John Stephens - Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Onward, still onward! We have reached the ancient Hellespont, the Dardanelles of the Turks, famed as the narrow water that divides Europe from Asia, for the beauties that adorn its banks, and for its great Turkish fortifications. Three miles wide at the mouth, it becomes gradually narrower, until, in the narrowest part, the natives of Europe and Asia can talk together from the opposite sides. For sixty miles (its whole length) it presents a continued succession of new beauties, and in the hands of Europeans, particularly English, improved as country seats, would make one of the loveliest countries in the world. I had just time to reflect that it was melancholy, and seemed inexplicable that this and other of the fairest portions of the earth should be in the hands of the Turks, who neither improve it themselves nor allow others to do so. At three o'clock we arrived at the Dardanelles, a little Turkish town in the narrowest and most beautiful part of the straits; a strong fort with enormous cannon stands frowning on each side. These are the terrible fortifications of Mohammed II., the keys of Constantinople. The guns are enormous; of one in particular, the muzzle is two feet three inches in diameter; but, with Turkish ingenuity, they are so placed as to be discharged when a ship is directly opposite. If the ship is not disabled by the first fire, and does not choose to go back and take another, she is safe. At every moment a new picture presents itself; a new fort, a new villa, or the ruins of an ancient city. A naked point on the European side, so ugly compared with all around it as to attract particular attention, projects into the strait, and here are the ruins of Sestos; here Xerxes built his bridge of boats to carry over his millions to the conquest of Greece; and here, when he returned with the wreck of his army, defeated and disgraced, found his bridge destroyed by a tempest, and, in his rage, ordered the chains to be thrown into the sea and the waves to be lashed with rods. From this point, too, Leander swam the Hellespont for love of Hero, and Lord Byron and Mr. Ekenhead for fun. Nearly opposite, close to a Turkish fort, are the ruins of Abydos. Here Xerxes, and Leander, and Lord Byron, and Mr. Ekenhead landed.

Our voyage is drawing to a close. At Gallipoli, a large Turkish town handsomely situated at the mouth of the Dardanelles, we took on board the Turkish governor, with his pipe-bearer and train of attendants, escorted by thirty or forty boats, containing three or four hundred people, his mightiness taking a deck passage. Toward evening we were entering the Sea of Marmora, the ancient Propontis, like one of our small lakes, and I again went to sleep lulled by the music of a high-pressure engine. At daylight we were approaching Constantinople; twelve miles this side, on the bank of the Sea of Marmora, is the village of St. Stephano, the residence of Commodore Porter. Here the domes and minarets of the ancient city, with their golden points and glittering crescents, began to appear in sight. High above the rest towered the mosque of Sultan Achmet and the beautiful dome of St. Sophia, the ancient Christian church, but now, for nearly four hundred years, closed against the Christians' feet. We approach the walls and pass a range of gloomy turrets; there are the Seven Towers, prisons, portals of the grave, whose mysteries few live to publish: the bowstring and the sea reveal no secrets. That palace, with its blinded windows and its superb garden, surrounded by a triple range of walls, is the far-famed seraglio; there beauty lingers in a splendid cage, and, lolling on her rich divan, sighs for the humblest lot and freedom. In front, that narrow water, a thousand caiques shooting through it like arrows, and its beautiful banks covered with high palaces and gardens in the oriental style, is the Thracian Bosphorus. We float around the walls of the seraglio, enter the Golden Horn, and before us, with its thousand mosques and its myriad of minarets, their golden points glittering in the sun, is the Roman city of Constantinople, the Thracian Byzantium, the Stamboul of the Turks; the city which, more than all others, excites the imagination and interests the feelings; once dividing with Rome the empire of the world; built by a Christian emperor and consecrated as a Christian city, a "burning and a shining light" in a season of universal darkness, all at once lost to the civilized world; falling into the hands of a strange and fanatic people, the gloomy followers of a successful soldier; a city which, for nearly four centuries, has sat with its gates closed in sullen distrust and haughty defiance of strangers; which once sent forth large and terrible armies, burning, slaying, and destroying, shaking the hearts of princes and people, now lying like a fallen giant, huge, unwieldy, and helpless, ready to fall into the hands of the first invader, and dragging out a precarious and ignoble existence but by the mercy or policy of the great Christian powers. The morning sun, now striking upon its domes and minarets, covers it, as it were, with burnished gold; a beautiful verdure surrounds it, and pure waters wash it on every side. Can this beautiful city, rich with the choicest gifts of Heaven, be pre-eminently the abode of pestilence and death? where a man carries about with him the seeds of disease to all whom he holds dear? if he extend the hand of welcome to a friend, if he embrace his child or rub against a stranger, the friend, and the child, and the stranger follow him to the grave? where, year after year, the angel of death stalks through the streets, and thousands and tens of thousands look him calmly in the face, and murmuring "Allah, Allah, God is merciful," with a fatal trust in the Prophet, lie down and die? We enter the city, and these questions are quickly answered. A lazy, lounging, and filthy population; beggars basking in the sun, and dogs licking their sores; streets never cleaned but by the winds and rains; immense burying-grounds all over the city; tombstones at the corners of the streets; graves gaping ready to throw out their half-buried dead, the whole approaching to one vast charnel-house, dispel all illusions and remove all doubts, and we are ready to ask ourselves if it be possible that, in such a place, health can ever dwell. We wonder that it should ever, for the briefest moment, be free from that dreadful scourge which comes with every summer's sun and strews its streets with dead.

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CHAPTER XII.

Mr. Churchill.—Commodore Porter.—Castle of the Seven Towers.—The Sultan's Naval Architect.—Launch of the Great Ship.—Sultan Mahmoud.—Jubilate.—A National Grievance.—Visit to a Mosque.—The Burial-grounds.

There is a good chance for an enterprising Connecticut man to set up a hotel in Constantinople. The reader will see that I have travelled with my eyes open, and I trust this shrewd observation on entering the city of the Cæsars will be considered characteristic and American. Paul was at home in Pera, and conducted us to the Hotel d'Italia, which was so full that we could not get admission, and so vile a place that we were not sorry for it. We then went to Madame Josephine's, a sort of private boarding-house, but excellent of its kind. We found there a collection of travellers, English, French, German, and Russian, and the dinner was particularly social; but Dr. N. was so disgusted with the clatter of foreign tongues, that he left the table with the first course, and swore he would not stay there another day. We tried to persuade him. I reminded him that there was an Englishman among them, but this only made him worse; he hated an Englishman, and wondered how I, as an American, could talk with one as I had with him. In short, he was resolved, and had Paul running about every street in Pera looking for rooms. Notwithstanding his impracticabilities as a traveller, I liked the doctor, and determined to follow him, and before breakfast the next morning we were installed in a suite of rooms in the third story of a house opposite the old palace of the British ambassador.