TWO YEARS OF THE EASTERN QUESTION BY A. GALLENGA, AUTHOR OK "ITALY RE-VISITED,". ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. Bonbon : SAMUEL TINSLEY, 10, SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND. 1877. (All Rights Reserved.') "PERCHE COSTANTINOPOLI E DEL HONDO LA MIGLIOR PABTE OCCUPA IL TURCO IMMONDO ? ****** CACCIAL D EUROPA * * * Ariosto, ORLANDO FURIOSO, xvii. 75, 77. A PROFESSION OF FAITH. I WAS in the East the best part of the period elapsing between the outbreak of the Herzegovinian insurrection and the declaration of the Russian War- I watched events under the impression that the office of their recorder was not that of an advocate, but that of a judge or juryman, and that however difficult it might be for mere man to place himself beyond the bias of sympathies and antipathies, his duty would be fulfilled so long as his sentence or verdict left him at peace with his conscience. The highest compliment ever paid to a writer was from a lady, who, having reacl an essay upon some subject in which sectarian controversy was in- evitable, declared she was " puzzled to make out whether the author was Catholic or Protestant." Writing on matters connected with the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern question, I do not think it likely that any doubt may arise as to my being Christian or Mussulman, but I should certainly object to the decision of those and there are many 2096927 iv A PROFESSION OF FAITH. both East and West who seem to think it im- perative on every man to be either Turk or Russian, who, upon any word being written which may seem to them disparaging to their "Dear Turks," are ready to stigmatise the writer as "a Muscovite Agent." As a man and a Christian, born of a nation which aspired to emancipation and achieved it, the cause of the vanquished and the oppressed, naturally and in the abstract, recommends itself to my feelings, but even then Magis arnica Veritas. THE AUTHOR. LLA.NDOGO, MONMOUTHSHIRE, July 31s;, 1877. CONTENTS OF VOL. I. CHAPTEE I. EASTWARD BOUND. PAOK ROME TO CONSTANTINOPLE. THE GATE TO THE EAST. ROME TO BRINDISI. BRINDISI. ITS CONDITION AND PROSPECTS. THE GREEK ISLANDS. SYRA. CONSTANTINOPLE. THE EASTERN QUESTION. ITALIAN, PAPAL, AND AUSTRIAN VIEWS OP THE SUBJECT 1 CHAPTER II. THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. A FOG. CONTRABAND BOOKS. STAMBOUL AND PERA. GALATA. THE STREETS OF PERA. GOD'S WORK AND MAN'S. A TURKISH CROWD. TURKISH WOMEN. SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. PORTERS, HAWKERS, AND BEGGARS. THE SULTAN AT MOSQUE. THE SULTAN . iN . . . .18 CHAPTER III. THE DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. THE DOGS. THEIR BREED. THEIR HABITS AND INSTINCTS. THEIR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION. THE TURKS AS RULERS OF DOGS AND MEN 42 CHAPTER IV. STAMBOUL BY DAY. SIGHT-SEEING IN CONSTANTINOPLE. MOSQUES. MINOR MOSQUES. BYZANTINE CHURCHES. RUINS. WALLS. GATES. THE INS AND OUTS OF STAMBOUL ... .... 55 vi CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. STAMBOUL BY NIGHT. PAGE AN IMPROMPTU RIDE. A TUMBLE. OUR ROUTE. SILENCE AND SOLITUDE. TWO DEAD CITIES. MOONSHINE. A NIGHT OF IT . 68 CHAPTEE VI. DIPLOMACY IN TURKEY. LIFE IN PERA. OUT-DOOR LIFE. 1N-DOOR LIFE. AMBASSADORS AT HOME. PAST AND PRESENT AMBASSADORS. AMBASSADORS AND CONSULS. AMBASSADORS AND DRAGOMANS . . 80 CHAPTER VII. RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH POLICY. DIPLOMATISTS AND JOURNALISTS. GENERAL IGNATIEFF. RUS- SIAN VIEWS. SIR HENRY ELLIOT. THE ENGLISH AND THEIR AMBASSADOR. ENGLISH POLICY AND DIPLOMACY . . 96 CHAPTER VIII. THE DRAMATIS PERSONS. THE SITUATION OF THE EMPIRE. GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSI- TION. THE GRAND VIZIER. MIDHAT PASHA. HUSSEIN AVNI. GLIMPSES OF FORTHCOMING EVENTS. THE TURKS JUDGED BY A TURK. SAID PASHA, THE WOOLWICH PUPIL . . .116 CHAPTER IX. THE TURKS AND THE GRAND TURK. SULTAN ABD-UL-AZIZ. POPE AND SULTAN. THE SULTAN AND HIS MINISTERS. THE SULTAN'S WEALTH. HIS SPECULATIONS. HIS CHARACTER. PECULIARITIES OF THE SYSTEM OF THE SULTAN'S GOVERNMENT 135 \ CHAPTER X. TURKISH REFORMS. OLD AND NEW FIRMANS. MAHMOUD NEDIM. MIDHAT* RE- FORMS IN ITALY AND TURKEY. THE STATE AND THE NA- TION. THE TURKISH CHARACTER. POLITICAL. COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL. BAZAARS. CEMETERIES . . . .152 CONTENTS. vii CHAPTER XI. MUSSULMANS AND CHKISTIANS. PAGE THE TUKKISH GOVERNING CLASSES. TURKISH EDUCATION. TURKISH HOMES. SCHOOLS, AND COLLEGES. HOME-KEEPING AND TRAVELLED TURKS. THE ABYSS BETWEEN TURKS AND CHRISTIANS CHRISTIAN EXEMPTION FROM MILITARY DUTY. PROBABILITIES OP A GENERAL MILITARY CONSCRIPTION . .175 CHAPTER XII. THE GOOD AND BAD OF THE TURKS. CHARACTER OF THE TURKS. OSMANLIS AND MUSSULMANS. HIGH AND LOW TYPES OF TURKS. PEOPLE AND GOVERN- MENT. OLD AND NEW TURKISH ATROCITIES. MR. BUTLER JOHNSTONE ON TURKISH MANNERS. TEMENAH AND SHAKING HANDS 198 CHAPTER XIII. TURKISH FINANCES. TURKISH BOND -HOLDERS. THEIR AGENTS. THE FIRMAN OF OCTOBER. TURKISH BUDGETS. THE CIVIL LIST. TURKISH AND EUROPEAN NEGOTIATIONS. THE SULTAN'S EXTRAVA- GANCE. HIS ILLNESS. THE HARD-BOILED EGGS. ALL FOOLS' DAY. EXEUNT THE BOND-HOLDERS* AGENTS. MR. HAMOND'S FAMOUS SNUFF-BOX .' . .220 CHAPTER XIV. THE ENGLISH ON THE BOSPHORUS. ENGLISH OPERATIVES. THE IMPERIAL OTTOMAN NAVAL ESTAB- LISHMENT. AN ENGLISH COLONY. ENGLISH HOMES. COT- TAGE-HOMES AND VILLA-HOMES. NEW CHALCEDON. THE ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED. THE SULTAN'S PALACES. THE BIBLE IN TURKEY 243 CHAPTER XV. HERZEGOVINA. POSITION OF THE PROVINCE. ITS POLITICAL AND ECONOMICAL CONDITIONS. THE OUTBREAK. ITS IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCE. viii CONTENTS. PACK TURKISH GOVERNORS AND GENERALS. SERVER. RAOUF. MIKHTAR. THE FIGHTING ABOUT NIKSITCH. TURKISH STRATEGY AND TACTICS 272 CHAPTER XVI. NOTES AND MEMORANDUMS. DIPLOMACY IN THE EAST. THE ANDRASSY NOTE. DIPLOMATIC ETIQUETTE. TURKEY AND THE POWERS. THE PORTE AND THE OPPOSITION. THE PORTE AND THE INSURGENTS. THE POLICY OF AUSTRIA. THE POLICY OF RUSSIA. THE GORTS- CHAKOFF MEMORANDUM. THE POLICY OF ENGLAND . . 312 CHAPTER XVII. TURKISH SHAMS AND DELUSIONS. DEALINGS OF THE PORTE WITH FOREIGN POWERS. WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY. HAREM LIFE. THE DOCTOR AND THE SLAVE- MERCHANT. TAXES AND TAX-GATHERERS. TURKISH EQUA- LITY. AT THK POLLS. IN THE COURTS OF JUSTICE. TURKISH CRIMINALS AND TURKISH JUDGES. THE PERA MURDERS. THE MURDER AT BROUSSA. THF. SALONICA MURDER . 345 TWO YEAES OF THE EASTERN QUESTION. CHAPTER I. EASTWARD BOUND. HOME TO CONSTANTINOPLE. THE GATE TO THE EAST. ROME TO BRINDISI. BRIXDISI. ITS CONDITIONS AND PROSPECTS. THE GREEK ISLANDS. SYRA. CONSTANTINOPLE. THE EASTERN QUESTION. ITALIAN, PAPAL, AND AUSTRIAN VIEWS OF THE SUBJECT. IN the month of November, 1874, I had gone to Rome to see the Pope die. This was not the first nor yet the second time that I visited the Holy City on the same fool's errand. My friends in the Piazza di Spagna had become accustomed to my presence and familiar with my business, and they laughed at me, and asked if I did not know that " Morto un Papa se ne fa un altro" and if I was so ingenuous as to suppose that the death of a Pope could ever involve the end of the Papacy ; they suggested that one who had been made infallible VOL. i. 1 2 THE EASTERN QUESTION. might also be gifted with immortality, and that, at all events, Pius IX. was no lion on whose dead hide any man could reckon, and would be as likuly to bury me and all the rest, as to gratify the curiosity of those who speculated on the vacancy of the Holy See and the issue of the next Conclave. The Pope was ill ; the Pope got well ; November day was dark and gray ; and the prospect before me by no means cheerful. The Roman season began under dull auspices ; Italian politics were flat, and I had hired apartments where the sun only shone when he was not wanted. I walked round the Pincio till I was tired ; I read half the novels in Piale's library, but vainly struggled against the conclusion that even Rome could, in certain circum- stances, be a tiresome place, and that time hung rather heavily upon me. One may imagine with what electric thrill I received a letter which bade me shift my quarters from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, to quit too well- known scenes for a region which was to me terra incognita, and where I was told I should witness " the Agony and Death of a Sick Old Man older and more sick than the Pope himself that I should l)o present at the reading of his last will and testa- ment, and report any squabbles which might arise as to the settlement of hi.s inheritance." I was going to watch some of the phases of the solution of the great Eastern Question. From Rome to Constantinople one travels now on EASTWARD BOUND. 3 the long obliterated track followed by the first Christian Emperor, when he removed his trium- phant eagles from the old to the new capital of his world-wide empire. After more than fifteen cen- turies we tread per vias antiquas, and the great gate opening from the Western to the Eastern world is again that Brundusium, where one stay-at-Kome Roman poet said good-bye to another Roman poet Eastward bound. The first stage of my journey took me from Home to Caserta, on the way to Naples, whence I struck across the Apennines by the line which goes through Benevento to Foggia and Barletta, and there I met the great maritime line, over which the Overland Mail is conveyed from Turin and Bologna to Brin- disi. I had left Rome at eleven o'clock in the evening and reached Brindisi on the ensuing evening at six, thus accomplishing in nineteen hours a dis- tance which a good express could and ought to go over in twelve. The Italian coast on the Adriatic exhibits already, both in the look of the country and in the features of the people, a semi-Oriental character. We are here in Magna Grecia, and the heel as well as the toe of the Italian Boot Puglia as well as Calabria bear the distinct marks of that ancient civilisation which set in with the tide of Greek colonists, and which the vicissitudes of after-times were in a great measure powerless to affect. As the traveller breaks through the Apennine gorges after Benevento, he 12 4 THE EASTERN QUESTION. advances across the Tavoliere di Puglia, a granary now as it was in ancient Roman times ; a vast, wind-blown, perfectly flat surface, unlike any other region in Italy, and for a parallel to which one must go to the fertile but dreary and desolate districts of Castile and Aragon. There is not a tree, not a bush in sight nothing living or telling of life, save here and there, at great distances, some huge farm- house, with high fencing walls and turrets, the tokens of former insecurity, and in the home-field around it a shaggy herd grazing, tended by a herds- man still shaggier. There is nothing to relieve that even, ocean-like, monotonous vastness. The moun- tains in your rear vanish in the autumn haze before you are in sight of the ridge of the Gargano, a long, smooth ridge dipping in the sea far away on your left, and forming the clumsy spur above the heel of the Boot. As the railway trends seawards from Foggia to Barletta, the look of the country im- proves. The land is still level, but it teems with -the vine, the olive, and the mulberry. A few ever- green oaks and stone-pines tower aloft over the orchards ; the acacia lines the railway track, and each station has its attempts at flower-beds and shrubberies, as on the Rhine or in Switzerland. Towns, villages, and isolated houses, however, as you hurry past Barletta, Trani, Bari, etc. almost invariably white-washed and flat- roofed prepare you for the sight of Eastern habitations. One may fancy what they must look like in the long summer EASTWARD BOUND. > days, glaring and grilling in the sun, unrelieved by the shelter ot a tree or by the shade and freshness of more sober hues. The movement along the line and at the stations was considerable ; the peasantry are in the main a well-dressed and well-to-do-looking people, for Pug- lia, unlike Calabria and Sicily, is an orderly, labo- rious, law-abiding community. In my first class carriage, however, I was alone till I picked up a bevy of priests of high rank, in fine long robes, purple stockings, and with large golden crosses on their breasts : portly bishops and sleek Monsignors, attended by their almoners, bearing witness to the thriving condition of a part at least of the clergy in Italy even after so many years of the squabble between Church and State and explaining the squalor and poverty of so large a mass of the lay population. It was night, but not dark, at Brindisi when I arrived, for the moon, struggling to break through the clouds, was still bright enough to light up the port with its shipping and the surrounding scenery. I had all my life longed to see this spot which played so important a part in the ancient world, and for which I thought, and still think, the revival of Italy may have a no less splendid future in store. I was grieved to see the long faces with which the people at the new Grand East India Hotel greeted my solitary presence. The Overland Mail was ex- 6 THE EASTERN QUESTION. pected that very evening, Thursday, at nine o'clock ; and I thought the smoke of the Peninsular and Oriental steamer would have been a sight to gladden my landlord's heart ; but he shook his head and looked seaward with blank dejection ; a state of mind which was presently explained by the arrival of the dark leviathan, which hardly loomed along the quay for twenty minutes, landed the passengers and their luggage in hot haste, and then steamed away out of sight without delay, while the travellers proceeded at once several omnibusfuls to the station, leaving not a shilling or a rupee or a piastre for mine host of the Indie Orientali, or for his waiters, porters or boots, to bless themselves with ! Of the many illusions into which Italian patriots dived during their struggle for emancipation, none, apparently, led to a more prompt and woeful disap- pointment than their expectation respecting the leading part that would be assigned to Brindisi as the great mart of Eastern trade. The hopes they built on the untold millions they would make out of the conveyance of the Overland Mail throughout the whole length of the Peninsula were as senseless as the fears entertained by Marseilles and the French railway companies at the prospect of losing it ; and both countries looked with breathless in- terest to the completion of that Mont-Cenis Tunnel, which, coinciding with the opening of the Suez Canal, was to give the Italian Peninsula, thrown as it is like a great Avharf athwart a large extent of the EASTWARD BOUND. 