University of Virginia Library

101. LETTER CI.

From this elevated point, the singular effect of a
desert commencing from the very streets of the city is
still more observable. The compact edge of the metropolis
is visible even upon the more rural Bosphorus,
not an enclosure or a straggling house venturing
to protrude beyond the closely pressed limit. To repeat
the figure, it seems, with the prodigious mass of
habitations on either shore, as if all the cities of both
Europe and Asia were swept to their respective borders,
or as if the crowded masses upon the long extending
shores were the deposite of some mighty overflow
of the sea.

From Pera commence the numerous villages, separated
only by name, which form a fringe of peculiarly
light and fantastic architecture to the never-wearying
Bosphorus. Within the small limit of your eye, upon
that silver link between the two seas, there are fifty
valleys and thirty rivers, and an imperial palace on every
loveliest spot from the Black Sea to Marmora
The Italians say, “See Naples and die!” but for Naples
I would read Stamboul and the Bosphorus.

Descending unwillingly from this enchanting spot,
we entered a long glen, closed at the water's edge by
the sultan's summer-palace, and present residence of
Beylerbey. Half way down, we met a decrepit old
woman, toiling up the path, and my friend, with a
Wordsworthian passion for all things humble and simple,
gave her the Turkish good-morrow, and inquired
her business at the village. She had been to Stavros,
to sell the paras' worth of herbs—about one cent of
our currency. He put a small piece of silver into her
hand, while, with the still strong habit of Turkish
modesty, she employed the other in folding her tattered
yashmack so as to conceal her features from the
gaze of strangers. She had not expected charity.
“What is this for?” she asked, looking at it with some
surprise. “To buy bread for your children, mother?”
“Effendi!” said the poor old creature, her voice trembling,
and the tears streaming from her eyes, “My
children are all dead! There is no one now between me
and Allah!” It were worth a poet's while to live in
the east. Like the fairy in the tale, they never open
their lips but they “speak pearls.”

We took a caique at the mosque of Sultan Selim,
at Beylerbey, and floated slowly past the imperial palace.
Five or six eunuchs, with their red caps and
long blue dresses, were talking at a high tenor in the
courtyard of the harem, and we gazed long and earnestly
at the fine lattices above, concealing so many of
the picked beauties of the empire. A mandolin, very
indifferently strummed in one of the projecting wings,
betrayed the employment of some fair Fatima, and
there was a single moment when we could see, by the
relief of a corner window, the outline of a female figure;
but the caique floated remorselessly on, and our
busy imaginations had their own unreal shadows for
their reward. As we approached the central facade
the polished brazen gates flew open, and a band of
thirty musicians came out and ranged themselves on
the terrace beneath the palace-windows, announcing,
in their first flourish, that Sultan Mahmoud had thrust
his fingers into his pilaw, and his subjects were at liberty
to dine. Not finding their music much to our
taste, we ordered the caikjees to assist the current a
little, and shooting past Stavros, we put across the
strait from the old palace of Shemsheh the vizier,
and, in a few minutes, I was once more in my floating
home, under the “star-spangled banner.”

Constantinople was in a blaze last night, with the
illumination for the approach of the Turkish feast of
Bairam. The minarets were extremely beautiful, their
encircling galleries hung with colored lamps, and illuminated
festoons suspended from one to the other.
The ships of the fleet were decked also with thousands
of lamps, and the effect was exceedingly fine, with the
reflection in the Bosphorus, and the waving of the
suspended lights in the wind. The sultan celebrates
the festa by taking a virgin to his bed, and sacrificing
twenty sheep with his own hand. I am told by an intelligent
physician here, that this playing the butcher
is an every-day business with the “Brother of the
Sun,” every safe return from a ride, or an excursion in
his sultanethe caique, requiring him to cut the throat
of his next day's mutton. It may account partly for
the excessive cruelty of character attributed to him.

Among other bad traits, Mahmoud is said to be
very avaricious. It is related of his youth, that he
was permitted occasionally, with his brother (who was
murdered to make room for him on the throne), to
walk out in public on certain days with their governor;
and that, upon these occasions, each was intrusted
with a purse to be expended in charity. The elder
brother soon distributed his piastres, and borrowed of
his attendants to continue his charities; while Mahmoud
quietly put the purse in his pocket, and added
it to his private hoard on his return. It is said, too,
that he has a particular passion for upholstery, and in
his frequent change from one serai to another, allows
no nail to be driven without his supervision. Add to
this a spirit of perverse contradiction, so truculent
that none but the most abject flatterers can preserve
his favor, and you have a pretty handful of offsets
against a character certainly not without some royal
qualities.

With one of the Reis Effendi's and one of the se
raskier's officers, followed by four kervasses in the
Turkish military dress, and every man a pair of slippers
in his pocket, we accompanied the commodore,
to-day, on a visit to the principal mosques.

Landing first at Tophana, on the Pera side, we entered
the court of the new mosque built by the present
sultan, whose elegant exterior of white marble and
two freshly gilded minarets we had admired daily, lying
at anchor without sound of the muezzin. The
morning prayers were just over, and the retiring Turks
looked, with lowering brows, at us, as we pulled off
our boots on the sacred threshold.

