CHAPTER VI
FREEDOM’S DOUBTFUL ENCHANTMENT
Territet, Dec. 1906.
I am conservative in my habits, as you will find out when you know me better, although Turkish women are generally supposed to be capricious and changeable.
Every day you can picture me sitting on the same terrace, in the same chair, looking at the same reposeful Lake Leman and writing to the same sympathetic friends.
The sea before me is so blue and silent and calm! Does it know, I wonder, the despair which at times fills my soul! or is its blue there to remind me of our home over yonder!
In the spring the Bosphorus had such sweet, sad tints. As children when we walked near its surface my little Turkish friends said to me, “Don’t throw stones at the Bosphorus—you will hurt it.”
Lake Leman also has ships which destroy the limpid blue of its surface and remind me of those which passed under my lattice windows and sailed so far away that my thoughts could not follow them.
Here I might almost imagine I was looking at the Bosphorus, and yet, is the reflection of snow-clad peaks what I ought to find in the blue sea away yonder? Where are the domes and minarets of our mosques? Is not this the hour when the Muezzins[9] lift up their voices, and solemnly call the faithful to prayer?
On such an autumn evening as this in Stamboul, I should be walking in a quiet garden where chrysanthemums would be growing in profusion. The garden would be surrounded by high walls, giant trees would throw around us a damp and refreshing shade, and the red rays of the dying sun would find their way through the leaves, and my companions’ white dresses would all be stained with its roseate hues.