The trembling executioner raised his eyes inquiringly toward the gallery; but a hard, dry voice was heard issuing from among those calm faces as unmoved and devoid of all expression as so many statues. “Kara-ali,” it said, “perform your duty.” The executioner at once attempted to seize Ibrahim by the shoulders, but he, uttering a loud shriek, flung himself into a corner behind the two slaves. Kara-ali, assisted by the sciaùs, however, threw the women aside, and again laid hold of the Pâdishah. There was an outburst of curses and maledictions, the sound of a heavy body being thrown violently to the ground, a piercing cry which ended in a dull rattle, and then profound silence. A bit of silken cord had launched the eighteenth sultan of the house of Osman into eternity.

Other buildings, in addition to the ones already described and those of the harem, were scattered here and there throughout the woods and gardens; as, for instance, the baths of Selim II., comprising thirty-two vast apartments, a mass of marbles, gilding, and painting, and every variety of kiosk, round and octagonal, surmounted by domes and fantastic roofs, and enclosing rooms lined with mother-of-pearl and decorated with Arabian inscriptions. In every window hung a parrot’s or nightingale’s cage, and the light streamed through stained-glass panes in floods of blue or rose color. In some of these kiosks the pâdishahs were wont to have the Thousand-and-One Nights read aloud to them by old dervishes; in others the little princes would receive their first lessons in reading with appropriate solemnities. There were little kiosks designed for meditation, and others for nocturnal meetings; nests and graceful little prison-houses erected and destroyed in obedience to some passing fancy, and commanding the most exquisite views of Skutari empurpled by the setting sun, or the Olympus bathed in silver by the rays of the moon, while the soft winds from the Bosphorus, heavy with perfume, made the golden crescents tremble and sway from the summit of each slender pinnacle.

At last we come to where, in the most retired part of the harem, stands the Temple of Relics, or apartment of the robes of state. It was built in imitation of the Golden Room of the Byzantine emperors, and closed with a door of silver. Here were preserved the mantle of the Prophet, solemnly exhibited once a year in the presence of the entire court, his staff, the bow enclosed in a silver case, the relics of the Kaaba, and that awful and highly venerated standard of the Holy War enveloped in no less than forty silken wrappings, upon which should any infidel be daring enough to fix his eyes, he would be struck with instant blindness as from a stroke of lightning. All the most sacred possessions of the race, the most precious belongings of the royal house, the most valuable treasures of the empire, were preserved in that retired spot, that little veiled shrine toward which every portion of the huge metropolis seemed to converge, as a vast multitude turns to prostrate itself in adoration before some common centre.

In one corner of the third enclosure, that one where the shade of the trees was thickest, the murmur of the fountains most musical, the twittering of the birds loudest, rose the harem, like a little separate district of the imperial city, composed of a great number of small white buildings surmounted by leaden domes, shaded by orange trees and umbrella pines, and divided from one another by little walled gardens overrun with ivy and eglantine and interspersed with footpaths covered with tiny shells laid out in mosaic patterns, which wound out of sight among roses, ebony, and myrtle trees. Everything was on a small scale, enclosed, divided up, and subdivided, the balconies roofed, windows grated, loggias hidden behind rose-colored hangings, the windows of stained glass, doors barred, and streets open at one end only. Over all there brooded a soft twilight, the freshness of the forest, and a dreamy sense of mystery and calm. Here lived and loved, suffered and obeyed, all that great female family of the Seraglio, constantly changing and being reinforced. It was like some large conventual establishment whose religion consisted in pleasure, and whose god was the Sultan. Here were the imperial apartments; here dwelt the kadyns, those four members of the imperial harem who had a recognized position and rank, each one with her own kiosk, her little court, her state officials, her barges hung with satin, her gilded coach, her eunuchs and slaves, and her slipper-money, which consisted of the entire revenue of a province. Here too dwelt the validéh sultan with her innumerable court of ustàs, divided into companies of twenty, each one charged with a special duty, and all the female relatives of the Sultan, aunts, sisters, daughters, nieces, who, with the royal princes, formed a court within the court. Then there were the gheduelùs, the twelve most beautiful of whom, having each her special title and duty, were selected for personal attendance upon the Sultan; and the shaghirds, or novices, undergoing the necessary course of instruction in order to fit them for the vacant posts among the ustàs; and a swarm of slaves gathered from all lands, of every shade of complexion and type of beauty; carefully selected from among thousands of others, who filled the hive-like compartments of that huge gynæceum with a rush and stir of eager, radiant youth, a hot breath of Asiatic and African voluptuousness, which, mounting to the head of the god of the temple, expended itself in his fierce passions throughout the entire empire.

