First Night

First night in and I awake at 05:00, December dark, crouching facing the door of the hotel room, heart beating fast, respiration elevated, skin tingling, hair standing up, all senses on alert, carpet underfoot, cold air and scent of sea from the narrow opening of the window. What awakened me? Sleep fogged, tendrils of memory, a long, drawn out, rising wail, something alien. A cry for help, moans of pain, a rallying cry for hunters?

Light from the hallway seeps under the door. I listen, focus, feel. No one there. I turn to the window, faint light from the street. No one at the window. I’m sweating in the cold room, in the moment, down in reptile brain. Where am I? What was that sound?

It comes again, high pitched, keening, mournful. What could it be? Higher cognition resumes. Ah. Of course. The muezzin’s call to the faithful. I take a deep breath, slow my heartbeat, and go to the window, a city street, illumination by streetlights and the glowing mosque. I’m in Istanbul, Constantinople, Byzantium.

The center of the world for sixteen hundred years and the destination of a journey I began in early spring of the last year of my youth. I had set out from London on a powerful silver and blue Triumph motorcycle, planning to spend midsummer exploring France and Spain, then turning east, to find Byzantium at summer’s end.

After green months of love and wine I departed France the fair, my dark eyed girl warm against my back, over the chill Pyrenees peaks and down to summer hot Barcelona. We were captured there by narrow streets and ancient city secrets, and by a white washed room in the Gothic Barrio. My desire for mythical Byzantium faded.

Three times in three decades of wandering I set out for that fabled city. Like stepping into a fast moving stream I was carried away on currents and tides, to minor tributaries and wide rivers, to Hong Kong and Oaxaca, to Cebu, Paris and Santa Monica. For some unknown reason I could not find my way.

Now I watch through the window as first light comes slow and gray, filtered through lowering clouds. And as first night fever passes I watch Byzantium emerge from morning mists, so long elusive, now found.