"And the Turks made it what it is!" I exclaimed, as Wasso Mikali, leading our little procession, turned off the main street we had been following into one of the stinking, littered lanes that twisted down into shadowy regions of corruption.
"Not the Turks! The Turks only finished what others had begun. No, the beginning of what you see around you was made by Hugh's ancestor and his brother knights of the Fourth Crusade, who, instead of fulfilling their vows to journey to the Holy Land, voyaged to Constantinople and overpowered the feeble Emperor of that day, and then sacked and wrecked the city. It was never the same afterward. It never recovered its strength. And when the Crusades finally impelled the concentration of the Moslem power, it became only a question of time before the city must fall. Had it not been for those walls we just passed, it would have fallen a century before it did. In fact, it fell then mainly because there were not enough men to hold the defenses."
"What you say is interesting," I said. "For after all, we are coming to-day on Hugh's behalf for pretty much the same object as lured his ancestor. We are hunting the treasure of the city."
"But we shall do no harm to any one by taking the treasure," returned Nikka. "What use would it be to these people around us? Would they share it? Never! It would be employed for the pleasures of their masters. The only way to redeem Constantinople is to repopulate."
We plunged deeper and deeper into the dark byways, sometimes traversing streets so narrow that pedestrians were compelled to squeeze themselves flat against the house-walls to permit us to pass. In the twilight it was difficult to see far ahead, and at every corner Wasso Mikali raised his voice in a shout of warning. But at last we rode forth into a wider thoroughfare and stopped opposite the gate of a huge, fortress-like building, whose windowless stone walls towered above the surrounding housetops.
"The Khan of the Georgians," explained Nikka. "Here we shall be swallowed up in an army of travelers. No one would think of looking for us in such a place."
Wasso Mikali made the necessary payment to the porter at the gate, and we rode between the ponderous, steel-bound doors into a courtyard such as you find in a barracks. Around it rose three tiers of galleries, arched in stone, and below them were a succession of stables fronted by sheds and penthouses. Piles of goods lay everywhere, in the courtyard and on the galleries. Horses, mules, oxen and camels neighed, brayed, bellowed and grunted. Men talked in knots on the mucky cobbles of the court, squatted in every gallery or leaned over the railings shouting to each other. Women sat on bales and nursed their infants. Children ran about with the usual ability of children to escape sudden death in dangerous places. It sounded like a boiler factory and an insane asylum holding a jubilee convention.
But Wasso Mikali and his young men pushed through the confusion with the same bored air I would have worn in bucking the subway rush, at Grand Central. They appropriated a corner of a stable, and put up the horses, uncinched the packs and climbed a flight of stone stairs to the second floor, where the old Gypsy rented two cubicles, each lighted by a grated window two feet square and containing nothing except some foul straw, from a custodian who looked like the conception of Noah entertained by the artists of the subscription editions of the Holy Bible.
Nikka had relapsed so thoroughly to Gypsyism that he professed not to be suspicious of the straw, but at my insistance he procured a worn broom from Father Noah and we swept out the room which had been set aside for Wasso Mikali and ourselves. The six retainers in Wasso's train were given the next cubicle, and they promptly piled into it the straw which we had banished from our room, so I doubt whether our labors produced any benefit, as they spent as much time with us as in their own quarters.
Such food as we did not have with us we bought from a general store conducted in an angle of the courtyard, and the cooking was done over a brazier, which, with the necessary charcoal, we rented from Father Noah. When night fell, and the cooking fires blazed out all over the courtyard and in the galleries it was a sight worth coming to Constantinople to see. There was an acrid reek of dung in the air, the sweaty smell of human bodies, the pungent aroma of the charcoal, and an endless babble of voices in a score of tongues and dialects.