I am afraid, to judge by my own cafÉ, it is quite impossible to give anything like a true idea of Constantinople to those who have never been there; at any rate it would require a volume and not two columns to do it, but I can’t help trying to impart some of my own impressions to your readers. Miles away in the Sea of Marmora you first catch sight of the domes and minarets (like huge wax candles with graceful black extinguishers on them) of the capital of the East. As you near the mouth of the Bosphorus, on the European side lies the Seraglio Point with its palaces, Sublime Porte, and public offices and gardens full of noble cypresses. On the Asiatic side lies Scutari, the great hospital, with the English cemetery and Marochetti’s monument in front of it, occupying the highest and most conspicuous point. Midway between the two shores is a rock called Leander’s rock, on which is a picturesque little lighthouse. Passing this you turn short to the left round Seraglio Point, and open at once the view of the whole city. The Golden Horn runs right away in front of you, and on the promontory between it and the Sea of Marmora lies the old town of Stamboul, crowned with the mosques of St. Sophia and Sultan Achmet. A curious old wooden bridge, some five hundred yards in length, crosses the Golden Horn and connects it with Galata, a mass of custom-houses, barracks and offices, broken by a handsome open square, at one end of which is the Sultan’s mosque. Behind these the houses are piled up the steep hill side, and at the top stands the striking old tower of Galata, from which you get the finest view of Constantinople. Beyond comes Pera, the European quarter, where are the Embassies and Missouri’s Hotel. Of course a vast city lining such a harbour and strait as the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus must be beautiful, but there is something very peculiar in the beauty of Constantinople, which the splendid site alone will not account for. I tried hard to satisfy myself what it was, and believe that it lies in the wonderful colouring of the place. The mosques are splendid, but not so fine as many Gothic churches, and the houses in general are far inferior to those of most other capitals; and yet, seen in the mass, they are strikingly beautiful, for those which are not of wood are almost all covered with boarding, which is stained or painted in many different colours. Many of them are a deep russet brown, others slate gray, or blue, or deep yellow, some pale green with the windows picked out in red. The colours are not fresh, but toned down. Then very many of the houses have court-yards, or small gardens, and you get the fresh foliage of orange-trees, and figs, and cypresses, as a further contrast, and for flooring and ceiling the blue of the Bosphorus water and of the cloudless Eastern sky. The moment you get into the wretched, narrow, unpaved streets, the charm goes; but while you keep to the great high street of the Bosphorus, I don’t believe there is any such treat in the world for the lover of colour. And the shape of the houses, too, is picturesque: as a rule they have flat roofs and deep overhanging eaves, and rows of many windows with open Venetian shutters. As we have no time to spare, we will not attempt the town, but stick to the high street.

There are three accepted ways of passing up and down the Bosphorus. There is the common market-boat of the country—a huge, lumbering, fiat-bottomed affair, about the size of a Thames lighter, but with high bows and stern. It is propelled by six or eight boatmen, each pulling a huge oar some eighteen feet long. They pull a long, steady stroke, each man stepping up on to the thwart in front of him at the beginning of his stroke, and throwing himself back till his weight has dragged his oar through, and he finds himself back on his own seat, from which he at once springs up and steps forward again for a fresh stroke. It must be splendid training exercise, and they make a steady four miles an hour against the stream;—no bad pace, for the boats are loaded with fruit-baskets and packages and passengers—the veiled women sitting in a group apart in the stern. Then there are the steamers, which ply every hour up and down, the express boats touching at one or two principal piers, and doing the twelve miles from the bridge at Stamboul to Bajukdere in an hour and a quarter, the others stopping at every pier, and taking two hours or more. They are Government boats, for passengers only, and the fares are somewhat higher than those of our Thames steamers. They have a long glazed cabin on the after-deck for the first-class male passengers, and a small portion screened off further aft, where the veiled women are crowded together. Until lately, all women were accustomed to travel behind this screen, but the unveiled are beginning to break the rule, and to intrude into the cabin of the lords of creation. You see the Turks lift their eyebrows slightly as women in crinoline squeeze by them and take their seats, but it is too late for any further demonstration. An awning is spread over the whole deck, cabin and all, and under it the passengers, who are too late to get seats in the cabin, sit about on small low stools. Such a colluvies gentium