Part 13 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: KEYEFF]
I was mistaken. All the picture people are collected here, and more than picture ever saw. No sober imagination could conceive the scene at the end of the Galata bridge. To present it a painter would have to inebriate himself, spill his colors all about the place and wind up with the jimjams. What do these people do there? They indulge in keyeff.
There is no English word for keyeff--no word in any language, probably, except Turkish. It is not done in any other language. Keyeff is a condition of pure enjoyment, unimpaired even by thought. Over his coffee and nargileh the Turk will sit for hours in a thought-vacancy which the Western mind can comprehend no more than it can grasp the fourth dimension. It is not contemplation--that would require mental exercise.
It is absence of thought--utter absence of effort--oblivion--the condition for which the Western mind requires chloroform.
From the end of the Galata bridge the thronged streets diverge, and into these a motley procession flows. Men of every calling under the sun--merchants, clerks, mechanics, laborers, peddlers, beggars, bandits--all men--or nearly all, for the Mohammedan woman mostly bides at home.
It is just as well that she does, if one may judge from the samples.
She is not interesting, I think. She may be, but my opinion is the other way. She dresses in a sort of domino, usually of dingy goods, her feet and ankles showing disreputable stockings and shoes. Even the richest silk garments, when worn by women--those one sees on the street--have a way of revealing disgusting foot-gear and hosiery. No, the Mohammedan woman is not interesting and she has no soul. I believe the Prophet decided that, and I agree with him. If she had one--a real feminine soul--she would be more particular about these details.
The Turk is a dingy person altogether, and his city is unholy in its squalor. Yet the religion of these people commands cleanliness. Only the command was not clear enough as to terms. The Prophet bade his followers to be as cleanly as possible. There was lat.i.tude in an order like that, and they have been widening it ever since. I don't believe they are as ”clean as possible.” They pray five times a day, and they wash before prayer, but they wash too little and pray too much for the best results.
I mean so far as outward appearance is concerned. Very likely their souls are perfect.
At all events they are sober. The Prophet commanded abstinence, and I saw no drunkenness. There are no saloons in Constantinople. One may buy ”brandy-sticks”--canes with long gla.s.s phials concealed in them and a tiny gla.s.s for tippling--though I suspect these are sold mostly to visitors.
You are in the business part of Constantinople as soon as you leave the bridge--in the markets and shops, and presently in the bazaars. The streets are only a few feet wide, and are swarming with men and beasts of burden, yet carriages dash through, and the population falls out of the way, cursing the ”Christian dogs,” no doubt, in the case of tourists. Yet let a carriage but stop and there is eager attention on every hand--a lavish willingness to serve, to dance attendance, to grovel, to do anything that will bring return.
The excursionist, in fact, presently gets an idea that these people are conducting a sort of continuous entertainment for his benefit--a permanent World's Fair Midway Plaisance, as it were, where curious wares and sights are arranged for his special diversion. He is hardly to be blamed for this notion. He sees every native ready to jump to serve him--to leave everything else for his pleasure. The shopkeeper will let a native customer wait and fume till doomsday as long as the tourist is even a prospect. The native piastre is nothing to him when American gold is in sight. That is what he lives for by day and dreams of by night. He will sweat for it, lie for it, steal for it, die for it. It is his life, his hope, his salvation. He will give everything but his immortal soul for the gold of the West, and he would give that too, if it would bring anything.
Most places along the Mediterranean deal in mixed moneys, but compared with Constantinople the financial problem elsewhere is simple. Here the traveller's pocket is a medley of francs, lire, crowns, piastres, drachmas, marks, and American coins of various denominations. He tries feebly to keep track of table values, but it is no use. The crafty shopkeepers, who have all the world's monetary lore at their fingertips, rob him every time they make change, and the more he tries to figure the more muddled he gets, until he actually can't calculate the coin of his own realm.
