In The Levant

Suddenly, I do not know how, or from what quarter, the feeling—for I could not call it information—was diffused that the successor of the Prophet would pray at the mosque in Ortakeui, and that he would go by caïque; and we all scampered up the road, a mile or two, racing carriages, troops and foot men, in eager outset, in order to arrive before the pious man. The mosque stands upon the Bosphorus, where its broad marble steps and pillared front and dome occupy as conspicuous a position as the Dogana at Venice. We secured a standing-place on the dock close to the landing, but outside the iron railing, and waited. A cordon of troops in blue regimentals with red facings was drawn around the streets in the rear of the mosque, and two companies of soldiers in white had stacked their guns on the marble landing, and were lounging about in front of the building.

The scene on the Bosphorus was as gay as a flower-garden. The water was covered with graceful caiques and painted barges and every sort of craft, mean and splendid, that could be propelled by oars or sails. A dozen men-of-war were decked with flags from keel to maintop; on every yard, and from bowsprit to stern, stood a line of sailors sharply defined against the blue sky. At one o’clock a cannon announced that the superior devotee had entered his caique, and then from every vessel of war in the harbor salute answered salute in thunder that awoke the echoes of two continents; until on all the broad water lay a thick battle-smoke, through which we could distinguish only the tops of the masts, and the dim hulks spouting fire.

In the midst of this earthquake of piety, there was a cry, “He comes, he comes!” The soldiers grasped their arms and drew a line each side of the landing, and the officials of the mosque arranged themselves on the steps. Upon the water, advancing with the speed of race-horses, we saw two splendid gilded caïques, the one containing the Sultan, the other his attendants. At the moment, a light carriage with two bay horses, unattended, dashed up to the side door, and there descended from it and entered the mosque the imperial heir, the son of the late Sultan and the nephew of the present, a slender, pale youth of apparently twenty-five or thirty years. We turn (not knowing how soon he is to become Sultan Murad V.) our eyes to him only for a moment, for the Sultan’s caique comes with imperious haste, with the rush as it were of victory,—an hundred feet long, narrow, rising at the stern like the Venetian Bucentaur, carved and gilded like the golden chariot in which Alexander entered Babylon,—propelled by fifty-two long sweeps, rising and falling in unison with the bending backs of twenty-six black rowers, clad in white and with naked feet. The Sultan is throned in the high stern, hung with silk, on silken cushions, under a splendid canopy on the top of which glisten his arms and a blazing sun. The Sultan, who is clad in the uniform of a general, steps quickly out, walks up the steps over a carpet spread for his royal feet,—the soldiers saluting, everybody with arms crossed bending the body,—and disappears in the mosque. The second caique lands immediately, and the imperial ministers step from it and follow their master.

At the side entrance an immense closed baggage-wagon, drawn by four horses and said to contain the sacred wardrobe, was then unlocked and unloaded, and out of it came trunks, boxes, carpetbags, as if the imperial visitor had come to stay a week. After a half-hour of prayer he came out, his uniform concealed under his overcoat, got quickly into a plain carriage, drawn by four magnificent gray horses, and drove rapidly away, attended by a dozen outriders. His heir followed in the carriage in which he came. We had a good view of the chief of Islam. He was a tall, stout man, with a full gray beard, and on the whole a good face and figure. All this parade is weekly enacted over one man going to pray. It is, after all, more simple than the pageantry that often attends the public devotion of the vicegerent of Christ in St. Peter’s.

Upon our return we stopped at the tekkeb, in Pera, to see the performance of the Turning Darwishes. I do not know that I have anything to add to the many animated descriptions which have been written of it. It is not far from the Little Field of the Dead, and all about the building are tombs of the faithful, in which were crowds of people enjoying that peculiar Oriental pleasure, graveyard festivity. The mosque is pleasant, and has a polished dancing-floor, surrounded by a gallery supported on columns. I thought it would be a good place for a “hop.” Everybody has seen a picture of the darwishes, with closed eyes, outstretched arms, and long gowns inflated at the bottom like an old-fashioned churn, turning smoothly round upon their toes, a dozen or twenty of them revolving without collision. The motion is certainly poetic and pleasing, and the plaintive fluting of the Arab nay adds I know not what of pathos to the exercise. I think this dance might advantageously be substituted in Western salons for the German, for it is graceful and perfectly moral.

