Sketches and Travels in London Read online

fact, Baden-Baden or Devonshire would be a better move than this;

  when Smyrna came, and rebuked all mutinous Cockneys into silence.

  Some men may read this who are in want of a sensation. If they

  love the odd and picturesque, if they loved the "Arabian Nights" in

  their youth, let them book themselves on board one of the

  Peninsular and Oriental vessels, and try one DIP into

  Constantinople or Smyrna. Walk into the bazaar, and the East is

  unveiled to you: how often and often have you tried to fancy this,

  lying out on a summer holiday at school! It is wonderful, too, how

  LIKE it is: you may imagine that you have been in the place

  before, you seem to know it so well!

  The beauty of that poetry is, to me, that it was never too

  handsome; there is no fatigue of sublimity about it. Shacabac and

  the little Barber play as great a part in it as the heroes; there

  are no uncomfortable sensations of terror; you may be familiar with

  the great Afreet, who was going to execute the travellers for

  killing his son with a date-stone. Morgiana, when she kills the

  forty robbers with boiling oil, does not seem to hurt them in the

  least; and though King Schahriar makes a practice of cutting off

  his wives' heads, yet you fancy they have got them on again in some

  of the back rooms of the palace, where they are dancing and playing

  on dulcimers. How fresh, easy, good-natured, is all this! How

  delightful is that notion of the pleasant Eastern people about

  knowledge, where the height of science is made to consist in the

  answering of riddles! and all the mathematicians and magicians

  bring their great beards to bear on a conundrum!

  When I got into the bazaar among this race, somehow I felt as if

  they were all friends. There sat the merchants in their little

  shops, quiet and solemn, but with friendly looks. There was no

  smoking, it was the Ramazan; no eating, the fish and meat fizzing

  in the enormous pots of the cook-shops are only for the Christians.

  The children abounded; the law is not so stringent upon them, and

  many wandering merchants were there selling figs (in the name of

  the Prophet, doubtless) for their benefit, and elbowing onwards

  with baskets of grapes and cucumbers. Countrymen passed bristling

  over with arms, each with a huge bellyful of pistols and daggers in

  his girdle; fierce, but not the least dangerous. Wild swarthy

  Arabs, who had come in with the caravans, walked solemnly about,

  very different in look and demeanour from the sleek inhabitants of

  the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked, their shops tended

  by sallow-faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled and welcomed you

  in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colours; and women, with black

  nose-bags and shuffling yellow slippers, chattered and bargained at

  the doors of the little shops. There was the rope quarter and the

  sweetmeat quarter, and the pipe bazaar and the arm bazaar, and the

  little turned-up shoe quarter, and the shops where ready-made

  jackets and pelisses were swinging, and the region where, under the

  ragged awning, regiments of tailors were at work. The sun peeps

  through these awnings of mat or canvas, which are hung over the

  narrow lanes of the bazaar, and ornaments them with a thousand

  freaks of light and shadow. Cogia Hassan Alhabbal's shop is in a

  blaze of light; while his neighbour, the barber and coffee-house

  keeper, has his premises, his low seats and narghiles, his queer

  pots and basins, in the shade. The cobblers are always good-

  natured; there was one who, I am sure, has been revealed to me in

  my dreams, in a dirty old green turban, with a pleasant wrinkled

  face like an apple, twinkling his little grey eyes as he held them

  up to talk to the gossips, and smiling under a delightful old grey

  beard, which did the heart good to see. You divine the

  conversation between him and the cucumber-man, as the Sultan used

  to understand the language of birds. Are any of those cucumbers

  stuffed with pearls, and is that Armenian with the black square

  turban Haroun Alraschid in disguise, standing yonder by the

  fountain where the children are drinking--the gleaming marble

  fountain, chequered all over with light and shadow, and engraved

  with delicate arabesques and sentences from the Koran?

