so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen. Its

dense array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and spreads

over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and

there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that

meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental

aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel.

Constantinople makes a noble picture.

But its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesqueness. From

the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, he execrates it. The

boat he goes in is admirably miscalculated for the service it is built

for. It is handsomely and neatly fitted up, but no man could handle it

well in the turbulent currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the

Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water.

It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a

knife blade at the other. They make that long sharp end the bow, and you

can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about. It has two oars,

and sometimes four, and no rudder. You start to go to a given point and

you run in fifty different directions before you get there. First one

oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are

going ahead at once. This kind of boating is calculated to drive an

impatient man mad in a week. The boatmen are the awkwardest, the

stupidest, and the most unscientific on earth, without question.

Ashore, it was--well, it was an eternal circus. People were thicker than

bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the

406

The Innocents Abroad