University of Virginia Library

93. LETTER XCIII.

The invariable “Where am I?” with which a traveller
awakes at morning was to me never more agreeably
answered. At Constantinople! The early ship-of-war
summons to “turn out,” was obeyed with
alacrity, and with the first boat after breakfast I was
set ashore at Tophana, the landing-place of the Frank
quarter of Stamboul.

A row of low-built cafés, with a latticed enclosure
and a plentiful shade of plane-trees on the right; a
large square, in the centre of which stood a magnificent
Persian fountain, as large as a church, covered
with lapis-lazuli and gold, and endless inscriptions in
Turkish; a mosque buried in cypresses on the left; a
hundred indolent-looking, large-trousered, mustached,
and withal very handsome men, and twice the number
of snarling, wolfish, and half starved dogs, are some of
the objects which the first glance, as I stepped on
shore, left on my memory.

I had heard that the dogs of Constantinople knew
and hated a Christian. By the time I had reached
the middle of the square, a wretched puppy at my
heels had succeeded in announcing the presence of a
stranger. They were upon me in a moment from
every heap of garbage, and every hole and corner. I
was beginning to be seriously alarmed, standing perfectly
still, with at least a hundred infuriated dogs barking
in a circle around me, when an old Turk, selling
sherbet under the shelter of the projecting roof of the
Persian fountain, came kindly to my relief. A stone
or two well aimed, and a peculiar cry, which I have
since tried in vain to imitate, dispersed the hungry
wretches, and I took a glass of the old man's raisin-water,
and pursued my way up the street. The
circumstance, however, had discolored my anticipations;
nothing looked agreeably to me for an hour
after it.

I ascended through narrow and steep lanes, between
rows of small wooden houses, miserably built and
painted, to the main street of the quarter of Pera.
Here live all Christians and Christian ambassadors,
and here I found our secretary of legation, Mr. H.,
who kindly offered to accompany me to old Stamboul.

We descended to the water-side, and stepping into
an egg-shell caique, crossed the Golden Horn, and
landed on a pier between the sultan's green kiosk and
the seraglio. I was fortunate in a companion who
knew the people and spoke the language. The red-trousered
and armed kervas, at the door of the kiosk,
took his pipe from his mouth, after a bribe and a little
persuasion, and motioned to a boy to show us the interior.
A circular room, with a throne of solid silver
embraced in a double colonnade of marble pillars, and
covered with a roof laced with lapis lazuli and gold,
formed the place from which Sultan Mahmoud formerly
contemplated, on certain days, the busy and
beautiful panorama of his matchless bay. The kiosk
is on the edge of the water, and the poorest caikjee
might row his little bark under its threshold, and fill
his monarch's eye, and look on his monarch's face
with the proudest. The green canvass curtains, which
envelop the whole building, have, for a long time, been
unraised, and Mahmoud is oftener to be seen on horseback,
in the dress of a European officer, guarded by
troops in European costume and array. The change
is said to be dangerously unpopular.

We walked on to the square of Sultana Valide. Its
large area was crowded with the buyers and sellers of
a travelling fair—a sort of Jews' market held on different
days in different parts of this vast capital. In
Turkey every nation is distinguished by its dress, and
almost as certainly by its branch of trade. On the
right of the gate, under a huge plane-tree, shedding
its yellow leaves among the various wares, stood the
booths of a group of Georgians, their round and rosy-dark
faces (you would know their sisters must be half
houris) set off with a tall black cap of curling wool,
their small shoulders with a tight jacket studded with
silk buttons, and their waists with a voluminous silken
sash, whose fringed ends fell over their heels as they
sat cross-legged, patiently waiting for custom. Hardware
is the staple of their shops, but the cross-pole in
front is fantastically hung with silken garters and tasselled
cords, and their own Georgian caps, with a gay
crown of cashmere, enrich and diversify the shelves.
I bought a pair or two of blushing silk garters of
a young man, whose eyes and teeth should have
been a woman's, and we strolled on to the next
booth.

