I determined to make the circuit of the ancient walls of Stambul entirely alone, and this plan I recommend to all Italians visiting Constantinople, as the sight of those majestic and beautiful ruins cannot make a profound and lasting impression upon the mind unless one is altogether intent upon receiving it and can freely follow his own train of thought. It is a question of tramping about fifteen Italian miles through deserted streets and exposed to the full blaze of the sun. “Very possibly,” said I to my friend, “when I have gone halfway I shall be seized with such a desperate attack of loneliness that I will invoke you like one of the saints, but, all the same, I want to go by myself.” And so, having first lightened my purse for fear some suburban pick-pocket might do it for me, and thrown something to the “eager dogs within,” so that I might say to myself later on, “Be still, then, accursed wolf!” I set forth in the direction of the ValidÊh Sultan bridge at eight in the morning, beneath a sky washed clean and bright by a shower which had fallen during the night. My plan was to leave Stambul by the gate in the BlachernÆ, to follow the line of the walls from the Golden Horn to the Castle of the Seven Towers, and to return along the shore of the Sea of Marmora, thus completing the triangle of the Mussulman city.

Crossing the bridge, I turned to the right and plunged into that vast district known as Istambul disciarÉ, or Outer Stambul, a long strip of the city shut in between the walls and the harbor, composed of miserable little houses and wood and oil-shops, and more than once destroyed by fire; flights of stairs lead from the banks down to little inlets crowded with boats and shipping, and in the space between these on the one hand, and the narrow lanes and alleyways of the city on the other, there is a constant passing back and forth of porters, asses, and camels, the same mixture of strange people and dirty things which, as well as the unintelligible clamor of tongues, is to be found in those wonderful ports of the Chinese and Indian seas where the people and merchandise of two hemispheres meet and mingle. Those walls which are still standing on this side are five times a man’s height, castellated, strengthened every hundred paces by small quadrangular towers, and in many places falling into ruins. They are, from an historic or artistic standpoint, however, the least noteworthy of any of the fortifications of Stambul.

Traversing the Greek quarters, I skirted the bank among the various pastry-cook, fruit, and fritter stalls, passing by groups of handsome Greek sailors standing in the attitudes of their own ancient gods around some cook carrying on his avocation in the open; then, making a circuit around the vast Ghetto of Balata and threading the silent BlachernÆ quarter, I finally quitted the city by the gate called Egri Kapou, not far from the banks of the Golden Horn. While all this may be said in a few words, to do it requires an hour and a half, now mounting, now descending, passing around lakes of mud and over heaps of stones, through an endless maze of narrow streets and dark passage-ways, across vast desolate wastes, with nothing to guide you but the points on the minarets of the Selim mosque: at a certain place you begin to notice fewer and fewer European faces and costumes; then European houses disappear, then pavements, then the signs on the shops, then names on the streets, then every indication of labor; and the farther you go the more surly the dogs become, the more impudently do the Turkish ragamuffins stare you in the eye, and the common women take pains to conceal their faces; until at last you find yourself in the heart of barbarous Asia, and, instead of a two hours’ walk, you seem to have made a two days’ journey.

On issuing from the Egri Kapou I turned to the left, and came quite unexpectedly upon a long stretch of those famous walls which formed Stambul’s defences upon the land side. Three years have elapsed since that moment, but to this day I can never recall it without a fresh sensation of wonder. There is no other spot in the East, so far as I know, which presents so vividly before the mind the memories of the past, the grandeur of human achievement, the majesty of power, the glory of the centuries, the mystery of decay, and the beauties of nature. You are filled with awe and terror and admiration at this sight, worthy of a canto of Homer, and involuntarily uncover, exclaiming “All honor!” as though called upon to salute the mutilated ranks of some mighty band of heroes.

The line of walls and lofty towers extends as far as the eye can reach, rising and falling according to the natural character of the land, at some points seeming to sink into the earth, and at others to crown the summit of a mountain: it is diversified by an endless variety of color, and ruin in every stage of advancement, in some places nearly black, in others almost as yellow as gold, and overgrown by a rich, deep-green vegetation, which, scaling the walls to their very summits, falls back in waving garlands from the battlements and loopholes, rears itself in feathery plumes upon the tops of the towers, and overflows in green cascades from curtain and crumbling breach, its billowy waves filling the moat and lapping the very roadside.

There are three lines of fortifications, forming as it were three gigantic ruined steps. The inner one, which is the highest, is strengthened at short regular intervals by massive square towers; that in the middle by round ones; the outer wall, much lower than the others, is protected by a deep, wide moat, formerly filled with water drawn from the Golden Horn and Sea of Marmora, and now choked with grass and shrubbery. These walls, as we see them now, are almost precisely as they were the day after the conquest of Constantinople. The restorations made by Muhammad and Bayezid II. amount to very little. There can be still seen the breaches made by Orbano’s powerful guns, the marks left by the catapults and battering-rams, the great rents where mines were fired, and all the various indications which mark those spots where the attack was most furious, the defence most desperate. Almost all the round towers of the middle wall are ruined from base to summit, and while those of the inner wall are most of them still standing, they are broken at the corners, dismantled, dwindling off to points at the top, like huge tree-trunks sharpened at the end with blows from some giant axe, or else cracked from top to bottom or hollowed out at the base like cliffs worn by the sea-waves. Great masses of masonry detached from the curtains have rolled down upon the platforms of the middle and outer walls and choke up the moat. Little footpaths wind in and out amid the heaps of stones and thick underbrush, lost to view in the deep shadows of the overhanging vegetation between huge stones and bare patches of earth torn up by the falling of some heavy mass. Each portion of walls between any two towers comprises in itself a complete and wonderful example of ruins and of vegetation, full of power and majesty, wild, colossal, forbidding, and adorned with a melancholy and imposing beauty which impels a feeling of reverence. One seems to be looking at the ruins of an endless chain of feudal castles, or of one of those mighty girdles of wall which encircled the fabulous empires of Eastern Asia. Constantinople of to-day disappears, and before us rises the City of the Constantines; we breathe the air of the fifteenth century, and as our thoughts become more and more centred upon the day of her tremendous fall, we find ourselves for a few moments dazed, bewildered, and turned, as it were, to stone.