Constantinople is a city of the dead as much as of the living, and one encounters everywhere tombs and cemeteries sentinelled by the mournful dark-green cypress. On our way to take boat for the Sweet Waters of Europe we descended through the neglected Little Field of the Dead. It is on a steep acclivity, and the stones stand and lean thickly there, each surmounted by a turban in fashion at the period of the occupant’s death, and with inscription neatly carved. That “every man has his date” strikes Abd-el-Atti as a remarkable fact. The ground is netted by haphazard paths, and the careless living tread the graves with thoughtless feet, as if the rights of the dead to their scanty bit of soil were no longer respected. We said to the boatman that this did not seem well. There was a weary touch of philosophy in his reply: “Ah, master, the world grows old!”

It is the fashion for the world to go on Friday to the Sweet Waters of Europe, the inlet of the Golden Horn, flowing down between two ranges of hills. This vale, which is almost as celebrated in poetry as that of the Heavenly Water on the Asiatic shore, is resorted to by thousands, in hundreds of carriages from Fera, in thousands of caïques and barges. On the water, the excursion is a festival of the people, of strangers, of adventurers of both sexes; the more fashionable though not moral part of society, who have equipages to display, go by land. We chose the water, and selected a large four-oared caïque, in the bottom of which we seated ourselves, after a dozen narrow escapes from upsetting the tottlish craft, and rowed away, with the grave Abd-el-Atti balanced behind and under bonds to preserve his exact equilibrium.

All the city seems to be upon the water; the stream is alive with the slender, swift caïques; family parties, rollicking midshipmen from some foreign vessel, solitary beauties reclining in selfish loveliness, grave fat Turks, in stupid enjoyment. No voyage could be gayer than this through the shipping, with the multitudinous houses of the city rising on either hand. As we advance, the shore is lined with people, mostly ladies in gay holiday apparel, squatting along the stream; as on a spring day in Paris, those who cannot afford carriages line the avenues to the Bois de Boulogne to watch the passing pageant. The stream grows more narrow, at length winds in graceful turns, and finally is only a few yards wide, and the banks are retained by masonry. The vale narrows also, and the hills draw near. The water-way is choked with gayly painted caiques, full of laughing beauties and reckless pleasure-seekers, and the reader of Egyptian history might think himself in a saturnalia of the revel-makers in the ancient fête of Bubastis on the Nile. The women are clad in soft silks,—blue, red, pink, yellow, and gray,—some of them with their faces tied up as if they were victims of toothache, others wearing the gauze veils, which enhance without concealing charms; and the color and beauty that nature has denied to many are imitated by paint and enamel.

We land and walk on. Singers and players on curious instruments sit along the bank and in groups under the trees, and fill the festive air with the plaintive and untrained Oriental music. The variety of costumes is infinite; here we meet all that is gay and fantastic in Europe and Asia. The navigation ends at the white marble palace and mosque which we now see shining amid the trees, fresh with May foliage. Booths and tents, green and white, are erected everywhere, and there are many groups of gypsies and fortune-tellers. The olive-complexioned, black-eyed, long-haired women, who trade in the secrets of the Orient and the vices of the Occident, do a thriving business with those curious of the future, or fascinated by the mysterious beauty of the soothsayers. Besides the bands of music, there are solitary bagpipers whose instrument is a skin, with a pipe for a mouthpiece and another at the opposite end having graduated holes for fingering; and I noticed with pleasure that the fingering and the music continued long after the musician had ceased to blow into the inflated skin. Nothing was wanting to the most brilliant scene; ladies in bright groups on gay rugs and mats, children weaving head-dresses from leaves and rushes, crowds of carriages, fine horses and gallant horsemen, sellers of refreshments balancing great trays on their heads, and bearing tripod stools, and all degrees of the most cosmopolitan capital enjoying the charming spring holiday.

In the palace grounds dozens of peacocks were sunning themselves, and the Judas-trees were in full pink bloom. Above the palace the river flows in walled banks, and before it reaches it tumbles over an artificial fall of rocks, and sweeps round the garden in a graceful curve. Beyond the palace, also on the bank of the stream, is a grove of superb trees and a greensward; here a military band plays, and this is the fashionable meeting-place of carriages, where hundreds were circling round and round in the imitated etiquette of Hyde Park.

