* * * * *
I thought that they were done with me! That all, all, all, was ended! I
have not heard them for twenty years!
But to-day--distinctly--breaking in with brawling impassioned
suddenness upon my consciousness.... I heard.
This late _far niente_ and vacuous inaction here have been undermining
my spirit; this inert brooding upon the earth; this empty life, and
bursting brain! Immediately after eating at noon to-day, I said to
myself:
'I have been duped by the palace: for I have wasted myself in building,
hoping for peace, and there is no peace. Therefore now I shall fly from
it, to another, sweeter work--not of building, but of destroying--not of
Heaven, but of Hell--not of self-denial, but of reddest orgy.
Constantinople--beware!' I tossed the chair aside, and with a stamp was
on my feet: and as I stood--again, again--I heard: the startlingly
sudden wrangle, the fierce, vulgar outbreak and voluble controversy,
till my consciousness could not hear its ears: and one urged: 'Go! go!'
and the other: 'Not there...! where you like, ... but not there...! for
your life!'
I did not--for I could not--go: I was so overcome. I fell upon the couch
shivering.
These Voices, or impulses, plainly as I felt them of old, quarrel within
me now with an openness new to them. Lately, influenced by my long
scientific habit of thought, I have occasionally wondered whether what I
used to call 'the two Voices' were not in reality two strong
instinctive movements, such as most men may have felt, though with less
force. But to-day doubt is past, doubt is past: nor, unless I be very
mad, can I ever doubt again.
* * * * *
I have been thinking, thinking of my life: there is a something which I
cannot understand.
There was a man whom I met once in that dark backward and abysm of time,
when I must have been very young--I fancy at some college or school in
England, and his name now is far enough beyond scope of my memory, lost
in the vast limbo of past things. But he used to talk continually about
certain 'Black' and 'White' Powers, and of their strife for this world.
He was a short man with a Roman nose, and lived in fear of growing a
paunch. His forehead a-top, in profile, was more prominent than the
nose-end, he parted his hair in the middle, and had the theory that the
male form was more beautiful than the female. I forget what his name
was--the dim clear-obscure being. Very profound was the effect of his
words upon me, though, I think, I used to make a point of slighting
them. This man always declared that 'the Black' would carry off the
victory in the end: and so he has, so he has.
But assuming the existence of this 'Black' and this 'White' being--and
supposing it to be a fact that my reaching the Pole had any connection
with the destruction of my race, according to the notions of that
extraordinary Scotch parson--then it must have been the power of '_the
Black_' which carried me, in spite of all obstacles, to the Pole. So far
I can understand.
But _after_ I had reached the Pole, what further use had either White or
Black for me? Which was it--White or Black--that preserved my life
through my long return on the ice--and _why_? It _could_ not have been
'the Black'! For I readily divine that from the moment when I touched
the Pole, the only desire of the Black, which had previously preserved,
must have been to destroy me, with the rest. It must have been 'the
White,' then, that led me back, retarding me long, so that I should not
enter the poison-cloud, and then openly presenting me the _Boreal_ to
bring me home to Europe. But his motive? And the significance of these
recommencing wrangles, after such a silence? This I do not understand!
Curse Them, curse Them, with their mad tangles! I care nothing for Them!
Are there any White Idiots and Black Idiots--_at all_? Or are these
Voices that I hear nothing but the cries of my own strained nerves, and
I all mad and morbid, morbid and mad, mad, my good God?
This inertia here is _not good_ for me! This stalking about the palace!
and long thinkings about Earth and Heaven, Black and White, White and
Black, and things beyond the stars! My brain is like bursting through
the walls of my poor head.
To-morrow, then, to Constantinople.
