submarines were in the Marmora--we churned quietly round the corner of
Stamboul and into the cool sea.

The side-wheeler was bound for the Dardanelles with provisions for the
army--bread in bags, big hampers of green beans, and cigarettes--and
among them we were admitted by grace of the minister of war, and papers
covered with seals and Turkish characters, which neither of us could
read. We tried to curl up on top of the beans (for the Marmora is cold
at night, and the beans still held some of the warmth of the fields),
but in the end took to blankets and the bare decks.

All night we went chunking southward--it is well over a hundred miles
from Constantinople to the upper entrance to the straits--and shook
ourselves out of our blankets and the cinders into another of those
blue-and-gold mornings which belong to this part of the world. You must
imagine it behind all this strange fighting at the Dardanelles--sunshine
and blue water, a glare which makes the Westerner squint; moons that
shine like those in the tropics. One cannot send a photograph of it
home any more than I could photograph the view from my hotel window here
on Pera Hill of Stamboul and the Golden Horn. You would have the
silhouette, but you could not see the sunshine blazing on white mosques
and minarets, the white mosques blazing against terra-cotta roofs and
dusty green cedars and cypresses, the cypresses lifting dark and pensive
shafts against the blue--all that splendid, exquisite radiance which
bursts through one's window shutters every morning and makes it seem
enough to look and a waste of time to try to think.

It is the air the gods and heroes used to breathe; they fought and
played, indeed, over these very waters and wind-swept hills. Leander
swam the Dardanelles (or Hellespont) close to where the Irresistible and