OUR baggage is on the backs of hamals or porters, and we follow it and them like mourners at a funeral.
The first objects to attract our attention are some ill-conditioned curs of low degree, full-blooded curs, with not a particle of respectability about them except in very rare cases. They are nearly all of the nondescript sort which the ruralist designates as “yaller dog,” without reference to his color. Yellow is the prevailing hue; but there are black, brown, white, and spotted dogs among them, and one of my friends avers that he has seen green, red, blue, and pink dogs over in Stamboul. But I fear he had tarried too long in a certain café there, and partaken of the cup which necessarily inebriates while it cheers.
There is a good deal of wolfishness about these dogs both in habits and appearance. They have no home, they live in the streets, and hunt for their living wherever there is a chance to find anything. You see them lying in the open street, on the pavement where men and horses are passing, or on the narrow strip of sidewalk, as if the place belonged to them. Under very favorable circumstances they crouch in doorways, but in so doing they render themselves liable to be kicked soundly whenever an occupant of the premises happens along. When they lie in the street men and horses generally step over or around them; I say generally, as neither men nor horses are very particular, and you not unfrequently hear a prolonged yelp or howl from some unfortunate cur whose leg, tail, or body, has received the impress of a human or equine foot. You see dogs with frightful wounds received from horse shoes, and others with huge scars where such wounds have been healed. In the Grand Rue de Pera and other streets where carriages can circulate, the sleeping dogs are occasionally run over and either wounded or killed.
I was one day an unwilling witness of one of these occurrences. Within a yard of where I stood a carriage-wheel passed over a dog, lacerating him in such a way that he died in a few minutes. But while he lived his howling was fearful to hear, and it rang in my ears long after the poor brute had ceased to breathe.
The Turks in general care little about the sufferings of the dogs, or in fact of any living thing. Now and then, one of them shows a little kindness to the animals, allows them to sleep in his doorway, and sometimes feeds them with any refuse food he has at hand. The Christian inhabitants of the place are more amiably disposed towards the brutes, and frequently kill them in order to end their misery. There have been several raids upon the dogs in the Pera quarter, but the animals are so numerous and the opposition of the Turks is so great, that the numbers are not much diminished. Though the Turks consider the dog an unclean beast and have no love for him, they have a great aversion to taking life on the principle I have before mentioned of non-interference with the will of God.
“If God wished the dogs to die,” said a Turk one day, in discussing the question, “he would sweep them off by a pestilence. Inshallah! they shall live.”
A practical reason for maintaining these dogs in Constantinople is that they are excellent scavengers. In this respect they are regarded exactly as are the buzzards that abound in some of our southern cities.