What associations are connected with the trees of those gardens and the walls of those little white kiosks! How many beautiful daughters of the Caucasus, the Archipelago, the mountains of Albania and Ethiopia, the desert and the sea, Mussulman, Nazarene, idolator, conquered by pashas, bought by merchants, presented by princes, stolen by corsairs, have passed like shadows beneath those silver domes! Can these be the selfsame walls and gardens amid which Ibrahim, his head crowned with flowers, his beard glittering with jewels, committed his mad acts of folly—he who raised the price of slaves in every market in Asia, and caused Arabian perfumes to increase to double their usual value; which witnessed the frantic orgies of the third Murad, father of a hundred sons, and of Murad IV., worn out by excesses at the age of thirty-one, and which re-echoed to the delirious ravings of Selim II.? Here were celebrated those strange nocturnal revels when ships and vases of flowers were traced in fiery outlines upon the domes and trees and roofs, their dancing flames reflected in innumerable little mirrors like a great burning flower-garden. Crowds of women pressed around the bazârs overflowing with precious objects, while eunuchs and slaves went through the swaying measures of the dance half hidden in clouds of burning spices and perfumes, which the breezes from the Black Sea wafted over the entire Seraglio, and accompanied by strains of barbaric and warlike music.

Let us try to bring it all to life again, just as it appeared on some soft April day during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent or the third Ahmed.

The sky is clear, the atmosphere heavy with the odors of spring, the gardens a mass of bloom. Through the network of paths still wet with dew black eunuchs wearing gold-colored tunics and slaves clad in garments of every hue carry baskets and dishes covered with green cloths back and forth between the kitchens and the various kiosks. Ustàs of the validéh, coming hurriedly out of the little Moorish doorways, run against the Sultan’s gheduclùs, passing by with haughty mien and followed by novice slaves carrying the imperial linen. All eyes follow the youngest of all the gheduclùs, the cup-bearer, a Syrian child, singled out by Allah, since she has found such favor in the eyes of the Grand Seignior that he has bestowed upon her the title of “daughter of felicity,” and the sable mantle will follow so soon as she shall have given signs of approaching maternity. In the distance the Sultan’s jesters are playing in the shade of the sycamores dressed in harlequin costumes, and with them a number of dwarfs with huge turbans on their heads, while beyond them, again, half concealed by a hedge, a gigantic eunuch with a slight movement of head and hand directs five mutes charged with the duty of carrying out punishments to present themselves before Kizlar-aghàsi, who needs them for a secret affair. Youths of an ambiguous beauty and clad in rich feminine-looking garments run and chase one another among the borders of a garden shaded by a single huge plane tree. At another place a troop of slaves suddenly pause, and, separating in two lines, bow low before the khasnadâr, superintendent of the harem, who returns their greetings with a stately wave of her staff adorned with tiny silver blades and terminating in the imperial seal. At the same moment a door opens, and out comes one of the kadyns, dressed in pale blue and enveloped in a thick white veil. She is followed by her slaves, and is on her way to take advantage of the permission obtained from the superintendent on the previous day to play at battledore and shuttlecock with another kadyn. Turning down a shady alley, she meets and exchanges soft greetings with one of the Sultan’s sisters going to the bath accompanied by her children and maid-servants. At the end of a sequestered path a eunuch stands before the kiosk of another kadyn, awaiting permission to admit a Hebrew woman with her wares consisting, though not entirely, of precious stones. She has only obtained the right of entrance to the imperial harem after endless wirepulling and scheming, and now carries concealed among her jewels more than one secret missive from an ambitious pasha or daring lover. At the extreme end of the harem enclosure the hanum charged with the duty of examining slaves for admission is looking for the superintendent to inform her that the young Abyssinian brought in the day before is, in her opinion, worthy of being admitted among the gheduclùs, if a tiny lump on the left shoulder-blade may be overlooked. In the mean time, the twenty nurses of the little princes born in the course of the current year are assembled beneath a high arbor in a pasture planted with myrtles; a group of slaves play upon flutes and guitars surrounded by a party of children, dressed in blue velvet and crimson satin, who jump and dance about or scramble merrily for the sugarplums which the validéh sultan throws from a neighboring terrace. Up and down the shady avenues pass teachers of music, dancing, and embroidery, on their way to give instruction to the shaghirds; eunuchs carrying great platters heaped with sugar parrots and lions and sweetmeats of various fantastic shapes; slaves clasping vases of flowers or rugs in their arms, the gifts of a kadyn to a sultana or the validéh, or from the validéh to a granddaughter. Presently the treasurer of the harem arrives, accompanied by three slaves, and wearing the look of one who has welcome news to communicate. Sure enough, word has been received that the imperial ships sent to intercept a fleet of Genoese and Venetian galleys came up with them twenty miles from the port of Sira, and succeeded in buying up the entire cargo of silk and velvet for the Pâdishah’s harem. A eunuch, arriving breathless to announce to a trembling sultana that her son’s circumcision has been successfully accomplished, is followed by two others bearing upon silver and gold dishes to the mother and validéh respectively the instruments used by the surgeon. There is a continual opening and shutting of doors and windows, a raising and dropping again of curtains, that messages, letters, news, gossip may pass in and out.

Any one whose gaze could have pierced through those different roofs and domes would have looked upon many a contrasting scene. In one apartment a sultana, leaning against the window, gazes mournfully between the satin curtains at the blue mountains of Asia, thinking, possibly, of her husband, a handsome young pasha, governor of a distant province, who, in accordance with a certain practice, had been torn from her arms after six short months of happiness, so that he might have no sons. In another small room, entirely lined with marble and looking-glasses, a pretty fifteen-year-old kadyn, who expects to receive a visit from the Pâdishah during the day, is frolicking with the slaves who are engaged in perfuming and anointing her, setting off her charms to the very best advantage, and raising little flattering choruses of delight and surprise at every fresh revelation of her beauty. Youthful sultanas run up and down the walled gardens, chasing each other around gleaming marble basins filled with goldfish, and making the shells with which the paths are laid rattle beneath their tiny flying feet encased in white satin slippers; others, shrinking back in the farthest corner of darkened rooms with pale set faces and averted looks, seem to be brooding over some act of despair or revenge. In one apartment, hung with rich brocades, children who from the hour of their birth have been condemned to death nestle upon satin cushions striped with gold beneath walls of mother-of-pearl; beautiful princesses lave their shapely limbs in baths of Paros marble; gheduclùs lie stretched full length upon rugs fast asleep; groups of slaves and servants and eunuchs pass back and forth through covered galleries and dim corridors and secret stairways and passages; and everywhere curious faces peering from behind grated windows, mute signs interchanged between terrace and garden, furtive signals from behind half-drawn curtains, low conversations carried on in monosyllables in the shadow of a wall or archway, broken by a ripple of half-suppressed laughter, followed by the swish of feminine garments and patter of flying slippers dying away among those cloister-like walls.

But lovers’ intrigues and childish escapades were not the only pursuits which occupied the time and attention of the occupants of that labyrinth of gardens and temples. Politics crept in through the cracks of doors and between window-bars, and the power exercised there by beautiful eyes over affairs of state was not one whit less far-reaching than in any other royal palace of Europe; indeed, the very monotony and seclusion of the life led by the inmates gave an added force to their jealousies and ambitions. Those little jewel-crowned heads from their perfumed and luxurious prisons bent the court, the Divân, the entire Seraglio, to their will. By means of the eunuchs they were enabled to hold direct communication with the muftis, viziers, and the aghas of the Janissaries, and, as they were allowed to have interviews with the administrators of their personal property from behind a curtain or through a grating, they had opportunities of keeping themselves thoroughly informed as to every minutest detail of the court and city, knew what especial dangers threatened them, and were perfectly familiar with the name and character of every official from whom they had anything to hope or fear. Thus equipped, they move with a sure hand and infinite patience all the tangled threads of those conspiracies by which they compassed the overthrow of their enemies and the elevation of their especial favorites. Every department of the court, every corner of the empire, had a root, a hundred roots, in the harem, nourished in the hearts of the validéh sultan, the sisters of the Pâdishah, the kadyns and odalisques. There was a continual plotting and scheming for the education of this one’s son, the marriage of that one’s daughter, to secure a dowry, to obtain precedence at the fêtes, or the royal succession for one of the princes—to bring about war or peace. The whims of these spoiled beauties sent armies of thirty thousand Janissaries and forty thousand spahis to strew the banks of the Danube with dead bodies, and fleets numbering a hundred sails to dye the blue waters of the Archipelago and Black Sea with blood. European princes provided themselves with letters to the harem in order to ensure the success of their missions. Little white hands assigned the government of provinces and positions of rank in the army. It was the caresses of Roxalana which drew the noose about the necks of the viziers Ahmed and Ibrahim, and the kisses of Saffié, the beautiful Venetian, “pearl and shell of the khalifate,” that maintained for so many years friendly relations between the Porte and the Venetian republic. Murad III.’s seven kadyns ruled the empire for the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, while the beautiful Makpeiker, “image of the moon,” the kadyn of the two thousand seven hundred shawls, held undisputed sway over two seas and two worlds from the reign of Ahmed I. to the accession of the fourth Muhammad. Rebia Gulnuz, the odalisque of the hundred silver carriages, ruled the imperial Divân for the first ten years of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and Shekerbuli, the “little lump of sugar,” kept the sanguinary Ibrahim travelling back and forth between Stambul and Adrianople like an automaton to suit her own ends.

