IN A SULTAN’S PALACE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4506, 20 December 1922, Page 1

IN A SULTAN’S PALACE.

(By G. Ward Price.) “Thera is no more Sultan.” This will not. change things much. The last two Sultans have been captive nonentities. Odd lives these modern descendants of what were once the mightiest monarchs of Europe lead ! I have paid private visits to the last two Sultans and found them living .among surroundings of garish pomp that must be most depressing. In the old days when terrible Sultans, at whose frown half Europe quaked, lived in the Old Seraglio on Stamboul Point, they had a dreamy Eastern palace of lofty halls lined with cool blue tiles, opening into little courts where tiny silver, fountains played. Gardens full of grave cypresses, ami flowering almond trees sloped gently to the blue waters of the Marmara and Golden. Horn, and the Padishah, in stately robes, with an emerald as big as your fist clasping the aigrette in her turban, took his ease upon a velvet throne studded with hundreds of pearls, each big enough to make a 'handsome tie-pirn.

Nowadays there seems to be some French furnishing firm that specialis ■ es in fitting up modern palaces for Oriental potentates. Their working motto is : Cover everything you can with crimson velvet and gild the rest. Lately it is but seldom that the Sultan Mohammed VT. has left the shuttered w,alled-in, forbidden apartments of the harem—a whole palace in ’tself. There not even his Ministers or personal chamberlains can reach him with bad news, and his only communication with the world beyond its silent precincts is through the eunuchs —black and white—whose gawky, disjointed, frock-coated figures shamble in and out through the guarded gates.

One day las.t month’, while I was sitting with an officer of the Sultan’s staff, the most extraordinary of these came in with a message for him. It was a tiny figure, not a hair’s dreadthi over three feet high, dressed in uniform like an animated soldier doll. At first I thought he was a babyboy mascot. The chubby bands and toddling walk seemted those of a child of fiye. But something odd in tjie wizened face —a half wistful, half resentful and bitter look in the dark eyes—said otherwise; it told of a man’s spirit cooped up in the dwarf body. The officer treated the pdd little gnome as’ if 'he w;ere a ,tpy, toughing when he saluted with a click of pigmy heels or spoke in his squeaky treble voice. “He is thirty years old,” he told me. “Enver Pasha found him somewhere in Asia Minor and brought him here. He is a dwarf eunuch, and he keeps the har,em amused. “They used to dress him in a red fantastic costume, blit the funny little thing was miserable in it and moped ; then they had a wee frockcoat made for him, but he always wanted to be a soldier, and now that he’s in uniform you can s.ee how happy it’s made him.” But, the sorrow of deformity that lurked in the dwarf’s eyes made it impossible to find him a figure of fun.