The Innocents Abroad
Genoa. If you wish to buy them by the gross, for retail, go to Milan.
There are plenty of dwarfs all over Italy, but it did seem to me that in
Milan the crop was luxuriant. If you would see a fair average style of
assorted cripples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman States.
But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human
monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople. A beggar in Naples who
can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one
shapeless nail on it, has a fortune--but such an exhibition as that would
not provoke any notice in Constantinople. The man would starve. Who
would pay any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters
that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their deformities
in the gutters of Stamboul? O, wretched impostor! How could he stand
against the three-legged woman, and the man with his eye in his cheek?
How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow?
Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each
hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down in his majesty?
Bismillah! The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud. The truly
gifted flourish only in the by-ways of Pera and Stamboul.
That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock in trade so
disposed as to command the most striking effect--one natural leg, and two
long, slender, twisted ones with feet on them like somebody else's
fore-arm. Then there was a man further along who had no eyes, and whose
face was the color of a fly-blown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted
like a lava-flow--and verily so tumbled and distorted were his features
that no man could tell the wart that served him for a nose from his
cheek-bones. In Stamboul was a man with a prodigious head, an uncommonly
long body, legs eight inches long and feet like snow-shoes. He traveled
on those feet and his hands, and was as sway-backed as if the Colossus
of Rhodes had been riding him. Ah, a beggar has to have exceedingly
good points to make a living in Constantinople. A blue-faced man, who
had nothing to offer except that he had been blown up in a mine, would
be regarded as a rank impostor, and a mere damaged soldier on crutches
would never make a cent. It would pay him to get apiece of his head
taken off, and cultivate a wen like a carpet sack.
The Mosque of St. Sophia is the chief lion of Constantinople. You must
get a firman and hurry there the first thing. We did that. We did not
get a firman, but we took along four or five francs apiece, which is much
the same thing.
I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I suppose I lack
appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in
heathendom. I believe all the interest that attaches to it comes from
the fact that it was built for a Christian church and then turned into a
mosque, without much alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the
land. They made me take off my boots and walk into the place in my
stocking-feet. I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with a
complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I wore out more
than two thousand pair of boot-jacks getting my boots off that night, and
even then some Christian hide peeled off with them. I abate not a single
boot-jack.
St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old,
and unsightly enough to be very, very much older. Its immense dome is
said to be more wonderful than St. Peter's, but its dirt is much more
wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it. The church has a
hundred and seventy pillars in it, each a single piece, and all of costly
marbles of various kinds, but they came from ancient temples at Baalbec,
Heliopolis, Athens and Ephesus, and are battered, ugly and repulsive.
They were a thousand years old when this church was new, and then the
contrast must have been ghastly--if Justinian's architects did not trim
them any. The inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous
inscription in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks as
glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble balustrades are
all battered and dirty; the perspective is marred every where by a web of
ropes that depend from the dizzy height of the dome, and suspend
countless dingy, coarse oil lamps, and ostrich-eggs, six or seven feet
above the floor. Squatting and sitting in groups, here and there and far
and near, were ragged Turks reading books, hearing sermons, or receiving
lessons like children. And in fifty places were more of the same sort
bowing and straightening up, bowing again and getting down to kiss the
earth, muttering prayers the while, and keeping up their gymnastics till
they ought to have been tired, if they were not.
Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom; every where
were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothing touching or beautiful
about it; every where were those groups of fantastic pagans; overhead the
gaudy mosaics and the web of lamp-ropes--nowhere was there any thing to
win one's love or challenge his admiration.
The people who go into ecstasies over St. Sophia must surely get them out
of the guide-book (where every church is spoken of as being “considered
by good judges to be the most marvelous structure, in many respects, that
the world has ever seen.”) Or else they are those old connoisseurs from
the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a
fresco and a fire-plug and from that day forward feel privileged to void
their critical bathos on painting, sculpture and architecture forever
more.
