SMYRNA—FIRST GLIMPSES OF THE EAST
I am glad that the Turkish part of Athens was extinct, so that I should
not be baulked of the pleasure of entering an Eastern town by an
introduction to any garbled or incomplete specimen of one. Smyrna seems
to me the most Eastern of all I have seen; as Calais will probably
remain to the Englishman the most French town in the world. The
jack-boots of the postilions don’t seem so huge elsewhere, or the tight
stockings of the maid-servants so Gallic. The churches and the
ramparts, and the little soldiers on them, remain for ever impressed
upon your memory; from which larger temples and buildings, and whole
armies have subsequently disappeared: and the first words of actual
French heard spoken, and the first dinner at “Quillacq’s,” remain after
twenty years as clear as on the first day. Dear Jones, can’t you
remember the exact smack of the white hermitage, and the toothless old
fellow singing “Largo al factotum”?
The first day in the East is like that. After that there is nothing.
The wonder is gone, and the thrill of that delightful shock, which so
seldom touches the nerves of plain men of the world, though they seek
for it everywhere. One such looked out at Smyrna from our steamer, and
yawned without the least excitement, and did not betray the slightest
emotion, as boats with real Turks on board came up to the ship. There
lay the town with minarets and cypresses, domes and castles; great guns
were firing off, and the blood-red flag of the Sultan flaring over the
fort ever since sunrise; woods and mountains came down to the gulf’s
edge, and as you looked at them with the telescope, there peeped out of
the general mass a score of pleasant episodes of Eastern life—there
were cottages with quaint roofs; silent cool kiosks, where the chief of
the eunuchs brings down the ladies of the harem. I saw Hassan, the
fisherman, getting his nets; and Ali Baba going off with his donkey to
the great forest for wood. Smith looked at these wonders quite unmoved;
and I was surprised at his apathy; but he had been at Smyrna before. A
man only sees the miracle once; though you yearn over it ever so, it
won’t come again. I saw nothing of Ali Baba and Hassan the next time we
came to Smyrna, and had some doubts (recollecting the badness of the
inn) about landing at all. A person who wishes to understand France or
the East should come in a yacht to Calais or Smyrna, land for two
hours, and never afterwards go back again.
But those two hours are beyond measure delightful. Some of us were
querulous up to that time, and doubted of the wisdom of making the
voyage. Lisbon, we owned, was a failure; Athens a dead failure; Malta
very well, but not worth the trouble and sea-sickness: in fact,
Baden-Baden or Devonshire would be a better move than this; when Smyrna
came, and rebuked all mutinous Cockneys into silence. Some men may read
this who are in want of a sensation. If they love the odd and
picturesque, if they loved the “Arabian Nights” in their youth, let
them book themselves on board one of the Peninsular and Oriental
vessels, and try one DIP into Constantinople or Smyrna. Walk into the
bazaar, and the East is unveiled to you: how often and often have you
tried to fancy this, lying out on a summer holiday at school! It is
wonderful, too, how LIKE it is: you may imagine that you have been in
the place before, you seem to know it so well!
The beauty of that poetry is, to me, that it was never too handsome;
there is no fatigue of sublimity about it. Shacabac and the little
Barber play as great a part in it as the heroes; there are no
uncomfortable sensations of terror; you may be familiar with the great
Afreet, who was going to execute the travellers for killing his son
with a date-stone. Morgiana, when she kills the forty robbers with
boiling oil, does not seem to hurt them in the least; and though King
Schahriar makes a practice of cutting off his wives’ heads, yet you
fancy they have got them on again in some of the back rooms of the
palace, where they are dancing and playing on dulcimers. How fresh,
easy, good-natured, is all this! How delightful is that notion of the
pleasant Eastern people about knowledge, where the height of science is
made to consist in the answering of riddles! and all the mathematicians
and magicians bring their great beards to bear on a conundrum!
When I got into the bazaar among this race, somehow I felt as if they
were all friends. There sat the merchants in their little shops, quiet
and solemn, but with friendly looks. There was no smoking, it was the
Ramazan; no eating, the fish and meat fizzing in the enormous pots of
the cook-shops are only for the Christians. The children abounded; the
law is not so stringent upon them, and many wandering merchants were
there selling figs (in the name of the Prophet, doubtless) for their
benefit, and elbowing onwards with baskets of grapes and cucumbers.
Countrymen passed bristling over with arms, each with a huge bellyful
of pistols and daggers in his girdle; fierce, but not the least
dangerous. Wild swarthy Arabs, who had come in with the caravans,
walked solemnly about, very different in look and demeanour from the
sleek inhabitants of the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked,
their shops tended by sallow-faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled
and welcomed you in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colours; and women,
with black nose-bags and shuffling yellow slippers, chattered and
bargained at the doors of the little shops. There was the rope quarter
and the sweetmeat quarter, and the pipe bazaar and the arm bazaar, and
the little turned-up shoe quarter, and the shops where ready-made
jackets and pelisses were swinging, and the region where, under the
ragged awning, regiments of tailors were at work. The sun peeps through
these awnings of mat or canvas, which are hung over the narrow lanes of
the bazaar, and ornaments them with a thousand freaks of light and
shadow. Cogia Hassan Alhabbal’s shop is in a blaze of light; while his
neighbour, the barber and coffee-house keeper, has his premises, his
low seats and narghiles, his queer pots and basins, in the shade. The
cobblers are always good- natured; there was one who, I am sure, has
been revealed to me in my dreams, in a dirty old green turban, with a
pleasant wrinkled face like an apple, twinkling his little grey eyes as
he held them up to talk to the gossips, and smiling under a delightful
old grey beard, which did the heart good to see. You divine the
conversation between him and the cucumber-man, as the Sultan used to
understand the language of birds. Are any of those cucumbers stuffed
with pearls, and is that Armenian with the black square turban Haroun
Alraschid in disguise, standing yonder by the fountain where the
children are drinking—the gleaming marble fountain, chequered all over
with light and shadow, and engraved with delicate arabesques and
sentences from the Koran?
But the greatest sensation of all is when the camels come. Whole
strings of real camels, better even than in the procession of Blue
Beard, with soft rolling eyes and bended necks, swaying from one side
of the bazaar to the other to and fro, and treading gingerly with their
great feet. O you fairy dreams of boyhood! O you sweet meditations of
half-holidays, here you are realised for half-an- hour! The genius
which presides over youth led us to do a good action that day. There
was a man sitting in an open room, ornamented with fine long-tailed
sentences of the Koran: some in red, some in blue; some written
diagonally over the paper; some so shaped as to represent ships,
dragons, or mysterious animals. The man squatted on a carpet in the
middle of this room, with folded arms, waggling his head to and fro,
swaying about, and singing through his nose choice phrases from the
sacred work. But from the room above came a clear noise of many little
shouting voices, much more musical than that of Naso in the matted
parlour, and the guide told us it was a school, so we went upstairs to
look.
I declare, on my conscience, the master was in the act of bastinadoing
a little mulatto boy; his feet were in a bar, and the brute was laying
on with a cane; so we witnessed the howling of the poor boy, and the
confusion of the brute who was administering the correction. The other
children were made to shout, I believe, to drown the noise of their
little comrade’s howling; but the punishment was instantly discontinued
as our hats came up over the stair-trap, and the boy cast loose, and
the bamboo huddled into a corner, and the schoolmaster stood before us
abashed. All the small scholars in red caps, and the little girls in
gaudy handkerchiefs, turned their big wondering dark eyes towards us;
and the caning was over for THAT time, let us trust. I don’t envy some
schoolmasters in a future state. I pity that poor little blubbering
Mahometan: he will never be able to relish the “Arabian Nights” in the
original, all his life long.
From this scene we rushed off somewhat discomposed to make a breakfast
off red mullets and grapes, melons, pomegranates, and Smyrna wine, at a
dirty little comfortable inn, to which we were recommended: and from
the windows of which we had a fine cheerful view of the gulf and its
busy craft, and the loungers and merchants along the shore. There were
camels unloading at one wharf, and piles of melons much bigger than the
Gibraltar cannon-balls at another. It was the fig-season, and we passed
through several alleys encumbered with long rows of fig-dressers,
children and women for the most part, who were packing the fruit
diligently into drums, dipping them in salt-water first, and spreading
them neatly over with leaves; while the figs and leaves are drying,
large white worms crawl out of them, and swarm over the decks of the
ships which carry them to Europe and to England, where small children
eat them with pleasure—I mean the figs, not the worms—and where they
are still served at wine-parties at the Universities. When fresh they
are not better than elsewhere; but the melons are of admirable flavour,
and so large, that Cinderella might almost be accommodated with a coach
made of a big one, without any very great distension of its original
proportions.
