Next morning the steamer had not come in; we went down to the quay
and questioned the officials as to the possible time of its arrival.
They, however, shrugged their shoulders in mute surprise at our
impatience. How could they know when it might please Allah to send the
steamer? We strolled idly through the orange-grove and into a larger
pleasure-ground, laid out with turf and empty flower-beds, as though
some Elizabethan gardener had designed it--and had left it to be
completed by Orientals. The pleasant melancholy of autumn lay upon it
all, but of an autumn unlike those to which we were accustomed, for it
had brought renewed freshness to the grass, scorched by the summer sun,
and a second lease of life to the roses. It was almost with surprise
that we noticed the masses of fruit hanging on the green orange boughs
which ‘never lose their leaves nor ever bid the spring adieu.’ In the
inner garden stood a tower into whose looking-glass rooms we climbed,
and from its balconies searched the Caspian for some sign of our ship.
But none was to be seen. In despair we sallied forth into the bazaar,
and purchased fish and fowls, honey and dried figs, on which we made an
excellent breakfast.
All day long we waited, and how the ‘many’ inhabitants of Enzeli
contrive to pass the time remains a mystery to us. As a watering-place,
it is not to be recommended, for the tideless sea leaves all the refuse
of the village to rot in the sand; sleep may prove a resource to them,
as it did to us, for the greater part of the afternoon and evening; but
their lot in the narrow peninsula did not seem to us an enviable one
as we hurried through the orange-grove in the dawn, summoned by the
whistling of the long-expected boat.
So we steamed away across the Caspian, and the sleepy little place
vanished behind the mists that hung over its lagoons and enveloped
its guardian mountains--faded and faded from our eyes till the Shah’s
palace was no longer visible; faded and faded from our minds, and sank
back into the mist of vague memories and fugitive sensations.
_THE MONTH OF FASTING_
OF the powers which come by prayer and fasting, every Mohammedan
should have a large share. It is impossible, of course, for the
uninitiated to judge how far the inward grace tallies with the
outward form, but he can at least bear witness that the forms of the
Mohammedan religion are stricter, and that they appear to be more
accurately obeyed, than those of the Christian. Religious observances
call upon a man with a rougher and a louder voice, and at the same
time they are more intimately connected with his everyday life--before
the remembrance of the things which are not of this world can have
faded from his mind, the muezzin summons him again to turn the eye of
faith towards Mecca. The mosques of Constantinople wear a friendly
and a homelike air which is absent from Western churches; even those
frequented shrines in some small chapel of one of our cathedrals, hung
about with pictures and votive offerings, and lighted with wax tapers
by pious fingers, do not suggest a more constant devotion than is to
be found in the stern and beautiful simplicity of Mohammedan places of
worship. At every hour of the day you may see grave men lifting the
heavy curtain which hangs across the doorway, and, with their shoes
in their hand, treading softly over the carpeted floor, establishing
themselves against one of the pillars which support a dome bright
with coloured tiles, reading under their breath from the open Koran
before them, meditating, perhaps, or praying, if they be of the poorer
sort which meditates little, but, however poor they may be, their
rags unabashed by glowing carpets and bright-hued tiles. As you pass,
slipping over the floor in your large outer shoes, they will look up
for a moment, and immediately return to devotions which are too serious
to be disturbed by the presence of unbelievers.
To the stranger, religious ceremonies are often enough the one visible
expression of a nation’s life. In his churches you meet a man on
familiar ground, for, prince or beggar, Western or Oriental, all have
this in common--that they must pray. We had seen the beggars, we were
also to see the Sultan on his way to mosque in Stamboul. He crosses
the Golden Horn for this purpose only twice in the year, and even when
these appointed times come round, he is so fearful of assassination
that he does his best to back out of the disagreeable duty--small
wonder, when you think of the examples he has behind him! When he
finally decides to venture forth, no one knows until the last moment
what route he will take; all the streets and bridges are lined with
rows of soldiers, through which, when he comes, his carriage drives
swiftly, followed by innumerable carriage-loads of the women of his
harem, dressed in pink and blue and green satin, their faces very
incompletely concealed by muslin veils--wrappings which are extremely
becoming to dark-eyed beauties.
