If circulation be a test of a city's vitality, then Constantinople was certainly at a low ebb. The pedestrians seemed to get nowhere. They were hanging about, waiting for something to happen. The whole town was dead-tired, unspeakably bored of life as it had to be lived under the Young Turks. Constantinople was getting cross. . . . Cross, like someone who was tired of adulation from the wrong person. Some trick of sea and sun give her this human quality of sex. Anyone who has lived for long in her houses must feel her personality. She is the courtesan of conquerors, but inherent in her is some witchcraft, by which she weakens those who hold her, so that they die and are utterly exterminated, while she remains with her fadeless and fatal beauty, an Eastern Lorelei beside the Bosphorus. . . . She sapped the strength of the Roman Empire, she overthrew the dominion of the Greeks, and now, after a period of fretful wedlock, she was shaking herself free from the Turk. Something was going to happen soon. One felt it in the air. What happened to us, was that it became necessary to draw the blinds and light our candle, and search for the pestilence that crept by night. Presently our meal arrived, which was always a cheerful interlude, but it was as short as it was sweet, for courses were few, with famine prices prevailing. Afterwards we continued our hunting till dawn. At dawn, when the chill of morning had sent our sated enemies to sleep, there was another truce from trouble. We used to draw back the blinds again and sit at the window. I used to watch the pale sun on the horizon, fighting the mist-forms that clung heavily to earth and sea, and I felt that in the world-consciousness a similar contest swayed. The old ideas of government were being caught by a light that was pale now, but soon to grow luminous--a radiance that would dispel the night of war, and show us a new world, intangible yet, but dimly sensed. In the dim alleys and side streets below, where balconies overhung, shutting out the dawn, what a weight of woe there was! Famine and fire, twin angels of destruction that lurked in every by-way of the city, were waiting to take their toll. And the war went on for caged and free, while some starved and others made fortunes, and some became generals and others corpses. And the end of these things was vanity. _Vanitas vanitatum._ The minaret of a mosque was directly opposite to me. Under sway of the sanctuary and the hour, the voice of the _muezzin_ spoke to me in all its sincerity and unity of purpose. God was everywhere, all-pervasive, all-unseen, invisible only because He was so manifest. Evil of the night and glory of the dawn made His picture, the world. With new eyes I saw now this city grey with sin, and fresh with the promise of another day.