 | VII. Inklings of adventure |  |
7. VII.
We had wandered out from our semi-European,
semi-Turkish lodgings on the third morning after our
arrival at Constantinople, and picking our way listlessly
over the bad pavement of the suburb of Pera,
stood at last in the small burying-ground at the summit
of the hill, disputing amicably upon what quarter
of the fair city beneath us we should bestow our share
in the bliss of that June morning.
“It is a heavenly day,” said Job, sitting down unthinkingly
upon a large sculptured turban that formed
the head-stone to the grave of some once-wealthy
summit of Bulgurlu.
The difference between Job and myself was a mania,
on his part for green fields, and on mine for human
faces. I knew very well that his remark was a leader
to some proposition for a stroll over the wilder hills of
the Bosphorus, and I was determined that he should
enjoy, instead, the pleasure of sympathy in my nevertiring
amusement of wandering in the crowded bazaars
on the other side of the water. The only way to accomplish
it, was to appear to yield the point, and then
rally upon his generosity. I had that delicacy for his
feelings (I had brought him all the way from the Green
Mountains at my own expense) never to carry my
measures too ostentatiously.
Job was looking south, and my face was as resolutely
turned north. We must take a caique in
any case at Galata, (lying just below us) but if we
turned the prow south in the first instance, farewell at
every stroke to the city! Whereas a northern course
took us straight up the Golden Horn, and I could appear
to change my mind at any moment, and land immediately
in a street leading to the bazaars. Luckily,
while I was devising an errand to go up the channel
instead of down, a small red flag appeared gliding
through the forest of masts around the curve of the
water-side at Tophana, and, in a moment more, a
high-pooped vessel, with the carved railings and out-landish
rigging of the ships from the far East, shot out
into the middle of the bay with the strong current of
the Bosphorus, and squaring her lattine sail, she
rounded a vessel lying at anchor with the flag of Palestine,
and steered with a fair wind up the channel of the
Golden Horn. A second look at her deck disclosed
to me a crowd of people, mostly women, standing
amid-ships, and the supposition with which I was about
after her seemed to me now almost a certainty.
“It is a slave-ship from Trebizond, ten to one, my
dear Job!”
He slid off the marble turban which he had profaned
so unscrupulously, and the next minute we
passed the gate that divides the European from the
commercial suburb, and were plunging down the steep
and narrow straits of Galata with a haste that, to the
slippered and shuffling Turks we met or left behind,
seemed probably little short of madness. Of a hundred
slender and tossing caiques lying in the disturbed
waters of the bay, we selected the slenderest and best
manned; and getting Job in with the usual imminent
danger of driving his long legs through the bottom of
the egg-shell craft, we took in one of the obsequious
Jews who swarm about the pier as interpreters, coiled
our legs under us in the hollow womb of the caique,
and shot away like a nautilus after the slaver.
The deep-lying river that coils around the throbbing
heart of Constantinople is a place of as delicate navigation
as a Venetian lagoon on a festa, or a soiree of
middling authors. The Turk, like your plain-spoken
friend, rows backward, and with ten thousand eggshells
swarming about him in every direction, and his
own prow rounded off in a pretty iron point, an extra
piastre for speed draws down curses on the caikji and
the Christian dogs who pay him for the holes he lets
into his neighbors' boats, which is only equalled in bitterness
and profusion by the execrations which follow
what is called “speaking your mind.” The Jew
laughed, as Jews do since Shylock, at the misfortunes
of his oppressors; and, in the exercise of his vocation,
translated us the oaths as they came in right and left
—most of them very gratuitous attacks on those, (as
Job gravely remarked,) of whom they could know
very little,—our respected mothers.
The slackening vessel lost her way as she got opposite
the bazaar of dried fruits, and, as her yards came
down by the run, she put up her helm, and ran her
towering prow between a piratical-looking Egyptian
craft, and a black and bluff English collier, inscribed
appropriately on the stern as the “Snow-drop” from
Newcastle. Down plumped her anchor, and in the
next moment the Jew hailed her by our orders, and
my conjecture was proved to be right. She was from
Trebizond, with slaves and spices.
“What would they do if we were to climb up her
side?” I asked of the Israelite.
He stretched up his crouching neck till his twisted
beard hung clear off like a waterfall from his chin,
and looked through the carved railing very intently.
“The slaves are Georgians,” he answered, after
awhile, “and if there were no Turkish purchasers on
board, they might simply order you down again.”
“And if there were—”
“The women would be considered damaged by a
Christian eye, and the slave merchant might shoot you
or pitch you overboard.”
“Is that all?” said Job, evolving his length very
deliberately from its coil, and offering me a hand the
next moment from the deck of the slaver. Whether
the precedence he took in all dangers arose from affection
for me, or from a praiseworthy indifference to the
fate of such a trumpery collection as his own body and
limbs, I have never decided to my own satisfaction.
In the confusion of port-officers and boats alongside,
all hailing and crying out together, we stood on the
outer side of the deck unobserved, and I was soon intently
occupied in watching the surprise and wonder
of the pretty toys who found themselves for the first
time in the heart of a great city. The owner of their
charms, whichever of a dozen villanous Turks I saw
about them it might be, had no time to pay them very
about their shoulders, they stood open-mouthed and
staring—ten or twelve rosy damsels in their teens, with
eyes as deep as a well, and almost as large and liquid.
Their features were all good, their skins without a
flaw, hair abundant, and figures of a healthy plumpness—looking,
with the exception of their eyes, which
were very oriental and magnificent, like the great, fat,
pie-eating, yawning, boarding-school misses one sees
over a hedge at Hampstead. It was delicious to see
their excessive astonishment at the splendors of the
Golden Horn—they from the desert mountains of
Georgia or Circassia, and the scene about them,
(mosques, minarets, people, and men-of-war all together,)
probably the most brilliant and striking in the
world. I was busy following their eyes and trying to
divine their impressions, when Job seized me by the
arm. An old Turk had just entered the vessel from
the land-side, and was assisting a closely-veiled female
to mount after him. Half a glance satisfied me that it
was the Gipsy of Sardis—the lovely companion of our
journey to Constantinople.
“Maimuna!” I exclaimed, darting forward on the
instant.
A heavy hand struck me back as I touched her, and
as I returned the blow, the swarthy crew of Arabs
closed about us, and we were hurried with a most unceremonious
haste to the side of the vessel. I scarce
know, between my indignation and the stunning effect
of the blow I had received, how I got into the caique,
but we were pulling fast up the Golden Horn by the
time I could speak, and in half an hour were set ashore
on the green bank of the Barbyses, bound on a solitary
ramble up the Valley of Sweet Waters.
| VII. Inklings of adventure | |