Every Friday Abdul Hamed goes to mid-day prayers in a small mosque
near his palace of Yildiz Kiosk. We stood one sunny morning on the
balconies of a house opposite the mosque waiting for his coming; the
roads were again lined with soldiers--those tall lean Turks whose grim
faces danger and hardship are powerless to disturb--the bands played
waltz tunes, the muezzin appeared upon the platform of the minaret, and
the Sultan’s horses came prancing through the crowds of spectators.
Just as he turned into the enclosure of the mosque, a man broke through
the crowd and rushed, shouting and waving a roll of paper above his
head, towards the carriage window. He pushed his way through two lines
of soldiers, with such impetuous force he came, but the third turned
him back, still struggling and waving his petition above his head. The
waltz tunes drowned his cries, the Sultan disappeared into the mosque,
and the petitioner, having been shoved and buffeted from hand to hand,
having lost his paper and the better part of his garments in the
scuffle, was sent homeward sadly and in rags. When the Sultan came out
half an hour later and drove his white horses back through the serried
lines of people, the soldiers were again standing with imperturbable
faces, and peace had been restored to the Ottoman Empire.
In Constantinople religious observances go far to paralyze the conduct
of mundane affairs. Three days of the week are _dies non_: on Friday
the Turks are making holiday, Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath, and on
Sunday the Christians do no work. Moreover, as far as the Mohammedans
are concerned, there is one month of the year when all business is at
a standstill. During the twenty-eight days of Ramazan they are ordered
by the Prophet to fast from an hour before sunrise until sunset. The
Prophet is not always obeyed; the richer classes rarely keep the fast;
those whose position does not lift them entirely beyond the pressure of
public opinion, soften the harshness of his command by sleeping during
the day and carousing during the night--a part of the bazaars, for
instance, is not opened until mid-day in Ramazan, at which hour sleepy
merchants may be seen spreading out their wares upon the counters with
a tribute of many yawns to last night’s wakefulness; but the common
people still keep to the letter of the law, and to all Ramazan is a
good excuse for postponing any disagreeable business.
Such a fast as that enjoined by Mohammed would fill the most ascetic
Christian of to-day with indignant horror. Not only is every true
believer forbidden to eat during the prescribed hours, but nothing of
any kind may pass his lips: he may drink nothing, he may not smoke.
These rules, which are to be kept by all except travellers and the
sick, fall heavily upon the poorer classes, who alone preserve them
faithfully. Porters carrying immense loads up and down the steep
streets of Pera and Galata, caïquejis rowing backwards and forwards
under the hot sun across the Golden Horn and the swift current of
the Bosphorus, owners of small shops standing in narrow, stuffy
streets and surrounded by smells which would take the heart out of
any man--all these not one drop of water, not one whiff of tobacco,
refreshes or comforts during the weary hours of daylight. As the sun
sinks lower behind the hill of Stamboul, the tables in front of the
coffee-shops are set out with bottles of lemon-water and of syrups, and
with rows and rows of water-pipes, and round them cluster groups of
men, thirstily awaiting the end of the fast. The moments pass slowly,
slowly--even the European grows athirst as he watches the faces about
him--the sun still lingers on the edge of the horizon. On a sudden
the watchman sees him take his plunge into another hemisphere, and
the sunset-gun booms out over the town, shaking minarets and towers
as the sound rushes from hill to hill, shaking the patient, silent
people into life. At once the smoke of tobacco rises like an incense
into the evening air, the narghilehs begin to gurgle merrily, the smoke
of cigarettes floats over every group at the street corners, the very
hamal pauses under his load as he passes down the hills and lights the
little roll of tobacco which he carries all ready in the rags about his
waist. Iced water and syrups come later; still later tongues will be
loosened over the convivial evening meal; but for the moment what more
can a man want than the elusive joy of tobacco-smoke?
