I Can Only Say That
They Looked To Be Very Good-Natured, Handsome, And Lazy; That The
Women's Yellow Slippers
Are very ugly; that the kabobs at the shop
hard by the Rope Bazaar are very hot and good; and
That at the
Armenian cookshops they serve you delicious fish, and a stout
raisin wine of no small merit. There came in, as we sat and dined
there at sunset, a good old Turk, who called for a penny fish, and
sat down under a tree very humbly, and ate it with his own bread.
We made that jolly old Mussulman happy with a quart of the raisin
wine; and his eyes twinkled with every fresh glass, and he wiped
his old beard delighted, and talked and chirped a good deal, and, I
dare say, told us the whole state of the empire. He was the only
Mussulman with whom I attained any degree of intimacy during my
stay in Constantinople; and you will see that, for obvious reasons,
I cannot divulge the particulars of our conversation.
"You have nothing to say, and you own it," says somebody: "then
why write?" That question perhaps (between ourselves) I have put
likewise; and yet, my dear sir, there are SOME things worth
remembering even in this brief letter: that woman in the brougham
is an idea of significance: that comparison of the Seraglio to
Vauxhall in the daytime is a true and real one; from both of which
your own great soul and ingenious philosophic spirit may draw
conclusions, that I myself have modestly forborne to press. You
are too clever to require a moral to be tacked to all the fables
you read, as is done for children in the spelling-books; else I
would tell you that the government of the Ottoman Porte seems to be
as rotten, as wrinkled, and as feeble as the old eunuch I saw
crawling about it in the sun; that when the lady drove up in a
brougham to Sultan Achmet, I felt that the schoolmaster was really
abroad; and that the crescent will go out before that luminary, as
meekly as the moon does before the sun.
CHAPTER VIII: RHODES
The sailing of a vessel direct for Jaffa brought a great number of
passengers together, and our decks were covered with Christian,
Jew, and Heathen. In the cabin we were Poles and Russians,
Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, and Greeks; on the deck were
squatted several little colonies of people of different race and
persuasion. There was a Greek Papa, a noble figure with a flowing
and venerable white beard, who had been living on bread-and-water
for I don't know how many years, in order to save a little money to
make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There were several families of
Jewish Rabbis, who celebrated their "feast of tabernacles" on
board; their chief men performing worship twice or thrice a day,
dressed in their pontifical habits, and bound with phylacteries:
and there were Turks, who had their own ceremonies and usages, and
wisely kept aloof from their neighbours of Israel.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 59 of 126
Words from 30307 to 30823
of 65663