a Turkish family I knew. The door was opened silently, and I found
myself in a tiny garden full of flowers. No matter how small his house,
the Turk always has a bit of a garden. If he is rich, he has it on a
hill from which he can see the Bosporus. The garden I visited opened
from a bricked hall. We went up the stairs and were greeted by the
ladies of the family more courteously and gracefully than I ever have
been greeted anywhere else. I wish I could describe for you the Turkish
salutation. It is as hard to acquire as a foreign accent. As she bows,
a lady makes a downward sweep with her arm, then raises her hand, palm
upward, to her heart and lips. This means, "I am at your service; my
heart is yours; the words that I speak are in your favor."
I was taken into a room all windows. The Turk loves windows as he loves
gardens--windows that look over the water. All around the room were
bright-colored _sedias_,--low hard couches,--which are, however, very
comfortable to sit or lie upon. In the middle of the room on a brass
tray was a big brazier containing live coals, on which the daughter of
the house soon made Turkish coffee. Besides gardens and windows, the
Turk loves coffee--his own peculiar kind that you must taste some day
along with the other goodies. This is the way it was made for me: Into
a brass coffee-maker, which looks like a pitcher with a long handle,
were put one sugar lump and one coffee-cupful of water. When this had
boiled, one teaspoonful of finely powdered Turkish coffee, taken from a
china egg on the tray, was put into the water. This mixture was allowed
to come to a boil three times and then poured, the pitcher being held a
foot from the cup so that there would be foam on the coffee. I tried to
drink it in the really Turkish way, holding the saucer with the cup to
my lips. If you try it, you will see how _hard_ it is to do this
_easily_!
A little sister showed us her drawing-book, in which she had begun at
the back and worked toward the front. The Turkish children recite their
lessons all together in the old-fashioned schools, and if you could
hear them, you would think that you had gone into _Wonderland_ with
_Alice_ where "things wouldn't come straight." The little girls go to
school in groups, and with them is always an old servant who carries
all their books on what looks for all the world like a small
clothes-tree. The boys go and come in two long lines, attended by their
teacher. They carry their own books and wear long trousers and fezzes
exactly like those of their fathers. Some of the tiny girls carry their
own little tables and drawing-boards. In the gipsy village in Scutari
the children learn their lessons by songs in the street. They stand in
a circle with a big girl in the middle, and they grow noisier and
noisier the more interested they become. These little girls wear
_shelvars_, which look like little trousers gathered in at the ankle. I
tried to take a picture of a little girl in an orange-colored pair and
of a boy in a wrapper and fez, but they were frightened and ran away
crying.
Now I must tell you about the Turkish shops--the really Turkish ones.
Most of them are about the size of a spider's parlor and have no front
wall, so you see the wares can be temptingly displayed to the
passer-by. You see in one of our pictures a shop where all kinds of
blankets and scarfs are sold. The scarfs are especially useful: if you
are a man, you can wind one around your fez or your waist; if you are a
lady, you can wear it indoors as a shawl, sash, or scarf; or, if it is
the right kind, a little girl can wear it to school on her head. You
don't know which one to choose when they are tossed down in front of
you--a riotous mingling of reds, browns, oranges, golds, and yellows.
Another fascinating shop is a bead-shop. Most of them are together on
the bead street. There you may see displayed all kinds of strings of
beads--long and short, large and small beads, red, yellow, and blue, of
amber, meerschaum, and olive-wood. The Turkish gentlemen carry the
short strings, and, when they chat, they play with the beads,
unconsciously, but always in the same way. They move them forward with
the thumb and first finger, two at a time, one from each side of the
string. When all have been moved, they turn the string about and move
the beads in the opposite direction.
Then there is the rug-shop. The Turkish rug-merchant offers you tea or
coffee and cigarettes, as he hopes you will spend much money. And while
you drink, he throws down before you rugs, rugs, rugs, soft, rich,
alluring, from Baluchistan, Kurdistan, Persia.
