The Snake Stone

21

Armed with a black malacca cane and a pair of Piccadilly boots, Dr. Millingen locked his door carefully and went down the few short steps into the street. During his medical studies at Edinburgh he had taken to rambling with other long-haired youths through moorland and mountains. They had declaimed poetry together, admired the awe-inspiring scenery, and ruminated on Adam Smith, Goethe, the tyranny of princes, and the long-term effects of the French Revolution. These days, in spite of the protests of his Turkish friends and clients, he walked half an hour at most, believing that mild exercise improved his circulation and shook up his liver.

The Turks, as a rule, avoided exercise. One of his clients had once observed that he had others to exercise for him: a household of servants to bring the pipes, the coffee, or the evening meal. He had even hinted, as delicately as he could, that Dr. Millingen was committing an injustice, intruding in another’s sphere by attempting any physical effort for himself. As for taking a strenuous walk, it led to the risk of being jostled in the street, or of apoplexy; and because an Ottoman gentleman could hardly be expected to appear in the streets without his retinue, the annoyance would be shared by his household. Short of taking a second wife, this gentleman liked to insist, there was no easier way of sowing disharmony and vexation through a man’s home than by following the doctor’s curious prescription.

The doctor himself did not throw himself into these walks with unalloyed enthusiasm, either. Though often steep and even staired, the streets of Pera were not the Lammermuir Hills; the gloomy alleys of the port could hardly be compared to the dark aisles of his beloved pinewoods; and where the corncrake skimmed across the fields at dusk, or the roebuck barked imperiously across the wild glens, the fauna of Pera, like that of Istanbul itself across the Horn, was lazy, underfoot, and had fleas.

Dr. Millingen faced the street, flexed his stick, and began to walk.

Nobody ever could say how, or even why, the dogs had come to Istanbul. Some people supposed that they had been there always, even in the time of the Greeks; others, that they invaded the city at the time of the Conquest, dropping down from the Balkans to prowl through the blasted streets and the ruins in the fields, where they formed into packs and carved out territories for themselves that still held good to the present day. But nobody really knew. Nobody, Dr. Millingen had realized long ago, much cared.

Not a breed, but all alike, these rough-coated yellow dogs with short legs, large jaws, and feathery, curving tails spent most of the day slumped in all the alleys, gateways, thoroughfares, and backstreets of the ancient city, with one eye closed and the other lazily absorbing the activities of the people around them. It took a visitor to see them properly, and a relatively recent resident like Dr. Millingen, trained in habits of scientific observation, to see them with a forensic eye; to everyone else they were so much a part of the fabric of the city, so perfectly integrated into their own mental map of a district, that had all the dogs simply vanished from the streets one night, people would have had only the uneasy impression that something had changed; and nine out of ten Stambouliots would have been hard pressed to say what. The dogs did not impinge. They almost never bit a child, ran amok in the market, or stole the butcher’s sausages. You stepped over a dog sleeping in a doorway; you skirted a muddle of dogs sprawled in a patch of sunlight in the middle of the road; you tossed in bed when the howling and barking of the dogs at night grew more than usually intolerable; and you never noticed that they existed at all.

Now and then, perhaps once in a hundred years, the authorities woke up to the omnipresent nuisance of the dogs and attempted to round them up: they were carted off into the country, dumped on islands, driven-surprisingly meek-into the Belgrade woods or out of the Edirne gate. But either they all came back or they simply grew again, like the lizard’s tail or moss in the masonry, the same yellow, rangy, ribs-sticking-out mangy curs, with fleabites and battle scars and their own distinct parishes. And nobody minded them, either. Like puddles after rain, or shadow, or the blazing sun at noon, they were simply there; and they scavenged the city streets and kept them clean.

A soiled crust, a dead bird, a heap of vegetable refuse, old bones, peelings, scraps, rinds, rotten fruit: they missed nothing and wasted nothing. They could eat anything-even shoes. But they rarely tasted fresh meat.

Dr. Millingen had once suggested, in the course of a consultation with the sultan himself, that with five hundred oka of the cheapest horseflesh and five ounces of arsenic, the sultan could rid his metropolitan subjects of an interminable nuisance, the whole race of mangy dogs-dogs, as he understood it, whom Muslims regarded as unclean animals; and the sultan, cocking his head sharply to register his surprise, had replied that he supposed the dogs, too, were a part of God’s creation. “You would think it very barbaric, would you not, if I were to order all the English doctors in Istanbul rounded up and fed with poisoned meat? It is the same with the dogs.”

Dr. Millingen could think of several arguments in reply, but he could not argue with the sultan’s tone.

Advancing at a brisk pace along the street, he swung his cane from side to side and glared suspiciously at the yellow dogs; while they merely yawned, or scratched their fleas, and pretended not to notice Dr. Millingen.