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The next week I found lodgings in the very center of the district of court residences and began to seek out the haunts and places of rendezvous of demi-mondaines, favorites and hangers-on of the Turkish officials. On the second day of my arrival, I had presented my credentials and letters at the German Pera Hospital, and had my name entered as a visiting honorary surgeon.
"Why; what's this, Halil? you fill me with amazement. Surely, it cannot be that you are that Mussulman of whom all Pera is talking? the man I mean who purchased a slave-girl in order to be her slave?" "It is as you say. But 'twere better not to talk of that matter at all. Those five thousand piastres of yours are the cause of it; they have ruined me out and out. My mind is going backwards I think.
In the town of Constantinople we come upon a wooden bridge, large, long, and broad, stretching across the Golden Horn. The streets of the town are rather better paved than those of Pera. In the bazaars and on the sea-coast alone do we find an appearance of bustle; the remaining streets are quiet enough.
I don't see why His Imperial Majesty's example is not followed by some of his subjects; perhaps we may yet come to that by-and-by. In what I have said about society in Pera I have not meant to be personal or offensive in any way. My object has been to show up a rotten system whereby everybody suffers.
Atlee, said he, 'would scarcely have read us so sharp a lesson as that; but, he added, 'we always hear stronger language from the man who couldn't station a gunboat at Pera than from the ambassador who could call up the Mediterranean squadron from Malta.
He searched every street and alley; he interviewed the Bekjees, who stamp along the streets, pounding the pavement with their iron-shod clubs; he tramped out to the Taksim, and down again to Galata tower, plunging into the dark alleys about the Oriental Bank, skirting lower Pera to the Austrian embassy, and climbing up the narrow path between tall houses, till he was once more in the Grande Rue; crossing to the filthy quarters of Kassim Paschá and emerging at the German Lutheran church, crossing, recrossing, stumbling over gutters and up dirty back lanes, silent and determined still, addressing only the sturdy Kurd by his side to ask if there were any streets still unexplored, and entering every new by-path with new hope.
Fourscore thousand of his native subjects, and of the vassal tribes of Gepidæ, Russians, Bulgarians, and Sclavonians, advanced under the standard of the chagan; a month was spent in marches and negotiations, but the whole city was invested on the thirty-first of July, from the suburbs of Pera and Galata to the Blachernæ and seven towers; and the inhabitants descried with terror the flaming signals of the European and Asiatic shores.
It was an evil night, a night for a bad deed, I thought, as I looked out of the carriage-window, when we were clear of the houses and streets of Pera. The black clouds drove angrily down before the north wind, seeming to tear themselves in pieces on the stars, as one might tear a black veil upon steel nails.
The first houses on each side of the street of Pera were in flames, but a spot was pointed out to me, twelve or fifteen houses off, where, the street narrowing between a stone mosque and some gardens, one might hope to clear a space to stop the fire, by pulling down the five or six intervening houses.
Not being one of them, and not caring very much for artificial society, I look on with great amusement. Some one gave great offence on a late occasion, while describing society in Pera, by suggesting that if there were a European court here things would be very different; so they might. People would then find their level, as they do in other capitals.
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