Let no one venture either on foot, on horseback, or in a carriage, along the all-but-interminable High Street of Pera, on a fête-day, if he be in a hurry! In the first place, two moderately-sized individuals who chance to be opposite neighbours may shake hands from their own doors without moving an inch forward—and in the next, there is no other road from Topphannè or Galata (the principal landing-places) to the Great Cemetery. And then the natives of the East have a very sociable, but extremely inconvenient habit of walking with their arms about each other’s necks, or holding hands like children in parties of five or six, although they are obliged, from the narrowness of the thoroughfare, to move along sideways; but, nevertheless, they will not slacken their hold until the necessity for so doing becomes sufficiently imperative to admit no alternative.
A STREET IN PERA.
Another peculiarity attending an Eastern mob is its utter disregard of being run over, or knocked down: an Oriental will see your horse’s nose resting on his shoulder, and even then he will not move out of the way until you compel him; and when your arabajhe warns him that he is almost under the wheel of the carriage, he looks at him as though he wondered at the wanton waste of words bestowed upon so insignificant a piece of information.
But, if the bipeds are difficult of management, the quadrupeds are altogether unmanageable! Let those whose nerves are shattered by the rattle of the London carts come here, and have their temper tried by the donkeys of Constantinople. You have scarcely turned the corner of the street, and forced your way among the clinging, chattering, lounging mob, ere you come upon a gang of donkeys—your horse is restless, he champs the bit, paws with his foreleg, and backs among the crowd, in his impatience to get on; you must be contented to allow him the privilege of champing, pawing, and backing, for there is no contending against a string of a dozen donkeys, laden with tiles.
While you are trying to look amused at your dilemma, and endeavouring with “favour and fair words” to induce their owner to arrange them in regular line in order to enable you to pass, you hear a portentous clatter a hundred yards a-head:—you look forward with foreboding, and your fears have not misled you: it is, indeed, “the meeting of the donkeys;” and another gang, heavily charged with earth, or bricks, or unhewn stone, are gravely approaching to entangle themselves among your first favourites, and to be dislodged only with blows and kicks very ill-calculated to pacify either you or your horse.
In an araba your case is still more hopeless; for a horse must get on at last, by dint of intruding upon the pavement, and impudently poking his nose into every window; applying his shoulder to the back of one individual, and whisking his long tail into the face of another—but a carriage following a carriage must be satisfied to travel at the pace which may chance to be agreeable to its leader—while a carriage meeting a carriage is pushed one way, lifted another, driven against the walls of the houses, and shoved into the kennel, until you begin to consider it very doubtful whether you possess sufficient strength of wrist and tenacity of finger, to enable you to remain within, while such violent proceedings are taking place without. And when to these difficulties are superadded the inconvenience of a dense, reckless, pleasure-seeking mob, it must be conceded on all hands that the progress along the High Street of Pera on a festival day is by no means “easy travelling.”
On the occasion of which I am about to speak we encountered three detachments of donkeys, four arabas, six horses laden with timber, and a flock of sheep—fortunately, we were by no means pressed for time; though how we escaped victimizing a few of the supine subjects of his Sublime Highness, I cannot take upon me to explain.
I have already spoken elsewhere of the indifference, if not absolute enjoyment, with which the inhabitants of the East frequent their burying-grounds; but on the occasion of this festival I was more impressed than ever by the extent to which it is carried. The whole of the Christian Cemetery had assumed the appearance of a fair—nor was this all, for the very tombs of the dead were taxed to enhance the comforts of the living; and many was the tent whose centre table, covered with a fringed cloth, and temptingly spread with biscuits, sweetmeats, and sherbet, was the stately monument of some departed Armenian! Grave-stones steadied the poles which supported the swings—divans, comfortably overlaid with cushions, were but chintz-covered sepulchres—the step that enabled the boy to reach his seat in the merry-go-round was the earth which had been heaped upon the breast of the man whose course was run—the same trees flung their long shadows over the sports of the living and the slumbers of the dead—the kibaub merchants had dug hollows to cook their dainties under the shelter of the tombs—and the smoking booths were amply supplied with seats and counters from the same wide waste of death.