We came down at sunset, racing swiftly among the returning caïques, passing and passed by laughing boatsful, whose gay hangings trailed in the stream, as in a pageant on the Grand Canal of Venice, and watching with the interest of the philosopher only, the light boat of beauty and frailty pursued by the youthful caique of inexperience and desire. The hour contributed to make the scene one of magical beauty. To our right lay the dark cypresses of the vast cemetery of Eyoub (or Ayub) and the shining mosque where, at their inauguration, the Osmanli Sultans are still girt with the sword of their founder. At this spot, in the first siege of Constantinople by the Arabs, fell, amid thirty thousand Moslems, slain outside the Golden Gate, the Aboo Ayub, or Job, one of the last companions of the Prophet. He was one of the immortal auxiliaries; he had fought at Beder and Obud side by side with Abubeker, and he had the honor to be one of the first assailants of the Christian capital, which Mohammed had predicted that his followers should one day possess. The site of his grave, forgotten for seven centuries, was revealed to the conqueror of the city by a fortunate vision, and the spot was commemorated by a mosque, and a gathering congregation of the dead.

Clouds had collected in the west, and the heavy smoke of innumerable steamers lay dark upon the Bosphorus. But as we came down, the sun broke out and gave us one of those effects of which nature is sparing. On the heights of Stamboul, a dozen minarets, only half distinct, were touched by the gold rays; the windows of both cities, piled above each other, blazed in it; the smooth river and the swift caiques were gilded by it; and behind us, domes and spires, and the tapering shafts of the Muezzin, the bases hid by the mist, rose into the heaven of the golden sunset and appeared like mansions, and most unsubstantial ones, in the sky. And ever the light caiques flew over the rosy water in a chase of pleasure, in a motion that satisfied the utmost longing for repose, while the enchantment of heaven seemed to have dropped upon the earth.

“The world has lost its gloss for us,Since we went boating on the Bosphorus.”

Constantinople enjoys or suffers the changeable weather appropriate to its cosmopolitan inhabitants and situation, and we waited for a day suitable to cross to Scutari and obtain the view from Boolgoorloo. We finally accepted one of alternate clouds and sunshine. The connection between the European city and its great suburb is maintained by frequent ferry-steamers, and I believe that no other mile-passage in the world can offer the traveller a scene more animated or views so varied and magnificent. Near the landing at Scutari stands a beacon-tower ninety’ feet high, erected upon a rock; it has the name of the Maiden’s Tower, but I do not know why, unless by courtesy to one of the mistresses of Sultan Mohammed, who is said to have been shut up in it. Scutari,—pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, a corruption of the Turkish name Uskudar,—the site of the old Greek and Persian Chrysopolis, is a town sprawling over seven hills, has plenty of mosques, baths, and cemeteries,—the three Oriental luxuries,—but little to detain the traveller, already familiar with Eastern towns of the sort. The spot has been in all ages an arriving and starting point for Asiatic couriers, caravans, and armies; here the earliest Greek sea-robbers hauled up their venturous barks; here Xenophon rested after his campaign against Cyrus; here the Roman and then the Byzantine emperors had their hunting-palaces; here for a long time the Persians menaced and wrung tribute from the city they could not capture.

We took a carriage and ascended through the city to the mountain of Boolgoorloo. On the slopes above the town are orchards and vineyards and pretty villas. The last ten minutes of the climb was accomplished on foot, and when we stood upon the summit the world was at our feet. I do not know any other view that embraces so much and such variety. The swelling top was carpeted with grass, sprinkled with spring flowers, and here and there a spreading pine offered a place of shade and repose. Behind us continued range on range the hills of the peninsula; to the south the eye explored Asia Minor, the ancient Bithynia and Mysia, until it rested on the monstrous snowy summits of Olympus, which rears itself beyond Broussa, city famed for its gauzy silk and the first capital of the Osman dynasty. There stretches the blue Sea of Marmora, bearing lightly on the surface the nine enchanting Princes’ Islands, whose equable climate and fertile soil have obtained for them the epithet of the Isles of the Blest. Opposite, Stamboul rises out of the water on every side; in the distance a city of domes and pinnacles and glass, the dark-green spires of cypress tempering its brilliant lustre; there the Golden Horn and its thronged bridges and its countless masts and steamers’ funnels; Galata and Pera, also lifted up into nobility, and all their shabby details lost, and the Bosphorus, its hills, marble palaces, mosques, and gardens, on either side. I do not know any scene that approaches this in beauty except the Bay of Naples, and the charm of that is so different from this that no comparison is forced upon the mind. The Bay of New York has many of the elements of this charming prospect, on the map. But Constantinople and its environs can be seen from many points in one view, while one would need to ascend a balloon to comprehend in like manner the capital of the Western world. It is the situation of Constantinople, lifted up into a conspicuousness that permits no one of its single splendors to be lost in the general view, that makes it in appearance the unrivalled empress of cities.

