some long speech that concludes with an offer, and will answer it
all with the one monosyllable "Yok," which means distinctly "No."

I caught one glimpse of the old heathen world. My habits for
studying military subjects had been hardening my heart against
poetry; for ever staring at the flames of battle, I had blinded
myself to the lesser and finer lights that are shed from the
imaginations of men. In my reading at this time I delighted to
follow from out of Arabian sands the feet of the armed believers,
and to stand in the broad, manifest storm-track of Tartar
devastation; and thus, though surrounded at Constantinople by
scenes of much interest to the "classical scholar," I had cast
aside their associations like an old Greek grammar, and turned my
face to the "shining Orient," forgetful of old Greece and all the
pure wealth she left to this matter-of-fact-ridden world. But it
happened to me one day to mount the high grounds overhanging the
streets of Pera. I sated my eyes with the pomps of the city and
its crowded waters, and then I looked over where Scutari lay half
veiled in her mournful cypresses. I looked yet farther and higher,
and saw in the heavens a silvery cloud that stood fast and still
against the breeze: it was pure and dazzling white, as might be
the veil of Cytherea, yet touched with such fire, as though from
beneath the loving eyes of an immortal were shining through and
through. I knew the bearing, but had enormously misjudged its
distance and underrated its height, and so it was as a sign and a
testimony, almost as a call from the neglected gods, and now I saw
and acknowledged the snowy crown of the Mysian Olympus!