits, probably brought from the interior of Asia Minor, passed close by me, and it was a sight which aroused both my compassion and my disgust. They looked like those terrible bandits of Hassin the Mad who passed through Constantinople toward the close of the sixteenth century on their way to die by the Austrian cannon on the plain of Pesth. I can see before me now their wild, sinister faces, rough shocks of hair, half-naked, tattooed bodies, and barbarous ornaments, and I seem to smell again the close, sickening odor, like that of wild animals’ dens, which they left behind them in the street. When the first news was brought of the massacres in Bulgaria, at once my thoughts turned to them. “My Skutari friends, beyond a doubt,” I said to myself. It is a fact, however, that they form the one solitary picturesque feature which I am able to recall of the Mussulman army.

O glorious pageant of Bayezid, of Suleiman, of Muhammad! could one but behold you just once from the walls of Stambul, drawn up in glittering array upon the plain of Daûd Pasha! Every time I passed the triumphal gate of Adrianapolis I would be haunted by this brilliant vision, and pause to gaze fixedly at the opening, as though expecting each moment to see the pasha quartermaster come forth, heralding the approach of the imperial troops.

It was, in fact, the pasha quartermaster who marched at the head of the army, with two horse-tails, his insignia of rank, while behind him for a great distance flashed and glistened in the sunlight certain objects which were nothing less than the eight thousand brazen spoons fastened in the folds of the Janissaries’ turbans; in their midst could be seen the waving herons’ plumes and glittering armor of the colonels, followed by a crowd of servants laden with arms and provisions. Behind the Janissaries came a small troop of volunteers and pages dressed in silk, with iron mail, and shining head-pieces, accompanied by a band of music; after them, the cannoneers, with the cannon fastened together by means of metal chains; and then another small band of aghas, pages, chamberlains, and feudal soldiers, mounted on steeds with plumes and breast-plates. All of these were only the advance-guard, above whose closely-packed ranks floated thousands of brilliantly colored standards, waving horse-tails, and such a sea of lances, swords, bows, quivers, and arquebuses that it was not easy to distinguish the lines of swarthy faces burned by exposure in the Candian and Persian wars; accompanying them was the discordant sound of drum and flute, of trombone and kettledrum, mingling with the voices of the singers who escorted the Janissaries, and, with the rattle of arms, clanking of chains, and hoarse cries of Allah, forming a mighty roar, at once inspiriting and terrible, which could be heard from the Daûd Pasha camp to the other bank of the Golden Horn. O poets and painters, you who have dwelt with loving touch upon every picturesque detail of that vanished life of the Orient! come to my aid now, that together we may recall to life the Third Muhammad’s famous army and send it forth, brilliant and complete, from the ancient walls of Stambul.

Passed the advance-guard, we see another glittering body of troops. Is it the Sultan? No, as yet the deity has barely quitted his temple. This is only the favorite vizier’s retinue, consisting of forty aghas clad in sable, and mounted upon horses caparisoned with velvet and with silver bits in their mouths; behind them are a crowd of pages and gorgeous grooms, leading other forty horses by the bridle, with gilded harness, and laden with shields, maces, and cimeters.

Another troop advances. This is not the Sultan, either, but a body of state officials--the chief treasurer, members of the council, and the high dignitaries of the Seraglio--and with them a band of players and a throng of volunteers wearing purple caps decorated with birds’ wings and dressed in furs, scarlet silk, leopard skins, and Hungarian _kolpaks_, armed with long lances entwined with silk and garlands of flowers.

Still another sparkling wave of horsemen pours out of the Adrianapolis gate, but it is not the Sultan yet. This is the train of the grand vizier. First comes a crowd of mounted arquebusiers, _furieri_, and aghas, all high in favor with the Grand Seigneur; after them forty aghas of the grand vizier, surrounded by a forest of twelve hundred bamboo lances, borne by twelve hundred pages, and then the forty pages of the grand vizier clad in orange color and armed with bows, their quivers richly ornamented with gold. Following them are two hundred more youths, divided into six bands, each band having a distinctive color, and, riding in their midst, the governors and relatives of the chief minister; after these come a throng of grooms, armor-bearers, employés, servants, pages, and aghas, wearing gold-embroidered garments, and a troop of standard-bearers carrying aloft a multitude of silken flags; and last the _kiâya_, minister of the interior, escorted by twelve _sciau_, or legal executioners, followed by the grand vizier’s band.

