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The Mihrab of the Mosque of Roustem Pasha, showing Persian Tiles[Frontispiece.]
Mosques of Sultan Ahmed and St. Sophia[21]
View of Pera and Galata[29]
Ancient Fountain[39]
Bridge of Galata[45]
Fountain of Court of the Mosque of Ahmed[65]
Burnt Column of Constantine[70]
Tower of Galata[90]
Panorama of the Arsenal and Golden Horn[105]
Date-seller[131]
View of Stambul, Mosque of Validêh, and Bridge[161]
Serpentine Column of Delphi[167]
Group of Dogs[179]
Types of Turkish Soldiers[189]
A Turkish Official[200]
Türbeh of Sultan Selim II. in St. Sophia[216]
Interior of Mosque of Ahmed[227]
Entrance and Tower of Serasker[243]
Entrance to St. Sophia[249]
Fountain of Ahmed[251]
Mosque of St. Sophia[255]
Interior of the Mosque of St. Sophia[260]
First Columns erected in St. Sophia[263]
Palace of Dolmabâghcheh[281]
Palace of the Sultan on the Bosphorus[296]

THE ARRIVAL.

The arrival at Constantinople made such an overpowering impression upon me as to almost efface what I had seen during the previous ten days’ trip from the Straits of Messina to the mouth of the Bosphorus. The Ionian Sea, blue and unruffled as a lake; the distant mountains of Morea, tinged with rose color in the early morning light; the archipelago, gilded with the rays of the setting sun; the ruins of Athens; the Gulf of Salonika, Lemnos, Tenedos, the Dardanelles, and a crowd of persons and events which had caused me infinite amusement during the voyage,—faded into such indistinct and shadowy outlines at the first sight of the Golden Horn that were I now to undertake a description of them it would be an effort rather of imagination than of memory; and so, in order to impart something of life and warmth to the opening pages of my book, I shall omit all preliminaries and begin with the last evening of the voyage at the precise moment when, in the middle of the Sea of Marmora, the captain came up to my friend Yunk and me, and, laying his two hands on our shoulders, said, in his pure Palerman accent, “Gentlemen, to-morrow at daybreak we shall see the first minarets of Stambul.”

Ah! you smile, my good reader, you who have plenty of money and are tired of spending it—who, when a year or so ago the fancy seized you to go to Constantinople in twenty-four hours, with your purse well lined and your trunks packed, set forth as calmly as if it were a trip to the country, uncertain up to the last moment whether, after all, it might not pay better to take the train for Baden-Baden instead. If the captain had said to you, “To-morrow morning we shall see Stambul,” you would probably have answered, quite calmly, “Indeed? I am very glad to hear it.” But suppose, instead, you had brooded over the idea for ten years; had passed many a winter’s evening mournfully studying the map of the East; had fired your imagination by reading hundreds of books on the subject; had travelled over one-half of Europe merely to console yourself for not being able to see the other half; had remained nailed to your desk for a whole year with this sole object in view; had made a thousand petty sacrifices and calculations without end; had erected whole rows of castles in the air, and fought many a stiff battle with those of your own household; and finally had passed nine sleepless nights at sea haunted by this intoxicating vision, and so blissfully happy as to have a twinge of something like remorse at the thought of all your loved ones left behind;—then you would have some idea of the real meaning of those words: “To-morrow at daybreak we shall see the first minarets of Stambul;” and instead of replying phlegmatically, “I am glad to hear it,” you would have given a great thump on the bulkhead, as I did.

One great source of satisfaction to my friend and myself was our profound conviction that, boundless as our expectations might be, they could not possibly be foiled. About Constantinople there is no uncertainty, and the most pessimistic traveller feels that there, at least, he is safe, since no one has ever been disappointed; and this, moreover, has nothing to do with the charm of its great associations or the fashion of admiring what every one else does. It has a beauty of its own, at once overmastering and triumphant, before which poets, archeologists, ambassadors, and merchants, the princess and the sailor, people of the North and of the South, one and all, break forth into loud exclamations of astonishment. In the opinion of the whole world it is the most beautiful spot on earth. Writers of travels on arriving there at once lose their heads. Perthusier falls to stammering; Tournefort declares that human language is powerless; Pouqueville thinks himself transported to another world; Gautier cannot believe that what he sees is real; the Viscount di Marcellus falls into ecstasies; La Croix is intoxicated; Lamartine returns thanks to God; and all of them, heaping metaphor upon metaphor, endeavor to make their style more glowing, and search their imaginations in vain for some simile that shall not fall miserably short of their ideas. Chateaubriand alone describes his arrival at Constantinople with such apparent tranquillity of soul as to strongly suggest the idea of stupor, but he does not fail to observe that it is the most beautiful thing in the world; and if the celebrated Lady Montague, in pronouncing a similar opinion, has allowed herself the use of a perhaps, she clearly wishes it to be tacitly understood that the first place belongs to her own beauty, of which she had a very high opinion. It is, after all, a cold German who declares that the most beautiful illusions of youth, the very dreams of first love, become poor and insipid when contrasted with the delicious sensations which steal upon the soul at the first sight of those charmed shores, while a learned Frenchman affirms that the first impression made by Constantinople is one of terror.

Imagine, then, if you can, the effect produced by all these impassioned statements on the ardent brains of a clever painter of twenty-four and a bad poet of twenty-eight! But still, not satisfied with even all this illustrious praise of Constantinople, we turned to the sailors to see what they would have to say about it; and here it was the same thing. Ordinary language was felt by even these rough men to be inadequate, and they rolled their eyes and rubbed their hands together in the effort to find unusual words and phrases in which to express themselves, attempting their description in that far-away tone of voice and with the slow, uncertain gestures used by uneducated persons when they try to recount something wonderful. “To arrive at Constantinople on a fine morning,” said the helmsman—“believe me, gentlemen, that is a great moment in a man’s life.”

The weather, too, smiled upon us. It was a fine, calm night; the water lapped the sides of the vessel with a gentle murmuring sound, while the masts and rigging stood out clear and motionless against the sky sparkling with stars. We seemed hardly to move. In the bow a crowd of Turks lay stretched out at full length, blissfully smoking their hookahs with faces turned to the moon, whose light, falling upon their white turbans, made them look like silvery haloes; on the promenade deck was a concourse of people of every nationality under the sun, among them a company of hungry-looking Greek comedians who had embarked at Piræus.

I can see before me now the pretty face of little Olga, one of a bevy of Russian children going with their mother to Odessa, very much astonished at my not understanding her language, and somewhat displeased at having addressed the same question to me three consecutive times without obtaining an intelligible answer. Here on one side a fat, dirty Greek priest, wearing a hat like an inverted bushel-measure, is looking through his glass for the Sea of Marmora, and on the other, an English evangelical clergyman is standing stiff and unyielding as a statue, who for three days past has not spoken to a soul nor looked at any one; near by are two pretty Athenian girls in their little red caps, with hair hanging down over their shoulders, who turn simultaneously toward the water whenever they find any one looking at them, in order to show their profiles, while a little farther off an Armenian merchant is telling the beads of his Greek rosary. Near him is a group of Hebrews, dressed in their antique costume, some Arabians in long white gowns, a melancholy-minded French governess, and a few of those nondescript personages one always meets in travelling, about whom there is nothing particular to indicate their country or occupation; and in the centre of all this mixed company a little Turkish family, consisting of a father wearing a fez, a veiled mother, and two little girls in trousers, all four curled up under a tent on a pile of many-colored pillows and cushions, and surrounded by a motley collection of luggage of every shape and hue.