Chapter XII: Part 12

Smyrna can be compared to Damascus in its age and in its perpetuity under all discouragements and changes,—the shocks of earthquakes, the constant visitations of pestilence, and the rule of a hundred masters. It was a great city before the migration of the Ionians into Asia Minor, it saw the rise and fall of Sardis, it was restored from a paralysis of four centuries by Alexander. Under all vicissitudes it seems to have retained its character of a great mart of exchange, a necessity for the trade of Asia; and perhaps the indifference of its conglomerate inhabitants to freedom and to creeds contributed to its safety. Certainly it thrived as well under the Christians, when it was the seat of one of the seven churches, as it did under the Romans, when it was a seat of a great school of sophists and rhetoricians, and it is equally prosperous under the sway of the successor of Mohammed. During the thousand years of the always decaying Byzantine Empire it had its share of misfortunes, and its walls alternately, at a later day, displayed the star and crescent, and the equal arms of the cross of St. John. Yet, in all its history, I seem to see the trading, gay, free, but not disorderly Smyrna passing on its even way of traffic and of pleasure.

Of its two hundred thousand and more inhabitants, about ninety thousand are Rayah Greeks, and about eighty thousand are Turks. There is a changing population of perhaps a thousand Europeans, there are large bodies of Jews and Armenians, and it was recently estimated to have as many as fifteen thousand Levantines. These latter are the descendants of the marriage of Europeans with Greek and Jewish women; and whatever moral reputation the Levantines enjoy in the Levant, the women of this mixture are famous for their beauty. But the race is said to be not self-sustaining, and is yielding to the original types. The languages spoken in Smyrna are Turkish, a Greek dialect (the Romaic), Spanish, Italian, Trench, English, and Arabic, probably prevailing in the order named. Our own steamer was much more Oriental than the city of Smyrna. As soon as we stepped ashore we seemed to have come into a European city; the people almost all wear the Frank dress, the shops offer little that is peculiar. One who was unfamiliar with bazaars might wonder at the tangle of various lanes, but we saw nothing calling for comment. A walk through the Jewish quarter, here as everywhere else the dirtiest and most picturesque in the city, will reward the philosophic traveller with the sight of lovely women lolling at every window. It is not the fashion for Smyrniote ladies to promenade the streets, but they mercifully array themselves in full toilet and stand in their doorways.

The programme of the voyage of the Achille promised us a day and a half in Smyrna, which would give us time to visit Ephesus. We were due Friday noon; we did not arrive till Saturday noon. This vexatious delay had caused much agitation on board; to be cheated out of Ephesus was an outrage which the tourists could not submit to; they had come this way on purpose to see Ephesus. They would rather give up anything else in the East. The captain said he had no discretion, he must sail at 4 p. M. The passengers then prepared a handsome petition to the agent, begging him to detain the steamer till eight o'clock, in order to permit them to visit Ephesus by a special train. There is a proclivity in all those who can write to sign any and every thing except a subscription paper, and this petition received fifty-six eager and first-class signatures. The agent at Smyrna plumply refused our request, with unnecessary surliness; but upon the arrival of the captain, and a consultation which no doubt had more reference to freight than to the petition, the official agreed, as a special favor, to detain the steamer till eight o'clock, but not a moment longer.

We hastened to the station of the Aidin Railway, which runs eighty miles to Aidin, the ancient Tralles, a rich Lydian metropolis of immemorial foundation. The modern town has perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants, and is a depot for cotton and figs; that sweetmeat of Paradise, the halva, is manufactured there, and its great tanneries produce fine yellow Morocco leather. The town lies only three miles from the famous tortuous Mæander, and all the region about it is a garden of vines and fruit-trees. The railway company is under English management, which signifies promptness, and the special train was ready in ten minutes; when lo! of the fifty-six devotees of Ephesus only eleven appeared. We were off at once; good engine, solid track, clean, elegant, comfortable carnages. As we moved out of the city the air was full of the odor of orange-blossoms; we crossed the Meles, and sped down a valley, very fertile, smiling with grain-fields, green meadows, groves of midberry, oranges, figs, with blue hills,—an ancient Mount Olympus, beyond which lay green Sardis, in the distance, a country as lovely and home-like as an English or American farm-land. We had seen nothing so luxuriant and thriving in the East before. The hills, indeed, were stripped of trees, but clad on the tops with verdure, the result of plentiful rains.

We went “express.” The usual time of trains is three hours; we ran over the fifty miles in an hour and a quarter. We could hardly believe our senses, that we were in a luxurious carriage, flying along at this rate in Asia, and going to Ephesus! While we were confessing that the lazy swing of the carriage was more agreeable than that of the donkey or the dromedary, the train pulled up at station Ayasolook, once the residence of the Sultans of Ayasolook, and the camp of Tamerlane, now a cluster of coffeehouses and railway-offices, with a few fever-stricken inhabitants, who prey upon travellers, not with Oriental courtesy, but with European insolence.

On our right was a round hill surmounted by a Roman castle; from the hills on the left, striding across the railway towards Ephesus, were the tall stone pillars of a Roman aqueduct, the brick arches and conductor nearly all fallen away. On the summit of nearly every pillar a white, red-legged stork had built, from sticks and grass, a high round nest, which covered the top; and the bird stood in it motionless, a beautiful object at that height against the sky.

