Constantinople, Volume 1

The arrival at Constantinople made such an overpowering impression upon me as to almost efface what I had seen during the previous ten days’ trip from the Straits of Messina to the mouth of the Bosphorus. The Ionian Sea, blue and unruffled as a lake; the distant mountains of Morea, tinged with rose color in the early morning light; the archipelago, gilded with the rays of the setting sun; the ruins of Athens; the Gulf of Salonika, Lemnos, Tenedos, the Dardanelles, and a crowd of persons and events which had caused me infinite amusement during the voyage,—faded into such indistinct and shadowy outlines at the first sight of the Golden Horn that were I now to undertake a description of them it would be an effort rather of imagination than of memory; and so, in order to impart something of life and warmth to the opening pages of my book, I shall omit all preliminaries and begin with the last evening of the voyage at the precise moment when, in the middle of the Sea of Marmora, the captain came up to my friend Yunk and me, and, laying his two hands on our shoulders, said, in his pure Palerman accent, “Gentlemen, to-morrow at daybreak we shall see the first minarets of Stambul.”