Constantinople by Edmondo De Amicis

Author:Edmondo De Amicis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2017-06-28T09:53:04+00:00

“Yangın var!”

I was half asleep and dreaming about this very walk towards five o’clock in the morning in my bedroom at the Hotel Byzantium. I could see the hill of Superga* in the distance and had just started to recite to my Turkish lady visitor: “That branch of the lake of Como which turns towards the south between two uninterrupted chains of mountains” – when my friend Junck suddenly appeared before me, dressed in his nightgown and carrying a candle, and exclaimed in astonishment: “What’s going on in Constantinople tonight?” Listening, I could hear a confused and muffled sound coming from the street, a noise of hurried footsteps on the stairs, a murmur and bustle, as if it were day. From my window I could make out in the darkness a crowd of people hurrying towards the Golden Horn. I ran out on the landing and seized a Greek waiter who was rushing down the stairs, and asked him what was happening. He tore himself away, yelling: “Yangın var,* for heaven’s sake! Haven’t you heard the shout?” and then vanishing he called back, “Look at the top of the Galata tower.” I returned to the window, and looking towards Galata saw all the upper part of the tower lit up by a vivid crimson light, and a huge black cloud within a great vortex of sparks billowing up from the neighbouring houses and rapidly covering the starry sky.

Suddenly we thought of the great fires of Constantinople in the past, and especially the terrifying conflagration which had broken out four years previously,* and our first reaction was one of terror and compassion. But immediately afterwards – I am ashamed to confess it – a crueller, more egotistical feeling arose in me, the curiosity of the painter and the writer and – this too I must confess – Junck and I exchanged a smile that Doré* could have used for one of the demons in Dante’s Inferno. If someone had opened our bodies up at that moment he’d have found only an inkwell and a palette inside.

We dressed in furious haste and went down into the main street in Pera. But our curiosity, fortunately, was disappointed. The fire had already been extinguished even before we reached the Galata Tower. Two small houses were still burning a little; people were beginning to go home; the streets were running with water from the pumps and encumbered with furniture and bedding, in the middle of which, in the grey light of dawn, men and women in their underclothes were coming and going, shivering with cold, and shouting in a dozen different languages, in a tone of voice in which only just enough of the terror at the danger they had recently passed remained to animate their talk about it. Seeing that everything was over, we went towards the bridge to console ourselves, for our wicked disappointment, with the sunrise, which, as a spectacle, proved to be quite equal to a conflagration. The sky was beginning to grow light beyond the hills of Asia.

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