The Ship-Dwellers: A Story of a Happy Cruise

It seemed that we would never get out of that street. We had to go slower, and the horrible gully was eternal in its length. How far ahead our party was we did not know. We were entirely alone in that unholy neighborhood with our faithful Suleiman, who looked like a cutthroat, anyhow. I wished he didn't look like that, and Laura said quietly that she never expected to see the light of another dawn.

Bumpety-bump – bark, howl, clatter, darkness, stench – rolling and pitching through that mess, and then, heavenly sight – a vision of lights, water, the end of the Galata bridge!

We made our way through the evening jam and the wild bedlam at the other end, crossing a crimson tide of fezzes, to reach the one clean place we have seen in Constantinople – that is, the ship. The ship is clean – too clean, we think, when we hear them scrubbing and mopping and thumping the decks at four o'clock in the morning, just about dog-howling time. Which brings me to a specimen of our ship German – American German – produced by a gentle soul named Fosdick, of Ohio. He used it on the steward after being kept awake by the ship-cleaning. This is what he said:

"Vas in damnation is das noise? How can I schlaff mit das hellgefired donner-wetter going on oben mine head?"

That is the sort of thing we can do when we get really stirred up. It is effective, too. There was no unseemly noise this morning.

XXI

LOOKING DOWN ON YILDIZ

Heretofore, during our stay here, whenever any one happened to mention the less attractive aspects of Constantinople, I have said:

"Yes, the city is pretty bad, but I'll wager the country is a dream. Remember Algiers and her suburban villas? It will be the same here."

I do not say that any more, now that we have been to the country. We went over to Skutari (Asiatic Constantinople) this morning, and took carriages to Bulgurlu Mountain, which overlooks all the city and a vast stretch of country. It is a good view, but it should be, considering what it costs to get there – in wear and tear, I mean.

Of all villanous roads, those outside Skutari are the most depraved. They are not roads at all, but just washes and wallows and ditches and stone gullies. I have seen bad roads in Virginia – roads surveyed by George Washington, and never touched since – but they were a dream of luxury as compared with these of Turkey. Our carriages billowed and bobbed and pitched and humped themselves until I got out and walked to keep from being lamed for life.

And then the houses – the villas I had expected to see; dear me, how can I picture those cheap, ugly, unpainted, overdecorated architectural crimes? They are wooden and belong to the jig-saw period gone mad. They suggest an owner who has been too busy saving money for a home to acquire any taste; who has spent his savings for lumber and trimmings and has nothing left for paint. Still, he managed to reserve enough to put iron bars on his windows – that is, on part of the house – the harem – every man becoming his own jailer, as it were. I remarked:

"I suppose that is to keep the neighbors from stealing their wives."

But the Horse-Doctor – wiser and more observant – said:

"No, it is to keep a neighbor from breaking in and leaving another."

Standing on the top of Bulgurlu – looking down on the Bosporus and the royal palaces – the wife of a foreign minister told us something of the history that has been written there:

When Abdul Aziz, in 1876, became Abdul "as was"4 (his veins were opened with a penknife, I believe), one Murad, his nephew, an educated and travelled prince, came into power. But Murad was for progress – bridges and railroads – so Murad retired to Cheragan Palace, where for thirty-two years he sat at a window and looked out on a world in which he had no part, while Abdul Hamid II. reigned in his stead. Murad was wise and gentle, and did not reproach Abdul, who came to him now and again for advice concerning matters of state.

But Murad was fond of watching the people from his window – excursion parties such as ours, and the like – and these in turn used to look up at Murad's window; which things in time came to Abdul Hamid's ears. Then Abdul decided that this indulgence was not good for Murad – nor for the people. Thirty-two years was already too long for that sort of thing. So Murad's face disappeared from the window, and it was given out that he had died – the bulletin did not say what of, but merely mentioned that it had been a "general death" – that is to say, a natural death, under the circumstances – the kind of death a retired Sultan is likely to die. And Abdul mourned for Murad many days, and gave him a costly funeral.

