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He hurried and scurried about till late in the evening without discovering a single trace of Janaki, and by that time his head was so confused by all manner of cogitations that when, towards nightfall, he began chaffering for fish in the Etmeidan market, he would not have been a bit surprised if he had been told that every single carp cost a thousand piastres.
Then they put Halil on Hassan's horse and proceeded in great triumph to the Etmeidan. The next instant the whole square was alive with armed men, and they hauled the Kulkiaja caldron out of the barracks and set it up in the midst of the mob. This was the usual signal for the outburst of the war of fiercely contending passions too long enchained.
The stranger seemed to be going towards the Etmeidan, the other man to be coming from it. The former let the latter pass, by squeezing himself against the wall, and only ventured to address him when he perceived that he had no evil intentions towards him. "I prythee, pitiful Mussulman, be not wrath with me, but tell me where the Etmeidan piazza is."
"By Allah!" said he, "it shall not be long before we see each other again." And thus their ways parted right and left. Musli conducted Janaki away in one direction, through a subterranean cellar, whilst Halil fled away across the house-tops, and within a quarter of an hour the pair of them arrived at the Etmeidan. What a noise, what a commotion in the streets of Stambul!
"Poor Irene!" sighed Janaki, buckling on his sword with which he certainly was not very likely to kill anybody and he accompanied the insurgents to the Etmeidan. In Stambul things were all topsy-turvy once more. The seventh Janissary regiment, when the two-and-thirty Janissaries returned to them with bloody swords boasting of their deed, rushed upon them and cut them to pieces.
Sheik Suleiman came forward. "Halil!" said he, "the bodies of the three dead men I have given to the people and their heads I have sent to thee." "Who were they?" asked Halil darkly. "The first was the corpse of the Kiaja Beg, his body was cast upon the cross-ways through the Etmeidan Gate." "And the second?" "The Kapudan Pasha, his body was flung down in front of the fountains of Khir-Kheri."
Every faithful Mussulman, therefore, guards his footsteps from any intrusion into the Etmeidan, as being in duty bound to know and observe that text of the Koran which says, "A fool is he who plunges into peril that he might avoid." The tattoo had already been beaten with wooden sticks on a wooden board, when two men encountered each other in one of the streets leading into the Etmeidan.
On the Etmeidan, in front of the Seraglio, in the doors of the mosques, the people are swarming, and from street to street they accompany the banner-bearing Dülbendar, who proclaims to the faithful amidst the flourish of trumpets that Sultan Achmed III. has declared war against Tamasip, Shah of Persia. Everywhere faces radiant with enthusiasm, everywhere shouts of martial fervour.
I saw the tops of those vast masses of cemetery-cypresses round the tombs of the Osmanlis outside the walls, and those in the cemetery of Kassim, and those round the sacred mosque of Eyoub, shrivel away instantaneously, like flimsy hair caught by a flame; I saw the Genoese tower of Galata go heading obliquely on an upward curve, like Sir Roger de Coverley and wild rockets, and burst high, high, with a report; in pairs, and threes, and fours, I saw the blue cupolas of the twelve or fourteen great mosques give in and subside, or soar and rain, and the great minarets nod the head, and topple; and I saw the flames reach out and out across the empty breadth of the Etmeidan three hundred yards to the six minarets of the Mosque of Achmet, wrapping the red Egyptian-granite obelisk in the centre; and across the breadth of the Serai-Meidani it reached to the buildings of the Seraglio and the Sublime Porte; and across those vague barren stretches that lie between the houses and the great wall; and across the seventy or eighty great arcaded bazaars, all-enwrapping, it reached; and the spirit of fire grew upon me: for the Golden Horn itself was a tongue of fire, crowded, west of the galley-harbour, with exploding battleships, Turkish frigates, corvettes, brigs and east, with tens of thousands of feluccas, caiques, gondolas and merchantmen aflame.
"There is no occasion to fear anything," said Musli reassuringly. "Good counsel is cheap. We can easily find a way out of it. Before the business comes to light, we will go to the Etmeidan and join the Janissaries. There let them send and fetch us if they dare, for we shall be in a perfectly safe place anyhow.
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