"I COME from L—— one of the northern Sporades. No, it is too small, you will only find it on German maps. I've got a marble cottage there. Don't be alarmed. It is deserted. Nobody will call on us."
They had embarked at the Galata bridge the day before, on leaving the train. A forbidding rain-swept landscape. The cupolas of the mosques were like big water-logged balloons which were unable to rise; every year the Pera sky-scrapers increase in number and add to the general depression; the river steamboats belch out clouds of Heraklian coal which grits between one's teeth, and dreary Scythian mists creep up from the Black Sea along the leaden Bosphorous. The driving rain soaked the houses of Scutari, turning their silver grey wood black.
"In Turkey," said Irene, "it always rains."
"I suppose if the Greeks had come back to Constantinople the weather would have changed completely."
Lewis tried to tease her, but she refused to see any humour in it, concentrating in herself the undying hatred of Greek for Turk.
"You French people, with your literary flirtations with Turkey and your blindness to her infidelities, are quite intolerable. Haven't you understood the lesson of the war?" And Irene pointed with her finger to the Goeben, a worn-out, unkempt hulk, but alive once more in front of the Old Seraglio.
"But I'm not standing up for the Turks."
"Yes, you are."
"I'm not."
Irene heaved "one of those Greek sighs that make the Bosphorous tremble," as Byron says.