7 Mediterranean, the monopoly of Levantine and Asiatic navigation. Tunnels and canals, however, are only the highways of commerce ; they are not commerce ; highways are merely the channels of produce, but are themselves unproductive. Before the Italians abandoned themselves to their sanguine anticipations, they should have considered what goods they had to sell or to purchase ; or, otherwise, what means they possessed for fetching and carrying other people's goods. I was at Rome and bound for Constantinople, and, on inquiring my way, was told that I had a choice between the Austrian Lloyd steamers that touch at Brindisi, and the French Messageries steamers which rendezvous at Naples. Strange to say, no one in the Italian capital seemed to know anything of the Italian line of La Trinacria, whose steamers, as I afterwards learned, plied between the Sicilian and South-Italian coasts and the East ; the company still surviving now under the new name of Florio and Co. That line, however, was struggling into existence under difficulties ; it lost much time in commercial transac- tions at the intermediate ports, and in fact could ill withstand the competition with its French and Austrian rivals in the conveyance of mails and passengers. These French and Austrian and the English Peninsular and Oriental steamers have nearly the whole Eastern traffic in their hands, and they naturally only resort to Italian ports in so far as these suit their convenience. The English vessels 8 THE EASTERN QUESTION. from Alexandria at first made Brindisi their ter- minus ; they landed their mails and passengers and a part of their merchandise ; and it is to this early period that Brindisi refers as the date of her short- lived prosperity ; but now the steamer only lands the mails and such of her passengers as long for the termination of their sea-voyage, most of whom drive at once to the special or " International " train which is waiting for them at the station ; and, for the rest, she proceeds up the Adriatic to Ancona and Venice, bringing, in sober fact, nothing to Brindisi besides bustle and fuss, a week of tanta- lising hope to be followed by a day of bitter disap- pointment. The fact is, national success has done all that could be expected towards making Italy a great trading community. It is now in the power of her people to reap all the benefit of their splendid posi- tion. Even at the moment I am writing, the Russo-Turkish war, by interrupting the ordinary traffic along the Danube, has given the companies of Mediterranean steamers the monopoly of the whole intercourse between the East and West. Of that trade and traffic it is in the power of the Florio or other Italian companies to have a large share. All the rivalry of Marseilles, all the petty intrigues of the French railway companies, cannot prevent Genoa becoming the Queen of the Mediterranean ; nor can Ancona or Venice, or even Trieste, deprive Brindisi of the importance she has as the keeper of EASTWARD BOUND. 9 the keys of the Adriatic. But in order that Italian ports may hold their own against their neighbours, they must, in the first place, become trading ports ; they must establish their shipping and maritime enterprise on a larger scale. Their steam navigation companies, the Florio and Rubattino, must be con- ducted with wider and more generous views ; and they must have a striving, working, trading country, as well as an intelligent and provident government, to back them. The Italians must work out their well-being by their own exertions, well knowing that other people will not allow them a greater share of their gains than they can help. I had never before seen Brindisi, and could not compare its present state with what it was fifteen years before, when it was rescued from Bourbon rule. But that there was progress in the place, and that its inhabitants were doing tolerably well, one might perceive at a glance. The harbour is not larofe, but well sheltered and almost land-locked, and O ' ' broad and handsome quays have been made with sufficient depth of water to allow the largest steamers to moor close to them, enabling pas- sengers to walk on board a convenience scarcely to be met with anywhere else in the Mediter- ranean. I walked in and about the town, and saw with pleasure that the old well-paved and smooth, though narrow, Strada Maestra and the more spacious Strada Amena were swept clean cleaner than any week 10 THE EASTERN QUESTION. I was to see for many months as I proceeded farther East. In the Strada Amena and other quarters large and handsome blocks of buildings with shops were rising ; a proof, in spite of all the croaking of my landlord, that the place had faith in its destinies, and was decidedly looking up. In my opinion to deprive such a place as Brindisi of her future as the gate of the East would be impossible. It takes time before the movement of commerce can find its level, before trade can be diverted from the channels it has long followed, before a race prostrated for centuries like the Italian can make up its mind to be up and doing. But it all will come to pass in God's' own good time. An Austrian Lloyd steamer took me up at Brindisi, and wafted me across to Corfu ; from this latter place another Austrian Lloyd steamer, two days later, threaded its way through the Greek Isles to Syra, and hence to the Dardanelles, and all along the Sea of Marmora to the famous group of the Three Cities at the southern entrance of the Bosphorus. Owing to a loss of twelve or thirteen hours at Syra, it took us three days and three nights to go from Corfu to Constantinople. All the time during the voyage which was not taken up by the contemplation of the lovely scenery through which I was borne, along the lofty coasts and threading the maze of islands of the ^Egean Sea, was employed by me in picking up whatever knowledge came into my way respecting the subject EASTWARD BOUND. 11 on which I had undertaken to enlighten other people. I had hitherto paid but little attention to the Eastern Question, and only heard that the interest the world felt about it had been recently awakened by the report of an insurrection in some districts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and by an untoward reso- lution of the Government of the Porte which de- frauded the holders of Ottoman Bonds of one half of the interest of their shares. Dissolution through disaffection of her people, and bankruptcy through mismanagement of her finances, we were given to understand, threatened the Empire of the Sultan with the speedy fulfilment of its long-impending doom. I need hardly say that in Italy men were heart and soul for the insurgents ; for the Italians, and especially the Venetians, among whom I had lately lingered, had not forgotten how a few years ago the Austrian eagles were still perched on every steeple all over the pleasant land ; they had felt what it is for a nation to have another nation's foot on its neck, and, apart from religious antipathy, they could not help feeling how far more unendurable masters the Turks must be than their own lately departed Tedeschi. Of the regions that stare at them from o the other side of the Adriatic, even of the clusters of islands and peninsulas which they themselves sub- jugated and colonised in old Venetian times, the Italians know next to nothing ; but they reasoned 12 THE EASTERN QUESTION. that, as it had been proved that Roumania, Servia, and Montenegro could enjoy the blessings of self- government, not without some credit to themselves, and with absolutely no disturbance to their neigh- bours, there could be no reason why the same autonomy should not be extended to the Herze- govina, to Bosnia, and so on from district to district, till the Crescent should be driven to the minarets of Constantinople, in proper time to be forced across the Straits. The Italians, it may be seen, had from the outset adopted the " neck and crop" theory of Mr. Glad- stone. The Italians themselves had achieved such prodigies in their own country, that they could dream of no problem of which time might not bring an easy solution. They took little time to consider where another Re Galantuomo and a minister with a Cavour's brain were to come from to lay the basis of that South-Slavonian Empire of which men talked so glibly ; they lost no time inquiring into the immediate or remote consequences of a disruption of the Ottoman Empire, and of a collision between the rival pretensions of Russia and Austria on the Danube, or of the jealousies between Russia and England as to the possession of the Bosphorus. All they knew was that the Christian subjects of the Porte were " men and brothers," and should not be made to submit to the Turks, who were "brutes." The question for Italian patriots was not on what footing the Osmanlis should hold their own in EASTWARD BOUND. 13 Europe, the first and most urgent necessity being that they should take themselves off. The only partisans the Ottomans had in Italy were the priests, with the Pope at their head. The Herze- govinians, in the opinion of the Vatican, were " Freemasons and Garibaldians," and as such could only be enemies of God whether they rose against the Crescent or the Cross. This partiality of the Pope to the Turks did not fail, of course, to strengthen the Italian laity in their anti-Turkish prepossessions, at the same time that it inclined them to augur well for the progress of Turkey's enemies ; for in the estimation of the Italians the poor Pope has the evil eye, and is sure to ruin any cause on which he bestows his blessings, as he almost invariably brings good luck to those against whom he hurls his curses. When Italy was left behind, and as we were steaming under Austrian colours, this unanimity in favour of the Christian subjects of the Porte was no longer apparent. I had been at Trieste a few months before, almost upon the first outbreak of those Herzegovinian disturbances, and what I had then learnt, and what I now heard from the captains and officers of the Lloyd steamers and from the miscellaneous passengers bound to the same goal with me, soon enabled me to perceive that Austria's views on the Eastern Question were, and must for ever be, as hopelessly divided and pointing opposite ways as the two heads of the bird which 14 THE EASTERN QUESTION. has almost prophetically been for so many years the cognisance of the House of Hapsburg. The insurrection of the Herzegovina ought, on a first glance of the subject, to have caused the Kaiser as bad a quarter of an hour as the S.ultan himself ; for, if the Porte was threatened with the danger of losing those districts, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ran the scarcely less evil chance of gain- ing them. A man whose next-door neighbour's house is on fire can enjoy no easy slumbers, and at Vienna, and still more at Buda-Pesth, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that it little mattered with what amount of bloodshed the Herzegovinian insur- rection was quenched/ so there might be peace on the Dalmatian, Croatian, and Slavonian frontier. For most of the statesmen in power in Austria the integrity of the Sultan's Empire was a vital neces- sity for the Kaiser's Monarchy : but there were other men, possessing influence at court, in the cabinet, in the army, and among a large part of the people, who thought, on the contrary, that the Kaiser's Monarchy could and should be made to rise on the ruins of the Sultan's Empire ; that all Turkey's loss should be Austria's gain, and that, instead of attempting to uphold the Sultan, the Kaiser should favour every movement which might enable him to step into the Sultan's place. It was not merely the Slavic party in some of the Austrian provinces, it was not merely General Rodich, the Governor of Dalmatia, or the Arch- EASTWARD BOUND. 15 duke Albrecht, the conqueror at Custozza, and the most popular man in the Austrian army, that were supposed to look upon the aspirations of the Slavs of Herzegovina with outspoken favour. The Em- peror Francis Joseph himself was supposed to have a leaning in that direction, and indeed it was openly asserted at Trieste and Ragusa that it was owing to the encouragement held out to them by the Kaiser during his summer trip across the Julian and Dinaric Alps that the Herzegovinians had ventured on a revolt for the success of which they must needs depend on other forces besides their own. The conditions of the Austro- Hungarian Mon- archy were so far improved by the events of 1866, that, could the Eastern Question be for ever ad- journed, the losses the Hapsburg-Lorraine dynasty suffered at Sadowa might be accounted clear gain. Austria at that juncture rid herself of Germany and Italy, and satisfied Hungary. By her scheme of a Dualism she put an equal amount of power into the hands of her own Germans and of the Magyars. Only in that arrangement she seemed to forget the Slavs the most numerous of her subject races, and the one to which in recent struggles she has been indebted for her very existence. These Slavonians, although split up into many distinct tribes, and known under the various names of Dalmatians, Croatians, Slovenes, etc., although hardly knowing anything of each other, and understanding but little of each other's language, had been lately plied with 16 THE EASTERN QUESTION. flattering notions of their common origin, and made to aspire to common destinies. These Southern Slavs in themselves were almost more than Austro- Hungary could manage ; but what would be the case if they were to make common cause, and be- come one people with their brethren of Herzegovina, Bosnia, Servia, and other Turkish provinces, and give full development to that idea of a South Slavonian Empire, which might prove stronger than either the Kaiser or the Sultan, and absorb all Southern Europe from the Danube to the Bosphorus ? It seemed easy to some of the people at Trieste, and on board the Lloyd steamers, to suggest that the Austrian Monarch could easily, however, lay the storm which threatened him from the South Sla- vonian movement by putting himself at its head ; that, by extending his protection to the Bosnians, Herzegovinians, or any other tribe attempting to shake off the yoke of the Porte, he could extend the limits as well as consolidate the foundation of his empire. But his Germans and his Magyars had found out that their master had already a great many more Slavonian subjects than they considered expedient, and Austria could only hope to become a great South Slavonian Monarchy by risking the loss of her German and of some of her Hungarian provinces, and exchanging Vienna, not merely for Pesth, as Prince Bismarck hinted, but for Constan- tinople a consummation, whether or not desirable in the end, the means for which were not at hand. EASTWARD BOUND. 17 It is easy to see from what has been said how troublesome and dangerous any insurrectionary attempt in the Turkish provinces must appear to those who direct the destinies of the Austro- Hungarian Monarchy. The House of Hapsburg- Lorraine was standing on a pretty firm foundation so long as the Eastern Question was left untouched. But the moment that Question pressed forward for solution Austria fell into a state of perplexity from which she found it impossible to free herself, seeing equally formidable dangers before her in any reso- lution she might venture to take, and hardly any greater safety in a policy of indecision and inaction. This may explain the endless shifts and heroic tours de force Count Andrassy was driven to at various periods during these last two years. His contrivances hitherto, far from ridding him of the difficulties of his situation, have only involved him deeper and deeper into the meshes of a vacillating policy, and made his own position, that of his party, and that of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy more hopelessly entangled, indefinable, and untenable. VOL. I. o 18 THE EASTERN QUESTION. CHAPTER II. THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. A FOG. CONTRABAND BOOKS. STAMBOUL AND PERA. GALATA. THE STREETS OF PERA. GOD'S WORK AND MAN'S. A TURKISH CROWD. TURKISH WOMEN". SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF CONSTAN- TINOPLE. PORTERS, HAWKERS, AND BEGGARS. THE SULTAN AT MOSQUE. THE SULTAN. THE first impression a traveller receives on entering Constantinople has been often described, and by none so successfully as by one who had never seen the place. To venture upon the subject otherwise than by quoting the author of " Anastasius " would seem sheer rashness ; to avoid it altogether might be considered a dereliction of duty. In my own case the horns of the dilemma had nothing formid- able ; the task of conveying my first impression of the place was rendered marvellously easy. Lovely weather had been with us from Rome to Brindisi, at Corfu, at Syra, in sight of " the fields Avhere Troy was," and at both ends of the Dardanelles. There was a blaze of stars and a bright waning moon as I rose on a Friday, November 19th, 1875, at four o'clock in the morning, and paced the deck of the THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 19 Austrian Lloyd steamer Vesta, which was slackening speed as it neared the harbour. "Now then," I thought, " for the glories of the Golden Horn, of the domes and minarets of Stamboul, of the palaces and groves of the Bosphorus 1" But, though the sea and sky were clear, a slight haze was clinging to the shore, which at break of day thickened into a dense mist, and veritable palpable fog, till a heavy curtain of clouds settled on the whole scene. Of Constantinople itself, of Pera, Galata, and Scutari I saw just as much as though at such an hour and day I had been steaming up from Gravesend to London Bridge, and of that an English reader hardly needs a description. As the capital was, so I found also, upon landing, was the Government of the Sublime Porte under a cloud. At the custom-house, where the boat landed me and my luggage, I was not unmindful of Murray's hint, and I instructed Spiro, the commis- sionaire of the hotel, to bribe his way without stint ; but the spell did not work : the hand that pocketed my backsheesh was still held out for the keys of my portmanteaus. I had to stand by, and bear and grin, while dirty fingers rummaged into the deepest recesses of those sorry trunks, turning everything topsy-turvy, and fishing, not for tobacco, or cotton prints, or any other contraband goods, but, of all things in the world, for books 1 They took them all out, nine in number, one by one, looked knowingly and lovingly at the lettering and gilding, shook 22 20 THE EASTERN QUESTION. them, raised them to their ears, and ended at last by piling them up together, tying them up with pack-thread, and in one word, seizing them, and dismissing me with an intimation that I could call for them when the official dragoman had satisfied himself that they contained no treasonable or in- cendiary matter "nothing," they said, " disrespect- ful to the sacred person of the Sultan, nothing in disparagement of the wisdom of his ministers." I sent for the books twice the day after ; sent again twice the next day ; part of them came up by driblets : Ouida's "Signa," the "Dodds Family Abroad," were soon out of quarantine. Presently Murray's "Handbook" and Theophile Gautier's "Constan- tinople " were also released. There only remained Conder's " Turkey," but that, I was told, " was for- bidden, and I should never see it again." It was a borrowed book, an odd, old little volume, a mere patchwork of other people's impressions and remarks about the country, chosen by the worthy compiler with all the partiality of an ardent Turkophile, and intended to paint the East and Eastern life as a sublunar Paradise. That book T was " never to get back." It was, and would for evermore remain, in the hands of the deep-searching interpreter, ap- parently busy in seeking in that cabalistic cento the clue to the tangled skein of the Eastern Question. " Shades of Omar and all the Khalifs !" I thought. " Fancy what an advanced stage that Eastern Question must have reached, how deeply faith in THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 21 the destinies of the Crescent must be shaken, when the good Mussulman turns censor of books ; when, like a very Duke of Modena, a Sultan stoops to wage war against printed paper !" I was unwilling to avow myself beaten. I called upon Sir Philip Francis, her Majesty's Consul- general and Supreme Judge of her Majesty's Court in the Levant, only too glad of an opportunity of making the acquaintance of one who became my staunchest friend in Constantinople as long as he lived. Sir Philip hardly allowed me time to state my case ; he rang the bell for his smartest cavass, or guard of the consulate, and bade him in his own hot and hasty manner, " go down to the dragoman at the custom-house with my curses, and tell him to give up instantly the book So-and-So, taken from Mr. So-and-So, instantly, on the spot, and see thou comest not back without it" He then bade me be seated, with a courtesy strangely contrasting with the strong language which he reserved for his deal- ings with the Turks, handed me one of his choicest havannahs, and before the cigar was smoked to the end, to be sure, old Josiah Conder's harmless rhap- sody made its appearance, not much the worse for the pawing and fingering of the jealous Ottoman official. I had never before been at Constantinople, but, like all travellers who have seen much, I had heard and read enough about it to be able to fancy what it was like. In many respects, indeed, the look of 22 THE EASTERN QUESTION. the place only too faithfully reproduced the picture of ray life-dream. But on one point, at least, I was strangely and grievously disappointed. I expected to find Stamboul a Turkish pig-sty, and Pera a Christian garden ; the reverse turned out to be the case. Bad weather and the press of business com- bined for a few days to shut me up in this diplomatic and commercial semi-European suburb of Pera- Galata, and I can freely declare that nothing my experience of the worst Italian and Spanish towns ever made me acquainted with comes up to the horrors of this Oriental abode of the world's am- bassadors. The Queen of the Bosphorus, as every one knows, consists of three cities. Two of them, Stamboul, or Constantinople proper, and Pera- Galata rise on hills on the European the third, Scutari, on the Asiatic side of the Strait. Stam- boul and Pera-Galata are separated by the Golden Horn, a long, broad, and winding inlet of the sea, forming the harbour of Constantinople, and are \joined by two long pontoon bridges, one at the harbour's entrance called " Karakeui Bridge," and the other a little more inland, being the " Old Bridge." Between the two a new iron bridge has been for a long time in progress of construction a lofty, broad, and magnificent structure, which was nearly finished long before my arrival at Constanti- nople, and which remained " more unfinished than ever" two years later when I left the place. Stamboul spreads out to the south, between the THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 23 Strait, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmora, in the shape of a triangle, with its base on what are called the " Seven Hills," and its apex, the Seraglio Point, guarding the mouth of the Strait, and facing Scutari across it. To the north of Stamboul, across the Golden Horn, rises the hill round the base of which spreads the old Genoese suburb of Galata ; and on' its top, where once were groves and gardens, are now the palaces, the shops, the churches, the barracks of Pera. The two towns, Pera and Galata, are now to all intents and purposes one town ; the old walls have almost everywhere disappeared, and with them every line of distinction between the lower or commercial and the upper or diplomatic quarter. The little level ground on the top of this steep hill is traversed throughout its length by what is called the Grande Rue de Pera. At its two ends there are thoroughfares practicable for carriages leading either to the bridges or to the open country ; and all along the same Grande Rue there slopes down a labyrinth of narrow streets and hard steep steps, leading to various points on the shore of Galata and to several dingy Mohammedan quarters on the base of the hill on the land side. The Grande Rue or main street of Pera is in some points less than half the width of the Corso at Rome ; the side streets and steps are hardly as broad as those one climbs in the most mountainous quarters of Genoa, or in what the oldest inhabitant remembers of the worst wynds in Auld Reekie. Round the base of 24 THE EASTERN QUESTION. the hill or cone on which rises Pera-Galata, there runs a level street coasting the sea, and ending on one side at Hasskeui, where lies Ters-haneh, the maritime arsenal and naval dockyard, and at the other end, leading to Top-haneh, or the artillery yard, and farther off to the palaces of Dolmabacheh and Cheraghan, recent edifices raised by the Sultans for their town residences ; what remains of the old Palace of Top-Capon, at the Seraglio Point at Stamboul, being merely reserved for great state- ceremonies. All along the lower Galata street, a busy thoroughfare, a tramway has lately been laid, and from the summit of Pera to the neighbourhood of Karakeui Bridge there is a tunnel, dignified under the name of Metropolitan Railway, by which the fatigue of the steep ascent can be avoided, pro- vided no accident occurs to interrupt the traffic, as happens almost periodically every three months. It rained in the evening and on the day after my arrival, and, after making a trial of all the pantoufles, gaiters, goloshes, patent overshoes and Russian bottines, and other contrivances that sym- pathising friends recommended, I came back thoroughly beaten to my hotel (the Angleterre, or Missirie's), convinced that walking, riding, driving, or, indeed, locomotion by any other means than a sedan-chair was out of the question. The pavement of huge, uneven, cruelly sharp-pointed stones had not, one would fancy, been ever taken up since the Genoese laid it down in the Middle Ages. Attempts THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 25 at drains or even open gutters seemed never to have been made ; sweeping was an unknown practice the black, thick, greasy, slippery, sticky mud collects in the huge holes everywhere yawning between the loose stones ; and in every effort you make to pick your steps you are baffled by the throng of men and beasts the men more irrational than the beasts- hurrying headlong on their errands, the carriages, the laden mules and asses, jumbled together at a dead-lock, threatening at every step to crush you unless you are wary and nimble enough to dash for a refuge into the open door of some of the quaint, dark, poky shops. This, of course, is the Grande Rue, the only thoroughfare ; the other streets, Rue des Postes, Rue de Pologne, etc., are streams in the rain, fetid beds of muddy rivers for days and weeks after it. Christians and Mussulmans are apt to call each other " dogs ;" but one thinks with a shudder what the Pera streets would be if one had not to thank the loose dogs, which are here the only scavengers. We had at last, fortunately, three and more days of such glorious sunshine as were never seen in o November. The fresh, balmy air absorbed and swept away the taint of the accumulated impurities, and, with something of the feeling of Noah from the Ark, I broke from confinement, stepped down to the bridge, and across the harbour, walked up to Stamboul, crossed over in a caique into Asia, to the English cemetery at Haidar Pasha near Scutari, 26 THE EASTERN QUESTION. stood on the deck of a steamer for a trip up and down the Bosphorus as far as Therapia and Buyuk- d ere, saw the Sultan going to Mosque in his gilt bucentaur, and, in short, took in at a bird's-eye view what " Eothen" calls the " splendour and havoc of the East." Would it be believed that I found at Stamboul what I had vainly looked for in Pera ? broad and comparatively well-swept streets only too few, alas ! with smooth footpaths ; large, fine open spaces with extensive views at the Porte, round the Se'raskierate or War Office, at the Hippodrome, and in front of some of the Mosques ; and, on the whole, practicable, habitable, hospitable quarters, with here and there symptoms of modern improvement and even refinement, setting forth to advantage the Sultans' tombs, the fountains and other relics of old Byzantine and Mohammedan art and civilisation. Only let the barriers of religious animosities be fully overthrown, only let a Christian have his choice of a residence, and there can be no European so utterly destitute of taste as not to prefer a sojourn in free- breathing, whitewashed Stamboul to that of cramped, stifled, dingy, and dreary Galata-Pera. I was told that the miracle by which Stamboul has been and is being transformed is all owing to the blessing of its frequent fires ; and I could enter with warm sympathy into the feelings of Nero, and share in his exultation that Rome which must, even after Augustus " had found it brick and made THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 27 it marble," have been just such a jumble of wood and mud-hovels as nine-tenths of Constantinople are now was being consumed by the flames before him ; I could twang his guitar, and sing his pseans, and bless with him the devouring element which con- quers men's sloth, stubbornness, and improvidence, strikes daylight into their foulest, plague-stricken nests, and enables some Hausmannising genius to lay his plans for those boulevards which are to give them air and space to breathe in, in spite of them- selves. But, alas ! the fire which has achieved but little for Stamboul though equally busy at Pera, Galata, or Scutari, has done next to nothing for their