We caught the steamer—­the dear, clean, lovely Nickolai II., with the stewardess a Greek named Aspasia, and I persisted in calling the steward Pericles, just to have things match.

Then we crunched our way out of the harbor through the ice into the Black Sea, and sailed away for Constantinople.

IX

CONSTANTINOPLE

Constantinople had three different effects upon me.  The first was to make me utterly despise it for its sickening dirt; the second was when I forgot all about the mud and garbage, and went crazy over its picturesque streets with their steep slopes, odd turns, and bewitching vistas, and the last was to make me dread Cairo for fear it would seem tame in comparison, for Constantinople is enchanting.  If I were a painter I would never leave off painting its delights and spreading its fascinations broadcast; and then I would take all the money I got for my pictures and spend it in the bazaars, and if I regretted my purchases I would barter them for others, because Constantinople is the beginning of the Orient, and if you remain long you become thoroughly metamorphosed, and you bargain, trade, exchange, and haggle until you forget that you ever were a Christian.  The hour of our arrival in Constantinople was an accident.  The steamer Nickolai II. was late, and as no one may land there after sunset, we were forced to lie in the Bosphorus all night.

It was dark when we sighted the city, but it was one of those clear darks where without any apparent light you can see everything. Surely no other city in the world has so beautiful an approach!  Our great black steamer threaded her way between men-of-war, sail-boats, and all sorts of shipping, and if there were a thousand lights twinkling in the water there were a million from the city.  It lies on a series of hills curved out like a monster amphitheatre, and it stretches all the way around.  I looked up into the heavens, and it seemed to me that I never had seen so many stars in my life.  Our sky at home has not so many.  Yet there were no more than the yellow points of flame which flickered in every part of that sleeping city.  Three tall minarets pierced above the horizon, and each of these wore circles of light which looked like necklaces and girdles of fire.  Patches of black now and then showed where there were trees or marked a graveyard.  Occasionally we heard a shrill cry or the barking of dogs, but these sounds came faintly, and seemed a part of the fairy-picture.  It looked so much like a scene from an opera that I half expected to see the curtain go down and the lights flare up, and I feared the applause which always spoils the dream.

But nothing spoiled this dream.  All night we lay in the beautiful Bosphorus, and all night at intervals I looked out of my porthole at that lovely sleeping princess.  It never grew any less lovely.  Its beauty and charm increased.