From that hour until dawn time passes gaily in Constantinople, and
especially in Stamboul, the Turkish quarter. The inhabitants are afoot,
the mosques are crowded with worshippers, the coffee-shops are full
of men eating, drinking, smoking, and listening to songs and to the
tales of story-tellers. The whole city is bright with twinkling lamps;
the carved platforms round the minarets, which are like the capitals
of pillars supporting the great dome of the sky, are hung about with
lights, and, slung on wires between them, sentences from the Koran
blaze out in tiny lamps against the blackness of the night. As you look
across the Golden Horn the slender towers of the minarets are lost in
the darkness, rings of fire hang in mid-air over Stamboul, the word
of God flames forth in high heaven, and is reflected back from the
waters beneath. Towards morning the lamps fade and burn out, but at
dusk the city again decks herself in her jewels, and casts a glittering
reflection into her many waters.
On the twenty-fourth night the holy month reaches its culminating
point. It is the Night of Predestination; God in heaven lays down His
decrees for the coming year, and gives them to His angels to carry
to the earth in due season. No good Mohammedan thinks of sleep; the
streets are as bright as day, and from every mosque rise the prayers
of thousands of worshippers. The great ceremony takes place in the
mosque of St. Sophia. Under that vast dome, which the most ancient
temples have been ransacked to adorn, until from Heliopolis, from
Ephesus, from Athens, and from Baalbec, the dead gods have rendered
up their treasures of porphyry and marble--under the dome which was
the glory of Christendom is celebrated the festival of the Mohammedan
faith. By daylight St. Sophia is still the Christian church, the place
of memories. The splendours of Justinian linger in it; the marbles
glow with soft colour as though they had caught and held the shadow of
that angel’s wings who was its architect; the doves which flit through
the space of the dome are not less emblems of Christianity than the
carved dove of stone over the doorway; the four great painted angels
lift their mutilated faces in silent protest against the desecration
of the church they guard. Only the bareness, the vast emptiness, which
keeps the beauty of St. Sophia unspoilt by flaring altars and tawdry
decorations, reminds you that it is a mosque in which you are standing,
and the shields hung high up above the capitals, whose twisted golden
letters proclaim the names of the Prophet and his companions. Long
shafts of dusty sunlight counterchange the darkness, weaving peaceful
patterns on the carpeted pavement which was once washed with the blood
of fugitives from Turkish scimitars.
But on the Night of Power Christian memories are swept aside, and
the stern God of Mohammed fills with His presence the noblest mosque
in all the world. As you look down between the pillars of the vast
gallery your eyes are blinded by a mist of light--thousands of lamps
form a solid roof of brightness between you and the praying people on
the floor of the mosque. Gradually the light breaks and disparts, and
between the lamps you see the long lines of worshippers below--long,
even lines, set all awry across the pavement that the people may
turn their eyes not to the East, but further south, where the Ka’bah
stands in holy Mecca. From the pulpit the words of the preacher echo
round the mosque, and every time that he pronounces the name of God
the people fall upon their faces with a great sound, which is like
the sound of all nations falling prostrate before their Creator. For
a moment the silence of adoration weighs upon the air, then they rise
to their feet, and the preacher’s voice rolls out again through arches
and galleries and domes. ‘God is the Light of Heaven and Earth!’ say
the golden letters overhead. ‘He is the Light!’ answer the thousands
of lamps beneath. ‘God Is the Light!’ reads the preacher. ‘God is the
Light!’ repeats a praying nation, and falls with a sound like thunder,
prostrate before His name.
With the Night of Predestination Ramazan is drawing to a close. On
the fifth succeeding evening all the Mohammedan world will be agog to
catch the first glimpse of the crescent moon, whose rays announce the
end of the fast. Woe to true believers if clouds hang over the horizon!
The heaven-sent sign alone may set a term to the penance imposed by
heavenly decree, and not until the pale herald has ushered in the month
of Shawwal may men return to the common comforts of every day.