improvement. Into what delightful residences could not Pera and Galata, and Stamboul, and Scutari, and Kadi- Keui or Chalcedon be made by a simultaneous appli- cation of the purifying process which they are, alas I only periodically undergoing ? What combination of Naples and Lisbon, of Genoa and Edinburgh could make up so glorious an aggregate of human habitation as the Bosphorus would present from end to end, if the power, wealth, and intelligence of our modern world could, as it should, be made to bear upon it ! Even as it now is, there is something in it that dazzles the eye with its quaintness and gorgeous - ness, and will not allow the mind to dwell on its meanness and squalor. What God has done, man, be he even a Turk, cannot wholly undo. Architec- ture is not and has, perhaps, never been at home in 28 THE EASTERN QUESTION. Constantinople ; it has only piled up huge ovens under the name of mosques, and reared slender white candlesticks and candles with black pointed extinguishers called minarets ; it has lined the shores of the Strait with Sultans' palaces, kiosques, pavilions, Pasha's yalis or country mansions, long rows of buildings, light not elegant, white not tidy, with unmeaning arabesques and blank windows, charming at a distance, disappointing on a near approach, silent and lonely, splendid follies, many of them hardly ornamental and worse than useless. The Christian homes themselves, jas though dreading the contrast that any attempt at a style of their own might suggest, are rather stately and ele- gant than really tasteful. The English, Russian, and other ambassadorial palaces of Therapia and Buyukdere, abodes of bliss, which make their tenants loathe their not less sumptuous but dirt-beset, noisy, and cramped mansions at Pera, are conspicuously plain, when they are not baroque in their grandeur ; nor has the gardener's art, except in a few spots, attained any higher degree of excellence than the builder's. Were it not for the cypresses of the cemeteries, the lovely shores of the Bosphorus, all except the lower fringe at the water-edge would be nearly as bare as the Dardanelles ; and Pera-Galata does not even boast the little spots of green which dot here and there the irregular mass of buildings of triangular Stamboul. Altogether, whether you look at it from the out- THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 29 side, where huge unsightly barracks constitute its framework, or venture into its dreary precincts where every view is obstructed, the hill on which Pera and Galata stand, in spite of its grand Em- bassies, is, in my opinion, the eyesore of the Bos- phorus ; and it is matter of great wonder and grief to me to think that so many diplomatic magnates, consuls, judges, and other European functionaries, rich bankers and merchants, should have been living here year after year, generation after generation, century after century, and yet never have clubbed together, never attempted joint action for improve- ment, never laid their wise heads together at least for a pavement that they should have done nothing to- wards making the ground round their residences in any respect better than when the Italians first colonised it. The Italians have at no time been particular for decency or cleanliness, and I have no sympathy with those aesthetic professors who look upon " dirty" and " picturesque " as synonymous ; but the Italians were at least grand and daring and Titanic in their conceptions. Witness the time-defying remains of their battlemented houses and city walls here and there still standing in Galata; witness especially that Genoese tower, a structure of colossal and solid dimensions, and not destitute of a certain character- istic beauty, and which is sure to outlive all the edifices which either Byzantines or Turks have reared within reach of its vast panorama. Yet improvement of some sort is going on at 30 THE EASTERN QUESTION. Constantinople, and it is chiefly, if not exclusively, of European contrivance. I have already alluded to the two or three steep carriage-drives, the tunnel or underground railway, the tramways, the new still- born bridge ; and I may now add the railway lines running from the City of the Sultan across those northern districts of Philippopolis and the Balkans, which were soon to become so familiar a theme of men's talk, and, on the other side, to Ismid or Nico- media and Aidin, to be some day extended to Smyrna and throughout Asia Minor. The change in the look of the inhabitants must needs keep pace with the alteration of the material conditions of the city ; but it would not be easy to say whether it be equally Tor the better. The crowd at the approach of Karakeui Bridge on both sides, but especially on the Galata side, is appalling by its crush and confusion, but at the same time attractive and amusing in its quaint, wild, and fan- tastic variety. On no other spot in the world, per- haps, are the costumes, features, and tongues of the various tribes of the East and West blended and crowded together in more equal proportions. No- where else are the European cylinder, wide-awake, and billy-cock, bonnet and chignon, the Turkish fez, turban, and yashmak, the Persian barette, the Cir- cassian kalpack, to be seen more densely swarming together in the motley mass of heads. Islam is now trousered and shod, and barring the hallowed fez, there is little in the button ed-up, collarless, plum- THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 31 coloured frock, straight shirt-collar and black tie of a young Turc de la Reforme to distinguish him from the common attire of a shabby Parisian dandy. The shoeblack brigade, an unknown institution I should fancy twenty years ago, is now as numerous as in Paris ; much more so than in London. Of the Asiatic tribes, as a rule, only a mere rabble is to be seen walking, and hardly ever a lady. The throng of horsemen and carriages, hacks, or cabs, or broughams, is incessant, all-pervading, bewildering ; deafening, stunning, ear-piercing the shouts and yells of the thousand sellers of water, oranges, nuts, sweets, and other multitudinous wares. It is not without much storming and thundering, not without an immense amount of swearing by all the gods and the prophets, not without the frequent crack, and even the occasional cut of the whip, that sumptuous equipages with prancing outriders, white or black, can force their way through the shockingly unwashed, unshaven, and prodigiously tattered multitude. Go where you like about the main thoroughfares, visit the bazaars, get in and out of the Kirket-i-Hairieh steamers that ply along or across the Bosphorus, you have the same pushing, jamming tide of human beings setting in against, or ebbing away along with you. How the gentler sex fare in that turmoil may be easily imagined. The yashmak of Turkish wo- men is nowadays a mere sham. It consists, as every one knows, of a coarse linen fold swathing the brow, with another gagging the mouth, the two 32 THE EASTERN QUESTION. meeting on or about the bridge of the nose, and allowing an opening of an inch or so for the eyes. This only for the women of the people ; those of higher rank substitute a thin veil of the thinness, though not of the shape, of the "fall" of Euro- pean ladies, and, like it, answering the purpose of coquettishly exhibiting and enhancing the charms of the face it pretends to conceal. All you can see in the throng is an occasional pair of bold black eyes shining out of dirty yellow, dusky brown or down- right Negro complexion. Fair moony faces, large dreamy orbs, and now and then an outline of exquisite features, with a vacant, dreamy expression, confront you from some of the carriage windows ; but of the' female figure you can form no other idea than that of a shapeless bundle of clothes, loosely hid by the ferijeh, a long blanket-like cloak, with broad sleeves or without sleeves, falling from the shoulders to the heels, with its folds hugged to the breast ; all of one colour, green, deep crimson, or sickly yellow, and more rarely a white and red check plaid, such as we would use for a covering to a mattress or pillow-case. The care a Turkish woman must bestow on her drapery gives her enough to do as she waddles heavily and clumsily along. I have seen her coming down the steps into a steamer holding her skirts up to her garters, ap- parently heeding the display of her stockings, when she has any, much less than the 'chance of the yash- mak slipping off her sacred nose. THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 33 Away from the shores of the Golden Horn, the bazaars, and the markets, the traffic in Stamboul is by no means considerable, and many of the upper quarters have a silent desolate look, suggesting the idea of a falling off in the population. It is not so iii any of the streets of Pera or Galata, where the crush and the din are incessant. On both sides of the harbour, wherever the bustle is at its height, three features of this strange Eastern life are painfully striking the multitude and importunity of loath- some beggars, the shouting and bawling of itinerant vendors, and the hideous torture of the hamals or street porters. Nowhere except at Genoa, where men in that condition bear the Eastern name of Camalli, is the human frame so dreadfully made to resemble a beast of burden as along these horrible thoroughfares. The hamal struggles and staggers on his way, bent double under his enormous load, his head on a level with his knees, black in the face, and with the veins starting on his neck and forehead. In a place where carriages are used, and where asses and mules are legion, it seems strange that men should make so little use of the truck or pack-saddle. Everything is carried on men's back, or depending on ropes between a pair of long poles resting on four men's stout shoulders. The beggars are of all races and religions ; and Eastern notions, hallowing even the freaks of stark madness, sanction the exhibition of festering sores, stunted or crippled limbs, positively sickening even to a stranger accustomed to the most VOL. i. 3 34 THE EASTERN QUESTION. repulsive exhibition of Roman and Neapolitan men- dicancy. The beggars at Constantinople have a peculiarly insinuating way of appealing to the feel- ings of charitable persons. The dirty hands of a slovenly squaw, or of a stalwart and sturdy vagrant, will, when you least expect it, pat you affectionately and caressingly on the shoulder or back, and when you turn with surprise and anger, frowning on the loathsome object that thus claims your attention, you are met with a grin of satisfaction by the wretch, who, if he fails to move, enjoys at least the pleasure of knowing that he annoys you. Judging from ap- pearances, the misery in the city of the Sultan must be as intense as it is all-pervading, and it can hardly be otherwise where the dervish, or monk, walks about so stout and sleek, and where mosques and imperial palaces outnumber the churches, convents, and princely mansions of what was once Papal Home. Another peculiarity of Constantinopolitan life are its omnipresent loose dogs ; but there is so much to be said about them that I think I must reserve this part of the subject for another chapter. To move among this unhappy Eastern crowd with- out wishing oneself deaf and blind seems to me hardly possible, or to catch any of the thousand glimpses of the lovely surrounding scenery without longing to rid the spot of the rascal- mob which is now in pos- session, and imagining what it would be in the hands of humanised beings. How long will it be THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 3.0 before the desire is fulfilled, before this ceases to be the city of the Sultan, or before the Sultan's govern- ment makes the first steps on the path of that im- provement some feeble symptoms of which are already perceptible in the material aspect of the place, creeping in, not by Turkish exertions, but rather in despite of the hindrances thrown every- where in the way by its improvident rulers ? I was curious, last Friday, to see the man on whom depends any impulse that may be given to the pro- gress of this long-stagnant community, the man in whose hands, by the advice of the present Grand- Vizier, the government has assumed the forms of the most absolute, irresponsible personal sway. I went down the road to Top-haneh, and stood on the bank of the Bosphorus at Fondookli, waiting for his Imperial Majesty, Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz, who, from his palace of Dolmabacheh, was to be rowed to the mosque, close to the spot w r here I and a few pri- vileged English among whom Sir Arnold and Lady Kemball were gathered. In the open space between us and the mosque, troops of all arms were drawn up ; a considerable number of carriages with veiled ladies, and a crowd, by no means dense, were in at- tendance. It is a custom with the present Sultan not to divulge the spot where he intends to repair for his weekly devotions, till only a few hours, and sometimes a few minutes previous to his leaving the palace. The ministers and other high functionaries, the troops which are to be mustered along the line 32 3G THE EASTERN QUESTION. of march, the band, the Sultan's barges, horses and carriages, and even carts laden with gravel to be strewn on the path to guard against its slipperiness, are all in readiness round the precincts of the palace, ready to set out in any direction that may be ap- pointed at the eleventh hour, the lateness and sud- denness of the Padishah's pleasure not unfrequently causing a great crush and helter-skelter before the suite can fall into the proper order of march. In the present instance the Sultan came to the mosque by water, and returned to the palace by land. At about half-past twelve, the appointed hour, some of the caiques of the retinue hove in sight, the distance between us and the palace hardly exceeding 300 yards. Presently the cannon from Top-haneh gave the signal that his Imperial Majesty was stepping into his barge, and the report was echoed bj^batteries on both sides of the Bosphorus. The barges then advanced, six of them the last a mass of golden ornaments, lined with scarlet cloth, with a lofty canopy, and under it a sofa on which the Sultan sat in solitary greatness. The Sultan's barge and each of the others were rowed by a score of tall, stout, white-clad oarsmen, Albanians, I was told, picked out for this especial service. The great men of court and state landed in order of their rank, and formed in a procession, the Sultan being the last to alight. The band struck up a lively Oriental march; the muezzin sang out from the minaret gallery ; the artillery again thundered as the Sultan's foot touched THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 37 terra firma, and a cheer de riguewr rose from the throats of the soldierly array, as the Sovereign