LETTER XXXI.
Gallipoli—Aristocracy of Beards—Turkish Shopkeepers—The Hospitable Jew and his lovely Daughter—Unexpected Rencontre—Constantinople—The Bosphorus, the Seraglio, and the Golden Horn.
What an image of life it is! The good ship dashes bravely on her course—the spray flies from her prow—her sheets are steady and full—to look up to her spreading canvass, and feel her springing away beneath, you would not give her “for the best horse the sun has in his stable.” The next moment, hey! the foresail is aback! the wind baffles and dies, the ripples sink from the sea, the ship loses her “way,” and the pennant drops to the mast in a breathless calm! “Clear away the anchor!” and here we are till this “crab in the ascendant” that makes “all our affairs go backwards,” yields to our better stars.
We went ashore to take a stroll through the streets of Gallipoli (the ancient Gallipoli of Thrace) as a sop to our patience. A deeply-laden Spanish merchant lay off the pier, with a crew of red-capped and olive-complexioned fellows taking in grain from a Turkish caique, and a crowd of modern Thracians, in the noble costumes and flowing beards of the country, closed around us as we stepped from the boat.
A street of cafés led from the end of the pier, and as usual, they were all crowded with Turks, leaning forward over their slippers, and crossing their long chibouques as they conversed together. It is odd that even the habit of a life can make their painful and unnatural posture an agreeable one. Yet they will sit with their legs crooked under them, in a way that strains the unaccustomed knee till it cracks again, motionless by the hour together.
I had no idea till I came to Turkey how rare a beauty is a handsome beard. Here no man shaves, and there is as great a difference in beards as in stature. The men of rank that we have seen, might have been picked out anywhere by their superior beauty in this respect. It grows vilely, it seems to me, on scoundrels. The beggars ashore, the low Jews who board us with provisions, the greater part of the soldiers and petty shop-keepers of the towns, have all some mark in their beards, that nature never intended them for gentlemen. Your smooth chin is a great leveller, trust me!
These Turkish towns have a queer look altogether. Gallipoli is so seldom touched by a Christian foot, that it preserves all its peculiarities entire, and is likely to do so for the next century. We walked on, ascending a narrow street completely shut in by the roofs of the low houses meeting above. There are no carriages or carts, and the Turks glide over the stones in their loose slippers with an indolent shuffle that seems rather to add to the silence. You hear no voice, for they seldom speak, and never above the key of a bassoon; and what with the odd costumes, long beards, grave faces, and twilight darkness all about you, it is like a scene on the stage when the lights are lowered in some incantation scene.
Each street is devoted to some one trade. We first got among the grocers. Every shop was a fellow to the other, containing an old Turk, squatted among soap, jars of oil, raisins, olives, pickled fish, and sweetmeats, and everything within his reach. He would sell you his whole stock in trade without taking his pipe from his mouth, or disturbing his yellow slipper.
The next turn brought us into the Jews’ quarter. They were all tailors, and their shops were as dark as Erebus. The light crept through the chinks in the roof, falling invariably on the same aquiline nose and ragged beard, with now and then a pair of copper spectacles, while in the back of the dim tenement sat an old woman with a group of handsome little Hebrews, (they are always handsome when very young, with their clear skins and dark eyes) the whole family stitching away most diligently. It was laughable to see how every shop in the street presented the same picture.
We then got among the slipper-makers, and vile work they turned out. We were hesitating between two turnings when an old Jew, with a high lamb’s-wool cap and long black caftan, rather shabby for wear, addressed me in a sort of lingua Franca, half Italian, half French, with a sprinkling of Spanish, and inquiring whether I belonged to the frigate in the harbour, offered to supply us with provisions, &c. &c. I declined his services, and he asked us directly to his house to take coffee—as plump a non sequitur as I have met in my travels.
We followed the old man to a very secluded part of the town, stopping a moment by the way to look at the remains of an old fort built by the Genoese in the stout times of Andrea Doria. (Where be their galleys now?) Hajji (so he was called, he said from having been to Jerusalem) stopped at last at the door of a shabby house, and throwing it open with a hospitable smile, bade us welcome. We mounted a creaking stair, and found things within better than the promise of the exterior. One half the floor of the room was raised perhaps a foot, and matted neatly, and a nicely carpeted and cushioned divan ran around the three sides, closed at the two extremities by a lattice-work like the arm of a sofa. The windows were set in fantastical arabesque frames, the upper panes coarsely coloured, but with a rich effect, and the view hence stretched over the Hellespont toward the south, with a delicious background of the valleys about Lampsacus. No palace window looks on a fairer scene. The broad Strait was as smooth as the amber of the old Hebrew’s pipe, and the vines that furnished Themistocles with wine during his exile in Persia, looked of as golden a green in the light of the sunset, as if the honour of the tribute still warmed their classic juices.
The rich Turkish coffee was brought in by an old woman, who left her slippers below as she stepped upon the mat, and our host followed with chibouques and a renewed welcome. A bright pair of eyes had been peeping for some time from one of the chambers, and with Hajji’s permission I called out a graceful creature of fourteen, with a shape like a Grecian Cupidon and a timid sweetness of expression that might have descended to her from the gentle Ruth of Scripture. There are lovely beings all over the world. It were a desert else. But I did not think to find such a diamond in a Hebrew’s bosom. I have forgotten to mention her hair, which was very remarkable. I thought at first it was dyed with henna. It covered her back and shoulders in the greatest profusion, braided near the head, and floating below in glossy and silken curls of a richness you would deny nature had you seen it in a painting. The colour was of the deep burnt brown of a berry, almost black in the shade, but catching the light at every motion like threads of gold. In my life I have seen nothing so beautiful. It was the “hair lustrous and smiling” of quaint old Burton.[[13]] There was something in it that you could scarce avoid associating with the character of the wearer—as if it stole its softness from some inborn gentleness in her heart. I shall never thread my fingers through such locks again!
We shook our kind host by the hand, and stepped gingerly down in the fading twilight to our boat. As we were crossing an open space between the bazaars, two gentlemen in a costume half European, half Oriental, with spurs and pistols, and a quantity of dust on their moustaches, passed, and immediately turned and called me by name. The last place in which I should have looked for acquaintances, would be Gallipoli. They were two French exquisites whom I had known at Rome, travelling to Constantinople with no more serious object, I dare be sworn, than to return with long beards from the East. They had just arrived on horseback, and were looking for a khan. I commended them to my old friend the Jew, who offered at once to lodge them at his house, and we parted in this by-corner of Thrace, as if we had but met for the second time in a morning stroll to St. Peter’s.
We lay till noon in the glassy harbour of Gallipoli, and then the breeze came slowly up the Hellespont, its advancing edge marked by a crowd of small sail keeping even pace with its wings. We soon opened into the extending sea of Marmora, and the cloudy island of the same name is at this moment on our lee. The sun is setting gorgeously over the hills of Thrace, and thankful for sea-room once more, and a good breeze, we make ourselves certain of seeing Constantinople to-morrow.
We were ten miles distant when I came on deck this morning. A long line of land with a slightly waving outline began to emerge from the mist of sunrise, and with a glass I could distinguish the clustering masses and shining eminences of a distant and far extending city. We were approaching it with a cloud of company. A Turkish ship-of-war, with the crescent and star fluttering on her blood-red flag, a French cutter bearing the handsome tricolor at her peak, and an uncounted swarm of merchantmen, taking advantage of the newly-changed wind, were spreading every thread of canvass, and stretching on as eagerly as we toward the metropolis of the East. There was something in the companionship which elated me. It seemed as if all the world shared in my anticipations—as if all the world were going to Constantinople.
I approached the mistress of the East with different feelings from that which had inspired me in entering the older cities of Europe. The interest of the latter sprang from the past. Rome, Florence, Athens, were delightful from the store of history and poetry I brought with me and had accumulated in my youth—from what they once were, and for that of which they preserved the ruins. Constantinople, on the contrary, is still the gem of the Orient—still the home of the superb Turk, and the resort of many nations of the East—still all that fires curiosity and excites the imagination in the descriptions of the traveller. I was coming to a living city, full of strange people and strange costumes, language, and manners. It was, to the places I had seen, like the warm and breathing woman perfect in life, to the interesting but lifeless and mutilated statue.
As the distance lessened, the tall, slender, glittering minarets of a hundred mosques were first distinguishable. Towers, domes, and dark spots of cypresses next emerged to the eye, and a sea of buildings, followed undulating in many swells and widening along the line of the sea as if we were approaching a continent covered to its farthest limits with one unbroken city.
We kept on with unslackened sail to the shore which seemed closed before us. A few minutes opened to us a curving bay, winding in and lost to the eye behind a swelling eminence, and as if mosques, towers, and palaces, had spread away and opened to receive us into their bosom, we shot into the heart of a busy city, and dropped anchor at the feet of a cluster of hills, studded from base to summit with buildings of indescribable splendour.
An American gentleman had joined us in the Dardanelles, and stood with us, looking at the transcendent panorama. “What is this lovely point, gemmed with gardens and fantastic palaces, and with every variety of tree and building on its gentle slope descending so gracefully to the sea?” The Seraglio! “What is this opening of bright water, crowded with shipping, and sprinkled with these fairy boats so gaily decked and so slender, shooting from side to side like the crossing flight of a thousand arrows?” The Golden Horn, that winds up through the city and terminates in the valley of Sweet Waters! “And what is this other stream, opening into the hills to the east, and lined with glittering palaces as far as the eye can reach?” The Bosphorus. “And what is this, and that, and the other exquisite and surpassing beauty—features of a scene to which the earth surely has no shadow of a parallel?” Patience! patience! We have a month before us, and we will see.
| [13] | “Hair lustrous and smiling. The trope is none of mine. Æneas Sylvius hath crines ridentes.”—Anatomy of Melancholy. |