Presented to the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

by the

ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE LIBRARY

1980

°)\4-

The hostess was sumptuously dressed.

POCKET EDITION

THE TRAVELS of THEOPHILE GAUTIER

VOLUME THREE

TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY PROFESSOR F. C. DE SUMICHRAST

Department of French, Harvard University |

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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR

BOSTON

\ LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1912

Copyright, ipoj, by GEORGE D. SPROUL

D

UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

Contents

INTRODUCTION ........... Page 3

SYRA AND SMYRNA ......... " 13

THE TROAD AND THE DARDANELLES .... "26

THE LITTLE FIELD OF THE DEAD. THE GOLDEN

HORN ............ " 42

A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN ........ " 53

CAFES . . ........... " 68

THE SHOPS ............ " 74

BAZAARS ............ " 82

THE WHIRLING DERVISHES ....... " 96

THE HOWLING DERVISHES ....... "103

THE CEMETERY AT SCUTARI ....... "no

THE SULTAN AT THE MOSQUE ...... " 1 26

WOMEN ............. "134

THE BREAKING OF THE FAST ...... "146

THE WALLS OF CONSTANTINOPLE ..... "159

BALATA. THE PHANAR. A TURKISH BATH . " 166

THE BEIRAM ........... "1-76

FIRES ............. "192

SAINT SOPHIA AND THE MOSQUES ..... " 204

THE SERAGLIO ........... " 220

THE ATMEIDAN ........ . . *' 234

THE ELBICEI ATIKA ......... " 248

MOUNT BOUGOURLOU. PRINCES* ISLANDS . . " 264

THE BOSPHORUS .......... " 277

BuYOUKDEREH ...... ..... " 290

Introduction

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Introduction

WHAT a charming travelling-companion is Theophile Gautier, and how well he compensates those who are not fortu- nate enough to imitate him in his wan- derings and must fain be content to read of foreign places and cities strange. Spain, Venice, and Con- stantinople form three volumes of absolute and con- tinual delight; for surely no one can write more entertainingly, more charmingly concerning Granada, Seville, the Queen of the Adriatic, and the City of Stamboul. Gautier's peculiar gift, in some respects greater even than Hugo's, of making his readers actu- ally behold what he describes and live the scenes he relates, makes of him the rarest of writers of travel. The impression he makes on the mind is so vivid that it requires but a slight stretch of the imagination to believe that one has been present at a bull-fight with him, watching Montes slay the fierce " Napoleon " ;

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travelled in his company and that of Lanza the cosario across the mountains to Velez-Malaga ; rambled through the Alhambra and the Generalife, and watched the sunset tints slowly fade away on the crests of the Sierra Nevada. Without stirring from one's fireside, one floats on the blue waters of the Lagoon, gazing at the marvellous prospect of Venice stretching out with the Campanile, San Marco, and the Palace of the Doges, every detail of which, suffused in rosy light, is recog- nised as if one had lived in the place as long as Byron or Browning. Indeed, it is quite possible that many readers of Gautier have an infinitely clearer vision of the City of the Lagoons than many who have trav- elled through it with the customary haste of tourists anxious to take in as much of Europe as they can compass during a brief summer-trip.

So with Constantinople : Stamboul, Pera, Galata, Scutari emerge from the haze of imagination and become real, tangible, familiar. The force, the direct- ness, the accuracy of Gautier's account fix indelibly in the mind the features and general aspect of the Otto- man capital. There is no escaping the spell under which he lays his reader ; no avoiding the actual know- ledge, intimate and close, which he imparts. The

INTRODUCTION

brilliancy of the illuminations, the sombre ride round the walls, the bustling nights of Ramazan, the splen- dour of the Bei'ram, the rush and tumult of the con- flagration, the swift, sunlit passage down the Bosphorus, the shimmering, gleaming glories of the Bezestan, the hideous repulsiveness of the Ghetto, — all are brought out with unmatched skill; and as long as the reader listens to the words Gautier speaks, so long is he in Constantinople, climbing the steep streets of Pera, wandering by the Sweet Waters of Europe, roaming through the Cemeteries, watching the pipemakers drilling pipestems, or casting a sly glance at the momentarily unveiled face of a beauty of the harem. There is a distinct method in Gautier's selection of the countries and places he chooses to write about at some length. He has not given us much about England, Belgium, Holland, or Germany ; not that he failed to be interested in them, but that they lacked the peculiar charm of exoticism which, for him and the other Romanticists, attached to Spain, Venice, Flor- ence, Padua, the East. These were the places he had dreamed of; there were light of a quality, of a lumi- nousness unknown in Northern climes; a wealth of luxury, a gorgeousness of costume, a strangeness of

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manners utterly unlike the North; a going back from the cold, practical civilisation which, like a dutiful disciple of Rousseau, he professed to abhor. They were the countries of romance, the fairylands of his hot, artistic youth, and for them he had longed, to them he had looked, nourishing the hope that some day he might wander through their cities, behold their mysterious beauties, and revel in their poetry. Africa and Egypt drew him in turn, and, if he went to Russia, it was because sent there, and not because the country had any special attraction. Yet there also the strange- ness, the picturesqueness, the oddity of costume, man- ners, dress, buildings, filled him with satisfaction, excited his artistic instinct, and made him taste anew the joy he had experienced in other and sunnier lands.

Gautier was intensely in earnest when travelling and sight-seeing; he was no mere globe-trotter who cares only to cover the greatest possible amount of country, to gallop through the finest scenery, to hurry through historical cities. He wanted to know each place, and if one, like Venice, like Granada, like Constantinople, particularly charmed him, there he would stay, enjoying every hour, every moment, and, in his brilliant accounts, making the world share the

INTRODUCTION

delight he himself felt. He became one of the inhabi- tants for the time being ; he threw off, as far as- be could, the Parisian, and endeavoured to enter into the nature of the Spaniard, the Venetian, the Turk, or the Russian. He wore the dress of the natives ; he fed as they did ; sought, in a word, to be one of them. But he was even better than that, for he bore with him everywhere his deep feeling for beauty, his intense sense of the picturesque, his magical power of understanding and reproducing colour, his wonderful encyclopaedic know- ledge ; and the Turk or Spaniard, the Russian or Vene- tian into whom he transformed himself was ever a poet and a painter.

In an article written for F Illustration in March, 1867, he thus sums up his wanderings and his mode of sight-seeing : —

"In May, 1840, I started for Spain. I cannot describe the spell cast upon me by that wild, poetic country, which I dreamed of under the influence of Alfred de Musset's ' Tales of Spain and Italy/ and Hugo's * Orientales.' Once there I felt I was on my own ground, and as if I had found again my native country. Ever since, my one thought has been to get a little money together and be off travelling. The

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passion, or the disease, of travel had developed in me. In 1845, in the hottest month of the year, I visited the whole of French Africa, accompanying Marshal Bugeaud on the first campaign in Kabylia against Bel Kasem or Kase, and it was in the camp of Ayn el Arba that I had the pleasure of writing the last letter of Edgar de Meilhen, the character I had charge of in the epistolary novel called ' The Berny Cross,' written in collabora- tion with Mme. du Girardin, Mery, and Sandeau. I pass over brief trips to England, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland. I travelled through Italy in 1850, and I went to Constantinople in 1852. These excur- sions have been described in my books. More recently the publishers of an art work, the text of which I had engaged to write, sent me to Russia in the depth of winter, and I was thus enabled to enjoy the delights of the land of snow and ice. In the early summer I pushed on to Nijni-Novgorod at the time of the fair. That is the farthest point from Paris which I have reached. If I had been wealthy, I should have lived a wandering life. I have a wonderful facility for adapt- ing myself easily to the life of different peoples. I am a Russian in Russia, a Turk in Turkey, a Spaniard in Spain. To the latter country I returned several times,

INTRODUCTION

drawn by my fondness for bull-fights, which caused the Revue des Deux Mondes to call me ' a stout f jovial and sanguinary individual.' I used to be a great ad-^ mirer of cathedrals, thanks to ' Notre-Dame de Paris,' but the sight of the Parthenon cured me of the Gothic disease, which in truth never had a very great hold upon me."

This book on Constantinople has a value, apart from its artistic form and its splendour of phraseology, in that it is a living picture of a Stamboul that has changed much since 1852 and is still changing. The innova- tions introduced by Mahmoud the reformer, many of which Gautier notes as he goes, have taken root and multiplied. The latest and best work on Constanti- nople has no pages to match those of the French traveller; the city the latter beheld is already a city of the past. It is but too true, as Hugo laments, that tc les vielles villes s'en vont" It is sufficient to compare the description of the Bezestan in Grosvenor's work with that in this volume to appreciate the change which has already taken place. And it will not be wondered at, either, that Gautier's book still remains popular and is still read with fervent delight, for it is the most vivid representation of that mysterious Con-

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stantinople that has haunted imaginations for centuries and even yet is enshrined in a halo of romance.

The book, of course, first saw the light in the form of letters of travel, of newspaper " copy." It was in the year 1852, at a time when the grasping policy of Russia, bent on obtaining a foothold on the Bospho- rus, was creating alarm throughout Europe, and drawing Great Britain, France, and Turkey into the alliance that was marked by the breaking out of the Crimean war, that Gautier sailed for the East. He was then on the staff of la Presse, and it was in this journal that his letters were published from October I, 1852, to December 3, 1853, un^er the title, u From Paris to Constantinople — Summer Jaunts." No sooner had the last batch of copy appeared than the publication in book form was announced, first by Eugene Didier, and next by Michel Levy, the latter finally bringing out the volume in 1853, tnougn ^ *s dated 1854. The title then given it was that it has ever since borne, — "Constantinople." The book proved very popular, and many successive editions of it have since appeared.

10

Constantinople

CONS TANTINOPLE

SYRA AND SMYRNA

USE doth breed a habit in a man," and I might say with as much truth, he who has travelled will travel again. The thirst for sight-seeing is excited by grat- ification instead of being appeased. Here I am in Constantinople, and I am already thinking of going to Cairo and Egypt. Spain, Italy, Africa, England, Bel- gium, Holland, a part of Germany, Switzerland, the Isles of Greece, and a few ports of the Levant, which I visited at different times and on different occasions, have merely increased my love of cosmopolitan vaga- bondage. It may be that travelling is a dangerous element to introduce into one's life, for it excites one deeply and causes an uneasiness like that of birds of passage kept prisoners at the time of migration, if any circumstance or any duty prevents one's starting. You are aware that you are going to expose yourself to fatigue, privations, annoyances, and even perils; it is

13

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difficult to give up pleasant habits of mind and heart, to leave family, friends, and relatives for the unknown ; yet you feel it impossible to remain, nor do your friends attempt to detain you, but press your hand silently as you step into the carriage.

And ought we not, after all, to explore, in part at least, the planet upon which we keep whirling through space until its mysterious Creator is pleased to transport us into another world where we may read another page of His infinite work ? Is it not clearly laziness to keep on spelling the same word without ever turning over the page ? What poet would be satisfied to see a reader keep to a single one of his stanzas ? So every year, unless I am detained by imperious necessity, I study some one country of the vast universe, which seems to me less vast as I traverse it and as it emerges from the vague cosmography of imagination. Without quite going to the Holy Sepulchre, to Saint Jago de Compos- i tello, or to Mecca, I start on a pious pilgrimage to those parts of the world where God is more visible in the beauty of the sites. This time I shall see Turkey, Greece, and a portion of that Hellenic Asia in which beauty of form mingles with Oriental splendour.

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SYRA AND SMYRNA

Sometime to-morrow we shall be in sight of Cape Matapan, a barbarous name which conceals the har- mony of the old appellation, just as a coat of lime-wash spoils a fine carving. Cape Taenarum is the extreme point of the deeply cut fig-leaf spread out upon the sea, now called Morea, formerly named Peloponnesus. Every passenger was on deck, gazing in the direction indicated, three or four hours before anything could be made out. The magic name of Greece had started the most inert of imaginations ; the bourgeois most averse to artistic ideas were moved. Finally a violet line showed faint above the waves. It was Greece. A mountain rose out of the waters like a nymph resting on the sand after a bath, beautiful, fair, elegant, and worthy of that land of sculpture. " What is that moun- tain?" I asked the captain. " Taygetus," he replied carelessly, just as he might have said, " Montmartre." As the name of Taygetus fell upon my ear, a line of the u Georgics " came back spontaneously to my mind,

"... virginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta!"

and fluttered on my lips like a monotonous refrain that satisfied my thoughts. What better can one address to a Greek mountain than a line of Vergil ? Although it

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was in the middle of June and fairly warm, the summit of the mountain was silvered with snow, and I thought of the rosy feet of the lovely maids of Laconia who traversed Taygetus as Bacchantes, and left their charming footprints upon the white paths.

Cape Matapan stretches out between two deep gulfs which it divides, the Gulf of Koron and that of Kolo- kythia. It is an arid, bare point of land, like all the coasts of Greece. After passing it you are shown on the right a mass of tawny rocks cracked by dryness, calcined by heat, without a trace of verdure or even of loam. It is Cerigo, or Cythera of old, the island of myrtles and roses, the place beloved of Venus, whose name sums up all voluptuousness. What would Watteau have said, with his " Departure " for his blue and rosy Cythera, in the presence of that bare shore of crumbling rock, its hard contours standing out under a shadowless sun, and better fitted for a cavern for a penitent anchorite than for a lovers' grove ? Gerard de Nerval at least had the pleasure of seeing on the shores of Cythera a man hanged, wrapped up in oil- cloth, which proves that justice is careful and comfort- able in that part of the world.

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Our vessel was too far away from land to allow the passengers to enjoy such a graceful detail, even if all the gibbets in the island had been in use at that mo- ment. Did the ancients lie? Did they imagine lovely sites where now exist only a rocky isle and a bare land ? It is difficult to suppose that their descriptions, the accuracy of which it was then easy to verify, can have been utterly fanciful. No doubt this land, worn out by human activity, has at last been exhausted. It died with the civilisation it supported, exhausted by master- pieces, genius, and heroism. What we behold is merely the skeleton; the skin and the muscles have fallen into dust. When the soul is withdrawn from a country, it dies like a body. Else how are we to explain so com- plete and general a difference ? — for what I have just said is applicable to almost the whole of Greece. And yet these shores, desolate though they be, have still fine lines and pure colours.

By morning we were opposite Syra. Seen from the roads, Syra greatly resembles Algiers, on a smaller scale, of course. On a mountainous background of the warmest tone, sienna or burnt topaz, place a triangle dazzlingly white, the base of which is laved by the sea, and the apex of which is a church, and you have an

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exact idea of the city, which but yesterday was a shape- less heap of hovels and which the transformation into a coaling port for steamers will soon make the queen of the Cyclades. Wind-mills with eight or nine sails break the sharp silhouette. There was not a tree, not a blade of green grass as far as the eye could see. A great number of vessels of all forms and all sizes were crowded along the shore, their slender rigging showing black against the white houses of the town. Boats were coming and going with joyous animation ; earth, sea, and heaven were inundated with light; life broke out in every direction. Boats were pulling fast towards our vessel and formed a regatta of which we were the finish.

Soon the deck was covered with a swarm of bronze- complexioned fellows with hooked noses, flashing eyes, fierce moustaches, who offered their services in the same tone as elsewhere one is called upon for one's purse or one's life. Some wore Greek caps (they had a perfect right to do so), vast trousers very much like petticoats, pleated woollen sashes, and dark-blue cloth jackets ; others wore kilts, white vests, and cotton caps, or else small straw hats with a black cord. One of them was superbly costumed, and seemed to be posing

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for a water-colour sketch in an album. He deserved the epithet which speakers in Homer addressed to the hearers whom they desired to flatter, euknemides Achaiot (well-booted Greeks), for he had the handsomest pique, embroidered knemids, ornamented with tufts of red silk, which it is possible to imagine. His closely pleated kilt, dazzlingly clean, spread out like a bell \ a tightly drawn sash set off his wasp-like waist ; his vest, braided, trimmed, and adorned with filigree buttons, gave passage to the sleeves of a fine linen shirt, and on his shoulders was elegantly thrown a hand- some red jacket stiff with ornaments and arabesques. This superb individual was neither more nor less than a dragoman who acts as guide to travellers on their trips through Greece, and no doubt he desired to flatter his clients by this show of local colour, just as the handsome maids of Procida and Nisida put on their velvet and gold costumes for English tourists only.

Syra presents the peculiarity of being a city in ruins and a growing city, a rather strange contrast. In the lower town one comes everywhere upon scaffoldings ; building stones and debris fill the streets; houses are visibly growing up ; in the upper town, everything is

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falling and going to ruin. Life has left the head and taken refuge in the feet.

A sort of very steep roadway separates New Syra from Old Syra. Once the bridge has been crossed, one has to climb almost vertical streets paved like tor- rent beds. With two or three comrades I scaled them between ruinous walls, fallen-in hovels, over loose stones and pigs that got out of the way with a yelp and scurried off, rubbing their bluish backs against my legs. Through half-opened doors I caught sight of haggard old witches cooking strange dishes on a fire blazing in the shadow. Men with the looks of melodrama brig- ands put aside their narghilehs and watched our little caravan go by with a very ungracious expression of countenance.

The slope became so steep that we were almost compelled to go on all-fours, through obscure labyrinths, vaulted passages, and ruinous stairs. The houses are built one above another, so that the threshold of the upper one is on the level of the terraced top of the lower. Every dwelling looks as if, in order to reach the top of the mountain, it had set foot on the head of the one below, on a road intended apparently more for goats than for men. The peculiar advantage of Old

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Syra seems to be that it is easily accessible to hawks and eagles only. It is an admirable location for the eyries of birds of prey, but a most unsuitable one for human habitations.

Breathless and perspiring, we at last reached the narrow platform upon which rises the church of Saint George, — a platform paved with tombstones, under which rest the aerial dead ; and here we were fully compensated by the magnificent panorama for the fatigue we had endured. Behind us rose the crest of the mountain upon which Syra is built ; on the right, look- ing seaward, fell away an immense ravine broken and torn in the most wildly romantic fashion ; at our feet sank in successive terraces the white houses of upper and lower Syra ; farther in the distance shone the sea with its luminous gleam, and the circle of Delos, Mykone, Tino, and Andro, which the setting sun bathed in rose and changing tints that, if they were represented in painting, would be declared impossible.

The next day we were to sail for Smyrna, and I was for the first time to set foot on the Asian land, the cradle of the world, the happy place where rises the sun and which it leaves regretfully to light the West.

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At early dawn we entered the roads of Smyrna, which form a graceful curve, at the bottom of which spreads out the town. The first thing that struck my eyes at that distance was the great screen of cypresses rising above the houses, mingling their black tops with the white shafts of the minarets, the whole still bathed in shadow and surmounted by an old, ruined fortress, the walls of which stood out against the lighted sky and formed a sort of amphitheatre behind the buildings. It was no longer the bare and desolate shores of Greece ; the land of Asia appeared, smiling and fresh in the rosy light of dawn.

It would be a grievous mistake to leave Smyrna without visiting the Caravan Bridge. This celebrated bridge, which unfortunately has been disfigured by an ugly balustrade of cast iron, crosses a small river a few inches in depth, in which were quietly swimming half a dozen ducks, as if the divine blind man had not washed his dusty feet in those waters which three thousand years have not dried up. The stream is the Meles, whence Homer was called Melesigenes. It is true that some scholars deny that this brook is the Meles, but other scholars, still more learned, maintain that Homer never lived, which simplifies the question

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considerably. I, who am but a poet, willingly accept the legend which has fixed a thought and a remem- brance upon a place already charming in itself.

Great plane-trees, under which a cafe has been erected, shade one of the banks ; on the other superb cypresses tell of a cemetery. Let not this name awaken any gloomy thoughts in your mind. Dainty tombs of white marble, diapered with pretty Turkish letters on sky-blue or apple-green backgrounds and of a form entirely different from Christian sepulchres, shine gaily under the trees as the sunbeams light upon them. At most they excite in those who are not accustomed to them a slight melancholy which is not without its charm.

At the farther end is a sort of custom house and guard house, occupied by a few of the Zebecs, whose appearance is familiar to every one, thanks to Decamps' paintings of Asiatic scenes. They wear high, conical turbans, short white linen drawers very full behind, huge sashes which reach from the loins almost to the armpits, and which are formidably full of yataghans and kandjar-hilts ; they have bare legs the colour of Cor- dova leather, hooked noses, and huge moustaches. Lying lazily on a bench were three or four scoundrels,

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very honest fellows, no doubt, but who looked a great deal more like brigands than customs inspectors.

To rest our animals we had seated ourselves under the plane-trees, and pipes and mastic had been brought to us. Mastic is a sort of liquor much drunk in the Levant, especially in the Greek Islands, and the best comes from Khio. It is alcohol in which has been melted a perfumed gum. It is drunk with water, which it freshens and whitens like eau de cologne. It is the oriental absinthe. This local drink recalled to me the small glasses of aguardiente which I used to drink some twelve years ago on the ride from Granada to Malaga, as I was going to the bull-fight with Lanza the arrlero, wearing my majo costume that had such a splendid pot of flowers embroidered on the back, and which is now, alas ! all moth-eaten.