  But the greatest sensation of all is when the camels come. Whole

  strings of real camels, better even than in the procession of Blue

  Beard, with soft rolling eyes and bended necks, swaying from one

  side of the bazaar to the other to and fro, and treading gingerly

  with their great feet. O you fairy dreams of boyhood! O you sweet

  meditations of half-holidays, here you are realised for half-an-

  hour! The genius which presides over youth led us to do a good

  action that day. There was a man sitting in an open room,

  ornamented with fine long-tailed sentences of the Koran: some in

  red, some in blue; some written diagonally over the paper; some so

  shaped as to represent ships, dragons, or mysterious animals. The

  man squatted on a carpet in the middle of this room, with folded

  arms, waggling his head to and fro, swaying about, and singing

  through his nose choice phrases from the sacred work. But from the

  room above came a clear noise of many little shouting voices, much

  more musical than that of Naso in the matted parlour, and the guide

  told us it was a school, so we went upstairs to look.

  I declare, on my conscience, the master was in the act of

  bastinadoing a little mulatto boy; his feet were in a bar, and the

  brute was laying on with a cane; so we witnessed the howling of the

  poor boy, and the confusion of the brute who was administering the

  correction. The other children were made to shout, I believe, to

  drown the noise of their little comrade's howling; but the

  punishment was instantly discontinued as our hats came up over the

  stair-trap, and the boy cast loose, and the bamboo huddled into a

  corner, and the schoolmaster stood before us abashed. All the

  small scholars in red caps, and the little girls in gaudy

  handkerchiefs, turned their big wondering dark eyes towards us; and

  the caning was over for THAT time, let us trust. I don't envy some

  schoolmasters in a future state. I pity that poor little

  blubbering Mahometan: he will never be able to relish the "Arabian

  Nights" in the original, all his life long.

  From this scene we rushed off somewhat discomposed to make a

  breakfast off red mullets and grapes, melons, pomegranates, and

  Smyrna wine, at a dirty little comfortable inn, to which we were

  recommended: and from the windows of which we had a fine cheerful

  view of the gulf and its busy craft, and the loungers and merchants

  along the shore. There were camels unloading at one wharf, and

  piles of melons much bigger than the Gibraltar cannon-balls at

  another. It was the fig-season, and we passed through several

  alleys encumbered with long rows of fig-dressers, children and

  women for the most part, who were packing the fruit diligently into

  drums, dipping them in salt
-water first, and spreading them neatly

  over with leaves; while the figs and leaves are drying, large white

  worms crawl out of them, and swarm over the decks of the ships

  which carry them to Europe and to England, where small children eat

  them with pleasure--I mean the figs, not the worms--and where they

  are still served at wine-parties at the Universities. When fresh

  they are not better than elsewhere; but the melons are of admirable

  flavour, and so large, that Cinderella might almost be accommodated

  with a coach made of a big one, without any very great distension

  of its original proportions.

  Our guide, an accomplished swindler, demanded two dollars as the

  fee for entering the mosque, which others of our party subsequently

  saw for sixpence, so we did not care to examine that place of

  worship. But there were other cheaper sights, which were to the

  full as picturesque, for which there was no call to pay money, or,

  indeed, for a day, scarcely to move at all. I doubt whether a man

  who would smoke his pipe on a bazaar counter all day, and let the

  city flow by him, would not be almost as well employed as the most

  active curiosity-hunter.

  To be sure he would not see the women. Those in the bazaar were

  shabby people for the most part, whose black masks nobody would

  feel a curiosity to remove. You could see no more of their figures

  than if they had been stuffed in bolsters; and even their feet were

  brought to a general splay uniformity by the double yellow slippers

  which the wives of true believers wear. But it is in the Greek and

  Armenian quarters, and among those poor Christians who were pulling

  figs, that you see the beauties; and a man of a generous

  disposition may lose his heart half-a-dozen times a day in Smyrna.

