I have perhaps never set my eyes on a handsomer man than Sultan Mahmoud. His figure is tall, straight, and manly, his air unembarrassed and dignified, and his step indicative of the well-known firmness of his character. A superb beard of jetty blackness, with a curling moustache, conceals all the lower part of his face; the decided and bold lines of his mouth just marking themselves when he speaks. It is said he both paints and dyes his beard, but a manlier brown upon a cheek, or a richer gloss upon a beard, I never saw. His eye is described by writers as having a doomed darkness of expression, and it is certainly one that would well become a chief of bandits—large, steady, and overhung with an eyebrow like a thunder cloud. He looks the monarch. The child of a seraglio (where mothers are chosen for beauty alone) could scarce escape being handsome. The blood of Circassian upon Circassian is in his veins, and the wonder is, not that he is the handsomest man in his empire, but that he is not the greatest slave. Our “mother’s humour,” they say, predominates in our mixtures. Sultan Mahmoud, however, was marked by nature for a throne.
I accompanied Mr. Goodell and Mr. Dwight, American missionaries at Constantinople, to visit a Lancasterian school established with their assistance in the Turkish barracks. The building stands on the ascent of one of the lovely valleys that open into the Bosphorus, some three miles from the city, on the European side. We were received by the colonel of the regiment; a young man of fine appearance, with the diamond crescent and star glittering on the breast of his military frock, and after the inevitable compliment of pipes and coffee, the drum was beat and the soldiers called to school.
The Sultan has an army of boys. Nine-tenths of those I have seen are under twenty. They marched in, in single file, and facing about, held up their hands at the word of command, while a subaltern looked that each had performed the morning ablution. They were healthy-looking lads, mostly from the interior provinces, whence they are driven down likes cattle to fill the ranks of their sovereign. Duller-looking subjects for an idea it has not been my fortune to see.
The Turkish alphabet hung over the teacher’s desk (the colonel is the schoolmaster, and takes the greatest interest in his occupation), and the front seats are faced with a long box covered with sand, in which the beginners write with their fingers. It is fitted with a slide that erases the clumsy imitation when completed, and seemed to me an ingenious economy of ink and paper. (I would suggest to the mind of the benevolent, a school on the same principle for beginners in poetry. It would save the critics much murder, and tend to the suppression of suicide.) The classes having filed into their seats, the school opened with a prayer by the colonel. The higher benches then commenced writing, on slates and paper, sentences dictated from the desk, and I was somewhat surprised at the neatness and beauty of the characters.
We passed afterward into another room where arithmetic and geography were taught, and then mounted to an apartment on the second story occupied by students in military drawing. The proficiency of all was most creditable, considering the brief period during which the schools have been in operation—something less than a year. Prejudiced as the Turks are against European innovation, this advanced step towards improvement tells well. Our estimable and useful missionaries appear, from the respect everywhere shown them, to be in high esteem, and with the Sultan’s energetic disposition for reform, they hope everything in the way of an enlightened change in the moral condition of the people.
We went to the chapel of the dancing dervishes. It is a beautiful marble building, with a court-yard ornamented with a small cemetery shaded with cypresses, and a fountain enclosed in a handsome edifice, and defended by gilt gratings from the street of the suburb of Pera, in which it stands. They dance here twice a week. We arrived before the hour, and were detained at the door by a soldier on guard, who would not permit us to enter without taking off our boots—a matter about which, between straps and their very muddy condition, we had some debate. The dervishes began to arrive before the question was settled, and one of them, a fine-looking old man, inviting us to enter, Mr. H. explained the difficulty. “Go in,” said he, “go in!” and turning to the more scrupulous Mussulman with the musket, as he pushed us within the door, “Stupid fellow!” said he, “if you had been less obstinate, they would have given you a bakshish” (Turkish for a fee). He should have said less religious—for the poor fellow looked horror-struck as our dirty boots profaned the clean white Persian matting of the sacred floor. One would think “the nearer the church the farther from God,” were as true here as it is said to be in some more civilised countries.
It was a pretty, octagonal interior, with a gallery, the mihrab or niche indicating the direction of the prophet’s tomb, standing obliquely from the front of the building. Hundreds of small lamps hung in the area, just out of the reach of the dervishes’ tall caps, and all around between the gallery; a part of the floor was raised, matted, and divided from the body of the church by a balustrade. It would have made an exceedingly pretty ball-room.
None but the dervishes entered within the paling, and they soon began to enter, each advancing first toward the mihrab, and going through fifteen or twenty minutes’ prostrations and prayers. Their dress is very humble. A high, white felt cap, without a rim, like a sugar-loaf enlarged a little at the smaller end, protects the head, and a long dress of dirt-coloured cloth, reaching quite to the heels and bound at the waist with a girdle, completes the costume. They look like men who have made up their minds to seem religious, and though said to be a set of very good fellows, they have a Mawworm expression of face generally, which was very repulsive. I must except the chief of the sect, however, who entered when all the rest had seated themselves on the floor, and after a brief genuflexion or two took possession of a rich Angora carpet placed for him near the mihrab. He was a small old man, distinguished in his dress only by the addition of a green band to his cap (the sign of his pilgrimage to Mecca) and the entire absence of the sanctimonious look. Still he was serious, and there was no mark in his clear, intelligent eye and amiable features, of any hesitancy or want of sincerity in his devotion. He is said to be a learned man, and he is certainly a very prepossessing one, though he would be taken up as a beggar in any city in the United States. It is a thing one learns in “dangling about the world,” by the way, to form opinions of men quite independently of their dress.
After sitting a while in quaker meditation, the brotherhood rose one by one (there were ten of them I think), and marched round the room with their toes turned in, to the music of a drum and a Persian flute, played invisibly in some part of the gallery. As they passed the carpet of the cross-legged chief, they twisted dexterously and made three salaams, and then raising their arms, which they held out straight during the whole dance, they commenced twirling on one foot, using the other after the manner of a paddle to keep up the motion. I forgot to mention that they laid aside their outer dresses before commencing the dance. They remained in dirty white tunics reaching to the floor, and very full at the bottom, so that with the regular motion of their whirl, the wind blew them out into a circle, like what the girls in our country call “making cheeses.” They twisted with surprising exactness and rapidity, keeping clear of each other, and maintaining their places with the regularity of machines. I have seen a great deal of waltzing, but I think the dancing dervishes for precision and spirit, might give a lesson even to the Germans.