We visited the Dancing Dervishes. There were twenty-one of them. They
wore a long, light-colored loose robe that hung to their heels. Each in
his turn went up to the priest (they were all within a large circular
railing) and bowed profoundly and then went spinning away deliriously and
took his appointed place in the circle, and continued to spin. When all
had spun themselves to their places, they were about five or six feet
apart--and so situated, the entire circle of spinning pagans spun itself
three separate times around the room. It took twenty-five minutes to do
it. They spun on the left foot, and kept themselves going by passing the
right rapidly before it and digging it against the waxed floor. Some of
them made incredible “time.” Most of them spun around forty times in a
minute, and one artist averaged about sixty-one times a minute, and kept
it up during the whole twenty-five. His robe filled with air and stood
out all around him like a balloon.
They made no noise of any kind, and most of them tilted their heads back
and closed their eyes, entranced with a sort of devotional ecstacy.
There was a rude kind of music, part of the time, but the musicians were
not visible. None but spinners were allowed within the circle. A man
had to either spin or stay outside. It was about as barbarous an
exhibition as we have witnessed yet. Then sick persons came and lay
down, and beside them women laid their sick children (one a babe at the
breast,) and the patriarch of the Dervishes walked upon their bodies. He
was supposed to cure their diseases by trampling upon their breasts or
backs or standing on the back of their necks. This is well enough for a
people who think all their affairs are made or marred by viewless spirits
of the air--by giants, gnomes, and genii--and who still believe, to this
day, all the wild tales in the Arabian Nights. Even so an intelligent
missionary tells me.
We visited the Thousand and One Columns. I do not know what it was
originally intended for, but they said it was built for a reservoir. It
is situated in the centre of Constantinople. You go down a flight of
stone steps in the middle of a barren place, and there you are. You are
forty feet under ground, and in the midst of a perfect wilderness of
tall, slender, granite columns, of Byzantine architecture. Stand where
you would, or change your position as often as you pleased, you were
always a centre from which radiated a dozen long archways and colonnades
that lost themselves in distance and the sombre twilight of the place.
This old dried-up reservoir is occupied by a few ghostly silk-spinners
now, and one of them showed me a cross cut high up in one of the pillars.
I suppose he meant me to understand that the institution was there before
the Turkish occupation, and I thought he made a remark to that effect;
but he must have had an impediment in his speech, for I did not
understand him.
We took off our shoes and went into the marble mausoleum of the Sultan
Mahmoud, the neatest piece of architecture, inside, that I have seen
lately. Mahmoud's tomb was covered with a black velvet pall, which was
elaborately embroidered with silver; it stood within a fancy silver
railing; at the sides and corners were silver candlesticks that would
weigh more than a hundred pounds, and they supported candles as large as
a man's leg; on the top of the sarcophagus was a fez, with a handsome
diamond ornament upon it, which an attendant said cost a hundred thousand
pounds, and lied like a Turk when he said it. Mahmoud's whole family
were comfortably planted around him.
We went to the great Bazaar in Stamboul, of course, and I shall not
describe it further than to say it is a monstrous hive of little shops
--thousands, I should say--all under one roof, and cut up into innumerable
little blocks by narrow streets which are arched overhead. One street is
devoted to a particular kind of merchandise, another to another, and so
on.
When you wish to buy a pair of shoes you have the swing of the whole
street--you do not have to walk yourself down hunting stores in different
localities. It is the same with silks, antiquities, shawls, etc. The
place is crowded with people all the time, and as the gay-colored Eastern
fabrics are lavishly displayed before every shop, the great Bazaar of
Stamboul is one of the sights that are worth seeing. It is full of life,
and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters,
dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking
and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces
--and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great
Bazaar, is something which smells good.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but
morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to
drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say
the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It
makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in
Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.
Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their
parents, but not publicly. The great slave marts we have all read so
much about--where tender young girls were stripped for inspection, and
criticised and discussed just as if they were horses at an agricultural
fair--no longer exist. The exhibition and the sales are private now.
Stocks are up, just at present, partly because of a brisk demand created
by the recent return of the Sultan's suite from the courts of Europe;
partly on account of an unusual abundance of bread-stuffs, which leaves
holders untortured by hunger and enables them to hold back for high
prices; and partly because buyers are too weak to bear the market, while
sellers are amply prepared to bull it. Under these circumstances, if the
American metropolitan newspapers were published here in Constantinople,
their next commercial report would read about as follows, I suppose: