Omobono evidently knew his way well enough, for he did not pause as he threaded the labyrinth, and only now and then glanced up at certain dingy signs that hung from the crazy wooden balconies, or from wooden arms that stuck out here and there like gallows from the walls. As he walked, he was chiefly occupied in not running against the people he met, and in not stepping upon the half-naked children that squirmed and squalled in the mud before every doorstep. For there were children everywhere, children and dirt, dirt and children, all of much the same colour in those dusky lanes. Near almost every open door the slatternly mother stirred a dark mess of some sort over a little earthen pan of coals, or toasted gobbets of fat mutton on a black iron fork, or fried some wretched fish in boiling oil. The Christian women were by far the dirtiest, and their children were the least healthy and the most neglected, for many of the little creatures had not a stitch of clothing on them. Most decent were the Mohammedans; they had already the bearing and the self-respect of the conquering race, and they treated their Greek and Bokharian neighbours with silent contempt. Did not Sultan Amurad, over there on the Asian shore, make and unmake these miserable little Greek emperors as he pleased? If he chose could he not take Constantinople and turn a stream of Christian blood into the Golden Horn that would redden the Sea of Marmora as far as Antigone and Prinkipo? Omobono went on and on, picking his way as he might, and little noticed by the people. He was not by any means in the poorest quarter of the city, and no one begged of him as he went by. If he thought of anything except of not setting his booted foot down on some child's sprawling leg or arm, he thanked heaven and the saints that he had been born a Venetian, and had been washed and sent to school like a Christian boy when he was little instead of having first seen the light, or what passed for light, in a back street of Constantinople. He turned another corner, entered a lane even narrower than those he had yet traversed, but almost deserted, and much less dark because one side of it was occupied by a wall not more than ten feet high, in which only one small door was to be seen. Along the top of the masonry all sorts of sharp bits of rusty iron and a quantity of broken crockery were set in mortar with the evident intention of discouraging any attempt to climb over, either from within or from without. The door itself was in good repair, and had been recently coated with tar and sharp sand by way of preserving it against the damp. A well-worn horizontal slit an inch long, and an upright one a foot higher up, showed that it had two separate Persian locks into which keys were often thrust.