Here was a Turk, with a table covered by a broad
brass waiter, on which was displayed a tempting array
of mucilage, white and pink, something of the consistency
of blanc-mange. A dish of sugar, small gilded
saucers, and long-handled, flat, brass spoons, with a
vase of rose-water, completed his establishment. The
grave mussulman cut, sugared, and scented the portions
for which we asked, without condescending to
look at us or open his lips, and, with a glass of mild
and pleasant sherbet from his next neighbor, as immoveable
a Turk as himself, we had lunched, extremely
to my taste, for just five cents American currency.

A little farther on I was struck with the appearance
of two men, who stood bargaining with a Jew. My
friend knew them immediately as fakeers, or religious
devotees, from Hindoostan. He addressed them in
Arabic, and, during their conversation of ten minutes,
I studied them with some curiosity. They were singularly
small, without any appearance of dwarfishness,
their limbs and persons slight, and very equally and
gracefully proportioned. Their features were absolutely
regular, and, though small as a child's of ten or
twelve years, were perfectly developed. They appeared
like men seen through an inverted opera-glass. An
exceedingly ashy, olive complexion, hair of a kind of
glittering black, quite unlike in texture and color any

I have ever before seen; large, brilliant, intense black
eyes, and lips (the most peculiar feature of all), of
lustreless black,[24] completed the portraits of two as
remarkable-looking men as I have anywhere met.
Their costume was humble, but not unpicturesque.
A well-worn sash of red silk enveloped the waist in
many folds, and sustained trousers tight to the legs,
but of the Turkish ampleness over the hips. Their
small feet, which seemed dried up to the bone, were
bare. A blanket, with a hood marked in a kind of
arabesque figure, covered their shoulders, and a high-quilted
cap, with a rim of curling wool, was prossed
down closely over the forehead. A crescent-shaped
tin vessel, suspended by a leather strap to the waist,
and serving the two purposes of a charity-box, and a
receptacle for bread and vegetables, seemed a kind of
badge of their profession. They were lately from
Hindoostan, and were begging their way still farther
into Europe. They received our proffered alms without
any mark of surprise or even pleasure, and laying
their hands on their breasts, with countenances perfectly
immoveable, gave us a Hindoostance blessing,
and resumed their traffic. They see the world, these
rovers on foot! And I think, could I see it myself in
no other way, I would e'en take sandal and scrip, and
traverse it as dervish or beggar!

The alleys between the booths were crowded with
Turkish women, who seemed the chief purchasers.
The effect of their enveloped persons, and eyes peering
from the muslin folds of the yashmack, is droll to
a stranger. It seemed to me like a masquerade, and
the singular sound of female voices, speaking through
several thicknesses of a stuff, bound so close on the
mouth as to show the shape of the lips exactly, perfected
the delusion. It reminded me of the half-smothered
tones beneath the masks in carnival-time.
A clothes-bag with yellow slippers would have about
as much form, and might be walked about with as
much grace as a Turkish woman. Their fat hands,
the finger-nails dyed with henna, and their unexceptionably
magnificent eyes, are all that the stranger is
permitted to peruse. It is strange how universal is
the beauty of the eastern eye. I have looked in vain
hitherto, for a small or an unexpressive one. It is
quite startling to meet the gaze of such large liquid
orbs, bent upon you from their long silken fringes,
with the unwinking steadiness of look common to the
females of this country. Wrapped in their veils, they
seem unconscious of attracting attention, and turn and
look you full in the face, while you seek in vain for a
pair of lips to explain by their expression the meaning
of such particular notice.

