A GREEK SHEPHERD
Sounds, no matter how far afield, drift to you drowsily, like the voice of one reading aloud on a summer's day—the bleating of the sheep in the valley where Plato argued, and the jangling of a goat's bell, or the laughter of children flying kites on the Pnyx, a quarter of a mile away. And beyond the reach of sound is the Ægean Sea weltering in the sun, with little three-cornered sails, like tops, or a great vessel drawing a chalk-line after it through the still surface of the water. All things are possible at such a time in this place. You can almost hear the bees on Mount Hymettus, and you would receive the advance of a Centaur as calmly as Alice noted the approach of the White Rabbit. You believe in nymphs and satyrs. They have their homes there in those caves, and in the thick green, almost black, woods at the base of the Parnes range, and you love the bravery of St. Paul, who dared to doubt such things when he stood on the rock at your feet and told the men of Athens that they were in many things too superstitious. It is something to have seen the ribs cut in the rock on the top of the Acropolis which kept the wheels of the chariots from slipping when the Panathenaic procession moved along the Via Sacra to the Eleusinian mysteries, to have looked upon the caryatides of the Erechtheum, and to have wanted back as a lost part of your own self, for the time being, the Elgin marbles. When Napoleon stole the Venus of Milo he placed her in the Louvre, where every one will see her sooner or later; for if he is good he goes to Paris when he dies, and if he is bad he is sure to go there in his lifetime. But who has ever been to the British Museum? One would as soon think of visiting Pentonville prison. And how do the marbles look under the soot-stained windows or the gray of London fog? Like the few Lord Elgin did not want, and that stand out like ivory in their proper height against the soft sky that knows and loves them? When the people of Great Britain have returned the Elgin marbles to Greece, and the Rock of Gibraltar to Spain, and the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, and Egypt to the Egyptians, they will be a proud and haughty people, and will be able to hold their heads as high as any one.
One cannot help feeling that the King of Greece has a much greater responsibility than he knows. Other monarchs must look after their boundaries; he must not only look after his boundaries, but his sky-line. Another such affront to good taste as the observatory on the Hill of the Nymphs, and the sky-line of Athens will be unrecognizable. And the tall chimneys at the Piræus are not half as attractive to the view as the spars of the ships. It is much better not to have manufactories that must have chimneys than to spoil a view which no other kingdom can equal. Any king can put up a chimney; very few are given the care of an Acropolis; and if the King and Queen of Greece wish to be remembered as kindly by the rest of the world as they are loved dearly by their adopted people, they will guard the treasure put in their keeping, and sweep observatories from sacred hills, and continue to limit the guides on the Acropolis, and so win the gratitude of a civilized world.
VII
CONSTANTINOPLE
A little Italian steamer drew cautiously away from the Piræus when the waters of the bay were quite black and the quays looked like a row of foot-lights in front of the dark curtain of the night. She grazed the anchor chains of H. M. S. the Colossus, where that ship of war's broad white deck lay level with the water, as heavy and solid as a stone pier. She seemed to rise like an island of iron from the very bottom of the bay. Her sailors, as broad and heavy and clean as the decks, raised their heads from their pipes as we passed under the glare of the man-of-war's electric lights, and a bugle call came faintly from somewhere up in the bow. It sounded as though it were a quarter of a mile away. Our lower deck was packed with Greeks and Albanians and Turks, lying as closely together on the hard planks as cartridges in the front of a Circassian's overcoat. They were very dirty and very handsome, in rakish little black silk pill-box caps, with red and gold tops, and the initials "H. I." worked in the embroidery; their canvas breeches were as baggy and patched and muddy as those of a football-player, and their sleeveless jackets and double waistcoats of red and gold made them look like a uniformed soldiery that had seen very hard service. Priests of the Greek Church, with long hair and black formless robes, and hats like stovepipes with the brim around the upper end, paraded the narrow confines of the second cabin, and German tourists with red guide-books, and the Italian ship's officers with a great many medals and very bad manners, stamped up and down the main-deck and named the shadowy islands that rose from the sea and dropped out of sight again as we steamed past them.
In the morning the islands had disappeared altogether, and we were between high banks—higher than, but not so steep as the Palisades; rows of little scrubby trees ran along their fronts in lateral lines, and at their base mud forts with mud barracks and thatched roofs pointed little cannon at us from every jutting rock. We were so near that one could have hit the face of the high hills with a stone. These were the Dardanelles, the banks that nature has set between the Sea of Marmora and the Mediterranean to protect Constantinople from Mediterranean squadrons. We pass between these banks for hours, or between the high bank of Roumelia on one side and the low hilly country of Asia where Troy once stood on the other, until, at sunset, we are halted in the narrowest strait of the Dardanelles, between the Castle of Asia and the Castle of Europe, "the Lock of the Sea"—that sea of which Gibraltar is the key. That night we cross through the Sea of Marmora, and by sunrise are at Constantinople.
Constantinople is such a long word, and so few of the people you know have visited it in comparison with those who have wintered at Cairo or at Rome, or who have spent a season at Vienna, or taken music-lessons in Berlin, that you approach it with a mind prepared for surprises and with the hope of the unexpected. I had expected that the heart of the Ottoman Empire would be outwardly a brilliant and flashing city of gilded domes and minarets, a cluster of colored house fronts rising from the dancing waters of the Bosporus, and with the banks lined with great white palaces among gardens of green trees. There are more gilded domes in New York city and in Boston than in Constantinople. In New York there are three, and in Boston there is the State House, which looks very fine indeed from the new bridge across the Charles when the river is blocked with gray ice, and a setting sun is throwing a light on the big yellow globe. But Constantinople is all white and gray; the palaces that line the Bosporus are of a brilliant white stucco, and the mosques like monster turtles, which give the city its chief distinction, are a dull white. In the Turkish quarter the houses are more sombre still, of a peculiar black wood, and built like the old log forts in which our great-great-grandfathers took refuge from the Indians—square buildings with an overhanging story from which those inside could fire down upon the enemy below. The jutting balcony on the Turkish houses is for the less serious purpose of allowing the harem to look down upon the passers-by.