Photograph by Apollon, Constantinople
I had the honour of meeting Mahmoud Shefket Pasha a little later, in company with Mr. Booth; and I owed it to the latter’s bandaged head and to the interest which the general took in the wounded journalist that I also obtained the coveted leave to visit Yîldîz. Yîldîz had so long been a name of legend that one approached it with the vividest curiosity—even though the innermost enclosure, jutting out into the park from the crest of the hill on a gigantic retaining wall, at first remained impenetrable. When at last the gates of the Forbidden City itself were opened, it was strange to discover that the Sultan who stood for all that was conservative and Oriental, who spent as he pleased the gold of the empire, who might have created anew the lost splendours of the Seraglio, had chosen to surround himself with would-be European cottages, for the most part of wood, with a profusion of gables and jig-saw carpentry. The more ornate were those intended for the reception of ministers and ambassadors. The simplest and the largest was the long, low, L-shaped structure where Abd ül Hamid lived with his extensive family. His private apartments gave a singular picture of that singular man. The rooms were all jealously latticed, even behind the fortifications of Yîldîz, and one was scarcely to be distinguished in its use from another, so full were they all of desks, screens, couches, weapons, and pianos. In one of the least ambiguous, where white chairs stood about a long table, was shown the gilt Vienna Récamier in which Abd ül Hamid received the notification of his dethronement. An orchestrion filled one end of the room, where also was a piano. No less than four of these instruments were in another room. Farther on were the empty safes where the old man hoarded his gold and his famous jewels, a cupboard of ugly tiles that was a mixture of Turkish hamam and European bath, without the luxuries of either, and a perfectly appointed carpenter’s shop. It is an old tradition for the princes of the house of Osman to learn some trade, in case their kîsmet should suddenly require them to make their own living. One chamber had more the air of a bedroom than any other. For the Sultan rarely slept two nights in succession in the same place, or undressed to do so. On a table were two of the bullet-proof waistcoats he wore at Selamlîk. A handsome case of arms stood by the door. High on the walls hung some crude pictures which he perhaps painted himself. He was fond of playing with the brush. A canvas somewhere else represented a boat full of priests, standing, to whom a group of plump pink sirens beckoned from an arsenic shore. The officer in charge told us that the faces of the priests were those of Midhat Pasha and other reformers. With all their oddity, the rooms had a familiar air of habitation. Things of use and of ornament were where Abd ül Hamid dropped them the night he was taken away. Writing materials were strewn on the desks. A photograph of the German imperial family looked out of a gold frame set in brilliants. In a corner stood a table, a chair, and a footstool, all with crystal legs, where the Sultan sat in thunder-storms. The whole palace was full of small human touches of the suspicious, ignorant, lonely old man who lived there. And East and West were strangely jumbled in his well-worn furniture, as they were in his ancient empire—as they were in the visitors inquisitively trampling the carpets and fingering the belongings of the fallen master of the house.
The harem, by a characteristic piece of Oriental reserve, was not opened even by its despoilers to the gaze of the profane. But we were allowed to go into the harem garden, overlooked by the Sultan’s lattices. An artificial canal wound through the middle of it. Row-boats, a motor-boat, even a small sailboat, were moored there. Under the trees stood a miniature replica of the fountain at Gyök Sou. Pigeons fluttered everywhere and water-fowl were playing in the canal, while against the wall cutting off the immense prospect the garden might have enjoyed stood cages of gaudy birds. At one spot only did a small kiosk, execrably furnished, give access to the view. Through the telescope on the upper floor Abd ül Hamid used to watch the city he dared not enter. We also saw a little theatre that communicated by a bridge with the harem. In this bonbon box of red velvet the singers and variety actors visiting the city used to be invited to perform—sometimes before a solitary spectator. King Otto of Bavaria would have found no kinship with him, though. On the wall a photograph of Arturo Stravolo, an Italian transformationist, hung beside a large and bad portrait of Verdi.
Outside this inner citadel the fabled gardens descended to the sea. Fabled they proved, indeed—as some city park, perhaps, though not so neatly kept. A driveway, fabulously dusty, led between the massive retaining wall and a miniature lake to Merassim Kiosque, a tawdry little palace in an enclosure of its own which was built for William II of Germany. I threaded a tortuous space, at one end of it not quite touching the bastion of the Forbidden City, where a small iron door in the kiosk faced a small iron door in the bastion. They had a potency, those small iron doors, upon the imagination of a romantic impressionist. Beyond stretched courts and stables, deserted save for a few last activities of departure. A eunuch was giving shrill orders to a soldier. A drove of buffaloes stood mild-eyed under a plane-tree, waiting to be driven away. A horse whinnied in the silence. A cat lay blinking in the sun, indifferent to the destinies of kings.
On a slope of thin shade farther on were grouped an ornate wooden villa, a castellated porcelain factory, kennels where a few dogs yelped miserably, and enclosures for all sorts of animals and birds. The one really charming part of the park was the ravine behind Chira’an Palace, cool with secular trees and the splash of water. Nightingales and strange water-fowl had their habitation there, and some startled colts galloped away as I descended a winding path. The look of the paths, neither wild nor ordered, made me wonder again what four hundred gardeners did at Yîldîz. I suppose they did what any gardener would do whose master never came to see his garden. Chalets and summer-houses with red seals on their doors stood among the trees. I went into an open lodge beside a gateway. A bed was torn to pieces, clothes and papers strewed the floor, a cut loaf and an open bottle stood on a shelf as if dropped there in some hasty flight.
There was a point on the hillside whence a long view opened—of domed Stamboul and cypressed Scutari reaching toward each other across an incredible blue, with dim Asiatic mountains in the background. From the height above he must often have looked out on that scene who brooded for thirty-three years, in silence and darkness, behind the walls his terror raised. So noble against sea and sky, so vastly spreading, so mysterious in its invisible activities, the city must have been as redoubtable to him as his bastioned hilltop was to the city. And I could not help imagining how, during the days so lately passed, as he watched the city that feared his power and whose power he feared, sounds must have come up to him: of the foolish firing he ordered for the 13th of April; of a more sinister firing eleven days later, when he waited for his deluded and officerless soldiers, shut up in their barracks, to save his throne; of that last firing, for him the sound of doom, proclaiming to his face the joy of the distant city that his power over it was no more.
As we went away a line of buffalo carts, piled with nondescript furniture, began to creak down the avenue where the imperial guard used to parade at Selamlîk. A Macedonian gendarme stood in the great arched gateway of the Palace court and checked them as they passed. Behind him a monkey sat in the coil of a black tail, surveying the scene with bright, furtive, troubled eyes.