Supreme Visions from the East

Supreme Visions from the East
Pierre Loti

Thursday, August 21, 1913.

I leave today the tragic Andrinople where my dear Turkish friends had given me during three days visions of great oriental enchantments  forgetting for a time their nameless miseries and their resentments so justified against the so-called Christian Europe, they had given me a festive welcome in a marvellous Eastern decor, and all that would remain for me unforgettable. Tonight I will be back in Constantinople, in the Bosporus, with my friends from Candilli, whom I will find as anxious as I am about the fate that Europe, excited by the lies of the gregache, is preparing for our dear Turkey.

Friday, August 22.

Candilli. In spite of the heavy weather, dark as in winter, I wanted to go alone to Béïcos, to rest in the "Valley of the Great Lord.

But, there, a heavy storm rain forces me to take refuge in a small Turkish café. And here I am recognized, everyone gathers: the officers, the soldiers, the people, even the most humble of the village. I am in a hurry, I am acclaimed, people kiss my hands, they don't want to leave me... What is the people in the world where we would find so much recognition?

I can only barely take the "Chirket" (the small steamboat that will take me back to Candilli along the Asian coast). People, boarded with me on this boat, signal me to all the passengers and when I disembark in Candilli, hundreds of people still cheer me.

The latest news tonight seems that Europe will have pity, that Russia will give in, that Andrinople will finally remain Turkish.

Sunday, August 24.

My last day of Candilli. I must take possession tomorrow of a house that my Turkish friends have prepared for me in the heart of Stambul.

Today, accompanied by Countess O... I go to Thérapia, for my visit to the French Ambassador. The palace, which served as the summer residence of our embassy, has just been destroyed by a fire; the ambassador walks us through the rubble. This old wooden palace, desiccated by time, had belonged to France for over a century; it burned like straw and nothing could be saved from all the precious memories it contained.

Most of the things I love in Turkey will have the same fate, since fire is, along with "progress" and gregache, one of the greatest destroyers of the Eastern past.

In the evening, after dinner, the Countess and I attend the prayer in the mosque of Candilli. It is a very small village mosque, without dome and that a simple wooden minaret distinguishes only from the houses of surroundings. It is almost dark, the few oil lights hanging from the ceiling barely illuminate the lime walls and naive decorations of the Mirhab. But the recollection of the faithful, in this modest place of prayer, perhaps strikes even more than in the sumptuous great mosques of Stamboul.

After the ceremony, the notables of Candilli and the Imans come to bid me farewell, since tomorrow, alas! I leave their delicious village.

Monday, August 25.

At two o'clock my Turkish friends came to take us to Candilli and took us to a new home, which I did not know yet.

Our house has been arranged in Turkish style, with beautiful old things that the Sultan sent me from the Old Seraglio Palace and our supper is served in golden dishes. But tonight, as if on purpose to give a little tragedy to my installation in this district so lost, a terrible storm comes to shake our roof, everything darkens here and, in spite of the oriental luxury which surrounds me, everything seems to me a little gloomy.

Thursday, August 28.

So here I am once again settling in my dear Stamboul, at the bottom of an almost inaccessible, untraceable district, at the end of long streets of the past time, of which, until now, I almost ignored the existence.

When you are in the holy square of Sultan Fatih, which has been familiar to me for almost forty years, you have to take "Charchembé Djiadessi," a street in old Turkey, between tombs and houses with wire windows, follow it for a kilometre and a half, turn right, in front of a small very ancient mosque, cross a pothouse and finally you arrive at home, at the bottom of a sort of dead end, at the first aspect of a throat-cutter, where the coachmen are always reluctant to engage. This tortuous dead end, lined with old crumbling wooden houses, old walls, old trees, gets lost in a mysterious and dark corner. Grass everywhere on the cobblestones, a small minaret in ruins, no view, no side; one would believe oneself in a humble village of Anatolia, rather than in this immense city.

In the morning, a flute song or musiquette announces the arrival of some fruit merchant, or some water carrier, in Asian costume. The rest of the time, nobody passes, if not, from far to far, a Turk in caftan and turban, who will get lost in one of the roasted houses of the alley. In the evening, in the moonlight, two young girls, always the same, walk a hundred steps, arm in arm, melancholic and fearful, without moving away from their home. Centuries must not have worked for this dead neighborhood.

And my house is there, very screened, too, and very quiet. On the ground floor are the servants' and the police's quarters, which keep me: eight or ten men. In the white marble vestibule, low and dark, there are, on shelves, their socks and their slippers; Sabah Eddin, one of the servants lent me by the Sultan, is a dervish, and I have also taken back my former servants from ten years ago, the great Djeniil and Hassan, the naive one. On the first floor is the dining room. In my house, we only eat Turkish food, served Turkish-style, in adorable little golden dishes. The table in my dining room is in solid silver and was that of Sullan Abd-ul-Aziz.

