Читать книгу Around the Black Sea. Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania онлайн

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Most of the Turks in the first-class cabin did not come to the table, because they will not eat Christian food for fear that lard or some other extract of the despised pig was used in its preparation. They took their meals in their state-rooms, with their wives and children, where they made their own coffee over spirit lamps and drank water from red earthen jugs which they had filled at the sacred fountains before leaving Constantinople. The women did not leave their cabins until they reached their destination, when they climbed blindly down the gangways into the row-boats, with veils drawn closely over their faces and their bodies enveloped in large shawls.

Several Persians in the first cabin came to their meals regularly, and brought their appetites with them. The Koran applies to them the same as it does to the Turks, but those gentlemen were not so pious as they should be. And I noticed that none of the Mohammedan passengers, except the mullahs and one general, said their prayers when the time came. The general was very devout. He wore a long, light-gray overcoat, reaching to his heels, which he kept so closely buttoned that we wondered if he had anything under it, and, like all military men over here, Russians, Austrians, and Turks, he never put aside his sword, not even when he spread his prayer rug on the deck and turned his face toward Mecca to pray.