The arrival at Constantinople made such an overpowering impression
upon me as to almost efface what I had seen during the previous ten
days’ trip from the Straits of Messina to the mouth of the Bosphorus.
The Ionian Sea, blue and unruffled as a lake; the distant mountains
of Morea, tinged with rose color in the early morning light; the
archipelago, gilded with the rays of the setting sun; the ruins of
Athens; the Gulf of Salonika, Lemnos, Tenedos, the Dardanelles, and
a crowd of persons and events which had caused me infinite amusement
during the voyage,--faded into such indistinct and shadowy outlines
at the first sight of the Golden Horn that were I now to undertake a
description of them it would be an effort rather of imagination than
of memory; and so, in order to impart something of life and warmth to
the opening pages of my book, I shall omit all preliminaries and begin
with the last evening of the voyage at the precise moment when, in the
middle of the Sea of Marmora, the captain came up to my friend Yunk
and me, and, laying his two hands on our shoulders, said, in his pure
Palerman accent, “Gentlemen, to-morrow at daybreak we shall see the
first minarets of Stambul.”
Ah! you smile, my good reader, you who have plenty of money and are
tired of spending it--who, when a year or so ago the fancy seized you
to go to Constantinople in twenty-four hours, with your purse well
lined and your trunks packed, set forth as calmly as if it were a trip
to the country, uncertain up to the last moment whether, after all, it
might not pay better to take the train for Baden-Baden instead. If the
captain had said to you, “To-morrow morning we shall see Stambul,” you
would probably have answered, quite calmly, “Indeed? I am very glad to
hear it.” But suppose, instead, you had brooded over the idea for ten
years; had passed many a winter’s evening mournfully studying the map
of the East; had fired your imagination by reading hundreds of books on
the subject; had travelled over one-half of Europe merely to console
yourself for not being able to see the other half; had remained nailed
to your desk for a whole year with this sole object in view; had made
a thousand petty sacrifices and calculations without end; had erected
whole rows of castles in the air, and fought many a stiff battle with
those of your own household; and finally had passed nine sleepless
nights at sea haunted by this intoxicating vision, and so blissfully
happy as to have a twinge of something like remorse at the thought of
all your loved ones left behind;--then you would have some idea of the
real meaning of those words: “To-morrow at daybreak we shall see the
first minarets of Stambul;” and instead of replying phlegmatically,
“I am glad to hear it,” you would have given a great thump on the
bulkhead, as I did.
One great source of satisfaction to my friend and myself was our
profound conviction that, boundless as our expectations might be,
they could not possibly be foiled. About Constantinople there is no
uncertainty, and the most pessimistic traveller feels that there,
at least, he is safe, since no one has ever been disappointed;
and this, moreover, has nothing to do with the charm of its great
associations or the fashion of admiring what every one else does. It
has a beauty of its own, at once overmastering and triumphant, before
which poets, archeologists, ambassadors, and merchants, the princess
and the sailor, people of the North and of the South, one and all,
break forth into loud exclamations of astonishment. In the opinion of
the whole world it is the most beautiful spot on earth. Writers of
travels on arriving there at once lose their heads. Perthusier falls
to stammering; Tournefort declares that human language is powerless;
Pouqueville thinks himself transported to another world; Gautier cannot
believe that what he sees is real; the Viscount di Marcellus falls
into ecstasies; La Croix is intoxicated; Lamartine returns thanks to
God; and all of them, heaping metaphor upon metaphor, endeavor to
make their style more glowing, and search their imaginations in vain
for some simile that shall not fall miserably short of their ideas.
Chateaubriand alone describes his arrival at Constantinople with such
apparent tranquillity of soul as to strongly suggest the idea of
stupor, but he does not fail to observe that it is the most beautiful
thing in the world; and if the celebrated Lady Montague, in pronouncing
a similar opinion, has allowed herself the use of a _perhaps_, she
clearly wishes it to be tacitly understood that the first place belongs
to her own beauty, of which she had a very high opinion. It is, after
all, a cold German who declares that the most beautiful illusions of
youth, the very dreams of first love, become poor and insipid when
contrasted with the delicious sensations which steal upon the soul at
the first sight of those charmed shores, while a learned Frenchman
affirms that the first impression made by Constantinople is one of
terror.
Imagine, then, if you can, the effect produced by all these impassioned
statements on the ardent brains of a clever painter of twenty-four and
a bad poet of twenty-eight! But still, not satisfied with even all
this illustrious praise of Constantinople, we turned to the sailors
to see what they would have to say about it; and here it was the
same thing. Ordinary language was felt by even these rough men to be
inadequate, and they rolled their eyes and rubbed their hands together
in the effort to find unusual words and phrases in which to express
themselves, attempting their description in that far-away tone of voice
and with the slow, uncertain gestures used by uneducated persons when
they try to recount something wonderful. “To arrive at Constantinople
on a fine morning,” said the helmsman--“believe me, gentlemen, _that is
a great moment in a man’s life_.”
The weather, too, smiled upon us. It was a fine, calm night; the water
lapped the sides of the vessel with a gentle murmuring sound, while
the masts and rigging stood out clear and motionless against the sky
sparkling with stars. We seemed hardly to move. In the bow a crowd
of Turks lay stretched out at full length, blissfully smoking their
hookahs with faces turned to the moon, whose light, falling upon their
white turbans, made them look like silvery haloes; on the promenade
deck was a concourse of people of every nationality under the sun,
among them a company of hungry-looking Greek comedians who had embarked
at Piræus.
