In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

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.