The Egri Kapou through which I had come is identical with the famous Charsian gate used by Justinian when he made his triumphal entry into the city, and later by Alexius Comnenus when he seized the throne: before it lies a Mussulman cemetery, and here, during the early days of the siege, were placed the gigantic cannon of Orbano, which kept four hundred artillerymen employed and required a hundred oxen to move. The gate was defended by Teodoro di Caristo and Giovanni Greant against the attacks of the left wing of the Turkish army, which reached clear to the Golden Horn. From this point to the Sea of Marmora there are no longer any hamlets, not so much as a group of houses, and, as the road consequently runs between the walls and the open country, there is nothing whatever to distract one’s thoughts from the mighty ruins themselves. Setting forth on the road, I walked for some time between two cemeteries, a Christian one on my left, lying directly beneath the walls, and an enormous Mussulman one on my right, shaded by a forest of cypress trees; overhead the sun poured down in straight, direct rays; before me stretched the highway, white, solitary, and rising by a gentle incline, until on the summit of the opposite heights it divided the limpid horizon with a sharp, clear-cut line. On one hand tower succeeded tower, on the other tombstone followed tombstone; not a sound broke the stillness save my own measured tread and the occasional rustle of a lizard in the grass by the roadside. After walking thus for some distance, I suddenly found myself opposite a beautiful square gateway surmounted by a great arch in an excellent state of preservation, and flanked by two massive octagonal towers. This was the Adrianopolis Gate, the Polyandrion of the Greeks, which was made the principal point of attack when the Avars besieged Constantinople during the reign of Heraclius in 625. During the attack under Muhammad II. it was defended by the brothers Paoli and Antonino Troilo Bochiardi, and later on was the gate through which the Turks made their victorious exits and entries. Neither ahead nor about me was there a living soul to be seen: all at once a couple of Turkish cavalrymen came through the gate and disappeared down the Adrianopolis road at a full gallop, enveloped in a thick cloud of dust, after which everything returned to the same death-like stillness. Following their lead, I too took the Adrianopolis road, and, turning my back for a time upon the walls, descended into the valley of the Lycus, climbed the opposite ascent, and found myself looking out over the vast undulating and arid plain of Dahud-Pasha, where, during the siege of Constantinople, Muhammad II. established his head-quarters. Here I stood for some time, shading my eyes with my hand and searching about as if expecting to find some traces still of the imperial camp to aid me in picturing to myself the strange and imposing spectacle which that spot must have presented toward the close of the spring of 1453. Just here the life of all that mighty army flowed back as to its heart, clasping in its fatal embrace the great dying metropolis; from this point those orders were issued which fell on all sides like thunderbolts, set in motion the arms of a hundred thousand workmen, directed the overland transportation of two hundred galleysA from the Bay of Beshiktash to the bay of Kassim-Pasha, thrust armies of Armenian miners into the bowels of the earth, despatched heralds in all directions whose flags announced the hour of attack, and in the time it would take to tell the beads of a tespi bent three hundred thousand bows and caused three hundred thousand cimeters to flash in the air. Here the trembling envoys of Constantine came face to face with their Genoese countrymen from Galata selling oil with which to grease Orbano’s mighty cannon, and Mussulman scouts stationed upon the banks of the Sea of Marmora in order that they might give warning when the European fleet should appear upon the horizon bringing the last relief of Christianity to the last defences of the Constantines. There too were to be found a swarm of renegade Christians, Asiatic adventurers, old sheikhs, and lean, ragged dervishes, wasted away by long marches, going restlessly back and forth among the tents of the fourteen thousand Janissaries; and interminable troops of horse already harnessed, long files of camels standing motionless in the midst of catapults and battering-rams, and cannons lying overturned where they had exploded, and great pyramids of huge granite balls, among which wound long processions of begrimed and blackened soldiers bearing two by two from the neighborhood of the walls to the open country beyond the mutilated bodies of the dead and groaning forms of the wounded; while over all there hung a perpetual cloud of smoke.