What opposing interests, what an intricate web of jealousy, suspicion, intrigue, and petty ambition, must have been drawn close about that omnipotent and voluptuous little city! Wandering up and down those paths and alley-ways, I seemed to hear all about me the murmur of female voices, now rising high and shrill, now dying away in the distance—expostulations, questionings, explanations, supplications—the entire secret chronicle of the Seraglio; and a varied and curious one it must have been, treating of such questions as—which of the kadyns had been chosen by the Sultan to accompany him in the summer to his kiosk at the Sweet Waters; what dot the Pâdishah’s third daughter, who was to marry the grand admiral, would have; if it were really true that the herbs procured by the superintendent Raazgié from the magician Sciugaa for the third kadyn, childless these five years, had been the cause of her having a son; if it were settled that the favorite, Giamfeda, was to have the governorship of Caramania for the governor of Anatoli. From one kiosk to another the news flew that the first kadyn had a child, and that the new grand vizier, in order to outshine his predecessor, had presented her with a cradle of solid silver set with emeralds; that the Sultan’s favorite was not the slave sent by the governor of Caramania at all, but the one presented by the Kiaya-harem: that the chief of the white eunuchs was about to die, and that in order to obtain the long-coveted position the young page Mehemet was to sacrifice his manhood: it was whispered about that the plan proposed by the grand vizier Sinau for a canal in Asia Minor was to be abandoned, so that the progress of the work on the new kiosk building for Baffo Sultan might not be kept back; that kadyn Saharai, who was thirty-five years old, had been crying her eyes out for the past forty-eight hours for fear she was going to be put in the Old Seraglio; that the buffoon Ahmed had sent the Sultan off into such a hearty fit of laughter that he had made him an agha of Janissaries on the spur of the moment. And then there would be thousands of choice bits of gossip and news to exchange in connection with the approaching nuptials of Otman Pasha with Ummetulla Sultan, when a bronze dragon was to vomit fire in the At-Meidan; and about the validéh sultan’s sable robe, whose every button was a jewel valued at a hundred golden scudis; or the new carriage of kadyn Kamarigé, “moon of beauty;” or the tribute from Wallachia; or the little blood-colored rose found on the neck of the Shamas-hirusta, care-taker of the Sultan’s linen; or the pretty, curly, golden hair of the Genoese ambassadress; or the wonderful letter written with her own hand by the first wife of the Shah of Persia in reply to one sent her by Sultana Khurrem, “the joyous one.” All the news received in the city, every topic discussed by the Divân, every rumor afloat in the Seraglio, was talked over and commented upon in each individual kiosk and garden among groups of busy, inquisitive little heads. Anonymous madrigals written by pâdishahs were passed about from mouth to mouth—the independent and melancholy verses of Abdul-Baki, the immortal; the sparkling poems of Abu-Sud, whose “every word was a diamond;” Fuzuli’s songs, redolent of wine and opium; and the licentious verses of Gazali. The whole character and life of the place, however, would change according to the tastes of the reigning Pâdishah. Now a current of tenderness and melancholy would creep across the face of that little world, leaving the imprint of a certain gentle dignity upon every brow; the passion for ease and luxury would subside; morals and customs undergo a process of reformation; language become purified; a taste for devotional reading, meditation, and religious exercises come into fashion; the very fêtes themselves, although conducted upon the same scale of royal magnificence, assume more the character of gay but dignified ceremonials. And then a prince ascends the throne trained from infancy in every form of vice and dissipation, and immediately the scene changes: the god of self-indulgence regains his kingdom; veils are thrown back, noisy laughter, free language, and shameless immodesty prevail; messengers travel the length and width of Georgia and Circassia in search of beauty; a hundred slaves boast of the Grand Seignior’s preference; the kiosks are crowded, the gardens overrun with children; the public treasury pours out rivers of gold; the wines of Cyprus and Hungary sparkle on flower-bedecked tables; Sodom raises its head, Lesbos is triumphant; faces lit up by great black eyes become paler and more wasted; the entire harem—mad, fevered, glutted with self-indulgence, intoxicated with the fumes of that heavy, sensual perfumed air, awakes one night dazed and helpless to find itself confronted by the vengeance of God under the form of the flashing cimeters of the Janissaries. It was indeed too true that those nights of horror fell upon the little flower-imbedded Babylon as well. Revolt respected that sacred third enclosure no more than it did the other two, and, beating down the Gate of Felicity, poured even into the harem itself. A hundred armed eunuchs, fighting desperately with daggers at the doors of the kiosks, beheld the Janissaries climb upon the roofs and break open the cupolas, from whence, leaping into the rooms below, they tore the infant princes from their mothers’ arms; validéhs were dragged feet foremost from their hiding-places, fighting furiously with teeth and nails, to be overpowered finally, pinned to the floor by a baltagi’s knee, and strangled with the silken cords of the window-curtains. Sultanas returning to their apartments would utter a piercing shriek at sight of the empty cradle, and, turning wildly to interrogate their slaves, read the answer in an ominous silence, which meant, “Go seek your son at the foot of the throne.” Terrified eunuchs would bring word to a favorite, whom the sound of distant tumult had already rendered uneasy, that her head was demanded by the mob, and she must at once prepare for death. The third Selim’s three kadyns, condemned to the noose and sack, were aroused one after another in the dead of night and heard each other’s screams, dying in the darkness in the convulsive grasp of the mutes. Vindictive jealousy and bitter revenge filled the kiosks with tragedies and spread terror and dismay throughout the entire harem. The Circassian mother of Mustafa tore Roxalana’s face; rival favorites cuffed and boxed Shekerbuli; Tarkan Sultan beheld the dagger of Muhammad IV. flash above the head of her offspring; the first kadyn of Ahmed I. strangled the slave who dared to be her rival with her own hands, and in her turn fell at the Pâdishah’s feet stabbed in the face and uttering shriek on shriek of rage and pain. Jealous kadyns lay in wait for one another in dark passage-ways, flinging out the insulting words “bought flesh” as they pounced like tigresses and tore their victims’ skin or buried poisoned stilettos in their backs. Who can form any idea of the number of secret unrecorded tragedies?—slaves held in the fountains until they were drowned, struck down by a blow on the temple from a dagger-hilt, beaten to death by the eunuch’s colbac, or crushed in the deadly embrace and arms of steel of a dozen jealous furies. Veils choke the cries of the dying, flowers cover up the blood-stains, and two dusky figures, moving down the dimly-lighted path, carry a sinister something between them. The sentinels pacing up and down upon the battlements which overlook the Sea of Marmora are startled for a moment by the sound of a heavy splash; then all is still, and the dawn, awakening the harem to another day of laughter and pleasure, whispers no tales of that one among its thousand rooms found empty.

