Pera is a mongrel city, set on a height and streaming blatantly to Galata; a city of tall, discolored houses not unlike the houses of Naples; of embassies and churches; of glaring shops and cafés glittering with plate-glass, through which crafty, impudent eyes are forever staring out upon the passers-by; of noisy, unattractive hotels and wizen gardens, where bands play at stated hours, and pretentious, painted women from second-rate European music-halls posture and squall under the light of electric lamps. There is no rest, no peace in Pera. There seems to be no discipline. Motor-cars make noises there even in the dead of night, and when standing still, such as I never before heard or imagined. They have a special breed of cars in Pera. Bicyclists are allowed to use motor sirens to clear the way before them. One Sunday when, owing to a merciful strike of the coachmen, there was comparative calm, I saw a boy on horseback going at full gallop over the pavement of the Grande Rue. He passed and repassed me five times, lashing his horse till it was all in a lather. Nobody stopped him. You may do anything, it seems, in Pera, if it is noisy, brutal, objectionable. Pera has all that is odious of the Levant: impudence, ostentation, slyness, indelicacy, uproar, a glittering commonness. It is like a blazing ring of imitation diamonds squeezing a fat and dirty finger. But it is wonderfully interesting simply because of the variety of human types one sees there. The strange thing is that this multitude of types from all over the East and from all the nations of Europe is reduced, as it were, by Pera to a common, a very common, denominator. The influence of place seems fatal there.
THE BOSPHOROUS—CONSTANTINOPLE IN THE DISTANCE
Stamboul is a city of wood and of marble, of dusty, frail houses that look as if they had been run up in a night and might tumble to pieces at any moment, and of magnificent mosques, centuries old, solid, huge, superb, great monuments of the sultans. The fire-tower of Galata looks toward the fire-tower of Stamboul across a forest of masts; but no watchfulness, no swiftness of action, can prevent flames from continually sweeping through Stamboul, leaving waste places behind them, but dying at the feet of the mosques. As one looks at Stamboul from the heights of Pera, it rises on its hills across the water, beyond the sea of the Golden Horn, like a wonderful garden city, warm, almost ruddy, full of autumnal beauty, with its red-brown roofs and its trees. And out of its rich-toned rusticity the mosques heave themselves up like leviathans that have nothing in common with it; the Mosque of Santa Sophia, of the Sultan Achmet, with its six exquisite minarets, of Mohammed the Conqueror, of Suleiman the Magnificent, and how many others!
There is no harmony between the mosques of Stamboul and the houses of Stamboul. The former are enduring and grand; the latter, almost like houses of cards. And yet Stamboul is harmonious, is very beautiful. Romance seems brooding over it, trailing lights and shadows to clothe it with flame and with darkness. It holds you, it entices you. It sheds upon you a sense of mystery. What it has seen, Stamboul! What it has known! What a core of red violence that heart has and always has had! When the sunset dies away among the autumnal houses and between the minarets that rise above the city like prayers; when the many cypresses that echo the minarets in notes of dark green become black, and the thousands of houses seem to be subtly run together into a huge streak of umber above the lights at the waterside; when Seraglio Point stretches like a shadowy spear toward the Bosporus and the Black Sea, and the coasts of Asia fade away in the night, old Stamboul murmurs to you with a voice that seems to hold all secrets, to call you away from the world of Pera to the world of Aladdin's lamp. Pera glitters in the night and cries out to heaven. Old Stamboul wraps itself in a black veil and withdraws where you may not follow.
GALATA BRIDGE, WHICH CONNECTS GALATA AND PERA
When I think of Constantinople as a whole, as seen, say, from the top of the Galata tower, set up by the Genoese, I think of it as the most wonderful, the most beautiful, and the most superbly situated city I ever have seen.