In the centre of the Janissaries’ camp rose the many-colored tents of the court, and high above them all the crimson pavilion of Muhammad II. At daybreak he would appear in his doorway pale from the anxious vigil of the night, wearing a great turban to which was affixed a yellow plume, and a long blood-colored caftan. There he would stand, his eagle glance fixed upon the still unconquered city lying before him, one hand toying with his thick black beard, while with the other he fingered uneasily the silver handle of his curved dagger: around him would be gathered a group of his officers—Orbano, inventor of that huge cannon which was destined before many days to explode and scatter his own bones upon the esplanade of the Hippodrome; Admiral Balta-Ogli, already filled with uneasy presentiments concerning his future and the disgrace which the golden sceptre of his mighty lord was to bring about his ears; the hardy governor of the Epepolin, that great movable castle, surmounted by a tower and braced with iron, which was finally burned to the ground in front of the gate of San Romano; and a circle of poets and legislators bronzed by the suns of a hundred battlefields; a retinue of pashas, whose bodies were covered with wounds and their long caftans riddled with arrow-holes; a throng of gigantic Janissaries, with naked blades clasped in their hands, and sciaus armed with great steel clubs, ready to strike off the head or pound the flesh of rebel or coward alike; the flower of that boundless multitude of Asiatics, overflowing with youth, energy, and ferocity, only awaiting the signal to hurl themselves like a mighty torrent of fire and sword upon the feeble remnant of the Byzantine Empire. There they would stand, silent, motionless, in the rosy beams of the rising sun, looking with rapt gaze where, against the horizon, the thousand cupolas of the great city promised to them by the Prophet rose above the sobs and lamentations of its cowardly inhabitants. I saw them thus before me, their very postures, their arms, the folds of their long cloaks and caftans, their gigantic shadows falling athwart the earth seamed and scarred with the passage of heavy cannon and ponderous cars, when all at once, my eye chancing to fall upon a large stone half buried in the ground, I mechanically read the worn inscription upon its face. In a twinkling the imposing warlike scene disappeared, and in its stead the wide barren plain was peopled with a light-hearted multitude of Vincennes soldiers in their red breeches; I heard the cheerful songs of Normandy and Provence, saw MarÉchal Saint-Arnaud, Canrobert, Forey, Espinasse, Pelissier, and recognized a thousand faces and brilliant uniforms, alive in my memory and dear to my heart ever since childhood, and read again, with an inexpressible sensation of surprise and delight, that meagre inscription: “EugÈne Saccard, Caporal dans le 22° lÉger, 16 Juin, 1854.” From this point I recrossed the valley of the Lycus, and again took the road which skirts the walls, still lonely and deserted and still winding between ruins and cemeteries, passing before the ancient military Gate of Pempti, now walled up, and again crossing the Lycus, which enters the city at this point, I found myself in front of the Cannon Gate, so called from the circumstance of Orbano’s great gun having been stationed opposite it; here Muhammad II. made his last and successful assault upon the fortifications. Raising my eyes to the top of the wall, I was startled at encountering the gaze of two or three dark, unprepossessing-looking individuals with wild, matted hair, who peered down at me from behind the battlements with an expression of astonishment, and then remembered to have heard that a band of gypsies had established themselves in the ruined towers and more habitable parts of the fortification. The traces left at this point of the fearful conflict are grand and awe-inspiring beyond expression—crumbling, dismantled walls, towers knocked to pieces or battered out of shape, bastions buried beneath huge masses of rubbish, loopholes burst open, the earth ploughed up, and the moat filled with colossal fragments which look like masses detached from the side of a rugged mountain. It is as though the terrific battle had been waged only the preceding day, and these ruins speak more eloquently than could any human voice of the frightful disaster of which they are the witnesses. It was the same, with but slight modification, before every gate in the whole line of the defences. The battle began at daybreak, with the Ottoman forces divided into four enormous columns preceded by a hundred thousand volunteers, who formed an immense vanguard predestined to death. All of this food for the cannon, this reckless, undisciplined horde of Tartars, Caucasians, Arabs, and negroes, directed by sheikhs spurred on by dervishes, driven and lashed from behind by furious bands of sciaus, hurled itself forward to the attack laden with earth and faggots, forming one unbroken line and raising one unearthly yell from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn. On reaching the edge of the moat they are momentarily checked by a hailstorm of stone and iron missiles, beating hundreds upon hundreds to the ground, pierced with arrows, blown to pieces by the cannonballs, set fire to by springals, beaten, crushed, and torn asunder—old men, boys, slaves, thieves, shepherds, brigands, hewn down by the thousand, until before long the moat and banks are filled with dead bodies, heaps of quivering flesh, blood-stained turbans, bows, and cimeters, across which still other hordes, driven forward by those behind, rush to the attack, only to be beaten back, overturned, repulsed, decimated by a still more furious storm of stones and arrows from the walls; while a dense cloud of smoke and dust envelops alike besiegers and besieged, living and dead, until at length a shrill, wild call from a thousand Ottoman trumpets, heard above the din of battle, sounds the retreat, and the great vanguard, bleeding, exhausted, and reduced to half its number, draws off from the entire length of the walls in an unsteady, wavering line. Then Muhammad gives the signal for a general assault, and at that sign three mighty armies, three great rivers of men, start into motion, advance, spread out, cover the heights, overflow the valleys, and amid the flashing of swords and waving of banners, the din and clangor of drums and trumpets, sweep against those doomed walls with a shock like that of a tempestuous ocean beating against a rock-bound shore, while the savage cry, uttered as with one voice from all that vast multitude of powerful throats, “La Ilah illa lah!” echoes like a thunder-clap from the Golden Horn to the Castle of the Seven Towers. Then the great battle really begins, or rather a hundred different battles, carried on before every gate, at every breach, in the ditches, from the bastions, at the foot of the curtains. From one end to the other of Constantinople’s mighty ramparts ten thousand bastions pour down death and destruction upon two hundred thousand human beings; rocks, beams, casks filled with earth, and burning faggots are hurled from tower and curtain. Ladders laden with men give way, the high bridges of the attacking towers fall in, catapults take fire; host after host hurls itself forward, wavers, and falls back upon heaps of stone, piles of human bodies, the drawn weapons of comrades, the dying and wounded; here and there the thick clouds of smoke are lighted up by vivid flames of Greek fire, while the air is rent with the shrieks of the injured, whistles of cannon-balls, explosions from the mines, and the forbidding roar of Muhammad’s eighteen batteries, which command the city from the neighboring heights. Occasionally there comes a momentary hush, as though the opposing forces had paused for breath: as the smoke clears away glimpses can be caught through the great breach near the San Romano Gate of Constantine’s crimson mantle, or the flashing arms of Gustinian and Francesco di Toledo, or the terrible forms of the three hundred Genoese archers; and at that sight the battle is resumed with renewed fury. The smoke, rolling down in thick clouds, again conceals the breach, ladders are flung against the walls, fresh torrents of missiles pour from the defences, and the dead are piled in heaps before the Adrianopolis and Golden, the Selymbria, the Tou Tritou, the Pempton, Rusion, BlachernÆ, and Heptapyrgion gates, while legion after legion of armed men, rising as it were out of the very earth, beat against the walls, pour over the moat, surmount the outer ramparts, fall, rise again, dragging themselves up by loosened stones, climbing over dead bodies, through clouds of arrows, beneath hailstorms of stones, in girdles of flame, until at length, decimated and spent, the besiegers draw off, while a wild cry of victory mingled with solemn chants of thanksgiving is heard from the city’s walls. From the height facing the San Romano Gate, Muhammad II. has followed the battle’s course surrounded by his fourteen thousand Janissaries, and now for a moment he seems in doubt whether to continue the assault or abandon the undertaking altogether; but, turning his glance upon that throng of eager upturned faces, those ranks of sinewy giants, whose mighty frames are trembling with fierce and wrathful impatience, only awaiting the word to throw themselves furiously into the breach, his mind is made up, and, rising in his stirrups with a gesture of haughty disdain, he once more raises the battle-cry. Then is the vengeance of the Almighty let loose upon that doomed city. The fourteen thousand, responding with one terrible cry as from a single throat, sweep forward; throngs of dervishes speed in all directions, threatening and collecting the scattered forces; sciaus beat back the fugitives; the pashas again form their men in line; and the Sultan, brandishing his iron mace and surrounded by a cloud of flashing cimeters and drawn bows, a sea of turbans and helmets, dashes forward to take the field in person. From the San Romano Gate there pours a fresh shower of missiles; Gustinian is wounded and drops; the Italians fall back discouraged; a gigantic Janissary, Hassan d’Olubad, is the first to scale the walls; Constantine, fighting amid the remnant of his Morean heroes, is thrown from the battlements, fights on below outside the gate, until at last, overpowered by numbers, he sinks among the heaps of the slain. And with him falls the Empire of the East.

