Just beyond is the mercantile suburb of Galatan, which your dainty diplomatist would not write on his card for an embassy, but for which, as being honestly what it calls itself, I entertain a certain respect, wanting in my opinion of its mongrel neighbour. Heavy gates divide these different quarters of the city, and if you would pass after sunset, you must anoint the hinges with a piastre.
LETTER XL.
Beauties of the Bosphorus—Summer-Palace of the Sultan—Adventure with an old Turkish Woman—The Feast of Bairam—The Sultan his own Butcher—His evil Propensities—Visit to the Mosques—A formidable Dervish—Santa Sophia—Mosque of Sultan Achmet—Traces of Christianity.
From this elevated point, the singular effect of a desert commencing from the very streets of the city is still more observable. The compact edge of the metropolis is visible even upon the more rural Bosphorus, not an enclosure or a straggling house venturing to protrude beyond the closely pressed limit. To repeat the figure, it seems, with the prodigious mass of habitations on either shore, as if all the cities of both Europe and Asia were swept to their respective borders, or as if the crowded masses upon the long extending shores were the deposit of some mighty overflow of the sea.
From Pera commence the numerous villages, separated only by name, which form a fringe of peculiarly light and fantastic architecture to the never-wearying Bosphorus. Within the small limit of your eye, upon that silver link between the two seas, there are fifty valleys and thirty rivers, and an imperial palace on every loveliest spot from the Black Sea to Marmora. The Italians say, “See Naples and die!” but for Naples I would read Stamboul and the Bosphorus.
Descending unwillingly from this enchanting spot, we entered a long glen, closed at the water’s edge by the Sultan’s summer-palace, and present residence of Beylerbey. Half way down, we met a decrepit old woman, toiling up the path, and my friend, with a Wordsworthian passion for all things humble and simple, gave her the Turkish good-morrow, and inquired her business at the village. She had been to Stavros, to sell ten paras’ worth of herbs—about one cent of our currency. He put a small piece of silver into her hand, while, with the still strong habit of Turkish modesty, she employed the other in folding her tattered yashmack so as to conceal her features from the gaze of strangers. She had not expected charity. “What is this for?” she asked, looking at it with some surprise. “To buy bread for your children, mother!” “Effendi!” said the poor old creature, her voice trembling, and the tears streaming from her eyes, “My children are all dead! There is no one now between me and Allah!” It were worth a poet’s while to live in the East. Like the fairy in the tale, they never open their lips but they “speak pearls.”
We took a caique at the mosque of Sultan Selim, at Beylerbey, and floated slowly past the imperial palace. Five or six eunuchs, with their red caps and long blue dresses, were talking at a high tenor in the court-yard of the harem, and we gazed long and earnestly at the fine lattices above, concealing so many of the picked beauties of the empire. A mandolin, very indifferently strummed in one of the projecting wings, betrayed the employment of some fair Fatima, and there was a single moment when we could see, by the relief of a corner window, the outline of a female figure; but the caique floated remorselessly on, and our busy imaginations had their own unreal shadows for their reward. As we approached the central façade the polished brazen gates flew open, and a band of thirty musicians came out and ranged themselves on the terrace beneath the palace-windows, announcing, in their first flourish, that Sultan Mahmoud had thrust his fingers into his pilaw, and his subjects were at liberty to dine. Not finding their music much to our taste, we ordered the caikjees to assist the current a little, and shooting past Stavros, we cut across the Strait from the old palace of Shemsheh the vizier, and, in a few minutes, I was once more in my floating home, under the “star-spangled banner.”