The Serasker Tower.
Feeling thus “airy and meet for intercourse with the stars,” one could not do better than ascend to the top of that stone Titan called the Serasker Tower. I think that should Satan again undertake to offer a view of the kingdoms of the world by way of a temptation, his best course would be to select this spot for the enterprise. The tower, built in the reign of Mahmûd II., is planted upon the summit of the most lofty hill in Stambul, on that spot in the centre of the vast courtyard of the War Office called by the Turks the umbilicus of the city. It is constructed mainly of white Marmora marble, on the plan of a regular polygon with sixteen sides, and rears itself aloft, erect, and graceful as a column, overtopping to a considerable extent the gigantic minarets of the adjacent mosque of Suleiman. Ascending a winding stair lighted here and there by square windows, you catch fleeting views now of Galata, now of Stambul or the villages on the Golden Horn, and before you are halfway to the top seem already to have reached the region of the clouds. It may happen that a slight noise is heard directly over your head, and almost at the same instant a something flashes by, apparently an object of some sort being hurled headlong from above; but, in reality, one of the guards stationed day and night on the summit to watch for fires and give the alarm, who, having discovered at some distant point of the horizon a cloud of suspicious-looking smoke, is taking word to the seraskier. After mounting about two hundred steps you reach a sort of covered terrace running all around the tower and enclosed with glass, where an attendant is always at hand to serve visitors with coffee. On first finding yourself in that transparent cage, suspended as it were between heaven and earth, with nothing to be seen but an immense blue space, and the wind howling and rattling the panes of glass and making the boards strain and creak, you are very apt to be attacked with vertigo and to feel strongly tempted to give up the view; but at sight of the ladder which leads to the window in the roof courage returns, and, climbing up with a beating heart, a cry of astonishment escapes you. It is an overpowering moment, and for a little while you remain silent and transfixed.
Entrance and Tower of Seraskier.
Constantinople lies spread out before you like a map, and with the turn of an eye the entire extent of the mighty metropolis can be embraced—all the hills and valleys of Stambul from the Castle of the Seven Towers to the cemetery of Eyûb; all Galata, all Pera, as though you could drop your sight down into them like a plumb-line; all Skutari as though it lay directly beneath you—three lines of buildings, groves, and shipping, extending as far as the eye can reach along three shores of indescribable beauty, and other stretches of garden and village winding away inland until they fade out of view in the distance; the entire length of the Golden Horn, smooth and glassy, dotted over with innumerable käiks, which look like bright-colored flies swimming about on the surface of the water; all of the Bosphorus too, but, owing to the hills which run out into it here and there, it looks like a series of lakes, and each lake seems to be surrounded by a city, and each city festooned about with gardens: beyond the Bosphorus lies the Black Sea, whose blue surface melts into the sky; in the opposite direction are the Sea of Marmora, the Gulf of Nicomedia [Ismid], the Isles of the Princes, and the two coasts of Asia and Europe, white with villages; beyond the Sea of Marmora lie the Dardanelles, shining like a silver ribbon, and beyond them again a dazzling white light indicates the Ægean Sea, with a dark line showing the position of the Troad; beyond Skutari are seen Bithynia and the Olympus; beyond Stambul the brown undulating solitudes of Thrace; two gulfs, two straits, two continents, three seas, twenty cities, myriads of silver cupolas with gilded pinnacles, a glory of light, an exuberance of color, until you doubt whether it is indeed your own planet spread out before you or some other heavenly body more highly favored by God.