LOOKING DOWN STEP STREET, CONSTANTINOPLE
The great bazaar of Stamboul is a city within a city. As you stand before its entrance you think of a fortress full of immured treasures. And there are treasures of price under the heavy arches, in the long roofed-over lanes. The bazaars of Tunis seem minute, of Damascus ephemeral, of Cairo dressed up, of Jerusalem crushed together and stifling, when compared with the vast bazaars of Stamboul, which have a solidity, a massiveness, unshared by their rivals. I saw there many cheap goods such as I have seen on certain booths in the East End of London, but they were surrounded with a certain pomp and dignity, with a curious atmosphere of age. Some parts of the bazaars are narrow. Others are broad and huge, with great cupolas above them, and, far up, wooden galleries running round them. Now and then you come upon an old fountain of stained marble and dim faience about which men are squatting on their haunches to wash their faces and hands and their carefully bared arms. The lanes are paved and are often slippery. Just under the lofty roof there are windows of white glass, and about them, and on arches and walls, there are crude decorations in strong blues and purples, yellows and greens. The serious merchants from many lands do not beset you with importunities as you pass; but sometimes a lustrous pair of eyes invites you to pause, or a dark and long-fingered hand gently beckons you toward a jewel, a prayer-carpet, a weapon, or something strange in silver or gold or ivory.
One day a man from Bagdad invited me to buy a picture as I drew near to him. It was the portrait of a dervish's cap worked in silk. The cap, orange-colored and silver, was perched upon a small table (in the picture) above which hung curtains in two shades of green. A heavy gilt frame surrounded this "old master" of the East. We bargained. The merchant's languages were broken, but at length I understood him to say that the cap was a perfect likeness. I retorted that all the dervishes' caps I had seen upon living heads were the color of earth. The merchant, I believe, pitied my ignorance. His eyes, hands, arms, and even his shoulders were eloquent of compassion. He lowered the price of the picture by about half a farthing in Turkish money, but I resisted the blandishment and escaped into the jewel bazaar, half regretting a lost opportunity.
Many Turkish women come to the bazaars only to meet their lovers. They cover a secret desire by a pretense of making purchases. From the upper floor of the yellow-blue-and-red kiosk, in which Turkish sweets are sold, and you can eat the breasts of chickens cooked deliciously in cream and served with milk and starch, I have watched these subtle truants passing in their pretty disguises suggestive of a masked ball. They look delicate and graceful in their thin and shining robes, like dominoes, of black or sometimes of prune-color, with crape dropping over their faces and letting you see not enough; for many Turkish women are pretty.
PUBLIC LETTER-WRITERS IN A CONSTANTINOPLE STREET
One day I was in the upper room of a photographer's shop when two Turkish women came in and removed their veils, standing with their backs to the English infidel. One was obviously much younger than the other, and seemed to have a beautiful figure. I was gazing at it, perhaps rather steadily, when, evidently aware of my glance, she turned slowly and deliberately round. For two or three minutes she faced me, looking to right and left of me, above me, even on the floor near my feet, with her large and beautiful blue-gray eyes. She was lovely. Young, perhaps eighteen, she was slightly painted, and her eyebrows and long curling lashes were blackened. Her features were perfect, her complexion was smooth and brilliant, and her expression was really adorable. It seemed to say to me quietly:
"Yes, you are right. It is foolish ever to conceal such a face as this with a veil when really there is not too much beauty in the world. Mais que voulez-vous? Les Turcs!" And the little hanum surely moved her thin shoulders contemptuously. But her elderly companion pulled at her robe, and slowly she moved away. As the two women left the room, the photographer, a Greek, looked after them, smiling. Then he turned to me, spread out his thin hands, and said, with a shrug, "Encore des désenchantées!"
I thought of the disenchanted one day as I sat among the letter-writers in the large and roughly paved court of the "Pigeon's Mosque," or Mosque of Bajazet II. For hours I had been wandering on foot through the upper quarters of old Stamboul, and I could not release my mind from the dull pressure of its influence. All those wooden houses, silent, apparently abandoned, shuttered—streets and streets of them, myriads of them! Now and then above the carved wood of a lattice I had seen a striped curtain, cheap, dusty, hanging, I guessed, above a cheap and dusty divan. The doors of the houses were large and solid, like prison doors. Before one, as I slowly passed by, I had seen an old Turk in a long quilted coat of green, with a huge key in his hand, about to enter. He glanced to right and left, then thrust the key into the door. I had felt inclined to stop and say to him: