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36 CONSTANTINOPLE AND ITS ENVIRONS ;
The marble flooring is so hot, that he is now obliged to mount on wooden pattens, as
his bare feet could not endure to come in contact with it. A dense vapour sometimes
so fills this saloon, that he sees nothing distinctly, but figures flit before him, like visions
in a mist. At the sides are ornamented fountains, whence issue pipes of hot and cold
water, which he mixes to his fancy, and bedews his person with it from a large copper
or iron spoon provided for the purpose. Having walked or sat in this heated mist till
a profuse perspiration bursts out, the tellah again approaches, and commences his operations. He lays the bather on his back or face, and pins him to the ground by kneeling
heavily on him; and having thus secured him, he handles him in the rudest and most
painful manner : he twists and turns the limbs, so as to seem to dislocate every joint.
The sufferer feels as if the very spine was separated, and the vertebrae of the back torn
asunder. It is in vain he complains of this treatment, screams out in anguish and apprehension, and struggles to extricate himself. The incubus sits grinning upon him, and
torturing him till he becomes passive from very exhaustion. When this horrid operation
is over, the tormentor offers to shave him; and if he make no resistance, he leaves but
one small lock of hair on the crown, by which the angel of death is to draw him from
his winding-sheet It is remarkable, that while the bather is burning with heat, the
flesh of this fiend, though exposed to the same temperature, is as cold and chilling as
monumental marble. A second tellah now attends, and uses him more gently than the
first: he envelopes his hands in gloves, or little bags of camlet, and, by a gentle and
dexterous pressure of the surface, he expresses, as it were, all the deposit of insensible
perspiration: it is surprising what a quantity he peels from the surface of the skin,
of this inspissated fluid, resembling in colour and consistence rolls or flakes of
dough.
When this substance ceases to exude, the operator rubs him with scented soap, and
drenches him almost to suffocation with deluges of hot water. After this thorough
ablution, he wipes him perfectly dry with soft, warm, perfumed towels, and leads him to
a divan, on which he reposes some time,—still in a state of nudity, with the exception of
a shawl thrown over him. Here refreshments are brought, and partaken of with an
extraordinary increase of appetite; after which he rises and dresses, perfectly refreshed.
Before he goes forth, a looking-glass set in mother-of-pearl is brought, to adjust his
cravat, on the glass of which he deposits the price of his bath. It was originally settled
at four aspers, which according to the present currency would be about one-third of a
farthing, and it still continues nearly the same in the small towns and villages. In the
capital, however, it is increased, in the more sumptuous baths, to fifty paras, or four
pence.
Where warm-springs are found, they are immediately diverted into reservoirs, and
edifices erected over them. Those of Kaplizza, near Brusa, already mentioned, are
perhaps the finest in the world. In the centre saloon, under a noble dome, supported
by marble pillars, is a basin of fifteen yards in circumference, also of polished marble,
and five feet deep, filled with hot and limpid water. At its source, whence it first issues
into day, it is at a boiling heat, and blisters the finger that incautiously feels it In the |
