The Pillars of Hercules

If I had arrived in Lesbos on my own, in a boat from Turkish Izmir, or on a Greek island-hopping ferry, with days on the island, I would have tried to make it work for me. I would have buttonholed a Lesbian, needled a landlady, glad-handed a Greek, and tried to create some rapport. But this was a one-day visit. I jumped puddles all morning, had lunch on the Seabourn and made another foray in the afternoon, all the time watching the clock. The food on board was excellent; there was friendship and good cheer and comfort. It was so easy for me to turn my back on the island and wait for the ship’s whistle to blow and for Lesbos to vanish astern.

Most of the passengers were getting off the ship in Istanbul. A few were going on to Haifa. Mrs. Betty Levy was threatening to stay aboard for another month or more. Her dream, she told me, was to be at sea for weeks—no ports, no tours.

This impending sense of departure gave our progress up the Dardanelles the following morning a gloomy air of abandonment, and the funereal pall was not lightened by the knowledge that we were passing Gallipoli, and the two hundred thousand graves of fallen soldiers. The Dardanelles is like a canal, no more than a mile wide in some places, linking the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to the Sea of Marmara, where another canal—the Bosporus—divides Istanbul, and so on, to the Black Sea.

The Dardanelles is also the Hellespont of Leander, who swam back and forth to be with Hero; and of Lord Byron, in homage and in imitation. I had thought of swimming it myself—a mile was swimmable—but it looked uninviting in late October, with four- to five-foot breaking waves, and a heavy chop, with a cold wind blowing from Thrace on the north side.

“Freeze the vodka,” Jack Greenwald was saying to the waiter in French, preparing him for the caviar course at tonight’s dinner. “Wrap the bottle in a wet towel, put an apple in it for taste and keep it so cold it gets syrupy. Do you follow me?”

The bloody battlefield of Gallipoli was now the little Turkish village of Gelibolu, mainly fisherfolk, and where Xerxes and Alexander had marched their armies across on pontoon bridges, where Jason had sailed with his Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, there were rusty freighters, and more villages, and a town, Canakkale—some mosques and minarets visible, along with the factories and the clusters of houses. But it was wrong to expect anything dramatic. It was an old sea, of myths and half-truths and sound bites of history; its periods of prosperity and peace had been interrupted by even longer periods of disruption and pillaging. It was the center of many civilizations, but there had always been barbarians at the gates—and inside the gates.

Yet so little was left of the Mediterranean past that it was possible to travel the sea, from port to port, and never be reminded of the ancients. Even the recent brutality of Gallipoli was buried on the featureless shore—just another cemetery. There were so many graves on the shores of this sea.

Fog rolled in, dusk fell, blurred lights shone from the shore, some indicating the crests of hills. And then in this mist, a nocturne of misty light, there emerged and remained printed on the night a vision from the past, of a skyline that was purely minarets and towers, and mosque domes and bridges and obelisks, like a promise made in Byzantium that was being honored in the present. We had crossed the Golden Horn.

Closer to the European shore, which is the site of the old city, their features were more distinct, first the squarer lines of the Topkapi Palace, then Agya Irene, and the fifteen-hundred-year-old Agya Sophia, every brick intact; and behind its minarets, the six minarets of the Blue Mosque, and on the crest of the hill Nur Osmanye—the Light of God—the thick Byzantine fire tower, Yeni Mosque beneath it, at the end of the Galata Bridge, and beyond the vast almost unearthly masterpiece of Sinan, the Süleyman Mosque, pale and glittering even in this shifting fog.

Ferries were crossing the Bosporus, passing the Seabourn, hooting, their lights illuminating the sea and giving the scraps of hanging fog the shimmering and golden texture of an antique veil, a little tattered and brittle, perhaps, but still usable for conveying mystery.

Just before I left the Seabourn Spirit, Jack Greenwald took me aside and gave me a gaily wrapped present. Inside was a Turkish lapel pin and his Household Cavalry tie.

“Wear them both,” he said. “The pin will be useful here in Turkey. The tie is helpful everywhere.”

“I’ll feel like an imposter wearing this tie.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“And isn’t it an insult to your regiment?”

“Not at all,” he said. “My regiment wasn’t half as impressive as that one.”

“Jack, do you mean you weren’t a member of the Household Cavalry?”