* * * * *
Descending to go to the ship, I had almost reached the middle of the
east platform-steps, when my foot slipped on the smooth gold: and the
fall, though I was not walking carelessly, had, I swear, all the
violence of a fall caused by a push. I struck my head, and, as I rolled
downward, swooned. When I came to myself, I was lying on the very bottom
step, which is thinly washed by the wine-waves: another roll and I
suppose I must have drowned. I sat there an hour, lost in amazement,
then crossed the causeway, came down to the _Speransa_ with the motor,
went through her, spent the day in work, slept on her, worked again
to-day, till four, at both ship and time-fuses (I with only 700 fuses
left, and in Stamboul alone must be 8,000 houses, without counting
Galata, Tophana, Kassim-pacha, Scutari, and the rest), started out at
5.30, and am now at 11 P.M. lying motionless two miles off the north
coast of the island of Marmora, with moonlight gloating on the water, a
faint north breeze, and the little pale land looking immensely
stretched-out, solemn and great, as if that were the world, and there
were nothing else; and the tiny island at its end immense, and the
_Speranza_ vast, and I only little. To-morrow at 11 A.M. I will moor the
_Speranza_ in the Golden Horn at the spot where there is that low damp
nook of the bagnio behind the naval magazines and that hill where the
palace of the Capitan Pacha is.
* * * * *
I found that great tangle of ships in the Golden Horn wonderfully
preserved, many with hardly any moss-growths. This must be due, I
suppose, to the little Ali-Bey and Kezat-Hanah, which flow into the Horn
at the top, and made no doubt a constant current.
Ah, I remember the place: long ago I lived here some months, or, it may
be, years. It is the fairest of cities--and the greatest. I believe that
London in England was larger: but no city, surely, ever _seemed_ so
large. But it is flimsy, and will burn like tinder. The houses are made
of light timber, with interstices filled by earth and bricks, and some
of them look ruinous already, with their lovely faded tints of green
and gold and red and blue and yellow, like the hues of withered flowers:
for it is a city of paints and trees, and all in the little winding
streets, as I write, are volatile almond-blossoms, mixed with
maple-blossoms, white with purple. Even the most splendid of the
Sultan's palaces are built in this combustible way: for I believe that
they had a notion that stone-building was presumptuous, though I have
seen some very thick stone-houses in Galata. This place, I remember,
lived in a constant state of sensation on account of nightly flares-up;
and I have come across several tracts already devastated by fires. The
ministers-of-state used to attend them, and if the fire would not go
out, the Sultan himself was obliged to be there, in order to encourage
the firemen. Now it will burn still better.
But I have been here six weeks, and still no burning: for the place
seems to plead with me, it is so ravishing, so that I do not know why I
did not live here, and spare my toils during those sixteen nightmare
years; for two whole weeks the impulse to burn was quieted; and since
then there has been an irritating whisper at my ear which said: 'It is
not really like the great King that you are, this burning, but like a
foolish child, or a savage, who liked to see fireworks: or at least, if
you must burn, do not burn poor Constantinople, which is so charming,
and so very old, with its balsamic perfumes, and the blossomy trees of
white and light-purple peeping over the walls of the cloistered painted
houses, and all those lichened tombs--those granite menhirs and regions
of ancient marble tombs between the quarters, Greek tombs, Byzantine,
Jew, Mussulman tombs, with their strange and sacred
inscriptions--overwaved by their cypresses and vast plane-trees.' And
for weeks I would do nothing: but roamed about, with two minds in me,
under the tropic brilliance of the sky by day, and the vast dreamy
nights of this place that are like nights seen through azure-tinted
glasses, and in each of them is not one night, but the thousand-and-one
long crowded nights of glamour and fancy: for I would sit on the immense
esplanade of the Seraskierat, or the mighty grey stones of the porch of
the mosque of Sultan Mehmed-fatih, dominating from its great steps all
old Stamboul, and watch the moon for hours and hours, so passionately
bright she soared through clear and cloud, till I would be smitten with
doubt of my own identity, for whether I were she, or the earth, or
myself, or some other thing or man, I did not know, all being so silent
alike, and all, except myself, so vast, the Seraskierat, and the
Suleimanieh, and Stamboul, and the Marmora Sea, and the earth, and
those argent fields of the moon, all large alike compared with me, and
measure and space were lost, and I with them.
