Recrossing the little valley, we came to another Greek quarter, Totaola, where our stomachs gave us a hint that this would be a favorable moment in which to investigate the interior of one of those innumerable restaurants of Constantinople, all of which, built on the same plan, present the same extraordinary appearance. There is one huge room, which might on occasion be turned into a theatre, lighted, as a rule, only by the door through which you enter; around it runs a high wooden gallery furnished with a balustrade. On one side is an enormous stove at which a brigand in shirt-sleeves fries fish, bastes the roast, mixes sauces, and devotes himself generally to the business of shortening human life; at a counter on the other side another forbidding-looking individual serves out red and white wine in glasses with handles; in the middle and front of the apartment are low stools without backs and little tables scarcely higher than the stools, looking for all the world like cobblers’ benches. We entered with some slight feeling of hesitation, not knowing whether the groups of Greeks and Armenians of the lower orders already assembled might not evince some disagreeable signs of curiosity; on the contrary, however, no one deigned so much as to look at us. It is my belief that the population of Constantinople is the least inquisitive of any on the face of the globe. You must be the Sultan at least, or else promenade through the streets without any clothes on, like the madman of Pera, for people to show that they are so much as aware of your existence. Taking our seats in a corner, we waited some time, but, as nothing happened, we finally concluded that it must be the custom in Constantinopolitan restaurants for every one to look out for himself. Advancing then boldly to the stove, we each got a portion of the roast—Heaven only knows from what quadruped—and then, providing ourselves with a glass apiece of the resinous Tenedos wine, we returned to our corner, spread the repast out on a table barely reaching to our knees, and, with a sidelong glance at one another, fell to and consumed the sacrifice. After resignedly settling the account we walked out in perfect silence, afraid on our lives to open our lips for fear a bray or a bark should escape them, and resumed our walk in the direction of the Golden Horn, somewhat chastened in spirit.
Panorama of the Arsenal and Golden Horn.
Kassim Pasha.
A walk of ten minutes brought us once more into real Turkey, the great Mussulman suburb of Kassim Pasha, a city in itself, filled with mosques and dervishes’ monasteries, which, with its kitchen-gardens and shaded grounds, covers an entire hill and valley, and, extending all the way to the Golden Horn, includes all of the ancient bay of Mandsacchio, from the cemetery of Galata quite to the promontory which overlooks the Balata quarter on the other shore. From the heights of Kassim Pasha a most exquisite view is to be had. Beneath, on the water’s edge, stands the enormous arsenal of Tersâne; beyond it extends for more than a mile a labyrinth of dry-docks, workshops, open squares, storehouses, and barracks, skirting all that part of the Golden Horn which serves as a port of war. The admiralty building, airy and graceful, seeming to float upon the surface of the water, stands out clearly against the dark-green background of the Galata cemetery; in the harbor innumerable small steamboats and käiks, crowded with people, shoot in and out among the stationary iron-clads and old frigates of the Crimea; on the opposite bank lie Stambul, the aqueduct of Valens, bearing aloft its mighty arches into the blue heavens above, the great mosques of Muhammad and Suleiman, and innumerable houses and minarets. In order to take in all the details of this scene we seated ourselves in front of a Turkish café and sipped the fourth or fifth of the dozen or more cups of coffee which, whether you wish to or not, you are bound to imbibe in the course of every day of your stay in Constantinople. This café was a very unpretending place, but, like all such establishments—Turkish ones, that is—most original, probably differing but little from those very first ones started in the time of Suleiman the Great, or those others into which the fourth Murad used to burst so unexpectedly, cimeter in hand, when he made his nocturnal rounds for the purpose of wreaking summary vengeance upon venders of the forbidden beverage. What numbers of imperial edicts, theological disputes, and bloody quarrels has this “enemy of sleep and fruitfulness,” as it has been termed by ulemas of the strict school, “genius of dreams and quickener of the mind,” as the more liberal sects have it, been the cause of! And now, after love and tobacco, it is the most highly prized of all luxuries in the estimation of every poor Osman. To-day coffee is drunk on the summits of the Galata and Serasker towers; you find it on the steamboats, in the cemeteries, in the barber-shops, the baths, the bazârs. In whatever part of Constantinople you may happen to be, if you merely call out, “Café-gi!” without taking the trouble to leave your seat, in three minutes a cup is steaming before you.
The Café.
