Summer Holidays, Travelling Notes in Europe (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889. Excerpt: ... CONSTANTINOPLE. I. The fuliginous and anti-picturesque mechanism of the steam-engine has certainly an impressive grandeur of its own, but the progress of electricity and of ballooning permits us to hope that it will prove to be only a transitory invention. This hope seems particularly consoling when we find that we have to enter the Golden Horn through a thick cloud of foul coal-smoke, vomited forth in gigantic spirals from the chimneys of innumerable steamers. It is disappointing to contemplate for the first time the fairy city of Constantine as it were through darkly smoked glasses. Alas the mysterious and meditative life of the East is no longer refractory to the hasty activity of the West. So-called barbarism is vanishing, and with it are vanishing the splendors of a world which was more concerned with beauty than with convenience. However, by a slight effort of imagination, one can eliminate the smoke, the shrieking steam-whistles, and a few hideous barrack-like buildings dotted here and there on the hills, and then Constantinople appears before us so beautiful and so brilliant that we can hardly believe it to be real. It seems more like a magnificent scene painted by some Titanic artist for a theatre of Babylonian immensity. And this first impression is exact, in a way, for closer acquaintance will show that Constantinople is a city of apparent and ephemeral gorgeousness, which one feels may some day suddenly disappear at the signal of a mighty and unknown scene-shifter. Before the anchor was cast, the Ceres was surrounded by caiques and small boats of all kinds, and picturesque-looking watermen and hotel touts offered their services in all the languages of the earth; shouting each other down, and bewildering the stranger with the babel of their vo...