The station people had not obeyed our telegram to furnish enough horses, and those of us who were obliged to walk congratulated ourselves on the mistake, since the way was as rough as the steeds. The path led over a ground full of stone débris. This was the site of Ayasolook, which had been built out of the ruins of the old city; most picturesque objects were the small mosque-tombs and minarets, which revived here the most graceful forms and fancies of Saracenic art. One, I noticed, which had the ideal Persian arch and slender columns, Nature herself had taken into loving care and draped with clinging green and hanging vines. There were towers of brick, to which age has given a rich tone, flaring at the top in a curve that fascinated the eye. On each tomb, tower, and minaret the storks had nested, and upon each stood the mother looking down upon her brood. About the crumbling sides of a tower, thus draped and crowned, innumerable swallows had built their nests, so that it was alive with birds, whose cheerful occupation gave a kind of pathos to the human desertion and decay.

Behind the Roman castle stands the great but ruinous mosque of Sultan Selim, which was formerly the Church of St. John. We did not turn aside for its empty glory, but to the theologian or the student of the formation of Christian dogmas, and of the gladiatorial spectacles of an ancient convocation, there are few arenas in the East more interesting than this; for in this church it is supposed were held the two councils of a. d. 431 and 449. St. John, after his release from Patmos, passed the remainder of his life here; the Virgin Mary followed him to the city, so favored by the presence of the first apostles, and here she died and was buried. From her entombment, Ephesus for a long time enjoyed the reputation of the City of the Virgin, until that honor was transferred to Jerusalem, where, however, her empty tomb soon necessitated her resurrection and assumption,—the subject which inspired so many artists after the revival of learning in Europe. In the hill near this church Mary Magdalene was buried; in Ephesus also reposed the body of St. Timothy, its first bishop.

This church of St. John was at some distance from the heart of the city, which lay in the plain to the south and near the sea, but in the fifth century Ephesus was a city of churches. The reader needs to remember that in that century the Christian controversy had passed from the nature of the Trinity to the incarnation, and that the first council of Ephesus was called by the emperor Theodosius in the hope of establishing the opinion of the Syrian Nestorius, the primate of Constantinople, who refused to give to the mother of Christ the title, then come into use, of the Mother of God, and discriminated nicely the two natures of the Saviour. His views were anathematized by Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, and the dispute involved the entire East in a fierce contest. In the council convened of Greek bishops, Nestorius had no doubt but he would be sustained by the weight of authority; but the prompt Cyril, whose qualities would have found a conspicuous and useful theatre at the head of a Roman army against the Scythians, was first on the ground, with an abundance of spiritual and temporal arms. In reading of this council, one recalls without effort the once famous and now historical conventions of the Democratic party of the State of New York, in the days when political salvation, offered in the creeds of the “Hard Shells” and of the “Soft Shells,” was enforced by the attendance of gangs of “Short boys” and “Tammany boys,” who understood the use of slung-shot against heretical opinions. It is true that Nestorius had in reserve behind his prelates the stout slaves of the bath of Zeuxippus, but Cyril had secured the alliance of the bishop of Ephesus, and the support of the rabble of peasants and slaves who were easily excited to jealousy for the honor of the Virgin of their city; and he landed from Egypt, with his great retinue of bishops, a band of merciless monks of the Nile, of fanatics, mariners, and slaves, who took a ready interest in the theological discussions of those days. The council met in this church, surrounded by the fierce if not martial array of Cyril; deliberations were begun before the arrival of the most weighty supporters of Nestorius,—for Cyril anticipated the slow approach of John of Antioch and his bishops,—and in one day the primate of Constantinople was hastily deposed and cursed, together with his heresy. Upon the arrival of John, he also formed a council, which deposed and cursed the opposite party and heresy, and for three months Ephesus was a scene of clamor and bloodshed. The cathedral was garrisoned, the churches were shut against the Nestorians; the imperial troops assaulted them and were repelled; the whole city was thrown into a turmoil by the encounters of the rival factions, each council hurled its anathemas at the other, and peace was only restored by the dissolution of the council by command of the emperor. The second session, in the year 449, was shorter and more decisive; it made quick work of the heresy of Nestorius. Africa added to its delegation of bullies and fanatics a band of archers; the heresy of the two natures was condemned and anathematized,—

“May those who divide Christ be divided with the sword, may they be hewn in pieces, may they be burned alive,”—and the scene in the cathedral ended in a mob of monks and soldiers, who trampled upon Flavian, the then primate of Constantinople, so that in three days thereafter he died of his wounds.

It is as difficult to make real now upon this spot those fierce theologic wars of Ephesus, as it is the fabled exploits of Bacchus and Hercules and the Amazons in this valley; to believe that here were born Apollo and Diana, and that hither fled Latona, and that great Pan lurked in its groves.