While we were smoking and sipping our mastic, a procession of some fifteen camels, preceded by an ass tinkling its bell, passed across the bridge with that singular ambling pace characteristic also of the ele- phant and the giraffe, their backs rounded and their long ostrich-necks waving. The strange silhouette of that ugly animal, which seems created for a special nature, surprises one, and impresses on you the fact

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that you are away from home. When you meet in the open those curious animals shown at home in menag- eries, you distinctly feel that you have left Paris. We also saw two women carefully veiled, accompanied by a negro with a repulsive face, no doubt a eunuch. The East was beginning to exhibit itself unmistakably, and the most paradoxical mind could not have maintained that we were still in Paris.

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THE TROAD AND THE DARDANELLES

GREAT was my regret at having to leave Smyrna so soon, with its Asiatic and volup- tuous grace. As I hastened to the boat, my glance plunged eagerly into the half-opened doors, through which I could see courts paved with marble, cooled by fountains, like the Andalusian patios, and verdant gardens, calm and shady oases embellished by lovely girls in white and soft coloured wrappers, wear- ing elegant Greek head-dresses, and grouped as would love to have them a painter and a poet. My regret was for the fine streets of this city, the Street of Roses and the neighbouring ones, for the Jewish quarter and certain parts of the Turkish quarter are wretchedly sordid and hideously dilapidated. Truth compels me not to conceal this reverse of the medal.

In spite of its great antiquity, — it existed already in the days of Homer, — Smyrna has preserved few re- mains of its former splendour. For my part, I saw no

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other antique ruins than three or four huge Roman columns rising by the frail modern structures at their feet. These columns, the remains of a temple of Jupiter or of Fortune, I am not sure which, have a fine effect, and must have excited the sagacity of scholars. I merely caught sight of them from the back of an ass as I passed by, so that I cannot express any satis- factory opinion about them.

The Asiatic shore is much less barren than the European, and I remained on deck as long as the day- light enabled me to distinguish the outline of the land.

The next morning at dawn we had passed Mityle.ne, the antique Lesbos, the country of Sappho. A flat shore spread out before us on the right. It was the Troad, —

" Campos ubi Troja fuit," —

the very soil of epic poetry, the theatre of immortal verse, the place twice consecrated by the genius of Greece and of Rome, by Homer and by Vergil. It is strange to find one's self thus in the very centre of poetry and mythology. Like ^Eneas relating his story to Dido from his raised couch, I can say from the quarter-deck, and with greater truth, —

" Est in conspectu Tenedos," —

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for there is the island whence glided the serpents that bound in their folds the unfortunate Laocoon and his sons, and furnished a subject for one of the master- pieces of sculpture ; Tenedos, on which reigns the mighty Phoebus Apollo, the god of the silver bow invoked by Chryses ; and farther on, the shore which Protesilaus, the first victim of a war that was to destroy a people, tinged with his blood as with a propitiatory libation. The mass of vague ruins, faintly seen in the distance, is the Scaean Gates, through which issued Hector wearing the helmet with the red aigrette that terrified little Astyanax, and before which sat down in the shade the old men who, in Homer, bowed before Helen's beauty. The dark mountain clothed with a mantle of forest, which rises on the horizon, is Ida, the scene of the judgment of Paris, where the three lovely goddesses, Hera, with the snowy arms, Pallas Athene with the sea-green eyes, and Aphrodite with the magic cestus, posed nude before the fortunate shepherd; where Anchises enjoyed the intoxication of a celestial hymen, and made Venus the mother of ^Eneas. The fleet of the Greeks was moored along this shore ; on it rested the prows of their black vessels partly drawn up on the sand. The accuracy of the Homeric description

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is plainly evident in every detail of the place ; a strate- gist could follow, Iliad in hand, every phase of the siege.

While thus recalling my classical remembrances, I gaze upon the Troad, Stalimene, the ancient Lemnos, which received Hephaestus hurled from heaven, rises over the sea, and shows behind me its yellowish prom- ontories. Would I were two-faced like Janus ! Two eyes indeed are but little, and man is greatly inferior in this respect to the spider, which has eight thousand according to Leuwenhoeck and Swammerdam. I turn for one moment to cast a glance at the volcanic isle where were forged the arms of proof of the heroes favoured by the gods, and the golden tripods, living metal slaves that served the Olympians in their celestial dwellings, and the captain draws me by the sleeve to point out upon the Trojan shore a rounded hillock, a conical hill, the regular form of which speaks of man's handiwork. The tumulus covers the remains of Anti- lochus, the son of Nestor and Eurydice, the first Greek who slew a Trojan at the beginning of the siege, and who perished himself by Hector's hands while warding off a blow aimed at his father by Memnon. Does Antilochus really rest under that mound ? no doubt the

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discursive critics will say. Tradition affirms that he does, and why should tradition lie ?

As we proceed we discover two other tumuli not far from a little village called Yeni Scheyr, recognisable by a row of nine wind-mills like those of Syra. Nearer to Smyrna, and also nearer to the shore, is the tomb of Patroclus, brother in arms and inseparable companion of Achilles. There was raised the gigantic pile watered with the blood of innumerable victims, on which the hero, mad with grief, cast four costly horses, two thorough-bred dogs, and ten young Trojans slain with his own hand, and around which the mourning army celebrated funeral games which lasted many days. The second, more inland, is the tomb of Achilles himself; such, at least, is the name given to it. According to the Homeric tradition, the ashes of Achilles were min- gled with those of Patroclus in a golden urn and thus the two great friends, undivided in life, were not sepa- rated in death. The gods were moved by the hero's fate. Thetis rose from the sea with a plaintive chorus of Nereids, the Nine Muses wept and sang hymns of grief around the funeral bed, and the bravest in the army performed bloody games in honour of the hero. The tumulus is no doubt that of some other Greek or

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Trojan, that of Hector perhaps. In Alexander's days, the place of the tomb of the hero of the Iliad was well known, for the conqueror of Asia stopped there, saying that Achilles was very fortunate to have had such a friend as Patroclus and such a poet as Homer ; he had only Hephaestion and Quintus Curtius ; yet his exploits surpassed those of the son of Peleus, and for once history triumphed over mythology.

While I am discoursing on Homeric geography and the heroes of the Iliad, — a very innocent piece of pedantry which may well be forgiven in the presence of Troy, — our steamer continues on its way, somewhat retarded by a north wind blowing from the Black Sea, and proceeds towards the Strait of the Dardanelles, which is defended by two castles, the one on the Asiatic, the other on the European shore. Their cross fire bars the entrance to the Strait and renders access to it, if not impossible, at least very difficult for a hostile fleet. Before I leave the Troad, let me add that beyond Yeni Scheyr falls into the Bosphorus a stream claimed by some to be the Simois and by others the Granicus.

The Hellespont, or Sea of Helle, is very narrow. It is more like the mouth of a great river than a sea.

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Its breadth is not greater than that of the Thames at Gravesend. As the wind was fair to run into the ^Egean Sea we passed through a fleet of vessels going in that direction with all sails set.

The European shore, which we kept close aboard, is formed of steep hills spotted with vegetation. The general aspect is rather barren and monotonous. The Asiatic shore is much more smiling, and presents, I know not why, an appearance of Northern verdure which would seem more suitable to Europe. At one time we were so close to the shore that we could make out five Turkish horsemen riding along a narrow foot- path stretching along the foot of the cliff like a narrow yellow ribbon. They formed a scale which gave me an idea of the height of the shore, which is much greater than I should have supposed. It is near this place that Xerxes built the bridge intended for the crossing of his army, and caused the disrespectful sea, which had been rude enough to break it, to be beaten with rods. Judged on the spot, this enterprise, men- tioned in all books of morals as the very acme of human pride, seems, on the contrary, quite reasonable. It is also supposed that Sestos and Abydos, made famous by the loves of Hero and Leander, were situated about

3*

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here, where the Hellespont is not much more than eight hundred and seventy-five yards wide. Lord Byron, as every one knows, repeated, without being in love, Leander's swimming exploit, but instead of Hero on the shore, holding up her torch as a guiding light, he found fever only. He took an hour and ten minutes to traverse the distance, and was prouder of the performance than of having written " Childe Harold" or "The Corsair."

I cannot tell you much about the Sea of Marmora itself, for it was dark when we traversed it, and I was asleep in my cabin, worn out by fourteen hours' watch- ing on deck. Above Gallipoli it broadens considerably and narrows again at Constantinople. When day dawned, on the Asiatic side the Bithynian Olympus, covered with eternal snows, was rising in the rosy vapours of morning with changing tints and silvery sheen. The European shore, infinitely less pictur- esque, was spotted with white houses and clumps of verdure, above which rose tall brick chimneys, the obelisks of industry, the ruddy material of which, seen from a distance, is a very fair imitation of the rose granite of Egypt. If I did not fear being accused of indulging in a paradox, I would say that the whole of

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4; 4; 4; 4; 4; £ 4- 4; £4. 4- &&£& & + + + + + & £&

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this part recalled to me the appearance of the Thames between the Isle of Dogs and Greenwich : the sky, very milky, very opaline, almost covered with trans- parent haze, still further increased the illusion.

In the blue distance loomed the Archipelago of the Princes' Islands, a great Sunday resort. In a few minutes more Stamboul would appear to us in all its splendour. Already, on the left, through the silvery gauze of the mist, showed up a few minarets; the Castle of the Seven Towers, where formerly ambassa- dors were imprisoned, bristled with its massive towers connected by crenellated walls; its base plunges into the sea, and it backs up against the hill. It is from this castle that start the old ramparts that surround the city as far as Eyoub. The Turks call it Yedi Kouleh, and the Greeks called it Heptapyrgion. It was built by the Byzantine emperors, commenced by Zeno and completed by the Komnenoi. Viewed from the sea, it appears to be in very bad condition, ready to fall in ruins. It is, however, very effective with its heavy form, its squat towers, its thick walls, and its look of a Bastile and a fortress.

Our steamer, slowing down so as not to arrive too early, shaved Seraglio Point. It is a series of long,

34

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whitewashed walls, the crenellations of which stand out against gardens of terebinth and cypress trees, of cabinets with trellised windows, kiosks with projecting roofs and without any symmetry. It is very far from the magnificence of the " Thousand and One Nights " which the single word " seraglio " calls up in the least excitable imagination; and I must confess that these wooden boxes with close bars, that contain the beauties of Georgia, Circassia, and Greece, the houris of that paradise of Mohammed of which the Padishah has the key, are uncommonly like hen-coops. We are con- stantly confounding Arab architecture and Turkish architecture, which have no relation to each other, and involuntarily we turn the seraglio into an Alham- bra, which is far from being the truth. These disap- pointing remarks do not prevent the old Seraglio from having an agreeable aspect, with its dazzling whiteness and its sombre verdure, between the blue sky and the blue sea, the rapid current of which laves its mysterious walls.

As we passed, we were shown an inclined plane jutting out of an opening in the wall and projecting over the sea. That is the spot, we were told, where were cast into the Bosphorus faithless odalisques

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and those who for some reason or another had fallen into disgrace with the master. They were enclosed in a sack containing a cat and a serpent.

We have doubled Seraglio Point. The steamer stops at the entrance to the Golden Horn. A mar- vellous panorama is outspread before me like an operatic ' stage-setting in a fairy sky. The Golden Horn is a gulf of which the Old Seraglio and the landing at Top Khaneh form the two ends, and which penetrates the city, built like an amphitheatre upon its two banks, as far as the Sweet Waters of Europe and the mouth of the Barbyses, a small stream which flows into it. The name of Golden Horn comes, no doubt, from the fact that it represents to the city a true cornucopeia, owing to the commodity it offers to shipping, commerce, and naval construc- tion. On the right, beyond the sea, is a huge white building, regularly pierced with several rows of win- dows flanked at its angles with turrets surmounted by flagstaff's. It is a barracks, the largest but not the most characteristic of Scutari, the Turkish name of the Asiatic suburb of Constantinople, which extends, ascending towards the Black Sea, from the site of the former Chrysopolis, of which no traces remain. A

36

Constantinople and the Golden Horn, from the Stamboul side.

TROAD AND DARDANELLES

little farther, in the centre of the waters, rises upon a rocky islet a dazzlingly white lighthouse, which is called Leander's Tower, and also the Maiden's Tower, although the place has no connection whatever with the legend of the two lovers celebrated by Musaeus. The tower, of elegant shape and which in the clear light looks like alabaster, stands out beautifully against the dark blue of the sea.

At the entrance to the Golden Horn lies Top Khaneh with its landing place, its arsenal, and its mosque with bold dome, and slender minarets, built by Sultan Mahmoud. The palace of the Russian Embassy raises amid red-tiled roofs and clumps of trees its proudly dominating facade which compels the glance, and seems already to seize upon the city ; while the palaces of the other embassies are satisfied with a more modest appearance. The Tower of Galata, in the Prankish business quarter, rises from the centre of the houses, topped by a pointed cap of verdigrised copper, and overlooks the old Genoese walls falling in ruins at its feet. Pera, the residence of the Europeans, outspreads on the top of a hill its cypresses and its stone houses, that contrast with the Turkish wooden shanties, and stretch as far as the Great Field of the -Dead.

37

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The Seraglio Point forms the other extremity, and on this bank rises the city of Constantinople, properly so called. Never did a more superbly varied line meander between heaven and earth. The ground rises from the shore, and the constructions are arranged like an amphitheatre. The mosques over- topping the sea of verdure and many-coloured houses with their bluish domes and their lofty white minarets surrounded by balconies and ending in a sharp point that pierces the clear morning sky, give to the town an Oriental and fairy-like appearance, augmented by the silvery light that bathes the vaporous contours. An officious neighbour names them in order, from the Seraglio and up the Golden Horn: Saint Sophia, Saint Irenaeus, Sultan Achmet, Nouri Osma- nieh, Sultan Bayezid, Souleiman, Shahzadeh Djami, Sedja Djamassi, Sultan Mohammed II, Sultan Selim. Amid all these minarets, behind the fa$ade of the Mosque Bayezid, rises to a prodigious height the Seraskierat Tower, whence warning is given of fires.

Three bridges of boats connect the two shores of the Golden Horn and allow of constant communica- tion between the Turkish city and its suburbs, with their varied populations. As in London, there are

****** 4, ********* ***** * **

TROAD AND DARDANELLES

no quays at Constantinople, and everywhere the city is laved by the sea. Vessels of all nations draw near the houses without being kept at a respectful distance by a granite wall. Near the bridge, in the centre of the Golden Horn, were anchored flotillas of English, French, Austrian, and Turkish steamers; water omnibuses, the watermen of the Bosphorus, the Thames of Constantinople, on which is concentrated the movement and bustle of the city. Myriads of boats and caiques were darting like fishes through the azure water of the gulf and pulling towards our steamer anchored a short distance from the Custom House, which is situated between Galata and Top Khaneh.

As usual, our decks were covered in a moment by a polyglot crowd. It was an unintelligible babel of Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, and English. I was feeling rather bothered by these con- flicting dialects, although before starting I had care- fully studied Covielle's Turkish speeches and the ceremony in the " Bourgeois Gentilhomme," when fortunately appeared in a caique, like a guardian angel, the person to whom I had been recommended, and who speaks as many languages as the famous Mezzo- fanti. He sent to the devil, each in his own particular

39

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idiom, every one of the rascals that crowded around me, made me enter his boat, and took me to the Custom House, where the inspectors were satisfied with casting a careless glance at my small trunk, which the hammal threw on his back as if it were a feather.

The hammal is a genus peculiar to Constantinople. It is a two-legged, humpless camel. It lives on cucum- bers and water, and carries enormous burdens through impracticable streets, up perpendicular slopes, in over- whelming heat. Instead of hooks, it carries on its shoulders a cushion of stuffed leather, on which it places the burdens under which it is bowed down, its strength lying in its neck, like that of oxen. Its cos- tume consists of white linen breeches, a jacket of coarse yellow stuff, and a fez with a handkerchief wrapped around it. The torso of the hammal is amaz- ingly developed, and, curiously enough, the legs are often very thin. One finds it difficult to understand how these poor legs, covered with tanned skin and looking like flutes in a case, can support weights under which a Hercules would bend.

As I followed the hammal, who was proceeding towards the lodging reserved for me, I entered a labyrinth of streets and narrow lanes, tortuous, ignoble,

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horribly paved, full of holes and pitfalls, encumbered with leprous dogs and asses carrying beams or rubbish The dazzling mirage presented by Constantinople at a distance was rapidly vanishing, Paradise was turning into a slough, poetry into prose ; and I asked myself, with a feeling of melancholy, how these ugly hovels could possibly assume at a distance such a seductive aspect, such a tender and vaporous colour. I reached, walking on the heels of my hammal and clinging to the arm of my guide, the room which had been secured for me at the house of a Smyrniote woman, copa syriska like that of Vergil, near the High Street of Pera, bordered with buildings insignificant but in good taste, somewhat like streets of the third rank in Marseilles or Barcelona.

CONSTANTINOPLE

THE LITTLE FIELD OF THE DEAD THE GOLDEN HORN

THE lodging which had been prepared for me was on the first floor of a house situated at the end of a street in the Frankish Quarter, the only one that Europeans are allowed to inhabit. The street leads from the end of Pera to the Little Field of the Dead. I do not indicate it more clearly for the very good reason that in Constantinople streets have no names, either Turkish or French, posted at the corners. Besides, the houses are not numbered, which increases the difficulty. Some streets, however, have a traditional name derived from a neighbouring khan or mosque, and the one in which I lived, as I learned later, was called Dervish Sokak j but the name is never written, and consequently is of no use in guiding you.

The house was built of stones, a point which was particularly insisted on to me and which is not to be disdained in a city as combustible as Constantinople.

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THE LITTLE FIELD OF THE DEAD

For greater security, an iron door and shutters of thick iron plate were, in case of the neighbourhood taking fire, to intercept the flames and sparks and to isolate the house completely. I had a sitting-room with white- washed walls, a wooden ceiling painted gray and orna- mented with blue lines, furnished with a long divan, a table and a Venetian mirror in a black and gold frame; and a bedroom with an iron bedstead and a chest of drawers. There was nothing particularly Eastern about it, as you see. On the other hand, my hostess was a Smyrniote ; her niece, though wearing a rose-coloured wrapper after the European fashion, owned languorous Asiatic eyes that glowed in her pale face framed in by mat black hair. A very pretty Greek maid, with a little kerchief twisted on top of her head, and a sort of lout from the Cyclades, completed the staff of the house, and gave it a touch of local colour. The niece knew a little French, the aunt a little Italian, and so we managed to understand each other some- what. Constantinople is, for the matter of that, a genuine Tower of Babel, and it would be easy to sup- pose it was still the day of the Confusion of Tongues. A knowledge of four languages is indispensable for the ordinary relations of life. Greek, Turkish, Italian, and

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French are spoken in Pera by polyglot street boys. The famous Mezzofanti would surprise no one in Constantinople. We Frenchmen, who know our own language only, are amazed at such prodigious facility.

The Little Field of the Dead, which, by way of abbreviation, or perhaps to avoid the suggestion of a melancholy thought, is usually called the Little Field, lies on the reverse of a hill that rises from the Golden Horn, and on the crest of which is built Pera, the hill- top marked by a terrace and bordered by high houses and cafes. It is an old Turkish cemetery where no one has been buried for some years, either because there is no more room or because the dead Mahometans think they are too near the living Giaours.

A brilliant sun rained down burning light upon the slope bristling with the black foliage and gray trunks of cypresses, under .which rose a host of marble posts topped by coloured turbans. These posts leaning, some to the right, some to the left, some forward and some backward, as the ground had yielded under their weight, had a vague resemblance to human forms. In several places these posts, covered with verses of the Koran, had been borne down by their own weight and, care- lessly set in friable soil, had fallen or been broken in

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THE LITTLE FIELD OF THE DEAD

pieces. Some of them were decapitated, the turbans lying at their base like heads cut off. It is said that these truncated tombs are those of former Janissaries, pursued beyond the confines of death by Mahmoud's rancour. There is no symmetry in this scattered cemetery, which sends a line of cypresses and tombs through the houses of Pera as far as the Tekieh, or monastery, of the Whirling Dervishes. Two or three paths built up with the debris of the funeral monuments, cross it diagonally. Here and there are small mounds, sometimes surrounded by low walls or balustrades, which are the reserved burial-places of some powerful or rich family. They usually contain a pillar ending in a huge turban, surrounded by three or four marble leaves rounded on top in the shape of a spoon handle, and a dozen smaller stones. They are in memory of a pacha, with his wives, and his children who have died young ; a sort of funeral harem which keeps him company in the next world.

