We set sail towards the hills of Galata and Pera; the Seraglio receded from us and grew larger in receding in proportion as the eye embraced more and more the vast outlines of its walls and the multitude of its roofs, its trees, its kiosks and its palaces. Of itself it is sufficient to constitute a large city. The harbour hollows itself out more and more before us; it winds like a canal between the flanks of the curved mountains, and increases as we advance. The harbour does not resemble a harbour in the least; it is rather a large river like the Thames, enclosing the two coasts of the hills laden with towns, and covered from one bank to the other with an interminable flotilla of ships variously grouped the entire length of the houses. We pass by this innumerable multitude of boats, some riding at anchor and some about to set sail, sailing before the wind towards the Bosphorus, towards the Black Sea, or towards the Sea of Marmora; boats of all shapes and sizes and flags, from the Arabian barque, whose prow springs and rises like the beak of antique galleys, to the vessel of three decks with its glittering walls of bronze. Some flocks of Turkish caïques, managed by one or two rowers in silken sleeves, little boats that serve as carriages in the maritime streets of this amphibious town, circulate between the large masses, cross and knock against each other without overturning, and jostle one another like a crowd in public places; and clouds of gulls, like beautiful white pigeons, rise from the sea at their approach, to travel further away and be rocked upon the waves. I did not try to count the vessels, the ships, the brigs, the boats of all kinds and the barks that slept or travelled in the harbour of Constantinople, from the mouth of the Bosphorus and the point of the Seraglio to Eyoub and the delicious valleys of sweet waters. The Thames at London offers nothing in comparison. It will suffice to say that independently of the Turkish flotilla and the European men-of-war at anchor in the centre of the canal, the two sides of the Golden Horn are covered two or three vessels deep for about a mile in length. We could only see the ocean by looking between the file of prows and our glance lost itself at the back of the gulf which contracted and ran into the shore amid a veritable forest of masts.
I have just been strolling along the Asian shore on my return this evening to Constantinople, and I find it a thousand times more beautiful than the European shore. The Asian shore owes almost nothing to man; everything here has been accomplished by nature. Here there is no Buyukdere, no Therapia, no palace of ambassadors, and no town of Armenians or Franks; there are only mountains, gorges that separate them, little valleys carpeted with meadows that seem to dig themselves out of the rocks, rivulets that wind about them, cascades that whiten them with their foam, forests that hang to their flanks, glide into their ravines, and descend to the very edges of the innumerable coast gulfs; a variety of forms and tints, and of leafy verdure, which the brush of a landscape-painter could not even hope to suggest. Some isolated houses of sailors or Turkish gardeners are scattered at great distances on the shore, or thrown on the foreground of a wooded hill, or grouped upon the point of rocks where the current carries you, and breaks into waves as blue as the night sky; some white sails of fishermen, who creep along the deep coves, which you see glide from one plane-tree to another, like linen that the washerwomen fold; innumerable flights of white birds that dry themselves on the edge of the meadows; eagles that hover among the heights of the mountains near the sea; mysterious creeks entirely shut in between rocks and trunks of gigantic trees, whose boughs, overcharged with leaves, bend over the waves and form upon the sea cradles wherein the caïques creep. One or two villages hidden in the shadow of these creeks with their gardens behind them on those green slopes, and their group of trees at the foot of the rocks, with their barks rocked by the gentle waves before their doors, their clouds of doves on the roofs, their women and children at the windows, their old men seated beneath the plane-trees at the foot of the minaret; labourers returning from the fields in their caïques; others who have filled their barks with green faggots, myrtle, or flowering heath to dry it for fuel in the winter; hidden behind these heaps of slanting verdure that border and descend into the water, you perceive neither the bark nor the rower, and you believe that a portion of the bank detached from the earth by the current is floating at haphazard on the sea with its green foliage and its perfumed flowers. The shore presents this same appearance as far as the castle of Mahomet II., which from this coast also seems to shut in the Bosphorus like a Swiss lake; there, it changes its character; the hills, less rugged, sink their flanks and more gently hollow into narrow valleys; the Asiatic villages extend more richly and nearer together; the Sweet Waters of Asia, a charming little plain shadowed by trees and sown with kiosks and Moorish fountains opens out to the vision.
Beyond the palace of Beglierby, the Asian coast again becomes wooded and solitary as far as Scutari, which is as brilliant as a garden of roses, at the extremity of a cape at the entrance of the Sea of Marmora. Opposite, the verdant point of the Seraglio presents itself to the eye; and between the European coast, crowned with its three painted towns, and the coast of Stamboul, all glittering with its cupolas and minarets, opens the immense port of Constantinople, where the ships anchored at the two banks leave only one large water-way for the caïques. I glide through this labyrinth of buildings, as in a Venetian gondola under the shadow of palaces, and I land at the échelle des Morts, under an avenue of cypresses.
Voyage en Orient (Paris, 1843).
THE YELLOWSTONE[13]
(UNITED STATES)
RUDYARD KIPLING
“That desolate land and lone
Where the Big Horn and Yellowstone
Roar down their mountain path.”