Tradition says that a mighty tree marks the spot where the emperor’s body was found, but I failed to discover any trace of it. Between the huge blocks of stone, where streams of blood once flowed, the ground is all white with marguerites, and clouds of butterflies hover above. Plucking a flower by way of remembrance, to the great bewilderment of the watching gypsies, I resumed my walk. Before me the walls still stretched away into the distance as far as the eye could reach, completely hiding the city at those points where the ground rose, so that one would never have dreamed that just beyond those deserted ruins there could be a great metropolis, crowned with mighty buildings and inhabited by a teeming population; in the hollows, however, above the battlements, points of minarets flashed in the light, and the summits of cupolas, roofs of Greek churches, and tops of cypress trees stood out against the sky, while here and there, through a gap, fleeting views of the city would be obtained, as through a door hastily opened and closed again—groups of houses seemingly abandoned, deserted villages, kitchen-gardens, pleasure-grounds, and still farther away the fantastic outlines of Stambul palpitating in the white heat of the mid-day sun.

I next came to the Tetarte Gate, now only distinguished by means of its two towers standing close together. All this part of the walls is in a much better state of preservation than the rest; long portions of the bastions of Theodosius are still standing almost intact, as well as the charming towers erected by the prefect Anthemius and emperor Ciro Constantine, whose invincible summits, crowned by fifteen centuries, seem to defy the ravages of time and fury of man. At some points peasants have erected upon the curtains huts whose slight construction offers a strange contrast to the massive masonry around them, like birds’-nests built upon the side of some beetling cliff. And to the right are the same interminable, unbroken succession of cypress groves and cemeteries, rising and falling with the rise and fall of the earth, the little valleys all gray with tombstones: here a dervish convent is half hidden by a circle of plane trees; there a solitary cafÉ stands with its fountain and willow, and beyond the trees white footpaths wind away and are lost to view in the rising ground of the bare and arid plain, beneath the brilliant sky, against which vultures may be seen slowly circling upward.

Another quarter of an hour’s walk brought me to the gate called Yeni Mevlevi, from a famous dervish monastery opposite it. The gateway is low, with four marble columns built into it, and a square lower on either side, bearing an inscription of Ciro Constantine dated 447, and another of Justinian II. and Sophia, in which the imperial names are incorrectly spelled—a rather striking proof of the barbaric ignorance of the fifth century. I peered through the gateway up at the walls, into the monastery, and the cemetery, but there was not a living soul to be seen anywhere, so, after resting a while with my back against the parapet of a little bridge thrown across the moat, I resumed my pilgrimage.

