| [13] | “Hair lustrous and smiling. The trope is none of mine. Æneas Sylvius hath crines ridentes.”—Anatomy of Melancholy. |
LETTER XXXII.
Constantinople—An Adventure with the Dogs of Stamboul—The Sultan’s Kiosk—The Bazaars—Georgians—Sweetmeats—Hindoostanee Fakeers—Turkish Women and their Eyes—The Jews—A Token of Home—The Drug Bazaar—Opium Eaters.
The invariable “Where am I?” with which a traveller awakes at morning was to me never more agreeably answered. At Constantinople! The early ship-of-war summons to “turn out,” was obeyed with alacrity, and with the first boat after breakfast I was set ashore at Tophana, the landing place of the Frank quarter of Stamboul.
A row of low-built cafés, with a latticed enclosure and a plentiful shade of plane-trees on the right; a large square, in the centre of which stood a magnificent Persian fountain, as large as a church, covered with lapis-lazuli and gold, and endless inscriptions in Turkish; a mosque buried in cypresses on the left; a hundred indolent-looking, large-trousered, moustached, and withal very handsome men, and twice the number of snarling, wolfish, and half-starved dogs, are some of the objects which the first glance, as I stepped on shore, left on my memory.
I had heard that the dogs of Constantinople knew and hated a Christian. By the time I had reached the middle of the square, a wretched puppy at my heels had succeeded in announcing the presence of a stranger. They were upon me in a moment from every heap of garbage, and every hole and corner. I was beginning to be seriously alarmed, standing perfectly still, with at least a hundred infuriated dogs barking in a circle around me, when an old Turk, selling sherbet under the shelter of the projecting roof of the Persian fountain, came kindly to my relief. A stone or two well aimed, and a peculiar cry, which I have since tried in vain to imitate, dispersed the hungry wretches, and I took a glass of the old man’s raising water, and pursued my way up the street. The circumstance, however, had discoloured my anticipations; nothing looked agreeably to me for an hour after it.
I ascended through narrow and steep lanes, between rows of small wooden houses, miserably built and painted, to the main street of the quarter of Pera. Here live all Christians and Christian ambassadors, and here I found our secretary of legation, Mr. H., who kindly offered to accompany me to old Stamboul.
We descended to the water-side, and stepping into an egg-shell caique, crossed the Golden Horn, and landed on a pier between the sultans green kiosk and the seraglio. I was fortunate in a companion who knew the people and spoke the language. The red-trousered and armed kervas, at the door of the kiosk, took his pipe from his mouth, after a bribe and a little persuasion, and motioned to a boy to show us the interior. A circular room, with a throne of solid silver embraced in a double colonnade of marble pillars, and covered with a roof laced with lapis lazuli and gold, formed the place from which Sultan Mahmoud formerly contemplated, on certain days, the busy and beautiful panorama of his matchless bay. The kiosk is on the edge of the water, and the poorest caikjee might row his little bark under its threshold, and fill his monarch’s eye, and look on his monarch’s face with the proudest. The green canvass curtains, which envelop the whole building, have, for a long time, been unraised, and Mahmoud is oftener to be seen on horseback, in the dress of a European officer, guarded by troops in European costume and array. The change is said to be dangerously unpopular.