"'I say, sir! here, sir! Hotel d'Orient is the best. Here's the card, sir—old palace—Murray says ver good,' cried one of the costumes.
"'Hi!' screamed another; 'don't go with him, master—too dear! Come with me?'
"The parties were immediately engaged in single combat.
"'Hotel d'Angleterre à Athènes, tenu par Elias Polichronopulos et Yani Adamopulos,' shouted another, all in a breath. I copy the names from the card he gave me, for they were such as no one could remember.
"'Yes, sir; good hotel,' said his companion. 'Look in Murray, sir—page 24—there, sir; here, sir; look, sir!'
"'Who believes Murray?' asked a fellow in plain clothes, with a strong Irish accent.
"'You would, if he put your house in the Handbook,' replied another."
By considerable display of mental and physical energy, a few of the passengers at last got into a boat and gained the quay of the Piræus. Grog's-shop was written on the shutter of a petty coffee-house, and a smart-looking Albanian stepped up, and proffered his services in excellent English. He had lived in London, he said: was a subject of Queen Victoria, and had the honour of being set down in Murray, page 25. With such recommendations, who could refuse the guidance of Demetri Pomorn? Not Mr Smith and his party, evidently, for they immediately engaged him for the day, hired a shabby vehicle from an adjacent cab-stand, and started on their hot and dusty road to Athens, thence about five miles distant. There they killed the lions, ate quince ices, bought Latakia tobacco, dined at the Hotel d'Orient à l'Anglaise, with Harvey sauce and pale ale, off English plates and dishes, and pulled on board again at night, to the tune of Jim Crow, played by an Anglified violin in one of the "grog's-shops" aforesaid. At five in the morning sleep was at an end, thanks to the clanking, stamping, and bawling upon the steamer's deck, and Mr Smith left the cabin, to reconnoitre and breathe fresh air. Some deck passengers had come on board at Athens; amongst others, a poor Albanian family, bound to Smyrna to pack figs. They were miserable, broken-spirited looking people, but picturesque in spite of their poverty; a melon or two and some coarse bread composed their entire stores for the voyage. This, however, was of no great duration, for at daybreak the next morning the passengers per Scamandre were told they were off Smyrna.
"It was very pleasant to hear this—to be told that the land I saw close to us was Asia, and that the distant slender spires that rose from the thickly clustered houses were minarets—that I should have twelve hours to go on shore, and see real camels, fig-trees, scheiks, and veiled women! And yet I could scarcely persuade myself that such was the case—that the distant Smyrna—of which I had only heard, in the Levant mail, as a remote place, burnt down once a-year, where figs came from—was actually within a good stone's throw of the steamer."
The travellers' expectations were more than realised. "I do not believe," says Mr Smith, "that throughout the future journey any impressions were conveyed more vivid than those we experienced during our first half hour in the bazaars of the sunny, bustling, beauty-teeming Smyrna." The appearance of a party of foreigners, and of the well-known face of the valet-de-place, caused a stir amongst the dealers, one of whom accosted Mr Smith in good English.
"'How d'ye do, sir; very well? that's right. Look here, sir; beautiful musk purse; very fine smell. Ten piastres.'
"A piastre is worth twopence and a fraction.
"'How did you learn to speak English so well?' I asked.
"'All English gentlemen come to me, sir,' he said, 'and I learn it from the ships, and from the Americans. Shake hands, sir; that's right. Buy the purse, sir?
"'How much is it?' asked one of our party.
"'Six piastres,' replied the brother of the merchant, who also spoke English, but had not heard the first price.
"'And you asked me ten!' I said to the other.
"'So I did, sir,' he replied with a laugh; 'then, if I get the other four, that's my profit—eh? But what's four piastres to an English gentleman?—nothing. It's too little for him to know about. Come—buy the purse. What will you give?'
"'Five piastres,' I answered.
"'It is yours,' he added directly, with a hearty laugh, throwing it to me.
"'What a merry fellow you are!' I observed.
"'Yes, sir; I laugh always; very good to laugh. English gentlemen like to laugh, I know; laugh very well. Look at his turban—laugh at that.'
"He directed our attention to an old Turk, who was going by with a most ludicrous and towering head-dress. It was diverting to find him making fun of his compatriot."
