STREET VISTA IN GALATA FROM END OF BRIDGE, CONSTANTINOPLE
The center or heart of Eyub is a pleasant village, which gathers closely about the mosque, and is full of a quietly cheerful life. Just beyond the court of the mosque is a Turkish bath, where masseurs, with shaven heads and the usual tuft, lounge in the sunshine while waiting for customers. Near by are many small shops and cafés. In one of the latter I ate an excellent meal of rice and fat mutton, cooked on a spit which revolved in the street. If you stray from the center of the village toward the outskirts you find yourself in a deserted rummage of tombs, of white columns, white cupolas, cloisters, rooms for theological students, mausoleums of white and pink marble. No footsteps resound on the pavement of the road, no voices are heard in the little gardens, no eyes look out through the railings. As I wandered through the sunshine to the small stone platform, where the Sultan descends from his horse when he comes to be girded with the sword, I saw no sign of life; and the only noise that I heard was the persistent tap of a hammer near the sea, where his Majesty is building an imperial mosque of white stone from Trebizond.
Presently, growing weary of the white and silent streets of the tombs, I turned into a narrow alley that ran by a grated wall, above which great trees towered, climbing toward heaven with the minaret of the Mosque of Eyub, but failing in their journey a little below the muezzin's balcony. They were cypresses, and creepers climbed affectionately with them. Just beyond them I came into the court of the mosque, and found myself in the midst of a crowd of pilgrims before the tomb of Abu Eyub, which is covered with gilding and faience. Near it is a fountain protected by magnificent plane-trees which are surrounded by iron railings decorated with dervish caps.
I had been told more than once that the Christian dog is unwelcome in Eyub, and I was soon made aware of it. In the façade of the tomb there is a hole through which one can look into the interior. Taking my turn among the pilgrims, I presently stood in front of this aperture, and was about to peep in discreetly when a curtain was sharply drawn across it by some one inside. I waited for a moment, but in vain; the curtain was not drawn back, so at last I meekly went on my way, feeling rather humiliated. A Greek friend afterward told me that an imâm was stationed within the tomb, and that no doubt he had drawn the curtain against me because I was an unbeliever.
Duly chastened by this rebuff, I nevertheless went on to the mosque, and was allowed to go in for a moment on making a payment. The attendant was very rough and suspicious in manner, and watched me as if I were a criminal; and the pilgrims who thronged the interior stared at me with open hostility. I thought it wiser, therefore, to make only a cursory examination of the handsome marble interior, with its domes and semi-domes, and afterward, with a sense of relief, took my way up the hillside, to spend an hour among the leaning gravestones in the shade of the cypresses. Each stone above the grave of a man was carved with a fez, each woman's stone with a flower; and tiny holes formed receptacles to collect the rain-water, so that the birds might refresh themselves above the dust of the departed.
The great field of the dead was very tranquil that day. I saw only two closely veiled women moving slowly in the distance near the small tekkeh of the Mevlevi dervishes, and an old Turk sitting with a child, at the edge of the hill before a café. The women, who were shrouded in black, disappeared among the gigantic cypresses, seeking perhaps among the thousands of graves one stone with a flower or a fez that was dear to their hearts because of the sleeper beneath it. The old Turk rolled a cigarette in his knotty fingers, looking dreamily down at the child, who sat with his little legs under him silently staring at the water below, upon which no vessels, no caiques were moving. On the bare hill to my left I saw the white gleam of the stones in a Jewish cemetery; and, beneath, the pale curve of the Golden Horn, ending not far off in the peace of the desolate country. Red-roofed Eyub, shredding out into blanched edges of cupolas and tombs by the sultan's landing-place, marked the base of the hill; and, beyond, in the distance, mighty Stamboul, brown, with red lights here and there where the sun struck a roof, streamed away to Seraglio Point. The great prospect was closed by the shadowy mountains of Asia, among which I divined, rather than actually saw, the crest of Olympus.
In these Turkish cemeteries there is a romantic and poignant melancholy such as I have found in no other places of tombs. They breathe out an atmosphere of fatalism, of bloodless resignation to the inevitable. Their dilapidation suggests rather than mere indifference a sense of the uselessness of care. Dust unto dust—and there an end! But far off in Stamboul the minarets contradict the voices that whisper over the fields of the dead. For the land of the Turk is the home of contradictions; and among them there are some that are welcome.