"May Heaven never again thwart your wish with delay, Martin _Effendi_." The Turk spoke placidly, his oily voice soft as a benediction, "I was delayed by pigs, and sons of pigs! Your annoyance is my desolating sorrow, yet"--he waved his hand with a bland gesture--"I am but the servant of His Majesty, the Sultan--whom Allah preserve--and the official is frequently detained."
"What is done, is done. _Bismillah_--no matter!" The Englishman curbed his annoyance and spoke as one resigned. "What now remains is this: We must see them, and you must learn to recognize them. You understand?"
"All Europeans," he suggested, "dine at the Pera Palace Hotel--it is the Mecca of their hunger."
To the white man's voice returned the ring of asperity. "And at the Pera Palace, we shall not only see, but be seen. Likewise unless we have a care in this enterprise, we shall not only eat, but be eaten. A man may stare at whom he chooses on Galata Bridge."
"When I dine in a public place"--the _Osmanli_ smiled cunningly from the depths of small pig-like eyes--"I shield myself behind a screen. Thus may I observe unobserved."
The sun had set, but the yellow after-glow still lingered in the sky behind Stamboul as the two men stood looking toward Galata Bridge, where their quarry had escaped them, and across the Golden Horn.
A pyramid of domes, flanked by a pair of slender minarets, daintily proclaimed the Mosque Yeni-Djami against the fading amber. On Galata Bridge itself, the day-long tide of medleyed life was thinning. Where there had been an eddying current of turbans and _tarbooshes_, bespeaking all the tribes and styles which foregather at the meeting place of two Continents and two seas, there were now only the belated few.
To the jaded imagination of Martin _Effendi_ and his companion, Abdul Said _Bey_, the falling of night over the quadruple city, smothering more than a million souls under a single blanket of blackness, made no appeal. They were watching a yacht.
Over the Pera roofs swept flocks of crows to roost in their garden rookeries at the center of the town. Across the harbor water, now too gloomy to reveal its thousands of jelly-fish, drifted the complaining cries of the loons. Then as the occasional city lamps began to twinkle, making the darkness murkier by their inadequacy, there arose from the twisting ways of Pera, Galata and Stamboul the night howling of thirty thousand dogs.