Chapter V: Part 5

Perhaps the greatest charm of Athens and of the islands and mountains round about it lies in their power to lure back your belief in a great many fine people of whose remarkable deeds you had grown sceptical--of whose existence even you had begun to doubt. It is something very serious when one loses faith in so delightful a young man as Theseus, and it is worth while sailing under the lee shores of Crete, where he killed the Minotaur, if for no other purpose than to have your admiration for him restored. If we could only be as sure of restoring by travel all of those other people of whom our elders ceased telling us when we left the nursery, I would head an expedition to the north pole, not to discover open seas and altitudes and eclipses and such weighty things, but to locate that nice and kindly old gentleman, and his toy store and his reindeer, who used to come at Christmas-time, and who has stopped coming since I left school. It is certainly worth while going all the way to Greece to see the Hill of the Nymphs, and the very cave where Pan used to sleep in the hot midday, and to thrill over the four crossroads and the high, gloomy pass where the Sphinx lay in wait for OEdipus with her cruel claws and inscrutable smile.

The story that must always strike every child as most sad and unsatisfactory is the one which tells us how the father of Theseus killed himself when his son came sailing back triumphant, and so gallantly engaged in entertaining the beautiful Athenian maidens whose lives he had saved that he forgot to hoist the white sails, and caused his father to throw himself off the high rocks in despair.

This used to appeal to me as one of the most pathetic incidents in history; but as time wore on my sympathy for the father and indignation against Theseus passed away, and I forgot about them both. But when they point out where the black sails were first seen entering the bay, and you stand on the rock from which the people watched for Theseus, and from which his father threw himself down, you feel just as sorry, and you rebel just as strongly against that morbid anticlimax, as you did when you first read the story in knickerbockers. It seems almost too sad to be true.

They had such a delightful way of mixing up the histories of gods and mortals in those days that the imaginative person who visits Athens will find himself gazing as gratefully and as open-eyed at the rocks in which the Centaur hid as at those from which Demosthenes delivered his philippics, just as in London the room at the Charter House where Colonel Newcome said "Adsum" for the last time is much more real than that room in Edinburgh in which Rizzio was killed, or as the rock from which Monte Cristo sprang, at the base of the Chateau d'If, is so much more actual than the entire field of Waterloo. It is hard to know just which was real and which a delightful myth; and yet there has been so little change in Greece since then that you are brought nearer to Alcibiades and to Pericles than you can ever come, in this world at least, to Dr. Johnson and Dean Swift. You cannot recreate Grub Street and the debtors' prison, but Euboea still "looks on Marathon, and Marathon on the sea," and, if you are presumptuous, you can strut up and down the rocky plateau from which Demosthenes spoke, or take your seat in one of the marble chairs of the Theatre of Dionysus, and pretend you are a worthy citizen of Athens listening to a satire of Sophocles.

The quiet and fresh cleanliness of modern Athens comes to you after the roar and dirt of Cairo's narrow lanes and dusty avenues like the touch of damask table linen and silver after the greasy oil-cloth of a Mediterranean coasting steamer. It is quiet, sunny, and well-bred. You do not fight your way through legions of donkey-boys and dragomans, nor are your footsteps echoed by swarms of guides and beggars. It is a pretty city, with the look of a water-color. The houses are a light yellow, and the shutters a watery green, and the tile roofs a delicate red, and the sky above a blue seldom shown to ordinary mortals, but reserved for the eyes of painters and poets, who have a sort of second sight, and so are always seeing it and using it for a background. Athens is a very new city, with new streets and new public buildings, and a new King and Royal Palace. It is like a little miniature. There is a little army, chiefly composed of officers, and a miniature cabinet, and a beautiful miniature university, and everybody knows everybody else; and when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard turns out and blows a bugle, and so all Athens, which is always sitting at the cafes around the square of the palace, nods its head and says, "The Queen is going for a drive," or, "Her Majesty has returned early to-day," and then continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mustache and to sip its coffee. Modern Athens tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of thought. The men have adopted his costume, and the women wear little flat curls like the French ladies in _Le Figaro_, and peaked bonnets and high heels.

