The Rulers of the Mediterranean by Richard Harding Davis

A little Italian steamer drew cautiously away from the Piraeus when the waters of the bay were quite black and the quays looked like a row of foot-lights in front of the dark curtain of the night. She grazed the anchor chains of H. M. S. the _Colossus_, where that ship of war's broad white deck lay level with the water, as heavy and solid as a stone pier. She seemed to rise like an island of iron from the very bottom of the bay. Her sailors, as broad and heavy and clean as the decks, raised their heads from their pipes as we passed under the glare of the man-of-war's electric lights, and a bugle call came faintly from somewhere up in the bow. It sounded as though it were a quarter of a mile away. Our lower deck was packed with Greeks and Albanians and Turks, lying as closely together on the hard planks as cartridges in the front of a Circassian's overcoat. They were very dirty and very handsome, in rakish little black silk pill-box caps, with red and gold tops, and the initials "H. I. " worked in the embroidery; their canvas breeches were as baggy and patched and muddy as those of a football-player, and their sleeveless jackets and double waistcoats of red and gold made them look like a uniformed soldiery that had seen very hard service. Priests of the Greek Church, with long hair and black formless robes, and hats like stovepipes with the brim around the upper end, paraded the narrow confines of the second cabin, and German tourists with red guide-books, and the Italian ship's officers with a great many medals and very bad manners, stamped up and down the main-deck and named the shadowy islands that rose from the sea and dropped out of sight again as we steamed past them.

In the morning the islands had disappeared altogether, and we were between high banks -- higher than, but not so steep as the Palisades; rows of little scrubby trees ran along their fronts in lateral lines, and at their base mud forts with mud barracks and thatched roofs pointed little cannon at us from every jutting rock. We were so near that one could have hit the face of the high hills with a stone. These were the Dardanelles, the banks that nature has set between the Sea of Marmora and the Mediterranean to protect Constantinople from Mediterranean squadrons. We pass between these banks for hours, or between the high bank of Roumelia on one side and the low hilly country of Asia where Troy once stood on the other, until, at sunset, we are halted in the narrowest strait of the Dardanelles, between the Castle of Asia and the Castle of Europe, "the Lock of the Sea" -- that sea of which Gibraltar is the key. That night we cross through the Sea of Marmora, and by sunrise are at Constantinople.