We presently came upon the site of the great Temple of Diana, recently identified by Mr. Wood. We encountered on our way a cluster of stone huts, wretched habitations of the only representatives of the renowned capital. Before us was a plain broken by small hillocks and mounds, and strewn with cut and fractured stone. The site of the temple can be briefly and accurately described as a rectangular excavation, perhaps one hundred and fifty feet wide by three hundred long and twelve feet deep, with two feet of water in it, out of which rises a stump of a column of granite and another of marble, and two bases of marble. Round this hole are heaps of fractured stone and marble. In this excavation Mr. Wood found the statue of Diana, which we may hope is the ancient sacred image, guarded by the priests as the most precious treasure of the temple, and imposed upon the credulity of men as heaven-descended. This is all that remains of one of the Seven Wonders of the world,—a temple whose fame is second to none in antiquity; a temple seven times burned and eight times built, and always with increased magnificence; a temple whose origin, referable doubtless to the Cyclopean builders of this coast, cannot be less than fifteen hundred years before our era; a temple which still had its votaries and its rites in the fourth century. We picked up a bit of marble from its ruins, as a help-both to memory and imagination, but we went our way utterly unable to conceive that there ever existed any such person as great Diana of the Ephesians.

We directed our steps over the bramble-grown plain to the hill Pion. I suppose Pion may have been the acropolis of Ephesus, the spot of the earliest settlement, and on it and around it clustered many of the temples and public buildings. The reader will recall Argos, and Athens, and Corinth, and a dozen other cities of antiquity, for which nature furnished in the midst of a plain such a convenient and easily defended hill-fortress. On our way thither we walked amid mounds that form a street of tombs; many of the sarcophagi are still in place, and little injured; but we explore the weed-hid ground with caution, for it is full of pitfalls.

North of the hill Pion is a low green valley, encircled with hills, and in the face of one of its ledges, accessible only by a ladder, we were pointed out the cave of the Seven Sleepers. This favorite myth, which our patriotism has transferred to the highlands of the Hudson in a modified shape, took its most popular form in the legend of the Seven Sleepers, and this grotto at Ephesus was for many centuries the object of Christian and Moslem pilgrimage. The Christian legend, that in the time of the persecution of Diocletian seven young men escaped to this cave and slept there two centuries, and awoke to find Christianity the religion of the empire, was adopted and embellished by Mohammed. In his version, the wise dog Ketmehr, or Al Rakiin as the Koran names him, becomes an important character.

“When the young men,” says Abd-el-Atti, “go along the side of the hill to the cave, the dog go to follow them. They take up stones to make him go back, for they 'fraid of him bark, and let the people know where they hide. But the dog not to go back, he sit down on him hind, and him look berry wise. By and by he speak, he say the name of God.

“'How did you know that?' ask him the young men.

“'I know it,' the dog say, 'before you born!'

“Then they see the dog he wise by Allah, and know great deal, and let him to go with 'em. This dog, Ketmehr, he is gone, so our Prophet say, to be in Paradise; no other dog be there. So I hope.”

The names of the Seven Sleepers and Ketmehr are in great talismanic repute throughout the East; they are engraved upon swords and upon gold and precious stones, and in Smyrna you may buy these charms against evil.

Keeping round the hill Pion, we reached the ruins of the gymnasium, heaps of stone amid brick arches, the remains of an enormous building; near it is the north gate of the city, a fine marble structure, now almost buried. Still circling Pion we found ourselves in a narrow valley, on the other side of which was the long ridge of Conessus, which runs southward towards the sea. Conessus seems to have been the burial-place of the old town. This narrow valley is stuffed with remains of splendid buildings, of which nothing is now to be seen but heaps of fine marble, walls, capitals, columns, in prodigal waste. We stopped to admire a bit of carving, or to notice a Greek inscription, and passed on to the Stadium, to the Little Theatre, to the tomb of St. Luke. On one of the lintels of the entrance of this tomb, in white marble, as fresh as if carved yesterday, is a cross, and under it the figure of an Egyptian ox, the emblem of that saint.

We emerged from this gorge to a wide view of the plain, and a glimpse of an arm of the sea. On this plain are the scattered ruins of the old city, brick, stone, and marble,—absolute desolation. On the left, near the sea, is a conical hill, crowned by one of the towers of the ancient wall, and dignified with the name of the “prison of St. Paul.” In this plain is neither life nor cultivation, but vegetation riots over the crumbling remains of Ephesus, and fever waits there its chance human prey. We stood on the side of the hill Pion, amid the fallen columns and heaped walls of its Great Theatre. It was to this theatre that the multitude rushed when excited against Paul by Demetrius, the silversmith, who earned his religion into his business; and here the companions of Paul endeavored to be heard and could not, for “all with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” This amphitheatre for fifty thousand spectators is scooped out of the side of the hill, and its tiers of seats are still indicated. What a magnificent view they must have enjoyed of the city and the sea beyond; for the water then came much nearer; and the spectator who may have wearied of the strutting of the buskined heroes on the stage, or of the monotonous chant of the chorus, could rest his eye upon the purple slopes of Conessus, upon the colonnades and domes of the opulent city, upon the blue waves that bore the merchants' ships of Rome and Alexandria and Berytus.

The theatre is a mine of the most exquisite marbles, and we left its treasures with reluctance; we saw other ruins, bases of columns, the remains of the vast city magazines for the storage of corn, and solid walls of huge stones once washed by the sea; we might have wandered for days amid the fragments, but to what purpose?

