The rising sun gilds the mosque, gilds it under the fresh plane-trees; in the air there is a white mist which is like the original veil of day. The little Turkish cafés begin to open, and two or three minims are already being shaved in the open air under the trees.

It is evidently very early, and I have time to stop here before returning to Pera. I sit down under the trellis ordering coffee with those warm little bonbons that they sell here in the morning, and I think this better than the most delicate breakfast.

About two hours afterwards, about eight o’clock, a carriage takes me back to Stamboul in the company of an aide-de-camp of His Majesty; and in a solemn and desert-like quarter, where the grass pushes up between the stones of the pavement, our coachman stops before a forbidding enclosure like that of a Mediæval fortress.

These walls shut in a little corner of earth which is absolutely special and unique, and which is the extreme point of Oriental Europe,—a promontory that juts out towards neighbouring Asia, and which was, moreover, for many centuries, the residence of the Caliphs and a place of incomparable splendour. This, and the sacred suburb of Eyoub contain all that is most exquisite in Constantinople: this is the “Old Seraglio,”—a name that alone evokes a world of dreams.

They open for us a door in this wall, and, then, as soon as the barrier is passed, the delicious melancholy of interior things is revealed to us, and the dead Past takes us to itself and envelops us with its winding-sheet.

At first, there is silence and shadow. Empty, desolate courts, where the neglected grass pushes through the flag-stones and where still live ancient trees that were contemporaries of the magnificent sultans of former times: black cypresses as tall as towers, plane-trees which have acquired unwonted forms, all hollowed out by time, being supported only by immense shreds of bark and bent like old men.

Then come the galleries with colonnades in the ancient Turkish style, painted with strange frescoes, under which the great Solomon forced the ambassadors of the European kings to enter. And this place, happily never open to profane visitors, has not yet become a common promenade for tourists; behind the high walls, it preserves a little mysterious peace, it is all imprinted with the sadness of dead splendour.

Crossing these first courts, we have upon the right impenetrable gardens, where you see rising above the clumps of cypress old kiosks with closed windows,—the residences of imperial widows and aged princesses who wish to end their days here in this austere retreat in one of the most wonderful sites in the world.

It is all bathed in sunlight, all dazzling in tranquil light, the last portion of this walled-in spot to which we have now come,—the very last point of the Old Seraglio, and of Europe. It is a solitary esplanade, very elevated and very white, dominating the distant blue of the sea and of Asia. The clear morning sunlight inundates those depths of space out yonder, where the towns, the islets and the mountains are sketched out in light tints above the motionless sheet of Marmora.

Around us are old buildings also white, which contain all that is rarest and most precious in Turkey.

First the kiosk, forbidden to infidels, where the cloak of the Prophet is kept in a cover embroidered with jewels. Then the kiosk of Bagdad, the interior of which is entirely clothed in those old Persian faïences; which are priceless to-day: the branches of red flowers were made upon them with coral that they liquified by a process now lost and spread upon them like pigment.

Then the Imperial Treasury, very white also under its layers of whitewash and barred like a prison; and whose iron gates will be opened for me presently.

And finally, a palace, uninhabited, but well maintained, which we entered and sat down. Steps of white marble led us to the salons of the first floor, which were furnished about the middle of the last century in the European taste. They are of the Louis XV. style, to which an imperceptible mixture of Oriental singularity gives a special charm. The white and gold wainscots with old cherry or old lilac damask with white flowers show nothing but light tints mellowed by time. There are some large Sèvres and Chinese vases, and few other objects, but all of them are old and rare. Much space, air, and light, and a tranquil symmetry in the arrangement of everything—give a feeling of changelessness and neglect.

