With a dinner in prospect at a friend’s house, six or eight miles up the Bosphorus, we started in the morning on foot, with the intention of seeing Sultan Mahmoud go to mosque, by the way. We stopped a moment to look into the marble pavilion, containing the clocks of the mosque of Tophana, and drank at the opposite pavilion, from the brass cup chained in the window, and supplied constantly from the fountain within, and then kept on through the long street to the first village of Dolma-baktchi, or the Garden of Gourds.
Determined, with the day before us, to yield to every temptation on the road, we entered a small café, overlooking a segment of the Bosphorus, and while the acorn-sized cups were simmering on the manghal, my friend entered into conversation in Arabic with a tawny old Egyptian, who sat smoking in the corner. He was a fine specimen of the “responsible-looking” Oriental, and had lately arrived from Alexandria on business. Pleasant land of the East! where, to be the pink of courtesy, you must pass your snuff-box, or your tobacco-pouch to the stranger, and ask him those questions of his “whereabouts,” so impertinent in more civilised Europe!
After a brief dialogue, which was Hebrew to me, our Alexandrian, knocking the ashes from his pipe, commenced a narration with a great deal of expressive gesture, at which my friend seemed very provokingly amused. I sipped my coffee, and wondered what could have led one of these silent grey-beards into an amusing story, till a pause gave me an opportunity to ask a translation. Hearing that we were Americans, the Egyptian had begun by asking whether there was a superstition in our country against receiving back money in change. He explained his question by saying that he was in a café, at Tophana, when a boat’s crew, from the American frigate, waiting for some one at the landing, entered, and asked for coffee. They drank it very quietly, and one of them gave the caféjee a dollar, receiving in change a handful of the shabby and adulterated money of Constantinople. Jack was rather surprised at getting a dozen cups of coffee, and so much coin for his dollar, and requested the boy, by signs, to treat the company at his expense. This was done, the Turks all acknowledging the courtesy by laying their hands upon their foreheads and breast, and still Jack’s money lay heavy in his hands. He called for pipes, and they smoked awhile; but finding still that his riches were not perceptibly diminished, he hitched up his trowsers, and with a dexterous flirt, threw his piastres and paras all round upon the company, and rolled out of the café. From the gravity of the other sailors at this remarkable flourish, the old Egyptian and his fellow cross-legs had imagined it to be a national custom!
Idling along through the next village, we turned to admire a Turkish child, led by an Abyssinian slave. There is no country in the world where the children are so beautiful, and this was a cherub of a boy, like one of Domenichino’s angels. As we stopped to look at him, the little fellow commenced crying most lustily.
“Hush! my rose!” said the Abyssinian, “these are good Franks! these are not the Franks that eat children! hush!”
It certainly takes the nonsense out of one to travel. I should never have thought it possible, if I had not been in Turkey, that I could be made a bugbear to scare a child!
We passed the tomb of Frederick Barbarossa, getting, between the walls of the palaces on the water’s edge, continual and incomparable views of the Bosphorus, and arrived at Beshiktash (or the marble cradle), just as the troops were drawn up to the door of the mosque. We took our stand under a plane-tree, in the midst of a crowd of women, and presently the noisy band struck up the sultan’s march, and the led horses appeared in sight. They came on with their grooms and their rich housings, a dozen matchless Arabians, scarce touching the ground with their prancings! Oh, how beautiful they were! Their delicate limbs, their small, veined heads and fiery nostrils, their glowing, intelligent eyes, their quick, light, bounding action, their round bodies, trembling with restrained and impatient energy, their curved, haughty necks, and dark manes flowing wildly in the wind! El Borak, the mare of the prophet, with the wings of a bird, was not lighter or more beautiful.
The sultan followed, preceded by his principal officers, with a stirrup-holder running at each side, and mounted on a tame-looking Hungarian horse. He wore the red Fez cap, and a cream-coloured cloak, which covered his horse to the tail. His face was lowering, his firm, powerful jaw, set in an expression of fixed displeasure, and his far-famed eye had a fierceness within its dark socket, from which I involuntarily shrank. The women, as he came along, set up a kind of howl, according to their custom, but he looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed totally unconscious of any one’s existence but his own. He was quite another-looking man from the Mahmoud I had seen smiling in his handja-bash on the Bosphorus.
As he dismounted and entered the mosque, we went on our way, moralising sagely on the novel subject of human happiness—our text, the cloud on the brow of a sultan, and the quiet sunshine in the bosoms of two poor pedestrians by the way-side.