quiet citizen, though the material of his clothes and the few
ornaments that were visible about his person indicated their owner
to be one who was no meagre possessor of the riches of this world.
Both rider and horse were as still as though they had been carved in
marble instead of being living objects, save the quick, nervous
motion, now and then, of the full-blooded animal's ears, as some
distant sound rose over the Turkish city.

The Mussulman, as he sat there in a thoughtful and silent mood,
stroked slowly the jetty black beard that swept his breast, while he
seemed completely absorbed in contemplating the scene before him. He
had galloped at once from paved streets to the unfenced and
uncultivated desert that stretches away from the seven hills of
Stamboul to the very horizon. No wonder he paused there to gaze upon
the beauties that the eye might take in at a single glance.

Before him lay the city in all its oriental beauty, while, on every
sloping hillside about it, in every rural nook stood a dark
nekropolis, or city of the dead, shadowed by the close growing
cypresses, beneath whose shadows turbaned heads alone are permitted
to rest. From out of these, stretching its slender point away
towards the blue heavens, rose the fairy-like minaret, as if
pointing whither had gone the spirits of the faithful.

There, too, lay the incomparable Bosphorus, stretching away towards
the sea, and the beautiful isles in the sweet waters of Marmora,
with countless boats swarming in the Golden Horn, and then the eye
would turn back again to the city with its thousand minarets. There
lay, too, the velvet-carpeted Valley of Sweet Waters, where was the
Sultan's serai, looking like some fair scene described in the Koran,