The Jew is more distinguishable at Constantinople
than elsewhere. He is compelled to wear the dress
of his tribe (and its “badge of sufferance,” too), and
you will find him, wherever there is trafficking to be
done, in a small cap, not ungracefully shaped, twisted
about with a peculiar handkerchief of a small black
print, and set back so as to show the whole of his national
high and narrow forehead. He is always good-humored
and obsequious, and receives the curse with
which his officious offers of service are often repelled,
with a smile, and a hope that he may serve you another
time. One of them, as we passed his booth, called
our attention to some newly-opened bales, bearing the
stamp, “TREMONT MILL, LOWELL, MASS.” It was
a long distance from home to meet such familiar
words!

We left the square of the sultan mother, and entered
a street of confectioners. The east is famous for its
sweetmeats, and truly a more tempting array never
visited the Christmas dream of a schoolboy. Even
Felix, the patissier nonpareil of Paris, might take a
lesson in jellies. And then for “candy” of all colors
of the rainbow (not shut enviously in with pitiful glass
cases, but piled up to the ceiling in a shop all in the
street, as it might be in Utopia, with nothing to pay),
it is like a scene in the Arabian Nights. The last
part of the parenthesis is almost true, for with a small
coin of the value of two American cents, I bought of a
certain kind called, in Turkish, “peace to your throat”
(they call things by such poetical names in the east),
the quarter of which I could not have eaten, even in
my best “days of sugar-candy.” The women of
Constantinople, I am told, almost live on confectionary.
They eat incredible quantities. The sultan's
eight hundred wives and women employ five hundred
cooks, and consume two thousand five hundred pounds
of sugar daily! It is probably the most expensive
item of the seraglio kitchen.

A turn or two brought us to the entrance of a long
dark passage, of about the architecture of a covered
bridge in our country. A place richer in the oriental
and picturesque could scarce be found between the
Danube and the Nile. It is the bazar of drugs. As
your eye becomes accustomed to the light, you distinguish
vessels of every size and shape, ranged along
the receding shelves of a stall, and filled to the uncovered
brim with the various productions of the Orient.
The edges of the baskets and jars are turned over with
rich colored papers (a peculiar color to every drug),
and broad spoons of boxwood are crossed on the top.
There is the henna in a powder of deep brown, with
an envelope of deep Tyrian purple, and all the precious
gums in their jars, golden-leafed, and spices and dies
and medicinal roots, and above hang anatomies of
curious monsters, dried and stuffed, and in the midst
of all, motionless as the box of sulphur beside him,
and almost as yellow, sits a venerable Turk, with his
beard on his knees, and his pipe-bowl thrust away
over his drugs, its ascending smoke-curls his only
sign of life. This class of merchants is famous for
opium-eaters, and if you pass at the right hour, you
find the large eye of the silent smoker dilated and
wandering, his fingers busy in tremulously counting
his spicewood beads, and the roof of his stall wreathed
with clouds of smoke, the vent to every species of
eastern enthusiasm. If you address him, he smiles,
and puts his hand to his forehead and breast, but condescends
to answer no question till it is thrice reiterated,
and then in the briefest word possible, he answers
wide of your meaning, strokes the smoke out of his
mustache, and slipping the costly amber between his
lips, abandons himself again to his exalted revery. I
write this after being a week at Constantinople, during
which the Egyptian bazar has been my frequent
and most fancy-stirring lounge. Of its forty merchants,
there is not one whose picturesque features
are not imprinted deeply in my memory. I have idled
up and down in the dim light, and fingered the soft
henna, and bought small parcels of incense-wood for
my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable faces of
the unconscious old mussulmans, till my mind became
somehow tinctured of the east, and (what will be better
understood) my clothes steeped in the mixed and
agreeable odors of the thousand spices. Where are
the painters, that they have never found this mine of
admirable studies? There is not a corner of Constantinople,
nor a man in its streets, that were not a
novel and a capital subject for the pencil. Pray, Mr.
Cole, leave things that have been painted so often, as
aqueducts and Italian ruins (though you do make delicious
pictures, and could never waste time or pencils
on anything), and come to the east for one single book
of sketches! How I have wished I was a painter since
I have been here!