[C] The Lycus enters the city near the Gate of Pusæus and empties into the Sea of Marmora at Vlanga-Bostan.—Trans.
From the walls of the Blachernæ we overlook the suburb of Ortajilar, inclining gently to the water’s edge and crowned with its many gardens; beyond it lies that of Eyûb, the consecrated soil of the Mussulman, with its charming mosques and vast cemetery shaded by a forest of cypresses and white with mausoleums and tombstones; back of Eyûb is the elevated plain which was formerly used as a military camp, and where the legions elevated the newly-made emperors upon their shields;[D] and beyond this, again, other villages are seen, their bright colors set in a framework of green woods and bathed by the farthermost waters of the Golden Horn.
[D] This ceremony more probably took place near Makri Keui on the Sea of Marmora.—Trans.
Such is Stambul, truly a divine vision. But when it is remembered that this huge Asiatic village surmounts the ruins of that second Rome, of that great museum of treasures stripped from all Italy, from Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, one’s heart sinks within him: the mere thought of such an accumulation of works of art makes one dizzy. And where are they now, those great arcades which traversed the city from wall to sea, those gilded domes and colossal equestrian statues which surmounted the mighty columns before baths and amphitheatres, those brazen sphinxes seated upon pedestals of porphyry, those temples and palaces which once reared their mighty façades of granite in the midst of an aërial throng of marble deities and silver emperors? All have disappeared or been changed past recognition. The equestrian statues of bronze have been recast into guns, the copper coverings of the obelisks converted into money, the sarcophagi of the emperors turned into fountains. The church of St. Irene is an armory: the cistern of Constantine[E] is a workshop; the pedestal of the column of Arcadius is occupied by a blacksmith; the Hippodrome is a horse-market; the foundations of the royal palaces are heaps of stones overgrown with ivy; the pavements of the amphitheatre, grass-grown cemeteries. A few inscriptions, half obliterated by fire or defaced by the simetars of the invaders, are all that remain to tell us that on these hills once stood the marvellous metropolis of the Empire of the East. And over all this mass of ruin and decay Stambul sits brooding, like some odalisque above a sepulchre, awaiting her hour.
[E] The Cistern Basilica, ascribed to Constantine the Great, is still used for its original purpose. The Cistern Philoxenes is occupied by silk-spinners.—Trans.
At the Hotel.
And now, if my readers will kindly accompany me back to the hotel, we will rest for a while. The greater part of what I have described thus far having been seen by my friend and myself on the very day of our arrival, one may easily imagine what a condition our brains were in as we wended our way toward the hotel at about nightfall. As we passed through the streets neither of us opened our lips, but on reaching our room we dropped on the sofa, and, facing about, asked each other simultaneously,
“Well, what do you think of it? How does it strike you?”
“Fancy my having come here to paint!”
“And I to write!”