That was Abdul's way. He was always a good brother – always a generous soul – according to a guide-book published in Constantinople during the time when there were twenty thousand secret agents inspecting such things. The author of that book wanted those twenty thousand secret agents to tell Abdul how good and gentle the book said he was; otherwise, the modest and humble Abdul might not remember. Besides, that author did not wish to disappear from among his friends and be sewed up in a sack and dropped into the Bosporus some quiet evening. But I wander – I always wander.

Abdul Hamid is said to be affectionate with his family – all his family – and quick – very quick – that is to say, impulsive. He is a crack shot, too, and keeps pistols on his dressing-table. One day he saw one of his little sons – or it may have been one of his little daughters (it isn't always easy to tell them apart, when they are so plentiful and dress a good deal alike), but anyway this was a favorite of Abdul's – he saw this child handling one of his pistols, perhaps playfully pointing it in his direction.

Hamid didn't tell the child to put the weapon down, and then lecture him. No, he couldn't scold the child, he was too impulsive for that – and quick, as I have mentioned. He drew a revolver of his own and shot the child dead. There were rumors of plots floating around the palace just then, and Hamid wasn't taking any chances. It must have made his heart bleed to have to punish the child in that sudden way.

But by-and-by the times were out of joint for sultans. A spirit of discontent was spreading – there was a cry for freer government. Enver Bey and Niazi Bey, those two young officers whose names are being perpetuated by male babies in every Turkish household, disguised themselves as newsboys or bootblacks, and going among the people of the streets whispered the gospel of freedom. Then one day came the upheaval of which all the world has read. Abdul Hamid one morning, looking out of his window in Yildiz Palace, saw, lying in the Bosporus just below, the men-of-war which all the years of his reign had been turning to rust and wormwood in the Golden Horn.

Abdul did not believe it at first. He thought he was just having one of those bad dreams that had pestered him now and then since spies and massacres had become unpopular. He pinched himself and rubbed his eyes, but the ships stayed there. Then he sent for the Grand Vizier. (At least, I suppose it was the Grand Vizier – that is what a sultan generally sends for in a case like that.) When he arrived the Sultan was fingering his artillery and looking dangerous.

"What in h – that is, Allah be praised, but why, sirrah, are those ships lying down there?" he roared.

The G. V. was not full of vain knowledge.

"I – I really don't know, Your Majesty," he said, soothingly. "I will go and see."

He was standing near the door and dodged as he went out. He did not come back. When he had inquired about the ships he decided not to seek Abdul himself, but to send a man – a cheap man – to tell him about it. This was just a dull fellow with not much politeness and no imagination.

"The ships are there by the order of the Minister of Marine, Your Majesty," he said.

Abdul was so astonished that he forgot to slay the fellow.

"Bring the Minister of Marine!" he gasped, when at last he could catch his breath.

The Minister of Marine came – a new minister – one of the Young Turk Party. He was polite, but not upset by the Sultan's emotion. When Abdul demanded the reason why the old ships had been furbished up and brought down into the Bosporus, he replied that they were there by his orders, and added:

"We think they look better there, Your Majesty, as in the old days."

"But, by the beard of the Prophet, I will not have them there! Take them away!"

"Your Majesty, it grieves me to seem discourteous, not to say rude, but those ships are to remain at their present anchorage. It grieves me still further to appear to be firm, not to say harsh, but if there is any show of resistance in this neighborhood they have orders to open fire on Your Majesty's palace."

Abdul took a chair and sat down. His jaw dropped, and he looked at the Minister of Marine a good while without seeming to see him. Then he got up and tottered over to the window and gazed out on those ships lying just below, on the Bosporus. By-and-by, he went to a little ornamental table and took a pen and some paper and wrote an order in this wise:

Owing to my declining years and my great burdens of responsibility, it is my wish that in future all matters pertaining to the army and navy be under the supervision of the Secretary of War and the Minister of Marine.

Abdul Hamid, Kahn II.

Son of the Prophet – Shadow of God, etc., etc.

At all events, that was the purport of it. In reality, it was a succession of wriggly marks which only a Moslem could read. Never mind, it was a graceful surrender.

