We walked on to the square of Sultana Valide. Its large area was crowded with the buyers and sellers of a travelling fair—a sort of Jews’ market held on different days in different parts of this vast capital. In Turkey every nation is distinguished by its dress, and almost as certainly by its branch of trade. On the right of the gate, under a huge plane-tree, shedding its yellow leaves among the various wares, stood the booths of a group of Georgians, their round and rosy-dark faces (you would know their sisters must be half houris) set off with a tall black cap of curling wool, their small shoulders with a tight jacket studded with silk buttons, and their waist with a voluminous silken sash, whose fringed ends fell over their heels as they sat cross-legged, patiently waiting for custom. Hardware is the staple of their shops, but the cross-pole in front is fantastically hung with silken garters and tasselled cords, and their own Georgian caps, with a gay crown of cashmere, enrich and diversify the shelves. I bought a pair or two of blushing silk garters of a young man, whose eyes and teeth should have been a woman’s, and we strolled on to the next booth.
Here was a Turk, with a table covered by a broad brass waiter, on which was displayed a tempting array of mucilage, white and pink, something of the consistency of blanc-mange. A dish of sugar, small gilded saucers, and long-handled, flat, brass spoons, with a vase of rose-water, completed his establishment. The grave Mussulman cut, sugared, and scented the portions for which we asked, without condescending to look at us or open his lips, and, with a glass of mild and pleasant sherbet from his next neighbour, as immovable a Turk as himself, we had lunched, extremely to my taste, for just five cents American currency.
A little farther on I was struck with the appearance of two men, who stood bargaining with a Jew. My friend knew them immediately as fakeers, or religious devotees from Hindoostan. He addressed them in Arabic, and, during their conversation of ten minutes, I studied them with some curiosity. They were singularly small, without any appearance of dwarfishness, their limbs and persons slight, and very equally and gracefully proportioned. Their features were absolutely regular, and, though small as a child’s of ten or twelve years, were perfectly developed. They appeared like men seen through an inverted opera-glass. An exceedingly ashy, olive complexion, hair of a kind of glittering black, quite unlike in texture and colour any I have ever before seen; large, brilliant, intense black eyes, and lips (the most peculiar feature of all), of lustreless black,[[14]] completed the portraits of two as remarkable-looking men as I have anywhere met. Their costume was humble, but not unpicturesque. A well-worn sash of red silk enveloped the waist in many folds, and sustained trowsers tight to the legs, but of the Turkish ampleness over the hips. Their small feet, which seemed dried up to the bone, were bare. A blanket, with a hood marked in a kind of arabesque figure, covered their shoulders, and a high quilted cap, with a rim of curling wool, was pressed down closely over the forehead. A crescent-shaped tin vessel, suspended by a leather strap to the waist, and serving the two purposes of a charity-box, and a receptacle for bread and vegetables, seemed a kind of badge of their profession. They were lately from Hindoostan, and were begging their way still farther into Europe. They received our proffered alms without any mark of surprise or even pleasure, and laying their hands on their breasts, with countenances perfectly immoveable, gave us a Hindoostanee blessing, and resumed their traffic. They see the world, these rovers on foot! And I think, could I see it myself in no other way, I would e’en take sandal and scrip, and traverse it as a dervish or beggar!
The alleys between the booths were crowded with Turkish women, who seemed the chief purchasers. The effect of their enveloped persons, and eyes peering from the muslin folds of the yashmack, is droll to a stranger. It seemed to me like a masquerade, and the singular sound of female voices, speaking through several thicknesses of a stuff, bound so close on the mouth as to show the shape of the lips exactly, perfected the delusion. It reminded me of the half-smothered tones beneath the masks in carnival-time. A clothes-bag with yellow slippers would have about as much form, and might be walked about with as much grace as a Turkish woman. Their fat hands, the finger-nails dyed with henna, and their unexceptionably magnificent eyes, are all that the stranger is permitted to peruse. It is strange how universal is the beauty of the eastern eye. I have looked in vain hitherto, for a small or inexpressive one. It is quite startling to meet the gaze of such large liquid orbs, bent upon you from their long silken fringes, with the unwinking steadiness of look common to the females of this country. Wrapped in their veils, they seem unconscious of attracting attention, and turn and look you full in the face, while you seek in vain for a pair of lips to explain by their expression the meaning of such particular notice.