In the open spaces workmen are cutting door-jambs and steps ; idlers are sleeping in the shade, or smoking their pipes upon a tomb; veiled women pass by, drag- ging their yellow boots with careless feet ; children are

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playing hide-and-seek behind the tombstones, uttering little glad cries ; cake sellers offer their light confections incrusted with almonds 5 between the interstices of the fallen monuments, hens are picking up seed, cows are looking for a few blades of grass, and for lack of it feed upon old shoes and old hats; dogs have settled them- selves in the excavations caused by the rotting of the biers, or rather, of the planks that support the ground around the bodies, and out of these refuges of death, enlarged by their ferocity, they have made hideous kennels for themselves.

In the more travelled spaces the tombs are worn away under the careless feet of the passers-by, and little by little disappear in dust and detritus of all kinds. The broken pillars are scattered on the ground like the pieces of a game, and are buried like the bodies which they designate, concealed by the invisible grave-diggers who remove everything that has been abandoned, whether a tomb, a temple, or a city. Here it is not solitude overspreading forgetfulness, but life taking back the place temporarily granted to death. Some denser cypress groves have nevertheless preserved a few corners of this profaned cemetery, and maintain its melancholy appearance. The doves roost in the dark

4.6

THE LITTLE FIELD OF THE DEAD

foliage, and the hawks circling in the azure sky soar above their sombre tops.

A few wooden houses built of planks, laths, and trellis-work painted red, which has turned rose-colour under rain and sun, are grouped among the trees, sunken out of plumb, and in a state of dilapidation most favour- able to water-colour painters and English book- illustrators.

Before descending the slope leading to the Golden Horn, I stopped for a moment, and gazed upon the wondrous spectacle unrolled before my eyes. The foreground was formed by the Little Field and its declivities planted with cypresses and tombs; the second distance, by the brown-tiled roofs and the reddish houses of the Kassim Pacha Quarter; the middle dis- tance, by the blue waters of the gulf that stretches from Serai Burnou to the Sweet Waters of Europe; and the fourth, by the lines of undulating hills on the slopes of which Constantinople is built. The bluish domes of the bazaars, the white minarets of the mosques, the arches of the old aqueduct of Valens standing out against the sky like black lace, the clumps of cypresses and plane-trees, the angles of the roofs, varied that wonderful sky-line prolonged from the Seven Towers

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to the heights of Eyoub ; and over all, a silvery white light in which floated like transparent gauze the smoke of the steamers on the Bosphorus about to start for Therapia or Kadikeui, of a lightness of tone which formed the happiest contrast with the crude, warm firmness of the foreground.

After a few moments of thoughtful admiration, I started again, following sometimes a faint track, some- times treading over the tombs, and I reached a network of lanes bordered by black houses inhabited by charcoal burners, blacksmiths, and other workers in iron. I said houses, but the word is rather large, and I take it back. Say hovels, dens, stalls, shanties, whatever you can imagine of smoky, dirty, wretched, but without those good old impasto walls, scratched, leprous, scabby, ruinous, which Decamps' trowel builds with such suc- cess in his Eastern paintings, and which give such character to hovels. Poor little asses with flapping ears and thin, raw backs, laden with charcoal and iron-work, shaved the walls of the dingy shops. Old beggar-women, seated on their haunches, their legs drawn up like those of grass-hoppers, pitifully held out to me from their ragged ferradjehs their hands, that re- sembled those of mummies after being unwrapped.

THE LITTLE FIELD OF THE DEAD

Their owl-like eyes made two brown spots in the mus- lin rag, bossed by the arch of the nose like the beak of a bird of prey, and drawn like a shroud over their hideous faces. Others, more alert, passed along with bowed back, their head sunk on their chest, leaning upon great sticks like Mother Goose in the pantomime prologues at the Funambules.

It is impossible to imagine to what an astounding de- gree of ugliness old women attain in the East, when they have absolutely given up their sex and no longer dis- guise themselves with the clever artifices of a compli- cated toilet. Here even the mask adds to the impression. What is visible is awful, what one imagines is frightful. It is a pity that the Turks do not possess a sabbath to which they could send these witches astride a broom- stick.

A few Arnaut or Bulgarian hammals, bending under enormous burdens, and, like Dante in hell, not lifting one foot until they have made sure the other is firmly planted, were ascending or descending the lane ; horses were travelling noisily, striking, every time they shied, sheaves of sparks from the uneven, rough pavement of this quarter, which is more industrious than fashionable.

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I thus reached the Golden Horn, debouching near the white buildings of the Arsenal, which are raised upon vast sub-structures and crowned by a tower in the form of a belfry. The Arsenal, constructed in the civilised taste, has nothing interesting to a European, although the Turks are very proud of it. I did not, therefore, stop to contemplate it, but devoted my whole attention to the movement of the port, rilled with ves- sels of all nations, traversed in every direction by caiques, and especially to the marvellous panorama of Constantinople outstretched on the other bank.

The view is so strangely beautiful that it seems unreal. It is as if there were spread out before one a stage drop intended for the setting of some Oriental fairy play, bathed by the painter's fancy and the glow of the footlights in the impossible luminousness of apotheo- sis. The palace of Serai' Burnou, with its Chinese roofs, its white, crenellated walls, its trellised kiosks, its gardens full of cypresses, umbrella pines, sycamores, and plane-trees ; the Mosque of Sultan Achmet, with its cupola showing round among its six minarets like ivory masts ; Saint Sophia raising its Byzantine dome upon heavy counterforts rayed transversely with white and rosy courses and flanked by four minarets ; the

50

THE LITTLE FIfiLD OF THE DEAD

Bayezid Mosque upon which hover like a cloud flocks of doves; Yeni Djami ; the Seraskierat Tower, a huge hollow column which bears on its cupola a perpetual Stylites watching for conflagrations at every point of the horizon ; Soulei'man with its Arab elegance, its dome like a steel helmet, — all these stand out blazing with light against a background of inconceivably deli- cate bluish, pearly, opaline tints, and form a picture that seems to be a mirage of the Fata Morgana rather than a prosaic reality. These splendours are reflected in the trembling mirror of the silvery waters of the Golden Horn, which add to the wondrousness of the spectacle. Ships at anchor, Turkish vessels furling their sails, opened like birds' wings, serve by their vigor- ous tones and the small black lines of their rigging to ,set off the background of vapour through which shows in dream colours the city of Constantine and of Mohammed II.

I am aware, thanks to friends who visited Constan- tinople before I did, that these marvels, like stage set- ting, need light and perspective ; as you draw near, the charm vanishes, the palaces turn out to be only rotten barracks, the minarets great whitewashed pillars, the streets narrow, steep, filthy, and characterless ; but no

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matter, if the incoherent collection of houses, mosques, and trees, coloured by the palette of the sun, produces an admirable effect between land and sky. The pros- pect, though it be the result of an illusion, is none the less absolutely beautiful.

I retraced my way and ascended to the Little Field of the Dead to reach Pera again. I turned off to the right, which brought me, by following the old Genoese walls, — at the foot of which is a dry moat half filled with filth in which dogs sleep and children play, — to the Galata Tower, a high building which is seen from afar off at sea, and which, like the Seraskierat Tower, has at its top a sentry watching for fires. It is a genuine Gothic donjon, crowned with battlements and topped by a pointed roof of copper oxidized by time, which, instead of a crescent, might well bear the swallow-tailed vane of a feudal manor. At the foot of the tower is a mass of low houses or huts which give an idea of its very great height. It was built by the Genoese. Those soldier merchants turned their warehouses into fortresses, and crenellated their quarter like a fortified city ; their trading-places might have sustained a siege, and did sustain more than one.

CONSTANTINOPLE

A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN

IN Paris the idea of going for a walk between eight and eleven at night in Pere-Lachaise or the cemetery at Montmartre would strike one as ultra-singular and cadaverously Romanticist; it would make the boldest dandies quail, and as for the ladies, the mere suggestion of such a party of pleasure would make them faint with terror. At Constantinople no one thinks twice about it. The fashionable walk of Pera is situated on the crest of the hill on which lies the Little Field. A frail railing, broken down in several places, forms between the Field of Death and the lively promenade a line of demarcation which is crossed constantly. A row of chairs and tables, at which are seated people drinking coffee, sherbet, or water, runs from one end to the other of the terrace, that forms an elbow farther on and joins the Great Field behind Upper Pera. Ugly houses of five, six, or seven stories in a hideous order of architecture un- known to Vignola, border the road on one side, and

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enjoy a prospect of which they are utterly unworthy. They exhibit the most civilised and modern hideous- ness, and yet I am bound to say that at night, when they are faintly lighted by the reflection of the lights and the sparkling of the stars or the violet beams of the moon which shimmer on their painted facades, they assume, owing to their very mass, an imposing aspect.

At either end of the terrace there is a cafe concert, where one can enjoy with one's refreshments the pleasure of hearing an open-air orchestra of gipsies performing German waltzes, or overtures to Italian operas.

This tomb-bordered promenade is uncommonly gay. The incessant music — for one orchestra starts up when another stops — imparts a festive air to the daily meeting of idlers, whose soft chatter forms a sort of bass to the brass phrases of Verdi. The smoke of latakieh and tombeki ascends in perfumed spirals from the chibouques, the narghilehs and cigarettes, for every- body, even women, smokes in Constantinople. Lighted pipes fill the darkness with brilliant dots and look like swarms of fireflies. The summons " A light ! " is heard in every possible idiom, and the waiters hurry in answer to these polyglot calls, brandishing a red-hot coal at the end of a small pair of pincers.

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A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN

The families living in Pera advance in numerous clans along the space left free by the seated customers. They are dressed in European fashion, save for some slight modifications in the head-dress and the attire

o

of the ladies. The East shows in this place only when some Greek goes by, throwing back the sleeves of his embroidered jacket and swinging his white fustanella outspread like a bell, or some Turkish functionary on horseback, followed by his khavass and his pipe-bearer, returning from the Great Field and going back to Constantinople by way of the Galata Bridge.

Turkish manners have influenced European ones, and the women in Pera live very much shut up. This seclusion is entirely voluntary, of course. They scarcely go out, save to take a turn around the Little Field to

o '

breathe the evening air. There are many, however, who do not allow themselves this innocent distraction, and thus the tourist has not the opportunity of review- ing the feminine types of the country as at the Cascine, the Prado, Hyde Park, or the Champs-Elysees. Man alone seems to exist in the East ; woman becomes a sort of myth, and Christians in this respect share the views of Mussulmans.

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On that particular evening the Little Field of the Dead was very animated. Ramazan had begun with the new moon, the appearance of which above the top of Bithynian Olympus is watched by pious astrologers and proclaimed throughout the Empire, for it announces the return of the great Mohammedan Jubilee. Rama- zan, as every one knows, is half Lent, half carnival ; the day is given up to austerity, the night to pleasure ; penance is accompanied by debauch as a legitimate compensation. From sunrise to sunset, the exact time being marked by a cannon-shot, it is forbidden by the Koran to take any food, however light. Even smoking is forbidden, and that is the most painful of privations for a people whose lips are scarcely ever taken away from the amber mouthpiece. To quench the most burning thirst with a drop of water would be a sin, and would rob fasting of its merit. But from evening to morning everything is permissible, and the privations of the day are amply compensated for; the Turkish city then gives itself up to feasting.

From the promenade of the Little Field I enjoyed a most marvellous spectacle. On the other side of the Golden Horn Constantinople sparkled like the carbun- cle crown of an Eastern emperor. The minarets of the

A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN

mosques bore upon each of their galleries girdles of lights, and from one to the other ran, in letters of fire, verses of the Koran inscribed upon the azure of the sky as on the pages of a divine book. Saint Sophia, Sultan Achmet, Yeni Valideh Djami, Soulei'man, and all the temples of Allah which rise from the Serai Burnou to the hills of Eyoub were dazzling with light, and proclaimed with a blaze of exclamations the for- mula of Islam. The crescent moon, accompanied by a star, seemed to embroider the blazon of the empire on the celestial standard. The waters of the gulf multiplied and broke the reflections of the millions of lights, and their waves seemed to be formed of half-melted gems. Fact, it is said, always falls short of fancy, but here the dream was surpassed by the reality. The " Thousand and One Nights " have nothing more fairylike, and the splendours of the outpoured treasures of Haroun al Raschid would pale by the side of this casket which flames along a whole league.

During Ramazan the most complete freedom is enjoyed. The carrying of lanterns is not obligatory as at other seasons. The streets, brilliantly lighted, ren- der this precaution needless. Giaours may remain in

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Constantinople until the last lights have been extin- guished, a piece of boldness rather dangerous at any other time. I therefore accepted eagerly the proposal of a young gentleman of Constantinople, to whom I had a letter of introduction, to go down to the Top Khaneh landing, hire a caique, go to see the Sultan pray at Tcheragan, and finish the evening in the Turkish city.

As we descended, the crowd increased and became dense j the shops, brilliantly lighted, illumined the way, invaded by Turks crouching on the ground or squatting upon low stools, smoking with all the voluptuousness due to a day's abstinence. People were coming and going, forming a perpetually animated and most pic- turesque swarming ; for between these two banks of motionless smokers flowed a stream of foot-passengers of every nation, sex, and age. Carried by the stream, we reached the square at Top Khaneh, traversed the arcaded court of the mosque which forms the corner on this side, and found ourselves opposite that charm- ing fountain which English engravings have made familiar to every one, and which has been stripped of its pretty Chinese roof, replaced at present by an ignoble balustrade of cast iron.

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A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN

A masked ball cannot offer a greater variety of costumes than Top Khaneh Square on a night in Ramazan. Bulgarians, in their coarse smocks and fur-trimmed caps ; slender-waisted Circassians, their broad chests covered with cartridges which make them resemble organ fronts ; Georgians, in short tunics belted with metal girdles, and Russian caps of varnished leather ; Arnauts, wearing sleeveless, embroidered jackets over their bare torsos ; Jews, known by their gowns split down the side and their black caps bound with a black handkerchief; the Island Greeks, with their full trousers, their tightly drawn sashes, and their fez with silk tassel ; the Reformed Turks, in frock coats and red fez; the Old Turks, wearing huge turbans, and rose-coloured, jonquil, cin- namon or sky-blue caftans, recalling the fashions of the days of the Janissaries ; Persians, in tall black astrakhan- lamb caps ; Syrians, easily known by their gold striped kerchief and their white mack'las, cut like Byzantine dalmatics ; Turkish women, draped in white yashmaks and light-coloured ferradjehs ; Armenians, less care- fully veiled, wearing violet and black shoes, — form, in groups which constantly draw together and fall apart, the most amazing carnival imaginable.

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Open-air stalls for the sale of yaourt (curdled milk), kalmak (boiled milk), confectioners' shops, — for the Turks are very fond of sweets, — water-sellers' stalls, the little chimes of bells or capsules of crystals struck by hydraulic means, drinking-places where one can get sherbets, granites, or snow water, border the sides of the square and brighten it with their illumination. The tobacconists' shops, brilliantly lighted, are rilled with high personages who watch the festival while smoking first-class tobacco in cherry or jasmine pipes with enormous mouthpieces. Within the cafes the tar- bouka roars, the tambourine clatters, the rebeb shrieks, and the reed flute miaouls; monotonous nasal songs, interrupted from time to time by shrill cries and calls like the Tyrolese jodels, rise from the clouds of smoke. We had the greatest difficulty in reaching, through the crowd, which would not make way, the landing-place at Top Khaneh, where we were to get a caique.

A few strokes of the oars took us well out, and we could see from the centre of the Bosphorus the illumi- nations of the mosque of Sultan Mahmoud and of the cannon foundry near it, which has given its name to the landing-place : " Top " in Turkish means cannon ; " Khaneh," place or storehouse. The minarets of the

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A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN

mosque of Sultan Mahmoud are said to be the most elegant in Constantinople and are cited as classical types of Turkish architecture. They rose slender in the blue atmosphere of night, outlined by fire and con- nected by verses of the Koran, producing the most graceful of effects. In front of the cannon foundry the illuminations were in the shape of a giant cannon with its carriage and wheels, a flaming blazon of Turkish artillery pretty accurately symbolised by this artless design.

We proceeded down the Bosphorus, keeping close to the European shore, which was blazing with light and bordered by the summer palaces of viziers and pachas, each distinguished by set pieces mounted upon iron frameworks and representing complicated monograms after the Oriental fashion, streamers, bouquets, flower- pots, verses from the Koran ; and we came opposite the palace, Tcheragan Serai', which is composed of a main building with a pediment and slender columns, something like the Hall of the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, and two wings with trellised windows, making them look like two great cages. The name of the Sultan, written in letters of fire, blazed upon the facade, and through the open door we could see a large hall, where, amid the dazzling light of the

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£ fm\

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candelabra, moved a number of opaque shadows, a prey to pious convulsions. It was the Padisha praying, surrounded by his court officers kneeling on carpets. A sound of nasal psalm-singing escaped from the hall along with the yellow reflections of the tapers, and spread out in the calm, blue night.

After looking on for a few moments, we signed to the caidgl to return, and I was enabled to look at the other shore, the shore of Asia, on which rose Scutari, the old Chrysopolis, with its illuminated mosques, and its cypress curtains dropping behind it the folds of their funereal leaves.

During the trip I had the opportunity of admiring the skill with which the rowers of these frail craft steer their way through the riot of boats and currents which would make travelling on the Bosphorus ex- tremely dangerous for less skilful watermen. The caiques have no rudder, and the rowers, unlike the Venetian gondoliers, who face the prow of the gondola, turn their backs to the place to which they are bound, 'so that with every stroke they look around to see if some unexpected obstacle is in their way. They have also conventional calls by which they warn and avoid each other with uncommon quickness.

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A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN

Seated on a pillow at the bottom of the caique by my companion's side, I enjoyed silently and in the most absolute immobility this wonderful spectacle. The least movement is sufficient to capsize the narrow craft, which is built for Turkish gravity. The night dew fell in pearls upon our coats and sputtered in the lata- kieh of our chibouques; for warm as the days are, the nights are cool on the Bosphorus, which is always swept by the sea-breeze and the columns of air dis- placed by the currents.

We entered the Golden Horn, and shaving Seraglio Point, we landed amid the flotilla of caiques, among which ours, after having turned around, pushed in like a wedge near a great kiosk with Chinese roof and walls hung with green cloth. It was the Sultan's pleasure- house, now abandoned and used as a guard-room. It was pleasant to watch the landing of the long boats, with gilded prows, of the pachas and high personages awaited on the quay by handsome Barbary horses splendidly equipped and held by negroes or khavasses. The crowd respectfully drew aside to make room for them.

Usually the streets of Constantinople are not lighted, and every one is bound to carry a lantern in his hand

CONSTANTINOPLE

as if he were looking for a man ; but during the Ram- azan nothing can be more joyously luminous than the ordinarily sombre lanes and squares, along which spar- kles here and there a star in a paper. The shops, which remain open all night, are ablaze, and cast great trains of light, brightly reflected by the houses oppo- site. At every stall there are lamps, tapers, and night- lights swimming in oil ; the eating-houses, in which mutton cut in small pieces (kabobs) is grilling upon perpendicular spits, are illumined by the brilliant reflections of the coals; the ovens, where cook the baklava cakes, open their red mouths; the open-air merchants surround themselves with small tapers to attract attention and to show ofF their goods ; groups of friends sup together around three-branched lamps, the flame of which trembles in the air, or else that of a big lantern striped with many brilliant colours ; the smokers, seated at the doors of the cafes, revive with each pufF the red spark of their chibouque or of their narghileh, and over the good-tempered crowd falls the splendour of light, splashing in quaintly picturesque reflections.

Everybody was eating with an appetite sharpened by sixteen hours' fast : some, balls of rice and hashed

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A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN

meat served in vine leaves ; others, kabobs rolled in a sort of pancake j others again, ears of boiled or roasted green corn ; still others, huge cucumbers or Smyrna carpous^ with their green skin and their white flesh ; a few, richer or more sensual, were helped to large shares of baklava or gorged themselves with sweets with an infantine avidity laughable in tall fellows bearded like the pard ; others regaled themselves more frugally on white mul- berries, which were to be seen heaped up in quantities in the fruiterers' stalls.

My friend made me enter one of the confectioners' shops to initiate me into the delights of Turkish gor- mandism, far more refined than people think it in Paris. The shop deserves a separate description. The shut- ters, drawn up like fans, like the ports of a ship, formed a sort of carved awning quadrilled and painted yellow and blue, above great glass vases filled with red and white sweets, stalactites of rabat lakhoum^ — a sort of transparent paste made with the best of flour and sugar and then coloured in various ways, — pots of preserves of roses, and bowls of pistachios.

