Book: The Innocents Abroad, Part 4 of 6

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Innocents Abroad, Part 4 of 6




We had water batteries and forts on both sides of the Hellespont, flying
the crimson flag of Turkey, with its white crescent, and occasionally a
village, and sometimes a train of camels; we had all these to look at
till we entered the broad sea of Marmora, and then the land soon fading
from view, we resumed euchre and whist once more.

We dropped anchor in the mouth of the Golden Horn at daylight in the
morning. Only three or four of us were up to see the great Ottoman
capital. The passengers do not turn out at unseasonable hours, as they
used to, to get the earliest possible glimpse of strange foreign cities.
They are well over that. If we were lying in sight of the Pyramids of
Egypt, they would not come on deck until after breakfast, now-a-days.

The Golden Horn is a narrow arm of the sea, which branches from the
Bosporus (a sort of broad river which connects the Marmora and Black
Seas,) and, curving around, divides the city in the middle. Galata and
Pera are on one side of the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn; Stamboul
(ancient Byzantium) is upon the other. On the other bank of the Bosporus
is Scutari and other suburbs of Constantinople. This great city contains
a million inhabitants, but so narrow are its streets, and so crowded
together are its houses, that it does not cover much more than half as
much ground as New York City. Seen from the anchorage or from a mile or
so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen. Its
dense array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and spreads
over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and
there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that
meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental
aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel.
Constantinople makes a noble picture.

But its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesqueness. From
the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, he execrates it. The
boat he goes in is admirably miscalculated for the service it is built
for. It is handsomely and neatly fitted up, but no man could handle it
well in the turbulent currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the
Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water.
It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a
knife blade at the other. They make that long sharp end the bow, and you
can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about. It has two oars,
and sometimes four, and no rudder. You start to go to a given point and
you run in fifty different directions before you get there. First one
oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are
going ahead at once. This kind of boating is calculated to drive an
impatient man mad in a week. The boatmen are the awkwardest, the
stupidest, and the most unscientific on earth, without question.

Ashore, it was--well, it was an eternal circus. People were thicker than
bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the
outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning
costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils
could conceive of. There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged
in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged
diabolism too fantastic to be attempted. No two men were dressed alike.
It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes--every struggling
throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts. Some
patriarchs wore awful turbans, but the grand mass of the infidel horde
wore the fiery red skull-cap they call a fez. All the remainder of the
raiment they indulged in was utterly indescribable.

The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bath-rooms, closets--any thing
you please to call them--on the first floor. The Turks sit cross-legged
in them, and work and trade and smoke long pipes, and smell like--like
Turks. That covers the ground. Crowding the narrow streets in front of
them are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing; and
wonderful cripples, distorted out of all semblance of humanity, almost;
vagabonds driving laden asses; porters carrying dry-goods boxes as large
as cottages on their backs; peddlers of grapes, hot corn, pumpkin seeds,
and a hundred other things, yelling like fiends; and sleeping happily,
comfortably, serenely, among the hurrying feet, are the famed dogs of
Constantinople; drifting noiselessly about are squads of Turkish women,
draped from chin to feet in flowing robes, and with snowy veils bound
about their heads, that disclose only the eyes and a vague, shadowy
notion of their features. Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched
aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have
looked when they walked forth from their graves amid the storms and
thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the
Crucifixion. A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to
see once--not oftener.

And then there was the goose-rancher--a fellow who drove a hundred geese
before him about the city, and tried to sell them. He had a pole ten
feet long, with a crook in the end of it, and occasionally a goose would
branch out from the flock and make a lively break around the corner, with
wings half lifted and neck stretched to its utmost. Did the
goose-merchant get excited? No. He took his pole and reached after
that goose with unspeakable sang froid--took a hitch round his neck, and
"yanked" him back to his place in the flock without an effort. He
steered his geese with that stick as easily as another man would steer a
yawl. A few hours afterward we saw him sitting on a stone at a corner,
in the midst of the turmoil, sound asleep in the sun, with his geese
squatting around him, or dodging out of the way of asses and men. We
came by again, within the hour, and he was taking account of stock, to
see whether any of his flock had strayed or been stolen. The way he did
it was unique. He put the end of his stick within six or eight inches of
a stone wall, and made the geese march in single file between it and the
wall. He counted them as they went by. There was no dodging that
arrangement.

If you want dwarfs--I mean just a few dwarfs for a curiosity--go to
Genoa. If you wish to buy them by the gross, for retail, go to Milan.
There are plenty of dwarfs all over Italy, but it did seem to me that in
Milan the crop was luxuriant. If you would see a fair average style of
assorted cripples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman States.
But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human
monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople. A beggar in Naples who
can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one
shapeless nail on it, has a fortune--but such an exhibition as that would
not provoke any notice in Constantinople. The man would starve. Who
would pay any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters
that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their deformities
in the gutters of Stamboul? O, wretched impostor! How could he stand
against the three-legged woman, and the man with his eye in his cheek?
How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow?
Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each
hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down in his majesty?
Bismillah! The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud. The truly
gifted flourish only in the by-ways of Pera and Stamboul.

That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock in trade so
disposed as to command the most striking effect--one natural leg, and two
long, slender, twisted ones with feet on them like somebody else's
fore-arm. Then there was a man further along who had no eyes, and whose
face was the color of a fly-blown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted
like a lava-flow--and verily so tumbled and distorted were his features
that no man could tell the wart that served him for a nose from his
cheek-bones. In Stamboul was a man with a prodigious head, an uncommonly
long body, legs eight inches long and feet like snow-shoes. He traveled
on those feet and his hands, and was as sway-backed as if the Colossus
of Rhodes had been riding him. Ah, a beggar has to have exceedingly
good points to make a living in Constantinople. A blue-faced man, who
had nothing to offer except that he had been blown up in a mine, would
be regarded as a rank impostor, and a mere damaged soldier on crutches
would never make a cent. It would pay him to get apiece of his head
taken off, and cultivate a wen like a carpet sack.

The Mosque of St. Sophia is the chief lion of Constantinople. You must
get a firman and hurry there the first thing. We did that. We did not
get a firman, but we took along four or five francs apiece, which is much
the same thing.

I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I suppose I lack
appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in
heathendom. I believe all the interest that attaches to it comes from
the fact that it was built for a Christian church and then turned into a
mosque, without much alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the
land. They made me take off my boots and walk into the place in my
stocking-feet. I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with a
complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I wore out more
than two thousand pair of boot-jacks getting my boots off that night, and
even then some Christian hide peeled off with them. I abate not a single
boot-jack.

St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old,
and unsightly enough to be very, very much older. Its immense dome is
said to be more wonderful than St. Peter's, but its dirt is much more
wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it. The church has a
hundred and seventy pillars in it, each a single piece, and all of costly
marbles of various kinds, but they came from ancient temples at Baalbec,
Heliopolis, Athens and Ephesus, and are battered, ugly and repulsive.
They were a thousand years old when this church was new, and then the
contrast must have been ghastly--if Justinian's architects did not trim
them any. The inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous
inscription in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks as
glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble balustrades are
all battered and dirty; the perspective is marred every where by a web of
ropes that depend from the dizzy height of the dome, and suspend
countless dingy, coarse oil lamps, and ostrich-eggs, six or seven feet
above the floor. Squatting and sitting in groups, here and there and far
and near, were ragged Turks reading books, hearing sermons, or receiving
lessons like children. and in fifty places were more of the same sort
bowing and straightening up, bowing again and getting down to kiss the
earth, muttering prayers the while, and keeping up their gymnastics till
they ought to have been tired, if they were not.

Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom; every where
were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothing touching or beautiful
about it; every where were those groups of fantastic pagans; overhead the
gaudy mosaics and the web of lamp-ropes--nowhere was there any thing to
win one's love or challenge his admiration.

The people who go into ecstasies over St. Sophia must surely get them out
of the guide-book (where every church is spoken of as being "considered
by good judges to be the most marvelous structure, in many respects, that
the world has ever seen.") Or else they are those old connoisseurs from
the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a
fresco and a fire-plug and from that day forward feel privileged to void
their critical bathos on painting, sculpture and architecture forever
more.

We visited the Dancing Dervishes. There were twenty-one of them. They
wore a long, light-colored loose robe that hung to their heels. Each in
his turn went up to the priest (they were all within a large circular
railing) and bowed profoundly and then went spinning away deliriously and
took his appointed place in the circle, and continued to spin. When all
had spun themselves to their places, they were about five or six feet
apart--and so situated, the entire circle of spinning pagans spun itself
three separate times around the room. It took twenty-five minutes to do
it. They spun on the left foot, and kept themselves going by passing the
right rapidly before it and digging it against the waxed floor. Some of
them made incredible "time." Most of them spun around forty times in a
minute, and one artist averaged about sixty-one times a minute, and kept
it up during the whole twenty-five. His robe filled with air and stood
out all around him like a balloon.

They made no noise of any kind, and most of them tilted their heads back
and closed their eyes, entranced with a sort of devotional ecstacy.
There was a rude kind of music, part of the time, but the musicians were
not visible. None but spinners were allowed within the circle. A man
had to either spin or stay outside. It was about as barbarous an
exhibition as we have witnessed yet. Then sick persons came and lay
down, and beside them women laid their sick children (one a babe at the
breast,) and the patriarch of the Dervishes walked upon their bodies. He
was supposed to cure their diseases by trampling upon their breasts or
backs or standing on the back of their necks. This is well enough for a
people who think all their affairs are made or marred by viewless spirits
of the air--by giants, gnomes, and genii--and who still believe, to this
day, all the wild tales in the Arabian Nights. Even so an intelligent
missionary tells me.