Another host pours out from the city-walls, and still it is not the Sultan, but a throng of _sciau_, _furieri_, and underlings, gorgeously attired and forming the retinues of the jurisconsults, the _molla_ and _muderri_; close behind them are the head-masters of the falcon, vulture, hawk, and kite hunts, followed by a line of horsemen carrying on their saddles leopards trained for the chase, and a crowd of falconers, esquires, grooms with ferrets, standard-bearers, and drummers, and packs of caparisoned and bejewelled dogs.

Another brilliant concourse sweeps out: the crowds of spectators prostrate themselves. At last the Sultan? No, not yet. This is not the head of the army, but its heart, the holy flame of courage and religious enthusiasm, the sacred ark of the Mussulman, around which mountains of decapitated heads have been reared, torrents of human blood have flowed--the green ensign of the Prophet, the flag among flags, taken from its place in the mosque of Sultan Ahmed, and now floating in the midst of a ferocious mob of dervishes clad in lion and bear skins, a circle of rapt-looking preaching sheikhs in camel’s-hair cloaks, and two companies of emirs, descendants of the Prophet, wearing the green turban; all of whom together raise a hoarse clamor of shouts, prayers, shrill cries, and singing.

Another imposing troop of horsemen herald the approach, not of the Sultan yet, but of the judiciary, the judge of Constantinople and chief judge of Asia and Europe, whose enormous turbans may be seen towering above the heads of the sciau, who brandish their silver maces to clear a space for them through the crowd. With them ride the favorite vizier and vizier kaimakâm, their turbans decorated with silver stars and braided with gold; all the viziers of the Divan, before whom are borne horse-tails dyed with henné, attached to the ends of long red and blue poles; and last of all the military judges, followed by a train of attendants dressed in leopard skins and armed with lances--pages, armor-bearers, and sutlers.

The next company pours out, glittering, magnificent. Surely the Sultan? No--the grand vizier, wearing a purple caftan lined with sable and mounted upon a horse fairly covered with steel and gold, he is followed by a throng of attendants clad in red velvet, and a crowd of high dignitaries, and the lieutenant-generals of the Janissaries, among whom the _muftis_ shine out like swans in the midst of a flock of peacocks; after these, between two lines of spearmen carrying gilded spears and two lines of archers with crescent-shaped plumes, come the gorgeous grooms of the Seraglio, leading by the bridle a long file of horses from Arabia, Turkestan, Persia, and Caramania, their saddles of velvet, reins gilded, stirrups chased, and trappings covered with silver spangles, and laden with shields and arms glittering with jewels; finally the two sacred camels are seen, bearing one the Koran, the other a fragment of the Kaaba.

The grand vizier’s retinue has passed, and a deafening clamor of drums and trumpets assails the ear. The spectators fly in every direction, cannon roar, a multitude of running footmen pour through the gate brandishing their cimeters, and here at last, in the midst of a thick forest of spears, plumes, and swords, the central point of those dazzling ranks of gold and silver head-pieces, beneath a cloud of waving satin banners, behold the Sultan of sultans, King of kings, the dispenser of thrones to the princes of the world, the shadow of God upon earth, emperor and sovereign lord of the White Sea and of the Black, of Rumelia and Anatolia, of the province of Salkadr, of Diarbekr, of Kurdistan, Aderbigian, Agiem, Sciam, Haleb, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, the coasts of Arabia and Yemen, together with all the other dominions conquered by the arms of his mighty predecessors and august ancestors or subdued by his own flaming and triumphant sword. The solemn and imposing train sweeps slowly by. Now and again, the serried columns swaying a little to right or left, a glimpse is caught of the three jewelled plumes which surmount the turban of the deity, the serious, pallid countenance, the breast blazing with diamonds; then the ranks close in once more, the cavalcade passes on, the threatening cimeters are lowered, the bystanders raise their bowed heads, the vision disappears.

