H. G. Dwight

“ No one who employs Turks or does business with them can get anything done, and tempers habitually mild grow strained as the month proceeds. Thus in one way or another does Ramazan continue to colour the whole life of the cosmopolitan city.
Stamboul, always solemn under her centuries and proud even in decay, is never prouder or more solemn than when illuminated for the holy month of Islam. It is one of the sights of the world to see the dark city under the moon of Ramazan, constellated with circlets of light that bead the galleries of numberless minarets. ”

“ Well, Alaska was like a bigger Norway—a Norway with longer fiords, with taller cliffs rising out of greener water, with bluer glaciers, with whiter and louder waterfalls. And it had, proportionately, a greater loneliness and a greater impression of contrast with the rest of the world. If Norway has its Sagas, if nightfall in some wild fiord-end seems literally a dusk of the gods, the silence of Alaska—the sense of its having been there for centuries by itself with no one to hear the grind of the ice and thunder of the waterfalls—takes you back farther yet. ”

“ The structure in which these are preserved, its broad eaves and crusting of flowered tiles reflected in a pool bordered by lanterns to be lit on holy nights, is one of the things that make that garden incomparable. Then there are quaint turrets and doorways; there are kiosks; there are terraces; there are white cloisters a little grassy and neglected; there are black cypresses and monstrous plane-trees into which the sun looks with such an air of antique familiarity.
Of all this every one has written who has ever been to Constantinople. ”

“ The Alps filled the horizon with pale outlines of shadow. Between them and the long spit of the Lido were shining lagoon spaces, out of which the clustered towers seemed to look wistfully over into the unpent sea. With the vividness of mirage he recalled a placid water avenue winding green between its lines of awninged palaces. Then he turned from it all, in sudden hatred of his artificial life, of the restlessness to express. He envied the fisherfolk under their butterfly sails out there where the Adriatic swept bare and blue to the east. There were the true creators! ”

“ On this southward-looking slope the cypresses attain a symmetry, a slenderness, a height, a thickness of texture and richness of colour unmatched in Stamboul. They grow in squares, many of them, or in magic circles. The stones under them are older than the others, and more like things of nature in the flowered grass. On certain happy afternoons, when the sun brings a fairy depth and softness of green out of the cypresses, when their shadows fall lance-like across bare or mossy aisles, and the note of a solitary bird echoes between them, it is hard not to imagine oneself in an enchanted wood. ”

“ If we secretly trembled lest our first impression were destined to suffer the common lot of first impressions, we proved that we had been right after all. We began to know it as soon as we clattered under the archway of the podere, passed out of the picturesque white court into an olive yard, skirted an old garden that had gone all to birds and bushes, and looked down from the terrace into the delicious morning freshness of the cypress avenue. But what really clinched us was the loggia. This was nothing less than a great marble room, opening out of the upper hall of the villa. ”

“ There also is a sacred way, leading out of an odoriferous ravine to a high place and a grove, whither all men gather in the heat of the day to partake of the water of a holy well. But waters less sanctified begin to flow more freely as night draws on, along the cool quay and in the purlieus thereof. Fringes of coloured paper are strung from house to house, flags hang out of windows or across the street, wine-shops are splendid with banners, rugs, and garlands of bay, and you may be sure that the sound of the lanterna is not unheard in the land. ”

“ Sacked of her wealth, home of the arts no more, guarded by jealous keepers, and lacking most that is dear to the modern wanderer’s heart, how should she compete with Rome? Only in one respect can she hold her own unchallenged against that potent rival, for by no stretch of the imagination can Rome, crouching on her seven ant-hills beside her muddy river, be given the palm of place over Constantinople. ”

“ Between them opened an avenue, I don’t know how many hundred yards long, of cypresses I don’t know how many hundred years old, that marched and dipped and rose again with such an air to the steps of a balustrated terrace in front of the castle! This fairy arcade, jewel-green with moss as if no one had trodden it for a century and cross-lighted by a westering sun, seemed to lead to some palace of enchantment rather than to the melancholy place we just had passed. ”

“ The carved and gilded iconostasis, the icons set about with gold, the multitude of candles, precious lamps, and chandeliers, the rich vestments, the clouds of incense, make an overpowering appeal to the senses. To the Western eye, however, there is too much gilt and blaze for perfect taste, there are too many objects in proportion to the space they fill. And certainly to the Western ear the Byzantine chant, however interesting on account of its descent from the antique Greek modes, lacks the charm of the Gregorian or of the beautiful Russian choral. ”

“ But nobody ever heard it as I heard it that night in the shadow of Castello Montughi, while cicadas chanted ethereally in the black cypresses and the Brenta muttered among its rocks. I didn’t laugh. I stood quivering. The theme swept on to its climax, returned, flowered magically, tragically, into developments I had never listened to or dreamed. If I can’t play a violin myself, I have sat in front of all the Russians and Jews and Gypsies who can. But no one of them ever let loose with his bow such pent-up passion and misery. Not one, ever. There was no mere poetry in that violin. ”

“ The lattices of the windows, the veils of the women, the high garden walls, the gravity and perfect quiet of the streets at night, all contribute to that sense. From the noisy European quarter on the opposite bank of the Golden Horn, where life is a thing of shreds and patches, without coherent associations and without roots, one looks over to Stamboul and gets the sense of another, an unknown life, reaching out secret filaments to the uttermost parts of the earth. ”

