I have seen the towering turban of the Bashi-bazouk, and
his long sword, and some softas in the domes on the great wall of
Stamboul, and the beggar, and the street-merchant with large tray of
water-melons, sweetmeats, raisins, sherbet, and the bear-shewer, and the
Barbary organ, and the night-watchman who evermore cried 'Fire!' with
his long lantern, two pistols, dirk, and wooden javelin. Strange how all
that old life has come back to my fancy now, pretty vividly, and for the
first time, though I have been here several times lately. I have gone
out to those plains beyond the walls with their view of rather barren
mountain-peaks, the city looking nothing but minarets shooting through
black cypress-tops, and I seemed to see the wild muezzin at some summit,
crying the midday prayer: '_Mohammed Resoul Allah!_'--the wild man; and
from that great avenue of cypresses which traverses the cemetery of
Scutari, the walled city of Stamboul lay spread entire up to Phanar and
Eyoub in their cypress-woods before me, the whole embowered now in
trees, all that complexity of ways and dark alleys with overhanging
balconies of old Byzantine houses, beneath which a rider had to stoop
the head, where old Turks would lose their way in mazes of the
picturesque; and on the shaded Bosphorus coast, to Foundoucli and
beyond, some peeping yali, snow-white palace, or old Armenian cot; and
the Seraglio by the sea, a town within a town; and southward the Sea of
Marmora, blue-and-white, and vast, and fresh as a sea just born,
rejoicing at its birth and at the jovial sun, all brisk, alert, to the
shadowy islands afar: and as I looked, I suddenly said aloud a wild, mad
thing, my God, a wild and maniac thing, a shrieking maniac thing for
Hell to laugh at: for something said with my tongue: '_This city is not
quite dead.
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