Then back again to dollars, pounds, lire, marks, drachmas, kronen, roubles.
They ate enormously at meal times, and took snacks between meals. The fat American Jew at my table ate greedily, forgetting his fork sometimes, and mopping his plate with bits of bread. He bullied the stewards for bigger or tenderer helpings. He spoke Russian, German, and American with equal fluency, but an international accent. At night there was card playing, outbursts of song, gusts of laughter, popping of champagne corks, whisperings and chasings along the dark decks, a reek of cigar smoke, no silence or wonderment because of the beauty through which our boat was passing.
The Ionian Sea, merging into the Adriatic, was so calm that when our ship divided its waters, leaving behind a long furrow, the side of each wave was like a polished jewel, and reflected the patches of snow still on the mountain crests (though it was May, and hot) and the fissures in the rocks. It was unbroken by any ripple, except where the boat stirred its quietude by a long ruffle of feathers, and it was so blue that it seemed as though one’s hand would be dyed, like a potter’s, to the same color, if one dipped it in. With this sea, and the sky above, we went on traveling through a blue world, except where our eyes wandered into the gorges of those mountains along the coast of old Illyria, where the barren rocks are scarred and gleam white, or when they were touched by the sun’s rays at dawn and sunset and glittered in a golden way, or became washed with rose water, or all drenched in mist as purple as the Imperial mantle which once fell across them. All day long the ship was followed by a flight of sea gulls skimming on quiet wings and calling plaintively so that we heard again the sirens who cried to Ulysses as he sailed this way through the Enchanted Seas.
We steamed slowly through the Gulf of Corinth, so narrow that if any boulder had fallen from its high walls it would have smashed a hole in our ship. Small Greek boys ran along a foot path, clamoring for pennies like gutter urchins beside an English char-à-banc. Then we lay off Athens, but in spite of a special Greek visa from the consulate in London for which I had paid a fee, I was not allowed to land. Through my glasses I saw, with a thrill of emotion, the tall columns of the Parthenon. At our ship’s side was a crowd of small craft rowed by brown-skinned boatmen who kept up a chant of Kyrie! Kyrie! (Lord! Lord!) like the Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy!) of the Catholic Mass, touting for the custom of passengers, as they did three thousand years ago, with those same shouts and waving of brown arms, and curses to each other, and raising of oars, when ships came in from Crete and Mediterranean ports with merchandise and travelers.
So we passed into the Ægean Sea, and saw on our port side, like low-lying clouds, the Greek islands in which the Gods once dwelt, and the old heroes. We drew close to Gallipoli, and I thought of heroes more modern, lying there in graves that were not old, who had done deeds needing more courage than that of Ulysses and his men, and who had faced monsters of human machine guns more dreadful than dragons and many-headed dogs, and the Medusa head. The trenches were plainly visible—British and Turkish—and the old gun-emplacements, and the Lone Tree, and the barren slopes of Achi Baba where the flower of Australian and New Zealand youth had fallen, and many Irish and English boys.
“Quite a good landing place,” said one of the passengers by my side. I looked at him, suspecting irony, and remembering the landing of the Twenty-Ninth Division, and the Australian troops, under destroying fire. But this elderly Jew said again, in a cheerful way, “A nice cove for a boat to land.”
We went on slowly through the narrow channel, until in the morning sunlight we saw the glory of the Golden Horn and the minarets of Constantinople. It was then that half the passengers put on the red fez of Islam, and paced the deck restlessly, with their eyes strained toward the city of the Sultan.
The fat American Jew touched me on the arm and spoke solemnly, with a kind of warning. “For those who don’t wear a fez Constantinople won’t be a safe place, I guess. They say there are bodies floating every morning at the Golden Horn—stabbed in the back. I’m keeping close to Pera.”
The first view of the Golden Horn was as beautiful as I had hoped, more than I had imagined, as we rounded the old Seraglio Point and saw in the early sunlight of a May morning the glittering panorama of Constantinople.
The domes of San Sophia lay like rose-colored clouds above the cypress trees. Beyond was the great mosque of Suleyman, its minarets, white and slender, cutting the blue sky like lances. Further back, rising above a huddle of brown old houses, was the mosque of Mohammad, the conqueror who, five hundred years ago, rode into San Sophia on a day of victory, over the corpses there, and left the imprint of a bloody hand on one of the pillars where it is now sculptured in marble. White in the sun on the water’s edge were the long walls of the Sultan’s palace. One could see Galata, and the old bridge which crosses from Stamboul, and above, on the hill, Pera, with its Grand’ Rue, its night clubs, its cabarets, its Christian churches, and haunts of vice.