We entered the shop, which, though three people would have found it difficult to move about in it, is one of the largest in Constantinople. The master, a stout,

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dark-complexioned Turk, with a black beard and a good-humouredly fierce expression, served us, with an amiably terrible air, rose and white rahat lakhoum and all sorts of exotic sweets highly perfumed and very exquisite, though somewhat too honeyed for a Parisian palate. A cup of excellent mocha relieved by its salu- tary bitterness the cloying sweets, of which I had par- taken too lavishly through love for local colour. At the back of the shop young boys, with print aprons around their waists, were moving upon the bright fire the copper basins in which the almonds and pistachios were being rolled in sugar, or were dusting sugar upon rolls of rahat lakhoum, making no mystery of their preparations. Seated upon low stools, which with divans form the only seats known to Turks, we watched the compact, multi-coloured crowd pass down the street, broken here and there by sherbet sellers, vendors of ice water and of cakes, and through which a functionary on horseback, preceded by his khavass and followed by his pipe-bearer, imperturbably made his way without a single cry of warning, or else a talika, abominably jolted by the ruts and the rocks, and led by a coachman on foot. I could not look long enough on a picture so new to me, and it was past one o'clock in the morning

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A NIGHT IN RAMAZAN

when, guided by my companion, I started for the land- ing where our boat was waiting for us.

On our way we traversed the Court of Yeni Valideh Djami, which is surrounded by a gallery of antique columns surmounted by Arab arches in a superb style, whitened by the moon's silvery rays and bathed in bluish shadows. Under the arcades lay, in the perfect contentment of people who are at home, numerous groups of rascals rolled up in their rags. Any Mussul- man who has no home may, without fear of the watch, stretch himself out on the steps of the mosques, and sleep there as safely as a Spanish mendicant under a church porch.

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CAFES

THE Turkish cafe on the Boulevard du Temple has given Pa/isians a false idea of the luxury of the Oriental cafes. Constan- tinople is very far from indulging in such wealth of horse-shoe arches, slender columns, mirrors, and ostrich- eggs. Nothing can be plainer than a Turkish cafe in Turkey. I shall describe one considered to be one of the finest, yet in no wise recalling the luxuries of Oriental fairyland. «

Imagine a room about twelve feet square, vaulted and whitewashed, surrounded with a breast-high wainscotting and a divan covered with straw matting. In the centre is the most elegantly Eastern detail, a fountain of white marble with three basins superimposed one above another, which throws into the air a jet of water that falls splashing down. In one corner blazes a brazier on which coffee is made, cup by cup, in little Coffee- pots of brass, just as consumers call for it. On the walls are shelves laden with razors and hung with

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CAFES

pretty mother-of-pearl mirrors in the shape of screens, in which customers look to see if they have been shaved as they wished, for in Turkey every cafe is also a barber's shop,

People believe, because the Koran forbids it, that the Turks absolutely proscribe images, and look upon the products of the plastic arts as idolatrous. That is true in theory, but the practice is far less rigorous, and the cafes are adorned with amazing selections of all sorts of engrav- ings in the most extraordinary taste, which do not appear to scandalise Moslem orthodoxy in the smallest degree.

It is a real pleasure to drink, in one of these cafes, one of the small cups of coffee, which a young rascal with great black eyes brings you on the tips of his fingers in a big egg cup of silver filigree or brass open-work, after you have been rambling through the tiring streets of Constantinople. It is more refreshing than all iced drinks. With the cup of coffee is brought a glass of water which Turks drink first and Franks afterwards. Every one brings his own tobacco in a pouch ; the cafe furnishes only chibouques, the amber mouthpiece of which cannot be infected, and narghilehs, the latter a somewhat complicated apparatus which it would be difficult to carry around.

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Although in Turkey any ragged rascal may sit down on the divan of a cafe by the side of the most splendidly dressed Turk without the latter drawing away to avoid touching with his gold-embroidered sleeve the greasy, torn rags, nevertheless, certain classes have their cus- tomary resorts, and the Marble Fountain Cafe, situ- ated between Serai' Burnou and the mosque of Yeni Valideh Djami, in one of the finest quarters of Con- stantinople, is frequented by the best people in the city. A charming and absolutely Eastern detail imparts much poetry to this cafe so far as Europeans are concerned. Swallows have built their nests in the ceiling, and as the cafe is always open, they enter and go out on their fleet wings, uttering joyous little cries and bringing food to their young without being in the least disturbed by the smoke of the pipes and the presence of cus- tomers, whose fez or turbans they sometimes touch with their brown wings. The young swallows, their heads sticking out of the openings in the nests, quietly look, with eyes that are just like little black beads, at the customers coming and going, and fall asleep to the snoring of the water in the bowls of the narghilehs.

The cafe of Beschik Basch, on the European shore of the Bosphorus, is a remarkably picturesque building.

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It resembles the cabins supported on piles from which fishermen watch the passage of schools of fish. Shaded by clumps of trees and built of trellis on piles, it is bathed by the rapid current that laves the quay of Arnaoutkeui, and refreshed by the breezes of the Black Sea ; looked at from seaward, it produces a graceful effect with its lights, the reflection of which streams over the water. A continuous tumult of caiques seek- ing to land enlivens the approach of this aerial cafe, that recalls, though it is more elegant, the cafes bor- dering the Gulf of Smyrna.

In closing this monograph of the cafes at Constanti- nople, let me mention another situated near the Yeni Valideh Djami landing, and frequented by sailors only. It is lighted in rather original fashion, by glasses filled with oil in which burns a wick, and that hang from the ceiling by twisted wires like the springs in toy guns. The cavadji (master of the cafe) from time to time touches the glasses, which through the tension of the spring, rise and fall, performing a sort of pyrotechnical ballet, to the great delight of the customers, who are dressed in such a way that they need not fear oil stains. A chandelier formed of a brass body representing a vessel outlined by a quantity of lights, completes this

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curious illumination. The delicate allusion is easily understood by the customers of the cafe.

On seeing a Frank enter, the cavadji gave in his honour such a mad impetus to the luminary, that the glasses began to dance like will-o'-the-wisps, while the nautical chandelier, pitching and rolling like a ship in a seaway, scattered a heavy shower of rancid oil.

To depict the physiognomy of the customers of this place, I should need Raffet's pencil or Decamps' brush. There were fellows with formidable moustaches, with noses spotted with violent tones, with complexions like Havana cigars or red brick, great Eastern white and black eyes, temples shaven and blue, who had a most ferocious look and an extraordinary vigour of features ; heads never forgotten once seen, and which eclipse the wildest work of the most truculent masters.

Let me note also a rather remarkable cafe situated near the Old Bridge at Oun Capan on the Golden Horn, and frequented chiefly by Phanariote Greeks. It is reached by boat, and while smoking your pipe, you can enjoy the prospect of the shipping going and coming, and the evolutions of the gulls that skim over the waters, and the hawks that soar in great circles in the blue sky.

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Such are, with a few variations, the types of Turkish cafes, which are scarcely like the French idea of them. I was not, however, surprised, for I had been prepared for them by the Algerian cafes, which are still more primitive, if that be possible.

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THE SHOPS

AN Oriental shop is very different from a European one. It is a sort of alcove cut out of the wall, and closed at night with shutters that are let down like the ports of a ship. The dealer, sitting cross-legged upon a bit of matting or Smyrna carpet, idly smokes* his chibouque, or counts with care- less fingers the beads of his chaplet, with an impassible, indifferent look, preserving the same attitude for hours at a time, and apparently caring very little whether he has a customer or not. Purchasers generally stand out- side in the street and examine the goods heaped up on the stall without the smallest attempt on the owner's part to set these off to advantage. The art of dressing windows, carried to such a high degree in France, is wholly unknown or disdained in Turkey.

Smoking is one of the most pressing needs of a Turk, consequently tobacconists' shops abound. The tobacco, which is cut very fine in long, silky, golden masses, is arranged in heaps upon the stalls according

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THE SHOPS

to price and quality. There are four principal sorts : iavach (mild), orta (medium), dokan akleu (strong), sert (very strong), and it is sold at from eighteen to twenty piastres an ocque, according to the brand, an ocque being equivalent to two and a half pounds. This tobacco, graded in strength, is smoked in chibouques or rolled in cigarettes, which are beginning to be common in Turkey. The most highly prized tobacco comes from Macedonia.

Tombeki, a tobacco intended for the narghileh exclu- sively, comes from Persia. It is not cut, like the other, but rubbed and broken into small bits. It is darker in colour, and so strong that it cannot be smoked until it has been washed two or three times. As it would scatter easily, it is kept in glass jars like apothecaries' drugs. Without tombeki one cannot smoke a nar- ghileh, and it is to be regretted that it is very difficult to obtain it in France; for nothing is more favourable to poetic reverie than to puff, while lying on a divan, this odorous smoke refreshed by the water it has passed through, and reaching you after travelling through the tube of red or green morocco that you wrap around your arm as a snake charmer in Cairo wraps serpents. It is the very sybaritism of smoking

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carried to its highest degree of perfection. Art con- tributes also to this delicate enjoyment. There are narghilehs of gold, silver, or steel admirably wrought and damascened, with niello work, engraved in marvellous fashion and as elegant in shape as the finest antique vases. They are often adorned with capricious ara^ besques formed of garnets, turquoises, corals, and othei precious stones. You smoke in masterpieces tobacco metamorphosed into perfume.

The Constantinople tobacco dealers are called tutun- gis. They are mostly Greeks and Armenians. The Greeks come from Janina, Larissa, and Salonica ; the Armenians from Samsoun, Trebizond, and Erzeroum.

In modern Byzantium the greatest care, and often the greatest luxury is lavished on everything that con- cerns the pipe, the Turks' favourite pleasure. The shops of the dealers in pipe-stems, bowls, and mouth- pieces, are very handsome and very well-stocked. The most highly prized stems are made of cherry or jasmine, and very high prices are paid for them, according to their size and perfection. A handsome cherry stem with the bark intact, shining with the sombre brilliancy of garnet satin, or a jasmine stem, with uniform callosities and of a pretty blond tint, is

THE SHOPS

worth fully five hundred piastres. I used to stand quite a long time before the shop of a dealer in pipe- stems in the street which leads down to Top Khaneh, •opposite the walled cemetery through the grated open- ings of which one catches sight of rich tombs striped with gold and azure. The dealer was an old fellow with a scanty gray beard, the skin wrinkled around his

eyes, his nose hooked, looking like a parrot that has

• been plucked and forming unconsciously an excellent

Turkish caricature that Cham would have delighted in. From the sleeve-holes of his vest with its worn buttons emerged a thin, yellow, lean arm that drove a bow like a violinist performing on the fourth string a difficult passage like Paganini. On an iron point spun around by this bow turned with dazzling rapidity a tube of cherry wood undergoing the delicate operation of bor- ing, and which the old dealer tapped from time to time on the edge of his stall to drive out the. dust. Near the old man worked a young lad, his son no doubt, who was practising on less costly stems. A family of kittens played nonchalantly in the sun and rolled around in the fine sawdust. The unbored and the finished stems were ranged at the back of the stall, sunk in shadow, and the whole thing formed a pretty

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Eastern genre picture, which, with a few variations, is to be seen at every street corner.

The places where lulebs (pipe-bowls) are manufac- tured, are easily known by the reddish dust that covers them. An infinite number of yellow clay bowls, which firing will turn to a rosy red, await, ranged in order upon planks, the moment of being put into the oven. These bowls, of a very fine, soft clay, upon which the potter imprints different ornaments by means of a wheel, do not colour like French pipes, and are sold very cheap. Incredible quantities of them are used.

As for the amber mouthpieces, they form a special business which is almost the equal of the jewellery business as regards the value of the stock and of the labour. At Constantinople, where amber is very dear, the Turks prefer the pale, semi-opaque citron shade, and insist on there being neither spot, flaw, nor veins ; and as this is a rare combination, the price of mouth- pieces is consequently very high. A pair of mouth- pieces has brought as much as eight or ten thousand piastres, and a set of pipes worth one hundred and fifty thousand francs is by no means rare in the homes of the high dignitaries and rich men of Stamboul These valuable mouthpieces are encircled with rings

THE SHOPS

of enamelled gold, sometimes enriched with diamonds, rubies, and other gems. It is an Oriental way of dis- playing wealth, just as we use silver plate and Boulle furniture. All these bits of amber, differing in tone and transparency, polished, turned, bored with extreme care, assume in the sunlight warm, golden tints that would make Titian jealous and inspire the most fa- natical opponent of tobacco with a desire to smoke. In humbler shops are to be found less expensive mouthpieces that have some imperceptible flaw, but which fulfil their purpose equally well and are just as sweet to the tongue. There are also imitations of amber in coloured Bohemian glass which are sold largely and which cost very little, but these imita- tion mouthpieces are used only by the Greeks and the Arnaouts of the lowest class. Of any Turk who respects himself may be spoken the line in "Na- mouna," slightly modified, —

'* Happy Turk! He smokes orta in amber." In the street running along the Golden Horn be- tween the New and the Old Bridge are the marble yards where are cut the turban-topped posts that bristle, like white phantoms emerging from their tombs, in the numerous cemeteries of Constantinople. There is a

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continual din of mallets and hammers; a cloud of bril- liant, micaceous dust covers with unmelting snow the whole of the roadway ; painters, surrounded by pots of green, red, and blue, colour the backgrounds on which are to be inscribed in gilded letters the name of the dead, accompanied by a verse of the Koran, or orna- ments such as flowers, vine stems, and grapes, used more particularly, as emblematic of grace, gentleness, and fecundity, to adorn the tombs of women. There also are carved the marble brsins of fountains intended to cool courts, apartments, and kiosks, or to serve in the frequent ablutions called for by the Mussulman law, which has raised cleanliness to the rank of a vir- tue, differing in this respect from Catholicism, in which dirt has been sanctified, so that for a long time in Spain people who bathed frequently were suspected of being heretics and considered Moors rather than Christians.

One thing that strikes the stranger in Constantinople is the absence of women from the shops. Mussulman jealousy does not allow of the relations which com- merce involves, so it has carefully kept from business a sex in which it trusts very little. Many of the smaller household duties which are with us relegated to women are carried out in Turkey by athletic fellows

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THE SHOPS

with mighty biceps, curly beards, and great bull necks, a practice that, rightly enough, appears ridiculous to us.

On the other hand, if women do not sell, they buy. They are to be seen standing in the shops in groups of two or three, followed by their negresses, who carry an open bag, and to whom they pass their purchases just as Judith passed the head of Holofernes to her black maid. Bargaining appears to delight Turkish women just as much as Europeans. It is as good a way as any to pass the time and to talk with a human being other than the master, and there are few women who will deny themselves that satisfaction, especially among those of the middle class; those of the upper have stuffs and goods brought to their homes.

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BAZAARS

BY following the tortuous streets leading to the Yeni Valideh Djami and the mosque of Sul- tan Bayezid, the Egyptian, or Drug Bazaar, is reached; it is a great market traversed from end to end by a lane intended for the use of purchasers and dealers. A penetrating odor, composed of the aroma of innumerable exotic products, catches and intoxi- cates you as you enter. Here are exposed in heaps or in open bags henna, sandalwood, antimony, colouring powders, dates, cinnamon, gum Benjamin, pistachios, gray amber, mastic, ginger, nutmegs, opium, hashisch, guarded by cross-legged merchants in attitudes of in- difference, who seem benumbed by the heaviness of the atmosphere saturated with perfumes. " These moun- tains of aromatic drugs," which recall the comparisons of Sir Hasirim, do not attract one long.

Continuing through the deafening hammering of coppersmiths and the sickening exhalations of eating-

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houses that exhibit upon their stalls jars full of Turk- ish preparations — not very appetising to a Parisian stomach — you reach the Grand Bazaar, the outer aspect of which is in no wise imposing, with its high gray walls ornamented by low, wart-like leaden domes and a multitude of hovels and stalls occupied by mean industries.

The Grand Bazaar, to give it the name bestowed upon it by the Franks, covers a vast space of ground, and forms^as it were, a city within a city, with streets, lanes, passages, squares, crossings, and fountains ; an inextricable maze in which it is difficult to find one's way even after several visits. The vast space is covered over, and light filters into it through the small cupolas I have just mentioned that dot the flat roof of the edifice. The light is soft, faint, and doubtful, favouring the dealer more than the purchaser. I do not wish to destroy the idea of Oriental magnificence suggested by the name Bezestin of Constantinople, but the Turkish Bazaar is like nothing more than the Temple at Paris, which it resembles also greatly in its arrangement.

I entered through an arcade devoid of architectural pretensions, and found myself in a lane devoted to per-

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fumery. Here are sold essences of bergamot and jas- mine, flagons of atar gull in cases of spangled velvet, rose water, cosmetics, seraglio pastilles marked with Turk- ish characters, sachets of musk, chaplets of jade, amber, cocoa, ivory, fruit-stones, rose or sandal wood, Persian mirrors framed in with delicate paintings, square combs with large teeth, — in a word, the whole arsenal of Turkish coquetry.

In front of the stalls are numerous groups of women, whose apple-green, rose-mauve, or sky-blue ferradjehs opaque and carefully drawn yashmaks, and yellow morocco boots, over which are worn galoshes of the same colour, mark them as thorough-paced Mussul- mans. They often hold by the hand handsome chil- dren dressed in red or green jackets braided with gold, full Mameluke drawers of cerise, jonquil, or other bright- coloured taffeta, that shine like flowers in the cool, transparent shade. Negresses wrapped in white and blue checkered Cairo kabbarahs stand behind them and complete the picturesque effect. Sometimes also a black eunuch, recognisable by his short body, his long legs, his beardless, fat, flaccid face sunk between his shoulders, watches with morose look the small company confided to his care, and waves, to make

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BAZAARS

room for them in the crowd, the courbacb of hippopota- mus leather which is the distinguishing mark of his authority. The dealer, leaning on his elbow, replies phlegmatically to the innumerable questions of the young women, who turn over his goods and upset his stall, asking all sorts of absurd questions, demand- ing to know the prices and objecting to them with little incredulous bursts of laughter.

Behind the stalls there are back shops, reached by two or three steps, where more precious goods are locked up in coffers or cupboards opened to genuine buyers only. There are to be found the beautiful striped scarfs of Tunis, Persian shawls, the embroidery on which is a perfect imitation of the palms of Cash- mere, mirrors of mother-of-pearl, stools incrusted with open-work and intended to support trays of sherbets, reading-desks to hold the Koran, perfume burners in gold or silver filigree, in enamel and engraved copper, small hands of ivory or shell to scratch the back, nar- ghileh bells in Khorassan steel, Chinese and Japanese cups, — in a word, all the curious bric-a-brac of the East.

The chief street in the Bazaar is surmounted with arcades in courses alternately black and white, and the

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vaulting is covered with half-effaced arabesques in gri- saille in the Turkish rococo taste, which is closer than might be supposed to the style of ornamentation in vogue under Louis XV. It ends in an open place in which rises an ornamented and painted fountain, the water of which is used for ablutions; for the Turks never forget their religious duties, and calmly break off in the middle of a bargain, leaving the purchaser waiting, to kneel upon their carpets, turn towards Mecca, and say their prayers with as much devotion as if they were under the dome of Saint Sophia or Sultan Achmet.

One of the shops most frequented by strangers is that of Lodovico, an Armenian merchant who speaks French and most patiently allows you to turn over his wares. Many a long stay I have made there, enjoying excellent Mocha coffee in small china cups placed in holders of silver filigree in the old Turkish fashion. Rembrandt would have found here the wherewithal to enrich his museum of antiquities : old weapons, old stuffs, quaint goldsmith-work, curious pottery, extraor- dinary utensils the use of which is unknown. On a little low table are spread out kandjars, yataghans, daggers with sheaths in repousse silver, scabbards of

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velvet, shagreen, Yemen leather, wood, brass, and handles of jade, agate, ivory, studded with garnets, turquoises, coral, long, narrow, broad, curved, waving; — of every shape, of every period, of every country, from the damask blade of the pacha, engraved with verses of the Koran, in letters of gold, to the coarse camel-driver's knife. How many Zebecs and Arna- outs, how many beys and effendis, how many omrahs and rajahs must have stripped their belts to form this precious and quaint arsenal, that would drive Decamps crazy with delight.

On the walls hang, below their helmets, with a scintillation of steel, Circassian coats of mail, gleam- ing bucklers of tortoise-shell, hippopotamus, or dama- scened steel, covered with copper bosses; Mongolian quivers, long guns with niello work, with incrustations, at once weapons and gems ; maces absolutely like those of mediaeval knights and which Turkish illustrations never fail to put in the hands of Persians as a distin- guishing mark of ridicule.