and suite walked across the space before the mosque, and disappeared behind its portals. Ten minutes elapsed ; the notes of a faint canticle resounded from the open doors of the sacred edifice ; and presently there was more cheering, more firing of cannon, a fresh burst of lively music, and it was understood that the Sultan had gone out of the mosque on the land side, had with his suite got into the court carriages, and taken a short drive back to the palace. We lost no time in getting into our own hackney-coach, and strove, but vainly, to force our way through the throng of Turkish equipages which stood in each other's way in the broad yet encumbered thoroughfare. We were too late for a sight of the Sultan, but indemnified our- selves for our disappointment by peeping close under the yashmaks of the beauties in the nearest equipages regardless of the scowling looks and heavy horse- whips of the eunuchs, the fair Moslem ladies in their turn leaning out of their windows, staring at us with all their might, some of them quietly taking stock of our Christian lady's " last sweet thing from Paris," whilst others chattered away with rare fun at the shape of our chimney-pots, and wondered what we hid in the pockets of our coat-tails. The Sultan looked aged, listless, and " bored ;" considerably paler and flabbier than when I saw him in London, his blank expression hardly conveying 38 THE EASTERN QUESTION. the idea of the wayward and wilful, impatient character attributed to him by those who approached him. Never addressed except with every show of servile adoration, knowing no other law, human or divine, than his will, this Sultan, Padishah, father of all sovereigns, this Hunkiar or Man- slayer, arbiter of life and death, Refuge of the World, and Shadow of God, was not much disposed by nature or fitted by education to comprehend or to brook the difficulties by which his throne was beset. Waited upon by ministers whom he browbeat, and mistrusted, and changed at every quarter of the moon; and from whom he expected not suggestion but submission, he was not easily to be told that his household ex- penditure, his ironclads, the scores of marble edifices, gardens, and pleasaunces with which he lined both shores of the Bosphorus, and the luxuries of the inmates there immured, contributed in no small degree to the disorder of his finance ; he could not be made to understand that the high functionaries whom his caprice invested with so brief a tenure of office, or who obtained it by bribing the Sovereign's minions and the Sovereign himself, must needs limit their exertions to the long-established practice of "making hay while the sun shines," and that the administration, by passing from hand to hand with such frequent vicissitude, could not fail, were even those hands the ablest and cleanest, to fall into a depth of corruption and confusion sure to exhaust his resources, to crush the sinews of the public THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 39 prosperity, and to sap the foundation of his power by land and sea. Unwilling to listen to domestic advice Abd-ul-Aziz was only too apt to resent foreign dictation. Remonstrance was seldom allowed to reach his ears, and never welcome ; and if at any time it gained forcible admission, it came through the organ of that Power which brooked no denial, and whose policy, questionable as to any good it may ever have boded to the Ottoman Empire, was now subservient to views at variance with its present interests, and eventually fatal to its future prospects. There was only one man, I was told, whose voice was ever heard in the Sultan's council, and it was he who, as he spoke, " never forgot that he had the strength of eighty millions of people to back him." How it was that the representatives of all other European States suffered Russian influence so long and so irresistibly to sway the Sultan's will, is what I shall in time endeavour to explain. The upsetting of the balance of power, mutual rancours and jealousies, and also want of personal energy, courage, and character, combined to paralyse the action of Western policy and diplomacy, precisely at a juncture in which its compactness and unanimity, its firm and resolute attitude, would not have been more than sufficient to meet the exigencies of an extremely difficult and perilous situation. There is a strange, so to say, fatalistic prejudice in some minds respecting any sudden and extraordinary aberration of a con- 40 THE EASTERN QUESTION. firmed character, any cessation of the immutable laws with which the very existence of an individual or state seems to be bound up, departure from which betokens approaching dissolution and death. A man who has been all his life a miser, becomes suddenly prodigal ; another, constantly persecuted by fortune, comes into unexpected affluence and prosperity such phenomena are held to be the forerunners of the end. In an analogous manner a pope, for the first time after eighteen centuries, " lives to see the years of Peter ;" his infallibility is voted by an oecumenical council. The fulness of the time has come for a time-hallowed institution when, lo ! the Italians break in at Porta Pia ; King Victor Emmanuel is lodged at the Quirinal, and the Sovereign Pontiff exchanges his throne for what he calls his Vatican prison ! Apply now the rule to our present subject. The Sultan doffs the turban of his predecessors. He calls in French tailors, English grooms, architects, and ship-builders. The world applauds. Islam is to be Europeanised ; it has taken a new lease of life. The cities of the West, for the first time in history, receive the print of the Padishah's sacred foot : wonders will never cease ! The Sick Man is healed ; the decrepit empire is rejuvenised. Ay ; but look at the result. Reform is but skin-deep. Improve- ment is found not to go one inch below the surface. Modern progress only brings in new luxuries ; refine- ment merely promotes fresh extravagance. The THE CITY OF THE SULTAN. 41 form of government is modified, but its old des- potism is intensified. The Sick Man is worse than ever ; the doctor is again called in, but with him also, this time, the lawyer, the priest, the undertaker. 42 THE EASTERN QUESTION. CHAPTEK III. THE DOGS OP CONSTANTINOPLE. THE DOGS. THEIR BREED. THEIR HABITS AND INSTINCTS. THEIR POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION. THE TURKS AS RULERS OF DOGS AND MEN. THE Ottoman Empire has a sublime contempt for statistics. You can never get a Turk to tell you the number of his wives, of his sheep, or other valuables ; and, being himself, with all he has, included among his lord the Sultan's chattels, he is content to re- main and to leave the rest of the world in ignorance of everything connected with the extent, the popula- tion, the revenue, and above all things, the debt, of the community of which he is a unit. Where even the poll-tax is unavailing to tell you the men's heads, who would keep an account of the dogs, of those omnipresent, lawless, yet perfectly harmless dogs which are both no man's and every man's pro- perty ? And yet when I walk along the Pera or Stamboul streets, and can hardly help treading upon them, lying as they do everywhere in my way, I am not quite sure that I do not deem them objects of as great an interest as many of the turbaned THE DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 43 bipeds who shrink from the unclean animal as they do from the Giaour. In the first place, it is to me a matter of doubt whether the dogs are not here indigenous to the soil ; older inhabitants than either Byzantine, Frank, or Osmanli, all races which de- signate each other as " dogs," and none of which are as kindly disposed towards one another as they are to the dogs, or these to them. I am told that a drop of the jackal blood runs throughout all the breed of the canine population of Turkey ; but whatever may be their remote origin, these animals are here, with few exceptions, no mongrels, In shape, in counte- nance, in language, in their bandy legs, pointed noses, prick-up ears, dirty yellow coats, and bushy tails, they might almost be mistaken for foxes, and hunted in the home counties or Gloucestershire. They ex- hibit less variety than is observable in the crowd of beings that here count as men. In the second place, although they live by charity, they never beg ; they never send their females to market as the Turks do at Stamboul, nor offer them for sale, as, I am ashamed to say, some degraded Christians do, both night and day, in the streets of Pera. Perfectly in- offensive as they are while living, the dogs do not cumber the earth when dead ; their cemeteries do not invade the abode of the living, nor are cypresses planted at their head to usurp the place which would be so much better filled by the olive or mulberry. What may become of their carcases I cannot tell, but although dead cats are an ordinary sight enough 44 THE EASTERN QUESTION. in the Pera thoroughfares, I am convinced that it is here as useless to look for a dead dog as for a dead donkey in England. And yet at certain hours of the day one would say that there are none but dead dogs to be met with in the place. These creatures lead, though a useful, yet a dissipated life ; like the fashionable members of the civilised world, inverting the order of nature. They are up and doing from sunset to sunrise, and enjoy the refreshment of well-earned, profound sleep almost throughout the day. They are not only masterless and homeless, but have also a sovereign contempt for bed or shelter. There is a time, it would seem, when sleep comes upon them all of them like sudden death ; when all squat down, coil themselves up, nose to tail, wherever they chance to be on the footpath, in the carriage-way, in the gutter and there lie in the sunshine, in the pelting rain, yellow bundles hardly distinguishable from the mud. They lie perversely in everybody's way, taxing the inge- nuity of the passers-by, who have to pick their steps over them ; and even when trodden by foot or threat- ened by hoof or wheel, they hardly rise from their lair, but instinctively crawl to right or left without awaking, without complaining, perfectly heedless of danger and indifferent to men's curses, which, they know, no blows follow. For between them and the human family among whom, but not with whom, they live, if there is no love lost, there is also no war. The Constantinople THE DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE, 45 dog never learns to wag his tail ; he seldom makes up, seldom looks up to a human being, hardly ever encourages or even notices men's advances. He is not exactly sullen, or cowed, or mistrustful ; he is simply cold and distant, as an Englishman is said to be when not introduced. Like all men of Southern blood, the Turk, unless roused by passion, is not cruel or uncharitable. Your Mussulman never kills small birds, either to eke out his scanty larder, or to protect his orchard from depredations ; and, in Asia, at least, he looks upon the stork which builds its nest on his hospitable roof, as the harbinger of Heaven's goodwill. Dogs and pigeons, though no inmates of his house, are under his protection and fostering care. Dogs that condescend to live by man's bounty need be in no fear of starvation where the Mussulman rules. They know that they are welcome to the offal supplied by butcher's' shops, to scraps from private houses, to waifs and strays from the vessels in harbour. On Fridays, as we learn from the handbooks, there are distributions of bread and dogs' meat throughout Islam, and a dole of dogs' bread and biscuit at the Bayezidyeh, or Bayazet's or Doves' Mosque. But your Turkish dog has an in- dependent spirit. He prefers catering for himself ; he prowls about all night ; he picks up what he can get out of the garbage which is laid out at every street-door, and performs, as a scavenger, a service of far greater benefit to the community than of emo- lument to 'himself. 46 THE EASTERN QUESTION. The dog's instinct, however, though dormant, is by no means dead in the heart of these Con- stantinopolitan canine rakes. Indifferent as they seem to all mankind, they single out with ready sympathy the hand of a benefactor, they linger with gratitude at the door of a, house where they are known as pensioners. They do not disdain a friend, though they acknowledge no master. A snowstorm or any stress of weather will break the ice of their reserve. Maternal feelings, especially, will tame the proudest spirits, and alms for her progeny will be thankfully received by a young menagere, who in her single state would have starved sooner than beg. It was in this interesting situation that the mother of three pups attached herself to an English young lady, on whose timely relief the forlorn being depended as she lay for weeks helpless in a hole she had burrowed among the graves of the Petit Champ des Morts. The love that sprang up between the giver and the receiver of the bounty was intense, yet I question whether any caress of the charitable fair hand could ever have overcome the dog's shyness ; whether any amount of kind treatment could have coaxed the houseless vagrant within the door of her benefactress's hotel. Free from the cravings of hunger after his frugal meal with Duke Humphrey, the Constantinople dog becomes a social being, and attends to the affairs of the commonwealth. At every street crossing, utterly deserted by men after nine or ten o'clock at THE DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 47 night, you find a dogs' council. Much as a visitor to Constantinople may have cause to lament his ignorance of Turkish, Arabic, and Romaic Greek, he ought to feel more put out by his inability to under- stand these dogs' Latin. Had I the rudiments of their language, could I acquire the means of com- muning with these demure and apparently un- sympathising animals, who knows what interesting particulars I might learn respecting the laws and institutions of their canine Republic ! Perfect gravity and solemnity, what one might describe as ominous silence, prevails sometimes for hours in their busy assemblies. Knowing glances, con- ventional signs, seem to suffice for their exchange of ideas. The occasional looking in or pairing off of honourable members adds importance or gives new zest to the dumb discussion. Under the leader- ship of some President, or on a motion from the Right or Left, the meeting is, now and then, adjourned ; in comes, now a message, now a deputation from some Upper House, now a report from some Select Committee. But, again, ah 1 at once some unexplained commotion seems to rouse the violent passions of the hitherto so calm, so deli- berate, and orderly Parliament. There ensues a general rush, a scamper down one street, up another, a sharp yell, a ringing chorus of yells. Is it a mes- sage of peace ? a shout