* * * * *
These proud Turks died stolidly, many of them. In streets of
Kassim-pacha, in crowded Taxim on the heights of Pera, and under the
long Moorish arcades of Sultan-Selim, I have seen the open-air barber's
razor with his bones, and with him the half-shaved skull of the
faithful, and the long two-hours' narghile with traces of burnt tembaki
and haschish still in the bowl. Ashes now are they all, and dry yellow
bone; but in the houses of Phanar and noisy old Galata, and in the Jew
quarter of Pri-pacha, the black shoe and head-dress of the Greek is
still distinguishable from the Hebrew blue. It was a mixed ritual of
colours here in boot and hat: yellow for Mussulman, red boots, black
calpac for Armenian, for the Effendi a white turban, for the Greek a
black. The Tartar skull shines from under a high taper calpac, the
Nizain-djid's from a melon-shaped head-piece; the Imam's and Dervish's
from a grey conical felt; and there is here and there a Frank in
European rags. I have seen the towering turban of the Bashi-bazouk, and
his long sword, and some softas in the domes on the great wall of
Stamboul, and the beggar, and the street-merchant with large tray of
water-melons, sweetmeats, raisins, sherbet, and the bear-shewer, and the
Barbary organ, and the night-watchman who evermore cried 'Fire!' with
his long lantern, two pistols, dirk, and wooden javelin. Strange how all
that old life has come back to my fancy now, pretty vividly, and for the
first time, though I have been here several times lately. I have gone
out to those plains beyond the walls with their view of rather barren
mountain-peaks, the city looking nothing but minarets shooting through
black cypress-tops, and I seemed to see the wild muezzin at some summit,
crying the midday prayer: '_Mohammed Resoul Allah!_'--the wild man; and
from that great avenue of cypresses which traverses the cemetery of
Scutari, the walled city of Stamboul lay spread entire up to Phanar and
Eyoub in their cypress-woods before me, the whole embowered now in
trees, all that complexity of ways and dark alleys with overhanging
balconies of old Byzantine houses, beneath which a rider had to stoop
the head, where old Turks would lose their way in mazes of the
picturesque; and on the shaded Bosphorus coast, to Foundoucli and
beyond, some peeping yali, snow-white palace, or old Armenian cot; and
the Seraglio by the sea, a town within a town; and southward the Sea of
Marmora, blue-and-white, and vast, and fresh as a sea just born,
rejoicing at its birth and at the jovial sun, all brisk, alert, to the
shadowy islands afar: and as I looked, I suddenly said aloud a wild, mad
thing, my God, a wild and maniac thing, a shrieking maniac thing for
Hell to laugh at: for something said with my tongue: '_This city is not
quite dead._'
* * * * *
* * * * *
Three nights I slept in Stamboul itself at the palace of some sanjak-bey
or emir, or rather dozed, with one slumbrous eye that would open to
watch my visitors Sinbad, and Ali Baba, and old Haroun, to see how they
slumbered and dozed: for it was in the small luxurious chamber where the
bey received those speechless all-night visits of the Turks, long rosy
hours of perfumed romance, and drunkenness of the fancy, and visionary
languor, sinking toward morning into the yet deeper peace of dreamless
sleep; and there, still, were the white _yatags_ for the guests to sit
cross-legged on for the waking dream, and to fall upon for the final
swoon, and the copper brazier still scenting of essence-of-rose, and the
cushions, rugs, hangings, the monsters on the wall, the
haschish-chibouques, narghiles, hookahs, and drugged pale cigarettes,
and a secret-looking lattice beyond the door, painted with trees and
birds; and the air narcotic and grey with the pastilles which I had
burned, and the scented smokes which I had smoked; and I all drugged and
mumbling, my left eye suspicious of Ali there, and Sinbad, and old
Haroun, who dozed. And when I had slept, and rose to wash in a room near
the overhanging latticed balcony of the façade, before me to the north
lay old Galata in sunshine, and that steep large street mounting to
Pera, once full at every night-fall of divans on which grave dervishes
smoked narghiles, and there was no space for passage, for all was
divans, lounges, almond-trees, heaven-high hum, chibouques in forests,
the dervish, and the innumerable porter, the horse-hirer with his horse
from Tophana, and arsenal-men from Kassim, and traders from Galata, and
artillery-workmen from Tophana; and on the other side of the house, the
south end, a covered bridge led across a street, which consisted mostly
of two immense blind walls, into a great tangled wilderness of flowers,
which was the harem-garden, where I passed some hours; and here I might
have remained many days, many weeks perhaps, but that, dozing one
fore-day with those fancied others, it was as if there occurred a laugh
somewhere, and a thing said: 'But this city is not quite dead!' waking
me from deeps of peace to startled wakefulness. And I thought to myself:
'If it be not quite dead, it _will_ be soon--and with some suddenness!'
