The visions of the morning have disappeared, and Constantinople, that dream of light and beauty, turns out to be a huge city, cut up into a succession of hills and valleys, a labyrinth of human anthills, cemeteries, ruins, and desert-places—a mixture without parallel of civilization and barbarism, reflecting something of every city in the world, gathering within its borders every aspect of human life. That comparatively small part enclosed within the walls forms, as it were, the skeleton of a mighty city; as for the rest, it is a vast aggregation of barracks, an enormous Asiatic encampment, in which swarms a population of every race and religion under the sun. It is a great city in a state of transformation, composed of ancient towns falling into decay, of new ones built but yesterday, and of still others in process of erection. Everything is topsy-turvy; on all sides are seen the traces of some gigantic undertaking—mountains tunnelled through, hills levelled, suburbs razed to the ground, great thoroughfares laid out, heaps of stone, and the traces of disastrous fires, portions of the earth’s surface for ever undergoing some alteration at the hand of man. The disorder and confusion and the never-ending succession of strange and unexpected sights make one dizzy.

Walk down a stately street, and you find it ends in a precipice; come out of a theatre, and you are surrounded by tombs; climb to the summit of a hill, beneath your feet you discover a forest, while a new city confronts you from some neighboring hilltop; the street you have this moment left suddenly winds away from you through a deep valley half hidden by trees; walk around a house, you discover a bay; descend a lane, farewell to the city: you find yourself in a lonely defile, with nothing to be seen but the sky above you; towns appear and disappear continually. They start into view over your head, beneath your feet, over your shoulder, far off, near by, in sun and shadow, on the tops of mountains and on the shore below. Take a step forward, an immense panorama is spread out before you; backward, and you see nothing at all; lift your head, and the points of a thousand minarets flash before your eyes; turn it, and not one is in sight. The network of streets winds in and out among the hills, overtopping terraces, grazing the edges of precipices, passing beneath aqueducts, to break up suddenly in footpaths leading down some grassy incline to the water’s edge, or else, skirting piles of ruins, meanders away among rocks and sand to the open country. Here and there the huge metropolis stops, as it were, to take breath in the solitude of the country, then recommences, more crowded, gay, noisy, bewildering, than before; here it spreads out flat and monotonous, there scales the hillside, disappears over the summit, disperses; then once more gathers itself together. In one section it ferments with life, noise, movement; in another there is the stillness of death; one quarter is all red, another white, a third shines with gilding, a fourth looks like a mountain of flowers: stately city, village, country, garden, harbor, wilderness, market, cemetery, in endless succession, rear themselves, one above another, in such a manner that certain heights command in a single view all the aspects of life which are usually found embraced in an entire province. In every direction a series of strange and unfamiliar shapes is outlined against the sea and sky, so close together and so indented and broken up by the extraordinary variety of architectural forms that the eye becomes confused and the various objects seem to melt one into another.

In among the Turkish dwelling-houses European palaces rise suddenly up, spires overtop the minarets, and cupolas crown the garden-terraces, with battlemented walls behind them; roofs of Chinese kiosks appear above the faÇade of a theatre; barred and grated harems face rows of glazed windows; side by side with open balconies and terraces are found Moorish buildings with recessed windows and small forbidding doorways. Shrines to the Madonna are set up beneath Arabian archways; tombs stand in the courtyards; towers arise amid the hovels; mosques, synagogues, Greek, Catholic, Armenian churches, crowd one upon the other, as though each were striving for the mastery, and, from every spot unoccupied by buildings, cypress and pine, fig and plane trees stretch forth their branches and tower above the surrounding roofs.

An indescribable architecture of expedients, following the infinite caprices of the soil, portions of buildings cut up into sections, triangular, upright, prone, surrounded and connected by bridges, props, and defiles, heaped up in confused masses, like huge fragments detached from a mountain-side.

At every hundred steps the scene changes. Now you are in a suburb of Marseilles; turn, and it becomes an Asiatic village; another turn, and it is a Greek settlement; still another, a suburb of Trebizond. The language and dress, the faces you meet, the look of the houses in the various quarters, all suggest a different country from the one you have just left; they are bits of France, slices of Italy, samples of England, scraps of Russia. One sees depicted in vivid colors on the great surface of the city that battle which is here being waged between the various groups of Christians on the one hand fighting to repossess themselves of, and Islamism on the other defending with all its remaining strength, the sacred soil of Constantinople. Stambul, once entirely Turkish, is assailed on all sides by settlements of Christians, before whose advance it is slowly giving way all along the banks of the Golden Horn and the shores of the Sea of Marmora; in other directions the conquest is proceeding much more rapidly: churches, hospitals, palaces, public gardens, schools, and factories are rending asunder the Mussulman’s quarters, encroaching upon his cemeteries, and advancing from one height to another, until already, on the dismayed soil, there are sketched the vague outlines of another European city, as large as the one now covering the banks of the Golden Horn, and destined one day to embrace the European shore of the Bosphorus.

But from such general observations as these the attention is distracted at every step by some fresh object of interest: on one street it is the monastery of the dervishes, in another a great Moorish building, a Turkish cafÉ, a bazÂr, a fountain, an aqueduct. In the course of a quarter of an hour, too, one is obliged to alter his gait at least a dozen times. You must descend, mount, climb down some steep incline or up by stairs cut out of the rock, wade through the mud and surmount a thousand different obstacles, threading your way now through crowds of people, then in and out among shrubbery; here stooping to avoid lines of clothes hung out to dry; at one moment obliged to hold your breath, at the next inhaling a hundred delicious odors. From a terrace flooded with light and commanding a magnificent view of the Bosphorus, Asia, and the blue arch of heaven one step will bring you to a network of narrow alley-ways, leading in and out among wretched, half-ruined houses and choked up with heaps of stone and rubbish; from some delicious retreat filled with verdure and bloom you emerge on a dry, dusty waste littered with dÉbris; from a thoroughfare glowing with life, movement, and color you step into some sepulchral recess, where it seems as though the silence had never been broken by the sound of a human voice; from the glorious Orient of one’s dreams to quite another Orient, forbidding, oppressive, falling into decay, and suggestive of all that is mournful and depressing. After walking about for a few hours amid this medley of strange sights, one’s brain becomes completely confused. Were any one to suddenly put the question to you, “What sort of a place is Constantinople?” you would only stare at him vacantly, quite incapable of giving any intelligible reply. Constantinople is a Babylon, a world, a chaos.—Is it beautiful?—Marvellously.—Ugly?—Horribly so.—Do you like it?—It fascinates me.—Shall you remain?—How on earth can I tell? Can any one tell how long he is likely to stay on another planet?

You return at last to your lodgings, enthusiastic, disappointed, enchanted, disgusted, stunned, stupefied, your head whirling around like that of a person in the first stages of brain fever. This condition gradually gives way to one of complete prostration, utter exhaustion of mind and body; you have lived years in the course of a few hours, and feel yourself aged.

And the population of this huge city?