The Emigrants

foot, or at best on a beast of burden. As if the wheel had not yet been invented. Or are we no longer a part of time? What meaning has a date like the 24th of September?? — Behind the house is a garden, or rather a kind of yard with a fig and a pomegranate tree. Herbs also grow there — rosemary, sage, myrtle, balm. Laudanum. One enters by the blue-painted door at the rear. The hall is broad and stone-flagged and newly whitewashed. The walls like snow. The rooms are almost bare of fittings, and make an empty, deserted impression. Cosmo claims we have rented a ghost house. Wooden steps lead up to a rooftop terrace shaded by an ancient vine. Next door, on the gallery of the minaret, a dwarfish muezzin appears. He is so close that we can see the features of his face. Before crying out the prayer, he calls a greeting across to us. -Under the rooftop vine, the first evening meal in our house. Below on the Golden Horn we can see thousands of boats crossing to and fro, and further to the right the city of Istanbul stretches to the horizon. Mounds of cloud above it, flame-red, copper and purple, lit by the setting sun. Near daybreak we hear a sound that fills the air, such as we have never heard before, a sound like the whispering of a far-off multitude gathered in the open in a field or on a mountainside. We go up to the roof and see a moving baldachin, a pattern of black and white canopied overhead as far as the eye can see. Countless storks, migrating south. Later in the morning we still talk about them in a coffee house on the shore of the Horn. We are sitting on an open balcony at some height, on show like two saints. Tall schooners pass by, at no distance at all. One can feel the swathes of air as they go. In stormy weather, the proprietor says, their booms sometimes smash a window or knock plants off ledges. - 17th October: behind with my notes, less through the demands of life than through idleness. Yesterday an excursion in a Turkish boat, down the Golden Horn and then along the right, Asian bank of the Bosphorus. We leave the outer parts of the city behind. Forested crags, embankments with evergreens. Here and there, lone villas and white summerhouses. Cosmo proves a good sailor. At one point we are surrounded by I do not know how many dolphins. There must have been hundreds, if not thousands. Like a great herd of swine they ploughed the waves with their muzzles and circled us time and again before finally plunging head over tail away. In the deep coves, the branches bent down low to the eddying waters. We slipped through beneath the trees and, with just a few pulls on the oars, entered a harbour surrounded by strangely silent houses. Two men were squatting on the quay playing dice. Otherwise there was not a soul about. We entered the little mosque by the gate. In an alcove in the half-light within sat a young man studying the Koran. His lids were half closed, his lips were murmuring softly. His body was rocking to and fro. In the middle of the hall a husbandman was saying his afternoon prayers. Again and again he touched his forehead to the floor and remained bowed down for what seemed to me an eternity. The soles of his feet gleamed in the straggling light that entered through the doorway. At length he stood up, first casting a deferential glance to right and left, over his shoulders — to greet his guardian angels, who stand behind him, said Cosmo. We turned to go, from the half-dark of the mosque into the sand-white brightness of the harbour square. As we crossed it, both shading our dazzled eyes like desert travellers, a grey pigeon about the size of a full-grown cockerel tottered clumsily ahead of us, leading us to an alley where we came across a dervish aged about twelve. He was wearing a

very wide gown that reached to the ground and a close-fitting jacket made, like the gown, of the finest linen. The boy, who was extraordinarily beautiful, was wearing a high brimless camel-hair toque on his head. I spoke to him in Turkish, but he only looked at us without a word. On the return, our boat seemed to glide of itself along the dark green overhung crags. The sun had set, the water was a shadowy plain, but higher up a light still moved here and there. Cosmo, at the tiller, says he wants to come out shortly once again, with a photographer, to take a souvenir photograph of the boy dervish …

On the 26th of October Ambros writes: Collected the photographs of the white boy from the studio today. Later, made enquiries at the Chemins de Fer Orientaux and the Banque Ottomane concerning our onward journey. Also bought a Turkish costume for Cosmo and one for myself. Spent the evening with timetables, maps and Karl Baedeker's handbook.

The route they took from Constantinople can be followed fairly closely from the diary notes, despite the fact that they are farther apart now, and at times stop altogether.