At every hundred steps the scene changes. Now you are in a suburb of Marseilles; turn, and it becomes an Asiatic village; another turn, and it is a Greek settlement; still another, a suburb of Trebizond. The language and dress, the faces you meet, the look of the houses in the various quarters, all suggest a different country from the one you have just left; they are bits of France, slices of Italy, samples of England, scraps of Russia. One sees depicted in vivid colors on the great surface of the city that battle which is here being waged between the various groups of Christians on the one hand fighting to repossess themselves of, and Islamism on the other defending with all its remaining strength, the sacred soil of Constantinople. Stambul, once entirely Turkish, is assailed on all sides by settlements of Christians, before whose advance it is slowly giving way all along the banks of the Golden Horn and the shores of the Sea of Marmora; in other directions the conquest is proceeding much more rapidly: churches, hospitals, palaces, public gardens, schools, and factories are rending asunder the Mussulman’s quarters, encroaching upon his cemeteries, and advancing from one height to another, until already, on the dismayed soil, there are sketched the vague outlines of another European city, as large as the one now covering the banks of the Golden Horn, and destined one day to embrace the European shore of the Bosphorus.
Ancient Fountain.
But from such general observations as these the attention is distracted at every step by some fresh object of interest: on one street it is the monastery of the dervishes, in another a great Moorish building, a Turkish café, a bazâr, a fountain, an aqueduct. In the course of a quarter of an hour, too, one is obliged to alter his gait at least a dozen times. You must descend, mount, climb down some steep incline or up by stairs cut out of the rock, wade through the mud and surmount a thousand different obstacles, threading your way now through crowds of people, then in and out among shrubbery; here stooping to avoid lines of clothes hung out to dry; at one moment obliged to hold your breath, at the next inhaling a hundred delicious odors. From a terrace flooded with light and commanding a magnificent view of the Bosphorus, Asia, and the blue arch of heaven one step will bring you to a network of narrow alley-ways, leading in and out among wretched, half-ruined houses and choked up with heaps of stone and rubbish; from some delicious retreat filled with verdure and bloom you emerge on a dry, dusty waste littered with débris; from a thoroughfare glowing with life, movement, and color you step into some sepulchral recess, where it seems as though the silence had never been broken by the sound of a human voice; from the glorious Orient of one’s dreams to quite another Orient, forbidding, oppressive, falling into decay, and suggestive of all that is mournful and depressing. After walking about for a few hours amid this medley of strange sights, one’s brain becomes completely confused. Were any one to suddenly put the question to you, “What sort of a place is Constantinople?” you would only stare at him vacantly, quite incapable of giving any intelligible reply. Constantinople is a Babylon, a world, a chaos.—Is it beautiful?—Marvellously.—Ugly?—Horribly so.—Do you like it?—It fascinates me.—Shall you remain?—How on earth can I tell? Can any one tell how long he is likely to stay on another planet?
You return at last to your lodgings, enthusiastic, disappointed, enchanted, disgusted, stunned, stupefied, your head whirling around like that of a person in the first stages of brain fever. This condition gradually gives way to one of complete prostration, utter exhaustion of mind and body; you have lived years in the course of a few hours, and feel yourself aged.
And the population of this huge city?
THE BRIDGE.
The best place from which to see the population of Constantinople is the floating bridge, about a quarter of a mile long, which connects the extreme point of Galata with the opposite shore of the Golden Horn, just below the mosque of the Validêh Sultan. Both banks are European territory, but, notwithstanding this fact, the bridge may be said to connect Europe and Asia, since nothing in Stambul but the ground itself is European, and even those quarters occupied by Christians have taken on an Asiatic character. The Golden Horn, though in appearance a river, in reality separates two different worlds, like an ocean. European news reaches Galata and Pera, and at once it is in every one’s mouth, and circulates rapidly, fresh, minute, and accurate, while in Stambul it is heard only like some vague, far-away echo; the fame of worldwide reputations and the most startling events roll back from before that little strip of water as from some insuperable barrier, and across that bridge, daily traversed by a hundred thousand feet, an idea does not pass once in ten years.