"Did they do anything to the driver who did it?"
"Yes; they gathered him up in a cigar box and gave him a funeral. No, the man didn't call for the camera."
I am sorry I have kept the reader waiting for the Selamlik, but the sultan is to blame. One may not hurry a sultan, and one must fill in the time, somehow.
Some carriages go by at last, and enter the mosque enclosure, but they do not contain the sultan, only some of his favorite wives, with those long black eunuchs running behind. Then there is a carriage with a little boy in it—the sultan's favorite son, it is said—the most beautiful child I ever saw.
A blare of trumpets—all the bayonets straight up—a gleaming forest of them. Oh, what a bad time to fall out of a balloon!
A shout from the troops—a huzzah, timed and perfunctory, but general. Then men in uniform, walking ahead; a carriage with a splendid driver; a pale, bearded, hook-nosed old man with a tired, rather vacant face. Here and there he touches his forehead and his lips with his fingers, waving the imperial salute. For a moment every eye of that vast concourse is upon him—he is the one important bauble of that splendid setting. Then he has passed between the gates and is gone.
Thus it was that Sultan Abdul Hamid attended mosque. It seemed a good deal of fuss to make over an old man going to prayer.
We drove from the Selamlik to the Dancing Dervishes. I have always heard of them and now I have seen them. I am not sorry to have it over.
Their headquarters are in a weather-beaten-frame-barn of a place, and we stood outside for a long time before the doors were open. Inside it was hot and close and crowded, and everybody twisted this way and that and stood up on things to get a look. I held two women together on one chair—they were standing up—and I expected to give out any minute and turn loose a disaster that would break up the show. There wasn't anything to see, either; not a thing, for hours.