In the cupboards Broussa silks shimmer like water in the moonlight under their silver overlay; Albanian slippers and tobacco pouches with light golden weft, coloured designs, and lozenges; chemises of fine, crepe

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silk with opaque and transparent stripes ; neckerchiefs embroidered with spangles ; Indian and Persian cash- meres, emir-green pelisses lined with zibelline sable ; jackets with braiding more complicated than *the ara- besques of the Hall of the Ambassadors in the Alham- bra; dolmans stiff with gold; brocades sparkling with dazzling gold embroidery ; Cairo macblas, cut on the pattern of Byzantine dalmatics, — the whole of the fabulous luxury, the chimerical wealtji of these coun- tries of the sun, of which we get a glimpse like the mirage of a dream from the depths of our cold Europe.

Amid the chaplets of amber, ebony, coral, sandal- wood, with the perfume boxes of enamelled gold, the writing-stands, the coffers and the precious mirrors, the paintings on which represent scenes drawn from the Mahabharata, the fans made of the feathers of peacocks or argus pheasants, the bowls of hookahs chased or inlaid with silver, — amid all these delightful Turkish things are met unexpectedly Sevres and Dres- den porcelains, Vincennes ware, Limoges enamels, which have come heaven knows whence.

Every street in the Bazaar is devoted to some special trade. Here are the dealers in slippers, sandals, and

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boots. Most curious are these stalls covered with extravagant foot-gear, turned up at the ends like Chinese roofs, with low heels, of leather, morocco, velvet, brocade, pique, spangled, braided, and adorned with tufts of down and of floss, and wholly unfitted to European feet. Some are curved and turned up at the ends like Venetian gondolas ; others would drive Rhodope and Cinderella to despair by their dainty smallness, and look like jewel-cases rather than possible slippers. Yellow, red, and green disappear under gold and silver quilling. Children's shoes are worked into the most charmingly capricious shapes and ornaments. For street wear women put on the yellow morocco boots which I have already mentioned ; for all these lovely marvels, intended for Indian mattings and Persian carpets, would soon stick in the mud of the streets of Constantinople. Next are the dealers in caftans, gandouras^ and dressing-gowns of Broussa silk. The costumes are not expensive, although the colours are charming and the tissues extremely soft. These dealers also sell Broussa stuffs, half silk and half thread, for the making of dresses, vests, and trousers in the European fashion, which are very cool, light, and pretty. This is a new industry, fostered by Abdul Medjid.

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Then in a special lane come the gold-wire drawers, who manufacture the silver and golden threads with which are embroidered tobacco pouches, slippers, hand- kerchiefs, vests, dolmans, and jackets. Behind the glass of the show-cases sparkle on their bobbins the brilliant threads which by and by will turn into flowers, foliage, and arabesques. There also are manufactured the cords and the graceful bows so coquettishly com- plicated, which our people are unable to imitate. The Turks make them by hand, fastening the end of the thread to the toe of the bare foot.

There are jewellers whose gems are enclosed in coffers from which they never take their eyes, or in glass cases placed out of reach of thieves. These obscure shops, very like cobbler's stalls, are full of incredible riches. Vizapoor and Golconda diamonds brought by caravans ; rubies of Giamschid, sapphires of Ormuz, — to say nothing of garnets, chrysoberyls, aquamarines, azerodrachs, agates, aventurine, lapis- lazuli, — are piled up in heaps ; for the Turks make great use of gems not only for purposes of luxury, but also as a convenient way of carrying money. A diamond, easy to conceal and carry, represents a large sum in a small volume. From the Eastern point of view it is a

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safe investment, although it brings in no interest. These gems are generally cut en cabochon^ for the Orientals cut neither the diamond nor the ruby, either because they are not acquainted with diamond dust, or because they fear to diminish the number of carats by cutting away the angles of the stones. The setting is usually heavy and in Genoese or rococo taste. The delicate, elegant, pure art of the Arabs has left but scanty traces among the Turks. The jewellery con- sists chiefly of necklaces, earrings, ornaments for the head, stars, flowers, crescents, bracelets, anklets, sword and dagger hilts ; but these are seen in all their splen- dour only in the depths of the harem, on the heads and bosoms of the odalisques, under the eye of the master curled up on a corner of the divan, and all this luxury, so far as the stranger is concerned, is as if it were not. Although the splendour of the foregoing sentences, constellated with the names of gems, may have made you think of the treasure of Haroun al Raschild and Abul Kassim's cave, you are not to imagine anything dazzling, a mad play of light ; for the Turks do not understand the art of showing off gems like Parisian jewellers, and the uncut diamonds, thrown in handfuls into small wooden cups, look like grains of glass. Yet

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it would be easy to spend a million in these two- penny shops.

The Arms Bazaar may be considered as the very heart of Islam. None of the modern ideas have crossed its threshold. The Old Turkish party reigns there, gravely seated cross-legged, professing for the dogs of Christians a contempt as deep as in the days of Mohammed II. Time has stayed its steps for these worthy Osmanlis, who, perhaps rightly, regret the janissaries and former barbarities. Here are to be found the great swelling turbans, the fur-edged dolmans, the full Mameluke trousers, the high sashes, and the true classical costume such as it may be seen in the Elbicei Attica collection, in the tragedy of"Bajazet," and in the ceremony of the " Bourgeois Gentilhomme." Here are to be seen faces as impassible as fate, serious, fixed glances, hooked noses over long white beards, brown cheeks tanned by the abuse of vapour baths, robust bodies worn by the voluptuousness of the harem and the ecstasies of opium, — the thorough-bred Turks, in a word, who are slowly disappearing, and who will soon have to be sought for in the very depths of Asia.

At noon the Arms Bazaar coolly closes, and the millionaire merchants withdraw to their kiosks on the

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banks of the Bosphorus to watch with angry looks the passing steamboats, diabolical Prankish inventions. The riches contained in this bazaar are incalculable. Here are preserved the damascened blades engraved with Arabic letters with which Sultan Saladin cut down pillows thrown in the air in the presence of Richard Coeur de Lion, who sliced an anvil with his great two- handed sword, and which have as many notches on the back as they have cut off heads, — their bluish steel cuts through breastplates as if they were sheets of paper, their handles are caskets of gems, — old wheel- lock and linstock muskets, marvels of chasing and niello work; battle-axes which perhaps Timour, Ghenghis Khan and Scanderberg used to smash hel- mets and skulls,— in a word, the whole of the fero- cious and picturesque arsenal of antique Islam. Here gleam, sparkle, and shine, under a sunbeam fallen from the high vaulting, saddle-cloths embroidered with silver and gold, studded with suns of gems, moons of dia- monds, stars of sapphires ; chamfers, bits, and stirrups Ln silver gilt ; fairy-like caparisons which Oriental luxury bestows upon the noble steeds of Nedji, worthy descendants of the Dahis, the Rabras,the Naamahs, and other equine celebrities of the old Islam turf.

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It is noteworthy, considering Moslem carelessness, that this bazaar is considered so precious that smoking is not permitted within its precincts. No more need be said, for the fatalist Turk would light his pipe upon a powder magazine.

By way of contrast to this splendour, let rne tell you something about the Lice Bazaar. It is the morgue, the charnel house, the abattoir, where end all these glories after they have gone through the diverse phases of decadence. The caftan that shone on the shoulders of a vizier or a pacha ends its career on the back of a hammal or a calfat ; the jacket that moulded the opu- lent charms of a Georgian beauty of the harem here envelopes, soiled and faded, the mummified frame of an old beggar-woman. It is an incredible mass of rags and tatters, in which, where there is not a hole, there is a stain. They hang flaccidly, lugubriously, from rusty nails, with that queer human look peculiar to clothes that have long been worn ; they move as the vermin travel over them. Formerly plague nestled in the worn folds of these indescribable garments stained with sanies, and concealed itself there like a black spider in its web in some loathsome corner. The Rastro at Madrid, the Temple at Paris, the former

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Alsatia of London, are nothing compared with this Tyburn of Eastern second-hand clothing known by the significant name I have given above. I hope I may be forgiven this itching description in favour of the gems, brocades, and vials of essences of the begin- ning. Besides, a traveller is like a doctor, he may say anything.

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THE WHIRLING DERVISHES

UNLIKE other Mohammedans who forbid Giaours from witnessing the ceremonies of their worship, and drive them with insults from their mosques if they attempt to enter them at the hours of prayer, the Dervishes allow Europeans to enter their tekiehs., on the sole condition that they shall leave their shoes at the door and enter barefooted or in slippers. They sing their litanies and perform their evolutions without being in the slightest degree troubled by the presence of dogs of Christians. It even looks as if they were pleased to have spectators.

The tekieh at Pera is situated on a square covered with tombs, turban-topped marble posts, and edged with cypresses, a sort of annex to the Little Field of the Dead. The hall in which the religious waltzes of the whirlers are performed is at the back of the court. Its interior reminds one both of a dancing-hall and of a theatre. It has a perfectly smooth, carefully waxed floor surrounded by a circular balustrade breast-high.

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Slender columns -support a gallery of the same form, with seats for spectators, the Sultan's box, and the tribunes intended for women. This part, which is called the Seraglio, is protected against profane looks by a very close trellis like that seen at the windows of harems. The orchestra is opposite the mirahb, which is adorned with tablets covered with verses of the Koran and cartouches of sultans and viziers who have been benefactors of the tekieh. The whole place is painted white and blue, and is exceedingly clean. It looks more like a class-room arranged for a dancing- master's pupils than the praying-place of a fanatical sect.

After a prolonged wait, the dervishes arrived slowly, two by two. The sheik of the community sat down cross-legged upon a carpet covered with gazelle-skins,, in front of the mirahb, between two acolytes. He was a little old man with a leaden complexion and a weary look, his skin all wrinkles, and his chin bristling with a scanty gray beard. His eyes, which flashed occasion- ally in his wan face out of great brown circles, alone imparted a look of life to his spectral appearance. The dervishes filed past him, bowing in the Oriental fashion with the marks of the deepest respect, as if he

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were a sultan or a saint. It was at once a courtesy, a proof of obedience, and a religious evolution. The movements were slow, rhythmic, hieratic, and the rite having been accomplished, each dervish placed himseif opposite the mirahb.

The head-dress of these Mussulman monks con- sists of a cap of inch-thick brown or reddish felt, which is most like a flower-pot put on upside down. A white vest and jacket, a great plaited skirt of the same colour, like the Greek fustanella, and tight white trousers coming down to the ankle complete the costume, which has nothing monkish according to our view, but which does not lack a certain elegance. At first I could only get a glimpse of it, for the dervishes wore cloaks or surtouts, blue, purple, cinnamon, or other shade, not forming a part of their uniform, and which they throw off when about to begin whirling, and put on again when they fall breathless, dripping with perspiration, worn out by ecstasy and fatigue.

When they had chanted a good many verses of the Koran, wagged their heads sufficiently, and prostrated themselves enough, the dervishes rose, cast aside their mantles, and began to march in procession around the hall. Each couple passed in front of the sheik, who

THE WHIRLING DERVISHES

was standing, and after having exchanged salutes, he blessed them, a sort of consecration performed with a singular etiquette. The dervish who has last been blessed takes another from the following couple and appears to present him to the imam, a ceremony which is repeated from group to group until all have passed.

A remarkable change had already taken place in the faces of the dervishes thus prepared for ecstasy. When they entered they looked gloomy, tired, somnolent, their heads bent under their heavy caps ; now their faces lightened, their eyes shone, they drew themselves up, they seemed stronger, the heels of their bare feet smote the floor with nervous trepidation.

To the chanting of the Koran in a nasal, falsetto tone was now added the accompaniment of flutes and tarboukas. The tarboukas marked the time and played the bass ; the flutes performed in unison a melody of a high tonality and of infinite sweetness. Motionless in the centre of the hall, the dervishes seemed to intoxicate themselves with the delicately barbaric and melodiously wild music, the original theme of which goes back perhaps to the earliest days of the world. Finally one of them opened his arms, stretched them out horizon- tally in the attitude of Christ on the cross ; then began

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to twist slowly, moving his bare feet noiselessly on the floor; his skirt, like a bird preparing to fly, began to lift and flutter, his speed became greater, the soft tissue, raised by the air, spread out in wheel-shape, then in bell-shape, like a whirlwind of whiteness of which the dervish was the centre. To the first was added a second, then a third, till the whole band had finally been drawn into the irresistible whirl.

They spun, arms extended, heads bent on shoulders, eyes half-closed, lips parted, like good swimmers who allow themselves to be carried away on the stream of ecstasy; their movements, regular and undulating, had extraordinary suppleness ; neither effort nor fatigue was apparent. The most intrepid German waltzer would have fallen suffocated, but these men continued to spin on themselves as if carried on by their own im- pulse, just as a top that whirls motionless when it is going round fastest, and seems to sleep to the sound of its own snoring.

There was a score of them, perhaps more, pirouetting in the centre of their skirts outspread like the calyxes of gigantic Javanese flowers, - and yet they never touched, never left the orbit of their whirl, never lost the time marked by the tarbouka. The imam walked

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about among the groups, sometimes clapping his hands, either by way of indication to the orchestra to quicken or slow the rhythm, or to encourage the whirlers and applaud their pious zeal. His impassible appearance presented a strong contrast to the illuminated, con- vulsed faces. The cold, wan old man walked like a phantom among these frantic whirlers, as if doubt had struck his withered soul, or as if the intoxication of prayer and the vertigo of sacred incantations had long since ceased to affect him, like opium and haschisch eaters, who are proof against the effects of their drugs, and are obliged to increase the dose until they poison themselves.

The whirling stopped for a moment, the dervishes reformed in couples and two or three times inarched in procession around the room. This evolution, performed slowly, gives them time to recover their breath and to recollect themselves. What I had hitherto seen was in a way the prelude of the symphony, the beginning of the poem, the introduction to the waltz.

The tarboukas rumbled a quicker step, the sound of the flutes became livelier, and the dervishes resumed their dance with increased activity. Sometimes a der- vish stopped, his fustanella rose and fell for a few

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moments, then, no longer supported by the whirling, slowly sank, and the unfolded stuff drooped and resumed its perpendicular folds like those of a Greek drapery of antiquity. Thereupon the whirler threw himself on his knees, his face to the ground, and a serv- ing brother covered him with one of the mantles I have mentioned, just as a jockey throws a blanket over a thorough-bred at the end of his race. The imam approached the dervish, prostrate, sunk in absolute immobility, murmured a few sacramental words, and passed on to another. After a time all had fallen, broken down by ecstasy. Soon they rose again, marched two and two around the hall, and left it in the same order as they had entered.

Dazzled by the giddy spectacle, I went to the door to pick out my shoes from amid the collection of foot-gear, and until night I saw whirling outspread before me great white skirts, and heard in my ears the implacably suave theme of the little flute sounding above the drone of the tarboukas.

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THE HOWLING DERVISHES

AFTER seeing the Whirling Dervishes at Pera, one must visit the Howling Dervishes at Scutari.

Their hall is not circular in shape, like that at Pera; it is a parallelogram devoid of architectural beauty. On the bare walls are hung some fifteen huge kettle- drums and a few placards inscribed with verses from the Koran. On the side of the mirahb above the carpet on which the imam and his acolytes sit, the wall is decorated in a ferocious manner that makes one think of the chamber of a torturer or an inquisitor. There are darts ending in heart-shaped pieces of lead from which hang chains, sharp basting instruments, maces, pincers, nippers, and all kinds of weapons of troublous, barbaric forms, the use of which is incom- prehensible but terrifying, and which make you shudder like the apparatus of a surgeon spread out prelimi- nary to an operation. It is with these atrocious tools that the Howling Dervishes flagellate themselves when

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they have attained to the highest degree of religious fury, and when cries no longer suffice to express their sacred, orgy-like delirium.

The imam was a tall, bony, dry old man, his face deeply marked and wrinkled. He had a very dignified and majestic look. By his side stood a handsome young fellow with a white turban bound with a cross-band of gold and dressed in an emir-green pelisse such as is worn by the descendants of the Prophet, and by hadjis who have performed the pilgrimage to Mecca. His profile, clean, sad, and gentle, was more Arab than Turkish, and his complexion, of a uniform olive tone, seemed to confirm that origin.

Opposite were ranged the dervishes in the regulation attitude, repeating in unison a sort of litany intoned by a big man with the chest of a Hercules, a bull neck, brazen lungs, and a stentorian voice. At each verse they nodded their heads forward and back with the same motion as Chinese figures, a motion which ends by causing a sympathetic vertigo when it is watched for any time.

Sometimes one of the Mussulman spectators, fasci- nated by the irresistible oscillation, staggered out of his place, joined the dervishes, prostrated himself, and began to swing his head like a bear in a cage.

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The song rose higher and higher, the nodding be- came faster, the faces began to turn livid and the breath to come short and quick ; the coryphaeus ac- cented the sacred words with increased energy, and I awaited, full of anxiety and terror, the scene which was about to take place.

Some dervishes, wrought up to the proper point, had arisen and continued their leaps at the risk of smashing their heads against the walls and of straining the vertebrae of their necks in their furious noddings. Soon everybody was up. That is the moment when the kettledrums are usually taken down, but it was not done on this occasion, the men being excited enough ; besides, on account of the Ramazan fast, it was desired not to work them up overmuch. The dervishes formed a chain, placing their hands on each others' shoulders, and began to justify their name by uttering from their chests a hoarse, prolonged howl, " Allah hou ! " which seemed to be produced by anything but human voices.

The whole band, now moving together, stepped back a pace, then forward, with a simultaneous dash, and howled in a low, hoarse tone resembling the growling of a menagerie when lions, tigers, panthers, and

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hyaenas have come to the conclusion that it is past feeding-time.

Then inspiration gradually grew, eyes began to shine like those of wild beasts in a cave, epileptic foam showed at the corners of the lips, faces became decom- posed, and shone livid under the perspiration. The whole file bent down and rose up under an invisible breath like ears of corn under a storm wind ; and every time, with every rise, the terrible " Allah hou ! " was repeated with increasing energy. I cannot under- stand how such howls, kept up for more than an hour, do not burst the framework of the chest and drive the blood from broken vessels. One of the dervishes was swinging his head, flagellated by long, black hair, and uttering from his skeleton breast roars like a tiger, or like a lion, or like the wounded wolf bleeding to death in the snow ; cries full of rage and desire, hoarse utter- ances of unknown voluptuousness, and sometimes sighs of mortal sadness, protestations of the body broken under the grindstone of the soul.

Excited by the feverish ardour of this mad devotee, the whole company, calling up its last remnant of strength, threw itself back in a body and sprang for- ward like a line of drunken soldiers, and howled the last

106

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u Allah hou ! " without any relation to known sounds, but such as may have been the bellowing of a mammoth or a mastodon in the colossal reeds of antediluvian marshes. The floor trembled under the rhythmical tramping of the howling band, and the walls seemed ready to fall like the ramparts of Jericho at the sound of the horrible clamour.

The exaltation was now at its highest pitch, the howling went on without any break; a noisome odour like that of a menagerie was given out by the per- spiring bodies. Through the dust raised by the feet of those madmen, grimaced convulsively, as through a reddish mist, convulsed, epileptic faces, illumined with white eyes and weird smiles.

The imam stood before the mirahb, urging on the growing frenzy with gesture and voice. A young lad left the group and drew near the old man ; and then I saw the purpose of the terrible irons suspended from the wall. Acolytes took from a nail an exceedingly sharp larding-iron and handed it to the imam, who drove it through both cheeks of the young devotee without the lad exhibiting the least sign of pain. The operation over, the penitent returned to his place and continued his frantic nodding. Horribly strange looked

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the spitted head. It was like a practical joke in a pantomime, when Harlequin drives his bat through Pierrot's body j only, in this case the joke was no joke.

Two other fanatics sprang into the centre of the room, bare to the belt. They were handed a couple of the sharp darts ending in leaden hearts and iron chains ; brandishing them in each hand, they began to perform a sort of disorderly, violent dagger dance, only with unexpected leaps and galvanic jumps; but instead of avoiding the points of the darts, they dashed furiously upon them in order to wound themselves. Soon they rolled to the ground, exhausted, breathless, covered with blood, sweat, and foam, like horses spurred to death and falling near the finish.

A pretty little girl of seven or eight years of age, as pale as Goethe's u Mignon," who rolled black eyes full of nostalgia, and who had stood near the door during the whole ceremony, walked alone towards the imam. The old man received her in a friendly and paternal manner. The little maid stretched herself out upon a sheepskin on the floor, and the imam, supported by two assistants, his feet in large slippers, stepped on to the small child and stood upon her for a few moments. Then he descended from his living pedestal, and the little girl

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rose quite happy. Women brought children of three or four years of age, who were, one after another, laid upon the sheepskin and gently trampled under foot by the imam. Some stood it very well, others shrieked like jays plucked alive. I could see their eyes nearly starting from their heads and their poor little ribs bend- ing under the pressure, which was frightful for them. Their mothers, their eyes brilliant with faith, took them up in their arms and appeased them with caresses. After the children came young fellows, grown men, soldiers, and even a general officer, who underwent the salutary imposition of the feet ; for according to the ideas of Mussulmans, the pressure cures all diseases.