There is a wonderful old Moslem cemetery near Bulgurlu – one of the largest in the world and the most thickly planted. It is favored by Moslems because it is on the side of the city nearest Mecca, and they are lying there three deep and have overflowed into the roads and byways. Their curiously shaped and elaborately carved headstones stand as thick as grain – some of them crowned with fezzes – some with suns – all of them covered with emblems and poetry and passages from the Koran. They are tumbled this way and that; they are lying everywhere along the road; they have been built into the wayside walls.

I wanted to carry away one of those tombstones – one of the old ones – and I would have done it if I had known enough Moslem to corrupt the driver. A thing like that would be worth it – adding to one's collection, I mean. The palace was full of great cypresses, too – tall, funereal trees – wonderfully impressive and beautiful.

We drove back to Skutari and there saw our driver Suleiman for the last time. I had already tipped him at the end of each day, but I suppose he expected something rather unusual as a farewell token. Unfortunately, I was low in fractional currency. I scraped together all I had left – a few piastres – and handed them to him and turned quickly away. There came a sudden explosion as of a bomb. I did not look to see what it was – I knew. It was the bursting of Suleiman's heart.

Up the Golden Horn in the afternoon, as far as the Sweet Waters of Europe. It is a beautiful sail, and there is a mosque where the ceremony of conferring the sword on a new Sultan is performed; also, a fine view across the Sweet Waters, with Jewish graveyards whitening the distant hills. But there was nothing of special remark – we being a little tired of the place by this time – except the homecoming.

There were caiques lying about the little steamer-landing when we were ready to return, and Laura and I decided to take one of these down the Horn to the ship. The caique is a curiously shaped canoe-sort of a craft, and you have to get in carefully and sit still. But once in and seated, it moves as silently and smoothly as a gliding star.

It was sunset, and the Golden Horn was true to its name. Ships at anchor, barges drifting up and down, were aglow with the sheen of evening – the water a tawny, molten flood, the still atmosphere like an impalpable dust of gold. Caiques carrying merchants to their homes somewhere along the upper shores were burnished with the aureate hue. Domes and minarets caught and reflected the wonder of it – the Galata bridge ahead of us had become such a span as might link the shores of the River of Peace.

Once more Constantinople was a dream of Paradise – a vision of enchantment – a city of illusion.

XXII

EPHESUS: THE CITY THAT WAS

Like Oriental harbors generally, Smyrna from the sea has a magic charm. When we slowly sailed down a long reach of water between quiet hills and saw the ancient city rising from the morning mist, we had somehow a feeling that we had reached a hitherto undiscovered port – a mirage, perhaps, of some necromancer's spell.

We landed, found our train, and went joggling away through the spring landscape, following the old highway that from time immemorial has led from Ephesus to Smyrna – the highway which long ago St. Paul travelled, and St. John, too, no doubt, and the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen. For all these journeyed between Ephesus and Smyrna in their time, and the ancient road would be crowded with countless camel trains and laden donkeys then; also with the wheeled vehicles of that period – cars and chariots and cages of wild animals for the games – and there would be elephants, too, gaudily caparisoned, carrying some rich potentate of the East and his retinue – a governor, perhaps, or a king. It was a mighty thoroughfare in those older days and may be still, though it is no longer crowded, and we did not notice any kings.

We did notice some Reprobates – the ones we have always with us. They sat just across the aisle, engaged in their usual edifying discussion as to the identity of the historic sites we were supposed to be passing. Finally they got into a particularly illuminating dispute as to the period of St. Paul's life and ministrations. It began by the Apostle (our Apostle) casually remarking that St. Paul had lived about twenty-one hundred years ago.

It was a mild remark – innocent enough in its trifling inaccuracy of two or three centuries – but it disturbed the Colonel, who has fallen into the guide-book habit, and is set up with the knowledge thereof.

"Look here," he said, "if I knew as little as you do about such things I'd restrain the desire to give out information before company."

The Apostle was undisturbed by this sarcasm. He folded his hands across his comfortable forward elevation and smiled in his angel way.