I would give my memories of the most beautiful view in Constantinople if in exchange I could transfer to my readers any of the profound and singular impressions made upon me by my slow progress between those two interminable chains of ruins and sepulchres, beneath that eastern sun, amid that profound solitude, that utter peacefulness. Often, at some troubled period of my life, I had wished that I might find myself one of a great silent caravan of mysterious persons ever travelling through strange, unfamiliar lands to an unknown goal. Well, that road seemed to answer to this fanciful longing. I wanted it to continue for ever. Far from oppressing me with any feeling of melancholy, I was conscious of a sensation of exhilaration and excitement: the brilliant vegetation, the cyclopean dimensions of the walls, the great rolling surface of the earth like the waves of a mighty ocean, the crowding memories of emperors and armies, of fierce warfare, dead and gone generations, whole nations who had passed away, the great city so near at hand, the mortal stillness, broken only by the beat of an eagle’s wings taking its solitary flight from the summit of a ruined tower,—all flooded my soul, and bore me out of myself on a rushing tide of unutterable desires and longings, which my mortal body seemed too small to contain. I felt as though I ought to be two feet taller, clad in that colossal armor of the grand elector of Saxony which hangs in the Madrid armory, that my tread should resound through the stillness like the measured beat of a troop of mediÆval halberdiers, and my arms be endued with titanic strength, that I might lift and heave into place the overturned masses of those superb walls; and, walking thus, with head aloft, with bent brows and clenched hands apostrophizing in heroic verse Constantine and Muhammad, rapt in a sort of warlike delirium, my whole soul in the past, and the blood coursing through my veins with all the heat and fire of first youth, I felt so unutterably happy at being alone, so jealous of that solitude surcharged with life, that, had I suddenly encountered the best friend I have in the world, I am afraid the coolness of my welcome would have estranged him for ever.

I next came to the ancient military gate called Tou Tritou, now closed. The shattered condition of towers and curtains show that some of Orbano’s mighty cannon must have been directed against this portion of the defences. It is thought, indeed, that here was one of those three breaches which Muhammad II. pointed out to his army on the first day of the assault, saying, “You can ride into Constantinople on horseback through the three openings I have made for you.” Next I came to an open gate flanked by two octagonal towers, which, from its small bridge supported on three charming arches of a beautiful golden color, I identified as the Silivri Gate, leading to ancient Selymbria, corrupted by the Turks into Silivri. During the siege this gate was defended by a Genoese, Maurizio Cottaneo. Some of the paving laid by Justinian can still be seen. Facing it is an enormous cemetery, beyond which stands the celebrated Balukli monastery. On entering the cemetery I found without difficulty the solitary spot where are interred the heads of the famous Ali of Tepelen, pasha of Janina, his sons Veli, governor of Trikala; Muctar, administrator of Arlonia, Saalih, administrator of Lepanto, and of his nephew, Mehemed, son of Veli, administrator of Delvino. There are five small stone columns, surmounted by turbans, bearing the date 1827,B and an inscription of the simplest kind. They were erected by the poor Soliman dervish, Ali’s boyhood’s friend, who bought the heads after they were removed from the Seraglio walls, and interred them with his own hands. The inscription upon Ali’s tombstone, which stands in the middle, reads as follows: “Here lies the head of the celebrated Ali Pasha of Tepelen, governor of the sanjak of Janina, who for upward of fifty years labored for the independence of Albania;” which proves that pious lies may be found even upon Mussulman gravestones. Pausing for a few moments to muse over the little corner of earth covering that once formidable head, Hamlet’s interrogations addressed to Yorick’s skull came into my mind: “Where now are your klephtis, lion of Epirus? where are your brave Arnaouts, your castles bristling with guns, your charming pavilions reflected in the still waters of Janina’s lake, your buried treasures? and where, alas! the beautiful eyes of your beloved Vasilik, that lovely unfortunate who wandered a homeless outcast through the streets of the capital distracted by the memories of her lost happiness and high estate?” At this point my reflections were disturbed by a slight noise behind me, and, turning, I found a tall, emaciated man, clad in a long dark tunic, gazing at me with a look of interrogation. From his gestures I understood that he was a monk from the Greek monastery of Balukli offering to show me the Holy Well, and I accordingly followed him in the direction of the church. Leading the way across a deserted courtyard, he opened a small door, and, having lighted a candle, conducted me down a narrow stair beneath a low damp roof: at the bottom was a sort of cistern, and my guide, holding the candle so that its rays fell upon the water, pointed out some red fishes swimming about, gabbling meanwhile some unintelligible rigmarole, which was no doubt the famous legend of the miracle of the fish. It seems that at the moment when the Mussulmans made their final and successful assault upon Constantinople a Greek monk was engaged in frying fish in the monastery kitchen. Suddenly another monk appeared in the doorway, crying that the city had been taken. “Bah!” replied the first; “I will believe it when I see these fish jump out of the pan;” upon which out jumped the fish as lively and frisky as you please, half brown and half red, because only one side was done; and they were religiously picked up, as any one might suppose, and put back in the water whence they had been originally taken; and there they are swimming to this very day. His recital finished, the monk threw some drops of holy water in my face, and, when these had fallen back in his hand converted into coin, reconducted me to the entrance, where he stood leaning against the doorway watching my receding figure with his dull, sleepy little eyes.