We visited the Thousand and One Columns. I do not know what it was
originally intended for, but they said it was built for a reservoir. It
is situated in the centre of Constantinople. You go down a flight of
stone steps in the middle of a barren place, and there you are. You are
forty feet under ground, and in the midst of a perfect wilderness of
tall, slender, granite columns, of Byzantine architecture. Stand where
you would, or change your position as often as you pleased, you were
always a centre from which radiated a dozen long archways and colonnades
that lost themselves in distance and the sombre twilight of the place.
This old dried-up reservoir is occupied by a few ghostly silk-spinners
now, and one of them showed me a cross cut high up in one of the pillars.
I suppose he meant me to understand that the institution was there before
the Turkish occupation, and I thought he made a remark to that effect;
but he must have had an impediment in his speech, for I did not
understand him.

We took off our shoes and went into the marble mausoleum of the Sultan
Mahmoud, the neatest piece of architecture, inside, that I have seen
lately. Mahmoud's tomb was covered with a black velvet pall, which was
elaborately embroidered with silver; it stood within a fancy silver
railing; at the sides and corners were silver candlesticks that would
weigh more than a hundred pounds, and they supported candles as large as
a man's leg; on the top of the sarcophagus was a fez, with a handsome
diamond ornament upon it, which an attendant said cost a hundred thousand
pounds, and lied like a Turk when he said it. Mahmoud's whole family
were comfortably planted around him.

We went to the great Bazaar in Stamboul, of course, and I shall not
describe it further than to say it is a monstrous hive of little shops
--thousands, I should say--all under one roof, and cut up into innumerable
little blocks by narrow streets which are arched overhead. One street is
devoted to a particular kind of merchandise, another to another, and so
on.

When you wish to buy a pair of shoes you have the swing of the whole
street--you do not have to walk yourself down hunting stores in different
localities. It is the same with silks, antiquities, shawls, etc. The
place is crowded with people all the time, and as the gay-colored Eastern
fabrics are lavishly displayed before every shop, the great Bazaar of
Stamboul is one of the sights that are worth seeing. It is full of life,
and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters,
dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking
and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces
--and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great
Bazaar, is something which smells good.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but
morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to
drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say
the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It
makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in
Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.

Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their
parents, but not publicly. The great slave marts we have all read so
much about--where tender young girls were stripped for inspection, and
criticised and discussed just as if they were horses at an agricultural
fair--no longer exist. The exhibition and the sales are private now.
Stocks are up, just at present, partly because of a brisk demand created
by the recent return of the Sultan's suite from the courts of Europe;
partly on account of an unusual abundance of bread-stuffs, which leaves
holders untortured by hunger and enables them to hold back for high
prices; and partly because buyers are too weak to bear the market, while
sellers are amply prepared to bull it. Under these circumstances, if the
American metropolitan newspapers were published here in Constantinople,
their next commercial report would read about as follows, I suppose:

SLAVE GIRL MARKET REPORT.

"Best brands Circassians, crop of 1850, L200; 1852, L250; 1854,
L300. Best brands Georgian, none in market; second quality, 1851,
L180. Nineteen fair to middling Wallachian girls offered at L130 @
150, but no takers; sixteen prime A 1 sold in small lots to close
out--terms private.

"Sales of one lot Circassians, prime to good, 1852 to 1854, at L240
@ 242, buyer 30; one forty-niner--damaged--at L23, seller ten, no
deposit. Several Georgians, fancy brands, 1852, changed hands to
fill orders. The Georgians now on hand are mostly last year's crop,
which was unusually poor. The new crop is a little backward, but
will be coming in shortly. As regards its quantity and quality, the
accounts are most encouraging. In this connection we can safely
say, also, that the new crop of Circassians is looking extremely
well. His Majesty the Sultan has already sent in large orders for
his new harem, which will be finished within a fortnight, and this
has naturally strengthened the market and given Circassian stock a
strong upward tendency. Taking advantage of the inflated market,
many of our shrewdest operators are selling short. There are hints
of a "corner" on Wallachians.

"There is nothing new in Nubians. Slow sale.

"Eunuchs--None offering; however, large cargoes are expected from
Egypt today."


I think the above would be about the style of the commercial report.
Prices are pretty high now, and holders firm; but, two or three years
ago, parents in a starving condition brought their young daughters down
here and sold them for even twenty and thirty dollars, when they could do
no better, simply to save themselves and the girls from dying of want.
It is sad to think of so distressing a thing as this, and I for one am
sincerely glad the prices are up again.