I can see before me now the pretty face of little Olga, one of a
bevy of Russian children going with their mother to Odessa, very
much astonished at my not understanding her language, and somewhat
displeased at having addressed the same question to me three
consecutive times without obtaining an intelligible answer. Here on
one side a fat, dirty Greek priest, wearing a hat like an inverted
bushel-measure, is looking through his glass for the Sea of Marmora,
and on the other, an English evangelical clergyman is standing stiff
and unyielding as a statue, who for three days past has not spoken to
a soul nor looked at any one; near by are two pretty Athenian girls in
their little red caps, with hair hanging down over their shoulders, who
turn simultaneously toward the water whenever they find any one looking
at them, in order to show their profiles, while a little farther off
an Armenian merchant is telling the beads of his Greek rosary. Near
him is a group of Hebrews, dressed in their antique costume, some
Arabians in long white gowns, a melancholy-minded French governess, and
a few of those nondescript personages one always meets in travelling,
about whom there is nothing particular to indicate their country or
occupation; and in the centre of all this mixed company a little
Turkish family, consisting of a father wearing a fez, a veiled mother,
and two little girls in trousers, all four curled up under a tent on a
pile of many-colored pillows and cushions, and surrounded by a motley
collection of luggage of every shape and hue.
How one realized the vicinity of Constantinople! On all sides there was
an unwonted gayety, and the faces lit up by the ship’s lights were all
happy ones. The group of children skipped around their mother shouting
the ancient Russian name of Stambul: “Zavegorod! Zavegorod!” Passing
near one and another of the little groups, I caught the names of
Galata, Pera, Skutari, Bujukdere, Terapia, which acted upon my excited
brain like stray sparks from the preliminaries of some grand display of
fireworks. Even the sailors were delighted to be nearing a place where,
as they said, one forgets, if only for a single hour, all the troubles
of life. Among the white turbans in the bow as well there were unusual
signs of life: the imaginations of even those sluggish and impassive
Mussulmen were stirred as there began to float before their minds the
magic outlines of _Ummelunia_, “Mother of the World”--that city, as
says the Koran, “which commands on one side the earth, and on two,
the sea.” It seemed as though, had the engine been stopped, the ship
must still have gone on, impelled forward by the sheer force of that
impatient longing which throbbed and palpitated from her decks. From
time to time, as I leaned over the side and looked down at the water,
a hundred different voices seemed to mingle with the murmur of the
waves--the voices of all those who cared for me. “Go,” they said, “son,
brother, friend! Go and enjoy your Constantinople. You have well earned
it; now enjoy yourself, and God be with you!”
It was midnight before the passengers began to disperse, my friend and
I being the last to go, and then with lingering steps. We could not
bear to shut up between four walls an exuberance of joy as compared
with which the Circle of Propontis seemed narrow and contracted.
Halfway down the stair we heard the captain’s voice inviting us to
come on the bridge the next morning. “Be up before sunrise,” he cried,
appearing at the top of the companion-way; “whoever is late will be
thrown overboard.”
A more superfluous threat was never made since the world began. I did
not close my eyes, and I don’t believe that the youthful Muhammad II.
on that famous night of Adrianople when he tore his bed to pieces,
agitated by visions of Constantine’s city, tossed and turned more than
did I throughout those four hours of expectation. In order to quiet my
nerves I tried counting up to a thousand, keeping my eyes fixed on the
line of white spray thrown up against my port by the movement of the
vessel, humming monotonous tunes set to the throbbing of the engine,
but all in vain. I was hot and feverish, my breath was labored, and the
night seemed endless. At the first glimmer of dawn I leaped out of bed,
to find Yunk already up; we tore into our clothes, and in three bounds
were on deck.
Despair! It was foggy.
A thick, impenetrable mist concealed the horizon on every side,
and it looked like rain; so the great spectacle of the approach to
Constantinople was lost, all our hopes dashed, the voyage, in short, a
failure. I was completely stunned.
At this moment the captain appeared, wearing his accustomed cheerful
smile. Explanations were unnecessary. The instant his eye fell on
us he took in the situation, and, patting me on the shoulder, said,
consolingly, “That will be all right; don’t give yourselves the
slightest concern. This fog, for which you ought to be very thankful,
will help us to make the most glorious entrance into Constantinople one
could possibly desire. In two hours, you may take my word for it, the
sky will be absolutely clear.” At these brave words my blood began to
circulate freely again, and we followed him to the bridge.
The Turks were already assembled in the bow, seated cross-legged upon
strips of carpet, with their faces turned toward Constantinople.
Presently the other passengers began to appear, armed with glasses of
all sizes and styles, and took their places, one after another, along
the port rail of the vessel, like people in the gallery of a theatre
waiting for the curtain to rise. A fresh breeze was blowing; no one
spoke, but gradually every glass was levelled upon the northern shore
of the Sea of Marmora, where, as yet, nothing could be seen.
The fog, however, had lifted so rapidly that it was now little more
than a filmy veil hanging over the horizon, while above it the heavens
shone out clear and resplendent. Directly ahead of us could be seen
indistinctly the little archipelago of the three Isles of the Princes,
the _Demonesi_ of the ancients, and the favorite pleasure-grounds of
the court in the time of the Byzantine Empire, now a popular resort and
place of amusement for the people of Constantinople.
Both shores of the Sea of Marmora were still completely hidden.