But you, I am sure, would prefer a candy-shop. Even if you have tasted
our Turkish paste, you have only a remote idea of how succulent a goody
the real _loukoumi_ is. Then there is _halva_, full of nuts and all
sorts of other good things which you can never guess. It is sticky,
and, when you bite it, it nearly pulls your teeth out. Then there are
_courabiés_ and _smits_, both of which are cakes which you must buy on
a ferry-boat to get the real flavor. A man comes in, carrying a basket
in one hand and waving a sheet of paper in the other. The _courabiés_
are stuck to this paper and you pull them off yourself. The _smits_ are
on a stick which protrudes from the top of the basket. For you must
know that a _smit_ is shaped like a doughnut. (Only the hole has grown
larger without affecting the size of the eatable part. This part is not
sweet and is covered with aniseed.)
It would make your mouth water if I should tell you of all the
delectable dishes you might have in the cafés all over the city. The
Turk loves to eat, he loves to sit, and he loves to stare at his
garden, at his beloved Bosporus, or at space. They never say in Turkey,
"Where do you live?" but always, "Where do you sit?" In spring and
autumn the hills about Constantinople are dotted with spots of color.
They are the Turkish men and women sitting on the grass. And what a
wonderful view they look at! There they sit for hours and hours,
usually silent, occasionally chatting, sometimes grunting "_Uh, uh, uh,
uh_," in descending tones.
The chief other thing a Turk does in times of peace is to pray. From
the gallery of a minaret the muezzin calls him to prayer five times a
day. Do you know what a minaret is? It is the tower of the Turkish
church, or mosque. Mosques built by royalty may have two minarets,
others only one. These minarets are slender, very tall, with a
gracefully pointed top that draws the eye right up to the sky. There is
a Turkish proverb that says, "Never steal a minaret unless you have a
place to hide it in." Two thirds of the way up, there is a carved
gallery, very light and beautiful, where the priest stands and chants
down through the air the call to prayer, which in English prose is
this: "There is no God but Allah; Mohammed is His Prophet; let us go
and pray; let us go save our souls; God is great; there is no god but
God." A pious Turk either goes to the mosque, or prays wherever he may
happen to be. I once saw a soldier praying on a ferry-boat. Inside the
mosques the cooing of many pigeons adds to the rhythmic murmur of the
prayers. There are pigeons inside and outside of all the mosques; one,
of which a picture is here shown, is called the Pigeon Mosque.
The most famous mosque of all is Santa Sophia, once a Christian church
as you can tell by its name, built by the Byzantine Greeks about 300
A. D. It is yellow, weathered by time, is very big and on top of a hill.
Inside, it is a dark golden-brown, and the pigeons flying around under
the roof seem to be far, far above you. The rugs on the floor are all
on a slant because the church was built originally with the altar
toward the east; later the Moslems made it face toward Mecca, southeast
of Constantinople. No Turk ever walks on those rugs with his shoes
on,--he leaves them at the door or carries them in his hand,--and
before he comes in to pray, he washes his feet and hands at the
fountain outside, no matter how cold the water or the weather.
Fountains are everywhere in Constantinople, made of white marble and
exquisitely carved.
Constantinople has been famous in history ever since the legend that
Leander died in swimming the Hellespont, the old name of the
Dardanelles. Nations have quarreled over it, because it is one of the
most wonderfully situated cities in the world, and Constantine the
Great made it the capital of his huge empire. You will study all that
in Roman history if you have not studied it already, and will read also
of its capture by the Turks, under Mohammed the Conqueror, nearly five
hundred years ago.
The history of the Ottoman Empire makes the most exciting fairy tale
seem colorless. Perhaps you do not know that, when Henry the Eighth
of England and Francis the First of France were forming a
mutual-admiration society of their two kingdoms on the Field of the
Cloth of Gold, there was another king, as great as either of them, in
the southeast of Europe, carving great pieces out of other countries
for his empire. This sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, was a great
lawgiver. His reign was the height of Turkey's power. Soon after its
close the rest of Europe became interested in Turkey, especially
Russia and England. Recently, German influence has been stronger than
any other at the Turkish court. That is why Turkey fought on the side
of Germany, and why England and France determined to storm the forts
and brave the mines in the water entrances to Constantinople and so
open up a way to the Mediterranean for their great ally, Russia.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GIANT AND THE GENIE
BY GEORGE FREDERIC STRATTON
Far up on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, in Washington, is a waterfall
which, according to the legend, was inhabited by a giant of enormous
strength--Menuhkesen by name. From out of the East there came a genie
possessed of such courage and audacity that when he was warned against
the terrible powers of Menuhkesen he laughed lustily and said that he
would call forth the surly giant and make him do his bidding. Summoning
his afrits, he gave them orders, and they immediately surrounded the
falls, some of them peering through strange instruments and making
mysterious signs with their hands, while others measured distances and
drove stakes, bearing weird symbols, into the river banks.
