Two hundred and fifty miles we traveled, south and east, and at last there came a day when we passed the Tchataldya barrier, and from a hillock caught a glimpse of a skyline of towers and floating domes and soaring minarets and beyond them to the right a hint of blue that was the meeting-place of the Bosphorus and the Marmora.
"It looks like a fairy city!" I exclaimed.
"It will stink in your nostrils," replied Nikka curtly. "It is Stamboul—the last stand of the Turk."
CHAPTER XIV
THE HOUSE IN SOKAKI MASYERI
Until we crossed its very threshold the spell of the city held us. Not even the noisome belt of Russian refugee camps and tawdry villas and the unkempt tombs of the Hills of the Dead could shatter the illusion of that splendid skyline. The nearer we approached, the more impressive it became. The long gray line of the old Byzantine walls, the uneven lift of the roofs staggering up and down its seven hills, the swelling domes of mosque and basilica, the slender beauty of countless minarets, the faultless contour of cypress groves and the far blue gleam of the Golden Horn and the Marmora, with the dim background of the Asiatic hills, all combined to mold a picture of piercing loveliness.
But when we passed through the echoing arch of the Adrianople Gate the spell was broken. Crazy houses toppled over the filth of the streets; a dense mass of unwashed humans eddied to and fro; squalor beggaring description leered from the steep lanes and alleys that branched off from the main streets. A hundred races swarmed about us, vying with one another in wretchedness and misery. Dogs and flies fought in the gutters with children and old people. Beggars whined for baksheesh. Food venders yelled their cries and hawked their unsanitary wares. Every kind of clothing appeared, from greasy European dress to the quaint peasant costumes of south-eastern Europe and Anatolia and all the countries eastwards to the Hindoo Koosh.
It was like one's fancies of the Arabian Nights, and yet unlike them. For here was no lavishness of Oriental display, no exotic magnificence, only suffering and want and hunger and disease and smells and a dreadful ugliness that was spiritual as well as physical. It was as if a gigantic, cancerous sore, festering and gangrened through the centuries, had eaten away the vitality of what had once been the richest city in the world. And back and forth in that swarm of humanity's dregs wandered men of the civilization which had prospered outside the pale of Islam, French and British officers, bluejackets, poilus, tommies and an occasional tourist, clinging to a smirking guide.
Nikka, riding beside me, viewed the spectacle with cynical detachment.
"Seven hundred years ago," he said, "this was incomparably the stateliest, most powerful city in Christendom. It was the center of an Empire that was still able to stand alone, although it had borne the burden of resisting the Moslem attacks on the Western world for more than five hundred years. It enshrined all that was best and most worthy of the ancient Greek and Roman culture. It had a million inhabitants. It had public services, schools, posts, police, drains, water supply. Life was safe, commercial independence and prosperity assured—which was more than could be said for any other community, East or West."