"It looks as if the city would all go," he said; and the mariner, thinking him afraid, summoned his oarsmen, and to please him made haste, as he too well might, for the light of the burning projected over the wall, and, flung back from the cloud overhead far as the eye could penetrate, illuminated the harbor as it did the streets, bringing the ships to view, their crews on deck, and Galata, wall, housetops and tower, crowded with people awestruck by the immensity of the calamity.
When the galley outgoing cleared Point Serail, the wind and the long swells beating in from the Marmora white with foam struck it with such force that keeping firm grip of their oars was hard for the rowers, and they began to cry out; whereupon the captain sought his passenger.
"My Lord," he said, "I have plied these waters from boyhood, and never saw them in a night like this. Let me return to the harbor."
"What, is it not light enough?"
The sailor crossed himself, and replied: "There is light enough—such as it is!" and he shuddered. "But the wind, and the running sea, my Lord"—
"Oh! for them, keep on. Under the mountain height of Scutari the sailing will be plain."
And with much wonder how one so afraid of fire could be so indifferent to danger from flood and gale, the captain addressed himself to manoeuvring his vessel.
"Now," said the Jew, when at last they were well in under the Asiatic shore—"now bear away up the Bosphorus."
The light kept following him the hour and more required to make the Sweet Waters and the White Castle; and even there the reflection from the cloud above the ill-fated city was strong enough to cast half the stream in shadow from the sycamores lining its left bank.
The Governor of the Castle received the friend of his master, the new Sultan, at the landing; and from the wall just before retiring, the latter took a last look at the signs down where the ancient capital was struggling against annihilation. Glutted with imaginings of all that was transpiring there, he clapped his hands, and repeated the refrain in its past form: