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Not oft I’ve seen such sight nor heard such song,

As wooed the eye, and thrilled the Bosphorus along.

Byron, Childe Harold, Canto xi.

In the spring of 1896, at a time when public attention centred on the Armenian troubles, the Sultan of Turkey sent a confidential emissary to London for the purpose of sounding the Marquis of Salisbury on the situation without the knowledge of the Turkish Ambassador. He endeavoured to obtain an interview with the Prime Minister, but without success. The Turkish Ambassador was anything but pleased at this Palace manœuvre, and did his best to prevent his master’s agent being received. Costaki Pasha, with whom I was on friendly terms, told me that it was bad enough to be kept waiting for one’s salary, but it was adding insult to injury to have your position undermined by unauthorized missions.

The Sultan’s emissary informed me during his stay that the Sultan was most anxious to ascertain Prince Bismarck’s opinion on the Armenian question, and if possible to learn what the Prince would advise him to do in reference to the embarrassing situation in Crete, and he begged me to assist him in this matter.

Shortly afterwards I paid a visit to Prince Bismarck at Friedrichsruh (June 26, 1896). After referring to the action of the Greek Committees which were fomenting trouble throughout the Levant, the Prince expressed his disapproval of the fire-eating Greek Press and the folly of its European backers, who, as he asserted, were at the bottom of the whole disturbance. It was on this occasion that the Prince, in answer to a question, made the since oft-quoted sarcastic remark that “he took less interest in the island of Crete than in a molehill in his own garden.” Referring to the Sultan and his troubles, Bismarck put his hands up to his ears, extending the open palms outwards, so as to imitate the attitude of a hare and to convey the idea of the Sultan’s timidity in face of a situation which called for exceptional nerve and strength of purpose.

On my return to London in the beginning of July, I received a request from the proprietor of the New York Herald to come to Paris. On my arrival he asked me whether I would be willing to go to Constantinople to represent his paper there for a couple of months. Sixteen years previously I had visited Turkey as a tourist, and I thought I should like to see the country again. So I accepted the offer on the spot.

We owe to a popular writer the assertion that there is something fundamentally different in character between the East and the West, which makes mutual understanding difficult and assimilation impossible. The English traveller who is inclined to accept this axiom may begin to detect the Eastern flavour of things as soon as he leaves the frontier of the German Empire behind him and passes through the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy on his way to Constantinople. Monarchs and statesmen may come and go, laws may be promulgated and the ballot-box may be adopted, but the character of a people is not materially changed even by such measures as compulsory education and universal military service. The East has adopted some of the machinery of Western life, but the Eastern remains an Eastern still. Institutions unsuited to a people’s traditions and character may only jeopardize its fortunes:

A thousand years scarce serve to form a State,

An hour may lay it in the dust: and when

Can man its shattered splendour renovate,

Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate?

Childe Harold, Canto xi, stanza lxxxiv.

Should you arrive at Vienna on a Saturday, you will have to wait there twenty-four hours if you intend to take the Orient Express to Constantinople, for it leaves Vienna on Sunday evening, and even in that short time you may feel a subtle change in the atmosphere of life. You ask a sedate-looking official in the bureau of your hotel up to what o’clock on Sunday morning the shops in the town remain open, as you want to purchase a few travelling necessaries. “Till mid-day, sir,” is the decisive reply. Instinctively warned by past experience, you turn to the hallporter, who usually embodies the brain power of a Viennese hotel, and in order to make sure you put the same question to him. “The shops are not open at all, sir, on Sundays,” is his reply: and so indeed it turns out to be.

You stroll towards the Leopoldstadt with the intention of taking lunch at the old “Goldener Lamm,” now called the Hotel National, long renowned as the hostelry patronized by European crowned heads as far back as the Vienna Congress in 1815. You grip the brass handle of a glass door on which the inviting word “Entrée” is affixed in large white enamelled letters. You tug at it in vain and are ultimately warned off by a man signalling frantically from the inside that it is not a door at all, but only the window of an apartment—and that the real entrance to the Hôtel is a few yards to the left. You now recollect that when you were there last—some seven years previously—that blessed word “Entrée” was already there, and that you—and doubtless many others ever since—were warned off, the proprietor not having deemed it worth while to do away with the misleading letters.

It is still Sunday, and you wish to post a registered letter. This can only be done at the Central Post Office during certain hours of the afternoon. You drive there, holding your letter in readiness, together with a “krone” to pay the registration fee, and wait your turn patiently. For without patience, that supposed Christian virtue (which, by the way, I subsequently acquired myself and discovered to be of Mohammedan origin), it is of little use starting on a journey to the East. At last your turn comes and you patiently watch the registering clerk, after slowly copying the address of your letter into a book, retire to the back of his capacious office. You notice that he is engaged in earnest consultation with a colleague. At last, he comes forward with an air of embarrassment and explains apologetically that he is in a “difficulty” as to providing the change out of the small coin you have handed him. Finally, he asks whether you would mind accepting a postage stamp of the value of ten heller (one penny) in part discharge of the sum due to you.

All this happens within twenty-four hours! You know now that you are well on your way to the East, where a minimum value of time and an element of fiction mixed up with every action or statement of fact constitute two of the many differences between the easy-going East and the matter-of-fact West. But there are compensations in the altered aspect of life, and one is the deep impression which Constantinople produces on the stranger by its gorgeous variety of colouring, its movement, and its polyglot chaos.

Constantinople with its five hundred gardens and palaces, its six hundred and eighty mosques, minarets, and towers rising above the sea in the form of a huge amphitheatre, offers to the eye a truly fascinating panorama. Byron extolled its position as incomparable to anything he had ever seen. That great traveller and student of nature, Alexander von Humboldt, thought Salzburg, Naples, and Constantinople the three most beautiful sites in the world. Such is its mysterious charm that “a Sea of Impressions stirs the soul—as a balmy breeze plays gently upon a cornfield in bloom. An intoxicating aroma is wafted towards us. All the wonders of the Eastern World seem to float before our vision—fables and palaces of the Arabian Nights.”

But if Constantinople must ever possess an attraction for the traveller by virtue of its unique situation, a deeper interest lies in its unrivalled historical associations, covering two thousand five hundred years of the world’s history. From the days of Darius, Alcibiades, and Justinian—when the corn-laden galleys from the Black Sea glided swiftly past the shore opposite Seraglio Point—down to the present time, Constantinople has always been the object of desire of ambitious rulers of nations.

Seen on a summer morning from a window on the upper floor of the Pera Palace Hotel, the city presents a dazzling picture of kaleidoscopic beauty. We are several hundred feet above the level of the sea. It is early morn, and a thick grey fog conceals the waters of the Golden Horn as well as the land. Gradually, as if awakening from a dream, the sharp angles of prominent buildings, the tips of tall minarets, the curved outlines of stately mosques, emerge through the mist between clusters of dark cypresses, dotted in stray patches away to the horizon. The rays of the rising sun strike a few windows here and there. These glisten with a peculiar iridescence, as if lighted by electricity—peeping through the impenetrable haze still dimming the ground. Something ghost-like pervades the scene. Fancy conjures up the vain anger of Polyphemus, the deriding jeers of Ulysses.

Rooks caw overhead as they circle through the air. Chanticleer crows on a patch of green meadow-land. Dogs bark with unwonted anger as three bears, led by their keepers, thread their way through the crowd—well accustomed to such sights. Resounding above all, the trumpet call from the Cavalry Barracks vibrates, mingling with the shouts of hawkers in the street. Fog-horns and the siren’s moan from ships at anchor swell the chorus, and between whiles the tinkling of bells of passing mules and horses is distinctly heard. Droves of black sheep, followed by Thracian shepherds in picturesque garb, and numbers of horses of Anatolian breed, ridden by barefooted boys, pass by. Amid this pandemonium, bricklayers are at work on the roof of a seven-storied building, run up in such primitive fashion that you wonder the whole structure does not collapse and bury them among its wreckage. Yet cobblers and tailors are unconcernedly plying their craft in the basement, completing a picture which, if witnessed on the stage or described in a story-book, would strike us as a fanciful realization of a mythical world.

But lo! the sun! Mosques, minarets, and cypresses float out of the grey mist as it lifts slowly off land and water. Turkish ironclads become substantial things as they lie at anchor in the Golden Horn alongside the battered old wooden hulks of Navarino’s bloody memory. At first the iron prows only are visible, tipped with light. But as the sun grows more powerful and plays on the water, streaks of silver quiver serpent-like—a veritable Greek fire—round the hulls, until finally the ironclads themselves appear majestically before the vision like antediluvian monsters.

An old disused Turkish cemetery is spread out in front of us with its mournful grove of cypresses. Not so very long ago the whole space from the Hôtel down to the water’s edge was one huge graveyard containing the dead of centuries. Théophile Gautier tells us that the Turk loves to be near his dead. To-day only a stray gravestone is left here and there to mark the resting-place of some pious personage hallowed for his faith, his virtues, and on no account to be desecrated by the removal of his bones. Farther away is the suburb of Cassim Pasha, on its fringe the Marine Ministry, and close by, on a hill, the Marine Hospital. Adjoining this, still farther to the right, is the Ters Hanè, the Turkish Government dry-dock on the banks of the Golden Horn. And if the eye takes a wider sweep to the right, the asylum of the poor, Fakir Hanè, comes into view—a noble structure beautifully situated, handsomely endowed by Sultan Abdul Hamid, and, with true Turkish charity, devoted to the poor of all creeds alike. Then there are the Cavalry Barracks, the Greek High School, the so-called Phanar—another instance of Abdul Hamid’s munificence. Finally, as we survey the scene from left to right, the cupolas and minarets of five different mosques, each erected in honour of some noted Sultan—Bajezid, Suleiman, Schah-Zadè, Mahmud, Selim—come into the picture and crown the horizon.

This, in faint outline, is the panorama of life and colour which, once witnessed, is stamped for all time on the memory. Yet the imagination is, perhaps, even more deeply stirred by the same scene deprived of its cacophonic noise and its bright colouring in the mysterious stillness of a summer night.^[1] Thousands of twinkling lights tell of the unchecked life of the city. The starlit heavens speak a language of their own. They whisper of the transitoriness, the vanity, the futility of what the human heart clings to, and, as if to emphasize the sadness of it all, the twang of a harp and a guitar breaks the silence. The dulcet accents of a woman’s voice—a Mignon of this Eastern land—ring out to their accompaniment. The musicians are gipsies—that mysterious race of nomads, wanderers like ourselves towards a distant bourne.

1.On great occasions, such as the Sultan’s birthday, the contrast of day and night is still further heightened by the illumination of the warships in the Golden Horn and other craft in the Bosphorus.