A Turkish House
The Harem windows are on the top floor to the right.
You will say, that I am sad—morbid even; but how can I be otherwise when the best years of my life have been poisoned by the horrors of the Hamidian régime. There are some sentiments which, when transplanted, make me suffer even as they did in the land of my birth. I am thinking particularly of the agony of waiting.
Do you think there is in any language a sentence stronger and more beautiful than that which terminates in Loti’s Pêcheurs d’Islande—the tragedy of waiting—with these words, “Il ne revint jamais”?
I mention this to you because my whole youth had been so closely allied with this very anguish of waiting.
Imagine for a moment a little Turkish Yali[1] on the shores of the Bosphorus. It is dark, it is still, and for hours the capital of Turkey has been deep in slumber. Scarcely a star is in the sky, scarcely a light can be seen in the narrow and badly-paved streets of the town.
I had been reading until very late—reading and thinking, thinking and reading to deaden the uneasiness I always felt when something was going to happen. What was coming this time?
By a curious irony of fate, I had been reading in the Bible[2] of Christ’s apostles whose eyes were heavy with sleep. But I could not sleep, and after a time I could not even read. This weary, weary waiting!