At Ephesus we encountered no living thing. Man has deserted it, silence reigns over the plain, nature slowly effaces the evidence of his occupation, and the sea even slinks away from it. No great city that I have seen is left to such absolute desolation; not Pæstum in its marsh, not Thebes in its sand, not Ba'albek, not even Memphis, swept clean as it is of monuments, for its site is vocal with labor and bounteous in harvests. Time was, doubtless, when gold pieces piled two deep on this ground could not have purchased it; and the buyers or sellers never imagined that the city lots of Ephesus could become worth so little as they are to-day.

If one were disposed to muse upon the vagaries of human progress, this would be the spot. No civilization, no religion, has been wanting to it. Its vast Cyclopean foundations were laid by simple pagans; it was in the polytheistic belief of the Greeks that it attained the rank of one of the most polished and wealthy cities of antiquity, famed for its arts, its schools of poetry, of painting and sculpture, of logic and magic, attracting to its opportunities the devout, the seekers of pleasure and of wisdom, the poets, the men of the world, the conquerors and the defeated; here Artemisia sheltered the children of Xerxes after the disaster of Salamis; here Alexander sat for his portrait to Apelles (who was born in the city) when he was returning from the capture of Sardis; Spartans and Athenians alike, Lysander and Alcibiades, sought Ephesus, for it had something for all; Hannibal here conferred with Antiochus; Cicero was entertained with games by the people when he was on his way to his province of Cilicia; and Antony in the character of inebriate Bacchus, accompanied by Cleopatra, crowned with flowers and attended by bands of effeminate musicians, made here one of the pageants of his folly. In fact, scarcely any famous name of antiquity is wanting to the adornment of this hospitable city. Under the religion of Christ it has had the good fortune to acquire equal celebrity, thanks to the residence of Paul, the tent-maker, and to its conspicuous position at the head of the seven churches of Asia. From Ephesus went forth the * news of the gospel, as formerly had spread the rites of Diana, and Christian* churches and schools of philosophy succeeded the temples and gymnasia of the polytheists. And, in turn, the cross was supplanted by the crescent; but it was in the day when Islamism was no longer a vital faith, and except a few beautiful ruins the Moslem occupation has contributed nothing to the glory of Ephesus. And now paganism, Christianity, and Moslemism seem alike to have forsaken the weary theatre of so much brilliant history. As we went out to the station, by the row of booths and coffee-shops, a modern Greek, of I do not know what religion, offered to sell me an image of I do not know what faith.

There is great curiosity at present about the relics and idols of dead religions, and a brisk manufacture of them has sprung up; it is in the hands of sceptics who indifferently propagate the images of the Virgin Mary or of the chaste huntress Diana.

The swift Asiatic train took us back to Smyrna in a golden sunset. We had been warned by the agent not to tarry a moment beyond eight o'clock, and we hurried breathless to the boat. Fortunately the steamer had not sailed; we were in time, and should have been if we had remained on shore till eight the next morning. All night long we were loading freight, with an intolerable rattling of chains, puffing of the donkey-engine, and swearing of boatmen; after the novelty of swearing in an Oriental tongue has worn off, it is no more enjoyable than any other kind of profanity.

XII.—THE ADVENTURERS.

WE sailed away from Smyrna Sunday morning, with the Achille more crowded than when we entered that port. The second-class passengers still further encroached upon the first-class. The Emir of Damascus, with all his rugs and beds, had been pushed farther towards the stern, and more harems occupied temporary pens on our deck, and drew away our attention from the natural scenery.

The venerable, white-bearded, Greek bishop of Smyrna was a passenger, also the tall noble-looking pasha of that city, just relieved and ordered to Constantinople, as pashas are continually, at the whim of the Sultan. We had three pashas on board,—one recalled from Haifa, who had been only twenty days at his post. The pasha of Smyrna was accompanied by his family, described on the register as his wife and “four others,” an indefinite expression to define an indefinite condition. The wife had a room below; the “four others” were penned up in a cushioned area on the saloon deck, and there they squatted all day, veiled and robed in white, poor things, without the least occupation for hand or mind. Near them, other harems of Greeks and Turks, women, babies, slaves, all in an Oriental mess, ate curds and green lettuce.

We coasted along the indented, picturesque shore of Asia, having in view the mountains about ancient Pergamus, the seat of one of the seven churches; and before noon came to Mitylene, the ancient Lesbos, a large island which bears another Mount Olympus, and cast anchor in the bay upon which the city stands.

By the bend of the bay and the opposite coast, the town is charmingly land-locked. The site of Mitylene, like so many of these island cities, is an amphitheatre, and the mountain-slopes, green and blooming with fruit-trees, are dotted with white houses and villages. The scene is Italian rather than Oriental, and gives one the general impression of Castellamare or Sorrento; but the city is prettier to look at than to explore, as its broad and clean streets, its ordinary houses and European-dressed inhabitants, take us out of our ideal voyaging, and into the regions of the commonplace. The shops were closed, and the country people, who in all countries appear to derive an unexplained pleasure in wandering about the streets of a city hand in hand, were seeking this mild recreation. A youthful Jew, to whom the Sunday was naught, under pretence of showing us something antique, led us into the den of a Greek, to whom it was also naught, and whose treasures were bags of defaced copper coins of the Roman period.

