Our men rowed very well, and we soon came to a village called Arnaudkoi, where the current is very rapid, and at times dangerous, the banks forming the outer curve of a sharp sweep in the stream. The boatmen here shipped their oars, for persons were in waiting to tow the caiques round the bend, it being impossible to row against the current. They were here always for the purpose, taking the boats in turn, and they received a few paras for their trouble. Further on, the same thing was repeated, and indeed at every sudden turn some poor fellows were waiting to track us.
The houses continued uninterruptedly along the shore, and they were nearly all built after the same style, and of wood. Here and there a new edifice was being raised upon a European model, but it did not appear to be so much in keeping with the scene, as the green, and dove, and claycoloured houses of the Turks. There is a lightness about these little buildings which is very pretty and effective. They look, from a short distance, as if made of card-board, and one cannot help thinking that a single candle within would illuminate their entire form, like the cottages the Italians carry about on their heads in our streets private tour Istanbul.
There are very many palaces amongst them, belonging to the Sultan and the great people of his court; and on the summits of some of the mountains are royal kiosks, wherever a beautiful view is to be commanded. In the absence of all artistic impressions, the Turks are great admirers of Nature. Fields and forests, blue water and skies, sunny air and bright flower gardens, are the great sources of their happiness. The state of idle listless dreaming into which the contemplation of these objects throws them, they call Kef. We have no word that answers to this; busy anxious England has not allowed one to be invented.
But it is a very pleasant repose—one that teems with images far more real and beautiful than the deadly opium or hasheesh can call up, and so, these little kiosks, dedicated to the idlest inactivity of mind and body, are perched about the hills of the Bosphorus, and there the Turk dreams away his leisure time, drinking in the bright and lovely prospects around him, with only the bubbling of the narghile to assist rather than intrude upon his unstrained contemplations.
Monte Cristo
With respect to the hasheesh, of which I have just spoken, a word or two may not be out of place. I had been so excited by the accounts I had read of its effects in “ Monte-Cristo,” that I was very anxious to try some; and Demetri bought me samples of two or three different preparations of it, somewhere on the sly. One sort was like greenish candy; another was of the same colour, but soft, and in a tin box; another was dark, and resembled black-currant jam; and a fourth was in powder. All tasted sufficiently nasty.
The second was the least offensive, being mixed up with honey and bitter almonds. Of the first I took a tolerable quantity; but the effect was not proportioned to my expectations. I felt rather giddy and buoyant, but nothing further: yet the dragoman assured me that I had swallowed more than the ordinary quantity. “ Once,” he said, “ a waiter found some in the hotel, and ate it all, not knowing what it was. He laughed all night long, and the next day was very sick, and cried.” Much, in a case of this kind, must depend upon the idiosyncrasy of the individual who swallows it. I have said, with myself, the hasheesh was a failure: I may mention, at the same time, that no quantity of wine or spirits, however large, has ever any effect upon my head; so that it does not follow that its exhibition would be similarly innocuous upon everybody.