The national costume of the Greeks is taken from the Albanians, but it is much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Like all national costumes, it is only worn, except for political effect and before a camera, by the lower classes, and also by three regiments of the army. You see it in the streets, but it is not so universally popular as one would suppose from the pictures of Athens in the illustrated papers and by the photographs in the shop-windows. It is a most remarkable costume, and as widely different from the flowing robe and short skirt of the early Greeks as men in accordion petticoats and heavy white tights and a Zouave jacket must evidently be. In the country it still obtains, and it is the farmers and peasants and their wives and the soldiers who supply the picturesque element of dress to the streets of the city.

It is an inscrutable problem why, with all the national costumes in the world to choose and pick from, the world should have decided upon the dress of the Frank, that is, of the foreigner--ourselves. In Spain the peasants have discarded their knickerbockers and short jackets, even in the country, for the long trousers and ill-fitting ready-made clothing of a French "sweater," and the Moors cover their robes with overcoats from Manchester, and the Arabs and Chinese and Swiss and Turks are giving up the picturesque garments that are comfortable and becoming to them, and look exceedingly ugly and uncomfortable in our own modern garb, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable of national costumes yet devised by men or tailors. If you judge by the uniforms of the army of officers and by the dress of the women of Athens, you would think you were in a French city and among French people. It seems a pity that this should be so; that Athens, of all cities, should be built of Italian villas, inhabited by people who ape the French, and governed by a King from Denmark; still, they did not make a success of it when they tried, fifty years ago, to govern themselves. It is perhaps hardly fair to expect the Greeks, or even the Athenians, to live up to the great rock and the monuments that crown it, and the people of Greece are no doubt as fine as those of other little kingdoms or principalities scattered about Europe; but then the other kingdoms and principalities have not the history of early Greece to call their own nor the Acropolis to look up to.

The rock of the Acropolis is hardly more a part of modern Greece than the Rock of Gibraltar is a part of Spain. Geographically it is, but it belongs as much to the visitor as to the native, so little inspiration has he apparently drawn from it, and so little has it served to bring out in him to-day those qualities that made demigods of his ancestors. I think I represent the average intelligence, and yet at this moment I cannot think of any Greek within the last hundred years who has gained world-wide renown, either as a sculptor, an artist, a soldier, a writer of comedies and satires, a statesman, nor even as an archaeologist; the very historians of Greece and the exponents of its secrets and the most distinguished of its excavators are of other countries. They have many heroes of their own; you see their portraits or their photographs in every shop-window; but they are not as familiar to you as the faces and histories of those other Greeks who sighed because there were no more worlds, and whose fame has lasted long after the other worlds were discovered. One would think that some young Greek, on arising in the morning and seeing the Acropolis against the sky, would say to himself, "To-day I shall do something worthy of that." And were he to say that often enough, and try to live up to the fortress and the temple above him, he might help to make Greece in this known world what she was in the smaller world of her day of glory. It is not because the world has grown and given her more with which to compete that she has fallen into lesser and lesser significance; for though the world has increased in latitude and longitude, it has not yet carved another Hermes like that of Praxiteles; and though it has added three continents since his day, it has never equalled in marbles the fluttering draperies of the Flying Victory, nor the carvings over the doorway of the Erechtheum.

But, as far as in him lies, the Greek has endeavored to copy the traditions of his ancestors. He holds Olympic games in the ancient arena which King George has had excavated, and if victorious receives a wreath of wild olives from the hands of the King; and he builds the new market where the old market stood, and the new military hospital as near as is possible to the hospital of AEsculapius. But he cannot restore to the market-place that very human citizen who cast in his shell against Aristides because he was aweary of hearing him called the Just; nor can either his games or his hospital bring back the perfect figure and health of the men whose figures and profiles have set the model for all time. He has, however, retained the Greek language, which is very creditable to him, as it is a language one learns only after much difficulty, and then forgets at once. He even goes so far as to put up the names of the streets in Greek, which strikes the bewildered tourist trying to find his way back to his hotel as a trifle pedantic, and he prints his daily newspaper in this same tongue. This is, perhaps, going a little too far, as it leaves you in some doubt as to whether you have been reading of the Panama scandal or a reprint on the battle of Marathon.