Our café was a large whitewashed room, with a wooden wainscoting five or six feet high, and a low divan running around the four walls. In one corner stood a stove at which a Turk with a hooked nose was making coffee in little brass coffee-pots, from which he poured it into tiny cups, adding the sugar himself: this is the universal custom in Constantinople. The coffee is made fresh for every new-comer and handed to him already sweetened, together with a glass of water, which the Turk always drinks before approaching the cup to his lips. At one side hung a small looking-glass, and beside it a rack filled with razors: almost all the cafés in Constantinople are barber-shops as well, the head of the establishment combining these duties with those of leech and dentist, and operating upon his victims in the same apartment as that in which his guests are drinking their coffee. On the opposite wall hung another rack filled with crystal narghilehs, their long, flexible tubes wound around like snakes, and terra-cotta pipes with cherry-wood stems. Five Turks were seated on the divan thoughtfully smoking their narghilehs, and in front of the door three others sat upon very low straw-bottomed stools, their backs against the wall, side by side, with pipes in their mouths; a youth belonging to the establishment was engaged in shaving the head of a big, fat dervish clad in a camel’s-hair tunic. No one looked up as we took our seats, no one spoke, and, with the exception of the coffee-maker and the young man, no one made the slightest movement of any sort. The gurgling sound of the water in the narghilehs, something like the purring of cats, was all that broke the profound stillness. Every one gazed fixedly into vacancy, with faces absolutely devoid of all expression, like an assembly of wax figures. How many just such scenes as this have impressed themselves indelibly upon my mind! A wooden house, a cross-legged Turk, broad shafts of light, an exquisite far-away view, profound silence,—there you have Turkey. Every time I hear that word pronounced these objects rise up before me in the same way that one sees a canal and a windmill when any one mentions Holland.
Piale Pasha.
From there, skirting along the edge of a large Mussulman cemetery which extends from the top of the Kassim Pasha hill to Tersâne, we proceeded again in a northerly direction, and, descending into the valley, reached the little district of Piale Pasha, almost buried in her trees and gardens, and paused before the mosque from which the quarter takes its name. It is white and surmounted by six graceful domes; the courtyard is surrounded by arches supported on airy columns; there is a charming minaret, and surrounding the whole a circle of enormous cypress trees. At that hour all the neighboring houses were tightly closed, the streets empty, and even the courtyard of the mosque itself deserted; the drowsiness and heat of noonday brooded over everything, and, except for the dull buzzing of the insects, not a sound was to be heard. Looking at our watches, we found it wanted just three minutes to twelve o’clock, one of the Mussulman’s five canonical hours, at which the muezzin, appearing upon the gallery of every minaret, announces to the four quarters of the globe the religious formula of Islam. We were perfectly well aware that in all Constantinople there is not a minaret upon which, punctual as clockwork, the messenger of the Prophet does not appear at his appointed hour; at the same time we could hardly bring ourselves to believe that in that farthest outpost of the immense city, on that solitary, out-of-the-way mosque as well, and amid that profound silence and apparent desertion, the figure would rise up, the message be delivered. Watch in hand, I stood waiting with lively curiosity the stroke of the hour, glancing now at the minute-hand, now at the small doorway opening out on the gallery of the minaret, about as high from the ground as the fourth story of an ordinary house. Presently the minute-hand reaches the sixtieth little black speck: no one appeared. “He is not there,” said I.—“There he is,” replied Yunk; and, true enough, there he stood. The balustrade of the gallery concealed all his person but the face, of which the distance was too great to distinguish the features clearly. For a few seconds he stood perfectly motionless: then, closing both ears with his fingers and raising his face toward heaven, he chanted slowly, in high, piercing accents, solemnly, mournfully, the sacred words which at the same moment were resounding from every minaret in Africa, Asia, and Europe: “God is great! there is but one God! Mahomet is his Prophet! Come to prayer! come and be saved! God is great! there is none other! Come to prayer!” Then, proceeding a part of the way around the balcony, he repeated the same words toward the north, then to the west, and then to the east, and finally disappeared as he had come. At the same instant we caught the faint far-away tones of a similar voice in the distance, sounding like some one calling for help. Then all was still, and we two were left standing motionless and silent, with a vague feeling of hopelessness, as though those two voices had been addressed solely to us, calling upon us to fall down and pray, and with the disappearance of the vision we had been left alone in that still valley, like beings abandoned by God and man. No tolling or chime of bells has ever appealed to me so strongly, and I then understood for the first time why it was that Mahomet decided in favor of the human voice as a means of summoning the faithful to their devotions, rather than the ancient trumpet of the Israelites or tymbal of the Christians. He hesitated for some time before making up his mind, so that the entire Orient narrowly escaped wearing an aspect totally different from that of the present day. Had he selected the tymbal, which must inevitably have become a bell later on, it is very certain that the minaret would have gone, and with it would have disappeared for ever one of the most charming and distinctive features of both town and country in the East.