of defiance ? a cry of distress? No man can tell ; but there is immediate response. From street to street, from ward to ward, from hill 48 THE EASTERN QUESTION. to hill, the alarm spreads with the swiftness of the Highland Cross of Fire. The uproar is as of myriads of unchained hell-hounds scouring the town, in the din of which dull, impassive man sleeps as he best can. The savage bark, the dismal howl, swells and subsides like the ocean-tide. It is jarring discord in the immediate neighbourhood, heavenly music, as all sound is, when mellowed by distance. Sometimes, as at this very moment, nothing can be imagined more overawing than the stillness of the midnight air from my open window ; nothing more deathlike than a vast abode of men when wrapt in universal sleep. It is that "audible silence," that appalling " voice of hushed-up life" which is all unlike the natural repose of forest, sea, or desert, and strikes us as a paralysis of our own sense of hearing. Sud- denly across the deep, from the border of the vast ce- metery at Scutari, or from the precincts of the Seven Towers at Stamboul, the far-away dogs' concert, faint and indistinct, is wafted to my ear ; faint and vague and dream-like at first, yet multitudinous, as if the Spectre Huntsman were driving his demon pack in full cry, yap-yapping, from their kennel in the nether regions. That faint wave of sound waxes and heaves and fills the space as it rapidly advances, and in a few seconds the empty haunts of men become the scene of unappeasable wrath and strife. To the uninitiated eye these dogs all look like brethren, issued from one common stock, living together in bonds of peace and unity; nomadic, THE DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 49 untied to any particular locality, wedded to the Saint Simon ian theories about all the social cora- munantes. But, with animals as with men, there is danger in any attempt to overstep the barriers of meum and tuum, and there are no more fierce and inveterate feuds than those between nearest kins- men. The dogs of Constantinople do not constitute one State, or even, as far as one can understand, a federation of States, but are divided into many petty communities, as unfriendly to one another as were the mediaeval Italian Municipalities, and they have probably been so ever since the time they came into the regions in the suite of the various wild Tartar hordes who first encamped here, always in as close a familiarity, yet as little domesticated, with every new tribe of invaders as they are now. The whole region of the Bosphorus, on both sides, is parcelled out into districts, with nicely-defined limits, among these canine tribes. Every dog of each, family knows full well the length and width of his tether, and is aware that he can only venture beyond it at his peril. But, with dogs as with men, what con- sideration of right and wrong, what apprehension of severe punishment, can control the instinct of curiosity and love of adventure, take the relish from forbidden fruit or stolen interview, or blunt a desire to diversify home monotony by a spell of foreign intercourse ? Woe to the vagrant whom hunger after alien dainties, or hankering after out- side beauty, lures into his neighbour's territory ! VOL. i. 4 50 THE EASTERN QUESTION. No Guelphs and Ghibellines ever stood up with greater jealousy in defence of their respective land- marks ; nowhere are trespassers more instantly fallen upon, or punished with more ruthless summary justice; nowhere is the injury, however well deserved, inflicted upon an individual taken up with greater esprit de corps, as a common cause, by a whole clan. By day the sudden, sharp, long- continued whine of agony of a luckless offender will occasionally appeal to the sympathies of his whole kindred, and a smart scuffle between his aggressors and his defenders will give rise to a few minutes' disturbance ; but the throng of lumbering men is too much in the way of the combatants for the melee to become general, or to extend to a large neighbourhood. But at night the angry passions of the hostile factions are allowed full play. Fresh breaches of the peace are embraced as good op- portunities for settling old scores. Every tribe takes the field either in its own or in its ally's quarrel. Every dog's fangs are against every dog ; and the result may be seen in the morning in the crippled limbs, lopped off tails, torn ears, large old scars, sores, and new gashes with which every champion's hide is scored, and which, added to the traces of every variety of loathsome diseases, make so many of the race so ragged, mangy, and unwhole- some as to sicken the most inveterate dog-fancier. The Turks, as I said, are not unfriendly to these dogs, though they do not let them into their houses THE DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 51 any more than they suffer Christians to pollute with their presence the sanctity of their harems and mosques. There were rows and riots in Con- stantinople when a reforming Grand Vizier, yielding to European suggestion, ordered the loose dogs to be slaughtered, or transported to an island in the Sea of Marmora, and there poisoned. The Turks, as I said, would not let the poor animals starve, though they shrink from their contaminating contact; but they do not presume to govern them, preferring to leave to them the responsibility of their autonomy and the administration of their own municipal justice, on the same principle as they have bestowed the same boon on Roumans and Servians, and as they must before long equally grant it to the Bosnians, Herzegovinians, and Bulgarians. They do not ill use them, nor will they allow them to be worried by brutal strangers or plagued by thoughtless children ; but they make no attempts to improve their condition or soften their manners, to civilise them, to win their ready affections, to utilise them in any of the thousand ways by which Providence seems to have intended the dog for man's trustiest friend and companion. The impression that this estrangement from our race of that most sympathetic of living species makes upon a traveller on his first arrival is painful in the extreme. These dogs, as I have shown, are no man- haters ; they are simply not on speaking terms with man. There was no smile of welcome for me from 42 52 TlfE EASTERN QUESTION. the dogs when I landed at Galata ; I have not made a friend among them since I settled at Pera ; but neither, on the other hand, has any difference arisen between us. The dogs simply ignore my existence. I was told that at Stamboul it is dangerous in the night to venture among these dogs unprotected ; that a lady's lap-dog, or strange dog of any breed, could not show himself there without being at once beset by a whole hostile pack and torn to pieces. But the pack I have seen round a sailor's noble Newfoundland inclines me to believe that even the dreaded Stam- boul savages are more ready with their bark than with their bite ; for when the Newfoundlander, weary of all the clamour at his heels, stood suddenly at bay, his Byzantine tormentors turned tail as curs invariably do all over the world. There is no doubt, also, that the unfriendliness with which an alien's intrusion is violently resented at first is not in the long-run an implacable feeling ; for exceptions to the sameness of yellow or tan coats, pointed noses, and other marks distinctive of the shaggy, semi-jackal race occasionally occur a proof that a smooth-coated stranger has now and then found favour with some member of the tribe, and come in either by mesal- liance or adoption. More inveterate unfriendliness is shown by the dogs to the dancing bears which are here an ordinary sight ; but, in reality, any strange, however commonplace object, any sudden, however familiar sound, is sufficient to create what the Komans would call a lagnara. One dog barks, and TUE DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 53 a thousand dogs bark to ask what he is barking about. If there were any good in vague speculations about the future, one would fain try to conjecture what is to become of this immense generation of dogs any day that fate should overtake the Osmanli and bring in another race to rule in his stead. Constantinople is the only corner in Europe in which an unowned and uncared-for dog is allowed to live. Will the reforms with which the Grand Vizier, Mahmood- Nedim Pasha, is now busy, extend to the canine family, or will the lawless condition of these vagrants continue unaffected, their dreadful serenades never allowing the Sultan himself peaceful slumbers even in the inmost bower of his genial Dolmabacheh ? Poor Padishah, Zil-ullah, or Shadow of God ! What sad but wholesome lesson could these yelling night- monitors teach him 1 What hope can he and his Grand Vizier entertain of satisfying the world about their ability to govern men, incompetent as they egregiously prove themselves to keep order among dogs ? How can they think that the Great Powers will allow them to settle the quarrels of Bosnians, Bulgarians, Circassians, or Armenians, so long as their police is unavailing to tame the wildness of what God created to be the most docile of man's subjects ? With what front could they deny province after province the inalienable right of self-government when they allow mere noisy brutes the enjoyment of the most unbridled, anarchic independence ? How 54 THE EASTERN Q UESTION. can they undertake to levy taxes and administer the people's substance before they show that they have a better intelligence of their wants and a readier sympathy with their sufferings than they evince to- wards the unhappy dumb creatures which they equally refuse to feed or kill ?] What chance is there of their hearing their subjects' complaints, or attending to the remonstrances of the Great Powers, if they are deaf to the protests which legions of maimed, torn, starving hounds are daily and nightly barking under their windows ? " You, rulers of Empires!" the Herzegovinians may say ; "first prove yourselves worthy of being keepers of kennels." STAMBOUL BY DAY. 55 CHAPTEE IV. STAMBOUL BY DAY. SIGHT-SEEING IN CONSTANTINOPLE. MOSQUES. MINOR MOSQUES. BYZANTINE CHURCHES. RUINS. WALLS. GATES. THE INS AND OUTS OF STAMBOUL. NOTWITHSTANDING the bad weather, the short days, and my natural indolence, I have not altogether neg- lected my duties as a civilised being, and have been about seeing some of the sights of Constantinople. A tourist who will follow Murray's guidance, may " do" the place in six days ; but my stay here has already considerably exceeded that period, and half the task is as yet scarcely accomplished. The fact is, I am a perfect Goth of a traveller. I hate goloshes, and to have to take them off and put them on at the bidding of a dirty cavass, or still dirtier dervish, seems to me the height of indignity. Besides, I do not see things to enable myself to " say that I have seen them," and it frets me to be trooped about with a pack of unsympathising strangers, hurried from room to room at stated hours and days, and plagued out of my nil admiran composure by the lecture of a r>r, THE EASTERN QUESTION. prosy valet de place, or the raptures of an aesthetic professor. The Turks also have made a journey from Pera to Stamboul a veritable corvee; and I never move about day or night, in fair weather or foul, without wondering what results can be expected from the projected reforms of a government and people who show so little disposition to " mend their ways," by removing some of the nuisances and discomforts at- tending any one who attempts locomotion along their thoroughfares. They make every bone in your skin ache if they drive you in their close hackney coaches, and you risk your neck if you ride one of their horses, many of whom, in spite of the excellence of their breed, are broken-down screws, and, even \vhen sound, are self-willed brutes, equally ignoring your bridle, whip, or spur, and only obeying the shouts or the switch of the bare-legged ragamuffin of an atjee, or horse-driver, who scampers after you rather like a footpad than a footman. The consequence is that I have not crossed the bridge five or six times O since I came to the place, and even then my anxiety to pick my way through the mud that horrid mud which neither sun nor wind seems to dry and my efforts to avoid collision with the well or ill- dressed, but generally ill-washed, and often ill-mannered, pushing and jostling crowd, have hardly allowed me a chance to look about me. Constantinople is the place in the world where a man, if he would be safe, must go about with his soul in his feet. STAMBOUL BY DAY, r>7 That I have seen mosques and kiosks, fountains and tombs, khans and bazaars, the Museum, the Sultan's treasure, and the Hall of Ancient Costumes, the reader must take for granted for I did not come here to write a guide-book and what interests me is not so much the place itself as the race that has governed it for above four centuries j not so much its arts and antiquities as the extent to which the monuments of another race and of a 'former age have been preserved or injured under the influence of rulers whom the fortune of arms placed in possession of the grandest and finest spot on earth, and who seem as yet so little inclined to quit it. There were, I am told, at the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, as many as 450 churches in the city and its suburbs. Of these only three were allowed by the conquerors to be used for Christian worship ; the rest were either desecrated or turned into mosques. The Turks, as good Mohammedans, abhorred the worship of images ; but, as a thrifty people, they did not wish to take the trouble of building so long as they had available edifices at their discretion. Up to this very day the old Byzantine Church of St. Sophia is the Ottoman Cathedral; and the Sultan, as in duty bound, proceeded to it in State the other day, on the recurrence of the Courban-Bairam, or feast of the lamb, as he is wont to do in all public solemnities. That church rises still, a mountain of masonry, in its primitive sublimity. Many of the alterations which make it an incongruous and somewhat clumsy mass 58 THE EASTERN QUESTION. on the outside, are anterior to the date of the Otto- man Conquest ; and, inside, the face of the Saviour and the faces of the angels and saints have been slightly scratched from the old Mosaics, so slightly in some instances as to leave the features still dis- tinctly perceptible, so that by a little application of the restorer's skill, and by the removal of the huge scrolls bearing verses from the Koran, and of a few bits of carpet, horse-tails, ostrich eggs, and other plain Mohammedan ornaments and relics, mere trum- pery and frippery, nothing would be easier than to replace the Cross where now the Crescent rises, and blot out every trace of the work of these