In the foreground lay Scutari, and in a broad sweep the heavy mass of cypress forest that covers the great cemetery of the Turks, which they are said to prefer to Eyoub, under the prophetic impression that they will one day be driven out of Europe. The precaution seems idle. If in the loss of Constantinople the Osmanli sultans still maintain the supremacy of Islam, the Moslem capital could not he on these shores, and the caliphate in its migrations might again he established on the Nile, on the Euphrates, or in the plains of Guta on the Abana. The iron-clads that lie in the Bosphorus, the long guns of a dozen fortresses that command every foot of the city and shore, forbid that these contiguous coasts should fly hostile flags.

We drove down to and through this famous cemetery in one direction and another. In its beauty I was disappointed. It is a dense and gloomy cypress forest; as a place of sepulture, without the architectural pretensions of Père-la-Chaise, and only less attractive than that. Its dark recesses are crowded with gravestones, slender at the bottom and swelling at the top, painted in lively colors,—green, red, and gray, a necessary relief to the sombre woods,—having inscriptions in gilt and red letters, and leaning at all angles, as if they had fallen out in a quarrel over night. The graves of the men are distinguished by stones crowned with turbans, or with tarbooshes painted red,—an imitation, in short, of whatever head-dress the owner wore when alive, so that perhaps his acquaintances can recognize his tomb without reading his name. Some of the more ancient have the form of a mould of Charlotte Busse. I saw more than one set jauntily on one side, which gave the monument a rakish air, singularly débonnaire for a tombstone.

In contrast to this vast assembly of the faithful is the pretty English cemetery, dedicated to the fallen in the Crimean war,—a well-kept flower-garden, which lies close to the Bosphorus on a point opposite the old Seraglio. We sat down on the sea-wall in this quiet spot, where the sun falls lovingly and the undisturbed birds sing, and looked long at the shifting, busy panorama of a world that does not disturb this repose; and then walked about the garden, noting the headstones of soldiers,—this one killed at Alma, that at Inkermann, another at Balaklava, and the tall, graceless granite monument to eight thousand nameless dead; nameless here, but not in many a home and many a heart, any more than the undistinguished thousands who sleep at Gettysburg or on a hundred other patriot fields.

Near by is the great hospital which Florence Nightingale controlled, and in her memory we asked permission to enter its wards and visit its garden. After some delay this was granted, but the Turkish official said that the hospital was for men, that there was no woman there, and as for Miss Nightingale, he had never heard of her. But we persevered and finally found an officer who led us to the room she occupied,—a large apartment now filled with the beds of the sick, and, like every other part of the establishment, neat and orderly. But our curiosity to see where the philanthropist had labored was an enigma to the Turkish officials to the last. They insisted at first that we must be relations of Miss Nightingale,—a supposition which I saw that Abd-el-Atti, who always seeks the advantage of distinction, was inclined to favor. But we said no. Well, perhaps it was natural that Englishmen should indulge in the sentiment that moved us. But we were not Englishmen, we were Americans,—they gave it up entirely. The superintendent of the hospital, a courtly and elderly bey, who had fought in the Crimean war, and whom our dragoman, dipping his hand to the ground, saluted with the most profound Egyptian obeisance, insisted upon serving us coffee in the garden by the fountain of gold-fish, and we spent an hour of quiet there.

On Sunday at about the hour that the good people in America were beginning to think what they should wear to church, we walked down to the service in the English Memorial Church, on the brow of the hill in Pera, a pointed Gothic building of a rich and pleasing interior. Only once or twice in many months had we been in a Christian church, and it was, at least, interesting to contrast its simple forms with the elaborate Greek ritual and the endless repetitions of the Moslem prayers. A choir of boys intoned or chanted a portion of the service, with marked ability, and wholly relieved the audience of the necessity of making responses. The clergymen executed the reading so successfully that we could only now and then catch a word. The service, so far as we were concerned, might as well have been in Turkish; and yet it was not altogether lost on us. We could distinguish occasionally the Lord’s Prayer, and the name of Queen Victoria, and we caught some of the Commandments as they whisked past us. We knew also when we were in the Litany, from the regular cadence of the boys’ responses. But as the entertainment seemed to be for the benefit of the clergymen and boys, I did not feel like intruding beyond the office of a spectator, and I soon found myself reflecting whether a machine could not be invented that should produce the same effect of sound, which was all that the congregation enjoyed.