And there in a sort of sumptuous solitude, seated on these fauteuils of a deliciously pale rose, before large open windows, we have from this last promontory of Europe, the splendid view that charmed the Sultans of the past. To our left, and very far below us, the Bosphorus spreads, furrowed with ships and caïques; the whiteness of the marble quays are reflected in it; the whiteness of the new imperial residences, Dolma Bagtche and Tcheragan, are mirrored inverted in long, pale lines; the row of palace and mosques is pictured magnificently upon its banks. Opposite is Asia, still bluish in the remaining drifts of the morning mist; it is Scutari, with its domes and minarets, with its immense cemetery and its forest of dark cypresses. To the right, the infinite expanse of Marmora;—distant steamboats are moving upon it, lost in all that diaphanous blue,—little grey silhouettes trailing delicate clouds of smoke.

How well it was chosen, this site, to dominate and watch from above that Turkey, seated superbly on two divisions of the world! And to-day, what peace and what melancholy splendour in this complete isolation from all the agitations of modern life, in this great silence of abandonment, under this clear and mournful sun!

When the guardian of the Treasury—an old man with a white beard—is ready to open the iron door with his enormous keys, twenty individuals come to form a hedge, ten to the right, ten to the left, on each side of the entrance.

We pass between this double row and enter the rather dark halls, into which they all follow us.

The cavern of Ali Baba could never have been filled with such wealth! For eight centuries they have been heaping up here the rarest jewels and the most astonishing marvels of art. As our eyes become rested from the outside sunlight, and get accustomed to the shadowy interior, the diamonds begin to sparkle everywhere. Things in profusion, without age or price, classified by species upon shelves. Arms of all periods, from Genghis Khan to Mahomet; weapons of silver and gold set with jewels. Then there are collections of golden coffers of all sizes and of all styles; some are covered with rubies, others with diamonds and others with sapphires; some of them are even cut out of a single emerald as big as an ostrich’s egg. Then there are services for coffee, for drinking, and ewers of antique and exquisite forms. And the stuffs fit for fays; the saddles; the harness, the housings of parade in brocades of gold and silver, embroidered and encrusted with flowers in precious stones; the large thrones made to sit upon cross-legged: all these in ruby and fine pearl together produce a rosy brilliancy; elsewhere, others covered with emeralds and brilliant in their green reflections, look as if bathed in sea-water.

In the last hall, there is waiting for us behind the windows a motionless and terrible company: twenty-eight macabre dolls, of human size, standing up straight in a military row with their elbows touching each other. They all wear that high pear-shaped turban that has not been in use for a century, and which is only to be seen upon the catafalques of distinguished personages, in the twilight of mortuary kiosks, or carved upon the tombs—so that this kind of a turban is for me absolutely associated with the idea of death. Until the beginning of this century, whenever a sultan died, they brought here a doll clothed in the ceremonial robes of the dead sovereign, they placed marvellous arms in his belt, put on his turban, and his magnificent jewelled aigrette,—and it remained here forever covered with this eternally wasted wealth. The twenty-eight Sultans who succeeded each other from the capture of Constantinople until the end of the Seventeenth Century are standing here in their imperial robes in facsimile; slowly has the sombre and sumptuous assembly increased, new funeral dolls came one by one to range themselves in line with the old ones, who had awaited them for hundreds of years, sure of seeing them at last—and they are now touching each other’s elbows.

Their long robes are of the strangest brocades, with great mysterious designs whose tints are dimmed by time; priceless poignards with large handles made of a single precious stone, rust, notwithstanding the care, in the silken belts; it even seems that the enormous diamonds of the aigrettes have lost some of their fire, and shine with a yellowish and dulled light.

And this unheard of luxury, all powdered with dust, is sad to look upon. Fabulously magnificent, the dolls with the high coiffure, objects of so much human covetousness guarded there behind the double doors of iron, useless and dangerous, see the seasons, years, reigns, revolutions and centuries pass by with the same immobility and the same silence, with scarcely any daylight through the gratings of the old windows and in total darkness after the sun sets. Each one bears his name, written like a common name upon a faded ticket—illustrious names that were formerly terrible: Mourad the Conqueror, Soliman the Magnificent, Mohammed and Mahmoud. I believe that these dolls give me the most terrifying lesson of fragility and nothingness.