“ Through the gateway between the houses where the Arno wound out to the plain the splendour of sunset streamed into the city, touching the dusty façades with a fairy glamour, filling the sandy river bed with undreamed secrets of colour, transmuting the parcelled water into purple and gold. The quay where Martin had that morning discovered two persons was crowded with carriages and pedestrians enjoying the cool of the day. The theatrical vivacity of the people, their unaccustomed faces, their foreign speech, gave a new poignancy to his mood of exaltation. ”

“ As you sit at a table, absorbing your own modest refreshment, you are even struck by a certain stolidity in those about you. Perhaps it is partly due to the fact that the crowd is not purely Greek. Armenians are there, Bulgarians, Albanians, Turks too. Then many of the pilgrims are peasants, come in ox-carts from outlying villages and dazzled a little by this urban press. They listen in pure delight to the music that pours from a hundred instruments. The crowning glory of such an occasion is to have a musician sit at the table with you, preferably a hand-organ man or a gipsy with his pipe. ”

“ The painter sprang out of his lazy posture.
“What are the things I have seen to those!” he cried. “What do I know of the world, compared to you? You have seen more of life here in Malamocco than I ever did in all the strange cities I have seen! It is nothing to know how men say ‘Good-morning’ in other languages or how they look in foreign coats, if you know what they say on the decks of sinking ships, and how they look when they are washed up dead by the sea!”
For a moment the fisherman was silent, surprised by the other’s vehemence. ”

“ The mosque yard has no great interest—except on Fridays, when a fair is established along its outer edge. But I must draw attention to the bird-house, like a cross-section of a little mosque with two minarets, on the façade of the forecourt, and to the small marble beehive that balances it. This forecourt is the only one of its kind in Scutari. As for the mosque itself, you may find the windows too coquettish even for a New Mother. For myself I rather like their flower-pots and flowers, though they clearly belong to a day other than that of the old window jewellery of Sinan’s time. ”

“ The People of the Chain do not steal secretly through the valleys of Pusht-i-Kuh, telling the Lurs lies and giving them papers in the night. I am not one of the People of the Chain. But the king of the People of the Chain is also my king. And he is a great king, lord of many lands and many seas, who has no need of secret messengers, hostlers and scullions of whom no one has heard, to persuade strangers of his greatness.”
“Your words do not persuade me!” cried the Father of Swords. “A wise man is like a jar in the house of the apothecary, silent but full of virtues. ”

“ Then arbours of saplings thatched with dried boughs follow the curve of the river; then picnic parties spread rugs or matting on the grass, partaking of strange meats while masters of pipe and drum enchant their ears; then groups of Turkish ladies, in gay silks, dot the sward like tulips; then itinerant venders of fruit, of sweets, of nuts, of ice-cream, do hawk about their wares; then fortune-tellers, mountebanks, bear tamers, dancers, Punch and Judy shows may be seen; and boats pass and repass on the river like carriages on the Corso. Most of them are sandals of the smarter kind. ”

“ This led into a sort of cloister, where a covered ambulatory surrounded a dark pool of stars. Thence another passage brought them out into a great open court. Here an invisible jet of water made an illusion of coolness in another, larger, pool, overlooked by a portico of tall slim pillars. Between them Magin caught the glow of a cigar.
“Good evening, Ganz,” his bass voice called from the court.
“Heaven! Is that you?” replied the smoker of the cigar. “What are you doing here, in God’s name? I imagined you at Mohamera, by this time, or even in the Gulf.” ”

“ For Turkish princes have no title other than that of their humblest subject. A band was playing in the garden, which is on the very top of Bebek hill, and the Greeks of the village were dancing among the flower-beds, while a row of little princes and princesses in big gilt armchairs looked solemnly on. Beyond them a clump of huge umbrella-pines lifted themselves darkly against the fairy scene of the illuminated Bosphorus. ”

“ End my days sneezing and sniffling by some polite lake of Zurich like you, my poor Ganz, when you find in your hand the magic key that might unlock for you any door in the world? That, for example, is not my idea of a lark, as your Son of Papa would say! Men are astounding animals, I admit. But I never could live in Europe, where you can’t turn around without stepping on someone else’s toes. ”

“ And all that blood and bitterness, which was so desperately the whole of reality for so many breathing men, is now but a pleasant quickening of romance for the visitor who follows a lantern through the darkness of the towers or who explores the battlements of the wall, grassy and anemone-grown in the spring, from which a magnificent view stretches of the sea and the city and the long line of ruined turrets marching up the hill. ”

“ So I walked miles and miles in one of those delicious New England afternoons of early summer when the air is an elixir of eternity. It made me think of the Pagan and it quickened in me a growing sense that the earth existed as a whole and endured as a whole; that men were but one phase of its immense secret energy whose so-called consciousness had unbalanced them a little, was merely another mode of an energy more astounding still, as light and heat are but two modes of vibrations which possess others undreamed. It was for this reason, perhaps, that I came home by the Poorhouse road. ”

“ I will not say that the Italians, in turn, never influenced the Greeks; the very name of Constantinople is proof to the contrary. Least of all will I say that Italy had only one source of inspiration. But I will say that there is room to revise our ideas of the Renaissance. Most that has been written about the Renaissance has been written without any first-hand knowledge of Byzantine art, and in the romantic view that the Renaissance was a miraculous reflowering of the classic spirit after a sleep of centuries. ”

“ Under them the nave is striated by lines of worshippers, their darkness varied by the white of turban or robe, men all, all shoeless, standing one close to the next with hands folded and heads down. There is not an exception to the universal attitude of devotion—save among the chattering spectators. The imam, from his high hooded pulpit with the sword and the banners of conquest, recites the prayers of the evening. Choirs, sitting cross-legged on raised platforms, chant responses from the Koran in a soaring minor that sounds like the very cry of the spirit. ”