Great excitement and bawling

At last, with great excitement and bawling, to which the Pool late on the evening of Greenwich fair was nothing, we got out of the Golden Horn. A long caique with a sail, and twelve or fourteen passengers, overtook us, like the wind, and soon shot ahead. The people smoked and drank coffee, all working their beads about with restless irritability; and a band of music played airs from the operas of Donizetti and Verdi. The great feature of this band was the performer on the Pandean pipes ; it Ls impossible to conceive the excellent music he blew out from them. They contained four octaves, and were not flat, as the common ones, but curved round, so that his lips formed the arc of a circle, as it were, of which his neck was the centre. Only associating the Pandman pipes with a street drum, as accompanying the exertions of Punch, acrobats, and the fantoccini, I was amazed to find what they were really capable of, when well played.

The voyage lasted, altogether, nearly two hours, and each time passengers were landed the riot was awful. The captain, who was a little podgy man, in a fez and frock-coat, stormed and swore, and jumped about on the paddle-boxes like a maniac. The watermen in the caiques fought and hanged each other with a ferocity that exceeded the boatmen at the Piraeus, as they struggled to get their fragile barks next the steamer; and the passengers jostled, and pushed, and so increased the confusion, that it was wonderful how they were not all drowned. All this went on at every island, but the most frightful to-do was at Prinkipo ; and, although a tolerable swimmer, I was not sorry when our over-laden caique touched the shore. We had been nearly swamped by getting between two larger boats, in a manner that would have been dangerous on a river, but here a heavy sea was running city tours istanbul.

Principally Greeks

We landed under a chi, along which a row of coffee-houses and some private villas ran; and, at the extremity of the promenade, we found an inn, in a fine position, with a view of Constantinople in the distance, looking far more beautiful than Venice — which, in all truth, is ‘not so attractive on first sight as some writers would make it — with the domes and minarets of Stamboul shining like gold, in the sunset. The hotel was kept by a Neapolitan; and was built entirely of light thin wood — very like those we see in Switzerland, in high and out-of-the-way spots. The landlord appeared very anxious to make his customers comfortable. ‘He gave us a very good dinner at a table-dhoti, where we sat down some fourteen or sixteen — principally Greeks; but he somewhat committed himself in recommending a bottle of Broussa beer to our notice. Broussa is a city in Asia hlinor, celebrated for its manufactories of silk, which supply the Levant. It certainly cannot claim any distinction for its breweries, for I never tasted anything so nasty in my life. With my eyes shut, I could have imagined it a species of effervescing black-draught.

As soon as dinner was over, we turned out for a stroll about the village, which possesses several very novel and entertaining features. I have said that there was a row of coffee-houses on the heights facing the sea. These were all wooden buildings with porticos before them; and on the opposite side of the promenade, in front, were platforms, surrounded by railings, built to project over the edge of the cliff, and singularly insecure. The masters supply coffee, narghiles, and a very tolerable punch.

The steamboat band was playing in front of the principal house ; and before all of them were suspended hoops, with thin white cylinders depending from them, which I at first took to be candles. But I found afterwards that they were blue-lights; and that when the beauties of Prinkipo assembled, (which they were to do on tho morrow in great numbers,) and it got dark, some public-spirited and gallant gentleman would pay to have one of these fireworks ignited, and thus show off the fair gazers to the admiration of the spectators. At present there were not many ladies about. Our steamer was evidently the “husband’s boat;” and they were listening to tho gossip of Constantinople in their own houses.