Our guide, an accomplished swindler, demanded two dollars as the fee
for entering the mosque, which others of our party subsequently saw for
sixpence, so we did not care to examine that place of worship. But
there were other cheaper sights, which were to the full as picturesque,
for which there was no call to pay money, or, indeed, for a day,
scarcely to move at all. I doubt whether a man who would smoke his pipe
on a bazaar counter all day, and let the city flow by him, would not be
almost as well employed as the most active curiosity-hunter.
To be sure he would not see the women. Those in the bazaar were shabby
people for the most part, whose black masks nobody would feel a
curiosity to remove. You could see no more of their figures than if
they had been stuffed in bolsters; and even their feet were brought to
a general splay uniformity by the double yellow slippers which the
wives of true believers wear. But it is in the Greek and Armenian
quarters, and among those poor Christians who were pulling figs, that
you see the beauties; and a man of a generous disposition may lose his
heart half-a-dozen times a day in Smyrna. There was the pretty maid at
work at a tambour-frame in an open porch, with an old duenna spinning
by her side, and a goat tied up to the railings of the little
court-garden; there was the nymph who came down the stair with the
pitcher on her head, and gazed with great calm eyes, as large and
stately as Juno’s; there was the gentle mother, bending over a queer
cradle, in which lay a small crying bundle of infancy. All these three
charmers were seen in a single street in the Armenian quarter, where
the house-doors are all open, and the women of the families sit under
the arches in the court. There was the fig-girl, beautiful beyond all
others, with an immense coil of deep black hair twisted round a head of
which Raphael was worthy to draw the outline and Titian to paint the
colour. I wonder the Sultan has not swept her off, or that the Persian
merchants, who come with silks and sweetmeats, have not kidnapped her
for the Shah of Tehran.
We went to see the Persian merchants at their khan, and purchased some
silks there from a swarthy black-bearded man, with a conical cap of
lambswool. Is it not hard to think that silks bought of a man in a
lambswool cap, in a caravanserai, brought hither on the backs of
camels, should have been manufactured after all at Lyons? Others of our
party bought carpets, for which the town is famous; and there was one
who absolutely laid in a stock of real Smyrna figs; and purchased three
or four real Smyrna sponges for his carriage; so strong was his passion
for the genuine article.
I wonder that no painter has given us familiar views of the East: not
processions, grand sultans, or magnificent landscapes; but faithful
transcripts of everyday Oriental life, such as each street will supply
to him. The camels afford endless motives, couched in the
market-places, lying by thousands in the camel-square, snorting and
bubbling after their manner, the sun blazing down on their backs, their
slaves and keepers lying behind them in the shade: and the Caravan
Bridge, above all, would afford a painter subjects for a dozen of
pictures. Over this Roman arch, which crosses the Meles river, all the
caravans pass on their entrance to the town. On one side, as we sat and
looked at it, was a great row of plane- trees; on the opposite bank, a
deep wood of tall cypresses—in the midst of which rose up innumerable
grey tombs, surmounted with the turbans of the defunct believers.
Beside the stream, the view was less gloomy. There was under the
plane-trees a little coffee- house, shaded by a trellis-work, covered
over with a vine, and ornamented with many rows of shining pots and
water-pipes, for which there was no use at noon-day now, in the time of
Ramazan. Hard by the coffee-house was a garden and a bubbling marble
fountain, and over the stream was a broken summer-house, to which
amateurs may ascend for the purpose of examining the river; and all
round the plane-trees plenty of stools for those who were inclined to
sit and drink sweet thick coffee, or cool lemonade made of fresh green
citrons. The master of the house, dressed in a white turban and light
blue pelisse, lolled under the coffee-house awning; the slave in white
with a crimson striped jacket, his face as black as ebony, brought us
pipes and lemonade again, and returned to his station at the
coffee-house, where he curled his black legs together, and began
singing out of his flat nose to the thrumming of a long guitar with
wire strings. The instrument was not bigger than a soup-ladle, with a
long straight handle, but its music pleased the performer; for his eyes
rolled shining about, and his head wagged, and he grinned with an
innocent intensity of enjoyment that did one good to look at. And there
was a friend to share his pleasure: a Turk dressed in scarlet, and
covered all over with daggers and pistols, sat leaning forward on his
little stool, rocking about, and grinning quite as eagerly as the black
minstrel. As he sang and we listened, figures of women bearing pitchers
went passing over the Roman bridge, which we saw between the large
trunks of the planes; or grey forms of camels were seen stalking across
it, the string preceded by the little donkey, who is always here their
long-eared conductor.
