This Sounded Promising

It seemed to me that his Majesty was a very long time at his toilet; but at last we were rewarded. Abruptly from the glass porch he appeared in Euro-pean dress, with very baggy trousers much too long in the leg and a voluminous black frock coat. He stood for a moment holding the frock-coat with both hands, as if wishing to wrap himself up in it.

 Then, still grasping it, he walked quickly down the steps, his legs seeming almost to ripple beneath the weight of his body, and stepped heavily into the brougham, which swung upon its springs. The horses moved, the carriage passed close to me, and again I gazed at this mighty sovereign, while the Eastern pilgrims salaamed to the ground. Mechanically he saluted.

His large face was still unnaturally blank, and yet somehow it looked kind. And I felt that this old man was weary and sad, that his long years of imprisonment had robbed him of all vitality, of all power to enjoy; that he was unable to appreciate the pageant of life in which now, by the irony of fate, he was called to play the central part. All alone he sat in the bright-colored brougham, carrying a flaccid hand to his fez and gazing blankly before him. The carriage passed out of the courtyard, but it did not go up the hill to the palace.

“The sultan/’ said a voice, “is going out

into the country to rest and to divert himself.”

To rest, perhaps; but to divert himself!

After that day I often saw before me a large

white envelop, and the most expressive people in the world were salaaming

before it.

STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES

MOSQUE OF THE YENI-VALIDE-JAMISSI, CONSTANTINOPLE 

STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES

STAMBOUL is wonderfully various. Compressed

between two seas, it contains sharp, even brutal contrasts: of beauty and

ugliness, grandeur and squalor, purity and filth, silence and uproar, the most

delicate fascination and a fierceness that is barbaric. It can give you peace

or a sword. The sword is sharp and cruel; the peace is profound and exquisite.

Every day early I escaped from the uproar

of Pera and sought in Stamboul a place of forgetfulness. There are many such

places in the city and on its outskirts: the mosques, the little courts and

gardens of historic tombs; the strange and forgotten Byzan-tine churches, lost

in the maze of wooden houses; the cemeteries vast and melancholy, where the

dead sleep in the midst of dust and confusion, guarded by giant cypresses; the

lonely and shadowed ways by the walls and the towers; the poetic glades and the

sun-kissed terraces of Seraglio Point.