Commercial morals, especially, are bad. There is no gainsaying that.
Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only in attending church
regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and in breaking the ten commandments
all the balance of the week. It comes natural to them to lie and cheat
in the first place, and then they go on and improve on nature until they
arrive at perfection. In recommending his son to a merchant as a
valuable salesman, a father does not say he is a nice, moral, upright
boy, and goes to Sunday School and is honest, but he says, "This boy is
worth his weight in broad pieces of a hundred--for behold, he will cheat
whomsoever hath dealings with him, and from the Euxine to the waters of
Marmora there abideth not so gifted a liar!" How is that for a
recommendation? The Missionaries tell me that they hear encomiums like
that passed upon people every day. They say of a person they admire,
"Ah, he is a charming swindler, and a most exquisite liar!"

Every body lies and cheats--every body who is in business, at any rate.
Even foreigners soon have to come down to the custom of the country, and
they do not buy and sell long in Constantinople till they lie and cheat
like a Greek. I say like a Greek, because the Greeks are called the
worst transgressors in this line. Several Americans long resident in
Constantinople contend that most Turks are pretty trustworthy, but few
claim that the Greeks have any virtues that a man can discover--at least
without a fire assay.

I am half willing to believe that the celebrated dogs of Constantinople
have been misrepresented--slandered. I have always been led to suppose
that they were so thick in the streets that they blocked the way; that
they moved about in organized companies, platoons and regiments, and took
what they wanted by determined and ferocious assault; and that at night
they drowned all other sounds with their terrible howlings. The dogs I
see here can not be those I have read of.

I find them every where, but not in strong force. The most I have found
together has been about ten or twenty. And night or day a fair
proportion of them were sound asleep. Those that were not asleep always
looked as if they wanted to be. I never saw such utterly wretched,
starving, sad-visaged, broken-hearted looking curs in my life. It seemed
a grim satire to accuse such brutes as these of taking things by force of
arms. They hardly seemed to have strength enough or ambition enough to
walk across the street--I do not know that I have seen one walk that far
yet. They are mangy and bruised and mutilated, and often you see one
with the hair singed off him in such wide and well defined tracts that he
looks like a map of the new Territories. They are the sorriest beasts
that breathe--the most abject--the most pitiful. In their faces is a
settled expression of melancholy, an air of hopeless despondency. The
hairless patches on a scalded dog are preferred by the fleas of
Constantinople to a wider range on a healthier dog; and the exposed
places suit the fleas exactly. I saw a dog of this kind start to nibble
at a flea--a fly attracted his attention, and he made a snatch at him;
the flea called for him once more, and that forever unsettled him; he
looked sadly at his flea-pasture, then sadly looked at his bald spot.
Then he heaved a sigh and dropped his head resignedly upon his paws. He
was not equal to the situation.

The dogs sleep in the streets, all over the city. From one end of the
street to the other, I suppose they will average about eight or ten to a
block. Sometimes, of course, there are fifteen or twenty to a block.
They do not belong to any body, and they seem to have no close personal
friendships among each other. But they district the city themselves, and
the dogs of each district, whether it be half a block in extent, or ten
blocks, have to remain within its bounds. Woe to a dog if he crosses the
line! His neighbors would snatch the balance of his hair off in a
second. So it is said. But they don't look it.

They sleep in the streets these days. They are my compass--my guide.
When I see the dogs sleep placidly on, while men, sheep, geese, and all
moving things turn out and go around them, I know I am not in the great
street where the hotel is, and must go further. In the Grand Rue the
dogs have a sort of air of being on the lookout--an air born of being
obliged to get out of the way of many carriages every day--and that
expression one recognizes in a moment. It does not exist upon the face
of any dog without the confines of that street. All others sleep
placidly and keep no watch. They would not move, though the Sultan
himself passed by.

In one narrow street (but none of them are wide) I saw three dogs lying
coiled up, about a foot or two apart. End to end they lay, and so they
just bridged the street neatly, from gutter to gutter. A drove of a
hundred sheep came along. They stepped right over the dogs, the rear
crowding the front, impatient to get on. The dogs looked lazily up,
flinched a little when the impatient feet of the sheep touched their raw
backs--sighed, and lay peacefully down again. No talk could be plainer
than that. So some of the sheep jumped over them and others scrambled
between, occasionally chipping a leg with their sharp hoofs, and when the
whole flock had made the trip, the dogs sneezed a little, in the cloud of
dust, but never budged their bodies an inch. I thought I was lazy, but I
am a steam-engine compared to a Constantinople dog. But was not that a
singular scene for a city of a million inhabitants?

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