"Oh, you think so," he said placidly. "Well, you think like a camel's hump. You never heard of St. Paul till you started on this trip. I used to study about him at Sunday-school when a mere child."

"Yes, you did! as a child! Why, you old lobscouse" (lobscouse is an article on the Kurfürst bill of fare) "you never saw the inside of a Sunday-school. You heard somebody last night say something about twenty-one hundred years ago, and with your genius for getting facts mixed you saddled that date on St. Paul."

The Colonel turned for corroboration to the Horse-Doctor, who regarded critically the outlines of the Apostle, which for convenience required an entire seat; then, speaking thoughtfully:

"It isn't worth while to notice the remarks of a person who looks like that. Why, he's all malformed. He'll probably explode before we reach Ephesus."

I felt sorry for the Apostle, and was going over to sit with him, only there wasn't room, and just then somebody noticed a camel train – the first we have seen – huge creatures heavily loaded and plodding along on the old highway. This made a diversion. Then there was another camel train, and another. Then came a string of donkeys – all laden with the wares of the East going to Smyrna. The lagging Oriental day was awake; the old road was still alive, after all.

Like the first "Innocents," we had brought a carload or so of donkeys – four-legged donkeys – from Smyrna, and I think they were the same ones, from their looks. They were aged and patchy, and they filled the bill in other ways. They wrung our hearts with their sad, patient faces and their decrepitude, and they exasperated us with their indifference to our desires.

I suppose excursion parties look pretty much alike, and that the Quaker City pilgrims forty-two years ago looked a good deal like ours as we strung away down the valley toward the ancient city. I hope they did not look any worse than ours. To see long-legged men and stout ladies perched on the backs of those tiny asses, in rickety saddles that feel as if they would slip (and do slip if one is not careful), may be diverting enough, but it is not pretty. If the donkey stays in the middle of the narrow, worn pathway, it is very well; but if he goes to experimenting and wandering off over the rocks, then look out. You can't steer him with the single remnant of rope on his halter (he has no bridle), and he pitches a good deal when he gets off his course. Being a tall person, I was closed up like a grasshopper, and felt fearfully top-heavy. Laura, age fourteen, kept behind me – commenting on my appearance and praying for my overthrow.

It was a good way to the ruins – the main ruins – though in reality there were ruins everywhere: old mosques, gray with age and half-buried in the soil – a thousand years old, but young compared with the more ancient city; crumbling Roman aqueducts leading away to the mountains – old even before the mosques were built, but still new when Ephesus was already hoary with antiquity; broken columns sticking everywhere out of the weeds and grass – scarred, crumbling, and moss-grown, though still not of that first, far, unrecorded period.

But by-and-by we came to mighty walls of stone – huge abutments rising from the marshy plain – and these were really old. The Phœnicians may have laid them in some far-off time, but tradition goes still farther back and declares they were laid by giants – the one-eyed kind, the Cyclops – when all this marsh was sea. These huge abutments were piers in that ancient day. A blue harbor washed them, and the merchant ships of mighty Ephesus lay alongside and loaded for every port.

That was a long time ago. Nobody can say when these stone piers were built, but Diana and Apollo were both born in Ephesus, and there was probably a city here even then. What we know is that by the beginning of the Christian era Ephesus was a metropolis with a temple so amazing, a theatre so vast and a library so beautiful that we stand amid the desolation to-day, helplessly trying to reconstruct the proportions of a community which could require these things; could build them and then vanish utterly, leaving not a living trace behind.

For nobody to-day lives in Ephesus – not a soul. A wandering shepherd may build his camp-fire here, or an Arab who is tilling a bit of ground; but his home will be in Ayasaluk, several miles away, not here. Once the greatest port of trade in western Asia, Ephesus is voiceless and vacant now, except when a party like ours comes to disturb its solitude and trample among its forlorn glories.