  There was the pretty maid at work at a tambour-frame in an open

  porch, with an old duenna spinning by her side, and a goat tied up

  to the railings of the little court-garden; there was the nymph who

  came down the stair with the pitcher on her head, and gazed with

  great calm eyes, as large and stately as Juno's; there was the

  gentle mother, bending over a queer cradle, in which lay a small

  crying bundle of infancy. All these three charmers were seen in a

  single street in the Armenian quarter, where the house-doors are

  all open, and the women of the families sit under the arches in the

  court. There was the fig-girl, beautiful beyond all others, with

  an immense coil of deep black hair twisted round a head of which

  Raphael was worthy to draw the outline and Titian to paint the

  colour. I wonder the Sultan has not swept her off, or that the

  Persian merchants, who come with silks and sweetmeats, have not

  kidnapped her for the Shah of Tehran.

  We went to see the Persian merchants at their khan, and purchased

  some silks there from a swarthy black-bearded man, with a conical

  cap of lambswool. Is it not hard to think that silks bought of a

  man in a lambswool cap, in a caravanserai, brought hither on the

  backs of camels, should have been manufactured after all at Lyons?

  Others of our party bought carpets, for which the town is famous;

  and there was one who absolutely laid in a stock of real Smyrna

  figs; and purchased three or four real Smyrna sponges for his

  carriage; so strong was his passion for the genuine article.

  I wonder that no painter has given us familiar views of the East:

  not processions, grand sultans, or magnificent landscapes; but

  faithful transcripts of everyday Oriental life, such as each street

  will supply to him. The camels afford endless motives, couched in

  the market-places, lying by thousands in the camel-square, snorting

  and bubbling after their manner, the sun blazing down on their

  backs, their slaves and keepers lying behind them in the shade:

  and the Caravan Bridge, above all, would afford a painter subjects

  for a dozen of pictures. Over this Roman arch, which crosses the

  Meles river, all the caravans pass on their entrance to the town.

  On one side, as we sat and looked at it, was a great row of plane-

  trees; on the opposite bank, a deep wood of tall cypresses--in the

  midst of which rose up innumerable grey tombs, surmounted with the

  turbans of the defunct believers. Beside the stream, the view was

  less gloomy. There was under the plane-trees a little coffee-

  house, shaded by a trellis-work, covered over with a vine, and

  ornamented with many rows of shining pots and water-pipes, for

  which there was no use at noon-day now, in the time of Ramazan.

  Hard by the coffee-house was a garden and a bubbling marble

  fountain, and over the stream was a broken summer-house, to which

  amateurs may ascend for the purpose of examining the river; and all

  round the plane-trees plenty of stools for those who were inclined

  to sit and drink sweet thick coffee, or cool lemonade made of fresh

  green citrons. The master of the house, dressed in a white turban

  and light blue pelisse, lolled under the coffee-house awning; the

  slave in white with a crimson striped jacket, his face as black as

  ebony, brought us pipes and lemonade again, and returned to his

  station at the coffee-house, where he curled his black legs

  together, and began singing out of his flat nose to the thrumming

  of a long guitar with wire strings. The instrument was not bigger

  than a soup-ladle, with a long straight handle, but its music

  pleased the performer; for his eyes rolled shining about, and his

  head wagged, and he grinned with an innocent intensity of enjoyment

  that did one good to look at. And there was a friend to share his

  pleasure: a Turk dressed in scarlet, and covered all over with

  daggers and pistols, sat leaning forward on his little stool,

  rocking about, and grinning quite as eagerly as the black minstrel.

  As he sang and we listened, figures of women bearing pitchers went

  passing over the Roman bridge, which we saw between the large

  trunks of the planes; or grey forms of camels were seen stalking

  across it, the string preceded by the little donkey, who is always

  here their long-eared conductor.

  These are very humble incidents of travel. Wherever the steamboat

  touches the shore adventure retreats into the interior, and what is

  called romance vanishes. It won't bear the vulgar gaze; or rather

  the light of common day puts it out, and it is only in the dark

  that it shines at all. There is no cursing and insulting of

  Giaours now. If a Cockney looks or behaves in a particularly

  ridiculous way, the little Turks come out and laugh at him. A

  Londoner is no longer a spittoon for true believers: and now that

  dark Hassan sits in his divan and drinks champagne, and Selim has a

  French watch, and Zuleika perhaps takes Morison's pills, Byronism

  becomes absurd instead of sublime, and is only a foolish expression

  of Cockney wonder. They still occasionally beat a man for going

  into a mosque, but this is almost the only sign of ferocious

  vitality left in the Turk of the Mediterranean coast, and strangers

  may enter scores of mosques withou
t molestation. The paddle-wheel

  is the great conqueror. Wherever the captain cries "Stop her!"

