We shook our kind host by the hand, and stepped gingerly down in the fading twilight to our boat. As we were crossing an open space between the bazaars, two gentlemen in a costume half European, half Oriental, with spurs and pistols, and a quantity of dust on their moustaches, passed, and immediately turned and called me by name. The last place in which I should have looked for acquaintances, would be Gallipoli. They were two French exquisites whom I had known at Rome, travelling to Constantinople with no more serious object, I dare be sworn, than to return with long beards from the East. They had just arrived on horseback, and were looking for a khan. I commended them to my old friend the Jew, who offered at once to lodge them at his house, and we parted in this by-corner of Thrace, as if we had but met for the second time in a morning stroll to St. Peter’s.
We lay till noon in the glassy harbour of Gallipoli, and then the breeze came slowly up the Hellespont, its advancing edge marked by a crowd of small sail keeping even pace with its wings. We soon opened into the extending sea of Marmora, and the cloudy island of the same name is at this moment on our lee. The sun is setting gorgeously over the hills of Thrace, and thankful for sea-room once more, and a good breeze, we make ourselves certain of seeing Constantinople to-morrow.
We were ten miles distant when I came on deck this morning. A long line of land with a slightly waving outline began to emerge from the mist of sunrise, and with a glass I could distinguish the clustering masses and shining eminences of a distant and far extending city. We were approaching it with a cloud of company. A Turkish ship-of-war, with the crescent and star fluttering on her blood-red flag, a French cutter bearing the handsome tricolor at her peak, and an uncounted swarm of merchantmen, taking advantage of the newly-changed wind, were spreading every thread of canvass, and stretching on as eagerly as we toward the metropolis of the East. There was something in the companionship which elated me. It seemed as if all the world shared in my anticipations—as if all the world were going to Constantinople.
I approached the mistress of the East with different feelings from that which had inspired me in entering the older cities of Europe. The interest of the latter sprang from the past. Rome, Florence, Athens, were delightful from the store of history and poetry I brought with me and had accumulated in my youth—from what they once were, and for that of which they preserved the ruins. Constantinople, on the contrary, is still the gem of the Orient—still the home of the superb Turk, and the resort of many nations of the East—still all that fires curiosity and excites the imagination in the descriptions of the traveller. I was coming to a living city, full of strange people and strange costumes, language, and manners. It was, to the places I had seen, like the warm and breathing woman perfect in life, to the interesting but lifeless and mutilated statue.
As the distance lessened, the tall, slender, glittering minarets of a hundred mosques were first distinguishable. Towers, domes, and dark spots of cypresses next emerged to the eye, and a sea of buildings, followed undulating in many swells and widening along the line of the sea as if we were approaching a continent covered to its farthest limits with one unbroken city.
We kept on with unslackened sail to the shore which seemed closed before us. A few minutes opened to us a curving bay, winding in and lost to the eye behind a swelling eminence, and as if mosques, towers, and palaces, had spread away and opened to receive us into their bosom, we shot into the heart of a busy city, and dropped anchor at the feet of a cluster of hills, studded from base to summit with buildings of indescribable splendour.
An American gentleman had joined us in the Dardanelles, and stood with us, looking at the transcendent panorama. “What is this lovely point, gemmed with gardens and fantastic palaces, and with every variety of tree and building on its gentle slope descending so gracefully to the sea?” The Seraglio! “What is this opening of bright water, crowded with shipping, and sprinkled with these fairy boats so gaily decked and so slender, shooting from side to side like the crossing flight of a thousand arrows?” The Golden Horn, that winds up through the city and terminates in the valley of Sweet Waters! “And what is this other stream, opening into the hills to the east, and lined with glittering palaces as far as the eye can reach?” The Bosphorus. “And what is this, and that, and the other exquisite and surpassing beauty—features of a scene to which the earth surely has no shadow of a parallel?” Patience! patience! We have a month before us, and we will see.