And the next morning I was at the Arsenal.
* * * * *
It is long since I have so deeply enjoyed, even to the marrow. It may be
'the White' who has the guardianship of my life: but assuredly it is
'the Black' who reigns in my soul.
Grandly did old Stamboul, Galata, Tophana, Kassim, right out beyond the
walls to Phanar and Eyoub, blaze and burn. The whole place, except one
little region of Galata, was like so much tinder, and in the five hours
between 8 P.M. and 1 A.M. all was over. I saw the tops of those vast
masses of cemetery-cypresses round the tombs of the Osmanlis outside the
walls, and those in the cemetery of Kassim, and those round the sacred
mosque of Eyoub, shrivel away instantaneously, like flimsy hair caught
by a flame; I saw the Genoese tower of Galata go heading obliquely on an
upward curve, like Sir Roger de Coverley and wild rockets, and burst
high, high, with a report; in pairs, and threes, and fours, I saw the
blue cupolas of the twelve or fourteen great mosques give in and
subside, or soar and rain, and the great minarets nod the head, and
topple; and I saw the flames reach out and out across the empty breadth
of the Etmeidan--three hundred yards--to the six minarets of the Mosque
of Achmet, wrapping the red Egyptian-granite obelisk in the centre; and
across the breadth of the Serai-Meidani it reached to the buildings of
the Seraglio and the Sublime Porte; and across those vague barren
stretches that lie between the houses and the great wall; and across the
seventy or eighty great arcaded bazaars, all-enwrapping, it reached; and
the spirit of fire grew upon me: for the Golden Horn itself was a tongue
of fire, crowded, west of the galley-harbour, with exploding
battleships, Turkish frigates, corvettes, brigs--and east, with tens of
thousands of feluccas, caiques, gondolas and merchantmen aflame. On my
left burned all Scutari; and between six and eight in the evening I had
sent out thirty-seven vessels under low horse-powers of air, with trains
and fuses laid for 11 P.M., to light with their wandering fires the Sea
of Marmora. By midnight I was encompassed in one great furnace and fiery
gulf, all the sea and sky inflamed, and earth a-flare. Not far from me
to the left I saw the vast Tophana barracks of the Cannoniers, and the
Artillery-works, after long reluctance and delay, take wing together;
and three minutes later, down by the water, the barrack of the
Bombardiers and the Military School together, grandly, grandly; and
then, to the right, in the valley of Kassim, the Arsenal: these
occupying the sky like smoky suns, and shedding a glaring day over many
a mile of sea and land; I saw the two lines of ruddier flaring where the
barge-bridge and the raft-bridge over the Golden Horn made haste to
burn; and all that vastness burned with haste, quicker and quicker--to
fervour--to fury--to unanimous rabies: and when its red roaring stormed
the infinite, and the might of its glowing heart was Gravitation, Being,
Sensation, and I its compliant wife--then my head nodded, and with
crooked lips I sighed as it were my last sigh, and tumbled, weak and
drunken, upon my face.
* * * * *
* * * * *
O wild Providence! Unfathomable madness of Heaven! that ever I should
write what now I write! I will not write it....
* * * * *
The hissing of it! It is only a crazy dream! a tearing-out of the hair
by the roots to scatter upon the raving storms of Saturn! My hand will
not write it!
* * * * *
In God's name----! During four nights after the burning I slept in a
house--French as I saw by the books, &c., probably the Ambassador's, for
it has very large gardens and a beautiful view over the sea, situated on
the rapid east declivity of Pera; it is one of the few large houses
which, for my safety, I had left standing round the minaret whence I had
watched, this minaret being at the top of the old Mussulman quarter on
the heights of Taxim, between Pera proper and Foundoucli. At the bottom,
both at the quay of Foundoucli, and at that of Tophana, I had left under
shelter two caiques for double safety, one a Sultan's gilt craft, with
gold spur at the prow, and one a boat of those zaptias that used to
patrol the Golden Horn as water-police: by one or other of these I meant
to reach the _Speranza_, she being then safely anchored some distance up
the Bosphorus coast. So, on the fifth morning I set out for the Tophana
quay; but a light rain had fallen over-night, and this had re-excited
the thin grey smoke resembling quenched steam, which, as from some
reeking province of Abaddon, still trickled upward over many a square
mile of blackened tract, though of flame I could see no sign. I had not
accordingly advanced far over every sort of _débris_, when I found my
eyes watering, my throat choked, and my way almost blocked by roughness:
whereupon I said: 'I will turn back, cross the region of tombs and
barren waste behind Pera, descend the hill, get the zaptia boat at the
Foundoucli quay, and so reach the _Speranza_.'