  Civilisation stops, and lands in the ship's boat, and makes a

  permanent acquaintance with the savages on shore. Whole hosts of

  crusaders have passed and died, and butchered here in vain. But to

  manufacture European iron into pikes and helmets was a waste of

  metal: in the shape of piston-rods and furnace-pokers it is

  irresistible; and I think an allegory might be made showing how

  much stronger commerce is than chivalry, and finishing with a grand

  image of Mahomet's crescent being extinguished in Fulton's boiler.

  This I thought was the moral of the day's sights and adventures.

  We pulled off to the steamer in the afternoon--the Inbat blowing

  fresh, and setting all the craft in the gulf dancing over its blue

  waters. We were presently under way again, the captain ordering

  his engines to work only at half power, so that a French steamer

  which was quitting Smyrna at the same time might come up with us,

  and fancy she could beat their irresistible, "Tagus." Vain hope!

  Just as the Frenchman neared us, the "Tagus" shot out like an

  arrow, and the discomfited Frenchman went behind. Though we all

  relished the joke exceedingly, there was a French gentleman on

  board who did not seem to be by any means tickled with it; but he

  had received papers at Smyrna, containing news of Marshal Bugeaud's

  victory at Isly, and had this land victory to set against our

  harmless little triumph at sea.

  That night we rounded the island of Mitylene: and the next day the

  coast of Troy was in sight, and the tomb of Achilles--a dismal-

  looking mound that rises in a low dreary barren shore--less lively

  and not more picturesque than the Scheldt or the mouth of the

  Thames. Then we passed Tenedos and the forts and town at the mouth

  of the Dardanelles. The weather was not too hot, the water as

  smooth as at Putney, and everybody happy and excited at the thought

  of seeing Constantinople to-morrow. We had music on board all the

  way from Smyrna. A German commis-voyageur, with a guitar, who had

  passed unnoticed until that time, produced his instrument about

  mid-day, and began to whistle waltzes. He whistled so divinely

  that the ladies left their cabins, and men laid down their books.

  He whistled a polka so bewitchingly that two young Oxford men began

  whirling round the deck, and performed that popular dance with much

  agility until they sank down tired. He still continued an unabated

  whistling, and as nobody would dance, pulled off his coat, produced

  a pair of castanets, and whistling a mazurka, performed it with

  tremendous agility. His whistling made everybody gay and happy--

  made those acquainted who had not spoken before, and inspired such

  a feeling of hilarity in the ship, that that night, as we floated

  over the Sea of Marmora, a general vote was expressed for broiled

  bones and a regular supper-party. Punch was brewed, and speeches

  were made, and, after a lapse of fifteen years, I heard the "Old

  English Gentleman" and "Bright Chanticleer Proclaims the Morn,"

  sung in such style that you would almost fancy the proctors must

  hear, and send us all home.

  CHAPTER VII: CONSTANTINOPLE

  When we arose at sunrise to see the famous entry to Constantinople,

  we found, in the place of the city and the sun, a bright white fog,

  which hid both from sight, and which only disappeared as the vessel

  advanced towards the Golden Horn. There the fog cleared off as it

  were by flakes, and as you see gauze curtains lifted away, one by

  one, before a great fairy scene at the theatre. This will give

  idea enough of the fog; the difficulty is to describe the scene

  afterwards, which was in truth the great fairy scene, than which it

  is impossible to conceive anything more brilliant and magnificent.

  I can't go to any more romantic place than Drury Lane to draw my

  similes from--Drury Lane, such as we used to see it in our youth,

  when to our sight the grand last pictures of the melodrama or