Upon the point above the city is a fine mediaeval fortress, now a Turkish fort, where we encountered, in the sentinel at the gate, the only official in the Orient who ever refused backsheesh; I do not know what his idea is. From the walls we looked upon the blue strait, the circling, purple hills of Asia, upon islands, pretty villages, and distant mountains, soft, hazy, serrated, in short, upon a scene of poetry and peace, into which the ancient stone bastion by the harbor, which told of days of peril, and a ruined aqueduct struggling down the hill back of the town,—the remnant of more vigorous days,—brought no disturbance.

In Lesbos we are at the source of lyric poetry, the Æolian spring of Greece; here Alcæus was born. Here we come upon the footsteps of Sappho. We must go back to a period when this and all the islands of these heavenly seas were blooming masses of vegetation, the hills hung with forests, the slopes purple with the vine, the valleys laughing with flowers and fruit, and everywhere the primitive, joyful Greek life. No doubt, manners were somewhat rude, and passions, love, and hate, and revenge, were frankly exhibited; but in all the homely life ran a certain culture, which seems to us beautiful even in the refinement of this shamefaced age. The hardy youth of the islands sailed into far seas, and in exchange for the bounty of their soil brought back foreign fabrics of luxury. We know that Lesbos was no stranger to the Athenian influence, its scholars had heard Plato and Aristotle, and the warriors of Athens respected it both as a foe and an ally. Charakos, a brother of Sappho, went to Egypt with a ship full of wine, and returned with the beautiful slave Doricha, as part at least of the reward of his venture.

After the return of Sappho and her husband from their flight into Sicily, the poet lived for many years at Mitylene; but she is supposed to have been born in Eresso, on the southwestern point of the island, where the ruins of the acropolis and remains of a sea-wall still mark the site of the famous town. At any rate, she lived there, with her husband Kerkylas, a landed proprietor and a person of consequence, like a dame of noble birth and gentle breeding as she was; and in her verse we have a glimpse of her walking upon the sandy shore, with her little daughter, the beautiful child whom she would not give up for the kingdom of Lydia, nor for heavenly Lesbos itself. That Sappho was beautiful as her image on the ancient coins represents her, and that she was consumed by passion for a handsome youth, the world likes to believe. But Maximus of Tyre says that she was small and dark;—graces are not so plenty, even in heaven, that genius and beauty can be lavished upon one person. We are prone to insist that the poet who revels in imagination and sounds the depth of passion is revealing his own heart, and that the tale that seems so real must be a personal experience. The little glimpse we have of Sappho's life does not warrant us to find in it the passionate tempest of her burning lyrics, nor is it consistent with her social position that she should expose upon the market-place her passion for the handsome Phaon, like a troubadour of the Middle Ages or a Zingara of Bohemia. If that consuming fire was only quenched in the sea at the foot of “Leucadia's far-projecting rock of woe,” at least our emotion may be tempered by the soothing knowledge that the leap must have been taken when the enamored singer had passed her sixtieth year.

We did not see them at Mitylene, but travellers into the interior speak of the beautiful women, the descendants of kings' daughters, the rewards of Grecian heroes; near old Eresso the women preserve the type of that indestructible beauty, and in the large brown eyes, voluptuous busts, and elastic gait one may deem that he sees the originals of the antique statues.

Another famous woman flits for a moment before us at Lesbos. It is the celebrated Empress Irene, whose cruelty was hardly needed to preserve a name that her talent could have perpetuated. An Athenian virgin and an orphan, at seventeen she became the wife of Leo IV. (a. d. 780), and at length the ruler of the Eastern Empire. Left the guardian of the empire and her son Constantine VI., she managed both, until the lad in his maturity sent his mother into retirement. The restless woman conspired against him; he fled, was captured and brought to the palace and lodged in the porphyry chamber where he first had seen the light, and where he last saw it; for his eyes were put out by the order of Irene. His very existence was forgotten in the depths of the palace, and for several years the ambitious mother reigned with brilliancy and the respect of distant potentates, until a conspiracy of eunuchs overturned her power, and she was banished to Lesbos. Here history, which delights in these strokes of poetic justice, represents the empress earning her bread by the use of her distaff.

As we came from Mitylene into the open sea, the view was surpassingly lovely, islands green and poetic, a coast ever retreating and advancing, as if in coquetry with the blue waves, purple robing the hills,—a voyage for poets and lotus-eaters. We were coming at night to Tenedos, to which the crafty Greeks withdrew their fleet when they pretended to abandon the siege, and to old Troy, opposite; we should be able to feel their presence in the darkness.

Our steamer, as we have intimated, was a study of nationalities and languages, as well as of manners. We were English, American, Greek, Italian, Turkish, Arab, Russian, French, Armenian, Egyptian, Jew, Georgian, Abyssinian, Nubian, German, Koor-land, Persian, Kurd; one might talk with a person just from Mecca or Medina, from Bagdad, from Calcutta, from every Greek or Turkish island, and from most of the capitals of Europe. A couple of Capuchins, tonsured, in brown serge with hanging crosses, walked up and down amid the throng of Christians, Moslems, and pagans, withdrawn from the world while in it, like beings of a new sex. There was a couple opposite us at table whom we could not make out,—either recently married or recently eloped, the man apparently a Turkish officer, and his companion a tall, showy woman, you might say a Frenchman's idea of physical beauty, a little like a wax Madonna, but with nothing holy about her; said by some to be a Circassian, by others to be a French grisette on an Eastern tour; but she spoke Italian, and might be one of the Continental countesses.

