Our café was a large whitewashed room, with a wooden wainscoting five
or six feet high, and a low divan running around the four walls. In one
corner stood a stove at which a Turk with a hooked nose was making
coffee in little brass coffee-pots, from which he poured it into
tiny cups, adding the sugar himself: this is the universal custom in
Constantinople. The coffee is made fresh for every new-comer and handed
to him already sweetened, together with a glass of water, which the
Turk always drinks before approaching the cup to his lips. At one side
hung a small looking-glass, and beside it a rack filled with razors:
almost all the cafés in Constantinople are barber-shops as well, the
head of the establishment combining these duties with those of leech
and dentist, and operating upon his victims in the same apartment as
that in which his guests are drinking their coffee. On the opposite
wall hung another rack filled with crystal _narghilehs_, their long,
flexible tubes wound around like snakes, and terra-cotta pipes with
cherry-wood stems. Five Turks were seated on the divan thoughtfully
smoking their _narghilehs_, and in front of the door three others sat
upon very low straw-bottomed stools, their backs against the wall,
side by side, with pipes in their mouths; a youth belonging to the
establishment was engaged in shaving the head of a big, fat dervish
clad in a camel’s-hair tunic. No one looked up as we took our seats, no
one spoke, and, with the exception of the coffee-maker and the young
man, no one made the slightest movement of any sort. The gurgling
sound of the water in the _narghilehs_, something like the purring
of cats, was all that broke the profound stillness. Every one gazed
fixedly into vacancy, with faces absolutely devoid of all expression,
like an assembly of wax figures. How many just such scenes as this
have impressed themselves indelibly upon my mind! A wooden house, a
cross-legged Turk, broad shafts of light, an exquisite far-away view,
profound silence,--there you have Turkey. Every time I hear that word
pronounced these objects rise up before me in the same way that one
sees a canal and a windmill when any one mentions Holland.