Then the genie stood on the bank overlooking the falls and shouted:
"Ho, afrits! Dig me here a deep hole!" And immediately they went to
work with great activity. When they had dug down a hundred feet, the
genie commanded them to tunnel under the falls. "We will unearth this
giant and prove his strength!" he cried defiantly.
So they dug a tunnel until they reached a great mass of rock underneath
the brink of the falls; and here they hewed out a huge cavern, and
carried into it strange machines and many wheels, fastening them all
strongly. And they hung wires from those machines, stringing them a
long distance through dense woods and across ghostly ravines to where
many men lived and worked. When all was ready the genie grasped a great
lever and shouted, "Ho, Menuhkesen! Come forth now, and get busy!"
Then he pressed down the lever, and instantly the spirit sprang out of
the falls, and leaping upon a wire, rushed along it with such swiftness
that no one could see him. The next moment he was many miles away,
performing marvelous feats of strength--pushing great street-cars at
incredible speed, turning the wheels in mills and factories, and
lighting stores and dwellings. In fact, he did whatever the genie
ordered him to do, without an instant's delay or any demur.
All over these big, resourceful United States, Menuhkesen is found, but
the modern captains of industry call him "Electricity." The genii also
are with us, graduates of technical colleges or of engineering
departments of great factories, who, donning khaki clothes and
high-laced leather boots, camp out in the wild mountain fastnesses, or
on the weird deserts, or in the dense forests, and invoke the giants
they meet everywhere in this wonderful country.
But it is the western mountain regions which chiefly hold the romance,
the tragedy, and the gigantic power of the mythical old giant. All up
and down the Rockies and the Sierras, and in the network of stupendous
mountains which cross the five or six hundred miles between, are
mountain torrents tearing down from summits perhaps two or three
thousand feet high to the valleys below. Some of them are very small in
appearance, but possessed of tremendous force.
Let us trace one of these and discover the giant. We hike, or ride a
sure-footed horse, six miles up one of the somber gashes in the
mountains, called cañons, arriving at the origin of a stream we have
seen growing smaller as we ascended. We find a little spring gushing
from beneath a huge boulder and trickling down through the ferns and
brush. Soon it is joined by other little streams on the right or left.
Presently, as we stumble along down the rocky trail, we see on one side
a wide, deep gulch, with walls of sandstone or granite rising almost
perpendicularly on either side. And that gulch has snow lying in it,
perhaps forty feet deep--the drifts of last winter or slides from the
slopes above it.
The snow may then have been sixty or a hundred feet deep, but now, in
midsummer, it is dwindling fast, and its water doubles or triples the
size of our little stream. Suddenly we see that the wild, rocky,
torrent bed has been cleaned out, and that the banks are lined up with
rock. The genie has been giving orders.
A few rods farther that torrent bed gives place to a timber flume; and
the next moment that flume, instead of keeping on the sharply sloping
floor of the cañon, rises on trestles, holding an almost level
position. The trestle increases in height as the ground beneath them
slopes downward, and cross a deep gulch, still holding the little
torrent running between the wooden walls of the flume.
From our trail beneath we see the flume now skirting round the waist of
some stupendous mountain, then crossing other gulches, and soon
appearing on the summit of a peak, eight hundred feet above where we
are standing. Below, at the foot of that peak, is a small, plain, stone
building, and, wriggling down from the summit, is, apparently, a huge
black snake, poking its nose into the basement of that house.
The house holds the generators for turning the force of that torrent
into electricity. The snake is the penstock--a great black steel pipe,
twisting and turning to avoid the huge boulders in its path as it
conducts that water from the summit into the turbines in the house.