Rome has been until recently less tolerant of the Protestant faith than Constantinople; and it was an inspiration of reciprocity to build here a church in memory of the Christian soldiers who fell in the crusade to establish the Moslem rule in European Turkey.

Of the various views about Constantinople we always pronounced that best which we saw last, and at the time we said that those from Seraglio Point, from Boolgoorloo, and from Roberts College were crowned by that from Giant’s Grave Mountain, a noble height on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus near the Black Sea.

One charming morning, we ascended the strait in a steamboat that calls at the landings on the eastern shore. The Bosphorus, if you will have it in a phrase, is a river of lapis lazuli lined with marble palaces. As we saw it that morning, its sloping gardens, terraces, trees, and vines in the tender bloom of spring, all the extravagance of the Oriental poets in praise of it was justified, and it was easy to believe the nature-romance with which the earliest adventurers had clothed it. There, at Beshiktash, Jason landed to rest his weary sailors on the voyage to Colchis; and above there at Koroo Ghesmeh stood a laurel-tree which Medea planted on the return of the Argonauts. Tradition has placed near it, on the point, the site of a less attractive object, the pillar upon which Simeon Stylites spent forty years of a life which was just forty years too long; but I do not know by what authority, for I believe that the perch of the Syrian hermit was near Antioch, where his noble position edified thousands of Christians, who enjoyed their piety in contemplating his, and took their pleasures in the groves of Daphne.

Our steamer was, at this moment, a craft more dangerous to mankind than an iron-clad; it was a sort of floating harem; we sat upon the awning-covered upper deck; the greater part of the lower deck was jealously curtained off and filled with Turkish ladies. Among them we recognized a little flock of a couple of dozen, the harem of Mustapha Pasha, the uncle of the Khedive of Egypt. They left the boat at his palace in Chenguel Keuy, and we saw them, in silk gowns of white, red, blue, and yellow, streaming across the flower-garden into the marble portal,—a pretty picture. The pasha was transferring his household to the country for the summer, and we imagined that the imprisoned troop entered these blooming May gardens with the elation of freedom, which might, however, be more perfect if eunuchs did not watch every gate and foot of the garden wall. I suppose, however, that few of them would be willing to exchange their lives of idle luxury for the misery and chance of their former condition, and it is said that the maids of the so-called Christian Georgia hear with envy of the good fortune of their sisters, who have brought good prices in the Turkish capital.

When the harem disappeared we found some consolation in a tall Croat, who strutted up and down the deck in front of us, that we might sicken with envy of his splendid costume. He wore tight trousers of blue cloth, baggy in the rear but fitting the legs like a glove, and terminating over the shoes in a quilled inverted funnel; a brilliant scarf of Syrian silk in loose folds about his loins; a vest stiff with gold-em broidery; a scarlet jacket decked with gold-lace, and on his head a red fez. This is the costly dress of a Croatian gardener, who displays all his wealth to make a holiday spectacle of himself.

We sailed close to the village of Kandili and the promontory under which and upon which it lies, a site which exhausts the capacity of the loveliness of nature and the skill of art. From the villas on its height one commands, by a shifted glance, the Euxine and the Marmora, and whatever is most lovely in the prospect of two continents; the purity of the air is said to equal the charm of the view. Above this promontory opens the valley down which flows the river Geuksoo (sky-water), and at the north of it stands a white marble kiosk of the Sultan, the most beautiful architectural creation on the strait. Near it, shaded by great trees, is a handsome fountain; beyond the green turf in the tree-decked vale which pierces the hill were groups of holiday-makers in gay attire. I do not know if this Valley of the Heavenly Water is the loveliest in the East, but it is said that its charms of meadow, shade, sweet water, and scented flowers are a substantial foretaste of the paradise of the true believer. But it is in vain to catalogue the charming villages, the fresh beauties of nature and art to which each revolution of the paddle-wheel carried us. We thought we should be content with a summer residence of the Khedive, on the European side below the lovely bay of Terapea, with its vast hillside of gardens and orchards and the long line of palaces on the water. Fanned by the invigorating breezes from the Black Sea, its summer climate must be perfect.