On leaving the tekieh, I saw the lad whose cheeks had been spitted by the imam. He had withdrawn the instrument of torture, and two small purple cicatrices, already closed, alone marked where the steel had passed through.

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THE CEMETERY AT SCUTARI

I CANNOT understand why Turkish cemeteries do not make me feel sad like Christian ceme- teries. A visit to Pere-Lachaise makes me dismally melancholy for many days, but I have spent hours at a time in the cemeteries of Pera and Scutari without falling into aught else than a vague, sweet reverie. Is this indifference due to the beauty of the heavens, the brilliancy of the light and the romantic beauty of the site, or to religious prejudices, which act upon us unconsciously and make us despise the burial- places of infidels with whom we are to have nothing to do in the next world ? I have not been able to make out the reason clearly, although I have often thought the matter over. Possibly it is due to purely plastic causes. Catholicism has shrouded death in a sombre poetry of terror unknown to paganism and Moham- medanism. It has covered its tombs with lugubrious, cadaverous forms intended to cause terror, while the urns of antiquity are surrounded with joyous bassi-relievi

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THE CEMETERY AT SCUTARI

on which graceful genii play amid leaves, and the Mussulman tombstones, diapered with azure and gold, seem, under the shadow of the beautiful trees, to be kiosks of eternal rest rather than the abodes of dead bodies.

Many a time I have traversed the Pera cemetery in the most weird moonlight, at the time when the white funeral columns rose in the shadows like the nuns of Saint Rosalie in the third act of " Robert le Diable," without my heart beating faster; a feat which I should perform in the Montmartre Cemetery only with ineffable horror, a cold sweat breaking out all over me, and nervous starts at the least sound, although I have confronted a hundred times in the course of my travels much more genuine subjects of terror. But in the East death is so familiarly mingled with life that one ceases to be afraid of it. The dead on top of

whom one drinks coffee, with whom one smokes a

•

chibouque, cannot possibly turn into spectres. So on leaving the menagerie of the Howling Dervishes, I accepted with pleasure, in order to drive the hideous spectacle from my mind, a proposal to walk over to the Scutari cemetery, the best situated, largest, and most populous in the East.

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It consists of a vast cypress wood rising on a hilly slope, traversed by broad walks and bristling with funeral stones over an extent of more than three miles. It is impossible in our Northern countries, where we know cypresses as thin broomsticks only, to imagine the degree of beauty and development reached in warmer latitudes by this tree friendly to tombs, but which in the East awakens no melancholy thoughts and is used to adorn gardens as well as cemeteries.

As the cypress grows old, its trunk becomes divided into rough ribs like the corrugations of Gothic pillars in cathedrals ; its worn bark turns a silvery gray, its branches spring out in unexpected fashion, and have curiously deformed elbows, yet without destroying the pyramidal outline and the vertical direction of the foliage, massed sometimes in thick clumps, sometimes in scattered tufts. The tortuous, bare roots grip the ground on the edge of the ridges like the talons of a vulture clutching a prey, and sometimes resemble ser- pents half disappearing within their holes. The solid, dark foliage does not lose its colour in the hot rays of the sun and is always vigorous enough to show sharply against the intense blue of the sky. There is no tree

H2

THE CEMETERY AT SCUTARI

at once so majestic, so grave, and so serious. Its apparent uniformity is varied by differences appreciated by the painter, though they in no wise break the gen- eral lines. The cypress harmonises admirably with the architecture of Italian villas and its black tops match wonderfully well the white columns of the mina- rets. Its brown draperies form, on the summits of the hills, a background against which stand out the painted wooden houses of the Turkish villas like shim- mering vermilion spots.

Already in Spain, in the Generalife and the Alhambra I had fallen in love with cypresses ; my stay at Con- stantinople merely increased this passion, while satisfy- ing it. The silhouette of two cypresses especially is ineffaceably engraved in my memory, and I cannot hear the name of Granada without seeing them at once rise above the red walls of the ancient palace of the Moorish kings with whom I am certain they are con- temporary. With what pleasure I used to perceive them, " black sheaves of foliage heavenward springing," when I returned from my excursions in the Alpujarras in company with Romero the eagle hunter or Lanza the cosario, riding a mule whose harness was covered with ornaments and bells. But let me return to the

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cypresses of Scutari, which are worthy of posing to Marilhat, Decamps, and Jadin.

A cypress is planted by the side of each tomb. Every standing tree represents a corpse lying down ; and in this soil saturated with human manure, vegeta- tion is very active ; every day new graves are dug, and the funeral forest quickly grows in height and extent. The Turks do not have the system of temporary leases of ground which makes the cemeteries of Paris resemble woods cut down at regular times ; the economy of death is not so well understood by these worthy bar- barians. The dead, poor or rich, once here, stretched out on his last couch, sleeps until the trumpets of the Last Judgment shall awaken him, and the hand of man at least does not disturb him.

By the side of the city of the living the necropolis extends infinitely, constantly recruited by peaceful inhabitants who will never emigrate. The inexhaust- ible quarries of Marmora furnish every one of these mute citizens with a marble post telling his name and his dwelling, and although a coffin takes very little room and the bodies lie very close to each other, the city of the dead is more extensive than the other. Mil- lions of bodies have been laid there since the conquest

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of Byzantium by Mohammed. If time, which destroys everything, even nothingness, did not throw down the tumuli stones and strike off their turbans, and if the dust of years, those invisible grave-diggers, did not slowly cover the debris of the broken tombs, a patient statistician might, by adding up the funeral columns, find out the number of inhabitants of Constantinople from 1453, the date of the fall of the Greek Empire. But for the intervention of nature, which everywhere tends to resume its primitive form, the Turkish Empire would soon be naught but a vast cemetery whence the dead would drive the living.

I first followed the main walk bordered by two vast curtains of sombre green most funereally effective. Marble cutters, quietly squatting down, were carving tombs on the roadside ; arabas filled with women were going to Hai'dar Pacha ; Mussulman courtesans, their eyebrows joined by a line of Indian ink, their reddened cheeks showing through the thin muslin yashmak, were idling along, exciting Turkish Johnnies with lascivious glances and sonorous laughter. I soon quitted the beaten road and my companions to roam among the tombs and study the Oriental aspect of death. I have already stated, in speaking of the Little Field of the

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Dead at Pera, that Turkish tombs consist of a sort of marble therm ending in a ball, vaguely recalling a human face, and covered with a turban the folds and form of which denote the rank of the dead. Nowadays the turban has been replaced by a coloured fez ; stones adorned with a stalk of lotus, or a vine-stem with leaves and clusters of grapes carved in relief and painted denote women. At the foot of the stone, which varies only in being more or less richly gilded and coloured, usually stretches a slab having in the centre a small basin a few inches deep in which the friends of the dead place flowers and pour milk or perfumes.

There comes a time when the flowers fade and are not renewed ; for there is no such thing as eternal grief, and life would be impossible without forgetful- ness; rain water replaces the rose water 5 little birds come to drink the tears of heaven on the spot where fell the tears of the heart ; the doves dip their wings in the marble bath, and dry themselves while cooing in the sun on the neighbouring stone, and the dead, deceived, thinks he hears the sigh of one faithful to him. Most fresh, most graceful is the winged life warbling on tombs. Sometimes a turbeh, with Moorish arcades, rises in monumental fashion among the hum-

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bier sepultures, and serves as a sepulchral kiosk to a pacha surrounded by his family.

The Turks, who are grave, slow, and majestic in every action of life, never hurry save where death is concerned. The body, as soon as it has undergone the lustral ablutions, is borne to the grave at a run, laid so as to point to Mecca, and quickly covered with a few handfuls of earth. This is due to superstitious ideas. Mussulmans believe that the body suffers so long as it is not restored to the earth whence it has come. The imam questions the dead on the principal articles of faith of the Koran ; its silence is taken for assent ; the spectators answer u Amen," and the procession scatters, leaving the dead alone with eternity.

Then Monkir and Nekir, the two funeral angels whose turquoise eyes shine in their ebony faces, question him on his virtuous or wicked life, and in accordance with his answers assign the place which his soul is to occupy, either in Hades or Paradise. The Mussulman Hades is merely a Purgatory, for after having expiated his faults by more or less lengthened, more or less atro- cious punishments, a true believer ends by enjoying the embraces of the houris and the ineffable sight of Allah.

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At the head of the grave is left a sort of hole or conduit leading to the ear of the body, so that it may hear the groans, lamentations, and weepings of the family and friends. This opening, too often enlarged by dogs and jackals, is the window of the sepulchre, the wicket through which this world can look into the other.

Walking about at random, I reached an older portion of the cemetery, consequently one more abandoned. The funeral columns, almost all out of plumb, leaned to the left or the right. Many had fallen, as if weary of having remained standing so long, and considering it was useless to mark a grave long effaced and which no one remembered. The earth, which had sunk through the falling in of the coffins or by being washed away by the rains, preserved less carefully the secrets of the tomb. At almost every step I struck against a jaw-bone, a vertebra, a rib, or a thigh-bone. Through the short, scanty grass shone occasionally, white as ivory, spherical and oblong like an ostrich-egg, a singular protuberance. It was a skull just show- ing above the ground. In some of the fallen-in graves, pious hands had set in order similar bones that had been cast up; other fragments of skele-

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tons rolled like pebbles on the edge of the deserted footpaths.

I was seized with a strange and horrible curiosity: I wanted to look through the holes of which I spoke just now, to surprise the mystery of the tomb, to see death in its own home. I bent over the window opened on nothingness, and easily perceived the human remains. I could see the yellow, livid, grimac- ing skull, with dislocated jaws and hollow orbits, the lean ribs filled with sand or black humus, on which carelessly rested the bone of the arm. The rest was lost in shadow and earth. The sleeper seemed very quiet, and far from being terrified, as I expected, I was reassured by the sight. It was really nothing more than phosphate of lime that lay there, and the soul having vanished, nature was little by little taking pos- session of its own elements to form new combinations.

Years ago I thought out " The Comedy of Death " in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, but I could not have written a single stanza of it in the Scutari ceme- tery. Under the shadow of these quiet cypresses a human skull did not seem to me in any wise different from a stone, and the peaceful fatalism of the East seized upon me in spite of my Christian terror of death

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and my Catholic studies of the sepulchre. None of the dust that I questioned answered ; everywhere silence, rest, forgetfulness, and Uie dreamless sleep in the bosom of Cybele, the holy mother. In vain I listened at every half-opened door; I heard no other noise than that of the worm spinning its web. None of the sleepers lying on their side had turned over, feeling uncom- fortable, and I continued on my walk, stepping over the marble tombstones, walking over human debris, calm, serene, almost smiling, and thinking with no great dread of the day when the foot of the passer-by would strike sonorous upon my own empty skull.

Sunbeams, piercing the black pyramids of the cy- presses, glittered like will-o'-the-wisps on the white tombs, the doves were cooing, and in the blue heavens the hawks were soaring. A few women, seated on a small carpet in company with a negress or a child, were dreaming in melancholy fashion or resting cradled by the mirage of tender remembrances. The air was delightfully balmy, and I felt life penetrating me at every pore amid this dark forest, the soil of which is made of dust that once was living men.

I had met my friends again, and we were now traversing an entirely modern portion of the cemetery.

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THE CEMETERY AT SCUTARI

There I saw recent tombs surrounded with railings and small flower-beds like those in Pere-Lachaise, for death has also its fashions, and in this place were buried in the latest style well-to-do people only. For my part, I prefer the Marmora marble post with carved turban, and the lines of the Koran in gilded letters.

The road through the cemetery issues into a broad plain called Hai'dar Pacha, a sort of drill-ground which stretches between Scutari and the vast neighbouring barracks of Kadikeui. A revetment wall formed of old broken tombs, ran along either side of the road and formed a terrace three or four feet high which offered the gayest of spectacles. It looked like a vast bed of living flowers. Two or three rows of women squatting on mats or carpets, exhibited the varying colour of their ferradjes, — rose, sky-blue, apple-green, lilac, elegantly draped round their forms. In front of these groups the red jackets, the yellow trousers, and brocade vests of the children shimmered in a luminous maze of spangles and gold embroidery.

The ferradje and yashmak at first produce on the traveller the same effect as a domino at the Opera balls. At the outset you can make out nothing ; you feel dazzled by these anonymous shadows which whirl

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before you, apparently all alike ; you can recognise no one. But soon the eye becomes accustomed to the uniformity, notes differences, observes forms under the satin which veils them. Some ill-concealed grace betrays youth, pld age is marked by some senile symp- tom, a propitious or unpropitious breeze lifts up the lace of the mask, the face shows, and the black phantom becomes a woman.

It is the same way in the East. The ample merino drapery, which resembles a dressing-gown or a bath- robe, soon loses its mystery j the yashmak becomes unexpectedly transparent, and in spite of all the gar- ments with which Mussulman jealousy clothes her, a Turkish woman, when you do not absolutely stare at her, soon becomes as visible as a French woman. The ferradje which conceals her form may also reveal it ; the folds, purposely drawn tight, will exhibit what they ought to conceal; by opening it under pretext of rearranging it, a Turkish coquette — there are such — sometimes exhibits through the opening of her gold-embroidered, velvet jacket a superb bosom scarcely concealed by a gauze chemise, and marble breasts that owe nothing to the shams of the corset. Those among them who have pretty hands know very

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well how to put out their slender fingers tinged with henna from the mantle in which they are wrapped; there are certain ways of making the muslin of the yashmak opaque or transparent by doubling it or using a single fold. This white mask, importunate at first, can be placed higher or lower, the space which separates it from the head-dress may be narrowed or broadened. Between these two white bands shine like black diamonds, like jet stars, the most wonderful eyes in the world, brightened by kohl, and concentrating in themselves the whole expression of the faintly seen face.

Walking slowly in the centre of the road, I was able to review at my leisure this gallery of Turkish beauties, just as I might have inspected a row of boxes at the Opera. My red fez, my buttoned frock-coat, my dark complexion and my beard enabled me to be easily confounded amid the crowd ; I did not look too scandal- ously Parisian.

On the drive at Haiidar Pacha filed gravely by arabas, talikas, and even coupes and broughams filled with very richly dressed ladies, whose diamonds, scarcely dead- ened by the white mist of muslin, sparkled in the sunshine, like stars behind a light cloud. Khavasses on

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horseback and on foot accompanied some of these car- riages, in which odalisques of the imperial harem were idly whiling away the weary hours. Here and there groups of five or six women rested in the shade, guarded by a eunuch, close to the araba which had brought them, and seemed to be posing for a picture by Decamps or Diaz. The great gray oxen chewed the cud peacefully and shook, to drive away the flies, tufts of red wool suspended from the curved sticks planted in their yoke and tied to their tails by a string. With their grave looks and their frontlets studded with steel plates, these splendid animals looked like priests of Mithra or Zoroaster.

The vendors of snow water, sherbet, grapes, and cherries passed from one group to another offering their wares to the Greeks and Armenians, and con- tributed to the animation of the picture. There were also sellers of Smyrna carpous cut in slices, and of rosy watermelons. Horsemen riding handsome steeds performed fantasias at a distance from the carriages, no doubt in honour of some invisible beauty. The thorough-breds of Nedji, Hedjaz, and Kourdistan proudly shook their long, silky manes and shone in their housings studded with gems, feeling themselves

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admired, and sometimes when a horseman had turned his back, a lovely head would show at the window of a talika.

The sun was setting, and I returned, thoughtful and a prey to vague desires, towards Scutari, where my cai'dji was patiently waiting for me between a cup of muddy coffee and a chibouque of latakieh, as he had the right to do, being a Greek and a Christian, not subject to the rigours of Ramazan.

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THE SULTAN AT THE MOSQUE

IT is customary for the Padisha to go in state every Friday to a mosque to pray in public. Friday, as every one knows, is to Mussulmans what Sunday is to Christians and Saturday to Jews, a day particularly devoted to religious practices, although it does not involve the idea of obligatory rest.

Every week the Commander of the Faithful visits a different mosque, Saint Sophia, Souleiman, Osmanieh, Sultan Bayezid, Yeni Valideh Djami, the Tulip Mosque, or any other, according to an itinerary settled upon and published beforehand. Besides the fact that prayer in a mosque is obligatory on that day in accordance with the precepts of the Koran, and that the Padisha, as head of the church, cannot avoid it, there is also a political reason for this official practice of piety. The object is to make the people see for themselves that the Sultan is alive; for the whole week he remains shut up within the mysterious solitudes of the Seraglio or the summer palaces scattered on the shores of the

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Bosphorus. By traversing the town on horseback, plainly visible to all, he certifies to the people and the foreign ambassadors that he is alive; a precaution which is not needless, for it would be easy, for the sake of palace intrigues to conceal his natural or violent death. Even serious sickness does not interrupt the performance, for Mohammed I, son of Mustapha, died between the two gates of the Seraglio on return- ing from one of these Friday excursions on which he had gone although he could scarcely keep in his saddle and had to be rouged to conceal his pallor.

I learned by the dragoman of the hotel that the Sultan was to go from the palace of Tcheragan to Medjidieh, situated close by. Medjidieh is connected with the palace, the facade of which looks out upon the Bosphorus, and on that side consists simply of great walls topped by the chimneys of the kitchens. These chimneys are painted green, and are in the shape of columns. The mosque is quite modern, and its architecture, with Genoese rococo volutes and foliage, has nothing noticeable, although its dazzling whiteness makes it stand out well against the dark blue sky.

The door of the mosque was open, and I had a glimpse of the various pachas and high officers, wearing

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£± ±££ 4, 4, 4,^^4.4.4.4,4:4, 4,4,4:^1, £4.4.

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the tarboush, their breasts blazing with gold, their shoulders set off by big epaulettes. They were per- forming, in spite of their obesity, the rather compli- cated pantomimes called for by Oriental prayer. They knelt and rose heavily, with apparently sincere faith, for philosophical ideas have progressed much less in Constantinople than people think. Even Turks brought up in Europe show themselves, on their return from London and Paris, none the less attached to the Koran. It needs but a slight scratching of their varnish of civilisation to come upon the faithful believer.

Black slaves and syces held horses or walked them round. These animals, covered with superb housings, had brought the sultan and his suite. They were very handsome, robust, and solid-looking, although without the muscular elegance of the Arab horse ; but they are said to possess remarkable endurance. The light desert steeds would break down under the weight of the heavy Turkish horsemen, who are most of them excessively stout, especially when they have attained to high rank. These horses are all of a particular Bar- bary breed. The sultan's was easily known by the gems that starred the schabrach, and by the imperial cipher, embroidered in a complicated arabesque at every

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corner of the velvet, which almost disappeared under the ornamentation.

Files of soldiers were drawn up along the walls, awaiting the coming out of His Highness. They wore the red tarboush, and their uniform, not unlike the undress uniform of our troops of the line, consisted of a round jacket of blue cloth and trousers of coarse white linen. This costume contrasts curiously with the characteristic, tanned faces, that a Janissary's tur- ban would become a great deal better.

On the floor of the mosque was stretched a rather narrow band of black cashmere for the Sultan to walk upon. It led from the gate over the steps to a marble horse-block, like those seen at the entrances of palaces and near the landing-places of caiques. I think, though I am not certain, that this black carpet is specially reserved for the Sultan as Grand Khan of Tartary.

Genuflections, prostrations, and psalm-singing went on within the sanctuary, and the noonday sun, shorten- ing the shadows, made the paving-stones on the square shine again, while the white walls reflected the blinding light, which was the more unpleasant for the three or four ladies who happened to be there because etiquette forbids opening a parasol in the presence of the Sultan

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01 even in front of the palaces in which he dwells. In the East the parasol has always been the emblem of supreme power; the master is in the shade, while the slaves roast in the sun.

On this point, as on many others, etiquette has been relaxed, and one would not run any risk nowadays by breaking the rule, but well-bred strangers always con- form to it. What is the good of shocking the habits of the country one visits, — habits which are due to some good reason and often are not more ridiculous than our own ?

Some commotion was now visible within the mosque; the -officers put on their boots at the door, the syces brought the Sultan's horse to the horse-block, and soon, between two files of viziers, pachas, and beys, bowing to him in Oriental fashion, a bow which I greatly prefer for its respectful grace to the European bow, appeared His Highness, Sultan Abul Medjid, standing out in the light against the dark background of the door, the frame of which formed a setting for him. His dress, which was very simple, consisted of a sort of sack coat of dark blue cloth, trousers of white silk, patent-leather boots, and a fez to which the imperial aigrette of heron's plumes was fixed by

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a clasp of huge diamonds. Through the opening of his coat showed gold embroidery. I greatly regret, for my part, the former Oriental magnificence. I looked for sultans as impassible as idols in reliquaries of gems, something like peacocks of power, blooming amid an aureole of suns. In despotic countries the sovereign cannot segregate himself too much from humanity by imposing, solemn, and hieratic forms, by a dazzling, chimerical, and fabulous display of luxury. As God to Moses, he ought to appear to his people only in a burning bush of blazing diamonds.