We often have guests, who are amused by this oriental service; they are mostly my son's guests, French starship signs, embassy attachés. But we must go to meet our guests, wait for them in front of the mosque of Méhémet Fatih, without which they would never arrive at our untraceable house, without getting lost on the way.

On the second floor, where most of the windows and the verandah give on the opposite side to the arrival lane, we suddenly notice that we are very high up, in an eagle's nest, dominating the districts of Fener and Balata, then the Golden Horn and, on the opposite bank, the village of Haskeui...

Haskeui is where I first lived - thirty-six years ago! and that I had received the girlfriend of my youth, when she arrived from Salonika. Nothing has changed here. From my present house, I can see every day, in front of and under me, my house of yesteryear in front of the small mosque of Haskeui and this same landing stage of old boards, on which, so many times, had landed my anxious foot, when I arrived in the evening at the house, clandestine. How time has flowed since that time, capsizing sultans and empires!... And today, not a little adventurer, as in the past, but someone whom Turkey worships, I live on this side of the Golden Horn, at the top of the fierce quarters, which I hardly dared to approach before, and near this mosque of Sultan Selim, which had been named to me one evening of my youth, by my poor Mehémet, when we passed in secular and that it appeared to us for the first time, all above our heads...

On this second floor, there is my living room entirely in Turkish, with couches, Koranic inscriptions and trinkets always sent from the palace of the Old Serail by the Sultan. And then there are our rooms, quite Turkish, too, thick rugs, silk mattresses on the floor, Damascus silk dressing gowns, beautifully embroidered silver and gold linen. In my house, mother-of-pearl table and vermeil sink marked with the number of a sultana who died a hundred years ago. My son's and Osman's rooms overlook the panorama of the Golden Horn; - mine, - more sadly, but of a deliberate sadness, - the small dead end, lugubriously closed, whose grass greenens the cobblestones.

In the evening after dinner, of course, we go to the big square of Méhémet Fatih, center of all these Muslim districts, and there, in front of the marvellous mosque, we sit under the trees of the traditional Turkish café of Mustapha, mixing us with the few hundred dreamers with turban who smoke narguilhés by hardly speaking. Around this square of Méhémet Fatih, Stamboul, at that time, is everywhere in great enchantment of Ramazan; the minarets all have their crowns of fire and support in the air, by means of ropes thrown from one to the other, holy inscriptions made of innumerable small nightlights.

Around ten o'clock, long journey again to return to our home by the deserted streets. In these old streets, asleep in spite of the Ramazan, you can hear from all sides, on the cobblestones that resonate, the clash of the railway sticks of the night watchmen, - the classic sound of old Stambul. During these hot summer nights, when I can't sleep, I often raise the fence of one of my windows, with the windows always open, to look at the mysterious little alley, under the stars. In the shadows walks with a velvety step the chaouch that keeps me against the Bulgarian arsonists.

At the tip of the dawn, we hear the song of a muezzin, from the top of the ruined minaret of the small mosque overlooking us. We had not sung there for years, but the Turks, to please me, now send every night, in this abandoned minaret, a different muezzin, chosen among those with the most beautiful and clear voice.

Friday, August 29.

Tonight, to celebrate the great holy night of Ramazan, we were invited to supper at the Dervishes Tourneurs, whose convent is located outside the walls of Stamboul, in the middle of the immense and silent desert of the dead. In Constantinople, there are other convents of Tourneurs that are more accessible than this one, there are even some in the heart of Péra, where foreigners are admitted; but here no one enters, and it is necessary to have intelligences in the place. The appearance, calm and whiteness of this large convent refectory with its Koranic inscriptions on the walls are striking from the entrance. The Dervishes, in very high brown caps, dine there by small tables, - a dozen small round tables, low almost to the ground, around which they are seriously crouched on the mats of the floor; candles, as long as candles, light them; during the meal, one of the religious reads prayers, the others listen to it in pious silence and, at each pose, when the reader stops, all, with a deep voice, pronounce bowing to the name of Allah.

Our host, the chief of the dervishes, is a young, educated man, well acquainted with all modern questions, but who has managed to keep, as is appropriate to his duties, the nobility and quiet courtesy of the Turks of yore. Moreover he wears the title of "saint," and his high hat, which surrounds a black turban, his dark dress give him very great air. The table around which we are at his side is however as low and as small as the others; only, the crockery is more precious there; it is old Chinese porcelain, undoubtedly come from there in remote times. After dinner, he takes us to his private room. Here again, of course, no Western object breaks the purely oriental harmony. Three or four black panels, where phrases from the Koran are written in gold characters, decorate the walls alone; large couches, a few very small tables for coffee and cigarettes, that's all there is in this strangely austere living room.