And ever on the one hand wall after wall, tower succeeding tower, and on the other shaded cemeteries, sometimes a green field or so, a vineyard, or a group of deserted houses. Now and then, as I looked ahead from some depression in the road, I would fancy that I could see the final outline, but on reaching high ground the same unbroken succession would again be seen stretching away into the distance, seemingly without end: at every few steps new towers would come in sight, far away, one behind the other, two or three at a time, as though they were pressing forward and peering over one another’s heads in the effort to see who it could be thus daring to disturb that silence and solitude.

All along this part of the defences the vegetation is something quite marvellous. Spreading trees grow from the very summits of the towers, as though they stood in gigantic vases; garlands of brilliant flowers, vines, and creepers droop and wave from the battlements; while below, from the midst of a dense undergrowth of brambles, nettles, wild strawberries, and lentisks, plane and willow trees cast their dark shadows across the moat and its banks. Whole sections of the walls are completely covered with vegetation flung like a green veil over the brickwork and crumbling masonry, and concealing the cracks and fissures. The moat is laid out in truck-gardens; on its banks are flocks of sheep and goats grazing, whose keepers, Greek boys, lie stretched out at full length under the trees; now and then a flock of birds flies out from the walls, and the atmosphere is loaded with the penetrating odor of wild grass; from those hoary ruins there comes something of the joyous spirit of spring-time, and they look as though they had been decked and wreathed for the triumphal procession of a sultana. All at once a salt breath blew across my cheek, and, raising my eyes, I saw far ahead of me the blue bosom of the Sea of Marmora; at the same instant a voice seemed to murmur in my ear, “The Castle of the Seven Towers,” arresting me in the middle of the road with a vague feeling of inquietude; but, presently resuming my walk, I passed first the ancient gate of Deuterou, and farther on the Melandesias Gate,C coming at last face to face with the castle itself. This place of ill omen, erected by Muhammad II. on the site of the ancient Kyklobion of the GreeksD to defend the city at that point where the sea and land walls join, was later, when further victories had rendered Stambul secure from danger of attack, and it was consequently no longer required as a fortress, converted into a prison. To-day it is merely the skeleton of a castle guarded by a handful of soldiers—a hated ruin, whose dark and gloomy associations and sinister history are bywords among the people of Constantinople, although strangers seldom see more of it than the fleeting glimpse to be had from the decks of the steamer which bears them to the mouth of the Golden Horn. By the Turks it is called Yedi Kuleh, and they regard it much as the French did the Bastile and the English the Tower of London—a monument recalling the most oppressive days of the tyranny of the sultans.

Looking at it from the road, the walls hide all but two of the great towers which gave it its name, only four of which are now standing. Two Corinthian columns indicate the ancient Golden Gate through which Heraclius and Narsetes made their triumphal entry: according to a legend common to Turk and Greek alike, it is through this gate that the Christians will come on that day when they once more take possession of the City of Constantine. A postern beneath a small square tower gives admittance to the interior, and the sentinel in slippers who drowses without usually permits the simultaneous entry of a visitor into the castle and a coin into his pocket. This successfully accomplished, I found myself in a large enclosure combining lugubriously the aspect of a cemetery with that of a prison. All around rose massive blackened walls, forming a pentagon crowned by heavy towers, square and round, high and low, some tottering to pieces, others intact and topped by high conical roofs, overlaid with lead; innumerable flights of half-ruined stairs led to the battlements and loopholes. A thick, tangled growth of vegetation was overshadowed by a group of cypress and plane trees, above whose summits the minaret of a little mosque could be seen, and beneath, half hidden by the undergrowth, a group of small huts occupied by the soldiers; in the centre of the enclosure stood the tomb of a vizier strangled in the castle; here and there appeared traces of an ancient redoubt, while beneath the underbrush and along the walls were fragments of bas-reliefs, shafts of broken columns, and capitals half buried in the earth and covered with moss and slime—a strange, melancholy chaos, forbidding and oppressive, which made me hesitate about exploring farther. After a momentary indecision, however, I proceeded, circumspectly though, as if afraid that a false step might land me in a pool of blood. The huts were shut up, the mosque closed—everything as still and solitary as in some abandoned ruin. On the walls may still be found traces of Greek crosses, the Constantinian monogram, the spread wings of the Roman eagle, and discolored bits of the decorations of the earlier Byzantine building. Some rough inscriptions on the stones in minute Greek characters bear witness to the presence of Constantine’s soldiers stationed here under the command of the Florentine Giuliani to defend the citadel; they were evidently executed on the day preceding the fall of Constantinople, and the poor fellows, reconciled to death for themselves, request only that Heaven may preserve their city from pillage and their families from slavery. One of the two towers flanking the rear of the Golden Gate is the dungeon tower, in which the sultan used to confine ambassadors from those countries with which he was at war: a number of Latin inscriptions may be seen upon the walls traced by the hands of the prisoners, the most recent being those of the Venetian envoys confined during the reign of Ahmed III., when the Morean War broke out. The other is that far-famed tower around which cluster all the most horrid traditions of the castle—that tower within whose gloomy walls were perpetrated countless deeds of blood and treachery, where viziers and once-powerful ministers raised their last prayers to Heaven for aid while the steps of the executioner were without the door, or, driven crazy by loneliness and despair, beat their heads against the stones. In one of these living sepulchres stood the great mortar in which the bones and flesh of the ulemas were pounded: on the first floor is the circular room, called the Bloody Prison, where the condemned were secretly beheaded and their heads thrown down a well called the Well of Blood, whose mouth may still be seen in the centre of the uneven floor covered with two slabs of stone. Beneath is the so-called Rocky Cavern, lighted by a lantern hung from the roof, where the skin of those sentenced to be tortured was cut into strips, or boiling pitch poured into the wounds left by the lash, and their hands and feet pounded with clubs, the agonized shrieks of these victims rising faint and muffled to the ears of the prisoners in the tower above. In one corner of the enclosure portions remain of the inner courtyard, where common criminals were beheaded by night, near to which there stood until comparatively recent times a wall of human bones reaching nearly to the ramparts of the castle. Near the entrance is the prison of Osman II., the first imperial victim of the vengeance of the Janissaries. Here the unhappy sultan, only eighteen years of age, his strength redoubled by despair, held his four executioners at bay until the hand of one cowardly ruffian, seizing him unawares, elicited a piercing cry, quickly choked by the fatal noose.