and Babel of tongues no man can see or hear anywhere else I should think. By your side, perhaps, sits a scrupulously clean old Turk, with his legs tucked up under him and his slippers on the floor beneath. He has the vacant hopeless look of an opium-eater, and you see him take out his little box from his belt, and feel with nervous fingers how large a pellet he may venture on in consideration of the bad company he is in. On the other side an English sailor boy, delighted to be able to talk broad Durham to somebody, is telling you how he has been down to the bazaars and has bought a “hooble booble,” and a bottle of attar of roses for the folk at home, and speculating how they would give £5, he knows, at Sunderland, to see one of those women who look as if they were done up in grave-clothes. Opposite you have a couple of silky-haired Persians, with their long soft eyes and clear olive skins, high head-dresses and sombre robes, and all about a motley crowd of Turks, Circassians, and Greeks, Europeans with muslin round their wideawakes, Maltese, English, and French skippers, soldiers in coarse zouave and other uniforms, most of them smoking, and the waiters (Italians generally), edging about amongst them all with little brazen coffee-trays. An artist wishing to draw the heads of all nations could find no richer field, and in the pursuit of his art would not of course object to the crush and heat and odour; but as we are more bent on comfort, we will go up the Bosphorus in the third conveyance indicated above, a caique—and a more fascinating one can scarcely be conceived. You may have your caique of any size, from one pair of sculls up to the splendid twelve-oared state affairs of ambassadors and pashas; but that with three caiquejees or rowers seems to be the most in use amongst the rich folk, so we can scarcely do wrong in selecting it.

Our three-manned caique shall belong to an English merchant, the happy owner of a summer villa at Therapia or Bajukdere. He shall be waiting for us, and shall board the steamer as it drops anchor opposite Seraglio Point. While our portmanteau is being fished up from the hold, we have time to examine critically his turn-out. The caique is about the size of an old-fashioned four-oar, but more strongly built, with a high sharp bow and a capital flat floor, and lies on the water as lightly as a wild duck. The caiquejees’ seats are well forward. The stern is decked for some eight feet, and in this deck is a hole, so that you can stow your luggage away underneath. When the ladies use the caique, their cavass, with his red fez, blue braided coat and scimitar, sits grimly with his legs in the hole and gives their orders to the caiquejees. Comfortable cushions lying on a small Turkey carpet, between the little deck and the stretcher of the stroke oar, in the roomiest part of the boat, await you. You will lounge on them with your shoulders against the deck, a white umbrella over your head, and a cigarette in your mouth. In the climate of the Bosphorus, cigarettes of Turkish tobacco supersede all other forms of the weed. The caiquejees are wiry, bronzed Turks; their costume, the red fez, a loose coloured jacket, generally blue, which they strip off for work, and appear in Broussa shirts of camels’ hair fitting to the body, with loose sleeves reaching only to the elbow, and baggy white cotton drawers tied at the knee. The stroke wears stockings, which the others dispense with; each of them keeps his slippers under his own seat. They each pull a pair of straight sculls fastened to a single thole pin by a greased thong. You follow your friend and portmanteau down the gangway and start, and are at once delighted at the skill with which your crew steer through the crowds of Maltese boats and caiques, and under great steamers and merchant ships, and fall into their regular stroke, twenty-eight to the minute, which they never vary for the whole twelve miles. Their form, too, is all that can be desired, and would not discredit a London waterman. Turning up the Bosphorus you soon lose sight of the Golden Horn, and the old rickety bridge which spans it from Stamboul to Galata. You pull away at first under the European shore, past the magnificent palace of the present Sultan, gleaming white in the sun; and then come other huge piles, some tumbling to pieces, some used as barracks, and private houses of all sizes and colours, in their little gardens, and warehouses, coffee-shops, cemeteries, fruit-markets and mosques. Not a yard of the bank but is occupied with buildings, and the houses are piled far up the hillside behind. It is the same on the Asiatic side, except that there the houses next to the water are chiefly those of the rich Turks, as you may guess from the carefully barred and jalousied windows of the harems, and that the line of houses is not so deep. And so on for five miles you glide up the strait, half a mile or more wide, alive with small boats moving about, and men-of-war steamers riding at anchor, through one continuous street. Then comes the narrowest part, where the current runs like a mill-tail against you. On the European side stand the three towers, connected with battlemented walls, built by Mahomed’s orders in the winter before the taking of