Accordingly, I made my way out of the region of smoke, passed beyond the
limits of smouldering ruin and tomb, and soon entered a rich woodland,
somewhat scorched at first, but soon green and flourishing as the
jungle. This cooled and soothed me, and being in no hurry to reach the
ship, I was led on and on, in a somewhat north-western direction, I
fancy. Somewhere hereabouts, I thought, was the place they called 'The
Sweet Waters,' and I went on with the vague notion of coming upon them,
thinking to pass the day, till afternoon, in the forest. Here nature, in
only twenty years has returned to an exuberant savagery, and all was now
the wildest vegetation, dark dells, rills wimpling through deep-brown
shade of sensitive mimosa, large pendulous fuchsia, palm, cypress,
mulberry, jonquil, narcissus, daffodil, rhododendron, acacia, fig. Once
I stumbled upon a cemetery of old gilt tombs, absolutely overgrown and
lost, and thrice caught glimpses of little trellised yalis choked in
boscage. With slow and listless foot I went, munching an almond or an
olive, though I could swear that olives were not formerly indigenous to
any soil so northern: yet here they are now, pretty plentiful, though
elementary, so that modifications whose end I cannot see are certainly
proceeding in everything, some of the cypresses which I met that day
being immense beyond anything I ever heard of: and the thought, I
remember, was in my head, that if a twig or leaf should change into a
bird, or a fish with wings, and fly before my eyes, what then should I
do? and I would eye a branch suspiciously anon. After a long time I
penetrated into a very sombre grove. The day outside the wood was
brilliant and hot, and very still, the leaves and flowers here all
motionless. I seemed, as it were, to hear the vacant silence of the
world, and my foot treading on a twig, produced the report of pistols. I
presently reached a glade in a thicket, about eight yards across, that
had a scent of lime and orange, where the just-sufficient twilight
enabled me to see some old bones, three skulls, and the edge of a
tam-tam peeping from a tuft of wild corn with corn-flowers, and here and
there some golden champac, and all about a profusion of musk-roses. I
had stopped--_why_ I do not recollect--perhaps thinking that if I was
not getting to the Sweet Waters, I should seriously set about finding my
way out. And as I stood looking about me, I remember that some cruising
insect trawled near my ear its lonely drone.
Suddenly, God knows, I started, I started.
I imagined--I dreamed--that I saw a pressure in a bed of moss and
violets, _recently made!_ And while I stood gloating upon that
impossible thing, I imagined--I dreamed--the lunacy of it!--that I heard
a laugh...! the laugh, my good God, of a human soul.
Or it seemed half a laugh, and half a sob: and it passed from me in one
fleeting instant.
Laughs, and sobs, and idiot hallucinations, I had often heard before,
feet walking, sounds behind me: and even as I had heard them, I had
known that they were nothing. But brief as was this impression, it was
yet so thrillingly _real_, that my poor heart received, as it were, the
very shock of death, and I fell backward into a mass of moss, supported
on the right palm, while the left pressed my working bosom; and there,
toiling to catch my breath, I lay still, all my soul focussed into my
ears. But now I could hear no sound, save only the vast and audible hum
of the silence of the universe.
There was, however, the foot-print. If my eye and ear should so
conspire against me, that, I thought, was hard.
Still I lay, still, in that same pose, without a stir, sick and
dry-mouthed, infirm and languishing, with dying breaths: but keen,
keen--and malign.
I would wait, I said to myself, I would be artful as snakes, though so
woefully sick and invalid: I would make no sound....
After some minutes I became conscious that my eyes were leering--leering
in one fixed direction: and instantly, the mere fact that I had a sense
of direction proved to me that I must, _in truth_, have heard something!
I strove--I managed--to raise myself: and as I stood upright, feebly
swaying there, not the terrors of death alone were in my breast, but the
authority of the monarch was on my brow.