Throughout all the towers, and parts of the walls themselves, is a network of dark corridors, secret stairways, low, ponderous doors secured with heavy bars and beams, beneath which many a haughty head of pasha or chamberlain, governor or imperial prince, has bent for the last time, hurled in the flower and vigor of youth from the height of power and success to a dark and ignominious death, their life-blood often staining the castle-walls, while their wives, arrayed in their richest robes, wondered as they sat expectantly amid the splendors of the harem why their lord delayed his coming. Along those narrow passage-ways reeking with moisture, down those steep, uneven stairs, soldiers and executioners with blood-stained hands have passed by night, guided by the uncertain rays of a lantern, or messengers from the Seraglio bringing a faint tantalizing gleam of hope to some poor wretch or else the final “No” of the Sultan, and dead bodies with staring eyes and the horrible silken cord still hanging from the neck been carried in the arms of panting sciaus, exhausted with their long silent struggle in the dim, uncertain light with the fury born of despair.

At the opposite end from Stambul, on the Seraglio Hill, was that terrible Tribunal of the Court, and hard by it the huge executioner’s machine, surmounted by seven great stone gallows, to which living victims were transported by sea and land to be offered up beneath the moon, and brought forth again into the sunlight, mere heads and trunks; from the heights of the tower beside it, in which he was to die, the lonely prisoner could see by night the brilliant lights of the Seraglio where the imperial kiosks were all illuminated for a fÊte. It gives one a positive sensation of pleasure to see that infamous pile so transformed, as though all its victims, unable to revenge themselves on man, had come to life again on purpose to rend and tear it with teeth and nails. The mighty monster, decrepit and disarmed, gapes with its hundred mouths of ruined doorways and disused loopholes, a mere empty scarecrow, while rats, snakes, and yellow scorpions eat like worms at its very vitals and swarm through its great spent body, and an insolent vegetation decks it out as if in mockery with leafy garlands and radiant bloom. After glancing in through several doorways, and seeing nothing but flying troops of rats, I mounted a grass-grown stair leading to one of the curtains on the western side, whence a view can be had of the entire building—a vast extent of ruined towers and battlements, stairways and ramparts, dark red or blackened with age, surrounding a mass of vivid green, and beyond them more towers and battlements, stretching on, on, on, belonging to the eastern walls of Stambul; so that by half closing the eyes one seems to be looking out over one prodigious abandoned fortress outlined against the blue waters of the Sea of Marmora: to the left a large part of Stambul is visible, cut up into long, winding streets, disappearing from view in the direction of the ancient triumphal way of the Byzantine emperors, which led from the Golden Gate by the forums of Arcadius and Constantine all the way to the royal palace. This broad and smiling view threw the dark, forbidding pile at my feet into sharp contrast. Leaning there against one of the battlements, warmed by the sun, bathed in the flood of vivid light, I gazed for a long time at the great uncovered sepulchre below with something of the same hesitating curiosity with which one looks at the scene of a recently-committed crime: everywhere there reigned a profound stillness; big lizards slid across the walls; below, in the ditch, a toad might occasionally be seen hopping about, and above the tower ravens were flying and cawing to each other. Clouds of insects rose from the damp ruins and buzzed around my head, and presently, as a light breeze stirred the air, my nostrils were saluted with the horrible odor of a dead horse thrown in the moat outside. A feeling of loathing and abhorrence seized me, yet I seemed rooted to the spot, as though detained there by magic. A dull sense of drowsiness crept over me; through the death-like noonday hush and the monotonous buzzing of the insects I seemed to hear the splash of each head as it fell into the Well of Blood; muffled dying cries rose from the dungeons, and the voice of Brancovano’s younger son shrieking, “My father! my father!” as he felt the halter about his neck; and, being weary and half blinded by the glare, my eyes gradually closed, and as I lost consciousness for a moment all these frightful fancies crowded into my brain with terrifying distinctness. Fortunately, at that instant I was aroused by a clear, piercing cry, and looking down I saw the muezzin of the castle mosque standing upon the balcony of the little minaret. That voice, so solemnly sweet, so tranquil, speaking to man of his God, heard in that spot and at that moment, stirred me to the very depths of my being: it seemed to proclaim in the name of all who had died within those walls that their sufferings had not been for nothing; that their tears had been caught, their miseries been rewarded; that since they had forgiven it became us to do the same; and that prayer and utter trust in God, even though the whole world may forsake you, are indeed the only paths to peace, while all outside the infinite love and pity is but worse than vain. And then, moved and touched, I left the castle.