The turbine is an enclosed water-wheel in which every particle of force
in the rushing water is used to turn a great steel shaft. On the other
end of that shaft is geared the generator--the wonderful machine with
wire-wound arms which makes the electric current. At this particular
power-house the little torrent which reaches the summit in a flume
thirty inches wide and two feet deep turns out 800 horse-power.
It is the force, not the size, of the stream which gives that power,
for water has a pressure of about fifty pounds per square inch for
every hundred feet of the height of its source. So this water has a
pressure at the turbine of four hundred pounds per square inch--a far
greater pressure than that in the cylinders of a great Mogul mountain
locomotive.
The little stream, freed from the turbines, whirls furiously round a
small basin and rollicks off on a wild, headlong dash through an open
sluiceway for a short distance. Then another flume arrests it; and as
we hike along down the trail, that flume rises above us, straddling
gulches on high trestles, and at two points tunneling through a great
mountain.
We get back to the mouth of the cañon, and there see, on the level we
have then reached, another power-house, larger than the first. Behind
it is another huge, bare mountain of rock; and coming down that,
another gigantic black snake, also poking its head into the
power-house. This snake--or penstock--is 1600 feet long, and the same
stream which developed 800 horse-power at the upper house is now--with
the addition of a little water picked up on the way--reeling off 2600
horse-power at this house.
This imprisoned, raging torrent is now released, and flows in a
subdued, gentle stream down a natural stream-bed. It is less than eight
feet wide and not deep enough to wet our horses' knees as we ford
across. But we gaze upon it with the awe and amazement it deserves when
we remember that, but a few moments before, it has sent its great power
over eleven miles of wire to a small town, is operating several
factories, and will, at night, light all the streets and the houses.
And that is only half its work! Before us is a great stretch of
orchards and fields, vividly green, although they have not had one drop
of water from the heavens for three or four months. All their health
and vigor and wonderful productivity is due to that little stream,
which irrigates over three thousand acres of the land.
Within twenty miles of where this is written, at the foot of the great
Wasatch Mountains, in Utah, are five such cañons with power-houses--two
of them with two houses in each cañon. All over this mountain country,
from the middle of Utah to the Canadian line, are hundreds of such
mountain torrents, only a small proportion of which are yet harnessed
for work.
Some of them are very much larger than the one we have visited. Come
with me to one of these larger houses.
It is in a cañon of awful sublimity, so deep and so nearly
unapproachable that the construction teams had to haul over eight miles
of zigzag trail to make the descent of less than half a mile to the
torrent. We scramble down over the rocks and brush; and although the
roar of the water reaches us for ten or fifteen minutes before we see
it, we are by no means prepared for the astounding scene when it at
last comes into view.
Out from the depths of the great ugly building belch forth four
gleaming, horizontal columns of water, big as barrels, with a force,
speed, and roar as though the discharge were from giant cannon.
Straight across the tail-race they gleam and quiver for a hundred feet,
impinging upon a solid ledge of granite, in which they have worn huge
caverns. The spray dashes up the face of the ledge for sixty or seventy
feet. Up and down the stream, swirling and writhing in a thousand
rushing, crowding whirlpools, the water, just freed from its maddening
confinement, is seeking to make good its escape. But it is jammed back
into the upper race, and for fifty yards you will see it hanging, ledge
upon ledge, fighting, snarling, surging, and struggling for its chance
to slip beneath those terrific outlet volleys and gain the lower stream
and liberty and peace.
The mighty Niagara has no such background of wild beauty, nor does it
ever convey such an instant impression of water force. Once I saw a big
two-inch plank dropped into one of those furious water columns. It
seemed scarcely to touch the water, but flew, faster than the eye could
follow, over to the granite ledge and was instantly smashed into ten
thousand splinters, and I knew that even before the plank had reached
the ledge, the mighty power which hurled it, transmuted into
electricity, had already reached, and was operating, street-cars in a
city seventy miles away.