There is no lack of knowledge concerning certain of the structures here – the more recent ones, we may call them, though they were built two thousand years ago. There are descriptions everywhere, and some of them are as cleanly cut to-day as they were when the tool left them. This library was built in honor of Augustus Cæsar and Livia, and it must have been a veritable marble vision. Here in its corners the old students sat and pored over books and precious documents that filled these crumbling recesses and the long-vanished shelves. St. Paul doubtless came here to study during the three years of his residence, and before him St. John, for he wrote his gospel in Ephesus, and would be likely to seek out the place of books. And Mary would walk with him to the door sometimes, I think, and Mary of Magdala, for these three passed their final days in Ephesus, and would be drawn close together by their sacred bond.

The great theatre where St. Paul battled with the wild beasts stands just across the way. It seated twenty-five thousand, and its stone benches stretch upward to the sky. The steep marble flight that carries you from tier to tier is there to-day exactly as when troops of fair ladies and handsome beaux climbed up and still up to find their places from which to look down on the play or the gladiatorial combat or the massacre of the Christians in the arena below.

These old theatres were built in a semicircle dug out of the mountain-side, so that the seats were solid against the ground and rose one above the other with the slope of the hill, which gave everybody a good view. There were no columns to interfere with one's vision, for there was no roof to be supported, except, perhaps, over the stage, but the top seats were so remote from the arena and the proscenium that the players must have seemed miniatures. Yet even above these there was still mountain-side, and little boys who could not get money for an entrance fee or carry water to the animals for a ticket sat up in that far perch, no doubt, and looked down and shouted at the show.

Laura and I, who, as usual, had dropped behind the party, climbed far up among the seats and tried to imagine we had come to the afternoon performance – had come early, not to miss any of it. But it was difficult, even when we shut our eyes. Weeds and grass grew everywhere in the crevices; dandelions bloomed and briers tangled where sat the beaux and belles of twenty centuries ago. Just here at our feet the mobs of Demetrius the silversmith gathered, crying, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" because the religion of St. Paul was spoiling their trade for miniature temples. Down there in the arena Paul did battle with the beasts, very likely as punishment. This is the spot – these are the very benches – but we cannot see the picture: we cannot wake the tread of the vanished years.

Behind the arena are the columns that support the stage, and back of these are the dressing-rooms, their marble walls as solid and perfect to-day as when the ancient players dallied and gossiped there. At one end is a dark, cave-like place where we thought the wild beasts might have been kept. I stood at the entrance and Laura made my picture, but she complained that I did not look fierce enough for her purpose.

On another slope of the hill a smaller theatre, the Odeon, has recently been uncovered. A gem of beauty it was, and much of its wonder is still preserved. Here the singers of a forgotten time gave forth their melody to a group of music-lovers, gathered in this close circle of seats that not a note or shading might be lost.

We passed around this dainty playhouse, across a little wheat-field that some peasant has planted against its very walls, on up the hill, scrambling along steep declivities over its brow, and, behold! we came out high above the great theatre on the other side, and all the plain and slopes of the old city, with its white fragments and its poor ruined harbor, lay at our feet. Earthquakes shook the city down and filled up the splendid harbor. If the harbor had been spared the city would have been rebuilt. Instead, the harbor is a marsh, the city a memory.

From where we stood we could survey the sweep of the vanished city. We could look across into the library and the market-place and follow a marble road – its white blocks worn smooth by a million treading feet – where it stretched away toward the sea. And once more we tried to conjure the vision of the past – to close our eyes and reproduce the vanished day. And once more we failed. We could glimpse a picture, we could construct a city, but it was never quite that city – never quite in that place. Our harbor with its white sails and thronging wharves was never quite that harbor – our crowded streets were never quite those streets. Here were just ruins – always ruins – they could never have been anything but ruins. Perhaps our imaginations were not in good working order.

We descended again into the great theatre, for it fascinated us, nearly breaking our necks where vines and briers tangled, pausing every other minute to rest and consider and dream. Pawing over a heap of rubbish – odd bits of carving, inscriptions, and the like – the place is a treasure-trove of such things – I found a little marble torso of a female figure. Head and arms and the lower part of the body all gone, but what remained was exquisite beyond words – a gem, even though rubbish, in Ephesus.