We entered upon what, but for the high pulpit, I
should have taken for rather a superb ball-room. An
unencumbered floor carpeted gayly, a small arabesque
gallery over the door quite like an orchestra, chandeliers
and lamps in great profusion, and walls painted of
the brightest and most varied colors, formed an interior
rather wanting in the “dim religious light” of a
place of worship. We were shuffling around in our
slippers from one side to the other, examining the
marble Mihrab and the narrow and towering pulpit,
when a ragged and decrepit dervish, with his papooshes
in his hand, and his toes and heels protruding from
a very dirty pair of stockings, rose from his prayers
and began walking backward and forward, eying us
ferociously and muttering himself into quite a passion.
His charity for infidels was evidently at a low
ebb. Every step we took upon the holy floor seemed
to add to his fury. The kervasses observed him, but
his sugar-loaf cap carried some respect with it, and
they evidently did not like to meddle with him. He
followed us to the door, fixing his hollow gray eyes
with a deadly glare upon each one as he went out, and
the Turkish officers seemed rather glad to hurry us out
of his way. He left us in the vestibule, and we mounted
a handsome marble staircase to a suite of apartments
above, communicating with the sultan's private
gallery. The carpets here were richer, and the divans
with which the half dozen saloons were surrounded,
were covered with the most costly stuffs of the east.
The gallery was divided from the area of the mosque
by a fine brazen grating curiously wrought, and its
centre occupied by a rich ottoman, whereon the imperial
legs are crossed in the intervals of his prostrations.
It was about the size and had the air altogether
of a private box at the opera.

We crossed the Golden Horn, and passing the eunuch's
guard, entered the gardens of the seraglio on
our way to Santa Sophia. An inner wall still separated
us from the gilded kiosks, at whose latticed windows
peering above the trees, we might have clearly
perused the features of any peeping inmate; but the
little cross bars revealed nothing but their own provoking
eye of the size of a roseleaf in the centre, and
we reached the upper gate without even a glimpse
of a waved handerchief to stir our chivalry to the rescue.

A confused mass of buttresses without form or order,
is all that you are shown for the exterior of that
“wonder of the world,” the mosque of mosques, the
renowned Santa Sophia. We descended a dark avenue,
and leaving our boots in a vestibule that the
horse of Mohammed the second, if he was lodged as
ambitiously living as dead, would have disdained for
his stable, we entered the vaulted area. A long breath

and an admission of its almost attributable supernatural
grandeur, followed our too hasty disappointment. It is
indeed a “vast and wondrous dome!” Its dimensions
are less than those of St. Peter's, at Rome, but its effect,
owing to its unity and simplicity of design, is, I think
superior. The numerous small galleries let into its
sides add richness to it without impairing its apparent
magnitude, and its vast floor, upon which a single individual
is almost lost, the sombre colors of its walls
untouched probably for centuries, and the dim sepulchral
light that struggles through the deep-niched and
retiring windows, form altogether an interior from
which the imagination returns, like the dove to the
ark, fluttering and bewildered.

Our large party separated over its wilderness of a
floor, and each might have had his hour of solitude,
had the once Christian spirit of the spot (or the present
pagan demon) affected him religiously. I found,
myself, a singular pleasure in wandering about upon
the elastic mats (laid four or five thick all over the
floor), examining here a tattered banner hung against
the wall, and there a rich cashmere which had covered
the tomb of the prophet; on one side a slab of transparent
alabaster from the temple of Solomon (a
strange relic for a Mohammedan mosque!) and on the
other, a dark Mihrab surrounded by candles of incredible
proportions, looking like the marble columns of
some friezeless portico. The four “six-winged cherubim”
on the roof of the dome, sole remaining trace
as they are of the religion to which the building was
first dedicated, had better been left to the imagination.
They are monstrous in Mosaic. It is said that the
whole interior of the mosque is cased beneath its
dusky plaster with the same costly Mosaic which covers
the ceiling. To make a Mohammedan mosque of a
Christian church, however, it was necessary to erase
Christian emblems from the walls; besides which the
Turks have a superstitious horror of all imitative arts,
considering the painting of the human features particularly,
as a mockery of the handiwork of Allah.

We went hence to the more modern mosque of Sultan
Achmet, which is an imitation of Santa Sophia
within, but its own beautiful prototype in exterior. Its
spacious and solemn court, its six heaven-piercing
minarets, its fountains, and the mausoleums of the
sultans, with their gilded cupolas and sarcophagi covered
with cashmeres (the murdering sultan and his
murdered brothers lying in equal splendor side-by-side!),
are of a style of richness peculiarly oriental and
imposing. We visited in succession Sultan Bajazet,
Sulymanye, and Sultana Validé, all of the same arabesque
exterior and very similar within. The description
of one leaves little to be said of the other, and,
with the exception of Santa Sophia, of which I should
like to make a lounge when I am in love with my own
company, the mosques of Constantinople are a kind
of “lion” well killed in a single visit.