In those early days, fresh from reading masses of Oriental literature,
I kept recognizing in the people I met on the streets famous personages
who figure in the legends and history of the East: sometimes they
answered so entirely to the picture I had drawn in my own mind of some
celebrated character that I would find myself stopping short in the
street to gaze after them. How often have I seized my friend’s arm,
and, pointing out some passer-by, exclaimed, “There he goes, by Jove!
Don’t you recognize him?” In the square of the Sultan Validéh I have
many a time seen the gigantic Turk who hurled down rocks and stones
upon the heads of Baglione’s soldiers before the walls of Nicea; near
one of the mosques I came across Unm Dgiemil, the old witch of Mecca
who sowed thorns and brambles in front of Mohammed’s house; coming out
of the book bazâr one day, I ran against Digiemal-eddin, the great
scholar of Brusa, who knew all the Arabian dictionary by heart, walking
along with a volume tucked under his arm; I have passed close enough
to Ayesha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, to receive a steady look
from those eyes “like twin stars reflected in a well.” I recognized in
the Et-Meidan the beautiful and unfortunate Greek killed at the foot of
the serpentine column by a ball from the huge guns of Orban; turning
a sharp corner of one of the narrow streets of Phanar, I found myself
suddenly face to face with Kara-Abderrahman, the handsomest young Turk
of the days of Orkhan; I have seen Coswa, Mohammed’s she-camel, and
recognized Kara-bidut, Selim’s black charger; I have encountered poor
Fighani, the poet, who was condemned to go about Stambul harnessed
to an ass for having made Ibrahim’s grand vizier the subject of a
lampoon; I saw in one of the cafés the unwieldy form of Soliman, the
fat admiral, whom the united efforts of four powerful slaves could
with difficulty drag up from his divan; and Ali, the grand vizier, who
failed to find throughout all Arabia a horse fit to carry him; and
Mahmûd Pasha, that ferocious Hercules who strangled Suleiman’s son;
and, established before the entrance of the copyists’ bazâr near the
Bayezid square, that stupid Ahmed II., who would say nothing all day
but “_Kosc! kosc!_” (Very well! very well!) Every character in the
_Thousand and One Nights_--the Aladdins, the Zobeids, the Sinbads, the
Gulnars, the old Jew dealers with their magic lamps and their enchanted
carpets for sale--passed before me one after another like a procession
of so many phantoms.