After the imperial retinue a crowd of court officials come, one carrying on his head the Sultan’s stool, another his sabre, another his turban, another his mantle, a fifth the silver coffee-pot, a sixth the golden coffee-pot; then more troops of pages, and after them the white eunuchs; then three hundred mounted chamberlains in white caftans, and the hundred carriages of the harem with silvered wheels, drawn by oxen hung with garlands of flowers or horses with velvet trappings, and escorted by a troop of black eunuchs; then three hundred mules file by laden with baggage and treasures from the court; after them a thousand camels carrying water and a thousand dromedaries laden with provisions; next a crowd of miners, armorers, and workmen of various kinds from Stambul, accompanied by a rabble of buffoons and conjurers; and finally the bulk of the fighting ranks of the army--hordes of Janissaries, yellow _silidars_, purple _azabs_, _spahis_ with red ensigns, foreign cavalry with white standards, cannon that belch forth blocks of lead and marble, the feudal soldiery from three continents, barbarian volunteers from the outlying provinces of the empire, seas of flags, forests of plumes, torrents of turbans--an iron avalanche on its way to overrun Europe like a curse sent from God, in whose track will be found nothing but a desert strewn with smoking ruins and heaps of skulls.

IDLENESS.

Although at certain hours of the day Constantinople wears an air of bustle and activity, in reality it is probably the laziest city in Europe, and in this respect both Turk and Frank meet on common ground. Every one begins by getting up at the latest possible hour in the morning. Even in summer, at a time when our cities are up and doing from one end to the other Constantinople is still buried in slumber. It is difficult to find a shop open or so much as to procure a cup of coffee until the sun is well up in the heavens. Hotels, offices, bazârs, banks, all snore together in one joyous chorus, and nothing short of a cannon would arouse them. Then the holidays! The Turks keep Friday, the Jews Saturday, and the Christians Sunday, besides which regular weekly ones are all the feast-days of the innumerable saints of the Greek and Armenian calendars, which are scrupulously observed; and although all of these holidays are supposed to affect only certain parts of the community respectively, in reality they provide large numbers, with whom, properly speaking, they have nothing whatever to do, with an excuse for being idle. You can thus form some idea of the amount of work accomplished in the course of a week. There are some offices which are only open twenty-four hours in the seven days. Each day some one of the five nationalities who go to make up the population of Constantinople is rambling about over the big city with no other object in the world than to kill time. In this art, however, the Turk yields to none. He can make a cup of coffee, costing two sous, last half a day, and sit immovable for five hours at a stretch at the foot of a cypress tree in one of the innumerable cemeteries. His indolence is a thing absolute and complete, an inertia resembling death or sleep, in which all the faculties seem to be suspended--an utter absence of any sort of emotion, a phase of existence completely unknown among Europeans. Turks dislike so much as to have the idea of movement presented to their minds. At Stambul, for instance, where there are no public walks, it is extremely unlikely that the Turks would frequent them if there were: to go to a place designed expressly for the purpose of being walked about in would, to their way of thinking, resemble work entirely too much. They enter the nearest cemetery or turn down the first street they come to, and follow, without any objective point, wherever their legs or the windings of the path or the people ahead may lead them. A Turk rarely goes to any spot merely for the purpose of seeing it. There are those among them, living in Stambul, who have never been farther than Kassim Pasha; Mussulman gentlemen who have never gotten beyond the Isles of the Princes, where they happen to have a friend living, or their own villa on the Bosphorus. For them the height of bliss consists in complete inactivity of body and mind; hence they abandon to the restless Christian all those great industries which require care and thought and travelling about from one place to another, and content themselves with such small trades as can be conducted sitting down in the same spot, and where sight can almost take the place of speech. Labor, which with us governs and regulates all the conditions of life, is a thing of quite secondary importance there, subordinated to what is pleasant and convenient. We look upon repose as a necessary interruption to work, while to them work is merely a suspension of repose. The first object, at all costs, is to sleep, dream, and smoke for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four; whatever time is left over may be employed in gaining one’s livelihood. Time, as understood by the Turks, signifies something altogether different from what it does to us. The hour, day, month, year, has not a hundredth part of the value there that it has in other parts of Europe. The very shortest period required by any official of the Turkish government in which to answer the simplest form of inquiry is two weeks. These people do not know what it is to desire to finish a thing for the mere pleasure of having done with it, and, with the single exception of the porters, one never sees a Turk employed on any business hurrying in the streets of Stambul. All walk with the same measured tread, as though their steps were regulated by the beat of a single drum. With us life is a seething torrent; with them, a sleeping pool.

