Читать книгу Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy, 1674-1681 онлайн

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The fertility of North’s invention did not stop there. His shrewd study of human nature had taught him that men are influenced by externals far more than by essentials. He endeavoured to make the Turks feel at home with him by making himself outwardly like one of them. Knowing their prejudice against clean-shaven faces he grew a prodigious pair of moustaches, such as the best of them had. He tried to sit cross-legged, as they sat, and learnt to write as they wrote, resting the paper on his left hand, and making the lines slope from the left top corner downwards. He taught himself to use parables, apologues, and figures of speech, as they did, and to swear as they swore. Of this last accomplishment he was especially proud. He held that for purposes of vituperation Turkish was more apt than any other language, and he grew so accustomed to its aptness that even when he returned home his tongue would run into Turkish blasphemy of itself. Let us add another external trait that tended to make this infidel acceptable to true believers, though it was a trait for which he was indebted to nature rather than to self-culture. “It seems,” says his biographer, “that after he found his heart’s ease at Constantinople he began to grow fat, which increased upon him, till, being somewhat tall and well whiskered, he made a jolly appearance, such as the Turks approve most of all in a man.”