However, in spite 'of the austere simplicity of his dress, Abdul Medjid's rank was plain to every one. Utter satiety was visible on his pale face ; the assurance of irresistible power gave to his features, not very regular, a marmorean tranquillity; his fixed, motionless eyes, piercing, and lacklustre, seeing everything and looking at nothing, did not resemble the eyes of men. A short, somewhat thin brown beard fringed the sad, imperious, and gentle face.

With a few paces taken extremely slowly and rather gliding than walking, the steps of a god or a phantom that does not progress like a man, Abdul Medjid crossed the steps separating the gate of the mosque from the

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stirriip-block, walking along the band of black stuff on which no one but he set foot, and rather let himself slide than got on to the saddle of his horse, which was as motionless as if carved out of stone. ,The stout officers hoisted themselves up with greater difficulty on top of their respective saddles, and the procession started to return to the palace amid cries of u Long live the Sultan ! " uttered in Turkish by the soldiers with genuine enthusiasm.

During the defile, the band played a march arranged on Turkish motives by the brother of Donizetti, who is band-master to the Sultan, and with enough kettle- drums and dervishes' flutes to satisfy Mohammedan ears, without, however, shocking Catholic ones. The march has a good deal of dash, and is rather char- acteristic.

Then every one entered the palace, through the open gate of which I could see the great modern court. The doors were closed, and no one was left in the street but a few sight-seers scattering in different direc- tions, Bulgarian peasants with coarse blouses and fur caps, and old mummified beggar-women squatting in their rags along the burning hot walls.

The noonday silence fell upon the mysterious

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palace which, behind its trellised windows, contains so much weariness and languor. I could not help thinking of all the treasures of loveliness lost to human gaze, of all the marvellous beauties of Greece, Circassia, Georgia, India, and Africa that vanish without having been reproduced by marble or on canvas, without art having made them immortal and bequeathed them to the loving admiration of centuries ; of the Venuses who will never have a Praxiteles, of the Violantes deprived of a Titian, of the Fornarinas whom no Raphael will see.

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WOMEN

THE first question asked of any traveller who returns from the East is, " What about the women ? " However much it may hurt my self-love, I must humbly confess that I have noth- ing to say in the way of love affairs, and I am forced to my great regret to omit from my story any account of amourous and romantic adventures. And yet it would have been so pleasant to vary my tale of ceme- teries, tekiehs, mosques, palaces, and kiosks ; for noth- ing better sets off an account of a voyage to the East than an old woman who, at the corner of a deserted lane, signs to you to follow and introduces you by a secret door into an apartment adorned with all the splendour of Asiatic luxury, where you find awaiting you, seated upon brocaded carpets, a sultana covered with gold and gems.

It is true that Turkish women go out freely, repair to the Sweet Waters of Asia and Europe, drive at Haidar Pacha, on Sultan Bayezid Square, sit on the

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mounds in the cemeteries at Pera and Scutari, spend whole days bathing and visiting their friends, go to the play at Kadikeui, watch the tricks of the jugglers at Psammathia, chat under the arcades of the mosques, stop at the shops in the Bezestan, travel on the Bos- phorus in caiques or steamboats ; but they have always with them two or three companions, either a negress or an old woman as a duenna, and if they are rich, a eunuch, who is often jealous on his own account ; when they are alone, which sometimes happens, a child serves to maintain respect for them ; and if they have no child, public custom watches over and protects them, perhaps even more than they desire. The free- dom which they enjoy is but apparent.

Strangers have believed they have had love ad- ventures because they have mistaken Armenian for Turkish women, both wearing the same costume save the yellow boots, and the Armenians imitating Turkish manners sufficiently well to deceive a stranger; but in reality Turkish life is hermetically closed, and it is very difficult to know what goes on behind the closely trellised windows in which are cut small holes as in the drop curtain of a theatre, to enable those behind to look out.

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Nor is it any use to ask for information from the natives themselves. As Alfred de Musset says at the beginning of " Namouna," —

"The deepest silence in this story reigns."

To speak to a Turk of his wife is the worst of manners; not the faintest allusion must ever be made to the delicate subject. The French minister's wife, desiring to give Reschid Pacha some beautiful Lyons silks for his harem, said to him as she handed them over : u Here are stuffs which you will know best how to use." If she had expressed more clearly the inten- tion of her gift, it would have been a rudeness, even to Reschid, accustomed to French manners, and the exquisite tact of the marchioness made her choose a graciously vague form which could in no wise wound Oriental susceptibilities.

It will easily be understood, when these are the ways of the people, that it would be a great mistake to ask of a Turk information concerning the inner life of the harem and the character and manners of Mus- sulman women. Even if one has known him familiarly in Paris, even if he has drunk two hundred cups of coffee and smoked as many pipes on the same divan as yourself, he will merely give an evasive answer, get

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very angry, and avoid you thereafter. Civilisation, in this respect, has not made the smallest progress. The only way to learn anything is to ask some European lady who has been well recommended and who is received in a harem, to tell you exactly what she has seen. A man must give up all hope of knowing any- thing more of Turkish beauty than the domino shows or the glimpse he may have caught of it under the awning of an araba, behind the windows of a telika, or under the shade of the cypresses in a cemetery, when heat and solitude suggest that the veil may be slightly drawn aside. Even then, if one draws too near and there happens to be a Turk in the neighbourhood, one is exposed to receive compliments of this sort : u Dog of a Christian ! Giaour! May the birds of heaven soil your chin ! May the plague dwell in your home ! May your wife be barren ! " a Biblical and Mussulman curse most seriously spoken. And yet the anger is feigned rather than real, and is principally intended for the gallery. A woman, even a Turkish woman, is never sorry to be looked at, and to keep her beauty secret always annoys her somewhat.

At the Sweet Waters of Asia, by remaining motion- less against a tree or leaning against the fountain like

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one slumbering and dreaming, I managed to catch a glimpse of more than one lovely profile scarcely con- cealed by the finest of gauze, of more than one pure bosom white as Parian marble, swelling under the folds of a half-opened ferradje, while the eunuch, reas- sured by my careless, idle look, was walking about at some distance, or watching the steamers on the Bosphorus.

For the matter of that, the Turks are no better off than the giaours. Even in the houses of their most intimate friends, they never get beyond the selamlik, and they are acquainted with their own wives only. When one harem pays a visit to another, the slippers of the visitors placed on the threshold forbid entrance even to the master of the house, who is thus turned out of his own place. An immense feminine population, anonymous and unknown, transformed into a perpetual masked ball, moves in the mysterious city, but the dominoes have not the right to unmask. Fathers and brothers alone have the right to see uncovered the faces of their daughters and sisters, which are verled in the presence of less close relatives ; so a Turk very likely has not seen in the course of his life more than five or six faces of Mussulman women.

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Large harems are owned by viziers, pachas, beys, and other wealthy persons only, every woman who becomes a mother having the right to a separate house- hold and slaves of her own. Most Turks are satisfied with one legitimate wife, although they may have as many as four, and also one or two purchased concu- bines. The remaining members of the sex are to them as phantoms or chimeras. It is true that they can make up for it by looking at the Greek and Armenian women, the Jewesses, the ladies of Pera and the few lady tourists who visit Constantinople.

Let me give a description of a Turkish interior taken down from the account of a lady invited to dinner by the wife of an ex-pacha of Kurdistan. This lady had been in the seraglio before she married the pacha. When they have attained the age of thirty, the Sultan gives their freedom to a number of his slaves, who usually marry very well on account of the relations which they maintain with the palace, and the influence which they are supposed to exert. Besides, they have been very well brought up : they can read, write, rime verses, dance, play on various instruments, and they have the high-bred manners acquired at court. They also possess in a very high degree a knowledge

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of intrigues and cabals, and often, through their friends who remain in the harem, learn political secrets, which their husbands turn to account either to obtain a favour, or to avoid being disgraced. To marry a lady of the seraglio is therefore a very wise step on the part of an ambitious or a prudent man.

The room in which the pacha's wife received her guest was elegant and rich, contrasting with the severe nudity of the selamlik. The three outer walls were filled with windows to admit as much air and light as possible. A hothouse gives an accurate idea of these rooms, themselves intended for the keeping of precious flowers. A magnificent, soft Smyrna carpet covered the floor; the walls were decorated with painted and gilded arabesques and knots j a long blue and yellow satin divan ran down two sides of the room ; another small and very low divan was placed between two windows from which there was a view of the splendid panorama of the Bosphorus. Squares of blue damask were thrown here and there on the carpet.

In a corner sparkled a great emerald-coloured Bohe- mian glass ewer with gold ornaments, placed upon a tray of the same material ; in the other corner was a

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coffer of goffered, ornamented, pique and gilded leather in the most charming taste. Unfortunately this Ori- ental luxury was marred by a mahogany chest of drawers, on the marble top of which was placed a clock under a glass shade between two vases of artificial flowers, also under glass shades, exactly as on the mantelpiece of a worthy retired Paris tradesman. These discords, pain- ful to an artist, are met with in every Turkish house with any pretensions to good taste. A room less richly ornamented and opening out of the first was used as a dining-room and led to the service staircase.

The hostess was sumptuously dressed, as all Turk- ish ladies are at home, especially when they expect a visit. Her black hair, divided into an infinite number of small tresses, fell down her cheeks and over her shoulders. On her head sparkled a sort of diamond helmet formed of the quadruple chains of a riviere of diamonds and of gems of purest water sewn upon a small, sky-blue satin cap, which disappeared almost wholly under the jewels. This splendid head-dress thoroughly became the noble and severe character of her beauty, her brilliant black eyes, her thin, aquiline nose, her red lips, her long oval face ; she had the mien of a haughty and kindly lady of rank.

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On her somewhat long neck was a necklace of large pearls, and through the opening in her silk chemise showed the upper part of lovely, well shaped breasts which had no support from stays, an instru- ment of torture unknown in the East. She wore a gown of dark garnet silk open in front like a man's pelisse, and on the sides from the knee down, with a train behind like a court dress. The gown was edged with a white ribbon puffed in rosettes at regular intervals. A Persian shawl fastened round her waist the full white taffeta drawers, the falling folds of which covered small slippers of yellow morocco, of which only the upturned tips could be seen.

She placed the stranger by her on the small divan with much grace, after having, however, offered her a chair to sit in European fashion if the Turkish seat should be inconvenient : and she examined her dress curiously without any marked affectation, as a well-bred person may do when she sees something new. Conver- sation between people who do not speak the same language and are reduced to pantomime could not be very varied. The Turkish lady asked the European if she had children, and gave her to understand that to her great grief she herself was deprived of that happiness.

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When the hour for the repast came, they went into the next room, around which also were divans, and a polished brass table covered with meats was brought in. A favourite slave of the khanoum shared the meal by her mistress's side. She was a handsome maid of seven- teen or eighteen years of age, robust, lovely, splendidly developed, but greatly inferior in breeding to the ex- odalisque of the seraglio. She had great black eyes, broad eyebrows, rich red lips, round cheeks, a some- what rustic glow qf health over her face, white, firm arms, large breasts, and a wealth of contours which her loose costume enabled one to perceive freely. She wore a small Greek cap from which her brown hair escaped in two heavy plaits, and was dressed in a jacket of a light pistachio yellow very light and soft in tone, which French dyers have never managed to reproduce. This vest, slashed on the sides and back so as to form basques, had short sleeves from which emerged silk gauze undersleeves. Great full drawers of muslin completed the costume, as simple as it was graceful.

A mulatto woman, the colour of new bronze, with a bit of white drapery twisted around her head, and wrapped carelessly in a white habbarah that brought

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out splendidly the dark colour of her skin, stood bare- footed by the door taking the dishes from the hands of two servants who brought them from the kitchen, situ- ated on the lower floor.

•

After dinner the khanoum rose and passed into the drawing-room, where she went from one divan to another, gracefully nonchalant. Then she smoked a cigarette, instead of the traditional narghileh, for cigar- ettes are now the fashion in the East, and there are as many papelitos smoked in Constantinople as in Seville. The Turkish women love to fill up their leisure by rolling the golden latakieh in the thin paper. The master of the house came to pay a visit to his wife and the European lady, but on hearing him coming, the young slave fled in the greatest haste ; belonging to the khanoum alone and already engaged, she could not appear with uncovered face before the ex-pacha of Kurdistan, who, for the matter of that, had but one wife, like many Turks.

After a few minutes the pacha withdrew to say his prayers in the next room, and the khanoum called her slave.

The hour of leave-taking had come. The stranger rose to go. The hostess signed to her to remain a

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little longer, and whispered a- few words to the young slave, who began to rummage in the drawers very energetically, until she found a small object enclosed in a case, which the pacha's wife handed to her visitor as a graceful remembrance of the pleasant evening spent together. The case, which was of lilac cardboard glazed with silver, contained a small crystal vial on which was the following label : " Extract for the hand- kerchief. Paris. Honey," and on the other side : " Double extract, guaranteed quality of honey. L. T. Piver, 103 Rue Saint-Martin, Paris."

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THE BREAKING OF THE FAST

I HAVE several times mentioned the caique, and one cannot well do otherwise when speaking of Constantinople ; but I perceive that I have not described it, though it is worth doing so, for unques- tionably the caique is the most graceful craft that ever furrowed the blue waters of the sea. By its side the elegant Venetian gondola is but a rough box, and gon- doliers are wretched louts compared with the ca'idjis.

The cai'que is a boat fifteen to twenty feet long by three feet beam, cut in the shape of a skate, and double-ended so that it can proceed in either direction. The rail is formed of two long planks carved on the inner side with a frieze of foliage, flowers, fruits, knots of ribbon, quivers, and other ornaments of the kind. Two or three planks, open-worked and forming braces, divide the boat and strengthen the sides against the pres- sure of the water. The prow is armed with a bronze beak. The craft is built of ash polished or varnished, relieved occasionally with a gold line, and is kept ex-

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tremely clean and elegant. The cai'djis, who each pull a pair of sculls larger at the handle by way of counter- weight, sit upon small thwarts covered with a sheep- skin, to prevent slipping as they pull, and their feet rest against wooden stretchers. The passengers seat them- selves on the bottom of the boat, at the stern, so as to bring the prow a little out of the water, which makes the boat travel very easily. The boatmen often grease the outside of the boat in order to prevent the water adher- ing to it. A more or less costly carpet is laid down in the stern sheets of the caique, and it is necessary to pre- serve the most complete immobility, for the least abrupt movement would upset the craft, or at all events make the cai'djis hit their hands, for they row overhanded. The caique is as sensitive as a pair of scales, and heels over if the equilibrium is disturbed even for a moment. The gravity of the Turks, who do not move any more than idols, is admirably suited to this constraint, painful at first to the more spirited giaours, though they soon acquire the habit of it.

A two-sculled cai'que can hold four persons seated opposite to each other. In spite of the heat of the sun the boats have no awning, for it would cause windage and would be contrary to Turkish etiquette — awnings

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being reserved for the sultan's caiques ; but a parasol may be used, provided it be closed when passing near the imperial residences. These boats can keep up with a horse trotting on the bank, and often distance it.

Each boat has on the bow a plate with the name of the landing where it is stationed : Top Khaneh, the Galata, the Green Kiosk, Yeni Valideh Djami, Be- schicktasch. The cai'djis, or rowers, are mostly superb Arnaouts or Anatolians, of great manly beauty and of herculean strength. Air and sunshine tanning their skin have given them the colour of the splendid bronze statues of which they already have the form. Their dress consists of full linen drawers, dazzlingly white, a striped gauze shirt with slit sleeves which leave the arms free, and a red fez with a blue or black tassel half a foot long, fitting close to their shaven temples. A woollen girdle, striped red and yellow, is twisted several times around their loins and sets off their busts. They wear a moustache only, in order not to be heated by useless hair. They are bare-legged and bare-footed, and their open shirt shows powerful pectoral muscles tanned to a rich colour. At every stroke their biceps swell and fall like cannon- balls on their athletic arms. The obligatory ablutions

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keep these handsome bodies scrupulously clean, and they are made healthy by exercise, open air, and a sobriety unknown to Northern people. The caidjis, in spite of their hard work, live as a rule on bread, cucumbers, maize, and fruit, drinking nothing but pure water and coffee ; and those among them who profess the religion of the prophet will row from morning to evening without smoking or drinking a drop of water during the thirty days of the Ramazan fast. I think I do not exaggerate when I estimate at three or four thousand the number of caidjis who serve at the differ- ent landings of Constantinople and the Bosphorus, as far as Therapia or Buyoukdereh. The situation of the town, separated from its suburbs by the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus, and the Sea of Marmora, renders con- stant water travel necessary. You have constantly to take a caique to go from Top Khaneh to Seraglio Point, from Beschicktasch to Scutari, from Psammathia to Kadikeui, from Kassim Pacha to Phanar, and from one side to the other of the Golden Horn, if you hap- pen to be too far from one of the three bridges of boats that cross the harbour. ,

It is most amusing, when you reach one of the landings, to see the caidjis hasten up and fight for your

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custom as formerly the stage-coach drivers used to do for travellers, swearing at each other with amazing volubility, and offering to take you at a reduced price. The tumult is increased occasionally by the barking of the frightened dogs which are trampled upon in the heat of the debate. At last, pushed, shoved, elbowed, dragged, you remain the prey of one or two gigantic fellows, who carry you off in triumph towards their boat through the growling groups of their disappointed brethren.

To board a caique without making it turn bottom up is a rather delicate operation. A good old Turk with a white beard, his complexion burned by the sun, steadies the boat with a stick provided with a bent nail, and you give him a para for his services. It is not always easy to get clear of the flotilla crowding around each landing-place, and it takes the incom- parable skill of the cai'djis to manage it without colli- sions and without accident. When landing, every caique is turned around so as to bring it in stern first, and this manoeuvre might involve dangerous collisions if the cai'djis had not, like the Venetian gondoliers, conventional cries of warning. When you land, you leave the price of the trip at the bottom of the boat on

150

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THE BREAKING OF THE FAST

the carpet, in piastres or beschliks, according to the trip and the price agreed upon.

The business of the Constantinople caidjis would be very profitable, but for the competition of the steam- boats which are now beginning to travel up and down the Bosphorus as they do on the Thames. From the Bridge of Galata, beyond which they cannot go, there start at every hour of the day numbers of Turkish, English, and Austrian steamers, the smoke of which mingles with the silvery mists of the Golden Horn, and which transport travellers by hundreds to Bebek, Arnaoutkeui, Anadoli Hissar, Therapia, and Buyouk- dereh on the European shore ; to Scutari, Kadikeui and the Isles of the Princes on the Asiatic shore. For- merly these trips had to be made in caiques, and cost much time and money on account of their length, being also somewhat perilous because of the violent currents and the wind, which may at any moment freshen up as it blows from the Black Sea.

The caidjis seek in vain to rival the speed of the steamers. Their muscles strive uselessly against the steel pistons. Soon they will have to be satisfied with the shorter intermediary trips, and the old retrograde Turks, who weep at the Elbicei Atika as they behold

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the costumes of the vanished janissaries, alone will make use of them to repair to their summer houses through hatred of the diabolical inventions of the giaours.

There are also omnibus caiques, heavy craft carrying some thirty people and pulled by four or six rowers who at every stroke rise, ascend a wooden step and throw themselves back with all their weight to move the huge sweeps. These automatic motions, repeated constantly, produce the strangest effect. This econom- ical and slow method of travelling is employed by sol- diers, hammals, poor devils, Jews, and old women, and the steamship companies will put an end to it whenever they please, by providing third-class seats and reduced fares.

The patiently expected time of the breaking of the fast had now come. It is celebrated by public rejoic- ings. The Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the basin of the Sea of Marmora then present the liveliest and gayest of aspects. All the ships in port are dressed in many-coloured flags, their ensigns, hoisted chock-a- block, flying out in the wind. The swallow-tailed Turkish standard exhibits its three silvery crescents on a green shield placed on a red field ; France unfolds its

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tri-colour; Austria hoists its banner, red and white, bearing a shield ; Russia its blue Saint Andrew's cross upon a white field ; England her cross of Saint George ; America her starry sky ; Greece her blue cross with the black and white checker of Bavaria in the centre ; Morocco its red pennant; Tripoli its half-moons upon the prophet's favourite green colour ; Tunis its green, blue, and red, like a silken girdle; and the sun gleams and blazes brightly upon all these banners, the reflec- tions of which lengthen and wind over the illuminated waters. Volleys of artillery salute the Sultan's caique, which passes by splendid in gold and purple, pulled by thirty vigorous oarsmen, while the sailors on the yards cheer and the frightened albatrosses whirl about in the white smoke.