These are very humble incidents of travel. Wherever the steamboat
touches the shore adventure retreats into the interior, and what is
called romance vanishes. It won’t bear the vulgar gaze; or rather the
light of common day puts it out, and it is only in the dark that it
shines at all. There is no cursing and insulting of Giaours now. If a
Cockney looks or behaves in a particularly ridiculous way, the little
Turks come out and laugh at him. A Londoner is no longer a spittoon for
true believers: and now that dark Hassan sits in his divan and drinks
champagne, and Selim has a French watch, and Zuleika perhaps takes
Morison’s pills, Byronism becomes absurd instead of sublime, and is
only a foolish expression of Cockney wonder. They still occasionally
beat a man for going into a mosque, but this is almost the only sign of
ferocious vitality left in the Turk of the Mediterranean coast, and
strangers may enter scores of mosques without molestation. The
paddle-wheel is the great conqueror. Wherever the captain cries “Stop
her!” Civilisation stops, and lands in the ship’s boat, and makes a
permanent acquaintance with the savages on shore. Whole hosts of
crusaders have passed and died, and butchered here in vain. But to
manufacture European iron into pikes and helmets was a waste of metal:
in the shape of piston-rods and furnace-pokers it is irresistible; and
I think an allegory might be made showing how much stronger commerce is
than chivalry, and finishing with a grand image of Mahomet’s crescent
being extinguished in Fulton’s boiler.
This I thought was the moral of the day’s sights and adventures. We
pulled off to the steamer in the afternoon—the Inbat blowing fresh, and
setting all the craft in the gulf dancing over its blue waters. We were
presently under way again, the captain ordering his engines to work
only at half power, so that a French steamer which was quitting Smyrna
at the same time might come up with us, and fancy she could beat their
irresistible, “Tagus.” Vain hope! Just as the Frenchman neared us, the
“Tagus” shot out like an arrow, and the discomfited Frenchman went
behind. Though we all relished the joke exceedingly, there was a French
gentleman on board who did not seem to be by any means tickled with it;
but he had received papers at Smyrna, containing news of Marshal
Bugeaud’s victory at Isly, and had this land victory to set against our
harmless little triumph at sea.
That night we rounded the island of Mitylene: and the next day the
coast of Troy was in sight, and the tomb of Achilles—a dismal- looking
mound that rises in a low dreary barren shore—less lively and not more
picturesque than the Scheldt or the mouth of the Thames. Then we passed
Tenedos and the forts and town at the mouth of the Dardanelles. The
weather was not too hot, the water as smooth as at Putney, and
everybody happy and excited at the thought of seeing Constantinople
to-morrow. We had music on board all the way from Smyrna. A German
commis-voyageur, with a guitar, who had passed unnoticed until that
time, produced his instrument about mid-day, and began to whistle
waltzes. He whistled so divinely that the ladies left their cabins, and
men laid down their books. He whistled a polka so bewitchingly that two
young Oxford men began whirling round the deck, and performed that
popular dance with much agility until they sank down tired. He still
continued an unabated whistling, and as nobody would dance, pulled off
his coat, produced a pair of castanets, and whistling a mazurka,
performed it with tremendous agility. His whistling made everybody gay
and happy— made those acquainted who had not spoken before, and
inspired such a feeling of hilarity in the ship, that that night, as we
floated over the Sea of Marmora, a general vote was expressed for
broiled bones and a regular supper-party. Punch was brewed, and
speeches were made, and, after a lapse of fifteen years, I heard the
“Old English Gentleman” and “Bright Chanticleer Proclaims the Morn,”
sung in such style that you would almost fancy the proctors must hear,
and send us all home.