If you go to the _bassma haneh_ by following the shore from the Great Harbour, it is very likely that you will never get there, by reason of the bluff to which I have just alluded. No road runs along the edge of that bluff to Haïdar Pasha and Moda, as perhaps in some far distant day of civic improvement may be the case; but here and there the houses are set a little back, and so many streets come vertically down toward the water that there are plenty of places to take in what the bluff has to offer. And then you will see why so many sultans and emperors built palaces there of old. I may, however, draw your attention for a moment to the island lighthouse falsely known as Leander’s Tower. In an old Italian map it is put down as _Torre della Bella Leandra_, and I have wondered if there, haply, was a clew to the name or whether it is simply a sailor’s jumble of the legend of the Dardanelles. In Turkish it is called _Kîz Koulesi_—the Maiden’s Tower—and it has a legend of its own. This relates to a Greek emperor who, being told that his daughter would one day be stung by a serpent, built a little castle for her on that sea-protected rock. But it happened to her to be seen by an Arab gallant, who expressed his admiration by bringing her flowers in disguise. Among them a viper chanced to creep one day, before the gallant left the mainland, and the princess’s prophecy was fulfilled. The gallant immediately sucked the poison out of her wound, however, and ran away with the princess. He was the celebrated hero Sid el Battal, forerunner of the Spanish Cid, who commanded the fifth Arab siege of Constantinople in 739 and who now lies buried in a town named after him in Asia Minor. The existing Maiden’s Tower was built in 1763 by Sultan Moustafa III. But a Byzantine one existed before it, of the emperor Manuel Comnenus, from which a chain used to be stretched in time of war across to Seraglio Point. And many centuries earlier the rock bore the statue of a heifer in memory of Damalis, wife of that Athenian Chares who drove away Philip of Macedon. After her the bluff itself used to be called Damalis—which again may be connected with the intricate myth of Io and the Bosphorus.