Baron Sina, a Greek banker, has shown the most public-spirited and patriotic generosity, and taste as well, in erecting the buildings of the university at his own expense and giving them to the city. They are reproductions in many ways of different parts of the temples of the Acropolis in miniature. The Polytechnic is almost an exact copy of the front of the Parthenon. There is a picture of it from a photograph given in this article, but it can supply no idea of the beauty of the modern reproduction of this temple. The lines and measurements are the same in degree; and the Polytechnic, besides, is colored and gilded as was the original Parthenon, and for the first time makes you understand how brilliant reds and beautiful blues and gold and black on marble can be combined with the marble's purity and help rather than cheapen it. It is a lesson in loveliness, and is as wonderful and brilliantly beautiful a building as the marble and gold monument to the Prince Consort in Hyde Park is vulgar and atrocious. If this copy in miniature, this working model of the Parthenon, moves one as it does, it can be understood how great must be the strength and purity of the Parthenon, even in ruins, with its gilt washed to a dull brown and its colors and bass-reliefs stripped from its pediment. I shall certainly not attempt to describe it.

There are very few tourists who visit Athens in proportion to those who visit far less momentous ruins; thousands go to Rome and see the Colosseum, to Egypt and view the storied walls of the great rude temples along the Nile, and as many more make the tour of the English cathedral towns; but in Athens it is almost difficult to find a guide. There are not more than a half-dozen, I am sure, in the whole city, and the Acropolis is yours if you wish, and you are often as much alone as though you had been the first to climb its sides. I do not mean by this that it is neglected, or that relic-hunters may chip at it or carry away pieces of its handiwork, or broken bits of the Turkish shells that have shattered it, but the guards are unobtrusive, and you are free to wander in and out in this forest of marble and fallen trunks of columns as though you were the ghost of some Athenian citizen revisiting the scenes of his former life.

There is no question that half of the pleasure you receive in wandering over the top of this great wind-blown rock, with the surrounding snow-touched mountains on a level with your eye, and the great temples rearing above you or lying broken at your feet, magnificent even there, is due to your seeing them alone, to the fact that no guide's parrot-like volubility harasses you, no guard's scornful gloom chills your enthusiasm. The great bay of turquoise-blue and the green fields and the bunches of cactus and groves of dark olive-trees below are unspoiled by modern innovations, and the hills are still dotted with sheep and shepherds, as they were in the days of Sappho.

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.

The crown-jewels and regalia kept at the Tower, itself under iron bars and guarded by Beefeaters, are not half as impressive as are the jewels of the Sultan, which lie covered with dust under a glass show-case, and guarded by a few gloomy-looking effendis in frock-coats. All the presents from other monarchs and all the gifts of lesser notables who have sought some Sultan's favor, all the arms and trophies of generations of wars, are piled together in this treasury with less care than one would give to a rack of pipes. It is a very remarkable exhibition, and it is magnificent in its Oriental disregard for wealth through long association with it. Bronze busts of emperors, jewelled swords, imperial orders, music-boxes, gun-cases, weapons of gold instead of steel, precious stones, and silver dressing-cases are all heaped together on dusty shelves, without order and classification and without care. You can see here handfuls of uncut precious stones on china plates, or dozens of gold and silver pistols thrown in a corner like kindling-wood. And the most remarkable exhibition of all is the magnificent robes of those Sultans who are dead, with the jewels and jewelled swords and belts and insignia worn by them, placed on dummies in a glass case, as though they were a row of stuffed birds or specimens of rock. In the turbans of one of these figures there are pearls as large as a woman's thumb, and emeralds and rubies as large as eggs, and ropes of diamonds. This sounds like a story from the _Arabian Nights_; but then these are the heroes of the _Arabian Nights_--the Sultans who owned the whole northern coast of Africa and Asia, and who spent on display and ornament what we put into education and railroads.

The present Sultan, Abd-ul-Hammed II., so far differs from those who have preceded him that he as well as ourselves spends money on education and railroads and all that they imply. As the head of a religion and of an empire he may not cheapen himself by being seen too often by his people, but his interests spread beyond even the great extent of his own boundaries, and his money is given to sufferers as far apart in all but misfortune as the Johnstown refugees and the victims of the earthquakes of Zante and Corfu. And his protection is extended to the American missionaries who enter his country to preach a religion to which he is opposed. While I was in Constantinople he showed the variety of his interests in the outside world by making two presents. To the Czar of Russia he gave a book of photographs of the vessels in his navy, and in contrast to this grimly humorous recognition of Russia's ambitions he presented to our government an emblem in gold and diamonds, commemorating in its design and inscription the discovering of this country, worth, intrinsically, many thousands of dollars. He was, I believe, the only sovereign who showed a personal interest in our national celebration, and his gift was properly one of the government's most conspicuous exhibits at the Columbian Fair.