I take a caique at Top Khaneh and have myself rowed from vessel to vessel, to examine the shape of the different ships, stopping by preference at those which have come from Trebizond, Moudania, Ismick, Lampsaki. With their lofty, galleried poops, their prows swelling like the breasts of swans, and their long an- tennae, they cannot be very different from the vessels that composed the fleet of the Greeks in the days of the War of Troy. The American clippers, so much

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talked about, are far from having the same elegance of form, and it would not take a great deal of imagination to fancy that the fair Achilles Peleades is seated on one of these high poops, floating on the sea into which flows the Simois.

As we roam around, my boat passes close by the rocky islet on which rises what the Franks call, no one knows why, Leander's Tower, and the Turks Kiss Koulessi, the Virgin's Tower. Needless to say, Leander has nothing whatever to do with this white tower, since it was the Hellespont and not the Bospho- rus which he swam to visit Hero, the lovely priestess of Venus. The truth is that this tower, — or at least, a similar one, — built by Manuel Comnenus in the time of the Lower Empire, held the chain which, fastened to two other points on the European and the Asiatic shores, barred the entrance of the Golden Horn to hostile vessels coming from the Black Sea. If one cares to go farther back, it appears that Damalis, the wife of Chares, the general sent from Athens to help the in- habitants of Byzantium, then attacked by the fleet of Philip of Macedon, died at Chrysopolis and was buried on this islet under a monument surmounted by a heifer.

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The day is devoted to prayers and to visits to the mosques; in the evening there is a general illumination. If the view of the harbor, with all the vessels dressed and the incessant motion of the boats, was a marvellous spectacle under a superb Oriental sun, what shall I say of the festival at night. It is now that I feel the powerlessness of pen and brush. A panorama alone could give, with its changing beauty, a faint idea of the magical effect of the light and shade. Salvos of artil- lery followed each other incessantly, for the Turks delight in burning powder. They burst out in every direction, deafening one with their joyous roar ; the minarets of the mosques were lighted up like light- houses, the lines of the Koran blazed like letters of fire against the dark blue of the night; and the many- coloured, dense crowd, divided into human streams, poured down the sloping streets of Galata and Pera. Around the fountain at Top Khaneh sparkled like glow-worms thousands of lights, and the Mosque of Sultan Mahmoud sprang heavenward illumined by points of fire.

The boat took us into the harbour and on board of one of the Lloyd's steamers, whence we could see Con- stantinople. Top Khaneh, lighted by red and green

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Bengal fires, flamed in an apotheosis atmosphere, torn from time to time by the flash of the guns, the crackling of the fireworks, the zigzags of serpents, the explosions of bombs. The Mahmoudieh mosque appeared, through the opal-coloured smoke, like one of the carbuncle edifices created by the imagination of the Arab story tellers to lodge the Queen of Peris. It was fairly dazzling. The vessels at anchor had out- lined their masts, yards, and rails with lines of green, blue, red, and yellow lanterns, so that they resembled vessels of gems floating on an ocean of flame, so bril- liantly were the waters of the Bosphorus lighted by the reflections of that conflagration of luminous flower-pots, suns, and illuminated ciphers. Seraglio Point stretched out like a promontory of topazes, above which rose, circled with bracelets of fire, the silvern staffs of Saint Sophia, Sultan Achmet, and Osmanieh. On the Asi- atic shore Scutari cast myriads of luminous sparks, and the two banks of the Bosphorus formed, as far as the eye could reach, a river of spangles constantly stirred up by the oars -of the caiques. Sometimes a distant vessel, hitherto unperceived, was lighted up with a purple and blue aureole and then vanished in the darkness like a dream. These pyrotechnic surprises had the

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most charming effect. The steamers, adorned with coloured lamps, came and went, carrying bands, the music of which spread joyously abroad with the breeze. Over all, the sky, as if it also intended to celebrate the feast, was prodigally lavishing its casket of stars upon a vault of the darkest and richest lapis-lazuli, and all the blaze upon earth scarcely managed to cast a red reflection upon its edges. Here and there after a time the lights began to pale, there were breaks in the lines of fires, the guns were fired less frequently, huge banks of smoke the wind could not dissolve curled over the water like monstrous forms ; the cold dew of night soaked the thickest clothing. I had to think of returning, an operation not unattended with difficulty and peril. My caique was waiting for me at the foot of the gangway. I hailed my cai'djis and we were off. The Bosphorus was filled with the most prodigious swarm imaginable of crafts of all kinds. In spite of warning cries, oars interlocked constantly, rail struck rail, sweeps had to be unshipped along the boats like insects' legs, to avoid being smashed. The sharp points of the prows swept within two inches of your face like javelins or the beaks of birds of prey. The reflection of the dying blaze casting its last gleams,

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blinded the cai'djis and made them mistake their road. A boat going at full speed nearly ran us down, and we should surely have suffered that fate if the oarsmen, with incomparable skill, had not backed water with superhuman vigour. At last I arrived safe and sound, at Top Khaneh, through the glitter and sparkle of the wives, in a riot of boats and cries fit to drive one mad, and I returned, stepping carefully over camps of sleep- ing dogs, to the Hotel de France on the Little Field by streets which were gradually becoming more and more deserted.

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THE WALLS OF CONSTANTINOPLE

I HAD resolved to make a grand round of the outer quarters of Constantinople, seldom visited by travellers, whose curiosity scarcely leads them beyond the Bezestan, the Atmei'dan, Sultan Bayezid's Square, the Old Seraglio, and the neighbourhood of Saint Sophia, in which are concentrated the whole movement of Mussulman life. I therefore started early, accompanied by a young Frenchman who has long inhabited Turkey.

We rapidly descended the Galata slope, traversed the Golden Horn on the bridge of boats, and leaving Yeni Valideh Djami on one side, plunged into a labyrinth of Turkish lanes. The farther we went, the greater was the solitude. The dogs, more savage, looked at us with fierce glances and followed us growling. The wooden houses, discoloured and tumble-down, with hanging trellises, out of plumb, looked like ruined hen-coops. A broken-down fountain filtered water

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into a mouldy shell ; a dismantled turbeb covered with brambles and asphodel, showed in the shadow, through its gratings covered with cobwebs, a few funeral stones leaning to right and left, the inscriptions of which were illegible. Elsewhere a chapel with its dome roughly plastered with lime and flanked by a minaret, resemb- ling a candle with an extinguisher behind it. Above the long walls rose the black tops of the cypresses ; clumps of sycamores and plane-trees hung over the street. There were no more mosques with marble columns and Moorish galleries, no more pacha's konacks painted in bright colours and projecting their graceful, aerial cabinets; but here and there great heaps of ashes amid which rose a few chimneys of blackened bricks remaining standing, — and over all the wretch- edness and loneliness, the pure, white, implacable light of the East which brings out harshly every mean detail. From lane to lane, from square to square, we reached a great mournful, ruinous khan, with high arches and long stone walls, intended to lodge caravans of camels. It was the hour of prayer, and on the top gallery of the minaret of the neighbouring mosque two phantom-like, white-robed muezzins were walking around calling out in their strange-toned voices the

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THE WALLS OF CONSTANTINOPLE

sacramental formula of Islam to the mute, blind, deaf houses that were falling here in silence and solitude. The words of the Koran, that seemed to drop from heaven, modulated by the suavely guttural voices, awoke no other echo than the plaintive moan of a dog disturbed in his dream, and the beating of the wings of a frightened dove ; nevertheless the muezzins continued on their impassible round, casting the name of Allah and his prophet to the four winds of heaven, like sow- ers who care not where falls the grain, knowing well that it will find its own furrow. Perhaps even under these worm-eaten roofs, within those hovels apparently abandoned, some of the faithful were spreading out their poor little worn carpets, turning towards Mecca, and repeating with deep faith, " La Allah, II Allah ! " or " Mohammed r a soul Allah ! "

A mounted negro passed from time to time j an old woman, leaning against the wall, held out frorr a heap of rags a monkey-claw, begging for alms, profiting by the unexpected opportunity ; two or three street boys, apparently escaped from a water-colour by Decamps, tried to stuff pebbles into the spout of a dried fountain ; a few lizards ran in perfect security over the stones, and that was all.

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We were looking for something to eat, for if we had satisfied our eyes, our stomachs had received no food and every minute increased our sufferings. There were not to be found in this forlorn quarter any of those appetising eating houses where kabobs dusted with pep- per spin around before a fire spitted on a perpendicular spit, none of the stalls upon which baklava is spread out in large bars which the confectioner's hand dusts with a light snow of sugar, none of the splendid places offering balls of rice enveloped in leaves, and jars in which slices of cucumber swim in oil, mixed with pieces of meat. All we could find to buy were white mulberries and black soap, which was pretty poor entertainment.

The quarter we next traversed had an entirely different aspect ; it no longer was Turkish. The half- opened doors of the houses allowed the interiors to be seen; at the untrellised windows showed lovely female heads ' earing rose or blue crepon, and crowned with great plaits of hair in the form of diadems. Young girls, seated on the threshold, looked freely into the street, and we could admire, without putting them to flight, their delicate, pure features, their great blue eyes and fair tresses. In front of the cafes men in white fustanellas, red caps, jackets with long braided sleeves

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The Walls of Constantinople.

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were swallowing glasses of raki and getting drunk like good Christians. We were in Psammathia, the quar- ter inhabited by rayots, non-Mussulman subjects of the Porte, who form a sort of Greek colony in the centre of the Turkish city. Animation had replaced silence ; joy, sadness; we felt ourselves among a living race of beings.

We wished to proceed along the outer side of the old walls of Byzantium from the seashore to Edirneh Kapou, and even farther if we were not too tired. I do not believe there exists anywhere on earth a more austere and melancholy walk than this road which runs for more than three miles between ruins on the one hand and a cemetery upon the other. The ramparts, composed of two rows of walls flanked by square towers, have at their foot a broad moat now filled by gardens, and provided with a stone parapet, so that there were three lines to be crossed. These are the old walls of Constantinople, such as they have been left by assaults, time, and earthquakes. In their brick and stone courses are still to be seen the breaches made by catapults, balistas, and rams, and the gigantic culverin, the mastodon of artillery, served by seven hundred gunners, which threw marble balls weighing

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six hundred pounds. Here and there a huge crack has split a tower from top to bottom, elsewhere a whole piece of wall has fallen within the moat ; but where the stones fall, the wind brings dust and grains, a bush rises in place of the fallen battlements and be- comes a tree, the innumerable roots of the parasitical plants keep together the falling bricks. The roots of the arbutus, after having acted as pincers to separate the joints of the stones, now turn into bolts to hold them in, and the wall continues uninterruptedly, showing its broken silhouette against the sky, spreading out its cur- tains draped with ivy and striped by time with rich, severe tones. Here and there rise the old gates, of Byzantine architecture with excrescences of Turkish masonry. They are still half recognisable. It is diffi- cult to believe there is a living city behind these dead ramparts, which nevertheless conceal Constantinople. It is easy to fancy one's self near one of those cities of Arab tales, the population of which has been turned into stone by a spell. A few minarets alone rise above the vast line of ruins and testify that Islam has set its capital there. The conqueror of Constantine XIII, if he were to return to this world, could well repeat his melancholy Persian quotation : u The spider spins its

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web in the palace of the emperors, and the owl sings its night song on the towers of Ephrasiab."

Four hundred years ago those red walls, now over- grown with the vegetation of ruins, slowly perishing in solitude, and overrun by lizards, saw crowding at their feet the hordes of Asia, driven on by the terrible Mohammed II. The corpses of Janissaries and Tima- riots rolled, covered with wounds, into the moat where now grow peaceful vegetables ; cascades of blood flowed down their sides where now hang the filaments of the saxifrage and of wall-flowers. One of the most terrible of human struggles, the combat of a race against a race, of a religion against a religion, took place in this desert where now reigns the silence of death. As usual, lusty barbarism won the day over decrepit civilisation ; and while the Greek priest was frying fish, unable to believe in an attack of Constanti- nople, the triumphant Mohammed II was riding his horse into Saint Sophia, and putting his bloody hand upon the wall of the sanctuary ; the cross was falling from the top of the dome to be replaced by the crescent, and from under a heap of dead was drawn Emperor Constan- tine, covered with blood, mutilated, and recognisable only by the golden eagles that clasped his purple cothurns.

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BALATA. THE PHANAR. A TURKISH BATH

NEAR the Andrinople Gate we alighted to drink a cup of coffee and smoke a chi- bouque in a cafe filled with a multicoloured throng of customers, and then continued on our way, still along the cemetery, which appeared to be endless. At last, however, we reached the end of the wall and re-entered the city, riding our tired horses carefully, as they stumbled against the marble turbans and broken tombstones that cover the slippery slopes. In this wise we reached a curious quarter, the appearance of which was very peculiar. The dwellings were more ruinous than ever, filthy and wretched, the sulky-looking, blear- eyed, haggard facades were cracked, disjointed, dis- located, and rotting ; the roofs looked scurfy and the walls leprous ; the scales of the grayish wash came ofF like the pellicles of a skin disease. Some bleeding dogs, reduced to skeletons, a prey to vermin and bitten all over, were asleep in the black, fetid mud. Villain-

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cms rags hung from the windows, behind which, by standing in our stirrups, we could get a glimpse of strange faces, sickly and livid, with complexions the colour of wax and lemon, heads covered with huge cushions of white linen, and stuck on little, thin, flat- chested bodies clothed in stuff shining like the cover of a wet umbrella ; dull, colourless, wan eyes, showing in the yellow faces like bits of coal in an omelette, turned slowly upon us and then turned again to their work. Fearful phantoms passed along the hovels, their brows bound with black-spotted, white rags, as if a usurer had been wiping his pen on them all day, their bodies scarce concealed in loathsome garments. We were in Balata, the Jewish quarter, the Ghetto of Constantinople. We beheld the result of four centuries of oppression and insult; the dunghill under which that nationality, proscribed everywhere, conceals itself as do certain insects, to avoid its persecutors. It hopes to escape through the disgust which it inspires ; it lives in dirt and assumes its colour. It is difficult to imagine anything more loathsome, more filthy, more purulent. Plica, scrofula, itch, and leprosy, all the Biblical impurities which it has never got rid of since the days of Moses, consume it without the people car-

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ing, so thoroughly are they given up to money- making. They do not even pay attention to plague if they can make something by the clothing of the dead. In this hideous quarter crowd together Aaron and Isaac, Abraham and Jacob. These wretches, some of whom are millionaires, feed on fish-heads, cast away because they are considered poisonous. This repulsive food to which are due certain peculiar diseases, from which these people suffer, attracts them because it is exceedingly low in price.

Opposite, on the other side of the Golden Horn, on a bare, red, dusty slope, lies the cemetery in which are buried their unhealthy generations. The sun blazes down upon the shapeless tombstones, no blade of grass grows around them, no tree casts its shade upon them ; the Turks would not grant that alleviation to the pro- scribed corpses, and took particular care to make the Jewish cen-etery look like a gehenna. The Jews are scarcely permitted to engrave a few mysterious Hebraic characters upon the cubes that dot this desolate and accursed hill.

We at last left this ignoble quarter, and turned into the Phanar quarter, inhabited by Greeks of rank, a sort of West End by the side of a Court of Miracles.

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The stone houses have a fine architectural look. Sev- eral of them have balconies supported by brackets carved in the shape of steps or volutes; some of the older recall the narrow facades of the small mansions of the Middle Ages, half fortresses, half dwellings. The walls are thick enough to stand a siege, the iron shutters are ball-proof, enormous gratings protect the windows, which are as narrow as those of barbicans; the cornices are often cut into the shape of battlements, and project like look-outs, a needless defensive display useful only against fire, for the powerless flames in vain seek to sweep through this stone quarter.

It is here that ancient Byzantium has taken refuge, that live in obscurity the descendants of the Komnenoi, the Duka, the Palaiologoi, princes without principalities, whose ancestors wore the purple and in whose veins flows imperial blood. Their slaves greet them as though they were kings, and they console each other for their decadence by these simulacra of respect. Great wealth is contained within these solid walls, very ornate internally, but very simple externally ; for in the East wealth is timid and exhibits itself only when safe from prying eyes. The Phanariotes have long been famous for their diplomatic skill. Formerly

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they directed all the international affairs of the Porte, but their credit seems to have greatly diminished since the Greek revolt.

At the end of the Phanar Quarter one enters again the streets that line the Golden Horn and where swarms a busy commercial population. At every step are met hammals bearing a burden hung between them from a pole, asses harnessed between two long planks, of which they each support one end, blocking traffic and breaking down whatever happens to be in their way when they are obliged to turn into a cross street. The poor brutes sometimes remain blocked against the walls of narrow lanes, unable to go forward or back- ward ; soon there results an agglomeration of horses, foot-passengers, porters, women, children, dogs, grum- bling, cursing, crying, and barking in every key, until the ass-driver pulls the animal by the tail and thus raises the blockade. The crowd disperses and calm is re-established, not, however, until a number of blows have been struck, the asses, the innocent cause of the trouble, naturally getting the greater part of them.

The ground rises like an amphitheatre from the sea to the ramparts along which we had just travelled, and

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above the maze of roofs of the Turkish houses is seen here and there a fragment " of crenellated wall, or the arch of an aqueduct, spurning the wretched modern buildings ready prepared for conflagration, and that a match would suffice to set on fire. How many Con- stantinoples have these old, blackened stones already seen falling in ashes at their feet ! A Turkish house a hundred years old is rare in Stamboul.

The next day I was somewhat tired, and I resolved to take a Turkish bath, for there is nothing so restful ; so I proceeded towards the Mahmoud Baths situated near the Bazaar. They are the finest and largest in Constantinople.

The tradition of the antique thermae, lost with us, has been preserved in the East. Christianity, by preaching contempt of matter, has caused to be aban- doned, little by little, the care of the perishable body, as smacking too much of paganism. I forget who was the Spanish monk that, some time after the conquest of Granada, preached against the use of the Moorish baths, and charged those who would not give them up with sensualism and heresy.

In the East, where personal cleanliness is a religious obligation, the baths have preserved all the refinement

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of Greece and Rome. They are large buildings of fine architecture, with cupolas, domes, pillars of marble, alabaster, and coloured breccia, and are filled with an army of bathers and tellacks, recalling the scrubbers, rubbers, and anointers of Rome and Byzantium.

The customer first enters a great hall opening on the street, enclosed by a portiere of tapestry. Near the door the bath-master is seated on the ground, between a box in which he puts the receipts, and a coffer in which are deposited the money, jewels, and other valu- ables deposited on entering, and for which he becomes answerable. Around the room, the temperature of which is about the same as that outside, run two gal- leries, one above the other, provided with camp-beds. In the centre of the constantly wet marble pavement a fountain throws up its jet of water, which splashes into a double basin. Around the basin are ranged pots of basil, mint, and other odoriferous plants, the perfume of which is particularly grateful to the Turks. Blue, white, and rose striped cloths are drying on cords, or hung from the ceiling like the flags and standards from the vaulting of Westminster and the Invalides. On the beds are smoking, drinking coffee or sherbet, or else sleeping covered up to the chin like babies, bathers

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who are waiting until they have ceased to perspire, before they dress.

I was taken up into the second gallery by a narrow wooden stair, and was shown to a bed. When I stripped off my clothes, two attendants wrapped round my head a napkin in the shape of a turban, and clothed me from the loins to the ankles in £ piece of stuff that wrinkled on my hips like the loin-cloth of Egyptian statues. At the foot of the stair I found a pair of wooden clogs into which I slipped my feet, and my at- tendants, supporting me under the arms, passed with me from the first room to the second, the temperature of which was higher. I was left in it for a few moments to accustom my lungs to the burning temperature of the third hall, which is as high as ninety-five to a hundred degrees.

These baths are different from our vapour baths. Under the marble flagging a fire is continually burning, and the water when poured out turns at once into a white steam, instead of coming from a boiler in strident jets. They are dry baths, as it were, and the very high temperature alone provokes perspiration.

Under a cupola fitted with thick panes of greenish glass through which filters faint daylight, seven or eight

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slabs very much like tombs are arranged to receive the bodies of the bathers, who, stretched out like corpses upon a dissecting table, undergo the first process of a Turkish bath. The muscles are lightly pinched, or rubbed like soft paste, until a pearly sweat comes out like that formed around the ice-pails used for cham- pagne. The result is very quickly attained. When through the open pores the perspiration ran down my softened limbs, I was made to sit up, slipped on the clogs in order to avoid touching the burning pavement with my bare feet, and was led to one of the niches around the rotunda. In each of these niches there was a basin of white marble fitted with taps of hot and cold water. The attendant made me sit down by the basin, drew on a camel's-hair glove, and rubbed down first my arms, then my legs, then my torso, so as to bring the blood to the skin, without, however, scratching or hurting me in the least in spite of the apparent rough handling. Then with a brass pail he drew from the basin hot water, and poured it over my body. When I had dried somewhat, he caught hold of me again and polished me with the palm of his bare hand, poured water over me again, rubbed me softly with long pieces of tow filled with foamy soap, parted

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