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Updated: May 10, 2025
Before the sun had sunk beneath the horizon, they had reached Scutari; and in order that the passengers might be disembarked comfortably, the anchor was dropped. Caiques came alongside for them and for their baggage. The captain went to the gangway to see the pasha safely into the boat, and to say his adieux to him.
An infinite population, summoned by the invigorating twilight, poured forth in all directions. The glowing river was covered with sparkling caiques, the glittering terraces with showy groups. Splendour, and power, and luxury, and beauty were arrayed before them in their most captivating forms, and the heart of Alroy responded to their magnificence.
Its shooting caiques, its forest of merchantmen, and its hoard of Turkish war ships; were changed, in a few moments of swift pulling, for the breathless solitude of the Valley of Sweet Waters, which opens with a gentle curve from the Golden Horn, and winds away into the hills towards Belgrade, where the river assumes the character of a silvery stream, threading its way through a soft and verdant meadow on either hand, as beautiful in aspect as the Prophet's Paradise.
In the afternoon the Behera is found surrounded by a swarm of caiques, bringing passengers and friends who have come aboard to see them off. These slender-built craft are paddling about the black hull of the steamer in busy confusion.
Among the caiques, which are quite peculiar to the Bosphorus, was one I met many a time, and which was indeed well known to everybody. It belonged to a sister of the late Sultan Mahmoud, celebrated in Constantinople for her love affairs a sort of Marguerite de Bourbon, for whose fleeting favours several people had paid with their heads.
Come to revel in color; to sit for hours, following with reverent pencil the details of an architecture unrivalled on the globe; to watch the sun scale the hills of Scutari and shatter its lances against the fairy minarets of Stamboul; to catch the swing and plash of the rowers rounding their caiques by the bridge of Galata; to wander through bazaar and market, dotting down splashes of robe, turban, and sash; to rest for hours in cool tiled mosques, which in their very decay are sublime; to study a people whose rags are symphonies of color, and whose traditions and records breathe the sweetest poems of modern times.
None of them is so impertinent as to look at her or speak to her. Only Europeans she meets turn round. The slave does not go with her. She stops at the quay where the caiques, or long rowing-boats, lie. The boatmen rise and scream together. Each one extols with words and gestures the excellences of his boat. She makes her choice, and steps in and sits down on the cushions.
The sultan and grand vizier seated themselves under the plum-colored velvet canopy, and the caïque proceeded swiftly toward the mosque, followed by three other caïques with his attendants. A gun from an iron-clad opposite the palace announced that the sultan had started.
As they stood together on the quay at Buyukdere, one could guess that, in the course of years, Alexander would be an irritable, peevish old dandy, while Paul would turn out a stern, successful old man. They stood looking at the water, watching the caïques shoot out from the shore upon the bosom of the broad stream. "Have you made up your mind?" asked Paul, without looking at his brother.
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