_REQUIESCANT IN PACE_
IT is a friendly ordering of the world that the episodes of
each man’s life come to him with so vivid a freshness that his own
experience (which is nothing but the experience of all his fellows)
might be unique in the history of the race. Providence is but an
unskilful strategist, and having contrived one scheme to fill the
three-score years and ten, she keeps a man to it, regardless of his
disposition and of his desires. Sometimes, indeed, he forces her hand,
wresting from her here a little more of power, there a sweeter burst of
romance, making her blow a louder peal of warrior trumpets to herald
him, and beat a longer roll of drums when he departs; sometimes he
outwits her, dying before he has completed the task she set him, or
disturbing her calculations by his obstinate vitality. But for the
most part he is content to obey, and the familiar story takes its
course until death abruptly closes the chapter, and sends the little
universe of his deeds to roll unevenly down the centuries, balanced
or unbalanced as he left it, with no hand more to modify its course.
Familiar and yet never monotonous--though wherever you turn the air
is full of memories everywhere the same, though the page of every
historian repeats the same tale, though every poet sighs over it, and
every human being on the earth lives it over again in his own person.
A man will not complain of the want of originality; he is more likely
to be cheered when he looks round him and sees his fellows suffering
and rejoicing in like manner with himself, when he looks back and sees
his predecessors absorbed by the same cares, urged forward by the same
hopes. The experience of those who have passed before him along the
well-trodden road will not hold him back or turn him aside; to each
newcomer the way is new and still to be enjoyed--new and exciting the
dangers and the difficulties, new the pleasant sensation of rest by the
fountain at mid-day, new and terrible the hunger and the foot-soreness,
new, with a grim unexpectedness, the forbidding aspect of that last
caravanserai where he lays himself down to sleep out the eternal night.
Yes, Death is newest of all and least considered in the counsels of
men--Death, who comes silent-footed at all moments, who brushes us with
his sleeve as he passes us by, who plucks us warningly by the cloak
lest we should forget his presence--he, too, will surprise us at the
last.
And if it were not so, small pleasure would be reaped from life. If
the past were to stand for ever holding a mirror of the future before
his eyes, many a man would refuse to venture forward--it is upon the
unknown that he lays his trust--and if the universal presence of death
had but once found a lodging in his mind, the whole world would seem to
him to be but one vast graveyard, the cheerful fields but a covering
for dead men’s bones, and the works of their hands but as tombstones
under which the dead hands lie.
Yet at times they are good and quiet company, the dead; they will
not interrupt your musings, but when they speak, whether they be Jews
or Turks or heathens, they will speak in a tongue all can understand.
There are even countries where the moving, breathing people are
less intelligible, dwell in a world further apart from you, than
that silent population under the earth. You may watch the medley of
folk hurrying into Stamboul across the Galata Bridge--that causeway
between East and West--and the Dervishes washing their feet under the
arches of a mosque, and the eager bartering in the bazaars, without
one feeling of fellowship with these men and women who look at you
askance as you go by; you may pass between long rows of crumbling,
closely-latticed houses without venturing to hazard the widest solution
of the life within--without even knowing whether there be life at all,
so inhospitable they seem, so undomestic. But, once beyond the walls,
you have done with distinctions of race. From the high towers of Yedi
Kuli on the topmost hill down to the glittering waters of the Golden
Horn are scattered countless graves--on the one hand, the triple line
of Constantine’s city wall, rent and torn, with cracking bastions and
dismantled towers, in its hopeless decrepitude still presenting a noble
front to all comers, save where the great breach tells of the inrush
of the Turkish conquerors Judas-trees drop their purple flowers over
the spot where Constantine Palæologus fell, red rose-bushes spring
from the crevices, a timid army of lizards garrisons the useless
forts. On the other hand, the great city of the dead--acre upon acre
of closely-packed graves, regiment upon regiment of headstones, some
with a rude turban carved atop, some (and these mark where women lie)
unadorned, and all pushed awry by time and storms and the encroaching
roots and stems of cypress-trees, all neglected, all desolate.
Constantinople, the dying city, is girt about with graves--not more
forgotten the names of those that rest there than her own glory on the
lips of men. So they speak to you, these dead warriors, dead statesmen,
dear dead women, and to the spiritual ear they speak in tragic tones.