The square occupied by the emir and his suite—a sort of bazaar of rugs and narghilehs—had music all day long; a soloist, on three notes, singing, in the Arab drawl, an unending improvised ballad, and accompanying himself on the mandolin. When we go to look at and listen to him, the musician betrays neither self-consciousness nor pride, unless you detect the latter in a superior smile that plays about his lips, as he throws back his head and lets his voice break into a falsetto. It probably does not even occur to his Oriental conceit that he does well,—that his race have taken for granted a thousand years,—and he could not be instructed by the orchestra of Von Bulow, nor be astonished by the Lohengrin of Wagner.

Among the adventurers on board—we all had more or less the appearance of experiments in that odd assembly—I particularly liked the French prestidigitateur Caseneau, for his bold eye, utter self-possession, and that indefinable varnish upon him, which belonged as much to his dress as to his manner, and suggested the gentleman without concealing the adventurer. He had a taste for antiquities, and wore some antique gems, which had I know not what mysterious about them, as if he had inherited them from an Ephesian magician or a Saracenic doctor of the black art. At the table after dinner, surrounded by French and Italians, the conjurer exhibited some tricks at cards. I dare say they were not extraordinary, yet they pleased me just as well as the manifestations of the spiritists. One of them I noted. The trickster was blindfolded. A gentleman counted out a pack of cards, and while doing so mentally fixed upon one of them by number. Caseneau took the pack, still blinded, and threw out the card the gentleman had thought of. The experiment was repeated by sceptics, who suspected a confederate, but the result was always the same.

The Circassian beauty turned out to be a Jewess from Smyrna. I believe the Jewesses of that luxurious city imitate all the kinds of beauty in the world.

In the evening the Italians were grouped around the tables in the saloon, upon which cards were cast about, matched, sorted, and redistributed, and there were little piles of silver at the corners, the occasional chinking of which appeared to add to the interest of the amusement. On deck the English and Americans were singing the hymns of the Protestant faith; and in the lull of the strains of “O mother dear, Jerusalem,” you might hear the twang of strings and the whine of some Arab improvisatore on the forward deck, and the chink of changing silver below. We were making our way through a superb night,—a thousand people packed so closely that you could not move without stepping into a harem or a mass of Greek pilgrims,—singing hymns, gambling, listening to a recital of the deeds of Antar, over silver waves, under a flooding moon, and along the dim shores of Asia. That mysterious continent lay in the obscurity of the past; here and there solitary lights, from some shepherd's hut in the hills or fortress casemate by the shore, were the rents in the veil through which we saw antiquity.

XXIII.—THROUGH THE DARDANELLES.

THE Achille, which has a nose for freight, but none for poetry, did not stop at Tenedos, puffed steadily past the plain of Troy, turned into the broad opening of the Dardanelles, and by daylight was anchored midway between the Two Castles. On such a night, if ever, one might see the evolution of shadowy armies upon the windy plain,—if, indeed, this conspicuous site was anything more than the theatre of Homer's creations,—the spectators on the walls of Ilium, the Greeks hastily embarking on their ships for Tenedos, the joyful procession that drew the fatal gift into the impregnable walls.

There is a strong current southward through the Dardanelles, which swung the vessel round as we came to anchor. The forts which, with their heavy modern guns, completely command this strait, are something less than a mile and a half apart, and near each is a large and handsome town,—Khilid-bahri on the European shore and Chanak-Kalesi on the Asiatic. The latter name signifies the pottery-castle, and is derived from the chief manufactory of the place; the town of a couple of thousand houses, gayly painted and decorated in lively colors, lies upon a sandy flat and presents a very cheerful appearance. It is a great Asiatic entrepôt for European products, and consular flags attest its commercial importance.

When I came upon deck its enterprising traders had already boarded the steamer, and encumbered it with their pottery, which found a ready market with the pilgrims, for it is both cheap and ugly. Perhaps we should rather say fantastic than ugly. You see specimens of it all over the East, and in the bazaars of Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus it may be offered you as something rare. Whatever the vessel is,—a pitcher, cup, vase, jar, or cream-pot,—its form is either that of some impossible animal, some griffin, or dragon, or dog of the underworld, or its spout is the neck and head of some fantastic monster. The ware is painted in the most startling reds, greens, yellows, and blacks, and sometimes gilt, and then glazed. It is altogether hideous, and fascinating enough to drive the majolica out of favor.

Above these two towns the strait expands into a sort of bay, formed on the north by a promontory jutting out from the Asiatic shore, and upon this promontory it is now agreed stood old Abydos; it is occupied by a fort which grimly regards a corresponding one on the opposite shore, not a mile distant. Here Leander swam to Hero, Byron to aquatic fame, and here Xerxes laid his bridge. All this is plain to be seen; this is the narrowest part of the passage; exactly opposite this sloping site of Abydos is a depression between two high cliffs, the only point where the Persian could have rested the European extremity of his bridge; and it surely requires no stretch of the imagination to see Hero standing upon this projecting point holding the torch for her lover.