Taking the road again and skirting the walls of Stambul, I walked toward the sea, passing close by the Adrianopolis station. Here several railroad lines cross each other, and I found myself among a number of long strings of dusty, travel-stained-looking cars. No one was in sight, and had I been one of those fanatic Turks hostile to all European innovations, I might easily have set fire, one after another, to all those cars, and then proceeded leisurely on my way quite unmolested. Starting to walk along the track, I expected every moment to hear the cry of some guard or other warning me off the premises, but nothing of the sort happened, and before long I reached the end of the land-walls, where I supposed I would be able to enter Stambul. In this, however, I was doomed to disappointment. The sea- and land-walls join each other on the shore without any sign of gateway; so, climbing a ruined mole which runs out into the water at this point, I seated myself on a large stone and proceeded to look about me. In front lay the Sea of Marmora, beyond which rose the mountains of Asia, and farther still the blue heights of Skutari, looking very far away indeed. The shore was utterly deserted, and I seemed to occupy the universe alone. The waves broke at my feet, dashing their spray up into my face. I sat there for some time, turning over all manner of vague fancies in my mind: first, I saw myself come out of the Caligarian Gate and proceed slowly down the deserted road between the towers and cemeteries—a lonely figure, which I followed with some curiosity as though it had been some one else; then I amused myself with trying to trace out Yunk through the mazes of the great city; then I watched the waves as one after another they broke upon the shore with a murmuring sound, and one after another melted away in silence, seeing in them a figure of all those peoples and armies which from age to age had successfully hurled themselves against the walls of Byzantium. The phalanxes of Pausanius and Alcibiades, the legions of Maximus and Severus, the Persian bands and hordes of Avars, and the Sclavs, Arabs, Bulgarians, and Croats, the armies of Michael PalÆologus and Comnenus, and those of Bayezid Ilderim, of the second Murad, and of Muhammad the Conqueror, vanished one after another into the infinite silence of death, until I felt the same vague, oppressed sensation of melancholy as that which swept over the soul of Leopardi in the “Sera del di’ di Festa” when the solitary song of the laborer died away little by little, speaking to him with the voice of the ancient peoples, reminding him that everything on earth must pass away like the shadow of a dream.

Returning thence by the way I had come, I entered the city through the gate of the Seven Towers, in order to skirt along the entire outer edge of Stambul on the shore of the Sea of Marmora. To tell the truth, I was pretty well tired out by this time, but on these long excursions which have some settled object a kind of dogged obstinacy usually comes to the rescue and revives one’s flagging energies. I can see myself now, walking, walking, walking along that lonely high-road, beneath the burning sun, in a sort of waking dream crowded with familiar Turin friends, characters in novels, views of distant countries, and vague reflections upon human life and the immortality of the soul, and, crowning them all, the round dinner-table of the HÔtel de Byzance, brilliant with crystal and lights, afar off on the heights of a city many times the size of Stambul, and already half buried in the shades of evening. Crossing a large Mussulman quarter, apparently uninhabited, and which breathed something still of the sadness and desolation of the Castle of Seven Towers, I came to the vast Psamatia quarter, inhabited by Greeks and Armenians, also quite deserted and forlorn. A long, winding, wretched-looking street, from which the black battlemented walls could be seen below on the right standing out against the water’s vivid blue, brought me to the Psamatia Gate, emerging from which I again found myself in a Mussulman quarter, among grated windows, closed doors, little mosques, walled gardens, moss-grown cisterns, and abandoned fountains. I crossed the open space formerly the Cattle Forum: below me, on the right, was the same unbroken line of wall and tower, tower and wall, around me the same solitude and apparent desertion; occasionally a dog would stop and eye me suspiciously, or a youngster seated on the ground stare at me round-eyed, revolving some piece of impertinence in his mind, or the sudden opening and shutting of a window close by reveal for an instant a hand or the edge of a woman’s sleeve. Making a circuit around the large Vlanga gardens, which surrounded the ancient Theodosian Gate, I came upon a vast tract of desolate-looking ground showing traces of a recent fire. Then the city seemed to fade and die away in spots and melt into country. Dervish convents, Greek churches, and queer little open squares broke up the line of the streets; occasionally an old Turk would be seated beneath the shade of a great plane tree, dozing with the mouthpiece of the narghileh clasped between his fingers. Proceeding on my way, I came to a Turkish cafÉ, and stopped to get a glass of the water which I could see displayed in the window, but, after calling and knocking for some time in vain, I gave it up and went on.

Next I came to the Greek quarter of Yeni Kapu, then to another Mussulman quarter, then back again among the Greeks and Armenians of the Kuni Kapu quarter, but all the time never losing sight of the dark battlements and blue sea on my right, and never meeting any living creatures but dogs, beggars, and boys. At last the voice of the muezzin sounded through the lonely streets announcing the hour of sunset, and before long the shadows began to deepen and evening set in, but still the never-ending succession of little houses, melancholy mosques, ugly, deserted streets, and the dark openings of side lanes and byways continued, until I began to feel my strength giving out, and was just on the point of deciding to throw myself down on the mat before the next cafÉ I came to, when, quite unexpectedly, the huge mass of St. Sophia loomed up before me through the gloom. Oh joyful sight! My spirits rose at once, my strength revived, and, quickening my steps, I soon reached the harbor, crossed the bridge, and, behold! there before the brightly illuminated entrance to the principal cafÉ of Galata, were Yunk, Rosasco, Santoro, all my little Italy, coming to meet me with beaming faces and outstretched hands; and I heaved as long and deep a sigh of satisfaction as ever filled the lungs of a tired, hungry man.