NIGHT.

As by day Constantinople is the most brilliant, so by night it is the gloomiest, city in Europe. Occasional street-lamps, placed at long distances one from the other, hardly suffice to pierce the gloom of the principal streets, while the others are as black as caves, and not to be ventured into by one who carries no light in his hand. Hence by nightfall the city is practically deserted: the only signs of life are the night-watchmen, prowling dogs, the skulking figure of some law-breaker, parties of young men coming out of a subterranean tavern, and mysterious lights which appear and vanish again like _ignis fatui_ down some narrow side-street or in a distant cemetery. This is the hour in which to look at Stambul from the heights of Pera or Galata. Each one of her innumerable little windows is illuminated, and, with the lights from the shipping, reflections in the water and the starry heavens, helps to light up four miles of horizon with a great quivering sea of sparkling points of fire, in which port, city, and sky melt imperceptibly one into another until they all seem to be part of one starry firmament. When it is cloudy, and through a break the moon appears, you see above the dark mass of the city, above the inky blots which mark the woods and gardens, the glittering rows of domes surmounting the imperial mosques, shining in the moonlight like great marble tombs, and suggesting the idea of a necropolis of giants. But most impressive of all is the view when there is neither moon nor star nor any light at all. Then one immense black shadow stretches from Seraglio Point to Eyûb, a great dark profile, the hills looking like mountains and their many pointed summits assuming all manner of fantastic shapes--forests and armies, ruined castles, rocky fortresses--so that one’s imagination travels off into the region of dreams and fairy tales. Gazing across at Stambul on some such night as this from a lofty terrace in Pera, one’s brain plays all sorts of mad pranks. In fancy you are carried into the great shadowy city; wander through those myriad harems, illuminated by soft, subdued lights: behold the triumphant beauty of the favorite, the dull despair of the neglected wife; watch the eunuch who hangs trembling and impotent outside the door; follow a pair of lovers as they thread some steep winding byway; wander through the deserted galleries of the Grand Bazâr; traverse the great silent cemeteries; lose yourself amid the interminable rows of columns in the subterranean cisterns; imagine that you have been shut up in the gigantic mosque of Suleiman, and make its shadowy corridors echo again with lamentations and shrieks of terror, tearing your hair and invoking the mercy of the Almighty; and then suddenly exclaim, “What utter nonsense! I am here on my friend Santoro’s terrace, and in the room below there not only awaits me a supper for a sybarite, but a gathering of the most amusing wits in Pera to help me eat it.”

CONSTANTINOPLE LIFE.

Every evening a large number of Italians gathered at the house of my good friend Santoro--lawyers, artists, doctors, and merchants--among whom I passed many a delightful hour. How the conversation flowed! Had I only understood stenography, I might easily have collected the materials for a delightful book out of the various anecdotes and bits of gossip told there night after night. The doctor, who had just been called to a patient in the harem; the painter, who was employed upon a pasha’s portrait somewhere on the Bosphorus; the lawyer, who was arguing a case before a tribunal; the high official, who had knotted the threads of an international love-affair,--each separate experience as they related it formed a complete and highly entertaining sketch illustrative of Oriental manners and customs. Each fresh arrival is the signal for something new. “Have you heard the news?” one exclaims on entering: “the government has just paid the employés’ salaries, due for over three months, and Galata is flooded with copper money.” Then another arrives: “What do you suppose happened this morning? The Sultan got mad at the minister of finance and threw an inkstand at his head!” A third tells a story of a Turkish president of a tribunal. Provoked, it seems, by the wretched arguments employed by an unscrupulous French lawyer in defending a bad cause, he paid him this pretty compliment before the entire audience: “My dear advocate, it is really quite useless for you to take so much pains to try to make your case appear good. ----;” And here he pronounced Cambronne’s word in full: “no matter how you may turn and twist it, it is still----,” and he said it again.