The shore is very pretty each side, not bold, but quiet scenery; and yet there is a contrast: on the Asiatic horizon are mountains, rising behind each other, while the narrow peninsula, the Thracian Chersonesus of the ancients, which forms the western bank of the Dardanelles, offers only a range of moderate hills. What a beautiful stream, indeed, is this, and how fond history has been of enacting its spectacles upon it! How the civilizations of the East and West, in a continual flow and reflow, push each other across it! With a sort of periodic regularity it is the scene of a great movement, and from age to age the destinies of the race have seemed to hang upon its possession; and from time to time the attention of the world is concentrated upon this water-street between two continents. Under whatever name, the Oriental civilization has been a misfortune, and the Western a blessing to the border-land; and how narrowly has Europe, more than once, from Xerxes to Chosroes, from Omar to the Osmanlis, seemed to escape the torrent of Eastern slavery. Once the culture of Greece passed these limits, and annexed all Asia Minor and the territory as far as the Euphrates to the empire of intelligence. Who shall say that the day is not at hand when the ancient movement of free thought, if not of Grecian art and arms, is about to be renewed, and Europe is not again to impose its laws and manners upon Little Asia? The conquest, which one sees going on under his eyes, is not indeed with the pomp of armies, but by the more powerful and enduring might of commerce, intercourse, and the weight of a world's opinion diffused by travel and literature. The Osmanli sits supinely and watches the change; the Greeks, the rajahs of all religions, establish schools, and the new generation is getting ready for the revolution; the Turk does not care for schools. That it may be his fate to abandon European Turkey and even Constantinople, he admits. But it is plain that if he goes thus far he must go farther; and that he must surrender a good part of the Roman Eastern Empire. For any one can see that the Hellespont could not be occupied by two powers, and that it is no more possible to divide the control of the Bosphorus than it is that of the Hudson or the Thames.

The morning was cold, and the temperature as well as the sky admonished us that we were passing out of the warm latitude. Twenty-five miles from the Chang and Eng forts we passed near but did not call at Gallipoli, an ancient city with few antiquities, but of great strategic importance. Whoever holds it has the key to Constantinople and the Black Sea; it was seized by the Moslems in the thirteenth century before they imposed the religion of the Koran upon the city of Constantine, and it was early occupied by the English and French, in 1854, in the war that secured that city to the successor of the Prophet.

Entering upon the Sea of Marmora, the “vexed Propontis,” we had fortunately smooth water but a cold north-wind. The Propontis has enjoyed a nauseous reputation with all mariners, ancient and modern. I don't know that its form has anything to do with it, but if the reader will take the trouble to consult a map, he will see how nearly this hag of water, with its two ducts, the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, resembles a human stomach. There is nothing to be seen in the voyage from Gallipoli to Constantinople, except the island of Marmora, famous for the quarries which furnish marbles for the palaces of the Bosphorus and for Eyoub and Scutari, the two great cities of the dead. We passed near enough to distinguish clearly its fine perpendicular cliffs.

It was dark before we saw the lights of Stamboul rise out of the water; it is impossible, at night, to enter the Golden Horn through the mazes of shipping, and we cast anchor outside. The mile or two of gas-lights along the promontory of the old city and the gleams upon the coast of ancient Chalcedon were impressive and exciting to the imagination, but, owing to the lateness of our arrival, we lost all the emotions which have, struck other travellers anything but dumb upon coming in sight of the capital of the Moslem Empire.

XIV.—CONSTANTINOPLE.

THE capital which we know as Constantinople, lying in two continents, presents itself as three cities. The long, hornshaped promontory, between the Sea of Marmora and the Golden Horn, is the site of ancient Byzantium, which Constantine baptized with his own name, and which the Turks call Stamboul. The ancient city was on the eastern extremity, now known as Seraglio Point; its important position was always recognized, and it was sharply contended for by the Spartans, the Athenians, the Macedonians, and the Persians. Like the city of Romulus, it occupies seven hills, and its noble heights are conspicuous from afar by sea or land.. In the fourth century it was surrounded by a wall, which followed the water on three sides, and ran across the base of the promontory, over four miles from the Seven Towers on the Propontis to the Cemetery of Eyoub on the Golden Horn. The land-wall, which so many times saved the effeminate city from the barbarians of the north and the Saracens of Arabia, stands yet with its battered towers and score of crumbling gates.

The second city, on a blunt promontory between the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, overlooks the ancient Byzantium, and is composed of three districts,—Galata and Tophanna, on the water and climbing up the hill; and Pera, which crowns the summit. Galata was a commercial settlement of the thirteenth century; Pera is altogether modern.

The third city is Scutari, exactly opposite the mouth of the Golden Horn, and a little north of ancient Chalcedon, which was for over a thousand years the camp of successive besieging armies, Georgians, Persians, Saracens, and Turks.

The city of the Crescent, like a veiled beauty of the harem, did not at once disclose to us its charms. It was at six o'clock in the morning on the eleventh day of blooming May, that we landed on the dirty quay of Tophanna. The morning was cloudy, cold, misty, getting its weather from the Black Sea, and during the day rain fell in a very Occidental dreariness. Through the mist loomed the heights of Seraglio Point; and a hundred minaret peaks and domes appeared to float in the air above the veiled city. Along the floating lower bridge, across the Golden Horn, poured an unceasing procession of spectres; caïques were shooting about in every direction, steamers for the Bosphorus, for Scutari, for the Islands, were momently arriving and departing from their stations below the bridge, and the huge bulk of the Turkish ironclads could be discerned at their anchorage before the palace of Beshiktash. The scene was animated, but there was not visible as much shipping as I had expected to see in this great port.