The mode of dealing, which in Christian Europe is stigmatised as Jewish—the system, namely, of asking thrice the value and twice what the seller means to take—is received, and by no means discreditable, in Turkish bazaars. The only way to purchase in such places, without being imposed upon, is at once to offer half the price demanded. This is met with a refusal; you walk away, the merchant calls you back, and you then offer him twenty per cent less than before. This plan Mr Smith, having picked up experience at Smyrna, put in practice at Constantinople, and generally found to answer.
Fig-packing, camels, and the slave-market are the three things which at Smyrna first attract the curiosity of the traveller from the West. Of the first-named, Mr Smith gives us a picturesque account. In the shade of a long alley of acacia and fig trees the packers were seated—Greeks by nation, and the women very handsome. "They first brought the figs from the warehouses, on the floor of which I saw hundreds of bushels, brought in on camels from the country. They were then pulled into shape, this task being confided to females; and after that sent on to the men who packed them. They gathered six or seven, one after the other, in their hand, and then wedged them into the drum, putting a few superior ones on the top, as we have seen done with strawberries." We have already mentioned that our sharp-sighted and lively traveller is somewhat of a naturalist, and here he favours us with the result of his observations upon the camel. That uncouth, but useful hunchback has been belauded and vaunted in prose and verse to such an exaggerated extent that we are quite tired of hearing of his virtues, and feel much indebted to the author of A Month at Constantinople for exhibiting his failings after the following fashion:—
"Your camel is a great obtainer of pity, under false pretence. He can be as self-willed and vicious as you please; and his bite is particularly severe: when once his powerful teeth have fastened, it is with the greatest difficulty that he is made to relinquish his hold. The pitiful noise too, which he makes, as small natural historians remark, upon being overladen, is all sham. It proceeds from sheer idleness, rather than a sense of oppression. With many camels, if you make pretence to put a small object on their back—a tile or a stone, for instance—whilst they are kneeling down, they begin mechanically to bellow, and blink their eyes, and assume such a dismal appearance of suffering and anguish, that it is perfectly painful for susceptible natures to regard them. And yet, when their load is well distributed and packed, they can move along under seven hundredweight."
But we must get on to Constantinople. Often as the magnificent spectacle has been described that bursts upon the view as you round Seraglio Point and glide into the Golden Horn, it yet would seem affected or eccentric of a traveller who writes about Constantinople were he to neglect recording the impression made upon him by that singularly lovely panorama. Mr Albert Smith's description is to the purpose, and we like it the better for the complete absence of that magniloquence in which so many tourists have indulged when discoursing upon the beauties of Stamboul. Probably no city in the world presents so great a contrast as Constantinople, when seen from a short distance and when examined in detail. Floating on the blue waters of the Bosphorus, the wondering stranger gazes upon a fairy spectacle of domes, and minarets, and cypress groves, of graceful palaces and stately mosques, gilded wherries and gaily-attired crowds. A few minutes elapse: the grave custom-house officials in their handsome barge have received the sixpenny bribe which exempts his luggage from examination; he lands at the Tophanné Stairs, and enters the steep lane that leads up to Pera, and in an instant the illusion is dissipated:—
"I felt," says Mr Smith, who readily avails himself, and in this instance very happily, of a theatrical comparison, "that I had been taken behind the scenes of a great 'effect.' The Constantinople of Vauxhall Gardens, a few years ago, did not differ more, when viewed in front from the gallery and behind from the dirty little alleys bordering the river. The miserable, narrow, ill-paved thoroughfare did not present one redeeming feature—even of picturesque dreariness. The roadway was paved with all sorts of ragged stones, jammed down together without any regard to level surface; and encumbered with dead rats, melon-rinds, dogs, rags, brickbats, and rubbish, that had fallen through the mules' baskets, as they toiled along it. The houses were of wood—old and rotten; and bearing traces of having been once painted red. There was, evidently, never any attempt made to clean them, or their windows or doorways. Here and there, where a building had been burnt, or had tumbled down, all the ruins remained as they had fallen. Even the better class of houses had an uncared-for, mouldy, plague-imbued, decaying look about them; with grimy lattices instead of windows, on the upper stories, and dilapidated shutters and doors on the ground-floors."