last 423 years. The awe struck into the Osmanli's minds by the achievements of the race among whom they settled so strongly appealed to their pride and ambi- tion as to prompt them to emulate what they could not help admiring, and for the best part of a century, while intercourse with the European nations and especially with the Italians, then at the zenith of their artistic glory was kept up, the Turks aspired to what may be considered an architecture of their own, and their endeavours culminated in that Mosque of Soliman the Magnificent, which, though not at- taining the grandeur, greatly surpassed the harmony and elegance of St. Sophia, and is, indeed, to its Byzantine rival what St. Paul's of London is to St. Peter's in Rome. Turkish genius, however, seems to have exhausted itself in that first effort. Nothing that can at all come near to the glory of St. Sophia STAMBO UL BY DA Y. 59 and the Suleymanieh is to be seen in Ahmet's Mosque of the Six Minarets, or in any other of the hundreds of temples with which the successors of Mohammed 1 1. have crowned the seven hills of Stamboul. Nothing original, nothing absolutely beautiful strikes the eye in those long rows of gay and fantastic imperial palaces and kiosks which line the Bosphorus. The attempts made here and there to reproduce the glories of the Alhambra of Granada and the Alcazar of Seville turn out deplorable failures. There is nothing like style to enhance the real value of the gold and costly marble with which those buildings are glittering, just as there is no workmanship in the setting of the inestimable jewels accumulated in the Sultan's treasure. That the solid and colossal Geno- ese Tower of Galata should so little have influenced the taste of the designers of the grotesque Seraskier's Tower is indeed a marvel, or that even what still remains of the "Palace of Belisarius" should not have supplied a design for some of the staring bar- racks and other public edifices which disfigure the open spaces in the capital, and the bare hills in its environs. If we except a few of the Turbehs, or sepulchral monuments, and of the fountains which exhibit some reminiscences of florid Arabic elegance, art seems altogether beyond the power of the Turk's creation or adoption. Even his undoubted religious veneration fails to interest the Mussulman in the preservation of the buildings consecrated to his own worship. The 60 THE EASTERN QUESTION. greatest mosques in Stamboul, not excepting St. Sophia, bear an aspect of dinginess which is as much the result of man's neglect as the work of time. This is not the country in which one may look for the well-washed marble floors, or the plashing fountains of the mosques in the Arabian Night's tales. The old worn-out stone or brick is, as a rule, covered with tawdry rags of carpet, and the noble simplicity of the walls and domes, which constitutes the real beauty of the great sacred edifices, is spoilt in minor buildings by such in credibly stupid daubs of birds, stars and crescents, flowers and vases, as to prove that the Mussulman's brush is still, and will probably for ever remain, a mere child's toy. A Greek but half- Anglicised antiquary of note, Dr. Paspati, by a special Firman, enabled me and a party of Englishmen to visit some of the transformed old Byzantine churches, into which " unbelieving dogs" are seldom admitted little St. Sophia, the Church of the Pantocrator, that of Pammakarista, that of Chora, and others- structures, some of them, the date of which goes back to the period between the first and the last Constantine, and most of which, after the destructive work by which they were disfigured, have been suffered to sink into slow decay, without ever an attempt to repair the ravages of storms and earth- quakes. Owing to the very multitude of sacred buildings which Islam usurped, the invader found neither the means of keeping them from ruin nor STAMBOUL BY DAY. 61 the purpose to which they might be turned. In some of those minor mosques, as we entered, the only living being seemed to be the muezzin on the minaret calling to prayer a flock who never came. In some others, under the portico, outside, we were met by a gloomy and shaggy "saint" i.e. religious lunatic, a ferocious-looking rascal who scowled at the intruders till tamed by the spell of backsheesh ; while, again, on the threshold of other mosques we passed, on one side, the unconcerned, half-paralytic old dervish telling his beads, and opposite the inevitable, ubiquitous Constantinopolitan dog curled up into a dirty yellow bundle, insensible to heat or cold, wrapt in the sleep of the righteous. I had read in guide-books that the noble Basilica of San Vitale, the glory of Ravenna, had been built by the Exarchs on the model of the Byzantine St. Sophia. By this, I now learnt, was meant, not the grand mosque of that name, but the minor church of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, otherwise called Little St. Sophia. The lofty tribunes, supported by columns on which rests the central dome in octagonal form, and which has been imitated on a larger scale and with more sumptuous material in the Italian church, are blackened with age ; the vault is seamed with fearful cracks ; the ancient frescoes and mosaics, where they were not pur- posely effaced, are outraged by contrast with the quaint shapes and gaudy colours of the stupid Mussulman artist, unimpressed by the gloomy 62 THE EASTERN QUESTION. solemnity, unsubdued by the quiet simplicity of the time-hallowed edifice. In some instances, however, Oriental indolence seems to have got the better of religious fanaticism. Much of what is old remains, simply because no one would take the trouble to remove it. Ancient sarcophagi and baptismal fonts, hurled from their places, lie often unbroken in the churchyards, more than half-buried in the ground, or have been con- verted into washing-troughs. The fallen mosaics are picked up by the shabbier class of Ulemas, and sold for a few coppers, the demand of silly tourists conspiring with the zeal of the true believer to hasten the work of demolition. But the greatest wonder awaited us at the Church of the Monastery of Chora, near the Edirne' or Adrianople gate, a perfect museum of mosaics and frescoes, which seems to have been spared during the many centuries since it was made into the Mosque of Karieh Jamisi, and was almost so intact at the time of our visit that mass could have been said at its altars without impropriety. That the anthem La- ill-Allah, etc. "There is but one God" should so long have been chanted between walls and under cupolas peopled with so many St. Georges, St. Helenas, and other orthodox gods and goddesses, is a phenomenon which it seemed difficult to reconcile with Mohammedan intolerance ; ye,t which it was not easy to attribute to reverence for works of art on the part of the Mussulmans, since the whole fabric had STAMBOUL BY DAY. 63 been allowed to go so sadly to waste that at this very time workmen have begun to scrape, and plaster, and whitewash, after their ruthless notions of restoration. Strange to say, however, even in this wholesale work of destruction, two colossal fresco figures on either side of one of the inner doors, representing two of the Apostles or Evangelists, had, probably by virtue of their bigness, found favour with the destroyers, who had not only left them unhurt, but even pro- tected them by wooden shutters revolving on hinges, with all the loving care which might be bestowed upon them in a museum of civilised Europe. For the rest, in their so-called museum, where relics of Greek and Roman times have been huddled together, the Turks allow dust and rust freely to accumulate. The palaces which go by the names of Belisarius or Justinian are little more than heaps of rubbish ; nor is any attempt made to avert the fall of that castle of the Seven Towers which their own Mohammed II. restored, and which is now a dilapidated yet hardly a picturesque mass, only worth visiting on account of the view of a broad expanse of land and sea which may be enjoyed from the one tower still accessible by arduous, tumble- down steps. I walked the other day from those Seven Towers all along the circuit of the walls on the land side as far as Eyoub, where is the tomb of the Mo hammedan warrior who fell at the first siege of the city by the Arabs, 785 years before the Turks took it, and where now the Sultans are inaugurated Gt THE EASTERN QUESTION. by being girded with the sword of Osman. It is, I think, about a five or six miles' walk, and I went alone from gate to gate, outside the town, following the turnings of that triple wall and double row of towers, close to the edge of the moat, a specimen of castellated, mediaeval architecture hardly to be matched even in Italy. Those lofty towers, square, round, hexagonal, octagonal, exhibiting every variety of shape and style, ivy- grown some of them, or weed-choked, massive, colossal, are now in an ad- vanced stage of dilapidation; utterly dismantled here, cracked from end to end there, split, torn, battered, and shattered everywhere, a mere wreck of the giant achievement of a bygone age ; and they svould, as we learn from the guide-book, have been altogether pulled down by the present Sultan for the mere value of the material, which he had made over as a present to the Valideh, his mother, had it not been for the interference of the British ambassador, who, as he himself assured me, protested against that deed of Vandalism, in 1869. What a scene it was 1 The road of circumvalla- tion was lonely, and I toiled wearily over the sharp flints of the paved causeway that cruel, murderous pavement, fit only for Turkish feet having on my right the walls, on the other the ragged cypress forest which shades the endless Mussulman City of the Dead and its turbaned tomb-stones, death-like silence and solitude on both sides, except at the town gates, where long strings of camels, laden STAMBOUL BY DAY. 65 mules, ox-carts, and pedestrians trudged sullenly on their way, the same sense of dull sameness, of decay and misery pervading all man and Nature's works, unrelieved even by the sky, which at this season was of a dun, leaden hue, unusual anywhere else in these latitudes. There was no one to be met ; only here and there, in the deep mud along the roadside, there lay the sprawling carcases of the horses shot down here from the knackers' carts, each carcase a heap of torn flesh and blood ; and on those mangled remains a whole pack of the dogs of Constantinople, roused from their torpor by the scent of that dainty prey, snarled and squabbled over the bare bones, while some shy or timid member of the tribe looked wistfully on at a distance at the banquet from which he was ostracised, and a gorged epicure waddled lazily away heavy with his too ample share of the feast. More interest lies in the memories than in the monuments of Constantinople, for it is always easier to make a desert of a once-famed spot than to ob- literate its historical associations. Under so learned a guide as Dr. Paspati, the city of Constantine lived before us a substratum of the mere brick and wood wilderness of the City of the Sultan. We were shown old houses at Galata bearing evidence of their having stood there ever since the time of the foundation of the Genoese colony in 1216. The quarters where Pisans, Venetians, and Amalfitans had their settlements were pointed out to us, and VOL. i. 5 66 THE EASTERN QUESTION. also the very reaches in the Golden Horn whence the Crusaders of Baldwin and Dandolo attacked the city in 1204, the gate where the Turks effected their entrance 149 years later, the tower upon which the Conqueror's flag was hoisted, the other gate whence the last of the Palaeologi went forth to meet his heroic death, and last not least the blind or walled- up gate through which, according to a well-estab- lished prophecy, the Osmanlis are one day to pass, when their days in the land shall be numbered, and the Cross shall drive the Crescent back across the Strait. With greater curiosity than that with which we viewed the Aqueduct of Valens, Constantine's cistern of the Thousand Columns, and the monu- ments of the Hippodrome the Obelisk, the muti- lated column of the Three Serpents, the Burnt Column, the Historical Coli^mn, etc. we gazed on the planetree called "of the Janissaries," a vener- able patriarch of the vegetable kingdom, rising in the middle of the open place before the old Sublime Porte a tree under the shade of which Mohammed II. may have rested, and which has witnessed all the events following upon one another since his remote times, down to that massacre of Sultan Mahmoud's guards, which was thought to have released Turkey from an insolent and turbulent soldiery, but which, as it turns out, removed the only check that public opinion, through those un- ruly Praetorians, exercised over the arbitrary will of a despotic Sovereign, and thus tore up the STAMBOUL BY DAY. 67 only rough -and -ready charter of Ottoman liber- ties. Should we feel too ready to anathematise the Turks for the barbarism with which they either wilfully demolished or, from neglect, suffered the monuments of past ages to go to decay, we should, in justice to all parties, bear in mind that equal and even more wanton vandalism was evinced by the Latin warriors of 1204 who signalised their conquest of the city by the destruction of many masterpieces of ancient Greek statuary in which they saw nothing but relics of Pagan idolatry. 52 68 THE EASTERN QUESTION. CHAPTER V. STAMBOUL BY NIGHT. AN IMPROMPTU RIDE. A TUMBLE. OUR ROUTE. SILENCE AND SOLITUDE. TWO DEAD CITIES. MOONSHINE. A NIGHT OP IT. I HAD thus twice and three times been up and down about Stamboul, and in spite of its unrivalled site, I had come to the conclusion that it is one of those places one likes best the least one sees of it. I fan- cied if not darkness, at least " pale moonlight" would suit the town and its neighbourhood better than the garish blaze of day, but an excursion across the bridges between sunset and sunrise was hardly a thing to be thought of, for the Turks are an early- to -bed and early-to-rise people, and ill brook disturbance in those quarters which they reserve for their exclusive habi- tation. There are no social entertainments, public or private, in a country where woman is kept out of sight, tih 1 you believe her a myth ; your polygarnist Moslem goes to roost with the hens and rises with the cock, and his city is like that spell-bound world in which a child fancied " everything stood still in the night, even the rain." It was easy for me to re- nounce a pleasure which seemed to be beset with STAMBOUL BY NIGHT. 