Taranto, the port of sailing, is a quaint old city of antiquarian interest situated on a beautiful bay. The museum is filled with ancient statuary and pottery excavated from the ruins of a still older city, dating back to the days of the ancients. We spent some hours in the building, examining the tessellated tiles and old Greek vases under the guidance of the elderly curator, who, as he said good-bye to us, broke two delicious pink roses off the rose tree in the courtyard, and, with a graceful old-world bow, his hand upon his heart, gave one each to Miss Huysmans and myself.
Taranto comprises two towns, the old and the new. The new is set upon a hill, the old lies about the port. The new has an American look about its new white stone-fronted buildings, the old has the stamp of the Middle Ages upon it. The streets of the old are winding and so narrow that the people on opposite sides of the streets can in some cases shake hands from their bedroom windows. They are paved with cobblestones, and there are no sidewalks. The houses have tiny windows and the top storeys project. The shops, as a rule, have no windows at all, but are open to the street along the whole of their front. Some of the cafés are underground cellars. Men and women meet in the shops for gossip, and in the cafés for scandal and politics. Work is leisurely. The men are mostly engaged in fishing, net-making and basket-weaving. The women wear native peasant dress, bright coloured, and attend to their houses or help the men with the nets. Donkeys are numberless. Huge masses of fruit, notably grapes and water melons, are piled up on the stalls and barrows that line the street fronting the sea. It is a city of amazing picturesqueness, astounding squalor and incredible smells.
Our ship was an Austrian vessel, part of the Italian share in the spoils of war. Her commander was an easy-going Italian with a tremendous admiration for Lord Fisher. He refused to promise us fine weather, and, even as we entreated, the sun entered a cloud which, before evening, had spread gloomily over the whole sky!
We sailed pleasantly amongst the Greek Islands, sighting Corinth and Athens and the Hill of Mars. We steamed slowly through the canal cut through the Isthmus of Corinth, a marvellous feat of engineering. We crept gently past Gallipoli and gazed with dim eyes on the graves of the gallant dead. The sea near the shore was full of ships, sunk by the fire from the Turkish forts, and the captain told us that here careful navigation was very necessary and we might not go nearer the land; but with the aid of field-glasses we marked the blasted hillsides and battered fortifications of the Turk. Here and there a broken gun rusted on its side in the scorched and trampled grass. Hearts felt sick for the sacrifice that the politicians were threatening to make vain, and we silently renewed our vows to devote our lives to the building up of such international organization as should make such sacrifices unnecessary in the future.
On the fourth day after leaving Taranto we sighted Constantinople. This city was the most completely satisfying of all my childhood’s dreams come true. I recollect how disappointing to me was my first glimpse of the Niagara Falls. So it has been with many of my friends. Such beauty as that grows upon one, but at the first visit one expects too much. One expects something more and bigger than can be taken in with a single glance of the eye, a wilderness of waters, something stupendous, to send one reeling! One sees a vast and steady tumbling, a roar like a Tube train entering a tunnel, and feels the lack of mystery. I am inclined to think the injury is done by the aggressive and vulgar civilization all round: the tawdry town, the eating-houses, the electric-power stations, the street cars, the vendors of toys and ice-cream and picture post cards and penny buns. Seen and heard in the vast spaces and awful silence of a desert it would be altogether different.
Constantinople fulfilled every wish, satisfied every expectation. Magnificently set upon its several hills it appeared the queen of cities enthroned above the worshipping waters, crowned by the moon, and glittering with ten thousand jewels of ten thousand shimmering lights. By day her beauty changed. Unlike Moscow, whose domes and minarets gleam golden in the sun, those of Constantinople have lost their radiance, but they stand out nobly against the clearest of blue skies, the mosques on the hills of Stamboul competing for praise with the vast modern palaces at the water’s edge. The Golden Horn, classic symbol of plenty, was crowded with shipping, a pleasing contrast to the stagnation of Astrakhan.
The streets of Constantinople are a kaleidoscope, a mass of jostling humanity, white and black and brown. The Turkish fez predominates. The dark-skinned Jew and the cunning Greek vie with the crafty Armenian in the business of stripping the guileless stranger of his money. Thick-lipped Nubians are as common as flies. Black-veiled Turkish women add a distinctive note to the scene. Water-carriers sell their water to thirsty traders in carpets and embroideries. Anatolian peasants bring their fruits to sell. Turkish princes flash past in shabby automobiles. Gay French officers on horseback menace the careless foot-traveller. Young British officers on polo ponies rush laughingly by. The big hotels are filled with the usual crowd of foreign Military Mission folk, big business men, pseudo-politicians; youthful, very youthful diplomats and soldiers, profiteers, adventurers, wives of officers and women of the underworld—gay, charming, lovely and dangerous. No sign there of the bitter hate that sits on the brow of the Turkish café habitué, who deems the least tolerable part of his burden the position of dominance over him given to his ancient insolent enemy, the corrupt and perfidious Greek.
I shall write more about our doings in Constantinople later. We sailed through the Bosphorus in a calm sea and into the dreaded Black Sea after the third day. The beauty of the Bosphorus suggests the exquisite reaches of the Rhine with its ancient castles and woody crags, but with a gentle softness for the Rhine’s proud strength. The Black Sea belied its name, and our passage was without a break in its comfort and content.