up the Horn, or over the Pera hill, or across the
bridge of boats; then, turning to the right, past
the poultry shops and the fish market, and the timber
stores and boat-builders, who live opposite
the arsenal, and so on through the Greek quarter,
through Eyub and its potteries, along dusty
roads, and across a bridge at the upper end of
the Golden Horn, following a little stream that
appears suddenly and offers to guide you with its
clue of silver thread, till you reach the Valley of
Pleasure with its solitary fountain, coffee-shops,
and shady trees. When I was there, there were no
flowers anywhere about the city, but a sort of leafless
yellow crocus, that sprang up in the
burial-grounds, and a few scented tufts of some sort of
mimosa, which boys offered you for sale in the
streets; but I dare say, in early spring, this
hill-girt valley is an amaranthine field of blossoming
hyacinth, and gold-spiked and gold-starred crocus.
Now, it was a brown-hide-bound meadow, with a
treeless brown stream (not boatless) severing it in
two. The same people seemed to fill the place—
Levantines, bedizened in vulgar and ill-understood
French dress, instead of the piquant national fez,
set sideways on the head, and the plaits of hair
wound like a turban round the classical, but
silly numskull. No flaunting white fustanella
kilts on the men; no pouch full of arms, forming
a threatening fan of silver handles. I see
and detest the false, stealthy eye; the large,
caricature nose; the bragging, cowardly face,
—in a word, the vulgarity, insolence, pretension,
and impudence of the Levantine generally; I see
telekis full of veiled ladies, and satins, and
fans; no ox-waggons with looking-glass
ornaments on the oxen's brows, and festoons of steel
crescents, but one or two ridiculous painted
sedans from Pera, and some cockney-looking
pedestrians out for the day from some Galata Greek
store. Under those plain folds of satin in the telekis,
just wrapped together like a dressing-gown,
and otherwise unornamented, I suppose lie hidden
the diamond-studded turbans, the ponderous
emerald earrings, the wide-sleeved selmas, the
embroidered scarfs, the striped gauzes, the Cashmere
fur-lined jackets, that I am told Turkish ladies
wear in their fountained rooms above the
Bosphorus, where perhaps they may one day rest as
thousands of murdered women have done before,
and nothing said. But, lo! as I am looking at
the beautiful itinerant wax-works, a teleki, that
seems hammered out of gold and silver, it is so
gay, drawn by four horses, sweeps down into the
valley! It contains the Sultan's daughter, whom
he married to his favourite page and pipe-bearer.
You may know the royal carriage by the red
braided reins, and the blue and silver livery of
the kawasses, drivers, and eunuchs, the stiff
half-European dress of the negro guard and the
attendant eunuchs. Of the attendant carriages
some are like blue boxes without doors, and one
has a silver bird with outstretched wings quivering
on the top.

Tired of the incessant patrolling of carriages,
and the monotony of seeing Greeks galloping
hack horses, we go and take coffee. Windybank,
who is with me here also, is soon writing a
ledger row of figures in the dust, and then casting
them up with his umbrella, hoping to show
that the stone procured from tunnelling the
Andes for a railway, would pay the expenses of
its making. We are near a great plane-tree, and
opposite a sort of blacksmith's shop, where
coffee, black, hot, and half grounds, is sold. At
the door sit some Greeks, taking sherbet, and
one or two poor Turks smoking water-bottle
narghilés, the glass jars of which are painted
with red and blue flowers. The Sultan, who
has been in the valley, has just left; I can see,
winding up a distant hill, the red and white flags
of his tawdry body-guard of lancers, emerging
from a thick rolling cloud of dust.

We were sitting meditating on I know not what
trifles, which were rising in our brains, thick as
motes in and out of the Jacob's ladders of
sunshine, when a teleki belonging to the Seraglio
drove up and stopped at the coffee stall where we
were. There were no court ladies in it (court
ladies were just then in such bad commercial
odour in Stamboul that they were refused credit
at the bazaars), but a kawass, coming to the door,
opened it respectfully, and indeed timidly, and
out stepped a very tall thin eunuch, of great rank
and of gigantic (self-) consequence. As a type of
his favoured class, he must be sketched. He wore
a fez of the finest scarlet cloth: the tassel, of the
bluest and the fullest. His robes were of the
costliest amber Cashmere, and his boots and overalls
of the glossiest patent leather. He had a broad
nose, and swollen pale black lips, black lustreless
eyes, and an imbecile forehead; and when he
spoke it was like a fife out of tune. The
sickliest dandy to be caught in Bond-street at a
fashionable hour, could not have put on such an
exquisite air of languor, indecision, and weariness,
of all the elements and life in general
as the head eunuch: who, I believe, can
bastinado and strap whom he will in the palace.
He stood—not condescending to rest his eyes
on us " forty-pig power of infidels"—one small
patent leather foot on the carriage-step and
one on the ground, a perfect example of fashionable
indecision. With slavish servility, came out
the dirty blacksmith cafigee whom no entreaties
could have brought near us, and asked his
eminence what he would have? He scarcely
knew; it was too warm and oppressive to decide;
perhaps he would wait and have coffee, perhaps
he would follow his lord the Sultan. Allah! let
the slaves wait till he can think. No, Satan, he
will go back to the palace without anything.
Satan, slap up the steps; Satan, drive quick;
Satan, flog the horses, fast. Away! curses
on all coffee-shops, and this one in the Sweet
Waters of Europe in particular. Satan, away!
The cafigee makes a gesture of hatred and disgust,
and goes back to his fire and his coffee-pots,
while the irresolute great man's carriage bounds
off across the turf, already sharp-lined with
pattern-cutting wheels.

And now, in their wake, Windybank and I,
mounting two hack horses, followed the Sultan's
flags and gingerbread carriages. When I thought
of the Dying Man, and the fading race and