09 difficulties, but chance brought me into contact with men of a more stirring and enterprising disposition, and it is thanks to them that I am now able to describe the impression a stranger receives from a view of Stamboul by night. There had been rain on Monday last from morning to evening, and we sat after dinner in the dense smoke of the reading-room of Missirie's Hotel, when one of the company, a lively young artist, happened to look out of the window, and announced that the clouds had cleared off, and " the Bosphorus was all a sheet of moonlight." " Moonlight I" was re-echoed : " Let us see it ! Let us go out into it I Let us have a walk nay, why not a ride by moonlight T It was done as soon as said ; so easy it is to over- come obstacles when one looks them in the face. "A ride by moonlight ! A ride to Stamboul I" A happy thought. Two or three clapped their hands ; one stood up, then another, then a whole brigade. Every one was ready to go. The author of the scheme ran out ; in half an hour he came back ; the steeds were at the door. He had borrowed a cavass: he had thought of everything. We buttoned up our coats ; we mounted : good hardy nags, I found, well-bred, unweary and spirited, were to be had for hire at all hours of the clay, and till late at night, at every corner of the Sultan's city and its suburbs. Better cattle to choose from than what had been summoned for us from the stand at Galata Serai or, at least, better suited to 70 THE EASTERN Q UESTION. our purpose the very stables of Dolma-bacheh could hardly have provided. Their saddles Avere hard, their amble or jog-trot puzzling at first ; but their canter was as easy as the motion of a grandmother's rocking-chair, and there is hardly an instance of any of these clever Arabs ever going down on their knees. We were seven, and the leader of the company and I, knee to knee, went first, as the youngest and oldest ; two rising artists, one an Englishman and the other a Dane, followed close at our horses' tails. Next to them two Germans, one a doctor and school- master, the other a broad-shouldered baron, one of the glorious ubiquitous Uhlans of the Prussian cam- paign in France. A cavass of the British Consulate, Hadji Aali, a swarthy young Albanian, closed the rear, his trusty scimitar clattering lustily at his left heel. Right before the door of our hotel, across the famous Grand Rue de Pera, there is a narrow side street Rue Timoni, Rue Dervish, or some such name through which we went down to the Petit Champ des Morts. We skirted this minor cemetery along the winding carriage-road, our ponies prancing and floundering deep in the mud, delighted with the splash which soon flew up, pelting their ears and noses, and making their coats as well as ours one mass of clinging wet clay. Almost at the outset a little mishap befell us. The horse which Hadji Aali rode was a big, brave, ambitious creature, who had seen better days as a STAMBOUL B Y NIGHT. 7 1 Bey's charger in the wars, and resented the indignity of having to follow when he felt himself born to lead. At the first and second turning in the road he began plunging and rearing ; at the third he fairly bolted, and, heedless of the strong curb/ which almost shat- tered his jaws, he came down thundering upon us, his rider vainly tugging at the reins till he was black in the face, and muttering something between his teeth which, let us hope, Allah did not hear. In this mad career the cavass's right knee came into rather too strong a collision with the learned German's left thigh, making the good Dominie roar like a bull of Basan ; whereupon the doctor's friend, the ex-Uhlan, dashed forth in pursuit of the helpless runaway, overtook him, laid hold of the unruly horse's rein, and, giving the man to understand that he was an old hand at the iiianege, and had yet to find the vicious brute he could not bring to his senses, he bade the Albanian alight and exchange seats with him. To exchange seats in a sea of mud is as awkward a feat as "to swap horses as you ford a river." The cavass, vexed with his horse and ashamed of himself, bewildered also by the wild pranks of his still fretting charger, flung himself rather clumsily from his saddle, and, catching his foot against sabre and stirrup, fell flat on his face, rolling over and over, "looking," as the German observed, " such an object when he fetched himself up, with his fresh coating of dripping mud about him. as you could only compare to a sausage 72 THE EASTERN QUESTION. dipped in butter-sauce." The ex-Uhlan himself proved to be no idle boaster. He vaulted into the empty saddle, bestrode the rebel steed with a Jove-like ma- jesty, put him through his paces with a masterly hand, and seemed to cast so thorough a spell over the animal that, after a few curvets and plunges, he was as tame as a lamb, and fell into the ranks in front or rear of us, the bridle in the German's hand chafing him as little as a silken thread. The order of march was thus re- sumed, and presently, without any further accident, the cavalcade arrived at the Golden Horn, and paid toll at the bridge. There are, as the reader knows, two wooden bridges across this harbour of Constantinople, without reckon- ing a third and a more solid and elegant structure which has long been ready for traffic, but which, as I said, owing to some of those hitches in which all things Turkish are apt to become entangled, is per- haps destined to rot on the spot before it be turned to any use. There is the Karakeui Bridge at the harbour entrance, and there is the old bridge about one mile further up towards the water-head. It was at this latter that we crossed, leaving the Pera-Galata suburb behind us, and entering Imperial Stamboul at the gate facing us. We went up at random, in zig-zag, through a mass of narrow streets, in single file, always at the top of our horses' speed, barely reining in as we stood before the Mosques of Moham- med II. and Sultan Selim, and threading at last the main thoroughfare the Rue d' Adrianople we STAMBOUL BY NIGHT. 73 went out at Edirneh Capoussi, or Adrianople Gate. Hence, after halting for a few minutes to gaze at the village of Eyoob, and the Valley of the Sweet Waters of Europe, at the upper end of the Golden Horn, we turned to our left and cantered along the city walls, passed the city gates, the Cannon Gate or Top-Capou, where the Turks came in, the walled- up gate, where the Turks expect to go out, and thus on and on to the Golden Gate and the Ruined Mole, where we had a boundless view of the Sea of Mar- mora ; and thence riding round the whole circuit of the Castle of the Seven Towers, we soon fell in with the broad track of the City tramway, followed its line to Bajazet's Mosque and the Seraskierat, past St. Sophia, the Sublime Porte, and the Valideh Mosque, till we came to and crossed the Karakeui Bridge, clambered up the Galata steps, and ended our journey in the Grand Rue de Pera, whence we had started. It was half-past nine when we left, and we reached home at half-past two ; a ride of five hours without any breathing time, except a few minutes at a shop in Galata for a cup of coffee on starting, and a some- what longer stay for an oyster and pale ale supper at a Pera Restaurant after our arrival. There was nothing along our progress that we had not again and again seen and wondered at in our rambles through the town and its neighbourhood. The novelty lay in the witching silence of those solemn late hours. Pera itself, so fussy and noisy 74 THE EASTERN QUESTION. and shrill as it is in the day time, becomes com- paratively hushed two or three hours after nightfall ; and in spite of gas lights, glaring cafes, and hostelries, its main street was already nearly deserted as we turned our back upon it, and it gave absolutely no sign of life when we came back to it. But at every step we made in the outskirts of Galata, and on through the mean hovels and shops, wharves and warehouses, at the water's edge, every trace of out or indoor existence had vanished ; no man's voice or even whisper broke the stillness of the air ; and the tramp of our horses' hoofs on the wooden bridge sounded hollow and ominous, so ominous as to strike us dumb as we advanced, and tone down our buoyant spirits into something like harmony with that blank solitude. Within the walls of Stamboul, along those endless rows of jealously-closed windows, past the recesses of those securely-fastened house- doors, the universal quiet was still more appalling ; for the town was not buried in deep darkness, as in ordinary nights, but bathed in that hoar moonlight and seen as distinctly as though basking in bright sunshine ; and one wondered what gave the place that weird forsaken look ; one wondered what had become of the motley people who only four or five hours before swarmed in those streets, lounged in those shops, hustled one another in those bazaars. Now and then, indeed, as our horses clattered on the flinty pavement, a nightcapped head or yashmaked face would darken the glass of a candle-lit casement, STAMBOUL BY NIGHT. 75 but it was instantly withdrawn as soon as the head- gear of the hated or despised shapkanus hove in sight. Now and then, again, the portly figure of a belated Greek or Armenian Caffejee in some lurking corner would fill the space between the half-closed shutters of his empty shop ; but long before midnight even these last symptoms of animation had died off, and nothing stirred. Here and there, as we neared the barracks or stumbled on a guardhouse, a sentry would suddenly emerge from the shade and make a grab at the bridle of the foremost horse, for we carried no lantern, and were, therefore, en con- travention; but a word from our cavass made all things straight. The soldier fell back without further parley ; and we suffered also no molestation from the weary old bekjee, or watchman whom we met in his rounds from time to time, but who, after scanning us, and satisfying himself at a glance as to who and what we were, did nothing but strike twice as fast, and thrice as loudly, his heavy, iron-hooped staff on the pavement that staff by which he in- timates to thieves and burglars that he is there, and that he expects them to have the common decency to keep out of his way. That night there was no " yangen-var," or alarm of fire, to enliven the still- life scene. Even the dissipated dogs of Con- stantinople, whose active existence only begins when human labours have a respite, prowled mutely in their dark corners, shunning that to them unwelcome glare, battening on their foul garbage, and hardly 76 THE EASTERN QUESTION. starting up to signal our approach or to vent their unfriendly feelings in a long, lingering howl at the moon. Outside, round the walls, at the gates, and as far as eye could reach down the sweep of the broad country avenues, that same awful sense, that dread of our own loneliness, struck us as even more oppressive. Between those huge dismantled mediaeval towers, that long triple line of tottering bulwarks enclosing half a million of oblivious souls on our left, and the zone of cypress forest shading myriads of glaring tombstones on our right, we should have been puzzled to decide on which side was the dead and on which side the living city. A faint light glimmered here and there at some of the open gates ; but of gate-keeper or guard no trace was to be seen ; for what lonely wayfarer or caravan, or, indeed, who else but a party of uneasy dogs of demented Ferringees, would at that hour be paddling in the mire in and out of Holy Stamboul, startling either the snug bodies that snoozed in peace under the Padishah's protection, or the happy spirits, each at rest on the lap of a Houri of Mohammed's Paradise ? For a man Avho wishes to convince himself that " things are not what they seem " commend me to a companionless moonlight stroll. What a cloak of silver those soft, soothing beams were to hide the ragged beggary of the Sultan's city ! What glamour of blended and blurred loveliness that glittering tide threw on tawdry palaces, dingy hovels, squat, STAMBOUL BY NIGHT. 77 clumsy mosques, shattered towers, and fire-ravaged rubbish-heaps 1 What idealisation of the Arabian Nights' tales were those ghostly minarets, those plashing fountains, those studding rows of turbaned sepulchral monuments I How one wished that we could have scurried along at a less spanking gaUop, that our horses' hoofs had been shod with felt, that our progress could have been as noiseless as the flitting of sheeted phantoms, that our joyous fellow-scamperers had been more sober in their mirth, less obstreperous in their laugh, less gushing in their raptures ; how happy each of us would have been had every one who preceded and every one who followed been out of sight and hearing ! Now and then, indeed, we came to a halt in spite of ourselves, and tarried to take breath, to await those who lagged behind, to consult Hadji Aali as to the right or left turning. Once or twice we drew rein in sight of a mosque, on the esplanade before the Sublime Porte or the Seraskierat, to look round ; and for a longer spell when we came in sight of the Sweet Water Valley at the Adrianople Gate, or of the Propontis at the Ruined Mole, close to the Seven Towers, when we stopped as if by common accord and stood still, our emotion too strong for utterance ; that Valley of the Sweet Waters, with the minarets of Eyoob's Mosque rising above a labyrinth of villas and gardens at our feet, and far away, the silver streak of its pure winding streamlet with the Sultan's Peacock Kiosk embosomed in 78 THE EASTERN QUESTION. its leafless wood, riveting our gaze as we took in the homely rural scene, the range of bare, bleak, breezy hills compassing it all round like a frame ; that wide expanse of the Marmora waters, with the line of town and sea-wall trending away on our right, and the low European shore lying in deep slumber on our left, and before us in the distance the hazy cluster of the Prince's Islands, and the masses of Asiatic mountains, over-topped by the long snowy ridge of the Mysian Olympus. But our impatience, our frenzy to get over the ground, soon got the better of our sense of the beautiful, and of our religion for the " Venerable Night." We stood still, I said, to breathe our panting steeds just one moment, and then with a view halloo, one galloped, another galloped, we galloped all seven. How we pelted on, slap-dash, hurry-skurry, neck or nothing, up hill, down hill, over rough pavements in town, across quagmires out of town, I can even now, as I write, hardly think over without shuddering. Our captain, the young artist, who rode backwards and forwards, twice over the ground, like a dog, all along the line, was teazing now one, now another of the party to run races with him. In one instance, on the tramway road, he was out of sight altogether, either the horse running away with him or he with the horse, and we began to feel some anxiety when we came up with him at a guard-house near the Seraskierat, his horse's rein tight in the grasp of the sentry, who, as our STAMBOUL BY NIGHT. 7