Idling along through the next village, we turned to admire a Turkish child, led by an Abyssinian slave. There is no country in the world where the children are so beautiful, and this was a cherub of a boy, like one of Domenichino’s angels. As we stopped to look at him, the little fellow commenced crying most lustily.
“Hush! my rose!” said the Abyssinian, “these are good Franks! these are not the Franks that eat children! hush!”
It certainly takes the nonsense out of one to travel. I should never have thought it possible, if I had not been in Turkey, that I could be made a bugbear to scare a child!
We passed the tomb of Frederick Barbarossa, getting, between the walls of the palaces on the water’s edge, continual and incomparable views of the Bosphorus, and arrived at Beshiktash (or the marble cradle), just as the troops were drawn up to the door of the mosque. We took our stand under a plane-tree, in the midst of a crowd of women, and presently the noisy band struck up the sultan’s march, and the led horses appeared in sight. They came on with their grooms and their rich housings, a dozen matchless Arabians, scarce touching the ground with their prancings! Oh, how beautiful they were! Their delicate limbs, their small, veined heads and fiery nostrils, their glowing, intelligent eyes, their quick, light, bounding action, their round bodies, trembling with restrained and impatient energy, their curved, haughty necks, and dark manes flowing wildly in the wind! El Borak, the mare of the prophet, with the wings of a bird, was not lighter or more beautiful.
The sultan followed, preceded by his principal officers, with a stirrup-holder running at each side, and mounted on a tame-looking Hungarian horse. He wore the red Fez cap, and a cream-coloured cloak, which covered his horse to the tail. His face was lowering, his firm, powerful jaw, set in an expression of fixed displeasure, and his far-famed eye had a fierceness within its dark socket, from which I involuntarily shrank. The women, as he came along, set up a kind of howl, according to their custom, but he looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed totally unconscious of any one’s existence but his own. He was quite another-looking man from the Mahmoud I had seen smiling in his handja-bash on the Bosphorus.