The Mosque of St. Sophia is one of the first things you are taken to see in Constantinople. It is to the Mussulman what St. Peter's is to the good Catholic, although Justinian built it, and the cross still shows in many parts of the great building. Three times during the year this mosque is illuminated within and without, and every good Mussulman attends there to worship.

There is something very fine about the religion of Mohammed--you do not have to know much about it to appreciate the faith of its followers, whether you know what it is they believe or not. In their outward observance, at least, of the rules laid down for them in the Koran, they show a sincerity which teaches a great lesson. You can see them at any hour of the day or in any place going through their devotions. A soldier will kneel down in a band stand, where a moment before he has been playing for the regiment, and say his prayers before two thousand spectators; and I have had some difficulty in getting my trunks on the Orient Express, because the porters were at another end of a crowded, noisy platform bowing towards the East. Once a year they fast for a month, the season of Ramazan, and as I was in Eastern countries during that month I know that they fast rigidly. Ramazan begins in Egypt when the new moon appears in a certain well near Cairo. Two men watch this well, and when they see the reflection of the new moon on its surface they run into Cairo with the news, and Ramazan begins. There is nothing which so well illustrates the unchangeableness of the East and its customs as the sight of these men running through the streets of Cairo, with its dog-carts and electric lights, its calendars and almanacs, to tell that the moon has again reached that point that it had reached for many hundreds of years before, when all the faithful must fast and pray.

On one of the last days of Ramazan I went to the door of St. Sophia, and was led up a winding staircase in one of its minarets--a minaret-tower so broad and high that the staircase within it has no steps, but is paved smoothly like a street. It seemed as though we had been climbing nearly ten minutes before we stepped out into a great gallery, and looked down upon thousands of turbaned figures bowing and kneeling and rising again in long rows like infantry in close order. Between these worshippers and ourselves were fifty circles of floating tapers swinging from chains, and hanging like a smoky curtain of fire between us and the figures below. The voice of the priest rose in a high, uncanny cry, and the sound of the thousands of men falling forward on their faces and arms was like the rumble of the waves breaking on the shore. Outside, the tops of minarets were circled with lights and lamps strung on long ropes, with the ends flying free, and swinging to and fro in the night wind like necklaces of stars. This was the most beautiful of all the sights of Constantinople; and as a matter of opinion, and not of fact, I think the best part of Constantinople is that part of it that is in the air.

* * * * *

Before ending this last chapter, I should like to make two suggestions to the reader who has not yet visited the Mediterranean and who thinks of doing so. Let him not be deterred, in the first place, by any idea of the difficulties of the journey, for he can go from Gibraltar along the entire northern coast of Africa and into Greece and Italy with as little trouble and with as much comfort as it is possible for him to make the journey from New York to Chicago. And in the second place, should he go in the winter or spring, let him not be misled by "Italian skies," or "the blue Mediterranean," or "the dancing waters of the Bosporus," into imagining that he is going to be any warmer on the northern coast of Africa than he is in New York. I wore exactly the same clothes in Italy that I wore the day I left the North River blocked with ice, and I watched a snow-storm falling on "the dancing waters of the Bosporus". There are some warm days, of course, but it is well to follow that good old-fashioned rule in any part of the world, that it is cold in winter and warm in summer, and people who spend their lives in trying to dodge this fact might as well try running away from death and the postal system. To any one who has but a little time and a little money to spend on a holiday, I would suggest going to Gibraltar, and from there to Spain and Morocco. This is the only place, perhaps, in the world where three so widely different people and three such picturesque people as the Moor, the British soldier, and the Spaniard can be found within two hours of one another.

Morocco, from political causes, is less civilized than any other part of the northern part of Africa; and it can be seen, and with it the southern cities of Spain and the Rock of Gibraltar, in five or six weeks, and at a cost of a very few hundred dollars. This was to me the most interesting part of the Mediterranean, chiefly, of course--for it possesses few of the beauties or monuments or historical values of the other shores of that sea--because it was unknown to tourists and guide-books. A visit to the rest of the Mediterranean is merely verifying for yourself what you have already learned from others.

THE END

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Transcriber's note:

Inconsistent hyphenation remains as in the original.

Spelling has been made consistent throughout where the author's preference could be ascertained.

Punctuation has been normalized.

Page 203: "It all that pertains to the Sultan"

"It all" has been changed to "In all".