Along the walls facing Skutari rose the new palace of Sultan Mahmûd, opening out on the water by a great door of gilded copper. Near Seraglio Point stood the summer harem, a vast semicircular building, designed to accommodate five hundred women, with its great courtyards and magnificent baths and gardens—the scene of those ingenious illuminations which under the name of “tulip festivals” became so famous. Beyond the walls, opposite the harem and just above the shore, was placed the celebrated Seraglio Battery, consisting of twenty guns of different designs and covered with sculptures and inscriptions: each of these was captured on some battlefield and from Christian armies in the course of the earlier European wars. The walls were furnished with eight gates, three of them on the city side and five facing toward the sea. Great marble terraces extended from the walls along the banks, and subterranean passage-ways leading from the royal palace to the gates on the Sea of Marmora offered a means of escape to the sultans, who could thus take ship for Skutari or Topkhâneh in case they were besieged from the land.
Nor yet was this all of the Seraglio. Near the outer walls and all along the sides of the hills there arose numberless other kiosks, built to imitate little mosques or forts or tunnels, each one of which communicated by a narrow footway, concealed behind lofty screens of foliage, with the smaller gates of the third court. There was the Yali Kiosk, now destroyed, which was reflected in the waters of the Golden Horn; there stands to-day, almost intact, the New Kiosk, a little royal residence in itself, circular and covered with gilt ornaments and paintings, to which the sultans used to repair at sunset to feast their eyes upon the spectacle of the thousand ships riding at anchor in the port. Near the summer harem stood the Looking-glass Kiosk, where the treaty of peace by which Turkey ceded the Crimea to Russia was signed in 1784, and the kiosk of Hassan Pasha, all resplendent with gilding, its walls covered with mirrors which threw back fantastic reflections of the fêtes and nocturnal orgies of the sultans. The Cannon Kiosk, out of whose windows bodies were thrown into the Sea of Marmora, stood hard by the battery on Cape Seraglio. The Kiosk of the Sea, where the validéh of Muhammad IV. held her secret councils, overhung the spot where the waters of the Bosphorus mingle with those of the Sea of Marmora. The Kiosk of Roses looks out upon the esplanade where the pages were exercised, and it was here that in 1839 the new constitution of the empire, embodied in the Hatti Sherif of Gül-Khâneh, was signed. Some of the kiosks on the other side of the Seraglio which are still standing are the Review Kiosk, from which, himself unseen, the Sultan could watch all who passed by to the Divân; the Alai Kiosk, at that angle of the walls near St. Sophia whence Muhammad IV. flung to his mutinous soldiers his favorite Meleki, together with twenty-nine officials of his court, to be torn to pieces before his eyes; and at the far end of the wall the Sepedgiler Kiosk, near which the sultans gave final audiences to their admirals about sailing for the seat of war.
Thus the huge palace spread out and down from the summit of its hills—where were gathered and carefully defended all its more vital parts—to the seashore crowned with towers, bristling with cannon, decked with flowers, its gilded barges shooting across the waters in all directions, its thousand perfumes floating heavenward in a great cloud as from some huge altar; the myriad torches of its fêtes reflected in the placid waters; flinging from its battlements gold to the people, dead bodies to the waves—yesterday the plaything of a slave, to-day the sport of a maniac, to-morrow at the mercy of the mob, beautiful as an enchanted island and forbidding as a living sepulchre.
The night is far advanced: each glittering star is reflected in the calm bosom of the Sea of Marmora, while the moon turns the Seraglio’s thousand domes to silver and whitens the tips of the cypress and plane trees. Deep shadows are cast across the open spaces below, and, one by one, the lights in all those innumerable little windows are extinguished. Mosque and kiosk rise white as snow against the dark background of the woods, and each spire and pointed minaret, aërial crescent, door of bronze, and gilded grating shines and sparkles among the trees as though part of a golden city. The imperial residence sleeps, the last of the three great gates has just been closed, and the far-off rattle of its huge keys can be heard as the kapuji turns away. In front of the Gate of Health a troop of kapujis stand watch beneath the lofty roof, while stationed along the wall by the Gate of Felicity, their faces in the shadow, immovable as so many bas-reliefs, thirty white eunuchs mount guard. From the walls and towers hundreds of hidden sentinels keep an active watch upon all the approaches, the sea and harbor, the deserted streets of the city, and the huge silent pile of St. Sophia. An occasional light still gleams in the huge kitchens of the first court, where some belated worker is finishing his task; then that too disappears, and the building becomes dark. Lights are still burning, though, in the houses of the Veznedar Agha and the Defterdar Effendi, and there seems to be some stir about the residence of the chief of the black eunuchs. Eunuchs patrol the deserted paths and wander in and out among the dark and silent kiosks, hearing no sounds save the sighing of the trees rocked by the sea-breeze and the monotonous murmur of the fountains. Perfect peace seems to enfold all that little world in its calm embrace, but only seemingly, for underneath those myriad roofs a tide of passionate life is stirring. That vast family of slaves, soldiers, prisoners, and servants, with their ambitions and heart-burnings, their loves and hates, let loose into the stillness of the night a brood of restless longings, dreams, and visions, which, scaling the Seraglio walls, find their way to every corner of the globe, seeking out homes of childhood, mothers lost in infancy, resuscitating half-forgotten scenes of horror. Prayers and supplications mingle with plots of vengeance in the moonlit walks and the overmastering impulses of secret ambition. The great palace sleeps, but it is a restless, disturbed sleep, interrupted by sudden fearful visions of alarm and terror; mutterings in a hundred different languages mingle with the voices of the night. Close together, divided by but a few walls, sleep the dissolute page, the imâm who has preached the word of God, the executioner who has strangled the innocent, the imprisoned prince awaiting death, and the enamored sultana on the eve of her nuptials. Unhappy wretches, stripped of everything they possessed in the world, find themselves side by side with the possessors of fabulous riches. Beauty which is almost divine, absurd deformity, every form of vice and misfortune, every prostitution of soul and body, are to be found shut in between the same walls.
Against the starlit sky are outlined the bizarre shapes of Moorish tower and roof, and shadows of garlands and leafy festoons play over the walls; the fountains shimmer in the moonlight like cascades of diamonds and sapphires; and all the perfumes of the gardens, gathered into one powerful odor, are swept by the breeze through every open lattice, every crack and crevice, leaving in their wake soft, intoxicating dreams and memories.
At such an hour as this the eunuch seated in the shadow of the trees, his eyes fixed upon the soft light issuing from a neighboring kiosk, gnaws out his heart and touches with trembling fingers his dagger hilt, and the poor little maid, stolen and sold into bondage, gazes from the window of her lofty cell with streaming eyes upon the serene horizon of Asia, thinking with unutterable longing of the cabin where she was born and the peaceful valley where her fathers lie buried. At this hour, too, the galley-slave laden with chains, the mute stained with blood, the despised miserable dwarf, reflect with a thrill of dismay upon the infinity of space which separates them from that being before whom they all must bow, and passionately interrogate the “hidden powers” as to why they must be deprived of liberty, speech, and the ordinary shape of the human form, while everything is given to one man. And this, too, is the hour in which the neglected and unhappy weep, while those who are great and successful are haunted with misgivings as they think uneasily of the future. In some of the buildings lights are still burning, illuminating the pale, anxious brows of the treasurers bending over their accounts. Odalisques, embittered by neglect, toss restlessly among their pillows, vainly seeking sleep. Janissaries lie stretched out upon the ground, the savage smile upon their bronzed faces telling of dreams of carnage and plunder. Through those thin walls come voluptuous sighs, sobs, broken expostulations. In one kiosk flows the accursed liquor amid a circle of dishevelled revellers; in another a wretched sultana, mother for but one short moment, stifles her shrieks beneath the pillows that she may not see her child’s life-blood flowing from the artery opened by order of the Pâdishah; and in the marble niches of the Bâb-i-Humayûn blood is still dropping from the heads of beys executed at nightfall. Within the loftiest kiosk of the third enclosure there is a room hung with crimson brocade and flooded with soft radiance from a Moorish lamp of chased silver suspended from the cedar-wood roof. Upon a sable-covered couch, surrounded by a magnificent disorder of pearl-embroidered cushions and velvet draperies worked in gold, there sits a beautiful brunette, enveloped in a great white veil, who not many years before conducted her father’s herds across the plains of Arabia. Bending her timid gaze upon the pallid countenance of the third Murad, who reclines half asleep at her feet, she begins in gentle murmuring tones: “Once upon a time there lived in Damascus a merchant named Abu-Eiub, who had accumulated great riches and lived in honor and prosperity. He had one son, who was handsome and who knew all sorts of wonderful things, and his name was Slave of Love, and a daughter who was very beautiful, and she was named Power of Hearts. Now, it came to pass that Abu-Eiub died, and he left all his possessions and all his wealth wrapped up and fastened with seals, and upon everything was written ‘For Bagdad.’ So, then, Slave of Love said to his mother, ‘Why is “For Bagdad” written on everything my father left?’ And his mother replied, ‘My son——’” But the Pâdishah has fallen asleep, and the slave lets her head sink gently down among the cushions, and sleeps as well. Every door is closed, every light extinguished, a hundred cupolas gleam like silver in the moonlight, crescents and gilded lattices shine through the foliage; the fountain’s splash and gurgle are heard through the stillness, and at last the entire Seraglio slumbers.
And so for thirty years has it slept the sleep of neglect and decay upon its solitary hill. Those verses of the Persian poet which came into the mind of Muhammad the Conqueror when he first set foot in the despoiled palace of the emperors of the East are equally appropriate here: “In the dwellings of kings see where the loathsome spider weaves her busy web, while from Erasciab’s proud summit is heard the raven’s hoarse cry.”