IN CONSTANTINOPLE
THE GRAND BAZAAR IN CONSTANTINOPLE
Chapter V
IN CONSTANTINOPLE
Constantinople is beautiful and hateful. It fascinates and it repels. And it bewilders—how it bewilders! No other city that I have seen has so confused and distressed me. For days I could not release myself from the obsession of its angry tumult. Much of it seems to be in a perpetual rage, pushing, struggling, fighting, full of ugly determination to do—what? One does not know, one cannot even surmise what it desires, what is its aim, if, indeed, it has any aim. These masses of dark-eyed, suspicious, glittering people thronging its streets, rushing down its alleys, darting out of its houses, calling from its windows, muttering in its dark and noisome corners, gathering in compact, astonishing crowds in its great squares before its mosques, blackening even its waters, amid fierce noises of sirens from its innumerable steamers and yells from its violent boatmen, what is it that they want? Whither are they going in this brutal haste, these Greeks, Corsicans, Corfiotes, Montenegrins, Armenians, Jews, Albanians, Syrians, Egyptians, Arabs, Turks? They have no time or desire to be courteous, to heed any one but themselves. They push you from the pavement. They elbow you in the road. Upon the two bridges they crush past you, careless if they tread upon you or force you into the mud. If you are in a caique, traveling over the waters of the Golden Horn, they run into you. Caique bangs into caique. The boatmen howl at one another, and somehow pull their craft free. If you are in a carriage, the horses slither round the sharp corners, and you come abruptly face to face with another carriage, dashing on as yours is dashing, carelessly, scornfully, reckless apparently of traffic and of human lives. There seems to be no plan in the tumult, no conception of anything wanted quietly, toward which any one is moving with a definite, simple purpose. The noise is beyond all description. London, even New York, seems to me almost peaceful in comparison with Constantinople. There is no sound of dogs. They are all dead. But even their sickly howling, of which one has heard much, must surely have been overpowered by the uproar one hears to-day, except perhaps in the dead of night.
Soldiers seem to be everywhere. To live in Constantinople is like living in some vast camp. When I was there, Turkey was preparing feverishly for war. The streets were blocked with trains of artillery. The steamers in the harbor were vomiting forth regiments of infantry. Patrols of horsemen paraded the city. On my first night in Pera, when, weary with my efforts to obtain some general conception of what the spectacular monster really was, what it wanted, what it meant, what it was about to do, I had at length fallen asleep toward dawn, I was wakened by a prolonged, clattering roar beneath my windows. I got up, opened the shutters, and looked out. And below me, in the semi-darkness, I saw interminable lines of soldiers passing: officers on horseback, men tramping with knapsacks on their backs and rifles over their shoulders; then artillery, gun-carriages, with soldiers sitting loosely on them holding one another's hands; guns, horses, more horses, with officers riding them; then trains of loaded mules. On and on they went, and always more were coming behind. I watched them till I was tired, descending to the darkness of Galata, to the blackness of old Stamboul.
Gradually, as the days passed by, I began to understand something of the city, to realize never what it wanted or what it really meant, but something of what it was. It seemed to me then like a person with two natures uneasily housed in one perturbed body. These two natures were startlingly different the one from the other. One was to me hateful—Pera, with Galata touching it. The other was not to be understood by me, but it held me with an indifferent grasp, and from it to me there flowed a strange and almost rustic melancholy that I cared for—Stamboul. And between these two natures a gulf was fixed—the gulf of the Golden Horn.