Such fancies as these kept crowding through my mind as I wandered about that famous spot, raising my eyes from time to time to the grated windows of one or another of those kiosks, now as mournful and neglected-looking as sepulchres. And yet, notwithstanding all the horrible associations of the place, one is conscious of a thrill of delicious excitement, a throbbing of the pulses, a languid, voluptuous, half-melancholy sense of pleasure, at the thought of all the youth and beauty and loveliness which once had its being here. These little stairways, up and down which I pass, once felt the pressure of their flying feet; these shady alleys, through which I walk, have heard the soft rustle of their garments; the roofs of these little porticoes, against whose pillars I brush in passing, have echoed the sound of their infantile laughter. It seems as though some actual token of their presence must still linger within those walls, hover in the very air, and I long to search for it, to cry aloud those famous names, one after another, over and over again, when surely some voice, faint, distant, ghostly, will reward my efforts, some shadowy white-robed figure flit across a lofty terrace or appear for a moment at the end of a dim, leafy vista. What would I not have given, as I scanned each barred door and grated window, to have known behind which of them the widow of Alexius Comnenus was confined—the most beautiful of all the fair Lesbos prisoners, as well as the most fascinating Grecian of her time—or where the beloved daughter of Errizo, governor of Negropont, had been stabbed for preferring death to the brutal caresses of Muhammad II.! And Khurrem, Suleiman’s favorite, at what window did she linger, graceful, languid, her great black eyes fixed upon the Sea of Marmora beneath their veil of silken lashes? How often must this very path have felt the light pressure of that fascinating Hungarian dancer’s feet who effaced the image of Saffié from the heart of Murad III., slipping like a blade of steel between the imperial arms! Above this flowery bank must Kesem, that beautiful Grecian and jealous fury who beheld the reigns of seven sultans, have bent her pale proud face to pluck a flower in passing. And that gigantic Armenian who drove Ibrahim insane for love of her, has she not plunged her great white arms into the cool depths of this very fountain? And whose feet were the smaller? The fourth Muhammad’s “little favorite,” two of whose slippers together did not measure the length of a stiletto, or Rebia Gulnuz, “she who drank of the roses of spring”? And who had the prettiest blue eyes in the Archipelago? And whose foot left no trace on the white sand of the garden-walk? Was the hair of Marhfiruz, “the favorite of the stars of the night,” thicker and more golden than that of Miliklia, the youthful Russian odalisque, who kept the ferocity of the second Osman in check? And those Persian and Arabian children who lulled Ibrahim to sleep with their fairy-tales, and the forty maidens who drank the third Murad’s blood, is there nothing left of them all—not so much as a tress of hair, a thread from a single veil, an imprint on the walls? For answer I saw a strange, weird vision far off where the great trees grew thickest. Beneath the long shadowy arcades I beheld a mournful procession: one after the other, in ghostly, never-ending succession, they filed by—validéh sultans, sisters of pâdishahs, kadyns, odalisques, slaves, children hardly arrived at womanhood, middle-aged, old and white-haired, timid young maidens, faces contorted with savage jealousy, rulers of an empire, favorites of a single day, playthings of an hour, representatives of ten generations and a hundred peoples—leading their children by the hand or clasping them convulsively to their breasts. Around this one’s neck the noose is still hanging; from that one’s heart sticks a dagger-hilt; the salt waters of the Sea of Marmora drip from another’s clothes. Brilliant with jewels, covered with dagger-thrusts, their faces contorted from the action of poison or the long-drawn-out agonies of the Old Seraglio, on they came, an interminable, mute, but eloquent procession, fading away one after another in the gloom of the cypress trees, leaving behind them a trail of faded flowers, of tears, and of drops of blood, which swept over my heart in a great wave of indescribable horror and pity.

Beyond the third enclosure there extends a long level stretch of ground covered with a luxuriant vegetation and dotted over with pretty little buildings, in the midst of which rises the so-called Column of Theodosius, of gray granite, surmounted by a beautiful Corinthian capital and supported upon a large pedestal, on one side of which may still be traced the last two words of a Latin inscription which ran as follows: “Fortunæ reduci ob devictos Gothos.” Here the elevated plain upon which stands the great central rectangle of the Seraglio buildings comes to an end; beyond, as far as Seraglio Point, and covering the entire space between the walls of the three courts and the outer boundary-walls, rose a great forest of plane trees, cypresses, pines, laurels, and terebinths, all along the hillsides, and poplars draped with vines and creepers, shading a succession of gardens filled with roses and heliotropes, and laid out in the form of terraces, from which wide flights of marble stairs led down to the shore.

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.”