Stamboul and the extinction of the Western Empire. Roumelie Hissa the point is called now, and behind it rises the highest hill on the Bosphorus. If it is not too hot, your friend will land and walk up with you, and when you have reached the top you will see Olympus and the distant Nicomedian mountains over the Sea of Marmora to the south, and the whole line of the Bosphorus below you, and the Giants’ Mountain and the Black Sea away to the north. Behind you lie wild moorlands, covered with heather and gum cistus, and arbutus bushes, and a small oak shrub. Here and there in the hollows are small patches of vines and other culture, with occasional clumps of stone pine and Scotch fir, and chestnut and beech, amongst which scanty herds of buffaloes and goats wander, watched by melancholy, truculent-looking herdsmen, in great yellow capotes and belts, from which a brace of long, old-fashioned pistols and the hilt of a long straight dagger stick out. But, desolate as the European side is, it is a garden compared to the Asiatic. You look across there, and behind the little bright belt of life along the Bosphorus, there is nothing between you and the horizon but desert heathery hills, running away as far as the eye can reach, without a house, a tree, a beast, or the slightest sign of life upon them. I scarcely ever saw so lovely a view, and it is thrown out into the most vivid contrast by the life at your feet. You descend to your caique again, and now are aware of a towing-path which runs at intervals along in front of the houses. A lot of somewhat wretched-looking Turks here wait with ropes to tow the caiques and other boats up the rapids. Your stroke catches the end of the rope, and fastens it, exclaiming, “Haidee babai” (so it sounds), “Push on, my fathers; push on, my lambs”; and two little Turks, passing the rope over their shoulders, toil away for some hundred yards, when they are dismissed with a minute backsheesh. And now the Bosphorus widens out: on the Asiatic side comes the valley of the Sweet Waters of Asia, and the new kiosk of the Sultan, which I spoke of before, and afterwards only occasional villages and the palaces of one or two great pashas. On the European side the houses are still in continuous line, but begin to get more elbow-room, and only in the little creeks, where the villages lie, are the hillsides much built on. Now you begin to see the summer villas of the Europeans, and accordingly an esplanade faced with stone, and broad enough for carriages to pass, begins. This upper part of the Bosphorus has its own charm. The water is rougher, as there is generally a breeze from the Black Sea; and porpoises roll about, and flocks of sea-swallows (Âmes damnÉes) flit for ever over the little restless waves. The banks between the houses and the wild common land of the hill tops are now often taken into the gardens and cultivated in terraces; and where this is not so they are clothed with fine Scotch fir and stone pine, and avenues of cypress of the height of forest trees, with magnificent old gray trunks, marking where paths run up the hillside or standing up alone like sombre sentinels. It is not until you get almost to Therapia that there is any break in the row of houses. Therapia, where Medea is said to have prepared her potions, is a Greek village, built round a little bay, the busiest and almost the prettiest place on the Bosphorus. There are always half a dozen merchantmen lying there, and a sprinkling of European sailors appear amongst the fezzes frequenting the quays formed by the esplanade, and there is a cafÉ restaurant, and a grog shop, where the British sailor can be refreshed with the strong liquors of his country. Behind the village is the little cemetery of the Naval Brigade, sadly neglected and overshadowed with beech and chestnut trees, where Captain Lyons and many another fine fellow lie, to whom their countrywomen have raised a large, simple white marble cross, which stands up mournfully amongst the tangled grass which creeps over the rows of nameless graves. One grieves that it is shoved away out of sight of the Bosphorus, up which the brave fellows all went with such stout hearts.

You pass more handsome villas and the summer residences of the English and French ambassadors just above Therapia, and then comes the Bay of Bajukdere, the broadest part of the Bosphorus, with the village of the same name on its north shore, the last and handsomest of the suburbs of Constantinople, where are the other embassies and the palaces of the richest merchants. It was the place where Godfrey of Bouillon encamped with his Crusaders. Beyond, the strait narrows again, and runs between steep cliffs with a sharp turn into the Black Sea, and close to the mouth are the storm-lashed Symplegades.

You must fill up the picture with ships of all sorts under the flags of all the nations of the earth passing up and down, and people the banks with figures in all the quaint and picturesque costumes of the East; but no effort of imagination, I fear, can realise the frame in which the whole is set, the water of the Bosphorus, and the unfathomable Eastern sky. I never had an idea of real depth before. I doubt if it be possible to imagine it. I am sure it is impossible to forget it.