Come into the power-house. Look at the four gigantic generators,
whirling and humming like leviathan June-bugs--see the wicked,
sputtering little blue sparks from the commutators. From the windows at
the back of the building we look up a very sharp slope, 1500 feet high,
and see the penstocks--twenty-four-inch steel tubes, black, ungainly,
and, at twilight, very uncanny. They follow in curves the profile of
the rough ground, bringing the furious rush of water from the summit
down to the turbines in the lower basement, turning out 26,000
horse-power.
The force of the water in these penstocks is terrific. Tests of a
four-inch jet from one of them have been made. A rifle-bullet glances
off as from chilled steel; a jet from it, no bigger than a penholder,
will drill a hole in sheet steel in a few moments. At the reservoir on
the summit a fly-line may be played in the water--at the foot of the
penstock no mortal could thrust a bayonet one inch into it.
A United States trooper once essayed, on a wager, to cut a two-inch jet
with his sword; a shattered weapon and a broken wrist resulted.
In the harnessing and curbing of these mountain streams the utmost
engineering skill and ingenuity has been called into play. Often the
power-house has to be situated miles back in such inaccessible wilds
that the greatest difficulty has been encountered in carrying machinery
and supplies to the spot. At one point in the Sierras men and material
were transported across two yawning chasms by means of wire cables,
under which ran a freight-carrier.
The Feather River in California makes a big horseshoe bend twenty-five
miles above Oroville, coming within three miles of itself again. An
enormous mountain intervenes, but the engineers tunneled that and
diverted the water into that tunnel. In the lower end of that black,
rushing, underground torrent are placed the great turbines and
generators.
The most striking instance of the results of securing a big headway for
a small stream is shown in San Juan County, Colorado. The Animus River
in its course between Silverton and Durango, a distance of twenty
miles, has a gradual fall of about fifteen hundred feet. Although
called a river, it is but a mountain stream, tumbling over little falls
and through rock-strewn gullies, at no point showing more power than
would be sufficient to drive a very small grist-mill. But the genius of
science has so cunningly diverted it and concentrated its energy as to
develop at last 40,000 horse-power.
A dam was built a few miles below Silverton, and the water turned into
a flume which is only six by eight feet in size. It will be seen that
it must be a very small stream whose waters can be run through such a
restricted channel. Across fearful cañons and around great mountains,
through tunnels and cuttings that flume carries the water for sixteen
miles to the edge of a great cliff near Durango. The cliff is over one
thousand feet high, and the pipe runs over the edge and makes a
perpendicular drop into the power-house below.
From the four-foot steel pipe, nozzles five-eighths of an inch in
diameter conduct the water into the turbines, whirling them at a speed
of four thousand revolutions per minute. The speed of the jets of water
shooting from those nozzles is 25,000 feet, or over four miles per
minute.
Note how the wizards of industry further concentrate and control the
giant they have evoked. That forty-thousand horse-power making that
mighty plunge over the cliff is met by magical machines and switched
into a wire but little larger than a lead-pencil. Forty feet of that
unyielding steel flume which held the power is a load for a freight
car; forty feet of the wire which carries the power is but a small load
for a six-year-old boy.
At one moment the power is in that roaring, headlong, terrific
plunge--the next, it is miles away, invisible, noiseless, and
mysterious, illuminating great arc-lamps, running heavy cars, and--to
come from great to small--whirling dainty fans or cooking an egg.
There are other marvelous power-plants situated on rivers where,
although the force is far less than that of the mountain torrents, the
volume of water is far greater. Idaho shows the most remarkable of the
developments of such water-power, and the astounding ingenuity and
determination of the genii are shown as much as in the mountains. The
Bear River, which runs through Idaho and Utah, carries a very large
flow at an exceedingly rapid rate--for a river. At one point in Idaho
no less than six great power-houses have been installed on that river,
producing a total of nearly 200,000 horse-power. In order to secure
good headway, and the force which this gives, two enormous pipe-lines
have been built to take the water from upper reaches of the river, and,
while holding that pipe almost to a level, run it across country to a
lower reach, where a power-house is built, thus increasing the headway
from nothing to two or three hundred feet.
One of these lines is of eleven-foot pipe, nearly five miles long; the
other is a sixteen-foot pipe, half a mile long. Almost all of the
current produced at these plants is transmitted by cable to Salt Lake
City, 135 miles away.