Quite a pretty English garden has been laid out in Pera, commanding
a fine view of the Bosphorus. There is a coffee-house in the centre,
with tables and chairs outside, where you can sip your coffee
and enjoy the view at the same time. The Turks make coffee quite
differently from us. The berry is carefully roasted and then reduced
to powder in a mortar. A brass cup, in shape like a dice-box with a
long handle, is filled with water and brought to a boil over a brasier
of coals: the coffee is placed in a similar brass dice-box and the
boiling water poured on it. This boils up once, and is then poured
into a delicate little china cup half the size of an after-dinner
coffee-cup, and for a saucer you have what resembles a miniature
bouquet-holder of silver or gilt filigree. If you take it in true
Turkish style, you will drink your coffee without sugar, grounds and
all; but a little sugar, minus the coffee-mud at the bottom, is much
nicer. Coffee seems to be drunk everywhere and all the time by the
Turks. The cafés are frequent, where they sit curled up on the divans
dreamily smoking and sipping their fragrant coffee or hearing stories
in the flowery style of the _Arabian Nights_. At the street corners
the coffee-vender squats before his little charcoal brasier and drives
a brisk business. If you are likely to prove a good customer at the
bazaar, you are invited to curl yourself up on the rug on the floor of
the booth, and are regaled with coffee. Do you make a call or visit
a harem, the same beverage is immediately offered. Even in the
government offices, while waiting for an interview with some grandee,
coffee is frequently passed round. Here it is particularly acceptable,
for without its sustaining qualities one could hardly survive the
slow movements of those most deliberate of all mortals, the Turkish
officials.