The conversation naturally covered geographical ground quite new to me. They used the same easy familiarity in talking of persons and events in Tiflis, Trebizond, Teheran, and Damascus as we do when it is a question of Paris, Vienna, or Geneva, in any one of which places they had friends or had lately been or were about going themselves. I seemed to be in the centre of another world, with new horizons opening out on all sides, and it was difficult to avoid a sinking feeling at the thought of the time when I would be obliged to take up once more the narrow and contracted routine of my ordinary life. “How will it ever be possible,” I would ask myself, “to settle down again to those commonplace occupations and threadbare topics?” This is the way every one feels who has spent any time in Constantinople. After leading the life of that place, all others must necessarily appear flat and colorless. Existence there is easier, gayer, more youthful than in any other city in Europe; it is as though one were encamped upon foreign soil, surrounded by an endless succession of strange and unexpected sights, an ever-changing, shifting scene which leaves upon one’s mind such a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all things human that you end by adopting something of the fatalistic creed of the Mussulman or else the reckless indifference of the adventurer.

The apathy of that people is something incredible; they live, as a poet has said, in a sort of intimate familiarity with death, looking upon life as a pilgrimage too short to attempt, even were it worth their while anyhow, great undertakings requiring long and sustained effort; and sooner or later this fatalism attacks the European as well, inducing him to live in a certain sense from day to day, without troubling himself more than necessary about the future, and playing in the world, so far as lies in his power, the simple and reposeful part of a spectator. Then the constant intercourse with so many nationalities, whose language you must speak and whose views to a certain extent you must adopt, does away with many of those fixed rules and conventionalities which have in our countries become iron-bound laws governing society, and whose observance or non-observance causes endless vexations and heartburnings.

The Mussulman population forms of itself a never-ending source of interest and curiosity, always at hand to be seen and studied, and so stimulating and enlivening to the imagination as to drive away all thought of ennui. The very plan of Constantinople helps to this end. Where in other cities the eye and mind are almost always imprisoned, as it were, in one street or narrow circuit, there every step presents a new outlet through which both may roam over immeasurable distances of space and scenes of entrancing beauty, and, finally, there is the absolute freedom of that life, governed by no one set of customs. One can do absolutely as he pleases; nothing is looked upon as out of the way, and the most astounding performances hardly cause a ripple of talk, forgotten almost as soon as told in that huge moral anarchy. Europeans live there in a sort of republican confederacy, enjoying a freedom from all restraint such as would only be possible in one of their own cities during some period of disorder. It is like a continual Carnival, a perpetual Shrove Tuesday, and it is this, even more than her beauty, which endears Constantinople so greatly to the foreigner, so that, thinking of her after long absence, one experiences a feeling almost amounting to home-sickness; while those Europeans who have made their homes there strike down deep roots and become as devotedly attached to her as her legitimate sons. The Turks are certainly not far wrong when they call her “the enchantress of a thousand lovers,” or say in their proverb that for him who has once drunk of the waters of Top-Khâneh there is no cure--he is infatuated for life.

THE ITALIANS.

The Italian colony at Constantinople, while it is one of the most numerous, is far from being the most prosperous there. It numbers among it but few rich persons, and many who are wretchedly poor, especially those who come from Southern Italy and are unable to find work: it is also the colony most poorly represented by the press, when indeed it is represented at all, its newspapers only making their appearance to promptly vanish again. When I was there the colony was awaiting the issue of the _Levantino_, and meanwhile a sample copy was put in circulation setting forth the academic titles and personal gifts of the editor: I made out seventy-seven in all, without counting modesty.