Then we go to the mosque of the convent to attend the holy night ceremony. There, from the tribune where we have taken our seats, on prayer mats, we dominate the space reserved for the Tourers' dance; it is a large empty circle that occupies the whole centre of the mosque and that surrounds a barrier. The chief has remained below, inside this sacred circle; standing and facing us, he stands still, rigid, as if anaesthetized, his eyes in a dream. One by one, the dervishes arrive, without a sound from the gloomy, solitary surroundings; they arrive with their eyes lowered, their hands joined on their chest, in the hieratic pose of the Egyptian mummies. They are dressed in long dark dresses, very loose, with a thousand folds, but that belts tighten a lot to their thin waist. They begin their exercises with a slow ritual walk, in line, around the round room. It is already as in dream that they move, and each time they pass or pass again in front of the head of the brotherhood, they address to him a very deep reverence, which is returned to them with the same gravity. The religious dance will be led by a small orchestra of flutes and huge cavernous tambourines; it will last throughout the service, accompanied by discreet songs in several voices. At first, the dervishes unfold their arms in jerks like automatons whose numb springs would play with difficulty, and when they have finally extended them completely, almost in a cross, their head bent over their shoulder with a morbid grace, it is only then that they begin to turn, with a movement that is at first very gentle, but which, from minute to minute, accelerates and rounds their large dark dresses into a bell; they soon look like large inverted bellflowers, now so light that it would be enough with an imperceptible breath to make them slide around the round room like dead leaves that the wind sweeps away. They all took a spinning motion launched smoothly on a flat surface. By the way, they don't make any noise, you don't even see their fast feet waving and their high hats don't even wobble over their ecstasy-eyed heads. They turn, they turn thus, always on the same side; so much one identified with their movement, it seems that, if they changed the direction, one would feel a painful concussion and that an ultra-terrestrial reverie would be broken without recourse... They turn endlessly, to give the vertigo...

The semi-darkness in which these so light characters twirl is a great funeral scene; they dance in front of an audience of dead people, dead people who, all their lives, had twirled like them, here, in the middle of this same sanctuary, but who today are content to watch, in an attentive and intimidating silence, in what way these current dervishes continue the holy tradition of religious vertigo. Indeed, the mosque is opened by wide arches on deep sides populated by immense and very high catafalques that drap green fabrics, the color of the Prophet. All these green tombs emir, which press one behind the other as if to better see if the rites of the secular twirling are well preserved nowadays, all these tombs of the different eras of Islam are all the higher and imposing that the dead asleep below was more holy and more venerated in the middle of the dervicheries, and each catafalque is surmounted by a high pointed dervish cap that supports a wooden "mushroom" and gives the whole a kind of vague human aspect.

In front of these motionless and hidden spectators, they turn, the dervishes, they turn faster and faster, to the sound of their ever-present little flute music that seems strangely distant and heard from the depths of past times..; it is so incredible, the continuation of their twirling without a jerk, neither a false step, nor a hesitation, that one would say they dematerialized or rather reduced to the state of swirling machines, whose dresses swell more and more in the shape of inverted bellflowers. The dead, who are so interested in green catafalques, seem more and more captivated by this easy dance that makes no noise; they seem to stretch their stiff necks and hoist themselves up to see better. Besides, what the dancers are looking for is the fatigue that is grey, it is the elegant, ethereal intoxication, it is the vertigo conducive to flight in the regions where the inaccessible god resides in the special form of this Allah, God of Islam and of the great deserts. By dint of watching, vertigo also takes you, and the giant hats, which hairstyle the attentive dead, now look quite to rise to approach the dancers.

All the same we are afraid at the end that they will fall, these vertiginous valseurs, and suddenly the little music so monotonous seems really tired, it too, and hesitant, close to finish, and the cavernous drums beat something out of order, as would be a kind of berloque that would say: That's enough, finish. The dancers start sagging on the floor, first one, then two, then three, then all... It's over. We feel almost as exhausted as themselves, and the big hats of the catalfaques also have the effect of collapsing, of pulling in their wooden necks. It's over...

Throughout the ceremony, we had not lost the notion of being surrounded by an absolutely mortuary region, and now we shiver a little at the thought that, to get away, we will have to plunge back in there, walk for a long time among the steles, among the cypress trees with black foliage, with white branches whose tips, under the midnight sky, also simulate colossal, obsessive dervish headdresses...

Saturday, August 30.

Tonight, at 9.30, I cross Stambul to go to the national representation that the Turks are giving in my honour. In the streets, the eastern crowd is in great festival of Ramazan, and above, in the dark sky, the air minarets have their crowns of lights. All the way down the road, I get cheered. In front of the theatre, the crowd, which was waiting for me, delirious seeing me and the music plays the Marseillaise. When I enter my dressing room, which is filled with drapes and flowers, the whole crowded room rises and the applause never stops. The Sultan, his son and the Crown Prince each sent an aide de camp to greet me on their behalf.

At this hour, still through the crowd, in the enchantment of the nights of the Ramazan, I return to my solitary house.

Translated by Bayron Pascal