As for Turkish money, in my opinion it is worth nothing whatever. It is mostly a lot of tinware and plated stuff, and the plating is worn off, and the hieroglyphics, and it was never anything more than a lot of silly medals in the beginning. Whenever I get any of it I work it off on beggars as quickly as possible for baksheesh, and I always feel guilty, and look the other way and sing a little to forget.
n.o.body really knows what any of those Turkish metallic coins are supposed to be worth. One of them will pay for a s.h.i.+ne, but then the s.h.i.+ne isn't worth anything, either, so that is no basis of value. There is actually no legal tender in Turkey. How could there be, with a make-believe money like that?
Speaking of bootblacks, they all sit in a row at the other end of the Galata bridge, and they go to sleep over your shoes and pretend to work on them and take off the polish you gave them yourself in the morning.
They have curious-looking boxes, and their work is as nearly useless as any effort, if it is that, I have ever known.
I have been trying for a page or two to say something more about the streets of Constantinople, and now I've forgotten what it was I wanted to say. Most of them are not streets at all, in fact, but alleys, wretched alleys--some of them roofed over--and as you drive through them your face gets all out of shape trying to fit itself to the sights and smells. I remember now; I wanted to mention the donkeys--the poor, patient little beasts of burden that plod through those thoroughfares, weighed down with great loads of brick and dirt and wood and every sort of heavy thing, enough to make a camel sway-backed, I should think. They are the gentlest creatures alive, and the most imposed upon. If Mohammed provided a heaven for the donkeys, I hope it isn't the one the Turks go to.
Then there are the fountains--that is, the public watering-places. They are nearly all carved in relief and belong to an earlier period, when art here was worth something. Here and there is a modern one--gaudy, tinsel, wretched.
But one has to stop a minute to remember that these old streets are not always occupied by the turbans and fezzes of the unspeakable Turk.
Constantinople was Greek in the beginning, founded away back, six hundred years or more B.C., and named Byzantium, after one Byzas, its founder. The colony had started to settle several miles farther up the Golden Horn, when a crow came along and carried off a piece of their sacrificial meat. They were mad at first; but when they found he had dropped it over on Bosporus Point they concluded to take his judgment and settle there instead.
Then came a good many changes. Persians and Greeks held the place by turns, and by and by it was allied to Rome. The Christian Emperor Constantine made it his capital about 328 A.D. and called it New Rome.
But the people wouldn't have that t.i.tle. Constantine had rebuilt the city, and they insisted on giving it his name. So Constantinople it became and remained--the names Galata, Pera, Stamboul, and Skutari (accent on the ”Sku”) being merely divisions, the last-named on the Asiatic side.
It was not until eleven hundred years after Constantine that the Turkomans swarmed in and possessed themselves of what had become a tottering empire. So the Turkish occupation is comparatively recent--only since 1453.
Still, that is a good while ago, when one considers what has been done elsewhere. Christopher Columbus was playing marbles in Genoa, or helping his father comb wool, then. America was a place of wigwams--a habitation of Indian tribes. We have done a good deal in the four and a half centuries since--more than the Turk will do in four and a half million years. The Turk is not an express train. He is not even a slow freight.
He is not a train at all, but an old caboose on the hind end of day before yesterday. By the way, I know now why these old cities have still older cities buried under them. They never clean the streets, and a city gets entirely covered up at last with dirt.
I have been wanting to speak of the dogs of Constantinople ever since I began this chapter. They have been always in my mind, but I wanted to work off my ill-nature, first, on the Turk. For I have another feeling for the dogs--a friendly feeling--a sympathetic feeling--an affectionate feeling.
Every morning at four o'clock the dogs of Constantinople turn their faces toward Mecca and howl their heartbreak to the sky. At least, I suppose they turn toward Mecca--that being the general habit here when one has anything official to give out. I know they howl and bark and make such a disturbance as is heard nowhere else on earth. In America, two or three dogs will keep a neighborhood awake, but imagine a vast city of dogs all barking at once--forty or fifty dogs to the block, counting the four sides! Do you think you could sleep during that morning orison? If you could, then you are sound-proof.