The Moslems, who abhor all pictures, have covered with whitewash the paintings in the Greek churches. In the Cathedral of Nicea, where the famous council was held, there glistens even today through the white coating of the wall, where the high altar used to be, the proud promise, I.H.S. (_in hoc signo_, i. e., under this sign, the cross, you will win). But directly over it is written the first dogma of Islam, "There is no God but God." There is a lesson of tolerance in these faded inscriptions, and it seems as if Heaven itself wished to listen as well to the _Credo_ as to the _Allah il allah_. One of the chief pursuits of the honest Turks is what they call _Kief etmek_, literally "creating a mood." It consists of drinking coffee in a comfortable place and smoking. Such a place _par excellence_ I found in the village where we made a stop. Imagine a plane which extends its colossal branches horizontally for almost one hundred feet, burying in its deep shadow the nearest houses. The trunk of the tree is surrounded by a small terrace of stone, below which water is gushing from twenty-seven pipes in streams as thick as your arm, and rushing off as a lively brook. Here, with their legs crossed, the Turks sit, practising--silence.
[This is the forty-third letter of Moltke's Letters from Turkey, and is dated from Dshesireh on the Tigris, May 1, 1838.]
I told you in my last letter that we should be going on an expedition against the Arabs. This did not materialize. Nevertheless, I had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of a very interesting part of the country. On April 15, von Mühlbach, I, and two fully armed _agas_ of the pasha, together with our servants and dragomans, embarked on a vessel built in a style well known even in the times of Cyrus, a raft supported by inflated sheep-skins. The Turks look upon hunting as a sin, they despise venison and beef, but eat an enormous quantity of sheep and goats. The skins of these animals are cut in front as little as possible and removed from the carcass with great care. Then they are sewed up and the extremities tied up. When the skin is inflated (which is done quickly and without touching the skin to the mouth) it is exceedingly buoyant and can hardly be made to sink. From forty to sixty such bags are tied together in four or five rows under a light framework of branches. There generally are eight skins in front and eighteen in the back. The whole is covered with a litter of leaves over which rugs and carpets are spread. Taking your seat on these you glide downstream with utmost comfort. Because the current is swift, oars are not needed for progress, but only for steering the raft, keeping it in the middle of the course, and avoiding the dangerous rapids. On account of these rapids we had to tie up every night until the moon was up, but in spite of this we covered the distance, which by land would have taken us eighty-eight hours, in three and one-half days. The river, therefore, must flow with an average velocity of almost four miles per hour. In places it is much swifter, and in others decidedly slower.