Past the Kamara and Shabaloh lights, we at last see the broad rays from the Kali Akra, and then we head straight out upon the lonely sea for the Bosphorus. One by one, the tired travellers, some of them from Ostend, Berlin, or Petersburg, make for their berths, and finding myself alone, I turn into the comfortable deck cabin kindly secured for me by telegram by my friend the Minister of Finance in Bucharest.
Rising early, I was already out on deck and taking photographs as we passed the two Turkish forts, Kilia and Poiraz, at the narrow entrance to the Bosphorus. And after stopping to take up our pilot, we crept slowly up the narrow channel amid delightful scenery, some of which I photographed and have reproduced in these pages, past the pretty summer resort of Therapia and Anatoli Hissar, until we approached the capital of Turkey, with her hundred domes and minarets, looking almost like a fairy city against the blue cloudless sky as we approached.
But what a disenchantment on landing! That terrible rabble at Galata in the midst of dirt and squalor, of shouting touts, scrambling porters, and scavenger dogs, is a thing to be ever remembered. Fortunately, I had a Greek dragoman, one Demosthenes Cambothecras, to meet me. I can recommend him as an excellent and honest fellow, and to the intending traveller I may say that a letter addressed to the Pera Palace Hotel will always find him.
He stood on the quay amid the thousand off-scum of Constantinople, and shouted my name. I shouted back, and ten minutes later we met. When I gave him over my baggage ticket, he said—
“The customs here, m’sieur, are difficult. But, with your permission, I will give the officer five francs.”
I assented readily, and my luggage was passed without inquiry, while that of a bespectacled Hungarian next me was examined piece by piece, greatly to the disgust and consternation of his obese wife.
I saw no money pass in the shabby, shed-like Custom House, but he told me that the chief of the Customs employed an agent out in the street to receive his bribes! So much for the morality of the Custom dues in Turkey. In that very same week the British Ambassador had made protest to the Sublime Porte regarding the same thing, but was promptly “snuffed out” by the all-influential Power, Germany.
Germany and German interests are always paramount in Turkey. If you are an Englishman, you may take a back seat and endure all your passport worries, but the German is, by the Turk, supposed to be his friend. German diplomacy is clever, wary, and unscrupulous, and in the Sultan’s capital you are treated with deference if you are a subject of the Kaiser William.
And how strange and ridiculous it all is! Germany intends ere long to wipe Turkey off the face of Europe—only Turkey cannot see it. She is fascinated and spellbound by German cringing and German goodwill, all pretence, and all directed towards the one end of traitorous abandonment.
Great Britain, notwithstanding her fine Embassy, is entirely eclipsed by the big white palace overlooking the Bosphorus which houses the German Ambassador. Tewfik Pasha, the Sultan’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, lives beneath its shadow, and the Turks look upon Germany as their natural protector and friend. A British protest to the Porte passes unheeded, while a German protest receives attention and adjustment the very next day. A German diplomatist at the Sublime Porte told me this with a roar of laughter, adding—