The cypresses cast their shadows over this page of Turkish history,
springing upwards in black and solemn luxuriance, nourished by dead
bodies. The cypress-trees are like mutes, who follow the funeral
procession clothed in mourning garments, but with sleek and well-fed
faces. They rear their dark heads into the blue sky and beckon to their
fellows in Scutari across the Bosphorus.
From the Scutari hill-top the eye is greeted by one of the most
enchanting prospects the world has to show--the blue waters of Marmora
traversed by greener Bosphorus currents, light mists resting along the
foot of the hill-bound coast of Asia, a group of islands floating on
the surface of the water, the Golden Horn glimmering away northwards,
with the marble walls of the Seraglio stretching a long white finger
between it and the sea, Stamboul crowned with minarets and domes.
Flocks of gray birds flit aimlessly across the water--the restless
souls of women, says Turkish legend--the waves lap round the tower of
Leander, the light wind comes whispering down between the exquisite
Bosphorus shores, bringing the breath of Russian steppes to shake the
plane-leaves in Scutari streets. Constantinople the Magnificent gathers
her rags round her, throws over her shoulders her imperial robe of
sunshine, and sits in peaceful state with her kingdom of blue waters
at her feet.... But all around you the dead speak and command your
ears. The ground is thick with the graves of men who died fighting,
who died of cold and hunger in bleak Crimea; under your feet are great
pits filled with unhonoured bones, and the white stones which strew the
grass cry aloud the story of struggle and fight into the quiet air.
Beyond them the dark canopy of cypresses shadows countless thousands
of Turkish graves; the surface of the ground is broken and heaped up
as though the dead men had not been content to sleep, but had turned
and twisted in their shallow covering of earth, knocking over their
tombstones in the effort to force a way out of the cold and the dark
into the beautiful world a foot or two above their heads. ‘Remember
us--remember us!’ they cried, as we passed under the cypress-trees. But
no one remembered them, and their forgotten sorrows could only send a
thrill of vague pity through our hearts.
Not less pitiful in their magnificence are the tombs of the Sultans
in Stamboul itself. Here under marble domes, adorned with priceless
tiles and hung round with inlaid armour, you may sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories of the death of kings, and as you tell of poison
and of dagger, of unfaithful wives and treacherous sons, each splendid
sarcophagus will serve as illustration to your words. The graves of
the dead Sultans are strewn with costly hangings, and set about with
railings of mother-of-pearl and precious woods; plumed and jewelled
turbans stand over their heads, their wives lie round them like a
bodyguard, but gold and pearl and precious stones all serve to blazon
forth the tragic histories of those men who lie buried in such mournful
state.
With the glitter of this vain pomp before our eyes, we idled on a
windy Friday through one of the poorer quarters of the town. A bazaar
was being held in Kassim Pasha; women were bargaining over their weekly
purchases of dried fruits and grains and household goods; copper pots
lay in shining rows among the coarse crockery and the flowers and cheap
luxuries of the poor; the sun shone upon veils and turbans and bronzed
faces. It was the hour of mid-day prayer, the little mosque at the end
of the street was full to overflowing, the people were kneeling all
down the sunny outer steps, rising and falling, bowing their heads upon
the stone at the name of God. We paused a moment, and went on round
the mosque. In the shadow of a neglected corner behind it, supported
on a couple of trestles, lay something swathed in coarse blue linen,
with a stick planted into the ground at its head, and surmounted by a
discoloured fez. It was the corpse of a man which lay waiting there
until the mid-day prayers should be concluded, and his relations could
find time for his burial. The wind flapped the corners of his blue
cotton coverings to and fro, and shook the worn-out fez, but the dead
man waited patiently upon the pleasure of the living--perhaps he knew
that he was already forgotten and was content.
In Turkish cities the graves are scattered up and down and anywhere;
the stone lattice-work of a saint’s tomb breaks the line of houses
in every street of Stamboul; wherever there is a little patch of
disused ground, there spring a couple of cypresses under which half a
dozen tombstones lean awry, and solemn Turkish children play in and
out among the graves. We, too, scrambled down the slopes between the
half-obliterated mounds, and stood under the shadow of their guardian
trees, until the nodding stone turbans wore to us as familiar an aspect
as the turbaned heads before the coffee shop in the street.