The Jew is more distinguishable at Constantinople than elsewhere. He is compelled to wear the dress of his tribe (and its “badge of sufferance,” too), and you will find him, wherever there is trafficking to be done, in a small cap, not ungracefully shaped, twisted about with a peculiar handkerchief of a small black print, and set back so as to show the whole of his national high and narrow forehead. He is always good humoured and obsequious, and receives the curse with which his officious offers of service are often repelled, with a smile, and a hope that he may serve you another time. One of them, as we passed his booth, called our attention to some newly-opened bales, bearing the stamp, “TREMONT MILL, LOWELL, MASS.” It was a long distance from home to meet such familiar words!
We left the square of the sultan mother, and entered a street of confectioners. The East is famous for its sweetmeats, and truly a more tempting array never visited the Christmas dream of a schoolboy. Even Felix, the patissier nonpareil of Paris, might take a lesson in jellies. And then for “candy” of all colours of the rainbow (not shut enviously in with pitiful glass cases, but piled up to the ceiling in a shop all in the street, as it might be in Eutopia, with nothing to pay), it is like a scene in the Arabian Nights. The last part of the parenthesis is almost true, for with a small coin of the value of two American cents, I bought of a certain kind called, in Turkish, “peace to your throat” (they call things by such poetical names in the East), the quarter of which I could not have eaten, even in my best “days of sugar candy.” The women of Constantinople, I am told, almost live on confectionery. They eat incredible quantities. The sultan’s eight hundred wives and women employ five hundred cooks, and consume two thousand five hundred pounds of sugar daily! It is probably the most expensive item of the seraglio kitchen.
A turn or two brought us to the entrance of a long dark passage, of about the architecture of a covered bridge in our country. A place richer in the oriental and picturesque could scarce be found between the Danube and the Nile. It is the bazaar of drugs. As your eye becomes accustomed to the light, you distinguish vessels of every size and shape, ranged along the receding shelves of a stall, and filled to the uncovered brim with the various productions of the Orient. The edges of the baskets and jars are turned over with rich coloured papers (a peculiar colour to every drug), and broad spoons of boxwood are crossed on the top. There is the henna, in a powder of deep brown, with an envelope of deep Tyrian purple, and all the precious gums in their jars, golden-leafed, and spices and dyes and medicinal roots, and above hang anatomies of curious monsters, dried and stuffed, and in the midst of all, motionless as the box of sulphur beside him, and almost as yellow, sits a venerable Turk, with his beard on his knees, and his pipe-bowl thrust away over his drugs, its ascending smoke-curls his only sign of life. This class of merchants is famous for opium eaters, and if you pass at the right hour, you find the large eye of the silent smoker dilated and wandering, his fingers busy in tremulously counting his spice-wood beads, and the roof of his stall wreathed with clouds of smoke, the vent to every species of eastern enthusiasm. If you address him, he smiles, and puts his hand to his forehead and breast, but condescends to answer no question till it is thrice reiterated, and then in the briefest word possible, he answers wide of your meaning, strokes the smoke out of his moustache, and slipping the costly amber between his lips, abandons himself again to his exalted revery. I write this after being a week at Constantinople, during which the Egyptian bazaar has been my frequent and most fancy-stirring lounge. Of its forty merchants, there is not one whose picturesque features are not imprinted deeply in my memory. I have idled up and down in the dim light, and fingered the soft henna, and bought small parcels of incense-wood for my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable faces of the unconscious old Mussulmans, till my mind became somehow tinctured of the East, and (what will be better understood) my clothes steeped in the mixed and agreeable odours of the thousand spices. Where are the painters, that they have never found this mine of admirable studies? There is not a corner of Constantinople, nor a man in its streets, that were not a novel and a capital subject for the pencil. Pray, Mr. Cole, leave things that have been painted so often, as aqueducts and Italian ruins (though you do make delicious pictures, and could never waste time or pencils on anything), and come to the East for one single book of sketches! How I have wished I was a painter since I have been here!
| [14] | I have since met many of them in the streets of Constantinople, and I find it a distinguishing feature of their race. They look as if their lips were dead—as if the blood had dried beneath the skin. |