The customs' official on the quay was of a very inquisitive turn of mind, but we could excuse him on the ground of his age and ignorance, for he was evidently endeavoring to repair the neglected opportunities of his youth. Our large luggage had gone to the custom-house in charge of Abd-el-Atti, who has a genius for free-trade, and only our small parcels and hand-bags were at the mercy of the inspector on the quay. But he insisted upon opening every bag and investigating every article of the toilet and garment of the night; he even ripped open a feather pillow which one of the ladies carried with her, and neither the rain on the open dock nor our respectable appearance saved our effects from his most searching attentions. The discoveries of General di Ces-nola and the interest that Europeans take in antiquities have recently convinced the Turks that these relics must have some value, and an order had been issued to seize and confiscate all curiosities of this sort. I trembled, therefore, when the inspector got his hands upon a baby's nursing-bottle, which I had brought from Cyprus, where it had been used by some Phoenician baby probably three thousand years ago. The fellow turned it round and regarded it with serious ignorance and doubt.

“What is that?” he asked Achmed.

“O, that's nothing but a piece of pottery, something for a child without his mother, I think,—it is nothing, not worth two paras.”

The confiscator of antiquities evidently had not the slightest knowledge of his business; he hesitated, but Achmed's perfect indifference of manner determined him, and he slowly put the precious relic back into the box. The inspector parted from us with regret, but we left him to the enjoyment of a virtue unassailed by the least bribe,—an unusual, and, I imagine, an unwelcome possession in this region.

Donkeys were not to be had, nor carriages, and we climbed on foot the very steep hill to the hotel in Pera; ascending roughly paved, crooked streets, lined with rickety houses, and occasionally mounting stairs for a mile through a quarter that has the shabbiness but not the picturesqueness of the Orient. A squad of porters seized our luggage and bore it before us. The porters are the beasts of burden, and most of them wear heavy saddles, upon which boxes and trunks can be strapped. No drays were visible. Heavy burdens, hogsheads, barrels, and cases of goods were borne between two long stout poles carried by four athletic men; as they move along the street, staggering under the heavy load, everybody is obliged, precipitately, to make way for them, for their impetus is such that they cannot check their career. We see these gigantic fellows at every street-corner, with their long poles, waiting for a job. Sedan-chairs, which were formerly in much request, are gradually disappearing, though there is nothing at present to exactly take the place of these lumbering conveyances. Carriages increase every year, but they are expensive, and they can only ascend the height of Pera by a long circuit. The place of the sedan and the carriage is, however, to some extent supplied by a railway in Galata, the cars of which are drawn up by a stationary engine. And on each side of the Golden Horn is a horse-railway, running wherever the ground is practicable.

To one coming from the West, I suppose that Constantinople would present a very mixed and bizarre appearance, and that he would be impressed by the silence of the busiest streets, in which the noise of wheels and the hum of a Western capital is wanting. But to one coming from the East, Galata and Pera seem a rather vulgarized European town. The Frank dress predominates, although it is relieved by the red fez, which the Turks generally and many Europeans wear. Variety enough there is in costumes, but the Grecian, the Bulgarian, the Albanian, etc., have taken the place of the purely Oriental; and the traveller in the Turkish capital to-day beholds not only the conflux of Asia and Europe, but the transition, in buildings, in apparel, in manners, to modern fashions. Few veiled women are seen, and they wear a white strip of gauze which conceals nothing. The street hawkers, the sellers of sweets, of sponges, and of cakes, are not more peculiar in their cries than those of London and Paris.

When we had climbed the hill, we came into the long main street of Pera, the street of the chief shops, the hotels and foreign embassies, a quarter of the city which has been burned over as often as San Francisco, and is now built up substantially with stone and brick, and contains very little to interest the seeker of novelty. After we had secured rooms, and breakfasted, at the hotel Byzance, we descended the hill again to the water, and crossed the long, floating bridge to Stamboul. This bridge is a very good symbol of the Sultan's Empire; its wooden upper works are decayed, its whole structure is rickety, the floats that support it are unevenly sunken, so that the bridge is a succession of swells and hollows; it is crowded by opposing streams of the most incongruous people, foot and horse jumbled together; it is encumbered by venders of eatables and auctioneers of cheap Wares, and one has to pay toll to cross it. But it is a microcosm of the world. In an hour one may see pass there every nationality, adventurers from every clime, traders, priests, sailors, soldiers, fortune-hunters of Europe, rude peasants of the provinces, sleek merchants of the Orient, darwishes, furtive-eyed Jews; here is a Circassian beauty seeking a lover through the carriage window; here a Turkish grandee on a prancing, richly caparisoned horse; here moves a squad of black soldiers, and now the bridge shakes under the weight of a train of flying artillery.

The water is alive with the ticklish caïques. The caique is a long narrow boat, on the model of the Indian birch-bark, canoe, and as thin and light on the water; the passenger, if he accomplishes the feat of getting into one without overturning it, sits upon the bottom, careful not to wink and upset it; the oars have a heavy swell near the handle, to counterbalance the weight of the long blade, and the craft skims the water with swiftness and a most agreeable motion. The caïques are as numerous on the water as the yellow, mangy dogs on shore, and the two are the most characteristic things in Constantinople.